The essential failure of Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles—the story of an angry cyclist and his passive-aggressive relationship with his testy, suspicious grandmother—is its lack of direction and absence of coherent plotting, along with characters who, with one exception, start off being largely unlikable and reveal themselves so slowly that by the time we see something admirable,…
“Sad but true, there is no more wild left in the world,” says Joe Fitting, deputy director of the San Francisco Zoo. “It’s true. There is no real wild place left on the planet. It’s all shared space now. Zootopia, this crazy Disney movie, it shows all of the different animals sharing the same city, the…
“It’s impossible to direct, or act, without using some of what you’ve experienced in your own life,” suggests actor-director Sheri Lee Miller, scooting her chair closer to the heater in the rehearsal room at Cinnabar Theater. As the sound of falling rain grows louder overhead, she takes a moment to mull that last thought over.…
“Joe, nobody knows anything,” observed actress Meg Ryan, as she teetered at the edge of a fiery abyss in the misunderstood fantasy film “Joe Versus the Volcano,” in which she played the soul-sick Patricia Graynamore opposite Tom Hanks’ “Brain Cloud” afflicted Joe Banks. In one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, she said, “Nobody knows…
For the second year in a row, the North Bay’s Rohnert Park Library will be literary ground zero as more than 30 local authors, writers, journalists, playwrights and bloggers come together to meet the public, read their works, answer questions, plug books and other merchandise, and general hang out. Amongst the participants this year will be…
“Larger, better, even more fun.” Asked to describe the 19th annual Sonoma International Film Festival in a few words, this is how festival director Kevin McNeely defines the latest iteration of the event that has been bringing star-power and tourist-dollars to Sonoma every spring for nearly two decades. This year, from March 30 to April…
“Unidentified Flying Objects are the biggest, most important topic on the planet Earth,” declares Jim Ledwith, Sonoma-based “UFOlogist” and curator-founder of the annual UFO Symposium. A popular film-and-conversation event, the Symposium will celebrate its sixth anniversary on April 1 and 2 as part of the upcoming Sonoma International Film Festival, running March 30 to April…
As theatergoers, we occasionally attend plays we never previously liked—and end up changing our minds by the end. Maybe exceptional acting somehow assists the script in transcending its limitations, or the directing cleverly alters the show to make some powerful social statement, finding some new way to show us something we’d not noticed in previous productions. For me,…
When word spread earlier this month that Jim DePriest had died at 79 there were those in the Sonoma County theater community who expressed more than just shock and sadness. To many, the tireless actor and director had given the impression that he might never die, so relentless was his commitment to local theater. “It’s…
SWIMMERS (Marin Theatre Company) Rating: ★★★★½ (Out of five) Swimmers, by Rachel Bonds, is a gorgeously poetic play about that specific form of crushing loneliness that can only be felt in the presence of other people, and it’s beautifully performed by a large company of 11 actors. Presented by Marin Theatre Company and directed with detailed precision…
North Bay Stage and Screen 