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…
“How about the Mayflower?” suggests musician Danny Sorentino. We’re standing in front of the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center. “We just saw a movie about the Beatles, right? We’d be wrong not to go have a beer at a British pub now, you know?” Well argued. We turn and head up the street toward the Mayflower…
The unpredictable combustible power of people eating dinner together is prominently featured in two notable stage plays currently running in the North Bay. Marin Theatre Company’s August Osage County, directed by Jasson Minadakis, is a solid, well-performed, but oddly distant and frequently unsatisfying staging of the 2008 Pulitzer winner from Tracy Letts. Usually presented with…
Wolf House, the doomed Glen Ellen dream-home of author Jack London, burned down over 103 years ago, just 13 years before London himself passed away. While London has seen his fair share of public adulation since then – especially during this, the centennial of this death – Wolf House is finally getting a bit of…
“I think it was one of the best roles Hugh Grant has ever had,” declares Richard Connema, praising Grant’s recent work in the new film Florence Foster Jenkins—directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, The Queen)—in which Meryl Streep also stars. “I think Grant deserves an Oscar for it. And that kid, the piano player, the actor…
‘The most surprising thing about this whole process for me,” says actor Dameion Brown, who’s playing the lead in Marin Shakespeare Company’s new production of Othello, “is hearing all of these amazing actors I’m working with, these incredibly experienced professionals, look me in the eye and say, ‘You belong here. This is your place. This is…
One cannot grow up in Sonoma County without gaining at least some awareness of who Jack London was, that he wrote books about wolves and dogs, and that his home is now a state park a mere 30-minute drive from Santa Rosa. This year, the county marks the centennial of London’s 1916 death with numerous…
It’s been 12 years since Stephen Walsh last played Tony the grape grower, in the classic Frank Loesser musical ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ at Cinnabar Theater. And to employ an over-picked cliché, in his second run of the show at Cinnabar, Walsh has only gotten better, deeper and rich—like a really, really good, well, you…
“I could see how that would be a little unnerving,” author John Langan says with a laugh, upon hearing that I had just watched the film Lights Out—about a creature who lives in darkness—at a theater where I was the one and only person, sitting in the dark. “This was probably not the best film to…
When the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973—making most abortions legal in the United States for the first time—the decision marked the end of a very long road. But in Lisa Loomer’s remarkable new play Roe, running through Oct. 29 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, the playwright shows that the landmark Supreme Court decision is…
North Bay Stage and Screen 