Press > Press coverage > Our shows hit it big in NY and beyond

Press coverage

our shows hit it big in new york and beyond

“Suddenly the Rep is one of the Bay Area’s leading export companies,” exclaimed the San Francisco Chronicle in a recent story that celebrated how our shows have been traveling to cities nationwide. Here are the rave reviews for shows that you saw locally before they were reborn abroad…

2009: broadway, the bestseller list and the silver screen

Broadway buzzes about Berkeley Rep’s Vibrator

In November, Associate Artistic Director Les Waters made his Broadway debut with In the Next Room (or the vibrator play). Berkeley Rep commissioned this script from MacArthur genius Sarah Ruhl and staged its world premiere earlier that year; then Lincoln Center Theater gave it new life at the Lyceum Theater in New York. This was the fourth show that Berkeley Rep helped send to Broadway in the last four years!

The reviews were full of good vibrations…In addition, check out a fascinating interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition and this fun feature in the Wall Street Journal that wondered if Broadway audiences could handle all those paroxysms.

“INSPIRED…In the Next Room is a true novelty: a sex comedy designed not for sniggering teenage boys—or grown men who wish they were still sniggering teenage boys—but for adults with open hearts and minds…The ideas underpinning the play, about the fundamental lack of sympathy between men and women of the period, and the dubious scientific theories that sometimes reinforced women’s subjugation, are serious. In the Next Room illuminates with a light touch—a soft, flickering light rather than a moralizing glare—how much control men had over women’s lives, bodies and thoughts, even their most intimate sensations. [It] is directed by Les Waters with a fine sensitivity to its varied textures. Insightful, fresh and funny, the play is as rich in thought as it is in feeling.”—New York Times
“THRILLING…superbly directed by Les Waters…In the Next Room brings scintillating news of the politics of desire, scientific history, and sexual behavior. Part of the comedy of Ruhl’s play—her most commercial and her best to date—is her nonjudgmental attack on a sensational subject. Ruhl hides her impish intelligence behind a simple style, maintaining a droll, detached sense of wonder at both the sexual ignorance and the sexual discoveries of her characters…In a low-key but daring way, Ruhl has extended the geography of the comedy of manners. Sex is always complicated, therefore always funny; Ruhl, however, never laughs at her bewildered, repressed characters, who are either lumbered by frustrations that they can’t explain or reeling with a desire for which they have no words…Ruhl’s playwriting is inspired; in the second act, she never falters as she puts her characters through the paces of passion with a special high-comic gravity and grace…In the Next Room gives ‘the body electric’ a whole new meaning.”—The New Yorker
“SENSUAL and dare we say it, surprisingly romantic…The dawn of electricity and the quest for sexual fulfillment. Who knew the two could be linked so satisfactorily on stage? But then Thomas Edison gets profusely thanked in Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the vibrator play, a perceptive comedy about female liberation of a very specific kind. This provocative, often quite funny play, which Lincoln Center Theater opened Thursday at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre, is Ruhl’s most entertaining work to date. Not only because of its sexual subject matter but because she has created a parade of appealing, fully drawn characters.”—Associated Press
“POETIC…In the Next Room or the vibrator play goes where no Broadway show has gone before. And we’re not talking about nudity (though there’s some of that) or graphic sexuality. Ruhl presents something a lot more intimate and a lot more daring: women’s discovery of their own bodies and their own pleasure. It may be the first time we’ve seen characters repeatedly reach orgasm on a mainstream stage—in a Lincoln Center Theater production, no less—and it happens in a play that’s smart, delicate and very, very funny…As well written as the play is, it could easily have gone astray in the wrong hands. But director Les Waters and his cast proceed with great sensitivity. Cerveris’ earnest, slightly stiff physicality is put to good use here, while Benanti and Dizzia brim with a contagious glee in their shared scenes.”—New York Post
