Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Kimberly King (with Cassidy Brown as Father Flynn) plays the stern Sister Aloysius in the TheatreWorks production of Doubt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by John Patrick Shanley. Photos by David Allen

For a while, Kimberly King and her husband, Ken Grantham, were sort of the first couple of Bay Area theater.

From their Berkeley base, they performed all over the place – Berkeley Repertory Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, Marin Shakespeare Festival, you name it. They acted, they directed.

Then, like so many great local actors, they moved to Los Angeles and then to New York. When that got old, they decided to head back to the West Coast, but instead of returning to the Bay Area, they made a surprising decision. They headed to Washington, but not to Seattle. Four years ago they settled in the Puget Sound area and run the Green Cat Guest House and Bed and Breakfast just outside of the tiny town of Poulsbo.

But they have not been so consumed by their careers as innkeepers that they have forsaken the stage. They’ve managed to work at the Intiman and A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, and they occasionally hit the road.

King made a memorable local appearance two years ago as Mary Tyrone in San Jose Repertory Theatre’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and she’s back to tackle the role of Sister Aloysius in TheatreWorks’ production of Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, now at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto.

“At first glance, Sister Aloysius can seem like kind of a stock character. We’ve seen terrifying nuns through the ages,” King says. “But the core of the sister, and the core of the play itself, is the central humanity of her character. Her belief is that she is doing good, trying to protect the children she deeply loves at her school, trying to make the world better. That’s what saves the character from being a stereotype. That’s also the place where we can hold up the mirror to ambition, human ideals, human conflict and, finally, human doubt. She may seem embedded in her belief system, but the playwright won’t let her stay there very long.”

Bay Area audiences had the chance to see Doubt two years ago when the Broadway tour, starring Cherry Jones in her Tony Award-winning role of Sister Aloysius, played the Golden Gate Theatre. King did not see that performance and so brings her own talent and background (she’s from Irish and Lutheran stock) to the role.

“Sister A is a woman to be admired and feared,” King says. “She is fiercely intelligent, passionate in her beliefs. Her guiding light is the care and nurturing, in her own way, of her flock, her children. She cares about them very deeply. Cares about the idea of education very deeply. Her strict and stringent guidelines remind me of maestros I’ve worked with. I’m not naming names, but they share a passionate belief they can affect a positive outlook in the world with standards that are important to adhere to. The question is whether those standards get in the way of other observations, other mindsets, let in other ways of being.”

In the play, Sister Aloysius must deal with a priest, Father Flynn, who may have abused one of the students. The incident, which also demonstrates a clash between the old ways and the new ways in the church in the early ’60s, around the time of Vatican II, shakes the Sister to her core.

“There’s a courtyard between the rectory and the convent, and as the Sister says, `It might as well be the Atlantic Ocean.’” King says. “That courtyard is an interesting symbol. Sister Aloysius is older than Father Flynn, maybe by about 20 years. She’s the old and he represents the new. Shanley doesn’t come down on either side. He holds up the prism that allows the facets of these people and the world outside to show. Part of the magnetism of the play is that the audience needs to decide, to have the discussion, formulate the views. There are no rights, no wrongs, no easy answers, no easy conclusions. Doubt is such a wonderful piece of writing. My respect for it grows every day.”

King is reveling being back in the Bay Area – one of her favorite places, she says – and says she and her husband moved to Puget Sound because, as Sister Aloysius says, “Life is perhaps longer than you think and the dictates of the soul more numerous.”

“Our souls dictated Puget Sound,” she says. “And they really do have 350 days of clouds and rain there. But I’m a California girl at heart. Some time, every day, we think about coming back here.”

For more with Kimberly King, please visit my Examiner.com theater page here.

TheatreWorks’ Doubt begins previews tonight (July 16), opens Saturday (July 19) and continues through Aug. 10 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $26-$64. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

Opened June 21, 2008 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts

The cast of TheatreWorks’ Snapshots creates scenes from the life of a married couple set to recycled Stephen Schwartz songs. Photos by David Allen

Stephen Schwartz songbook turns into Snapshots revue
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The idea of a musical revue was green before we even knew what green meant. Revues reuse and recycle, just as all good citizens should do.

We’ve had standard-issue revues along the lines of A Grand Night for Singing (Rodgers and Hammerstein), Jerry’s Girls (Jerry Herman), Cole! (Cole Porter),
Side by Side by Sondheim (Stephen Sondheim) in which shiny, happy people (usually too shiny and too happy for my taste) tap their troubles away with seemingly endless medleys clever twists on songs by great composers that we know and love.

