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Ten down-on-their-luck Texans gather on a car lot to compete for a cherry red Nissan pickup. They must lay their gloved hands upon the truck and, except for scheduled breaks every six hours, never let go. The last person standing wins. That’s the premise behind Hands on a Hardbody, a 2012 musical now in its Bay Area premiere run at Napa’s Lucky Penny Community Arts Center. Based on a 1997 documentary that followed 24 contestants in an actual endurance competition, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright trimmed the number of contestants to ten and Trey Anastasio (Phish) and Amanda Green composed a Tony-nominated score to tell their backstories. For those who don’t think there’s enough here for a full-length musical, Benny Perkins (Brian Watson) makes it clear to the audience that it’s a “Human Kind of Thing”, and then each contestant explains what they’d do “If I Had This Truck”. Benny’s won the contest before but since lost the truck and his wife. Ronald (Michael David Smith) thinks his all-Snickers

High atop Mount Tamalpais, at about the 2,000 foot level, sits the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre where the “great outdoor theatre adventure” known as The Mountain Play has been produced for the past 105 years. Your all-day adventure includes a slow, winding ride up the mountain, a hike to the 4,000 seat amphitheatre and a trek down to your seat lugging coolers full of food and ‘adult’ beverages (they’re allowed.) You get your umbrella and seat cushions arranged, unpack your goodie basket and just as you start to enjoy a pleasant afternoon picnic, a show breaks out. Ah, yes. There is a show. This year’s production is Mamma Mia!, the 1999 jukebox musical that uses the slightest of stories as an excuse to perform the catalogue of pop super group ABBA. Set at a Greek island taverna run by Donna Sheridan (played by Dyan McBride), the story centers on the circumstances of her daughter’s upcoming wedding. Sophie (a very charming Carrie Brandon) is about to get married to a slab of British beefcake (Jake Gale) and

That the name ‘Jeeves’ immediately conjures up the image of a staid British manservant is a tribute to the staying power of author P. G. Wodehouse’s character. Since his first appearance in 1915, he’s been featured in films, television, and even an internet search engine. There was but a single theatrical venture until playwright Margaret Raether began writing a series of plays beginning with Jeeves Intervenes, running now at Sonoma Arts Live. Jeeves (Randy St. Jean) is the unflappable valet to Bertie Wooster (Delaney Brummé), an upper-class twit who Jeeves is constantly rescuing from troubles of his own making. Under pressure from his imperious Aunt Agatha (Jennie Brick), Bertie finds himself engaged to Gertrude Winklesworth-Bode with whom Bertie’s ne’er-do-well friend Eustace Bassington-Bassington has fallen hopelessly in love. Other complications arise, but leave it to Jeeves to sort it all out. It’s a snazzy production with nice costume and set design work. Director James Jandak Wood has cast it well

Female protagonists in peril are the focus of one very silly and one very melancholy production running now in the North Bay. Left Edge Theatre’s “Women in Jeopardy!” is a laugh-out-loud look at the changing dynamic among a group of single friends once one of them begins a relationship. That the friends are middle-aged women makes for a nice change of pace. Mary (Shannon Rider) and Jo (Sandra Ish) are having a tough time adjusting to a new addition to their circle of friends. Their friend Liz (Angela Squire) has a new man in her life and Jackson (Richard Pallaziol) is not quite their cup of tea. He’s a dentist who makes Little Shop of Horrors’ Orin Scrivello, DDS look like a pussycat. His hygienist has gone missing and it doesn’t take long for Mary and Liz to leap to the conclusion that he’s the responsible party. What’s worse, he’s about to take Liz’s daughter off on a camping trip. What do you do when your best friend is dating a serial killer? All three wine-swilling ladies have their comedic momen

J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has been seen on stage in one form or another for well over 100 years. It’s survived being Disney-fied and even Christopher Walken-ized in a disastrous live television spectacle. The most popular adaptation is the 1954 musical starring Mary Martin. It’s that version that takes flight in a well-mounted production running at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center through May 20. Peter Pan (a winsome Sarah Wintermeyer) has lost his shadow while eavesdropping on story time at the Darling household. While retrieving it late one night, he awakens eldest child Wendy Darling (Lucy London) and after a quick flight demonstration, Peter convinces Wendy and her brothers to join him in Neverland. They’ll soon cross paths with some warriors and the dastardly Captain Hook (David Yen) and his scurvy pirate crew. Director Sheri Lee Miller and her team get almost everything right here, from casting to costumes and sets, from choreography to musical direction. Wintermeyer is so good as Peter that she

