San Francisco
(Bay Area)

FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE SPANISH GHETTO Octavio Solis’ Se Llama Cristina is a gritty, mind-bending trip.   The main characters, Man and Woman, slip in and out of past, present, and future with varying degrees of lucidity. They and the audience struggle to keep a grasp on what’s real. What is tangible is that Magic…

THE SEMBLANCE OF A PLAY It is unfortunate that Our Practical Heaven is a relationship-fueled play, because it was difficult to invest in any of the characters. The two-hour play, now receiving its world premiere at the Aurora in Berkeley, contained one-dimensional characters and lacked a three-dimensional story. Anthony Clarvoe’s script resulted from Aurora’s Global…

GROWING UP AND GROWING OLD Engaging, comfortable, realistic, gripping, and heart-tugging – all these tags apply equally to story, language, script and performances in American Conservatory Theater’s 4000 Miles, graciously directed by Mark Rucker. Billed as a “comic drama,” 4000 Miles is indeed an engrossing human drama spiced with down-to-earth humor. 21-year-old Leo arrives unexpectedly…

A SOBERING AND SUBSTANTIAL CAT Why do we tend to stick with the intolerable? When slashing at those closest to us becomes our way of filling inner emptiness or expressing a family bond, even love, what extremes are we capable of? Is it possible that webs of deceit can serve as a strong familial glue…

STURM AND SLANG Every generation writes its own playbook for tackling the game of life.   These new rules are encoded in language that the previous generation (parents, Old School, The Establishment) usually finds baffling. Flummoxing grown-ups with newfangled lingo (think:   fresh, dope, rad and bitchin’) helps young people find a voice, establish an identity and…

DIVERSE CHARACTERS CAST A THEATRICAL SPELL It’s not Halloween but Christmastime, and the San Francisco Playhouse is ringing in the season in a novel way with their production of Bell, Book and Candle in their sparkling new Post Street venue with its comfy chairs. With its decorative air of belonging to another, long-past time period,…

ROLL OUT THE CAROL For two generations, a yearly outing to see A Christmas Carol has been a feel-good tradition for San Francisco families. American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) has staged adaptations of this famous Dickens story continuously since 1976, with few gaps, changing up the production on a regular basis to keep it from getting…

BIG RIVER MAKES A CLASSIC BOOK FLOW BEAUTIFULLY ONTO THE STAGE In Big River, adapted from the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the “mighty Mississippi” gracefully becomes a mighty metaphor for a journey of discovery into human foibles, adventure, the meaning of friendship, prejudice, redemption, and right and wrong. More than that, decked in…

AN OPENING NIGHT SURPRISE It’s one of those instances that may just be talked about in the San Francisco opera circle for years to come. In Act One of Puccini’s Tosca (1900) at San Francisco Opera, we were treated to the glorious and beautiful strains of Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu, and although she grew in…

THERE HAS TO BE ANOTHER WAY When Anna Ziegler’s world premiere play Another Way Home began, it seemed that the thrust of the play would revolve around Joey (Daniel Petzold), a 17-year-old spending the summer as a Counselor-in-Training at Camp Kickapoo in Maine. When his Jewish, upper middle-class parents Philip (Mark Pinter) and Lillian (Kim…

AN AUGUST PROJECT In many ways, playwright August Strindberg’s influence in the theater has been far more significant than his public reception. While theater historians and scholars speak of Strindberg (1849-1912) with the fervency normally associated with Shakespeare, only five of his over sixty plays are produced with any kind of regularity: The Father, Miss…

NINE TIME TONY AWARD WINNER TOMMY TUNE RETURNS TO THE VENETIAN ROOM In his review of A Day in Hollywood – A Night in the Ukraine (1980), New York Times’ critic Mel Gussow called director/choreographer Tommy Tune “The toe-tapping heir to Busby Berkeley. What his predecessor did with 50 dancing girls and a sound stage,…

THAT’S AMORE I hope San Franciscans actually know how advantaged they are to have a company like 42nd Street Moon, which presents fully staged productions of rarely-seen musicals. While I am grateful for Musical Theatre Guild’s concert-style, one-time only productions in Los Angeles, rare is the theater company willing to dust off an old American…

BERKELEY REP HITS A HOMER It utterly astonishes that the epic tale of the Trojan War could be rendered with power and grace by a solo actor. The fact that one actor would have, and does have, the reserves to go for 100 unflagging minutes, bringing to life a litany of historical facts, names, dates,…

SHOOTING HISTORY IN THE NECK With the exception of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and its fierce gender-bending genius, and Rocky Horror Picture Show (sublime sexy silliness that nudged a million budding transvestites into their corsets and fishnets just that much sooner), the genre of rock musicals, in general, is an overrated bore.   My verité-besotted…