We like Jonathan Moscone, and have admired his directing talents often at CalShakes and A.C.T., and this week a play that is very close to his heart and life premiered at Berkeley Rep. Ghost Light, which was written by longtime Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone and co-conceived by Moscone, who serves both as director and as the central character — Taccone insists this is a "character" based on Jonathan who happens to be named Jonathan, but you get the point — is a play about a son struggling with the death of his famous father many years after that father was assassinated and made national headlines. And that father was slain San Francisco mayor George Moscone. more ›

Those of you who read these reviews know that our complaints about the lack of imagination and freshness in Bay Area theater, at least among the established companies, go back quite a while. There are exceptions, however, which are always welcome, and The Wild Bride at Berkeley Rep is certainly one of those. It's a production conceived and performed by Britain's Kneehigh Theater Group — the same wily troupe who brought us Brief Encounter at A.C.T two years ago — and directed, as Brief Encounter was, by Emma Rice. Rice and her gang of nimble, musical, energetic performers take on a particularly dark (and arguably feminist) fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm called "The Girl Without Hands," and view it through a Southern Gothic lens, complete with banjo-and-bass bluegrass songs, and a lot of dancing. more ›

You all know David Mamet's a conservative now, right? He moved to Santa Monica a while back, came under the influence of a widely respected conservative rabbi and Bush supporter, and in 2008 he wrote his first play from a conservative bent, November, which was a sort of light farce about a Bush-esque President trying to get re-elected that was not exactly uncritical of such a president. more ›

It's amazing how the 1960s, which much of the culture has grown tired of making reference to over the years, have managed to become way more relevant in recent weeks than they felt during the anti-war protests of 2003. Even as we watched the Public Theater's revival of Hair in its premiere run at Shakespeare in the Park three years ago, directed by Diane Paulus, we thought to ourselves, "Huh. The new generation of twentysomethings can probably relate to this in a way that Gen X really couldn't, at least when we were in our 20s." more ›

Kevin Spacey makes a great villain. We were remembering this recently when some basic cable channel was playing Se7en, and he of course won his first Oscar for playing Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects. And holy shit were we reminded again last night at the U.S. premiere of Richard III at the Curran Theater — as directed by Sam Mendes originally for the Old Vic in London. We haven't seen enough of Spacey in recent years, and it's because he's been holed up across the pond working on projects like this, and we can tell you right now he hasn't lost an ounce of his signature creepiness, or his acting chops. more ›

Some plays are more beguiling and moving than you expect them to be, at least upon hearing the basic outline, and that's definitely the case with Bill Cain's How to Write a New Book for the Bible, which just had its world premiere last night at Berkeley Rep. It's a taut and at moments incredibly sad play, which takes as its subject a son caring for his dying mother in her final months. The play is pure autobiography -- the main character's name is Bill, and Cain has named the other characters after his family as well, mother Mary, brother Paul, and his father Pete -- but Cain has suffused the action with enough subtle, simple theatrical magic to keep it from feeling self-indulgent. more ›

Nothing ever changes in Hollywood. They think they want intelligent people to write screenplays and make creative decisions, but meanwhile they fly by the seat of their pants and often the dumbest movies are huge hits, almost by accident. So they keep making them. This was as true in 1930, just three years after the dawn of the "talkie," as it is today, and that's what makes Kauffman and Hart's play from that era, Once in a Lifetime, as ticklingly funny today as it was 80 years ago. ACT's newest production, and the opening play of the season, is a smart and spiffy revival of not-well-known play replete with camp and satire. more ›

We love when repertory companies, whose duty it is to cycle through Shakespeare's entire body of work, tackle the "tough" plays that have been deemed by modern minds to be too controversial/un-PC/racist: namely Merchant of Venice, which CalShakes did a marvelous production of a few years back; Titus Andronicus, the ridiculously violent early tragedy which CalShakes tackled earlier this season with some ironic success; and Taming of the Shrew, the indisputably sexist comedy which rounds out CalShakes' 2011 season. While director Shana Cooper does an admirable job of modernizing what she can, and giving Katherine, the "shrew," a sense of autonomy, the script ends up undercutting her efforts before the last act is through. It's a tough job trying to soften a tough play, without outright rewriting it. more ›

