(February 15, 2024)
The journey to try to find the Exit Theatre (890 G St., Arcata) is guided by a mischievous Google Maps and skeptical townspeople convinced we bought tickets online to a...
(February 8, 2024)
A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder by Robet L. Freedman is a side-splittingly funny, dark-humored, self-aware and fast-paced romp of pure entertainment. The cast and crew at Ferndale Repertory...
(December 14, 2023)
The Little Match Girl: A Warm Tale on a Cold Night, written and directed by James Peck and Sarah Peters Gonzalez, is the annual holiday show at Arcata Playhouse. It...
(November 30, 2023)
I wish more than a handful of people could have seen Jessie Gelormino as one of the best Cosettes I've had the pleasure to witness in Les Misérables. Her performance was...
(November 9, 2023)
If one were to stage a Brechtian version of Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks would look directly into the camera and relinquish any evidence of his character to deliver the line,...
(October 19, 2023)
On the evening of the preview performance of Natural Shocks by Laura Gunderson, the lights went up on the small stage at Exit Theatre revealing semi-haphazardly strewn household miscellany —...
(August 31, 2023)
It's opening night of North Coast Repertory Theatre's sex comedy Lysistrata. The excitement is palpable with bouquets in the hands of proud parents eager to support their kids, actors' friends...
(August 24, 2023)
Joe Pintauro was an author, poet and prolific playwright in late 20th century New York. The eight plays in North Coast Repertory Theatre's Pintauro, A Night of One Acts...
(August 10, 2023)
Stephen Hillenburg attended what was then Humboldt State University in the early 1980s, about a decade before I did. He had a more impressive major than myself: natural resource planning...
(June 8, 2023)
The musical Kinky Boots, written by Harvey Fierstein (music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper), is about the journey of self-expression fraught with internal and external barriers. And, yes, it's about...
(May 25, 2023)
I've written before about how the past is the ultimate foreign land, shrouded permanently by the forward nature of time in our particular dimension. We can read texts and compare...
(May 11, 2023)
Jean Paul Sartre was known for a great many things, chief among them is likely the creation of a quote as misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche's line about God being dead....
(April 27, 2023)
Timing and rhythm can turn a 90-minute masterpiece into a 120-minute dental experience. They make comedy gut-busting or obligatorily chuckling. They set up style, and era, and can even relate...
(March 30, 2023)
The first decades of the American 20th century were filled with contradiction. In some rural corners, medicine shows hawked cold remedies that were a quarter alcohol and hair tonics that...
(March 30, 2023)
Being stuffed into folding chairs in the wheelchair section affirmed the mistake of not confirming my seat for Sister Act: The Musical at Ferndale Repertory Theatre. Turns out the early...