Category Archives: Michael Gene Sullivan

Shavian wit still dwells in Aurora’s Houses

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The cast of Aurora Theatre Company’s Widowers’ Houses by George Bernard Shaw includes (from left) Megan Trout as Blanche Sartorius, Dan Hoyle as Harry Trench, Michael Gene Sullivan as Cokane and Warren David Keith as Mr. Sartorius. Below: Keith’s Sartorius (left) wrangles with Howard Swain’s Lickcheese. Photos by David Allen

George Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses last played Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company more than 20 years ago, and though the theater company has come up on the world (bigger, spiffier theater), the satirical world of Shaw’s play still reflects badly on our own lack of evolution where greed, poverty and decency are concerned.

That 1997 production, directed by Aurora co-founder, the late Barbara Oliver, made me a fan of Shaw’s first produced play and made me an immediate fan of Aurora’s chamber approach to great plays where every subtlety and nuance is amplified and the intimacy increases your connection to the characters and the action.

The new production of Widowers’ Houses, directed by the estimable Joy Carlin, is certainly handsome to look at, from the giant gold-framed screen depicting Victorian life dominating the set by Kent Dorsey, who also did the lighting design, to the posh costumes by Callie Floor (who also makes shabby costumes look so real you can practically smell them).

Dispensing with three acts in under 2 1/2 hours, Carlin’s pace is brisk but not rushed. There’s a surprising disparity in the small six-person cast. There’s the expected precision and excellence bringing shaw to vibrant life, but then there’s also some distracting hamminess and amateurishness that keeps the play from truly taking off.

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But what’s good is really good. Warren David Keith is the dark heart of the play as Sartorius, a self-made man of means who turns out to be one of London’s biggest slumlords. He swears he does it all for his daughter, Blanche (an incisive Megan Trout), whom he has raised on his own (and turned into a spoiled, tiny-hearted brat in the process). He is also of the opinion that there’s nothing to be done with the poor except leave them to their own wretched devices. If you extend any sort of generosity – like repairing a dangerous bannister, for instance – they’ll just turn it into so much firewood. You might as well take what you can from them and keep moving along.

Keith is cold and imperious as well as frustratingly smart and considered. His Sartorius is commanding and chilling. He speaks from the heart, but where his heart ought to be is a giant bag of cold coins.

Equally good is Howard Swain as Lickcheese, whose Dickensian name is so very appropriate. He’s Sartorius’ henchman who wrings every last cent from the tenants, many of whom are paying for a quarter of a room. Lickcheese also swears he carries out his heinous duties to support his own family, but he clearly relishes it. When Lickcheese returns later in the play a changed man, he calls to mind a later Shaw character, Alfred P. Doolittle in Pygmalion, who will also use his life on the streets as the basis for a future fortune.

Trout’s Blanche is a delicious character – a prissy Victorian lady hoping to woo marry a naive young doctor she and her father met in their European travels but who reveals herself to be vicious in her thinking and her actions. She hates the poor almost as much as she hates her maid, whom she beats and berates incessantly (the maid is played by a broadly comic Sarah Mitchell). Blanche is the very opposite of what you think of when you think of a Victorian lady in that she is robustly physical and has no qualms in speaking her mind.

By the third act, Shaw’s stomping on his soapbox results in splinters more than barbs, but his point is well made: one man’s riches is the result of another’s poverty. Advantage will always be taken, and even the most noble among us are culpable, whether we realize it or not, in keeping this system alive and thriving. In other words, the play could have been written last week. When the Aurora produces Widowers’ Houses again in another 20 years or so, if the world still exists, the same will undoubtedly remain true.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
George Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses continues through March 4 at Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $33-$65. Call 510-843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org.

Joy, power of stories in Cal Shakes black odyssey

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The cast of California Shakespeare Theater’s black odyssey by Marcus Gardley includes (from left) Lamont Thompson (Super Fly Tireseas), J. Alphonse Nicholson (Ulysses Lincoln), Safiya Fredericks (Benevolence Nausicca Sabine), Dawn L. Troupe (Caribdiss), and Aldo Billingslea (Great Grand Paw Sidin). Below: J. Alphonse Nicholson as Ulysses Lincoln, Margo Hall as Calypso and Safiya Fredericks as Benevolence Nausicca Sabine. Photos by Kevin Berne

Just when it seems the news can’t get any worse, it gets worse. This weekend in Virginia we saw some of the worst of humanity, with terror, death, hatred and ignorance all on full display. At such times, it can be hard not to give in to that helpless, hopeless feeling of things ever getting better, of our species ever giving over to our better natures rather than constantly reveling in our worst.

