★★★ Cinnabar Theater Weekends through Nov. 1 —In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as everyone knows, a creature is assembled from dead body parts and granted the spark of life. In Trevor Allen’s The Creature—a daring, artful, but ultimately problematic adaptation—the playwright puts Victor Frankenstein’s creation process in reverse, taking the original story apart and reassembling it into something similar,…
★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company Weekends through Oct. 25 When 2005’s Light in the Piazza first played on Broadway, there was much talk that the show, a musical adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel, marked a return to the gorgeous scores and lyrical drama of the golden age of musical theater. Ignoring decades of rock and pop influences, composer…
“Festival mind,” says actress-comedian Brooke Tansley. “It’s the attitude people get into at film festivals and theater festivals. It’s an attitude of, I guess, a kind of grateful expectation, of excitement and anticipation, where everyone knows that the more movies you see, or the more plays you see, or the more comedy acts you see,…
HIDING OUT WITH INGRID BERGMAN MVFF Exhibit is not easy to find—but it’s well worth the effort October 10, 2015 — Just out of shouting distance of the crowds, right around the corner from the thrumming hub of cinematic energy that is the Rafael Film Center (in downtown San Rafael), there is a free exhibit…
MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL LAUNCHES 38th YEAR Opening night features parties, parties, parties—and even some films October 9, 2015 — Opening night of the Mill Valley Film Festival is always fun, with pre-festival receptions flowing with intoxicating beverages, press-conferences and screenings infused with cinematic star-power, and after-parties so jam-packed with revelers that its sometimes hard…
★★ Ross Valley Players Weekends through Oct. 18 It’s ironic. In creating a script that celebrates Florence Foster Jenkins—renowned as one of the 20th century’s worst operatic sopranos—playwright Peter Quilter has achieved something as eccentric and unexpectedly sweet as Jenkins herself—but just as mediocre. In all fairness, there isn’t really much about Jenkins’ life from…
★★★½ Marin Theatre Company Daily through October 11 Sarah Ruhl is without doubt one of the most innovative and daring playwright’s working today, and ‘The Oldest Boy,’ despite its somewhat undercooked story and curiously bipolar point-of-view, is a good example of why theaters love staging her works, and why audiences keep showing up, even if they…
★★★★ Narrow Way Stage Company/Sonoma Arts Live Through Oct. 4 Stephen Sondheim’s offbeat historical-musical fantasia on what drives certain desperate people to pick up a gun and attempt to kill a President is exactly the kind of material Narrow Way thrives on, but rarely has assembled a cast as thoroughly strong voiced and spot-on as…
Treasure Island ★★★★ Amélie: the Musical ★★★★½ Spreckels Theater Company & Berkeley Repertory Company A story is an illusion, a series of events that are not really taking place, presented in a way that fool an audience into believing they’re really happening. Telling that story in a book or movie is a certain kind of…
★★★★ Lucky Penny Productions Through Oct. 4 “A lovely, occasionally very moving, splendidly put-together musical adaptation of the classic novel. The script by Marsha Norman takes a few creative liberties with the book, but without harming the tone of the original, and the songs, by Norman and composer Lucy Simon (Carly’s sister) are lush, emotional, and haunting. Speaking…
North Bay Stage and Screen 