Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

“We’re calling it our Bar Mitzvah season not just because the company is run by two Jews,” says Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman referring to herself and managing director Cheshire Isaacs. “This season we’re taking some large leaps forward. It really is a rite of passage for us.”

Yes, Impact Theatre, one of the Bay Area’s most youthfully invigorating theater companies (their motto is: “Theater that doesn’t suck”) opens its 13^th season next month with Lauren Yee’s irreverent new comedy Ching Chong Chinaman. The play won the 2007 Yale Playwrights Festival and made its debut at the New York Fringe Festival shortly after. Yee is a Bay Area native and is the founder and executive director of the San Francisco Young Playwright’s Festival.

Skewering every cliché about Asian-American identity, Yee’s play receives its West Coast premiere under the direction of former Impact associate artistic director Desdemona Chiang.

Next up, in November, is Melanie Marnich’s Tallgrass Gothic, a spare, haunting drama based on the Jaobean tragedy The Changeling. In this adaptation, the action takes place in the Great Plains, where Laura yearns to leave her hometown and escape her abusive husband. A lover appears to promise her a way out, but that path leads to a devastating climax.

Tallgrass was featured in the 2004 Humana Festival of New Plays, and Marnich’s works have been on some of the country’s major regional stages. But this production marks her Bay Area professional debut.

In February 2009, Hillman directs the company’s seventh “classic with a twist.” Previous outings have been heavy Shakespeare (Henry IV, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Measure for Measure). This time around, however, Hillman is in a lighter, brighter mood and will be directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her production, while retaining Shakespeare’s language, will be set in 1980s nightclubs.

The season concludes with the return of Impact Briefs in May 2009, an evening of original short plays on a theme, which this time around will be puberty.

“Impact may be growing up in many ways, but we’re still 13 years old,” Hillman says with a laugh. “I think puberty describes exactly where we are in our development. That said, no matter how old we get, we’re always going to have this streak in us.”

In addition to its roster of plays, the Impact season comes with some other news: audiences will enjoy new seats in LaVal’s Subterranean, the basement theater space under a Berkeley pizzeria. And the seats have fold out desks that promise to make the eating of pizza during the show that much easier.

Also, subscriptions are available for the first time – a full season commitment figures $13 per show. And the date for Impact’s popular poker night fundraiser, Full Houses, has been set for July 11, 2009.

Visit www.impacttheatre.com.

Opened July 21 at American Conservatory Theater

Roger Rees performs a soliloquy from Richard II, one of many incredible moments in What You Will, a solo show about all things Shakespeare at American Conservatory Theater. Photos by David Allen

Laughs, brains, heart infuse Rees’ evening of Shakespeare
««««

Sometimes one actor is plenty.

Roger Rees may be alone for the duration of What You Will, but he brings with him 400 years’ worth of English history and literary criticism as well as some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful verse.

One of those great British-born actors who makes it all seem so effortless, Rees is best known on these shores for his TV stints (”Cheers,” “The West Wing,” “Grey’s Anatomy”), but in reality, he’s a Tony-winning former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company who knows a thing or two thousand about Shakespeare.

Rees’ abundant knowledge and humor are the focal point of What You Will, a 90-minute showcase now at American Conservatory Theater. He tells stories about Shakespeare, about what people think about Shakespeare, from George Bernard Shaw and Voltaire to kids in online chat rooms. He relates backstage tales, many of them bawdy, and makes fun of himself as a young spear-carrying actor.

And then he performs excerpts from Shakespeare. He sneaks Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy on us at an amazing moment, and his most robust turn comes when he plays Juliet’s nurse from Romeo and Juliet. Rather than donning drag, Rees just puts on a backwards A’s cap and lets loose…

Read the complete review at my Examiner.com site HERE.

What You Will continues through Aug. 9 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $29-$85. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

“I’m so old people will say, `Is he still alive?’”

That’s Roger Rees exaggerating people’s response to his arrival in San Francisco with his one-man show What You Will, an evening of Shakespeare, stories about Shakespeare and about performing Shakespeare, that begins performances today (July 18) at the American Conservatory Theater.

