Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

The idea of outdoor theater is so appealing in the summertime – picnics, friends, perhaps a little wine and, if you’re lucky, an engaging show.

But this is the Bay Area, where July and August can mean midsummer winter, with fog, chilly breezes and a hint of snow. OK, so no snow, but sometimes it feels downright arctic when you’re shivering under a blanket trying to soak up some Shaw or Shakespeare of San Francisco Mime Troupe.

That said, when you venture out for some al fresco theatrics – and really, you should – you need to be prepared. Dress in layers and be prepared for hot and sultry weather that might, in a moment, turn into Anchorage in deepest February.

If you’d like to venture out for some free Shakespeare, you might try Woman’s Will’s Romeo and Juliet. The all-female troupe is consistently rewarding. Here’s their schedule:

Shows are at 1 p.m. July 28 at San Felipe Park, Hayward; 6 p.m. July 28 at Centennial Park, Pleasanton; 1 p.m. July 29 at Fremont Central Park, Fremont; 6 p.m. Aug. 3 at Yerba Buena East, San Francisco; 4 p.m. Aug. 4 at Yerba Buena East; 1 p.m. Aug. 5 at Rengstorff House, Mountain View; 8 p.m. Aug. 9 and 10 at Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland; 1 p.m. Aug. 11 and 12 at Dolores Park, San Francisco
Contact: (510) 420-0813; www.womenswill.org

Or you could try some swashbuckling with Shotgun Players’ annual free show in Berkeley, The Three Musketeers. Continues through Sept. 3 at John Hinkel Park, Southampton Avenue off The Arlington. 4 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays (plus Sept. 3). Contact: (510) 841-6500; www.shotgunplayers.org.

San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s touring production this year is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The show is at Cupertino’s Memorial Park Amphitheater through Aug. 5 then moves San Mateo’s Central Park Aug. 11-26; and the tour finishes up Sept. 1-23 at San Francisco’s Main Post Parade Ground Lawn in the Presidio. Contact: www.sfshakes.org.

If you’re in the mood to pay for the privilege of seeing outdoor theater, then check out California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda. The company’s first two shows of the season, Richard III and Man and Superman, have been excellent. Next up is Marivaux’s The Triumph of Love directed and with a new adaptation by Lillian Groag. The show previews Aug. 8-10 and opens Aug. 11 and continues through Sept. at the Bruns Amphitheater. Tickets are $15 to $60. Call (510)548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

So, you and two of your buddies are forming a theater company. Of course there are significant artistic considerations — a company needs a mission, right? — but there’s one hugely important thing: the name.

Do you go the stately route like Sophisticated Repertory Theatre? The silly route like Jake the Bunny Players? Or the inscrutable route like X!ZE?

If you happen to be Damian Kalish (above, with a moutful), Tore Ingersoll-Thorp and John Rosenberg, you go about choosing a name methodically.

Each of the founders compiles a list and submits it to the others. Names are discussed and rejected. Before long, you are Sleepwalkers Theatre.

“I thought it was funny because it could mean all sorts of things,” Kalish says on the phone from his Oakland home. “Tore, who is our artistic director, is actually a sleepwalker. I know that because we grew up together and have been roommates before. I thought Sleepwalkers was a cool image you could play with, and it was an inside joke, too.”

The newly formed Sleepwalkers actually got its start about two years ago when its trio of founders — all friends from Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley — produced an evening of one-acts about relationships called Undying Love in San Francisco.

“It didn’t make any money. Not a cent,” Kalish says. “But we ended up breaking even because we got a donation from this older couple who came in and were happy to see fresh, new theater. We did that one on the cheap under the assumption that we were doing it to create something.”

In addition to creating the play itself, they ended up creating a theater company.
“We took our time forming the company because we knew we needed to learn about promotion and not just throw up a show,” Kalish says.

Without a role model — there was no discussion of becoming the Steppenwolf of the Bay Area or even the new Shotgun Players — the trio of founders decided the company would be all about encouraging people to work on new plays.

“We’re simple in the sense that we want to make new, good plays and don’t have any grand model,” Kalish says.

The company’s first production in its three-show inaugural season (a short play, Saints in Strange Places, was part of the recent one-day San Francisco Theater Festival) is Deep Fried Cheese, which begins performances Thursday at the Climate Theater in San Francisco and runs through Aug. 18.