Then there’s art. In a quirk of timing for which I will be forever grateful, California Shakespeare Theater opened a new production Saturday night at the Bruns Amphitheater amid the full chilly summer glory of the Orinda Hills. It wasn’t just any production, but one so suited to our troubled times that it seems we should find some way to broadcast it nationally over and over. The play is black odyssey by Oakland-born playwright Marcus Gardley, one of the finest poetic/dramatic voices in the country. It’s a loose adaptation of The Odyssey, but its power is unmistakable as it reaches deep into the human experience to grapple with storytelling as a fundamental means of connecting our lives and our experiences with those of our ancestors – a profound way to find meaning in our time on earth (and perhaps beyond it). More specifically, he’s using Homer’s lost soldier template to tell stories of the African-American experience, to share pain and injustice and triumph and perseverance and love. There is a lot of love in this play, which makes for a deeply moving experience.

In the face of horrific news stemming from horrific behavior, it is…”reassuring” or “inspiring” seem too small here…of paramount importance to note that there are artists like Gardley and director Eric Ting (now in his second season as Cal Shakes’ artistic director) and these designers and these actors who are working against the wretchedness simply by doing their jobs, and doing them with compassion, intelligence and a beautiful mix of humor and passion.

black odyssey (its lower-case appearance belies its ALL CAPS impact) serves as a fascinating bookend to another play Ting directed recently, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon at Berkeley Repertory Theatre (read my review here). That mind-bending play also deals with the African-American experience and is also highly and wonderfully theatrical. But while Octoroon hits the brain (and funny bone), black odyssey aims more for the heart.

I can’t say I’ve ever been moved by The Odyssey in any form, but Gardley’s ambitious, ferocious re-telling earns its emotions, even while it challenges audiences to just go with it while modern-day ancient gods play a game of chess, both literal and figurative, that affects the fate of mortals below and sends our hero, Ulysses Lincoln, back and forth in time and space. In the real world, he’s a 21-year-old from Oakland who has been in love with the same girl, Nella Pell (or “Nella P” as he calls her) since they met in a group home at age 13. The two get married and are expecting a baby when Ulysses enlists during peacetime, thinking that’s the best way to ensure his college education. But then 9/11 happens, and he’s deployed to Afghanistan, where he inspires the wrath of the god of the sea, known here as Great Grand Paw Sidin.

On his way back to the U.S., Ulysses is swept from the deck of his boat and given up for dead. His 16-year journey back home takes him all kinds of bizarre places, all of which are meant to help him become less lost in every sense of the word. To find home, he must connect with his own personal past, his cultural past and connect with his ancestors.

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Back home in Oakland’s Acorn housing project (Gardley loves to name drop his hometown), Nella is visited by the goddess Athena, in the guise of a long, lost relative, and ends up trading her immortality for life on earth helping Nella raise her son, Malachi, all the while trying to keep the hope of Ulysses’ return alive.

The Oakland scenes offer a gritty reality (not unlike another recent lower-case play, Shotgun Players’ production of brownsville song (b-side for tray) by Kimber Lee – read my review here), while Ulysses is in a time-warp fever dream that kept calling to mind a modern-day The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder in the way it creates an irreverent apocalyptic epic that never loses its human scale.

Ulysses, played by the charismatic J. Alphonse Nicholson, encounters all kinds of people and places in his journey, most notably a family living on the roof of their Louisiana home desperately trying to survive 40 days and 40 days of flooding as the end of days approaches. Ulysses is washed onto their roof by Hurricane Katrina, and from their soon-to-be-submerged perch, they can see in the distance Emmet Till dangling from a tree but not yet dead. In another direction they see the Scottsboro Boys, waiting in vain for justice, and the Birmingham Four, the little girls killed in a church bombing. It’s a grim place, and the parents (Michael Gene Sullivan and Dawn L. Troupe) reluctantly send their 10-year-old daughter, Benevolence (Safiya Fredericks), off with Ulysses for her best chance of survival.

To keep his young charge entertained, Ulysses tells her stories of his journey, including his time in Circe’s undersea den, which happens to be in the middle of the Middle Passage. You can’t get to your destination from there unless you have a past. Until Ulysses figures out his own, he is royally wined and dined by his hostess (played with jazzy verve by Troupe), who nearly steals the entire show with her lusty prayer before digging into the fantasy meal of all fantasy meals.

Another stop on his route involves a stylishly suited blind man atop a rolling Cadillac – Super Fly Tireseas (Lamont Thompson, who also plays the Zeus-like Daddy Deus) – who helps him navigate past Scylla- and Charybdis- like monsters who take the form of Diana Ross, Tina Turner and James Brown.

The most moving part of Ulysses’ journey takes him to slave quarters, where he is tended to with the utmost love and care by his great grandmother, played be the ever-extraordinary and surprising Margo Hall, who also plays Athena (aka Great Aunt Tina). This scene has incredible power and beauty, and the set by Michael Locher helps create one of the most incredible stage pictures in recent memory.

While all of this is going on, we also keep focus on the domestic drama of Nella (the invaluable Omozé Idehenre), rebellious teen Malachi (Michael Curry) and Aunt T. As if life weren’t difficult enough for them, a disguised Paw Sidin (Aldo Billingslea, simultaneously hilarious and menacing) is attempting to complicate their struggles even further by meddling with Nella’s affections and her desperation to do right by her son.

