Tidy Aphrodite
December 2006

There’s nothing like reaching a milestone for prompting arts organizations to dig up the past. For San Francisco’s Magic Theatre and A.C.T. – both celebrating their 40th anniversaries this year – that means co-producing a play about archeology. In Luminescence Dating, a new drama by playwright and A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff receiving its West Coast premiere at the Magic at the end of this month, three Ivy League archeologists become entangled in a mystery involving the pink, terracotta limb of an Ancient Greek statue, 122 very small, dented helmets, and several Ziploc bags filled with Cypriot dirt. more...

And Now for 365 Plays
15 November 2006

What's harder than writing a play a day for a year? Putting them all on stage. Chloe Veltman on a mind-boggling project

One November morning in 2002, the American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks told her husband she was going to write a play a day for a whole year. "Yeah, baby," said her husband from the couch. "That sounds cool."

Parks' notion might have sounded cool, but it was hardly practical. Since becoming the first black woman to win a Pulitzer prize, for her play Topdog/Underdog, the LA-based dramatist's life had lurched into top gear. Between embarking upon a lengthy book tour for her debut novel, Getting Mother's Body, preparing for the Royal Court transfer of Topdog, and working on screenplays for Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt, Parks' schedule didn't leave room for hugely ambitious schemes.

Nevertheless, she stuck to her plan, beginning on November 13 2002 with a piece entitled Start Here (a Waiting for Godot-esque conversation between the Hindu god Krishna and the hero Arjuna), and finishing on November 12 2003 with a dialogue-free, meta-theatrical work which featured lights shining on a manuscript containing all the plays. She filled a series of notebooks with 365 short dramas, from a paragraph to several pages in length, dealing with everything from the war in Iraq, to the death of playwright Sarah Kane, to a lost sweater. more...

Irvine Welsh
[NOVELIST, PLAYWRIGHT, FILMMAKER]

November 2006

“Success teaches you fuckall. Failure’s the best and only way you can learn.”

Techniques for getting by in the British film industry:

1. Listen to what commissioners have to say, take their notes, then go away and do what you like

2. Make a film with the word ‘wedding’ in the title

3. Move to France

I met Irvine Welsh in June 2006 when he was in San Francisco with his writing partner Dean Cavanagh for the world premiere of their new play, Babylon Heights (2006,) a black comedy about the dwarf actors drafted to play Munchkins in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. Before I saw Babylon Heights performed, I must admit that the idea of a play about the diminutive, eternally perky inhabitants of the Land of Oz seemed unlikely coming from a writer whose novels and short stories are commonly populated by heroin addicts, sociopaths and amateur porn actors. more...

Give our regards to Broadway
November 2006

As if we didn't have enough good theater around here: these days we're getting high-profile musicals and star-laden dramas before they hit New York. Applause, applause-in spite of the duds.

Until the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed all eight of the city’s downtown playhouses, San Francisco ranked right up there with Manhattan as a national hub for large-scale theatrical extravaganzas. One observer felt it was the only city in the country outside New York in which “a high-salaried player could be assured a long and lucrative run.”

The promise of big salaries and long runs may have crumbled along with the buildings, but San Francisco has regained its status as a topflight theater town. Today the city has around 160 theater companies—and there are more than 400 in the Bay Area as a whole, which makes it the largest center for the performing arts after New York and Chicago. Clearly, you could go to the theater six nights a week for a year and never see the same production twice. You probably couldn’t even keep up with the “don’t miss” plays, since this region has more than its share of talented actors, inspired directors, and lively, innovative theater groups. Even so, when it comes to big, splashy musicals and “important” dramas with star-studded casts, most Broadway producers long regarded San Francisco as just another stop on the touring circuit for cookie-cutter reruns of Les Misérables and Cats. The closest we’d get to a famous name was seeing a celebrity from a ’70s TV show starring in Annie Get Your Gun. more...

Dancing King
4 October 2006

King Arthur might be a revered figure in British folklore, but in American choreographer Mark Morris" reworking of a pedantic 17th-century opera by composer Henry Purcell and poet John Dryden, the legendary ruler is conspicuously — and blessedly — absent. In a move that might be as audacious as pulling a sword from a stone, Morris has not only jettisoned Dryden's dry text from his version of King Arthur, currently receiving its American premiere, but he's also done away with the good king himself.

