Much like they did with last summer's Spunk, CalShakes veered away from their standard repertoire of 20th Century classics and Shakespeare plays with the selection of Richard Montoya's American Night: The Ballad of

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/

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

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,

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

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

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.