KRCB-FM: Second Row Center: Recent Episodes
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House lights down. Cue the music. The curtain rises weekly on KRCB’s early-morning news segment Second Row Center.
There’s a lot of theatre in the Bay Area. With so many options and limited time and resources, how does one go about deciding just what to see? That’s where a critic can be of assistance.
Theatre critic Harry Duke has been knocking around Bay Area stages for twenty years since his days in the Sonoma State University Theatre Arts program. He’s turned what used to be post-show conversations with fellow artists into full-fledged reviews of Bay Area theatre that can be found in the Sonoma County Gazette and on the For All Events website. More than a simple recitation of a plot (you can look that up yourselves,) his reviews are honest evaluations of the components that make a good show good and a bad show bad.
On December 4, 1956, a legendary jam session was held at rock and roll pioneer Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley were labeled the “Million Dollar Quartet” by a local journalist and the moniker stuck to the recordings of the session released decades later.
In 2006, Colin Escott and Floyd Matrux unleashed a highly fictionalized and time-compressed theatrical version of the event also titled Million Dollar Quartet. After several successful bay area productions, Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse gives the North Bay a chance to check out this popular jukebox musical now running through March 24.
Jukebox musicals are usually comprised of a couple of dozen well-known songs connected by expositionary material and Million Dollar Quartet is no different. Sam Phillips (Benjamin Stowe) narrates the tale of the event, filling in the backstory and presenting the dramatic conflict (Will Johnny Cash sign a contract extension or fly the coop?) around which the music swirls.
At a recording session for Carl Perkins (Jake Turner) with Jerry Lee Lewis (Nick Kenrick, also music director) on piano, who should happen to drop by but Elvis Presley and his girlfriend (played by Daniel Durston and Samantha Arden) and Johnny Cash (played by Steve Lasiter)! In no time, there’ll be a whole lot of shakin goin’ on as we’re treated to “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Folsom Prison Blues”, “That’s All Right”, “Great Balls of Fire” and 20 other classics.
Director Michael Ray Wisely – who has played Phillips and directed this piece before - had the benefit of 6th Street expending significant coin on this production beginning with an impressive set (Conor Woods adapting Kelly James Tighe’s original scenic design) and imported talent. It’s not an easy show to cast as each performer must be a “triple threat” - an actor, a singer, and a musician.
Kenrick reprises his TBA Award-winning performance as Jerry Lee Lewis and steals the show with his kinetic piano playing and entertaining characterization. Local performer Jake Turner manages to hold his own against Kenrick as Carl Perkins, and Durston and Lasiter do fine in capturing the essence of their characters while avoiding simple caricatures. They receive good musical support by locals Nick Ambrosino on drums and bassist Shovanny Delgado Carillo.
Ignore the shaky musical history and often-pedestrian exposition that’s presented and you’ll find yourself enjoying a well-performed staged concert of some of rock and roll’s greatest hits.
'Million Dollar Quartet' runs Thursdays through Sundays through March 24 at 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa. Thursday through Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm; there are Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
Anyone going to a performance of Hello, Dolly! - running now at the SHN Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco through March 17 - with an appetite for an enlightened look at male/female relationships is likely to leave quite hungry. The current national tour of the 2017 revival of the 1964 Broadway smash based on Thorton Wilder’s 1955 revision of his 1938 play extrapolated from an Austrian playwright’s 1842 extension of an English dramatists 1835 one-act reflects the then-common attitudes towards a women’s place in society and the home.
Anyone going to a performance of Hello, Dolly! with an appetite to see a Broadway legend at work, or hear magnificent musical classics delivered with gusto, or see a bevy of athletic dancers spring across the stage in spirited numbers based on Gower Champion’s original choreography, or be dazzled by the color and craftsmanship at work in Santo Loquasto’s scenic and costume design, is likely to leave the theatre with their appetite satiated.
Tony-winner Betty Buckley (Cats, Sunset Boulevard) plays Dolly Gallagher Levi, a matchmaker and jill-of-all-trades in 19th century New York engaged by the well-known Yonkers half-a-millionaire Horace Vandergelder (Lewis J. Stadlen) to find him a bride, an assignment which Dolly intends to fill herself. Sub-plots involve Vandergelder’s niece Ermengarde and her paramour Ambrose Kemper (played by Morgan Kirner and Garret Hawe) and Feed Store clerks Cornelius and Barnaby (played by Nic Rouleau Jess LeProtto).
At age 71, Buckley does her damnedest to make the part made famous by Carol Channing (at age 42) her own, and succeeds to an extent. It’s obvious and understandable that her choreography has been limited and that she lacks the vocal power to deliver some of the musical’s biggest moments (“Before the Parade Passes By” was disappointingly flat) but she really delivers in the show’s quieter moments when she engages with the memories of her late husband.
The supporting cast is outstanding with Rouleau and LeProtto really scoring as the clerks unleashed in New York City and Analisa Leaming and Kristen Hahn as the objects of their affections.
MVP of this production goes to Stadlen, a reliable Broadway performer for the past 50 years who often toils in the anonymity common to great character actors. His eyebrows are as expressive as anything else on stage.
Go ahead, roll your eyes during “It Takes a Woman” but don’t be surprised to find yourself cheering after “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” and “The Waiters’ Gallop” and, at the very least, smiling through almost everything else.
‘Hello, Dolly! ’runs through March 17 at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco. Dates and times vary.
For more information, go to shnsf.com
Sometimes the most interesting dramas are the simplest - a single set, a few characters, a conflict. “Naturalistic” plays, as they are sometimes referred, were the result of a late 19th century movement in European theatre to enhance the realism of plays with an understanding of how heredity and environment can influence an individual.
The most famous play to come out of this period is Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Set in the downstairs kitchen of an estate, it’s a three-character piece examining issues of sex and class. The title character’s the daughter of a count with an eye for the manor’s chauffeur, complicated by the presence of the manor cook who also happens to be the chauffeur’s wife-to-be.
Playwright Patrick Marber (Closer, film’s Notes on a Scandal) adapted the play for British television in 1995 under the title After Miss Julie and a stage version premiered in 2003. It’s the version running now through March 3 at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West.
Marber moved the time and setting of the play to post-WWII England, specifically to the night of the Labour Party’s landslide victory over Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party. The significant upheaval to Great Britain’s political and social system is reflected in the characters.
Miss Julie (Illana Niernberger) is literally “to the manor born”, but that doesn’t stop her from slumming with the servants. John (Sam Coughlin) is the Lord of the Manor’s chauffeur who, while harboring a long love for Miss Julie, is to be married to Christine (Jennifer Coté), the manor cook. Miss Julie is used to getting what she wants, and that includes John. John wants something, too, and that is to “improve” his lot in life and Miss Julie can facilitate that. Christine wants a simple life with a husband with a pension and a family.
Co-Directors/Scenic Designers Elizabeth Craven and David Lear elicit strong performances from the cast. Niernberger’s Julie is lost in a changing society, turning on a dime from entitled superior to groveling submissive. Coughlin’s John is the villain of the piece, desperate to be something other than he is at any cost, but destined to be no more than a (literally) bootlicking lackey. Coté’s Christine is the most aggrieved of the party, but she is willing to overlook - or forgive – John’s boorishness to ensure she gets what she wants.
After Miss Julie is a classic love triangle told exceedingly well, though the question of how much “love” exists between any of them is up for debate.
'After Miss Julie' runs through March 3 at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Thursday through Saturday evening performances are at 8pm. The Sunday matinee is at 5pm.
For more information, go to mainstagewest.com
Musical zombies rise from the dead to sing an evening of ‘50’s pop standards.
Let me try that again.
On February 4, 1964, The Plaids, an eastern Pennsylvania-based vocal quartet, were headed for a major gig at the Fusel-Lounge at the Harrisburg Airport Hilton when their cherry red Mercury was broadsided by a bus full of Catholic schoolgirls. The girls, who escaped unscathed, were on their way to see the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Plaids went on to that Great Performance Hall in the Sky… or at least the green room of the Great Performance Hall in the Sky. Rather than spend an eternity waiting to “go on”, they make their way back to earth to give the concert that never was.
That is the plot upon which Stuart Ross and James Raitt hang twenty-four musical standards in their very popular jukebox musical Forever Plaid, running through March 3 at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa.
Frankie (F. James Raasch), Sparky (Scottie Woodard), Jinx (Michael Scott Wells), and Smudge (David Murphy) were high school friends who dreamed of musical glory. Following the path created by ‘50’s versions of what we now refer to as “boy bands” (The Four Lads, The Four Aces, The Crew-Cuts, etc.), they formed The Plaids and specialized in four-part harmonies.
And that’s what you’ll hear over the Michael Ross-directed show’s one hour and 45-minute running time. “Three Coins in the Fountain”, “Sixteen Tons”, “Chain Gang”, and “Love is a Many Splendored Thing” are just some of the 20-plus songs performed by the crisply costumed gents (courtesy Barbara McFadden) with matching choreography by Woodard. Music is nicely performed by a trio consisting of music director Craig Burdette (keyboards), Quentin Cohen (drums), and Alan Parks (bass).
The guys are good with each one getting a solo shot to go along with the group work. Their stock characters (the shy one, the funny, etc.) banter with each other between numbers and amusingly engage with the audience. The comedic numbers are particularly well done with the show’s highlight being a three-minute recreation of The Ed Sullivan Show, though it helps to have some familiarity with that show.
The same can be said for the music. Yes, it’s a trip down memory lane, but if toe-tapping, hand-squeezing and perpetual grinning are any indications, Forever Plaid hits all the right notes with an audience willing to make the trip.
’Forever Plaid' plays through March 3rd at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa. Thursday evening performances are at 7pm; Fridays and Saturdays are at 8pm. There’s a Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to luckypennynapa.com
To see or not to see? That is the question.
Anyone with even the slightest interest in theatre has probably seen a production or two of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in their lifetime. Considered by many to be Shakespeare’s - if not the world’s - greatest play, it’s one-third ghost story, one-third dysfunctional family drama, and one-third revenge tale. It’s now the first-ever Shakespeare play to be mounted on the Nellie W. Codding stage at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Artistic Director Sheri Lee Miller helms the production which runs through February 17.
Something is rotten in the state Denmark. A spirit claiming to be the late King has appeared to Prince Hamlet to inform him he was poisoned by his own brother Claudius, who then married the widowed queen Gertrude and usurped the throne. He has one simple request of Hamlet – revenge!
Miller has gathered an impressive roster of talent to essay the Bard’s classic roles. First and foremost, there’s Keith Baker as the brooding Prince. Baker is a marvel to watch and to listen to as Shakespeare’s words come trippingly off his tongue. Peter Downey is magnetic as the scheming Claudius, shading his villainy with a glimpse into his humanity and his true love of Gertrude. Eric Thompson’s Polonius brings a welcome lightness to the stage and is sorely missed upon his “departure”. Chad Yarish as faithful friend Horatio, Danielle Cain as the easily swayed Gertude, Ivy Rose Miller as the doomed Ophelia and the entire supporting cast do honor to their roles.
The stark yet imposing set by Elizabeth Bazzano and Eddy Hansen in conjunction with Hansen’s lighting Design and Chris Schloemp’s projections design give the production an otherworldly feel. Costumes by Pamela Johnson pop against the dark and dank (courtesy of ample fog) backgrounds.
An extremely effective addition is a live music “soundscape” composed and performed by Nancy Hayashibari. Accompanying many scenes, Hayashibari’s contribution to this production’s success cannot be overstated.
Look, folks, I’m no Shakespeare pushover. It’s overdone, usually underproduced, and often interminable, but I get it. It’s royalty free, has roles that are on every actor’s bucket list, and comes with a built-in audience. Yes, it’s long, but director Sheri Lee Miller has put together an outstanding production of Hamlet that should reach beyond that “Shakespeare” audience. Will they come?
Aye, there’s the rub.
'Hamlet' runs through February 17th at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 8pm, the Sunday matinee is at 2pm. There’s also a Thursday, February 14th performance at 7pm.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com
Serial killing would seem to be rather ghoulish subject matter for a comedic play, yet Arsenic and Old Lace has been a reliable audience-pleaser for over seventy-five years. Sonoma Arts Live has a production running through February 10.
Joseph Kesselring’s tale of the Brewster sisters and their pension for helping lonely old men meet their maker via a glass of elderberry wine debuted on Broadway in 1941 and ran for 1,444 performances. It starred Jean Adair, Josephine Hull, and Boris Karloff as black sheep Jonathan Brewster. A film adaptation by Frank Capra followed in 1944 starring Cary Grant as Jonathan Brewster. Though the play has since become a staple of the American theater, like an old haunted house it’s starting to creak.
Mortimer Brewster (Michael Coury Murdock) returns to his childhood home and his Aunts Abby & Martha (Karen Brocker & Karen Pinomaki). After getting engaged to the next-door preacher’s daughter Elaine (Julianne Bradbury), Mortimer is horrified to discover his aunts have taken on the most macabre hobby. They’re helping lonely old men find “peace” and disposing of the bodies in the basement. Luckily, Uncle “Teddy” (Tim Setzer) believes himself to be Teddy Roosevelt and is always willing to dig a new lock downstairs at the Panama Canal for the latest “yellow fever victim.”
Mortimer figures he can pin everything on the obviously insane Teddy, but things get
complicated when brother Jonathan (Mike Schaeffer) shows up with a physician friend (Rose Roberts) and a body of their own.
Director Michael Ross has some good talent at work here. Mmes. Brocker and Pinomaki are delightfully dotty as the sisters, and Setzer invigorates the stage with his every appearance.
However, Mr. Murdock is too one-note as Mortimer, showing little range of emotion considering the insanity that’s going on around him. He rarely seems to be “in the moment”, often appearing to be casually awaiting his next line. Ms. Bradbury is far more animated as Elaine, making one wonder what she see’s in Mortimer.
Schaeffer and Roberts are two very talented actors, but I’m not sure these were the right roles for them. I found Schaeffer’s menacing Jonathan undone by his distracting John O’Hurley (J. Peterman from Seinfeld)-like voice and Roberts baby-faced Dr. Einstein too youthful to capture the character’s exhaustion and desperation.
Nice stagecraft compliments the performances. The black and white set (by Michael Walraven) and costumes (by Janice Snyder) evoke a classic cinema period-like feel.
Arsenic and Old Lace is definitely a nostalgia piece, best enjoyed by those familiar with it.
‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ runs through February 10 at Andrews Hall in the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma. Thursday through Saturday performances are at 7:30pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to sonomaartslive.org.
When playwright August Wilson passed away in 2005, he left behind a body of work that has become a staple of the American theatre. As much a documentarian as a poet and author, the ten plays (Jitney, Fences, et al.) of Wilson’s Century (or Pittsburgh) Cycle chronicle the twentieth century African-American experience mostly through the lives of the residents of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where Wilson grew up.
In 2002, Wilson stepped away from the Cycle and turned to himself as his subject with How I Learned What I Learned, running now at Mill Valley’s Marin Theatre Company in partnership with San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theatre and Oakland’s Ubuntu Theatre Project. The show will play other Bay Area venues under their auspices after the conclusion of its Marin run.
Directed with obvious love by Margo Hall and starring Steven Anthony Jones as Wilson, the show is a 110-minute intermission-less conversation between the author and the audience. It’s not a “greatest hits” review, but a look back at the life experiences that shaped Wilson as a young man and the people he encountered along the way. Those familiar with Wilson’s work will recognize some people as the basis for characters or plot elements in his work.
Set on a simple stage against a backdrop of sheets of paper hanging like laundry drying on a line, each of Wilson’s often humorous reminiscences is announced by a projection of a typewritten title. After a quick review of the African-American experience through 1863, it begins with his decision to move out of his mother’s house and zig-zags through his experiences as a young man seeking work, his neighborhood interactions, his dalliances, his time in jail, his discovery of jazz, and the indignities he suffered because of the color of his skin. From an early job interview that ended with a warning not to steal, to being asked to stop mowing a lawn because the white home owner objected to a black man being on her property, to the difficulties in cashing a check, the show’s most powerful moments are those in which Wilson reminds us that the respect of others won’t come without respect of self.
Steven Anthony Jones is a marvelous story teller who, though he struggled a bit with lines on opening night, completely captured the audience by the time the lights had dimmed. August Wilson may be gone, but Jones brings him roaring back to life with an entertaining, enraging, and eye-opening evening of solo theatre.
‘How I Learned What I Learned’ runs Tuesday through Sunday through February 3 at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley before moving to other venues in the Bay Area. Dates and times vary.
For more information, go to marintheatre.org
Continuing with the tradition of theatre companies producing theatre about theatre, 6th Street Playhouse is presenting Ken Ludwig’s 1995 door-slamming farce Moon Over Buffalo. The backstage comedy runs through February 3.
Buffalo, New York’s Erlanger Theater is hosting the repertory company of George and Charlotte Hay (Dodds Delzell & Madeleine Ashe), grade-B actors and grade-A hams who never made it big on stage. Content to spend their waning years touring second-rate theatres and playing roles more appropriate for actors half their age, they’re on the ropes when word comes to George that Frank Capra is coming to see them perform and possibly cast them as replacements for Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson in a big-budget period film.
Charlotte doesn’t believe George as she’s just found out he’s been lying about an affair he had with company ingenue Eileen (Victoria Saitz) who happens to be carrying George’s child. Charlotte announces she’s running off with family friend/attorney Richard (Joe Winkler) which sends George into a drunken spiral. Charlotte finds out the Capra story is true, so it’s up to Charlotte, her recently returned daughter Rosalind (Chandler Parrot-Thomas), her daughter’s ex-lover and current stage manager Paul (Robert Nelson) and Charlotte’s hearing-impaired mother Ethel (Shirley Nilsen Hall) to sober up George in time for the matinee. There’s also the confusion over Rosalind’s current fiancé Howard (Erik Weiss), a TV weatherman who is mistaken by Charlotte for Capra and by George as Eileen’s vengeful brother, and a concluding performance of Noël Coward’s Private Lives mashed up with Cyrano de Bergerac.
Director Carl Jordan has a terrific cast of comedic talents running, jumping, stumbling and rolling through Ludwig’s tale which comes off as a lesser knock-off of his superior Lend Me a Tenor. All the elements are there (mistaken identity, feuding lovers, running jokes, etc.) but at its core it’s a hollow re-do that starts slowly before hitting its stride. More problematic, the characters as written simply aren’t very likeable. The show only works if you care about the characters and want them to get out of their mess. I just didn’t.
The set by Jason Jamerson is solid – literally, as it has to withstand two hours of door slamming – and it’s one of the better sets seen recently on 6th Street’s stage. The cast is game and their timing is great with each squeezing some laughs out of their characters. Delzell gets to play half the show soused, Parrot-Thomas is quite delightful as Rosalind, and while Weiss’s physical comedy is always fun to watch, I’d really like to see him do something different with his next role.
Moon Over Buffalo is a case where the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
'Moon Over Buffalo' runs Friday through Sunday through February 3 at 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm. There’s a Thursday, January 24 performance at 7:30 pm
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
It’s said that musicals are the bread and butter of community theatre, so here’s a list of the North Bay productions I toasted this past year. Here are my top torn tickets of 2018: Part Two, the Musicals (in alphabetical order):
Always, Patsy Cline… - Sonoma Arts Live - Danielle DeBow’s Patsy was as heartbreaking as Karen Pinomaki’s Louise was amusing in director Michael Ross’s labor of love. Excellent costume and set design work (also by Ross) along with outstanding live music accompaniment under the direction of Ellen Patterson made this a memorable evening of musical theatre.
A Chorus Line - Novato Theater Company - Few small theatre companies would take the risk of producing a vehicle that requires triple-threat performers in most roles. Director Marilyn Izdebksi’s decades of experience in dance and choreography and terrific casting were key to this production’s success.
Hands on a Hardbody - Lucky Penny - The perfect sized musical for the Napa company’s small space, there wasn’t much room for anything else once they got the pickup truck that’s central to the story on stage. Director Taylor Bartolucci and choreographer Staci Arriaga had just enough room for a nice, diverse cast to beautifully tell the atypical story.
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change - Raven Players - The cavernous Raven Theatre in Healdsburg was converted into a quaint black-box space where director Diane Bailey let loose four talented performers to tell musical stories about the arc of human relationships. It worked really well.
Illyria - 6th Street Playhouse - Shakespeare. Ugh. A Shakespeare musical? Groan. A really entertaining musical production based on Twelfth Night? Surprising! Director Craig Miller’s swan song was a clever adaptation of the Bard’s comedy that combined excellent vocal talents and the musical direction of Lucas Sherman to produce the best sounding show I’d seen at 6th Street in a long time.
Peter Pan - Spreckels Theatre Company - There’s no better stage in the North Bay on which to see a large-scale musical than the Codding stage at Spreckels. Flying around on wires is so much more impressive in a 550-seat theater, and Sarah Wintermeyers’ winsome performance as Peter was good enough for me to set aside my long-standing beef with always casting a female in the role.
Scrooge in Love! - Lucky Penny - A fairly new play (this was only its third production) that’s good enough to become a Christmas standard. A great lead performance from Brian Herndon was supported by a top-notch ensemble in this reverential continuation of the Dickens classic.
‘Tis the time for “Best of …” lists, so in the spirit of my illustrious predecessor and with a nod to the substantial differences in mounting a musical versus a play, here are my top torn tickets of 2018 - Part One, the Plays (in alphabetical order):
Blackbird - Main Stage West – As dark subject matter goes, this look at a pedophile and his victim is as unsettling a piece of theatre as I’ve seen. Under David Lear’s direction, Sharia Pierce and John Shillington acted the hell out of David Harrower’s script which raised a lot of really uncomfortable questions and provided no answers.
Buried Child - Main Stage West – Elizabeth Craven’s direction of Sam Shepard’s nightmarish look at the crumbling American Dream found the right balance between the real and the surreal in this dark, funny, disturbing, and heartbreaking show.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Spreckels Theatre Company – Elijah Pinkham’s revelatory performance as a 15-year-old with an Asperger’s/autism-like condition on a journey of self-discovery was the centerpiece of this Elizabeth Craven-directed production.
Death of a Salesman - Novato Theatre Company & 6th Street Playhouse - It’s a critic’s burden to have to go see multiple productions of the same piece within weeks or months of each other and it’s rare when both productions are superb. The Carl Jordan and Craig Miller-helmed productions each had their own strengths and weaknesses but both had towering lead performances. Joe Winkler’s and Charles Siebert’s takes on Willy Loman were utterly different and totally devastating.
Equus - 6th Street Playhouse – Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play about a boy and his horse was such a left-field choice for 6th Street to produce that I really didn’t know what to expect. That this very difficult play turned out to be one of the North Bay’s best 2018 productions is a credit to director Lennie Dean and an outstanding ensemble.
The Great God Pan – Cinnabar Theater – A terrific combination of script, performance, technical and design craft under the direction of Taylor Korobow made this rumination on recovered memory unforgettable.
Oslo - Marin Theatre Company – While the Oslo Accords have been deemed a failure, MTC’s excellent production of the J.T. Rogers drama about the negotiations that lead to them reminded us that humanity is too often the missing element in politics today.
Next week: Top Torn Tickets, the Musicals!
For years, Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater has closed out the year with a musical cabaret show. Past years’ productions have celebrated the work of musical artists from Edith Piaf to Mahalia Jackson to Frank Sinatra. This year, the work of classic American tunesmith Cole Porter takes center stage via Love, Linda, a look at Porter through the eyes of his wife, Ms. Linda Lee.
Veteran cabaret performer Maureen McVerry plays Mrs. Cole Porter and yes, there was a Mrs. Cole Porter. More than a marriage of convenience, the Porters had a genuine affection for each other, despite Porter leading an active homosexual life. Notwithstanding the challenges that presented to the relationship, they remained married until Lee’s death in 1954.
The show is set in the Porter’s elegant Parisian apartment where Linda reminisces about her life before Porter, how they met, their life together in Paris, their adventures in Hollywood, and their settling in an apartment at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. Interspersed between the memories are, of course, the songs. The tale of their time in Paris is matched with “I Love Paris”, their time in Hollywood with “Night and Day” (also the title of the highly fictionalized film biography where the diminutive Porter was portrayed by the 6’4” Cary Grant). Her complex relationship with Porter is represented by “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and “Wunderbar”.
Ms. McVerry’s vocals are accompanied by a terrific on-stage three-piece combo of piano (played by Chris Alexander for the opening performance, musical director Cesar Cancino handles it for the rest of the run), bass by Steven Hoffman, and drums by John Shebalin. McVerry does not possess a particularly rich voice, which led the musical accompaniment to regularly overwhelm her vocals. We hear Porter’s beautiful compositions, but his often amusing, often passionate lyrics are frequently lost. Cinnabar should really consider miking their musicals.
Director Clark Sterling keeps things moving at a brisk pace and brings the show in at 85 minutes, including an intermission. Scenic designer Wayne Hovey brings an expansive apartment feel to the Cinnabar space, though I wish the projections used throughout the show had been worked more into the set rather than displayed over it.
Love, Linda is an affectionate look back at one of America’s greatest musical talents. My affection for it would be amplified if the vocals were.
'Love, Linda' runs through January 13th at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 8pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm. There’s a New Year’s Eve party and performance at 9pm on December 31st.
For more information, go to cinnabartheater.org.
Dear Evan Hansen,
I attended the opening night performance of the San Francisco run of your national tour at the Curran Theatre. I’ve heard a lot about your show - the six Tonys (including Best Musical) and the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. I’ve seen the songs performed on various television shows and many of my friends own the album. I know this show has touched a nerve with a lot of people and, after seeing it, I understand why. Yet, I left the theatre feeling a bit uncomfortable.
Your story of a friendless high school student (played by Ben Levi Ross) with an unspecified behavioral condition who finds himself trapped in a lie of his own creation about a fellow student’s death has a lot to say. It speaks to the lonely, the different, and the heartbroken via some beautiful songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, like “You Will Be Found” and “Waving Through a Window”. Your tale of the desperate need for human connections in a technologically oppressive world is filled with terrific performances, especially Jessica Philips as your mother, Jared Kleinman as your “family friend” Jared, and Maggie McKenna as Zoe, the object of your affection.
Steven Levenson’s book speaks many truths as well. I have experienced first-hand the phenomenon of what happens at a public school when students are faced with the unexpected death of a classmate; how some latch on to a person they never knew and create a relationship that never existed.
Where I find the story less than truthful, however, is in dealing with the issue of your condition and the underlying message of the myth of a “good lie”.
What is it that led you to seek therapeutic help? Is your awkwardness a manifestation of that condition? If it is, why is the audience amused by it? Do they find your behavior cute? Funny? Is your pain being played for laughs? Is that why your lying is excused? The more I thought about these things, the more troubled I became.
And what of your lie? Is the fact that everyone seems to come out of the situation unscathed, or even better off, a classic case of the ends justifying the means? Is that the message with which the playwright really wants to leave us?
We live in perilous times, Evan. Truth is a precious commodity that is in too short supply these days. Let’s not lose sight of that via eye-popping stagecraft and soaring ballads.
Sincerely,
Me
‘Dear Evan Hansen’ runs through December 30th at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. Dates and times vary. For more information, go to sfcurran.com
One-person shows with a holiday theme tend to skew toward the male variety, whether it’s a show about a disgruntled department store Christmas elf (David Sedaris’s Santaland Diaries) or a single dad desperate to maintain the fiction of Santa Claus with his children (David Templeton’s Polar Bears). Even Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol has been reduced to a one-man show with Scrooge.
Playwright Ginna Hoben’s the 12 Dates of Christmas is a rare female-centric holiday themed show that, despite its title, has little to do with the holiday and more to do with a one woman’s experience in the dating world. It runs at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse through January 6.
Mary (Jess Headington), a thirty-something actress in New York, is getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving with her fiancé when he calls to beg off due to food poisoning. She’s watching the Macy’s Parade on television, when what to her wondering eyes do appear but said fiancé nibbling on his co-worker’s ear.
No sooner is the engagement ring dropped in a Salvation Army kettle when Mary begins her own parade - of dates. We skip from holiday to holiday and follow her through a year of family set-ups, chance meetings and the occasional hook-up. Each date is represented by an ornament Mary hangs on her Christmas tree.
There’s a doctor who’s too good to be true, a bartender who forces Mary to break one of her personal rules (never date anyone with an ass smaller than your own), a stalker, a guy who offers her a steady job, a co-worker, an old friend, and even the ex-fiancé. Some dates are better than others. She turns down a guy who calls back. She waits for a call from a guy who never does. A year later, she’s still single, but seems content with her choices and has moved on, continuing to build her life, whether there’s another person in it or not.
Headington is a talented performer and engages the audience from the get-go. Her Mary is a fully-formed character, neither perfect nor a walking disaster. She owns her choices, recognizes the bad ones she makes, revels in the good ones, and keeps plowing forward through the ups-and-downs of dating with her sense of humor intact.
Mary is not the only character to take the stage, as Headington takes on the roles of her mother, her busy-body aunt, her perfect sister, her various dates and about a half-dozen other characters who enter the scene. She does a good job making each character distinctive and recognizable, either through vocal choice or physicality.
Director Juliet Noonan keeps Mary on the move and brings the show in at about 90 minutes with an intermission. She utilizes the entire black box space and even has Mary come into the audience. Headington’s goodwill prevents these moments from becoming too intrusive. The closing moments of both acts need to be defined a bit more, though. It’s never good when an audience isn’t sure whether a show is over or not.
The dating world is often a fertile field for comedy. Headington and the 12 Dates of Christmas do a pretty good job of harvesting that field for good-natured laughs.
'The 12 Dates of Christmas' runs through January 6th at the 6th Street Playhouse Studio Theatre in Santa Rosa. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm. There’s one Saturday matinee on December 29th and a Thursday evening performance on January 3rd.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com.
For folks looking for some respite from Christmas shopping or from becoming participants in the demolition derby that is mall parking, North Bay theatre companies are providing several seasonal entertainments to help keep you in the holiday spirit.
Family-friendly musicals are the usual fare and there are several on tap. While not all would be classified as holiday-specific shows, they’ll still get the kids out of the house for a few hours and give adults some welcome relief.
Santa Rosa Junior College Theatre Arts (theatrearts.santarosa.edu) is presenting Shrek, the Musical. Burbank Auditorium renovations continue to require them to do their shows “on the road”, so you’ll have to travel to Maria Carrillo High School to see this one.
Spreckels Theatre Company (spreckelsonline.com) is doing The Tailor of Gloucester. This original holiday musical, based on the Beatrix Potter story, was originally commissioned and produced by Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater back in 2004 and had several Youth Theatre productions there. Michael Ross directs (mostly) adults in this studio theater production.
Sonoma Arts Live (sonomaartslive.org) brings Anne of Green Gables to their Rotary stage. This musical version of the L.M. Montgomery classic is about a spunky redheaded orphan winning over her new family and an entire Canadian island.
Speaking of spunky redheaded orphans, 6th Street Playhouse (6thstreetplayhouse.com) assures us the sun’ll come out tomorrow with Annie. It’s Daddy Warbucks versus the evil Miss Hannigan with Annie - and her little dog, too – as the objects of their attention. The 12 Dates of Christmas will run in the 6th Street Studio Theater. It’s a single woman’s ‘holiday survival guide’.
For nostalgia fans, Redwood Theatre Company (redwoodtheatrecompany.com) will be presenting It’s a Wonderful Life in the live radio play format.
A plucky little girl – this time named Eve – takes center stage at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center (cloverdaleperformingarts.com) in Yo Ho Ho: A Pirate’s Christmas. Can she rescue Santa and Christmas from the clutches of a gang of directionally-challenged pirates? If she doesn’t, the audience may mutiny.
Over in Napa, Lucky Penny Productions (luckypennynapa.com) is presenting Scrooge in Love. This will be only the third fully staged production of this original musical after having been done twice by San Francisco’s 42 Street Moon. It musically answers all the questions you may have about what happened after the end of Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol. Dyan McBride, the show’s original director, heads this production as well.
Finally, for those in the mood for a big, splashy music and dance extravaganza, there’s always Transcendence Theatre Company (transcendencetheatre.org) and their Broadway Holiday Spectacular. They’ll be doing three performances at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center and two performances in Napa at the Lincoln Theatre in Yountville.
Lots of entertainment options, and I’m sure the producing companies would like to remind you that theatre tickets make GREAT stocking stuffers.
You can find links to all these shows and more on the calendar page of the North Bay Stage and Screen web site at northbaystageandscreen.com.
When after sixteen years David Templeton hung up his theater critic’s hat, his stated purpose was to turn his full attention to other pursuits: artistic, journalistic, theatrical and otherwise. Since then, he continues to write, has a full-time gig as the Community Editor at the Petaluma Argus-Courier, and took a featured role in Left Edge Theatre’s pole dancing extravaganza The Naked Truth. An “otherwise” pursuit for Templeton would be directing, and he’s about to do just that with his holiday-themed one-man show Polar Bears, opening November 30 at San Rafael’s Belrose Theater.
Templeton describes Polar Bears as “a heartwarming holiday tragedy.” Say Again? “I wrote it,” said Templeton, “because I've read scads of stories about Christmas and families and Santa Claus, but never have I read any story about that unique passage of childhood, and parenthood, that is the moment that kids stop believing, and the ways their parents help or hinder that rite of passage.”
It’s an autobiographical tale of an average father who finds himself a bit in-over-his-head one holiday season and goes to increasingly outlandish lengths to keep his kids' belief in Santa alive. It seems his own faith in Santa was disrupted when he was four-years-old and he's hellbent on making sure that doesn't happen to his kids.
Polar Bears had two successful productions in Sonoma County with Templeton under the direction of Sheri Lee Miller. For the this production, Templeton takes over the directing reins and has cast actor Chris Schloemp in the role of David Templeton. Sound strange? “I’m actually not thinking of it as Chris playing ME,” said Templeton, “he’s playing a character named David, who did some things I did, but I told him from the beginning to think of David as a fictional character. He’s constantly surprising me with new things, and I love it.”
What’s it like for an actor to be directed by his ‘character’? “Being directed by the guy you’re performing and who’s also the writer is a little intimidating”, said Schloemp, “but also very rewarding in that, in any play, there are always those nagging questions you want to ask. Here I get to ask them at every rehearsal. David’s been very insistent that I am not playing him, so I have free rein.”
So, in a season full of Nutcrackers and Christmas Carols, where does Polar Bears fit in? “I think anyone who loves Christmas stories but has grown tired of the same old cloying, overly sentimental holiday stories will appreciate it”, said Templeton. “That was the intention, and based on audience reactions in the past, I think we’ve succeeded.”
‘Polar Bears’ opens November 30 and runs through December 15 at the Belrose Theater in San Rafael. There are Friday and Saturday evening performances at 7:30pm. For more information, go to thebelrose.com
There will be one performance in Santa Rosa at 7:00pm on December 23 at Left Edge Theatre at the Luther Burbank Center. For more information, go to leftedgetheate.com
If you’re trying to avoid attending the umpteenth production of The Nutcracker in your lifetime, Marin theatre companies are providing several other entertainment options for this holiday season.
Last year, the Marin Theatre Company (marintheatre.org) was one of the participants in the rolling world premiere of Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon’s Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley. The continuation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was a smashing success, so it’s no surprise that Gunderson and Melcon have returned to the material and created a companion piece entitled The Wickhams: Christmas at Pemberley. While Miss Bennet dealt with the folks celebrating Christmas ‘upstairs’ at the manor, The Wickhams is more of a ‘downstairs’ piece focusing on the estate’s staff as they deal with an unwelcome visitor and a potential holiday disaster. Megan Sandberg-Zakian directs the show which will no doubt be colorfully costumed and impressively designed.
The College of Marin Performing Arts Department (pa.marin.edu) will be presenting the musical comedy Nuncrackers in their Kentfield campus’s studio theater. Yes, it’s a Nunsense Christmas musical. Creator Dan Goggins’s Little Sisters of Hoboken return to stage a Christmas special in their new basement cable access TV studio to raise funds for the Mount Saint Helens School. The nuns will be singing songs like “The Twelve Days Prior to Christmas” and “Santa Ain’t Comin’ to Our House”, dancing in their habits, and handing out fruit cake. I think Sister Amnesia makes a return appearance, but I can’t remember.
Actors Basement is staging PacSun contributor David Templeton’s one-man holiday show Polar Bears at The Belrose (thebelrose.com) in San Rafael. It’s the autobiographical tale of a father’s attempt to keep his children’s belief in Santa Claus alive way past the point most others do. Templeton has performed the piece in Sonoma County several times in the past few years. For this Marin production of his “heartwarming holiday tragedy”, Templeton moves into the director’s chair and turns over the performance duties to actor Chris Schloemp.
The Ross Valley Players (rossvalleyplayers.com) are giving audiences the chance to completely forget about the holiday season with their production of The Odd Couple. The Neil Simon classic comedy about a mismatched pair of middle-aged roommates that’s been a proven laugh-getter since it’s 1965 Broadway premiere.
For those willing to travel and in the mood for a big holiday musical extravaganza, the Transcendence Theatre Company (transcendencetheatre.org) will be presenting their Broadway Holiday Spectacular with three performances up at Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center and two performances out at the Lincoln Theatre in Yountville.
There’s nary a Sugar Plum Fairy in sight on these North Bay stages.
You can find links to all these shows and more on the calendar page of the North Bay Stage and Screen web site at northbaystageandscreen.com
For an area with as large a gay population and as much theatre as Sonoma County, it’s surprising how little gay-themed theatre is produced in the region. Oh sure, the larger companies will produce the more mainstream musicals like Cabaret or La Cage aux Folles every few years, and Halloween usually brings The Rocky Horror Show, but little else seems to cross local stages.
The nomadic Pegasus Theater Company, in existence in one form or another for about 20 years, is the exception. Its Russian River roots have been planted firmly in the gay community since its inception, and it regularly programs shows with gay content into its seasons. Previous productions include newer plays like Avow to old chestnuts like Norman, is that You?
This season Pegasus brings Paul Rudnick’s The New Century to the Mt. Jackson Masonic Lodge in Guerneville. Rudnick (I Hate Hamlet, In & Out) has taken a collection of comedic one-acts and put them together for this show. It’s basically three monologues and a “wrap up” scene.
“Pride and Joy” opens the show with a meeting of the Massapequa, Long Island chapter of the PLGBTQCCC & O – the “Parents of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgendered, Questioning, Curious, Creatively Concerned and Others”. Ms. Helene Nadler (Thea Rhiannon) introduces herself to the membership as the "most loving mother of all time". She has to be. She has three children: a lesbian daughter, a transgendered son who dates lesbians, and a gay son into BDSM and scatology. Beat that, parents.
We the meet “Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach”. Charles (Nick Charles) has been exiled from New York by the gay community for being “too gay”, which happens to be the title of the cable access show he now hosts along with his “ward” Shane (director John Rowan) where he answers viewer mail and revels in being who he is.
With “Crafty” we meet Barbara Ellen Diggs (Noel Yates), a crafts-crazy Midwesterner who makes toilet paper koozies and tuxedo toaster covers. The passing of her son by AIDS has led her to question her faith. “I don’t know if I believe in God anymore,” she says, “but I do believe in cute.”
All these characters come together in a really contrived closing scene set at a New York Hospital maternity ward that seems tacked on to create a full-length show.
The show suffers from the challenges inherent in running a small theatre company - no budget, minimal sets and lighting, a limited talent pool leading to casting issues, etc., but it has heart, which counts for a lot, and you have to love a show that credits costumes to an entity called “Nutsack Creations”.
‘The New Century’ runs through November 25 at the Mt. Jackson Masonic Lodge in Guerneville.
Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm, the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to pegasustheater.com
I don’t know anyone who attends theatre to reinforce their belief that life is simply a series of travails to be endured until the sweet release of death, but if you’re out there, have I got show for you. Birdbath Theatres is presenting Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in a new adaptation by Jesse Brownstein, directed by David Abrams and playing at The Belrose through November 18.
Vanya (Rob Garcia) and his niece Sonya (Winona Wagner) manage the small estate of his late sister where they live with the family matriarch Mariya (Molly Noble), an old family nurse (Shirley Nilsen Hall), and a guitar-playing family friend (Andrew Byars).
The estate’s meager proceeds have gone to support his late sister’s husband Professor Serebryakov (Ray Martin) and his new trophy wife Yelena (Claire Champommier). A perpetually infirmed Serebryakov, after spending the summer at the estate, has come to a decision. He wishes to sell the estate to come up with enough money to purchase a nice retirement cottage in Finland for him and his wife. What of the others who live there?
Well, those details can be worked out later.
This infuriates Vanya, who’s already ticked off because Yelena, for whom he secretly pines, has shown affection for country doctor Astrov (Jesse Lumb), who has also caught the eye of the perpetually sad Sonya, who bemoans her looks. After two and a half hours, no one ends up with anyone, nothing is sold, and life drones on.
Abrams takes a minimalist approach to Chekhov’s look at the miserable lives of a turn-of-the-twentieth century Russian family. There’s no set of which to speak; the audience is seated against the theater walls and up on the stage; and the action (and I use that term loosely) often takes place at opposites sides of the small space, leading many in the audience to have to make a tennis match-like back-and-forth observation of the proceedings.
It’s a well-acted production, with Garcia’s Vonya a cauldron of self-loathing that, after finally boiling over, returns to a state of eternal simmering. Lumb’s Dr. Astrov is the least dreary of the lot who, while filled with remorse about his life decisions, provides a welcome spark to the often-lethargic proceedings.
The play’s bleak tone is reinforced with some fine cello accompaniment by Diego Martinez Mendiola. Is there any sadder sound produced than that of the bowed chordophone?
Regret is the overriding theme of Uncle Vanya; the regret that comes when revisiting the decisions that define a life. I don’t regret the time I spent with the dispiriting Voinitsky family, but I don’t see the need to revisit them anytime soon.
‘Uncle Vanya’ runs through November 18 at the Belrose Theater in San Rafael. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to birdbaththeatres.com
In the past month, North Bay stages have been occupied by vampires, ghosts, a Thing, and Transylvanian transvestites. The Novato Community Playhouse now finds itself overrun with the most ghastly, heinous, and horrifying creatures ever to set foot on a theatrical stage. I am referring, of course, to white upper middle-class parents. They are the featured monsters in playwright Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, directed by Terry McGovern and running at the Playhouse through November 11.
Alan and Annette Raleigh (Ken Bacon & Jena Hunt-Abraham) have come to the home of Michael and Veronica Novak (Marty Lee Jones & Heather Shepardson) to discuss the matter of a fight between their sons. It seems that the Raleigh’s son knocked two teeth out of the mouth of the Novak’s son with a stick. After a quick review of the Novak’s statement on the incident (and the decision to change the verbiage to reflect the Raleigh boy being “furnished” with a stick, as opposed to “armed”), the two couples sit down to awkwardly determine what to do next. Over the next ninety intermission-less minutes, the façade of civilized gentility will give way to tribal warfare.
Reza’s play has always seemed to me to be a grade B knock-off of Edward Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If it was Reza’s attempt to show that who we appear to be is rarely who we really are, she’s at least fifty years late to that party. What she adds to that familiar trope is the omnipresence and annoyance of cell phones in our lives and a considerable quantity of stage vomit.
Ah, yes, the vomit. Within the theatre community, this show has garnered the nickname “the vomit play” as there is a scene that requires (per the stage directions) “a brutal and catastrophic spray of vomit.” While it’s always interesting to see how a company accomplishes this, it’s really little more than a device to represent the verbal garbage spewn by many on a daily basis. The Novaks and Raleighs have been vomiting on each other all evening, why not take it to its logical conclusion?
Have I mentioned yet this is a comedy? Yes, there are plenty of opportunities to laugh at the parents’ idiocy, but the joke is ultimately on the audience. Go ahead. Laugh at them, because they couldn’t possibly represent you.
The late, great cartoonist Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” line comes to mind:
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
‘God of Carnage’ runs Friday through Sunday through November 11 at the Novato Theater Company Playhouse in Novato. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 8 pm; there’s a Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to novatotheatercompany.org.
If you’re wary of attending the latest splatter fest at your local multiplex and seeking a kinder, gentler Halloween season entertainment, Napa’s Lucky Penny Productions brings you Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, running through November 4. It’s an old-fashioned ghost story laden with Coward’s acerbic wit and charm.
Author Charles Condomine (Tim Kniffin) is researching the occult world for his next novel. He’s invited a local medium, Madame Arcati (Karen Pinomaki), to conduct a séance in his home. Charles is convinced she’s a charlatan, but Arcati manages to call forth the spectral presence of his late first wife Elvira (Sydney Schwindt). As Charles is the only one who can see or hear Elvira, Charles’ current wife Ruth (Kirstin Pieschke) thinks he’s going quite mad. Soon convinced of Elvira’s presence, Ruth finds herself in a battle with Elvira over their husband.
At first terrified with the situation, Charles actually begins to take some delight in the circumstances and starts to adapt to living with two wives – even if one is dead. Elvira goes about scheming to get Charles to join her on the ‘other side’ while Ruth seeks out Madame Arcati to help rid her of the troublesome spirit. That’s easier said than done.
Director Barry Martin brings a light touch and a good cast to this production. Kniffin is solid as the initially flustered but soon rolling-with-the-punches Charles who, after closer examination, is really quite a cad. He’s the perfect vehicle to deliver some classic Coward lines in a classic Coward manner. Schwindt is a lot of fun as the devilish Elvira and gets a major assist from makeup designer Brette Bartolucci. Small, intimate spaces like Lucky Penny can be a test for makeup designs as the audience’s proximity to the stage can make the artificiality abundantly clear. In this case, Bartolucci’s makeup and April George’s lighting design work really well together.
As Madame Arcati, Pinomaki has the showiest role (it won Angela Lansbury her fourth Tony for the 2009 revival) and garners big laughs with her physicality. Festooned in costume designer Barbara McFadden’s colorful accoutrements, Pinomaki earns those laughs by playing the character straight. Her visual outlandishness and other spectral bits are nice counterparts to the dry verbal humor for which Coward is best known and that this cast delivers well.
The play creaks a bit, but in a day when stage pyrotechnics often overwhelm a show, it’s nice to be reminded that the words are what really matter.
‘Blithe Spirit’ plays through November 4 at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa. The Thursday performance is at 7pm; Friday and Saturday’s are at 8pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to luckypennynapa.com
At a time when the language of diplomacy has been reduced to a 140-character tweet transmitted at 3 am, it’s good to be reminded of the men and women for whom the quest for peace demanded actual thought and personal interaction.
J. T. Rogers’ Oslo, now running in its West Coast premiere at the Marin Theatre Company through October 28, is a look at the circumstances and personalities responsible for the Oslo Accords. The 1993 Accords, considered to be a breakthrough in the search for Middle Eastern peace, brought about Israeli acceptance of the Palestinian Liberation Organization as official representatives of the Palestinian people and the PLO’s recognition of the state of Israel.
Norwegians Terje Rod-Larsen (Mark Anderson Phillips) and Mona Juul (Erica Sullivan) are a well-connected husband and wife. He runs a think tank in Oslo; she is an official in the Foreign Ministry. They are the unlikely leaders of a plan to try a “gradualist” approach in middle east diplomacy. Issues would be dealt with one at a time, from the smallest to the largest, and they would be resolved person-to-person, not nation-to-nation.
As it was the official stance of both parties to never deal directly with each other, this had to be accomplished through secret, back-channels. Those channels, though far from Washington, D.C., led to that moment on the White House South Lawn when Israeli Prime Minister Rabin shook the hand of PLO chairman Arafat.
Rogers’ play takes the same approach as the negotiations. We get to gradually know the individuals involved. As they become better acquainted, we become better acquainted. As the process evolves, the audience evolves with it to the point where you would swear you were in the room with them.
Director Jasson Minadakis has gathered a terrific ensemble to tell this riveting story. It’s an exceptional cast of fourteen players. Sullivan’s Juul acts as the narrator, providing context and humor and facilitating the initial connection between the audience and the play. Phillips is magnificent as the part strutting peacock, part heartfelt peacemaker Rod-Larsen. His alcohol-fueled takedown at one point in the negotiations by the participants was wrenching. J. Paul Nicholas and Ashkan Davaran as the PLO representatives and Brian Herndon and Ryan Tasker as the initial Israeli contacts are excellent as the across-the-table enemies who soon develop a friendship.
While a true peace remains elusive, and regardless of how much of this dramatization is actually factual, Oslo reminds us that when humanity is allowed to enter a political process, there’s still hope.
‘Oslo’ runs through October 28 at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley. Tuesday through Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm. The Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to marintheatre.org.
The credits for the Spreckels Theater Company production of The Addams Family, running now through October 28, notes that the musical is “based on characters created by Charles Addams.” It is not a recreation of the beloved 1960’s sitcom. It is not an adaptation of the visually inventive films of the ‘90’s. At the insistence of the Charles Addams Foundation, who retain control of all things Addams, the source material for the musical had to be the cartoons Addams published for fifty years in the New Yorker.
The 2010 Broadway musical by Marshall Brickman, Rick Elice and Andrew Lippa had a moderately successful run before becoming a theatrical Halloween season staple. It banks on the goodwill and fond memories of the generations raised with the reruns or the films and then goes in a very different direction.
Uncle Fester (Erik Weiss) narrates the show and lets the audience know it’s gonna be a story about love. A teenage Wednesday Addams (Emma LaFever) is worried about bringing her “normal” boyfriend/fiancée Lucas (Cooper Bennett) and his straight-laced, midwestern parents (Larry Williams, Morgan Harrington) home to meet her unconventional family. Wednesday lets her father Gomez (Peter Downey) in on her marriage plans but gets him to agree to not reveal her intentions to her mother Morticia (Serena Elize Flores) till an announcement is made at dinner. Things don’t go as planned.
It’s a stock plot dressed up with the Addams characters though the characters bear little resemblance to their previous incarnations. Downey comes closest with a very nice paternal take on Gomez while Flores’ voluptuous Morticia lacks the character’s dark, funereal tone.
The score is bouncy yet unmemorable, but there are a lot of good voices delivering it. Prepare to be knocked out when Pugsley (Mario Herrera) sings about the potential loss of a playmate sister with “What If.”
Ignore the trick the show’s creators play with The Addams Family characters and you’ll enjoy a family-friendly Halloween treat.
‘The Addams Family’ runs through Oct. 28 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Fri. & Sat @ 8 pm; Sun @ 2 pm, Thurs, Oct. 25 @ 7 pm.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com.
Now, in order for a show like Count Dracula - running now in Monte Rio through October 27 - to work, it has to be either played straight or as total camp. Playwright Ted Tiller’s 1971 version of the Bram Stoker novel under the direction of Nadja Masura tries to do both and the mix just doesn’t work. Tiller also seems to have worked under the assumption that no one had ever heard vampire lore before and inserted reams of lengthy, dull exposition that makes the show run an hour longer than it should.
A good set, some nice effects, and a game cast can’t mask the un-dead weight of a leaden script.
‘Count Dracula’ runs through Oct. 27 at the Russian River Hall in Monte Rio. Fri. & Sat. @ 8pm; Sun @ 3pm.
For more information, go to curtaincallrussianriver.com.
There’s an interesting style of theatre in which a piece of dramatic prose, usually a short story or selected chapters from a longer piece, is fully staged and performed. Usually referred to as a “word-for-word” or “page-to-stage” dramatization, it takes some getting used to as literally every word on the written page -every word- is spoken.
It’s the approach director John Shillington and the SRJC Theatre Arts Department take to tell the story of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Two chapters are taken from the 1991 novel by Julia Alvarez and given the page-to-stage treatment.
Alvarez’s novel is a collection of stories told from the perspectives of the four Garcia sisters about the challenges they faced as emigrants from the Dominican Republic. It covers thirty years in the family’s life, from their childhood on the Caribbean island to their adult lives as emigrants to the United States. Two of the chapters are performed.
“Floor Show” tells the tale of the family’s big night out courtesy the largess of a well-to-do American friend. It’s told by Sandi (played by Jasmine Flores-Nunez), the youngest of the four sisters and features the Garcia parents. Papi (Khalid Shayota) is having difficulty getting his license to practice medicine approved while Mami (Jisaela Tenney) is trying to raise her four girls properly in a foreign land. They are preparing to go out for a fancy meal at the invitation of Dr. and Mrs. Fanning, a couple they met back in the Dominican Republic. Mami is very clear as to what she expects from her girls (she will order their modest meals, they will like everything they eat) and Papi is somewhat ashamed at what he sees as charity. Several things happen over the course of what should be a pleasant evening that reinforce the family’s feelings of displacement.
“The Rudy Elmhurst Story” is told by Yolanda (played by Aaronne Louis-Charles, Annelise Hermsen, and Katerina Flores as the character at various ages), the third-oldest of the sisters. It’s the late 1960’s, the sexual revolution is well underway and she’s away at school. On her first day of English class, she draws the attention of one Rudy Brodermann Elmenhurst III (Riley Craig). They are soon an “item” but the conflict between Rudy’s liberal take on sex (“Can’t it just be fun”?) and the mix of Yolanda’s Old-World upbringing with the fragmentation of identity that comes with assimilation leads him to leave her and her to believe that she “would never find someone who would understand my particular mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles." There’s a bittersweet, but empowering ending to the story.
Shillington and his diverse cast are good storytellers. They’re housed in Newman Auditorium where the use of technical elements is limited, but designer Andrew Moore manages enough lighting to give the show a more theatrical feel to it than the lecture hall environment usually allows.
The (mostly) young multi-cultural cast are the perfect vehicles to tell stories that must resonate with many of them. High school student Jasmine Flores-Nunez perfectly captures the petulant behavior of the even younger Sandi, and the actresses playing Yolanda give a real sense as to the character’s internal conflicts and maturation. There’s good work by the young ensemble throughout the piece.
While the stories focus on the girls, the challenges faced by their parents are not ignored. The difficulties in having to start over after leaving a good life are well played by Shayota and Tenney.
The combination of the unique presentational style of interesting stories with a diverse, vibrant cast makes the SRJC production of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents well-worth checking out during its limited run.
‘How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents’ runs Wednesday through Sunday through October 14 in Santa Rosa Junior College’s Newman Auditorium. Wednesday–Saturday, 8pm; Saturday & Sunday, 2pm.
There's more at theatrearts.santarosa.edu
If you’ve missed having Summer Repertory Theatre around this year, 6th Street Playhouse’s production of “Guys and Dolls” may hold you until SRT’s return in 2019.
SRT Artistic Director James Newman helms this production of the 1950 musical about colorful New York gamblers trying to avoid the police, a persistent fiancé, and the goodly influence of local missionaries.
Nathan Detroit (played by Ariel Zuckerman) runs the “oldest, established, permanent floating crap game in New York" but police pressure is making it difficult to find places to house it. The only willing host wants a thousand bucks, which Nathan ain’t got. When word gets out that big-time gambler Sky Masterson (played by Ezra Hernandez) is in town, Nathan figures he can finance his game by getting him to make a sucker-bet that Nathan can’t lose. Nathan bets Sky he’ll be unable to get Sarah Brown, the leader of the newly-opened Save-a-Soul Mission, to go away with him for an evening.
While Skye goes about winning the bet (and falling in love, of course), Nathan scurries about trying to get the game going while avoiding the matrimonial pressure of his fiancé of fourteen years Adelaide. Trouble comes to town in the forms of gun-toting Chicago gambler Big Jule (Carl Kraines), and General Cartwright (Laura Davies) who wants to close the mission. Things work out for everyone after about a dozen-or-so Frank Loesser tunes and dance numbers.
Perhaps the most SRT-like aspect of this production is its youthful cast. It’s chock-full of SRJC Theatre Arts and high school grads mixed in with some stage vets. The casting leads to some significant age issues with the characters as written. Apparently, Miss Adelaide has been engaged since age six and there’s something a little unsettling about a teenage Harry the Horse (Benjamin Donner) roughing up senior citizen Big Jule.
Thankfully, the talent onstage can get you past that issue. Zuckerman brings a legitimate New York vibe to his character and Hernandez has the cockiness requisite for Sky. The character arc for Sarah Brown isn’t particular believable, but Elenor Paul makes it work. Ella Park is an absolute delight as Adelaide and her rendition of “Adelaide’s Lament” is a show highlight.
The shows other highlights include Randy Nazarian’s terrific work as Nicely Nicely Johnson and the show-stopping “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” production number.
If you enjoy well-crafted productions of classic American musicals, it’s a good bet you’ll enjoy “Guys and Dolls”.
'Guys and Dolls' runs Thursday through Sunday through October 14 at the 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa. Thursday through Saturday performances are at 7:30pm. There are Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
Last year, Healdsburg’s Raven Players surprised this critic with a very interesting production of Quiara Alegría Hudes “Water by the Spoonful”. The play, which tells parallel stories of the tribulations of a returning Iraq war vet trying to assimilate back into civilian life and a group of recovering drug addicts trying to stay clean, was not what I expected from this theatre group whose home is located one block from the quaint wine country destination’s town square. It was a fascinating variation in the norm of this venerable community theatre.
This year, they’re opening their season with not one, but two very interesting shows running in repertory – a serious comedy called “Church & State” and the intense drama “Time Stands Still”.
With just 72 hours before election day, North Carolina Senator Charles Whitmore (played by Matt Farrell) is having a crisis of faith. A recent school shooting in his hometown has led him to question his belief in God and in his usual staunch defense of the Second Amendment. What’s worse, he’s admitted as much to a reporter. His re-election campaign manager is apoplectic. His Bible-quoting, Glock-toting wife will have none of it. He’s about to make the biggest campaign speech of his life. Will he stick to the script or speak from the heart.
Playwright Jason Odell Williams has written an interesting 80-minute polemic on the political paralysis that has gripped our nation on this subject. While there’s no doubt where Williams and director Steven David Martin stand on the issue of gun control, the play does not reduce those who take a different stand to cartoon figures. He’s does, however, wrap the debate in a sitcom-like script albeit one with a joltingly dramatic climax.
Farrell does well as the conflicted Senator, though he lacks some of the gravitas and maturity one would expect from a southern politician. Priscilla Locke is terrific as the tough-as-nails wife, and Katie Watts-Whitaker holds her own in scenes between the two. Zack Acevedo plays multiple roles and provides some of the play’s lighter moments as a campaign gofer.
For the second show. Caitlin Strom-Martin directs a very strong cast in the Donald Margulies-penned “Time Stands Still”. Maureen O’Neill plays Sarah Goodwin, a photojournalist returning home after being blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq. She’s accompanied by her partner James (Rusty Thompson), a reporter who had returned stateside earlier after suffering a breakdown from his own war zone experiences. While Sarah’s are more visible, both individuals have scars that run deep.
The scabs from those scars are ripped by off by the arrival of Sarah’s editor Richard (Pablo Romero) and his rather young (“There’s young, and there’s embryonic.”) and deceptively lightweight girlfriend Mandy (Emily Tugaw). Their relationship has James contemplating a less chaotic life while Sarah looks to return to her work. Time may stand still but relationships don’t.
Margulies’ thought-provoking script about life’s dramas both big and small is well-served by the artists involved in this production.
Kudos to the Raven Players for continuing on their occasionally-out-of-the-ordinary programming path.
‘Church & State’ and ‘Time Stands Still’ run in repertory through October 7 at the Raven Performing Arts Theater in Healdsburg. There are Thursday through Sunday performances but the specific show dates and times vary.
For more information, go to raventheater.org
Spreckels Theatre Company opens their season with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel about a boy with ‘behavioral difficulties’ took England and Broadway by storm and earned multiple awards on both continents.
Christopher (Elijah Pinkham) is a 15-year-old boy with an unspecified cognitive condition (that some read as autism or Asperger’s) living with his father in Swindon, England. He discovers a neighbor’s dog has been killed and, to his father’s consternation, decides to undertake an investigation. That investigation leads to another mystery culminating in a journey of self-discovery and affirmation.
Director Elizabeth Craven gets outstanding performances from her cast. Pinkham completely inhabits the incredibly difficult lead role. David L. Yen as Chris’s father and Bronwen Shears as a woman in their lives are also superlative and there’s a “who’s who” of quality North Bay performers filling out the ensemble.
Excellent technical elements (set design, lighting design, sound, and projections) effectively transport you inside Christopher’s oft-confused mind but occasionally overwhelm the story.
Performance and presentation combine to make The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time unlike anything previously produced in this area.
’The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’ runs through September 30 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Thursday performances are at 7pm; Friday and Saturday’s are at 8pm; and there’s a Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com
If you’re going to see only one ‘five British women of varying ages, socio-economic statuses and body types bonding over pole dancing’ play in your lifetime, might as well make it Dave Simpson’s The Naked Truth. A big hit in England, director Argo Thompson imports it to the North Bay for its U.S. premiere at Left Edge Theatre.
Its story of five disparate individuals brought together with the goal of putting on a charity show is hardly original and its characters are pretty stock (the shy one, the bawdy one, the snobby one, etc.), but its well-acted and the five performers (Angela Squire, Bonnie Jean Shelton, Katie Kelly, Annabel Pimentel, Serena Elize Flores) and their instructor (Heather Danielle) have definite chemistry.
After your ears adjust to the accents, there’ll be two hours of laughs and tears as the ladies deal with self-image and relationship issues, sex talk, ill health, and betrayal. Will all conflicts be resolved in time to put on the big charity pole dance?
How did you think the show would end?
‘The Naked Truth’ runs through September 30 at Left Edge Theatre in Santa Rosa. Friday and Saturday performances are at 8pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to leftedgetheatre.com
Like an Elizabethan game of whack-a-mole, as soon as North Bay theatre companies knock out one outdoor summer Shakespeare production, another one seems to pop up.
Marin Shakespeare brought us Pericles at Dominican University’s Forest Meadows amphitheater, the Raven did A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Healdsburg’s Seghesio Winery, and Shakespeare in the Cannery did Shakespeare in Love in the, well, Cannery.
A few more weeks of summer means a few more weeks of North Bay Shakespeare al fresco.
The Petaluma Shakespeare Company is presenting their Shakespeare by the River Festival with two shows – the bard’s All’s Well That Ends Well and an original production by Jacinta Gorringe entitled Speechless Shakespeare – through September 2.
Marin’s Curtain Theatre is presenting Henry IV, Part 1 at the Old Mill Park in Mill Valley through September 9, and Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse closes out their season with The Comedy of Errors, one of Shakespeare’s earliest and mercifully shortest plays (merciful as it gets might cold in the Cannery after the sun goes down.)
It’s the tale of two sets of twins - masters and servants - separated by shipwreck who years later come together in the city of Ephesus, thoroughly confusing wives, mistresses, merchants, and each other. Yes, the basic plot isn’t very original (Shakespeare “borrowed” it from a couple of even earlier plays) but that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining.
Director Jared Sakren has gathered a group of quality actors who all seem to be having fun with their roles. William Brown and Ariel Zuckerman are the masters who share the moniker Antipholus while Jared Wright and Sam Coughlin each play a servant named Dromeo. They’ll find themselves dealing with a bewildered wife (Jessica Headington), her supportive sister (Isabella Sakren), a doctor (Eyan Dean) who diagnoses demonic possession and an Abbess (Jill Wagoner) who’s just this side of Misery’s Annie Wilkes before everything is sorted out in the end.
Colorful Victorian-era costumes (that’s when it’s set) by Pamela Johnson add to the jovial tone of the show and there’s some excellent physical comedy by Wright and Coughlin as the put-upon servants.
It’s a silly show done seriously (and occasionally a bit too intensely) but overall, it’s an amusing way to bring summer theatre to a close.
The Shakespeare by the River Festival runs Thursday through Sunday through September 2 on the Foundry Wharf Green in Petaluma. Times & shows vary. Admission is free.
For more information, go to petalumashakespeare.org
‘Henry IV, Part 1’ runs Saturdays and Sundays through September 9 at the Old Mill Amphitheatre in Mill Valley. All performances are at 2pm and admission is free.