“PURE PLEASURE…Sarah Ruhl should write more porn. Her works of brainy, feathered whimsy generally hover a few safe inches over dolorous themes—death, depression, unbridgeable distances between the sexes and between people in general. But her latest, the giggly, teasing, shamelessly entertaining In the Next Room or the vibrator play, displays something new: a pornographer’s instinct for instant gratification. Positioned somewhere between a dirty joke and an educated guess, the play draws on historical fact—Victorian doctors really did administer machine-assisted genital massage to ‘hysterical’ women—to tell the tale of a staid physician (Michael Cerveris), his ebullient wife (Laura Benanti), and the miraculous device that comes between them. The play begins as an extravagantly elongated gag, morphs into an upended A Doll’s House, and ultimately verges on romantic comedy…Ruhl’s a great intellect, a true entertainer, an authoritative American voice that Broadway desperately needs. Let her milk it a little.”—New York Magazine
“PROVOCATIVE…ambitious and surprisingly moving…In the Next Room will elicit paroxysms of mirth…By turns deftly farcical and deeply poignant, In the Next Room raises questions that transcend gender and, for that matter, time…The laughs that result (and there are many) are offset by the difficulties endured by Ruhl’s female characters…The actresses all do justice to this vivid, bittersweet humanity that Ruhl affords them, as do their male castmates. By showing how women and men struggle with both pleasure and pain, In the Next Room offers something a lot more satisfying than cheap thrills or cheesy self-empowerment.”—USA Today
“BEGUILING…a period-appropriate comedy of manners about an inappropriate subject…There are so many lingering moments of emotional truth, and even more of daring comedy, that the play amuses and charms…Les Waters, who first directed the play at Berkeley Rep, has an agreeably light touch that allows the comedy to milk every ounce of naughtiness without tipping over into puerility. The treatment scenes in particular benefit from staging that underlines the clinical nature of the approach while slyly tickling the audience’s more contemporary attitudes toward sexuality and manual stimulation. And the scene in which Mrs. Givings and Mrs. Daldry turn into complicitous, giggling schoolgirls when they get their illicit hands on the doc’s equipment is a riot.”—Variety
“STIMULATING. Although it would seem to hold the promise of being an extended dirty joke, Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room or the vibrator play actually is a surprisingly funny and sensitive portrait of the eternal disconnect between men and women…The playwright, responsible for such works as The Clean House and Dead Man’s Cell Phone, mines her subject for suitably bawdy humor without resorting to vulgarity. But what really gives the work its distinction is its sensitive exploration of the physical and emotional repression suffered by the women of the era, which has yet to disappear entirely. Nor does Ruhl neglect the male side of things, as evidenced by the beautifully staged final scene in which Mrs. Givings provides her husband with a lesson about the beauty of his own body. The play, seen at the Berkeley Rep, has been given a pitch-perfect Broadway staging that beautifully balances its humor and pathos. Under the sensitive direction of Les Waters, the ensemble delivers sterling performances, with Benanti a particular delight as the woman for whom electricity turns out to be a marriage saver.”—Hollywood Reporter
“COMIC and poignant…a compelling yarn with engaging characters…This premise could easily devolve into a silly sex farce or a strident feminist critique; in fact, Ruhl samples from both without becoming indebted to either…She doesn’t just point at historical ignorance and cackle, but probes sympathetically, to portray a marriage warped by shame and secrecy, in which scientific ritual occludes common sense and instinct…Ruhl achieves an unforced aura of hopeful wonder—for the future of both love and science.”—Time Out New York
