This material highlights how different the historically informed performances of PBO (and the Academy of Ancient Music) are from anything most of us grew up with. This was driven home by snippet of what must have been an early ‘60’s recording which sounded stultifying, thick, and very unBaroque.

We received an email yesterday that made my heart sink a little. It was from Nina Meehan, executive director of Bay Area Children's Theatre, asking for a donation. Nothing unusual about that. The arts, as we all know too well, are in a perpetual mode of fund-raising, and cost cutting....

Rothman's considerable strengths, as a writer and performer, make this show worth taking in.

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.

This touring show has even more of the flash and glitz of the reality TV, which audience seemed to revel in, breaking into spontaneous applause after sequences of multiple pirouettes.

Congratulations to all involved in the stunning revitalization of the new Strand Theater on Market Street. A.C.T. artistic director Carey Perloff today announced the new space, featuring a bold red facade and clean lines, had won a major award. The American Institute of Architects awarded The Strand project its prestigious "Revitalization Design...

This take on the Gilbert and Sullivan classic tweaks a more than a few bits, with Frederic confused with Frodo, and pilots with pirate.

Above photo: Sid Davis (Dan Hiatt, pictured in orange suit) indulges the Miller family with food gags at the dinner table in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, performing at A.C.T.'s Geary Theater through Sunday, November 8. ‘Eugene O’Neill’ and ‘hilarious’ don’t usually belong in the same sentence. America’s great tragedian did...

Within seconds of lights going down, kids in the audience began to burst into irrepressible giggles at the sight of Slater Penney and Jaron Hollander, as if all were privy to some inside joke.

Peter Callender travels the biggest distance as Robert, moving between living and dead, from compulsively filling notebooks with meaningless drivel to one who arrives from the hereafter, moving with a generous slowness and clarity that reads as wisdom, in a way that only Callender can.