In this story about Arthur's efforts to rescue his blind fiancée, Emmeline, from the Saxon king who has kidnapped her, the most we see of the man is a big, goofy-looking crown that pops up on stage every now and again. What remains is a spiraling 100-minute riff on Purcell's 1691 score, combining the choreographer's dance steps (executed by Morris' renowned Dance Group) with sung performances by members of the original cast from the English National Opera. more...

Actors With Roots: Danny Wolohan
October 2006

He's the guy next door --but looks can be deceiving

If Danny Wolohan lived in Los Angeles and worked in television or movies, he’d probably get cast as the cuckolded husband, the sensitive caretaker or the honest cop. The 34-year-old actor has the look of the dependable guy next door. His beefy frame, sensible haircut and broad, open face suggest the kind of suburban middle-manager who takes his son to football games on weekends and reads John Grisham novels in the tub. But given that he’s based in San Francisco and works principally with the new-writing theatre ensemble Campo Santo at the city’s longest-running alternative arts space, Intersection for the Arts, Wolohan rarely gets cast according to type.

Since he started performing at Intersection, Wolohan has played, among other things, a drag queen in size-13 red heels, a cop partnered with a foul-mouthed dummy and legendary bank robber John Dillinger. He’s channeled Billie Holiday while lying in a coma, sung about heartbreak in falsetto and danced in multimedia performance art works. And all of this from a junk food¬loving insomniac who describes himself as being plagued by nerves. “If I thought too hard about what I’m doing up there, I would just get too scared,” confesses Wolohan. “It’s easiest just to jump in.” more...

Sex-Crazed Dwarves
14 June 2006

Movie history has never been very fair to little people. With the notable exception of the diminutive central character in Thomas McCarthy's 2003 gem The Station Agent, played by Peter Dinklage, dwarves repeatedly come across on screen as not much more than adorable soft toys with helium-fueled voices; they are Snow White's sidekicks, Dorothy's guiding lights, and Willy Wonka's worker bees. The idea of showing undersized people having sex or mainlining heroin or transgressing in any way is out of the question, as far as filmmakers from Walt Disney to Tim Burton are concerned.

But if Trainspotting and Porno author Irvine Welsh and British screenwriter Dean Cavanagh have anything to do with it, the portrayal of little people in pop culture may never be the same again. more...

Odd One In
11 June 2006

'Pathetic' art, invisible paintings ... If it's unconventional, the new director of the Hayward Gallery, is bound to love it. He talks to Chloe Veltman

At the opening of Sudden Glory: Sight Gags and Slapstick in Contemporary Art, a recent group show at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, Ralph Rugoff suddenly found himself dangling upside down in the air. The 6ft 7in conceptual artist Martin Kersels had lumbered up behind Rugoff and swept him off his feet, suspending the curator by the ankles. "It was such an insane experience. My whole world turned inside out and I didn't know what was going on for a second," says Rugoff. "I was very thankful to Martin for doing that."

An unconventional way to treat one of the most highly respected curators on the global contemporary art scene? Perhaps. Then again, Rugoff isn't one for conventions. For more than 15 years, the new director of the Hayward Gallery in London has shaken up art audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, inspiring them to engage with the kind of puzzling, cerebral work that tends to put off all but the most dedicated of contemporary art aficionados. more...

Lobster and Lamb
7 June 2006

KML dishes out a full-length play

A few weeks ago, the producers of the world premiere of Bay Area playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's dark comedy Hunter Gatherers invited John Chakan, a lamb-slaughtering expert from Plantation Farm Camp in Sonoma County, to a production meeting. According to co-producer Marc Vogl, the 6-foot-5, 300-pound butcher strode into the room with a massive insulated bag filled with slabs of meat and proceeded to instruct the assembled cast, director, and other collaborators in the art of lamb slaughtering. "He came to tell us how to stun the baby lamb before killing it and how best to slice the neck and let the blood drain," said Vogl. "He took cuts of meat out of his bag to show us the correct texture, look, and feel of properly slaughtered lamb." more...

Writers with Scripts
24 May 2006

Why are there so few great writers for the stage today? Of all the questions posed by the theater community over the last few decades, this has to be one of the most common. While directors and literary managers lament the loss of the playwright to sitcoms and reality TV, Campo Santo, now celebrating its 10th anniversary with a series of projects, is busy proving that the stage is the medium of choice for some of the most daring and influential writers around. more...

