In most modern musical revues, much of the drama and emotion springs from the nostalgic hit an audience gets at hearing beloved and familiar old songs. That’s certainly the case with My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra, now playing in a cozy, cabaret setting at Cinnabar Theater. Anyone who feels their pulse quicken at…
To Margot Robbie, Tonya Harding was a pit bull. That’s not just a metaphor. It’s how the fast-rising Australian actor (Suicide Squad, Goodbye, Christopher Robin) elected to play the real-life figure skater in the just-released movie I, Tonya. The film, which is already appearing on many end-of-year top 10 lists, screened on December 2 at…
“I love performing at holiday time,” says composer-musician David Arkenstone. “People are almost always in a great wintery mood during the holidays. If they’re not, it’s our job to put them in the mood.” Shepherding busy, stressed-out people into a warm, wintery frame of mind. That’s the primary goal of “David Arkenstone’s Winter Fantasy,” an…
“Frank Sinatra’s voice, his stage presence, his whole Sinatra ‘thing,’ it was one-of-a-kind,” says director Jennifer King. “There was a time when I might not have thought Sinatra was my thing, but now, I love him. I could listen to his songs forever and never get tired of them.” King is currently helming “My Way:…
Some plays, not surprisingly, get a little old after a decade of repetition. Others, miraculously, get better. The key, as evidenced by David Yen’s 10th annual performance of David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries, at Left Edge Theater, is changing things up from time to time. Adding a fully stocked bar to the set one year, and using…
In comedy, timing is everything, and the timing is so off in 6th Street Playhouse’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, the fact that it manages to extract any laughs from its audience is somewhat of a Christmas miracle. Plagued with pre-production challenges ranging from a change in director to the untimely passing of its lead…
“The human voice,” composer Richard Strauss once said, “is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play.” He could have added the words, “at Christmas time,” and few would have blinked an eye, because it’s true. At Christmas time, there’s nothng more beautiful than the human voice lifted in…
I don’t know if it’s the time of year or an undiagnosed coronary issue, but I’ve found my heart warmed twice by local theatre productions now running. First, it was the Main Stage West production of Daddy Long Legs that started an atrial flutter and now it’s the Spreckels Theatre Company’s Little Women, the Musical…
If you like A.R. Gurney’s popular two-person play “Love Letters”, you’re going to love “Daddy Long Legs”, a musical adaptation of the 1912 novel by Jean Webster. Set at the turn of the 20th century, it’s the story of the relationship between an orphan and her mysterious benefactor as told – well, actually, sung –…
In 1992, a retired truck driver named Teri Horton paid five dollars for a painting from a southern California thrift store to give as a gag gift to a friend. An incomprehensible series of dots, blotches and streaks, her friend refused her gift and Horton ending up trying to unload the gangly canvas at a…
North Bay Stage and Screen 