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.
Terri White's Great White Way (and a perfect martini!)
Palo Alto native Terri White grew up and became a Broadway star, thanks largely to her big break in 1972's musical hit Two Gentlemen of Verona, which she also performed on tour at the Geary Theater. There have been dramatic ups and downs in White's career – it is a theater career, after all – but her journey has brought her back to the Bay Area several times, including a double stint in 1994 at the then-named Theatre on the Square in Make Someone Happy composer Jule Styne's last hurrah (White remembers it more as Make Someone Run because it wasn't Styne's best work; he died several weeks after the show), followed by Nunsense 2.
But White's most memorable San Francisco stage experience, at least until she makes her cabaret debut July 10 at the Rrazz Room was in the Cy Coleman musical Barnum in which she originated the role of Joice Heth (singing the memorable song "Thank God I'm Old").
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.
David Thompson on racism, history and making it all sing
David Thompson is the first to admit that regardless of the show itself, he would do anything to work with John Kander, Fred Ebb and Susan Stroman, three major theater artists with whom he had collaborated on And the World Goes 'Round, the 1987 revival of Flora the Red Menace and Steel Pier.
"Working with John, Fred and Stro has been an extraordinary gift and privilege," Thompson says on the phone from his home in Millburn, N.J. "They come from a kind of theater that really understands the craft of telling a story and telling it well. We begin every work session with 'what if' and just throw ideas out there. Working with them, they've always found a way to inspire me to do better and bigger work – not in a grand way – their talent is so huge that everybody they work with brings the best possible work they can to the table."
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.
SF Symphony scales Bluebeard's Castle
There are seven locked rooms in Duke Bluebeard's castle, and Nick Hillel knows what's in each one. From blood to torture to tears, the contents of the room were originally devised in French folklore and then formalized by the writer Béla Balázs for his friend, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, for the short opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle. But it was up to Hillel, who helms a London-based digital media company called Yeast Culture, to bring those mysterious chambers into the 21st century.
Hillel is the director of an acclaimed new production of Duke Bluebeard, which had its premiere last October with the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. After a tour through Europe, the production comes to Davies Hall for three performances by the San Francisco Symphony.
As conceived by Hillel, who has worked with artists as diverse as the Beastie Boys and Cirque du Soleil, the symphony hall is transformed by a stage-engulfing set that is 24 feet high onto which he projects all sorts of wild video projections. And hovering over the orchestra itself is what Hillel calls "the sails," a sculptural origami-like structure that also provides projections surfaces as it unfolds over the course of the hour-long opera.
Don't wanna see no more American Idiot
The inevitable homecoming is upon us. The Broadway musical version of Green Day's American Idiot, which had its world premiere in 2009 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, has returned to the Bay Area as part of the SHN season.
As an employee of Berkeley Rep at the time of the show's premiere, I was deeply immersed in the world of Green Day, big Broadway producers and a world of expectations riding on the shoulders of this 90-minute rock 'n' roll extravaganza. It was a blast to have an inside seat for the creation of such an exciting show. But my vantage point also prevented me from really seeing the show with fresh eyes.
There were things I liked about it and things I didn't. The Green Day score, especially as orchestrated, arranged and supervised by Tom Kitt, was by far the best part. Kitt succeeded masterfully in capturing the rock pulse of the music and then finding ways to infuse it with range and emotion it didn't have on record.
I had trouble connecting to the bare-bones story of three 20something friends battling their apathy in the suburbs...
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.
On the radio: Streisand and Streep
I recently had the pleasure of sitting in the studio with Chloe Veltman, host of the KALW radio show "Voicebox." Our topic of the evening was singing actresses. More specifically, we discussed the staggering talents of Barbra Streisand and Meryl Streep, both of whom apply their prodigious acting skills to some marvelous song performances. Of course Streisand is as well known as a singer as she is an actress, but Streep is full of wonderful surprises as a singer.
Ben Vereen and a sweet, happy life
When you call Ben Vereen's mobile phone, you get a most entertaining voicemail message. It's Chita Rivera singing, "My wish for you is a sweet, happy life." Then a cheerful Vereen says that's his wish for you as well. It's such an uplifting message that by the time you hear the beep, you realize you don't really miss talking to the man himself.
But then you get the man himself, and he proves to be even more cheerful than that message. At 65, and after a car accident in 1992 that would have sidelined just about anyone else, Vereen is a man on the move, a man with a plan. He's bringing his show Steppin' Out with Ben Vereen to the Rrazz Room June 12-17. Next month he'll play the newly opened 54 Below, the cabaret underneath the former nightclub (now legit Broadway theater) Studio 54. Then he goes to Australia, and after that, it's Broadway, baby. At least that's the plan. Vereen is hard at work on the show he's call in The Last of the Showmen, and that's really what he is.
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.
Disney’s Lion King roaring back to San Francisco
p>According to the Wall Street Journal, the King really is the King of Broadway.
News came down last month that Disney's The Lion King is now Broadway's all-time highest grossing show. It's a title the regal hit stole from The Phantom of the Opera. The cumulative gross is staggering: $853,846,062 and counting.
Timing of the news couldn't have come at a better time. Lion King's Tony Award-winning director, Julie Taymor, happened to be in town with producer and president of Disney Theatrical Productions President, Thomas Schumacher. They were with a small group at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville to promote the return of The Lion King to San Francisco this November as part of the SHN season at the Orpheum Theatre.
Debby Boone lights up Yoshi’s
With her dad, Pat Boone, on the big stages of Las Vegas, Debby Boone was able to explore Sin City in the swinging '60s. She remembers seeing some of the big-name performers – Sinatra, Streisand, Presley – but it was the lounge singers who really made an impression.
"I'd look into one of the lounges and see some beautiful woman in a beautiful gown standing by a piano and singing a song," Boone recalls. "I knew then that's what I wanted to do."
That's exactly what the 55-year-old Boone is doing now, but it took her a while to get here. Boone will be in San Francisco this weekend (Sunday, May 20) with her show Reflections of Rosemary, a tribute to the late, great Rosemary Clooney, who happens to be her mother-in-law.
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.