Architectural Adventure
Apurva Pande and Chinmaya Misra's starter home is as indebted to their architectural background as it is to their creditors, but for fledgling professionals, this home is pretty sweet.

June 2006

When people ask architects Apurva Pande and Chinmaya Misra where they live, they never get a straightforward answer. The couple’s home lies at the end of a cul-de-sac somewhere between Culver City and West Adams—an amorphous zone west of downtown Los Angeles where angular streets rudely interrupt the city’s regular grid. The neighborhood council is still trying to come up with a name for the area. “We live an in-between of in-betweens,” says Pande. “Given our penchant for complexity, this neighborhood suits us perfectly.” more...

The Bellwether of Belvedere
Sustainable consultant to the stars Jordan Harris convinces Hollywood starlets to go hybrid, but when it came to greening his own home, he enlisted outside help.

June 2006

Jordan and Julie Harris’s home in Belvedere, just north of San Francisco, doesn’t look like most of the other houses in the area. What sets this low-slung study in clean lines and uncluttered light apart from the rest of the buildings bordering Belvedere Lagoon isn’t  the understated modernist aesthetic. It’s something subtler: the building’s orientation. While the neighboring properties all back squarely onto the lagoon, with views of gardens and docks on the opposite shore, the Harris residence rotates at a 30-degree angle, drawing the eye down the body of water toward the hazy, 2,571-foot peak of Mount Tamalpais beyond.

Yet for all the beauty of the house and its setting, the feature of which the owners are most proud is—improbably—the electric meter. “It’s running backwards,” says Jordan, revealing the ordinary-looking meter from behind a panel in the wooden fence that encircles the house. “Since last year, we’ve put hundreds of kilowatts of power back into the grid.” more...

Way Up In The Gods

British playwright Israel Zangwill coined America's most enduring metaphor as his reputation dissolved in controversy

9 May 2006

A few years ago, when I was working on a volume of interviews with actors, On Acting, for Faber Inc, I was lucky enough to spend several afternoons in the company of Luba Kadison, the last living member of the Vilna Troupe, arguably the most renowned Yiddish theater company of the last century. Armed with tape-recorder and a cup of tea, I would sit on a footstool near Kadison's armchair, listening to the actress—a grande dame in the true sense of the term, with enormous black eyes, a gentle sense of humor, and magnetic energy—tell story after story. Then in her mid-90s, Kadison was frail and losing her eyesight, but she still had the sort of voice capable of stirring emotions way up in the gods. She'd lament the difficulty of making a living in the theater today ("young actors all over the world have to fight very hard for work and act for free because they love it so much"), reminisce about her years studying acting in Warsaw ("The teachers said I possessed a magic quality when I played the role of Medea,") and extol the virtues of ensemble theater ("a company should be like an orchestra; all the greatest companies have a sense of ensemble"). more...

Main Lobsters
22 March 2006

Sucka Free City

This summer, Killing My Lobster, one of San Francisco's most widely respected comedy companies, will lose both of its founding directors. Executive Director Marc Vogl, who has for the past nine years been overseeing everything from writing and acting to directing and producing, is throwing in the comedic towel for a career in the significantly less humorous world of arts policy-making. Meanwhile, Artistic Director Paul Charney, whose Lobster job spec is similarly multifaceted, is taking an extended sabbatical to travel.

Not since Robin Williams went sober has local comedy felt this hard of a, er, blow.

"Many of us ... see the group as a projection of these two guys' personalities," says longtime KML collaborator Jon Wolanske. "It's hard to imagine KML existing without them."

Then again, is it? more...

Melting Point

British playwright Israel Zangwill coined America's most enduring metaphor as his reputation dissolved in controversy

10 March 2006

On October 5, 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt, the First Lady, and an entourage of dignitaries gathered at Washington. D.C.'s Columbia Theatre to catch The Melting Pot. Set in New York in the early 20th century, the play chronicled a tumultuous love affair between two Russian expats: Jewish composer David Quixano and Vera Revendal, an aristocratic ex-revolutionary. In a country that welcomed thousands of immigrants every day, the then-provocative title—with its vision of America as a bubbling cauldron of cultures—resonated deeply with theatergoers, including the President, who applauded loudly throughout, shouting, "It is a great play, Zangwill!"

If there was ever anyone capable of turning a metaphor into a household word, it was Israel Zangwill. From his impoverished roots in the East End of London, which in the late nineteenth century was home to multitudes of downtrodden Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he grew to become one of the most outspoken arbiters of the Jewish cause and famous men of letters of his day, counting H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle among his friends and earning the admiration of American literary luminaries like William Dean Howells and Willa Cather. more...

