Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Opened March 28, 2007, American Conservatory Theater

ACT finds jazzy grace notes in Gotanda’s After the War
three [1/2] stars Great chops

Well into Act 1 of Philip Kan Gotanda’s world-premiere play After the War, a jazz trumpeter recalls his glory days of playing with great musicians in Chicago clubs.

“You show up with your chops, add to the brew and make it tasty,” he says.

That’s essentially what happens with “After the War,” which opened Wednesday at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.

Everyone who shows up for this entrancing endeavor, from the actors to the designers to the playwright, definitely has chops, and boy is this brew tasty.

Gotanda’s story is at once sprawling and specific, universal and wonderfully intimate, and best of all it — like the playwright — is local. Set in San Francisco’s Japantown in 1948, the drama unfolds in the Monkawa Boarding House, where the denizens are as diverse as the city itself.

The building was originally owned by the Monkawa family, but when they were shipped off to internment camps during World War II, an African-American family took it over. With the end of the war and the return of the Japanese-American community, ownership has shifted back to the Monkawas, but like so many things during this era, the shift is an uneasy one.

Japantown — or Japanese Town as they called it then — is different as well. The Fillmore District is in full jazz swing, and the post-war economy is taking its toll on the African-American workforce.

Chester Monkawa (Hiro Kanagawa, above) is attempting to keep the family boarding house afloat. His brother, who fought and died in the war, left behind a fiancee, Lillian (Sala Iwamatsu, above), who now keeps Chester’s books.

The growing relationship between Chester, or Chet to his friends, and Lillian is only one of this ambitious drama’s love stories.

Earl (Steven Anthony Jones), the building’s last African-American tenant, is raising his young daughter (whom we never see) with the help of his sister-in-law, Leona (Harriett D. Foy). He’s also carrying on a secret affair with Mary-Louise (Carrie Paff), the blond lady who lives in the back of the building with her mentally impaired brother (Ted Welch).

Olga (Delia MacDougall, below left), the Russian immigrant maid, has a mysterious relationship with Mr. Goto (Sab Shimono), one of Japanese Town’s leading businessmen, but she’s quite taken with the house’s most eccentric tenant, the beret-wearing Mr. Oji (Franics Jue, below left).

However melodramatic Gotanda’s multi-pronged plot gets, he and director Carey Perloff never lose sight of the fact that this play is about race — about prejudice, injustice, stereotypes, grudges and just plain ignorance. In other words, it’s about America.

We get major drama involving pregnancy, poverty, desperation, shame and prostitution (literal and emotional), but we also get a whole lot of period charm along the way.

One of the best scenes in the 2 1/2-hour play comes at the end of Act 1 when all the tenants gather to watch that newfangled contraption called television. With Perry Como singing up a storm, the tenants dance, cavort and reveal more of themselves than they realize.

The actors are uniformly excellent, with startlingly good work coming from Jones as Earl, a man whose pride and compassion turn out to have their breaking points. MacDougall’s Olga, with her Russian-tinged English, is also a character who tends to linger in the memory. Her scenes with Jue are fraught with mostly unspoken emotion, and their sad, charming relationship adds some wonderful layers to this already complicated tale.

Helping to simplify the telling is Donald Eastman’s extraordinary set, a giant, revolving structure that faithfully captures the Sutter Street boarding house, from its entry and living room, to the kitchen, the rooms and the multi-level backstairs.

In addition to James F. Ingalls and Nancy Schertler’s lighting, the production is further enhanced by Anthony Brown’s original score — jazz, piano, traditional Japanese sounds — used primarily to underscore scene changes as the set revolves.

After the War creates a conversation about race that feels like life. Even though it takes place 60 years ago, it feels current and vital.

There are hitches along the way. Act 2 can get a little strident, especially when Chet delves into his status as a “No-No Boy,” which means that while imprisoned in the camp, he was asked to swear loyalty to the U.S. and to serve in its armed forces. He answered no and no, while his brother answered yes and yes, and died a war hero.

The action in Act 2 is also swift and tidy, but it almost has to be because there are so many secrets needing revelation and stories needing resolution.

That’s part of what makes After the War so compelling: It’s so overstuffed with plot, period detail, likable characters and cultural insight we just want it to keep going.

For information about After the War, visit www.act-sf.org.

