Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Dame Edna warbles her way through songs and insults audience member like nobody’s business in her new show, Dame Edna: Live and Intimate in Her First Last Tour, at San Francisco’s Post Street Theatre. Photo by kevinberne.com

Familiar shtick hobbles grand Dame’s latest outing
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Nobody works an audience like Dame Edna.

Ten years ago, Bay Area audiences were gleefully brutalized by Australian actor Barry Humphries’ most celebrated creation in Dame Edna’s Royal Tour. That show injected new life into the Dame’s late-life career and eventually landed her on Broadway, where she won a special Tony Award.

The last couple times Edna has been back to San Francisco, she has played the Broadway-size Curran Theatre, but now that she’s back to celebrate both her 10^th anniversary revival in San Francisco and her 50^th year in show business, she’s back in the cozy confines of the Post Street Theatre, where we fell for her a decade ago (when the space was called Theatre on the Square).

In Dame Edna: Live and Intimate in Her First Last Tour, which opened Sunday and continues into early January, the glittery, mauve-haired dame holds court in all the usual ways – and that’s both a joy and a problem.

When it comes to interacting with – and insulting – audience members, Edna is in a class all her own. She insults the folks in the balcony, chiding them for their poverty, though instead of calling them paupers this time out, she describes them as “nouveau pauvre” and calls them Les Miserables.

She makes fun of a woman near the stage for attempting to make her own clothes and failing miserably, and then chides senior citizens for being old and attempts to dazzle them by jiggling the rhinestones on her glittery dress.

There’s the traditional tossing of the gladioli at the end of the show and references to her gay son Kenny, though Edna is still hoping he’ll meet Ms. Right someday. She leads the audience in the sing-along “Friends of Kenny,” which she says has become her signature song since introducing it during the Royal Tour. Andrew Ross capably accompanies Edna and gives her a few polite nudges when she veers off track.

The frocks (designed by John Van Gastel and Stephen Adnitt) are garishly gorgeous – the puffy, rainbow jacket that opens the second act might actually be a parade float – and the winged spectacles are as sparkly as ever.

Even though we meet Edna’s estranged daughter Valmai (played by the wonderful San Francisco actress Erin-Kate Whitcomb, who really could stand to be more than just a glorified stage assistant), there’s not much new in this outing.

Edna befriends women in the audience and later invites them up on stage to be part of a proposed HBO talk show. Opening night’s group was less than scintillating, though there was a woman celebrating her 93^rd birthday who had been singled out by the Dame at a show 10 years ago.

The first act ends with Edna marrying two of her audiences members (never mind that one was gay and the other was already married), and that’s a cute bit. This is where Edna hauls out the telephone and attempts some improv comedy with a stranger. After a few answering machines, Edna finally got a livewire human, and the show, as Edna had predicted, did not go down the toilet.

As a big Edna fan, I have to express disappointment that this show offers us very little we haven’t seen before. In interviews leading up to his show’s opening, the 74-year-old Humphries said that this show would see the American debut of one of his other characters, cultural attaché Sir Les Patterson, but he’s nowhere to be seen. He appeared in the Austin run of this show but has disappeared.

There is a surprise guest in the show, but the appearance is part of an awkwardly structured ending that isn’t nearly as satisfying as it should or could be.

As familiar as much of the material seems, Humphries is still a deft comedian, and Edna gets off some very funny lines. She says she has adopted a baby from “the same village where Madonna shops for her loved ones.”

And she bought Sarah Palin an Atlas and sent it care of the North Pole. But Palin, though happy with the gift, was disappointed in it because she couldn’t find “overseas.”

The subtitle of the show is “A meditation on gender and post-election trauma,” which is a bit of a joke because the show is neither. If Edna mentioned President-elect Obama, I missed it. She did mention Lehman Brothers and the bombed-out crater that is the stock market, but the focus of the show is on audience interaction.

When you go to the show – and if you haven’t ever seen Dame Edna, you really should at least once – dress nicely or you’ll hear about it. And if one-on-one interaction with an Australian gigastar who’s actually a man in a dress scares you, consider sitting in the balcony.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Dame Edna: Live and Intimate in Her First Last Tour continues through Jan. 4 at the Post Street Theatre, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $58-$78. Call 415-771-6900 or visit www.ticketmaster.com for information.

Forget about High School Musical. The real teen movie musical to see is Were the World Mine, a favorite of the gay film festival circuit that is now seeing wider release.

