AUDRA MCDONALD MAKES A RARE VISIT TO SAN FRANCISCO As if San Francisco Symphony's (SFS) annual opening night galas were not the most anticipated events of any year, SFS and Music Director Mi…
A PRODUCTION OF AND IN NO MAN'S LAND It seems that people are forever cursed by their feeble attempts to make their lives neat and tidy. Whatever illusion of structure is created"a calendar,…
HEROISM AND ESTROGEN Well worth seeing, this stylized 100-minute tour de theatre nonetheless requires"and rewards"an informed audience: It needs eager theatergoers already aware of the story…
YEAH, I CAN DIG IT The third installment of monologuist Don Reed's autobiographical coming-of-age trilogy has been extended yet again at the Marsh, and following on the heels of this San Fra…
CAL SHAKES' BIGGEST FAN The titular character in Oscar Wilde’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan is a vivacious young woman, married only two years, who never coughs or displays any oth…
EXTRA INCHES East Berlin expat Hedwig was forced to leave a rather important bit of himself"later herself"behind the Wall in order to pass physical exams and immigrate to America with the G.…
NO PROBLEM WITH THIS "PROBLEM PLAY" In Oregon Shakespeare Festival's performance of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, director Bill Rauch manages to brew a potion of familiar Shakespearean themes inc…
AN ARAB ZELIG Supple, swift and slippery, this 80-minute, four-character satire by Jonas Hassen Khemiri (translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles) skewers Islamophobia and its many mutations. Its…
STAGE NOIR In many ways, the stage adaptation of James Cain's novel, Double Indemnity, is a radical departure from the iconic film from director/writer Billy Wilder. The film"co-written by C…
A HIGHLY ENGAGING SLOWGIRL After a traumatic accident, millennial teenager Becky (Rae Gray) visits her uncle Sterling (William Petersen) in Costa Rica, where her constant chattering disrupts…
THE X FACTOR How many times have we mused that we would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when ___________? That's exactly what playwright Kemp Powers has done in his One Night in Mi…
RUPTERED RAPTURE Attending the opening night of a comedy at one of the smaller 99 seat theaters in Los Angeles can be problematic. In addition to a minute smattering of critics and avid thea…
I GET THE PICTURE Pageant of the Masters' The Big Picture is perhaps the most three-dimensional idea from the fertile mind of director Diane Challis Davy. Continuing the 80-year tradition of…
BORDERING ON TRAGEDY There is a lot to like about Chay Yew and playwright Luis Alfaro's Mojada, a modern retelling of Medea, which sets the main character as an undocumented immigrant and se…
THE SHAPE OF THINGS After Bruce Norris's A Parallelogram at the Mark Taper Forum, I overheard a few audience members describe the play has "cute." For all of the play's political incorrectne…
STORY-LESS A rubber knife jiggles and bends during an ostensibly dramatic stabbing scene. Characters' "trumpet playing" is out of sync with the actual trumpeter. Performers struggle to remem…
LEAR AND HUNGRY TIMES With only a small caramel as dinner, I was concerned about the three-hour running time of director Bill Rauch's contemporary adaptation of King Lear at Oregon Shakespea…
IT'S TIME FOR A LITTLE HAPPY EVER-AFTERING As San Francisco Playhouse opens a promising and highly anticipated rendition of Camelot this week, I am reminded of T. H. White's The Once and Fut…
I DO BUT I DON'T With all the adorability, simplicity, cliché and generic tone of a Hallmark Card, I Do! I Do! opened last weekend at the Laguna Playhouse. Starring Broadway stalwarts Davis…
ALL THE WORLD'S A GLOBE The Old Globe has officially opened the 2013 Shakespeare Festival, now on through September 29. Adrian Noble returns for his fourth and final season as the internatio…
MISGUIDED MELODRAMA Billy Wilder's 1950 film masterpiece Sunset Boulevard starred Gloria Swanson as the washed-up-actress-turned-cougar Norma Desmond, and William Holden as her prematurely-j…
A GREAT PLAY (BASED ON SOMETHING) Though little happens and nothing is resolved in the Pulitzer-nominated Thom Pain (based on nothing), the play is oddly and intensely captivating. Will Eno'…
IN GOOD COMPANY "It's a revue, but not a revue," Stephen Sondheim said about Company when he was interviewed at Segerstrom last year. This surprised me because the groundbreaking 1970 musica…
EASE ON DOWN A fascinating phenomenon has occurred recently in the theater world for this critic. Far and away, my favorite theatergoing experiences have been at revivals of musicals, most o…
AND NOW FOR A BRIEF INTERLUDE What's hip these days? It's the old tradition of taking idiosyncratic history or historical figures and putting the stories and details to music. Sufjan Stevens…