La Cenerentola Gioachino Rossini (Composer): Jacopi Ferretti (Original Italian Libretto); Donald Pippin (English Libretto) Pocket Opera Music that excites the imagination and pleases the senses; voices that soar with their clarity and amaze with their electricity; an adapted, English libretto that teases and titillates with its rhymes and rhythms; acting that elicits … [Read more...] about La Cenerentola
Ruddygorre Or, The Bruja’s Curse
Ruddygore Or, The Bruja’s Curse W.S. Gilbert (Libretto) & Arthur Sullivan (Score) Adapted by David Euresti Lamplighters Musical Theatre The Company that for seventy-one years has entertained Bay Area audiences with its Gilbert and Sullivan fare has taken one of the pair’s Victorian parodies of the English, nineteenth-century melodrama, Ruddygore, and married it … [Read more...] about Ruddygorre Or, The Bruja’s Curse
Big Data
Big Data Kate Attwell American Conservatory Theater A stranger shows up at the door, and you let him in, not knowing quite why. He settles in as if he knows the place and begins asking mundane but also personal questions and taking some notes. Somehow, he seems already to know a lot about you and describes aspects of yourself, your inner desires, and even dreams for … [Read more...] about Big Data
Bees & Honey
Bees & Honey Guadalís Del Carmen Marin Theatre Company “Love me as I love you, Give me your love beyond measure, Find me like a bee to a honeycomb, Long live the honey of my life!” Inspired by this chorus from “Como Abeja al Panal” (“Like a Bee to a Honeycomb”) by the Latin song writer Juan Luis Guerra, Guadalís Del Carmen has penned a sweet-and-sour, … [Read more...] about Bees & Honey
Rigoletto
Rigoletto Giuseppe Verdi Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave Opera San José Little wonder it is that from its Vienna premiere in 1851 until the twenty-first century, Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto is one of the world’s most-beloved, most-performed operas. Soaring in music that includes famous, widely recognized arias that are difficult for an audience member not to … [Read more...] about Rigoletto
Corpus Evita
Corpus Evita Carlos Franzetti Libretto by José Luis Moscovich; Concept by Lorenz Russo How much responsibility must a person in power assume for acts against humanity that occur because the untested, unprepared leader is either unaware, naïve, or completely incompetent? Is it possible for such a leader ever to seek and receive atonement – especially if the crimes … [Read more...] about Corpus Evita
Manahatta
Manahatta Mary Kathryn Nagle Aurora Theatre Company Two American stories, four centuries apart, interlock in their telling, with characters, events, motives, triumphs, and tragedies strikingly similar in Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta, which premiered in 2018 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Now in an intimately engrossing and enlightening production at Aurora … [Read more...] about Manahatta
For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday
For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday Sarah Ruhl The Pear Theatre In a tribute to her own mother’s 70th birthday, prolific and award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl has penned a play featuring a woman much like her mom along with her mom’s four, adult siblings. Both in the play and in real life, her mom is an actress whose lifelong career began as a child in Davenport, … [Read more...] about For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday
Rent
Rent Jonathan Larson (Book, Music & Lyrics) Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory In January 1996, onto a Broadway stage burst a sexy, soaring musical daring to bestow unforgettable faces and personalities to seven artists struggling to survive not only their 1989, East Village poverty, but also the plague of AIDS/HIV that appeared ready to wipe out an entire … [Read more...] about Rent
A Little Night Music
A Little Night Music Stephen Sondheim (Music & Lyrics); Hugh Wheeler (Book) South Bay Musical Theatre In a rich, reverberating blend of harmonies, an elaborately attired quintet sings snippets of fuller songs soon to come of the on-again, off-again love affairs and marriages we are about to witness: “Unpack the luggage, la-la-la; pack the luggage, la-la-la.” ... … [Read more...] about A Little Night Music
People Where They Are
People Where They Are Anthony Clarvoe San Jose Stage Company A Black man dressed in coat and tie walks into a room lined with bookshelves where six chairs are arranged in a circle. Looking at the other five people, he asks the one other Black – Mrs. Clark, a woman with a welcoming smile – “Why are all these white people here? In Alabama, Black and white in the same … [Read more...] about People Where They Are
My Home on the Moon
My Home on the Moon Minna Lee San Francisco Playhouse Outside, the crushing sounds of a next-door bakery’s demise reverberate, facing the same deadly fate as the deli and tea shop that were part of the once-vibrant neighborhood. Inside Pho Lan Restaurant, owner Lan prays before the altar to her ancestors while her young chef, Mai, holds up a stack of unpaid bills, … [Read more...] about My Home on the Moon
Misery – The Play
Misery William Goldman Based on the Novel by Stephen King Palo Alto Players I feel compelled to make an upfront confession: I have never read a Stephen King novel; and while I do enjoy the suspense and thriller aspects of Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Sterling, I have never been a fan of the ever-popular genre of horror. It was thus with slight trepidation that I stepped … [Read more...] about Misery – The Play
Kimberly Akimbo
Kimberly Akimbo David Lindsay-Abaire Altarena Playhouse Teenage Kimberly is once again on the curb of the ice-skating rink waiting for her dad to pick her up. That it is 10:30 p.m. and the rink closed at 8 and that it is the middle of winter in Bogota, New Jersey is bad enough; but soon-to-be-sixteen Kimberly has the body of someone four-and-a-half times her age … [Read more...] about Kimberly Akimbo
Swimming with Lesbians
Swimming with Lesbians Marga Gomez The Marsh Grab your life preserver; stop by the bar on the Lezzo Deck for a ‘sapphotini;’ and welcome aboard The Celesbian, “the world’s oldest lesbian cruise line because we have the world’s oldest lesbians on board.” We may think we are at The Marsh Berkeley; but under the command of the comic antics of veteran author and performer … [Read more...] about Swimming with Lesbians
