It’s been 35 years since La Cage aux Folles took Broadway by storm. What began in 1973 as a French stage farce followed by a series of films, the Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman musical was considered daring for its time with its portrayal of a happily domesticated male couple thrown for a loop by a…
The Santa Rosa Junior College theatre season ends with a production of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It’s a fairy tale mash-up with elements of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood set to a classic Sondheim score. As in the original tales – and not like most…
Film, television and theater veteran Charles Siebert headlines the 6th Street Playhouse production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s Pulitzer Prize- and multi–Tony award–winning treatise on the elusiveness of the American dream is considered by many to be the greatest American play ever written. Nearly 70-years-old, in the hands of the right artistic…
Two Pulitzer Prize–winning dramas have hit North Bay stages. The first is the Raven Players’ production of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. Simon, whose best-known works are comedies tinged with a little melancholy (The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys), won the 1991 Pulitzer for Yonkers, a melancholy family drama tinged with comedy. With their mother deceased and their…
In Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg assesses Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro with the criticism that it has “too many notes.” Cinnabar Theater’s current production suffers from the opposite—it’s missing a few. Amadeus is actually the story of Antonio Salieri (Richard Pallaziol), the most celebrated composer of his time. Salieri has dedicated his life to God and mankind in…
One wouldn’t think a play that deals with the wreckage left behind by a natural disaster would be particularly attractive to North Bay residents right now, but Sharyn Rothstein’s By the Water speaks to what our community is going through. While it’s set in 2012 on New York’s Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy, the human and material…
At a post-show Q & A following the opening night performance of Main Stage West’s Blackbird, director David Lear stated he felt that one of theater’s responsibilities is to make an audience “a little uncomfortable.” He more than succeeds with this production. The lights come up and through the windows of a darkened employee break room…
While time may heal all wounds, a little human kindness along the way doesn’t hurt. That’s the takeaway from the Santa Rosa Junior College production of Julie Marie Myatt’s Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Originally produced in 2008 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it was one of the first works to address the issues faced by…
One of the oddest plays I’ve seen in a while, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses isn’t particularly real in its examination of two suburban couples who share the same surname. It does, however, often ring true. Set in an unnamed town, Bob and Jennifer Jones (Chris Schloemp and Melissa Claire) are spending a quiet evening…
Ask anyone under fifty years of age who Rosemary Clooney is and they’re likely to respond “George Clooney’s wife?” They’d be in the ballpark (she was his aunt) but what they probably don’t know is that she was an immensely popular musical performer who charted numerous hit songs in the 50’s and 60’s. Changes in…
North Bay Stage and Screen 