.Arts & Culture

Reformation and transformation are on the mind of Aurora Theatre Company artistic director Josh Costello in early 2023. Swiftly to follow are immediacy, relevancy and stability, as well as alliances leading to Community Partner programs he initiated...

The Tony Award-winning Berkeley Repertory Theatre is revving back into action in 2023 with a full season of live performances. After the pandemic shutdown halted theater activity across the country for nearly two years, managing director Tom Parrish says cultural workers are the nation’s second responders.

Gianna Davy's debut picture book, "No One Owns the Colors" (The Collective Book Studio), follows an unnamed lead character on a spirited, nature-filled romp through a panoply of colors and sentient beings. 

The only thing cold about Rita Moreno when we speak is the fact that she has one. Otherwise, the “EGOT” actress—one of an elite group of actors crowned with the theater industry’s prestigious Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards—is warm, salty, even fiery, and only occasionally pauses as if about to sneeze or grumbles like a Christmas Carol curmudgeon about her raspy voice. 

Naima Shalhoub’s first album of original material, Siphr, covers a lot of emotional, geographical and musical ground. It plays like a suite and includes arrangements that draw on Middle Eastern and American modes. It also includes her reinvention of “Lamma Bada Yatathanna,” a song from Moorish Spain that’s more than 1,000 years old. The music was recorded in San Francisco, but Shalhoub said the idea behind it began brewing a few years before, during a trip to Lebanon, her parents’ birthplace.

Criterion’s 2022 lineup of Fox noirs is even more bitter, hard-hitting and merciless—the perfect home-video accompaniment to our current winter of discontent.

On Dec. 14, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will open a new curated selection of Buddhist art, from antiquity to the present, “Endless Knot: Struggle and Healing in the Buddhist World."