Tag: Raven Players

The arts did not beckon when Ron Nash was a young man—far from it. “I was in trouble mentally in high school. I was angry, angry, angry,” he said. He even got kicked out of school, but his athletic ability—he was a hurdlers champion in track—earned him a scholarship to college.

Local drama takes another step forward with the next play at the Raven, "Who Will Dance with Pancho Villa?" But the production, which opens on Jan. 22 for an eight-performance run, is hardly new. Gabriel Fraire and his brother John wrote it over 30 years ago and it had its first off-Broadway performance in New York in 1994.

"Macbeth stomped about the stage more concerned with his manly swagger than any of the events taking place in the play. If his desire was to make Macbeth a raging, petulant symbol of toxic masculinity, then Witthaus was quite effective. I hope this was the intention," says critic Caitlin Strom-Martin

Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day is a play with deep Bay Area roots. Originally commissioned by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre and first performed in 2018, it won the 2019 San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award for Original Script and Theatre Bay Area’s Will Glickman Award for best new play to premiere in the Bay Area. It's now at Healdsburg's Raven Theater, until Sept. 21.

'Two Gentlemen of Verona' is one of Shakespeare’s earlier works. I’ve always thought it was one of the Bard’s easier plays to follow, written before he got all “Shakespeare-y.” It’s the tale of besties Valentine and Proteus whose friendship is tested by, of course, a woman.

“We were down to 'Man of La Mancha' and this show,” director Joe Gellura said. “And Bridges of Madison County' was a show that I personally wanted to do since I saw it on Broadway 11 years ago, with the original cast.” That production won two Tony Awards, including for Best Original Score and Best Orchestration for the composer, Jason Robert Brown.

here’s quite the variety of live theater from which to choose to warm our hearts and minds, and to escape the North Bay’s cold winter nights. Harry Duke points out a few shows worth seeing...

Audiences headed for a performance of the Raven Players’ production of Cinderella who are expecting anything along the lines of a Disney musical are in for a bit of a surprise, says drama critic Harry Duke...

By Harry Duke Reviewing a mystery/thriller is always a challenge. One wants to leave a play’s twists and turns for the audience to discover on...

This weekend’s opening marks the culmination of 10 years of research, inspiration and introspection for playwright Francine Schwartz, now 75, along with a lifetime of memories. That decade began in 2014 while she went through family possessions in the family home, cleaning things out because her mother had moved into assisted living...