Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

opened Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007, Post Street Theatre

For fans only: One-man `Star Wars’ has major dork appeal
three stars Geek mythology

Charles Ross is saving the galaxy one geek at a time. I use the word “geek” with love. It takes one to know one.

Ross goes so far as to call himself a “professional geek,” and it’s hard to argue with him. For nearly six years, this amiable Canadian has been performing One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, which made its Bay Area debut Tuesday at San Francisco’s Post Street Theatre.

The title pretty much says it all: One hard-working guy performs three classic sci-fi movies in just about an hour.

If you know your Star Wars movies (and we’re talking the original three, not those more recent, nominally human debacles), you’ll love every obscure reference in Ross’ vast repertoire of obscure references.

If names like Jabba the Hutt or Lando Calrissian mean nothing to you, this is not the play for you. Granted, the show will be over before you can grab much of a nap, but it’ll be torture for you, and Ross’ exertions will look like the weirdest, least effective exercise class you’ve ever seen.

But for those who cherish every R2-D2 beep (and Ross does terrific R2 squeaks, whistles and grunts), One-Man Star Wars Trilogy is better than Shakespeare.

Dressed in black coveralls, Ross begins at the beginning, with the yellow letters crawling across the screen and John Williams’ bombastic score blasting. We get a hint of Ross’ somewhat cavalier approach when he turns all that scrolling verbiage into so much “blah, blah, blah.” Apparently he doesn’t care about that stuff either.

He jumps right into the first movie, which he dispatches in about 20 minutes.

Highlights include a petulant Luke Skywalker, who comes across as a whiner with ’70s feathered hair, an asthmatic Darth Vader and a crotch-grabbing Han Solo, who’s not above uttering a little “schwing” whenever Princess Leia is around.

Ross’ revisionist version allows us a moment of indignation when, at the award ceremony that closes Star Wars, poor Chewbacca doesn’t get a medal of honor.

Just as in real life, the second movie is better than the first and not quite as silly as the third. Ross doesn’t do a very good Yoda — he sounds like a prospector staking a claim on the Yukon — but he makes up for it with his dead-on impersonation of a disabled AT-AT (all-terrain armored transport, those giant machines that look like the loading cranes at the Oakland docks).

By the time he gets to Return of the Jedi, Ross is cracking himself up because with all the light saber action, he can’t help spitting on the people in the front row.

The true Star Wars geeks — and the opening-night audience was full of them — howl over the minutiae that baffles the rest of us. I mean, is Ross slicing open the belly of a dead tauntaun on the frozen planet Hoth or what?

If you haven’t ever seen the movies or have mostly forgotten them, you can pretty much forget figuring out what’s going on. Between the breakneck pace of T.J. Dawe’s direction and Ross’ liberties taken with both plot and character, it’s sort of a free-for-all.

No one, however, whether you know the movies or not, will be able to resist Ross’ depiction of Jabba the Hutt, the giant worm-like baddie that chains up Leia and makes her wear a golden bikini that only Cher would envy.

Mercifully, Ross keeps the Ewok references to a minimum, though he does a very funny version of their song that ends Return of the Jedi.

Ross calls his show a sketch that has “gone very wrong…or very right depending on how you look at it.”

For Star Wars fans, he’s a rock star, and this show is heaven. To others, he’s a talented, energetic geek performing for other geeks. The force is strong in this one. Long may he geek out.

As if that terrible TV show “Grease: You’re the One That I Want” wasn’t enough to prove that the musical Grease has run out of gas, check out this story from Holland.

During a production of Grease, the two stars — Danny and Sandy (right) — were in a stage car (presumably during the drive-in scene), when their little car (made out of convertible chassis and a golf cart engine) went out of control and drove over the edge of the stage into the orchestra pit

Jim Bokkum, playing Danny, was “driving” and suffered a concussion. His co-star, Bettina Holwerda, was able to jump out of the car before it went over the edge, but there was some speculation that she may have broken her arm. No musicians were injured.

Lesson learned. We’re going to stop doing Grease before someone ends up rammalammalammaed, kedinkeekadinkydonked, shoobobshoowaddawaddaed, oopedeeboopdebooped. I mean, come on.

Daly City native Evan Pappas, who directed Seven Brides for Seven Brothers last year for San Mateo’s Broadway by the Bay, was seriously injured in a car accident Feb. 19 while in Phoenix, Az., a tour stop for the production of On Golden Pond in which he played dentist Bill Ray.

Playbill.com reports that the 48-year-old actor/director and fellow cast member Kate Levy (who plays Chelsea) were in a vehicle struck by an SUV. The two were on a shopping excursion on their day off. Both, reportedly, were wearing seatbelts. Levy was unharmed, while Pappas’ injuries, according to Playbill, include “many broken ribs, a broken pelvis, a broken jaw and a collapsed lung.”