The Welsh-born Rees, 64, is one of those extraordinary actors who can seemingly do anything. He won a Tony Award in 1982 for his work in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s production of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, a gargantuan, two-part undertaking in which Rees played the leading role. He’s also familiar from his many TV appearances – Robin Colcord on “Cheers,” Lord John Marbury on “The West Wing” and more recently, Dr. Colin Marlow, the surgeon who patted Cristina Yang’s ass on “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Rees also co-wrote, with his partner, Rick Elice (co-writer of Jersey Boys) a hit comedy thriller called Double, Double (which ran for a year in London’s West End with Rees starring opposite Jane Lapotaire), and he ran the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts for three years.

As previously stated, the man can do just about anything.

Rees was last in San Francisco as the director of Bebe Neuwirth’s
Kurt Weill revue, Here Lies Jenny, three years ago. His only other experience with the Bay Area prior to that was as a vacationer in Sonoma and as an actor playing the villain in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, which filmed in Point Reyes.

Rees developed What You Will with Beth Emerson at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., and performed it there and at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He calls the show “an evening of juxtaposed material” and says the show is “changing as I do it.”

The show includes some great Shakespeare soliloquies (male and female) and stories of Rees’ onstage experiences and even includes “appearances” by Noel coward, James Thurber, Charles Dickens and Stevie Wonder.

“I do soliloquies and relate stories and offer commentary about characters and acting,” Rees says. “It seems to have a nice shape of an evening. It’s really about the humanity you need to bring to bear when performing Shakespeare.”

Before putting this show together, Rees recalls doing similar patchwork evenings in England, when, on days off, he and Judi Dench and her husband, Michael Williams, would perform a similar kind of show.

“We’d drive up to some stately home and perform,” Rees recalls. “In the end, we had so many of these party pieces – 26 of them – that we created the show 26 Characters in Search of an Author. We assigned each letter of the alphabet to a favorite piece.”

After performing in Hamlet with Virginia McKenna (whom Rees describes as “a great English actress”), Rees and McKenna continued exploring mother and son relationships with a show called, appropriately, Sons and Mothers.

With What You Will, Rees is hoping to get the show solidly on its feet then tour extensively. “I’m thinking of this as something we can take around the English-speaking world spreading the word of Shakespeare,” he says.

While he was running the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Rees wasn’t on stage a whole lot, though he was on the Tony nominating committee last year and saw everything. “I’ll do it again this year,” he says. “I love being an audience. It was a fascinating and wonderful experience. That’s the thing about theater – there’s something for everybody, and it’s different every time.”

That’s part of the reason he loves being an actor on stage – because it’s different every time.

“You get to do the whole thing again the next night,” he says. “I love telling stories in a room to other people. Film scripts get smaller and smaller, and once you get the scene right, you never do it again. Theater is scary because things go wrong and you always wish you were better. Doors get stuck and guns don’t end up where they should be. It’s a perilous thing that is supposed to be serious. Nothing could be more stupid than an actor without a prop.”

Though afraid of the old axiom that an actor’s legs are the first to go, Rees says he’s standing sturdily these days, and he’s delighted to be returning to San Francisco.

“Audiences there have a real sense of occasion,” he says. “They have a great knack for going to the theater in sensible and clever ways.”

Roger Rees’ What You Will runs July 18 through Aug. 9 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $29-$85. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org for information.

You probably know Roger Rees from his TV work — Robin Colcord on “Cheers,” the British ambassador on “The West Wing” and the doctor with a thing for Christina Yang on “Grey’s Anatomy.”

But if that’s all you know of Rees, prepare to see the real thing. The TV work is great (and even one of the world’s greatest actors has to pay the bills), but in July, Bay Area audiences will be treated to Rees on stage, all by himself in What You Will, a 90-minute, one-man show through all things Shakespearean.

Rees, a Tony and Olivier award winner for his mind-blowing work in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s monumental The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, presents the greatest soliloquies from Shakespeare and tells backstage tales of the funniest disasters ever perpetrated on a Shakespearean stage. Romeo, Juliet, Juliet’s nurse, Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard II and even Charles Dickens, James Thurber, Noel Coward and Stevie Wonder make appearances in What You Will.

The show runs July 18-Aug. 9 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $29-$85. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org for information. Special “groundling seat” tickets at the front of the orchestra will be old to students each night for $20.

