Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Above photo: Ashkon Davaran (left) and Casey Jackson in Den of Thieves at SF Playhouse. Photo by Jessica Palopoli. Photo below: Tommy A. Gomez and Lucinda Serrano in Sunsets and Margaritas, a TheatreWorks production at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto. Photo by Mark Kitaoka

How strange it is to see two wildly different comedies at two different theaters and find they have something in common: plot twists that involve the restraining of characters by tying them down with duct tape.

Since when did that become an element of slapstick? Has someone alerted Abbott and Costello?

At the SF Playhouse, more than half the cast spends the second act bound to chairs with duct tape and plastic wrap (with extra cling, no doubt) in Stephen Adley Guirgis’ Den of Thieves. And down in Palo Alto at the Lucie Stern Theatre, the TheatreWorks production of Sunsets and Margaritas by José Cruz González also hauls out the sturdy gray multi-use tape to restrain a major character. One more instance of this and we’d have ourselves a trend (apparently a trend only requires a trio of appearances).

Perhaps the Guirgis use of severe restraint should be less surprising, given the writer’s time on the writing staffs of shows like The Sopranos and NYPD Blue. In his comedy (one of his earlier, slighter efforts that lacks the heft of later shows like Our Lady of 121st Street or Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train), desperate characters, none of whom are terribly bright, embark on a too-easy-to be-true heist and end up paying for their lack of proper research.

Director Susi Damilano grounds the comedy in realism, and she’s helped immensely by Bill English’s superb set, which turns a grimy New York apartment into a sinister disco basement during an impressive Act 2 scene change. The stage looks like the real world, and that makes the characters seem truer and more recognizable. That helps the comedy a lot and gives this Sopranos-lite script a greater sense of fun and comic adventure.

Damilano also gets some delicious performances from her cast. Casey Jackson is superb as Paul a young man who never met an addiction or obsession he couldn’t conquer through a handy 12-step program. Such groups receive a hearty amount of ridicule here, but there’s also an underlying respect for the powerful potential for change these programs can offer. As the adopted son of a Jewish family, Paul has a family legacy in the form a grandfather who worked as a skilled safe cracker with a group known as the Den of Thieves. The Den would pull heists then give all the money to local charities. Paul thinks he can do the same when he gets mixed up with a small-time hood named Flaco.

Flaco (an astute, very funny Chad Deverman) is a wannabe Latino gang-banger who hatches the easy-peezy scheme that goes awry. He’s still pining for his ex, Maggie (Kathryn Tkel), who’s working through her own pick-pocketing, kleptomania, compulsive over-eating issues. But being a ladies’ man, Flaco isn’t letting his broken heart get in the way of dating a stripper named Boochie (Corinne Proctor tickles every conceivable laugh from this familiar role). The comedy ramps up a few notches with the arrival of Ashkon Davaran as Little Tuna, a mobster with what appears to be a fully functioning human heart. His cohorts, Sal (Peter Ruoco) and Big Tuna (Joe Madero), are straight from gangland central casting.

Things get really interesting in Act 2 when the comedy gives way to actual drama, and the characters begin showing a little depth. Duct-taped and plastic-wrapped to their chairs, the would-be criminals are forced to decide amongst themselves which of them should be sacrificed as a mob hit. This is where we see the more soulful and searing Guirgis of the later plays, and Damilano and her actors do a terrific job hijacking the comedy by inserting from heartfelt drama. Den of Thieves steals plenty of laughs but cracks the safe only to find drama in the vault.

Down at TheatreWorks’ Sunsets and Margaritas, the duct tape comes in handy when a wily older gentleman becomes too much for his family to handle. On the anniversary of his wife’s death and facing possible imprisonment in a senior home, Candelario Serrano has chosen to lose his mind. After crashing his car through the wall of his restaurant and terrorizing the town with a gun (and with glimpses of him in his boxer shots), Candy has been captured by his son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren and taped to a dolly.