If you’re a regular Theater Dogs reader, you know there’s a lot of love here for Patty Griffin, one of our best singer-songwriters. She just came through the Bay Area supporting her new CD, “Children Running Through” (see concert review below), and now there’s official word from New York about the musical she has written with playwright Keith Bunin.

The show, called 10 Million Miles, begins preview performances May 11 at the Atlantic Theater Company in Manhattan and opens June 14, according to the Atlantic’s Joe Perrotta.

Some of the same players from the Atlantic’s hit Spring Awakening are also involved in 10 Million Miles, including director Michael Mayer and lead producers Tom Hulce and Ira Pittelman.

The musical is about a romantic roadtrip from Florida to upstate New York, and playing the lovers will be Matthew Morrison (Hairspray. The Light in the Piazza) and Irene Molloy (The Civil War). Rounding out the cast are Skip Sudduth and familiar face Mare Winningham (St. Elmo’s Fire!), an admired singer-songwriter in her own right making her New York stage debut.

For more info, visit the Atlantic Theatre Company Web site here.

For a sample of the Patty Griffin magic, here she is singing “No Bad News,” an upbeat cut from the new album, recorded earlier this year:

And I can’t resist another. Patty’s not in this one, but I love this song, “Heavenly Day,” also from the new album. A friend challenged her to write a love song, and she ended up writing about how wonderful it is to hang out outside with her dog.

When the ribald puppet musical Avenue Q won the best musical Tony Award in 2004 (one of three the show won that night), those of us outside New York got excited at the prospect of the national tour.

But that tour didn’t happen. Producers of Avenue Q decided — with all the wisdom producers can muster — that the show would be better off not touring and instead opening up shop in everyone’s favorite Sin City, Las Vegas.

Well, that production, which christened the 1,200-seat Broadway Theatre at the Wynn resort, only lasted about eight months and closed in May of last year.

So now this merry (and naughty) spoof of “Sesame Street,” currently in its fourth year on Broadway, is hitting the road and opens its national tour Aug. 7 at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre as the final show in the current Best of Broadway season.

The show runs through Sept. 2, and tickets go on sale in June. Visit www.shnsf.com for information.

Here’s a taste of the adult pleasures (defintiely PG-13 at least) of Avenue Q: “The Internet is for Porn.”

We knew there would be plays in American Conservatory Theater’s 41st season. What we didn’t know was that the core company would welcome three new actors.

ACT artistic director Carey Perloff announced the new season lineup Wednesday, and mixed in with all the vital data about the plays was some key information about the players.

The core company, which includes Rene Augesen, Gregory Wallace and Steven Anthony Jones (ACT MFA graduate Alison Jean White spent last season as a temporary core company member), has been expanded to include some familiar faces.

Joining the ranks are Anthony Fusco and Jack Willis, both veterans of the ACT stage, most recently in Hedda Gabler.

White’s slot as the younger, one-year company member will be filled by Jud Williford, seen most recently in the memorable American $uicide at the Thick House in San Francisco.

The season opens with the previously announced Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a touring production of the recent hit revival on Broadway in which the orchestra and the actors are the same thing. The musical begins performances Aug. 30 and runs through Sept. 30.

Next up, Oct. 25 through Nov. 25, is N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker directed by Mark Rucker and starring Augesen as Lizzie, a spinster in a drought-ridden town. Fusco and Willis will also be in the cast.

James Carpenter returns to the role of Scrooge in the company’s annual A Christmas Carol in December, and the season continues in January with David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, best known as the Hollywood insider play that allowed Madonna to make her much-maligned Broadway debut.

In February comes Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot, a South African drama about Apartheid that will star Jones and Willis as brothers.

Perloff directs Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, featuring Augesen, Fusco, Jones and Wallace March 20 through April 20.

The season winds down with Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class (featuring Williford and Willis) in April 2008 followed by John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore in June.

Two non-subscription events are also part of the season: The Tosca Project, Perloff’s collaboration with Val Caniparoli in October, and Jose Rivera’s Brainpeople in January.

Season subscriptions range from $101 to $570. Call (415) 749-2250 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Opened Friday, March 23, 2007 at the Ashby Stage

Shotgun’s Blood Wedding looks, sounds great
2 [1/2] stars In cold Blood

Music and passion are always in fashion at the Copa…Oh, wait this is a different kind of music and passion.

