Pictured from left: Daveed Diggs, Traci Tolmaire, Margo Hall and Dwight Huntsman in the world premiere
of Chinaka Hodge’s Mirrors in Every Corner at Intersection for the Arts. Photos by Pak Han

Watching the audience on stage at Intersection for the Arts was a stunning experience. Sometimes theater companies trying to push boundaries and break down walls really do get it right.

The show in this case is Oakland playwright Chinaka Hodge’sMirrors in Every Corner, and the companies involved in bringing it to life are many: Intersection, Campo Santo and The Living Word Project’sYouth Speaks theater company. They say it can take a village. In this case, it takes a community.

When you walk into the performance space at Intersection – sort of a bunker-like lecture hall – there’s something definitely different going on. The audience is milling about the stage as if at an art gallery. Wait – the stage is an art gallery. When artist Evan Bissell was asked to collaborate on the show and create a set, he didn’t quite know how to go about doing that, so he created a stunning art installation about families and racial identity and about community. There’s a giant mural of a Mission District family across the back wall, while on another there are seemingly hundreds of framed photos, collages, stories and poems all created by families in the Mission who came to Intersection for what turned out to be a hugely successful free family portrait day. Some came back to create art and write poems.

Intersection has always been a wall breaker, even if only because you have to cross the stage to get to the bathroom. The audience has always seemed part of the action, but this installation takes the concept even further.

By the time Hodge’s play begins, the audience is in an open-minded space ready to experience more art, and Hodge delivers in a big way. Her play – directed by Marc Bamuthi Joseph – is hilarious and deadly serious, outlandish and completely personal. She may only be 25 (and a product of the Youth Speaks program since her mid-teens), but this is a playwright to watch.

She tells the story of a black Oakland family with a secret. A mom (Margo Hall) and her three boys (Daveed Diggs, Dwight Huntsman and Traci Tolmaire) play cards and flip back and forth through time to tell the story of the family’s youngest member, Miranda aka “Random,” who for some mysterious reason was born white.

What that means to the family, let alone to the outside world, fills the play’s 80-some minutes with familiar warmth and humor, intense soul search and surprising violence. Hodge firmly grounds her play in a traditional family story, but she plays with all kinds of flourishes (some that work better than others) that imbue every moment with the tension of surprise and the delight of seeing a playwright flower.

As the matriarch, Hall is an intelligent woman caught up in a biological mystery. Hall also plays Random, and it is a testament to this actor’s tremendous skill that much of the play’s excitement comes from watching her slip effortlessly from role to role.

All the actors are terrific, but Diggs is especially vivid as Watts, the eldest child and the one with the wryest, driest sense of humor.

Mirrors in Every Corner reflects all kinds of wonderful things, most notably a young playwright making a sensational debut and a theatrical collaboration that doesn’t just talk about change but makes it.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Chinaka Hodge’s Mirrors in Every Corner continues an extended run through March 28 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25. Call 415 626-2787 ext. 09 or visit www.theintersection.org.

In Trevor Allen’s intelligent, compassionate adaptation of Frankenstein at the Thick House, Victor Frankenstein defies death by creating life from dead parts and cowering from the unexpected results.

Over at Intersection for the Arts, Campo Santo and the Erika Chong Shuch Performance Project ponder the death of a goldfish and, through engaging text and movement, ruminate on the nature of life and breath in The Future Project: Sunday Will Come.

Both pieces, while they couldn’t be more different from one another, are completely compelling and find grace amid seriously dark subject matter.

In Sunday, a whole troupe of people, led by performers Erika Chong Shuch and Sean San José, have created a simple, hour-long three-hander about a seemingly small matter – a man and woman (Shuch and Sean José) contemplate the illness and imminent death of their goldfish. They act out the creature’s fight for breath through some extraordinary movement on a small but sturdy table, and their discussion of this aquatic mortality resonates in larger waves.

Troubadour Denizen Kane weaves in and out of the central action, lending the tale his soulful voice and songs that give the show a soothing pulse and a throbbing heart.

There’s none of the pretension that can come from a hybrid dance-theater-music-spoken word piece because the performers are so incredibly focused, so funny and so intensely emotional. They seem to live partly in the world of boring, normal people and partly in the world of extraordinarily talented artists who sing and move and speak on an entirely different, entirely dazzling plane.

