Category Archives: Curran Theatre

Steve Cuiffo dazzles as Lenny Bruce at the Curran

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Steve Cuiffo is Lenny Bruce2 (c) Jim Norrena
Steve Cuiffo re-creates Lenny Bruce routines in his aptly named one-man show Steve Cuiffo Is Lenny Bruce at the Curran Theatre. Photos by Jim Norrena

My knowledge of Lenny Bruce is sorely limited (I’ve seen the Dustin Hoffman movie and heard other comics express their reverence), but I’d like that to change. After seeing Steve Cuiffo Is Lenny Bruce at the Curran Theatre as part of the astonishingly varied and vital Curran: Under Construction series, I feel like not knowing enough about Lenny Bruce is not knowing enough about an important and influential artist of the 20th century.

To appreciate Cuiffo’s expertise, it helps to be familiar with Bruce’s voice and delivery. He sounds like this (Cuiffo does a bit like this in his show).

Cuiffo sounds just like this – a little comedian mixed with professor mixed with Rod Serling. He has memorized routines verbatim and delivers them with the pauses, stutters, stumbles and emphasis that Bruce used. The result is a piece of theater that feels remarkably natural. The tension that fuels stand-up comedy is there: will a routine land? will it offend? will it elicit a laugh? will it do any or all of the above? In Bruce’s case, and therefore Cuiffo’s, the result is usually yes to all of the above, though “offend” may be a little strong. Bruce was famous for getting arrested on obscenity charges because of his language, but the fact that we know that (Bruce talks about it in his act and even reads part of his police file) only emphasizes how important words are to him.

Steve Cuiffo is Lenny Bruce1 (c) Jim Norrena

Bruce has the instincts of a comic (vaudeville, burlesque, Catskills) along with the need for the attention that laughs bring (“laughter is acceptance…you’re thinking like I think”), but he has the soul of an artist – a poet, a jazz musician, a philosopher. All of that comes through powerfully in Cuiffo’s hour-long show. In a talk-back after Friday’s show, Cuiffo discussed how important it is to him to convey Bruce in as exacting a manner as possible because, he said, his delivery is as important to his meaning as his words.

There are moments when Bruce still feels dangerous, as in a riff on the word “nigger” and how its constant use would eliminate its power to cause pain. You can hear Bruce do it here, but as you listen, pay attention to yourself and your reaction. Obviously the word (and all the others Bruce throws in there) has not even begun to lose its power, but also consider how extraordinary it is that a “comedy” monologue from 50 years ago is still so resonant.

There’s a quote in the program from Mort Sahl, a contemporary of Bruce’s: “Lenny was looking for hypocrisy all the time and finding the funniness of what people pretend to be versus what they are.” And that seems to cut right to the heart of why Bruce still matters and why Cuiffo’s selection of Bruce material is so canny. That core concept of not accepting the truth, what is is, still feels like the foundation of modern life, with politics and religion leading the hypocritical charge.

Cuiffo is probably as close as we can get to feeling what a Lenny Bruce performance was really like – rollicking, weird, hilarious, provocative, important – and his show, which gains even more power when performed on the stage of the Curran, where Bruce last performed almost exactly 54 years ago, leaves us craving more.

Here’s a taste of Cuiffo as Bruce (the video is a little wonky). Hypocrisy is skewered, especially in the bit involving that “dirty word in a Christian culture: pleasure”:

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Steve Cuiffo Is Lenny Bruce closes Nov. 21 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $50. visit sfcurran.com.

Curran brilliance continues with stunning Ghost Quartet

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The performers of Ghost Quartet are, from left, Brittain Ashford, Gelsey Bell, Dave Malloy and Brent Arnold. The play/concert/musical/event continues through Oct. 31 at the Curran Theatre as part of the Curran: Under Construction Series. Below: Composer/performer Malloy at work. Photos courtesy of the Curran Theatre

Before I rhapsodize about the incredible Ghost Quartet now at the Curran Theatre as part of the Curran: Under Construction series, can I just say how extraordinary this series has been so far? This is the third show following The Events (review here) and The Object Lesson (review here), and so far, producer Carole Shorenstein Hays is batting a million (I don’t know sports).

