Porgy sings anew at the Golden Gate
p>The music of Porgy and Bess is so pervasive in the musical landscape that actually seeing the show and how the songs fit into the story is a little startling.
I know the George Gershwin-Ira Gershwin-DuBose Heyward score not from cast recordings but from pop and jazz versions recorded by the likes of Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Carmen McRae, Cleo Laine and Ray Charles and Frances Faye and Mel Tormé. And then there are the countless covers of the show's songs. "Summertime" is considered one of the most recorded songs of all time, with more than 30,000 versions. This music, in other words, is part of the American cultural fabric.
Productions of Porgy and Bess don't come along very often...
Campo Santo, Cal Shakes do some Califas dreaming
There's something extraordinary happening at Intersection for the Arts, and only part of it has to do with theater. Intersection, along with Campo Santo and California Shakespeare Theater have been partners for years, but their current collaboration is kind of staggering.
It began back last April with a production of Richard Montoya's The River directed by Campo Santo's Sean San José (read my review here) and continued with Cal Shakes' season opener, Montoya's American Night: The Ballad of Juan José in June starring San José and directed by Jonathan Moscone (read my review here).
Now we have the culmination of the collaboration in the Califas Festival, a multimedia exploration of what it means to be a Californian.
Part recital, part memory play, Berkeley Rep's Pianist soars
Simply listening to Mona Golabek play the piano would be pleasure enough. But in her remarkable one-woman show The Pianist of Willesden Lane now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, her music goes far beyond the loveliness of a recital. Every note Golabek plays honors the mother who taught her to play and the grandmother who taught her mother to play. The music, in essence, is the story here.
For most of this play's 90 minutes, Golabek plays her mother, Lisa Jura, who was a gifted piano student growing up amid the cultural wonders of Vienna, a city falling ever more under the influence of the Nazis. As a teenager in 1938, young Lisa notices the changes in her city, but when her beloved piano teacher must refuse her as a student because she is Jewish and he is afraid, the true horror of the Nazi regime begins to show itself.
ACT's Lintel celebrates life, librarians
What's the haps in Hoofddorp, you ask? Well, for a small town in Holland, things are pretty dull, actually, thanks for asking. The good news is they've got a heck of a library in Hoofddorp, complete with the Dewey decimal system and time-stamped check-out cards and everything. We know this because a former librarian – we never find out his name – desperately wants to tell us about a life-changing adventure that was triggered by something that happened on an ordinary day on the job at the library.
So goes Glen Berger's Underneath the Lintel, a solo drama now at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater. The inestimable David Strathairn is the Librarian, complete with mild Dutch accent (he sounds a little like Tim Conway's Mr. Tudball on the old Carol Burnett Show) and the growing enthusiasm of globe-trotting storyteller on a mission.
Scheie shines in SJ Rep's poignant Next Fall
As an actor and director, there is seemingly nothing Danny Scheie cannot do. Over the summer, he dazzled in several drag roles in California Shakespeare Theater's Lady Windermere's Fan (read my review here), and now he's doing a serious about face in the drama Next Fall with San Jose Repertory Theatre.
Geoffrey Nauffts' play is formulaic to a degree, but it's a sturdy formula, and Scheie – not to mention the rest of the excellent cast – bring out the best in this play about faith, love and family.
Norm Lewis brings on the leading man charm
More than two dozen songs and four standing ovations later, Norm Lewis has officially made his San Francisco splash. The Broadway leading man and golden-voiced baritone made his long-overdue Bay Area concert debut Sunday night at the Fairmont's Venetian Room as part of the Bay Area Cabaret's 10th anniversary season.
Most recently, the 50-year-old Lewis nabbed a Tony Award nomination opposite Audra McDonald in The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, but his impressive resume also includes Javert in the revival of Les Misèrables, King Triton in Disney's The Little Mermaid, the Sondheim revue Sondheim on Sondheim and Side Show. He also has a recurring role as a senator on ABC's "Scandal" and will be starring opposite Bernadette Peters and Jeremy Jordan in A Bed and a Chair conceived by Sondheim and Wynton Marsalis. So all of that to say: Norm Lewis has chops, and he's not afraid to use them.
