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Press coverage
artists applaud berkeley rep
- “At Berkeley Rep, I feel like a wanderer who has finally come home.”—Rita Moreno, legendary actress
- “Working with Tony Taccone has been an intense, enlightening, fortifying experience…My creative partner, Steve Colman, and I have learned more about our own process through our collaborations with Tony than with anyone else. His generosity, passion, and dedication to the craft of honest expression are but a few of his many gifts. In other words, we think he kicks ass.”—Sarah Jones, Tony Award-winning solo performer
- “Seeing a show at Berkeley Rep changed my life.”—Tom Hanks, Academy Award-winning actor
- “Berkeley Rep was one of the first theatres in the country to do my work, ten years before it became ‘known.’ They have been big enough for experiments, but savvy enough to become a mainstay of American arts. They are the symbol of their generation: an exemplary one!”—Anna Deavere Smith, playwright, performer and MacArthur genius
- “Tony [Taccone] is one of my oldest friends. We’ve done seven shows now, and I love the theatre he’s built. Any chance I get to work at Berkeley, I take it.”—Tony Kushner, Tony- and Pulitizer-winning playwright
- “Berkeley Rep is a really amazing place to make art. I feel like I won the creativity and community lottery by getting to make a piece here…I would be the Berkeley Rep’s pool boy. Just to get to work here.”—Julie Wolf, composer and music director
- “Rock and roll with extra hot sauce on it, baby! Che Guevera would be pleased, and he would probably be a subscriber. ¡Viva Berkeley Rep!”—Culture Clash, homegrown comedy troupe
- “Berkeley was a comfort zone for us. I mean, we throw a lot of references at people—art history, literature, politics, language jokes. And we’re thinking, ‘If anybody’s going to get all this, it’s these people.’ Do you realize that there’s a homeless book club in Berkeley? If you’re going to throw a bag of cultural references at people, this is the place to do it.”—Stew, creator of Passing Strange
- “Berkeley Rep is a smart, generous and forward-thinking theatre. The audience it serves is the most intelligent I’ve run into in America. And Berkeley Rep has the signal advantage of being the place where Les Waters, one of the great minds and hearts of the theatre world, happens to work. I can honestly say there’s nowhere I’d rather develop a new piece.”—Ellen McLaughlin, actress and playwright
- “I like [Taccone’s] pugnaciousness. I like that he knows what he wants to do. Any artist these days who is brave enough to stand up for what he wants to do and not buckle, that’s rarer than the ivory-billed woodpecker.”—Maurice Sendak, beloved children’s author
- “Working at Berkeley Rep is like playing with the smart kids: fun, challenging, surprising and fulfilling. There is a unique alchemy of audience and artists and staff at play here, and that makes it a magnetic operation.”—Lisa Peterson, Obie Award-winning director
- “It gave me the opportunity to learn my craft as an actor. How better can you do that than by working in a repertory company for 10 years?”—Joe Spano, actor and Emmy nominee
- “Berkeley Rep has been a West Coast home for my work, and I can’t think of another theatre that would be daring enough to help us realize a performance that is both epic in scale and extremely intimate in scope. Audiences here have always been receptive to new work that tests conventional wisdom.”—Mike Daisey, popular solo performer
- “Berkeley Rep! O lucky me! A support system for comedy!”—Geoff Hoyle, renowned clown
- “He [Les Waters] has been called a Zen director. He does it so quietly: by giving a generous enjoyment when something is working or someone tries something that opens up possibilities, and he questions the text and choices by raising his eyebrow, a gentle interrogation, that allows us to work in the room without censorship. He completely immerses himself in the tonality of feelings that a work summons up, and he feels his work deeply.”—Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
- “Les goes with his gut rather than living in a place of cleverness. There is always something emotional, transcendent, at stake for him…His fearlessness in the rehearsal studio has become a beacon that draws playwrights to him. To find a director who is so virtuosic but also so caring, so loyal, to what you might describe as the-play-in-itself…that’s a playwright’s dream.”—Sarah Ruhl, playwright and MacArthur genius
- “Berkeley Rep is home and always new cultural territory—as an artist I’m proud to be part of its life and growth.”—Sharon Lockwood, veteran Bay Area actor
- “I remember when Michael Leibert announced he was going to make a professional repertory theatre in Berkeley, all the faculty at Berkeley—we were in grad school—all the professors said, ‘That’s crazy. You’ll never pull it off.’ But Michael just kept trucking. We were just flying by the seat of our pants, so it’s nice to know that all that work built a theatre that will last forever.”—Holly Barron, leading lady from Berkeley Rep’s early days