Sarah Moser and Megan Trout in a Three Little Dumplings adventure
Photo by Jessica Holt
The twelfth annual Bay One-Acts Festival, just opened at the Boxcar Theater, is an intriguing collection of five plays written by Bay Area artists and performed by two dozen actors. The longest of the one-act plays lasts less than one hour. The production uses minimal props and tightly timed scene changes for a seamlessly paced show. In Program 1 of two, the themes of the plays involve dysfunctional family life, a dance interpretation of a play by Anton Chekhov and murderous revenge that turns on itself. The partnership of ten local theatre companies and more than seventy theatre artists brings an anthology of selected new plays each year. With talented directors, BOA always features well-focused actors on uncomplicated sets.
Program 1
Cello by Anthony Clarvoe opens the show. A restless couple in the wee hours of the morning argues about sleep. Maria Giere Marquis in her nightgown and robe tells Cooper Carlson in his pajamas about a dream she had involving bumble bees. Their conversation is fortified by an onstage live cello accompaniment that serves as chorus and punctuation. At the mention of bees, musician El Beh elicits a hive-like humming from the cello. She produces some innovative sounds by tapping and scraping the strings of her instrument. After the couple reconciles about her dream, he gives her a piggy-back ride off. The cello plays a sad coda.
The 11th Hour Ensemble production of The Seagull Project is a freely stylized, movement oriented interpretation of Chekhov’s play about a symbolic bird. While a wild-haired man sits writing at a table on the deck, an ensemble of six sways and adds some vocalization on a platform behind him. They could be his muses, but he believes he is writing clichés. He has a fit and repeatedly complains about Nina, “She doesn’t love me and I can’t write any more.” Backed by a sea sound audioscape, he claims to be “drifting through a chaos of dreams,” but in the end Nina comes back to serenade him with a ukulele. The seabird makes a cleverly offhand entrance.
Three Little Dumplings Go Bananas is a sequel to a previous BOA show by Megan Cohen that introduced the Dumplings. The distinctly descriptive costumes for the whole production are generally simple and understated, except for the Dumpling trio. They look cutely delicious in pink and black. They are identified by numbers on their fuzzy pink hats. Their activities include slapstick and break dancing to the song “Bananas” and one of the Dumplings complains about her “asshole family.” As the Dumplings move through their separate worlds, the actresses clearly project well-defined characteristics. Number 3 (Megan Trout) is needy, wants love and is out of it, and so gets locked in the bathroom. Number #2 (Molly Holcomb) acts depressed and nervous but is certain that she is smarter than #1 (the enthusiastic and ingenuous Sarah Moser), who bullies the others and declares herself to be the “alpha Dumpling.” She murders their Mommy (the stern voice of Siobhan Doherty) and keeps the ghost in a suitcase, feeding it peanut butter sandwiches. Then she discovers an unexpected way to control the nagging Mommy. While the trio and the disembodied voice cavort in a forest glen, their feckless father is sitting upstage on a bench. He just wants to make peanut butter sandwiches and hold on to the television remote control. “TV is the perfect place to hide from my problems.” Number #2 wants the remote. He tries vainly to ignore his little Dumplings.
Brainkill by Sruart Eigene Bousel explores the thematic differences between breaking eggs to make an omelet and killing people. Alex the woman (Theresa Miller) has a plan to get rich. She calls it “genocide” and she hands Bobby (Dave Levine) a gun. Her plans take an ironic twist after she insists he kill a woman he was talking to in a club.
The couple In Bed can’t keep their hands off each other from the moment they enter entwined in passionate embraces. The next morning finds her in bed with belongings and empty Chinese takeout boxes strewn across the floor and some unfortunate misunderstandings.
BOA 12 Program 1 runs in repertory a with the five plays of Program 2 through May 12 at the Boxcar Theater, 505 Natoma Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($25 to $45) are available online at www.BayOneActs.org or at the door. ___________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Anatol (r. Mike Ryan) tries to prevent Max (l. Tim Kniffin) from waking his secret sleeping lady
Photo by David Allen
The lighthearted Anatol is a character-driven comedy of manners. Aurora Theatre just opened the world premiere of this classically plotted play in a new translation. Arthur Schnitzler’s Austrian play is the story of a chronic lothario, some of the women he seduces and his sneering, cynical best friend. Anatol lives in the bourgeois elegance of late19th-century Vienna. He believes that all the women he has been with tortured him by being unfaithful. He thinks all women are cheating liars, but only because he is one also. He asks his pessimistic friend Max for help. Character development in the play is minimal; they don’t change much. The traditional setup of the story arc begins quickly, and when you see the two men you know instantly all you need to know about them. The nature of the conflict is quickly revealed, and you can see this won’t resolve easily.
Anatol is paranoid about and fearful of romantic entanglements, yet he seeks them out. Once he has conquered a woman’s heart, he then tries to prove she is also seeing someone else. His convenient pattern has been to dump her and move on to the next conquest. In the end one of them catches on to him just as he is on the way to wed someone else.
Actor Mike Ryan skillfully creates an Anatol intoxicated with his own amorous attractions. Ryan projects a commanding presence. He can hold stage from a chair, and his broad, slightly pompous and mannered gestures make his character more sympathetic. Anatol’s frenetic stage crossings actively use the whole space. They might seem random, but they are plainly motivated by his nervousness about his self-inflicted predicament. Ryan’s gesticulations become wilder and his characterization increasingly broad as the play develops in just over two hours. He projects a keen sense of inner conflict as we watch him fret and stew, willfully complicating his own situation by duplicity. His best friend Max is frequently present when the next conquest enters his chambers.
Max is the antithesis of Anatol. Tim Kniffen plays him as stiff and cool, with no emotional attachment excepting a strange fondness for his friend. He criticizes him brutally and mercilessly while goading him on and mentoring him in his quest for more women. He shows exaggerated reactions to Anatol’s latest plight. Even as Max castigates Anatol, Kniffen’s supercilious attitude and smugly expressive facial motions show that he is mildly astounded by the breadth of Anatol’s activities. He serves the classical part of a chorus in ancient Greek plays. As a group they explained to the protagonist who he was and what he should do next. Kniffen’s chorus seems to enjoy making sarcastic comments and snide remarks. While Anatol restlessly frets all over the stage, Max stands stoically by like a judging presence. Trying to justify to Max his affairs as “episodes,” Anatol becomes very defensive.
Delia MacDougall plays all of the women with surprising dexterity. She easily makes transitions between decidedly different characters, from a Russian countess type to a ditzy diva who cannot even remember which opera she just performed in. Delia makes grand entrances for each in distinctly different costumes. Wiley Naman Strasser not only gives Franz the butler a contentedly servile, obligingly domestic attitude, he also becomes a stage hand for scene changes and a café waiter with oysters.
Director Barbara Oliver has made this production plainly comic, but there are elements of profound depth, even with some slapstick. Anna Oliver’s period styled costumes, like top hats and tails with waistcoats and gold watch chains, accentuate the texture of indolent decadence. In the well paced show, the four actors move easily through differing settings on a plain, brilliantly designed set by John Iacovelli. With a turntable for scene changes, it makes excellent use of the stage space.
Two centuries ago and longer, serial sexual relationships have undoubtedly been commonplace. Nowadays the notion always seems to imply some form of forced activity. Anatol was just a horny old coot. Casting Director Jessica Heidt made a clever choice in using an older gent like Ryan to play the part of an active satyr. Tim’s age is indeterminate and irrelevant. He is Anatol’s cynical but well-meaning friend. He’s to be Best Man at Anatol’s wedding, if it happens.
Anatol runs through May 13 at Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley, California. Tickets ($30 to $55) are available online at auroratheatre.org or by phone at 510.843.4822. ________________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Society of Dynamic
Obsolescence (SDO) members Ellen (Julia Coffey, center) and her husband, Dean
(Jamison Jones), partake in an evening of cocktails and a lively game of
charades with new SDO member Katha (Emily Donahoe)
Photo by Kevin Berne.
From Apple laptops to Argyle ties in smooth scene changes, director Mark Rucker’s Maple and Vine, just opened at A.C.T., takes a contemporary couple out of a hectic business life into a calm, supposedly irenic earlier time – the 1950s. By joining a group of “secret communists” in the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence, or SDO, they hope to escape the stress of modern life. Instead they find hypocrisy and repression on a scale they never imagined. Split scenes by Ralph Funicello and distinctive costumes by Alex Jaeger clearly delineate the temporal disconnect of the switch between eras of contemporary angst and mindless conformity. Surprising homosexual love and expected racial prejudice flavor the play by Jordan Harrison.
The time shifts between the two different period settings are not only apparent and obvious but also believable. On stage trucks, various set elements, such as a ‘50s style living room, slide on and off gracefully as an ensemble of five outstanding actors glides effortlessly against backdrops of a swiftly delivered curtain or animated video projections of a suburban home with a white picket fence. They also make credible transitions across the years from a time when Katha and Ryu (Emily Donahoe and Nelson Lee) spend their time together on futuristic furniture with individual laptops to the days of grey flannel suits and a wife in a pink sweater who believes, “The power to bear children is an honor and a privilege.”
A.C.T. Associate Artistic Director Rucker’s production easily spreads the action across the stage, and then draws it together into a statement that sets up succinctly for the next scene change. The cast confidently and blithely takes their entrance cues amidst the precise choreography of moving set elements. These experienced actors maintain the comedic and tragic natures of their characters.
Maple and Vine plays through April 22 at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets (starting at $10) may be purchased online at act-sf.org or by calling 415.749.2228. __________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Kathleen Turner as Sister Jamison Connelly & Evan Jonigkeit as Cody Randall
Photo courtesy of SHN
Powerhouse performer Kathleen Turner commanded the Curran stage in her recent show High, a dramatic depiction of the relationship between as a nun counselor (Sister Jamison Connelly) to a wretched drug addict (Evan Jonigkeit as Cody Randall) she has decided to try to help. She delivers blistering dialogue at the young man. His defiant refusal to listen to her words causes an outpouring of tense frustration in Act II.
This show contains adult language, adult content including sexual violence, drug use, frank discussion of sexual assault on a child, and full male nudity.
At up to $100 per ticket, High was well worth the price for the performance by Kathleen Turner. This was a short run. Catch the show if it tours through The City again. ___________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Happy Mahaney, Chloe Tucker
Photo By: Joan Marcus
Mamma Mia! brings the grandeur and energy of Broadway style entertainment to a Market Street stage with SHN’s touring production of the hit. With inventive choreography and vibrant singing to live orchestra, this show at first appears to be about a young woman’s upcoming fabulous Greek wedding, but when she tries to invite her estranged father to the wedding, she discovers more about her past than she previously understood. The songs of the ‘70s monolith pop rock group ABBA weave the plot together.
On a two-part moving set, the lively ensemble cast develops the relationship between naïve young Sophie Sheridan (Chloe Tucker) and her outspoken mother Donna (Kaye Tuckerman), a hard case, entering first with bib overalls, one strap hanging loose, unkempt, short dark hair and a sassy mouth. Kaye makes Donna seem happy enough for the wedding, but remains somewhat self-centered, hinting at the subtext of the unexpected wedding occurrence. Chloe charmingly revels in Sophie’s enthusiasm, which drives the action until the subplot takes center stage.
The production designers sought a particular look of youth and style for Sophie. They found in Chloe the uplifting eagerness and the curly dark hair that lets Sophie carry the show. But she leaves the bridal path when confronted with the question of who will give her away.
Donna at the aborted wedding reveals her relationships with at least three different men. Kaye gives no sense of martyrdom or regret to confess it before the congregation. The most appealing of the three ends up being her knight in shining armor. Tall with blond hair, he talks her into marriage on the spot where Sophie fled and the marryin’ priest was awaitin’ with, “Why should we waste a good wedding?”
The timing of entrances and exits was flawless on opening night. The sound of the band in the pit (strings, drums and keyboards, led by Music Director Bill Congdon) balanced beautifully with the vocalizations on stage. Rotations of the two set elements were succinctly choreographed to denote scenes such as a street, a bedroom, a church, or a taverna with artfully convincing simplicity. Overall, the show is a heartwarming visual treat with some imaginative reinterpretations of favorite old standards such as “Dancing Queen” and “The Name of the Game.”
Mamma Mia! tours San Francisco through March 4 at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market Street. Tickets ($86 to $120) are available online at http://theatrer.org/ResultsTicket.aspx?evtid=1794965&event=Mamma+Mia! or by phone at 888.746.1799.
By Albert Goodwyn
Cinderella (Antonette Bracks) finally meets her Prince Charming (David Moore)
photographer – Lance Huntley
San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company has opened its new season with a whimsical production of the timeless tale of Cinderella. Sherri Young directs this new edition of Cinderella, featuring a dazzling masquerade ball choreographed by Patrik Gallineaux.
This reinterpretation of the classic fairytale features all of the pageantry, hilarity and charm of the original. The AASC always adds soulful twists. You know the story of the slipper and the Prince. The lowly scullery maid slips into the Prince’s grand ball. The prince falls in love with her and the fairy godmother has her rush off but she leaves one glass slipper behind. The Prince searches his province for the one foot that fits perfectly that abandoned slipper.
This uplifting, brought-to-magical-life show is back by popular demand, just in time for the holiday season. Cinderella finds her Prince Charming and learns that anything is possible, even a miracle.
African-American Shakespeare Company was introduced in 1994 as an opportunity and a venue for actors of color to hone their skills and talent in mastering some of the world’s greatest classical roles. The company is dedicated to producing classic stage works from an African-American cultural perspective, providing opportunities and accessibility for minority artists and their communities to view these works in a manner that is inclusive of their cultural heritage.
Cinderella opened Sunday, December 11 at the Buriel Clay Theater in the African American Art & Culture Complex, 762 Fulton Street (at Webster), San Francisco. Tickets ($10 to $30) are available online at www.African-AmericanShakes.org or by phone at 1-800-838-3006. _________________________
Ross Valley Players just opened their production of the stage play taken from the award-winning book To Kill a Mockingbird. This production stays compellingly true to the original script and realistically portrays the texture of Depression-era rural Alabama. The simple tranquility of a child is disrupted by racism and murder. Some characters show nobility of spirit.
In a small town, Atticus Finch the lawyer dares to defend a wrongly accused black man. The narrator tells the story of the effect this has on him and his son Gem and young daughter Scout. Mary Ann Rodgers as the grown Scout narrator Jean Louise Finch moves seamlessly and invisibly through the cast as she lovingly recreates a tumultuous time.
On a set of three simple home facades, swinging screen doors everywhere, a culture of gentility is assumed, except for neighbor Mrs. Dubose who doesn’t like anybody. Anne Ripley finds great humor in Mrs. Dubose’s crotchetiness. Throughout it all, Steve Price as Atticus maintains a calm, soothing air of complete control, an anchor for the young Scout.
But Mayella Ewell loses her control on the witness stand as she perjures herself. Melissa Bailey as Mayella is able to project frantic tears as she concocts false memories.
On Buzz Night (November 12), a new tradition at Ross Valley Players, the young Scout was portrayed by Katrina Horsey with a good sense of devotion to and reverence for her dad.
Altogether, the cast of seventeen gave a well-coordinated ensemble performance, from friendly neighbors to angry townspeople. The dialect spoken by everyone was consistent and eerily accurate.
Set Designer David Apple keeps his three house fronts in place while he uses simple set pieces to stage other scenes downstage, from the jail to the courtroom. Costumes by Michael A. Berg reflect with verisimilitude a place and timeless style.
Scene changes and cues went seamlessly last Saturday. The show is fast paced, but not without moments of slow deliberation. Price has a fine sense of patience that is not martyred when he explains things to young Scout. He broadly projects his sense of reluctance as he carefully aims the rifle at the rabid dog, having the desired results.
In under two hours, the visual narrative is so absorbing it makes you more intensely interested in the dialogue and Jean Louise Finch’s occasional monologues. The characters are strongly identified and played with an appropriate complexity.
Ross Valley Players’ To Kill a Mockingbird continues through December 11 at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, Ross. Tickets ($17.00 to $25.00) are available online at boxoffice@rossvalleyplayers.com or by phone at 415.456.9555 ext 3. ________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Three Qualities stand by the electric Ariel Coil in The Tempest
Photo by Eric Chazankin
Jon Tracy adds electricity to Shakespeare’s antique storm. The new production of The Tempest, now at Marin Shakespeare Company, updates Duke Prospero of Medieval Italy to a post-Tesla world, where electrical devices and a flock of enchanted spirits dominate the stage. Tracy has inserted sparks in the storm with his choreographed concept of the fairy spirit Ariel.
Wave sounds seep through the outdoor space in the two-act, hour-and-20 play. Three blue traveling boxes face US, not yet revealing their contents. Stage center holds the “Ariel Coil,” a reference to the father of modern electricity, Nikola Tesla, famous for his dramatic Tesla coil display. In his time he was considered a mad scientist.
In his leather apron, in a lab on an unnamed island, Robert Parsons as Prospero seems bewildered or perhaps in awe of the power of the array of electric devices revealed when the Qualities turn around the blue units. The rotations reveal racks of wires and electric equipment (Electronics was a few years down the road in the Victorian era.)
The Qualities are the enchanted spirits left behind by the witch Sycorax who once ruled the island. She left behind Caliban, a slave in chains, and the sprite Ariel trapped in a pine tree. Tracy has split open the pine to unleash a flurry of six Ariels who follow Prospero’s instructions. Shakespeare’s original text identified Ariel only as a single character. The six Qualities here (Silvia Girardi, Maro Guevara, Kimberly Miller, Nesbyth Rieman, EriKa Salazar, and Jeremy Vik), in frock coats, hats and dark goggles all, speak Ariel’s lines in unison. With tight choreography and surprising grace, they make entrances and exits through trap doors in the stage deck.
The set design by Nina Ball draws directly from the 1950s sci-fi genre. The mad scientist rules still, but he has doubts and misgivings here. By using a hundred-fifty year old setting for the ancient story, Director Tracy has added a new perspective. The Victorian punk style oddly slants the view.
This production adds dimensions to the original while remaining true to the inspired story of a man consumed by the power of intellect, a Victorian fetish. By bringing the story nearly up-to-date – compared to the original – Director Jon Tracy has made the timeless tale more immediate.
The Tempest plays to Sept. 25, 2011 at Forest Meadows Amphitheatre of Dominican University, 1475 Grand Avenue, San Rafael. Tickets ($20 to $35) are available online at www.marinshakespeare.org or by phone at 415.499.4488. _________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Darren Bridgett, Mike Mize and Cassidy Brown as True Americans
Photo by Eric Chazankin
Marin Shakes’ newest production is a spoof that inflicts irreverent mayhem upon the body of American history. Under the trees in San Rafael, The Complete History of America (abridged) recounts events since 1492 and tangentially earlier with only coincidental relationship to the facts. The energy of the three players keeps the timeline churning in the outdoor theater. They go through many costume quick-changes to become anyone from Ben Franklin to B. Obama.
Reed Martin of Sonoma, creator of the play and original cast member (along with Austin Tichenor and Adam Long) wrote it to be improvisational. “In all of our shows we include places to insert local and topical references,” he says. He updated this production to make sure Marin Shakes had the latest version. He edited out Bill Clinton and added W. Bush and Obama. The use of anachronisms and non-sequiturs in this ten-year-old parody of our culture keeps it fresh and current.
On an opening night fraught with danger and annoyances (July 30), the breathless cast of local actors found every one of Reed’s places to insert local and topical references. They took some right-wing digs at Berkeley. A persistent car alarm turned into fodder for laughs. Even a major technical glitch couldn’t stop them.
Darren Bridgett, Cassidy Brown and Mick Mize create an array of familiar characters against a colorful background. They work well together within the script while quickly and seamlessly slipping in another impromptu joke at any opportunity. They are very good at focusing on non-scripted banter and some unexpected mockery of each other, making you believe that they planned it that way. One actor accidentally took a prat fall but carried on like a trouper, giving rise to jokes about splinters.
From an opening scene about the origin of the name of our country to a choice of modern finales, the misguided slapstick humor is incisive. To begin the story, Cassidy plays Amerigo Vespucci with a ship’s helm, Mick plays wife Sophia Vespucci with a Chianti bottle and Darren plays a ukulele. Sophia complains that Amerigo’s name is all over the map.
Running through the years, the actors assume many different characters in quick succession with varying levels of inhabitation. Darren is somewhat mechanical in ensemble scenes, but he is more involved in his solo scenes, such as when he becomes didactic with his easel presentation. He takes mischievous joy in off-color jokes. Cassidy remains stoically patient until the Dance of the Antelope Intestines. Thank you Cassidy for stopping Darren and Mike from singing. Mike Mize as Obama with a partial mask does some amusing break dancing.
In the end, they try to define our post-war sensibilities. Cassidy insists it is all Broadway show tunes and wants to sing and dance. Darren argues that it is “film noir mystery” and becomes Sam Spade. Mike does a stunning star turn as Lucille Ball.
After all the cynicism they give you an encore of a “happy ending.” They run it all backwards. It is a stirringly visual moment when they describe the Twin Towers rising heroically out of the ground.
The Complete History of America (abridged) by Marin Shakespeare Company plays through September 25 at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, 1475 Grand Avenue, San Rafael. Tickets ($20 to $35) are available online at marinshakespeare.org or by phone at 415.499.4488. ____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Bob Greene and Zoe Conner explore geriatric activities at Pelican Roost.
Photo by David Allen
I plan to get older. What’s the alternative – aside from magic or Dorian Gray? To laugh about aging, Assisted Living: The Musical® debuted two years ago in a Florida retirement community and has rolled into San Francisco at The Imperial Palace in Chinatown. The duet of Zoe Conner and Bob Greene goes through 19 songs about the problems of seniors. The seventy-five minute show is lively and wickedly funny.
Piano accompaniment is provided by actor Robbie Cowan, whom they claim is their nephew. The music is diverse and familiar as the writing of Rick Compton and Betsy Bennett gives new lyrics to old songs. The show is tightly staged with hilariously succinct costume changes.
Against gold framed red velvet panels Bennett and Compton act as denizens of the Pelican Roost nursing home. As the show begins the players circulate through the house in character. Compton introduces himself as Andy, saying “I’m the handyman around here.” Bennett is Marge the Social Director. Their nephew is Lou. Andy also becomes a cowboy lawyer and Marge also plays a nurse and Naomi Lipschitz Yamamoto Murphy who upgrades her living quarters every time her next husband dies.
The music styles range from doo-wop to a slow ballad. The duo laughs at everything from wheelchairs to Viagra. Andy’s opening solo “Help! I’ve Fallen For You And I Can’t Get Up” is a reference to the little blue pill. In one scene Andy wears a deely-bobber with big blue pills. His “A Ton-And-A-Half Of Cadillac Steel” is a litany of senior driving errors sung while Bob mimes using a stool as a steering wheel.
For comedy hour at Pelican’s Roost, Marge welcomes the audience to “Poughkeepsie-by-the-Sea” where she introduces Bob as a Catskill comedian, who tells every lame joke from the borscht belt circuit and acts surprised when nobody laughs. “Haven’t you ever been to the Catskills?” he asks.
Both actors are remarkably versatile. Bob in his hideous yellow and green golf clothes looks like he can play the game when he sings the blistering “Golf Cart Seduction.” For his solo “Lost-My-Dentures-On-Steak-Night BLUES” he stoops as he slowly shuffles across the stage holding his dinner tray. His cowboy-hat lawyer repeats that he can be trusted as he looks at the audience with wide-eyed innocence.
Zoe switches characters easily. She is very efficient in her white nurse uniform and very cold as Naomi singing about how she is able to capitalize on the deaths of her husbands. Her voice is pleasant and well controlled. At the end of her slow ballad about an online love affair (“WalkerDude@Facebook Dot Com”) she rises effortlessly to a high C.
Robbie as Lou is personable and interacts with the audience. Sometimes he has to set things up, such as for “WalkerDude,” where he had to explain some Internet terms. He got the audience to sing along “Happy Birthday” twice for people in the house. When Marge and Andy sing about “The AARP,” he plays along the score to “Ghost Riders In The Sky.” They plan to “go out rock and rolling.”
Assisted Living: The Musical® has an open-end run at The Imperial Palace, 818 Washington Street, San Francisco. The second-floor dining room has room for 150 people at large tables. A Chinese food banquet precedes the show. Tickets ($79.59; $99.50 VIP) are available online at AssistedLivingTheMusical.com or by phone at 888.885.2844. ______________
By Albert Goodwyn
Dan Clegg as Proteus and Arwen Anderson as Julia in Cal Shakes' world premiere production of The Verona Project
photo by Kevin Berne.
California Shakespeare Theater just opened (July 9) a vibrant updating of William Shakespeare's commonplace tale of unrequited love and mistaken identity using many of the Bard’s lines. In The Verona Project, Cal Shakes has added to his original story of cross dressing sex-role confusions, both deliberate and uncovered. And it’s all set to a versatile rock band. The words of the story drive the plot and the music is largely incidental, but the eight versatile performers enact multiple characters while singing belt-out flawlessly.
Shakespeare's Original Early Play
Many liberties have been taken with Shakespeare’s early Sixteenth Century play, but the story remains with the popular themes of Renaissance literature: unrequited love and its conflict with friendship. TVP adds modern-day topics with homosexual relationships and gay marriage.
In the original play, two friends from small-town Italy plan to travel to the big city. That would be Milano, where they meet the fearsome Duke (Adam Yazbeck who also plays accordion and piano). Shakes’ characters Proteus and Valentine also will be searching for their love interests. In this version, Proteus must decide between his love for Julia (Arwen Anderson) and his lust for Valentine (Nate Trinrud, who also plays sax).
Similar to the original, Julia dresses as a man to guard the Duke’s son Sylvio. Here Sylvio is a boy, not the girl from Shakespeare. Proteus forgets about Julia when he meets Sylvio, but Julia is still there in disguise. The farcical complications resolve in a uniting of lovers.
This Production
Amanda Dehnert’s reimagining of a Shakespearean comedy as musical theatre tells most of the original story of the love interests of young Italians and adds clever twists that Willie the Shakes would probably have approved of.
The instrumentation includes works on keyboards, cello, ukulele, xylophone, and cowbell, set against an enclosed cyclorama with projections. A scraggly band comes on with Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone and sings about a small town named True.
The Performers
These eight actors are thoroughly competent musicians, but the stronger ones burst through. From the first, the vocals and stage presence of mezzo-soprano Marisa Duchowny dominate the stage. She has a powerful voice. Her head boom mike is probably superfluous in the tight Bruns Amphitheater. She sings well and also plays guitars and keyboards.
Arwen Anderson as Julia carries the show. The actress is able to project a calm blend of determination and ditziness. When she dresses in her father’s military coat (not a page as in the original) she convinces the men she is actually Sebastian, until she reveals herself. Her voice is a high soprano with some beguiling innate tonality. Her guitar playing and abrupt physicality give unusual dimensions to her character. She sings about Julia’s story (“Julia knows she’s a freak show.”) in a well-controlled rock soprano voice. In this show, she has overgrown her house with plants.
The players take on some ensemble parts as various moms of the characters. Elena Wright as spoiled brat Thurio also plays Val’s mom. Duchowny also plays moms of both Proteus and Silvio, making her the Duke’s wife..
The Chilly Venue
The nighttime production in the drafty hillside amphitheater can get physically uncomfortable. On opening night, at the intermission of this two and one-half hour performance, the audience was heading back to their cars in droves. Only the hardy stuck out the one-hour eleven-minute Act II to watch the identity frauds unravel.
TVP Sucessfuly Updates Shakespeare
TVP literally realizes the physical humor of Two Gentlemen. Proteus shifts his form to accommodate the situation. Speed can't stand still he is so intent on delivering messages. Valentine is a heart-breaker. In the end, by the sea, all lived happily ever after. Shakespeare’s play is a comedy; nobody dies.
TVP remains true to Shakespeare’s original story while deftly modernizing it with musical interludes and contemporary dialogue. While expanding the farce with the implications of male lovers and unrequited love, the musical reshapes a repressed Elizabethan moral landscape. The love heart of Shakespeare continues with a rock beat.
The Verona Project continues through July 31at Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way. (formerly 100 Gateway Blvd.), Orinda, California. Tickets ($35 to $66) are available online at calshakes.org or by phone at 510.548.9666. _______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Eerie Maestro
Voronin and agile puppet Svetlana
Photo courtesy of Teatro ZinZanni
Maestro’s Enchantment, the newest offering from the irrepressible, ever-zany Teatro ZinZanni brings back two long-time favorites for another five-course-dinner spectacle under the tent on The Embarcadero. The eerie Ukranian illusionist Yevgeny Voronin is The Maestro, the leader of a mixed pack of weirdoes who serve only to entertain you while your meal is being served. Joining Voronin, singer Joan Baez returns for the fifth time as Madame ZinZanni. The evening of song, live music, aerial acts both comic and graceful, and magic serves as a delightful accompaniment for scrumptious dining among friends and party people.
ZinZanni shows are accommodated by a nice menu, an attentive wait staff and a floor show that always distracts you from the plate. While you are still savoring that last bit of cheese, salad or entrée the singers and acrobats demand your attention. In this new show, The Maestro, when he can be found, superciliously keeps the action moving with his precise timing and startling sleight of hand. In a cast of ten, he leads the strongman, the juggler, the trapeze artists, the magician, and Joan Baez.
Madame ZinZanni is somewhat recalcitrant, but she and Voronin dance romantically while the salad is being served. Miss Baez has a beautifully distinctive voice. Her songs to the live Teatro ZinZanni Orchestra include the Italian funicular tune and Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.”
The show has a vaguely Italian accent, but the performers come from places as disparate as New York, Hawaii and Russia. Under the antique Spiegel tent, the performers move easily among the large tables.
Acts continue while you eat. Some are understated. The pacing of the floor show is closely aligned with your consideration of the next course and the intensity of the stage action. When you first are served your next dish, the activity is low-key. By the time you are finishing that delicious zucchini-squash soup, the action picks up.
Aside from magicians, acrobats and jugglers, the acts include some beautiful singing by soprano Kristin Clayton, the human cannonball who fizzles and a spectacularly intimate aerial silk artist (Bianca Sapetto.)
The cannon ball fires from the stage by the banda and then she magically appears on the other side of the house with her bullet-shaped helmet shredded. The aerialist twirls upside down encased with intricate folds and drapes of her silks and occasionally peeks out to reveal herself.
Magician Brandon Rabe really does stick his long sword down his throat all the way to the hilt. I watched him from not more than eight feet away. Strongman Peter Pitofsky u-bends a steel bar. Then his assistant easily straightens it.
Voronin takes over as the master for Russian contortionist Svetlana Perekhodova as the Puppet who pops out of a valise. With her pink bob hairdo, her tiny pouty red lips and her vacant stare, she wordlessly does fake pliés while Voronin in his formal jacket with eyeballs for buttons is burning the book Puppetry for Dummies. She adopts some unlikely positions and speaks when he kisses her.
Artist Kristin Clayton, a graduate of San Francisco Opera’s Merola and Adler scholarship training programs, is identified here as “Opera Diva.” She presents a lovely solo aria during the entrée but does not waste her talents as Isabella (EES-a-bella), a screaming woman with an Italian accent who rushes on seeking the eerie Maestro. If you can tear your attention away from the salad long enough, you might notice a slight romantic entanglement entwining.
The voices and musicianship are a rich background for a sumptuous feast. Baez and Clayton flow together in a duet of Louis Armstrong’s “When You’re Smiling” that seems to be one effortless voice. Clayton’s physical instrument is reaching the peak of her performing power, a mighty force with her acting ability and stage presence. The voice of old folkie Baez has substantially withstood the ravages of time. In her closing solo number of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” her voice is trademark distinctive and whole.
ZinZanni dinner shows are loosely themed and largely free of plot. Fun and indulgence are accommodated by a savory prix fixe menu, an attentive wait staff and a floor show that always distracts you from the plate. While you are still nibbling that last bit of cheese, salad or entrée the singers and acrobats demand your attention.
Maestro's Enchantment plays through October 9 at Pier 29, The Embarcadero, San Francisco. Tickets ($117 to $167) are available online at http://tzsf-tickets.zinzanni.org or by phone at 415.438.2668. ___________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Aliens from the Future Influence a Presidential Election
Photo by Fletcher Oakes
Seeking to make you laugh by satirizing contemporary life, The San Francisco Mime Troupe ensemble mimics and mocks. Since the 1960s the Troupe has pushed a message of solidarity and comedy about most of the burning issues of our time. They perform free in public parks every summer. This year’s offering 2012 - The Musical! begins their World Domination Tour with an exploration of presidential elections, piercingly debunking the official story.
On a small portable stage the Troupe continues to pound out their political message about the desperate plight of the worker in our increasingly corporatized democracy.
This year’s annual show lampoons the dynamic between corporate greed and underfunded artists, with a bit of a dig at green industries thrown in. For the July 4 opening, fans packed the hillside in Dolores Park. The Troupe will return to Dolores in September after performing in such far-flung places as Napa and Nevada City.
The afternoon show on July 4 began with two Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence on stage for some topical shticks, and then moved on to parody everyone from President Obama to Jesus Christ. The ‘60s liberal background of the players still rings out stridently.
Pat Moran, a past contributor to the Mime Troupe, and Bruce Barthol, former Country Joe & The Fish bassist, wrote the music and lyrics for Michael Gene Sullivan’s play within a play. An idealistic theatre company seeks any contribution to stay afloat. A large corporation will underwrite a production for them if they will toe the capitalist party line.
The ensemble enacts the struggling, artistically focused company Theater BAM! In order to stay in business, they eventually give in to “corporate fascism.” Their devil-on-the-shoulder takes the form of Green Planet Inc. company evangelist Ms. Haverlock (Keiko Shimosato Carreiro). The corporation will supply the money if Theater BAM! will write the play 2012 – The Musical.
The stage curtain opens to another curtain as the new show begins. They parody the next President with Senator “Skip” Pheaus (writer Sullivan, who also plays Obama and Jesus). He claims there are terrorists outside children’s windows. In the end, Theater BAM! thanks International Amalgamated Cheese Industries and is “ready to par-tay!”
Wilma Bonet directs this musical satire about the art of Mass Distraction. The ensemble of Lizzie Calogero, Cory Censoprano, Siobhan Marie Doherty, Michael Gene Sullivan, and Victor Toman takes on characters ranging from Nostradamus and an alien to a Mayan Priest. Barthol’s lively music is performed by a three-man band. The songs are competently voiced.
Bring your picnic blanket and relax to this fast eighty-minute play. This new show has red-state edges, a departure from the Troupe’s tradition. Sometimes they seem to doubt Obama’s message.
2012 – The Musical! by San Francisco Mime Troupe will be touring through California and beyond past Labor Day. Their next performances is 7:00 pm Wednesday July 13 at Mitchell Park, 600 East Meadow Drive, Palo Alto. See the full schedule at http://www.sfmt.org/index.php. ___________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Grace (Rebecca Schweitzer) finally
gets up from the sofa as Sherry and Zack observe (Melissa Quine and Jeremy
Kahn).
Photo by Jessica Palopoli
Depression and humor get neurotically blenderized in Tigers Be Still
by Kim Rosenstock. The SF Playhouse has just opened a deliciously
staged production of the ninety-minute off-Broadway hit comedy. The play
documents the frustrations of a newly minted Art Therapist. Practicing
her chosen profession from her home office does not provide the rewards
she was expecting. The other three characters plague Sherry in her
apartment with their own anxious needs.
The Setup
Sherry Wickman (Melissa Quine) has earned her master's degree in art
therapy and expects her career and life to fall into place perfectly and
immediately. However, OCD Sherry in her home office has to argue with
her self-indulgent sister over the use of the couch for her therapy
sessions. Sherry’s well-directed interactions with sister Grace (Rebecca
Schweitzer) establish the sibling dynamic. Then playwright Rosenstock
introduces further complications.
The Neurotics
In this incongruously enchanting play, all three women deal with
depression in different ways. Their mother upstairs won’t get out of bed
or let anyone see her after being abandoned by Sherry's father. They
only communicate by telephone.
Despondent about having broken up with her fiancé, Grace spends her days
in a boozing on the couch and watching one movie over and over. She
steals stuff from her ex-boyfriend's condo in hopes it will make him
give her a call.
Sherry has sexual yearnings and a desire for “only reasonably attractive
children.” For an unusually intimate effect, Quine delivers this as a
monologue to the audience meant to heard by her sister. Sherry also has
regular classroom duties at a middle school. Her boss, Principal Joseph
Moore (Remi Sandri) has asked Sherry to take on her first client, his
troubled teenage son Zack (Jeremy Kahn), who still hasn’t gotten over
the recent death of his mother.
From the unseen mother to the teenage son with anger-management issues,
the characters are dealing with deadly serious issues, but Rosenstock's
distinctive dialogue finds laughter at their pain while giving you an
empathetic cheer for their recovery.
The First Client and the Tiger
And now Sherry faces her first client in her home, Zack a dim, slow
patient who readily misunderstands anything. Kahn plays this role with a
genuine sense of distraction. Then to set Sherry more on edge she hears
that a tiger has “escaped from the local zoo.”