It's not often in this life that you get to see someone who has EGOT'd (that's someone who's won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony, for those who don't watch 30 Rock) performing live on stage. Hell, there's only a few of them alive, and Rita Moreno, at the age of 80 and still dancing, is one of them. Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone spent several years trying to persuade Moreno — a Berkeley resident who's appeared twice before at the Rep, in 2004's Master Class and in 2006's The Glass Menagerie — to collaborate with him on an autobiographical show. Moreno finally relented... more ›

The California Shakespeare Theater's four-play season always includes at least one non-Shakespeare work, and in both last season and this one that work has been by the great George Bernard Shaw. Last year's production of Mrs. Warren's Profession proved to us that Shaw could still feel vitally relevant, and even fresh, in the modern day. The current production of Candida, while still a fine example of Shaw's wit and emotional subtlety, feels less vital and somewhat more dated. more ›

CalShakes continues their season exploring another of Shakespeare's earliest works, Two Gentlemen of Verona, which is thought to be the first play Shakespeare wrote, around 1590. (See also our review of Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's earliest tragedy, which was the first production of the season.) The current production, The Verona Project, is more than just a modern interpretation of Shakespeare's text, however; it's a wholesale update and revision of the play, with modern language, performed by a band of actors who also form a rock band, with songs from a concept album based on Two Gentlemen of Verona interspersed throughout the action. Suffice it to say, it's a highly original piece, with a lot of good music (though some of it falls flat), a lot of good humor — as well as a faithful exploration of the same themes of love and friendship that Shakespeare intended. more ›

Titus Andronicus is one of those Shakespeare plays that doesn't get performed much and that nobody reads in school unless they're a Shakespeare scholar. And here's why: It's ridiculously bloody, and racist, and the writing is generally considered among the worst in Shakespeare's oeuvre. The scholar Harold Bloom has called the play "an explosion of rancid irony," and "a poetic atrocity," and people in the audience of a 1955 London production laughed at parts that were supposed to be tragic, which he uses as evidence that it's a failure as a tragedy. CalShakes' new production, the first they've ever mounted of Shakespeare's earliest known tragedy, is nonetheless a fine example of the company's ability to embrace irony and modernize Shakespeare, complete with some fine performances, a fair amount of blood, and a lot of face-painted Goths. more ›

Get ready for some superlative praise: When it comes to a mastery of accents, dialects, and the ability to embody another person's idiosyncratic language, Anna Deveare Smith rivals Meryl Streep. Both actresses are physical chameleons, too, with faces that are somehow blank slates that can transform easily into other people — even crossing genders as Smith has frequently been known to do in her stage work, and as Streep did most recently in the HBO version of Angels in America, playing an elderly rabbi. Smith is best known as playing National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on The West Wing, and more recently playing hospital administrator Gloria Akalitus on Nurse Jackie. But her truly astonishing work has been for the theater, giving voice to Jewish and African American residents of Crown Heights, Brooklyn in her Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Fires in the Mirror — performed for sold-out audiences at Berkeley Rep in 1994 — and her follow-up piece two years later about the Rodney King riots, Twilight: Los Angeles. more ›

It's not often that San Francisco gets to see a potentially Broadway-bound new musical have its world premiere here, and when it's a musical about San Francisco based on a beloved serial that first appeared in the Chronicle in the 70s, well, that's a major aligning of the musical theater stars. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, which is the centerpiece of the season at A.C.T. and the biggest scale new work ever produced there, will not disappoint lovers of the books or the PBS mini-series from the early 90s. It's a joyous and almost fully realized piece of theater, with a terrific cast and at least three great musical numbers, and it is, by any stretch, a glorious celebration of the San Francisco of the mid-70s, in that moment of liberation and drug doing just before things turned darker with assassinations and Jonestown and such. more ›

We're going to say something that may not be so controversial , but we hope no one takes this wrong way: Every so often San Francisco theater really needs an injection of energy from New York. We can get a little becalmed and lazy here, what with no cohesive "downtown" scene, no network of cutting-edge off-Broadway theaters etc. We have the talent here — San Francisco would be a very different place without emigrés from New York and L.A., escaped here to find a better and easier life but bringing with them a few innovations, fresh talent, new viewpoints. What got us thinking like this was Taylor Mac's witty and audacious new play The Lily's Revenge, playing for a month at the Magic Theater and starring a crew of amazing Bay Area performers. Taylor Mac is a born performer we were already familiar with from the Tingel Tangel Club circuit, which has made a couple of trips to S.F. in recent years, and he's a writer, singer, Vaudevillian and drag performer of a school that fits well with the edgy, rag-tag drag scene here, born of the Cockettes as much as it was from the East Village in the 80s. more ›

