ACT's Perloff aims Higher
This is the season for artistic directors sharing their writing with their audiences. Tony Taccone at Berkeley Repertory Theatre has actually done it twice this season with Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup and the current Ghost Light.
Now American Conservatory Theater's Carey Perloff is sharing her fourth full-length play as a special non-subscription production at the Theater at the Children's Creativity Museum (formerly Zeum). In both cases, the artistic directors are making bold moves to put their work out there -- a brave gesture, to say the least. And they've both wisely handed over the directorial reins to trusted cohorts. In Taccone's case it's Jonathan Moscone and in Perloff's case, it's ACT Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker.
Four hot bodies heat up Aurora’s Body Awareness
Drama in the small college town of Shirley, Vermont, is much like it is anywhere: small, intimate and, for the people involved, earth shattering.
Playwright Annie Baker, one of the theater world's most acclaimed and buzzed-about writers, has a particular skill in writing about the lives of ordinary people. She's acutely aware of the comic absurdity and the fissures of sadness and anger that clash continually and cause tremors, both minor and majorly damaging.
Baker is a humane and very funny writer, and the Bay Area is finally getting a taste of her talent in the Aurora Theatre Company's utterly delightful production of her Body Awareness. In true Aurora form, the production gives us a meaty play and performances by a quartet of Bay Area actors that defy you to find a false moment in this up-close and intimate space.
Dating sharp, funny, creepy Becky Shaw at SF Playhouse
The humor is in direct proportion to the discomfort in Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw, now in its West Coast premiere at SF Playouse.
If David Mamet were good at anything other than provocation and crisp dialogue, he might write something as entertaining and as distressing as Becky Shaw, a smart, incisive and very funny play that, despite its lack of focus, makes for a beguiling evening of theater.
By lack of focus I mean that Gionfriddo doesn't delineate protagonist or antagonist. Even though the title of the play belongs to one character, the playwright's aim seems much broader – like how power works between family members, between men and women and between the seemingly weak and the seemingly strong. She's interested in highly functional dysfunctional people, which is to say, just about everybody.
TheatreWorks' Pitmen paints poignant arts ed picture
Seeing some of the Bay Area's best actors collected on one stage is a pleasure in and of itself. But Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters has other things to recommend it like its unapologetic championing of the arts as an essential part of being a fully formed human being.
Bringing this true story to life are James Carpenter, Dan Hiatt, Jackson Davis, Nicholas Pelczar and, in perhaps the most revealing performance, Patrick Jones. They're all wonderful actors, and to see them interacting and playing off of one another is worth the ticket price alone.
I reviewed the production for the Palo Alto Weekly.
Hall's journey from Billy to War Horse to Pitmen
The Bay Area has been pretty good to Lee Hall of late. Last year, his musical adaptation (with music by Sir Elton John) of his movie Billy Elliot received rapturous notices (though closed a month early) at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. It's a show that had already won the British scribe a 2009 Tony Award for best book of a musical.
Hall's Broadway follow-up to Billy was a play called The Pitmen Painters, another exploration of arts influence on the population of Northern England. Now that play makes its West Coast debut courtesy of TheatreWorks in Mountain View.
I spoke with Hall about his many and varied projects for an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle. Click for more.
Serious clowning around in ACT's Humor Abuse
Now, apparently, it's time to hear from Bay Area sons.
At Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Jonathan Moscone (with an assist from Tony Taccone) is grappling with the loss and legacy of his father, slain San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, in Ghost Light. Now at American Conservatory Theater, Lorenzo Pisoni is recounting his childhood as the son of a clown, Pickle Family Circus' Larry Pisoni, in Humor Abuse.
Right at the top of this captivating 80-minue show, the younger Pisoni tells us flat out that he was raised to be his father's straight man. "I'm not funny," he says.
Delicious theater spiced with fiction
That most scrumptious of Bay Area theater companies, Word for Word, is going the way of the foodie. Yes, Word for Word, the company that turns short fiction into extraordinary theater, is diving headlong into food lit with Food Stories: Pleasure Is Pleasure.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Word for Word's Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter about the show (directed by Theatre Rhino Artistic Director John Fisher) for the San Francisco Chronicle. Also got to chat with one of the authors featured in the show, T.C. Boyle, whose "Sorry Fugu" is a delightful tale of a New York chef battling his nerves and his confidence during three visits by the harshest food critic in town. I did not get to speak with the other author, Alice McDermott, whose story "Enough" is also featured.
