Hot to trot: Can War Horse survive the hype?
As a showcase for mind-blowing stagecraft, you will not find a better example than War Horse, the National Theatre of Great Britain hit that is trampling audience's tear ducts around the world. Everything you've heard about the life-size horse puppets from South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company is true – there isn't a more powerful fusion of design, movement and emotion on a stage anywhere. The horses – and especially the puppeteers who bring them to life – balance the weight of imagination and reality with such skill that the pretend beasts are the most vital beings on stage (not to slight the capable human cast, but the horses win by more than a nose).
Now at the Curran Theatre as part of the SHN season, War Horse arrives with a staggering amount of hype. Is the show everything we've been led to expect? The answer is yes. And no.
Gettin’ to the git in Cal Shakes’ glorious Spunk
Zora Neale Hurston writes with zest and zeal. She can move from joy to anguish in a second and still find her way back to hope. All of this is readily apparent in California Shakespeare Company's production of Spunk at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda. Sharp and spirited and brimming with talent, these three Hurston stories, adapted for the stage by George C. Wolfe, are poetry and drama and jubilation and as much stirring music as you're likely to hear in 90 minutes in the foggy Orinda Hills.
Wolfe honors Hurston by making sure the audience knows these are short stories – not plays – being brought to life so that we, as a group, can appreciate Hurston's rich, beautiful and musical language. Each of the three stories includes narration of some kind, so the evening never strays from its literary roots. But this is no storytime theater. This is theater that moves. And sings. Boy, does it sing.
Still Misérables after all these years
The 25th anniversary production of Les Misérables now at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN season is annoying and gratifying, pretty much in equal measure.
You have to give credit to super producer Cameron Mackintosh for even attempting something new with such a tried-and-true money maker as Les Miz. He hired new directors and a raft of new designers. They 86-ed the turntable, such a memorable (and thematically important) element of the original Royal Shakespeare Company production and added that now inescapable 21st-century plague, projections.
This musical war horse is certainly refreshed if not necessarily strengthened.
Razzle dazzle and outrage in Kander and Ebb's Scottsboro Boys
The Scottsboro Boys is a musical on crusade. Not for the first time in their storied career, composers John Kander and the late Fred Ebb make some of the worst human traits entertaining all the while championing the underdog and giving splendid voice to those who might be otherwise ignored or forgotten.
The crusade at hand is two-fold: Kander and Ebb, working with book writer David Thompson and choreographer/director Susan Stroman – a copacetic dream team if ever there was one – want to rescue the victims of a particularly ignominious chapter in American history from obscurity. And they want nothing short of exposing the roots of the Civil Rights Movement. They accomplish both goals, and The Scottsboro Boys is as powerful as it is entertaining, and that's saying a lot on both counts.
We've seen Kander and Ebb working this particular vein before: politics, horror, victimization and good, old razzle-dazzle. We saw it in Cabaret, where singing Nazis made the blood run cold; we saw it in Chicago, where cynicism and celebrity trumped humanity; we saw it in Kiss of the Spider Woman, where revolutionary zeal was squashed but the human spirit is not. This is not to say that Scottsboro is a re-tread in any way. There are echoes of other shows, other songs, but this compact, deeply felt show ratchets up the disturbance factor with its very form.
Berkeley Rep champions Emotional girl power
I'm going to paraphrase the title song of Eve Ensler's Emotional Creature, now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Don't tell them not to cry or to calm it down or be so extreme or be reasonable. They are emotional creatures. It's how the world got made. After all, you don't tell the Atlantic Ocean how to behave.
It's a rousing number at the end of a compelling show, and it makes you want to scream and shout and, well, be an emotional creature yourself.
After her all her international success with The Vagina Monologues and the related V-Day events raising millions of dollars to combat violence against women around the world. After all her books and shows and personal struggles and triumphs, Ensler is still turning to theater as a means to agitate, to stir hearts and to make people want to scream and shout.
Just Wilde over Aurora’s Salomania
If only a 94-year-old scandal were sensational in ways we no longer understood, we could look back and wonder what all the fuss was about and why the media underestimated the taste of the general public and why the general public was so content to be constantly underestimated.
Alas, not much has changed since the early 20th century criminal libel suit that American dancer Maud Allan brought against British newspaper publisher Noel Pemberton-Billing after he described the interest in her dance piece Vision of Salomé as the "cult of the clitoris." That was the headline he used in his paper, the Vigilante, to describe the moral reprobates who were attracted to Allan's version of the play by Oscar Wilde, which had been banned since Wilde's very public downfall.
What we learn in Mark Jackson's fascinating and at moments electrifying new play Salomania is that the media, though their aims may be occasionally true, are a pawn in larger political games and panderers to public taste, which they help shape.
Magic time, or what's all the Bruja-ha?
