Marin’s Seagull: a Chekhovian reverie
As long as we live in a world where celebrity and art continually clash, Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull will feel extraordinarily timely. And as long as people are restless, stingy and full of dreams, Chekhov will continue to offer extraordinary insight to his audiences.
It’s amazing that a flop play from 1896 has become such a resonant classic. From our perspective, Chekhov had the disadvantage of writing in Russian, which means his work has to be filtered through a translator/adaptor – and there have been some big names attached to that duty. Tennessee Williams did it with his “free adaptation” The Notebook of Trigorin. Playwrights Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard and Christopher Hampton have all done it as well.
Now former Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Libby Appel (working from a literal translation by Allison Horsley) brings us her version (a commission of OSF) in a world-premiere production at Marin Theatre Company under the direction of Jasson Minadakis.
Ripley, believe it or not, still rocks Normal
When I saw Next to Normal on Broadway, I was of two minds. For much of the first act, I glowered in my seat, overwhelmed by the Tom Kitt/Brian Yorkey score – too many lyrics, loud music of the pop-rock-showtune mega-mix variety and super-slick storytelling and direction by Michael Greif.
But somewhere in Act 2, I got completely caught up in the story of Diana, a bipolar woman whose illness has dominated and in some ways warped her husband, Dan, and their 16-year-old daughter, Natalie. From the song “Maybe (Next to Normal),” a duet for mother and daughter, to the end of the show, I was in tears.
It was the story more than the staging that got to me, and it wasn’t so much the music but the characters and the choices they make that was ultimately so moving.
So I left with the question: why does this show have to be a musical? The Pulitzer committee didn’t seem to mind when they handed out awards.
Clybourne Park is amazing. But this is not a review.
Because I interviewed playwright Bruce Norris for the San Francisco Chronicle (read the interview here), I will not be reviewing his Clybourne Park at American Conservatory Theater.
Mr. Norris requests that journalists who interview him not review his work. I'm happy to respect that request, but know that it will be extremely difficult not to tell you how extraordinary this play is or that it's the first absolutely-must-see show of 2011.
Taking Steps toward a lively evening
A hit on London’s West End in 2006, The 39 Steps became Broadway’s longest-running comedy two years later. The touring production played San Francisco’s Curran Theatre in December of 2009, and now Mountain View’s TheatreWorks has cast it with a quartet of local favorites.
Under the direction of Artistic Director Robert Kelley, it’s hard to imagine a more enjoyable evening of mystery mayhem and slapstick espionage. Kelley has cast an irresistible quartet of actors to create the whirlwind, and the result is two hours of constant laughs.
Mark Anderson Phillips is Richard Hannay, a Canadian visiting London. Bored, he craves something mindless and trivial, so he goes to the theater. Naturally. There he meets a classic femme fatale, a German named Annabella Schmidt played by Rebecca Dines with an accent think as strudel.
More ecstasy than agony in Daisey's Steve Jobs
It’s interesting that Mike Daisey chooses not to talk about current events in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, the second of two monologues running in repertory on Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage.
The very title of the show implies that Jobs will factor largely in the two-hour, intermission-free show. But Daisey never mentions that on Jan. 17, Apple announced that Jobs has taken medical leave from the company. Following other health issues – pancreatic cancer in 2004, a liver transplant in 2009 – the departure isn’t a huge surprise, but it’s a very big deal in the world of Apple and, consequently, in the world of technology.
Daisey wrote about Jobs’ leave on his blog: “It is almost impossible to imagine Apple without him, and there's a palpable sense of loss and change as the tech industry struggles to know what this will mean for its future.”
The Companion Piece or “I glove you whore”
You could throw a lot of adjectives at The Companion Piece, a world-premiere creation by director Mark Jackson, actor Beth Wilmurt and their crew: wily, zany, exciting, perplexing, silly and utterly beautiful. You could throw a lot of words, but they don't quite create the picture of just what the Companion experience is.
