Dear Frenemy
A musical twist on The Shop Around the Corner charms at SF Playhouse.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
The Wedding Zinger
Center REP’s wedding musical is a welcome surprise.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
A Temperate Tempest
If you’re going to be shipwrecked by a freak storm, a Livermore winery is an awfully pleasant place to wind up.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Seeking Hyde
Central Works imagines the making of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Read my review in the Mercury News. Read more
Feeling Adrift
The office workers in MTC’s Swimmers are drowning in their own lives.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Can’t Start a Fire Without a Spark
Lauren Gunderson’s latest play explores the near-impossibility of love under state-sponsored repression. My review is on KQED Arts.
Live, Die, Fail
Marin Theatre Company gives us the cheery tale of the untimely deaths of the Fail sisters.
My review of Failure: A Love Story is in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Gant, Get It Out of My Head
Edward Gant brings his traveling Victorian freak show of heartbreak to Shotgun’s Ashby Stage. My review is on KQED Arts.
The Importance of Being Wilde
There must be something in the water in the South Bay and Peninsula. TheatreWorks has unveiled a new musical version of Oscar Wilde’s classic comedy The Importance of Being Earnest in Mountain View, not long before San Jose Rep opens another musical adaptation of a great British play of the 1890s written by a renowned Irish wit: A Minister’s Wife, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. While the latter is set in the original period, Being Earnest has been transplanted to the swinging London of the 1960s for some reason, or for no reason at all.
Lazzi Come Home
Truffaldino Says No isn’t really a commedia dell’arte play, nor an adaptation of one. It is, however, about commedia stock characters, and what happens when one of them decides that he doesn’t want to be a guy who keeps doing the same thing over and over anymore.