It would certainly be easier to wheel the old man into the home while he’s taped up, but playwright González isn’t after heavy drama or even light drama. He’s after laughs, and that’s mostly what he gets in this affable comedy that feels mere inches away from being a weekly half-hour installment on Fox. Working with director Amy Gonzalez (no relation), he and a likeable cast do a sort of Latino version of Neil Simon. Instead of neurotic New Yorkers we get a middle-age son dealing with his much-macho father, his kids (a clothing designer son in a souped-up electric wheelchair and a lesbian Republican daughter) and his world-weary but loving wife.

Tommy A. Gomez as Gregorio, the son, keeps doing the equivalent of smacking his forehead and muttering, “Ay, dios mio!” by breathing into a paper bag and hallucinating that he’s seeing the Virgin of Guadalupe (a very funny and frisky Lucinda Serrano).

Just how the familial farce ends up with grandpa bound in duct tape is somewhat mysterious. But you know, there’s a lesson here. When life spins out of control, reach for the duct tape.

In comedy, apparently, nothing captures attention more than characters restrained by duct tape. It’s practically a trend. You heard it here first, folks.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

SF Playhouse’s Den of Thieves continues through April 17 at 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $40. Call 415 677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

TheatreWorks’ Sunsets and Margaritas continues through April 4 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $24-$62. Call 650 463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

EXTENDED THROUGH MARCH 28!

Pictured from left: Daveed Diggs, Traci Tolmaire, Margo Hall and Dwight Huntsman in the world premiere
of Chinaka Hodge’s Mirrors in Every Corner at Intersection for the Arts. Photos by Pak Han

Watching the audience on stage at Intersection for the Arts was a stunning experience. Sometimes theater companies trying to push boundaries and break down walls really do get it right.

The show in this case is Oakland playwright Chinaka Hodge’sMirrors in Every Corner, and the companies involved in bringing it to life are many: Intersection, Campo Santo and The Living Word Project’sYouth Speaks theater company. They say it can take a village. In this case, it takes a community.

When you walk into the performance space at Intersection – sort of a bunker-like lecture hall – there’s something definitely different going on. The audience is milling about the stage as if at an art gallery. Wait – the stage is an art gallery. When artist Evan Bissell was asked to collaborate on the show and create a set, he didn’t quite know how to go about doing that, so he created a stunning art installation about families and racial identity and about community. There’s a giant mural of a Mission District family across the back wall, while on another there are seemingly hundreds of framed photos, collages, stories and poems all created by families in the Mission who came to Intersection for what turned out to be a hugely successful free family portrait day. Some came back to create art and write poems.

Intersection has always been a wall breaker, even if only because you have to cross the stage to get to the bathroom. The audience has always seemed part of the action, but this installation takes the concept even further.

By the time Hodge’s play begins, the audience is in an open-minded space ready to experience more art, and Hodge delivers in a big way. Her play – directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph – is hilarious and deadly serious, outlandish and completely personal. She may only be 25 (and a product of the Youth Speaks program since her mid-teens), but this is a playwright to watch.

She tells the story of a black Oakland family with a secret. A mom (Margo Hall) and her three boys (Daveed Diggs, Dwight Huntsman and Traci Tolmaire) play cards and flip back and forth through time to tell the story of the family’s youngest member, Miranda aka “Random,” who for some mysterious reason was born white.

What that means to the family, let alone to the outside world, fills the play’s 80-some minutes with familiar warmth and humor, intense soul search and surprising violence. Hodge firmly grounds her play in a traditional family story, but she plays with all kinds of flourishes (some that work better than others) that imbue every moment with the tension of surprise and the delight of seeing a playwright flower.

As the matriarch, Hall is an intelligent woman caught up in a biological mystery. Hall also plays Random, and it is a testament to this actor’s tremendous skill that much of the play’s excitement comes from watching her slip effortlessly from role to role.

All the actors are terrific, but Diggs is especially vivid as Watts, the eldest child and the one with the wryest, driest sense of humor.

Mirrors in Every Corner reflects all kinds of wonderful things, most notably a young playwright making a sensational debut and a theatrical collaboration that doesn’t just talk about change but makes it.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Chinaka Hodge’s Mirrors in Every Corner continues an extended run through March 28 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25. Call 415 626-2787 ext. 09 or visit www.theintersection.org.

