Theater and Art

Broadway Sacramento has announced its 2013-14 season with a six-show package that includes five regional premieres.

"Kind of Like a Sound," a bouquet of trumpetlike flowers, greets you on the first wall of Robert Ortbal's exciting show at Jay Jay. It's quirky yet beautiful, an elegant comedian made of unexpected materials.

TODAY-THURSDAY - The River Cats, the hometown AAA baseball team, extend opening weekend into next week, first against the Las Vegas 51s and then against Tacoma's Rainiers.

In yet another sign of Downtown Plaza's changing landscape, Tapigami, the local masking-tape art group, is moving into a 7,300-square-foot space that until recently was a gleaming Hyundai dealership.

Athol Fugard's slowly simmering 1982 drama "Master Harold … and the boys" encapsulates the tragic complexities of apartheid-era South Africa in one dismal rainy afternoon. The fine new production of the classic at the Sacramento Theatre Company's Pollock Stage benefits from a strong trio ensemble and careful, sensitive staging from director Buddy Butler.

Photographers Jay Spooner and Allyson Seconds wrap up their joint "Retrospectives" show with a fun-for-all closing night shindig Saturday at midtown's Little Relics Galleria.

Abstraction was a staple of art in the 20th century until it was rudely displaced by Pop Art in the 1960s. While abstraction took a secondary role for a time, it is once again popular with artists in the 21st century.

April 4, 1968, Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.. The date and place are famous as the setting of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.

Ballet and humor aren't the most common dance partners, yet the Sacramento Ballet has found comic charm in its new program at the Community Center Theater.

Though they are worlds apart, two shows at midtown galleries share a common thread.

Stephanie Gularte's imminent resignation as artistic director at Capital Stage, the professional theater company she co-founded, closes a remarkable and inspiring chapter in the region's arts life. This isn't by any means the end of the road for either Gularte or Cap Stage, but a corner has been turned. Gularte leaves a legacy of gutsy forward-thinking arts management and a model organization built to last.

David Pierini's new play "Finding Our Voice: Susan B. and the Women's Suffrage Movement" places the historical elements of the story in an accessible personal context. Pierini tells the story of Susan B. Anthony's nearly lifelong battle to gain for women the right to vote through his central character, a young woman named Mary Foster.

"FLASH," a new dance piece at UC Davis, was created by choreographer and director Qudus Onikeku out of his upbringing in violent Lagos, Nigeria.

Water, wood and earth are the three elements the Zhang sisters explore in their joint show at CSU Sacramento's Library Gallery. The sisters – Ling, Bo and Hong – were born and raised in the northeast China in the city of Shenyang, often referred to as the Detroit of China. Each has found a new home: Ling in Atlanta, Bo in Beijing and Hong in Lawrence, Kan.

New Helvetia Theatre's sparkling production of Adam Gwon's satisfying "Ordinary Days" has so many charms it's hard to know where to begin. Set in contemporary New York, the funny and dramatic sung-through chamber musical has a bright, unaffected grasp of modern life, which for its characters is vibrantly comic, sad and hopeful.

Who knows how many kids and parents have the songs from "Disney's Beauty and the Beast" etched in their brains from repeated listening? That number is surely astronomical, as the 1991 film has generated close to $425 million in revenue from its numerous releases.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has made an art of retooling its leadership.

Capital Stage founding artistic director Stephanie Gularte announced Friday that she will leave the theater after its 2013-2014 season. Capital Stage board President Cliff McFarland said the professional nonprofit theater company will immediately begin a national search for her replacement.

Alex Bult Gallery- "Waterworks" is a show of transcendent images of water, seen up close so that the image becomes abstract on first viewing

As young Lysander doggedly pursues an uneven romance in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," he sagely observes, "The course of true love never did run smooth."

Playwright Michael Elyanow's tumultuous world-premiere comedy-drama "Robyn Is Happy" at B Street Theatre veers across wide swaths of dramatic territory.

Sacramento theater reboots this weekend with four new shows opening, including two Shakespearean comedies and two world premieres.

Like ancient Greek sculptures of gods and goddesses, China's terra-cotta warriors, on view at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, would have been brightly painted.

THURSDAY - Historical-fiction writer Melanie Benjamin's new novel, "The Aviator's Wife," tells the story of the marriage of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who emerged from his shadow to become a writer and advocate for women's rights.

Museums – much like libraries – are places where voices are hushed and noise minimal.

