‘AS YOU LIKE IT’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Rating (out of 5): ★★★ One of the most interesting things about the plays of Shakespeare is how powerfully they work as showcases of a stage director’s view of the world, their relative aesthetic values, and the ingenuity they bring to their interpretation of a particular play. Case in…
‘CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Rating (out of 5): ★★★★★ “Nothing in Cambodia stays buried for long.” That line is delivered as a bit of an inside joke, but it comes with a sting, one that resonates throughout playwright Lauren Yee’s sensational new play, “Cambodian Rock Band.” The play premiered last year at South Coast…
This weekend, when Sonoma County’s Fire Circle Theater presents its first ever “ReVerberation Festival of Community Voices,” at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park, Petaluma’s Julie Yeager will be one of many to participate in what promises to be a vast, wildly diverse showcase of spoken word performances. “I am going to do a…
My guests on the Thursday, March 14 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were Leila Rosa and Chris Schloemp from the Left Edge Theatre production of The Nether. Click below to listen: ********** *Note – this audio files cuts out before the actual end of the interview. It will be replaced by…
Playwright Ayad Akhtar burst on the theatrical scene in 2013 with Disgraced, a searing drama about identity politics and Islamophobia which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2016, Marin Theatre Company presented Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, a play that took on capitalism and Islamic fanaticism. Gender issues in the Islamic community are the…
In late 1942, when our country was a year into World War II, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth opened on Broadway. Wilder, whose Our Town dramatized the lives of one small community over a period of twelve years, expanded his sight a bit with a play that covers all of human existence as…
In a recent Letter to the Editor of the Bohemian, a theatre patron decried one North Bay company for its tendency to program shows with dark themes that portray men and women at their worst. The patron then went on to suggest attending a then-running show at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre. That patron may…
On Saturday night, as part of Spreckels Performing Arts Center’s big party celebrating its 30th anniversary, Artistic Director Sheri Lee Miller announced Spreckels Theatre Company’s ambitious, premiere-filled 2019/2020 season. Anchored by a number of major North Bay debuts, the season – which will begin this August – will feature two plays and four musicals, a…
Totally fucked. That, dear readers, sums up the teen angst expressed via song in Spring Awakening, Marin Musical Theatre Company’s latest offering. It runs at the NTC Playhouse in Novato through March 16. Based on German playwright Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play that dealt frankly with teenage sexuality, playwright Steven Sater and musician Duncan Sheik…
On December 4, 1956, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley held a once-in-a-lifetime jam session at rock and roll pioneer Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Records studio. They were labeled the “Million Dollar Quartet” by a local journalist and that moniker was affixed to the recordings of the session released decades later.…
North Bay Stage and Screen 