Then there’s the jukebox musical (hello, Mamma Mia!), which recycles old songs (usually pop songs not written expressly for the theater) and shoehorns them into some semblance of a story, however awkward.

And then there’s Snapshots, the long-gestating revue of songs by Stephen Schwartz, the composer of Godspell, Pippin and Wicked to name a few of his better-known shows. This is a revue with jukebox aspirations, which is to say, songs from Schwartz’s shows from the last 30 years are forced into the service of an all-new story.

Conceived by Michael Scheman and David Stern, the show has been re-worked and refined right up through its most recent incarnation from Mountain View’s TheatreWorks. Schwartz and Stern (who gets final credit for the book) have been involved in this latest production, and the results are surprisingly good. IN theory, a cobbled together show like this shouldn’t work – it sounds unappealing.

But under director Robert Kelley’s care, there’s a real show here. Not everything works as Schwartz’s re-configured songs attempt to tell the story of how the marriage of Sue (Beth DeVries) and Dan (Ray Wills) has come to the breaking point, but some of the songs work beautifully, and some genuine feeling comes bubbling up.

Spun out in the attic (cluttered, useful set by Joe Ragey) of Sue and Dan’s Connecticut home, the story of the marriage is triggered by snapshots dating back to childhood when Dan, just after losing his mother, moves to the neighborhood and meets Sue, the woman who will be the love of his life.

In childhood the couple is played by Brian Crum and Courtney Stokes, and in the college to middle years by Michael Marcotte and Molly Bell. Everyone helps out by playing various other characters – lovers, friends, children (Crum even dons cheerleader drag) — to fill out the story.

One goal of any revue is to give audiences a concentrated sense of a composer’s life work. We should leave with a sense of who Stephen Schwartz is and what his musical palette has to offer. The overarching impression of Schwartz that comes through here is one of someone straddling two worlds: the pop-infused Broadway of the ’70s and ’80s (which can’t help sounding a little dated) and a more timeless musical theater sound.

Songs from Pippin and The Magic Show, for instance, even in new arrangements by Steve Orich (and under the musical direction of William Liberatore and his quartet), are strongly anchored in a hippie-ish pop, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s just very specific, while songs like “Popular” (from Wicked) and “In Whatever Time We Have” (from Children of Eden) still have Schwartz’s strong pop sensibility but connect to a bigger musical theater sound that helps them work better in this new context.

The best re-worked song is “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife. Usually performed as a diva’s showstopper, the song in the context of Snapshots is performed by the three women in gorgeous harmony who are approaching the song from different places in their lives. It works so well, in fact, you wish the rest of the show could match its intensity.

Though there’s some emotional connection to the beleaguered married couple at the center of the story, our attachment to the individuals is lopsided. The woman, Sue, is far more interesting, and it’s hard to see what she ever saw in Dan and why she pined for him for so many years. The women get all the interesting songs, and as a result, the character of Dan doesn’t amount to much. In fact, one key moment, when Dan finally stops seeing Sue as a pal and recognizes his love for her simply happens – no defining moment, no song, nothing.

In the end, you have to wonder if all the futzing and fussing with old songs is really worth it in the telling of a new story. Wouldn’t a new Stephen Schwartz musical be more exciting than something recycled? Snapshots is perfectly enjoyable, well performed and staged, but it can’t help leave its audience wondering what lyrically and musically interesting things Schwartz still has to offer.

Snapshots continues through July 13 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $26-$64. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

To keep up with Stephen Schwartz visit his Web site: www.stephenschwartz.com

In terms of Broadway composers, Stephen Schwartz is up there with Sondheim and Lloyd Webber as one of the latter-day saviors of modern musical theater.

From his first show, Godspell, right up through his most recent hit, Wicked, Schwartz has been up, down and in between, but his work has been constant. Some of that work has been for movies as well. He won Oscars for his work on Disney’s Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and earlier this year, three of the songs he and Alan Menken wrote for Disney’s Enchanted were nominated for Academy Awards.

At 60, and with Wicked showing no signs of slowing down (the national tour hits the Bay Area yet again in February 2009), Schwartz doesn’t need creative projects, but a long-gestating revue/musical – we’ll call it a revusical, though Schwartz himself calls it a “musical scrapbook” – is coming up for air once again. Way back in the mid-’90s, Michael Scheman and David Stern, who were then both working on one of Broadway’s most notorious flops, Nick & Nora, approached Schwartz about using songs from his existing catalogue and turning them into something more than a revue – a book musical that told a story through songs and gave the songs – some familiar, some obscure – a new spin.

