Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Baseball drama aims for more than just naked truth

three stars Play ball!

It’s a shame that Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out is known as “the naked baseball play.”

Sure, there’s more male nudity than in all the previous Tony Award-winning best plays combined. Sure, the front rows have more than their share of gawkers. But at least there’s an actual play there amid all that flesh.

At its best, “Take Me Out,” now receiving a sturdy, often insightful production from San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theatre Center, the play is more than simply a play about a popular major league baseball player who rocks the ultra-macho world of professional sports by coming out of the closet.

The play is often about being part of something larger than our individual selves. There’s a spiritual element (couched in intense, baseball-loving dialogue) that goes beyond labels like “baseball play” or even “gay play.”

Being part of a community — whether it’s a baseball team or a stadium full of cheering or booing fans — consumes much of Take Me Out and its flashes _ not just of skin _ of tremendous intelligence, humor and compassion.

Director Ed Decker’s production succeeds in many ways comparable to the touring Broadway version that played San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre in 2004.

This is a more modest production without all the bells and whistles (or running water for the shower scenes), but its smaller, more intimate nature gives Greenberg’s philosophical dialogue a more comfortable, thought-provoking arena.

The intimacy also underscores the play’s trouble spots — mostly in Act 2 when the emerging plot is hijacked by violence _ and its tendency to make athletes sound like college professors or complete dunderheads. Greenberg also has a tendency to use race as a substitute for character when it comes to the minor players on the team.

The most striking performance comes from Jeffrey Cohlman (above, center) as the bad guy: Shane Mungitt, a racist rookie from the minor leagues brought on board to help the world-champion New York Empires clinch another title.

Mungitt, unlike so many of the other characters, is barely verbal, and there’s something terrifying in the lanky tension of his body and the vacant look in his eyes. Cohlman, with his redneck sideburns and Southern drawl, goes far beyond caricature to create a truly menacing — either through ignorance or intent — player.

As main character Darren Lemming, Brian J. Patterson (seen in the photo at the top of the review) has the requisite good looks, and he manages to give the character some shading beyond his vanity and super-size ego.

Matt Socha as Kippy Sunderstrom, the ball player who serves as our narrator, has warmth and charm.

As for the other guys, well, kudos to them for their ability and willingness to be little more than fleshy set dressing.

There’s probably more nudity than is really necessary here, but this is a play dealing with, among other things, masculinity and vulnerability — the naked truth if you will — so at least there’s some sense under the sensation.

Take Me Out may not be a grand slam, but it’s a good, solid triple that leaves you wondering if baseball — or believing in baseball or believing in something — is really the secret of life.

For information about Take Me out, visit www.nctcsf.org.

I have to admit that last week’s “contretemps,” as Barbara Walters put it, between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck left me a little sad.

I have TiVo’d “The View” pretty much every day since O’Donnell joined the cast last September, and I grew quite addicted. The conversations were lively (and a shout out to Joy Behar, a consistently funny, opinionated and intelligent woman who never really gets her due) and interesting, and though the guest spots could be tiresome, I thoroughly enjoyed all the Broadway pizzazz O’Donnell brought to the show. I hope the producers (one of whom is Walters) keeps up the Broadway connection forged by O’Donnell.

The saddest part is that O’Donnell’s premature departure (by three weeks) robs us of a proper goodbye for the big-mouthed and even bigger-hearted host who has done the most to make the show watchable on a daily basis (I’ll still probably check in with the show from time to time).

I know it’s wrong, but I’m glad O’Donnell’s producer scribbled a moustache on Hasselbeck’s photo, and I’m even glad guest Alicia Silverstone (who had the misfortune to be the first person onstage after Rosie and Elisabeth’s knock-down-drag-out) snubbed Hasselbeck and gave O’Donnell a big, fat hug.

Of course we’ll be hearing more from O’Donnell (there’s a rumor buzzing that she’s going to be Madame Thenardier in the current Les Miserables revival), but I’ll miss haning out with her everyday.

OK, people, time to start planning those Tony Award viewing parties for Sunday, June 10 on CBS.

We’ve got to get those dismal ratings up, so if you’re having people over, make sure they’re still setting their TiVos (and VCRs if you’re archaic) to record the telecast. If you’re a Nielsen family, do some creative figuring and say you watched the Tonys on all five of your TVs.

The show’s organizers have begun talking about what we’ll be seeing.