Or at least it should be.

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, the tangled love story of a bride, her groom and her true love, is a whole lot more passionate and poetic than Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana,” the tangled love story of Tony, Lola and Rico.

But the current Shotgun Players production now at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley is missing a few key pieces that might otherwise separate poetry from pop.
What’s good about director Evren Odcikin’s production is very good.

Kate Boyd’s simple, graceful set — a stucco arch and a variety of wooden chairs — is gorgeous and effectively lit by Jarrod Fischer.

The starkness of the stage is appropriate to Lorca’s 1932 tale of a small rural town in Spain, where a wealthy widow (Scarlett Hepworth) is about to see her only surviving son (Ryan O’Donnell, below left) enter into marriage with the daughter (Erin Gilley) of the town’s other wealthy family.

Such a convenient, economically agreeable marriage is bound to falter, and sure enough, the bride has other ideas. Turns out her heart beats for another man: Leonardo (John-Paul Goorjian, far right).

Though married to the bride’s cousin (Dawn Scott), Leonardo is equally hot for his cousin-in-law.

As the town gathers for the wedding, the wedding party seems to be a bride short. In true swashbuckling fashion, Leonardo has whisked the bride away, and they’re off into the night, heading into a life of forbidden love.

But Lorca is a dramatic poet, not a swashbuckler. When his lovers run away, the moon (Scott again) sings a somber song, and death — in the form of Patricia Miller as beggar — pursues them along with a search party from the town.

Much has been made of this being the “flamenco” production of Blood Wedding. Guitarist David McLean and choreographer Yaelisa collaborated on a live solo guitar score (thrillingly played by McLean), but there is precious little dancing.

Scenes often begin with a stomp or some other loud noisemaking, much the way you might begin a dance. The promise of dance is there, but not enough actual moves.

The notion that dance could ratchet up the drama’s ferocity comes into play during the duel between the groom and his rival. O’Donnell and Goorjian, knives in hand, spar in exaggerated, dance-like moves (Dave Maier is the fight consultant) that is surprising in its effect.

This does not look like a real fight, nor does it seem either man will be seriously injured, but the outcome inspires gasps because the execution has been so visceral.

Odcikin’s swift, nearly two-hour production could use more moments like this one.

Performances are all over the place, which makes it hard for the passionate intensity — which this play desperately needs — to build to the near operatic heights required by the script.

Hepworth as the groom’s dour, life-hardened mother, has some powerful moments, as do Gilley and O’Donnell. But the best performance comes from Scott, as Leonardo’s spurned wife and as the foreboding moon.

Perhaps Scott is able to register more than her colleagues because she gets to sing several lovely, intricate songs, and the music — including McLean’s evocative underscore — does more to convey love and despair than anything else in the show.

For information visit www.shotgunplayers.org.

San Francisco playwright Peter Sinn Nachtrieb (above) accepted his Will Glickman New Play Award Sunday at a reception hosted by Theatre Bay Area. Peter won the $4,000 award for his play Hunter Gatherers.

This Saturday, Peter will be in Louisville, Ky., for the Humana Festival of New Plays. He’s been nominated for the Steinberg Award, a $25,000 award to new plays administered by the American Theatre Critics Association. Check back here on Monday to see who won (two runners-up receive $7,500 each, which is also not too shabby).

At the lively Glickman reception Sunday afternoon (hosted by Tom Driscoll and Nancy Quinn), Peter told us that a theater on Cap Cod will be doing Hunter Gatherers later this year. He’s also under commission from the Encore Theatre Company, and we’ll likely see that play in 2009.

Hunter Gatherers was selected by the Glickman committee of local theater critics, including yours truly. In a rare truce between writers and critics, Peter posed with the attending critics below (Karen D’Souza of the San Jose Mercury News was sidelined by an injury and unable to attend). From left: Robert Avila (SF Bay Guardian), Chloe Veltman (SF Weekly), me, Peter, Robert Hurwitt (SF Chronicle).

Visit Peter’s Web site here.

In honor of this week’s vernal equinox, I want to sing the praises of my latest musical theater obsession: Spring Awakening.

