Community School of Music and Arts is a great place for learning. The staff is organized, prepared,…read moreknowledgeable, and encouraging. They create a positive and inspiring environment that helps students grow both creatively and confidently.

Young Chamber Musicians greatly enjoyed producing both our Winter Concert and Finale Concert in…read moreTateuchi Hall at the Community School for Music & Arts this season! Thanks to CSMA's great staff for making our students, coaches and audience so welcome!

The Pear has gone through a lot of change past few years, needless to say COVID was a tough time…read more They have a new artistic Director, the new season looks promising. The 2025 Annual production of Pear Slices (short original plays written by local playwrights) was fantastic. The upcoming season looks really interesting. The theater is just off of 101 / Shoreline, plenty of free parking. Thepear.org

It's incredible how much things can change. I used to love this theater -- in fact, I gave it a…read more5-star review six years ago. Unfortunately, my recent experience was a real disappointment. While the actors were talented and delivered strong performances, they didn't seem well-matched to the roles they were cast in, which made it harder to connect with the story. More importantly, I came to see a Shakespeare play, but was disheartened by the insertion of modern political messaging that felt out of place and unnecessarily polarizing. Sadly, this no longer feels like the theater I once enjoyed. I won't be returning.

Very underwhelming summer camp experience. Our 7-year-old daughter attended the two-week summer…read moreprogram and ended up with only seven lines and about 30 words in the entire play. I completely understand that not every child can have a leading role, but giving any child of this age such a marginal role during a two-week camp does not seem acceptable to me. In fact, she came home crying after the second day and said that this amount of text she could memorize in less than a day. What made me particularly sad and disappointed as a parent was not even the wasted money, but the missed growth opportunity. We use the summer break to expose our daughter to new activities and interests outside the classroom so she gets outside her comfort zone and can discover what she enjoys. From that perspective, these two weeks felt like a waste of time and potential.

We had a horrible experience with the Peninsula Youth Theatre summer camp program in Mountain View…read more First, the teaching staff is a group of inexperienced middle schoolers just a few years older than our first grad kid. It's clear they have no idea how to engage the kids. Second, the staff is rather rude and impatient with the kids. For example, the team in charge of the sound for the final performance made an unsolicited comment to one of the kids that he was so loud that she needed to turn down the speaker making the kid almost want to cry. Third, without even saying a word to us the parents, the staff made a false report to the Child Abuse & Neglect Center and initiated an investigation of because they are concerned of a potential child abuse of our kid!!! The investigation wasted our time and nearly scared our kids. It was surreal that we needed to explain to the county agent how a 7-year boy would have a scar on his knee from his soccer practice a few years ago. Both the agents and we are frustrated by the trouble the careless and inexperienced staff are causing us. Stay away from this program unless you want real dramas in your life!

We saw "Come From Away" on 5/9/2026 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Not only…read morewas the performance fantastic, parking was easy to find and free. The staff was extremely helpful in finding options for a comfortable, accessible set for me. Thank you! We are looking forward to seeing upcoming shows.

I recently looked online for tickets to a show at the Mountain View Center. I didn't purchase the…read moretickets at the time since I had questions that I needed answered from the box office. In the 2 days that I delayed purchasing, the price of tickets changed from $69 to $79. For me this represented paying an extra $40 since I was buying 4 tickets! There was no advance warning that this was going to happen and when I spoke to the box office they were not interested in honoring the original price I'd seen. Very disappointing.

This was my first time at this particular stage company, and we saw "Waiting for Godot!"…read more Wow- the voices of both the two main characters were simply marvelous!! I have never heard of this play before, yet my dad and brother knew it very well within the psychologically realm. Lol, As I listened to the play, there were a number of quotes I had actually heard when I was studying different theories within existentialism so it brought me back to my old college days! Lol A very small cast, but so well acted, especially the amazing rant that the character, lucky does was almost like a wrap! I honestly wish I had tape recorded or at least the audio of that because he said so many amazing quotes and Mantras of life. I wish I could've repeated any of them! My brain could not process everything so quickly but goodness well played!! The seats were a bit rickety, but they were still comfortable, and the play itself was not too cold luckily for me since I'm always freezing! Lol I also had a jacket handy, just in case. It was a cold overcast day, and the wind picked up, but everything inside the theater was pleasant. I wouldn't mind coming back and seeing a couple other plays especially the musical number ! This particular was about 2 1/2 hours long so at the last 30 minutes of the play, sadly my dad's phone rang since we were late for our dinner reservation! Lol, so I wish we knew how long the play was going to be before we made dinner plans. Lol.