Moscone, Taccone illuminate history in Ghost Light
Jonathan Moscone and Tony Taccone have found the courage to stay out of what they call "the suck drawer."
The phrase comes from Ghost Light, the play Moscone and Taccone conceived together and that Taccone wrote and Moscone directed and it has to do with the life of an artist – the life of anyone, really – and the effort to create work and, ultimately, a life that is true and uniquely individual.
I expected Ghost Light, a co-production of Berkeley Repertory Theatre (where Taccone is artistic director) and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where the play had the first leg of its world premiere last summer, to be about grief and the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. It is about those things. How could it not be, seeing as how it deals primarily with the effect of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone's assassination in 1978, when his son Jon was 14 years old.
Don Reed checks into The Kipling Hotel
I interviewed Don Reed about his new autobiographical solo show The Kipling Hotel, which opens this weekend at The Marsh Berkeley.
You can read the article here.
This is the second chapter in what will likely be a trilogy of solo shows about the Oakland native's life. The first was the phenomenally successful East 14th, which ran at The Marsh for 2 1/2 years – no mean feat for a guy who lives in Los Angeles and works as the warmup comedian for "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."
Here's what didn't make the newspaper...
2011 in the rearview mirror: the best of Bay Area stages
Let's just get right to it. 2011 was another year full of fantastic local theater (and some nice imports). Somehow, most of our theater companies has managed thus far to weather the bruising economy. May the new year find audiences clamoring for more great theater.
1. How to Write a New Book for the Bible by Bill Cain
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
Directed by Kent Nicholson
Only a few days ago I was telling someone about this play – my favorite new play of 2011 and the most moving theatrical experience I've had in a long time – and it happened again. I got choked up. That happens every time I try to describe Cain's deeply beautiful ode to his family and to the spirituality that family creates (or maybe that's vice-versa). Nicholson's production, from the excellent actors to the simple, elegant design, let the play emerge in all its glory.
Spirit but no soul in loud Bring It On musical
Like a weak episode of "Glee" shot up with steriods and stuffed full of anti-depressants, Bring It On: The Musical sends up a rousing cheer for the robotic vapidity of the new Broadway. The real shame about this overblown movie-to-stage adaptation is that it's chock full of appealing, talented and boundlessly energetic young performers, but their sparkling humanity is mostly lost in the non-stop machine of this depressingly mechanical, surprisingly shrill effort (a part of the SHN season).
Targeted to an age range of teens to twentysomethings who slavishly recite lines from the 2000 movie starring Kirsten Dunst as a beleaguered cheerleading squad captain, this musical has a startling pedigree with its multi-award-winning creative team. You'd think among this heavily lauded crowd of artists that someone could have located a little heart or a moment of actual human connection. But no. This is musical by committee, and a strenuous effort it seems to have been.
Making a musical Garden grow
The Secret Garden will always hold a special place in my heart. It was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. And because I was there with friends who had friends in high places, we got to go backstage afterward. On my first day in New York, just after my first Broadway show, I got to stand center stage of the St. James Theatre and stare out into the empty theater. Amazing experience.
We got to go backstage, where I met Alison Fraser and, almost by accident, Rebecca Luker. Also go to see Mandy Patinkin pitch a fit because he didn't want to meet people, dammit, between shows. That was interesting.
I'm thinking about The Secret Garden because I just saw TheatreWorks' second production of the show.
Oh do do the Xanadu that you do so well
When I called playwright Douglas Carter Beane to interview him for a San Francisco Chronicle story on Xanadu: The Musical at the New Conservatory Theatre Center, he happened to be taking a break from rehearsals for his latest Broadway show, Lysistrata Jones. That musical, a hip, funny adaptation of the Aristophanes classic, happens to rehearse in the same building as the Foxwoods Theatre, home to Broadway's notorious web slinger, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
With his ear pressed to his cell phone, Beane surveyed the crowded sidewalk and quipped. "I hope people don't think I'm buying tickets."
Berkeley Rep's wildly wonderful Bride
Such joy. Such wicked, delicious, heart-pounding joy.
That's what it feels like at the end of The Wild Bride, the dark fairy tale come to life on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda stage. This is, without question, the great treat of the holiday theater season (though it's not really for kids younger than about 13, what with the mutilations, the sex and the devilish nature of the show).