California Shakespeare Theater production opened May 31, 2008, Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda

The eight-member cast of California Shakespeare Theater’s Pericles puts on a jousting pageant on stage at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater in Orinda. Photos by Kevin Berne

Cal Shakes season opens with radiant romp
«««« Rich, rewarding, adventurous

Presented as a gorgeous fairy tale for grown-ups, California Shakespeare Theater’s first show of the season, Pericles, reminds us that in a seemingly horrible world, faith, love and integrity will receive their just reward.

One of those tricky plays labeled “romance,” Pericles might as well be called “kitchen sink Shakespeare” because it includes a little bit of everything: incest, fiery shipwrecks, knightly jousts, swirling romance, assassination attempts, tragic death, magical resurrection, marauding pirates, betrayal and beyond-belief happy ending machinations. Experts quarrel about the exact authorship of the play, especially the first two of the five acts, but the fact is, Pericles is mightily entertaining, especially when directed with flair.

And flair is something director Joel Sass has in great abundance. This Pericles, which is winnowed down to eight actors (and four general ensemble members) playing forty-some roles, is based on the adaptation Sass created for Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre in 2005. All the role switching gives the play a hyper-theatrical feel and helps keep it more in the realm of vibrant storytelling and less in the more emotionally demanding world of realism.

The stage of the Bruns Amphitheater, nestled in the rolling Orinda hills, has rarely been so beautiful. Set designer Melpomene Katakalos gives us a natural world – a tree trunk forms a central arch amid a sandy floor – with crude structures walled in by Persian carpets. Exotic carpets and pillows are strewn about the sand to create a warm, cozy atmosphere for ripping yarns and lusty romance. Russell H. Champa’s lights play with the set the way fireworks play with a Fourth of July sky – they form an extraordinary element in the storytelling here, with their dastardly shadows, warm hues, heroic posturing and near-operatic grandeur.

All of those elements are necessary in the telling of Pericles, the story of the Prince of Tyre (Christopher Kelly), whose life seems to take dramatic turns every time he takes a voyage. First he heads to a kingdom to woo a beautiful princess, but because her father the king is an incestuous letch, that doesn’t work out too well, and Pericles finds himself and his kingdom under attack.

So the handsome prince heads off to a kingdom suffering famine and brings them grain and hope. Returning from that trek, his ship catches fire and sinks. He washes up on the shores of a gentle kingdom and is taken in by kindly fisherman. It just so happens that there’s a knightly tournament going on and that the good-hearted king has a lovely, unmarried daughter. Cue the jousting. From here, the tale takes a more tragic turn, with death, kidnapping, jealousy, murder, forced prostitution and the supernatural all coming strongly into play.

But director Sass and his wonderful octet of actors sail through these bumpy dramatic waters with style. Shawn Hamilton(above) holds the narrative together as Gower, the storytelling poet who sings beautifully and fills in the blanks as the years hurry by over the course of the play’s nearly three hours. Having a narrator helps because it’s a little hard to keep track of this wandering tale.

But that’s another reason Sass’ production works so well – even when the play loses its way or gets tangled in yet another adventure, the stage is gorgeous and there’s always something interesting going on. Raquel M. Barreto’s costumes are lush and beautiful, like something out of 1,001 Nights. She also has a sense of humor. Her fishermen, for instance, look less like people and more like grass huts. And when it’s time for the joust, the knights strap on their horses like clowns. Composer Greg Brosofske lends pomp and romance to an already lyrical story.

The role-shifting actors all shine. Ron Campbell goes from dastardly (as the incestuous king) to dippy (as a fisherman) to equine (as a prancing knight on “horseback“); Delia MacDougall (above, with Kelly) is a robust redhead who wins Pericles’ heart, and then she’s a madam in a fat suit (complete with over-stretched fishnet stockings); Domenique Lozano is a duplicitous queen and an enigmatic sorcerer who has the power to bring the dead back to life; Sarah Nealis is a radiant Marina, daughter of Pericles; Alex Morf plays a series of bad guys until his final bad guy, in the face of overwhelming virtue, turns good; and Danny Scheie plays several good, noble men and one feisty hunchback.

