Sonoma Arts Live is making a few New Year’s resolutions. Earlier show times… a higher number of performances spread more widely throughout the year… an immediate transition from the former alliance of different theater troupes into a single theater company… and a decided move toward more artistic and thematic consistency in its choices of plays…

‘Mahalia Jackson has been a part of my life as long as I can remember,” says singer and playwright Sharon E. Scott, speaking of the legendary New Orleans gospel singer and civil rights activist. “My grandmother was a pastor’s wife, and we could only listen to sacred music. She was a maid, cooking dinner every…

On New Year’s Eve in Canada, cities offer free public transportation. It’s a tradition. In certain parts of Mexico, when the clock strikes midnight, partiers eat 12 grapes and make a wish with each one. In Albania, at precisely midnight, people make perfectly timed phone calls to wish each other a prosperous new year. Here…

It was over a year-and-a-half ago that the script for ‘Polar Bears’ was completed, literally two hours before its first public reading at Main Stage West. That was in late July of 2014, less than a week before I left for Scotland to present my first one-man-show ‘Wretch Like Me’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.…

Rebekah Pearson has never seen Little Womenin any of its acclaimed screen adaptations, including the renowned 1994 Winona Ryder version. In preparing to play the role of Jo March in Spreckels upcoming production of Little Women: The Musical, Pearson has only allowed herself to read the original novel, by Louisa May Alcott. “It was a very deliberate…

While local curiosity about 6th Street Playhouse’s upcoming production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ is but a fraction of what exists for the new ‘Star Wars’ movie, news that Charles Siebert (‘Trapper John, M.D.’; ‘One Day at a Time,’ ‘Xena: Warrior Princess.’) will be playing the infamous “tightfisted old miser” has made certain segments of the theatergoing populace…

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…

“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,…

I love Autumn. I love Autumn because of theater. Actually, I love it for many reasons, from the first fall of leaves in late September, on into the arrival of pumpkins on doorsteps in October, to the sound of rain falling on trees, sidewalks and parked cars in November. That’s when streets begin to become adorned…