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Bay Area theatre reviews with KPFA Theatre Critic Richard Wolinsky,.Older posts include theatre interviews recorded pre-pandemic. LINK TO ASSORTED LOCAL THEATER & BOOK VENUES2026KPFA 312700 Politique et gouvernement Sciences politiques
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  • Review: “Every Saturday Night” a SFBATCO production at ACT Strand

    Review: “Every Saturday Night” a SFBATCO production at ACT Strand
    Oct 19 2026
    Photo: ©2026 by Alexa LexMex Treviño KPFA Theatre Critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “Every Saturday Night: A Harlem of the West Musical” presented by SFBATCO at ACT Strand Theare through November 1, 2026. TEXT OF REVIEW Every Saturday Night

Cities change all the time. Napoleon III rebuilt Paris nto an Art Nouveau wonderland. New York’s San Juan Hill slums became Lincoln Center . And in San Francisco, urban renewal turned a poor yet vibrant black neighborhood called The Fillmore into the amorphous Western Addition. That story, or at least an aspect of that story, has become an important element in the world premiere musical, Every Saturday Night, presented by SFBATCO at ACT’s Strand Theatre through November 1st. The show opens on a living room in a large Victorian in what was once the Fillmore, in two time lines. In the today timeline, an elderly man named Dante is selling his family home because it’s time to downsize. A couple with a teenage son are looking around, thinking of buying. While they look, Dante remembers his teenage life in the early 1960s, when his mother opened their large boarding house on Saturday nights as a kind of nightclub, with dancing, food and drink. This is the real past of the show’s songwriter and co-librettist Danny Duncan. Using a jazz score from songs composed over the years, Every Saturday Night is at its best during the ensemble numbers set in the past, when the entire cast shows up, dancing, singing and fooling around. The cast is led by Darryl V. Jones as old Dante, Jacob Henrie-Naffaa as his young counterpart and Cathleen Ridley as his mother. Stealing every scene he’s in is R. J. Wayne as Dante’s missing father. 

But a musical is also a play, and it’s there that Every Saturday Night stumbles. Act One has has one or two subplots, but no drama. An old man reminisces to the couple’s son. The couple looks at rooms. There’s no so-called want song, no way to rev things up. Act Two goes the other way. It’s all plot, most of which is never mentioned in Act One, and all of which peter out. A second act subplot involving Peter Pan feels like a closeted something else. Every Saturday Night would need to be torn up and recreated from scratch to have a future. But there’s so much richness in Every Saturday Night, the dancing, the music, the singing, the vibe, the performances, the love and care visible every moment in the production, so maybe there’s still good reasons to catch the show before it disappears forever. Every Saturday Night, a Harlem of the West Musical, plays in a BATCO production at ACT’s Strand Theatre through November first. For more information you can go to sfbatco.org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA. The post Review: “Every Saturday Night” a SFBATCO production at ACT Strand appeared first on KPFA.
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    6 min
  • Review: “North By Northwest” at ACT Toni Rembe Theatre

