About Chad Jones

Chad Jones is a San Francisco Bay Area journalist and theater enthusiast. He was a theater critic and features writer for the Oakland Tribune/Bay Area News Group for 10 years. He is a member of the Will Glickman new play award committee and served as the San Francisco correspondent for London-based magazine Plays International. He is the executive director of the San Francisco Arts Education Project (www.sfartsed.org), a nonprofit started in 1968 that provides hands-on arts experiences for children in public schools. Contact me at chiatovich@gmail.com

Nightmare or revelation? It’s Cambodian Rock Band, and it rocks

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: The cast of Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band at Berkeley Repertory Theatre includes (from left) Joseph Ngo, Abraham Kim, Geena Quintos and Moses Villarama. BELOW: Ngo and Francis Jue. Photos by Lynn Lane/Berkeley Rep

Cambodian Rock Band is such a unique show that it’s hard to describe. It’s the most uplifting story about human atrocities you can imagine. You could say it’s a play with music, but the music – performed live by the cast – is such an integral part of the story (and the emotion of it all), that you could call it a concert with play. There’s genocide and the uplift of great live music.

Whatever it is, it’s powerful and moving and a joy (and, truth be told, a terror) to behold on stage at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre. The exuberant cast keeps up with every tonal shift, time shift and musical cue in playwright Lauren Yee’s compelling story, and the experience slams the audience this way and that in the best possible way.

The roots of Cambodian Rock Band go back to 2016 and to Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor new works program. From there, the show has been produced in a lot of places – Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Rep, off Broadway to name a few – and it’s that off-Broadway production from the Signature Theatre that is making the rounds of major regional theaters, including Berkeley Rep.

Director Chay Yew dexterously blends all the disparate elements of Yee’s script into something wholly original. The show begins as a rock concert circa 1975 in Phnom Penh. The five-piece band is Cyclos, and they’re caught up in the excitement of recording their first album. Then everything changes. The Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot comes to power, launching a horrifying reign that ultimately led to the death of an estimated 2 million Cambodians. Amid the totalitarian terror, education, music and art were outlawed, and those who practiced such dangerous trades were systematically dispatched.

From the opening concert, we bounce to Phnom Penh in 2008 and the first war crimes trial related to the Pol Pot regime. A young Cambodian-American woman, Neary (Geena Quintos) is part of the legal team bringing Commrade Duch to justice after his stint as director of the infamous S-21 prison, which is estimated to have slaughtered 20,000 people. When the prison was liberated in 1979, only seven people appeared to have survived. But, as Neary discovers, there is a possible eighth survivor, and she needs to locate him so he can testify.

Just as her trial is about to begin, Neary’s father, Chum (Joe Ngo) shows up and wants to bring her back to the U.S. He fled the Khmer regime and doesn’t want his daughter mired in all that horror from 30 years before. But she is insistent, and the father-daughter struggle will delve into some tangled family history that is played out in flashbacks.

To say that Ngo as Chum is extraordinary really isn’t saying enough. He is called upon to sing and play guitar in the band, play the young Chum navigating the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge and play the older Chum, a husband and father and American who would rather not re-live his Cambodian past. By turns funny, sympathetic and devastatingly dramatic, Ngo brings an astonishing level of energy and depth to his character’s remarkable journey.

Quintos as Neary is a defiant but sympathetic daughter following her own quest for justice, but she’s also a powerhouse singer in the band. Moses Villarama plays characters in both of the play’s eras and plucks a mean bass, while Abraham Kim wallops the drums (and some smaller roles) and Jane Lui tackles the keys (and prisoners at S-21).

Former Bay Area resident (but still Bay Area favorite) Francis Jue interrupts the opening concert to act as a sort of host for the evening and to guide us back and forth in time until he becomes a major player in the drama. Nobody can convey more charm or more menace than Jue, who is truly masterful in this show. And not for nothing, he plays a mean cowbell.

Unlike something like Life Is Beautiful the warmhearted(?) Roberto Benigni comedy(?) about the Holocaust, Cambodian Rock Band is not sappy or easy. Yee isn’t softening Pol Pot’s genocide in any way. The use of music – something the Khmer Rouge considered so dangerous they banned it – and specifically rock music (originals by the band Dengue Fever plus some vintage Cambodian surf songs and other period tunes) emphasizes the raging glory of humanity – and the human connection that art creates – even in the face of humanity at its very worst. An evening that begins as a concert ends as a transcendent event that feels enormous and full of hope.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band continues through April 2 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. Running time: 2 1/2 hours (including a 15-minute intermission). Tickets are $21-$122 (subject to change). Call 510-647-2949 or visit berkeleyrep.org.

Dear San Francisco still charms, dazzles

Posted on February 25, 2023 by Chad Jones

The human-scale circus acts in Dear San Francisco are as captivating as ever as the show continues to evolve in its second year at Club Fugazi. Photos courtesy of Dear San Francisco and Club Fugazi Experiences

Dear San Francisco, the dazzling acrobatic spectacular that had the audacity to set up shop in Club Fugazi after the historic nearly half-century run of Beach Blanket Babylon’s, is now in its second year. The show will always hold in a place in my heart as only the second in-person show I attended after a year and a half of watching theater on screens. That experience was mind blowing, not least because I was in a crowd of people who seemed to be as happy as I was just to be in the same room.