While Disney’s HSM franchise exploits the shiny pop pleasures of high school, Were the World Mine offers a darker fantasy guided by the magic of theater and, more specifically, by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Directed by Tom Gustafson and co-written by Gustafson and Cory James Krueckeberg, this bit of low-budget indie film enchantment (now at the Opera Plaza in San Francisco and the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley) takes its cue from Max Reinhardt’s lush 1935 movie (and earlier stage production) of Midsummer and its ultra-romantic take on the world of lovers in the forest and the faeries that guide them.

The movie also seems inspired, in part, by Dead Poet’s Society, which includes a tormented, sensitive protagonist at its center who plays Puck in the all-boy academy’s production of Midsummer, but he commits suicide.

In Gustafson and Krueckeberg’s version, the protagonist is out gay student Timothy (Tanner Cohen), who is regularly roughed up by his rugby-playing compatriots. An English teacher/drama director (Wendy Robie), forces all the senior boys into her production of Midsummer, and Timothy lands the role of Puck because he can actually sing.

Invested in the role of the merry sprite, Timothy somehow borrows one of the play’s magic spells – the one that makes you fall in love with the next person you see – and begins turning his small town into the same-sex capitol of the world.

The farcical aspects of the plot never get too far out of hand, thanks primarily to the score (original music by Jessica Fogle and Tim Sandusky, lyrics by Krueckeberg and Shakespeare), which is beautiful and eerie and anything but farcical. (Soundtrack is available from PS Classics and on iTunes.)

More Dead Poets vibe comes from Zelda Williams, Robin’s daughter, who plays one of Timothy’s best friends. She sings the brightest song in the score, a sort of light-rock re-telling of the Pyramus and Thisbe story from Midsummer.

I could have used more music and some bigger musical numbers. Cohen has a gorgeous voice, and it’s a shame we don’t get to hear it more.

But it’s hard to complain when there’s so much that’s wonderful in this movie. How can you resist a movie where townsfolk are practically waving pitchforks and torches to get the school NOT to produce a Shakespeare play?

If only theater in the real world could inspire such vehement response.

Here’s the trailer for Were the World Mine:

Here’s an interview with director Gustafson and stars Cohen and Nathaniel David Becker:

Carlo D’Amore plays himself, his mother, members of his family and assorted other characters in his one-man show No Parole at The Marsh in San Francisco. Photo by Rudy Meyers

It’s a laugh sentence in D’Amore’s arresting `No Parole’
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Decked out in his glittery, color-splattered Ed Hardy shirt, Carlo D’Amore is a little like animation come to life in his energetic solo show No Parole now at The Marsh in San Francisco. And that’s a good thing when you need to command a stage for 80 minutes or so.

D’Amore has no problem endearing himself to his audience. He bounces around the stage, switches characters with instant flair and tells a humor-laced story that ends up being quite moving.

The topic, not surprisingly, is family. We’ve all got one and we’ve all got the related issues.

But hand it to D’Amore – his issues are on a grand, international, even criminal scale.

If “No Parole” weren’t so darned entertaining and if D’Amore weren’t so charming, his life story could be downright depressing.

Born in Peru to a Peruvian mother and an Italian father, D’Amore grew up in the shadow of his eccentric, attention-starved mother who had a talent for con-artistry. Clearly the acting gene runs in the D’Amore family, and while Carlo has channeled his into the more legit forms of stage and screen, his mother, whose name varied depending on the con – Angelica, Tina, Gina, Coco – invested hers in scheming, manipulating and money making.

The family headed north to the U.S. , entered illegally (acting was involved) and once settled, Mama D’Amore really went to town on the scams. For a while she was even a highly successful immigration attorney who scored green cards for hundreds of migrant workers.

She was, not, however, flawless in her approach and ended up in prison. Once out, she resumed her schemes, and as angry victims and the law began closing in on her, she suffered a debilitating stroke and ended up living with her son in his illegally sublet studio in New York’s Lower East Side.

This is the meat of D’Amore’s show, his coming to terms with the mother he loves – “To me, my mother is the best mother in the world,” he says – while taking care of her and foiling more of her scams.

Early parts of the show, detailing a tumultuous childhood, come across as comic reflections, but the show, directed by Margarett Perry, really gains traction when it becomes an outright drama and D’Amore finds himself making bold, serious choices in the way he deals with this woman, his mother, who has some sort of pathological need to lie, manipulate and scam.

Throughout the show, he offers life lessons his mother imparted to him such as “People believe what you make them believe.” But in the more dramatic portion of the evening, the lesson “Hurt those who hurt you” takes on some significant emotional weight.