To begin with, it's all about entertainment – the old-fashioned, shtick-'em-up vaudeville kind of entertainment. Pratfalls, hoary jokes and razzmatazz. The 80-minute show is bookended by a pasty-faced vaudevillian with spit curls and routine that sputters like a rickety but reliable old car. He does magic. He sings. He says things like, "Do you have a mirror in your pocket? I can see myself in your pants." And then he's done and trundles up to his dressing room alone.
Chatting with Normal’s Superboy
>
When people talk about the musical Next to Normal, it's inevitably about one of two things: how they related on a deep personal level to the story of a bi-polar mom and the affect her disorder has on her family or how astonished they were by Alice Ripley's lead performance as the struggling mom.
Ripley is extraordinary – this is the role that won her the Tony Award – and the show can be amazingly powerful, but there's more to this Pulitzer Prize-winning musical by Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics). When Normal pulls into San Francisco's Curran Theatre as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway series, audiences will see there are other complicated, multi-layered characters surrounding Ripley's Diana. One of them is Gabe, her son.
On tour, this tricky role is played by Curt Hansen, who was part of the Broadway cast as the vacation swing. When he describes Gabe, he uses words like "average" and "all-American." But as the show's title suggests, nothing here is exactly normal.
Cutting Ball revives a Bone to gnaw on
In the summer of 2008, Cutting Ball Theater threw audiences an incredible Bone. The play, part of the evening known as Avant GardARAMA!, was Eugenie Chan’s Bone to Pick, a one-act that re-imagined the myth of Ariadne, a princess of Crete and a key player in the whole Theseus/Minotaur tussle.
Chan’s play fascinated because it took a dusty old myth and gave it a compelling spin. Ariadne, known as Ria here, is haggard waitress at the end of the world. She was left on the island of Naxos by her new groom (Theseus, here called Theo) at the moment of her greatest happiness. She had just helped her new husband slay the Minotaur (actually her half-brother), and they were heading off to a glorious future together.
But for whatever reason, Theo dumped her. And here it is 3,000-some years later, and she’s a waitress in what’s left of a diner near the end of time. In her craziness/loneliness, she cycles through her life and takes a journey – possibly real, possibly imagined – into a meat locker that leads to a labyrinth of sorts filled with memory and emotion.
Oh, and meat.
Taken in by the Cult of Mike Daisey
I’ve seen Mike Daisey before on the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Thrust Stage. The country’s foremost monologist has entertained and captivated me on several occasions.
But at Wednesday’s opening of The Last Cargo Cult, I felt like I really got to see Mike Daisey. His story has to do, among many other things, with a live volcano, and that’s what he’s like on stage. He erupts in ways that are frightening and so dazzling you just can’t turn away.
2010 in the rearview mirror: My Top 10
I did two things I'm proud of this year. I worked for a great theater company and I stopped working for a great theater company. From June 2009 to September 2010, I was the communications manager for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and it was a fantastic experience. For a critic to jump the fence and experience a theater company from the inside was the education of a lifetime.
A job change in September allowed me to go back to writing and reviewing with a renewed vigor and appreciation for the art of theater.
And my timing couldn't have been better. All of a sudden, with the launch of the fall season, it seemed that the Bay Area was the epicenter of all good theater. With Compulsion at Berkeley Rep, Scapin at American Conservatory Theater and the opening of The Brother/Sister Plays at Marin Theatre Company, there was great theater everywhere you turned.
Herewith, a conventional Top 10 list for 2010 – starting at No. 10 and working toward No. 1.
A Wishful toast to Fisher's Drinking
The force is strong with this one. Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, her one-woman stage autobiography, continues its wild ride.The Bay Area saw the show twice at Berkeley Repertory Theatre before it landed on Broadway. The book with the same name was a New York Times bestseller. And now Wishful Drinking is an HBO documentary.The show has its broadcast debut at 9pm Sunday, Dec. 12 and repeats through Dec. 28 (on HBO) and Dec. 29 (on HBO 2).
