Christopher Beale

MEHVITA Eva Perón is back on stage downtown as San Francisco Playhouse stages the classic Broadway musical Evita. Inspired by a radio documentary about Perón, the first lady of Argentina, Evita  began as a 1976 rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, the authors of  Jesus Christ Superstar; it was staged as a musical on…

EVERYBODY WILL BE TALKING ABOUT RAY OF LIGHT’S EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE Now, it’s a legend. First there was the 2011 British television documentary  Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, which became a concept album for the hit musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, which opened on the West End in 2017, toured, then recorded and screened in…

CIRQUE AND THE CITY During Dear San Francisco at Club Fugazi in North Beach, one could be forgiven for feeling like you’d jumped into a Cirque Du Soleil production, and that’s fine as the founders of this San Francisco based cirque troupe worked there for a time. The intimate and immersive resident production was created…

A MUSICAL THEATRE EXPLOSION San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center is presenting a musical by the late Broadway composer, lyricist and playwright Jonathan Larson. If you have heard of the runaway smash hit Rent then you are familiar with Larson’s style. tick, tick… BOOM!  predates Rent by a few years, but the tight harmonies and quick…

FRAGILE GIRL, KOOKY MOM, POSSIBLY QUEER SON, HANDSOME CALLER, STURDY PRODUCTION The Glass Menagerie is likely the reason you’ve heard the name Tennessee Williams. The Glass Menagerie put Tennessee Williams on the map and led the way to American classics like A Streetcar Named Desire, Night of the Iguana, and Cat on a Hot Tin…

EXTREME ACTS IS EXTREMELY GOOD A performance artist recounts the greatest moments of her career, from work that got her started, to the performance that almost killed her in the exciting and emotional two-act two-hander Extreme Acts  by prolific playwright Lynne Kaufman, directed by Molly Noble. The show, which opened last night at The Marsh San…

BITCH, YOU AGING GOOD In the tradition ’80s sitcoms but with elements of telenovela melodrama, Bitch Slap! is a hilarious, over-the-top spoof comedy written and directed by San Francisco’s inaugural drag laureate D’Arcy Drollinger. Bitch Slap first opened in 2017 and is back on stage through May 18 at Oasis. D’Arcy Drollinger, Katya Smirnoff The…

YOU’LL WANT TO GET CAUGHT IN THIS LOOP A Strange Loop, a Pulitzer Prize winning, loosely autobiographical, one-act musical drama by Michael R. Jackson explores a myriad of themes related to identity, queerness, self-esteem, and religion. It first debuted off Broadway in 2019, won a Tony when it hit Broadway in 2022, and is now…

GLAD PLAID Forever Plaid, an Off-Broadway musical revue written in the late eighties by Stuart Ross, takes place in the in-between, or whatever exists between this life and the next. The Plaids, a prototypical guy group in appearance, harmonies and temperament, find themselves dead right at the top of the show. But, they have been…