Produced by San Francisco Children’s Musical Theater, That Kid Can SING! is a musical revue featuring a cavalcade of young talent, ages 4 to 25. Yes, a real cavalcade! With each of the 30 performers singing a solo number, the two-hour program requires some audience stamina, but that...

From Sept. 8-19, the San Francisco Fringe Festival offers a bounty of LGBT-interest shows. Featuring over 250 performances of some 43 different theatre pieces, it’s easy to see 4 to 5 shows a day. And fun! A complete schedule of the 19th annual Fringe Festival is available at...

GuyWriters proudly presents Eat Our Shorts, a quirky collection of short plays by SF writers. People innocently move throughout the City, unaware of what is happening all around them. Humorous and/or sexual exploits are laid bare when GuyWriters follow up their successful December 2009 debut to expose the...

To those who speak of post-racial societies, who don’t think a play about race written in 1955 could have relevance for contemporary audiences, I offer you the following moment at a recent performance of Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress at the Aurora Theatre (currently running). In the...

Marin Shakespeare Company’s production of Antony and Cleopatra (currently-running) is Shakespeare’s continuing saga of ancient Rome, which begins with Julius Caesar (which Marin Shakes produced last summer). And director Lesley Currier is a brave woman to tackle this seldom-produced historical play. Her production of this drama of love...

Venerable lore has always brought the story of alienation, of “The Other.” And Disney has a veritable knack for bringing ancient stories into the current vernacular. Their 1991 animated film retold the traditional fairy tale about a valiant prince beset by a curse and his princess savior, and it’s...

By Michael Platania

I learned about Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in elementary school in the ‘70s, back when it was still the “Greatest Show on Earth.” Barnum’s FUNundrum, the 140th edition from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, which recently performed at San Jose’s HP Pavilion,...

If you are a couple and want to have your story told onstage, just volunteer your names to “How We First Met.” At the SF Improv Festival 2010, held recently at the Eureka Theatre, audience members “Laura and Eric” got to see their courtship played out by four...

Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson deals with the legacy of slavery and what still exists in a free environment. Multi-Ethnic Theater’s currently running production at The Next Stage features a fine ensemble and strong directing by Lewis Campbell. The script gives tremendous insight into what African-Americans...

Under the cool summer skies over Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, the forewarning hooting of real live owls reminds viewers of the curses placed upon theatres performing Macbeth throughout the centuries. The California Shakespeare Theater production of Macbeth recently opened in this most appropriate natural setting. And so far this...

After resigning last month as the artistic director of the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco, Stephanie Lynne Smith has landed quickly on her creative feet ...  or uh, back? She and comedic partner, Carolyn Eidson, performed their fabulous Fifi & Fanny: LIVE at the Texas Whorehouse musical comedy...

Boxcar Theatre has mounted an innovative, very successful new interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, currently running in their black box South of Market theater (extended to Sept. 5). Despite the intimate space, they add six more characters to the original four, serving to flesh out and humanize...

Great theatre directors exercise a jurisprudence of balance. They approach their characters with infinite mercy but unyielding justice, respecting the needs and claims of the individual but reserving their highest veneration for the conflicts that those needs and claims produce.

They do not champion, but juxtapose; not endorse,...

By Michael Platania

Stuff. Do we define it or does it define us? This is a question asked in the Mugwumpin production of This is All I Need, currently running at the NOHspace. Four performers â€” Madeline H.D. Brown, Joe Estlack, Erin Mei-Lling Stuart and Christopher W. White â€” take us...

Although Disney’s animated features from the early ‘90s remain immensely popular, for members of my generation (who were children when the films premiered) they meant - and still mean - something special. It was as though those cinematic events, those magical worlds, were created especially for us. Disney’s...

Divalicious, the delightful cabaret showcase starring Leanne Borghesi with G. Scott Lacy on piano, directed by Stephanie Temple, is currently running at New Conservatory Theatre Center. Some know Borghesi by her alter ego, Faux Queen Anita Cocktail. But here, she is full-on diva to the max. The concept...

Intricacies of the Human Spirit

For the remainder of August (and extended to September 5!), Boxcar Theatre presents Tenn Will, three award-winning Tennessee Williams plays in repertory. Williams won Pulitzer Prizes for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and the...

By Michael Platania

I don’t have kids, but I know the feeling of watching a niece, nephew or a neighbor’s child in a show. And now I have a sense of what it’s like to watch, instead of a child, a parent or grandparent in...

Choosing material for the opening show of a newly formed theatre company is challenging, especially when one’s mission is “to never have more male than female roles in any given show and never more male than female actors’ union contracts.” Current gender imbalance in theatrical union contracts is...

Humble Boy by British playwright Charlotte Jones opens to the “Flight of the Bumblebee” which set the tone for this production. Produced by Marin Actors’ Workshop and deftly directed by Terry McGovern, Humble Boy is currently running at the Novato Theater Company Playhouse.

The title character, Felix Humble...

“Memory is your only escape.” And indeed memory plays an integral role in both short works that comprise A Night of One-Act Plays, recently performed at (and produced by) the Victoria Theatre. The two one-man shorts, both written by Robert Correa, feature actor Gerrad Bohl in startlingly different...

By Michael Platania

Rent, the ‘90s Broadway phenomenon with music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson and based on the Puccini opera La Boheme (now playing at the City Lights Theater in San Jose), still resonates today. The play begins on Christmas Eve, in a loft apartment where filmmaker Mark...

The art of improvising is the art of saying “yes.” As Keith Johnstone wrote in Impro, the defining text on improvisation theory, “There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes,’ and people who prefer to say ‘No.’ Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have,...

On Aug.15, theatrical legend Carol Channing appears at the 16th Edition of Help Is on the Way, a star-studded musical revue produced by the Richmond Ermet AIDS Foundation. Subtitled “That’s Entertainment,” this edition features Melissa Manchester, James Darren, Lisa Vroman, Bruce Vilanch, Paula West and many more! And...

Boxcar Theatre has distilled one essence of a classic American play in their abbreviated version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. As one of their three-show series called Tenn Will (which also includes Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie in repertory),...

By Jeanie K. Smith

Occasionally a show comes along that reminds you why you love the theatre, and this is one of them. Shakespeare Santa Cruz has mounted a near-perfect production of The Lion in Winter by James Goldman (currently running) with wonderful design elements and a smart script...

Attending a dress rehearsal of 30 Days In September was a very moving experience. I was able to speak personally with director Rooben Morgan who told me that the play was about child abuse and incest. Produced by IndiStage, 30 Days In September, an intricate and in-depth look...

Marin Shakespeare Company again brings innovation to one of the classic comedies by The Bard of Avon with their production of The Taming of the Shrew. The works of the Elizabethan-era poet have, over the centuries, been recast in many different styles, but probably not ever before in...

Septuagenarian comedienne Lynn Ruth Miller bids you welcome to the “Final Gasp Residential Home” in her one-woman cabaret show Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s Cha Cha Cha (currently running). Her lively performance includes singing, a striptease and free condoms. Miller might be aged, but she only acts creaky for effect. She...

If Shakespeare had a runner-up - a fellow playwright whose themes were so broad, whose characters so full and whose conflicts so timeless as to deem him second choice for the singular voice of the English language - surely George Bernard Shaw would be him. How fitting, then,...

By Michael Platania

Nymph O’ Mania, a new comedy by local playwright Morgan Ludlow (currently playing at Stage Werx Theatre), is billed as “a modern twist on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Produced by Wily West Productions and directed by David Stein, Nymph is a musical-chairs story of love and...

Playwright A.R. Gurney has (like Philip Barry before him) appointed himself a chronicler of the American monied classes. And Ross Valley Players is currently presenting his wryly comedic drama The Middle Ages, which predates his best-known play The Dining Room. In both plays, the story is effectively told...

Tennessee Williams wrote about society’s sexual and religious outcasts, “others” like himself. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s 1955 masterpiece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, now running in a fresh new production at Actors Theatre of San Francisco, opens a gripping insight to the plight of a questioning gay...

If you’re a fan of jokes about rimming, farts, scat, bestiality, STDs and lesbians (with every variation of vaginal derivation and secretion imaginable) while the “F” bomb and its variants are hurled with clockwork regularity, The Kinsey Sicks in Each Hit & I at The Rrazz Room wouldn’t...

By Michael Platania

Where else can you find love, Paris, rolling pins and leather whips, but in the New Conservatory Theatre Center’s fun-filled production of Cowardly Things, currently running. Part of NCTC’s Summer Cabaret series, Michael Phillis directs Scrumbly Koldewyn and Cindy Goldfield who laugh, dance and sing through...

“My professional life is fantastic, but my love life is not so good.” So said Edith Piaf, a French chanteuse at the height of her career whose passion for music, men and eventually morphine is celebrated in Piaf: Love Conquers All by Roger Peace, presented by Tone Poet...

