Follow Us on Our Trip To Asland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

We're Reviewing the Following Four Shows This Week at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Watch for Our Reviews Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

COCOANUTS
Sun, sand and shtick

The service stinks but the gags are four-star in this Marx Brothers romp. Groucho owns a bum hotel in Florida and peddles dubious real estate to gullible Northerners seeking a place in the sun. He’s after a rich society dame, who’s after an eligible match for her daughter, who’s in love with the hotel’s head clerk. Trouble rolls in with the tide when the other Marxes arrive and mama’s eligible match turns out to be anything but. Mark Bedard (Groucho in 2012’s Animal Crackers) will adapt this jazz-age gem with songs by Irving Berlin.

THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN'S WINDOW
No man is an island

It’s 1964, and Sidney Brustein is in his element: a Jewish intellectual in the heart of Greenwich Village, a hotbed of artists, activists and social upheaval. But nothing has brought him happiness—not his bohemian friends, his wife Iris, his failed folkie nightclub, or even his own lofty ideals. Then, when a turbulent political campaign sparks him into action and Iris begins yearning for a different life, he’s forced to decide what’s really worth fighting for. 

This 50th-anniversary production of a neglected classic by Lorraine Hansberry ("A Raisin in the Sun") explores the rocky landscape of love, choices and consequences with poignancy and biting humor.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Double double trouble

Antipholus and his servant, Dromio, go looking for family they lost years ago. Traveling from the rural South, they journey to the big city and find themselves in the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. And surprise! Suddenly there are two identical Antipholi and two identical Dromios, which has everybody in town (including significant others) seeing double. To make matters worse, another family member is about to be executed for breaking local law. Laughs fly as the clock ticks in Shakespeare’s farce about the craziest family reunion ever.

A WRINKLE IN TIME
Across the universe

Meg Murry is the quintessential square peg: a middle-school math whiz with glasses and a short temper. But when she and her strangely gifted little brother set off to find their missing father, they’re catapulted across time and space to a world where being different isn’t just an annoyance—it can cost you your life. Even with the help of curious otherworldly beings, Meg will have to conjure every power she can find, and then some, to put her family back together.

OSF presents a new adaptation of this mind-expanding science fiction story  by Madeleine L'Engle that’s still a favorite with the young and young at heart. The book won a Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award, and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award.

PLUS WE"LL BE REVIEWING THE ASHLAND EXPERIENCE. WHERE TO EAT, HOW TO ENJOY YOUR STAY AND MORE!

Reviews will be by Gregory E. Zschomler with Ruth Zschomler.

Additional reviews by Dennis Sparks will be linked (some of the same shows and some different).