Praise be, A.C.T. has managed to pull another hit out of their collective hat by way of Canadian theater company Electric Company Theatre, whose new and totally original re-imagining of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit deserves major praise. We'll stop harping on A.C.T. for not being able to pull off such inventive stuff with their own resources and company just this once — though they did score another win a couple months back with Clybourne Park, albeit directed by CalShakes' artistic director Jonathan Moscone, which just so happened to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last week. Things are looking up, kids, and we're holding out hope that the big original production of the season, the upcoming Tales of the City musical premiering June 1, will not suck. more ›

Chekhov plays all have certain themes and elements in common: love of work, unrequited love, suffering, aging, adultery, the etiquette of dealing with servants, educated people bored by the banalities of their circumstance. Three Sisters has all of that, and as fine a production as just opened at Berkeley Rep also brings with it a heap of pathos, and some emotionally charged, interlocking layers of interpersonal dynamics among a varied cast of characters, ranging in age from about 22 to 82. It's a fantastic play that deserves a nuanced production, and director Les Waters, a Berkeley Rep staple, and a terrific cast give it just that — with the not inconsiderable help of a new version of the play by Sarah Ruhl (of The Vibrator Play fame). more ›

We're always glad to find interesting new work being performed around town, though we don't make it out to enough of it — and the latest production from the Cutting Ball Theater, Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and Other Plays by Will Eno certainly qualifies. It's a trio of short plays, all pretty mercifully short — and we say that only because when one listens to dialogue and monologue as dense and unique as Eno's, brevity makes one appreciate it more. The first, the title play, is a monologue performed by Danielle O’Hare with great restraint, that sketches, almost simultaneously, a portrait of a melancholy woman in an almost happy marriage, as well as the young girl she once was. The structure of the monologue is hard to describe, and is all the better for it, featuring some direct addressing of the audience and plenty of jumps through time. Suffice it to say we were, at several points, confused, but the piece came together like a long poem, and we were entranced by O'Hare's quietness and diction throughout. more ›

We consider ourselves intelligent people. We went to a good college, majored in English, read a lot of plays in our day. We even did some theater, and know our prosceniums from our three-quarter-rounds, and we've seen our fair share, on- and Off-Broadway and on the Left Coast. But sometimes we see productions we ought to like that just puzzle us, and we think, 'Well that's okay. Good theater should provoke emotions, surprise us, even confuse us at times. Confusion is good.' But walking out of The Homecoming at A.C.T., a play by Harold Pinter that's considered one of the playwright's best, we knew that the play had done all of those things but still left us wanting somehow. At its dark, emotionally distant, absurdist best The Homecoming is hardly the kind of play to leave an audience warm and enraptured by the end. But still, we were wanting, and we're going to try to put our finger on that want right now. The play was directed by Carey Perloff, Artistic Director of the company and occasional punching bag of the New York TImes. For some familiar with A.C.T. over a number of years, this may be all one needs to know to want to avoid this production. more ›

We knew from the title we weren't likely in for a cheery good time, but we went into Berkeley Rep's newest production, Ruined, without having read anything about it. The subject turns out to be the systematic rape and genital mutilation of women in the Congo -- a subject we knew a little bit about, but which, sure, we might not opt to go watch a whole play about. The play, as it happens, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009, and don't get us wrong: It's a good play. But we suppose we're among those stereotypical Americans fatigued by stories about atrocities like these. Africa's seen a lot of them, and we've heard about a lot of them. But this isn't a play that's meant to proselytize or educate so much as it seeks some answers about why humans do the things they do, and in particular, why men commit such crimes against women, or against their own people. more ›

We take back everything bad we've said about A.C.T.. Well, almost everything. Clybourne Park is a great choice of play, for its edginess, contemporary-ness, and wit, and the current production up on Geary Street is one you shouldn't miss. (It's been extended until February 20, so run, don't walk.) more ›

KQED calls it "a farce of a farce, a lark, an evening of theater only to the extent that it features actors, lighting, sound effects and the rest." more ›