Traveling Light, the title of Joe Goode Performance Group’s revived dance installation currently playing in the Old Mint Building, works on (at least) three levels. First, it encapsulates the performance’s main and most unusual conceit: that the audience (not to the mention performers) must travel through different spaces...

That dynamic duo, Pamela Barnes and Ellen Hoffman, have created a new hit musical, Josephine the Pirate Queen, which recently ran at the Knox Center for the Performing Arts at Contra Costa College in San Pablo. Josephine boasted a multi-racial cast of 72 (mostly students, ranging from under...

Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, now playing at Marin Shakespeare Company, is densely populated with clever witticisms and somewhat abstruse literary references. Director Robert Currier has mounted this play as a truly physical, almost vaudevillian, comedy while sensitively paying attention to the intellectual content and artfully making it accessible...

By Michael Platania

Dorothy’s not in Kansas anymore. This time she’s headed to San Francisco in Left of Oz, a Stephanie’s Playhouse production currently running at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley. An original musical (book, original music and lyrics) by Stephanie Reif with songs that ranged from intimate solos...

The best aspect of Beijing, California, produced by the Asian American Theater Company and now running at the Thick House, may be its premise: a not-too-distant future in which China rises, America falls, and the former conquers the latter. One can imagine this scenario more easily with each...

Teatro ZinZanni hits the runway the fun way with a passion for fashion in Love, Chaos, Couture: All Dressed Up with Someplace to Go!, now playing at their lush Spiegeltent (SF’s Pier 29). Like many other Bay Areans, I wrote off Teatro ZinZanni as upscale tourist entertainment....

By Michael Platania

The San Francisco Mime Troupe opened its 51st season with Posibilidad, or Death of the Worker, on July 4th in Dolores Park. It was a beautiful day with a clear blue sky, a light cool breeze, and a full-capacity crowd. Posibilidad, written by Michael Gene Sullivan...

If you like Borscht Belt humor, you’ll love Mel Brooks’ new musical Young Frankenstein! Now playing at the Golden Gate Theatre, SHN’s latest offering in the Best of Broadway series has some of the best choreography and well-sung songs that bring a crazy 1974 classic movie back to...

On August 15, theatrical legend Carol Channing will appear at the 16th Edition of Help Is on the Way, a star-studded musical revue produced by the Richmond Ermet AIDS Foundation. This Edition, subtitled “That’s Entertainment,” features Melissa Manchester, James Darren, Lisa Vroman, Bruce Vilanch, Paula West and many...

Elegant and beefy drag queen Seth Eisen pays loving tribute to singing female impersonators in his show Blackbird, now at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory. He gives elaborately-costumed interpretations of their performances and styles, accompanied by a two-piece combo. Essentially, the show is a cabaret performance covering celebrities and...

As a theatre critic, I often seek subtlety in the productions I review. I look for understatement — in design, in performance — to counter what is inherently exaggerated and confrontational in the medium: the makeup, the motions, the emotions and conflicts that flare up right in front...

Going into this year’s Tony Awards, MEMPHIS, a big-hearted musical with Bay Area roots, had already won four awards each from the Outer Critics Circle (OCC) and Drama Desk (DD), though with enough variation as to question which of the eight Tony nominations would transmute into awards. At...

“We’re ‘The Little Festival That Could’ and ‘The Best Kept Secret in San Francisco!’,” jokes Tom Orr, our own musical comedy, cabaret, porn star and lyricist, who also adds to his resume “drag queen and legitimate stage actress” (after his stint as the Widow Norton in Theatre Rhino’s...

Growing up gay and simultaneously saddled with the guilt-inducing dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, actor Christopher Durang laughed and evolved into a satirical dramatist whose fiercely comic works have been produced on Broadway, Off Broadway, and around the world. Custom Made Theatre’s Durang Me! couples the acidly...

A lucky audience experienced a 20th anniversary of one of the best shows about Black gays and some of  their stories on June 15 at the San Francisco Main Library. Fierce Love: Stories from Black Gay Life by Pomo Afro Homos was as fresh,uplifting and outrageous as...

If an actor’s body is an instrument, Paul Gerrior’s is like a set of bagpipes‑— presuming his portrayal of the title role in Krapp’s Last Tape, currently running at the EXIT on Taylor, is representative of his artistry. Here, at least, Gerrior works like the Scottish musical lung‑—...

Porchlight Theatre Company opened their 10th anniversary season on June 19 with Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton with co-directors Ann Brebner and Ken Sonkin.‑Les Liaisons Dangereuses marks the 50th anniversary of Ann Brebner’s arrival on the Bay Area theatre scene and her founding of the Marin Shakespeare...

What has such a dull title, Speech & Debate by Stephen Karam, got to do with the play’s content concerning a sex scandal? Not until we see the play do we understand a threesome of maladjusted teenagers’ efforts to comprehend and eventually bring freedom of expression and tolerance...

The musical love story The Fantasticks by Tom Jones (book and lyrics) and Harvey Schmidt (music) celebrates its 50th anniversary! And Bill English and his crew at SF Playhouse have cleverly produced this venerable comedy (currently running) with some of the finest Bay Area talent. English’s directing presents...

By Michael Platania

Topsy-Turvy, a presentation of two one-act plays by local writers, turns the age-old stereotype of promiscuous gay men and relationship-obsessed gay women on its head. The plays, performed one weekend only at the Metropolitan Community Church as a fundraiser, celebrated the church’s 40th anniversary.   

The evening opened...

How strong are your convictions? Would you be willing to die for your beliefs? In Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw, produced by San Francisco Free Civic Theatre (currently running at the Eureka Valley Rec Center), a band of Christians bravely face imminent death with a...

On June 19, from noon to midnight (ending with a late-night party), The Marsh celebrates its 20th anniversary with a Performance Marathon of solo work. Stephanie Weisman, Marsh Founder and Artistic Producing Director, has invited 45 Marsh performers, old and new, for non-stop performances and reminiscences (plus open...

Woody Guthrie’s American Song is a musical revue of Guthrie’s best-loved material, and it follows the singer from the Great Depression through the Dust Bowl and on to the promised land. Recently opening to a standing ovation, Marin Theatre Company has a hit on their hands!

Conceived, adapted and...

In opening its current season with The Pastures of Heaven, Octavio Solis’ play based on the short stories by John Steinbeck, California Shakespeare Theater broadens — and takes advantage of — its horizons. This is the first world premiere the Bruns Amphitheater has housed, and as a celebration...

In their current production of God’s Ear by Jenny Schwartz, the Shotgun Players are not shy about foreshadowing motifs before the show begins. The program looks like an old-fashioned plane ticket. The usher tells you to “enjoy your flight.” The pre-show announcement sounds like an in-flight safety demonstration,...

How many twists can you put into a Southern gothic tale? In Enrique Urueta’s Forever Never Comes — A Psycho-Southern Queer Country Dance Tragedy, currently running at The Boxcar Playhouse, there are at least six. 

First in this Crowded Fire production is the suicide by hanging of Ricardo (Shoresh...

Paul Rudnick’s play The New Century, now running at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, delves deeply into shallow gay stereotypes. It explores the heroically long-suffering mother of three gay children, the flamboyant public television host in Florida who was “too gay” for New York and the simple homespun...

Those four gay guys who play four old broads are back treading the boards at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory for their fourth Pride Season with two hilarious new episodes. The Golden Girls is a clever live stage play using scripts from old Golden Girls TV episodes and a...

Closets, AIDS, and centuries of injustice have long threatened the history of individual LGBT seniors and elders. But This Many People, an original theatrical production by OutLook Theater Project, brings these stories out of the closet and into the spotlight (this weekend) as part of the National Queer...

The Pittmans were normal. Dad was a World War II hero. Mom was editor of her college yearbook. They were happy for 24 months. And then there were the other 47 years of their marriage. In 60 riveting minutes, Marilyn Pittman tells the story of her parents’ murder-suicide...

Rhino, a very quick (45 minutes) ensemble-generated work inspired by Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, is the finest serio/comic, site-specific, movement-based performance of the Spring season. Ending a four-weekend run, it completes Boxcar Theatre’s “Reimagining the Familiar” series. In this tightly and brilliantly directed (and imagined) work by Evren Odcikin (also...

Simultaneously temporary and eternal, live performing arts exist in these polar-opposite states. Beethoven’s immortal music is only black glyphs upon white backgrounds until life is breathed into them in performance. In its regional premiere at TheatreWorks (opening soon), Michael Hollinger’s play titled Opus explores this contrapuntal conceit —...

Social Theory and Non-Violent Revenge Mix Well 

The world premiere of The Apotheosis of Pig Husbandry by local playwright William Bivins is currently running at the SF Playhouse as part of their Sandbox Series (dedicated to promoting new works with top-notch directors and actors, using minimal...

Candy-Coated Rainbow Gay Pride 

Boys Will Be Boys: An OUT-Rageous New Musical Revue is so sweet you’ll want to brush and floss your teeth right after. It’s a delicious piece of taffy. A sticky gummy bear. A mouthful of pink cotton candy. And it is soooooo...

