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 Aurélia Thierrée, star of Aurélia’s Oratorio at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (currently running), looks more like her younger audience members.  But, childlike as the imagination of director/ designer Victoria Thierrée 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, Eugène 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 risqué 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...

It would be hard enough to waste your adolescence in “The Salad Bowl of America” Salinas California, but add the onus of being a 1980s gay Asian and the burden could become oppressive. Impressionist Kenny Yun finds humor and optimism in his recollections of personal experiences in just...

“Why are there so many doors in here?” asks Dr. Rance in Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, now at Marin Theatre Company. “Was it designed by a lunatic?” It’s a humorous rhetorical question in the context of the mental hospital examination room where this classic farce is...

The Golden Girls: More Gay Pride Episodes is now playing at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory through June 26. Two new shows based on the original scripts of the TV series that ran for seven successful seasons, “Goodbye, Mr. Gordon” and “Scared Straight,” are delightfully acted by an all-drag...

Jeffrey Self’s My Life on the Craigslist, an autobiographical solo show now at New Conservatory, begins, as most lives have, before Craigslist came into being. Self grew up and discovered his homosexuality in Rome, Georgia, where “if you meet another gay person, you feel obligated to have sex...

Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven
It’s a joy to find good theatre writing that is well performed. Hearing Mark Twain’s words brought to life at the People’s Theatre production in the intimate North Beach venue at Pena Pachamama is one of those joy-inducing experiences that makes for a...

As pop/rock rhythms energize the youth, Cal Shakes launches its 35th Anniversary Season with Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone’s production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a passionate tale of young lovers caught in a dangerous and threatening world. Moscone delivers a modern-dress Romeo as the tragedy of a violence-wracked...

Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, now at Actors Theatre, is a refreshingly intimate portrayal of the playwright’s iconic story of infidelity. Skillfully directed by Keith Phillips and James Baldock, the inverted history of Jerry’s affair of seven years with Emma, the wife of Robert, Jerry’s best friend, is complemented by ...

“There’s a place for us,” sings a voice in the darkness at the beginning of Terrence McNally’s Some Men, now in its West Coast premiere at New Conservatory. As the lights rise, the nine members of the all-male cast materialize, and “us” suddenly refers to a new antecedent:...

Mister Krapp led a hard life in Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape. Not only that, he forced himself to relive it in excruciating detail through reviewing audio recordings he had made years earlier. Under Rob Melrose’s direction, Paul Gerrior plays Krapp with a strong sense of bemusement...

At first, Mauritius seems a curious title for the thrilling new drama by Theresa Rebeck that just opened at The Magic Theatre.  Sure, Jackie, our young protagonist, inherits a couple of rare postage stamps that hail from thereabouts. But what could be farther away from a dank stamp...

Hysterical!  This theatrical romp through ancient Rome (64 AD) keeps the laughs coming.  And with the jarring exception of some historically inaccurate homophobia, it’s bunches of fun. Berkeley Rep stylishly produces the world premiere of You, Nero by Amy Freed with great performances and stunning visuals. The 2-1/2...

Lovingly “ripped-off” from the internationally famous comedy team’s most popular motion picture, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Python’s Spamalot is deservedly the winner of three Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Director (Mike Nichols), as well as the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards for...