San Francisco
(Bay Area)

FEEL-GOOD SHOW SPICES UP MARIN THEATRE Marin Theatre takes a flying leap into immersive culture with Mrs. Krishnan’s Party—which opened tonight in the intimate Boyer Main Stage. The interactive comedy is a short, frenetic and very funny helping of what goes on in back-of-the-store India, transported to Mill Valley. The audience slowly enters a backstage…

THE ART OF MAKING ART An extravagant art purchase causes a major upheaval among three old friends in Yasmina Reza’s Art, at Berkeley’s Ashby Stage through April 9. David Sinaiko and Benoît Monin The setup: former college buddies Serge, Marc, and Yvan meet regularly for dinner, drinks, and discussion. One day Serge (Benoît Monin) announces…

AUDACIOUS AND FUN MUSICAL TAKES ON REALITY TV Last Wednesday, A.C.T. opened an extremely likeable, engaging and entertaining musical telling one of the tried-and-true stories of the 21st century. It’s boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy goes on girl’s favorite reality dating show to win girl back! In an era where technology dominates communication…

NAPA’S LUCK PENNY GOES TO POT– IN A GOOD WAY A hokey 1930s propaganda film runs headlong into Beach Blanket Babylon in Reefer Madness at Napa’s Lucky Penny Productions through March 23. A musical spoof by Dan Studney and Kevin Murphy, the show opens with a swarm of zombies lifted right out of Michael Jackson’s…

WILD ROMP IN SENIOR LIVING TheatreWorks Silicon Valley has launched an uproarious spoof of senior living with Happy Pleasant Valley: A Senior Sex Scandal Murder Mystery Musical. It’s an all-encompassing effort by Min Kahng. He knows his stuff: he’s definitely of an age to qualify for Medicare, but Kahng wrote book, music and lyrics, and…

CABS, COKE AND COMING OUT: PEARL ONG’S JOYRIDE THROUGH SF At The Marsh Theater, Pearl Ong—who describes herself as a “former Hong Kong Princess, pot-smoking and coke-snorting lesbian—is performing her one-woman show, Night Driver—and it’s a perfect fit for San Francisco. After moving here from Hong Kong with her mother in the 1970s, as many…

CHICAGO: IT’S A RAZZLE DAZZLE HELLUVA SHOW How did Throckmorton Theatre in downtown Mill Valley get such a stunning production of Chicago? This isn’t Broadway, or is it? With the flash of a giant overhead marquee, a mute trumpet oozing honeyed notes, and a stageful of beautiful bodies in racy outfits, Chicago is one helluva…

PUSH/PULL PACKS A PUNCH Berkeley’s Central Works is known for offering local Bay Area writers workshops and the opportunity for new playwrights to debut their works on stage with an audience. The offering at hand is Harry Davis‘s triumphant Push/Pull, performed in the small and intimate setting of The Berkeley City Club. For the world premiere,…

A MUSICAL THAT CURVES IN CONCENTRIC CIRCLES Fly by Night, an affecting chamber musical which premiered in 2014 at Playwrights Horizon, has been described as a “darkly comic rock-fable,” and that’s about as accurate as any attempt to define this quirky show. With a book, music, and lyrics by Kim Rosenstock, Will Connolly, and Michael…

WHO ARE YOU ASKING TO THE PROM? It may not be high school or college prom season just yet, but in the San Francisco Bay Area, at least three theatre companies have decided it’s time to dust off their corsages and take The Prom for a spin. And given the recent American political events that…

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR RISES AGAIN. ROCK ON. Rock operas don’t come much more iconic than Jesus Christ Superstar, and Berkeley Playhouse’s electric new production makes it feel as urgent and incendiary as ever. With a timeless score by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, this show has been rattling the rafters of theaters since its…

YOU GOTTA HAVE HEART Two young immigrant women find joy and hope in a budding friendship in Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers, at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre through March 9. The show moves to TheatreWorks in Mountain View for a three-week run in April. Adroitly directed by Jennifer Chang, the two-actor 90-minute one-act, an uproarious comedy…

FANTASTIC FROGGY Jennifer Haley’s audacious graphic novel Froggy comes roaring to life on the Margaret Lesher Theatre’s big stage in Walnut Creek, and it’s one of the freshest theatrical offerings anywhere. Jamella Cross (Froggy) At its core a tale of a young woman who falls for a flaky third-tier actor, Froggy is a dark comedy spoofing…

WHAT—OR WHOM—SHALL BE DISCARDED? Marin Theatre Company has never shied away from provocative material, and its current production, Waste, is no exception. Waste tells the story of politically ambitious and idealistic Henry Trebell (Lance Gardner) and the loss of his political dreams when his affair with Mrs. O’Connell (Liz Sklar), a married woman, becomes public…

A SUSPENSEFUL ONE-MAN MURDER MYSTERY The Gay community in San Francisco was shocked and terrified by a series of murders between 1974-75 committed by a serial killer known as “The Doodler.” Believed to have killed between six and sixteen men, most of whom were gay, he was known for meeting his victims in bars, and…

WELL-SEASONED THEATER IS LOADED WITH FLAVOR Welcome to 1999, a time of hysteria over the impending Y2K crisis, widespread fear of monosodium glutamate (MSG), crude video games and crude popular culture. In the midst of all this wanders a Japanese-American high school girl named Ami (Ana Ming Bostwick-Singer), wrestling with her cultural identity, arguing with…

Currently playing at The New Conservatory Theater, Francis Grey and the Case of His Dead Boyfriend is a whirlwind one-man mystery that fuses elements of classic whodunits, camp, film noir, and drag—all packed into a breakneck, one-hour experience. This world premiere, written, directed, and performed by the multi-talented Nathan Tylutki, is a theatrical high-wire act…

THE THING ABOUT GREAT THEATER Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, Berkeley Rep’s world premiere production of The Thing About Jellyfish delivers an emotionally resonant adaptation of Ali Benjamin’s beloved coming-of-age novel, weaving together grief, wonder, and the mysteries of growing up with an ethereal, dreamlike quality, as a young girl on the cusp of adolescence searches…

THERE’S A HOT HIT COOKING IN ROSS In ancient biblical texts, Gilead is not only a place of final peace, but also invokes healing and hope. How appropriate that playwrights James Valcq and Fred Alley chose this name as the location of The Spitfire Grill, a café in a down-on-its-luck small town, grown smaller by…