Theatre Rhinoceros held its annual Benefit Spectacular on May 25 at one of its new digs, the Eureka Theatre, featuring the local talent of Rhino regulars and newcomers. Dave Dobrusky was the musical director and piano accompanist with Rhino producer/ executive director John Fisher as the very animated...

Peter Pan flies alongside Tinker Bell (his “Fairy with an attitude”) in the new stage presentation of Peter Pan, currently running at The threesixty Theatre, a brand new, 1350-seat, state-of-the-art 360-degree CGI theatre pavilion in SF’s Ferry Park. Inside the huge white tent, the London smash hit of...

All My Sons by Arthur Miller, produced by the Actors Theatre of San Francisco, is currently running and continues through June. This powerful script by one of America’s most brilliant playwrights offers a subtle message about responsibility to others.

Taking place during World War II and centering on next...

Americans suffer from exceptionalism and litigiousness. They coin abhorrent terms like “closure” (for the conclusion of the grieving period). David Hare, the British playwright, could hardly make his disdain for this country more manifest in The Breath of Life, produced by Spare Stage and currently running. Yet to...

Berkeley Repertory Theatre in a co-production with Center Theatre Group of Los Angeles presents the world premiere of Lisa Kron’s In the Wake which explores sex, politics and sexual politics. The show follows the career of an outspoken, ultra-liberal journalist through the Bush II years, the high points...

Top Girls by feminist playwright Caryl Churchill recently opened, and is currently running, at Ross Valley Players. Set in 1980s London at the Top Girls Employment Agency, Top Girls tells the story of an ambitious and successful career woman, Marlene (Loring Williams) who has just been appointed head...

Marga Gomez celebrates Pride Month early with an updated return of her one-hander Proud & Bothered, now at the New Conservatory Theatre Center. With her frenetic comic delivery and her New York City brashness, she weaves together the stories of her personal experiences as a professional mistress of...

A view of the George Washington Bridge soars between apartment buildings on Anna Louizos’ Upper Manhattan set of In The Heights - a new musical brought to the Curran Theatre by Carole Shorenstein Hays. Conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda (who also wrote the music and lyrics) with book by...

Bay Area artists and public figures have long been at the forefront of combining talent forces for humanitarian causes. “An Evening of Giving and Saving Lives” - a one-night-only performance extravaganza focusing on the supporting the relief efforts in Haiti - is one such synergistic happening.

The Tuesday, May...

A glance at the program of Tender Stone, an Artship Ensemble exploration of Persian myth, reveals a production thoroughly aware of its strengths. With an entire page devoted to the company’s image-based philosophy and another to its costume design, the publication primes audiences to expect great things in...

It helps to know the ancient myth of Lysistrata to appreciate Hot Greeks, the Cockettes’ modernization of Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy.

[Peace-loving Lysistrata talked the women of Greece into refusing sex with their warrior husbands until they end the Peloponnesian War against Sparta.] Add to the ancient tale...

Threshold: Theatre on the Verge recently opened its new poetic docudrama, Terroristka by Rebecca Bella at the Berkeley City Club (currently running). Based on a true story, it centers on Zarema Muzhakhoyeva, who was arrested in Moscow for having carried a bomb that she decided not to detonate.

Director...

One of the most frustrating experiences attending the theatre is knowing that the playwright whose work you are about to see is a fine craftsman, the cast of players are carefully chosen and perfectly competent, and the designers and director are all of good repute. And yet, the...

The tradition of Broadway musicals is kept alive by San Francisco’s 42nd Street Moon. Their latest revival, now playing at the Eureka Theatre, is a lighthearted spoof of typical summer-stock rehearsals in Connecticut. In Very Warm for May by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, teenage girl May escapes...

PlayGround recently opened (and is currently running) The 14th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival, featuring seven full productions of original short plays by emerging playwrights. Receiving this year’s SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle’s prestigious Paine Knickerbocker Award, PlayGround was recognized for its outstanding and continuing support of...

With a hot line-up of local cool cabaret cats coming up soon (May 27 to June 27) at the Eureka Theatre, Something C.O.O.L. Summer Cabaret Festival has enough variety to spice up the summer nights for all. C.O.O.L. (a kind of acronym for Carly Ozard, Tom Orr and...

Arriving at Brava Theater Center to see Echo’s Reach (written and directed by Tim Barsky), I wasn’t sure what to expect from my first experience of Urban Circus Arts. As described by City Circus, Urban Circus Arts is “a cross platform performance discipline that unites traditional circus arts...

About to celebrate its 35th year, Beach Blanket Babylon is the longest-running musical revue in theater history. This laugh-a-minute musical romp, known for its over-the-top costumes, wacky wigs and humungous hats, was created by the genius of Steve Silver, whose vision continues under the guiding hand of...

On Monday, May 3, 2010, the SF Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle hosted their 34th Annual Awards Ceremony to celebrate and applaud Bay Area theatre excellence during 2009. Over 300 dapperly dressed theatre folk attended the event at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre Lobby. And the mood...

The Fringe of Marin and the Dominican University Community Players recently celebrated their silver anniversary, with grateful thanks going to their founder Dr. Annette Lust, Artistic Director and Festival Coordinator. And on May 2, Theatre Critic’s Circle Awards and People’s Choice Awards for the Spring 2010 festival were...

Klea Blackhurstt’s Knockout Merman Tribute

Ethel Merman was called a lot of things in her life, including “the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage.” Some people loved her and still do, some really didn’t and still don’t, and some have never even heard of her....

By Jeffrey R Smith

The Fringe of Marin, a festival of one-acts plays, started by Dr. Annette Lust precisely 25 years ago, has, like a good Bordeaux, qualitatively evolved. Produced by Dominican University Community Players, it is now a substantial theater event for Marin County. And the current Spring...

SexRev: The JosĂ© Sarria Experience is the latest comic gem by writer/ director John Fisher (Artistic Director of Theatre Rhinoceros). Presented by Theatre Rhino and mounted at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory (currently running), this musical montage of one of the nation’s first queer activists is held in the...

Merrily We Roll Into the Words

Sondheim’s words, music and puzzle-and-puzzling-people affinity provide inspiration for Roundabout Theatre’s docu-revue-tribute-musical hybrid Sondheim on Sondheim. Conceived and directed by James Lapine — currently running at Studio 54 in a very limited engagement — a stellar ensemble of eight (under the...

It’s difficult to imagine why the Magic Theatre selected An Accident by Lydia Stryk as the closer for its 2009-2010 season. Sure, the theatre was otherwise without a female playwright for the year, but could it not have found another way to check off that pesky demographic box?...

Who was that sentimental fool crying at the end of Act One of Girlfriend? Oh, it was me. I never thought I’d live long enough to see a boy-meets-boy love story at a major theatre set to music by a famous composer and with such incredible production values.!...

Last Friday, April 16, 2010, Artistic Director Dr. Annette Lust welcomed us to the 25th season of the Fringe of Marin’s new discoveries.

The first half of the program is devoted to Dr. Lust’s amazing adaptation of The Little Prince by St. Exupery, which is imaginatively directed by Sasha...

As part of this year’s DIVAfest at the EXIT Theatre (currently running), three women play in a tragic love story titled The Wind and Rain. Writer/director Claytie Mason has dramatized an Irish ballad by that name, and the performers sing, dance and/or fiddle. The 90-minute tale tells of...

Social progress is painfully slow. And while viewing TheatreWorks’ sumptuous stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird, based on the 1960 novel about 1930’s small-town life, acknowledgements of racism in today’s world plague the audience. The stunning visuals and superb script (dramatized by Christopher Sergel from the novel...

Legendary comedian Buddy Hackett comes back from the dead in his son’s new show titled Sandy Hackett’s Rat Pack Show, currently running at Marines’ Memorial Theatre. Buddy appears as the disembodied voice of a fallen angel introducing a devilishly good show featuring his compatriots from Vegas: Dino, Sammy,...

Which came first, the musical or the film? In the case of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, it was the 1988 film starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin. Now playing at Broadway by the Bay (directed by Brooke Knight), the 2005 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical (originally with John Lithgow and...

“Don’t push back the curtain,” host Sean Owens says in his Lady of the ‘Loin, currently running at the EXIT Theatre as part of DIVAfest 2010. As chanteuse Shannon Day sings his plaintive “Look Again,” he asks, “Is your gender so fixed? Do you bend?” His remarkably poetic...

The opening image of John Gabriel Borkman, at the Aurora, may be the production’s best. When the lights rise, the title character is hunched over a desk upstage — yet, motionless and cocooned in heavy linens, he seems more corpse than character. Downstage, on a settee, sits his...

The irreverent monologist Josh Kornbluth has ten righteous people for his minion. As a prayer service, his new show Andy Warhol: Good For The Jews? gathers the faces of Jews who have had a lasting impact on society, the same faces Warhol used for his controversial 1980 screen...

