Sam's Online Salon: Please Tell Me a Story



Sam's Online Salon: Thoughts, Musings, and Looking Ahead from Artistic Director Sam Woodhouse

May 20, 2020
Over the past 6 years, audiences at San Diego REP have enjoyed a regular offering of unforgettable one-person shows. Rather than thinking a solo performance is somehow “less than,” I find such performances uniquely engaging and satisfying.
 
Remember with me for a moment…

  • Herbert Siguenza’s stunning painting and performance as the maestro in A Weekend with Pablo Picasso (pictured at right). Herbert is a trained visual artist as well as an actor and playwright. The production featured jaw-dropping Picasso reproductions, created right before your eyes. 
 
  • D.W. Jacobs play, R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe (pictured below right), which took us on a journey into the life and mind of a 20th century genius. Classical actor and world renowned clown Ron Campbell was dazzling in the role of “Bucky.”
 
  • The captivating story of the heroism of Gordon Hirabayashi in Hold These Truths by Jeanne Sakata. Actor Ryan Yu (pictured above) invited us to join him in defiance, as he shared Gordon’s inspiring refusal to enter a Japanese-American internment camp in WWII.
 
  • Virtuosic performances from musician, writer, singer, and actor Hershey Felder (pictured below left as Claude Debussy). Because of his genius, REP audiences have been privileged to dive deep into the minds and music of Leonard Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, Irving Berlin, Chopin and Ludwig von Beethoven.
 
What’s so special about a one-person show? My answer comes directly from the mission of San Diego REP—We produce intimate, provocative and inclusive theatre. A masterful solo performer incorporates all three of these. There is nothing as intimate as a storyteller looking us straight in the eye, mesmerizing us with their tale. We imagine the telling is just for us. Sharing a story like this, in a room with strangers, can cause us to breathe with the teller and the audience, so that by the end of the tale we have all become one.


- Sam Woodhouse

Photo Credits: Above right photo from A Weekend with Pablo Picasso photo by Daren Scott; below left from Heshey Felder's A Paris Love Story photo by Christopher Ash; below right from R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe photo by Kevin Berne.