Wilson's Fences hits hard at Marin Theatre Co.
I've always been moved by August Wilson's Fences, the 1950s installment of his extraordinary Century Cycle of plays depicting African-American life in the 20th century. But the current production of the play at Marin Theatre Company under the direction of Derrick Sanders made me feel the play in a whole new way.
This has largely to do with Carly Lumbly's wrenching central performance as Troy Maxson.
Bright and bouncy, Moon's Sunshine radiates charm
The song titles say a lot about what this musical is like: "Livin' in the Sunlight," "You Hit the Spot," "Sweeping the Clouds Away." If it seems there's a rosy glow emanating from these titles, that's exactly right. You'll find no more glowing show in town than 42nd Street Moon's first original musical in its two-decade history, Painting the Clouds with Sunshine.
This is a stage musical in love with movies. Creators Greg MacKellan and Mark D. Kaufmann have learned a whole lot from the passing parade of lost, forgotten and banal-to-brilliant musicals...
To laugh or not to laugh: that's the question in Wittenberg
You don't have to have a college degree to enjoy David Davalos' Wittenberg a the Aurora Theatre Company, but it sure will help.
If 16th-century academia is your thing, then you probably already know all about Wittenberg, the German university made famous as the seat of higher learning from which young Prince Hamlet of Denmark returned home after his father's murder.
Wittenberg also happens to be where Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, theologian and lecturer, nailed his 95 provocative thoughts on a church door and sparked the Protestant Reformation. And, to keep things interesting, the hallowed university happens to be where Christopher Marlowe's fictional Dr. Faustus practiced his dark arts.
Magic's Five Minutes misses the mark
I loved Linda McLean's Any Given Day so much that I proclaimed it my favorite show of 2012 (read my review here). And that makes it all the harder to convey just how much I disliked her world premiere Every Five Minutes at the Magic Theatre.
Va-va-va Venus! ACT's Fur flies
Is it just me, or is it hot in this theater?
Live theater is not usually a hotbed of eroticism – so often attempts at sexiness inspire laughs more than they do accelerated heart rates – but the Bay Area of late has been home to some theatrical sexy time. First we got hot and heavy with polyamory in Carson Kreitzer's Lasso of Truth at Marin Theatre Company (read my review here), which featured Wonder Woman's creator happily submitting to the many strengths of his wife and his girlfriend (who also generated their own heat independent of the man).
And now we have David Ives' scintillating (for lots of reasons) Venus in Fur, in which dog collars, leather bustiers, thigh-high black leather boots and degradation play significant parts.
Crowded Fire saddles up comic Horses
There's something very sly at work in She Rode Horses Like the Stock Exchange, the world-premiere from Amelia Roper with Crowded Fire Theater at the Thick House. From looking at the vivid, sharply designed set by Maya Linke, with its paper sculpture trees and angled artificial grass, it's clear this is not going to be just any walk in the park.
But that's exactly how the play starts: a Sunday in a suburban Connecticut park...
Realistic portrait of the abstract artist in SF Playhouse's Bauer
A mysterious chapter in modern art history receives some theatrical exploration in the world premiere of Lauren Gunderson's Bauer at San Francisco Playhouse. If you've never heard of the abstract painter Rudolf Bauer, whom some considered a genius beyond contemporaries like Kandinsky and Klee, that may have something to do with the fact that the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which was built to display his work, kept them instead in the basement out of public view.
That's one of the issues addressed in Bauer, a three-person drama by Gunderson, San Francisco's most prolific and produced playwright.
Bouncy Island breezes blow at TheatreWorks
Last Saturday I reviewed the TheatreWorks production of Once on This Island, the charming musical fairy tale by the Ragtime/Rocky team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. My review ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, and you can read it here.
Director Robert Kelley's production captures much of the show's charm and energy, and the cast is delightful. But I've been thinking about...
Blood, gore, giggles galore at Impact Theatre
Blood is fun – at least it is within the confines of Impact Theatre's omnibus presentation Bread and Circuses, a collection of nine short plays fairly dripping with the thick red stuff.
As you'd expect with such an assortment, there's a wide variety in style and substance here. There's also one easy-to-draw conclusion: endings are hard.
The most satisfying entries in this two-hour experience at LaVal's Subterranean include...
Life, love, kick-ass music in Bengsons' Hundred Days
In those moments, when the music and voices are soaring, the drums are pounding, the feet are stomping and the hands are clapping, there's no better place to be than sitting in Z Space fully immersed in the glorious new rock musical Hundred Days.
A creation by The Bengsons, the musical duo comprising spouses Abigail Bengson and Shaun Bengson, Hundred Days is an unconventional musical that is so much more than it seems.
Fifty shades of Wonder in Marin Theatre Co.'s Lasso
You're bound to like Carson Kreitzer's Lasso of Truth if you like Wonder Woman...and a heaping helping of S&M on the side.
If you didn't know the two were related, first of all, think about it for a minute (the golden lasso, the bustier, the metal bracelets, etc.), and second of all, has Kreitzer got an origin story for you. Commissioned by Marin Theatre Company, the play is part of the National New Play Network, which means this is what they call a "rolling world premiere." The show begins in Mill Valley then heads to Atlanta and Kansas City.