Stephanie Lynne Smith is leaving her post as artistic director of the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco to join up with fellow L/G Chorus member Carolyn Eidson to form their new musical comedy act “Fifi & Fanny.” Their inaugural show, Fifi & Fanny at the Texas Whorehouse, is...

Fans of edgy, comic rock musicals filled with outrageous drag queens and crazed bio-females should rush out to see Scalpel! The Killer Rock Musical at Brava Theater Center. This totally rock-out farce is by writer/ director D’Arcy Drollinger and features a cast of local favorites that is guaranteed...

A superb production of Terrence McNally’s Master Class recently opened at the New Conservatory Theatre Center (“NCTC”), and thanks to the more intimate setting (under 99-seat house), I liked this presentation better than the 2004 run in a much larger venue (at Berkeley Rep). Actress Michaela Greeley, a...

In the first of their Ira Gershwin Celebration Shows this season, 42nd Street Moon has done the master proud. Lady, Be Good! with its medley of memorable show tunes has put the fascination in “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” and the good in the title song! 

Written by Guy Bolton and Fred...

As a theatre critic, I cannot help eavesdropping, occasionally, on other audience members’ thoughts about a play. Sometimes a conversation vindicates my opinions, more often it challenges them, but rarely am I made to feel as I did during the intermission of American Conservatory Theater’s Vigil. A woman...

Coming up at the New Conservatory Theatre Center from April 14-17, P.A. Cooley (also known as Bay Area Cub 2010) brings his “Four Nights Only” Bearlesque. Talented local actor and funnyman Cooley has brought the gift of laughter to a multitude of Bay Area theatre audiences over the...

Bill Cain’s Equivocation — currently running at Marin Theatre Company in its Bay Area premiere — is as close to theatrical perfection that one will see in this lifetime. Anna Bullard, Lance Gardner, Andrew Hurteau, Craig Marker, Andy Murray and Charles Shaw Robinson give sterling performances (99.7% pure...

The Diary of Anne Frank, produced by the Custom Made Theatre Company and currently running at The Next Stage, chillingly portrays what it must have been like to grow up under house arrest during the Nazi occupation of Holland. And the play also unflinchingly reveals thirteen-year-old Anne’s attraction...

Across the Bay, something sweet is soon appearing at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage. Matthew Sweet, that is. And Girlfriend, a musical of first, young love between two high school boys (portrayed by Ryder Bach and Jason Hite) is based on Sweet’s album “Girlfriend.” Director Les Waters (Berkeley...

Strap-on baby bumps abound in Ray of Light Theatre’s BABY: A Musical now playing at the Off-Market Theatres. Pregnancy — or the lack thereof — is the driving theme behind this plot. The six happy actors and an ensemble of five depict the trials and tribulations of couples...

We haven’t come a long way, baby. At least not as far as corrupt politicians are concerned. In An Enemy of the People, written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen, capitalism rules, and anyone who gets in the way of the rich getting richer is summarily squashed. Currently running,...

“To be suspected, framed to make women false. The Moor is of a free and open nature,” states Iago in the Bard’s Othello. Originally intended for a male actor, in African-American Shakespeare Company’s smartly-taut Othello, it is a female Iago, and a lesbian at that, who plots the...

Tom Griffin’s 1984 play, The Boys Next Door, features four mentally-challenged men living in a group home. Ross Valley Players stages this heartwarming drama with a cast of talented local actors directed by Kim Bromley. Humor is the emphasis in Griffin’s sensitive script, and Bromley’s able cast captures...

Fats Waller, the early jazz musician, found success in paradox. As a pianist, he was all flourish; as a singer, all foible. His hands built him up, the right flitting through frills on top of the left’s ragtime rhythm, but his words knocked him down: “I don’t stay...

The Cutting Ball Theater and the Playwrights Foundation are currently mounting a deeply moving and challenging poetic drama of a spiritual journey punctuated by a spiritually-uplifting church service and Motown choreography. In this play 
and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, Oakland playwright Marcus Gardley uses the...

“Your ticket allows you to be an honorary Sri Lankan, gay, vegetarian. Now you can laugh at the pain!” And thus begins one of the most remarkable one-man shows to hit the Bay Area in ages. Ramble-ations: A One D’Lo Show, on Brava’s second stage, is performed...

Rarely does a set of talents converge to redefine performing arts history. But audiences at the opening night of SF Ballet’s production of John Neumeier’s sparkling, deep and quixotic The Little Mermaid – swimmingly-danced to penultimate perfection by Yuan Yuan Tan in the title role and guest artist...

Local gay playwright Nathan Sanders’ macabre full-length play, titled The Sugar Witch, is receiving its San Francisco premiere (and currently running) at the New Conservatory Theatre Center. This is the second in The Sugar Bean Trilogy (following The Sugar Bean Sisters), and this Southern Gothic tale is set...

How can you be a “good” person? Must you abide by the law, contribute to civic life and give to charity? Or, conversely, is your best hope only to recognize how “bad” a person you are? If so, should you just do the best you can and try...

Tomorrow! Productions presents The Night Stephen Sondheim Kissed Me, a one-night-only all-star cabaret birthday soiree concert to celebrate the 80th birthday of living legend and Broadway treasure Stephen Sondheim, on Monday, March 22, 7 p.m. at Martuni’s, 4 Valencia Street.

This beloved and iconic lion of the musical theatre...

A chainlink fence with a gap large enough to peer through separates the audience from the stage, which is strewn with newspapers and other detritus.  A few actors drag in a washtub, laundry basket, valise.  A resounding boom and a bank of lights descends at an angle stopping...

This weekend Over Our Heads, the world’s longest-running all-women improv troupe, celebrates 25 years of laughter and original music with a reunion appearance.  Annie Larson and Karen Ripley, both talented comics and members of OOH, took some time to answer a few questions regarding the show.  There are...

Fans of Broadway musicals recently received a treat with the staging of Forever Broadway at the Herbst Theatre. The cast of over 60 local singers, dancers and choreographers presented a multitude of songs from favorite Broadway musicals! The talented performers sang and moved rhythmically to precise choreography (all...

Hat’s off, here they come, those beautiful girls – and guys! – celebrating the 2nd Anniversary Gala of West Coast jazz/cabaret nightspot, The Rrazz Room.  The Headmistress of Hats, Jan Wahl, hosts the event that includes a stellar line-up, and Kelly Park is musical director.  The event also...

Pulp, Camp and History

The West Coast premiere of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, presented by Brava! For Women in the Arts, brings the iconic lesbian pulp novels written by novelist Ann Bannon in the ‘50s and ‘60s to life.  If you’re not already familiar with these books,...

Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer poses a formidable challenge to any cast.  The story — for all its love, deception, and avarice — runs the risk of boring its audience because almost everything has already happened before the play begins.  And we don’t even learn what’s happened until...

Ranging in length from 5 to 30 minutes, this year’s selection of spirited one-act plays in the Ninth Annual Bay One Acts Festival (aka BOA) varies in genre, tone and style.   The large number of plays are broken into two programs which rotate in a weekly repertory.

Under the...

“Bless the Founders of our country who were liberal elitists and not fundamentalist Christians.”

So prays writer/performer Dan Hoyle consoling himself at many challenging moments while on the road among the middle Americans he encounters in his latest show The Real Americans, now running at The Marsh.  Inhabiting character...

The Position is the third of five world premieres by local playwright William Bivins opening this season (upcoming are Altered Landscape in February at the Bay One-Acts Festival and The Apotheosis of Pig Husbandry in May at SF Playhouse).  It ventures into a world ravaged by 80% unemployment...

By Katharine Holland

On Feb. 26, Brava! for Women in the Arts Theater Center opens the West Coast premiere of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles.  Ann Bannon wrote pulp novels during the ‘50s and ‘60s, three of which inspired this dramatization by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman (which...

The Safe House, written by Geetha Reddy and originally commissioned by PlayGround, recently opened (and is currently running) at the SF Playhouse.  This co-production with PlayGround is the first production of the SF Playhouse’s The Sandbox, a series of world premieres and an interesting look at promising new...

I was born a Baptist, bred a Baptist and soon I’ll be a Baptist gone!” proclaims the legendary Mahalia Jackson.  Jeanie Tracy, an acclaimed recording artist portrays the title character in Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s inaugural production of Mahalia: A Gospel Musical by Tom Stoltz in their new...

Believe it or not, MEN have biological clocks, too.  No, not like reaching an age when they really have to have a baby.  It’s more like getting to a point in one’s life where you feel you’ll never truly create something important. The clock is ticking.  So it...

Pulitzer Award-winner Nilo Cruz’s Beauty of the Father, produced by Off Broadway West Theatre Company, develops the story of Emiliano (energetically played by Durand Garcia), a conflicted bisexual artist.  Currently running at the Phoenix Theatre.

Emiliano is conflicted between his responsibility to his estranged daughter Marina (Natasha Chacon) and...

Among the most impressive works in the performing arts are one-person, multiple-character solo shows.  Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 come to mind.  And now, add to that list Pamela Gien’s solo-actress/24-character saga, The...