The Acting and the Production
When the first student rings the doorbell, Quine makes Sherry effusively
happy. She projects an exciting sense of eager anticipation. Schweitzer
as Grace seems to wallow in the laziness of her character. She appears
to like her misery. Sandri as Joseph seems right in his self-effacing
character with an agenda. Kahn as student Zack marvelously projects the
attention span of a slacker. They all interact with a high degree of
verisimilitude under the guidance of esteemed Bay Area director Amy
Glazer on an intricate, compact set by SF Playhouse Artistic Director
Bill English.
There is solidly consistent character inhabitation between the sisters.
Zack and Joseph are forthrightly and sensitively delivered. A script
problem is that these characters as written do not have a lot of room
for imaginative inhabitation. They are not fully dimensional; they are
one-trick ponies. They are their hapless, neurotic selves and that is
all, funny as they are. “This is the story of how my mother got out of
bed,” Sherry declares in the end.
This is the west coast premiere of a quirky dark comedy that was
featured in SF Playhouse’s 2008 reading series. It then went on to a
critically acclaimed 2010 New York premiere.
Get Tickets through July
Tigers Be Still has been extended through September 10 at The SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street (between
Powell & Mason Streets), San Francisco. Tickets ($30 to $50) are
available online at http://www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415.677.9596.
____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Grete (c. Megan Trout) dances for house guest Mr. Fischer
(seated, Patrick Jones) as her parents (back l-r, Allen McKelvey, Madeline
H.D. Brown) watch and Gregor (top, Alexander Crowther) listens from his room
Photo by David Allen
Gregor Samsa cannot understand the nightmarish Metamorphosis that has overcome him. In the play by that name, just opened at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre as the final play of their current season, the 1915 novella by Existential philosopher Franz Kafka is imaginatively dramatized in the American premiere of a new adaptation. The direction by award-winning Bay Area director, performer and playwright Mark Jackson maintains and heightens the Kafkaesque sense of alienation and futility of the original.
Gregor attributes the change to work pressure as a traveling salesman. He worries about his sample case, but his boss comes by to fire him for being late. The boss runs away in fright and disgust when he gets a look at him. Gregor has been hideously transformed. His family doesn’t want to look at him. They refer to him as “it” or a thing. They cannot understand his speech, while it is intelligible to the audience. Eventually, the family gives up on him.
The Characters
In a middle-class home setting Alexander Crowther as Gregor projects a weary fear. The actor uses physically odd animalistic contortions and seemingly involuntary reactions to denote his abnormality. On Nina Ball’s comfortable and frightening bifurcated set, he crawls around barefoot and climbs a metal latticework to the height of the stage.
The Father (Allen McKelvey) and Mother (Madeline H. D. Brown) neglect Gregor. He is so revolting that the family does not want him to come out of his room. “What an absurd idea,” Father asks, “Invite that to the dinner table?” Gregor spends most of the one-hour-plus play in his room, a sharply raked upstage structure with a bed on a floor of steps.
The Alieantion
Gregor’s otherness is starkly delineated. The skewed angle of his bed above the stage deck and the steep steps that make up his bedroom floor severely contrast to the homey, unpretentious living area of the rest of the Samsa household. The distortions in Jackson’s concept extend to Greg’s relationship to the outside world. Where he had been the major breadwinner for the family, now he can’t work, and they shun him. Jackson has studiously made them the epitome of dull normalcy. Gregor’s bewilderment is evident and consistent throughout the play. The inhabitation of character by all actors is constant and unswerving.
Sister Grete is at first solicitous of him, bringing him food and helping him stay in his room. But even she eventually turns against his physical ugliness. Megan Trout has a good comic sense and a well-turned student ballet dance routine. She makes this character transition effectively, but with no apparent motivation except the continued strain of befriending a freak. Trout at first seems genuinely empathetic to Gregor’s plight, but she abruptly changes course and decides to call him an “it,” a cancer that should be exterminated. Mother agrees. “We don’t want him coming down,” she says.
“You’re right, Grete. It’s time for me to disappear,” Greg also agrees and crawls up the stairs to his room where he slides under his bed and freezes while the family tries to ignore him and brings in a lodger to help the budget.
The Production
Patrick Jones as boss Mr. Stietl and lodger Mr. Fischer plays two entirely different characters but with the same air of arrogance. When he rushes in with mustache on as the domineering, pompous Mr.Stietl, he acts pushy. When he returns later as the pretentious lodger Mr. Fischer, he is a dapper, prissy dandy in a prim, proper three-piece suit (Christine Crook’s costume design is simple and timeless.) He bosses the family around with a dismissive air until he sees Gregor. His abruptness as the boss is short-lived, and his commandeering attitude as a lodger in the house is inappropriately irritating. Then he demands his money back, but the family turns on him.
This adaptation by David Farr and Gísli Örn Gardarsson, and Jackson’s production do not belabor Kafka’s use of the German word Ungeziefer (vermin) in the first line of his novella. It would be so easy just to have Gregor in a cockroach costume, although not necessarily for the actor. Crowther surpasses this shortcut with his athletic acting and physical contortions. He looks like he believes he is a piece of vermin. Fortunately the word “bug” is used only once in this production. Trout’s dance routine for the flirty lodger is packed with physical humor. There are laughs in this play and she is responsible for most of them, especially when she shakes her pink tutu right in Fischer’s face. But Father gets some laughter too when he beats Gregor with a baguette. “It’s the story of a very ordinary family where something awful happens,” adapter Farr says. “But there is a lot of laughter in among the awfulness.”
The setting has a generalized eastern European atmosphere. The accents in this play when used are here and there and fade in and out. The speech of the family and friends is somewhat stilted, Father’s the most with an attempted Germanic tone that fades away. Boss Stietl speaks with a vaguely Bronx accent. Gregor, Grete and Mother don’t try for foreign intonations. Gregor speaks with a feeling of despair. Grete has a chirpy, upbeat voice, even when she calls to get rid of the it. Mother is lovingly modulated, especially when she accepts that Gregor must go. Fischer’s attitude and diction instantly make you want to hate him. With all of their strangely affected delivery of dialogue, they say they can’t understand Gregor. All they hear is insect chatter.
In this Absurdist melodrama, Jackson has skillfully let the audience feel Gregor’s disaffection while not belaboring sympathy. He is a soul twisted from a daily dependence on workplace drudgery and social disaffection. This production of an Existential classic gives new artistic insights to the dark night of the soul without tugging hard on any heartstrings.
The Director's Background
For more information on Mark Jackson’s work, please follow these links:
Miss Julie http://www.sfbaytimes.com/article_p.php?article_id=10543
Miss Julie http://www.auroratheatre.org/reviews_dtl.php?id=292&prod_id=60
Metamorphosis has been extended through July 24 at Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($10 to $45) are available online at auroratheatre.org or by phone at 510.843.4822. ____________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Anna Deavere Smith
Photo by Joan Marcus
This solo show on Berkeley Rep’s big stage is a masterpiece of stagecraft. The legendary Anna Deavere Smith returns with her latest hit Let Me Down Easy. She uses humor, impressionism and multimedia to examine aspects of health care and mortality.
She masterfully uses the whole stage with technical adjuncts to present a variety of characters ranging from a Harvard minister to a Texas governor. Her roles are described by super titles. Her facial motility, amplified by projections, makes her story poignant and personal.
Let Me Down Easy, the latest one-woman show by Anna Deavere Smith, continues through July 10 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison Street near Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Tickets ($34 to $73) are available online at www.berkeleyrep.org or by phone at 510.647.2949 and toll-free (888) 4-BRT-Tix. ____________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Blue Man Group presents a rock show at the Golden Gate
Theatre with percussive thunder.
Photo by Paul Kolnik
Three actors with bald blue heads and blue hands perform a
magical multimedia show to a live onstage band.
The comedy, music and stage spectaculars of this rousing
show hype the audience for enthusiastic participation.
Blue Man Group continues through June 19 at
Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor Street, San Francisco. Tickets start at $30 and
are available online at http://shnsf.com/shows/bluemangroup
or by phone at 888.746.1799. _____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
John watches as Alma conducts a meeting with her fellow "misfits" (l, Leanne Borghesi, c. left, Beth Deitchman, c, Ryan Tasker)
Photo by David Allen
Tennessee Williams’ major play The Eccentricities of a Nightingale has opened at Aurora Theatre. Director Tom Ross has mounted a sensitive, gripping dramatization of repression and lust, typical fodder for Williams. His stage metaphor visualizes a woman discovering and ultimately yielding to her particular set of passions. The minister’s daughter in a southeastern U. S. town sinks into her singing and refrains from romantic entanglements to avoid the chastising by her puritanical father. She falls for a doctor and can’t resist. He dumps her and she moves on to sample more pleasures elsewhere. Aurora has paid scrupulous attention to details of setting and dialect of this small-town coming-of-age – or coming-out -- story in honor of what would have been Williams’ 100th birthday.
The players
Bay Area actress Beth Wilmurt plays and sings Alma Winemiller with a veneer of Southern gentility that barely covers her desire for the noble young doctor John Buchanan, Jr. Reflecting the seasonal setting, holiday themes dominate the amplified musical choices by Sound Designer Ted Crimy, and Beth sings them flawlessly at the spinet on stage. Thomas Gorrebeeck gives his character John Junior a patina of professional competence and graciousness, but firmly portrays his hesitancy when it comes to hooking up with Alma. The Act II scene in a cheap hotel room is fraught with uncertainty and terror of commitment. After the New Year’s Eve movie date and fireworks in Glorious Hill, Mississippi, Alma and John try to light a fire in the hotel room, but it goes out.
Even in the Holiday Season, the inhibited sexual tension in the room, technically laid out efficiently with a plinth turned into a rolling bed, is densely humid and tropical. In genteel, hypocritical Old South phrasings they sidestep the issues of intimacy and togetherness until the fire miraculously revives. The timing of Jim Cave’s light cue makes the end of the scene poignant and exciting. Especially when Alma later enjoys her newly found freedom. What fun she must finally have had.
Watching it
Tom Ross’ staging in the three-quarter round space on Addison is highly attentive to the audience view. Watching actors’ backs is hardly enlightening for patrons. Ross keeps the crossings and turns well motivated so that no one has to look over an actor’s shoulder for a noticeable amount of time. His staging was helped by the play script in a scene of “the little cultural meeting at the [Episcopalian] rectory.” The participants sit in a loose circle, walk around some and give their readings by a fireplace. All very succinctly delineated in the clever set by Liliana Duque Piñeiro, with actors making minor scene shifts in blue-out lighting.
Marcia Pizzo as mother Mrs. Buchanan, plays a somewhat whimsical over-the-top parody of a stock character in Williams’ writing, like Southern belle Amanda Wingfield of Glass Menagerie. Charles Dean again displays his remarkable versatility as an actor as he both the anxious, stern father of Alma, the Reverend Winemiller, and then Vernon, an unkempt kook at “the little cultural meeting.” Also at the meeting is Roger, played by Ryan Tasker with a fussy priggishness, totally belied when he appears later as a traveling salesman flirting with Alma.
Production values
The pace of the production reflects the habituated languor of people in the fever swap of southeastern America. On this mild New Year’s, none of Laura Hazlett’s costumes involve winter-weight coats. Minimal set elements with logical placements describe perfectly the settings, from parlor to park bench. After the conversational setups in Act I, the urgent events of Act II are readily accessible and emotionally engaging. Take it from an Alabama-born rebel, y’all, Lynn Soffer’s dialect coaching produces some authentic results. Williams’ Confederate jingoism comes through loud and clear when Alma twice tells John that he will “marry some northern beauty.”
Overall, this 1964 version of a 1948 play named Summer and Smoke is strongly autobiographical of Williams’ life, his troubled relationship with his mother and his struggles with his choices of sex partners. Aurora’s production emphasizes the breakout of his alter ego Alma from her stifling nunnery to a life of indulgence. Beth Wilmurt staunchly holds her ground as the protagonist with an itch. Depending on your personal moral structure, she either turned to a sordid life or freed herself. The actress is so involved with her character that you watch in awe as this tiny-waist beauty spurns all carnal pleasures, except for a one-night stand with the one who will not have her. Sexual frustration and abandonment are frequent themes in the works of Tennessee Williams.
The Eccentricities of a Nightingale continues at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley, California through May 8. Tickets ($10 to $45) are available online at auroratheatre.org or by phone at 510.843.4822. _________________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Joan Mankin as Gertie tries to stop the puppet of Lance Gardner as Millet from harming the Limping Man Tim True
Photo by Kevin Berne
Who is Fuddy Meers? In the wild funhouse ride of the play by that name, now at Marin Theatre Company, fuddy is an adjective in “stroke talk,” not a character. This chaotic family drama pits together wildly psychotic characters in a surprisingly dark plot with a sweet ending. The grandmother of the family speaks in a disjointed language because she had a stroke. Only her daughter can understand her, but she has amnesia. Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire throws in drugs, kidnapping and severe backstabbing. Ryan Rillette’s fast-paced direction of this comedy treads neatly on the edge of slapstick.
Against a background of broad pastel stripes, the characters of the dysfunctional family and their henchmen blunder through a reunion on a cleverly versatile set deigned by Erik Flatmo. Wife Claire wakes from her bed as husband Richard brings her coffee. Andrew Hurteau as Richard gives what might seem to be excessively doting attention to his wife, until we learn he has been going through exactly the same routine for the sake of his dear amnesiac every day for years. His somewhat blasé attitude throughout the play is a broad satire.
The amnesiac protagonist
The character development of the wife is the major through-element of the play. Mollie Stickney artistically and sensitively modulates the transition of Claire from ditz to take-charge nurse. The actress projects a linked train of reawakening thoughts as she watches the mayhem unfold. Claire has help from her pothead son Kenny who goads her and turns out to be the only reliable witness. Newcomer to the MTC stage Sam Leichter gives son Kenny a sympathetic blend of rebellious youth and familial duty.
The other four members of the cast weave conniving misadventure into the texture of Claire’s transformation. The kidnapper, identified in the program as “Limping Man,” turns out to be Philip, according to revelations from son Kenny. Tim True as Philip has a commanding stage presence to begin with, and when he stalks around with his face out of the ski mask, his ghastly prosthetic ear, accurately and disturbingly created by Costume Designer Callie Floor, effectively draws morbid attention. Don’t forget the gun on the table in any Act I; it has to go off in Act II. We learn the story of the ear injury, with a running porcine comic lead-up, in Act II courtesy of Kenny. And the gun does go off, both in Act I and Act II.
Philip and his accomplices stage an elaborate deception during their escape to Canada. Philip’s former jail mate and a fake female cop fail hilariously in their attempt to rescue Claire. Dena Martinez as Heidi the cop with a pink tank top is a small package of dynamite. Philip retains a manacle after his prison escape. So does his foil Millet, who can only speak the truth through the mouth of his hand puppet, also manacled. Lance Gardner speaks the lines of Millet with a charming sense of distraction, but when he eloquently intones the lines of his puppet he gazes on with wide-eye wonder and deep frustration over how outspoken his alter ego is.
The lively production describes settings succinctly
Simplified details make the highly specific set changes visually descriptive. Settings are mostly at grandma’s house, the destination of kidnapper and husband; three generations in the same household. Favorite Bay Area actress Joan Mankin as grandma Gertie soft-pedals the sympathy as she persistently saves the day, even though she can only communicate in gibberish. Gertie is wily and resourceful, understanding the others more than they understand her. Joan Mankin is fierce as she takes her revenge.
The production is well conceived and fast paced with small shifts in set elements easily signifying new locations. The use of mime techniques in chairs for in-car scenes leads to understated humor when the fake cop stops father and son while they are smoking dope. Props are few, but that cop’s gun gets passed around. Each actor is well cast and remains consistently involved in his part. MTC has creatively maintained the subtle shifts of memory and terror in the play. The farce bursts forward with no wrong moves toward a pleasantly satisfying ending.
Fuddy Meers plays through April 24 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley, California. Tickets ($32 to $53) are available online at www.marintheatre.org or by phone at 415.388.5208. _____________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l to r) At Berkeley Rep, Zainab Jah, Carla Duren and Pascale Armand star in Ruined, a powerful new play by Lynn Nottage that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com
Ruined is a tender, heart-wrenching love story with appallingly dark overtones. But wait. Dare we – especially in the case of this play now running at Berkeley Rep – use that particular word ‘appalling’? Doesn’t it mean going pale and white in the face from shock as the blood drains from the face? There is stage blood in this production.
They are sweet, not-so-innocent teenagers who work for Mama Nadi, the feisty madam with a heart of gold defensively played by Tonye Patano. When the local louts or the brutal soldiers come to Mama’s bar, the girls hustle their little pink skirts to earn money.
There are extended complications, such as a tragic abortion attempt and incoming artillery fire, but ho-hum. Certain facts are well known. Third-world countries have a different culture than liberal America. The arrogant brutality of the Commander of the soldiers (Commander Osembenga menacingly played by Adrian Roberts) is over-emphasized, adding a superfluous or irrelevant element for the sake of sensationalism. The focused emotional impact of the play itself becomes obscured by the military violence. The story of these young working girls is drama enough. Shave at least half of this overlong play into a sizeable hunk that could stand on its own for an hour or two.
Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, the BRep production abounds with optimism and courage. Liesel Tommy’s careful direction treads nervously near to melodrama. The play script dictates that to some extent, but this production puts the tragic situation in an intensely realistic perspective. The story of child abuse and human trafficking gives a densely focused view of a primitive world so we can look and cluck our tongues to sad truth. The capitalistic practicality of Mama is cold but becomes rewarded. She thinks her business is beneficial. “They’d rather be here than in their villages,” she says about her girls, where they get raped anyway, for no pay.
Ruined continues at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($34 to $59) are available online at http://www.berkeleyrep.org/tickets/single.asp or by phone at 51. 647.2949 and 888. 427.8849. _______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
The white people (l – r) Josh Schell and Alexis Papedo) look on as the Koreans (l – r) Katie Chan, Mimu Tsujimura, Lily Tung Crystal) listen to Korean American's sermon (Cindy Im).
Photo by Dave Nowakowski
Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven surprises and satirizes, unafraid to make sacred cows into kimchi. The probing and funny play, just opened at Thick House on Portrero Hill, uses dance, multimedia and mime to explore racism, counter posing the strained relationship of a white couple with the desire of an Asian American to be them. Two San Francisco theater companies, Crowded Fire and Asian American Theater Company, put up this production together.
Cindy Im plays the character named Korean American. After an extended, suggestive dialogue prologue in darkness, she gets her spanking in a projection on a rough, unpainted wall. Then she appears as narrator and monologist for an hour-long one-act, accompanied by a chorus named Korean 1, Korean 2 and Korean 3, plus White Person 1 and White Person 2.
Racism
“I hate white people,” she says, expressing her “minority rage” while blaming her parents for her low self esteem, calling them monkeys. One of the choristers is her grandmother who converts her to Christianity. After Cindy enthusiastically leads the chorus in a well choreographed gospel chant about Jesus she tells the audience “Christians are evil.”
“Korean Christians are different. We are more evil,” she explains. This self-deprecating humor will keep you laughing while the Korean dancing ladies in their pretty, exotic dresses of embroidered silk and gauze mug and mime. Like the simple, rustic set by Emily Greene, Keiko Carreiro’s costume differences speak volumes in an understated way. Cindy wears jeans and a top, like a valley girl. The traditional ethnic dress of the chorus is graceful and flowing. And the white couple looks appropriately casual.
They are searching for a relationship and accuse each other of many unsavory things. In the non-stop action of the play they have little interaction with the Asians. Alexis Papedo tells Josh Schell he is “sub par,” now that she found out she loves him. After they argue about the size of his nose, he slinks off in shame. Later, with a wild mime against the bare wall she describes what she did to his pet.
“I want to be white,” Cindy says, calling that her “sophisticated response to racism.” She claims she wants to be an empowered Asian, but the white two being held up as a paradigm seem worse off than she. Dragons Flying is almost two separate stories, with the Asians being the outsiders looking into a world less attractive than it seems to be.
About the production
The stage activity is animated and quickly paced. The chorus members (Mimu Tsujimura: Korean 1; Lily Tung Crystal: Korean 2; Katie Chan: Korean 3) in their own scenes deliver some elaborately vivid mime and impressions. One somewhat frightening scene takes place against the upstage wall when they crouch together and seem to be predators devouring their latest kill, but the best one is their fun-loving enactment of various methods of hara kiri. Each one laughs as they try to outdo the other in the gruesomeness of their ritual suicides.
Cindy has a stiff stance but good audience contact and confident line delivery. Her narrator explanation of why Asian women date white men is touchingly honest. She tries to be a controlling bitch, but doesn’t quite make it, whether by direction or subtle acting skill. Her mud fish story is seamlessly worked into the script by playwright Jean Young Lee. She almost seems to taste the “stuffed tofu” as she describes how her mother prepared the traditional Korean recipe.
The movements of the three coro ladies is spare, gracefully imaginative and well synchronized by choreographer Dohee Lee. They present three decidedly different characters, especially grandma, and make surprising entrances to interrupt or interpret monologues or arguments, like a Greek chorus. Their scenes include singing and chanting with interesting, mellifluous foreign language sounds, as called for by the playwright. Still, when the val or the whites talk, it’s a relief to hear English again, like when the sound system plays “All I want for Christmas is you.”
Director Marissa Wolf keeps the staging taut with some overlapping entrances and exits. She uses Stephanie Buchner’s clever lighting design to signify different worlds on the fragrant rectangular set of bare wood. The warm, focused lights for the Asian scenes are visually opposed to the white-couple scenes lit under bright fluorescent bulbs. Josh is stiff but has good line delivery. Perhaps his awkward posture is a directorial choice to show his true dedication to Alexis. She acts intensely interested in him and shows great frustration at the same time.
A show to see
Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is a brash and frequently hilarious satire with a unique point of view. This coproduction by Asian American Theater Company and Crowded Fire Theater Company is scenically and intellectually engaging. The perplexing and violent opening is too long, but once the lights come up it is visually eloquent on a bare stage with no props and only some occasional folding chairs. The desultory nature of the script allows for some surprising entrances through the two open doorways. The plot is all in the mind of the Korean American, but the sequence of events makes perfect sense if you can follow the way she copes with her ethnic identity rage.
Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven continues through April 16 at Thick House Theater, 1695 18th Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($15 to $35) are available online at http://www.crowdedfire.org/tickets.html or by phone at 415.913.7366. ______________________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Kerri Brackin, Nicky, Rod, Brent Michael DiRoma with their puppets
Photo by John Daughtry
The Broadway musical Avenue Q returns to The City with a fresh look and with the gloriously heightened tension between gritty reality and comic pathos. The set and production at the Orpheum are strikingly familiar but different. The interactions between the hand-held puppets and the human actors are strongly accentuated by the appealing faces of the puppets. Their human handlers have a very professional focus and are pleasant looking in their stage blacks, but they only bear a few moments of gazing. The puppets hold your attention, especially when they get on the table in various highly suggestive positions. This is an adult puppet show.
The story is clear-cut and evenly displayed. A couple of recent liberal arts college graduates find no market for their skills in the outside world. So they wind up in rental housing with odd neighbors on not quite the sleaziest avenue in town, nowhere near Avenue A and well on the way to Z.
The neighbors are monsters, literally. Kate Monster – that’s her name – meets preppy young Princeton and they commiserate about their job situations with such an attractive song as, “It Sucks to Be Me.” The wide flapping mouth and the wide eyes in the huge round head of Princeton are precisely maneuvered by the miked singer and handler David Colston Corris. Ashley Eileen Bucknam as Kate handles her puppet’s sad, downcast face with sensitivity and sings for Kate in a tuneful, birdlike voice.
And there are humans playing humans talking to Kate and Princeton. These are played with intense humor by the ensemble. The live band was in perfect sonic balance at the Orpheum.
The show is smoothly produced and a lot of fun. Some people might find it eerie how those puppet faces haunt you long after. For a previous review of mine, please link to http://www.sfbaytimes.com/article_p.php?article_id=6735.
Avenue Q runs through February 27at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market Street at Hyde. Tickets ($30 to $99) are available through www.shnsf.com or by calling SHN Audience Services at 888.746.1799. ______________________
Air ducts? We ain’t gotta show you no stinkin’ air ducts.
By Albert Goodwyn
Sarah Nealis (right) as Eliza talks to Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker, left) about being given an office the size of a broom closet at the end of a hallway.
Photo by Jennifer Reiley
Teresa Rebeck’s sensitive new play What We’re Up Against, now in its world premiere at Magic Theatre, offers a light-hearted view of very serious problems in the workplace. The playwright’s witty lines and the five highly talented Bay Area actors do not duck the issue of discrimination in a male-dominated world of corporate sexism, but as the characters and plot develop, you are transfixed by revelations, insights and comedy.
On Skip Mercier’s set with rotating glass panels in pseudo-chrome/ersatz stainless steel frames, five actors move through various permutations of the office of an architecture firm. Under Sarah Sidman’s sterile, mostly white lighting, random personnel traffic bustles through the hallway past Stu’s clear Lucite desk. Warren David Keith as Stu bristles with management efficiency and favoritism while he goads his staff to finish designing the shopping mall before the deadline. The plans seem finished, except for one intractable detail.
The conflict
Even though the junior associate Eliza (Sarah Nealis) has what she terms an elegantly simple solution for the problem, Stu tries to short circuit her career ambitions by turning over the work to a newcomer male, David Weber (James Wagner). The two-act play deals with young Eliza’s attempts to rise in the office hierarchy and maintain her precarious sense of self-worth at the beginning of her professional journey.
The animated acting of Sarah as Eliza is impassioned but uses nervous, clichéd body gestures, perhaps a deliberate choice to portray Sarah as a clueless intern. Sarah adds multiple dimensions to this role. She is self-effacing as she pretends to be an actress out of her depth. She brings intensely personal involvement to her part and overlays it with a character that is easily diverted.
The struggle
Eliza competes with David, the hero of the firm, and with the other female associate Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker) in the male-female power struggles of the office. She finds it necessary to defend her talent and her idea, her secret solution. Sarah compellingly projects the anguish and frustration of Sarah dedicated to proving herself as a woman. She energetically fights for survival in a contentious, defensive and combative stage relationship with Janice.
“The battle for power between women has gotten more vicious,” Rebeck said in an interview. “Women are more overtly playing those games on each other the way men have done.” The competitive behavior between the women adds dramatic tension to this production.
Eliza’s nemesis, golden boy David proselytizes about the glories of shopping and how the strip mall is the new American commons, the town meeting place. James Wagner concisely portrays David with a smug superiority that is justified by his work, but emblematic of the bad guys of “gender politics.” Rod Gnapp as ruthless survivalist office-mate Ben plays all sides of the struggle with an intense projection from a core of evil conniving.
The Problem
The problem with the mall design is complex but secondary to the overall plot. The HVAC system has nowhere to live. Every scene centers on the plans for placement of the air ducts. Eliza has the best plan, but she nobly gives it to David because she knows it would never be approved if it came from a woman. In the different areas of the office suite, the scenes either end with or obsess about the air ducts. Do they have all their ducts in a row?
This play is a one-trick pony as anarchic and inane as the Marx brothers’ movie Duck Soup. Aside from spectacular acting and a succinctly textured production, there are not enough laugh lines or character development to make it either a comedy or a drama. Darling of the day Theresa Rebeck has created a bold, clever but repetitious dramatization of office politics. Magic has made a major effort for a slight work that should be a one-act. Still, the humor and the social commentary are entertaining and thoughtful.
Loretta Greco, Artistic Director of Magic, staged Theresa Rebeck’s What We’re Up Against, which runs through March 6 at Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco (parking lot entrance at Marina Blvd. and Buchanan St.) Tickets ($44 to $60; Student & under 30: $20 with valid ID, side sections only; senior & educator Discount: $5) are available online at www.magictheatre.org or by phone at 415.441.8822. _______________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Hannah (Carrie Paff) and David (Gabriel Marin) discuss their fears
Photo by David Allen
The world premiere of Collapse uses physical destruction as a metaphor of social and economic disintegration. Allison Moore’s play now at Aurora Theatre was developed there as part of their Global Age Project, a new works initiative that encourages playwrights and directors to explore life in the 21st century and beyond. Director Jessica Heidt in her Aurora main stage debut effectively guides a talented cast of four through varieties of angst and suffering to find humor.
The title of Moore’s play refers to the 2007 collapse of a Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Some partial bridge trusses dominate and frame the set by Melpomene Katakalos. The huge structure looms over the stage and gives a sense of urban devastation while serving as a constant reminder of the random, inescapable nature of tragedy.
Four highly talented actors
The cast is the same as in the play when it was first developed at Aurora last season in a reading workshop, so they have ripened familiarity with each other and the needs of the play. Carrie Paff as Hannah projects a fine, stoic façade to hide her frustration at the collapse of her life.
She gets her husband David (Gabriel Marin) to give her hormone injections in attempts to cure the couples’ infertility. Her job is in jeopardy. David has become a jobless near-invalid because of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the public tragedy he narrowly avoided. And then her flighty, jobless sister Susan (Amy Resnick) arrives with an illicit shipment and nowhere to live. Susan proceeds to accompany David on his path to alcoholic destruction, leading to a later complication..
Marin as David with off-hand humorous comments displays a tense, unrelenting refusal to face his fear. The casual way he silently pours one of his beers into a scruffy potted plant is pure slapstick comedy. After the bridge incident, he developed a fear of falling so intense he could not even ride an elevator. He eventually mounts the highest part of the bridge structure on the stage.
Susan and her shenanigans further disrupt Hannah’s equipoise. Resnick plays Susan with a wild insouciance underlain with cold calculation. She is finally able to get David to confront his dread physically. She urges Hannah to attend David’s support group so she can open her mind.
Hannah’s home life becomes even more disrupted when she meets Ted the impotent sex addict at her therapy session (Aldo Billingslea), “just an innocent home-wrecker.” Billingslea looks charming in his sharp jacket and carrying a leather briefcase. He seems gleefully pleased with his suggestive dialogue. He beams a smile when he explains, “I may be impotent but all my other parts are working.”
The Global Age Project at Aurora
Aurora Theatre Company continues its 19th season with Collapse, one of their Global Age Project (GAP) finalists last season and the second main stage production to develop from the GAP. They produced it with the National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, with Aurora as the lead theater in collaboration with Curious Theatre in Denver and Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas.
Collapse is the fully-staged anchor production in this season’s Global Age Project. This year’s GAP finalists include the following: Fire Work by Lauren Gunderson; Silent Disco by Lachlan Philpott; Bird in the Hand by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas; and Our Practical Heaven by Anthony Clarvoe. The selected plays will be presented as staged readings in a four-week festival at the Aurora Theatre, Mondays, February 7-28, 7:30pm. All GAP readings are free and open to the public.
Winner of seven San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards for 2009, Aurora Theatre Company continues to offer challenging, literate and intelligent stage works, each year increasing its reputation for top-notch theater.
A good production at eighty minutes
Jessica Heidt, the Artistic Director of Climate Theater, did a great job for her first time directing the main stage at Aurora. The actors project intense anxiety. Some of the scenes about feelings are protracted, but that was not the actors’ fault. The script is formulaic: select a human-interest event, especially a major tragedy, and then add your own characters to indulge your whimsy. But in the end these feelings become palpable when Marin admits, “I am scared …”
Heidt made good use of the intimate three-quarter round play space, keeping the actors’ faces toward all audience members as much as possible, but there were some unmotivated wanderings across the stage. She seems to have concentrated too much on the spoken lines, but the dense prose of the writing leads to droning lectures. Major Bay Area talent was wasted on an inconsequential, politically motivated work. It wasn’t worth the drive from San Francisco, especially considering that was the night of the Bay Bridge sandbar disaster. Those actors could have done more, Heidt could have pumped it up, but the interpersonal involvement of the acting relationships was intense on opening night.
Collapse continues through March 6 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tckets ($10 to $45) are available online at auroratheatre.org or by phoning 510.843.4822. Half-off tickets for Under 30 and group discounts are available. ________________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Harper (Susi Damilano) is denied time off to see her dying father by her boss, Mr. Barnes (Richard Frederick)
Photos by Jessica Palopoli
Harper Regan, in the play named for her, steals a black leather motorcycle jacket and becomes a rebel without a cause. The depressed English housewife takes a sabbatical from her life and wanders aimlessly into a world so foreign to her that she finally realizes she was already in the best of all possible worlds. This two-hour production, just opened at SF Playhouse, features some outstanding Bay Area acting talent on a clever set in a well-written play by Simon Stephens.
The leaving
Harper’s rootless drifting begins in a modern office setting at an employer/employee meeting with distinctly sexual overtones. Susi Damilano creates a sympathetic Harper with a complex depth of character. As she is being lectured to about the realities of the workplace, she knits her brow studiously. She keeps a desperately professional attitude when Richard Frederick as boss Elwood Barnes puts his arm around hers, but the fear of and loathing for this sort of life read distinctly in her eyes. Elwood says, “If you go, I don’t think you should come back.” She leaves.
Susi’s sense of unease and her skill at projecting it, along with her spot-on British accent, give a fine sense of yearning to be free from entrapment. She is burdened with not only a scut job but also with an unresponsive husband and a pseudo-punk teenage daughter at home. Still in her work clothes she goes to a familiar bridge to experiment with her newly found freedom. She opens a conversation with a stranger who will come to symbolize an anchor of stability in the maelstrom of her new life.
Seventeen-year-old engineering student Tobias Rich (Daniel Redmond) says he does not like ladies in fancy dresses. When he asks why she left, she replies, “I wanted some time off [from life], that’s all.” There are some slow passages, but things pick after Tobias says, “I like white women. And I like older women.” Then she flirts with and touches him. She later returns to the bridge for a reality check, but first she tests her possibilities elsewhere.
After confronting her daughter Sarah (Monique Hafen) in the home kitchen for a bout of mother/daughter bonding to show the gravity of what she’s leaving, she winds up flirting with a lager lout in a pub. Monique effectively presents a sassy rebellious nature covering a deep seated sense of fear and uncertainty, but Richard Frederick returning now as Mickey Nestor presents a character entirely different from Elwood Barnes, yet he still wants to paw Harper.
Meet in a pub
On the set by Artistic Director Bill English, Harper and Mickey sit on various platforms and ledges which rotate out from the distressed white walls with haut-relief patterns. As they converse, she in a credible British middle-class accent and he in more lower-class Cockneyfied style, Mickey in his black leather jacket moves closer to Harper and praises her shoulders. It’s eleven AM at the pub, and he looks rough in the jacket like that worn by the iconic rebel James Dean.
Richard Frederick makes it sound blatantly sincere when his Mickey says he can’t believe that she would turn down his offer of a free drink. Susi here does a quick reaction; she makes Harper seem to be mildly astonished, perhaps at the thought of her dull ole self eliciting such a response, even from a low-life, intelligent and witty though he is . She finally smiles.
Mickey strokes her breast casually, then stops. The slightness of her discomfort surprises her. He asks if she wants to go back to his place. Another caress and he suggests they get a hotel room. Susi at blackout radiates with surprised pride at the deed she has done, stealing the jacket. And that’s just Act I.
The rebel jacket and home to mother
With a simple moving element, Act II opens in an opulently elegant but simple set, where she meets an anonymous older man in a hotel room. In front of a white traveler gauze on a vaguely ess-shaped track upstage of a white shag rug, Harper says she’s never before seen a hotel room with two floors. She also says, “I’ve never answered a personal advert before.” She wears the jacket.
Michael Keys Hall as James Fortune is gently blunt as he simply states to Harper, “I’m married.” And “I want to fuck you here.” In pre-coital small talk, he asks her why she left. Susi gives Harper a blend of loss and resignation when she explains she just “walked out.” Harper is awkwardly shy and tenuously aggressive when she asks to touch him. But first he must sing a song for her and dance with her. Michael’s seduction song was tuneful and his ballroom dancing was graceful.
Bay Area favorite actress and director Joy Carlin appears as Harper’s mother in a homey setting with chairs, table, mantle with clock, and paintings hanging. Joy as mom Woolley does not like the jacket Harper is wearing and wonders where she was. “You were ‘orrible to ‘im,” she chides her for her treatment of her husband Seth (also Michael Keys Hall). After that Harper goes back to the bridge.
The bridge to home
“You’re ‘ere,” Tobias says to her in a Caribbean Island-inflected British accent. In this place of truth she has found a reliable witness. There is no overt indication that she seriously considered jumping, and it was only a bridge over a canal anyway. She shows no great sense of contrition when she confesses to him she had used a ploy to start speaking the first time. “I lied to you about thinkin’ you were somebody else … I’ve been following you …” “You’re fucking crazy,” he tells her. She takes his cap and caresses his hair.
The finale finds her back home gardening on the patio and casually telling Seth that she had sex with a stranger in a hotel room. Sarah and the home life now seem pleasant and secure.
The part of Harper Regan takes skilled creative artistry to play, because she has no antagonist to play against. She is both protagonist and antagonist at once. She is not battling against anyone and does not hate anyone, only the drudge that she perceived herself to have become. The other members of the excellent cast are assiduously attentive supporting actors. Harper is the show in herself, and Susi Damilano is fascinating to watch as she puts Harper through her inward journey. This play is a star vehicle and it’s no jalopy. Susi steers and she drives the whole play to distinction.
