On New Year’s Eve in Canada, cities offer free public transportation. It’s a tradition. In certain parts of Mexico, when the clock strikes midnight, partiers eat 12 grapes and make a wish with each one. In Albania, at precisely midnight, people make perfectly timed phone calls to wish each other a prosperous new year. Here…
As ‘Polar Bears: A Story of Fatherhood, Funerals, and Santa Claus’ enters into its final week of shows (Thursday through Sunday at Main Stage West, in Sebastopol), the reviews are in, and the buzz is remarkably good, from critics and audience members alike. The show has been awarded a “Go See!” designation by the San…
At a small Middle School in Sonoma, California, the Force is with two faculty members who count themselves as lifelong ‘Star Wars’ fans. The Principal, William Deeths, has so many ‘Star Wars’ action figures on his walls at the school, kids actually want to be sent to the Prinicpal’s office, and English instructor Bridget Paul…
It was over a year-and-a-half ago that the script for ‘Polar Bears’ was completed, literally two hours before its first public reading at Main Stage West. That was in late July of 2014, less than a week before I left for Scotland to present my first one-man-show ‘Wretch Like Me’ at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.…
★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company continues its hot streak with a cool musical adaptation of a classic novel. ‘Little Women: The Musical’ features a spectacular lead performance by Rebekah Pearson in the role of Jo March, the young woman who dreams of becoming a writer, but whose gory storytelling instincts threaten to undermine her dreams—until she…
★★★★½ ‘I wear the chains I forged in life!” This ghostly report from the doomed spirit of Jacob Marley is among the most famous supernatural utterances in English literature. It’s also a fair metaphor for the heavy weight of responsibility carried by any theater company brave enough to stage Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. This unstoppably popular…
“Why are you wearing those chains?” A pair of small girls, visitors at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, have just spied actor Tom Westlake, who plays the part of Jacob Marley’s ghost each year at the popular annual Dickens-inspired theater festival. Marley, as should be recalled by anyone who’s caught one of the dozens of…
Rebekah Pearson has never seen Little Womenin any of its acclaimed screen adaptations, including the renowned 1994 Winona Ryder version. In preparing to play the role of Jo March in Spreckels upcoming production of Little Women: The Musical, Pearson has only allowed herself to read the original novel, by Louisa May Alcott. “It was a very deliberate…
My Mañana Comes ★★★★½ Marin Theatre Company The Other Place ★★★★ Main Stage West In both Sharr White’s lyrical and lovely drama The Other Placeand Elizabeth Irwin’s magnificent My Mañana Comes, we are invited inside the lives of people who—in theater, as in real life—are often all but invisible. In a near balletic production at Marin Theater Company, My Mañana…
Twenty years ago, in 1995, I picked up Carol Doda. Literally. The pioneering stripper and “adult” entertainer was waiting for me at the side of the road in the San Francisco, where we’d arranged to meet before going to see the now-notorious movie ‘Showgirls.’ The movie was a hot ticket, freshly landed in theaters, and everyone…
North Bay Stage and Screen 