Arts And Entertainment
Books: Prof. Joseph Voyle’s Buried Ancient City Under UC Berkeley
By Richard Schwartz
Tuesday March 25, 2008
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a three-part series featuring stories of forgotten Berkeley history excerpted from Richard Schwartz’s book Eccentrics, Heroes, and Cutthroats of Old Berkeley.
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The Theater: ‘Tragedy: A Tragedy’ at Berkeley Rep
By Ken Bullock, Special to The Planet
Tuesday March 25, 2008
“Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Increasing darkness, with widely scattered daylight in the morning.” So George Carlin’s stoned weatherman predicted the nocturnal trend in his ’60s stand-up comedy act.
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Berkeley Opera Stages Donizetti’s ‘L’Elisir D’Amore’
By Ken Bullock, Special to The Planet
Friday March 21, 2008
The village flirt tosses aside the book of the romance of Tristan and Isolde she has been reading aloud, flippantly singing, “If only I knew that recipe” for the famous love potion, as the chorus of peasants idling in the piazza picks up the refrain—and her forlorn, would-be suitor Nemorino, who’s caught the storybook as if it was the garter flung after a wedding, finds himself in the same predicament.
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Fonts, Facades, And Frolicking Femme Fatales
Friday March 21, 2008
Helvetica—a Greek tragedy? No, a typeface. Who would think of making a documentary film about a typeface? And who would attribute political significance to a font? Well, the writers of this 80-minute film did.
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Moving Pictures: The Shakespeare Films of Orson Welles
By Justin DeFreitas
Friday March 21, 2008
With just a few exceptions, when we talk about an Orson Welles film we talk about a tangled mess of topics all at once. We talk about the film as it exists and the film as it might have been; we talk about intentions and motivations, disagreements and compromises, edits and changes; we talk about artistic integrity versus commercial considerations, about the rights of the artist contrasted with the rights of studios, stockholders, producers and distributors.
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Working With Welles on ‘Macbeth’
By Ken Bullock, Special to The Planet
Friday March 21, 2008
"What Orson always said about his career,” Richard Connema reminisced about working on Macbeth with Orson Welles at Republic Studios in 1946, “was that when he came out with Citizen Kane, he was a big shot and everybody gave him Christmas presents. During the making of The Magnificent Ambersons, they still gave him presents. But the next year, after he got back from Brazil and with all the problems with the release of Ambersons, nobody gave him presents.”
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