Harper Regan runs through March 5 at The SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street (one block off Union Square), San Francisco. Tickets ($30 to $70) are available online at www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415.677.9596. ________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Corinne Robkin as Bug & Josh Schell as August
Photo by Lois Tema Photography
Treefall uses adolescent sexual awakening to explore themes of adult responsibility and gender identity. The production now at New Conservatory uses four actors and a distressed set to present Henry Murray’s thought-evoking drama. In the face of some widespread, civilization-altering events, role-playing keeps a weird family together, until an intruder tries to steal their food. Seduction, jealousy and reverse penis envy thicken the plot.
A family at the end of the world
The family lives in Pacific Northwest cabin sometime after a future ecological disaster. More than roughing it, these three young brothers must not only be ready to kill for their food but also must live without a traditional mother and father. So Flynn (Evan Johnson) as the eldest drives himself to find safety by serving both roles at once. In the family charade, he is the sternly controlling dad until he puts on the dotted apron smock and the red wig to become the domineering mommy. The inane tea party banter of three guys seriously playing house is eerily amusing. Evan’s irate scolding of the youngest Craig (Sal Mattos) for playing with “the mommy wig” is a complex artistic delivery of both parents at the same time, one the father retaining control and the other the territorial mommy protecting her iconic wig and her status in the family.
Craig is a problem child, and somewhat of an idiot savant. He can not only flawlessly recite whole random passages from abstruse and diverse works of literature, but he also fantasizes having conversations with his inanimate doll Drew, talking back to himself in an affectedly high squeaky voice. Sal is appealingly consistent in his part, making the gruesome ending even more appalling.
Brother August (Josh Schell) is caught in the middle. He longingly slips his hand under the apron of the red wig, knowing full well what’s there. Josh develops his character with a sophisticated mixture of wisdom and naivety. August shows the greatest developmental change of any other in the play – at least as far as intellectual and emotional growth go, the brutal ending notwithstanding. He is the first to identify the true nature of the intruder. He also falls in love.
The Intruder
Scenic Designer Kuo-Hao Lo has effectively created a post-apocalyptic milieu of hard-scrabble circumstances for the intimate space of New Conservatory’s black box Walker Theatre. The world of the family is circumscribed by their cabin and their food storage cache. The designer used a dark palette and a few moving set elements to delineate the two sites. Some chalk writing by the cast on the black walls also helps. When the door unit is rotated the word “HOME” is written on it. When a tattered, ratty looking curtain travels in on a draw line angled across stage, it becomes the “STORE ROOM.” Flynn carries the rifle there and turns it on the intruder they find.
Bug, the destabilizing element of their sanity, enters their larder and their lives in the simulacrum of a cute young boy. Corinne Robkin is in a classic trouser rôle and the boys don’t get it. Corinne cunningly plays this part with mocking guile. She recognizes their misperceptions and teasingly gives them every clue to reveal the truth. With her pre-formed hostility to males and her sass, like a bratty little girl, she appears fascinatingly different to them. Corinne wants to project an uppity attitude, but her inner resources for such a harsh part are limited. She barely realizes her spitefulness.
They should have picked up on those feminine characteristics. Act II resolves the implications when they invite Bug to share their cabin. Living with Bug, they discover a new world of different rhythms. “Why is he bleeding?” Craig naively asks. “He’s a girl,” August exclaims when they see the “boy” bleeding at the crotch. [duh]
“Y’kno? Sometimes, August, I wish you were a girl,” Flynn wistfully says, but August is finding new aspects of his manhood. The scene in which he flirts with Bug are touching and exciting as they share fears in a budding heterosexual relationship. From Kuo-Hao Lo’s clever stage-right prop wall August takes a book to Bug, Atlas of Anatomy, then awkwardly asks her, “Can I see your breasts?” “Not now,” she replies.
A pleasant rustic production of a heart-wrenching play
The weird family seeks stability in a place of “mere anarchy,” effectively denoted by brown patterned and drippy white on grey drops, along with rustic, barefoot costumes (designed by Miriam Lewis). The family dinner table is a large, taped cardboard packing box. At dinner they wallow enthusiastically in food nostalgia, remembering what it must have been like as they scrape pretend-butter from an empty tomato can. In this world of sibling rivalry, the fiction of the hyper-kinetic fault-finder father with a son who relates only to dolls is painfully shattered by real-world lust and romance, but hope remains.
Henry Murray’s Treefall, directed by Ben Randle runs through February 27 at The New Conservatory Theatre Center (Walker Theatre), 25 Van Ness Avenue (near Market St.), San Francisco Tickets ($24 to $40) are available online at www.nctcsf.org or at the NCTC Box Office 415.861.8972, _____________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Beverly (René Augesen) and Russ (Anthony Fusco), a married couple in 1959, are packing to leave their family
home.
Photo by Erik Tomasson
The volume level was low when the opening night of Clybourne Park began at American Conservatory Theater, attenuating some of the marvelously comic lines of playwright Bruce Norris. A.C.T. Company core veterans René Augeson and Anthony Fusco should be ashamed of themselves for their lack of vocal projection, but all was redeemed once they warmed up. The production is tellingly hilarious and sharply critical with an engrossing story that spans decades.
René gloried in her ditzy character in Act I, then reveled in the ennui of her different Act II character. Anthony sat in his grumpy chair mostly making unpleasant noises, as well he should considering what happened in the neighborhood he is moving out of, as he later intones vociferously. When the comic satire picked up steam, other characters were introduced to illustrate the plight of Bev and Russ (René and Anthony) as they are selling their family home.
The Play
Norris’ work is funny and provocative. The keen social insights of this play are chillingly obvious behind the broad overlay of incisive wit. The A.C.T. cast of seven (René Augesen, Manoel Felciano, Anthony Fusco, Gregory Wallace, Omozé Idehenre, Emily Kitchens, and Richard Thieriot) works enthusiastically as an ensemble in less than two hours. When they argue over buying Bev and Russ’ house years later, the actors allow their characters to be wholly focused on their own immediate needs to the exclusion of the larger issues of urban decay and racism raised by the play.
In 1959 Act I a white couple in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood sells their home to a black family, causing an uproar. Neighborhood association representative Karl (Richard Thieriot) explains the differences between the races to house maid Francine (A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program graduate Omozé Idehenre) and her husband Albert (A.C.T. core acting Company member Gregory Wallace). Unctuous Karl seeks to undo the sale to Negroes by trying to convince them that they won’t be able to find their preferred foodstuffs in this lily-white area. René comes in and tries to give castoffs to the maid. “We got our own things,” Omozé as Francine proudly refuses, saying she prefers spaghetti and meat balls.
In the same house in 2009 Act II, the stakes are different, but the debate is strikingly familiar. The nabe has deteriorated drastically and the house is an empty derelict with wallpaper stripped and spray-paint tags on the bare walls. As an anomaly, a white couple is trying to buy into the now-black neighborhood. Worse, they seek to improve, tearing down the two-story and erecting a three story totally out of line with the local architectural aesthetics.
The Performances
Between acts, the ensemble smoothly shifts from an Archie Bunker milieu to a contemporary property acquisition. In this story about race and real estate in America, the Act II characters discuss with barely contained hostility the deterioration of the neighborhood. In Act I, the local pseudo-activists want to keep blacks out of the neighborhood. In Act II, the same sorts of organizers want to keep the gentrifying whites out.
While the opening scenes focused on Anthony as Russ in his chair with his radio down stage left, the cast of seven actors eventually used all the stage under the direction of Jonathan Moscone, Artistic Director of California Shakespeare Theater, in his A.C.T. main stage debut. His CalShakes directing style is greatly different from what is usually seen at A.C.T. Though uneven or static at times, the staging picks up and becomes engrossing. The running gag of the trunk is handled with surprising humor moving into bitter-sweet poignancy. Moscone handled the surprisingly redemptive, optimistic ending simply and with no distracting flourishes.
The West Coast premiere of Clybourne Park by adamant provocateur Bruce Norris plays through February 20 at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets (starting at $10) are available online at www.act-sf.org or by calling the A.C.T. Box Office at 415.749.2228. _________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Leah S. Abrams as Adventure
Photo by Jay Yamada
In Custom Made Theatre Company’s Bay Area premiere of Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell a five-person ensemble performs his beloved classics and never-before-heard stories that embrace his wit and wisdom. Spalding Gray’s autobiographical monologues touch on subjects ranging from a child in a high chair being subjected to Beethoven, “the Bermuda Triangle of health care,” a car explosion, and his first communion. In 50 recitations, the cast takes him from Vineyard Haven and Provincetown in Massachusetts (getting away from his mom) to a prison mess hall in Nevada (watching a barbecue on a prison bunk in his cell).
Spalding became world-famous for such monologues as Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box and Gray’s Anatomy. His widow Kathleen Russo conceived of a tribute to him using five actors of mixed age and gender to take on parts of Spalding’s psyche in the reading of his works. The five (miming reading from book props but obviously having memorized the lines) have symbolic names: Love (Richard Wenzel), Family (AJ Davenport), Career (Patrick Barresi), Adventure (Leah S. Abrams), and Journal (Gabriel A. Ross).
He was shockingly neurotic, brutally funny and in love with the crazy world around him. She mixed together beloved sections of his famous works, along with unpublished private writings, into a vibrant, creative 90-minute narration that is both familiar and unexpected. The result is a collage of his reactions from the 1960s to the ‘90s.
There is very little interaction between the players, all familiar faces and Custom Made Theatre Company members. Each one having a unique style, they create a synergy of self-exposure with their personal inhabitations of Spalding’s storytelling. The genius of his lines is dramatically underscored by the professional intonations of the cast. With their caring involvement in the text, the ensemble gives insight to Spalding Gray and his complex, funny and touching private life.
Custom Made Theatre Company produces plays of literary significance and social conscience in their intimate space attached to the historic Trinity Church. Their core of actors has great talent, but the paucity of its display in this production screams out for a better presentation of this new, beautifully poetic prose. The individual personal narratives leave no room for interaction between the actors. This staging does involve some slightly choreographed group dancing, but there is no drama in the production, only in the lines. Even so, the finale degenerates into a cacophony of individual voices proclaiming all at once.
Directed by Brian Katz and Daunielle Rasmussen; Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell continues through February 19 at The Gough Street Playhouse (formerly The Next Stage), 1620 Gough Street (at Bush), San Francisco. Tickets ($20 to $25) are available online at CustomMade.org or by phone at 510.207.5774. ___________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Beth Wilmurt as part of a performing duo struggling and failing to make an act
Photo by Pak Han.
Beth Wilmurt and Mark Jackson have produced a Companion Piece with a frantic, madcap glory that that gives striking insights to the creative process. While the polished vaudevillian Headliner (Jake Rodriguez) mugs the audience and chews gum endlessly, the Duo (Beth Wilmurt and Christopher Kuckenbaker) are backstage with a variety of props trying to create an act to upstage him – and each other. Now playing at Z Space, this is a “devised” work: the skits the Duo goes through were developed through improvisation and set for the play, appearing to be spontaneous acts.
The Headliner
As “The Sensation of The Stage” against a painted drop canvas with flowery drapes and cherubs, the Headliner is dapper man with a formal bow tie. He is lively, athletic and frenetically leers at the audience. After an extended drum roll, the gyrating, greasy MC launches into a Cabaret-style song with exaggerated gestures His act bookends the backstage activity, appearing at the beginning and end, bracketing the failed efforts of the Duo to come up with an act.
His deliberately lame severed-rope trick is banal but well done. The sound effects of his over-the-top gum chewing are annoyingly credible, but where he finally parks the used gum is humorously crass (“speaking of class”). The Headliner’s attitude toward his audiences is tersely summed up in his couplet, “Thanks for being here/Now disappear.”
The canvas drop covers only about a third of the opening to this large, open stage space. On the sides can be seen various backstage detritus, such as costume racks, a piano, rolling spotlights, rolling ladders, a large trunk, trampolines, and other props to draw from as the Duo’s imagination works. The Lonely Vaudevillian raises the curtain to reveal the otherwise bare stage. Mr.Kuckenbaker takes a rolling ladder to the star’s dressing room door, located high in an otherwise blank wall with no step.
The Duo
The Duo sets folding chairs together center stage and over a microphone requests responses from the audience. On their post-mortem of the show they supposedly just finished, they answer fake questions. Ms. Wilmurt charmingly demonstrates her wonderful ability to appear naïve and trusting when she euphemizes the activity as a “post-show discussion.” She natters on about the “structure” of the show until Mr.Kuckenbaker takes away the mic.
At a table they circle each other in rolling chairs, a physical metaphor of their constant attempts to one-up each other with their acts. They each use a trampoline, but Mr.Kuckenbaker puts a stool on his and stands on that. After a failed hoop trick, Ms. Wilmurt tap dances in a cliché sailor cap, plays a uke, a piano, and enters in a red tutu. Mr.Kuckenbaker grows a nose like Cyrano and enters in a speedo and sox. As they move through various skits, there is a running gag with a potted plant: no matter where Mr.Kuckenbaker places it Ms. Wilmurt moves it.
Vaudeville with a bite
In an hour and a third with no intermission, this wacky comedy is like a play-writing workshop, with brainstorming people unafraid to confront the ludicrous as part of the creative process. Amazingly, this comic duo, while small, is broad enough to fill the huge stage area. Quick access to props gives the production added immediacy. The subtext of this competition for the winning idea is a poignant story of identity and success.
The world premiere of Companion Piece, directed by Mark Jackson, conceived by Beth Wilmurt and produced in association with Encore Theatre Company, continues through February 13 at Z Space, 450 Florida Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($20 to $40) are available online at www.zspace.org or by phone at 800.83.-3006. ________________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Paige Rogers as Ariadne in Diadem at Cutting Ball
Photo by Rob Melrose
Paige Rogers returns to the Cutting Ball Theater stage with her critically acclaimed one-hander Bone to Pick. This re-imagining of the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur takes place in a diner at the end of the world. Cutting Ball Playwright in Residence Eugenie Chan penned a special one-act companion piece Diadem about Ariadne’s early days. Together they tell a gripping love story and showcase Ms. Rogers’s remarkably diverse talents.
She wears a sinuous silvery gown for the romantic Diadem. The script of this world premiere play is lush and filled with lyrical poetry. Ms. Rogers gives due diligence to her enunciation and delivery of the lines, however, much of the early parts of this new play were rote recitation. Ms. Rogers dramatically and decisively found her character at the finale when she writhed on a box and expressed her longing for her husband.
Bone to Pick takes place on a mostly bare stage against a back drop of smoky mirror panels. Light poles reflect in the mirrors. With a longhorn steer skull, a worn plastic chair and a mechanical cash register on the deck, Ms. Rogers plays Ria, a soiled pink waitress with bare feet and a hick accent. With her only prop a coffee pot, she mimes interactions with other characters. She introduces Theo (Theseus the lover who left her in the original myth) to the sounds of processed audio echoes.
She laments that there will be no more rib eye and beans because of the fighting, no more “sody crackers.” Just as she praises beans as “earthquake food,” explosions sound and the lights make blinding, gradually fading glare across the mirrors.
Ms. Rogers is immensely skilled at her earnest inhabitation of differing characters. Her description of the half-man half-bull is intensely personal. The faraway look in her eyes tells a vivid story. When she explains to Theseus her plan to give him a long thread and a sewing needle so he can find his way out of the labyrinth after he kills her brother the Minotaur, she is solely involved in an imaginary character on stage with her, bringing to life a form not seen. Her projected sense of resignation at the end gives personal insight to her equating “my world” with “my desert.”
Ms. Rogers confidently occupies the entire stage at the EXIT on Taylor theater in these two short plays of classical young love and post-modern satire. She explores the character Ariadne, as well as the myth, with loving care. The program not only gives new insights to an aged story, but it also gives her the opportunity to exhibit her bravura acting skills.
Bone to Pick and the World Premiere of Diadem .play through February 13 at the Cutting Ball Theater in residence at EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($15 to $50) are available at www.cuttingball.com or by phone at 800.838.3006. _______________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Mike Daisey
Photo courtesy of KevinBerne.com
Mike Daisey is an accomplished storyteller. His spirited monologues humorously relate his adventures through exotic places, like Middle America or Maine. As in his past shows at Berkeley Rep, he sits at a table for The Last Cargo Cult, now playing there. For this one he tells us of his trip to the volcanic island Tanna in the South Pacific, about 1,000 miles north of Australia. His keen societal observations are generously laced with cynical, harsh wit and coarse language. His style has become more forceful since previous shows.
At his table downstage of a cyclorama of stacked cardboard cartons, he tells his story with enthusiasm that generates good audience rapport. They laugh, and his comic timing is very sensitive to the decay of the laughter. His only props are a water glass (from which he sipped only once) and a handkerchief (to mop his sweaty brow). His monologue seems to be wandering at times with jumpy transitions (sometimes facilitated by lighting blackouts), but he has a point to make, and it all ties together. He adds some fascinating anecdotes at the end to emphasize his point, although they seem gratuitous and off-piste.
The narrative
With broad, energetic gestures he describes his scary flight into the island Tanna, about 5 times the area of San Francisco. He calls the primitive South Seas jungle outpost, “the island that is just beyond the reach of money.” Through all his meanderings about climbing to the crater rim of the active volcano Mount Yasur and sleeping with a baby pig, he always brings the subject back to money.
Into his narrative he laces lessons on financial theory. He jumps to the nature of American consumerist society and all its vast array of “awesome shit” like Ikea products. He also explains the cargo airdrops of WWII He is not vituperative in his disdain for consumerism, but uses it as the antithesis to the money-less economy of Tanna.
As he details his encounters with people so primitive they burn money and use their solar powered cell phones only as flashlights, his imagery is vivid and evocative. He does not appear judgmental of the natives but describes them with sympathy. The object of his scorn is “financial terrorism.” His history lessons go from the gold standard to the creation of derivatives and other secondary fiduciary instruments, calling all of it BS. “Derivatives are some high-level bullshit, indeed,” he says. To him, all money is a pyramid scheme.
The style of Daisey
Daisey is indefatigable in his non-stop two-hour monologue, and unhesitant to use profanity to emphasize his point. He likens himself and his exploration to Indiana Jones, but without all that “dirt-bike bullshit.” As in a previous show, he tells of his backwoods Maine upbringing, bragging that “Maine is just like Mexico, but with white people.” The brief vignette of Long Islanders roughing it for a summer vacation Down East is believable, cynical and bitterly satiric, typical of all the First World side-stories he weaves in.
“Someone will have to pay. You’ll pay.”
At the entrance to the house, each patron was handed a U. S. currency bill, ranging from a one to a twenty. After his monologue, Daisey finally stood up and told the audience why the money was handed out. He explained that he had worked that night for free, handing all his salary over to the audience. Then a Stage Manager brought to the table an empty glass bowl while Daisey made a shameless plea that he still needed money to pay the rent and buy some of that “awesome shit” from Ikea, so anyone could put their money in the bowl, add more or keep it. On the way out, I noticed at least one ten-dollar bill in the hand of BRep Artistic Director Tony Taccone; a woman next to him handed him some more bills.
The set’s product placement could be better used to generate revenues. Rather than make his wall of cartons a cascading tirade against consumption, he should ask product-placement fees from the companies whose names and logos he displays, companies from Dell and Mac to Ikea and Ridgid.
Daisey presents an appealing presence on stage, and his demeanor is self-effacing enough that we forget about him and concentrate on what he is saying. When he does use his hands for emphasis and added explications, they move like a ballet. His descriptive gestures are now a constant presence, rather than being occasional, as in past shows. His face is very motile and can move in perfect synchrony with the ideas he is presenting. While he does admit that, “The way I perceive reality is … uh … not so great,” his perceptions are unique and give insight to many aspects of the world we might not ever be acquainted with.
Mike Daisey's two-hour monologues perform in repertory on differing days and times. The last performance will be on February 27 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($39 to $59) are available on line at www.berkeleyrep.org or by phone at 888. 427.8749. _________________________
Shen Yun’s glorious three-night-only celebration
of the upcoming new year on the Chinese calendar brings to life classical
Chinese dance and music in a brilliantly colorful and inspiring show.
Lavishly costumed dancers move in stunningly synchronized
patterns and legions of thunderous
drums shake the stage. Masterful choreography moves through
grand imperial processions against state-of-the-art
backdrops of celestial realms and lush landscapes. The live orchestral music
combines the best of Chinese and Western composition. Ancient tales of virtue are
brought to life alongside modern stories of courage.
Based in New York,
Shen Yun seeks to provide audiences with an experience of sublime beauty
and enchantment that entertains,
educates, enriches, and inspires with a rich repertoire drawn from traditional
Chinese culture in an original performance from the pages of history, universal
themes and the world around us.
To find
out more about Shen Yun visit www.ShenYunPerformingArts.org.
To know more about the show, please visit these links for previous reviews:
Shen
Yun will
perform December 28 through 30 at The War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. Tickets ($100
to $300) are available online at http://sfshow.net/sfopera.html.
Photos courtesy of Shen Yun and New Tang Dynasty Television
_____________________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
The horn section of Lemony Snickett’s orchestra
Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com
Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead,
Berkeley Rep’s holiday show, is the world premiere of a comedy murder
mystery set around a crime investigation in an orchestra of uppity
marionettes. The musical was written under the nom de plume of worldwide
best-selling San Francisco writer Daniel Handler, and stars local clown
Geoff Hoyle as the investigating inspector. The one-hour show consists
of two interlocking shorts, “The Magic of Living, Breathing Theater” and
“The Composer Is Dead.”
Hoyle first interacts with a large-scale screen projection of the
Dramaturge in a film by Lisa Cook. The filmed Dramaturge interacts
seamlessly and surprisingly with the live performer, leading him to
investigate the murder of the composer. Hoyle’s onstage performances
usually hold the audience attention, but in this case the film strip
upstages him. His comic skills shine though when he confronts a sitting
orchestra of puppet musicians. From strings to woodwinds, everyone seems
to have a motive, and an alibi. Still, the composer is dead.
The Production
Hoyle sympathetically
projects his character’s frustration with the musicians. These
marionettes, conceived by husband and wife team Jessica Grindstaff and
Erik Sanko of the New York Phantom Limb Company, interact with Hoyle in a
multi-disciplinary performance. Five Puppeteers handle the musicians.
The sense of a backstage setting is enhanced after the Dramaturge and a
skeleton with an amputated hand say, “Send for the police.” A proscenium
arch stage set lurks upstage of the Roda Theatre’s arch, with the
puppets orchestra pit in front of the stage apron.
Geoff Hoyle is a highly kinetic performer, moving frenetically about the
stage with internalized motivations. His incidental comic routines
include a royal fanfare from a boom box, the old
water-drinking ventriloquist trick and moon walking. When he speaks to
the orchestra, he coordinates easily with Nathaniel Stookey’s music
performed by The San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Edwin Outwater.
While he is partially obscured behind a wall of puppet strings, the
animated orch members assume individual personalities. They are all most
certainly guilty of something. On the night in question, where were the
violins? Did anyone see the harp? The boisterous trumpet protests
loudly. The detailed and whimsical construction of each puppet
categorizes them and their animation is eerily realistic.
The Performers
Mime Geoff Hoyle is a British performer who has worked with other Bay
Area performers and companies, as well as having originated the role of
Zazu in the Broadway theatre production of The Lion King. Hoyle has also
performed in vaudeville shows, worked with Bill Irwin in "The Pickle
Family Circus" of San Francisco, performed with Cirque Du Soleil, and
performed with Teatro ZinZanni, Lamplighters, and the Christmas Revels.
Phantom Limb Company has been critically acclaimed for its reinvention
of traditional theatrical forms, such as marionette puppetry, in order
to probe issues of contemporary life and modern consciousness. Jessica
is an installation artist, painter and set designer whose work ranges
from tiny Victorian music boxes to wax and chalk paintings to 15 ft.
tall puppets built out of barn lumber. Erik Sanko is a lifelong musician
having played with The Lounge Lizards, John Cale, Yoko Ono, and his own
band Skeleton Key.
Children’s author Lemony Snicket has been called a fraud, a spy, a
fugitive, and a bad influence. He has written thirteen books with unique
wit and wisdom. Lemony Snicket is represented in all legal, literary
and social matters by Daniel Handler, who leads a relatively uneventful
life with his wife and son in San Francisco. Mr. Handler has written
three novels for adults, The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth and Adverbs.
This is the theatrical adaptation of The New York Times best-selling
picture book The Composer is Dead, his latest work featuring
illustrations by acclaimed artist Carson Ellis.
More Info
Lemony Snicket’s The Composer is Dead
continues through January 15, 2011 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025
Addison Street, Berkeley, California. Tickets ($34 to $73) are available
online at http://www.berkeleyrep.org/tickets/single.asp or by phone at
510 647.2949 and 888.4BRTTix (888.427.8849).
Being green is not easy, whether you are an environmentalist, a frog or an ogre. The green ogre Shrek, now singing at the Orpheum Theatre in SHN’s Touring Broadway production of Shrek The Musical, makes a compellingly sympathetic case for being part of “The Other,” those who do not easily mesh with polite society.
Eric Petersen in the title role delivers a winning character with strong vocalizations. As he seeks the hand of Princess Fiona his supporting cast of fairy-tale personae is superbly choreographed and vividly brought to life, but none so starkly as Shrek’s only real friend the Donkey.
The Ogre Gets the Girl
Petersen artfully tells his sad tale with his baritenor voice. When he sings along with “Big Bright Beautiful World,” a song full of optimism, his vaguely British accent lends credence to his immense stage presence. He holds audience attention without hesitation and is the star of the show, regardless of his hideous nature.
Eventually, despite his appearance, he wins over Fiona (Haven Burton singing in a convincingly innocent little-girl voice). Her acceptance of the outsider is the climax of this musical which appeals to adults and families alike. Fairy tales can come true.
The struggle of the play is about Shrek’s efforts to convince Fiona that he is genuine, not just a stereotyped monster. Fiona eventually turns green with envy when she finds he is not so awfully different and has much love to give.
A Grand Production
Alvin Mingo, Jr. plays the Donkey in a body suit with ears and hooves. His interpretation of a flighty beast of burden is a wonderfully fey show in itself, immensely suitable for children and jaded grownups alike.
The grand staging of this fantasy allegory involves highly descriptive costuming and lively, unadorned choreography. The twenty-one member ensemble moves easily between characterizations, from blind mice to knights in shining armor. They explore their parts with enthusiasm.
Fairy-tale creatures cavort through a colorful world of fantastic story-book settings. The huge rod-puppet dragon is fascinating, and everybody sympathizes with the hideously different creature who might be better than us. If the producers of this play had set out to create a two-hour childrens moralistic fable about tolerance and acceptance, they succeeded admirably.
Shrek The Musical continues through January 2, 2011 at Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($30 to $99) are available online at Shorenstein Hayes Nederlander or by phone at 888.SHN.1799.
Please see also another review at Bay Times and at Examiner.com/Entertainment. _____________________
License to Kiss II plus dinner
By Albert Goodwyn
Kari Podgorski in an aerial split
Photo courtesy of Teatro ZinZanni
Teatro ZinZanni presents the lavish comedy License to Kiss II, A Sweet Conspiracy. This theatrical evening of “Love, Chaos & Dinner,” as they call it, has a James Bondish noir edge. Old-world traditions come back to life in the Spiegeltent imported from Belgium and erected on The Embarcadero. The hyperactive, brightly costumed players move across the floor and through the tables while the audience seated there is served courses ranging through appetizers and soup, salad, a choice of entrées, and desserts.
Food is the overall theme of their latest show License to Kiss II. Actors whimsically styled as espionage agents, along with exquisitely skilled acrobats, a juggler, aerialists, and a skilled wait-staff interact with the audience. And some members of the audience are volunteered to be part of the show. License presents seven interrelated performances studded with servings of a five-course gourmet dinner, all in a jewel-box setting under a tent with live music by The Teatro ZinZanni Orchestra.
For a show to watch while eating, dialogue between the elaborately costumed characters, and often with the audience, leads smoothly into physical feats or comedy. A cool head and rigid formality are the mainstays of the Maitre D’ Mr. Lutz, played by Dresden-born actor Lutz Jope. He visits the tables to make sure everyone is happy. Under his stern rule a militaristic parade of servers with oven mitts marches through the aisles and across the central performing area. The salad crew dances in.
The plot leads to dessert
Mr. C The Pastry Chef leads the cast of nine on a mission to find the perfect dessert. Quirky comedian Kevin Kent uses humor and physical comedy in this part, especially when he chooses an audience member to perform under his direction. His effortless way of keeping the show moving is impressive. His improvisational skills are quick and his original ad libs unexpectedly relate to the moment. The audience members seemed to enjoy themselves. Then there is discussion of choosing assassin agents to find the secret. While the five-course dinner is being served the shows begin.
Cirque-style acts
The shows sometimes involve the characters who interact with Mr C. Kari Podgorski is a quick and witty actress. She also is stunning in her aerial act with white ropes, abrupt drops and a one-foot hang. She handles the ropes sensuously, seeming ecstatically involved. She mimes flying sideways and swimming in the air. Her luxuriating and beautifully choreographed aerial red silk winds her up down and sideways while the soup is being served. Her fast and surprising technique is flawless.
To the accompaniment of the Orchestra on a small stage, featuring Musical Director Russ Long on piano with Karl Theobald on woodwinds, Wil Hendricks on bass and David Rokeach on drums, Swedish performer and heartthrob Tobias Larsson in a bear costume dances on to ride a unicycle on a slack rope while a comic melody plays.
While the plates are being cleared Mr. C resumes his quest for the perfect chocolate using broad innuendos and his glamorous band of nefarious characters, setting up for the next show. These performers are all professionally excellent, whether athletic or not. Singer Kristin Clayton has a lovely voice. Acrobatic gymnast Andrea Conway Doba plays physical comedy with her tap-dancing husband Wayne. Their hijinks lead to her signature act of hanging from the chandelier. “Vertical Tango” takes Sam Payne and Sandra Feusi high above the tables in a sinuous dance in the air. The duo uses seemingly effortless grace on the pole.
The confectionery through-line serves as a link between the shows. In between the acts, Mr. C continues his search for the perfect dessert. Before the audience gets dessert, the perfect one is found, Swiss chocolate. ”Here’s to love in all its forms,” they say and “Wunderbar” plays with confetti dropped from the top of the tent.
A festive technical success
Timing the servings to occur between the acts, or at least during lulls in the frenetic activity of the cast, is an art form in itself. The complicated technical timing of the production is flawless. Costumed riggers, hands and stage managers must work smoothly and knowledgeably in setting up and striking trusses and guy wires for the various physical apparatus for the shows. The current acts distract from the scene settings. Scene shifts are set for a timely reveal of next act with precision, but no one cares because they are eating and talking around the tables.
The show on San Francisco’s waterfront is a fine evening out and you don’t have to worry about getting something to eat beforehand. The acts are always entertaining and professional in cabaret and cirque vernaculars. The food is good and the staff and actors all seem to want you to have a good time.
License to Kiss II, A Sweet Conspiracy plays through March 6, 2011 at Pier 29 on The Embarcadero (at Battery Street), San Francisco. The regular schedule runs Wednesday through Saturday at 6 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. Tickets ($117 to $145; includes dinner) are available at the on-site Box Office weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and weekends from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., online at www.zinzanni.org or by phone at 415.438.2668.
More information can be found at Examiner.com. _______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Sylvia Zerbini’s “Grande Liberté”
Photo by Pascal Ratthé
Cavalia is much
more than a horse show. The interaction of humans with beasts is the theme of
this spectacular production now at the White Big Top in China Basin.
Two friendly horses open the show by themselves, and then a lady musician plays
on the same stage. The horses nuzzle and communicate with each other while
acrobats and equestrians parade their highly specialized talents. Lie music
accompanies the energetic, fast-paced show with some sequences of furious
action and some of magical dreamy grace.
The stage setting begins on a shallow wide dirt deck and a
platform. A projection screen straddles the platform. The importance of the
horse is emphasized by a charmingly sentimental video sequence of a mare
foaling while the cello plays. The struggle of the young foal to gain the use
of its legs is a heartening nature experience.
Then the horses grow up and charge across the stage in the
hands of skilled riders who can disappear behind them or can ride them in such
unexpected positions as upside-down. In one sequence named “Poste Hongroise,”
following a tradition of Hungarian postal workers, riders stand straddling more
than one horse. The one opening-night botched attempt at standing on the backs
of two galloping horses while jumping over a bar was wildly received when the
second attempt, from the top, succeeded. But the woman who held the reins of
six horses at once while she stood on two of them seemed to be having the most
fun.
A large ensemble of international acrobats, riders,
trainers, and horses work a stunningly smooth choreography that segues
seamlessly from scene to scene. The horses are as well rehearsed as the humans,
but there’s always one oddball. The expected horse nuggets on the dirt stage
deck notwithstanding; there were no animal mistakes on opening night, only the
human one. The rebel appeared, perhaps by design, in trainer Sylvia Zerbini’s
“Grande Liberté” where she led a team of white and Appaloosa horses in a dance
pattern with echoes of Busby Berkeley. That one white horse did not seem to
want to join the circle.
After the opening birth sequence and the introduction of the
acrobats, the stage doubles in depth when the drapes and projection panels fly
out to reveal a continuation of the dirt deck upstage of the platform, so as to
suggest a racetrack or equestrian oval. Sylvia Zerbini, standing stage center
in a circle of galloping horses, controls them calmly with upraised arms and
subtle gestures. Her gentle sprinkles of sand from the stage deck coax them
back into line. A single cue from her sends them racing around the platform in
formation and back to a tighter circle around her. The maverick eventually fell
back into line.
Sylvia Zerbini’s smiling vulnerability as she stands safe
and defenseless in the midst of creatures three times her size is the aesthetic
heart of this production. Wonderful steeds throughout history have had close
understandings with humans. Artistic Director Normand Latourelle, one of the
founders of Canada’s
famed Cirque du Soleil, has brought his vision of the man/beast relationship to
the stage in a complex dramatic metaphor without being didactic about how
important horses have been in human history.
It’s a human show, too, with a wide variety of physical
theatre acts, from amazingly versatile lassos to bungee jumping on stage. The
large troupe keeps the show lively with tumbling, aerial work and horse tricks.
Mounting a galloping horse is an impressive trick, but this show tends to
overdo the derring-do. Several times the proud horses galloped across the stage
in precise formation while the riders ran alongside, jumped over the saddle or
hung on the stirrup, legs in the air. The horses took it all in good-natured
fun. Somewhere between the whispered cues from the humans and the beat of the
music from the live combo, the horses obviously know their lines. The show is a
family venture and suitable for anyone interested in a good show and
sympathetic use of animals.
he internationally touring show Cavalia continues at White Big Top in San
Francisco adjacent to AT&T
Park. Tickets ($64.50 to
$139.50) are available online at www.cavalia.net
or by phone at 866-999-8111. Stable visits are also available. ______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Erik Rhea as Mr. Darcy and Lori Dorfman as Elizabeth Bennet in a scene from the Ross Valley Players' production of Pride and Prejudice
Photo by Wendell H. Wilson
Jane Austen’s enduring early Nineteenth Century novel Pride and Prejudice, in Ross Valley Players’ current staged version, is a charming, simply-put visit with the manners and mores of the English Regency period. The actors in this romantic comedy lovingly portray their characters in tail coats and high-waist dresses. The sparse stage elements are efficiently set by performers to give a quick sketch accurately evoking a middle-class drawing room, a lordly estate, a ballroom, or a garden. Jon Jory’s stage adaptation of Austen’s novel delves deeply into the nature of the characters, sometimes creating dialogue and sometimes having characters break the fourth wall and describe what is happening directly to the audience.
The comfortable Bennet family, headed by a cynical but loving father, has five young daughters eligible for marriage. Pamela Chiocetti’s Mrs. Bennet is over-the-top eager to get them all married off in her mother-hen manipulations. But Alex Ross plays the tolerant, sardonic family patriarch with a detached ease, confident that everything will work out.
Wealthy nearby landowners Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy are would-be suitors of two of the sisters. Bingley gets along well with Jane Bennet, the eldest. Caitlin Evenson and Michael Cassidy play these parts with an air of joy and young love trapped in stiff costumes and social strictures. Despite Darcy’s interferences, they do get married.
Darcy has his eye set on Elizabeth, the second-oldest daughter. Even though he describes her as “insufficiently tolerable,” he condescendingly assumes this twenty-year old beauty from a lower social order would naturally accept his proposal. After Darcy's haughty rejection of her at the dance, she felt compelled to match his coldness with her own prideful anger. He is devastated when she refuses, at first. Erik Rhea acts Darcy with stiff-necked snobbishness. When he makes his conquest, he seems astonished, yet cannot abandon his superciliousness.
Elizabeth was repelled by Darcy’s smugness and by the fact that he was interfering in the romance between Bingley and Jane. Lori Dorfman makes a swift transition from wide-eyed interest to stony withdrawal when she first meets Darcy. She gracefully shows restrained passion at the first kiss.