“They had a lot of down time working on Nick & Nora,” Schwartz explains on the phone from the TheatreWorks rehearsal hall in Mountain View. “They had the idea of taking my songs and putting them into a new story framework. I said it would be impossible for me to allow that. I’d never seen it done successfully and frequently seen it done unsuccessfully. But I said do a reading, I’ll come and we’ll see. They did, and I have to say, they had some interesting takes. For various reasons, nothing went much further. A few years later, the thing reared its head.”

The show, called Snapshots, saw incarnations in Norfolk, Va., and more recently at Seattle’s Village Theatre in 2005, but the TheatreWorks version that begins previews today (June 18) and opens Saturday, June 21, is even more fully revised and includes songs from Wicked.

Schwartz insists that this is not a revue because it does indeed tell a story (penned by Stern) about a middle-age couple whose marriage is on the brink of collapse. A box of old photos sends the couple reeling into the past. The structure allows six actors to play the couple at various ages. Schwartz thinks the concept really works this time around.

“I’ve seen this tried before, and the script and the songs are inconsistent in both lyrics and tone,” Schwartz explains. “The songs were clearly not meant to fulfill dramatic moments in this particular story. It always seemed like a shotgun marriage. When I saw what was being developed for this story in terms of interesting relationships, I said if you’re really going to do this, the lyrics ought to be revised and songs ought to be rearranged or put into medleys to tell the story properly. That’s what we’ve done. This is truly a hybrid in almost the true botanical nature of the word because it yields a strange, exotic flower for fruit.”

Schwartz estimates that all the songs – most from his shows and movies, with only the title song freshly penned – have been about 50 percent rewritten, which could irk his fans.

“I can see how audiences will either be intrigued by it and think it’s cool or some will say it’s too weird and that they’re not accustomed to hearing certain songs with new words,” he says. “It’s adventurous and challenging, which makes it fun.”

Admitting that some might consider it sacrilege to re-write songs like “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife or “Popular” from Wicked, Schwartz says he relishes revisiting and revising his own work. In some cases, there are only a few lyrical changes, a verse here, a line here. In others, it’s the same tune with entirely new words.

“If, for instance, you know `Lion Tamer’ from The Magic Show, you’re suddenly going to hear words you’ve never heard before,” Schwartz says. “Other songs, like `Popular’ are pretty much the same except for a few words but in a totally different situation. If people are willing to get their heads turned around a little bit, then it’s fun. If that’s hard for them to do, it will just be annoying or disturbing.”

The last time Schwartz was in the Bay Area was to fine tune the world premiere of Wicked. He was so busy then that he didn’t deign to chat with journalists.

“In all honesty, the San Francisco run couldn’t have been better for us,” he says. “The show was well enough received that no one was panicking or feeling it was a disaster – no throwing of bathwater or babies. It was clear there was work to be done and revisions to be made in the book and the score. The critical community was, frankly, very helpful to us. We learned a lot from the reviews, which were honest and constructive in the aggregate, unlike New York, where the critics make up their minds before they come to the theater. It’s not just the negativity the critics express but their corruption.”

TheatreWorks, thankfully, is far from that critical crowd. Schwartz says he had enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the company and its founding artistic director, Robert Kelley, who is directing Snapshots. Schwartz even remembers – barely – a previous attempt at a Schwartz musical revue done at TheatreWorks in the late ’70s or early ’80s, but he can’t quite remember the name.

His big project at the moment is an opera commissioned by Opera Santa Barbara based on the movie Séance on a Wet Afternoon, a 1964 British film about a psychic who kidnaps a child to “prove” her abilities. The opera is slated to have its premiere in December 2009.

And for Wicked fans who were hoping that Schwartz and team might turn the book’s sequel, Son of a Witch, into a musical, don’t get your hopes up.

“I’m not big on sequels,” Schwartz says. “I don’t quite get why other than for economic incentive, they’re necessary. We told that story. I can understand the perspective of Gregory Maguire (the book’s author) about writing a sequel. I encouraged the writing of the sequel and another. I think he should make it a trilogy.”

Snapshots continues through July 13 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, corner of Castro and Mercy streets, Mountain View. Tickets are $26-$64. Call 650-903-6000 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

San Francisco Chronicle theater writer Robert Hurwitt has an excellent story in today’s paper about the ongoing struggles of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, the Bay Area’s 27-year-old African-American theater company.(Read the story here.)

