Hard work is an essential part of any artistic or financial success. Actor-singer-producer Brad Surosky, of Transcendence Theater Company, has learned that from personal experience – but he’s also learned that hard work is often not enough. Success also requires an additional little thing called luck. “So many things have had to line up perfectly…
“I know what it’s like to have a dream,” says actor-educator Jim Jarrett, of Sonoma. “I know what it’s like to struggle in pursuit of that dream – and I know what it’s like to start late in doing it.” Vincent van Gogh didn’t start painting until he was 27, points out Jarrett, who began…
“It’s challenging to play in the pit for three different musicals in a given week,” admits Sonoma-based drummer Quinten Cohen. “But it’s very rewarding.” A longtime company member and orchestra performer with the annual Summer Repertory Theater Company in Santa Rosa, Cohen says that he looks forward to his yearly participation in the program. It’s…
“Don’t get me started.” Jasson Minadakis, one quickly notices, uses that phrase a lot. “Don’t get me started.” For the record, when it comes to talking about theater—especially the kind of expectation-defying, definition-challenging, artistically fearless theater Marin Theatre Company (MTC) has become known for over the 10 years that he has served as its artistic…
Elizabeth Fuller and Conrad Bishop, the multitalented, long-married team at the core of Sebastopol’s Independent Eye theatre troupe, approach their art with a fervor and devotion rarely seen outside of religion or psychosis. Over the decades, they have tackled all forms of theatre, from the traditional to the experimental. They have also written books and produced syndicated…
“Fabulous concealment.” Those are the words playwright Tim Firth employed in the author’s notes for his 2008 stage play “Calendar Girls.” They refer to the staging of one particular scene. It is, perhaps, the most famous scene in the play, as it was in the 2003 film from which Firth’s script – he also co-authored…
‘Sometimes,” muses actor Mark Bradbury, “you play a character you just don’t like very much.” Over the last 12 years, he says, after appearing in more than 30 shows, Bradbury has portrayed his share of unlikable people. “With those guys,” he notes, “you have to work extra hard to find something you connect with. Then…
“A man can die but once,” wrote William Shakespeare in “King Henry IV, Part II.” That’s true enough, but few among us can hope to have our one-and-only death remembered – or our lives and accomplishments celebrated – a full 400 years after the fact. One can’t say the same about Shakespeare. This weekend, to…
QUESTION: When is a play not a play? ANSWER: When it’s a concert. Plays, generally speaking, have plots. And concerts, generally speaking, um . . . don’t. That’s the argument some have made against the rise (and strange popularity) of so-called “jukebox musicals,” the cutely coined nickname for stage shows consisting primarily of a catalog of songs…
“The Loner Stoop.” That, laughs singer-songwriter Jesca Hoop, now of Manchester, England, was her name for the space just outside the theater department at Santa Rosa High School. It was in the early 1990s, when Hoop, who describes herself as a less-than-overachieving student, found an unexpected place of acceptance at SRHS. “That spot outside of…
North Bay Stage and Screen 