Allen’s The Creature is equally dazzling but in entirely different ways. His adaptation rescues Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from the domain of creature features and returns it to the domain of gut-punching drama, where it belongs.

Taking his cure from the 1818 novel, Allen gives his stage over to three narrators: Captain Walton (Garth Petal), who is searching for a sail-able passage through the North Pole; Victor Frankenstein (Gabriel Marin), a scientist with a gift for reanimating dead matter; and the Creature (James Carpenter), who had the bad luck to be created by a scientist unable to bear the responsibility of his great work.

Time bends as we hurtle back and forth between past and present as the tale of Frankenstein’s creation takes shape and we, along with the scientist, begin to comprehend the scope of what he has done in creating a man from disparate dead parts. The sea captain makes for a sympathetic ear, but what really makes the story land is hearing from the Creature himself.

While Petal and Marin are grounded, intense and wonderful, Carpenter’s Creature is simply astonishing. This is the kind of performance – brave, complex and utterly devastating – that lingers for days, if not years afterward. Often crouched on a table and cast in shadows by Stephanie Buchner’s lights, Carpenter creates a vision of a misunderstood giant with minimal makeup and virtually no gimmickry. Props to Boris Karloff and his makeup team, but Carpenter is the real Creature – not a grunting monster (or one that warbles “Puttin’ on the Ritz” for that matter), but an eloquent soul touched with self-sustaining genius and afflicted by shattering loneliness.

Carpenter, under the direction of the always-astute Rob Melrose (of the Cutting Ball Theater), is giving the can’t-miss performance of the season. He already has the reputation of being one of the very best actors in the Bay Area. His work in The Creature allows us to see something he hasn’t really shown us before. And it is, in short, magnificent.
(PHOTO CREDIT: James Carpenter in The Creature by Allesandra Mello)

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The Future Project: Sunday Will Come continues through Nov. 7 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Call 415 626-2787 or visit www.theintersection.org

The Creature continues through Nov. 7 at the Thick House, 1695 18^th St.,San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$30 on a sliding scale. Call 415 401-8081 or visit www.thickhouse.org or www.blackboxtheatre.com

Listen to Black Box Theatre’s podcast of The Creature featuring James Carpenter here.
 

Maria Candelaria (left) is Belicia, Biko Eisen-Martin (center) is Fukú and Vanessa Cota is Lola in the Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts production of Fukú Americanus, a theatrical adaptation of Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Photos by James Faerron

Diaz novel finds vibrant life as stage `Fukú’
«««

Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents all kinds of challenges, first to the reader who has to navigate a fractured time frame, footnotes almost as involved as the novel itself and shifting narration.

Good luck to anyone attempting to adapt this convoluted novel into anything other than the rich novel it is. Playwright Jose Rivera is taking a crack at the screenplay, but San Francisco’s own Campo Santo has beaten him to the punch with the first adaptation: a stage work called Fukú Americanus, now at Intersection for the Arts.

Co-directors Sean San José and Marc Bamuthi Joséph have wrestled with the novel and come out, for the most part, on top. The stage version retains a certain literary feel – indeed, much of the language comes directly from the book – but it crackles with emotional life and gives characters dimension and shading they didn’t have on the page.

The six-member cast is excellent, especially in their heated emotional exchanges. I was blown away by Anna Maria Luera, who shifts from playing a Dominican Republic grandmother, La Inca, a fierce, passionate woman, to playing a smart but ditzy New Jersey girl named Anna Obregon, who can’t stop talking about her boyfriend Manny and his prodigious endowments.

Carlos Aguirre (seen at right in the blue shirt with Brian Rivera and Biko Eisen-Martin), who provides the dynamic soundscape as the resident DJ/beat boxer, emerges as the show’s most engaging character, a college-age lady player named Yunior, who keeps forgetting to hide his inner depths with his callow exterior.

The 2 ½-hour show gets off to a rousing start with Biko Eisen-Martin as a dancer/narrator/observer telling us all about the Dominican Republic and the notion of “fukú,” a kind of doom or curse that intricately weaves its way through Dominican politics and spirituality. We are all dealing with fukús of one kind or another, we’re told, and this story’s family is dealing with a doozy.

