The Bay Area has been pretty good to Lee Hall of late. Last year, his musical adaptation (with music by Sir Elton John) of his movie Billy Elliot received rapturous notices (though closed a month early) at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. It's a show that had already won the British scribe a 2009 Tony Award for best book of a musical.

Hall's Broadway follow-up to Billy was a play called The Pitmen Painters, another exploration of arts influence on the population of Northern England. Now that play makes its West Coast debut courtesy of TheatreWorks in Mountain View.

I spoke with Hall about his many and varied projects for an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle. Click for more.

Now, apparently, it's time to hear from Bay Area sons.

At Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Jonathan Moscone (with an assist from Tony Taccone) is grappling with the loss and legacy of his father, slain San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, in Ghost Light. Now at American Conservatory Theater, Lorenzo Pisoni is recounting his childhood as the son of a clown, Pickle Family Circus' Larry Pisoni, in Humor Abuse.

Right at the top of this captivating 80-minue show, the younger Pisoni tells us flat out that he was raised to be his father's straight man. "I'm not funny," he says.

That most scrumptious of Bay Area theater companies, Word for Word, is going the way of the foodie. Yes, Word for Word, the company that turns short fiction into extraordinary theater, is diving headlong into food lit with Food Stories: Pleasure Is Pleasure.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Word for Word's Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter about the show (directed by Theatre Rhino Artistic Director John Fisher) for the San Francisco Chronicle. Also got to chat with one of the authors featured in the show, T.C. Boyle, whose "Sorry Fugu" is a delightful tale of a New York chef battling his nerves and his confidence during three visits by the harshest food critic in town. I did not get to speak with the other author, Alice McDermott, whose story "Enough" is also featured.

Read the story here.

Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone have found the courage to stay out of what they call "the suck drawer."

The phrase comes from Ghost Light, the play Moscone and Taccone conceived together and that Taccone wrote and Moscone directed and it has to do with the life of an artist – the life of anyone, really – and the effort to create work and, ultimately, a life that is true and uniquely individual.

I expected Ghost Light, a co-production of Berkeley Repertory Theatre (where Taccone is artistic director) and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the play had the first leg of its world premiere last summer, to be about grief and the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. It is about those things. How could it not be, seeing as how it deals primarily with the effect of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone's assassination in 1978, when his son Jon was 14 years old.

I interviewed Don Reed about his new autobiographical solo show The Kipling Hotel, which opens this weekend at The Marsh Berkeley.

You can read the article here.

This is the second chapter in what will likely be a trilogy of solo shows about the Oakland native's life. The first was the phenomenally successful East 14th, which ran at The Marsh for 2 1/2 years – no mean feat for a guy who lives in Los Angeles and works as the warmup comedian for "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."

Here's what didn't make the newspaper...

Let's just get right to it. 2011 was another year full of fantastic local theater (and some nice imports). Somehow, most of our theater companies has managed thus far to weather the bruising economy. May the new year find audiences clamoring for more great theater.

1. How to Write a New Book for the Bible by Bill Cain
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Directed by Kent Nicholson

Only a few days ago I was telling someone about this play – my favorite new play of 2011 and the most moving theatrical experience I've had in a long time – and it happened again. I got choked up. That happens every time I try to describe Cain's deeply beautiful ode to his family and to the spirituality that family creates (or maybe that's vice-versa). Nicholson's production, from the excellent actors to the simple, elegant design, let the play emerge in all its glory.

Like a weak episode of "Glee" shot up with steriods and stuffed full of anti-depressants, Bring It On: The Musical sends up a rousing cheer for the robotic vapidity of the new Broadway. The real shame about this overblown movie-to-stage adaptation is that it's chock full of appealing, talented and boundlessly energetic young performers, but their sparkling humanity is mostly lost in the non-stop machine of this depressingly mechanical, surprisingly shrill effort (a part of the SHN season).

Targeted to an age range of teens to twentysomethings who slavishly recite lines from the 2000 movie starring Kirsten Dunst as a beleaguered cheerleading squad captain, this musical has a startling pedigree with its multi-award-winning creative team. You'd think among this heavily lauded crowd of artists that someone could have located a little heart or a moment of actual human connection. But no. This is musical by committee, and a strenuous effort it seems to have been.