Ingersoll-Thorp wrote the play, a comedy about relationships and competitive eating, and also directs it. Kalish stars as a guy whose penchant for entering eating contests doesn’t sit all that well with his girlfriend, who is going vegan.

“I think Tore wrote this play to torture me,” Kalish says. “I eat a bunch of hot dogs really fast, and spaghetti. I also catch Vienna sausages in my mouth and spray Cheez Whiz into my mouth. I wrap an Oreo in salami. It’s pretty intense. Eating hot dogs fast is disgusting.”
But Kalish is quick to point out that amid the spectacle of all this eating is a romantic comedy with a “strong emotional center.”

“I think what it’s really about is that nobody in a relationship makes a decision based entirely on what they say they’re basing it on,” Kalish says.

Growing up in Santa Cruz, Kalish got involved in theater when his sixth-grade teacher told him he was good at acting. He got involved in junior theater and has been performing as an actor since.

By high school, he had moved to Marin and met Rosenberg, a musician.

“I was in a punk band, and John was a dork. He made a music demo on his computer and I knew I wanted to be friends with him because of his music. That’s when he was 13, and he’s almost 30 now. He knew Tore from before, and we were all involved in theater at Tam High School.”

Rosenberg is the only member of the founding trio not in the Bay Area. All grown up and no longer a dork, he plays with the New York-based Missing Teens (and formerly played for German Cars vs. American Homes).

Even from New York, he remains involved, composing and sending original music for the shows.
The remainder of the season includes Use Both Hands, which bows in the fall at the Phoenix Theatre in San Francisco. The play, by Rosenberg, takes place in the keno lounge of Circus Circus in Reno. Ingersoll-Thorp will direct.

The final play, slated for February, is Lost & Found, a David Ackerman play about barriers people build in intimate relationships.

“For me, this theater company is a long-term commitment,” Kalish says. “We panic sometimes and talk about doing fewer shows next season, but my role in the company is to play the optimist. I figure we’ll find a way to do it, even if it’s small theater. We’ll keep making stuff and keep our name out there. We’ve already put so much into this. We spent a year creating the company before we even began production on a play.

“Everything has happened right so far. We’ll hit snags. You always hit snags. I’m committed to Sleepwalkers going on beyond this season.”

Sleepwalkers Theatre’s “Deep Fried Cheese” runs Aug. 2-18 at the Climate Theater, 285 Ninth St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Tickets are $12. Call (415) 407-1446 or visit www.sleepwalkerstheatre.com.

One of the funniest evenings I’ve ever spent in a theater was at the Cable Car Theatre in San Francisco for Eddie Izzard’s Dress to Kill (which was later filed at the bigger theater next door, which is now Ruby Skye nightclub).

Since then, Izzard has claimed his place as the world’s funniest men both in his own comedy specials and in movies (some serious). He even won raves on the legit stage with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. His current gig is on the FX TV series “The Riches.”

Well, Bay Area audiences are lucky because Izzard is coming back to San Francisco to workshop his new show — but here’s the thing: there are only two performances. Izzards will perform at 8 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 5 and Monday, Aug. 6 at the Marines Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco. Tickets are $55. Call (415) 771-6900 or visit www.ticketmaster.com. Maximum of four tickets per person.

Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Here’s a little taste of Eddie doing what he does (and as for how he dresses, he calls the look “action transvestite”):

Opened July 21, 2007 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto

TheatreWorks’ `Theophilus North is Wilder and wonderful
three stars Northern delights

In turning Thornton Wilder’s final novel, Theophilus North, into a play, adaptor Matthew Burnett took a cue from Wilder’s best-known work, the play Our Town.

Because Wilder is constantly searching for the universal in the specific, simply having characters speak dialogue to one another hardly seems sufficient. In Our Town, we get the Stage Manger filling us in on the geography of the town and even the archaeology as he helps us find the town’s place in the universe.

In Theophilus North, which had its West Coast premiere Saturday under the auspices of TheatreWorks at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, the setting is Newport, R.I., circa 1926, when the ’20s were really roaring in spite of Prohibition.

Burnett makes the town come alive — literally. We hear from trees, statues, stately homes, jalopies, road signs, ferry boats and even a lonely lighthouse. The effect, with its elements of silliness and scope, works beautifully to imbue the story with theatrical language while it enriches our experience of the setting.

TheatreWorks’ casting director Leslie Martinson steps into the director’s chair for this production and gives us an evening full of charm supplied by an inventive production and an agile, energetic cast.

