Arts & Events

Around & About Opera: Goat Hall's Valentine's Party This Sunday—Songs, Arias & Duets

By Ken Bullock
Friday February 10, 2012 - 04:33:00 PM
Eliza O'Malley

Goat Hall Productions always come up with the most refreshing—and fun!—modus operandi for putting on a show of opera new and old. This Sunday at 8, they're throwing a benefit party for Valentine's Day at the Julia Morgan Chamber Arts House on Ashby ... and the m. o.'s been to hand over the role of impresario to the principal donors, over a dozen of whom have staked $100 per singer to hear their favorite operatic numbers, from Mozart to Puccini, Mahler and Debussy, including Goat Hall's founders, Harriet March Page and Mark Alburger performing his fine music, and Eliza O'Malley singing Delibes and Schubert. -more-


EYE FROM THE AISLE: Counter Attack at Berkeley's Ashby Stage—a delicious slice of theatre a la mode!

By John McMullen II
Friday February 10, 2012 - 05:07:00 PM
Lynne Hollander, Joan Mankin, Arthur Holden

With COUNTER ATTACK at the Ashby Stage, Joan Holden has written a moving tale of an aging waitress, capturing the craziness of the profession, the lure of the tips, the regulars, the banter, and what happens when your legs ain’t what they used to be. -more-


AROUND AND ABOUT FILM: Rare Gregory Markopoulos Retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive

By Ken Bullock
Friday February 10, 2012 - 07:44:00 PM

Gregory Markopoulos (1928-92) was one of the most creative American filmmakers who emerged during or just after the Second World War. From Toledo, Ohio, on of Greek immigrants, he made his first film at 12, and studied with Josef Von Sternberg as a teenager. His sense of place, of the subliminal (Markopoulos might've said said "mythic"), of person was volatilized by an extraordinary, "almost Mannerist" use of color ("Color is Eros") and his own signature in montage, eventually expressed through rapid cutting and unusual soundtracks, with and without music. -more-


THEATER REVIEW: 'Body Awareness' at the Aurora

By Ken Bullock
Friday February 10, 2012 - 05:14:00 PM

Body Awareness Week on campus at Shirley State college in Vermont, and the feminist professor in charge (Amy Resnick as Phyllis) bravely plunges into welcoming the audience to the festivities—while at home, her domestic partner Joyce (Jeri Lynn Cohen) is verbally scrimmaging with her post-adolescent son Jared (Patrick Russell) over his ongoing onanism, spiraling phone bills for sex calls, and her suspicions (along with Phyllis) he has Asperger's Syndrome. But Jared is having nothing of it, sniping at his mother while delving into his passion ... etymology. -more-