North Bay theater companies are starting to announce their shows for next season, and there are a couple you might like to note right now.Santa Rosa's 6th Street Playhouse is bringing back television, film and stage actor Daniel Benzali during its 2009-2010 season to star in "The Entertainer."Best-known known for [...]

As I ease into the wide world of blogging after long service in the gray world of print, I wish I knew a bit more about what specific kinds of information people really want most.So far, my marketing efforts have consisted of quizzing random strangers I encounter on the public [...]

There is nothing you can name that is anything like a classic Rodgers & Hammerstein musical.Tickets go on sale Sunday, June 7, for the new revival of "South Pacific," which starts its national tour with a run at San Francisco's Golden Gate Theater, Sept. 18-Oct. 25.This production, directed by San [...]

Eric Idle, co-founder of the English comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus, figures he and Mel Brooks saved musical comedy from extinction.The art form was almost dead, he says, driven out by more serious musicals, like "Miss Saigon" and "Phantom of the Opera.""Musical comedy was gone for 10 or 15 [...]

Moran & Duran. Sounds like a law firm or even a Vegas nightclub act. (But it's still better than calling them The Two Johns.)John Moran is a playwright, actor and arts activist, as well as the former proprietor of the late, still lamented Bacchus Deli, and currently an organizer for [...]

One day during the 1990s, I was called to jury duty and had found a spot in the waiting room to await my turn, when I heard a familiar voice call my name.It was Charles Schulz.I was surprised and impressed that the world-famous cartoonist showed up for jury duty. Surely, [...]

"There's nothing worse than getting what you wanted."That great line comes from Donald Margulies' two-woman play, "Collected Stories," presented by the Ensemble Theater Collective (ETC) through June 13 at Petaluma's Cinnabar Theater.The line is spoken by Carol Mayo Jenkins, playing Ruth Steiner, famed short story writer and curmudgeonly teacher.The play's [...]

It has been a long time since I reviewed movies seriously. Anybody can do it, and practically everybody does.But people keep asking me how I liked the new "Star Trek" movie. I didn't. In fact, I hated it.Whenever you criticize something other people like, the immediate comeback is "Did you [...]

Like Charles Dickens? How do you feel about Oliver doing the Twist? And David Copperfield, of course, is the guy who can make the Statue of Liberty disappear. There's nothing like great literature. And sure enough, this is nothing like great literature. It's a show about books that doesn't try [...]

Last January, when I reported the appointment of Kate Eilertsen of Oakland as interim executive director at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in Sonoma, one reader commented, "Oh great, the announcement of an office temp!"Well, Kate is no longer a temp. And she runs the office. Eilertsen will stay [...]