It’s a lot to deal with in 2 1/2 hours, but Gardley and Ting and this phenomenal cast keep it all rolling along. One of the great advantages of this production is its frequent use of choral music, which amplifies the heart and soul of the story. Credit Linda Tillery and Molly Holm for raising these voices to such a glorious place full of spirituals and blues and jazz and pop and an original song at the end that may just crack your heart wide open.

There’s so much beauty in this production – choreography by Latanya D. Tigner, stunning costumes by Dede M. Ayite – and so much pain in the story. Gardley’s words have poetry and pathos and power along with humor and defiance. And, as I said before, a love that lingers like a light in the dark.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Marcus Gardley’s black odyssey continues through Sept. 3 in a California Shakespeare Theater production at the Bruns Amphitheater, 100 Shakespeare Festival Way, Orinda. Free shuttles between Orinda BART and the theater. Tickets are $20-$92. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

Holiday cheer in SF Playhouse’s sparkling She Loves Me

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Amalia Balash (Monqiue Hafen) and Georg Nowack (Jeffrey Brian Adams) find love in the streets of Budapest in front of Maraczek’s parfumerie in the musical She Loves Me, a San Francisco Playhouse production. Below: Shop clerk Ilona Ritter (Nanci Zoppi) is seduced by co-worker Steven Kodaly (Rodney Earl Jackson Jr.). Photos by Jessica Palopoli

The 1963 musical She Loves Me is just a little gem of a musical – full of melody and charm and camaraderie and romance. The recent Broadway revival made a case for the show as sturdy, funny showcase for actors who can perfectly balance realism and musical comedy in a way that makes the show feel intimate and lived in even while it traffics in song and dance.

Just in time for the holidays, San Francisco Playhouse polishes this gem to a sparkling shine. Director Susi Damilano and a fine ensemble of actors and musicians deliver the Playhouse’s most consistently rewarding musical yet.

Apparently Hungarian-born playwright Miklós László stumbled onto an irresistible storyline when he penned the play Parfumerie in 1937 about store clerks who loathe each other on sight without realizing they’ve already fallen in love through letters they’ve shared in a lonely hearts club. The play became the gold-standard 1940 Ernst Lubitsch movie The Shop Around the Corner starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullivan, and just a few years later in 1949 it became the Judy Garland musical In the Good Old Summertime. Audiences apparently love being in the know about the protagonists long before they have any clue that fate and coincidence has mashed up their love lives and their work lives. (The 1998 Tom Hanks–Meg Ryan rom-com You’ve Got Mail is also a riff on the story, but…blech.)

Writer Joe Masteroff expertly adapted the original play for the Broadway stage with a perfectly calibrated score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (the duo that would have its biggest hit in Fiddler on the Roof) that features irresistible tunes. Just try to get the title song out of your head and “Will He Like Me?” is as emotionally honest a ballad as Broadway ever produced. The musical is so masterful (disarmingly so) it can make a sexual awakening at a library or the heart-expanding joy of vanilla ice cream into pure melodic joy.

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Damilano’s ebullient production features a wonderful five-piece band headed by music director David Aaron Brown that sounds much larger and fuller than it is, with rich violin, woodwinds, brass and accordion giving real warmth and vitality to the score. So from the moment the overture begins, the spell is cast, and Damilano and her actors never break it.

As the central lovers/fighters, Monique Hafen as Amalia and Jeffrey Brian Adams as Georg, have a nice chemistry that anchors the production and makes you care whether or not they end up together. They are both vocally assured, and the one-two punch of her “Vanilla Ice Cream” followed by his “She Loves Me” is sheer musical theater bliss.

For a small Budapest perfume shop, Maraczek’s employs a large number of clerks, but that’s good for the musical. MVP award goes to Joe Estlack as journeyman Ladislav Sipos, and also doubles as a wonderfully noodle-legged dancing waiter at the Café Imperial. And then there’s scene stealer Nanci Zoppi as Ilona Ritter, whose supposedly secret relationship with co-worker Steven Kodaly (Rodney Earl Jackson Jr.) leads her to heartbreak and then to glorious self-realization. Zoppi’s “I Resolve” and “A Trip to the Library” are stellar, and her duet with Hafen on “I Don’t Know His Name” is a beautiful moment of backroom bonding. Jackson is marvelously slinky on his two big numbers, the seductive “Ilona” and the FU to his coworkers, “Grand Knowing You.”

As the gruff but lovable Mr. Maraczek, Michael Gene Sullivan has a sweetly melancholic song (“Days Gone By”) and Nicholas J. Garland as young delivery boy Arpad is a constant bright spot, especially when he comes into his own on “Try Me.”

