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Articles by Toba Singer
Oscar
Oscar Wilde’s second trial began on May 20. This time, the British Liberal Government seemed determined to secure a conviction against Wilde. The Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery, was himself suspected of having had a homosexual affair when he was the Foreign Minister with no less than Francis Douglas, another of Queensberry’s sons. Francis Douglas was killed in a hunting accident (widely believed to be suicide).
Q&A w/David Hallberg
David Hallberg, Artistic Director of The Australian National Ballet led a 2026 company tour of Berkeley and New York in late with Christopher Wheeldon’s 2024 full-length ballet Oscar to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall (September 25–27) and New York City Center (October 8–11). The company also performs resident choreographer Stephanie Lake’s Seven Days at City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival on October 2–3.
Berkeley Rep’s “The Cook”: What’s Not on the Menu
A playwright encumbers each character with an intention that shapes the plotline. In “The Cook,” Eduard Machado tasks Gladys, the protagonist, with embodying the mood of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Each major character, Carlos, the chauffeur, Adria, the dueña, Julio, the cousin, and Rosa, the daughter, are tethered to Gladys’ outlook as obstacles, challengers, or allies. But who is this Gladys, really?
Late Fame (2025)
Meet self-styled radical and aspiring poet Wilson Meyers. He inveigles 1970s poet of momentary note, Ed Saxberger, now a mail sorter, into becoming the linchpin of a cultural rediscovery rescue mission. In Meyers’ race to the bottom, Saxberger’s late fame rides side-saddle as a counterweight to the “late capitalism” that Meyers and his artist friends trendily disdain. These café-haunt poseurs are hell-bent on biting the capitalist hand that spoon-feeds them.
La Sylphide
Ballet teacher Richard Gibson liked to remind his students that their preparation for a step “predicts what comes next.” For the French-born ballet choreographer and pedagogue August Bournonville, it was important that the preparation remain simple and unadorned. Three Bournonville choreographic exemplars, “Festival at Genzano,” “Napoli,” and “La Sylphide,” have stood the test of time.
Q&A w/Javier Galitó-Cava on his coaching of San Francisco Ballet dancers in “Don Quixote”
Javier Galitó-Cava is the Artistic Director of the Meisner Technique Program Spain(meisner.es), which he founded after studying at American Conservatory Theatre (A.C.T.)and the Rachael Adler Studio in San Francisco. He travels to Europe, the United States and South America to offer workshops for professional actors. During the 2025-26 season, Galito-Cava worked with stagers and choreographers to coach San Francisco Ballet dancers performing roles in Onegin and Don Quixote.
Interview: Jimmy Smits and Wanda DeJesus
In Arthur Miller’s 1946 play “All My Sons,” sins of omission and commission twist two neighboring suburban families into a double helix conflict, rife with tragic consequences. War-time business partners Joe and Steve have a small-scale aircraft cylinders plant. While pressed to deliver parts, they knowingly ship defective ones that have cost the lives of soldiers in combat. In Act I, we learn that Steve is doing time, but somehow, Joe isn’t.
The Blake Works
Dance more than any of the Seven Lively Arts, affirms that actions speak louder than words. Before reading mine, reserve your seat for San Francisco Ballet’s “Blake Works.” In a single lifetime, you’re not likely to encounter its equal, danced with such exuberant joy, conviction, and exactitude. If dance notation entered into a situationship with kinesiology, would it wax as portentous as the drop that choreographer William Forsythe commissioned to open his tour de force trio, “Blake Works”?
Eugene Onegin--San Francisco Ballet 2026
Alas, our youth was what we made it, Something to fritter and to burn, When hourly we ourselves betrayed it, And it deceived us in return; When our sublimest aspiration, And all our fresh imagination, Swiftly decayed beyond recall Like foliage in the rotting fall. Alexandr Pushkin In his pre-curtain talk, guest Drama Coach Javier Galitó-Cava warned against a common misidentification– referring to the dancers as storytellers: “The choreographer, Yuri Possokhov, is the storyteller.
Nuremberg (2025)
Does the title “Nuremberg” summon a dust-coated memory of the 1961 film, “Judgement at Nuremberg,” that colors your predictions about this one? Judgement at Nuremberg’s proposition was meant to certify that the prosecutions, trials, and hangings of Nazi officials by the Allied victors were justified and certify their juridical authority as absolute. In the 2025 film “Nuremberg,” writer/director James Vanderbilt takes the opposite tack.
San Francisco Dance Film Festival 2025
When adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave a tri-part answer: “A choreographer, a journalist, and a beautician.” The three disparate vocations slimmed down to two when styling hair did not translate into a skill for cutting it. When revolutionary politics drew me into its orbit during the 1960s Civil Rights movement, it persuaded me that one cannot serve two masters, I strategized along dialectical lines to combine the remaining two ambitions of the three.
Q&A w/Yoav Potash
Eight years prior to the Oct. 7, 2023 antisemitic attack by Hamas and other Gazans on the Nova Concert in Israel, Berkeley-based filmmaker Yoav Potash had begun researching and filming a different story about antisemitism. It explored the nature of the antisemitism engulfing Poland leading up to, during, and after World War II.
Red Carpet, Hofesh Shechter
“Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar,” Sigmund Freud famously wrote. Emblematic of his psychoanalytic work, his emphasis on symbolic iconography in family relations set him apart from his colleague and friend, Carl Jung, whom he mentored. Jung popularized symbology in myth and religion as the more reliable repository for sourcing answers to the question, “What explains human behavior?” According to the choreographer, Hofesh Shechter, his “Red Carpet” is just a red carpet.
Q&A w/Barbara Kingsley
Josh, an alcoholic, is what standup jokesters dub a “stay-at-home son” though he has no longer can lay claim to his home. On the heels of a blackout, he comes to at the side of a reservoir, as dawn breaks. He accesses the home he’s been locked out of through a pet door, turning to his grandparents for succor as they face the despair that comes with old age. Barbara Kingsley plays Irene, Josh’s maternal grandmother. In the throes of dementia, she is the sherpa carrying the plot’s moral compass.
Eleanor, the Great (2025)
Your best friend and roommate Bessie dies suddenly. Hers is the Greatest Story Never Told that deserves an airing. What do you do when usual circumstances suddenly find themselves populated by unusual suspects. What are their morals? What are yours? So many questions; such a poverty of clues. And you, with scarcely two legs to stand on, literally or figuratively.
Guns and Moses (2024)
This rabbi didn’t sleep late. You won’t even catch him nodding off while studying the Torah. If you’re looking for schmaltz, schmutz, or maybe a kibbutz, you’re in the wrong neighborhood. “Guns & Moses” is set in the High Desert, where the opening salvo in a local synagogue launches the first of four mysterious murders. The rabbi is caught in the crossfire of, well . . . it’s hard to say at first or second or third blush.
One Hundred Saturdays:
Israeli comic, Yohay Sponder, says, “C’mon guys [by ‘guys’ he means Hamas]. The Germans, they’re the Germans, if they couldn’t do it, why you . . .?” leaving the rest up to us to ponder. “One Hundred Saturdays” is Michael Frank’s riveting reckoning of the biographical narrative he teases out in interviews with Stella Levi over one hundred Saturday visits to her Manhattan apartment.
2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025)
On February 23, 2022, the news that Russia had invaded Ukraine “broke” as I lay on a gurney waiting to be prepped for knee replacement surgery. By the time the physician’s assistant hovered over my bed to welcome me back to consciousness, but before a mega-cascade of opioids wore off, talk of it was on everyone’s lips. Evidence of near-unanimous sympathy for Ukraine was all over Facebook in the blue and yellow flags you can superimpose on your profile photo.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2024)
It is a rule of thumb in power struggles that you take only what you are big enough to take. Eight-year-old Bobo (Lexi Venter) is not yet big. Still, her reach exceeds that of the grasp of her European family, which assumes the straitened dimensions determined by the apartheid-like racialism during the Ian Smith regime’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence government, recently overthrown by a guerrilla war.
Hans Van Manen: Dutch Grandmaster San Francisco Ballet
No dancers in sneakers, no story built around cult idols, and no heavy metal to punish the nervous system. In other words, no pandering to presumed low-ball taste preferences, and notably, no box office revenues were harmed upon the opening of “Van Manen: Dutch Grand Master” to a near-full house.
The Penguin Lessons (2024)
Argentina’s 1970s Dirty War gets dirtier just days after Tom Michell (Steve Coogan) arrives to teach English at an elite “prepa,” populated by the curried sons and daughters of the ruling junta. He assumes that Argentina is a safe place for an Englishman, but instead comes face to face with police-state scoundrels responsible for disappearing (a gerund that replaced the verb phrase “made disappear”) suspected communists. He finds that his classroom is a microcosm of the State.
Reid Yalom interview
REID YALOM is a Northern California photographer whose work has been published and exhibited over a 30 year period. A graduate of Stanford University and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Yalom trained as an assistant to photographer Mark Citret. Yalom prints his own images, in silver and in archival pigments.
Raymonda-San Francisco Ballet
Through a photographer’s lens, sets mimicking the framed innards of a box camera, and costumes reviving custom-crafted fabric that great-grandmothers should have been photographed wearing, we meet the historic Raymonda.
Shoplifters
In Kindergarten, making friends was the first practicum. It became an empirical affair leaning on a trial-and-error approach we’d picked up earlier in life, when we stumbled into playing with other kids in Mosholu Park. We’d eye them judiciously, study their every feature, decision, and expression. Then we’d go in, probing, posing diplomatic questions, never pushing too hard.