For more information, go to curtaintheatre.org
'The Comedy of Errors' runs Friday through Sunday through September 2 at the Cannery Ruins behind 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa. Performances are at 7pm
For ticketing information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
With September come football games that actually matter, open season on California tree squirrels (daily limit of four) and the opening of the new artistic season for many North Bay theatre companies. Here’s some of what they have in store for local audiences:
Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater (cinnabartheater.org) transforms itself into Berlin’s Kit Kat Club and bids you willkommen, bienvenue, and welcome to the classic Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret. Broadway veteran Michael McGurk and Petaluma native Alia Beeton take on the roles that won Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli their Oscars.
The Spreckels Theatre Company of Rohnert Park (spreckelsonline.com) opens its season with the multi-Tony-Award-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Fans of the Mark Haddon novel about a young boy on the autism spectrum investigating the death of a neighborhood dog will find that it’s been somewhat reworked for the stage, but Tony voters liked it enough to name it 2015’s Best Play.
Sebastopol’s Main Stage West (mainstagewest.com) opens its season with the world premiere of an original comedy by local playwright Bob Duxbury. Savage Wealth examines the impact of the sale of a Lake Tahoe home and the vacant lot next to it on a pair of brothers and their childhood friend. John Shillington directs a cast of three in a story that also manages to work new age philosophy, politics, and romantic betrayal into it.
Dancing and singing New York “wiseguys” take over Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse (6thstreetplayhouse.com) as they present Guys and Dolls. Summer Repertory Theatre Artistic Director James Newman moves to Railroad Square to helm what has been called “the greatest of all American musicals”.
Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre (leftedgetheatre.com) continues to provide North Bay audiences with recently written plays never before seen in the area with the U.S. premiere of a hit British comedy. David Simpson’s The Naked Truth involves charity fundraising, female empowerment, and pole dancing. Argo Thompson directs and somehow has worked former Second Row Center host David Templeton into the mix.
The Pegasus Theatre Company of Guerneville (pegasustheater.com) will present its 12th annual Tapas: New Short Play Festival. This year’s festival will include seven short plays by Northern California playwrights and will be the first production overseen by new Artistic Director Rich Rubin.
Healdsburg’s Raven Players (raventheater.org) open with two contemporary dramas that deal with a host of complex issues including war, PTSD, gun violence, politics and religion. Time Stands Still and Church & State will run in “rep”.
In Marin, the Novato Theater Company (novatotheatercompany.org) hopes to have one singular sensation with their production of A Chorus Line, while Mill Valley’s Marin Theatre Company (marintheatre.org) will present the West Coast premiere of the 2017 Best Play Tony-winning political thriller Oslo. Ross Valley Players buck the trend and bring Shakespeare indoors for a change with their production of Twelfth Night.
Napa’s Lucky Penny Productions (luckypennynapa.com) invites you Into the Woods, where director James Sasser has apparently added another layer of “fun” to the musical fairy tale mash-up.
Plenty of options for the avid theatregoer.
Information on all these shows can be found in the “Calendar” section of the North Bay Stage and Screen web site at northbaystageandscreen.com
Theatregoers hankering for a classic or the desire to see something new have two productions running now that fit the bill.
Cinnabar Theater presents the 50-year-old classic Cabaret. The Kander and Ebb musical, which has gone through significant changes via numerous revivals since its 1966 debut, is the tale of two couples whose lives intersect via the Kit Kat Klub, a seedy pre-WWII Berlin cabaret.
Cliff Bradshaw (Lucas Brandt) is an American traveling through Europe as he attempts to write the great American novel. His train mate Ernst Ludwig (Mark Robinson) sets him up at the boarding house of Fräulein Schneider (Mary Gannon Graham) whose other boarders include members of the chorus of the Kit Kat Club. Cliff meets Sally Bowles (Alia Beeton), the “headliner” at the club with whom he’s soon sharing his room.
Fräulein Schneider, who’s becoming adept at looking the other way at certain situations, finds herself being courted by Herr Schultz (Michael Van Why), the local grocer. The future of these relationships grows gloomier as the cloud of National Socialism forms over Germany.
One of the darkest American musicals ever written with as depressing an ending ever staged, director Elly Lichenstein proves that Cabaret still has the ability to stun, evidenced by the opening night audience’s hesitation at applauding the end of Act One.
Michael McGurk makes the iconic role of the cabaret Emcee his own, but it’s the delicate and devastating performances of Gannon Graham and Van Why that will haunt you.
Mary Chun does her usual fine job of musical direction, though a balance between vocals and accompaniment was occasionally elusive.
‘Cabaret’ runs through September 23 at the Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma. Friday and Saturday performances are at 8 pm; There’s a Sunday matinee at 2 pm.
For more information, go to cinnabartheater.org
For audiences looking for something a lot lighter, there’s Main Stage West’s production of Savage Wealth. It’s a world premiere comedy by local playwright Bob Duxbury. John Shillington directs Peter Downey and Matt Cadigan as Todd and Gabe, two very different siblings dealing with the disposal of their late father’s Lake Tahoe home. Complications are provided by their new-age neighbor/friend/ex-lover Beenie, played by Ilana Niernberger.
It’s a very amusing script that only occasionally belies the pedigree of its retired English professor author. Timing is everything in comedy and the three performers have it down to a tee.
It’s well worth checking out, particularly for those who decry the cyclical and repetitive nature of local theatre.
‘Savage Wealth’ runs through September 16 at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Thursday through Saturday performances are at 8 pm; their Sunday matinee is at 5 pm.
For more information, go to mainstagewest.com
So, what’s former Spreckels Performing Arts Center Manager Gene Abravaya been doing since his retirement to the Arizona desert?
“Well”, he told me in a recent interview, “I’ve been enjoying my retirement and developing style and techniques for the abstract sculptures I am interested in designing.” “Oh”, he added, “and I’ve been working on a new play.” That play, The Trial of John Brown, will have a one-time staged reading at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park this Saturday, August 25th.
In 1859, John Brown, an ardent abolitionist and a fanatically religious man, led his followers into Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His objective: confiscate weapons from a rifle factory and an Armory, then sweep across the Southern United States, setting free every black slave he encountered. He was met with heavy resistance. After a three-day battle, during which all but five of his men were killed, Brown was finally captured. The trial that followed brought the issue of slavery to the attention of the nation and the entire world.
What piqued Abravaya’s interest in this moment in American history?
Abravaya told me that he’s “always been fascinated with it ever since seeing Raymond Massey’s portrayal in a 1940 Errol Flynn film called Santa Fe Trail”. Although he felt that the character was somewhat distorted and superficial, there was much about John Brown's personality that rang true to him and he was captivated after reading more about the actual raid and the trial that followed.
Abravaya is bringing it to Spreckels from Arizona for practical reasons – his previous connection to the facility plus the quality of talent he knew he could find in the North Bay. Abravaya said that he “wanted actors who were talented enough to make the written words come to life”. He knew he would find the people he needed up here to give life to the play and to help him see what legitimately works in the play and what still needs work.
Spreckels Theatre Manager Sheri Lee Miller is excited for the opportunity to offer North Bay patrons the first look at Abravaya’s script and will be participating in the reading. “Since Gene had been so much a part of Spreckels for many years,” said Miller, “it was only natural he should give us the first shot at sharing the script publicly.” Miller said that when she read the script, she found herself in the very uncommon position of having no suggestions on how it might be improved. She thinks it's a tight script with a clear narrative. “I didn't know much at all about John Brown,” she said, “so it was great to learn something historic through a play.”
Cast members will include Heather Buck, ScharyPearl Fugitt, Chris Ginesi, Mary Gannon Graham, Nate Mercier, Sean O'Brien, Dixon Phillips, Michael Ross, Chris Schloemp, Tim Setzer, William Thompson, Zane Walters, and Sarah Wintermeyer.
The project, Abravaya says, is more than about just writing a play. “I want to illustrate that the injustices of the past, no matter how much we try to deny them, are still with us, influencing the course of our lives”, said Abravaya, “If I manage to agitate someone enough to become an agitator or an activist, I will have succeeded and maybe have contributed something of value to what might be the most important issue of our time.”
‘The Trial of John Brown’ will be performed at a staged reading on Saturday, August 25 at 7:30pm at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Admission is free, but the seating is limited.
Relationships are front and center in two very different shows now running on the North Bay’s northernmost stages through August 19.
The Cloverdale Performing Arts Center is presenting Heroes, playwright Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of a 2003 French play about three World War I vets in a retirement home.
Gustave (Robert Bauer), Henri (Peter Immordino), and Philippe (Dale Harriman) pass their days sitting on a terrace, annoying each other, and plotting their escape from the veterans’ home. Convinced that the tyrannical nun in charge has it out for Philippe, their latest plan starts out with the goal of running to French Indo-China but ends on settling for a poplar grove within view of their terrace. Now if they can just figure a way to take a 200 lb. statue of a dog with them.
An odd combination of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Waiting for Godot, and The Golden Girls (with Gustave as Dorothy, Henri as Blanche, and Philippe as Rose), Heroes is a slight piece with some amusing dialogue and geriatric slapstick.
'Heroes' runs Friday through Sunday through August 19 at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center in Cloverdale. Friday and Saturday evening performances at 7:30pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to cloverdaleperformingarts.com
Healdsburg’s Raven Players have converted the cavernous Raven Theatre into an intimate black box performance space and are presenting an updated version of 1996’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. The Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts musical revue holds the record as the second-longest running Off-Broadway show.
It consists of a series of comedic vignettes that follow the arc of human relationships from dating, sex, and marriage through children and aging. Four versatile performers (Bohn Connor, Kelly Considine, Troy Evans, and Tika Moon) sing and dance their way through eighteen scenes with songs like “Better Things to Do”, “Single Man Drought”, and “I Can Live with That”. Recent revisions include 21st century additions like sexting (“A Picture of His…”) and same-sex families (“The Baby Song”).
It’s a very entertaining show helped immensely by the talented cast. All do well by the multiple roles they play, but the rubber-faced Connor really makes an impression with characters ranging from an incarcerated mass murderer giving dating tips to a hapless husband trying to put the kids to bed so he and the missus can get it on.
‘I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change’ runs Thursday through Sunday through August 19 at the Raven Performing Arts Theater in Healdsburg. Thursday through Saturday performances are at 8pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to raventheater.org.
Transcendence Theatre Company’s seventh season of “Broadway Under the Stars” continues with a dance-centric production entitled, appropriately enough, Shall We Dance. The show runs through August 19 at the Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen.
Transcendence imports Broadway and national touring professionals to populate their productions so the caliber of performance is always quite high. Director Leslie McDonel and choreographer Marc Kimelman guide a cast of seventeen talented artists through a program featuring songs from eighteen Broadway shows like The King and I and Hamilton as well as pop hits from artists like Madonna and Ed Sheeran.
The show opened, as is tradition, with a passage from the writings of Jack London as introduced by a coterie of tap dancers. The audience was then welcomed by the full company with an amusing adaptation of “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast that replaced banquet table staples with wine varietals, though I’m not quite sure what dancing strawberries were doing on the stage.
The (mostly) fast-paced, forty minute first act included numbers from In the Heights, West Side Story, My Fair Lady and Kiss Me, Kate. The highlight of the act was an energetic production of Louis Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” which incorporated a variety of dance styles that complimented its swing roots. Things then slowed down with “Mama Who Bore Me” from Spring Awakening, which seemed tonally out of step in a mostly joyous program, before concluding on a lighter note with the hilarious “A Musical” from Something Rotten.
Act two featured dancing set to numbers from a diverse group of artists ranging from Janelle Monae (“Tightrope”) to Madonna (“Vogue”). The evening’s most visually striking moment came courtesy of a tango-infused production of Sting’s “Roxanne” from Moulin Rouge with the winery ruins bathed in red.
The juxtaposition between the diversity in dance styles and music selection in this production with the lack of diversity among the cast is noticeable. For a company that imports a great deal of its talent from New York and the world, the relatively small number of artists of color utilized is disappointing. Simply put, it’s jarring to have Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” and Michael Jackson’s “Bad” sung and danced by a bunch of white guys, talented as they may be.
It’s time for Transcendence’s casts to be as colorful as the costumes they wear.
‘Shall We Dance’ runs Friday through Sunday through August 19 at the Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen. Doors open for picnicking at 5pm; the show starts at 7:30pm.
For more information, go to transcendencetheatre.org
‘Tis the season for Shakespeare al fresco so pack a picnic, grab a blanket and check out these North Bay productions:
Marin Shakespeare closes out its season under the stars with Pericles, a play whose authorship by Shakespeare has fostered many a debate. Plot points include incest, assassination, famine, a shipwreck, marriage, maternal death, familial separation, attempted murder, kidnapping, pirates, prostitution, and a seemingly dead person rising from a watery grave. Who knew Shakespeare wrote a zombie play? And this is a comedy.
Director Lesley Currier and her design team have taken all these elements, dressed them up in modern garb, added a few topical references, and come up with the theatrical equivalent of a “B” movie. It’s entertaining and even moving at the end, but it evaporates quickly in the night air.
Artist-in-residence Dameion Brown brings his commanding stage presence to the title role. Fine supporting work is done by Cathleen Ridley as the loving Queen Simonedes and the treacherous Dionyza; Eliza Boivin as Marina, Pericles’s daughter; Rod Gnapp and Richard Pallaziol in a variety of roles; and Diane Wasnak, who is very engaging as the puckish storyteller Gower.
'Pericles' runs Thursday–Sunday through August 5 at Forest Meadows Amphitheater at Dominican University in San Rafael. The showtimes vary and the venue opens one hour before curtain for picnicking.
For more information, go to marinshakespeare.org
Santa Rosa’s Shakespeare in the Cannery ceases to exist after this season’s production as the property is being “repurposed.” Co-founder/director David Lear decided to go out on a lighter note so they’re presenting Shakespeare in Love, the stage adaptation of 1998’s Best Picture Oscar winner.
Poor Will Shakespeare (John Browning) has writer’s block and can’t seem to finish his latest opus, Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter. A muse arrives in the person of Viola (Sydney McNulty), who disguises herself as ‘Thomas Kent’ so as to get around the ‘no women on stage’ rule. Shifty theatre producers, a loathsome Lord, a treacherous boy and a haughty queen all come into play before Romeo and Juliet sees the light of day.
It’s a piffle but the cast has fun, with good comedic support from Alan Kaplan and Liz Jahren. Isiah Carter impresses in two roles and keep an eye out for Isabella, one of the moodiest, scene-stealing “bitch” characters I’ve seen on a North Bay Stage.
'Shakespeare in Love' runs Friday through Sunday through August 5 at the Cannery in Railroad Square in Santa Rosa. Show time is at 7pm with the gate opening at 5pm for picnicking.
For more information, go to shakespeareinthecannery.com
Jukebox musicals have become the bread and butter for a lot of community theatre groups. Minimal casts, simple sets and the built-in audience that comes with a popular singer or musical group is tough for an artistic director to resist. Around since the 1970’s, the genre really exploded onto the scene with the success of the ABBA-themed “Mamma Mia!” and continues with the recent Broadway opening of the Go-Go’s-themed “Head Over Heels”.
Back in 1988, playwright Ted Swindley took 27 songs recorded by Patsy Cline and created “Always… Patsy Cline”, which is running now at Sonoma Arts Live through July 29. It’s not so much a musical biography as a snippet of Cline’s career as seen through the eyes of one of her biggest fans. It covers the six years from her appearance on Arthur Godfrey’s television program till her untimely death at age 30 in an aviation accident.
Louise Seger (Karen Pinomaki) fell in love with Cline’s music the moment she heard it on a Texas radio station. When she hears that Patsy (Danielle DeBow) will be making a local appearance, she and some friends hightail it to the Empire Ballroom to discover no one’s there yet but Patsy. They strike up a conversation and become fast friends. Patsy ends up spending the night at Louise’s before heading back out on her tour. They regularly corresponded with each other after that night and it’s those letters that are the basis for the show.
DeBow is a gifted vocalist who, in conjunction with her backup singers “The Jordanaires” (Sean O’Brien, F. James Raasche, Michael Scott Wells, Ted Von Pohle) and musical director Ellen Patterson and a six-piece band, delivers a quality evening of Cline’s greatest hits including “Sweet Dreams” and “Crazy”. The songs are interspersed with Louise’s musings about her life and her love for Patsy. Pinomaki is very entertaining as the bombastic, big-haired Louise, though there were moments where less would be more.
Director Michael Ross, who’s directed a few female-centric musicals in his day (“Gypsy”, “Little Women”, “Sister Act” for example) shows a real mastery of the material here. Also responsible for costumes and some of the set design, he gets almost everything right. Costume work is stellar as DeBow must go through a dozen changes throughout the evening with each one colorfully evoking period and personality. The two-level set/three-sided audience design is interesting, but it leads to some awkward blocking and audience perspectives.
Terrific performances, colorful design work, and classic Americana combine to make “Always… Patsy Cline” one of the better jukebox musicals I’ve seen on a North Bay Stage.
“Always… Patsy Cline” plays Thursday through Sunday on the Rotary Stage of Andrews Hall in the Sonoma Community Center. Thursday through Saturday performances are at 7:30 pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2:00 pm.
For more information, got to sonomartslive.org.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame was originally scheduled as the closing production of the Spreckels Theatre Company’s 2017-2018 season. The musical, whose development by Walt Disney’s theatrical arm started in Germany and ended in New Jersey (having never made it to Broadway), is an atypical Disney production. More Les Miserables than The Little Mermaid, it’s an interesting amalgam of Victor Hugo’s original gothic novel with music and elements from Disney’s 1996 animated adaptation. Far darker than one would expect from a production with the Disney named semi-attached, Spreckels’ decision to replace it in their season with a more ‘family-friendly’ production of the classic Peter Pan is understandable. It’s also regrettable, because as the production running now in San Francisco produced by Bay Area Musicals reveals, it’s a very good show.
Hugo’s 15th century-set tale of Quasimodo (Alex Rodriguez), the bell ringer at Paris’s Cathedral of Notre Dame, his guardian (and uncle) Archdeacon Frollo (Clay David), and a gypsy girl named Esmeralda (Aysia Beltran) contains enough thematic elements for a half-dozen shows. Religious extremism, class differences, bigotry, love vs. lust, lookism, repression and oppression are all explored in Hugo’s story and Peter Parnell’s book and through the score with music by Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors, Beauty and the Beast) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Pippin, Wicked).
It’s grand opening number “The Bells of Notre Dame” provides the somewhat lengthy backstory before the main narrative kicks in. A band of gypsies has come to Paris and its newest member Esmeralda has caught the eye of both Quasimodo and Archdeacon Frollo. Quasimodo is taken by her kindness while Frollo is taken by ‘impure thoughts’. Add a dashing French soldier to the mix (Jack O’Reilly) and you have one helluva triangle.
Music director Jon Gallo and the nine-piece orchestra do well by the score, which runs from the light (“Topsy Turvy”, “Tavern Song) to the dark (“Hellfire”). The choral numbers are particularly powerful with tremendous vocal work done by the entire cast.
Alex Rodriguez makes for a fine Quasimodo and Clay David is excellent as the conflicted Frollo, who utters a few comments about immigrants and borders that might seem rather prescient. Both bring substantial vocal power to their musical moments.
Director/Choreographer/Scenic Designer Matthew McCoy and his team do a pretty good job with the show’s technical aspects and the limitations imposed by the venue. Narration eliminates many of the challenges, but the solution to how to present a flood of molten lead poured over a rioting crowd was ingenious.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is no children’s show, talking gargoyles to the contrary. Operatic at times, classic American musical at others, it’s a worthy addition to the season of any company with the talent, facility and budget to do it as well as this production.
'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' runs Thursday through Sunday through August 5 at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco. Thursday and Friday evening performances at 7:30 pm, Saturday evening performances at 8:00 pm. Saturday and Sunday matiness at 2:00 pm.
For more information, go to bamsf.org
One might think that the talents behind Downtown Abbey and Phantom of the Opera would be odd choices to make a Broadway musical out of a 2003 comedy starring Jack Black.
One would be correct. School of Rock, now on the San Francisco stop of its National Tour, is Julian Fellowes and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s overblown take on that modest film whose charm relied mostly on one’s appreciation of its star.
Dewey Finn (Rob Colletti, doing Jack Black-light) has been kicked out of his band, has no visible means of support and is months behind on the rent due his best friend Ned (Matt Bittner). After receiving an ultimatum from Ned’s girlfriend (a shrewish Emily Borromeo) to raise the money or get out, he answers a phone call seeking Ned’s services as a substitute teacher. Since subbing obviously requires no skills at all, Dewey decides he can impersonate Ned and make some quick money.
Soon it’s off to the toney Horace Green Academy where Dewey takes charge of an elementary class whose students have one thing in common – their parents all ignore them. When Dewey discovers he’s got a musically gifted group of kids, he hits upon the idea of creating a band and entering them in a competition. How long can he fool the stern headmistress (Lexie Dorsett Sharp, doing Joan Cusack-light) and bring his plan to fruition? Well, almost to the end of the show’s two hour and 40 minute running time, which is about an hour longer than the film took to tell the story, albeit with less music – which isn’t a bad thing.
Webber’s score is his least memorable as may be this entire production. The characters are all one dimensional. Every adult comes off poorly (except, of course, Dewey, who is not what one would think of as a role model) with every parent self-absorbed, every educator an idiot and every child a prodigy. The kids are talented musicians – yes, they play their own instruments – but when it comes to acting, not so much. To be fair, they’re on stage a lot, the choreography requires them to jump up and down a great deal, and they spend a fair amount of time moving set pieces. Maybe that’s a lot to ask of a group of pre-teens.
The best parts of the show, beyond the kids’ musical performances, are drawn straight from Mike White’s film script. There are laughs, but kids deserve a better School than this. This School simply doesn’t make the grade.
'School of Rock' runs Tuesday through Sunday through July 22 at the SHN Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. Show times vary.
For more information, go to SHNSF.com
In a world of theatre based on movies and television shows, why not Shakespeare? Such is Illyria, a musical adaptation of Twelfth Night first produced Off-Broadway in 2002 and now running at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse.
Don’t let the words ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘musical’ chase you away. Peter Mills has written a book and score that takes the plotline of the Bard’s 17th century comedy, modernizes it a bit in speech and time period, sets it to music and comes up with a terrifically entertaining piece of theatre.
Shakespeare’s tale involves shipwrecked and separated twins Viola and Sebastian (played by Carmen Mitchell and Lorenzo Alviso), Duke Orsino, the lovelorn leader of the isle of Illyria (played by Burton Thomas), and Olivia, the in-mourning object of his affection (as played by Tracy Hinman.) There’s also Andrew Aguecheek, a silly suitor for Olivia’s hand, Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s soused uncle, Malvolio, a stuffed-shirt steward, Maria, a servant with eyes on Sir Toby, and Feste, a fool who narrates the tale. Impersonation, mistaken identity, gender confusion, and trickery all come into play before things get sorted out and everyone ends up with his or her intended. Well, most everyone.
To fully enjoy this production, more than the usual suspension of belief is required in a couple of areas. One must accept Ms. Mitchell being regularly mistaken for a male and Ms. Hinman is a more mature Olivia than one usually sees in the role, but just go with it.
Mills’s 20+ songs vary in style from a lilting ballad (the beautiful “Save One”) to English Musical Hall numbers like the hilarious “Cakes and Ale”. Musical director Lucas Sherman has a six-piece band delivering the beguiling score flawlessly while director Craig Miller’s cast brings superb vocal talents to bear. As strong a group of voices I’ve heard on a North Bay stage, this may be the best sounding musical 6th Street has produced. It’s gratifying that the characterizations provided by the performers match their vocal quality.
Mitchell charms as the gender-bending Viola and is matched by Burton’s flustered Orsino. Orsino’s musical confession of love to Alviso’s Sebastian (whom Viola was impersonating) shows Shakespeare was a couple of centuries ahead of society when it came to same-sex relationships. Ample comedic support is provided by Seth Dahlgren as Toby Belch, Larry Williams as Malvolio, and Stephen Kanaski as the foppish Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Tim Setzer’s clowning and dancing as Feste was rakishly amusing.
Craig Miller ends his tenure at 6th Street Playhouse on a high note with this delightful production.
'Illyria' runs Friday through Sunday through July 8 at 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa; Friday and Saturday performances are at 7:30pm; there are Saturday & Sunday matinees are at 2pm.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
Sonoma’s Transcendence Theatre Company opened its seventh season of “Broadway Under the Stars” in Jack London State Park with Stairway to Paradise, the first of four staged concert events scheduled this year.
The company takes performers with Broadway, touring company, film and television experience and creates an original themed musical revue around them. This year’s theme is ‘Every Moment Counts’ and director/choreographer Tony Gonzalez has designed 20+ production numbers full of memorable moments. Along with Broadway show tunes, the Transcendence play list includes a mix of recent and past pop hits, classic rock, and specialty numbers. They’re all done ‘Broadway style’ and occasionally with a twist. It often works well, but sometimes it doesn’t.
The first act ran the gamut from numbers from Sunday in the Park with George, South Pacific, The Wiz, and Victor/Victoria to “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” and “Feelin’ Groovy” by Paul Simon. Highlights included a recreation of the famous Judy Garland/Barbra Streisand duet of “Get Happy/Happy Days are Here Again” with Courtney Markowitz and Shaleah Adkisson, Christine Lavin’s popular “Air Conditioner” song, also done by Adkisson with Tim Roller, and a large-scale production number of “Blue Skies” with the entire company led by Joey Khoury singing and dancing to the Irving Berlin classic.
In an amusing bit that allowed the performers (and audience) a break, the cast played a round of ‘Transcendence Family Feud’ with contestants pulled from the crowd. The act ended on a local note with a performance of “Everything”, a tribute song written by Sonoma County songwriters Mark Beynon and Joe Label and the Transcendence version of “Oklahoma!” which morphed the Rogers and Hammerstein classic into “Oh, Sonoma!”
The second act included numbers from Cabaret, Into the Woods, and The Sound of Music mixed with Justin Timberlake, Van Halen and, in the evening’s one clear misstep, Don McLean’s “American Pie”. Sorry guys, but perky, Cheshire cat-like smiling performers singing “This’ll be the day that I die” just doesn’t work for me. It actually came off a little creepy.
Things snapped back with a jaunty Michael Linden performing Drew Gasparini’s “A Little Bit” and large-scale numbers with Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” and Van Halen’s “Right Now” before concluding with “Finale B’ from Rent.
Dress in layers, pack a picnic, indulge in some wine or food purchased from local food trucks and vintners serving on-site, then sit back and enjoy a unique north bay entertainment experience.
'Stairway to Paradise' runs Friday through Sunday through July 1 at Jack London State Historic Park in Glen Ellen. Doors open for picnicking at 5pm; the show starts at 7:30pm.
For more info on this and the other three “Broadway Under the Stars” productions running this season, go to bestnightever.com
Two community theatre workhorses have galloped onto North Bay stages.
Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater is presenting The Fantasticks, the 1960 musical that ran for a record 42 years Off-Broadway and then had a revival in 2006 that ran for another eleven years. It’s a modest production with a sweet score and engaging performances.
It’s a simple tale of two neighboring families. Mrs. Hucklebee (Krista Wigle) and Mr. Bellomy (Michael van Why) each have a child they wish to fall in love with the other. They figure the best way to achieve that is to start a pseudo-feud between the families and make it clear to them they don’t want them to see each other. When Luisa (Carolyn Bacon) and Matt (Lucas Brandt) do fall in love, how do they end the “feud” so all may live happily ever after? Well, they hire a mysterious stranger who goes by the name “El Gallo” (Sergey Khalikulov) and some players (James Pelican, Brandon Wilson) to stage a phony abduction of Luisa to allow Matt to rescue her so all may be forgiven between the families, of course! Act One ends on a happy note as all seems rosy for the couple. Act Two makes it clear the bloom has fallen off the rose.
The Tom Jones/Harvey Schmidt musical can trace its roots back to Shakespeare and even further back to Greek and Roman mythology and yet if often feels more dated than that. Director Elly Lichenstein utilizes several authorized revisions to make some of the show’s more problematic elements more palatable to today’s audience and it mostly works. The music is nostalgic (“Try to Remember” opens the show), the staging is colorful, and the cast is excellent with Ms. Bacon and Mr. Khalikulov in fine voice and Messrs. Pelican and Wilson providing welcome comedy relief.
'The Fantasticks' runs through June 24 at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 8pm; there’s a Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to cinnabartheater.org
Curtain Call Theatre in Monte Rio is presenting Bullshot Crummond, a 45-year-old parody of a 100-year-old pretty-much-forgotten British literary character. Running through June 23, it’s the type of show where you’re encouraged to boo the villain and cheer the hero as he rescues a damsel in distress.
An ambitious undertaking for the small theatre company in terms of staging, its technical elements are somewhat lacking but the steampunk-style costumed cast is game and director Avi Lind puts them through their paces. There are some nice bits of physical comedy and inventive sight gags that at the very least will have you cracking a smile and shaking your head. It’s silly and it’s stupid, but that’s what it’s supposed to be.
'Bullshot Crummond' runs through June 23 at the Russian River Hall in Monte Rio.
Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 8pm.
For more information, go to curtaincallrussianriver.com
“Everyone’s a little bit racist” sing the puppets in the musical Avenue Q. Playwright Greg Kalleres takes that thought and runs with it in Honky, running now at Left Edge Theatre.
It opens up with a commercial for Skymax 16’s, the latest craze in athletic footwear. It ends with the tag line “S’up now?” which we soon learn is the last thing said to a black teen before he’s killed for the shoes.
Lights up on the office of Davis Tallison (Mike Pavone), the white president of a company that makes footwear “by black people for black people.” Thomas Hodge (Trey G. Riley) is there to unveil his latest design and is aghast to learn that sales of the 16’s have exploded in the white youth community since the shooting. Tallison announces the new 17’s will now be marketed to them. Hodge is furious that something he created for “his people” has become bastardized and seeks some sort of retribution on the creator of the commercial he thinks is responsible.
Enter Peter Trammel (Mark Bradbury), whose issues about the commercial’s impact have led him to a therapist (Liz Rogers-Beckley) with her own issues. In a coincidence that only occurs to writers, she happens to be Hodge’s sister. Credulity is further strained when Hodge runs into Peter’s fiancé (Lydia Revelos) and sees a way for some payback, but credulity really shouldn’t be an issue in a play with a sublot involving a new pharmaceutical cure for racism whose side effects lead to visions of a lusty Abraham Lincoln (Nick Christenson) and a foul-mouthed Frederick Douglass (Julius Rea).
Part absurdist farce and part blistering social commentary, Honky will make you laugh and uncomfortable. More about racial identity than racism, the feelings of being “too white” or “not black enough” are deftly combined with swipes at our consumerist society where discrimination is masked as “marketing” and stereotypes are just “demographics.”
Director Argo Thompson has a terrific cast with California-newcomer Riley outstanding as the conflicted Hodge. The opening scene with veteran Pavone crackles and sets the tone for the duration. Excellent work is done by all with an extra shout out to Julius Rea and Jim Kaskey for their work as a variety of ‘urban’ youth the other characters encounter.
Funny, infuriating, profane and profound, shows like Honky don’t play on wine country stages that often. Catch it while you can.
‘Honky’ runs through July 1 at Left Edge Theatre located in the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 8pm.
There’s a Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to leftedgetheatre.com
Ten down-on-their-luck Texans gather on a car lot to compete for a cherry red Nissan pickup. They must lay their gloved hands upon the truck and, except for scheduled breaks every six hours, never let go. The last person standing wins. That’s the premise behind Hands on a Hardbody, a 2012 musical now in its Bay Area premiere run at Napa’s Lucky Penny Community Arts Center.
Based on a 1997 documentary that followed 24 contestants in an actual endurance competition, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Doug Wright trimmed the number of contestants to ten and Trey Anastasio (Phish) and Amanda Green composed a Tony-nominated score to tell their backstories.
For those who don’t think there’s enough here for a full-length musical, Benny Perkins (Brian Watson) makes it clear to the audience that it’s a “Human Kind of Thing”, and then each contestant explains what they’d do “If I Had This Truck”. Benny’s won the contest before but since lost the truck and his wife. Ronald (Michael David Smith) thinks his all-Snickers diet is the ticket to victory (he’s mistaken.) J. D. (Barry Martin) sees the truck as a way to regain his virility. Greg (Ryan Hook) and Kelli (Kirstin Pieschke) meet cute and then make plans to drive away to Hollywood together. Janis (Lucinda Hitchcok Cone) is doing it for her kids. Jesus (Alex Gomez) could use some help putting himself through veterinary school. Chris (Michael Scott Wells) is a military vet who’s looking to make his son proud. Heather (Jenny Angell) may have the inside track, but Norma (Daniela Innocenti Beem) has God on her side.
Benny is the ostensible lead, but it’s a true ensemble piece with each character, including the non-contestants involved (spouses, the car dealers, a radio DJ) having their moments. Credit to director Taylor Bartolucci for assembling a talented, diverse cast to explore the themes beneath the surface and to choreographer Staci Arriaga for figuring out how to make the cast move with one hand attached to a truck at all times (well, mostly.) By the way, the truck is on rollers and is frequently spun by the cast, so no one section of the audience spends the bulk of the show staring at the back end of a truck (or cast member.) Musical director Craig Burdette leads a four-piece band in the heavily country and western-influenced score whose musical highlight is the raucous gospel number “Joy of the Lord”.
Basically, it’s A Chorus Line with a truck and at two and a half hours it runs a bit long, but by the end you’ll be giving a hand to this Hardbody.
‘Hands on a Hardbody' plays Thursdays through Sundays through June 17 at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa. Thursday performances are at 7pm; Fridays and Saturdays are at 8pm; the Sunday matinee is at 2pm.
For more information, go to www.luckypennynapa.com
High atop Mount Tamalpais, at about the 2,000 foot level, sits the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre where the “great outdoor theatre adventure” known as The Mountain Play has been produced for the past 105 years. Your all-day adventure includes a slow, winding ride up the mountain, a hike to the 4,000 seat amphitheatre and a trek down to your seat lugging coolers full of food and ‘adult’ beverages (they’re allowed.) You get your umbrella and seat cushions arranged, unpack your goodie basket and just as you start to enjoy a pleasant afternoon picnic, a show breaks out.
Ah, yes. There is a show. This year’s production is Mamma Mia!, the 1999 jukebox musical that uses the slightest of stories as an excuse to perform the catalogue of pop super group ABBA.
Set at a Greek island taverna run by Donna Sheridan (played by Dyan McBride), the story centers on the circumstances of her daughter’s upcoming wedding. Sophie (a very charming Carrie Brandon) is about to get married to a slab of British beefcake (Jake Gale) and wants to invite her father to her nuptials. The problem is, she doesn’t know who it is!
A quick trip through her mother’s diary leads her to three possibilities – Harry (played by Sean O’Brien) is an uptight British banker, Bill (played by David Schiller) is a travel writer and adventurer, and Sam (played by Tyler McKenna) is an architect and, the other two possibilities notwithstanding, her mother’s one true love. Sophie decides, in proper musical theatre tradition, to invite them all and sort everything out later. Chaos, hilarity, singing, and dancing ensue.
Folks don’t go to shows like Mamma Mia! for their complex storylines or deep psychological subtext, they go for the songs. Put no thought into why the story leads to a particular song being sung, just enjoy the 20 + ABBA tunes including “Chiquitita”, “Dancing Queen”, “S. O. S.” and the title tune.
Director Jay Manley gets generally solid performances from the large cast, but it took a couple of songs for the vocals to really hit their stride culminating in a very powerful delivery of “The Winner Takes It All” by McBride. There’s colorful and clever scenic work by Andrea Bechert, some nice energetic choreography (including a chorus line of swim-finned dancers) by Nicole Helfer and Zoë Swenson-Graham, and the ABBA songbook is well played by Musical Director Jon Gallo and a nine-piece band.
The Mountain Play provides a unique Bay Area theatrical experience. Where else can you catch a pleasant Broadway musical that comes with a pre-show warning about ticks and rattlesnakes?
‘Mamma Mia!’ runs Sundays through June 17 (and there’s one Sing-Along Saturday performance on June 9), at the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre in Mount Tamalpais State Park. All shows are at 2pm. Be sure and pack the sunscreen.
For more information, go to mountainplay.org
That the name ‘Jeeves’ immediately conjures up the image of a staid British manservant is a tribute to the staying power of author P. G. Wodehouse’s character. Since his first appearance in 1915, he’s been featured in films, television, and even an internet search engine. There was but a single theatrical venture until playwright Margaret Raether began writing a series of plays beginning with Jeeves Intervenes, running now at Sonoma Arts Live.
Jeeves (Randy St. Jean) is the unflappable valet to Bertie Wooster (Delaney Brummé), an upper-class twit who Jeeves is constantly rescuing from troubles of his own making. Under pressure from his imperious Aunt Agatha (Jennie Brick), Bertie finds himself engaged to Gertrude Winklesworth-Bode with whom Bertie’s ne’er-do-well friend Eustace Bassington-Bassington has fallen hopelessly in love. Other complications arise, but leave it to Jeeves to sort it all out.
It’s a snazzy production with nice costume and set design work. Director James Jandak Wood has cast it well with St. Jean perfect as the imperturbable Jeeves. There’s good work from the supporting players, especially Nick Moore as Eustace and Libby Oberlin as Gertrude, but Jandak erred in having Brummé play Bertie with a voice that can best be described as “annoying”.
How annoying? Well, he had me envisioning a sequel entitled Jeeves Drowns Bertie in the Thames.
“Jeeves Intervenes” runs through May 27 on the Rotary Stage in the Sonoma Community center in Sonoma. Thursday through Saturday evening performances at 7:30pm; there’s a Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to sonomaartslive .com
Wodehouse published a collection of essays under the title Louder and Funnier, which is the stage direction Jared Sakren must have given the cast of the 6th Street Playhouse production of The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged).
Significant energy is expended by the hard-working and talented Nick Mandracchia, Zac Schuman and Erik Weiss in comically presenting 38 Shakespeare plays in two hours, but it needn’t be delivered almost entirely at a decibel level that rivals the nearby SMART train.
The show is a fast paced series of jokes, bad puns, quick changes, and audience interactions. Some things worked, others (like the attempts at topical humor) didn’t. What comedy there was to be found was often drowned out by the vociferous cast.
C’mon, guys. If I wanted to spend two hours being yelled at, I can just go visit my mother.
“The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged)” runs through June 3 at the 6th Street Playhouse Studio Theatre in Santa Rosa. Thursday through Saturday evening performances are at 7:30pm; there are Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 pm.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
Female protagonists in peril are the focus of one very silly and one very melancholy production running now in the North Bay.
Left Edge Theatre’s “Women in Jeopardy!” is a laugh-out-loud look at the changing dynamic among a group of single friends once one of them begins a relationship. That the friends are middle-aged women makes for a nice change of pace.
Mary (Shannon Rider) and Jo (Sandra Ish) are having a tough time adjusting to a new addition to their circle of friends. Their friend Liz (Angela Squire) has a new man in her life and Jackson (Richard Pallaziol) is not quite their cup of tea. He’s a dentist who makes Little Shop of Horrors’ Orin Scrivello, DDS look like a pussycat. His hygienist has gone missing and it doesn’t take long for Mary and Liz to leap to the conclusion that he’s the responsible party. What’s worse, he’s about to take Liz’s daughter off on a camping trip. What do you do when your best friend is dating a serial killer?
All three wine-swilling ladies have their comedic moments, with Ish’s frequently flabbergasted second-banana Jo garnering a lot of laughs with just a look. Pallaziol is hilariously creepy as Jackson and equally amusing as a Dudley Do-Right-ish police sergeant. Victoria Saitz as Mary’s daughter and Zane Walters as her cougar-hunting on again/off again boyfriend also contribute to the fun.
The show is a lot of fun with Wendy MacLeod’s script full of witty lines and amusing bits. What the show doesn’t have is an ending as things just sort of conclude with an abrupt wind-up that you shouldn’t think too hard about.
You really don’t have to expend many brain cells at all as there’s no great message to be found in “Women in Jeopardy!”, just a lot of laughs.
“Women in Jeopardy!” runs through May 27th at Left Edge Theatre in Santa Rosa. Thursday through Saturday performances are at 8pm; there’s a Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to leftedgethreatre.com
If Greek mythology is more to your taste, then Main Stage West has a production of Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” running through June 2. Ruhl has flipped the focus of the classic tale of Orpheus (Taylor Diffenderfer) and his quest to bring his wife Eurydice (Brianna Rene Dinges) back from the dead to Eurydice’s time in the Underworld and her relationship with her father (John Craven).
Director Chris Ginesi flips it even further with the non-traditional casting of Orpheus that while seeming to fit Ruhl’s alternative world of raining elevators, a tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld (Neil Thollander), and a Greek Chorus of Talking Stones (mollie boice, Nick Christenson, Samantha Bolke-Slater), actually detracts from it.
It’s a visually arresting piece with inventive design elements that complement the script’s other-worldliness and the performances are good, but there’s a hole in the heart of this production.
“Eurydice’' runs through June 2 at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Thursday through Saturday performances are at 8pm; their Sunday matinee is at 5pm.
For more information, go to mainstagewest.com
J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan has been seen on stage in one form or another for well over 100 years. It’s survived being Disney-fied and even Christopher Walken-ized in a disastrous live television spectacle. The most popular adaptation is the 1954 musical starring Mary Martin. It’s that version that takes flight in a well-mounted production running at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center through May 20.
Peter Pan (a winsome Sarah Wintermeyer) has lost his shadow while eavesdropping on story time at the Darling household. While retrieving it late one night, he awakens eldest child Wendy Darling (Lucy London) and after a quick flight demonstration, Peter convinces Wendy and her brothers to join him in Neverland. They’ll soon cross paths with some warriors and the dastardly Captain Hook (David Yen) and his scurvy pirate crew.
Director Sheri Lee Miller and her team get almost everything right here, from casting to costumes and sets, from choreography to musical direction. Wintermeyer is so good as Peter that she almost gets me to put aside my bucket list wish to see a production cast with a male in the role. This is actually the first production I’ve attended where I haven’t been surrounded by little tykes asking “Why is Peter a girl?”
David Yen must be on a low-fiber diet as he doesn’t really chew up the scenery as much as one would expect with such a role. Still terrifically entertaining, his decision to go ‘small’ with some things puts the bits in danger of being lost on the large Spreckels stage.
Nice supporting work is done by Craig Bainbridge as Hook’s right-hand man Smee, Morgan Harrington as Mrs. Darling and the entire cast as Wendy’s siblings, various warriors, pirates and Lost Boys. Honorable mention goes to the backstage “flight crew” and to Andy Templeton who spends the show costumed as either Nana the dog or a tick-tocking crocodile but manages to get some of the biggest audience reactions.
Miller handles the problematic parts of Barrie’s script - its depiction of Native Americans - by transmogrifying them from an “Indian” tribe to non-specific “warriors” and costuming them in a patchwork of styles and designs. It helps, but dialogue (“Let’s smoke a peace pipe!”) and lyrics are still a bit cringe-worthy.
The show is in three acts and runs about two hours and forty minutes, which seems long, but the first and third acts only run for a peppy 35 minutes. Act II runs about an hour and does get a bit sluggish. There are intermissions between the acts to give the kiddies a restroom break.
In toto, Peter Pan makes for a great evening of family entertainment.
Peter Pan runs Friday through Sunday through May 20 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Friday and Saturday evening performances are at 7pm; Saturday and Sunday matinees are at 1pm. There’s a Thursday, May 17 performance at 7pm.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com
It’s been thirty-five years since La Cage aux Folles took Broadway by storm. What began in 1973 as a French stage farce followed by a series of films, the Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Herman musical was considered daring for its time with its portrayal of a happily domesticated male couple thrown for a loop by a request from their son. With marriage equality the law of the land and RuPaul’s Drag Race a crossover hit, it seems less daring today but its message of self-acceptance still packs a punch.
Anthony Martinez plays Geirges, the proprietor of La Cage aux Folles, a French Riviera nightclub that features drag entertainment. The headliner is “Zaza”, otherwise known as Albin, Georges’s partner of twenty years as played by Michael Conte. Together they have raised their a son who’s come home to announce his engagement to a girl whose politician father happens to be the leader of the right-wing “Tradition, Family, and Morality” Party. He wants his fiancé’s father and mother to have dinner with his father and mother - that is, his biological mother. Albin is not to be included. It’s going to be quite some dinner party.
Herman’s Tony Award-winning score runs from the romantic (his “Song on the Sand”) to the comedic (the funny “Masculinity”) to the joyous (the popular “The Best of Times”) and hits its apex with “I Am What I Am”, a defiant ode to individuality. Musical conductor Ginger Beavers and a six-piece band handle the jaunty Herman score well.
There are two terrific lead performances in this Russell Kaltschmidt-directed production, both delivered by Michael Conte. As bombastic as he is as diva-deluxe Zaza, he’s even better as Albin. Conte brings real emotional depth to his character as he deals with his son’s rejection. It’s a depth that’s lacking from Martinez’s rather bland Georges.
Nice comedic support is provided by Joseph Favalora as their butler/maid Jacob and Michael Fontaine as the stuffed-shirt politician. His twelve-syllable delivery of a five-syllable word had me laughing out loud. Lorenzo Alviso also does well as the turncoat son who soon sees the error of his ways.
The design budget must have gone almost entirely to the costumes as there’s almost no set to speak of, but Zaza’s and Les Cagelles’ couture almost makes up for it.
Social progress may have dimmed some of the ‘novelty’ from La Cage, but it still has plenty of heart.
'La Cage aux Folles' runs Friday through Sunday through May 20 at the 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa. Friday and Saturday performances are at 7:30pm, there are Saturday and Sunday matiness at 2pm. There’s also a Thursday, May 3rd performance at 7:30pm.
For specific show dates and times, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
The Santa Rosa Junior College theatre season ends with their production of James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It’s a fairy tale mash-up with elements of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood set to a classic Sondheim score. As in the original tales - and not like most adaptations - things do not end well for the characters.
A childless baker (Brett Mollard) and his wife (Katie Smith) make a bargain with a witch (Alanna Weatherby) to lift a family curse and grant their wish for a child. They are tasked with acquiring four items – a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure as gold. Their search leads them to cross paths in the woods with the characters from the aforementioned fairy tales, all seeking fulfillment of their own wishes. The first act ends on a happy note as everyone seems to have their wishes granted but Act II gets very dark as the consequences of the characters’ actions play out.
In other words, be careful what you wish for…
With the JC’s Burbank Auditorium undergoing renovations, the limitations of the high school auditorium utilized for this production led director Laura Downing-Lee and her design team to get even more inventive than usual. They’ve reached back to the source material and set the show in a library. Scenic designer Peter Crompton loads the stage with oversized books that work as doors and steps. Other library materials are ingeniously worked into scenes – flapping books as birds, library carts as horses, etc.
Under the vocal direction of Jody Benecke and musical direction of Justin Pyne and a nine-piece offstage orchestra, the creatively-costumed cast did well with the often-challenging Sondheim score. Mollard, Smith, and Weatherby lead the talented ensemble which includes Levi Sterling as Jack, Serena Poggi as Little Red Riding Hood, Ella Park as Cinderella, Shayla Nordby as Rapunzel and Cooper Bennet and Roberto Perez Kempton as Princes who were “raised to be charming, not sincere”.
Unfortunately, the opening night performance was marred by numerous technical difficulties. Erratic microphone work and a failing projection system really distracted from the fine work being done onstage. My wish is that they get it all fixed so that audiences can fully enjoy this very entertaining production.
'Into the Woods' runs through May 6 at the Maria Carrillo High School Theatre in Santa Rosa. It’s recommended for ages 12 and above. Performances run Thursday through Saturday at 7:30pm with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 1:30pm.
For more information, go to theatrearts.santarosa.edu
Dramas old and new dominate North Bay stages with two good ones continuing their runs.
Film, television, and theatre veteran Charles Siebert headlines the 6th Street Playhouse production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s Pulitzer Prize and multi-Tony Award winning treatise on the elusiveness of the American Dream is considered by many to be the greatest American play ever written. While almost seventy-years-old, in the hands of the right artistic team it can seem as fresh as ever.
Director Craig Miller has assembled that team to surround Siebert’s towering central performance as Willy Loman, a traveling salesman whose days on the road are rapidly coming to an end. Frustrated at still living paycheck-to-paycheck at his late age, Willy is coming unraveled to the consternation of his wife Linda (Sheila Lichirie) and son Happy (Ariel Zuckerman). Things aren’t helped by the return of semi-prodigal son Biff (Edward McCloud). The action glides between the present and the past and between fantasy and reality as we see why Willy’s dreams for his boys and himself have come to naught.
The Studio theatre setting brings a level of intimacy to the show that makes Willy’s downfall, Linda’s helplessness, and Biff’s acknowledgement of his own failures even more gut-wrenching. In a very strong ensemble of North Bay regulars, take note of Bay Area newcomer Zuckerman’s performance as the son most like his father.
Attention should be paid to this excellent production of an American classic.
‘Death of a Salesman’ runs Thursday–Sunday through April 28 at the 6th Street Playhouse Studio Theatre in Santa Rosa. Thursday through Saturday performances at 7:30pm; Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For specific show information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
If political drama is more to your liking, then the scrappy Redwood Theatre Company is presenting Farragut North by Beau Willimon (who’s responsible for Netflix’s House of Cards). Willimon turned his time as a press aide during Governor Howard Dean’s 2004 Presidential run into this tale of the inner-workings of a similar campaign.
Set in Iowa over two days before their caucuses, Press Secretary Stephen Bellamy (Kot Takahashi) is a 25-year-old political hot shot working on what everyone thinks is a winning campaign. Clandestine meetings and questionable decisions lead to double-crosses, triple crosses and unemployment before the first votes are cast.
RTC’s no-budget productions are always interesting and director Ron Smith uses the energetic young troupe to good advantage here. What they lack in production value, they make up for in talent and heart.
'Farragut North' runs Friday through Sunday through April 22 at the Redwood Theatre Company Studio Theatre in Healdsburg. Friday and Saturday evening performances at 7:00pm; Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to redwoodtheatrecompany.com
Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas hit North Bay stages, first with the Raven Players production of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. Simon, whose best-known works are comedies tinged with a little melancholy (The Odd Couple, The Sunshine Boys) won the 1991 Pulitzer for Yonkers, which is a melancholy family drama tinged with comedy.
With their mother deceased and their father off to work to pay off a loan shark he owes for covering his late wife’s medical bills, Jay (Ari Votzaitis) and Arty (Logan Warren) find themselves living for ten months in 1942 with their tyrannical grandmother (Trish DeBaun) and their mentally-challenged Aunt Bella (Priscilla Locke) in Yonkers, New York. Grandma Kurnitz is cold, demanding, and unable to express affection of any kind. She does not want the children there, but Bella does. The battle is on, first between Kurnitz and her grandchildren, but ultimately between mother and daughter.
Director Joe Gellura has a strong ensemble at work in this piece with laughs generated by Warren as Simon’s alter ego. The key performance is delivered by Locke, excellent as the daughter simply looking for a little happiness in her life. It’s a sensitive performance that grounds this show and gives it more heart than one expects from a typical Simon play.
‘Lost in Yonkers ' runs Friday through Sunday through April 15 at the Raven Performing Arts Center. 115 North St., in Healdsburg. Friday & Saturday evenings at 8pm; Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to raventheater.org
There may be no more “community theatre” in our area than the folks at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center. A glance through the bios in their programs shows a mix of trained veterans, community actors, and a fair number of newcomers. This willingness to cast from the community, while commendable, often leads to a variance in the quality of their productions.
Their current presentation of William Saroyan’s prize-winning-but-severely-dated The Time of Your Life is a good example. The show, a sort of pre-WWII Cheers, has a cast of sixteen with various levels of experience playing the denizens of a San Francisco dive bar circa 1939. There’s no real plot, just a variety of human flotsam and jetsam floating through the tavern.
In an early scene, one character asks another if a performance they’re watching is any good. The response – “It’s awful, but it’s honest and ambitious...”
I can’t improve on Saroyan.
'The Time of Your Life' runs Friday through Sunday through April 15 at the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center, 209 N. Cloverdale Blvd., in Cloverdale. Friday & Saturday evening at 7:30pm; Sunday matinee at 2pm.
For more information, go to cloverdaleperformingarts.com.
In Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg assesses Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro with the criticism that it has “too many notes.” Cinnabar Theater’s current production suffers from the opposite - it’s missing a few.
Amadeus is actually the story of Antonio Salieri (Richard Pallaziol), the most celebrated composer of his time and a man who’s dedicated his life to God and mankind as thanks for God’s granting him the gift of musical talent. Enter Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Aaron Wilton), a crude, boorish reprobate for whom reasons Salieri cannot fathom has been gifted by God with musical genius. Salieri, feeling mocked by God and unhinged by what he sees as a betrayal, seeks revenge on Him by destroying His vessel. He will bring about Mozart’s ruin while seeming to be his friend but destroy himself in the process.
Shaffer’s historical fiction won the 1981 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play (Ian McKellen) and the film adaptation matched that with its 1985 Oscar wins for Best Picture and Best Actor (F. Murray Abraham). Both Pallaziol and Wilton have their moments as Salieri and Mozart with Pallaziol at his best when Salieri is at his most duplicitous. While Wilton succeeds in bringing a high level of obnoxiousness to his Mozart, there’s little chemistry displayed in scenes he shares with Rose Roberts as Mozart’s wife Constanza.
Chad Yarish leads an uneven supporting cast as the amusingly befuddled Austrian emperor Joseph II with Tim Setzer also effective as the pompous Count Johann Kilian von Strack.
Where this Jennifer King-directed production really falters is in its design elements. Scenographer Peter Parrish brings little more than a few platforms and some haphazardly hung drapes to a play whose settings include an 18th century Viennese palace. A large center scrim used occasionally for shadow projections went curiously unused for most of the production. Parrish’s lighting design was also lacking, really only effective in a scene where Salieri collapses in frustration after he reads page after page of Mozart’s compositions and finally succumbs to his genius.
Skipper Skeoch’s period costume design had to do double-duty in providing a sense of time and place with wigs and makeup by Jolie O’Dell also providing nice atmospheric support.
The show concludes with Salieri, speaking for all “mediocrities” in the word, absolving them. Sadly, that’s not in my power here.
“Amadeus” runs Friday through Sunday through April 15th at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma. Friday and Saturday evening performances at 8pm; Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For specific dates and times, go to cinnabartheater.org
One wouldn’t think that a play that deals with the wreckage left behind by a natural disaster would be particularly attractive to North Bay residents right now, but Sharyn Rothstein’s By the Water speaks to what our community is going through. While it’s set in 1992 on New York’s Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy, the human and material devastation portrayed might just as well be set in Coffey Park today.
The show opens with Marty and Mary Murphy (Mike Pavone and Mary Gannon Graham) returning to what’s left of their storm-ravaged home to begin the process of rebuilding. Word comes that the government may be offering buyouts to the residents as long as 80% of the neighborhood is willing to sell. The Murphy’s son Sal (Mark Bradbury) and their best friends Philip and Andrea Carter (Clark Miller and Madeleine Ashe) are all for getting out, but Marty is resistant. Actually, he’s more than resistant as he recruits his other son Brian (Jared Wright) to actively campaign against the buyout. He speaks of family and community and history, but there’s another reason for his intransigence. That reason just may do the job that Hurricane Sandy couldn’t and finish off the family.
Rothstein’s script is Arthur Miller-esque in its examination of a middle-class American family in economic crisis. The shadow of Death of a Salesman hangs over this production with its floundering patriarch, long-suffering-but-loyal wife, sons whose lives took different paths, a financially supportive friend, family secrets, etc. but Rothstein has effectively updated the story and added a few layers, though some like a subplot involving Brian’s rekindling of an old flame (Katie Kelly) feel superfluous.
Director Carl Jordan has an impressive cast with leads Graham and Pavone terrific as spouses whose relationship is put to the test, not by the disaster but by what it reveals about the family. Bradbury and Wright do well as the siblings who have their own issues but whose love for each other is clear. Madeleine Ashe delivers the most devastating line in the play – a single line that speaks of the desperation and frustration that many in this community now feel. Speaking to Marty she tries to explain why her and her husband are so inclined to accept the buyout. She looks directly at Marty and says, “I’m 60, and I have nothing.”
The pain in that line was palpable, and yet it was also cathartic. By the Water is not a story of natural disaster but of human resilience. It’s our story.
‘By the Water’ runs Friday through Sunday through April 8 at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Friday and Saturday evening performances at 8pm; Sunday matinees are at 2pm. There’s a Thursday, April 5 performance at 7:30pm.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com
At a post-show Q & A following the opening night performance of Main Stage West’s Blackbird, director David Lear stated he felt that one of theatre’s responsibilities is to make an audience “a little uncomfortable.” He more than succeeds with this production.
The lights come up and through the windows of a darkened employee break room we see two people arguing in a hallway. The door to the breakroom opens, the lights are turned on and the two individuals enter the room. Not much is said, but it is obvious there is history between these two. Are they estranged father and daughter? Ex-lovers? Siblings?
It’s soon revealed that the fifty-something Ray (John Shillington) had a sexual relationship with the twenty-something Una (Sharia Pierce). However, the “relationship” occurred when Ray was forty and Una was twelve.
Uncomfortable yet? Well, it won’t get any easier over the course of the show’s uninterrupted eighty minutes as the conversation runs the gamut from their first “innocent” meeting to the graphic details of their last evening together. Una has come seeking the answer to a question that’s haunted her while Ray would rather say nothing.
He’s paid the legal price for his actions and tried to build a new life, but can that bill ever be paid in full?
Playwright David Harrower paints this picture with a palette full of greys, refusing to color these characters in simple black and white. Ray and Una are damaged individuals, but whether they were damaged before they met or as a result of their meeting is open to interpretation. He makes no excuses for Ray’s actions but dares to make an audience attempt to better understand them. Una is even more complicated. Deceptively written and played at the beginning as sort of an avenging angel, it soon becomes clear she’s not there to punish Ray. She’s there for a sort of closure. Neither of them will get it.
Pierce and Shillington are excellent in what have to be two of the most difficult roles ever played on a local stage. Lear has guided them well in giving their characters depth and complexity, eschewing the easy labels of hero and villain.
Post-show discussions give the audience and the actors a chance to decompress. Opening night’s talkback was almost as fascinating as the play.
Prepare to be angered, challenged, conflicted and ultimately saddened by Blackbird.
‘Blackbird' runs through April 1st at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8pm; their Sunday matinee is at 5pm.
For more information, go to mainstagewest.com
While time may heal all wounds, a little human kindness along the way doesn’t hurt.
That’s the basic takeaway from the Santa Rosa Junior College production of Julie Marie Myatt’s Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Originally produced in 2008 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it was one of the first works to address the issues faced by returning veterans of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts.
Recently discharged Marine Jenny Sutter (Jenna Rechsteiner) has returned to California after being physically and emotionally wounded in the service of her country. Avoiding actually returning to her home for fear of her family’s reaction to her wounds, a happenstance meeting at a bus station leads her to join Lou (Maureen O’Neill) on a trip to Slab City, CA. It’s an actual location in the Sonoran Desert where squatters and campers have reclaimed an abandoned military base and turned it into a sort of off-the-grid commune.
Jenny soon finds herself surrounded by people dealing with their own damaged lives. There’s Lou, who is dealing with addiction problems (gambling, smoking, sex); Buddy (Geoffrey Nixon), an abuse survivor who fancies himself a preacher (his ordainment came free with a credit check); and Donald (Dylan Kupper), an anti-social jeweler with anger issues. They are all looking for someone or something to believe in, but they – and especially Jenny - need to begin with themselves.
With only six roles to fill from a school full of theatre arts students, Director Wendy Wisely has double-cast every role and has the two casts alternating performances. The opening night cast was fine with particularly warm performances from O’Neill as Jenny’s guide to recovery and Nixon as the sermon-delivering preacher.
With Burbank Auditorium in the thick of renovations, the somewhat-lacking Newman Auditorium hosts this production which translates to minimal set and lighting designs. That’s a shame because the story’s locale provides interesting opportunities for both, though lighting designer Vince Mothersbaugh does manage to do something with the limited resources.
The show is preceded by a slide presentation noting the military service of some of the cast, crew, and SRJC staff and the program notes that there are over 1,000 currently enrolled members of the student population who are active duty, reservists, veterans or their dependents. Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter is a nice salute to them and their families.
‘Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter' runs Wednesday through Sunday through March 18 at Santa Rosa Junior College's Newman Auditorium. Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8pm; Saturday & Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to theatrearts.santarosa.edu
One of the oddest plays I’ve seen in a while, Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses isn’t particularly real in its examination of two suburban couples who share the same surname.
It does, however, often ring true.
Set in an unnamed town, Bob and Jennifer Jones (Chris Schloemp and Melissa Claire) are spending a quiet evening in their backyard talking about nothing (and talking about talking about nothing) when some new neighbors come over to introduce themselves.
John and Pony Jones (Chris Ginesi and Paige Picard) have rented a house down the street and bring a bottle of wine over to break the ice. The awkward conversation that comes with meeting new people is really awkward as it veers into the personal.
It seems that Bob and Jennifer are there because it’s the best place for Bob to receive treatment for a degenerative neurological disease characterized by pain, bouts of blindness, and loss of memory. Bob deals with it by not dealing with it. Jennifer deals with it daily and is beginning to crack under the strain. John and Pony have just picked up and moved there on a whim, but it soon becomes clear the two couples have something in common.
The subject matter doesn’t seem ripe for humor, but it is. Its marvelously quirky dialogue is often absurd, and yet it feels genuine. In one of the plays best scenes, the two male Joneses have a late-night conversation:
John: “Arrrgh!’
Bob: “What?”
John: “Nothing. Ice cream headache.”
Bob: “Did you just have ice cream?”
John: “I wish.”
Delivery of dialogue like this can be a challenge and in the hands of lesser talents can come off cheaply, but director Argo Thompson has a cast that can handle it. Schloemp is excellent as the “everyman” struggling to deal with a failing body. Claire’s role as the put-upon wife borders on the stock, but she gives it just enough variance – particularly in her moments with John – to keep it interesting. Ginesi and Picard garner most of the laughs as neither’s character seems to possess much of an internal filter with Picard’s Pony having the verbal metabolism of a hummingbird.
The Realistic Joneses is difficult to categorize. It’s tough to find meaning in a play about the meaningless of meaning and for a play as funny as it is, an overwhelming sense of melancholy hangs over it. Highly original, it makes for a wonderfully weird evening of theater.
‘The Realistic Joneses’ runs through Mar. 25 at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre at the Luther Burbank Center for the Performing Arts; Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8pm; Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to leftedgetheatre.com
Ask anyone under fifty years of age who Rosemary Clooney is and they’re likely to respond “George Clooney’s wife?” They’d be in the ballpark (she was his aunt) but what they probably don’t know is that she was an immensely popular musical performer who charted numerous hit songs in the 50’s and 60’s. Changes in the musical landscape combined with a struggle with mental health issues led to her star fading. After an onstage breakdown and years of therapy, she was the rare performer who managed a ‘second act’ in showbiz when she turned to jazz. She continued to perform and record until her death in 2002.
Composers, lyricists and playwrights Janet Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman use Clooney’s breakdown as the jumping off point for Tenderly, The Rosemary Clooney Musical, playing now at Napa’s Lucky Penny Community Arts Center. The show uses the framing device of Clooney’s therapy sessions to tell her tale.
After melting down during a Reno, Nevada performance, Rosemary Clooney (Taylor Bartolucci) finds herself in the care of psychiatrist Dr. Victor Monke (Barry Martin). At first reluctant, she soon finds herself opening up about her upbringing, her waning career, her failed marriages, and the struggles with addiction and depression that led to the breakdown.
It’s a standard showbiz melodrama wrapped up in the songs for which Clooney’s known, like “Hey There”, “Botch-A-me”, Come On-A My House”, “Mambo Italiano”, and the title tune. Bartolucci gives a restrained performance as Clooney, which is appropriate given the intimate performing space and subject matter.
Martin is challenged by not only playing her confessor, but every other person that Clooney encounters in her life including her mother, her sister, her uncle, various radio station employees, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and the twice-married-to Jose Ferrer.