Super amateur and uncomfortable…read more Dropped by here on a lark because I saw a sign advertising their production of "Cabaret" at a local restaurant and I've been meaning to see the Robert Altman film. 95% of the audience were Boomers who are probably bored out of their minds and desperate for any diversion from waiting for the sweet release of death. The other 5% were presumably friends of the cast. Basically all the actors were failure-to-launch white guys in their 30s, along with a few plus-sized Hispanic and Asian actresses. One actress was an attractive white girl, which confused me so badly that I assume she must have been somehow blackmailed into being part of the play. Nobody seemed to be having any fun, the laughter felt forced, the costumes and make-up were garish, and the playbill lacked any context for the story. I feel vaguely like I was rubbernecking the end of Western civilization, where young whites (who are a minority of young Americans) put on a half-hearted charade for their grandparents to try and maintain the illusion that the world they lived in still exists. As the Boomers pass away over the next decade, I expect all these local theater companies to shut down. The aforementioned attractive white girl and an acrobatic gay white guy seemed to actually be trying, which I appreciated, but their efforts weren't enough to salvage the play from all the others phoning it in. I'm glad I walked out a half-hour in. I wish I could get my money back. This may have permanently put me off from live theater lol.

The adult theater jazz dance class on Saturday morning with Becky is super fun! First class is…read morefree if you want to sample it. The music is from Broadway musicals. There is a warm up to a medley of songs and then a dance routine. The dance changes every six weeks or so.

WVDC offers a really good dance class for adults. Easy to learn steps and patient teacher.read more

Stanford Repertory Theater is great. Its productions are first rate, led by the really creative,…read morefun, intelligent, Rush Rehm. It's super affordable given the quality of their performances. I've seen everything from Euripides and Orson Welles ("Moby Dick - Rehearsed") to this summer's excellent, rich, and mind-expanding Naomi Wallace production, "Slaughter City", and soon "Waiting For Lefty." Although the Rep doesn't have the reputation of Yale or some of the New York theaters, and it's not as big as ACT in SF, it's just as good if not better. I'm so glad Stanford supports this drama program to help balance out all of the new, new, cutting edge, science and technology of Silicon Valley. Take "Slaughter City" for instance, playing now (for a couple more days). It's about human work, and history, and desire. Written in the 1990's, it's set in a spare and creatively staged slaughterhouse to examine labor and the centuries old tension between workers and bosses. Who gets the power and how, who pays and how? And true, maybe we're not slaughterhouse workers, but someone does that work for us, while we do other work, as surgeons or programmers, say. Maybe we're not subjected to physically bruising work conditions, but don't we have aches and pains from sitting 8-12 hours a day coding or typing or managing? We might also reflect on these labor struggles wonder about the future of work with automation. The play is also about history, with surreal and poetic moments that trace labor's perennial indignities and tragedies, the ghost of the Triangle ShirtWaist Fire, for instance, indentured through time to the ruthless "capitalist" who takes on the guise of "Sausage Man". So here's a play about labor, and power, and history, but it's also about desire. Oh, desire. Maybe these workers desire something simple -- a car -- a Ford or a Chevy. A young man desires an the older woman, and another woman is drawn to a woman dressed as a man. What does the manager desire in making his workers grovel and all of us squirm? When it's hot these characters desire cold, when it's cold they need warmth, when they can't breath they need air, and when they know they're going to die? They just want a few more minutes to live. What is it about desire that pushes humans to endure so much? All of this in a 90 minute production in an intimate theater where no seat is a bad seat. TV shows can't beat it for dramatic thought-provoking timeless entertainment, and all those shows borrow, steal, and reference classic theater. The Stanford Rep also has an amazing summer symposium that's amazing and totally worth attending. I do wish they sold season tickets.

Moby Dick-rehearsed. One of the best plays I've ever seen. Superbly acted. Wonderful choreography…read more So creative. Don't miss it! Playing until Aug 10th.

We attended the opening-night performance of "the Da Vinci Code" at the Lucie Stern Theater. The…read moreevening ended with refreshments & celebratory toasts with Palo Alto Players cast & crew. Twenty years after the film release (& longer, still, since the controversial novel was published), the fast-paced stage adaptation did justice to the thought-provoking original story. Intimate theater with high production value; raw talent; & reasonably-priced tickets -- all the best parts of community theater. We had an amazing time!

Amazing plays locally in Palo Alto Ca. Affordable, exciting, amazing cast, and very relaxing…read moreevening out.