Omoze Idehenre and Manoel Felciano in American Conservatory Theater’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Photo by Kevin Berne

Theater is musical even when it’s not necessarily musical theater. At the very least, you’re likely to hear music in the lobby before and after the show or at intermission. People sing on stage, even in plays, and what’s a blackout without some sort of music or soundscape with which to accompany it?

My point is that theater and music are deeply and inextricably linked. Two ends of the show music spectrum played out this week in San Francisco.

At American Conservatory Theater, directory John Doyle – best known for his Broadway revivals of Sondheim (Sweeney Todd, Company) in which the actors double as the orchestra – applied his talents to a new translation (by Dominique Lozano) of Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle. On what you might call a “garbage set” (think Cats meets Rent), he stages a sort of wartime, apocalyptic version of the Judgment of Solomon as filtered through Brecht’s epic theater.

What’s most interesting about this play is Doyle’s use of music. You’d never call this a musical, but there’s an awful lot of music. San Francisco composer Nathaniel Stookey has created a sound that is part choral blast, part solemn chant. New ACT core company member Manoel Felciano does most of the heavy vocal lifting as the de facto narrator, and his superb voice serves the score well.

Stookey’s score – at turns accompanied by the occasional accordion, guitar or violin – never lets loose and fully engages singer and audience. This is Brecht, after all, with the theater of alienation and all that. Also, to reach that kind of musical apex would veer more directly into full-fledged musical theater.

The traditional show tune, to put it rather crudely, allows for full release.

Caucasian Chalk Circle takes us close but not all the way. That somehow makes this enterprise seem a more serious way to serve both Brecht’s (and Doyle’s) vision of a wartime parable.

For full-on show tune release – and then some – we had to wait until Saturday night’s performance of Forever Broadway at the Herbst Theatre.

The latest from emerging impresario John Bisceglie, who made a splash with the SF Follies, Forever Broadway was a show-tune lover’s haven and pure hell for anyone else. Here’s the general overview: three hours; a cast of 80; nearly 90 songs. If you left Caucasian Chalk Circle feeling musically frustrated, you left Forever Broadway feeling overstuffed. Director/producer Bisceglie does things on a grand scale, and this show is a lot of fun. But it’s also a little much, even for a show-tune fanatic like me.

The first act has the slickness of a really good high school show choir or a better-than-average cruise ship revue. More than 50 songs are crammed into about 80 minutes, with singers and dancers hustling on and off the stage like they’ll be penalized for lingering (or at least mowed down by a horde of black-clad backup singers, which could actually happen).

Music and vocal director Frank Johnson’s pre-recorded accompaniment adds to the slick factor but also keeps the evening moving right along. Toward the end of the first act, we start a medley with a fist-pumping ensemble number from Les Miserables, segue to “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” make a divergent Sondheim stop for “Broadway Baby” then hustle into the expurgated lyrics of “Greased Lightning” before landing, rather inexplicably, at “Tomorrow” from Annie.

It’s a democratic song selection without any consistent rhyme or reason, but there can be no doubt we hear some wonderful voices. There are also moments of cringing, such as when the inevitable “Memory” pops up with a dancer mimicking feline movements behind the singer.

Act 2 is a definite improvement because Bisceglie lets his singers take the time to connect with the audience and invest more emotion in their songs. Keith Stevenson’s “Some Enchanted Evening” is as sweet a version as I’ve heard, completely free of bombast. And Jason Hite’s musical monologue “If I Didn’t Believe In You” from Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years was one of the long evening’s most memorable moments.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the show that came off best on this show tune-y night was Avenue Q. A suite of that puppet musical’s songs – performed, I might add, completely without puppets by Brett Hammon, Brooke Wallace, Larry Cowen, Daniel Schultz, Chad Benjamin Potter, Lee Achacoso-Haskin and Mandy Wilczynski – was funny and sweet. Suzanne Henry worked the audience with Stars and the Moon (another Jason Robert Brown charmer), and Désirée Goyette showed off a dazzling voice on “Gold,” an unfortunately mediocre Frank Wildhorn song from Camille Claudel.

Bisceglie and his gargantuan cast will reprise the show March 21 at the Herbst (3pm). Tickets, as they were on Saturday, are $25, which is a bargain when you consider how many singers and songs you get for your entertainment dollar.