“ENDEARING…a painful and riotous symphony of sexual searching…Ruhl’s grasp of her characters is strong, and their troubles are affectingly depicted…Director Les Waters’ production mines the comic potential of this setup, with the audience howling at the sexual misconceptions espoused and the powerful effects of Dr. Givings’ marvelous instrument. Waters also stresses the tragedies caused by the characters’ being out of touch with their bodies…As the vibrant Mrs. Givings, Laura Benanti is a ball of fire barely contained by costume designer David Zinn’s elegant but restrictive corsets and gowns. Best known for her roles in musicals, including a Tony-winning turn in Gypsy, Benanti is emerging as one of our best young actors. Her Mrs. Givings is wildly funny as she blurts out inappropriate observations and achingly moving as she tearfully seeks to fill voids in her soul and libido. Fellow Tony winner Michael Cerveris is equally complex as Dr. Givings, who believes he’s a forward-thinking scientist but is as convention-bound as the most domineering husband. In a shattering final scene, beautifully staged by Waters with the aid of Annie Smart’s moving (both literally and figuratively) set and Russell H. Champa’s warm lighting, Cerveris bravely sheds both the doctor’s insecurities and his clothes.”—Back Stage
“DELIGHTFUL…If Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde had decided to collaborate on a post-modern drawing-room comedy, the hotsy-totsy twosome surely would have turned out something very much like Sarah Ruhl’s genuinely hysterical new work In the Next Room or the vibrator play…Handed material that theatergoers stuck in a bygone age might find unsavory, director Les Waters has honed it to a fare-thee-well. (He also helmed the piece for its Berkeley Repertory Theatre debut.) And his actors are certainly a game lot…Ruhl is so accomplished in her aim as she progresses toward a dazzling Edenic conclusion that Sigmund Freud himself might have applauded her bold grappling with civilization and its discontents. He might even have conceded that Ruhl supplies the correct answer to the question that baffled him, ‘What do women want?’”—TheaterMania
“SUPERB…Ruhl’s flighty Vibrator Play lives up to the buzz. [She] has written a smart, charming, iridescently funny-serious jewel…As Ruhl traces it with wit and insight, and without the slightest prurience, the birth of this new era gives rise to colorful events, astute psychological revelations and endearingly apt dialogue…Les Waters has directed compellingly on Annie Smart’s scrupulous set, abetted by David Zinn’s elaborately sober costumes and Russell H. Champa’s electricity-enamored lighting. Laura Benanti is the most incandescent Mrs. Givings imaginable. She knows how to make flightiness winsome and gush graceful. Michael Cerveris’s Doctor is flawless in the exacting traversal from cool scientist through jealous spouse to liberated wife-lover. And as the bumpily recovering Mrs. Daldry, Maria Dizzia is enchantingly exuberant.”—Bloomberg
“FANCIFUL…Commissioned by Berkeley Rep, which is becoming something of a feeder theater for Broadway—Wishful Drinking this year, Passing Strange last year, and probably Green Day’s American Idiot next year—In The Next Room could not hope for a better production. Annie Smart’s set is a credible facsimile down to the wallpaper, costume designer David Zinn’s bustles, corsets, vested suits and gloves seem exactly right. The acting is uniformly spot-on, precise and believable—no broad winking—from a cast of seven, made up of both well-known Broadway names Laura Benanti (Tony-winner for Gypsy; Into the Woods; The Sound of Music) as Mrs. Givings and Michael Cerveris (Sweeney Todd; Assassins; Titanic) as Dr. Givings and such Off-Broadway mainstays as Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Obie-winner for Ruined), who plays a wet nurse for Mrs. Givings’ infant and Maria Dizzia, a particular stand-out as Mrs. Daldry, the doctor’s unhappy patient. Ruhl herself, with the help of director Les Waters, establishes right from the start through dialogue and gesture the period’s patronizing attitude towards women that amounts to oppression, the quaint fascination with electricity, the misplaced obsession with propriety, the ignorance about sexual pleasure, the wrong-headedness of the doctor’s approach.”—The Faster Times