When they’re not playing inanimate objects, the seven cast members play the denizens of Newport _ the wealthy ones who are served and the less wealthy who do the serving. Our hero is 30-year-old Theophilus North, played with irresistible appeal by Mark Anderson Phillips, who fancies himself an adventurer who needs to see the world.

Tired of “auxiliary verbs like `should’ and `ought,’ ” Theophilus quits his job at a private boys’ school and heads off to discover a more exciting fate. He only makes it 180 miles from his New Jersey home when his car breaks down in Newport, and there he stays for a spring and a summer doing odd jobs like teaching tennis (badly) at a country club and reading to the rich and infirm.

Theophilus tells us that since childhood, he has harbored nine ambitions: to be an anthropologist, archaeologist, detective, actor, magician, lover, saint, rascal and free man. During his summer in Newport, he has the opportunity to be a little of each and become a better man for it.

Unlike the Theophilus of Wilder’s novel (a sort of stand-in for the author himself), Phillips’ Theophilus is obnoxious in a likable way.

His great intelligence, ambition and ego are tempered by humor. For instance, he tells a young French student (a hilarious Craig Marker) that gigolo is “French for dancing partner with ambition.”

Theophilus means well, and he is both creative and manipulative as he strives to help those who seek his assistance. “Imaginative kindness can give a man a shock,” he says.
Among other accomplishments, he emboldens a frail old man (Jackson Davis) to reconnect with his passions, convinces a debutante (Kristin Stokes) not to elope with a gym teacher (Patrick Sieler) and helps a pregnant woman (Zehra Berkman) on bed rest save her marriage.

Of course Burnett had to streamline the novel in its transition to a 2 [1/2]-hour play, but while the character of Theophilus has been improved, some wonderful characters are completely left out. And some that remain, like the delicious former servant and now boarding house maven Mrs. Cranston (Julia Brothers), gets precious little stage time.

The dramatic arc of the play — the novel is much more episodic in nature — now involves Theophilus’ quest to become something more than a catalyst, the element that never changes while inspiring change in those around him.

The rallying cry here is Tennyson’s “I am part of all I have seen,” and it becomes Theophilus’ mission to eschew adventure for its own sake and attempt something more difficult: to belong to the world wherever he happens to be.

Part of that “belonging,” ironically, will come from observation as Theophilus, like Wilder, finds his true calling as a writer. As he says: “Memory and imagination can do marvelous things.”
The emotional pay-off in this lovely production — simple, graceful set by Annie Smart, lighting by Michael Palumbo and unflashy but handsome ’20s costumes by Taisia Nikonischenko — doesn’t have the passion it might. And the darkness and stark realism of Our Town is almost entirely absent, but Theophilus North radiates with the warmth and intelligence of a summer day spent in the best possible company.

For information about Theophilus North, visit www.theatreworks.org.

In his unfinished, unpublished preface to Theophilus North, his final novel, Thornton Wilder wondered what we humans do with our “despair, rage and frustration.” He considered North, which was published in 1973, to be precisely about our battle against the worst things that life throws at us.

That battle courses through Wilder’s work, whether it’s one of his plays (Our Town) or one of his novels (The Bridge of San Luis Rey).

Early in his career, Wilder summed up his work to then, and his assessment proved true for most of what was to follow: “It seems to me that my books are about: What’s the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it.”

In Theophilus North, published when Wilder was 76, two years before his death, Wilder offered a somewhat autobiographical title character who was both aimless and ambitious, anxious to find his place in the world and to be of service.

Theophilus (who bears the same name as Wilder’s twin, who died shortly after birth), is stuck in Newport, R.I., and ends up working odd jobs for the town’s wealthy inhabitants and the less wealthy people who serve them.

He’s not unlike Dolly Levi in Wilder’s The Matchmaker, who ends up meddling and changing people’s lives.

The story of Theophilus grabbed hold of Matthew Burnett, also aimless and ambitious, almost by chance and ended up changing the young actor’s life. His stage version of the novel has its West Coast premiere Saturday in a TheatreWorks production at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto.

Having reached a sort of post-college sand bar that had waylaid his own voyage through life, a 23-year-old Burnett ended up back at his old high school in Calabasas chatting with the teacher who had directed him in a production of Our Town. The teacher recommended the young man read Theophilus North.

