Lynn Ruth Miller

Theatreworks gives us new perspectives on art

2012-01-26T23:18:00.001-08:00

Theatreworks presents……
THE PITMAN PAINTERS
By
Lee Hall
Directed by Leslie Martinson
It is through art and through art only,
That we can realize our perfection.
Oscar Wilde

“I have a passion for plays about art,” said Theatreworks Artistic Director Robert Kelley. “They are inevitably about much more – about the flawed, fragile, familiar human beings behind every aesthetic endeavor and often about the politics and prejudices of the era that produced it.”

That sums up the beauty and the impact of this wonderfully produced story of a group of British coal miners in the thirties who take up painting in an effort to understand ”art.” Andrea Bechert’s creative and highly original set designs coupled with Leslie Martinson’s tightly paced direction elevate the fairly loose plot into a compelling story meant to spur us all to find our own creative muse. “The joy of this play ….. is that it gives us a vibrant ‘insider’s view’… we all are visitors to their community,” said director Leslie Martinson. “When Robert Lyon, their teacher, urged them to pick up brushes and create their own paintings, his goal was simply to give them a means to understand what they were looking at when they looked at a painting. …..What he wasn’t expecting…is the energy and complexity of the images they created.”

The men were fascinated by the creative process and each man found something in it that gave him new perspectives on his own life. “We paint those little moments of being alive,” said Harry Wilson (Dan Hiatt).

Lee Hall was fascinated by the true story of these men and he says, ”I think more than the pitmen wanting to become artists, I was attracted to the idea of a group discovering and discussing art.”

The miners painted together once a week and eventually put on several successful shows of their work. When collector Helen Sutherland (Marcia Pizzo) tries to explain her fascination with the men’s work, she says “The meaning is something that happens in your heart.” And Oliver Kilbourn (Patrick Jones) says “Art is making things possible that weren’t there before. It is the first time I made something that was mine and not for money or for anyone else.”

The work these men produce is not the polished paintings of artists who have studied the creative process and devoted their lives to perfecting their technique. Instead, the works the pitmen produce are unique to each one, reflecting who they are and what is in their hearts. Their teacher Robert Lyon (Paul Whitworth) observes, “Don’t mistake technique for quality. Art is about knowing yourself.” And he tells Oliver, “Go out and paint something new.”

The cast in this ensemble production is outstanding and it would be difficult to single out any one as better than the others. The beauty of the presentation is that they all work together to create a mesmerizing treatise on the importance of unleashing each person’s creative spirit and letting it grow at in its own way. “Why do we assume that art is the province of the educated and elite?” asks Lyons. “You can’t have a rich culture if half the world is disenfranchised.”

THE PITMAN PAINTERS continues through February 12 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro Street in Mountain View. For information and to order tickets call (650) 463 1960 or visit theatreworks.org

Paintings have a life of their own
That derives from the painter's soul.
Vincent Van Gogh

DOUBLE INDEMNITY: A THRILLER ON EVERY LEVEL

2012-01-26T22:10:00.000-08:00

San Jose Rep presents…….
DOUBLE INDEMNITY
By James Cain
Adapted by David Pichette & R. Hamilton Wright
Directed by Kurt Beattie

DOUBLE INDEMNITY, now playing at the San Jose Repertory Theatre, is based on a 1936 serialized novella by James M. Cain, in which a woman and her lover conspire to murder her husband for the insurance money. In 1944, the year after the story was published in a collection by Cain, Billy Wilder made it into a very famous movie starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson; Raymond Chandler shared the writing credit with Wilder. The movie rather than the novel has lasted in the public consciousness. DOUBLE INDEMNITY was not made into a stage play until David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright adapted it last year for Seattle’s ACT (A Contemporary Theatre); the current San Jose run is a co-production with Seattle.

Pichette and Hamilton based their adaptation on the novella rather than the movie. The result is a spare, stylized work that communicates the spirit of noir better than any recreation of the movie could have done. It comes to the stage as a taut, streamlined chamber piece (five actors play ten roles, compared to 30 credited roles in the screenplay), deliberately simple on the surface but much deeper than it looks at first. Hamilton said that DOUBLE INDEMNITY
reads as if Dostoyevsky “decided to write a leaner, meaner little book in English.”

Director Kurt Beattie has kept this concept clearly in mind, and the result is a tight and compelling evening of noir entertainment. The audience is kept continually involved, even though everyone knows the story cannot end well. As the apparently perfect crime first evolves and then unravels, we identify with the very flawed, indeed wicked, characters – this is the mark of noir, which approaches a mystery from the viewpoint of the participants rather than that of an outside detective. Rooting for murderers is a walk on the wild side for us, a thrill that is part of the excitement of the genre.

Beattie (and Cain) are helped by a cast that is always competent and sometimes outstanding. John Boger has many excellent as the insurance salesman drawn into Carrie Paff’s murderous plot. It is sometimes deliberately ambiguous just whose plot this is. Boger’s intentionally subdued affect is part of the style, and strangely helps rather than inhibits his communication of unspoken passion. Richard Ziman is terrific as the doomed husband, and extra-terrific as the insurance man who tries to solve the crime. Mark Anderson Phillips takes three small roles and makes something memorable out of each of them.

Double Indemnity is effectively staged. Thomas Lynch’s set provides many startling and ingenious effects while staying within the production’s minimalist tone. Its details, and Annie Smart’s costumes, help keep the action believably in its period, as does a modest amount of actual smoking, without which noir is barely gris.

Cain wrote, in the preface to his novel The Butterfly (1947), “I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this, rather than violence, sex, or any of the things usually cited by way of explanation, that gives them the drive so often noted.” This is certainly true of DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and the San Jose Rep makes opening that box very pleasurable indeed.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY plays at the San Jose Repertory Theatre, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, through February 5. Evening performances are at 7:30 on Tuesday and Wednesday and 8:00 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; matinees at are 11:00 AM (on Wednesday January 25th only), 3:00 on Saturdays and 2:00 on Sundays. Tickets can be ordered from the theatre’s website at www.sjrep.com. Discounts are available for students, teachers and seniors.

Period of Adjustment

2012-01-02T01:43:00.001-08:00

SF Playhouse presents…..
PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT
By Tennessee Williams
Directed by Bill English
The mark of a good marriage is when
only one of you goes crazy at a time!"
-Heinz Kohut

SF Playhouse commemorates Tennessee Williams’ centennial with his rarely produced comedy, Period of Adjustment. The play was first produced on Broadway in 1960 and two years later made into a movie starring a very young Jane Fonda.

Period of Adjustment opens on a Christmas Eve in 1958, in the suburban Nashville home of Korean War veteran Ralph Bates (Johnny Moreno). As the curtain rises, Bates has just quit his job and his wife has left him. His wartime buddy George Haverstick (Patrick Alparone), arrives unexpectedly with his brand new wife Isabel (MacKenzie Meehan). Their marriage is not doing so well. Both couples seem to be enduring an agonizing, upsetting period of adjustment.

The play was written near the end of William’s series of great successes, between Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana. Williams, stung by critics who complained about his dark subjects, decided to write a happy play and Period of Adjustment is the result. However , it would be hard to call this play happy. The plot is a strange mixture reminiscent of the style of both Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon – the play feels like a satire of a tragedy instead of the comedy it was intended to be.

There are certainly many funny moments as the couples collide with one another, but although the dialogue is choice, the ending is predictable well before the curtain falls on the first act. In reality, the wounds the couples inflict on each other are serious and all too real. One wonders that they can be so easily healed when the play finishes and everyone is back in love again. The happy ending is far from convincing and feels more like “grin and bear it” than “hearts and flowers”.

Nevertheless, Period of Adjustment is a rewarding experience. The direction is perfect, the pacing beautifully orchestrated and the set is vintage fifties down to the last detail. Nina Ball’s design is excellent and provides three distinct areas on the stage clearly visible from every angle. English condensed the three act play into two which speeds the action and keeps the long speeches less turgid. The clever remarks make the plot seem frothy and light despite the heavy undercurrent of disillusion, insult and anger. Still, Williams’ dialogue is amusing and incisive, always a pleasure to hear.

Williams does not seem entirely at home with the dynamics of heterosexual marriage. If he had lived in a time when it was possible to write openly about gay relationships, Period of Adjustment might have been more effective. The obvious but unstated erotic connection between the two male characters is more interesting and far more authentic than the hetero relationships. When Ralph reminds us over and over that his wife is turning their son into a sissy, one cannot help but wonder if this if what Williams’ father said about him.

English brings out the best in his performers although Meehan steals the show for this reviewer. She is the perfect outraged innocent when she describes her outrage with men by saying, “If they can’t make ‘em any better, they should stop production,” and when she calls her daddy to tell him between tears that she might be coming home very soon. Her heartbreak might make us laugh, but the anguish her character suffers is always right beneath her words.

Tennessee Williams’ brother Dakin said that “not a single person was raped, castrated, lynched, committed or even eaten” in Period of Adjustment. The truth is that every character comes very close to doing each one of these deeds as the play progresses.

SF Playhouse productions are always well worth seeing and this one has the added value of Tennessee Williams exquisitely crafted dialogue. Just listening to the way he puts words together is a magnificent treat.

Period of Adjustment continues through January 14, at the Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter Street between Powell and Mason, Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7, Fridays at 8 and Saturdays at 3 and 8. Tickets are available at 415-677-9596, or at http://www.sfplayhouse.org/season1112/period_of_adjustment.php; half-price tickets can be ordered at www.goldstar.com.

Katya Sminoff-Skyy is not to be missed

2011-12-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

KATYA SMIRNOFF-SKY IS ALWAYS AN EVENT

Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season,
that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones
in sharing centuries-old traditions such as
trying to find a parking space at the mall.
Dave Barry

If you missed Katya Smirnoff-Skye’s All New Holiday Spectacular, you missed the perfect kick-off to your holiday season. In the spirit of Dave Barry and all great comedians, Katya Smirnoff–Skye captivated her audience at The RRazz Room, San Francisco's Premier Nightclub, Tuesday, December 6 by reminding us that the holiday season is a lot of fun if you don’t let the stress of spending too much, eating what you shouldn’t and drinking foolishly upset you. “if you wake up in your own bed and don’t know how you got home, it was a pretty good night,” she says and we all know she is right.

Smirnoff-Skye has a delightful voice , no matter how much she clowns around with remarks about her love relationship to vodka: “It is my very good friend; the best libation. In fact, the more I drink, the better time you’ll have.” She tells her audience she is the hostess with the mostest on the ball and says, “I want to welcome all of you here to this two drink minimum room.”

Indeed, she is a consummate entertainer. Every parody she sings has a special twist to make you laugh and love her at the same time. “I want all those Christmas clichés,” she tells her audience. “I love the tradition around holiday times.” And when her audience cannot resist singing along with the chorus she reminds them “I didn’t pay to hear YOU sing.”

Smirnoff Skye was accompanied by the accomplished Joseph Kanon, at the piano with Greg Robles, and Daniel Fabricant to complete the trio. She added a bit of sparkle with two delightful elves Ms. Sheldra, and John Cavellini who cavorted on and off the stage with appropriate props and gave away a selection of presents at the end of the show. Her special guest was Keilbasia, her sister from the old country who played the accordion and encouraged everyone to celebrate their own day, finishing her act with a rousing rendition of Hava Negila. We were reminded that the best perk for the Jews was eight nights of presents, while the rest of us only have one.

The audiences was treated to marvelously funny videos, songs that sounded like carols but weren’t quite as expected including Jingle Bell Rock, I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm and Katya Baby. It was all fun and laughter, ridiculous jokes and outrageous glitz until the finale, a moving rendition of Ave Maria, every note clear as a bell, sung with all the beauty and love that spells the real meaning of this holiday season.

The good news is that there are plenty of chances to see this wonderful talent and hear her out perform the best of them. Eat your heart out Britney and Beyonce. Katya Smirnoff-Skyy has done you one better and she’ll prove it the third Sunday of every month at San Francisco’s beloved Martuni’s (4 Valencia Street in San Francisco) at 7:30 pm and in The Temperamentals at the New Conservatory Theater Center until December 18, 2011. Her holiday spectacular was unforgettable. The audience was treated to an amazing bundle of talent crammed into 90 minutes of fun and farce. We are now knee-deep in this season to force yourself to be jolly, and no one can get it up and going quite as effectively as San Francisco’s own Katya Smirnoff-Skyy.

Christmas is a race to see which gives out first –
your money or your feet.
Anonymous

ANNAPURNA: A MASTERPIECE

2011-11-11T22:10:00.000-08:00

The Magic Theatre presents…….
ANNAPURNA
Written by Sharr White
Directed by Loretta Greco
Starring Rod Gnapp and Denise Cormier

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does.
Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
James A. Baldwin

“ANNAPURNA contains everything that comprises a great Magic play: rich, precise language, high stakes, arresting metaphors, complicated characters and emotional daring,” says Loretta Greco, Magic’s Artistic Director, and director of this production. “It’s a family play …. full of buried secrets, inexplicable hope and the eternal theses of mortality, faith and redemption.”

But the element that makes this work a stunning achievement is Rod Gnapp as Ulysses, at the bottom of his luck, dying of emphysema alone and angry, recovering from major lung surgery. We meet him standing in the kitchen of his dilapidated mobile home frying rancid sausages with nothing on but an apron. It takes a great leap of faith to buy the image we see before us, much less care about him. We see a wasted, unsavory remnant of a human being, bitter and filled with furious self-pity, void of any shred of goodness. His is a disgusting character: a man reduced to a vicious animal. Yet, Gnapp’s portrayal transforms Ulysses into a tragic hero, a man who could have been so much, reduced to so little. His body language, his facial expressions, and his bullet-like delivery all paint the picture of a beautiful human being submerged beneath the prickly, poisonous shell of the man we see before us. The art of a master actor is to incorporate the personality of his character so completely that the audience actually experiences his vulnerability and his longing to be whole. Gnapp’s Ulysses is as real as the man next door, as the guy you loved who could never break through his shell to release his potential. “I wanted the simplicity and challenge of working with just two characters,” says author Sharr White. “I find again and again, I’m writing plays about people who are found by others. Who, in the face of all their flaws, are forgiven for who they might have been or what they might have done in the past.”

And this is what Emma (Denise Cormier) is all about. She has learned that her ex-husband is dying. She left him twenty years ago when she discovered their son had been brutalized, but her own sense of betrayal and outrage could not erase what he was and would always be to her. She returns to him and despite the lost years, the audience realizes that their bond has not broken, even though the two people on stage have yet to figure that out.

The dialogue in this play is mesmerizing because it is real. The miscommunication and the verbal thrusts that hide the pain each suffers is the stuff of relationships. We have all been there. We have all fought useless battles like the one we see unfolding before us, hating our anger yet unable to suppress it.

Andrew Boyce’s set creates the perfect background for the couple’s furious encounter. Loretta Greco’s direction makes the hour and forty minute production evaporate into a moment. Make no mistake, there are gaps in the plot, and unexplained motivations, but isn’t that the way it is in life? We don’t always know why we do things and we don’t always get it right. In the end, these characters who meet like two churning volcanoes anxious to spew lava over one another come to terms with who they really are and how little they are to blame for what they once thought about each other. All that really matters is that they have rediscovered one another. The poignancy is that there is so little time left for them. “It takes courage to love, truly love,” says dramaturge Lue Morgan Douthit. “ …… we are social animals, and one is the loneliest and most unnatural number. Before we go ‘into that good night’, we need to know that we made a connection.”

Ulysses and Emma made that connection twenty years ago and they find it before our eyes. Gnapp and Cormier breathe truth into every line. Indeed, it is the acting that will embed this production of ANNAPURNA into your heart. You will not soon forget its definition of what humanity can become. This play is a dramatic masterpiece all the more meaningful because the tortured characters on stage could so easily have been us.

If you press me to say why I loved him,
I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
Michel de Montaigne

ANNAPURNA continues through December 4, 2011
Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco
Tickets $20-$60, 415 441 8822 or www.magictheatre.org
1 hour 40 minutes: no intermission

HARVEY comes to San Mateo

2011-11-09T11:36:00.001-08:00

The Crystal Spring Players present……
HARVEY
By
Mary Chase
Weekends, November 11-19 @ 8pm and November 13 @ 7 pm
Directed by Paul Wells and starring Cheryl Pierson and Brian Rausch

If you have never seen Mary Chase’s charming piece about a man whose best friend is a 6 foot invisible rabbit, (and even if you have) you owe it to yourself to check out this delightful combination of farce and fantasy at The Crystal Spring Theatre this month.
The play is a lot more than a comic farce. It has a lot to say about the importance of preserving the unique spark that makes us all a bit different from each other. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1944, and its initial run lasted for four years—1,775 performances. It was made into a movie in 1950 with Jimmy Stewart and its charm has not faded over the years. Indeed if anything, the humor and the pathos are more meaningful today than ever before, with our emphasis on conformity and politically correct behavior. It is, after all, the renegades and the originals that move our world forward and Chase’s Elwood P. Dowd (Brian Rausch) is exactly that. The story revolves around his sister Veta Louise’s (Cheryl Pierson) attempt to commit her brother to the local sanitarium. This production is beautifully paced and director Paul Wells (who also plays the head psychiatrist of Chumley’s Rest Home) has added a delightful forties feel to the production with a jazz quintet especially assembled for the production called “Chumley’s Pookas”. The mini-orchestra plays vintage songs of the era during scene changes sung by Johnny Villar while the cast moves the scenery around and dances to the irresistible beat.

The set is beautifully put together, the costumes are charming and choreography of this production is excellent. Cheryl Pierson is perfection as Dowd ‘s frazzled, frustrated sister trying to present her daughter to society in a respectable light while dealing with a brother who wanders through town carrying on spirited conversations with a rabbit. Johnny Villar plays the cab driver that takes Elwood to the sanitarium and it his beautifully rendered speech that is the turning point of the play. He tells Veta about the change that comes over the supposedly crazy people he brings to be treated and how once they are “cured” they have lost the essence of who they really are. We all face these decisions today when we must decide when to use a drug to calm a hyperactive child or lift a person from the depths of depression. At what point is the medicine more destructive than the cure?

Both Villar and Pierson steal the show for this reviewer. Pierson plays her character with real soul. She is far more than a comic character. She is a kind and caring person trying to deal with an impossible situation and still keep her wits about her. Villar’s singing adds a special rhythm to songs that have been eternal favorites such as “I’ll Be Seeing You”, “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and “Young at Heart.”

The Crystal Springs Players must be commended for bringing this lovely production to its stage. Community theater is one of the finest of our creative institutions. It brings together undiscovered talents of our neighbors and friends and gives us all an opportunity to have our moment in the spotlight. The cast in this production have donated hours of their time to create a memorable evening for us all. Don’t miss the opportunity to see what they have created. You won’t be sorry.

HARVEY continues November 11, 12, 17, 18, 19 @ 8 pm. November 13 @ 7pm at the Crystal Springs Theater, 2145 Bunker Hill Drive in San Mateo.
Reservations 650 345 2381

What happened to the American Dream?

2011-11-03T22:08:00.000-07:00

People are so busy dreaming the American dream,
fantasizing about what they could be or have a right to be,
that they’re all asleep at the switch.
Florence King

Back in the dark ages when I was a child, I wanted to be a fairy princess. I wanted to sprinkle everyone I met with fairy dust and create golden paradise. As I grew older, I wanted to become a beautiful dancer, a talented artist, a spirited cheerleader that encourages everyone to root for their team. I wanted to be a brilliant student, a fascinating conversationalist, a sugar plum.

Little boys had fiercer dreams. They wanted to be cowboys and bare-chested Indians with feathers trailing down their backs. They wanted to shoot guns, kick puppies and punch each other because that was what little boys were supposed to do.

Those were the days when we all believed our streets were paved with gold and hard work could earn you a rainbow. We believed love and marriage was a right. Every future needed lots of babies, a cute puppy and two cars in every garage. That was the American way.

Attitudes have certainly changed, haven’t they? Newsweek magazine just did a study of what Americans want to be these days and I feel like I have unintentionally moved into a foreign country. Little girls want to be witches, vampires and black swans; little boys pirates and hungry pigs. No one believes in miracles or magic. We want power, money and lots of bling.

Demonstrations, senseless wars and corruption have tarnished us. These days, every American girl realizes that to sprinkle everyone with fairy dust reduces you to a sex object. Little boys know that muscles only get you admiration at the gym. Healthy bank accounts, gas guzzling cars and the ability to hold your liquor are in. After all, Galahads can’t pay the mortgage; and maidens don’t want to be saved. It demeans them.

