World War II didn’t seem like ancient history in 1949 when South Pacific made its Broadway debut. Sadly, its warnings of the damage that bigotry and prejudice can do aren’t ancient history now as it bows at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific, Richard Rodgers,…
The choices in life that haunt you take center stage in two terrific productions running now in North Bay theatres. Sebastopol’s Main Stage West is presenting Sam Shepard’s Buried Child while Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater has David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People. Shepard’s forty-year-old, Pulitzer-Prize-winning look at the implosion of the American nuclear family seems as fresh as…
“A lot of my writing process is thinking, and not typing,” admits playwright Lauren Gunderson, of San Francisco. “What that means is that I tend to work on several projects at once, crossing from one to the other, back-and-forth in my mind, comparing and considering how this one could go and what the possibilities are…
To Sonoma County film fans — including roughly 100 Santa Rosa Junior College cinema students per semester — there is no movie-going experience quite like the Petaluma Film Alliance’s year-long movie-and-lecture series at Petaluma’s Carole L. Ellis Auditorium. Open to the public as well as to students, taking place every Wednesday evening during school term,…
The San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle has announced the recipients of its four Special Awards for 2018. The Special Awards will be presented as part of its 42nd Annual Excellence in Theatre Awards Gala to be held on Monday, March 26, 2018 at San Francisco’s historic Victoria Theatre. The event will be hosted…
Ross Brown is washing dishes. Wine glasses, to be specific – props in the upcoming production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Good People,” opening this weekend at Cinnabar Theater. Brown, of Cotati, is the show’s stage manager, a role he often fills at Cinnabar, along with a number of other theaters and performance spaces around the North…
Blistering drama takes the stage at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre with the North Bay premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced. Akhtar has taken the “friends drink to excess and soon truths are revealed” theatrical trope (see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, etc.) and dragged it into the 21st century. Amir Kapoor (Jared Wright) is…
The plight of the vanishing New England WASP is the subject matter of A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room, running now at Sonoma Arts Live. No, it’s not a science lecture on the more annoying cousin of the honeybee, but a look at the cultural transformation of a specific component of 20th-century America: the White Anglo-Saxon…
Some people make a lasting impression with a smile, a handshake, a way with a joke or a compliment, or perhaps with a beautiful singing voice and a knack for delivering a line on stage in an unexpected way. For Stephen Walsh, known to many Petalumans for his frequent appearances on stage at Cinnabar Theater,…
North Bay theater kicks off the new year with 6th Street Playhouse’s Honky Tonk Angels, a country-music revue by Ted Swindley. Swindley, best known for the community theater staple Always . . . Patsy Cline, has taken about 30 country standards and wrapped the thinnest of stories around them to create a raucous and enjoyable evening of…
North Bay Stage and Screen 