In the past month, North Bay stages have been occupied by vampires, ghosts, a Thing, and Transylvanian transvestites. The Novato Community Playhouse now finds itself overrun with the most ghastly, heinous, and horrifying creatures ever to set foot on a theatrical stage. I am referring, of course, to white upper middle-class parents, the featured monsters…
My guests on the Thursday, October 25 theater segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were Alexis Macnab, Rhett Curry, Sierra Slusiewicz, and Natasha Potts from the Sonoma State University Theatre Arts production of Mr. Burns – A Post Electric Play. Click below to hear that interview: **********
What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban… These opening lines from the Elizabeth Barret Browning poem “A Musical Instrument” are spoken midway through Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan, now running in a gripping production directed by Taylor Korobow at Petaluma’s…
My guests on a special Friday, October 19 theater segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were Aaron Wilton, Richard Pallaziol and Elly Lichenstein from Cinnabar Theater’s The Great God Pan. Click below to hear that interview: **********
San Francisco North Bay theater artists gathered Monday night at the Juncture Taproom and Lounge in Santa Rosa for the Third Annual Marquee Theater Journalists Association Awards. Seventeen awards were given to local theatre artists and productions whose nominations were culled from the sixty-six Sonoma County productions attended by members from September 1, 2017 through…
At a time when the language of diplomacy has been reduced to a 140-character tweet transmitted at 3 am, it’s good to be reminded of the men and women for whom the quest for peace demanded actual thought and personal interaction. J. T. Rogers’ Oslo, now running in its West Coast premiere at the Marin…
The credits for the Spreckels Theater Company production of The Addams Family, running now through October 28, notes that the musical is “based on characters created by Charles Addams.” It is not a recreation of the beloved 1960’s sitcom. It is not an adaptation of the visually inventive films of the ‘90’s. At the insistence…
There’s an interesting style of theatre in which a piece of dramatic prose, usually a short story or selected chapters from a longer piece, is fully staged and performed. Usually referred to as a “word-for-word” or “page-to-stage” dramatization, it takes some getting used to as literally every word on the page – every “she said’…
Marisela Treviño Orta’s The River Bride returns to Marin County as the season opener for the College of Marin’s Drama Program. Last seen in a bare-bones production in a vacant San Rafael storefront courtesy of Alter Theater, Orta’s play is an interesting combination of a Brazilian folk tale with an M. Night Shyamalan film script…
Last year, Healdsburg’s Raven Players surprised this critic with a very interesting production of Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful. The play, which tells parallel stories of the tribulations of a returning Iraq war vet trying to assimilate back into civilian life and a group of recovering drug addicts trying to stay clean, was not…
North Bay Stage and Screen 