Long before there was Jerry Seinfeld and his eponymous show about nothing, there was Thornton Wilder and his play about nothing. While Seinfeld mined the mundane in big-city living for often outrageous hilarity, Our Town took a gentler approach to the day-to-day minutiae of life in early twentieth-century small-town America. The Ross Valley Players have…
North Bay theatre in 2024 kicked off with Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater and their production of the Jason Robert Brown musical The Last Five Years. It’s the first of four shows remaining in their season before they close up shop at the little red schoolhouse on the hill and go on the road as a proposed…
Of course they made a Broadway musical out of the 2003 Will Ferrell comedy Elf. Bob Martin and Thomas Meehan took the basic elements from the film, softened one of the major characters, added more “Christmas spirit” and music by Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin, and came up with Elf, the Musical. It’s a show…
Just aside the Bohemian Highway on the outskirts of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it hamlet of Monte Rio sits the Russian River Hall. For fifteen years, it’s hosted the productions of Curtain Call Theatre, a company comprised of a dedicated group of local volunteers who bring live theatre of all sorts to the West County. The productions usually…
A cranky member of the 1% spends years exploiting the labor of his employee by paying a sub-standard wage and forcing him to work unregulated hours in an unsafe work environment. Spectral social activists attempt to persuade the capitalist exploiter to see the error of his ways, but it takes the threat of death for…
If the lack of a splatter zone is what’s kept you from returning to live theater, do the Raven Players have a show for you. Evil Dead: The Musical is running at the Raven Performing Arts Theater in Healdsburg through October 29. Based on the Sam Raimi classic cult horror film trilogy, playwright George Reinblatt…
Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse continues to provide trips down memory lane for this reviewer. Their recent production of Fiddler on the Roof made me harken back to my days in high school theatre, while their current production of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow plunged me further back into my youth. The West Coast premiere…
In the ten or so years I’ve been doing theater journalism, I’ve probably seen close to one thousand shows, with about one-third of them being productions of Mamma Mia! (The Addams Family Musical is rapidly approaching that number.) Lately, the repetitive nature of theater programming has been getting to me. I have found it difficult…
North Bay audiences finally got a chance to say “hello” to Dolly Gallagher Levi after the curtain rose on the bureaucratically-delayed Spreckels Theatre Company production of Hello, Dolly! Veteran director Elly Lichenstein makes her Spreckels debut with the Jerry Herman classic now running at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park through Oct 15. …
I have a soft spot for Fiddler on the Roof. The 1971 film adaptation was the first movie musical I saw on the big screen, and I made my musical stage debut as Motel the Tailor nine years later in a Millville Senior High School production. I can still recite the lyrics of “Miracle of…
North Bay Stage and Screen 