Sing a song of Sondheim
You never need an excuse to celebrate the genius of Stephen Sondheim, but here goes. We're still celebrating his 80th birthday (which actually occurred last March). He has a new book out, Finishing the Hat, Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (445 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, $39.95). A new DVD, Sondheim: The Birthday Concert, is out on Nov. 6. And tonight in San Francisco is the opening of West Side Story, Sondheim's Broadway debut as a lyricist.Sondheim was interviewed recently on WNYC radio's The Leonard Lopate Show and talked about his life and work. You can listen to the entire interview below, but here are a few juicy excerpts.
Just play it cool, boy! The enduring sound of West Side Story
What is it that makes West Side Story so incredibly intoxicating, even 53 years after its premiere? There's no denying the power of Jerome Robbins' athletic and gorgeous choreography or the simplicity and (occasional) corniness of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics (his first for a Broadway show). And Arthur Laurents' book, which puts a 1950s spin on Romeo and Juliet, is about as solid as Broadway books come.
But it's the music, Leonard Bernstein's astonishing music that elevates West Side Story to legendary status. Combining classical with jazz with show tune, Bernstein concocted a highly original sound that has yet to be bested on the Broadway stage. This is a score for the ages, one equally at home in the symphony hall as in the high school auditorium. How many scores can fit as comfortably in both spaces? Aside from Bernstein's own Candide (which he was working on in tandem with West Side Story), not many.
We'll have the chance to revisit the score this week as the most recent Broadway revival comes to town as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway series.
Tracking big Game: Delving into Afghanistan at Berkeley Rep
Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, gazes over a map of Afghanistan and says to Abdur Rahman, the country's Amir, "Your country is in the wrong place."
That imagined pronouncement could have occurred in 1893, when Ron Hutchinson's play Durand's Line, takes place. Or it could be an echo that reverberates through much of Afghanistan's complex and troubled history – at least the chunks of history we experience in The Great Game: Afghanistan, an extraordinary theater event now in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda Theatre.
A hit for London's Tricycle Theatre, a company known for connecting audiences with plays of political and historical import, The Great Game is now touring the U.S. with a three-part cycle of 12 one-act plays (and assorted interstitial monologues), all about Afghanistan from the 1800s to present day. Tricycle Artistic Director Nicolas Kent felt that all the attention was going Iraq and the war raging there with not enough focus on Afghanistan and the war raging there. So he commissioned a bunch of playwrights to write about the country, and this powerfully involving theatrical marathon is the result.
Berkeley Rep is presenting Part One, 1842-1930, Invasions & Independence on Wednesdays; Part Two, 1979-1996, Communism, the Mujahideen & the Taliban on Thursdays; and Part Three, 1996-2010, Enduring Freedom on Fridays. Then all three parts are presented in marathon viewings on Saturdays and Sundays. For opening day last Friday, we were able to see all three parts. We started at 11:30am and finished shortly after 10:30pm. Box meals are available in the theater lobby so patrons can keep their strength up, and a number of local restaurants offer prix-fixe menus to ensure that patrons enjoy a hearty meal and get back to the theater in time.
This really is a staggering event, and you have to get your head in the right place to enjoy it.
Marin ignites an inferno with extraordinary 9 Circles
Craig Marker gives a performance of such magnitude in Marin Theatre Company’s 9 Circles that it almost eclipses the play itself.Obviously the play has to be substantial and artful enough to elicit great work from actors, and that is certainly true of Bill Cain’s script here. But at times it almost seems Marker’s not in a play at all – he’s a flesh-and-blood documentary, a slice-of-life person pushing everyone in the room through a barrage of intense emotions.There’s simply no escaping Marker’s intensity in the 99-seat Lieberman Theatre, Marin’s intimate second stage. Nor would you want to escape. This is without question must-see theater.
Fathers and sons, heists and homelands in Habibi
Love, tension and desperation are deeply felt in Habibi, the world-premiere production of Sharif Abu-Hamdeh’s drama about always feeling away from home. This is yet another co-production from Campo Santo and Intersection for the Arts that lights an oil lamp from within a dark subject.On one level, the central relationship between a father and a son is completely recognizable by anyone from anywhere. Tariq (Aleph Ayin) should be in college, but he can’t really be bothered. He gets fired from crappy jobs and spends a whole lot of his time doing nothing in the tiny Mission District apartment he shares with his dad, Mohammed (Paul Santiago), a museum security guard.They’re scraping by, and in their cramped quarters, they fight a lot. Tariq sounds like a spoiled, contemptuous brat when he’s talking to his dad – every sentence practically drips with a sneer and an eye roll. Mohammed is rigid in his own way, loving his son fiercely but holding too tight, lecturing too much.
The Venetian Room and the way we were
Sometimes I feel like I got to San Francisco just a little bit too late.
