The founders of Frog and Peach, Lynnea Benson and Ted Zurkowski, began the company with the goal of making Shakespeare “playful and down to earth,” i.e. accessible to all. This is a great idea, and undoubtedly their group has introduced many people to the Bard but in this case it doesn’t make a great production.
Let it never be said that an evening of Lutheran virtue makes for date night in San Francisco. Absent last Friday from our grey-haired audience huddling into its winter coats were the backless dresses and sculpture-worthy flashes of leg which usually cheer the frisky. Two gay men I passed in the crowd were no happier about it: "Bach only brings out the old men," sighed one ruefully. But there was a fascination for me in what turned out to be a solid, indeed old-fashioned evening of Victorian-style uplift. In particular, I was eager to encounter live Mendelssohn's Lobgesang Symphony-Cantata ("The Song of Praise"), sometimes called his Second Symphony. It was composed in 1840 to celebrate Gutenberg's invention of moveable type (ed.), but receives here its first San Francisco performance.
Stockbridge: Summer 1966
A memoir of the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s inaugural season — Episode I
Meetings with Remarkable Men (and Women)
In 1965 I had been in New York City for two years, having come down the Thruway from Honeoye …
