Prejudice is an insidious thing. Without even realizing that I'd been turned off the music of Wagner at a young age as a result of my father's vendetta against anyone popular opinion considered anti-semitic, I had decided I hated Wagner. I had made this decision, even though my only exposure to the composer during my formative years had been through playing Die Meistersinger Von Nurnberg in my school orchestra at the age of 15.It was only when I was in New York a couple of years ago participating in the NEA/Columbia Journalism School's … [Read more...]

As a singer-in-training, I'm just beginning to squawk out my first aria from the operatic cannon. I'm tackling "Che Faro Senza Euridice?" from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. The famous song is, of course, one of the most divinely beautiful and tragic arias I've ever heard, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from my mangled attempts to penetrate Gluck's underworld.Thankfully, my singing coach came up with the bright idea of pointing me to YouTube so I could hear some of the world's great mezzos and countertenors tackle the aria. I spent a very … [Read more...]

Yussef El Guindi's new play about a Middle-Eastern actor trying to make his way in Hollywood without being constantly cast as an Allah-praising, virgin-deflowering plane hijacker or suicide bomber has one of the catchiest titles I've heard on stage in recent years. Jihad Jones and the Kalashnikov Babes presciently ties in with the blockbuster new Indiana Jones movie currently playing in cinemas across the country -- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- while at the same time refuting the link to Hollywood by deliberately … [Read more...]

The American Actors Equity Association (AEA) is pulling out of San Francisco.On June 5, members of the Equity Bay Area Advisory Committee received a letter from Equity's headquarters advising them of the organization's decision to close San Francisco's AEA office. "Over the next several months we will transition the administration of San Francisco/Bay Area Equity companies to our Los Angeles office," the letter, signed by AEA President Mark Zimmerman and Executive Director John P Connolly, read.The decision comes as a result of an AEA study … [Read more...]

Dance and puppetry are kindred artforms. Dance captures the essence of human behavior and feeling. So does puppetry. Both art forms depend upon physical human dexterity. Given the close ties between the two, you'd imagine that there would be tons of renowned puppet danceworks out there. I guess there's Petrushka - a ballet with a puppet in the plot. Maybe the doll at the center of Coppelia counts too. But I can't think of any really well-known works created for puppets off the top of my head.The innovative Bay Area-based choreographer Joe … [Read more...]

On Saturday night, the Berkeley Early Music Festival hosted the U.S. premiere of the largest work of vocal polyphony in the history of western music at Berkeley's First Congregational Church. The 16th century Italian composer Alessandro Striggio wrote his mammoth 60-part Missa Sopra "Ecco Si Beato Giorno" for five choirs between 1565 and 1566.Berkeley music scholar Davitt Moroney unearthed the manuscript in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris in 2005 and it received its world premiere, under Moroney's direction, at the BBC Proms in … [Read more...]

Visiting Oakland Museum of California isn't like visiting other major museums in the Bay Area like the de Young and SFMOMA. Oakland doesn't attract much of a tourist contingent, so on any given day, the museum's visitors are locals. This creates a very different dynamic as many of the people who visit the museum not only seem to hold a powerful affection for the place like it's home, but also run into each other in the corridors, galleries and sculpture gardens and say hi or stop to chat.This sensation was powerful when I last visited the … [Read more...]

The morning I left for the East Coast on a business trip last week, I happened to read an extraordinary article in the March issue of Gourmet Magazine. Francis Lam's piece on the art of omelette-making is one of the most wonderful bits of food writing I've read in my life.The article is brilliant because it's deceptively simple, like the subject that it covers. We tend to think of throwing some eggs in pan as just about the easiest thing one can do in a kitchen besides making toast, and Lam's salty-humorous story explains that there's much more … [Read more...]