Michael Vega (born September 4, 1969 in Colorado Springs, Colorado) is an American actor. He grew up in central New Jersey and attended Trenton State College where he studied theatre and communications. After spending several years in New York City, Vega moved in 2002 to the San Francisco Bay Area and has enjoyed great success in theatre, including appearances in Schoenberg by John Fisher, Bent by Martin Sherman, and A Queer Carol by Joe Godfrey, all at Theater Rhinoceros in San Francisco, and The Gravedigger's Tango by Ian Walker at the Phoenix Theater in San Francisco.
Vega starred as Ishi in a play based on Ishi's life presented July 3–27, 2008, at Theatre Rhinoceros. Written by the theater's artistic director, John Fisher, the play addresses many angles of the Ishi story. The San Francisco Chronicle said the work "is a fierce dramatic indictment of the ugliest side of California history". [1]
In 2008, he starred in his first feature film Beatific Vision, co-starring Marianne Shine.
Ishi was the last known member of the Native American Yahi people from the present-day state of California in the United States. The rest of the Yahi were killed in the California genocide in the 19th century. Ishi, who was widely described as the "last wild Indian" in the United States, lived most of his life isolated from modern North American culture, and was the last-known Native manufacturer of stone arrowheads. In 1911, aged 50, he emerged at a barn and corral, 2 mi (3.2 km) from downtown Oroville, California.
In American theater, summer stock theater is a theater that presents stage productions only in the summer. The name combines the season with the tradition of staging shows by a resident company, reusing stock scenery and costumes. Summer stock theaters frequently take advantage of seasonal weather by having their productions outdoors, under tents set up temporarily for their use, or in barns.
Annette Carol Bening is an American actress. With a career spanning over four decades, she is known for her versatile work across screen and stage. Bening has received numerous accolades, including a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and nominations for five Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award and two Tony Awards, making her one of few artists nominated for the Triple Crown of Acting without winning.
The culture of San Francisco is major and diverse in terms of arts, music, cuisine, festivals, museums, and architecture but also is influenced heavily by Mexican culture due to its large Hispanic population, and its history as part of Spanish America and Mexico. San Francisco's diversity of cultures along with its eccentricities are so great that they have greatly influenced the country and the world at large over the years. In 2012, Bloomberg Businessweek voted San Francisco as America's Best City.
Bradley Darryl Wong is an American actor. Wong won a Tony Award for his performance as Song Liling in M. Butterfly, becoming the only actor in Broadway history to receive the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, Clarence Derwent Award, and Theatre World Award for the same role. He was nominated for a Critic's Choice Television Award for his role as Whiterose in Mr. Robot, and earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.
The Metreon is a shopping center located in downtown San Francisco, California, United States at the corner of 4th Street and Mission Street. It is a four-story 350,000 sq ft (33,000 m2) building built over the corner of the underground Moscone Center convention center. Metreon opened on June 16, 1999, as the first of a proposed chain of Sony "urban entertainment centers", aggregating dining, games, music, exhibitions, shopping, and movies. Sony intended the ambitious US$85 million project to be a theme park and gallery for Sony products, and to reinforce a sophisticated image for the Sony brand.
Theatre Rhinoceros, Theatre Rhino, or The Rhino is a gay and lesbian theatre in San Francisco. Theatre Rhinoceros claims to be the world's longest-running professional queer theatre company. It was founded in the spring of 1977 by Lanny Baugniet and his late partner Allan B. Estes, Jr.. The name is based on the lavender rhinoceros, a symbol popularized by the Boston gay community in the mid-1970s. It is a non-profit theater company dedicated to the production of plays by and about gay and lesbian people.
Prince Gomolvilas is a Thai American playwright. He has written many plays which have been produced in the United States and won several distinctive awards, including a PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Drama.
Francis Jue is an American actor and singer. Jue is known for his performances on Broadway, in national tours, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area and at The Muny in St. Louis. His roles in plays and musicals range from Shakespeare to Rodgers and Hammerstein to David Henry Hwang. He is also known for his recurring role on the TV series Madam Secretary (2014–2019).
Women Behind Bars is a camp black comedy play by Tom Eyen, parodying the prison exploitation films produced by Universal, Warner Bros. and Republic Pictures during the 1950s.
Frank Vincent Ferrante is an American stage actor, comedian and director known for his improvisation and audience interactive comedy. He has performed as Groucho Marx in the Arthur Marx/Robert Fisher play Groucho: A Life in Revue and in his own An Evening With Groucho. Ferrante was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for 'Comedy Performance of the Year' for the title role in Groucho: A Life in Revue in London's West End in 1987. He had previously won New York's 1987 Theatre World Award for 'Outstanding Debut' for the same role.
The Magic Theatre is a theatre company founded in 1967, presently based at the historic Fort Mason Center on San Francisco's northern waterfront. The Magic Theatre is well known and respected for its singular focus on the development and production of new plays. Sean San José is the Artistic Director.
Jason Moore is an American director of film, theatre and television.
Tony Taccone is an American theater director, and the former artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California.
Medea, the Musical is a 1994 musical comedy by American playwright John Fisher. The play, a farce, concerns a theater director's attempt to recast Medea, the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides, as a serious modern commentary on LGBT culture, which goes humorously wrong when the director's cast and crew refuse to conform to the stereotyped roles he has created for them. The play became a long-running "cult favorite" in San Francisco in the mid 1990s before touring regionally. Not to be confused with Medea The Musical written by English actress and playwright Hayley Canham which premiered in Cambridge in 2022.
Carey Elizabeth Perloff is an American theater director, playwright, author, and educator. She was the artistic director of American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco from 1992 to June 2018.
Edward Scissorhands is a contemporary dance adaptation of the 1990 American romance fantasy film Edward Scissorhands, created by Matthew Bourne, with music by Terry Davies. The screenwriter and composer of the film version, Caroline Thompson and Danny Elfman, helped to develop the dance version, which is set in the 1950s. The story is told entirely through music and dance with no discourse although the plot is similar to the movie.
Pam MacKinnon is an American theatre director. She has directed for the stage Off-Broadway, on Broadway and in regional theatre. She won the Obie Award for Directing and received a Tony Award nomination, Best Director, for her work on Clybourne Park. In 2013 she received the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for a revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was named artistic director of American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, California on January 23, 2018.
San Francisco Playhouse is a non-profit theater company in San Francisco, California, founded in 2003 by Bill English and Susi Damilano. The theater stages nine plays yearly, including Broadway plays, musicals, and world and regional premieres.