by Cari Lynn Pace * Spreckels Theatre Company opens their 2026/27 season with the North Bay premiere of the contemporary musical Dear Evan Hansen. Written by Steven Levenson, with music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, this multi-Tony-Award-winning show exposes the teen angst so prevelant today. It runs in the Nellie W. Codding…
by Cari Lynn Pace * Welcome to Putnam County, where a middle school spelling bee championship takes place with a ragtag collection of juveniles and two clearly biased judges. William Finn wrote the clever words and music to two dozen numbers based on Rachel Sheinkin’s book presented onstage at the Novato Theater Company. Adults play…
My guests on the 09/24/26 “Theatre Thursday” segment on The Drive on 95.5 FM were director Kim Bromley and lead actor Addison Brown from the Spreckels Theater Company’s production of Dear Evan Hansen. The Tony Award-winning musical has its North Bay premiere run in the Codding Theater at the Speckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert…
by Cari Lynn Pace * Cinnabar Theater opens its 54th season with the nostalgia-filled musical Bye Bye Birdie, now running in the Warren Auditorium at Sonoma State University through Oct. 4. The Broadway musical (with book by Michael Stewart, music by Charles Strouse, and lyrics by Lee Adams) won several Tony Awards in 1961 including…
My guests on the 09/17/26 “Theatre Thursday” segment on The Drive on 95.5 FM were cast members Noah Evans and Molly Larsen-Shine from the Cinnabar Theater production of Bye Bye Birdie. The classic musical runs in the Warren Theater on the campus of Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park through October 4. Click below to…
by Barry Willis * The black-box Condiotti Theatre at Spreckels Performing Arts Center morphs into Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, a 17th-century courtroom, a torture chamber, an execution site, and more in Bill Cain’s Equivocation, now running in Rohnert Park through September 13. Adroitly directed by Spreckels’ artistic director Sheri Lee Miller, Cain’s 2009 play melds real…
My guests on the 08/27/26 “Theatre Thursday” segment on The Drive on 95.5 FM were cast members Jeff Coté and Jereme Anglin from the Spreckels Theatre Company production of Equivocation. The political thriller set in Shakespeare’s time runs in the Condiotti Black Box Experimental Theater in the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park through…
by Harry Duke * Despite being adapted from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel, The Secret Garden, the Musical isn’t really a “children’s show” in the modern sense. It opens with the death of a young girl’s parents in a cholera epidemic and then focuses on a father’s inconsolable grief at the death of his…
by Barry Willis * This coming weekend (June 26-28) closes Cinnabar Theater’s sumptuous production of The Secret Garden, an operetta of hope and triumph by Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon, based on the novel by Frances Hodgson Norman. It’s 1906 and an orphan girl named Mary Lennox (Violet Spears) has returned to England from India, where…
My guests on the first of two “Theatre Thursday” segments on The Drive on 95.5 FM on 06/04/26 were cast members Syona Ayyankeril and Zachary Hasbany from the Cinnabar Theater production of The Secret Garden. The family musical runs through June 28 in the Warren Auditorium on the campus of Sonoma State University in Rohnert…