Having been a Duncan Sheik (below, left) fan from the moment I listened to his first album (1997’s Duncan Sheik), I was anticipating greatness when I heard that Sheik and his frequent songwriting partner, Steven Sater(below, right), were working on a musical. I liked what the two had done with Sater’s Nero (Another Golden Rome) at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre last year, but that was really more of a play with music than a full-on musical.

When Spring Awakening opened last summer at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York, I was thrilled by the positive buzz but unsure that any new musical of quality, especially a brainy one based on a late-19th-century drama by Franz Wedekind, would surely be a commercial disaster.

I’m so happy I was wrong. Spring Awakening triumphed at the Atlantic and moved to Broadway in December, and, perhaps best of all, the cast recording was released on Decca Broadway.

Here’s a clip of the Broadway cast singing “Touch Me” from last month on “The View” (Rosie O’Donnell is a HUGE fan of the show).

The album is a Duncan Sheik/show tune fan’s dream. Sheik’s inimitable sound infuses almost every track, but the voices of the young cast (they’re all 20 or younger) are stunning. Some of the male voices even sound like Sheik from time to time, and the opportunity to hear the “Sheik” sound sung by women is heavenly.

I read the Wedekind play to get a better idea of what I was listening to and was surprised just how out there this 1891 play really is with its frank depiction of represeed German teenagers exploring sex and their bodies and being punished for it. In the play we get suicide, abortion, child abuse and even a little homosexuality. Frankly, after reading the play, I still wasn’t sure how the decidedly pop-rock music worked in the show.

Then I saw a bootleg DVD of Spring Awakening, filmed by a ballsy audience member when the show was still at the Atlantic (I know, I know, bootlegs are wrong, but sometimes you just can’t get to New York). Suddenly I got it. The songs are the contemporary link to all the angst and passion of the century-old story. Sater’s adaption of the play is pretty faithful to Wedekind (mercifully streamlined), and the songs (Sater’s lyrics, Sheik’s music) are happening now, and comment on the play and on the characters’ inner thoughts and feelings.

The CD, as brilliant as it is, doesn’t convey nearly the level of energy on stage, which is heightened enormously by Bill T. Jones’ choreography and the performances by the tremendously appealing cast. But the CD is fantastic (beautifully produced by Sheik), and it’s a step forward for the “rock” musical because it’s not trying too hard. It rocks when it needs to and gets introverted and intimate when it needs to. The score is passionate and painful and moving. Tony Awards, please, for Sheik and Sater. Best of all, the music sounds like something teenagers might actually listent to without pandering to trendy tastes or apologizing for being show music.

I’m going to see Spring Awakening in April. I just hope the real thing is as good as the version in my head. I’m guessing it will be.

Here’s the cast in a video for “The Bitch of Living.”

Visit the official Spring Awakening Web site here.

If you missed the San Francisco cast on “The Tonight Show” March 19, here you go. Apparently the SF cast — Christopher Kale Jones, Erich Bergen, Deven May and Michael Ingersoll — are heading to L.A. in May.

The Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle’s 2006 award winners were announced last week, and the recognition was spread out pretty evenly. American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and California Shakespeare Theater all received four awards, while Aurora Theatre Company, SF Playhouse and San Jose Repertory Theatre each received three.

In the musical category, Broadway by the Bay led with nine awards, and Foothill Music Theatre had five awards.

The outstanding drama award was shared by Berkeley Rep’s The Miser (left, which actually originated at Minnesota’s Theatre de la Jeune Lune) and Aurora’s Salome.

Outstanding musical awards went to three winners: Broadway by the Bay’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Foothill’s Urinetown and TheatreWorks’ Vanities.

In the dramatic acting categories, principal performance awards went to Rita Moreno (below left, The Glass Menagerie, Berkeley Rep), Susi Damilano (Reckless, SF Playhouse), James Carpenter (The Master Builder, Aurora) and L. Peter Callender (World Music, TheatreFirst). Supporting awards went to Delia MacDougall (The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cal Shakes), Nancy Carlin ( TheImmigrant, San Jose Rep), Sue Trigg (Noises Off, Willows Theatre) and Dan Hiatt (The Immigrant, San Jose Rep).