And then there was the show – co-conceived and co-directed by Shana Carroll and Gypsy Snider of the amazing cirque nouveau troupe The 7 Fingers – a thrilling, up-close experience with nine acrobats/dancers/athletes/charmers who wrote a love letter to San Francisco with their bodies and their startling hold on the audience and each other.

I had the pleasure of returning to Dear San Francisco recently to see how the show has evolved since October 2021. I still stand by everything in my original review (read it here), and, if anything, I enjoyed the show even more simply because the performers are are so relentlessly talented and charismatic.

As with any circus-type venture, the acts may change as performers come in and out of the show. I missed the unicycle and teeter-board acts that blew the top off my head the first time around, but the 90-minute show (which seems to have trimmed its subtitle, A High-Flying Love Story) is still bursting with thrills and heart and humor.

A shout out to the entire cast – Sereno “Reno” Aguilar Izzo, Dominic Cruz, Devin Henderson, Maya Kesselman, Oliver Layher, Shengan Pan, Chloe Somers Waller, Enmeng Song and Kyran Walton – for their stunning virtuosity and their extraordinary teamwork. Though the performers have their specialties, it also seems like everyone does a little bit of everything, including playing instruments, reciting beat poetry and creating gorgeous stage pictures in tandem with the projections by Alexander V. Nichols.

Dear San Francisco has beauty, power, excitement, laughs and abundant reminders of San Francisco’s pleasures (and occasional pains). It’s hard to imagine a more worthy successor to Beach Blanket or a show that deserves to have just as long a theatrical life.

Here’s a lovely segment from the show:

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Dear San Francisco is selling tickets through July 30 at Club Fugazi, 678 Green St., San Francisco. Running time is 90 minutes (no intermission). Tickets are $49-$99. Call 415-273-0600 or visit clubfugazisf.com

SIX sicks sexy exxies on Henry for histo-remix

Posted on February 23, 2023 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: Olivia Donalson (center) as Anna of Cleves in the North American tour of SIX, part of the BroadwaySF season at the Orpheum Theatre. BELOW: The cast revives the six wives of King Henry VIII. Photos by Joan Marcus

If SIX, the peppy, poppy musical that attempts to “girl power” the six wives of King Henry VIII back into the spotlight, feels like an imaginative school project that has gotten way out of hand, well that’s pretty much what it is. Creators Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss began working on the show while they were still in college. The show, which brings back the wives as mock-Tudor versions of ’90s pop royalty such as Beyonce, Britney Spears, Ariana Grande and the like, made its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017 and has taken its crusade to London’s West End and to Broadway, where the queens are still going strong.

There’s a lot of earnest good cheer and posturing in SIX, whose national tour has decamped to the Orpheum Theatre as part of the BroadwaySF season. The women are all glammed up in sparkly outfits (by Gabriella Slade that are part disco armor, part regal finery. They strut and fret for about 85 rambunctious minutes on an illuminated set (by Emma Bailey with exceedingly busy lighting design by Tim Deiling) that feels very much like the Las Vegas version of Hampton Court Palace.

This college project that has turned into an international mega-hit is primarily a concert, complete with the all-women band on stage, that has the wives competing with each other to see who had the most miserable time being married to old Hank Eight. That’s an awfully thin thread on which to hang a show, but there it is – another singing contest full of vocal one-upsmanship in which you expect Simon Cowell to show up and scowl.

Since SIX opened on Broadway (right before the lockdown but resumed in the fall of 2021), I’ve encountered friends who absolutely loved the show and its fierce embrace of campy/poppy sensibility to reframe historical figures. Others absolutely loathed it and feel its shallow history lesson does nothing but offer empty feminism in an aggressively sparkly package.

I fall somewhere in between. I enjoyed the show and really enjoyed the audience enjoying the show. With co-creator Moss co-directing alongside Jamie Armitage and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille choreographing, all the dazzle goes down pretty easily. The Orpheum swallows too many of the lyrics to fully appreciate their sass or their cleverness, but we get the gist.

My favorite song comes from Anne Boleyn played by the perfectly named Storm Lever. The sorry-not sorry chorus of “Don’t Lose Ur Head” is a particularly insistent ear worm (though Anne’s beheading jokes grow tiresome). But my favorite queen is Anna of Cleaves as played by the fabulous Olivia Donalson. Her solo is preceded by a fun house music homage called “Haus of Holbein” that blends portrait painting by Hans Holbein the Younger with Tinder. But then Anna, who apparently wasn’t as pretty as her portrait suggested, disappointed Henry. He had the marriage annulled and set her up in her own palace with her own accounts. According to “Get Down,” Anna loved living the life of an independent former queen and makes zero apologies for her lack of misery.

By the end, when the women realize their silly contest continues to define them as Henry’s wives and not as distinct individuals, their epiphany doesn’t really get the song full of rebellion and verve it deserves. Rather, they get that tried-and-true finale cliché of a mega-mix (or mega-six, as the case may be), trotting out songs we’ve heard but in shorter versions.