Shifts in time and location are indicated by simple lighting changes and character transformations for Martin are expressed with slight costume modifications – a purse for mother, a pipe for Crosby, a jacket slung over the shoulder for Sinatra. Some characters read better than others (Martin does a pretty good Crosby) as the script keeps these characters superficial. It’s their effect on Clooney that matters.
One’s enjoyment of jukebox musicals is often dependent on one’s enjoyment of the specific style of music involved and how well it’s represented on stage. Music Director Craig Burdette, his three piece combo and performer Bartolucci represent Clooney and her style well.
Lucky Penny’s Tenderly, The Rosemary Clooney Musical brings a little luster back to Rosemary Clooney’s faded star.
‘Tenderly, The Rosemary Clooney Musical' plays Thursday through Sunday through March 11 at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa - Thursdays at 7pm; Fridays & Saturdays at 8pm; with Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to luckypennynapa.com
Why?
It’s a question we seem to be asking ourselves daily as we wake up to the news of the latest national tragedy or act of incomprehensible behavior. That too-oft-asked question with the most elusive of answers is at the heart of Peter Shaffer’s Equus.
Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Craig Miller) is asked to take on the case of Alan Strang (Ryan Severt), a 17-year-old boy who has committed a horrific act of animal cruelty. Alan, a quiet boy, has taken a chance equestrian encounter in his youth and developed it into a personal theology. His devotion, passion for and submission to his God “Equus” (Latin for ‘horse’) makes his brutal and inhumane act of blinding horses in his care with a metal spike all the more difficult to fathom. Dysart must find out why.
Was it the conflict inherent in being brought up by a devout mother (Juliet Noonan) and atheist father (John Shillington)? Was it confusion over his burgeoning sexuality that’s been awakened by his co-worker Jill (Chandler Parrot -Thomas)? Or is it - in the play’s most disturbing point as expressed by Alan’s mother in her own search for answers - that evil simply exists?
Dysart’s search for the answer leads him to question his own state in life. His career in a state of “professional menopause” and married to a woman he hasn’t kissed in years, he envies Alan’s passion and begins to ponder whether it’s right to “cure” him and damn him to a life of normalcy. Dysart’s psychological quest finally leads to Alan’s confession and a recreation of the event, but is the initial question answered?
Director Lennie Dean balances the play’s innate theatricality with genuine human emotion which is all the more commendable considering four of the cast spend a good deal of time portraying horses. It’s a visually striking production, aided in good measure by original 1970’s costume pieces courtesy of American Conservatory Theater and an effective lighting design by April George.
Miller is excellent as the psychiatrist grappling with his own demons. Severt bares Alan’s soul (and body, as does Parrot-Thomas in the crucial climax) and gives a gut-wrenching performance. The pain in these characters is palpable. Superb work is done by the entire cast as they move in and out of the story as multiple characters.
An almost perfect combination of script, design, direction, and performance, 6th Street Playhouse’s Equus is not an easy play to sit through. It is also not to be missed.
'Equus' runs through February 25 at the 6th Street Playhouse Studio Theatre in Santa Rosa - Thursday, Friday and Saturday evening performances at 7:30pm; Saturday & Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
World War II didn’t seem like ancient history in 1949 when South Pacific made its Broadway premiere. Sadly, its warnings of the damage that bigotry and prejudice can do aren’t ancient history now as it bows at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center.
Based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan took a couple of the stories, softened some of the characters and created an immensely popular musical tale of wartime love.
Set on two islands in the South Pacific during the war, two love stories are at the center of this tale. Navy Nurse Nellie Forbush (Heather Buck) finds herself falling in love with French expatriate plantation owner Emile de Becque (William O’Neill). Mssr. de Becque has a somewhat mysterious past, which doesn’t seem to bother Nellie too much. Well, at least not as much as the fact that he has bi-racial children born of a youthful relationship with a Polynesian girl.
Meanwhile, newly-arrived Lt. Joe Cable (James Raasch) flips head over heels (in what seems like record time, even for a Broadway musical) for local girl Liat (Maya Babow). Liat’s mother, Bloody Mary (Elsa Fulton), is anxious to marry her off. Joe, however, just can’t imagine bringing her back to his Philadelphia family. Nellie and Joe end their relationships. Emile and Joe head off on a dangerous military mission, but will love be the ultimate casualty?
Classic songs like “There’s Nothing Like a Dame”, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair”, the enchanting “Bali Ha’i” and the beautiful “Some Enchanted Evening” fill out the story, with the daring-for-1949 “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” driving home the source of people’s prejudices.
Musical director Nancy Hayashibara and her 11-piece orchestra deliver the lush score and Buck and O’Neill are in excellent voice and character with O’Neill’s operatic training put to good use here. Nice comedic support comes from William Thompson as Seabee ‘entrepreneur’ Luther Billis and Jeff Coté as harried Captain Brackett. Elsa Fulton steals every scene in which Bloody Mary appears.
Directors Jim Coleman and Sheri Lee Miller keep things moving at a good pace through the two-hour, forty-five-minute running time, but there are some flat spots and things do get a bit sluggish in Act II.
Don’t dive too deeply in the waters and you’ll find yourself enjoying the music and appreciating the message of South Pacific.
South Pacific runs through February 25 at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park. Friday and Saturday performances at 8pm with 2pm matinees on Sunday.
There’s also a Thursday, February 22 performance at 7:30pm.
For more information, google Spreckels Performing Arts Center. They’ve got a funky city web address.
The choices in life that haunt you take center stage in two terrific productions running now in North Bay theatres. Sebastopol’s Main Stage West is presenting Sam Shepard’s Buried Child while Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater has David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People.
Shepard’s forty-year-old, Pulitzer-Prize-winning look at the implosion of the American nuclear family seems as fresh as ever with a very strong cast bringing Shepard’s oft macabre cast to life. John Craven (in a perfect melding of actor to role) is Dodge, the family patriarch. Once a successful farmer, he’s been reduced to being the cuckold of his domineering wife Halie (as played by Laura Jorgensen) and often finds himself at the mercy of his sons Bradley, an amputee who shaves Dodge’s head while he’s sleeping, and Tilden, who’s back home after getting in “trouble” in New Mexico. Tilden now spends his time carting in vegetables from a farm that hasn’t seen a seedling in decades. The sons are played by Eric Burke and Keith Baker, both making a welcome return to the Sonoma County stage after too-long absences.
The family’s decline can be traced to an event that is occasionally hinted at but never revealed - that is, until the arrival of grandson Vince and his girlfriend Shelly (played by Sam Coughlin and Ivy Rose Miller) sets a chain of events in motion in which the devastating secret is revealed and the family, perhaps, regenerated.
Rooted in realism yet often surreal, Buried Child is dark, funny, heartbreaking, disturbing and great theatre.
Good People, seen locally two years ago as the premiere production of Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre, is the tale of Margie (Sarah McKereghan), a down-on-her-luck Boston “southie” who some would say has made a string of bad choices in life but would say herself that she never had any to make.
At the encouragement of her friend Jean (Liz Jahren), she attempts to reconnect with her old boyfriend Mike (played by Nick Sholley), now a doctor who long ago abandoned the projects of South Boston. Margie, for whom the term “pushy” is an understatement, wrangles an invitation to a birthday party for Mike being thrown by his wife. The wife is played by Liz Rogers-Beckley, who interestingly is reprising the role from the Left Edge production. Margie hopes to connect with someone who can offer her a job, but then the party is cancelled - or is it? Margie’s gonna find out. It does not go well.
Funny, bleak, and utterly real, Good People will have you nodding your head in recognition of these characters and shaking your head in frustration at their decisions.
Two great scripts. Two great casts. Two great shows. Your Choice.
'Good People ' runs through February 18 at Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater - Friday & Saturday at 8pm; Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to cinnabartheater.org.
'Buried Child' runs through February 25 at Main Stage West in Sebastopol – Thursday through Saturday at 8pm; Sunday matinees are at 5pm. For more information, go to mainstagewest.com.
Blistering drama takes the stage at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre with the North Bay premiere of Ayad Akhtar’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced. Akhtar has taken the “friends drink to excess and soon truths are revealed” theatrical trope (along the lines of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and dragged it into the 21st century.
Amir Kapoor (an intense Jared N. Wright) is a mergers and acquisitions attorney who’s changed his name and family history and abandoned his Muslim faith in his attempt to climb the corporate ladder. His wife Emily (Ilana Niernberger in the play’s most difficult role) is an artist whose work is heavily influenced by Islamic culture. She’s anxious to have her work displayed by her friend Isaac, played by Mike Schaeffer in an alternately amusing and disturbing performance. He’s a museum curator and the husband of Jory (played by an effective Jazmine Pierce), who’s a fellow ladder-climbing attorney at Amir’s firm.
All seems to be on track until Amir appears at a court hearing for an imam accused of raising money for a terrorist organization. He did so after repeated entreaties from his nephew (played solidly by Sonoma State University student Adrian Causor) and under pressure from his wife Emily. A short blurb in the New York Times about Amir is the catalyst for the action that ensues at a dinner party where Isaac plans to share some happy news.
Akhtar manages to address issues of assimilation, cultural appropriation, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, bigotry, racism, workplace inequity, misogyny, and religious and political fundamentalism in 90 compact minutes with no intermission. The action all takes place in Amir and Emily’s apartment with two short expositional scenes prefacing the play’s main event - the dinner party. It’s a party that begins well enough but, after a plethora of alcohol is ingested and ugly truths are revealed, ends in a shocking act of brutality.
While the dinner party setting may be stock, these characters are not. Director Phoebe Meyer and the cast take a no-holds-barred approach to the material and it pays off. Each character’s complexity is refreshing and provides a worthy challenge for the experienced cast. The company is excellent in their portrayals of individuals who struggle with their core beliefs and the realization that they may not be who they think they are or - more frighteningly - that they are.
That struggle was mirrored by the audience in post-show conversations. The best theatre starts a dialogue, not just about the show, but of the issues raised. This production should lead to a lot of discussions and maybe some heated - but hopefully civil - arguments.
There’s no disgrace in that.
‘Disgraced’ runs through February 18 at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre in the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8pm; Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to leftedgetheatre.com.
The plight of the vanishing New England WASP is the subject matter of A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room, running now at Sonoma Arts Live. No, it’s not a science lecture on the more annoying cousin of the honeybee but a look at the cultural transformation of a specific component of 20th century America – the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Gurney, whose other works include Love Letters and Sylvia, uses 18 vignettes and about 50 characters to chart the rise and decline of upper middle-class America. The scenes all occur in the titular location around a stately dining table. The table, which was once the center point of family life and special occasions, in time has been reduced to a place on which to fold laundry.
Wafting through the room over its two-hour running time are generations of unrelated characters, ages four to ninety, all played by a company of six talented actors - Isabelle Grimm, Kit Grimm, Rhonda Guaraglia, Len Handeland, Trevor Hoffman, and Jill K. Wagoner. One actor goes from playing a stern, turn-of-the-century father lecturing his son on manners to a young boy begging the family servant not to leave her job. Another goes from playing a real estate agent eager to make a sale to a young girl pleading to go to the movies instead of dance lessons.
Scenes overlap and intertwine with characters from one era occupying the space at the same time as characters from another era. There are no blackouts as the action is continuous and the actors simply glide in and out of the room. This led to some confusion with a few audience members, so much so that were a few more empty seats post-intermission. It’s really not that confusing one you acclimate yourself to the style and buy into the premise of veteran performers playing children. Where else will you get the chance to see Kit Grimm bouncing around the stage like a four-year old pretending to be a monkey?
The scenes range from the poignant to the humorous with the most effective being a conversation between an ailing father and his son about funeral plans and a laugh-out-loud segment between an aunt and her nephew about a college photography project.
The action all takes place on the single dining room set, nicely designed and appointed by Bruce Lackovic. William Ferguson has added some effective lighting elements as well.
Director Joey Hoeber keeps his cast in check and despite the range in characters the show never veers into the cartoonish. If you don’t enter the theatre expecting a traditional linear narrative, you’ll find yourself enjoying a well-acted, acute observation of a slice of by-gone American life.
'The Dining Room' runs through February 4 at Andrews Hall in the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma. Thursday through Saturday evening performances at 7:30pm, Sunday matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to sonomaartslive.org.
North Bay theatre kicks off the new year with 6th Street Playhouse’s Honky Tonk Angels, a country music revue by Ted Swindley. Swindley, best known for the community theatre staple Always, Patsy Kline, has taken about thirty country standards and wrapped the thinnest of stories around them to create a raucous and enjoyable evening of entertainment.
It’s the tale of three would-be singers, each stuck in a rut, who decide to take a chance and follow their dreams of a singing career to Nashville. There’s Angela (played by Daniela Innocenti Beem), queen of her double wide who’s having trouble standing by her man (cue Tammy Wynette). Darlene (played by Abbey Lee), is struggling with being a coal miner’s daughter (cue Loretta Lynn) and the loss of her boyfriend Billy Joe (cue Bobbie Gentry). Finally, there’s Sue Ellen (played by Amy Webber), who’s fed up with the chauvinist boss at her 9 to 5 job (cue, of course, Dolly Parton).
Act I begins with their backstories and their individual decisions that it’s time for them to fly (cue REO Speedwagon. Wait a minute, REO SPEEDWAGON?!) and concludes with their fortuitous meeting on a Greyhound bus. A lot must happen during intermission because Act II consists of their farewell performance after a record-breaking six-week engagement at Nashville’s Honky Tonk Heaven. In addition to the songs alluded to earlier, others performed include “I Will Always Love You”, “Delta Dawn”, “Rocky Top”, “Sittin’ on the Front Porch Swing”, and “I’ll Fly Away”.
Director Michael Ross has a trio of talented ladies for angels. Ms. Beem as Angela is the unabashed leader of the trio. As the oldest and most worldly member, she grabs hold of the stage – and the audience – and never lets go. Ms. Webber gives her a run for her money as the brassy, big-haired Sue Ellen while Ms. Lee has the quieter moments as the wide-eyed, innocent Darlene.
Eye-popping costumes by Pamela Enz (think leopard skin and a lot of sequins) add to the fun, as does some playful choreography by Michella Snider. Both come together in the amusing “Cleopatra, Queen of Denial” number.
Swindley’s script – if you can call it that – doesn’t provide character depth and there’s no great message to be found beyond the pat “follow your dreams” axiom but what it does provide is the opportunity to hear some great American music performed live. Music director Robert Hazelrigg and musicians Ian Scherer, Quinten Cohen and Kassi Hampton handle the country/bluegrass songbook well. Credit the ladies for bringing the right amount of character and a quality voice to each song, particularly on some very sweet three-part harmonies.
When it comes to shows like Honky Tonk Angels, it is all about the songs. They’ve got this.
“Honky Tonk Angels” runs Thursday–Sunday through Feb. 4 at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse with evening performances at 7:30 pm and matiness at 2pm.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
Avoiding the typical “Best of…” lists that are commonplace at this time of year, last week I presented Part I of my 2017 “Special End of Year” Awards for local theatre. Here now is Part II:
The “One is the Loneliest Number” Award - I’ve been asked a couple of times “If you could open up a theatre company in Sonoma Country, what kind of shows would you do?” Getting past the issue that no one in their right mind would open another theatre company in this area, my answer is “one-person shows.” Why? Well, this year we had Patrick Varner as a Streisand employee, Libby Villari as a former Texas governor, Sheri Lee Miller as a ghost, and David Yen as a disgruntled Christmas elf. All were highly entertaining and each came down to a single performer and an audience.
The “No, I’ve Got Something in My Eye” Award – I found myself quite taken with two holiday presentations (that aren’t really holiday plays.) Main Stage West’s Daddy Long Legs and Spreckels’ Little Women, the Musical took me by surprise. Credit the performers for getting me to dust off the adjective “sweet” in my vocabulary.
The “Better Than It Had Any Right to Be” Award – The Redwood Theatre Company has impressed me in its short life for the energy and passion they bring to their productions. As one who has never succumbed to the cult of Star Wars, my expectations for their production of Brittany Law’s original musical parody The Farce Awakens were not high. I expected it to be a bunch of young folk in cheesy costumes with dime-store props saying silly things. That is EXACTLY what it was, and yet it was all delivered with such a sense of joy and fun that they won me over.
The “If You Build It, They Will Come” Award – Sonoma County is blessed with several excellent set designers who often do wonders with often tiny, restricted spaces. The sets for Cinnabar’s Man of La Mancha, Spreckel’s The Sugar Bean Sisters, and Main Stage West’s The Birds all grabbed your attention and transported you to another place from the moment you walked through the theatre door.
The “Just (Don’t) Do It” Award – Just because a show hasn’t been done in Sonoma County before (or in a long time), doesn’t mean it should be done. Some are chestnuts that are best left buried (The Children’s Hour), while others just aren’t very good (David Mamet’s Race.) And why do companies recycle shows that have played in the community within the past few years? You couldn’t pick one of the other 1,000 plays available?
2018 will be a challenging year for both theatre companies and audiences. The Sonoma County landscape has changed in many ways. Theatre companies that struggle even in good times face even greater difficulties now. I know our community’s support of the arts is greatly appreciated.
Again, here’s to an artistically invigorating 2018.
I’ll see you at the theatre.
It’s that time of year again for the usual “Best of…” lists where critics review their picks for the best (and sometimes worst) in music, movies, fashion, and the like and give people at holiday parties something to argue about. For the past three years my approach has been a little different as I prefer to offer a few “Special End of Year Awards” to Sonoma County theatres and artists. Here is Part I of my 2017 awards:
The “Now You See It, Now You Don’t” Award - The Santa Rosa Junior College production of It Can’t Happen Here opened on October 6 and closed on October 8. The adaptation of the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel about the rise of a populist blow-hard to the Presidency had a lot to say about our current political climate, but not a lot of people had a chance to see it. Its run was cut short with the closure of the SRJC campus as a result of the fires.
The “Show Must Go On” Award – There were many theatre companies that understandably postponed their runs during the North Bay fires. Cinnabar Arts and Spreckels Theatre Company went on with their scheduled openings of Quartet and Monty Python’s Spamalot. While neither facility was in immediate danger, I was conflicted about the decision. I attended both productions, enjoyed them both, and was glad they decided to open. That being said, I’m still not sure they should have.
The “Yes, There IS Diversity in Sonoma County, Dammit” Award – The Santa Rosa Junior College production of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s In the Heights proved the claim that there isn’t a diverse enough talent pool from which to cast many shows is suspect. Perhaps choosing shows in a season that speak and appeal to more diverse artists and audiences would widen the pool. Maybe it’s also time to check some artistic egos at the door and go and find them.
The “Big Things Come in Small Packages” Award – The studio theatres of Sonoma County’s largest companies often offered superior work to that displayed on their main stages - 6th Street’s Visiting Mr. Green and A Masterpiece of Comic… Timing and Spreckels’ The Sugar Bean Sisters and Little Women, the Musical for example.
The “Out of Left Field” Award – Not many people are willing to venture out to Monte Rio to catch theatre. You should give it a shot. You’re not going to get the bells and whistles other production companies may provide, but Curtain Call can do a lot with a little. They put on an excellent production of The Elephant Man with local comedian James Rowan giving an incredibly touching performance as John Merrick.
Live theatre continues to struggle in Sonoma County (as it does most any place else.) Like many residents, the theatre community did not escape the fires unscathed with some companies losing their performance space and others losing equipment, props and costumes. Numerous theatre artists lost their homes. Live theatre will go on because Sonoma County supports it but, as with every other part of our community, change is inevitable.
Tune in next week for Part II of my awards.
Here’s to an artistically invigorating 2018.
I’ll see you at the theatre.
In comedy, timing is everything and the timing is so off in 6th Street Playhouse’s Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge that the fact that it still manages to extract any laughs at all from its audience is somewhat of a Christmas miracle. Plagued with pre-production challenges ranging from a change in director due to the fires to the untimely passing of its lead actor, director Jared Sakren and his cast have done their best to present local audiences an option for alternative holiday fun.
Christopher Durang’s musical parody of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – with detours through the worlds of Oliver Twist, The Gift of the Magi, and It’s a Wonderful Life amongst others– has not aged well since its 2002 premiere. Full of political and pop cultural references that might have seemed dated even them (Remember Enron and Kenneth Lay? Harry and Leona Helmsley? TV’s Touched by an Angel?), it follows Ebenezer Scrooge (played by Kit Grimm) on his Christmas Eve journey through his past as guided by an incompetent ghost (Debra Harvey, alternating in the role with Serena Flores). Their visit to the Cratchit household reveals an angry and bitter Mrs. Bob Cratchit (played by an appropriately crotchety Tika Moon), who’s fed up with her milquetoast husband (an earnest Conor Woods), their twenty children - most of whom live in the root cellar - and her lot in life. Soon it’s off to the pub for her where she’ll knock back a few followed by a London Bridge plunge into the Thames. Scrooge and Cratchit’s fates become intertwined, as Scrooge finds himself oddly attracted to his underling’s miserable wife and Cratchit wishes she had never been born. The show concludes with a decidedly un-Christmas-like moral – you can be poor, loving, and noble, or rich, mean, and happy. God bless us, everyone!
The play contains four original songs by Durang and Michael Friedman that offer a few chuckles, but you won’t be hearing carolers singing any of these any Christmas soon.
Dicken’s original story is ripe for parody, and Durang does manage to mine a few silly laughs out of it, but this show never really gets off the ground. There are hints at what Ms. Harvey might have been able to do with the lead role of the ghost with sufficient rehearsal time, but the necessity of her reading from a script played havoc with the show’s pacing. Without a strong, central performance, it was left to the supporting cast to veer out on their own and bring the laughs. The most successful of those were Moon’s bitingly sarcastic Mrs. Cratchit, Laura Levin’s ebullient, cherubic Mrs. Fezziwig, and Eric Weiss’s rubber-limbed not-so-Tiny Tim.
Credit to them and the entire ensemble for gamely marching on in the hopes of producing some Christmas cheer. While the punchbowl they’re serving it from is far from full, there’s at least enough in it for a couple of glasses.
Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge plays at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse through December 23rd with evening performances at 7:30 pm and matinees at 2:00pm
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
If you like A.R. Gurney’s popular two-person play “Love Letters”, you’re going to love “Daddy Long Legs”, a musical adaptation of the 1912 novel by Jean Webster. Set at the turn of the 20th century, it’s the story of the relationship between an orphan and her mysterious benefactor as told – well, actually, sung – through a series of letters. Elly Lichenstein, Artistic Director of Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater, transports her directorial skills from the cozy confines of Cinnabar to the even cozier confines of Sebastopol’s Main Stage West for this production.
Jerusha Abbott (Madison Genovese), the oldest orphan at the John Grier Home, is surprised to learn that a trustee who’s been impressed with her writing will provide her with a college education under a very particular set of circumstances. She must write him regularly with the knowledge that he will never respond. He will remain anonymous with her letters simply to be addressed to “Mr. Smith”. Jerusha imagines him to be a trustee whose shadow she caught a glimpse of one evening. His legs were long and spindly and as he is a trustee she imagines him to be quite old. Rather than address her benefactor with his chosen boring moniker, she titles him “Daddy Long Legs.”
Her benefactor is actually Jervis Pendleton (Tyler Costin), a young philanthropist who is at first amused but soon enchanted by Jerusha’s musings on college life and her personal growth. As he’s the uncle of one of Jerusha’s college roommates, he arranges to meet her while maintaining his anonymity. Their relationship grows over the four years of college, but Jerusha’s graduation may finally force Jervis’s hand in revealing his true identity.
This entire tale is told through song with titles like “Who is this Man?”, “She Thinks I’m Old”, “Freshman Year Studies”, “The Secret of Happiness”, “Graduation Day” and the like. The show’s format demands that the music and lyrics by Paul Gordon and John Caird be heavy on exposition and there’s so much of it that it often feels repetitive and one note.
Ah, but it’s a beautifully sung note. Ms. Genovese brings pluck and charm to Jerusha and Mr. Costin’s physical lankiness is perfect for the role of Jervis. Both are in fine voice and complement each other quite well in their duets. They manage to completely avoid the trap that a closer examination of the storyline might provide.
Elizabeth Craven had designed a very utilitarian set for the small MSW stage with half of it occupied by Jervis’s study and the other half representing the orphanage, the college, a farm and a mountaintop at various times.
Musical director Dave MacNab and his three-piece orchestra give the often-sweet score its due with the cello work by Gwenyth Davis particularly emotive.
Director Lichenstein, though again limited by the show’s epistolary format and the relatively small performance space, manages to add a few nice directorial touches that when combined with two appealing performances ends with the result being a very
pleasant evening of musical theatre.
“Daddy Long Legs” plays at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West through December 10, Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings at 8pm, with Sunday matinees at 5pm.
For more information, go to mainstagewest.com
In 1992, a retired truck driver named Teri Horton paid five dollars for a painting from a southern California thrift store to give as a gag gift to a friend. An incomprehensible series of dots, blotches and streaks, her friend refused her gift and Horton ending up trying to unload the gangly canvas at a yard sale. It caught the eye of a local high school art teacher who let her know she just might be in possession of a genuine Jackson Pollock painting worth millions. Horton’s response is unprintable, but it was the beginning of a decades-long quest to determine the authenticity of the painting and its true value.
That’s the backstory to Bakersfield Mist, playwright Stephen Sachs’s fictionalized take on Horton’s quest running now at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre. Set in a Bakersfield trailer park, it’s a two-character comedy of desperation that imagines the meeting between ex-bartender Maude Gutman (played by Sandra Ish at her blowsy best) and art connoisseur Lionel Percy (a prickly Mike Pavone.) Gutman has scraped enough money together to hire Percy to render his professional opinion on the work in question. As dismissive of Gutman as he is of the painting, what follows is an 80-minute, bourbon-soaked battle of wits between the two that raises issues of class, culture, personal validation and authenticity that go beyond the determination of the status of a single work of art.
Sachs packs a lot into 80 minutes and falters a bit when he veers into maudlinism. At its core, the script is a neo-Neil Simon Odd Couple with Gutman’s ‘Oscar’ clashing with Percy’s ‘Felix’, albeit with a bit more depth and a lot more adult humor and language. Ish and Pavone are equally matched talents and equally matched adversaries, each seeking their own validation. For reasons greater than simply the money at stake, Gutman needs the painting to be genuine. Percy has his own issues in needing his decision to be right.
Co-directors Argo Thompson and Kimberly Kalember set Ish and Pavone loose on a nicely detailed set (also by Thompson) that perfectly captures the stock ambiance of a mobile home. From its fake wood paneling to its omnipresent collection of shot glasses to a well-worn recliner, the set almost becomes a third character in the play, and maybe even a fourth if you include the painting itself.
Bakersfield Mist uses the inhabitants of an art museum and a trailer park as a clever means of examining the classic blue collar/white collar (or, if you prefer, red state/blue state) divide and, more interestingly, the current hot-button topic of authenticity. Should a leader in a field calling something ‘fake’ overrule scientific evidence to the contrary?
Sound familiar?
“Bakersfield Mist” plays at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Studio Theatre in the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts through December 2nd with evening performances at 8pm with some additional weekend performances at 2 or 5pm.
For specific show dates and times, go to leftedgetheatre.com
The holiday season will soon be upon us and Sonoma County Theatre companies will be providing plenty of opportunities to escape the bumper-to-bumper traffic, full parking lots, and crowded stores that are all too common at this time of year. Some will be presenting traditional Christmas programs while others will be giving audiences some theatrical refuge from this often-overwhelming season.
Perhaps the most traditional will be 6th Street Playhouse’s production of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, a stage musical based on the popular 1954 film starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. It’s the story of a couple of song-and-dance men who come to the rescue of their old Army commander who’s now the proprietor of a failing Vermont lodge. Looks like they’re gonna put on a show to save the lodge, and do it while singing a bunch of classic Irving Berlin songs like “Happy Holidays”, “Blue Skies” and, of course, the title tune. The show opens on the GK Hardt stage December 1st and runs through December 23rd.
In their smaller Studio Theatre, 6th Street will be presenting the somewhat less traditional Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge, playwright Christopher Durang’s manic mash-up of A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, It’s a Wonderful Life and some other stories. It’s a very funny show and runs from December 8th to December 23rd.
Out in Sonoma, the folks at Sonoma Arts Live will be presenting Inspecting Carol, a comedy about a flailing theatre company trying to get through a disastrous production of A Christmas Carol with the hopes of receiving a financial grant dangling over their heads like mistletoe. The Carl Jordan-directed show opens on November 29th and runs through December 10th.
For a wine country take on a couple of holiday classics, you might check out the Raven Players’ A Vintage Christmas. It’s a world premiere production written by Tony Sciullo that’s described as a cross between A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life set in wine country. It’s a Raven on the Road production that plays at the Trione Vineyards and Winery in Geyserville from December 1st through December 10th.
Travel a little further north and you’ll find The Nutcracker Musical being presented by the Cloverdale Performing Arts Center. It is not the ballet based on Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (though there should be about one hundred productions of that produced in the next two months.) It’s a musical play based on the original E. T. A. Hoffman story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” and has a two-weekend run starting on December 1st.
For those seeking a respite from holiday-themed shows, you have a few choices. Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre opens Bakersfield Mist on November 17th. It’s a comedy based on the true story of a Southern California trailer park resident who’s convinced the five-dollar painting she bought at a thrift store is a Jackson Pollack original worth millions. Sebastopol’s Main Stage West is presenting the two-person musical Daddy Long Legs. A turn of the century story most famously turned into a Fred Astaire/Leslie Caron film, it’s a May-December romance set to music. The Spreckels Theatre Company in Rohnert Park is reprising its production of Little Women: the Musical, albeit with a new director and an almost entirely new cast. It opens in Rohnert Park on November 24th. Monte Rio’s Curtain Call Theatre presents Rapture, Blister, Burn, a drama that presents a generational debate over the question “Can today’s woman really have it all?”
Finally, for those looking to ring-a-ding-ding in the New Year with the Chairman of the Board, Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater is presenting My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra. It opens December 15th and runs through mid-January.
Sonoma County Theatres are serving up a nice variety of shows for the holiday season. Consider checking one out or make a present of live theatre to a friend or family member. Season tickets to one of your local theatres would make a great gift.
At last count, Sonoma County had over twenty active theatre companies, ranging from the nomadic Pegasus Theatre Company to the theatre departments of the two local institutions of higher learning. From Petaluma to Cloverdale, from Monte Rio to Sonoma, the options available for those interested in live theatre in this county are plentiful.
Two years ago, four Sonoma County based theatre critics – including your host - gathered to discuss the possibility of celebrating the best of local theatre through an awards process. All were members of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, an organization that has for the past 41 years recognized excellence in theatre produced in the nine bay area counties with an annual awards ceremony. Theatre Bay Area, the largest regional theatre service organization in North America, started their own awards program four years ago, also for productions throughout the Bay Area.
While Sonoma County has made a respectable showing in these awards over the past few years – including two wins for Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre at the recent TBA Awards - the local critics thought there was enough theatre produced in this county to warrant their own honors.
Thus was born the Marquee Theater Journalists Association and the MTJA Awards, named for the legendary Marquee Theatre of Santa Rosa where many local artists began their theatrical careers. Awards are given in fifteen categories that recognize outstanding work in Sonoma County productions that opened from September of the previous year to August of the current year. One major difference with the MTJA Awards is that the performance categories are non-gender specific. There are awards for outstanding lead performances and awards for outstanding supporting performances – all performers are considered for each award. The terms “actor” and “actress” are nowhere to be found on the Award certificates. The awards are separated by genre, with categories recognizing the differences between dramas, comedies, and musicals.
Nominations for the 2nd Annual MTJA Awards were announced in mid-September with the awards ceremony scheduled for mid-October. Wellllll, that didn’t happen but this past Monday the Sonoma County theatre community had the opportunity to gather at the Confluence Taproom & Lounge in Santa Rosa and celebrate the past year in theatre.
Here are the recipients of this year’s MTJA Awards:
Outstanding Poster/Program Design
Pagliacci (Victoria Von Thal, Cinnabar Theater)
Outstanding Set Design
Peter Crompton (In the Heights, SRJC)
Outstanding Costume Design
Maci Cae Hosler (Fairyworlds!, 6th Street Playhouse)
Outstanding Light Design
Eddy Hansen (The Sugar Bean Sisters, Spreckels Theatre Company)
Outstanding Sound Design
Doug Faxon (The Birds, Main Stage West)
Outstanding Choreography
Sam Browne, Casandra Hillman, Anakarina Swanson (In the Heights, SRJC)
Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Drama
Rose Roberts (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Main Stage West)
Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Musical
Erik Weiss (You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, 6th Street Playhouse)
Outstanding Supporting Performance in a Comedy
Heather Gordon (The Money Shot, Left Edge Theater)
Outstanding Lead Performance in a Musical
Daniela Innocenti-Beem (Gypsy, Sonoma Arts Live)
Outstanding Lead Performance in a Comedy
Melissa Claire (Becky’s New Car, Sonoma Arts Live)
Outstanding Lead Performance in a Drama
Alan Kaplan (Visiting Mr. Green, 6th Street Playhouse)
Outstanding Musical Production
In the Heights (John Shillington, director; Janis Wilson, musical director; SRJC)
Outstanding Comedy Production
Becky’s New Car (Carl Jordan, director; Sonoma Arts Live)
Outstanding Drama Production
Visiting Mr. Green (David L. Yen, director; 6th Street Playhouse)
Congratulations to these artists and the entire Sonoma County theatre community.
The unique bonds of female friendship are at the heart of Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, now in the middle of its run at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse. Based on the life of Harling’s sister, the show debuted off-Broadway in 1987 and shortly thereafter was adapted into the successful film starring Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine and Julia Roberts in an early Academy Award-nominated role.
Set in a Louisiana hair salon, it’s the tale of a group of small-town Southern “belles” of all ages and statuses who gather to gossip, share recipes, and occasionally get their hair done. There’s Truvy (Jennifer Peck), the bubbly proprietor and chief conduit of all local information, Annelle (Crystal Carpenter Wilson), the new girl in town who hires on at the salon as the show begins, Shelby (Ellen Rawley), an independent young woman about to be married, M’Lynn (Jill K. Wagoner), Shelby’s lovingly-controlling mother, Ouiser (mollie boice), the town “character”, and Clairee (Kate Brickley), widow of the mayor and town sage.
The play opens on Shelby’s wedding day and progresses through the next couple of years. We see changes in all of their lives, from Shelby’s desire for a family to Annelle’s maturation from an insecure lost lamb to true believer. M’Lynn struggles with letting her daughter live her own life, while Ousier, who really isn’t crazy (she’s “just been in a very bad mood for 40 years”), reconnects with an old flame. Clairee starts to step out of her late husband’s shadow and expand her horizons. It’s a tear-jerker, so someone’s gonna get sick and… well, you know.
Director Beulah Vega’s got a top-notch cast at work here with each actor providing a fully-formed character that while steeped in cliché is wholly believable. Kate Brickley’s Clairee is the heart of the show, overseeing things from a waiting chair and tossing out a quip every now and then. She’s the town mother, which is not meant to take anything away from Jill Wagoner’s M’Lynn, who is excellent as Shelby’s mother, torn between her daughter’s desire to be happy and what may be truly best for her. mollie boice follows up her role from earlier this year as a cantankerous Southern senior in Spreckel’s The Sugar Bean Sisters with her work here as a cantankerous Southern senior. Madame boice would seem to have a lock on this type of role and delivers the goods.
If Clairee is the heart of the show, then surely Ellen Rawley’s Shelby is the soul. To steal a line from another show currently running, she’s always looking on the bright side of life and Rawley is charming in the role. Crystal Carpenter Wilson’s Annelle has the greatest character arc and by the play’s conclusion has come into her own as a strong woman. The glue that holds this group together is Jennifer Peck’s Truvy. Her beauty shop is their refuge and Peck plays her with a heart of gold and a great deal of humor. The affection she holds for others and that others hold for her really comes through.
That beauty shop is well represented on the GK Hardt stage with a nicely appointed scenic design by Sam Transleau. Props for making it a functional shop, where hair is actually shampooed (not mimed) and props to the cast for taking on the challenge of setting curlers while performing. Set in the 80’s, the time is well represented in the costume choices of designer Gail Reine.
Full of humor, pathos and delivered via excellent character work by the entire cast, the 6th Street Playhouse production of Steel Magnolias delivers a heaping helping of southern comfort to its audience, and not just a female audience. Consider making an appointment.
Steel Magnolias plays at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse through November 5 with evening performances at 7:30pm and matinees at 2pm.
For more information, go to 6thsteetplayhouse.com
“Am I supposed to be retelling my creature’s story or confessing my own?” – so asks Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, author of Frankenstein and the protagonist in Petaluma playwright (and former Second Row Center Host) David Templeton’s latest theatrical piece Mary Shelley’s Body, now in its premiere engagement at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West. Templeton, whose previous plays are autobiographical, ventures into historical fiction with this stage adaptation of his same-named novella published last year in Worde Horde’s anthology “Eternal Frankenstein”.
The play opens, as most good ghost stories do, in a graveyard where we find Mary Shelley (Sheri Lee Miller) atop her tomb and coming to grips with the realization that she is dead. She finds herself trapped by an invisible force and begins to review her life with the hope of revealing the reason for her purgatorial existence. Her upbringing by a stern father, her romance with the married Percy Shelley, their eventual marriage after the suicide of Shelley’s wife, and the loss of three of her children are all relayed, as well as the fateful summer evening spent in the company of Lord Byron and others where she conceived the idea for her classic horror tale.
Interspersed with the biographical information is Templeton’s original take on the Frankenstein story, focusing on the “construction” of the monster. Four tales are told of the various parts collected by Victor Frankenstein – the hands of an ox man, the brain of a judge, the heart of a stallion, and the blood of a washwoman. Each tale is a horror story unto its own and they provide the play with its strongest, creepiest moments.
The play concludes with Shelley’s horrific realization as to how she met her demise but to reveal more may reduce the jolt audience members deserve to receive for themselves. I’ll just say that in Templeton’s world, Shelley’s tale of Frankenstein may be more autobiography than fiction.
Miller gives a tour-de-force performance as Mary Shelley, one moment exuding the charm of her character and in the next relating a bone-chilling tale of murder and body snatching. There is also a surprising amount of humor in the piece which Miller slyly delivers. She commands the stage from beginning to end of the play’s one hour and forty-five-minute run (with a fifteen-minute intermission.) The show could stand to be trimmed a bit, particularly with the sometimes-clunky exposition at the show’s start. There were also a few moments that left some members of the audience confused (including myself) that should be clarified.
Templeton writes a good horror story, and Miller as Shelley is a great story teller. Both are aided by a simple but effective set design by stage director Elizabeth Craven and the omnipresent flashes of lightning and rumbles of thunder that surround the audience courtesy of designers Missy Weaver and Doug Faxon.
Current events may make some shy away from a tale in this genre but the Main Stage West production of Mary Shelley’s Body really will transport you to another time and place.
Mary Shelley’s Body plays at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm, with a 2pm matinee on Saturday and a 5pm matinee on Sunday.
For more information, go to mainstagewest.com
The old axiom “the show must go on” traces its origins back to traveling circuses when, if an animal got loose, the ringmaster and the band tried to keep things going so that the crowd would not panic. Well, there’s one hell of an ‘animal’ running loose in Sonoma County right now and the folks at the Spreckels Theatre Company have decided their show must go on. They’ve gone ahead and opened their production of Monty Python’s Spamalot at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park with the intent of completing its run through October 29.
I had mixed emotions about the decision. Most theatre companies have cancelled or postponed their productions. The air quality in the area is horrendous. Cell phones constantly beep with notices of the latest evacuations or fire updates. Thousands of people have lost their homes or have been evacuated from them. Roads are closed. Emergency vehicles from around our state and others are filling the streets. One cast member from this production is recovering from burn injuries in San Francisco.
And yet I attended, not so much as a reviewer, but as a member of the theatre and Sonoma County community seeking to support my fellow artists and citizens. I was joined by about one hundred other folks, some to support their family and friends, others to escape for a few hours from the harsh reality of the world literally just outside the theatre doors.
I’m glad I did. It was incredibly therapeutic to be in a theatre and to hear people laugh. I am extremely proud of the theatre artists who took the stage last night and gave their all to provide this community some relief.
The show began with a slight change to the usual admonition about cell phones. Rather than turn them off, people were encouraged to just switch them to vibrate. With that, musical director Lucas Sherman and the eleven-piece orchestra began the overture.
Spamalot is Monty Python member Eric Idle’s musical mash-up of their 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail and several of their British television series’ best bits. It’s the warped tale of King Arthur (Robert Nelson) who, joined by his servant Patsy (Ted Smith), is gathering a company of knights (Zane Walters, Craig Bainbridge, Peter Rogers, David Gonzalez) to begin a quest for the Holy Grail. Along the way they’ll run into the Lady of the Lake (Shannon Rider), some Knights who say “ni”, a “him-sel” in distress (Lorenzo Alviso) and his exasperated, music- hating father (Sam Starr), a French taunter (Thomas Yen), a person who’s not quite dead (Emily Walters) and a rabbit that’s dynamite.
It’s a silly show with silly songs like “I’m Not Dead Yet”, “The Song That Goes Like This”, “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway”, and “Whatever Happened to My Part?”. Choreographer Michella Snider has them done in a variety of styles from classic Broadway show-stoppers to Vegas lounge acts to a smidgen of disco. In the same vein, director David Yen has his silly cast doing silly things. The humor is often bawdy and crude with both groan-inducing and laugh-out-load visual puns and bits. The “Black Knight” scene seemed to fall apart as much as the Black Knight, but that just made it funnier.
For those who expect more specific criticisms, let me just say this: For a cast that, like most people in the area, has probably slept little in the last week and have had to breathe ash for the last five days, they did all right. Hell, they made me laugh.
The show concluded with an encore of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Many in the audience joined in, and as they exited the auditorium, they all seemed a little happier than when they entered.
If you’re at the point where you need a break and feel safe enough to get out, go ahead and turn off your TV and radio, put your phone on silent, grab some friends who could use a laugh or two as well, and join King Arthur and his gang on their quest. You may not find the Grail, but you’ll find some something better – a little light during these very dark days.
Back in my college days when, after the ingestion of a substantial quantity of adult beverages, the conversation topic amongst my friends inevitably steered to the meaning of life, my standard contribution was that life had no meaning, it was simply the sum of the choices we make. I then proceeded to a) throw up, b) pass out, or c) grab another beverage. See? Choices.
Who hasn’t put themselves in the position to wonder “What if?” or played the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” game when it comes to the choices we’ve made in life. Well, British playwright Nick Payne plays that game theatrically with his characters in his 2012 play Constellations, which is running in its North Bay premiere engagement at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse.
It’s a two-character piece that follows the relationship of quantum physicist Marianne (Melissa Claire) and bee-keeper Roland (Jared Wright) from their first meet through a multitude of life situations. Each situation lasts but a few minutes and is presented multiple times, with slight or major derivations each time. Marianne may confess infidelity, then Roland may be the guilty party. Roland may forgive her. Or not. He may be compassionate. Or violent. They may speak to each other in British accents. Or American Sign Language (a fascinating scene.) Their relationship may endure. Or not.
It’s an interesting exercise but hardly original (see the film Sliding Doors, for example).
It takes off from the concept of mulit-verses, which would take substantial research and writing time to explain fully, but I refuse to spend more time writing this review than it took to watch this production, which clocked in at the performance I attended at a very brisk 63 minutes. For a pretty good primer on the subject, check out the episode of Family Guy that covers the material.
What the show is more than anything is a challenge for its artists, and director Juliet Noonan and actors Claire and Wright meet the challenge. Performed in the round in 6th Street’s Studio theatre, what could easily bore an audience with its repetitive nature holds the audience from beginning to end, though the short running time is also key. I’m not sure I could sit through two hours of a show structured like this.
Claire’s and Wright’s ability to play the scenes with different shadings and maintain the characters’ credibility is a tribute to their talent. Scenes take emotional leaps that would throw many actors, but with a simple light or sound cue the transformation is almost immediate. Director Noonan keeps her cast in almost perpetual motion over an eye-catching, well-lit, yet simple set that evokes the vastness of time and space. With each shift in movement and placement comes a different version of the story.
I’m not sure what the big picture is here, or if there’s even a big picture to be found. One could go mad contemplating the infinite possibilities in life. Or one could go see this show.
Your choice.
Constellations plays at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse through September 24th.
Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 pm, Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2pm
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
Two shows hit North Bay stages whose titles audiences may recognize from their somewhat better-known film adaptations. First up is Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre’s presentation of Sideways, author Rex Pickett’s re-working of his 2004 novel which was adapted by filmmaker Alexander Payne into the multi award-winning film.
Adapting Pickett’s tale of a weeklong road trip/bachelor party through Central California wine country to a small, intimate stage would seem to be a bit of a challenge, but director/set designer Argo Thompson and his Left Edge team – in collaboration with Pickett – make it work. It’s well cast with Ron Severdia as Miles, a frustrated, unpublished author who’s sunk so low as to steal money from his mother to pay the rent and Chris Ginesi as Jack, Miles’ best friend and groom-to-be who’s a whirling dervish of positivity and testosterone. Jack sees the trip as his last chance to score before settling down. Miles just wants to get out of LA and escape into his own viticulturally-devised world. Their plans go a bit awry after meeting a couple of tasting room managers. Maya (Maureen O’Neill) seems to have an interest in Miles while Terra (Jazmine Pierce) has Jack thinking his upcoming nuptials may be a mistake.
If you know the film or novel, then you know the play. If you’re wondering how a story set in so many places can be fit onto a small stage, Thompson has designed a multi-functional set that easily transforms from a dingy apartment bathroom to a classy tasting room to a cheap motel room to a restaurant dining room, and all with minimal transition time.
Which is good, because the show feels a bit long. The pace should pick up a bit as the run gets rolling but the show could be streamlined a bit. Pickett has retained all the best scenes and lines of dialogue and there are plenty of laughs, but some scenes ran on and others seemed extraneous or repetitive. Payne changed the ending a bit in his Oscar-winning film script, but the play retains Pickett’s original conclusion. I think Payne was right. The ending as written seems a bit too pat with everything tidily wrapped up with a tone that is very different from the rest of the story.
Ah, but the rest of the story is so well done with the cast doing wonders with Pickett’s characters. Severdia and Ginesi are excellent in capturing the essence of male friendship and fraternal love when you can go from hugging your best friend one minute to punching him in the mouth in the next. O’Neill is quite effective as a weary divorcee whose scabs from marital wounds are picked fresh by Miles’ and Jack’s behaviors. Pierce does well as a free spirit who does not respond well to Jack’s machinations. Even the ensemble (Kimberly Kalember, Angela Squire and Mark Bradbury) get their moments as they take on all the other characters whose paths Jack and Miles cross from Miles’s mom to an effete tasting room manager.
One needn’t be a student of oenology to enjoy the Left Edge Theatre production of Sideways, but a glass or two of the stuff in the lobby beforehand (and at intermission) wouldn’t hurt – just don’t try to match the amount of drinking that seems to be going on on-stage.
In the vernacular of the Sommelier, it’s a full-bodied show that induces sufficient laughter to allow for proper aeration of its complex properties. This critic found Sideways well-balanced with just the right blend of humor and heart but with a finish that’s just slightly off.
Sideways plays through October 1st at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre in the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 2pm.
For more information, go to leftedgetheatre.com
Titular roles don’t come more challenging than those of Miguel de Cervantes, the Man of La Mancha and John Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, so why not increase the challenge by casting the roles with performers whose fortés are outside of standard theatre?
Cinnabar Theater Director Elly Lichenstein has Daniel Cilli, primarily an opera singer, in the dual role of Cervantes and Don Quixote, while Michael Tabib of Curtain Call Theatre has cast stand-up comedian James Rowan as Merrick. Both gentlemen do honor to their characters.
La Mancha is set in the bowels of a 16th century Spanish prison, where Cervantes awaits his fate at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. Stripped of his belongings by the other prisoners, Cervantes pleads for the return of his manuscript of Don Quixote and demands a trial. His defense will be a reenactment of his story of honor and love. He will play the title role with his also-imprisoned manservant (Michael Van Why) as Sancho Panza. Other prisoners are drafted into roles as the tale is told.
And sung, because it is a musical after all. Under musical director Mary Chun, Cilli’s magnificent baritone is the perfect match for the Mitch Leigh & Joe Dario score culminating with a show-stopping version of “The Impossible Dream.” He sets the standard for musical performance in this show, and is met by Daniela Innocenti-Beem as his Dulcinea with the heart-breaking “Aldonza”. Nice vocal work is also done by Kevin Gino as the Padre. A necessary lighter tone is brought to this often-dark production courtesy of Van Why with “I Really Like Him” and Mary Gannon Graham as the Housekeeper in “I’m Only Thinking of Him”. Other quality performers round out the ensemble.
Befitting a show with a budget, there’s a dank and detailed dungeon set by Wayne Hovey and appropriately grimy costumes by Abra Berman. Chun continues her award-winning work at Cinnabar with a six-piece orchestra that fills the auditorium with the Tony-winning score.
Lichenstein wasn’t tilting at windmills when deciding to bring this production to the North Bay. A quest to Petaluma to catch this production will bring ample reward.
On the opposite side of the budget spectrum lies Monte Rio’s Curtain Call Theatre. Housed in the Russian River Hall, they’ve impressed me in the past with what they’re able to do with minimal resources. Their current production of The Elephant Man utilizes projections more so than set pieces to evoke a sense of time and place and, because of the playwright’s desire to not recreate the physical deformities that afflicted the title character, allows the audience to get past that potential distraction by displaying photographs taken of John Merrick and his condition.
That leaves it to James Rowan to give the audience the inner character. Best known for hosting and performing comedy at local taprooms, he’s begun dipping his toes in local theatre. There’s ample evidence that comedians make good actors (and, conversely, that actors do a lousy job playing comedians) and Rowan’s name can be added to that list. He gives a very human performance as Merrick that recalls John Hurt’s brilliant work in the same-titled film.
For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s the fact-based tale of John Merrick, the doctor who rescued him from his “freak show” existence, his life as a resident of London Hospital and his transformation into an A-list member of British society.
The cast consists of Curtain Call regulars and Tabib guides them in doing good work, but it all comes down to Rowan’s believability as the title character. His commitment to Merrick - his physicality and his manner of speech - is admirable. More importantly, he brings Merrick’s humanity to the forefront, particularly in several very touching scenes with Segal/Kendall.
The Elephant Man is an excellent example of how, while technical elements often play an important part in a production’s success, a strong central performance is what really makes a show.
A citizen of Santa Rosa who criticizes anything Charles Schulz / “Peanuts”- related runs the risk of being run out of town on the next Smart Train. This theatre critic took on that risk and attended the opening night performance of the 6th Street Playhouse production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I’m happy to report that I won’t be taking an unscheduled rail trip anytime soon.
Simplicity was one of the keys to the success of Schulz’s creation – simplicity of drawing, simplicity of character, simplicity of style. This simplicity masked the complexity of emotions and behaviors that Schulz was able to address in his long-running comic strip.
Director Marty Pistone honors both the simplicity and complexity of Schulz’s style with his sure-footed direction of this production. His diverse cast, while bearing slight physical resemblance to the world-renowned characters, captures each one’s inner character - Dominic Williams’ angst-ridden Charlie Brown, Cooper Bennett’s quiet but self-assured intellectual Linus, Amy Webber’s alpha-crab Lucy, Robert Finney’s musically-focused Schroeder, Katie Kelley’s frustrated at the world’s injustices Sally, and Eric Weiss’s manic puppy Snoopy – with assistance from some basic costuming and an occasional wig.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the original off-Broadway production which was itself a sort of spin-off of an original “concept” album by Clark Gesner. A 1999 Broadway revival brought three additional songs by Andrew Lippa (The Addams Family). The show itself is a series of vignettes, live comic strip panels if you will, which cover familiar “Peanuts” territory. The kite-eating tree, the baseball game, Lucy’s Psychiatric Help Booth, Schroeder’s piano, the little red-headed girl (Siena Warnert) and Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel all make appearances. Music often accompanied these scenes with music director Ginger Beavers and a small four-piece orchestra performing such titles as “The Kite”, “The Doctor is In”, and “Happiness”.
Musical highlights included the charming “My Blanket and Me” featuring Bennett’s Linus dancing with his baby blue security blanket (Warnert), and the joyous “Suppertime”, where a hyperkinetic Weiss presents Snoopy’s ode to his favorite time of day.
The comic strip feel of the show is helped immensely through the presence of animated projections created by Chris Schloemp. These along with several Schulz-inspired set pieces and the aforementioned costumes and wigs went a long way into getting the audience to “buy into” the concept of a live action comic strip.
But it all really comes down to the cast. Each has their moment while gelling very well as an ensemble. They can sing, they can move, and they can surrender to the child within themselves in bringing these characters to life. Much as how Snoopy was the break-out character from the strip, Weiss’s frenzied puppy frequently steals the show. With his understated performance, however, Bennett gets the show’s “awwww” moment when his Linus deals with Lucy’s physical bluster with verbal kindness.
I saw an absolutely terrible production of this a few years back when a theatre full of elementary school students came this close to turning into a European-soccer-match-style mob after failing to adapt to human beings playing their favorite comic strip characters – particularly Snoopy. Preparing your younger audience members for what they will see may go a long way in smoothing the path to an enjoyable evening of family theatre. The cast will do the rest.
Like paging through one of the “Peanuts” compendium books you probably have on your bookshelf, 6th Street Playhouse’s delightful You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown will make you smile – a lot.
And smiles don’t come easy these days.
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown plays at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse through September 17th, Thursday through Sunday at 7:30pm, Sat and Sunday matiness at 2pm.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
According to IMDB, the budget for 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an estimated $245,000,000.00. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here in saying the budget for the Redwood Theatre Company’s production of Brittany Law’s original musical parody The Farce Awakens was about 1/245,000,000th of that. Cardboard sets, Super Soakers for ray guns, and a droid costume consisting of an oversized t-shirt and bike helmet equal a show with production values that would make Edward D. Wood, Jr. blush.
And yet there’s something charming about making due with the resources at hand, so playwright/composer/assistant director/dance choreographer/costume, set & prop designer Law joined with RTC’s Artistic Director/stage director/dance & fight choreographer Kot Takahashi to bring her creation to life on the quaint and comfortable Redwood Theatre Company stage in the heart of an industrial park in Healdsburg.
Law’s script follows the screen story of the search for the long-lost Luke Skywalker while battling the villainous ‘First Order’ but manages to chop the film’s 126 minutes down to about 75 while adding 14 songs to the mix. All your main characters are there – Rey (Ms. Law), Poe Dameron (Mr. Takahashi), Finn (Isiah Carter), Kylo Ren (Ezra Hernandez), BB8 (Adriano Brown), Teedo (Griffin Tatum) as well as Han (Brett Mollard), Chewie (Alex Jimenez), Luke (Alex Sterling) and Leia (Shawna Jackson).
Most of the cast fill in for various other roles from General Hux to a Rockettes-like kick line of dancing stormtroopers. The ensemble also has two members, Mathew Gravel and Jasmine Capriotti, from the Alchemia Arts program which supports adults with developmental disabilities through artistic expression. They all seem to be having a blast and their affection for the material is evident.
I don’t know how they are able to sing with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks, but they do and often quite well. Ms. Law and Mr. Hernandez are trained singers and did best with Ms. Law’s often clever compositions. With titles like “New Best Friend”, “Darth Inside of Me”, and “Totally Brand-New Cantina”, the challenge was often not just to sing, but to do it with a straight face. The cast managed to do that – mostly.
It helps to know the canon of Star Wars, as there are plenty of references and in-jokes that mighty fly over the heads of the unaware. No matter, as there are plenty of other things at which to laugh. Comedic props to Adriano Brown for managing to be more than a sight gag with his BB8. Kot Takahashi’s overplaying (appropriately) as Poe is balanced out by Isiah Carter’s underplaying as Finn. Together, you might say they’re ham and wry. Brett Mollard and Alex Jimenez play Han and Chewie like the space equivalent of Laurel and Hardy (though I don’t expect many of their generation to get that reference.)
Look, we’re not talking Shakespeare or Arthur Miller or even Ken Ludwig here. What we have is a group of talented young performers having fun with something that’s a pop cultural reference point for them. I may not be a member of the cult of Star Wars, but I find this company’s energy and enthusiasm for what they are doing infectious. I found myself smiling frequently at the silliness happening on-stage. The all-ages audience was certainly with them. They were there to have a good time.
They got it.
The Farce Awakens plays at the Redwood Theatre Company in Healdsburg through August 13th
Fri & Sat @ 7:30pm, Sun @ 2pm
- Admission is free but space is limited and donations are appreciated. *
For more information, go to redwoodtheatrecompany.com
Musicals are the bread and butter of community theatre. They’re usually crowd pleasers and with their large casts they can bank on a crowd of family and friends to fill a good portion of the house. They require a certain amount of space and a certain level of talent. Directors often cast for singing talent and cross their fingers that acting-wise their choices will be sufficient or that their audiences will be somewhat forgiving.
No such worries with the Sonoma Arts Live production of Gypsy, running now through July 30. Director Michael Ross utilizes every inch of space on the Rotary Stage (and beyond) and has cast veteran performer Daniela Innocenti Beem as Momma Rose, the biggest stage mother of them all in the Arthur Laurents – Jule Styne – Stephen Sondheim classic based on famed striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir.
It follows Madame Rose and her two daughters from their beginnings as an out-of-town vaudeville kiddie act. Through fortuitous circumstances, Rose meets Herbie (Tim Setzer), a former agent who agrees to take them on and get them a dreamed-for New York booking. Herbie falls deeply in love with Rose, but Rose won’t return the affection until she’s made her daughter June (Amanda Pedersen) a star. When June branches out on her own, she turns her plans to her heretofore neglected older daughter Louise (Danielle DeBow). Louise does become a star but at oh, what a cost.
Beem is terrific and her ferocity as Rose is matched by Setzer’s heart as the put-upon Herbie. Both have played these roles before and should the opportunity present itself they should not hesitate to play them again. Their relationship is the bedrock of this production and it’s a true pleasure to watch two pros at the top of their game.
Amanda Pedersen and Danielle DeBow do fine work as sisters June and Louise with their relationship neatly summed up in the entertaining and wistful number “If Momma Was Married”.
Other more familiar tunes from “Let Me Entertain You’ to “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” were all delivered with vocal gusto by the cast. Honorable mention goes to Julia Holsworth, Jaime Love and Karen Pinomaki for their work as a trio of past-their-prime strippers whose job advice to Louise is "You Gotta Get a Gimmick". Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about the musical accompaniment. Musical director John Partridge and his six-piece band sounded timid, unprepared, and under-rehearsed from the beginning of the overture through the musical conclusion. Musical entrances were missed and exits were haphazard. It was a major disappointment to have such a talented cast provided such lackluster musical support. That the cast powered through and delivered the performances they did is a tribute to their sense of professionalism.
I’ve been impressed with the advances seen and improved quality of lighting, sound, and set design in Sonoma Arts Live’s relatively short life as a stand-alone production company. If they want to be given serious consideration as a go-to venue for musical theatre, both by audiences and artists, then improvements must be made in the quality of the music they produce. Their casts deserve it.
Their audience should demand it.
Gypsy plays Thursdays through Sundays at the Sonoma Community Center in Sonoma through July 30th.
For more information, go to sonomaartslive.org.
George M. Cohan was known as “the man who owned Broadway” in the first two decades of the twentieth century. A prolific playwright and composer of hundreds of songs, today he’s mostly known as the answer to the trivia question “Whose statue can be found opposite Times Square between 45th and 47th Street?” He is considered by many to be the father of the American musical, which is why he deserves a better show about him than the one written by Michael Stewart and John & Francine Pascal.
George M!, running now at 6th Street Playhouse in a production directed by Patrick Nims, debuted on Broadway in 1968 and closed a year later. It starred Joel Grey in his follow up role to his Tony-winning work in Cabaret. George M! managed two Tony nominations, one for Grey and one for choreographer Joe Layton with Layton winning. It has never been revived and is rarely performed these days.
There’s a reason for that.
The book written around Cohan’s songs is a stock show biz story with paper-thin characters and little in the way of plot. It’s the story of Cohan’s rise and fall as the toast of Broadway, beginning with small town vaudeville days as part of a family act to becoming one of Broadway’s biggest producers. Most dialogue exists as a way to introduce one of Cohan’s songs, and once you get past the most well-known of those (“Give My Regards to Broadway”, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) there’s little left of interest.
Cohan’s jingoistic, flag waving style may have led to big hits around the time of World War I, but it had to feel out-of-step by the 1960’s and fifty years has not made it more palatable.
The title role is played by Joseph Favalora, a terrific dancer who has brightened Sonoma County stages before with his talent. Unfortunately, the character gives him little to do as it seems to have been written in only two shades – Cohan as cocky, self-assured artist, and Cohan as angry bastard. Favalora is believable as the former, but simply not credible as the latter. Thankfully, the rest of the time he’s dancing, which is Mr. Favaloras’ forte.
Dancing is this show’s strong suit, and choreographers Marilyn and Melinda Murray pull off what many thought would be a difficult task- taking a large cast of mostly untrained dancers and turning them into a credible tap-dancing troupe. The show really comes alive during the large ensemble numbers when there are 30+ tap-dancing feet on the stage.
Other moments of life are provided by some of the supporting actors. Jacinta Gorringe has fun as boarding house owner Mrs. Grimaldi and Jill K. Wagoner makes for a fine diva as Faye Templeton. The ensemble is strong as they switch between multiple characters as scenes from several Cohan shows are recreated. For example, Jake Druzgala has some nice moments as Cohan’s partner Sam Harris and also shows up as a carnival fire eater.
Cohan’s music is well handled by Music Director Justin Pyne and a thirteen-piece orchestra. There are thirty-some musical numbers in this show which can be exhausting for a musician but Pyne and Company provided musical consistency from start to finish. That only five (a generous estimate) of the songs will ring a bell to some (and not many) theatre-goers is a problem.
On a technical note, the opening night performance had numerous sound issues which should be resolved quickly. Costume Designer Tracy Hinman must have bought up every inch of red, white and blue fabric in the state to colorfully dress the cast.
Theatre people love to put on shows about theatre people, hence the regularity of productions like Noises Off and the canon of Ken Ludwig. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. 6th Street Playhouse dipped into that well earlier in the season with Stage Kiss and in prior seasons with shows like Crazy for You, Funny Girl, and The Producers. Maybe it’s time to give theatre-themed shows a rest.
And George M! should be put to sleep.
George M! plays through July 9 at 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa.
Middle-aged angst takes center stage at the Sonoma Community Center as Becky’s New Car pulls into Sonoma Arts Live. Steven Dietz’s bittersweet comedy runs through June 25.
Becky Foster has reached the “Is that all there is?” stage in her life. She’s got a job that overworks her, co-workers that don’t appreciate her and a grown, psychology-majoring son living in her basement. On the plus side, she has a loving, doting husband who’s willing to work roofing jobs hours away to keep his family in comfort. Becky seems destined to live her life out in quiet desperation when a gentleman walks into the car dealership at which she works. He’s wealthy, widowed and in a very short period of time, interested in Becky. Through a series of misunderstandings, he thinks Becky’s widowed too. Does she correct him, or will she see this as her way out? Well, good people sometimes make bad choices and Becky is soon looking for a way out of her way out.
Lest you think this all sounds a bit bleak and/or depressing, fear not as it’s actually a pretty funny show. Director Carl Jordan has gathered a winning cast who find the humor in each character’s foibles and flaws while retaining their humanity. Melissa Claire does a great job in helping the audience understand why Becky makes the choices she does and gains their empathy. Dietz has the character “break the fourth wall” and directly interact with the audience throughout the show which can be awkward but Claire handles it with aplomb.
Mike Pavone as Walter Flood makes for a charming gentleman suitor who stumbles upon Becky and maybe a way out of his funk at the loss of his wife. It’s easy to see why Becky could risk everything for him. Matt Witthaus does very well as the good-hearted husband Joe whose obliging manner turns a bit a dark by show’s end. Michael Temple does a good job as the basement-dwelling, pizza swilling Chris who pontificates on the psychological state of all and drives his mother nuts.
