Arts & Entertainment 'The Hills of California' Tells the Story of English Sisters and the Stage Mother Who Raised Them As they gather to await the death of their hard-charging, ambitious stage mother, three sisters, and then a fourth, estranged sister, parse through their past in playwright Jez Butterworth's 'The Hills of California,' now playing at Berkeley Rep.
Arts & Entertainment 'Stereophonic' Artfully Evokes Rock Legends Holed Up In a Sausalito Recording Studio In 1976 Tony-winning play Stereophonic blew into town this week with the bravado of the legendary rock band that it sorta kinda imagines the story of, pulsing with 1970s recording studio vibes, and using fiction to fill in the missing pieces of an iconic moment in American music history.
Arts & Entertainment 'Suffs' Keeps Marching on National Tour, Arriving Triumphantly In SF at a Time of Protest It is hard not to hear the many, painful echoes of our own time in the story of Suffs, the Tony-winning Broadway musical based on real events in the women's suffrage movement of the 1910s.
Arts & Entertainment 'Kim's Convenience' at ACT Is a Hilarious, Taut Tale of an Immigrant Family Originally written 20 years ago and first performed 14 years ago, leading to a popular Canadian TV show adaptation, 'Kim's Convenience' remains a funny and powerful piece of theater about the immigrant experience.
Arts & Entertainment 'The Reservoir' at Berkeley Rep Plumbs the Depths of Addiction and Familial Love Berkeley Rep's 2025-26 season opened this week with playwright Jake Brasch's semi-autobiographical play 'The Reservoir,' which is an unconventional, mostly unsentimental examination of the parallels between severe alcoholism and dementia.
Arts & Entertainment 'Shucked' at the Curran Is a Pun-a-Minute, Corn-y Good Time 'Shucked,' a new Broadway musical that delighted audiences in New York in 2023, arrived in San Francisco this week on its first national tour, and it's a genuinely funny, light-hearted treat of a show in an old-timey vein.
Arts & Entertainment ‘9 to 5: The Musical’ at the Victoria Theatre Works All Day as a Screwball 1980s Nostalgia Romp Dolly Parton herself wrote the music to ‘9 to 5:The Musical,’ running this month at the Victoria Theatre, a slapstick revue featuring over-the-top wigs and a comedic commitment to specifically recreating the year 1980.
Arts & Entertainment 'Luigi: The Musical' Is as Silly as It Sounds, Also Kind of Subversive? 'Luigi: The Musical' has been something of an underground hit in San Francisco since debuting last month at the Taylor Street Theater. And while it's definitely dumb and quite rough around the edges, it is a subversive good time in line with drag parodies and the like.
Arts & Entertainment 'Co-Founders' at ACT Is a Joyously Oakland-Centric Hip-Hop Musical About Startup Culture Screens are everywhere in 'Co-Founders,' the inventive, tech-centric, Bay Area-set new musical that just had its world premiere Thursday at ACT's Strand Theater. And, just maybe, it presents a vision for how technology will integrate into the musical theater we see produced in the coming years.
Arts & Entertainment 'Parade' Tells Story of Infamous Injustice In Atlanta Through Haunting Score A Tony-winning musical that tells the tragic, frustrating story about a Jewish man who was likely wrongly accused of murder and convicted on flimsy evidence in the Jim Crow South has just landed at SF's Orpheum Theater.
Arts & Entertainment Eddie Izzard Shows Endurance and Wit In Solo 'Hamlet' Great comedians sometimes make for great actors, and Suzy Eddie Izzard joins those ranks with her solo performance of 'Hamlet,' now playing at ACT's Strand Theater.
Arts & Entertainment Reality TV Sendup 'Nobody Loves You' at ACT Is Witty, Sharp, and Entirely Lovable The modern musical hasn't ever tackled the ubiquitous phenomenon that is reality television, maybe because the two worlds seem like they'd be incompatible. But Nobody Loves You, which just opened at ACT Wednesday, proves they can be a match made in Broadway heaven.