Is the play nonsensical and outlandish? Absolutely. Is it incredibly moving at its tearjerking conclusion when all is set right, and noble Pericles, after all his misfortunes, is given what he most wanted in the world? Oh, yes, and then some. Fairytale is fantasy, and we want to believe some of that fantastical world, of outrageous wrong and unwavering right, can rub off on our world. We want to believe in happy endings so that in our daily dealings with shipwrecks, bawds and nefarious kings, we, like Pericles, can take heart in an ending of the happy, tear-stained variety.

Pericles continues through June 22 at the Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, one mile east of the Caldecott Tunnel on the Gateway/Shakespeare Festival exit in Orinda (there’s a free shuttle to and from the theater and the Orinda BART station). Tickets are $32-$62 (with student, senior and under 30 discounts). Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org for information.

Opened May 7, 20008 at the Curran Theatre, San Francisco

The cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photos by Tistram Kenton

Beautiful, challenging, rewarding – those are three words that immediately come to mind when thinking about the production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream now at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre. I’d also use the word shocking, but not so much about the show, more about the audience. More on that in a minute.

Part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season, this well-traveled Midsummer was first produced in India about three years ago and has since been produced in Stratford-on-Avon, London, Verona and Australia. The cast and crew is all Indian and Sri Lankan, and the play is performed with three live musicians at the sides of the stage (traditional South Asian instruments, heavy on the percussion) and in seven languages: Hindi, Tamil, Malyalam, Marathi, Bengali, Sanskrit and Shakespeare’s native tongue, English.

The goal of director Tim Supple seems to be the creation of a universal Shakespeare production that through music, dynamic production, dance, song, excellent acting and clarity of intent communicates the story even when the text is in a foreign language.

To a large and satisfying degree, Supple succeeds. Certainly it helps if you have some familiarity with Midsummer and its romantic tangle of a plot (if you don’t, and if you arrive at the theater a half hour early, you can read the two-page “synopsis” slipped into the program). But even if you come as a blank slate, you’ll get it. There’s just enough English to coax us along as the plot unfolds.

The first striking thing about the production is the work of set and costume designer Sumant Jayakrishnan. Everything is simple but effective on his stage. The colors of the costumes – gold, pink, orange, cyan, magenta – are stunning, and his set is a rough wood scaffolding covered with what looks like white tissue paper but is actually something much sturdier as we come to see when the action shifts from the court in Athens to the wilds of the woods and the cast members clamber all over that scaffolding like 12-year-old gymnasts.

There are two moments in Act 1 that stick out in my mind. The first is when Titania, Queen of the Fairies (Archana Ramaswamy) asks to be sung to sleep, so her fairies put on a dazzling pageant for her enjoyment. At this point, the show turns into a mini-Cirque du Soleil, with actors twirling up and down ropes and performing acrobatic feats on great swaths of red fabric dangling from the rafters.

The other moment comes toward the end of the act when mischievous Puck (a mohawked Ajay Kumar) has turned a quartet of runaway Athenian lovers into a magically mismatched mess. While the lovers – Yuki Ellias, Prasanna Mahagamage, Chandan Roy Sanyal and Shanaya Rafaat – fight, Puck begins weaving a rubbery web around them – literally roping them in – so that when he’s finished, they can hardly move with becoming entangled and ensnared. It’s an amazingly apt visual image, and it tells the story beautifully even if we don’t understand a word of what’s being said.

Then came intermission and the great exodus. The number of people who bailed on Act 2 on opening night was shocking. I can understand that a) watching Shakespeare and b) watching Shakespeare in a foreign language without supertitles is a challenge. But this is San Francisco. People here are supposed to welcome challenge and not be such cultural cowards. Looking across the orchestra section I saw to center rows, each with three people in them.

If the production were appalling, I could understand the impulse to bail, but this Midsummer is wonderful. I will say that the people who stayed responded mightily with appreciation in an effort to make up for the empty seats.

Too bad for them. They missed an immensely satisfying performance by the rude mechanicals – the blue collar workers who take it upon themselves to present a tragic play for the entertainment of the royals. As Bottom, the overly inflated actor who, for a dreamy night, is turned into an ass, Joy Fernandes (speaking mostly in English) captures the innocence and exuberance of Bottom, both qualities that make his ego easier to tolerate.