Katie Kelly has some nice moments as Kenni Flood, Walter’s daughter, particularly when dealing with a potential gold-digging neighbor (a boozy and biting Serena Elize Flores). The show’s single funniest moment comes courtesy of Stephen Dietz (no relation to the playwright) as Becky’s co-worker Steve in a monologue that involves a mother, a child, a puppy, and a cliff.
It’s not giving anything away to say that all these characters cross paths and while the specific circumstances strain credulity sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Claire’s and Pavone’s performances are the initial hooks that make you willing to go along for the ride.
Set Designer Bruce Lackovic manages to fit four distinct settings onto the small Rotary Stage, with Becky scurrying between her living room, her office, her car, and Walter’s home. The backdrop is a series of lit, colorful spheres that double as projection screens. Combined it makes for a very eye-catching set.
Becky’s New Car is a welcome respite from some of the darker, more mean-spirited plays that have been produced locally of late. It’s nice to see a lighter touch applied to the dramatization of the journeys we often take in life.
Director Carl Jordan and cast have mapped out a pretty amusing outing. Consider jumping into Becky’s New Car and joining them for the ride.
Becky’s New Car plays at the Sonoma Community Center Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30pm and Sundays at 2pm through June 25.
For more information, go to sonomaartslive.org
Your enjoyment of Clue: The Musical, now running at Napa’s Lucky Penny Community Arts Center, may be wholly dependent on two factors –
1.) Your familiarity with and affection for the classic board game upon which it is based
and
2.) Your familiarity with and affection for the performing artists involved.
Both of those will go a long way in getting you through the show which, though cast with top comedic talent, suffers from a weak script and unimaginative score.
First produced in Baltimore in 1995, it opened off-Broadway in 1997 and closed after a scant 29 performances. Despite its lack of success, the show has become a staple of community theatre, no doubt playing off the goodwill and sense of nostalgia that many people have for childhood amusements. That goodwill is tested.
It is, in essence, an evening of murder mystery dinner theatre, albeit without the dinner. You get fourteen songs instead. The show opens with Mr. Boddy (a jaunty Barry Martin) gleefully admitting to his eventual murder and facilitating the audience’s selection of perpetrator, location and weapon. Clues are revealed throughout the evening and audience members who wish to “play” are given clue sheets with which to deduce the answers to the mystery. There are apparently 216 possible solutions to the crime which no doubt created an interesting challenge for the cast.
And what a cast it is that director Taylor Bartolucci has gathered. The suspects are of course Mrs. Peacock (Daniela Innocenti Beem), Professor Plum (Tim Setzer), Miss Scarlett (Danielle Debow), Colonel Mustard (Larry Williams), Mrs. White (Phillip Percy Williams), and Mr. Green (Michael Scott Wells). They’re joined by the aforementioned Mr. Boddy and a second-act detective (Heather Buck). It’s a shame that a cast this talented and who are proven laugh-getters aren’t given much with which to work.
Not that they don’t try. What laughs there are in the script and songs (and there are a couple) are amplified by the terrific comedic skills of the cast. Beem’s cabaret experience pays off as Mrs. Peacock works the audience from her grand entrance to exit. Her big number, “Once a Widow”, may be the show’s musical highlight. Williams is fun as the festooned Colonel Mustard. Setzer’s constipated Professor Plum is almost over-shadowed by his pomegranate pants. Philip Percy Williams also works the audience – both vocally and physically - as Mrs. White but his choice of accent sometimes made his song lyrics unintelligible. Wells’ shady Mr. Green and Daniel Debow’s lounge lizard-ette Miss Scarlett play well off of (and with) each other.
Credit should be given to Staci Arriaga for some creative choreography and for managing to make pretty effective use of the limited stage space. Musical Director Craig Burdette and his band did what they could with a lackluster score. The set/prop design (also by Bartolucci) and costuming (Liz Martin and Liesl Seitz Buchbinder) do evoke the original game elements.
Clue: The Musical isn’t terrible - it couldn’t be with all the talent involved – but it isn’t very good either. The term “middling” comes to mind. People who attend expecting something like the 1985 cult film starring Tim Curry are likely to be disappointed. (Interestingly, there is a new non-musical theatrical adaptation of the film which just premiered last month.)
So, if it’s not the cast and it’s not the directors and it’s not the designers at fault, who’s responsible for this theatrical misdemeanor? In the vernacular of the game:
The writers. In the theater. With this script.
Clue: The Musical plays Thursdays through Sundays through June 18 at Napa’s Lucky Penny Community Arts Center. For more information, go to luckypennynapa.com
If you haven’t had a chance in the last 104 years to check out the Mountain Play, now’s as good a time as any. This year brings an enjoyable production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast to the Cushing Memorial Amphitheater atop Mt. Tamalpais and while it’s a trek to get there, it’s a trek worth taking.
Based on a French fairytale (which is the source of innumerable film, television, and stage adaptations) and adapted by Disney into a highly successful animated film in 1991, it premiered on Broadway in 1994 to great commercial - if not critical - success and was the first of what now seems to be an endless stream of Disney musicals.
The tale as old as time is of a romantic triangle consisting of Belle (Chelsea Holifield), an unwanted suitor and local him-bo (Jeff Weisen) and a reclusive prince/beast (Daniel Barrington Rubio). The prince, cursed to be a beast until he learns to love and be loved in return, lives a solitary life in his castle with his only companions being his staff who, apparently also cursed, happen to be transmogrifying into various inanimate household objects. Circumstances bring the lovely Belle to him and it becomes a race against time to beat the curse’s final outcome – permanent beastliness.
If you know the film, you know the show. All the characters are here albeit with some slight modifications. The eight songs from the film by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman are joined by six additional numbers by Menken and Tim Rice. The action takes place in either the castle or a small village with a three-part revolving stage facilitating a quick change between the two.
We’re talking a stage adaptation of a cartoon here, folks, so there isn’t a lot of depth to be found. The leads, as written, are pretty bland but Holifield and Barrington Rubio’s strong vocal performances make up for what their characters lack. Disney villains often provide actors with the most memorable roles and Jeff Weisen is a lot of fun as the strutting blowhard Gaston. You almost, almost feel bad for him at his ‘exit’.
The show’s most entertaining moments are provided by the supporting cast with an assist by costumer Michelle Navarre-Huff. Buzz Halsing’s ‘Cogsworth’, Zachary Isen’s ‘Lumiere’, Samantha Cooper’s ‘Babbette’, Jennifer Boesing’s ‘Mrs. Potts’ and Jenny Matteucci’s ‘Madame de la Grande Bouche’ bring color, energy and humor to every scene they’re in, culminating in the terrific ensemble number “Be Our Guest”.
Director Jay Manley meets most of the challenges provided with staging a large-scale musical in the cavernous 4,000 seat amphitheater. The nuance and color that the element of lighting can provide is sorely missed from this production but what are you going to do when your only source is the sun? David Möschler directs a 22-piece orchestra who deliver but no amount of amplification can reproduce the sound and sense of an orchestra filling a theater. These sacrifices are somewhat offset by the magnificent surroundings of Mt. Tamalpais State Park
Attending The Mountain Play production of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast requires a commitment of time and effort well in excess of a usual theatre-going venture. It can involve a bus trip, hiking, picnicking, and the risk of sunburn and poison oak. The reward is a pleasant afternoon of joyous, family-friendly theatre.
Be their guest.
The Mountain Play’s Disney’s Beauty and the Beast plays at Mt. Tamalpais State Park’s Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre Sunday afternoons through June 18.
For important information about parking, transportation and the venue, go to mountainplay.org
“Vapid” and “vacuous” are two terms that come to mind when discussing the characters in The Money Shot, Neil LaBute’s theatrical thumb-in-the-eye to Hollywood that closes out the 2016/2017 season at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre. LaBute, who’s written such harsh but interesting plays as In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things, has also spent time as a writer and director in Hollywood. If this play is any indication, he has not enjoyed his time there.
It’s set at the Hollywood Hills house of Karen (Laurie Gaugin), an actress past her prime, and Bev (Sandra Ish), her partner. They’re being joined for dinner by Steve (Dodds Delzell) an over-the-hill action star and his trophy wife Missy (Heather Gordon). It seems that the European director of Karen and Steve’s latest film has some ideas on how to really “spice up” the film. Because they both need a hit, they’re willing to do anything – anything – as long as it’s ok with their respective partners. What follows is two hours of funny, if empty, conversation and argumentation which culminates in the play’s own ‘money shot’ – a wrestling match.
LaBute, who’s been accused of being a misanthrope and misogynist, doesn’t allay those concerns with this script. I’d say he leans more heavily to the misanthropic side with this one as no one come off very well. To be fair, I’d say he’s taking his shots at very specific Hollywood “types” but still, there isn’t a likeable person to be found on stage. It’s the type of show designed with characters for you to laugh “at” rather than to laugh “with”.
And you will laugh.
Dodds Delzell, who hasn’t been seen on a Sonoma County Stage for a while, is very funny as the vain and doltish action star – think Bruce Willis or Nicolas Cage (with whom LaBute made a terrible film). Just when you think he can’t saying anything stupider, he outdoes himself. Heather Gordon earns the show’s biggest laughs (to me) with a simple warning about a specific “situation” and a cheerleader’s take on The Crucible. Sandra Ish, who is also the show’s co-director with Kimberly Kalember, does solid work as Karen’s put-upon partner whose blood pressure must spike fifty points with each of Steve’s incredible utterances. Her character seems the most grounded till you start to wonder how she ever ended up with Karen. As Karen, Laurie Gaugin seems to be the least “seasoned” of the cast as I felt there was a lot more to be mined from the Gwyneth Paltrow-like character who’s willing to endorse anything and everything to keep her image out there.
The show is funny, but it is also caustic and crude and mean-spirited with some pretty graphic dialogue which really should be no surprise if you understand the meaning of the title - Google it if you don’t. There’s no great meaning to be found in The Money Shot. Some have labeled it satire. I see it more as farce. It’s two hours of unbelievable, exaggerated characters saying and doing ridiculous things. I say exaggerated because nobody could be as boorish, thoughtless, self-centered, egotistical, narcissistic, and stupid as the characters in this play.
Right?
The Money Shot runs at Santa Rosa’s Left Edge Theatre at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts through June 4. For more information, go to leftedgetheatre.com
Big shot Broadway producer Jerry Cobb has a problem. He’s in desperate need of a big comedy hit to impress the Hollywood bigwigs and pave his way to fame and fortune on the left coast. He’s rented a suite in one of Arizona’s finest hotels where he and Charlie Bascher, his assistant, await the arrival of Broadway wunderkind playwright Danny “Nebraska” Jones. Things aren’t going well as there are slight temperature control issues with their rooms and things don’t get much better when Jones arrives. Seems that he is in a bit of a funk. He’s experienced a painful loss and his best idea for a comedy begins with a child being devoured by wolves. What lengths will producer Cobb, assistant Bascher and a surprise visitor go to in getting the script they want?
That’s the premise behind Robert Caisley’s A Masterpiece of Comic … Timing, making its Bay Area premiere at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse. Caisley has a history at the Playhouse, where at least five other of his works have been produced. For his latest, director Craig Miller has gathered a cast of experienced farceurs – Chris Schloemp, Benjamin Stowe, Devin McConnell, and Rose Roberts - and has them running (and jumping, and crawling) around the Studio Theatre’s nicely appointed Royal Palms Hotel set.
They all play standard character types. Schloemp is fun as the dogged producer, willing to say whatever needs to be said to get what he wants. Stowe does what he can with a stock role as the nebbish assistant who’s incapable of “toughening up” to the level of his producer boss - but gee whiz he’ll try! McConnell seems to be channeling John Turturro’s Barton Fink character from the same-named Coen Brothers film. Character similarities aside, he is involved in some of the show’s best sight gags. Rose Roberts is a comedic dynamo in her politically incorrect role as a blonde bombshell who gained her success the old-fashioned way.
The show seemed a bit long, with Act I leaning heavy on exposition and set-up and Act II, while moving quicker (with a major assist from Roberts), let a few things run on too long before the ultimate payoff. Characters in farce are often one-dimensional, as they certainly are here, but I would have liked to see more variety in the delivery and level of those characters. If a character’s energy level runs from A to Z, it can be exhausting for an audience if they all start at X.
In an early scene, producer Cobb explains that “Comedy doesn’t necessarily have to ‘mean’ anything. You take a hundred jokes and put it in two acts, there’s your plot.” - which is pretty much what Caisley has done here. Some of them work, some of them don’t. Some are original, some seem awfully derivative. They’re all delivered with bombast and the cast does wring a fair amount of laughs out of the material, which is nothing less than what I’d expect from a cast of this caliber.
A Masterpiece of Comic… Timing isn’t that by a longshot, but it does make for an amusing night of theatre. Comedy may not have to have a meaning, but it sure as hell better have laughs, and Miller and company mine the script for every laugh they can. It may not be a Comstock lode of laughs, but there’s more than enough silliness to cover the price of a ticket.
A Masterpiece of Comic… Timing plays at Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse through May 28.
For more information, go to 6thstreetplayhouse.com
It’s 1648 and the splendiferous Taj Mahal awaits its opening. Humayun and Babur, the two lowliest members of Emperor Shah Jahan’s Royal Guards, are assigned the lowliest duty at the lowliest post. They are stationed at the outside gate and forbidden to look in. Humayun dreams of being reassigned to the Emperor’s harem. Babur dreams of bigger things. Babur can’t help but to steal a gaze at the magnificent edifice, and soon their dreams turn to nightmares.
So goes the tale of playwright Rajiv Joseph’s Guards at the Taj, running now at the Marin Theatre Company. A curious mixture of comedy and horrific drama, director Jasson Minadakis helms what is easily the most polarizing production currently playing in the bay area. While set in ancient India, it’s told in the vernacular of modern American youth. What starts out with light, amusing interplay between Humayun (Jason Kapoor) and Babur (Rushi Kota) as they deal with the monotony and tedium of ‘work’ soon turns very dark and blood red as Humayun’s desire for advancement leads to them both taking on an unenviable duty. Sha Jahan has decreed that nothing more beautiful than the Taj Mahal shall ever be built, and to ensure that has ordered that the 20,000 craftsmen involved shall have their hands removed. Seeing this as an opportunity to prove themselves to their superiors, Humayun and Babur undertake the task. In the end, neither ends up where they expected.
MTC has issued plenty of notice to its patrons that this production features simulated violence and even discounts its front row seats since they are in a sort of a “splash” (though more like “splatter”) zone. Ponchos are also offered to guests seated in the area. In fact, there is little violence actually portrayed on-stage but the results of the unseen violence can be unsettling to some. I suspect the closer you are to the stage, the more unsettling it is.
Lost in all the talk of the gallons of blood occupying the Boyer Theatre stage are the performances of Kapoor and Kota. They have terrific chemistry and immediately charm the audience as two old friends. One is practical, responsible, somewhat level-headed. The other is goofy, impetuous, more artistic in his thinking. That friendship is, to say the least, tested. Their happy-go-lucky banter and the genuine affection portrayed for each other in the first half makes the second half resolution that much more difficult to stomach.
Joseph packs a lot into this 85 minute, no intermission play. Issues of class and power, duty and responsibility are at the forefront, but ultimately it comes down to what an individual is willing to do to advance in the world and what one does when faced with a difficult choice. Whether these issues are overshadowed by the staging is a fair question, and one that requires significant post-show thought.
As the audience exited, I sat in the theatre trying to come up with some way to describe the mixture of styles and tones within this one show. The best I can come up with is this – what starts out as a sort of Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “Road” movie (The Road to Agra?) soon dissolves into a Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter film by way of My Dinner with Andre.
Each genre has its fans. I’m not sure they cross over.
Guards at the Taj plays through May 21 at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley.
For more information, go to marintheatre.org
In recent years, when you entered the Spreckels Performing Arts Center’s Codding Theater you found yourself in an undersea world, or on the deck of the Titanic, or in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Currently, you’ll find yourself in an African jungle as the Spreckels Theatre Company presents Disney’s Musical Tarzan, running now through May 21.
It’s a stage adaptation of the 2009 animated film and follows the “origin” story pretty closely. Stranded in the African jungle and soon orphaned, a young boy is taken into the care of a mother gorilla and raised as one of her own. After growing up into a strapping young (ape)man, the boy named Tarzan comes face-to-face with other humans. It’s a science expedition led by Professor Porter and his daughter Jane. They’ve come just to observe and study gorillas but their nefarious guide Clayton has other plans.
The film had five songs written by Phil Collins, including the Oscar-winning “You’ll Be in My Heart”, and for the stage show he added nine additional numbers. Like in the film, most musical numbers serve as narration. Tarzan didn’t sing in the film, but he sure does in the stage show and yes, he yells, too. The songs aren’t particularly memorable but they serve the play and they’re well delivered by the cast.
The show is well cast with the role of Tarzan split between two actors, Walker Brinskele and Michael Lumb, each taking the role in alternating performances. At the show I attended Tarzan was played by Lumb, who has the athleticism and voice to tackle the role. The always delightful Abbey Lee makes for a fun Jane and plays well off of Lumb and Kit Grimm as her father. Jeremy Berrick adds another villain to his Spreckels résumé with his over-the-top take on the role of the evil guide Clayton. He’s a lot of fun to watch, even if the character choice seems a bit out of place, especially in comparison to others.
The array of character choices and acting styles is quite substantial, ranging from the almost method-like performances of Brian Watson and Shawna Eiermann as Kerchak and Kala, Tarzan’s ape “parents” to Berrick’s cartoonish, self-aware Clayton. Everyone else falls somewhere in between. This may be the result of having the directorial reins shared between Gene Abravaya and David L. Yen. It’s not that any of the choices or styles seem wrong individually, I’m just not sure they gelled.
That being said, Watson and Eiermann are quite good, both in their characters’ physical beings and in their vocal delivery. It takes some time to adjust to the very human voices emanating from Pamela Enz’s inventive costumes (no gorilla suits here) but once you suspend belief you realize their performances are quite magnetic. Scottie Woodard amusingly fills the sidekick role as Tarzan’s buddy Terk.
The shows best moments were when the elements of costume, lighting, choreography and music came together, best exemplified by Act I’s almost hallucinogenic “Waiting for this Moment” number when Lee’s Jane sings of the joy of finally living a life she only dreamed about while the local flora and fauna dance, float and fly around her. The ensemble also opens Act II energetically with “Trashin’ the Camp”.
Disney’s Musical Tarzan may have been intended as a young male-attracting counterpoint to The Little Mermaid, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing many kids arriving at the theatre in little loincloths. While definitely one of the lower-rung entries in the Disney theatrical canon, it’s still a well-produced and entertaining family show with an imaginative set and the aforementioned costumes making it a visual feast for the eyes. Between a band of gorillas, a man-eating plant, a marauding leopard, a hiss-worthy, rifle-toting villain and a vine-swinging ape-boy and man, there’s plenty to keep the younger tykes’ attention.
Disney’s Musical Tarzan plays through May 21 at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com
Songs for a New World is not a typical piece of American musical theatre. There is no book or “story”, per se, with a standard beginning, middle and end. There are no characters to follow from Act I to Act II. There are no lavish production numbers and set and costuming are minimal.
“Songs…” is exactly what it says it is – a collection of stories told through song. They are by composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown (The Last Five Years, Honeymoon in Vegas) and were apparently written over several years for several different projects while he performed in New York City nightclubs and piano bars. Brown has linked the 16 songs in the piece by the barest of threads. As Brown himself says, “It’s about one moment. It’s about hitting the wall and having to make a choice, or take a stand, or turn around and go back.” It’s about the choices we all make in life.
The production is a labor of love for producer Lucas Sherman, best known to the local theatre community for his work as musical director and pianist on numerous projects for a variety of companies. Sherman retains that role in this production as well as taking the reins of stage direction and performer. Joining Mr. Sherman for vocal duty are Robert Finney, Daniela Innocenti-Beem and Kat Ray. Mr. Sherman also retains piano-playing duty and is joined by Abe Newman on bass, Quinten Cohen on drums, and Erica Bergeron on percussion.
The songs are written and performed in a variety of styles ranging from pop and rock to gospel and jazz. Half are solos, the rest are duets or ensemble numbers. Some are comedic, some are dramatic, some are inspiring, some are downbeat. Regardless of tone or design, they all have the feel of musical theatre, so much so that you almost wish there were entire shows written around some of them.
For such a variety of style and themes, a versatile cast is required and Sherman provides one (including himself.) While experience does tell, each performer is given his or her own moment to shine. For Finney, it’s telling the story of a youth overcoming the hardships in life and pressing on in “The Steam Train.” Kat Ray’s moment came with “Just One Step” the darkly comedic tale of a woman’s futile attempt to get the attention of her husband from the ledge of their high-rise apartment building. Sherman acquits himself quite nicely with his earnest delivery of “She Cries”. Dani Beem, clearly the most experienced performer and most comfortable in a musical revue-type show, showed her versatility with her regret-filled woman looking back at what money couldn’t buy in “Stars and the Moon” and as a frustrated Mrs. Claus in the show-stopping “Surabaya Santa”. Beem also nicely duets with Sherman in “I’d Give It All for You”, a song about lovers reuniting after realizing they can’t be apart.
The aforementioned musicians provide these performers with excellent accompaniment which is no small feat due to the variety of styles at play. Being it’s really more of a staged concert than a full-fledged musical production and it’s staged in the Spreckels’ small Condiotti space, errors or missed notes would not be easily masked. No such concerns with these talented musicians. The musicians were just as much a pleasure to listen to as the singers.
Songs for A New World is a difficult show to review as it is actually 16 different shows in one. Rather than subject you to 16 mini reviews I’ll just say that, like in most shows, some songs hit better than others – both in form and delivery – but that collectively it’s a very appealing night of song and theatre. Because of its unfamiliarity, it’s the type of show that demands an audience’s attention. As with any good storytelling, there are rewards to be had from careful listening. You may not know the songs, but you’ll be glad you heard them.
Songs… can be heard Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons through May 7.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com
Sonoma County is, some would say blessed, others might say cursed, with a lot of theatre. Currently running or recently closed shows range from classic fare like The Odd Couple, The Diary of Anne Frank, and The Children’s Hour to more modern shows like Race or The Birds. If you’re looking for something completely original, you tend to have to travel a bit which brings us to the FaultLine Theater Company of San Francisco.
They’re a group of young theatre artists committed to the development and production of new works. They’ve impressed me in the past with the passion and energy they put into their work and with the quality of production they’ve been able to stage. They are always interesting and frequently outrageous. How outrageous? Well, the co-leads of their latest production are hamsters.
One wouldn’t think that there’s a lot to learn from hamsters on the subjects of commitment and parenting (seeing as how they tend to knock each other off and devour most of their young) but that didn’t stop playwright Dan Giles from using a couple of anthropomorphic rodents to broach the issues in his comedy Breeders, running now at Faultline Theater in San Francisco.
It’s the tale of Mikey and Dean, a same sex couple in a long-term, committed relationship who are days away from the arrival and adoption of an infant. It’s also the tale of Tyson and Jason, two cohabitating hamsters being cared for by Mikey and Dean who, to both of their surprise, turn out to be of the opposite sex. Soon, the pressures of impending parenthood strain both pairs of relationships, though only one ends in the loss of first an eye and then, well...
Though labeled as a “queer comedy”, the heart of the situation presented by Giles knows no gender or orientation. The excitement, the challenges, the dreams and the doubts that come with parenthood are pretty universal and apparently even cross species. The same goes for the issues of commitment and monogamy, which are hilariously addressed in several vignettes.
First-time director Adam Odsess-Rubin is up to the challenge of staging the parallel storylines in the confined space of PianoFight’s 40-seat second stage. He’s got a nicely-matched cast with Ryan Hayes and Sam Bertken as the huggy and occasionally histrionic humans. Hayes’s rock-solid Mikey plays in nice contrast to Bertken’s anxiety-ridden Dean. Both make for a believable couple as they navigate through Dean’s insecurities.
Nikki Meñez and Neil Higgins are the voracious vermin. Meñez is a force to be reckoned with as Tyson, the tough-as-nails alpha-female. Higgins is absolutely adorable as Jason, the ceaselessly amiable and affectionate proud papa to be. They romp on a clever set designed by Max Chanowitz and beneath a colorful lighting design by Maxx Kurzunski that go a long way in setting the show’s playful tone.
For a show with a couple of hamsters as co-leads, there’s an awful lot of humanity on stage in Breeders. Giles strikes just the right balance of absurdity and reality in his examination of the impact of procreation on an individual and on a relationship. Director Odsess-Rubin and cast have created a show that’s funny, thought-provoking, often sweet and occasionally biting – in every sense of the word.
Breeders runs Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights through April 29 in San Francisco at the very interesting PianoFight venue.
For more information, go to faultinetheater.com
Before attempting to explain what Conor McPherson’s The Birds is, running now at Sebastopol’s Main Stage West, best make it clear what it isn’t. It is not a stage adaptation of the Alfred Hitchcock film. It’s not set in Bodega Bay, there is no schoolhouse full of screaming children, and no one is trapped in a phone booth by marauding sea gulls. Nor is it a straightforward adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s original 1952 novella. It’s not set in post WWII England. It’s not about a war veteran working on a farm with his family. It’s not a metaphor for the aerial bombardment endured by England during the Second World War. The only thing the three have in common is the premise of nature turning on man in the form of indiscriminate and deadly attacks of the avian variety. McPherson takes that premise and wraps a human story around it with elements whose genesis may be found in… well, we’ll get to that.
It begins with a man and a woman, Nat (Nick Sholley) and Diane (Liz Jahren), taking refuge from the birds in an abandoned New England Farm House. Nat is in the throes of some illness, so Diane nurses Nat back to health. Together they map out a plan for survival. Not knowing if there’s a world to return to, they begin to settle into sort of a domestic arrangement when the balance of that arrangement is set askew by the arrival of Julia (Rae Quintana) and a visit from a “neighbor” (Anthony Abaté). Soon, the birds may become the least of their problems when it comes to their survival.
The Birds is a challenging mixture of horror, thriller and character study. It’s an oddly constructed piece with some scenes lasting only seconds and others seeming to jump in time past significant action. The play’s structure works against it as a sense of dread or danger was often dissipated by the requirement of having the cast rearrange the set or move prop pieces. Still, it does manage to have a couple of nice jolts in it.
What The Birds has going for it is an excellent cast and MSW’s naturally claustrophobic setting. Nick Sholley (last seen at MSW in A Steady Rain) brings another seriously flawed, slightly unhinged character to vivid life. Liz Jahren is very good in the role of Diane, effectively playing a character who starts out as bedrock of sense and purpose but who eventually crumbles under the pressure, both real and imagined. Rae Quintana’s Julia is a character of many shades and quite possibly shady. Anthony Abaté has the least amount of stage time, but that time is memorable.
Director Elizabeth Craven doubles as Set Designer and, as I have come to expect from Main Stage West, she packs a lot of set into its relatively small space. While the interior of the house takes up the complete stage, a sense of depth and the outside world is achieved through lighting and especially by Doug Faxon’s sound design. Nary a feather is seen on stage, but the birds – aurally - are omnipresent.
McPherson’s plays (Shining City, The Seafarer) often have a supernatural or spiritual component to them. One might assume that the use of du Maurier’s original concept of the destruction of the human race by birds would fit that bill but, as I alluded to in the opening paragraph, I think it actually goes a bit deeper.
At its core, what McPherson presents in his adaptation is the story of a man and woman, possibly the only humans on earth. Their (relatively) idyllic existence is challenged by temptation in the form of Julia. The seeds of mistrust are sown by the appearance of a Mephistophelian neighbor. That mistrust leads to actions that result in their leaving (or self-banishment from) the comfort and safety of their surroundings.
Could it be that Conor McPherson’s The Birds is a very twisted retelling of the Book of Genesis and Adam and Eve?
The Birds runs through April 23rd. Visit mainstagewest.com.
There’s a certain segment of the “thea-tuh” community that turns its collective nose up at the mere mention of a mainstream, commercially-successful playwright. One of my most vivid college memories is of a member of the Theatre Arts faculty nearly having a stroke at the mention of the possibility of scheduling a Neil Simon play in the season. These artists often measure success by how badly attended their productions are, reveling in the confirmation of how unique and right they are about what is art and how wrong everybody else is.
Director Jennifer King graciously admits to prescribing to some of these thoughts, till an actor who she greatly respects prodded her into taking a look at Simon’s The Odd Couple. The next thing she knew she was directing a production of it, now running at Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater.
The Odd Couple may be the most post popular American play ever written. From its premier on Broadway over fifty years ago to the classic Jack Lemmon – Walter Matthau film to its current third incarnation as a prime-time television sitcom, The Odd Couple, with slight modifications (including a Saturday morning cartoon) endures. Why? Because it’s funny.
The premise is simple – mismatched roommates. There’s a whole lot more than that, of course, but it’s with that now-classic premise to which most people can relate. Who hasn’t roomed with a Felix and/or Oscar at some point in their life? Who hasn’t been driven up a wall by a compadre’s peccadilloes? Who hasn’t reached out to help a friend and then turn around and want to kill him?
Friendship is at the heart of The Odd Couple, male friendship in particular and King has cast the show with a group of guys who you can actually believe are friends. Nathan Cummings brings a gruff charm to Oscar and Aaron Wilton nails both the prissiness and heart of Felix. Both manage to avoid comparisons to Matthau/Lemmon & Klugman/Randall, with Wilton’s Felix wound a bit tighter than usual. Wilton may come off as a tad young to be playing the middle-aged Felix, but his character choices get you past that. They’re both fun to watch.
A lot of the humor in the play comes from Felix and Oscar’s poker playing buddies, and King has cast these supporting roles as well as her leads. Tim Kniffin is very dry as accountant Roy. Tim Setzer, usually seem locally in musicals, is amusing as henpecked Vinnie. Zachary Stockton as the cigar-chewing, wise-cracking Speed is a man after my own heart with his laser-like focus on the game. Chad Yarish’s Murray the cop is the heart and soul of the group, managing to be funny and kind of sweet when it comes to caring about his friend Felix. Laughs also come via the Pigeon sisters (nicely played by Samantha Dakin and Morgan Harrington), a couple of British expatriates who are the source of the final conflict (and resolution) between Oscar and Felix.
In a pre-show presentation, director King addressed the personal challenge of putting on a straight forward production and resisting the temptation to add any avant-garde elements. I can’t imagine this show done with a minimalist set instead of Joseph Elwick’s nicely designed NY apartment or everyone dressed in black instead of Skipper Skeoch’s nicely understated period dress. King met the challenge by simply sticking to the script and trusting her actors.
While there are individual lines that seem dated ($280 a month for an eight room, New York City apartment?!) the show itself does not come off that way. Rooted in real relationships, it’s a funny look at the American male-psyche, still gloriously flawed after fifty years.
\Cinnabar Theater’s The Odd Couple is an extremely enjoyable production of an American comedy classic.
It plays weekends through April 23rd.
For more information, go to cinnabartheater.org
There’s a nice, little show running in the 6th Street Playhouse Studio Theatre right now. You’ve probably never heard of it, though it’s been around a little over 20 years. In those twenty-plus years, it’s been translated into 23 languages and been produced all over the world to the tune of about 500 productions. Just this year, it’s played or is currently playing in such far-away places as Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, and Romania. Which brings us back to Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, California, where Visiting Mr. Green is running through April 2.
It’s a two-person show - part Odd Couple, part I’m Not Rappaport – set in the New York City apartment of Mr. Green (Al Kaplan,) an elderly Jewish widower recovering from a recent close-call with a motor vehicle. His solitude is interrupted by Ross Gardiner (Kevin Kieta,) the Wall Street-employed driver of the vehicle, who stops by to announce that he’ll be making weekly visits to assist Mr. Green as part of the community service portion of his sentence. Mr. Green doesn’t want him, and Gardiner would be more than happy to have the judge relieve him of the duty, but then there wouldn’t be a play, would there? Green and Gardiner go from butting heads, to grudging acceptance, to perhaps the formation of a real friendship when an issue is raised that changes everything. What started as a comedy of opposites takes a decidedly dramatic turn.
It works. Playwright Jeff Baron has taken a stock situation with stock characters and managed to make them feel somewhat fresh. It’s not the most well-written script and it has some elements that absolutely strain credulity (A present day, 29-year-old corporate executive that doesn’t carry a cell phone?) but my annoyance with those was overcome by the fine performances of the co-leads.
Director David L. Yen started on third base with the casting of Al Kaplan as Mr. Green. Kaplan has been knocking around Sonoma County stages for a bit doing yeoman’s work in supporting roles. Where did he get the chutzpah to take on the lead role of a loud, opinionated, demanding, set-in-his-ways senior citizen? (Full disclosure – I’ve worked with Al.) Kaplan was made for this role - which is more layered than I let on - and I’m not sure I can think of any other actor in the area who could do it as well. The consistency of his physical work with the character should also be noted.
The greater challenge for Yen must have been the casting of Gardiner, and Yen did well with his choice of Kevin Kieta. There’s a lot going on with Ross, and Kieta does a good balancing act throughout his character’s arc. Kaplan and Kieta work well together, and I completely bought into their characters and their relationship.
The scenic design by Sam Transleau does a pretty good job of recreating a New York City apartment, though there are a few anachronisms. I particularly like the sense of depth provided by a nicely designed window and backdrop. Sound designer Craig Miller nicely bridges the scenes with appropriate music that reinforces the cultural component of the show.
6th Street Playhouse’s Visiting Mr. Green is a small show with big aspirations. It packs a lot of humor and emotion into its 105 minutes, touching on such issues as family, responsibility, religious orthodoxy, acceptance, regret, the devastating consequences of one’s actions, atonement and forgiveness. These issues are universal, which may explain why this particular piece seems to be in constant play around the world.
Grounded in two fine, funny and heartfelt performances by its leads, Visiting Mr. Green kind of took me by surprise. Some of the issues presented hit close to home and I found myself a bit emotional by the end. That’s not an easy thing to admit, and while I see a lot of theatre, it doesn’t happen that often.
Nice work, gentlemen.
Visiting Mr. Green plays at the 6th Street Playhouse through April 2. Visit 6thstreetplayhouse.com
A title like The Sugar Bean Sisters may conjure up images of sweet Southern belles, mint julips, or quaint sibling rivalries that end in hugs, forgiveness and tears. Perhaps it invokes memories of the female singing groups of by-gone days like the Andrews Sisters
Wrong.
Faye Clementine and Willie Mae Nettles are living out their lives in their ramshackle family home in swamp-side Sugar Bean, Florida. Once a happy family of five, they’re down to two after Mama’s passing, Papa’s hanging (by mob after accidentally poisoning 14 beauty pageant contestants,) and third sister Robinelle’s unfortunate consumption by ‘gator. Willie Mae pines for the local Mormon Bishop and the bright lights of Salt Lake City. Faye longs for the return of an alien spaceship that landed in their corn field twenty-five years ago, and hopes it will whisk her away to some distant planet. Their mundane existence is interrupted by the arrival of Miss Videllia Sparks, a “dancer” out of New Orleans stranded by car trouble. Then things start to get weird.
A hidden grapefruit fortune, Eva Gabor wigs, sandwiches, Jack Daniels, snakes, the Weekly World News, voodoo curses, Disney World, ghosts, a Reptile Woman and spontaneous human combustion all come to play over this bizarre play’s two hour running time. Need I say this show has some twists and turns to it?
Director Denise Elia-Yen has gathered a tight ensemble of performers, including Lydia Revelos, Larry Williams and Sharon Griffith, but make no bones about it, Mesdames Mary Gannon Graham and mollie boice rule the Sugar Bean roost as the strangest pair of sisters since Blanche and ‘Baby’ Jane Hudson from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The humor, as that reference may indicate, is often macabre as the show begins by taking you one on one journey and by intermission veers to another. The humor, though plentiful, gets darker and darker as the evening progresses.
All this weirdness takes place on finely detailed, over-stuffed, multi-level set by Eddy Hansen and Elizabeth Bazzano that is as much a character in this piece as any of the performers. It may be the most interesting set I’ve seen in the Condiotti space. Adding to the swampy ambience are some nice projections by Patrick Taber and a terrific sound design by Jessica Johnson.
It’s tough to categorize the Spreckels Theatre Company’s production of The Sugar Bean Sisters. Nathan Sanders’s script is a southern gothic theatrical stew - part family drama, part jet-black comedy, and part supernatural fantasy. At heart, it’s a comedy of desperation. It’s the oddest play I’ve seen in while, and I just saw a play about Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s campy, creepy and often very funny. There’s certainly nothing else like it on stage right now in this area.
By all means, head on out to the Spreckels Performing Arts Center, if ya like.
But DON’T sit in Momma’s chair. It just ain’t done…
The Sugar Bean Sisters plays at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park through April 9.
For more information, go to spreckelsonline.com
The Handoff…
DAVID: The art of theater and the inevitability of change - they’ve gone together from the beginning of, well, of theater. And I’m not talking about the pocket change that most theater artists earn for their work, or the mundane kinds of change - like ‘scenery changes’ and ‘quick changes in the dressing room.
The art form itself has changed over the centuries, from a single bard standing in the square reciting an epic poem, to Greek choruses expounding exposition, to men playing women, to women playing men, to men writing plays in which people drop F-bombs, to women writing plays in which women talk to each other about something other than men.
The audience changes too, mostly by turning gray, but sometimes by turning the tables on the theater establishment and demanding something new.
And, inevitably, those of us who give our opinions on the art of theater, we change too. And that’s good, because new voices and new ideas always serve to keep things interesting and fresh.
Which is a long, theatrical way of saying that after nearly ten years of contributing my thoughts - and my voice - to this weekly ‘Second Row Center’ radio segment, it’s time for me to make a change, and as such, this will be my last time appearing on the radio in this particular format.
Why the change? Main reason – I’ve taken a position as the Community Editor with the Petaluma Argus Courier, and the new gig will be taking up a great deal of my time.
I will continue as the theater reviewer of the North Bay Bohemian, however, so I will stay in the role of North Bay theater critic, in print, if not on KRCB.
Which brings me to Harry Duke, who will be taking over this segment, beginning . . . well, beginning right now.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Harry Duke.
HARRY: Thank you, David. We’ll now take a short pause while the listeners say “Who?” Well, I am Harry Duke. I’m a twenty-five-year resident of Sonoma County, a graduate of Sonoma State University’s Theatre Arts program, an actor, a director, an educator, one of the founders of the Marquee Theatre Journalists Awards, the Chief Information Officer of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle and a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. I’ve been performing on North Bay stages since the last century and reviewing theatre as far back as my days on my New Jersey high school newspaper.
I love theatre. Whether onstage or in the audience, theatre has always been the place I have been most content. We are fortunate to have an abundance of it in this area. With so many choices and limited time or resources, how does one go about deciding what to see? That’s where a critic can be of assistance. I’ll share my thoughts and opinions with you about productions in the North Bay and beyond. The foundation of those thoughts will be my education, my experience, and my love of the art of theatre. I’d rather give you a reason to go see something than to not go see something but, like a baseball umpire, I just call ‘em like I see ‘em.
Thanks to my colleague David Templeton and to the folks at KRCB for allowing me to add my voice to the Radio 91 airwaves. So, until next week, I’m Harry Duke…
DAVID: And I WAS David Templeton, Second Row Center . . .
HARRY: … for KRCB.
It has been argued, effectively, that the person most qualified to talk about race and racism is the victim of that racism – not those who, consciously or unconsciously, are benefiting from that racism, or any system of inequality in which they have it better, more or less, than everyone else.
Clearly aware of the arguments, pro and con, playwright David Mamet – a white guy – and never one to shy away from taboos or controversy - has stepped into the conversation with his 2009 drama ‘Race,’ currently running at Left Edge Theater, at Luther Burbank Center for the Arts.
Sensitively and entertainingly directed by Carl Jordan, ‘Race’ aggressively tackles subjects of bigotry, black rage, white guilt, white privilege, cultural suspicion, and workplace sexism. Mamet’s script is a surgical, often humorous exploration of the lies so many Americans tell each other, and themselves, about matters of race.
The play first appeared eight years ago, when many were claiming that Barack Obama’s presidency had ushered in a post-racial America. Bringing things up to the moment, director Jordan opens the play with a video montage showing current race-themed political confrontations in the streets and on the airwaves, all cut to the recognizable strains of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Goin’ On?’
Then the play begins.
In Mamet’s Ze-Koan-like story, Henry is a brilliant African-American lawyer, played superbly by Dorian Lockett, who is alternately funny and furious. From the opening moments, Henry is facing off against a potential new client, the cocky millionaire Charles, played by a nicely layered Chris Ginesi. Charles has been accused of raping a black woman.
He insists he’s innocent, but one law-firm has already sent him packing, so he comes to Henry, and Henry’s law partner Jack, who aren’t immediately sure they want to take the case.
Mike Pavone plays Jack as a blunt-and-befuddled, ever-moving force of nature, verbally bulldozing his way through everyone in this path - including Susan, the law firm’s cautiously watchful new hire. Played with intense focus by Jazmine Pierce. She does what she can with the role, though it frequently requires her to stand around silently and observe the men plotting their defense of Charles. Thankfully, her character does become increasingly pivotal as the plot-twists stack up.
It’s hard to say anything more without spoiling the intricately composed story.
Race is certainly an ambitious undertaking, though the script bears one or two irritating David Mamet-sized flaws, a typically under-written female part, being one. That said, Mamet’s best trick is to ask a lot of very hard questions - and then barely attempt to answer them.
That’s smart.
He knows that to offer any actual answers about such subjects could be cloying at best and deeply offensive at worst. Instead, Mamet simply presents a number of juicy, interesting, uncomfortable things to think about, then tosses in a few last-minute surprises and sends us away wondering what-the-hell it was that just happened.
It’s no shock that Mamet, ever the master of profane conversation, peppers his play with four-letter-words, racial epithets, and effectively hammer-hard dialogue. Ultimately, Race is as much about sexism as it is about racism.
Intelligent and raw, probing and disturbing, Left Edge Theater’s bold production might offer no real answers, but the questions it asks couldn’t come at a better time, or be more important.
'Race’ runs Friday–Sunday, through March 26 at Left Edge Theater.
www.leftedgetheater.org
There’s a line that comes about halfway through Edward Albee’s classic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Unlike so much of the rest of Albee’s brutal and brilliant drama, it’s not a line full of anger or recrimination, or witty humor, or caustic observation.
As such, it stands out like a whisper in a rainstorm.
It is uttered by an extremely inebriated young woman named Honey, curled up on a couch after a period of extreme alcohol-fueled nausea, making her barely-conscious remark in response to her host, George, telling a deeply personal story, which Honey’s own husband, Nick, told George less than an hour before, while Honey was indisposed in the upstairs bathroom.
As it so happens, it’s a story about Honey.
“This story sounds familiar,” she murmurs softly, unexpectedly adding, “Familiar stories are the best.”
Sometimes, that’s true, isn’t it? Sometimes, familiar stories are the best.
That’s why classics like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” keep cycling through our culture every so often. They might have been written 55-years-ago, like “Virginia Woolf,” but the good ones – like “Virginia Woolf” – always seem to have something to say.
Whatever familiarity you might have with Albee’s masterpiece, or with George and Martha and Honey and Nick – that furious foursome of funny-and-ferocious married academics whose relationships all unravel spectacularly over the course of single evening - you’d be well advised to leave your expectations - and perhaps your past disappointments - at the door of Main Stage West, where director David Lear and his first rate cast are serving up a dry and dirty, perfectly poured presentation of Albee’s caustic excoriation of modern marriage and the deadly addictiveness of illusion and deceit.
If I seem to be using a lot of words, I am. After nearly three hours with these loquacious, word-wielding folks, you too might find yourself luxuriating in the rich highlights and lowlights of the English language.
In the play, George — a sensational Peter Downey — is a middling history professor at a small university, and his wife Martha — Sandra Ish, also marvelous — obviously resents him for his lack of academic ambition. Early one morning, after a lengthy faculty dinner, George and Martha have invited another couple over for drinks. Nick—John Browning, quite strong in a difficult role—is the school’s new biology professor, and his wife, Honey—a remarkable Rose Roberts—well, um, Honey has a habit it throwing up a lot when things become too “intense.”
So, you know, woe is them.
Director Lear keeps the tone masterfully light, recognizing that the escalating intensity of all those words works best when they’re delivered as if it’s all pretty hilarious – which, amazingly, it often is. The production’s best moments include Ish’s priceless expression when a potted Venus flytrap is placed in her hand as a “hostess gift.” Or Downey’s hilariously multi-layered response to Nick’s saying, “Well, you know women.” And words cannot describe Robert’s jaw-dropping brilliance when Honey launches an improvised dance that includes elements of ballet, hand-jive and a mime stuck in a box.
The brilliance of Albee’s script, of course, and this razor-sharp interpretation, lies in the awareness that beautiful truths can be found even amongst people as vile and ruthless as these. Yes, they are, to varying degrees, swine, but they are remarkably believable swine. And as George so memorably puts it, late in the show, “You have to have a swine to show you where the truffles are.”
'Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’ runs Thursday–Sunday through March 19 at Main Stage West www.mainstagewest.com
Well, it’s spring, and the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival has kicked off its 2017 season with four new shows – out of an eventual total of eleven —the majority of them playing for the next nine months in Ashland, Oregon. The First Four include a frisky stage adaptation of the film ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ and two plays by William Shakespeare – a bloody and visceral staging of ‘Julius Caesar’ and a highly entertaining take on the father-son history ‘Richard IV, Part One.’
Taken together, they make for a strong opening salvo at OSF.
For me, the most impressive of the bunch, however is the play ‘Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles,’ by the prolific L.A.-born writer Luis Alfaro, presented with remarkable power and passion by director Juliette Carrillo.
Alfaro has adapted a number of classic Greek tragedies over the years, putting a Latino-spin on such influential myths at Elektra and Oedipus Rex — and now Medea. In ‘Mojada’ – the Spanish word for ‘wet,’ as in ‘wetback’ — Medea is an undocumented Mexican seamstress, living in L.A. with her husband Jason, her son Acan, and her talkative, Greek Chorus-like storyteller Tita. They are all survivors of a brutal crossing from Mexico, which, we eventually learn, has cost Medea much more than mere money or blood.
Frail and fearful, she now confines herself to her small yard in L.A.s Boyle Heights barrio, avoiding her neighbors, helping to make beautiful dresses she could never afford to buy with the meager wages she earns.
Played with ferocious fragility by a superb Sabina Zuniga Varela, Medea carries some very dark secrets—and a desperate fear of losing Jason (an excellent Lakin Valdez), a construction worker whose American dreams of money and influence have placed him in an uneasy alliance with the wealthy widow Armida (Vilma Silva, wonderful). Also an immigrant – though with a very different story of making her way to the States – Armida employs Jason as a contractor in her construction company, and may have her eye on more than just his house-building talents.
Medea’s neighbor, the over-effusive Josefina (Nancy Rodriguez), is yet another version of the immigrant story. She’s a hard-working baker who rises early to make the bread she sells from a cart on the streets. Providing some easy comic relief, Josefina’s resourceful acceptance of America’s love-hate relationship with its immigrant population is a stark reminder of what Medea could become, if she could somehow find a sense of power and strength in her life, all of which this strange new land seems to want to deny her.
Anyone familiar with the Medea story, of course, will know where all of this headed, and the machete occasionally wielded by Tita (wonderfully played by VIVIS) just serves as a constant reminder of what’s to come.
Alfaro does much more with this marvelous, gorgeously constructed drama than just parrot the bloody plot turns of the original Medea myth. In retelling it through the eyes of a Mexican immigrant in America – with one stunning bit of beautifully queasy magical realism – the playwright reveals what happens when any human being is denied a sense of humanity, dignity, and control over their own lives.
I should add that the set by Christopher Acebo is a little marvel of architectural beauty and poetry - a circle of chain link and concrete, a garden grown in old tires and tin cans, and a tiny house that appears to almost float above the yard, with vast roots angling beneath it - as if to suggest the sense of ‘uprootedness’ and ‘in-between-ness’ that constantly threatens to define Medea, as it does, tragically, an entire generation of disenfranchised American dreamers.
For the full schedule of shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, visit OSFashland.org.
I’m not sure what it is, but there’s just something appealing—if that’s the word—about watching a puppet – especially a cute puppet – talking dirty … dropping F-bombs, describing sex acts, saying things that puppets don’t normally get to say. Maybe that’s because, over the last seventy-five years or so — beginning with Kukla Fran and Ollie and Howdy Doody, all the way to Sesame Street and Mister Rogers — television has enforced the idea that puppets are for kids.
That’s not true.
Consider Punch and Judy, who in medieval times were anything but kid-friendly.
That’s just the tip of a dark and dirty iceberg of puppet-powered adult-oriented entertainment.
Well, in recent years, puppets have been regaining their adult voice through such inappropriate inanimate objects as Greg the bunny, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, those murderous marionettes from “Team America: World Police,” and good old Trekkie Monster - and all the other foul-mouthed porn-surfing residents of “Avenue Q,” the hit Broadway show that gave the world the songs, ‘The Internet is for Porn’ and ‘Everyone’s a little bit racist.’
To that list of celebrated, envelope-pushing puppets, we may now add Tyrone, the hilariously devilish sock puppet who rules over playwright Robert Askin’s remarkable new stage play, ‘Hand to God’ (now running at Berkeley Repertory Theater). Blending clever one-liners, expert slapstick and shocking (but funny) acts of violence, with outrageously pointed observations about faith, guilt, parenthood, and the notions of good and evil, “Hand to God” is extraordinary.
It’s obviously not the first show to feature puppets saying and doing bad things.
But as written by Robert Askins – who was nominated for a 2015 Tony award for this play— “Hand to God’ is always feels fresh and inventive, even a bit transgressive in its willingness to go places very few puppet-shows have ever dared to go.
Directed with spot-on precision by David Ivers, “Hand to God” is set in a small-town Texas church, where a troubled, sweet-spirited teenager named Jason—brilliantly played by Michael Doherty—has just created Tyrone.
Innocent-looking enough, at first, Tyrone was made of socks and yarn – and eventually, teeth - part of the youth puppet ministry run by his recently-widowed mother Margery. Also in the club is the gentle-but-resourceful Jessica, and Timothy, a confrontational teen punk with a serious case of the hots for Jason’s recently widowed mother.
Hoping that a church project might help snap Margery out of her grief, the church’s painfully lonely pastor Greg has basically forced the puppet club on her. It’s not a great fit. All hell breaks loose, literally, when Tyrone begins exhibiting strong anti-social behavior, dropping those aforementioned F-bombs alongside some brutally escalating observations about Jason, his mother, and the other basement-dwelling “Christ-keteers.”
These puppety outbursts begin gradually, with Tyrone tagging inappropriately sexual comments onto a performance of the famous “Who’s on first?” routine, occasionally reciting vaguely threatening facts: “The smallest of cuts to the Achilles tendon will cripple a man for life!”
Before long, though, Jason has to accept the fact that his Id-driven puppet just might be … Lucifer himself. It’s very funny, but also genuinely scary, a testament to Askins’ skill as a writer, and the actors skills as a tight, energetic ensemble.
As Jason/Tyrone, Doherty is a marvel, pivoting between characters with breathtaking speed and precision. The play does go to some very dark places, but the show never loses its inherent sense of humor and heart, or the story’s staunch commitment to the idea that those things out there that we loathe and fear the most, might be closer to home than we prefer to imagine.
‘Hand to God’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through March 19 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, www.berkeleyrep.org
Powered by some pretty spectacular voices, Sonoma Arts Live’s clever, minimalized production of Webber-and-Rice’s iconic musical “Evita” scores major points for musicality, invention and sheer guts, emphasizing the politically ominous rags-to-riches story of its heroine by removing the massive cast and the elaborate dance numbers for which the beloved stage show first became known.
On the medium-sized stage at Andrews Hall - in the historic Sonoma Community Center, just off the Sonoma plaza - wooden planks, scaffolding and a brilliantly employed piece of moving machinery take the place of the ornate sets usually employed for musicals of this scale.
Originally announced as a “staged concert,” the show, as directed by Lauren Miller, exists somewhere in between a concert and a full-production. Though the blocking of the tight nine-actor cast tends a bit to often towards the static - with several people standing in a line, striking slightly stiff poses while singing straight out to the audience - what this approach lacks in dynamism and visual energy it more than makes up for in helping tell its story simply and clearly.
Ellen Toscano, a ten-year-veteran of San Francisco’s Beach Blanket Babylon, deploys her stellar singing voice as Eva Peron, who started out as a middle class dreamer from the outskirts of Argentina, became an actress and screen celebrity, and worked her way up to become the first lady of her country, the wife of the dictator Juan Peron. Though a bit physically rigid at times, her face is constantly alive with emotion, ranging from resolve to disdain to love to anger to pain, and sometimes all at once.
As her politically ambitious husband, Juan, Michael Conte strikes the perfect tone of austere authority, and his voice is magnificent. As the narrator Che, who steps in and out of the story - frequently offering challenging perspectives in the form of wry commentary - Robert Dornaus is also quite strong, climbing up and down the set pieces, leaping to the audience floor, even operating the man-lift at a crucial moment, easily giving the shows most varied and animated performance.
In the small part of Peron’s kicked-to-the-curb mistress, Fiorella Garcia delivers one of the show’s most powerful moments, singing the lovely “Where do we go from here,” and as Eva’s lounge-singing first conquest, Tod Mostero is appropriately smarmy, smitten and entertainingly surprised at being less in control of his hungry paramour than he assumed.
The ensemble is in fine voice throughout, though at times they seem to be wishing they has more to do then file onstage, sing beautifully, and file off again, though perhaps this is the remaining vestiges of the original “staged concert” concept.
All in all, the miraculous thing about this production is how well the parts that work, work, especially the marvelous moment when Toscano sings the show’s most famous number, “Don’t Cry for me Argentina.” I won’t spoil the surprise of how the song is staged, but it’s truly delightful and inventive.
Perhaps most surprising of all is how pertinent and powerful this story feels today, as it traces the way that politicians often take advantage of the people they claim to be wanting to help, using them to gain the power they need to take control—then convincing them that they’ve delivered what they promised, even when they have done the exact opposite.
‘Evita’ runs Thursday through Sunday through Feb. 5 at Sonoma Arts Live, at the Sonoma Community Center. www.sonomaartslive.org
Beauty, one could argue, isn’t always very pretty.
Especially in the case of great literature.
Richard Wright’s 1940 masterpiece Native Son—considered one of the most important and powerful American novels ever published— is one great example.
A bestseller upon publication, the novel has been alternately praised and condemned over the years since, often drawing kudos and criticism for the very same things—mainly, the brutal honesty, stark realism, and shocking violence of Wright’s supremely crafted work, a stark depiction of life as a poor, under-educated black man in America in the early 1940s.
And yet, as written from within the conflicted mind of one such man, it’s also a beautiful piece of writing, insightful and raw and full of gorgeously well-written passages.
Which brings us to ‘Native Son,’ the play.
Powered by a poetic, elegant script by Nambi E. Kelley, Marin Theatre Company, in Mill Valley, has finally brought Wright’s explosive novel to the stage. Under the steady guidance of director Seret Scott, an extraordinary cast gives perfectly tuned performances, resulting in a remarkable theatrical experience that is at once astonishing, beautiful, visceral, vibrant and, because of the reality it describes, often inescapably ugly.
Kelley, succeeding where countless adapters have fallen short, strips Wright’s epic-length novel to its bones, dressing it back up again with brilliant theatrical ideas, enhancing, rather than diminishing the power of Wright’s ingeniously built, emotionally rich ethical puzzle box of a story.
The conflicted protagonist is Bigger Thomas — played superbly by Jerod Haynes. Bigger is barely scraping by, living in a rat-infested Chicago slum with his mother (C. Kelley Wright), sister Vera (Ryan Nicole Austin) and borderline criminal brother Buddy (Dane Troy). Bigger, for understandable reasons, is a combustible blend of anger, hopelessness and fear. He dreams of flying airplanes, but knows the system will never give him the opportunity.
Bigger’s violent internal struggles are brilliantly illustrated through his conversations with The Black Rat (played by William Hartfield), the playwright’s nattily dressed depiction of Bigger’s conflicted inner battles. The Rat represents Bigger’s claim that the way society sees him is often in opposition to how he sees himself.
Which one is which is never made clear, adding extra meat to chew on in already chewy storyline.
For Bigger, even the possibility of a decent job, chauffeuring for a wealthy, liberal white woman (Courtney Walsh), is rife with danger. Her daughter Mary (Rosie Hallett) and Mary’s communist boyfriend Jan (Adam Magill) attempt to show Bigger how open-minded they are, but are cluelessly indifferent as to how their public shows of “equality” and familiarity with Bigger actually put him in danger.
When disaster strikes early on, Bigger ends up on the run, his clumsy act of accidental violence leading quickly to another, less defensible one.
As the story plummets ahead with ferocious speed—told in a single, 90-minute act—Bigger literally steps back and forth from his present to his past, vivid flashbacks underscoring his rising fear and fury with heartbreaking power.
The story may be set in the 1940s, but that so little has changed since then is abundantly clear. That — along with the graceful energy of his storytelling — is why Wright’s brutal masterpiece continues to have such resonance after more than 75 years, and why Marin Theatre Company’s gorgeously ugly adaptation is the first must see of 2017.
‘Native Son’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through February 12 at Marin Theatre Company. www.marintheatre.org
Playwright Clare Barron, a New York theater artist with a fast-rising reputation for crafting quirky comedy-dramas with the ring of truth and an affection for damaged people, is finally getting her shot in the North Bay, where Left Edge Theater has just opened the West Coast premiere of her oddball play ‘You Got Older.’
Skillfully directed by Argo Thompson, ‘You Got Older’ follows a struggling, twenty-something lawyer named Rae, who’s recently lost her job, her apartment, her boyfriend, and her self-esteem, at the very same moment that her father is diagnosed with a mysterious, possibly fatal throat cancer. She’s also got a truly terrible-sounding rash.
Rae is played with meticulous sensitivity by Paige Picard, a first-rate performance in a play full of them, and Joe Winkler, as Rae’s kind but befuddled father, is frequently astonishing, particularly so in a key scene at the end where his steady bravado suddenly crumbles.
Barron’s writerly kookiness manifests itself mainly through the stunningly candid dialogue between her characters. The awkward but believable way that Rae converses with Mac, a rash-loving stranger she meets in a bar. He’s played nicely by Jared Wright. There’s sexy-but-menacing Cowboy (played by Chris Ginesi) who Rae conjures up in a series of increasingly disturbing sex fantasies. Then there’s the way Rae makes wobbly plans for the future with her loving, easily distracted siblings, all while waiting at the hospital bedside of their post-surgery dad. The convincingly familiar siblings are played by Sandra Ish, Devin McConeell, Victoria Saitz, all good, though the apparently twenty year spread in ages seems a bit unrealistic, given other details of the script putting them closer together than that.
That one weirdness aside, there is a palpable honesty and “realness” to the story that sneaks up on you, and delivers a surprising impact. As hinted in the title, You Got Older is actually a play about growing up, about the ways that facing our losses, disappointments and the eccentric irritations of life, in time make us all older - and sometimes, a little wiser, too.
Meanwhile, 6th Street Playhouse’s Buyer & Cellar, which also opened last weekend, is a one-actor exploration of the affluent eccentricities of singer-actor Barbra Streisand. Written by Jonathan Tolins, directed with energetic simplicity by Sarah Muirhead, Buyer & Cellar takes a well-documented fact about Streisand—that she built a miniature shopping mall in her cellar to hold the costumes and kitsch acquired over the years—and uses it to launch a flight of fancy about an unemployed actor named Alex who is hired as a make-believe storekeeper in Bab’s bizarre basement playground.
The enjoyable, joke-packed script contains a truly effective play-ending twist, but its insights into Streisand’s psyche mostly tend toward the obvious—her mother never told her she was pretty, she grew up in poverty so she now likes to flaunt her wealth. And the story itself, while definitely funny and affectionate, sometimes strains for purpose and relevance.
It doesn’t matter.
The real reason to see Buyer & Cellar is Patrick Varner’s outstanding performance as Alex. Jaw-droppingly good, Varner’s inventive characterizations and clear emotional arc carry this kooky comedy along on a wave of energy and sweetness, with only occasional lapses of momentum.
Taken together, both new shows show extraordinary humanity and compassion for their messy, identifiable characters, and at a time when its sometimes hard to recognize the commonalities between us, a bit if humanity and compassion are exactly what the world needs more of.
'You Got Older’ runs Friday–Sunday, through Feb. 3 – Feb. 19 at Left Edge Theater, www.leftedgetheater.com. 'Buyer & Cellar’ runs Thursday–Sunday through Feb. 19 at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com
Truly effective plays are often built on big ideas. And ideas don’t get much bigger than the Birth of America – or E = mc 2, which happen to be the subjects of two shows currently being performed by a pair of prominent Sonoma County theater companies. One’s a classic, rarely performed due to the monumental size of its cast, The other is brand new, notable for the minimalism of its scope, in the face of the gargantuan themes it dares to tackle.
Let’s start with the classic - Spreckels Theater Company’s grand staging of Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards historical musical ‘1776,’ first produced in 1968. Telling the surprise-laden story of how America’s Declaration of Independence came to be signed, the production, under the direction of Larry Williams, combines a cast of nearly 30 actors, along with clever projections and elaborate, gorgeously detailed costumes. Not surprisingly, the show looks magnificent, and the somewhat longish tale — clocking in at just under three hours, with one intermission — only rarely loses its momentum. That’s really saying something for a show boasting just thirteen songs, only two or three dance numbers, and a “plot” - if that’s the word - in which impassioned political debate carries the bulk of the “action.”
The story, fortunately, includes a Who’s Who of American historical figures. Jeff Coté plays John Adams, who – in May of 1776, is desperate to convince his fellow Continental Congress-members to separate from Great Britain. Coté is wonderful, fiery and fun, even if the singing does sometimes get away from him, pitch-wise.
Adam’s chief supporters in seeking Independence are Benjamin Franklin, played by a thoroughly delightful Gene Abravaya, and the darkly moping Thomas Jefferson, David Strock. Then there’s the genial Richard Henry Lee, played by Steven Kent Barker, who shines in one of the show’s most rambunctious songs, ‘The Lees of Old Virginia’. It’s thorough-lee infectious, and if you think that joke is bad, wait till you hear the ‘Lee puns’ layered through the song itself.
‘1776’ is a massive undertaking, and Spreckels pulls it off with only a few bumps.
Assisted by a large orchestra under the fine guidance of Lucas Sherman, Spreckels accomplishes a very difficult task with, as audiences will clearly see, far more grace and polish than the founding fathers showed in bringing our still struggling nation to life.
On to another big idea.
At Cinnabar Theater, Trevor Allen’s delightful ‘One Stone’ takes on Albert Einstein’s development of the Theory of Relativity — but approaches it on a much smaller scale than that with which Spreckels tackles 1776. Under the inventive direction of Elizabeth Craven, working on a simple stage suggesting a cluttered office, a single actor, Eric Thompson, represents Einstein’s Brain, his various discoveries and observations brought to life by a balletic puppeteer (Sheila Devitt) and an often-present violinist (Jennifer Cho).
Elevators fall through space, bicycles scoot along at the speed of light, and much more.
The miraculous thing about ‘One Stone’ is how emotionally powerful it is. With little in the way of actual plot, Allen’s words, plus Thompson’s exuberant performance, and the rich, magical puppetry of Devitt, all create a poetic space where Einstein’s ideas scamper about like curious children in a playground. ‘One Stone’ is consistently lovely, excitingly unconventional, and thoroughly extraordinary.
‘One Stone’ runs through February 19 at Cinnabar Theater, www.cinnabartheater.org. '1776' runs Friday–Sunday through Feb. 26 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. www.sp[reckelsonline.com
Valentine’s Day is less than a month away, and love is already in the air at some local theaters. Well, love and sex, and betrayal … and sex, and also mathematics … and sex, and stage-fright, fake kissing, real kissing … and sex.
Sound fun?
