Sublime stories from Word for Word and Alice Munro
Any celebration of Alice Munro merits attention, but when that celebration comes from Word for Word, the ever-astonishing local company that transforms short fiction into brilliant theater with complete fidelity to the original text, attention must not only be paid but also reveled in and savored.
Word for Word brought a Munro story to life in 1999 ("Friend of My Youth"), and the intervening years have brought more acclaim for the Canadian writer and a Nobel Prize for literature. Now that she is rightly revered for her masterful prose, Munro is given a full Word for Word evening in Stories by Alice Munro: "The Office" & "Dolly," a sort of career bookend.
Of nihilism, comedy and epic theater in Aulis
Award-winning San Francisco playwright Christopher Chen gets deep into existential nihilism in his latest world premiere, Aulis: An Act of Nihilism in One Long Act. That title pretty much says it all: Chen takes the premise of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis and gives it a contemporary spin that allows for abundant comedy yet still leads to a bloody, ultimately futile end.
Chen's epic one-act receives a spiffy production from U.C. Berkeley's Theater Dance & Performance Studies Department, which seems appropriate as Chen is a Cal alum and began his playwriting career there.
Crowded Fire's Edith hits the target
Think of A. Rey Pamatmat's Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them as sort of a '90s "Peanuts" strip come to life. Sixteen-year-old Kenny is like Charlie Brown. Twelve-year-old Edith is Kenny's younger sister, so that makes her Sally (and so does her sass). And Kenny's classmate Benji is Linus (with a little Schroeder mixed in). There's even a giant stuffed frog named Fergie that could be considered Snoopy-esque. Only in this comic strip, Charlie and Sally Brown have essentially been abandoned by their parents to fend for themselves on a farm, and Charlie Brown and Linus are in love.
The "Peanuts" comparison is apt here if only to convey the tone of Edith, which has mature actors playing tweens and teens. There's a very grown-up feel to this tale, and that's partly because Kenny and Edith are being forced to grow up much faster than normal.
Judy Collins warbles Sondheim
It's only logical that Judy Collins would end up doing a show devoted to the songs of Stephen Sondheim. The legendary American singer is, after all, the only one to deliver Sondheim an actual radio hit. Her version of his "Send in the Clowns" (from A Little Night Music) is his only radio hit – it was on the Billboard charts for 11 weeks in 1975, peaking at No. 36. Then, rather amazingly, Collins' recording charted again in 1977, peaking at No 19. The recording also nabbed a Grammy for song of the year.
Some three decades later, Collins, more gorgeous than ever at 75, is parlaying her success with "Clowns" into an entire act.
Faith, choices, colonialism collide in Marin's gutsy Convert
p>For someone who kills zombies in her day job, Danai Gurira sure knows her way around a compelling drama. Best known as the kick-ass, Katana-wielding Michonne on AMC's "The Walking Dead," Gurira is also a playwright, an impressive one as it turns out based on her Bay Area debut with The Convert now at Marin Theatre Company.
This is a good, old-fashioned historical drama – three acts and nearly three hours – about the soul-crushing damage of colonialism and missionary zeal. What's interesting is that The Convert is the second play to open in the Bay Area recently specifically addressing the colonizing of Africa by Europeans.
Disney's Newsies seizes its musical day
Newsies that unlikely Broadway hit that started out as a flop movie musical, isn't so much about groundbreaking theater as it is a sterling example of how efficient Disney can be at creating solid, broadly appealing entertainment.
The Broadway production closed last fall, but the tour dances on. If ever there was a show meant for the road, it's Newsies, a high-energy, stick-it-to-the-man ode to unions of all kind (labor, romantic, brotherly). Now at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN season, Newsies is the definition of crowd pleaser.
Just Theater presents a wildly provocative Presentation
In some ways, the less you know about Just Theater's latest show, the better. Here's what you need to know and then you can read the rest after you've seen it: this is a very modern show in that it deconstructs and wrestles to the ground ideas of traditional theater. It deals with heavy subject matter (genocide) but does so with intelligence, humor and a wildly energetic style that moves well beyond the usual, polite play-audience interaction and more into the visceral punch-in-the-gut territory that leaves you slightly dazed in its aftermath.
Aurora's Lyons subdues its roar
There are breathtaking moments – literally, your capacity to process oxygen is shut down – in Nicky Silver's script of The Lyons now at the Aurora Theatre. Silver takes an average situation – a patriarch in the final days of an illness is tended to by his wife and two adult children – and makes it painfully funny by exposing every sharp edge he can find and slicing through anything in his way. Those breathtaking moments usually involve some sort of truth telling at the expense of someone else's fragile or carefully crafted sense of self, but the inability to breathe is often followed by a huge laugh.
Or at least it feels like there should be a big laugh. Director Barbara Damashek's production is dialed to 6 while Silver's script seems to call for at least double that.
Shaker it up, baby now!
If, as they say, 'tis the gift to be simple, then Early Shaker Spirituals is truly gifted.