Darcy’s distaste for all the country locals eventually dissolves as his character develops, but Liz also realizes she was prejudiced about the upper classes. Through the courtship she directs her biting wit and sarcastic remarks toward him. Then she agrees to marry him. Dorfman and Rhea have intense personal involvement with each other on stage, making their love/hate interactions more dramatic.
Alex Ross as Mr. Bennet looks as warm and jovial as a Toby Mug. His sense of insouciance and his revelations of behind-the-scenes scheming are delivered with a sly sense of humor. He is an anchor for the flighty consternations of Ciochetti as Mrs. Bennet.
Director Phoebe Moyer uses the mostly bare stage descriptively with just a few chairs or a table as a pianoforte. The sense of different settings, from estate, to park to house, is distinct for each scene on a raked stage leading up to arched openings. The scene changes are seamless and overlapping. While a new group of characters gathers, costumed performers strike the few elements from the last scene. The next characters draw attention from the set shift. Sometimes, stage narration by the characters or internal monologues accompany the shifts. This page-to-stage rendering of the novel sometimes slows down the pacing, but stays true to the original. The romance, hypocrisy and snobbery are satirized in this production. The show sympathetically depicts the humor and self-determination of a beautiful young woman.
Pride and Prejudice continues through December 12 at the Barn Theatre in Marin Art & Garden Center, Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, Ross. Tickets ($15 to $25) are available by e-mail at boxoffice@rossvalleyplayers.com or by phone at 415.456.9555 ext 3. ________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) David Sinaiko ,
Caitlyn Louchard and Donell Hill share
a mysterious vision in Cutting Ball Theater's chamber version of The Tempest
Photo by Rob Melrose
Shakespeare might have been a technological visionary in the
writing of one of his later plays The
Tempest, now playing at Cutting Ball Theater. Shakespeare envisioned a
world of motion in the ocean, sight and sound, all tied together with magic.
Director Rob Melrose and company have mounted a new production that greatly
enlarges Shakes’ vision with audio processing and streaming video on a set with
a distinctly modern nautical theme. The physical flights of three actors
playing multiple parts open up the EXIT on Taylor stage space to a world far vaster than
Prospero’s tiny island.
After the shipwreck, the Rob Melrose version of the almost
mystical play focuses intensely on the central relationship between a father,
his daughter and her suitor, while skimming over some of Shakes’ marvelously
complex subplots. This makes abundantly clear the story of the weird, deposed Duke
Prospero of Milan
who deliberately maroons himself and his daughter Miranda on an island. David
Sinaiko plays Prospero with a charmingly patriarchal concern.
Caitlyn Louchard as Miranda portrays a sweet and innocent
young woman who has been isolated for twelve years. With her diverse acting
talents she becomes both male and female characters. Her Miranda has a
wholesome, girl-next-door quality, and her portrayals of love scenes as other characters
are suitably histrionic to advance the plot and get back to the story of
Prospero’s loss. She shines across the dark foreboding sea of the set when she
is Ariel. With a snap of his fingers, Prospero can make her fly, cause
shipwrecks and sing lyrical ballads in a fine soprano voice. Louchard’s instantaneous transformations from
daughter to sprite highlight Prospero’s schizophrenic relationship between the spirit
and his daughter.
The wide and shallow stage space of the EXIT on Taylor is occupied by a
large platform highly suggestive of a swimming pool with curved edges and
chrome handrails. Prospero’s books, the source of his magic, are piled and
scattered randomly about. He uses a picture from his desk to explain how she
got there and who the witch Sycorax was. Then he reveals his “servant monster”
Caliban, a hideous slave begat of the witch. Prospero reveals Caliban by
opening trap doors in the deck of the platform. Donell Hill plays this part
with the barely repressed rage of a dangerous animal, but when he is Miranda’s
suitor Ferdinand he shows eager optimism. His character changes are the most
dramatic of this production.
Director Melrose’s conception
does away with some of Shakes’ plot complications in favor of concentrating on
Prospero’s reluctance to give up his daughter to the son of the king who
deposed him. In his cluttered mind Prospero wills his daughter to turn
into a mystical spirit of the air. Louchard’s character
shifts to Ariel become magical moments. In her scenes, the sound design of
Cliff Caruthers gives an audible ambience with a dreamy effect.
The video projection sequences
by Caruthers become longer, more animated and more insistent as the play
progresses and he adds voiceovers and pictures of the cast. Abstract patterns,
moonscapes and storms at sea give a heightened sense of place and circumstance
in separate scenes. His soundscape complements the stage action.
The characters follow the
original script but are scarcely delineated, except by minor costume changes.
Hill plays not only Caliban but also Ferdinand the suitor and Antonio, Prospero’s
brother. Sinaiko shines as Prospero. Of the three actors, he has the
best sense of line and is careful to attend the Elizabethan style of putting gestures
at line ends. He also plays the king who deposed him and plays a drunken butler
effortlessly. Lively, athletic Louchard morphs from airy spirit to court jester,
to old friend, to the king’s brother. Her sparkling moments come when she makes
the beast with two backs on her sofa and when she climbs the ladders to sing. She
is a modern woman; Miranda proposes to Ferdinand.
Sinaiko as Prospero wears a suit with his red power tie. When
he becomes the drunken butler, he loses the jacket and wanders across the stage
with his trousers down. His stage
crossings sometimes seem barely motivated, but when he moves to Miranda on the
sofa, his vaguely sexual physical attentiveness to her develops a dark, suspect
sub current. In the happy ending of Elizabethan romance, he casts his book of
magic spells into the trap to the sounds of splashing water.
The use of four ladders to suggest flight, airiness and
other-worldliness is very effective. Melrose’s
physical blocking shows energy and, usually, motivation. Line delivery by all
sometimes becomes rushed and not clearly enunciated. The stage activity tells
the story as concept takes precedence over text. The
lyrical nature of Shakespeare’s original lush exotic images is here woven
palpably into a multimedia stage activity. Melrose’s daring conception efficiently uses
an up-to-date idiom to enhance an age-old story of tragedy with a happy ending.
Shakespeare’s The
Tempest by Cutting Ball Theater has now been extended through December 19 at EXIT on Taylor,
277 Taylor Street, San Francisco. For tickets ($15 to $50) and
more information, the public may visit www.cuttingball.com or call 800.838.3006. ___________________________
Adam Overett as the detective and Joe Kinosian as everyone
else
Photo courtesy of Brenda Hughes
Murder for Two, a
comedy murder mystery musical now being produced by 42nd Street Moon, is a tour de
force, frenetic ninety minutes of inquiries by Adam Overett as investigating Officer
Marcus Moscowicz. His only suspect is played by hyperkinetic Joe Kinosian as
all the usual suspects. Joe and Adam both swap off on playing the onstage grand
piano as the clueless Moscowicz tries to get a straight answer from Joe while
he plays nine different characters, all having something to do with the murder
of novelist Arthur Whitney, an invisible dead body lying downstage center during
the entire show. The two earnest actors play seriously but never pretend that
they are not having fun.
The Agatha Christie-inflected story opens with a histrionic death
in blackout at the home of the celebrated novelist Whitney. When the lights come
up Moscowicz tries to sort out the clues he can get from the constantly
changing array of characters Kinosian deftly portrays. As an impressionist Kinosian
makes abrupt, well delineated changes
between implicated characters such as Mrs. Dahlia Whitney, the ditzy widow sure to be guilty of something, Steph
Whitney, obviously with underhanded motivations, the impenetrable psychiatrist Dr. Griff, and various nefarious
others such as Yonkers
and Skid. Kinosian’s sweat-drenched stage crossings from a chair upstage of a
screen to the grand piano are non-stop and his nellie leg crossings are vampy.
The clues develop through dialogue and songs by Kellen Blair
and Kinosian. “Waiting in the Dark” portends the invisible death scene of the
invisible corpse. Two tenuously related themes of formality and theft resonate
through songs such as “Protocol Says” and “Solving the Crime” to the finale,
the question of who stole a certain substance. The piano playing duo present
workman-like voices that are very pleasant and do not try to stretch
themselves. Their keyboard staging is phenomenal.
Officer Marcus poses questions with a wide-eyed innocence as
he dashes with well-motivated questioning gestures from the piano to the murder
scene. Just as he jumps up from the piano to see the non-existent dead body,
Kinosian as Mrs. Dahlia or some lesser character takes over the keyboard
without missing a beat. This seamless live music continues through the play. Kinosian
seems to do all the work for Overett as his straight man. The wide variety of
his impressionisms, from a ballerina to an
aspiring detective, reaches an artistic peak in his portrayal of a 12-member
boys’ choir.
The set and musical stylization of Murder for Two are a departure from the usual 42nd Street Moon productions.
This musical comedy was developed at The Adirondack Theatre Festival in New York state for their
2010 season and is presented here in association with The Eureka Theatre. Their
usual ensemble performances are here replaced by a musical theatre duo which
has refined its act to rote through several performances. The wit, spark and
energy of Overett and Kinosian have definitely been polished to a high sheen by
multiple performances.
Murder for Two: A
Killer Musical continues through November 21 at Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($24 to $44) are available online at 42nd Street Moon
or by phone at 415.255.8207.
________________________
The Broadway Company of West Side Story
Photo by Joan Marcus
Bernstein and Sondheim’s familiar tunes of West Side Story and Arthur Laurents’ treatment of the classic plot of young love explode on the Orpheum stage with this touring Broadway production brought to town by Shorenstein Nederlander Hays. Kevin McCollum and company’s recreation of the original Broadway production by Jerome Robbins features fabulous choreography in a revival of a marvelously styled original masterpiece. The enthusiastic performers dance to the live music with the precise fervor of teeny boppers and kool kats. The lead singers evoke all the passion of the classic young love story of alienation and death. In a novel twist, McCollum adds a texture of urban roughness to the text by having much of the dialogue and parts of the famous songs in Spanish. It’s a good thing we monolinguals know the old story. Many people laughed at jokes that went over the heads of others.
Borrowed from Shakespeare
The Romeo and Juliet story was beautifully updated to 1950s Manhattan in Arthur Laurents’ book for the original Broadway production he also directed. This show at the Orpheum evokes the tenor and times of juvenile delinquency and turf wars while suggesting elements from Twenty-first Century culture.
Maestro John O’Neill leads the orchestra from the pit in an overture of familiar tunes by Leonard Bernstein against a stage drop inscribed with such jumbled, scratched graffiti as “Lenny, Sharks, Bernard, Riff, America,” as if scraped on blue tile. At curtain rise to “The Neighborhood” on a street-home set, the Sharks and the Jets confront each other between a fire escape and a brick wall under the brooding overhead presence of a bridge. Sondheim’s music begins to insinuate with such well-known compositions as “Something’s Coming” and “Maria.”
Ominous music
The use of phrases like "Puerto Rican trouble" and “Stick to your own kind” subtly heightens the dramatic ethnic differences of the characters. The light, almost whimsical treatment of group choreo jumps by tooges in wife beaters against blank windows in a dilapidated brick wall disguises the brutality of the territorial xenophobia. The music is heartbreakingly beautiful and the stage action is smoothly and energetically expressed in Joey McKneely’s recreation of the Robbins blocking.
The original 1957 Broadway production, directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins and produced by Robert E. Griffith and Harold Prince, marked Stephen Sondheim's Broadway debut. It ran for over seven-hundred performances before going on tour. It won a Tony Award in 1957 for Robbins' choreography. This touring production brings back the heartbreaking, youthful energy of the story with lush musicality, eye-catching staging and sympathetic characters.
West Side Story continues through November 28 at The Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($30-$99 and up) are available online at www.shnsf.com or by phone at 415.551.2000 or 888.SHN.1799. _____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
The cast of The Great Game: Afghanistan in The Night is Darkest before the Dawn by Abi Morgan
Photo by John Haynes
Berkeley Repertory Theatre is commendable for bringing some enlightenment to the current situation in Afghanistan. If you are interested in Barry’s war, interested in knowing about the reactions of the people involved in the fighting, then you would be interested in Berkeley Rep’s current production of The Great Game: Afghanistan. The overall work comprises three plays. Part Three: Enduring Freedom presents vignettes largely unrelated to each other, except through the binding tissue of the war. The human drama in each scenelet is sometimes tense, sometimes humorous, but always deeply probing into motives, goals and results.
However, if you like plays in Berkeley with a discernible story arc, a strongly defined protagonist and a plot, go see A Winter’s Tale by Actors Ensemble at Live Oak Park, or whatever Shotgun Players are putting up at Ashby Stage, the latest Aurora Palomino on Addison, or go to LaVal’s Subterranean pizza theater on Euclid. Great Games: Part Three has none of those dramatic qualities. It is a series of staged readings loosely tied together by an unreliable narrator and lame video titles identifying the characters speaking.
An Educational Exercise
The dialogue-driven British play is a pastiche of short, conversational one-acts involving foxhole soldiers in camo, Afghanis in robes and an actor in a coverall burqah. That was the best acting. Aside from war artillery sounds Part Three is dull. The excitement of machine gun fire is a welcome relief from the incessant talking about the war, the stiff, unmodulated acting and the unmotivated stage crossings. Part Three of Great Game jumps through time and space with no unifying theme other than the war and with loosely identified characters walking to various parts of the large Roda stage for no apparent reason. A table reading of these contributions could be more dramatic. This imported production purports to tie them all together with a native interlocutor, who occasionally joins the scenes, and with distracting multimedia displays.
The scenes range from soldiers in a foxhole looking out for incoming to Brits in a conference room discussing what went wrong. A lush field of Afghan poppies forms a unified background. On a simple set with starkly functional furniture and few props, an ensemble of fourteen actors from London’s Tricycle Theatre offer dramatizations of battle conditions, high-level diplomatic meetings and simulated verbatim enactments of media interviews. One actress even recites lines from Hillary Clinton.
Characters depicted include Ambassador to India and a narrator sure to be a victim of racial profiling. Understated hints of cultural artifacts, such as an elaborate and showy high overhead pouring of tea, set the milieu unobtrusively, a place where people wear flak jackets every day and money is opium poppies. Multimedia effects include explosions, footage of the Twin Towers attack on a projection screen and cricket sounds.
Many Reasons to See These Plays
Many thought-provoking moments weave through each other in a temporally loose time line. The explorations into human destiny and extreme conflict develop high levels of taut audience involvement. The three plays were designed as a day-long event, with time-outs for refreshments. They can be viewed individually.
The Great Game: Afghanistan continues in a limited run through November 7 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2015 Addison Street @ Shattuck, Berkeley, California. Tickets ($34 to $73; varying performance times and dates) are available online at www.berkeleyrep.org or by phone at 510.647.2949. _______________________
Plácido Domingo as Cyrano de Bergerac
photo by Marie-Noëlle Robert
Plácido Domingo held a brief but revealing interview at the War Memorial Opera House after a rehearsal for his upcoming performance of the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac. San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley talked with him in an informal, second-floor lounge setting. Plácido spoke eloquently about his interest in singing Cyrano (He pronounces it si-RAA-no.) and about his first experiences at the WMOH.
Some wag suggested that Plácido was still getting his nose off after the rehearsal, but he showed up promptly at 5:03 pm, like a trouper in his sleek grey suit with scarf. After introductions, sitting on stools in the Intermezzo room of the House, David asked questions of Placido.
While David reviewed the details of Plácido’s first appearance at San Francisco Opera, Plácido waited patiently and somewhat glumly, certainly no wonder after three hours of singing. When David finally shut up and waited for an answer, Plácido was fully on and focused. In the long, narrow room, his warmth and sense of humor projected intimately as he spoke in a mellifluous voice without affectation.
David lauded Plácido for playing eighteen different roles plus concertos and other events in his professional career and said he wanted him to come back to San Francisco Opera. He recounted the story of Plácido as a last-minute replacement in Otello 1983 when the late Terry McEwen was General Director. Plácido had just finished singing in Madrid when he got the message to come to San Francisco. “If they have a way to get there,” he said, “I will do it.” Very graciously, Plácido talked about how happy he was to be invited to work at “one of the most important companies in the world.”
“The City is charming,” he said lamenting that he would have to miss a Giants game between the final dress rehearsal and the premiere of Cyrano because he cannot risk getting a cold. He said the opera, written by Franco Alfano, “breaks your heart in the end.” While admitting that Alfano was “a black hole in operatic history,” he also said Cyrano had some “unbelievable melodic lines,” and he sang a couplet a capella.
Responding to suggestions that he might have to sing below his range, he said, “No, I have to really color the voice. You have really to color.” At his advanced age some clueless critics suggest he should give up singing and stick to directing at Los Angeles Opera. The operatic world's chronic over-achiever said “I am not going to retire one day earlier than I can sing.”
The San Francisco Opera production of Cyrano will demonstrate his remarkable vocal state late in life, at an indeterminate age around 70. “When I am retired, I want to do Simon Bocanegra,” he said, referring to his recent work at The Royal Opera House of London.
David somewhat defensively complimented Plácido on his work with Los Angeles Opera. “You have fast-tracked that company to prominence.” Plácido said to expect two sold-out Ring cycles down south. “There are so many people who cannot leave their houses,” he said. “I believe the audience wants the live performance.” His next challenge in 2012 will be singing in Thais at The Royal Opera House.
Jon Finck, Director of Communications and Public Affairs for San Francisco Opera was kind to introduce Plácido’s lovely wife Marta, also a director. The Opera’s Education Department plans to bring California school students to the final dress rehearsal of Cyrano, students from as far away as the North Coast on an overnight trip.
Cyrano de Bergerac opens October 24 and runs in repertory through Friday November 12 at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Avenue. Tickets ($50 to $335) are available online at Cyrano or by phone at 415.864.3330. ________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Jessica Coghill as Anna & Cole Alexander Smith as Al
Photo by Gregg Le Blanc
Are you ready to be confused? Entranced? Involved? Amused? Seven Days, the multimedia play just opened at SF Playhouse offers all of this with three interacting couples of differing ages and temperaments. Their analytic mentor attempts empirical evaluations of everybody’s grief/reward patterns. This entry to the Sandbox Series of plays presents romance, confrontation and humor, all through a fine cast of six tightly directed by SF Playhouse co-founder Susi Damilano.
The days of the title are a week beginning on a Sunday, as projected on a panel by an overhead projector. In this staging, the projector becomes an intersection point for the characters. Analytic Al (Cole Alexander Smith) wants to document the highs and lows of everybody’s relationships. He does this almost like a clinical psychologist. Using a preformatted cell transparency on the projector, he throws his graph on the middle of three panels while others fill in the blanks.
His graph plots romantic intensity on the y-axis and a timeline on the x-axis. Each lover is to draw a graph of the ups and downs of their relationships, with the origin at the x-y axis intersection being the moment they met. Some of their graphs present wildly varying swings, including one flat-liner. “Intensity may be negative,” Al advises, preparing for lines that move into the negative y-axis sector.
The open and breezy set allows for several different entrance locations. The characters come and go in different situations, but the overhead projector rolls on for day changes to throw on the panel such words as “Tuesday” or “previous Sunday.” The graph tracings by the characters set the scene for whatever confrontation is to come. This is highly effective, fast paced staging with a minimal set in a black box theater.
The interwoven timelines among the characters in different milieus on the same stage suggest the temporal Inhabitation of shared space with no recognition of each other in the style of Alan Ayckbourn. But unlike his plays, these characters abruptly come to acknowledge each other.
The three couples move through the week, sometimes acting as private couples. Relationships are not made abundantly clear, but the female of the oldest couple Beatrice (Phoebe Moyer with a well-rounded mixture of family concern and a domineering nature) announces herself to be the mother of Al. David Cramer as father Tank displays rationality straining at the edges of impatience at Al and his partner Anna (Jessica Coghill as Anna displays genuine, uncomplicated affection without becoming a vapid airhead.)
Cramer acts convincingly lewd during his bourbon whisky flirtation with Anna on the phone. When Anna proposes a drinking game with new rules to Al on Wednesday, Coghill’s buildup to the penetrating accusation is sly and so carefully paced that she seems to have dropped the subject, until she drops the bombshell.
Daniel Heath’s script, developed in co-production with PlayGround, has many shining moments of warmth and humor. The fact that Al’s quantitative analysis trivializes love can be seen either as ironic or as an indictment of various social processes. The thematic conflict pits sterility against an out-of-control libido. Damilano’s direction and Jeremy Harris’ set design keep the stage activity well focused while making the space seem bigger that it is with clever use of three levels, as well as live video projections.
Seven Days continues through November 6 at San Francisco Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($40) are available online at tickets@sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415.677.9596. _________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Agamemnon faces off against the gods in IPH ...
Ancient Greek drama comes back to life in a faded Twentieth Century movie palace with all the trappings of current multimedia technology. And it happens with a multiracial cast in one of San Francisco’s truly Hispanic barrios. African American Shakespeare Company and Brava Theater have collaborated to present a reimagining of Euripides’ play about a king’s sacrifice of his daughter. Iphigeneia at Aulis receives an adapted translation by Colin Teevan that is long on intensity of dialogue and short on stage activity. IPH … is a sensitive, ambitious reworking of an old story. Entirely new dimensions are added to this production by the cooperation of two minority groups: women in the arts and African American actors.
IPH … uses a set by Matt McAdon that harkens back to the outdoor amphitheatres carved out of hillsides in the Peloponnesus era. The rounded stage deck and staircases give a sense of theatre in the half-round to an audience in the raked seats from the time when the house showed movies. Erika Tsimbrovski’s choreography on the three-level stage creates a panoply of movement for this innately static script.
Dylan Russell’s direction is true to her fondness for Greek drama, and this collaboration with African American Shakes takes full advantage of new insights. The style demands a chorus, a group of actors who narrate and explain the changes and developments. This chorus of four ladies in evening dresses, not only warns Agamemnom but vocalizes to a percussive background. The artistic staging takes them onto both levels of steps, but always in the background.
Director of African American Shakespeare Company L. Peter Callender as the tortured king Agamemnom commands the stage deck. He speaks to the chorus above and below. Talking with his ill-fated daughter Iphigeneia, here passionately played by Traci Tolmaire, Callender strongly projects a profound sense of personal anguish throughout the cavernous theater.
Dylan once told me her view of Greek tragedy. She said it’s not a Greek tragedy if there’s no blood. Obviously that was a joke. There was no stage-blood letting in this production, unlike her other versions of Greek plays. However, Agamemnom’s wife Klytaimnestra (the statuesque C. Kelly Wright) splashes it all over the stage when she painfully laments “How we first dipped our hands into our own children’s blood.”
Klytaimnestra nags and harangues him about his decision, but he must do the deed or the ships don’t sail. The back story involves a hunt goddess and a wrongly slain deer. It’s all been there for millennia to discover. This conception with minimalist staging adds urgent new dimension to an old story. The notion that Agamemnon’s family in the time of Euripedes in the eastern Mediterranean was not portrayed by black actors is of little consequence. Here is a man who must make a painful choice between love of family and a disastrous loss of life. This production eloquently and succinctly tells his story with great sympathy.
Iph … plays through October 16 at Brava! Theater Center, 24th Street at York, San Francisco. Tickets are available at the door. __________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Hyacinth (A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program student Ashley Wickett, left) and Zerbinette (A.C.T. core acting company member René Augesen) eagerly await the result of Scapin’s machinations.
Photo by Kevin Berne.
American Conservatory Theater brazenly tickles with broad physical humor in their current production of Moliere’s French farce Scapin. Since the title character is played by San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus clown Bill Irwin this is a sane approach. Irwin also adapted, along with Mark O’Donnell, the original Seventeenth Century play, and he directed it. It’s no surprise that Irwin’s antics dominate the stage.
Irwin’s script calls for two named musicians off the stage where they can be seen and interact with the players. Here on keyboard and percussion in one of the house box seats, Randall Craig as George and Keith Terry as Fred also partake in some of the stage relationships. Comically fast paced action takes place on a cartoonish, vaguely Alpine set by Erik Flatmo. Delving through themes of mistaken identities, calculated deceit and romance, the eleven characters include the requisite fathers with sons and daughters, two pairs of young lovers, and two Gendarmes (Keith Pinto and Ben Johnson) armed with floppy rubber truncheons.
The actors liked it.
The lively slapstick nature of the entire show is typified in the scene where the Gendarmes in Beaver Bauer’s whimsical and specifically characterizing costumes enter to beat Sylvestre (Jud Wiliford) with their limp clubs when he refers to a time “before my brush with the law.”
The physical puns permeate the action and dialogue. Irwin acts with gleeful sympathy for the numerous dirty deeds of his character, and he is almost constantly in motion. His adaptation modernizes the language with some non-French, like “I’m a little lost here.”
.His supporting cast is ready for his exuberant commedia dell’arte. They eagerly and breathlessly keep up with him. Skilled mime Geoff Hoyle as Geronte, father of two, worked with Irwin at Pickle, so he knows what to expect. ACT Core Company member Steven Anthony Jones as Argante, father of a boy and a girl, artfully uses his bluster to cover up his miscomprehension of Scapin’s tricks. Jud Wiliford as Sylvestre, Valet to Argantes’ son Octave, who is played by Greg Wallace, another Core Member, respond to Scapin with their own brands of enthusiastic humor.
Laughter rings out.
American Conservatory Theater’s reimagining of this antique comedy has delightfully retained much of the structure of the original French play while adding a purely American interpretation: vaudeville. The gags, some totally unexpected and some deliberately corny, come fast and furious as Scapin schemes fiendishly and comically to seek money and revenge, spinning out a story of a dark heart reaching a happy ending. And at the finale, Irwin still holds the stage, even when being at the end of the bow line.
Scapin plays through October 23 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco). Tickets ($23 to $88) are available on line at www.act-sf.org or by phone at 415.749.2228. ___________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Kara Emry and Flynn DeMarco in Thrillpeddlers’ Shocktoberfest!! 2010: Kiss of Blood
Photo courtesy of www.DavidAllenStudio.com
A severed finger, a severed hand, detached heads, torture devices, and a lot of stage blood. Welcome to San Francisco’s Halloween season. Thrillpeddlers puts on the eleventh annual production of their signature show Shocktoberfest!! Three one-act plays at the Hypnodrome Theatre explore themes of bondage, discipline and sado-masochism, the clever effectiveness of a scold’s bridle, stolen pharmaceuticals, and a psychotic desire to assuage guilt by amputation, all with shamelessly superficial acting and gleeful delight in over-the-top horror.
Thrillpeddlers producers Russell Blackwood and James Toczyl artfully recreate the French theatrical style of Grand Guignol, after the tradition of a 1920s Parisian theater. Gore permeates the atmosphere of eerie props and ghastly consequences. Russ, Jim and their ensemble of performers enthusiastically embrace the brazen pageant of terror and sexual titillation. The half-hour title piece “Kiss of Blood” is an English adaptation by Daniel Zilber of a 1929 French-language play presented first at Théâtre du Grand Guignol in Paris. The first two contemporary pieces were penned by New York playwright Rob Keefe. All take place in the whimsical production space near Division Street in SF.
Keefe’s “Lips of the Damned” uses an onstage guillotine prop known as “The Widow.” James Toczyl plays the smarmy Curator in his “museum of atrocities.” Although Kara Emry as the wife of The Widow’s inventor binds her dockworker lover Andre (Daniel Bakken) and whips him into position in the guillotine, she falls for the inventor’s urgings to find the secret of The Widow by wearing the scold’s bridle, a metal cage for the head, and biting on the projection into the mouth. She bites and the blood starts flowing. Meanwhile, the rodent exterminators are releasing their poison gas.
The next play, “The Empress of Colma,” uses music at first to explain the history of the scold’s bridle and why the mouth projection was involved. The well-choreographed ensemble (by Michael Phillis and Rory Davis) sings of the magnificent device. “It makes all your nagging problems go away.” This is an artful transition.
The scene change between the two plays is smooth and seamless, but scene two of “Colma” enters an entirely different milieu. Russ Blackwood as Crystal, holder of a Colma beauty pageant ribbon, refuses to give up her title to either Patty Himst (a very masculine Eric Tyson Wertz) or Sunny (Birdie-Bob Watt trying to iron her long platinum wig). Their friend Marcie (Kara Emry again) was to score for the three drags, but all she could manage on her way back from her dental school studies was to steal some sodium pentothal. They decide to huff it on a rag. Then they bare their souls to each other while Grandma upstairs (L. Ron Hubby with a suitably discordant voice) screams not to go down there with the queens because of the evil. The results of the truth serum cause dissension among the group. Then out comes the hypodermic syringe.
After intermission, “Kiss of Blood” is set in a hospital brain surgery. A frenzied, deeply troubled crazy man (Birdie-Bob Watt) insists that the Dr. Leduc (Flynn DeMarco, who also played in “Lips of the Damned”) amputate his trigger finger because it pains him so. Watts’ stage reaction to the plot between Dr. Voulone (Bonni Suval) and Dr. Leduc to frighten the Patient out of his psychosis does not go the way it was intended. As Dr. Voulone slowly passes each sharp shiny instrument to the operating surgeon, Watt’s eyes especially, but also his whole face light up with fascination.
Thrillpeddlers’ relentlessly brutal staging makes the amputation itself nightmarishly entertaining. The denouement of this short play occurs when the Patient encounters the ghost of his former wife (L. Ron Hubby in ragged widow’s weeds). The production uses strobe-lit entrances with a very short reading time to introduce her. When she stands with him and demands revenge for her murder, the Patient’s guilt forces him to make a further amputation.
The Shocktoberfest signature tradition is to completely black out the house and float glowing apparitions through the audience. Past night-light shows have been longer with more flying elements. Thrillpeddlers take joy in presenting horrible scenes with the loving menace of such authors as Edgar Allen Poe and Steven King, those who want to show just how horrible they can be and rub your nose in it. This is the time of the season to get in the spooky spirit, especially now that the costumes are starting to come out.
"The Forsaken Laboratory," a co-production between Thrillpeddlers and Vigor Mortis (Brazil's Grand Guignol theatre company), will be performed at the end of the Shocktoberfest!! 2010 Kiss of Blood bill on October 21 and 22, and 28 - 31. There will be a Halloween show at midnight.
Shocktoberfest!! 2010: Kiss of Blood continues through November 19 at The Hypnodrome, 575 10th Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($25 general admission; $35 premium for “Shock Boxes” and “Turkish Lounges,” sold in pairs only) are available at Brown Paper Tickets or by calling 800.838.3006. Also visit www.thrillpeddlers.com. __________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Carl Lumbly and Charles Dean in The Sunset Limited
Photos by Jessica Palopoli
Devil or angel? Cormac McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited, now playing at San Francisco Playhouse, toys
with this question in a tense two-man drama starring luminous Bay Area actors
Charles Dean and Carl Lumbly, identified in the script only as Black and White.
McCarthy’s play does not cast racial judgments, but religious concerns are a
major factor in the onstage discussion between a Jesus freak and the
ultra-liberal atheist he rescued from attempted suicide. In Director Bill
English’s production, the two men argue passionately about the meaning of life,
only to end with notes of hope and despair.
The playwright's concept
The play script depends heavily upon dialogue, with little
motivation for stage actions. Director English and his cast have wildly
succeeded in keeping this production from being static and interrogative. The
tension between the two veteran players is palpable and holds intense interest
without unnecessary stage activity. The novelistic approach is barely
noticeable because these two characters are decidedly at each others’ throats
every moment, although with differing methods of attack.
The actors rise to the challenge
Charles Dean as the liberal professor is ultimately unable
to counter the religious arguments of the ex-con black guy who saved him. To
Carl Lumbly the black, the prof went far astray of the teachings of Jesus, as
personified in a rumpled Bible on the table in his single-room-occupancy
welfare hotel room. Carl brought the prof there for intervention after he had
tried to jump under The Sunset Limited train as a relief to his anxieties.
After being in prison, Carl has found the way to salvation of his soul. He
wants to share his vision with Charles.
The bloodied Charles Dean just wants Carl to unlock the door
so he can leave. But Carl will not until his fire-and-brimstone preaching has
been heard. The intellectual prof feels compelled to respond to the black man’s
certainty of salvation as found in the Bible. Dean as the prof projects an
urgent professional need to educate the somewhat literate savior, but that
welfare case has more to teach than the professor, especially when they both
admit to the existence of “the trick bag.”
English’s staging on a set partially attenuated from the
available space keeps the tension between the two men focused and intense.
Lumbly tries to hammer home the necessity for belief to the progressive atheist
Dean. His arguments are convincing to Dean, who is able to accept the logic and
truths of the sermons, yet still appear unfazed. Dean as an actor can present
inner turmoil while keeping a believable outward presence of denial. Lumbly
with his persistent rage and references to his hopeless rescue of the prof from
“the hope of nothingness” presents a fully dimensional character who Believes,
no matter what. In the end he lets the prof go to try again tomorrow to end it
all. But Lumbly will be there.
Two opposites attract
The male bonding in McCarthy’s story is strong and poignant,
regardless of the differences in socio-economic status and intellectual
achievement. The love Lumbly wants to give is callously rejected by Dean’s
character, on the surface. The two form a relationship. With all of Dean’s
angst, and with all of Lumbly’s belief in salvation, they reach a tacit
agreement: you don’t jump under the train, and I will be there to save you anyway.
English’s direction, and the fine acting talents of Dean and
Lumbly make this printed-page dialogue into a tense ninety-minute
confrontation.
The intellectual elements of the arguments between a
fundamentalist Christian and a despairing agnostic are clearly expressed, and
then shown to be irrelevant to a suicidal maniac. The use of street lingo while
discussing literature creates a divisiveness that the two men seem to conquer
and accept, reluctantly. Dean’s resistance to spirituality becomes the crux of
the play. In the end he acquiesces.
Some might think the black man with his devotion to biblical
literalism to be crazier, but even after his drug and prison episodes, he seems
more level-headed than the leftist thinker who wants to cast his own body under
The Sunset Limited. McCarthy’s use of the word ‘sunset’ speaks volumes about
the prof’s alienation. Lumbly’s prized possession in his SRO apartment, the
ruffled Bible, tells of infinite wisdom and hope. This production presents a
tense interaction between truth and despair.
Domenique Lozano as Beatrice and Andy Murray as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing
Photo by Jay Yamada
Shakespeare’s witty play Much Ado about Nothing, just opened at California Shakespeare Festival, provides clever physical comedy and two parallel love stories, one old and one young. Director Jonathan Moscone has created a seamlessly fast-paced production about love, both deferred and impetuous, along with villainy and betrayal. The celebratory finale is a joyous dance to love. Moscone’s exuberant use of unashamed mugging and physical asides enhances the tender romantic stories.
Soldiers returning from battle to Messina, Italy in the early part of the Nineteenth Century find new wars in the pastures of love. Aristocratic warrior Benedick resumes his interrupted love affair with Beatrice in a very quarrelsome manner, and young Claudio comes home to fall in love with Bea’s cousin Hero. The various royals and townspeople scheme to get the couples together – or apart – and they all live happily ever after.
Emily Kitchens plays the quiet, polite Hero with a wide-eyed innocence. And Kitchens’ wide eyes can dominate the stage. She falls in love with the returning Claudio when he falls for her. Kitchens’ respectful and gentle portrayal makes Hero’s betrayal at the altar and subsequent feigned death deeply touching. When Hero is thrown to the floor by her intended groom, Kitchens thoroughly and convincingly projects her anguish and hurt.
Claudio’s unfortunately suspicious nature is a consistent undercurrent of Nick Childress’ portrayal. He carefully and calmly builds the tension at the altar, pretending to be the amiable but dubious suitor. Rashly taking revenge at a perceived wrong, his quick reversal when he throws the bride to her father’s knees gives a vivid glimpse into Claudio’s mind as he planned for this moment. He actually believed the slanders and evil rumors Prince Don Pedro’s illegitimate brother John had spread about her.
Don John is a sneering villain, played by Danny Scheie with a venomous intensity. There is more than one reason he is called “The Bastard.” Scheie enters the stage boldly on the two- and three-level open platforms signifying the house of Hero’s father Leonato (Dan Hiatt). Don John proclaims from on high his orders for revenge to his evil henchmen Borachio (Thomas Gorrebeeck) and Conrad (Michale Davison). His inhabitation of this part has a dense texture of vengeful bitterness.
But Scheie’s other part in the play, town Constable Dogberry, is inspired lunacy. Dogberry is caught between demographic groups in this early Shakespeare work. He is not of the Don Pedro and Leonato upper class, yet he assumes himself to be far above the miscreants he and his posse The Watch round up late at night. Scheie eagerly assumes the pomposity Dogberry associates with the upper classes while his elocution is barely above the level of a lager lout.
Scheie delivers Dogberry’s malapropisms and solecisms with hilarious certainty. When Dogberry’s miscreants are presented for sentencing, the magistrate pronounces him a shallow fool. Scheie’s ignorant self-pleased grin to be called such is an artful contrast to his melancholy, imperious attitude as Don John.
Beatrice and Benedick are an older couple very much in love, although you’d never think it, and possibly a former item. Benedick is the victorious lord, recently returned from fighting. Beatrice is sharply witty and defiantly cynical. In a war of “merry wits” the two always compete with clever insults and barbed comments.
