Maintaining the integrity of her story keeps her very imperfect son alive for her. We immediately ache; our vision of our children is part of who we are. This is the story of Michelangelo's Pieta.

Every lighting cue and every sound cue work to heighten this realism and transform the Berkeley Rep’s thrust stage. In lesser hands, this hyperrealism could feel mechanistic and antiseptically cold, but here, it’s so well done that it only pushes the story forward.

Frances McDormand, Kathleen Chalfant, and Steven Epp scheduled to star next season at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Even if you don’t like her acting style, you’ll marvel at her command, her timing, her eyebrows. Watching her makes me start connecting lines back to a young Carol Burnett.

Grad student Rachel, played by Martha Brigham, is such a study in insecurity that you want to take her offstage, and give her a Xanax.

Tom Stoppard, one of the most acclaimed living playwrights, jokes about being “the house playwright” for the American Conservatory Theater. Program notes inform me that he is second only to Shakespeare in number of productions mounted here (17 to Shakespeare’s 21). Stoppard’s fame is rightly deserved, and we’re lucky...

"These artists are going to change opera."

On the eve of her wedding, a daughter's quest to discover the identity of her father brings three men from her mother's past back to the island they last visited 20 years ago.

Harry Potter fans, grab your magic wands! This is not a drill. Organizers have announced that the official opening of the West Coast production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is on for tonight at the Curran Theater. The event is so eagerly anticipated San Francisco that even mayor London...

There's plenty to see and do in the San Francisco Bay Area. While many visitors and tourists think of San Francisco, or Berkeley or maybe wine country up in Napa and Sonoma, there's hidden gems to be found in the culturally rich city of Oakland. In this Redfin round-up of...