[title of show] = musical theater bliss
I can tell you that [title of show] is not for everyone, but I can also tell you that it's for more people than you might actually think. This meta-musical about two guys writing a musical about two guys writing a musical (based on their real-life process of two guys actually writing this musical) is especially designed for people who love musicals. LOVE musicals.
There are enough obscure musical theater references to make any theater geek's head explode with delight, but they appear alongside jokes about obscure musical theater references and the utter nerdiness of true devotees. In other words, writers Hunter Bell (book) and Jeff Bowen (music and lyrics) are self-aware enough and sharp enough writers of comedy to include everybody in the joke.
The Bay Area has finally been graced with [title of show], and though my expectations were unusually high, the TheatreWorks production is even better than I had hoped for. The cast album is great (really great), but what's not on the recording is Bell's very funny, ultimately quite touching book.
Anna Deavere Smith: Easy to love
In the last year or so, Berkeley Repertory Theatre has offered an instructive survey of the solo show. Last summer, as part of the Fireworks festival, local favorite Dan Hoyle offered two of his pieces, both recounting his transformative travels. In that same festival, John Leguizamo went back to the well of autobiography for a high-energy, primarily comic show that ended up on Broadway.
Earlier this year, Mike Daisey, whom many would deem the reigning master of the monologue, offered two of his trenchant, highly charged pieces of theatrical journalism/activism.
And now we have Anna Deavere Smith returning after a too-long absence from Bay Area stages. More than any of these other solo performers, Smith raises the form to a fine art. She has the instincts and drive of a journalist, the performance style of a skilled thespian and the soul of a poet striving for grace.
Telling Tales and making them sing
There’s a beautiful line of dialogue that perfectly encapsulates the denouement of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, a tricky new musical having its world premiere at American Conservatory Theater. Toward the end of the nearly three-hour show, one character comforts another with: “Mystery solved. Mystery loved.”
In those two short lines we get what Tales of the City, whether in novel, miniseries or musical form, is all about: acceptance and love. It’s interesting to note that in the musical, this line is spoken not sung. That’s telling.
Of course the show had to begin life in San Francisco, and like the city that both inspires and hosts it, this Tales of the City has its ups and downs.
Digging Blue Man Group's high-tech follies
In many ways, Blue Man Group is the modern equivalent of The Ziegfeld Follies — a lot of razzle-dazzle flash and sound, entertainment for its own sake. Instead of gorgeous gals with gams up to here, you get three bald dudes covered in shiny blue paint. And rather than singing and dancing, you get a thumping rock score, concert-style lighting and performance art on a grand, vaudevillian scale.
After more than 20 years of sit-down productions in New York, Chicago, Orlando and other such bustling tourist hubs, Blue Man is finally on tour and lands at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre as part of the SHN season.
Short sweet frolic on the PlayGround
In the spirit of PlayGround's annual 10-minute play festival, I'm going to attempt to write a 10-minute review.
The time is 10:40am. Start the clock.
The joy of a short play festival is the utter diversity in style, tone and voice. You can have what amounts to a sketch comedy bumping up against muscular drama, an intriguing fragment or a surprising burst of poetry. All of that happens and more in Best of Playground 15: A Festival of New Writers & New Plays at the Thick House. The seven plays presented represent the cream of the PlayGround playwriting process, which runs from October through March. A pool of 36 writers is given a topic and then asked to write a 10-minute play on a chosen theme. The best of those plays are given staged readings, and then the best of that bunch makes it to this festival.
Of the seven shows now on display, I can tell you my three clear favorites.
Feeling the Passion of Sarah Ruhl
What an interesting Sarah Ruhl moment we’re having.
Ruhl’s new version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters is getting a moving and lovely production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. And her 2005 triptych Passion Play receives its local premiere courtesy of Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, a community theater producing shows in Berkeley since 1957.
Both productions allow Ruhl to explore, in her lyrical, passionate and quirky ways, what happens to people when dreams and reality, identity and illusion are at odds.
Russian dressing: The vintage charms of Silk Stockings
How in the world do you follow Strike Up the Band? 42nd Street Moon’s last outing was a spectacularly charming and tuneful production of a Gershwin show that has been unjustly sidelined by musical theater history.
The problem with doing such a bang-up job with Band is that there’s still a final show in the season with which to contend.
And may I say, the finale is no Strike Up the Band. But it’s Cole Porter, so all is not lost.
Silk Stockings, a 1955 musical adaptation of the Greta Garbo film Ninotchka, is a minor work with a wildly unfocused book and a hit-and-miss Porter score.
You don’t see a lot of Silk Stockings revivals, so we have yet another reason to celebrate 42nd Street Moon’s dedication to dusting off shows that we’d never otherwise get to experience.
Pants down, smiles up: you’ve been HughJacked
It was hot and steamy in San Francisco Wednesday. And the weather was nice, too. Hugh Jackman, that final Australian frontier of old-school razzle-dazzle entertainment, put on a show at the Curran Theatre.
