Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Am I getting old and cranky or are show tunes getting crappy?
Probably a little of both, and I should say very quickly that there’s plenty of new show music that is thrilling, moving, funny, etc.
But I’ve been listening to the cast albums for Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and the against-all-odds hit stage adaptation of Xanadu. [...]

Seems like we’ve written this sentence before — because we have.
TheatreFirst, the intrepid small theater company that just will not give up, is moving again.
The itinerant troupe always seems to find itself without a home after having been promised a permanent home. After bouncing from rec room to church to make-shift theater space, Clive Chafer’s [...]

Ha’penny, we hardly knew ye.
Hot on the heels of announcing that the big Irish musical Ha’penny Bridge would be part of its season, the folks at SHN/Best of Broadway have announced that the show has canceled its San Francisco date.
“It is with great regret that we will be canceling the scheduled engagement of Ha’penny Bridge, [...]

Opened Feb. 19, 2008 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Sex, drugs, drinking, celebrity: Fisher tackles it all in Wishful Drinking
three 1/2 stars
Her mother is famous for, among other things, a movie musical with Gene Kelly and buckets of rain. Now Carrie Fisher is, in a sense, carrying on her mother’s legacy, though she’s singing in the [...]

Wednesday night (Feb. 20) we’ll experience one of those all-too-rare occasions when we dont’ have to go to Broadway, when Broadway comes to us.
PBS’ “Great Performances” will broadcast the John Doyle-directed Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company on Wednesday night (Bay Area folks, it’s 9 p.m. on KQED-Channel 9). So set those DVRs (or VCRs [...]

Opened Feb. 13, 2008 at American Conservatory Theater

Powerful performances tighten ACT’s Knot
Three stars (Powerful, scary)
Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot comes from a terrifying place, and I don’t mean the apartheid-dominated world of South African in the early 1960s, when the play was written.
The horror of Blood Knot is deeply human. It comes from that potential each [...]

For my full interview with Barry Manilow see below or click here.
In our conversation, he talked about being a guest coach on “American Idol”: “Most young people sing to their eyelids,” he said. “The yclose their eyes and show their voice off. I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve always needed a theatrical situation [...]

It’s a miracle that even now, Barry Manilow is writing the songs that make, if not the whole world, at least a fair portion of it sing. Could it be magic?
Magic had nothing to do with it. Try hard work, dogged persistence and thousands of “Fanilows’ who can’t smile without him.
Yes, Barry Manilow is still [...]

In his highly enjoyable book How Does the Show Go On? An Introduction to the Theater (Disney Editions, $19.95), Thomas Schumacher recounts, in no particular order, all the jobs he’s had in his life, from childhood in San Mateo to the top of the heap as president of Disney Theatrical Productions.
The list is as follows: [...]

Opened Feb. 11, 2008 at SF Playhouse Stage II

Mee’s melancholy Gone goes down easy
Three stars (Sad beauty)
No man was ever born
but he must suffer.
He buries his children and gets others in their place;
then dies himself. — Sophocles
Those words open Charles L. Mee’s grief-stricken but strangely joyous Gone, having its Bay Area premeire from Crowded Fire [...]