Adriana Sevahn Nichols subtly and poetically draws from her own life in a “Night Over Erzinga,” a heartfelt world premiere presented by Golden Thread Productions.The Bay Area troupe, whose mission is to give voice to Middle Eastern artists, commissioned the play with New York’s Lark Play Development Center and Chicago’s Silk Road Theatre Project. In its first outing, the groups’ Middle East America new plays initiative proves a success. Read More

Perhaps more artists should spend a decade between performing and releasing new material - for Sade, it’s been working like a charm. The band, fronted by the sleek, Nigerian-born, British-raised Sade Adu, hasn’t run out of steam as it wound toward the end of its highly anticipated tour in the first of two shows at the Oracle Arena in Oakland Friday night. Read More

Trudy Williams recalls that when she was in kindergarten, it was suggested she seek counseling because she told her class about some unusual animals at her home. "To me, it was just natural to have an elephant in the backyard," says Williams, who grew up in Riverside, where her parents ran a business called Have Trunk Will Travel that supplied exotic animals for films. It follows, then, that Williams would grow into her current position as manager of animal stewardship for Ringling Bros. Read More

Like many a good self-help book, “Learning to Laugh When You Feel Like Crying” contains a lot of common sense and universal truths. Subtitled “Embracing Life After Loss,” the compact book by Allen Klein, a San Francisco-based motivational speaker and former director of the Life-Death Transitions Institute in San Francisco, is filled with aphorisms, anecdotes and advice about dealing with the difficulties of going on with life after a loved one has died. Read More

Gentle, funny and touching on topics near and dear to baby boomers and their parents — that’s “Assisted Living: The Musical.” Sometimes slight but often sweet, the three-person, 75-minute show about life in a retirement home is appropriately running for lunch and early-bird dinner shows on weekends (sharing space with “Tony and Tina’s Wedding”) in  Chinatown’s Imperial Palace. Each performance offers a plentiful and serviceable, if not gourmet, multi-course Chinese buffet. Read More

Billy Elliot, the character, is a smokin’ dancer. “Billy Elliot the Musical” isn’t so hot.The drama, sentiment, passion and excitement that permeated the excellent 2000 movie starring Jamie Bell as the young dancer and Julie Walters as his crusty ballet teacher don’t pervade the touring version of the Tony Award-winning show at the Orpheum in The City.Even though the film and musical have the same creators, director Stephen Daldry and writer Lee Hall, and the same unlikely combination of themes — ballet dancing and labor strife in Britain — they vary wildly in tone. Read More