After suffering under the rule of Dominican dictator Trujillo, a young mother and her two children flee the Caribbean for New Jersey. In the ensuing years, mom Belicia (a powerful Maria Candelaria) has raised two children: bright, rebellious Lola (Vanessa Cota) and overweight sci-fi dork Oscar (Brian Rivera).

After the rousing intro, and after we meet the central family, Fukú stalls for about a half an hour while we get, essentially, the same information over and over. Oscar is such a nerd he’ll never get a girlfriend. Belicia is dealing with cancer and a rancorous relationship with Lola.

But then Oscar meets Anna (the aforementioned Luera), and the plot kicks in. From that plotline we move to a clash between mother and daughter that results in a runaway scenario. From there, we follow Oscar to college, where, after a suicide attempt, he becomes roommates with Yunior, who tries to make like Henry Higgins and turn Oscar into something resembling a non-loser.

Directors San José and Joséph imbue the story with rhythm, movement and flow, but somehow the show never quite breaks the literary bond the way last year’s Campo Santo hit, Angry Black White Boy, based on Adam Mansbach’s novel of the same name, managed to do. While that show felt like a fully realized theatrical experience, this one still seems propelled by forces outside the theater.

That said, Diaz’s story of the immigrant experience, the American teenage experience and the profound mother-daughter connection emerges from the stage with clarity and force. At its best, Fukú Americanus finds the theatrical wow in Oscar Wao.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Campo Santo’s Fukú Americanus continues an extended run through July 12 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Call 415-626-2787, ext. 109 or visit www.theintersection.org for information.

I wrote a story for the San Francisco Chronicle about Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao becoming the Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts play Fuku Americanus.

Read the story here.

Theatergoing in the San Francisco Bay Area is one of life’s treats. No question about it. If you love theater, this is a wonderland. In this devastating economic climate, may that only hold true for the next couple of years.

There is so much good theater here, so many incredible actors, writers, directors and crafts people that an annual Top 10 is often difficult to wrangle. That’s why the Top 10 is followed by a list of other shows that should, by all rights, also be included in the Top 10, but numbers being the chronological beasts that they are, dictate on show per number (still, I cheated with No. 6 and included two shows by one playwright).

1. TheatreWorks’ Caroline, or Change by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori – My favorite show of the year peeled yet another layer of this incredible musical to reveal a work of sheer genius. Director Robert Kelly and his extraordinary leading lady, C. Kelly Wright, offered some of their best work ever, and that’s saying something.

2. California Shakespeare Theater’s Pericles – Adapted and directed by Joel Sass, this incredibly colorful telling of one of Shakespeare’s oddest tales was entrancing and memorable, especially on a warm summer night in the gorgeous Bruns Amphitheatre in Ordina.

3. Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts’ Angry Black White Boy adapted by Dan Wolf from Adam Mansbach’s novel – The year’s most exciting new work was a bold act of contemporary theatricality, blending hip-hop, spoken word, drama and movement into a seamless blend directed by Sean San Jose. Good news for anyone who missed it – the show returns to Intersection Jan. 29-Feb. 15.

4. SF Playhouse’s Abraham Lincoln’s Big Gay Dance Party by Aaron Loeb – We had to wait all year for a world-premiere play that entertained as much as it titillated and thrilled. Funny, serious and wacky, this Chris Smith-directed musing on a divided America proved to be as smart as it is imaginative.

5. Traveling Jewish Theater and Thick Description’s Dead Mother, Or Shirley Not All in Vain by David Greenspan — Weird and wild barely begins to describe this play about a gay son who essentially becomes his dead mother. Outstanding, memory-searing performances came from Liam Vincent and Deb Fink in Tony Kelly’s production.

6. SF Playhouse’s Shining City and Marin Theatre Company’s The Seafarer, both by Conor McPherson – Ireland’s top-tier playwright received two outstanding productions by local theaters, each demonstrated his compassionate (and slightly warped) humanity.

7. Shotgun Players and Banana, Bag & Bodice’s Beowulf – This rock musical take on one of college lit’s greatest hits was one of the year’s most delightful surprises. Composer Dave Malloy and writer Jason Craig breathed new life into an Old English classic. This one comes back for one performance only, Jan. 8, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, before heading out to conquer New York.

8. Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s TRAGEDY: a tragedy by Will Eno – Audiences were sharply divided over this existential dark night of the soul as filtered through a TV news team. I loved its Beckettian aridness and humor, and Les Waters’ production was anchored by an outstanding cast.

9. Magic Theatre’s Octopus by Steve Yockey – Water poured and unease flowed in director by Kate Warner’s splashy production of a challenging, unnerving play in which death and disease ooze into every nook and cranny.

10. American Conservatory Theater’s Rock ‘n’ Roll by Tom Stoppard – ACT often does its best work with Stoppard, and this was on exception. Director Carey Perloff revealed the rich rewards of this dense, emotional work.

And now a few other greats in no particular order: Theatre Rhinoceros’ Ishi: The Last of the Yahi by John Fisher; Cal Shakes’ An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde; Magic Theatre’s Evie’s Waltz by Carter W. Lewis; SF Playhouse’s Bug by Tracy Letts; Word for Word’s Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin; Aurora Theatre Company’s The Busy World Is Hushed by Keith Bunin; ACT’s The Quality of Life by Jane Anderson; Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s The Arabian Nights by Mary Zimmerman; Aurora Theatre Company’s The Best Man by Gore Vidal.

It was quite a year for excellent solo shows as well. Here are some highlights: Nilaja Sun’s No Child… at Berkeley Rep; Colman Domingo’s A Boy and His Soul at Thick Description; Roger Rees’ What You Will at ACT; Ann Randolph’s Squeeze Box at The Marsh; Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking at Berkeley Rep; Judy Gold’s 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother at the Marines Memorial Theatre; Billy Connolly live at the Post Street Theatre; Mark Nadler’s Russian on the Side at the Marines.

And, it has to be said, not everything is genius. Here are shows that lingered less than fondly in memory: Darren Romeo’s The Voice of Magic at the Post Street Theatre; Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector at ACT; Cybill Shepherd in Bobby Goldman’s Curvy Widow at the Post Street Theatre; Edna O’Brien’s Tir na nOg (Land of Youth) at the Magic Theatre.

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.

Keith Pinto (left) and Dan Wolf star in Wolf’s adaptation of the Adam Mansbach novel Angry Black White Boy at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. The dynamic production features live music, rap, dance and old-fashioned storytelling. Photos by Evan Loewy

Music, beats, movement make `Angry’ a joy
«««1/2

For all of its form crunching and boundary pushing, Angry Black White Boy rises or falls on the strength of its storytelling.

For most of its two hours, Dan Wolf’s stage adaptation of Adam Mansbach’s novel tells a fierce, funny, fascinating story that cuts to the core of what we talk about when we talk about race in this country.

There’s satire and sincerity in ample supply, and this dynamic Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts production, directed with sharp focus and experimental glee by Sean San José, is compelling as it is entertaining.

Mansbach’s narrative, which lacks only a satisfying ending, is augmented by fluid sound and movement that make the story feel like dance, poetry and music without ever detracting from the forward motion of the plot and the characters’ trajectory.

“The question is not how I got here but how you all didn’t,” says Macon Detornay (played by Wolf), a white Jewish kid from the Boston suburbs who has fully immersed himself, body and soul, in the world of hip-hop. He’s so outraged by the tacit level of racism in the U.S. that he begins to act out. A Columbia University student, Macon supports himself by driving a cab. And when a “typical white devil asshole” gets into the back of the taxi, Macon robs the man of his wallet and his dignity.

The vigilante robberies continue because all the victims report that the offending driver was black. After the inevitable arrest (when Macon insists that his latest victim note the actual color of his white skin), Macon becomes something of a folk hero and media darling/punching bag as he denounces white people’s institutional, economic and social privilege through something he calls the Race Traitor Project.

Like so many rise to fame stories, once the protagonist hits the peak of celebrity, things get less interesting. Aside from some excellent re-creations of talk show appearances, Macon’s story sort of implodes rather than explodes.

But the storytelling along the way crackles with energy that comes from the fusion of mostly live music (performed by Tommy Shepherd, Keith Pinto and Myers Clark, all of whom are also actors) – a blend of hip-hop, rap, beatbox, doo-wop, gorgeous harmonies — and incisive movement devised by Pinto, who is a joy to watch glide around the small Intersection for the Arts stage.