When you visit America, what do you see? You see overweight human beings guzzling MacDonald’s hamburgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken while they listen to music on their I-pods, texting on their cell phones. You see huge shopping centers, clogged streets and no children playing on the streets. It is too dangerous here. We put our children on school buses and worry that they will be kidnapped if they walk home from school. And no wonder. 2,185 children disappear every day in this country.

We think that the world has homogenized and we are all alike, but I know that is not so. In Britain, someone will help a stranger. Dogs are allowed on buses. People who cannot eat are fed. Those are not priorities here. Life moves too fast to worry about someone else. People awake before dawn to drive on packed freeways for hours to a job that pays too little and demands too much. They battle traffic jams to get home too late to say good night to their children, turn on TV with a beer in one hand and a remote in the other. There is no time to admire the daisy that bloomed in the garden or the pink dragon their child made in school. I see women dropping off their children at day care so they can go to an office, work until five, pick up the children, do the grocery shopping, clean the house and make dinner with no time to enjoy the money they have earned or get to know the children they have created. I see families buying gadgets they don’t need, wearing clothes that turn them into carbon copies of everyone else and I wonder if they know what they are missing.

There is a lot of good in the American way, of course. I love that women have choices and men do the dishes. I love that, in California at least, you can be gay or straight, black, white or yellow and still have a shot at grabbing the gold ring. I love that little girls play football and little boys are allowed to cry. We pride ourselves on our modern appliances, our streamlined life styles and or democracy. We are so absorbed in what we call progress that we have enjoying each other.

Not long ago, I was visiting a family in Edinburgh and when I opened the front door, their little girl was sitting in the hall singing to her dolls. The first thing that occurred to me as I watched that child so wrapped up in her fantasy she didn’t know anyone else existed, was ”This could never happen in America.”

Just last month, I lost my way on a Brighton street and a woman I did not know walked me several blocks to my destination. If you are lost in my town, it is your bad luck. Do not bother to ask a policeman. He is too busy giving tickets and arresting people for possession to help. People here have deadlines. They do not have time for compassion.

I love progress and I know that dreams change with the times. I just wonder if California dreaming is fun anymore. Sure, there’s lots of notoriety and plenty of action. We make headlines every day. You can’t beat us for glitter, but something awful has happened to the gold.

We must stop talking about the American dream
And start listening to the dreams of Americans.
Max Beerbohm

DEMONS IN THE AGE OF LIGHT: A MUST READ

2011-10-10T01:24:00.001-07:00

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race
Is the human race.
Don Marquis
I have just read DEMONS IN THE AGE OF LIGHT, A Memoir Of Psychosis And Recovery by Whitney Robinson. This beautifully written, poignant account of a tortured soul was a compulsive read for me. As I followed Robinson’s anguished quest to become what others say she should be, I could not help but see myself in her words. Who among us has not felt out of touch with their world? Who has never thought the steps to success defined by an arbitrary impersonal world were impossible to climb?

As I read of Robinson’s descent into fragmented reality, I could not help but wonder how many of us have experienced the very disassociation she described. Were we too obtuse to see that sometimes it is a good thing to allow our imagination to lead us off the beaten track? Robinson’s account is both lucid and moving. She takes us with her into a struggle we all have faced at some point as we travel through life. We all must face our devils and conquer them if we dare to realize our unique genius. The difference here is that Whitney Robinson ‘s delusions interfered with her attempts to function in the real world. She sought help and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Once labeled, she believed that she was a broken human being, one that need to be “fixed.”

The tragedy here is that society has narrowed the parameters of what it labels “normal”. The innovators, the original thinkers, the true beacons of progress all fall outside those boundaries. “In the end it's also important to remember that Freud, to paraphrase him, as he accepted the Nazi government for what it was, said, ‘Sometimes the Paranoids are right’,” observed psychiatrist William Hay. “That's even more true today given the changing perceptions of the fabric of reality, the economic crisis and the lack of faith in the truthfulness of government, a wide variety of competing sources of internet information, the continued predation of the mentally ill and the greater stigma attached to schizophrenia and psychosis itself in the overall stigmatization of mental illness in general.”

Schizophrenia effects 1% of our population and is among the top ten causes of disability in this country. Once diagnosed, the patient must balance his need for medication with its dulling, personality altering side effects. The question is not just what kind of balance a medication restores in your psyche, but, even more important, what it erases. When a pill stops your crying, it might also dull your laughter. That is huge price to pay for serenity. Hay goes on to say, “(Continued research) may indeed prove that patients will heal better than society at large which often appears more fragmented, psychotic and schizophrenic by the day.”

DEMONS IN THE AGE OF LIGHT paints a vivid picture of the author’s battle with demons that encouraged her to do away with herself. Somehow, she found her way in and out of the labyrinth her mind created. “I’d surrender myself entirely to this sickness,” she says. “But minds don’t want to be lost –they cling to their hosts despite everything.”

Schizophrenics are prone to killing themselves. According to The National Institutes of Mental Health, people with the condition have a 50 times higher risk of attempting suicide than the general population. In fact, suicide is the number one cause of premature death among people with schizophrenia, with an estimated 10 percent to 13 percent killing themselves and approximately 40% attempting suicide at least once. The condition accounts for a fourth of all mental health costs and takes up one in three psychiatric hospital beds. It is not something to be ignored. Yet reading this book will convince you that each person’s battle is unique. There is no blanket ”cure” that will magically either prevent or erase this disease in everyone. “Often, the experiences of mental illness imply not a deficit of humanity, but an excess of the things that separate us from all other kinds of life,” says Robinson.

She describes her parents’ confusion and guilt when they realize that she is emotionally unbalanced. “How hard they have tried not to make the same mistakes with me that their parents made with them, but it doesn’t matter because I ended up a thousand times worse.”

But did she? She managed somehow to cope with her mind’s voyage in and out of the tangible world, and is now enrolled in graduate school. It is difficult to believe that anyone capable of writing prose as exquisite and compelling as Robinson’s could possibly have a defective mind. “All of us who have the privilege of working with the mentally ill, especially the schizophrenics know these individuals as frightened and a far cry from the way they have too often been portrayed by the media,” observed Hays. “There is indeed a powerful link between the sensitivity of those with psychosis or those who go onto schizophrenia and those with genius or special gifts. Family studies consistently show that the two run together.”
Life is a roller coaster for us all. The more intelligent we are, the more clearly we see its potential and fear its dangers. The brightest among us tend to become loners, their socialization skills muted because there is no one on their level to understand the pathways their thinking creates for them. “I believe that some people are simply better at being human than others and that free will is a conditional state,” says Robinson in her Afterword. “But I think that as long as we work in good faith with what we’ve been given and take up our freedom wherever we find it, arête (the act of living up to one's full potential) is never beyond our reach.”
Still, the only thing that is ours alone, is ourselves. Surely, society owes its members the right to indulge their idiosyncrasies and exploit their creativity. These qualities are the stuff of progress. If the only people we allow to flourish are the conformists, civilization will become stagnant. “Demons surround us,” says Robinson…. ”They make us interesting, they make us doubt. They form our souls from an undifferentiated light.”

This book written when Whitney Robinson was twenty-three years old will speak to every human being who evaluates his life. Her story will remind us that the very cracks in our façade that make us different are the blessings that give our lives color and shape. Everyone must learn the best way to be ourselves. No one can do that for us. It is up to each of us to determine when we need help to return to a less dangerous path. I for one prefer to follow Robert Frost’s footsteps:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

I am nobody but myself.
Ralph Ellison

A.C.T. has another winner

2011-10-03T19:01:00.001-07:00

American Conservatory Theatre presents…..
ONCE IN A LIFETIME
Written by Moss Hart & George S. Kaufman
Directed by Mark Rucker
Featuring René Augesen, Julia Coffey, Patrick Lane and Alexander Crowther

If you like lots of glitz, amazing costumes and not much substance, this is the show for you. A.C.T. has created a lively, funny romp of this 1930 Hollywood satire by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The play, Hart’s first Broadway success, looks at Hollywood just as talking pictures were starting to transform the movie industry, ending the careers of countless stars who looked great but sounded awful, or whose acting style could not transfer to the new medium. The result is a blend of farce and satire that director Mark Rucker plays to the hilt. ONCE IN A LIFETIME is dated and threadbare, but beautifully paced, and always amusing.

The central characters are May Daniels (Julia Coffey), Jerry Hyland (John Wernke) and George Lewis (Patrick Lane) who have been performing together in a small-time vaudeville act. When they read in Variety that the “talkies” are transforming the movie industry, they abandon their act and head for Hollywood. The plan is for May to teach elocution to silent film actors who cannot adapt to the new medium.

Kaufman, who directed the original production, put Hart’s script through many rewrites and squeezed out most of the conventional romance and nearly all the sentimentality in favor of the wild grotesqueries of the Hollywood scene and the movie studio. This was a wise choice – as usual in the comedies of this period, the low characters are more interesting than the high ones. Nick Gabriel plays Herman Glogauer’s (Will LeBow) secretary and both men steal the show for this reviewer. The two of them internalized their characters instead of burlesquing them and each won the audiences heart. Indeed, they made every scene they were in a delicious bon-bon. The other actors too often tried so hard to be funny, they didn’t truly convince. However, this production is meant to be ridiculous exaggeration and the panorama of the characters interacting with one another in costumes to die for and sets that boggle the mind made up for any sense of artifice.

Each member of the cast has his moment: René Augesen as a Hollywood columnist, Margo Hall in a number of roles (one of them in a gray moustache that makes her look astoundingly like Charlie Rangel), and a delightful satire of romance between George and an ambitious ingénue (Ashley Wickett) who is determine to break into pictures.

This cast of 15 plays nearly 60 parts and this multiplicity means there is always something going on to engage the audience. The masterful direction saves the production from being a confusing muddle. Instead, it is wonderfully refreshing and funny from the opening scene in a tiny hotel room to the tap dance finale that ends the show.

Daniel Ostling‘s sets were nothing less than dazzling: a seedy hotel room, an elegant Hollywood restaurant, a Hollywood filming set, bare and cluttered at the same time and a fabulous railroad car in velvet and dark wood. Perhaps, even more dazzling were the pitch-perfect period costumes by Alex Jaeger.

ONCE IN A LIFETIME isn’t Death of a Salesman. Don’t expect naturalistic character development, or inspiring insight into the human condition. But in 1930, it ran for more than 400 performances, and in the capable hands of A.C.T. it still succeeds on its own terms. It is true comedy and made everyone laugh – no one can ask any more than that.

The American Conservatory Theatre’s production of ONCE IN A LIFETIME plays through October 16, Tuesdays through Sundays at 8 PM (with Saturday matinees at 2 PM), at the Geary Theatre, 415 Geary Street at Powell in downtown San Francisco. Silent films play before the show on Fridays; other nights feature audience exchanges after the show. The box office is next to the theatre, at 405 Geary Street; tickets are also available by phone at 415-749-2228, or on the A.C.T. website www.act-sf.org. Some tickets are offered at the Half-Price Tickets booth at Union Square, or at www.tixbayarea.com.

MARGA GOMEZ DOES IT AGAIN

2011-09-30T21:42:00.001-07:00

NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER written and performed by Marga Gomez

Older women are like aging strudels –
The crust may not be so lovely,
But the filling has come at last into its own.
Robert Farrar Capon

Marga Gomez is a comic genius. Yet, her comedy alone doesn’t begin to reflect her depth and insight. It is in her one woman shows that she paints such a strong vision of who she has become. She is a human being who defied convention and had the strength to become her own person at a time when that person was destined to be censured and despised by a society too frightened to recognize the value of difference.

Gomez’s latest production, NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER is not about aging. It is about becoming someone who is comfortable in her own skin. As with all great theatrical works, we are given the pieces of the puzzle, but the audience must put it all together to come up with the message. We see the child of a controlling, vain mother and a determined father, a child who cannot understand the rules she needs to obey to fit into the pattern her parents try to carve for her. We see the young Gomez in New York’s Freedom Land Park dying to put out an imitation of the Great Chicago fire and meet Elsie the Borden Cow because she so loves dairy foods. “We went to Freedom Land to experience American History. Lucky for me it was fake American history.”

We all lie. All of us want to see ourselves as perfect beings. When reality yanks us off our pedestals, we either come to terms with what we really are, or go into some kind of shell to protect ourselves from truth. Gomez uses laughter to explain herself to her audience and to herself. The pace of the performance is amazing; indeed her 75 minute monologue seems to last but a moment. Gomez changes voices, switches from child to adult and swerves from fantasy to memory. Each transition is seamless and convincing. Under her veneer of laughter and satire, lies a poignant story of a little girl trying so hard to understand the whys grown ups never explain.

We meet Lisa the know-it-all, devious friend and her blustery, bull-headed ex-marine of a father who was never in the marines. We go with Gomez to buy clothes that no longer fit right and hear her try to adjust to new phrases that mean old things. Every time she looks in the mirror, pulls out a gray hair or wonders at a new dance craze, she realizes that all life is a race against time.

The text of this piece is very funny; but underneath the laughs is a telling portrait of what American society has become. NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER paints the picture of a brave, fearless woman who can laugh at the world’s foibles and still have the courage to carve her own unique niche. Even as Gomez tells us the ways she deceives herself, she opens our own eyes to what we really are. Human beings have life spans, but Marga Gomez’s message is eternal. Give yourself the gift of seeing her in action, wherever she performs. She is a diamond.

Marga Gomez's NOT GETTING ANY YOUNGER
September 8 - October 23, 2011
The Marsh San Francisco
1062 Valencia St (@22 St) SF, CA 94110
Performances:
Thursdays & Fridays @ 8:00 pm
Saturdays @ 8:30 pm
Sundays @ 3:00 pm
No performance on Saturday, October 15
Tickets: by phone
Mon - Fri 1:00 - 4:00pm
415-282-3055
More Information
415-826-5750

Magic Theatre's WHY WE HAVE A BODY

2011-09-21T21:21:00.000-07:00

Magic Theatre presents…..
Claire Chafee’s WHY WE HAVE A BODY
Directed by Katie Pearl
Featuring Rebecca Dines, Lauren English, Lorri Holt and Maggie Mason

There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud
was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anaïs Nin

“WHY WE HAVE A BODY pulses with life within a uniquely visceral theatrical universe,” says Loretta Greco, Magic Theater’s Artistic Director. “Much of its raw beauty is tied to Claire’s unabashed embracing of the innate absurdity of family and the messy mysteries that make up the lives of her four intrepid women. Mary, Lili, Renee and Eleanor are all explorers of a sort, trekking forward and back- each on the verge of discovery.”

When you think of about it, every one of us is on that same path, searching… always searching… for an elusive answer to who we really are. Each experience becomes part of us and even as we react to it in our own unique way, it changes us. Inevitably, we become a different person than the one who took that first step to anywhere we go. That is the thesis of Claire Chafee’s brilliantly perceptive play and that is the reason it can never become dated or passé.

Our bodies are with us always but what they want from us and how we realize their fullest potential can never be an absolute, Every day we live changes who we become. “(Our body) is the only thing we take everywhere, from birth, and therefore carries all that has ever happened to us somewhere inside,” said Chafee in discussing the underlying theme of her work. “I have always been inspired by people and characters braver than myself, who really do listen to what their hearts tell them.”

That is what each of her characters is trying to do in this exquisitely realized window into four different women’s psyches. They are all working really hard to figure out how to be themselves. If we really listen to each of them, we will hear our own anguished voices. The play is riddled with memorable quotes you want imbed in your memory and pull out to give you perspective when your life fragments. “I can see that there’s a highway, I can see that there’s a suitcase, and I get a restless feeling like I want to get born but I don’t know how,” says Lili, who has become a private detective specializing in adultery from the wife’s perspective.

“Marriage boggles the imagination,” says Lorri Holt who plays Eleanor, Mary and Lili’s mother. “How little can happen and how busy you can be.”

And she goes on to say, “All my life, I’ve had two overriding fears. One, that I would never make something of myself and the other that I would.”

The direction, the set, the four women on the Magic stage cast an unforgettable spell. Every sentence, every movement touches a universal nerve. Anyone who tries to examine the purpose and the direction of his life has asked himself these same questions. It makes no difference what your sexual preference is, what your home life was, what your education gave you ……we all are on a unique quest. No one else has lived the life we are in and so we must create our own signposts. As we watch the characters in this play carve out their identities and learn to accept who they are and where they want to go, we are given clues on how to make our own lives feel better.

“Claire’s writing is as touching and urgent now as it was in 1993,” says Greco. “And is unique in its ability to transcend the confines of the era in which it was written. We couldn’t miss the opportunity to share this with our audiences.”

To the question of your life, you are the only answer.
To the problems of your life, you are the only solution.
Jo Coudert

WHY WE HAVE A BODY continues until October 2
Magic Theatre
Building D, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco
Tickets and information: www.magictheatre.org
(415) 441-8001

EDINBURGH IN AUGUST

2011-08-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

Every August for the past 24 years, I fly across the Atlantic Ocean and lose myself in the surreal, intoxicating world of Edinburgh, Scotland, where some men wear skirts, others high heels and glitter and still others nothing at all. Performers carry flamboyant banners down the street and singers shout their melodies in alleys for fun. I am besieged with clowns and magicians urging me to let them amaze me in a bar or the basement of a church and I am transformed. I am not the ordinary rational me I usually am eleven months of the year. I am a Cinderella captivated by a magic world of pomp, outrageous exaggeration and fascinating tales of mankind on unexpected journeys.

August is festival time in Edinburgh and the city becomes an enormous theater where with every kind of art form is performed, displayed and pushed to its limit. The streets are bursting with wild entertainment but the real thrill is the aftereffect. Each unique moment becomes part of an exciting and challenging fabric to take home and ponder for the next eleven months.

The kaleidoscope of activity that unfolds before our eyes is the very stuff that makes up our world. The entertainers in the street and on the stages at festival time reflect the temper, the terror and the fondest hopes of the universe. Here, thousands of performers present hundreds of plays, skits, songs and dance from every country in the world. They all are determined to flaunt their message whatever it is because to them it is their everything.

I walk down Princes Street elbow to elbow with the celebrities of the future, with housewives aching for something different, and teenagers hoping to find nirvana. The miracle of Edinburgh is that somehow through its muddle of sensation, the cacophony and the shimmer, we come away enriched, encouraged and stimulated, ready to return to our ordinary lives to rest up for the next Edinburgh infusion.

Through the years I have migrated from the conventional programs of the International Festival, charming and intellectually exciting as they always are, to the avante guarde fare of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. At first, I was only a punter and I can still remember my amazement at the innovative drama at The Traverse and the Church Hill Theatre, the surprise of discovering a high school musical in a church basement that left me speechless. The multitude of talent packed into performances at this festival carried by the enthusiasm of the cast alone convinced me that indeed our finest talent is undiscovered. It erupts from the clerk in the grocery store, the teacher when she leaves the classroom and the mechanic when he closes his shop.

Seven years ago, the bug bit me, and I decided it was time for me to take to the stage. I started with comedy, drifted into stories, then burlesque. Each year, I met performers who, like me, needed to discover their inner souls and become the very dream they always thought out of reach. I marvel at the creative velocity of the shows I see and those I am in. I realize that Edinburgh at Festival time is heady fare that inspires all who visit to reach beyond their grasp, to become something more than they were when they arrived.

This year I have seen the story of Enrico Caruso accused of pinching a lady’s bottom in New York, and a 50 minute poem about the way we diminish the very people we should encourage: those who dare to be unique. I have watched sketch comedy and improvisation, seen a human tuning fork that still makes me laugh at the image of her upside down emitting the key of A. I lost my heart to a cabaret whore who does not need to sell her body. Her songs are that glorious. I have seen two versions of Charles Dodson’s life and a women who is having her first wedding on stage. That is only the beginning of the variety of performance I will absorb as the days melt away.

Whether on the stage or in the audience, on the street or looking from a window the world unfolds before your eyes with all it has to offer and everything it aspires to become in Edinburgh in August. In what seems but a moment, it is all over and I need to pack my bags and get ready to put all these slices of the lives I’ve seen into some kind of perspective. Edinburgh in August! The one month in twelve when I can step away from the routines that imprison me and have the courage to pursue a new vision for my world.

