Alison Whittaker begins her one-woman show provocatively, telling folks in the audience how they would acquiesce, maybe even with a smile, if she stuck her hand up their private parts. Read More

We Players’ “The Odyssey on Angel Island” is a fun and funky, all-day, interactive theatrical experience that takes its participants on their own personal journeys wonderfully reflective of those experienced by characters in Homer’s epic poem.   Read More

Valerie Simpson has got a solid solo act. On Tuesday, in one of her first performances since the death last August of her husband and musical partner Nick Ashford, the veteran R&B singer-songwriter charmed her Rrazz Room audience, showing no signs of being nervous, though she said she was. “The hardest thing for me to remember,” she said, “is to keep singing. I’m used to singing half the song.” Read More

In his funny one-man show “The Kipling Hotel” onstage at The Marsh in Berkeley, Oakland-bred comedian Don Reed picks up where he left off in his previous offering, “East 14th: True Tales of a Reluctant Player.”Following his late-1970s East Bay teen adventures being the son of a pimp and stepson of a Jehovah’s Witness, his new tale vividly describes his stint in Los Angeles as a UCLA student on a “partial scholarship” (code for “not enough f------ money,” he says) studying speech and debate and trying to get a career going in show biz.Lack of funds led to the single-room occu Read More

Jo Schuman Silver, the producer of “Beach Blanket Babylon” -- The City’s long-running, wild musical revue -- invites young performers to apply for the annual BBB Scholarship for the Arts award. The deadline is April 27. Can you talk a bit about the honors? Winners in three categories — singing, acting and dance — each get $10,000 scholarships toward higher education. Read More

Bruce Rosen, a Bay Area writer and investment manager since 1983, talks about his newest book, “If You Ever Need Me, I Won’t Be Far Away.”Would you categorize your book as a memoir? I would call it creative nonfiction. It takes the form of a memoir and goes beyond it. Its themes are both personal and universal. It represents my desire to make sense of what’s going on in the world — but not in a dry, abstract way.So what’s in the book? It has stories important in my life, it’s about the friends I’ve known, the coming apart of my marriage. ... Read More

An unlikely spoof of telenovelas, Westerns and even grindhouse fare, “Casa de Mi Padre” is the slight, wacky and even briefly charming new comedy from Will Ferrell and his former “Saturday Night Live” collaborators. Ferrell nails the Spanish — yes, the film has English subtitles — in this delightfully overblown saga about a Mexican ranching family that gets caught up in drug wars. Read More