So where did Wonder Woman come from (and we're not talking about Paradise Island, home of the Amazons)? For many of us, she sprung fully formed in the 1970s looking like Lynda Carter in a patriotic bathings suit and gold accessories. That famous TV show is actually a jumping-off point for Kreitzer's play.
Greed not so good in ACT's Napoli!
Scuzza me, but you see back in old Napoli that's...
In the play Napoli!, it's not so much "amore" as it is "controlling the market." American Conservatory Theater's new translation of Eduardo De Filippo's 1945 play eschews the Italian title, Napoli milionaria!, in favor of translators Linda Alper and Beatrice Basso's choice, Napoli!. The exclamation point might suggest a musical (Hello, Mussolini!), but it's probably meant more ironically. Naples during World War II, especially before the allies arrived, was a pretty dismal, bombed-out, typhus-infested place with no shortage of shortages.
Neither a chest-beating drama nor an uproarious comedy, Napoli! resides in an in-between zone...
Simply put, Just Theater's A Maze is just amazing
There's only so much you can say about Rob Handel's delectably intriguing play A Maze without spoiling the fun. The first thing to know is that the play was first produced in the Bay Area last summer by Just Theater at the Live Oak Theater. That production generated such buzz, both from critics and audience members, that the astute folks at Shotgun Players pricked up their ears and decided to re-mount that production at the Ashby Stage.
The re-mount brings back the original cast of eight under the direction of Molly Aaronson-Gelb, and though I didn't see the show last summer, it's hard to imagine these performances are not sharper and more astute this time out.
Shhhh! Fizzy Speakeasy fun until it's not
So I met a fella in a yellow fedora on the steps of a museum, and he told me where to go to find The Speakeasy, a new interactive theater experience created by Nick A. Olivero and Boxcar Theatre.
I reviewed the show for the San Francisco Chronicle, and I have to say this was a hard review to write only because I so wanted to love this ambitious enterprise.
Gardley's House stands best when it sings
Music is so ingrained in New Orleans culture that it's no surprise when a play set in the area turns out to be full of wonderful choral singing, voodoo chanting and other musical surprises. But what's interesting about Marcus Gardley's The House that will not Stand, now receiving its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is that music elevates the show in ways the plot and characters do not.
This play about a mixed-race family in New Orleans circa 1836 really wants to be a musical.
Fit to be tied in Aurora's powerful, provocative Knot
To call Gidion's Knot, Johnna Adams' play now at the Aurora Theatre Company, a mystery is accurate but only to a point. Certainly there are things we don't know and need to find out, but there's a whole lot more to this complex, disturbing and even devastating drama.
Looking at Nina Ball's incredibly realistic fifth-grade classroom set – complete with tiled ceiling and fluorescent lights – it's easy to think, "A play about a parent-teacher conference in a bright, friendly classroom. How intense could this be?" Oh, it's intense all right.
Bucky's back and better than ever
I've probably seen D.W. Jacobs' R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe five times now, and I get something new out of it every time. I saw the one-man show starring the extraordinary Ron Campbell about 14 years ago when it opened in San Francisco at Theatre Artaud. That production ran for over a year, went on tour, then came back about a year later. I thought I might get weary of Bucky and his fascinations, but that was never the case.
Now History/Mystery is back...
Turning on a paradigm in Magic's HIR
The last time Taylor Mac was in town, he gave us the five-hour Lily's Revenge with glitter, drag queens, a cast of 40 and so much dazzling theatricality that we were able to withstand his absence in the following three years (read my Lily's Revenge review here)
Mac has continued to wow audiences in shows like his two-man outing with Mandy Patinkin or La Ma Ma's acclaimed The Good Person of Szechwan, but the Magic Theatre was able to lure him back to present the world premiere of something entirely different than Lily's Revenge. This time out, Mac is the playwright of HIR (pronounced like "here"), a fairly traditional two-act, two-plus-hour play that seems like a sitcom filtered through Mac's gender-fluid, ragingly intelligent, funny and passionate artistry.
Complex Jerusalem unfolds at SF Playhouse
San Francisco Playhouse deserves tremendous credit for tackling Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, a multi-award-winning play in London and New York whose success hinged, in large part, on a central performance by Mark Rylance, one of our greatest working actors.
Minus Rylance's dazzle, the rambling, shambling play must stand on its own, and there's not much there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.
Slice of SF life in fascinating Pornographer's Daughter
Liberty Bradford Mitchell's story of pornography, family and murder could so easily come across as a public form of therapy. Given what she and her family have been through, that would certainly be understandable and maybe even interesting in a sort of voyeuristic way. But Bradford Mitchell, working with director Michael T. Weiss as crafted something much richer and more interesting in The Pornographer's Daughter, a solo show for performer and rock band now at Z Below.
Bradford Mitchell is the daughter of Artie Mitchell and niece of Jim Mitchell, the infamous Mitchell Brothers, purveyors of porn and major players in ...