Review: “As You Like It” in Napa

Napa Valley College has an excellent track record with youth-centric, large-scale Broadway musical productions. They’ve done a great job with past productions of such shows as Matilda the Musical and Spring Awakening. It was inevitable that Jennifer King, Theatre Arts and Film Studies Coordinator at NVC and founder of Shakespeare Napa Valley, would find a…

Review: “Morning Sun” in Rohnert Park

How interesting can a play be if it tells the story of an unremarkable person’s life told by that unremarkable person and the unremarkable people that surround them?  How unremarkable? So unremarkable that playwright Simon Stephens doesn’t even give them names in his cast list for Morning Sun, now playing in the Condiotti Experimental Theatre…

Review: “Awake and Sing!” in Santa Rosa

The name Clifford Odets probably means little to the modern theatregoer, but there was a time he was considered a titan of American theatre, fitting somewhere in between Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. His “working class dramas” of the 1930s (like Waiting for Lefty) were extremely popular with audiences and influential with up and coming…

Review: “Harvey” in Pittsburg

I recently ventured out of my usual “sphere of attendance” of North Bay theatre after receiving an invitation from Contra Costa County’s Pittsburg Theatre Company to join them for their season opener. They’ve titled their season “Rising from the Ashes 2025” as they recover from a devasting warehouse fire where they basically lost everything from…