The Best Bay Area Theater We Saw in 2024

There’s no denying that theater continued to face massive obstacles in 2024. With audiences still choosing to stay home in large numbers, fundraising campaigns were often as common as season announcements, while consequential closures of legacy institutions stung the ecosystem as a whole.

Still, companies large and small continued to crank out successful, fantastic productions in the face of brutal headwinds — with some of the nation’s biggest touring productions adding cherries to our already massive regional theatrical sundae.

Below, theater critics and regular KQED contributors Nicole Gluckstern and David John Chávez share their most significant Bay Area theater happenings of 2024.

The Truth of Illusion in ‘Glass Menagerie’ at SF Playhouse

At San Francisco Playhouse in May, The Glass Menagerie, one of Tennessee Williams’ most produced and haunting plays, served a master class in how to modernize a classic. First, find themes of relevance in our modern world through the fraught existence of the Wingfield family and its illusory protagonist Tom. Second, collect a bang-up cast of terrific performers. Third, let them cook.

This production wrangled such explosiveness out of the piercing text, extracting lessons of race, class and sexuality in flaring new ways. Jeffrey Lo’s direction of his diverse cast bubbled to a firmly unifying crescendo, easily making this one of the year’s most thrilling locally produced pieces of theater. The show blew me away at every turn.—David John Chávez

A Soaring ‘Angels in America’

Oakland Theater Project’s exquisitely distilled Angels in America stomped, glided and soared across the stage at Marin Shakespeare Company’s new digs in San Rafael. Remounts of this heaving contemporary epic with deep Bay Area roots are always highly anticipated events around these parts, and OTP’s version was a welcome addition to the firmament. From the inspired casting (including company stalwarts J Jha as Prior, and Lisa Ramirez as the Angel) to the bare-bones but carefully curated design choices and the full-throated demand for more life, this production felt utterly of this time. That’s despite ostensibly being set in an earlier, similarly fraught era, when public health, personal faith and political machination collided in generationally shifting ways. Kudos to director Michael Moran for taking a big swing, and hitting a theatrical home run.—Nicole Gluckstern

Solidarity Shined in Berkeley Rep’s ‘Mexodus’

If one of theater’s goals is to break new ground while bringing in a younger and more diverse patron base, then Berkeley Rep’s production of Mexodus was wildly successful. Channeling the art form of live looping in this two-hander, Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson fluttered and flew all over the stage while dropping sick beats everywhere. Their musical magic traversed multiple genres: hip-hop, reggaeton, bachata and classic Mexican bolero. In our fraught times, the message of unity between a Black slave and brown soldier through the Underground Railroad’s little known pathway into Mexico may be the show’s most hopeful lesson.—David John Chávez

Dance Dance Revolution

Election years seem to generate desire for two very different kinds of works: the resolutely political, and the resolutely not. For the former, I found solace and solidarity emanating from the dance community. Standouts included Flyaway Productions’ Ode to Jane, in which a fierce cohort of aerial performers scaled the walls of the Tenderloin’s Cadillac Hotel and soared over the streets to audio of abortion rights activists, community activators and a stirring score by Xoa Asa.

Meanwhile, the return of Dance Mission Theater’s D.I.R.T. (Dance in Revolt-ing Times) Festival included free outdoor activations in the form of embodied invocations led by Dance Brigade and guest artists, followed by pay-what-you-could indoor performances by powerhouse radicals such as the Embodiment Project, amara tabor-smith and Sara Shelton Mann. And over at Z Space, the barrier-breaking Sean Dorsey Dance celebrated 20 years of cultivating trans and queer resistance via life-affirming, liberatory dance with a retrospective of early works.—Nicole Gluckstern

The Continued Rise (With One Tough Fall) of Outdoor Theater

The Bay Area’s temperate summer climate makes us the envy of those who sweat, swelter and shrink elsewhere in the country. Sure, it’s a little chilly at night, but the cool fog rolling in is the stuff from which legendary songs are made. This year, summertime shows like Jersey Boys at Oakland’s picturesque Woodminster Summer Musicals or the San Francisco Chinatown-inspired production of The Comedy of Errors at Silicon Valley Shakespeare were dazzling in both spectacle and scenery.

