It snowed last night in Ashland, Oregon, where the temperature outside ultimately dropped to a low of 20 degrees. Meanwhile, on stage inside the Angus Bowmer Theater, the temperatures and blood pressures were increasingly high, as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival kicked off its 2017 season with a vigorous, high-energy, decidedly weird staging of William Shakespeare’s…
“I just turned 70,” says actor/producer George Maguire. “But in many ways, as an artist particularly, I feel like I’m just starting out.” After a lifetime appearing in other people’s plays and films, and teaching others how to do the same, Maguire is finally venturing into the field of developing and producing his own projects.…
Ideas don’t get much bigger than the nature of democracy or the theory of relativity. But two local theater companies are successfully wrestling those brain-busting subjects into highly enjoyable, stage-sized entertainments. 1776, the seldom-produced 1968 musical by Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards (Spreckels Theatre Company), combines an enormous cast, clever projections and elaborate costumes to…
“Before we called it PTSD, people with post-traumatic stress syndrome were just considered weirdos, people who couldn’t or wouldn’t shake off their bad experiences,” says Sonoma director-actor-teacher Jim Jarrett. He’s the director of the acclaimed wartime drama “Home Front,” which will be running five consecutive days next week at Andrews Hall, presented by Sonoma Arts…
A beloved Broadway classic and an edgy off-Broadway newcomer will spring to life this summer, and Sonoma Arts Live is hosting auditions for actors to populate the upcoming plays. “This is one of our most daring series of plays ever,” says Sonoma Arts Live managing artistic director Jaime Love, who points out that the season,…
Last October, on opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF)—and months before La La Land was officially released in theaters—its writer-director, Damien Chazelle, was in Marin with his leading lady Emma Stone, and composer Justin Hurwitz. During a pre-screening press conference, Chazelle was asked about the Oscar potential for the film, a musical about artists…
Last October, the North Bay Bohemian profiled and presented excerpts from the recent anthology book ‘Eternal Frankenstein,’ a collection of 16 stories published by Petaluma’s Word Horde Books. One of those stories was the novella-length ‘Mary Shelley’s Body,’ written by playwright and Bohemian contributor David Templeton. With Templeton’s history of writing and performing one-man plays and other theatrical efforts,…
‘Kooky” is a word often ascribed to people who are offbeat and unusual to an uncomfortable degree—people like playwright Clare Barron, whose effectively oddball drama You Got Older just opened at Left Edge Theatre. Also new is 6th Street Playhouse’s Buyer & Cellar, a one-actor exploration of the eccentricities of Barbra Streisand, another routine recipient of the “kookiness”…
Beauty isn’t always pretty. Richard Wright’s 1940 masterpiece Native Son—among the most important and powerful American novels ever published—has been alternately praised and condemned, drawing kudos and criticism for the very same things—mainly, the brutal honesty, realism and shocking violence of Wright’s supremely crafted depiction of life as a poor, undereducated black man in mid-century America.…
North Bay Stage and Screen 