78 stories by "Joanne Engelhardt"
To launch TheatreWorks Silicon Valley's "New Works from Home" series, the company will offer a benefit online reading of Suzanne Bradbeer's comedy "Shakespeare in Vegas" through July 27. The…
Redwood City's Fuse Theatre and Dragon Theatre this year had intended to expand on the one-act festival they co-produced last summer. "Over the next few years, our plan was to build a festiv…
Palo Alto Players Artistic Director Patrick Klein chose an unusual spot for a video message about the theater company's upcoming "reimagined" season: a bedroom in his home. While he and mana…
Audiences who log on July 12 to a livestream benefit performance of Hershey Felder as Beethoven will also have the chance to vote for their favorite artistic interpretation of the composer's…
An eccentric, sometimes unsettling, series of digital video productions make up Pear Theatre's new hodgepodge of vignettes called "This Street and the Next." Directed by the company's artist…
EnActe is turning the spotlight on women performers and playwrights in a new series of virtual events, plays, readings and more. Women EnActe for Themselves, or WEFT, launches June 27 with a…
Pear Theatre in Mountain View is moving ahead in today's virtual world with a season announcement/subscription kick-off party June 12. Pear Artistic Director Sinjin Jones will host the Pear'…
Any other year, June would be the month when students start looking forward to that last school day and a lazy summer of fun ahead. This year, it's definitely dicey whether some families wil…
Foothill College's Theatre Arts Department found itself in the same unenviable muddle as most local theater companies these days: What to do now that it can't stage its spring production? Fo…
Mountain View's Pear Theatre came up with a creative way of presenting its annual short-play program despite the current pandemic""Pear Slices 2020: Digital Edition." The Pear is presenting …
The annual PlayGround Festival of New Works, which features two Peninsula residents and one San Jose world premiere, has gone digital this year and is streaming most of its events free of ch…
A "reimagined" 2020-21 season is in store for TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, with the next production now not scheduled to open until next October. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced substantial…
South Bay theaters have found some innovative ways to "keep the lights on" virtually even as their physical spaces remain shuttered while the "shelter in place" order is in effect. Leading t…
Necessity is the mother of virtual classes, which is what many Peninsula theater companies are ramping up right now. Los Alto Stage Company introduced several unusual virtual classes earlier…
That old expression "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" has never been more apt for theater companies throughout the Bay Area, which are dark until the "shelter in place" order is li…
With Bay Area theaters on a hard stop during the coronavirus "shelter-in-place" era, some theaters have devised innovative ways to stay relevant. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley followed the Ame…
To close or not to close. That is the question facing local theater companies in the face of COVID-19. It's not an easy decision to make because shuttering a theater production"either for a …
A tiny wisp of a girl"never more than 100 pounds even as a grown-up"is wrapping TheatreWorks Silicon Valley audiences around her finger at performances of "They Promised Her the Moon" throug…
Two plays, "Confession" by Barry Slater and "The Baltimore Waltz" by Paula Vogel, are in rotating repertory through April 5 at Dragon Theatre in Redwood City. Each is relatively short ("Conf…
What do you get when you combine an unfinished Charles Dickens novel, a music hall of the 1890s, a play within a play, broad (very broad) humor, a number of rather bland songs and a "mystery…
There's a whole lot of testosterone on stage in Los Altos Stage Company's production of "Oslo," which runs through Feb. 16 at Bus Barn Theater in Los Altos. Despite the fact that this Tony A…
After such a standout production of "Newsies" in December, it's unfortunate that Hillbarn Theatre in Foster City has come up with what is, essentially, a somewhat lackluster version of "Litt…
British playwright Alan Ayckbourn has written more than 70 plays, most of them comedies and quite a number of which could rightly be called farces. "Taking Steps" is one of those, though the…
In the rather other-worldly place of "The Nether," a somewhat disturbing play by Jennifer Haley now at Dragon Productions Theatre in Redwood City, the world " at least the world in the Nethe…
Palo Alto Players is currently offering "A Doll's House, Part 2," a bit of a hard sell in this day and age when it's likely not everyone is familiar with Henrik Ibsen's original classic, "A …
