★★★★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…
Treasure Island ★★★★ Amélie: the Musical ★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company & Berkeley Repertory Company A story is an illusion, a series of events that are not really taking place, presented in a way that fool an audience into believing they’re really happening. Telling that story in a book or movie is a certain kind of…
★★★★ Lucky Penny Productions Through Oct. 4 “A lovely, occasionally very moving, splendidly put-together musical adaptation of the classic novel. The script by Marsha Norman takes a few creative liberties with the book, but without harming the tone of the original, and the songs, by Norman and composer Lucy Simon (Carly’s sister) are lush, emotional, and haunting. Speaking…
★★½ Cinnabar Theater If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than perhaps disappointment is the purest reflection of respect. There are few theater companies in the Bay Area that have earned the level of respect and admiration that Cinnabar Theater has over its 43 years of presenting quality theater, opera and musicals. So maybe…
★★★★ You don’t need to have seen Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew to know what it’s about. More than 400 years after Shakespeare invented them, Kate and Petruchio, the feisty and ferocious fiancée and her would-be “tamer,” are among the most famous characters in dramatic literature. In Curtain Theatre’s rollicking new outdoor production—free to the…
