photographs by Barry Wisdom / Each year, B Street Theatre Producing Director Buck Busfield and his consiglieri head to the Humana Festival of New America Plays in Louisville, Ky., to check out the freshest and fiercest that U.S. playwrights have to offer. At 2011's festival, among the works at which Busfield took aim was A. Rey Pamatmat's "Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them." The drama concerns three kids: 16-year-old Kenny and his 12-year-old sister Edith, and their friend Benji. Kenny and Edith are "all but abandoned on a farm in remotest Middle America," but the siblings care for each other with more devotion than offered by their parents. As Benji and Kenny's relationship evolve

photographs by Barry Wisdom / The volume wasn't the only thing turned to "11" the evening of May 4, as an off-the-dial number of revel-hungry music lovers descended on Cesar Chavez Park for the 2012 Concerts in the Park season opener. Some 6,300 men, women and children – a record for the 21-year-old free, all-ages concert series – filled the downtown Sacramento venue to celebrate the River City's unofficial summer kick-off. Local musician and erstwhile emcee Danny Secretion hosted the Downtown Sacramento Partnership-sponsored event, offering loving introductions to The Storytellers, Island of Black and White, and Arden Park Roots. The Storytellers, described on the DSP website as a

photographs by Barry Wisdom /   The B Street Theatre, best known as a new-works playhouse that specializes in staging cozy, serio-comedies of quiet quirkiness, takes an early summer vacation from the subtle in its West Coast premiere of Kate Fodor’s “Rx.” A satire on America’s never-ending quest for pharmaceutical solutions that’ll cure what ails ya, “Rx,” which plays April 29 through June 10, 2012, is a high-energy, medicinal hilarity dispensary that guarantees relief from overwrought, overdone dramas. Buck Busfield directs the farcical, physical, frenetically paced production that is bold and brassy, with comically exaggerated huffing and puffing, punching and puking, hugging and hum

photographs by Barry Wisdom / Go ahead and Google “Hansel and Gretel,” and nearly 200,000 results will pop up – results that feature such headlines as: “a tale of childhood terror”; “maternal cannibalism”; “gruesome fairy tales”; and “a tale dark and Grimm.” Nothing like a soothing, happy-go-lucky story before bedtime. Happily, in adapting Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s 1812 classic about a runaway brother and sister and their wicked encounter with a wand-wielding witch, B Street Theatre Associate Producer-Resident Playwright Jerry R. Montoya (and young son Malachi) have given the two-dimensional story a hilarious and heartfelt makeover. In replacing the Grimms’ original series of nightmare

photographs by Barry Wisdom / There seems to be "an app" for everything. If only the pharmaceutical industry was as quick on the draw to deliver niche narcotics as Apple and its partners have been in creating software that satiates every possible desire. Perhaps it's not the drug companies' fault. Maybe it's that pesky Food and Drug Administration and its obsessive compulsion to ensure the safety of the U.S. population that forces most of us to get through the work day unmedicated and unhappy. Sure, there are illegal alternatives to doctor-prescribed "happy pills," but wouldn't it be so much better not to risk losing one's job and having employer-paid healthcare foot the bill for the m