Wisetrips Travel Blog

A.C.T.’s North by Northwest ( playing at Toni Rembe Theater, San Francisco)  feels like a production whose theatrical ingenuity outpaces its storytelling: an accomplished cast, inventive stagecraft, and considerable comic energy, but an uneven relationship with Hitchcock’s suspense. Whether that sounds entertaining or frustrating depends on how much you enjoy seeing a familiar thriller turned into playful physical theater. …

We saw Primary Trust at Lucie Stern Theatre. I enjoyed the original premise, though I found the pacing slow. The unexpected premiere party, with Mai Tais, chardonnay and cookies, was a pleasant surprise. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley staged Eboni Booth's Primary Trust, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, at Lucie Stern Theatre from March 4 to 29, 2026. Directed by Jeffrey Lo, the regional premiere followed a bookstore worker w…

Inna purchased tickets to Berkeley Rep 's new production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. We were pleasantly surprised by the production on our first visit to Berkeley Rep in a long time. Berkeley itself was also cleaner than when I last visited. We really enjoyed this dramatic performance, and  Hugh Bonneville's acting  was excellent (as expected).

For my birthday, Inna pre-purchased tickets to the  production of Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird at Golden Gate Theater for 7:30pm.   We started our walk to the theater from the Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel at around 7:00pm. It was a sketchy part of town with lots of homeless everywhere. We arrived around 7:20, and Inna picked up her tickets at the Box Office. Our seats turned out to be J21/22 on t…

How does Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway compare to the famous movie Dangerous Liaisons  (starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer)? Having never read the book by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (and only seen the movie), I was not sure what to expect. I had nothing to fear. The Broadway adaptation of the book was dramatic and compelling. …

The rain pours down in steady streams, shrouding in the gloom the Irish countryside of "Outside Mullingar," a recent play by John Patrick Shanley that opened on October 5, 2016, at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The play premiered at Broadway's  Samuel J. Friedman Theatre   on January 23, 2014, and closed on March 16, 2014. This was my first time seeing the play on…

I have been relatively disappointed with the past few productions at Berkeley Rep , so I had reasonably low expectations coming into seeing "Disgraced" - a play I knew very little about. Cast Isaac : J. Anthony Crane Abe : Behzad Dabu Emily : Nisi Sturgis Amir : Bernard White Jory : Zakiya Young Wikipedia describes it as f…

Today, we saw a musical version of Jane Austen's Emma in the Lucie Stern Theatre. The music and lyrics were written by Paul Gordon. The stage was beautifully designed. Miss Emma Woodhouse, played by Lianne Marie Dobbs, acted delightfully as the ingenue matchmaker, whose initial success in matchmaking is overshadowed by her later failures. Although obsessed with romance, Emma is clueless about her feelings. The e…