Hot Babes! Even hotter tunes!
Let it be said that Babes in Arms is one of the weirdest musicals with the greatest scores ever written. There have been weirder musicals and greater scores, but never in such striking combination.
You can see for yourself as 42nd Street Moon unfurls all the daffy delirium that is Babes in Arms on stage at the Eureka Theatre. Go for the weirdness but stay for the sheer pleasure of hearing “Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine,” “I Wish I Were in Love Again,” “Way Out West,” “Johnny One-Note” and “The Lady Is a Tramp” in their original context.
This is the second time that 42nd Street Moon has resurrected Rodgers and Hart’s 1937 show. The first time was in November of 1999, when the cast included Darren Criss, the newest cast member on the phenomenon known as Glee.
In fact, Glee and Babes in Arms have several things in common. For one, they’re both full of talented kids crazy about putting shows. For another, they both traffic in some terrific songs. And finally, they’re both about as reality-based as Santa Claus.
Warm and wonderful Christmas Memories
You can keep your Shreks and your Lemony Snickets. Give me the human warmth of a corny holiday musical any day.
I use the word "corny" with love – if it's not a little corny, a little sentimental, then it's not really a holiday musical. And A Christmas Memory at the Lucie Stern Theatre, a TheatreWorks production, is a genuine holiday musical.
In its world-premiere production, A Christmas Memory hits all the right notes in every sense. The score by Larry Grossman (music) and Carol Hall (lyrics) is appealingly old-fashioned and catchy. There are a couple numbers that actually make you believe the charms of well-made musical theater are ageless. And the book by Duane Poole captures the magic of the Truman Capote story while finding effective ways of filling it out. The story, first published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1956, is short and so vivid it's almost like poetry. The musical is just as vivid, in part, because its creators have hewed so closely to the original but without making the finished product seem hampered by the faithfulness.
This Composer really is dead
There’s a moment of absolute magic in the world premiere of Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
We’ve just been subjected to a rather dispiriting film (more on that in a minute), a sort of theatrical appetizer, and we’re making the transition into the main course. The curtain on the Roda Theatre rises to reveal an absolutely magnificent set that looks like a life-size Victorian paper theater.
There’s an orchestra full of puppets – each personality-infused face affixed to a representation of an instrument – and Geoff Hoyle (the only human in the show) as the Inspector in a fantastic plaid suit preparing to solve the crime of who murdered the world’s greatest, formerly living composer.
The reveal of the set in all its glory is by far the best part of this strangely moribund evening. The show, including the movie, is just over an hour, and yet it seems much longer.
Freaks, ogres and lowered expectations
I wanted to love Shrek The Musical because it’s an unlikely underdog. I didn't love it.
Here you have a big Hollywood studio, DreamWorks, with a hit movie franchise (that, by the way, they pretty much ran into the ground) making its first foray onto Broadway – hoping for the success Disney had with The Lion King and Mary Poppins or that Universal had with Wicked.
So DreamWorks did what any big Hollywood studio would do in this situation: they threw money at some of the most talented people on Broadway and said, “Make us a hit.” One of the first people at whom they hurled money was Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes (American Beauty), who then hurled money at Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole).
At this point, Shrek appears to be the opposite of an underdog: a highly capitalized movie studio willing to spend whatever it takes to play with the lions and the witches on Broadway.
But money and talent don’t always add up to success. Shrek The Musical began previews at The Broadway Theatre in November of 2008 and closed a little more than a year later.
The Shrek now on display at the Orpehum Theatre as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway series is an underdog because, aside from the (very happy) kids in the audience, no one expects much from this show. And with those lowered expectations, Shrek is enjoyable.
A Magic proposal (in verse no less!)
This is one of the best stories to come out of a theater in many a moon.
