Chad Jones’ Theater Dogs

Paula West is going to do things to you in the dark, and you’re going to like it.

Now that she can actually be considered a veteran of the San Francisco cabaret scene, West is letting loose in her new show at the Rrazz Room in the Hotel Nikko, and man does it feel good.

Backed by the George Mesterhazy Quartet, a jaunty West takes the stage and in short order she struts, she makes friends, and she romances in the dark. In her opening number, she funkifies “Dark Town Strutter’s Ball” to the point that a truly golden oldie sounds like the hippest thing going. Then she bends Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” into a fetching reggae pulse (and even makes it sound a little Cole Porter-ish). It turns out those turns are merely a warmup for the near-nuclear explosion of “Romance in the Dark,” a 1940s tease made famous by Lil Green.

Bold and sexy, “Romance in the Dark” gives West the perfect opportunity to show off just why she’s so incredibly good. The song caresses and punches. It slaps and tickles, if you will. And West imbues the song with warmth that turns into heat and sass that turns into sensuality.

After that opening trio, can I just say that the Great Recession is officially over, and Paula West is the first step toward recovery – at least toward recovering a glimmer of unadulterated joy in these dark winter months. After the momentum of “Darktown Strutter’s” and Dylan followed by the climax of “Romance,” there’s no way West can follow up with anything but Cole Porter. “Nobody’s Chasing Me,” with its lounge-y melody and clever lyrics, serves as a between-courses palate cleanser, and the rest of the show is a nutritious feast.

West is pulling tunes from all over the place – New Orleans for “Iko Iko,” Tin Pan Alley for Hoagy Carmichael’s delicious “Bread and Gravy, mid-’60s Dylan again with a fantastic “Maggie’s Farm” – and she delivers them all with shifting colors and a voice as supple as it is strong.

For the evening’s wrenching ballad, she soars through “Where Flamingos Fly,” an obscure tune recorded by Peggy Lee and Helen Merrill that involves a criminal lover making a quick getaway. And she winds down with a swingin’ “Have You Met Sir Jones,” “My Romance” and “The Music Goes Round and Round.” To wrap up this close-to-perfect cabaret evening, she hauls out her big belt notes to wail on Porter’s “I’m in Love Again.” West’s exuberance is barely contained, and her opening-night audience felt exactly the same way. They demanded a second encore, and West obliged, offering “The Snake,” her ssssssinfully biting signature tune.

Paula West just gets better and better. She has exited the realm of wonderful cabaret singers and entered the pantheon of greatness. She’s at the Rrazz Room for the next month and a half. Treat yourself and see her – at least once. They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Paula West continues at the Rrazz Room through March 14. Tickets are $35-$45 plus a two-drink minimum. The Hotel Nikko is at 222 Mason St. Visit www.therrazzroom.com for information.

Now here’s a treat. Paula sings “Like a Rolling Stone” with the George Mesterhazy Quartet.

Julia Brothers floors ‘em in Joel Drake Johnson’s The First Grade at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company.
Rebecca Schweitzer is in the background. Photo by David Allen

The Bay Area is blessed with an abundance of theatrical talent. Spend any time at all in local theaters, and that becomes clear pretty quickly.

What’s even better is that sometimes we get really lucky, and that theatrical talent decides to stick around for a while rather than bouncing off to New York or Los Angeles. There are a number of actors, directors and writers whose names alone make me want to show up at one production or another.

High on that list of MVPs is Julia Brothers, who has performed everywhere from San Jose Repertory Theatre to TheatreWorks to the Magic to Marin Theatre Company. She steps on stage, and you know you’re in for something special. She’s totally in control, always interesting and continuously surprising. There’s a grounded quality to her characters that makes them real, even when they’re outrageous.

Last year, while briefly exiled to Sacramento, I had the opportunity to see Brothers star in Margaret Edson’s Wit at the B Street Theatre, and though the production surrounding here was hit and miss, Brothers was a lightning bolt of brilliance.

