Once again, the folks at Boxcar prove they are “the little (theater) engine that could” with their insane, inventive, irresistible “Clue.” Artistic Directors Peter Matthews and Nick O. Olivero have adapted the screenplay of the foppish 1985 cult film — itself inspired by the perennial board game — and crafted a unique and loving sendup of a sendup. Read More

Valerie Holiday can’t explain why she has so rarely performed in California. “We’re trying to fix that now,” she laughs, referring to the Rrazz Room debut of The Three Degrees this week.Holiday joined the relatively unknown Philadelphia-based group in 1967 four years after Fayette Pinkney, Shirley Porter and Linda Turner were discovered by producer and songwriter Richard Barrett. Read More

Margaret Cho likes to keep a full calendar. Wrapped around her recent three wild weeks on “Dancing With the Stars,” the former San Franciscan promoted “Cho-Dependent” — her debut album as a singer-songwriter — and continued her comedy tour across the nation. She appears at the Nob Hill Masonic Center on Saturday.“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” Cho says about the schedule, which includes planning for the third season of “Drop Dead Diva,” her Lifetime series shot in Georgia, and making new videos for the album such as “Lice,” which was inspired by a trip to Morocco last year. Read More

There’s a wonderfully pragmatic guy-next-door quality to Marvin Hamlisch. Awards and world-famous friends seem to be just part of a day’s work for the composer-conductor, who will simultaneously launch the seventh season of Marilyn Levinson’s Bay Area Cabaret and rechristen the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel as an upscale entertainment venue Sunday. Hamlisch played the Venetian Room “many, many, many years ago. I can’t remember when,” he says, “but then I can’t remember Tuesday, so that tells you something.” Read More

By today’s “Glee”-filled standards, a group of students having frank discussions about sex barely raises an eyebrow. Not so in 1960, when “Where the Boys Are” presented four girls — including singer Connie Francis in her screen debut — awakening to their sexual urges with very different opinions of how to behave. This week, Francis returns to the Castro Theatre, scene of her sold-out 2007 concert, for a 50th-anniversary screening of “Boys” on Wednesday and a concert performance, backed by a 21-piece orchestra, on Saturday. Read More

There’ll be no onstage reunion with Robert Wagner when Stefanie Powers opens “Hart of My Heart” for two nights at The Rrazz Room this  weekend. The Hart of the title is not a television character, but lyricist Lorenz Hart, first long-term writing partner of composer Richard Rodgers. That Powers sings still surprises those who know her only as a glamorous society sleuth or from her campier early days as “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.” Read More

According to Cheryl Bentyne, who’s one-quarter of the musical group the Manhattan Transfer, even Grammy-winning recording artists have to do their chores. This explains why she has spent the waning days of the summer outside her 1836 Sudbury, Mass., vacation home with a brush dripping “cottage red” on her hands. “I painted a house!” she says. “Not the inside. Not a closet. Not around a windowsill. I painted a house.” Read More