“I started to read the book and was dumbfounded,” Burnett says from his New York City home. “It became apparent to me within 30 pages that this novel would be a great play. It just had to be a play. At that point I was thinking about it as an actor. I was Theophilus. I figured I’d write the play for myself.”

Years passed, and by the time Burnett was at the point where he could actually begin to seriously turn the novel into a play, he was too old to play the 30-year-old North.

“It’s just as well,” he says. “If I was going to write this, I needed to be able to separate myself and see what’s working, what isn’t.”

Before Burnett began to write in earnest, he contacted the Wilder estate, which was then run by Wilder’s sister, Isobel. The response from the estate was pretty much, “No thank you very much.”

A heartbroken Burnett couldn’t be dissuaded. He decided if he couldn’t write the play as a viable project, he’d write it for the love of doing it.

For several years, in between acting gigs, Burnett would sit on the roof of his Brooklyn building and turn Theophilus North from a nearly 400-page novel into a two-hour play.

When he actually had a working script and had actor friends read it in a sort of living room workshop scenario, he decided to make a serious move: He hired a literary agent.

“I knew I had no credibility as a writer, but through the agent we contacted the Wilder estate again, which was by this time run by Thornton’s nephew, Tappan Wilder,” Burnett says.

One night Burnett’s phone rang, and it was Tappan Wilder. Burnett recalls Wilder saying: “You know, we don’t ever give rights to these things, but I’m intrigued by the work you’ve done and who you are and why you’ve done this.”

Burnett and Wilder met in New York at the Yale Club, and at the end of the night a deal was struck.

“Tappan said to me: `I like you and think you’ve done a good job. I say yes.’ He shook my hand. I don’t know what I did for the next three hours or how I got home or any of it,” Burnett says.

Theophilus North, the play, had its world premiere in 2003 as a co-production between the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and Geva Theater Center in Rochester, N.Y., and it was produced again last year off-Broadway.

The novel is episodic, as Theophilus makes his way through Newport, helping here, teaching there and affecting lives everywhere. Burnett’s job as a dramatist was to give Theophilus a more dramatic arc and emphasize that although he’s a bright man with a wealth of factual knowledge, he still has a lot to learn about the world.

“There’s a section in the novel in which Wilder says Theophilus wanted to be surrounded by a constellation, but that this desire had nothing to do with romantic love or love of family.

“That made me think, `What kind of love are we discussing exactly?”’ Burnett recalls wondering. “It’s such a pure, beautiful thing that Wilder ended up turning to: a love of friends, a love of your community, which is a love that is not swayed by broader, more basic impulses. But that’s one of the things Theophilus in my play has to discover. That’s his journey. He’s somebody that has a perspective on the world at the beginning that is kind of unraveled by the end through the process of him helping other people.”

For the last few years Burnett has been, in essence, living in Wilder’s world, which, he says, is not a bad place to be.

“I think Wilder, more than any other American writer, was better able to articulate in a direct, tangible fashion, the ability to see the universal in the particular,” Burnett says. “We can’t live within the constant desire to have consciousness of the universal, but we can find the universal in the specific.”

When he died, Wilder was reportedly at work on a sequel to Theophilus North, and its tentative title was Theophilus North, Zen Detective.

Now there’s an intriguing idea. Perhaps the time has come for Burnett to pen a Thornton Wilder-inspired TV series.

Theophilus North continues through Aug. 12 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $21 to $57. Call (650) 903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

Opened July 18, 2007 at American Conservatory Theater

Kiki & Herb warble, whine and imbibe through `Alive From Broaway’
three stars Dark humor

The warning is right there on the poster and the program: “Dare to suck and let the magic happen,” Kiki.

It’s easy to imagine American Conservatory Theater subscribers being a little startled at what they find onstage at the famed San Francisco theater this summer. But they can’t say they haven’t been warned.

Kiki & Herb Alive From Broadway opened Wednesday, and it’s a homecoming for performers Justin Bond, who stars as “boozy chanteusy” Kiki DuRane, and Kenny Mellman, her constant companion, musical director and accompanist.

About 20 years ago, Bond and Mellman got their act together at small San Francisco clubs, and it’s been an upward downward spiral ever since. Their characters are throwbacks to the drunken mediocrity of airport lounge acts. Think Vegas before it got Cirque du Soleil’d.

But being the edgy kids they were, Bond and Mellman weren’t content making fun of kitsch past. They used their crotchety counterparts to start commenting on the state of American politics, the battle for gay rights, religious hypocrisy and, of course, the end of the world.

