It’s been 35 years since La Cage aux Folles took Broadway by storm. What began in 1973 as a French stage farce followed by a series of films, the Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman musical was considered daring for its time with its portrayal of a happily domesticated male couple thrown for a loop by a…
The Santa Rosa Junior College theatre season ends with a production of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It’s a fairy tale mash-up with elements of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood set to a classic Sondheim score. As in the original tales – and not like most…
Film, television and theater veteran Charles Siebert headlines the 6th Street Playhouse production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s Pulitzer Prize- and multi–Tony award–winning treatise on the elusiveness of the American dream is considered by many to be the greatest American play ever written. Nearly 70-years-old, in the hands of the right artistic…
While time may heal all wounds, a little human kindness along the way doesn’t hurt. That’s the takeaway from the Santa Rosa Junior College production of Julie Marie Myatt’s Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Originally produced in 2008 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it was one of the first works to address the issues faced by…
One of the oddest plays I’ve seen in a while, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses isn’t particularly real in its examination of two suburban couples who share the same surname. It does, however, often ring true. Set in an unnamed town, Bob and Jennifer Jones (Chris Schloemp and Melissa Claire) are spending a quiet evening…
Why? It’s a question we ask ourselves daily as we wake up to news of the latest national tragedy or act of incomprehensible behavior. That too-oft-asked question with the most elusive of answers is at the heart of Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Craig Miller) is asked to take on the case of Alan Strang (Ryan…
Blistering drama takes the stage at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre with the North Bay premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced. Akhtar has taken the “friends drink to excess and soon truths are revealed” theatrical trope (see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, etc.) and dragged it into the 21st century. Amir Kapoor (Jared Wright) is…
North Bay theater kicks off the new year with 6th Street Playhouse’s Honky Tonk Angels, a country-music revue by Ted Swindley. Swindley, best known for the community theater staple Always . . . Patsy Cline, has taken about 30 country standards and wrapped the thinnest of stories around them to create a raucous and enjoyable evening of…
Some plays, not surprisingly, get a little old after a decade of repetition. Others, miraculously, get better. The key, as evidenced by David Yen’s 10th annual performance of David Sedaris’ Santaland Diaries, at Left Edge Theater, is changing things up from time to time. Adding a fully stocked bar to the set one year, and using…
In comedy, timing is everything, and the timing is so off in 6th Street Playhouse’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, the fact that it manages to extract any laughs from its audience is somewhat of a Christmas miracle. Plagued with pre-production challenges ranging from a change in director to the untimely passing of its lead…
