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...

Into the Woods is a difficult show to perform, demanding split-second responses, with nary a rest. Fairytale characters busily weave their assorted tales, while simultaneously operating on a whole different level to subtly remind us that these archetypes live in our heads, inhabiting some deep part of ourselves. These...

“What makes a lion a lion?” Alone onstage with seven guitars, Benjamin Scheuer sings, “My father has an old guitar, and he plays me folk songs.” That’s the start of Benjamin’s passion for music, but it’s also a cause for his troubled relationship with his father. Depressed and quick to...

In 2004, Finding Nemo won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. It beat out a very different finalist: the bizarre French-Québécois film The Triplets of Belleville. This near-silent movie with a swinging jazz score is an imaginative adventure set during the Tour de France. The cyclist Champion is...

"I think there is no world without theatre." - Edward Bond Looking for a show to see? Stark Insider is here to help. This edition of our theater and arts round-up includes new shows, some swashbuckling, mile high laughs, and a cinematic experience inside one of San Francisco's newest and most exciting...