Fisher and Taccone go Drinking on Broadway

In the fall of 2009, Artistic Director Tony Taccone returned to Broadway with his production of Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, which set box-office records during its two runs in Berkeley, became a New York Times bestseller and played to sold-out crowds on a six-city national tour. Manhattan proved to be no different than the rest of the country—critics and audiences loved the show:

“Hilarious…You’re going to like it. A lot. Ms. Fisher—an actress, writer and sometime heroine of the tabloids—is the creator and cast of Wishful Drinking, the brut-dry, deeply funny memoir of a show that opened on Sunday night at Studio 54, directed by Tony Taccone…Ms. Fisher makes you feel you’ve arrived for a slumber party to swap confidences. Never mind that she does most of the talking. She has the gift, possessed by only the smartest and most charming of narcissists, of making you think that it’s somehow all about you…Ms. Fisher was blessed with a sense of the howling absurdity built into fishbowl lives…What she is doing, most cannily, is letting you see the Carrie Fisher Defense System in action. I mean the one that’s built on the transformational power of epigrams instead of pills.”—New York Times
“Confession may be good for the soul, but does it make for good theater? Yes, indeed. Especially when the author and star is Carrie Fisher, daughter of showbiz royalty, Star Wars icon, manic-depressive, alcoholic and astute observer of the Hollywood scene. Fisher is a raconteur in the best sense of the word. She knows how to tell a story. And Wishful Drinking, her hilariously perceptive journey through a world of celebrity and self-destruction, is chock-full of funny, fascinating tales. It helps that Fisher has enormous rapport with the audience at Broadway’s Studio 54…Wishful Drinking produces large laughs. Fisher’s jaundiced view of the luxurious movieland lifestyle is priceless.”—Associated Press
“In Wishful Drinking—her personable, almost excruciatingly personal autobiographical show and gossip-fest—the witty actress/author clearly appreciates the absurdity of her own tabloid-ready life…She makes an expert witness to fame in all its ridiculousness and peril, who knows that celebrity is ‘obscurity biding its time.’ She’s a loose cannon with satirist’s discipline, a still-crazy-after-all-these-years survivor…As Fisher sees it, this is material begging to be confronted and enjoyed in public—not just postcards from the edge, but live onstage with glitter and an R2D2 throw pillow on the divan…tenderly directed by Tony Taccone and developed at his Berkeley Repertory Theatre.”—Newsday
“Loopy and laid back…Carrie Fisher carries the day in Wishful Drinking…With Fisher’s winning wit and gift for gab you’re glad to sit around and laugh with her for a couple of hours…Briskly directed by Tony Taccone, Wishful whips through incidents previewed by dishy headlines flashed on a screen in Alexander V. Nichols’ funky living room set, tricked out with comfy couches, a garden gnome and gigantic red apple. She welcomes you in for juicy stories, caustic quips and gobs of self-deprecation.”—Daily News
“Wildly entertaining…harrowing and hilarious…Drinking is terrific fun, sort of like reading dozens of outrageous tabloid-newspaper stories in one sitting while their subject gets to respond to them…What elevates the proceedings beyond the usual Hollywood confessional, besides the sheer exoticism of her experiences, is Fisher’s ability to craft both hilarious one-liners and nearly poetic observations about her life.”—Reuters
“This is pretty delicious…Fisher is likable, acerbic, clever and wryly forthcoming about the warped reality of life in the celebrity bubble…Fisher’s avoidance of self-pity when reflecting on her lowest points is as admirable as her disdain for self-congratulation.”—Variety
“Hollywood celebrities beware, Carrie Fisher is on the loose and taking no prisoners in her one-woman tour de force, Wishful Drinking, now playing on Broadway at Roundabout Theatre’s Studio 54. Fisher, most recognizable from her turn as the bun-haired princess in Star Wars, has taken to the stage to tell a tale, or three, of her ups and mostly downs over the last 50 years, and shines brighter than any star in George Lucas’ faraway galaxy…There is something for every car crash rubbernecking, gossip-hungry person to enjoy in Wishful Drinking. Fisher even throws those sentimental types a bone or two, although she is quick to break through those downer moments with a readied zinger…Wishful Drinking never fails to keep the audience rolling in the aisles. Fisher need not be a stand-up comedian as her radiant personality and wry sense of humor continuously satisfy.”—Broadway World
“Fisher is such a cheerfully sober—and sometimes subtly sobering—host that a good time is had by all…Fortunately, whatever vices she no longer has, Fisher is still addicted to the temptation to be ironic on every aspect of the dazzling, dizzying, dysfunctional life she’s led…Throughout, Fisher has an ability to use words like Play-Doh, manipulating them to her clever advantage.”—TheaterMania
“Extremely funny…a witty, engaging evening, presented by a woman who didn’t take the easy path…Fisher recounts her life and times with a bracing combination of wryness and cynicism, and without self-pity. Even if you don’t like confessional theater and feel like crawling under your seat when a celebrity, in the name of honesty, reveals all, you might find yourself laughing your head off at Fisher’s stories.”—Star-Ledger

Wishful Drinking becomes a bestseller

After Carrie Fisher broke sales records at Berkeley Rep with Wishful Drinking, she repeated that success in print. Even before this outrageous solo show became a Broadway hit, the book version of it turned into a New York Times bestseller which received rave reviews from around the world:

“She shoots straight from the hip to the heart. The ease of the style, the thrill of the flow! The book is gone in an instant…Only 170 or so pages long, it manages feverishly and hilariously to cover Fisher’s babyhood, plump-teenager angst, stint as front woman in the trilogy of Star Wars films, failed marriage to the singer Paul Simon and various drug-induced nervous breakdowns, without pausing for breath…As the chapters get smaller, the emotions expand to fill every available space. On page after page, Fisher is seamlessly simultaneously crazy and tender…And she writes precisely as she looks: like a continually fresh and bold idea.”—London Times
“Funny as hell…Her stories bubble, bounce, and careen with an energy as loose as the jauntiness in The Best Awful was tight. Get someone to read this rollicking book aloud to you—then trade off and you play Leia.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Princess Leia’s wit tames the Dark Side…It buttonholes you and, desperate to please, wrings laughs from the story of Ms. Fisher’s strange, off-the-wall journey. She won’t let you feel sorry for her, which is greatly to her credit in this age of needy, tell-all celebrity memoirs…The jokes—the puns, the wisecracks, the deadpan one-liners—come rattling along at the rate of one every other sentence or so.”—New York Times
“An honest, funny, near-libelous look at the Hollywood elite…perhaps the last insider account of true celebrity aristocracy…Wishful Drinking should be read as an account, as touching and incisive as any, of bipolarity, addiction, and motherhood.”—The London Independent
“Fisher has a knack for titles. But she also has a talent for lacerating insight that masquerades as carefree self-deprecation…You could say this book is a blistering stream of witty comments, or a dazzling romp through the experiences of a woman who once sought drug-addiction counsel from Cary Grant. But it isn’t really about any of that. It’s about the dizzying, dissonant music of Carrie Fisher’s existence…The effect, ultimately, is extraordinarily painful while being extremely entertaining. This is Fisher’s distinctive trick and what has kept her going in Hollywood for decades.”—Los Angeles Times
“Anyone who enjoyed her brilliant novel Postcards from the Edge will love it. She has a wonderful self-deprecating wit and total lack of self-pity—there is none of the I Will Survive grandiosity one expects from Hollywood memoirs.”—London Telegraph
“What about something wickedly funny and totally offbeat? Does the name Carrie Fisher do anything for you? Try her vivid and outrageous new memoir of life in Hollywood and elsewhere, Wishful Drinking (Simon & Schuster). Be prepared for humor as sharp as knives and hefty doses of psychological soul-baring (and a lot more than that). Note to rabid Simon and Garfunkel fans: There is an entire chapter on her relationship with Paul. And a pic or two. Delicious.”—Readers’ Digest
“Carrie Fisher can’t stop writing or talking about her life, but who can really blame her? With stories like these, there’s no need for her to hide behind fiction any more. Wishful Drinking began as a stage show, and certain zingers have a polished Borscht Belt ring, while other passages are incredibly poetic; Fisher writes movingly about what it’s like to be born into celebrity and never really leave. At the very least, her memoir lays waste to the tabazine conceit that stars are ‘just like us.’”—Variety
“Fisher’s big, beautiful brain is the perfect filter for a life too trippy and surreal for fiction. I like to think that in every soul-shattering trauma lies an amusing anecdote. Fisher’s life beautifully illustrates my theory: she’s capable of wringing the breeziest of laughs from the most horrifying of experiences. Her delightful memoir Wishful Drinking delves deep into the seldom-explored lighter side of alcoholism, parental abandonment, drug addiction, manic-depression, and what used to be called ‘electro-shock therapy.’”—The Onion’s AV Club
“With acerbic precision and brash humor, she writes of struggling with and enjoying aspects of her alcoholism, drug addiction, and mental breakdowns…Her razor-sharp observations about celebrity, addiction, and sexuality demand to be read aloud to friends.”—Publishers Weekly

Passing Strange: The Movie

Passing Strange, the provocative rock musical that was born at Berkeley Rep, burst onto Broadway with its original cast intact. It won awards and acclaim at every stop of its long, strange trip. As if that weren’t enough, celebrated director Spike Lee shot two of the show’s final performances to preserve it for future generations. The resulting film debuted at Sundance and then screened at South by Southwest, the Seattle International Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival, where it was picked up by PBS. Here are some of the rapturous reviews for the film version of Passing Strange:

“In rethinking the Tony-winning 2008 rock musical Passing Strange for the screen, director Spike Lee made sure to do the right thing: not fuck up what worked like gangbusters onstage. Lee and the masterful cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Iron Man, Inside Man) brought their HD cameras to Broadway’s Belasco Theatre to film two live performances with the original cast. Then, for greater cinematic dynamism, they shot a performance without an audience, letting the cameras rock out in their own freewheeling dance. The invigorating result, zestily edited by Lee’s own inside iron man, Barry Brown, is in every way a knockout…On stage and screen are a host of mesmerizing, multitasking talents, including Chad Goodridge, Colman Domingo and the electrifying De’Adre Aziza and Rebecca Naomi Jones as the women in this youth’s life. And permeating everything is that thrilling score in which rock, punk, funk and gospel conduct a revival meeting that blows the roof off. Stew’s voice, which can twist from mellow to shout without missing a nuance, is a distinct pleasure. And the lyrics, whether evoking an Amsterdam where ‘men dressed up in Gauloise smoke quote Marx right back at you’ or the pain of missing life while you’re ‘working your wound,’ shame the usual Broadway treacle.”—Rolling Stone
“I was blown away…The show does two contradictory things at once, both brilliantly: it captures the impatient emergence of a budding artistic personality with a perfect mixture of sympathy and skepticism, and also reckons the sometimes devastating costs of a young artist’s desire to set himself free and make himself real…Camera movements and compositions immerse the viewer at once in the story and the process of performance, emphasizing both the play’s artifice and its fidelity to emotional facts. The members of the small cast, several of whom take on multiple roles, are shown in the full, sweaty glory of self-transformation…And it is Stew’s refusal to sentimentalize his life that makes him a trustworthy guide to it. But at the same time, his refusal to condescend to the desire to wrest art from experience, or to the crystallizations of that desire in Los Angeles garages or Berlin cabarets, makes Passing Strange moving, thrilling and new. That and the music, a pastiche of styles given coherence by the rumble of Stew’s voice and the snarl and wail of his electric guitar. Passing Strange is less a collection of songs—though there are a few, most notably ‘Keys (Marianna),’ that stand out—than a single headlong piece of music. You might say a rock opera, if that phrase did not summon up spectacles of bloated self-importance entirely antithetical to the spirit of this show. A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.”—New York Times
“Nimbly directed by Lee and propelled by a rousing cabaret rock score (by Stew and Heidi Rodewald) that cleanses the palate of contemporary Broadway’s prevailing jukebox drivel, Passing Strange conjures a rare kind of theatrical magic with its emotionally raw, frequently euphoric portrait of the artist as a young man.”—Village Voice
“There’s never been a musical quite like Passing Strange. There’s also never been a movie of a play like Spike Lee’s uncompromisingly dynamic take on Stew’s autobiographical art-rock creation. The film [is] a must-see for anyone who loves any of the art forms involved. Strange is a rocker-as-artist-coming-of-age story emerging, like some wondrous new life form, from the psychedelic cocoon of a particularly tuneful, varied, soulful and witty rock concert…Lee lets you see it as you can’t live, from close-ups to views of the energized audience over the actors’ shoulders. The subtleties of Stew’s emotional engagement emerge as clearly as his great, growling, bluesy voice…The result re-creates a great performance infused with last-show electricity between actors and audience…If Strange alters the future of musical theater, Lee has raised the bar for filming live performances.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Strikingly original…As someone who didn’t go to see Passing Strange on Broadway and who now, having seen Lee’s cinematic rendering, feels like an idiot for passing it up, I can tell you only that nothing I read prepared me for the show’s exuberance and vibrancy…The cast is knocking itself out, and the strikingly edited result is theater magnified, amplified, brought to a kind of life that doesn’t usually happen with filmed performances…At every turn in that twisting path, Stew provides a musical style to match—gospel, blues, punk and toe-tapping show music. And his collaborators—co-author Heidi Rodewald and stage director Annie Dorsen—provide an impressive array of staging tricks, to which Spike Lee adds considerable sizzle on screen.”—NPR
