Review: “Once Upon a Mattress” at Sonoma Arts Live

by Cari Lynn Pace * Sonoma Arts Live’s season-closing Once Upon a Mattress holds plenty of delights. This Tony-award nominated 1959 musical with a book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller & Marshall Barer and lyrics by Barer and music by Mary Rogers runs through August 2. Based on the ageless fairy tale The Princess and…

Feature: Opening Night at Broadway Under the Stars 2026

by Cari Lynn Pace * Broadway comes to the North Bay with the opening of Transcendence Theater Company’s 2026 Broadway Under the Stars season and awakens sleepy Sonoma with ain’t too proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations. The outdoor production of blockbuster songs and dancing transplanted from the lights of Broadway runs through…

Review: “Home, I’m Darling” in Sonoma

by Barry Willis * Fantasy and reality collide headlong for a married woman in Laura Wade’s Home, I’m Darling at Sonoma Arts Live through June 21. Ashley Kennedy stars as Judy, half of a contemporary British couple who have transformed their home into a pastiche of 1950s kitsch—aqua-colored refrigerator and TV, starburst clock, martini glasses,…

2nd Review: “The Light in the Piazza” in Sonoma

by Barry Willis * Sonoma Arts Live continues its ambitious and mostly successful run of boy-meets-girl favorite The Light in the Piazza through May 10. A tale about an American woman and her daughter on a tour of Italy, with book by Craig Lucas and music by Adam Guettel, the stage show, based on the…

Interview – “X” at Santa Rosa Junior College

My guests on the first of two “Theatre Thursday” segments on The Drive on 95.5 FM on 04/30/26 were Lizzy Bies and Jaden “Moose” Frank from the Santa Rosa Junior Colllege Theater Student Production Club’s presentation of Alastair McDowall’s X. The sci-fi drama plays in the SRJC’s Frank Chong Studio Theatre in Santa Rosa for…