There’s a lot of pain masked by humor in No Parole, and it might make for a more potent show if D’Amore trusted his dramatic power a little more and didn’t try so hard to make this reminiscence quite so palatable for his audience. He’s such a likeable guy we’d go pretty much anywhere with him.

It’s the darkness more than the light that lingers after No Parole concludes, although D’Amore’s optimism and resilience resonates. How did he survive his family with a sense of humor and a sense of self intact?

“Hopefully you learn to forgive them as much as you can.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

No Parole continues through Dec. 13 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$35. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.themarsh.org.

Creative schizophrenia is a common occurrence in show biz. You’ve got actors, writers and sometimes even directors donning different personalities in the name of storytelling and entertainment.

Nowhere was this fascinating split personality more evident than when interviewing comic genius Barry Humphries and his most famous creation, Dame Edna Everage.

The goal was to talk to creator and creation for a Theatre Bay Area magazine story (coming soon to http://www.theatrebayarea.org/mag/mag.jsp) in conjunction with the Dame’s new show coming to San Francisco’s Post Street Theatre (where it’s in previews now and officially opens Sunday, Nov. 23).

I was delighted by the assignment, having been a fan of both Edna and Humphries for years. I had interviewed both before and was excited to experience some of Humphries’ improv brilliance.

But let me tell you, interviewing a character is a strange experience (as it must be for Humphries to be interviewed in character – talk about concentration and chops!).

When I spoke to Humphries, he was doing a quick stopover in San Francisco and the previous night had appeared as Dame Edna at Macy’s Passport fashion fundraiser. In addition to kissing Mayor Gavin Newsom, Edna had auctioned herself off to the highest bidder (all in the name of charity, of course).

“I don’t know what will come of that,” Humphries mused.

We talked about Edna’s golden jubilee – 50 years since her creation – last year, and how this year’s return to San Francisco marks 10 years since Edna’s appearance at the Theatre on the Square (now the Post Street) sparked a late-career renaissance that led to a special Tony Award on Broadway.

Humphries is an erudite man, and conversation with him always takes surprising turns.

From Edna’s outrageous onstage high jinks, we skittered around to Humphries’ early days in comedy when he would play outrageous pranks on the public such as planting food in a garbage can near a busy restaurant, dressing as a street person and then wandering by, digging through the trash and eating what he “finds.” And then there was the trick with the canned soup and the air sick bag, but that’s a little gross.

“I’ve always thought of myself as Dadaist in the old European sense,” Humphries says. “I’ve always been very entertained and stimulated by that particular art movement. Through that I drifted into the theater. I really didn’t consciously choose acting. I did shows at university intended to outrage people.”

Humphries, it seemed, loved to shame the audience by enticing them to boo and heckle someone on stage, then reveal the person was blind and not really part of the show.

“I would trick them into derision and then trick them into feeling terrible shame and regret,” he says. “I enjoyed doing things of that kind.”

In later years, even as Edna, Humphries would still pull tricks such as having stunt people seated in a box in the theater, then when Edna begins hurling gladioli at the end of the show, they’d overreach to grab a flower and fall out of the box (they were outfitted with a safety harness, but the terrified audience didn’t know that).

“The whole audience was standing up, trying to assist and practically climbing up the stucco walls,” Humphries recalls. “Then Edna would say something like, `Isn’t that awful! Wouldn’t it be terrible if that happened every night!’ The audience was tricked into feeling terrible alarm and panic, but the stunt itself was very expensive – more than it cost to have four dancers in the show. But it was worth it.”

Humphries realizes the interview has hit the 30-minute mark, and politely signs off. The plan was to switch personae and spend the next 30 minutes as Dame Edna, but apparently he’s pooped and begs off the Edna interview.

A few weeks later, I call Humphries’ native Australia to talk with the Dame, and this is what I was greeted with: “Hello, darling Chad. You’ve caught me doing my toenails. I like to do them myself. I don’t like a strange woman fiddling with my extremities.”

Discussing how happy she is to be returning to San Francisco, Dame Edna says when in town, she often stays with society doyenne Denise Hale. “I don’t understand a word she says, but I adore that little Serbian minx. Hence the term `acerbic.’ Every aspect of San Fran I love.”

The grand Dame likes to work personal details of her interviewer into the conversation. She offers congratulations on a recent marriage and sends greetings to the new spouse. Then she offers an astrological observation: “You are such a typical Leo. It’s that growling thing you do. And you’re carnivorous.”

Last time she was in San Francisco, Edna revealed that she had been to local gay author Armistead Maupin’s wedding. “There was no sign of the bride. But something very excited happened. I caught his bouquet.”

Trying to get the conversation back on track proved impossible, but the ride was an awful lot of fun.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Dame Edna: Live and Intimate in Her First Last Tour continues through Jan. 4 at the Post Street Theatre, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $58-$78. Call 415-771-6900 or visit www.ticketmaster.com for information.

Here’s footage of Humphries and Dame Edna meeting:

EXTENDED AGAIN! NOW THROUGH JAN. 18!

The rambunctious cast of Mary Zimmerman’s The Arabian Nights tells the tale of the virtuous merchant, his hideous bride and the beauty who tricked him. Photos by kevinberne.com

Berkeley Rep unveils some enchanted `Nights’
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Thanks to Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Bay Area audiences are sort of expert in the art of Mary Zimmerman.

Berkeley Rep’s relationship with the award-winning Chicago-based director and member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company is such that we’ve had a steady stream of Zimmerman productions, from the glorious, ultimately Tony Award-winning Metamorphoses to The Secret in the Wings, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and, most recently, Argonautika.

Zimmerman’s got a great gimmick: she creates beautifully designed, expertly acted vehicles for sophisticated storytelling. In a very grown-up way, she turns us into kids slathering for a juicy bedtime story.

And she always delivers.

Zimmerman and company are back at Berkeley Rep (in a co-production with Kansas City Repertory Theatre) with The Arabian Nights, a show she originally created for Lookingglass in 1992 in response to the first Gulf War.

As expected, the production is gorgeous. Though Daniel Ostling’s set is a simple courtyard in the midst of rough buildings, with pillows, small wooden platforms and carpets scattered about, the space is lit in extraordinary, evocative, incredibly effective ways by TJ Gerckens’ lighting design.

There are gorgeous Middle Eastern lanterns hung over the stage and throughout the theater, but Gerckens’ lights are so much more – they become a mad house, an exotic night on the Tigris and, most significantly, the first rays of dawn, which could mean death for Scheherezade and the end of her stories.

Zimmerman has selected her stories from The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, translated by Powys Mathers, and her approach to the classic collection of tales is compellingly human.

Our story begins with – what else? – a story. King Shahryar (Ryan Artzberger) was betrayed by his wife, so in his rage and grief, he assaults a virgin each night, and then kills her. With so few young women left in the country, young Scheherezade (Sofia Jean Gomez, left with Artzberger) concocts a plan to save her life and put an end to the slaughter.

With the help of her sister, Dunyazade (Stacey Yen), Scheherezade begins telling the king stories of all kinds, usually involving sex, violence and crude humor. Cleverly, and like a great serial storyteller, she stops at a crucial point, leaving the king begging for more.

With each dawn, and with each cliffhanger, Scheherezade is spared, the king is pulled one more degree away from his psychosis and we are treated to tantalizing story after story.

One tale folds into another as the evening flows along, enchanting us all the while.

Zimmerman’s 15-member ensemble tumbles and spins through the tales with grace and glee. They drum, they play stringed instruments, sing, dance and jump from one character to another with ease and clarity. And they’re gorgeous in the shimmering, flowing robes and gowns and drapes provided by costumer Mara Blumenfeld.

The nearly three-hour production might be somewhat overstuffed, but it’s hard to complain when a show is this engaging. For every jokey tale, like the one about the greatest fart in the world, there’s one with more depth such as the tale of Sympathy the Learned about an incredibly wise woman (played by Alana Arenas) or the tale of the false Kalifah, a man who pretends to be the ruler only because he wishes so badly to be anyone but his flawed self.

With so much focus on storytelling, it’s not at all surprising that Zimmerman unleashes her actors, for a moment, to spin some improvised tales of their own. During the tale of the “wonderful bag,” two actors are chosen at random from the ensemble to fight for a little purse that has been found in the marketplace and claimed by both men. Each actor must describe the contents of the bag in great detail.

At Wednesday’s opening-night performance, Ramiz Monsef and Evan Zes were the actors charged with making the audience (and their fellow cast members) howl with delight at each outrageous outburst. “My mother was a toothless whore. My father drank. Wouldn’t you?” was one part of the exchange, and the expression “moon over my hammy” was another.

With its ever present threat of death, The Arabian Nights never devolves into frivolity. There’s weight to the stories that comes from sadness and wisdom, and when, at the end, Zimmerman echoes present-day Baghdad, the oft-described “city of peace and poets,” we sense the depth of history and our place in it.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

The Arabian Nights continues an extended run through Jan. 18 on Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $13.50-$71. Call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org.