    Review: “North By Northwest” at ACT Toni Rembe Theatre
    Oct 1 2026
    KPFA Theatre Critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “North By Northwest,” adapted and directed by Emma Rice, at ACT Toni Rembe Theatre through October 18, 2026, TEXT OF REVIEW Along with having to be perfect night after night, live theatre can only rely on sets, costumes and craft to transform time and space to fit the parameters of a script. Sure, these days a lot is computerized, but it’s still hands on, and if something goes wrong, it stays wrong. Directors like Emma Rice look at the limitations of theatre as a canvas, and then see impossible concepts as creative challenges. Whether the moors of “Wuthering Heights” or the fantasy of “The Red Shoes”, she looks to find ways to make it all work and keep audiences entertained. There may be few films less obvious to bring to the stage than Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller, “North By Northwest,” with its ever changing scenery, famous set pieces and convoluted plot. But in her version, now at ACT’s Toni Rembe Theatre through October 18th, it all happens on one stage, with a cast of eight, and a set of revolving doors that turn and twist and rarely stay in one place at one time. The show is introduced and explained by a narrator who frequently breaks the fourth wall. We first meet protagonist Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant in the film), an advertising executive, during a very busy day. He’s in a hotel lobby attempting to catch a waiter’s eye to send a telegram, when suddenly he’s mistaken for someone else, kidnapped by Russian agents — this is the cold war after all — and driven from Manhattan to an estate on Long Island. Emma Rice’s “North By Northwest” is at its most entertaining as a dance spectacle, using elements seemingly torn from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks as well as acrobatics and ballet. Songs from the era are lip-synched here and there, and the narrator works overtime to keep things from spiraling. Leading the cast is the brilliant Danny Collins as Thornhill, Patricia Kujawska as Eve Kendall, the Eva Marie Saint role, and Katy Owen as the seemingly male narrator. As Emma Rice herself notes, Hitchcock has an extremely male perspective, but if examined carefully, the script has a decidedly feminist twist. Thus the gender switching. Sometimes less is more, and by the second act, the choreography and songs start to drag, and the cleverness fades as the brilliant crop duster scene leads to an incoherent ending on Mount Rushmore. Still, getting there is a lot of fun. “North by Northwest,” adapted and directed by Emma Rice, plays at ACT’s Toni Rembe Theatre through October 18th. For more information you can go to act-sf.org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA. The post Review: “North By Northwest” at ACT Toni Rembe Theatre appeared first on KPFA.
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    6 min
  • Review: “The Fall Show” at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage

    Review: “The Fall Show” at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage
    Oct 12 2026
    KPFA Theater Critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “The Fall Show” at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage, extended to November 1, 2026. TEXT OF REVIEW: The boomer generation runs from almost eighty down to sixty two. The partying ended a long time ago, the next generation is grown, friends move away, or die. Cognition slowly fades. These years can lead to loneliness for the single person, tempered by the joys of privacy and the ability to throw off social filters that now seem pointless. 

A connection, particularly a sexual one, can sound impossible The Fall Show, a world premiere production created by Erika Chong Shuch and Charles Mee, now at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage through October 25th, takes an often dreamlike look at that time in life. There’s a play in there somewhere in which an older severe looking leftist woman, a no-nonsense never suffer fools Beth Wilmurt, meets an older divorced working class man, an often poetic but never enigmatic Reginald Wilkins, on a park bench near where both live. The Fall Show takes us through the meeting to the realization that maybe something more is going on, and beyond. Different races, backgrounds, education levels. The problem is commonality, or its lack. Surrounding and sometimes overwhelming the two are six players, an audiovisual Greek chorus, who act out the emotion behind the words, which include singing, dancing — most notably Marit Brook-Kothlow from the Joe Goode Performance Group — violence against dinner plates, and Magritte-like tableaux. As co-creator and director Erika Chong Shuch notes, in creating the piece, she gave herself explicit permission, instruction, in her words, to trust the deep gut, to keep faith that the abstract means something. And therein lies both failure and success. It takes a while for the connection to be made between the story slowly unfolding on the bench, and the actions of the other players. When the two elements work, it’s theatrical gold. But often times, the results are head scratching. Luckily, when that happens, the performance and dialogue of the two leads keeps the Fall Show together. This is an attempt to put on stage the feelings and thoughts of aging, of loneliness, of finding and losing affinity, of reaffirming one’s sexuality.

By stretching boundaries between theatre and other visual forms, The Fall Show doesn’t always work, but then there are those moments of epiphany when you suddenly realize, you get it. (This is theatre taking chances, pushing the envelope. Not for everybody, but then what is?) The Fall Show, created by Erika Chong Shuch and Charles Mee, plays at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage through October 25th. For more information, you can go to shotgun players.Org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA. The post Review: “The Fall Show” at Shotgun Players Ashby Stage appeared first on KPFA.
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    6 min
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