Waitress Cora Values at the Gas ‘N’ Gulp slings not only hash, but also heaps of love and laughter in her current show about recovering from Valentine’s Day.  In Cora’s Recipe For Love, currently running at the EXIT Theatre, the holiday hostess out on the highway tells stories...

The First Grade by Joel Drake Johnson, now in its world premiere at the Aurora, doesn’t quite cohere. Hokier moments in which a dysfunctional family trades barbs in an effort to conceal their abiding affection for one another evoke a dark Everybody Loves Raymond. Yet other scenes conjure...

Many accuse theatre of losing its cultural relevance.  The classics are based on systems of belief that no longer apply, so the claims go, and newer works pertain only to affluent whites.  Oedipus el Rey, a reimagining of the archetypal Greek tragedy, now running at the Magic Theatre,...

Opening to an enthusiastic and sold-out house at The Marsh, Ron Jones’ The Wave sailed in with just a few choppy moments along the way.  Currently running, this eagerly anticipated world premiere musical has been extended to February 14. 

The script is based on an actual classroom experiment in...

It takes puppets to bring poetry to the surface.   And to echo truth without speaking.  So goes the true story of Moritz Rabinowitz, a Polish Jew, brought back to life as a puppet to tell his story.  Written, directed and produced by Wakka Wakka Productions (NYC-based theatre group...

A perennial hit since it first opened its Tony Award-winning 1964 production (directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins), Fiddler on the Roof has enjoyed great critical acclaim. Overall, this passionate story is about the ups and downs of family life. Family life, that is, in Russia in a...

New Conservatory Theatre Center well presents John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable.  Directed by Ben Randle, this 2005 Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play exposes the fundamental constraints of “certainty” within a larger framework of unassuming bigotry.  

The uninterrupted 78-minute play takes place in 1964 at the St. Nicholas...

Custom Made Theatre Company’s currently running production of Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter is a spellbinding and haunting masterpiece. The story of two young American men — a successful white publisher and his disheveled black buddy, an aspiring playwright — and the prostitute they engage explores the toxic...

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”—Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1914.

The winner of Marin Theatre Company’s 2009 Sky Cooper New American Play Prize, Sharr White’s Sunlight is the story of the last hour and a half of a liberal university president’s tenure as the head...

Continuing their artistic adventure and celebrating 40 years of great theatre-making, TheatreWorks mounts the world premiere (with Rubicon Theatre Company and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park) of Daddy Long Legs, the musical adaptation of Jean Webster’s novel. And this charming, two-person chamber musical (direction/book by John Caird...

Or When “Cagney” Gets Racy

“BEFORE I TURN 67 - next March - I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.‑ If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

From a simple personal ad begins one of the most...

The Lamplighters Music Theatre’s presentation of Patience, directed by Jane Erwin Hammett, may require a little (patience, that is), depending upon your point of view.  For Gilbert & Sullivan enthusiasts, it will no doubt be a frolic in the park.  Patience was the longest running G&S show, first...

To understand the characters in Animals Out of Paper, now in its West Coast premiere at SF Playhouse, one must look at their creations.  Freestyle raps, poems, random acts of kindness, a journal of blessings, an origami book called Folding What I Lost and works of origami‑— these...

Mary Alice Fry, Artistic Director of Footloose Dance Company, continues her version of the San Francisco Fringe Festival.  This year is the 10th anniversary of the annual Women on the Way Festival and features 19 different works by women in dance, theatre, and music at 3 separate SF...

Writer/performer David Templeton oozes religiosity in almost every minute of his two-act monologue titled Wretch Like Me, currently running at 142 Throckmorton Theater. But in the end he admits he was brainwashed into being a self-confessed “Jesus freak.” His story of a Southern California adolescence where he found...

Leslie Jordan Serves a Southern Slice in From Whence I Came

By Mike Ward

“In the South we don’t put crazy people away, we put them out on the porch so everyone can enjoy them!” It’s an accurate view of the world of television’s favorite Southern Sissy (Sordid...

While thinking about how to review Ross Valley Players new production of Moliere’s The Miser (with an updated translation by David Chambers), I mulled over something serious to structure my thoughts around or some deep literary concept one could say runs through this comic classic.  Perhaps it’s the...

Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig, currently running at The Jewish Theatre San Francisco, offers sharp truths on what divides relatives and what draws them together as well as explores how women define themselves through romances, careers and family. Though Anton Chekov’s The Three Sisters is an intentional influence,...

The Dames at Sea musical, now running at the New Conservatory Theatre Center and extended until Jan. 31, is a brilliant parody of those larger-than-life, flashy 1930s Busby Berkeley-type MGM movie spectaculars where an understudy straight from the sticks and just off the bus steps into a role...

‑Instead of sunscreen, Vitamin D, or a good, stiff drink, try Circus Finelli’s presentation of Frau Bachfeifengesicht’s “Spectacle of Perfection” to counteract the post-holiday slump pervading the Bay Area. The all-women extravaganza, directed by Michael Gene Sullivan, is an Alice in Wonderland experience of the purest order, pulling...

Lesbian Latina Marga Gomez reached a new height in her career as an edgy comic at her New Year’s Eve show at the Victoria Theater. The event was presented by Theatre Rhinoceros, and Rhino’s artistic director John Fisher was the bouncing, twirling MC who clearly enjoyed himself on...

Singer/Composer/Actor Tom Orr ‘s Jingle Bell Jock Show at the Eureka Theatre on Dec. 27 was a unapologetic and blatant erotic-themed holiday extravaganza that is fresh and authentic. In direct contrast to holiday shows across the Bay Area, Orr’s show was full of hilarious homoerotic word changes rammed...

With well over 300  theatre and dance companies in the SF Bay Area, there were more than a thousand productions during the year 2009.  And the SF Bay Times reviewers covered as many of them as possible.  Each writer sees 50-150 shows annually and reviews most of them. ...

For the latest Tom Orr parody production, Jingle Bell Jock!, the Eureka Theatre stage is set with two trees:  one for Christmas hung with jock straps, and the other a blue Hanukkah bush decorated with bagels, dreidels, and blueballs — er — blue balls.  It’s fun to figure...

By Mike Ward

San Francisco has a full platter of holiday treats, and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s Black Nativity is potentially among the tastiest.  The company’s signature piece, staged by LHT co-founder Stanley Williams, evolves each year with featured artists.  

This year gospel recording artist Debra Henderson gives a master...

By Mike Ward

“Who is the greater criminal?  The man who robs a bank, or the man who founds one?” asks the timeless 1928 Brecht/Weill epic-theatre-piece, The Threepenny Opera.  And Shotgun Players’ must-see, darkly-brilliant and currently-running production, staged with raw, seductive power by Susannah Martin, answers the question.  A...

Her hair tousled and her costumes oversized, the gamine AurĂ©lia ThierrĂ©e, star of AurĂ©lia’s Oratorio at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (currently running), looks more like her younger audience members.  But, childlike as the imagination of director/ designer Victoria ThierrĂ©e Chaplin is — her circus-in-miniature explores the fantastic and the...

“Bubbles are not solid, liquid or gas.  They’re here and they’re gone, like life.  They teach you the ephemeral quality of life.”  So says the “Pope of Soap” Louis Pearl, professional Bubble-ologist in The Greatest Bubble Show On Earth, currently running at The Marsh.  

Pearl, the Amazing Bubbleman, makes...

The Coverlettes, now performing The Coverlettes Cover Christmas at the Aurora Theatre, do best when they highlight what is great in both the oldies and the Christmas carols that they perform.  But ultimately it’s at the expense of themselves as individual vocalists.  

There’s a reason why 1960s girl group...

Katya Smirnoff-Skyy, that fabulous red-headed Russian drag queen countess, is back again for a brand new Holiday Spectacular! Katya will entertain you with her usual zestful, uproarious, broken English-Russian accented one woman show, featuring her gorgeous high soprano singing and kooky bantering about times “in the Old...

Alfred Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS, the Tony Award-winning whodunit comedy currently running at the Curran Theatre, is the first production in the 2009-2010 Citibank Best of Broadway series season.  Do not confuse it with the original 1935 film masterpiece by Alfred Hitchcock.  While the stage version is remarkably...

This season’s remounting of A Christmas Carol by American Conservatory Theater (currently running) brings a different life to the production.  Director Domenique Lozano has added some clever fillips to Carey Perloff’s original stage adaptation of the Victorian novel by Charles Dickens.  This retelling of the familiar story of...

The eighth annual production of David Sedaris’ The Santaland Diaries (adapted for the stage by Joe Mantello) by Combined Artform and Beck-n-Call is a refreshing, candy-coated slice of joy in these gloomy days of recessionist reflexes.  The 90-minute monologue, directed by Lux Obscura (ummh?), tells the story of...

