Monday, December 2, 2019
Harry Potter, known as "the boy who lived," has continuously found life on the pages of seven best-selling novels, on the screen in eight blockbuster films, in theme parks both in Florida an…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 10:57AMTuesday, November 26, 2019
There are so many charming, astonishing, inspiring moments in PigPen Theatre Co.'s The Tale of Despereaux you have to stop logging them and simply realize that, from beginning to end, this i…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:03PMFriday, November 8, 2019
You could say that Kate Attwell's Testmatch, the world premiere play at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, is about cricket. You could also say it's about untangling the gnarly …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:04PMThursday, November 7, 2019
After a seven-year absence, STOMP has returned to San Francisco, but only for five days at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater. This touring production is top notch, and the two ne…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:09PMFriday, October 4, 2019
Suzan-Lori Parks' White Noise is an intensely interesting play. Just not a very good one.
And that's surprising given that Parks, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, has bent, molded and shaped contem…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:33PMThursday, September 26, 2019
The mind of Caryl Churchill is an extraordinary place to spend an evening. Happily, this theater season, the Bay Area will see an abundance of Churchill, beginning with American Conservatory…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:09PMFriday, September 20, 2019
Director Mark Wing-Davey layers an intricate sound design (by Bray Poor and even more intricate projection design (by Tara Knight) onto the play in a way that makes it seem he doesn't fully …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:48PMThursday, September 5, 2019
As much as we might like to think that the future of Broadway looks like Hamilton or Hadestown, I'm pretty sure the future looks more like Anastasia, the inconsequential musical based on the…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:45PMFriday, July 12, 2019
San Francisco Playhouse's Cabaret is, to put it simply, a wow. A big, debauched, delightful wow. Everything in director Susi Damilano's production just clicks. The look, the feel, the sound …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:08PMFriday, June 7, 2019
After 33 years at Berkeley Repertory Theatre – 22 as artistic director – Tony Taccone is taking a final bow with Kiss My Aztec, a world-premiere musical that serves as a fitting farewell…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:54PMThursday, June 6, 2019
There are multiple points in human history when Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros would make for funny/terrifying entertainment. Unfortunately, this is one of them.
In Ionesco's 1959 play, a sma…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:38PMThursday, May 30, 2019
Almost six years ago, a Broadway-bound musical had its world premiere at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, and though there were a few issues, the show looked like a bona fide hit. Sure enough…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:56PMSaturday, May 4, 2019
Let's just admit it. The Bible is a clusterf**k. How in the world did such a literary hodgepodge, political football, myth collection become one of the most influential – if not the most i…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:23PMFriday, May 3, 2019
Last year I fell in love with Weightless, the rock musical by The Kilbanes, when it had a triumphant world premiere at Z Space. The show had muscle and heart and passion and staggering beaut…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:49PMThursday, April 25, 2019
For their adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel Vanity Fair, writer Kate Hamill and director Jessica Stone do a little bit of cheating. Hamill has decided to liven things up…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:01PMThursday, April 18, 2019
A golden ticket doesn't buy you much these days – a cut-rate touring musical with chintzy sets, a mediocre score and about as much joy as you'd find in a board meeting about turning wacky …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:15PMThursday, April 11, 2019
You may enter The Jungle at the beautiful Curran theater in downtown San Francisco, but you exit in an entirely different place – mentally and emotionally speaking, that is.
The idea of i…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:26PMWednesday, March 27, 2019
What Dorothy Gale said is true: there's no place like home. But in this particular instance, there is no place and no show quite like HOME, the creation of the marvelous Geoff Sobelle, whom …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:09PMFriday, February 22, 2019
If anything, the current company – known as the #AndPeggy company – of Hamilton now at the SHN Orpheum Theatre through Sept. 8, is even better than the one we saw at the same theater in …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:14PMThursday, February 21, 2019
The Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! has spawned a national tour with the marvelous Betty Buckley as Dolly, and while the erstwhile star of Cats, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Sunset Boule…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:30PMFriday, February 1, 2019
Nearly 20 years later, Metamorphoses returns to Berkeley Rep, this time to the Peet's Theatre. The show remains stunning – still gorgeous, still moving, still an example of theater at its …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:34PMThursday, January 31, 2019
As directing debuts go, Pam MacKinnon's for American Conservatory Theater is pretty auspicious. Her production of Seascape by Edward Albee is her first on the Geary Theater stage since takin…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:49PMSaturday, January 26, 2019
It was with trepidation that I went to opening night of the world premiere drama Candlestick by Bennett Fisher and produced by Campo Santo, long one of the Bay Area's best incubators of new …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:33PMFriday, January 11, 2019
There are actually two competing musicals in Paradise Square: A New Musical now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. One of them is much better than the other.
Incredibl…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:10PMThursday, January 10, 2019
Already a long-running hit on Broadway, Come From Away is now making its way around the country. The touring company at the SHN Golden Gate Theatre is extraordinary. A dozen performers play …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:23PMFriday, December 7, 2018
It's absolutely astonishing that a musical about pain, that is in itself a painful experience, can be so enjoyable. But that's what Dear Evan Hansen is: a deeply felt show that wrings tears …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:53PMThursday, November 29, 2018
If it feels like we've seen it all before, well, we have. The gangsters, the tormented teens, the tough streets of New York's deeze, dem, dose borough – it's all the same old stuff in the …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:16PMSaturday, November 24, 2018
Taylor Mac is back with a two-hour show called Taylor Mac's Holiday Sauce, and while two hours is far better than no hours, by the time the show ended, I felt like we were just getting warme…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:26PMSunday, November 18, 2018
Not being an opera aficionado, I was interested in San Francisco Opera's adaptation of It's a Wonderful Life for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the power of the original 1946 Fra…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:06PMFriday, November 16, 2018
The new touring spectacle, Volta, opened Thursday night under a gray-and-white-striped tent in the AT&T Park for a nearly three-month run before heading down to San Jose. It's a high ene…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:09PMFriday, November 2, 2018
Oars up! Oars out! We're going adventuring.
The first thrill of our adventure is the sheer delight of seeing 10 women on stage – 10! – in the American Conservatory Theater production of…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:09PM 