The story also takes some surprising turns. Part of Macon’s rage against white people stems from his heritage, namely his great grandfather, Cap Anson, the guy largely responsible for getting African-Americans banned from major league baseball. As a sort of attempt to make amends, Macon befriends the great-grandson of a black ball player who was one of the last to leave the league.

This historical detour – the baseball stuff is true – gives the enormously likable Shepherd the chance to play Moses “Fleet” Walker, the player who held on to his dignity to the very end, and to create a rich musical riff inspired by Fleet to the effect of “you can’t keep running away.”

There’s also a very funny late-night encounter with he People’s Cooperative Guerilla Theatre, who stage an impromptu version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House with a startled Macon “starring” as Nora, and an astute scene set in the classroom of a distinguished “academic gangsta” professor who happily apologizes for anything untoward in hip-hop.

As Macon’s friends Nique and Andre, Shepherd and Clark, respectively, offer sharply drawn performances full of humor and grounded realism. And as all of Macon’s victims, as well as a series of talk show hosts, Pinto is equally as effective but in a more stylized comic way.

The excellent quartet of actors fuses sound, movement and storytelling to create a uniquely theatrical experience. This is a true ensemble endeavor, and that’s the ultimate joy of Angry Black White Boy.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Angry Black White Boy continues through Nov. 30 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Call 415-626-3311 or visit www.theintersection.org.

Is Dan Wolf an angry black white boy? Or does he just play one on stage.

The answer to both questions is somewhat complicated.

Wolf (pictured above, left, with Tommy Shepherd) is an extraordinary actor, playwright, MC and rapper behind the live hip-hop group Felonious. He’s the father of a newborn, and he spends his days as program manager of The Hub, a group at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco that helps young people in their 20s and 30s connect with their Jewish identity through the arts, new ritual, social action and social networking.

In one of those life-altering moments, Wolf heard San Francisco author Adam Mansbach on the radio talking about his 2005 novel Angry Black White Boy or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay.

“It was just the right moment for me because I had all these questions about the future of Felonious and what it meant for a white kid from the suburbs teaching hip-hop to white kids,” Wolf says. “I ran out and bought the book, and it just cracked open all these questions in my mind, and passages just jumped off the page.”

Being a man of the theater, Wolf immediately began thinking about adapting the book in some way, but he quickly learned the book had already been optioned as a movie. In his work with the Jewish Community Center, Wolf actually crossed paths with Mansbach, the two talked about some sort of stage adaptation, and Wolf was off and running.

Through his association with Intersection for the Arts’ Hybrid Project and its resident theater company, Campo Santo, Wolf set to work and premiered a 15-minute version of Angry Black White Boy last year as part of the Grounded Festival of New Works.

Campo Santo co-founder Sean San José and the Intersection team liked what they saw and began developing a full-length show with Wolf as the title character working with fellow Felonious members Tommy Shepherd, an actor and soundscape musician, and actor and choreographer Keith Pinto.

Part theatrical storytelling, part poetry, rap, beatboxing, ballet and hip-hop dance, Angry Black White Boy previews this weekend and opens Monday, Oct. 27 at Intersection and continues through Nov. 16.

Directing the piece is San José, who is used to long developmental periods with a new show. Sitting around an Intersection conference table with Wolf and Shepherd, San José says this show demanded a faster and more experimental creation.

“We’ve always wanted to do something like this – a sound and movement piece where sound lives as text and dialogue and music and movement is text and storytelling,” San José says. “It’s sonic and movement and text all feeding into one another. The process has been really fun for all of us. The notion of adaptation has been less of a task.”

Wolf calls the process a “remix”: “We take words, story, movement and sound and use them the way you might take a sample from a song and bring in disparate instruments. You make something new out of something old – and what’s more hip-hop than that?”

Mansbach’s novel tackles issues of race in America through the character of Macon, a white boy obsessed with black culture to the point that he becomes a sort of vigilante celebrity and founder of The Race Traitor Project, which leads to a national Day of Apology and to an epic New York City riot.

“I can’t even imagine the book as a movie because the story is so sharp and complex,” San José says. “But it works as a play. It’s so nuts what we can do with it, how we can tell this story not just through text and sound but also dance. The talent of this team is so extraordinary they can tell a story without words and still keep the story moving forward. Sometimes, between the sound and the movement, which is leading which.”