Sometimes names are facts. Like now – there's magic at the Magic Theatre.
The play is Luis Alfaro's world-premiere Bruja, and it's extraordinarily powerful. Even better, it has one foot very firmly grounded in the real world, and the other somewhere else that's hard to describe, but rather than being some twinkly netherworld, this supernatural zone can be dangerous. And deadly.
Being an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, you know this experience wont' end happily. But what you might not know is that Alfaro, who scored at the Magic two years ago with his award-winning Oedipus el Rey, is going to make you care and he'll freak you out a little, maybe a lot.
TheatreWorks’ Wheelhouse takes the road to nowhere
The members of GrooveLily, vocalist/electric violinist Valerie Vigoda, keyboardist/vocalist Brendan Millburn and drummer/vocalist Gene Lewin seem like such nice people. They seemed nice in 2004 when their Striking 12 (a pop-rock re-telling of "The Little Matchgirl") sparked with audiences at TheatreWorks, and they seem even nicer in their new concert cum autobiographical theatrical piece Wheelhouse, now having its world premiere courtesy of TheatreWorks.
The fact that they seem so nice makes it hard to say that I found Wheelhouse uninteresting. Nice but bland. It's like being forced to watch somebody's home movies while they play songs they wrote to accompany them.
Crowded Fire delivers the goods with Good Goods
A little bit weird (in the most wonderful way) and a whole lot good, Christina Anderson's Good Goods is a captivating drama that becomes a highly satisfying love story – or love stories to be exact. Crowded Fire Theater is producing the West Coast premiere, with artistic director Marissa Wolf firmly at the helm.
What's so appealing about this two-act play is that it's old-fashioned and fresh at the same time, mysterious and yet straightforward enough to be almost instantly engaging. You get a sense of community and real human connection intermingled with the supernatural as in an August Wilson play and abundant romance, betrayal and pining, as in a Tennessee Williams play. But this is not to say that Anderson is being derivative.
The dark art of violence and abuse
Dael Orlandersmith's Black n Blue Boys / Broken Men is a brutal experience. How could it not be? Its 90-plus minutes are all about the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of young men and how such violence affects them into adulthood. These fictional stories are harrowing, graphic and shattering, which is to say this is not an evening of light entertainment.
Orlandersmith wrote and performs these stories, and she doesn't pull any punches as she plays six men/boys of varying ages and ethnicities. Under the direction of Chay Yew, Orlandersmith is such a graceful, powerful performer that you can't take your eyes off of her, even when the material makes you flinch.
God of Carnage or Why the end of the world is A-OK
Watching four people try to practice "the art of coexistence," as the playwright puts it, is entertaining but ultimately depressing in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage at Marin Theatre Company. One of the hottest plays in recent memory, Carnage is the perfect storm of contemporary drama. It has one set, four actors and that perfect blend of satirically repulsive comedy and apparent moral heft. Oh, and it has impressive vomit special effects and that most satisfying of dramatic dénouements, the destruction of a mobile phone.
What it doesn't have – not even in this brilliantly produced MTC version – is a satisfying reason for being.
Xanadu the right thing
Summer camp has started early this year, but not to worry. This is some high quality high camp.
We've had a few Bay Area productions of Xanadu, the Broadway musical version of the notorious 1980 movie starring Olivia Newton-John as a roller-skating light bulb, er, sorry, roller-skating Muse (you know, from Mt. Olympus kind of muse). The Retro Dome in San Jose and New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco both did the show last year, but having missed the show during its 2007/08, I was waiting for the Center Repertory Company production that just opened.
I'm so glad I waited.
Before I tell you how fabulous this production is – and fabulous really is the operative word on so many levels – I have to confess to being a Xanadu fan.
Be-handle with care: lost in Spokane
What did Spokane, Washington ever do to Martin McDonagh? The London-born, Ireland-identified playwright famously wrote six plays, including The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Cripple of Inishmaan, in a year and then moved on to film. His short film, Six Shooter, won an Oscar, and he was nominated again for his screenplay to In Bruges (which he also directed).
Then the fiercely talented McDonagh returned to the stage with his first play set in America. A Behanding in Spokane, which ran on Broadway in 2010, is clearly a McDonagh play, what with the desperation, the black comedy and the flying body parts. But this is minor McDonagh, and, in fact, Behanding is a pretty lousy play.
Rough neighborhood, extraordinary theater
You may think you know the Tenderloin – drugs, poverty, violence, crime – and certainly those impressions are valid, but Cutting Ball theater's world-premiere Tenderloin challenges audiences to think more deeply about the neighborhood, its history, its significance and even its beauty. Director and head writer Annie Elias and her team of actor-journalists – Tristan Cunningham, Siobhan Doherty, Rebecca Frank, Michael Kelly, Leigh Shaw, David Sinaiko and David Westley Skillman (who is not in the show) – spent more than a year collecting interviews, conducting workshops and shaping a theater piece out of the real life happening on the other side of the theater walls.
