How Murmur’s Filters Work
By Vera / 6 min read
Choosing a show in the Bay Area is always something of an educated guess. Murmur’s filters exist to make that guess a more informed one - this page explains what each one is actually doing, and what the less obvious categories mean.
If you want the bigger picture - how to read a production before you’ve seen a word written about it - start with How to Choose a Show in Bay Area Theatre.
PART 1
Narrowing the list
These filters are mostly straightforward, but here’s a sense of what they’re actually doing behind the scenes.
Performance week
Narrows the list to shows running during a specific week, so you’re only looking at what you could actually see. A show’s run dates and its opening night aren’t quite the same thing: previews sometimes run before the official opening, and closing weeks can sell out fast once word has had time to spread.
County
Filters by where the venue is, not where the theatre company is based. A company can be headquartered in one county and staging a show in another, especially touring companies or ones renting space for a run. Most people don’t naturally think about theatre in terms of counties, but traffic, parking, and how far you’re willing to drive on a weeknight are all real constraints - and county is the most practical way to organise that.
Theatre
The producing company. This isn’t a filter most people reach for first. It becomes useful once you already know what you’re looking for: a company you’ve seen before and trust, or one you’ve heard about and want to start following.
Audience
Adult, Teen & Above, For Kids, and All Ages. It isn’t a precise rating system, more a general sense of what age of child you could reasonably bring along. It matters more in theatre than in film or TV, since there’s no way to skip a scene or quietly step out once you’re seated.
Mood
Uplifting / Feel-Good, Emotionally Intense, Thought-Provoking, and Dark / Unsettling. The words don’t really need defining, but of everything on this page Mood comes closest to what you’ll actually feel sitting in the room. It’s worth pausing on what you’re looking for before you search, since the honest answer isn’t always “something fun.”
PART 2
Show type
This filter is about structure, not quality. It tells you what kind of experience you’re walking into before you know anything about the story itself.
Play
The traditional form: a scripted story carried through spoken dialogue. It’s the one you’ll see most often on Murmur, and a safe default if you’re not sure what else you’re looking for.
Musical
Carries its story through song and dance as much as through dialogue, and a bigger cast with bigger production needs tends to follow from that.
Solo show
Written and performed by one person, often drawing on their own life or inhabiting a single character in real depth. There’s an intimacy to it that a full cast can’t quite offer.
Variety
A mix of acts rather than one continuous story, closer in spirit to a revue or cabaret than to a play.
Non-traditional
The catch-all for work that doesn’t sit neatly in the categories above, blending forms or breaking from a conventional narrative arc. It’s harder to predict going in, but that unpredictability is often exactly the point.
PART 3
Production level
This is the filter that tells you the most before you’ve read a single word about the show itself. The producing tier signals scale and ambition, and understanding how Bay Area theatre is actually structured makes the rest of the list much easier to navigate.
Touring & presenting
SAFEST BET
The safest bet in the traditional sense: someone else already decided this production was worth significant investment to bring here. Expect high production value, recognizable titles, and large venues.
Flagship professional
HIGH
The handful of companies, like ACT and Berkeley Rep, doing work with national reach. Serious artistic ambition at significant scale, and the work sometimes travels beyond the Bay Area entirely.
Local professional
VARIES
Where most Bay Area theatre actually lives. Serious and professional, primarily local in footprint, and wide-ranging in artistic approach — which means the name of the company matters less here than getting to know its particular sensibility over time.
Community
HARDEST TO CALL
Amateur, and the quality genuinely varies, but often the place producing familiar, well-loved titles. A warm entry point if you want a known story, even if the production itself is harder to predict.
Student & youth
DIFFERENT SCALE
Work made by or for younger performers and audiences. Not measured on the same scale as the tiers above — simply a different kind of value, closer to watching artists at the very start of something.
The tier tells you about scale, not worth. A community theatre production can move you just as much as anything on a flagship stage. This filter is here to help you set expectations, not to rank one kind of theatre above another.
START HERE