Let’s start in Ross, in Marin County, where the Ross Valley Players have just opened a four-week run of Lauren Gunderson’s surreal 2010 drama, ‘Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight.’ That’s an unwieldy but intriguing title for an intriguing but unwieldy play, the true story, sort of, of the Emile Du Châtelet, an 18th Century mathematician, physicist and philosopher who scandalized French society by becoming the lover of the famous playwright-adventurer Voltaire - and challenged scientific assumptions by writing papers finding fault with some of the most esteemed thinkers of her day.
In Gunderson’s poetically convoluted version, the show’s heroine has just died. Robyn Grahn plays her with undeniable charm, yet always feels strangely distant from us, as if she is relating her story from beyond the mists of time, which she is. The script is written that way. Offered a chance to relive and review her life, possibly even getting to finish her life’s work — a book describing the Life Force as a mathematical equation — Emilie finds that actually touching these memory-people she encounters leads to a nasty electric shock.
Nice sound effects, by the way.
Anyway, whenever Emilie’s story gets “physical,” in that she remembers doing the nasty with Voltaire or any of her other occasional lovers, she avoids ethereal electrocution by calling in a younger version of herself, played by Neiry Rojo, to handle all the kissing and groping.
Director Patricia Miller takes a very bold, but ultimately unsuccessful risk in casting Catherine Luedtke as Voltaire. Luedkte, a first-rate actor, does everything she can, but the choice doesn’t work, taking an already over-analytical, over-complex story, and adding another level of unreality, pushing it all even further from the grasp of the audience’s emotions.
We want to feel for this brave, intelligent woman, but she never seems real enough, despite Grahn’s best efforts to make her so. Yes, the scientific stuff is frequently thrilling, but the sexy parts - mainly reduced to men chasing women while shouting “hoo-hoo-hoo” - are about as un-sexy as a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Considerably sexier—and considerably more convincing—is 6th Street Playhouse’s production of Ruhl’s “Stage Kiss,” directed with welcome farcical fury by Marty Pistone. This one is definitely easier to wrap one’s head around, but only so much.
As written by Ruhl, this story of stage actors in love is so oddly structured as to require constant audience effort to absorb what’s happening some of the time. Structured as a play-within-a-play—followed by another play-within-a-play—‘Stage Kiss’ gives us two ex-lovers, He and She, played by Edward McCloud and Jenifer Coté. Both He and She are actors, thrown together in a very bad 1930’s play called ‘The Last Kiss.’
The other actors in the play-within-a-play are a delightfully underachieving bunch, played gleefully by Rusty Thompson, Lydia Revelos, Abbey Lee, and Tim Kniffin, all of them guided by a woefully unprepared Director, played by mollie boice.
‘Stage Kiss,’ as promised in the title, contains a whole lot of kissing - some serious, some very, very funny - and it’s entertaining to watch the way fake kissing can lead to real kissing, then back again. Though ultimately kind of pointless, vague, and a bit overly mean-spirited, Stage Kiss is an enjoyable enough romp, cleverly comparing the easy promises of love-struck fantasy with the hard-but-worthwhile work of creating real-life love.
‘Emilie’ runs Thursday–Sunday through February 5 at Ross Valley Players. www.rossvalleyplayers.com. 'Stage Kiss’ runs Thursday–Sunday through February 5 at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com
Whatever else one has to say about the year 2016, for those in the North Bay who love live theater, it’s been an especially strong year. If you were willing to do your homework, make good choices, take some chances, and keep at it even after the occasional disappointment, there have been a high number of truly exceptional shows playing on local stages over the last 12 months.
So what better way to end the old year and start the new one than by attending a party at one of our fine local theaters. It’s become a tradition, for some companies, to kick off their new year with a performance of the first show of that new year. Cinnabar Theater, in Petaluma, has turned the tradition into one of its best-attended fund-raisers of the year.
This time, on Saturday night, December 31st, they’ll be launching another year-end gala with the first performance of the new one-woman musical “Sophie Tucker: Red Hot Mama.”
Written and performed by acclaimed Tony-nominated actress Sharon McKnight, ‘Red Hot Mama’ tells the story of Sophie Tucker, the renowned burlesque, vaudeville and Broadway performer who made a name for herself with her tough-as-nails, bawdy and boozy songs and banter.
The show features several of Tucker’s most famous songs, including ‘Red Hot Mama,’ “My Yiddishe Mama,” and “I Don’t Want to Be Thin.’ McKnight was nominated for a Grammy award for best supporting actress for the 1989 sci-fi musical ‘Starmites.’ Now a resident of Hollywood, she’s performed ‘Red Hot Mama’ all over the world. The show will have a full run at Cinnabar from January 6 – 22, but for those looking for a sexy and salacious way to sashay into the new Year, Cinnabar’s New Year’s Eve party will give a chance to see the show first, along with special musical entertainment, food and drinks, champagne and Auld Lang Syne.
There’s just something about New Years and naughtiness.
The other hot ticket for the New Years – so hot it had to be spread over two nights and three shows – is 6th Street Playhouse’s New Year’s Cabaret featuring Sandy and Richard Riccardi, performing their YouTube sensational songs about the weird side of life, love, politics and making it in a crazy world.
The show runs once on December 30, at 8 p.m., and twice on New Year’s Eve, at 7 p.m. and again at 10, for those who want to be laughing at midnight when the calendar finally turns the page.
To learn more and buy tickets, visit 6thsttreetplayhouse.com and/or cinnabartheater.org.
It all began on a road-trip to Ashland, Oregon.
The acclaimed playwright Lauren Gunderson was taking a theater-going excursion with Margot Melcon, then the Director of New Play Development for Marin Theatre Company, in Mill Valley.
On the drive, the two began discussing the need for alternative Christmas-themed plays. And having confirmed a mutual appreciation for the works of Jane Austen, soon began imagining a holiday play featuring characters from Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
They started sketching out scenes on a series of napkins borrowed from Starbucks, and the result, Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, is now gaining rave reviews and playing to sold out houses at Marin Theatre Company, where it continues through December 23.
Deliciously funny, and boldly old-fashioned, “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley” is a sequel, of sorts. Pride and Prejudice, of course concluded with the marriage of Elizabeth Bennet (here played by Cindy Im) to the wealthy and charming Mr. Darcy (Joseph Patrick O’Malley).
Elizabeth, of course, is one of five sisters.
As Austen’s story now continues - under the skillfully knowing direction of Meredith McDonough – the happily married Darcy’s have invited three of Elizabeth’s sisters — Jane, Lydia, and Mary — to spend Christmas at Pemberley, their vast country estate, which Elizabeth has boldly adorned with a Christmas tree, a custom not yet common in England.
That tree is almost a character unto itself.
Sister Jane (played by Lauren Spencer), is now married to the affable Mr. Bingley (Thomas Gorrebeeck), and is, as they say, with child. Lydia (in a powerhouse performance by Erika Rankin) desperately tries to convince her sisters that her absent husband, Mr. Wickham, is not the scoundrel everyone knows him to be, and her duplicitous and hyperkinetic activities over course of the holiday cause at least one of the play’s many comic misunderstandings.
The primary focus of the play, it turns out, is Mary Bennet, played with agreeably dry wit and plenty of simmering charm by Martha Brigham. Mary is the sister portrayed in the original novel as talentless and pointedly bookish, though not necessarily very bright. Well, thanks to Gunderson and Melcon, much has changed over the last two years.
Mary, clearly, has evolved into a smart, observant and accomplished young woman, though no one seems to have noticed. The absence of the fifth sister, Kitty, by the way, is acknowledged in a funny, slightly “meta” reference toward the end of the play.
The tale’s expected love story comes in the form of the painfully awkward bookworm Arthur de Bourgh, a magnificent Adam Magill, whose recently inherited the estate of Darcy’s aunt, the daughter of which, Anne, played by a hilarious Laura Odeh, suddenly appears to interrupt the growing love-at-nerd-sight romance between Arthur and Mary.
The dialogue is sparkling and infectious, and the set by Erik Flatmo is a marvel, with snow constantly-falling behind the drawing room window, and even falling from the rafters onto the set itself.
Fluffy and sweet as a Georgian Ice, Miss Bennet: Christmas in Pemberley is as captivating and delightful a holiday diversion as one is likely to find – with or without a Christmas tree.
‘Miss Benet: Christmas at Pemberley’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through December 23 at Marin Theatre Company. www.marintheatre.org
“Hope. Do we ever give up on hope? Even in the face of hard evidence?”
That the question at the heart of Si Kahn’s succinctly-titled new musical memory play Hope, running through December 18 at Main Stage West theater, in Sebastopol. A world premiere, Hope is a surprisingly innovative, if not always entirely smooth collection of stories, some a little on the tall take side, that Kahn heard over and over growing up in a family of Jewish immigrants with a strong political conscience, and a clear knack for spinning a good yarn.
Kahn, who authored Main Stage West’s popular musical Mother Jones in Heaven, is an award-winning folksinger, nationally renowned for his politically fueled songs and progressive activism. Hope is his fourth Main Stage West collaboration with director Elizabeth Craven.
In the new show, transformed from a straightforward monologue-type piece into something far more theatrical and a bit strange and wonderful, Kahn uses stories to mine his own family’s past, borrowing songs from his own celebrated discography.
These are stories of his aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents, including some relatives he never got a chance to meet. Filled with references to pogroms and concentration camps, these are stories of hope somehow surviving in the midst of unspeakable loss and sacrifice. As one piece of the massive story of European immigration to America in the 1900s, it’s powerful stuff.
Which is not to say it isn’t occasionally very funny.
In presenting Kahn’s loosely connected stories, Craven and her troupe of four actor-singers and three versatile musicians have created something altogether unexpected, though a bit confusing. Kahn’s first-person narration has been spread out amongst the members of the cast, each of whom tell bits of the author’s family history, all speaking as Kahn.
While ultimately quite effective, this approach takes a while to figure out, and leads to some initial befuddlement. That said, the stylized storytelling does yield some supremely satisfying fruit. The expert cast features Mary Gannon Graham, Sharia Pierce, John Craven, and Alia Beeton, working their way through short overlapping vignettes of determination, love, resilience and grief, playing an array of characters: from Si Kahn himself to members of Kahn’s family, to Cossacks engaged in pogroms, and even a hilarious Angel of Death, who gets laughs with lines like, “Oy, what a day I’ve had!”
At such times, ‘Hope’ resembles nothing as much as a Jewish immigrant ‘Hee Haw,’ the popular 1969-1981 television show combining country music, one-liners, and folksy sketch comedy. The main difference, of course, is that ‘Hee Haw’ went solely for belly laughs, while Kahn’s deeply personal assemblage of memories aims straight at the heart.
The ensemble is first-rate, and under the musical direction of Jim Peterson, Kahn’s songs are simply and precisely orchestrated for maximum emotional impact. Craven’s gracefully energetic staging, though a bit uneven at times, is always striking and dreamlike in its flow. Despite some wobbly moments, it works, much like a really good Si Kahn folksong, serving up its scraps of dreams and slivers of hope with quiet power, and deep, wholehearted emotion.
‘Hope’ runs Thursday–Sunday through December 18 at Main Stage West.
www.mainstage west.com
Describing a new Cirque du Soleil show is a little like describing a dream while still half asleep. Talking about ‘Luzia,’ appropriately subtitled “A Waking Dream of Mexico,” is roughly that difficult.
Presented through January 29 under the company’s conspicuously festive big-top tent in the parking lot of San Francisco’s AT&T Park, ‘Luzia,’ directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca, is a rain-drenched love-letter to the vast, colorful culture of Mexico. Though dazzling throughout, the luxurious show succeeds especially well in the first of its two spectacular acts, as a luck-challenged traveller—played by the acclaimed clown Eric Fool Koller—tries against odds to get … well, we’re not sure till the end where he’s so desperate to get to, though he clearly would appreciate a nice cool drink of water along the way.
Koller is first seen falling from an airplane, dangling downward past birds and clouds as he descends from the towering heights of the tent, improvising a safe landing after losing his parachute.
Throughout the rest of the show, our plucky wanderer finds himself stumbling in-and-out of various mind-boggling landscapes and experiences, first encountering a stunning Monarch butterfly with enormous puppeteer-powered wings, dance-flying alongside a remarkable mechanical horse, running in slow motion on a series of speeding-and-slowing treadmills.
Then there are the acrobatic hummingbirds, impossibly bouncing their way through a series of ever-rising hoops; a Tarzan-like acrobat dancing in-and-out of a pool of blue water, as a friendly jaguar prowls and frolics on the periphery; a Mexican wrestler, who achieves the ultimate dream of schoolyard children, on a massive swing that, in one heart-stopping moment, actually takes its rider all the way around; there’s a crew of filmmakers who take over the stage to make a movie in which a classic circus strongman climbs higher and higher on stacks of chairs.
I can’t even begin to describe the dancing cacti, but do be warned, because they are as crudely sexy as they are delightfully silly.
Eventually, the show’s amazing sights and stirring sounds – the latter provided by a guitar-playing band of crocodiles and a power-voiced chanteuse – all start to blend and overlap in a kind of uniquely Cirque du Soleil sensory overload.
As stunning as the visuals are, nothing prepares us for the wall of rain that routinely falls across the stage, drenching its performers, which include a team of women dancing, twirling, and spinning inside of enormous hoops, and a pair of break-dancing soccer players who commit act of gravity-defying glee using an ever moving soccer ball.
Then, in one jaw-dropping sequence, that sheet of rain becomes the show itself, at first dividing itself into two, then raining in falling patterns to the left and then the right, and finally transforming itself into a magical canvas, dropping its raindrops in the patterns of fish and birds, butterflies, and other visions.
I know it was done with computer-timed releases of water, but knowing that doesn’t detract from the utter amazement of the effect. Perfectly timed to the beats of pulsing, soul-reaching music, the magnificent rain sequence was easily one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen on stage.
With a rotating, ever changing set by Eugenio Caballero — who won an Oscar for his work on the sublime ‘Pan’s Labyrinth — ‘Luzia’ reaches past dreams and beyond logic to create a world you might not want to leave.
And might just want to go back and experience again.
Luzia runs through January 29 at AT&T Park. Visit CirqueduSoleil.com/luzia for more details.
Have you ever noticed that most stories that appear, on the surface, to be all about death and dying, actually turn out to be all about life and living? It’s true. Think about Joan Didion’s memoir ‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ or C.S. Lewis’s ‘A Grief Observed.’ What about Anne Tyler’s ‘The Accidental Tourist,’ or movies like ‘Heaven Can Wait,” ‘The Descendants,’ or Pixar’s ‘Up,’ or even plays like the recent ‘Fun Home’ and the obvious ‘Death of a Salesman.’
All of these stories use the inevitability of death and dying, and the trappings of grief, to cast a clear, comparative light on the many joys, privileges, and bittersweet consolations of surviving death, of finding a way through grief, of being alive.
In such a spirit of philosophical death-musing comes Jane Alexander’s deliciously rich drama The Quality of Life, now playing at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma. Featuring four superb performances, the play is a beautifully-crafted series of alternately heavy and lighthearted discussions about death and life, and everything in between—culminating in a gorgeous two-part climax that is at once breathtaking in its poetic simplicity and stunning in its blunt clear-eyed wisdom.
Dinah and Bill—played by Susan Gundanas and Richard Pallaziol—are conservative Christians from the Midwest, each struggling in their own way with the recent brutal death of their teenage daughter.
When Dinah learns that her cousin Jeanette—played by Elly Lichenstein—has lost her Northern California home in a wildfire, and that her husband Neil—James Pelican—is in the final stages of cancer, the straight-laced Midwesterners decide to visit their hippy-dippy in-laws, and are stunned to find their hard-hit in-laws living blissfully in a yurt beside the blackened and skeletal remains of their house.
Dinah and Bill are in for another surprise when they learn that Neil, who inhales a great deal of pot as relief from the pain, plans to take his own life in a few weeks – after he and Jeanette throw one last blowout of a party.
What perhaps sounds depressing and heavy is anything but in Anderson’s lovely, humor-filled script. In fact, the level of intellectual debate that unfolds between this oppositional foursome is at times exhilarating, as this mismatched foursome power through a list of hot-button topics, from medical marijuana and right-to-die issues to the question of whether God actually truly has a plan for our lives.
The striking and unusual set, by Nina Ball, is truly impressive, all scorched timber at crazy angles on a patch of real dirt complete with a rather realistic campfire. And the lighting by Jon Tracy effectively gives a sense of time, from early morning to late evening.
Taylor Korobow’s sensitive direction is unfussy and clean, focusing on building intensity through the ever-shifting relationships of the all-too-human characters. Though an unnecessary opening sequence, set to Bob Dylan’s It’s Not Dark Yet, is more confusing and odd than engaging, and mainly just serves to delay the start of the action, Korobow’s work with her actors is marvelous, drawing effective and dialed down performances that are powerful without pushing too hard.
I encourage you to overlook what might sound like a downer, and take a chance on Quality of Life, a gripping, moving, funny and life affirming examination of the ways that death, ironically enough, does have ways to remind us that life, for all its shocks and snares and unhappy twists, really is worth living, and worth savoring, right to the end.
‘Quality of Life’ runs through October 30 at Cinnabar Theater, cinnabaretheater.org
The Threepenny Opera — Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 “play with music — is like an expensive desert that’s so complex and filled with flavor most people can’t quite figure out how to enjoy it.
That’s how Brecht liked it. A proponent of what he called “Epic Theater,” Brecht was not interested in entertaining his audiences or allowing them to become lost in the emotions of a story. He wanted his audiences to stay a bit uncomfortable, to remain just distant enough from their feelings —and from the show they are watching — to always be thinking about how the play is being presented, what it all actually means.
Therefore, I’d say that for most people, the only significant obstacle in 6th Street’s thoroughly effective and often delightful production of Threepenny Opera is that in the end, it’s still The Threepenny Opera. Staged in the larger G.K. Hardt theater, it a fascinating choice for 6th Street, where its main-stage musicals have tended, of late, toward the safe and predictable.
Directed by Michael R.J, Campbell, Threepenny features thrilling singing voices, excellent musical direction by Janis Dunson Wilson, frequently brilliant staging, cooler-than-cool visual stylings, and whimsically Brechtian touches. The set, essentially a large room filled with props and costumes, resembles a theater hoarder’s paradise, and I loved those chalk-drawn signs some characters hold up from time to time, and that well-lit proscenium over the stage, chalked over with the scrawled titles of all the songs, constantly reminding us that this is, after all, just a play with music.
The music, by the way, is by Kurt Weill, and includes some of his best known songs.
The story is set in London in 1937, and plays like a Victorian-version of the Rocky Horror Show. It’s gleefully sexy and aberrant, and joyously contemptuous of those too sensitive and proper to sit and watch a dark, twisted, tune-filled show about the seedy underbelly of society.
Ironically, the musical—based on John Gay’s 1728 “The Beggar’s Opera”—is actually (if you pay attention) all about Europe’s wealthy class of bankers and businessman, who too-often behave like crooks and murderers. Though in Threepenny Opera, we get crooks and murderers behaving like bankers and businessmen.
The show’s best-known song (“The Ballad of Mack the Knife”), is presented in a gothy prelude by an accordion-playing street-singer (a first-rate Shawna Eierman), after which the plot-heavy story introduces Mr. and Mrs. Peachum (Robert Rogers & Eileen Morris, both excellent). The Peachums oversee a network of robbers and thugs, rivaled only by the vicious gang of the knife-wielding Macheath (a wonderful Jerry Lee, singing beautifully while looking like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Gomez Addams).
When Mack secretly marries the Peachum’s daughter Polly (Molly Larsen, adding yet another excellent voice to the cast), things get complicated. It seem Mack has more than one wife, and a girlfriend or two on the side. One of them, the prostitute Jenny, played powerfully by Seran Elize Flores, reluctantly collaborates with the Peachums to have Mack arrested, his eventual fate illuminated, literally, the noose hanging over the stage, occasionally lit by a spot so we don’t forget its there.
The twisty tale is deliberately hard to follow (Brecht trikes again), but for venturous audiences willing to take their tea with a bit of arsenic, this energetic romp of an anti-capitalist fable is served up with enough style to keep you smiling, even as it sends you out of the theater thinking hard, and perhaps just a little unsettled.
'Threepenny Opera’ runs Thursday–Sunday through October 23 at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com
Victorian England produced some spectacularly bloody and murderous literature.
Some was written and published, some began as the stuff of urban legend before being translated for the stage or to the cheap and popular ‘penny dreadful’ magazines that were filled with stories of the macabre, the sensational, the bloody, the mysterious.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries landed somewhere in between.
And gruesome tales like that of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, they were retold in increasingly outrageous and shocking ways. Continuing the trend of transforming gruesome Victorian potboilers into new forms of entertainment, two of the best tales from this era are currently running at two different Sonoma County theaters.
Baskerville—running for one more weekend at Spreckels Performing Arts Center—is Ken Ludwig’s ultra-spoofy take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, one of Sherlock Holmes most popular adventures.
Directed by David Yen, who demonstrates an obvious affection for Monty Python and the Airplane films, Baskerville follows Holmes and Watson—played by Stephen Cannon and Chris Schloemp, respectively—as they take on the case of a wealthy man killed on the moors by a mysterious beast. As written by Ludwig, the play is jam-packed with pratfalls, outrageous accents, crazy characters, and silly walks. Yen stages such stuff brilliantly, and adds a number of wacky bits of his own, including a massive cloud of machine-made fog that seems to have a mind of its own.
Trust me, if you sit in the front row, you’re gonna get fogged.
The cast of five is mostly excellent.
Though Cannon’s ultra-dry delivery as Holmes reads as lifeless and unfunny much of the time, the rest of the cast is a brisk and bouncy delight. Especially Larry Williams, excelling in an array of wildly over-the-top roles. Watching him tumble down stairs is a hilarious hoot. Kim Williams and Zane Walters do exceptional work as well, playing numerous potential murderers and/or victims. The best performance in the show, though—thanks to Williams’ utter commitment to the moment—is from the floppy stuffed-animal appearing as the mysterious Hound itself.
Rarely has an inanimate object been funnier.
If only “Sweeney Todd,” now p;aying at the Raven Theater in Healdsburg, had had same level of energy.
Though featuring one of the best orchestras I’ve ever heard in the North Bay—with expert musical direction from Lucas Sherman—Stephen Sodheim’s spirited, darkly fun tale of murder and cannibalism feels disappointingly stiff and dour. Directed by Carl Hamilton—who delivered one of 2015’s best shows in All My Sons—this Sweeney is dealt a mortal blow by stiff and constricted, overly presentational staging that, despite several nice visual touches—I loved the falling red fabric when key characters die—often feels flat and frozen.
A bit more melodramatic vitality and dynamism is called for in this kind of show.
IT might be dark and bloody, but it should also be larger-than-life, over the top, melodramatic … and maybe even fun.
As Todd, Matt Witthaus cuts a fine figure, and reveals a powerful singing voice—put this man in more musicals—but the dark intensity of presence for which Witthaus has become known is rarely capitalized on in this production. Far more lively and on-the-mark is Tika Moon as the pie-making Mrs. Lovett, balancing her characters’ dark humor and comic tragedy with masterful ingenuity.
The Raven’s Sweeney Todd certainly has its moments.
Too bad it doesn’t have more of them.
'Sweeney Todd’ runs Friday–Sunday through October 9 at the Raven Performing Arts Center. www.raventheater.org
‘Baskerville’ runs Thursday–Sunday through October 4 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center.
www.spreckelsonline.com
Two appetizingly notable stage plays, both currently running in the North Bay, feature the unpredictable combustible power of people related to one another, or about to be, sitting down to eat dinner together. Yes, the family dinner. What has been lauded and celebrated as the linchpin of the American family, appears on two local stages, not necessarily as the glue that holds people together, but as the launching pad that, at many moment, could blow everything apart.
Marin Theatre Company’s August Osage County, directed by Jasson Minadakis, is a solid, well-performed, but oddly distant, and strangely unsatisfying staging of the 2008 Pulitzer winner from Tracy Letts. At the center of the play is a family dinner that starts off friendly and ends in chaos.
Usually presented with detailed realism, this is a deliberately surreal production that emphasizes the family-meal elements of the script by building a massive tabletop structure into the stark, skeletal bleacher-like set. Though worth checking out for the ugly beauty of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-winning script, there’s something off-the-mark about the production, which seems to have missed the point of the play, but at least misses it in an interesting way.
With a magnificent lead performance by Sherman Fracher as Violet Westin, the ferocious pill-popping matriarch of an Oklahoma clan gathering together after the disappearance of their paterfamilias dad, the play is solidly acted by a strong cast of thirteen. Minadakis’ choice to have the actors pantomime some props is interesting, placing metaphorical emphasis on those props (pills, pot, cigarettes, alcohol) that are real. But in attempting to turn Letts’ meticulously realistic play into a tone poem about the addictiveness of casual family cruelty, this admirable but unsuccessful production blunts the razor-sharp edges of the playwright’s brilliantly brutal storytelling.
Inaugurating Left Edge Theater’s brand-new 60-seat performance space at Luther Burbank Center. Director Argo Thompson serves up Dan LeFranc’s high-concept play The Big Meal covering four generations in the life of a typical American family, as told through a series of short (sometimes very short) vignettes, all presented by a character-shifting cast of eight actors, each and every scene set … in a restaurant.
The ensemble show features a superb 9-performer cast that includes Sonoma County veteran actors Kimberly Kalember and Joe Winkler (Man #1), along with Sandra Ish, Graham Narwhal, Liz Frederick, and Jacob de Heer.
All are excellent, playing sweeping arcs of love and loss in a show that is as ambitious in its scope and as it is, unfortunately, a bit lacking in any real payoff or point. Not that life has a payoff or point, of course, which apparently, is part of the point of ‘The Big Meal.’ That said, the combined pleasure of seeing so much good acting one stage, in a story about learning to savor life as long as we can, makes this uniquely-told story well worth pulling up a chair for.
'The Big Meal runs Friday–Sunday through September 25 at Left Edge Theater. Leftedgetheater.com
‘August Osage County’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through October 2 at Marin Theatre Company. Marintheater.org
Jack London.
One cannot grow up in Sonoma County, or even visit here for very long, without gaining at least some awareness of who Jack London was. Few local school-kids can’t tell you that London wrote books about wolves and dogs, and some might even be able to name ‘White Fang’ and ‘Call of the Wild.’ Anyone whose done a bit of wine tasting in the Valley of the Moon probably knows that London’s home is now a State park a mere 30-minute drive from Santa Rosa. And of course, this year, the world marks the centennial of London’s death in 1916, with numerous events taking place all over the county.
Interest should be high, therefore, for Cecilia Tichi’s passionate, fact-filled, over-long but generally well-performed world premiere, The House that Jack Built, running now in the Studio at 6th Street playhouse. Directed with resourceful tenacity by Craig Miller, the play appears alongside Charlie Bethel’s acclaimed one-man telling of the aforementioned sled-dog adventure, Call of the Wild, also in the Studio.
Propelled by a first-rate performance by Ed McCloud as Jack London, ‘The House That Jack Built’ is set in August of 1913, three years before his death, just as London was completing construction on Wolf House, the vast rock-and-redwood residence he’d sunk his dwindling fortune into building for himself and his wife Charmian, played nicely by Elizabeth Henry.
It is one of the clever pleasures of Tichi’s script that the house of the play’s title extends not just to the literal Wolf House, but also to the wide world London spent so much time exploring, and the future of which we clearly worried about, and often covered in his progressively political writings. If only the script had focused a little more tightly on that one theme, or any one theme, even just being willing to explore this one pivotal moment in London’s life, instead of trying to tell the entirety of London’s life in the series of long monologues and flimsily constructed conversations that make up the first act.
Few Sonoma County residents don’t know the eventual fiery fate of Wolf House, but that something bad is going to happen to it is easy to guess from all of the first-act foreshadowing about insurance and creditors. The act is anchored by a long barroom conversation between London and three old associates —boyhood pal Frank Atherton (Lito Briano,) newspaper reporter Cloudesley Johns (James Rowan,) and photographer—and one-time South Sea shipmate—Frank Atherton (Matthew Cadigan.)
The actors do what they can with the material. As bar-owner Johnny Heinold, Ben Harper is delightfully natural, all watchfulness and easy grace. But the whole first act is little more than a vigorous recitation of well-researched historical details that the playwright – a scholar at Vanderbilt University – felt lovingly compelled to squeeze in.
The second act—highlighted by an unexpected boxing match and the climactic event that altered the course of London’s life—is far livelier, but still feels less like a play than an interpretive docudrama presented to visiting tourists. If this were Disneyland, it would be performed by animatronic robots. The House That Jack Built—for all its charms and local significance—strains under the weight of being so aggressively “educational.”
That said, it’s never boring, and it has moments that are genuinely and deeply moving, due mainly to McCloud’s muscular, fully engaged performance—and, of course, to the wild, wooly excitement of London’s truly extraordinary life.
'The House That Jack Built’ runs Thursday–Sunday through September 25 at 6th Street Playhouse. 6thstreetplayhouse.org
It’s been twelve years since Stephen Walsh last played Tony the grape grower, in the classic Frank Loesser musical ‘The Most Happy Fella,’ at Cinnabar Theater. And to employ an over-picked cliché, in his second run of the show at Cinnabar, Walsh has only gotten better, deeper and rich—like a really, really good wine.
The show itself—about romantic complications arising when the much older Tony, an Italian wine-maker in Napa, impulsively leaves a love letter for a San Francisco waitress—is a blend of fantasy romance and soap-opera heartbreak. It’s like something John Steinbeck might have written if asked to pitch an idea for a musical about love.
Nicely directed by Elly Lichenstein, with her patented knack for filling the stage with things to look at, the production pivots on the performance of Walsh, who not only sings gorgeously, but nails the role of a love-struck sweetheart who believes he’s too old and unattractive to deserve happiness. Walsh makes Tony’s emotional journey so believable it’s impossible not be happy when happy and devastated when his desperate attempt at love hits snags, which it does from the very beginning.
This is hardly light and fluffy musical material. There is real human drama here, and the music—with the exception of the poppy ear-worm ‘Standin’ on a Corner’— is complex and operatic, beautifully light and dark, bubbly and haunting, and occasionally a bit weird. This is the kind of show in which people sing whatever is in their soul, even if that means singing a single name over and over and over.
As Amy—who Tony seems to think is named Rosabella—Jennifer Mitchell is charming. She’s especially strong in the early scenes where she is tricked—due to Tony having sent her a photo of his foreman instead of himself—into believing that her coffee shop pen-pal is the young and handsome guy she recognizes from the photo when she arrives at the Vineyard. She’s there in Napa, having impulsively agreed to marry the man she’s been swapping letters with. Mitchell sings beautifully, and plays the early flirtations of love and attraction to lovely effect.
When she learns of the deception, a series of actions take place that steer the tale in the direction of tragedy, but never leaves us doubting that true love might somehow be possible for Tony, one way or another, no matter how unlikely.
Michael Van Why, as Tony’s optimistic farmhand Herman, is magnificent—like the Scarecrow of Oz crossed with Curly from ‘Oklahoma’—and his guileless courtship of Amy’s friend Cleo—a power-force performance by Krista Wigle—is a nice balance to the rockier romance of Tony and his “Rosabella.” The music, played simply on two pianos and a set of drums, is nicely directed by Mary Chun.
There are many reasons to see this show, but in the end, it all comes down to Walsh, who returns to a favorite role after a dozen years, and somehow makes it even better, giving one of the best performances of his career, and easily one of the North Bay’s best musical productions of 2016.
‘The Most Happy Fella’ runs through September 25 at Cinnabar Theater, www.cinnabartheater.org
Hooray for Captain Spalding.
And hooray for the weird, wonderful, creatively imitative assemblage of actors who are currently bringing the Marx Brothers ‘Animal Crackers’ to retro-ridiculous life at the 6th Street Playhouse. Originally a long-running play on Broadway, ‘Animal Crackers’ is best known for the 1930 movie version, considered by many to be the finest example of the pun-filled, language-assaulting, physically offbeat comedy that the Brothers Marx made a career of. The play, with songs by George S. Kaufman, also gave the Brothers Marx a tune they would become inextricably associated with: the aforementioned, Hooray for Captain Spaulding, a goofy prog-pop extravaganza containing one of Groucho’s indelible signature lines, ‘Hello, I must be going.’
The 6th Street production uses the Broadway script, so if you know the movie well, prepare for a bunch of bits and songs that were cut from the show when it was adapted for the screen.
As Captain Spalding, played famously by Groucho, Jeff Coté gives an uncanny impersonation, from the painted mustache and active eyebrows to Groucho’s joyously twisty-turny dance moves. As the larcenous musician Emanuel Rivelli, aka Chico Marx, David Yen is delightful, blending mischievous enthusiasm with a confidently trouble-making underpinning of potential danger.
Watching Yen and Coté toss famously outrageous one-liners back and forth is one of the show’s chief pleasures.
“That’s a-not a flash, that’s a fish!”
Well, that’s in the show.
Also, expect a slightly sinister Harpo Marx, who, in the inventive, elastic-faced hands of actor Erik Weiss, is less an imitation of Harpo than a free interpretation of the goofily creepy Professor character he played in ‘Animal Crackers.’
Don’t expect Weiss to play the harp, though. In a conspicuously desperate and clunky homage to Harpo’s musicianship, director Craig Miller — who otherwise brings a parade of inventive ideas and cleverly inspired bits to the show – basically throws the brakes on the show as we in the audience watch Weiss, as Harpo, hanging out watching a movie of the real Harpo playing a tune.
That probably should have been cut.
On the other hand, Craig introduces a brilliant second act bit in which John Rathjen – absolutely superb in two supporting roles – steps out in his underwear to sing ‘Keep Your Undershirt On’ while putting on the costume of the marvelously droll butler Hives, nicely dueting with a similarly negligeed Jacinta Gorringe, as the marriage-minded matron Mrs. Rittenhouse.
Also excellent, in duel supporting roles, is Abbey Lee, quick-swapping outfits and wigs as Mrs. Rittenhouse’s hot-to-trot daughter Arrabella and as the scheming neighbor Mrs. Whitehead. Lee, along with the aforementioned Rathjen, commands some of the show’s best musical moments, supported by a fine onstage orchestra under the direction of Justin Pyne, and some nice choreography by Joey Favalora.
Unfortunately, many of the other voices in the cast often fail to soar or blend, unless, of course, one of the faux Mark Brothers is involved. To Tell the Truth, it’s hard to know whether Coté and Yen are singing well or not, because they sound so much like Groucho and Chico, and – like the rest of this overlong but frequently hilarious, beautifully and affectionately nostalgic show - are so stitch-in-the-side funny, nothing else really matters.
‘Animal Crackers’ runs Thursday-Sunday through September 18 at 6th Street Playhouse, 6thstreetplayhouse.com.
The issue of high ticket-prices is rarely discussed openly within the North Bay theater community, nor do many seem eager to talk about the arguable effect of prices on the widely reported erosion of the audience for live theater.
But it’s an issue the community thinks, and worries about, nonetheless.
It takes money to put on a show.
But it’s not unreasonable to expect that the more you pay, the better a show you get.
A fully professional, Equity theater such as Marin Theater Company can charge what they do because the quality of their productions tends to be consistently excellent.
Training programs like those at SRJC, Summer Repertory theater, College of Marin and SSU continue to have solid audience followings, despite uneven and understandably student-level work, because they rarely charge more than fifteen dollars a ticket.
But when the average North Bay community theater show costs 28 or 29 dollars—and almost always requires the audience to overlook the acceptability of at least a few eager-but-not-always-stellar actors, singers and musicians—the cost, when weighed against the quality, invariably works to drive down overall audience attendance, sending those potential patrons to other entertainment options, ones that deliver more dependable bang for the buck.
Well, for maximum theatrical bang, there is no better bargain for your buck right now than Curtain Theater’s joyously lowbrow, energetically slapstick production of William Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, running through September 11 in Mill Valley.
Not only is the show good. It’s free.
Yes, a hat is passed after the show, but given that the average per-patron donation for pass-the-basket shows is ten-fifteen dollars, this ludicrously over-the-top, highly energetic, crowd-pleasingly hilarious show easily offers the best all around bang-for-buck value to anyone seeking a bit of cleverly-wrought afternoon entertainment.
Staged outdoors in the pleasantly redwood-shaded Old Mill Park, director Carl Jordan takes what is possibly Shakespeare’s crudest comedy, sets it in the 1920s, and adds a live band playing atmospheric tunes of the era, plus a few modern songs adapted to fit the style. Ingeniously mining the story for every possible pratfall, fart joke, rubber-chicken slap, and unexpectedly crude-gesture hibernating somewhere in the Bard’s gleefully bawdy text, Jordan’s cast—who should all be awarded prizes for most miles logged in a single onstage performance—attack this opportunity for outrageousness with an enthusiasm that astounds as often as it delights, even if Shakespeare’s ingenious language occasionally gets a bit muddied in the process.
In the city of Ephesus—established as a colorfully dangerous place by Steve Coleman’s brilliant storybook set and Amanda Morando’s sexy performance of Coolio’s ‘Gangster’s Paradise’’—Antipholus of Syracuse (Adam Niemann) and his faithful servant Dromio (Heather Cherry) suddenly arrive, unaware that as children they were each separated from identical twins bearing their same names. The other Antipholus and Dromio (Skylar Collins and Nick Christenson) now live in Ephesus.
Confusion quickly ensues as one set of twins is mistaken for the other, leading the resident Antipholus to accidentally alienate his wife (Melissa Claire) and make his sister-in-law (Heather Gordon) think he has fallen in love with her. Additional bits about gangsters, the twins’ father facing execution at sunset, and a frustrated goldsmith (Alexis Christenson, her hilariously snorty laugh a true thing of beauty) all bring value-added laughs to this first-rate example of how to give more while charging less.
‘Comedy of Errors runs Saturdays, Sundays and Labor Day, through Sept. 11, at Old Mill Park Amphitheater in Mill Valley. All shows are at 2:00 p.m. and are Free. Further info can be found at curtaintheatre.org
Some stage musicals are lighter than air, soothing as water, sounding good and feeling delightful as long as they last, then evaporating on the wind, fading fast into the folds of our cerebral cortex, almost immediately after the show is over.
Big Fish, the new production offered by Gene Abravaya and Spreckels Theater Company, is that kind of show. Light and fluffy, with pleasant but strikingly unmemorable songs, tinged with a touch of serious human drama, but mostly just a good old-fashioned American musical.
But, as written by John August, with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, this adaptation of the Daniel Wallace novel and the Tim Burton movie it inspired is so sweet-natured and so crammed with positivity and eye-popping pleasures, one can’t help but walk away feeling good.
The stage version deviates wildly from the movie, which deviated wildly from the book.
In many ways, the stage play is even more grounded and clear than the others, which tended to obfuscate the line between reality and fantasy. In the version now playing at Spreckels, playwright John August only occasionally muddies the line between what’s really happening and what is only happening in one of the many tall tales of master storyteller Edward Bloom.
A travelling salesman with a knack for telling outrageous stories in which he’s always the hero, Bloom is played by Darryl Strohl-DeHerrera, who joyously protrays a variety of ages from teenage to old age. Bloom has spent his life gleefully fabricating encounters with mermaids and giants, werewolves and witches, but why?
And why are there parts of his life he seems unwilling to even make up a story about?
That what Edward’s adult son Will decides to find out. A recently married investigative reporter Will has always resented his father’s tendency to make things up. When Edward is diagnosed with a terminal illness, Will sets out to discover the real Edward Bloom, one way or another.
Will’s mother Sandra—played nicely by Heather Buck, also portraying numerous ages — is clearly the love of Edward Bloom’s life, and in his stories, she’s the primary “plot motivation” for his various adventures and exploits, from his colorful love-at-first-sight encounter under a circus big top, to his unorthodox method of travelling to see her once he finds out who his heartthrob actually is.
The script by John August drops some of the book and movies more outrageous images, so don’t go in expecting Siamese twins or magical glass eyeballs. The mysterious town of Specter, where no one where’s shoes and everyone seems to be under a magical spell? That’s gone too, which means August has to do a little fancy storytelling footwork to make the remaining pieces fit together. The cast is energetic and clearly having a great time playing so many colorful characters in gloriously offbeat costumes by Pam Enz. The songs by Andrew Lipa feature genuinely clever lyrics, though somewhat hampered by repetitive, oddly monotone and melody-restricted music. Most of the time, it’s all singing and no song.
Abravaya’s staging makes ingenious use of Spreckel’s acclaimed projection system, which provides much of the ever-shifting scenery, along with a number of clever visual effects, including a man being shot from a cannon.
Of course, the best part of a story is the ending, and ultimately, this ambitious and mostly satisfying production delivers a climax that is both impactful and surprising. It might even inspire you to call up your own parents or children, to tell them you love them—and perhaps to share a story or two.
‘Big Fish’ runs through August 28 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, rpcity.org.
Let’s talk about Jukebox Musicals.
That’s a slangy term describing a stage show that is built around an assortment of pre-existing, usually well-known songs, stuff you might have heard on the radio, or on a barroom jukebox. Most traditional musicals build the songs into the stories as a unified whole. A jukebox musical lets the songs themselves suggest the storyline, the characters, and the tone.
It’s basically building a musical in reverse.
Nice Work if You Can Get It, built around classic 20s and 30s songs by George and Ira Gershwin, is pleasant, classy, solidly performed, and light-as-a-feather. Written by Joe DiPietro, seems to evaporate almost as soon as its over, along with the majority of its pleasing but strangely unmemorable tunes, the two or three exceptions including ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,’ ‘S’wonderful,’ and ‘Fascinating Rhythm.’
The plot, about a Prohibition era playboy, falling in love with a sweet bootlegger on the eve of his marriage to a famous dancer, is slight and silly, but crammed with old-fashioned, simplistic charm.
The performances are lively, if mostly just skimming the surface, and the dancing, from swing moves to ecstatic tap numbers, is frequently breathtaking.
Rock of Ages—constructed from hard-rocking, face-melting, pop-rock-and-metal tunes from the garish 1980s—is coarse, crude, exuberant, and sprinkled with sleazy Sunset Strip darkness and danger.
Created by Chris D’Arienzo Rock of Ages employs songs by Journey, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Starship and others in telling the story of Drew, a wannabe rocker stuck cleaning the bar at an L.A. music club, and Sherrie, the aspiring actress he falls hard for. That Drew will eventually break into a rendition of Steve Perry’s ‘Oh Sherrie’ is inevitable from the moment he first hears her name. While both working at the a legendary rock venue called The Bourbon Room, their budding romance is derailed by the arrival of Stacee Jaxx, the amoral lead singer of a band called Arsenal.
A subplot involves a plot by German developers to raze the Bourbon Room to make way for chain stores, galvanizing the club’s supporters into various forms of protest, including repeated group performances of Twisted Sister’s ‘We’re Not Going to Take It.’
As written, it’s a bit of a hot mess, with a fair share of gleefully offensive moments and one potentially moving scene marred by the actors’ use of distasteful stereotypes. But overall, Rock of Ages is infectiously pleasurable, with loads of high energy, a kind of gritty youthful innocence, and tunes written to stick in your brain for days.
'Rock of Ages' runs through August 11, and ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’ runs through August 13. Visit www.summerrep.com
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
One of Shakespeare’s scariest lines comes from what is easily his scariest play, ‘Macbeth,’ a show so frightening most theater people refuse to speak the title aloud.
In the third season of Shakespeare in the Cannery—in the old cannery ruins near Railroad Square—director David Lear unleashes an offbeat, seriously gonzo take on the Bard’s bloody masterpiece, blending modern jeans, combat boots, and bike leather with traditional elements like capes, cackling witches, blood drenched swords … and a head in a bloody bag—which never gets old.
Overall, Lear’s vision is impressive. He springs masks, trapdoors, and a whole toolbox of other theatrical tricks, including the incorporation of drummers from Sonoma County Taiko, pounding out a live percussive score throughout the show.
Shakespeare’s eerie supernatural tragedy tells the twisty-gory tale of the highly suggestible Scottish warrior Macbeth, played by Ben Stowe, who emphasizes the reluctance and fear beneath his character’s fighting façade. At Macbeth’s side, sort of, is his blindly ambitious wife, whom Shakespeare never gave a name to. She is always only ‘Lady Macbeth,’ played here with cruel coolness by Ilana Niernberger. Mr. and Mrs. M are goaded into traitorous action by the riddle-spouting Weird Sisters—you know, the ‘bubble, bubble, toil and trouble twins— who tell Macbeth he will become king.
Anyone else might sit around and wait for the crown to fall in their laps, but Lady M. wants that crown, and Duncan, the king, just invited himself over for dinner so . . . why waste an opportunity? Screwing their courage to the sticking place—a line that here takes on a seriously sexy second meaning—the married first-time murderers argue a bit before finally offing Duncan, quickly shifting blame to his sons, and then taking his throne as king and queen.
That would be a terrible end to the story.
But fortunately for the audience, Macbeth—not to mention Shakespeare—just can’t seem to stop killing people, and the whole kill-the-king-and-then-retire-from-evil-deeds scheme soon collapses under of storm of mystery, madness and mayhem.
On a pleasingly playground-like stage, the performances sometimes stray toward the big, and over-acted. That’s not necessarily a bad choice for an outdoor show. But in this case, what’s gained in terms of clarity and size is often lost in terms of subtlety and absorbing emotion. That’s a problem enhanced by a number of freaky visual ideas that—while interesting and certainly not boring—often distract from the drama rather than heighten it.
Still, there are some very strong moments in this ‘Macbeth,’ fueled by several effectively surprising acting choices. As Duncan, the doomed King, Clark Miller very convincingly plays the monarch’s essential sweetness. Eric Thompson, as a servant in Macbeth’s castle, is hilarious, making the most of the play’s one comedic scene.
Sam Coughlin, as Duncan’s vengeful son, is impressively complex in a very small part. And as Macbeth’s fellow warrior Banquo, Alan Kaplan brings a sense of affronted decency and a solid soldiers’ bearing to a role usually played by a much younger man.
Though perhaps lacking in actual human drama and emotion, playing more like a Halloween pageant than an actual tragedy, this particular ‘Macbeth’ is probably an excellent production to introduce kids to Shakespeare with. Energetic and ambitious—like poor befuddled Macbeth himself—the show may sometimes stumble … but it definitely brings the sound and fury.
‘’Macbeth’ runs Friday & Saturday through July 23 at The Cannery. Visit www.shakespeareinthecannery.com
Summer Repertory Theater Festival, Santa Rosa’s acclaimed training program, has returned for its 45th year. Over the last four-and-a-half decades, Summer Rep has earned a reputation as one of the country’s best experiences for young theater artists, who come from all over the U.S. to spend their summer rehearsing, creating and performing up to five shows, stage in repertory between June and August.
Over that time, audiences have come to expect a certain degree of comfortable consistency in the shows staged each summer, usually an assortment of classics and Broadway favorites. But because this is a program designed to push and challenge its artists, sometimes something unusual, even a bit controversial, manages to sneak its way in.
This year, that’s the case. In addition to the cozy-cute Gershwin musical Nice Work if You Can Get It, the rowdy heavy metal musical Rock of Ages, the Sondheim classic Merrily We Roll Along, and the musty bedroom-farce Boeing Boeing, Summer Repertory Theater is presenting one of its edgiest shows ever. Though you wouldn’t know it from the way Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed has been marketed.
Hardly the light-hearted romp the festival’s advertising suggests, this bold 2006 Hollywood satire brings a bit of welcome edge to a season crammed with frothy crowd-pleasers.
The Little Dog Laughed – its title taken from the nursery rhyme about the dish who runs away with the spoon – is not quite an artistic triumph, due to some spotty performances by a cast otherwise game to tackle a very hard play. But for the sheer boldness of the choice, Summer Repertory Theater is to be commended. With luck, despite the show’s faults, I believe it may still find an audience in its final weeks.
The story is narrated by Diane, a hyper-driven Hollywood agent played by Alexa Erbach, disappointingly off-key in a performance that is far too over-the-top. Diane’s client is a closeted second-tier movie star, Mitchell—played by Justin Genna, the best thing about the show. Mitchell yearns to balance his professional ambitions with his need to find real human connection. Early on, he drunkenly summons a scheming hustler, Alex, whose primary clientele is wealthy men—though he assumes he’s straight because he sometimes sleeps with his best friend Ellen.
As Alex, David Miller, a bit weak in a tough role, though impressively committed to it, and Makenzie Morgan Gomez, as Ellen, is easily the next best thing about the production.
Mitchell’s growing attachment to Alex creates a bit of a problem for Diane, who might still be able to turn Mitchell into a star—if she can only keep him in the closet.
The script is clever, packed with sharp observations and inventive dialogue. The direction by Travis Kendrick is focused and well paced, but too heavy-handed to let the humor breathe. The cast is certainly to be congratulated for its professionalism in handling the script’s sexual content, its suggested nudity, and its intimately close proximity to the audience, the first row of which is seated close enough to touch them. Unfortunately, this kind of writing requires a better balance of darkness and comedy. Perhaps, with a stronger cast and direction, the frank and confrontational outrageousness of Beane’s socially biting storytelling might have been as funny as it is brutal, bleak, and unforgiving.
'The Little Dog Laughed' runs through August 7 at Newman Auditorium, on the campus of the Santa Rosa Junior College. www.summerrep.com
Prince Hamlet is a moody death-metal addict with a messed-up ghost on his case.
The jealous monarch from The Winter’s Tale has become a tyrannical ruler in imperial China.
And the 70’s musical The Wiz is … well … The Wiz.
It’s hard to conceive of any scenario in which a presentation of ‘The Wiz’ – a variation on the Wizard of Oz set in a fantasy version of a New York ghetto – would be made to seem tame and safe, but safety is a matter of perspective. In what turns out to be Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s most daring and inventive summer season in years, the Allen Elizabethan Theater has now opened, presenting two supremely bold, thoroughly satisfying takes on William Shakespeare—and a perfectly pleasant production of The Wiz that, in any other year, might have actually felt like the risky choice.
Helmed by first-time OSF director Robert O‘Hara, the delightfully revolutionary 1975 adaptation of Frank Baum’s fantasy novel has been given a respectfully energetic staging that may comes as a shock to anyone who thinks that the 1978 Michael Jackson-Diana Ross movie was actually The Wiz. The movie version changed the tone, cut crucial songs, and transformed the sweetness of the stage show into confusing, uncomfortable, weirdness.
On a strikingly bare stage, a mostly African-American cast brings The Wiz to life, not with elaborate sets, but with brilliant costumes and over-sized, crystal clear performances. As Dorothy, Ashley D. Kelley is all kinds of adorable, and she leads an impressive cast of singers and actors who act first, sing second, and dance third, but fully capture the up-from-the-streets inspiration that is sewn into every beat of Charlie Smalls and William Brown’s groundbreaking show.
Compared to the committed, goofy comfort of The Wiz, Lisa Peterson’s freaky, gleefully transgressive art-house horror show of a Hamlet is the equivalent of setting fire to elementary school. Which is to say, it’s brilliant, but possibly not what anyone expected.
Danforth Comins’ angsty/angry prince carries an electric guitar, is haunted by the ghost of his dead father—who is seen running here and there past doorways and windows before suddenly appearing right next to his son. Hamlet is ominously “shadowed” by the ever-watching form of Neurosis guitarist Scott Kelly, accompanying the action on an array of instruments. The introduction Kelly’s Doom Metal music, intrinsically spring from feelings of anger and fear, is nothing short of ingenious, and the cast’s commitment the creepy beats of a classic horror story results in a Hamlet that is alternately thrilling, heartbreaking, and unforgettably disturbing.
Standing somewhere in between those two shows is Desdemona Chiang’s surprisingly effective staging of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, an emotionally complex, endlessly surprising interpretation of the Bard’s silliest and saddest romantic fantasy. Almost post-modern in structure, the story begins in Sicilia – transformed here into China – where the jealous king Leonates — becomes convinced that his wife, the devoted queen Herminone has been unfaithful.
The resulting series of misfortunes move the tale to Bohemia, here imagined as a kind of steampunk/Godspell version of the Old West, giving Shakespeare’s melancholy masterpiece a touch of Kung Fu. As Leonates abandoned daughter Perdita (Cindy Im, breathtakingly good) comes to adulthood in a foreign country, the patented forces of fate and Shakespearean soft-heartedness conspire to bring two broken families back together again.
Rarely has The Winter’s Tale made so much emotional sense, transformed with skill and affection into a play overflowing with sweet, life-affirming beauty.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs February to October, in Ashland, Ore. For information on all currently running shows visit osfashland.org.
I’m David Templeton Second Row Center, for KRCB
Money corrupts, as does Power, and they often work together, because of course, everywhere you go in this world, money is power.
In playwright Ayad Akhtar’s uneven but often gripping drama ‘The Invisible Hand,’ these concepts are explored in ways that might not be particularly fresh or groundbreaking, but serve as above-average grist for smart, serious theater-making.
Directed with an almost cinematic attention to detail by Jasson Minadakis, ‘The Invisible Hand’ runs through June 26 at Marin Theatre Company, in Mill Valley.
The company’s sprawling stage has been somehow shrunk, the brilliant set by Kat Conley transforming it into a grimy brick prison cell in Pakistan, where American banker Nick Bright is being held after a daylight kidnapping that was intended to nab Nick’s much more important boss.
The mistake turns out to be bad for both everyone.
With Nick not a big enough fish for his bank to cough up the required ten million dollar ransom—as Nick is brutally informed by the English-born kidnapper Bashir—the frightened businessman soon realizes he’s never getting out of this cell alive. Encouraged by the kindness of a sympathetic jailer named Dar, Nick makes a desperate offer to Imam Saleem, the religious leader who claims he needs Nick’s ransom money to build roads and feed the poor.
If allowed access to information and a computer, Nick says, he can raise the ransom himself, using the stock market and a series of tricky insider trading moves.
It’s a great idea, and for the first half of the play, as Nick trades his way to a million, then three million, then five million, the tension rises powerfully, added to by quiet scenes of Nick patiently working to dig his way out of the cell at night.
The second act loses much that torturous tension, or more accurately, allows it to evolve into a different kind of torture, as a series of setbacks lead Nick—and all us watching—to begin to doubt he’ll ever reach his goal and earn his freedom.
The playwright’s best idea is that the enemy of the story is not the kidnappers, but the destructive power of money itself. Unfortunately, this is explained through long exposition-heavy conversations that, while rich with information, are a bit like listening to an economics lecture in college.
Director Minadakis and his team of designers work hard to keep things moving, employing a brilliant soundscape during scene changes that opens up the story’s constricted world. Other effects, from light streaming through the window, the sounds of drones and bombings outside, and a nicely done bit of offstage violence, are expertly coordinated.
But much of the onstage violence is as unconvincing has the actors’ ever-shifting accents, and the performances, though solid, rarely soar to the degree we’ve come to expect from a Marin Theater Company production. “The Invisible Hand’ has much to say—perhaps a little too much—but while it is an important message, it’s not an especially new message. Still, it’s a bit of a thrill just to be seeing things on stage that we usually only see on episodes of ‘24’.
Like Nick working the markets, ‘The Invisible Hand’ doesn’t always deliver on its promises, but when it does, it’s a real rush.
‘The Invisible Hand’ runs Tuesdays through Thursdays at Marin Theater Company. Marintheatre.org.
West Side Story—Sondheim, Bernstein and Laurents’ beloved 50s-era street-gang homage to Romeo and Juliet. Few American musicals are as widely loved and as over-performed.
Let’s face it, in America, it’s you can’t walk down a city street without seeing at least one poster for some upcoming production of West Side Story. There’s a reason for that, of course.
It’s that ‘West Side Story’ is a really, really good show.
But it’s not an easy show, and pulling it off requires a remarkable amount of talent, craft and theatrical panache. Which brings us to the Mountain Play, in Mill Valley, where West Side Story runs for three more weekends. Directed by Jay Manley, the sprawling production unfolds with admirable grace and energy, helped along, on opening day, by Mother Nature, dispensing a bit of classic Mountain Play magic.
You know the story.
Two teenage New Yorkers meet by chance at a tense interracial community dance. Tony is a former-gang member trying to go straight. Maria is a wide-eyed Puerto Rican émigré with dreams of becoming a “young lady of America.” Separated by race and tradition, their forbidden love sets in motion a series of events both hopeful and tragic. Now, for that all-important first-act meet-up to properly work, the audience has to feel the electrifying, fateful connection between and.
Hopefully, that electricity will come from the actors.
Sometimes it arrives in other ways.
On opening day, during the pivotal Tony-meets-Maria moment, a beam of sunlight broke through the low-hanging clouds, suddenly shining directly down on the star-crossed lovers.
Dressed all in white, the two literally began to glow as we all watched them fall in love before our eyes.
That’s the kind of unplanned trick of nature that puts the Mountain Play amongst the most popular annual theatrical events of the summer. Spectacle, as usual, is a big part of the draw too. Director Manley certainly pulls that off, with an amazing set giving us New York streets-and-alleys painted in moody purple, with random streaks of lamplight painted across the stage, approximating the feel of evening in the city.
The tale bursts into action with an athletic cast invading the stage, beautifully dancing and fighting their way through the famous opening succession of Sharks vs. Jets skirmishes. Aided by a first-rate orchestra under the direction of David Möschler, excellent choreography by Nicole Helfer and nifty fight-work by Zoe Swenson-Graham, the dangerous romanticism of “West Side Story” unfolds with maximum visual power.
As Maria, a strong-voiced Lym brings all the fiery giddiness one could hope for, and though Lee is much too old to play the teenage Tony, his full, operatic singing finds every scrap of melody in the gorgeous songs he sings. The rest of the cast, particularly Zachary Isen as reckless Jets leader Riff, David Crane as the simmering Sharks leader Bernardo, and Erica Lamkin as his girlfriend Anita, are all very good.
Whether or not the sun makes the same dazzling appearance in every performance, the cast and technicians bring plenty of their own light and emotional razzle-dazzle to this highly enjoyable spin on a true American classic.
‘West Side Story’ runs Sundays though June 19 (and one Saturday, June 11), at the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre on Mt. Tam. Visit www.mountainplay.org for all the information.
Fictionalized history, like ‘free trade’ and ‘forgotten memories,’ is something of an oxymoron. The minute you introduce fiction to a story, its claim to being history loses strength. But unless a playwright has a transcript of the backroom conversations held by historical figures, she has no choice, in telling the story of great historical moments, but to guess at and improvise those conversations.
The result is a hybrid of history and fiction, that when done well, illuminates and expose the truth of what happened—or what very likely happened—while employing just enough imagination and guesswork as necessary to allow the story to be told at all.
Such was the task lying before British playwright Lolita Chakrabarti as she tackled the story of a significant, but little known, figure in theatrical world history—Ira Aldridge, the first black actor of perform on the legitimate stage in London. That was in 1833, when slavery was still legal in England.
Chakrabarti’s award-winning play ‘Red Velvet,’ now brings the story to the Bay Area, where San Francisco Playhouse has put together one of the best shows of the year.
Following the death of famed classical actor Edmund Kean, Aldridge—in an openly provocative and controversial move—was called upon to replace him in playing the lead in William Shakespeare’s Othello. In taking on the role, Aldridge would be acting alongside the all white actors of the distinguished company, performing at Keane’s famed Theater Royal.
Abolition was three months from becoming law in England, and the city was in a state of conflict and turmoil, with open riots in the streets. This was hardly the best time to challenge centuries of tradition and deep-seated prejudice.
What is known are the basic details of what happened, what the critics said about Aldridge’s performance, how the company responded, and what Alrdridge did next.
What is not known, and what Chakrabarti makes a highly entertaining and impressive effort at surmising, is what that first multiracial meeting of artists might have been like.
How did the company respond? What was the first rehearsal like? Who said what to whom before and after opening night?
Did it happen this way? Who knows?
But, as deftly and powerfully devised by Chakrabarti, directed by Margo Hall with marvelous command of the script’s complex blend of social comedy and raw drama, Red Velvet transcends the oxymorns of fictionalized history.
This is a good play and a strong production, with a towering performance by Carl Lumbly as Aldridge. The superb supporting cast includes Sonoma County actor Tim Kniffin, excellent in a tricky role as the dying Keane’s affronted actor son Charles, whose rising indignation at watching a black actor play Othello—a role he’d expected to assail himself—is simultaneously hilarious and chilling. Also strong are Richard Louis James in dual parts as Aldridge’s long-suffering dresser and a stodgy Shakespearean actor, Susi Damilano as Charles’ tentative but artistically intrigued actress fiancée Ellen Tree, and the effortlessly accent-shifting Elena Wright in a trio of key roles, including that of Aldridge’s white, English-born wife.
Chakrabarti’s robust script does somewhat stretch believability in an effort to have fun with Aldridge’s first backstage appearance at Theater Royal. That quibble aside, Red Velvet stands as a thing of graceful beauty, earning its way, line by line, to its heartbreaking climax. Supremely satisfying on numerous levels, this is a must-see historical drama. In eschewing simple conclusions or one-dimensional characterizations, Red Velvet delivers a 180-year-old story that, sadly enough, feels vividly and unnervingly contemporary.
‘Red Velvet’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through June 25 at San Francisco Playhouse, sfplayhouse.org
“Battle of the sexes.”
That phrase dates back to at least 1914, when the notorious filmmaker D.W. Griffith (he of “Birth of a Nation”) released a blatantly sexist film with that title. “Battle of the Sexes.”
Over the years, what that phrase means and how that particular battle is fought, has vastly evolved. Consider, for example, the enormous differences between Lerner and Lowe’s beloved 1956 musical “My Fair Lady,” and David Ives’ spicy 2011 comedy-drama “Venus in Fur.”
We begin with that last one.
Currently running at San Rafael’s Belrose Theater, directed by Carl Jordan and presented by Marin Onstage, ‘Venus in Fur’ is a two-person examination of sex, power and the pleasures of pain. There is a bit of light sadomasochism. There is leather and a dog collar.
And it’s hilarious.
When an off Broadway audition is crashed, late, by a scattered, goofy mess of an actress—excellently played by Melissa Claire, who plays the character as alternately ditzy, sexy and scary—she convinces the frustrated playwright-director—Tyler McKenna, quite good in a tough role—to let her audition. At first she seems totally unprepared.
But she seems to know the play by heart, even though the script has not yet been distributed. And she seems to know quite a bit about the 1870 novel on which the new play is based, a novel written by the man for whom the term “masochism” was named. What follows is a series of escalating power trips and challenges and sexual intimidation, in which the rules, and the roles, change several times.
Very adult, very funny, and full of surprises, this is a play designed, in part, to make you rethink how women are traditionally portrayed in theater and literature.
Which brings us to ‘My Fair Lady,’ now playing at 6th Street Playhouse.
Much tamer, compared to “Venus in Fur,” and clearly the product of an early era, the beloved musical ‘My Fair Lady’ was itself a taming-down of G.B. Shaw’s furious social critique ‘Pygmalion.’ It features some of the best songs ever written for the stage—‘Wouldn’t it be Loverly,’ ‘With a Little bit of Luck,’ ‘I Could Have Danced All Night,’ ‘The Street Where You Live,’ ‘I’m getting Married in the Morning.’
Impressively sung by a strong-voiced cast—who are somewhat poorly supported by a spotty orchestra. The production’s pleasures include a marvelous Norman Hall singing two of the show’s most famous songs, and some delightful costuming by Tracy Hinman. The play is directed with obvious affection by Craig Miller, who employs some impressive touches—crumpled poetry, a well-timed tear, but despite the cleverness of these inventions, it can’t quite make this dated, deeply tired show seem less like the out-of-touch dinosaur it is.
As the self-impressed professor of linguistics Henry Higgins, David Yen is thoroughly entertaining, though not very likable, gleefully aiming a barrage of insults at Eliza Doolittle, an unhappy flower girl who asks him to teach her proper English enunciation. As Eliza, Denise Elia sings the part beautifully, effectively underplaying the character’s usual fire, thus emphasizing Eliza’s fear and uncertainty—making Higgins even less likable in the process.
That, it must be said, has always been the primary failure of ‘My Fair Lady’—a Battle of the Sexes” love story in which the last thing we want is for main characters to fall in love.
