Sweat Lynn Nottage Palo Alto Players Stories are how we often best learn new truths about the world around us. Lynn Nottage -- the first and only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama two times -- clearly understands the power of narratives to deliver messages and to raise questions that we in the mostly liberal and Blue Bay Area somehow have missed while … [Read more...] about Sweat
Best Bet
Co-Founders
Co-Founders Ryan Nicole Austin, Beau Lewis, Adesha Adefela Music Team Led by Victoria Theodore American Conservatory Theater For seven years, Esata has been coding in her mother's West Oakland basement, creating an interacting avatar of her deceased father, Cyril -- an incredible accomplishment for someone non-degreed who learned to code with her dad on an Atari … [Read more...] about Co-Founders
Sweet Charity
Sweet Charity Neil Simon (Book); Cy Coleman (Music); Dorothy Fields (Music) San Jose Stage Company (The Stage) Sometimes there are so many aspects of a spectacular production that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. That is especially true for San Jose Stage Company's current summer hit-in-the-making, Sweet Charity. First, the 1967-premiering musical … [Read more...] about Sweet Charity
Next to Normal
Next to Normal Brian Yorkey (Book & Lyrics); Tom Kitt (Music) Ray of Light Theatre Lifelong mental disease, paralyzing grief, severe depression, feelings by a child of a parent's abandonment, drug abuse, the questionable practices of modern psychiatry, suicide. While not the subjects normally associated with the Great American Musical, Brian Yorkey (book and … [Read more...] about Next to Normal
Harvey Milk Reimagined
Harvey Milk Reimagined Stewart Wallace (Composer); Michael Korie (Librettist) Opera Parallèle "And shame to rage, And rage to pride, And pride to hope, And hope will never be silent." At the age of forty-eight and just days before his assassination, the first out gay elected city official in California reflects his own life's journey in a climatic moment of … [Read more...] about Harvey Milk Reimagined
The Cake
The Cake Bekah Brunstetter City Lights Theater Company For Della, the ingredients for the perfect cake are two: "You gotta get the real stuff" and "you gotta follow the directions." That means "full fat" and "not your eggs that were ever caged" or "ever went to the movies," and it means "give your time and your worship to directions." Doing so -- according to … [Read more...] about The Cake
Brigadoon
Brigadoon Alan Jay Lerner (Book & Lyrics); Frederick Lowe (Music) South Bay Musical Theatre "When you love someone deeply, anything is possible ... even miracles." In times such as we are now experiencing where more and more people are either deeply losing hope, becoming daily more cynical, or just checking out, the idea of miracles probably for most seems a … [Read more...] about Brigadoon
Otello
Otello Giuseppi Verdi (Music); Arigo Boito (Libretto) West Bay Opera After his successful Aida premiered in 1871, the great Giuseppi Verdi decided with firm finality to retire from opera composition; but the librettist Arigo Boito had other ideas. Boito's persistent temptations for Verdi to tackle one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, Othello, finally led to a … [Read more...] about Otello
Yellow Face
Yellow Face David Henry Hwang Shotgun Players Following a decade in the 1990s when Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson railed against the growing influence of Chinese Americans and questioned where their loyalties really lay (going famously after nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee as a traitor), David Henry Hwang opened in 2007 his play, Yellow Face, a brilliantly scripted … [Read more...] about Yellow Face
Crumbs from the Table of Joy
Crumbs from the Table of Joy Lynn Nottage Aurora Theatre Company For seventeen-year-old Ernestine Crump on the verge of her high school gradation, life sometimes "feels like floating out of your body, entering the Milky Way and getting stuck in it just as its curdling." That is especially true for this young Black girl living in lily-white Brooklyn in 1950. After … [Read more...] about Crumbs from the Table of Joy
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Simon Stephens, Based on the Novel by Mark Haddon San Francisco Playhouse A boy of fifteen years, three months, three days can count from a fast moving train the exact number of trees on a hillside, of clouds in the sky, and of hues of green in the meadows passing by. He notes without hesitation that his neighbor … [Read more...] about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Henry V
Henry V William Shakespeare The Pear Theatre “Therefore take heed how you impawn one person, How you awake our sleeping sword of war. We charge you in the name of God, take heed; For never two such kingdoms did contend Without much fall of blood.” The King who looks squarely, calmly, and bluntly into the eyes of the Archbishop of Canterbury – a man … [Read more...] about Henry V
Shameless Hussy
Shameless Hussy Lynne Kaufman The Marsh Surrounded by the sounds of fog horn, crashing waves and terrifying thunder, a trembling eleven-year-old girl cries to her mother as the two leave her native France, bound for the U.S, "I am losing my country, my language, and my father". Her mother hands her a notebook and suggests she write in it letters to the father left … [Read more...] about Shameless Hussy
Jersey Boys
Jersey Boys Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice (Book) Bob Gaudio (Music); Bob Crewe (Lyrics) Palo Alto Players Let it be known by anyone and everyone who has seen once, twice, or a dozen times Jersey Boys in New York, London, or on touring stages throughout the country and abroad that seeing the 2005, multi-Tony-award-winning juke-box hit one more time in a … [Read more...] about Jersey Boys
Writing Fragments Home
Writing Fragments Home Jeffrey Lo Hillbarn Theatre & Conservatory Forty-year-old Jay awaits anxiously with luggage in hand for his mom to get home from work, nervously practicing various ways of saying, "Hi, Mom, it's good to see you/How was work?/I'm sorry ... can I move back home?" When Mary Beth walks in, her first reaction? "What's wrong?... What are you … [Read more...] about Writing Fragments Home
