Theater Dogs' Best of 2016
The theater event that shook my year and reverberated through it constantly didn't happen on Bay Area stage. Like so many others, I was blown away by Hamilton on Broadway in May and then on repeat and shuffle with the original cast album (and, later in the year, the Hamilton Mix Tape) ever since. Shifting focus back home, theater in the San Francisco Bay Area continues to be a marvel, which is really something given the hostile economic environment arts groups are facing around here.
Madwoman drives a Volvo through 'the change'
If the idea of an NPR-ready take on the challenges and complexity of menopause appeals to you, get yourself to Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Peet's Theatre to see The Madwoman in the Volvo, Sandra Tsing Loh's disarmingly humorous exploration of her midlife mania. If the combo of NPR and menopause raises your hackles, stay away.
Fences comes home to the Curran Theatre
Hard to know which was more exciting: the art or the venue. Let's go with both.
The Curran Theatre formally reopened Thursday, Dec. 15, after more than a year of renovations and refurbishments, and it's gorgeous. In shades of elegance and Curran red, Carole Shorenstein Hays' palace has once again cast open its doors.
The first official event, preceding the January bow of the Fun Home tour (get tickets now), was a homecoming of sorts: the San Francisco premiere of Denzel Washington's screen adaptation of August Wilson's Fences.
A dreamy White Christmas at the Golden Gate
Eleven years ago, our holiday entertainment bandwidth grew a little wider with the stage adaptation of White Christmas, the 1954 movie that solidified the evergreen popularity of Irving Berlin's holiday ballad.
That production was pure delight, the kind of instant Christmas classic that would inevitably be taking its place alongside the Christmas Carols and Nutcrackers. Sure enough, White Christmas is a perennial, and this year's touring production has returned back to San Francisco
Tickety boo! Kneehigh, Berkeley Rep jazz up history in Adolphus Tips
Spirits are high at Berkeley Repertory Theatre this holiday season. What's interesting is that the merry-making on stage in 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips – the singing, dancing and general revelry – is all in service to a story about war and a little-known and avoidable tragedy that cost nearly 1,000 during World War II. So it's happy about sad, which makes sense given the theater company at work here is Kneehigh, the Cornwall-based troupe that has made various Bay Area splashes.
Raging with Marty @ ACT's Strand
If Martin Moran wanted to tell me about his trip to the dentist, I would stop whatever I was doing and listen in rapt attention knowing that Moran is a master storyteller and will inevitably find every telling detail, every character nuance, every link to something bigger than just the story he's relating.
Holiday cheer in SF Playhouse's sparkling She Loves Me
p>The 1963 musical She Loves Me is just a little gem of a musical – full of melody and charm and camaraderie and romance. The recent Broadway revival made a case for the show as sturdy, funny showcase for actors who can perfectly balance realism and musical comedy in a way that makes the show feel intimate and lived in even while it traffics in song and dance.
Just in time for the holidays, San Francisco Playhouse polishes this gem to a sparkling shine.
Lost in Austen with Marin's Christmas at Pemberly
We're all in need of some genuine Christmas cheer this year, and that's exactly what Marin Theatre Company's Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley provides. It's sweet without being sappy. It's sharp, clever and funny with a warm undercurrent of genuine emotion. What more could you want from a holiday show (except maybe passed eggnog and a round of carols)?
Wonderful women in Word for Word's Aunt Hagar
What you remember from Word for Word's production of All Aunt Hagar's Children, a full theatrical adaptation of the short story by Edward P. Jones, are the women. Such women. They make an impression on the audience the way they make an impression the story's narrator, a nameless young man who returned to his native Washington, D.C., nine months ago after serving in the Korean War.
Cirque du Soleil's Luzia low on thrills, big on beauty
Having seen abundant Cirque du Soleil shows over the years, I've come to think of them as lovely packages. It's not what's inside the package that intrigues – we know each one will be filled with some of the world's best acrobats, assorted clowns and acts that range from prosaic to heartstopping, dopey to achingly beautiful. So it's not the content so much as the packaging itself that makes the arrival of a new Cirque show so exciting.
The newest touring show, Luzia is subtitled "a waking dream of Mexico" ...