The short version is that Stanley Williams and Quentin Easter, who run the company, were ousted from their downtown theater space by a real estate-grubbing university with an artistic bent. They had to be out of the space by June 1.

I talked to Williams and Easter earlier this week, and they seem confident that they will eventually find a space — many irons in the fire, and they seem to have the ear of SF Mayor Gavin Newsom. In truth, it’s shameful that the city’s preeminent African-American theater finds itself without a permanent home.

Yehmanja Houff, Zeondrae RoShawn, Brian S. King, Stefon Williams, Linwood “Woody” Clark, and Luther Michael Spratt (left to right) huddle to do some tight harmonies in The Black Nativity, A Gospel Celebration of Christmas, a Lorraine Hansberry Theatre production. Photo by Stacie Batiste

But even in this tricky time, the Lorraine Hansberry will have a season. Williams and Easter have done some creative collaborating. Here’s how the season shakes out:

August Wilson’s Radio Golf, Oct. 8-Nov. 2, a TheatreWorks production in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, Oct. 8-Nov. 2

Langston Hughes’ The Black Nativity. Venue to be announced (likely the Marines Memorial Theatre, across the street from the old Hansberry venue), November-December.

William A. Parker’s Waitin’ 2 End Hell (a spoof of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale from the man’s perspective), February 2009, venue to be determined.

Tracy Scott Wilson’s The Story, March 21-April 25, 2009. A co-production with S.F. Playhouse.

Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, Dubose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin. San Francisco Opera production in association with the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, June 9-27, 2009.

Another “in association” even is Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in November.

Call 415-345-3980 or visit www.lhtsf.org for information.

Two wonderful actors, formerly of the Bay Area, are having some good days in the New York theater world. We’re sorry they’re not having good theater days in the Bay Area, but we wish them well. Here’s the scoop:

Colman Domingo is starring in the Tony-nominated Passing Strange, which, incidentally, just won three Drama Desk Awards including Best Musical, two Obie Awards including Best New American Theatre Piece, two Theatre World Awards, and the top prize from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle (whew). If that weren’t cause enough to celebrate, Colman will direct New Professional Theatre’s production of Lisa B. Thompson’s Single Black Female, a comedy about “single black women and their search for love, dignity and clothes.” The production will star Soara-Joy Ross and Riddick Marie, at The Duke on 42nd St. in Manhattan. The show will run June 10-29.
Colman first directed the play in March of ‘99 at San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros.

Francis Jue, San Francisco native and a favorite at TheatreWorks in Mountain View (though that’s hardly the only local stage he has graced), won an Obie Award for his featured performance in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face.
Here’s a nice story on Francis from AsianConnections.com. No word on whether Francis will be in the production of Yellow Face closing Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 2008-09 season. Here’s hoping…

Cassie Beck, local actress and co-artistic director of San Francisco’s Crowded Fire Theatre Company went off to New York to be in Adam Bock’s Drunken City. And what do you know? She won a Theatre World Award for her New York debut!

Beck first worked on Bock’s play when it was part TheatreWorks’ New Works Festival (the play was developed as part of the company New Works Initiative). Beck was also featured in TheatreWorks’ production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, directed by Beck’s husband (and Crowded Fire co-artistic director) Kent Nicholson.

This year’s Theatre World Award winners include:
de’Adre Aziza, Passing Strange
Cassie Beck, Drunken City
Daniel Breaker, Passing Strange
Ben Daniels, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Deanna Dunagan, August: Osage County
Hoon Lee, Yellow Face
Alli Mauzey, Cry-Baby
Jenna Russell, Sunday in the Park with George
Mark Rylance, Boeing-Boeing
Loretta Ables Sayre, South Pacific
Jimmi Simpson, The Farnsworth Invention
Paulo Szot, South Pacific

The Theatre World Awards ceremony will be held in Manhattan June 10 at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre.

It’s all about us, right?

Sure the Tony Awards celebrate NEW YORK theater and Broadway and all that jazz, but what about US?

Not a problem. We can even make the Tonys Bay Area-centric. It’s a little harder this year because we’re not getting as many pre-Broadway tryouts as we have in past years, and our local geniuses are content with being local, so their output is expressly for us and not those NYC theater aesthetes.

So here’s how we factor into the Tonys:

First off, Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, a nominee for best play, will be part of the American Conservatory Theater season later this year. It’ll be a different production but the same play. So root for that one to win (it won’t –it’s all August: Osage County this year, but stay tuned — there’s buzz that one way or another, Bay Area audiences will be seeing that next season as well).

