Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Black N Blue Boys/Broken Men' at Berkeley Rep One-person shows are always a test of both the performer and the audience. Can this actor tell a story and capture an audience's attention for ninety minutes with no help? Can one, as
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Endgame' and 'Play' at A.C.T. We'll begin by admitting something that will likely color the tone of this review, and should affect how seriously you want to take our opinion: We love Samuel Beckett. The late, great playwright
Arts & Entertainment 'Elektra,' 'Streetcar,' and 'Arcadia' All Part of A.C.T.'s Upcoming Season The American Conservatory Theater announced their 2012-13 season today, and it includes a new translation of Elektra which will feature Olympia Dukakis and be directed by artistic director Carey Perloff, and a new
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Maple & Vine' at A.C.T. Wouldn't it be swell if we could just unplug ourselves from contemporary life completely and live like it was 1955? That's the question posed by the play Maple & Vine which made its
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Red' at Berkeley Rep A perfect play should provoke, inspire, educate, entertain, and delight its audience, and Red is certainly a near-perfect play. Berkeley Rep's latest import from Broadway won the Tony Award for Best Play in
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Nellie McKay's 'I Want to Live' At The Rrazz Room There's a brightness to Nellie McKay that's hard to describe if you haven't seen her live. Having long been fans of her music a blend of quirky, articulate lyrics with an amalgam of
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Scorched' at ACT Sometimes watching a play about torture in a war-torn country can be torturous in and of itself. And while we would not say that about A.C.T.'s latest offering, Scorched, we
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'A Doctor In Spite of Himself' at Berkeley Rep Berkeley Rep: We love you. Seriously, between The Wild Bride and their current mainstage production, A Doctor In Spite of Himself, the theater has truly reaffirmed its role in selecting and producing some
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Ghost Light' At Berkeley Rep 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'The Wild Bride' At Berkeley Rep 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.
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Race' at A.C.T. 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Hair' at the Golden Gate Theater 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: Kevin Spacey in 'Richard III' at the Curran Theater 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'How to Write a New Book for the Bible' at Berkeley Rep 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Once in a Lifetime' at ACT 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Taming of the Shrew' at CalShakes 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/
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup' at Berkeley Rep 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Candida' at CalShakes 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'The Verona Project' at CalShakes 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,
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Titus Andronicus' at CalShakes 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Let Me Down Easy' at Berkeley Rep 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: 'Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City' at A.C.T. 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: The Lily's Revenge at The Magic Theater 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: <em>No Exit</em> at A.C.T. 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
Arts & Entertainment SFist Reviews: <em>Three Sisters</em> at Berkeley Rep 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.