Pappas faces months of rehabilitation, and we wish him well and want him back in the Bay Area.

Last year, while Pappas was working in San Mateo, I talked to him about his career in Broadway musicals such as My Favorite Year and Parade as well as his early days with Peninsula Civic Light Opera and Beach Blanket Babylon.

Here’s what he had to say about getting older in show business:

As an actor it’s hard to stay on top. Jobs aren’t there the way they used to be, and people aren’t paying like they were. That’s not me being whiny and negative and bitter. It’s just a beast. We try to continue to be creative and pay the bills. We make changes. As I move more and more into directing I love it. We all find new niches.

Playbill suggests that we send cards and letters (but not packages or flowers) to Evan Pappas c/o On Golden Pond tour, Jeffrey Finn Productions, Inc., 1501 Broadway, Suite 2003, New York, NY 10036.

There will be no singing of “Memory” when these cats perform.

Forgive those of us who aren’t exactly cat people for not jumping up and down, but the Moscow Cats Theatre is heading for San Francisco.
Some 30 feline thespians — yes real cats — and two dogs and (ugh) six clowns will perform routines such as “Cats from Outer Space” (can’t be as funny as the Muppets’ “Pigs in Outer Space”) and “Nutcracker.”

Formed in Russia in 1990, this furry troupe (well, maybe the clowns aren’t furry) has performed around the world in more than 80 countries. Perhaps you saw them on “Live with Regis and Kelly” or on “Good Morning America.”

And here you thought cats couldn’t be bothered to be trained to do anything. Give Yuri Dmitrievich Kuklachev credit for coming up with the idea for a cat circus in 1971 (”Hey, let’s put those darn lazy cats to work!”). Kuchlachev, who was a Moscow State Circus clown, was nursing back to health a malnourished stray kitten he had rescued from the streets. He noticed the cat doing somersaults while begging for food and was soon performing with the little furball, whom he named Strekla.

Kuklachev says that by watching a cat’s natural behaviors and “rewarding them with love,” he could build an act.

The Moscow Cats Theatre is at the Palace of Fine Arts April 7 and 8 and 28 and 29. Tickets are $49.90 to $58.90. Call (415) 978-2787 or visit www.moscowcatstheatre.com.

Now see the magic for yourself:

The Academy Awards came and went without making much impression. Ellen DeGeneres was fun, just as you’d expect.

The nicest surprise to me was the best foreign film winner, The Lives of Others. Fantastic movie. Deserves every prize there is.

Enjoyed watching best supporting actress winner Jennifer Hudson wipe the floor with Miss Beyonce during the Dreamgirls best song medley. Glad none of those songs won because they’re just not as good as the songs from the original show. Sad that Randy Newman’s “Our Town” (a fine, sad song from Cars about the death of the American small town) didn’t win, although I can’t begrudge Melissa Etheridge anything.

Loved Ellen’s line: “Without blacks, gays and Jews, there’d be no Oscars…or guys named Oscar for that matter.”

If you were watching the Academy Awards instead of “Grease: You’re the One That I Want,” well good for you. If you’re not reading Seth Rudetsky’s weekly wrap-up on Playbill.com, you’re missing out. Go there now.

Here’s a sample of Mr. Rudetsky’s (right) brilliance (and whey he’s so much more fun than the actual show:

First of all, from the low cut-ness of the negligees the girls were spilling out of, I thought it was going to be a medley from Boobs: The Musical (which actually played the Triad Theatre). Zowee! Also, they cut the “Fongool” lyric. I know it’s an Italian curse, but nevertheless I felt gypped. I was sitting on my couch saying out loud to no one, “Where’s the fongool?” Not unlike the time I saw the “Evita” movie and was in a rage asking, “Where’s the aristocracy?” (”All my descamisados expect me to outshine the enemy, [the aristocracy]. I won’t disappoint them!”) Why did Madonna cut that lyric? And, on a related note, didn’t the real Eva Peron have a vibrato? Why didn’t the movie version?

Apparently this week there was singing, dancing and acting by all the potential Sandys. Now aren’t you glad you didn’t watch. Oh, and the special guest was Frankie Avalon.

The cuts were: Kate Rockwell and Kevin Greene. Next week – can you believe there’s a next week? — it’s all about the Dannys.

As the song says, “When you got it, flaunt it.” But when you don’t got it, close it. That’s the advice the producers of Broadway’s The Producers are following.

After six years and 2,502 performances, Mel Brooks’ mischievous, merry musical will ring down the curtain April 22 at New York’s St. James Theatre.

When the musical opened in 2001 with stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, the noisy hype grew to a deafening roar. The show won a record-setting 12 Tony Awards and spawned the infamous “premium ticket,” which allowed greedy producers to up the price on the in-demand tickets — already a steep $100 — to $480.

