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…
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…
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.…
Anyone going to a performance of Hello, Dolly! – running now at the SHN Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco through March 17 – with an appetite for an enlightened look at male/female relationships is likely to leave quite hungry. The current national tour of the 2017 revival of the 1964 Broadway smash based on…
Sometimes the most interesting dramas are the simplest – a single set, a few characters, a conflict. “Naturalistic” plays, as they are sometimes referred, were the result of a movement in late 19th century European theatre to enhance the realism of plays with an understanding of how heredity and environment influence an individual. The most…
My guests on the Thursday, February 21 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were Diane Dragone, Clark Sterling, and Michael McGurk to talk about the Cinnabar Theater’s Broadway Bash. Click below to listen: **********