Audra McDonald will sing “Raunchy” from 110 in the Shade, for which she is nominated in the best actress in a musical category.

Christine Ebersole will sing “The Revolutionary Costume for Today,” which happens to be the best song in Grey Gardens, for which Ebersole is competing with McDonald in the best actress category.

The cast of Curtains, featuring David Hyde Pearce, will peform “Show People” and the adorable cast of Spring Awakening (so I’m biased — sue me) will perform a medley from the Duncan Sheik-Steven Sater score. The cast of Mary Poppins will perform — probably the TV-ready “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

The revival of A Chorus Line will likely trot out “One” again (we’ve seen that baby everywhere, from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to “The View”), and Raul Esparza will probably sing “Being Alive” from the revival of Company.

Fantasia, a recent replacement in the hit The Color Purple, is also slated to perform.

There won’t be a host (sorry, Nathan Lane) this year, but the list of presenters is impressive and includes Harry Connick Jr., Claire Danes, Neil Patrick Harris, Anne Heche, Marg Helgenberger, Felicity Huffman, Eddie Izzard, Jane Krakowski, Angela Lansbury, Robert Sean Leonard, Cynthia Nixon, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Plummer, Liev Schreiber, John Turturro, Usher, Vanessa Williams, Rainn Wilson and the cast of Jersey Boys.

Happy Memorial Day weekend, Dogs.

A family member in Reno tipped me off to the following column by Reno-Gazette Journal columnist Siobhan McAndrew that ran in today’s paper.

The gist of it is that after a speaking engagement, Moreno — the Bay Area’s own diva — reportedly dropped a casual invitation to the writer and her entourage to join Moreno for dinner.

Here’s a sample from the column:

We trick ourselves into believing how nice and sweet movie stars must be because reporters, like me, interview them and make them seem refreshingly real.

We grasp for any bit of ordinary, like whether they ordered soup and crackers during the interview, and we present it to the world as proof of regularness.

I learned the hard way how stupid that is when I almost had dinner with actress Rita Moreno.

Now, I’ve interviewed Moreno on numerous occasions. I’ve dined with her. I’ve watched her in the rehearsal hall, and I’ve always been impressed by a) how smart and sharp she is and b) how approachable she is. I’ve never seen her throw her diva weight around, which is not to say she never does, but the column surprised me, and I feel like we haven’t quite heard the whole story.

Here’s another bit of the column:

Occasionally, Moreno glanced at us, but most of the conversation was about how talented she was and how she should do a one woman show. We chimed in that she was great when we could, but we gave up quickly and sat silently in awkward misery.

We here at Theater Dogs will attempt to round out the story and see if there are perhaps any other perspectives.

The crowd in the funeral parlor was practically giddy.

One man, in a mourning veil, no less, let loose with the fake tears and proclaimed between phony sobs: “Kiki! You were a flaming megastar!”

Rather than mourners, San Francisco’s Halsted Funeral Home was filled last week with press gathered to hear comedian and writer Bruce Vilanch eulogize Kiki and Herb, the ancient singing duo, who had apparently died on their way to be “highlighted yet uninvited performers at the funeral of the Rev. Jerry Falwell.”

As Vilanch took his seat in a front pew, he could be heard asking a fellow across the aisle, “Are you choked up? Would you like to be?”

Such was the non-grief that ruled the unconventional press conference held by American Conservatory Theater to herald the arrival in July of Kiki & Herb Alive from Broadway.

During Vilanch’s eulogy, he mentioned that en route to Falwell’s funeral, Kiki and Herb had stopped in Texas at the Bush Library. “They read one book and colored the other,” Vilanch said. “Then Kiki was abducted by an actual coyote, who rejected her saying, `There’s such a thing as coyote too ugly.’ ”

But before Vilanch could get too far in his speech, the door of the chapel bust open, and in busted Kiki and Herb themselves with Kiki bellowing through a megaphone.

“Having this almost be our funeral is almost a dream come true,” said Kiki (played by Justin Bond), while Herb (Kenny Mellman) settled behind a keyboard. The two then launched into a typical K&H number, a cover of the Mountain Goats’ “No Children,” which has a refrain that goes something like, “I hope you die. I hope we both die. La la la la la.”

