1,373 stories by "Chad Jones"
Davis (Jamella Cross, left) explains herself to Ms. T. (Safiya Fredericks) after an altercation in the classroom in [hieroglyph], a co-production of San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hans…
William DeMeritt is Nathan in Lauren Gunderson's The Catastrophist produced by Marin Theatre Company and Round House Theatre. Photos courtesy of Marin Theatre Company; Director of Photograph…
James Carpenter revisits the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in American Conservatory Theater's A Christmas Carol: On Air, an audio adaptation of the beloved annual production. Photo by Kevin Berne…
Sitting in the intimate Aurora Theatre watching great actors close up is one of the great treats of Bay Area theater. Even though we can't be together in that space for a while, the Aurora c…
The Bay Area theater scene has been short on excitement, understandably, these last seven months. So it's beyond thrilling news when a theater company, in this case San Francisco Playhouse a…
Josh Kornbluth is really working the Empathy Circuit these days. Unlike, say, the Borscht Belt or the nearly vanished cabaret clubs, the Empathy Circuit isn't any sort of entertainment netwo…
Credit creative directors and designers who are working to turn Zoom into a dynamic theater space. American Conservatory Theater kicks off the fall theater, such as it is, with a production …
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Gloria is a fascinating play. It's a lively workplace comedy until it's an unsettling workplace drama. There's a sheen of satire to it but also reality and heart. The…
ACT in S.F. presents Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' funny and scary 'Gloria,' perhaps even more shocking for what it says than what it depicts.
When a show flops on Broadway and then undergoes serious re-tooling, you hold out hope that lessons were learned, wrongs righted and mistakes corrected. The debut musical from rock icon Stin…
Sting's musical "The Last Ship," inspired by his English childhood, got a major rewrite but is still weighed down by cliches and blandness.
SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, is the kind of energetic, colorful endeavor that nearly did the trick when it came to making everybody happy. Director Tina Landau and scenic/cos…
Don't expect a traditional A-to-B narrative from this fascinating play, says our theater critic. Instead, "Veep" and "Arrested Development" star Tony Hale bemuses audiences with an unexpecte…
Will Eno is one of the most interesting playwrights in the theaterverse. He's weird and brilliant, funny and deeply humane. Because there can be an oblique and highly theatrical quality to h…
For a terrible show, Summer: The Donna Summer Musical is fairly enjoyable, and that is for one reason alone: the music. As jukebox musicals go, this one is toward the bottom of the list, whi…
Harry Potter, known as "the boy who lived," has continuously found life on the pages of seven best-selling novels, on the screen in eight blockbuster films, in theme parks both in Florida an…
There are so many charming, astonishing, inspiring moments in PigPen Theatre Co.'s The Tale of Despereaux you have to stop logging them and simply realize that, from beginning to end, this i…
You could say that Kate Attwell's Testmatch, the world premiere play at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, is about cricket. You could also say it's about untangling the gnarly …
After a seven-year absence, STOMP has returned to San Francisco, but only for five days at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater. This touring production is top notch, and the two ne…
Suzan-Lori Parks' White Noise is an intensely interesting play. Just not a very good one.
And that's surprising given that Parks, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, has bent, molded and shaped contem…
The mind of Caryl Churchill is an extraordinary place to spend an evening. Happily, this theater season, the Bay Area will see an abundance of Churchill, beginning with American Conservatory…
Director Mark Wing-Davey layers an intricate sound design (by Bray Poor and even more intricate projection design (by Tara Knight) onto the play in a way that makes it seem he doesn't fully …
As much as we might like to think that the future of Broadway looks like Hamilton or Hadestown, I'm pretty sure the future looks more like Anastasia, the inconsequential musical based on the…
San Francisco Playhouse's Cabaret is, to put it simply, a wow. A big, debauched, delightful wow. Everything in director Susi Damilano's production just clicks. The look, the feel, the sound …
After 33 years at Berkeley Repertory Theatre " 22 as artistic director " Tony Taccone is taking a final bow with Kiss My Aztec, a world-premiere musical that serves as a fitting farewell. Ha…