Just what is this show exactly? Is it an hourlong piece of documentary theater about songs sung (and danced) by the Shakers, an offshoot of the Quakers? Is it a simply staged concert in which four women sing along with a record album? Is it some avant garde comment on simplicity and spirituality by New York's famed Wooster Group? Yes, yes and yes.
If you happen to be going to this sold-out touring production now at Z Space, first of all, lucky you.
Gardley gets a Glickman
Oakland playwright Marcus Gardley is the winner of the Will Glickman Award for the best new play to have its premiere in the Bay Area in 2014. The play is The House that will not Stand, loosely based on Federico Garcìa Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, which had its premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in February of 2014. Read my review of the show here.
Hébert's moving Tree explores family's tangled roots
I reviewed Julie Hébert's drama Tree at the San Francisco Playhouse for the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's a sample: "Director Jon Tracy’s powerful and poignant production feels grounded in reality of the siblings and their fraught, fractious attempts at a relationship, but in the realm of the parents, there’s a lyrical quality filled with love and sadness that elevates the play from kitchen-sink drama to something more."
Love and loathing in Berkeley Rep's football drama
A critic's personal feelings or attachment to a subject are often irrelevant when it comes to writing about a particular play. But in the case of Berkeley Repertory Theatre's world premiere of X'x and O's (A Football Love Story), I feel I have to disclose a strong personal bias. I loathe football. LOATHE it, and have all my life. That's my dad and my brother's territory. I'll be in my room canoodling with stereotypes and listening to Broadway cast albums. Sports in general have never interested me much, but no other sporting activity do I actively detest and strenuously ignore as much as loud, violent, overblown football.
Sir Noël's been Lansburied. Lucky Sir Noël.
Is anyone in the theater world more spirited than Angela Lansbury? She has been giving great performances on stages and screens of various sizes for 70 years. She has every right to rest on her laurels and be adored as the legend she is. But not right now. She has work to do.
At 89 (you'd never know it by watching her on stage), Lansbury is taking a victory lap, a final North American tour in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit. She is playing oddball spiritualist Madame Arcati in director Michael Blakemore's production (part of the SHN season). It's a role that earned her a fifth Tony Award in 2009. To be clear, this is as sturdy a production of Coward's 1941 comedy as you're likely to see, performed with wit, sophistication and, perhaps surprisingly, heart. The cast is excellent, the design just right and the sound (in the cavernous Golden Gate Theatre) startlingly clear. But you come to this production first and foremost for Lansbury, and she is every bit the warm and wonderful genius you want her to be.
Wilder's genius shines in Shotgun's Our Town
When it comes to the rituals of the New Year – making and abandoning resolutions, vowing to live more fully and with intention, trying not to let time slip away so quickly by living more fully in the present – the most powerful thing you could do for yourself is head over to the Ashby Stage in Berkeley and see Shotgun Players' excellent production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.
This 1938 masterpiece has long been my favorite American play, and aside from its structural genius, its Expressionistic (and still unmatched) theatricality balanced with genuine emotion, Our Town is the self-help book embedded in our nation's consciousness. I've seen the play dozens of times in straightforward productions (like Shotgun's) and over-produced and over-thought re-imaginings, in musical and film versions, in schools and on the professional stage, and every time I come away with something new. More than any other, I feel Our Town in other works when they succeed in connecting audience to play or when they tap into simple truths that need constant reiteration about what the hell we're even doing on this planet.
Threats of totalitarianism have never been so fun
Our sorry political state may be sending the country down the toilet, but it sure is inspiring some grand entertainment. Veep and House of Cards offer two distinct points of view on the absurdity of Beltway power mongering. Lauren Gunderson's The Taming was a comic highlight of last year's local theater scene (review here) in its exploration of political game playing.
Now we have Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's The Totalitarians, a Z Space production in association with Encore Theatre Company and the National New Play Network.
A Kinky kick in the pants
Kinky Boots is the kind of musical comedy that leaves no unpleasant aftertaste. There's no guilt in enjoying its pleasures, and though it's not exactly an emotional feast, neither is it empty calories. This is a well-crafted, tuneful show whose only aim is to entertain and uplift. It succeeds on both counts.
A huge hit on Broadway, where it racked up six Tony Awards and is well into its second year, Kinky Boots is based on the 2005 film of the same name, one of those distinctly British underdog feel-good movies they do so well over there. Harvey Fierstein, adapted the movie, Cyndi Lauper made her Broadway composing debut with the score, and Jerry Mitchell (last seen in these parts with the Broadway-bound Legally Blonde – review here) directs and choreographs in his typically efficient, ebullient manner.
Kathleen Turner kicks ass in Red Hot Patriot
The moral of the story seems to be: if you're going to kick some political ass, make sure you're wearing red cowboy boots – and it helps to have a brain, a fire in your belly (fueled, no doubt, by some hooch) and a sense of humor fueled by a larger-than-average intellect.
It seems Molly Ivins had all of the above, at least the Molly we meet in Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins now on stage at Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda Theatre. Ostensibly a one-woman play about Texas' leading red-haired liberal crusader with a typewriter, the play stars Kathleen Turner as Ivins