Extraordinary acting is at the heart of “Match,” a comedic drama and mystery — of sorts — by Stephen Belber about people who are not what they initially appear to be. In a role played by Frank Langella on Broadway, Michael Medici is perfectly delicious as Tobi, an aging dancer and choreographer, in this local premiere from Expression Productions onstage in a nifty gallery on Mariposa Street.
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Director Edward Zwick, recently in San Francisco to promote “Love & Other Drugs,” slightly balks upon trying to identify one or two characteristics common to his varied films, which range from “About Last Night” to “Glory” to “The Last Samurai” to “Blood Diamond.”
He settles on “relationships” and “ideas,” calling “Love & Other Drugs,” which opens Wednesday, a movie that challenges the current Hollywood notion of a romantic comedy.
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"My parents were teachers, and you have a red pen — I must be making an F,” Ruben Studdard told a woman sitting in the front row Wednesday on the opening night of his five-day engagement at
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The Rubinoos, persistent power popsters celebrating 40 years with a reunion gig Saturday at the Great American Music Hall, date their anniversary back to a 1970 gig at a “free school” in Berkeley.
“It was the Bay High hop,” says Tommy Dunbar, who formed the group with Jon Rubin after the pair dropped out of ninth grade, later to find the atmosphere at Bay High School (“you didn’t have to attend”) more compatible with their pastime of listening to oldies from his sister’s collection of 45s.
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Russell Thompkins Jr. and the New Stylistics are appearing in The City in a show of old-school R&B at its most sublime.
Backed by a smokin’ seven-piece band (with horns!) and two smooth vocalists, the original lead singer of the Stylistics, his unmistakable falsetto intact and sweet as ever after four decades, is serving up classic 1970s Philadelphia soul at the Rrazz Room.
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At 20, singer-songwriter Lucy Schwartz already has a fair amount of experience in the pop-music business, with two recordings and a bunch of songs featured in movies to her credit.
Creating music with a folk-indie influence along the lines of Regina Spektor, Feist and Fiona Apple, she seems to be taking her success in stride.
For example, she’s on a bill with the Weepies at the Great American Music Hall this weekend, part of a series of gigs that materialized after Internet encounters a while ago with the duo.
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Torture never has been as much fun as it is in the trio of one-act plays developed for the Halloween season by Thrillpeddlers.
The enthusiastic troupe brings outrageousness to life at Hypnodrome, a cozy little South of Market theater under the freeway that adds to the show’s delicious funk factor.
This 11th annual Shocktoberfest!! program — based on Grand Guignol plays filled with horror and humor in Paris at the turn of the 20th century — overflows with fake blood and timeless themes.
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An invigorating, thought-provoking and fun behind-the-scenes experience of the wildly successful Bay Area studio is in store for visitors to “Pixar: 25 Years of Animation” at the Oakland Museum of California.
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Choreographer Kim Epifano created San Francisco Trolley Dances to be the ultimate community art event.
“Art isn’t just for the person who can pay $30 to get into a show,” she says, contrasting that with her inexpensive display, which celebrates its seventh year this weekend, along Muni’s N-Judah line.
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Giovanni Zoppé, who has been a clown since he was 2, has a special definition of his art.
“Circus is family — those two are almost the same,” says the performer, who plays Nino in the 168-year-old Zoppé Family Circus, which opens in Redwood City on Friday.
He adds, “It’s magic that touches your heart, that you can feel.”
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The cartoonist and columnist probably best known for her funny map of “New Yorkistan” on the cover of the best-selling issue in the history of the New Yorker magazine is the subject of a delightful show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
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Taking on similar themes as “Food Inc.,” “King Corn” and “Fast Food Nation” comes “Fresh,” a documentary by Ana Sofia Jones that not only explores and explains the crises facing Americans and what they eat, but more importantly, showcases farmers and purveyors actively doing things to change the broken system.
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“The Brothers Size,” billed as part two of up-and-comer Tarell Alvin McCraney’s three-part “Brother/Sister Plays” about the black experience in the Louisiana bayou, is a more intimate, emotionally resonating offering than its predecessor, the more ethereal “In the Red and Brown Water.”
Magic Theatre opened “Brothers Size” Tuesday just a week after Marin Theatre Company launched, and already extended, “Water.”
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Word for Word founders Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter agree that they “scored” the rights to “Olive Kitteridge,” the Pultizer Prize-winning book of linked short stories by Elizabeth Strout.
This week, the acclaimed San Francisco theater troupe known for presenting short works of fiction literally as they’re written on the page, brings two of the book’s stories, “Tulips” and “River,” to Z Space at Theater Artaud this week.
“We wanted to show the arc, which is tricky to do in two stories,” Harloe says.
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Why would Rob Reiner make a movie about the ups and downs of romance between two 1950s-era eighth-graders?
“I literally flipped over it. It describes what it actually feels like to experience falling in love,” he said during a phone interview, describing the book “Flipped” by Wendelin Van Draanen on which the film of the same name, which opens Friday, is based.
Reiner first heard the story a few years ago, when his son, then 11, brought the book home and they read it together.
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