A jewel needs a showcase to really sparkle, and set designers Bill English and Jacquelyn Scott provide a marvelous world for these characters to inhabit. A Budapest street becomes the cosmetics-filled shop thanks to an efficient turntable, but further spins reveal a swanky nightclub (featuring a droll headwaiter played by Brian Herndon), and another portion of the set unfolds to reveal Amalia’s messy bedroom. It all looks great, assisted greatly by the lighting design of Thomas J. Munn.

Though it’s not a holiday show per se (it begins in the fall and ends on Christmas Eve), She Loves Me makes for ideal December/January entertainment. People squabble and suffer and ultimately come together in warmhearted ways, all the while singing charming songs. Sounds like a pretty ideal holiday to me.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
She Loves Me continues through Jan. 14 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $35-$125. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

Catching up with Colette & Cyrano

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Lorri Holt stars in and co-wrote Colette Uncesnored, the story of the infamous French novelist’s life as a writer, a woman, a pioneer for social change and a lover. The solo show runs through May 14 at The Marsh San Francisco. Photo by David Allen Below: Le Bret (Michael Gene Sullivan, left) warns Cyrano (J. Anthony Crane) in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s production of Cyrano, running through May 1 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Photo by Kevin Berne

So many shows, so little time!

Herewith, a petite voyage to France, first to check in with the writer Colette and then to catch up with the swashbuckling Cyrano de Bergerac. I reviewed both Colette Uncensored at The Marsh, a solo show starring and co-written by Lorri Holt (with Zack Rogow, and Cyrano, a new adaptation of Rostand’s tale at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Here is a bit of the Colette Uncensored review:

There’s a definite “ooh la la” factor to Colette’s story, and Holt can flirt with and tease an audience like a true Parisian. But this is less a gossipy tale and more an evolutionary one. Colette thrived in the Belle Epoque period in which the bohemians sought freedom in all its forms (and suffered all the consequences).
At a certain point in her life, she delights that her reputation as a writer has overtaken her reputation as a scandal magnet, and by the time Paris is overtaken by the Nazis, we’ve seen her as a naive young wife, a successful actress, a journalist and a successful novelist. Through it all, she keeps coming back to a central question: “Is pleasure the same thing as happiness?”

Read the full review here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Lorri Holt and Zack Rogow’s Colette Uncensored continues through May 14 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$100. Call 415-282-3055 or visit www.themarsh.org.

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And here is a peek a the Cyrano review:

There’s a robust charm to director Robert Kelley’s production in the first act, when Cyrano is surrounded by a noisy crowd of soldiers, actors, friends and antagonists. The second act, however, loses steam in a major way as the lively comedy and masterful swordplay (fight direction by Jonathan Rider) gives way to less exciting romance, a detour into battle and then a 15-year time jump into outright tragedy.
At nearly three hours, this “Cyrano” is at least 20 minutes too long and has a much easier time bearing the laughs and action of the first act than it does the increasingly sad drama of the second.

Read the full review here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano, adapted by Michael Hollinger and Aaron Posner, continues in a TheatreWorks Silicon Valley production at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $19-$80. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

SF Playhouse offers a sweet, satisfying Kiss

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Carrie Paff and Gabriel Marin play actors in a romantic play who share a turbulent romantic past in Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss at San Francisco Playhouse. Below: Marin and Paff, along with Taylor Iman Jones as Angela navigate rocky real life off stage. Photos by Jessica Palopoli

San Francisco Playhouse puckers up and offers a nice juicy kiss for the holidays in Stage Kiss, a delightfully daffy theatrical spin with a touch of real-life melancholy.

This is the first time we’ve seen Ruhl’s play in San Francisco, but the whole Bay Area is alive with the sounds of Ruhl’s empathetic, intelligent, often mystical take on life. Marin Theatre Company and Shotgun Players recently produced her The Oldest Boy (read my review here) and Eurydice respectively. And Berkeley Repertory Theatre is gearing up for her For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday next summer.

There’s a reason Ruhl reigns over theater here (and across the country): her plays are warm, wise, funny and fresh. Stage Kiss, a cautious valentine to the theater (it’s wonderful, but it’s tricky, and its make believe has real-life repercussions), feels like equal parts 1930s theatrical farce and contemporary relationship comedy. The tone, as the director of the show within the show says, is “slippery.”

But the show’s actual director, Susi Damilano, mostly navigates the slip-and-slide tonal shifts deftly and with tremendous warmth. Her cast is headed by three Playhouse MVPs: Carrie Paff is an actress just coming back to the stage after leaving to raise a now-16-year-old daughter; Gabriel Marin is her leading man with whom she shared a turbulent but never quite forgotten romance in the past; and Mark Anderson Phillips is perhaps the worst director of all time (“Just go with your instincts!”). All three have shining moments, but Paff is positively luminous as the unnamed actress (known only as She in the program) whose insecurity gets knocked for a loop when her old lover shows up as her co-star.