It’s been thirty-five years since La Cage aux Folles took Broadway by storm. What began in 1973 as a French stage farce followed by a series of films, the Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman musical was considered daring for its time with its portrayal of a happily domesticated male couple thrown for a loop by a request from their son. With marriage equality the law of the land and RuPaul’s Drag Race a crossover hit, it seems less daring today but its message of self-acceptance still packs a punch. Anthony Martinez plays Geirges, the proprietor of La Cage aux Folles, a French Riviera nightclub that features drag entertainment. The headliner is “Zaza”, otherwise known as Albin, Georges’s partner of twenty years as played by Michael Conte. Together they have raised their a son who’s come home to announce his engagement to a girl whose politician father happens to be the leader of the right-wing “Tradition, Family, and Morality” Party. He wants his fiancé’s father and mother to have dinner with his father and m

The Santa Rosa Junior College theatre season ends with their production of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It’s a fairy tale mash-up with elements of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood set to a classic Sondheim score. As in the original tales - and not like most adaptations - things do not end well for the characters. A childless baker (Brett Mollard) and his wife (Katie Smith) make a bargain with a witch (Alanna Weatherby) to lift a family curse and grant their wish for a child. They are tasked with acquiring four items – a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure as gold. Their search leads them to cross paths in the woods with the characters from the aforementioned fairy tales, all seeking fulfillment of their own wishes. The first act ends on a happy note as everyone seems to have their wishes granted but Act II gets very dark as the consequences of the characters’ actions play out. In other wo

Dramas old and new dominate North Bay stages with two good ones continuing their runs. Film, television, and theatre veteran Charles Siebert headlines the 6th Street Playhouse production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s Pulitzer Prize and multi-Tony Award winning treatise on the elusiveness of the American Dream is considered by many to be the greatest American play ever written. While almost seventy-years-old, in the hands of the right artistic team it can seem as fresh as ever. Director Craig Miller has assembled that team to surround Siebert’s towering central performance as Willy Loman, a traveling salesman whose days on the road are rapidly coming to an end. Frustrated at still living paycheck-to-paycheck at his late age, Willy is coming unraveled to the consternation of his wife Linda (Sheila Lichirie) and son Happy (Ariel Zuckerman). Things aren’t helped by the return of semi-prodigal son Biff (Edward McCloud). The action glides between the present and the past and between fantasy an

Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas hit North Bay stages, first with the Raven Players production of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. Simon, whose best-known works are comedies tinged with a little melancholy (The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys) won the 1991 Pulitzer for Yonkers, which is a melancholy family drama tinged with comedy. With their mother deceased and their father off to work to pay off a loan shark he owes for covering his late wife’s medical bills, Jay (Ari Votzaitis) and Arty (Logan Warren) find themselves living for ten months in 1942 with their tyrannical grandmother (Trish DeBaun) and their mentally-challenged Aunt Bella (Priscilla Locke) in Yonkers, New York. Grandma Kurnitz is cold, demanding, and unable to express affection of any kind. She does not want the children there, but Bella does. The battle is on, first between Kurnitz and her grandchildren, but ultimately between mother and daughter. Director Joe Gellura has a strong ensemble at work in this piece with laughs generated by Warren

In Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg assesses Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with the criticism that it has “too many notes.” Cinnabar Theater’s current production suffers from the opposite - it’s missing a few. Amadeus is actually the story of Antonio Salieri (Richard Pallaziol), the most celebrated composer of his time and a man who’s dedicated his life to God and mankind as thanks for God’s granting him the gift of musical talent. Enter Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Aaron Wilton), a crude, boorish reprobate for whom reasons Salieri cannot fathom has been gifted by God with musical genius. Salieri, feeling mocked by God and unhinged by what he sees as a betrayal, seeks revenge on Him by destroying His vessel. He will bring about Mozart’s ruin while seeming to be his friend but destroy himself in the process. Shaffer’s historical fiction won the 1981 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play (Ian McKellen) and the film adaptation matched that with its 1985 Oscar wins for Best Pict