Sadly, one of the Bay’s most perfect outdoor venues has officially shut down for good, and it’s impossible to overstate the impact on the Bay Area’s theater ecosystem. Many efforts were made to save California Shakespeare Theater, including a $350,000 fundraiser to bankroll its final production. Even a softening of the budget and a $100,000 gift from superstar (and Cal Shakes alum) Zendaya could not stave off the inevitable. It’s depressing to think that Bruns Memorial Amphitheatre in Orinda, whose last production was As You Like It, will now move forward only as a beautiful forest, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”—David John Chávez

Go Out(side) and Play

Speaking of the great outdoors, it’s been a particularly good year to take in a performance al fresco. From the joys of witnessing a mesmerizing Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe wreak magical havoc in SF Shakes’ The Tempest, to the solace of SF Mime Troupe’s election-year production American Dreams, to a chance encounter with an afterlife-themed play — Skateboarding Through Bardos — during the Día de Los Muertos celebrations at Potrero del Sol Park, there were more than enough opportunities to scratch the theatre-going itch outside.

A couple of way-outside-the-black-box concepts that I hope make a comeback next year are San Francisco’s mid-Market block parties, Unstaged, which included a rollicking “jazz club” aboard the F-Market train, and the delightful, kid-oriented Pinecones and Portals “Hiking Theater Company” which holds its performances in East Bay parks. Audiences follow the action literally along woodland trails, or huddle together around campfires for music, stories, and s’mores. How cool is that?—Nicole Gluckstern

Cinco Años de la Lengua

Producing theater in San Francisco can be viciously difficult and cost-restrictive, often quickly turning grand openings in grand closings. Fortunately, Virginia M. Blanco didn’t get that message. Blanco’s company, La Lengua Teatro en Español, continues to find new ways forward, with a September run of their critically-acclaimed, world premiere production Paradise by Tere Martínez playing to sold out houses at the Mission’s Brava Theater Center studio space.

Blanco, a native Argentinian and the executive artistic director and founder of the company, has poured heart and soul into the venture, surrounding herself with a terrific team of like-minded, passionate creatives who’ve tapped into the Bay’s massive Spanish-speaking citizenry. The company is celebrating their fifth year of existence, and are now in a critical campaign to secure funding for 2025. Despite the company being around since 2019, it certainly feels like they’re just getting started.—David John Chávez

The Future (Really) is Now

It was a good year for staged speculative fictions, with SF Playhouse’s production of My Home on the Moon, by Minna Lee, and ACT’s Big Data, by Kate Atwell (both world premieres). The former was set in a simulverse inside a woman-owned, struggling Phở shop, where a community development “grant” from a corporate benefactor comes with a suspiciously helpful “consultant” named Vera (played impeccably by Rinabeth Apostol). With seemingly unflagging optimism for novelty and aphorism, Vera is eventually revealed to be AI, and when the newly decorated walls of the restaurant begin to crack and eventually transform, reality itself is revealed to be a fragmenting hall of mirrors.

Meanwhile, in Atwell’s Big Data, the suspiciously helpful character “M” (a magnetic BD Wong) was the embodiment of “the” algorithm that dominates so much of what we consciously and unconsciously consume. Casually embedded in the everyday routines of a cast of interrelated characters, M had an uncanny ability to simultaneously attack and affirm, flirt and fight, and the startling results of his capricious, relentless campaign flipped the script, quite literally, by the play’s end. That both productions had incredible sets designed by Tanya Orellana was a welcome detail.—Nicole Gluckstern

SFBATCO Celebrates a Decade

I first interviewed Rodney Earl Jackson, Jr. in 2014, when he was on tour in Motown: The Musical playing David Ruffin, which came with lead vocals on “My Girl.” That conversation with the native San Franciscan came around the same time his new theater venture, the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company (SFBATCO), was kicking off. Jackson and co-founder Marcelo Javier’s company has made huge strides in the past 10 years, and is now considered one of the most critical developers of new work in the Bay.

In 2021, their New Roots Theatre Festival launched with a focus on developing new works from BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices. And one of the company’s highlights in 2024 was their scintillating world premiere musical Sign My Name to Freedom, telling the story of 103-year-old Betty Reid Soskin and her rich history in the Bay Area, including her retirement as a national park ranger at the age of 100.—David John Chávez