David Mamet's AMERICAN BUFFALO at Actors Theatre

2011-07-31T22:25:00.000-07:00

Actors Theatre of San Francisco presents……………..
AMERICAN BUFFALO by David Mamet…an accomplished, professional piece of theater.
Directed by Keith Phillips
Starring Randy Hurst, Christian Phillips and Vlad Sayenko
All I'm saying is don't confuse business with pleasure.
Teach
When David Mamet’s AMERICAN BUFFALO was first performed at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 1975, the dialogue’s staccato profanity was far more outrageous than it is today. Nonetheless, the outrageous dialogue peppered with vulgarities usually spoken in smoke filled bars creates enough shock value to grab your attention even though the plot and action are minimal. The success or failure of any Mamet play depends on the believability of the characters and their ability to hold you with words alone. It takes a masterful director and a hugely talented cast to mesmerize an audience with so little action and this production does just that. The dialogue sweeps us into the mind sets of three men who represent Chicago’s lowest low life and we are fascinated. “In a vernacular that is terse and crude and has been called “profane poetry”, they (the characters) scheme, lecture, lie and betray in the name of ‘business’,” says Director Keith Phillips. “The futility of their efforts is what lifts the play from the underclass streets of Chicago to a moving lament for the human condition.”

Listening to these three men on stage is like hearing a dissonant symphony with driving rhythm as compelling as a Bartok Mazurka. The rapid paced conversation is spellbinding on every level because it is completely believable. The plot deals with a plan for Donny (Randy Hurst) to steal a coin collection from a customer who bought a rare buffalo nickel from his junk shop. He arranges for the theft with his protégée Bobby (Vlad Sayenko) but Teach (Christian Phillips) manages to convince Donny that he is a more experienced and better man for the job. It is a deceptively simple story line that becomes multidimensional through the dialogue of the three men. Each speech combines rapid fire obscenity and pungent repartee to paint a complex picture of how desperate we all are to fulfill our own needs.

This is a play about trust…our search for it and our inability to feel it. Christian Phillips’ Teach is a driven man, determined hang on to his tenuous place in a limited world at any cost. He insists that they have a right to steal the coin collection because they are society’s victims and he says to Donny, “Let’s go get what is ours.”

Randy Hurst has created a character that has real compassion for the people he cares about. He wants Bobby to eat right, and Teach to take care of himself. It is that compassion that the hardened, determined Teach tries to destroy by forcing Donny to question Bobby’s motives. Doubt is the most killing weapon against trust and Teach is a master at creating that doubt and casting a light on everyone’s Achilles heel.

AMERICAN BUFFALO is far more than a lot of dirty words about an unsavory robbery scheme. It is a reflection of the insecurities and suspicions we all harbor and the fears that force us to take desperate, dangerous steps to insure our own safety. These men are not discussing the pros and cons of stealing a coin collection; they are talking about what they owe to one another as human beings. They are questioning the cost of getting the loyalty and protection we all need if we are to be free to pursue our dreams.

The only person anyone really knows is himself and all too often our actions defeat us. When our fear of diminishing our self image becomes greater than our fear of breaking a law, we are one with the three desperate men we see in David Mamet’s AMERICAN BUFFALO.

Actor’s Theater gives us another masterpiece, with acting that is so powerful that each scene replays in your mind long after you leave the theater. Keith Phillips direction keeps the pace and movement peppered with pauses to absorb the anxiety under the words we hear. James Baldock’s set brings us into the world of a junk shop overrun with the refuse of city life. It is a masterpiece of construction with chairs hanging from the ceiling, children’s toys clustering around with old furniture and rubble no one wants.

This is production is exquisite theater and not to be missed. To see these three men interact with one another spewing vitriolic verbal attacks on the world and the trap it sets for us all is drama at its best.
Loyalty is fine, but this is business.
Teach

AMERICAN BUFFALO continues through Sept. 3rd, Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8pm at Actors Theatre of San Francisco, 855 Bush St, Between Taylor and Mason in San Francisco.

Tickets: General: $38, Students & Seniors: $26
Box Office: (415) 345-1287 or online at DramaList.com
More Info: www.ActorsTheatreSF.org

A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST

2011-07-13T21:14:00.000-07:00

Off Broadway West Theatre Company presents….
INDULGENCES IN THE LOUISVILLE HAREM by John Orlock …a glimpse into what we once were.

Being an old maid is like death by drowning,
A really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
Edna Ferber
If you ever doubt how much freedom and choice women have achieved in this past century, see Off Broadway West’s production of INDULGENCES IN THE LOUISVILLE HAREM. You will meet two sisters in their mid-thirties, Florence (Jocelyn Stringer) and Viola (Kim Saunders) living in Louisville, Kentucky at the turn of the century. They are unmarried and dependent on their uncle for all financial decisions. At that time, there was no internet dating and respectable ladies could not go into a bar to meet a husband. Yet, a husband was the only passport to “the good life.” In those days, women could only become secretaries, maids, whores or wives and the roles for each job were almost identical.

Marriage was so important for respectability at that time that love didn’t figure into the equation. You might meet someone in church, or perhaps while walking in the park but it was unlikely. Unless your family or friends introduced you to an eligible bachelor, you were locked into the dull, thankless and very boring life of a spinster. That was where mail order brides came in. Men would advertise for a women and find their match, but what was a woman to do? John Orlock found one answer: a catalogue of eligible respectable, professional men. “We can all relate to the ‘mail order husband” process as we live in an era of online dating,” said Director Richard Harder. “And it‘s interesting and fun to observe this, in an earlier form during the beginning of the twentieth century. The mystery and adventure associated with this process is full of surprises and sometimes dramatic turns.”

Harder’s direction keeps up the pace and interest in what would otherwise be a shallow , vapid script and the four actors, do their best with highly predictable dialogue. Sylvia Kratins’ costumes are delightful and Bert van Aalsburg’s set is a masterpiece. The audience is feels as if it is sitting right in the two sisters’ parlor when they meet and entertain their very unusual “gentlemen callers.”

Winfield Davis (Paul Stout) is the voice for mesmerist Amos Robbilet (Damien Cin Seperi) and must speak for both of them as they court the sisters with an eye to gaining control of their finances and their property. One wonders if such a thing could happen today and indeed it could but under the guise of an on line dating service where we each describe ourselves as we wish we could be.

The only way to understand the present is to see the past. You will get an all too accurate picture of the single woman’s dilemma in Orlock’s INDULGENCES IN THE LOUISVILLE HAREM.

The reason for much matrimony is patrimony.
Ogden Nash

INDULGENCES IN THE LOUISVILLE HAREM continues until July 30 at The Phoenix Theatre, Suite 601, 414 Mason Street in San Francisco.
Tickets: $40 (with discounts available) at 415 407 3214 or www.offbroadwaywest.org

TIGERS BE STILL

2011-07-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

The SF Playhouse presents……
TIGERS BE STILL by Kim Rosenstock…..a moving, funny glimpse into what we are.

People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.
Judith Guest

If you see no other production this year, treat yourself to the SF Playhouse ‘s TIGERS BE STILL written with depth and sensitivity by Kim Rosenstock and directed with just the right touch by Amy Glazer. To tell you what this play is about is to explain what living is. We wake in the morning and some of us leap into the excitement of the day. Others cannot even get out of bed. Reality strikes unexpected and punishing blows to us all and some of us survive. Sadly, others do not. TIGERS BE STILL is about five people who won the fight, each in his own unique way. Sherry Wickman (Melissa Quine) has managed to pull herself out of her blue funk because she finally has a job. She is determined to be the best teacher and art therapist in the universe. Yet, she is petrified because inside she knows she could very well be the worst. Her mother (never seen on stage) cannot come to terms with what steroids have done to her body and like more people that one would suspect never leaves her room. Grace Wickman (Rebecca Schweitzer) has lost the love that gave her life meaning and she is furious, depleted and afraid of what blow the next minute will bring. She cries, she drinks and she sleeps.

Add into this sad mix of failures and fears, Zack (Jeremy Kahn) who believes he was responsible for killing his mother and Joseph (Remi Sandri) who gives us one of the most beautiful portrayals of a man trying to come to terms with his loss and be a mother and father to a son paralyzed by guilt. When Joseph tries to mend a button on his son’s shirt, the audience is riveted. Everyone there needs him to thread that needle and repair what is left of his life.

The four actors in this production are a perfectly synchronized ensemble. It is impossible to single out one performance because each depends on the others for veracity. Bill English’s set never detracts. It creates exactly the right time, space and mood. Michael Oesch’s lighting design moves us seamlessly from the Wickman living room, to Joseph’s dining room to his office. The pace is perfect and the lives we see unfold before us are poignantly real. We all have lived what we are seeing. We have fought similar torments and too many of us give up. “TIGERS BE STILL uses theatre to explore another human quandary: what happens when we get stuck?” says Bill English the Artistic Director of SF Playhouse. “How do we struggle to break free of depression? Throughout the ages, theatre has shown us how we struggle with defeat and how we defeat the powers that hold us down.”

IN TIGERS BE STILL we see four people on their way into their own sunlight. The production casts a spell we wish would never end, so captivating is the combination of the humor in the lines and pathos in the emotions played out on stage. The theatre itself is small enough so that everyone in the audience is part of the drama. Amy Glazer has done a masterful job of opening the window into the fourth wall on stage. We are all part of every scene and we all care very much for its resolution. TIGERS BE STILL is a masterpiece on every level. Don’t miss it.

I don't want any more vicissitudes,
I don't want any more of this try, try again stuff.
I just want out.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
TIGERS BE STILL continues until July 30 at The SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter in San Francisco Tuesday and Wednesday @7pm, Thursdays-Saturdays 8 pm and Saturday matinees at 3 pm.
Tickets & information: ($30-$50): 415 677 9596 or www.sfplayhouse.org

ASSISTED LIVING: THE MUSICAL

2011-07-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

ASSISTED LIVING: THE MUSICAL …a tour de force about aging…

Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.
Kitty O'Neill Collins

Let’s face it. Aging is the only option we have if we want to finish up all those plans we have for the future. Creators Rick Compton and Betsy Bennett surveyed the toll time takes on us all and decided the best way to survive the ravages of age is to laugh at them. And that, in a nutshell, is what ASSISTED LIVING: THE MUSCIAL does.

We’ve heard it all before: jokes about drooping features, inadequate limbs, teeth that don’t chew and organs that don’t do their job. The production has no surprises and in some ways the topics are just a bit disturbing to those of us to enjoy what we are and love each new day. After all, there are plenty of unexpected doors that always open even as we stand on tiptoes to see ourselves in the mirror. “This show makes fun of very serious matters,” said an audience member, a middle aged woman who had taken her mother to the show …and she is right. Losing your teeth and being crippled isn’t funny to anyone trying to cope with the loss. Living with someone who doesn’t know who you are is heartbreaking.

Indeed, the only thing that elevates this production from the clichéd jokes that are passed from one in-box to another on the internet is the delightful energy and talent of the three people singing and dancing on the stage. The songs are mostly parodies and you know what’they are about the minute you see Zoe Conner come out in a nurse’s uniform or Bob Greene trying to hold his tray of food while pushing his walker. Still, the pacing and the staging is delightful and Robbie Cowan (supposedly the grandson of the stars) is an utter delight, never condescending, always joining in the singing and acting as a perfect catalyst to the action on stage. Greene and Conner sing about plastic surgery, internet dating and the multiple marriages that seem to take place in the senior home as soon as the sun sets. Who can keep a straight face when they hear ”I found my thrill in a little blue pill,” or I’ve fallen for you and I can’t get up”?

Someone asked authors, Betsy Bennet and Rick Compton (both successful musical satirists ) what their next show would be and they came up with the title of the production we can see now at The Imperial Palace, along with a dim sum meal to die for as part of admission. Compton and Bennet decided that they wouldn’t make jokes about incontinence and respirators, but every other sign of advancing years is fair game. “We would love it if this show could change the way folks see maturity and how they see themselves in maturity,” said Bennet.
For this writer, the disabilities parodied only made the prospect seem more daunting but for many others just hearing someone sing about the problems they face or the fears they have is exhilarating fare. The show has been a hit wherever it appears from Florida, to Delaware to Pennsylvania. “This is the biggest thing to happen to our writing careers,” said Compton.
ASSISTED LIVING: THE MUSICAL is well worth the 110 minutes you spend eating the magnificent meal served by the wonderful people at The Imperial Palace and tapping your feet to parodies of songs about what you are or will be soon enough. Bob Greene and Zoe Conner give it their all as they sing about the inevitable. The truth is you might want to buy your plot while you are still breathing, but you’d like to avoid being put in it for as long as you can. Knowledge is the best defense, and this happy musical gives you fair warning of what you won’t be able to do if you stick around long enough.
ASSISTED LIVING: THE MUSICAL continues all this month at the Imperial Palace, 818 Washington Street, San Francisco. Tickets include both the banquet and the show and can be purchased at 888 885 2844 or on line at www.assistedliviingthemusical.com

A RAISIN IN THE SUN AT PEAR AVENUE THEATRE

2011-06-27T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Pear Avenue Theatre presents……
A RAISIN IN THE SUN
By Lorraine Hansberry
Directed by Aldo Billingslea and Sara Capule
Prejudice is the reason of fools. - Voltaire

A RAISIN IN THE SUN is a profound play on every level, one every thinking individual should see. It gives the audience a glimpse of what it meant to be a Black American in the 1950’s and it reflects every minority’s self-deception that money is the gateway to their own definition of success and happiness. We see so many evils in today’s world, that we often believe we will never achieve true racial, sexual and economic equality. Yet, when the curtain falls on this uncompromising picture of the Younger family, their angers, and their frustrating fight to rise above their circumstances, we realize how far we really have progressed. Black Americans can get a decent education; they can live in any neighborhood they choose and they have as much access to that elusive “American Dream” as any one of us living in America today. It was not so in the fifties in this country.

The plot of this play reflects the American myth that we each have the power to make our future more satisfying than our present. Every minority who fled the limitations of their native land came to this country to make a better life not just for themselves but for their children. None envisioned the glass walls that would lock them into poverty and tarnish their dreams. Once they began to try to build the life they envisioned, they found themselves compromising at every turn. With each compromise, they lost a little of their fundamental pride and a far bigger chunk of their self respect.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN is based on Hansberry’s own experience, when her father bought a house in a white neighborhood in Chicago and the family was forced to abandon it because of the violence and legal battles that threatened to destroy them. Each of the characters in this beautifully realized production have their own vision of the kind of life they want to create but no matter how many steps they take toward that goal, they never seem to get any closer. The impact of this play is that the incidents we see unfold on stage make each of them re-think their objectives and pare down their ambition to fit what they define as reality until they are all pushed to the final and most demeaning compromise of all. Should they sell their integrity to get the money to buy their dream?

The Pear Avenue Theatre recreates the dead-ends, the conflicts, indeed the very core of Hansberry’s play with power and heart. This tightly knit production casts a spell that sweeps us into another time and place and they do this in a tiny 49 seat low budget theater with limited resources that would daunt far larger theatrical organizations. The set designed by Ron Garparinetti is spot-on and the costumes designed by Barbara Murray reflect not just the fashion of time, but the personality of characters themselves.

The direction is masterful and both Billingslea and Capule must be complimented on maintaining the integrity of Hansberry’s Chicago on their tiny stage where the audience is practically sitting in the set. The pace is perfect and the movement of the actors together and alone is orchestrated with the precision of a choreographed dance. Many members of this cast, including co-director Capule studied with Billingslea and his own talent and ability to impart what acting can be to his students is obvious in the way they realized this very important story. The entire cast works together as a tightly knit ensemble, never upstaging each other and always moving the action forward.

Kendra Owens gives a sensitive, masterful performance as Lena, the mother who wants to find a place for her family to be able to blossom; a woman who loves each of her children for what they are and believes that her faith will protect them all, no matter what happens on the very rocky road that life has given them. She reminds her children that God is always in her house and the audience knows that the strength of her belief sustains the entire family and fortifies them to deal with the upsets and setbacks they encounter.

Her son Walter, (Michael Wayne Rice) frustrated, thwarted by his inability to make a living doing anything that gives him self respect, says “I want so many things, it’s kind of driving me crazy,” and justifies his racing after one money-making scheme to another because he believes that if you think big, you have to take the chance of losing big. Lena sees his devotion to money as his downfall and she says, “Once upon a time, freedom was life, now it’s money.”

These two actors are thrilling to watch and the sweep of their talent carries the play, although they never overshadow the very capable cast that supports them. Lorraine Hansberry would have been proud to see them recreate the central characters in her story of dreams unrealized and the inevitable disappointments people suffer when they want so much and can do so little not because of what they are, but because of who they are. Don’t miss this unforgettable theatrical experience that holds a mirror up to our most fundamental belief of the potential of every human being in our society to grab the gold ring.

Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become
Matthew Maltz

A RAISIN IN THE SUN continues through July 10 at The Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear Avenue, Unit K, Mountain View, CA 94043, and Thursday-Saturday evenings @8 p.m. with an added Wednesday evening performance July 6. Matinees are Sunday @2 p.m. For more information and to order tickets e mail tickets@thepear.org or call 650-254-1148

TINY ALICE

2011-06-12T00:54:00.001-07:00

Marin Theatre presents……
Edward Albee’s TINY ALICE
Directed by Jasson Minadakis
Starring Andrew Hurteau, Carrie Paff, Rod Gnapp

You cannot absorb a play written by Edward Albee the first time you see it. There are so many layers of meaning and such a wide variety of possible interpretations of each character, that the only way to enjoy the production is to sit back and let the marvelous dialogue sweep you into the action on stage. And indeed, that was director Jasson Minadakis’s intention. There is no single, correct interpretation of this play and that is the point. “This play is going to mean many things to many different people,” Minadakis said. “It will affect you based on what you bring to it…it’s impossible to say what it means. That’s the thrilling part of it.”

Marin Theatre’s spectacular production of this three hour classic is indeed thrilling on every level. “This is the most infamous play ever written by Edward Albee, one of the greatest living American dramatists”, said Minadakis. “In this equal-parts erotic thriller and darkly comic allegory, Brother Julian stumbles into a twisted world of manipulation, aggression and seduction when he visits the castle home of Miss Alice, the Church’s mysterious new benefactor.”

J.B. Wilson’s simple, stark set design keeps the model of Miss Alice’s mansion always before us. It’s stark, spare use of space keeps us focused on the intense interaction of the people on stage. The characters have no names, other than Alice (Carrie Paff) and Julian (Andrew Hurteau) and that alone makes them more symbols of the twisted products society creates rather than flesh-and-blood vulnerable human beings. Minadakis keeps the pace so rapid that three hours vanish as if they are but a moment. No doubt about it. This is a masterful piece of theater with a superb cast and amazing direction to make it unforgettable.

The play opens in the Cardinal’s (Richard Farrell) garden with a vitriolic encounter between him and Lawyer (Rod Gnapp) who had studied at the seminary with the Cardinal but left to study law and “become ringed in stench.” As with every Albee play, the characters at first seem so completely evil that we wonder at their humanity, but Gnapp gives his role veracity tinged with an urgency to validate his substitutes for an intangible god. His forceful and angry pursuit of his deity is reminiscent of the intensity of religious converts determined to convince themselves that they are “right” and the rest of the world is short-sighted and delusional. Lawyer worships his power over Alice and her money. He doesn’t care if Alice wants or likes him. Alice says “I have a loathing for you that I can’t describe,” and Lawyer answers, “You never had a way with words, did you?”

It is control that he is after. “To love is to possess,” he says. Gnapp never lets us doubt that his vicious sniping has become the very reins that tie Alice and Butler (Mark Anderson Phillips) to him. His is a masterful portrayal because nasty, demanding, stubborn and cruel as he is, he is still very real. One senses that underneath his callused, satirical baiting of the others on stage, he is a desperately uncertain human being. Alice rebuffs him and says, “Did it hurt? Does something finally hurt?” and when he answers, “Everything hurts,” you see his vulnerability. How similar he is to us all…searching for answers, thinking we have found them and realizing that every answer is as evanescent as the very vision of the god we abandoned.

The theme of the play is faith on every level. “It's about all religions that we create in our own image and the personifications that we make,” said Albee. “I'm convinced that the only thing that can be worshiped is that which is unimaginable - which is why the Mass was always more effective in Latin. (Tiny Alice) deals with a lot of things, the relationship between religious ecstasy and sexual hysteria, all sorts of stuff.”

Julian explains the six years of his life that Lawyer cannot trace by saying “I lost my faith when I realized men create a false god in their own image.” After his years in a mental institution, he realizes “My faith is my sanity. They are one and the same. Sometimes hallucination is desirable.”