Ben Moroski still can't say why he used to cut himself. Even though the Davis native has written and performed a one-person play based on his self-mutilation, he can't reduce his reasons to a simple sentence, and in "This Vicious Minute" he doesn't try to.

As he approaches his 90th birthday, Sacramento painter Gregory Kondos walks with a cane and has a constant ache in his shoulder from holding up a paintbrush. But he insists he is doing his best work yet, and he is ready to tackle an 8-foot-tall canvas.

There are some stories that sound much better in short-form synopsis than they play on stage (yes, Neil LaBute, I'm looking right at you). The description tells you everything, the execution not so much.

On the surface, the works of Irving Marcus and Peter Stegall would seem to have little in common.

Looking to tap into the city's burgeoning mural scene, downtown officials are seeking entries from artists willing to provide a cosmetic upgrade to a blighted corner of K Street.

He's an everyman schlub with a brilliant streak, an incisive observer whose devoted self-skewering softens his edge.

Tens of thousands of visitors made their way to area museums – admission free – on Saturday for Sacramento Museum Day.

Shpritz Anthony, a beloved member of the Sacramento theater community, passed away unexpectedly Jan. 5 at his Sacramento home at the age of 47. The cause of death has not been determined.

Johannes Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring" was purchased in the 1880s for $1. Today it is the centerpiece of a show of 17th century Dutch paintings at San Francisco's de Young Museum, where it has a room of its own

Think back to high school lit class and you'll remember it. "The Great Gatsby" was the ultimate essence-of-an-era tale.

If you're wondering what today's kids are up to, take a trip out to Three Stages at Folsom Lake College this weekend. You'll see some terrific theater by young people, and more than that, you'll see infectious enthusiasm and relentlessly positive attitudes.

Pop the top off the second California Craft Beer Month with the Art of Beer, an evening of unlimited beer tasting. Midtown's Rubicon Brewing Co. and newcomer New Helvetia can be counted among the two dozen or so breweries offering up specialty suds, which can be paired with eats from regional food vendors.

A "carapace" refers to the protective shell of a turtle or tortoise. When the idea turns up in a play you can bet it's symbolic of a character's, you know, protective shell.

I get the feeling that playwright Jason Wells intended his farce "The North Plan" as a cautionary black comedy about the potentially draconian results of the Homeland Security Act. Along the way he created an outrageously funny character named Tanya Shepke, who hijacked the play.

When I saw the off-Broadway production of Rajiv Joseph's "Gruesome Playground Injuries" in 2011, the production was being overshadowed by another Joseph play. The prolific and highly regarded young writer was then a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his "A Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" starring Robin Williams. Readying for its Broadway premiere, that production was naturally pulling the media spotlight.

There's been a lot of talk lately about stage musicals being better than their film adaptations. It's true. The stage musical "Rock of Ages," playing through Sunday at Sacramento's Community Center Theater, surpasses the 2012 movie version starring Tom Cruise.

"Face Yourself" at the Elliott Fouts Gallery is a show of self-portraits by artists who are not, for the most part, known for their figurative work. The result is a show that ranges from a straightforward, traditional self- portrait by Bryan Mark Taylor to a psychologically fraught painting by John Tarahteeff, who depicts himself as a sailor in a beached boat with a broken mast.

Comic John Oliver nearly burst into tears one afternoon during an impromptu celebration at "The Daily Show" offices.

Jack Gallagher specializes in both transparency and personal oral history.

For our theater entertainment and edification, Jack Gallagher will again cannibalize his life.

Cindy Williams, 65, spent the 1970s in the thick of Hollywood creativity, acting for directors George Lucas ("American Graffiti") and Francis Ford Coppola ("The Conversation") and starring opposite Ron Howard and Penny Marshall, who would become notable directors.

Second Saturday gallery picks by Victoria Dalkey

TODAY-SUNDAY- The 11th annual Wild & Scenic Film Festival focuses on climate change, offering more than 100 films about nature, community activism, adventure, conservation and more.

True story: In college, I took a class on the 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and we examined his signature work "Ethics." I tried very hard but understood very little, though statements such as "When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it," did speak to me with a certain unintended irony.

The duo of Sam Misner and Megan Smith are fine actors and even better Americana singer-songwriters. The pair met, appropriately enough, in a production of the musical "Woody Guthrie's American Song" and discovered a mutual love of the folk music tradition.