At the moment, you can see Brothers doing her thing in the world premiere of Joel Drake Johnson’s funny, heartening The First Grade at the Aurora Theatre Company. Brothers stars as Sydney, a first-grade teacher whose control of her classroom is in direct opposition to her lack of control in the real world. Her grown daughter (Rebecca Schweitzer) and grandson have moved back to what she calls “the house of baggage,” and though she has divorced her husband (Warren David Keith), he’s still living on the other side of the house. Suffering from arthritis, Sydney goes to see a physical therapist (Tina Sanchez) whose soap operatic personal life immediately triggers Sydney’s Good Samaritan meddler button.

Brothers’ Sydney is cranky and crackly, but watch her in the classroom when she raises her right hand as a signal to quiet her students. She’s a benign but powerful dictator, and she truly loves her students. Sydney takes true delight in the power of words, especially the ones her students bring her like show-and-tell gems: congenial, solipsism, plethora, pertinacious. She’s more ferocious when it comes to her testy daughter and boozy ex-husband. It’s no wonder she wants to help the therapist because she seems to be unable to help anyone else in her personal realm. During a painful therapy session, she rails against a popular slogan. “I have plenty of pain and not one ounce of gain!” she yowls.

Brothers shows us how tough Sydney can be but also how tender. During an intense conversation with her daughter, Angie, the subject turns increasingly dark to the point of a rather shocking admission. Sydney’s smart-aleck warrior shield falls away, and a compassionate, frightened mother’s face emerges. It’s a beautiful moment – one of many in director Tom Ross’ sharply etched production.

There are laughs amid the substance, real life amid the theatricality, and Brothers is there at the center of it, doing her usual, extraordinary balancing job.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

The First Grade continues through Feb. 28 at the Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $15-$55. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org/.

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Megan McGinnis and Robert Adelman Hancock star in the TheatreWorks premiere of
Daddy Long Legs, a new musical. Photo by Mark Kitaoka.

There’s a joke about being huge in Japan, but in the case of Jean Webster’s 1912 novel Daddy Long Legs, it’s quite true. The novel continues to be a big hit in Japan and in England as well. Why? Perhaps it’s Webster’s strong feminist (for the early 20^th century anyway) take on life. She’s strident but with charm.

The latest incarnation of Webster’s story – after her own stage adaptation, countless movie versions (including the most famous with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron in 1955), a British stage musical and made-for-Japanese-TV movies – is a new chamber musical from the team of Paul Gordon (music and lyrics) and John Caird (book and direction). These are the guys who partnered so memorably on Jane Eyre (a Broadway flop but a hit for TheatreWorks) and Emma (a big, big hit for TheatreWorks), and they return to TheatreWorks with Daddy Long Legs, a co-production with Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura (where the show made its initial bow) and the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (the final stop after Mountain View).

I interviewed Caird and Gordon for Theatre Bay Area magazine. Read the story here.

The TheatreWorks production is completely delightful – if you’re a musical theatre fan. I can’t imagine anyone who doesn’t appreciate being sung at for 2 ½ hours having a good time here, but what’s surprising in Caird’s production is the way he keeps the stage lively with only two people singing and not interacting face to face until the end. Like Webster’s book, this is an epistolary story. Jerusha (Megan McGinnis) is the oldest orphan in the orphanage, and her spunk has been noticed by a benefactor who volunteers to pay for her college education. The donor wishes to remain anonymous, but Jerusha catches a glimpse of his long, leggy shadow and comes up with the nickname Daddy Long Legs.

Unlike Webster’s book, the musical allows us to hear from the benefactor, Jervis (Robert Adelman Hancock) through letters to Jerusha he writes but never sends. Through a bit of duplicity, Jervis actually meets Jerusha, but she remains unaware that he’s anything but a roommate’s uncle. What was creepy in the Astaire-Caron movie (the age difference was a game killer in spite of Astaire’s considerable charms) is a non-issue here. Jerusha thinks her “daddy” is an ancient money bags type, when in reality he’s sort of a hot, young money bags type. Their fated hook-up is actually welcome rather than cringe inducing.

