Sunday, October 6, 2013
The last time San Francisco Playhouse produced a play by Rajiv Joseph -- Animals Out of Paper in 2009 -- the young playwright was becoming one of the hottest writers in the country. TheatreW…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:24PM[SHARE]The bucket of pig's blood is to Carrie the Musical what the chandelier is to The Phantom of the Opera -- you just know both of those suckers are coming down. In fact, Carrie and Phantom have…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:05PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 3, 2013
On a refreshingly brisk autumn night, California Shakespeare Theater's A Winter's Tale aimed to tell a sad story with a happy ending. "A sad story is best for winter," or so we're told by a …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:40PM[SHARE]Sunday, July 7, 2013
What's immediately striking about California Shakespeare Theater's Romeo and Juliet, the second show of the season, is the apparent absence of a set. When the company last dipped into this r…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:04PM[SHARE]Friday, June 28, 2013
It's hard to imagine but it's true: the music is so glorious you barely even miss the dancing. The San Francisco Symphony concludes its season with the first concert presentation of the full…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:53PM[SHARE]Monday, June 17, 2013
Clutch your rosary beads and get ready to laugh. New Conservatory Theatre Center's The Divine Sister by Charles Busch (a national treasure, even if the entire nation isn't quite aware of it …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:15PM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 11, 2013
One of life's great mysteries has at last been solved. Those outdated notions of the afterlife involving harps and angels and a paternal, white-bearded God never seemed to catch up with our …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:23PM[SHARE]Sunday, June 9, 2013
In his wildly cynical, angry, sad and, ultimately, happy new play Wild With Happy, playwright/actor (and former San Franciscan) Colman Domingo is doing several admirable things. In telling t…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:57PM[SHARE]Friday, June 7, 2013
If you've seen a Mike Leigh movie, the conversational rhythms and that true-to-life quality of nothing happening/everything happening will seem familiar on stage in Abigail's Party, a play L…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:25PM[SHARE]Thursday, June 6, 2013
The ideas are as big as the heart in Tom Stoppard's glorious Arcadia, a play that seems only to get better with time.
When American Conservatory Theater Artistic Director Carey Perloff firs…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:40PM[SHARE]Sunday, June 2, 2013
Spring and early summer 2013 may well be remembered as the Great Montoya Surge.
In April, Richard Montoya " one third of the legendary San Francisco-born comedy trio Culture Clash " premie…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 08:35PM[SHARE]Saturday, June 1, 2013
p>When playwright Lauren Gunderson arrived on the Bay Area theater scene, she arrived in a big way. First, she blew everyone away with her comedy Exit, Pursued by a Bear and then she prov…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:45PM[SHARE]Friday, May 31, 2013
Safe to say you're not going to see anything like Mark O'Rowe's Terminus, the aptly named conclusion to Magic Theatre's 46th season. If you saw O'Rowe's last show at the Magic, the extraordi…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:46PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 30, 2013
You would never, ever expect to see a production of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. In what has become a staple of community theaters everywhere, a man and a woman…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:51PM[SHARE]Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Watching Joy Carlin work her magic Mag Folan in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane is the epitome of theatrical delight. Here you have one of the great Bay Area actors offering a …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:53PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 16, 2013
It's interesting that the horrors of war " far away from the battlefields " tend to turn into a videogame on the big screen and small screen, with the camera becoming a shield from the actio…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:23PM[SHARE]Friday, May 10, 2013
San Francisco Bay Area cabaret lovers drooped a little when The Rrazz Room, after attempting to make a go of it after departing the Hotel Nikko, finally packed up and headed out of town earl…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:31PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 9, 2013
Some are Shakespeare purists. Or Chekhov purists. Or Star Wars purists. Their simple message is: don't mess with the original. I happen to be a Mary Poppins purist. Not the original P.L. Tra…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:55PM[SHARE]Sunday, May 5, 2013
My faith in the good ol' American star-making machine is kaput. Any yahoo with a access to a "reality" show camera crew gets 15 minutes and all the nonsensical covers of ridiculous magazines…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:04PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 18, 2013
There's a rough beauty to director Mark Wing-Davey's Pericles, Prince of Tyre now on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Thrust Stage. The industrial look of the bi-level set by Douglas Stein and P…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:58PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 17, 2013
It's hard to imagine a better production of Stuck Elevator than the one now on view at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater. Production values and performance levels are superlative…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:58PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Some rivers run with water. This one is a torrent of words " some really extraordinary words.
Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts' world premiere of The River, a dazzling fusion of po…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:11PM[SHARE]Friday, April 12, 2013
My first encounter with Swiss playwright Max Frisch was in college when my Drama as Literature class read his Biedermann and the Firebugs, a 1953 radio play that was expanded into a stage pl…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:36PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 10, 2013
How does Chay Yew manage to be the artistic director of Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater and hopscotch the country as an in-demand director?
"Consummate scheduling," Yew says.
He's i…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 09:06PM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 9, 2013
You know you've got your audience right where you want them when they're laughing at the rape fantasy being played out " rather graphically and violently " on stage. It's easy to imagine an …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:11PM[SHARE]Sunday, April 7, 2013
In addition to some terrific songs and a perennial reason to scream at Dover to "move yer bloomin' ass," My Fair Lady has left an interesting legacy in the form a highly raised bar to which …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:31PM[SHARE]Saturday, April 6, 2013
Watching the 1961 musical Carnival!, a hit on Broadway, it's fairly easy to see why the show was never a candidate for major Broadway revival or a staple of community theaters. The score, by…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:24PM[SHARE]Thursday, April 4, 2013
At first the music is loud and fun. Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky" seems like the perfect audio accompaniment to a grown-up birthday party scene set in a Garden Grove, Califorina, su…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:10PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 3, 2013
If Matthew Lopez were a miner, he could brag that he uncovered a rich mineral vein of enormous wealth, both cultural and commercial. But Lopez isn't a miner. He's a playwright, and though th…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:55PM[SHARE]Sunday, March 31, 2013
I've come to learn that when a Neil LaBute play or movie crosses my path, I detour around it, ignore it or make an immediate donation to a women's support or LBGT organization. LaBute is a r…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:03PM[SHARE]Thursday, March 21, 2013
Need your Patti LuPone fix? You've come to the right place.
We have for you an interview with Ms. LuPone in connection with the San Francisco debut of her latest cabaret show, Far Away Plac…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:13PM[SHARE] 