In theory, we enjoy one-person shows. A charismatic performer, alone on a stage, speaking truths and telling good stories, can captivate an audience in a way that multi-person performances can't. All you have is that one voice, that one thread to follow, that one pair of eyes staring back at you in the darkness. Mike Daisey is certainly a captivating speaker, and the performance we saw last night of his nonfiction monologue The Last Cargo Cult at Berkeley Rep, kept our attention, made us chuckle and even laugh out loud once or twice, but we've got to say that Berkeley may not be the most provocative place to stage a piece like this. Given the theme — it's basically an indictment of the American-capitalist dogma, and a semi-philosophical rant about our religion of currency — it felt a little like he was preaching to the converted here in the Bay Area, and doing so in a manner that suggested he thought he was teaching us something we didn't already know. more ›

It's been a season for whimsy and old-fashioned clowning in local theater, with Bill Irwin bringing his adaptation of Molière's Scapin to A.C.T., and now with Berkeley Rep's new theatrical adaptation of Lemony Snicket's The Composer Is Dead, in collaboration with NYC-based puppet-masters Phantom Limb Company. The production is an amalgam of puppetry, symphonic music, live-action film, and "living breathing theater," featuring a single multi-talented jester by the name of Geoff Hoyle (who also appeared in Scapin). The basis for the piece is Lemony Snicket's (a.k.a. Daniel Handler's) children's book and accompanying audio CD of the same name, which had original music by composer Nathaniel Stookey that was performed by the San Francisco Symphony. Handler wanted to turn the story — meant as an entertaining way to teach children about the parts of an orchestra, as told through Snicket's deceptively adult brand of wit — into a live theater piece, and the result was a half-hour long script to be performed by one man and several dozen marionettes, in a Victorian-style tableau of a stage set. more ›

Pft. Bah. Gah. What the hell was that? more ›

We can't stop being impressed with CalShakes. No matter how many productions of Shakespeare they churn out (on average, two per season, with two 50+-year-old, non-Shakespeare works in repertory as well), they still manage to find fresh and revealing ways of staging works that most actors and theater lovers have seen at least once or twice before in their lifetimes. more ›

The Bay Area, sadly, does not have the same vibrant, well supported stream of new work on its theater stages as New York does Off-Broadway, but then again no American city really does. What we have, instead, is quite a lot of recycled material — revivals, touring companies, west coast premieres and the like — with the occasional good new play by Berkeley Rep or one of several of S.F.'s small repertory companies. There's nothing wrong with revivals, don't get us wrong, especially when they're not of the ho-hum academic variety that A.C.T. seems to enjoy doing (see this year's Round and Round the Garden, or the more painful Phèdre as examples). It can be exciting to discover a little-known play from theater history that no one's produced in years but which still has some potency or relevance today. Mrs. Warren's Profession, an 1893 work by George Bernard Shaw currently being done at CalShakes in Orinda is one of those plays. more ›

The latest production at A.C.T. is less a theater piece than it is a dance piece, and it's not quite the experimental, genre-blurring work that it aspires to be as it is a Forrest-Gump-esque tour of the 20th century as conceived by a choreographer. more ›

On paper, we'll admit, this was not a play we were necessarily excited to see: multiple lesbian characters, one woman's struggle to choose between a man and another woman set in New York against the backdrop of the 2000 election and 9/11. But In the Wake, Berkeley Rep's last production of the season and their latest world premiere (a co-production with L.A.'s Centre Theatre Group, where the show ran last month), is a fiercely smart play about love, ambition, and American liberalism that is stirring and complicated, if maybe a touch over-written. more ›

It's a truncated play, and we figure we'll give it a truncated review, despite the fact that our enthusiasm for this new work playing at the Boxcar Theatre (Natoma near 6th) is huge. Eugene Ionesco's early 60s French-absurdist work Rhinoceros — in which a bunch of townspeople morph into rhinoceroses over three acts, gets a compressed and experimental adaptation at the Boxcar called, simply, Rhino, directed by Evren Odcikin. The production features four characters playing just a handful of roles, one of which is Ionesco himself, who speaks most of his lines from the playwright's own journals. And the audience? Well, you're standing for the duration of the 45-minute piece as the action unfolds in different corners of the room. more ›