Friday, April 25, 2014
After hosting three cabaret performances, the Aurora Theatre Company's rehearsal/black box/office space (the Dashow Wing, to be specific) known as Harry's UpStage at last beings life as a pl…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:15PMThursday, April 17, 2014
There is not another drama about family, about communication, about the very essence of language like Nina Raine's Tribes. The 2010 British play now on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Thrust St…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:43PMWednesday, April 16, 2014
I've always been moved by August Wilson's Fences, the 1950s installment of his extraordinary Century Cycle of plays depicting African-American life in the 20th century. But the current produ…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:53PMSunday, April 13, 2014
The song titles say a lot about what this musical is like: "Livin' in the Sunlight," "You Hit the Spot," "Sweeping the Clouds Away." If it seems there's a rosy glow emanating from these titl…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:52PMFriday, April 11, 2014
You don't have to have a college degree to enjoy David Davalos' Wittenberg a the Aurora Theatre Company, but it sure will help.
If 16th-century academia is your thing, then you probably alr…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 09:04PMSunday, April 6, 2014
I loved Linda McLean's Any Given Day so much that I proclaimed it my favorite show of 2012 (read my review here). And that makes it all the harder to convey just how much I disliked her worl…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:53PMMonday, March 31, 2014
Showbiz legend Liza Minnelli, currently in the midst of a multi-city tour with her Simply Liza concert, pulled into Davies Symphony Hall last Friday for a 90-minute show that encompassed old…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:13PMThursday, March 27, 2014
Is it just me, or is it hot in this theater?
Live theater is not usually a hotbed of eroticism – so often attempts at sexiness inspire laughs more than they do accelerated heart rates –…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:45PMTuesday, March 25, 2014
There's something very sly at work in She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange, the world-premiere from Amelia Roper with Crowded Fire Theater at the Thick House. From looking at the vivid, s…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:34PMSunday, March 23, 2014
A mysterious chapter in modern art history receives some theatrical exploration in the world premiere of Lauren Gunderson's Bauer at San Francisco Playhouse. If you've never heard of the abs…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:51PMThursday, March 13, 2014
Maybe you have to be in the right mood for a satirically slapstick political farce. I can tell you I was definitely in no mood for satirically slapstick political farce – not that I knew t…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:28PMWednesday, March 12, 2014
Last Saturday I reviewed the TheatreWorks production of Once on This Island, the charming musical fairy tale by the Ragtime/Rocky team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. My review ran in t…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:28PMFriday, March 7, 2014
Blood is fun – at least it is within the confines of Impact Theatre's omnibus presentation Bread and Circuses, a collection of nine short plays fairly dripping with the thick red stuff.
A…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:03PMMonday, December 16, 2013
From the moment you walk into the Ashby Stage auditorium to see Shotgun Players' Edward Gant's Amazing Feats of Loneliness, you know something special is going to happen. The space contains …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:39AMFriday, December 6, 2013
In many ways, John Patrick Shanley's Storefront Church, now at San Francisco Playhouse for a well-timed holiday run, is less about the battle between the material world and the spiritual wor…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:18PMWednesday, November 27, 2013
The thing about a love story is this: you want to feel it. You need to feel it. When Juliet wakes just after Romeo bites it, if you’re not feeling that dagger in your own chest, what’s t…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:32PMMonday, November 25, 2013
The remarkable thing about Mona Mansour's Urge for Going and the work of Golden Thread Productions is how effectively the complex world of the Middle East comes through in a moving family dr…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:38PMFriday, November 22, 2013
Don't you love it when a new play starts out and you really like it, then it turns into something else and you like it even more? That's what happens with Ideation, a world-premiere play by …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:39PMSaturday, November 16, 2013
The last time Cirque du Soleil rolled through town with Totem in 2011, the company seemed refreshed and revived. Gone was the pretentious stuttering and back was the purely enjoyable spectac…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:48PMFriday, November 15, 2013
For a second time this fall theater season, a play is dealing with the Rapture, that moment when believers will ascend and everyone else...doesn't. First it was the young gay actor in the Sa…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 08:46PMThursday, November 14, 2013
p>The music of Porgy and Bess is so pervasive in the musical landscape that actually seeing the show and how the songs fit into the story is a little startling.
I know the George Gershwi…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:32PMFriday, November 8, 2013
The company of Peter and the Starcatcher opens Act 2 with a rousing number involving Neverland mermaids. The Tony Award-winning play continues through Dec. 1 at the Curran Theatre as part of…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:02AMMonday, November 4, 2013
There's something extraordinary happening at Intersection for the Arts, and only part of it has to do with theater. Intersection, along with Campo Santo and California Shakespeare Theater ha…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:23PMThursday, October 31, 2013
Simply listening to Mona Golabek play the piano would be pleasure enough. But in her remarkable one-woman show The Pianist of Willesden Lane now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, her music goes…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:31PMWednesday, October 30, 2013
What's the haps in Hoofddorp, you ask? Well, for a small town in Holland, things are pretty dull, actually, thanks for asking. The good news is they've got a heck of a library in Hoofddorp, …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:15PMSaturday, October 26, 2013
As an actor and director, there is seemingly nothing Danny Scheie cannot do. Over the summer, he dazzled in several drag roles in California Shakespeare Theater's Lady Windermere's Fan (read…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:39PMMonday, October 21, 2013
More than two dozen songs and four standing ovations later, Norm Lewis has officially made his San Francisco splash. The Broadway leading man and golden-voiced baritone made his long-overdue…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 10:00AMWednesday, October 16, 2013
Call it the Great Gunder-splosion of 2013. And 2014. San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson has taken over the local theater scene with more productions than you can shake a dramaturg at.…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:42PMWednesday, October 9, 2013
You know that Beautiful: The Carole King Musical has worked its musical biography magic when, during the curtain calls, the extraordinary Jessie Mueller takes her bow, you feel like you're a…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:23PMTuesday, October 8, 2013
The word factions is uttered in a way that makes it sound like the filthiest word you can imagine. And, in these tense government shutdown days, it actually is. But when James Madison says t…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:52PMSunday, October 6, 2013
The last time San Francisco Playhouse produced a play by Rajiv Joseph -- Animals Out of Paper in 2009 -- the young playwright was becoming one of the hottest writers in the country. TheatreW…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:24PM 