The evening ends on a stage filled with deep reds, wonderfully bad acting (by the rude mechanicals) and rousing song and dance. The twists and turns of Shakespeare filtered through another culture still manage to end in the same happy, fulfilling place. This Midsummer’s Night is truly a dream.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream continues through June 1 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are$35-$80. Call 415-512-7770 or visit www.shn-sf.com or www.ticketmaster.com for information.

The American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA) has named six finalists in its annual playwriting competition, supported by generous funding from the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, which recognizes plays that premiered outside New York City.

The top honoree in the Steinberg /ATCA New Play Awards will receive $25,000 — the largest prize for a national playwriting award. Two additional playwrights will receive $7,500 each.

The winners will be announced at a March 29, 2008 ceremony at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre in Louisville, Ky.

The six finalists:

The Crowd You’re in With, by Rebecca Gilman, debuted at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in November. The play examines three couples at a backyard barbecue who reveal vastly different attitudes toward having children in the 21st century.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone, by Sarah Ruhl, bowed at Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in June. The quirky comedy examines the fallout when a lonely woman takes the cell phone from the body of dead man she discovers sitting next to her in a café and begins answering his calls.

End Days, by Deborah Zoe Laufer, premiered in October at Florida Stage in Manalapan. Sometimes comic, sometimes moving, the play studies the challenge of maintaining faith in a world dominated by science and fear. A Jewish family copes with the aftermath of 9/11 as the mother, now a born-again Christian, tries to convert the family before the rapture arrives — on Wednesday.

The English Channel, by Robert Brustein, debuted in September at Suffolk University and then the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard. The noted critic and founder of the American Repertory Theatre penned a droll comedy centering on creativity, inspiration and plagiarism, in which the young Shakespeare, the ghost of Marlowe and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets collide in a tavern.

Strike-Slip, by Naomi Iizuka, opened last spring at the Humana Festival. The playwright presents a cinematic look at the interconnected nature of seemingly disconnected lives in the diverse, multi-cultural Los Angeles basin. One judge praised it as a 21st Century O. Henry story.

33 Variations, by Moises Kaufman, debuted in September at Washington’s Arena Stage. Kaufman offers a fictional imagining of Beethoven’s creation of 33 brilliant variations on a prosaic waltz. His obsessive pursuit of perfection parallels a modern tale of a terminally-ill musicologist struggling with her own obsession to unearth the source of Beethoven’s.

These finalists were selected from 28 eligible scripts submitted by ATCA
members. As the competition requires, none had productions in New York City in
2007. They were evaluated by a committee of 12 theater critics from around the
U.S. headed by chairman Wm. F. Hirschman of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and vice-chair George Hatza of the Reading Eagle.

“The amazing range of work — dramas, fantasies, musicals, farces, melodramas –
was uplifting confirmation that theater remains a vital and evolving art form
that can speak to every generation,” Hirschman said.

Since the inception of ATCA’s New Play Award in 1977, honorees have included
Lanford Wilson, Marsha Norman, August Wilson, Jane Martin, Arthur Miller, Mac
Wellman, Adrienne Kennedy, Donald Margulies, Lee Blessing, Lynn Nottage, Horton
Foote and Craig Lucas. Last year’s winner was San Francisco’s own Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Hunter Gatherers.

The awards are supported by an annual grant of $40,000 from the Harold and Mimi
Steinberg Charitable Trust, created in 1986 by Harold Steinberg on behalf of
himself and his late wife. The primary mission of the Steinberg Charitable Trust
to support the American theater. The trust has provided grants totaling millions
of dollars to support new productions of American plays and educational programs
for those who may not ordinarily experience live theater.

I’ve already offered up my Top 10 list of 2007’s best Bay Area theater (see it here).

That’s all well and good, but there was way too much good stuff in 2007 to contain in a polite numbered list. What follows, in no apparent order, are some of the year’s most distinctive theater moments (mostly good, some not so much).