With Bisceglie’s stage full of talent, I couldn’t help longing for a celebration of the great American show tune that re-cast favorites in a new light and exposed hidden gems that should have stopped their original shows but never got the chance. Maybe that will be the ever-enterprising Bisceglie’s next extravaganza.

Here’s a video taste of Biscgelie’s Forever Broadway. Perhaps I don’t have to mention this, but it’s kinda long.

FOR INFORMATION

American Conservatory Theater’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle continues through. Call 415 or visit www.act-sf.org for information.

Forever Broadway returns March 21. Visit www.foreverbroadwaysf.com for information.

Opera’s not really my bag, but I had a fantastic time reviewing West Bay Opera’s Der Freischütz for the Palo Alto Weekly.

The short run ended today (Sunday, Feb. 28), but the review lives on forever. Read it here and please enjoy this photo from the production. Eric Coyne is Kuno, the head forester, and those are the masked townspeople behind him. (Photo by Otak Jump).

The original cast of [title of show] included (from left) Heidi Blickenstaff, Hunter Bell (seated), Jeff Bowen (top),
and Susan Blackwell. [title of show] will be presented as part of the 2010-2011 season at TheatreWorks. Photo by Carol Rosegg

If the new TheatreWorks season only contained[title of show], I would be thrilled. I wanted desperately for this “little musical that could” to have it’s pre-Broadway run in San Francisco, but creators Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen opted not to go out of town and head directly from off Broadway to on. The show didn’t exactly re-write Broadway history, but the original cast recording preserved a plucky show that, to some of us, is legendary in its wit and ambition.

But now this musical for people who love (and loathe and love to loathe) musicals is going to conclude the newly announced TheatreWorks season in June of 2011.

[title of show] isn’t the only treat in the season. After its run on Broadway this season, the Bay Area will get to sink its teeth into Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, his well-received follow-up to the gazillion-award-winning August: Osage County. The play runs Oct. 6 to 31. And another Broadway hit (one that recently stopped in San Francisco on its national tour) takes steps to Mountain View. The 39 Steps, a lovingly comic spoof of the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name, opens in January of 2011.

You can usually count on a TheatreWorks season to include a big, juicy musical, and the coming season is no exception. Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’ A Light in the Piazza, a stunning, sophisticated work of modern musical theater (with a score by Richard Rodgers’ eminently talented grandson, no less), opens Aug. 25.

The season also includes three world premieres, including season-opener Auctioning the Ainsleys by Laura Schellhardt about a family of auctioneers. Schellhardt’s The K of D was seen at the Magic Theatre.

The second world premiere is a holiday offering: a new musical adaptation of Truman Capote’s story A Christmas Memory with lyrics by Carol Hall (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), music by Larry Grossman and a book by Duane Poole. The show runs through most of the month of December.

The third world premiere is Rajiv Joseph’s psychological thriller The North Pool. Joseph is probably best known for his play Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo. His Animals Out of Paper is currently at SF Playhouse.

And finally, David Gutterson’s acclaimed novel Snow Falling on Cedars gets a theatrical adaptation (and a Bay Area premiere) in March 2011. Kevin McKeon of Book-It Repertory Theatre adapted and directed David Guterson’s masterful novel for the stage in Seattle three years ago.

For information about the TheatreWorks season call 650 463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org. Subscriptions range from $149 to $441.

Photo at right: Tracy Letts, author of Superior Donuts. Photo courtesy of Steppenwolf Theatre Co.

EXTENDED THROUGH MARCH 27!

The last major magic show to hit the Bay Area theater scene involved Siegfried and Roy giving their stamp of magical approval to a kid who sang show tunes while doing fairly lame tricks. It’s no wonder that magic gets such a bad rap for being such a cheeseball staple of the Las Vegas showroom.

But when magic is done well, it’s tremendous. Free of schmaltz and full of ingenuity, genuine theatrical magic is a joy, and that’s what you’ll find in Christian Cagigal’sNow and at the Hour now at the EXIT Stage Left. After a successful run in New York followed by a well-received San Francisco run, the magical Cagigal has revived the show, much to the delight of his adoring audience.