There’s a certain sameness to Gordon’s appealing pop-folk-show tune score, but luckily the sound is quite pleasant even if you can’t always tell one song from another. The inevitable romantic ending cries out for a full-out show tune duet, but Gordon keeps things fairly low key, and music director Laura Bergquist (along with her warm, inviting six-piece band paying Gordon’s own orchestrations) never fails him in terms of keeping momentum and emotion pouring from the orchestra pit.

Though not as sparkling as Emma, Daddy Long Legs has tremendous charm, and much of it emanates from McGinnis, who is perfectly cast as the smart and lively Jerusha. Hancock provides a nice foil for her (along with some lovely harmonies), but the show really belongs to McGinnis, whose attractive voice and endearing manner really give this Daddy legs.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Daddy Long Legs continues through Feb. 14 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $34 to $67. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

In the Palo Alto Players production of Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire, Becca (Shannon Warrick)
and Howie (Earle Carlson) look for comfort after the unimaginable. Photo courtesy of Palo Alto Players

Last weekend I made like Alice in Wonderland and headed into a rabbit hole. While Alice ended up traumatized by a heartless queen, a funky tea party and a disturbing cat, my rabbit hole had a pedigree — a Pulitzer Prize for drama to be more precise.

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is an extraordinary play because it takes what could be a movie-of-the-week topic, which is the grief and mourning after the accidental death of a young child, and turns into a deeply felt, emotionally honest account of what it means to be a human being amid other complex human beings.

I reviewed the Palo Alto Players production, beautifully directed by Marilyn Langbhen, for the Palo Alto Weekly.

Read the review here.

I’ve been spending the last few months with Ira Gershwin, and I must say, I have completely enjoyed his company.

Greg MacKellan, the co-artistic director of San Francisco company 42nd Street Moon approached me last year and asked me to contribute a narration script for what is becoming an annual Moon tradition: a salon evening paying tribute to a great lyricist. Last year it was Dorothy Fields. This year, Ira Gershwin.

What I knew about Ira was what a lot of people know — with his brother, George, he wrote some of the greatest of great songs, including “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “‘S Wonderful,” and the list goes on. And on. George (the music) was the flashy, charming guy whose premature death at age 38 from a brain tumor was a tremendous blow to Ira (the words), the soft-spoken, bookish older brother.

So how do you create an entertaining show about a guy whose life was, by all accounts, productive but free of scandal? Who liked to golf and play poker with his songwriting buddies and eschewed all the Hollywood/Broadway glitz and glamour?

The simple answer is: you let Ira’s work do all the work. His day-to-day life may have lacked flash, but it didn’t lack for brilliance. Ira channeled his brilliance and passion into his lyrics, which he cared about passionately. His nickname was “The Jeweler” because he was such a consummate craftsman, and boy did he churn out the gems.

Even after George died in 1937 (the song they were working on at the time of George’s death, ironically, was “They Can’t Take That Away from Me”), Ira continued to hone his craft. Look no further than his collaboration with Kurt Weill on Lady in the Dark or with Harold Arlen on the Judy Garland/James Mason movie A Star Is Born for evidence of his post-George genius.

One of the delights of researching the script was discovering some delightful songs. Being a native of Nevada, I was intrigued by the song “Sweet Nevada” from Park Avenue, the 1946 Broadway flop Ira wrote with Arthur Schwartz. Originally written in the style of a Viennese waltz, the song (about potential divorcees heading to the Silver State) morphed into a country swing, which Ira described like this: “The undulating Blue Danube-ish three-quarter-time rip-roared to a clop-clop, plunk-plunk, bang-bang rowdy-dow.” I thought it would be great to hear a little of the song in the original waltz style then shift to the final country-swing version. Alas, though we have the lyrics — “A bill of divorcement/At one time, of course, meant/A lady was dragged in the dust–/Till Nevada saved the day;/Sweet Nevada led the way” — the music is somehow no longer with us.

