As Cinnabar Theater prepares to launch its new show on Oct. 14, all involved are aware that “The Quality of Life,” from award-winning playwright and screenwriter Jane Anderson, is not an easy play to describe in a single word or sentence. The play tells the story of a conservative Christian couple from the Midwest who…
“I like language,” says Amy Adams, addressing the audience at Corte Madera’s Century Cinema on opening night of the 39th annual Mill Valley Film Festival. A second after saying it, the award-winning actress smiles, then laughs lightly, as if suddenly aware that praising language while in the very act of using it, is, if nothing else, a symmetry worth…
“Imagine a cross between Waiting for Guffman and Night of the Living Dead,” says director Nick Sholley. “Well, that’s Zombietown.” Opening this weekend at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theater, Tim Bauer’s 2009 comedy is a clever blend of horror movie spoof and social-theatrical satire. If that sounds like a strange mix, it is, and that’s the point. While the…
This weekend was supposed to mark the Sonoma Music Festival’s 30th year and second at its new location at the Field of Dreams. But after slow ticket sales forced cancellation of the three-day event last month, the future of the local festival favorite is very much in doubt, according to its founder and producer Bruce…
Three years ago, when a report was published claiming that more than 800 Santa Rosa Junior College students were essentially homeless, theater instructors Laura Downing-Lee and Leslie McCauley began envisioning a future theater project formed around exploring the issue. This weekend, Leaving Home, opens a two weekend run in the Newman Auditorium. A “devised theatre…
“Growing up, I was always interested in ghosts and UFOs, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, all of that stuff,” says filmmaker Tom Wyrsch, of Petaluma, writer-director of the soon-to-materialize “Haunted Sonoma County.” “But out of all of those things, ghosts always seemed the most possible. I think there’s something about the idea of ghosts,…
Victorian England produced some spectacularly bloody and murderous literature. Some was written and published, some began as the stuff of urban legend before being translated for the stage or to the cheap and popular ‘penny dreadful’ magazines that were filled with stories of the macabre, the sensational, the bloody, the mysterious. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock…
For many, the act of attending a really good movie is a truly religious experience. For the 30th anniversary of the Wine Country Film Festival, taking place in and around Glen Ellen and Kenwood, the annual event’s producers are lending credence to that notion, with a strong lineup of international and American films that, as…
Last year, around the time I was launching this website, I was completing work on my novella, ‘Mary Shelley’s Body,’ in which the ghost of the famous ‘Frankenstein’ author finds herself hanging her own grave, and begins a review of her own life that uncovers secrets even Mary didn’t know she was hiding. The novella-length…
Here’s a good “theater world” question. What’s harder and more intimidating to have to accomplish on stage – the simple, basic acting of a scene? Or the wielding of a sword in a choreographed, highly physical sword-fight, designed so the participants are dodging furniture and other cumbersome set pieces, all while trying not to…
North Bay Stage and Screen 