And it’s about time. In the old days, Jackman would have starred in a weekly variety show on TV, had regular gigs at the Tropicana in Vegas and toured with his celebrity golf tournament.
These days, it’s much harder for an entertainer. Once you have your street cred and your bona fides – sci-fi/action movie star, romantic lead, beloved awards show host, Tony Award-winning Broadway star – you get license to do as you please.
So Jackman has his own show, and it looks and sounds an awful lot like the shows of your – and thank the heavens for that.
Baby, it's Hugh
Australian dreamboat and all-around wonderful entertainer Hugh Jackman is about to take the Bay Area by storm. And if he doesn't, he'll be back to settle our hash in his full Wolverine drag.
This week, Jackman opens a brand-new song-and-dance extravaganza at the Curran Theatre, courtesy of SHN. It'll be like what we've seen him do on the Tony Awards and Academy Awards telecasts, which is to say, he'll charm everyone for miles around and leave us wanting more.
I had 15 minutes on the phone with Jackman, which became a feature in today's San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.
Because I had so little time with him, there wasn't a lot of material from the interview that didn't make it into the final article, but there were a couple of things.
Oh, meow, or why Cats is still a kick in the jellicles
When they said Cats was "now and forever," they weren't kidding. Not even a little bit.
On May 11, the much beloved (and derided) Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about singing pussycats and tires that lift off to kitty-cat heaven marks the 30th anniversary of its London premiere. Yes, it has been three decades since Mr. Mistoffolees and the Rum Tum Tugger first bounded onto the stage of the New London Theatre in the West End. Elaine Paige was a late-in-the-game replacement for Judi Dench (not yet a dame), who had been injured more than once during rehearsals – first a foot injury, then, juggling crutches, a pitch off a ramp into empty seats. Paige had the distinction of introducing the song "Memory" into the public consciousness, where it has boldly resisted becoming the kind of memory it sings about.
It should not surprise you that Cats is coming back. SHN brings the tour to the Orpheum Theatre May 5-15.
What’s up, glitter Lily?
Sitting at the computer, hands on the keyboard, I’ve been staring at the screen wondering where to begin describing and opining about The Lily’s Revenge at the Magic Theatre.
Adjectives don’t quite do it justice – much the way that a photograph of an oil painting never really captures the essence and vibrancy of the original work. And the usual critical jabber – Don’t miss it! Theater event of the spring! Unforgettably unique! – seem paltry as well.
It’s not that Lily, the brainchild of writer/performer Taylor Mac, is a landmark work in the canon of Western theater or the reinvention of the art form as we know it. But it’s something really special – a completely absorbing communal experience that turns out to be more than the sum of its abundant parts.
Tweeting, posting and singing with Betty Buckley
Onstage and online, Broadway legend Betty Buckley is electrifying.
If you’ve ever seen her perform on Broadway – perhaps in the original cast of Cats or as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard -- or in concert halls large or small, you know just how electrifying she can be. Very few singer/actors connect to material the way she does.
But Buckley, at age 63, has embraced social media in a big way. On the advice of her brother, Norman, a television director, she got hooked up. Now she Tweets daily (@BettyBuckley) and posts on Facebook with regularity to her nearly 5,000 friends. To find a name for her latest concert, she asked her online followers for suggestions. The winner would receive two tickets to the show.
Buckley brings that show, called For the Love of Broadway, to the Rrazz Room in the Hotel Nikko May 3 through 8.
Eder, Wildhorn reunite for Now
I talked to singer/actress Linda Eder a while back for a San Francisco Chronicle story pegging to her concerts this weekend (April 22 and 23) as part of the Rrazz Room Concert Series at the Marines Memorial Theatre. Read the story on SFGate.com.
The story focuses mainly on her reunion with ex-husband Frank Wildorn for her new album, Now.
There was only one question that didn't make it into the final piece, and it has to do with Linda's skills as a renovator.
Of pleasures and Eccentricities
Oh, Alma Winemiller. If you had been able to shuck off the burden of having an insane mother and a stern Episcopalian priest for a father, you might have become the woman you were meant to be: Lady Gaga.
OK, that's an exaggeration, but poor Alma is just a heap of talent and emotion and expression aching for release in Tennessee Williams' Eccentricities of a Nightingale, a play with a convoluted history in the Tennessee Williams canon. The Aurora Theatre Company production of the play, directed with finesse and warmth by Artistic Director Tom Ross, makes a case for the play being if not alongside siblings like A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, then at least in an honorable spot somewhere just below.
The Magic's Lily blooms!
There’s a lot of excitement burbling through the Bay Area theater community this spring. One of the reasons is the Magic Theatre’s The Lily’s Revenge, a ballsy five-hour play by Stockton native Taylor Mac.
With five acts performed in five different styles – musical theater, dance, puppets, Elizabethan-style drama – the show has a cast of nearly 40 (all local, by the way) musicians, actors, dancers, acrobats, drag queens, etc. There are actually six directors – one for each act plus one to direct the intermission events between each act. This is definitely the biggest, boldest theatrical event of the spring.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Mac and Magic Theatre Artistic Director Loretta Greco for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the feature here.
