Friday, August 31, 2012
In professional wrestling, we're told, you can't kick a guy's ass without the help of the guy whose ass you're kicking. Talk about a democracy! Perhaps there's more to learn from the gaudy w…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:17PMThursday, August 30, 2012
Berkeley Repertory Theatre's season-opening production of Chinglish by David Henry Hwang presents the best possible circumstances to witness communication happening under the worst possible …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:41PMSunday, August 26, 2012
You don't really expect Japanese erotic tentacle art to be the inspiration for a feel-good treatise on saving a broken marriage. But that's just what Steve Yockey delivers in the world premi…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 10:27PMThursday, August 23, 2012
Cabaret dazzler Mark Nadler is on the road both literally and figuratively. In the figurative sense, Nadler is on the road to the past in his new show. That shouldn't be a surprise for a pia…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:33PMThursday, August 16, 2012
Noël Coward was a man of his time in many ways and maybe even ahead of his time in others. For instance, in the delightful 1941 play Blithe Spirit, now gracing the Orinda Hills in a handsom…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:18PMWednesday, August 8, 2012
At once the antithesis of drama (nothing's happening!) and a complete exposure of the theater's guts and bones, Annie Baker's has a particular genius for creating simplicity of the most comp…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:45PMSaturday, August 4, 2012
As a showcase for mind-blowing stagecraft, you will not find a better example than War Horse, the National Theatre of Great Britain hit that is trampling audience's tear ducts around the wor…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:04PMSaturday, July 14, 2012
Zora Neale Hurston writes with zest and zeal. She can move from joy to anguish in a second and still find her way back to hope. All of this is readily apparent in California Shakespeare Comp…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 11:00AMThursday, July 12, 2012
The 25th anniversary production of Les Misérables now at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN season is annoying and gratifying, pretty much in equal measure.
You have to give credit to s…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:25PMWednesday, July 4, 2012
Palo Alto native Terri White grew up and became a Broadway star, thanks largely to her big break in 1972's musical hit Two Gentlemen of Verona, which she also performed on tour at the Geary …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:24PMThursday, June 28, 2012
The Scottsboro Boys is a musical on crusade. Not for the first time in their storied career, composers John Kander and the late Fred Ebb make some of the worst human traits entertaining all …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:28PMSunday, June 24, 2012
David Thompson is the first to admit that regardless of the show itself, he would do anything to work with John Kander, Fred Ebb and Susan Stroman, three major theater artists with whom he h…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:53PMSaturday, June 23, 2012
I'm going to paraphrase the title song of Eve Ensler's Emotional Creature, now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Don't tell them not to cry or to calm it down or be …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:20PMFriday, June 22, 2012
If only a 94-year-old scandal were sensational in ways we no longer understood, we could look back and wonder what all the fuss was about and why the media underestimated the taste of the ge…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:33PMWednesday, June 20, 2012
Sometimes names are facts. Like now – there's magic at the Magic Theatre.
The play is Luis Alfaro's world-premiere Bruja, and it's extraordinarily powerful. Even better, it has one foot v…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 09:39PMThere are seven locked rooms in Duke Bluebeard's castle, and Nick Hillel knows what's in each one. From blood to torture to tears, the contents of the room were originally devised in French …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:32PMThursday, June 14, 2012
The inevitable homecoming is upon us. The Broadway musical version of Green Day's American Idiot, which had its world premiere in 2009 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, has returned to the Bay …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:11PMSunday, June 10, 2012
The members of GrooveLily, vocalist/electric violinist Valerie Vigoda, keyboardist/vocalist Brendan Millburn and drummer/vocalist Gene Lewin seem like such nice people. They seemed nice in 2…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:58PMSaturday, June 9, 2012
I recently had the pleasure of sitting in the studio with Chloe Veltman, host of the KALW radio show "Voicebox." Our topic of the evening was singing actresses. More specifically, we discuss…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:41PMFriday, June 8, 2012
When you call Ben Vereen's mobile phone, you get a most entertaining voicemail message. It's Chita Rivera singing, "My wish for you is a sweet, happy life." Then a cheerful Vereen says that'…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 09:40PMSunday, June 3, 2012
A little bit weird (in the most wonderful way) and a whole lot good, Christina Anderson's Good Goods is a captivating drama that becomes a highly satisfying love story – or love stories to…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 11:00AMFriday, June 1, 2012
Dael Orlandersmith's Black n Blue Boys / Broken Men is a brutal experience. How could it not be? Its 90-plus minutes are all about the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of young men and h…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:12AMWednesday, May 30, 2012
Watching four people try to practice "the art of coexistence," as the playwright puts it, is entertaining but ultimately depressing in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage at Marin Theatre Company.…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:25AMWednesday, May 23, 2012
Summer camp has started early this year, but not to worry. This is some high quality high camp.
We've had a few Bay Area productions of Xanadu, the Broadway musical version of the notorious…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:41PMSunday, May 20, 2012
What did Spokane, Washington ever do to Martin McDonagh? The London-born, Ireland-identified playwright famously wrote six plays, including The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Cripple of Ini…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:33PMSaturday, May 19, 2012
p>According to the Wall Street Journal, the King really is the King of Broadway.
News came down last month that Disney's The Lion King is now Broadway's all-time highest grossing show. I…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 10:00AMFriday, May 18, 2012
With her dad, Pat Boone, on the big stages of Las Vegas, Debby Boone was able to explore Sin City in the swinging '60s. She remembers seeing some of the big-name performers – Sinatra, Stre…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:59PMSaturday, May 5, 2012
You may think you know the Tenderloin – drugs, poverty, violence, crime – and certainly those impressions are valid, but Cutting Ball theater's world-premiere Tenderloin challenges audie…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:37PMThursday, April 19, 2012
So far, playwright Annie Baker is two for two in the Bay Area. It took a while for the country's hottest young playwright to make her mark locally, but she has done it now. Twice. And a thir…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:13PMThursday, April 12, 2012
Linda McLean's Any Given Day, now having its American premiere at the Magic Theatre, is theater for grown-ups. There's nothing fanciful or sensational about. It's basically duet conversation…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:50PMWhen Darren Criss was a kid going to American Conservatory Theater's Young Conservatory, he attended one of the company's annual galas. Joel Grey was the headliner. Now Criss, all grown up a…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:04AM 
