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…
‘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…
North Bay Stage and Screen 