Oh, well. Plenty of other material from which to choose. Another favorite discovery was from late in Ira’s career. He kept threatening to retitre but always got pulled back into one project or another. His last was writing some songs for Billy Wilder’s 1964 comedy Kiss Me, Stupid. Using some of George’s unused trunk music, Ira composed lyrics to several songs (none of which are used to great effect in the movie, which is a mess), and he seemed to be having a grand time. He wrote a comedy number called “I’m a Poached Egg,” which was based on a fragment of a song from the ’30s, with the assignment of creating something “nutty.” He more than delivered. And delivered. Ira got on a roll and just couldn’t stop writing lyrics.

Here’s the basic idea:

I’m a poached egg
Without a piece of toast,
Yorkshire pudding
Without a beef to roast,
A haunted house
That hasn’t got a ghost—
When I’m without you

He kept going and going with this song. My favorite verses, which were never used, include:

My Fair Lady
Without the rain in Spain,
I’m a dentist without novocaine—
When I’m without you

or

I’m a missile
That can’t get into space,
Monte Carlo
Without a Princess Grace,
Perry Mason
The time he lost a case—
When I’m without you

Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing the song here.

I have a new appreciation for Ira Gershwin, especially for his robust sense of humor and his class. Spending time in his world is, well, it’s awful nice. It’s paradise. It’s what I love to see.

Now listen to Ira himself (clearly reading a written text) talk about his life and his brother, George.

There’s a wonderful story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the show and its star, Donna McKechnie. Read it here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Nice Work If You Can Get It: An Ira Gershwin Salon Evening starring Donna McKechnie is at 7pm, Thursday, January 28, at the Alcazar Theatre, 650 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $70 for the show, $100 for the show and a dessert after party with Ms. McKechnie. Call 415
255 8207 or visit www.42ndstmoon.org for information.

Two extraordinary shows are lighting up Bay Area stages, and in each of them, the specter of death hovers in the shadows.

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.
 

TOP: Ralph and Myron (l-r, Patrick Russell and Charles Dean) have a father-and-son talk as Moe (back, Rod Gnapp) listens in Aurora Theatre Company’s production of Awake and Sing! Photo by David Allen
BOTTOM: Playwright D.H.H. (Pun Bandhu, left) takes a lesson on the American dream from his father, H.Y.H. (Francis Jue, right) in the Bay Area premiere of Yellow Face at TheatreWorks. Photo by Mark Kitaoka

As long as there have been fathers and sons, one has wanted to please the other and often encountered difficulty in doing so.

Two very different plays opened in the Bay Area last weekend, and each has, at its center, a touching father-son story.

In the Aurora Theatre Company’s Awake and Sing!, Clifford Odets’ 1934 slice-of-Depression-life family drama, the son Ralph (Patrick Russell) is constantly being brow beaten toward the life of a successful capitalist –not by his father but by his domineering mother, Bessie, played with ferocity by Ellen Ratner. Ralph’s father, Myron, is the epitome of meekness. Though he means well, Myron (the ever-compelling Charles Dean) can’t help but be his wife’s best ally, even when she’s lying and scheming and doing what she thinks – in her sometimes warped way – is best for her family.

Ralph can’t turn to his father for a role model. Instead he turns to his soulful grandfather, Jacob (Ray Reinhardt), who knows that in spite of Bessie’s ranting about the importance of money, life can’t be printed on dollar bills. But Jacob, like Myron, can’t really stand up to Bessie, who admits to her children that she had to be both father and mother to them.

There’s a fascinating friction between the generations in director Joy Carlin’s production. We see Jacob’s generation, which has found meaning in struggle and ideas that actually mean something in the life pursuit. Then we have Bessie’s generation reacting against that – grabbing for money and security no matter what the spiritual cost. And then there’s Ralph’s generation, seeking something beyond the struggle, beyond the financial fixation.

