Review: “Mamma Mia!” on Mount Tamalpais

High atop Mt. Tamalpais, at about the 2,000 foot level,  sits the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre where the “great outdoor theatre adventure” known as The Mountain Play has been produced for the past 105 years. Your all-day adventure includes a slow, winding ride up the mountain, a hike to the 4,000 seat amphitheatre and a trek…

With ‘Natural Shocks,’ Lauren Gunderson’s act of theatrical activism strikes a nationwide chord

By David Templeton On Friday, April 20, Marin Theatre Company (MTC) acknowledged the 19th anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, with a casual but keenly poignant reading of playwright Lauren Gunderson’s one-woman-play, Natural Shocks. On the same evening, all across the country, hundreds of schools, theaters and nonprofits gave simultaneous readings…

Craig Miller Leaving 6th Street Playhouse

Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse has announced the departure of Craig Miller. Miller, who’s been the Playhouse’s Artistic and Education Director for the past seven years, is leaving to join the faculty of the University of Idaho as Assistant Professor of Acting and Directing. “To leave my wonderful artistic home and family here in Santa…

Review: “Peter Pan” in Rohnert Park

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has been seen on stage in one form or another for well over 100 years. It’s survived being Disney-fied and even Christopher Walken-ized in a disastrous live television spectacle. The most popular adaptation is the 1954 musical starring Mary Martin. It’s that version that takes flight in a well-mounted production…

Review: “La Cage aux Folles” in Santa Rosa

  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…

Review: “Into the Woods” in Santa Rosa

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…

Reviews: “Death of a Salesman” in Santa Rosa and “Farragut North” in Healdsburg

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…

Reviews: “Lost in Yonkers” in Healdsburg and “The Time of Your Life” in Cloverdale

Two Pulitzer Prize–winning dramas have hit North Bay stages. The first is the Raven Players’ production of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. Simon, whose best-known works are comedies tinged with a little melancholy (The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys), won the 1991 Pulitzer for Yonkers, a melancholy family drama tinged with comedy. With their mother deceased and their…