★★★★½ ‘I wear the chains I forged in life!” This ghostly report from the doomed spirit of Jacob Marley is among the most famous supernatural utterances in English literature. It’s also a fair metaphor for the heavy weight of responsibility carried by any theater company brave enough to stage Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. This unstoppably popular…

My Mañana Comes ★★★★½ Marin Theatre Company  The Other Place ★★★★ Main Stage West In both Sharr White’s lyrical and lovely drama The Other Placeand Elizabeth Irwin’s magnificent My Mañana Comes, we are invited inside the lives of people who—in theater, as in real life—are often all but invisible. In a near balletic production at Marin Theater Company, My Mañana…

Whatever else one says about Point Break Live!, you have to agree there are not many other live entertainments where the audience is doused with water, spattered with blood, beaned by flying sandwiches, harassed by surfers, and robbed at gunpoint by guys wearing Richard Nixon masks. An outrageously loose-limbed spoof of the iconic, 1991 cult-hit…

Blithe Spirit ★★★   Rocky Horror Show ★★★★ 6th Street Playhouse Weekends through November 8 Two supernatural sex comedies are running concurrently at 6th Street Playhouse, perfectly timed for Halloween. Both feature witty retorts and sexual innuendo (and out-uendo), alongside ghostly visitations and eye-popping outfits—but only one features the “The Time Warp.” For the full review from the…

★★★★ Lucky Penny Community Arts Center Weekends through Oct..25 Edgy, dark, funny and more than a little unsettling, Lucky Penny’s deliriously twisted production of Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries is not the kind of thing most theatergoers expect when they sit down for an onstage love story. For the full review from the October 21, 2015 North Bay…

★★★ Cinnabar Theater Weekends through Nov. 1 —In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as everyone knows, a creature is assembled from dead body parts and granted the spark of life. In Trevor Allen’s The Creature—a daring, artful, but ultimately problematic adaptation—the playwright puts Victor Frankenstein’s creation process in reverse, taking the original story apart and reassembling it into something similar,…

★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company Weekends through Oct. 25 When 2005’s Light in the Piazza first played on Broadway, there was much talk that the show, a musical adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel, marked a return to the gorgeous scores and lyrical drama of the golden age of musical theater. Ignoring decades of rock and pop influences, composer…

★★ Ross Valley Players Weekends through Oct. 18 It’s ironic. In creating a script that celebrates Florence Foster Jenkins—renowned as one of the 20th century’s worst operatic sopranos—playwright Peter Quilter has achieved something as eccentric and unexpectedly sweet as Jenkins herself—but just as mediocre. In all fairness, there isn’t really much about Jenkins’ life from…

★★★½  Marin Theatre Company Daily through October 11 Sarah Ruhl is without doubt one of the most innovative and daring playwright’s working today, and ‘The Oldest Boy,’ despite its somewhat undercooked story and curiously bipolar point-of-view, is a good example of why theaters love staging her works, and why audiences keep showing up, even if they…

★★★★ Narrow Way Stage Company/Sonoma Arts Live  Through Oct. 4 Stephen Sondheim’s offbeat historical-musical fantasia on what drives certain desperate people to pick up a gun and attempt to kill a President is exactly the kind of material Narrow Way thrives on, but rarely has assembled a cast as thoroughly strong voiced and spot-on as…