As they vie to outwit, outsmart and out-insult the other, Associate Cal Shakes Artist Domenique Lozano strives to withstand Andy Murray’s prods as Benedick, but the actress is not mean and sardonic enough to withstand Benedick’s dominating aggressions. Sometimes serendipity is a brilliant solution, and she often wins the battles. Lozano’s hesitancy to commit and her defensive sarcastic mechanism give extra dimension to the part of Beatrice. However, her acquiescence to Benedick’s demands, after reading mutual love notes secreted by the townspeople co-conspirators, seems abrupt and unmotivated. There is no glimpse of internal thought and recognition; only a sudden decision to love Benedick, who vows that he will never marry. She also appears content never to marry.
Lozano carries off the “oh don’t bother” attitude effortlessly. There is an uncanny resemblance of the personal chemistry between Domenique and Andy and that of the fictional Beatrice and Benedick. The affection fades in and out, but the attraction of the last chance at love for two people who’ve been thwarted by their pasts is a vivid subtext to their final acceptance of each other.
Domenique Lozano as Beatrice could be meaner and more snarky in her line delivery, but she is a gentle soul and wades only in the shallow waters of provocative humiliation. Her finest acting occurs when she is sent to announce to Benedick that dinner is served. She turns away from him while remaining intensely focused on his character.
Andy Murray as Benedick looks and acts the part of a rigid soldier who is not comfortable with his softer emotional side. The actor artfully presents a confounding picture of befuddlement and some deeper emotion below the surface when Ben admits his love to Bea, resulting in a passionate smooch.
Moscone’s production carefully attends to Shakes’ elaborately worked puns and physical jokes. Themes of obvious incompatibility, false accusations of infidelity, and outright villainy create a redemptive, passionate tale of love realized by those who thought it had passed them by and those who took it for granted until it was nearly gone. In a funny, realistic production, the audience sees genuine emotional bonds being created on the stage.
Much Ado about Nothing continues through October 17 at Bruns Amphitheater, 100 California Shakespeare Theater Way (formerly 100 Gateway Blvd.), Orinda. Tickets ($20 to $65) are available online at http://www.calshakes.org/v4/tickets or by phone at 510.548.9666. __________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Dreya Weber as Cleopatra
Photo courtesy of Teatro ZinZanni
Teatro ZinZanni presents a lavish theatrical evening of “Love, Chaos & Dinner,” as they call it. With an overall food theme, their latest show Hail Caesar! uses interactions between actors whimsically based on ancient characters, exquisitely skilled acrobats, a juggler, a skilled wait-staff, and some members of the audience. HC! presents seven interrelated performances studded with servings of a five-course gourmet dinner, all in a jewel-box setting under a tent with live music by The Teatro ZinZanni Orchestra.
Old-world traditions come back to life in the Spiegeltent imported from Belgium and erected on The Embarcadero in San Francisco. The hyperactive, brightly costumed players move across the floor and through the tables while the audience sits at tables being served courses ranging from antipasto and soup with choice of entrée to desserts. But the imperialistic chef Caesar proclaims protractedly and loudly that his salad is the best. Master impressionist Frank Ferrante as Caesar exhibits no shame at all about having named his fabulous salad after himself. Then the salad is served. Timing the servings to occur between the acts, or at least during lulls in the frenetic activity of the cast, is an art form in itself.
Ferrante the chef emcee selects occasional audience members to join him on the floor for extended Q & A sessions. His victims ranged from a theatre reviewer to a pregnant kindergarten teacher. His improvisational abilities and effortless way of keeping the show moving are impressive. The audience members seemed to enjoy themselves.
Cleopatra high overhead the diners
Dreya Weber as Aerialist
Photo courtesy of Teatro ZinZanni
Dreya Weber is a glamorous vamp in her Cleopatra
costume. She’s a quick and witty actress. She is stunning in her aerial
act with white ropes and abrupt drops. Her aerial red silk act is
sensuous and beautifully choreographed. Although she is sometimes too
focused on technique to relate to the audience, and one sequence
featured a seemingly endless number of gyrations, her quick and
surprising technique is flawless and her technicians made fantastically
well coordinated hoists.
Tim Tyler in shorts and pith helmet
plays Mr. PP, an anachronism explorer, charmingly funny. He interacts
with Caesar and Cleopatra in what is assumed to be ancient Egypt,
complete with Cleo’s onstage barge. Then he balances an egg and a
chopstick on his nose, continuing the food theme of the show and the
evening. His later act of spitting out ping pong balls – and perhaps
even an egg – is impressive in the number of balls he must have
swallowed, but the regurgitation connotations are not appetizing.
Please! I’m eating.
Music in the show includes the Orchestra on a
small circular stage off to the side of the dining and performance
floor. Singer Christine Abraham has a lovely voice. Acrobatic gymnast
Alexa Hukari uses seemingly effortless grace on the pole. “Vertical
Tango” takes Sam Payne and Sandra Feusi in a sinuous dance in the air
high above the tables. Tumblers Ming and Rui leap over and make graceful
and challenging calisthenic movements on a dinner table. A large
ensemble of costumed extras perform such vital functions as roll on
Caesar’s chariot, carry on a sarcophagus in an operatic triumphal
procession, bring on the barge, and erect the pole at the center of the
tent with guy wires. The complicated technical timing of the production
is flawless.
The show on San Francisco’s waterfront is a fine
evening out and you don’t have to worry about getting something to eat
beforehand. The acts are always entertaining and professional in cabaret
and cirque vernaculars. The food is good and the staff and actors all
seem to want you to have a good time.
Hail Caesar!
plays through October 31 at Pier 29 on The Embarcadero (at Battery
Street), San Francisco. The regular schedule runs Wednesday through
Saturday at 6 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. Tickets ($117 to $145; includes
dinner) are available at the on-site Box Office weekdays from 10 a.m. to
6 p.m., and weekends from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., online at www.lovezinzanni.org or by phone at 415.438.2668.
Doctor Theater's preview information can be found at Examiner.com. ______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Funny phone calls to the Oval Office: Buzz Halsing as President Charles “Chucky” Smith and Steven Dietz as his aide in David
Mamet’s comedy November now at The Barn Theatre in Ross
Photo by Wendell H. Wilson
Does a lesbian marriage precede the national need for
turkeys on Thanksgiving? That's the problem faced by President Chucky Smith in
David Mamet's political satire November, now being produced by the Ross
Valley Players. Perhaps because Mamet’s scripts typically do not avoid the
F-word, and because the major conflict in this play is about a gay wedding
ceremony, the Players and Director James Dunn have made a daring outreach to
the mostly elderly denizens of the wealthiest community of the wealthiest
county in the United States. The effort is a major success, even for the scant
opening night audience. Those people who stayed away because of subject matter
should be ashamed, and after they read these reviews they will realize they
missed a good one. Maybe they’ll try.
Mamet's portrayal of an incompetent manager in a job too big
for his britches is both tellingly humorous and poignant, because that is who
we are stuck with, a national President totally batting out of his league, not
necessarily just now, but usually through well more than forty of them. The
situation enacted in The Barn on Ken Rowland’s brilliantly simple Oval Office
set keeps intense visual interest with Dunn’s blocking in an amusing and
topical story. Facing the need to redefine Thanksgiving entrees in terms of
tuna, President Smith tries to bargain with a psychotic Indian over ownership
of Nantucket Island.
Buzz Halsing maintains an intense dramatic tension with his
uncontrolled fanatic ranting as the impatient, dismissive Chucky throughout
both acts of this brief, fast-paced play. Buzz works with consistent focus on
the persona of a beleaguered executive officer barely keeping up with his job,
with the patient help of his aide, but he lacks presidential bearing.
Tall, nervous Tom Reilly plays the turkey guy (see www.rossvalleyplayers.com to find
his extremely long character name.) When he tries to get The President to join
the birds in front of the television cameras, he acts like they are his brood.
Rómulo Torres as Grackle the
Indian claiming ownership of Nantucket in the later part of the play, presents
a whimsically nostalgic picture in Michael A. Berg’s costume of wide-ranging
styles. When he blows his poison dart, neither The President nor his aide can
find security (“Special Services are on lunch break.”) or a gun.
The President’s bane is his publicist Clarice Bernstein.
LeAnne Rumbel plays this part of a lesbian speechwriter with high expectations
and sweet innocence as she bribes The President. She will only give him the
sure-fire re-election speech she wrote if he changes the law so she can marry
her woman friend.
Throughout the Oval Office antics, Steve Dietz playing the
ever-patient aide Archer Brown is the only anchor of sanity as he studiously
takes notes and tersely answers the incessant phone calls, especially the ones
from The President’s wife. Dietz crafts a delivery of efficient, flatly factual
responses that become hilarious. When the self-centered Buzz complains about
the lesbian couple adopting a baby girl in China, Dietz gives his line with
off-hand insouciance: “That’s all they sell."
Buzz made the show good with his intense egomania, but Steve
saved the show, and the President's butt. This is a quick, engaging parody of
current events, even though it was written a couple of years ago. Ross Valley
Players have artfully realized Mamet’s keen insights to American culture and
his sardonic sense of humor in a beautifully focused production.
November continues through October 17 at The Barn
Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, Ross,
California. Tickets ($15 to $25) are available online at www.rossvalleyplayers.com or by
phone at 415.456.9555 ext. 3. __________________________
Al Manners (Tim Kniffin) directs Wiletta Mayer (Margo Hall) in Trouble in Mind
Photo by David Allen
In the Alice Childress play Trouble in Mind, now at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, a Broadway stage director from Hollywood has to cope with an actor who does not like the script and an African American actress asserts her objections to lynching. The two threads twine inextricably together in a whimsically gripping melodrama. Does the humorously imperialistic director prevail or will the actress get her way? Robin Stanton’s staging in this three-quarter round space carefully provides deep personal involvement with the characters by keeping the faces of most of the nine actors equally visible to all sides. Eric Sinkkonen’s set design eloquently speaks the vernacular of a theater stage.
Act I takes place at a table reading rehearsal on a stage. For the play-within-a-play, the texture of a backstage is thoroughly realistic with a rough brick wall, a rope gallery and guarded radiators mounted high. The first reading is tense as the actors enter and get ready to rehearse with each other, sight unseen. The mixed-race cast members seem affable enough toward each other, but then the director Al Manners enters in his “Hollywood director tweed.” Callie Floor’s costume design gives Tim Kniffin the sleaze and style to flesh out his overbearing, pseudo-creative character.
But Al Manners encounters his equal when his white skin and his play written by a white man, Chaos in Belleville, an anti-lynching drama referencing the segregationist period around Montgomery Alabama, meet his leading lady Wiletta Mayer, a gifted African American actress fiercely and sympathetically played by Margo Hall. Wiletta will not compromise and wants the script changed to eliminate mention of lynching. Sometimes, in the real-life of theatrical endeavors a cast member or even a director will storm off the set because of artistic differences, drastically changing the original concept of the show.
The structure of this under two-hour play uses an ancient plot device (e. g. “The play’s the thing / By which we’ll catch the king” Hamlet or Bottom and The Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare) to make a special pleading. The recalcitrant actor in this setting could have been upset about anything. Doctor Theatre has seen actresses demand the director rewrite their lines while the camera was rolling (He did sit down then and change the script for her.) All too often it’s just plain personality differences that break up a promising production. Childress could have chosen anything from disagreements over Nazi Germany (Having lived through World War II, Childress died in 1949.) to aesthetic considerations of the script phrasing as a contentious point in the rehearsal process. Instead she chose to indicate an emotional fervor to deny the existence anywhere of lawlessness.
Aurora’s production and Jessica Heidt’s casting show us believably genuine people in their normal work environment. For instance, Earll Kingston as the octogenarian stage electrician Henry is lovably avuncular and picks up the loose end of the play script’s ending. Michael Ray Wisely is a versatile Bay Area favorite and his blowhard Alabama politician Bill O’Wray is spot-on.
Trouble in Mind continues through September 26 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($34 to $55) are available online at www.auroratheatre.org or by phone at 510.843.4822. _______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Adrienne Warren, Syesha Mercado & Margaret Hoffman
Photo by Joan Marcus
“Miracles happen all the time in the world of rhythm and blues,” says one character in Dreamgirls, now playing at the Curran Theatre. The style of Shorenstein Hayes Nederlander’s touring Broadway musical is big and flashy, presenting the story of a Motown-era girl group as a concert with some back story. Thirty songs to live music with glamorous choreography fill more than two hours of a visual narrative of a young woman’s difficult rise “straight from Chicago” to the Apollo Theater in New York City.
Hundreds of costumes and wigs travel with the show in William Ivey Long’s design. As the group progresses through early incarnations ranging from The Stepp Sisters through The Tru-Tones and the Dreamettes to performing under their own names, their quick changes and statuesque entrances with microphones are smoothly coordinated. The choices of their costumes, such as slinky blue dresses with tulip bottoms or leggy ones with sequined teddies keep the concert moving relentlessly forward in space and time.
Robin Wagner’s rotating set elements synchronize flawlessly with the music direction of Sam Davis and the orchestrations by Harold Wheeler to indicate different locations from street scenes to club stages. The lighting techniques give a fascinating energy to the different numbers as the panels turn and glow to represent scene changes. A nightclub atmosphere texture pervades the show, although many of the numbers are understood to be set on concert stages or in arenas.
Payola, infidelity and drug addiction figure largely in the story of the rise-to-the-top of a 1960s and ‘70s group not unlike Diana Ross and the Supremes. With an alluring image, their manager turns The Dreams, their new name, into a top-selling pop act, making African American singers mainstream successes among white audiences. The technical aspects of this production are swiftly executed in a well planned order. The costumes and changes of location are engrossing. The singing is soulful and evocative of a past era in popular music.
Dreamgirls continues through September 26 at Curran Theatre, 445 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($30 to $99) are available online at SHN Tickets or by phone at 888.SHN.1799.
By Albert Goodwyn
Justin Glaser as Beast and Liz
Shivenir as Belle
Photo by Joan Marcus
Walt Disney had a veritable knack for bringing ancient stories into the current vernacular. The retelling in his 1991 film of the traditional fairy tale about a valiant prince beset by a curse and his princess savior is brought to life on the stage of the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is a grand spectacle set in a rococo French castle with live orchestra, ensemble choreography to rival great cinematic staging, and some stirring vocalizations.
Shorenstein Hayes Nederlander brings this touring Broadway-style musical production to The City with theatrical precision and a vivid cast. Tenor – as it finally turned out – Justin Glaser evokes pity and rage in his character as Beast. The actor appears as the Prince only twice. Most of the show he speaks from behind a hideously fanged face and his voice is processed so as to sound gravelly and ghastly. Keeping his character as relatively simple (He’s hexed. He’s angry. He’s very powerful and he’s in love.) is a solidly understandable concept, but this production underplays an important inflection of the fairy tale. French director Jean Cocteau illuminated this point in his film of the story. Beast is a figure of sympathy. He is not to be dismissed because of his unpleasant physiognomy. Glaser does not adequately address this aspect of the character. This is a love story, as is to be expected from Disney.
Liz Shivenir as Belle the beauty is appealing and her frustration at trying to love the shy Beast is well projected. Her Eighteenth Century-style costume is graceful and becoming. She moves easily on the Baroque rolling step units behind a floral scrim, especially when Beast finds her at the top of the stairs near his precious rose. Shivenir’s vocalizations tend to be sloppy and shrieky, going sharp occasionally, and she mugs with bravura gestures. This is again typical of Disney productions; by having her use a little-girlish voice and play naïve ingénue they make Belle more lovable, so the final lifting of the hex is more tender.
The fairy tale has another character Gaston, a loutish, muscular local who wants to marry Belle. Baritenor Nathaniel Hackmann as Gaston was a cunning casting decision and he sings with a warm, pleasant voice, frequently flexing his muscles to show what a stud he is. His aide Lefou can be counted on to provide comic lazzi whenever they are onstage together. Michael Fatica falls and tumbles with great gusto and elasticity.
In the Prince/Beast’s enchanted castle, his household staff has also fallen under the spell. Chip the Tea Cup is only a child’s head on a table. Jeremiah Frank Burch III and Reese Sebastian Diaz share this charming part. Beast’s liverymen Cogsworth and Lumiere have been turned into a pendulum clock and a portable lighting stand, respectively. Keith Kirkwood in his clock costume is marvelously inventive, especially when he shows up with a wind-up key sticking out of his back. Merritt David Janes as Lumiere presents a giddy butler with lighted torches for hands. His act of punctuating staging and dialogue by turning them on and off is inventive, but the lazzi gets a bit repetitive until the spell is broken and they can return to being human.
The dynamic movement of the large ensemble of townspeople is choreographed with precision and grandeur reminiscent of the symmetry of Busby Berkeley’s film ensembles. Matt West’s mug-clink choreography is flawlessly timed, and when the ensemble dances as utensils in a chorus line and turn into dinner plates for the song “Be Our Guest,” they exhibit sheer fun and exuberance to delight all ages.
This is a well produced show with timeless themes, simple but dimensional characters and beautiful sets and costumes. Judicious use of tight, intensely focused spotlights make the principle costumes glow. The choral harmonies are sparkling and lively. Wolves figure in various versions of the tale. Disney’s use of white wolf puppets behind a scrim is at once frightening and clever. The orchestra in the pit, conducted by Musical Director Carolyn Violi, is well balanced and sensitively timed with stage actions.
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast continues through August 29 at Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($30 to $99) are available online at SHN.com or by phone at 415.551.2000.
By Albert Goodwyn
Suzan A. Kendall, Brian Trybom and Hannah Knapp as the Wingfield family
Photo courtesy of Boxcar Theatre
Boxcar Theatre has mounted an innovative, very successful new interpretation of Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie in their black box theater South of Market. In their small, intimate space they have even added six more characters to the original four, serving to flesh out and humanize the stereotyped symbols that Williams wrote about. On a stage configured as a runway with audience on two sides, Boxcar's Artistic Directors Peter Matthews and Nick A. Olivero have opened up Williams' play with sympathy, providing greater insights to the lives of the desperate Wingfield family and their "Gentleman caller."
Thomas Lanier Williams wrote autobiographically about Tom Wingfield, son of a proud, genteel Southern woman and a distant father. Williams' father did desert the family and they did live in St. Louis, Missouri, where the play is set. Thomas did work in the shoe business, as does Tom. Thomas' sister Rose did have a disability, as does Laura Wingfield in the play. Williams' stage directions describe it as a "memory play." Boxcar has taken this to heart and run with it.
The shadowy lighting and additional characters filter the surreal show through Tom’s memory, subject to guesswork and subconscious distortions. Mother Amanda Wingfield, a vivacious woman clinging feverishly to memories of a vanished past, is also portrayed by a "Shadow Amanda" (Maggie McCally acting smug and flirty) who is mute, as are the other two shadow characters, Shadow Laura (Lauren Doucette) and Shadow Tom (Peter Matthews). These three barefoot characters seem to be earlier, perhaps more stable representations of the Wingfields.
On a bare set with moveable stools for furniture and only four props, the delicate animals of Laura's glass menagerie are mimed, as are other bits. The ingenuity of this production lies in the wordless interactions between the shadows and the distraught Wingfields. For instance, while Laura protests her innocence to her mother for dropping out of business school, using shyness as an excuse, her shadow sits on the stage deck and pretends to fixate on playing with something small and fascinating.
Later, when gentleman caller Jim (Nick A. Olivero) joins Laura in her fantasy world, he participates in her belief in the imaginary animals. Olivero's aggressively unctuous character clumsily breaks her favorite one. His regret does not read as being genuine, whether by production design or because of monotonal acting, but she mimes giving the figurine to him as a parting gesture.
The marvelously complex staging of this show holds interest intensely, despite some audience views of characters' backs and shoulders, inherent in a strip-style set. Having the shadows react to their real selves heightens the emotions of anger and disillusionment, while extending Williams' metaphors of uncertainty and melancholy.
Many times the shadows merely observe the meager family living room, but sometimes they interact with their real characters, but only with themselves, not with others. For instance, Shadow Laura and Laura Wingfield (played sympathetically but not as pitiable by Hannah Knapp) sit on the floor to play together with their imaginary animals. Sometimes the shadows mirror what their namesakes are doing, such as when Shadow Amanda stands beside Amanda (Suzan A. Kendall) and points to the door along with her as she commands Tom to leave.
The Wingfield apartment is across an alley from a 1930s music hall. The music and patrons of the play script are heard and talked about but never seen. Boxcar has added live music in the form of the incidental characters the Jones sisters, in slinky shiny dresses and red shoes. Williams called for music to be played at certain points. These Andrews-like sisters swing in a tight chorus line. Ruby Jones (Linnea George) plays violin, sometimes sweetly and sometimes discordantly. Expanding the cast in this small space is a daring concept.
As Tom (Brian Trybom) explains, Williams intended the play to be ambiguous and indistinct, like memory. This low-level lighting and the character doubling give a dreamy quality. Despite the dimness, the actors' faces are always clearly visible and they stay in character. A major part of the ingenuity of this rewrite is that the shadows are obviously the characters they follow, even to the Lauras wearing very similar dresses, but the shadows also have their own personalities.
Where mother Amanda Wingfield is charming and laughable, her shadow is not pathetic but strong. Tom's alter ego looks on helplessly, seeing the tragedy and unable to stop it. Shadow Laura acts like a devoted big sister to Laura's withdrawn crybaby.
Reinterpretations of classic plays are a mark of acceptance in the pantheon of great authors. Boxcar has added more depth in a modernist or cubist style, showing facets of the characters from skewed angles, thereby expanding our understanding of who these people are. In just over two hours, we get the characters plus their back-story, developing for us complex new dimensions.
The Glass Menagerie continues through August 27 at Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($20 to $25) are available online at Boxcar Theatre, by emailing boxoffice@boxcartheatre.org or by phone at 415.776.1747.
By Albert Goodwyn
Peter Matthews as Brick and Lauren Doucette as Maggie the Cat
Photo courtesy of Boxcar Theatre
Boxcar Theatre has distilled one essence of a classic American play in their abbreviated version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. As one of their three-part series called "Tenn Will," they are mounting the story of a depressed former hero and his nagging wife as an experiential performance focusing on the relationship between a hard-driving patriarch and his questioning son. This focuses on one of the many diverse elements Williams addressed in his play.
The story
Maggie the Cat, fiercely played by Lauren Doucette, nags incessantly at Big Daddy's son Brick (Peter Matthews, one of the artistic directors of Boxcar) who is attempting to recover from a tragic midnight attempt to regain his former glory as a pro-footballer. His repeated visits to the "Echo Springs" bourbon bar keep him insensate to her unheeded demands for sex. He only pays attention when Big Daddy (Michael Moerman) harangues him about his dead friend Skipper.
Boxcar shows only one of many aspects
Moerman plays Mississippi plantation owner Big Daddy as a blunt instrument, a self-made man who is angry about his son's failed career. Williams' autobiographical reference to his own homosexuality is presented as the crux of this ninety minute show. Matthews as Brick with his twin crutches, one wooden and one liquid, remains largely passive as he listens to Maggie's rants. He can only rise above his self-induced stupor when Big Daddy forces him to confront his true feelings about Skipper.
In the history of Williams' play and the movie version, different conclusions have been presented. The movie version kept a happy ending, against the wishes of Williams. This edited rendition leaves the relationship between Maggie and Brick as a cipher. As Brick lies in bed with his ankle in a cast and totally out of Echo Springs bourbon, Maggie once more seeks his favors, and we are left in the dark as to what happens.
This production, using a few rewrites and some major ellipses, emphasizes the stark berating by Big Daddy. He knows that Brick and Skip were lovers, and he sternly admonishes him that he does not care. It's Brick's life and Big Daddy wants him to make something big of it, not just be a sports announcer for a game he can no longer play.
In-your-lap theatre
The stage at Boxcar is intimate. Set elements blend into the audience seating arrangements. A sofa in this theatre-in-the-round is aligned with attendee seats, as though it were a part of the house. Maggie's dressing table is crowded beside a patron seat. Being right next to Doucette as she performs in-your-face without acknowledging your existence is thrilling. Brick's habitual invalid bed is the major set element on the black-box stage.
Williams, trying to resolve his personal issues of sexual intimacy, used Skipper as an imaginary idol. In the play script, Skip is not cast, only referred to. Boxcar has brought him back to life. Behind sheer scrims around the stage, Seth Thygesen as the ghost of Skip walks dreamily around in his torn number 18 football jersey, sometimes wandering on to the stage and always wordless. In a tellingly dramatic theatrical trope, Maggie the Cat dons a fresh number 18 jersey to induce Brick to love her as much as he loved Skip.
The original masterpiece of American dramatic literature has many facets. Boxcar has emphasized one element and explored it tentatively, but not exhaustingly enough. They have been bold in their exposition, and they could have gone further. They leave us with the question: Is Brick finally going to make love with her after sleeping on the sofa for five years?
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof continues in repertory with the other Williams plays A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie at Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available by phone at 415.776.1747. _______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Photo courtesy of Lynn Ruth Miller Septuagenarian comedienne Lynn Ruth Miller bids you welcome to the “Final Gasp Residential Home” in her one-woman cabaret show Alzheimer’s, Alzheimer’s Cha Cha Cha. Her lively performance includes singing, a striptease and free condoms. She might be aged, but she only acts creaky for effect. She pokes fun at nursing-home lifestyles, from claiming that “Spandex is a girl’s best friend” to worrying about another resident's walker getting stuck in the elevator.
“The older I am the better I get,” she brags, leading the audience in sing-alongs of her own composition. She provides a flyer with her lyrics to familiar songs ("Lord, I want to find a live one/When the guys come rolling in.") For her "Happy Hour" to the tune of "Happy Days" she provides free vodka to the audience. In her "Been There, Done That" she proclaims that she has learned when to fight and when to give way and how to "stand up and start over again." She even volunteers a man from the audience to dance with.
Her singing voice is a well controlled mezzo-soprano. The audience of thirty or more created surprisingly good harmonies at her first of two shows. In between songs she describes life at Last Gasp and her reactions to it. She has an obvious proprietary affection for the place where “Help is just a buzzer away.” The high-cholesterol fried diets there are designed to cause fatalities. Her descriptions of heart attacks and ambulances are morbidly hilarious. “We look for vacancies in this place,” she tells us, almost as though she were the pr spokeswoman for Last Gasp.
She has named Act I of the ninety-minute show after the Roman goddess of wisdom Minerva, and it is a story of how she learned to accept her aging. The shorter Act II, "Aging Is Amazing" is inspirational and still funny. She provides a new take on lust when she talks about a live one she plans to pound “… ‘til I make his IV drop.” After she hands out condoms she declares that all can be solved if you'll just “Put another capsule in.”
The upbeat optimism of this 76 year old woman is inspiring in the two songs of this act, "I Will Survive" ("As long as I can use a comb.") and "I'm Living My Dream." She says she's made it this far and is not ready to give up. Her stage antics and her warm audience contact keep this from being preachy.
Lynn Ruth's humor is sometimes bitingly self-referential. She asks that the music be turned up (piano) because she forgot her hearing aid. Beginning the show she enters in a long comfy nightgown, puts on her sleep mask and cuddles her stuffed bear on the sofa. She has become a sleeper in her version of “Jeepers Creepers,” but complains that “I can’t hear a fucking thing.” She performs Act I in her nightie.
“I wrote the book on sex appeal,” she brags. Her Act II costume is a red and purple gown. “Take it off” she sings as she doffs the gown to reveal a tightly fitting merry widow with tassels in the expected places and pink polka dot bloomers. She's not as lithe as a North Beach showgirl, but she's not afraid to show off her bingo wings. She moves about the stage and into the audience with energy and grace.
She can toss off lines like a pro, but she tends to fade in and out of character. Perhaps it's a technical problem, but she sometimes loses inhabitation while waiting for music pickups. Since the show has been highly successful at the past three Edinburgh Fringe Festivals, some missed tech cues might be deliberate.
She tells jokes about hand jobs that would seem lame from a young woman, but her panache carries them. When it became clear early on that the entire show would be all old-age jokes, Doctor Theater was waiting for the denture jokes. Fortunately, only one arrives. She cleverly rhymes dentures with adventures. Life is still an adventure for The Stripping Granny, and it's a pleasure to share it with her.
Alzheimer’s, Alzheimer’s Cha Cha Cha plays only once more next Sunday, July 25, 7:30 pm at Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush Street. Tickets ($10 to $20) are available online at Goldstarl or by phone at 415.345.1287.
By Albert Goodwyn
Nick Russell as Brick and Jennifer Welch as Maggie
Photo courtesy of Actors Theatre San Francisco
Actors Theatre of San Francisco has opened a gripping insight to the Tennessee Williams masterpiece play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The production uses a single set to display the troubled interactions among a family living on a Southern plantation. The acting is strongly focused for each character, giving the show a sensitive, unblinking look at decadence and self-destruction.
Invalid Brick is steadfast in his need for his crutch, the alcohol that gives him the "click." Big Daddy is boisterous and invincible, but when the bad news sinks in he takes it in good humor. Maggie the Cat finally gets her Brick. The two and one-half hour show keeps up the pace intensely, allowing for extreme voyeuristic pleasure. Brick is an ample vessel for sympathy. Big Daddy screams and forcefully holds the stage. But Maggie holds the plot together. They both try to take away Brick's crutches.
The time setting proceeds from the afternoon to the night on Big Daddy's sixty-fifth birthday. Everybody but he and Big Mama (Hannah Marks loud and flowery) knows he is dying of cancer. Christian Phillips presents Big Daddy as a dominant, leering lout with his hand down his crotch. The object of his leering is the beautiful Jennifer Welch as Margaret Pollitt, Brick's wife.
Slender Welch is an obvious target of lust for Big Daddy, so it's puzzling why Maggie has not been able to get Brick in her bed for five years. Nicholas Russell consistently and thoroughly holds his conception of Brick as morose and self-centered while the talkative, excited Maggie tries to get his attention.
Director Keith Phillips (Christian's brother) keenly develops the obstinate sexual tension between Maggie the predator and the exasperated Brick. He has a passive reaction to her insults, rejecting them and accepting her domination. The arc of tension in this section, where Welch holds Act I while Russell hobbles and drinks, reaches a peak when she taunts him about his dead friend Skipper. Brick becomes defensive and flippant. Maggie's discontent with her unsatisfied lust is a driving force in the play. But the introduction of Skipper becomes a major shouting point later.
Brick's brother Gooper, a fastidious lawyer (Sean Hallinan) has grandchildren for Big Daddy. Maggie and Brick are young, vital and barren. Welch portrays Maggie's nagging with a complex mixture of love, frustration and greed. If she can't produce a grandchild, Brick won't be inheriting the huge plantation. Brick empties the whiskey bottle.
At night, the ensemble gathers for the party. Big Daddy refuses to blow out the candles and asks everybody but Brick to leave the room. As Big Daddy harangues Brick, Christian Phillips becomes angry and red-faced. Russell reluctantly listens with a faraway gaze. The subject of the lecture is that it's okay with Big Daddy if Brick and Skipper had been lovers. The Director expertly and seamlessly wove into the texture of this confrontation the question of whether or not Brick is up to the tension with Big Daddy. The tightly focused stage space intensifies the pressure for all to see.
After a new whiskey bottle is set on the drinks trolley, Brick comes out of his shell long enough to explain that a normal love relationship between people is rare, like when he was holding out his hand to pro-football compatriot Skip as they slept in separate beds.
Maggie wants to comfort Big Daddy when he learns the news. She tells him there is life inside her. He is immensely pleased. Brick is astounded. His sister-in-law Mae Pollit (Carol Robinson) is rudely skeptical and loudly denunciates Maggie. After she tells the lie, Welch's face becomes convincingly and continuingly tortured and remorseful.
Her acting is strong and fully inhabited throughout the play. She reacts forcefully and staunchly to her position as the black sheep of the family. When Maggie is dressing for the party and screaming at Brick, she convincingly mimes looking over her dress selections in a distant, unseen mirror. Her Act I shifts between a wide variety of moods is powerfully emotional.
Russell's Brick stays wholly in character, presenting a self-enclosed addict who does not see the love all around him. The hopeful finale presents him as coming back to life.
Christian's smug patriarch is barely modulated in his bluster. He can act as a fanatic, then laugh at himself. Even his silence dominates the room. His subtlety is exquisite, as when he acts impatient and shows a sly, fleeting grin of satisfaction.
The production values of this show are very high with close attention to realism and verisimilitude. This small company regularly pays justice to some of America's best dramatic literature. This Cat claws and dangles, holding on with a desperate fury.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof continues Through September 4 at Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush Street. Tickets ($26 to $38) are available online at www.ActorsTheatreSF.org and at www.TicketWeb.com or by phone at 415.345.9582.
By Albert Goodwyn
Sylvia Kratins as Fiona Foster, Jeff Garrett as Frank Foster, Jocelyn Stringer as Mary Featherstone, Adam Simpson as William Featherstone, Corinne Proctor as Teresa Phillips, James Darbyshire as Bob Phillips
photo credit: Barbara Michelson-Harder
In his play How the Other Half Loves, now at The Phoenix Theatre, Sir Alan Ayckbourn typically depicts middle-class English couples engaged in hiding their adulterous relationships with hilariously disastrous consequences. Off Broadway West's production of this British farce plays the adulterous machination for laughs. The lives of three couples intersect in unexpected ways, causing, alas, the usual: jealousy, recriminations, and false accusations. In the end, slyly staged by Director Richard Harder, they surreptitiously acknowledge their playing around and their intent to continue messing with the spouses of their friends. The extreme novelty of this production shows the couples in the same space as though they were in separate housing. The brilliant direction depicts lively actors becoming frozen statues in the same room, ignoring each other and coming back to life for the next relevant action.
The three couples are distinctly different and uniquely eccentric in the quirky British way. The cast of six inhabits their roles earnestly, sometimes shiningly. Last Wednesday night is the nut of the plot. As with all farces, there are many doors and abrupt scene changes. Fiona Foster and her husband Frank are somewhat more urbane than Teresa and Bob. Fiona is very elegant as portrayed by Sylvia Kratins, but she stoops to fooling around with the somewhat loutish Bob, as sympathetically portrayed by James Darbyshire. Fiona and Bob erect many elaborate and hilarious subterfuges to cover up their missed wedding anniversary, their upcoming dinner party and what they did Wednesday night.
A signature device of many of Sir Ayckbourn's plays is time and space displacement. Director Harder uses Bert van Aalsburg's creative, '70s Mod set to enact two separate plays at the same time on one stage. While Fiona is telling lies to Frank, Bob and Teresa freeze in their argument. With immaculately well timed entrances and exits, the sense of the space during personal interactions between the characters is distinct. When one wife leaves and a husband talks to the other the specific household is implicit. The shifts between settings are rapid but never hectic; very refined as compared to frenetic French farce.
The dinner parties become the intersection that leads to the unraveling of the knotted deception. The introduction of the dinner guests, workmate William Featherstone and his wife Mary, becomes the opportunity for Ayckbourn to throw massive amounts of confusion into the mix. The Featherstones dine at the Foster table one night and at the Phillips table another. The difficult staging required for this time/space shift is deftly handled by the cast. The clueless William and Mary, well handled by Jocelyn Stringer and Adam D. Simpson, turn their attention from Bob and Teresa to Fiona and Frank, shifting to different settings by well choreographed changes of position.
The laughs built into this play are expertly developed. The throwaway Britishisms in the lines are delivered with a stiff upper lip. In the English theatrical vernacular, the laugh riot in this sort of bedroom farce comes from watching well-off straight people caught in their own webs of deception. This production hammers home the humor without the subtlety of the West End London style, where the play had a highly successful run. The aesthetics of deflecting the audience's focus to two different locations within the same set and two different lives progressing and interweaving is a tricky concept. Off Broadway West presents a merry Americanization of this imported frolic.
How the Other Half Loves plays through July 31 at The Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason Street, Ste. 601, San Francisco. Tickets ($17.50 to $35) are available online at Brown Paper Tickets or by phone at 415.407.3214. _____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l-r) Howie (Maro Guevara), Diwata (Jayne Deely), and Solomon (Jason Frank) take a dance break in Speech & Debate
Photo by David Allen
Ho-hum. The Speech and Debate play, now at Aurora in Berkeley, centers on another typical quotidian politician sex scandal and adds gay apologists. War protest dramas from the '60s were popular theatrical themes in the '70s and '80s. Are we not over 'Nam yet? Stonewall was long ago. Are we just now discovering that there are differences among us? Maybe in another age the scandal would not have involved a closeted gay teen with a city office-holder but a dope dealer with a priest or a commie with a socialite, or some such.
Although this is just a trite theme, Aurora and playwright Stephen Karam have managed to add some fresh elements. However, unless you are interested in an inhibited high-school student who comes out to confess he has not only been in a pederasty relationship with a small-town mayor, but that his parents have also sent him to a gay recovery summer camp, you will only find in this production some humorous moments, some lively but clichéd acting and some brilliant staging by Director Robin Stanton on the three-quarter round stage.
