The venerable Ross Valley Players have a long history of presenting new works to their audiences. In 1984, they initiated the Ross Alternative Works (RAW) program, dedicated to staged readings and full productions of original works by Bay Area playwrights. This season brings Scott & Zelda: The Beautiful Fools, running now through April 28. Written…
In the pantheon of great American musicals, one would be hard-pressed to find Clark Gesner’s You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown on the list. What began as a concept album in 1966 soon transmogrified into a very successful off-Broadway show that never really cut it on Broadway. Its first run in 1971 lasted less than…
At Monday night’s San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards Gala, a number of North Bay theater artists and companies walked away with crisp new personalized certificates in an array of categories. The big winner of the evening was Rohnert Park’s Spreckels Theatre Company, which took home a total of eight wins – all…
When is a free outdoor performance a thing of public service and culture and art, and when is it just noise? That’s the debate currently being battled in Mill Valley, where residents near Old Mill Park have petitioned the city to reduce the auditory impact of an annual Shakespeare festival that comes to the park’s…
At a time when occupational safety regulations are being loosened and funding for the agencies responsible for their enforcement being reduced, it’s good to be reminded how those safeguards came to be and what life was like for American workers before then. The Ross Valley Players’ production of Melanie Marnich’s These Shining Lives does just…
Playwright Ayad Akhtar burst on the theatrical scene in 2013 with Disgraced, a searing drama about identity politics and Islamophobia which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2016, Marin Theatre Company presented Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, a play that took on capitalism and Islamic fanaticism. Gender issues in the Islamic community are the…
In late 1942, when our country was a year into World War II, Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth opened on Broadway. Wilder, whose Our Town dramatized the lives of one small community over a period of twelve years, expanded his sight a bit with a play that covers all of human existence as…
