The third show of TheatreFIRST’S 09/10 season will open June 12th at The Marion E. Greene Black Box Theatre, 531 19th Street, on the ground floor of The Fox Oakland Building. Oakland, Calif., April 6, 2010 – TheatreFIRST today announced that Domenique Lozano will be directing the third show of their 09/10 season, Michael Healey’s [...]

Oakland’s Arts District Is on Its Way Up, Again by Rachel Swan Most Oakland boosters now live by the credo that Uptown is the new downtown, and each year it carries more weight. “Uptown Unveiled” allowed the city to applaud itself last June, with a street fair big enough to rival the enduringly popular Art [...]

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 [...]