‘Venus in Fur’ runs Fridays and Saturdays through May 21 at Belrose Theater, Visit marinonstage.org. ‘My Fair Lady’ runs Thursday–Sunday, through June 6 at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com
The writings of San Francisco playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb have always been a balance of the weird, the wondrous, the sensitive, and the cynical. Nachtrieb likes to test artistic and cultural boundaries, daring his audience to surrender its expectations. He likes happy endings, but he also likes to subvert them and stand them on their heads.
In many ways 'BOB: A Life in Five Acts' is the quintessential Peter Sinn-Nachtrieb play, combining all of the idiosyncrasies and struggles and odd artistic impulses we've come to expect from one of his stories.
And in the currently running production of 'BOB' at Main Stage West, in Sebastopol, all of these wildly consorting contradictions are given the perfect playground on which to cavort and cartwheel and freely express themselves.
A bit of a dream project for director Sheri Lee Miller, 'BOB' is, in many ways, the perfect undertaking for her particular talents, requiring a high degree of artistic collaboration with her cast (one of Miller's strong suits), while also demanding a strong artistic eye. Miller accomplishes this, allowing the whole mechanism to feel as if it might go off the rails at any minute, brilliantly enhancing the sense of dangerous improvisation that is etched into the script.
In other words, 'BOB' is a wild ride.
Born in the restroom of a White Castle in the American South, Bob — played from birth to old age by Mark Bradbury — is promptly abandoned by his mother, then unofficially adopted by a waitress at the restaurant. In the first of five eventful acts, Bob names himself, travels to country with his adopted mom, grows into adolescence, learns a pop-cultural encyclopedia of random historical and sociological facts, and sets his sights on the goal that will determine the course of his life: to somehow become a "great man." As Bob grows up, essentially homeless, but driven by an optimism so pure it can be tasted in his kisses, he encounters and reencounters a bizarre parade of American stereotypes—good, bad, and otherwise.
Bob’s epic, cross-country, decade-hopping life story is illustrated and narrated by a chorus of actors played with jaw-dropping elasticity by Laura Levin, Gina Alvarado, Sam Coughlin and Nick Sholley. Frequently beginning with the line, "It is said, that . . ." the storytellers work wonders, together and apart, roaming the pleasingly spare blank-canvass of a stage as they change voices, postures and costumes to become the numerous outrageous characters—and a number of animals and inanimate objects as well—whom Bob encounters as he pursues his dream, suffers a broken heart, loses his way, and finds it again in the most unexpected of places.
Between each act, one member of the chorus performs a dance, exploring different themes such as hardship, hope, love, and luck.
To reveal more would be to spoil an array of offbeat surprises.
There is, to say the least, a lot going on in ‘BOB,’ much of which rests on the shoulders of Bradbury, who perfectly embodies the character’s boyish openness. Not everything in Nachtrieb’s ambitious script works, and though it happens rarely, some of the cast’s choices seem to treat certain revelations as punchlines rather than life-altering discoveries.
But on the whole, ‘Bob’ is a thing of loose-limbed wonder and beauty, a wacky journey across a surreal landscape that will leave you with plenty to ponder and respond to, long after Bob finally learns what it really means to be great.
Bob: A Life in Five Acts, runs Thursday-Sunday through May 22 at Main Stage West. www.mainstagewest.com.
One recently-opened Bay Area stage show takes place under the Sea, where fish creatures dwell, another takes place on the Sea, where dangerous men scheme and battle for buried gold. One show features fish on roller skates; the other presents pirates and parrots. Both have singing and dancing—though only one is a musical.
One is in Berkeley. One’s in Rohnert Park.
One is Disney’s ‘The little Mermaid.’ The other is a brand new adaptation of ‘Treasure Island.’
Both are well worth a voyage to the theater.
First, let’s talk about ‘Treasure Island.’
Writer-director Mary Zimmerman’s richly reimagined action adventure—adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s beloved novel—is visually inventive and surprisingly emotional.
And it rocks.
Literally.
As presented at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, in Berkeley, the show employs a stunningly well-engineered stage that—during scenes where the characters take to the open sea—actually rocks, swinging back-and-forth from side to side like a pirate ship rolling on the ocean.
That is just one of many eye-popping delights that await, as director Zimmerman launches a wildly unexpected, subversively psychological adaptation that might skimp a bit on the sword-fighting and swashbuckling, but makes up for it with beauty, pathos and rich human comedy.
Now, there’s no doubt that Treasure Island is a good book, but it would be hard to make the case that it is a very deep book—despite the fathomless depths of fondness many, including me, still feel for it. It’s a great story, but not exactly packed with psychological insight.
That’s why it’s such a surprise that Zimmerman has so deftly managed to turn the tale into something so humanely perceptive and emotionally rewarding. Packed with poetic touches—including a an odd but effective bit of dreamy piratical ballet—this rollicking interpretation is stirring and fun, achingly lovely, frequently sweet, occasionally a bit weird, and a tad upsetting.
Which is to say that, for a story about ships and pirates, with a set that swings into the action, it’s practically perfect.
Meanwhile, in Spreckels Theater Company’s splashy new production of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, colorful costumed fish on wheels appear to swim across the stage. Seagulls fly and mermaids frolic, huge waves splash and crash, octopus women grow to six times their normal size, while six-foot strands of seaweed bob and wiggle in time to the music, thanks to dancers dressed up in seaweed suits.
It is, in a word, dazzling.
But of all the special effects unfurled in Spreckels elaborate production, directed with charm and energy by Gene Abravaya, the most impressive is the strong-voiced, agile and energetic cast. Led by Julianne Thompson Bretan as the adventurous title character, Ariel, with memorable turns by Mary Gannon Graham as the villainous sea-witch Ursula and Fernando Sui as Flounder, Ariel’s BFF (that’s “best fish friend”), the show is made colorful and clever by the costumes and set pieces, but succeeds on an emotional level primarily due to the delightfully cartoonish, occasionally quite moving performances.
Despite some glaring script flaws, an over-stuffed score and a confusing, undercooked climax, this Mermaid still delivers a level of onstage dazzle-dazzle that is pretty much unmatched in ambition and spectacle by any other local stage musical in recent memory.
‘Treasure Island’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through June 17 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, www.berkeleyrep.org. ‘Disney’s The Little Mermaid’ runs through May 22 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, www.spreckelsonline.com.
For several years, the lack of strong roles for women has been the talk of the theater world, lighting up blogs and theater-related websites. With the problem so prominently under discussion these days, Santa Rosa Junior College's currently running production of William Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night' is eye-opening, to say the least.
Marking the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death, the show employs what it's calling an "original practices” approach.
Original practices?
For one thing, the set by Peter Crompton resembles that of a traditional Elizabethan theater. The lighting is a clever approximation of candlelight, with massive chandeliers that are carefully "lit" by stagehands before the show, then hoisted to dangle up over the stage. Maryanne Scozzari’s sumptuous costumes are carefully authentic, beautifully representative of what actors would have been wearing in Shakespeare's day.
But the boldest of all is the casting.
As was the practice during Shakespeare's day, when it was illegal for women to perform on stage, all of the roles—including the characters of Viola, Olivia, and Mariah—are played by men. When they play men, they dress as men, but when they play women, it’s all about corsets and bum rolls and wigs.
Okay. Alright. Such stuff might have been the norm four centuries ago, but can it work today?
It can, and it does. Brilliantly.
With a smart, pace-perfect style that’s both funny and ferocious, director Leslie McCauley capably transcends the usual pitfalls of "stunt casting," employing a committed and perceptive cast, all engaged in an inspired dramaturgical treasure hunt for the countless buried gags and inside jokes that Shakespeare—working under the constraints and limitations of 16th century theater—so carefully and cleverly embedded in his script. In so doing, McCauley and her SRJC team of actors and technicians have uncovered comedic gems and pleasant surprises that most other productions, in their quest for updated relevance, usually miss entirely.
The story, of course, is all about artifice leading to deeper truth.
Following a shipwreck that drowned most of the crew and passengers, the grieving survivor Viola, played with straightforward seriousness by Matt Heredia, disguises herself as a young man named Cesario and presents herself as a servant to the local Count Orsino (Evan Held), who’s lovesick and pining for the lovely Lady Olivia, played marvelously by Kot Takehashi, who sensitively moves Olivia from a state of mourning over the recent loss of her father and brother, into a loopy state of over-the-moon ecstasy as she finds herself falling for Cesario, who of course, is actually Viola in boy drag.
Adding to the madness are subplots involving butlers, fools, drunken knights, conniving maids, and the inevitable eventual arrival of Sebastian, Viola’s presumed-drowned identical brother.
The entire cast is strong, playing the ludicrousness of the story without losing the essential realness and humanity of the characters—regardless of what those characters are wearing.
Sweet, inventive and a constant delight, SRJC’s ‘Twelfth Night’ might push a few buttons, but it will definitely spark some modern conversation about the need for better opportunities for female artists.
This, in and of itself, makes the show worth seeing.
That the show turns out to be so genuinely entertaining, is all the more reason to buy a ticket.
‘Twelfth Night’ runs through May 8 at Burbank Auditorium, on the JC campus. Visit theatrearts.santarosa.edu for tickets and information.
Anne Boleyn lost her head.
Everyone knows that.
Little else is known about the infamously short-lived second wife of King Henry VIII. Largely because her husband all but erased her memory from the history books, scraping her name from all monuments, burning her pictures, making it a crime to speak her name aloud—all of which, of course, came after he had her head chopped off.
In Howard Brenton’s perceptive and audacious comedy-drama ‘Anne Boleyn’—running through May 7th at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley—the award-winning author indulges his own meticulously researched speculations about ‘Anne Boleyn’s’ life, resulting in an intelligent, funny, and probably not all that historically accurate collision of sex, politics and religion.
Directed with confidence and creativity by Jasson Minadakis, Brenton’s play fills in the missing bits of history with gutsy glee and a perceptive understanding of how politics and religion work.
It’s fun, too.In the opening scene, Anne Boleyn’s ghost appears, bloody but unbowed, clutching a bag we assume contains her severed head.
“You want to see it?” she asks the audience.
You bet we do.
What happens next, though, is a bit of a surprise, a good one, and it’s just the first of many in Brenton’s clever, intelligent tale of blood, sex, and faith, as Anne Boleyn returns from the dead to tell her side of the story.
Bouncing between the16th century court of King Henry VIII and that of the 17th Century King James I (both played brilliantly by Craig Marker), the play eventually suggests that the world might not have ended up with the King James Bible, had not a deeply religious Boleyn strategically employed her sexual charms to force a break between her king and the Catholic Pope.
Thus did one of history’s most notorious home-wreckers purposefully pave the way for the Protestant reformation—of which she was a kind to freelance secret agent—which was subsequently allowed to gain a foothold in a staunchly Catholic England.
Unable to provide a male heir to the King, Boleyn’s machinations eventually make enough enemies that, well, her head’s removed. Oops. But not before giving birth to Elizabeth, who will eventually succeed her father on the throne, and will eventually be succeeded herself by James of Scotland.
Did I mention there’s a lot of historical detail?
In the King James parts of the story, having discovered Boleyn’s secretly hidden and thoroughly forbidden Protestant Bible, King James hits on a way to unify his fractured kingdom, by commissioning a new translation of the word of God, a Bible that will ultimately bear his own name.
It’s a bit thick with information, yes, and there are a number of lengthy conversation about the meaning of variation scriptures, but Minadakis is masterful at keeping the story clipping along and not forgetting that, we the audience, want to see lots of sex and slinky stuff along with the bits about the Bible.
As Anne, Liz Sklar is magnificent, playing so many spot-on emotional notes you’d think she was auditioning for the symphony instead of giving the performance of her career. Aided by a jaw dropping set by Nina Ball and era-blurring fashions by Ashley Holvick, the large cast, able and energetic, swaps costumes and characters almost as frequently as Henry swapped wives.
‘Anne Boleyn’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through May 8 at Marin Theatre Company. Marintheater.org.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
When is a play not a play?
When it’s a concert.
Because concerts have no plots, and plays have plots
That’s the argument some have made against the recent rise of so-called “Juke box musicals,” shows that are basically just a catalog of songs from a specific artist, time period, or style. Now, to be sure, there are good Juke box musicals and what separates those from bad jukebox musicals is, yes, a sense of plot, but also the presence of strong characters we actually care about. That’s something, I would argue, that is even more important than plot.
Which brings me to ‘The Andrews Brothers,’ now running at the Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa.
Essentially a two act playlist of songs made popular by the 1940’s pop trio The Andrews Sisters, the show—directed with an obvious love of the Three Stooges by Barry Martin, Heather Buck and Scottie Woodard—would fail as a play were it not for the well-wrought character work of the cast.
It’s 1945, somewhere in the South Pacific, hours before a USO show featuring the famous Andrews Sisters. Three brothers, Max, Lawrence, and Patrick—all also named Andrews—are in a panic. They are the stagehands for the local USO unit, though they long for a chance to show off their own singing skills. The opening act, an American pin-up girl named Peggy Jones, needs three male backup singers, and the boys have boldly decided that they will do the job, if they don’t get fired first.
Matt Davis, Scottie Woodard, and Adam Blankenship are charming as the bumbling brothers, and as Peggy, Andrea Dennison-Laufer, is the perfect blend of bombshell and sweetheart.
She not only does not have the brothers fired, she forms an instant crush on one of them. The first act is the rehearsal, as the foursome sing their way through wartime hits like Rosie the Riveter, Cuanto Le Gusta, On a Slow Boat to China, and Accentuate the Positive. Just when it looks like the boys might learn the steps in time to open for the Andrews Sisters, they learn that the main act has the chicken pox, and the show is canceled.
Which is when Peggy decides to dress up the Andrews Brothers AS the Andrews Sisters. And what happens next is the second act, a USO drag show, with outrageous physical comedy, accented by songs from the Andrews Sisters greatest hits, from Shoo Shoo Baby and Three Little Sisters to Six Jerks in a Jeep, At the Canteen, and Stuff Like that There.
That’s the plot, such as it is.
And it works, especially in the second act, where so much giddy goofiness is rolled out, and where the cast is having so much obvious fun, it can’t help but be contagious.
The set by Brian Watson is simple but effective, and includes some delightful roll-out embellishments, the costumes by Barbara McFadden are fabulous, and the lighting design by April George is crisp and clean. The band, under the direction of Craig Burdette, keep things popping, and with a total of 25 songs to accompany in under two hours, they certainly work hard in their tiny crawlspace above the stage.
The Andrews Brothers might not be much of a play, and lets face it, doesn’t really tell all that much of a story, but it does have characters we instantly root for, and that’s plenty to carry the playlist through to the final, surprisingly satisfying, song.
The Andrews Brothers runs through May 1st at Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa. Luckypennynapa.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Two plays based on real happenings from the first half of the twentieth century have recently opened in the North Bay. One is new, the work of an up-and-coming young playwright from San Francisco. The other is an American classic. Each production is worthy of attention.
At 6th Street Playhouse, in Santa Rosa, Lauren Gunderson’s enthralling and lovely Silent Sky tells the story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, a pioneering astronomer whose passion for the stars put her at odds with her devout sister and the male-dominated scientific community within which she worked at Harvard University. Henrietta Leavitt lived from the mid 1800’s to the early 1920s. The play focuses on her years at Harvard.
As a “computer” – the name given to female clerks responsible for charting the skies— Leavitt initially bristles to learn that the male professors will get credit for any discoveries made by her and the other “computers.” Eventually, despite the confusing attentions of her male supervisor, Leavitt defies authority in studying a star pattern that might actually contain a clue to the size and scope of the universe.
As Henrietta, Jessica Headington is wonderful, a blend of the smart and the sweet. Juliet Noonan plays her sister Margaret, and an effectively stiff and quirky Devin McConnell plays Peter. As the two other “computers,” Willamina and Annie, Laura J. Davies and Maureen Studer are a hoot.
Directed with affection and humor by Lennie Dean, Gunderson’s prose is lean, inventive, and captivating, turning the language of science into the stuff of pure poetry. An impressive light design by April George adds to the magic, from the dangling antique light bulbs that stand in for stars, up to the stunning final effect that puts the audience at the center of the universe. The play is not without a few flaws. Its pace slacks in act two, and there are a few moments throughout when the emotion feels forced rather than natural, but on the whole, Silent Sky is a thing of beauty as luminous as the stars its heroine longed so deeply to understand.
Moving on to Healdsburg, and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, the legendary playwright’s his first critical hit. It’s not an easy show to pull off, but Miller’s ingeniously unfolding post-WWII drama gets a solid, emotionally truthful production courtesy of director Carl Hamilton and the Raven Players.
The story is based on an actual event that took place during and after the war. Aging manufacturer Joe Keller (played quite well by Steve Thorpe) lost his youngest son, Larry, in the war. But because the body was never recovered, his wife Kate (an appealingly raw Rebecca Allington) still believes he’s alive. When Joe’s other son Chris (Jeremy Boucher, who is excellent) reveals that he plans to marry Ann (Angela Squire), who was once engaged to Larry, the stage is set for a family conflict with far more at stake than anyone knows. The drama builds as layers of secret and lies are gradually peeled back, exposing wounds and deceptions that threaten to tear the family apart. Though less popular than Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ and ‘The Crucible,’ ‘All My Sons’ stands as one of the playwright’s most accessible and affecting stories.
The Raven Production is flawed, slightly, by casting that puts certain actors in roles too old or too young for them. But with Hamilton’s fine direction, an impressive set by Darius Hamilton and some equally impressive light design by Robin DeLuca, along with the generally outstanding acting of the cast, this adds up to a rich and deeply powerful experience, with an emotional impact that does not soon fade away.
'Silent Sky’ runs Thursday–Sunday through April 17 in the Studio at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com.
All My Sons’ runs Friday–Sunday through April 24 in the Studio at the Raven Performing Arts Center. www.raventheater.org
War is not just about bombs and bullets and blood.
It’s also about politics and position and power.
Playwright Donald Margulies is not particularly interested in either the politics of war or the gory details of modern warfare. From his Pulitzer nominated play ‘Collected Stories’ to his Pulitzer-winning play ‘The Dinner Party,’ Margulies has always been interested in relationships, and the way extraordinary circumstance force people to peel away the beliefs and desires and secrets and lies around which their lives become wrapped.
That is exactly what happens, brilliantly, in Margulies’ flawlessly observed comedy-drama Time Stands Still, running now at Cinnabar Theater. The achingly authentic adrenaline-junkies at the center of the play are very much interested in the politics and power of war, though to Sarah and Jamie, it’s much more than just a profession. It’s their reason for living—until a series of horrific events in a war-ravaged country returns them both to the states, one scarred mentally, one only physically.
Photographer Sarah has only narrowly survived a car bombing in Iraq, an event that left her in a coma for several weeks. Her longtime journalist boyfriend Jamie (John Browning, also excellent) would have been with her, had he not suffered a war-stress breakdown and returned home alone several weeks before the explosion. As Sarah, Laura Lowry is excellent, balancing brittle fragility against steely resolve. Browning, for his part, portrays Jamie’s post-traumatic trauma with a nicely subdued sensitivity, instantly telling us that in witnessing one-too-many horrors, Jamie’s war addiction may have just been given exactly the right intervention it needed.
But as he forcefully works to leave the battlefield behind—all but ignoring the book he’s agreed to write to accompany Sarah’s wartime photographs–Sarah, quite clearly, cannot wait to get back into harm’s way. Feeling caged by her own wounds, smothering under Jamie’s loving but stifling care, she struggles hard to regain a sense of normalcy in a world of polite conversation, dinner parties, theater performances—and the absence of constant physical danger. Adding further complications to the relationship with Jamie is her guilt over the death of Tariq, the America-loving Iraqi interpreter who died in the roadside bombing that almost killed her.
Siding with Jamie is the couple’s friend-and-editor Richard—a spot-on John Shillington—and his much-younger new girlfriend Mandy, played by Ivy Rose Miller, who is brilliantly layered and full of surprises. Initially, Jamie and Sarah cannot understand what Richard sees in the chipper young event planner. Sheltered, but hardly lacking in grit, Mandy brings an outside perspective to that subtly but powerful alters the way these hardened professionals look at war, and their own participation in it.
Director Sheri Lee Miller skillfully and gracefully guides the story forward with an emphasis on emotional authenticity, gradually building tension, and believable connections between her characters. Packed with gradual revelations and delightfully acerbic observations, supported by first-rate lighting, sound and set design, Time Stands Still is a remarkable, breathlessly beautiful achievement, as hopeful and healing as it is heartbreaking, intelligent and wise.
‘Time Stands Still ’ runs through April 17 at Cinnabar Theater, www.cinnabartheater.org
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB
As theatergoers, we occasionally attend plays we never previously liked, and end up changing our minds by the end. Maybe the acting and directing somehow assist the script in transcending its limitations, altering the show to make some powerful social statement, finding some new way to show us something we’d not noticed in previous productions.
For me, Yazmina Reza’s acclaimed dark comedy God of Carnage has always been such a play. I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it, and its 2009 Tony award for Best Play continues to perplex me. Still, I am quite willing, eager even, to be proved wrong. As a theater writer, and a theater fan, nothing is more exciting than being proved wrong.
Which brings us to Left Edge Theater’s rambunctious new staging at Luther Burbank Center. Unfortunately—though I did enjoy a number of things about the production—its intermittent pleasures were not enough to change my view that Reza’s satirical stab at modern social relationships is poorly constructed, lacking in true insight, and ugly to a fault. And no, graphic onstage vomiting—though entertaining in a way, and very well done here—does not qualify as a social statement.
Though it is pretty funny.
The idea of the play certainly has merit. Two pairs of suburban parents meet to discuss a playground scuffle between their two eleven-year-old sons. After initial attempts at civility, the convivial conversation quickly devolves into caustic verbal attacks, vitriolic blame slinging, blatant displays of marital discord, some abusive treatment of inanimate objects, and general drunken mayhem. The point, such as it is, is that civilization is a fairly weak and flimsy construct. Though we have become domesticated by the artificial constraints of society, we are all just one step away from the kind of brutal behavior that defined our warring, primitive ancestors.
That’s hardly a fresh message. From ‘Lord of the Flies’ to ‘The Hunger Games,’ the subject has been pretty fully excavated. Heck, anyone who watches a Donald Trump speech might come to the same conclusion. That’s all right, in and of itself. Theater and literature repackage old messages all the time. The goal, though—one would hope—is to do it in a way that is fresh and clever, or at the very least, fun to watch.
As the parents of the young victim, Ron Severdia and Melissa Claire exude varying levels of passive-aggressive hostility from the get-go. Heather Gordon and Nick Sholley, the parents of the attacker, convey palpably miserable frustration. Overall, despite their efforts, the script does not allow these characters any of the likability necessary for audiences to identity with these people, a vital factor in effective satire.
Under Argo Thompson’s lean, unfussy direction, the four-actor cast clearly works hard to keep things light, playing their characters’ essential repugnance slightly over the top, straining hard to make the most of the jokes Reza has buried in her script’s quicksand of verbal meanness. But there are few real opportunities for levity here, and despite a few inspired moments of physical comedy—including the aforementioned vomiting scene and its messy aftermath—all that’s left for the actors is to illuminate the moments of dark humor in the dialogue.
Thompson’s direction does bring a bit of a fresh perspective to the material, depicting the characters’ abrupt slide into bad behavior, not as a shocking surrender to primal savagery—as portrayed in other productions—but as a goofy, tantrum-tossing, sulking-and-pouting eruption of childishness. That’s a smart directorial choice, but it’s just not enough to balance out the bland cynicism of Reza’s viewpoint, or to change my mind that God of Carnage, even when reasonably well done, has worse problems than not being very funny.
Sadly, it’s just not that good of a play.
‘God of Carnage” runs Fridays and Saturdays through April 2, at Luther Burbank Center. Details at www.leftedgetheater.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB
I am, in a moment, going to talk about spelling, as in spelling bees, as in ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,’ a musical that is currently running in two different productions in the North Bay. But first, let me delve further into the disciplines of vocabulary with a few stage-related definitions.
I’d like to start with the word, “Ensemble.”
E-N-S-E-M-B-L-E.
“Ensemble.”
It’s one of those confusing theatrical words that can mean two different things. Often used to describe the supporting members of a cast – those nearly-nameless people singing and dancing somewhere behind the lead actors – the word “ensemble” also refers to a type of show, a show in which the entire cast has more-or-less equal responsibility in creating the world in which the story takes place. These are sometimes referred to as “ensemble pieces.”
“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” running through April 2nd at the Belrose Theater in San Rafael, and through this Sunday, March 20th, at the Sonoma Community Center, in Sonoma, is one of two such “ensemble pieces” that recently opened in the North Bay.
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the Marin version, is presented by Marin Onstage, directed with conspicuous glee by Pat Nims. The show features a committed, though somewhat unevenly matched cast, several of them playing adorably misfit middle school spelling competitors, which is additionally interesting since all of the actors are adults. Aided by some clever audience participation, the show plays out like “The Hunger Games” crossed with “Revenge of the Nerds.”
Only funnier, and definitely sweeter, but also with some serious edge, and a bit of PG-13-related material, just for fun.
Standouts, in the nine-actor San Rafael Cast, include Arielle Mandelberg as the lonely dictionary-loving Olive Ostrovsky, Peter Carroll as the clueless, cape-wearing Leaf Coneybear, and, despite a struggle against one-note interpretations and a few unfortunate lost opportunities, John Griffin, whose charm wins out as the lugubrious, hilariously eccentric William Barfee (he pronounces it bar-fay.)
There is actual spelling in this spelling bee, so be prepared, because you might be asked to participate. It’s all good, goofy fun, a bit uneven musically, and with a number of slightly clunky rough spots, but its all done with an infectious energy that literally pulls the audience—the volunteer spellers, anyway—into the warmth of its giddy, slightly skewed, entirely life affirming embrace.
The Sonoma version, presented by the Teens ‘N Training program at Sonoma Arts Live, uses a teenage cast, and has altered the proceedings so that the main characters are now girls instead of boys. The young cast performs with a sense of wild abandon and breathless commitment. It’s good loopy fun, and some of the more salacious material has been toned down.
Give this ensemble piece a solid PG.
Which brings us to the next vocabulary word, “Community,” as in “Community theater,” defined as theatrical performance created from, performed within, and staged for the benefit of the artists’ communities. Sometimes that means kids playing adults, and sometimes it’s adults playing kids, but it always means the community is the most important part, and that means the audience, which in this case is spelled Y-O-U.
There are many ways you can support your community, and checking the shows they are producing is one especially enjoyable one.
Check it out.
‘25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’ runs Fridays and Saturdays through April 2 at Belrose Theater, info at marinonstage.org. and the Teens ‘N Training version runs Friday-to-Sunday through March 20th at Sonoma Community Center, info at sonomaartslive.org.
Many playwrights strive to create poetry on stage, hoping to put such elegant words in the mouths of their characters that audiences will sit stunned and shaken, transported from their seats to some new world. If only all playwrights began as poets—as did San Francisco’s Marisela Treviño Orta—then all of our stages would be singing with poetry as beautiful as that in Orta’s rich fairytale ‘The River Bride,’ which just opened a five-month run at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. The festival, which runs annually from February to November, always begins in the Spring with four shows, gradually adding new ones. The openers this time are Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night,’ Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Yeomen of the Guard,’ Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations,’ and ‘The River Bride.’
I’ll discuss the first three in my next broadcast.
Easily the best of a strong batch, ‘The River Bride’ was first staged in San Rafael in 2014, part of the AlterLab new play development program sponsored by Marin County’s AlterTheater Ensemble. Originally co-directed by Ann Brebner and Jeanette Harrison, that early production was elegantly simple, using only a few wooden blocks as set pieces. In Ashland, Orta’s slinky, sexy blend of Brazilian river mythology and Grimm’s fairytales has now been given a magical, deceptively high-tech makeover by director Laurie Woolery, working with a stellar cast and a first-rate team of visual artists. Woolery fills her stage with gorgeous images, each scene a poem in its own right, a stunning collage of sight, sound, words and emotion.
Fortunately, such bedazzlements never distract from the story, or from the incandescent heart of Orta’s indelible characters.
Just three days before the wedding of 16-year-old Belmira and the local fisherman Duarte, the bride’s older sister Helena is doing her best to hide her own broken heart, having loved Duarte since childhood. During a stormy day of fishing, complete with raging thunder and mysterious pink lightning, Duarte and the sisters’ goodhearted father Senhor Costa haul up a well-dressed, unconscious stranger in their fishing nets.
Initially suspicious, Senhora Costa soon welcomes the soft-spoken newcomer, who gives his name as Moises, and almost immediately forms a bond with the cautious, but gradually love-struck, Helena.
As Helena, Nancy Rodriguez, is spectacular, revealing layer upon layer of hidden emotion. Armando McClain, who as Moises makes an art of enigmatically smoldering, is quite good in a part that less expert actors might have played too extravagantly. Jamie Ann Romero is excellent in the tricky part of Belmira, managing to be both innocent and selfishly devious, and as Duarte, Carlo Alban is all coiled intensity and molten jealousy. Triney Sandoval is delightful as Senhor Costa, and Vilma Silva, as Senhora Costa, is perfect, playing as many shades of motherly love as there are strings on a guitar.
What happens next takes place in a world of grounded fantasy and stylized realism. On the Amazon, there are legends of trickster porpoises, which for three days in June take the form of human men, looking for love amongst those who dwell on the land. That myth eventually overlaps the lives of Orta’s characters in powerful ways, as Moises’ courtship of Helena stirs up deep and forbidden passions.
As in all fairytales, the ending involves the breaking of curse, but with a poetic and heart-stopping twist, just one of many satisfying pleasures Orta serves up in this transcendent, one-of-a-kind masterpiece.
‘The River Bride’ runs in repertory with ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Great Expectations,’ and others, Tuesday through Sunday, in the Angus Bowmer Theater at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland, Oregon. For information on this and ten other shows opening throughout the year, www.osfashland.org has all the details.
In author-playwright Mary Spletter’s world premiere, Arches, Balance and Light, the East Bay playwright takes on a difficult, if not impossible, task—telling the personal behind-the-scenes life story of the legendary Julia Morgan, California’s first license female architect.
Why is that so impossible?
Well, though much is known of Morgan’s professional career and long list of accomplishments—including the design of Hearst Castle and over 700 others—almost nothing is known of Morgan’s real personal life. She stands amongst history’s most notoriously secretive and private people. It hasn’t stopped others from trying. A few years ago, playwright Belinda Taylor brought out her own attempt, the well-received “Becoming Julia Morgan,” which managed to stitch the bare facts of Morgan’s life into a captivating adventure tale, while avoiding speculation on its subject’s private life, loves and rumored secret scandals. Spletter takes a very different approach. In her somewhat convoluted play-within-a-play-within-a-play, now running at Ross Valley Players, Spletter has blended snippets of solid, historical reality with a kind of juicy, fanciful “fan fiction,” making up from whole cloth a series of possible explanations for Morgan’s deeply private demeanor, all of which results in an entertaining if somewhat shaggy-doggish fantasy romance that is rich with emotion, but absent the kind of ‘Wow! I-Never-Knew-That’ kick that comes from watching actual, fact-driven biography.
That said, what Spletter and director Joe Manley have created, with the contributions of a charming cast, is a delightfully well-constructed bit of theatrical misdirection, though perhaps saddled with a few too many bits of clichéd humor, as in the moment a young Julia Morgan loses her temper and angrily shouts that she never loses her temper. The rest of the script is too clever to deserve moments so hackneyed and silly. Also, and this may just be a matter of taste, I’d suggest the play is perhaps encumbered by one too many “framing devices.”
As the show begins, Julia Morgan’s somewhat prickly spirit—played by an excellent Ellen Brooks—appears on stage alongside a chorus of ghosts, addressing the audience with a quick summary of her life, followed by the “memory” of a visit from an elegant young Parisian named Marguerite, played with watchful intensity by Anastasia Bonaccorso. The visitor, we quickly learn, is intent on determining whether or not Julia is her mother. In response, Julia—aided by those spirits—describes her early days as a young student in Paris in the late 1800s, her younger self played with plucky charm, and considerable guts, by Zoe Swenson Graham, who stepped into the role just three days before opening. Initially denied entrance to a prestigious French architecture school, the determined Julia finds an enemy in the old-fashioned University director played with austere harumphery by John Simpson), while finding a friend and mentor in Victor, the amiable middle-aged teacher who sees Julia’s potential as a designer, and possibly a bit more. Victor is played with openhearted charm by Robin Schild.
Revealing anything else that happens would spoil the surprises, of which there are many.
As already stated, it is unlikely that any of what unfolds actually happened, of course. But around the edges of Spletter’s pleasantly quirky drama—basically a love story, wrapped in a mystery, disguised as a memory—the writer’s obvious admiration for Julia Morgan’s remarkable legacy is brought to vivid, infectious life.
‘Arches, Balance and Light’ runs Thursday–Sunday through March 6 at Ross Valley Players.
www.rossvalleyplayers.com
Last year, Spreckels Theater Company staged an unconventional revival of Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘Carousel,’ a play many have heard of but few have ever actually seen. Eschewing complex sets, shoreline scenery—and, you know, an actual carousel—director Gene Abravaya inverted the whole concept, hauling the orchestra up from the pit, and letting the show unfold in front and around the musicians, in what was advertised as a “staged concert.” The production was a solid success, though—it being described as a concert—there were some audience members who showed up expecting actors in suits standing before microphones, singing the show from sheet music propped up on metal music stands. They did not expect a fully staged musical, presented with costumes and characters and choreography and even actual, if somewhat minimal, sets. Stripped down as it was, the result was intimate, satisfying and strangely magical.
This year, Abravaya is trying to make similar magic, with another “staged concert” of a little known musical, this time taking on the rarely-performed, Arabian-tale-themed 1953 romance ‘Kismet.’ Set in ancient Bagdad during the time of poet Omar Kayam—he of the ‘Rubiyat,” the “moving finger writing,” and the “jug of wine, loaf of bread and thou”—‘Kismet’ blends original songs by Robert Wright and George Forest with reworked pieces by the 19th century Russian composer Alexander Borodin. The composer’s 1890 opera Prince Igor has been resurrected, and largely rewritten for ‘Kismet,’ with a new story and wholly original lyrics layered atop Borodin’s sweeping melodies.
Kismet’s shaggy-doggish story, based on a non-musical stage play of the same name from 1911, follows a poor poet played by Tim Setzer with charming, spot-on perfection. Seeking a few coins with which to buy a meal, the poet arrives in Bagdad with his daughter Marsinah—an electrifyingly good Carmen Mitchell—accidentally timing their visit just as the royal Caliph—a somewhat stiff but gorgeously voiced Jacob Bronson—is reluctantly shopping for a princess, the various candidates arriving from surrounding kingdoms by the score.
The poet, almost immediately arrested for a petty crime, attempts to save himself from a harsh punishment by passing himself off as a wizard to Bagdad’s stern, law-enforcing Wazir, played by Harry Duke, in a hilarious and richly entertaining performance that is simultaneously wacky and unsettling. At the same time, the poet launches a reckless affair with the Wazir’s primary wife LaLume, played by Brenda Reed, managing to be both sexy and a little bit scary all at once.
Meanwhile, Marsinah, the poet’s daughter, accidentally meets the Caliph, who, for various reasons, assumes she’s a visiting princess, while she assumes that he’s a gardener. They fall in love to the aching strains of the show’s most recognizable tune, Stranger in Paradise, setting up a series of events that become frequently tangled, and quite a bit silly, right up until the story’s slightly shocking climax.
There’s a lot going on, but ultimately, Kismet still turns out to be not much of a play, with a dated premise, thin characters and a preposterous plot, plus some outrageously nonsensical dialogue.
Still, the cast is uniformly splendid—and as directed by Abravaya with sweet simplicity and an emphasis on the lovely but rarely memorable music—there is a bit of welcome sorcery on display at all times, bringing this lost artifact from the Golden Days of Broadway back to life with plenty of warmth, color, contagious enthusiasm and genuine love.
'Kismet' runs Thursday–Sunday through February 28 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. www.spreckelsonline.com
The Nobel-prize winning novelist Edith Wharton once wrote, “There are two ways of spreading light—to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Mirrors—and candles, too—are both the set dressing and driving metaphor in two recently opened plays, stories in which indelible women stand center-stage to take a good hard look at their world, their choices, and their own naked souls. One was written in the 1970s in South Africa, the other just a few years ago in New York City. Beyond the shows’ mutual use of mirrors, and the fact that the central characters are women, they have little in common, other than this: if you get a chance, you should really try to see them both.
The first, set in a tiny South African community in 1974, is Athol Fugard’s three-actor drama The Road to Mecca—now running at Main Stage West. The play was inspired by the life of artist Helen Martins, though Fugard’s script takes fictional flights of fancy as mystical and inventive as the cement sculptures of owls and camels and elongated wisemen that Martins fashioned and surrounded her tiny rural house with.
Martins, played with bone-weary specificity by Laura Jorgenson, is a lapsed Christian, once driven by the need to create, now trapped in a difficult space, intensely feeling the encroaching darkness she once fought by filling her yard with strangely beautiful creatures. She crams the interior of her house with mirrors, mosaics and hundreds of candles. Frail and uncertain, Helen seriously considers leaving her house and moving to a church-run retirement home, a move that is strongly supported by her one-time minister, Marius, played by John Craven. Marius has secretly loved Helen for years, despite her frightening displays of pagan art making, and worries for her safety as she grows older, also worrying deeply about the state of her soul. Opposing her move from the house is Martin’s schoolteacher friend Elsa, Ilana Niernberger, a strong supporter of Martin and a fierce opponent of the church. Elsa has just arrived from the city in a state of deep sadness and barely controlled rage and heartbreak, the reasons for which take most of the play to reveal themselves.
The resulting three-way showdown comes in gradually building waves leading to an affecting, fiercely hard-won moment of awareness and self-resolution. The set, with it’s mirrors, mosaics and suggestions of sculptures, was designed by director Elizabeth Craven and David Lear, and it’s a marvel, as much a character as everyone else in this powerful play, a marvelous, thoughtful, deeply complex and human examination of the power of light, outside and in.
Mirrors are equally prominent in Theresa Rebeck’s one-woman comedy-drama Bad Dates, now running at Cinnabar Theater. Starring Jennifer King, and directed by Molly Noble, this is a ferociously funny rollercoaster of a show, about a hard-working New York restaurant manager and single-mother named Hayley, who tells her story as she prepares herself for a series of dates, few of which turn out the way she hopes.
Observing her reflection as she tries on an array of outfits, King’s marvelously performed “long-night of the soul” includes hilarious descriptions of each date-gone-wrong, and much more. As Hayley tells the story—which in the second act takes us to some truly surprising and unexpected places—she gradually realizes that finding a person to love won’t happen until she finally figures out what she really wants, and who she really is.
‘Road to Mecca’ runs Thursday–Sunday, through February 21 at Main Stage West. Mainstagewest.com.
‘Bad Dates’ runs through February 21 at Cinnabar Theater, cinnabartheater.org
Short plays aren’t easy.
Like a haiku, you have to say a lot with a little.
Because of that, it’s easy for a short play to come off less like a full play in miniature, and more like a campfire skit at summer camp.
Still, because they are condensed, when they are done well, the emotions they convey can be they can be impressively rich, like the thick sweet jam left from a kettle of fruit, intense and delicious and a little bit bigger-than-usual.
So when the short play is a comedy, the result, in a well-written, well-acted, well-directed short play, can be absolutely hilarious.
With Valentine’s Day looming, two local theater companies are offering separate showcases of quick, comedic plays, fast and furious, all written in the loopy language of love.
In the intimate Studio Theater at 6th Street Playhouse, From Russia With Love is a high-spirited assemblage of shorts by Russian author Anton Chekhov, better known for his tragic plays ‘The Cherry Orchard and ‘Uncle Vanya.’ Anchored by two classics of the short-form comic romance—‘The Bear’ and ‘The Marriage Proposal’—the show elegantly intertwines the text of real love letters from Chekhov—played with humor and cagey coy flirtation by Adam Palafox—to his distant wife Olga (Yelena Segal). The letters add an unexpected dose of tender, heart-warming emotion to the whole show.
The Bear, directed by Eyan Dean, gives us a grief-stricken widow (Taylor Differnderfer) who swears she’ll never leave her house again, and whose self-indulgent mourning period is rudely interrupted by the intrusion of a gruff, blustery businessman (Ryan Severt), who arrives to collect a debt and ends up falling in love—with disastrous and rather funny results, that include a duel by pistols.
In The Marriage Proposal, directed by Palafox, a wildly hypochondriac landowner (Matt Cadigan) attempts to propose to Natalia (Segal), the daughter of his affable neighbor Stepan (Clark Miller). But before he can manage to propose, he is drawn into a series of petty escalating arguments with his still-unaware intended, who might actually be interested if he’d stop disagreeing with her and propose.
Feisty, physical and farcical in the extreme, these two laugh-inducing bon mots are delivered in a 90-minute package that might make you rethink everything you believed about Chekhov. Evidently, he was a very funny guy, and . . . he sure had a way with a love letter.
SO that’s ‘From Russia With Love.’ Then there’s ‘In Love with the 8X10,’ presented by Lucky Penny Productions, in Napa.
Eight ten-minute shorts culled from over 100 submissions from around the country, these unevenly acted but generally well-written shorts include the twisty tales of a two nerds on a very rocky date (which includes actual rocks), a pair of Labradors discussing the complex etiquette of doggie mating, and a lawyer who brings his fiancée to a shrink to learn small talk, and gets a lesson in true love himself. Directed by Delia Bisconer, Charles Jaeger, and Tony Kelly, the plays run the gamut from gentle and humorous to flat-out over-the-top scandalous wackiness. Think of it as the stage equivalent of those tiny candy conversation hearts—though with a bit more bite beneath all the sugary sweetness.
'From Russia With Love’ runs Thursday–Sunday through Feb. 14 in The Studio at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com.
‘In Love With the 8x10’ runs Thursday–Sunday through February 13 at The Lucky Penny Community Arts Center, www.luckypennynapa.com
Good cop. Bad cop.
It’s a formula so mainstream that it was the basis of a character in the ‘The LEGO Movie,’ where Liam Neeson voiced the dual-personalities of a tiny plastic policeman, named Good Cop-Bad Cop, who was literally two-faced, depending on the situation. Even when kind of disturbing, he was kind of adorable.
There is nothing the least bit adorable—but plenty that is disturbing, unsettling, compelling, and creepy—about Keith Huff’s two-character play ‘A Steady Rain,’ running through February 6 at Wells Fargo Center. Presented by Left Edge Theatre, directed with sharp focus and appealing simplicity by Argo Thompson, the propulsive crime drama takes the corny old clichés about good cops and bad cops, and after gleefully indulging in them to a nearly shameless degree, aggressively and thrillingly disassembles those icons of police force pulp-fiction piece by piece.
Using minimal furniture on an entirely bare stage, Nick Sholley and Mike Schaeffer play two low-level beat cops—lifelong friends, career partners, and frustrated veterans of the force who’ve watched dozens of others be promoted ahead of them, leaving them to patrol the seedy streets of Chicago with little hope of ever landing a better, less dangerous job.
We soon learn why.
Joey, played with a weary, tentative sense of collapsing moral decency by Sholley, is the ‘good cop,’ tall, thin and unmarried, always appearing in a suit and tie, rattling off a series of ah-shucks rationalizations, just tenuously on-the-wagon after years attempting to medicate his own loneliness, depression and guilt with alcohol. Schaeffer, as Denny, the ‘bad cop,’ is, on the surface anyway, the exact opposite of his partner. Big and broad, a bit of a bully, proudly racist and perfectly comfortable with beating up drug dealers, accepting bribes and pay-offs from pimps and prostitutes, all while maintaining his firm belief that he is the good guy, the moral superior to the scum and low-lifes he clearly enjoys pushing around. A fiercely protective husband and father—perhaps not quite as committed or faithful as he wants to believe—Denny constantly pushes Joey to find a woman and start a family of his own.
Then it starts to rain.
And little by little, over the course of a few days, everything Joey and Denny have been building, working for and lying about begins to unravel, beginning with a drive-by shooting that leaves Denny’s son in a coma.
What unfolds, not surprisingly given the playwright’s pedigree as a writer for such shows as ‘American Crime,’ ‘Mad Men,’ and ‘House of Cards,’ is at turns frighteningly funny, edge-of-your-seat tense, and increasingly packed with surprises. Choosing to trust the talents of his magnificent duo of actors, director Thompson avoids cluttering the action with extraneous embellishments. Beyond an atmospheric soundscape of rain, thunder and the occasional car crash or gun shot, Thompson makes the most of the two chairs and single wooden table that act as a set, letting the story, and power of the performances, carry the show.
The writing is superb, crammed with great lines and complex, sometimes astonishing truths, and the story is, in the end, so much more than the simple good-and-bad dynamic is initially appears to be.
By the time the downpour ends, and the thunder stops rumbling, ‘A Steady Rain’ takes its audience on one hell of a ride-along, one sensitive souls might want to miss, but all others will be very glad they took.
‘A Steady Rain’ runs Friday through Sunday through February 6 in the Carston Cabaret at Wells Fargo Center for the Arts. Information can be uncovered at www.leftedgetheatre.org.
The late August Wilson wrote ten plays as part of his celebrated Century Cycle, completing one play for each decade of the twentieth century, all but one of them set in the same neighborhood in Pittsburg, each tackling that decade’s most significant challenges for the African-American families who lived, loved, struggled and eventually died there.
Just attempting such a thing was an undertaking unparalleled in the history of American playwriting, and that the resulting works were uniformly excellent—six of them nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, two of them winning it—is extraordinary.
Which brings us to ‘Gem of the Ocean’—running through February 14 at Marin Theatre Company. Wilson’s penultimate play, ‘Gem of the Ocean’ arrived in 2003, two years before he died of cancer. ‘Gem’ marks the chronological beginning of the ten-play cycle, set as it was in 1904. Throughout Wilson’s previous plays, there was the occasional reference to a woman named Aunt Ester, a kind of spiritual guide and protector whose doors were always open to anyone in need.
‘Gem of the Ocean’ was the play that finally gave us Aunt Ester in all her glory. She was worth the wait. Though set in the early 1900’s, there is a specific timelessness to this play, sewn into the script like the old quilts and collages that Wilson often said were the inspiration for his work. Like all of his works, Gem of the Ocean blends lush historical detail and remarkably well-drawn characters into a plot that unfolds like an old roll of fabric.
In Daniel Alexander Jones’ sometimes baffling, but still emotionally rich staging, Wilson’s engaging script is embellished with a kind of hand-clapping, finger-snapping, sign-language-style choreography that resembles dance, but stops short of having his characters actually burst into ballet or the soft shoe. It’s a technique Jones calls “theatrical jazz,” a style the young New York-based director has become known and celebrated for.
Whether the play calls for such initially distracting ornamentations, whether or not the story is actually strengthened by this distinctively, almost ritualistically musical style of performance, is ultimately beside the point. ‘Gem,’ after all, is the most mystical and “ritualistic” of Wilson’s works, and Jones’ aesthetic eventually starts to make a kind of otherworldly sense.
There is a lightness and playfulness to the entire production, which makes it stand out from other productions of ‘Gem’ that I’ve seen, and the sense of determined hopefulness and ragged joy that rises from the story’s accumulating tragedies at times feels almost revolutionary.
The story, enacted by a tremendously strong cast, follows a group of lost, wounded souls who’ve found a refuge in the home of Aunt Ester, played with brilliant, buoyant groundedness by Margo Hall. Ester, who claims to be 285 years old—born the year slaves first arrived in the New World—serves as the personification of her people’s collective memory of slavery. Throughout the 2-1/2 hour play, Ester welcomes a guilt-ridden newcomer named Citizen Barlow (played with roiling emotions by Namir Smallwood), and ushers him through a series of initiations that include a trance-like guided visualization to a city of bones at the bottom of the sea.
Though there are challenges along the way, in this bold, impeccably acted reinterpretation of an American masterpiece, the audience travels right along with Citizen Barlow, all of us taking a similar journey, one that is as mysterious and strange as it is illuminating, devastating and beautiful.
‘Gem of the Ocean’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through February 14 at Marin Theatre Company. www.marintheatre.org
Four-and-a-half years ago, Richard Bean’s comedy play ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ appeared out of nowhere, making a mad, merry pratfall onto the stage of public awareness—first in London on the West End, then in New York City on Broadway, and most recently in Berkeley, where last year ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ played to ecstatic sold out houses for months.
“You’re a strange planet,” one character tells another early on in the show, and it’s a phrase that could also describe the play itself: a strange planet populated by wildly funny characters.
‘One Man, Two Guvnor’ is a preposterously British, 1960s-set update of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th-century Italian farce ‘A Servant of Two Masters.’ This Pythonesque adaptation has already become a modern comedy classic, scooping up awards on both sides of the Atlantic, making an international star of its original leading man James Cordon, and landing on the performance-rights Wish Lists of college and community theaters across the Western world.
Now, under the supremely playful direction of Carl Jordan—who last year directed 6th Street Playhouse’s award-winning ‘Clybourne Park’—this aggressively silly enterprise finally gets its North Bay premiere, also at 6th Street, where it is quite possibly the funniest play the company has presented since its staging of the similarly over-the-top ‘The 39 Steps,’ in 2012.
Crowned by a truly masterful performance by 6th Street’s Artistic Director Craig Miller, this production—though still a bit wobbly and uneven on opening night—transcends its somewhat shaky opening, and deserves to be seen by anyone who relishes the savory tang of laughter, lewdness and blatant, unashamed spectacle.
The story—which alternates with pleasantly scruffy songs delivered by a combo of laid-back musicians—follows a day in the life of professional servant Francis Henshaw—that would be Miller—who’s just arrived in the seaside town of Brighton to deliver a message from his boss, the petty criminal Roscoe Crabbe, who was reportedly recently killed by the wealthy and slightly-psychotic gangster Stanley Stubbers—a magnificent Ben Stowe. Much to everyone’s surprise, Roscoe isn’t dead after all. Well, he is, but he’s just shown up in town anyway, impersonated, just barely, by his own sister Rachel (Rose Roberts), who’s arrived with Francis in search of a big score before eloping to Australia with her psychotic boyfriend, who happens to be Stanley Stubbers.
Are you following this? Doesn’t matter.
Either is Francis.
Easily confused—and ravenously hungry—Francis ultimately accepts a second job working for Stubbers, who’s also arrived in town, looking for his missing fiancé.
A large cast of crazy characters constantly swirls about, as Francis gamely attempts to solve all of the problems he accidentally causes. The constant action is carried along on a wave of physical comedy and some outrageously over-the-top dialogue.
There are even moments of “audience participation,” so don’t be surprised if you end up on stage holding a pot of plastic fish.
There are, it should be pointed out, a few problems here and there with the production, as presented on opening night.
Certain actors’ accents border on the indecipherable, a closing song by the cast is woefully tone-challenged, and some of the gags—and a great deal of the second act—lag a tad in energy and invention. Still, furiously driven as it is by the joyous mayhem of Craig Miller’s masterly skills and jaw-dropping comic presence, this ridiculous exercise in comedic fervor is as satisfying as a good sandwich at the end of a long day.
‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ runs Thursday–Sunday, through February 7 at 6th Street Playhouse.
www.6thstreetplayhouse.com
“Sometimes,” exhorts actress Sharon E. Scott, stirringly embodying the rich voice and sassy-sweet attitude of the great Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. “Sometimes, God turns your life upside down—so you can help turn things right side up.”
In the sensational, heartbreaking and soul-lifting biographical theater piece ‘Mahalia Jackson: Just As I Am’—running through January 24 at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma—Scott takes what might have been a straightforward story of an American church singer who became an international star, and creates something much richer than mere biography or impersonation.
In a show that runs just over two-and-a-half hours, Scott—who wrote and directed the show—turns Mahalia Jackson’s tumultuous life upside down and sideways, singing nearly thirty of Jackson’s most memorable songs and hymns, all while giving us a sense of Jackson’s vibrant, indomitable style and personality. Simultaneously, she leads her audience through one of America’s most dramatic and moving social evolutions—the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
With first-rate musical direction by Tammy Hall, who accompanies on piano, and assisted on stage by John Shillington in a variety of roles, Scott’s tribute to Jackson is sometimes feels a tad overstuffed, as if she was reluctant to leave any part of the story out. But just when the show seems to reach the full-to-the-brim point, Scott launches a series of emotional climaxes that are nothing short of stunning, transforming the show into tribute to the power of faith. Not just faith in the religious sense, but faith in the power of the human soul to transcend impossible obstacles.
Known in her time as the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson had the power to turn even non-believers into full-fledged Gospel music fans, and with a voice as rich and full of emotion as a full-on Sunday service with lunch served afterwards, Scott makes her audiences believe by showing us how Mahalia did it. In addition to the Florida-based performer’s committed musical performances of songs like ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ and ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,’ she turns out to be a first-rate actor, attacking the many storytelling portions of the play with a luscious, laid-back warmth and depth of feeling that might make you believe you are being addressed by the real Mahalia Jackson.
In the second act, when Jackson’s friendship with Martin Luther King is described, the play reaches a new plateau of dramatic tension and lyrical creativity. In one achingly gorgeous sequence, Scott intersperses verses of the song The Lord’s Player, with snippets of her own conversations with Dr. King. The power of the sequence is electrifying and deeply moving.
Shillington proves an equally energetic force, playing recognizable and obscure figures from Mahalia’s life—various promoters, a frighteningly racist policeman, and even the great performer Danny Kaye. Most notably, as Mahalia’s lifelong friend and supporter Studs Terkel, the legendary radio personality and interviewer, Shillington serves as a kind of narrator, setting up the story, and finishing with a breathtaking eulogy to a true American original. “Mahalia Jackson: Just as I Am,” is a must see, as moving as it is ambitious, as inspirational as it is eye-opening.
Mahalia Jackson: Just As I Am, runs through January 24 at Cinnabar Theater, cinnabartheater.org.
Magic isn’t easy.
And sometimes, it takes a village to make something truly magical—and that even goes for fairy tale villages perched on the edge of a mysterious forest. With leads us to Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Into the Woods,’ now playing at Spreckels Performing Arts Center for one more weekend. Featuring a strong ensemble of North Bay performers, the show is bolstered by uniformly fine singing voices.
Those voices are the primary magic ingredient in the show, presented by Theater-at-Large, in an encore production of Stephen Sondheim’s crafty musical homage to—and reinvention of—the classic Brothers Grimm-style fairy tale. The show played to full houses and rave reviews last autumn in Novato, and now it gets a reprise run at Spreckels. It’s not a perfect transformation—but there is much to recommend this second look at Sondheim’s delightfully dark masterpiece.
First of all, there’s the jaw-dropping beauty of the music — spun as if from a magic loom by a chamber orchestra directed by Debra Chambliss—and the fine singing and playful presence of the cast. It’s plenty enough to make audiences glad they came, even if the woefully straightforward staging and a few clumsy moments of transition do come off as less than inspired.
What might have seemed cozy and warm at the much smaller Novato Theater Company space, struggles to fill out the massive Spreckels stage, often swallowing the best efforts of the first-rate cast.
About that cast… I do not have space or time to list them all, which is a shame, because like a village working together, each performer plays an important part.
As the sweet but conflicted Cinderella, Julianne Thompson Bretan gives one of many standout performances, and Krista Joy Serpa, as a fierce and funny Little Red Riding Hood, is a song-belting hoot. Also exceptional are Sean O’Brien and Allison Peltz as the show’s childless protagonists, the Baker and his wife, who launch the action with a scavenger hunt for magical items to reverse a witch’s curse and give them a baby.
Playing Cinderella’s ‘Prince Charming’ with a swashbuckling grin and a smarmy swagger, Anthony Martinez is wonderful, as is Johnny DeBernard, bringing a comforting presence—and supremely clear diction—as the mysterious narrator. And, as The Witch—the unexpected moral authority of this fractured fairy tale—Daniela Innocenti Beem is a force of nature, taking chances with the first part of the story, playing the witch for laughs rather than the usual menace, then morphing into a powerhouse of emotional strength and sheer vocal dynamite.
I only wish they’d used some of that brilliance in figuring out to stage to the show, especially the scenes where a giant invades the land and causes murderous mayhem. Use a projection for the giant, a big puppet, a shadow, whatever. Anything would have been better than simply having people point up at the imaginary giant coming at them from the audience, then run off stage and scream, only to have other people point off stage and say, “Oh no! They’re dead.”
Wow!
And then there’s the moment when one character is magically transformed. A flash of lighting or something to add some magic to the moment would have been nice. But to watch that actor run off stage, change their look, then run back on . . . um, really?
Sorry. It’s just not magical.
And it’s not fair, when the performers are doing such a good job, to not to support them with matching effort in the staging of their scenes.
That criticism aside, I do recommend this show.
Yes, some of the effects may leave you underwhelmed, but there’s no escaping the forceful enchantment of this fine ensemble of actors, making merry magic with their mighty voices.
'Into the Woods' runs Thursday–Sunday through January 17 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center.
www.Spereckelsonline.com
Let’s talk a little about New Year’s Eve.
I know, I know. It’s not even Christmas yet.
But given that some of the New Years Eve events I’m about to mention will be sold out by Christmas, I thought I’d better talk about them now, while you still have a chance to snap up a ticket. But first, let me offer a little perspective on the whole theme of New Year’s Eve traditions.
Different people celebrate the turning of the year in different ways.
In Canada, on New Year’s Eve, cities offer free public transportation.
Not sexy, perhaps, as traditions go, but it’s certainly practical.
In certain parts of Mexico, as the midnight bells strike twelve times, partiers eat twelve grapes—hopefully without choking—because they make a wish with each swallowed grape.
In Albania, at precisely midnight on New Year’s, they make perfectly timed phone calls to wish each other a prosperous new year. Also not sexy, or particularly festive, but definitely warm and fuzzy and nice.
It’s midnight. Let’s call Dad.
I like it.
Meanwhile in the San Francisco North Bay area . . . well, we do all kinds of things. Amongst them, it has become a certified tradition for theater companies to wrap a big happy New Years Eve party around a brand new theatrical production, often kicking off the next full run of their new show by debuting it on the 31st of December, followed by a champagne toast, confetti, cheers and a kiss or two.
I like that too.
Case in point: this New Year’s Eve, Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater (www.cinnabartheatre.org)—one of the first theater companies in the area to adopt the New Year’s Eve debut tradition—will be staging the first performance of their new show, Mahalia Jackson: Just as I Am. Written and performed by Sharon E. Scott, the show tells the story of America’s iconic blues and gospel singer, punctuating the tale with scorching renditions of Jackson’s best known songs. Cinnabar’s New Year’s Gala, running from $55-$66, begins at 9:00 p.m., and includes fancy pre-show desserts and champagne at midnight.
Mahalia Jackson: Just as I Am, continues it’s run at Cinnabar through January 24.
Over at Main Stage West in Sebastopol (www.mainstagewest.com), a bit of macabre mayhem will be added to the merriment on New Year’s Eve, as the esteemed theater launches Serial Murderess: A Love Story in Three Ax, Amanda Moody’s one-woman-show about a trio of famous female killers.
Talk about drinking a cup of kindness … just make sure it’s not poisoned.
Main Stage West’s first annual New Year’s Bash—cost $50, with the show beginning at 8:00 p.m.—includes food, drinks, a bit of murderous revelry, and the show itself.
I suggest you dress to kill for this one.
And finally, over at 6th Street Playhouse (www.6thstreetplayhouse.com), the New Year will kick in with a cabaret-style party and musical show—cost: $25-$40—featuring the return of Sandy and Richard Riccardi, the daft and daring duo whose charmingly satirical, tastefully raunchy songs have taken them to New York and back, and won them international acclaim on YouTube. There will be two shows, at 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.
Food and drink will be available for purchase.
These shows are actually much more than just a great way to kick off the New Year.
Such special events are vital fundraisers; so even if you can’t make it out to your favorite theater, consider dropping off a tax-deductible donation as your way of saying Auld Lange Syne to support live theater in Sonoma County.
Happy New Year, a little early, and here’s to a theatrically satisfying 2016.
Many of our Christmas entertainment traditions are tales of tribulation from Jimmy Stewart contemplating suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life to Charlie Brown’s seasonal affective disorder which becomes a kind of wistful melancholia with enough piano jazz.
So, it stands for reason that writer and performer David Templeton would yoke is yuletide monologue, Polar Bears, to a similar strategy. “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.” But Templeton isn’t pursuing comedy so as much as a stage-borne catharsis.
And he succeeds.
Polar Bears is inspired by the true events that followed Templeton’s divorce from and the untimely death of the mother of his two young children and how he endeavored, against incredible odds, to keep the spirit of Christmas alive. Through funeral arrangements and an array of misunderstandings (including the inspiration for the title which will put a lump in your throat,) Polar Bears reminds that our children’s belief in Santa may not be the best measure for our belief in ourselves as parents.
Well-directed by local theater veteran Sheri Lee Miller, the collaboration must have been akin to a protracted psychotherapy session. Though overcompensation is the modus operandi of many a divorced dad, Templeton’s story approaches the neurotic.
By the second act it’s clear that Templeton’s son manifested a belief in Santa that endured long beyond what many might think healthy, or at least exceeded the initial benefit of Templeton’s efforts. The repercussions, of course, are grist for a dramatic confrontation that is by turns heartbreaking –and hilarious. And it’s testament to the raw honesty with which Templeton confronts himself as a father.
Templeton is a writer first and an actor second – not a distant second, but enough that the latter sometimes has to play catch up with the former. At worst, Templeton has a tendency toward recitation, which, at nearly two hours of live performance, is a feat in itself. At his best, Templeton seems to eschew total fidelity to his text and speaks truly to the emotion of the moment. It’s like he’s speaking to a friend about one of the most challenging periods of his life. (Full disclosure: I consider myself among the playwright’s many friends who packed recent performance).
Templeton’s hindsight, however, is not through rose-tinted glasses it’s more like a microscope whose slide is smudged around the edges with Vaseline. This affords it a kind of Golden Age of Hollywood-style nostalgia despite the rigorous self-examination. Polar Bears may not restore your belief in Santa Claus but might restore your belief in parenthood.
Polar Bears plays Thursdays through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 5 p.m., through December 20 at Main Stage West, 104 N. Main Street, Sebastopol. Tickets are $15 to $27 and can be had by calling (707) 823-0177, or by visiting mainstagewest.com.
Not recommended for those who still believe in Santa Claus.
“I wear the chains I forged in life!”
This ghostly report from the doomed spirit of Jacob Marley is amongst the most famous supernatural utterances in English literature. It’s also a fair metaphor for the heavy weight of responsibility carried by any theater company brave enough to stage Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This unstoppably popular story has been around for better than 170 years, and along the way it’s forged a long, weighty chain of expectations, adorations, misinterpretations, criticisms, dismissals and the weird, unkind backlashes that spring from any legendary story’s overfamiliarity in the public eye.
Amongst the many reasons that 6th Street’s current production of A Christmas Carol can claim to be called one of the best surprises of 2015, is that it both embraces what’s made the tale so enduring, while also blazing new trails, finding fresh, entertaining possibilities in what has, in some adaptor’s hands, become stale and predictable.
With a strong, adaptable cast, an inventively clever script by Michael Wilson, sprightly, emotion-focused direction from Craig Miller, and a delightfully steam-punk production-design, this incarnation of the Dickens classic also makes maximum use of actor Charles Siebert as Ebeneezer Scrooge. Performing rarely on local stages, Siebert’s North Bay appearances are always occasions to celebrate (6th Street’s Red, Cinnabar’s The Price). As Scrooge—the miserly skinflint whose Christmas Eve haunting takes him backwards and forwards through his own history—Siebert is fancifully mesmerizing and terrifically, touchingly real, maintaining a remarkable level of creative generosity toward all others with whom he shares the stage.
As Marley—materializing to deliver a dire warning to his former business partner Scrooge—Alan Kaplan is a wickedly, wackily menacing and also heartbreakingly earnest. As the various spirits of Christmas—past, present, and future—Miller has assembled a trio of comic actors (Jessica Headington, Nick Christenson, and Ryan Severt) who deliver delightfully spectral comedy while consistently landing sharp emotional punches when necessary—in one case, while towering over the stage on stilts.
