Put a Little Drama in your Life
KPBS AIRDATE: JUNE 1, 2001 "Our Town" is performed so often in American high schools and community theaters that it's become synonymous with amateur productions. What makes it so effortless to produce is the minimal cost, since it's written to be performed without any sets and few props. But while students may have an easy time with it, they're really too young to appreciate this American classic. And Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: MAY 25, 2001 Okay, let me not keep you in suspense. Right off the bat, I'll tell you that, as a musical, as a revue, as an evening of theater, I think the best thing about "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change" is the title. It's a pastiche of skits and sketches, mostly musical, about the stages of love and romance: the terrors of dating, Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: MAY 18, 2001 It's a good thing Eugene O'Neill is dead. Or, at any rate, a good thing you didn't know him. His masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into Night," arguably America's greatest drama, is painful to watch as fiction. But as fact, it is almost unbearable, voyeuristic, more than you'd ever want to know about someone you knew. The play is unabashedly autobiographical, one day in Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: MAY 11, 2001 In case you were wondering, there are no elephants in this "Aida." When I first saw the Verdi opera, I was 12 and we were outdoors at the Baths of Caracalla in Italy. When the Triumphal March began, and the elephants tramped onstage, I was wide-eyed, open-mouthed and absolutely transfixed. On opening night of the San Diego Opera edition of "Aida," a production Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: MAY 4, 2001 A quilt is made up of little pieces, stitched together to form a picture or pattern. And so it is with "Quilters," the musical revue by Molly Newman and Barbara Dameshek. It's a series of songs and vignettes, threaded together by 16 different quilt designs, each representing ages and stages in the lives of American Pioneer women. It's a sweet, pleasant premise, focusing Read More →
KPBS AIRDATE: APRIL 27, 2001 A new play festival is always something to crow about. Okay, some fledgling works don't fly. But you might just witness the shell-breaking birth of something wonderful. So, take a chance; the theater of tomorrow is in the youth of today. This year, there are two exciting theatrical spawning grounds: right now, you can catch the UCSD New Play Festival 2001… and in Read More →
“San Diego is a hotbed of theater. Every year, I see 200-250 productions. This is fertile ground for new work. In addition to the prodigious local talent, theatermakers from around the country come here to premiere their latest creations. San Diego sends more shows to Broadway than nearly any other city in the U.S.”
-Pat Launer