When Waverly's date, Andrew (Ben Tissell, as wonderful here as he is in many a local musical), arrives, the conversation couldn't be more awkward, with him geekily nervous and Waverly worried and distracted while trying to pretend everything is fine. To make the date even more of a bust, they both keep a wary eye on the breaking TV news.
ASTORIA - On Ten Fifteen Productions ' list of coming attractions, no word speaks so loud as a single punctuation mark. It's a surprise, a pause, a question in itself that asks, "But is it?" "America the Beautiful?" is the Astoria-based theater's theme for the coming year, a lineup of six performances inspired by the nation's 250th birthday celebration, designed not so much to celebrate as provoke.
Celebrating old and new works, two more companies open their seasons this month. In celebration of its 20th anniversary, Third Rail Reportory is revisiting the first show it produced, in 2005, Craig Wright's Recent Tragic Events, while Corrib Theatre has commissioned a work, Stilt, by award-winning playwright Joy Nesbitt. Meanwhile, former Fertile Ground producers continue to flourish this fall. Jed Sutton (What the Fox?, 2025) and Ariel Bittner (Mountain Woman, 2025) are joining forces with Maddy Schultz this month to present, three short plays onstage at Ethos Music Center.
Mayra Flores and Cristal González Ávila honor their roots through poetry. Flores brings the stories of her East San José community. Her self-published debut, Flores, bridges generations towards change. Ávila, a daughter of farmworkers in Watsonville, has written and acted for the stage for the last 15 years. Her stories explore domestic violence and housing injustice, and recent playwriting credits include La Cortina de la Lechuga and Luz: Senior Stories, commissioned by Teatro Vision.
What happens when a group of people gather in a room and really listen to each other? That may sound like an ordinary enough act, and as you walk into the James Earl Jones Theater, you might find yourself deceived by David Zinn's 1970s basic gym basement of a set, or by Susannah Flood's hand-holding introductory address to the audience-fear not a long running time, she says, standing in for the playwright Bess Wohl, all those six-hour plays are by men who didn't have children.
Saying yes to Witch (see Linda Ferguson's ArtsWatch review here) meant committing to a production calendar that would spirit cast and crew from first table read to opening night in less than a month, a process that Modica-Soloway calls "a beautiful, hard, lovely, gratitude-filled lift." With it came the opportunity for her to slip into the skin of the gruff, acerbic Elizabeth, whom she describes as "a Character, capital C."
New York City is the most popular place in the country to plan a trip based around theater - and for good reason; home to Broadway, Off Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway theaters, you could see multiple shows a day here and not get bored. However, just because New York has a reputation for being the nation's top theater destination doesn't mean that it's the only U.S. city with a fantastic theater scene.
The principles of examining creativity through the lens of neuroscience reveal a lot of the same principles that exist with AI, in a sort of a stochastic sense, And it establishes a different vehicle to look at the mechanism of creativity-through a mechanistic lens, through the lens of behavioral neurology-and I think if someone who was brilliant with AI were to come and look at this, they would see a lot of similarities and it would be, I think, very useful data.
Set in the 1970s at the meetings of a feminist consciousness-raising group - as well as in the present day, when a narrator (Susannah Flood) is telling the story of the group her mother founded - the show goes down like a bracing tonic, an antidote for the dark. It's powered not by celebrities but by a company of superb New York theater regulars (the cast took home the Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble)
Despite (or perhaps because of) its overwhelming awfulness, the climate crisis has been oddly underrepresented on stage and screen. Humanity's greatest challenge has often been deemed too much of a downer, too complex or too dull a topic to spawn shows and movies. A burst of recent climate-themed cultural output, however, suggests this may be changing. Weather Girl, a one-woman play about the unraveling of a TV meteorologist who can no longer bear to gloss over climate breakdown in California,
Tara-Jean is confused, then frightened, as Cass crowds into her, getting almost nose-to-nose as she searches the young star's face for something that will explain Tara-Jean's stratospheric success and her own failure. "Our faces were so close that her eyes looked like one giant copper eye," Cass recalls. "There were green flecks inside that copper eye. Was that the mark of fate?"
Jordan Tannahill' s jaw-dropping new drama has a homophobic slur in the title - and that's not the only provocative or profane thing about it. British monarchy watchers are sure to clutch their pearls with the play's main premise about the future king of England being openly gay, having a headline-grabbing romance with an Indian man and performing raw sex acts on stage. But star N'yomi Allure Stewart presents another aspect of royalty and LGBTQ+ culture just as fascinating.
From one of hip-hop's most entertaining stars to a plethora of pumpkin treats, we're looking at a fine, fun weekend. So let's get to it, shall we? (As always, be sure to double check event and venue websites for any last-minute changes in health guidelines or other details.) Meanwhile, if you'd like to have this Weekender lineup delivered to your inbox every Thursday morning for free, just sign up at www.mercurynews.com/newsletters or www.eastbaytimes.com/newsletters.
