If you like A.R. Gurney’s popular two-person play “Love Letters”, you’re going to love “Daddy Long Legs”, a musical adaptation of the 1912 novel by Jean Webster. Set at the turn of the 20th century, it’s the story of the relationship between an orphan and her mysterious benefactor as told – well, actually, sung –…
In 1992, a retired truck driver named Teri Horton paid five dollars for a painting from a southern California thrift store to give as a gag gift to a friend. An incomprehensible series of dots, blotches and streaks, her friend refused her gift and Horton ending up trying to unload the gangly canvas at a…
“Am I supposed to be retelling my creature’s story or confessing my own?” asks Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein and the protagonist in Petaluma playwright David Templeton’s latest theatrical piece “Mary Shelley’s Body,” now in its premiere engagement at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West. Templeton, the Argus-Courier features editor, whose previous plays are autobiographical, ventures…
In the average 24-hour-day, we make thousands of decisions, never knowing when a seemingly innocuous choice – grabbing coffee at Starbucks (where the future love of our life is standing in line) or Peets (where a runaway car is about to kill 12 patrons) – could have life-changing repercussions. Speaking of choices. Right now, at…
The late, great Ann Richards, former governor of Texas and certified political icon, had a colorful style and a commanding presence that inspired a generation of women, and a fair number of men, to enter the world of politics themselves. After Richard’s death of cancer in 2006, Emmy-winning actor Holland Taylor (‘Two-and-a-Half Men,’ ‘The L-Word,’ ‘Legally…
There are works of art that are exciting and captivating to experience, but which quickly lose their initial spark of pleasure, diminishing in brightness the more you think of them. Guards at the Taj, by Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo), does the exact opposite. It leaves one a bit stunned and baffled, then…
Last weekend, two Neil Simon plays opened in the North Bay, each a demonstration of the legendary playwright’s mastery of rat-a-tat dialogue, skillful one-liners and flawed but relatable characters. At San Rafael’s Belrose Theater, Marin Onstage presents The Sunshine Boys, Simon’s 1972 hit about a long-feuding former vaudeville duo lured into reuniting for a television special.…
‘Hold still and sip the pain.” It’s a brief, swift line, uttered kindly but fiercely by the wise, wary slave Azucar (Cathleen Riddley), combing the hair of the impulsive, 13-year-old Zuri (Dezi Soley). Azucar’s simple sentence is a strong early example of how playwright Star Finch will be weaving words together in the stunning world…
The poster art for Marin Theatre Company’s current production of the high-school comedy “Peerless” is mischievously ingenious. It features an illustration: a pair of smiling school girls, a silhouetted rat and crow, and a cartoonish x-eyed corpse – all so cutely and crisply drawn one might assume that – rats, crows and corpses aside –…
“You want to tell me about black people?” In director Carl Jordan’s sensitive, doggedly humane staging of David Mamet’s 2009 drama Race – running through March 26 at Left Edge Theater – that confrontational line comes early, as a brilliant black lawyer, Henry (Dorian Lockett, funny, furious, and absolutely superb) faces off against a potential client, the cocky…
North Bay Stage and Screen 