Power tools, storms and an atomic opera
29 September 2005

Chloe Veltman sees John Adams’s portentous work

On the night before Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team prepared to detonate the world’s first plutonium bomb in the New Mexico desert, a freak electrical storm erupted. For the stressed scientists, the sudden outbreak of wind and rain was highly unseasonal and -- as the bomb had already been hoisted up on the scaffolding for detonation -- very dangerous.

For American composer John Adams, however, the dramatic climate change that night signifies something larger: “There’s something mythic and portentous about a storm of this magnitude suddenly appearing right as the world’s first atomic bomb was about to explode,” said the neo-minimalist maestro in a recent interview. more...

Can You Train to be Funny?
July/August 2005

If comedians are born, not made, why are comedy training programs thriving like never before?

The beginner standup comedy course at The Hyena Comedy Institute in San Francisco was hurtling towards its climax. Each of the nine novice comedians in the class was gearing up to perform eight-minutes-worth of original material in front of a live audience, but one student was having a particularly hard time coming up with jokes. Steff Casella had, in fact, been suffering from an enduring stretch of writers' block since the eight-week course began, some seven weeks previously. Now she watched, with a mixture of awe and dismay, as her classmates asked the teacher penetrating questions about the quality of the lighting; mused about whether the concept of sleeping with Arnold Schwarzenegger was funnier than the idea of sleeping with Donald Rumsfeld; and queried whether it would be OK to invite 65 members of the local leather community along to the course's final performance.

Casella’s bout of self-doubt first made itself apparent to the rest of the class in Week Three during an exercise that was meant to develop the comedy fundamental of “writing jokes involving the element of surprise.” The teacher cited the Stephen King funny, “I still have the heart of a little boy…in a jar on my desk,” as an example of the form and the students were given ten minutes of class time to come up with their own snappy examples. Perching on a high stool in a lilac dress and matching crushed velvet lilac boots, Casella reluctantly shared her efforts with the class. “I can’t even make up a bad joke,” she said, fiddling uselessly with the microphone stand. “Here’s all I could come up with: ‘Time is irrelevant…Sprint PCS.’ That’s just stupid.” more...

Still Hybrid After All These Years
15 June 2005

Intersection for the Arts turns 40, right at home in the Mission

Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco's oldest alternative art space, is turning 40 this year. Its name is now synonymous with the Mission District, and as hipsters flow out onto the street after an evening of experimental theater, art, or jazz, it's hard to imagine the organization existing anywhere other than on that scruffy block of Valencia between 15th and 16th streets.

But before taking over an ex-mortuary and furniture store in the Mission in the 1980s, Intersection had been equally inseparable from its original location in North Beach. As "Intersection, A Center for Religion and the Arts" in the 1960s, the organization focused its energies on attracting the flower children of the era to spirituality through music, poetry, art, and performance. Although Intersection was housed in a church at 756 Union St., its connection with organized religion was pretty loose (and would formally come to an end in the early 1970s). In those days, North Beach honchos like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Michael McClure read their poetry to standing-room-only crowds. more...

Vanishing Act
30 March 2005

"The audience has seen a lot of me, and maybe they need a break."

He's been called, on various occasions, "preening, arrogant, sinister"; "a raving tyrant, enthusiastically cruel and as self-convinced as one of Tom Waits' growling drunkards"; "quiet, intense, inarticulate and bewildered, growing more helplessly tongue-tied the more he understands what's going on." And now he's skipping town. more...

Anatomy in the Gallery
12 March 2005

A rotating exhibition programme at the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, United States. The current installations will be on display until 22 April 2005 www.imss.org

A small, blue blanket sits upon a medical examination table, as if a child has mislaid it there. It looks soft, but feels surprisingly rough to the touch. Upon closer inspection, the blanket reveals itself to be crocheted not out of wool but from disposable hospital examination gowns.

The blanket is part of an interactive, multi-media installation entitled The Waiting Room, by Illinois-based artist Karen Jayne, currently on show at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago alongside The Body... Re-imagined, a series of paintings that explore the skin's surface by Illinois painter L J Douglas. The Waiting Room and The Body... Re-imagined are part of the museum's ongoing Anatomy in the Gallery exhibition programme, which presents work by contemporary artists dealing with a range of medically related themes and which changes every two to three months. more...