By the time I got here in 1990, the cabaret heyday was long past, and just a year before, the famed Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel – where Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr. had all performed and where, in 1962, Tony Bennett introduced a little tune called "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" – shut its doors as a musical venue after more than four decades and became just another overly ornate meeting room.
Tonight, I'm happy to report, the Venetian Room reopened as the new home of Bay Area Cabaret, Marilyn Levinson's seven-year-old nonprofit fighting to keep classy cabaret alive in San Francisco.
A funny Megan Cavanagh happened on the way to this Forum
Anybody's enjoyment of the 1962 Stephen Sondheim/Burt Shevelove/Larry Gelbart musical farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum depends largely on the actor playing Pseudolus, the lie-spouting slave and comedy motor at the center of the show.
Zero Mostel originated the role – did anyone have a bigger comic motor than Zero? – Phil Silvers played it in 1972 and Nathan Lane and Whoopi Goldberg took turns in the most recent Broadway revival in 1996. I've seen several productions of Forum and experienced what the Romans used to call Pseudolus annoyaolus, which is to say, the actors in the role were working so laboriously to be funny that I never laughed. It's not surprising that Pseudolus breaks a sweat, but I really don't want to.
The 42nd Street Moon production of Forum now at the Eureka Theatre is the first where I didn't grow to dread the ever-expanding machinations of Pseudolus, who never met a lie he couldn't enlarge. The reason is simple: Megan Cavanagh. She's doing a little gender bending to play the scheming slave, and she's marvelous. The old vaudevillian aspect of the role doesn't escape her, nor does she belabor it. She's a natural comic, so she doesn't have to force the laughs. And she's absolutely charming. She has grace where other Psuedolii have goals. She makes you laugh while they want to make you laugh.
TheatreWorks’ slam-dunkin’ Donuts
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Leslie Martinson, director of Superior Donuts, should bring together such good actors. Martinson is also the company's casting director and has been with TheatreWorks for 26 years. Some directors say that casting is more than 50 percent of directing, and that's probably true for Martinson, though she's clearly a solid director (I loved her Theophilus North three years ago).
Howard Swain stars as donut shop owner Arthur Przybyszewski, an aging hippie who can't really be bothered by life, which he describes as "a derailment." He runs his shabby donut shop and doesn't much care that the new Starbucks across the street is killing his business. For him, the business has been dead for years. Swain conveys Arthur's detachment while making us care about him. Arthur has made some rough decisions in his life, and his troubled relationship with his now-dead father complicate his emotional life as well as his relationships with his own fractured family.
Thrillpeddlers' Kiss puckers up for some bloody good fun
There’s nothing like the ooze of blood to usher in the holiday season. And by holiday season, I mean Halloween, which suddenly seems to be more reverently and feverishly celebrated than Thanksgiving.While some theater companies rely on A Christmas Carol to boost their holiday box office, San Francisco’s Thrillpeddlers rely on blood, gore and cheap thrills. Who needs Scrooge when you have dismembered body parts?Shocktoberfest!! the “annual pageant of terror and titillation, has returned with three one-acts: one new, one old and one old newly updated. The plays are performed in the classic Grand Guignol style, which is to say anything goes on stage, and by anything, I mean in the blood and sex departments.Dubbed Kiss of Blood, this year’s edition – the 11th – is silly, trashy, gory and a lot of fun. Watching these three one-acts offers the same kind of pleasures you might experience watching a trashy/terrific horror movie from the early 1970s.
An elegant, inspiring Sunset at SF Playhouse
Cormac McCarthy makes a pretty good argument for the ruin of mankind in The Sunset Limited, a 2006 "novel in dramatic form." But then again, McCarthy is his own best argument for mankind's salvation.
By taking two characters, Black and White (each named for his race), McCarthy goes for the tricky gray area in this 95-minute dialogue about the worthiness of the human race. It's a play defined by talk, not by action. The only real action of the play has taken place before the lights came up. Black, an ex-con murderer who is now an evangelical Christian, prevented White, a professor, from throwing himself in front of an oncoming subway train (aka The Sunset Limited, like the train that criss-crosses the Southern half of the U.S.).
The action of the play is about what doesn't happen.
Life is hell for Jerry Springer and Judas Iscariot
There are some wonderfully theatrical theological discussions going on around town these days.At the Victoria Theatre in the Mission, outlandish talk show host Jerry Springer is facilitating a conflict resolution session between Satan and Jesus in Ray of Light Theatre’s Jerry Springer the Opera.And the Custom Made Theatre Company is delving deep into notions of Judeo-Christian forgiveness and despair in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Satan and Jesus make appearances in this show, too.
IPH... a picture paints a thousand words
One general problem I have with Greek tragedy is that I’m not Greek and, most days, not terribly tragic. I’ve experienced, a time or two, the feeling of catharsis that can come from being immersed in godly and ungodly troubles. Fiona Shaw as Medea comes to mind, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s The Oresteia had its acutely emotional moments.
