Steve Murray - Page 1

Berkely Rep’s co-production with La Jolla Playhouse of Ngozi Anywanu’s The Monsters is a joyous, heartwarming story of the bond between sister and brother that will want to make you hug your sibling. Both emotionally devastating and rewarding, The Monsters is brilliantly written, superbly acted by Anyanwu and Bay Area–born actor Sullivan Jones (HBO’s The Gilded Age, Slave Play on Broadway), and beautifully staged by Director Tamilla Woodard and her technical crew.

For Starra Jones, a baller from rural Plainnole, Arkansas, fulfilling her mother’s dream of basketball glory is her prime motivation. Playing a style of ‘dirty’ ball, her braggadocio will lead her to a foul play in Candrice Jones’ Flex, making its West Coast premiere at SF Playhouse.

There are many types of great theatre- light, cheerful, romantic, uplifting, silly, classic. Z Spaces’ co-production of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class is unflinchingly dark, emotionally devastating and a tough watch – but it is great theatre, a timely cautionary tale of evil startingly conceived and executed.

I admit I’ve never seen Stephen Sondhiem’s Assassins, nor ever heard the score or read the synopsis. A flop in 1990, the 2004 revival won five Tony awards, and it’s been in theatre rotations since, often causing controversy for its raw language and unsavory content. A play from the perspectives of infamous assassins?

The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, the world's first openly gay chorus, continues it’s forty-eighth season with a concert both cheerful and deeply emotional celebrating the music and events of the 1980’s. For the LGBT community, the 80’s was the apocalypse incarnate - a community devastated by the AIDS pandemic, government abandonment, and social ostracization.

What did our critic think of AN INTIMATE EVENING WITH LUCIE ARNAZ at Feinstein's At The Nikko?

There is plenty of interesting ideas in Eisa Davis’ into the lives of four women, students in a summer music program. The need for arts education drives these girls, partly for parity in a male dominated world of music and secondly as a respite from the dramas of their individual lives.

What did our critic think of GODS & MONSTERS at New Conservatory Theatre Center?

What did our critic think of SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD at Hillbarn Theatre?

TheatreWorks and director Jeffrey Lo must have been licking their chops with the chance to produce the regional premiere of Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize winning Primary Trust. In Lo’s skillful hands, and with a seasoned powerful cast, Primary Trust is a winner – both deeply emotional and full of hope.

For every lover of Ibsen, Arthur Miller and Stephen Sondheim, there’s a lover of The Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello and of course, Monty Python. Back in the 1970’s Monty Python’s Flying circus was a sensation with their irreverent and risqué observational comedy. If you couldn’t recite the week’s show the next day, you were ‘square.’

There’s a giant dynamo inside the petite frame of Marilyn Maye that propels her constantly forward, now approaching her 98th birthday, and eighth decade of performances. She’s a national treasure and receives adulation befitting her status wherever she performs.

The late AIDS activist Larry Kramer meets Pete Buttigieg in John Fisher’s wild political fantasia Left Field, now occupying the full stage at Theatre Rhino. Written and directed by Fisher, Left Field follows an angry radical f****t who rises from mayor to supervisor, to VP candidate, to potential President of the US.

Arthur Miller needed after his disastrous Broadway debut with the four-performance The Man Who Had All the Luck, and an article in an Ohio newspaper would provide the basis for All My Sons which would on to win two Tony awards for Best Author and Direction of a Play.

The Paranormal Activity franchise (seven films from 2007 -21), while critically panned, proved people love to be scared, then laugh at their foolishness. Now a theatre piece, the crowd anticipated the expected thrills of supernatural goings on in a live experience.

What did our critic think of THE NOTEBOOK at Orpheum Theatre?

What did our critic think of M. BUTTERFLY at SF Playhouse?

Change is hard, we all know that. We get stuck in patterns and the comfortable, even if that inertia is destructive. Watching Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, brilliantly directed by American Conservatory Theatre Artistic Director emerita Carey Perloff and starring an all-star cast of local legends, will make to jump into action.

Heidi Schreck’s award-winning 2019 homage to the US Constitution couldn’t be timelier than at this moment of political crisis in America. Written as a remembrance of her 15-year-old self as a debater in love with the constitution, the present-day Heidi narrates the play which links her family’s backstories to the application of the 9th and 14th Amendments.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are on a high recently, with their long- running animated series South Park skewering the present administration in their inimitable profane and darkly surreal style. 2011’s The Book of Mormon brought their irreverent humor to Broadway in what at the time seemed shocking, blasphemous, and absurdly brilliant.