Marin Theatre Co. gets its yawp on with I and You
Call it the Great Gunder-splosion of 2013. And 2014. San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson has taken over the local theater scene with more productions than you can shake a dramaturg at. Only last week she opened The Taming with Crowded Fire Theatre Company (see my review here), and here she here is, barely a week later, with another world premiere, I and You with Marin Theatre Company (like The Taming, I and You is part of the National New Play Network and will receive several more productions as part of what they call a "rolling world premiere").
Here's what these two plays have in common:
Broadway-bound Carole King bio truly is Beautiful
You know that Beautiful: The Carole King Musical has worked its musical biography magic when, during the curtain calls, the extraordinary Jessie Mueller takes her bow, you feel like you're applauding an actor for her superb performance as King and you feel like you're acknowledging King herself and all of the remarkable work she has contributed over the last five decades.
King herself is nowhere to be found in the creation of this Broadway-bound enterprise except where it really counts: in the music. The story that book writer Douglas McGrath and director Marc Bruni are telling springs out of King's early start in the songwriting business and her emergence as a seminal singer-songwriter of the 1970s, but the show is really a tribute to the craft of songwriting.
Shrew you, shutdown! The Taming gets it right
The word factions is uttered in a way that makes it sound like the filthiest word you can imagine. And, in these tense government shutdown days, it actually is. But when James Madison says the word, you feel it whistling through the centuries like an airborne bomb that keeps exploding every time political idiocy allows factions (it's such an easy word to say with loathing) to hijack democracy.
The world premiere of San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson's The Taming couldn't come at a more volatile time. Our government just happens to be in the middle of a crisis that was anticipated, according to Gunderson's play, by our founding fathers. The wise Mr. Madison did his best to avert the power of the special interests, but he compromised to keep our fledgling country steady and strong, at least to start.
Joseph's Bengal Tiger prowls the SF Playhouse stage
The last time San Francisco Playhouse produced a play by Rajiv Joseph -- Animals Out of Paper in 2009 -- the young playwright was becoming one of the hottest writers in the country. TheatreWorks produced his The North Pool in 2011, just as his Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was preparing to bow on Broadway in a starry production that featured Robin Williams as the titular caged beast.
Joseph, with his Tony Award and Pulitzer nominations, has fully emerged as an American playwright of note and his work is back at San Francisco Playhouse to launch a new season, the second in the stellar theater on Post Street.
In Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Joseph has crafted a challenging war/ghost story that wrestles with the very notion of god (or, if you prefer, God).
Well I'll be dipped in pig's blood -- Carrie lives
The bucket of pig's blood is to Carrie the Musical what the chandelier is to The Phantom of the Opera -- you just know both of those suckers are coming down. In fact, Carrie and Phantom have more than falling props in common. They're both essentially horror stories adapted for the musical stage in which the central character is a misunderstood, sensitive soul who gets bullied to the point of horrific violence. The difference is that one has an upper berth on the "most successful musicals of all tiem" express train, and one is a flattened penny on the track underneath that train.
If you've heard of Carrie the Musical it's probably in the context of "musical disasters" or "Broadway's biggest flops."
Cal Shakes' lukewarm take on Winter's Tale
On a refreshingly brisk autumn night, California Shakespeare Theater's A Winter's Tale aimed to tell a sad story with a happy ending. "A sad story is best for winter," or so we're told by a young boy not long for this earth.
Even by Shakespearean standards, this is a strange play, with its jarring shifts in tone, unexplained fits of jealousy, interference by the gods and living statuary. In other words, it's a director's dream – here's a wacky play that needs lots of interpretation and massaging to make it work for a modern audience.
Cal Shakes previously closed the season with A Winter's Tale in 2002 with a massive production in which the audience moved around to accommodate the shift in action from Sicilia to Bohemia. Director Lisa Peterson hauled out screaming teenagers, a school bus and an all-out rave before audience members headed back into the theater proper for the moving, if fantastical, finale.
This time around, we get a wildly different Tale directed by Patricia McGregor, who returns after the triumph of last season's Spunk.