Here comes the Bride indeed – in the most unexpectedly charming and poignant fashion you can imagine. Director/adaptor Emma Rice and Kneehigh, the quirky troupe from Cornwall, England, are blessedly back in the Bay Area, where they previously triumphed with their dynamic adaptation of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter at American Conservatory Theater a couple seasons back. May they keep coming back. And back.
Adjusting to a Period of lighter Tennessee Williams
As a fading Southern belle in a Tennessee Williams play might say, "Well I do declare! What's a theatergoer to do with so many scrumptious Williams play from which to choose?"
The answer is: see all of them. As we come to the end of Williams' centenary year, it seems only appropriate to be reveling in the writer's work. Marin Theatre Company recently opened a lovely production of The Glass Menagerie (read my review here), and in January, Theatre Rhinoceros presents The Two-Character Play, which Williams claimed was his "most beautiful play since Streetcar."
There's no mistaking Williams' A Period of Adjustment, now at SF Playhouse, for one of his most beautiful plays. Nor is it even one of his most interesting. But it is fascinating for a number of reasons. Written in 1960, between Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana, Adjustment is Williams working in sitcom mode as if to prove that he's capable of something lighter.
Marin reveals crystaline Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams' first brilliant move was to let everyone off the hook – himself included. By alerting the audience that The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, he removes it from reality (or not) and lets the creative team and the audience make their own accommodations as to what is memory, what is fact and what is flight of artistic fancy. In other words, you can try to get away with just about anything because it's all a memory, right?
Marin Theatre Company's production of Menagerie doesn't stray too far from tradition, but director Jasson Minadakis definitely puts his own spin on the 1944 classic and gets some marvelous performances from his cast.
Seducing Amy Glazer (away from the stage)
Theater folk know Amy Glazer as one of the busiest directors in Bay Area theater. But she also has a burgeoning career as a film director, which is no surprise given that she grew up on movie sets.
I interviewed Glazer for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle pegging to the release of her second full-length feature, Seducing Charlie Barker, which is based on Theresa Rebeck's play The Scene, which Glazer directed at SF Playhouse in 2008. (Read my review of that production here.)
Stravinsky and the sadness of a puppet Soldier
As the weary soldier trudges down the road home, you see the weight of his exhaustion as well as his excitement to see his mother and fiancée in his every step. The remarkable thing is that this soldier – who goes by the name of Joseph – is a Bunraku-style puppet. All that extraordinary expression is coming from his puppeteer, Muriel Maffre, the San Francisco Ballet star who retired in 2007.
Along with Aurora Theatre Company artistic director Tom Ross, Maffre is the co-director of The Soldier's Story, a theatrical fusion of music, dance, puppetry and storytelling that carries a melancholy charm for its brief 75 minutes. Much of that charm comes from Maffre, who also dances the role of the King's daughter, who falls under Joseph's spell.
It's easy to succumb to this Tale.
Fela! explodes with music, dance
You don’t walk into Fela! expecting Oklahoma!. With the visionary Bill T. Jones serving as director, choreographer and co-writer, you know this is going to be different. And it’s going to be something to see.
Fela! is a concert, a dance extravaganza and, to a lesser degree, a theatrical biography of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. It is, in short, a raging party.
Such a hybrid experience is only fitting for Fela, a renegade pop star, activist, agitator and rebel. Was he a man driven by social conscience? By ego (he did, after all, have 28 wives)? After seeing the show, my guess is both. We’re a little short on details but long on feeling.
Tip o’ the Hat to Yee's wacky theatrical fable
Talk about your unconventional love stories! Lauren Yee’s charming world-premiere play A Man, his Wife, and his Hat is a romance between an elderly hat maker and his favorite hat.
So where does this relationship leave the hat maker’s wife? Lonely and without a hat, that’s where. When she up and leaves, it’s hardly surprising. The only question was why was she with this chapeau-loving bozo in the first place?
There’s a lot that doesn’t make sense in this story, but that’s part of the point. Yee, working under commission from San Rafael’s AlterTheater has created a quirky fable with a decidedly Yiddish storytelling tilt. It doesn’t all hold together in director Robin Stanton’s enjoyable production, though there’s genuine humor and emotion in abundance.