“Growing up, I was always interested in ghosts and UFOs, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, all of that stuff,” says filmmaker Tom Wyrsch, of Petaluma, writer-director of the soon-to-materialize “Haunted Sonoma County.” “But out of all of those things, ghosts always seemed the most possible. I think there’s something about the idea of ghosts,…
Victorian England produced some spectacularly bloody and murderous literature. Some was written and published, some began as the stuff of urban legend before being translated for the stage or to the cheap and popular ‘penny dreadful’ magazines that were filled with stories of the macabre, the sensational, the bloody, the mysterious. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock…
For many, the act of attending a really good movie is a truly religious experience. For the 30th anniversary of the Wine Country Film Festival, taking place in and around Glen Ellen and Kenwood, the annual event’s producers are lending credence to that notion, with a strong lineup of international and American films that, as…
Last year, around the time I was launching this website, I was completing work on my novella, ‘Mary Shelley’s Body,’ in which the ghost of the famous ‘Frankenstein’ author finds herself hanging her own grave, and begins a review of her own life that uncovers secrets even Mary didn’t know she was hiding. The novella-length…
Here’s a good “theater world” question. What’s harder and more intimidating to have to accomplish on stage – the simple, basic acting of a scene? Or the wielding of a sword in a choreographed, highly physical sword-fight, designed so the participants are dodging furniture and other cumbersome set pieces, all while trying not to…
“How about the Mayflower?” suggests musician Danny Sorentino. We’re standing in front of the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center. “We just saw a movie about the Beatles, right? We’d be wrong not to go have a beer at a British pub now, you know?” Well argued. We turn and head up the street toward the Mayflower…
The unpredictable combustible power of people eating dinner together is prominently featured in two notable stage plays currently running in the North Bay. Marin Theatre Company’s August Osage County, directed by Jasson Minadakis, is a solid, well-performed, but oddly distant and frequently unsatisfying staging of the 2008 Pulitzer winner from Tracy Letts. Usually presented with…
Wolf House, the doomed Glen Ellen dream-home of author Jack London, burned down over 103 years ago, just 13 years before London himself passed away. While London has seen his fair share of public adulation since then – especially during this, the centennial of this death – Wolf House is finally getting a bit of…
“I think it was one of the best roles Hugh Grant has ever had,” declares Richard Connema, praising Grant’s recent work in the new film Florence Foster Jenkins—directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, The Queen)—in which Meryl Streep also stars. “I think Grant deserves an Oscar for it. And that kid, the piano player, the actor…
‘The most surprising thing about this whole process for me,” says actor Dameion Brown, who’s playing the lead in Marin Shakespeare Company’s new production of Othello, “is hearing all of these amazing actors I’m working with, these incredibly experienced professionals, look me in the eye and say, ‘You belong here. This is your place. This is…
North Bay Stage and Screen 