Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Kink' and 'Interior. Leather Bar' at Frameline James Franco is on a mission. It's a valid mission, but also one that you might expect from an undergraduate with a passion for pushing buttons, a liberal sensibility, and resources like wealth
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'American Night' At CalShakes 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Dear Elizabeth' At Berkeley Rep A book or play in letters is not a new concept see A.R. Guerney's 1989 play Love Letters as one popular example of the form, or Alice Walker's The Color Purple but
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Tom Stoppard's 'Arcadia' There are too few contemporary plays that are instant classics, but Tom Stoppard's 20-year-old masterwork Arcadia is one of them. It's dense with language yet buoyant in style, speaking to the present as
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Black Watch' At The Armory Community Center A.C.T. recently took on the role of being a test case for use of the Armory's enormous Drill Court space. As we discussed earlier in the week, the theater company needed
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Janelle Monáe At Davies Symphony Hall It's not often that you get to see the symphony crowd, populated as it is by S.F. society types and mostly a bit long in the tooth, get on their feet and
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Sutton Foster Live At Feinstein's Old-fashioned talents like the ability to command a stage, large or small, and hold an audience in the palm of your hand for an hour and a half just through song and a
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Pericles' at Berkeley Rep In the hands of certain directors, contemporary productions of Shakespeare can become something far greater than the sum of their parts. Mark Wing-Davey is one of those directors, and his take on Pericles,
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Tanlines Outshines Vampire Weekend At The Fox Sometimes an opening act just has more chutzpah, charisma, and raw hunger for an audience's love than the band they're supposed to be warming people up for, and that was exactly the case
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Stuck Elevator' At A.C.T. It's hard to criticize a piece of musical theater that is as ambitious, poignant, and unique as Stuck Elevator without coming off as a philistine, and for that A.C.T. deserves some
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'The Happy Ones' at the Magic Theatre We don't make it out to The Magic Theatre too often, in large part because of the travel anxiety associated with getting out of the Marina after dark, but for all those of
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Fallaci' At Berkeley Rep In their valiant efforts to produce new work, Berkeley Rep occasionally has some misses, and their latest mainstage play, Fallaci, is one of them. The play centers on the life and provocative persona
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Dead Metaphor' at A.C.T. We've complained often enough about A.C.T. defaulting to the canon of "good plays" and the safest exports from New York, and we don't want to suggest that they've heeded just our
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: '4000 Miles' At A.C.T. Winter is a time for quieter plays on the A.C.T. calendar, and the current production, 4000 Miles, is no exception. It's a new play by Amy Herzog having its West Coast
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Anything Goes' at the Golden Gate Theater SHN's latest Broadway tour arrival, Anything Goes, is a good reminder of what purely pleasurable confections musicals once were. And this cast and production, fresh from a Tony-winning run in New York, shine
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'The White Snake' at Berkeley Rep About once a year the Bay Area gets treated to a magical theater gem that transcends time and genre, and this may be it. The latest main stage production at Berkeley Rep, running
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Elektra' at A.C.T. Sophocles' Elektra is a play about outrage, and revenge, and how deep the well of anger can go. ACT's latest production, directed by artistic director Carey Perloff and starring Olympia Dukakis as a
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'An Iliad' at Berkeley Rep Homer's Iliad is not the sort of story you expect to find performed on an intimate stage, with no costumes, let alone by a single man. But how can one tell the legend
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'War Horse' at the Curran Theater Broadway comes to San Francisco just a handful of times a year, and one of the biggest hits from the 2011 season in New York was War Horse, an import from London based
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Chinglish' at Berkeley Rep Are you an American? Do you speak a foreign language with any fluency? Of course not. This assumption forms one of the core jokes in David Henry Hwang's new play Chinglish, which comes
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Humor Abuse' at A.C.T. We unfortunately missed Lorenzo Pisoni's acclaimed stage memoir Humor Abuse during its first, sold-out run at A.C.T. this past winter, so we were glad, after all the accolades it received, to
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Spunk' at CalShakes The second show of CalShakes' four-play season is often the most adventurous, typically being one of the two non-Shakespeare productions that this always creative company puts on each summer. And the latest, Spunk,
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Eve Ensler's 'Emotional Creature' at Berkeley Rep The Vagina Monologues. Heard of them? That is the 1996 play that made Eve Ensler famous, and sent her on a tour around the world performing the show herself, as she originally had
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'The Scottsboro Boys' at A.C.T. Let's take a second to refresh the memories of those of you for whom it's been a few years since you took an American History class: The Scottsboro Boys were nine teenage black
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'The Tempest' at CalShakes All Shakespeare plays were once done in outdoor theaters in the daylight, but certain works lend themselves best to being done in the open air. Along with A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest
