Opera’s not really my bag, but I had a fantastic time reviewing West Bay Opera’s Der Freischütz for the Palo Alto Weekly.
The short run ended today (Sunday, Feb. 28), but the review lives on forever. Read it here and please enjoy this photo from the production. Eric Coyne is Kuno, the head forester, and those are the masked townspeople behind him. (Photo by Otak Jump).
The original cast of [title of show] included (from left) Heidi Blickenstaff, Hunter Bell (seated), Jeff Bowen (top),
and Susan Blackwell. [title of show] will be presented as part of the 2010-2011 season at TheatreWorks. Photo by Carol Rosegg
If the new TheatreWorks season only contained[title of show], I would be thrilled. I wanted desperately for this “little musical that could” to have it’s pre-Broadway run in San Francisco, but creators Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen opted not to go out of town and head directly from off Broadway to on. The show didn’t exactly re-write Broadway history, but the original cast recording preserved a plucky show that, to some of us, is legendary in its wit and ambition.
But now this musical for people who love (and loathe and love to loathe) musicals is going to conclude the newly announced TheatreWorks season in June of 2011.
[title of show] isn’t the only treat in the season. After its run on Broadway this season, the Bay Area will get to sink its teeth into Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, his well-received follow-up to the gazillion-award-winning August: Osage County. The play runs Oct. 6 to 31. And another Broadway hit (one that recently stopped in San Francisco on its national tour) takes steps to Mountain View. The 39 Steps, a lovingly comic spoof of the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same name, opens in January of 2011.
You can usually count on a TheatreWorks season to include a big, juicy musical, and the coming season is no exception. Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’ A Light in the Piazza, a stunning, sophisticated work of modern musical theater (with a score by Richard Rodgers’ eminently talented grandson, no less), opens Aug. 25.
The season also includes three world premieres, including season-opener Auctioning the Ainsleys by Laura Schellhardt about a family of auctioneers. Schellhardt’s The K of D was seen at the Magic Theatre.
The second world premiere is a holiday offering: a new musical adaptation of Truman Capote’s story A Christmas Memory with lyrics by Carol Hall (The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), music by Larry Grossman and a book by Duane Poole. The show runs through most of the month of December.
The third world premiere is Rajiv Joseph’s psychological thriller The North Pool. Joseph is probably best known for his play Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo. His Animals Out of Paper is currently at SF Playhouse.
And finally, David Gutterson’s acclaimed novel Snow Falling on Cedars gets a theatrical adaptation (and a Bay Area premiere) in March 2011. Kevin McKeon of Book-It Repertory Theatre adapted and directed David Guterson’s masterful novel for the stage in Seattle three years ago.
For information about the TheatreWorks season call 650 463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org. Subscriptions range from $149 to $441.
Photo at right: Tracy Letts, author of Superior Donuts. Photo courtesy of Steppenwolf Theatre Co.
EXTENDED THROUGH MARCH 27!
The last major magic show to hit the Bay Area theater scene involved Siegfried and Roy giving their stamp of magical approval to a kid who sang show tunes while doing fairly lame tricks. It’s no wonder that magic gets such a bad rap for being such a cheeseball staple of the Las Vegas showroom.
But when magic is done well, it’s tremendous. Free of schmaltz and full of ingenuity, genuine theatrical magic is a joy, and that’s what you’ll find in Christian Cagigal’sNow and at the Hour now at the EXIT Stage Left. After a successful run in New York followed by a well-received San Francisco run, the magical Cagigal has revived the show, much to the delight of his adoring audience.
Cagigal doesn’t waste a lot of time with the usual flash-and-flair gimcrackery. He doesn’t need to impress us with empty gesturing and phony-baloney showmanship because he has plenty of genuine wonder at his disposal, and if that fails to make an impression, then magic is simply not for you.
Part autobiographical solo show, part mind-reading festival, Cagigal’s show is a spellbinding hour that puts a fresh spin theatrical magic. He enters the theater and sets up his stage. He turns over an hourglass and sets a metronome in motion. He checks his pocket watch and he wonders aloud, “Did you ever get the feeling that everything has happened before and it will all happen again?” He attempts to prove the notion of time travel – or at the very least, time bending – during the next hour, and he makes a pretty good case.
Whatever his methods, be they manipulation, trickery, suggestion or genuine magic, Cagigal elicits gasps of amazement from his audience as he quite effectively reads people’s minds. There’s quite a lot of audience participation in this show, but not to worry – it’s not obnoxious in the least. Cagigal is not only a genial host but also unfailingly polite to his volunteers. If some detail he intuits turns out to be too personal, he won’t share it with the crowd, but he’ll make sure you know he knows what’s going on in your dirty mind.
Holding a stereoscope (usually used to view old-fashioned 3-D postcards), Cagigal stares at blank cards that volunteers have supposedly filled with visions from their memories. He then describes what he sees with seemingly remarkable acuity. He does card tricks and even, for one trick, makes the audience the magician.
In between tricks, he tells us stories from his childhood and what it was like growing up in San Francisco with a father whose mental balance was upset by a stint in Vietnam. His father’s presence looms large in the show because as the elder Cagigal battled his demons, the younger retreated into a world of magic as a means of escape. The power of memory and the passage of time fuel the smoke and mirrors of the show and raises it far above the sort of parlor tricks that can sometimes pass for theatrical magic.
How many shows are both astonishing and moving? Cagigal’s Now and at the Hour is both. Cagigal engages the heart and the imagination, making him a magician to watch with a show to see sooner rather than later.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Christian Cagigal’s Now and at the Hour continues an extended run through March 27 at the EXIT Stage Left, 156 Eddy St., San Francisco Tickets are $15-$25. Visit www.theexit.org for information.
Curtains, the final collaboration of legendary John Kander and Fred Ebb (Rupert Holmes came in to finish the show after Ebb’s death), is finally taking a Bay Area bow.
Diablo Theatre Company (formerly Diablo Light Opera Company) opens the show tonight (Feb. 12) at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, where it runs through Feb. 28.
A combination backstage musical meets murder mystery, Curtains won a Tony Award for its Broadway leading man, David Hyde Pierce, who played Lieutenant Frank Cioffi, a Boston homicide detective investigating the death of a musical theater diva.
Here comes the judge
In the DTC production, Oakland’s Tom Reardon plays Cioffi, and that right-side-of-the-law sleuth isn’t too far removed from Reardon’s actual day job: he’s an Alameda County Superior Court judge.
Reardon (right) has performed with a number of Bay Area companies, including Contra Costa Civic Theatre. He previously appeared in DTC productions of Peter Pan (he was Captain Hook in 2007), and last year he was Henry Higgins in the Lamplighters production of My Fair Lady.
So how did the Hon. Tom Reardon make the leap to song-and-dance man?
“For many years I have sung with a small group of friends for charitable events.” Reardon explains. “We sing the Broadway songbook and call ourselves the Broadway Babies. But, it wasn’t until four years ago that I first had a stage role. A friend was in need of men for the ensemble of Anything Goes. I turned up to help him out and somehow was given the lead in the show. And the rest is East Bay community theater history.”
Reardon adds that he’s been “fortunate to have played some great roles in a short time.”
Super conductor
Former member of the Grammy-winning ensemble Chanticleer, Chad Runyon (left) is playing several roles in DTC’s Curtains. He’s conducting the orchestra and he’s playing Sasha, the Russian conductor for the show-within-the-show, Robin Hood.
And he does it all without leaving the orchestra pit.
Runyon, a Danville resident, spent 10 years exploring some of the greatest choral music ever written with Chanticleer. Since he left the group, he has continued recording and also teaches, conducts and has been vocal director for DTC since the company’s production of Thoroughly Modern Millie three years ago.
For Curtains, Runyon has had to brush up his Russian accent.
“I have the added challenge of keeping the ball rolling in the actual show,” he says, “working with our wonderful pit instrumentalists and singing actors. It will be a fun challenge, and the show will be lots of fun for the audience. Sort of a blend of Oklahoma!, Sherlock Holmes and Mel Brooks.”
Here’s the trailer for the show:
“Curtains” Trailer from Diablo Theatre Company on Vimeo.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Diablo Theatre Company Diablo Theatre Company’s Curtains runs Feb. 12-28 at the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. Tickets are $29 to $42. Call 925-943-7469 or visit www.lesherartscener.org or www.diablotheatre.org.
Consider the last couple years in the life of local director Mike Ward. He received a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award nomination for best director and he was nominated for the prestigious Ockrent Fellowship for Broadway. Oh, and he almost died several times.
Ward says he had a “white light” experience during what he calls his “Year of Living/Dying Dangerously.”
“I didn’t realize it was one because I would have never lit or costumed the scene that way!” Ward says, his sense of humor still clearly intact.
While continuing to work in theater, Ward has fought a number of cancers, and this past fall, he had major surgery described as “curative” for his surgically targeted cancers. Ward is still living with hepatocelluar carcinoma, but the disease has been in remission for more than two years. He continues to work as a mentor to actors and writers and is creating what he’s calling an “absurd tragicomedy” that deals with his adventures with cancer. The project, as he puts it, is “more comedy, less tragi.”
The Ockrent nomination, named for British director Mike Ockrent, who died in 1993 from leukemia, was a big deal for Ward.
“The nomination allowed me to take a good look at what being in the theater means to me,” he says. “The process of the Ockrent Fellowship involves an essay, and I was able to review what I’ve done and where I am. It helped me realize that this is my time and that there is much ahead for me. Being engaged in the act of creation is life-renewing, life-affirming, and it helped pull me through a very harrowing year.”
An accomplished writer, director and choreographer, Ward has worked at the Magic Theatre and TheatreWorks among other theaters, and Ward he had his own company with San Francisco playwright Tom W. Kelly called Isis Arts Collective.
Ward recently found out that he was not selected for the Ockrent Fellowship for Broadway, which would have put him to work on the Broadway revival of Promises Promises. But he says he’s grateful for the process.
“It allowed me to sit with what theatre means to me, where I belong in it and where I’m looking at going,” he says. “It made me realize how vital theater is to my life.”
George Furth, a mentor and friend to Ward, would frequently remind him, “It’s not enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for having talent, and you have that.”
While Ward ponders what Furth means by that, the director is satisfied with his journey of late, even with all its ups and downs. “The Ockrent Fellowship and the BATCC let me know that I’m where I should be,” he says, “and I’m heading toward the next place I’m going to.”
Above: Kara Emry and William McMichael get Shanghaied in Pearls Over Shanghai.
Below: Eric Wertz and Steven Satyricon dream of “un bel di.”Photos by David Wilson
Mash up Beach Blanket Babylon with Miss Saigon, throw in every bad Oriental exotica movie ever made, season with Ziggy Stardust and The Rocky Horror Show then sprinkle liberally with Cockettes. The result will be Pearls Over Shanghai, San Francisco’s most unlikely hit musical. It’s so hip John Waters even came to see it.
Forty years after it premiered, Pearls was revived last June by director Russell Blackwood and his Thrillpeddlers theater company at The Hypnodrome, their funky SOMA headquarters. And the show is still going strong. Not even a busted water main and an ensuing flood could rain on this pearly parade.
Pearls Over Shanghai has been extended through April 24, making it practically a San Francisco institution this side of Rice-a-Roni and just as phony (in the best possible way). Dirty, salty, nasty, slinky, sweet and sour are mere glints of the jewel that is Pearl.
Directed by Blackwood and featuring a cast of more than 20, this extravaganza features a score by original Cockette composer Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn, who is still tickling the ivories (and the occasional funny bone) in a curly Ilsa She Nazi wig. The book and lyrics by Link Martin have more exotic flavors than an order of house chow fun and drag us into the underbelly of Shanghai circa 1937.
Three “Yankee Imperial tourists” wander down the wrong alley – imagine the Andrews Sisters falling into white slavery – and that’s the primary plot, though there is a fairly significant ode to Madame Butterfly with an American captain and his Shanghai peasant love. But who needs plot when you’ve got so much delightful decadence done up in so much glittery makeup and so many snazzily salacious costumes (by Kara Emry, Louise Jarmilowicz and Tahara)?
Blackwood is Mother Fu (Fu Manchu’s mother no less), sort of the opium den mother, and he presides over a stage full of familiar faces (Michael Phillis as the glitter-nippled Red Dragon, Veronica Klaus as Russian spy Petrushka, Kim Larsen as Madam Gin Sling) and some faces so garishly glittered they could be classically trained Kabuki actors. And in true San Francisco fashion, you see a whole lot more than just faces.
During intermission, audience volunteers are welcomed on stage, put on all fours and roundly spanked by Lottie Wu (Kara Emry), a dominatrix courtesan. And Act 2 of this two-hour camp delight gets down and dirty flirty with scanty costumes sometimes disappearing altogether. Call it Flower Bum Song. The second act also features some truly extraordinary black-light effects that take flight during an opium nightmare sequence.
With so much glittery carnality and Oriental kitsch filling the stage, just what does this Shanghai express? Sex, drugs and campy fun are the true San Francisco treat.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Pearls Over Shanghai continues an extended run through April 24 at The Hypnodrome, 575 10th St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8pm Fridays and Saturdays and 7pm Sundays. Tickets are $30 (or $69 for the special “Shock Boxes”). Call 800 838-3006 or visit www.thrillpeddlerscom or www.brownpapertickets.com.
The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews, 1965. TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp.
All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection.
Back in the dark ages of VHS, I remember being thrilled when I could actually buy The Sound of Music and watch it whenever I wanted, not just on whatever holiday the networks chose to trot it out. Ever since I saw the movie on the big screen in the early ’70s, it had become one of my favorite things because Julie Andrews was right up there with Carol Burnett and Mary Tyler Moore in my youthful pantheon of perfection.
Then, as an adult, I saw The Sound of Music again on a big screen. It was like seeing a whole different movie from what I was used to seeing on videotape. The TV version was pan-and-scan, meaning they decided widescreen (with the black bars across the top and the bottom) was unacceptable but shifting focus on certain parts of that widescreen and cutting out the rest was perfectly all right. From then on I couldn’t watch the movie on TV unless it was letterboxed.
With the advent of DVD, letterboxing became the norm – preserving the original screen ration as the cinematographer and director intended. No more cutting out VonTrapp children during “Do Re Mi.” I didn’t mind shelling out more money for the DVD because the format seemed to be the apex of the home video revolution. Then came the special anniversary DVD edition of the movie, which featured new features, including interviews with Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer (not to mention a promotional film starring Charmian Carr about her life as a teen movie star working in Austria). Had to buy that one.
Then the Rodgers and Hammerstein folks released a box-set collection of all the R&H movie musicals (except Flower Drum Song), which included the special edition Sound of Music discs I already had. But I had to have the whole set.
If you’re counting, that’s four times I purchased The Sound of Music for my home collection. Somehow I bypassed the LaserDisc craze, so that saved me some money. And please don’t get me started on all the various versions of the soundtrack I’ve owned through the years (remember 8-track?).
I’m savvy enough to know that I’ll probably never be done spending money on The Sound of Music. Couldn’t resist going (more than once) to the Sing-Along Sound of Music at the Castro Theatre, and I’m always open to seeing the movie on a big screen in a theater with a great sound system. I thought about downloading a digital version of the movie, but it’s not available … yet. That one can’t be too far away.
Until then, we have yet another format and another potential purchase. Come next Christmas, we’ll be able to have a near-perfect Sound of Music experience in our own homes with the Blu-ray release. Here’s a teaser trailer.
For further VonTrappist fun, check out this entry in a long line of re-cut trailers casting sunny musicals as horror films. This one is my favorite of the Sound of Music efforts.
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There’s bad news aplenty in the world, so it’s always nice to discover some bright spots of good news, especially in the theater world.
San Francisco playwright Trevor Allen, who had a sizable hit last fall with his adaptation of Frankenstein, received a walloping dose of good news the other day. PlayGround’s New Play Production Fund chose his play Lolita Roadtrip to receive a $15,000 grant for production at San Jose Stage Company next season.
“I am extremely grateful for this opportunity,” Allen said. “Jim Kleinmann and PlayGround have made a unique commitment with this new grant. By awarding the money directly to San Jose Stage Company to produce my play, they have insured that my work will actually have a life. In the past I have been the fortunate recipient of a few commissioning grants, which have allowed me the much needed time and support to create new plays. Of course, I wish there were more such opportunities for local playwrights because there are some amazing writers here who are truly deserving of recognition. But a play just sitting there on a laptop is like a blueprint for a house, it may look good on the page but the real test is to actually build it and then have a family move in and live in it for a while. Then you have a home. That’s what this production grant means to me. It has given my play a home.”
Here’s more from the folks at PlayGround:
Allen’s Lolita Roadtrip was originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround last season as part of the 2009 Best of PlayGround Festival. This darkly comic play follows Julia (a rebellious Stanford graduate student researching her thesis) and Danny (a hitchhiking teenaged runaway she picks up) as together they retrace novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov’s actual 1941 roadtrip from New York to Stanford. A series of cross country adventures ensues bringing them closer to Julia’s climactic confrontation with Professor Drake (the man who stole her innocence and plagiarized her journal). Nabokov’s spirit visits them and somewhere between the Grand Canyon and Los Vegas they confront their own dark pasts and discover what really causes a chrysalis to transform into a butterfly. Lolita Roadtrip will mark Trevor’s second world premiere with San Jose Stage Company, following the 2005 hit Tenders in the Fog, originally commissioned and developed by PlayGround. He is currently working on a third PlayGround commission, Golden Gate Fair (set in the Bay Area), which will receive a staged reading on Sunday, May 30 as part of the 2010 Best of PlayGround Festival at Thick House.
Allen said his experience working on Tenders in the Fog revealed San Jose Stage to be “wonderfully supportive of my work.” The new production is another homecoming for the San Jose native. “Besides a brief stint at UCLA for theatre I spent half my life there, and most of my family lives there. Now having spent the better part of two decades living and working in San Francisco, it is interesting to return as a playwright and have my words come to life there.”
Also receiving a PlayGround New Play Production grant (for $5,000) is Just Theater, which will produce Erin Marie Bregmann’s Nightmare Play at the Berkeley City Club.
Keep up with PlayGround at playground-sf.org.
Keep up with Trevor Allen at his excellent site, Working for the Mouse.
Paula West is going to do things to you in the dark, and you’re going to like it.
Now that she can actually be considered a veteran of the San Francisco cabaret scene, West is letting loose in her new show at the Rrazz Room in the Hotel Nikko, and man does it feel good.
Backed by the George Mesterhazy Quartet, a jaunty West takes the stage and in short order she struts, she makes friends, and she romances in the dark. In her opening number, she funkifies “Dark Town Strutter’s Ball” to the point that a truly golden oldie sounds like the hippest thing going. Then she bends Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” into a fetching reggae pulse (and even makes it sound a little Cole Porter-ish). It turns out those turns are merely a warmup for the near-nuclear explosion of “Romance in the Dark,” a 1940s tease made famous by Lil Green.
Bold and sexy, “Romance in the Dark” gives West the perfect opportunity to show off just why she’s so incredibly good. The song caresses and punches. It slaps and tickles, if you will. And West imbues the song with warmth that turns into heat and sass that turns into sensuality.
After that opening trio, can I just say that the Great Recession is officially over, and Paula West is the first step toward recovery – at least toward recovering a glimmer of unadulterated joy in these dark winter months. After the momentum of “Darktown Strutter’s” and Dylan followed by the climax of “Romance,” there’s no way West can follow up with anything but Cole Porter. “Nobody’s Chasing Me,” with its lounge-y melody and clever lyrics, serves as a between-courses palate cleanser, and the rest of the show is a nutritious feast.
West is pulling tunes from all over the place – New Orleans for “Iko Iko,” Tin Pan Alley for Hoagy Carmichael’s delicious “Bread and Gravy, mid-’60s Dylan again with a fantastic “Maggie’s Farm” – and she delivers them all with shifting colors and a voice as supple as it is strong.
