At Monday night’s San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards Gala, a number of North Bay theater artists and companies walked away with crisp new personalized certificates in an array of categories. The big winner of the evening was Rohnert Park’s Spreckels Theatre Company, which took home a total of eight wins – all…
Written by David Templeton Among the many pleasures to be found in the writing of playwright Terrence McNally (“Love! Valour! Compassion!” “Master Class,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune”) is the way he always allows his primary characters to have second chances. An opportunity to redress a past error, take one more creaky…
My guests on the Thursday, March 28 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were Larry Williams and Sam Coughlin from the Spreckels Theatre Company production of Barbecue Apocalypse. Click below to listen: **********
When is a free outdoor performance a thing of public service and culture and art, and when is it just noise? That’s the debate currently being battled in Mill Valley, where residents near Old Mill Park have petitioned the city to reduce the auditory impact of an annual Shakespeare festival that comes to the park’s…
“That’s so meta” is a phrase you hear bandied about a lot these days. It’s usually used to describe a reference by someone about themselves. Metatheatre is a style of play that acknowledges it is a play within a play – actors are aware of the audience and may interact with them or acknowledge they’re…
Written by David Templeton “We’re not technically drinking, I want that to be absolutely clear,” Petaluma stage director-and-actor Larry Williams pointed out, on a recent St. Patrick’s Day Sunday, as a pair of tall, colorful, impossibly sweet-looking margaritas – one blended, one on the rocks – appeared at our table. “This isn’t alcohol consumption. It’s…
At a time when occupational safety regulations are being loosened and funding for the agencies responsible for their enforcement being reduced, it’s good to be reminded how those safeguards came to be and what life was like for American workers before then. The Ross Valley Players’ production of Melanie Marnich’s These Shining Lives does just…
Written by David Templeton The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland, Oregon, is currently marking its 86th year of existence. That means that OSF has outlasted Betty Friedan, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lloyd Bridges, Agatha Christie, Roy Clark, Pope Pius XI, Carl Jung, Fritz Lang and Daniel Boone, all of whom successfully made it…
‘MOTHER ROAD’ (March 3-October 26) Rating (out of 5): ★★★★½ The idea of writing a theatrical sequel to John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” would seem shocking were it not that the playwright is Octavio Solis, one of the country’s most-celebrated living writers of the Mexican-American experience. There is definitely something Steinbeckian about Solis’ award-winning work.…
‘HAIRSPRAY: THE BROADWAY MUSICAL’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Rating (out of 5): ★★★★ It’s easy to roll one’s eyes when a Shakespeare-based theater festival programs a popular musical, dismissing the choice as no more than as a lazy, desperate cash-grab. And truth be told, some companies would be guilty as charged. But even the most cynical of…
North Bay Stage and Screen 