The shows in the Top 10 were really great shows, but so were these. This is my honorable mention roster:

– American Suicide, Encore Theatre Company and Z Plays
– Pillowman, Berkeley Repertory Theatre
– The Birthday Party, Aurora Theatre Company
– Pleasure & Pain, Magic Theatre’s Hot House ‘07
– After the War, American Conservatory Theater
– Heartbreak House, Berkeley Repertory Theatre
– Tings Dey Happen, Dan Hoyle and The Marsh
– Annie Get Your Gun, Broadway by the Bay
– Des Moines, Campo Santo, Intersection for the Arts
– Richard III, California Shakespeare Theater

Favorite scene: Didn’t even have to think twice about this one. The dinner scene in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s adaptation of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Director Les Waters, working from Adele Edling Shank’s script, fashioned a multilayered scene that would have made Woolf herself proud. A boisterous family dinner, warmly illuminated by candles, allows us into the head of each of the diners without ever losing track of the dinner conversation. Extraordinary and beautiful — and vocally choreographed like a piece of complex music.

Greatest guilty pleasure: Legally Blonde, The Musical, had its pre-Broadway run early in 2007 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre, and though it had its problems, it was a heck of a lot of fun. The best number was the lengthy “What You Want” in which sorority gal Elle Woods (Laura Bell Bundy) decides to apply to Harvard. In true musical fashion, the number sweeps through time and space, coursing through months of effort and from Southern California to the hallowed halls of Harvard. Jerry Mitchell’s choreography incorporates a frat party, the Harvard selection committee and a marching band.

Favorite image:The green girl in Berkeley Rep’s The Pillowman.

Favorite couple: Francis Jue as Mr. Oji and Delia MacDougall as Olga Mikhoels in Philip Kan Gotanda’s After the War at ACT. The sweetest romance was also the most surprising: a shy Japanese man and a recent Russian immigrant, neither of whom speaks much English.

Speaking of MacDougall: It was a good year for the actress (seen at right with the fur and tiara), who died memorably in Cal Shakes’ King Lear and ended 2007 with a superb, hip-swiveling, lip-pursing performance in Sex by Mae West at the Aurora.

Favorite tryout: Joan Rivers is more than a red carpet personality and an experiment in plastic surgery. An avowed theater lover, Rivers got down to some serious (and seriously funny) business in The Joan Rivers Theatre Project at the Magic. She combined stand-up with drama as she told an autobiographical tale of growing old in show business. The play was far from perfect, but she gets an A for effort.

Best ensemble: Behind every good show is a good ensemble, in front of and behind the scenes. But the one that comes to mind that, together, elevated the play was the fine crew in TheatreWorks’ Theophilus North (left) directed by Leslie Martinson.

Biggest disappointments: There were a few of them. I adore Kiki and Herb (Justin Bond and Kenny Melman), but their summer gig at ACT was in desperate need of a director. Berkeley Rep hosted Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Oliver Twist, and while it was good, it didn’t reach anything approaching the heights of David Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby. I complained about this in the review, and I’ll complain about it again: In ACT’s The Rainmaker, when the rain falls at the end, the actors should get wet. That’s the whole point of the play. In this version, the rain fell from above, but the actors were behind it and only pretended — acted if you will — the wetness. Lame.

Most gratuitous nudity: Actors bare all emotionally _ it’s what they do. But this year saw some unnecessary flesh, most notably in ‘Bot at the Magic, Private Jokes, Public Places at the Aurora and Two Boys in Bed on a Cold Winter Night. Costumes are a good thing.

Favorite quote of the year: It was uttered by the food critic Anton Ego (and written by Brad Bird) in the brilliant Pixar/Disney movie Ratatouille. As a critic (or what’s left of one), the words really hit home. And they’re true.

Here’s a taste: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”

Happy New Year. May your stages in 2008 be full of the discovery of the new.

That Shakespeare is one groovy guy, man.

For centuries, enterprising directors have taken the Bard of Avon’s work and twisted and pulled it like so much theatrical taffy.

But the thing about Shakespeare is this: He’s a big boy. He can take it.

Do what you will with his work, ye directors of grand imagination. The brilliance, as they say, will out.

Robert Kelley, the founding artistic director of Mountain View’s TheatreWorks, is having a little fun with ol’ Willie Shakes. Kelley’s production of Twelfth Night, which opens Saturday (Dec.1) at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, is going to be hipper than usual — or maybe the better word is “hippie-er.”

