Let’s talk about Jukebox Musicals. That’s a slangy term describing a stage show that is built around an assortment of pre-existing, usually well-known songs, stuff you might have heard on the radio, or on a barroom jukebox. Most traditional musicals build the songs into the stories as a unified whole. A jukebox musical lets the …
Monthly Archives: July 2016
“Macbeth” – July 13, 2016
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” One of Shakespeare’s scariest lines comes from what is easily his scariest play, ‘Macbeth,’ a show so frightening most theater people refuse to speak the title aloud. In the third season of Shakespeare in the Cannery—in the old cannery ruins near Railroad Square—director David …
“The Little Dog Laughed” – July 20, 2016
Summer Repertory Theater Festival, Santa Rosa’s acclaimed training program, has returned for its 45th year. Over the last four-and-a-half decades, Summer Rep has earned a reputation as one of the country’s best experiences for young theater artists, who come from all over the U.S. to spend their summer rehearsing, creating and performing up to five …
“A Winter’s Tale” – July 6, 2016
Prince Hamlet is a moody death-metal addict with a messed-up ghost on his case. The jealous monarch from The Winter’s Tale has become a tyrannical ruler in imperial China. And the 70’s musical The Wiz is … well … The Wiz. It’s hard to conceive of any scenario in which a presentation of ‘The Wiz’ …
“The Invisible Hand” – June 9, 2016
Money corrupts, as does Power, and they often work together, because of course, everywhere you go in this world, money is power. In playwright Ayad Akhtar’s uneven but often gripping drama ‘The Invisible Hand,’ these concepts are explored in ways that might not be particularly fresh or groundbreaking, but serve as above-average grist for smart, …