EXTEDNED THROUGH DEC. 14

The cast of Marin Theatre Company’s The Seafarer by Conor McPherson includes (from left) Julian Lopez-Morillas as Richard, Andrew Hurteau as Ivan, Andy Murray as Sharky, John Flanagan as Nicky and Robert Sicular as Mr. Lockhart. Photos by Ed Smith

Bedeviled on Christmas Eve in McPherson’s `Seafarer’
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The first holiday show of the season is upon us, and it’s overflowing with booze, poker and a visit from ol’ Satan himself.

Yes, it’s just another Irish Christmas by way of Conor McPherson’s rollicking The Seafarer which opened Tuesday night at Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley.

It’s a fantastic production of a play that ranks among McPherson’s best, which is saying something. The author of The Weir, Dublin Carol and others is one of Ireland’s foremost playwrights and one of those assured voices that has a touch of magic to them. If you require more evidence, we’re in the midst of a minor McPherson festival. Aside from The Seafarer in Marin, SF Playhouse is winding up its scarily good production of McPherson’s Shining City.

Both Seafarer and Shining City take otherworldly routes to darkly human places. They’re fantastic in every sense but squarely grounded in the alcohol-soaked, muck-ravaged lives of people who’ve seen the good life pass by.

The past weighs heavily in The Seafarer. It’s Christmas Eve in Baldoyle, Ireland, and Sharky (Andy Murray) has returned home to care for his blind older brother, Richard (Julian Lopez-Morillas). Sharky is hardly a saint, though he’s not too shabby as a caretaker. Richard is not a kindly patient – he’s cantankerous, ornery, voluble and prone to the drink.

Sharky is, at the moment, taking a break from alcohol. He’s two days dry, and if he can just get through Christmas, he’ll be OK.

But being back in the bosom of family is enough to drive anybody to drink.

Set designer J.B.Wilson literally sets the brothers’ home in a dank Irish cave. There’s a recognizable house in there – though the brothers have basically turned it into a junk heap littered alcoholic refuse – but the overall impression is that of a dark, chilly underground lair.

How fitting, then, that as the brothers welcome some friends – Andrew Hurteau as Ivan and John Flanagan as Nicky — over for holiday cheer and a friendly poker game, that the devil, in the suave form of Mr. Lockhart (Robert Sicular, right in overcoat with Hurteau), shows up as well to claim a soul that was promised to him about 25 years earlier.

This deal-with-the-devil scenario is hardly Damn Yankees and this Christmas tale is hardly of the Carol variety, though there are certainly elements of both here.

There’s guilt, regret, drunk and disorderly conduct, hidden passions and maybe even a little redemption in this long Christmas night of the soul, but there’s also a whole lot of laughter.

Lopez-Morillas’ Richard is highly memorable – the kind of character you love to watch on stage but would never want to know (or smell) in real life. Loud and emotional, Richard is the exact opposite of his brother, a bruised (literally) man tired of being beaten by life. Murray’s great skill as an actor allows us glimpses of the man Sharky is trying to hard to be but can never quite make that breakthrough.

Sicular is devilishly good with his keenly focused gazes and his seen-it-all worldliness. His is not a sly devil – more like a drunk one who makes no bones about why he’s there and who he’s after.

The final card game, one that could result in the reclaiming of a soul, is beautifully directed by MTC artistic director Jasson Minadakis, who never lets this seemingly lumpy play out of his tight control. There’s careful orchestration at work here, and Minadakis executes McPherson’s verbal score like a master.

Hurteau as Ivan is a sad sack bundle of misery – a lousy father and husband but a good friend with a wide streak of decency in him, while Flanagan’s Nicky is a good-time guy who never met a bottle of beer he couldn’t best.

It’s a veritable full house of great actors, and they’re a joy to watch in this disarming tale of deep, dark nights, hopeful day breaks and, yes, maybe even a little genuine (and genuinely sozzled) Christmas cheer.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

The Seafarer continues through Dec. 14 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $31-$51. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org.

Lee Meriwether has had a long, distinguished career that stretches from her beauty queen days as Miss San Francisco, Miss California and eventually Miss America in the mid-’50s to her stint alongside Buddy Ebsen on TV’s “Barnaby Jones” in the ’70s.

But Meriwether will probably always be best known for playing Catwoman in the 1966 movie version of Batman.

A graduate of the Community College of San Francisco, Meriwether is back on her old stomping grounds in one of American drama’s toughest roles: drug-addicted matriarch Mary Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

The production, directed by Susan Jackson, a board member of the Danville-based Eugene O’Neill Foundation, continues at 8 p.m. Nov. 20-22 and 2 p.m. Nov. 23 at the Diego Rivera Theatre, 50 Phelan Ave., San Francisco. Tickets are $15 general, $10 for students. Call 415-452-5185.

ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY KEEPS GOING

Intersection for the Arts and Campo Santo are literally turning dozens of people away each night because the waiting list for their hit Angry Black White Boy is so long. It seems everyone wants a piece of Dan Wolf’s dynamic, engrossing stage adaptation of the book by Adam Mansbach.

To help accommodate the clamoring crowds, this world-premiere production has been extended through Nov. 30. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Intersection for the Arts is at 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.brownpapertickets.com or www.theintersection.org.

EXTENDED THROUGH DEC. 21!

The cast of the Magic Theatre’s Evie’s Waltz includes, from left, Marielle Heller, Darren Bridgett and Julia Brothers. The Carter W. Lewis play continues through Dec. 7. Photos by www.davidallenstudio.com.

Tension mounts in Lewis’ modern `Waltz’
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Carter W. Lewis’ Evie’s Waltz, now at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, is a tense, frightening thriller that dredges up provocative issues about life in 21^st-century America.

The fact that the 90-minute play is so uncomfortable – I can’t remember sweating so much during a play, and it wasn’t the unseasonably warm weather – is a testament to how well the show is produced.

Magic artistic director Loretta Greco, in her first directorial outing since joining the theater, has cast the show brilliantly and guides her trio of actors through Lewis’ taut, fraught examination of guns, teens and the detonation of the nuclear family.

Erik Flatmo created the patio set on which the play takes place, and from what we can see, this is a gorgeous suburban home surrounded by woods and upper-middle-class affluence. We can only peek into the house itself, but we can tell it is well appointed in every way, as are its inhabitants, Clay (Darren Bridgett) and Gloria (Julia Brothers), who dress nicely even for an informal early autumn barbecue on the deck (costumes are by Fumiko Bielefeldt).

York Kennedy’s lighting design takes on extra importance in Lewis’ story. The warm, inviting early evening light gives way to looming night in the real time of the play, and the darkness is significant in many ways. Kennedy’s lighting design (with assistance from Sara Huddleston’s Strauss-infused sound design) also has some chilling, highly theatrical surprises that remind us just what’s at stake here.

What begins as another white suburban angst drama – Clay and Gloria’s 16-year-old son, Danny, was suspended that morning for bringing a gun to school – turns into a mystery and then an outright thriller.

Clay emerges as the bleeding heart of the family. As he skewers vegetables and brushes them with his soy-citrus marinade, he defends Danny, while Gloria, sipping from her gin and tonic, declares that the boy upstairs in his room is no longer her son. “I want to smother him in his sleep,” she declares.

Then Evie (Marielle Heller), daughter of a hard-drinking single mother in the neighborhood and Danny’s girlfriend, arrives. “Mom’s drunk, so I came instead,” Evie says, just before Gloria and Clay notice the blood on her shoulder.

The tension ratchets up from there as deceptions and plans are revealed, and ghosts of Columbine and random acts of teen violence flood the stage.

Who’s to blame for teen violence? Is it the parents or the parents of the parents? And can a parent really stop loving a child? Lewis doesn’t have any answers, but he creates interesting questions. He shades his female characters beautifully – both Gloria and Evie are far more complex than they first seem – but he doesn’t let Clay develop much beyond the big-hearted, caretaker he appears to be.

That said, the performances are outstanding. Brothers brings incredible depth to Gloria, a smart, mean woman whose plan to be an incredible mother didn’t quite pan out. There’s bitterness and tenderness in her, and it’s an extraordinary thing to watch her succumb to the power of the teenagers she loathes.

Bridgett takes Clay to a powerful emotional level even as the character attempts to put a positive spin on a situation that couldn’t possibly end well. His capacity for denial is immense, but so is his need to be a good father.

Heller has the hardest of the three roles because playing a loose canon 16-year-old and making the audience care about her is a tall order. Heller does it but never without letting us forget that, even with her considerable brains and bruised humanity, Evie is someone we need to fear.

I have rarely been so uncomfortable watching a play as I was during Evie’s Waltz. Fully recognizing how extraordinarily well produced, written and acted it was, I honestly couldn’t wait for it to be over.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Evie’s Waltz continues through Dec. 21 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard at Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $40-$45 ($15 for students). Call 415-441-8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org.

Pete Townshend and The Who did it. Phil Collins did it badly. Duncan Sheik did it brilliantly. Billy Joel sort of did it. And Elton John does it every other day.

Now it’s time for Ben Folds to make the leap and write a Broadway musical.

