Category Archives: Theatre Rhino

It’s good to be…Colman and Francis

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Two wonderful actors, formerly of the Bay Area, are having some good days in the New York theater world. We’re sorry they’re not having good theater days in the Bay Area, but we wish them well. Here’s the scoop:

Colman Domingo is starring in the Tony-nominated Passing Strange, which, incidentally, just won three Drama Desk Awards including Best Musical, two Obie Awards including Best New American Theatre Piece, two Theatre World Awards, and the top prize from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle (whew). If that weren’t cause enough to celebrate, Colman will direct New Professional Theatre’s production of Lisa B. Thompson’s Single Black Female, a comedy about “single black women and their search for love, dignity and clothes.” The production will star Soara-Joy Ross and Riddick Marie, at The Duke on 42nd St. in Manhattan. The show will run June 10-29.
Colman first directed the play in March of ’99 at San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros.

Francis Jue, San Francisco native and a favorite at TheatreWorks in Mountain View (though that’s hardly the only local stage he has graced), won an Obie Award for his featured performance in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face.
Here’s a nice story on Francis from AsianConnections.com. No word on whether Francis will be in the production of Yellow Face closing Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 2008-09 season. Here’s hoping…

Bock in black

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We can claim Adam Bock as a San Francisco playwright, but that’s really not quite accurate.

The talented writer basically used the Bay Area as a way station between his native Canada and the greener pastures of New York. But it must be said, the pastures were pretty green in San Francisco, where Bock made a splash with the man-in-love-with-shark comedy Swimming in the Shallows with Shotgun Players (done in the basement of Theatre Rhinoceros) and most especially with Five Flights, a production of Encore Theatre Company at the Thick House.

Well, let’s all celebrate the fact that “San Francisco” playwright Adam Bock won an Obie Award last Monday for his play The Thugs. (The Obies, in case you don’t know or barely care, are the Village Voice’s awards for off-Broadway shows.)

The Thugs, we have discovered through some diligent Googling, is about temps in a law office who suspect some of the firm’s employees are being murdered or something even more sinister.

The New York Times’ Jason Zinoman described the play as, “a delightfully paranoid little nightmare that is both more chillingly realistic and pointedly absurd than anything John Grisham ever dreamed up. ”

Message to Adam: congratulations. Message to Bay Area theater companies: please produce The Thugs. We hear it’s only an hour.