Amid the hurry and flurry of the holiday season just past, Bay Area media outlets were busy crowning the year’s best creative achievements. We’re proud to say that our productions made most critics’ top-ten lists for 2011.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, critic Robert Hurwitt named Jonathan Moscone‘s production of Candida, by George Bernard Shaw, among the year’s ten best, calling it “buoyantly nuanced, exquisitely designed, and unexpectedly suspenseful.” Hurwitt also gave this year’s Bay Area acting MVP nod to Rod Gnapp, who played Baptista in our The Taming of the Shrew this season. On his theater blog The Idiolect, independent critic Sam Hurwitt, a.k.a. Hurwitt the Younger, included Amanda Dehnert‘s brand-new play, The Verona Project, as one of his favorite 2011 productions, “entirely new and electric, with a touch of magical realism, witty dialogue, fiendishly clever storytelling devices, and some awfully catchy pop-rock songs”; one of his two MVPs was Verona‘s Julia, actress Arwen Anderson. Critic Chad Jones gave Shana Cooper‘s production of The Taming of the Shrew a prominent place on his Theater Dogs top ten, admitting that it was a tough call between that and our Candida but ultimately falling for how “leads Erica Sullivan and Slate Holmgren brought not only humor to this thorny comedy but also a depth of emotion I hadn’t ever experienced with this play.” And Cooper’s Shrew “packed a punch” according to KCBS‘ list of the Bay Area’s best arts and culture in 2011.

Accolades must also be given to Cal Shakes Artistic Director Moscone, whose production of Clybourne Park at A.C.T. made it onto every single list mentioned above!

Read the Chronicle‘s Top Ten list here.

Read The Idiolect‘s Top Ten list here.

Read the Theater Dogs Top Ten here.

Read KCBS’ Best Ofs here.

Julie Eccles plays the title role in CANDIDA

We continue our 2011 season with George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, playing at the Bruns Amphitheater August 10 through September 4. Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone, in a return to the works of Shaw following his critically-acclaimed production of Man and Superman in 2007, will direct.

Candida is Shaw’s brilliant, witty, and trenchant comedy about a morally superior clergyman in turn-of-the-20^th-century London, his enigmatically charismatic wife, and the wildly romantic young poet who puts the very foundation of their marriage to the ultimate test.

”Candida is endlessly fascinating to me as I continue to discover the complex nuances of each character, and of the play’s highly charged circumstances,” says Jonathan Moscone. “Underneath the veneer of Shavian humor and wit is a piercingly painted portrait of the sometimes savage undercurrents running through the veins of the seeming complacency of married life.”

The cast of Candida includes Cal Shakes Associate Artist Julie Eccles (The Pastures of Heaven, An Ideal Husband) in the title role and A.C.T. core acting company member Anthony Fusco (Clybourne Park, Prospero in Cal Shakes’ The Tempest [2006]) as Reverend James Morrell. Others in the cast include Nick Gabriel (A.C.T. core company member; Michael Tolliver in the workshop production of Tales of the City) as Eugene Marchbanks; Alexandra Henrikson (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Hell House at St. Ann’s Warehouse) as Miss Proserpine Garnett; Jarion Monroe (Cal Shakes’ The Tempest and Macbeth [1992]; twenty seasons at Berkeley Rep) as Mr. Burgess, and Nicholas Pelczar (Titus Andronicus, Macbeth) as Reverend Lexy Mill.

The design team includes: Annie Smart (set design), who designed Cal Shakes’ productions of The Pastures of Heaven, Man and Superman, and An Ideal Husband, as well as the Berkeley Rep and Broadway productions of In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play; Anna Oliver (costume design), whose work has been seen throughout the US and abroad, and who designed Nicholas Nickleby and Restoration Comedy at Cal Shakes; York Kennedy (lighting design), who created lighting for Cal Shakes’ The Pastures of Heaven, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Uncle Vanya, among others, and whose work has been seen across the country from A.C.T. to Yale Rep; and Will McCandless (sound design) whose soundscapes have appeared in numerous Bay Area productions.