Freedom, dreams clash in Aurora's Safe House
There are several ways to interpret the title of Keith Josef Adkins' Safe House now at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company. One way sees cobbler Addison Pedigrew, a free man of color in Kentucky, aiming for his version of the American dream: a thriving shoe making/repairing business run out of his home to support his Aunt Dorcas and his brother, Frank, so that they can be truly free to thrive and expand their families. The other way, according to Frank and Dorcas, is to provide shelter and assistance to fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Both co-exist, but not easily in this 2014 drama, which takes much of its first act to really get going.
Making friends with Golden Thread's Enemies
When you go to a show from a specialized company like Golden Thread Productions, which focuses on plays from and about the Middle East, you expect your perspective to be expanded, to have your assumptions challenged and to encounter voices you may not hear enough. In its 20 years, Golden Thread has earned a strong reputation for accomplishing all of the above and more...
Even The Lion King seems political now
The "mane" question is this: after nearly 20 years, does Disney's The Lion King, now the highest grossing Broadway show of all time, still have any roar left? Based on the touring production that has settled into SHN's Orpheum Theatre for a two-month run through the holidays, the answer is a qualified yes.
ACT attempts to solve Stoppard's Hard Problem
All through American Conservatory Theater's production of The Hard Problem you can feel playwright Tom Stoppard making an effort to be accessible. With a play about the very nature of consciousness – the "hard problem" about not just the knowing about what's at our human core but the knowing about the knowing – there's a danger of a) boring a lay audience with intricate lectures on neuroscience or b) becoming so involved in the intellectual pursuits of the play that actual drama. Stoppard slips a little into both camps during his play's one hour and 40 minutes, but it's hard to fault a playwright for being too smart or too passionate about the subject he's exploring.
Tech & show tunes! SOMA musical skewers Silicon Valley
Having lived in San Francisco for 26 years now, it's' sad to say that everything I know about Silicon Valley comes not from firsthand experience of the world outside my doorstep but from the HBO show "Silicon Valley." Based on that show and on the genial South of Market: The Musical, I would venture to say that the best way to deal with that world is through a satirical lens. My impression is that Silicon Valley life/work is so wacky and self-involved it's basically satire that writes itself.
Bouncy around here: Shotgun's Virginia Woolf howls
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is famous for being, among other things, a night in the life of a querulous quartet, a four-part marital slugfest, a boozy broadside in four parts. In other words, four actors fighting, lashing out, drinking and suffering. All of that is present and accounted for in director Mark Jackson's production concluding Shotgun Players' 25th anniversary season. But it feels like there's another character here.
TheatreFIRST gets tempest tossed in Bagyó
When one of the Bay Area theater scenes most reliably inventive, resourceful and rewarding directors takes over a theater company and begins making changes, you pay attention. Jon Tracy is now at the helm of the Berkeley-based TheaterFIRST, a small but ambitious company that has had bumps and triumphs over the last 20 years while building a reputation as a haven for actors and playwrights to share voices from around the world.
The company's new season officially launched on Monday with the world premiere of San Francisco playwright Rob Dario's Bagyó.
Hello, love: Hedwig slams her Angry Inch in our faces
Hedwig and the Angry Inch launches its first Broadway national tour with the power of a barbecue fired with jet fuel. An explosion of rock, lights, humor and heart, this show is a rarity among rarities: a quirky late '90s off-Broadway hit that inspired a devoted cult following that seemingly peaked with its big-screen adaptation in 2001. Over the years, however, Hedwig's tragic tale of rejection and transformation has traveled around the world and created an international league of Heheads.
Heat, sizzle fire up SF Playhouse's Seared
I'm going to spoil something right off the bat about Theresa Rebeck's fantastic new play Seared now receiving its world premiere from San Francisco Playhouse: there is no conventional romance. Just because the cast consists of one woman and three men does not mean there's going to be a burgeoning love story or a sordid triangle or break-ups or make-ups. No, the central love story comes out of a friendship and business partnership between a chef and a money guy who open a small restaurant in Brooklyn.
Berkeley Rep's warning: it can so happen here
Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s It Can’t Happen Here is a nightmare on so many levels, and that’s mostly a good thing in the world-premiere adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel.
This is the right story at the right time, and therein lies the dark heart of this nightmare.