For the evening’s wrenching ballad, she soars through “Where Flamingos Fly,” an obscure tune recorded by Peggy Lee and Helen Merrill that involves a criminal lover making a quick getaway. And she winds down with a swingin’ “Have You Met Sir Jones,” “My Romance” and “The Music Goes Round and Round.” To wrap up this close-to-perfect cabaret evening, she hauls out her big belt notes to wail on Porter’s “I’m in Love Again.” West’s exuberance is barely contained, and her opening-night audience felt exactly the same way. They demanded a second encore, and West obliged, offering “The Snake,” her ssssssinfully biting signature tune.
Paula West just gets better and better. She has exited the realm of wonderful cabaret singers and entered the pantheon of greatness. She’s at the Rrazz Room for the next month and a half. Treat yourself and see her – at least once. They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Paula West continues at the Rrazz Room through March 14. Tickets are $35-$45 plus a two-drink minimum. The Hotel Nikko is at 222 Mason St. Visit www.therrazzroom.com for information.
Now here’s a treat. Paula sings “Like a Rolling Stone” with the George Mesterhazy Quartet.
Julia Brothers floors ‘em in Joel Drake Johnson’s The First Grade at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company.
Rebecca Schweitzer is in the background. Photo by David Allen
The Bay Area is blessed with an abundance of theatrical talent. Spend any time at all in local theaters, and that becomes clear pretty quickly.
What’s even better is that sometimes we get really lucky, and that theatrical talent decides to stick around for a while rather than bouncing off to New York or Los Angeles. There are a number of actors, directors and writers whose names alone make me want to show up at one production or another.
High on that list of MVPs is Julia Brothers, who has performed everywhere from San Jose Repertory Theatre to TheatreWorks to the Magic to Marin Theatre Company. She steps on stage, and you know you’re in for something special. She’s totally in control, always interesting and continuously surprising. There’s a grounded quality to her characters that makes them real, even when they’re outrageous.
Last year, while briefly exiled to Sacramento, I had the opportunity to see Brothers star in Margaret Edson’s Wit at the B Street Theatre, and though the production surrounding here was hit and miss, Brothers was a lightning bolt of brilliance.
At the moment, you can see Brothers doing her thing in the world premiere of Joel Drake Johnson’s funny, heartening The First Grade at the Aurora Theatre Company. Brothers stars as Sydney, a first-grade teacher whose control of her classroom is in direct opposition to her lack of control in the real world. Her grown daughter (Rebecca Schweitzer) and grandson have moved back to what she calls “the house of baggage,” and though she has divorced her husband (Warren David Keith), he’s still living on the other side of the house. Suffering from arthritis, Sydney goes to see a physical therapist (Tina Sanchez) whose soap operatic personal life immediately triggers Sydney’s Good Samaritan meddler button.
Brothers’ Sydney is cranky and crackly, but watch her in the classroom when she raises her right hand as a signal to quiet her students. She’s a benign but powerful dictator, and she truly loves her students. Sydney takes true delight in the power of words, especially the ones her students bring her like show-and-tell gems: congenial, solipsism, plethora, pertinacious. She’s more ferocious when it comes to her testy daughter and boozy ex-husband. It’s no wonder she wants to help the therapist because she seems to be unable to help anyone else in her personal realm. During a painful therapy session, she rails against a popular slogan. “I have plenty of pain and not one ounce of gain!” she yowls.
Brothers shows us how tough Sydney can be but also how tender. During an intense conversation with her daughter, Angie, the subject turns increasingly dark to the point of a rather shocking admission. Sydney’s smart-aleck warrior shield falls away, and a compassionate, frightened mother’s face emerges. It’s a beautiful moment – one of many in director Tom Ross’ sharply etched production.
There are laughs amid the substance, real life amid the theatricality, and Brothers is there at the center of it, doing her usual, extraordinary balancing job.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
The First Grade continues through Feb. 28 at the Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $15-$55. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org/.
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