The big Bay Area tie comes courtesy of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, which co-produced the world premiere of Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s rock musical Passing Strange, which then went on to the Public Theater in New York and then BroadWAY. Passing Strange, as you’ll recall, earned seven Tony Award nominations on Tuesday.

Here’s Stew on the Berkeley Rep connection:

Passing Strange is all about pilgrimages to the Real, and my first real-life pilgrimage was to Berkeley when I was a teenager. This is why it was so moving and important to me that the play premiered at Berkeley Rep. Berkeley embodies many of the ideals that are celebrated in the play - a place where people live as if their thoughts have meaning and consequence. Berkeley Rep was the perfect place for a crazy rock band with no idea what theatre was to make a play. I can’t think of a better environment to have given birth to Passing Strange. Probably because there is none.

Finally, fine folks at TheatreWorks are always right on top of this stuff and provide the following list of their Tony connections:

BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTOR IN A MUSICAL
Danny Burstein, South Pacific - at TWorks in Everything’s Ducky (World Premiere from Bill Russell and Henry Krieger)
BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FEATURED ACTRESS IN A MUSICAL
Laura Benanti, Gypsy - at TWorks in Caraboo (written by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning author Marsha Norman) at New Works Festival reading
BEST CHOREOGRAPHY
Andy Blankenbuehler, In the Heights - at TWorks for Kept and A Little Princess (world Premiere from Andrew Lippa and Brian Crawley)
Dan Knechtges, Xanadu - at TWorks for Vanities (world premiere from David Kirshenbaum and Jack Heifner)
BEST COSTUME DESIGN OF A MUSICAL
Catherine Zuber, South Pacific - at TWorks for A Little Princess

For all your Tony Award needs, visit www.tonyawards.com.

Bay Area audiences were the first to see the most recent revival of A Chorus Line before it headed to New York (where it’s still running at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre).

Now, as the Broadway production moves beyond its 500th performance (celebrated last January), it’s time for the Line to hit the road. The national tour will return to the Curran Theatre July 8 through 27 as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season. This is the same theater that launched the very first A Chorus Line national tour in 1976.

Michael Gruber, who plays Zach on tour, was actually a member of the line during the original A Chorus Line’s record-breaking, nearly 15-year run on Broadway. He was in the final company playing Mike, who sings “I Can Do That.”

Another notable name in the cast is Nikki Snelson, who plays Cassie. Bay Area audiences saw Snelson in TheatreWorks’ world-premiere musical Kept and again in that company’s Smokey Joe’s Cafe. Snelson originated the role of the accused murderer/exercise guru in Legally Blonde, which had its pre-Broadway tryout at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre.

Tickets go on sale May 4 and will run $25 to $99. Call 415-512-7770 or visit www.shnsf.com or www.ticketmaster.com

Paul Gordon’s musical version of Emma, which Bay Area audiences turned into TheatreWorks’ highest-grossing production in its 38-year history, continues its merry matchmaking.

Cincinnati Playhouse and The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis are co-producing Emma, and TheatreWorks founding artistic director, Robert Kelley will be at the helm, just as he was for the Mountain View production.

The show, based on the Jane Austen novel, is at the Cincinnati Playhouse Sept. 2 - Oct. 3 and at The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis Oct. 8-Nov. 2; several cast members from the TheatreWorks world premiere are expected to reprise their respective roles.

Arielle Jacobs is Gabriella Montez and John Jeffrey Martin is Troy Bolton in the touring production of Disney’s High School Musical coming to San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus

Growing up in Half Moon Bay, Arielle Jacobs wanted to be a pop singer – the next Mariah or Whitney. She’s not there yet, but she did manage to snag a leading role in one of the hottest properties of the 21^st century.

Jacobs is starring as Gabriella Montez. If you’re a tween (around the ages of 9 to 12), that name is enough to elicit squeals of delight. For those of you a little out of that demographic, Gabriella Montez is one half of “Troy and Gabriella,” the jock and the brain, the Romeo and Juliet if you will, of Disney’s cultural phenomenon known as High School Musical.

HSM, as it’s known in cyberspace, was an original musical made for the Disney Channel. No one quite expected the level of popularity it found. The TV movie sequel, aptly titled High School Musical 2, became the most-watched TV program ever on cable.

