On December 4, 1956, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley held a once-in-a-lifetime jam session at rock and roll pioneer Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Records studio. They were labeled the “Million Dollar Quartet” by a local journalist and that moniker was affixed to the recordings of the session released decades later.…
Anyone going to a performance of Hello, Dolly! – running now at the SHN Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco through March 17 – with an appetite for an enlightened look at male/female relationships is likely to leave quite hungry. The current national tour of the 2017 revival of the 1964 Broadway smash based on…
Sometimes the most interesting dramas are the simplest – a single set, a few characters, a conflict. “Naturalistic” plays, as they are sometimes referred, were the result of a movement in late 19th century European theatre to enhance the realism of plays with an understanding of how heredity and environment influence an individual. The most…
Musical zombies rise from the dead to sing an evening of ‘50’s pop standards. Let me try that again. On February 4, 1964, The Plaids, an eastern Pennsylvania-based vocal quartet, were headed for a major gig at the Fusel-Lounge at the Harrisburg Airport Hilton when their cherry red Mercury was broadsided by a bus full…
“Satire,” said American playwright and humorist George S. Kaufman, “is what closes Saturday night.” That quote came to mind as a I sat in the audience at the Super Bowl Sunday matinée of Impeaching America at the Belrose in San Rafael. Actually, I was the audience at that particular performance. The allegorical political satire by…
“Who are you?” That’s the opening line from Laura Eason’s Sex with Strangers, running now through February 17 at Left Edge Theatre. It’s a question that lingers throughout the Diane Bailey-directed production. In the good ol’ days, getting to know someone meant hanging out, dating, talking on the phone for hours, etc. With the advent…
When Joe Orton’s Loot opened in Cambridge, England in 1965 it created such a scandal that the Lord Chamberlain, England’s official theatre “censor” until 1968, ordered revisions and deletions before it could run on London’s West End. It’s running now at the Novato Theater Company through February 10. Orton’s look at the savage hypocrisy beneath…
To see or not to see? That is the question. Anyone with even the slightest interest in theatre has probably seen a production or two of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in their lifetime. Considered by many to be Shakespeare’s – if not the world’s – greatest play, it’s one-third ghost story, one-third dysfunctional family drama, and…
Mysteries and thrillers present interesting challenges for critics. We want to give audiences enough of an idea of the plot to pique their interest without giving away any of the twists, turns and surprises audiences should discover for themselves. Well, here goes. Playwright Sidney Bruhl, once a successful writer of theatrical thrillers, is tired of…
Serial killing would seem to be rather ghoulish subject matter for a comedic play, yet Arsenic and Old Lace has been a reliable audience-pleaser for over seventy-five years. Sonoma Arts Live has a production running through February 10. Joseph Kesselring’s tale of the Brewster sisters and their penchant for helping lonely old men meet their…
North Bay Stage and Screen 