Last year, Healdsburg’s Raven Players surprised this critic with a very interesting production of Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful. The play, which tells parallel stories of the tribulations of a returning Iraq war vet trying to assimilate back into civilian life and a group of recovering drug addicts trying to stay clean, was not…
My guest on the Thursday, September 20 theater segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon was Rich Rubin, the new Artistic Director of the Pegasus Theater Company. Click below to hear that interview: **********
Theatre Bay Area has announced the nominees for their 5th Annual TBA Awards and North Bay companies have snagged 43 nominations. The awards will be presented on Monday, November 5th at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. The TBA Awards are designed to honor excellence in professionally oriented theatre through a peer-based, Bay Area-wide adjudication process…
The Marquee Theater Journalists Association has released the list of nominees for its 3rd Annual MTJA Awards. The Association recognized the exemplary work of Sonoma County theater artists with nominations in seventeen categories that were culled from the sixty-six productions attended by MTJA members. Recipients will be announced at the 2018 MTJA Awards – A Celebration of Sonoma…
Spreckels Theatre Company opens their season with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel about a boy with ‘behavioral difficulties’ took England and Broadway by storm and earned multiple awards on both continents. Christopher (Elijah Pinkham) is a 15-year-old boy with an unspecified behavioral…
If you’re only going to see one “five British women of varying ages, socio-economic statuses and body types bonding over pole dancing” play in your lifetime, might as well make it Dave Simpson’s The Naked Truth. A big hit in England, director Argo Thompson imports it to the North Bay for its U.S. premiere at…
A Chorus Line really isn’t done much by community theatres these days. The 1976 multi-award-winning musical requires about two dozen experienced dancer/singers to fill out the cast; a requirement that’s tough to fulfill. If you’re gonna do it, best to start with a director with over four decades of experience in dance and choreography and…
Guests on the Thursday, September 13 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon included artists from Healdsburg’s Raven Players “Mini-Rep” productions including director Steven David Martin and Priscilla Locke from Church & State and director Caitlin Strom-Martin and Maureen O’Neill from Time Stands Still. Click below to hear that interview: **********
In his ‘Director’s Notes’ for the Lucky Penny Production of Into the Woods, James D. Sasser discusses why directors often try to bring different approaches to popular works beginning with the old axiom that ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ For someone who, in the role of theater critic, sees upwards of sixty shows a year, it’s a…
Guests on the second Thursday, September 6 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon included actors Bonnie Jean Shelton and Angela Squire from the Left Edge Theatre production of The Naked Truth. Click below to hear that interview: **********
North Bay Stage and Screen 