When reviewing theatre, the technical elements involved in a production often take a back seat to a discussion of the story and the performances. People don’t go to a show because of the lights, right? There are times, however, when the poor execution of those elements so overwhelms the other components on stage that it…
There’s an interesting style of theatre in which a piece of dramatic prose, usually a short story or selected chapters from a longer piece, is fully staged and performed. Usually referred to as a “word-for-word” or “page-to-stage” dramatization, it takes some getting used to as literally every word on the page – every “she said’…
Marisela Treviño Orta’s The River Bride returns to Marin County as the season opener for the College of Marin’s Drama Program. Last seen in a bare-bones production in a vacant San Rafael storefront courtesy of Alter Theater, Orta’s play is an interesting combination of a Brazilian folk tale with an M. Night Shyamalan film script…
If you’re a theatregoer who missed having Summer Repertory Theatre around this year, 6th Street Playhouse’s current production of Guys and Dolls may hold you until SRT returns in 2019. It’s SRT Artistic Director James Newman who helms this production of the 1950 musical about colorful New York gamblers trying to avoid the police, a…
Last year, Healdsburg’s Raven Players surprised this critic with a very interesting production of Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful. The play, which tells parallel stories of the tribulations of a returning Iraq war vet trying to assimilate back into civilian life and a group of recovering drug addicts trying to stay clean, was not…
My guest on the Thursday, September 20 theater segment on KSRO’s The Drive with Steve Jaxon was Rich Rubin, the new Artistic Director of the Pegasus Theater Company. Click below to hear that interview: **********
Theatre Bay Area has announced the nominees for their 5th Annual TBA Awards and North Bay companies have snagged 43 nominations. The awards will be presented on Monday, November 5th at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. The TBA Awards are designed to honor excellence in professionally oriented theatre through a peer-based, Bay Area-wide adjudication process…
The Marquee Theater Journalists Association has released the list of nominees for its 3rd Annual MTJA Awards. The Association recognized the exemplary work of Sonoma County theater artists with nominations in seventeen categories that were culled from the sixty-six productions attended by MTJA members. Recipients will be announced at the 2018 MTJA Awards – A Celebration of Sonoma…
Spreckels Theatre Company opens their season with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel about a boy with ‘behavioral difficulties’ took England and Broadway by storm and earned multiple awards on both continents. Christopher (Elijah Pinkham) is a 15-year-old boy with an unspecified behavioral…
If you’re only going to see one “five British women of varying ages, socio-economic statuses and body types bonding over pole dancing” play in your lifetime, might as well make it Dave Simpson’s The Naked Truth. A big hit in England, director Argo Thompson imports it to the North Bay for its U.S. premiere at…
North Bay Stage and Screen 