Shepherd chimes in: “In Felonious we always say follow the follower.”

The book’s sharp, satirical tone initially put off both San José and Shepherd – both say they’re not sure they would have picked up the book, let alone finished it, had Wolf not been so insistent about the project.

But San José and Shepherd eventually fell into Mansbach’s narrative and his exploration of race in the U.S.

“Race is one of the three issues I think I’ll always be addressing in my work,” San José says. “Mansbach is basically saying we live in a racist society, and then we as artists have to decide how we fulfill that. There’s a lot of nastiness to present in the complexity, but Mansbach has done all the thinking for us, and that helps us not over-think it.”

Wolf says the process of bringing Angry Black White Boy to the stage has been all about pushing himself further than he ever has artistically and surprising himself.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time – work on a story and a character,” Wolf says. “I’ve had this strange desire for something more classically structured that allows me to use specific skills and create shades in a bigger picture. I’m hoping what we’re doing is more universal, less marginalized artistically. That’s the beauty of working at Intersection and working with these people. We’re allowed to dig deep into the thing and ask the tough questions. As we push ourselves to the next level, we try to do it as fully and completely as possible, and I’m blessed to work in this building with these people.”

Angry Black White Boy continues through Nov. 16 at Intersection for the Arts, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$25 on a sliding scale. Call 415-626-3311 or visit www.theintersection.org.

- The pop opera The Rosenbach Company is at 8 tonight (May 14) at the Jewish Community Center. The piece is by Ben Katchor (projections, text and direction), the author of the comic-strip series Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, The Cardboard Valise, Hotel & Farm and The Jew of New York. You’ve probably seen his work in the New Yorker. Mark Mulcahy composed the score and performs the role of Abe Rosenbach. Mulcahy has released the albums Fathering, Smilesunset and In Pursuit of Your Happiness. He also composed the music for the TV series “The Adventures of Pete & Pete” with his fictional TV band, Polaris. At the JCC, Katchor’s picture stories and drawings will be on exhibit in an exhibition called “The Backlit Word” through June 30. The exhibition is free.
Tickets for The Rosenbach Company, which tells the story of the world’s preeminent rare book dealer in the first half of the last century, are $15-$22. Call 415-292-1233 or visit www.jccsf.org/arts for information. The JCCSF is at 3200 California St., San Francisco.

- 42nd Street Moon celebrates its 15th anniversary with a world-premiere revue: Peddling Rainbows, a tribute to the lyrics of E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, whose most famous song (with Harold Arlen) was “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. Among his other hits are “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “April in Paris,” “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” and “Down with Love.” The cast includes Andrea Brembry, Bill Fahrner, Susan Himes-Powers, Maggie May, Peter Sroka, Scarlett Hepworth and Alexander Nee. Previews begin Thursday, May 15, and the show continues through May 25 at the Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson St., San Francisco. Tickets are $22-$38. Call 415-255-8207 or visit www.42ndstmoon.org.

- Comedy troupe Killing My Lobster and Intersection for the Arts pair up to present a one-night-only film event: KML Gets Reel. This group fundraiser-auction-short film showcase will screen some of KML’s most beloved short films and preview the new short film Orifice Visit and the mini-feature Evolution: The Musical (above). Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and the screening begins at 8 at Intersection, 446 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $10-$20 on a sliding scale. Visit www.killingmylobster.com for information.

Here’s the trailer for Evolution: The Musical:

On Friday, April 18 and Saturday April 19, Campo Santo is opening up its rehearsal process to give audiences a peek into Bay Area playwright Philip Kan Gotanda’s new play, #5 The Angry Red Drum at Intersection for the Arts.

This is part of Campo Santo/Intersection’s Open Rehearsal and Open Process Series exploration. Presented in collaboration with the Asian American Theater Company, Gotanda’s play is set in an apocalyptic world and addresses the effects of war on our psyches and culture.

This is a rare chance to see some fantastic Campo Santo folks in the throes of their creativep rocess: movement direction by Erika Chong Shuch, live music score from Dwayne Calizo and featuring Samantha Chanse, Daveed Diggs, Randy Nakano, Donald Lacy and Danny Wolohan.

Make reservations at www.theintersection.org or call 415-626-3311 for information.