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…
Totally fucked. That, dear readers, sums up the teen angst expressed via song in Spring Awakening, Marin Musical Theatre Company’s latest offering. It runs at the NTC Playhouse in Novato through March 16. Based on German playwright Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play that dealt frankly with teenage sexuality, playwright Steven Sater and musician Duncan Sheik…
For theater fans, theater writers and theater artists of all stripes, there are few times of year as exciting as that stretch of weeks in the late winter/early fall when theater companies take turns announcing the titles of the plays they will be producing in the following theatrical season. It’s a time for actors to…
“Satire,” said American playwright and humorist George S. Kaufman, “is what closes Saturday night.” That quote came to mind as a I sat in the audience at the Super Bowl Sunday matinée of Impeaching America at the Belrose in San Rafael. Actually, I was the audience at that particular performance. The allegorical political satire by…
When Joe Orton’s Loot opened in Cambridge, England in 1965 it created such a scandal that the Lord Chamberlain, England’s official theatre “censor” until 1968, ordered revisions and deletions before it could run on London’s West End. It’s running now at the Novato Theater Company through February 10. Orton’s look at the savage hypocrisy beneath…
Mysteries and thrillers present interesting challenges for critics. We want to give audiences enough of an idea of the plot to pique their interest without giving away any of the twists, turns and surprises audiences should discover for themselves. Well, here goes. Playwright Sidney Bruhl, once a successful writer of theatrical thrillers, is tired of…
When playwright August Wilson passed away in 2005, he left behind a body of work that has become a staple of the American theatre. As much a documentarian as a poet and author, the ten plays (Jitney, Fences, et al.) of Wilson’s Century (or Pittsburgh) Cycle chronicle the twentieth century African-American experience mostly through the…
North Bay Stage and Screen 