No less a source than the Mayo Clinic recommends laughter as a great source of stress relief and in these stressful times, two North Bay productions may be just what the doctor orders for local audiences. The SRJC Theatre Arts Department is presenting Neil Simon’s Rumors through April 27, while Sonoma Arts Live presents the…
Jerome Kern. Richard Rogers. Oscar Hammerstein II. Stephen Sondheim. Jimmy Buffett. Something seems off there. Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Gypsy, Escape to Margaritaville. Something really seems off there. “Ol’ Man River”, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin”, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”, “Cheeseburger in Paradise”. Ok, I think you see where this is going. In the pantheon of…
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…
North Bay Stage and Screen 