Hotel Rwanda
21 January 2005

About halfway through Terry George's Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina, a hotelier and the central character in the film, steps out of a van that has been run off the road in thick fog one morning, to find himself nose to nose with a corpse. Stumbling to his feet in the swirling mist, he realises that he is staring not just at one cadaver but a landscape strewn with lifeless, bloodied bodies.

More than 10 years have passed since the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800 000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu Rwandans were methodically hunted down and murdered by government-backed Hutu extremists, while the international community—favouring economic policies over humanitarian principles—failed to intervene. Today, Rwanda is still reeling from the impact of the disaster, particularly from a healthcare perspective. An Amnesty International report published last April estimated that between a quarter and half a million women were subject to rape—including gang rape, sexual torture, and mutilation—during the Rwandan genocide, and that of those who survived, seven in ten are now living with HIV/AIDS. A study by Physicians for Human Rights, meanwhile, reports widespread mental trauma among child survivors at refugee camps. more...

The Passion of the Morrissey
August 2004

During his tenure as frontman for the Smiths, this gladioli-strewing, hearing-aid-wearing waiflet of a man inspired fan devotion worthy of a deity. Why, then, might he take his own advice to a "silly old man" in "misguided trousers" (aka Mick Jagger) and "get off the stage"?

The gladioli are in flight. On the stage of the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood, a slender man in heavy 1950s style eye-glasses, floral shirt, white jeans and pompadour hairdo is energetically hurling a bunch of gangly blooms into the audience whilst singing something about spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. In the auditorium, tough-looking twenty-somethings in cuffed jeans, baseball boots and voluminous quiffs, sing word-perfectly along, their eyes shining as they strain to catch the somersaulting stems like blushing bridesmaids outside a country church.

Gradually, the adoration turns into unabashed devotion, as people try to clamber onto the stage. Those that make it past the heavy-set bouncers cling desperately onto their pop idol like lepers begging for a miracle. As the singer up on stage leads the bacchanal of flailing bodies in a rousing chorus of "Hang the DJ! Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ!" the scene resembles something of a cross between a room full of lagered-up soccer hooligans and The Sermon on the Mount. more...

The Good Body
24 July 2004

Written and performed by Eve Ensler Directed by Peter Askin American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco, California, United States, until 1 August 2004

In a darkened auditorium against a backdrop of loud gurgling and sucking sounds, a 35 year old woman lies on her back, talking about her latest cosmetic surgery procedure. It is the most recent in a long history of operations, which have included everything from liposuction to soy breast implants. Without a hint of irony, the woman says that she is in a sexual relationship with her plastic surgeon, a man who seems to regard himself as something of a Dr Frankenstein and his partner as his most fabulous creation. more...

Super Size Me
22 May 2004

When Morgan Spurlock decided to find out what would happen to him if he ate nothing but McDonald's fast food for a month, doctors didn't think the experiment would cause their patient too much harm. At most, they reckoned, the 33 year old New York based filmmaker would gain a few pounds and get bored with the diet. Little did Spurlock's medical advisers—a nutritionist, general physician, gastroenterologist, and cardiologist—imagine that a mere month on Big Macs, French fries, and bucket-sized Cokes would be enough to turn a healthy, energetic young man into a wheezing, lethargic blob with a liver well on its way to becoming pâté.more...

Shaking the Money Tree
Cinema's New Independent Entrepreneurs
22 January 2004

During the making of his 1989 Academy Award–nominated documentary short about a Washington, D.C. diner, Fine Food, Fine Pastries, Open 6 to 9, filmmaker David Petersen put a jar on the diner counter with a sign saying, “The Film Needs Help.” Beyond begging for spare change from customers, the rest of the funding was patched together from individual donors, a grant from the D.C. Community Humanities Council, one or two corporations, and the liberal use of Petersen’s credit card. Petersen is one of growing list of filmmakers who are applying their creativity and entrepreneurialism to finding innovative ways to fund their work. more...

A Bookstore Where Cultures Collide
10 July 2003

The City Lights Bookstore stands at the corner of a noisy intersection in San Francisco’s North Beach district. Outside, cultures collide: waiters from the area’s many Italian cafes flap menus in the faces of strolling tourists; smokers puff and shuffle in the doorways of local Irish bars; pots and pans clatter in the kitchens of adjacent Chinese restaurants as the windows steam up from inside; and down the street on Strip Club Row, the neon lights of Centerfolds and the Larry Flynt Hustler Club wink salaciously at passers by. more...