The years have been kind to Kiki and Herb. It was nearly 20 years ago that Bond and Melman first hatched the characters on the entertainment fringe in San Francisco. Since the early days of playing clubs like Cafe du Nord, this not-so-dynamic duo moved on to New York, where they became downtown favorites and eventually crossed over to the mainstream — imagine Steve & Eydie on some divine hallucinogen played by Kabuki actors with a penchant for dark rock songs.

Kiki & Herb Alive from Broadway is nominated for a best “special theatrical event” Tony Award. Their competition is ventriloquist Jay Johnson.

“Will you beat the ventriloquist?” a journalist asked Kiki, who narrowed her eyes and muttered: “One way or another.”

Ever the edgy boozy chanteusey, Kiki responses to the press were pointed and only slightly slurred. Here are some highlights:

We’re immortal, so we speak a lot of dead languages.

I was at the bottom of the pile and pleased as punch.

I haven’t touched my hair since 1994 when Pierre died of AIDS. I think of my hair as a living AIDS memorial.

I like to fuel up the old liver and watch her go.

I admire what Paula Abdul did to save her Chihuahua. If I had been that way, my cat Mr. Peepers might still be alive.

This is the start of our Year of Magical Drinking tour.

If we can get a Tony nomination and Jerry Falwell can die on the same day, there’s a tide turning in the culture war. But there’s still a shadow because Pat Robertson is still alive and Bush is still president.

My advice for Paris (Hilton) is to enjoy the ride. I was in prison. That’s where I learned there’s more than one way to love. It’s marvelous

Kiki & Herb Alive on Broadway runs July 13 through 29 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $13-$66. Call (415) 749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

We can claim Adam Bock as a San Francisco playwright, but that’s really not quite accurate.

The talented writer basically used the Bay Area as a way station between his native Canada and the greener pastures of New York. But it must be said, the pastures were pretty green in San Francisco, where Bock made a splash with the man-in-love-with-shark comedy Swimming in the Shallows with Shotgun Players (done in the basement of Theatre Rhinoceros) and most especially with Five Flights, a production of Encore Theatre Company at the Thick House.

Well, let’s all celebrate the fact that “San Francisco” playwright Adam Bock won an Obie Award last Monday for his play The Thugs. (The Obies, in case you don’t know or barely care, are the Village Voice’s awards for off-Broadway shows.)

The Thugs, we have discovered through some diligent Googling, is about temps in a law office who suspect some of the firm’s employees are being murdered or something even more sinister.

The New York Times’ Jason Zinoman described the play as, “a delightfully paranoid little nightmare that is both more chillingly realistic and pointedly absurd than anything John Grisham ever dreamed up. ”

Message to Adam: congratulations. Message to Bay Area theater companies: please produce The Thugs. We hear it’s only an hour.

With all this talk about the Summer of Love – it was 40 years ago, in case you hadn’t noticed – I’ve been thinking about the musical Hair, which, not so coincidentally, is also celebrating its 40th birthday this year (as am I, but why dwell on such a depressing statistic).

“The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” as it was known, is a distinct product of its time. The score by James Rado (book/lyrics), Gerome Ragni (book/lyrics) and Galt MacDermot (music) feels more authentically show tune than it does rock, which is probably why I enjoy it so much, but it sure doesn’t sound like other shows of its era: Kander and Ebb’s The Happy Time, Bacharach and David’s Promises, Promises (which includes my favorite overture of all time) and Sherman Edwards’ 1776.

There’s something a little quaint about Hair now, especially its Act 1 finale, which takes place in dim light as most of the cast disrobes. Naked hippies, it turns out, are cute. Not rebellious, not edgy, not counter-culture. Cute.

Bay Area audiences can see a cleaned-up, no-nudity Hair (pictured below) on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County as the Mountain Play, the official harbinger of the summer theater season in these parts, “mounts” the musical. For information, visit www.mountainplay.org.

If you’re in New York in late summer, the Public Theater, the original producer of the musical in its 1967 off-Broadway run, is putting on a concert version in Central Park in mid- to late September. Visit www.publictheater.org for information.

And if you want to reacquaint yourself with the score, I highly recommend the Actors Fund of America benefit recording featuring an all-star cast including Charles Busch, Raul Esparza, Lea DeLaria, Harvey Fierstein, Lillias White, Billy Porter, Sheri Rene Scott, Adam Pascal, Ledisi, Ana Gasteyer and Jennifer Hudson. The album is available on iTunes or at Sh-k-Boom Records.

