by Charles Kruger No doubt about it: “Dance Nation” is an extraordinary play and people will talk about it. In ten years of reviewing theatre in the Bay Area, seeing as many as 60 to 80 shows each year, I have never seen a production that has elicited such strong visceral reactions as “Dance Nation.” […]
by Charles Kruger Award winning local playwright Christopher Chen is a rising star on the regional theatre circuit, his plays being produced both in the Bay area (Cutting Ball Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory) on the East Coast (Long Wharf Theatre), and points in between. Last year, he was part of SF Playhouse’s popular […]
by Charles Kruger Three hapless proofreaders, their harried boss, and a mysterious character named “that guy” who does little else but toss paper airplanes from behind a glass partition, work in the dismal basement of a Washington D.C. advertising agency. Stuck in a dead end situation, with failing power (the lights are constantly flickering), they […]
by Charles Kruger Nobody could imagine anything more impossible or ridiculous than that gangster-style businessman Harry Brock (Michael Torres in an SF Playhouse debut) and his bimbo of a girlfriend, Billie Dawn (Millie Brooks), could possibly acquire influence among the respectable senators and lawyers in our nation’s capitol. Brock is crude, brutal, crooked and crass, […]
(Charles Kruger) Playwright Lucas Hnath is a notable talent who has generated excitement in the world of literary theatre as if he were a newly discovered planet, He is original, exciting, and will no doubt attract many admirers into his orbit. Hnath has a voice that will be heard loud and clear for some time […]
by Charles Kruger We all love traditional Christmas classics, whether Tiny Tim or George Bailey, Pyotr Tchaikovsky or Irving Berlin. But, in San Francisco, some of us are very grateful indeed to the SF Playhouse for their lovely tradition of offering the unexpected each Christmas season. Previous treasures have included Tennessee Williams’s charming, but rarely produced, Christmas […]
by Charles Kruger So Larry Gelbart (Emmy-winner for “M*A*S*H” and screenwriter for “Tootsie”) knows from funny, and he’s no slacker on the sentiment, either. The premise is great: the show simultaneously follows the story of a novelist working on a screenplay adaptation of his book, while the screenplay itself is acted out simultaneously on an upstage […]