The 42-year-old Folds should be a massive pop star, up therein the pantheon with piano men Joel and John, but because the world is the way it is and the music industry is the way it is and radio is the way it is, Folds has to be content being a superstar to millions of geeks, dweebs and sensitive rockers.

Folds performed Thursday night at the Warfield in San Francisco (read Jim Harrington’s concert review here) to support Way to Normal” his third solo studio album since leaving his trio the Ben Folds Five, and the concert offered even more proof that it’s time for Folds to put his considerable songwriting skills in service of telling a story.

From the dawn of the Ben Folds Five in the mid ’90s, it has been clear that Folds has the troubadour gene. He’s a showman (just watch him bash his piano, climb on top of the piano, manipulate the piano strings and lead the audience in horn section sing-alongs) and he has a penchant for character songs.

Even his titles are littered with character names: “Julianne,” “Where’s Summer B?,” “Alice Childress,” “Uncle Walter,” “Kate,” “Steven’s Last Night in Town,” “Eddie Walker,” “Emaline,” “Tom & Mary,” “Jane,” “Annie Waits, “Zak and Sara,” “Fred Jones Part 2,” “The Ascent of Stan,” “Losing Lisa,” “Carrying Cathy,” “Gracie,” “Give Judy My Notice,” “The Secret Life of Morgan Davis,” “Dr. Yang” and “Kylie from Connecticut” to name just a few.

In that group above, Folds has even written a show tune. Just listen to “The Secret Life of Morgan Davis,” an obscure track off a CD single, and visions of lights in Times Square twinkle, and you can just imagine a guy in a top hat dancing in front of glittery show girls. Except if you listen to the lyrics, that wily Ben has written the tale of a degenerate man who spends his nights ingesting drugs, cavorting with sex workers, vomiting on himself and then slipping home in the wee hours so he can put on a tie and go into the office.

But that’s Folds in a nutshell. He’ll conform to a style only to bash it from the inside out.

Which is all the more reason he should write a musical. Reportedly Folds is collaborating with British novelist and music writer Nick Hornby on an album. That’s exciting, but they should have been the ones to turn Hornby’s High Fidelity into a Broadway musical. The version that actually opened in New York (by Tom Kitt, Amanda Green and David Lindsay-Abaire) was exactly the kind of musical that the characters in the show would make fun of and loathe. Hornby and Folds would have invented the real thing because they get how funny, emotional and snarky music can be – all at the same time.

Folds has succumbed to the Hollywood thing without much success. He contributed songs to the computer animated Over the Hedge, and neither his work, nor the movie itself, was anything more than minor. It was all so constrained, and the family friendly aspect of it removed all of Folds’ bite. He even sanitized his great satirical rocker “Rockin’ the Suburbs” for the movie, and it’s just silly (even with the vocal contributions of Folds’ friend William Shatner).

To make his debut on the Great White Way Folds doesn’t even have to start from scratch. He can take his first solo album, Rockin’ the Suburbs, and build a song cycle about people in the ‘burbs from its 12 tracks. The album contains two of Folds’ most heartfelt ballads (”Still Fighting It,” a love song to a firstborn child, and “The Luckiest,” a truly great love song) and some of his most arresting character work. Throw in some tracks from Songs for Silverman (”You to Thank,” “Jesusland”) and Way to Normal (”Cologne,” “You Don’t Know Me”) and you’ve got the basis of a really interesting show.

Billy Joel’s musical consisted of Twyla Tharp stringing songs of his together and using dance to tell a story, but that wouldn’t work as well with Folds. His songs require actors and back story and goofy intensity that’s not quite up to the grace and power of dance. Whatever show Folds eventually writes will undoubtedly be funnier than The Who’s “Tommy.”

Folds is at that point in his life and career – he’s on his fourth marriage, has two kids and can continue making records and touring for as long as he wants – where he can make some choices. In addition to the Hornby project, Folds is reportedly putting together an album of a cappella groups from around the country.

But a Broadway musical would give him an entirely new experience. He would get to invent his own version of the form and, if successful, the show will continue generating income for decades as regional and community theaters perform it well into the 21^st century and possibly beyond. And what aging pop star doesn’t want a little respectable immortality?

Here’s Folds with the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra performing “Zak and Sara”:

A familiar face is back among us.

Carlo D’Amore got his start in the acting world more than a decade ago in productions with some prominent Bay Area theaters: Theatre Rhinoceros’ Twelfth Night, the Magic Theatre’s A Park in Our House and Dog Opera and several San Francisco Shakespeare Festival touring park productions.

