San Francisco Playhouse Blog

George Bernard Shaw was a revolutionary for his time, a member of the famed and radical Fabian Society and a passionate feminist who believed strongly that women should not be pigeonholed into stereotypical roles. He also believed that relationships should not be governed by conventional notions of gender or sexual orientation or be built around …

Our theatre is a sacred space. A place where hearts are cracked open, souls are stirred, and compassion is not just spoken of, but practiced. The Empathy Gym is not just a clever phrase; it is a spiritual calling. In a time when we are taught to armor up, scroll past pain and judge rather …

When I first read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I was awed not only by its original storytelling format, but by its unique invitation to experience the world through the eyes of someone whose brain works differently than most. It is what we dream of in theatre, to be truly transported—not …

Adaptations of Shakespeare abound from West Side Story to Romanoff and Juliet to & Juliet. The composer of Hair wrote a musical adaptation of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Verdi crafted operas of Othello and Macbeth, and John Cassavetes starred in a terrific film called Tempest. There is an adaptation of Macbeth set in a donut …

Exotic Deadly: Or The MSG Play is one of those rare scripts that became a front-runner for season selection before I even finished reading it. The play was handed to me by Marie-Claire Erdynast, our Associate Artistic Director, who saw the play in its Old Globe run in San Diego. Before I reached Page 10, …

I have always been drawn to St. Francis’s famous prayer, “Make me an instrument of thy peace.” What a wonderful wish. To be an agent of peace. To answer hate with love, despair with hope, doubt with faith. In the secular world of today, words like hope and faith have gotten lost in the endless …

The official trailer for Waitress is here! Watch the video below. Performances of Waitress continue through January 18, 2024. Featuring a tasty, tuneful score by Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles and a fresh-baked book by Jessie Nelson, this sweet musical confection follows Jenna, a waitress for a small-town diner. Trapped in a loveless marriage and unexpectedly pregnant, …

Community is a word we see bandied about a lot these days. It is used to sell products, memberships in organizations promising belonging while asking for money, and loyalty to the home team or the home religion. Community is much in demand and difficult for us to feel. When faith in government, local or federal …

Working for many years as a set designer, I have never imagined that scenic art could be the villain of a story. But watching The Play That Goes Wrong has made us all aware that the environment on stage can be the primary antagonist. Boobytraps lie in wait for every character, and the more wary …

San Francisco Playhouse will serve up a holiday treat with the beloved Broadway favorite Waitress, directed by San Francisco Playhouse Producing Director and co-founder Susi Damilano with music direction by Dave Dobrusky and choreography by Nicole Helfer. Featuring a tasty, tuneful score by Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles and a fresh-baked book by Jessie Nelson, …

At a recent performance of Evita, our fabulous turntable hiccupped, stuttered, staggered and stopped. It failed, of course, at the very moment when it was needed to deliver the “lover’s bed/speaker’s podium” unit to the stage so it could serve as the anchor for the seven minutes of “A New Argentina” to close Act I. …

Why do we laugh at a farce? Because otherwise we would have to cry. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, “Farce is nearer tragedy than comedy is.” Oscar Wilde said, “Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its …

San Francisco Playhouse kicks off its 2024-25 season with the Olivier Award-winning comedy The Play That Goes Wrong. This fast-paced farce packed with inventive theatricality finds the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society on opening night of its newest production, The Murder at Haversham Manor. As the incompetent theatre troupe attempts to stage this 1920s murder mystery, their production devolves into …

In the late 1940s, the Eva Peron Foundation granted my grandmother the opportunity to build a home in a budding Buenos Aires neighborhood – something that was unheard of in Argentina, a country with no established middle class and an extremely polarized division between the rich and the poor. My grandmother spent the rest of …

Initially, I selected Evita for our 2023/24 Season because I knew it was going to be an election year in the U.S. and our democracy was certain to be on the line. I thought, “wouldn’t it be interesting to look at another time and place where a very charismatic populist leader rose up with his …

A high school junior who had played a supporting role in one musical but hadn’t really cared much about the experience was waiting for a bus when he noticed a used bookstore. Curious, he wandered in – and drawn to the drama section, he scanned the titles. High on a shelf, he saw a little …

San Francisco Playhouse has announced its 22nd season, to be presented September 2024 to September 2025. Unveiled at a special event on March 24th to an enthusiastic group of Playhouse supporters and fans, Artistic Director Bill English and Producing Director Susi Damilano revealed the two musicals and four plays the company will present at its …

From the back seat of my parents’ Country Squire station wagon at the local drive-in theatre, I watched Cary Grant dodge a crop-duster and hang off Mount Rushmore and my life-long love of Alfred Hitchcock was born. Years later, while working a graveyard shift summer job at a state mental hospital it was cemented by …

In many ways, the world premieres we produce on our mainstage make us the most excited. They are about taking risks, pushing envelopes of what theatre can do, giving our stage to playwrights/prophets to illuminate for us, life as it is being lived in our moment in time. World premieres bring out the best in …

Despite our deepening understanding of the subtleties and nuances of human behavior, despite a growing intellectual consensus that good and evil are inextricably intertwined, we are nonetheless living in a world being pushed deeper into extremist positions, where beliefs are polarized into black and white postures, each camp despising the other with little hope for …