SIX wants to entertain and it does (especially those with a fondness for ’90s pop). But it also wants to be taken a little bit seriously as an example (hello, Hamilton) of re-writing women and people of color back into the historical narrative. That is certainly admirable, but SIX mostly sashays around that throne rather than fully claiming it.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
SIX continues through March 19 at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco, as part of the BroadwaySF season. Running time is 85 minutes (no intermission). Tickets are $66.50-$263.50 (subject to change). Call or visit broadwaysf.com. For every performance of SIX, a minimum of 20 tickets will be sold at $30 ($36, including fees) through Lucky Seat.

At Marin Theatre Company, these Supremes sing of Justice

Posted on February 22, 2023 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: The cast of Justice: A New Musical at Marin Theatre Company includes (from left) Karen Murphy as Sandra Day O’Connor, Stephanie Prentice as Sonia Sotomayor and Lynda DiVito as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. BELOW: DiVito as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Photos by Kevin Berne

We are told in Marin Theatre Company’s Justice: A New Musical, now continuing its world premiere (after its debut at Arizona Theatre Company), that power should be shared. But to share it, you must first have it.

And power, at Tuesday’s opening night performance, was a tricky proposition. With cold winds howling through Mill Valley (and much of the Bay Area), the lights in the theater flickered a bit just as the audience was being welcomed to the show. And then the emergency lights clicked on. The power was out just long enough for the tech crew to have re-set the whole shebang and run through a full battery of tests. Then, once the show began, the same thing happened. Power out, emergency lights on, intrepid actors halted mid-song. The outage was short lived, but someone announced that the show would not go on and they’d be happy to re-ticket us in the lobby. But wait! The show WILL go on! Book writer Lauren Gunderson and composers Kait Kerrigan (lyrics) and Bree Lowdermilk (music) jumped up on the stage to discuss how they came to write a musical about the first three women on the Supreme Court bench.

There’s nothing like live theater and the enthusiasm with which theater folk carry on the “show must go on” tradition. Even with the winter winds still blowing, the show resumed where it had left off and carried on to its semi-hopeful, semi-terrifying conclusion about the state of the court moving forward.

The notion of a musical about Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsurg and Sonia Sotomayor doesn’t exactly seem like a natural fit – it somehow feels too light or too silly to do justice (ahem) to the gravity of what these women have accomplished (and in Sotomayor’s case, are still accomplishing). So give full credit to Gunderson, Kerrigan and Lowdermilk as they quickly establish that the show will be respectful, emotional and enjoyable without being (too) preachy.

To say that Justice is like a feature-length “Schoolhouse Rock” is not a diss. The show is less about the workings of the Supreme Court and more about how O’Connor, the first woman in the court, and then Ginsburg, forged an unlikely friendship (Repbulican-Democrat, Episcopalian-Jew, Texan/Arizonan-Brooklyn Baby) and paved the way for Sotomayor and others (Ketanji Brown Jackson is named; I can’t recall if Elena Kagan is name dropped; and the other one is definitely not mentioned by name).

At only 90 minutes, Justice covers a lot of ground, from 1981 when O’Connor took her seat, to present day, and we see a lot of the American dream/nightmare cross the stage. While the world is turning, we also come to know the O’Connor, Ginsburg and Sotomayor a bit – their personal lives, their quirks, their judicial passions. What makes it all work is not necessarily Gunderson’s vivacious book or Lowdermilk and Kerrigan’s pleasant if not always distinct songs. It’s the powerful women playing these powerful women.

The voices, the dignity, the humanity – it’s all on full display in the strong, beautiful performances by Karen Murphy as O’Connor, Lynda DiVito as Ginsburg and Stephanie Prentice as Sotomayor. I would say that DiVito has the toughest job to do if only because Ginsburg is such an icon (which is, in fact, addressed in one of the songs), but she brings the requisite intelligence, wit and charisma to make a singing Ginsburg (who did, after all, love opera and Barbra Streisand) entirely plausible.

My issue with director Ashley Rodbro’s production is that it doesn’t support its superb actors nearly enough. The cumbersome, unattractive set – think a high school production of Sweeney Todd set in a marbled bathroom – just gets in the way and makes unnecessary work for the actors. At one point Rodbro has actors spinning parts of the set during a song, and it’s beyond distracting. There are hints of projections, but they’re ineffectual and unnecessary (there are actual stars and stripes projected at various times as if we need reminding we’re in America).

And the music. Ugh. From what I can tell in the scant program, there are two keyboard players, and that explains why the faux-symphonic accompaniment sounds so dead. When it’s just piano-like keyboard, we’re fine. The actors are so good they don’t need bells and whistles. They’re brining the power and emotion, and the lackluster accompaniment too often tries to stifle them.

The production simply does not rise to the level of the performers, and that’s a shame. We learn a lot about these women and the often sorry state of our union over the course of Justice, and it’s actually interesting to see these justices bond through song. Had the power actually gone out at the theater, I suspect that if the three actors simply sang and performed the show on their own without the ineffective staging, we’d have been taken right to the heart of this piece and been stirred deeply by these women’s stories, the extraordinary work that has been done and the seemingly impossible work yet to do.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Justice: A New Musical by Lauren M. Gunderson, Bree Lowdermilk and Kait Kerrigan continues through March 12 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Running time is 90 minutes (no intermission). Tickets are $25-$65. Call 415-388-5208 or visit marintheatre.org.

