November 5, 2015—Southwest Shakespeare’s Jared Sakren has been named new Executive Director of 6th Street Playhouse, while Cinnabar has welcomed San Leandro’s Diane Dragone to replace former Executive Director Terence Keane. And that’s just the beginning to the new faces on the North Bay theater scene. READ ARTICLE IN NORTH BAY BOHEMIAN
November 4, 2015—For 20 years, the beloved (but largely forgotten) Novato Theater has been dark, sitting forlornly in the middle of downtown Novato. Once an art deco jewel, the building was shut down for safety reasons, and whole generations of theater-goers have grown up in the area without ever setting foot inside. Now, a local…
November 1, 2015—Amidst expected film screenings and highly anticipated celebrity appearances (John Travolta! Bruce Dern!), this year’s Napa Valley Film Festival is including one event that no one saw coming: a live concert-version of a brand new stage musical. Presented in collaboration with Napa’s Lucky Penny Productions and San Francisco’s Fogg Theater, the sneak peek…
Listen. Can you feel it? There is a disturbance in the Force. Even before last year’s record-setting release of the first trailer for J.J. Abrams’ ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens,’ there have been whispered rumors surging through the fan-iverse, wondering about the direction the new film (to be released on December 18) will be taking the beloved…
Blithe Spirit ★★★ Rocky Horror Show ★★★★ 6th Street Playhouse Weekends through November 8 Two supernatural sex comedies are running concurrently at 6th Street Playhouse, perfectly timed for Halloween. Both feature witty retorts and sexual innuendo (and out-uendo), alongside ghostly visitations and eye-popping outfits—but only one features the “The Time Warp.” For the full review from the…
The Sonoma Valley has more than its share of festivals. There are music festivals, film festivals, harvest festivals, pumpkin festivals, vineyard festivals – even a historic race car festival. Now, thanks to Broadway actress-comedian Brooke Tansley – formerly of Los Angles and New York City, now a regular member of Transcendence Theater Company, and a…
★★★★ Lucky Penny Community Arts Center Weekends through Oct..25 Edgy, dark, funny and more than a little unsettling, Lucky Penny’s deliriously twisted production of Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries is not the kind of thing most theatergoers expect when they sit down for an onstage love story. For the full review from the October 21, 2015 North Bay…
★★★ Cinnabar Theater Weekends through Nov. 1 —In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as everyone knows, a creature is assembled from dead body parts and granted the spark of life. In Trevor Allen’s The Creature—a daring, artful, but ultimately problematic adaptation—the playwright puts Victor Frankenstein’s creation process in reverse, taking the original story apart and reassembling it into something similar,…
★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company Weekends through Oct. 25 When 2005’s Light in the Piazza first played on Broadway, there was much talk that the show, a musical adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel, marked a return to the gorgeous scores and lyrical drama of the golden age of musical theater. Ignoring decades of rock and pop influences, composer…
“Festival mind,” says actress-comedian Brooke Tansley. “It’s the attitude people get into at film festivals and theater festivals. It’s an attitude of, I guess, a kind of grateful expectation, of excitement and anticipation, where everyone knows that the more movies you see, or the more plays you see, or the more comedy acts you see,…
North Bay Stage and Screen 