Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Onstage and online, Broadway legend Betty Buckley is electrifying.
If you’ve ever seen her perform on Broadway – perhaps in the original cast of Cats or as Norma Desmond in Sunset Bou…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 07:08PMThursday, April 21, 2011
I talked to singer/actress Linda Eder a while back for a San Francisco Chronicle story pegging to her concerts this weekend (April 22 and 23) as part of the Rrazz Room Concert Series at the …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:22PMOh, Alma Winemiller. If you had been able to shuck off the burden of having an insane mother and a stern Episcopalian priest for a father, you might have become the woman you were meant to b…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:10AMTuesday, April 19, 2011
There’s a lot of excitement burbling through the Bay Area theater community this spring. One of the reasons is the Magic Theatre’s The Lily’s Revenge, a ballsy five-hour play by Stockt…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:46PMSaturday, April 16, 2011
I think I'd like Canada's The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre to mount every play I never want to see again. I'm convinced they could make it interesting and vital.
My interest …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:40PMThursday, April 14, 2011
Time aches in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s elegiac Three Sisters. The past is where true happiness lived (in Moscow), and the future holds the promise of reviving that happiness (in Moscow…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:48PMSunday, April 10, 2011
I've seen a lot of 42nd Street Moon shows over the years, but I've rarely seen one as exuberant, funny, beautifully sung and as hugely enjoyable as Strike Up the Band. Everything about Zack …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:20PMSaturday, April 9, 2011
There are cannibals in Hackensack. A tsunami swallowed South America live on TV. And there are dogs the size of Chevys ransacking libraries.
Welcome to, as the producers put it, "your fri…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:50PMWednesday, April 6, 2011
The world of David Lindsay-Abaire is askew. From his earliest wacky comedies to his later, more serious award-winning work, Lindsay-Abaire’s “askewniverse” (to borrow a word from Kevin…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:39PMTuesday, April 5, 2011
Mark Lewis never really intended to become the crown prince of Beatles tribute bands. As a young keyboardist/singer/songwriter in Los Angeles, Lewis wanted to perform his own songs, and to t…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:53AMMonday, April 4, 2011
Recently I had the pleasure of conducting an email interview with playwright Will Eno, whose Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and other plays closes this weekend at Cutting Ball Theater.
R…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:51PMWednesday, March 30, 2011
Collective memory will soon forget that there used to be entertainers in the grandest sense – performers who could be hilarious, could interact with audience members in wonderful (non-chee…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:38PMMonday, March 28, 2011
Race shmace. Let's do plays about explosions – exploding race, exploding narrative, exploding audience brains.
That's sort of what Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:38AMThursday, March 24, 2011
Maintaining a sense of balance can be hard enough in an off-kilter world. But just try doing the way Anna Ostapenko does it – on one hand clutching to a skinny narrow pole.
Somehow, the…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:25PMWednesday, March 23, 2011
By focusing in on some of the oldest practitioners of the world’s oldest profession, playwright Paula Vogel finds a lot to say about the way the world views senior citizens. Even more than…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:57PMMonday, February 21, 2011
Watching Anika Noni Rose (seen above, photo by Andrew Macpherson )on the cabaret stage, you sense a superstar in the making.
The gorgeous Rose, all of 38, has already made a name for herse…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 04:15PMFriday, February 11, 2011
Playwright Theresa Rebeck, a master of barbed contemporary dialogue, conducts an interesting experiment in the Magic Theatre’s world premiere of What We’re Up Against.
Her Petri dish…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:54PMSaturday, February 5, 2011
Sometimes things collapse. Sometimes buildings and bridges, things that are built to physically support us. And sometimes marriages and families, things that are meant to sustain and bolster…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:03PMThursday, February 3, 2011
Erich Bergen became a man in San Francisco. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but when the performer was cast as Bob Gaudio in the touring production of Jersey Boys, he was all of 20 years old. …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:41PMWednesday, February 2, 2011
As long as we live in a world where celebrity and art continually clash, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull will feel extraordinarily timely. And as long as people are restless, stingy and full o…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:55PMFriday, January 28, 2011
When I saw Next to Normal on Broadway, I was of two minds. For much of the first act, I glowered in my seat, overwhelmed by the Tom Kitt/Brian Yorkey score – too many lyrics, loud music of…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:15PMThursday, January 27, 2011
Because I interviewed playwright Bruce Norris for the San Francisco Chronicle (read the interview here), I will not be reviewing his Clybourne Park at American Conservatory Theater.
Mr. N…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:15PMWednesday, January 26, 2011
A hit on London’s West End in 2006, The 39 Steps became Broadway’s longest-running comedy two years later. The touring production played San Francisco’s Curran Theatre in December of 2…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:57PMMonday, January 24, 2011
It’s interesting that Mike Daisey chooses not to talk about current events in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, the second of two monologues running in repertory on Berkeley Reperto…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:56PMSunday, January 23, 2011
You could throw a lot of adjectives at The Companion Piece, a world-premiere creation by director Mark Jackson, actor Beth Wilmurt and their crew: wily, zany, exciting, perplexing, silly and…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 11:12AMSaturday, January 22, 2011
>When people talk about the musical Next to Normal, it's inevitably about one of two things: how they related on a deep personal level to the story of a bi-polar mom and the affect her di…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:36PMFriday, January 21, 2011
In the summer of 2008, Cutting Ball Theater threw audiences an incredible Bone. The play, part of the evening known as Avant GardARAMA!, was Eugenie Chan’s Bone to Pick, a one-act that re-…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:27PMThursday, January 13, 2011
I’ve seen Mike Daisey before on the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage. The country’s foremost monologist has entertained and captivated me on several occasions.
But at Wedne…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:02PMMonday, December 27, 2010
I did two things I'm proud of this year. I worked for a great theater company and I stopped working for a great theater company. From June 2009 to September 2010, I was the communications ma…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:07PMWednesday, December 8, 2010
The force is strong with this one. Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, her one-woman stage autobiography, continues its wild ride.
The Bay Area saw the show twice at Berkeley Repertory Thea…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:51PMMonday, December 6, 2010
Let it be said that Babes in Arms is one of the weirdest musicals with the greatest scores ever written. There have been weirder musicals and greater scores, but never in such striking comb…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:58PM 