Murder, family meld in Chen’s Headlands at ACT

Posted on February 16, 2023 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: Johnny M. Wu as George (left), Phil Wong as Henry (center) and Erin Mei-Ling Stuart as Leena in the West Coast premiere of Christopher Chen’s The Headlands, running at ACT’s Toni Rembe Theater through March 5. BELOW: Charles Shaw Robinson (left) is Detective, Wong (center) is Henry and Sam Jackson is Jess. Photos by Kevin Berne

San Francisco playwright Christopher Chen seems to revel in puzzle, enigma and truth quests. His fascinating body of work is rich with mystery and unconventional theatricality. He’s one of the most interesting and intelligent playwrights working today, and he’s one of those artists who, when you see his name attached to something, you immediately check it out.

This is quite true of Chen’s The Headlands, now receiving its West Coast premiere (after being at Lincoln Center Theatre in early 2020 right before lockdown) at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater. This one-act drama is a murder mystery and a complex family drama all rolled into one compelling package.

The less revealed about the plot the better, so I’ll just say that this is the story of Henry Wong, a San Francisco native and resident of the Sunset. As played by Phil Wong, Henry is distractingly charming. He speaks directly to the audience and lets us know that he’s an amateur sleuth with a penchant for solving cold cases. There’s one particular 20-year-old case that intrigues him. It involves a murder (or was it?) in his neighborhood. Not just in his neighborhood but in his house. OK. It was his dad. His dad was the victim, and Henry was only 10 years old.

Henry is what you call an unreliable narrator, but then again, how many 10-year-olds make reliable witnesses? His charm and easygoing manner pull us into his quest, but in true Chen fashion, the excitement of a whodunit soon gives way to some serious family complexities that make The Headlands more of an emotional puzzle than a criminal one.

That’s not to say we don’t care about what really happened to Henry’s dad and who may or may not have killed him. We absolutely do, and director Pam MacKinnon creates a propulsive but still deeply emotional production that plays with the idea of creating a film noir for the stage without sacrificing content to genre.

The set by Alexander V. Nichols really is another character here because it contains the whole world of Henry’s story – his past and present, his memories, his misconceptions. The basic structure comprises the plain gray walls of Henry’s family’s Sunset – two stories, a staircase, a kitchen, a window looking out onto the street. The set gracefully rotates, with walls that slide in and out, and all of it serves to hold Nichols’ vivid projections. They’re mostly of San Francisco and environs – Chinatown, the Sunset, Land’s End, the Marin Headlands, Coit Tower, SFPD’s Taraval Station, Lucca Deli (which practically got a round of applause) – but we also get moody images of fingers hitting piano keys, glass breaking, an IV drip. As Henry delves deeper into his family’s secrets, the projections are a kind of stream of consciousness that envelops everyone and wraps them in the beauty and moodiness of San Francisco.

I’m not usually a fan of abundant projections in live theater (why not just make a movie?), but MacKinnon and Nichols use them so artfully and effectively I was completely mesmerized. When the story reaches intriguing places, the projections fade so the focus can be on the characters. There’s only one scene, to my mind, when the projections overstep and briefly (but still ineffectively) take over the storytelling.

The actors never get overwhelmed by the production primarily because they’re all so good. Beginning with Wong’s increasingly complex Henry, the cast does service to the murder mystery tropes but has no problem digging in to the demands of the family drama. Sam Jackson as Jess, Henry’s girlfriend, helps us navigate what we can and cannot trust in Henry’s storytelling, and Keiko Shimosato Carreiro adds whole new chapters to stories Henry thought he knew.

The invaluable Charles Shaw Robinson turns up twice and manages to fascinate both times (and reveal how casual racism can have drastic results). But it’s the trio of Jomar Tagatac, Erin Mei-Ling Stuart and Johnny M. Wu that carries the biggest dramatic load. Their stories involve elements of mystery (of course), rom-com, immigrant saga, soap opera and Greek drama, and the actors make it all feel real and vital.

The Headlands is seductive in the way that murder mysteries can be, but its cold case fever gives way to greater depths as one man wrestles with his family – their ghosts, their mistakes and their love for him. It’s a captivating experience that feels deeply rooted in San Francisco, not just as a location but as a state of mind – a head land, you might say.

[Bonus Chen!]
Last year, Christopher Chen dropped an Audible Original called The Podcaster, a 92-minute audio play that messes with the whole notion of podcasts. Of course there’s a mystery involved, and it’s a blast. Get more info here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Christopher Chen’s The Headlands continues through March 5 at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Running time: 100 minutes (no intermission). Tickets are $25-$110. Call 415-749-2228 or visit act-sf.org.

On Wednesdays we wear pink and kvetch about Mean Girls

Posted on February 2, 2023 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: The cast of the Mean Girls national tour includes (from left) English Bernhardt as Cady Heron, Jasmine Rogers as Gretchen Wieners, Nadina Hassan as Regina George and Morgan Ashley Bryant as Karen Smith. BELOW: Based on the 2004 movie, Mean Girls explores the highs and lows of high school life. Photos by Jenny Anderson

The burns from the Burn Book are splashed all over the stage when you walk into the Golden Gate Theatre to see the national tour of Mean Girls (part of the BroadwaySF season). Some of the burns are sort of clever, “if corn flakes were a person.” Or another poor dude gets “You could live off the food in his braces.” There are a few of those awful slams that only one girl can perpetrate on another, including “Needs super jumbo tampons.” And then there’s the ultimate burn, the one we all fear to our core. Just a simple “Who?” scrawled over a photo.