After moving to New York, becoming the toast of the downtown hipster crowd, playing Carnegie Hall and then Broadway (where they received a Tony Award nomination earlier this year but lost to a ventriloquist), Kiki & Herb finally come back to their roots with a show that’s not all that different from what audiences saw in small local venues like the Café du Nord and Eichelberger’s back in the day.

The difference, and it’s a big one, is the grandiosity of the American Conservatory Theater. In a polite setting, with everyone in their seats, having paid up to $66 to be there, Kiki & Herb are a different kind of act than when they’re about 5 feet away, and you don’t know if their jokes about being hopped-up on goofballs are jokes or reality. There was edge and danger and wicked hilarity.

Those elements are still in place, but only in traces, with Kiki & Herb Alive From Broadway, which is about 30 minutes too long.

Bond and Mellman are powerful performers, with Bond’s gutsy warble combining the haughty elocution of a Bette Davis or a Katharine Hepburn combined with the Broadway belt of an over-the-hill Liza Minnelli.

Alive From Broadway attempts to be concert and theater, and for about an hour, it’s brilliant and funny. But it quickly grows old, and as Kiki imbibes her cheap bourbon and gets drunker and drunker, her political rants get screechy, and the humor drains from her delivery.

The musical offerings are also somewhat exhausting. The best numbers are the Mountain Goats’ acidic “No Children,” and the encore, the classic reinterpretation of Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” mashed up with Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” It’s a genius moment saved for last.

Dan Fogelberg’s “Another Auld Lang Syne” is a piece of pop mediocrity turned into a bit of autobiography as Kiki recalls a reunion with her estranged daughter, Miss D, at a grocery store. Kiki delivers the song from the branches of a dead tree (appropriately garish set by Scott Pask), but the long number withers.

The funniest re-imagining of a song comes near the top of the show as Kiki takes the Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” very seriously, though her “folk music” rendition of Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” is pretty hilarious.

Kiki’s one-liners are almost reason enough to see the show. Complaining about how long they’ve been around (since the Nativity, we’re led to believe), Kiki surveys the audience and notes all the young faces and how encouraging that is. “Between the AIDS and the Alzheimer’s, we haven’t a fan left over 40,” she says.

Before taking a sip from her generous cocktail, Kiki says: “Time to make mama pretty.” And the “prettier” she gets, the more likely she is to say something like, “If you weren’t molested as a child, you must have been an ugly kid.” The audience laughs and gasps. “I don’t care if it hurts,” Kiki snaps.

After a long rant on her loathing of President Bush, the Iraq War and many Pope-related issues, Kiki launches into Mark Eitzel’s “Patriot’s Heart” as if it were a Puccini aria, with Herb pounding the piano into submission, and then she tries to lighten things up with the Scissor Sisters’ “Take Your Mama.”

The show sort of crashes down around them but is then rescued by the ultra-dramatic reading of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which includes a coda incorporating Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”

You either get Kiki and Herb or you don’t. You either find them sharp and funny or flat and ghastly. There’s no middle ground with this kind of performance art, but one thing that is also true of performance art: a little edge goes a very long way.

For information about “Kiki & Herb Alive From Broadway” visit www.act-sf.org.

Take a big, tasty bite of Bay Area theater _ and do it for free _ at the San Francisco Theater Festival on Sunday, July 22. The festival’s 10 stages will host more than 70 shows and nearly 300 actors.

Among the participating theater companies and performers are Asian America Theater Company; Ruth Lynn Miller; African American Shakespeare Company; 42nd Street Moon; Magic Theater; Uncle Buzzy’s Hometown Variety Show; BATS Improv; The Marsh; Intersection for the Arts; Lamplighters Music Theatre; Stanford Summer Theatre; Stagebridge Senior Theatre; Cutting Ball Theater; and Subterranean Shakespeare.

Last year’s festival attracted more than 6,500 people, and organizer Bill Schwartz says this is the only theater festival that showcases a “huge variety of live theater in one place in one day. It’s truly a people’s festival.”

The event runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Yerba Buena Gardens, which includes the Center for the Arts, Zeum and the Metreon, and is at Mission Street between Fourth and Fifth streets (nearest BART stations are Montgomery and Powell).

“In centuries past, theater was a people’s art form, and that is exactly what this festival is about,” Schwartz says. “We are returning theater to its roots.”

