1,373 stories by "Chad Jones"
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a landmark play for California Shakespeare Theater. When the company really became the company, then known as Berkeley Shakespeare Company, the first show produc…
There's an observation about Internet porn in Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn now at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company that is at once hilarious and trenchant. A college woman encap…
Playwright (and former San Franciscan) Will Power knows a potent match-up when he sees it. In this corner we have young, preening world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali who, in the last yea…
Michael Urie is so freaking charming it's outrageous. The erstwhile scene-stealer from "Ugly Betty" landed in a one-man off-Broadway hit more than a year ago, and he's had the good sense to …
The challenge in reviewing Motown: The Musical is to be honest about its two most prominent components. The first is the clunky, self-aggrandizing book by Motown founder Berry Gordy who, at …
When real life comes in and smacks Prof. Henry Higgins across the face, it's a wonderful thing to see this brilliant yet stunted man consider, perhaps for the first time in his life, that ki…
"Sex and the City" impressario Darren Star stopped by to see the San Francisco phenomenon known as Sex and the City Live!, a drag romp inspired by his HBO TV series, and his feeling was that…
You don't often think of puppets and drama together, but playwright David West Read makes a strong case for the combination in the world premiere of his The Great Pretender, the first show o…
It must be better in New York.
I've heard about Forbidden Broadway for much of its 32-year history and enjoyed some very funny recordings on several of the cast albums, but until this week,…
I must admit that for a while there, I ceased looking forward to the July Fourth debut of the latest San Francisco Mime Troupe show at Dolores Park. The productions were feeling slack or wor…
Jack London's words take on special meaning when uttered at the start of One Singular Sensation, the first of this summer's three Broadway Under the Stars shows from Transcendence Theatre Co…
Later this year we're going to get a star-studded, Disney-ized version of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods, a 1986 musical mishmash of fairy tales, grim realities and reali…
A visiting stranger makes a keen observation: "Your town is troubled with unruly boys." The trouble is, he ends up being one of the unruly boys, and that's the fun of Shakespeare's The Comed…
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company concludes its season with David Mamet's American Buffalo, an early (1975) Mamet play that has all the telltale Mamet qualities (staccato dialogue sprayed in…
If every movie-to-musical transformation were as soulful and creative as Once the state of the Broadway musical would be in a much better place.
There would seem to be no less likely candid…
American Conservatory Theater concludes its season with The Orphan of Zhao an epic tale of revenge that some scholars think stretches back to the fourth century BCE. It's a tale as old as ti…
Philip Dawkins writes about the inevitable ending of all our stories in Failure: A Love Story, but his version of death is pretty darn upbeat. His beguiling play, now having its West Coast p…
Even Stephen Sondheim's cast-offs are sturdy enough to carry a show on their own. At least that's the case with Marry Me a Little, a 1980 revue created by Craig Lucas and Norman René. The s…
If you can't make it to Broadway to see the latest star-studded version of Lorraine Hansberry's classic American drama A Raisin in the Sun, you'll probably do just as well to head out to Ori…
There's a lot of old-fashioned musical theater charm in Mr. Irresistible, a new musical by D'Arcy Drollinger and Christopher Winslow now having a short run at the Alcazar Theatre. It's a new…
I've had the privilege of covering three Beach Blanket Babylon anniversaries for three different newspapers: the 20th for the Bay Area Reporter, the 30th for the Oakland Tribune and now the …
There are probably more English words in Tony Kushner's new play than not in the new play. So many things about The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to t…
Between the Shakespearean twists of House of Cards and the utter inanity of Veep, you'd think that we'd have Washington politics pretty well covered by pop culture. Well clearly not because …
The ego, the insecurity and the courage of fiction writers are all on hilarious and intriguing display in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar, a one-act comedy that derives laughter from pain and theat…
Simplicity translates into great beauty in The Suit, a skillfully wrought tale that originated as a story by South African writer Can Themba and has been directed for the stage by the legend…