Down to a Science
Capacitor brings a body of principles to dance
5 March 2003

In recent months, a bunch of geophysicists and geologists have taken to hanging around a dance studio in downtown Oakland. Brandishing books with titles like Seismic Data Processing and Earth: Portrait of a Planet, the scientists have been sharing their enthusiasm for studying the micromovements of tectonic plates with an eager crowd of ballerinas, modern dancers, capoeristas, jugglers, and aerialists.

One early January evening the conversation erupts in erratic directions. In an environment where a description of the geological framework underlying Japan's Osaka airport casually segues into ruminations on how to install revolving restaurant-style seating in a theater, it feels like anything is possible. Still, there's little indication that these ravings will eventually cohere into a work of art. more...

Holy Orgasm!
Sex-toy company divine interventions is a shepherd in search of a flock.
25 December 2002

On a recent December evening, a young man walked into Castro Gulch, a gay erotica store on Upper Market. Picking his way through the brightly lit displays of adult videos, cock rings, and calendars emblazoned with oiled and rippling pectorals, he greeted the bespectacled sales assistant, hoisted a large sports bag onto the counter, rummaged through the contents, and selected an item. When the guy behind the counter saw what the man – whom I shall call Nigel R. – was pulling out of the bag, he gave a nervous little laugh and said one word: "Sacrilegious." more...

Pulling Faces
As cartoon characters get more sophisticated, how do animators keep pace?
January 2003

Early in the morning when there’s no one about, Glen Keane shuts his office door and pretends he’s a pirate. On this particular morning, the well-respected professional with some 30 years of experience behind him, swivels around in his chair to face a small, round mirror and strikes an unlikely pose. Gurning like Popeye and hunched like Quasimodo, Keane becomes John Silver, a bombastic tyrant whose sole aim in life is to seize a stash of treasure from a dysfunctional orphan called Jim.

As one of the lead animators on Disney’s latest animated feature film, Treasure Planet, a space age take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (release date: November 27, 2002), Keane has been conjuring up Silver’s unsightly mug hundreds of times a day over the last four years. By the end of the working day he frequently goes home with an aching jaw from the effort of imitating the character’s spastic pirate grin in the mirror. more...

Her Majesty's Mirth
In search of Brit laughs at the Edinburgh Fringe
28 August 2002

Expats, no matter where they live in the world, always wish they could pack some small aspect of home in their suitcases before boarding the plane. As a British journalist living in San Francisco for the past two years, I frequently have to deal with unmanageable cravings for real Cadbury's chocolate (not the unpalatable impostor made by Hershey and sold under the Cadbury name), country pubs, and even, on occasion, rain.

Lately what I have been missing more than anything is the British sense of humor. Seinfeld and Six Feet Under are all well and good, but when it comes to comedy, there's nothing like a well-turned British pun, a droll British put-down, or an off-beat British sketch, preferably involving a parrot and a man in a bowler hat. more...

Laughing Yourself Sick
31 August 2002

Watching the usual parade of penis contortionists, lesbian dwarf cabaret singers and one-legged, necrophiliac performance poets at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one is left feeling, as ever, that humankind ran out of things to say about human genitalia, terminal illness and the Taliban years ago.

Yet among the barrage of comedians at this year's Fringe who put bums on seats on the basis of their claims to break down taboos, there are two who actually accomplish what they set out to do. more...

Hit Me Hard
You need more than courage to make stand-up comedy out of Ground Zero
7 September 2002

If there's one subject that can be said to have dominated the programme at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it's responses to the events of September 11th 2001. From stand-up comedy to drama, 11 shows took their inspiration from the terrorist strikes and dozens more mentioned them in passing. more...

Time travel on festival stage
18 August 2002

Alongside love, death and loss, the past is a constant among favourite themes for modern playwrights.

At this year's Edinburgh International Festival, audiences can experience productions of two new plays that explore the subject of memory in very different ways. more...

Stage-hunting frenzy at Fringe
8 August 2002

Every year at Edinburgh's crowded Fringe Festival, production companies have to go to great lengths to find a venue to stage their shows.

Such a venue can be found in a damp, deserted bank vault under George IV Bridge in central Edinburgh. For 11 months of the year, it serves as extra storage space for the Central Library's book collection.