If you didn’t get to see the show on Broadway or in its several Bay Area tour stops, there’s always the mediocre movie (featuring much of the original cast plus Will Ferrell and Uma Thurman). And if you’re really motivated to see the show after April, chances are you can still catch David Hasselhoff – in drag no less — in the shortened version at the Paris Las Vegas resort.

The Associated Press reports that worldwide, The Producers generated more than $1 billion in ticket sales.

Here at Theater Dogs, we zip from one subject to the next — from the dark cynicism of American $uicide to the zip of a light saber with One-Man Star Wars Trilogy.

Well, imagine how hard it must have been for director Les Waters (above) to go from the child torture and murder of The Pillowman to the world of Virginia Woolf and her sedate surfaces and roiling interior emotions.

Last month at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Waters opened Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman one week and began rehearsals for the world-premiere stage adaptation of Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse the next.

“I went from an aggressive male play with a fast rhythm to working on unconventional scenes that appear to be like scenes you’d encounter in a conventional play, but everyone is speaking their internal thoughts,” Waters explains. “My first week of Lighthouse following Pillowman was a jolt to my system.”

Waters, who is Berkeley Rep’s associate artistic director, never counted himself as a Virginia Woolf fan. Growing up in England, he didn’t study her in high school or college, but he did see Sally Potter’s movie version of Orlando starring Tilda Swinton.

“I think I had some kind of reservation or distance toward Virginia Woolf, which sounds stupid,” Waters says. “There’s such a cult around her, particularly in England. Every member of that Bloomsbury group had diaries or letters published, and I always thought, `Oh, God. No more.”’

But while working as a professor in the theater department at UC San Diego, Waters’ colleague, Adele Edling Shank, handed him a script for her adaptation of To the Lighthouse.

Waters read it and then bought the novel.

“Yes. Virginia Woolf. I’d come on board,” Waters says.

That was about six years ago, and this weekend the Lighthouse finally shines.

Previews begin this weekend, and the show opens Feb. 28 at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre.

Like the novel, the play is in three sections: “The Window,” in which the Ramsay family visits its summer home in the Hebrides; “Time Passes,” a fast-forward peek into the various Ramsays’ lives (and deaths); and “The Lighthouse,” set 10 years after the family last visited the vacation home, and involving the painting of a picture and a boat trip to the lighthouse.

Not exactly action packed, but then again Woolf was all about breaking the conventions of the novel. That’s why Woolf and Shank added music to their stage version.

“For a while, the script felt like a normal adaptation,” Waters says. “We knew we needed to expand or develop in a different direction. It felt a little tight and needed to go somewhere else. The same way Woolf is experimenting with the form and content of a novel, Adele felt there was something we needed to do to push the adaptation just past being a tightly controlled distillation of the text.”

Enter composer Paul Dresher, who composed the play’s score, which will be played onstage by the Seventh Avenue String Quartet.

Waters says the music starts off the play and helps in scene transitions at first, then fully develops during the “Time Passes” sequence.

“In `Journey to the Lighthouse,’ the four performers sing the majority of the text,” Waters says. “If you read the section, it’s very dry. Set to music, it expands with these sorts of volcanic emotions.”

This is Waters’ first time working on an adaptation (he doesn’t really count his work with Caryl Churchill on Mouthful of Birds, which was “such a loose adaptation” of Euripides’ The Bacchae ). There are a couple of other novels he’d like to see come to the stage, notably Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field.

“I’m also a huge fan of Proust,” he says. “But how? I have no idea. You could ask the same question of Woolf. The answer is: You try.”

To the Lighthouse continues through March 25 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. Call (510) 647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.

He doesn’t live in a galaxy far, far away, but he does live on an island somewhat far away.

Charles Ross, the man behind One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, lives in Victoria, British Columbia, a picturesque hamlet on Canada’s Vancouver Island.

“It’s a nice, little, secret place in a lot of ways,” Ross says on the phone. “And it’s away from the whole hubbub.”

The “hubbub” he’s referring to is completely self-inflicted. Since 2001, Ross has been famous (in the way that people in the theater world are famous without being all that famous) as the guy who condensed the original trio of Star Wars movies (episodes IV, V and VI for the geeks) into an hour-long show. He performs all the parts, re-creates all the sounds effects and hums all the music.

It has taken about six years, but Ross is finally bringing Luke, Leia and Papa Vader to the Bay Area. His One-Man Star Wars Trilogy opens Feb. 27 at San Francisco’s Post Street Theatre.

This whole thing is rooted — not surprisingly — in Ross’ childhood, which was spent partly in rural British Columbia and partly in Hawaii (to escape the Canadian cold). For various reasons, lack of substantial channels among them, Ross’ TV watching was pretty much confined to a VHS tape of Star Wars.