There’s an entire HSM empire as only Disney could create it replete with every product imaginable, burgeoning pop careers for all the movie’s young stars (Zac Efron, who plays Troy in the movies, even has potential as a breakout movie star after his star turn in last summer’s Hairspray movie) and even a touring ice show (which played the Bay Area last year).

Jacobs’ take on Gabriella can be seen beginning April 15 at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre when the touring stage production of High School Musical opens for a two-week run as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season.

On the phone from a tour stop in Des Moines, Iowa, the chipper Jacobs, 24, says she and her family lived in Half Moon Bay until she was 14, when the Jacobs clan moved to New Jersey.

But Jacobs has fond memories of our little coastal hamlet. “I remember the pumpkin festival, of course,” she says. “To this day I’m obsessed with pumpkins. At one of our tour stops, we went to a glass-blowing factory, and I blew a glass pumpkin.”

Jacobs also recalls clam chowder at Barbara’s Fish Wrap as “the best in the whole world” and remembers riding horses on the beach and through the eucalyptus forest.

“That smell still reminds me of the beach there,” she says. “And you can’t beat those sunsets.”

As a kid, Jacobs was truly serious about being a singer. She took voice with Teddi Lightfoot in San Francisco, and she and her brother, Adam, joined a group called Razzle Dazzle Kids and did little cabaret and Christmas shows around the Bay. One year she was Raggedy-Ann then worked her way up to Mrs. Claus.

She also studied music at the San Francisco Conservatory, and though guided toward classical music, she fell in love with show music.

“I really liked performing and communicating story through song,” she says. “I started to lean in the musical theater direction, and my parents were really supportive, and I have to tell you, I was famous for starting something and getting bored half-way through. I started playing soccer because my brother played soccer. My parents took me to all the practices and bought the equipment. I was 7 or so. I went to the first game and quite at half-time.”

Luckily her interest in theater remained constant. And so did her brother’s. Apparently the Jacobs family ate show-tune Wheaties for breakfast. The two Jacobs siblings made their professional theater debuts in 1994 in TheatreWorks’ Honor Song for Crazy Horse. Adam was Little Hawk and Arielle was Blue Swan. Jump ahead a few years, and while Arielle tours the country in High School Musical, her brother recently finished a gig on Broadway in Les Miserables.

“My parents don’t know quite what they did, but they’re really proud of us,” Jacobs says.

Even before there was a stage version of HSM, Jacobs says she was alerted to the movie because friends and casting directors kept telling her she looked like the original Gabriella (played by Vanessa Hudgens). So when auditions rolled around, Jacobs felt primed.

“I could relate to Gabriella,” Jacobs says. “I didn’t just look like her, I am a lot like her.”

Being on the inside of the HSM phenomenon, Jacobs says she can understand why the show has become such a hit. “The story is very universal,” she says. “It’s very much a model for kids to show them what high school is going to be like and how it’s possible to pursue different things and follow your dreams and get the support of friends, family and teachers.”

Keen HSM observers will notice differences between the TV and stage versions. For instance, onstage there’s a new narrator character, Jack Scott, the school announcer. There are also some new songs – “Cellular Fusion” recalls “The Telephone Hour” from Bye Bye Birdie as the students of East High blaze up their cell phones spreading rumors about Troy and Gabriella and the school talent show – and some new complexity in the relationships, most notably between brother and sister Ryan and Sharpay. Drama teacher Ms. Darbus and basketball coach Bolton also have a new level of adult interaction.

Touring to cities large and small has been a wearying but ultimately satisfying experience for Jacobs, who also paints and takes photos. When she’s done with the tour, she’s heading to Brooklyn, where she just bought an apartment. Her next goal: to star in a Broadway show, of course. But there are other things to do first.

“I’m going on an artist’s retreat,” she says. “I’m going to paint for four days during a break in the tour. I’m also hoping to write some music. I wrote a children’s book and want to get that published as well.”

As if she weren’t busy enough touring and maintaining an official backstage blog (highschoolmusicalblog.com), she also has her own Web site (www.ariellejacobs.com) and an environmental site called www.helphealtheearth.com, which opens with a photo of Jacobs literally hugging a tree.

“I like to direct a lot of the HSM fans to that site,” she says. “It’s all about helping the environment and appreciating nature. It’s really hard on the road to find people who care about recycling. I’m trying not to get depressed too much that people don’t seem to care.”

Spoken like a true Half Moon Bay kid.

High School Musical runs April 15-27 at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco. Tickets are $23-$85. Call 415-512-7770 or visit www.shnsf.com or www.ticketmaster.com for information.