Except for large proscenium frame, the stage of California Shakespeare Theater's Bruns Amphitheater is mostly bare. There's no back wall to the stage, so the light from the setting sun on th…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:44PMEXTENDED THROUGH JULY 29 Lance Gardner is George, a new plantation owner, in the West Coast premiere of An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Below: Afi Bijou …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:07PMThat a play about challenges faced by a 15-year-old boy with autism spectrum disorder (just what he's dealing with is never detailed) has become a worldwide phenomenon is surprising only if …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:59PMPlaywright Kimber Lee's brownsville song (b-side for tray) offers a poignant reminder that our grim news feeds are built of lives, not just of victims and perpetrators and garbage politician…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:04PMTranscendence Theatre Company has a lock on the show tune market. Sure, other companies might be doing musicals, but only Transcendence offers multiple musical revues each summer performed i…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:52PMChristopher Chen’s world-premiere play You Mean to Do Me Harm features a cast that includes (from left) Charisse Loriaux as Samantha, James Asher as Ben, Don Castro as Daniel and Lauren En…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:45PMThere are several wonderful things about Jen Silverman's The Roommate now at San Francisco Playhouse, not the least of which is that it seriously considers the lives of two women in their 50…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:00PMEvery actor in San Francisco Playhouse's Noises Off, the celebrated and oft-performed Michael Frayn ode to theater and theater people disguised as a knock-down, drag-out farce, has a wonderf…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:34PMIf you love Hamilton, and let me say for the record that I love Hamilton, there's a whole lot to love, including, now, a new company in my hometown. After the Chicago company, which began pe…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 08:50AMAs a dramatic work, Sarah Greenman's Leni about the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, has to juggle history, artistry and, now, discomfiting parallels to our own time. Was Riefenstahl the r…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:50PMSort of an Alice in Wonderland for our topsy-turvy times, Mia Chung's You for Me for You takes us through a very specific lookingglass: a refugee's experience attempting to flee North Korea.…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:04PMDanai Gurira's intense, harrowing drama Eclipsed really only appeals to two kinds of people: those who care about women and those who care about basic human decency. Anyone else should stay …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:36PMThere is so much event and detail in Lisa Loomer's Roe – a brisk re-telling of the events and people involved in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade – that it feels like the…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:45PMThere are two Johns in Annie Baker's John, neither of whom we actually meet. One wreaked mental havoc on another person and the other is wreaking havoc on a relationship. Both feel like sini…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:12PMYou've journeyed Into the Woods, but you haven't ever been into these woods. When great musicals are revived, the first question has to be: why? Is it going to be another retread of a succe…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:54PMLet's be honest: sitting in a beautiful theater watching a well-crafted play is an absolute privilege, so where better to challenge our very notions of privilege and confront the reality tha…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:13PMHand to God is just the spiritual exploration we deserve at this point in our sordid human existence. Imagine if the current administration reimagined "Sesame Street" in its own twisted, gre…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:13PMWhile the San Francisco Playhouse audience was delving into Lucas Hnath's The Christians, a powerful, fraught examination of faith and organized religion, protestors were shutting down airpo…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:19PMAt only about 100 minutes, the musical Fun Home, manages to encapsulate a profoundly moving life experience: coming to terms with your parents as human beings and not just the people who gav…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:20PMI'm calling it: the use of Peter Pan as an automatic trigger for poignant reflections on lost youth and the emotional cruelty of aging is officially over. It's been over for a while, but app…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:25PMJulia Cho's Aubergine is the winner of the 2016 Glickman Award for the best new play to make its world premiere in the Bay Area. Aubergine was developed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre' Ground…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:25PMBill Irwin wants to address everything you've ever wanted to know about Samuel Beckett but were afraid to ask. His casual one-man show On Beckett, now in a short run at American Conservatory…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:49PMThe 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 …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:52PMIf 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, S…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:32PMHard 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 refurbishme…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:24PMEleven 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 Berl…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:51PMSpirits 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 a…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:39PMIf 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…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:50PMWhen 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 n…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:50PMHedwig 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 amo…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:14PMI'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 romanc…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:16PM
