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The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs

March 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

In the Southern Chinese Province of Guangdong there is a City called Shenzhen. A generation ago it had seven hundred inhabitants, most of whom were fishermen. Now it has fourteen million. They make our electronic stuff…our iPhones, our Macs, our iPads. There are millions of workers, making them by hand. Why, one company – Foxconn – employs 430,000 people. That’s more than live in Atlanta! Foxconn has them thread, wire, and wind our fancy machines, repetitively, for ten hours a day or more, and then marches them off to their tiny dormitories, where they sleep as many as fifteen to a room. And sometimes, they climb up to the top of the building, and jump off. [Read more...]

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And the Curtain Rises

March 30, 2011 By 3 Comments

Signature Theatre and The Shen Family Foundation have made a commitment to develop new works representing the American Musical Theatre through its groundbreaking American Musical Voice Project (AMVP), and for this they should be applauded.  The ambitious scope of this partnership, the largest commission program for new works in the country, has enabled them to deliver the flawed but capacious and memorable Giant by John La Chiusa and Ricky Ian Gordon’s Sycamore Tree. This, their third work in the series, has, like the others, helped its artistic creators realize a fully orchestrated and staged production.  Mounting new works is always a noble experiment, and like all authentic experiments, not all will succeed.  Signature tried in many ways to get it right, but, sadly, And the Curtain Rises failed in several ways this first test. [Read more...]

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The Weir

March 30, 2011 By 5 Comments

The Washington area’s unofficial Totally Irish Theater March Madness continues unabated this week, aided and abetted by Scena’s new production of Conor McPherson’s problem comedy The Weir. Now playing at the H Street Playhouse DC’s increasingly trendy Atlas Theater District, Scena’s current offering is the second iteration of McPherson’s play to hit the boards here over the last month or so, with the Keegan Theatre’s highly-regarded production opening first. In the immortal words of “Cheech” Marin, both productions are “the same, only different.” [Read more...]

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King Lear

March 30, 2011 By 1 Comment

Synetic Theater’s silent King Lear is one of the most hauntingly beautiful things I’ve ever seen—and that’s saying something since clowns normally give me the creeps.

Director Paata Tsikurushvili sets Shakespeare’s tragedy in an absurdist landscape of European clowns and acrobats that recalls Federico Fellini films with a dash of the grotesqueries of American movie director Tim Burton. The result is visual poetry, a melancholy sonnet to madness and abuses of power. [Read more...]

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