Monday, 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 06:58PMSunday, December 5, 2010
You can keep your Shreks and your Lemony Snickets. Give me the human warmth of a corny holiday musical any day.
I use the word "corny" with love – if it's not a little corny, a little se…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:00PMFriday, December 3, 2010
There’s a moment of absolute magic in the world premiere of Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
We’ve just been subjected to a rather dispiritin…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:26PMThursday, December 2, 2010
I wanted to love Shrek The Musical because it’s an unlikely underdog. I didn't love it.
Here you have a big Hollywood studio, DreamWorks, with a hit movie franchise (that, by the way, t…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:51PMTuesday, November 30, 2010
This is one of the best stories to come out of a theater in many a moon.
Last week, after a performance of Liz Duffy Adams' Or, actress Maggie Mason was proposed to by her longtime boyfri…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:58PMMonday, November 29, 2010
Kermit the Frog said it best: it’s not easy being green. It wasn’t easy for Elphaba the witch of Wicked. It wasn’t easy for the Grinch (of stealing Christmas fame). And it certainly is…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:28PMSunday, November 21, 2010
A door presents itself. You enter. Suddenly you're immersed in a warped version of reality.
That's what happens to 9-year-old Coraline ,the heroine of Neil Gaiman's novel of the same name …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 11:29PMFriday, November 19, 2010
The smiling cartoon woman on the poster – the one juggling the trappings of modern life such as a cell phone, a brief case, a lap top, a glass of wine and a baby – is a comic figure. She…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:11PMWednesday, November 17, 2010
A few years ago, if you’d asked me what I thought about horses as theater, I’d have probably said something like, “Call me when Mr. Ed performs as Hamlet.”
But then I saw Cavalia,…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:10PMMonday, November 15, 2010
High-concept Shakespeare gives me a rash. I should modify that. Most of the time, when directors impose some great new twist, time period, setting, the result merely obscures rather than hei…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:16PMSunday, November 14, 2010
In today's San Francisco Chronicle, I write about how Shrek, the hit series of animated films, became a Broadway musical and how that musical has actually improved – according to the creat…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:41PMSaturday, November 13, 2010
Salacious (and accurate) title aside, David Bell's The Play About the Naked Guy is a little bit sweet and a whole lotta funny. The Impact Theatre production, affectionately and astutely dire…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:10PMThursday, November 11, 2010
With a wink and a nod to Shakespeare, playwright Liz Duffy Adams explains the title of her play Or, in a spiffily rhymed prologue. It's about love or lust. Danger or delight. Gay or straigh…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:26PMWednesday, November 10, 2010
David Cale is a perfectly attractive human being – he’s got great posture, a receding hairline and a beautifully expressive face. But once you fall under his spell as a storyteller – a…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:00PMSaturday, November 6, 2010
Last night I fell in love with a 77-year-old Broadway legend.
Actually, I started with a giant crush that developed during a recent phone interview with Chita Rivera (read the story in the…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:43PMFriday, November 5, 2010
The millennium approached, then quickly fell behind us. Time marches on, but Tony Kushner's Angels in America remains a landmark achievement of 20th century theater.
The legacy of the play …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 06:01PMWe met him as a baby. Then we got to know a little bit more about his father. And now we get to watch Marcus Eshu make his first steps into manhood.
Tarell Alvin McCraney's Brother/Sister …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 12:54AMFriday, October 29, 2010
You know that annoying habit we have of combining couples' names to form one idiotic name – you know, Brangelina, TomKat, Bennifer.
Well, I have a new one. After last night's 42nd Street…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:04PMThursday, October 28, 2010
To quote one of the Jets, “Dig this and dig it the most.” The most compelling drama at Wednesday’s opening of West Side Story wasn’t happening on the stage of the Orpheum Theatre. It…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:45PMWednesday, October 27, 2010
You never need an excuse to celebrate the genius of Stephen Sondheim, but here goes. We're still celebrating his 80th birthday (which actually occurred last March). He has a new book out, Fi…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:06PMMonday, October 25, 2010
What is it that makes West Side Story so incredibly intoxicating, even 53 years after its premiere? There's no denying the power of Jerome Robbins' athletic and gorgeous choreography or the …
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 10:00AMSunday, October 24, 2010
Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, gazes over a map of Afghanistan and says to Abdur Rahman, the country's Amir, "Your country is in the wrong place."
That imagined pronouncement could have occurr…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:05PMWednesday, October 20, 2010
Craig Marker gives a performance of such magnitude in Marin Theatre Company’s 9 Circles that it almost eclipses the play itself.
Obviously the play has to be substantial and artful enou…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 07:13PMTuesday, October 19, 2010
Love, tension and desperation are deeply felt in Habibi, the world-premiere production of Sharif Abu-Hamdeh’s drama about always feeling away from home. This is yet another co-production f…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 05:39PMMonday, October 18, 2010
Sometimes I feel like I got to San Francisco just a little bit too late.
By the time I got here in 1990, the cabaret heyday was long past, and just a year before, the famed Venetian Room i…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 10:30AMTuesday, October 12, 2010
Anybody's enjoyment of the 1962 Stephen Sondheim/Burt Shevelove/Larry Gelbart musical farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum depends largely on the actor playing Pseudolus, the…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 11:00AMMonday, October 11, 2010
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Leslie Martinson, director of Superior Donuts, should bring together such good actors. Martinson is also the company's casting director and has been wit…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:43PMFriday, October 8, 2010
There’s nothing like the ooze of blood to usher in the holiday season. And by holiday season, I mean Halloween, which suddenly seems to be more reverently and feverishly celebrated than Th…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 02:36PMSunday, October 3, 2010
Cormac McCarthy makes a pretty good argument for the ruin of mankind in The Sunset Limited, a 2006 "novel in dramatic form." But then again, McCarthy is his own best argument for mankind's s…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 11:32PMFriday, October 1, 2010
There are some wonderfully theatrical theological discussions going on around town these days.
At the Victoria Theatre in the Mission, outlandish talk show host Jerry Springer is facilita…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 03:46PMTuesday, September 28, 2010
One general problem I have with Greek tragedy is that I’m not Greek and, most days, not terribly tragic. I’ve experienced, a time or two, the feeling of catharsis that can come from bein…
SOURCE: Chad Jones' Theater Dogs at 01:05PM 
