Playwright Eric Coble loves his characters, and lavishes them both with one-liners that ring so true they occasionally raised a gasp of recognition from the audience.

"This is why you see live theater. It sticks with you, haunting, and beautiful. At its best, it shines an inspiring, if not at times challenging, light on our own lives." Chester Bailey is the kind of play you wish everyone had the opportunity to see. At its core, this...

Sex and violence dominate Calixto Bieito's Carmen, which paints a gritty, unidealized picture of poverty and abuse.

The magic in this play is all in that fantastical morphing, which shimmers in its quiet way, infusing the play with lightness and warmth. The catch is you have to wait until the last third to get there.

Quick to connect with the audience, Will Durst alternates knowing insults and ego stokes, always taking the audience’s pulse.

Star Trek, Pink Martini, Ratatouille with live orchestra, music from the Final Fantasy video game series. San Francisco Symphony's Summer Series is stocked to the rafters with goodness.

The imaginative geometries created by Roberts Wierzel’s lighting design are so striking that whole dissertations could be directed at explicating how their crisp precision advances the plot in ways that hold one’s attention without being intentionally attention-getting.

Watching a made-for-television Cinderella by Rogers and Hammerstein is an important part of growing up in a musical theater-loving family. I’ve wasted evenings debating the merits of Julie Andrews (1957), Lesley Ann Warren (1965), and Brandy Norwood (1997) in the title role. Incredibly, despite its place in the canon,...

Davies’ score is rife with unexpected turns, as irregularly unpredictable as the sound of creaking timbers on a New England whaling ship in a nor’easter,

Mention Frank Loesser to a musical theater fan, and you’re sure to hear about Guys and Dolls. The Most Happy Fella is unlikely to be discussed, because it is so rarely performed these days. It’s less consistently toe-tapping than Loesser’s more lasting hit, but it makes up for it...