‘Tis the time for “Best of …” lists, so in the spirit of my illustrious predecessor and with a nod to the substantial differences in mounting a musical versus a play, here are my top torn tickets of 2018 – Part One, the Plays (in alphabetical order): Blackbird – (Main Stage West) – As dark subject…
For years, Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater has closed out the year with a musical cabaret show. Past years’ productions have celebrated the work of musical artists from Edith Piaf to Mahalia Jackson to Frank Sinatra. This year, the work of classic American tunesmith Cole Porter takes center stage via Love Linda, a look at Porter through…
My guest on a special Wednesday, December 19 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon was Jess Headington from the 6th Street Playhouse production of the 12 Dates of Christmas. Click below to listen: **********
One-person shows with a holiday theme tend to skew toward the male variety, whether it’s a show about a disgruntled department store Christmas elf (David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries) or a single dad desperate to maintain the fiction of Santa Claus with his children (David Templeton’s Polar Bears). Even Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol has been…
My guests on the Thursday, December 13 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were Elly Lichenstein and Clark Sterling from the Cinnabar Theater production of Love, Linda. Click below to listen: **********
There’s no more proven commodity for community theatres than Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. A reliable audience-pleaser since its 1965 Broadway debut, the story of mismatched roommates has been adapted for film and television numerous times and Simon himself rewrote it for an all-female cast. The Ross Valley Players production running through December 16 is…
My guest on a special Wednesday, December 12 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon was Carmen Mitchell from the Redwood Theatre Company production of It’s a Wonderful Life: The Live Radio Play. Click below to listen: **********
I doubt any of the tykes attending the 6th Street Playhouse production of Annie have any idea of its origins as a newspaper comic strip which ran for 86 years. Their exposure undoubtably comes from the 1982 film or its television remakes which all have their genesis from the 1977 Broadway musical. That the show…
My guests on the Thursday, December 6 theatre segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon were David Templeton, comedian Oliver Graves, and actor Charles Siebert from David Templeton’s upcoming Twisted Christmas Live!, a fundraiser for the theatre and youth programs of the Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Click below to listen: **********
For Marin audiences seeking some live holiday-themed entertainment, local theatre companies are presenting a couple of non-traditional seasonal shows. Audiences can choose between an ecclesiastical musical and a one-man holiday reminiscence. In 1985, writer/composer Dan Goggin adapted his line of greeting cards that featured nuns saying outrageous things into a cabaret show and then an…