Cagigal doesn’t waste a lot of time with the usual flash-and-flair gimcrackery. He doesn’t need to impress us with empty gesturing and phony-baloney showmanship because he has plenty of genuine wonder at his disposal, and if that fails to make an impression, then magic is simply not for you.

Part autobiographical solo show, part mind-reading festival, Cagigal’s show is a spellbinding hour that puts a fresh spin theatrical magic. He enters the theater and sets up his stage. He turns over an hourglass and sets a metronome in motion. He checks his pocket watch and he wonders aloud, “Did you ever get the feeling that everything has happened before and it will all happen again?” He attempts to prove the notion of time travel – or at the very least, time bending – during the next hour, and he makes a pretty good case.

Whatever his methods, be they manipulation, trickery, suggestion or genuine magic, Cagigal elicits gasps of amazement from his audience as he quite effectively reads people’s minds. There’s quite a lot of audience participation in this show, but not to worry – it’s not obnoxious in the least. Cagigal is not only a genial host but also unfailingly polite to his volunteers. If some detail he intuits turns out to be too personal, he won’t share it with the crowd, but he’ll make sure you know he knows what’s going on in your dirty mind.

Holding a stereoscope (usually used to view old-fashioned 3-D postcards), Cagigal stares at blank cards that volunteers have supposedly filled with visions from their memories. He then describes what he sees with seemingly remarkable acuity. He does card tricks and even, for one trick, makes the audience the magician.

In between tricks, he tells us stories from his childhood and what it was like growing up in San Francisco with a father whose mental balance was upset by a stint in Vietnam. His father’s presence looms large in the show because as the elder Cagigal battled his demons, the younger retreated into a world of magic as a means of escape. The power of memory and the passage of time fuel the smoke and mirrors of the show and raises it far above the sort of parlor tricks that can sometimes pass for theatrical magic.

How many shows are both astonishing and moving? Cagigal’s Now and at the Hour is both. Cagigal engages the heart and the imagination, making him a magician to watch with a show to see sooner rather than later.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Christian Cagigal’s Now and at the Hour continues an extended run through March 27 at the EXIT Stage Left, 156 Eddy St., San Francisco Tickets are $15-$25. Visit www.theexit.org for information.

Curtains, the final collaboration of legendary John Kander and Fred Ebb (Rupert Holmes came in to finish the show after Ebb’s death), is finally taking a Bay Area bow.

Diablo Theatre Company (formerly Diablo Light Opera Company) opens the show tonight (Feb. 12) at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, where it runs through Feb. 28.

A combination backstage musical meets murder mystery, Curtains won a Tony Award for its Broadway leading man, David Hyde Pierce, who played Lieutenant Frank Cioffi, a Boston homicide detective investigating the death of a musical theater diva.

Here comes the judge

In the DTC production, Oakland’s Tom Reardon plays Cioffi, and that right-side-of-the-law sleuth isn’t too far removed from Reardon’s actual day job: he’s an Alameda County Superior Court judge.

Reardon (right) has performed with a number of Bay Area companies, including Contra Costa Civic Theatre. He previously appeared in DTC productions of Peter Pan (he was Captain Hook in 2007), and last year he was Henry Higgins in the Lamplighters production of My Fair Lady.

So how did the Hon. Tom Reardon make the leap to song-and-dance man?

“For many years I have sung with a small group of friends for charitable events.” Reardon explains. “We sing the Broadway songbook and call ourselves the Broadway Babies. But, it wasn’t until four years ago that I first had a stage role. A friend was in need of men for the ensemble of Anything Goes. I turned up to help him out and somehow was given the lead in the show. And the rest is East Bay community theater history.”

Reardon adds that he’s been “fortunate to have played some great roles in a short time.”

Super conductor

Former member of the Grammy-winning ensemble Chanticleer, Chad Runyon (left) is playing several roles in DTC’s Curtains. He’s conducting the orchestra and he’s playing Sasha, the Russian conductor for the show-within-the-show, Robin Hood.

And he does it all without leaving the orchestra pit.

Runyon, a Danville resident, spent 10 years exploring some of the greatest choral music ever written with Chanticleer. Since he left the group, he has continued recording and also teaches, conducts and has been vocal director for DTC since the company’s production of Thoroughly Modern Millie three years ago.