So why no 40th anniversary Broadway production? There have been attempts in recent years to revive Hair on Broadway, but the surviving creators (Ragni died in 1991) can’t seem to agree on what the production should be — what, if any, of the seemingly constant revisions over the years should be incorporated, etc. It seems if there ever were a time for a Hair revival, what with the 40th anniversary of the musical and the Summer of Love and the fact that we’re a country at war, this would be it. Missed opportunity.

It sure was good to have Annette Bening back onstage at what used to be called the Geary Theater.

Back in the early ’80s, when Bening was a grad student at the American Conservatory Theater, the Geary was where she honed her craft and took giant strides in a career that would turn out to be one of the brightest in Hollywood.

Last week, as part of ACT’s 40th anniversary celebration and San Francisco’s City Arts & Lecture series, Bening returned to the Geary, now simply called American Conservatory Theater, to talk about the craft of acting and everything she’s learned during the last two decades.
First of all, Bening at 48 (she turns 49 on May 29), couldn’t be lovelier.

With her straight blond hair and a gray skirt suit that showed of her great gams, Bening is every bit the beauty she was when she first started appearing on movie screens in movies ranging from lame (The Great Outdoors, 1988) to the sublime (The Grifters, 1990).

Her relaxed California good looks recall her childhood spent mostly in San Diego and belie the fact that she and husband Warren Beatty have four children, ranging in age from 7 to 15.

Sitting on the stage, Bening looked out into the full theater and said, “Feels like home.”
Recalling one of her first scene study classes, Bening said she finished the five-minute scene and felt pretty good about herself.

“Then they sat me down and gave me the talking to I needed,” she said. “I wasn’t taking in the other person. I was busy doing what I was doing and not receiving from the other actor. One of the things I remember most about studying here, and one of the things that helped me, was learning to listen and then learning to be heard.”

Growing up, Bening didn’t go to a lot of theater. One of her earliest experiences was a school trip to the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego.

Somehow, though, Bening knew that being a classical actress was what she wanted to do with her life.

“I have always been so uncultured. When I worked on Romeo and Juliet or A Doll’s House it was all new to me,” she said. “One of the things that drew me to the theater was the dramatic language and literature. I loved it. I still do. Movies can never have the language and the voices of theater.”

Addressing an audience peppered with ACT students working toward their master’s degrees, Bening said the thing you’re always working toward — and she even described this as “corny” — is the freedom of a child at play.

“That’s the whole deal: You have to lose the watcher, that part of us that watches,” she said. “I remember being a girl playing in the yard. I’d be playing frontier girl, and I’d be grinding berries or whatever, and there was freedom. I wasn’t worried about whether it was believable or not. It’s an exhilarating feeling — and you only get glimpses of this — when acting is effortless. You’re just in it.”

Though she values her ACT training, Bening said you ultimately try to forget everything you learned.

“One thing I like to tell young people is that there is no arrival,” she said. “There’s no moment when you’re not insecure. You learn to tolerate it and not to let it get to you. You say, `Oh, no, no. I’ve seen you before. I’ve heard you before. You’re not in charge.’ And you keep trying to get back to when you were 6 and grinding berries in the yard.”

Once her film career got going — the unmissable Bening performances are American Beauty, Being Julia and The Grifters _ Bening took a break from the stage. But after 10 years of movies, she went back to her roots for a 1999 production of Hedda Gabler at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.

“It took me a long time not to feel funny on a movie set,” Bening said. “I always felt like a stage actor pretending to be a movie actor. You’d work in short little scenes, and I was used to theater, where you continue without a break. But when I went back to the theater after about 10 years away, we were running Act 1, and I remember thinking, `I have been acting for 30 minutes straight. This is going on forever.’ It took a while to get back in that groove. Acting on stage takes incredible concentration if you’re really in it.”

Here are a few more pithy Bening observations:

On motherhood: “I thought I’d know more than they did for a lot longer.”
On DVD commentaries: “We’re all talking too much about what we do.”
On her first movie, The Great Outdoors: “I can’t believe I got another job after that.”
On being an actor: “You risk being a phony every time you put yourself out there. I wish I could fake it. If someone could teach me, I’d do it.”

Bening is being choosy about her projects these days so we don’t see her as much, but wouldn’t it be great if she had a proper Bay Area homecoming and decided to do a play for ACT?

Someday.