But for the last three years, the books have had to find a new home every August. more...

From Pill to Quill
July/August 2002

It's 11.30 on a Saturday morning and Carl Djerassi, professor of chemistry at Stanford University, is gesticulating dramatically in front of a giant projected image of a human penis. Exchanging slingshot wisecracks with a young female colleague from the human biology department in between detailed monologues about the process and implications of reproductive science, the diminutive, white-bearded academic seems to be enjoying every moment of his performance. more...

Birth of the Board
29 June 2002

When Jay Adams stepped into the arena at the Del Mar National Skateboarding Championships in 1975, the art of skateboarding changed forever. The elfin 15-year-old, with his girly blond hair and blue eyes, did things with a plank of wood that no one at that time would have dared to imagine. more...

Japanese hit cartoon gets US release
19 April 2002

Spirited Away, the animated film that blew Titanic out of the water with unprecedented box-office records in Japan, is getting its US debut this weekend.

The tale of Chihiro, a 10-year-old girl who is whisked away to a spirit world, was brought to Japan's big screen last summer by Japanese master animator Hayao Miyazaki. more...

Steinbeck's Legacy Remembered
25 February 2002

Ocean View Avenue, Monterey, has changed a lot since the days when sardine-canning factories lined the street. Soon after the Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck immortalised the dilapidated area in his 1945 novel, Cannery Row, the landscape began to alter, as did the clientele. more...

Mad for Ab Fab in San Fran
8 December 2001

If the two Bolly-swigging, Gucci-hugging heroines of the BBC TV series Absolutely Fabulous were ever kicked out of the UK for their bad behaviour, they would find no city more eager to give them asylum than San Francisco. more...

Is Tricky getting too big for his roots?
4 June 2001

Hunched over a microphone in the charcoal darkness of a crowded San Francisco club one night in April, Tricky is apparently oblivious to the 1,200 people who have come to watch him perform. With his bird-like frame turned away from the audience, the compulsive shaking, and a voice that bores into your soul like a pneumatic drill, the Bristol-born musical maverick is no Britney Spears. "I've forgotten the rest of the words," he mumbles at one point, breaking off a song midway. Not that it matters: in a city that was moved to proclaim 2 December as "Tricky Day" in his honour, all he has to do is cough and the crowds scream. more...

The next ice age: Torke in the rink
27 January 2000

The surface of New York's Rockefeller Plaza ice-rink is scarred with the balletic endeavors of a thousand blades. But no sooner has the regular crowd of ear-muff-clad skaters clambered to the side-lines, wheezing for hot cocoa, than an elegant flock of ice-dancers swoops down on the glassy plane, limbering up without a thought for the freeze. The swirling cluster of six noiselessly divides into two groups of three as the members of the Baltimore-based ice ensemble The Next Ice Age follow their artistic director, Nathan Birch, in a port-de-bras on ice. "These movements are the building blocks for the performance," explains champion figure skater and commentator Alicia (Jo-Jo) Starbuck from her rink-side vista. more...

Kids on canvas
30 September 2000

School's out and for most of the children on Bristol's housing estates, the end of July signifies uninterrupted phone calls, unlimited sleep and unmitigated Eminem, Britney Spears and Pok³mon. But if the noises emanating from a squat pink building on the corner of Dean Street in the city's St Paul's area are anything to go by, one group of children is engaging in rather different activities. more...

Scars still fresh, the Balkan theatre plays on
2 July 2000

Zagreb, Croatia -- The Factory is a noisy place. Inside, by 9:30 on a Tuesday night, trails of moisture slither down the paint-splattered walls and a fat belly of cigarette smoke hangs in the air. But as crowds of fashionably dressed young Croatians gather expectantly outside the drab, inconspicuous entrance, work could not be further from their minds. The Factory, one of Zagreb's trendiest nightspots, has even more to offer than bottled beer and ubiquitous techno music: it has become one of the city's most popular theaters. more...

Click here for 'mayn yidishe mame'
26 November 1999

Yiddish cultural life has found a new home in cyberspace. The bustling theaters of Second Avenue, the one-time hub of the New York Jewish arts scene, may have closed their doors long ago, but a new web-oriented project masterminded by the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University could go some of the way toward recouping the fading memories of that effervescent world. more..

Jamaican art soon seen
2 May 2000

A musical chapter in history of the struggle for civil rights
31 March 2000

Staging the diary of a remarkable woman
21 January 2000