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Town Hall Theatre
Rating Details »
- Good for Kids:
- Yes
5 reviews for Town Hall Theatre
This is a lovely local theater. I have seen a few productions here and they have been consistently good.
Although the theater is small with no "bad" seats, when purchasing tickets online they show you where your seats will be on a little venue map. If you don't like the look of the seats you can click on a button to request another spot. The only time I took advantage of this option was when I was buying tickets to see The Graduate and the first seats that came up were in the first row. Since The Graduate is known for containing some nudity I opted for seats a few rows back.
The theater is located near some great restaurants so I suggest parking near the theater (there is ample street parking) and then walking to a nearby restaurant for a pre-theater dinner.
The theater staff are all incredibly nice and obviously enthusiastic and excited about their jobs.
A full bar is available and they have even had drink specials to correspond with the theme of the current production.
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Maybe 2 1/2 stars. Last night we saw "The Graduate", the first production of this year's season. Last year's season included "Moonlight and Magnolias", beautifully reviewed in February by Elisa V., and a final play, mercifully lost in memory, written by Kevin Morales, who wrote the brilliantly funny "Let's Go To Casablanca", as his final effort before leaving the company. Let's just say it read like a college term paper, hastily conceived and written and paper thin. The acting was OK. We left at intermission when it had completely failed to take shape or engage us.
For financial reasons the theatre has retreated from its ambitions to join ACT, Berkeley Rep and Cal Shakes as a Regional Equity company and is functioning more as a community theatre. Out of hope and a sense of obligation we signed up for another season this year, but it'll probably be our last. Despite being its penultimate performance the actors didn't inhabit their roles well, although as the play progressed they improved. We didn't leave at intermission because we were sufficiently engaged to want to see the second half, but basically it was little theatre and if we wanted that we could go down the hill to the Contra Costa Civic Theatre here in El Cerrito, whose productions have generally been top notch. So we'll see what the reviews are like for the coming performances and if they're not good we'll give the rest of the season a miss. Too bad. We loved our first taste of what this theatre could do, but nothing has risen to that level since.
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11/25/2007
We discovered these folks last season when a rave review in the paper drew us to see "Let's Go To… Read more »
The food was incredible with two sore spots...I had the Fried Chicken whcih rocks as always! The Poke appetizer was amazing. My dinner companions had the steak(boring but good) and the meatballs(surprisingly excellent)...
The sore spot? I had the mashed potatoes with gravy which was awful..greasy and lifeless. Tasted like mashed potatoes they serve in not so good diners in Georgia. The greens were tough and flavorless..
otherwise...a great restaurant. Work on your sides folks!
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"Moonlight and Magnolias" at Town Hall Theatre in Lafayette is a week in the life of the Producer, Director, and Writer of Gone with the Wind. So, in preparation for the show, I read all 1,037 pages and watched all 238 minutes of Gone with the Wind! Whooopeee!
Just kidding, who I ask you can sit through that? In preparation for the show, I watched the very beginning and the very end of Gone with the Wind. Feeling very studious and pleased with myself.
Before I address the play, can I just say that Gone with the Wind is supposed to be set in the South, but apparently Clark Gable as Rhett Butler (or Rhett Butler as Clark Gable, either works really) couldn't do the accent? Because he only knows the one Clark Gable accent? And Vivian Leigh who plays Scarlett is clearly a Brit...?
This all begins to make sense to me after watching M&M. Welcome to old Hollywood, people. Where you can do a beachfront scene set in Paris because "we can't cater to the few people who know Paris." Such is the philosophy under which Hollywood screenwriters like Ben Hecht operated, and so it is that the "we can do whatever the heck we want, we're Hollywood" attitude is forever enshrined in Moonlight and Magnolias.
My only strong objection to this production was the very modern set design. It looked like we were on set with Three's Company. If Scarlett herself hadn't made a camio in a dream sequence at the beginning of Act 2, I would have been CONVINCED we were on set with Three's Company... especially considering M&M's slap-stick, bannana eating, men-pretending-to-birth-babies shenanigans. The labor and toil that went into the writing of the GWTW screenplay, one learns over the course of the show, was indeed a lot like giving birth to the big fat southern monstrosity that was David O. Selznick's bejeweled and overdressed brainchild. You also get to learn all about how timeless lines such as "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" and "Tomorrow's another day" only come into being with the divine and tantric levels of hallucination and mad creativity one reaches after spending 5 days locked in an office. (That looks a lot like the set of Three's Company, did I mention that?)
Long story short, the characters are so stressed out by the end that the writer has black circles under his eyes and only one shoe, the director yo-yos between the tears and violent outbursts of a manic depressive, the producer suffers a pre-death rigamortis, and, finally, the poor overworked secretary Miss Poppenguhl malfunctions like a fembot.
What could be more delightful? And as long as you've watched the very beginning and very end of GWTW, you'll get all the quick-witted, smart ass jokes that fly across the stage.
I always was a sucker for nostalgia.
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A great venue, if you like old wooden buildings from the frontier days, which I do. Local productions, many with amateur (but talented) performers. Original plays. Full bar. Quaint, small, every seat excellent. Free street parking. Very friendly and accomodating box office staff. Plenty of good restaurants in the area. Not inexpensive, but not outrageous either. All-in-all a treasure for the community.