Erika Milvy

What does a professional 24/7 stalker-fan do when the objects of her obsession have been cancelled by HBO? Kristen Schaal, who plays Mel, the down-stairs neighbor/would-be sex slave in “Flight of the Conchords” is out of one job but, like Mel, the slightly scary, she keeps popping up all over the place.

Tickets for this coming weekend’s SF Food Wars sold out in one hour and 3 minute.

And that's not just because this month’s food war is called the “The Mini Cupcake Clash" and the 170 ticket-holders are the designated eaters. Last month, tickets for Mac and Cheese competition sold out in 20 hours.

1. Star Wars: In Concert!

This multi-media event features music from all six of John Williams' epic Star Wars scores. Part of a world-wide tour, the concert comes to the HP Pavilion on October 11.

“Can you bump up the lights so I can see?” is what Carol Burnett used to ask her tech people at the start of every episode of The Carol Burnett Show. This meant it was time for her audience to pry her with questions, the bland and bizarre, and Burnett would always find a way to make her off-the-cuff answers super-funny.

Yesterday, (read: hot) in Orinda (read: really really hot) the actors in the California Shakespeare Company’s “Midsummer Nights Dream” danced and pranced, screamed and yelled, leapt and ran. In hot costumes at Orinda’s outdoor amphitheater (read: no air-conditioning.)

And yet, amazingly, they gushed -- not sweat -- but white hot energy.

For a big Broadway musical that is otherwise (to quote one character) as  corny as Kansas in August, South Pacific is full of darkness. Despite its cavalcade of terrific songs, this 1949 musical serenades war, death and racism. And features some creepy characters.

Gems that they are, movies from the golden age of black and white cinema are not timeless. The obsolete manners and super-sized emotions of classic romances and melodramas can be so hokey as to be downright distracting.

Which is exactly what Kneehigh theater knows and capitalizes on in their marvelous production of Noel Coward’s “Brief Encounter.” Having wowed London, the production is seeing its US premiere at ACT.

Berkeley Rep’s Green Day rock-opera “American Idiot”- which world premiered last night at Berkeley Rep - is a hugely ambitious project that bombards with sound, vision and thrashing emotion. It looks, smells and sounds like teen spirit.

The plot takes a familiar path that goes like this: the anti-hero leaves home, lives in squalor, becomes disillusioned, rocks, rages against the machine, takes drugs, angsts more, rocks more and does more drugs.  The end point is either death or redemption. And that's pretty much it.

Most of the time, a night at the theater at Berkeley Rep is filled with an audience of full-on grown-ups with faculty beards and grey streaks.  The crowd at last night’s opening of the world premiere of “American Idiot”, the staged adaptation of the Green Day concept album, was a horse of many snazzier colors and an entirely more youthful demographic.