For Curtains, Runyon has had to brush up his Russian accent.

“I have the added challenge of keeping the ball rolling in the actual show,” he says, “working with our wonderful pit instrumentalists and singing actors. It will be a fun challenge, and the show will be lots of fun for the audience. Sort of a blend of Oklahoma!, Sherlock Holmes and Mel Brooks.”

Here’s the trailer for the show:

“Curtains” Trailer from Diablo Theatre Company on Vimeo.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Diablo Theatre Company Diablo Theatre Company’s Curtains runs Feb. 12-28 at the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. Tickets are $29 to $42. Call 925-943-7469 or visit www.lesherartscener.org or www.diablotheatre.org.

Consider the last couple years in the life of local director Mike Ward. He received a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award nomination for best director and he was nominated for the prestigious Ockrent Fellowship for Broadway. Oh, and he almost died several times.

Ward says he had a “white light” experience during what he calls his “Year of Living/Dying Dangerously.”

“I didn’t realize it was one because I would have never lit or costumed the scene that way!” Ward says, his sense of humor still clearly intact.

While continuing to work in theater, Ward has fought a number of cancers, and this past fall, he had major surgery described as “curative” for his surgically targeted cancers. Ward is still living with hepatocelluar carcinoma, but the disease has been in remission for more than two years. He continues to work as a mentor to actors and writers and is creating what he’s calling an “absurd tragicomedy” that deals with his adventures with cancer. The project, as he puts it, is “more comedy, less tragi.”

The Ockrent nomination, named for British director Mike Ockrent, who died in 1993 from leukemia, was a big deal for Ward.

“The nomination allowed me to take a good look at what being in the theater means to me,” he says. “The process of the Ockrent Fellowship involves an essay, and I was able to review what I’ve done and where I am. It helped me realize that this is my time and that there is much ahead for me. Being engaged in the act of creation is life-renewing, life-affirming, and it helped pull me through a very harrowing year.”

An accomplished writer, director and choreographer, Ward has worked at the Magic Theatre and TheatreWorks among other theaters, and Ward he had his own company with San Francisco playwright Tom W. Kelly called Isis Arts Collective.

Ward recently found out that he was not selected for the Ockrent Fellowship for Broadway, which would have put him to work on the Broadway revival of Promises Promises. But he says he’s grateful for the process.

“It allowed me to sit with what theatre means to me, where I belong in it and where I’m looking at going,” he says. “It made me realize how vital theater is to my life.”

George Furth, a mentor and friend to Ward, would frequently remind him, “It’s not enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for having talent, and you have that.”

While Ward ponders what Furth means by that, the director is satisfied with his journey of late, even with all its ups and downs. “The Ockrent Fellowship and the BATCC let me know that I’m where I should be,” he says, “and I’m heading toward the next place I’m going to.”

Above: Kara Emry and William McMichael get Shanghaied in Pearls Over Shanghai.
Below: Eric Wertz and Steven Satyricon dream of “un bel di.”Photos by David Wilson

Mash up Beach Blanket Babylon with Miss Saigon, throw in every bad Oriental exotica movie ever made, season with Ziggy Stardust and The Rocky Horror Show then sprinkle liberally with Cockettes. The result will be Pearls Over Shanghai, San Francisco’s most unlikely hit musical. It’s so hip John Waters even came to see it.

Forty years after it premiered, Pearls was revived last June by director Russell Blackwood and his Thrillpeddlers theater company at The Hypnodrome, their funky SOMA headquarters. And the show is still going strong. Not even a busted water main and an ensuing flood could rain on this pearly parade.

Pearls Over Shanghai has been extended through April 24, making it practically a San Francisco institution this side of Rice-a-Roni and just as phony (in the best possible way). Dirty, salty, nasty, slinky, sweet and sour are mere glints of the jewel that is Pearl.

Directed by Blackwood and featuring a cast of more than 20, this extravaganza features a score by original Cockette composer Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn, who is still tickling the ivories (and the occasional funny bone) in a curly Ilsa She Nazi wig. The book and lyrics by Link Martin have more exotic flavors than an order of house chow fun and drag us into the underbelly of Shanghai circa 1937.