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The play’s best moments occur in rehearsal for The Last Kiss a (fictional) creaky old play from the early ’30s, the kind of thing that Katharine Hepburn might have starred in and chewed up all the scenery (including her leading man). Ruhl’s dialogue for the play is convincingly awful, but as the former lovers rekindle their affections, their performances in the silly play suddenly become much more intense and passionate.

There’s a second play within the play in Act 2, a tormented love story abut an IRA terrorist and a whore (title: I Loved You Before I Killed you, or Blurry), and though it’s not quite as fun, it’s still got some big laughs, and all that kissing in the first play is replaced by more challenging fight choreography.

The idea of actors kissing in front of an audience – how weird that is, how titillating – gets a lot of exploration. By the former lover co-stars, of course, but also with the leading man’s understudy (a very funny Allen Darby as Kevin). The leading man, who is described as “a 17-year-old in man pants,” says audiences don’t really like all that kissing. “They tolerate it,” he says. “They don’t really like to see the act of kissing onstage, only the idea of kissing onstage. That’s why actors have to be good-looking, because it’s about an idea, an idea of beauty completing itself. You don’t like to see people do more than kiss onstage, it’s repulsive.”

There’s nothing remotely repulsive about any of the kissing on stage, but his point is well taken. Watching people kiss is odd. But it’s also fun in the proper context, and this context is continually interesting for much of the play’s two hours.

Michael Gene Sullivan, like many of the actors, plays multiple roles. He’s playing the husband of the leading lady in the Act 1 play, and then in Act 2, he plays her real-life husband, who turns out to be much more interesting than we might surmise. His observations about marriage and the way he fights to keep his alive is one of the most heartfelt and interesting aspects of the play. “Marriage is about repetition,” he says to his estranged wife, who has gotten carried away by her theatrical nature. “Every night the sun goes down and moon comes up and you have another chance to be good.”

Also strong in supporting roles are Taylor Iman Jones as several characters in the Act 1 play and then as a real-life daughter in Act 2, and Millie DeBenedt, who steals every scene she’s in when she appears in Act 2 as the leading man’s school teacher girlfriend.

The revolving set by Bill English and Jacquelyn Scott conveys a rich sense of theatricality – Act 1 even gets lush red velvet curtains – and is part of the joke when real life turns into theater.

Stage Kiss doesn’t have the depth of some of Ruhl’s other work, but as light, bright comedies go, it has substance. There are some big, robust laughs here. Even better, this turns out to be a Kiss that lingers.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Sarah Ruhl’s Stage Kiss continues through Jan. 9 at San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post St., San Francisco. Tickets are $20-$120. Call 415-677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org.

SF Mime Troupe rocks the boat in Ripple Effect

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Lisa Hori-Garcia (left, as Jeanine Adenauer), Keiko Shimosato Carreiro (center, as Sunny Nguyen) and Velina Brown (as Deborah Johnson) in this year’s San Francisco Mime Troupe free show Ripple Effect. Photo by DavidAllenStudio.com

I must admit that for a while there, I ceased looking forward to the July Fourth debut of the latest San Francisco Mime Troupe show at Dolores Park. The productions were feeling slack or worse, forced. The writing was off and the politics came off as strident or silly rather than relevant or even entertaining.Happy to report that this year’s show, Ripple Effect, is a major improvement. Much of the credit must go to writers Tanya Shaffer and Eugenie Chan, who co-wrote the show along with the Mime Troupe’s Michael Gene Sullivan. Very smart to tap two of the Bay Area’s most interesting playwrights.

I reviewed Ripple Effect for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here’s a sampling:

This year’s offering, “Ripple Effect,” which opened, as tradition dictates, in Dolores Park on the Fourth of July, could be full of rage, disgust and an overwhelming sense of injustice. And it is, to a degree. But it’s wrapped in a brightly written, laugh-laden, altogether chipper package that makes it one of the most enjoyable Mime Troupe outings in recent memory.

As written by Michael Gene Sullivan, Eugenie Chan and Tanya Shaffer, “Ripple Effect” takes its time working the audience into a fit of San Francisco outrage (about life in San Francisco no less), but by the end, fists are pumping and everyone’s chanting, “Justice rules and the Earth comes first!”

Though tech companies, outrageous rents and the displacement of San Francisco’s working class are the obvious fuel for this year’s show, the focus is personal.

Read the full review here.

And one of the best parts of this year’s Mime Troupe experience: bringing Fanny, the original Theater Dog, who doesn’t actually get to see much theater. She had a splendid time as well.

Fanny Mime Troupe

FOR MORE INFORMATION
San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Ripple Effect tours Bay Area and Northern California parks through Sept. 1. Shows are free. Call 415-285-1717 or visit www.sfmt.org.

Holy Zuzu’s petals! Get into the spirit with Wonderful Life

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The cast of Marin Theatre Company’s It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play includes (from left) Patrick Kelly Jones as Harry “Jazzbo” Heywood, Carrie Paff as Lana Sherwood, Michael Gene Sullivan as Freddie Filmore and Gabriel Marin as Jake Laurents. Below: Marin’s Jake gets into character as Bedford Falls’ favorite son, George Bailey. Photos by Ed Smith

At a certain point, no matter how much you love Dickens or get your heart cockles warmed by Scrooge and Tiny Tim, you’ve had it. Enough already with A Christmas Carol. Some years you just need to take a Carol break and find a little holiday spark elsewhere.

