I love short play festivals. You get a bunch of different stories and a bunch of different storytellers and, should there be a lemon in the bunch, welllll… it’s over in a few minutes and you move on to the next one. Left Edge Theatre is presenting their Hindsight 2021 Short Play Festival, featuring twelve…
My phone-in guests on the Thursday, January 7 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were Paige Picard and Abbey Lee from Left Edge Theatre’s Hindsight 2021 Short Play Festival. Click below to listen: **********
Soul is a beautiful film of incredible depth, more depth than we’ve become used to from animated films – even Pixar’s. Gorgeously animated, wonderfully voiced (with contributions from some recognizable Bay Area theatre talent), and vibrantly scored, I think it would have been the least financially successful Pixar film to date had it been released…
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a major restructuring at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center. An email sent out earlier today announced the departure of Artistic Director Yavé Guzmán and Front-of-House Manager Mary Dixon. “Unfortunately, due to the extreme financial toll of the pandemic, we are no longer able to pay any staff and have…
Perhaps the niche-iest of niches in modern literature is the bathroom reader. Usually a collection of essays, short stories, jokes, or comics that can be absorbed in a few minutes time, they are the dog-eared, soft-covered books you find on your neighbor’s bathroom counter that you pick up and thumb through when necessity requires you…
I spent the weekend catching up on two high-profile, gay-themed streaming productions – Netflix’s The Boys in the Band and The Prom. The former is a star-studded remount of Mart Crowley’s ground-breaking 1968 Off-Broadway production (and William Friedkin’s 1970 film adaptation) directed by Joe Mantello with the latter being a star-studded remounting of the 2018…
My phone-in guest on the Thursday, December 10 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon was the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Michael Gene Sullivan to preview their radio production of A Red Carol. Click below to listen: **********
If you come to David Fincher’s Mank seeking a definitive answer to the question of who really wrote Citizen Kane you are likely to find yourself disappointed. The question, first raised by film critic Pauline Kael in a 1971 essay, has hung out there in the cinema atmosphere for decades. Kael’s conclusion that it was…
My guest on the Thursday, December 3 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon was Transcendence Theatre Company’s Resident Artist Meggie Cansler Ness to preview this year’s Broadway Holiday at the Drive-in program. Click below to listen: **********
You’ve got to be of a certain age or a cinephile to understand the term “B” movie. Originally used to identify the second feature on a double-bill (the first being the “A” movie), some studios maintained “A” and “B” production units, while other studios – like Monogram and Republic – produced nothing but low-budget features…
North Bay Stage and Screen 