Arts & Events

New: Alban Berg’s LULU at An Abandoned Train Station

Reviewed by James Roy MacBean
Sunday July 26, 2015 - 11:03:00 AM

West Edge Opera’s Music Director, Jonathan Khuner, has close family ties to the music of Alban Berg. Jonathan’s father was a string player who launched an international career when he performed in the première of Berg’s Lyric Suite Quartet in Germany in 1927. Later, Jonathan says he debated with his father over the respective merits of Berg’s two operas, Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937). Judging from the passion for Lulu showed by Jonathan Khuner in bringing this difficult opera to West Edge Opera, I think he clearly prefers Lulu to Wozzeck.

This is a preference I wholeheartedly share. I have now seen Lulu five times, and it never fails to make a positive impression. Wozzeck, on the other hand, can drive me up the wall, as it did in a Vienna Staatsoper production I saw in Berlin in 1987. Since that time, I have assiduously avoided Wozzeck. However, when West Edge Opera scheduled Berg’s Lulu for performance in an abandoned train station in Oakland, I made sure to attend the opening night show, on Saturday, July 25. I was not disappointed. -more-


Barber of Seville: Opera Buffa in Mendocino Music Festival's Big Tent

Ken Bullock
Friday July 24, 2015 - 07:18:00 PM

Every year, the Mendocino Music Festival--finishing this weekend its 29th season of a panoply of musical styles, from classical and contemporary orchestral pieces to big band, from jazz vocals and choral groups to international folk and popular music---stages an opera, inviting the public to the afternoon rehearsals leading up to a single evening presentation, this year producing Rossini's comic masterpiece, 'The Barber of Seville,' preceded by a lecture given by stage director and baritone Eugene Brancoveanu, who also sang the title role of the rascally barber Figaro. -more-


Around & About: Theater--Closing Shows of a Rare Staging of Shakespeare's 'Cymbeline;' 'Glengarry Glen Ross' with a Russian Theater Director

Ken Bullock
Friday July 24, 2015 - 07:17:00 PM

--One of the rarer of Shakespearean plays is in its last weekend: 'The Tragedy Cymbeline, King of Britain,' produced as early as 1611, is onstage for four more shows--two on Sunday--outdoors under the stars (and a Sunday matinee) at Forest Meadows Amphitheater, Dominican University in San Rafael, the home of Marin Shakespeare, whose artistic director Robert Currier directs a cast featuring Paul Abbott as in the title role.

With all the trimmings--a secret wedding, a young woman disguised as a man, a young hero visited by the ghost of his father--'Cymbeline' sounds at times like a compendium, too, of The Bard's plays of various genres, tragic, comic, romantic ... Indeed, academics have long argued over whether it's a Tragedy, as titled, or a Romance, like The Winter's Tale, which it in some ways resembles. -more-


Irrational Man

Reviewed by Gar Smith
Friday July 24, 2015 - 10:07:00 AM

Woody Allen's Irrational Man is a mildly amusing film (arguably without a single major laugh line) that revisits the director's familiar neurotic landscapes through the filter of Abe Lucas, a depressed, alcoholic philosophy professor. Once a famous author (and equally famous as a womanizer), Abe is now reduced to bouncing between jobs at second-tier universities. In the first scene, he's barreling down a narrow country road to the music of "The In Crowd" with one hand on the wheel and the other hand on a whiskey flask. (Here's an odd take-away from the film: Have you ever noticed how "The In Crowd" resembles the gospel standard, "Wade in the Water"?)

In his first meeting with the administrators at a leafy northeastern college, Abe (mumbled to perfection by Joaquin Phoenix in his patented meta-Brando mode) can barely offer one-word grunts to the effusing academics eager to sing his praises. But, although he's ill at ease and monosyllabic in social settings, when he's in the classroom, he is in his element—discussing and dissing existentialism with an ease and panache that leaves his young students spellbound.

Abe is unusual character. On one hand he is presented as a world-weary professor and, at the same time, a disillusioned social activist who has reportedly spent time trying to save the world's poor in foreign lands and also toke time to comfort the victims of Hurricane Rita in the waterlogged precincts of New Orleans.

It's not enough that Abe can find no comfort in Heidegger or Kant, his social activism has also convinced him that engaging in small acts of altruism to solve big problems is also a useless waste of time. Existence in empty; life is meaningless; Woody Allen is in the house. -more-