‘HAIRSPRAY: THE BROADWAY MUSICAL’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Rating (out of 5): ★★★★ It’s easy to roll one’s eyes when a Shakespeare-based theater festival programs a popular musical, dismissing the choice as no more than as a lazy, desperate cash-grab. And truth be told, some companies would be guilty as charged. But even the most cynical of…
‘AS YOU LIKE IT’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Rating (out of 5): ★★★ One of the most interesting things about the plays of Shakespeare is how powerfully they work as showcases of a stage director’s view of the world, their relative aesthetic values, and the ingenuity they bring to their interpretation of a particular play. Case in…
‘CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND’ Oregon Shakespeare Festival Rating (out of 5): ★★★★★ “Nothing in Cambodia stays buried for long.” That line is delivered as a bit of an inside joke, but it comes with a sting, one that resonates throughout playwright Lauren Yee’s sensational new play, “Cambodian Rock Band.” The play premiered last year at South Coast…
This weekend, when Sonoma County’s Fire Circle Theater presents its first ever “ReVerberation Festival of Community Voices,” at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park, Petaluma’s Julie Yeager will be one of many to participate in what promises to be a vast, wildly diverse showcase of spoken word performances. “I am going to do a…
On Saturday night, as part of Spreckels Performing Arts Center’s big party celebrating its 30th anniversary, Artistic Director Sheri Lee Miller announced Spreckels Theatre Company’s ambitious, premiere-filled 2019/2020 season. Anchored by a number of major North Bay debuts, the season – which will begin this August – will feature two plays and four musicals, a…
Spreckels Performing Arts Center, in Rohnert Park, is celebrating its 30th Anniversary this weekend with a free onstage musical event on Saturday, March 9, at 7:00 p.m. The show will feature “concert-style songs” showcasing some of Spreckels’ most popular and fondly remembered musicals, and will include a bit of a “look forward” to what Artistic…
For theater fans, theater writers and theater artists of all stripes, there are few times of year as exciting as that stretch of weeks in the late winter/early fall when theater companies take turns announcing the titles of the plays they will be producing in the following theatrical season. It’s a time for actors to…
To a vast number of local film fans, the annual Mill Valley Film Festival is like a 10-day-long Roman feast, a cinematic bacchanal in which roasted pigs and hand-peeled grapes have been metaphorically substituted with movies, movies and more movies. Running through mid-October, the 2018 MVFF—now in its 41st year—will screen more than 200 movies…
Popular Broadway musicals are often inspired by classic books. For example, next month’s Spreckels Theater Company production of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,” written by Mark Haddon and adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens. Kander and Ebb’s ‘Cabaret,’ opening August 31 at Cinnabar Theater, is based on John Van Druten’s…
It’s been a while since pianist Nancy Hayashibara – of the Santa Rosa Junior College – has appeared on stage in one of her semi-legendary stage shows, in which she alternates between stellar renditions of classical masterpieces and hilarious comedy bits, often playing over-the-top characters, including (sometimes) her own mother. On Saturday, July 28, she…
North Bay Stage and Screen 