Linda Dorsey

Max Vernon's new musical The View UpStairs sees its Bay Area premiere in Ed Decker's appealing production at the New Conservatory Theatre. This is a time-traveling tale that allows multiple generations of the gay community to intermingle and confront the complexities of building queer communities throughout the ages in the charming UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans, the site of one of the most violent incidents in the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. 

BWW Review: THE VIEW UPSTAIRS at New Conservatory Theatre Center follows a time-travelling millennial back to the historic Upstairs Lounge in 1973.

In May, New Conservatory Theatre Center is thrilled to present Max Vernon's The View UpStairs, directed by NCTC Founder & Artistic Director Ed Decker with musical direction by Kelly Crandell. When impulsive entrepreneur Wes buys a dilapidated building in the French Quarter of New Orleans, he's magically transported to its glory days: the UpStairs Lounge in 1973. Serving as a home, a church, and a gay dive-bar, the UpStairs was its own kind of paradise.  As Wes meets the larger than life lounge regulars, he learns what has been gained and lost in the fight for equality, and how the past can help guide all of us through an uncertain future.

Woodminister Summer Musicals is closing its season with a dynamic production of In the Heights, which won four Tonys (Best Musical, Score, Choreography and Orchestrations) in 2008. The show was conceived in the heart and soul of composer and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was homesick for his Washington Heights, Manhattan neighborhood, and poured all of that longing into song and the first glimmers of a story, which was later fleshed out by playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes. What emerged was a rap-infused, slice-of-life tale about a modern immigrant community on the cusp of change. Who will stay? Who will go? Whose dreams will thrive and how will the neighborhood survive the gentrification that is slowly beginning to take place?

AIDA at Woodminster. The love triangle between Nubian Princess Aida, Egyptian Captain Radames and his Princess Amneris will tug at your heartstrings. But only thru September 13. Get your tickets now!

'Little Shop of Horrors, the deliciously dark comedy/horror-rock musical -- beloved by high school and community theatre companies across the country -- spreads its gripping green vines now through March 24 in the East Bay at Holy Names University's Regents' Theatre.

Sherry Boone and Sean Jeremy Palmer have created a new opera about a slave's daring attempt at escape.