No one’s really happy, but everyone’s up against it. There’s a sadly sweet scene toward the end of the play when Myron, who has gone to bed after much emotional unrest in the family, returns for an apple. He has no way of knowing that his children, Ralph and daughter Hennie (Rebecca White), have undergone seismic emotional shifts that will affect the course of their lives.

No, Myron, chomps on his apple and heads back to bed and to the all-consuming Bessie.

Meanwhile, down at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, TheatreWorks is traversing a more contemporary father-son relationship in David Henry Hwang’s mockumentary Yellow Face.

Hwang makes himself the central character in this true/false account of racial uproar in the theatrical community and beyond. There’s farce and there’s dramatic/political heft here as Hwang (played by doppelganger Pun Bandhu) recounts his adventures trying to prevent Jonathan Pryce, a Caucasian Welsh actor from playing a half-Asian pimp in the Broadway production of Miss Saigon. But then, in creating a follow-up play to his Tony-winning M. Butterfly, Hwang writes a racial farce and accidentally casts a Caucasian man (Thomas Azar) in the role of an Asian man pretending to be Caucasian to get a role in a play.

Hwang plays fast and loose with the facts as the theatrical brouhaha becomes overshadowed by systematic racism perpetrated by the American government on Asian Americans in the 1990s.

Amid the farcical chaos of director Robert Kelley’s production, one relationship emerges with emotional depth. That relationship is between Hwang and his father, Henry Y. Hwang, who founded the first Asian-American-owned, federally chartered bank in the U.S. Francis Jue, a longtime Bay Area favorite, plays the elder Hwang (among many other roles) and reveals just why the role won him an Obie when he performed it off Broadway at the Public Theater.

Jue, playing well beyond his actual age, makes Henry a fascinating man – a self-made Chinese immigrant who always idolized Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper and who ended up a wealthy man. Henry is funny, especially when trying to get tickets to Miss Saigon through his son, but when things turn serious in the second act, Jue keeps pace with the jagged turns of the script and imbues the character – indeed the play – with heart.

Hwang has clearly been deeply affected by his relationship with his father, and in many ways, in spite of the tornado of issues swirling through the play, Yellow Face seems in many ways to be a simple tribute to the elder Hwang, a man the playwright missed and wanted (or needed) to conjure.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Aurora Theatre Company’s Awake and Sing continues through Sept. 27. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org for information.

TheatreWorks’ Yellow Face continues through Sept. 20. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org for information.

Patty Gallagher is a gun-toting Winnie in the Cal Shakes production of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. Photo by Kevin Berne

In the world of live theater, you never know from where the drama will come.

For California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Jonathan Moscone and his production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, there was already a certain amount of drama in the choice of the play – the first time Moscone had tackled Beckett and the first time Beckett would be performed in all the outdoor glory of the Bruns Amphitheater.

As a way to counteract the risk of doing an essentially one person play (one person who, by the way, is stuck in a mound of muck for the entire play), Moscone cast Oscar-nominee Marsha Mason, one of those comforting and familiar actors we’ve watched, admired and enjoyed for years. Add a little celebrity pizzazz to a play potential patrons might not know much about and you have a theatrical event.

But oh, the drama. Deep into the rehearsal period, Mason had to exit the production for, as the theater company put it, “personal reasons.” Suddenly the event is now back to the red zone of risk.

In steps Patty Gallagher, an associate professor of theater arts at UC Santa Cruz. Where patrons might have said, “Marsha Mason, how wonderful,” they now say, “Patty who?”

Well Patty Gallagher is a hero for stepping into a difficult role in a difficult play (a role she’d done before and a play she teaches) and even more of a hero for a performance that is full of life and a kind of joy you don’t expect in a Beckett musing on mortality. The valiant effort is applause-worthy enough. But what she does with the role goes beyond heroic. She’s a revelation.