About four years ago, I was having a chat with Berkeley monologist Josh Kornbluth.

He was touting his latest show, Love & Taxes, but something he said then occurred to me before I talked to him last week.

Kornbluth was discussing how he didn’t want to invade the privacy of his wife and son by creating a show specifically about them.

“But because I have a family, I’ve been thinking about politics, the future and the wider picture. That has forced my gaze outwards and away from my navel,” Kornbluth said.

Sure enough, that outward gazing has pulled Kornbluth squarely into the realm of politics. His new monologue, Citizen Josh opens May 19 at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre.

Even though he keeps threatening to make his next show about playing the oboe, Kornbluth decided he wanted to concentrate on democracy.

“I’m interested in citizenship and democracy,” Kornbluth says from his home. “I’m particularly interested in people who are just becoming citizens and hearing what they think.”

As he has with many of his shows, Kornbluth hit the road to improv. He made the circuit of Bay Area campuses — UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Cal State East Bay and University of San Francisco among others — and started testing material on “audiences not necessarily comfortable with my references and definitely not from my age group,” as Kornbluth, 48, puts it.

As he talked about the frustration of the 2004 election, his feeling of disconnection from the rest of the country, making the world a better place for children and wondering aloud if democracy is even possible in today’s world, Kornbluth found himself learning.

“I was learning not just about the show but about myself and who I am politically, which feels really helpful. What do I believe in? What kind of `-ist’ am I?”

One improv session proved to be particularly insightful. A theater professor at UC Berkeley invited Kornbluth into a History of Theater class, the first of several visits. He had just seen the documentary “Berkeley in the ’60s” and had its visions of politically agitated students protesting and turning over cars dancing in his head.

But what he saw in the classroom was a bunch of young people surfing the wireless Internet on the laptop computers.

“You know if someone is looking at a computer while you’re talking, chances are they’re shopping at the Gap or doing anything but being present,” Kornbluth says. “I really didn’t connect with them at all.”

He was, in his words, “really bummed,” and didn’t relish the idea of returning to the classroom. “I wondered if I was fooling myself that I had connected better with the students at other schools.”

But Kornbluth did go back. He jumped off the stage and started his presentation on the floor. I told them no one was allowed to eat or be on the computer.

“I told them it had seemed like a slap in the face to them to have this guy start talking about the ’60s. `It seemed irrelevant to you. How did you feel about it?’ ”
Then the students started talking.

“The entire class got totally passionate,” Kornbluth recalls. “All these important, profound issues came up. I left there thinking that finding passion is an important part of what democracy allows, what keeps it going, sustains it. As I was leaving the class, a student said, `I’ve never talked about politics like that.’ I realized a lot of what they were talking about, in terms of life and acting, affected me: fear, anger, worry that stuff won’t work out or that no one will agree with me.”

Re-energized, Kornbluth, working with director David Dower, formerly of San Francisco’s Z Space Studio and now an associate artist at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, immersed himself even more into politics.

“I have a feeling with this piece that I haven’t had with others,” Kornbluth says. “I’m trying to address a profoundly widespread feeling, a shared community feeling, our communal response to the political traumas of our time. In my own little way I’m trying to respond to it all.”
While gainfully employed as the host of KQED-Channel 9’s “The Josh Kornbluth Show,” a chatty, free-form talk show in the typically Kornbluthian mold, Kornbluth managed to find time to work on Citizen Josh at the Sundance Theater Lab in Utah.

While there, he, a loquacious Berkeley liberal, found common ground with the heavily Mormon, red-state folks he was meeting at the mall.

“We need to be in the habit of talking to each other about serious, important things respectfully across the spectrum,” Kornbluth says. “This idea of red states vs. blue states is anathema to me. I hate it. I don’t think it’s true that red states are that different from blue. We take for granted that we can’t talk to each other, we won’t talk to each other and we’re done.”
A professor of theology from Brigham Young University got into a conversation with Kornbluth about the need to get people to talk to each other and participate in government.

“He was passionate about that, too,” Kornbluth says. “We agreed that what’s wrong with American politics is that people only talk with people they agree with. Talking to him was exciting and gratifying. In many ways, we were both the `other’ and yet we were so much on the same side.”

Because Kornbluth says he’s still at the beginning of his political education, he doesn’t know quite where to end his show.

“I’ve said this in rehearsal, and I mean it,” Kornbluth says. “I can’t wait to see how this show ends.”

