Theatrical adaptations of popular movies populate American theaters to an often-nauseating extent. Often transmogrified into musicals, producers mount them in the belief there’s a built-in audience guaranteed to show up and buy tickets en masse. While successful Bay Area runs of such shows as Mrs. Doubtfire and Back to the Future might be proving their…
Napa Valley College has an excellent track record with youth-centric, large-scale Broadway musical productions. They’ve done a great job with past productions of such shows as Matilda the Musical and Spring Awakening. It was inevitable that Jennifer King, Theatre Arts and Film Studies Coordinator at NVC and founder of Shakespeare Napa Valley, would find a…
How interesting can a play be if it tells the story of an unremarkable person’s life told by that unremarkable person and the unremarkable people that surround them? How unremarkable? So unremarkable that playwright Simon Stephens doesn’t even give them names in his cast list for Morning Sun, now playing in the Condiotti Experimental Theatre…
The name Clifford Odets probably means little to the modern theatregoer, but there was a time he was considered a titan of American theatre, fitting somewhere in between Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. His “working class dramas” of the 1930s (like Waiting for Lefty) were extremely popular with audiences and influential with up and coming…
I recently ventured out of my usual “sphere of attendance” of North Bay theatre after receiving an invitation from Contra Costa County’s Pittsburg Theatre Company to join them for their season opener. They’ve titled their season “Rising from the Ashes 2025” as they recover from a devasting warehouse fire where they basically lost everything from…
“You stepped over the line.” is both the first line of Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things and also a criticism leveled at LaBute for a lot of his writing. Sometimes labeled a misanthrope and other times labeled a misogynist, Labute’s plays and films like In the Company of Men often feature terrible people doing…
For folks who think local theatre has gotten too repetitive, has Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse got a show for you. Groundhog Day: The Musical, based on the popular 1993 film starring Bill Murray, is running (and running, and running…) in their GK Hardt Theatre through Feb. 23. The show, with a book by the…
by Beulah F. Vega First things first. Is The Epic of Gilgamesh (currently playing at Marin Shakespeare Company’s downtown theater through Feb. 23) really the oldest story ever written? That’s a question for the philologists to argue (but probably not). It’s the tale of Gilgamesh, the first king of Uruk, who was a tyrant until…
Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre continues to push the boundaries for North Bay theatre audiences with another provocative production, this time with a show whose title is usually redacted in print. Steven Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker with the Hat runs at The California though February 22. Guirgis, who won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama…
‘Six Degrees of Separation’ is the concept that every individual on the planet can be connected to every other individual through six or fewer social connections. First posited in the late 1920s, it entered the cultural lexicon via John Guare’s same-named play in 1990, so much so that a parlor game in which participants were…
North Bay Stage and Screen 