This year, if you’re searching for an alternative to Ebenezer and his ghosts, I recommend you head to Marin Theatre Company and spend some time with George Bailey and Clarence, his Angel Second Class. It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play takes Frank Capra’s much loved 1946 film and turns it into a stage experience by transforming it into a radio play. As re-conceived by Joe Landry, we’re in a Manhattan radio station on a snowy Christmas Eve as five actors play all the roles and create all the sound effects for a streamlined version of Capra’s story (which itself is based on a short story, Philip Van Doren Stern’s “The Greatest Gift”).

This is a smart approach because it relieves the stage production from having to compete with indelible images from Capra’s movie and allows us the extreme pleasure of settling in and being told a good Christmas story enlivened by a quintet of vibrant performers.

Director Jon Tracy marshals a lot of good energy to keep things from veering into the corny, both within the story itself and within the 1940s context of the radio show, where we get flashes of the “actor” characters who are portraying the characters within the story. Thankfully, there’s not a lot of time spent developing the actors beyond their basic personae. We hear what movie, radio or TV shows they’re most famous for, and that’s about it. This keeps the focus on the “Playhouse of the Air” production of It’s a Wonderful Life.

Landry’s adaptation of the screenplay (by Capra, Frances Goodrich, Jo Swerling and Albert Hackett, with reported “polish” by Dorothy Parker) keeps all the basic details and the framework: beleaguered George Bailey (Gabriel Marin) has had enough of his dreams being killed by small-town life. His ongoing fight to keep his family’s building and loan business afloat has finally crashed (thanks a lot for nothing, Uncle Billy), and so has any semblance of George’s faith and hope in life, wonderful or otherwise.

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As townspeople pray for George, the angels we have heard of (on high) take note and make moves to do something about it. An angel who has yet to achieve his wings, one Clarence Odbody (Patrick Kelly Jones) is given an overview of George’s life (also known as Act 1) and then sent down to prevent George from killing himself and then showing himself what the world would be like if he had never been born.

It takes a good long while for the set-up to result in some action, but once George gains a new perspective on the life he has led and the work he has done, It’s a Wonderful Life becomes a mash-up of A Christmas Carol and Our Town. We have supernatural forces intervening in a human life, offering an alternative view of that life and leading to redemption and a new-found appreciation for the intrinsic value of human life – every human life. As Clarence says, “One man’s life touches so many others, when he’s not there, it leaves an awfully big hole.”

Marin’s George is understandably cranky for much of the play’s 100-plus minutes, but when George gets an angelic kick in the spiritual pants, Marin brings on a full-blown nervous breakdown and rebirth. Even when he’s cranky, though it’s easy to see why sweet Mary (Sarah Overman) would be infatuated with George, who’s smart and ambitious and edgy in ways that other Bedford Falls folks are not.

Rounding out the cast in a number of roles are Carrie Paff, most memorable as Zuzu, George and Mary’s sniffly little girl, and Violet Bick, as close as Bedford Falls gets to a vixen, and Michael Gene Sullivan, who gleefully sinks his teeth into “old money-grubbing buzzard” Henry Potter, the bad guy.

Like any good piece of holiday entertainment, this show is warm and entertaining for its first two-thirds and then gets profound and truly emotional in its last section. This Wonderful Life can stand on its own apart from the movie, which is no small feat, and stake a claim for being wonderful in its own right.

[bonus video]
Here’s the original trailer for the movie It’s a Wonderful Life from 1946:

FOR MORE INFORMATION
It’s a Wonderful Life continues through Dec. 16 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. Tickets are $36-$57. Call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org.

TheatreWorks offers Variations on a scheme

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With the help of her friend Gertie (Marie Shell, left), musicologist Dr. Katherine Brandt (Rosina Reynolds) races against time to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the life of Beethoven (Howard Swain), who is breaking the bonds of time to complain about his soup in Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, a TheatreWorks production. Below: Reynolds and Swain have an otherworldly meeting between musicologist and music maker. Photos by Tracy Martin

When Moisés Kaufman gets to the point in his play 33 Variations, there’s resonance, beauty and purpose in it. For nearly 2 ½hours we’ve been tracking parallel stories: one in the present as a terminally ill musicologist delves into the mystery of why Beethoven wrote 33 variations on a waltz theme by music publisher Anton Diabelli. And the other in the early 19th century as we watch Beethoven, his health and hearing failing him, tackle major late-career works (his Mass, his Ninth Symphony) all while succumbing to an obsession with the Diabelli variations. The two stories do fuse in an interesting way eventually as issues of time, mortality and attention to detail bridge past and present while offering a spark of inspiration and insight into the nature of obsession.