Legendary tales are always subject to reinterpretation.  Of the thousands of variations of the Cinderella story, African-American Shakespeare Company has brought to the stage a decidedly new version.  This one is updated to an indeterminate time in an enchanted land.  There are hints of the Louisiana bayou, but...

The Dames at Sea musical, now running at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, is a brilliant parody of those larger than life, flashy 1930s Busby Berkeley type MGM movie spectaculars in which an understudy straight from the sticks and just off the bus steps into a role because...

For the bugs in OVO - the U.S. premiere of Cirque du Soleil’s newest show now playing at AT&T Park - the sky looms close. The bulges in the big top canopy that envelop the playing space and its 2,600 seats create a cocoon-like shelter against which lights...

“The Golden Girls” episodes - the ones acted by an all-drag live cast - are always a treat to watch. As a very special sugarplum for their fans, they are currently acting out the actual scripts from the classic TV series, The Golden Girls, with a seasonal theme...

With dark humor and satirical wit, Wylie Herman’s Better Homes and Ammo, currently running at the EXIT Theatre, examines the interactions of a family locked in a subterranean fallout shelter after surprise nuclear attacks.  The apocalypse has landed.  And the proprietor of a military surplus store has herded...

42nd Street Moon is currently producing their holiday musical, Jubilee — Cole Porter and Moss Hart’s classic take on British royalty run riot.  Jubilee was 42nd Street Moon’s inaugural production in 1993, and it proved so popular that they brought it back in 1995.  And Porter/Hart’s farce is...

For many, The Custom Made Theatre Company’s production of Cotton Patch Gospel is an ideal holiday show.  This backwoods, bluegrass musical tale by Tom Key and Russell Treyz (book) and Harry Chapin (music and lyrics) recounts the “second coming” of Jesus with unabashed sincerity.  The production values are...

Some of us still harbor the romantic fantasy of running away to the circus.  For classically-trained actress Michelle Matlock, an out and proud lesbian, it wasn’t always the case.  Now celebrating her first year of clowning as the beautiful Ladybug in Cirque du Soleil’s OVO — currently playing...

Interview with John Fisher, Artistic Director of Theatre Rhinoceros

John Fisher, Artistic Director for Theatre Rhinoceros, recently took some time from his hectic schedule to spread the word about their upcoming one-night only performance of A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, co-produced this year with Word for...

Popular NYC Holiday Drag Musical Makes SF Debut Dec. 8 & 9

When Madonna’s Christmas Celebration debuted in the Big Apple five years ago, hundreds raced to the small off-Broadway theatre hosting it - and those were just the protesters! According to Mimi Imfurst, the New...

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Rosalind, one of his wittiest heroines, manipulates her beloved, Orlando, by disguising herself as a man.  In the Bard’s original productions, a man would have played Rosalind — in other words, a man playing a woman playing a man.  In its West...

When Jo answers a casual-encounters ad for “sex to change the course of the world,” she has no idea that grad-student Jules actually fears that the apocalypse is at hand and is looking for a partner to repopulate the species.  In BOOM, an explosive comedy about the end...

Consider for a brief moment those religious folks waving signs proclaiming “God Hates Fags” and/or the devout who tooketh away California’s same-sex marriage rights.  Well, the perfect antidote to those poisonous proselytizers is found in Pulp Scripture.  Here, playwright William Bivins humorously proves (in one too-brief hour) that...

“When does love become a crime and blood an obligation?”  In ReOrient 2009, a two-program rotating repertory of 9 short plays, many facets of love and aggression intermingle to varied effect.  Produced at the Thick House by Golden Thread Productions (SF theatre company dedicated to exploring the Middle...

It takes Charlie Varon and a widow to create a religious reality that would otherwise go unseen in Rabbi Sam, written and performed by Varon (developed and directed by David Ford with music composed by Bruce Barth).  In just over two hours, Varon inhabits 12 characters, including  Rabbi...

It can be a good thing when a play shows its age.  But while some plays aptly evoke worlds of the past, others are merely products of the past. 

Beautiful Thing, now in its ten-year anniversary production at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, falls into the latter category. ...

Spare Stage’s production of Lee Blessing’s A Body of Water (currently playing at the EXIT Theatre) examines the nature of personal identity as defined by memory and the extent to which we choose what we remember, and in doing so, choose our identity.

Before the lights dim, the sound...

How far will a person go to save a loved one?  In the “anything is possible” world of Bill Bivins’ play The Afterlife of the Mind, Lydia will stop at nothing — even if it means hosting her husband’s brain in her own body!  That may sound like...

Actors Theatre of San Francisco’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, directed by Keith Phillips, is outstanding, exquisitely crafted and well worth seeing.  It has been said that Edward Albee was never satisfied with productions of his work, and he preferred not to view them, having observed...

One of them most spectacular shows seen in San Francisco in years, The Thrillpeddlers’ Pearls Over Shanghai  is riding a wave of popularity, and it has been sold out for months. Now the Cockette musical remounting has been held over through Jan. 23. The show is being presented...

The Fringe of Marin Fall 2009 recently opened its 24th season at Dominican University and is presenting thirteen new short plays and solos (Programs One and Two running in repertory) written, acted and directed by local Bay Area talent.  Program Two features seven works (reviewed below).

Opening the evening...

In November, David Mamet’s latest comedy (currently running at American Conservatory Theater), President Charles Smith — the most corrupt boob ever to occupy the Oval Office — is in the last days of his bid for re-election. Not surprisingly, the country is a disastrous mess, and his polls...

Aileen Clark does not consider herself to be a playwright, but she certainly knows how to tell a rich story.  Produced by Guerrilla Rep and Ann Marie Productions, she does so with the help of co-writer John Caldon in How I Stopped Worrying and Lost My Virginity.  Premiering...

By Annette Lust

Neil Labute’s Fat Pig (currently running at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre) grabs and holds your interest with its witty and cutting repartee between Tom, his newfound fat girlfriend Helen, his protective friend Carter, and jealous ex-girlfriend Jeannie. But this highly comical repartee gradually turns to a dark...

The Jewish Theatre of San Francisco (TJT) opens its first season under its new name (fka Traveling Jewish Theatre) with the world premiere of Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd’s Stateless:  A Hip-Hop Vaudeville Experience.

Stateless begins with a narrator telling the performers (and thereby the audience as well) that...

As the second production of their 80th(!) season, Ross Valley Players presents The Miracle Worker by William Gibson.  This production commemorates the 50th anniversary of The Miracle Worker, which premiered October 19, 1959 at Broadway’s Playhouse Theatre and ran 719 performances. 

Set in Alabama in the 1880’s the play...

Written in 1949, EugĂšne Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano, was created from his observation of the absurdity in British dialogue while he was learning English.  Running slightly over an hour without intermission, The Cutting Ball Theater’s production (currently running), directed and translated from the French original by...

“The rio is a ghost of what it used to be, and all the people who live nearby are ghosts.” 

But it’s not only a Halloween story. Octavio Solis’ Ghosts of the River are tales of love, loss, courage, and honor for the people who live at the border...

“Was I convincing?” asks Mrs. (Margaret) Whitney, the title character of John Kolvenbach’s new drama, at the Magic Theatre. Though the query is nominally directed at Finn, the son of her ex-husband, this question of effective performance - of self, or some concept of it - is one...

Expression Productions recently opened its production of Oleanna, written by David Mamet and directed by Andrey Esterlis, at Royce Gallery, one of the newer venues for theater in San Francisco. Royce Gallery is clean and comfortable and, true to its name, features work on its walls currently by...

If you have yet to experience Halloween in the Castro: A Horror Opera, there’s still have time before All Hallow’s Eve is all but over.  Composer and librettist extraordinaire Jack Curtis Dubowsky has created a monster of a hit show featuring the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco and...

So who had a rotten childhood?  Well, in the rock musical The Who’s Tommy, the titular character sure qualifies.  And yet, in this tribute to life and music the worst of times (and upbringings) is overcome and sensationally celebrated.  This Ray of Light’s production, currently running at the...

Tiny Kushner, a series of five short plays by Tony Kushner takes us to (among other places) New York City, Indiana, two psychiatrists’ offices, heaven, and the moon.  And the characters we encounter therein are no less diverse.  But Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in...

Jennifer Jajeh is a consummate impressionist as well as a dancer, actress, Arab, and a troublemaker. To be fair, trouble seems to follow her, as she recounts in her live show I Heart Hamas, extended 4 additional weeks at the Off-Market Theater until Nov. 21.  For those with...

Two Diverging Views of Childhood
In Albert’s Fear — one of four plays recently presented as part of the International Czech Theater Festival at The Marsh — actor/creator Vojta Svejda examines the triumphs of a small boy over his timidity and indecisiveness.  In one short hour, solo artist...

You know how storytellers like to clean up their tales for a mainstream audience?  Well, NOT the SF Buffoons!  The all-male collective’s currently running show, The Hasheesh Eater, rolls in the squalor of dirty gutters and gives audiences perhaps their most realistic glimpse of gold-rush San Francisco ever. ...