The adult world in the form of a news reporter comes crashing into the inconsequential private-life drama of three high-school misfits. The kids make a big deal about one of them, the closeted one, having had sex with the mayor of Salem Oregon, but the reporter uses their efforts to promote her own book. Why are they surprised? Their naivety in this production is cloying.
Some plot elements are current and relevant, but are too much like nightly news fodder to be fresh and new. Regardless of the outdated themes, this production is refreshing, unless you live in the real world where these issues have become predictable. For the fawning ultra-liberals of Berkeley and the people from over the eastern hills who still find gay issues quaint, this must be a charming performance. However, if the adult actors are going to portray adolescents, they should be either looser or more controlled. Instead they haphazardly deliver the imagery of adults playing childish.
The three students form a debate club to expose the perverted politician. We wait until Act II to find out that one of them was his victim. Jessica Heidt's casting decisions leave room for doubt. Did she select actors who could portray incompetent adolescents or did she choose them precisely for their lack of acting ability?
Diwata is the girl leader of the two ineffectual boys. Howie is the avowedly gay student. Solomon is never judgmental, perhaps because he has too much to hide. Jayne Deely as Diwata, surprisingly not black, is a good dancer but not a good actress. Her in-control Diwata is a mother hen, but she indicates and loses character while waiting for line cues. When the "Group Interpretation" scene comes up, as noted by projections on the upstage classroom wall above the blackboards, her modern dance movement is fluid and graceful. Her false enthusiasm, gratuitous gesticulations and uneven acting still outshine the two boy actors.
Howie (Maro Guevara) as the "queeny" boy has found his flighty fruity character and loves him. Jason Frank is stiff and inhibited as Solomon and unable to inhabit his part, even when Diwata drags him kicking and screaming out of the closet. His admission of being found in a public bathroom with the mayor is neither anguished nor flippant, just flat. Perhaps the casting decisions were intended to make the students out to be clumsy and inexperienced, but when veteran actress Holli Hornlien interviews them as a Teacher and Reporter, it's relieving to see an adult in the room. These three student actors are too old to be believable as adolescents, 'though they do act well as simpletons.
The production seeks to be modern by introducing instant messaging and new ways to make connections to the major gay subtext. Projections of Boy George and Anderson Cooper hammer home the dominance of the gay theme for Pride Month. The interesting but not wholly effective blocking not only brings on a gay Abe Lincoln in a stovepipe hat but also goes so far back as to make Abel gay.
The show revels in amateurishness, perhaps seeking a younger audience, a persistent problem with live theatre. The internal evidence is there. The reporter sums up their performance as being "not prodigious." Karam's writing provides some good laughs and contemporary plot points. Regardless of any age difference on the part of a spectator, these are not sympathetic characters.
Speech and Debate continues through July 16 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($34 to $55) are available online at www.auroratheatre.org or by phone at 510.843.4822. _____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Lisa Asher, Megan Pearl Smith, Berwick Haynes, Sam Misner and Matt Mueller in WOODY GUTHRIE'S AMERICAN SONG at Marin Theatre Company
Photo by Ed Smith
Woody Guthrie's American Song is a pleasantly rousing tribute to musical Americana, and Marin Theatre Company has gloriously mounted a spirited revival of this stirring tradition. Five lively singers enact the periods and backgrounds of Woody's career through some of his most popular songs. With the onstage banda of three musicians and a simplified rustic set, the show is a series of chronologically ordered vignettes with spoken details of the politics and economic conditions of the time when he was traveling around the country writing and singing songs to promote the Midwestern American morale during the years of the Great Depression and the World War. The enthusiastic ensemble delivers Guthrie's uplifting folk songs with a personal fervor.
MTC's production expertly expresses the spirit of the show and of the music with the arrangements of political and traditional songs and ballads from Woody's legacy. Sam Misner as Woody and other cast members narrate briefly between songs. The temporal settings of the songs follow Woody from his Oklahoma birthplace through the Dust Bowl, New York City and California. With minimal set pieces to denote his travels, Woody and the company sing his familiar songs about "Dust Storm Disaster" and "Hard Travellin'." They sensitively portray the radical nature of Woody's politics while remaining fervently enthralled by his music.
The banda of strings and an occasional wind instrument is a foot-stomping trio dressed in Jocelyn Herndon's vividly descriptive, plain costumes. The choreography is interesting and provides motivation for crosses and actions while remaining understated and unobtrusive. For the song "Bound for Glory" from Woody's hobo days, a set change erects poles and diagonals to denote a train. The singers crouch on a platform and rock back and forth rhythmically while Woody climbs a train car ladder with his guitar. This is one of the most animated scenes in over two quick hours, until the well known finale. "This Land Is Your Land" invites the audience to sing along while the singers form a vee shape. This is fortunate staging because it allows the singers to concentrate and conscientiously deliver their work.
Suggestive of the diversity of American culture, the show opens with a multi-voiced cacophony that blends into harmonies. During an ensemble number of "The People I Owe," singer Lisa Asher's twangy voice harmonizes outstandingly with Megan Pearl Smith's soprano. Baritone Berwick Haynes provides a strong basis for the other singers. Tenor Matt Mueller as the Cisco Kid competes with Woody at guitar busking on a New York street in a hat lazzi. The two subtly sabotage each other while singing and playing their hilarious duet "New York Town."
The show is meant to be feel-good nostalgia and ennobling themes set to an uncomplicated, tuneful score. MTC has succeeded admirably in creating a comfortable, professional production. It's more than a concert of Woody Guthrie's best songs, but it's definitely worth seeing for the music alone.
Woody Guthrie's American Song continues through June 20 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave, Mill Valley. Tickets ($31) are available online at www.marintheatre.org or by phone at 415.388.5208. _____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Annie (Delia MacDougall) tries to free Norman (Manoel Felciano) from the bloody brambles in her garden.
Photo by Kevin Berne.
The English people seem to believe that the secret to life lies in their backyard garden. Round and Round the Garden, Alan Ayckbourn's comedy now at American Conservatory Theater, sets the libidinous librarian Norman inside the walls of a lush, vine-covered garden behind the house where he seduces various women. The other characters are aghast at the disasters he creates. In an ironic metaphor, he becomes entangled in the vines.
The inter-related cast of six moves in and out of the house, but the garden is the center of activity. And Norman is the center of the plot. His affair with his sister-in-law causes hilarious complications for the rest of the family and one outsider. This colorful, scenic production features ACT company member Manoel Feliciano as Norman. His internal occupation of his character projects consistently and deviously. He tells a lie to justify his presence when he goes away with his wife’s sister Annie (Delia MacDougall). As Norman formulates the lie in his head for a brief few seconds, Manoel’s face delivers a dramatic sequence that is bald-faced and funny because nobody but the audience can see the lie.
Manoel commands the stage as he intensely portrays the self-centered Norman who motivates the actions of the other characters. Other company members play his abused family. René Augesen as his frustrated wife is appealing as she lovingly accepts Norman’s conquests. Anthony Fusco as Reg the brother-in-law seems sincerely supportive of Norman but exasperated.
Ayckbourn’s sly wit weaves through the farce. This cast delivers his Britishisms with a passable accent. Many of his physical comedy gimmicks are effectively carried out. The routine with folding lawn chairs is doubly funny because of its predictability. The drunken rape scene on the grass and the family’s reactions to it are deftly set up by Director John Rando to make the payoff appallingly humorous.
Round and Round the Garden plays through May 23 at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($10 to $67) are available online at www.act-sf.org or by phoning 415.749.2228. ___________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Tim Kniffin as Anton visits the hospital room of Libby, the young woman he paralyzed
Photo by Jennifer
Imagine you are a history professor who has run down a young woman. That’s a strong premise for guilty recriminations and atonement. But then add that, if it was not exactly her fault, her paralysis could have been avoided if she had not been texting her rejected lover while she was running in the street.
Then imagine your professor at her hospital bedside, trying to make it right with her, and she demands, yes demands that he take off her gown and kiss her breasts. A sexual frenzy ensues. In the end he takes over her hospital bed and she walks again. An Accident, now at Magic Theatre, is not a sad story. Her optimism and his devotion to her beg for a sequel. These two, who met “by accident” as she says, should stay together.
Lydia Stryk’s world premiere play An Accident is a pounding two-person drama with utterly compelling pile drivers of empathy for the characters and surprisingly good humor. The action centers on the hospital bed of Libby (played by the beautiful and graceful young Arwen Anderson), the quadriplegic who still has a hyperactive, sardonic mind. Tim Kniffen as Anton, the guy who lifted his Toyota Corolla off of her, is guilt-ridden and apologetic. The dramatic tension of Stryk’s writing is sharply intensified by the hospital room setting. Flirting, courtship and cars typically go together, but rarely in such a tragic environment.
The stage set is severe, angular and unmistakably a hospital room. A finale opening of the vertical blinds to springtime foliage makes the couple’s recovery more poignant. Some isolated monologues clumsily serve to fill in background information, but the interactions between Libby and Anton are thrilling. There is much more to the mixture in Rob Melrose’s direction, but the heated physical attraction between the attractive young woman who can only move her head and the older divorced academic builds to a fierce tropical swelter.
Arwen displays rugged theatrical discipline as she lies on the bed complaining that she cannot move. Tim ably exhibits a major internal conflict over his regrets about loving the body he wrecked. Their acting techniques and Rob’s direction make this one of the most richly realistic, while sweetly ironic productions Magic has put up since Loretta Greco took over as Artistic Director.
An Accident continues through May 9 at Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center (Marina Blvd. and Buchanan St.), San Francisco. Tickets ($40 to $55) are available online at www.magictheatre.org or by phone at 415.441.8822. _____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Michaela Greeley as diva Maria Callas and Holly Nugent as her student Sharon Graham
Photo by Lois Tema
Maria Callas, the glamorous opera queen, began to teach later in her career, as many has-beens do. Terrence McNally wrote the play Master Class, now at New Conservatory, to illustrate the impact of her flamboyant teaching techniques on aspiring students. She had a very public sharp tongue and he has written her some zingers in this comedy, 'though she does succinctly express some truths about music and the stage, as well as muse about her personal life.
Three students and a pianist provide some lovely moments of singing, almost a relief from Callas' barbs. Her imperious attitude engulfs these moments. Every mundane interchange becomes a lesson. She chides the good-natured pianist (Kenneth Helman as Manny) for wearing a red sweater, saying he has no "look." Then she picks on the audience for having no look. "Get one," she commands, "As soon as possible."
Michaela Greeley as the tempestuous divina boldly creates a tense atmosphere of being in a classroom where everyone is sweating bullets hoping not to be called on. Her three victims wilt under her venomous comments, but they undoubtedly learned something.
Alyssa Stone as the first soprano tries exceedingly hard to please Callas and do as she directs. Her strong projection of worry unnerves the audience. Stone has just the right look for an eager, aspiring professional singer with no future. Our hearts go out to her when she attempts a bravura staging gesture, but Maria is constantly negative. Stone the singer is a good alto with a thin voice and some interesting head resonances, but she does not kneel according to the composer's instructions. Callas commands her to kneel at the proper moment.
The other two students don't fare much better. Tenor Tony Tightpants (Gustavo Hernández as a smugly sneering Anthony Candolino) gets lambasted for being macho and soprano Sharon Graham (Holly Nugent in a coy red dress) is humiliated for daring to do Lady Macbeth.
Between students Callas talks about herself. She mentions professional rivalries and her relationship with Aristotle Onassis. Greeley expresses a passionate but polite hatred for Tebaldi, a well-known story, but her longing for Ari is unconvincing. When the actress is relating to other characters she storms with a biting tongue and a quick, sarcastic wit, but her monologues tend to become loosely inhabited recitations. The play is about Callas, and Greeley takes us directly to the funny and harsh taskmistress.
Master Class continues through May 2 at New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. Tickets ($22 to $40) are available online at www.nctcsf.org or by phone at 415.861.8972. ______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(from
L to R) Timothy Beagley, Jeff Garrett and Brook Robinson in an emotional and
plot turning scene from the Ross Valley Players production of "The Boys
Next Door"
Photo by Wendell H. Wilson
The Boys Next Door gives a gentle, friendly ribbing to those of us who are less fortunate. The warm humor flourishing in Ross Valley Players' production of this comedy about a group home for the handicapped allows for humanizing insights to the problems of other people. The three retarded men reach out to us from their mental chaos and force us to love them as we laugh at them. The actors unselfconsciously project their own fondness for their characters.
Each of the four roommates has an extremely distinct character, and the actors never lose sight of the theme of lovable daffiness. However, one of them is on the morose side of lunacy. The actor playing his part consistently maintains the air of a tragicomic hero. He is diagnosed as schizophrenic by Jack the social worker, who describes the others as retarded or "borderline." At the play's happy ending, each triumphs in his own way.
No matter how trivial the event or how well-meaning the remark, Arnold will misconstrue it in some oddly tangential way. Lucien can be counted on to misinterpret everything. If it can be misunderstood, borderline Norman will not get it and react in eccentric ways, usually involving donuts. Their harmless comic chaos is riddled with misconstrued situations and pleasant conclusions. Schizo Barry is able to rise partially out of his self-centered world through a necessary confrontation. Jack is extremely patient as he explains things to the audience and coaxes on the boys.
David Yen as a 1984 nerd is comfortable with Arnold's pathetic attempts to migrate to Russia on a train. Wendell H. Wilson plays Lucien with a lanky juvenile innocence and is ideally suited to the black patois. His only action verb is "be." At a surprise party he says, "Jack be leavin'." Josh List loves his character like Norm loves the donuts from the shop where he works. His awkward kiss with Sheila from a community social at the residence complex is tender and charming. Brook Robinson bleakly and sympathetically portrays Barry's inner turmoil. In the scene where he meets his estranged father, the one-armed man (an intact Jeff Garrett) Barry meekly seethes at his brutality. Timothy Beagley as a professionally reliable Jack presents a very dedicated friend who easily tosses off social-workerese language.
The action takes place mainly in the living area of a four bedroom apartment, with location scenes played in downstage areas. Set Designer Kenneth Rowland has a sensitive knack for describing a situation with the construction and dressing of a stage setting. Kim Bromley's direction keeps the pacing tight and generously weaves the humor into the situation of people suffering the results of years of confusion. The heartbreaking aspects are not heavy-handed and the well-timed laughs are set up and delivered with perfect rhythm.
The Boys Next Door plays through April 18 at the Barn Theatre, Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, Ross. Tickets ($15 to $25) are available online at www.rossvalleyplayers.com or by phone at 415.456.9555. __________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Kemp (Marco Barricelli) does not understand why Grace (Olympia Dukakis) is putting on makeup when she will be dying soon.
Photo by Kevin Berne.
Vigil, now at American Conservatory Theater, keeps a humorous death watch over a grabbing venal relative and treads on the edges of necrophilia. In a sharply designed production, this play pits an eager, earnest nephew against the wiles of a lonely old lady. He is not in the situation he thinks he is, and she coyly makes the most of it. The show weaves a fine whole cloth of irony from elements of mockery and satire.
Kemp arrives unannounced to a downtown loft, saying he received a note that his aunt was dying. He makes no pretense. He is after only Grace's money. As the play progresses through quick scenes punctuated by blackouts, all his self-centered monologues seem to end with a reference to death arrangements, hers. At the end of one he presents her with a written will to sign, naming him beneficiary.
The superb comic pacing by Director and Playwright Morris Panych expertly leads up to a delicious plot twist. ACT veteran Marco Barricelli as nephew Kemp deftly threads the warp and weft of the humor by staying consistently focused on his nebbishy meanderings about himself. The dramatic slub in the fabric is his epiphany and moment of undoing. Another great ACT star Olympia Dukakis as aunt Grace has remarkably few lines, at first. By the end she is downright loquacious. The artistry of the play construction lies in preparing for the reversal by deliberately making Kemp boring. This also draws attention to a strong actress who must show reactions without speaking, a difficult training exercise at least. All the while Barricelli is speaking unanswered, Dukakis' face and demeanor continuously reveal a charming woman caught up in an unexpected but enticing new circumstance and slyly turning it to her advantage.
She plays mute until the finale of Act I. When he has become a passed-out victim of his own device, she wishes him a "Merry Christmas." Act II opens with a hint of remorse. He attempts to make himself smother her with a pillow, but can't. Before she can eat the pudding he has poisoned, he takes it away. His sabotage of an electric lamp backfires in an experience he describes as "oddly satisfying." His futile Wily Coyote plots continue until he hears the police at the door.
ACT's presents a creatively accurate interpretation of the playwright's intentions. The story is an old chestnut: the vultures circle the dying corpse. This interpretation of it is bright and new. The acting is always thoroughly engaging. His impatience for her death is appallingly crass. She appears to have trouble formulating her carefully chosen words, but not much. Her well timed, flatly factual lines always get laughs.
She lives in a loft-style place amidst a scatter of cartons, trunks, a dress form, and broken furniture. The middle of three askew scenic flats has three levels of high windows decorated with brown paper shapes strongly suggestive of a cubist painting of a city skyline. The use of the quick scenes with blackouts for some prop adjustments keeps the show moving quickly, despite Kemp's repetitious confessions of self-loathing. The months of Kemp's protracted visit pass with understated but obvious visual cues.
Watching the ironic surprise is well worth the price of admission. Dukakis steals the show anyway, but that moment keeps the audience transfixed. The conclusion warmly resolves a personal contradiction between isolationism and human contact.
Vigil runs through April 18 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($67 to $27) are available online at www.act-sf.org or by phone at 415.749.2228. _________________________
Aimee McCrary as Iago in Othello
Photo by David Allen
Successfully updating a timeless classic, African-American Shakespeare Company sets Othello in a battle zone with contemporary people. A judicious streamlining of the original text and the excision of some characters allow for a fast-paced production. Some added dialogue ties the plot together in a concise way.
The Moor is a Marine Corps general and his officers are in the Navy. With five actors and simplified set changes, the play moves quickly from Iago's hatred of his boss Othello to the tragic results of his plot to make him think he is cuckolded. Clever script changes work in seamlessly. The sword of doom becomes Iago's knife that Othello uses to kill the supposed cuckolder Cassio. Iago uses her cell phone to spread a rumor about Desdemona making "the beast with two backs" with a black man.
Tall black Jeff Handy as Othello displays inner turmoil effectively, but his monologues tend to be monotonously didactic. His versatility as an actor is evident when he talks like an American hillbilly at one point. Sam Leichter plays Cassio as a one-dimensional buffoon, so we do not develop much of an emotional attachment to him and thus do not overly bemoan his death.
In the hankie-argument scene, Handy creates a powerful confrontation with his deceitful wife Desdemona. Vivian Kane plays her part with a sweet innocence and a credible devotion to Othello, but she overlays it with a feel of the hapless victim. Meggy Hai Trang as Amelia, Iago's wife, projects a muted, half-hearted sense of regret at the part she has played in Iago's schemes.
Iago is played intensely by black actress Aimee McCrary. In her monologues she speaks very personally to the audience. She is able to seem powerless over her hatred for Othello, yet shows a seething, deeply repressed desire for him. At intermission, Director Sherri Young was overheard when questioned by an audience member about the relationship between Amelia and Iago. She said, “She’s bisexual." She went on with, "We have student matinees," and described the students as wondering, “What’s goin’ on?”
The actors' blocking is primarily on the thrust part of the stage, except for the final scene, which is played under a blood-red light behind a gauzy, sparkly scrim. The senses of location and action are clear, and the actors benefit greatly by having minimal set changes.
They all deliver Shakespeare's lines intelligibly and with graceful rhythms. The new lines fit well with the Bard's style. Some interactions are turned into monologues. The additions are surprising and effectively advance the story line without being jarring. None of the poetry of Shakespeare is lost.
This compelling version of a tale of jealousy maintains the density of Shakespearean text while being modernized. The African-American Shakespeare Company has produced an action drama that is easily accessible to the non-Elizabethan audience, but that is artfully true to Shakespeare's intent.
Othello plays through Sunday, April 18 at Buriel Clay Theatre in the African-American Cultural Center, 762 Fulton Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($20 to $30) are available online at www.BrownPaperTickets.com. _______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Jeanette Harrison as Cadence Marie Verse and Aldo Billingslea as Demeter
Photo courtesy of The Cutting Ball Theater
Cutting Ball has mounted a deeply moving, challenging poetic drama of a spiritual journey punctuated by an uplifting church service and Mo-town choreography. In his play …and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi, Oakland playwright Marcus Gardley uses the Mississippi River (an actual character named "Miss Ssippi" (Nicole C. Julien is ebullient as a narrator) to tell a Civil-War-era story about a runaway slave on a fruitless search for his lost daughter Poem.
The slave Damascus is -- naturally -- trapped and hanged from a bare branch, but a dreadlocked Jesus (a gleeful David Westley Skillman with internalized holiness) descends to the hanging tree and gives Damascus a new life as a woman Demeter (de-MEET-er, he insists). As she weaves through River towns and decaying plantations, an uplifting Chorus of three (Rebecca Frank, Halili Knox and Erica Richardson) in a lineup with matching light blue-green gowns (highly descriptive costumes throughout by designer Callie Floor) support Ms. Ssippi's soulful renditions of gospel music standards such as "Take Me to the Water" and "Follow the Drinking Gourd."
Director Amy Mueller adheres to the texture of Gardley's play, using the framework of a religious ceremony to tell about American and family history, folklore, myth, and musings on race. The dozen cast members draw in the audience to the bare stage, whether they are enacting a ceremony with singing or depicting the estate of the white Verse family, who may or may not be on their side. Set Designer Michael Locher's specially-built plank deck on top of the usually bare floor at the EXIT on Taylor gives the players a clear sense of space, and the choreography thrusts them right into the audience.
Gardley's plot develops slowly, and his dialogue veers wildly between the cloyingly poetic (such as when a mamma tells her daughter, "Yer paw ain't writin' you because he's dead," and she replies, "No, mama, he ain't dead. He's just better off.") and racist polemics larded with blackisms (such as, "… a beauty that can only be described as black," or "The house is now black." The play script is rich, but this production is somewhat at sea. While unable to realize fully the complexities of the work, Cutting Ball elegantly paces the rising tension developed by the succeeding scenes of Act II.
Ms. Ssippi leads the gospel singing quartet in good harmony and zealous enthusiasm. The entire cast works congenially together as an ensemble. Some standout performers are David Sinaiko as Jean Verse, a slightly venal Union soldier; the most animated Martin F. Grizzelle, Jr. as Brer Bit in a green top hat doing his slap-dance routine on special leather patches ingeniously sewn to his costume; and Aldo Billingslea (Actors Equity Association) as an impassioned Damascus/Demeter, especially when he's in his mammy drag.
…and Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi continues through April 11 at The Cutting Ball Theater in Residence at EXIT on Taylor, 277 Taylor Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($15 to $30) are available online at www.cuttingball.com or by phone at 800.838.3006.
Also see http://www.sfexaminer.com
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Kathryn Tkel as Maggie and Chad Deverman (Courtesy of Actors Equity Association) as Flaco in Den of Thieves
Photo by Jessica Palopoli
Den of Thieves merrily lampoons organized crime families, grand larceny, drug dealing, torture, and murder, but kleptomania and compulsive overeating drive the plot. This dark comedy by Stephen Adly Guirgis is now playing at The SF Playhouse in a fast-paced, riveting production with an incredibly eccentric collection of characters, from a hapless addiction counselor to a red-hot stripper. The unexpected encounters and skewed intersections between differing cultures create some absurd situations so tense they can only be resolved by laughter. Director Susi Damilano has expertly timed the laugh lines and the development of the unlikely but scary plot.
Her hyped ex-boyfriend Flaco (Chad Deverman as an over-optimistic petty criminal plays the pseudo-bad boy with a charming innocence.) arrives with his newest caper and newest girlfriend Boochie the erotic dancer (played with a trashy gusto by Corinne Proctor). Flaco, looking cool in his shades, pork pie hat, wife-beater undershirt, suspenders, chain, and tats is after $750K. He suspiciously searches for a man under the table and finds Paul, who happens to be a safecracker, among his many other peccadilloes. The four of them join forces to crack the safe at the disco.
That's the Act I setup for the obviously ill-fated caper heist. Act II opens with four hooded figures, tied in chairs in a basement while a yegg talks on his cell phone. The disco was run by the mafia, who caught them. Little Tuna (Ashkon Davaran) and his sadistic sidekick Sal (Peter Ruocco) are holding them until Big Tuna gets back. When Al "the Big Tuna" Pescatore comes down stairs he is aghast that the hostages have been there all weekend. "Why are they still alive?" he asks incredulously. The hostages are left with a dawn deadline for their decision on whom to sacrifice.
The two yegg actors define their characters with an aesthetic sense true to the play script. Ruocco's sinister Sal takes great pleasure in his cold blood. Davaran plays Little Tuna with a complex sense of ennui over killing people. Joe Madero as Big Tuna is affable and avuncular as the Don, but Proctor creates a strong secondary plot dynamic when she flirts with him ("Please don't kill us, Mr. Sexy Mafia Man.") She steals the show when she sits on his lap and asks him a naughty question.
The two sets by Bill English are simple but effectively dressed to denote specific places and circumstances. The costumes by Bree Hylkema are completely believable and accurately denote their specific characters. The conflict between the two groups is snide satire; by comparison to the thieves the Mafiosi look normal. The actors seem to take delight in the premise of the play: to an unlikely group of rag-tags in a tense situation stir in a heavy helping of mob threats. They all love their characters.
Den of Thieves continues through April 17 at The San Francisco Playhouse, 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($40) are available online at http://www.sfplayhouse.org/pages/tickets.php or by phone at 415.677.9596. ____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Devon (Brian Tybom) squares off with dad George (Raymond Hobbs) in The Philadelphian
Photo courtesy of Three Wise Monkeys Theatre Company
The new one-act plays at B. O. A. 9 slither through such pleasant themes as alienation, alcoholism, incest, and copyright infringement. The 9th Annual Bay One-Acts Festival, now at Boxcar Theatre, features local talent and playwrights. Program 1 of this two-part series presents six plays in two hours, the shortest running five minutes and the longest ones around twenty-five minutes. The productions feature minimal but distinctive set pieces, such as a table and a chair, and very few props. The audience can effectively focus on the plays themselves and expand their own imaginations.
Edward Luhn's Generic Play opens the show with a couple engaged in a sterile dialogue stripped of all but minimal details. The actors (Laura Jane Coles and Derek Fischer) are able to do a lot with their reactions, such as when he sighs the line, “exasperated assent” or when she is highly offended and snaps out, “Oh! Anger!”
The longer Query by Bennett Fisher satirizes do-gooders and artists. An unctuous, in-your-face social worker Priscilla Poplarson (Kathryn Wood) interviews a hippie woman “life artist” Arwen Archer (Alana Waksman) who does not know what she wants to do. But the real reason she came to DPWHOPWTPP (the Department of People Who Help Other People with Their Personal Problems) is her dogtooth; “It didn’t need to be pulled out.” Both the actresses, and the mute Banjo Man (Brian Trybom), distinctively differentiate their parts.
In his play The Catcher in the Rye, Jon Brooks of San Francisco Mime Troupe is making a formal apology to J. D. Salinger’s estate for copyright infringement. He was using Salinger's character in a play. Then his own play is interrupted by Holden Caulfield reciting the opening lines of the Catcher book, Franny & Zoe in the bathtub together and Snow White looking for seven little guys. They and several more heavily copyright-protected characters spin out of control while he shouts at them. Scarlet O'Hara and Snow White make out passionately. A drunken Ronald MacDonald squats on his buns.
After intermission the plays explore irony, alienation and cuckoldry. Chris Barth's Reading with Friends pits the friends against the playwright's locked bedroom door on the night of his play reading. They are distinctively drawn characters, especially Laura Jane Coles as a sardonic guest. They surmise a suicide and simultaneously start to call 911.
In Altered Landscape by William Bivins, a couple revisits the wilderness site of their honeymoon only to find utter change, both in the outer and the inner territory. The river that saw their passion has turned into a logjam.
Sam Leichter's The Philadelphian shows why dad drinks: George (Hobbs) was seducing dad's fiancé who now has a ten-year-old son that looks like him. Devon (Trybom) is an intense, confrontational father in a striking character study of frustration, anger and forgiveness.
Three Wise Monkeys Theatre Company presents B. O. A. 9 through March 13 at Boxcar Theatre, 505 Natoma Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($12 to $24) are available online at www.threewisemonkeys.org or by phone at 415.776.7427. ________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Joyce Henderson as Vi Venable and Mark Bird as Dr. Cukrowitz
Photo courtesy of Actors Theatre of San Francisco
In his play Suddenly Last Summer Tennessee Williams showed his usual penchant for inflammatory themes, like drugs, homosexuality, cannibalism, and pandering. The Actors Theatre develops these and other insights to the human character with artful stage skill in their new production of the work by a great American dramatist. The staging by Christian Phillips focuses on the characters of this largely conversational play. The art that Williams wrote into the play lies in the hideous and bleak imagery of his words, and Actors has delivered a beautifully engrossing opportunity to watch these scenes being visualized by the cast.
The story centers on the dead poet Sebastian. We never see him, but the entire play is haunted by his presence. From the hysterical protectionist rants of his mother Violet Venable (Joyce Henderson) to the drug-induced description of his gruesome demise by his cousin (Larissa Archer as Catherine Foxhill) Sebastian drives the story. When the truth finally comes out, Vi is mortified and Catherine is purged.
Director Phillips has done a masterful job of pacing Williams' string of revelations. Doctor Cukrowitz (Mark Bird) patiently awaits the mother's protestations of her son's innocence. With a faraway look in her eyes, Henderson plays Vi as being like a controlling mother in another world. In this world she has no son to adulate and dominate.
Mark Bird in his seersucker suit portrays the Dr. as chivalrous when he comes from the state to interview for the case. His slightly simpering air effectively connotes an unctuous civil servant. His persistent, low-key questioning makes both interviews painfully incisive. When he says to Vi, "you're meeting this girl who you think is responsible for your son's death," he offers sympathy and displays tenacity in a subtle blend.
The girl is Sebastian's cousin, who was with him when he died. Larissa flutters like a Southern belle when she complains to the Dr. that she will have "just your little black bag to remember you by, "when he leaves. After the Dr. gives her an injection, he tells her, "Give me all your resistance," and to count backwards from 100.
"I feel it already," Larissa says in a coy accent, the same one she uses to try to seduce the Dr. When he gets her to "tell the true story," she spills the beans, the ones mother Vi wanted to hold in reserve. Her son was a predatory pederast, and Vi had served as his procurer. Larissa displays a convincing sense of epiphany as Catherine suddenly realizes that she also has become his procurer.
Actors has produced this Twentieth Century play with a highly sensitive attention to detail. From the romantic moonlit garden setting with lush climbing vines to the intense focus on Catherine by the supporting cast during her story, Phllips allows Williams' rhythm and cadences to dominate the staging. William's forces us to visualize -- with our own imaginations -- the horrible demise of the unseen poet from New Orleans.
Suddenly Last Summer plays through March 27 at Actors Theatre of SF, 855 Bush, Between Mason and Taylor Streets, San Francisco. Tickets ($10 to $35) are available online at www.ticketweb.com or by phone at (415) 296-9179; more Info at www.actorstheatresf.org. _________________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Cole Alexander Smith, Amy Resnick, Brian Herndon, and Marissa Keltie while watching the Hale-Bopp comet
Photo by Nina Ball
What at first appear to be two separate stories in Geetha Reddy's Safe House, now at SF Playhouse, turns out to be a disjointed time line. A family of four goes through domestic violence, an earthquake, a crossbow, knives, and an explosion on the way to reconciling their differences. On the way, the insane twins, led by a crazed one-mommy militia, try to kill their father. The final scene jumps way back in time for a satisfactory and touching ending.
This joint venture between the Playhouse and PlayGround makes good use of the second stage in their first production. The set uses minimal pieces and rear-wall projections to shift scenes between a wilderness, a camp and a home. Marshall the father (Brian Herndon) is stuck in a pit in the wilderness after being away from his family for three years. While he calls for help, his daughter is standing on a cliff high above, aiming at him through her telescopic sight. In a sequence guided more by the flow of information than the flow of time, the rest of the play explains how this situation came about.
Reddy's play, developed in the 2008 Bay Area Playwrights Festival, finds its fully staged world premiere as part of The Sandbox, a lab for new works. Director Nancy Carlin has created a vivid interpretation of the script with intensely involved actors. Marshall is the brick in the family, and the only stable one. Herndon consistently acts beleaguered as the exasperated bread winner. Amy Resnick as mother Em uses a heightened, sometimes nerve-racking manic quality to depict a doting mom who will do anything to protect her darling son, including teaching her daughter to fight and kill.
The wheelchair-using son came out of the womb with a neurological condition and has trouble grasping reality. Cole Alexander Smith looks like he is having fun playing this part, especially with the glee he takes in portraying the boy's fondness for violence. Smith also doubles as a hale and hearty guide to Ranger training. Marissa Keltie as the daughter maneuvers easily within the paranoiac schizophrenia of her character, between beating up her brother and teaching him how to hold a knife.
The family looks like a train wreck, but the genuine emotions expressed permeate the entire play. Em is an awe-inspiring character because of her excesses, but we eventually come to feel great sympathy for her, just as we do for the other characters. The fast-paced work presents a fascinating dark humor.
Safe House continues through March 6 at The SF Playhouse, 588 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($15 for previews; $30 regular) are available online at www.sfplayhouse.org or by phone at 415.677.9596.
By Albert Goodwyn
Emiliano and his daughter Marina
Photo courtesy of Barbara Michelson-Harder
Symbolism reigns supreme in the plays of Nilo Cruz, and Off Broadway West Theatre Company pays close attention to his use of metaphoric representation in their lively current production of Beauty of the Father. In a southern Mediterranean setting, four characters, with the help of a ghost, meet to resolve a love triangle between an eccentric Spanish artist, his estranged American daughter and her Moroccan boyfriend. In the end, the ghost of Federico García Lorca chooses to take the bullet meant for the bisexual lover. "It only takes a few seconds," he tells us.
Lorca was an avant-garde poet, playwright and theatre director who was assassinated during the Spanish Civil War. In Cruz' play, the Lorca character talks only to the patriarch artist Emiliano, unseen by everyone else, except -- inexplicably -- during a picnic. Through his lines he gives background and narration to the audience, as well as counsel to Emiliano. Director Richard Harder's use of stage freezes during the highly symbolic eclipse sequence naturally provides a physical interpretation of Lorca's monologue where he states that everything "can be arrested when the moon passes between the sun and the earth."
In the opening of this production -- after some explosive Flamenco dancing by Shannon Botts -- father Emiliano (Durand Garcia) is painting at an easel stage right and his daughter Marina (Natasha Chacon) Is standing stage left bemoaning an empty birdcage. We only visualize the free bird, and we only see the painting at the end. This two-edged allegory about creation and loss, freedom and sacrifice gives a foretaste of further deft weaving of interlocking, visually depicted tropes.
Harder smoothly and unobtrusively develops the meaning of these stage turns. Michael Carlisi enters as Lorca in his ice-cream suit and white shoes, looking pale as a disembodied spirit, and taunts Emiliano about the death of Emiliano's first wife and the arrival of their daughter with Karim (Chris Holland), his former lover. Emiliano is disturbed to see his little bad boy Moroccan perfume salesman again, especially with his daughter. The scent of jealousy and betrayal reeks through the Andalusia hacienda. Emiliano wants to be rid of Karim and drags out a long shotgun. Even Marina is innocently taken aback. "I didn't know that my father and Karim were …" She trails off, unable to formulate -- or face -- her thoughts. Emiliano's second wife Paquita (Jeanette Sarmiento) begs to light the fire and burn the demons.
Harder's pacing steadily develops and intensifies the tension. The actors provide workmanlike but uneven portrayals. The ghost mumbles in a vaguely Castilian accent, but his smooth insouciance toward mortality is charming. The histrionic artist is too obviously waiting for his next line cue, but warms up in Act II. The second wife shifts from being completely in character to staring into the middle distance in search of her next line. The daughter actress stays halfheartedly in character, creating half of a charming young woman when she displays reserved contact with her father. The lover boy is low key and can't seem to muster up any sense of old affection for the father, but his consistent eagerness to please all sides strongly drives the production. The sense of place is well realized by Director Harder's set, and the minimal use of props concentrates the focus on the interactions of the characters themselves, be they live or dead.
This romantic production speaks Cruz' poetry eloquently on many different levels. The show is technically flawless. Presenting but not overemphasizing the philosophical implications of the compelling story adds mystical dimensions. The dramatic spectacle alone, the sense of eavesdropping on a real incident, is a grand engrossing show, regardless of the many layers of interpretation.
Beauty of the Father continues through March 13 at The Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($30) are available online at www.offbroadwaywest.org or by phone at 800.838.3006.
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Wozzeck Sung as Film Noir
By Albert Goodwyn
Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck, derived from Georg Büchner's play, takes the hapless title character through moral depravity, weird science, illegitimacy, jealousy, infidelity, and murder. The music of the early Twentieth Century opera, just produced at Yerba Buena Center by Ensemble Parallèle, is modern with aggressively atonal passages perfectly suited to the brutal happenings on stage, tempered by lushly romantic passages. On a set with shapes as biting and angular as the music, accompanied by video projections, a stellar cast of local artists gave a performance to rival any other opera company in The City.