Kafuman’s 2007 drama, produced by TheatreWorks and directed by Artistic Director Robert Kelley, takes its time getting to the point. Kelley’s production is thoroughly enjoyable and features some sharp performances, but the play itself doesn’t cut very deep, and the whole past/present cohabiting the stage thing doesn’t really work. In the crudest of terms, the play is an uneasy mash-up of Wit and Amadeus.

What works sublimely and powerfully is having a live pianist (William Liberatore) onstage the entire time, playing the original Diabelli waltz and then pieces of Beethoven’s variations on it. Hearing that music and listening to smart people talk about what’s happening in the music is exciting. This experience puts us inside the music and allows us to appreciate it (if we haven’t already) in a whole new way. The music, is in fact, much more interesting than the period drama Kaufman presents us with, as Beethoven (played by Howard Swain) behaves like a brilliant kook and makes life difficult for his assistant, Schindler (Jackson Davis), and music publisher Diabelli (Michael Gene Sullivan).

33 Variations 2

Not for lack of effort by Swain, Davis and Sullivan, the past part of the play stuck in the past never gains traction. And the reality of Beethoven’s life – his hearing loss, his money woes – turns out to be far less interesting than his music. There’s only one scene with Beehoven – it’s a fantasy sequence in which the past and present fuse – that has an emotional payoff, so I can’t help thinking the play would be a lot more interesting if Beethoven’s appearances were more limited and his music was emphasized even more.

The drama unfolding in the present, at least the part involving musicologist Katherine Brandt (Rosina Reynolds) and her quest to solve the Diabelli Variations mystery, is more compelling, especially as her research becomes at once more intensely focused and more hindered by her encroaching illness. As she examines Beethoven’s notebooks in Germany under the watchful eye of archivist Gertie (Marie Shell), Katherine is exploring her passion for music and answering questions that turn out to have as much to do with her own life as they do with Beethoven. Reynolds’ performance has the requisite sharp edges but without making Katherine a cold academic.

Would that Kaufman could let Katherine’s exploration command the stage, but he tacks on a subplot about Katherine’s daughter, Clara (Jennifer Le Blanc) and her budding relationship with one of Katherine’s nurses, Mike (Chad Deverman). We see their first date and watch them grapple with the physical and emotional demands of Katherine’s illness. It all has a familiar TV-like rhythm to it. Neither Clara nor Mike is a particularly complicated character. Both are nice and well meaning and, frankly, kind of boring.

Two things here are of primary interest: Katherine and Beethoven’s music. Everything else just gets in the way.

[bonus interview]

I interviewed playwright/director Moisés Kaufman for the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

TheatreWorks’ 33 Variations continues through Oct. 28 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $23-$73. Call 650-463-1960 or visit www.theatreworks.org.

Michael Gene Sullivan rouses the theatrical rabble

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Earlier this week I attended the Theatre Bay Area Annual Conference, and amid much useful information about the state of local and national theater, and in between the networking and general schmoozing, I heard a voice of startling sanity.

Michael Gene Sullivan, a local writer/actor/director, gave the closing inspirational speech, and it was a doozy. Sullivan, in case you don’t know, is the head writer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe (not that kind of mime – they specialize in sharp political satire and sticking it to the man). He’s a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post, and his adaptation of George Orwell’s
1984 was directed by Tim Robbins for the Actor’s Gang in Los Angeles.

Sullivan, an old-school San Francisco rabble rouser in the best sense, was fired up from the start of his speech as he pointed out that the $700 billion bail-out does not really compute because there are fewer than 7 billion people on the planet, so that’s about $100 for every man, woman and child on the planet.

Then he let Wall Street have it: “These Wizards of Wall Street – whose genius was not in buying low and selling high, but in keeping the rest of us so hypnotized with hype, so distracted with glitter, so backed into a terrifying corner with their economic shock and awe that Americans failed to do the obvious – which was hunt them down, beat in their doors, drag them naked, screaming and crying into the streets and redistribute their wealth and internal organs all across this great country of ours.”

Then he asked a question: “And who wouldn’t want to do a play about that? Doesn’t it sound better than remounting Wind in the Willows…again? Who wouldn’t want to do a play about the people of this country actually waking up and grabbing these pencil-necked free market pirates by their pitiful comb-overs?…What would Moliere do? Skewer the greedy weasels on a comically hot spit, then slowly roast them over a fire of their own lies!”

Sullivan challenged the theater makers in the room to challenge themselves and their audiences – a difficult thing to do in economically challenging times. “If theater doesn’t … challenge us to be our better selves, our braver selves, teach us about one another – if we as artists and audience don’t leave a show smarter, better, more human people than before, then what we saw was not theater. It was television.”

But here we are in a country that doesn’t value the arts, where the government provides precious little funding for the arts and much of the slack comes from charitable foundations and corporations. Sullivan, of course, warns against becoming corporate shills for the sake of survival, but he warns just as vehemently against entertainment for entertainment’s sake, which he equates with Internet porn.

