Rating: ★★★½ (Out of five) — (Theater-at-Large) A strong ensemble of North Bay performers, bolstered by uniformly fine singing voices, is the primary magic ingredient in Theater-at-Large’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Resurrected for a reprise run at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, this is an encore staging of the delightfully dark fairy-tale mashup that…
Rating: ★★★★ (Out of five) — Cinnabar Theater “Sometimes,” exhorts actress Sharon E. Scott, stirringly embodying the rich voice and sassy-sweet attitude of the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. “Sometimes, God turns your life upside down—so you can help turn things right side up.” In the sensational, heartbreaking and soul-lifting biographical theater piece Mahalia Jackson: Just…
Theatrical undertakings are a little like cats and dogs. Some are just a whole lot easier to love than others. Here are the shows I loved the most from the 87 I saw last year, my own personal top ten torn tickets of 2015. Plus a few extras, extending the list to 15. Just for fun.…
★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company continues its hot streak with a cool musical adaptation of a classic novel. ‘Little Women: The Musical’ features a spectacular lead performance by Rebekah Pearson in the role of Jo March, the young woman who dreams of becoming a writer, but whose gory storytelling instincts threaten to undermine her dreams—until she…
★★★★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,…
