If you’re a theatregoer who missed having Summer Repertory Theatre around this year, 6th Street Playhouse’s current production of Guys and Dolls may hold you until SRT returns in 2019. It’s SRT Artistic Director James Newman who helms this production of the 1950 musical about colorful New York gamblers trying to avoid the police, a…
Last year, Healdsburg’s Raven Players surprised this critic with a very interesting production of Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful. The play, which tells parallel stories of the tribulations of a returning Iraq war vet trying to assimilate back into civilian life and a group of recovering drug addicts trying to stay clean, was not…
Spreckels Theatre Company opens their season with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel about a boy with ‘behavioral difficulties’ took England and Broadway by storm and earned multiple awards on both continents. Christopher (Elijah Pinkham) is a 15-year-old boy with an unspecified behavioral…
If you’re only going to see one “five British women of varying ages, socio-economic statuses and body types bonding over pole dancing” play in your lifetime, might as well make it Dave Simpson’s The Naked Truth. A big hit in England, director Argo Thompson imports it to the North Bay for its U.S. premiere at…
A Chorus Line really isn’t done much by community theatres these days. The 1976 multi-award-winning musical requires about two dozen experienced dancer/singers to fill out the cast; a requirement that’s tough to fulfill. If you’re gonna do it, best to start with a director with over four decades of experience in dance and choreography and…
In his ‘Director’s Notes’ for the Lucky Penny Production of Into the Woods, James D. Sasser discusses why directors often try to bring different approaches to popular works beginning with the old axiom that ‘familiarity breeds contempt.’ For someone who, in the role of theater critic, sees upwards of sixty shows a year, it’s a…
Theatregoers with a hankering for a classic or the desire to see something new have two productions running that fit the bill. Cinnabar Theater presents the 50-year-old classic Cabaret. The Kander and Ebb musical, which has gone through significant changes via numerous revivals since its 1966 debut, is the tale of two couples whose lives…
Like an Elizabethan game of whack-a-mole, as soon as North Bay theatre companies knock out one outdoor summer Shakespeare production, another one seems to pop up. Marin Shakespeare brought us Pericles at Dominican University’s Forest Meadows amphitheater, the Raven did A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Healdsburg’s Seghesio Winery, and Shakespeare in the Cannery did Shakespeare…
Relationships are front and center in two very different shows now running on North Bay stages through August 19. The Cloverdale Performing Arts Center is presenting Heroes, playwright Tom Stoppard’s translation and adaptation of a 2003 French play about three World War I vets in a retirement home. Gustave (Robert Bauer), Henri (Peter Immordino), and…
Relationships are front and center in two very different shows now running on North Bay stages through August 19. Healdsburg’s Raven Players have converted the cavernous Raven Theatre into an intimate black box performance space and are presenting an updated version of 1996’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. The Joe DiPietro and Jimmy…