Zombie Town by Tim Bauer (along with members of the Catharsis Collective) is a social and genre satire with a well-realized B-movie texture, even when interrupted by self-referential asides.  Currently running at the EXIT Stage Left, the production focuses not only on the ridiculous theme of reanimated corpses,...

From silver-sequined tube top and accessories to in-your-face stage presence, Trixxie Carr as the titular character ROCKS!  Hold Me Closer, Tiny Dionysus may confuse at times, but it never fails to captivate.  The music, visuals, and dance (supplied in abundance by a talented and supple young cast) wildly...

The Royal Underground Theatre Company is currently presenting a fresh new look at Jekyll and Hyde: The Musical, the smash Broadway musical hit based on the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.  The original stage concept was by Steve Cuden...

In The Clean House (a Pulitzer finalist), Sarah Ruhl allows her characters to speak for themselves as few other playwrights can.  The play, now being produced by Woman’s Will Theater Company, opens with soliloquies by each of the three female leads.  Right away the brutally honest (“I did...

The artistry in Goldfish, now in its Bay Area premiere at the Magic Theatre, lies in its timing:  Scenes always end in exactly the right places, and the confrontations within them are articulate and witty.  But, in failing to differentiate his character’s voices during these intellectual sparring matches,...

Thrillpeddlers presents Shocktoberfest!! 2009 The Torture Garden, their tenth annual pageant of terror, now running at The Hypnodrome.  The evening features two one-act plays:  “The Phantom Limb” by Rob Keefe (commissioned by Thrillpeddlers) and “The Torture Garden” by Pierre Chaine and Andre de Lorde (based on the book...

The Custom Made Theatre Company’s production of The Heidi Chronicles highlights this Pulitzer prize-winning play by Wendy Wasserstein that brought women and their political status  to a primary, rather than a secondary, place on the stage.  Directed by Brian Katz, the play chronicles the life of feminist art...

Sandra Bernhard, singer, satirist, and irreverent comic, is bringing her new show, “Whatever It Takes” to the Rrazz Room at Hotel Nikko.  Bernhard was kind enough to give an interview to Bay Times.

(Bay Times) What is the meaning of the title of your upcoming SF appearance, Whatever It...

It’s a no-brainer.  Ann Randolph is a comic genius
 and not just any sort of hide-your-light-behind-a-bush kind of genius, but a hardworking, dare-to-put-it-out-there kind of genius.  If you missed her first show Squeeze Box that played last year at The Marsh (and deservedly won Best Solo Show from...

When does one know they’re an artist?  For someone named Asher Lev, it was early.  At six years old he could not stop drawing pictures of his mother, his father and the Hasidic world of Brooklyn where he lived.  In Aaron Posner’s play adaptation of Chaim Potok’s novel...

Sins Invalid returned to San Francisco this past weekend, Oct. 2 - 4, with three evening performances at the Brava Theatre. Co-founded by Patty Berne and Leroy Moore in 2006, Sins Invalid is a performance project reflecting the sexual world of the queer and gender variant disabled, a...

“We need help!”

Harsh economic times have hit us all.  And theaters are no exception.  Currently, the Willows Theatre faces a financial crisis that may force it to shut down both its mainstage facility in Concord and its cabaret in Martinez.  Reason?  Growing debt.  Their goal?  $350,000 by October...

When The Kids Are Away, The Parents Will Play

The San Francisco Playhouse kicks off its new season with the world premiere of First Day of School by Billy Aronson.

Married couple Susan (Zehra Berkman) and David (Bill English) have dropped off their two children on the morning...

So I get off a plane from Budapest where I was helping out filmmaker and activist Douglas Conrad on a project about the recent threats against the queer community in Hungary and the dynamic Pride Celebrations that have been taking place in this Eastern European country for more...

In Little Dog Laughed, Mitchell (Matt Socha), an aspiring movie star, and his agent Diane (Michaela Greeley) are horrified at the prospect of his acting in a play. Truly, what could be worse for an acting career than a dalliance with theatre? The answer, as Diane constantly reminds...

The comparison of playwright Philip Kan Gotanda to Samuel Beckett is apt. In his new play, Angry Red Drum, now in its world premiere by the Asian American Theater Company, Gotanda creates a post-apocalyptic sense of imprisonment that can only be reminiscent of the existentialist master. As with...

Blessing Her Heart — Subtle and Poignant

Three southern ladies speak their minds in three short solo pieces which comprise “Blessing Her Heart” by local playwright Susan Jackson.  Produced by Southern Railroad Company, this Fringe Festival entry excels with poignant writing, performances, and direction.  Forsaking the prevalent wildness of...

“It’s insanity in stereo here.”  Dwelling within a swirling miasma of madness, “No Ordinary Nut” written and directed by local gay playwright Jamie Daniel, perfectly fits the SF Fringe Festival goal to encourage “artists to take risks, explore ideas, pose questions and tell their stories in new and...

Given the anything-goes nature of the 2009 SF Fringe Festival, the Bay Area premiere of Spider Baby the Musical introduces the audience to a bit of sensationalism via inbreeding, sexual repression, murder, and cannibalism.  Remember the old-fashioned musical where boy meets girl, loses her, then gets her back? ...

By Ben Sinclair

Overall I had a great time with American Idiot: The Musical. Director Michael Mayer’s adaptation of Green Day’s last hit record exuberantly celebrates the tradition of the punk rocker within America’s mainstream. His embellished version - songs from the album rearranged with a couple politically relevant...

“It’s a very complicated issue,” states Garrison Harward, the writer and director of Marriage: a queer institution (part of the 2009 SF Fringe Festival), regarding homophobia and Proposition 8, both vital topics in today’s glbt community. And with his innovative 60-minute play, this young Chico State University student...

Dan Hoyle’s Tings Dey Happen, which has returned briefly to San Francisco prior to departing for a tour in Nigeria, is well deserving of all its critical acclaim. Directed by Charlie Varon, this one-man tour de force is nothing short of amazing. We find ourselves within the underbelly...

All the whimsy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is accentuated in the current Cal Shakes production, and the director brought out the warmth of the human love, even for those blinded by magic herbs. The fairy world opens up on a fanciful stage. The actors present strong, definitive...

The Headless Woman, written and directed by Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, tells a story of mishap and privilege in negative space, a technique far more compelling than linear narrative. In Spanish with English subtitles, running 92 minutes, it is the story of Vero (short for Veronica), played by...

David Lynch’s movie Blue Velvet has become an underground cult classic since its release in 1986. Foul Play company has given it a live interpretation. On a small underground stage, they tell the same story as the movie, but with a distinctive technique that has the texture of...

You Can’t Get There From Here opens the Z Space at Project Artaud

Anne Galjour hails from Southeastern Louisiana but she’s lived in the Bay Area for 29 years and has been performing her solo work on the East and West coasts for many years. While earlier...

Legs and All, the brainchild of Summer Shapiro, in collaboration with Peter Musante, Brandi Brandes and Jeremy Shapiro, is a brilliant translation of the details of conversant life as we know it, taking these details a few steps beyond Harold Pinter and flinging them with utmost precision into...

At the end of A (Bearded) Lady, a one-woman show at the Fringe Festival, our protagonist thanks her audience, “kindly priests,” for listening to her “confession.”  Yet, “confess” the Bearded Lady does not; such a word implies secrecy with compulsion to reveal. The Bearded Lady merely narrates.

Hers...

The Ross Valley Players kicks off its 80th season with Premiere, the last play written by award-winner Dale Wasserman, the Tony Award recipient for his book of Man of La Mancha and the stage version of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Author and journalist, Abby Wasserman, niece of...

Aurora’s current production of a Great Depression-era play provides intense involvement in the home-life of an impoverished Bronx family. Three generations populate this household, along with a boarder, a suitor and a well-off brother. Joy Carlin’s direction of Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets, brings together some venerable...

Art matters, says Art, Yasmina Reza’s international dramatic phenomenon. Our reactions to even a single painting can reflect, or mask, deeply held beliefs, so what happens when different beliefs come into conflict? With what weapons should combatants wage a battle of aesthetics? Or, more importantly, a battle of...

Having graced the stages of many local venues, including El Rio, the annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy at Xmas in Chinatown, The Herbst Theatre, Dolores Café, local Jewish lesbian comic Lisa Geduldig is taking her talent east to meet up with other stand-up comedy colleagues for a run...

Before I write anything more on the matter, I will warn you/ taunt you with the fact that in Tom Orr’s latest hilariously entertaining cabaret show, A Crass Act, the star appears totally nude - both frontal and backal – in a portion of his performance. Yes, I...

The color of the face is a strong element of racial politics, but the feeling of otherness, in such a context, is a vital subtext in many of David Henry Hwang’s plays, like in M Butterfly and in the more recent Yellow Face, now at TheatreWorks. Hwang has...

A Long Day’s Journey into Oklahoma

It’s been over a year since Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County garnered seven Tony nominations on Broadway, winning five including Best Play as well as snapping up a Pulitzer Prize. Now, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, it’s playing through September 6...

