Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

As Frankie Valli once sang, “Bye-bye, baby, baby bye-bye.”
It’s closing weekend for Jersey Boys, the show the Bay Area has come to love in a big way. I say that with confidence having heard from friends, co-workers, readers and total strangers about how much they enjoyed what is probably one of the most enjoyable musicals [...]

Dean Martin can be heard crooning in the background as Christine Andreas scurries around her kitchen, the phone tucked between shoulder and ear, as she conducts an interview and prepares for a party she’s throwing her son in a few hours.
“My son turns 20 in a few days, and when you’re special, you get lots [...]

Apparently the leap from the Broadway stage to television takes a little longer than previously thought.
If you planned this weekend around multiple screenings of Legally Blonde, the Musical on MTV, you’re going to have to find other ways to amuse yourself.
The MTV broadcast of Legally Blonde, the Musical will not screen until Oct. 13
But the [...]

Pranks are all well and good…as long as you’re not the vicitm.
Pgranstgroup seems to be a group that pulls elaborate pranks and, in true 21st-century fashion, posts them online for all to see.
They came to my attention because their pranks occasionally involve…wait for it…musical theater.
Who doesn’t love a prank with original songs?
Here’s something Prangstgrup calls [...]

Opened Sept. 22, 2007 at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center

Broadway by the Bay hits musical target with Annie Get Your Gun
There’s simply no business like Irving Berlin’s show business: grit, glitter, grins and some of the best, most buoyant musical theater tunes ever to hit a stage.
Perhaps Berlin’s best overall package is Annie Get [...]

Opened Sept. 22, 2007 at the Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda
Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Cal Shakes ends season with royally pleasing Lear
three stars Moving, powerful
Perhaps the Fool said it best: “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”
Saturday night was indeed cold as California Shakespeare Theater opened the [...]

Opened Friday, Sept. 21, 2007

Shotgun’s lyrical Bulrusher finds poetry in love and Boont
Three stars Beauty and Boont to boot
In Shotgun Players’ Bulrusher, the characters most definitely harp the ling.
Set in Boonville, in the heart of Mendocino’s Anderson Valley, in the mid-’50s, Eisa Davis’ drama traffics in Boontling, the language peculiar (and we do mean peculiar) [...]

Parents get dragged into the darndest things by their kids.
Aw, c’mon, Dad, you know you want to do it. C’mon, Mom, it’s really fun!
For John Duggan (above, center), it didn’t take too much arm-twisting for his twin sons, Mikhail and Nikolai — Khail and Nik to their friends — to pull him back into the [...]

Great actors wait for it — that defining moment when, as actors and as men, they are seasoned enough to tackle one of theater’s biggest mountains: the title role of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
Jeffrey DeMunn scaled that peak, but there was a slight hitch: He was only 26 years old playing an 80-plus-year-old man.
“We had lost [...]

In case you missed it, here’s the San Francisco (soon to be Chicago) cast of Jersey Boys performing on the Emmy Awards in a tribute to another set of Jersey boys — “The Sopranos.”