Much Ado About Nothing can be one of Shakespeare’s trickier romantic comedies. It’s full of sparring lovers, great lines and thoroughly entertaining comic bits. But it also contains some harsh drama, faked death and edgy mischief making. Capturing just the right tone can help ease the audience through all those shifts, and that’s what eludes so many directors of the play.

Thankfully, California Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone finds fresh ways to meld all of Shakespeare’s fragments into a seamless and captivating whole.

Spectacular things are happening at the Bruns Amphitheater – on stage and off.

At long last, California Shakespeare Theater is getting a performance venue worthy of its status as one of the Bay Area's foremost theater companies. Improvements to the Bruns include a new box office, new landscaping and, most importantly, a beautiful new 7,850-square-foot building to house its food operations and some spectacular bathrooms (if you ever used the bathrooms in the old endlessly "temporary" facility, you'll appreciate just how spectacular these new facilities really are).

The improvements aren't quite done yet, but they're already upping the ante on the Cal Shakes experience – and just in time for Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone's 10-year anniversary with the company.

So many things to celebrate ̶ not the least of which is the world-premiere production on the Bruns stage.

Marin Theatre Company's Equivocation is enormously enjoyable theater.

I liked Bill Cain's play last summer when I saw it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and I still like its muscular, hugely entertaining theatricality. The Marin production, directed by Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis, is more intimate but just as rewarding.

The cast boasts some of the Bay Area's finest – Anna Bullard (the lone woman in the cast), Lance Gardner, Andrew Hurteau, Craig Marker, Andy Murray, and Charles Shaw Robinson – as they crawl around J.B. Wilson's scaffolding set that reminds of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Where else would you want to set a story of William Shakespeare, or Shagspeare as he's called in the play?

As Cain's play imagines Will attempting to write a piece of propaganda theater for bonny King James (and his henchman, Sir Robert Cecil) and discovering that what he writes has to be the truth or nothing, something very interesting happens. Cain's immense knowledge of Shakespeare's plays and British history coalesce into a drama that feels recognizably human yet epic in its scope and more than just a little bit contemporary.

I reviewed Marin Theatre Company’s production of What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton as my first reviewing assignment for the Marin Independent Journal. You can read the review here. The show has been extended through July 5. Stacy Ross is Mrs. Prentice and Andy Murray is Dr. Rance in the Marin Theatre Company production of What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton....

EXTEDNED THROUGH DEC. 14 The cast of Marin Theatre Company’s The Seafarer by Conor McPherson includes (from left) Julian Lopez-Morillas as Richard, Andrew Hurteau as Ivan, Andy Murray as Sharky, John Flanagan as Nicky and Robert Sicular as Mr. Lockhart. Photos by Ed Smith   Bedeviled on Christmas Eve in McPherson’s `Seafarer’««« ½ The first...

  Alex Morf (left) is Viola disguised as Cesario and Stephen Barker Turner is Count Orsino in the California Shakespeare Theater’s season-ending production of Twelfth Night. Photos by Kevin Berne   Director’s vision weighs heavily on Cal Shakes’ `Twelfth Night’««   It’s not often you leave a Shakespeare play and feel like...