Julius Caesar, now at Marin Shakes, is hardly a straight tragedy; and if it were, it would not be mainly Caesar’s. It falls in the tragic-historical category and if anyone is a hero, Brutus is. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare comes close to making a play out of sheer...

Odd characters in eccentric costumes portray a sympathetic parody of gay life, customs and attitudes, using SF as a metaphor, in Shame! now at Mama Calizo’s. Subtitled An Original Grotesque Queer Performance, this acutely observed, very physical show uses elements of commedia dell’arte to satirize local notions, but...

The set of El Otro, now in revival at Thick Description, looks empty at first: the lines of the black-box playing space are interrupted only by a cluster of candles in the upstage left corner. But once the action of this fluid play spills outward, the initial vacancy...

Good Boys and True, which opened recently at New Conservatory, is a disappointing amateur production that fails to grasp fully playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s underlying intent. The acting consists of line recitations and playing emotion rather than embodying characters who realize the situation and experience its emotional impetus. The...

John Steinbeck’s seminal novel The Grapes of Wrath, adapted for stage by Frank Galati (Steppenwolf Theatre, university professor of drama and inductee to the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of fame) is a powerful work that receives its just reward in Actors Theatre’s dynamic production, directed by Jennifer...

Impressionist Joshua Walters bares his psyches — both of them — to the audience in his show w Madhouse Rhythm, now at the Climate. His well-defined character transitions lead from a human beat box, through an Afro-centric uncle to a series of psychologists and herbalists. The show is...

In their second production in the uniquely intimate chamber theater at Pena Pachamama in North Beach, The People’s Theatre has once more served up an entertaining and delectable treat with four humorous short plays about food. Under the larger title of Theater You Can Eat by local playwright...

From atop a jumbled pile of artifacts and clayey soil, a clear voice exhorts. In Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, now at Cal Shakes, the clear voice is as jumbled as the soil heap, but cheery, even in the face of doom. Annie, buried in the soil up to...

Newly Revised, Perversionized Pearls Over Shanghai

As you may know, at the June 17 opening, I gave a sterling review of Pearls over Shanghai, the all-singing, all-dancing Cockettes musical extravaganza produced by Thrillpeddlers – held over and now playing through September 20 at the Hypnodrome Theatre. My only complaint...

Jim David enacts A Streetcar Named Desire in his one-man show South Pathetic, now at New Conservatory. It would be difficult enough to play all the parts of the Tennessee Williams play, but to do it with a cast of small town southern losers at the worst community...

When Meg Mackay sings “Making Love Alone,” a slow ballad, her crotch-grabbing and blatantly suggestive mime telegraph that this performer is not afraid to look silly. She does it with a graceful style that trumps her tendency toward risquĂ© humor, which she sprinkles liberally throughout this cabaret show...

In Traveling Light, the latest sight-specific work that played to sold-out audiences during its brief two week-end run at the Mint, choreographer/director Joe Goode providds a visceral experience that demonstrated the extent of his sensitive and brilliant ear to the pulse of our nation’s current dilemma. What is...

Golden Thread Productions, whose aim is to nurture artists of Middle Eastern heritage, premiered Denmo Ibrahim’s Ecstasy/a waterfable last weekend at The Thick House. The ancient Sufi Story “When the Waters Were Changed”, the inspiration for the theatre piece Ecstasy, recounts a time when Khidr, the teacher of...

Stephen Sondheim has written many songs, all the way from such big hits as Sweeny Todd, A Little Night Music, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and abomination Merrily We Roll Along. Then conceived an evening of his hits, as well as lesser known...

By Carol Dunne

They say that an existentialist attitude is an awareness of the absurdity of reality. If so, then Skid Row and its runaway teens are the quintessential existentialists, for their daily struggle to feed themselves and find a safe place to sleep would qualify as the ultimate...

The venerable works of William Shakespeare have been subjected to many different interpretations over the centuries, and Marin Shakes’ latest takes liberties The Bard could never have imagined. Co-director Lesley Currier described it succinctly as a journey to a “psychedelic far out Illyria.” The seventies garb and rock...

The ages-old theme of love torn apart by war is explored once again in TheatreWork’s world premiere of Tinyard Hill as part of their New Works Festival. This musical is full of songs and presents a story of small-town America being affected by ‘Nam and a sophisticated New Yorker. Summer...

The West Coast premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places opened last Saturday, produced by Ross Valley Players. This beautifully written play is about six lonely people whose lives intersect and overlap in ordinary places: offices, homes, bars, and hotels. The structure of the play is almost like...

Performance art entails logistical complication: a lot of people, audience and artists have to be in the same place at the same time — often for an extended period of time. Yet, while itt’s difficult to attract an audience to a show, it’s impossible to bring them to a rehearsal,...

By Dr. Annette Lust

One can see Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge, performed by the Off Broadway West Company and staged by other companies, as though each were treating it as a different play, theme-wise. This is because of the wealth of emotional themes the play contains. Off Broadway West...

Under a perfect sky on a balmy night in NYC, the Metropolitan Opera presented three young well-trained voices singing their hearts out to an enthusiastic crowd of 4,300 music lovers. The only distraction came from a few airplanes that flew surprisingly close. Opening the program were several selections of Mozart,...

Oscar Wilde’s comedy of manners The Importance of Being Earnest is a spoof of the hypocrisy of upper middle class Victorian English society. Marin Shakes’ production of the play remains true to its origins while occasionally spoofing the play itself. On a three-level outdoor set, in three acts, the action...

When exes make a chance encounter after five years apart, the still-smoldering embers of passion flare up, new life breathed into them by new marriages. Noel Coward wrote the play Private Lives about the aftermath of that unexpected meeting, and Cal Shakes’ current production is a masterful realization of the...

What do you do when you’re stuck on a train with the author of the book you’ve brought along, and you’ve got nothing else to read? Do you say something, do you just start reading, or do you do nothing at all? What if you’re the writer, and you see...

Berkeley Rep’s production of Wishful Drinking, written and performed by Carrie Fisher and directed by Tony Taccone, is a cozy, down-home visit with Hollywood celebrity and its harmful side effects. We join Carrie in her glass house, set appropriately as a living room with glass walls through which we view...

A Winning Tale of Folklore and Finance “Too Big to Fail”

Fourth of July would not be the same without a rousing crowd at Dolores Park celebrating not only Independence Day but also the half century mark of SF Mime Troupe’s foray into dramatized independent thought...

By Carol Dunne

How can one hold onto joy in an increasingly controlled society that is, by its very nature, soul-denying? That is the premise of Dale Wasserman’s play now at SF Playhouse, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on the novel by Ken Kesey. Bravo to Director...

S F Opera’s final, sold-out performance of Porgy and Bess, by George and Ira Gershwin, was presented in its restored state as the Gershwins had written it, and was well worth experiencing. The original work premiered in 1935 and was subsequently revised to accommodate a shorter running time....

In conjunction with the Network of Ensemble Theaters, San Francisco’s own foolsFURY concluded their annual furyFACTORY last weekend at Traveling Jewish Theatre and NOHspace with an array of theatre artists re-examining the concept of America and its place in the world.

The three weeks of programming featured a diversity...

As part of the National Queer Arts Festival, the SF Moving Men presented Dancing @ The Garage, a lively series of contemporary movement numbers. The nine short pieces by six artists explored many sensibilities. Moving Men is a new company of dancers that choreographer and Artistic Director of...

Raquel Gutierrez and Butchlalis de Panochtitlan present The Barber of East L. A. as part of FURY Factory 2009. This three-hander by women monologists creates a borrida of Eastside characters. The tales of the barber, an actual woman barber with her own shop in Eastside, the predominantly Hispanic...

The Aurora’s latest production Jack Goes Boating by Bob Glaudini is the perfect play for a summer evening in Berkeley. It opens on the Aurora’s intimate space where three quarters of the audience seated around the stage listen to a couple of New York limo chauffeurs, Jack (Danny...

The award-winning, professional Porchlight Theatre Company opened its annual outdoor summer season with Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, a story that takes place in the Russian countryside in the early Twentieth Century.

Three Sisters is a naturalistic play about the decay of the privileged class in Russia and the search...

In their West Coast premiere of their world wide tour of Beyond the Mirror, the New York Bond St. Theatre, that has for a number of years organized theatre projects in teacher training and youth programs in crisis areas, and the Kabul Exile Theatre, that began this multi-media...

Because The Cockettes Are Back, And Better Than Ever

I fondly recall through a drug haze memory when the Cockettes played live at the Palace Theatre in North Beach for ‘70s midnight productions of such gems as Pearls over Shanghai. Four decades later, I heard a...

If you’ve ever seen the oft performed 1958 one-act play Zoo Story by Edward Albee, you probably remember two strangers who meet in New York’s Central Park. Jerry talks non-stop. Peter listens, sitting on a bench. What we learn about Peter’s life is what Jerry elicits from many...