For a schedule, visit www.sftheaterfestival.org or call (415) 291-8655.

Summer has finally arrived, at least it has for me. Living in the cool-to-cold, foggy Bay Area, I seek my summer thrills in movie theates (sorry, but the thought of outdoor summer theater in the Bay Area fills me with dread — except for California Shakespeare Theater, whose skills transcend the cold).

I found summer in Hairspray, the hilarious, joyful movie version of the Broadway musical, which is in turn based on an original 1988 John Waters movie. Forget recent Broadway-to-movie adaptations like Rent, The Producers and The Phantom of the Opera. They don’t even begin to compare to the thrills of Hairspray, which manages — and this is really something — to not feel manufactured. It feels clever and sharp and well constructed, which makes it feel less like a shiny product and more like an engaged and engaging work of art.

Way back in the summer of 2002, I remember listening to the cast album of Broadway’s Hairspray straight through (this was before my iPod put my life on shuffle) and immediately went to the computer and bought a ticket for the show, then planned a trip to New York around it.

I’ve been a fan since, and the show is among the most enjoyable I’ve ever experienced. There’s just something about the energy of the cast and the audience having a great time and dancing to the same beat.

The movie, frankly, made me nervous. Director Adam Shankman didn’t seem the obvious choice to guide the movie or choreograph it on the basis of his previous film work such as The Wedding Planner, A Walk to Remember and >Bringing Down the House. Well, it turns out Shankman was exactly the right man to bottle the exuberance of the show and translate it into a movie that seems like a movie much more than stage-bound show.

Little details abound in the movie that make it worth seeing more than once, and the performances are, for the most part, stellar. I was thoroughly unconvinced by John Travolta as Edna Turnblad in the previews, but he quickly won me over with his Baltimore accent, which quickly turns charming (and has me calling everyone “hun.”) Young Nikki Blonsky is a real find as Tracy, the plucky teen dancer who inadvertently helps integrate Baltimore television in 1962.

It turns out that Michelle Pfeiffer looking more gorgeous than ever, is a crispy comic actress; Christopher Walken is made for quirky musicals; Zac Efron proves more than a pretty face as Linc Larkin; James Marsden lights up the screen as Corny Collins; Allison Janney as a religious nut mother steals every scene she’s in (which isn’t many); and if they ever make The Sammy Davis Jr. Story, I elect newcomer Elijah Kelley, who plays Seaweed here, for the part.

I must admit a little disappointment in Queen Latifah as Motormouth Maybelle. Latifah is a delightful screen presence, no question, and she looks great here. But she’s lacking the emotional heft the role needs. Maybelle is a deeply soulful woman with a tremendous zest for life. She’s sensual and spiritual, and those aspects don’t really come through in Latifah’s performance, pleasant as it is.

Screenwriter Leslie Dixon has made some smart choices in adapting the musical for the screen, and genius songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman have augmented the Broadway score with some good new songs, including “Ladies Choice” and “Come So Far (So Far to Go).” I noticed at least four songs in the credits (all Shaiman-Wittman compositions) that are not on the movie soundtrack CD. What gives? Can we expect a Vol. II if the movie’s as huge a hit as it deserves to be?

I hope when Oscar time rolls around next year, the Academy remembers that in the summer of 2007, there was a major flash of celluloid happiness called Hairspray.

Remember the name James Zongus. You just might be able to say you knew him when.

Though only 12 years old, James, a Foster City resident, has been performing for nearly a decade, and his story is strikingly familiar if you know the song “I Can Do That” from A Chorus Line.

Like the kid in the song, James would follow his two older sisters to dance class, and at age 3, he all but demanded to share the stage with his sisters in The Nutcracker.

“I was at a rehearsal and said, `I want to be in the show!’ So they cast me in a little part,” James recalls. “I got to walk across the stage and do a little bit of dancing. After that I just kept on going.”

James played Oliver in Oliver! with the Bay Area Educational Theatre Company in San Mateo, and last year he was one of the king’s children in the The King and I at American Musical Theatre of San Jose.

When Bowditch Middle School, where James will be in the eighth grade come September, joined with two other schools to produce Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, James played the role of Chip, the tea cup son of Mrs. Potts, the tea pot.

Like Olivier returning to the role of Hamlet, James will once again essay Chip, only this time for Broadway by the Bay.

For his audition, he found a song he thought would be good for Beauty and the Beast, what with its singing and dancing flatware and furniture.