Cool Britannia: San Francisco Ballet 2025
A pandemic-era corollary to “The show must go on!” is “The show’s reviewer must arrive 15 minutes before curtain.” Why?
Manon--2025 San Francisco Ballet
The June 2024 announcement of the death of Karl Burnett, beloved stager of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon,” evoked memories of his kindness that those fortunate enough to have danced the work, feel deeply attached to. I share them. I must fully disclose that my son James Gotesky was one of the fortunate, having danced three of the leading roles in that work when he was a Soloist with Houston Ballet. Along with those valued memories were my musings about the future of MacMillan’s works.
The Room Next Door (2024)
There is a long line of admirers at Ingrid’s book signing. She has written about her fear of death. Among those waiting for an autographed copy is an old friend she hasn’t seen in some time. The friend tells Ingrid that a mutual friend Martha, a war correspondent whom Ingrid hasn’t seen in many years, is dying of cancer. As she bids her friend goodbye with the poise of a successful author, Ingrid’s expression belies conflict. Seeing this, the friend leans in, to insist that Ingrid call Martha.
Starry Nights
There were not many stars in the night sky above the Frost Amphitheater, possibly because those that shined most brightly were onstage or in the orchestra. This heavenly constellation came together under the hand of Artistic Director Tamara Rojo, who has been taking educated risks, as opposed to calculated ones, in curating programs throughout her nearly three-season tenure. The Starry Nights program proved an exemplar in exposing company strengths, and those of its collaborators.
Daddio (2024)
“The birth control pill gave women freedom from fear of sex leading to pregnancy or shotgun marriage, but the egalitarian treatment of women as compared to men has lagged behind that scientific advance.” Comment in a Women’s Rights workshop “Girlie” (Dakota Johnson) steps into a yellow cab after arriving at an unnamed New York airport, reciting her destination’s cross streets to the cabbie (Sean Penn.) After refreshing her lipstick and checking her phone messages, the familiar awkward silence...
Farewell, Mr. Haffman (2021)
At a time when antisemitic graffiti and slogans show up writ large amidst campus occupations that pre-empt Jewish students’ safe conduct to and from class and preview the grisly end-game horrors that a moribund capitalist system seeks to trumpet, and then deny or disguise, Fred Cavayé offers up a glimpse of how the workings of fascism sort moral fiber.
Toba Singer's take on "Galileo"
Actor Nathan Lane, in a Tony Award acceptance speech, points out that successful musical comedy, when its allied arts and artists come together, is a rare and glorious thing. (link) My sentiments exactly. What he didn’t say is that the opposite is true of Rock Opera: when all of its elements join together, the result is pandemonium. For me, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the love child of Andrew Lloyd Weber and The Virgin Mary, drove the point home when I saw it several decades ago.
The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed (2024)
That this film is billed as a comedy and a Cannes Film Festival selection, are two of life’s (very) little mysteries. In one of the many lukewarm BDMS scenes, a casual sex partner gags the lead character (who is also the film’s writer and director) because he is tired of hearing her talk.
Dos Mujeres
In the ongoing conversations about choreography that I shared with Fernando Alonso, architect of the Cuban ballet training system, he would return to two themes: music and stimulating the imagination. These, he said, had to be supported and enabled through access to, and informed respect for classical ratios in art forms, even and especially when you are interrogating them.
Interview w/Tommy Bo
“The Far Country” opens a window on the widespread but under-the-radar practice of Chinese immigrants buying and selling their identities to gain legal entry into the United States during the 68-year period during which the Chinese Exclusion Act, and auxiliary legislation designed to discourage Chinese immigration, was in force. Tommy Bo plays one such immigrant, Moon Gyet in The Far Country production currently playing at Berkeley Rep.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” teased out the memory of a story from the brother of the friend who accompanied me to the show. As children, in search of their after-school cookies-and-milk snack, they happened upon a sculpture by their mother of a male nude that she had left to dry on the dining room table. Seeing that it didn’t have a belly button, they decided to give it one, poking a hole where they decided it belonged.
Shayda (2023)
Prescient direction by Noora Niasari and actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi’s intuitive reach for her character’s touchpoints prevent a predictable plot from short-sheeting the story before its interpreters can inhabit its carefully tendered folds. Set in Australia, this is the story of Shayda, the Iranian wife of Hossein, who threatens and abuses her so violently that she can’t bring herself to reveal the extent of his perfidy.
Swan Lake San Francisco Ballet 2024
Nikisha Fogo is the rare dancer in whose interpretation you can distinguish nearly every investment by teachers, ballet masters, and coaches, along with the serious commitment she has made to her artistic life. I saw this phenom for the first time two seasons ago, when she danced the role of Mirtha, Queen of the Wilis in “Giselle.” Contributions from others notwithstanding, she created her Mirtha on terms that were exclusively hers.
