#theater

#theater

When a stranger smiles at you, you smile back. That is why, when Sir Ian McKellen ( The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Amadeus) walked on the stage in front of me, looked me straight in the eye, and smiled at me, I smiled back. It was the polite thing to do. It was also completely unnecessary, because McKellen was not actually on the stage in front of me. He smiled at me through a pair of special glasses.

The Specimen follows Johnny, a gay paleozoologist who loses his job amid Trump-era science budget cuts. Outraged and unmoored, Johnny refuses to abandon his life's work, continuing his research through increasingly dangerous-and darkly comedic-methods inside his apartment bathroom. Blending horror, satire, and political rage, The Specimen explores queer identity, institutional abandonment, and the costs of pursuing truth in a world that no longer funds it.

The sad part of theater, says Illya deTorres of Chapel Theatre Company in Milwaukie, is that the experience evaporates. "It's like being in summer camp," he says. "It just goes by in a blur."

When Marjorie Prime premiered a decade ago, its technology felt abstract and futuristic. Today, it feels incremental. Artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty; it is fluent, responsive, and embedded in daily life. What once played as a cautionary what if now lands as a question of habit: not whether we would use such technology, but why we already do.

The Lawrence Hall of Science's planetarium is playing Traditions of the Winter Sun, a short film about Ohlone and other cultures' traditions surrounding the cosmos, from now to Feb. 27. Photo credit: Lawrence Hall of Science Learn about Ohlone and other cultural traditions for the sun, moon, planets and stars in the 30-minute planetarium show, Traditions in the Winter Sky. Show runs from now to Feb. 27 at the Lawrence Hall of Science. $5 plus admission fee

Going into the woods can evoke scary thoughts of wild animals and creepy people, but not so for the magical forest displayed in SF Playhouse's stunning production of Into the Woods. Beautifully designed by Heather Kenyon, these woods feature lush trees and foliage with one tall tree rotating to become Rapunzel's tower. Bill English cleverly directs his impressive cast with just the right amount of sarcasm, humor and tender moments. His slightly over-the-top look at storybook characters gone awry

Bless me, reader, for I have sinned. For 40 years Moses wandered in the wilderness. And for roughly the same amount of time I have stumbled through the landmines of contemporary culture, wearing the sackcloth of the most extreme form of penitent journalist. I have been a critic. Well, apparently I have. That's what everyone tells me. Lord knows I've denied it over the years.

When their (perfect) adaptation was well past its twentieth birthday, director Brian Henson looked back on what had originally been envisioned as a "romping parody": "Then we stopped and reconsidered," he said. The screenwriter Jerry Juhl put it this way: "Rather than let the Muppets ride roughshod over Dickens, I went back to the novel and decided it would be rotten of us to belittle the quality of one of the greatest stories of all time."

Inspired by Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice, Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon's Georgiana and Kitty: Christmas at Pemberley is the third play in their Christmas at Pemberley trilogy (following Miss Bennet and The Wickhams) and mixes new characters with old ones from the original novel. The story follows the friendship between-and love lives of-Georgiana, the younger sister of Mr. Darcy, and Kitty, the younger sister of Elizabeth Bennet.

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.

London's Brooklyn Rep is putting their money where their mouths are with a performance in the real Brooklyn. The company will present a one-night-only benefit reading of Jesse Morgan Young and Matthew Sherbach's The Leads (FKA Glengarry Glen Faggot) November 16 at Life World in Bushwick. Described as "a queer disassembly of a very straight, critically acclaimed play," the work follows the performance of a very masc play that gets co-opted by its unseen characters with off-script ideas.

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.

Thanks to Ava Byrd's fabulous costumes and Jeremy Letheule's hair designs and wigs, I found myself transported to 1940s New York where snappy dialog, moral ambiguity and unchecked ambition drive the action. Written by Mary Orr in 1946, The Wisdom of Eve became a successful Hollywood film starring Bette Davis in 1950 and went on to become the musical Applause! Applause!

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."