Set in a small garrison town in Germany about 1835, Wozzeck is a lowly army barber. As he is shaving his Captain, the officer chides him for having an out-of-wedlock child with a prostitute. Marie the mother dotes on the preadolescent child, but she and Wozzeck no longer get along. In fact she has her eye on a new conquest, the pompous Drum Major. After he rapes her, Wozzeck's jealousy can no longer be contained. He kisses her one last time by a moonlit pond, then stabs her. Searching for the knife, he comes to a bad end.
Berg's hybrid style of avant-garde music was sensitively performed by an ensemble of musicians from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music under the energetic conducting by Nicole Paiement, Artistic Director and Founder of the Conservatory. She describes the score as being "at turns terrifying, serene, transparent, and then obscured." The singers were all ably articulated the nuances of Berg's jumps and slides into and out of melody and dissonance.
As the half-mad Wozzeck, bass-baritone Bojan Knezevic never fails to thrill and elicit sympathy with his rich, highly trained voice. The recent graduate of scholarship programs at San Francisco Opera is also a skilled actor, projecting his emotional plight with an internal consistency of facial gestures. His intensity is matched by SFOpera compatriot bass-baritone Philip Skinner as The Doctor who experiments on Wozzeck and finds his dead body. Having worked together in several other operas, the two play off of each other with genuine character and both produce flawlessly rich, entirely different voices. But tenor John Duykers as the bumptious drunken Captain tended to overawe them with his comic interpretation and assertive voice. Mezzo-soprano Patricia Green as the tragic Marie sang the high notes of her soaring plaintive pleadings with a pure sustain.
Ensemble Parallèle's cinematic-style staging made elaborate use of large-scale video projections of live singing and prerecorded clips to set scenes and to highlight the action. The monochrome projections and the steely dark set gave the show a nourish style. Seeing the singing faces enlarged on screen at the same time as watching them live made for a different operatic experience. The show brought together grand opera and theatre. The Ensemble has a lengthy history of ambitious, greatly successful operatic productions, the last being Lou Harrison's Young Caesar. They will next participate in the Pacific Rim Festival in April with an all-Varèse concert.
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Doubt: A Parable
By Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Roselyn Hallet as Sr. James, Scarlett Hepworth as Sr. Aloysius and Andrew Nance as Fr. Flynn
Photo by Lois Tema
The conflict of John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt, now at New Conservatory, is between certainty and suspicion. This intensely intimate production starkly illuminates the themes of pederasty and guilt within the Roman Catholic Church. The severely economical staging in the black box Walker Theatre brings the erring priest and the vindictive nun right into the laps of the audience. The effect is thought-provoking, heart-rending and sometimes humorous.
Sister Aloysius (played with an almost vicious self-righteousness by Scarlett Hepworth) is the disciplinarian principal of a school for difficult boys. She has been looking for the chance to bring down the over friendly Father Flynn (Andrew Nance paying close attention to the nuances of a weak holy man), and she gets it with the help of a naïve young eighth-grade teacher Sister James. Roselyn Hallett, in the most consistently inhabited performance in the play, enacts her with a palpable sense of compassion.
A major character is never seen: the altar boy who seems to be Fr. Flynn's pet. We only get to meet the boy's mother, who wants the situation left alone because she knows the boy is "that way." Pamela Smith's black patois and her act of indignity are forced at first, but as she warms up to the part she becomes intensely involved and vehement, expressing a mother's acceptance and love
Sr. Aloysius' overbearing strictness looms over the cleverly lit play even when she is offstage. Fr. Flynn's inner turmoil becomes more pathetic as the doubt of his guilt slowly changes to certainty. Sr. James presents an ideal of purity and innocence.
Shanley's writing deftly interweaves a number of very specific themes with ambiguous propositions and Ben Randle's direction highlights both sides with a highly developed aesthetic sensibility.
Doubt: A Parable continues through February 28 at New Conservatory Theatre Center, 25 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. Tickets ($22 to $40) are available online at www.nctcsf.org or by phone at 415.861.8972. ________________________
The Bright River
Tim Barsky and his Bright River combo on stage
Photo courtesy of Laird Archer
The Bright River flows through Iraq, the afterlife and South Berkeley. Tim Barsky’s critically acclaimed musical has reopened in a larger venue, Brava Theater Center. Barsky as narrating musician of his hip-hop opera sings about his search for a girl named Calliope, his meeting with a raven and his confrontation with an Arab who says, “Please do not give us any more democracy.” As he moves around a stage set with urban detritus, he is accompanied by drums, a cello, a human beat box, and himself on flutes. He plays more than one to accompany his story as the music builds to a crescendo finale.
From the moment he enters through the house to the stage, his flute and piccolo playing repeatedly punctuate his narration. His playing is at first discordant, but by the time he reaches the stage, his command of musical artistry informs the show. At first it looks like a lone piper piping through the wilderness with naïve expectations for his trek to the big city. Then he becomes the leader of a smoothly synchronized musical production with sophisticated themes.
His unerring sensitivity to the rhythms of street argot and the casual fluency of his person-to-person impressionist attitudes create distinct, richly detailed but brief glimpses into everyday struggles of specific societal groups, such as mystics, super-naturalists, Jews, and Arabs. His enthusiastically animated delivery takes the show beyond the club scene -- clubs would be thrilled to present such an ambitious act -- and into the leading thrust of contemporary performance styles. The imagery and cadences of his language are reminiscent of Beatitude poetry, and the gritty landscapes he depicts recall the critical observations of Kerouac or Ginsberg. The music he has written gives an up-to-date texture to that ancient style. He shifts characters with major changes in his voice. Sometimes he speaks as himself, setting up the story of Calliope. Other times he speaks in a raspy Tom Waits-like voice. He interacts in this way with a detective and the raven. The people he describes range from an Iraqi to a social worker. His meanderings take him across the set and to a rooftop, all the while earnestly and effectively engaging the audience.
Onstage, his backup trio plays with an edge. Percussionist Kevin Carnes hits his drum kit with a lively, forceful beat and provides some preprogrammed riffs. Cellist Alex Kelly provides a solid bass foundation, usually bowing the strings but sometimes plucking them. His solo is a weepy, discordant plaint. Carlos Aguirre plays himself as a human beat box. His ability to create and mimic sounds with his voice is impressive and distinctive. In his solo he enacts a club bouncer checking cards. When he mimes opening the door occasionally, he creates loud party sounds. Also, in his trainers, he does a soft-shoe with tap sound effects.
During the show, Barsky thanked the large opening night audience for coming out on a Wednesday night to promote independent Bay Area theatre. He deserves our thanks for daring to take risks, using a thoroughly credible contemporary setting and putting on a good show.
The Bright River continues through February 20 at Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($15 to $25) are available online at http://wwwbrownpapertickets.com/event/90226 or by phone at 800.838.3006. More information can be found at http://www.thebrightriver.com. ______________________
By Albert Goodwyn
Don Reed
Photo by Keith Leman
Oakland's
East 14th Street
(now International Boulevard)
was a crime-ridden major thoroughfare in the 1970s when comedian Don Reed was
growing up there. Reed's enacted tales
of depravity humanize the neighborhood experience of becoming a player there and
then. In his show East 14th, now
reappearing at The Marsh after a successful off-Broadway engagement, he offers true tales of a reluctant player. He
energetically portrays differing people he ran across in his teenage years. He
shifts effortlessly and distinctively as he tells of living with his father the
pimp and of his seeking sex while lacking in balls. He admits he had only nuts.
His father tries to help, and his brothers guide and protect him from manipulative
thugs and harlots.
With a brief but densely informational set-up about where he
lived and what his father was like, Reed follows the timeline of his quest to
lose his virginity. His self-assured brother, who does break-dance moves every
time he speaks, tries to instruct him on how to be a player, but Don is too
nice a guy to shove women around the way his brother does. His brother's
illustration of those methods involves a demanding ultimatum on the phone. When
Don tries it he winds up with a joint and $2, far different from the terms
prompted by his brother.
Don's mother and father were separated; the mother gets very
little time on stage. Don moves back into his father's house on East 14th. He
closes Act I with a cliffhanger about how his father plotted to get him to lose
his virginity. "Y'all ain't gonna believe this shit," he says as the
stage blacks out and he exits.
Later, left alone in the house with his father's sly
benefactions, Don takes a phone call. It's Merle "from up the street"
who wants to suck his dick. He says ok, but when she arrives his torturously
slow reaction to her at the door is exquisitely performed. He takes his time
with this one, making it obvious that he can't believe his eyes, then allowing
himself a response. He describes graphically her missing front teeth -- which becomes
one of several running gags -- and he convincingly mimes her jiggling
overweight. He thinks she moves too fast. Then when he is confronted with the
opportunity to pick up on his brother's girlfriend, he mimes himself as a
vulture, scavenging the remains of a painful death, except that his brother is
none too pained by it; he just wants to be rid of her, as is evidenced by Don's
one-man enactments of a three-person car altercation on the Bay Bridge.
There are many other incidental characters, such as
Steakface and Troutmouth with strongly vivid faces -- on Don -- who enrich the
texture of his tapestry of life in an ethnic neighborhood where he faces sexual
confrontations largely initiated by the woman. His writing is mostly free of
black patois, sticking largely to standard English. Reed has a strong track
record of stand-up and comedy writing, but his artistry shines in his quick
shifts between characters and his skillful verbal and physical introduction to
each one. His mime and characterizations, along with clever and striking
vocalizations, bring to life his reminiscences of being the son of a pimp
growing up among tough guys. His distinctive facial contortions artistically
animate the characters he displays.
East
14th true tales
of a reluctant player continues through January 16 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco. On January 22 (through February 13) the show will move to The Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley. Tickets ($20 to $50) are
available online at www.themarsh.org and www.brownpapertickets.com or by phone at
800.838.3006.
By Albert Goodwyn
In “Astounding Conviction,” a lone man in Tiananmen Square opposes an oppressive government.
Photo courtesy of New Tang Dynasty TV
The Year of the Tiger is approaching. In the Chinese calendar, the current year of the calm and dependable Ox will give way to the rebellious, unpredictable Tiger. Shen Yun Performing Arts' spectacular New Year celebration on the Opera House stage features song and dance from classical Chinese culture. They recount tales of simple pleasures or derring-do in scenes ranging from a celestial kingdom with angels in clouds to the Great Wall. A large company of dancers performs perfectly synchronized choreography to live orchestra with elaborately constructed traditional costumes, different for each act. Shen Yun's guiding principle thematically informs the show; to promote humanity's divinely-inspired cultural heritage in the face of a repressive society. The uplifting spirit of hopefulness shines through beautifully in each of the twenty-one acts.
The individual acts include an ethnic dance routine to a Chinese fairy tale to a pilgrimage in search of Buddhist scriptures. The northeastern folk dance "Handkerchiefs" captures youthful energy flourishing and blossoming as the maidens twirl and toss their napkins. "Tibetan Dance of Praise" expresses the spirituality of Falun Dafa principles, which Shen Yun follows. "In a Miao Village” is a folk dance from one of China’s oldest ethnic groups. In their ornate costumes -- with bells -- the dancers move in front of a stunning moving backdrop on a stage-wide, technologically advanced projection screen. With rice paddies in the background, they use a “unique Chinese posture” as the dancers feed through each other in precise choreography, taking them through staggered entrances in smoothly alternating rows. "Wu Song Battles the Tiger" tells of a village hero who -- after drinking much sake -- chases a ravaging tiger onto the projection screen in clever animation. Then he returns to the stage with his quarry hanging from a stick.
The costumes are a show in themselves with elegant detailing and historical accuracy. “Mongolian Hospitality” presents dancers in persimmon dresses with broad gold hues and thick royal blue piping. They use household plates as castanets. In “Flowing Silk” young maidens in green, white and fuchsia colors wave their over long “water sleeves” as they dance against a backdrop of a lake with cherry trees and a pavilion. All the costumes are gorgeous, and the dancers make them move with graceful symmetry.
Shen Yun's orchestra uses modern western and traditional Chinese instruments. For a solo “Saving the Predestined,” Xiaochun Qi plays the erhu, a two-stringed, bowed instrument, with grand piano accompaniment. The tune is sweetly melodic with a wailing weeping quality. Tenor Hong Ming's “Calmly Take a Look” uses pure highs to offer an optimistic message with words he composed. His thin voice but well controlled voice has good sustain and a beautiful vibrato: just the right amount to impress but not enough to overwhelm.
The political message is clear. In “Nothing Can Block the Divine Path,” figures fly on from the screen, leading to well coordinated physical entrances. Police persecute citizens. The announcer informs us that, “The injustice we just saw is still happening in China today.” Baritone Qu Yue sings “As the Red Regime sinks” with a strikingly pure voice and a well controlled tremolo.
Shen Yun continues through January 7 at the War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. The touring show then moves to San Jose and Sacramento. Tickets ($40 to $160) are available online at www.cityboxoffice.com or by phone at 415.392.4400. For more information please visit www.Shenyunperformingarts.org.
____________________
By Albert Goodwyn
(l – r) Katie Guthorn, Carol Bozzio Littleton and Darby Gould as The Coverlettes
Photo by David Allen
Cover band interpretations frequently provide new insight to the original works. Local rock band artists “The Coverlettes” dig up their material from the glorious days of the late Fifties. This trio, all members of noted Bay Area contemporary bands, don their slinky sequined mini dresses and giant bouffant hairdos to recollect the Christmas songs of the doo-wop era, a style of heavily synchronized stage choreography and group harmonizing. They pay tribute to such singing idols as The Shirelles, The Chantelles and Martha and the Vandellas. Aurora’s Artistic Director Tom Ross has remounted his conception for this year’s holiday season show The Coverlettes Cover Christmas with a few new boughs and decorations. On a seasonally decorated stage, backed by a trio on piano, bass and drums, the three ladies with a high tolerance for hairspray give marvelously rousing interpretations of rock Christmas songs that were widely popularized by such performers as Brenda Lee (“Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree”), Jimmy Boyd (“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” with a heavy rock beat, like The Ronettes' top-40 hit) and their own softly harmonic take on the traditional carol with “We Three Queens of Orient Are.”
In a lively, non-secular show, Darby Gould of Jefferson Starship sings and dances with Carol Littleton and Katie Guthorn of the twelve-piece rock and soul band Big Band Beat. Their harmonized vocalization of familiar tunes is exquisitely rendered with no missed notes or inappropriate vocal stretches. When not choralising they swap off lead parts; each one has a strong, distinctly different performance personality. Their occasional solos demonstrate their professional versatility as they merrily deliver classics. The artfully enacted song selections range from “Leader of the Pack,” “Da Doo Run Run” and “Hanky Panky” to “Set Me Free,” “Silver Bells” and “White Christmas.”
In this holiday show, the trio sings perennial favorites for a family audience, while wearing provocatively tight-fitting mid-thigh gowns and moving suggestively in traditional rock and roll blocking. This is an intimate show with no dramatic staging techniques – such as Aurora’s Artistic Director Tom Ross has paid ample attention to in typical productions. The Coverlettes sing together as a group in a rock choreography style with well-coordinated arm movements and hip sways. The untrained voices and "garage" sound of 1950s recordings are addressed in these women’s performance, and their coy subtext speaks loudly of sexual desire. Their sensuous undulations while performing “Santa Baby” leave no question about what that chimney means.
The production seeks – and finds – the nut of the doo-wop style, actually improving on the melodic style of blended pop. The lyrical innocence of the genre, combined artfully with the yearning emotional directness of gospel singing and rhythm and blues comes through forcefully from these sexy ladies. The simple and guileless lyrics enhance their demure combination of girl-next-door wholesomeness and torrid vamp. The three women sensitively recreate the angelic, mellow style of more superficial musical forms. With a subtle understanding of the musical style, they have completely rendered the seminal event in the history of Twentieth Century pop music, the merging of R & B into rock and roll, without diluting its power. In this show you will find well-known feel-good holiday music presented in subtly new ways by appealing, accomplished singers.
The Coverlettes Cover Christmas continues through December 27 at Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($28) are available online at http://www.auroratheatre.org or by phone at (510) 843-4822.
______________________
by Albert Goodwyn
Prince Albert (Rupert Friend) and Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt) take an ill-fated carriage ride.
Photo courtesy of Apparition and GK Films
Queen Victoria of England rose to the throne because of her father’s lack of a male heir, this much is true. In the movie The Young Victoria, her possible reactions and growth are dramatized in a lushly romantic costume drama of epic proportions. This film explores the development of a young woman as she rises to an extraordinary level of power and tries to shed hereditary bonds that would keep her from exercising her free will. Producers Sarah Ferguson and Martin Scorsese have paid amply close attention to historical fact.
With Emily Blunt as the Queen, the movie delineates the early years of England's longest-reigning monarch. The story begins before her accession to the throne, details her surprisingly passionate, politically motivated love affair with Prince Albert of Germany (Rupert Friend) who married her and became her Royal Consort, and ends before the royal couple complete some of the major accomplishments of the Industrial Age.
Blunt's portrayal of a privileged woman who, dominated by well-meaning but oppressive family and ministers, finds her own voice and mature confidence as she takes the throne. During the film's story Blunt exhibits first naïveté then recognition of the effects this immense worldwide power is having on her and her relationship with her lover.
Friend as the Consort does an admirable job of acting the difficult part of a bedroom companion with no constitutional status or power, but who has significant influence over his spouse. He is devoted to her, and being of royal background himself respects her power. Friend is able to show Albert’s love for his wife and to keep his stiff Teutonic spine in the face of her queenly demands.
The compelling story of Victoria’s coming of age is richly detailed with glorious costuming and site-specific location settings. She was the first English sovereign to live in Buckingham Palace; the new rooms look lovely. All dressing, props, makeup, and attitudes seamlessly interweave to evoke a bygone age. The compelling cinematography moves effortlessly from grand spectacle through palatial rooms to intimate encounters. Aside from the accurate historical narrative, the movie presents a deeply moving insight to a young woman’s ascendant struggle to fulfill her destiny as a country’s most powerful figure.
The Young Victoria opens in theaters on December 18.
__________________________
Aurelia Thierrée has used the ecclesiastical, usually
vocalized oratorio form to physicalize her own religious tribute to her surreal
imagination. She uses her mime, dance and acrobatic skills to perform a series
of mysterious, quirky fantasies set to an unpredictable score that ranges from
chamber music to jazz, all on mostly bare stage with a minimum of props. Her
show, conceived for her by her mother, uses three assistants and features works
by dancer Jaime Martinez. She is fascinating to watch and he gracefully enacts
some bizarre situations. Co-producers Crying Out Loud UK seek to present
material that is appealing to audiences of all ages.
From her opening as a contortionist inside three dresser
drawers at once to her untimely demise in the sands of an hourglass, she
encounters collapsing draperies, a giant ogre, a vicious gnome, and malevolent
animals. Her sense of humor and sense of invention are woven tightly into the
visual texture of this wordless show. To operate a small set piece she bends a
rope and mimes a crank. One skit uses skewed angles and warped perspectives.
She lies on the stage deck and pretends to walk across, as though she walked
parallel to the Earth's surface. Then she flies a kite, but it stays on the
ground and she holds the string from a flying position above the stage.
Jaime and she work together on some acts, but his solo
pieces continue the theme of altered perceptions with good-natured surprises
and persecution by ill-willed inanimate objects. He does amazing stunts as a three-legged
man, and his fling with an empty overcoat is amusing. Then it turns comically
dark when the coat turns around and tries to strangle him.
This is a great family show, ideal for the season. Aurelia
is lithe and energetic. Her focus on the part at hand is lovingly intense, and
she presents a strong stage presence. Jaime's modern-dance styles are
refreshingly quick and he uses them succinctly to depict the theme and actions
of each story. The seventy minute one-act leaves the audience ready for a second
act. Seeing more of Ms. Thierrée would be an aesthetically pleasurable treat
anytime of the year.
Aurelia's Oratorio
continues through January 24 at Berkeley Repertory TTheatre, 2015 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($33 to $71) are
available online at www.berkeleyrep.org or by phone at 510.647.2949.
A Victorian Christmas Carol in SF
This season's remounting of A Christmas Carol by ACT brings a different life to the production. Director Domenique Lozano has added some clever fillips to Carey Perloff's original stage adaptation of the Victorian novel by Charles Dickens. This retelling of the familiar story of Scrooge confronting Christmas ghosts is fast and lively with an effectively touching performance by James Carpenter as Mr. "Bah! Humbug!" himself. Other members of the large cast, including children, comport themselves with professional imagination, but Carpenter holds stage as the central figure in this story of failure and redemption.
On a set with crudely painted sliding flats, Carpenter leads the core company members and a large group of newcomers along the path to the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. On a cold Christmas Eve, as Scrooge settles in for his gruel in a thrifty unheated room, his indigestion -- he asserts -- causes him to visualize spirits, ghosts of Christmases past, present and future, all teaching him how he has let down his fellow man by his parsimonious cynicism. By the time the Ghost of Christmas Future visits him, Scrooge is ready to repent his anti-social attitudes.
This seasonal family show is replete with monstrous visions, music, stunning but forthright scene shifts, and children dressed as vegetables. All characters become objects of fascination for Scrooge as the spirits lead him through what was, what should have been and what to expect next. The play centers on Scrooge and his reactions, but, bemused as he is by the scenes he is in but not of -- he tries to speak to the people he knew but they do not hear him -- he stands mute among the people he has known and loved.
The dramatic highlight of the staging is the appearance of the Ghost of Christmas Future -- a striking , but the supreme excellence of the acting comes when Carpenter as Scrooge is able to become happy like a little boy that he is still alive on Christmas Day. Carpenter's performance is self-effacing; he acts with forced joy as though being happy is unfamiliar to him. He acts awkward, stilted in his newly found magnanimity, but his infectious emotionalism projects loudly and clearly throughout the house, inspiring other cast members with his buoyant optimism, even when confronted by the Ghost of Christmas Future, a two-story tall rod puppet, the folded wings of which provide for entrances and exits of ignorant and wanting children, plus Businessmen who discuss the particulars of Scrooge's death .
Scrooge lives, and brightens everybody's Christmas Day by unleashing his purse strings. The moral of Dickens' tale is timelessly relevant, and ACT's hour-and a-half rendering of the story succinctly and beautifully depicts the enlightenment of a miser.
A Christmas Carol continues through December 27 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($14 to $102) are available online at www.act-sf.org or by phone at 415.749.2228.
by Albert Goodwyn
(l - r) Dad Warden Lawlor, sis Cassie Powell and mom Molly Benson;
(front) son James Tinsley
Photo courtesy of Wylie Herman
With dark humor and satirical wit, Wylie Herman's
play Better Homes and Ammo examines
the personal interactions of a family locked in a subterranean fallout shelter for months after
surprise nuclear attacks. The apocalypse has landed and the proprietor of a military
surplus store has herded his wife, daughter and son below ground and locked
away the outside world. They deal with paranoia, bondage, brutal sadism,
deceit, and incest as the fighting sounds rage.
The despotic Sid Bosra is a right-wing extremist who keeps automatic
weapons at hand and stages mock torture with his family, for preparedness training. Son Spencer is
rebellious and resists his father's command. Adopted sister Sally is still
obsessed with the pop culture she left behind three months ago, especially her
stuffed caterpillar and Oprah. Mom Angela is part Martha Stewart at keeping the
shelter tidy and part Edith Bunker in her ditziness. In the end, dad proves to
be at least as deceitful as his son and daughter and mom turns out to be
tougher than anticipated, but not before all go through the chaos of "mandated family
game night," Weekly Bible Study and discomforting sex.
With the sounds of a full blown panic blaring, the family tries
to keep their sanity while desperately maintaining some normalcy. As the play
progresses the tension of frayed nerves from enforced proximity becomes more
complicated. Dad Sid (H. Warden Lawlor) is very upset that his iron authority
is being challenged, not only by son Spencer (James Tinsley) but also by his
wife (Molly Benson) and most of all by daughter Sally (Cassie Powell). He
tyrannically chains the kids to the wall. Sally shows the lengths she and
Spence will go to in their games when she takes a rope and he sits in a
chair for the Czechoslovakian death knot. But it turns out mom knows the death
knot better. Spence shows his mettle when he short-circuits the power panel and
escapes topside through the automatic door.
Herman's cramped set on a small stage gives an excellent sense of
claustrophobia, with beds, kitchen and living space all in the same room. His
direction keeps the show moving with only a few bits of sluggish pacing. Some
stage crossings are unmotivated, but all the stage activity is well focused on
narrative flow. His writing follows a pattern of classic play-building:
introduction to the characters and situation, revelation of complicating
circumstances, all leading up to conflict, resolution and denouement.
The actors are well suited to their roles. Lawlor as
dad has a strong, commanding voice, suitable for a militaristic gun nut who
attributes everything to the government's "conspiracy of fear." He
uses cliché gestures and recites some lines with his eyes closed, not relating
to the others. Perhaps his blind tyrannical attitude is supposed to be a
parody, but his superficial stereotype
seems to gloss over important aspects of the dad character, like his understated
reaction to the guilt he should be feeling at what he has perpetrated. Benson
as the clueless mom tends to be detached from the action, as though observing
it from afar. Her face remains largely static but her eyes are lively and
revealing. She hits her stride when she expresses outrage about sibling sex. Tinsley as Spencer acts
self-enclosed, and does not bring anything fresh to the part, but he is very
effective at portraying single-minded resentment and the need for escape. Powell as
Sally is by far the strongest actor. She is very involved with her character
and shows many gradations of emotions in her demeanor and especially in her
face. She handles the transition from loving sister to gun moll smoothly.
Ammo lampoons the American way with
broad strokes. The humor of the situation is somewhat overshadowed by the stark
nature of the conflict. Killing My Lobster alumnus Wylie Herman's
first full-length play and No Nude Men Productions have mined the irony of a
miserably failed attempt to make the best out of a worst case
scenario. The thought-provoking nature of the play tends to overwhelm the
potential hilarity. These people would be funny if the circumstances were not
so grim. As mom says, "Always carry ammunition."
Better
Homes and Ammo (a post apocalyptic suburban tale) continues through December 19 at EXIT Theatre, 156 Eddy Street, San Francisco.
Tickets ($15 to $19; $1 off with canned food donation, used to
decorate the fallout shelter set) are available on line at http://theexit.org or by phone at 415.867.7970.
The egg
rules the insect world in OVO, now being presented by Cirque du Soleil.
The company gives its trademark athletic, fanciful performance to live music on
a stage with an organic form. The costumes portray whimsical appearances of
bugs, usually; some are abstruse yet still colorful. There are Spiders, a
Dragonfly, Fleas, Butterflies, Ants, Scarabs, Cockroaches, Crickets, and a
Mosquito. In these costumes are tumblers, contortionists, acrobats, aerialists,
a juggler, and a slack-wire artist. Rounding out the show as emcees are a fly,
a foreigner and a lady bug, not as energetic as the other performers but still
quite lithe. The show's theme is an exploration of the bug community faced with life and
death questions in the form of a giant inflatable egg.
Flipo the
fly (Joseph Collard from Belgium),
Étranger the foreigner (Francois-Guillaume from Canada)
and Coccinelle the lady bug (Michelle Matlock from the U. S.)
introduce the various acts with distractions of comic lazzi or improvisation
with the audience as the scenes are set up. Through these between-the-scenes
episodes, they encounter the egg and make peace with its metaphorical
importance. Flipo falls in love with Coccinelle and tries to woo her. They
argue and she stalks off stage. Later she returns and kisses Étranger, who is
crushed. In the end the entire cold-blooded community gathers around a table
for a banquet, featuring the egg. The story is plain enough, but the addition
of the acrobats provides thrilling visual interludes amidst its telling.
The
opening community scene, complete with egg, is set to background sounds of
insect chatter. Music is provided by a banda set up stage left and right. The
singer stands with the stage-right group. The sounds of Brazil are mixed with African styles to produce
samba, reggae and electronic Rio funk. Cirque’s
sound system is flawless, providing distortion-free amplification that fills
the big tent with surround sound. Throughout the show, cricket sounds are also
played on keyboard.
The
invertebrates, usually the Ants and Fleas, help with scene changes. They move
eighty-pound dandelions, nets, webs, and flying set pieces, all in well
coordinated order. Some of them also perform circus arts. Writer and Director
Deborah Colker's synchronized choreography of the community scenes, when all
arthropods and arachnids are moving around on the amoeba-shaped stage, is
carefully arranged and gives a visually pleasing sense of teeming activity. The
upstage backdrop membrane with holes suggests a maze of tunnels or a hive.
The acts
include a surprising amount of invention to spice up some standard routines,
plus some innovative approaches to new material. The Creatura (Lee Brearley of
the U. K. in a woven costume) has collapsing limbs like a Slinky and no head.
With the size of the arms and legs, the costume suggests an elephant, but
perhaps there is a bug out there that moves like that. The show opens with the
egg, and a man walking on a spiral jungle-gym to elegiac music while Coccinelle
looks on. Act II opens with a haunting melody and vocals, and then proceeds to
a fog-shrouded web with Spiders. The inspired costuming of the Spiders here is
almost scary with predatory black widows, red widows and white ones, all with
hourglass shapes sewn in. The males stand by while the Spiders climb the web.
Marjorie Nantel, one of the Spiders, also performs an aerial silk act in Act I
called "Cocoon" where she begins inside the silk, a distinctly
different approach. Foot
juggling Ants twirl stuffed kiwi slices, pushing them into the air and swapping them
with others. Then they manipulate corn cobs. Insect food figures large here. There
is some roughness in the coordination of this act, but it is spectacular and
amusing. Foot jugglers appear later as feathery legs with coconut heads sticking
up from holes.
Cirque builds its repertoire to ever more difficult and stunning
acts during the show. Most spectacular of all are the aerialist Scarabs. Clad in brown
and gold they swing from trapezes left and right to a platform in the middle, over
a net. This highly synchronized act shows off mid-air spins and tumbles with
unerring catches – except once. But that’s okay; the aerialists exit their
aerie by falling into the net anyway. In this and other acts, the performers
who have finished their bits cleverly indicate the active ones with crouching
gestures and signals to the audience.
The
highlight of the show comes when the tumbling Crickets bounce on trampolines set up
below a climbing wall and straight down the middle of the stage. With the
trampolines' help, they pop up to the wall and walk straight up it. Their eerily
insect-like ninety degree landings on the wall and repeated momentary sticking truly
suggest an insect invasion; as soon as you shoo away one horde, another lands.
Gringo
Cardia's set is of a largely amorphous shape, but provides for unexpected
entrances through holes that open. It also provides some spaces for full-body
slides. Liz Vandal's costumes are a show in themselves. Occasionally, the
nature of the bug is not readily apprehended, but the Crickets are a masterpiece
of engineering. When they crawl, the motion of their hind legs is effectively
reminiscent of the actual insect. While there are some raw moments in this
two-hour show, the performers recover adroitly without missing a beat. The
visual spectacle keeps the near-capacity audience in this big tent attentive
and enthralled. When the slack-wire artist (Li Wei of China) brings
on his unicycle, there is audible disbelief from the house. The entire
production is sweetly sensational and excitingly professional.
OVO continues through January 24 under the blue and yellow Grand Chapiteau set
up near AT & T Park. Tickets for this U. S. premiere ($45.50 to $250) are
available on line at www.cirquedusoleil.com or by phone at 800.450.1480.
____________________
Linda Ayres-Frederick in Google at Fringe Marin
The edges of theatrical
adventure take on many different shapes, from clever concoctions to highly
experimental work. The twenty-fourth season of Fringe of Marin presents a wide variety of plays, from a darkly
comic monologue to a family comedy at a MUNI bus stop. In two programs of six
or seven short one-acts and solos, Dominican University Community Players enact
stories of whimsy and drama from local playwrights.
The six plays of Program 1
begin with In Situ by Susan Jackson,
about two women who play with toys. Steve North’s farce How to Write a Play contains a surprise entrance. A Work of Art by John Robinson is billed
as “A Comedy of Desire.”
Wabi Sabi by Ruth Kirschner takes place under an authentic bus stop
sign. Linda Ayres-Frederick’s dark comic monologue Googling for Gerson takes place on a simple set of just a table
with a Mac laptop and a stool. Naomi Newman’s tragicomedy Gussie and Sam closes out Program 1.
Program 2 includes seven plays:
L’Amour or Less, “A Timely Comedy” by
Carol Sheldon; William Chadwick’s “Twisted Drama” James Masters Is Late; Micheline Birger’s Eros and Mors is billed as a “Dramedy of Love”; Jim Fazackerly’s Dinner Memories is a family drama; The Fourth Date by Kate Gordon is a
“Harmonious Tale of Modern Love”; Billie Cox’ The Bearded Lady is a “Carnaval Tale”; and Don Sampson’s What about the Couch? is a “Dark
Domestic Comedy.”
Program 1 plays again November
21 and 22 and December 6. Program 2 plays November 20 and 22 and December 4 and
5. Both take place at Dominican
University’s Meadowlands
Assembly Hall, 50 Acacia Avenue,
San Rafael. Tickets ($5 to $15)
are available at 415.673.3131.
Aurora’s current production of Fat Pig eloquently understates the ironic humor of Neil LaBute’s play. The plump girl of the title is the only one who does not parody herself. The laughs are sporadic, but the politically correct horror of the overblown plot situation is satiric and comedic because it takes seriously the agonies of these superficial people. The four actors here interact well with each other in the story, except for one, the titular heroine. She interacts only with the protagonist Tom Sullivan.
Jud Williford as Tom, the stern, efficient businessman, enacts a spectacular character shift as he becomes the shy suitor of a large woman. Tom can be firm and in control at the office but, from the guarded attraction to each other during the initial meet cute at a lunch counter to the final encounter, he is a hesitant fumble-mouth. Jud is consistent in Tom’s act of blamelessness, and he expresses succinctly a wide range of emotions, from Tom’s realization that he likes Helen a lot, despite her girth, to his barely suppressed irritation at his colleague Carter’s teasing him about the weight of his new girlfriend.
Liliane Klein as Helen Barnes portrays a woman who is comfy with her size. Her Helen is always happy and eager. The actress herself has poise and forthright posture. When her character gets into discussing her size, she heads for the cliché “big bones.” Her self-acceptance and sense of humor are a pivotal point of the play’s theme: why are you ashamed to love me just because I’m fat and why is everybody laughing at us? Klein cleverly carries into her character her own personal acceptance of having a supposedly inappropriate body mass index.
This acceptance by Liliane and Helen lucidly illustrates the ironic juxtaposition of a legitimate worry against a tongue-in-cheek send-up by the playwright – perhaps unintentional – of breathlessly earnest proclamations in favor of special rights for defined groups, in this case fat people.
Klein and Wiliford demonstrate differing types of involvement in their parts. Jud’s character shows intense inner turmoil but he holds back. Like his character he is hesitant and reluctant. Liliane indulges herself in the wantonness of Helen, just as her character does with frankfurters and ice cream.
LaBute’s play is a parody of those that try to preach and moralize, but it is one of them itself. His lines, with weight/wait puns and unintentional digs, are delivered by these actors with guileless sincerity. In interviews, the playwright characterizes himself as a troublemaker, always trying to agitate his public with the latest hot-button issue. Either he has been bottom-fishing for this theme, or he malevolently seeks to make fun of honestly sincere poets who want to better the world.
Barbara Damashek’s direction makes bold use of the Aurora’s three-quarter round stage. Sometimes the action is concentrated at one end of the stage or the other and sometimes it is spread across the entire space. This makes for succinct scene changes and a minimum of blocking problems. The sense of place -- from the office to the beach -- is distinct in each scene of this wide-ranging story. The actors have dug their teeth into these parts and portray their characters with earnest dedication to their various fatuous quests for fairness, malevolence and love.
Fat Pig continues through December 13 at Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison Street, Berkeley. Tickets ($15 to $55) are available at www.auroratheatre.org or by phone at 510.843.4822.