One wouldn’t think that a play that deals with the wreckage left behind by a natural disaster would be particularly attractive to North Bay residents right now, but Sharyn Rothstein’s By the Water speaks to what our community is going through. While it’s set in 1992 on New York’s Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy, the human and material devastation portrayed might just as well be set in Coffey Park today. The show opens with Marty and Mary Murphy (Mike Pavone and Mary Gannon Graham) returning to what’s left of their storm-ravaged home to begin the process of rebuilding. Word comes that the government may be offering buyouts to the residents as long as 80% of the neighborhood is willing to sell. The Murphy’s son Sal (Mark Bradbury) and their best friends Philip and Andrea Carter (Clark Miller and Madeleine Ashe) are all for getting out, but Marty is resistant. Actually, he’s more than resistant as he recruits his other son Brian (Jared Wright) to actively campaign against the buyout. He speaks of family an

At a post-show Q & A following the opening night performance of Main Stage West’s Blackbird, director David Lear stated he felt that one of theatre’s responsibilities is to make an audience “a little uncomfortable.” He more than succeeds with this production. The lights come up and through the windows of a darkened employee break room we see two people arguing in a hallway. The door to the breakroom opens, the lights are turned on and the two individuals enter the room. Not much is said, but it is obvious there is history between these two. Are they estranged father and daughter? Ex-lovers? Siblings? It’s soon revealed that the fifty-something Ray (John Shillington) had a sexual relationship with the twenty-something Una (Sharia Pierce). However, the “relationship” occurred when Ray was forty and Una was twelve. Uncomfortable yet? Well, it won’t get any easier over the course of the show’s uninterrupted eighty minutes as the conversation runs the gamut from their first “innocent” meeting to the gra

While time may heal all wounds, a little human kindness along the way doesn’t hurt. That’s the basic takeaway from the Santa Rosa Junior College production of Julie Marie Myatt’s Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Originally produced in 2008 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it was one of the first works to address the issues faced by returning veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts. Recently discharged Marine Jenny Sutter (Jenna Rechsteiner) has returned to California after being physically and emotionally wounded in the service of her country. Avoiding actually returning to her home for fear of her family’s reaction to her wounds, a happenstance meeting at a bus station leads her to join Lou (Maureen O’Neill) on a trip to Slab City, CA. It’s an actual location in the Sonoran Desert where squatters and campers have reclaimed an abandoned military base and turned it into a sort of off-the-grid commune. Jenny soon finds herself surrounded by people dealing with their own damaged lives. There’s Lou, who is

One of the oddest plays I’ve seen in a while, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses isn’t particularly real in its examination of two suburban couples who share the same surname. It does, however, often ring true. Set in an unnamed town, Bob and Jennifer Jones (Chris Schloemp and Melissa Claire) are spending a quiet evening in their backyard talking about nothing (and talking about talking about nothing) when some new neighbors come over to introduce themselves. John and Pony Jones (Chris Ginesi and Paige Picard) have rented a house down the street and bring a bottle of wine over to break the ice. The awkward conversation that comes with meeting new people is really awkward as it veers into the personal. It seems that Bob and Jennifer are there because it’s the best place for Bob to receive treatment for a degenerative neurological disease characterized by pain, bouts of blindness, and loss of memory. Bob deals with it by not dealing with it. Jennifer deals with it daily and is beginning to crack under the

Ask anyone under fifty years of age who Rosemary Clooney is and they’re likely to respond “George Clooney’s wife?” They’d be in the ballpark (she was his aunt) but what they probably don’t know is that she was an immensely popular musical performer who charted numerous hit songs in the 50’s and 60’s. Changes in the musical landscape combined with a struggle with mental health issues led to her star fading. After an onstage breakdown and years of therapy, she was the rare performer who managed a ‘second act’ in showbiz when she turned to jazz. She continued to perform and record until her death in 2002. Composers, lyricists and playwrights Janet Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman use Clooney’s breakdown as the jumping off point for Tenderly, The Rosemary Clooney Musical, playing now at Napa’s Lucky Penny Community Arts Center. The show uses the framing device of Clooney’s therapy sessions to tell her tale. After melting down during a Reno, Nevada performance, Rosemary Clooney (Taylor Bartolucci) finds herself in