It's hard to think of a more iconic exchange in the history of theater than the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet. Those legendary lines. That stolen kiss. It's been performed countless times the world over. And it was for that reason that Andrew Moerdyk, Kimie Nishikawa, and Santiago Orjuela-Laverde, founders of the Brooklyn-based scenic design studio dots, hoped to reinvent it, when tapped by director Sam Gold for the Circle in the Square Theatre's recent Broadway adaptation. Together, the creative team conceived a bed of flowers-revealed by the opening of a circular panel-and, suspended above it, a mattress.
Chief among the many pleasures of Artist Rep's production of The Bed Trick is its talented cast, all of whom are as adept at batting witty banter as they are at creating pockets of emotional depth. Written by Keiko Green and directed by Luan Schooler, the play features a group of mismatched freshman dormmates. The most sexually sophisticated of the three, Lulu (Madeleine Tran), is in a relationship with Willis (Mac Schonher), whose attention is starting to wander on the dating apps.
Good day, DC! There's a ton of fun and positive things to do this week to help you try to unplug from the bad news. Snallygaster returns Downtown with endless beer and cider tastings, music superstar Chris Brown is still in town, and a free go-kart experience invites neighbors to Race the District. Best Things to Do This Week and Weekend October 6-October 12
Jessica Monette: Root Me in the Soil-Jessica Monette's installation, the second Project Room exhibition at the de Saisset, will explore familial memory, presence and absence, and place. Free. Reception Oct 2; runs until June 13, 2026. de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara. scu.edu/desaisset Fri, Oct 3 The Art of Murder-The Pear Theatre opens its 24th season-dubbed Hidden Truths-with a play by Joe DiPietro.
On the way out of The Other Americans, the new drama written by and starring John Leguizamo, I overheard a man about my age talking to his friend as they shuffled up the aisle. "If that isn't my family," he said, trailing off. He looked a little shell-shocked. I don't know what he thought of the play as a play, but he had seen something of his own experience on stage and it had moved him.
William Thomas Berk's new play Anno Machina: An Apocalyptic Elegy follows the fortunes of a sentient AI robot, played by Gabby Bosso, whose job it was (and that of other Human Service Units) to save humanity from itself. But humanity refused to be saved despite the robots' best efforts, and now Bosso's character is forced to reconcile her failure at achieving her programmed directive against the fact of her continued existence.
Tell us-did you ever go to a slumber party? Were you ever LEFT OUT of a slumber party? Did you go to lots of slumber parties, but never felt like you could be yourself? Well, this is a slumber party where you can be you! Infinite Snarch features 30 plays about all the key elements of a slumber party-friendship, games, secrets, romance, fear, pranks, and homosexual activity.
Yet, I laughed harder - and certainly more often - during opening night of "Shucked" at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco than I did while watching any of those other entirely worthy productions. There are 498,735 jokes (give or take) in this 2022 musical, which received nine nominations - including for Best Musical - at the 76th Tony Awards. And roughly 498,736 of jokes work (do the math and you'll see what I did there) in "Shucked," which is making its West Coast debut at the Curran.
I feel like every character I play is a drag role. It doesn't matter the gender of the character or the costume I'm wearing. You're stepping into a persona through presentation and performance - that's drag.
At Hermès, every object speaks. They bear witness to a long history of patience, inspiration, and precise gestures, interwoven with joyful encounters and curious anecdotes. They tell the story of a family house and the people who make it up, from the artisans to the boutique staff, not to mention the customers! They represent the lively and bold side of creation, always striving to reinvent itself without ever repeating itself.
Sara Toby Moore's "The Mechanix," a self-described "science fiction-magical realism-human cartoon" show, takes place on "a normal day at a seaside amusement pier." The show includes interdimensional travel, anthropomorphic animals, the nature of free will, and an extended riff on "The Wizard of OZ." Through it all, one would be forgiven for occasionally asking what one thing has to do with the other. It's a question that never gets answered.
How to describe what I heard from the orchestra? It happened one night at the Booth Theater during a preview performance of John Proctor Is the Villain. Raelynn Nix (Amalia Yoo), the preacher's daughter, was delivering the final part of her monologue: "One day, maybe, the new world we were promised will actually be new. One day, maybe, the men in charge won'tbe in charge anymore." The scene is wrenching; the audience held its breath.
When a frog closes a door, he opens a window for a 12-week theatrical run. For the first time outside of the fictional events of the 1984 classic movie musical Muppets Take Manhattan, the real, live, felt-and-blood Muppets are coming to Broadway. There are so many possibilities for what a live Muppet Broadway show could look like: a Muppet Show-style musical revue!
Over 40 years of loving Bob and still he astounds. His vodka paintbrush of absurdity, vaudeville, heartbreak and forgiveness and imagination of the infinite is still wet and painting backdrops backwards behind the Mirror into the wee hours of the morning of his opening night! We will always be suspended in his orbit.
