Name: Wanda Sykes: Please & Thank You Tour with Special Guest Keith Robinson
Start: 2025-05-18T20:00:00
Location: Barbara B Mann Performing Arts Hall

Berkeley Repertory Theatre is set to captivate audiences with a series of diverse and thought-provoking performances in 2025. From historical narratives and surreal plays to comedy and illusion, this line-up promises something for everyone. Highlights include the gripping play 'Here There Are Blueberries', Wanda Sykes' 'Please & Thank You Tour', and the family-friendly magic of illusionist Rick Thomas. Dive into the vibrant world of theatre and experience performances that challenge, entertain, and inspire.

A Theatrical Kaleidoscope: Exploring the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's 2025 Line-Up

From exploring historical truths to evoking laughter through comedy, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre showcases a variety of engaging performances. With powerful plays like 'Here There Are Blueberries' and 'The Aves', alongside comedic acts featuring Wanda Sykes, Ian Bagg, and Taylor Tomlinson, the theatre offers captivating experiences that resonate with audiences of all tastes. This article delves into the remarkable events staged by the theatre, highlighting the artistry and themes that make them stand out.

Berkeley Repertory Theatre: A Spectacle of Diverse Narratives and Laughter

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Rediscover the beauty of human connection in The Lunchbox — a new musical adaptation of Ritesh Batra’s internationally acclaimed film filled with heart, humor, and hope. In bustling Mumbai, a lunchbox delivery meant for one man lands in the hands of another, sparking an unlikely bond between a young wife longing to be seen and a widower nearing retirement. As notes pass back and forth with each meal, their words blossom into a romance that might save them both. Directed by Tony Award-winner Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown) and featuring performances from Manu Narayan (Broadway’s Bombay Dreams, Apple TV’s Your Friends & Neighbors) and Kuhoo Verma (Berkeley Rep’s Monsoon Wedding and Octet, Off-Broadway’s Heathers: The Musical), The Lunchbox is a tale of love, yearning, and new beginnings — one that will leave you believing in the bravery of opening your heart to the unexpected.

The Lunchbox

An aristocratic Cuban family flees from Havana to Miami on the eve of Castro’s revolution, entrusting their mansion to their devoted cook Gladys who vows to protect it until their return. For forty years, she keeps her promise, enduring loss, upheaval, and the slow unraveling of a country’s dreams. But when the aristocrats’ daughter returns, Gladys finds she has sacrificed everything for a bond that has been forgotten. Berkeley Rep’s Associate Artistic Director David Mendizábal (All My Sons, Mexodus) directs Eduardo Machado’s sharp, funny, and quietly devastating play where two worlds are held in tension: the life carefully preserved, and the life that had to be lived.

The Cook

It’s 1970s Ohio, and Lizzie has gathered a group of women in a rec center basement to change their lives and maybe the world. Decades later, Lizzie’s daughter delves into her mother’s history to find answers to the feminist revolution’s unanswered questions, reliving those necessary, messy, and impassioned meetings that asked: What does it mean for a woman to be free? Direct from its acclaimed Broadway run, Tony Award nominees Bess Wohl (Grand Horizons) and director Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) bring ferocious wit and emotional precision to this intensely relevant and bitingly funny memory play about what we inherit, what we forget, and what we’re still fighting to understand.

Liberation

In a small Georgia town, superstitions and rumors abound. The graveyard, the church, the neighbors, their families — there seems to be a secret within everything, and Avery wants out. But when her once-awkward childhood friend Johnny returns to town as a smooth-talking blues star, raising suspicion he’s made the darkest of deals, a series of secrets emerges to envelop them all. Hailed by The New York Times as “a striking Southern Gothic work,” York Walker’s Covenant unravels truth from myth in a haunting and gripping reckoning with what we choose to believe and what we cannot escape.

Covenant

Six teenagers meet at an arts summer camp in the 1970s and form a lifelong bond over their shared dream of leading creative and inspiring lives. Decades later in New York City, that bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. Featuring music and lyrics by Grammy Award-winning and Emmy and Tony Award-nominated artist Sara Bareilles (Waitress), a book by The New York Times best-selling novelist Meg Wolitzer and Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Sarah Ruhl (Eurydice, In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)), and direction by Tony Award-winner Michael Arden (Parade, Maybe Happy Ending), The Interestings explores friendship, love, envy, class, art, money, and power — and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a life.

The Interestings

When Ryan falls for a man he just met, he’s ready for the romance of his dreams. But as their connection grows, he learns that new heights of joy can bring deep insecurities to the surface. Written and performed by Ryan J. Haddad and directed by Danny Sharron, Hold Me in the Water is a playfully provocative and disarmingly vulnerable solo play about the passion and intimacy of first love.

Hold Me in the Water

In the 1920s, an Armenian American man wages a quiet legal battle for the right to belong. A century later, a group of Armenian Americans wage a different type of battle on the set of his descendant’s reality television show. Talene Monahon’s boldly imaginative new play stitches together historical drama and scorching satire in what The New York Times calls “wildly funny” and “pure entertainment.” At once hilarious and haunting, Meet the Cartozians exposes a little-known chapter of American history while asking a question that refuses to stay in the past: Who gets to be American, and at what cost?

Meet the Cartozians

Renowned dramatist Tom Stoppard’s most personal, sweeping masterwork traces one Jewish family through sixty years of Viennese history — from the 19th century’s glittering promise to the Holocaust’s shattering aftermath. Winner of the Tony and Olivier Awards for Best Play, Leopoldstadt moves with the rhythm of memory itself: vibrant, then fractured, then hauntingly still. Directed by Stoppard’s long-time collaborator Carey Perloff in close partnership with Stoppard before his death, this monumental drama paints a deeply human portrait of what families carry, what they lose, and what they must fight to remember.

Leopoldstadt

Mark your calendars for May 18, 2025, as the renowned Berkeley Repertory Theatre is set to dazzle audiences at the Barbara B Mann Performing Arts Hall in Ft Myers, US. Known for their captivating performances, Berkeley Repertory Theatre promises an unforgettable evening of performing arts starting at 20:00. This is a unique opportunity to witness the magic of theatre as brought to you by one of the leading names in the industry. Don't miss out on this extraordinary event. For tickets and more information, visit the primary event link. See you at the theatre!

Wanda Sykes: Please & Thank You Tour with Special Guest Keith Robinson

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