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Posts published by “David Yearsley”

The Beef with Kobe

Great teams have great benches. So strong was the musical squad assembled for Kobe Bryant’s send-off at Los Angeles’s Staples Center on Monday, that even Hall of Famer Jennifer Lopez didn’t rate any playing time.…

LIV Free or Die

The NFL has made it to the ripe old age of 100. The same can be said for only a tiny clutch of its former players. Notwithstanding the league’s PR efforts, it’s a century of…

Brecht in Berlin

One of Brecht’s best-loved and most-performed works, The Caucasian Chalk Circle was written in Los Angeles in 1944 while the playwright was still in exile. He returned to Germany in 1947

Performance Anxiety

How did I get into this? As a kid that was the inevitable question of concert day. I still ask it now and again. One of my colleagues, to be heard on violin with your…

Kanye in the West

At the beginning of August I drove from the Oregon Coast to the middle of New York State mostly on U. S. Highways and state and county roads. I spent the second night of the…

Favorite Things: Greta, Ariana, Coltrane & The Von Trapps

Greta Thunberg’s four-minute jeremiad at the United Nations this past Monday was delivered not standing behind a pulpit or kneeling on rocky ground. With perfect posture she perched at the front of a bright white…

Head of State

The body politic has human parts: head, limbs, heart. That body has an abundance of these in the case of the royal giant that brandishes sword and scepter on the frontispiece of Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. This…

Big in the Bungalow of Believers

Free tickets from a friend sent my companion and me to a production of the musical Big staged by the Berkeley Repertory Theatre on a sunny Sunday afternoon in July. My companion grew up in…

Songs of State

Other than the basic press blurbs, I could find no detailed reports of the music performed at the recent state banquet held in the Buckingham Palace ballroom. The largest space in the palace, the ballroom…

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