Arts & Entertainment 'Uncle Vanya' at Berkeley Rep Is Pure Theater Magic at Work Sometimes a great cast and a great director coalesce around a particular play and make it sing in ways it only rarely can, and such is the case with the current production of Chekhov's 'Uncle Vanya' playing at Berkeley Rep.
Arts & Entertainment 'Back to the Future: The Musical' Is a Kitchsy and Fun (If Forced) Take on the Classic Film The latest movie-to-musical adaptation to hit the national tour circuit is 'Back to the Future: The Musical,' and I may be in the minority among the theater-going public in wishing it was more than just a spectacle.
Arts & Entertainment World Premiere Play 'The Thing About Jellyfish' Dazzles at Berkeley Rep Ali Benjamin's acclaimed 2015 young-adult novel The Thing About Jellyfish has now been adapted for the stage, and Berkeley Rep hosted the play's world premiere this week.
Arts & Entertainment 'Some Like It Hot' Marries New Values With Old-Broadway Razzle Dazzle at SF's Orpheum Fans of the Billy Wilder classic film 'Some Like It Hot' will find plenty that's familiar in the plot of the Tony-winning Broadway musical adaptation, which just opened Thursday in its first American tour at SF's Orpheum Theater.
Arts & Entertainment ACT's 'A Whynot Christmas Carol' Deconstructs a Dickens Classic, to Evocative Ends There is no definitive stage version of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol,' just as there is no one definitive film version. And though ACT had a faithful and well loved version of its own that it staged for over 40 years, the company decided it was time for a change.
Arts & Entertainment 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' at Berkeley Rep Is a Timely, Poignant Comedy About the Immigrant Experience 'Steel Magnolias' first showed the theatrical and storytelling potential of the hair salon. And Jocelyn Bioh's 2023 play 'Jaja's African Hair Braiding' adapts the concept to a modern-day hair-braiding shop in Harlem, where most of the characters are African immigrants.
Arts & Entertainment Broadway Vet Carolee Carmello Makes a Phenomenal 'Kimberly Akimbo' at the Curran Theater The Tony Award-winning Best Musical of 2023, Kimberly Akimbo, is already on tour. And in an opening night performance at San Francisco's Curran Theater on Thursday, star Carolee Carmello brought down the house in the hard-to-pull-off lead role.
Arts & Entertainment Mary Zimmerman's Miniaturized 'Matchbox Magic Flute' Is Full of Fresh Delights at Berkeley Rep More of an artful condensation than an adaptation, Mary Zimmerman's slimmed-down version of Mozart's famous opera 'The Magic Flute' becomes a music-hall comedy that's accessible for all.
Arts & Entertainment 'Mexodus' at Berkeley Rep Takes a Riveting Musical Journey Into a Little-Known Piece of History Berkeley Rep kicked off its new season this week with a new musical piece by a pair of talented performers and musicians that delves into a mostly untold piece of pre-Civil War history.
Arts & Entertainment 'Private Lives' at ACT Transposes Noel Coward's Classic Comedy to Argentina The 2024-25 season at ACT kicked off Wednesday night with the opening of 'Private Lives,' Noel Coward's beloved 1930 comedy about the impossibilities and intransigencies of romantic love.
Arts & Entertainment Gender-Reversed 'Company' Recasts a Classic Sondheim Score Centered on Marriage The sexual politics of 2024 are a far cry from what they were in 1970, when Stephen Sondheim wrote 'Company,' arguably the first in a string of brilliant Broadway shows that together encompass the peak of his talents.
Arts & Entertainment American Finance Is the Stuff of Epic Drama In 'The Lehman Trilogy' at ACT American corporate history doesn't often inspire poetry, let alone theater. But such is the feat of the epic historical play 'The Lehman Trilogy,' a London import now making its West Coast premiere at ACT, directed by Oscar- and Tony-winner Sam Mendes.
Arts & Entertainment World Premiere Musical 'Galileo' Turns the Famed Astronomer Into a Rock Balladeer In the new musical 'Galileo,' which had its world premiere Wednesday night at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Broadway star Raul Esparza commands the stage as the maverick Seventeenth Century astronomer, in a rock musical that is at turns both audacious and confounding.