At this point, Hays’ curatorial skills have proven so wonderful I’d show up anywhere she told me was worthwhile. At some point in this ongoing series of shows set entirely – audience and all – on the stage of the Curran while it undergoes refurbishment, there will likely be a show that doesn’t blow my mind, but I have no doubt it will at the very least be interesting and worthwhile.

The experience of being on the stage, which has been creatively reconfigured for each show, is surprisingly cozy and intimate – the world’s nicest black box theater. Coming through the stage door at the side alley is exciting, and the staff is always welcoming. Hays is a brilliant producer, but I can’t imagine this impeccably produced series is making loads of money, so I think about this series as her gift to San Francisco audiences. For that we should be incredibly grateful.

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Ghost Quartet heralds the return of Dave Malloy, who made a strong impression when he was a Bay Area resident working with Banana Bag & Bodice on projects like Shotgun Players’ Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage. He decamped to Brooklyn nearly a decade ago and in the interim has produced a major work of genius, the unconventional War and Peace musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.

With Ghost Quartet, which was developed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor, he’s working in chamber mode, but his fervent intellect, passion for literary mash-up and melodic gifts are out in full force. the audience is seated on three sides of a performance area covered in Persian carpets. The stage’s curtain is up, so the empty Curran auditorium is on full view, with the lowered chandelier becoming sort of a character in the 90-minute piece (all the design is by Christopher Bowser, and it’s low-key spectacular).

Malloy on keyboards and Brent Arnold on cello (and other marvelous stringed instruments) are situated on opposite sides of the center-facing section of audience, while Brittain Ashford and Gelsey Bell on vocals and various harps and things, face forward with their backs to the open auditorium. The central playing area isn’t much used, which means the music surrounds you and the theatrical aspect feels less presentational and more like an active experience of being told an extraordinary story.

So what exactly is Ghost Quartet? I can’t say I got it all, exactly. There’s a multi-layered story thickly interwoven with threads made of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and of the New York Post’s infamous cover photo of a man about to be killed by an oncoming subway train. There are fairy tales (with a nod to Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods) and murders and ghosts and reincarnations and tributes to Thelonious Monk and a conjuring of Arabian Nights. It doesn’t all completely make sense, yet in the moment, amid the music and the performances and the cozy atmosphere and the way the story circles back on itself, it all makes perfect sense somehow.

The evening is broken into four “sides” (as in record albums), and just before we get to Side 3, the audience gets to participate in one of the recurring themes: whiskey (or section got Evan Williams Kentucky bourbon and my fellow audience members were generous with their pours). Just when the night couldn’t get any better – WHISKEY! – the lights go out, and the story unfolds in the dark. I heard some people got uncomfortable in the darkness (ghost stories win), but I loved it. I could have listened to the rest of the show in the dark and been ecstatically happy if they’d started it over again at the end.

But the lights do come back on, and the show comes to its thrilling, interactive conclusion that is sweet and eerie at the same time. The song is the traditional murder ballad “The Wind & Rain” slightly tweaked by Malloy, and it’s hard to imagine a more stirring finale.

These four performers are astonishing. Everybody sings and plays, but the bulk of the dramatic work is handled by Ashford and Bell. They’re so good (and so, for that matter, are Arnold and Malloy) that even when things don’t entirely make sense or you miss a lyric here and there, it doesn’t matter. You’re in good hands, and these performers will deliver you exactly where they want you to go – and that place is likely to blow your mind in the best possible way.

[bonus videos]
Enjoy “Any Kind of Dead Person,” one of the livelier numbers from Ghost Quartet and “Starchild,” one of the most beautiful.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION
Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet continues through Oct. 31 as part of the Curran: Under Construction series at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25-$50. Visit www.sfcurran.com.

Stuff, nonsense and dreams in Curran’s Object Lessson

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The audience mills about the stage of the Curran Theatre, looking into the boxes comprising the set for Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson, a solo show about stuff and time and life. Below: Stuff, stuff and more stuff. Inside one of the boxes and Sobelle sets up at the beginning of the show.

You’d think, from the piles and walls of boxes that fill the stage of the Curran Theatre, that Geoff Sobelle’s object here would involve shame – shame that we’re so attached to our stuff and that we accumulate so much stuff and that being burdened by SO MUCH STUFF would be about the worst thing there is.

But that’s not really the case. The experience does kind of make you want to go through some old boxes and maybe do some judicious pruning to the stuff collection, but the overall feeling is one of affection for our stuff because, as junky and fire hazard-y as it might be, it’s ours, and as such, filled with memories, traumas, joys, mysteries, connections lost and found. In short, it’s all the physical manifestations of our innards, however you want to define that (soul, psyche, spirit, psychosis).

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Audiences members are encouraged to get to the theater early so they can immerse themselves in the world of the play (which, as are all Curran: Under Construction events, held entirely on the stage of the venerable San Francisco theater). Designer Steven Dufala has stuffed the space with piles and towers of boxes, and they’re filled – at least all those within reach – with objects, notes and enigmas. We are encouraged to dive in and explore. One box I opened, labeled “balloons,” had inflated red balloons as well as several hot-air balloon-themed wind chimes. Another box was filled only with instructions, that I was to find someone who wanted to share a secret with and tell them with a smile, “I believe this is just for you.” Another box was filled with boots and photographs.

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People really get into the poking about, finding masks and taking selfies wile trying them on, discovering a mini-disc player and grooving to the tunes it happens to be playing and just enjoying the thrill of going through other people’s things.

Creator/performer Sobelle, who launched this show at the Edinburgh Fringe last year before taking it to New York, emerges into the crowd and begins emptying boxes and creating a set for himself – green chair, busted (but functional) lamps, an end table and a dial telephone, a fake plant, a turntable playing David Byrne’s “Glass, Concrete and Stone,” a gramophone – while the audience finds a seat on one of the sturdy cardboard boxes marked “seat.”

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Once his little nest is settled, the lights go down, and the 90-ish-minute show begins. The first chapter involves Sobelle ranting into a little tape recorder and then, cleverly, receiving counsel via the telephone from the recording he has just made. He then shifts to the edge of the stage, where the closed curtain conceals the auditorium, but the curtain doesn’t remain closed for long, and sure enough, the auditorium, especially the mezzanine, is also filled with boxes.

Sobelle muses on the past and the greatest week of his life living and working in the French countryside. His story is punctuated by discoveries from the boxes, including some goat cheese, a baguette and a bottle of wine, all of which are generously shared with the audience. A trek into the mezzanine to retrieve a beloved memento is nothing short of enchanting.

After some interaction with audience members who narrate the contents of their pockets and purses, Sobelle launches into a clown section of the show that reminded me of Bill Irwin and David Shiner and the kind of thing they might do in Fool Moon. Wearing ice skates, Sobelle chooses an audience member (a young woman named Kelly at Thursday night’s show) and woos her with wine and a salad. He makes the salad on a tabletop, shredding the lettuce and chopping the carrots with his ice skates. He also does an impressive amount of dancing on the tabletop in said skates.

The final act involves a magic trick, or an illusion really, akin to the bottomless carpetbag Mary Poppins uses to dazzle the Banks children. But Sobelle’s mostly wordless version is a lyrical musing on life, from youth and work and dating to parenting to retirement and death. It’s absolutely extraordinary, beautiful even, and I was a little sorry when the show reached its inevitable end. It gets kind of cozy there among all those boxes, with audience members playing along, scurrying out of the way when Sobelle needs the space for his act and quickly settling into a new space.

