Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Jeffrey Lane (Book); David Yazbek (Music & Lyrics) San Jose Stage Company Filled with more corn than an Iowa field in mid-summer, San Jose Stage Company’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is overflowing with groaner puns, slapstick silliness, sexual innuendos, and sophomoric vulgarity the likes of high-school boys making fart jokes. Based on the … [Read more...] about Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
4 E
tick, tick … Boom!
tick, tick… BOOM! Jonathan Larson (Book, Music & Lyrics); David Auburn, Script Consultant New Conservatory Theatre Center “Maybe I really have written the show that will reinvent musicals for our generation, the Hair of the ‘90s.” With that hope, a struggling playwright and composer heads to a workshop production of the musical he has been writing for five years. … [Read more...] about tick, tick … Boom!
The Music Man
The Music Man Meredith Wilson (Book, Music & Lyrics) Palo Alto Players Musicals often burst onto the stage with numbers that arouse an audience to peak attention and leave fond impressions (and earworms) that can last a lifetime. Among the dozens of opening numbers that are my big-sound, big-number favorites are the likes of Belle entering the village in Beauty and the … [Read more...] about The Music Man
The Skin of Our Teeth
The Skin of Our Teeth Thornton Wilder Los Altos Stage Company Alert! Alert! It’s the coldest day of the year, and it’s only August. An ice wall has moved the Cathedral of Montreal into Vermont; and in Excelsior, New Jersey, dinosaurs and mammoths alike are getting as worried about their survival as are the mounting number of refugees who are heading southward … [Read more...] about The Skin of Our Teeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A Midsummer Night’s Dream William Shakespeare Shotgun Players With costumes wonderfully strange, weird, and entirely fanciful and a setting that is dark, mystical, and mysterious as a vast forest in a dream might be, Shotgun Players opens A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a cast that bends genders, mixes races, and celebrates diversity in almost every dimension possible. … [Read more...] about A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Far Country
The Far Country Lloyd Suh Berkeley Repertory Theatre “I do not want to take from America … I want to give to America.” So does the amiable, big-smiling Gee patiently make his case to the persistently doubtful U.S. Inspector to prove in 1909 that he is a naturalized American citizen who – like everyone living in Chinatown in 1906 – lost all his proof-of-birth papers in the … [Read more...] about The Far Country
Dirty White Teslas Make Me Sad
Dirty White Teslas Make Me Sad Ashley Smiley Magic Theatre (with Campo Santo) In a week when San Franciscans hear the news of yet another landmark institution about to close its doors for good – Macy’s on Union Square – and when the Chronicle columnist Carl Nolte’s Sunday column is titled “We’re Losing San Francisco Bit by Bit, Aren’t We,” Magic Theatre in union with … [Read more...] about Dirty White Teslas Make Me Sad
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
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
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
Nora: A Doll’s House
Nora: A Doll’s House Stef Smith, after Henrik Ibsen City Lights Theater Company When Henrik Ibsen premiered A Doll’s House in 1879, controversy immediately erupted when Nora, banker’s wife and mother of three, challenges the society’s definition of marriage and walks defiantly away from hers, seeking to discover who she really is beyond those two, domestic titles. … [Read more...] about Nora: A Doll’s House
Tosca
Tosca Giacomo Puccini Original Italian Libretto by Luigi Illica & Giuseppe Giacosa English Version by Donald Pippin Pocket Opera, in a Co-Production with Cinnabar Theatre When Giacomo Puccini’s universally popular, 1900-premiering Tosca is transformed from its usual position on grand opera stages with scores of cast members to an intimate setting where a few … [Read more...] about Tosca
The Kinsey Sicks: Drag Queen Storytime Gone Wild
Drag Queen Storytime Gone Wild! Benjamin Schatz (Book), with Spencer Brown, Jeff Manabat & Nathan Marken Benjamin Schatz (Lyrics); Jeff Manabat (Vocal Arrangements) New Conservatory Theatre Center The masters of brilliantly delivering both corn and porn in glorious, a cappella harmonies brimming with biting political and social satire are back in what they call … [Read more...] about The Kinsey Sicks: Drag Queen Storytime Gone Wild
Hurricane Diane
Hurricane Diane Madeleine George Aurora Theatre Company Climate, comedy, and catastrophe are the unlikely combination in Madeleine George’s Hurricane Diane, now in its Bay Area premiere at Aurora Theatre Company. The laugh-out-loud, in-your-face warnings about our potentially disastrous future features in its stormy center a lesbian, permaculture gardener who just … [Read more...] about Hurricane Diane
The Dignity Circle
The Dignity Circle Lauren Smerkanich Central Works “Hi, y’all. I’m Angela. I work in real estate. I live in Westlake, Sacramento, California. … I have a question for you. What would you do if right now I handed you forty thousand dollars? In cash. No strings attached?” Maybe “a trip, a new car, a new guest bathroom, a new forehead?” Or how about just “a way to … [Read more...] about The Dignity Circle