High school is awful. The original Mean Girls Burn Book arrived in those (hardly) innocent pre-internet days of 2004 when the movie came out. Fast forward more than a decade to the inevitable musical adaptation, and the Burn Book bullying is no longer contained within the walls of a suburban Illinois high school but rather available for viewing on every screen in every corner of the world.

All to say there’s something retro about Mean Girls, even in its new musical form, and that’s not a bad thing. Tina Fey wrote the original screenplay and starred as one of the beleaguered teachers, and now she makes her debut as a Broadway book writer with the same story, which was inspired by Rosalined Wiseman’s 2002 nonfiction exploration Queen Bees and Wannabes.

Fey knows all the ins and outs of the plot, which remains the same: after growing up home-schooled in Kenya, new girl Cady Heron arrives in the U.S. and begins a stint in a public high school so, in her words, she can become socialized. That means quickly learning the high school caste system, from stoners (rich and poor but taking the same drugs) to obnoxious jocks to sexually active band geeks to math nerds (DO NOT fraternize here or risk certain social death), etc. At the top of the food chain are “The Plastics,” a trio of terror with supplicants Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith supporting their queen mean girl, Regina George.

Cady is too smart for all this social nonsense – she’s a math prodigy and in Africa she was dealing with actual apex predators – but she wisely acknowledges the “need to belong that roars within us all” and unwisely falls into scheming and social climbing and ultimate disaster.

Fey’s smart, funny book is really the star here, though composer Jeff Richmond (Fey’s husband) and lyricist Nell Benjamin (of Legally Blonde fame, which feels very on point here) work hard to give this story a musical heartbeat and not just stick songs into a brand-name story. Within the realm of movie-to-musical adaptations, it sits comfortably in the middle of Beetlejuice/Carrie (at the bottom end) and Little Shop of Horrors/The Producers/A Little Night Music (at the top).

Director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw brings the same comically fluid pace he brought to The Prom (a similar but better show in almost every way) and to The Book of Mormon. It’s a breakneck 2 1/2 hours with little room for actual emotion and barely time for characters to register in any meaningful way. Oddly, it’s one of the supporting players, Gretchen, who gets the most active inner life. Her song “What’s Wrong with Me” is a standout, and it’s a shame that Cady, the protagonist, can’t fails to get the same traction.

If anything, the show is too slick and efficient for its own good. Scott Pask’s set is essentially blank surfaces to be filled with the hyperactive projections by Finn Ross and Adam Young. The actors are often in competition with the visuals, and they don’t always win. The brightness of the backdrops makes it feel everything is happening in front of a giant screen saver, and that never helps warm a cold tale about mean people. For all the burning here, the show never really heats up.

Among the energetic cast members, standouts at Wednesday’s opening-night performance were Cady’s first friends in the new school, fringe dwellers Janis (Adriana Scalice, filling in for Lindsay Heather Pearce) and the “too gay to function” Damian (Eric Huffman). Also stellar was Mary Beth Donahoe filling in for Jasmine Rogers as Gretchen Wieners, the mean girl you actually root for. Some of the evening’s best laughs come from the underplayed mean girl, Karen (Megan Grosso filling in for Morgan Ashley Bryant), who is a lot smarter than she thinks.

Too often in the sound design stage voices were rendered shrill and over-miked to almost painful levels. That’s the kind of mean nobody needs.

What is the kind of mean people need? Apparently the kind that eventually helps everyone learn a lesson and become better people. The underlying message of Mean Girls – to be kind (to yourself and others), to be authentic, to be fearless – resonates, especially as it relates to young women. That is true of the movie as well, and it’s hard to say if the musical has amplified or improved that message in any meaningful way beyond simply re-telling it in an entertaining way. Sometimes you aim for “fetch” and end up with “feh.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Mean Girls continues through Feb. 26 at the Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco, as part of the BroadwaySF season. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (including intermission). Tickets are $66.50-$184.50 (subject to change). Call 888-746-1799 or visit broadwaysf.com.

Stage, not screen, is the place for Evan Hansen

Posted on January 27, 2023 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: Anthony Norman (left) is Evan Hansen in the 2022-23 North American tour of Dear Evan Hansen. Also in the cast are (from left) John Hemphill as Larry Murphy, Lili Thomas as Cynthia Murphy and Alaina Anderson as Zoe Murphy. BELOW: Norman’s Evan attempts connection with his single mom played by Coleen Sexton. Photos by Evan Zimmerman for Murphymade

The movie version of Dear Evan Hansen broke more than its protagonist’s arm. It shattered its source material – a Tony Award-winning musical – into a million awful little pieces. The movie made the cardinal mistake of taking something that can be extraordinary in the theater and making it seem absolutely absurd when earnest characters started to sing in their living room or their classroom, and the audience response was to wince or, even worse, to laugh.

At the time of the movie’s release (fall of 2021) there was a lot of unnecessary gnashing about how original Broadway star (and Tony winner) Ben Platt was too old (27 at the time) to convincingly play a 17-year-old. Platt was hardly the problem. His Herculean stage performance was fairly effectively modulated for the screen. But it’s the very notion of this story on a screen that was the problem.