“Deftly capturing the exuberance of singer-songwriter Stew’s popular Broadway musical Passing Strange, Spike Lee’s new film elatedly affirms the show’s inspiring theme of creative discovery…Stew’s semi-autobiographical narrative skirts the pitfalls of conventional coming-of-age material by harnessing the boisterous energy of the endlessly inventive musical numbers, co-created with Heidi Rodewald, the bassist for the show’s band. Drawing on rock, gospel, soul and blues, the songs comment on the frequently amusing story line while also advancing it, nicely shading Stew’s onstage narration. In directing the film, Lee allows the show’s inherent vitality to carry the documentary, relying on Stew’s charismatic stage presence, the cast’s absorbing performances and the production’s effective combination of minimal staging and impressive lighting design to convey the musical’s energetic celebration of artistic discovery.”—Reuters
“Dazzling…With Stew as combination narrator, band leader, stage manager and puppeteer for the characters, the film traces the odyssey of a young black man called Youth (Daniel Breaker), who breaks with his mother’s down-home adherence to church and family and seeks to reinvent himself overseas.”—Associated Press
“We don’t get to see films of this measure very often, and it’s a rare treat when the power of voice is used to make us happy, sad, and thoughtful…Spike Lee, to his credit, realized the beauty of the musical was right there on stage—no further tinkering was needed. Spike used 14 cameras at once to capture the action like it’s never been done before. Amazingly, you never see a camera you weren’t meant to see. Intimate shots were gathered in gorgeous high-definition over the course of three shows and seamlessly edited together. It’s a technological triumph as well as an artistic one…Spike shows off stellar camera work, and the enigmatic Stew takes us on a roller coaster ride of emotion and joy.”—Film.com
“Intoxicating and vivid…The best film to come out of Sundance: Nothing at Sundance 2009 will be better than Spike Lee’s amazingly cinematic transcription of Passing Strange, the sensational Broadway musical by journeyman rock and cabaret artist Stew (leader of LA band The Negro Problem) about his own life and struggle for identity. Tender, sexy, funny, moving and profound, Passing Strange bears comparison not just to the great works of the American musical theatre but to literary landmarks like James Baldwin’s Another Country and (especially) Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man…Alternately melancholy and ferociously rocking as he watches his former self take the same large risks and make the same wrong turns he himself made in life, Stew is a riveting presence, who presides over the world he’s lovingly but unsparingly recreated like some kind of rueful patriarch. His story and his lyrics have the bracing and unexpected quality of specificity and a unique life lived to the fullest; as Youth bounces from LA to Amsterdam to Berlin, blossoming and supping from the fruit of every tree; he becomes a sort of black Steppenwolf, but one engaged in a constant dialectical dialogue with the man and the artist who sprang from him. Near the end of the show, when Stew and Youth stand face to face and confront each other over Stew’s lingering remorse about his mother’s death and the many ways he took her for granted and let her down, the already profound Passing Strange reaches a high note of human complexity. For Stew never takes the easy way out, nor lets either his former or his present self off the hook for what is, what has come from it and what can never be undone. To put it plainly: Passing Strange is a work of genius. And there’s nobody I can think of who shouldn’t see it.”—BoxOffice.com
“Passing Strange is Spike Lee’s record of the Broadway musical that ran six months last year. This first-rate multicamera transcript of a terrific show should delight musical fans (and many who think they aren’t)…Lee adds two short 8mm sequences and a backstage interlude in an otherwise straightforward HD presentation as energetic as Annie Dorsen’s staging itself…The witty writing, winning perfs and often irresistibly catchy songs soon work their magic.”—Variety
“It’s easy to see why Spike Lee was drawn to Stew, the one-named musician and mastermind behind the Broadway production Passing Strange. Like Lee, the artist formerly known as Mark Stewart possesses a powerful and singular voice, one he uses to express vividly his own experience of growing up as a black man in America. And Lee has always shown a strong affinity for music in his films, as evidenced by his longtime collaboration with composer and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard. In bringing Stew’s show to the screen as Passing Strange: The Movie, Lee took the wise and uncharacteristic step of staying out of the way—of letting the songs and the story play out without inserting his own trademark aesthetics into them…The result is so crisp and intimate, it makes you feel as if you’re right on the minimalist stage with Stew (who also narrates), the rest of his formidable cast and the band.”—San Jose Mercury News

