Email Author Michael Scott Moore

1999 Stories by Michael Scott Moore

• Mad Poetry for All

  published December 29, 1999

  There's a good chance that people who normally visit theaters in San Francisco will notice the slim range of plays open in this dead week between... More >>

• Sweet Millennial Cheer

  published December 22, 1999

  If I'm reading our general mood right, the 21st century is about to dawn in America with the same unfounded optimism that ushered in the 20th.... More >>

• Wild Women

  published December 15, 1999

  Not even Tarantino can match the Greeks for brutal gore. Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and the rest have an almost lurid taste for showing mangled... More >>

• Stage Capsules

  published December 15, 1999

  A Black Nativity After years of holding off (and trying not to compete with the Allen Temple in Oakland, which performs it... More >>

• Water Sports

  published December 8, 1999

  Putting the Metamorphoses onstage might sound like trying to mount the Divine Comedy or the Iliad: Fifteen chapters of... More >>

• Stage Capsules

  published December 8, 1999

  Babes in Arms 42nd Street Moon's latest staged concert may have the best song score (by Rodgers & Hart) of any musical ever,... More >>

• Radio Days

  published December 1, 1999

  For a while there, in the '30s and '40s, radio plays were big. You sat beside an enormous piece of walnut furniture with electronic guts and... More >>

• Stage Capsules

  published December 1, 1999

  Dream Boy It seems likely that before Eric Rosen wrote the script for Dream Boy, he jotted down a list of items that... More >>

• Dueling Tyros

  published November 24, 1999

  Last week saw a pair of major West Coast premieres by a pair of novice playwrights. Spring Storm, written by Tennessee Williams when he was... More >>

• Game Theory

  published November 17, 1999

  Milan Kundera has a famous theory of the novel that imagines its history as an evolutionary tree, with important books like Ulysses at the... More >>

• Stage Capsules

  published November 17, 1999

  New Wrinkles Morris Bobrow, Rita Abrams, and former Chron theater critic Gerald Nachman's new comedy revue about... More >>

• Half a Loaf

  published November 10, 1999

  Hillary and Soon-Yi Shop for Ties sounds like an idea for a Saturday Night Live sketch, one that would be funny for only a few... More >>

• Greensboro: A Documentary

  published November 3, 1999

  On Nov. 3, 1979, a day before Iranians stormed the American Embassy in Tehran, a handful of communist anti-Klan protesters had just begun a march... More >>

• Panning for Gold

  published October 27, 1999

  Indigo Blues has the plot of a good folk song, like "Long Black Veil" or "Big Joe and Phantom 309." It's about a saxophonist named... More >>

• The Living and the Dead

  published October 20, 1999

  George F. Walker's reputation is vast in Canada. "His work has been honored with six Chalmers Awards, five DORA Awards, and two Governor General's... More >>

• The Crucifixion of Galilei

  published October 13, 1999

  A version of The Life of Galileo nine years ago, by the Berliner Ensemble in Germany, may stand as the best play I've ever seen. The Wall... More >>

• Stage Capsule

  published October 13, 1999

  John Fisher's new historical farce is about a band of socialist-minded Jewish students in Poland who think that escaping to Russia during World... More >>

• Let No One Deceive You

  published October 6, 1999

  "More perhaps than any other theater in America," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle in 1899, "the Tivoli made opera a democratic... More >>

• The Quiet Storm

  published September 29, 1999

  The current Cal Shakes production of The Tempest lays a heavy emphasis on Prospero's magic, and the director's taste in supernatural... More >>

• Shawn Behaving Badly

  published September 22, 1999

  The story goes that a little bald man who looked suspiciously like Wallace Shawn turned up an hour early for opening night of the first-ever... More >>

• Stage Capsule

  published September 22, 1999

  Berkeley's Impact Theater has a self- conscious mission: to do live shows "for people of our own generation, born between roughly 1961 and 1981";... More >>

• A Little Off the Side

  published September 8, 1999

  Every September, for the last eight years, the Exit Theater has been hosting a two-week tromp through the Tenderloin known as the Fringe... More >>

• Sweet Bird of Youth

  published September 1, 1999

  When Cynthia Ozick writes, in her famous book-jacket blurb, that Alice Munro is "our Chekhov," she doesn't mean Munro's work will translate easily... More >>

• Dramatic Emetic

  published September 1, 1999

  Wallace Shawn, it always seems necessary to explain, is the famous New Yorker editor William Shawn's son. He's also that short, whiny guy... More >>

• Pilgrim's Progress Report

  published August 25, 1999

  For three years, Geoffrey Chaucer & Co. has been rehearsing and presenting The Canterbury Tales almost in order, one and sometimes two at a... More >>