It seems so simple, the idea of musing about life and stuff amid so much stuff, but this artful creation is carefully calibrated and impeccably designed (directed by David Neumann, lit by Christopher Kuhl, sound designed by Nick Kourtides) so as not to seem overly designed, but spontaneous and random. But isn’t that life – seemingly so chaotic and overstuffed and yet with so much, especially the end, that is absolutely certain.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson continues through Oct. 18 as part of the Curran: Under Construction series at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25-$50. Visit www.sfcurran.com.

Curran Theatre roars back to vibrant life

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Carole Shorenstein Hays is doing something very exciting with the her jewel of a theater, the Curran Theatre. The 93-year-old neighbor to the Geary Theater in San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood is undergoing refurbishment, but most of the improvements are happening front of house, which leaves the stage available. So Hays, formerly of Best of Broadway and SHN, has launched a performance series called Curran: Under Construction, which brings smaller but notable performances to the Curran stage, where the audience also happens to be seated. You enter through the famed stage door, which was used in the movie All About Eve, and enjoy an intimate theater experience on the stage itself.

The series opened this week with an astonishing British import: the Actors Touring Company production of The Events by David Greig and directed by the company’s artistic director, Ramin Gray.

Before the show began, as audience members found a seat on the risers facing out toward the empty theater, the most striking image was of the grand chandelier, usually hung high above the seats, was lowered to the level of the balcony as if for cleaning or, perhaps, simply to be admired.

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But as the show began, a curtain slowly rose to block out the theater and train focus on the long playing area where actors Lesley Hart and Clifford Samuel performed Greig’s powerful examination of a (fictional) mass shooting event in a church. We don’t find out all the details, and what actually happened is offered in bits as the 100-minute drama unfolds.

Sharing the stage with these astonishing actors is a choir. There will be three different choirs performing through the show’s short run through Saturday, Sept. 26, and for opening night, it was from Most Holy Redeemer Church under the direction of Victor Cervantes.

Almost instantly, we are pulled into the story by virtue of the show’s rawness. There is a lighting design and sound design and all the usual professional elements, but the overall feeling here is one of pure, raw theater, performed without veneer. The chorus on stage is used in many different ways, and their freshness to the material (they’re following along with scripts) adds to the sort of primal vitality of the experience.

The central character is Claire, a priest who runs a choir that happens to feature people of many different races and cultures. For that reason, the choir is named on a list decrying state-funded multiculturalism created by a racist politician. A troubled young man who admires the politician and his entirely backward stance on race and foreigners, singles out the chorus from the list, arrives with a gun and opens fire.

Claire survives the attack but feels like the events caused her to lose her soul. The show itself represents a deep dive into her stream-of-consciousness as she strives to regain that soul and to somehow come to terms with the killings and the killer himself.

Without being maudlin and without sacrificing humor, The Events delves into the human psyche to ask: why would someone do this and how does someone possibly recover from its destruction? It’s a heavy, heavy show, but it doesn’t feel that way. Perhaps it’s the music (by composer John Browne and music directed by Joe Bunker at the piano) or the sheer energy and commitment of Hart and Samuel that lifts the show and keeps it from feeling like a helpless freefall into the ever-present violence that so permeates our culture (especially in this country).

It’s a rich, moving experience, made all the more exciting for being the inaugural show in this Curran: Under Construction series. Construction has rarely been so enriching.

Upcoming performances include:
The Object Lesson (Oct. 14-18)
Ghost Quartet (Oct. 23-31)
Steve Cuiffo Is Lenny Bruce (Nov. 19-21)
Notes of a Native Song (Dec. 3-5)
Story Pirates’ Greatest Hits Show (Dec. 12-20)
Taylor Mac: A 24-decade History of Popular Music 1776-1836 (Jan. 17-31)

For information visit www.sfcurran.com.