In the musical categories, principal performance awards went to Jessica Raaum (Annie Get Your Gun, Foothill) and Rick Williams (1776, Willows). Supporting awards went to Tiffany Marie Austin (Miss Saigon, Broadway by the Bay), Mary-Pat Green (Putting It Together, SF Playhouse), Maureen McVerry (Pardon My English, 42nd Street Moon), David Settler (Miss Saigon, Broadway by the Bay) and Paul Araquistain (Miss Saigon, Broadway by the Bay).

Director awards went to Barbara Damashek (Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Center Repertory Company) and Alex Perez (Miss Saigon, Broadway by the Bay). Ensemble awards were given to San Jose Rep’s The Immigrant, Center Rep’s The Marriage of Figaro and Berkeley Rep’s Passing Strange.

Touring productions cited for excellence were Doubt, Hairspray and Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake.

For a complete list of winners, visit www.theatrebayarea.org.

Opened March 15, 2007, Exit on Taylor

Cutting Ball slices into murderous Woyzeck
three stars Creepy, compelling

If Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck seems to be an explosion of dramatic ideas and imagery, well, that’s exactly what it is.

Woyzeck is a mess of a play about a mess of a world.

San Francisco theater company The Cutting Ball, specialists in experimental works and reinterpretations of classics, opened a sharp production of Woyzeck last week at The Exit on Taylor.

Depending on your taste for the inscrutable, Woyzeck is either a blissfully short — 70 minutes — slice of German Expressionism or a fascinating piece of theatrical history that still has a lot to offer.

Buchner died of typhus at age 23, leaving behind only a handful of plays and short pieces of fiction (and an influential revolutionary tract called The Hessian Messenger). He wrote “Woyzeck,” based on a real-life case of a soldier named Johann Christian Woyzeck who was executed in 1821 for the murder of his girlfriend, the year before he died, but the text, in bits and pieces, wasn’t exactly complete.

Editors attempted to put the thing together and published it in 1879, though the first performance didn’t arrive until 1913.

Alan Berg turned the story into an opera, Wozzeck, in 1925, and the play has been continually fiddled with ever since.

For The Cutting Ball production, Rob Melrose has given the text an accessible new translation, and director Adriana Baer helps focus Buchner’s manic story with a beautifully designed and sturdily performed production.

What’s real and what isn’t in Woyzeck is completely up for interpretation. You can take the story literally and assume that Woyzeck (Chad Deverman, above), a 30-year-old soldier, is so mentally unstable that he imagines all kinds of bizarre situations, including the murder of his lover, the prostitute Marie (Drea Bernardi, above).

That would explain the presence of a white-coated scientist (Ryan Oden) who seems to be conducting experiments on Woyzeck, one of which involves forcing him into a diet of only peas. It might also explain the surreal circus with a scary ringmaster (David Sinaiko), the human horse (Rebecca Martin) and ape (Bill Selig).

If all of this is happening in Woyzeck’s head, can we believe that he really murders Marie in a fit of jealousy? It’s hard to say.

That’s where the other levels come in. It could be that Buchner used the story to comment on the ways in which society, industrialization, poverty and the like erode the human mind and turn us into savage animals.

Whatever the interpretation, Baer’s production is always interesting to look at. Melpomene Katakalos’ mostly white set is a collage of everyday items all neatly contained in shelves and compartments, and Melrose’s lighting plays off the whiteness to give us washes of red or green to match the mood. He also uses the harshness of fluorescent lights to heighten the sense of discomfort.

Not surprisingly, given the incomplete nature of the script, the play ends abruptly, leaving us to sort through all the images and come to our own conclusions.

The actors never let the energy flag, and their physically specific, almost dance-like movements, give the action a surreal, dreamlike quality. Deverman’s Woyzeck never gives too much away — is he a victim or a madman? We’re never quite sure, and that’s a good thing.

Bernardi’s Marie is by turns lusty and fearful. At one point she says to Woyzeck: “I’d rather have a knife in my heart than your hands on my body.” Ouch. And a special note about Bernardi: after Marie is killed in the woods, Bernardi becomes the scariest corpse ever. As Deverman jostles her around, her head lolls, her eyes roll back in her head, and the audience flinches. Truly creepy. And great.

Woyzeck is a strange theatrical experience, but strange can have its rewards.

For information about Woyzeck and The Cutting Ball visit www.cuttingball.com.