Last week, after a performance of Liz Duffy Adams' Or, actress Maggie Mason was proposed to by her longtime boyfriend Matt Trainer. Maggie's co-stars, Natacha Roi and Ben Huber beat a hasty retreat after the curtain call and left Maggie alone on stage to be serenaded by Matt in verse he had written for the occasion.
Just watch the video and try not to tear up.
The greening of Shrek's Eric Petersen
Kermit the Frog said it best: it’s not easy being green. It wasn’t easy for Elphaba the witch of Wicked. It wasn’t easy for the Grinch (of stealing Christmas fame). And it certainly isn’t easy for Shrek, the good-hearted ogre from the swamp.
As difficult as it is for Shrek, that’s nothing compared to the challenges facing Eric Petersen (above), the actor playing him on tour in Shrek The Musical, which opens this week at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN/Best of Broadway season.
The method of converting the amiable Petersen, who was the standby for Shrek on Broadway, into a singing ogre takes about 90 minutes. It takes a village, as they say, and the finished Shrek is the work of Tim Hatley (Tony Award-winning costume and set designer), Naomi Donne (make-up design) and Michael Marino (prosthetic make-up design).
“It’s not so bad,” Petersen says on the phone from Denver. “I can go to a Zen place while it’s being done. Sometimes I can even sleep through half of the process.”
Musical Coraline is creepy, kooky, altogether ooky
A door presents itself. You enter. Suddenly you're immersed in a warped version of reality.
That's what happens to 9-year-old Coraline ,the heroine of Neil Gaiman's novel of the same name when she unlocks a door in her creaky new house. And that's what happens to audiences that venture into Coraline the musical by David Greenspan (book) and Stephin Merritt (music and lyrics) now at SF Playhouse.
This looks like a children's musical, but there's a twist. Things are pretty creepy in this twisted world. And it sort of sounds like a musical, though this is about as far away from Rodgers and Hammerstein as you can get and still be in a theater.
SF Playhouse's Coraline looks just right. The black-and-white set (by director Bill English and Matt Vuolo) looks like a storybook haunted house, and when Coraline slips through that locked door and enters an alternate reality, Michael Osch's lights kick into blacklight gear, with fluorescent colors cracking the darkness. The same is true of Valera Coble's costumes – shades of black, white and gray give way to crispy fluorescents once Coraline encounters the mirror-image "others" on the other side of the door. Oh, and the others also come equipped with button eyes – a truly creepy feature.
Happy Now? Well no, not really.
The smiling cartoon woman on the poster – the one juggling the trappings of modern life such as a cell phone, a brief case, a lap top, a glass of wine and a baby – is a comic figure. She’s about to slip on a skateboard, but she’ll go down being what society wants her to be: a productive super gal.
The poster says comedy, but in actuality, Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now? Is something of a modern tragedy. The 2008 drama had its premiere at the National Theatre in London and is only just receiving its West Coast premiere from Marin Theatre Company.
Directed by Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis, the production is sharp where it should be as well as hard and cynical for most of its nearly 2 ½ hours. The cast, though beset with fluctuating British accents, creates vivid, highly recognizable characters who are easy to relate to and who make us cringe frequently.
There are a few laughs along the way as we watch two households unravel or come dangerously close to it, but this is serious stuff. There’s a whole lot of misery, anger and stress pouring off the stage, and to be honest, it’s not pleasant.
A galloping good time at Cavalia
A few years ago, if you’d asked me what I thought about horses as theater, I’d have probably said something like, “Call me when Mr. Ed performs as Hamlet.”
But then I saw Cavalia, an inspired Cirque du Soleil-like spectacular built around the beauty and strength of horses. That was in February of 2004, and I’ve never quite looked at horses the same way since.
I joked at the time that the show was “Cirque du Horse,” but that shorthand quip doesn’t fully express the originality and power of this gorgeous creation. Sure, Artistic Director Normand Latourelle is one of the founding members of Cirque, and he brings that sensibility with him in the form of an immersive tent experience that combines high-tech theatrical wizardry wrapped around live music and acrobatics.