1,373 stories by "Chad Jones"
What a rare treat to have had two productions of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life Is a Dream on local stages this year. First there was California Shakespeare Theater's production (read …
The whole time I was watching Lachlan Philpott's Truck Stop, a Crowded Fire Theater production at Thick House, I was working myself into a state of anxiety imagining being the parent of a te…
Two of the Bay Area's most interesting theater artists, Philip Kan Gotanda and Sean San José, were asked to adapt a short story from Lysley Tenorio's 2012 collection Monstress for American …
There are two very good reasons to see the musical Dogfight at San Francisco Playhouse. The 2012 stage adaptation of the 1991 movie starring River Phoenix and Lili Taylor has its moments (mo…
How appropriate to go (high) camping under the stars in the Orinda hills with the California Shakespeare Theater. One doesn't think of Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep as a play for …
Just when it seems all the colorful characters are fleeing San Francisco, along comes an Oasis of (fake) tits and glitter. Yes, Oasis, the new South of Market nightclub, has defied the real …
I've never seen anything quite like Now for Now, the new theatrical work devised and performed by Mark Jackson and Megan Trout now at Z Below through July 26 (time is short " go see it). As …
What is it about Roald Dahl that makes his books so ripe for adaptation? Probably the most famous book-to-screen-to-stage example from his canon is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which b…
Robert (Keith Pinto, center) suffers his friends and their attempts to fix him up Stephen Sondheim and George Furth's 1970 musical Company now at San Francisco Playhouse. Below: Amy (Monique…
If you've ever seen a show by our foremost docudramatist, Anna Deavere Smith, you know the power she has over an audience. She conducts extensive interviews on her chosen topic, then she re-…
In the wake of my review of TheatreWorks' world premiere musical Triangle someone tweeted a link to the review and suggested that the show could make it to Broadway. I have some thoughts abo…
There's so much talk about nature and stars in Life Is a Dream that it seems perfectly natural to be sitting outside on a temperate summer night watching Pedro Calderón de la Barca's 1635…
Would that Caryl Churchill's 1982 play Top Girls was something of a dated relic in its details of the horrors, tribulations, indignities and injustices suffered by women through the ages. Th…
There's a particular kind of fear that grips those who have all the things we're "supposed" to have " jobs, houses, marriages, ideals. The fear, of course, is not in the having of it all but…
p>Eddie Izzard was back in town this week with his Force Majeure tour. His San Francisco stop at the Golden Gate Theatre offered congratulations to audience members for being the smartest…
Leave it playwright Lauren Yee to bring clear definition to the sub-genre "existential slasher comedy." That's exactly what her Hookman is, a fascinating world-premiere play from Encore Thea…
Some houses leak when it rains. For Shelah, the deluge inside is almost as severe as the one outside, and that's just the water. The metaphorical flood " of tragedy " has only just begun.
T…
In the world of pop culture, we've had precious few insights into the world of autism. Certainly the work of Oliver Sacks and Temple Grandin (and the HBO movie about her starring Claire Dane…
The greatest crime the musical Nick & Nora seems to have committed in its ill-fated 1991 debut was not being nearly as good as it should have been and not being nearly the catastrophe ev…
It's a museum piece come to life, a poem that dances, a classic that feels ultra-modern. Shotgun Players' Antigonick is all that and more, including somewhat baffling and exhausting.
You do…
In Aaron Posner's Stupid Fucking Bird, an energizing riff on Chekhov's The Seagull, a playwright laments that what he's written is just another play where nothing real happens. You can't rea…
Faith is one of the most valuable and powerful things human beings have to give away, and anyone who takes advantage of that faith with anything less than sincerity and devotion qualifies as…
Tremble those gladdies, possums. Our dear Dame Edna is departing. She's not shaking off this mortal coil (for her that somehow seems tacky), but she is saying a final goodbye. Sort of. Dame …
Any celebration of Alice Munro merits attention, but when that celebration comes from Word for Word, the ever-astonishing local company that transforms short fiction into brilliant theater w…
Award-winning San Francisco playwright Christopher Chen gets deep into existential nihilism in his latest world premiere, Aulis: An Act of Nihilism in One Long Act. That title pretty much sa…
