Listen. Can you feel it? There is a disturbance in the Force. Even before last year’s record-setting release of the first trailer for J.J. Abrams’ ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens,’ there have been whispered rumors surging through the fan-iverse, wondering about the direction the new film (to be released on December 18) will be taking the beloved…
Blithe Spirit ★★★ Rocky Horror Show ★★★★ 6th Street Playhouse Weekends through November 8 Two supernatural sex comedies are running concurrently at 6th Street Playhouse, perfectly timed for Halloween. Both feature witty retorts and sexual innuendo (and out-uendo), alongside ghostly visitations and eye-popping outfits—but only one features the “The Time Warp.” For the full review from the…
The Sonoma Valley has more than its share of festivals. There are music festivals, film festivals, harvest festivals, pumpkin festivals, vineyard festivals – even a historic race car festival. Now, thanks to Broadway actress-comedian Brooke Tansley – formerly of Los Angles and New York City, now a regular member of Transcendence Theater Company, and a…
★★★★ Lucky Penny Community Arts Center Weekends through Oct..25 Edgy, dark, funny and more than a little unsettling, Lucky Penny’s deliriously twisted production of Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries is not the kind of thing most theatergoers expect when they sit down for an onstage love story. For the full review from the October 21, 2015 North Bay…
★★★ Cinnabar Theater Weekends through Nov. 1 —In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as everyone knows, a creature is assembled from dead body parts and granted the spark of life. In Trevor Allen’s The Creature—a daring, artful, but ultimately problematic adaptation—the playwright puts Victor Frankenstein’s creation process in reverse, taking the original story apart and reassembling it into something similar,…
★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company Weekends through Oct. 25 When 2005’s Light in the Piazza first played on Broadway, there was much talk that the show, a musical adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel, marked a return to the gorgeous scores and lyrical drama of the golden age of musical theater. Ignoring decades of rock and pop influences, composer…
“Festival mind,” says actress-comedian Brooke Tansley. “It’s the attitude people get into at film festivals and theater festivals. It’s an attitude of, I guess, a kind of grateful expectation, of excitement and anticipation, where everyone knows that the more movies you see, or the more plays you see, or the more comedy acts you see,…
HIDING OUT WITH INGRID BERGMAN MVFF Exhibit is not easy to find—but it’s well worth the effort October 10, 2015 — Just out of shouting distance of the crowds, right around the corner from the thrumming hub of cinematic energy that is the Rafael Film Center (in downtown San Rafael), there is a free exhibit…
MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL LAUNCHES 38th YEAR Opening night features parties, parties, parties—and even some films October 9, 2015 — Opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival is always fun, with pre-festival receptions flowing with intoxicating beverages, press-conferences and screenings infused with cinematic star-power, and after-parties so jam-packed with revelers that its sometimes hard…
★★ Ross Valley Players Weekends through Oct. 18 It’s ironic. In creating a script that celebrates Florence Foster Jenkins—renowned as one of the 20th century’s worst operatic sopranos—playwright Peter Quilter has achieved something as eccentric and unexpectedly sweet as Jenkins herself—but just as mediocre. In all fairness, there isn’t really much about Jenkins’ life from…
North Bay Stage and Screen 