In praise of Anthony and Sharon and Lorri and Spike
If you spend any time at all going to theater in the San Francisco Bay Area, you soon see that we have some extraordinary homegrown talent populating our local stages. That's not empty boosterism – rah, Bay Area! – but something nearing actual fact – rah, working Bay Area actors in it for the long haul! In just the last month or so, Marin Theatre Company, TheatreWorks, Aurora Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theater and Magic Theatre have opened their seasons with at least one dazzling, shake-your-head-in-wonder performance by a Bay Area actor.
Now Berkeley Repertory Theatre gives a triple scoop of local actor goodness in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the local premiere of Christopher Durang's Tony Award-winning comedy.
Founding Fathers sing a show tune in ACT’s spirited 1776
American Conservatory Theater opens the new season with canny revival of the 1969 musical 1776 originally produced last year at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Fla. Tony Award-winning director Frank Galati helmed the patriotic tuner in time for the presidential election (which somehow seems a lot further behind us than just a year), and now he has brought his creative team and his leading players to San Francisco along with a cast fleshed out with some lively locals.
1776 is an unusual choice for a musical and creators Sherman Edwards (music and lyrics) and Peter Stone (book) take a rather unusual approach in that they've crafted more of a play than a musical, but the dozen or so songs somehow work to add a humanizing and emotional layer to a history lesson we think we know but was actually messy and contentious and full of ominous compromise.
Wonky tone buries Magic's Buried Child
By all rights, the Magic Theatre's season-opening production of Buried Child by Sam Shepard, the man who helped build the Magic's national reputation during his 12-year stay from the mid-'70s into the early '80s, should be a triumph. Continuing the five-year Sheparding America celebration of the writer's work, the production should be a potent reminder of just how electrifying, unsettling and beautiful Shepard's writing can be.
This is not that production.
What you should know about Impact’s What Every Girl Should Know
The first thing to know about Impact Theatre's What Every Girl Should Know, a one-act play by Monica Byrne, is that it's a gripping play about matters physical and spiritual. It's also very well produced by director Tracy Ward and an excellent cast of four. This is a play set in 1914 but feels, rather sadly, of the moment because, it seems, there will always be people (old, white men mostly) who want to keep other people (women, mostly) as ignorant as possible, especially when it comes to their own bodies and – heavens forfend – sex.
Byrne's drama is set in the tight confines of Room 14, a four-bed dorm room at St. Mary's, a Catholic girl's reformatory on New York's Lower East Side. The year is 1914, and the church is the ultimate power for the occupants of Room 14.
Personal is political in Aurora’s fiery Revolution
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company opens its 22nd season with Amy Herzog's smart, moving drama After the Revolution, an ambitious play that juggles American history, the cost of political idealism and how one generation affects another – for good and ill – in a tight-knit family.
This is the same Herzog whose 4000 Miles was so good at American Conservatory Theater earlier this year (read my review here), and this play, which predates 4000 Miles, also features the character of Vera Joseph (who is based on Herzog's own grandmother).
Wesla Whitfield's dazzling Street of Dreams
Wesla Whitfield and Mike Greensill are better than ever, which is saying something as they've been better than most for quite some time. The singer and her husband, the arranger/pianist, haven't been seen regularly here in San Francisco since they moved north a few years back, but anytime they return is cause for attention and celebration, especially when they're part of an auspicious launch of a new cabaret room.
The lovely space is called Society Cabaret, and it's tucked away in the Hotel Rex, right off Union Square.
Bonnie & Clyde live (and die) by the Shotgun (Players)
Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that Berkeley's Shotgun Players are reviving the myth of gangsters Bonnie and Clyde. The celebrated criminals storm the Ashby Stage on the run from the law and nearing the end of their bloody, well-chronicled run of robberies and murders across the American south. They enter an abandoned barn to take cover. He's got a pistol in each hand and she's wielding -- what else? -- a shotgun. She is, it turns out, a true shotgun player.
British playwright Adam Peck's stage version of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not really anything like the revered 1967 movie version except for the basic facts of the story.