Moscone and his company embraced the drama in a way that actually enhances the experience of watching the play. More specifically, Moscone began blogging about directing the show, about Mason’s departure and about working with Gallagher and her co-star, Dan Hiatt, who appears intermittently but is essential to the power of the play. In a frank and open way, Moscone exposes the stress of the experience but also the support he received and the depth he was able to reach with Gallagher and Hiatt. Here’s a sample of Moscone writing on Aug. 3 in an entry titled “I’m nervous but I’m in love”:

“Have frankly been quite exhausted, physically that is, not mentally or spiritually, from this week’s work. But I have to say, I am in a place I thought I’d never be. I cherish this project in a way that surpasses any other piece I have worked on in my life. Partly it’s the events of the week that make me feel more connected to this piece than perhaps to other plays that haven’t seen themselves through a real crisis-turned-opportunity. And a great part is this play. Patty (Gallagher) makes me love this work and have a deep emotional connection to Beckett, something I thought would never happen.”

Knowing what went on behind the scenes adds an extra layer of excitement to the play, and that layer underscores what Beckett already seems to be driving at: amid all the garbage, mud, dirt and pain of life, we can choose to view all of it with gratitude, through our connection to others and with the simple joy of being alive. That’s what I took away from Gallagher’s ebullient Winnie, a formally dressed woman stuck up to her waist in a dirt mound (Todd Rosenthal’s set pours right off the Bruns stage and into the audience).

Winnie wakes in the morning at the sound of a piercing bell, performs the routine that sustains her, attempts to chat with her husband, Willie, who lives in another part of the dirt mound, and tries valiantly to find things to be cheerful about, whether it’s memories, a mumbled word from Wilie or the pleasure of language itself. She is quite literally being buried alive (in Act 2 she’s buried up to her neck) but she is more alive than many of the people we know.

I have often found Beckett intimidating – the gnawing sense of not getting it tends to destroy my ability to enjoy the play. But several Beckett productions stick in my mind as having helped me relax enough to really listen and experience Beckett – one was Cutting Ball Theatre’s Krapp’s Last Tape earlier this year. The other was years and years ago, in a small theater at the Central YMCA in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Hiatt co-starred as Lucky in Waiting for Godot, and he was brilliant. Dennis Moyer directed the production for Fine Arts Repertory Theatre, and it starred Joe Bellan and John Robb.

That hugely enjoyable production was the first time I realized that Beckett could be equal parts brilliance and boredom, entertainment and brain-stretching philosophy. That’s what Happy Days is, and it also feels like therapy for our world at this particular moment in history. May we all be as lucky or as resilient, as resourceful or as valiant as Winnie and, like her, go down singing.

Backstage drama, onstage drama – it’s all the same thing when it feeds the audience and gives us more to muse upon. There’s a happy ending for this production of Happy Days, but the ending of the play itself is a miraculous blend of the shattering, the beautiful and the inspirational. There’s no such thing as happiness as a destination – only moments, here and gone.

And can I add, one great moment of happiness in this production came from the intermission music mix. While the audience milled about the Bruns, an instrumental version of the theme song from the TV show “Happy Days” played, and I could think of nothing more appropriate.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Cal Shakes’ Happy Days continues through Sept. 6 at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda. Call 510 548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org for information.

Leo Bloom (Tim Reynolds) and Ulla (Brittany Ogle) in Foothill Music Theatre’s The Producers. Photo by David Allen

These aren’t appearing here in a timely fashion, but they’re here, just for the record.

This summer I did a couple of reviews for the Palo Alto Weekly.

I saw Foothill Music Theatre’s production of The Producers, which was exciting because opening night got stopped by the police — literally. That was a first in a lifetime of theatergoing.

Read the review here.

I also saw Dragon Theatre’s A Girl’s Guide to Chaos.

Read the review here.

