Musicals seem to be the season openers of choice for North Bay theatre companies with two more joining the Spreckels Theatre Company run of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. 6th Street Playhouse is hosting 4 Guys Named José… And Una Mujer Named María! in their GK Hardt Theatre while Sonoma Arts Live brings Young…
Former Windsor resident Francine Schwartz has long remembered the stories her mother and grandmother told her about living in occupied France during World War II and of the German soldiers billeted in their home. For the last decade, she has been working on a piece based on her family history and what began as a…
by Bob Duxbury Heroes of the Fourth Turning caused a stir when it was first produced in 2019, not least because the normally liberal theater community produced an energetic defense of conservative Catholic doctrine adapted for popular consumption from the cerebral The Fourth Turning. The book, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, is a favorite…
With the deep connection between Charles Schulz’s and his world of Peanuts and Sonoma County, one might expect a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown to be running locally in perpetuity. Instead, local theater companies dutifully trot it out every couple of years to give local folks the opportunity to visit with live-action…
After a COVID-related postponement, the Raven Players production of Company is now open for business. The classic Stephen Sondheim and George Furth musical runs in the Playhouse at Windsor High School through July 21. A smash hit in 1970, the show is a series of musical vignettes in no particular order on the subject of…
The Novato Theater Company closes out their 103rd season with a production of Michael Frayn’s award-winning farce Noises Off. The three-act comedy runs at the Novato Playhouse through July 14. Act I introduces us to stressed-out director Lloyd Dallas (Mike Pavone), who has his hands full at the final rehearsal of a touring production of…
‘April is the cruelest month’ is the opening line to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, but June has been no picnic for the North Bay theatre community either. Transportation issues marred the opening of the Mountain Play while bouts of illness plagued other productions. Napa’s Lucky Penny had to utilize an actor…
Salonen’s Symphony of Disgust Last Sunday, I attended a very interesting program at Davies Symphony Hall. It was a groundbreaking collaboration with Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet, as well as the performance of a rarely done operatic monologue by Arnold Schoenberg. Here’s a spoiler: they were successful in that they did happen, not because they should…
North Bay theaters seem to be in the middle of a Karen Zacarías mini-festival with the Ross Valley Players well-received run of the playwright’s The Book Club Play coming to an end while Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse is in the middle of their run of Native Gardens. Both plays poke fun at suburban life…
In a London in the not-too-distant future, the British government has imposed a strict limitation on the number of words any individual can speak in a twenty-four-hour time period. That’s the basic premise of Sam Steiner’s Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons. The “whys?” for the limitations are barely addressed (and the “hows?” never are) in…
