What a year for Bay Area Tom Stoppard fans. Shotgun Players in Berkeley treated us to a staggeringly good production of Shipwreck, the second installment…
One of the first productions to come out of the recently established National Theatre of Scotland, Black Watch takes up the story of the country’s…
“I remember at one point I thought it might have to be a guy screaming in Chinese for an hour on stage,” says Byron Au…
Theater of the absurd, the catchall term for the works of post-World War II writers like Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, is to…
Dead Metaphor, George F. Walker’s political “black comedy” now running at American Conservatory Theater, begins at a job placement agency for veterans, with what unfortunately…
“Don’t worry – everyone’s leaving with both ears tonight,” joked a dapper-looking Mike Tyson toward the start of his travelling one-man performance, Mike Tyson: Undisputed…
Beating out hundreds of other scripts, Anthony Clarvoe’s Our Practical Heaven received top honors in the Aurora Theatre Company’s 2011 Global Age Project (GAP), an…
The African American Shakespeare Company’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof comes during an off-year for Tennessee Williams plays. The American Conservatory Theater…
Amy Herzog’s 4,000 Miles begins with shaggy, smelly, twenty-one-year-old Leo (Reggie Gowland) showing up one night at the Manhattan apartment of his ninety-one-year-old Grandma Vera…
“I’m having trouble getting into the mind of a twelve and a half-year-old.” This was more or less the feeling I was bracing for upon…
There are those who decry contemporary Christmas for losing touch with its religious roots and reforming itself in the name of consumerism instead. They are…
It’s the holiday season. Your family is in town, and now that you’ve seen Lincoln, you’re seeking something more spiritually fulfilling than the silver screen….
Thornton Wilder found a liberating potential in quick, one-act plays. Not beholden to the rounding out of full narrative arcs, they offer just glimpses into…
Greek tragedies are not the sort of play you come out of, quoting lines. The words all but recede into crashing tidal waves of bloodshed…
Break out the leopard prints, ladies; The Lion King is in town. I’ll start by saying that reviewing this play is pointless; as with most…
Contagion. Specifically, HIV/AIDS, but the very early days of the outbreak – the days of patient zero, when deaths were beginning to mount in the…
Cruise fanatics, in particular younger ones, are no doubt a weird bunch. It bespeaks a certain personality (or, pathology) to serially indulge in this form…
In spite of the dramatic art form’s possibilities, theater goers – a population that tends to fall few standard deviations above the 18 – 35…
After seeing War Horse at the Curran Theatre, I walked down the street to a speakeasy-themed bar, where I sat for a while and hypothesized…
Since Stephen Sondheim elevated him to Broadway in 1979, Victorian anti-hero Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, has been nicking victims on stage…
Les Miserables is a play that I have been aware of for what feels like my entire life without knowing a thing about it. With…
The Scottsboro Boys, written by David Thompson with music and lyrics by Broadway titans John Kander and Fred ebb (Cabaret, Chicago), opened two years ago…
“Everything is intense to me,” sings one of the girls in Eve Ensler’s Emotional Creature. Her tone is not one of frustration or shame, but…
The word “theater” has a curious place in the vocabulary of war, where it means something like “arena” (WWII was split between the Pacific theater…
Pruning next month’s concert calendar for the not-to-be-missed Japandroids (6/14 at The Independent · Tickets) Japandroids’ Celebration Rock begins and ends with fireworks, though a…
Pruning next month’s concert calendar for the not-to-be-missed Destroyer w/ Sandro Perri (6/5 at The Fillmore · Tickets) Sandro Perri has come a long way…
Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a play about the end; whether of all humanity or merely one individual consciousness, critics continue to debate, and a convincing…
Tenderloin Trailer from The Cutting Ball Theater on Vimeo. Welcome to the Tenderloin. If spoken by an outsider to the neighborhood, it’s likely this phrase…
Following up on our own recommendations It felt very much like a school night at the Rickshaw Stop on Sunday. Prior to the headlining performance…
Following up on our own recommendations The stage at The Independent, bathed luxuriously in deep blue, purple and turquoise light, was an anemone of craning…
Following up on our own recommendations Wild Flag’s riot grrrl tunes, rollicking electric pop with punk-flare, may not occupy quite the same sphere as EMA’s…
What is a sitcom, but a series of episodes making light of life’s little tests — frequently sex-related ones? By this definition, the typically televised…
Spamalot, Eric Idle’s loving Broadway adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), has received almost uniform praise from the critics and theatergoers who…
You work at a start up; you spend half your income at fancy bars. You order sushi – it comes; you leave your trash at…
Pruning this month’s concert calendar for the not-to-be-missed The Shins (4/23 at Robert Mondavi Center, UC Davis · Tickets) The Shins seem to belong to…
After World War II, the single room seemed the set to end all sets within European drama circuit. Most famously in Sartre’s “No Exit” and…
Our store of famous, mid-century eccentrics has proven a real goldmine for screenwriters lately. Over the past year alone, people have flocked to films about…
The curtain rises to reveal Sister Jamison Connelly (Kathleen Turner), standing solo. Her delivery promptly takes center stage, thrusting the content of her speech (something…
Following up on our own recommendations “We’re a little apprehensive about opening for Perfume Genius,” Parenthetical Girls frontman Zac Pennington admitted. “They’re a very sincere,…
Pruning next months’ concert calendar for the not-to-be-missed Nicolas Jaar (3/25 at The Independent · Sold Out – start Craigslisting!) “Replace the word space with…