Kelley is setting this sublimely romantic play in the Summer of Love, when life was psychedelic, the skies were blazing blue and the grass was, ahem, oh so green.

To help blend the worlds of Shakespeare and 1967, Kelley has assembled a team that includes composer Paul Gordon (coming off his big TheatreWorks musical hit Emma), set designer Andrea Bechert and costumer Allison Connor.

Connor, a native of Palo Alto and now a Berkeley resident, has a long history with TheatreWorks. She was actually in the company’s first production, Popcorn, in 1970.

In her years as a costume designer, Connor, who teaches humanities at San Jose City College and costume design at San Jose State, has outfitted many Shakespearean productions. In fact, this is her fourth Twelfth Night.

Some of those productions had concepts that worked. Others didn’t.

“I did a more traditional Italian Renaissance production of Romeo and Juliet that was really beautiful,” Connor says. “Did another R&J set on another planet. That was really awful. As a designer, you tend to go along with what the director wants, but sometimes it just doesn’t work. And that one did not work at all.”

Usually a director hires a costume designer, but in the case of the current Twelfth Night, Connor actually called her old friend Kelley. She told him, in essence, that he simply had to hire her.

“I was around in the ’60s,” Connor explains. “I was a child for most of it _ I graduated high school in ‘72 — but it was a really formative period in my life. I remember it all vividly. My mother was politically active in the civil rights and peace movements, and as a child I was participating. I was in a peace march at 10 years old. I saw (Janis) Joplin perform. I was at Monterey Pop at 12 years old. I saw the Beatles at Candlestick Park — couldn’t really hear them or see them well, but I can say I was there.”

Of course, we tend to look at the late ’60s through somewhat rose-tinted glasses, and Connor acknowledges that the period had its very good — and very bad — points. You won’t see the nasty stuff on stage in this more idyllic version of the ’60s.

“I wasn’t interested in helping design a Christmas show about the seedy underbelly of the ’60s,” Connor says. “I wanted it light and colorful. It’s the ’60s that never happened, quite frankly. We’re not seeing the Vietnam War. Not seeing a lot of the stuff that was really there. What we’re seeing is a lot of color and graphics style influenced by Peter Max and the Beatles‘ Yellow Submarine.”

For her costumes, Connor looked to ’60s rock icons for inspiration. Duke Orsino is based directly on Jimi Hendrix. The separated twins, Viola and Sebastian, both wear uniforms that are a combination of Hendrix and the Beatles‘ “Sgt. Pepper’s.”

The character of Feste, the court jester, has been expanded to become a three-piece band, and their costumes are inspired by the kind of patchwork jacket favored by Hendrix.

And though they’re not exact replicas by any means, Antonio is inspired by Country Joe MacDonald, Sir Toby Belch is a takeoff of Wavy Gravy and Olivia’s final dress takes its cue from Joplin.

“This is a play that lends itself to style,” Connor says. “I’ve done it many different ways, but that’s why Shakespeare’s wonderful. You can place his shows, especially the comedies, anywhere you want. Shakespeare’s writing is so strong he can withstand some of the worst things directors have done to him. The intelligence, humor and wonderful writing shines through.”

The gimmick of placing Twelfth Night in the Summer of Love, Connor says, seems to fit.

“The play is about love in all its many forms — romantic love, love between siblings, love between friends — and everything is resolved cheerfully in the end,” she says. “All of that is coming out very strongly in this production.”

Twelfth Night continues through Dec. 23 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $20-$56. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

A friend sent along a link to a hilarious (and useful) “kit” for creating and hurling Shakespearean insults.

Check it out here. The creators are to be congratulated for fine scholarship and heck of a fun online toy.

Here are some results we’ve been enjoying in the office:

You, sir, are a “pribbling, milk-livered scut.”

You, madam, are a “wimpled, whoreson Basket-Cockle.”

You, Mr. Editor, are a “craven, hasty-witted bugbear.”

You, Mr. President, are an “unmuzzled, scurvy-valiant wagdog.”

You can also get an official insult hurled at you from Shakespeare himself here.

I just got: “I find the ass in compound with the major part of your syllables.” (from Coriolanus )