San Francisco
(Bay Area)

A VERY MERRY MATCH Once upon a time in San Francisco there were two beloved icons of the city’s music scene.   They were practically the same age, enormously talented, and lionized by legions of fans who adored them both; but by some trick of fate their paths had never crossed. The slightly older but very…

AN APPETIZER FOR THE REAL LIFE OF ORIANA FALLACI At the top of Berkeley Repertory Theater’s Fallaci, Italian opera soars as the chiaroscuro image of Oriana Fallaci is illuminated by only her cigarette lighter. It is a fitting introduction to a play which sheds light on a character but fails to fully illuminate the life…

A PERFECT CHILDREN’S STORY FOR OPERA, BEAUTIFULLY STAGED…BUT IS IT READY FOR CHILDREN? I confess to being passionately attached to the score for the successful stage musical, The Secret Garden by Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman (1991), but translating Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s novel – the story of Mary, a spoiled 19th-century 11-year-old sent…

INSPIRATIONAL, THOUGHTFUL, DARING What if Dr. Martin Luther King was a down-to-earth, simple, vulnerable human being like the rest of us? What if human existence could be viewed from another dimension, one that allowed the viewer to weigh the pluses and minuses of the greater good versus personal choice, or the math of one human…

MAY THE WONDERFUL FOURTH MESSENGER BE A HARBINGER OF GOOD THEATER TO COME Enter a flight of fancy and imagine the scenario if a deity on the scale of a Buddha were a woman living today, where she and her disciples grapple with modern-day challenges. That is the setup of the exceptional new musical The…

MIGHT AS WELL FACE IT, WE’RE ADDICTED TO, WELL, EVERYTHING In the tragicomedy The Motherfucker with the Hat, every character has something painful in their lives that they are self-medicating. Bronx couple Jackie and Veronica are alcohol and drug addicts, trying hard to get their lives together but continually slipping up. After being imprisoned for…

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…