San Francisco
(Bay Area)

GREAT F. SCOTT! If you love literature, have fond memories of being read to or of reading to others, and feel, as so many do, that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is in the Pantheon of Great American Novels, and you also have an appetite for ambitious or unusual theater projects and, in particular,…

LOST IN AUSTEN All of Jane Austen’s novels are built on the same premise. A woman meets and marries an eligible man after a series of usually comic difficulties. But Austen extracts a remarkable amount of drama, comedy, and human interest from her domestic tales through her witty, ironic prose and her shrewd but forgiving…

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF SATIRE Has it really been 40 years since Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 was first presented? The biting satire is so topical — containing cross-dressing, gay relationships, and patriarchal and colonial rule — that one would think it just arrived on the scene. It’s every bit as entertaining, contemporary, and downright…

DOES  GROUNDHOG DAY  BEAR REPEATING? At the center of San Francisco Playhouse’s first regional premiere of Broadway’s Groundhog Day the Musical is the brilliant, perfectly cast Ryan Drummond, playing local TV news weatherman, Phil. This arrogant, uncaring teaser must relive Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney until he learns to care about other people. This musical adaptation of the…

ON THE BORDERLINE What do a Latino cop, a black vet in the Bronx, a Saudi Arabian without a country, a gay pagan goat rancher, and a homeless HIV-positive man have in common? Dan Hoyle. SF’s own master storyteller is back with a new show, Border People, one he has crafted from a series of…

YOU’RE THE TOP, GIRLS For the most part, Joyce, a working class Englishwoman in Ipswich is not a sympathetic or likeable person: She is annoyed by her teenage daughter Angie (who admittedly is belligerent and daft), and begrudging toward her sister, Marlene, whom she views as a ball-busting, career-driven, selfish, soulless abandoner (not that there…

A PASSIONATE PASSION Stephen Sondheim’s Passion is less a work of art than it is an art piece and the Custom Made Theatre Co., in its lovely and elegant chamber version, treats it as such. It is the jewel in the Sondheim canon, exquisite to some, an oddity to others, and it contains some of…

EVEN WHEN HAIRSPRAY CAN’T HOLD UP… THE EXPERIENCE CAN There are some shows that are beyond criticism or, rather, shows that render criticism totally unnecessary, and the Bay Area Musicals production of Hairspray is one of those shows. Everyone involved has set out to provide a lively showcase for local talent and for the friends…

GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE ‘HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that Alfaro’s heart bleeds with compassion for his characters, that his writing is rich and often dazzling in its use of language and in its…

ACTOR DOUGLAS NOLAN: TOTALLY HUMAN AND TOTALLY ABSURD If you’ve ever seen a production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano that had you in stitches from practically the very first moment right through the absolutely nutty ending just before it begins — horrors! — all over again, it doesn’t take more than five minutes into…