Why? It’s a question we seem to be asking ourselves daily as we wake up to the news of the latest national tragedy or act of incomprehensible behavior. That too-oft-asked question with the most elusive of answers is at the heart of Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Craig Miller) is asked to take on the case of Alan Strang (Ryan Severt), a 17-year-old boy who has committed a horrific act of animal cruelty. Alan, a quiet boy, has taken a chance equestrian encounter in his youth and developed it into a personal theology. His devotion, passion for and submission to his God “Equus” (Latin for ‘horse’) makes his brutal and inhumane act of blinding horses in his care with a metal spike all the more difficult to fathom. Dysart must find out why. Was it the conflict inherent in being brought up by a devout mother (Juliet Noonan) and atheist father (John Shillington)? Was it confusion over his burgeoning sexuality that’s been awakened by his co-worker Jill (Chandler Parrot -Thomas)? Or is it - in

World War II didn’t seem like ancient history in 1949 when South Pacific made its Broadway premiere. Sadly, its warnings of the damage that bigotry and prejudice can do aren’t ancient history now as it bows at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan took a couple of the stories, softened some of the characters and created an immensely popular musical tale of wartime love. Set on two islands in the South Pacific during the war, two love stories are at the center of this tale. Navy Nurse Nellie Forbush (Heather Buck) finds herself falling in love with French expatriate plantation owner Emile de Becque (William O’Neill). Mssr. de Becque has a somewhat mysterious past, which doesn’t seem to bother Nellie too much. Well, at least not as much as the fact that he has bi-racial children born of a youthful relationship with a Polynesian girl. Meanwhile, newly-arrived Lt. Joe Cable (Jam

The choices in life that haunt you take center stage in two terrific productions running now in North Bay theatres. Sebastopol’s Main Stage West is presenting Sam Shepard’s Buried Child while Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater has David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People. Shepard’s forty-year-old, Pulitzer-Prize-winning look at the implosion of the American nuclear family seems as fresh as ever with a very strong cast bringing Shepard’s oft macabre cast to life. John Craven (in a perfect melding of actor to role) is Dodge, the family patriarch. Once a successful farmer, he’s been reduced to being the cuckold of his domineering wife Halie (as played by Laura Jorgensen) and often finds himself at the mercy of his sons Bradley, an amputee who shaves Dodge’s head while he’s sleeping, and Tilden, who’s back home after getting in “trouble” in New Mexico. Tilden now spends his time carting in vegetables from a farm that hasn’t seen a seedling in decades. The sons are played by Eric Burke and Keith Baker, both making a welcome

Blistering drama takes the stage at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre with the North Bay premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced. Akhtar has taken the “friends drink to excess and soon truths are revealed” theatrical trope (along the lines of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and dragged it into the 21st century. Amir Kapoor (an intense Jared N. Wright) is a mergers and acquisitions attorney who’s changed his name and family history and abandoned his Muslim faith in his attempt to climb the corporate ladder. His wife Emily (Ilana Niernberger in the play’s most difficult role) is an artist whose work is heavily influenced by Islamic culture. She’s anxious to have her work displayed by her friend Isaac, played by Mike Schaeffer in an alternately amusing and disturbing performance. He’s a museum curator and the husband of Jory (played by an effective Jazmine Pierce), who’s a fellow ladder-climbing attorney at Amir’s firm. All seems to be on track until Amir appears at a court heari

The plight of the vanishing New England WASP is the subject matter of A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room, running now at Sonoma Arts Live. No, it’s not a science lecture on the more annoying cousin of the honeybee but a look at the cultural transformation of a specific component of 20th century America – the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Gurney, whose other works include Love Letters and Sylvia, uses 18 vignettes and about 50 characters to chart the rise and decline of upper middle-class America. The scenes all occur in the titular location around a stately dining table. The table, which was once the center point of family life and special occasions, in time has been reduced to a place on which to fold laundry. Wafting through the room over its two-hour running time are generations of unrelated characters, ages four to ninety, all played by a company of six talented actors - Isabelle Grimm, Kit Grimm, Rhonda Guaraglia, Len Handeland, Trevor Hoffman, and Jill K. Wagoner. One actor goes from playing a stern, tu