Shannon Cochran (left) is eldest daughter Barbara and Academy Award-winner Estelle Parsons is Violet, her drug-addled mother, in the national Broadway tour of August: Osage County, running through Sept. 6 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by Robert J. Saferstein

Where have all the family dramas gone and why did they become so unfashionable?

With the grand-scale success of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-wining August: Osage County, the family drama came roaring back, but while watching the excellent touring production now at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre (as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season), I had to wonder why in the world the drama of thick family dynamics became so passé.

Incorporating chunks of O’Neill and Williams and Miller, Letts really lets loose in August, a 3 ½-hour trip through family hell, complete with drugs, drink, death, incest, bile and dark, dark humor. We get three generations of the Weston family of Pawhuska, Oklahoma (about 60 miles northwest of Tulsa). We’re deep in the plains, which we’re told is a state of mind sort of like the blues: she’s got a bad case of the plains.

We have the missing patriarch and his pill-popping wife (played by the redoubtable Estelle Parsons), their three grown daughters, assorted other relatives and the lone grandchild (as addicted to her weed as the grandmother is to her pills).

Listening to the audience at the Curran on opening night, it was exciting to feel an audience connecting with a play. That’s what family dramas do because we can all relate on some level. We may not be sleeping with our first cousins, we may not have a mother who takes delight in ripping us to shreds and we may not be quite as dysfunctional as the Westons, but we can relate. We have family members who can slice into us seemingly without even trying. One tossed-off comment can cause a serious wound, and that’s how you know you’re with family. Other people have to work much harder to wound less.

There are two moments in the play that really struck me and reminded me how long it had been since I’d seen a family drama that reminded me just how cathartic a family drama can be.

The first involves Uncle Charlie (Paul Vincent O’Connor – a former Bay Area actor doing great work), probably the kindest, most sensible person in the play. He’s married to Mattie Fae (Libby George), sister of the drug-addled Violet. Charlie and Mattie Fae have a son, Little Charles (Stephen Riley Key), whom Mattie Fae belittles at every opportunity. Finally, Charlie has had enough. He loves his wife and son dearly, but enough is enough.

Charlie: “Mattie Fae, we’re gonna go get in the car right now and go home, and if you say one more mean thing to that boy I’m going to kick your fat Irish ass onto the highway. You hear me?”

Of course, Mattie Fae is astonished to hear her generally genial husband say such a thing. But he’s not finished yet. And this is where it gets good because Charlie (via Letts’ incredible skill with dialogue) is about to reaffirm his love for both son and wife all the while putting his foot firmly down.

Charlie: “I don’t understand this meanness. I look at you and your sister and the way you talk to people and I don’t understand it. I just can’t understand why folks can’t be respectful of one another…We’ve been married for 38 years. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But if you can’t find a generous place in your heart for your own son, we’re not going to make it to 39.”

I find that extraordinary, partly because it makes me wish that every family in difficulty had a Charlie to provide such a stern moment of clarity and enforced kindness.

Shortly after Charlie lays down the law, Mattie Fae is part of another extraordinary scene, this time with her eldest niece, Barbara (the extraordinary Shannon Cochran). Some deep, dark family secrets are revealed, and Barbara is astonished that her Aunt Mattie Fae is capable of holding such juicy secrets.

Mattie Fae: “…Maybe it’s hard for you to believe, looking at me, knowing me the way you do, all these years. I know to you, I’m just your old fat Aunt Mattie Fae. But I’m more than that, sweetheart…there’s more to me than that.”

That moment really struck me – I immediately thought of family members I’ve known my entire life but whom I’ve never really known – not as anything but my family member. In that one line lies an entire play — not this one, but another one. Maybe Tracy Letts will write it. Maybe someone else. But I’m in the mood for more family drama – families in the here and now, navigating this interesting, troubled, exasperating world of ours.

Read my interview with Estelle Parsons for Theatre Bay Area magazine.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

SHN/Best of Broadway’s August: Osage County continues through Sept. 6 at the Curran Theatre. Visit www.shnsf.com for information.