Blistering drama takes the stage at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre with the North Bay premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced. Akhtar has taken the “friends drink to excess and soon truths are revealed” theatrical trope (see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, etc.) and dragged it into the 21st century. Amir Kapoor (Jared Wright) is…
The plight of the vanishing New England WASP is the subject matter of A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room, running now at Sonoma Arts Live. No, it’s not a science lecture on the more annoying cousin of the honeybee, but a look at the cultural transformation of a specific component of 20th-century America: the White Anglo-Saxon…
North Bay theater kicks off the new year with 6th Street Playhouse’s Honky Tonk Angels, a country-music revue by Ted Swindley. Swindley, best known for the community theater staple Always . . . Patsy Cline, has taken about 30 country standards and wrapped the thinnest of stories around them to create a raucous and enjoyable evening of…
It’s that time of year again for the usual “Best of…” lists where critics review their picks for the best (and sometimes worst) in music, movies, fashion, etc. and give people at holiday parties something to argue about. For the past three years my approach has been a little different as I prefer to offer…
In comedy, timing is everything, and the timing is so off in 6th Street Playhouse’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, the fact that it manages to extract any laughs from its audience is somewhat of a Christmas miracle. Plagued with pre-production challenges ranging from a change in director to the untimely passing of its lead…
I don’t know if it’s the time of year or an undiagnosed coronary issue, but I’ve found my heart warmed twice by local theatre productions now running. First, it was the Main Stage West production of Daddy Long Legs that started an atrial flutter and now it’s the Spreckels Theatre Company’s Little Women, the Musical…
If you like A.R. Gurney’s popular two-person play “Love Letters”, you’re going to love “Daddy Long Legs”, a musical adaptation of the 1912 novel by Jean Webster. Set at the turn of the 20th century, it’s the story of the relationship between an orphan and her mysterious benefactor as told – well, actually, sung –…
In 1992, a retired truck driver named Teri Horton paid five dollars for a painting from a southern California thrift store to give as a gag gift to a friend. An incomprehensible series of dots, blotches and streaks, her friend refused her gift and Horton ending up trying to unload the gangly canvas at a…
“Am I supposed to be retelling my creature’s story or confessing my own?” asks Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein and the protagonist in Petaluma playwright David Templeton’s latest theatrical piece “Mary Shelley’s Body,” now in its premiere engagement at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West. Templeton, the Argus-Courier features editor, whose previous plays are autobiographical, ventures…
On Monday, November 14th, a gathering was held at the Local Barrel Tap Room in Santa Rosa to celebrate the outstanding work done by the local theatre community for the 2015 – 2016 season. Here is the full list of the 2016 nominees and recipients of the inaugural Marquee Theater Journalists Association Awards with winners…
North Bay Stage and Screen 