As usual, I couldn’t fit all the good stuff into the story. Here’s more with Taylor Mac.
Entrancing Exit at ACT
I think I'd like Canada's The Virtual Stage and Electric Company Theatre to mount every play I never want to see again. I'm convinced they could make it interesting and vital.
My interest in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit was minimal when I first read it in college and has only waned over the years. The play is a mostly stale pile of ideas and philosophies instead of plot, characters as metaphors rather than people. Is it possible we've simply outgrown existentialism? Historically, the play remains interesting – especially in view of the fact that Sartre's musing on the tortures of hell debuted in Paris in 1944 during the Nazi occupation.
Director Kim Collier (co-founder of Electric Company) is clearly aware that No Exit has some interesting ideas, but is in need of some major goosing.
Enter technology.
Vodka, misery and beauty: family time with Three Sisters
Time aches in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s elegiac Three Sisters. The past is where true happiness lived (in Moscow), and the future holds the promise of reviving that happiness (in Moscow). But the present (not in Moscow) is just a painful stretch to be endured and lamented.
That Anton Chekhov was a harvester of human souls, and the crop he tended was ripe with sorrow, loss and, perhaps worst of all, indifference. This is readily apparent in director Les Waters’ production of Three Sisters on the intimate Thrust Stage.
There’s warmth and humor emanating from the stage as we meet the soldiers, staff and sisters in a well-appointed country home, but once we get to know the characters a little bit, it’s one big stream of thwarted desire, boredom, frustration and self-delusion.
It sounds like misery, but between Chekhov and Waters, we’re treated to an exquisitely staged, deeply compassionate exploration of mostly unhappy people.
Moon strikes up a triumphant Band
I've seen a lot of 42nd Street Moon shows over the years, but I've rarely seen one as exuberant, funny, beautifully sung and as hugely enjoyable as Strike Up the Band. Everything about Zack Thomas Wilde's production is top notch, from the extraordinarily sharp book by George S. Kaufman and the immediately appealing score by George and Ira Gershwin to the terrific cast and the gorgeous late '20s costumes (by Scarlett Kellum).
42nd Street Moon is less in the business of presenting musty, dusty lost musicals and more in the realm of offering polished if modestly produced professional productions.
And this Band benefits tremendously from the smaller scale. More attention is focused on the satirical book (the original 1927 Kaufman script, not the Morrie Ryskind rewrite from 1930) and on the Gershwins' songs (especially on Ira's incisively wonderful lyrics).
Without the proverbial cast of thousands, we get a clearer look at just what a gem Strike Up the Band really is, and its snarky attitude about how it's commerce – not politics or even morality – that get us into war couldn't be more timely. Alas.
Apocalypse wow! Clear Blue Sky captivates
There are cannibals in Hackensack. A tsunami swallowed South America live on TV. And there are dogs the size of Chevys ransacking libraries.
Welcome to, as the producers put it, "your friendly neighborhood apocalypse." Playwright JC Lee is in the midst of unfurling his world-premiere trilogy This World and After, and he's getting some big-time help from Sleepwalkers Theatre, the company that produced Part One, The World Is Good and is now unveiling Part Two, Into the Clear Blue Sky.
If this is what post-apocalyptic life looks like, I don't think I'll mind so much when everything goes to hell. Not that life isn't wretched. In addition to the horrors mentioned above, there are sea beasts to contend with, not to mention the fact that, due to acceleration of global warming, the very shape of the earth is changing and you can now, for reasons more poetic than scientific, find your way through the ocean to the moon.
But in Lee's ravaged world, human beings are, mercifully, still human beings. His play, directed with flair by Ben Randle, is full of horror and wonder, but it's all on a human scale. Lee has a graphic novelist's flair imaginative drama and a playwright's love of the poetic. He can be comic-geek funny one moment and Gabriel Garcia Marquez beautiful the next. As I said, human scale.
Something Fuddy going on here
The world of David Lindsay-Abaire is askew. From his earliest wacky comedies to his later, more serious award-winning work, Lindsay-Abaire’s “askewniverse” (to borrow a word from Kevin Smith’s oeuvre) is filled with people on the outside of perceived normal life, people who are, for whatever reason, struggling just to make themselves understood.
In Shrek the Musical it’s a green ogre who takes a while to figure out that even though he’s not a handsome prince, he’s actually a hero. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole it’s a mother numbed by grief slowly rebuilding a life and marriage after the death of her young son.
And in Fuddy Meers, Lindsay-Abaire’s first produced play (written while he was still in grad school at Juilliard), it’s an exceedingly cheerful woman named Claire who suffers from psychogenic amnesia.
Marin Theatre Company’s production of Fuddy Meers has the great advantage of having Mollie Stickney in the role of Claire. In the play’s nearly two hours, Claire’s blank slate becomes surprisingly full, and every revelation, recovered memory, moment of joy or pain registers on Stickney’s wonderfully expressive face.