A.C.T. (San Francisco, CA)
A decades-spanning tale of Prague's rock revolution, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll follows the passions and politics of a Marxist professor in Cambridge and his Rolling Stones-obsessed protégé fighting for freedom in Soviet-dominated Prague. Nominated for four 2008 Tony Awards, Rock 'n' Roll features the music of the Stones and Pink Floyd.
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The last date listed for Rock 'n' Roll was Saturday October 18, 2008 / 8:00pm. (view all dates)
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Fresh from Broadway, Mamet's new comedy November takes a satirical stab at American politics. President Charles Smith, the most corrupt buffoon ever to sit in the Oval Office, is in the final days of his bid for re-election, but the country is a mess and his poll numbers are low. Toss in a lesbian speechwriter longing to marry her sweetheart on TV, Thanksgiving turkeys awaiting pardon, and a ton of shady back-room scheming and you've got Mamet's latest. Learn More
Remember the play mocked in Stoppard's _The Real Thing_? The political play that doesn't feel like a play at all because it's all words, no soul? Director Carey Perloff has turned this difficult cricket-bat of a play into that kind of a wooden work.
Actors continuously deliver wordy arguments intellectually and to the audience, making connections between the characters hard to understand. It's true that this is a hard play, full of political ideas. But Stoppard did not set out to write a diatribe, let alone one that requires a previous understanding of Eastern European history to appreciate it. Certain core parts of the play are lost entirely because of the director's insistence on enunciating the political story: the feeling of the music is lost; talk of the soul seems empty; the Greek poetry comes across as irrelevant. The actors seem to have been directed to seem awkward and angry, just like mouthpieces in a propaganda play, right down to their distractingly unnatural accents.
It just seemed so distant that I could not hear half the words spoken. And because the play is set in Poland during the 60s to current that if you don't know your history too well, you get lost.
great history lesson with snappy dailogue and music references
The Geary Theater, built in 1909, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a San Francisco City Landmark. The theater's neo-classical brick and terra cotta facade on Geary Street opens to a monumental 1,500 seat auditorium trimmed with ornamental stenciling and gilded plaster.
Website: http://www.act-sf.org/089/rocknroll/index.html
A rapturous, decades-spanning tale of Prague's rock revolution, Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll follows the passions and politics of a Marxist professor in Cambridge and his Rolling Stones–obsessed protégé fighting for freedom in Soviet-dominated Prague. Nominated for four 2008 Tony Awards, Rock 'n' Roll pulsates to the beat of the Stones, Pink Floyd, and Syd Barrett, Floyd's disturbed genius, whose reclusive life becomes a haunting motif of the play.
