For the second year in a row, the North Bay’s Rohnert Park Library will be literary ground zero as more than 30 local authors, writers, journalists, playwrights and bloggers come together to meet the public, read their works, answer questions, plug books and other merchandise, and general hang out. Amongst the participants this year will be…
“Larger, better, even more fun.” Asked to describe the 19th annual Sonoma International Film Festival in a few words, this is how festival director Kevin McNeely defines the latest iteration of the event that has been bringing star-power and tourist-dollars to Sonoma every spring for nearly two decades. This year, from March 30 to April…
“Unidentified Flying Objects are the biggest, most important topic on the planet Earth,” declares Jim Ledwith, Sonoma-based “UFOlogist” and curator-founder of the annual UFO Symposium. A popular film-and-conversation event, the Symposium will celebrate its sixth anniversary on April 1 and 2 as part of the upcoming Sonoma International Film Festival, running March 30 to April…
As theatergoers, we occasionally attend plays we never previously liked—and end up changing our minds by the end. Maybe exceptional acting somehow assists the script in transcending its limitations, or the directing cleverly alters the show to make some powerful social statement, finding some new way to show us something we’d not noticed in previous productions. For me,…
When word spread earlier this month that Jim DePriest had died at 79 there were those in the Sonoma County theater community who expressed more than just shock and sadness. To many, the tireless actor and director had given the impression that he might never die, so relentless was his commitment to local theater. “It’s…
SWIMMERS (Marin Theatre Company) Rating: ★★★★½ (Out of five) Swimmers, by Rachel Bonds, is a gorgeously poetic play about that specific form of crushing loneliness that can only be felt in the presence of other people, and it’s beautifully performed by a large company of 11 actors. Presented by Marin Theatre Company and directed with detailed precision…
People hide things. We bury our sins, secrets and hidden thoughts down deep, or we simply disguise them behind a mask of pretense. Theater is the ultimate exercise in pretense as art, and in two first-rate plays, those secrets are uncovered in very different ways. Click ‘Here‘ to read the full review in the North…
I am, in a moment, going to talk about spelling, as in spelling bees, as in ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,’ a musical that is currently running in two different productions in the North Bay. But first, let me delve further into the disciplines of vocabulary with a few stage-related definitions. I’d like…
“Better than the Super Bowl.” That hyperbolic declaration appeared the morning of February 28, on the Facebook page of local film fan, actor and blogger Peter Warden. It was the morning of the Oscars, and after a “friend” noted that for Warden, the Oscars were very likely as exciting as the Super Bowl, Warden affirmed that,…
Forget what you know about daylight savings time. Marin Theatre Company is springing back. Which may be a shrewd move forward. Beginning last January, all evening shows at Marin Theatre Company are starting at 7:30 p.m. (instead of 8:00, as has been the tradition since, well, forever). This makes MTC the first theater in Marin County to…
North Bay Stage and Screen 