The large, multi-age cast—with notably strong and/or hilarious performances by Jeff Coté as Bob Cratchit, Harry Duke as Fezziwig, and Crystal Carpenter as Belle—work incredibly well as a shape-shifting, character-changing, scenery-moving ensemble.
And particular praise must be given to Miller’s technical team, whose clock-work set (Jesse Dreikosen), mood-making lights (Steven Piechocki), and otherworldly sound-design (Miller, with John Gromada) are some of the best seen at 6th Street in many a Christmas.
Meanwhile, over at Spreckels Arts Center, another beloved novel leaps to life on stage in ‘Little Women: The Musical.’ With a spectacular performance by Rebekah Pearson in the lead role of Jo March, with crisp, lively direction by Thomas Chapman, and a beautifully spare musical direction Jim Coleman, Louisa May Alcott’s enduring story of love, family and individual determination is gorgeously and cleverly transformed. The story has been rearranged a bit, with the bulk of the familiar tale of the March sisters a flashback in Jo’s grown-up memory, as she strives to make a go of it as a writer in New York City, far from the home she loves.
IT works, taking elements of the book that happened earlier, and easing them later into the story, where they become the emotional peak of the play.
The entire cast is excellent, the sing is stellar, and the remarkably accessible storytelling aims straight for the heart, without forgetting that ‘Little Women’ the novel, is also delightfully, humanly hilarious.
Taken together these two season favorites are must-sees for this holiday season.
A Christmas Carol’ runs Thursday–Sunday through December 20 at 6th Street Playhouse. 6thstreetplayhouse.com.
Little Women: The Musical runs Friday - Sunday until December 20. Speckelsonline.com
It has been said that there is nothing less dramatic or more lacking in entertainment value than watching a writer write. In the clever comedy-drama ‘Seminar,’ presented at Wells Fargo Center by Left Edge Theatre, playwright Theresa Rebeck—the mastermind behind such stage hits at The Scene and television’s Smash—deftly transports her patented hard-edge comedy style from the worlds of stage-and-screen to the land of the literarily engaged. By never showing us a writer in the act of writing, but rather showing us a quartet of authors in the act of defending and describing their work, Rebeck shows them at the vulnerable core of who they are.
And it’s a blast. Mostly.
If anyone could really determine a great novel or a lousy novel by just reading the first who pages, then maybe I should only be watching the first ten minutes of a play before rendering my own opinion as to its overall worth. That’s not possible, of course, and for a playwright as adept as Rebeck to take such lazy shortcuts, actually showing us people in the act of recognizing a literary work’s excellence by it’s first several paragraphs, is disappointing.
Thankfully, the value of ‘Seminar’ lies in its entirety, not in one or two false moments, and on the whole, ‘Seminar’ is outstanding.
“Don’t defend yourself,” intones Leonard, early in the play. Played by actor Ron Severdia with a mix of weary resignation, playful, grinning antagonism, and vicious, sociopathic bloodlust, Leonard is an esteemed author-turned-teacher-for-hire, and he doesn’t like it when a writer defends herself after he’s criticized her.
“If you’re defending yourself,” he tells a whole group of young writers he is in the middle of eviscerating, “then you’re not listening.”
Directed by Argo Thompson with a strong ear for the rapidly shifting rhythms of intellectual debate and literary double-speak—though with a conspicuous tendency to have his entire cast perform facing and rarely to each other—Seminar follows a bunch of would-be writers who pay a Leonard $5000 apiece to give them a private class, “critiquing” their writing—and everything else about them. Rose Roberts, as the Jane Austen-loving Kate—who rents the New York apartment where the classes take place—is at the top of her game, and as her variously talented classmates, Jacob de Heer, Devon McConnell, and Veronica Valencia give strong, appealing performances in a play in which every character has something great to do, alternately required to be torn apart, or to learn the fine art of tearing apart others. As Leonard gleefully pronounces, “Writers, in their natural state, are as civilized as feral cats.” This entertaining exploration of artistic egos under pressure is a bit over-cooked at times, but on the whole is as deliciously fierce, ferocious and funny as a pack of wild animals.
And like a wild animal, it doesn’t always behave itself.
“Seminar” runs Friday through Sunday through November 28, at Wells Fargo Center for the Performing Arts, presented by Left Edge Theatre. www.leftedgetheatre.com
Invisibility.
It’s not just something that happens in fantasy books and science fiction movies. In the real world, there are invisible people, folks who, because of their social status or lifestyle, or just because they keep their secret pains and problems to themselves, remain essentially unseen, unnoticed, unappreciated, unprotected—invisible.
In two highly recommended North Bay plays, we are invited inside the lives of people who—in theater, as in real life—are rarely ever given a voice.
In a near-balletic new production at Marin Theater Company, in Mill Valley, ‘My Mañana Comes’ follows four hard-working “busboys” at an upscale restaurant in New York City. The play is set entirely on the prep side of the bustling kitchen. We never see a single wait-person, and only the occasional hand and arm sliding dishes into view from the chef’s side. It’s a brilliantly detailed, realistic and lived-in set, by Sean Fanning, is like a character unto itself.
Irwin’s brilliant script pulls us in immediately, and director Kirsten Brandt keeps things hopping as a quartet of actors bus dishes, prep plates of food, slice fruit and vegetables—using real knives—and rush in and out of swinging doors, with a grace and energy that would be impressive even if the actors weren’t also giving deep, fleshed out, fully engaging performances.
Peter—played by Shaun Patrick Tubbs—and Jorge—Eric Avilés—have worked in the restaurant the longest, and each one tries in their own way to school the two newer bussers: Whalid—Caleb Carera— and Pepe—Carlos Jose Gonzales Morales. A bit of competition is natural, but when the restaurant’s management cuts the busser’s pay, everything changes. It’s here that the play kicks into high gear, showing us the way that privilege bring power, even amongst those who are living paycheck to paycheck, and in a hidden world where undocumented workers make up a huge part of the work force, it’s possible to lose everything—job, money, and the American dream—in an instant.
In Sharr White’s The Other Place, now playing at Main Stage West, following an earlier run with much of the same cast at 6th Street Playhouse, Jacquelyn Wells steps into the lead, and gives a heartbreaking, emotionally scorching performance as Julianna, a brilliant scientist and expert on a rare form of dementia, who refuses to accept she’s showing signs of the same devastating illness. Deftly directed by David Lear—who keeps clear the playwright’s various flashbacks and narrative asides—the play unfolds as a bit of mystery, as Julianna recounts an event involving a girl in a yellow string bikini who appears in the audience during a lecture on brain function.
There are other mysteries to be revealed in the lives of Julianna and her baffled husband Ian as well, all adding up to a show that is part family drama and part mediation on the meaning of memory. There is nice work by actor Clark Miller as Ian, with skillful performances from Angella Martin and John Browning in multiple roles. Sam Coughlin takes over for Browning in the show’s final week, and the show deserves an audience as it wraps up its run. Ultimately, Though heartbreaking and challenging, The Other Place finds a surprisingly sweet and lovely resolution, a reminder that the ones we have loved and lost are more than mere memories—they are what we have when nothing else is left.
'The Other Place’ runs Thursday–Sunday through November 15 at Main Stage West. www.mainstagewest.com
‘My Mañana Comes’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through November 22 at Marin Theatre Company. www.marintheatre.org
Halloween is upon us, and to get us in the mood, two infamous supernatural sex-comedies are currently haunting 6th Street Playhouse. Both plays are crammed with witty retorts and sexual innuendo, both feature ghostly visitations and eye-popping fashions—but only one has the Time Warp and a guy dressed in fishnet stockings.
Let’s start there.
Richard K. O’Brien’s infamous musical The Rocky Horror Show—playing at 6th Street for its third consecutive year—manages the impressive magic trick of transcending its own quirky script deficiencies. Under the direction of Craig Miller, the production employs a kind of theatrical misdirection, distracting audiences from the fact that the story of Rocky Horror is a bit of a mess, by turning the whole show into one joyously raucous, sex-positive “event,” complete with cross-dressing costume contests at the intermission, and a rowdy post-show dance break in which the audience is invited to Time Warp with the cast.
Assisted by musical director Justin Pyne, whose magnificent rock band is spot-on perfect, this is a Rocky Horror that brings enough high-spirited fun to outweigh the loony flaws of the story, and additional credit for that should definitely go to the fearless commitment of its cheerfully extroverted cast.
As Dr. Frankenfurter—the not-so-sweet transvestite from outer space—Rob Broadhurst unleashes a torrent of high-heeled, pelvis-thrusting glee, and Zach Howard rocks hard as the duplicitous butler Riff Raff.
Mark Bradbury and Abbey Lee, as the virginal visitors Brad and Janet, do fearless, first-rate work in the show’s trickiest roles. And nice supporting performances are given by Rose Roberts as the conflicted groupie Columbia, a delightful Zac Schuman in the dual roles of delivery boy Eddie and his government agent uncle Dr. Scott, and Amanda Morando as Riff Raff’s dry-witted sister Magenta.
Though haphazardly paced, and plagued with some opening night technical issues, this Rocky Horror succeeds, big time, by brazenly showing it’s true colors—From beginning to end, this is one big dark-humored dance party disguised as a play.
After three years, all I can say is, Let’s do the time warp again.
On to Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, a drawing comedy that was the Rocky Horror of its time, the story of a milquetoast writer haunted by the ghost of his manipulative first wife while struggling with the passive-aggressive machinations of his second.
Directed by Meghan C. Hakes, the 6th Street version delivers visually—with a great set and some very entertaining ghost effects—but it totally misses the mark in terms of its tone and rhythm. Hurt by its tentative pace and some wildly uneven . . . often unintelligible . . . English accents, the show takes what might have been a bracingly tasty martini and turns it into a rather diluted cocktail of clashing, but still slightly fizzy, soft drinks.
Despite fine, engaging performances by David Yen as optimistic author Charles, Gina Alvarado as the ghostly femme fatale Elvira, and Lennie Dean as the well-meaning medium Madam Arcati, the production woefully miscalculates the underlying point of the play—which can’t be described without spoiling key second-act surprises—resulting in an ending is a strangely disappointing clash of contrasting ending, on that’s visually magical and the other that is suddenly, unexpectedly un-fun.
'Blithe Spirit' and ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ run Thursday–Sunday through November 8 at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com
1999 years ago, an unmarried teenage mother had a bad dream. The next morning, she decided to turn that dream into a short story. Over the next few months, that story evolved into a novel—and that novel changed the future of literature. The teenager was Mary Shelley, and her book was Frankenstein. As everyone knows, it’s the tale of a creature assembled from dead body parts and granted the spark of life. In playwright Trevor Allen’s stage adaptation The Creature, Shelley’s original story is taken apart at the seams and reassembled into something entirely new. The Creature, now running at Cinnabar Theater, is daring, inventive, and artful—but problematic.
Director Jon Tracy mixes up a meta-theatrical cocktail of misty atmosphere and sheer chance-taking guts, staging Allen’s minimalist take on the novel using only a trio of chairs, a snowy slab of white for a set, a leather journal—and three actors.
Eschewing special effects, action scenes and monster makeup, the three barefooted narrators are: Victor Frankenstein (played by popular local actor Tim Kniffin) Captain Walton (played by Richard Pallaziol), and the Creature himself (Robert Parsons). Each character takes turns telling their side of the story in a long string of beautiful words.
Unlike the novel—a tale within a tale within a tale—Allen places the narratives side by side, simultaneously, with the narrative bouncing back and forth like a ping pong ball every sentence or two. Confusion and exhaustion are just some of the by-products of this fiendish experiment. By breaking each man’s tale into such tiny fragments, the power of Shelley’s original story is almost entirely diminished, literally smashed to pieces.
As Walton, the ships captain who discovers Victor Frankenstein near the North Pole and takes his deathbed confession, Pallaziol is quite good, and Kniffin, as the dying mad scientist, nicely captures the last-gasp desperation of the character. But in delivering his entire story in a steady, near-lifeless monotone, the emotional arc of Frankenstein’s horrific personal journey becomes one-note, sadly hammered flat and cold.
As the Creature, Parsons is served the best, and he brings an impressive sense of wounded dignity to the role of an abandoned child, but in the script, Allen goes too far in trying to make the character sympathetic, even altering the details of the Creature’s various murders. In a deliberate deviation from Shelley’s text, Allen turns each murder—including the calculated framing of an innocent woman—into simple, unintentional accidents.
While such story and plot changes may go unnoticed by those unfamiliar with the novel, they do matter, throwing off the balance of the drama, robbing the story of much of its complexity.
On the plus side, Tracy’s set is beautifully done—a sloping swath of snow that runs across the stage and curves up the wall and out of sight. And the lovely light design (also Tracy) and sound design (Jared Emerson Johnson) all set the mood beautifully.
Still, though fascinating and visually haunting, this Creature—despite the best intentions of its talented creator—turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.
‘The Creature’ runs through Nov. 1 at Cinnabar Theater www.cinnabartheater.org
A little emotion goes a long way. And music is one of the best communicators of emotion, as Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Billy Joel can tell you.
The richer the music, the deeper the emotional response to it.
Which is why emotions combined with music can be so powerful, and so dangerous. When 2005’s The Light in the Piazza first materialized on Broadway, there was much talk that the show—a musical adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel—marked a return to the kind of gorgeous scores and lyrical drama that fueled the golden age of Broadway. Ignoring decades of rock and pop influences on Broadway, composer Adam Guettel created a score that was lush, orchestral, complex, operatic and deeply, brazenly romantic.
Some people hated it. After years of easy, amiable, non-challenging throwaway tunes, ‘The Light in the Piazza’ just sounded so . . . old fashioned. Because of that, others fell in love with it.
Like music, and definitely like love itself, its all a matter of taste.
In a remarkably strong new production at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, director Gene Abravaya—taking a real risk in tackling something this difficult—has more than met the challenge, assembling a cast of first-rate singers and a stellar chamber orchestra, for what is quite possibly the most beautiful, satisfying, musically competent, and artistically successful show Spreckels Theater Company has ever staged.
And that some of the cast sings and speaks (convincingly) in Italian, that only adds to the impressiveness of the achievement.
Whether all of this is excellence and musical skill is enough to draw an audience remains to be seen, though positive word-of-mouth will certainly help. Based on a book few have read, this is no Mary Poppins. But for audiences loudly clamoring to see something that dares to venture beyond the confortable familiarity of the same old overdone standard musicals, here is your chance to prove it.
Set in Italy in the 1950s, the story follows two visiting Americans, the wealthy southerner Margaret—brilliantly played by Eileen Morris—and her wide-eyed daughter Clara—played by Jennifer Mitchell, whose pure singing voice and expressive face make every emotion and discovery as clear as a bell. When Clara falls in love, at first sight, with the youthful and exuberant Frabrizio—Jacob Bronson—the stage is a set for a series of clashes between Margaret and Fabrizio, between Margaret and Clara, and between Margaret’s own desire to protect her daughter, and to also allow her the love she never has the courage to claim for herself.
The clever, entertaining book by Craig Lucas—who wrote Prelude to a Kiss and Amélie: The Musical—does include scenes spoken in Italian, giving a sense of the lost-in-translation confusion that impedes Clara and Fabrizio at every turn. In one delightful scene in the second act, Fabrizio’s mother—Barbara McFadden, who’s wonderful—drops the Italian to explain in English what her husband—an excellent Steven Kent Barker—has been saying to their other son and his wife—played respectively by Tariq Malik and Amy Marie Webber.
That said, the Italian sequences are so well staged, it’s pretty clear what’s going on.
With some fine design and technical support, and a strong ensemble cast, Spreckels’ Light in the Piazza is a truly impressive show, dripping with music and the dangers and allure of love—and that’s worth experiencing in any language.
'The Light in the Piazza' runs Friday–Sunday through Oct. 25 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Spreckels online.com
Oh, the glory of the human voice.
And the power of the human mind to hear one’s own voice, and somehow experience it as beautiful when to other’s it’s . . . not.
Not Beautiful.
Not even good.
Which brings us to Florence Foster Jenkins.
That’s her we are listening to now, from a recording she made in 1944.
Jenkins was, in her time, a famous singer. She once sold out Carnegie Hall, packing the place with people eager to find out if the wacky socialite from Manhatten was really as bad as everyone said she was. The wild thing was, Jenkins was one of the only people who had no idea what she actually sounded like. Was she mistaken, mislead perhaps, mentally ill, or just really, really in love with the idea of being a singer?
Those are the questions that are raised in the play Glorious! by Peter Quilter, running through October 18 at Ross Valley Players in Ross, in Marin County.
It’s a little ironic that in creating a script that celebrates Florence Foster Jenkins, the playwright has created something as eccentric and strange and unexpectedly sweet as Jenkin’s herself . . . and just as mediocre.
In all fairness, there isn’t really much about the Jenkins life from which to build a full story, and this ultra slight, plot-thin comedic farce avoids some of the more interesting things. The result is, well, kind of a one-joke story with no real story.
And the running joke about a really old dog does not count as plot.
There is charm in the story, certainly. But is charm enough?
Glorious! suffers from the same malady that Jenkins did—a woeful insensitivity to tone, pitch, and pacing. And though it makes a herculean effort at turning Jenkins into some kind of self-actualized heroine, it can’t escape the uncomfortable truth that her popularity was, in many way, a deeply cruel joke.
In the Ross Valley Players staging—unevenly orchestrated by the usually excellent director Billie Cox—the best thing about the show is the charming, infectiously upbeat performance of Ellen Brooks as Jenkins.
She’s delightful.
There is also fine additional support by Mitchell Field as Jenkins’ roguish common-law husband St. Clair, a frequently unemployed, alcoholic actor, who depended on his paramour’s money, but seemed genuinely devoted to her and her singing efforts.
Also, good, if a little one-note, is Dan Morgan as the accompanist McMoon, whose transition from grudging employee to affectionate friend provides what little there is in the way of plot. As Maria—Jenken’s cranky Mexican maid, Maureen O’Donoghue does a lot with a slight role, but as an affronted music fan attempting to burst Jenkin’s bubble, Jackie Blue is allowed to do far too much with far too little. Apparently intended as the antagonist of the play, she’s far too ridiculous and cartoonish to be taken seriously, even as comic relief.
As Jenkins friend supporter Dorothy, Ellen Fisher creates a goofy but affectionate caricature of a devoted friend, who might be even crazier than Jenkins.
Through it all, there is an authentic sweetness to the proceedings, but the play is ultimately as lacking in substance and depth as was the infamous singing voice of its hapless subject. Glorious! is diverting and amusing and sometimes funny, but funny in a sad way.
Just like Jenkins.
‘Glorious!’ runs Thursday–Sunday through Oct. 18 at Ross Valley Players. Rossvalleyplayers.com
A story is an illusion, a series of events that are not really taking place, presented in a way that fools its audience into believing, for a moment, that it is all really happening.
Telling that story in a book or movie is a certain kind of trick, with its own rules and traditions, and telling the same story on the stage is quite another. But transferring a story from one medium to another—say, from the screen to the stage—that may be the hardest trick of all.
Which brings us to ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Amélie.’
Two beloved stories, one a classic book and the other a beloved modern masterpiece of cinema, have both landed on stage in the Bay Area, and each carries its own unique kind of cross-media magic.
At Spreckels Performing Arts Center, in Rohnert Park, Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic pirate adventure ‘Treasure Island’ hits the stage in a compact, robust adaptation by Ken Ludwig.
Someone give me an Arrrrrrr?
Directed with humor and charm by David Yen, staged in the intimate studio theater with exhilarating in-your-face inventiveness and plenty of robust, swashbuckling energy, the crafty condensation of Stevenson’s classic works surprisingly well.
The story, though stripped down a bit, is quite faithful to the book, with the exception of a few lady pirates thrown in here and there—something that might have shocked Robert Louis Stevenson and possibly some of the pirates.
The strong, versatile cast is led by a grounded, impressively non-cartoonish John Rathjen as Long John Silver, often played a bit too over the top, but not here.
In this production, the whole cast slips gracefully in and out of dozens of characters. Animated projections combine with cleverly adaptable set pieces to turn the stage into a ship’s decking with rolling waves over the stern, to an island jungle filled with waving foliage. The effects works well, and if some of the book’s detail and depth of character are swept overboard in the process of translation, the loss is more than made up for in sense of rollicking, high-spirited, double-crossing, sword-clashing fun the able-bodied cast and crew bring to the stage.
Translating the beloved 2001 French comedy Amélie to the stage is a different kind of trick altogether, and turning it into a musical only makes the challenge harder. But with a book by Craig Lucas—he wrote the play Prelude to a Kiss—and with lovely, ethereal tunes by Daniel Messé and Nathan Tysen, this supremely satisfying adaptation—directed with immense creativity by Tony-winner Pam MacKinnon—is a sweet, sneaky surprise of a show.
As Amélie, the café worker who sets out to make the world a happier place, Samantha Barks is everything an Amélie should be—beautiful, sweet, a little wacky, and thoroughly beguiling.
There is a marvelously whimsical sense of innocence in the play, even when incorporating such things as sex shops and orgasms, and the story’s transformation into a musical—rather than proving distracting or cluttered—is so deftly done you might think that the story of Amelie and her bumpy road to finding her own true happiness, was always meant to become a musical.
If anything, it’s become better this way.
And that’s not an easy trick to pull off.
‘Treasure Island’ runs Thursday–Sunday through October 4 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, www.spreckelsonline.com
'Amelie’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through October 11 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, www.berkeleyrep.org
In Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” the indelible Kate and Petruchio—a feisty, ferocious fiancé and her would-be “tamer”—together discover something truly amazing and surprising. They discover that even after 400 years, people will see a show about two people fighting with each other until they finally fall in love.
Kate and Petruchio are amongst the most famous characters in western theatrical literature, and despite the datedness of the play, and the imbedded minefield of gender issues that are always part of the process of staging the show for modern audiences; people keep coming to see it.
Why? Why not?
The politics of love are not easy today, so why not look at a time when they were even more complex, and see if maybe we’ve learned anything. Besides, part of the pleasure of sitting down to a fresh production of such a well-known play is seeing if the cast, crew, and director will make it somehow seem new, or unpredictable, or surprising—or maybe fail miserably in the attempt.
That’s always a possibility.
I am happy to report that in Curtain Theatre’s rollicking outdoor production—free to the public and running weekends in the Old Mill Park in Mill Valley—the only real failure on display were those few unhappy audience members who failed to bring a sweater or coat, and were visibly shivering in the second act when the Mill Valley fog began rolling in.
As for the production itself, it’s a blast.
There are plenty of fresh ideas, uniformly strong performances, a boatload of clever theatrical flourishes, and a few moments of true genius. The fluid, fast-paced direction by Carl Jordan—here tackling Shakespeare for his first time—results in a buoyant, bouncy fluff-ball of a play, with a stunningly high laugh-to-minute ratio, and gallons of charm and visual razzle-dazzle
The setting and basic attire of the production are fairly traditional, with a live band playing renaissance tunes before the show, but director Jordan lets us know early on that he will be taking a decidedly playful tone with the material, beginning with an original pop-rock-inspired tune that essentially stands as a prologue. In this production, people do tend to burst into song, tossing out snippets of popular rock songs, a few lovely originals by music director Don Clark, and one hilariously heartbreaking rendition of A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.
Kate—a splendidly three-dimensional Melissa Claire—makes her initial appearance wielding a chainsaw, stalking across the stage while belting out the lyrics of George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone. Petruchio—played by an excellent Alan Coyne—is not the brutish bully he is often depicted as, but a goofy sweetheart with a giddy knack for improvisational madness, and questionable taste in codpieces.
The marvelous ensemble is too large to give proper credit to all, but notable standouts include a brilliant Heather Cherry as Petruchio’s frazzled servant Grumio, Tom Reilly as Kate’s gracefully befuddled father, Juliana Lustenader as Kate’s shallow-but-winsome sister, Steve Beecroft as the crafty servant Tranio, and an amiably silly Seth Dahlgren as Hortensio, a wildly persistent suitor to Bianca.
And … did I mention the show is free?
After 16 years, Curtain Theatre is still managing to exist solely on the donations audiences happily drop in the baskets at the end of the show.
And trust me—this one is well worth paying to see.
‘Taming of the Shrew’ runs Saturdays, Sundays and Labor Day, through Sept. 13, at Old Mill Park Amphitheater in Mill Valley.
All shows 2:00 p.m. Free.
www.curtaintheatre.org
“Oh, what fools these mortal’s be!”
“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.”
There are a lot of great lines in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but one of my favorites comes close to the end. It’s a theater review, of sorts. Having just witnessed a wacky performance by a band of over-excited tradesmen turned actors, the stern Duke Theseus quiets his nitpicky entourage with the words, “Nothing can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.”
In other words, when some is simply done, with great love, it’s just not fair to judge it too harshly.
That’s a lovely thought, and one that certainly applies to Pegasus Theater’s rambunctious and unruly staging of the Bard’s most popular comedy.
On the Sunday I saw it, some of the cast’s performances were a bit, um, ragged, with lines blown or stumbled over. Parts of the action are blocked in ways that make it hard to see from certain places in the audience. Also, the original text has been cut-apart, reduced and re-written, adding new lines like “Everything will be okay!” alongside Shakespeare’s indelible poetry.
Personally, I think if you don’t want to try and make Shakespeare’s words work, then you should have done a different play. Cut a few of Shakespeare’s lines if you have to, but don’t rewrite let, unless your new lines are, you know, brilliant.
Okay, that’s my pet peeve.
Anyway, in the Pegasus production, it hardly matters, because the whole thing is so amiably and passionately presented, done with such a disarmingly life-and-love affirming spirit, whatever quibbles I had while watching it quickly sank into the sun-dappled river in front of which the show is presented, outdoors, under a bridge, the simple set draped in late afternoon light and shadow.
As directed by Beulah Vega, this Midsummer Night’s Dream is clearly a lusty love offering to the river community of Guerneville and the surrounding areas. For one thing, the show is free—well, donations are accepted, and cushy seats are one of the perks available to those donating on the company’s Indiegogo site. Aside from being a literal gift to its audiences, the whole production shouts aloud the joys and pleasures of love.
In this version, the four Athenian lovers, originally written as two men and two women, are all women—Crystal Carpenter, Jessica Anderson, Elaine Koslowski, and Alexis Christenson—and the idea of them pairing up and getting married doesn’t cause anyone in Athens to bat an eye.
The woodland fairies, ruled by King Oberon (Peter Rogers) and Queen Titania (Elizabeth Henry) with the help of the playful Puck (Jake Hamlin), have a lot of fun with the word “fairy,” and are about as sex-positive a group as one could imagine.
Adding to the positives, is Nick Christensen, who as the blundering would be actor Bottom, frequently steals the show, with or without the fluffy donkey head Puck magically gives him.
There is enough kissing, groping, fondling, and stroking in the show to raise anyone’s pulse rate, the audience is encouraged to shout out their own improvisations, and the clever use of Pink Floyd’s The Wall—the actual vinyl album—gets one of the show’s biggest laughs. If you are in love with love, there’s plenty to like in this sexy, silly, entertainingly bubbly Midsummer.
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ runs Friday-Sunday through August 31 at Riverkeeper Park, near Sonoma Nesting Company. All shows at 6:00 pm. Donations accepted. Bring a cushion because the seats are concrete. Reservations recommended through pegasustheater.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB
Last week—in my report on Dezi Gallegos’ new show, ‘Yesterday Again’—I spent a lot of time talking about newness, originality, world premieres, fresh spins on old themes… You know.. Stuff we haven’t seen before.
Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, in part because this week marks the one-year-anniversary of my trip to Scotland, where I presented fourteen performances of my own theatrical enterprise, the one-man-show ‘Wretch Like Me.’ Going to Scotland, a land where so much is so old, was nevertheless like a full-immersion baptism in the new, the original, the never-been-seen-before.
I was there for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where something like 2,500 shows were taking place all over the city during that three-week period. In Edinburgh, walking down the street during festival time is like watching a battle between the new, the newer, and the newest. Some mornings, I’d put up a new poster for my show, stapling it a pillar already covered with posters, and people would actually stop to look my new poster… Until the next theater artist came along—sometimes less than a minute later—to slap their own, even newer poster up on that pillar right on top of mine.
That’s a perfect summation of what the festival is like… A feeding frenzy, one that extends beyond the hoards of theater artists trying to woo audience members into their particular show, and also includes those very audience members, because in Edinburgh—at all Fringe Theater Festivals, in fact, including the San Francisco Fringe happening again this September in the City—people show up eager to see something new. They want to be surprised. They want to be shocked. They want to have their socks blown off by the sheer novelty of seeing something no one has ever seen before, to be amongst the first to be exposed to a new talent, a new script, and new idea, or a new spin on an old idea.
I managed to see about 30 shows while I was there, and not all of them were good, but some were unforgettable, and if the price of seeing a great play I’ll never forget is to see one or two that I’d like to forget as quickly as possible… Well, I’ll pay it, because that’s the way the world works, isn’t it?
Yes, I know. The safe and the comfortable do have their place.
One thing I’ll never forget is watching a hundred people fill the lobby before my show began every day, only to watch the majority of them file, not into my show, but into a production of Alice in Wonderland happening in the theater across the lobby. Another hit show was an adaptation of Oliver Twist, reinterpreted and set in Nazi Germany during World War II. A bit of the old with a new… twist.
I get it. I saw some of those shows.
But watching something you are familiar with, and walking out having gotten exactly what you expected, as reassuring as that is, is nothing compared to the thrill of walking into a show about which you know nothing, and being blown away but something that took you places you didn’t even know you wanted, or needed, to go.
What if we somehow could sustain that Festival State-of-mind for the rest of the year, right here in Sonoma County, all of us eagerly reading the calendar listings to see what’s opening at one of our many Bay Area theaters, scanning the page to see what’s new and exciting—or what’s old in an exciting new way—taking a chance and throwing ourselves into the unexpected mystery of adventure that defines the theatrical experience.
I know that would be good for the many theater artists who work to bring you something new every week. And for you, who knows? It just might change your life.
So why not plan to see some theater this weekend. Do it. The new, the old, and the new-and-old, it’s all waiting at a theater near you.
It’s a mystery, a challenge, a puzzle, a conundrum.
How do you keep theater alive and interesting, when the majority of your audience has proven their relative preference for familiar shows, revivals of familiar shows, and shows based on familiar movies or T.V. programs, and takes a wait-and-see attitude when presented with a play that is un-familiar, in development, or brand spanking new.
“New,” apparently, while clearly something we get excited about when it’s a new car, a new baby, or a new ride at Disneyland, suddenly becomes a liability when it’s a play opening in your neighborhood between local productions of "Noises Off" and "Oklahoma."
Not that there’s anything wrong with those.
They were each new once, and in their time, they each changed the face of modern theater, which needs a good change of face, and change of pace, every so often - just to stay alive.
All of which brings us to the multiple-award-winning 19-year-old playwright Dezi Gallegos, whose brand-spanking-new play "Yesterday Again," opened last weekend in the Studio at 6th Street Playhouse. First, let me congratulate and salute my friend Sheri Lee Miller, director of "Yesterday Again." As one of the best directors in the North Bay, her willingness to step forward and help bring to the stage a new work by a young playwright is in itself extraordinary.
Then there’s the production, featuring as strong a cast of veterans and newcomers as you are likely to see anywhere, including performances by Marty Pistone, Sharia Pierce, John Browning, Pam Koppel, Barry Martin, and Craig Miller, all taking on roles that reveal sides of their acting chops you likely have never seen before. Lesser known emerging actors fill out the cast - Alyssa Jirrels, Isaac Jay, Lyla Elmassian, Lucy London, Olivia Marie Rooney, Jack Wolff, Maxx Zweers, and I should fully disclose that another is my son, Andy Templeton, just one of the young players who you will want to be watching out for in the future.
The play itself is an ambitious, rambunctious, slightly confusing, intensely engaging puzzle box of a story that will surely make a lot of people wonder how a 19-year-old came up with it at all, let alone carried it off with so much insight, artfulness, and fearlessness.
Taking place in the past, the present, and the future all at once, "Yesterday Again" explores the notion that our lives begin with infinite possible futures, and that with every choice we make, those possible futures change, and in some case are eliminated. As the parallel stories of two college students, Eric and Bella, each play out, we see their past experiences playing simultaneously, with other actors playing Eric and Bella as the children they were and the adults they will, or might, become.
The material is tough, with explorations of trauma and abuse, and various damaging collisions of sexuality, friendship, family and love, and though the script at times feels a tad over-reaching, the beauty of the performances and the strength of the direction carries us over such road bumps on a powerful wave of emotion, mystery, and dramatic tension.
"Yesterday Again," the play, is the past, the present, and the future of Sonoma County Theater, all at once. It’s not flawless, but if you love theater, it’s well worth your time - because, trust me, you’ve never seen anything quite like it.
And that’s a good thing.
"Yesterday Again" runs this weekend, Friday through Sunday, at 6th Street Playhouse (www.6thstreetplayhouse.com) and then moves to Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa from August 7-16. (www.luckypennynapa.com).
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
It is better, they say, to give than to receive.
That must be why so many groups gather so often to give so many awards to so many people for their efforts in so many different art forms connected to so many different award-worthy fields of endeavor. Though most people in show business are buzzing about the upcoming Emmy awards, about 75 people gathered together on Monday, July 13, to watch the offbeat, quirky annual distribution of certificates known to local theater people as The Sonoma County Stage One Theatre Arts Awards, otherwise known as The SOTAs.
Now in its seventh year, the stated purpose of the SOTAs is to honor theater artists and theater productions taking place in Sonoma County. The SOTAs have earned a fair share of criticism over the years for awarding the lion’s share of their honors to shows that, how do I say this delicately, are sometimes conspicuously less deserving of the word “excellence” than shows that were either minimally mentioned or not nominated at all - Main Stage West’s exceptionally strong "Other Desert Cities" is one example from this year’s list of howlingly embarrassing omissions.
To the organization’s credit, under the direction of president Lito Briano, clear efforts have been made to make the distribution of awards more balanced and fair, and to do that more in the future, companies who feel they deserve more attention will have to step forward and work harder to get their own fans and followers to join as voting members.
With the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle having stepped up in the last few years to finally notice the work being done by some (but not enough) Sonoma County theaters, the SOTAs will have to step up their game even more to retain any semblance of relevance and credibility in the future.
I say this with all hope that the SOTAs will do just that, because many of the smaller community theater companies and student productions honored by the SOTA’s certainly deserve some recognition, so vital are they as an engine of training and community good will throughout the theater scene.
With all of that said, allow me to offer my congratulations for the twelve awards taken home by Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse, which donated it’s G.K. Hardt theater for the awards ceremony.
Amongst those 6th Street artists honored were Best Director Bronwen Shears for her work on "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," actors Lennie Dean and Danielle Innocenti Beem for their performances in ‘Beauty Queen’ (that would be Lennie) and "Thoroughly Modern Millie" (that would be Beem), actor Mike Pavone for "Clybourne Park," and actor Dallas Munger for "The Glass Menagerie," that last one also winning awards for best scenic and sound design, and tying for Best Overall Production with "Phantom of the Opera," performed by Santa Rosa Junior College.
‘Phantom’ was the second-biggest winner of the night, also taking awards for Best Vocal Performance for a Male and Female - that would be Ezra Hernandez and Megan Fleishman - and other awards, including best costume and best makeup design.
Mary Gannon Graham won the Best Actress award for her amazing work in Main Stage West’s "Mother Jones in Heaven," coincidentally now playing again in an encore run of the show featuring music by Si Kahn. And Raven Players won for best stage props for the prop-dependent drama "In the Next Room: or, the Vibrator Play," and yes, you may feel free to make jokes about the props needed for a play of that name.
Congratulations to all the winners, and even those who did not walk off with a certificate, because the truth is, when there is this much good theater going on in a community of this size, everyone is a winner, especially the audience.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
For those who prefer not to travel far for their onstage entertainment, and like to avoid any excursions into foreign territory, there are, fortunately, a tremendous number of nearby theater companies. But for those who like experiencing the new and exotic, and don’t mind working a bit to get there, may I suggest a trip to San Francisco, and Faultline Theater Company’s impressively performed light-and-dark comedy "Shiner," by rising playwright Christian Durso.
The play runs through July 26 at the Tenderloin’s very-cool Pianofight venue, where up to five or six different plays, concerts, or comedy shows might take place on a single evening in one of the venue’s two theater spaces.
Might I suggest a pre-show brew in the lobby, which is actually more like a laidback bar-bistro with a small stage of its own. Don’t worry about missing the play. Each performance is announced five minutes before curtain, summoning theatergoers from their drinks and snack to whichever theater-space their particular show is running in, like an airport announcement that your flight is now boarding.
And speaking of flying, the two-person cast of "Shiner," Monica Ho and Adam Magill, manage a rather remarkable feat of high-wire actorly daring-do, playing thirteen-year-olds despite being obviously at least ten years older than that. They pull it off, spectacularly at times, capturing in their bodies and faces the doubt-ridden, hormonally amped, molten and morphing psyches of their young, intense, categorically at-risk characters.
Set in Los Angeles in 1994, when the Grunge Rock movement was stirring up the youth of America, Kurt Cobain was still alive, and Nirvana ruled the hearts and minds of a generation of disaffected young people.
In "Shiner," that generation is represented by Margot, the possibly ADD-affected founder of an afterschool club she’s named the Grunge Rock Underground National Great Escape, which of course spells GRUNGE. To the club of one - evidently no one at school wants to associate much with the hyper-intense Margot - comes the lonely Jake, who knows nothing about Grunge rock, but likes the idea of joining a club, assuming the members - in this case . . . Margot - will have him.
What follows is a remarkable journey that begins with friendship - a friendship built around a mutual sense of isolation and family dysfunction - and quickly moves into something like love, before turning dark and unsettling, sometimes uncomfortably so.
The early scenes in this 80-minute one-act, with the live band Lyon Grove on stage to contribute an appropriate underscore, are full of fun and angsty youthful energy, as our tragically but adorably earnest twosome shout out a spontaneous list of everything that sucks, or co-write a letter to Kurt Cobain informing him of their plan to score tickets to see Nirvana, then jump off the freeway overpass and thus dies happy.
As few don’t know, the dark side of the grunge movement, as exemplified by Cobain’s overdose and death, is not all lighters and fist-pumping, and playwright Durso is to be commended to for not ignoring that fact in his emotionally complex play.
The disturbingness of Jake and Margot’s plan notwithstanding, when their home lives push them to even more extreme outsider behavior, even then going out it in ways that reveal their youth and innocence, those episodes pack a serious wallop.
The play’s ambiguous ending retains its original manic-depressive sense of simultaneous joy and pain, and will probably give you lots to talk about on your drive home from the City.
"Shiner" runs through July 26 at Pianofight. www.pianofight.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
"Twelfth Night" is amongst Shakespeare’s most popular plays, in part because the story is so accessible, and the situations so universally funny. Typical of the Bard, humor and tragedy are never far from each other. A young woman, Viola, grieves for her twin brother Sebastian after surviving a shipwreck in which she believes he drowned. Cast ashore in a strange country, she disguises herself as a man, donning an outfit matching that of her brother, who soon shows up - surprise! - wearing the same thing.
They are now identical.
Viola, having taken the name Cesario, finds employment with the local Duke, whom she instantly falls for. The Duke’s in love with the wealthy Olivia, who’s mourning her own brother’s recent death, and swears she will never love any man, but changes her mind the first time she takes a look at Cesario, who of course is actually Viola.
Wacky subplots involve of Olivia’s drunken cousin Toby Belch and the clueless Sir Aguecheek, Olivia’s servants Maria and the self-righteous Malvolio, and a freelance jester-singer-trouble-maker named Feste - all of whose paths begin to cross Cesario’s in increasingly complicated, potentially life-threatening ways.
Meanwhile, believing his sister to have drowned, Sebatian can’t understand why everyone in this strange land seems to know him, some trying to kill him and others trying to take him to bed.
It’s great stuff, all served up with Shakespeare’s patented sense of poetry and escalating crisis.
What’s tricky about a play so well known and well loved is presenting it freshly. How do you bring something new to a show so thoroughly mined and milked that virtually everything findable in it has been found?
That’s the task set before director David Lear and the Shakespeare in the Cannery crew, the relatively new company that last weekend opened its sophomore season in the old cannery ruins in Railroad Square. With a uniformly talented cast, and a strong vision by Lear, this production manages to both hit the notes we love to hear in a staging of "Twelfth Night," and somehow find a few more I, for one, have yet to have heard.
Without altering the text, Lear has found a way to balance the play’s extremes, making the comedy funnier by attending to the details of the drama. Certainly, Lear - known for his innovations and sometimes unconventional approaches - does make a few changes, the most obvious being Feste the Jester, who here has been split into TWO, played as twins or clones or BFFs by Haley Bartels and Brandon Wilson, both delightful.
The other obvious splashes of invention are largely stylistic, from the tennis shoes worn by most of the cast to the black lipstick and corsets worn by several of the supporting ensemble.
As Viola and Sebastian, Kot Takahashi and Carmen Mitchell are not just wonderful at making you care about their plights, they look a lot more like each other than in most productions of "Twelfth Night" I’ve seen. I don’t have time to mention everyone by name, but special mention must go to April Krautner’s Olivia, arcing from gloom to puppy love with immense charm, Clark Miller and Brian Abbott as Toby and Aguecheek - managing to be silly and kind of sad at once - and the magnificent Alan Kaplan in the play’s trickiest role, that of Malvolio, who as the subject of one of literature’s most famous practical jokes, must transform from ridiculous to near-tragic, without altering the tone of the shenanigans all around him.
Congratulations to Lear and his entire team.
By finding the new in something so old, this is a Twelfth Night to celebrate and savor.
Twelfth Night runs Fridays and Saturdays at 7pm through August 15. Visit shakespeareinthecannery.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
There’s an old Latin saying.
"Aestivo Tempori est Shakespeare!"
Roughly translated: There’s no better time to watch Shakespeare than in the summertime!
I don’t know when summer became so connected to the Bad Bard of Avon, but there’s no denying that the moment the weather gets nice, along comes a troupe of iambic-pentameter talking actors to put on a little something by good old William S.
This coming weekend, Railroad Square’s Shakespeare in the Cannery will open "Twelfth Night," and next month will bring productions of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" to Guerneville, and "The Taming of the Shrew" to Mill Valley.
Since they are amongst Shakespeare’s better-known shows, there’s a pretty good chance what you see and hear with these productions will be more-or-less what Shakespeare wrote, because there’s an unwritten rule about Shakespeare: If you’re going to mess around with the Bard, you will get less blowback if you pick a play that nobody knows.
Which brings us to William Shakespeare’s "Cymbeline," landing with a gleeful-giddy splash last weekend in San Rafael’s Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University.
"Cymbeline," one of Shakespeare’s final works as a playwright, is rarely ever performed, despite the fact that it’s one of the playwright’s most complexly plotted, entertaining, surprise-packed, and satisfying plays - all of which made it very popular, you know, in the olden days. But modern critics tend to turn their noses up at it, as they do anything Shakespeare wrote for the sheer happy hell of it - which is more-or-less what "Cymbeline" feels like.
As that other old Latin saying goes:
Prolixior est unum rabidus fabula.
Meaning: “This is one crazy play!”
There’s a woman disguised as a boy.
An aging ruler losing his kingdom and his sanity.
A soldier convincing a married man his wife has been unfaithful.
And a magic potion that makes the living appear to be dead.
And that’s just for starters.
"Cymbeline" carries so many plot ideas reminiscent of Shakespeare’s other plays, it sometimes seems like a cross between a deliberate self-parody and a career retrospective.
The play is named for the crazy English king Cymbeline, but the true heroine of the story is his daughter Imogen, played with brilliant simplicity and sweetness by Stella Heath. Having P.O.’d her papa by refusing to marry the obnoxiously self-loving prince Cloten -a hilarious Thomas Gorrebeeck - instead marrying the lowly Roman orphan Leonatus Posthumus - also Gorrebeeck, a quick-change artist of the highest order - Imogen becomes the target of her duplicitous stepmother, the queen, and also the subject of a certain test-of-fidelity on the part of Posthumus.
Falsely accused of fooling around, she ends up on the run, dressed in drag, with wacky old Cloten in pursuit, and that’s where a pair of kidnapped princes raised as mountain men enter the story.
Like I said, Crazy!
And in this light-hearted production, director Robert Currier keeps things frisking along, tackling the problem of the play’s complexity by inserting a few original songs in place of Shakespeare’s text, and adding a few lines of his own here and there to clear things up and explain what’s going on.
I’d have preferred the more classic approach of simply directing the play in a way that makes it understandable to the audience, but hey! It’s sort of fun and it kind of works. And since very few audience members will have seen "Cymbeline" before, it’s likely no one will know the difference.
"Cymbeline" runs Friday–Sunday through July 26 at Forest Meadows Amphitheater at Dominican University. www.marinshakespeare.org
And as they say in Latin . . .
Ego sum David Templeton, Second Row Center, enim KRCB.
One of the cool things about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the current season of which I have been reporting on lately, is the way it often programs shows that cleverly comment on each other in interesting ways. This year’s festival, which runs through November 1st up in Ashland, Oregon, has one particularly creative pairing of shows, though to the casual theatergoer, the connection might not seem obvious.
I’m talking about Charles Fechter’s melodramatic 1868 adaptation of "The Count of Monte Cristo," now playing on the big outdoor Allen Elizabethan theater, and Eugene O’Neil’s Pulitzer-winning drama "A Long Day’s Journey Into Night," running in the intimate indoor Thomas Theater. What does a popcorn-level swashbuckling adventure about revenge and swordfights have to do with a theatrical masterpiece about drug addiction and chronic self-destruction?
Keep listening.
O’Neill’s autobiographical tale tells a painfully personal family story, thinly disguised as fiction, but burning with the raw anguish, and dark comedy of truth. Impressively directed by Christopher Liam Moore - putting the “long” into Long Day’s Journey by using the full text, all four hours of it - the OSF production pulls off something truly spectacular, presenting a lushly real look at the gorgeously ugly inner lives of one very troubled, but occasionally kind-of-loving American family, circa 1912.
Edmund Tyrone (a masterful Danforth Comins) is young, alcoholic, and sick of body. He’s probably dying of consumption. He’s also sick of heart, after learning that his drug addicted mother has just started using again. Over the course of one very long day and night, Edmund will learn his own fate - spoiler: Eugne O’Neil did NOT die of consumption - and will go on to confront each member of his family in turn, as they all pound back enough whiskey to fill an inflatable swimming pool. The exception, of course, is Mom, who prefers shooting up to whiskey shots.
Edmund’s father, James (Michael Winters, also excellent), is terrified of ending up in the poor house, despite having made a fortune as a stage actor in a popular adventure (he calls it “the moneymaker”) which he considered beneath him, but couldn’t stop performing for fear of losing his sizable income.
Guess what that real-life “money-maker was?
Yep. "The Count of Monte Cristo," the very same adaptation OSF is presenting this year, being careful to retain the script changes made in the early 1900’s by James O’Neill, the real-life actor father of Eugene O’Neill.
This adaptation emphasizes the fun parts of Dumas’ classic novel while diminishing or eliminating its, um, boring parts. It accomplishes this largely by establishing an over-the-top melodramatic tone that has little resemblance to the serious historical melancholy of the original, but works well with the help of some big, entertaining stagecraft, courtesy of director Marcella Lorca.
You probably know the story.
Edmond Dantes is a ship’s captain framed by a trio of businessmen and politicians who all have something to gain by getting rid of the gentle, kindhearted captain. His years-long imprisonment in an island hellhole is condensed here, using some storytelling trickery. After escaping and locating a buried treasure, he returns home as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo, planning to exact revenge on all who betrayed him.
The performances are tuned a tad bigger than life, but just short of having the villains twirl their mustaches.
Thanks to OSF’s clever programming, audiences can catch 'Monte Cristo,' then go see 'A Long Day’s Journey,' and when the drunken patriarch talks about his love-hate relationship with “the Money-maker,” everyone will know exactly what he’s talking about.
Thanks OSF. That’s kind of cool.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs through November 1st. www.OSFAsland.org.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
It’s not just the name of an old Clint Eastwood movie.
It’s also a fitting way to think about this year’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, currently running in Ashland on OSF’s three world-class stages. Yesterday I talked about the VERY GOOD "Head Over Heels," a new musical by Jeff Whitty of "Avenue Q" fame.
With summer kicking into gear, there are several shows running on those three stages, and that’s one of the good ones. So let me tell you about the BAD and the UGLY, both of which could be used to describe OSF’s unsatisfying staging of Shakespeare’s "Antony and Cleopatra."
Tony and Cleo has NEVER been an easy play to produce. Directors have to find clever ways to establish a coherent tone that’s not actually suggested in the script, which - sorry Mr. Shakespeare - is a bit of a mess.
OSF’s Artistic Director Bill Rauch helms this production. Usually spot-on, Rauch appears to have decided to just follow Shakespeare’s unfocused lead, the result being a sometimes entertaining, frequently baffling mish-mash of tonal inconsistencies.
By pushing the comedic moments to goofy excess, it diminishes, rather than enhances, the whole flow of the show. Consider the arrival of a bumbling snake seller who acts like an extra from T.V.s Hee-Haw show, a bit of outrageousness that comes just seconds before the tragic demise of a major character. And after watching the supposedly middle-aged Antony and Cleopatra act like lovesick puppies for thirty minutes, it’s hard to feel bad for them when their world starts to crumble under the weight of their irresponsible actions. That’s the point, of course, to show how great societies are often destroyed by the acts of selfish rulers, but it’s just inconceivable that the real Tony and Cleo would have run around squealing and clapping like toddlers at a birthday watching the clown tie balloon animals.
Such choices leave the entire enterprise foundering in a kind of dramatic uncertainty.
This is a tragedy, after all.
In this production, that’s true in many ways.
Let’s move back to the category of the GOOD, with the clever, emotionally rich "Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land," written and directed by Stan Lai. The American premiere is a translation of a Chinese play originally performed in in 1986, shortly after the 40-year ban on communication between China and Taiwan had been lifted and families long-separated were taking steps at reunion. In its first-ever English version, Lai takes the original script - a kind of site-specific experiment in which two theater companies attempt to rehearse on the same space - and tailors it to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is referred to often by name, along with numerous suggestions that someone should call Bill Rauch - mentioned earlier - to come straighten out the mess.
One of the plays, the deadly serious drama "Secret Love," is being directed by a Stan Lai stand- in known only as Director, putting his race-blind cast through the paces of a story clearly based on the loss of his one great love. When a group of Chinese-American comedians crash the theater, insisting Bill Rauch has given them the space for their rehearsal, a strange back-and-forth ensues. With an outrageously silly send-up of the ancient Chinese fable Peach Blossom Land - about an unhappily married man who finds a magical world where all his dreams come true, but pines for the wife who never really loved him - the newcomers agree to share the space, with some very funny, genuinely touching results.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs through November 1. www.osfashland.org
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Well, the recent Supreme Court ruling affirming marriage equality to all couldn’t be better timed, ‘cause the big celebration’s already started up in Ashland, Oregon, and this dance party’s got somethin’ special on the record player.
It’s got the Go-Go’s.
Well . . . it has a bunch of Go-Go songs, if not the actual 1980’s all-female punk-pop band, but either way, the music is so good even Shakespeare would be dancing.
He, after all, was a big believer in love.
And so is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where - two whole weeks before the historic ruling making same-sex marriage legal all over the country - the popular Ashland-based festival unveiled "Head Over Heels," a joyously love-affirming musical by Tony-winner Jeff Whitty, the guy behind the hit musical Avenue Q. Anyone wanting to celebrate a new engagement or legally-sanctioned wedding might want to hit the road to Oregon and snap up some tickets to this outrageously creative, gleefully uplifting world premiere show.
Directed by Ed Silvanus Iskandar, "Head Over Heels" takes a bunch of the Go-Go’s greatest hits and spreads them throughout Whitty’s clever comic adaptation of the forgotten Elizabethan pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The original play was written in the 1600s by the poetry-penning soldier Phillip Sydney, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court till he was banned for dueling - and for daring to propose marriage to the queen. In exile, he wrote his play, snappily reinterpreted as a big bright burlesque about forbidden love.
Basilius is the King of Arcadia. When he gets a prophecy predicting the collapse of his kingdom and the disruption of his family, he does what any fictional ruler of the Elizabethan era would do - he packs up his court, his wife, and his two daughters, and heads out to the forest to wait for it all to blow over. There in the wide arms of mother nature, of course, a series of confusions and collisions ensue, most of them revolving around the character of Musidorus, a lovesick young shepherd boy pining for the king’s youngest daughter. Musidorus disguises himself as an amazon woman to be admitted to the King’s company in the forest.
And almost immediately . . . everyone falls in love with him . . . uh, her.
Anyway.
All of this confuses some characters and leads others to a number of much-needed self-discoveries, the end result being that the King’s definition of love - and everyone’s ideas about the purpose of marriage - get a well-timed overhaul by the end of the play.
The way Whitty and his musical arranger have integrated the songs into the story is nothing short of brilliant. Whether translated into English Madrigals, doo-wop quartets, or slinky rock-and-roll tangos, the song’s lyrics move the action along, nicely revealing the inner lives of the characters just as if the songs had been written with the show in mind.
It’s all goofy, giddy fluff, yes - but its sweet, irresistible, ingenious fluff. And as the many happy Americans who finally get to meet their soul-mates at the altar will tell you, sometimes, nothing is better than a bit of fluffy sweetness - and a big old dance party - to celebrate the end of a long, hard journey.
"Head Over Heels" runs through October 10 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. www.OSFAshland.org
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB
Lets talk about inspiration.
Inspiration is often likened to lightning striking, or an electric bulb popping on over our heads. Metaphorically, when light suddenly appears, when lightning suddenly strikes, it means we have been inspired, either with a new idea or with a new sense of energy and excitement.
Theater has long been in the business of inspiration.
It feeds off of it, and also causes it, in a remarkable endless loop of creativity.
Which brings me to the Transcendence Theater Company, and Broadway Under the Stars.
Continuing their own mysterious knack for making lightning strike over and over, Transcendence Theater has just kicked off its third full season of Broadway Under the Stars shows, with yet another toe-tapping, soul-pleasing, one-hundred-percent inspiring, music-and-dance extravaganza designed to lift our spirits and raise some money for the gorgeous local treasure, the Jack London State Park.
"Oh, What a Night!" - the first of several shows performed outside at Jack London and elsewhere this summer - is a wonderful, witty collection of songs and dance numbers, borrowed from big and little Broadway shows and from the world of pop music.
One might ask the question, how often can these folks keep making the same thing work, assembling songs into shows that don’t just entertain and keep our attention, but also send us home wondering what we might do to make the world a happier place.
Under the artistic direction of Amy Miller, the Transcendence people show no signs of stopping or soon ending their lightning strike record. By blending top-tier talent, endlessly clever ideas, brilliant programming, and a persistent sense of professional polish and contagious enthusiasm, they just keep turning these shows into something special. Think of it as part concert, part dance party, part master class, and good part old-fashioned tent revival.
"Oh What a Night!" runs for two more weekends out at Jack London, and for one-night-only tonight, at 7:30, at Wells Fargo Center for the Arts. Transcendence will follow it up with a whole bunch of other shows, large and small, spread out over the rest of the summer, with a special one-night-only appearance in July by Megan Hilty.
Highlights of "Oh What a Night!" include Leslie McDonel’s gorgeously slinky interpretation of Summertime (from Porgy and Bess), a lovely duet of Say it Somehow (from A Light in the Piazza) performed Julie Craig and Michael Mahaney, and a pair of stunningly funny songs by Lexy Fridell - Miss Byrd, in which she dances with an office chair, and In My Car, in which she does things with her face and voice you have to see to believe, Fridell teams up later with Stephan Stubbins for a clever condensation of West Side Story, singing all of its songs, and telling the story, in just six minutes.
Another crowd-pleasing medley brings to life the manic-depressive emotions of a typical high school prom, with half-a-dozen classic dance tunes acted out and sung by the cast.
Ultimately, the show is more than just another presentation of the patented Transcendence Theater magic, it’s an event, deliberately and admittedly aimed at inspiring us all to go out and make our own magic in the world. Even the port-a-potties are inspiring, festooned inside with uplifting quotes from great minds.
Whether outside at Jack London or indoors at Wells Fargo, "Oh What a Night" lives up to its name.
"Oh! What a Night!" runs tonight, June 24 at Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, and then continues weekends through July 3 at Jack London State Park. www.broadwayjacklondon.com has all the info on this summer’s Transcendence shows. Check it out.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
There’s no denying it. Music is a powerful force. Music can express the deepest of human emotions. And there are, obviously, many different styles and forms of music. One could easily make the argument that no two forms of musical expression better convey the depth of human feeling than do OPERA and the mighty SPRITUALS that grew out of slavery and the African-American experience.
Right now, two different opportunities await you in the Bay Area to experience the power of both musical forms.
Let’s start with opera.
In Giuseppe Verdi’s "Falstaff," the last of 30 operas the Italian composer wrote in the late 1800s, the emotional and financial stakes are high for everyone, but the comedy is as broad as the girth of its title character.
Now running in an intimate English-language adaptation at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma, the story of Falstaff is borrowed from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. The debt-ridden Sir John Falstaff - played with delightful expressiveness by Jo Vincent Parks - is a plus-sized inebriate with an exaggerated appreciation for his own attractiveness and charm. When he runs out of money with which to pay his bills, including the tab for all the beer and food he ingests, Falstaff attempts to solve his money problems by seducing two different local married women, Mrs. Ford - played by Eileen Morris, who practically glows with charm and mischief - and Mrs. Page - Kim Anderman, quite good as the less flashy of the two wives. Both merry wives are beautiful and, most importantly, rich.
When they discover Falstaff is courting both of them, they launch a scheme to expose and embarrass Falstaff. Their plan is complicated by certain subplots - one involving Mrs. Ford’s jealous husband (William Neely, who’s hilarious), the other involving the sweet, secret love affair between the Ford’s daughter Nannetta and a poor local boy.
As directed by Elly Lichenstein, who brings plenty of wicked silliness and disarming funny business to the story - aided by strong musical direction from Mary Chun - "Falstaff" is classic fluff, but it’s fluff with tremendous heart and some spectacular operatic melodies.
Melody and heart are traits shared by the brilliant, beautifully written, flawlessly acted "Choir Boy," by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Directed with stunning intensity by Kent Gash at Marin Theatre Company, the play is set at the fictional Charles Drew Prep School for Boys, a prestigious all-black boarding school.
As a new year begins, tensions boil when the all-but-openly gay student Pharus - a stunningly good Jetani Alladin - is made the leader of the school’s all-important a cappella choir.
The choir presents classic black spirituals in contemporary arrangements, and the uplift they give Pharus, a true believer in the power of music, helps guide him through what turns out to be a very rocky year.
The music, by the way, is awesome, with the cast all able of blending into some jaw-dropping harmonies.
A coming-of-age story with tremendous insight and lovingly observed characters, this lyrical thought-poem of a play is not just about bullying and prejudice and homophobia. Yes. It touches on those things, but at its heart "Choir Boy" is about friendship and self-acceptance.
Wonderfully crafted and beautifully staged, "Choir Boy" is about what happens when a person is finally accepted for who they are. It’s about the transcendent power of a simple song, and the power of a single voice when they are finally allowed to sing from the heart.
"Choir Boy" runs Tuesday–Sunday through June 28 at Marin Theatre Company. www.marintheatre.org.
"Falstaff" runs through June 28 at Cinnabar Theater, www.cinnabartheater.org
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Making an audience laugh is not an easy task for any playwright, or for the actors indebted with bringing the author’s words to life on stage. Humor is primarily a matter of taste. Where one of might think a joke about geometry is hilarious, another prefers to watch an actor plummet headlong into a birthday cake. Expecting an entire audience to snort and guffaw at any one gag or line of dialogue is as optimistic as thinking that every patron in a restaurant will start salivating at the same single entree on the menu.
Unless, of course, it’s one very special entrée.
Which brings us to two brilliant-but-unconventional plays currently running in the North Bay. In Sarah Ruhl’s 2004 "The Clean House," a Brazilian comedian-turned-house cleaner, Matilde - played by Livia Demarchi - confesses in her opening monologue that cleaning houses depresses her. Unfortunately, her over-stressed employer Lane - an excellent Sylvia Burboeck - is a surgeon who likes things clean. Meanwhile, Lane’s sister Virginia - Tamar Cohn, also wonderful - just isn’t happy unless she’s cleaning something, so a secret arrangement is made between Virginia and Maitilde wherein the former sneaks in to clean cleans Lane’s house every day while Matilde lies on the couch trying to think up the perfect joke - a joke, she says, that will be “somewhere between an angel and a fart.”
When Lane’s cancer surgeon husband Charles announces he’s fallen in love with a much older woman on whom he’s just performed a double mastectomy, life suddenly takes on a series of twists and turns for everyone, proving that, as tidy as we might like our lives to be, sometimes things just get messy.
Directed with energy and sensitivity by JoAnne Winter, "The Clean House" is packed with surprises, and is as funny as it is genuinely, authentically moving.
Jason Wells’ "The North Plan," on the other hand is both broader and darker. Directed with a taste for farce and a furious sense of wicked glee by Rick Eldridge, "The North Plan" finds humor in the disconcerting not-too-distant future, a future made possible by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s pronouncement that torture isn’t torture if it’s applied not as punishment but as interrogation.
Ready to laugh?
Believe it or not, I think you will.
A mysterious shadow government has taken over the White House and declared martial law, and Carlton, a fugitive government employee has stolen a secret list of “government enemies.” Carlton is played by Sam Coughlin with a manic intensity reminiscent of Woody Allen, only more believable. When Carlton winds up in a rural Missouri jail awaiting the arrival of two scary government agents - John Browning and Jared Wright - he has no choice but to try and enlist the help of his jailers, the patient police chief Swenson, John Craven, and bored administrator Shonda, played by Miranda D. Lawson. When he strikes out there, he has no choice but to try and get through to his agitated, foul-mouthed fellow prisoner Tanya - played by Sharia Pierce, who is a hoot). Sharia is an unhinged local motor-mouth whose just turned herself in for drunk driving, and what happens next shouldn’t be funny, but in this cleverly crafted fable of fermenting revolution, the end of the world miraculously becomes wildly, inspiringly - and a bit frighteningly - hilarious.
"The North Plan" runs Thursday–Sunday through June 21 at Main Stage West. www.mainstagewest.com
"The Clean House" runs Thursday–Sunday through June 14 at Ross Valley Players. www.rossvalleyplayers.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
No one’s ever done an official scientific study on this, but I have observed certain conspicuous distinctions between the way adults react to the story of Peter Pan, and how children respond to the same story - whether we’re talking about the 1911 novel by J.M. Barrie or the various stage versions, and especially the 1954 musical adaptation made famous by Mary Martin.
Kids, of course, love the action and adventure, they love the fairies, pirates, the natives, mermaids, the crocodile, the swordfights - and who doesn’t love that little flying boy.
Adults, on the other hand, tend to get strangely weepy about Peter Pan, and I have observed—as recently as last weekend when I saw the massive production of Peter Pan presented by the Mountain Play association on Mt. Tam - that the older we get, the more emotional we become.
This becomes a little complicated for us, since we’ve been trained since adolescence that we’re all supposed to grow up eventually and let go of childish things, even fairy tales about the psychological cost of growing up and letting go of childish things.
Peter Pan was never intended as a story for children alone, as is pretty obvious to any adult who’s ever read Peter Pan aloud to children and been shocked to find themselves giving a careful dissection a pirate murder, or describing a group of drunken fairies on their way home from a fairy “orgy,” or decrying the cruelty and “heartlessness” of children.
Peter Pan is, to a large degree, a psychological and sociological examination of the differences between childhood and adulthood, culminating in the observation that each holds benefits and deficits not available to the other. In other words, Peter Pan is a very sad story.
Fortunately, it’s also a blast.