When Julian moves in with Alice he asks her “Why am I being tested?” When he says his only wish in life is to serve others, Alice says, “Every martyr was a man first.” The tension builds as she tries to seduce Andrew into reacting like a man instead of the saint he is trying to become. The audience so hopes he will resist, yet they know he won’t.

“The language is amazing in this piece,” says Minadakis. “… Every line of this play takes amazing leaps forward, pushes the characters and the ideas deeper.”

Do not miss this opportunity to examine your own faith and wonder at its motivations. This amazing production of Tiny Alice will stay with you long after you leave the theater. It is the story of who each of us are and what we can become. It will haunt you for months after the curtain descends.

TINY ALICE continues through June 26 in Marin Theatre’s Boyer Theatre, 397 Miller Avenue in Mill Valley.
Tickets range from $33-$53 with senior discounts and rush tickets available.
More information: www.marintheatre.org , 415 388 5208 or boxoffice@marintheatre.org.

What the Lily tells us

2011-05-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Magic Theatre presents: THE LILY’S REVENGE written by Taylor Mac with music composed by Rachelle Garniez… an unforgettable five hour experience.

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.
Mae West

You cannot experience any production by Taylor Mac without questioning the human condition and wondering why we all have deceived ourselves into believing conventional wisdom. The Lily’s Revenge is no exception. During this five hour party, circus and social experiment, we are reminded of all the preconceived notions we never dared to question. Why do we get married? What does being human mean? What IS a man? At the cast’s first meeting, Mac told everyone there that they are part of something that is far more than just a play. It is an unforgettable experience that will change us forever if we dare to listen to what the lines really mean. “I want you to have a wonderful time and not be afraid to go a little crazy,” he said…and after all going crazy can sometimes be the perfect medicine in this confused over-stimulated, fearful world we live in.

The Lily’s Revenge is a camp, exaggerated exploration of one lily’s journey to become a man. As we watch the exciting, overblown antics on stage, we see how ridiculous human interaction really is and we realize how much we as a society misrepresent what really matters in life. Jeri Lynn Cohen is the personification of time and sets the tone of the evening. She warns the audience that the play is very long. In fact, ”This play will last the rest of your life,” she says. “Make your escape now in this moment or this moment will be no more.” And she tells us as the play begins, “This is a tale that stars time and the lily.

Taylor Mac’s presence is the one consistent dramatic element that ties the five disparate acts together and gives depth and meaning to the songs and the frenetic action taking place on stage. He is the trigger that forces us to evaluate our most fundamental goals and dare to question them. It is he who stars as the lily who falls in love and cannot marry his bride until he becomes a person. He says, “I’ve never been on the stage before. I’m an organic flower who grew under grow lights.” And then he tells his audience, “I brought you into this play to put an end to institutionalized ritual.”

As each act unfolds, the lily loses one of his five petals as his idealism is chipped away, and still he tries to become an entity the bride will love. She tells him, “You are a lily but you have pulled yourself up from your roots.”

Mac named the first act “A Princess Musical” and in it we meet the bride dressed in mattress ticking who asks her groom (with a superman emblem on his crotch) “Why does it hurt so much to love you?” We meet Curtain who tells us, ”I give you the aging of the bride.” …but the aging is not in years, it is in understanding what she is contracted to be and do.

Each act is complete in itself and has its own special appeal. Mac explains it this way: “This is an allegory of how we have trivialized love.” And he goes on to explain that the production is a revolt against consumption and corporate greed. But it is more: it is an examination of how we have programmed ourselves to believe in institutions that smother us and erase our individuality. The bottom line is always that if you truly love, what does it matter if the object of your affection IS a lily, or a man or a woman or a dog. It is the love and its expression that matters.

The questions we all should ask ourselves are all there if you look beyond the frenetic activity and the pithy memorable lines you want to hold on forever. Mac wonders, “To love and lose is loving after all,” and the sunflower (Marilee Talkington) reminds us that flowers are found in human suffering. Mac has personified the garden and we see the tulip, the lilac the rose…all of them on stage captivating us even as they confuse us. By the fourth act, the lily has only one petal and far too big a dose of reality. Still, she is determined to become a man. Mac says, “Love is worth the sacrifice of beauty” and the audiences begins to understand that it is not at all. He adds, “The institution of marriage is so large I couldn’t possibly understand it” and we realize that no one does really fathom what it has become. In the final act, the pope (and in one performance this was me …. one of my most memorable experiences) shoots the cast and then insists it wasn’t his fault. Taylor Mac appears center stage and reminds us that indeed everyone should have their special day. “Certainly not a perfect one, but a special one.”

The truth is that anyone brave enough to truly listen to the what this lily’s fruitless adventure teaches us will have given himself a very special day indeed, one that he will not want to forget . Mac asks, “Don’t you want love?” and of course we all do…. But perhaps we look for it in all the wrong places and expect it to do far more than it was meant to do.

The Lily’s Revenge doesn’t give you answers…. But it encourages you to question what you thought was absolute and realize…well…. realize that the only rule you can count on is that in this life and this world there are no rules at all.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
Bhudda

The Lily’s Revenge continues until May 22 at Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Building D, San Francisco. Tickets: 415 441 8822 or www.magictheatre.org.

LA BOHEME IN SAN JOSE

2011-04-25T17:38:00.001-07:00

Opera San Jose presents Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme…….a delicious melodic bon bon.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Anonymous

Puccini’s La Boheme is a soap opera made sublime. The melodies are unforgettable and the heartbreaking story of consumptive Mimi (Jasmina Halimic) who stumbles into Rudolfo’s (Alexander Boyer) garret flat, loses her key and falls in love will melt the most cynical heart. The voices in this production are so marvelous that you will not dwell on the paper thin plot because all you want to do is hear these talented young stars sing some more. This production was directed by the very talented Timothy Near, former founder and artistic Director of San Jose Repertory Theatre and she does an excellent job of keeping this story real. “La Boheme is an opera for all time, because it tells a youthful tale to which we can all relate. We recognize and love these four crazy young artists and their eccentric girlfriends," says Near. "The recitative is short and energetic and sounds just like people talk; there are great tunes that are loaded with emotional messages and repeated so often we leave the theatre singing. Puccini's music reminds me of the Beatles: they are so emotionally complex you never get tired of them and so catchy you can't escape them. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to remount this beloved Opera San José production, creating the bohemian world of Paris in 1840 with all its colorful eccentricity and youthful passion."

And indeed along with Kim A. Tolman’s imaginative set designs and Kent Dorsey’s lovely lighting effects, Near immerses the audience in the frothy, exciting and artistic world of Gay Paree. But she does a great deal more than most directors to make this a believable drama. She keeps the pace just right and her singers sing to each other, not to the audience. Halimic is the first Mimi I have seen who really looks sick. Alexander Boyer’s Rudolpho is right there as the frustrated lover who knows his beloved Mimi is dying but loves her too much to tell her. His voice is superb and his acting memorable. No one can resist Tolef Borsting as the artistic Marcello and Sandra Bengochea as the feisty , irrepressible Musetta. She is outrageous and adorable as every Musetta must be and has been since the opera was first presented in 1896. The cast is young enough for us to really believe they could love one another but the show stealer was Schaunard (Daniel Cilli) who to combine truly excellent acting (never a priority in an opera) with a thrilling voice. He is a true Bohemian with every gesture and every note he sings. His interaction with the others is just right and his comic timing perfect.

“La Boheme is an opera for all time because it tells a youthful tale to which we can all relate. We adore the characters and want to be friends with them,” says Near.

Indeed, this production will move the most cynical among us. It is a must see if you love opera and are into romance…and who of us is not?

La Boheme CONTINUES THROUGH May 8 in San Jose’s magnificent California Theater. For tickets and information 408 437 4450 or www.operasj.org

SHOPPING! THE MUSICAL

2011-04-19T22:58:00.000-07:00

SHOPPING ! THE MUSICAL….too good to miss
Whoever said money can't buy happiness
simply didn't know where to go shopping.
Bo Derek

Morris Bobrow has a way of exposing human realities we do not like to admit and the amazing thing is that the weapon he uses to rip through our politically correct facades is music. You cannot attend any of his deliciously funny musical productions without wondering, “How did he know we do it that way?” And no wonder. Bobrow is the recipient of four San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Awards for outstanding music and lyrics, the Back Stage Bistro Award for outstanding cabaret revue in New York, and two DramaLogue Critic's Awards. He obviously knows how to write and direct a show.

SHOPPING! is a stellar example of his talent. Bobrow has assembled an amazing cast to sing 24 songs and a reprise about that favorite of all American sports: buying stuff. The acting and singing are top notch, the energy and pace is choice and the 90 minute show seems like one gloriously funny moment of truth. Lydia Wirth and Andre Cravens created choreography for singers who are not dancers and Angela Dyer keeps the music going like a breathless romp.

This is an ensemble piece and although each singer has his moment, it is their enthusiastic working together that captivates the audience. When David Goodwin sings that his dreams to become a concert pianist have diminished into a job playing piano at Nordstrom’s, we all know the feeling. When he stands in line while his ice cream melts into soup behind an earnest Deborah Russo counting change and hassling clerk Kim Larsen, we remember when it happened to us. The musical runs the gamut of the shopping experience from street fairs to the delight of buying those useless tchotchkes at the five and ten cent store. Bobrow takes a few uncomfortable jabs at addictive computer shopping and the mystery of what the handling charge is all about. There is a wonderfully awkward moment when Kim Larsen sings “What Am I Doing Here?” buying lingerie for his wife. And who hasn’t worried just like Sara Hauter when she tries to find jeans that really fit. “It’s all about the butt,” she sings …and you know? She’s right.

Each number rings a familiar bell. We have all bought that, wanted that and wondered why we continue to spend so much time and money accumulating things we really don’t need. The husband’s agony when he shops with is wife and the search for sales resistance none of us manage to have….who has escaped it? The last song is the last straw. What happens when we bring our purchases home? Well you know as well as they do: it doesn’t fit; it doesn’t work; it isn’t what we thought it was…and yet when a new day dawns and our optimism is refreshed, what do we all do? You guessed it. We go SHOPPING!

Reality can be a bitter pill unless it is sugar coated in glorious melody and adorable dance. Treat yourself to this bon-bon that rings all too true and cannot fail to delight even as we squirm remembering when that very thing happened to us.

I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.
Tammy Faye Bakker

SHOPPING! The Musical continues Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. at The Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Tickets: 800 838 3006 or www.brownpapertickets.com
Further information: www.shoppingthemusical.com

FUDDY MEERS AT MARIN THEATRE COMPANY

2011-04-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Marin Theatre Company presents…..FUDDY MEERS by David Lindsay-Abaire
Directed by Ryan Rilette
Starring Mollie Stickney, Andrew Hurteau, Sam Leichter and Tim True

The most important things are the hardest to say,
because words diminish them.
Stephen King

FUDDY MEERS seems like a comedy; the lines and situations are very funny. However, when you ponder the action on stage, you realize that this is far more than a series of laughs. It is actually a profound treatise on what happens when we cannot communicate who we really are to those who mean the most to us. I fell in love with this play when I saw it eleven years ago in Ashland. It struck me as a poignant drama about a woman (Claire, played with heart and soul by Molly Stickney) whose reality was so horrifying, she has to erase it to continue her life, in contrast to her mother (Gertie, played by Joan Mankin) who remembers everything but cannot express it because she has had a stroke.

The key to making Fuddy Meers (Gertie’s way of describing the funny mirrors in the fun house) a dramatic success is for each character to believe the reality of the situation they are in. Claire’s trauma is so appalling she cannot face it. Andrew Hurteau is Richard, her new husband, who met her in the hospital and now must remind her of who she is every morning before she gets out of bed. As the play develops, we realize that Richard has overcome hurdles of his own: drugs, anger issues, dysfunction…but he has come to terms with them all because his raison d’être has become seeing his wife through her day before loses it to sleep. He has created a scrapbook of the events in her life she needs to recall so she can function for the next 16 hours comfortably and he reviews it with her every morning after he brings in her morning coffee. Hurteau strikes just the perfect note in his portrayal of a man in love; frustrated by the repetitive routine he must perform to launch the day. He is determined to stick to his resolve to kick his habits and become a new man. He refuses to internalize the insults and vicious antagonism of Claire’s son Kenny (San Leichter) because he knows (and the audience knows he understand this) that the boy is suffering his own brand of trauma. Indeed, Hurteau gives us a wonderfully realized character, one that touches our hearts. He forces us to really feel his internal struggle and care about who is trying to beIt is a treat to see him on that stage.

For me, the show stealer is Molly Stickney. Imagine waking up every morning having no idea who you are, what you did, whom to trust and what you love. You are suffused in wonder at a dawn you cannot remember, the presence of a man you do not know, a son who is a stranger, clothes you had no idea were yours. To internalize that persona takes a psychologist, a sociologist and a true student of the vagaries of the human condition. Stickney breathes veracity into Claire and paints a whimsical and touching picture of a woman who greets every event she encounters as brand new. She captures the surprise, the delight, the puzzlement and the excitement of a novel world. “I feel Fuddy Meers has much more depth and heart than one would think at first glance,” she observed. “The play is a challenging piece. The shifts in tone are very swift, much like a tilt-a-whirl carnival ride, with Claire in the center of that whirl. She is a character who is very much alive in the present moment because--with her amnesia--that is all she has. Playing each moment as it happens is where one wants to be ideally as an actor. But with Claire, she is defined by each moment, each moment and every word informs who and where she is...she is truly a unique character to portray. I had to throw out all my usual techniques and pre-conceived notions about acting in my approach to her and become a "blank slate" myself, which was absolutely terrifying; but I felt it was imperative to fall, to take that risk, and let the playwright and my director catch me.”

And she succeeds. She carries this play. If this production makes your heart break at the fragile foundations that dreams come from or thrill at the hope life gives us all, it is thanks to Molly Stickney’s Claire.

Each character has his choice moment and this reviewer was particularly taken with Dena Martinez, the ex-con pseudo-policewoman. She is needy, combative, and desperate all at the same time. Her comedic timing is right on beat. Joan Mankin gives us the frustration of a stroke victim who knows what she needs to say, but simply cannot say it. Sam Leighter is Kenny, the son who saw it all and cannot come to terms with the cruelty and injustice of a world that would allow his father to do what he did to his family.

The tone of the play is just a bit off and I can only attribute it to the scenes where the actors tried to play up the comedy instead of the characters. Jasson Minadakis, Marin Theatre’s gifted and amazing artistic director summarizes the sense we all should get as the plot unravels. “”So what makes this play so special?” he asks. “It is what David (Lindsay-Abaire) brings to all of his plays: a deep and nurturing sympathy and love for each of the characters he’s created.”

Stickney and Hurteau never sacrifice the beauty of their characters to the punch lines and it is they who make this production memorable. To experience them in action is worth twice the cost of admission. Fuddy Meers is an important drama and Marin theatre does it well.. Reality can be a nightmare. What would all of us give to escape it? Lindsay-Abaire shows us that very experience in this touching, dramatic work, How we can not identify with his characters? They are so very human…so us.

Fuddy Meers continues through April 24, 2011 at The Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley, Ca.
Tickets are $32-$53 with discounts for seniors and rush tickets available 30 minutes before each performance
Contact www.marintheatre.org 415 388 5200 or e mail boxoffice@marintheatre.org

Magi Theatre has a magnificent production opening April 28

2011-04-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

Magic Theatre presents Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge……a unique theatrical experience
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings,
An exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Eugene Ionesco

“The Lily’s Revenge isn’t a play; it’s an event, a wedding, a bar mitzvah and a big, big party.”

Get ready for a fantastic cornucopia of movement, dance and drama, a party, a circus and a social experience all crammed into a five hour happening featuring an abundance of local talent and the inimitable, beautiful and unforgettable Taylor Mac. “The Lily’s Revenge is like nothing ever experienced at Magic Theater,” says publicist Pattie Lockard. “It promises to be the most extravagant and entertaining theatrical event of the spring season….representing the diversity of the Bay Area….in an unparalleled social experiment.”
Playwright and burlesque performer Taylor Mac, along with dozens of local Bay Area artists, tackle love, marriage, and Prop 8–using vaudeville, haiku, drag queens, ukuleles, feminist theories, dream ballets, public dressing rooms, and everything else in Mr. Mac’s theatrical arsenal. If a flower falls in love with a blushing bride, can he complete a quest to become a man and win her love? The answer is The Lily’s Revenge, a rambunctious cross examination of the human experience.
Robert Browning observed that artistic expression is the only way to really express truth, and truth is what Taylor Mac is all about. His statements on the social conditions that threaten to stifle us all will disturb you even as they motivate you to resist the cliché’s that limit us. His inventions, his bizarre interpretation of what life is about insists we burst out of the bubble of conformity, if we are to be truly alive.

His current play, The Lily’s Revenge is so much more than theater. It is an opportunity to re-examine the world we have allowed to happen and cast aside its petty limits so that each of us can become what we can be. To see Taylor Mac in action is witness living proof that you can find your unique nirvana simply by being human, vulnerable and real in an uncaring world.

This Magic Theatre production features local actors, directors and designers coming together to paint a fantastic, opulent and very touching story of a flower in love. “Lily was inspired by anti-gay marriage agendas, which use tradition and nostalgia as an argument for discrimination (“marriage has always been between a man and a woman”), says Taylor Mac. “ It was also inspired by the ever-growing homogenization of our cities (“things aren’t the way they used to be”) and, perhaps most of all, the millions of flowers, suffocated in plastic, and thrown on the White House lawn, Buckingham Palace, and The Vatican in honor of Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Princess Diana’s funerals.”

At the first meeting of cast, directors and the press, Artistic Director Loretta Greco said she hoped this production will inspire more people to take a chance on something extraordinary …a piece destined to create national ripples. And indeed it already has done just that. “In its bravery, scope, creativity, extremity and sheer generosity of spirit, The Lily’s Revenge, to my mind, surpasses any American theater in New York this year. (Taylor Mac) is one of the most exciting theater artists of our time.” says Adam Feldman in TimeOut NY.

“The Lily’s Revenge is theatrically epic,” says Greco. “A five act party experienced over five hours, with six directors, a creative company of 50 in collaboration with six adventuresome Bay Area performing arts companies. It may be the most ambitious production Magic has ever launched in its 44-year history. This production is a tremendous boost to Magic’s momentum, affirming our national impact and the importance of creating this once-in-a-lifetime experience for Bay Area audiences.”

The production combines realism with theater of the ridiculous. “”I want you to give yourself permission to go a little crazy,” says Taylor Mac. “We need to make bold choices.” Indeed putting this immensely complicated, multifaceted event together is a very bold choice for Magic Theatre. It has collaborated with the queer performance collective, THE OFFCENTER, TheatreWorks, Crowded Fire, Erika Chong Such Project, Shogun Players and Climate Theater to make this happen. ”As we strive to capture the pulse and pride of San Francisco, these budding relationships solidify Magic’s ability to push the boundaries of theatrical innovation and community inclusivity,” says Greco.

Creating a happening as all inclusive and encompassing as The Lily’s Revenge demands bold imagination and the courage to smash theatrical limits and plunge into new dramatic territory. But it must be seen to be understood. It is a visual, dramatic experience that word cannot recreate. “There are so many reasons audiences should come to see this show,” said Taylor Mac. “A few of them are: because it's freaking fun, because I truly do believe it is a transcendent experience, because it's a rare theatrical event to have thirty-five performers on (as intimate of a stage as) The Magic Theater, because every single one of those performers are from the Bay Area, and because the play is furthering the conversation of San Francisco companies like The Cockettes (with it's wild aesthetic and large ensemble) and The SF Mime Troupe (with it's node to agit-prop theater) but it's a new play and so (though I love a good museum piece), it's not a museum piece but a play of this moment that addresses issues our community are dealing with in this moment.”

That pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

The Lily’s Revenge previews April 21 and opens April 28 and plays Tuesdays through Sundays at Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center Bldg D in San Francisco . Tickets range from $30-$75 with senior and educator discounts. To purchase, call: 415 441 8822 or visit www.magictheatre.org.

The color, the grace and levitation, the structural pattern in motion, the quick interplay of live beings, suspended like fitful lightning in a cloud, these things are the play.
Tennessee Williams

Another Winner at Theatreworks

2011-04-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

TheatreWorks present…Snow Falling On Cedars..... a statement of who we once were and still could become

Racism is man’s gravest threat to man
The maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason
Abraham J. Heschel

Snow Falling On Cedars is a magnificent achievement on every level. Robert Kelley,
Director of the production and Artistic Director of TheatreWorks has elevated an excellent, if fragmented script packed with too much information into an unforgettable work of art. This is an ensemble piece and no one actor outshines the rest, yet thanks to Kelley’s masterful orchestration of the movement, the lighting and the cameo scenes, each has his special moment. The story is based on David Guterson’s disturbing, and beautifully rendered novel of the prejudice, cruelty and persecution of the Japanese after World War II. Anyone who was alive during that time will recall the propaganda that encouraged us as Americans to despise anything Japanese, German or Italian.
I can still recall the stories of those camps where we imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent who had done no wrong. They were enemies even though they had done no crime.

