I love short play festivals. You get a bunch of different stories and a bunch of different storytellers and, should there be a lemon in the bunch, welllll… it’s over in a few minutes and you move on to the next one. Left Edge Theatre is presenting their Hindsight 2021 Short Play Festival, featuring twelve…
I spent the weekend catching up on two high-profile, gay-themed streaming productions – Netflix’s The Boys in the Band and The Prom. The former is a star-studded remount of Mart Crowley’s ground-breaking 1968 Off-Broadway production (and William Friedkin’s 1970 film adaptation) directed by Joe Mantello with the latter being a star-studded remounting of the 2018…
With no date in sight for the resumption of live, in-house theatre, Left Edge Theatre becomes the first North Bay company to move forward with a full season of streaming productions beginning with Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Sweat. The show streams through Sept 27. The play opens with a parole officer (Corey Jackson)…
A young couple debates the merits of bringing a child into this environmentally-challenged world and then deal with the ramifications of their decision in Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs, the latest offering from Zoom Theatre. There’s one final performance scheduled for Sunday, May 10 at 5:00 pm PDT. Zoom Theatre is the brainchild of director Patrick Nims.…
With the shelter-in-place order estimated to be in effect for quite some time, many theatre companies have turned to streaming archival footage of shows previously produced to maintain a connection with their audiences. Bay Area director Patrick Nims has come up with a new entity that’s diving headfirst into the pandemic-necessitated world of on-line theatre.…
The renovation and remodeling of Santa Rosa Junior College’s 80-year old Burbank Auditorium is now complete. The venerable 600-seat theatre has been reconfigured into two performance venues; a 400-seat proscenium arch space and a 200-seat 3/4 thrust studio theatre. The JC’s Theatre Arts Department, which has had to take their shows “on the road” for…
In the pantheon of great American plays, Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie is surely in the upper tier. Perhaps the most personal of Williams’ works, its name recognition, small cast, simple setting, and straight-forward storytelling have made it a staple of community theatres. Its ease of staging, however, belies its complexity and the quality of…
Bring Down the House By Rosa Joshi and Kate Wisniewski Adapted from William Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is drawing close to wrapping up its ten-year-long commitment to staging all of Shakespeare’s plays within a single decade. That’s 36 shows in ten seasons, with crowd-pleasers like “A Midsummer…
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM By William Shakespeare Directed by Joseph Haj REVIEWED BY DAVID TEMPLETON I have seen enough productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” over the course of my theatergoing life –- at least two dozen of them — that I literally cannot recall anything about the majority of them. That will not be…
The Hunchback of Notre Dame finally makes its North Bay debut with a production offered up by a local music education center. Cotati’s Music to My Ears is presenting the musical at the new Rancho Cotate High School Theatre Arts Auditorium in Rohnert Park through March 8. A blend of Victor Hugo’s gothic novel and…
