If you’ve ever glanced at a flyer hanging from a community center bulletin board that offers an acting course and worried about the time commitment required, playwright Annie Baker’s got you covered. In Circle Mirror Transformation, now running at the Novato Theater Company through September 25, Baker covers in two hours what most courses do…
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House premiered in 1879 to great controversy. His look at the limitations and restrictions placed on women in a patriarchal society was considered quite scandalous at the time. Many consider it to be the beginning of modern feminist literature, though Ibsen himself denied that. Suffice it to say that…
Every thirty years or so, musical theatre manages to produce something to which the younger members of a generation latch onto. From Hair in the 1960’s through Hamilton today, composers and lyricists’ use of the music of their time has been an effective way to entice younger audiences into theaters. The 1990’s brought Jonathan Larson’s…
Directors will often change the setting or time period of an older, well-known play in the hopes of making it more accessible to contemporary audiences. Modernized Shakespeare plays are usually the best examples of this practice. Similarly, the Novato Theater Company has taken Oscar Wilde’s community-theatre staple The Importance of Being Earnest and plopped it…
Four events taking place today (Saturday, May 16) in the North Bay (and viewable around the world!) 1. 4:30 p.m. Dirty Cello Dirty Cello performs love as part of Hopmonk Tavern Sebastopol’s new “In The Meantime’ love concert series. It happens on the Hopmonk Tavern Facebook page. Watch the show, send Rebecca Roudman and company…
There is no more quintessential piece of American theatre than Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Written in 1938 and set decades earlier, Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the inhabitants of small-town America has become a staple of school drama programs and community theatres. The Novato Theater Company has a production running through February 16. The play’s…
There are three kinds of people. The people who love Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town,” the people who hate it, and the people who’ve yet to decide because they’ve never actually seen a production of it. For the record, I’m one of the first ones. I love “Our Town.” I can even quote whole…
Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd is an exceedingly difficult show to produce. More opera than musical (San Francisco Opera actually did a production in 2015), the vocal demands alone create a significant casting challenge for most theatre companies. The complexities of Sondheim’s score and the requirements of the set design add to the…
With the Kincade fire no longer posing an imminent threat and with PG&E enlisting a full contingent of wheel-running squirrels to power up the area, North Bay theatre companies that were forced to shutter their productions last week are looking forward to resuming their runs this weekend. Here’s the status of all Sonoma and Marin…
The chances of Legally Blonde showing up on anyone’s list of ‘great American musicals’ are as likely as the chances of a UCLA sorority President with a Bachelor’s Degree in Fashion Merchandising really being admitted to Harvard Law School. Based on the 2001 novel by Amanda Brown and film starring Reese Witherspoon, it’s the…
North Bay Stage and Screen 