On stage, Dear Evan Hansen takes place in a dark, impressionist version of modern society. Suburban households and schools are rendered with just a few pieces of furniture on David Korins’ set, while seemingly gazillions of screens, mostly flashing, streaming and scrolling info from our social media wasteland, fills much of the rest of the space. It’s visually overwhelming (as it should be), and it never lets us forget that the stakes in this drama are rooted, triggered and magnified by the omnipresent internet.

When this dazzling stage version of our warped world was hemmed in by the conventions of a movie screen depicting real-life locations, it became just another “window” much like the one Evan sings about in the showstopping “Waving Through a Window” – another screen on which we’re on one side and the rest of the world feels like it’s on the other.

The only way to truly feel the impact of this story about living a delusional life is to experience it on stage. The Broadway production closed last September, but the national tour, now in its fifth year, is going – at least until July, when it will close up shop. Bay Area audiences first saw the tour at the Curran Theatre late in 2018 (read my review here), and now, a little more than four years later and in the wake of the movie, that same tour, with an entirely different cast, is back as part of the BroadwaySF season at the Orpheum Theatre.

The good news is that the tour is still in fine shape. The physical production (which, in addition to Korins’ incredibly efficient set, includes lights by Japhy Weideman, projections by Peter Nigrini and sound by Nevin Steinberg) delivers all the necessary bells and whistles to keep the show speeding along through its nearly three hours. And the cast of eight is spot on, with shouts out to Micaela Lamas as Alana, a teenager whose desperation for acceptance provides a powerful mirror for Evan’s, and to understudy Gillian Jackson Han filling in for Alaina Anderson as Zoe Murphy, the sister of a teen who takes his own life, who becomes caught in the intricate web of Evan’s lies. As Evan’s mom, the superb Coleen Sexton brings equal amounts of hurt, rage and insecurity to the role, and her “So Big/So Small,” a song to comfort Evan and reassure him of her love, is like a small, exquisite musical all on its own.

In the title role, Anthony Norman is an excellent actor if a less excellent singer, although he delivers on all the dramatic high points of his character, an anxiety-ridden, mentally unstable 17-year-old who cannot stop himself from falling into lie after lie when his dreams of being what he considers “normal” begin to materialize around him. The son of a divorced, hardworking mom and an all but invisible father in a different state, Evan’s failure to clarify a misunderstanding leads him to experience what it might be like to have a stable home with a mom who cooks and dotes; a father who is present and supportive; peers at school who actually talk to him; and the affection of a girl he has adored from afar for years.

The score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul reveals something more with every listen. “Waving Through a Window,” Evan’s cri de coeur, remains chilling, especially in the frenetic way director Michael Grief stages it, and the faux-inspirational rush of the Act 1 closer, “You Will Be Found” is fascinating. A social media viral sensation happens before our eyes, and though the song hits all the right notes and words about creating a supportive, connected community, it’s all based on a huge lie, and all that online hubbub feels like hollow platitudes that could just as easily turn into bone-crushing stones (which they do in Act 2). That said, I could do without ever hearing “To Break in a Glove” ever again – its purpose to create a surrogate father moment for Evan is clear and potent, but the song, unlike most of the rest of the score, does not bear repeated listenings.

I also wish the show had a more powerfully musical ending. People gripe that Evan isn’t punished enough for his lies and his fraud, but I’m not one of them. What Evan does is wrong, most certainly, but he’s primarily acting out of a need to help other people and in turn helps himself to a life he never thought he could have. His breaking point comes when one final lie turns out to be wholly self-serving (a clever, powerfully desperate moment in the book by Steven Levenson). And then, in the emotional aftermath, we skip ahead in time and end with a reprise of “For Forever” rather than “You Will Be Found.” Both songs have finally found some semblance of truth in Evan’s acceptance of himself and his need for help. Still, it’s “You Will Be Found” that feels more relevant and ultimately more hopeful than “For Forever.”

At some point, Dear Evan Hansen with its focus on social media damage, the precarious state of teen mental health and its characters who work so hard to delude themselves, may feel dated. Sadly, that day when “we could be all right for forever” seems very far away.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Dear Evan Hansen continues through Feb. 19 as part of the BroadwaySF season at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco. Tickets are $66.50-$256.50 (subject to change). Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. Call 888-746-1799 or visit broadwaysf.com.

Pain and strife sandwiched by laughs in Berkeley Rep’s Clyde’s

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: Cyndii Johnson is Letitia and Wesley Guimarães is Rafael in Lynn Nottage’s Tony Award-nominated play Clyde’s, at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. BELOW: (from left) Louis Reyes McWilliams is Jason, Harold Surratt is Montrellous and April Nixon is Clyde. Photos by Muriel Steinke/Berkeley Rep

It’s easy to see why Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s is this country’s most produced play. Like other works in the Nottage canon, this one is about real things, hard things – violence, poverty, addiction, rehabilitation, homelessness and a system of so much inequity that too many don’t even have a chance. But Clyde’s is also a comedy. It’s heartfelt and hopeful, with laughs to leaven what might, in less skilled hands, become mawkish or sentimental.

Audiences and theater companies are understandably attracted to this show: it’s about 90 minutes with five diverse actors, one set (a working kitchen at a truck-stop diner) and a take on contemporary life that doesn’t ignore harsh realities but allows humor, connectivity and grace to warm a cold place.