Citizen Josh continues through June 17 at the Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$45. Call (415) 441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org.

For all things Josh Kornbluth, visit his Web site at www.joshkornbluth.com.

Opened May 16 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre

Berkeley Rep gives Dickens a dark Twist
Three stars Grim ‘n’ grand

We’re told early on in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, a bracing stage adaptation of the classic novel, that what we’re about to see is complete fiction. The story concerns “hope flourishing when all hope has passed,” and that means, according to Dickens, that it couldn’t possibly be true.

Ah, the sting of Dickens.

In Twist, Dickens is at his rabble-rousing, hyperbolic best. In telling the story of an impossibly good-hearted 10-year-old orphan who suffers every imaginable cruelty, he gave the so-called civilized world a big flat-handed smack to the face.

Everything in Oliver Twist is so dark, so mean and so biting, it’s funny – by design. For all the grimness, there’s abundant humor in Dickens’ blistering scolding. If you are on of the “haves’’ who has ever ignored – or worse – oppressed the “have nots,’’ Dickens considers you even worse than the murderers, pickpockets and corrupt lawmen who populate his story.

The popular 1963 musical Oliver! took the story at face value and gave us a cartoonish, sentimental tale with hummable songs and step-lively dancing.

British director Neil Bartlett wants to retrieve Dickens’ satiric edge from the clutches of “Consider Yourself’’ and “Oom-Pah-Pah.’’

He does so quite effectively in Oliver Twist, a London hit in 2004 that is now seeing its first American tour (with an American cast) in association with American Repertory Theatre, Theatre for a New Audience and Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

The Twist now at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre is a spin on Victorian melodrama complete with footlights, bare-bones theatricality and overblown acting that wouldn’t be out of place in a silent film.

Bartlett isn’t much interested in Dickens’ comic sensibility with its broadly drawn buffoons like Mr. Bumble (Remo Airaldi), whose stage time is minimal, as is that of his shrewish wife and co-conspirator (Karen MacDonald). No, Bartlett seems much more interested in Dickens’ menace.

It’s there in the ominous shadows of Scott Zielinski’s lighting design. It’s there in the boxy set by Rae Smith, where it looks like a printer’s dark, inky toner cartridge exploded in the corner. Smith, who also designed the tattered costumes, reduces a full-color world to black, gray and beige with only a hint of color here and there.

Though this is not a musical (and, by the way, not for young children), there is music. Composer Gerard McBurney has the ensemble a cappella chant-singing chunks of Dickens’ dialogue, and occasionally, he creeps us out with actors playing a screechy violin, a disconcerting hurdy-gurdy and a serpent-shaped horn that blows no good.

As we follow Oliver from his dismal birth to the defining events of his 10th year, we find a world almost devoid of compassion. Shortly after asking for more gruel at the work house, Oliver is pushed into service as an undertaker’s lackey. Then he wends his way – on bloody feet no less – to London, where he falls in with a terrible crew of pickpockets and thieves.

The ring leader is Fagin (Ned Eisenberg, above left), whose affection for his lost boys is unnerving to say the least. Chief thief is Artful Dodger (a spry Carson Elrod, who also serves as narrator), and chief bad guy is Bill Sykes (an imposing Gregory Derelian, above right).

Oliver is played by Michael Wartella in shades of wide-eyed misery, and the fact that he’s not a child, though perfectly in keeping with the exaggerated theatricality of the production, somehow robs the story of some internal light.

In the realm of Dickens’ thick darkness, director Bartlett does well. But he seems leery of Dickens’ equally powerful affection for well-earned sentiment, he backs off.

The good-hearted prostitute Nancy (Jennifer Ikeda complete with visible bruises on her neck and arms) is the best example of nearly extinguished goodness, but the supposedly good folks (Will LeBow as Mr. Brownlow and Elizabeth Jasicki as Rose Brownlow) hardly get a chance to be anything more than meddling rich people who take an interest in Oliver’s welfare.

Amid all the inventive direction and diverting theatrics, we hear Dickens loud and clear: There’s goodness in the world, and most of us are squelching or ignoring it. But we don’t get the full-heart experience that Dickens seemed to manage so well. Sure life is bad and we give in to our base natures, but there’s always hope. Even Dickens never really believed that was entirely fiction.

For information about Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist visit www.berkeleyrep.org.