![Playhouse, Hansberry join for powerful <i>[hieroglyph]</i>](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/65dcf2bddedf2253cdd0bb91/1714085845234-6TCKCKE04G5A0B3Z1FQM/Hieroglyph.jpeg)
SF Playhouse explores Art on stage on film
The Bay Area theater scene has been short on excitement, understandably, these last seven months. So it's beyond thrilling news when a theater company, in this case San Francisco Playhouse announces a new play on an actual stage with actors acting together on a set that has been designed and lit, with nary a Zoom square to be seen.
Josh Kornbluth saves the world with Citizen Brain
Josh Kornbluth is really working the Empathy Circuit these days. Unlike, say, the Borscht Belt or the nearly vanished cabaret clubs, the Empathy Circuit isn't any sort of entertainment network. It's the complex wiring that winds through various parts of our brains and allows us to feel empathy – that is, the ability to care about, imagine or even try to feel the feelings of another being.
ACT Zooms into a new era with Warcraft
Credit creative directors and designers who are working to turn Zoom into a dynamic theater space. American Conservatory Theater kicks off the fall theater, such as it is, with a production that amply demonstrates how effective Zoom can be as a play space. In Love and Warcraft by Madhuri Shekar is a co-production with Alaska's Perseverance Theatre, and it's a remount of a production made last spring, at the start of quarantine, with members of ACT's MFA Class of 2022 under the direction of Peter J. Kuo.
G-L-O-R-I-A! Gloria fascinates, frightens at ACT
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Gloria is a fascinating play. It's a lively workplace comedy until it's an unsettling workplace drama. There's a sheen of satire to it but also reality and heart. There's a bracing boldness to it that makes its two hours fly by, and its path is never exactly what you think it will be.
There's a Sting in this Ship but no sting
When a show flops on Broadway and then undergoes serious re-tooling, you hold out hope that lessons were learned, wrongs righted and mistakes corrected. The debut musical from rock icon Sting, The Last Ship, fizzled in New York, but that didn't mean dry dock for this vessel. No, Sting continued to work on it, giving it a complete re-write (with director Lorne Campbell), shuffling and re-shuffling songs and characters and setting out on another voyage, first in England, then in Candada.
Soaking it up at the SpongeBob musical
SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, is the kind of energetic, colorful endeavor that nearly did the trick when it came to making everybody happy. Director Tina Landau and scenic/costume designer David Zinn delivered something with broad humor, fan service and buckets full of flash and sparkle. Cynical critics had to admit they were somewhat surprised to enjoy something they would never have expected to like in a million years.