Snow Falling On Cedars takes place on an island in Puget Sound and is the story of a murder trial of a Japanese American Veteran, Kabuo Miyamoto (Tim Chiou) who fought for the United States in World War II and is accused of murdering Will Springhorn Jr. (Carl Heine, Jr.) the son of the man who took Miyamoto’s father’s land from him. Miyamoto’s lawyer, Nels Gudmundsson (beautifully portrayed by Edward Sarafian) is the character whose dialogue keeps us focused on what this story is really about. Kabuo Miyamoto is on trial for what he is, not what he has done and Gudmundsson’s eloquence in reminding the jurors (and the audience) that to try a man because of his parentage is not only un-American, it is inhumane.

“In Snow Falling on Cedars” we see the big picture of American life through the specific experiences of a few families on a remote island at the extreme northwestern edge of the country,” said Robert Kelley. “ ‘The legacy of prejudice, the frailty passed on from generation to generation’ as David Guterson describes it, plays out in a microcosm of a community divided against itself in the months after Pearl Harbor and later haunted by that experience in the halcyon days of the mid-fifties. Humanity’s penchant for discrimination overwhelmed this community as it did our own here in the Bay Area, and many Americans, both Asian and Caucasian, paid its price. Snow Falling on Cedars is about a fracture of the human spirit; about how evil for a time overwhelmed the good; about the choice to forgive and the chance to revive”…..and he continues, “(Ishmael’s) story…..is about a love that should have been and a hate that should have not.”

This is a must see for every thinking human being in today’s world. The hatred spewed out against the Muslim community, the checkpoints, arrests and searches of people whose only sin are the parents who bore them and only a few examples of how irrational prejudice and fear has seeped into this society. Snow Falling on Cedars is as immediate as the headlines in the news, artistically developed in the skilled hands of a talented and creative director, with lighting that highlights the sense of place by Steven B. Mannshardt, and settings that enhance the action, designed by Andrea Bechert. Snow Falling On Cedars is a production to be seen not once but again and again so we never forget the time when the color a person’s skin and the slant of his eyes was a crime.

Snow Falling on Cedars continues until April 24, 2011 as The Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro Street in Mountain View. Tickets are $24-
$67. Information: 650 463 1960 or www.theatreworks.org.

ACTORS THEATRE HAS ANOTHER HIT ON ITS HANDS

2011-04-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

A Steetcar Named Desire…….brilliantly realized, moving and uncomfortably real.

Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

This drama, like so many of Tennessee Williams' plays, contrasts the brutality of the real world with our need to believe in the potential of beauty and goodness in the human experience. Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911 in the kind of dysfunctional family that is reflected in all his writings. One theme throughout his work is the victimized “southern belle” most apparent in Laura in The Glass Menagerie but even more so in his characterization of Blanche DuBois (Rachel Klyce) in A Streetcar Named Desire. His portrayal of the cruelty and aggressive conflict in heterosexual love is reflective of what he saw in his own home. The “love” that Stella (Jennifer Welch) has for someone as insensitive and brutally selfish as Stanley (Vlad Sayenko) is as frightening as it is true. Stanley shouts, “I am the king around here, so don't forget it!” as he sweeps the dishes to the floor and Stella does not question his behavior. She accepts it.

This production, directed by Christian Phillips, the co-founder of Actor’s Theatre and its artistic director, is a work of art. Phillips has preserved a somber countermelody beneath the dialogue and movement as the characters interact with one another. Yet, he manages to achieve a miraculous balance between the brutality, sensitivity, fantasy and dreams each character displays by his very positioning of them on stage. We see the scenes outside the bedroom of the Kowalski home as a counterpoint to the conflict within. This play can easily slip into melodrama, but the production at Actor‘s Theatre maintains its validity on every level. We KNOW these people. They exist even today because they are what we all could so easily become.

We see Blanche’s hold on hope and reason disintegrate when all her defenses are brutally snatched from her, the very fantasies that have kept her alive. She says, “I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don't tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.”
We see Stella trying to protect her sister from unwarranted, unjust attacks yet unwilling to tarnish her relationship with her husband because, the truth is that he is what she has…and the security he gives her is exactly what Blanche does not possess and needs to find if she is to continue her life. Stella defines her need for her husband as love and her lust for him its raison d’art. Williams makes it very clear that women are defined and ruled by the men they marry in a heterosexual world and without those men, they will be lost. Stella tells her sister, “I wish you'd stop taking it for granted that I'm in something I want to get out of.”
Stella cannot give the sense of security she has found to her sister and Blanche is not strong enough to find it for herself. We question the validity of a relationship driven by Stanley’s brutality, temper tantrums and need to dominate, but it is very clear that Stella accepts what he is and loves what he gives her. She believes in him and tells herself he will give her a secure future. “Stanley's the only one of his crowd that's likely to get anywhere.” she tells Blanche.

The pace of this production is just right, despite its length (three acts with two 15 minute intermissions) and our attention is riveted on the drama unfolding before us. The set is vintage 1948, thanks to Biz Duncan’s design, with a view of the outside world from Blanche’s bedroom. The ensemble interacts with one another as if choreographed for a dance. But the drama that elevated this production into a masterpiece is the relationship between Blanche and Stella. Rachel Klyce and Jennifer Welch create characters that are true in gesture and movement so eloquent one need only look at the two of them to feel their shared history, the love that they have for one another and the heartbreak Stella endures because she realizes that despite the injustice she sees in Stanley’s belligerent viciousness toward the defenseless Blanche, in Stella’s world, she must sacrifice her weak, defeated sister for the dominant strength of the man she married. He is her destiny now.

Don’t miss this mesmerizing production of one of the all time great American dramas.
A Streetcar Named Desire continues through Saturday, May 28, 2011, Wednesdays-Saturdays @ 8pm at Actors Theatres of San Francisco, 855 Bush Street,
Tickets: $38-$26. (415)345-1287 or www.DramaList.com
More information: www. Actorsthearesf.org.

THE HOMECOMING: A THEATRICAL GEM

2011-03-16T22:56:00.000-07:00

ACT PRESENTS…..THE HOMECOMING…a masterpiece on every level.
By Harold Pinter
Directed by Carey Perloff
Starring Andrew Polk, Jack Willis, Kenneth Welsh, Adam O’Byrne, Anthony Fusco & Rene Augesen
People talk about dysfunctional families;
I’ve never seen any other kind.
Sue Grafton

When we watch a play unfold on stage, we try to figure out what makes each character react the way he does to the lines he delivers and the action we see. That approach will not work with a Harold Pinter play. The reason his work is so mesmerizing is that we are watching the motivations being created before our eyes. You cannot ask why a character says what he does or reacts in ways you want to understand because those reactions and their motivation happen on stage in the moment. Even Pinter has no idea how is characters will develop until he puts them through their paces. He is like every fine author since composition began. He uses his writing to explain life. “If I could have defined it, I wouldn’t have written it,” he says. “This really applies to everything I write.”

“When watching a Pinter play, you must free yourself from the obligation to attach meaning or to interpret and simply enter into the game being played,” says director Carey Perloff. ”Pinter took his characters incredibly seriously and conceived of them not as symbols or metaphors, but as passionate, sexual, often violent individuals trying to protect themselves and their territory from outside danger. …What fascinated him about human beings was not psychology but behavior – the complicated and often hilarious betrayal, family warfare, humiliation and death.”

And that is why the characters in THE HOMECOMING fascinate us even as they startle and repel us. Jack Willis is in top form as the father of his brood, a sour, angry, retired butcher who feels that his control of his family is slipping from his grasp. His son Lenny, (Andrew Polk) regards him with disgust and derision. Polk is so real on that stage that one shudders at the thought of his ilk confronting any human being. He is the ultimate example of pure self interest with no regard for others except to the extent he can manipulate them. Anthony Fusco is Teddy, the only son who has managed to escape the penumbra of his family. He is a professor of philosophy and lives in the United States with his wife Ruth (Rene Augesen) and their two children. One of the shocking elements of this play that is causally dropped into the conversation is that Teddy and Ruth married while still in England but his family had no idea that they had wed. To add to this mix of dysfunction, frustration and anger, we are introduced to Sam (Kenneth Welsh) Max’s younger brother, who revered Max’s deceased wife Jessie and seems (at first) to be the most human member of this abusive callused, insensitive brood.

THE HOMECOMING is Rene Augesen’s play. Her Ruth is a cold, calculating woman determined to escape the life she is in and live on her own terms. Teddy is obviously happy with her and is satisfied with their relationship. He tells the others that she is a fine cook and an excellent mother…but the audience can actually feel Ruth’s distance from him and her distaste. She is not to be dominated and you can see it in her refusal to go to bed when the two arrive at the house, her manipulation of Lenny , Jack and Joey (Adam O’Byrne). She refuses to allow the men to attach more meaning to her response to them than the act itself. “Look at me,” she says. “I…move my leg. That’s all it is. But I wear….underwear…which moves with me…it…captures your attention. Perhaps you misinterpret. The action is simple.”

The ending of the play is the puzzle. Why does Ruth decide not to return home with Teddy to her two children and instead stay with these atavistic, self-serving and duplistic men? There is really no need to answer that. You can see her reasoning before your eyes. She is offered her own flat and she demands a new wardrobe, a personal maid and a contract drawn up to her liking…but she never actually says she will be the prostitute the men assume she will become to “earn her keep.” She is in control. As Teddy’s wife, she was not. She was a faculty wife, and a mother with duties that defined her. At the end of this play, she is Ruth and she is the one who delineates who she is and what she does. “She’s misinterpreted deliberately and used by this family,” says Pinter. “But eventually she comes back at them with a whip. She says, ‘If you want to play this game I can play it as well as you.’ ’’

“In THE HOMECOMING, the past exists more potently in the minds of the characters than as a set of independent, objective, verifiable facts,” says Michael Paller discussing Pinter’s writing. “It is the act of remembering that makes a memory real.”

And that is how it is in life, isn’t it? We live in the present and recall a past that validates where we are in the moment. THE HOMECOMING gives us two hours of life happening in a house in North London with characters we hope we never meet in a dark alley. The acting is superb; the set strikes exactly the right note. It is stark, empty and disturbing. “I don’t think of myself as making the set as much as making the experience,” said designer Daniel Ostling, and his design sets the tone. It heightens the bleakness of this family and the emptiness of their lives. The language is perfect: phrases you wish you could remember forever that say exactly what the character means. Max says of Ruth “We’ve had a smelly scrubber in my house all night.” You cannot beat that for total derision.

“Pinter’s words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other,” said Peter Hall who has staged many Pinter plays. Indeed, Perloff and her unbelievable talented cast have given us a glimpse of reality we won’t soon forget. This is a must see play and one that will stay with you in all its horrifying dimensions. It is unforgettable.

THE HOMECOMING continues through March 27, 2011 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108
Tickets & Information 415 749 2228; www.act-sf.org

THE OLDEST PROFESSION

2011-03-15T22:01:00.000-07:00

Brava Theater’s The Oldest Profession….a delight.
Written by Paula Vogel
Directed by Evren Odcikin. Music by Angela Dwyer

It’s not the job you do, it’s how you do the job.
Anonymous

You can’t help but love them: five adorable old ladies dropping one-liners about the ups and downs (no pun intended) as proud members of the world’s oldest profession. The women, Linda Ayers-Frederic as Edna, Lee Brady as Vera, Tamar Cohn as Lillian, Patricia Silver as Ursula and 83 year old Cecele Levinson as Mae gather on a bench in the park to discuss their declining “situation”. The five of them deliver rapid fire puns like gun shots and you have to give them credit: they act their hearts out. But that is the problem with this production: they are all acting. Not one of them “get it.”

I loved what they were trying get across: pride in their work, loyalty to one another, determination to be independent and take care of themselves. But not one of these ladies convinced me that she had the faintest notion of what prostitution involved. Still, it was delightful to hear a generation we think of as on the last lap of life, talking about the joys of doing the elderly (although as a fellow septuagenarian, I take issue with that one). The punch lines are predictable, but funny still. We all know what age does to sexual performance. We all chuckle at hearing cracks about the back breaking effort it takes to turn three tricks before lunch at $10 a crack, especially when your arthritis is killing you. The political remarks are pure Vogel: “Who wants another Richard Nixon who bangs the piano instead of the First Lady” says Lillian.

The script has some wonderful moments, if we could but believe in the characters. Vogel explores the grim reality of getting too old to “cut the mustard” and the changing landscape of prostitution. The main theme of this play boils down to ”Being a whore just ain’t what it used to be and we aren’t the whores we used to be either….now how do we support ourselves?” This is the mantra of aging athletes, senile accountants, deteriorating fashion designers…indeed of us all when we realize that our jobs don’t suit our abilities any more. No one wants to let go of the profession that defines them and as Mae says, “When a woman can’t defend her territory or her girls, it’s time to get out of the Life.”

“The funniest comedy comes from pain and heart,” says director Even Odcikin. “It has to have an underneath layer for it to be truly funny.” Right; but we have to believe that the women on stage are really hurting, not just talking about it.

The elements that keep the production from being maudlin and repetitious are Angela Dwyer’s delightful roaring twenties score and Odcikin’s imaginative direction. He paces his characters beautifully and keeps them moving in interesting patterns so that the endless conversation about men who don’t pay up and expect more than they can give, job security and impending poverty never seem boring. The women eventually go to Whore Heaven, a place where bawdiness is “in” and all bodies are hot. Here again, I would have liked the costuming to be a bit braver, with more tassels, bells and feathers as each woman sings her swan song and ascends to a better place.

The ending however is pure genius and it is Odcikin’s unique take on the script. Edna, the last to go, sits on a park bench surrounded by her deceased co-workers eating a sandwich rescued from the dust bin. Would that the rest of the production could have managed to convey the heart of this play as beautifully and deeply as its final moment. Indeed, this production of The Oldest Profession is a hoot but it could be so much more. See it for the music, for the message and for the sheer joy of watching five women play at parts they could never have lived but might have loved if they had.

The Oldest Profession continues through April 9, 2011
Brava Theater, 2781 24th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Tickets $10-$25
Box Office 415 647 2822
www.brava.org

The Dresser is in San Jose

2011-02-13T02:28:00.000-08:00

San Jose Rep presents The Dressesr …a comic portrait of backstage life.
We are are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall.
Jules Renard

The Dresser examines the backstage relationship between the self absorbed “Sir” played by Ken Ruta and his loyal, too devoted and very alcoholic dresser Norman played to perfection by James Carpenter. The play opens in 1942 during World War II when Britain’s very survival was in danger. We hear the sirens and air raid warnings even as the actors in this struggling repertory theater prepare to present their 227th performance of King Lear. “Sir” is so old that he borders on senility and his body threatens to give out on him. Norman, who has dedicated his entire life to taking care of this aging and decaying and autocratic old man fears his death not just because he will be losing his employer but because he will have to say good bye to the very fabric of his own life. The play is a tribute to theater and the to friendship, loyalty and human spirit of actors facing every kind of trauma both from within with their main character in a state of collapse and without with the world threatening to destroy their country. The show must go on and indeed it does despite falling scenery, failing wind effects, and impending disaster. “This play, which celebrates the power and love of the theater to sustain us, speaks very deeply to me,” says Director Rick Lombardo. “In its celebration of all things theatrical, it also celebrates the power of tradition, work and purpose to give meaning to whatever we do in life.”

The Dresser was written by Ronald Harwood and was based on his own experiences as dresser for the distinguished British actor Sir Donald Wolfit who is the prototype for Ken Ruta’s character. It was first presented in Manchester, England in 1980 and in 1982 was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. “I am enormously excited to be working on this play with two of the Bay Area’s finest and most beloved actors, Ken Ruta and James Carpenter,” said Lombardo.

For this reviewer, it is James Carpenter who carries the play. He is in his role every moment and despite the many flaws in pacing and direction in the production, when Carpenter is on stage the drama glows. Rachel Harker as Her Ladyship is excellent and very real in her part and the rest of the cast does as well as can be expected with the cumbersome scene changes and dragging movement. The entire performance is runs over two hours and to this reviewer it seemed to go on and on and on. The lines were slow and dragged out until they were finally said and the magic of this beautiful drama of human need mingled with loyalty and love was lost. Only Carpenter managed to keep the audience with him and that is a magnificent achievement since really he did it almost alone.

The acting was good, the sets effective if a bit overdone and David Lee Cuthbert’s lighting masterful. One only wishes that everyone on stage would have just hurried up.

The Dresser continues through February 20, 2011 at San Jose Repertory Theatre, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, in San Jose between South 2nd and 3rd Streets
Tickets $35-$74: 408 367 7255 or www.sjrep.com.

MAGIC THEATRE HAS ANOTHER WINNER

2011-02-13T01:32:00.000-08:00

Magic Theatre presents Theresa Rebeck’s What We’re up Against….a must see.

In the sex war, thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male,
Vindictiveness of the female.
Cyril Connolly

“I honestly believe that the act of finding humor in real despair is both courageous and life-affirming,” says Theresa Rebeck, author of this world premier drama at The Magic Theatre. “Some people think that comedy is a less-serious form than drama. I would say, ‘far from it’.”

She is speaking about What We’re Up Against the production now playing at The Magic Theatre. The action takes place in the offices of an architectural firm run by David (whom we never see), with Warren David Keith as Stu, outraged at the very thought that a woman like Eliza (Sarah Nealis) could possibly have the brains and the know how to compete with him professionally. James Wagner is the newest member of the firm but because he is male, he is way ahead of Eliza in the office pecking order.

All the discussions in the play revolve around installing problematical air ducts in an expanded shopping center and the immense frustration and anger of the men because the only one who has the solution is Eliza. Rod Gnapp as Ben is nothing short of amazing and acts as the “Devil’s Advocate” in the dialogue. In every argument and each encounter, he always brings the discussion back to the problem no one but Eliza can solve: those ducts. The plot is “An examination of the corporate work place where excellence is trumped by safe, mediocre ‘group think,” says Magic’s Artistic Director, Loretta Greco. “And a slippery ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality.....Nevertheless, despite it’s comedic size of spirit, the play’s gender politics are heartbreakingly true.”

Indeed, while we laugh at the language, the exaggerated bigotry and the hyped-up reactions of the masterful cast in What We’re Up Against,” we weep for Eliza as she comes to terms with the truth no one wants to admit: talent is never enough…nor is it even a deciding factor. Who you know, who you are, what you say and who likes you is a far better barometer of acceptance on the job. Eliza is abrasive, full of herself, haughty and judgmental. She sees Janice (Pamela Gaye Walker) the other woman in the firm as a stupid tool who allows herself to be demeaned and trivialized by the men in the firm and she will have none of it. She is smart. She knows her business and she deserves recognition for what she can do. Why then do the men in the firm hate her? Why do they put her down, ignore her and refuse to give her either work or respect? It has not occurred to her that she must assess the pecking order in the firm and work with it before she can become part of the team. “Of course I’m a malcontent,” she tells Janice. “They shoved me in a corner and ignored me for six fucking months. Only a fucking idiot would be contented with that.”

And Janice counters with, “They ignored me for a full year. When they weren’t asking me to bring them coffee.”

Eliza answers, “Oh so what? You’re better than me because you know how to put up with their bullshit? That doesn’t make you smart. That makes you a pussy.”

Every woman in that audience should have shut her eyes and recalled how many times the guy who knew less than she did got the promotion, or how humiliated she was when the woman who buttered up the boss got the raise. We watch Eliza and if we have taken any notice of the real world, we don’t just cry for her, we weep for us all. “Women’s liberation,” said Gloria Steinem, “Is men’s liberation too.”

We all lose, when ability isn’t recognized. We all pay when excellence is ignored.
“You have an attitude problem,” says Janice to Eliza and then continues, “You come in here with all your ‘I want to learn, I want to work,’ so that then what, you can go off and become Frank Ghehry or I.M. Pei or Julia Morgan?”

But Eliza cannot control her indignation. She knows the answer and they won’t listen. She points to her design and she says, “I’m talented, you motherfucker. I’m fucking talented….” And continues “I came here, you stuck me in a closet and expected me to just take it. You tried to erased me.”

