By Yuko Kurahashi
The world-premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt, directed by Doug Hughes, is currently playing at La Jolla Playhouse.
JUNK’s pivotal character is Robert Merkin, a financier, loosely based on bond traders from the junk-bond era of the 1980s such as Michael Milken. Merkin helps Israel “Izzy” Peterman, a businessman, to wage a hostile takeover of a Dow Jones industrial steel company owned by Thomas Everson, the grandson of the founder. [Read more…]
By Yuko Kurahashi
Hershey Felder’s Maestro (directed by Joel Zwick), one in a series of solo shows on famous composers, was staged at the San Diego Repertory Theatres’ Lyceum Stage from July 6-17, 2016. Capturing key moments in Leonard Bernstein’s life, Felder offers a truly memorable piece that humanizes the world-famous American conductor and composer. It gives voices to people who influenced Bernstein directly or indirectly, including his parents, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Demitri Mitropoulos, Serge Koussevitzky, and his wife of 27 years Felicia Cohn Montealegre.
Highlighting key events in Bernstein’s life, Hershey focuses on: Bernstein’s Jewish heritage, his encounters and relationships with world-renowned composers and conductors; his marriage to Felicia and homosexuality, his ambitions and successes as a composer, and failures as a composer. He ties these all together to his love of music and life [Read more…]
By Yuko Kurahashi
The La Jolla Playhouse, in partnership with Berkeley Repertory Theatre, presents Jeff Augustin’s The Last Tiger in Haiti, a play about “restavek” (child slavery in Haiti), directed by Joshua Kahan Brody, at the Mandell Weiss Forum through July 24, 2016. The playwright Augustin, of Haitian descent, chose to use the traditions of Haitian storytelling as a vehicle not only to expose child slavery but also question traditional and contemporary “story-telling” and its power.
Augustin depicts child slaves making up stories about their lives in a competitive way, shaping the stories in response to the comments of the listeners. In Haiti, the tradition is that a storyteller says, “krik” if one has a story to tell. Then the “listener” says “krak” if they are willing to listen. Using this set of call and response the stories in the play are comingled with folktales and religious traditions, while they also introduce the audience to the tragic reality of child slavery. [Read more…]