Extraordinary Day dawns at the Magic
Linda McLean's Any Given Day, now having its American premiere at the Magic Theatre, is theater for grown-ups. There's nothing fanciful or sensational about. It's basically duet conversations in two acts and less than 90 minutes. But the richness of McLean's language, seemingly so simple yet so precise in defining the characters and their relationships to each other and to the world.
The pain and sadness is palpable in these people, yet so are the passing moments of joy and kindness and good humor. McLean's world is full of the kind of emotional upheaval you only get to see when you spend time with people and see what's really happening with them under their reasonably calm, reasonably functional exterior selves. To catch glimpses of the real turmoil underneath is an astonishing achievement, and that's what McLean and this powerful production manage to accomplish.
Othello: not a fan but a grudging admirer
When faced with the prospect of seeing another production of Othello, I usually gird my loins, wipe my nose with a strawberry-embroidered hanky and settle in for a show I know I'm not going to like much. As a theater critic, I suppose I'm not supposed to have a bias for or against certain plays, but that's really nonsensical when you think about it, especially plays you've seen over and over and over again. I've been doing the theatrical criticism thing for almost 20 years now, and I've seen Desdemona choked (and choked and choked again) a number of times, in good productions and bad. And I've never really been moved by the play. Certain performances made an impact, but more on an intellectual than emotional level.
Perhaps I should have skipped the latest Othello at Marin Theatre Company, but the prospect of seeing two actors I admire greatly, Aldo Billingslea and Craig Marker as Othello and Iago respectively, was too much to resist. I have to say I'm glad I saw the production because these two formidable local talents do not disappoint.
Past imperfect in ACT's Maple and Vine
Dwelling in the past, as so many human beings come to find, causes nothing but frustration and disappointment. The same is true for Jordan Harrison's play Maple and Vine now at American Conservatory Theater.
Harrison is the talented young writer last seen in the Bay Area with Finn in the Underworld at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2005 and Act a Lady at the New Conservatory Theatre Center in 2009. His Maple and Vine premiered about a year ago at the Humana Festival of New Plays in Louisville, Ky., and it's a more interesting play than it is a good one. The play purports to be about the quality of life now compared to the 1950s, but it really ends up being about how far people are willing to go to save a relationship.
Act 1 is pretty much all set up...
Who's taking care of Pinter's crafty Caretaker?
There are all kinds of battles going on in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker – brother vs. brother, brothers vs. the tramp, the tramp vs. the truth, loneliness vs. despair, etc. – but the really interesting battle is between menace and humor. Surprisingly, at least in the sharply etched production now at the Curran Theatre as part of the SHN season, humor wins.
Pinter can annoy me faster than just about any other playwright if his work falls into the wrong hands. Happily, this production, which originated at the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse before moving on to London's West End and a world tour, feels lived in and full of life (at least as much life as Pinter will allow amid the portentous silences and lonely drifting).
Subtle brilliance in out-of-this-world Aliens
When Annie Baker made her Bay Area debut with Body Awareness at the Aurora Theatre Company, I was impressed by the arrival of an intriguing, intelligent and compassionate new voice on the American theater scene (other folks who had seen Baker's work were already well aware of this). But it turns out that with Body Awareness Baker was only getting warmed up.
Baker's The Aliens is now running at SF Playhouse, and its brilliance is deceptive. The play seems so very simple. Two 30something slackers have nothing better to do than hang out in the staff break area behind a cafe called the Green Sheep in Baker's fictional Shirley, Vermont. Their shiftless idyll is interrupted by 17-year-old Evan Shelmerdine, a new busboy at the cafe who insists, in his halting way, that the slackers can't slack off her. This area is only for staff.
Happily, the slackers – KJ the poet and lyricist and Jasper the aspiring novelist – don't listen to Shelmerdine but instead draw him into their exclusive little club.
The Aliens is an absolutely astonishing play.
Berkeley Rep’s pulsating Red
You've heard that insulting phrase, "As exciting as watching paint dry." Well in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Red, you do watch paint dry, and it's surprisingly exciting.
This is one of those new American dramas that arrives at the local regional level lauded with awards and high expectations. John Logan's drama won a passel of Tony Awards, including Best Play, so it wouldn't be surprising if audience members showed up with minds made up one way or the other – oh, this is going to be good because the people in New York (and London) say it is; or, oh, there's no way this can actually be good because it has received too much praise.
It's the kind of artistic situation about which painter Mark Rothko, the subject of Logan's play, would have a definite, probably loud, opinion.
Writing a play about a volcanic talent like Rothko can't help but tame him in some ways.