By George Heymont My Cultural Landscape September 6, 2010 Those familiar with Slings and Arrows, the hilarious Canadian television series that took place at The New Burbage Festival (a fictional nonprofit Shakespeare festival experiencing financial problems while being haunted by the ghost of  the company’s founding artistic director) won’t want to miss a chance to see Anton [...]

By Pat Craig Correspondent , The Oakland Tribune 06/16/2010 05:29:46 PM PDT “The Drawer Boy,” from the title on down, is your basic shaggy Canadian play, complete with Toronto jokes and a plot that catches you like a sucker punch in a dark barroom. Canadian Michael Healey’s play gets a terrific run by TheatreFIRST in [...]

by Angela Woodall Posted: 01/26/2010 08:36:22 PM PST Updated: 01/26/2010 11:32:25 PM PST “Heads. Heads. Heads.” So begins “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” playwright Tom Stoppard’s contemplation on the irrationality of life and the role we play in it, which opened Saturday at TheatreFIRST. Act 1 begins with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — originally two minor characters in [...]

New TheaterFIRST production gives Tom Stoppard his due. By Rachel Swan You don’t have to know Hamlet to understand the sense of doom that pervades Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s there in the title, after all. But it does help to know a bit of the backstory. For many of us, that’s not a [...]

by Robert Avila Tom Stoppard’s sensational first play will probably never have the impact it had in 1966—partly because it proved so influential—but TheatreFIRST’s generally sturdy production wades in enthusiastically and the results remain ultimately, if more quietly, contagious. In a cheeky, knowing meld of Beckett and Shakespeare, Stoppard crafts a heady as well as [...]

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet Thursday January 28, 2010 The beginning of the winter-spring theater season hit last weekend, more concentrated a downpour than the storm. And a few shows that opened earlier are still running, too, including Oleg Liptsin’s unique, brilliant iPhone-era take on Gogol’s The Nose (which has decamped from Berkeley [...]

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet Thursday October 22, 2009 On a mostly-bare set—a couple of chairs at skewed angles across the stage, a cabinet with a broadbrimmed hat and a cap on the shelves and clothing on hangers at the sides—two men pose, seeming to lurch together as Irish music strikes up to [...]

Two Black-box theatre companies use their resources wisely (excerpt) By Rachel Swan October 21, 2009 Oakland’s similarly small-scale, equally ambitious group TheatreFIRST began its season last week with Stones in His Pockets, Marie Jones’ comedy about two extras working on a Hollywood film set in Ireland. Stones is partly about the friendship that grows between [...]