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Christian Phillips as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The Actors Theatre has mounted an intensely involving performance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In Edward Albee's play, the early-morning boozing at the home of George and Martha takes its toll on the two guests, two hapless victims of the fun and games of their hosts. The acting in this production is superbly focused and well characterized. The play begins on an intimate residential living room set in an intimate performance space. George and Martha have just returned from a faculty party. During the loathing "What a dump" bit by Martha, Christian Phillips as George skillfully uses his reactions, both facial and gestural, to tell a tale of a henpecked husband. Phillips' portrayal of George is a sensitive identification with the character, keeping the seething determination for revenge just under the surface. As George is putting on his slippers, dressing down to get comfortable for home, Martha reveals that they have young guests coming over, any minute now. The languor with which Phillips wearily puts his shoes back on tells of contentment and resignation to the situation. When he later talks about their games, he delivers a thoroughly credible interpretation of a lecturing professor, as George is, when he introduces "Hump the Hostess." Rachel Klyce is an animated Martha. She projects a good sense of desperate self-involvement when she sits alone and talks to her daddy, who is still alive and running the University never named. This is a source of tension between her and George, and is part of her need to play biting games. George has risen only to history professor, cannot run the department and can never run the University, as had been the family plan. Martha reminds him of this fact repeatedly, and in excoriating, sadistic ways. Klyce shows personal glee when enacting Martha's bitchiness. Her intense focus on the character bears down relentlessly with exuberant gestures and a stunning stage presence. She keenly understates the exasperated depth of Martha's love for George when she says he "learns the game I play quicker than I can change the rules." The intellectual battle between the two is well and tautly waged.The hapless guests, young, upcoming Nick and his platinum-blonde bimbo wife Honey, at first are reluctant to join in the games, but in the end submit. The transition between these attitudes is well realized by Alex Alessandro Garcia as Nick. As a scientist, a biology professor, he exhibits his interest in logical observation; he studies the games for their objectives and rules, gaining a vague understanding in the end. Jessica Coghill portrays the vacuous arm-candy Honey with a great deal of self-mocking humor. Honey is the best of the four at getting drunk. When the next game comes around, she is ready to play anything. Coghill looks like shei s having fun in pumping up the part. George and Martha have a private game, which they inadvertently -- or not -- share witht he guests. It involves a hypothetical "son." In the end, after "Hump the Hostess" turned into a "flop," Nick is reduced to the status of "Houseboy." A tense moment of silence between him and George is timed with precision by the actors. When George and Martha have a knock-down drag-out fight about the son, the production, including lighting, set and blocking, gives a scary sense of involvement in an evening with George and Martha. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? continues through December 19 at The Actors Theatre, 855 Bush Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($26 to $40) are available at http://www.actorstheatresf.org/purchase_ticketsor by phone at 415.345.1287.
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by Albert Goodwyn
‘Tis the season for ghost stories,and the hapless character in The Woman in Black tries to tell his onChristmas Eve, according to the script of the play now at The Phoenix Theatre.Second Wind Productions company effortlessly enthralls with their taut,gripping suspense and intense pacing. They deftly render the wide variety ofplaces and characters involved in the story. And for thetwo actors who tell the story, it is in a book, an actual prop. One actor, FredSharkey, is identified in the program as “Actor.” Mike Newman, the only otheractor, plays “Kipps.” The Actor reads from the book, the beginning of hishorrifying tale of the events that led up to a tragedy. His opening reading is deliberately dull and droning. Then Kipps bounds onto the stage to stop him. While directorKipps tries to pump life into the Actor’s delivery, he protests repeatedly thathe is not an actor. The stiff neophyte just wants to read the recounting of hispersonal experience with the supernatural. “We’ll makea Barrymore out of you yet,” Kipps repeatedly tells the Actor. As the days passwithin the play, Kipps, under the Actor’s employ, coaxes him into being abrilliant impressionist who uses distinct character shifts to portray manydifferent people. On a bare stage with a minimum of props, the situation andsetting of each scene are effectively made clear. The two characters enact asolicitor scene about the will of a reclusive widow that will lead the protagonistto her dreary house far away. Later, in that remote, spooky house, they portraynightmarish visions with a chilling sense of place. Through it all, the twoactors allow their characters to become better actors as the play progresses. They interchange characters with quick precision. When the author of the taletravels to a desolate, boggy coastal town, actor Sharkey does the traveling andactor Newman narrates. When he arrives at the town, Sharkey plays townspeoplewhile Newman reacts as the protagonist, the manuscript writer. The actors atThe Phoenix handled this complex set of personality changes with a cleardetermination. And it works with the actors’ well-timed entrances of newcharacters. StephenMallatratt’s play builds on early insinuations of terror, and Director IanWalker has been sensitive to the need for the anticipation and dread to buildslowly and deliberately to the surprise twist at the end. While the logic of anactor playing an actor who becomes a better actor as a result of incidents inthe play is frightening enough, the suspense in this play makes the gruelingtension all the more scary. As written, the setting of the play is on a stage.Second Wind’s production team made great use of The Phoenix’ black-box space.The eerie setting of an empty theater combines with the fast-paced story and anominous soundscape to provide prolonged expectations in an atmosphere of doomwith effective intensity. The Woman in Black continuesthrough November 14 at The Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($20 - $25) are available online at http://www.theatermania.com/san-francisco/shows/the-woman-in-black_158754/or by phone at (415) 508-5614.
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by Albert Goodwyn
Jennifer Jajeh Photo by Maressa Stertz
Jennifer Jajeh is a consummate impressionist, a dancer,
an actress, an Arab, and a troublemaker. To be fair, trouble seems to follow
her, as she recounts in her live show I Heart Hamas, just now extended
at the Off-Market Theater. Jennifer herself is a single Christian American San Francisco native of Palestinian descent. Her one-woman show
uses a variety of characters to detail the year and a half she spent in Ramallah, her
parents' West Bank hometown just north of Jerusalem. Jennifer first
went there in 2000, the time of the Second Intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising against the Israelis. She loved it and felt comfortable in the area. Her
show brings to life her experiences. This is the San Francisco premiere of a show that was
previewed here last summer.
On
a bare stage with minimal set pieces, Jennifer assumes a multitude of
identities. She uses a lectern sometimes and takes questions against a backdrop
of a signboard with flashing lights. Images on a projection screen hanging
upstage center provide atmosphere and further information. Her self-referential
central character seems to have identity problems, at least in the eyes of
others. With her non-white skin and her distinctive features, she confounds
those who meet her and are seeking to learn her ethnic identity. At one point
she professes to be Catholic, leading to the suggestion that she might be
Irish. "I'm an American," she protests in her Arabic inflected
English. Later, a crowd at a checkpoint begins chanting,
"Espaniola" when they see her. She shouts back at them, "I'm
not Spanish. I'm Palestinian."
Jennifer
is also a documentary filmmaker. As she tells us, she was filming that
confrontation at the checkpoint for Ramallah. As an actress she exhibits strong
stage presence in the hour and a half show, and is especially lithe when she
mimes dancing at a club in Jerusalem.
In her writing, she uses humor in up-to-date situations, such as when she speaks
teenage talk or when she takes her family into a club and discovers the
entrance fee is 95$ for her family, but singles get in free. Her deadpan in a
bit about phone mail makes rue over misguided acts seem funny. After leaving many
excoriating messages, she finalizes with, "Just disregard those last
messages."
Although
she begins the show with static staging and gestures, she soon moves into
animated impressionism, demonstrating her ranges of accents and dialects. She
shows keen insight with her good facial expressions. Her bodily gestures
differentiate the characters with a minimum of distraction and some inherent
dynamism. They are woven integrally into the tapestry of personalities she creates.
Her act gives a specific sense of place and situation, made all the more
realistic by her choice of interesting subjects.
I Heart Hamas continues through November 21 at Off-Market Theater,
965 Mission St., San Francisco. Tickets ($20 to $30) are
available through Brown Paper Tickets at (800) 838-3006 or online at www.ihearthamas.com.
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by Albert Goodwyn
Dan Wilson as Scoop and Leah Abrams as Heidi
Photo by Brian Katz
Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1988 play The Heidi Chronicles, now at Custom Made Theatre Company's new space, shows in vignettes the details of a woman pushing herself through a career of questioning and discovery. Also a Tony Award winner, the play follows the life journey of Heidi as she tries to reconcile her love of humanity with her desire for independence. Her travails and encounters reveal her own nature with touching precision and insightful humor. Director Brian Katz has dramatized the many layers of Heidi’s personality with deft sensitivity.
On a simple set with minimal but deeply meaningful props, the cast of eight, some playing multiple roles, enacts scenes of Heidi Holland’s development from teenager to mother. The path is rugged. Leah Abrams as Heidi projects an impassioned intensity in her ardent feminist beliefs, and a bemused helplessness in her relationships with men.
Heidi begins the play in 1989 as a forty-year-old art instructor at a lectern at New York's Columbia University talking about obscure artists, all women. The following scene takes place earlier in a high school in Chicago where sixteen-year-old Heidi attends a dance with her friend Susan Johnston (Kelly Rinehart, playing well a dichotomy of resoluteness and indecision). As the play moves forward chronologically, it takes Heidi, and sometimes Susan, through meetings with boys, then men. Around 1970, Heidi attends a dance in New Hampshire for the volunteers and supporters of presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. She joins a consciousness-raising group, where she meets some oddballs dedicated to empowering themselves and fighting the repression of women. Susan is now a law student, while Heidi attends graduate school at Yale. At a protest rally chastising a museum curator for leaving out women's art from an exhibition, she marches on the office. In 1986 at the upscale Plaza Hotel in New York, she gives an unprepared, extemporaneous speech describing the ideal housewife. She has two children now. She says we are "all in this together." In the end, she sits home with her kids and wants to marry the boy she met at the high-school dance, Peter, even though he's gay.
The issues of feminism and sexuality play a prominent role in Wasserstein's play, but not without some droll humor. In high school, Heidi is shyly taken by Peter (played with earnest, conflicted desire by Fred Pitts), but does not want to dance. At the McCarthy rally, journalist Scoop Rosenbaum (Dan Wilson as an aggressive, hyper intelligent boor) hits on her. The sexual tension in this love/hate scene is obvious. Both males later intertwine their lives with hers. The loutish Scoop gets married and turns out to be a womanizer. He calls on Heidi at the end, when she reveals that she is dating "a Heather I seem to like." At the consciousness-raising group she encounters Fran (Jessica Rudholm in a military uniform gives a spitefully monotonal, artless portrayal; she plays other characters with more depth) an authoritarian -- to say the least -- thirty-year-old lesbian feminist who yells to get her point across, and Becky (Roselyn Hallett, also playing other parts) a seventeen-year-old abandoned by her parents and living with an abusive boyfriend. Heidi stands up to Fran's hectoring, deciding on her own whether or not to shave her legs.
Heidi is adamant that women should get more respect in modern society and she is determined to realize her own feminine identity. She loves the gay pediatrician Peter and wants to make it work between them. She takes female lovers. And she is morbidly fascinated by the power of Scoop. The struggles among these contradictory attitudes are consistently discernable in Abrams' performance. The actress can portray simultaneously resoluteness and confusion. Other characters are more one-dimensional.
As insight to the difficulty of an intelligent, well-educated Baby Boomer woman attempting to succeed in a society dominated by men, the play moves Heidi from a shy teenager to one of the "Heroines of the Twenty-first Century." Wasserstein's comedic dialogue and incidents provide an excellent counterpoint to the more serious issues at hand, and Abrams is quick in her portrayals of both ardor and humor.
Custom Made's production uses quick, well choreographed scene changes with a clever, sequential device to denote year changes. At rise, the set walls are hung with period paintings of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, from op art to figurative, abstract, construction, and other. As it moves forward through the years, one painting is struck for each shift, denoting possibly the end of one short era and the beginning of the next. Recordings of top 40 hit songs also set the dates. The ensemble players are all distinctively recognizable in their character shifts, while the principal actors strongly define their parts. The two-and-a-half hour play is entertaining and thought provoking, with hints of sadness and easily identifiable characters.
The Heidi Chronicles continues through October 24 at The Next Stage, 1620 Gough Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($18 to $28) are available at www.custommade.org or by phone at Brown Paper Tickets, (800) 838-3006.
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Zachary Franczak as Tommy in Ray of Light's production
The Who’s Tommy is a licensed stage version of the English rock group’s 1969 concept album. This popular 1992 musical, now being presented at Victoria Theatre by Ray of Light Theatre in a very professional production, features every song from the double album and follows the emotionally moving story line of the original with precision and gusto. Don’t expect a re-enactment of the movie here; this is a new show.
The story contains themes of betrayal, catatonia, fame, and redemption. Characters include an adulterer, a child-molesting uncle, a bullying cousin, disciples of a pinball god, and a groupie. Symbolism plays an important role in the concept. Tommy Walker, born during World War II, loses his father to the War, or so his mother thinks. When papa Walker returns alive to find his wife in the embrace of another man, he kills him. Tommy’s witnessing of this act sends him into a state of shock, rendering him deaf, dumb and blind. While his reunited parents search for a miracle cure, Tommy grows up to discover that he can do one thing excellently, always get a replay with his high scores on pinball machines. He rises to stardom and eventually overcomes his disability. The attention has gone to his head, undercutting his innate humility. He realizes he has been too caught up in the star making machinery and makes amends. Along the way to his redemption, Tommy encounters a multitude of people, most of them nefarious.
The staged rock opera remains true to the album, told completely in song with no recitatif, except one. When the perverted Uncle Ernie takes charge of Tommy’s Holiday Camp, he tries to sell Tommy tee shirts to the audience, saying, “Oh come on now, it’s Saturday night,” perhaps a bit of improvisation for the packed Saturday performance. Otherwise, the entire show comprises The Who’s songs. Ray of Light Director Shane Ray has staged the singers with imaginatively impeccable blocking, and Choreographer Ellyn Marie Marsh moves the dancers around in graceful and enthusiastic patterns. All the voices, especially of the principal singers, are well trained and completely right for their parts. While there is some occasional sharping of the high notes by Tommy’s mother Mrs. Walker (Emily Wade Adams, lead singer of local jazz band The Midnight Sessions and singer for SF Symphony chorus), there is no attempt to recreate Who vocals and the singers’ performances stand up very well on their own. And although the six-piece combo (2 six-strings, 2 keyboards, electric bass, and drum kit led by Music Director Ben Prince) is somewhat lacking in The Who’s thunder chords, they are good on the downbeat and the playing is quintessential rock with no inter-song patter. Who’s power chords are understated, yet the combination of classic music, energetic playing, impassioned singing, well-orchestrated staging and scene changes, and appealing actor/singers provides a hugely entertaining performance of a timeless and nostalgic art work.
Ray’s production begins with “Overture,” a sampling of some of the songs of the album, while actors on the stage deck below the raised banda march across in military uniforms to suggest the time period. When the narrative begins, Mrs. Walker learns that “It’s A Boy” from a conception that occurred before Captain Walker (Bay Area actor Cameron Weston) went to war. For Tommy’s fourth birthday party, complete with cake, kindergartner Deucalion Martin sings the character. For Tommy age ten, eighth-grader David Kahawaii sings. Both have beautiful boy-soprano voices and when they sing trio with the grown-up Tommy (Zachary Franczak, a local singer and actor with more than twelve years of experience), the blend is mellifluous with superb overtones. Cabaret singer and performance artist Leanne Borghesi portrays The Acid Queen, a prostitute and drug dealer consulted to save young Tommy, with gusto and a big lusty voice. Franczak as grown up Tommy has a fine, well-controlled tenor voice and an appealing set of passive, dazed gestures that draw the audience into his plight and persona with fully accessible emotions and intense focus on his part.
Writers Townshend, McAnuff, Entwhistle, and Moon cleverly followed through on their included themes of alienation and supernatural salvation. The wartime setting sets up the scene for the violence that will send Tommy over the edge. ROL’s production concept prepares for this very well with a slightly menacing group of soldiers. The mirror symbolizes Tommy’s mystical experience and his breaking free. He has been the only one able to see himself in the mirror (here a free-standing, rolling unit), but not his present self; all three Tommys see themselves at different ages. His mother encourages him to break the mirror (“Smash the Mirror”), which he does. After that he discovers that he is no longer deaf, dumb and blind (“I’m Free”) and realizes his celebrity status. The humanization of the apotheosized Tommy is well documented and believable.
The ensemble singers and the principals ring out in this “cavernous” 101-year old vaudeville house. The dancers on the wide, shallow stage move about with fluid ease. Minimal set pieces are carried on with little distraction from the music and stage activity. Costume details by Mark Koss, such as an officer in an Eisenhower jacket and teenyboppers in Keds, keep the sense of time flow straightforward. Even for those not familiar with The Who, this Ray of Light production enthusiastically provides 37 songs, including overtures and reprises, in over two hours of deep and meaningful storytelling with some wry humor and a full-on rock beat.
The Who’s Tommy continues through November 7 at The Victoria Theatre, 2961 Sixteenth Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($25 to $36) are available at www.tommysf.com or by phone at Brown Paper Tickets, 800.838.3006.
The Catharsis Collective plays in Zombie Town
Zombie Town by Albert Goodwyn
Zombie Town, the play now running at the Exit, is a social and genre satire. The B-movie texture is well realized, even when interrupted by self-referential asides. The production focuses not only on the ridiculous theme of reanimated corpses, but also on the foibles and closed minds of small-town residents. The five members of Sleepwalkers Theatre effectively inhabit a multitude of parts as they recount the zombie invasion in Harwood Texas.
Tiny Harwood, in south central Texas, does not offer much in the way of excitement, so some local residents decide, "Let's go party in the Harwood cemetery." As a woman dances on a grave, she seems to sprout an extra hand on her foot, but it is a zombie hand reaching out of the grave. That unleashes from their interments other walking dead and Harwood is over-run with flesh eaters. Graves the gravedigger, who has heard it all about the connection between his name and occupation goes off to get drunk and returns to find an open grave. "Someone's already dug the grave," he declares. Dug out of the grave is more like it. Now, in disclaimer, the town's Web site declares that "the State of Texas has certified that not a single carnivorous corpse has been spotted in over nine months."
In the play, some theatre majors from a college collective have invaded Harwood to interview local residents for material for a possible play. The five actors portray a broad cross-section of the locals, all the way from the sleazy used-car dealer mayor (Damian Lanahan-Kalish), a housewife (Ariane Owens), a redneck (Drew Lanning), and an Itinerant accountant from the nearest city who happens to be in town (Ian Riley, also Sleepwalkers' Managing Director). Ian becomes trapped in a room in an abandoned house to escape from the carnivorous murderers -- Shades of George Romero! -- along with Owens and Lanning, now portraying a young couple. The sarcastic accountant names them "Slut Girl" (Owens) and "Numb Nuts" (Lanning). They discover that fire is the only thing that scares away zombies, so Numb tears apart a chair and rips his tee shirt to make torches of the legs. Alas, his flame goes out. Together they attempt to fend off the flesh-seeking zombies, to no good end.
The actors, known as The Catharsis Collective (Drew Lanning, Ian Riley, Alex Curtis, Damian Lanahan-Kalish, and Ariane Owens), use no props, miming such things as torches and broken chairs. They visualize the sight of the approaching zombies until the gory finale. Their impressionism of the locals is highly distinctive, and they are able to switch roles effectively and with well crafted characterization. For instance, Lanning moves from a redneck in an overstuffed chair, recounting the invasion, to Numb Nuts actually battling it. And Lanahan moves from Mayor to zombie with ease. Some scene shifts involve the quick travel of bed sheets hanging on a clothes line. The rustic nature of Owens' economical set design lends itself well to the multitude of changes in time and space. During the interview scenes, the actors announce who the character is supposed to be, a necessary help to identifying the townspeople. Act II takes place mostly in the room, boarded up from the inside.
" He doesn't run very fast. He's dead," Numb reassures Slut. This sort of tongue-in-cheek humor pervades the play. Self-referential asides also contribute to the fun of the play, such as when one actor asks what's happening, another replies, "It's a metaphor." The actors have no compunctions about making these references, sometimes even working them into the plot. When Ian does not want to continue the play, Numb encourages him by demanding an ending, saying, "These people paid good money," while gesturing toward the audience. One even expresses to another his desire for a Critics Circle award.
A duo of banjo and fiddle sits down stage right throughout the show, occasionally breaking into tunes and familiar riffs. The actors all have good sense of comic timing, but sometimes crack up on the blatant idiocy of their lines. The staging is well thought-out, generally. There are occasional unmotivated crosses. As townspeople they use over-done vaguely southern accents. The company's low-budget professionalism enables the actors to concentrate on their performances. They show great enthusiasm for their parts in this hour-and-a-half two-act play, delivering non-stop and excellently the witty writing of playwright Tim Bauer, just in time for a funny, pseudo-morbid romp through the Halloween season.
Zombie Town continues through November 7 at EXIT Theatre Stage Left, 156 Eddy Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($14 to $20) are available at www.sleepwalkerstheatre.com or by phone at (415) 913-7272.
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South Pacific by Albert Goodwyn
Photo by Peter Coombs of Carmen Cusack and Anderson Davis
New York's Lincoln Center Theater production of South Pacific, beginning its country-wide
tour in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Theatre, is replete with romance,
comedy -- including sailors in grass skirts -- and many well known songs by
Rodgers and Hammerstein, including the one with their unsubtle racist bias.
This successful new Broadway revival of the 1949 musical is lively, fast paced,
beautiful to look at, and delightful to hear. How appropriate then that the show
should begin its tour so near the Pacific Ocean
and the Hawaiian island setting of James Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning book
from which it was derived.
The intertwining stories of United States Naval wartime
occupation, sailors with too much time on their hands, love affairs between an
expatriate Frenchman and a Navy nurse as well as between a Marine lieutenant
and a young island girl, a covert operation, some zany follies, and
miscegenation come to a heroically tragic but happy ending. Local plantation
owner Emile de Becque, played with the rich baritone
of a leading American opera singer from California,
Rod Gilfry, gets the girl and the heroic, flawed Marine Lieutenant Joe Cable
gives his life in service to his country. Amidst all this, the sailors fritter
away their beach time in offhand ways until they are summoned to battle.
Gilfry as de Becque commands
the stage with a presence equal to the lush allure of his voice while he flirts
with the hesitant Ensign Forbush. He sings "Some Enchanted Evening"
to her, delivering it almost as a lecture. His deep voice rises from powerful
chest tones with a light sustain and judicious use of a good vibrato. In her Little Rock accent, Forbush calls herself "Knucklehead Nellie"
and sings "A Cockeyed Optimist." World-traveled actress, cabaret and
concert artist Carmen Cusack (She played the bad witch in Wicked.) belts out her songs with a well controlled soprano voice.
Her act of being an airhead country girl is belied in a later scene when she
lathers up in the shower with "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta
My Hair." The first hint of the racist theme comes when de Becque's dark-skin
children, whom Forbush does not realize are his, mock the black servant.
The sailors as an ensemble have
great fun with "There Is Nothin' like a Dame." The
choreography by Trude Rittmann and Christopher Gattelli on the set by Michael
Yeargan (professor of Stage Design at the Yale School of Drama), in this and other
ensemble scenes is graceful and exuberant, including flips and splits. Then
they introduce Bloody Mary, the siren of Bali Ha'I, the mythical,
twin-volcanoed island that is a metaphor of the attraction of romance and is off
limits to the sailors. Plump and seductive mezzo-soprano Keala Settle, a Hawaiian
native, has a voice that glides well into the high notes with inflections
peculiar to the Islands. When Marine Lt. Cable
comes along, she offers to sell him a shrunken head, but she mostly wants him
to come to Bali Ha'I to marry her teenage daughter. Cable (Lousiana tenor
Anderson Davis, who has sung in Broadway and regional shows) acts convincingly
enthralled by Bloody Mary's daughter Liat (Sumie Maeda) when he sings to her,
"Younger Than Springtime." He towers over Liat. Nothing good can come of this. Cable and de Becque wind
up on Bali Ha'I on a secret mission which the local Navy officers talk them
into. Some good comes of that, and some bad.
The singing by principals and
the ensemble, orchestration by Robert Russell Bennett and rigorously period
costumes by Catherine Zuber are all flawless, entertaining and lovely to see
and hear. Donald Holder's lighting of Yeargan's set of sandy beaches,
interspersed with flies of lattice-work and the plantation porch sets a
whimsical tone for the sailors' good fun, a somber atmosphere for scenes in the
Navy office and romantic focus for meetings of Forbush and de Becque. Director
Bartlett Shear recreates the original 1949 staging of Joshua Logan (who wrote
the book along with Hammerstein) in a sensitive and unadorned way. The play is dense with character insights, elegant
where it counts and forceful where it needs to be.
Photo by Peter Coombs of Carmen
Cusack and Anderson Davis
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The Torture Garden
by Albert Goodwyn
The Torture Garden contains themes of capitalism,opportunism, restitution, purloined passion, mercenary mercy, bad liquor, andprostitution – and that’s just Act I. Actually, that is the first one-act inThrillpeddlers’ tenth annual Shocktoberfest, now running at TheHypnodrome. Act II is the titular play of an entirely different nature from ActI, entitled The Phantom Limb, except that they share in the GrandGuignol genre of deliberately melodramatic acting for the effect of shockhorror so extreme that it’s either awe-inspiring or laugh getting. The play TheTorture Garden involves alcoholism, racism, assassination, inscrutability,and graphic depictions of torture. During the interval audience membersvolunteer to have their heads chopped off by a guillotine. The torture play opens aboard an oceangoing vessel with menat the rail drinking and joking about women while the ship’s captain tries tohide his association with a frequent passenger and an inscrutable Chinamanlurks nearby. Then enter the Captain’s rival Jean Marchal and the object oftheir affection Miss Clara Watson. The Captain, admirably played by the play’sdirector Russell Blackwood, warns Marchal to stay away from her because she’strouble. And she is. Not only might she be a spy who foments minor conflictsand is in the control of the Chinese mafia, she also has a morbid fixation withimages of torture, so much so that, once on land, she leads Marchal to anexhibition depicting torture techniques, then to a retired master of torture,with gory, expected results. Her Master tells her that she “will not escape thescarlet dragon.” After the last drop of stage blood has been spilled,Thrillpeddlers’ trademark phosphorescent specters dance through the blacked-outhouse. . This is the first English translation of the 1922 Frenchplay Le Jardine des Supplices by Pierre Chaine and Andre de Lorde.Perhaps the ever-so-sophisticated French regard this over-the-top style the wayAmericans might regard action movies, crime-scene investigations or exhibitionwrestling, with morbid fascination. There is humor embedded in this writing.These are one-dimensional characters in stupid situations, and we need notempathize with them. Therefore, we can laugh at the absurdity of theirpredicaments and fates. The first play, written recently, is set in a New Orleanswhorehouse just after The War between the States. Mama DuCharme formerly ran abar in Kentucky where she served soldiers liquor so bad it blinded them. Thenshe moved her operations to New Orleans where her working girls get theirclients drunk enough to steal their wallets and send them staggering out thedoor. War veteran amputees can also get their missing limbs soothed by Mama’smagic and shrapnel can be removed from bodies using vudu and chicken blood. Although this play has its gory moments, it is far moremeaningfully plotted than the sinister Chamber, which sought onlyreasons for bloodshed. The texture of writer Rob Keefe’s modern sensibilitiesweave through the play. Mama DuCharme has no compunctions in repeating that sheworships money. She does not proselytize about the War and who lost, but statesthat country unity is her philosophy. No implicit condemnation of the girls’work habits is made. Athough Mama DuCharme gets hers in the end, the girlssurvive. Humor lies in the broad characterizations by the actors and the lazzibits when the rolled johns stagger back onto the streets. The company ensembleactors all make dramatic character changes between he two plays. The Torture Garden continues through November 20 atThe Hypnodrome, 575 Tenth Street, San Francisco. Tickets ($25general admission; $69 for a private “Shock Box” seat for 2) are available at www.thrillpeddlers.com or by phone at (415) 377-4202.
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By Albert Goodwyn
All the whimsy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is accentuated in the current Cal Shakes production, and the director brought out the warmth of the human love, even for those blinded by magic herbs. The fairy world opens up on a fanciful stage. The actors present strong, definitive characterizations. The outdoor Amphitheater seating under tall trees is a perfect setting for Shakespeare’s play in the woods. The strands of the story line, tangled with comic complications, all weave together by the end.
The Duke of Athens is about to wed Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. His daughter Hermia (Erin Weaver) is eloping. She and her man Lysander (Avery Monsen) go to the woods. The suitor Demetrius (Richard Theriot) her father has chosen also goes to the woods, along with her friend Helena. Some local rustics are preparing a play to entertain the ceremony. They rehearse in the woods at night. At the same time, the king and queen of the fairies and their mischievous sprite Puck are also in the woods.
King Oberon, playing a trick on his queen Titania, commands Puck to squeeze some magic pansy juice on her eyes, so that she will automatically fall in love with the first person she sees upon awakening. He also should squeeze the juice on the eyes of the chosen suitor of Hermia. Puck gets it wrong and uses the magic on the wrong person. In his bad boy way, he puts an asses head on Nick Bottom, one of the rustics. So, Demetrius and Lysander both profess their love to Hermia. Titania wakes up to see Bottom with an ass’ head and falls in love with him. Oberon manages to correct the situation with another magic flower, and the rustics put on their play for the Duke’s wedding. It all makes perfect sense in this production.
They use many anachronisms. The costumes are modern and whimsical. Hermia dresses like goth punk. Others wear suits and robes. A microphone stand serves for a rock song to a ukulele. The comic lazzi bits abound, including a plastic hammer that squeaks when bopped against a character’s head. At one point, Puck is upstaged by a mechanical toy dog. The many scene changes are quick and well choreographed. The broad stage of the Amphitheater is cut down to size with a small set and light stands on the deck. The set is like a skateboard ramp with a colorful mosaic design. Steps lead up to the top, where a wooden moon hangs. Puck occasionally enters from the top by the moon, singing his songs.
The casting decisions were excellently made. Some core company members, along with some actors from other cities, provide strikingly distinct portrayals. Singer, dancer and actor Doug Hara is outstandingly energetic as the narrator Puck. His portrayal of confusion when he enchants the wrong set of eyes is a masterpiece of direction by Aaron Posner. Danny Scheie as Bottom obviously loves his buffoonish part, and plays it convincingly. Lindsey Gates as Helena provides a bemused character with a serious case of the giggles. Keith Randolph Smith plays both Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Oberon. As Theseus he is overly histrionic, but works very well as Oberon. Elegantly tall Pegge [sic] Johnson plays both Hippolyta and Titania very well.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays through October 11 at Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd. at Hwy 24, Orinda. Tickets ($20 to $68) are available at www.calshakes.org or by phone at (510) 548-9666.
Sarah Moser and Megan Trout in a Three Little Dumplings adventure
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Kathleen Turner as Sister Jamison Connelly & Evan Jonigkeit as Cody Randall
Happy Mahaney, Chloe Tucker
Cinderella (Antonette Bracks) finally meets her Prince Charming (David Moore)
Ross Valley Players just opened their production of the stage play taken from the award-winning book To Kill a Mockingbird. This production stays compellingly true to the original script and realistically portrays the texture of Depression-era rural Alabama. The simple tranquility of a child is disrupted by racism and murder. Some characters show nobility of spirit.
Three Qualities stand by the electric Ariel Coil in The Tempest 
Darren Bridgett, Mike Mize and Cassidy Brown as True Americans
Bob Greene and Zoe Conner explore geriatric activities at Pelican Roost.
Dan Clegg as Proteus and Arwen Anderson as Julia in Cal Shakes' world premiere production of The Verona Project
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gets up from the sofa as Sherry and Zack observe (Melissa Quine and Jeremy
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Grete (c. Megan Trout) dances for house guest Mr. Fischer
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Anna Deavere Smith
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Theatre with percussive thunder.
John watches as Alma conducts a meeting with her fellow "misfits" (l, Leanne Borghesi, c. left, Beth Deitchman, c, Ryan Tasker)
Joan Mankin as Gertie tries to stop the puppet of Lance Gardner as Millet from harming the Limping Man Tim True
(l to r) At Berkeley Rep, Zainab Jah, Carla Duren and Pascale Armand star in Ruined, a powerful new play by Lynn Nottage that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The white people (l – r) Josh Schell and Alexis Papedo) look on as the Koreans (l – r) Katie Chan, Mimu Tsujimura, Lily Tung Crystal) listen to Korean American's sermon (Cindy Im).
Kerri Brackin, Nicky, Rod, Brent Michael DiRoma with their puppets
Sarah Nealis (right) as Eliza talks to Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker, left) about being given an office the size of a broom closet at the end of a hallway. 
Hannah (Carrie Paff) and David (Gabriel Marin) discuss their fears 
Harper (Susi Damilano) is denied time off to see her dying
(l - r) Corinne Robkin as Bug & Josh Schell as August
Beverly (René Augesen) and Russ (Anthony Fusco), a married couple in 1959, are packing to leave their family
home.
Leah S. Abrams as Adventure
Beth Wilmurt as part of a performing duo struggling and failing to make an act
Paige Rogers as Ariadne in Diadem at Cutting Ball
Mike Daisey
Shen Yun’s glorious three-night-only celebration
of the upcoming new year on the Chinese calendar brings to life classical
Chinese dance and music in a brilliantly colorful and inspiring show.
Photos courtesy of Shen Yun and New Tang Dynasty Television
The horn section of Lemony Snickett’s orchestra
Alvin Mingo, Jr. plays the Donkey
Kari Podgorski in an aerial split
Sylvia Zerbini’s “Grande Liberté”
Erik Rhea as Mr. Darcy and Lori Dorfman as Elizabeth Bennet in a scene from the Ross Valley Players' production of Pride and Prejudice
(l - r) David Sinaiko ,
Caitlyn Louchard and Donell Hill share
a mysterious vision in Cutting Ball Theater's chamber version of The Tempest
Adam Overett as the detective and Joe Kinosian as everyone
else
The Broadway Company of West Side Story
The cast of The Great Game: Afghanistan in The Night is Darkest before the Dawn by Abi Morgan
Plácido Domingo as Cyrano de Bergerac
Jessica Coghill as Anna & Cole Alexander Smith as Al
Agamemnon faces off against the gods in IPH ...
Hyacinth (A.C.T. Master of Fine Arts Program student Ashley Wickett, left) and Zerbinette (A.C.T. core acting company member René Augesen) eagerly await the result of Scapin’s machinations.
Carl Lumbly and Charles Dean in The Sunset Limited
Domenique Lozano as Beatrice and Andy Murray as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing
Dreya Weber as Cleopatra
Dreya Weber as Aerialist
Funny phone calls to the Oval Office: Buzz Halsing as President Charles “Chucky” Smith and Steven Dietz as his aide in David
Mamet’s comedy November now at The Barn Theatre in Ross
Al Manners (Tim Kniffin) directs Wiletta Mayer (Margo Hall) in Trouble in Mind
Adrienne Warren, Syesha Mercado & Margaret Hoffman
Justin Glaser as Beast and Liz
Shivenir as Belle
Suzan A. Kendall, Brian Trybom and Hannah Knapp as the Wingfield family
Peter Matthews as Brick and Lauren Doucette as Maggie the Cat
Photo courtesy of Lynn Ruth Miller
Nick Russell as Brick and Jennifer Welch as Maggie
(l-r) Howie (Maro Guevara), Diwata (Jayne Deely), and Solomon (Jason Frank) take a dance break in Speech & Debate
Lisa Asher, Megan Pearl Smith, Berwick Haynes, Sam Misner and Matt Mueller in WOODY GUTHRIE'S AMERICAN SONG at Marin Theatre Company
Tim Kniffin as Anton visits the hospital room of Libby, the young woman he paralyzed
(l - r) Michaela Greeley as diva Maria Callas and Holly Nugent as her student Sharon Graham
(from
L to R) Timothy Beagley, Jeff Garrett and Brook Robinson in an emotional and
plot turning scene from the Ross Valley Players production of "The Boys
Next Door"
Kemp (Marco Barricelli) does not understand why Grace (Olympia Dukakis) is putting on makeup when she will be dying soon.
Aimee McCrary as Iago in Othello
(l - r) Jeanette Harrison as Cadence Marie Verse and Aldo Billingslea as Demeter
(l - r) Devon (Brian Tybom) squares off with dad George (Raymond Hobbs) in The Philadelphian
(l - r) Joyce Henderson as Vi Venable and Mark Bird as Dr. Cukrowitz 
Cole Alexander Smith, Amy Resnick, Brian Herndon, and Marissa Keltie while watching the Hale-Bopp comet
Emiliano and his daughter Marina
Wozzeck Sung as Film Noir
(l - r) Roselyn Hallet as Sr. James, Scarlett Hepworth as Sr. Aloysius and
Tim Barsky and his Bright River combo on stage
Don Reed
(l – r) Katie Guthorn, Carol Bozzio Littleton and Darby Gould as The Coverlettes
Prince Albert (Rupert Friend) and Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt) take an ill-fated carriage ride. 
(l - r) Dad Warden Lawlor, sis Cassie Powell and mom Molly Benson;
(front) son James Tinsley
Wall Act 
Jud Williford and Liliane Klein in Fat Pig
‘Tis the season for ghost stories,and the hapless character in The Woman in Black tries to tell his onChristmas Eve, according to the script of the play now at The Phoenix Theatre.Second Wind Productions company effortlessly enthralls with their taut,gripping suspense and intense pacing. They deftly render the wide variety ofplaces and characters involved in the story.
Zachary Franczak as Tommy in Ray of Light's production
The Catharsis Collective plays in Zombie Town
The Torture Garden contains themes of capitalism,opportunism, restitution, purloined passion, mercenary mercy, bad liquor, andprostitution – and that’s just Act I. Actually, that is the first one-act inThrillpeddlers’ tenth annual Shocktoberfest, now running at TheHypnodrome. Act II is the titular play of an entirely different nature from ActI, entitled The Phantom Limb, except that they share in the GrandGuignol genre of deliberately melodramatic acting for the effect of shockhorror so extreme that it’s either awe-inspiring or laugh getting. The play TheTorture Garden involves alcoholism, racism, assassination, inscrutability,and graphic depictions of torture. During the interval audience membersvolunteer to have their heads chopped off by a guillotine.