Toba Singer reviews Berkeley Rep's "Cult of Love"
“It’s Christmas!” is one of those announcements like, “You’re pregnant!” So much depends on context.
Harry Clarke
With two parts “Six Degrees of Separation,” one part “Being There,” and a spicy rub of Imposter Syndrome leavened by a light pass of polymorphous perverse, Billy Crudup rustles up a sumptuous meal out of “Harry Clarke.” With character development credibly passing for wizardry, audience laughter registers from sympathetic to raucous.
Bulrusher
From the shoals of the woke formulary, set in rural Boon against a forest primeval (Lawrence E. Moten III), Eisa Davis’ Bulrusher confects the tale of a social conundrum that the title character (Jordan Tyson) embodies. Bulrusher is an 18-year-old counter-phobic young woman who interprets clients’ fortunes by inducing them to put their hands under water.
Q&A w/ Misty Copeland and Babatunji Johnson
In this film short headlined by American Ballet Theatre Principal Dancer Misty Copeland, she has ballet telling a modern-day story by setting it in Oakland California, in the company of former LINES dancer, Babatunji Johnson. They find beauty in truth by focusing their lens on the unhoused in an RV community, where they open up a platform for telling that community’s stories in the first person.
I Went to the Dance (J’ai été au bal)1989
All that I knew about Zydeco music came from the Mountain Stage radio programs I attended religiously, every Sunday afternoon, when I lived in Charleston, West Virginia. My son’s dulcimer teacher, Bob Webb, was one of the regulars. One of the Twister Sisters, Julia, when I bumped into her at a sale where we were eyeing the same certain tea kettle, insisted that I take it. The Zydeco groups Mountain Stage brought in were from Nova Scotia.
Interview with Alice Corning, Ceramicist and Sculptor
Born in Cincinnati, Alice Corning earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Harvard University. In 1965, after living abroad for a year, she studied ceramics at the Spring Street Pottery Studio in New York, until moving to Mill Valley in 1974. Her quest to bring technique and geology into harmony, met with success this year. Culture Vulture’s Toba Singer and Corning are members of Les Copains, a San Rafael French conversation group.
The Eternal Memory (2023)
Stephen Mallarme, Silvio Rodríguez, Toni Morrison, Aleksandr Pushkin, Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, James Baldwin, Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Barbara Streisand, Patti Page, Frank Sinatra, Loretta Lynn, Tony Bennett, and everyone who takes a memoir writing class, has mined memory. But what about memory loss?
20 Days in Mariupol
Reviewed: July 2, 2023 “War is like an x-ray,” says a doctor attending to victims of a Mariupol hospital shelling. “It shows us the insides of our world.” A cop watches dispassionately as looters grab whatever they can get their hands on in a bombed-out notions shop. The woman shop owner begs them to return what they’ve taken. “War makes those who are bad, worse, and those who are good, better,” the says.
An Interview with Ari’el Stachel
By age 29, Berkeley-born actor Ari’el Stachel had won a Drama Desk Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, and a Tony,for his role as Haled in “The Band Visit.” “Out of Character,”is Stachel’s one-man show, developed under the fastidious hand of director Tony Taccone. In it, Stachel recounts a lifelong struggle with anxiety, memorialized in abundant quantities of sweat.
Dance Review: Hard Nut, Mark Morris Dance Group
“Hard Nut” is Funny—But See “Nutcracker” First! A huge map projection drops from above. On it, red lights flash to indicate the country of origin of the divertissements.
California Literary Review
Books While he has an ear for both the humdrum and the eccentric dissembling pronouncements of the landowners, Saramago primarily concerns himself with capturing the diametrically opposite and logical sentiments of the workers. To dub him the John Steinbeck of his people and generation would at once amount to a compliment and faint praise of the singularity of his writing… Raised from the Ground: A Novel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 384 pp.
California Literary Review
Hispanic American If you were born in New York and see a set that has been detailed with a rollaway folding cot in the hallway, and a living room view of not only the standard-issue brick wall of the building behind yours, but also the laundry hung out wherever space permits, you know that this is the Bronx, Brooklyn or Manhattan West Side post-war apartment that your parents grew up in, and spent their lives striving to escape.
California Literary Review
Toba Singer: It might be tempting to say that Somewhere is derivative of Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie. Could you both speak about what distinguishes one from the other? Priscilla Lopez: It’s a combination of what is written that comes out of Inez’s mouth, which is Matthew and the way the words come out of her mouth, which is me. I keep saying I’m playing my mother, but my daughter insists–no you’re playing yourself. You can’t fault Amanda because she’s a WASP.
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