Arts & Entertainment

FOR ITS first offering of the new year, Sunset Concerts at St. Luke’s presents Quarteto Vivace Brasil, featuring guitarists Robert Colchiesqui and Edson Lopes, flutist Tadeu Coelho and percussionist Rodrigo Marinonio. For its first swing through the United States » Read More

For San Jose Rep’s 2010-11 season, new artistic director Rick Lombardo has just announced the world premiere of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Love in American Times, a romantic comedy. The show, which opens May 12, 2011, examines with a wry eye the meeting, dating and wedding plans of a well-off WASPy business type and a young Asian woman. Lombardo will direct. » Read More

“Taking Flight,” the one-woman, one-act play running at Mexican Heritage Plaza, is a story about how the bonds of friendship are tested. Actress and writer Adriana Sevahn Nichols portrays a woman who bares her soul, and the emotion, passion and introspection she stirs up had me wanting to dial up old friends by the time I hit the exit. » Read More

IT IS a little too easy to be shocked by Shel Silverstein’s plays. As is apparent just minutes into Dragon Theatre’s An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein, they are outrageous, ghoulish and full of dark, crude and sexual humor. For easily offended fans of Silverstein’s children’s works, such as Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Giving Tree, it may be too much. But for most of us who loved his stuff as a kid, it’s a chance to see his genius in a totally different context and just confirms what a lot of us suspected all along: the dude is twisted. » Read More

IT HELPS to know going in to see Dead Man Walking at City Lights Theatre Company that the play has a very specific point of view to get across. Written by Tim Robbins as “a study into the national discourse on the death penalty” in the United States (and why it should be abolished) » Read More

DISTRACTION is an effective tool in the hands of playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, whose 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning Rabbit Hole is now playing at the Lucie Stern Theater. As the Palo Alto Players production opens, we are introduced to a tornado of talk named Izzy (Kate McGrath), who is regaling her sister, Becca (Shannon Warrick), with the story of her recent bar fight » Read More

RICHARD LAMPARSKY (Ron Talbot) is a washed-up romance novelist going through a midlife crisis at age 40. There he is at an upscale hotel bar, putting away drinks and waiting for his ex-wife to meet him, which apparently isn’t going to happen. She’s a no-show. In walks Gloria Winwood (Helena Clarkson), a powerful older woman with her own predicament » Read More

SHUFFLING toward the exit after Theatreworks’ opening night performance of Daddy Long Legs, I saw the man next to me turn to his wife and say simply: “Their best ever.” Curious, I asked them how long they’ve been going to TheatreWorks productions. Twenty years. Now, granted, that’s only half the time the company has been in existence » Read More

I GUESS when it comes to naughty puppets, you have to be careful what you wish for. Personally, I wish Avenue Q, the long-running Broadway musical touring in San Jose at the Center for the Performing Arts this week, was an edgier parody of Sesame Street’s chipper, overcaffeinated puppetry. » Read More

TO CHARACTERIZE the Margaret Wingrove Dance Company’s vision of the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations: it’s not overly joyous. People struggle on the ground level, rolling, huddling, holding their bodies, negotiating their limbs. Even at standing level, characters seem bowed, movements labored, as if through sticky webs of restriction or melancholy. » Read More