If live theatre, which is in crisis, ends up in a doom spiral, it won’t be for a lack of talent and energy from the current generation of performing artists. The stages at College of Marin and Santa Rosa Junior College recently hosted productions featuring some very good work by their youthful casts. Napa Valley…
Gender fluidity flows like the Russian River after a torrential rain in the Santa Rosa Junior College Theatre Arts Department production of Orlando. Laura Downing-Lee directs the Sarah Ruhl-penned adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel. The show runs in the Frank Chong Studio Theatre in the Burbank Auditorium on the SRJC Santa Rosa campus through…
It’s been almost 50 years since the antics of the British comedy troupe known as Monty Python’s Flying Circus were unleashed on an unsuspecting Texas audience by a Dallas PBS station. The BBC-produced series soon found a loyal American audience and a series of feature films followed. Python made it to Broadway in 2005 with…
Cinnabar Theater hosted one of five productions that opened in the North Bay last weekend. Dream Hou$e, by Eliana Pipes, may be the least well-known among those five, but it is a show that should be seen. The production runs in Petaluma through February 25. Sisters Julia and Patricia have agreed to sell their mother’s…
Seething drama gives way to light comedy at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse with their production of She Loves Me. The romantic musical comedy runs in the GK Hardt Theatre through Feb. 25. Based on the 1937 play Parfumerie by Hungarian playwright Miklós László, She Loves Me retains the basic storyline of co-workers who detest…
Long before there was Jerry Seinfeld and his eponymous show about nothing, there was Thornton Wilder and his play about nothing. While Seinfeld mined the mundane in big-city living for often outrageous hilarity, Our Town took a gentler approach to the day-to-day minutiae of life in early twentieth-century small-town America. The Ross Valley Players have…
North Bay theatre in 2024 kicked off with Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater and their production of the Jason Robert Brown musical The Last Five Years. It’s the first of four shows remaining in their season before they close up shop at the little red schoolhouse on the hill and go on the road as a proposed…
My guest on the January 4 “Theatre Thursday” segment on The Drive on 95.5 was Diane Dragone, Executive Director of Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater, for a conversation about their planned relocation. Click below to listen: ********** Click HERE for more information.
While musicals may be the bread and butter of local theatre, much can be learned about a community through the plays programmed in a company’s season. Comedies seemed few and far between this year, which may be a reflection of our local and perhaps national feelings of unease with what’s going on in our schools…
Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater has announced their plan to relocate after 50+ years in the “Little Red Schoolhouse” on the hill. The company’s website announced the following: “Cinnabar is at a crossroads after five decades of producing shows. The infrastructure of our current space, built in 1908, cannot support modern theater technology, limiting the scope of…
North Bay Stage and Screen 