Then, with “ants in his pants,” as he puts it, he headed off to New York in 1996 to try life in a bigger pond, only to bottom out before attaining a measured degree of success.

“It was a lot harder than I suspected,” says D’Amore (at right, photos by Rudy Meyers). “But I’ve done pretty well and been lucky enough to work on Broadway a couple of times. For a 5′6″ white Latino who doesn’t sing, that’s a huge accomplishment.”

While living in New York, D’Amore’s mother, a colorful character to say the least who had lived her life as a flamboyant con artist, had a stroke and needed the care and attention of her son.

Born in Peru to an Italian father and a Peruvian mother, D’Amore emigrated to the U.S. and lived in the South Bay. That’s where he came into contact with acting, but he attributes his acting gene to his mother.

“She always used to say that had she been an actress, she would have been amazing,” D’Amore says. “But she was an actress because she was constantly putting on personas in her scamming. She was basically performing, making you think what she wanted you to think. She was fearless in her sort of attack. I learned from her how to do that. Even when I started studying at American Conservatory Theater or with Jean Shelton, I was always a natural.”

While taking care of his ailing mother in New York, D’Amore found himself having to grow up a little bit and become a caretaker. His mother, true to her history, “pulled some shenanigans,” as D’Amore puts it.

“After 30 years of going through these experiences, it came home to me,” he says. “I went ballistic. I came close to…I don’t know.”

He came more than close to pouring his heart out in what would become No Parole, an autobiographical one-man show, the basis of which is this: “Family is a life sentence.”

“I locked myself in for two weeks and wrote 80 pages, single spaced,” D’Amore recalls. “I was pouring these rants, these huge rants, onto the page.”

From that, he was able to perform a chunk of the show in its early stages at the Tribeca Theater Festival. “I was told they were looking for people of color, and I thought, `Hey, I’m colorful!” D’Amore says. “I did it and got some awesome feedback. From there I wanted to go more in depth with it. I worked with a director, Joe Megel, and he told me that with this kind of work, there’s no place to hide. I was talking about my mother, but part of me was still trying to protect her.”

Years before, at Theatre Rhino, D’Amore had performed in the one-man show Men on the Verge and savored the experience of being an actor alone on stage. “I wanted to have that experience again,” he says. “And it turns out the best story I had to tell was my life story and growing up with my mom.”

A producer friend in San Francisco convinced D’Amore to bring his show here, where it ran for several weeks last year at the SF Playhouse. That version of the show was heavy and dark, according to D’Amore.

“My sense of humor is very dark,” he says. “Things I thought were funny just horrified people. People were moved by it, but they weren’t laughing as much as I wanted them to. Something was still not clicking.”

Further work on the show at the Lark Play Development Center in New York and then work with director Margaret Perry have taken the show, D’Amore says, to a “totally different place.” When No Parole opens tonight (Thursday, Nov. 13) at The Marsh, where it runs through Dec. 13, audiences will see a show that is, according to its creator, at least 30 percent new material.

“I think I’m done writing the play,” says D’Amore, who will soon be 40. “It took three years, but it’s finished, and I’m thrilled with where it is.”

D’Amore’s mother didn’t see him on stage for a long time, but not too long before she died, she did get to see him in an early version of No Parole, in which he plays her as a vibrant young woman and as a 60-year-old debilitated by a stroke.

“She saw me do this in 2005 in the first version of the show,” D’Amore says. “It was pretty interesting to have her see that. I think it must have been difficult for her to watch. Part of her loved the fact that she was being immortalized. She’s a huge personality, and along with that comes quite a bit of ego, which is why I think she was able to do all the things she did. She was unstoppable.”

Coming back to San Francisco, D’Amore says, always feels like coming home. He has fond memories of working at the Magic and says that Danny Scheie, who directed him in Theatre Rhino’s all-male Twelfth Night set on a submarine, is “probably the best director I’ve ever worked with. Nobody else is quite as creative or fun.”

There’s a second solo show in the works, Feet First, and though it’s based on his mother’s brother, this is quite a different piece, and at no time in the show does D’Amore play himself.

“My uncle died in San Quentin chained to a hospital bed. It’s a tragic story,” D’Amore says. “The title comes from Incan lore: if you’re born feet first, and you make that journey, you’ll be blessed to waltz through life. It’s basically about a man looking at his life from prison and attempting to pass a positive image on to his son.”

D’Amore pauses and admits that talking about the show gives him “full-body goose pimples.”

“I’m thrilled not to be a one-trick pony writer.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

No Parole continues through Dec. 13 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$35. Call 800-838-3006 or visit www.themarsh.org.