He saw the movie more than 400 times (his mother apparently counted). He saw the sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Jedi, sorry RETURN of the Jedi, about 50 times each.

So when he had the brainstorm to perform the movies himself, he didn’t need to re-watch the movies at all. He just went with the movies in his head.

The 32-year-old Ross has now performed his Star Wars show more than 1,000 times in 116 cities around the world, including a five-month run off-Broadway.

His fans include Vin Diesel and Ian McKellen along with Star Wars actors who played an Ewok (Warwick Davis) and Boba Fett (Jeremy Bulloch) and a host of Storm Troopers.

He also has one very important fan: his Imperial Highness George Lucas.

Rather than sue Ross or slap him with a cease-and-desist order (which the Lord of the Rings people did with Ross’ one-man Rings trilogy), Lucas embraced the show, gave it an official license and invited Ross to perform at several Star Wars conventions.

“That’s the closest I’ll ever get to being a rock star,” Ross says. “It’s nothing short of a miracle to perform at a Star Wars convention. Talk about the perfect demographic. I cannot describe what it’s like to perform this show in front of hard-core, screaming Star Wars geeks.”

Ross says he also loves performing for regular audiences, even though some of the details zoom past them like a landspeeder stirring dust on Tatooine. His favorite character to do is Ian McDiarmid’s Palpatine, one of the bad guys.

“He’s a Shakespearian actor, so he takes Lucas’ script to places the others, except maybe Alec Guinness, can’t,” Ross says. “He’s a lot of fun to do. I’ve never been fond of my Yoda. But hey, you do your best. It’s a short show. What doesn’t work goes by quickly.”

Lucas has never seen the show (except possibly on the DVDs Ross has sent him), but given that he lives in the Bay Area, there’s a chance he might finally catch it.

“Of all the people on the planet, he’s one of the busier ones,” Ross says. “But maybe he’ll come check it out. If I got to meet George Lucas and he saw the show, it couldn’t get better than that.”

Well, maybe it could: Ross could be turned into an action figure.

For information about One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, call (415) 771-6900 or visit www.poststreettheatre.com. Visit Ross’ Web site here.

True to my word, I didn’t watch the oily reality TV sludge known as “Grease: You’re the One That I Want” on Sunday night, even though it’s a long holiday weekend with nothing better to do. I did catch up with some Monday morning quarterbacking on the previous night’s episode, and it seems that Jason (our local San Mateo native) is gone, along with brunette Laura. They should consider themselves lucky.

Fans of the show — people who actually like it — were complaining bitterly on message boards about the screaming, ridiculous audience, comparing them to 13-year-olds at a Justin Timberlake concert. I also liked that someone said that Austin (the guy we saw on tour as Link in Hairspray, right) was too gay porn star to be Danny Zuko. Maybe, but he’s awfully talented — maybe too talented for this debacle.

The good news about Sunday-night TV is that Sundance is running Season 3 of the fantastic Canadian series “Slings & Arrows” about a large Shakespeare festival theater. One of the night’s best lines was uttered by the director character Darren played by Don McKellar, who had just returned from directing a dark musical about Humpty Dumpty in Amsterdam.

I must say I’ve fallen in love with the musical genre. It’s the art form of the common man. If you want to communicate something to the proletariat, cover it in sequins and make it sing. It’s noisy, vulgar and utterly meaningless. I love it.

Finally, not on TV but in movie theaters is an extraordinary German film (nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign film category): The Lives of Others. I mention it here because it’s relevant. The main character is a celebrated theater director in pre-Glasnost East Germany. His leading lady is his significant other, and she makes an unfortunate enemy in the Minister of Arts. The performances are intense and moving, and the warmth and humanity that comes out of this cold, socialist world is extraordinary.

The movie is so good, I may root for its Oscar win over another favorite of last year, Pan’s Labyrinth.

Great news for theater dogs who also love some good TV. The Canadian-import series “Slings and Arrows” arrives for a third season on Sunday (Feb. 18) on the Sundance Channel.

If the first two seasons are any indication, season 3 will be a hoot as we return to the New Burbage Theatre Festival (which bears a striking similarity to the Stratford Festival). Apparently there will be a production of King Lear to contend with as well as a new musical with music and lyrics by the team that created The Drowsy Chaperone on Broadway (most of whom were already involved with the creation of “Slings and Arrows” to begin with. (That’s Paul Gross, Don Mckellar and Mark McKinney in the photo.)

I can’t emphasize enough how enjoyable this series is. It’s so sharply written and acted that even theater unenthusiasts might enjoy it.

Visit the Sundance Channel Web site for information. If you don’t have cable, the first two seasons are available on DVD. Check them out at Amazon.