House lights down. Cue the music. The curtain rises weekly on KRCB’s early-morning news segment Second Row Center.

There’s a lot of theatre in the Bay Area. With so many options and limited time and resources, how does one go about deciding just what to see? That’s where a critic can be of assistance.

Theatre critic Harry Duke has been knocking around Bay Area stages for twenty years since his days in the Sonoma State University Theatre Arts program. He’s turned what used to be post-show conversations with fellow artists into full-fledged reviews of Bay Area theatre that can be found in the Sonoma County Gazette and on the For All Events website. More than a simple recitation of a plot (you can look that up yourselves,) his reviews are honest evaluations of the components that make a good show good and a bad show bad.