“Girlfriend,” the world-premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, represents an extraordinary feat in modern theater: This musical based on 1990s pop rocker Matthew Sweet’s cult-classic album of the same name is wholeheartedly sweet.
With a precise, funny and smart book by Todd Almond, a big fan of the recording, this story of awkward young love between two guys who just graduated high school in Nebraska works markedly better than Berkeley Rep’s other recent high-profile rock-music project, Green Day’s “American Idiot.”
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A show with a title like “A History of Human Stupidity” seemingly promises a lot of silly laughs. Yet the world premiere by Rough and Tumble, a Berkeley troupe dedicated to exposing folly, is more of a sometimes-funny political or philosophy lecture on steroids than a rollicking dumb comedy.
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Themes in Henrik Ibsen’s 1896 drama “John Gabriel Borkman” are wildly relevant today. The title character’s grandiose thinking and illegal financial schemes resulted in lost fortunes, not just for business investors but for family members, who, years later, continue to reel in the wake of the devastation.
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There’s no equivocating: The Bay Area premiere of Bill Cain’s “Equivocation” is a hit.
The exhilarating show, which had its world premiere at Oregon Shakespeare Festival last year and won a 2010 American Theatre Critics Association award for best new play, has been extended twice at Marin Theatre Company in a rousing production directed by Jasson Minadakis.
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Duncan Sheik is admittedly a bit hesitant about his world premiere performance with the San Francisco Symphony next week.
“I’m very excited, but incredibly nervous,” says the New Jersey-born Grammy and Tony Award-winner (for “Spring Awakening”) of the concert, in which he’ll play and sing a song suite from his latest musical “Whisper House” backed by the full orchestra — nearly 100 musicians.
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Iago is one of drama’s greatest villains. In African-American Shakespeare Company’s new streamlined production of “Othello,” he’s a she – and the gender switch works without a hitch.
The show, which opened Friday in the African American Art & Culture Complex, also has a modern setting, in a military tribunal in Iraq with presumably American soldiers – another alteration that serves the story well.
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A mighty river is among the most vivid characters in “... and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi,” Cutting Ball Theater’s production of Marcus Gardley’s new play set in the Civil War era.
At times confusing but often thrilling, the ambitious, complex, pieced together quilt of a drama tells the tale of a slave Damascus, who is hung, then resurrected as a woman, Demeter, who — as in the Greek myth — goes in search of her lost daughter.
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Show tunes, anyone? They’re alive and well in “Forever Broadway,” receiving an encore presentation at the Herbst Theatre this weekend.
The production is the brainchild of John Bisceglie, creator of last year’s “S.F. Follies.”
While “Follies” was a costume comedy in the vein of “Beach Blanket Babylon,” this two-hour, 40-minute revue falls more along the lines of a pageant, featuring literally dozens of local performers.
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So far, Barry Manilow appears to be pretty happy in his new home at Paris Las Vegas in the heart of the Strip.
After a successful five-year stint at the Hilton, he made it, as he said during Saturday night’s opening weekend performance, to the “other side of the monorail.”
Designed specifically for the hotel’s relatively intimate 1,500-seat theater, this show is his most cozy and personal ever, pegging to a theme of romance (not to mention tying in with his most recent recording, “The Greatest Love Songs of All Time”).
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Paula West is as reliable as the main character in her signature tune “The Snake.”
In the clever Oscar Brown Jr. song, when the reptile bites his benefactor, leaving her to die after she has saved him, he tells her: “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
Of course, The City’s premier jazz singer’s constancy is of a positive nature, not fatal; at Tuesday’s opening of her six-week engagement at the Rrazz Room, she was predictably delightful.
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Tim Barsky’s “The Bright River: A Mass Transit Tour of the Afterlife” is a one-of-a-kind journey for adventurous theatergoers.
Onstage at Brava Theater Center, the show — Barsky’s trippy monologue set to eclectic live and taped music — reprises successful Bay Area productions that ran in 2004-05 at Traveling Jewish Theatre and Ashby Stage.
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Harvey Fierstein’s name is above the title in the program for “Fiddler on the Roof” for good reason.
The longtime Broadway performer (“Torch Song Trilogy,” “La Cage aux Folles,” “Hairspray”) brings a, dare we say, gay interpretation to the iconic role of Tevye the dairy man in the hit musical, now onstage in a touring production at the Golden Gate Theatre in The City.
The term “gay” is meant in both the contemporary and old-fashioned definition of the word.
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Harvey Fierstein’s name is above the title in the program for “Fiddler on the Roof” for good reason.
The longtime Broadway performer (”Torch Song Trilogy,” “La Cage Aux Follles,” “Hairspray”) brings a, dare we say, gay interpretation to the iconic role of Tevye the dairy man in the hit musical, now onstage in a touring production at the Golden Gate Theatre in The City.
The term “gay” is meant in both the contemporary and old-fashioned definition of the word.
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Athol Fugard is known for his powerful political and social dramas about challenges in his homeland of South Africa.
He has created another in 2008’s “Coming Home,” receiving an excellent West Coast premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Directed by Gordon Edelstein, who was at the helm of the premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., the play tells the deeply personal story of one woman and her family in post-apartheid South Africa.
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Not only has “Pearls Over Shanghai” survived a flash flood that closed it down for several weeks, the good-humored, gender-bending show is hosting guests of national prominence and questionable tastes — such as John Waters.
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