Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Another week, another Berkeley Repertory Theatre show going to Broadway.
Carrie Fisher’s autobiographical solo show Wishful Drinking, directed by Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone, will open in October at — where else? — Studio 54, where it runs through Jan. 3. The show is produced by Roundabout Theatre Company in association with Jonathan Reinis, Jamie [...]

UPDATED 5:45 p.m., April 29, 2009
The rumors have been swirling for days that the Post Street Theatre and the Marines Memorial Theatre are closing down.
Roberto Friedman in the Bay Area Reporter reported that the most recent Post Street show, the ballroom dance extravaganza Burn the Floor, would be heading to Broadway but added: “Uncorroborated word [...]

The geniuses over at Great Hera!, which translates into my friend and nerd queen Sarah Kuhn, have seen fit to award this humble little theater Web site a Zombie Chicken Award.
It’s our first award of any kind, and we’re bursting with pride. And gratitude.
We’d like to thank the Academy, the Board of Tony voters and [...]

For a long time, Oakland activist and hip-hop theater artist Ariel Luckey (above, photo by Amanda Salzman) suffered the same social, cultural and historical amnesia that afflicts many of us. But he cured his amnesia by paying attention. And using everything he learned, he created a show.

Luckey grew up amid the rich, multicultural diversity of [...]

Berkeley Repertory Theatre announced today that the hole in its 2009-10 season has been filled with the West Coast premiere of Coming Home by Athol Fugard (right) directed by Gordon Edelstein, who also staged the show’s world premiere in New Haven. The drama begins previews on the Thrust Stage Jan. 15, opens Jan. 20 and [...]

Opened April 22, 2009 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, EXTENDED THROUGH MAY 24!

Padraic (Blake Ellis, front center) finds himself in a spot of trouble when he’s set upon by fellow terrorists from his Irish splinter group (from left) Brendan (Rowan Brooks), Christy (Danny Wolohan) and Joey (Michael Barrett Austin) in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant [...]

Marc Chagall, Introduction to the Jewish Theater (detail), 1920, tempera, gouache, and opaque white on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

How do you put theater in a museum? The real answer is: you don’t.

A successful museum exhibition about theater, full of artifacts, photos, [...]

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage. Photo by the LA Times
Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined, inspired by Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

The play, about a Congolese brothel run by a woman named Mama Nadi, is about a country torn apart by civil war and about a woman who is [...]

Thick Description artistic director Tony Kelly reports the good news that former San Franciscan Colman Domingo’s stellar one-man show, A Boy and His Soul, will be part of the 2009-2010 season at off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre.

Kelly will direct, as he did in the show’s original Thick D run in 2005 and in its revival in the [...]

Ian Walker (left) is J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, and Charles Evans is Gen. Leslie R. Groves in Carson Kreitzer’s drama The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a production from San Francisco’s Custom Made Theatre Co.

 
`Love Song’ serenades Oppenheimer with magic realism«« ½

 
With a title that echoes T.S. Eliot, you expect [...]