“Why are you wearing those chains?” A pair of small girls, visitors at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, have just spied actor Tom Westlake, who plays the part of Jacob Marley’s ghost each year at the popular annual Dickens-inspired theater festival. Marley, as should be recalled by anyone who’s caught one of the dozens of…
Rebekah Pearson has never seen Little Womenin any of its acclaimed screen adaptations, including the renowned 1994 Winona Ryder version. In preparing to play the role of Jo March in Spreckels upcoming production of Little Women: The Musical, Pearson has only allowed herself to read the original novel, by Louisa May Alcott. “It was a very deliberate…
My Mañana Comes ★★★★½ Marin Theatre Company The Other Place ★★★★ Main Stage West In both Sharr White’s lyrical and lovely drama The Other Placeand Elizabeth Irwin’s magnificent My Mañana Comes, we are invited inside the lives of people who—in theater, as in real life—are often all but invisible. In a near balletic production at Marin Theater Company, My Mañana…
Twenty years ago, in 1995, I picked up Carol Doda. Literally. The pioneering stripper and “adult” entertainer was waiting for me at the side of the road in the San Francisco, where we’d arranged to meet before going to see the now-notorious movie ‘Showgirls.’ The movie was a hot ticket, freshly landed in theaters, and everyone…
Whatever else one says about Point Break Live!, you have to agree there are not many other live entertainments where the audience is doused with water, spattered with blood, beaned by flying sandwiches, harassed by surfers, and robbed at gunpoint by guys wearing Richard Nixon masks. An outrageously loose-limbed spoof of the iconic, 1991 cult-hit…
November 8, 2015 — In its first week online as a free streaming video, the short film ‘NEW,’ by Santa Rosa filmmaker John Harden, has been watched by over one-thousand people. “We’re having a great first week online,” Harden recently posted. That’s an understatement. In a social media landscape where videos are often posted to a…
While local curiosity about 6th Street Playhouse’s upcoming production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ is but a fraction of what exists for the new ‘Star Wars’ movie, news that Charles Siebert (‘Trapper John, M.D.’; ‘One Day at a Time,’ ‘Xena: Warrior Princess.’) will be playing the infamous “tightfisted old miser” has made certain segments of the theatergoing populace…
November 5, 2015—Southwest Shakespeare’s Jared Sakren has been named new Executive Director of 6th Street Playhouse, while Cinnabar has welcomed San Leandro’s Diane Dragone to replace former Executive Director Terence Keane. And that’s just the beginning to the new faces on the North Bay theater scene. READ ARTICLE IN NORTH BAY BOHEMIAN
November 4, 2015—For 20 years, the beloved (but largely forgotten) Novato Theater has been dark, sitting forlornly in the middle of downtown Novato. Once an art deco jewel, the building was shut down for safety reasons, and whole generations of theater-goers have grown up in the area without ever setting foot inside. Now, a local…
November 1, 2015—Amidst expected film screenings and highly anticipated celebrity appearances (John Travolta! Bruce Dern!), this year’s Napa Valley Film Festival is including one event that no one saw coming: a live concert-version of a brand new stage musical. Presented in collaboration with Napa’s Lucky Penny Productions and San Francisco’s Fogg Theater, the sneak peek…
North Bay Stage and Screen 