Three “Yankee Imperial tourists” wander down the wrong alley – imagine the Andrews Sisters falling into white slavery – and that’s the primary plot, though there is a fairly significant ode to Madame Butterfly with an American captain and his Shanghai peasant love. But who needs plot when you’ve got so much delightful decadence done up in so much glittery makeup and so many snazzily salacious costumes (by Kara Emry, Louise Jarmilowicz and Tahara)?

Blackwood is Mother Fu (Fu Manchu’s mother no less), sort of the opium den mother, and he presides over a stage full of familiar faces (Michael Phillis as the glitter-nippled Red Dragon, Veronica Klaus as Russian spy Petrushka, Kim Larsen as Madam Gin Sling) and some faces so garishly glittered they could be classically trained Kabuki actors. And in true San Francisco fashion, you see a whole lot more than just faces.

During intermission, audience volunteers are welcomed on stage, put on all fours and roundly spanked by Lottie Wu (Kara Emry), a dominatrix courtesan. And Act 2 of this two-hour camp delight gets down and dirty flirty with scanty costumes sometimes disappearing altogether. Call it Flower Bum Song. The second act also features some truly extraordinary black-light effects that take flight during an opium nightmare sequence.

With so much glittery carnality and Oriental kitsch filling the stage, just what does this Shanghai express? Sex, drugs and campy fun are the true San Francisco treat.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Pearls Over Shanghai continues an extended run through April 24 at The Hypnodrome, 575 10^th St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8pm Fridays and Saturdays and 7pm Sundays. Tickets are $30 (or $69 for the special “Shock Boxes”). Call 800 838-3006 or visit www.thrillpeddlerscom or www.brownpapertickets.com.

The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews, 1965. TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp.
All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection.

Back in the dark ages of VHS, I remember being thrilled when I could actually buy The Sound of Music and watch it whenever I wanted, not just on whatever holiday the networks chose to trot it out. Ever since I saw the movie on the big screen in the early ’70s, it had become one of my favorite things because Julie Andrews was right up there with Carol Burnett and Mary Tyler Moore in my youthful pantheon of perfection.

Then, as an adult, I saw The Sound of Music again on a big screen. It was like seeing a whole different movie from what I was used to seeing on videotape. The TV version was pan-and-scan, meaning they decided widescreen (with the black bars across the top and the bottom) was unacceptable but shifting focus on certain parts of that widescreen and cutting out the rest was perfectly all right. From then on I couldn’t watch the movie on TV unless it was letterboxed.

With the advent of DVD, letterboxing became the norm – preserving the original screen ration as the cinematographer and director intended. No more cutting out VonTrapp children during “Do Re Mi.” I didn’t mind shelling out more money for the DVD because the format seemed to be the apex of the home video revolution. Then came the special anniversary DVD edition of the movie, which featured new features, including interviews with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer (not to mention a promotional film starring Charmian Carr about her life as a teen movie star working in Austria). Had to buy that one.

Then the Rodgers and Hammerstein folks released a box-set collection of all the R&H movie musicals (except Flower Drum Song), which included the special edition Sound of Music discs I already had. But I had to have the whole set.

If you’re counting, that’s four times I purchased The Sound of Music for my home collection. Somehow I bypassed the LaserDisc craze, so that saved me some money. And please don’t get me started on all the various versions of the soundtrack I’ve owned through the years (remember 8-track?).

I’m savvy enough to know that I’ll probably never be done spending money on The Sound of Music. Couldn’t resist going (more than once) to the Sing-Along Sound of Music at the Castro Theatre, and I’m always open to seeing the movie on a big screen in a theater with a great sound system. I thought about downloading a digital version of the movie, but it’s not available … yet. That one can’t be too far away.

Until then, we have yet another format and another potential purchase. Come next Christmas, we’ll be able to have a near-perfect Sound of Music experience in our own homes with the Blu-ray release. Here’s a teaser trailer.

For further VonTrappist fun, check out this entry in a long line of re-cut trailers casting sunny musicals as horror films. This one is my favorite of the Sound of Music efforts.

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