Main Stage West revealed its 2018 – 2019 season at a season announcement party held Sunday night at its Sebastopol theatre. Artistic Director Elizabeth Craven announced the following productions: Savage Wealth – a world premiere comedy by Bob Duxbury running August 31 through September 16 and directed by John Shillington The Night Alive – Conor McPherson’s…
Actor Nate Currier of San Rafael has played many Shakespearean characters over the course of his 26 years of life—Romeo, Laertes, Prospero, Lord Capulet, Benedick—and almost all of those roles in what he calls “very grungy” productions. “I’ve been working with a friend in Oakland,” Currier says, “doing these low-budget to no-budget shows in basements…
Female protagonists in peril are the focus of one very silly and one very melancholy production running now on North Bay stages. Left Edge Theatre’s Women in Jeopardy! is a laugh-out-loud look at the changing dynamic among a group of single friends once one of them begins a relationship. That the friends are middle-aged women makes…
Film, television and theater veteran Charles Siebert headlines the 6th Street Playhouse production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s Pulitzer Prize- and multi–Tony award–winning treatise on the elusiveness of the American dream is considered by many to be the greatest American play ever written. Nearly 70-years-old, in the hands of the right artistic…
Two Pulitzer Prize–winning dramas have hit North Bay stages. The first is the Raven Players’ production of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. Simon, whose best-known works are comedies tinged with a little melancholy (The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys), won the 1991 Pulitzer for Yonkers, a melancholy family drama tinged with comedy. With their mother deceased and their…
In Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg assesses Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro with the criticism that it has “too many notes.” Cinnabar Theater’s current production suffers from the opposite—it’s missing a few. Amadeus is actually the story of Antonio Salieri (Richard Pallaziol), the most celebrated composer of his time. Salieri has dedicated his life to God and mankind in…
One wouldn’t think a play that deals with the wreckage left behind by a natural disaster would be particularly attractive to North Bay residents right now, but Sharyn Rothstein’s By the Water speaks to what our community is going through. While it’s set in 2012 on New York’s Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy, the human and material…
At a post-show Q & A following the opening night performance of Main Stage West’s Blackbird, director David Lear stated he felt that one of theater’s responsibilities is to make an audience “a little uncomfortable.” He more than succeeds with this production. The lights come up and through the windows of a darkened employee break room…
While time may heal all wounds, a little human kindness along the way doesn’t hurt. That’s the takeaway from the Santa Rosa Junior College production of Julie Marie Myatt’s Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Originally produced in 2008 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it was one of the first works to address the issues faced by…
One of the oddest plays I’ve seen in a while, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses isn’t particularly real in its examination of two suburban couples who share the same surname. It does, however, often ring true. Set in an unnamed town, Bob and Jennifer Jones (Chris Schloemp and Melissa Claire) are spending a quiet evening…
North Bay Stage and Screen 