“I sang `Hey, Look Me Over’ because the song has the words `rose’ and `spoon’ and `fork’ in it,” James explains. “It went really well. They laughed.”

In this production, which opens Saturday at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, James, like all the Chips before him, appears to be a tea cup-encased head on a rolling cart. There’s a bit of stage magic involved in Chip’s appearance, but James won’t give away the secret.

When asked if it’s a comfortable way to perform, he will say this: “It’s not comfortable. No way.”

But he’s enjoying working on the show and with Tracy Chiappone, who plays his mother.

“She’s very nice and easy to work with and gives me good advice,” James says.

James’ real mom, Joanne Zongus, says having a performer in the family requires the support of the entire family for both logistical and emotional reasons.

“We told him we’d make the commitment if he was willing to make the commitment and keep his grades up between a 3.5 and 3.8 and keep himself healthy and keep his commitment to his family,” Joanne says. “He’s done really well. I don’t know where he gets it. Neither his father nor I can be in front of a group of people. We’re very proud of him.”

So far, acting is just James’ hobby. Part of his agreement with his parents is that he make sure he’s a well-rounded person.

“In school, James does sports like basketball and golf,” Joanne says. “He serves on the altar for church. It’s a mind-body-soul kind of thing. We feel it’s important that all parts of you are well-rounded.”

James says theater isn’t all that cool in middle school, but in high school, especially if he gets his wish and ends up, like his twin older sisters, at theater-friendly San Mateo High School, the cool factor may improve.

“I feel like in high school, theater will be just something I like to do and no one will judge me for it,” James says.

From there, James has an interesting plan.

“I know it’s really hard to get to Broadway,” he says. “So I’ll get a good college education and then a really steady job — I like construction and architecture; I love to build stuff — then I’ll retire early and do shows at least twice a year.”

James’ practical attitude toward show business was shaped, in part, by his experience doing The King and I at AMTSJ.

Says James’ mom: “Doing that show, I think it dawned on him what it meant to perform professionally. There were a lot of New York actors there who had left their families behind, and … it can be kind of hard.”

James says the hardest part of that show was balancing rehearsal, performance, school work and the commute from Foster City to San Jose.

“I barely made it through,” James says. “But when I’d get to the theater, it was so much fun, and the sets were so intricate and everything that I forgot about everything else and had a wonderful experience.”

Broadway by the Bay’s Beauty and the Beast continues through July 29 at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, 600 N. Delaware St., San Mateo. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; plus 2 p.m. July 21 and 28. Tickets are $17 to $42. Call (650) 579-5565 or visit www.broadwaybythebay.org.

The Broadway production of Xanadu actually received some lovely reviews. Critics seemed astonished that they were compelled to write nice things about what is apparently a funny, enjoyable show.

Charles Isherwood in the New York Times started off his review: “Can a musical be simultaneously indefensible and irresistible? Why, yes it can.” He goes on to call the show “silly bliss” and quotes Douglas Carter Beane’s script (a line uttered by Tony Roberts as Zeus): “Creativity shall remain stymied for decades. The theater? They’ll just take some stinkeroo movie or some songwriter’s catalog, throw it onstage and call it a show.”

Another good quote, this one uttered by Jackie Hoffman as the muse Calliope: “This is like children’s theater for 40-year-old gay people!”

The AP’s Michael Kuchwara has this to say about Xanadu, “the jaw-droppingly awful 1980 film that sank Olivia Newton-John’s movie career yet couldn’t kill roller disco, has been turned into a fast, funny little stage musical. Quite a transformation.”

And, helpfully, Kuchwara points out that leading man Cheyenne Jackson is “sporting the best thighs on Broadway” and that leading lady Kerry Butler “knows how to slyly snare a laugh.” More praise for comic actors Hoffman and Mary Testa, who apparently chew the scenery in good ways.

Joe Dziemianowicz writing in the New York Daily News says the show is a cure for summertime blues and is “90 minutes of souped-up silliness and broad comedy.”

Clive Barnes in the New York Post, giving the show one star out of four (headline: Xanadon’t), is not a fan of the show (and has never seen the movie), but says Beane’s book is “arch and camp, a fair example of the kitschy-sink school of writing, with a few decent quips in its shivering quiver.”

BroadwayWorld.com has a terrific video interview with Hoffman and Testa (and the sequence of clips at the end really offers a taste of the show. Watch the video here.