This spring's theater season in San Francisco is especially full with acclaimed shows newly on tour, and a world-premiere musical at Berkeley Rep centered on the story of Galileo Galilei.
As we move into late March, April, and May, local theater lovers are going to have a veritable feast of new and revived musicals and plays to take in, including the 2022 Tony winners for Best Musical and Best Revival of a Musical.
First, starting Saturday March 30, ACT's Strand Theater will host the local premiere of Kristina Wong's acclaimed one-woman show, Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord. Developed through Zoom performances during the pandemic and born of a pandemic story, the piece premiered at New York Theater Workshop in 2021. Wong grew up in San Francisco, the story of creating an Auntie Sewing Squad to sew masks during the pandemic is based on a real one that involved Wong's mother and her friends in SF. And the piece was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and won both Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards in 2022. It runs through May 5, and you can find tickets here.
Previews begin Thursday, April 18 for A Strange Loop, the 2022 Tony winner for Best Musical and 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama, at ACT's Toni Rembe Theater. We learned last summer that Michael R. Jackson's "big, Black, and queer-ass Great American Musical for all" would be filling out ACT's season, and we now know that this production will star Malachi McCaskill taking on the role of Usher, which Jaquel Spivey originated.
"I began writing what would become A Strange Loop in a small room of a bungalow style apartment in the middle of nowhere Queens when I was 23 years old," Jackson says. "Working on the show was my life raft and I never in a million years imagined the miles it would travel. I am so excited to share A Strange Loop with even more audiences and so grateful to ACT and CTG for making this West Coast premiere possible. What a strange loop!"
A Strange Loop runs through May 12, and you can find tickets here.
Broadway SF brings us the recent Broadway revival of Funny Girl, starting April 30, and starring Katerina McCrimmon as Fanny Brice, and Grammy-winning singer Melissa Manchester as Mrs. Brice.
Keeping with the classics, SF Playhouse will be opening a new production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie on May 2, directed by Jeffrey Lo.
And on May 5, previews begin for Galileo, a world premiere musical at Berkeley Rep starring four-time Tony Award nominee Raúl Esparza. The show has music and lyrics by Michael Weiner and Zoe Sarnak, and a book by Emmy-winning writer Danny Strong (Dopesick, Empire, The Butler), and it's directed by Michael Mayer, who directed the original 2006 Broadway production of Spring Awakening, as well as Green Day's American Idiot — which premiered at Berkeley Rep in 2009.
The show has star power behind it, and Esparza and Mayer surely hope this thing transfers to Broadway, but we'll see! Find tickets here, and opening night is May 15, FYI, if you want to wait for them to work out some kinks.
Speaking of star directors, Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall, 1917) is bringing his National Theatre production of The Lehman Trilogy to ACT starting May 25. The play, which won Best Play at the 2022 Tony Awards, traces the Lehman Brothers dynasty in New York, which ended with the spectacular failure of their 158-year-old bank in 2008. Find tickets here.
And opening June 5 is the national tour of Company, the gender-reversed production of Stephen Sondheim's beloved early-70s musical about a single thirtysomething surrounded by married friends, and more than slightly afraid of commitment. This production stars Britney Coleman in the lead role of Bobbie — and SF audiences may have seen Coleman in the tour of Beetlejuice: The Musical in late 2022.
The show won the 2022 Tony for Best Revival of a Musical, rounding out this season of Tony-certified entertainment. Find tickets here.
Related: 'The 39 Steps' at SF Playhouse Is a Clever, Madcap Four-Person Sendup of a Hitchcock Thriller