Taking Over Los Angeles

Tony Taccone directed the world premiere of Danny Hoch’s Taking Over at Berkeley Rep in 2008, before moving it to Montreal, touring the boroughs of New York and earning an extended off-Broadway run. In 2009, the pair marched into Los Angeles with this hard-hitting look at gentrification, and Danny’s invasion was greeted with the usual enthusiasm at the Kirk Douglas Theatre:

“He once again turns himself into a one-man melting pot…When Hoch is in full bilingual flight as a Latino taxi dispatcher or insurgently rapping as a Marxist radical known as Launch Missiles Critical, Taking Over reaches out to audiences in a capacious, 21st-century Whitmanesque embrace…While letting off some understandable socioeconomic steam about the gentrifying armies, he pays homage to the diverse voices that are being drowned out by the privileged post-college whiners, who don’t mind a little funky street life as long as it doesn’t clog up the lines at the new Whole Foods.”—Los Angeles Times
“‘Can’t we all get along?’ Rodney King famously asked, and the answer that too often comes back is ‘Hell no.’ In Taking Over, Danny Hoch’s indictment of neighborhood gentrification, the hip-hop monologist identifies several root causes, notably our pervasive blindness to the reality of those (especially the underclass) with whom we share communal living space. His argument is borne more by rage than strict logic, but you can be moved by his pungent observations and performance savvy without relying on him for sober recommendations on urban planning…He’s reminiscent of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, reviling the system’s hypocrisy but exhausted by the lack of answers…Hoch’s expert transformations always showcase his talent in high style, complemented by Alexander Nichols’ kaleidoscopic projections, which take us from stoop to loft to community center with a dazzling vitality not unlike that of the city itself.”—Variety
“As always, Hoch focuses on the uneasy relationship between the disenfranchised and the privileged, and in Taking Over he has found the perfect canvas and subject: the gentrification of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, where he has lived for the last 20 years. The result is an often engrossing work about the wrenching changes that have come to a place that was once a haven for crack addicts and now attracts young, moneyed professionals from all over the country…Hoch makes a persuasive case for the brutality of the dispossession that’s always the dark twin of gentrification…Director Tony Taccone makes sure the stories and characters flow seamlessly [through] a Hochian gaggle of charmers, grifters and schemers.”—Orange County Register
“The parodies are broad, vicious and tender at the same time…The topics change even more quickly than Hoch’s turn-on-a-dime impersonations…It’s worth seeing him perform if only for that Puck-like nimbleness that he uses to portray a series of men and women from a Brooklyn neighborhood that’s in the throes of being gentrified. This nimbleness reaches into verbal dexterity as well as the physical, hypnotic renditions of rapid-fire local cadences.”—LA Weekly

A caravan to Kansas City and Chicago

After its sold-out, nine-week run at Berkeley Rep, The Arabian Nights traveled to Kansas City and Chicago in 2009. Wherever it went, Mary Zimmerman’s show received a welcome fit for a king:

“A cascade of life-affirming stories…The Arabian Nights, Mary Zimmerman’s thrilling Chinese box of nested Middle Eastern stories [is] 1,001 nights of sad, funny, moral, smart, silly, satirical, repeatable and ultimately redemptive yarns of Baghdad, its quirky denizens and colorful environs. These interlocking yarns dance in their visually gorgeous frames—intruding, delighting, imposing and, by the end of a couple of hugely engrossing hours, universalizing…The new production, which has already been acclaimed at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and deserves to end up on Broadway—is sharper, faster, more polished, more exciting…And here’s the best part. Whichever way you are looking at the opening, the conclusion is life-affirming and satisfying in every respect. That’s because Zimmerman’s adaptations of these ancient yarns are relentlessly focused on our shared humanity.”—Chicago Tribune
“I need to expand my vocabulary. I need new ways of saying a show is exceptional, unique and an example of the highest level of professionalism a theatergoer can expect to see in Kansas City—or anywhere…The playwright/director gives us a show that is visually mesmerizing, sexy, witty, outrageously comic and, at times, deeply melancholic. More than that, it’s a vivid example of what I choose to call ‘pure theater.’ It stimulates the imagination in surprising ways with the most basic of theatrical tools—human beings, a few hand props, judiciously employed musical instruments and atmospheric lighting. All theater is high-tech anymore, but this show embraces a low-tech performance aesthetic that pays big dividends…There’s much wisdom in The Arabian Nights and much humor. This is a brainy show that embraces very low comedy at times. I dare you not to laugh out loud.”—Kansas City Star
“Exuberant and sensual…a continually seductive swirl…She does have a sublime gift for making stories come alive on stage. And this signature work of hers plays more beautifully, passionately and humorously than ever—from the thrilling prologue, with its explosion of drumming, swiftly unfurled Persian carpets, glittering lamps and harem dancers, to its finale of exhausted storytellers rolling in tandem as they fitfully sleep and dream. And it possesses all the mystery, exoticism, energy and spiciness of a Silk Road bazaar of times past, even as its poetic meditation on things spiritual, on the psyche of despots, and on male-female tensions suggests enduring questions.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“Zimmerman’s Arabian Nights is like that imaginary bag. It’s crammed with stories, music, sex and pageantry…I laughed and laughed. The older women sitting next to me laughed and laughed. Their laughter made me laugh even harder, which further spurred them on, until we were all laughing so hard, the actors actually nodded to us, and this made it all the funnier…I wish theater this transporting wasn’t so rare.”—The Pitch

back to top

10/11 Season Tickets