Marvelous Much Ado closes Cal Shakes season
Much Ado About Nothing can be one of Shakespeare’s trickier romantic comedies. It’s full of sparring lovers, great lines and thoroughly entertaining comic bits. But it also contains some harsh drama, faked death and edgy mischief making. Capturing just the right tone can help ease the audience through all those shifts, and that’s what eludes so many directors of the play.
Thankfully, California Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone finds fresh ways to meld all of Shakespeare’s fragments into a seamless and captivating whole.
There's no escapin' the joys of this Scapin
If you want to see what funny looks like, you should see Bill Irwin in a comedy. In recent years, he’s been fairly serious, what with his stage work in shows like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (a Tony Award-winning turn opposite Kathleen Turner) or The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (opposite Sally Field) and his movie work as a dedicated dishwasher-loading dad in Rachel Getting Married.
But Irwin is a clown in the purest sense. The Bay Area knows him as one of the founders of the Pickle Family Circus, and his alter ego, Willy the Clown, is as beloved as they come.
We’ve seen Irwin on the American Conservatory Theater stage in the last few years, in his luminous Fool Moon project with David Shiner and the conundrum of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, but his return as the title character in Moliere’s Scapin, ACT’s season opener, is reason to cheer.
Size matters -- Magic's Brothers is a keeper
Comparing The Brothers Size, the second part of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays cycle, to In the Red and Brown Water, the first part, is inevitable but ultimately unnecessary.
These are two very different plays, both extraordinary and both extraordinarily well produced by, respectively, Magic Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. Red and Brown opened first and gave us a broad view of McCraney’s world, a working-class Louisiana town where the mostly African-American inhabitants exist in a purely theatrical dimension between reality and poetry, between fact and folklore.
Gaggles of gays ruffle feathers in La Cage
The irony surrounding Friday's opening-night for La Cage aux Folles at San Mateo's Broadway by the Bay was sweet. Audience members showing up for this glitzy gay musical fairy tale were not able to park in the parking lot of the San Mateo Performing Arts Center (aka San Mateo High School) because there was a football game going on.
That's right: it was the classic collision of quarterbacks and drag queens.
And I think the drag queens won – at least they were more entertaining.
Etiquette is politely impolite
I'm so sorry you missed my performance in Etiquette, the unique show brought to us by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' DARE program. I must say, not to be too boastful, that my performance bordered on brilliant. But the only person who will ever know that is a charming woman named Sylvia, who happened to be visiting from Vancouver to celebrate her 50th birthday (happy birthday, Sylvia, my charming co-star!).
A creation by the UK-based Rotozaza, Etiquette is one of those highly original theater/art experiences that tries to reconfigure the form. For this interactive, two-person-at-a-time show, participants are performers and audience.
With strings attached, Compulsion compells
It's so incredibly exciting to be enthralled by someone or something. In the case of Rinne Groff's Compulsion at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, it's someone and something.
The world-premiere production (in collaboration with Yale Repertory Theatre, where the play ran earlier this year, and The Public Theater in New York, where the play goes next) is ostensibly a roman a clef about the life of Meyer Levin, the journalist and novelist most famous for the novel Compulsion, his fictionalized spin on the Leopold and Loeb murders. Levin's stand-in here is Sid Silver, also Jewish, also from Chicago, also married to a French woman, also obsessed with Anne Frank and her diary.
Cycle revs up in exquisite shades of Red and Brown
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Tarell Alvin McCraney's In the Red and Brown Water feels like ritual. It feels like a party. It feels like living, breathing poetry. And that's a hell of way to begin a prodigious three-play cycle involving three plays, three theaters and one playwright.
It fell to Marin Theatre Company to launch McCraney's The Brother/Sister Plays, a trilogy produced in tandem with the Magic Theatre (up next with The Brothers Size) and American Conservatory Theater (wrapping things up with Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet). It's probably hardest to be first, but you wouldn't know it from the production that shimmered on stage in Mill Valley Tuesday night.
Teatro ZinZanni tames the zaniness
I'll just say it right up front: the first time I saw Teatro ZinZanni, I left the spiegeltent with a raging headache.
That was 10 years ago, and the show was, appropriately, Love, Chaos & Dinner. I've been back a number of times over the last decade, and I really started to see a change when Joan Baez joined the show and took over the dual role of hostess and singer. Having one person who could assay both characters with aplomb (not to mention star power) really gave the show some cohesion it sorely needed.
I returned to Pier 29 recently and surprised myself by actively enjoying the show. Director Norman Langill and his team (co-director/choreographer Tobias Larsson, associate director Elise "Mo" Durocher and associate artistic director Reenie Duff) have really tamed the chaos and found a way to balance comedy, audience interaction, music, circus acts and genuine elegance. This latest version, dubbed Hail Caesar, is a fun and classy show.