And Bens sees what she is up against. He gets it. “Everybody’s collaborating on shit that is totally corporatized junk, but you still want your mark somewhere.”

”Everywhere I go, these fucking golden boys who are morons, what is it about a pretty boy with no brain that makes all these shitheads with power start singing love songs?” Eliza says, and continues, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They said it wasn’t like this anymore. Why is it still LIKE this?”

Reality is tough to take and this fast paced production does not spare us. You may laugh at the dialogue, but you will leave that theater realizing how far we have not gone at all. This production shows what everyone of us is really up against. It will grab you by your tail and keep you engrossed from start to finish. The directing is right on the mark, and not a word is wasted. Make no mistake…those scenes aren’t superficial figments of a feminist imagination on a stage. They are the glass walls all of us smack into whether we are black in a white world, Latino in a corporate setting, female in a mechanic’s garage or young in an old boy’s club. Who we are matters more than we dare to admit and all those entrenched attitudes that we SAY have vanished are even harder to fight today because they are frosted with polite talk. In What We’re Up Against, Theresa Rebeck strips away the civilized language. We hear a string of four-letter-words that blacken the picture we hate to believe is really there.

What We’re Up Against continues at Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA 94123.
Tickets: ($44-$60) 415 441 8822 or www.magictheatre.org
Preludes: Free introduction to the play: 7:00 -7:30 pm in the lounge. Free glass of wine served.
TalkBACKs after every performance with Magic Theatre artistic staff and artists.

HOW WE FIRST MET IS BACK

2011-02-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

How We First Met ..A unique Valentine treat about the positive side of life.

Falling in love consists of uncorking the imagination
And bottling the common-sense.
Anonymous

“How We First Met is the perfect way to celebrate Valentine’s Day whether you’re on a blind date, going steady or have been married for longer than you can possibly imagine,” said Jill Bourque, who dreamed up the idea for the show ten years ago. “I created the show as a response to the plethora of improv comedy that was very ‘shticky’ and not based on any true emotions. I really wanted to push the boundaries to see what could happen if we used stories from real people.”

And what happened was an instant success on Valentine’s Day, 2001 at San Francisco’s Bayfront Theatre; a show that has played in dozens of cities worldwide. The production has featured hundreds of couples over the years, all united by a common desire to celebrate the love they have for each other. “The very first show sold out and was a heartfelt and hilarious adventure,” said Bourque. “I remember clearly that the audience was ‘pin drop’ quiet during the couple interviews and when the stories were acted out, the laughter came in great rolling waves. It was a cathartic and exciting moment that I had never before experienced in improv comedy. I knew that we were on to something special.”

The experience that planted the seed to develop the show actually happened at Bourque’s own wedding reception because all the guests asked her how she and her husband met. That was when she realized that people are fascinated by stories of how others fall in love. That idea stayed with her and germinated into reality in 2001.

The current production features improv actors Laura Derry, Paul Erskine, Scott Keck and Deborah Wade, keyboardist Jerome Rossen and technical improviser Damon Paiz. Bourque is the MC of the show. “It’s very much a collaborative effort,” said Bourque. “Most of the cast has been with the show since the very beginning. Paul Erskine and Laura Derry were both in the very first show in 2001.”

In each performance, Bourque interviews three couples live on stage about that special moment when chemistry connected them and they knew they were in love. The improv cast transforms their story into real-life sketches and songs. “There is a sort of alchemy that happens when a real-life couple steps on the stage to tell a story,” said Bourque. “The audience identifies with them and becomes charmed.”

In order to be part of the show, couples need to submit their profiles to www.howwefirstmet.com. The selection is narrowed down to ten couples through online voting and audiences choose their favorite lovebirds on the night of the performance. Bourque feels it is her job to create a safe space for couples to relay their special moments in front of an audience. Her intention is to combine real life experience with improv to create comedy and genuine emotions. “Everyone is capable of being interesting,” she says. “Every life is interesting. Sometimes you just have to dig to find it.”

How We First Met started because of Bourque’s determination to create a uniquely imaginative theatrical experience and is now in its tenth year of making Valentines Day memorable for audiences in cities as diverse as San Francisco, Ney York, Tokyo and Melbourne. “What I didn’t expect was to be so surprised and inspired by the stories I hear,” said Bourque. “I thought by now I would have heard it all, but I continue to be amazed at the way love happens.”

You can hear it all too and even tell your own tale of love and romance Saturday February 12 at 8 pm for one night only. “As a host sometimes, I think I’m like a therapist,” said Bourque. “But I’m not going to lie. The couple on stage is having the best time of all.”

How We First Met: Herbst Theater, 401 Van Ness Feb.12, 2011 @ 8pm.
Tickets $25-$59 415 392 4400; www.howwefirstmet.com

ACTORS THEARE HAS ANOTHER GREAT ONE!

2011-02-06T17:23:00.000-08:00

Actor’s Theatre of San Francisco premiers Keith Phillips’ William Blake Sings the Blues

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Oscar Wilde

Friday night, February 11 at 8 p.m., Actor’s Theatre of San Francisco will continue its tradition of communicating what it means to be alive in a tough, gutsy and existentially dangerous drama, William Blake Sings the Blues. This is the story of two academics competing for the position of chairman of the English department of a small liberal arts college and it is also a play about what makes us who we are. There are issues of morality and class conflicts, violence and tension with real people fighting the same blue devils we all face. “It boils down to the fact that, in reality we are all basically the same,” said the author and director, Keith Phillips, who is also the theater’s founder with his brother Christian, now the Artistic Director of the theater.

Indeed, we are all imperfect beings doing our best to make a decent imprint on our world and every one of us want to think of ourselves as “nice guys”. “Our culture has taught us that audiences cannot be moved unless they are involved in something they believe is real, “said Christian, who plays the role of Sam in this production.

Actors Theatre selects plays that audiences relate to on a very human level. Perhaps that is why they have such a loyal following: people who seek solid theater that explores the issues they face in their own lives. “Our productions reflect the human condition,” said Christian Phillips. “We want to change the way the audience thinks.”

The classic works this group presents prove his point. “Delivering the lines is only half of it,” said Keith Phillips. “The play is driven by its dialogue.”
Christian and Keith adhere to the basic philosophy of the Group Theater. “We have kept our focus on what it means to be human,” said Christian. “It is our heritage. Our father was responsible for changing the state of the arts by creating situational believability in theater. We do plays that are about something…not simply entertainment.”
Their father was Wendell K. Phillips, member of the legendary Group Theater and a teacher at The Actor’s Studio in New York. Their mother is Jean Shelton, founder of the Jean Shelton Actor’s Lab inspired by Stanislavsky approach: If the actor and the role connect, the role comes to life. Both men were taught that the theatrical experience must be strong enough to change the way the audience sees the world. They accomplish this with an ensemble approach to acting. At Actor’s Theatre, we see many of the same actors playing a variety of challenging roles, always dedicated to the social impact of what they are saying. “Good actors take years to build,” observed Christian. “It takes tremendous dedication. You have to function as an artist and your own personal needs need to take a back seat to the ideas of the play. Our goal is to reveal something about life itself.”
You have only to have seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Who’s Afraid of Virginias Woolf to see this theory take shape. These plays though written for another time and another place are as strong today as they were in 1958 ad 1966 because they are about the relationships all of us form and the fragile underpinnings that make them dysfunctional. Many of the plays the Phillips’ select are products of the gay community and for a very good reason “Gay writers are some of the best playwrights in American Theater,” said Christian. “And the largest identifiable group of theatergoers is from that community.
William Blake Sings the Blues is a lesson in morality that illustrates how little we differ from one another. “Our productions reflect the human condition,” said Christian.
Indeed, when you attend a production at Actor’s Theater, you know you are going to see memorable theater done well. Treat yourself to something wonderful and new at the opening of William Blake Sings the Blues, theater that redefines who you are and shows you what you can become. Lafayette, played by Duane Lawrence ends the play by saying “I ain’t never forgot what it felt like being on the outside and having that boy open the door for me and let me in.”
Who among us have not felt isolated and alone in our quest for meaning, aching to be “let in” to we know not where?
William Blake Sings the Blues opens Friday February 11 and plays through Saturday March 5, 2011, Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 pm.
Actors Theater of San Francisco, 855 Bush Street. Tickets $38, students and seniors $26. Box Office: 415 345 1287 or www.dramalist.com
More information: www.actorstheatresf.org

PARTY OF TWO IS A MUST SEE

2011-01-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

AWAT PRODUCTIONS presents…
Party of 2-The Mating Musical…a musical gem

Love is what you've been through with somebody.
James Thurber

If you believe in love, and well you should, you must not miss this delightful bon-bon, a mini-operetta about the relationship of two independent people who meet, mate and move in together. Although the songs are light, the mood is humorous and the theatrical experience charming and fun. Yet, the observations in this fast-paced and captivating production are profound and all too true. All of us want love and when we think we have found it, we watch horrified as that beautiful moment we just discovered fades into the grim reality of toothpaste tubes squeezed in the middle, hurtful remarks and disgusting habits that eat away the magic and burst that glittering balloon of perfection you once thought you had. Morris Bobrow has created memorable tunes with facile lyrics that belie the importance of the message Jennifer Ekman and Scott Gessford sing to a rapt, spell-bound audience.

Charlie (Scott Gessford) sings about the ideal person he seeks and says he wants “basically a female version of me.” Rebecca (Jennifer Ekman) is so busy with her career that she has no time for romance…until the two meet at a wedding. The chemistry between them is so powerful that they fall in love instantly despite their intellectual reservations about love at first sight. We actually feel their initial delight in one another when Rebecca’s says “Love is perfect when it’s new”. As they spend more and more time together (chronicled in each song), we see the fascination begin to fade. There is a sudden surge of excitement when the relationship is consummated; yet there is also a little nagging doubt when Rebecca wonders how Charlie got so good. Every member of the audience recognizes the signs because they have felt them and have felt betrayed by inevitable disenchantment when they notice those little things that tear at the most powerful attraction.

There are some wonderful moments in this musical and the amazing thing is that although the script walks a fine line between trite and clichéd, it is so skillfully crafted that it never descends to the maudlin. The two stars, Ekman and Gessford make the entire experience sublime. They are authentic and involved in every routine on stage and they are delightful. On a scale of ten, I give them both at least a twelve. Their acting is top notch. The audience is swept into the personas of these talented singers and never doubt for a moment the spectrum of emotions they feel. They are real lovers who want to stay loving and are not sure how to make it happen.

Bobrow’s lyrics may seem facile and cute, but listen closely and you will see that they are so much more. They show an intelligent depth and understanding of human nature, its foibles and its penchant to rip itself into shreds of doubt. We are indeed our own worse enemies and in a relationship, the discomfort we create for ourselves doubles. Every sequence contains a solid nugget of really lovely truth, like when the two sing “If we can do nothing together, then there’s nothing we can’t do.” When the couple tries to add a bit of excitement to their sex life by watching pornography, Charlie is obviously uncomfortable and Rebecca realizes they are watching movies about women dreamed up by men. So funny…so real…so true.

You do not want to miss this wonderful slice of modern reality and discover Bobrow’s solution to the souring relationship and the uncomfortable marriage. You may laugh at his resolution, but you will want to consider it. Only the most cynical will dismiss it as impossible.

Angela Dwyer accompanies and never intrudes on the singing, and Jayne Zaban did a tasteful, imaginative job of moving the couple individually and together through the production. Indeed, all the songs are memorable, but her choreography makes them brilliant. The costuming highlights but never detracts. The pace of this musical is perfect, the singing unforgettable and the script as authentic as it is funny… this reviewer cannot think of a better way to spend a Friday evening.

Party of Two continues Friday evenings at The Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $29 general and $27 for seniors and students. Reservations and information: 800 838 3006 or visit www.partyof2themusical.

A CHRISTMAS MEMORY IN PALO ALTO

2010-12-10T18:18:00.000-08:00

TheatreWorks presents…..
A Musical adaptation of Truman Capote’s
A Christmas Memory

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love,
the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
The Wonder Years

If you read Truman Capote ‘s short story of a seven-year-old child abandoned by his mother and living with the cousin who shares his sense of wonder, you would have to be made of granite to get through it without dissolving into tears. Elizabeth Lawrence says, “There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”

It is this garden that Capote brings to life for us in his beautiful symphony of words: “Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.”

Robert Kelley does a masterful job of recreating the mood, the tension and the spirit of the rural south during the depression and Allison Conner’s costumes are just right, down to Sook’s bobby socks and her gingham apron. Joe Ragey has designed the perfect sets for the piece and the staging recaptures the exact mood of the time. Each visual moment is an unforgettable painting from long ago.

Penny Fuller and Gabriel Hoffman capture the spirit of the piece and cement it into your memory so the audience cannot forget the beauty and the magic we all can make if we dare to kindle our imaginations. Hoffman is Capote as a child and his chemistry with Fuller, his retarded, childlike cousin, over fifty years his senior is worth the entire production. They sweep you into the story and outshine every character on that stage.

A Christmas Memory is a musical and although the songs are at times delightful and always nice, they are an unnecessary intrusion on the sweep of this sensitive painting of growing old and growing up. 1933 was not a fun time. People were homeless, jobless, frightened and hungry and The South suffered most of all. Somehow people managed to create hope and love out of the shambles of their desolation and fear and this is the story that lies beneath Capote’s lovely memoir. It is the one Robert Kelley tries to bring back to us on the TheatreWorks stage and he succeeds. The script however does not.

The main problem here is pace. One can handle just so much sweetness and nostalgia before it sours and writer Duane Pool evidently didn’t know when enough was enough. The other actors all have their moments on stage, but they are all acting, not being. Richard Farrell is a consummate 1933 postman, but he isn’t real. He also plays Buddy’s uncle and Haha Jones and in each role he just misses the human connection. Cathleen Riddley does her best in an inadequate, poorly developed role and makes it as human as anyone can.

But if you remember childhood, its fears and its immense need, you won’t care a whit about anything but the gossamer web of love that binds Buddy and Sook to one another. It reaches out to you the moment the two of them appear on that stage and all the rest of the action fades into the background. In Capote’s story he describes his cousin: “In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry.” And you love her all the more for her innocence and her belief that good and evil are absolutes. It is this faith she gives to Buddy and as you watch them wheel their baby buggy across the stage to gather pecans or fly their kites in the air toward a heaven as real to them as I Pods and computers are to the fools of today, you are lost in their world and you never want to leave.

Sadly, most of the cast have no idea what the real depression felt like, the combination of hope and despair, the hunger for things you will never find and the irrepressible need to look for it anyway. Hoffman and Fuller get it….and for them alone it is worth twice the price of a ticket to see TheatreWorks A Christmas Memory.

A Christmas Memory continues through December 26 at the Lucie Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road in Palo Alto
Tickets $19-$67.00 650 463 1960 or www.theatreworks.org

BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS

2010-12-10T00:33:00.000-08:00

San Jose Rep presents….. BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS
When you’re happy, you don’t count the years.
Ginger Rogers

San Jose Rep has launched an ambitious attempt to recreate the spectacular excess of the “Golden Age Of Hollywood”. Their production of Backwards in High Heels has the costumes, the dancing and all the glitz of the era. Yet, despite a lavish presentation with elaborate cosuming and choreographed lighting and movement, it isn’t quite there…yet. Anna Aimee White is Ginger Rogers and although she plays her part well, she does just that…she hasn’t yet absorbed her character and she doesn’t ring true. Her mother Lela (Heather Lee) is right on the mark and must be especially complimented because so often she carries the scene. She is the prototype of a mother who cares, ambitious for her daughter but wary too of the influences she will have to understand and the obstacles she must overcome. Matthew LaBanca is Fred Astaire down to the last slicked hair on his head. When he dances with White, the couple does indeed recapture the glamour, grace and elegance that was theirs alone back in the golden Age of Hollywood.

The scenes move from Texas to Broadway to Hollywood and follow Rogers from her roots in Independence, Missouri to that glorious day she won an Academy Award for her dramatic leading role in Kitty Foyle even though she did the movie against everyone’s advice. That was the film that proved she was more than a singer and dancer…she was an amazing dramatic actress who went on to win a Golden Glove nomination for her role in Monkey Business. Rogers became Hollywood’s highest paid star in 1945.

The script, written by Lynnette Barkley and Christopher McGovern manages to weave in all the old Gershwin, Kern and Berlin favorites into the flimsy plot, but it all seems a bit contrived. Still, each number is beautifully presented. The dancing, the costumes, the energy of each ensemble number is memorable and you can’t beat that wonderful music. Songs like Fascinating Rhythm and Shall We Dance can never be bad and no one cares if they fit into the story. They are wonderful to watch and marvelous to hear.

The biggest problem with this particular production is that several members of the cast play multiple roles and with few exceptions, they cannot carry it off. Christianne Tisdale is amazing as Ginger’s secretary assistant and manages to do very well in many of her other roles but she simply cannot make Ethel Merman look like more than a joke that doesn’t quite work. James Patterson has an magnificent voice and is perfectly cast as Jack Culpepper, Roger’s first husband, but as he progresses through his other roles as Hermes Pan, Jimmy Stewart and others, you are never sure who he is although there is never a doubt that this man can sing and dance.

You will love the melodies and thrill to the production itself: wonderful, creative choreography, superb costuming, energy and pace. Just don’t pay too much attention to the story…it simply isn’t there. The script doesn’t do justice to the talent on stage, but have no doubt the talent is there and every member of the cast puts their best foot forward. See it for the spectacle …you won’t be sorry.

BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS continues every night but Mondays through December 19, 2010 at San Jose Repertory Theatre, 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose. Tickets $35.00-$74.00 by phone: 408 367 7255 or online www.sjrep.com or in person.

THE LION IN WINTER

2010-12-04T18:47:00.001-08:00

Actor’s Theatre of San Francisco presents
James Goldman’s THE LION IN WINTER

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
William Congreve.

Every moment of the play mesmerizes its audience and every actor more than carries his weight. Yet, the impact of this family drama belongs to Christian Phillips (Henry II) and Joyce Henderson (Eleanor of Aquitaine) who also directed the play. Their interaction propels the plot ,their lines are unforgettable and their characters like every unhappy couple you have ever met. You cannot doubt their frustrated rage, their desperate need for control of a world that isn’t going their way and their ache for a love once so lovely, now lost.

The play opens on Christmas Eve, 1183 and we are confronted with a family eating each other up in their quest for power. Eleanor watches her three sons fight one another for the right to become King of England, and sees her husband lie and exploit them all so he can keep his mistress (Karina Wolfe) and secure the future of his country and she says, “How from where we started did we ever reach this?”

Yet, both as husband and wife and King and Queen, Eleanor and Henry take responsibility for what they are now and realize it is they who made their children into the vicious, amoral people they have become. “We are the origins of war,” says Eleanor. “We breed war; we carry it inside us like syphilis.”

“Every single character is struggling for power, some quite skillfully,” says Henderson in her role as director. “As each member of the family plots, schemes, conspires and counter-plots, the deep-seated emotional ties between them get played out in the political arena, such that sibling rivalry and marital jealousy translate into civil war, treason and perhaps even murder….The tightrope of love, rage and desire for power is the tension that holds this story together.”

But it is far more than the plot that makes THE LION IN WINTER such a fine piece of theater. It is the pace, the lighting and, most of all, superb acting. The challenge of making these bitter and disillusioned people seem human is a huge challenge but this cast is up to it. We see their insecurities, their fears and their desperate need to be loved in their faces, in their every gesture. Henry is driven to control the future of his domain after he dies. After all, he is not eternal “I am fifty,” he says. “I am the oldest man I know.” And he goes on to say, “I’ve put together England. I am the greatest power in a thousand years.”

His son, Richard (Joe Napoli) determines to thwart him and John (James Baldock) the baby and the buffoon of the family refuses to believe that he is not the most loved, the most wanted and the most deserving even though his brothers think him worthless. “I’m father’s favorite,” he says. “That’s what counts.”

And Geoffrey (Duncan Phillips) the one son who has no hope of getting recognition from his parent, responds “If you are a prince, there is hope for every ape in Africa,”

Henry finally realizes that none of his sons are worthy to rule and when he says, “I don’t much like our children,” you see his anguish because he knows that these boys who are part of him have somehow been warped into men he does not respect. He says to Eleanor, the woman he once loved, “I hope we never die,” and she answers, “I hope so too.” Because if they die, what will happen to England?

