Pacific Conservatory Of The Performing Arts

Here in the land of butter cookies, kringle and the PCPA Theaterfest, a play that's really a screenplay based on another play made its world premiere over the weekend. It is billed as "Alfred Hitchcock's Rope," which it is, and isn't. Allow me to explain. Pat Hitchcock O'Connell, daughter of the director whose silhouette and movies are legendary, is a longtime supporter of the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts and its Solvang Theaterfest.

Here in the land of butter cookies, kringle and the PCPA Theaterfest, a play that's really a screenplay based on another play made its world premiere over the weekend. It is billed as "Alfred Hitchcock's Rope," which it is, and isn't. Allow me to explain. Pat Hitchcock O'Connell, daughter of the director whose silhouette and movies are legendary, is a longtime supporter of the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts and its Solvang Theaterfest.

How do you solve a problem like "The Taming of the Shrew"? How do you deliver Shakespearean speeches about the taming of a proud woman's spirit now, when a woman's right to speak her mind has never been more admired--unless, of course, she's Hillary Rodham Clinton? James Dunn's breezy and refreshingly accessible direction of the classic at the Old Globe's Lowell Davies Festival Theatre careens playfully around most of the red flags.

"Dancing at Lughnasa," Brian Friel's hauntingly beautiful memory play about the disintegration of an impoverished Irish family in the 1930s, is as close to living poetry as you're likely to find in the theater. Friel uses language not so much to define or explain facts as to evoke a reality in which, as his narrator and stand-in Michael puts it, "atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory."

Most of the highlights of my year of reviewing were in the genre of little musicals. The year began with a spirited revival of the Bock-Harnick trilogy of one-act musicals, "The Apple Tree," at Long Beach's Studio Theatre: a production that treated the show's big themes and small frivolities with equal conviction and success. The revue "Bittersuite: Songs of Experience" appeared in June and is still playing (after cast changes) at the Back Alley.

The Theatricum Botanicum opens its summer season today with "The Winter's Tale." Artistic Director Ellen Geer directs. "It was written late in Shakespeare's career, around the time of 'Lear' and 'The Tempest,' the plays that were most filled with his sense of the human heart," she said. "It's a study of jealousy--one of our worst emotions--and I think it's one of the most heartfelt pieces he wrote.

How do you solve a problem like "The Taming of the Shrew"? How do you deliver Shakespearean speeches about the taming of a proud woman's spirit now, when a woman's right to speak her mind has never been more admired--unless, of course, she's Hillary Rodham Clinton? James Dunn's breezy and refreshingly accessible direction of the classic at the Old Globe's outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre careens playfully around most of the red flags.

A deceptively simple Nativity play, "Christmas in the Marketplace" provides a compelling evening of intimate spirituality thanks to capable staging by PCPA Theaterfest, which pulls off a minor miracle of its own in bringing lustre to a well-worn tale. The familiar story is the birth of Jesus, acted out here by a band of gypsies who gather in a village marketplace.