And in the smart, entertaining, visually inventive Mountain Play production. there is plenty of that cool, kid-friendly stuff and plenty of heart-stopping emotion to choke up the adults who still remember what it was like to be a kid, to play and imagine and pretend like our lives depended on it.
Director Michael Schwartz, a Broadway veteran with an eye for spectacle, shows a keen sense of how to use the enormous stage area of the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre overlooking the San Francisco Bay. On a set resembling a summer camp playground in the woods, pirates, natives and lost boys erupt from all corners of the amphitheater, the crocodile is assembled from spare tires and puppets.
Shadows dance.
An invisible fairy knocks things over and pulls hair.
Magical animals prowl.
Trampolines are hopped upon, teeters are tottered, and bright-colored balls are bounced out into the crowd.
As Peter, Melissa WolfKlain displays a strong singing voice and a nicely boyish sense of rough-and-tumble confidence, making it obvious why Wendy and her brothers would leave the safety of their beds and follow him to Neverland. The villainous but somewhat foolish Captain Hook—played well by Jeff Wiesen) and his right-hand man Smee - a hilarious David Yen - do a good job of straddling the balance between threat and comedy.
Most importantly, Peter flies, beautifully, thanks to some conspicuous but still magical pulleys and wires.
Kids will be happy as clams, and older folks will be happy and sad at the same time—they may even wish they could be kids again while being secretly glad they never will, because, hey, that’s the magic of Peter Pan.
‘Peter Pan’ runs Sundays though June 21 (and one Saturday, June 12), at the Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre.
www.mountainplay.org
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Let’s face it - it’s not always easy to look on the bright side of life. Laughter helps, but getting there often requires a helpful boost. If you are looking for something to give your laughing-and-smiling impulses a comedic kick in the pants, you are currently in luck. Right now, there are two shows running in the Bay Area, each one designed to make you feel a bit lighter and a touch happier - a stunt made possible by daredevil actors committed body-and-soul to the fine art of stage comedy, confident in the uplifting power generated through the sheer ridiculous joy of watching a skilled comedian tumbling down a flight of stairs.
In downtown Sonoma, on the Rotary stage at the Sonoma Community Center, Narrow Way Stage Company has pulled out all the stops with Michael Frayn’s high-energy farce "Noises Off" Running weekends through May 31. Though a bit loose and lumpy here and there, the Narrow Way actors bring a strong, pulse-quickening dose of their patented theater-punk sensibility to this rollicking play-within-a-play, the meta-level story of dysfunctional actors rehearsing and performing a wild sex farce called ‘Nothing On.’ Tony Ginesi’s rotating two-story set let’s us see both sides of the action, front-of-stage and back-of-stage, as the hapless actors present the same ridiculous story three times over the course of its months long run, which - true to the longstanding rules of comedy - goes anything but smoothly.
Directed by Nick Christenson, with a bring-it-on, anything-goes sense of heightened performance and comedic timing, this high-energy roller-coaster of a show benefits from a cast willing to do just about anything, from romping about in underwear to falling down stairs - I told you - to slipping on a plate of sardines or sitting on a cactus.
Meanwhile, just beyond the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, Berkeley Repertory Theater is presenting the West Coast premiere of "One Man, Two Guvnors," Richard Bean’s joyously madcap assault on the average funny-bone, running through June 21. A bawdy British adaptation of the classic Italian farce A Servant of Two Masters, "One Man, Two Guvnors" is set in Brighton, circa 1963, where a poor, hungry musician, desperate for a sandwich or a plate of eggs, finds himself working for two different criminals, one rich, one on the lam. With original tunes played by a “skiffle” band along the lines of John Lennon’s pre-Beatles band The Quarrymen, this show caused a sensation in London and New York, making a star of James Corden (The Late Late Show), whose shoes are capably filled in Berkeley by actor Dan Donohue, acclaimed for his work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
The show is brilliantly performed by every single member of the ensemble, playing an assortment of oddballs from the cross-dressing woman pretending to be her dead brother, to the jittery servant who keeps falling down stairs - there it is again. Even the poor guy with only three lines as a waiter makes comic gold of his brief moment in the spotlight. Directed by David Ivers with a sense of controlled mania, the show incorporates ingenious audience participation and musical interludes that both set the tone and add a specific flavor of riotous party-time mayhem to the proceedings.
Easily one of the best new-but-based-on-something-old comedies of the year, "One Man, Two Guvnors" is a happy smile of a show that, like Noises Off, brings its characters right to edge of tragedy before winging wackily back to the land of happy endings.
It’s hard not to feel happy after something like that.
"Noises Off" runs through May 31st at the Sonoma Community Center (sonomaartslive.org) and "One Man, Two Guvnors" runs through June 21st at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (BerkeleyRep.org)
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Theater is all about transformation, and transformation is never easy. But transforming one of the best-loved movies of all time into a stage musical? That’s a huge challenge, because the expectations are always so remarkably high. So it takes guts, creativity, and a whole lot of daring-do, all of which are on vivid display in the splendid new production of "Mary Poppins," presented by Spreckels Theater Company in Rohnert Park.
Adapted, in part, from the Walt Disney film with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, "Mary Poppins," the play, is a fascinating fusion of the expected and the unexpected. Writer Julian Fellowes, the guy behind Downton Abbey, pulls off the trick by rewriting the lighthearted movie’s plot to make it a bit more faithful to the darker, scarier books by P.L. Travers, while still retaining most of the movie’s songs and several of its best moments.
The magic carpet bag? It’s there, as is the smarty-pants tape measure that tells more about you than just your height. Gone, though, are the dancing penguins and the tea party on the ceiling.
In their place are dancing statues and a trip to a magical shop where letters and words can be purchased like candy.
The big question is, does Mary Poppins still fly?
Yes she does, spectacularly.
And as played by the delightful Heather Buck, she shows a lot more strength, edge and power than in the film, sweet when she needs to be, but tough too, and even a little bit dangerous.
The unruly siblings Jane and Michael Banks are causing friction between their parents, the skittish but blustery Mr. Banks, played by Garet Waterhouse, and the strong-willed Mrs. Banks, played wonderfully by Sandy Riccardi. Right on cue, the mysterious Mary Poppins arrives with her bag of tricks and a plan to put things right with the amiable assistance of her best friend Bert, played with energy and charm by Dominic Williams. There’s a dark-humored subplot involving the terrifying Miss Andrews - a stellar Mary Gannon Graham - who shows up to battle Mary Poppins for the family’s future - and perhaps a bit of its soul.
Under the direction of Gene Abravaya, who handles the shifts in tone from light to dark and back with grace and ease, the entire show is packed with wonder and rich with emotion.
Give this man the Facing-a-Challenge and exceeding-all-expectations award. The effects are cleverly done, the dancing and music are eye-popping and ear pleasing, and the bittersweet ending is effectively lovely. True to form, when Mary Poppins shows up, she brings out the best in everyone she meets.
Meanwhile, at 6th Street Playhouse, the Lemons-into-Lemonade Award of the month goes to director Craig Miller, who has cleverly surmounted a number of imposing challenges in creating a highly entertaining new production of the 1992 musical "Crazy for You." The Tony-winning show by Ken Ludwig is built from old standard songs by George and Ira Gershwin - "I’ve got Rhythm," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Slap that Bass" - inventing a plot about a dusty western town invaded by show-people from New York.
It works, due to strong lead performances and some clever invention from Miller, whose written a new opening scene that sets things up and solves an array of issues, including the fact that Miller’s cast has far more women than men. His solution to the problem is not just clever. It makes the show funnier.
With spectacular choreography by lead actor Joseph Favalora, and a winning performance by Abbey Lee as a love-struck cowgirl, "Crazy for You" is not exactly deep theater, but its funny, sweet, and driven by an infectious love of the theater.
If you like musicals, especially if you love Gershwin, you should check it out.
"Crazy for You" runs Thursday–Sunday through March 15 at 6th Street Playhouse. www.6thstreetplayhouse.com.
"Mary Poppins" runs Friday–Sunday, through May 23 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. www.spreckelsonline.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
First, let me tell you about a show I saw last week, then let me say a few words about where I saw it.
"Trailer Park Gods" is an original play by Nayia Kuvetakis, a recent UC Berkeley graduate. So, actually, are most of the members of Faultline Theater, a San Francisco-based company made up of recent Berkeley theater majors, all fueled by a passion for creating fresh new plays, by emerging playwrights, telling effective stories that speak to a new generation of theatergoers. Trailer Park Gods is a strong example of just that: good, effective storytelling from a fresh voice.
Taking the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone, Kuvetakis has left the names and the bare bones of the myth, but has refashioned it into a modern tale of desperate people yearning to feel powerful and loved in a landscape where powerlessness and abandonment are the norm. In this version, Demeter, played with fire and focus by Sarah Nowicki, is not the goddess of nature of the original myth, but a near-destitute mother with a green thumb whose grown bitter after losing her central valley farm in the recession. She blames a lot of people for her troubles, including her ex-husband Zeus, but mostly she blames her brother-in-law Hades, Paul Rodrigues, who years earlier abandoned the farm, taking her life-savings with him. After being thrown in jail, Hades essentially dropped from the Earth, leaving Demeter to raise her smart, studious daughter Persephone alone in a trailer park, surrounded by various hardscrabble folks all dreaming of a better life while doing little to make it happen.
After Hades returns to town, he avoids Demeter’s wrath while re-establishing a bond with the teenage Persephone, played indelibly by Amanda Farbstein. After years spent taking care of her mother, working an afterschool job to make payments on their trailer, Persephone finds herself powerfully drawn to Hades, a man she’s been raised to hate for the last several years of her life.
The cast is first-rate, with some riveting, real performances, and the script, while perhaps a tad loose and work-shoppy, is packed with strong ideas, crisp dialogue, and clever observations about the myths we tell ourselves and each other to get by. Director Emma Nichols keeps the pace clipping, and keeps the actors on fire, though sometimes the sudden tone-shifts in how each character speaks and relates to each other seem a little out-of-key and ever-so-slightly confusing.
Small matter, that.
Trailer Park Gods, flaws and all, is still one exciting piece of theater, an absorbing story of real people who've lost control of their own lives, and must summon what power they have left, be it the power of anger, hope, love, hate - or simple perseverance.
Now let’s talk about the theater space itself.
Lets face it. Part of the experience of going to the theater is in actually going to the THEATER, the physical brick-and-mortar edifice which contains the stage on which the theatrical performance of the moment is being staged. There is an element of theater in the very act of walking into such a place, and that includes what happens inside the lobby before and after the show.
PianoFight, in San Francisco’s tenderloin area, is a brilliant fusion of social club, bar and restaurant, and theater. There’s food and drink and a spacious area to socialize with friends before and after the show, and with two theaters, there is always a new show about to start at PianoFight, which gives local theater artists a place to hone their craft for an audience eager to see something new, and then have a beer and talk about it with friends.
Is there a place in Sonoma County for a venue like Pianofight? I think there is. The question now is, who’s going to make that happen?
Trailer Park Gods runs through May 16 at Pianofight. www.pianofight.com.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Whatever else one says about "Point Break Live!," you have to agree there aren’t many other live entertainments where the audience is doused with water, beaned by flying sandwiches, robbed at gunpoint by guys wearing Richard Nixon masks, and . . . um . . . spattered with blood.
Fake blood, but yeah, blood.
Welcome to "Point Break LIVE!" an astonishingly weird, loose-limbed spoof of the iconic, 1991 cult-hit B-movie starring Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze and Gary Busey. "Point Break Live!" - or PBL to its fans - was conceived written by Jaime Keeling in 2003.
Today, twelve years after its initial debut, this giddy over-the-top “extreme theater” extravaganza of coarseness and crudity is still going strong. On the first Friday of every month, the cast of the long running L.A. production brings the show up to San Francisco, unleashing PBL at the South-of-Market DNA Lounge.
The show’s story is more-or-less that same as the movie.
A young FBI agent, and former college quarterback named Johnny Utah infiltrates a ring of beach-dwelling daredevils who rob banks by day and surf waves by night. Known as “the ex-presidents,” they commit their crimes wearing rubber masks of Nixon, Reagan, Ford and Carter. The ring is led by the guru-like Bohdi (Swayze, in the film, Sam Snowden on stage). Bohdi lives by the principle, “If you want to experience the ultimate, you have to pay the ultimate price.”
The movie was full of car chases, surfing scenes, skydiving heroics, and number of epic explosions and barrages of gunfire, all recreated in Point Break LIVE! in deliciously low-tech ways that frequently spill over into the audience.
During the surfing scenes, for example, the actors douse the crowd with super soakers and sun block. During the wildly funny gunfights, fake blood cascades into the air in all directions, including up, so watch out if you’re in the balcony. During the famous meatball sandwich scene, in which Johnny Utah’s partner Pappas (James Cotner) delivers the crowd-pleasing line, “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass-end of rhino!” actual meatball sandwiches are hurled into the seats. Experienced PBL visitors come prepared with ponchos and rain slickers, and believe me, you'll need one.
It’s not exactly classy, but it’s fun, it’s high energy, it’s inventive and it’s endlessly clever. Though the cast-members are all trained actors, the Keanu Reeves character is a member of the audience, chosen by the audience. Once selected, the Keanu-of-the-night delivers his lines from cue cards wielded by his perky handler and part-time stunt double, played with sassy charm by Christi Waldon.
The actors are quite good. Some of them rappel onto the stage from the balcony or dangle from cables during the skydiving scenes. In some ways, the cast is like an expert clown troupe in a three-ring circus, juggling a whole lot of balls at once while delivering lines with audacious glee and loose-but-effective comic timing.
While at times it all seems more like a Saturday Night Live sketch on steroids, uppers, and a bottle of Jack Daniels than it resembles a more traditional piece of theatrical craftsmanship, that barely matters. The unrestrained joy and pure ballsy outrageousness of the thing, ultimately turns Point Break Live! into something unique, and truly memorable. To paraphrase Bodhi, “If you want to experience the ultimate night of theater, you have to pay the ultimate price!” In this case, that price includes getting spattered with blood.
Trust me. It’s worth it.
"Point Break Live!" runs the first Friday of the month at DNA Lounge. in San Francisco at 7:30pm and 11:00pm. Dnalounge.com
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Music has a way of reaching out like no other art form. In times of stress it calms our nerves. It gives us strength when we are struggling. Then again, it also has a way of reaching into our souls and tearing us into sad little pieces.
Two new Marin County shows, neither a traditional musical, each use music in unexpected ways to tell stories about tough, resilient people battling impossible odds.
One is just so-so. The other is a must see.
“The Way West,” now playing at Marin Theatre Company, is Mona Mansour’s intriguing but mostly unsatisfying examination of how self-delusion and optimism can make us feel like the heroes of our own stories, even when we’re not. Mom, played with forceful enthusiasm by Anne Darragh, just won’t let anything get her down. Her Central California home is being foreclosed upon. She has a mysterious illness. She keeps driving her car into things. But as long as she can pick up a ukulele and sing songs about the early pioneers - those plucky survivors who made it through on sheer grit and optimism - then she’ll get by.
Her daughters aren’t so sure.
Manda, a high-earning grant writer, is appalled at her mother’s ambivalence in the face of looming disaster, and Meesh is just looking for the next E-bay scam to earn a few dollars of her own. Mom’s friend Tress has taken what little is left of her friend’s money to invest in a cutting-edge weight loss business, something to do with magic water selling for 500 bucks a bottle.
From this rather promising theatrical set-up, directed with a wobbly sense of pace by Hayley Finn, a rather rocky and rambling story unfolds, one that frustrates as much as it entertains. The songs are a nice diversion, and the performances are likable across the board. But like the less fortunate pioneers Mom loves to sing and talk about, the ones abandoned along the way or eaten by the others, this amiable failure of a play just doesn’t have what it takes to make it through to the end.
That brings us to James Baldwin’s marvelous “The Amen Corner” presented by AlterTheater of Marin.
In “The Amen Corner,” Gospel music underscores the roiling emotions lurking under the surface of a small storefront church in Harlem, 1953. Directed with fierce attention to emotional detail by Jeanette Harrison, this production unfolds, with minimal props and set pieces, in a cramped corner the Body Kinetics health club in San Rafael, a setting that lends an appropriate sense of urban place to the story.
Sister Margaret, played sensationally by Cathleen Riddley, is the impassioned shepherd of a small flock of believers. She leads by example as much as by the fire of her sermons. When her long-estranged jazz musician husband Luke suddenly appears, Margaret fears he might pull their son David from God’s path.
She never suspects that its her congregation, gradually incited by what they’ve learned about their leader’s past, who she should be wary of. Insightful and lyrical, with beautiful writing and strong supporting performances anchoring the rising drama, “The Amen Corner” is sensitively insightful and powerfully moving.
It’s long, with two intermissions, but like a good old-fashioned gospel tune, it’s worth the time, and impossible to get out of your head.
“The Way West” runs Tuesday–Sunday through May 10 at Marin Theatre Company.
“The Amen Corner” runs Tuesday–Sunday through May 17 at Body Kinetics, and Saturdays at the Smith Rafael Film Center.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
There may be more-than-one theatrical franchise of musical plays that started out as a line of greeting cards showing nuns saying vaguely racy things, but if there is, it’s not anywhere as famous or as popular as the "Nunsense" shows by Dan Goggins.
The first one appeared off Broadway in 1985. The show, in which the Little Sisters of Hoboken put on a fundraiser to bury the four dead sisters who are taking up space in the freezer - they died of botulism - was a mostly plotless assemblage of nun characters with funny names performing goofy nun-themed comedy sketches, some involving puppets, bingo games, or ballet dancing, all of it wrapped up in some truly catchy songs like "Nunsense is Habit forming," "Holier Than Thou," and "We’ve Got to Clean Out the Freezer." It all pokes gentle fun at Catholicism while also being one-hundred-percent pro-faith, pro-God, and pro-nun, especially nuns who make jokes about death, leprosy and the Apostle Peter.
Since its debut, "Nunsense" has been performed all over the world, and miraculously, has given birth to several sequels and spinoffs, two of which are currently being performed by different theater companies in Sonoma County.
"Nunsense: the Mega Musical," is essentially a rewrite of the original show, with some new musical numbers and a few additional onstage characters. Running through May 3rd at the Sonoma Community Center, in Sonoma, and produced by J Love Productions, the shiow’s highlights include Abbey Chamber’s soaring rendition of "I Just Wanna Be a Star," Sister Robert Anne’s bittersweet lament about missed opportunities, and Nora Chambers’ outrageous performance of "The Dying Nun Ballet," as interpreted by the convent’s resident novice Sister Mary Leo, who always wanted to be a ballet dancer. Also very funny is "So You Want to Be a Nun," performed with commitment and excellent comic timing by Julia Holsworth as Sister Mary Amnesia, who can’t remember anything ever since a crucifix fell on her head. In the song, she sings a duet with a nun puppet, who appears to be possessed. Eventually Sister Mary Amnesia recalls her former life as a country Western Singer and secret millionaire.
That’s the funny thing about the Little Sisters of Hoboken.
They all seem to have secrets, and were all once been performers. Even the Reverend Mother was once a tightrope walker, and still yearns to be in the spotlight.
That’s more or less the point of "Nunsense II, the Second Coming," running through April 26 at the Raven Theater Windsor. The very first sequel to the original, Second Coming finds the sisters back on stage for a thank you show, after everything worked our favorably enough the first time. The dead sisters have been buried, and now the only problem is that Sister Mary Amnesia, played in Windsor by Cindy Brillhart-True, might have once been a Franciscan. And having been revealed to be a millionaire, the Franciscans now want her back.
There is even less plot than the original, and the songs aren’t quite as catchy or as funny, but there is still plenty of entertainment value in seeing the Little Sisters again, all of them still wrestling with their secret desires to be famous. Sister Robert Anne, here played marvelously by Jeanine LaForge, is especially eager to prove herself, to great comic effect.
The Windsor cast, all of whom have played these roles before, bring an extra dash of confidence and character-development to their parts, which is saying something with material this light and fluffy and essentially pointless.
That said, even the Reverend Mother would agree that laughing, especially laughing at ourselves, is definitely never a sin.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
I love puppets.
It’s a secret that only a certain number of people know about me, but in my late teens, I was a professional puppeteer. It’s true. I had my own company - a puppet company - and we toured around Southern California doing, you know, puppet shows.
That was a 35 years ago, but as a guy who knows what its like to bring an inanimate object to life, I still appreciate the sheer difficulty of putting puppets on stage in a theatrical production. Which brings us to the The Independent Eye’s dreamlike staging of William Shakespeare’s epic tragedy "King Lear," running Fridays and Saturdays through April 26 at the Emerald Tablet art gallery in San Francisco.
This is "King Lear" as a puppet show.
Which makes more sense than it sounds.
The puppets themselves, to begin with, are breathtaking. Eerily beautiful works of art, these old fashioned hand-puppets are amazing to see, and in the hands of Sebastopol theater artists Elizabeth Fuller and Conrad Bishop - Bishop built the puppets himself - they pop to life in mesmerizing ways. These are not the fluffy, cutesy-bootsy kind of puppets you might see in a children’s show, which is good because King Lear is not some fluffy, cutesy-bootsy Shakespeare play.
The story is well known.
The aging monarch Lear, who impulsively hands the rule of his kingdom over to his daughters, somehow believes he is still in control of his kingdom and his destiny, but his greedy family members have plans of their own. It isn’t pretty. Eye gouging is involved. King Lear, after all, is a tragedy about weak-willed people becoming puppets to their own desires and to each other, helpless in the cruel hands of fate. Clearly, none of Shakespeare’s works is better suited to the puppet show treatment than this.
Bishop, in flowing white hair and a crown of leather braid, plays the increasingly frail and frustrated Lear. Fuller, in full clown makeup and red nose, is Lear’s faithful fool. All of the other characters are played by puppets, voiced and manipulated by Bishop and Fuller.
At times, the way this talented twosome manipulates those puppets, the blank faces coming alive with no more than a tiny adjustment of angle, is nothing short of genius. The sound design by Fuller is also amazing, constructed entirely from Fuller’s own voice, transformed through a vocal processor into a soundtrack of haunting reverberations and otherworldly music.
But for all its visual and auditory glory, the production - as currently constructed - is frustratingly confusing and hard-to-follow at times. Though Bishop easily ranks as one of the best, most heartbreaking Lear’s I’ve ever seen, his performance is hampered by the need to play scenes against puppets he’s voicing himself - with not a lot of vocal variation from one puppet character to another - all of which adds to a strangely muddled flow in the proceedings.
At times it’s hard to tell which character is speaking when.
In other shows I’ve seen by the Independent Eye, such as their adaptations of "The Tempest" and "Frankenstein," a troupe of four or five performers An additional puppeteer or two would allow others to play several of Bishop’s puppet characters, freeing Bishop to engage and interact as Lear unencumbered. A performance this good deserves nothing less.
In the end, how much you enjoy this eerie Lear may depend on your ability to ignore the problems, and simply surrender to the strange, lush beauty of it all.
"King Lear" runs Friday and Saturday through April 25 at The Emerald Tablet. Independenteye.org.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB
Something kinky has been taking place lately in the world of mainstream entertainment. Sadism and masochism are now to romantic comedy what romance and comedy use to be to romantic comedy. From the 2002 movie Secretary to 2011’s three-novel series 50 Shades of Grey (released as a movie earlier this year), many of our favorite new “love stories” are disturbingly, conspicuously twisted.
Standing somewhere between those two examples is David Ives’ Tony-winning 2010 stage play "Venus in Fur," now running at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Winner of the Tony for Best Play and Best Actress, Venus in Fur stands as a career high-water-mark for Ives, who’s best known for work like All in the Timing and Lives of the Saints, both collections of short one-acts. Ives’ work, by and large, has tended to sacrifice plot in the service of playing with language. Few playwrights are as masterful and entertaining with words and sentences as is Ives. But as an inventor of compelling stories, he’s always been a little lacking. Perhaps that’s the reason he’s chosen to adapt so many classic tales by other people when tackling full-length plays, works like Piere Corneille’s "The Liar" and Moliere’s "The Misanthrope."
With "Venus in Fur," Ives fuses his best instincts into one show, fashioning a language-rich play about a playwright-director who’s just completed an adaption of the 1870 novel Venus in Furs, by Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
And here’s where it gets kinky.
Sacher-Masoch is the gentlemen for whom the term “masochism” was named, and Venus in Furs is the novel that brought the concept of sadomasochism into public awareness.
At Main Stage West, Anthony Abate plays Thomas the playwright, who has been auditioning actresses for the part of Vanda, an aristocratic woman who spontaneously takes a sex-slave and learns to mistreat him in degrading ways. As Thomas is about to leave his New York office, with the role of Vanda still uncast, in walks an actress whose name is also Vanda (mysterious!), played by Rose Roberts, who’s pretty much astonishing from start to finish. Vanda is a hot mess of an actress, dropping F-bombs left and right, desperate to audition though she’s three hours late, clutching a bag of props and costumes and a copy of the script she’s somehow gotten her hands on - despite the fact that almost no one has read it but Thomas and his producers.
It is difficult to describe what happens next without spoiling the delicate series of revelations and red-herrings Ives incorporates into his gradually intensifying - and frequently hilarious - if not exactly plot-heavy story. The audition quickly turns into a battle of wits, sexuality, and gender assumptions. Thomas is surprised when that Vanda seems to have memorized the entire script, and as the audition commences, he reluctantly reads the role of the sex-slave to Vanda’s dominatrix. Sacher-Masoch’s soft-porn story-within-the-story - which Vanda eventually eviscerates with her dead-on critical analysis - eventually overlaps onto the intensifying power-play taking place between director and actress.
There’s a bit of smoke-and-mirrors going on in Ives’ script, which would have little story at all were it not for the story within the story, but Ives’ work the smoke and mirrors well enough that few will notice that not much actually happens.
But then, what does happen is extremely entertaining and even a little thought-provoking, thanks largely to director David Lear, who adds a few bold additions to Ives’ original vision. Ultimately, this uneven but highly intelligent play has lots to say about what men and women think about men and women. Funny, thoughtful, and painfully to-the-point, Venus in Fur is so good it hurts.
"Venus in Fur" runs Thursday–Sunday through April 25 at Main Stage West. Mainstagewest.org.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
One thing about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that surprises a few newcomers is that only about four or five of the eleven shows they do each year are by William Shakespeare. The festival mixes things up a lot, adding original shows, historical classics, world premieres, musicals and American standards. This year - with four shows open already and more to come as the year unfolds - two non-Shakespeare shows are already clear hits.
Such is the case with Frank Loesser’s "Guys and Dolls," a show so popular that no high school and community theater company in the nation can resist taking a crack at it. Everyone knows it.
But forget what you think you know about "Guys and Dolls."
Director Mary Zimmerman, a card-carrying theatrical magician of the highest order, is known for tackling impossible source material like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci, and Kipling’s The Jungle Book. This year, she’s taken on the herculean task of making Guys and Dolls look fresh, fun, and significant - and she’s done it.
Behind a mostly bare stage occupied at all times by a wooden table and a portable scale model of New York City, a massive wall occasionally opens up revealing windows that display various scene-setting images like palm trees or sewer grates. Other scene elements roll off and on - or bounce on, in the case of several dozen beach balls that appear in one scene set in Havana, Cuba - but the real razzle-dazzle in this Guys and Dolls is the superb cast.
As the confirmed-bachelor and gambler Sky Masterson and the engaged-but-marriage-phobic Nathan Detroit, Jeremy Peter Johnson and Rodney Gardiner are forces of nature, bringing stellar voices and magnificent character work to what could have been nothing but easy-to-phone-in cliché’s. In the hands of such inventive actors, these two cartoonish characters - affable criminals caught in the magnetic pull of love - become richly detailed human beings.
The entire cast follows suit, somehow turning these broadly drawn people into folks with real emotions roiling under their skins, and the result is a "Guys and Dolls" that has more than just dynamite singing and dancing and a fluffy, superficial plot - this one has real heart.
And that brings us to "Fingersmith."
Sarah Waters’ bestselling Victorian crime thriller became the novel to read about ten years ago, fueled by its daring combination of Dickensian detail and heart-pounding lesbian sex. With a sprawling cast of characters, public hangings, Victorian pornography, and that aforementioned girl-on-girl bedroom action, Fingersmith might not sound like an obvious choice for a Shakespeare Festival.
So it’s a good thing OSF likes to break rules.
This world premiere commission from playwright Alexa Junge brings with it enormous buzz and huge audience awareness.
And it pays off.
The story - about which little can be revealed - is set in two very different households in 1861 Londonl. Sue Trinder is a pickpocket who’s grown up in the makeshift “family” of the amiable Fagin-like criminal Mrs. Sucksby. When a legendary conman named Gentleman pulls Sue into his scheme to swindle a mentally frail heiress, things, to say the least, take a few unexpected turns.
Directed by OSF artistic director Bill Rauch, the story clips along with pacing and polish, its shape-shifting cast augmented by some delightful stagecraft, including boats and carriages sailing or clip-clopping along on a rotating stage. Alternately moving and scary, hilarious and engaging, "Fingersmith" will keep you guessing to last surprise, in a show so full of surprises you’ll lose count.
It’s a must see.
For the full schedule and information about this year’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, visit the website at www.osfashland.org
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Every year in spring, when people hear me talking about the shows that just opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, they get confused.
“Wait . . . what? Just opened? You mean LAST year! Last SUMMER, right? The Shakespeare festival is in summer.”
My response is usually along the lines of, “Yes, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs in the summer. But it opens in February. And it closes in October.”
It’s true.
Each year, OSF produces eleven shows between the Spring and Fall, beginning with four shows that open toward the end of February. These are in their two indoor theaters. In June, the big outdoor theater opens too, and that’s when tourism in Ashland is at its highest. But Sonoma County theater fans who prefer smaller crowds do take the six-hour drive up to Ashland before that, and for those willing to do so, there are some very good new shows waiting for them: a world premiere adaptation of a gothic novel, a classic American musical, and two shows written by Shakespeare himself.
I’ll talk about the Shakespeare shows today.
Listen tomorrow for my reviews of the other two.
Playing in the Angus Bowmer theater, "Much Ado About Nothing" kicks things off with a comedic bang. 'Much Ado' is, after all, a comedy. But William Shakespeare had a way of writing comedies with plots that often veered close to the teetering edge of becoming tragedies. "Much Ado About Nothing" is one of those, with a story that ventures so far into dark and dangerous territory it becomes difficult, bordering on miraculous, actually, for some directors to ease the production back away from that brink, back into the realm of lightness and love and humor.
With 'Much Ado,' director Lileana Blain-Cruz works that kind of miracle by making actual sense of certain plot turns that usually baffle the directors put in charge of making Shakespeare’s various merry mix-ups make sense.
Did that make sense?
Blain-Cruz sets the action in a modern-day version of that Messina, a world that includes such things as toe socks and exercise equipment. But the show still carries elements of an ancient fairytale with plenty of European splendor. The story involves several characters being tricked into and out of love, for good reasons and bad. The cast is spectacular, and they do a good job of giving believable underpinnings for actions that often seem unlikable or unforgivable. The emotions are rich and nuanced, the comedic elements beautifully carried out, the language is crisp and clear, and the climax is believably bittersweet, with just the right touch of hope and happiness.
One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays during his lifetime was "Pericles," a play that has not felt much love for over the last hundred years. Maybe it’s because this epic high sea adventure is not exactly simple or cheap to produce, what with its rapidly changing scenes, flipping like a slide show from exotic islands to ocean storms to shipwrecks to more exotic islands to brothels and palaces and graveyards and jousts and sacred temples to resurrections and battles and tricks and riddles and pirates and kidnappings and, ultimately, the timely arrival of one very helpful goddess.
In this case, she’s on a trapeze.
Sort of. Not exactly. Anyway, it’s cool.
Gorgeously directed by Joseph Haj, the play-that-can-no-longer-be-staged has been turned into that rarity of a theatrical event: a magical, richly emotional play that is, form it’s acting to the unchecked loveliness of its visual presentation, pretty much perfect.
For the full line-up of shows in Ashland visit osfashland.org
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
It’s a striking coincidence.
You don’t have to be the writer of stage thrillers to see it.
Maybe it’s the work of some devious theatrical conspiracy.
How else to explain two shows opening in the North Bay the same weekend, each one a play about people writing a play about people writing a play. And just keep things interesting, one of these self-referential theatrical endeavors is a musical.
"[Title of Show]," and yes, that’s the title of the show, was written in 2004 by Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, who proposed to the New York Musical Theater Festival that they be allowed to write a musical about the process of writing that very same musical. Eventually, with the addition of two actresses named Susan and Heidi, "[Title of Show]," with brackets, did actually appear in the festival, followed by an off-Broadway run and after a period when it looked like the show’s life was finally over, it ended up on Broadway. And yes, all of that is in the show, too.
And now, it’s in San Rafael, presented by Marin Onstage at Belrose Theater, this loopy, tuneful love story to the creative process is directed by Carl Jordan, and features Fernando Siu and Phillip Percy Williams as Jeff and Hunter, and Abbey Lee and Amanda Morando as Susan and Heidi. Justin Pine appears too, as Larry, the guy at the piano, because evidently every would-be playwright has his own accompanist hanging out in the corner of his apartment, just in case inspiration strikes.
It really is a show about the creation of the show it’s about, which gets a little weird at times, as we watch the writers writing the show in front of us. At one point, Jeff asks Susan why she hasn’t said anything in a while, and she responds by saying, "Because this is the first line you’ve written for me to say in a while.”
The songs are, for the most part, all about writing songs, but also - and this is why "[Title of Show]" is such a great show - the songs get to the heart of what it’s like to try and create something: the insecurities and doubts, the discoveries that come out of nowhere, the thrills and joys of hitting the mark when you finally do.
Energetically and sympathetically performed by the entire cast, who bring their own unique personalities to the characters indelibly established by the original Jeff, Hunter, Susan and Heidi, this is a show for anyone whose ever dreamed of doing something really hard, and knows the heartache of failure and the sheer, ecstatic wonder of success.
There’s one more weekend.
And running through April 5th is Spreckels Theater Company’s production of "Deathtrap." Written by Ira Leven and directed with nastiness and glee by David Yen, ‘Deathtrap’ is a two-act, five-character play about a blocked playwright discover a two-act, five character play called "Deathtrap."
There is little I can say about it without spoiling the many surprises, so let me just say that the cast of five drive the play with mounting energy, balancing the mounting tension with plenty of authentic comedy. Some of the murder weapons hanging on the wall are a little conspicuously rubbery and non-threatening, but everything else in this show is sharp, loaded, and entertainingly lethal.
And there you have it: Two shows about people creating shows.
You should consider showing up for one for both.
You won’t regret it.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Well, Monday night was a good night for North Bay theater people.
At the 39th annual San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Awards, a batch of Sonoma County theaters were honored, with some very talented actors, directors and theater artists walking the steps up to claim awards for their work in 2014.
Winners included Denise Elia-Yen for her snappy portrayal of Annie Oakley in Spreckel’s Performing arts Center’s brilliantly presented production of "Annie Get Your Gun." Other North Bay actresses who picked up awards included Abbey Lee, honored for her outrageous portrayal of an oversexed gangster’s moll in "Victor/Victoria," and Rebekkah Pearson for playing the title role in "Thoroughly Modern Mille," both of those shows at 6th Street Playhouse. 6th Street saw a few more of its artists win awards: Anthony Guzman and Evan Attwood both picked up wins for "Thoroughly Modern Mille," and for the same show Joseph Favalora was honored for his choreography.
And back to Spreckels, Mary Gannon Graham was awarded for her splendidly goofy turn as a wacky modern day witch in "Bell, Book and Candle," and Jeff Coté picked up a win for the title role in Gene Abravaya’s "The Book of Matthew (Liebowitz)." Oh, and Janis Wilson won for musical direction of "Annie get Your Gun."
Main Stage West, in Sebastopol, also saw a few wins, beginning with singer-songwriter Si Kahn, for best original music for his show "Mother Jones in Heaven." Also honored were Tyler Costin for his fine work in "Vanya and Sonja and Masha and Spike," and for Albert Casselhoff, for his sound design on "T.I.C. (Trenchcoat in Common)."
And for Cinnabar Theater, the love continued with wins for Mary Chun, for her musical direction of last year’s "Fiddler on the Roof," with the entire cast of "Of Mice and Men" winning for best ensemble.
And speaking of love, local actor, writer, director Dezi Gallegos, who’s just nineteen, picked up a special award, the first ever Annette Lust Award, given to young theater artists who show incredible promise and potential.
His acceptance speech, promising to find the next young dreamer and help them follow their passions, had the audience crying and cheering.
That’s just a few of the winners in the North Bay. For the full list, go to the Cristics Circle website at S-F-B-A-T-C-C dot.org, standing, of course, for San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle.
And while we’re celebrating the art of theater, let me just mention two upcoming shows about the art of theater, in one form or another. Opening this weekend, down in San Rafael, is a little thing called "[Title of Show], in brackets." It’s a musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical, and when they invite two talented women to join them, it becomes a show about four people creating a musical about four people creating a musical, and then there are songs. Songs about writing songs.
As it so happens, the cast of four were ALL nominated for awards Monday night, for previous works, and two of them, including the aforementioned Abbey Lee.
It runs March 13-28 at Belrose theater, presented by Marin Onstage, marinonstage.com.
The show sounds like a blast, as does "Deathtrap," opening in a couple of weeks at Spreckels performing arts Center. It’s the story of dueling playwrights who might just be trying to kill each other.
It runs March 20 through April 5.
Who knows, maybe next year these shows will be picking up awards of their own. And either way, as was recently stated, theater awards are just a party game. Getting to make theater, that’s the real party.
I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.
Change is part of life.
Some changes are easy, others much less so.
And when cultures collide, change is often dangerous, violent, and destructive. From the opening scenes of Danai Gurira’s astonishing period drama "The Convert" - set in Colonial Africa in the late 1800s - we are plunged into the middle of such a change, as the brutal dominance of the British Empire and the aggressive forward thrust of Christianity brings civilization to the people of Africa - whether they want it or not. The absorbing and emotionally powerful play - presented with sensitivity and passion by Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley - follows a young Shona woman, whose conversion to Catholicism puts her at the precarious center of her country’s increasingly violent cultural divide. As the occupying English government imposes its rule, one of its tools of dominance is, of course, the church, its leaders waging war on local “pagan” practices, forcing codes of dress and behavior that seem bizarre to the locals, at the very least, and in some cases, represent a betrayal of centuries of local custom and religious tradition.
In a transcendent performance by Katherine Renee Turner, young Jekesai - speaking no English, having never set foot inside a house with an actual floor of cement or wood - has sought shelter at the home of Mr. Chilford, a pro-English Shona convert who lives in the rapidly colonializing country of Rhodesia. Bare-breasted and terrified, Jekesai hopes to escape a forced marriage to an elderly villager who has purchased her to join his other wives, by trading a goat to her cruel uncle, played by L. Peter Callender with comically menacing perfection.
Mr. Chilford has willingly traded in his native name and style of dress for proper Victorian substitutes. As a result, he’s incurred the suspicions of the locals, who call him bafu, or “traitor.” His chief allies are the well-tailored Chancellor - played with relish by Jefferson A. Russell - and Chancellor’s educated fiancée Prudence, an amazing character brought to life by the sensational Omoze Idehenre.
Fond of the benefits of British culture they’ve adopted, they are only gradually realizing that they will never be treated as equal to the wealthy whites who are coming to their country in droves, and are rapidly losing the connection to their own people.
And then there’s Jekesai.
Her resourceful aunt Mai Tamba, a wonderful Elizabeth Carter, works as a servant to the deeply Catholic Mr. Chilford. It’s a job Mai Tamba keeps by feigning conversion to Christianity, half-reciting her prayers - “Hail Mary, full of ghosts!” - while secretly maintaining her old customs, hiding charms in the house, reciting prayers to her ancestors. She encourages Jekesai, whose quickly been dressed in “proper” attire and renamed Ester, to follow her example, never guessing the young woman will quickly take to Christianity with a passionate fervor surpassing even Chillford’s.
As local anger against the British grows, Ester’s faith is put to increasingly impossible tests, her love of Jesus competing against her commitment to her family, her country and her most basic sense of identity.
"The Convert," three hours long, told in three riveting acts, is gorgeously written by Gurira, best-known as an actress. She plays Michonne in the TV series The Walking Dead. This stunningly well-done production is directed with exceptional skill by director Jasson Minadakis. The story only stumbles in its final moments, with a perplexing twist that seems less the result of previous actions, and more a calculated attempt at giving the play some shock value.
It’s a tiny issue in a play of monumental power and insight.
The power of "The Convert," a must-see if ever there was one, is how it illustrates, with impeccable beauty, how the changes we experience can affect more than just ourselves. When who we are shifts, we also change our families, our communities, and sometimes, violently or peaceably, for good or for bad, we end up changing the whole world.
"The Convert" runs Tuesday–Sunday through March 15 at Marin Theatre Company, marintheatre.org
The thing about death is, it’s not negotiable.
Sooner or later, we all have to face it.
Till then, it’s hanging out there, somewhere, waiting for us.
And one way we deal with that is by experiencing books, movies, songs, poetry and plays about the inevitability of death. Somehow, when glimpsing the grim reaper through the arts, we feel a little better because, I don’t know, maybe watching other people deal with the specter of mortality makes it all seem more normal.
Or something.
If that’s your take, then a pair of just-opened plays make be just your cup of tea, since the inevitability of death hangs over both of them like an ax dangling above a doorway in a condemned cabin in the middle of an earthquake.
First, there’s Conor McPherson’s evocative drama "Shining City," now playing at Main Stage West, in Sebastopol. In this sly, slippery, deceptively unassuming play, the author of "The Weir" and "The Seafarer" has crafted a ghost story, of sorts, in which a troubled Dublin therapist named Ian, played with marvelous intensity and fragile humanity by Nick Sholley, gains a new client: an anxious insomniac named John, played brilliantly by John Craven.
Poor old John. A steady-minded businessman, he is shaken by the fact that he keeps seeing the ghost of his recently deceased wife. And she doesn’t seem happy. Unable to sleep, afraid to enter his own house, John believes he’s being haunted for certain unspoken sins. Ian, convinced his new client is simply struggling with feelings of grief and unresolved guilt, gently coaxes the old man toward facing his fears, all the while carrying his own soul-crushing battle with shame and despair.
With carefully crafted delicacy, the playwright takes us through Ian’s increasingly powerful therapy sessions with John, scenes that play out against a pair of shattering close encounters Ian has with the fierce-but-frail Neassa (Ilana Niernberger) the mother of Ian’s child, and with Laurence (John Browning) a sensitive street hustler who brings Ian an unexpected understanding of how the world works. Elegantly staged by director Beth Craven, beautifully acted by the entire ensemble - with special kudos to Craven for the astonishing twenty-minute monologue that comes mid-way through the show - this rich, emotionally powerfully story is more than just a chilling ghost story. In the end, "Shining City" - glowing with intelligence, humor and humanity - reveals itself as a lyrical, lush look at the conversations we have, and the choices we all make, to feel alive in a world haunted by the ghosts of our past decisions.
Next up, "Bonnie and Clyde: the musical."
It is widely known that the notorious Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrows died violently in a hail of gunfire. In a car. In Texas. In composer Frank Wildhorn’s musical reworking of the bank robbers’ lives, the legendary tale begins at the end, the sound of gunfire, the flash of light, and famous fugitives’ bloody bodies dead in their car.
Ivan Menchell’s clever script then jumps back in time to Bonnie and Clyde’s childhoods, gradually working the story’s way back to where it began. It’s an effective choice.
As the title characters, Taylor Bartolucci and James Bock have some killer chemistry, thick enough to spread on a baguette, and they are matched in poise and presence by Scottie Woodard and Heather Buck as Clyde’s brother Buck and sister-in-law Blanche. Barry Martin, as a local preacher, brings some impressive southern gospel charm.
The somewhat uneven musical score does have a few strong moments, mostly when emphasizing the tragic love story at the heart of the play. On Jesse Dreikosen’s first-rate set of jagged wooden slats, director Craig Miller keeps the tension building and building and building, right to end.
And that’s no small feat, considering the fact that, hey, everyone knows the ending.
"Bonnie & Clyde" runs Thursday–Sunday through March 15 at 6th Street Playhouse. 6thstreetplayhouse.com.
"Shining City" runs Thursday–Sunday through March 15 at Main Stage West. Maistagewest.com.
"Carousel," the second musical created by the legendary Rogers & Hammerstein, is noted today for two major things. One - it’s the show from which we gained the songs "June is Bustin’ Out All Over," and "You'll Never Walk Alone," sometimes alternately known as "When You Walk Through a Storm," a song without which funerals, church services, graduations, and high school music recitals would have been a very different experience over the last 70 years. The SECOND Thing "Carousel" is usually noted for is, well, the plot of the 1945 musical is kinda weird and sort of unsettling, But Hey, at least it’s got that 'Storm' song.
And didn’t Elvis have a huge hit with that song?
Yes, he did.
In truth, "Carousel," a huge hit when it first spun onto Broadway with John Raitt and Jan Clayton in the leads, has a LOT of great songs, some of which you might even have heard before. "June is Bustin’ Out All Over," for what it’s worth, has been bustin‘ into movies, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and major league baseball commercials ever since it first hit the stage. Then there’s, "If You Loved Me," covered on record albums hundreds of times by everyone from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como to Art Garfunkel, Chad & Jeremy and Sammy Davis Jr.
And of course, though it has no lyrics and almost no one knows its name, this piece of music, "The Carousel Waltz," is one of the most famous pieces of circus music ever written, gracing zillions of music boxes for seven decades.
Less famous, but worth noting is "Real Nice Clambake," which gave us the indelible lyric, "This was a real nice clambake/we're mighty glad we came/the vittles we et/were good, you bet/the company was the same."
Man, that’s poetry.
Actually, all kidding aside, that IS poetry.
Rogers & Hammerstein’s commitment to capturing the vernacular of their characters was unheard of on the Broadway musical stage before R&H arrived with "Oklahoma," "South Pacific," "The King & I," and "Carousel."
Oh, by the way, the reason I’m talking about it is that Spreckels Performing Arts Center is currently presenting a delightfully stripped down production of "Carousel," putting the music front and center along with the orchestra, which is right there on stage with musical director Janis Wilson. Billed as a staged concert, it’s more of a fully staged musical with minimal sets, and an orchestra you can actually look at during the show if you want to.
But with gorgeous costumes, snappy choreography, and some truly magnificent singers and actors, you'll soon stop noticing the musicians and be pulled into the story.
Or not.
The truth is, "Carousel" DOES have a kind of a weird, conspicuously dated story, in which the residents of a turn of the century New England mill town deal with everyday problems: love, poverty, death, spousal abuse, class divisions, what to do when you've died with unfinished business, and timeless issue of finding a suitable rhyme to the word ‘vittles.’ The music is lovely, and it weaves in and out of the dialogue like a river along a gentle mountainside.
Directed with fondness and a staunch refusal to ‘fix’ any of the stories outdated ideas, this "Carousel" but putting focus on it’s most notable attribute, the music, is as pleasant and laidback as a lazy ride on a merry-go-round - or a summertime clambake amongst friends.
"Carousel" runs through March first at Spreckels Performing Arts Center - spreckelsonline.com
Twelve years ago, journalist and playwright Doug Wright unveiled a new one-actor play with a curious name: "I Am My Own Wife." As a member of the Tectonic Theater, which had earlier premiered the ground breaking play "The Laramie Project," Wright was fully adept at the process of creating documentary style theater, a play that built from actual interviews with people who lived the experiences being recreated on stage, actors performing real-life characters using the actual words collected in the interview.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and travel was permitted into East Berlin for the first time since 1961, word began to spread about a woman named Charlotte Von Mahlsdorff, an elderly antique dealer who ran a museum in her home. Charlotte was an openly transgender woman; people then referred to her as a transvestite. When Doug Wright learned that a transgender woman had somehow survived not only the communist regime of East Germany, but the Nazis before that, he set out to build a play around her experiences, using actual interviews, which he taped face-to-face over the course of a few years.
Wright decided to emphasize the play’s tale of isolation and endurance by having all 40 characters, including himself and Charlotte, played by one single actor.
The result, "I Am My Own Wife," is as much Wright’s journey as it is Charlotte Von Mahlsdorff’s, something much deeper, richer, complex and mysterious than a mere survivor story. It premiered on Broadway in 2003, winning the Tony for Best new play, and going on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
In 2006, working with director Jennifer King, North Bay Actor Stephen Abbott tackled ‘I Am My Own Wife’ at Sonoma County Repertory Theater, a brilliantly-staged performance that played sell-out crowds. Four years later, Abbott and King remounted the show at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, with similar results. And now, nine years after first playing Charlotte Von Mahlsdorff, Abbott is doing it once again, this time at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma.
While it seems impossible to improve upon perfection, Abbott is doing just that. He is once again working with director King, who recently visited Germany and toured the real-life home and museum of Von Mahsldorff, who died in 2002 at the age of 74. That up-close-and-personal touch has only deepened the show, King introducing tiny details on which Abbott builds his characters, each one a bit more real, more clearly defined and complicated than ever.
Regardless of how one ultimately feels about Von Mahlsdorff, and the questions of how she actually survived her years under brutal totalitarian regimes, this is an impressive work of art. Was she telling the truth with stories of killing her Nazi father with a rolling pin and turning a beloved gay friend over to the communists at his request? Did she really operate a gay brothel under the eyes of one of the most oppressive governments in history? Some of her stories are easier to swallow than others. Perhaps it was her ability to tell tall tales, to spin the truth her own way, part of what allowed her to survive in such an impossible set of situations? Either way, Abbott fully embodies the heart and soul of this extraordinary human being, showing her from the inside out, along with scores of the family, friends, soldiers, neighbors, customers, journalists and visitors she met along the way.
As an extraordinary feat of first-rate theater, "I am My Own Wife" is a must see. As an inspiring, true-ish tale of living as your heart guides you, existing by your own rules, it could even, for some, be nothing short of life-changing.
"I Am My Own Wife" runs through February 22 at Cinnabar theater, cinnabartheater.org.
In Victorian England, the unhappy wife of a repressed doctor yearns to feel alive - and finally takes matters into her own hands. In an imaginary steam-punk version of Victorian England, a band of brave, opera-singing women similarly yearn to be happy, free - and a little bit naughty - and they make it happen through the power of song. In East Berlin, Germany, a mysterious woman with a powerful secret survives against impossible odds, ultimately becoming an inspiration to a young American journalist. She survives through the power of her own belief in herself.
In three productions either currently running or about to open in the North Bay, the concept of “gender” is just the tip of the iceberg in stories that challenge us, the audience, to look beneath the surface of some amazing human beings - some real, some fictional - all with something to show us we might not be expecting.
Let’s start with "Heroines," opening tomorrow night at Sonoma State University.
This one is a brand new original musical review featuring classic operetta tunes from the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Lehar, Gilbert & Sullivan and others. It was created by musical director Lynn Morrow and stage director Jane Irwin Hammett, who appropriately titled their piece, "Heroines." Set during a time of radical change in England, when women were demanding the vote and a whole lot more, the piece pulls famous females from out of other stories and throws them all together. Due to a magical twist of time, these women from various centuries join forces to express their feelings through indelible songs borrowed from shows like "The Threepenny Opera," "The Merry Widow," and other musical masterpieces, and number from the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. In a fantasy version of London, these iconic characters come together in a city blending visuals from Dickens with ideas from Jules Verne, joining their hearts and voices in a revolutionary effort to break the shackles of tradition and inequality.
Sounds fun, huh?
New shows deserve our support, and SSU, in recent years, has made a strong effort to present at least one original show a year. And with voices recruited from SSU’s Departments of Music and Theater Arts & Dance, this is a production that probably will sound like a blast of pure operatic dynamite - and then some.
Meanwhile, At Cinnabar Theater, Doug Wright’s Pulitzer-winning one-actor drama "I Am My Own Wife" introduces audiences to a different kind of heroine: the real-life Charlotte von Mahlsdorff, a transgender woman whose courage - and possibly a bit of treasonous duplicity - allowed her to escape Hitler’s concentration camps, and survive, in her own way, operating a small museum under the noses of her enemies, all during the communist party’s decades-long reign of suspicion and terror.
I’ll be reviewing it in full next week.
And finally, there’s Sarah Ruhl’s eye-opening drama, "In the Next Room," subtitled, "The Vibrator Play." This is a daring move for the usually fairly reserved Raven Players. The play looks at the marriage of a late Victorian woman and her husband, a doctor specializing in the treatment of hysterical women. He has been using a new treatment, made possible through the power of electricity, which seems to leave his patience extremely happy, and eager for their next appointment. It only his wife could become the focus of his attentions, she - and maybe even he - could find what is missing in their lives.
Gorgeously written by Ruhl, it’s a love story with a jolt of raw truth, another story of what happens when strong women are given the power they need to take control of their own destinies, their own happiness, their own world.
"I Am My Own Wife" runs February 6-22 at Cinnabar Theater, cinnabartheater.org.
"Heroines" runs February 5-15 in the Evert B. Person Theater at Sonoma State University, Sonoma.edu.
"In the Next Room" (or "The Vibrator Play") runs through February 14 at Raven Theater, Raventheater.org
It’s awards season, and everyone’s talking about who got nominated and who didn’t. And no, I’m not talking about the Oscars. Last week, the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle announced the nominees for its upcoming 29th annual awards ceremony, to be held Monday March 9, at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco. After decades of neglect from the Circle, which simply has had a majority of writers working and watching shows in the City, the East Bay and South Bay, the poor North Bay, and especially Sonoma County, has recently been enjoying a gradual shift in attention from the Circle, of which I am a member. Last year, there were actually a fair number of wins for a few surprised actors, directors and stage artists from North of the Golden Gate.
With this year’s announcements though, it’s as if some sort of theatrical earthquake has hit the area, changing the geography so much that even Main Stage West, in far-from-the-Bridge Sebastopol got a number of well-deserved nominations.
The reason for the change?
It’s a mix of factors, one being simply that more North Bay theater critics have joined the circle of late, at the same time that the ranks of the circle have been declining due to attrition and other factors. So the odds once stacked impenetrably against Sonoma County theater artists are, for the time being, somewhat in our favor. There are, in fact, too many local names to mention all of them here, though I will point out a few highlights, and let you look for yourselves, if you find yourself curious. I’ll give the link to the Critics Circle web site in just a minute.
Focusing primarily on Sonoma County, congratulations are due to Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater, snapping up 22 nominations, including a Best Director nod for Sheri Lee Miller, for last year’s spectacular "Of Mice and Men," which also got nominations for Samson Hood for best Principle actor in a play, who played Lennie in the production also nominated for best show and best ensemble. Cinnabar was also awarded several nominations for its production of "The Marriage of Figaro," and for "Fiddler on the Roof," the latter snapping up a nomination for best principle actress for Elly Lichenstein and Best principle actor for Stephen Walsh.
Nineteen nominations were awarded to Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse including several for choreography in a musical - congrats to Stacie Ariaga and Joseph Favalora for their work on "Grease" and "Victor/Victoria," both for Stacie, and "Thoroughly Modern Milly," that one for Joe.
6th Street also several got nominations for acting, including a much-deserved nomination for Abbey Lee, stealing every scene and dazzling audience with her hilarious strip-tease seduction in "Victor Victoria," and Larry Williams, doing the same thing, sort of, with exhausting-to-watch energy in the comedy "Boing Boing." Other acting nominations include one for Trevor Hoffman who played Kinicki in 6th Street’s production of "Grease."
Other companies honored are Spreckels Performing Arts Center, with a whopping 25 nominations, including acting nods for members of "The Book Of Matthew Liebowits," "Annie Get Your Gun," "Oliver!," and "Bell, Book and Candle," and "Scrooge the Musical". Then there’s Main Stage West, with fourteen nominations, including one for Mary Gannon Graham for her work in "Mother Jones in Heaven," directing nods for Sheri Lee Miller for "T.I.C. Trenchcoat in Common" and Beth Craven for "Yankee Tavern," and acting nominations for Sheri Lee Miller (a good year for her) for her work in "Other Desert Cities," which also got nominations for Sharia Pierce.
Whew! These names are just the tip of the iceberg.
To read them for yourself, and get info on how you can attend and cheer on our local heroes, go to the website at SFBATCC.ORG, those being, of course, the initials of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle. Check it out.
I saw an amazing performance last weekend, but I have no clue how to properly describe what I saw. I could start by talking about Wallace Shawn, the playwright of "The Fever," which was first performed in 1990 or so, was turned into a provocative film in 2004, and is now being performed by actor and author Elliot Fintushel, most commonly in other people’s living rooms.
Occasionally their backyards.
And for one more weekend . . . in an actual theater, Main Stage West in Sebastopol to be specific.
But I was talking about Wallace Shawn.
He’s best known as the voice of Rex the lovable plastic dinosaur from the Toy Story movies, or as the villainous Vizzini in "The Princess Bride," yeah the guy who says, "Inconceivable." You might even know him as the other guy at the dinner table in ‘My Dinner With André,’ the one who wasn’t André.
Anyway, Shawn is also a playwright, and while his films are often light and airy and fluffy and mostly positive, his plays - including things like "The Designated Mourner" and "Aunt Dan" and "Lemon" - are not. An avowed socialist, Wallace writes plays about the world at large, about politics and oppression and the plight of the poor and dangers of fascism and hypocrisy of the ruling class.
But of course, he’s also a millionaire. The website celebritynetworth.com estimates Shawn’s fortune at about eight million. So as a socialist, Shawn feels sort of conflicted about that.
Which is why he wrote "The Fever," a stunningly effective, frequently lyrical, inescapably uncomfortable, and occasionally very, very funny ninety-minute monologue, which Shawn originally performed for his rich Hollywood friends in their own living rooms, which made them uncomfortable, which was exactly Wallace Shawn’s intention.
How do we in the west deal with our position of privilege, how do we who enjoy relative wealth and luxury compared with all of those third world countries where people have literally nothing actually make ourselves okay with that?
Told as if it’s just some guy at a dinner party telling a story about a recent trip abroad, the wildly stream-of-consciousness monologue traces the storytellers gradual existential crisis, made vivid while suffering a strange fever that keeps him on the bathroom floor of a hotel in a small country currently engaged in violent revolution.
It’s an astonishing piece of writing, and in Elliot Fintushel’s hands, a wholly remarkable act of high-risk performance art. At Main Stage West, you can sit on stage with Fintushel if you like, perched on a comfy couch, though you may also sit out in the darkened theater if that’s too intense for you. Either way, what you will witness is the theatrical equivalent of Philippe Petit's famous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in New York. Barely moving from his own chair at center stage, Fintushel takes his audience on a journey through what it means to be human being in a world where only a few share the wealth while the majority go without. It's powerful, challenging, important, sad, funny, beautiful, and (though definitely not exactly light-hearted theater) DEFINITELY an experience you are not likely to regret, or easily shake off . . . on your way home.
"The Fever" runs this Thursday through Sunday at mainstage west, mainstagewest.com
One need not have ever seen Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun to appreciate the setup - or laugh at the jokes - in Bruce Norris’s brilliant 2012 Pulitzer-and-Tony-winning comedy-drama "Clybourne Park."
Taking place immediately following the events of the original, Clybourne - running through January 25 at 6th Street Playhouse - is a smart, insightful, baldy frank and frequently hilarious examination of the racial divide in America.
Hansberry’s play - which gave many theater-going white folks their first glimpses into the lives of Africa-American families - takes place in a poor, Southside neighborhood of Chicago in 1959, where the African-American Younger family is preparing to move to a house they’ve just purchased in the all-white neighborhood of Clybourne Park. At the end of that play, Karl - a nervous, white representative of Clybourne Park - visits the Youngers, attempting to bully, cajole or outright bribe them into selling the house back - something they ultimately refuse to do.
In "Clybourne Park," directed with expert comic timing, gripping intensity and escalating drama by Carl Jordan, the action now takes place in the Clybourne Park house the Youngers have purchased.
The place is half-empty, its contents mostly packed into cardboard boxes standing here and there on the nicely detailed set by Ronald Krempetz, as its white residents Bev and Russ prepare to move out of the area. When Karl, the white guy from Raisin in the Sun, appears - having just come from failing to bribe the Youngers - Russ stubbornly digs in his heels at the suggestion he should assist the neighborhood in keeping the black family out.
It turns out Russ has some grudges against his neighbors, in part for the way they treated his son after the Korean War.
The escalating conflict, which pulls in the young minister Jim and Karl’s deaf, very-pregnant wife Betsy, takes place in the presence of Russ and Bev’s longsuffering black housecleaner Lena and her husband Albert, who gradually insert their own opinions about the callous racism they are witnessing.
Decisions are made. Words are exchanged. Lives are changed. Then, in the play’s boldest move, the story suddenly leaps fifty years ahead.
In Act 2, the Younger’s home is now a condemned wreck covered in graffiti, the property about to be demolished following years of drug-enhanced neglect in the once depressed, all-black but now mixed-race and rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. The same, supremely strong flexible cast appears again, this time as contemporary characters, gathering at the house to discuss the details of what kind of structure can be built on the same spot. IT being a historically valuable neighborhood, there are rules how big, and how tacky, the new owners are allowed to make any new building. The witty dialogue is riveting, raw, and real, as the marvelous cast shows us the prejudices still lurking below the surface, demonstrating with humor and candid transparency that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
"Clybourne Park" runs Thursday–Sunday through Jan. 25 at 6th Street Playhouse. 6thstreetplayhouse.com
It’s a new year, and as the North Bay theater community prepares to launch its first shows of 2015, Cinnabar Theater, in Petaluma, has already unveiled its newest show, and I mean new. "Edith Piaf: Under Paris Skies" is an original commission, assembled from scratch for Cinnabar Theater, and though its creators are better known as performers than authors, I predict their clever, moving, raunchy, mysterious, funny, sad and seductive little musical theater piece will definitely have a life beyond Cinnabar, or should, if there is any justice in the world.
Written by Michael Van Why and Valenitna Osinski, with additional work by translator Lauren Lundgren, "Edith Piaf: Under Paris Skies" is primarily a musical revue, blending many of the legendary French cabaret singer’s best-known songs with a number of obscure treasures from the far reaches of her repertoire. The songs are sensitively and cleverly blended with biographical vignette’s, adapted mainly from the memoir’s of Piaf’s sister Simone, played with world-weary panache by Melissa Weaver, who also directs the shopw with endlessly entertaining creativity. Simone appears as a kind of narrator/spirit guide through the show, commenting on but also interacting with Piaf. In the show’s most interesting artistic choice, Piaf is played by four different performers - two female, two male - each embodying a different aspect of Piaf’s character.
Osinski, for example, is Reckeless Piaf, while Van Why plays Jaded Piaf. Joining them are Julia Hathaway as Romantic Piaf, and Kevin Singer as Traditional Piaf.
Piaf’s life was a rough one, and the script does not shy away from that, with language and sexual references that are suitably appropriate to the kind of hard-drinking, hard-hitting life she rose from, and eventually fell back to. That the creators of the show chose not to turn Piaf into a singer-makes-good saint is one of the strengths of the show. Through the four aspects of Piaf’s personality, demonstrated through songs that chart her growth as a writer and as a defiant, love-struck, frail but also fearless human being, we get a better sense of who this woman was and what she achieved than any traditional biographical piece would do.
The music, performed by a tight stage band under the direction of Robert Lunceford and Al Haas, is sensational, all of it arranged by the directors, who had almost no printed sheet music to work with.
The first act is perhaps a bit too long, with a few too many songs crammed in, but the second act, which includes the stories of Piaf’s doomed love affair with a prizefighter and her stint in an asylum. Flies along on a wave of dramatic power, aided by some of the show’s strongest musical pieces, including Piaf’s signature song La Vie en Rose. That song, a sweet and melancholy description of love in all its openhearted vulnerability, has lasted for decades, pretty much defining Piaf’s commitment to the kind of love she dreamed of but never found. Here’s hoping that audiences will find "Edith Piaf: Under Paris Skies," and that it will have a life as rich and memorable as the woman who inspired it.
"Edith Piaf: Under Paris Skies" runs through January 18 at Cinnabar Theater. Cinnabartheater.org