But Eleanor’s life is a torment and Henderson makes you feel the full extent of her grief and humiliation as she watches the man she still loves, kiss Alais (Karina Wolfe) whom she had groomed for her son, Richard. Her future is in the prison Henry has made for her and he has decided to get their marriage annulled so he can marry Alais and have new sons. He says of his wife, “She is not among the things I love.” That is the stuff of humiliation and heartbreak. Henderson wraps the audience in her spell and we actually feel the torrent of emotions that are battering her but never defeating her.

This family bonfire is as pertinent today as it was in 1183. Family dynamics have not changed and we all are the poorer for it. There is no hatred portrayed on that stage that we have not seen acerbated by the demands of modern society. We know the frustration, we feel the futility, and we, too know not how to heal it. “When the story of my life is written, it will read better than it lived,” says Henry.

You will cry and you will laugh with the characters on the Actor’s Theatre stage because this production opens your eyes to what you could so easily become.

Treat yourself to what a real family Christmas can be, with all its love. hate, jealousy and manipulation. Actors Theatre's production of James Goldman's The Lion in Winter surpasses any this reviewer has yet seen on stage or screen, beautifully realized and acted with true humanity. On a scale of ten, this production well deserves a twelve.

IF YOU GO:

WHERE: Actors Theatre of San Francisco
855 Bush Street
San Francisco, CA

WHEN:
Performances continue Wednesday-Thursdays through December 18.

TICKETS: ($26-$38.00) 415 345 1287
information@actorstheatresf.org.

Pacifica begins the holiday season

2010-11-21T18:06:00.001-08:00

The Trial Of Ebenezer Scrooge launches the holiday season

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.
Roy L. Smith

Have you ever wondered if Scrooge kept his promise? Did he really live his life in a new way reflecting the goodness and joy of Christmas? Well, now is your chance to find out in Pacifica’s Spindrift Players production, The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge. In this play, Ebenezer Scrooge is accused of reneging on the promises he made Christmas, 1843 and he has pleaded not guilty. “Much to his surprise, Scrooge is up against some ‘heavy hitters, something he certainly did not expect,” says director David Acevedo. “As his past begins to unravel, one witness at a time (talk about karma), everyone is asking what’s up with him?”

The set is constructed from recycled materials and everything is white and glittery including the main characters who are garbed in white. Scrooge (John Musgrave) is the expected curmudgeon and is representing himself. The lawyer for the prosecution is a Jewish man, Solomon Rothschild played with honesty and integrity by Marte Mejstrik. The cast carries the predictable and very contrived plot along at a good pace and there are a couple unforgettable moments on stage. Roger Genereux as the deceased Jacob Marley is choice, rattling his chains and reminding Scrooge that he entered into his room through the doorknob. Shannon Quinn rocked the house when she approached the witness stand scratching her bottom.

Acevedo uses music from The Beatles and some Shakespearean sources to heighten the mood and a wonderful touch is Mrs. Cratchit (Marti Coyne) running, screaming from the back of the theater to the stage to protect her husband. The entire audience is incorporated into the play. We rise when court is in session and the characters move into the audience as the plot progresses.

“When I first read this play,” said Acevedo. “I was reminded that we are fortunate to be able to keep hope alive, and that we can all come together not by material means (money) but through our own “soulful spirit’ making our little corner of the world a better place.”

Start your holidays early this year with a bit of old fashioned Christmas spirit at The Trial Of Ebenezer Scrooge.

The Trial of Ebenezer Scrooge continues through December 12 at PSP Theater, 1050 Crespi Drive, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm, Sundays at 2 pm
Tickets: $18-21.00 650 359 8002; www.pacificaspindriftplayers.org

THE UNLEAVENED TRUTH

2010-11-20T19:20:00.001-08:00

THE UNLEAVENED TRUTH
By Darryl A Forman
Published by Untreed Reads
http://www.untreedreads.com
Retail $3.99

“When people ask me why Jews are the chosen people, I shrug my shoulders and tell them, “Everyone else said no.” says Darryl Forman in her e-book , THE UNLEAVENED TRUTH. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy her take on the challenges and upsets life gives to us all. We’ve all been where her essays take us and we have all wondered at the same paradoxes in our lives. The difference is that while we might have cried or complained when life dealt us a body blow, Darryl Forman makes us laugh at the very foibles we thought were driving us crazy. She talks about her vision of the world and how she came to realize that the whole world wasn’t Jewish: “It wasn’t until I moved to California ….that I really started to notice the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ” she says. And one of the things she discovered as she grew up was that people are people and the men you date are men whether they are Jewish, Catholic or nothing at all.

Her publisher says, “Join Darryl in this rollicking collection of essays covering everything from growing up Jewish to surgery to a secret love for Jon Stewart (ok, not so secret anymore). You’ll encounter cruise ship travels gone awry and wry looks at relationships that have cruised. From dads that are rabbis to jobs that have gone bye-bye, Darryl puts her own unique spin on telling-it-like-it-is.” And indeed every topic tells it just like she sees it from the perspective of a single Jewish woman of a certain age. Like so many from her generation, Darryl grew up loving baseball, avoiding relatives, working like crazy and trying to find a good man. She evidently found many loves, but not The Perfect One. Her discussion of internet dating and a chance coupling on a cruise ship that ended up becoming a seven year long distance relationship are choice.

This book touches on the alarming effect of coming to terms with an aging body, the determination to live life to the fullest despite all the circumstances that get in the way and how to deal with aches and pains that happen when your body decides it has had enough She ends the book with a “Dis-jointed Reader’s Guide” that reminds us that much of the content has been fictionalized but, as she says, “Who cares? A laugh is a laugh, and if it didn’t happen to her, it coulda happened to you.”

This is good casual reading, wonderful if you need a laugh and even better if you want to read about someone who has been there, done that and lived to joke about the tale.

HAPPY NOW?

2010-11-19T18:37:00.000-08:00

Marin Theatre Company presents HAPPY NOW?
Written by Lucinda Coxon
Directed by Jasson Minadakis
Boyer Theatre
November 11-December 5, 2010

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when
He so lives as to make happiness impossible.
St. Augustine

These days, modern women are trying to be everything to everyone and discover too late that when they do that they become nothing to themselves. “The backlash of the feminist movement is that both sexes, but especially women, are feeling the pressure to ‘do it all.’ ” said Margot Melcon. “Now women owe it to themselves to ease up, and realize that just because we can do it all, doesn’t mean we have to. “

And that is Kitty’s problem in HAPPY NOW? She has all the ingredients for the perfect life but way too much is missing. She asks “Is this my life? My one and only life?”

And she says to her husband Johnny (Alex Moggridge portrayed with just the right touch of frustration and idealism) “why don’t you kiss me anymore?”

This production belongs to director Jasson Minadakis. He has created a masterpiece on every level with his staging techniques, the people moving in harmony across the stage, and the fantastic melding of scenes into one another. HAPPY NOW? is a comedy that isn’t funny. It is too real. We watch five people so desperate to find happiness that they cannot see what they actually have and instead of the actors on stage, we see ourselves. Kitty, (played with sensitivity and impeccable taste by Rosemary Garrison) the central character in the play, seems to have it all and yet she feels as if she has nothing. “Everyone I know works tremendously hard to be Kitty,” said Minadakis. “To have the job that makes a difference in the world, to be leader at that job, to have a happy family, to have a circle of friends. But when you are living ‘the dream’ how do you balance it all? How is it possible to be all these things and still be sane?”

There is another question Minadakis does not ask: How can you be happy when you have never seen what happiness is? Kitty ‘s father who is now seriously ill walked out on her mother (masterfully played by Andrew Hurteau who also steals the show as Michael the hard nosed realist who loves all women but does not feel that jeopardizes his marriage). Kitty’s mother is the prototype hypochondriac smearing guilt in her wake. Kitty is trying desperately not to be the person who mothered her, but the kind of mother she wishes she had. But how to do this when you come home from a hard day at the office, the house is a mess, the kids are crying, your husband is hungry and dealing with his own blue devils? “One of the hardest things about contemporary life is finding a way to forgive ourselves for being human and making mistakes,” says Minadakis. Indeed, the characters in this play try so hard to grab their dream, that when they open their hands they have nothing.

Every moment in this production is brilliantly orchestrated thanks to Kurt Landisman’s lighting designs and Melpomene Katakalos’s unique scenic construction. The story told on stage could not help but mesmerize the audience because it was about every one of them. “Today everyone seems to be chasing happiness,” observes dramaturge Sarah Schlegel. “If a nice house, family, job, possessions, travel, and anything else under the sun doesn’t bring happiness, what will?.....We have come to realize we chase a dream that is unattainable.”

But watching these people attempt to capture a love they don’t feel because they think it should be there for them makes us realize it is the trying that is making them miserable. It is forcing Bea (Molly Stickney) to send her less than brilliant child to a conservative, stifling school and Miles (Mark Anderson Phillips) to escape into alcohol. The unhappy, desperately seeking Bea asks Miles, “Can you ever see me anymore?” and he answers through a cloud of alcohol, ”No, but it doesn’t seem such a loss.”

Reality is only a disappointment if you define it beforehand. Inevitably you will discover that your definition is exactly what it is not. The play ends with none of the characters reaching their nirvana…instead they are living each day the best they can. And, after all, what else can any of us do?
If only we'd stop trying to be happy
we could have a pretty good time.
Edith Wharton

IF YOU GO:
HAPPY NOW? continues at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Avenue, Mill Valley, CA 94941. through December 5, 2010.
WHEN:
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturdays at 8pm, /Wednesdays at 7:30 pm, Sundays at 7 pm, Matinees: Dec 2 at 1 pm, Saturdays November 20 & 27 at 2 pm, Sundays at 2 pm.
TICKETS: $33-$53; Box Office 415 388 5208; www.marintheatre.org

A TOSCA TO REMEMBER FOREVER

2010-11-14T22:09:00.000-08:00

Opera San Jose presents……
TOSCA

When love is not madness, it is not love.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Opera San Jose’s production of TOSCA will not disappoint on any level thanks in part to Sandra Bengochea’s inspired stage direction. It is all there: the voices, the wonderfully elegant, sets, the costuming that adds without detracting and that magnificent score that has spoken volumes to us all for over two centuries. “TOSCA presents a very universal subject, which we as appreciators of art see in all great operas,” says Bengochea. “It portrays the huge conflict between revolutionary and traditional worldviews.”

Indeed, every opera lover has seen hundreds of “Tosca’s” but I promise not one of them will have seen a more moving, beautifully rendered production of this opera than that created by Opera San Jose. Their TOSCA is a perfect blend of virtuosity, opulence and pathos that this moving story gives to us all.

The story of what we will do for love, the music that fills your heart and brings tears to your eyes…all are timeless. The setting is Rome in June, 1800 just as Napoleon is defeated and the powers that rule have been overturned. TOSCA is the tale of love meeting the ultimate test. It must be sung and acted with extraordinary passion to convince us that what we see and hear on that stage is real. Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste sings Tosca with heart. Her voice is thrilling and its passion real. Her lover, Mario Cavaradossi is sung by Alexander Boyers with a Spinto tenor voice in the tradition of Domingo and Gigli. Conductor David Rohrbaugh is Opera San Jose’s founding Music Director and does a masterful job of never overpowering the voices and yet letting the music add the atmosphere and the tension of this plot of lust, intrigue and murder done for love. “ TOSCA is a passionate melodrama, romantic, and powerful. ,” he says. “The exceptionally melodic areas are some of the most stunning and beguiling in operatic literature…Throughout the opera, every emotion is heightened.”

TOSCA has become one of the most popular of all operas since its premier in 1900, and this production in San Jose will make you understand why it is considered such an operatic treasure. The music is divine (and that is an understatement). Opera San Jose has made it easier to remember those melodic arias you are still humming as the curtain descends because their titles are listed in order under each act in the program. When Cavaradossi and Tosca sing Qual’occhio, your heart melts and you wish someone loved you like that. When Tosca murders Scarpia and sings Vissi d’arte, you think “Hooray!!! Tosca!!”. But when you get home, you wonder “What was that marvelous melody I loved so much in the first act?” You open your program and there it is.

The supertitles in this performance are pure poetry. They are written with an eye to the mood and the meaning of the libretto. Yet, they are unobtrusive, brief and clear. We want to understand the story of course, but really we are there for that music. “The spectacular California Theatre is the ideal venue for this wonderful production,” says Rohrbaugh. “The proximity of the audience makes them feel as a witness of the story – and what a story to witness!”

Irene Dalis is to be praised to the skies for producing one masterpiece after another, showcasing young talented and professional singers soon to become the international stars of tomorrow. Her standards are high and she never compromises quality in every opera on her stage. TOSCA is a production not to be missed; it is unforgettable.

There are two casts that alternate in this production. Previous experience assures me that the audience will not be disappointed with either.

TOSCA continues through November 28 at The California Theatre, 345 South First Street, San Jose. Tickets $51-$101: 409 437 4450; www.operasj.org.

CNTRL+ALT+DELETE

2010-11-14T22:07:00.001-08:00

The Pear Avenue Theater presents
CTRL+ALT+DELETE
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein

The Pear Avenue Theatre is worth going to for the venue itself. IT is small and intimate and makes the theater you are seeing seem real. The actors are a stone’s throw away from you and are living their lives before your eyes. However, their
production of Anthony Clarvoe’s CTRL+ALT+DELETE tries to make some very good points about the world of investment and high finance, but it doesn’t do it very well. The fault is certainly not the actors’ nor is it the direction of this interesting attempt to prove to us that all the money we think we are making and all the projects we invest in are nothing but figments of our imagination. Director Vickie Rozell and her scenic designer Michael Palumbo make the most of the tiny stage and the rapid change of scenes in the script and although the actors are a bit intense for this reviewer’s taste, they stay in character and do their best to convince us that they are saying something that everyone doesn’t know already.

The action takes place in 1999, before the GPS, The Blackberry and the IPod. Eddie Fisker (Kevin Hsieh, a veteran Pear Avenue player) has managed to buy all the rights to an all-in-one hand-held communication device that he calls the gizmo. He presents his idea to Gus Belmont (Ray Renati) financial guru and moneymaker who picks it up and decides to run with it. Belmont is revered by the financial world; one word from him can send stocks plunging. He has just suffered a near-death experience and he is protected and loved by Marie (Lizzie O’Hara) whose real identity is part of the culmination of the plot. O’Hara steals the show for this reviewer. She is in tune with every character and every action, yet she never up-stages anyone. She is so real it is hard to realize that she is playing a part. Everyone lucky enough to see her should be grateful that she accepted this role even though she says the thought of it scared her.

The play is billed as a glimpse into the “hot-wired world of high pressure scheming and manipulation that accompanies a breakthrough in technology. The action takes us through the manipulations of the stock market, the selling of an idea that has yet to become real and the inevitable crash of confidence when the bubble bursts. They actors try to instill suspense and surprise into the script but it just isn’t there. The dialogue is filled with clever wordplay, but it doesn’t really say much. We all know about the vicissitudes of a stock market that makes hopes real by convincing investors of their potential. We leave the theater after two hours of watching all hysterics and histrionics of the cast saying, “So what?”

However, this production is saved by its pace and by its very loyal audience. The Pear Avenue Theatre is a tiny space where the audience is literally inches away from the action on stage. They have developed a loyal following and their season has great substance. Their choice of plays cover a wide spectrum of current topics. The 2010-11 selection is labeled “Americana”. Next up is No Good Deed by Paul Braverman, set in East Boston about an Irish gang war, and after that Arthur Miller’s never-fail-to-please classic Death of a Salesman. It is an ambitious season played to loyal and interested fans and one for all theater goers to watch.

CTRL+ALT+DELETE continues Thursdays-Saturdays@ 8pm, Sundays @ 2pm through November 21 at Pear Avenue Theatre, 1220 Pear Avenue, Mountain View. Tickets ($15-$30) 650 254 1148 or www.thepear.org.

ACT PRESENTS THE FINAL PLAY IN THE BROTHER/SISTER TRILOGY

2010-11-13T16:32:00.000-08:00

AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER PRESENTS….
MARCUS; OR THE SECRET OF SWEET
By
Tarrell Alvin McCraney
Directed by Mark Rucker

Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing.
Labels are not for people.
Martina Navratilova

MARCUS; OR THE SECRET OF SWEET is the third play in The Brother/Sister Plays Trilogy by McCraney. It is a play about the inner torment a black man suffers when he comes out in San Pere, Louisiana. For this reviewer, the mood of the play and the levity of the treatment of so profound a subject contradicted what the author was trying to tell us. This is not a topic that is funny or a transition to be taken lightly by any adolescent, black or white. Emily Hoffman explains, “Many coming-out stories of black gay men are characterized by similar, sometimes baffling dualities of acceptance and rejection, of knowing and refusal to know.”

McCraney talks about the way he was teased when he admitted that he was “sweet”. “When I was a kid, people did that all the time and I said, ‘But then, when I came out of the closet, why did everybody have such a fit? You’ve been saying I was gay since I was nine.’”

Marcus (Richard Prioleau) knows he is “sweet” and so does everyone in his community but he is not sure how to play out his life. His mother Oba (Margo Hall) asks him, ”Are you turning into the man you want to be or the man you need to be?” and indeed that is the theme of this production. Do we have the power to create the “who we are” that we think we want to be or are we destined to be what we are no matter what our head tells us will be the better (and safer) way of life? Marcus interacts with his girlfriends as friends and the scene of the three of them, Shaunta (Omoze Idehenre), Osha (Shinelle Azoroh) and Marcus bathed in golden light dancing in a sun shower shows us how lovely and truly innocent that friendship is for each of them.

Yet, although she senses that Marcus is gay, Osha loves him as a man and her disappointment when his sexual preferences are openly expressed feels like betrayal to her. Friendship is another kind of love and she comes to realize that this is the basis for their devotion to one another. When she tells him about her new lover Shua (Tobie L. Windham), Marcus realizes that he has been betrayed. He had his first sexual experience with Shua and the revelation that this man he thought loved only him was actually using him as a diversion is devastating. Windham brings Shua to life with artistic sensitivity. One can see his duplicity even before he utters a line. Windham is also Oshoosi Size and he is excellent in that role as well. One cannot praise his ability to switch characters with such authenticity enough.

The words in these plays are pure poetry. Marcus’s uncle Ogun Size (beautifully portrayed by Gregory Wallace) a character who has appeared in all three plays, tells the tormented boy to look to the sky to find all his answers, but ultimately those answers must be discovered in Marcus’ own heart and no one else’s. McCraney says, “I never felt average. So when people tried to put me in an average place, I couldn’t subscribe to it, because it didn’t feel right to me. “

Mark Ruder directed this production and he says, “The world, the writing, the dialogue and the characters of MARCUS are so compelling. The story of a boy coming out is very moving to me, and telling it in the frame and context of the world Tarell has created is something that I am proud of.”

Yet, despite excellent acting and a story that should be told, the production lacks the impact of The Brothers Size. Too many teen agers struggle with their sexual identity to have it portrayed as something casual and easy. There is nothing funny about Marcus’s struggle and nothing trivial about his desperate search for the why of the way he feels. His affair with Shua is a heart-break but that is not how is appears on the ACT stage. It is told as a victory for homosexuality and the audience cheered, while those of us who understand the agonies every human being feels when he knows he is different, wept.

The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.
Rita Mae Brown

IF YOU GO:
MARCUS continues until November 21, 2010
WHERE: ACT: 415 Geary Street
San Francisco, CA 94108
TICKETS:
Prices start at $10
415 749 2228 or www.act-sf-org

Sunset Boulevard: don't miss it

2010-11-07T23:39:00.001-08:00

Palo Alto Players present….
SUNSET BOULEVARD a musical masterpiece
Stardom isn't a profession; it's an accident.
LAUREN BACALL

The Palo Alto Players’ production of SUNSET BOULEVARD is an exquisite piece of theater on every level. Director Matthew Mattei designed a professional and gripping production that is much more than the wonderfully talented actors singing on stage or Andrew Lloyd Webber’s powerful score. Thanks to choreographer Robyn Tribuzi, every action is a synchronized, choreographed dance with each character in perfect step. Patrick Klein’s scenic designs never take away from the action on stage; indeed, they are the perfect foil to heighten the mood and meld the action, music and movement into an artistic whole. The lighting was created by Carolyn Foot and it is just right…very like a chiaroscuro painting that highlights the uneasy, eerie feeling that pulsates beneath Joe Gillis’s (Ashley Simms) relationship with Norma Desmond and her butler/ protector, Max Von Mayerling (Russ Bohard). Annmarie Martin is Norma Desmond, a silent movie star whose moment in the spotlight is gone. She cannot come to terms with her reality: she was once a famous personality beloved by millions and now only a handful recognize her name. Her character borders on psychotic: a madwoman obsessed with her own lost grandeur. Martin plays Desmond to the hilt, exaggerating every emotion and yet convincing us she is real. Mayerling is her former director and husband, her butler and her self appointed savior. He believes in her talent and the strength of his belief protects his mistress from herself. He sings “The Greatest Star of them All,” and you realize the immense scope of what Norma Desmond once was and feel the tragedy of her descent into an oblivion she cannot accept. His song is more than its words or its music…it is a cry against the fickleness of time. When Martin’s Norma Desmond sings “Surrender” the power and emotion in her voice mesmerizes the audience. She is unforgettable.