The Bay Area premiere of Clyde’s comes in an engaging co-production from Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where the play opened Wednesday night in the Peet’s Theatre, and Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company. There are lots of laughs in director Taylor Reynolds’ production, but underneath the sitcom veneer – think “Alice” by way of “The Bear” and “Orange Is the New Black” – what really shines through are the relationships that become powerful enough to change the characters’ lives – even the bad ones.

The reputation of Clyde’s, a Pennsylvania roadside sandwich joint favored by truckers, is that the sandwiches and burgers are pretty tasty. What diners may not know is that owner Clyde (April Nixon) has, as she puts it, sold her soul to keep this place open. Her kitchen staff has always comprised formerly incarcerated people who have trouble finding gainful employment anywhere else. While Clyde could be seen as a savior of sorts, she’s really more of a bully, even physically abusing some of the crew (and they have the bruises to prove it). She doesn’t want to hear their woeful stories, and she definitely doesn’t want to taste their inventive new sandwiches. Her needs are simple: show up on time and do the work (and maybe don’t crumble under her rather ferocious management style).

The center of the kitchen crew is Montrellous (Harold Surratt), an older Black man who is the epitome of mindfulness and consideration. He doesn’t view sandwiches as food as much as democracy. He does things with care and intention and love. He tries to instill this sense of presence and purpose in his co-workers, Rafael (Wesley Guimarães), a Latino man who tried to rob a bank with a BB rifle, and Leticia (Cyndii Johnson), a Black mom who robbed a pharmacy to get meds for her special-needs child and then, in her words, got greedy grabbing a few things to sell on the side.

Both Rafael and Tish, as she’s known, are fully under Montrellous’ spell and are trying, in their ways, to be better and do better. Their productive kitchen trio is upended with the arrival of Jason (Louis Reyes McWilliams), a newly released white guy covered in racist gang tats – something that doesn’t exactly endear him to Tish. His presence ups the tension in the kitchen, but, in short order, he falls into the workaday rhythm and begins, like the others, to revere Montrellous and to take his work (and himself) seriously. The environs may be dingy (the set by Wilson Chin is perfection), but the work and the people occasionally operate at reverential, life-changing levels.

Two-time Pulitzer winner Nottage uses Clyde to keep things sharp, but she’s not afraid to introduce a burgeoning love story for Tish and Rafael, which could be sappy but is absolutely endearing (especially in the marvelous, warmhearted performances from Johnson and Guimarães). Nearly every time Clyde comes into the kitchen, she’s wearing a different wig and another expensive, flashy outfit (costumes by Karen Perry). Nixon’s performance could use more menace, but we get the idea. Clyde, who also has a prison stint in her past, is this purgatory’s resident demon, and to escape, her prisoners will have to rely on one another to find strength, motivation and the right moment.

What’s interesting is the way Nottage brings everyone in the play more clearly into focus as it moves along – everyone but Clyde. You actually begin to care about all the characters (but Clyde), and the notion that she is just an end to a more just means begins to sink in. Society has let down everyone here, but the alchemy of Clyde’s kitchen (and her penchant for meanness and humiliation) forges a crucible for change. For Montrellous, Tish, Rafael and Jason, sandwiches are a step toward self-actualization and Clyde is a devil they’ll leave in their past.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Clyde’s by Lynn Nottage continues through Feb. 26 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Running time: 90+ minutes (no intermission). Tickets are $30-$135 (subject to change). Call 510-647-2949 or visit berkeleyrep.org.

A Beauty awakes, Panto style, at the Presidio

Posted on December 26, 2022 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: The cast of Sleeping Beauty, the second annual holiday Panto at the Presidio Theatre. BELOW: Cast members include (from left), Phoebe Angeni as Major Major, Scott Reardon as Embarkadero and Curt Branom as Julia the Cook. Photos by Terry Lorant

How do you start what you hope will become a new holiday tradition? Persistence and pluck – at least that seems to be how the Presidio Theatre is going about it as they attempt, for a second year, to make the British tradition of Panto a thing stateside (or at least in the Bay Area).

The Panto (short for pantomime) is a raucous family entertainment trotted out for the holidays that redecorates a crusty fairy tale with amped-up fabulousness: exaggerated, colorful costume; ditzy pop songs with re-written lyrics; lots of daffy gender-bending; abundant audience participation; and heaps of silliness.

Last year, as part of the beautifully renovated Presidio Theatre’s return from Covid hibernation, the company offered a Panto in the form of a Bay Area-based Aladdin (read my review here), and while that was a lot of fun, Sleeping Beauty, which I finally caught up with just before Christmas, is even better.

For one thing, director Liam Vincent and writers Stephanie Brown and Richard Ciccarone bring even more zip and zest. The show is shorter (just about two hours, including intermission) and moves along at a terrific comic clip.

The highly energetic cast is matched in vibrancy only by the stunning costumes by Alina Bokovikova. Nobody makes a better chicken costume, and this year, Bokovikova also gets to dress a talking dog, a trio of fairies and the juiciest villain this side of Maleficent (only with devilish red horns instead of black).

The juiciest roles are the showiest, including Rotimi Agbabiaka as Hernia the Evil Witch, and Curt Branom as Julia the Cook. Their performances are outsize and truly funny. Their interactions with the audience are among the show’s highlights, and the night I saw the show, the audience was way more than willing to talk back, shout back and truly give their all to catch the candy that is frequently thrown at their heads.

