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Jan 14, 2025 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez
After 12 years, Kimberly Mohne Hill knew it was time. Hill is a fixture in the South Bay’s theater scene, as a busy director, sought-after dialect coach, and chair of Santa Clara University’s Department of Theatre and Dance. Yet in those years–from witnessing her daughters blossom from little girls to college students, then ensuring her terminally ill husband had, as she says, a “smooth and loving transition”–Hill had not set foot on stage as an actor.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez |Mark Shanahan
There is so much melancholia within the soul of sleuth extraordinaire Sherlock Holmes. After all, when your arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty is no more, what’s the point of living? I mean, sure, Holmes probably helped cause the death after a scuffle, but can we stop splitting hairs about it? There’s a true victim here, and that’s Holmes, who has one less enemy to spar with at the edge of a cliff.
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Dec 1, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez
While multiple ghosts in “A Christmas Carol” convince the dastardly Ebenezer Scrooge to go from horrible to gleeful, it’s the spirit of a certain artist who passed in 2016 that informs all the joy and mirth at Silicon Valley Shakespeare. Richard T. Orlando’s adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic ran at Northside Theater Company in San Jose, the company he founded, for 43 years.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez
It takes mere seconds for David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori to show their mutual admiration, manifested through good-natured ribbing about each other’s New York borough.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez |Rajiv Joseph
A modest season for young LeBron James would have been considered career-defining for many high school basketball players. After all, when James was a 15-year-old freshman, his varsity team went 27-0. He averaged more than 18 points and six rebounds per game on the way to an Ohio state championship in 2000.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
kqed.org | David Chavez |David John Chávez
Sep 20Failed to save articlePlease try againBrady Morales-Woolery and Gianna DiGregorio Rivera in Noël Coward’s ‘Private Lives’ at A.C.T.’s Toni Rembe Theater. (Kevin Berne)The tango is a luscious expression of lost love, nostalgia and melancholia — and a staple of Argentinian life. In the hands of Elyot and Amanda, their tango is perfect: a soft kick here, a gentle spin there, with bodies that flutter close together to turn their hot breath into hotter fire.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
kqed.org | David Chavez |David John Chávez
Aug 26Failed to save articlePlease try againLakisha May and Nana Mensah in the Broadway run of ‘Jaja's African Hair Braiding.’ (Matthew Murphy)This past July is officially on record as the hottest California month in decades. And while cooler temperatures will be ushered into the Bay Area soon, theater companies are hoping that local stages continue to stay hot well into the fall.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez
The history of San Jose’s Chicanx theater company Teatro Visión is marked with transcendent highs and devastating lows. The resilient troupe has big plans for the future, yet not before their big night to celebrate the past and toast what’s ahead. Teatro Visión’s 40th Anniversary Gala is taking place Aug. 24 at Mexican Heritage Plaza. Live music, performances and the presentation of a short documentary about the company is slated for the celebration.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez
Playwright Vichet Chum’s abilities as a creator of stories has its limits. Once his work reaches the initial conclusion, he needs outside voices to develop his work further, which provides necessary inflection and context for both his ears and vision.
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Jul 25, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | David Chavez |David John Chávez
The premise for Richard O’Brien’s “The Rocky Horror Show” is gleefully campy, informed by heavy doses of sexual schlock. The stage version premiered in 1973, followed soon after by the 1975 film, arguably the standard bearer of the term “cult classic.”The film has its own monopoly on supplemental fun, encouraging audiences to serve as collaborators with costumes and call-outs that accentuate every piece of engaging off-color wit they can muster.