“Internet porn is not out to change the world, it’s not looking to show the injustice, racism or sexism inherent in our society. It is not a demand for equal rights or even a mild reminder that things could be better. Its sole purpose is to entertain its audience – normally one at a time and probably in a cubicle. Porn, like commercial TV, is not meant to be cutting edge or politically challenging. It is the perfect example of entertainment for the sake of entertainment. And you know what you never hear about with Internet porn? A lack of funding. You never hear about porn producers struggling over a grant application.”

So short of becoming the theatrical equivalent of Internet porn (fluffers included), what’s the answer as we head into the next Great Depression? Sullivan frankly admits he has no idea, but for theater to continue to survive, as it has done since the Ancient Greeks, theater must remain dangerous.

“Each of us has the power and talent to undermine institutional stupidity and crime. We will not only say the Emperor is wearing no clothes, but also that his testicles look a little funny…And that feeling of immediacy, of danger, of theater being not a refuge from the real world but a starker version of my experience of the hope and engagement in a time of injustice – that’s what I want to create, and that is what all of us can give our audience. Hope.”

The conclusion that Sullivan comes to is that theater has to become important to people’s lives.

“We have to stop thinking of ourselves as the `theater community.’ We have to train ourselves and others to think of us as a beloved and necessary part of the larger community – a part that is vital to telling their stories, vital to helping us all understand ourselves better, vital to enunciating and being a part of the fight to make this life fairer, more equitable and just.”

There it is. A rant. A manifesto. A big slice of common sense, which is in short supply these days.

You can read Michael Gene Sullivan’s complete speech here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-gene-sullivan/my-speech-to-the-membersh_b_133102.html

And while you’re there, read his other posts. He’s a terrific writer whose sense of humor never obscures his sharp points.

Review: `Red State’

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Opened July 4 in Dolores Park


The cast of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Red State includes (from left) Lisa Hori-Garcia, Lizzie Calogero, Robert Ernst and Adrian C. Mejia. Photos by David Allen

Great songs make Mime Troupe’s `Red State’ sing
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This Fourth of July, at the premiere of SF Mime Troupe’s latest opus, Red State, petitions were circulating to get a local sewage plant named after George W. Bush. Another group was fighting the push to charge $115 for replacement library books. Cindy Sheehan was there, so were giant dragonflies dancing over the heads of the theatergoers/revelers, and even the sun made intermittent appearances.

With the impending presidential election, this is prime time for a nearly 50-year-old lefty-loony theatrical troupe with satire on its collective mind.

Written and directed by Michael Gene Sullivan, Red State forgoes the big, easy targets and focuses on the little man. Specifically, the show is about the dying Kansas town of Bluebird, where the hospital, the public schools and the farms are all kaput.

It’s Election Day 2008, and by some bizarre twist, the results are tied, with only one district not reporting any results. Yes, little Bluebird – with its late-arriving ballot machine and dwindling population – holds the key to the nation’s highest office.

Though it bears a strange resemblance to Swing Vote, an upcoming Kevin Costner film about a regular guy who holds the deciding vote in the presidential election, Red State is sharp for most of its 90 minutes. There’s a dull patch in the last third, but things pick up by the end.

The real high point of the show is Pat Moran’s score. He has written some great songs about struggling Americans. In “How Much” a woman trying to sell her last few possessions sings, “What’s the use of memories when you can’t make enough to get through the day?”

And in the showstopper, Velina Brown (above with Robert Ernst), as Miss Rosa the librarian, sings “Leaving Town.” Soulful and with a hint of ’50s blues, the song bemoans a country where the educated are in the minority and the priority is bombs over brains. In the end, Miss Rosa sings that she’s just another over-educated, unemployed old woman whose country doesn’t want anything she has to offer.

Red State lives up to its name during a fantastic fantasy sequence in which the son of a diehard union man (Ernst) gets swept away by a twister and wakes up in an alternate socialist reality in which his town is thriving, health care is paid for, the pencil factory is still running and no families are living in their Oldsmobiles.
Seems this pithy scene is worthy of a show all its own, but when the man returns to the real world, his heart beats with socialist fervor as he sings the praises of “Bein’ Red.”

Also in the perky cast are Noah James Butler (whose funniest character is God-fearing Wendell, a man trying to sell a giant crucifix), Lizzie Calogero (hilarious as a creaky homeless granny), Lisa Hori-Garcia (as a dutiful mom trying to keep her family afloat while her husband fights in Afghanistan) and Adrian Mejia (as a hometown boy turned soldier just back from the Middle East).
Red State gets its message out there with plenty of laughs to cut the sting. As one man says: “Fighting just keeps you tired – too tired to realize you might be fighting the wrong fight.” Ouch.

Red State continues its free park tour through Sept. 14 and is likely coming to a park near you. Visit www.sfmt.org for a complete schedule or call 415-285-1717.