The story of this sleeping beauty, one Princess Sonoma (Sharon Shao), makes very sure that should the curse of her falling into eternal sleep ever come true, Prince Logan (Matthew Kropschot) has her full consent to kiss her back to life. With that detail taken care of, the production has free reign to be goofy as all get out. The fairies who have to muster their strength to fight Hernia are a delight: Ruby Day is Orinda, Ryan Patrick Welsh is Fremont and Eiko Yamamoto is Pacifica. These marvelous Bay Area names also extend to the trio of chickens which, as they did last year, threaten to steal the show. Andre Amarotico is Pecker, and the hens are Phaedra Tillery Boughton as Mission Burrito, Jen Brooks as Sourdough and Kaylee Miltersen is Cioppino.

At the performance I saw, the venerable Danny Scheie was out as Major Major, the palace’s stern taskmaster, and assistant director Phoebe Angeni was in without missing a beat or a laugh. That’s one of the keys to a successful Panto – making it seem breezy and effortless with a continuous roll of laughs, and dancing and dazzle. The Panto doesn’t have anything to do per se with the holidays, but that carefree, let-it-all-go vibe is key to capturing the holiday spirit that is so hard to find in real life.

Happily, it seems that local audiences are taking a shine to the Panto. The tradition is taking hold, and the Presidio Theatre could be in the Panto business for many years, many jokes, many chickens and many chucked chocolates to come.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Sleeping Beauty continues through Dec. 30 at the Presidio Theatre, 99 Moraga Ave., in The Presidio San Francisco. Tickets are $15-$40 (subject to change). Call 415-960-3949 or visit presidiotheatre.org.

Giving up the musical ghost in ghastly Beetlejuice

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Chad Jones

ABOVE: The cast of the Beetlejuice national tour includes (from left) Britney Coleman as Barbara, Will Burton as Adam, Isabella Esler as Lydia and Justin Collette as Beetlejuice. BELOW: (from left) Danielle Marie Gonzalez as Miss Argentina, Esler as Lydia and Jesse Sharp as Charles. Photos by Matthew Murphy

That the Beetlejuice musical is dead on arrival shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Tim Burton’s 1988 movie of the same name, which is, after all, about a dead guy trying really hard to rejoin the world of the living.

What the Beetlejuice musical, which premiered on Broadway in 2019 and is still running, joins is that ever-expanding group of semi-living movie-to-musical adaptations that don’t improve on the source material in any way, nor do they contribute anything of note to the larger world of musical theater.

My biggest complaint about this singing Beetlejuice isn’t the bawdy, crude, antic humor – in fact, that’s one of the show’s major assets and true source of entertainment. No, the problem is the score by Eddie Perfect, which is standard issue, vaguely rock, vaguely pop, vaguely Broadway. Why do so many new shows have such a nondescript sound?

Some of Perfect’s lyrics are sharp and funny, while whole ballads are filled with inanity. When Perfect mimics Broadway to get the big, razzle-dazzle vibe going, the show comes to life. The opener “The Whole ‘Being Dead’ Thing” is a hoot and makes it very clear (a la “Comedy Tonight”) to the audience exactly what is going on: “This is a show about death.”

Except that it’s not, really. It’s a show about dead people and living people who are stunted or lonely or grieving, and they’ll all have warm-and-fuzzy resolution by show’s end – a narrative that feels quite at odds with the irreverent tone that director Alex Timbers tries hard (but fails) to keep alive for 2 1/2 hours. There are some scattered musical theater jokes in the book by Scott Brown and Anthony King, but mostly the story seems scattered and unfocused, unsure whether the protagonist is Beetlejuice, grieving daughter Lydia or newly dead couple The Maitlands (why, oh why do they get a whole insipid number called “Barbara 2.0”?).

Justin Collette in the title role isn’t nearly as charming, menacing or funny as Michael Keaton was in the movie, but then again he’s saddled with songs about how it’s OK for him to take an underage bride. But Collette, in wocka-wocka vaudeville mode, sells the songs well, and his audience interactions are terrific. His big Act 2 number, “That Beautiful Sound” (about screaming and being terrified) is another one of those attempts to capitalize on some Broadway pizzazz, and it nearly infuses some life into this moribund enterprise.

The sets by David Korins bring to mind the Tim Burton sensibility with some theatrical fizz and flair, as do the puppets by Michael Curry and the costumes by William Ivey Long.

But the storytelling seems confined by Perfect’s score rather than liberated or enlivened by it. The songs don’t seem written to reveal character so much as to reveal just another song sung by just another person we don’t care much about. There’s a blandness to the words and music no matter how many applause-inducing buttons are appended. When the Belafonte numbers “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora),” magically appear, the whole original score vanishes anyway, which leads one to wonder: how might Beetlejuice have fared as a play (with these Belafonte songs, which were also pivotal in the movie) rather than as a full-blown, please-everybody musical.

Sometimes it’s OK for the dead just to speak.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Beetlejuice continues through Dec. 31 as part of the BroadwaySF season at the Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco. Tickets are $66.50 – $194.50 (subject to change). Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes (including intermission). Call 888-746-1799 or visit broadwaysf.com.

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