One would expect to see as lavish and opulent a production as this one on much bigger stages with far more professional actors and production staff. This SUNSET BOULEVARD is a must see for anyone who wants to lose themselves in music , dance and dialogue so closely meshed that they all seem as one. Each scene melts into the next; the pace is just right, the mood enhanced by the contrasting use of dim light, transparent curtains and projections of Sunset Boulevard and the car Joe Gillis drives to escape his debtors. Courtney Hatcher strikes just the right note of the idealistic ingénue and aspiring writer who falls in love with the kept Joe Gillis because she believes in his talent. She never descends into maudlin sentimentality; she is the lovely “girl next door” that Joe can never have because he has bought into the sick debauchery his mistress lavishes upon him even as she imprisons him.

Director Mattei has brought SUNSET BOULEVARD to life with imagination, creativity and sensitivity to the underlying psychological forces of the plot. Every member of this cast and crew are to be lauded for a magnificent accomplishment.

IF YOU GO:
SUNSET BOULEVARD continues until November 21, 2010, Thursdays –Saturdays at 8:00 pm and 2:30 p.m. Sundays at the Lucy Stern Theater, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, California, 94301
Tickets $23-$32 with student and senior discounts.
650 329 0891 or www.paplayers.org.

A GLIMPSE AT OUR OWN IMMATURITEIS

2010-10-31T23:01:00.000-07:00

GLORY DAYS
A New American Musical
Presented by The Royal Underground Theatre
Directed by Enrico Banson
Starring Jason Aaronson (Andy)
Ivan Hardin (Jack)
Chris Morrell (Skip)
Jepoy Ramos (Will)

Moving on is simple. It's what we leave behind that's hard.
Author Unknown

You cannot see this coming-of-age musical without remembering your own high school angst. Those four years of almost everyone’s life are a heady combination of excitement, uncertainty, hope and despair. Remember? We try to succeed in the adult definition of the world and no matter how we try, it is hell….maybe not for those quiet, acquiescent and frightened souls who obeyed their mommies….. but for most of us… unbearable hell. “GLORY DAYS isn’t just about youth and friendship; it’s about change and accepting change with or without the deep personal/familial/friendly connections around you,” observed director Enrico Banson. “Even though we are surrounded by friends, relatives and loved ones, we need to be able to write our own stories.”

GLORY DAYS is the story of 4 misfits who bonded together in high school because they were not part of the “in” group. After they graduated and each went his own way, they discover that they cannot recapture the camaraderie and support they once gave one another because in that very short 365 days they became different people. Indeed, the conflict of being what the world tells us we should be and discovering who we really are is the most frightening and often alienating event of our lives. Graduation from high school is a stepping stone so daunting that too many of us retire into a fantasy life we create to cushion us from reality. We go to college; we live at home; we refuse to admit that now it is time for us to become ourselves. And so, we stay the same. Andy (Jason Aaronson) in GLORY DAYS is one of those who cop out. Jack (Ivan Hardin) seeks the open road and finds the new person he never knew he could be.

Every audience member will relate to one or more of the characters on the Royal Underground Theatre stage singing their hearts out about their growing pains. They reminisce about the year they have spent away from each other and how much they miss what they had before they left to become adults. The question is, “Did they all really grow up?”

And the answer is “not yet.”

The four boys in the cast do an amazing job of becoming the characters they play. It is hard to realize the Jason Aaronson (Andy) is not really a boring conformist desperate to remain “one of the guys” or that Ivan Hardin (Jack) is not really an 18 year old who discovers he is gay. Chris Morrell (Skip) reminds us that those Glory Days we all try to recapture vanish forever on graduation day. Life has disappointed him and we all understand why.

The original music by Nick Blaemire, while a bit monotonous, is sung with such energy and emotion that it doesn’t really matter. No one will soon forget the touching lyrics of Jack’s “Open Road” admission that he is not what they think he is, or Skip’s powerful and totally believable take on the world: “Generation Apathy.” We have all been there…we have all wept those disillusioned tears.

The pace of this production is beautifully orchestrated, and each character has his moment on stage to expand his character and bring him to life. This is a musical that is far more than its book…Its subtext forces the audience to relive those terrible/ delicious/ scary/ exciting days when they were teens trying to be like everyone else.

GLORY DAYS tells us all that different is inevitable. It says to every one of us who are living a life: “Buddy…high school got you to the diving board. Now it is time to jump. Go forth and become the adult you need to be.

Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations;
He is only trying on one face after another to find a face of his own.
Logan Pearsall Smith

IF YOU GO:
GLORY DAYS continues until November 7, 2010
Boxcar Studios
Hyde & G.Gate, San Francisco
Tickets and information:
www. Jerica productions.com

WOODY ALLEN'S TAKE ON LIFE

2010-10-27T23:23:00.000-07:00

YOU WILL MET A TALL DARK STRANGER
Written and directed by Woody Allen
113 minutes ( R)
Starring: Antonio Banderas (Greg) Josh Brolin (Roy), Anthony Hopkins (Alfie) Gemma Jones (Helena) & Naomi Watts (Sally)

Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself:
I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.
Groucho Marx
YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER is about a lot of frustrated, insecure people chasing the dreams they believe will make them happy. The film is set in London and is wonderfully presented with a tongue–in–cheek narrator and scenes that highlight the ridiculous, the extreme, the illogical impulses that make us do the things we do. It is about aging and the unavoidable sense that we missed out on something but know not what; it is about a marriage that isn’t what it was meant to be and the fear too many of us have of being alone, being poor, being without. The story, if you can call this series of cameos a story, reflects Allen’s belief that most people are dysfunctional and grasp at fantasy to come to terms with their reality. He doesn’t believe that the so-called golden years are gold at all. “You don't gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens,” says Woody Allen. “People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you'd trade all of that for being 35 again. I've experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That's what happens to Anthony Hopkins (Alfie) at the beginning of YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife (Gemma Jones) , "Oh, you can't keep doing that - you're not young anymore." Yes, she's right, but nobody wants to hear that.”
The multi-faceted and very slender plot line follows two married couples, Alfie and Helena, both on in years and their lovely ambitious, talented daughter Sally who is supporting her romantic dreamer of a husband, Roy instead of opening her own art gallery or getting some satisfaction from her relationship with him. Roy wrote one successful novel but cannot seem to duplicate his success and is so petrified of defeat that he does indeed fail. Alfie is determined to recapture his lost youth and does so by sprucing up his image and marrying a former prostitute who is as shallow as a puddle on a dry day. Roy attempts to find love with a woman he sees playing the guitar in the flat across the way (Freida Pinto) and Helena tries to find meaning without the husband she dedicated her life to nurturing by going to a fortune teller, Sally recommends. Helena consoles herself in daily doses of alcohol and becomes convinced that she had lived before and will have a new life after this one is over. She even goes to a medium with her new “boyfriend” to ask his dead wife’s permission to continue their relationship. Every character in the story is desperate to find some meaning in the existence that traps them. They grasp fruitless dead ends, creating false hopes that lead them nowhere.
Allen exaggerates each encounter so that every character appears ridiculous, empty and immature. He encapsulates the message of this film when he says, “I am operating within a nightmarish context that life itself is a cruel, meaningless, terrible kind of thing. God forbid the people who have bad luck, or even neutral luck, because even the luckiest, the most beautiful and brilliant, what have they got? A minuscule, meaningless life span in the grand scheme of things.”
Robin Weigel, a writer and a student of humanity, observed that the common theme that defines the characters in the film is that other people are leading the lives they themselves deserve. “They all thought ‘The Grass Is Always Greener On The Other
Side’ “, he says. “In some cases, literally, as with the mother, who knew she's going to live again (that other side!), and Josh Brolin's character, (Roy) who saw into the other woman's window on that other side and thought IT was better.”
The film ends with all the characters in worse shape than they were in the beginning despite heroic efforts to better their situations. No matter what absurd and illogical steps each took to remedy the lacks in their lives, they are still left dealing with defeat on every level.
YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER is a fascinating and very funny film, but it leaves the viewer with a sour taste. There is no resolution and perhaps that is the way Allen believes life is. We go on and on and never do find the answer to anything until we die and then it’s too late. The sense of futility reflected in the film is typical of the way Allen has lived his own life, wanting what he doesn’t have and acting inappropriately to get pleasure that once attained is hollow, after all. We are not guided by moral principle but ruled by our passions. “The heart wants what it wants,” says Allen. There’s no logic to those things. You meet someone and you fall in love and that’s that.”

Have we so little control over the events we let into our lives? Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not.
We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of
getting something we don’t have, but rather
of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.
Frederick Keonig

THE HELLS OF WAR: NINE CIRCLES

2010-10-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

Marin Theatre Company Presents
NINE CIRCLES
by
Bill Cain
Directed by Kent Nicholson

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
George Herbert

Bill Cain is a practicing Jesuit priest and an immensely gifted playwright. His writing reflects his concerns with heaven and hell and how traditional beliefs can warp the individual’s concept of the way to live his life.

Cain’s organization of the play is inspired by Dante’s INFERNO, an allegory that paints Hell as nine circles of suffering that represent the soul’s recognition and rejection of sin on his journey toward God. That is why the drama we see on the Marin Theatre stage is far more than a simple story of a soldier‘s execution for the deeds he committed in the name of war; it is a brilliant exploration of how mankind twists morality to justify his actions. “Life is not a battle, but a journey,” says Cain. “The ultimate goal is not the obliteration of the enemy. In Dante, when you achieve your crown, it is because you have become ‘lord of yourself.’ ”

NINE CIRCLES is fiction but its plot was inspired by the trial and conviction of Steven B. Green, who was accused of instigating the brutal massacre of an entire Iraqi family in 2006. “Stories are my way of understanding the world,” says Cain. “We can understand an event if we can fit it into a story.”

Green was described as “a petulant loner and a hard-drinking druggie” and after he was inducted he told one of his neighbors,” I’m gonna go over there and kill ‘em all.” And that was exactly what basic training taught him to do. A sergeant who was in Green’s platoon asked, “What does an infantry rifle platoon do? It destroys. That’s what it is trained to do. Now,… let slip the leash, and it becomes something monstrous.”

There were three other members of Green’s platoon who were part of the episode but they were exonerated because they testified against Green. They refused to take responsibility for joining in the horrific rape, murder and burning of an innocent family and allowed Green to take full blame for an incident that they too made happen.

Green’s personality is very much like Cain’s character, Daniel Reeves, played with unremitting honesty by Craig Marker. Reeves served in Iraq as a member of the United States Armed Services and was honorably discharged, against his will. He loved the army, the importance and sense of purpose it gave him as one of its soldiers. Upon his return to the states, he was arrested for acts he committed during his tour of duty. His record before he was inducted was less than laudable. He had served time in prison and had broken both civil and moral laws repeatedly before he was inducted. Yet, once he became a soldier, he was a loyal team member eager to do what it took to defend his country. He liked being part of something bigger than himself. The army gave him power and tried to teach him the responsibility that power entails. Reeves was comfortable in his military role and could not understand why he was arrested for acts he committed against the enemy. After all, he had been programmed to kill Iraqis. Wasn’t that why he was sent to battle? He was only doing what he had been told to do. “This was my one shot at being normal,” he tells the public defender after his arrest.

James Carpenter and Jennifer Erdmann play the other characters in the drama and their ability to become attorneys, chaplains, psychiatrists and social workers is nothing short of amazing. Thanks to director Kent Nicholson, the pace is as rapid as gunfire, the movement on stage almost military in its precision. The effect is as chilling as it is spell binding. NINE CIRCLES is a gut wrenching window into the kind of people we trust to defend us and how we brainwash them to make them succeed in combat.

The drama is performed without intermission on an almost bare stage. The audience cannot help but become part of the action and everyone in the intimate Lieberman Theatre captivated by the events happening before them. Michael Palumbo did a masterful job of creating mood and scene modulations with his use of light and dark emphasizing the choreographed movements of the actors. “NINE CIRCLES is very close to my heart,” says Cain. “It’s the journey of a young man who comes to understand who he is and what he has done, and that he can be empathetic with what he once thought was his enemy. It’s the story of a young man who achieves greatness by doing the one necessary thing – becoming himself.”

This production is theater at its best. It tells a story everyone needs to hear if he is to gather the courage to be the unique human being he is meant to be. “The MTC artistic staff was astounded by the power and grace of NINE CIRCLES,” says MTC Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis.

Don’t miss this extraordiinary production. You too will be astounded, thrilled and inspired.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary
Nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway

IF YOU GO
NINE CIRCLES continues through November 7, 2010
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday & Saturday 8:00 PM
Wednesday 7:30 PM
Sunday 7:00 PM
Matinees some Saturdays & every Sunday 2:00 PM
WHERE: Marin Theatre Company
397 Miller Avenue
Mill Valley, CA 94941
TICKETS: www.marintheatre.org
415 388 5208

SECRET ORDER: ANOTHER HIT FOR SAN JOSE

2010-10-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

San Jose Rep presents
SECRET ORDER
By Bob Clyman
Directed by Chris Smith

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.
Sophocles

If you want drama so real it feels as if you are eavesdropping on people you know and have seen too many times before, don’t miss this amazing production now playing at San Jose Repertory Theatre. “SECRET ORDER is about cutting-edge discoveries, chasing dreams and the powerful allure of the big prize,” says director Chris Smith. Indeed, your attention will never waver in this gripping drama by Bob Clyman now playing at San Jose Repertory Theatre. Every moment of this fast-paced production is orchestrated so carefully that movement and scene changes melt into spellbinding dance routines. What we see on stage is far more than dialogue and plot. Scenic designer David Lee Cuthbert coordinated his efforts with Pamila Z. Gray’s fantastic use of light to emphasize the conversations that ricochet like bullets between characters. Steve Schoenbeck designed a musical backdrop as vital to the staging as the desks, chairs and lab equipment. SECRET ORDER tells the story of a gifted, idealistic young research scientist, William Shumway (James Wagner) who has discovered what he believes is a definitive cure for cancer. Robert Brock (Robert Krakovski) hears of Shumway’s work and invites him to continue his research at the cancer research institute he directs in New York City. Brock is past fifty living the dream he never had by promoting and encouraging Shumway’s work. Both men are certain that the younger man’s discoveries will end the disease forever despite evidence to the contrary.

This play is far more than the story of scientific fraud or an unprincipled gallop toward professional distinction. It is a modern moral drama, one perfectly crafted by its author. Clyman is a clinical psychologist who writes his prize-winning plays between appointments with his patients. He knows all too well the secret motivations behind our words. The veracity of this dialogue is unmistakable. There is not an artificial phrase, a false sequence in the speech of every character. Real people have said and thought everything these people convey on that stage. The audience is right there feeling the push of ambition, the heady excitement of discovery, and terrible loss that failure might bring to these men and the girl who believes in their work. “SECRET ORDER makes us feel the thrill of discovery along with the tug of responsibility and ethics,” says Rick Lombardo, the Rep’s Artistic Director.

The acting in this production is stunning. Robert Krakovski gives his character the bravado, the determination and the pathos of a man on the downside of what could have been a stellar career now left with peddling other men’s discoveries. Krakovski is not delivering lines. He is that man we all know who sacrificed his family for his ambition and realizes too late that the creativity that was once his hallmark is gone. His ideas have all been said and done and he must look elsewhere for that unique discovery he never found. He sees his last chance for making his mark in Shumway’s discovery and has tied his star to Shumway’s success. “(SECRET ORDER) refers to a certain dynamic, sometimes unconscious and often problematical, that can insinuate itself into human communication,” says Bob Clyman. “The desire to control another person with the willingness to acknowledge that we are making that choice. We may be effectively issuing an implicit ‘order’ to the other person, but the order is so obscure that this person isn’t exactly sure what it is we’re doing –and neither are we.”

James Wagner (Shumway) conveys his confusion between what his supervisor says and what he means not just in words but in his expression, his walk, his very posture. Julian Lopez-Morillas is an amazing talent. Never has he been more challenged than breathing life into the stereotypical character of Saul Roth. Roth is a Jewish scientist who is little more than departmental decoration in danger of being demolished by the aggressive and ambitious Brock. His lines are riddled with clichéd references to his wife’s shopping and his love of food, and expected jabs at his memory loss, but Lopez-Morillas gives us the human being inside the preconceived profile of a Jewish intellectual gone to seed. He elevates Saul Roth into a desperate, determined human being who will stop at nothing to destroy those who threaten him. His performance is unforgettable.

And so is Kathryn Tkel as Alice Curiton, young and far more unprincipled in her eagerness to be part of Shumway’s discovery and carry it to success. She is adorable, funny and real. …indeed she adds just the right note of delightful youth and determined pursuit of an unattainable goal…or is it really unattainable?…we will never know. The plot does not tell us that. We are left at the end never knowing if she will capitalize on Shumway’s downfall.

Don’t miss this production…it is all that good theater should be and more.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius
Who is not a man of honor.
George Bernard Shaw

IF YOU GO:
WHERE: 101 Paseo de San Antonio, San Jose
WHEN: Tuesdays (7:30 pm) Wednesdays through Saturdays (8:00 pm) with matinees Saturdays (3:00 pm) and Sundays (2:00 pm) until November 7, 2010
TICKETS: $35.00-$74.00; 408 367 7255; wwwsjrep.com

WORLD WAR II REVISITED

2010-10-17T16:27:00.001-07:00

RIVETS
Galatean Players Ensemble Theatre
Directed by Kathryn C. McCarty
Book and Lyrics: Kathryn C. McCarty
Musical Score by Mitchell Covington
Music Direction: Peter Maleitzke
Choreography: Renae Klein

History must be written of, by and for the survivors.
Anonymous

People alive during World War II still call it THE war. All the other conflicts following it were nothing but skirmishes compared to the immense mobilization of this country to fight a trio of enemies that dared to threaten our sovereignty. The loyalty of every citizen to the support the cause and their eagerness to become part of the fight for a common cause that is almost unprecedented in human history. “There is no substitute for victory,” said General Douglas MacArthur and Americans refused to accept any less for themselves and for their country.

Many events change history, but World War II called on all its citizens to forget (if only for the duration) their racial biases. It was essential that all of us, white, black or brown unite against the forces that threatened to destroy us. Indeed it was a war that forced our nation to change its fundamental vision of women, race and what it meant to be American. “When the war is over, things will go back to normal” say the characters again and again, but they are wrong. Things never returned to the way they were. In the years since that war ended, our prejudices eased; women infiltrated the work force more and more on an equal level with men; races intermarried and all of us learned that to be different is not to be wrong.

World War II mobilized Americans to work together as never before to defeat the enemy, to willingly sacrifice what once were necessities for the war effort. Every able-bodied man enlisted in the armed forces and many women did as well. I still remember 15 and 16 year olds, encouraged by their parents to lie about their age to they could fight. Those left at home became the dedicated “home front soldiers” we see on stage in RIVETS. Children knit sweaters and quilts for the men overseas, the entire nation rolled bandages, gave blood and recycled rubber, metal, tin, nylon, silk and newspapers. Civilians invited soldiers into their homes for home-cooked meals, worked at the Red Cross and the USO and patrolled the streets during air raid alarms. It was a unifying time, a time when we all were determined to work together to win the war.

RIVETS celebrates the men who couldn’t fight on the battlefield because of age or physical infirmity and the millions of women who left their kitchens to work in war factories so that our troops would have enough ammunition and supplies to fight the enemy. The show is billed as “a musical celebration of Rosie the Riveter and the Home front Soldiers of World War II” and indeed it brings the era to vivid life. Women in the lower income brackets have always been part of the American workforce, but the traditional image of the middle classes was that women’s place was in the home. World War II and its sweeping call to be part of the defense effort changed that picture and gave women a taste of what it was to be part of something greater than themselves and their families. The government launched a campaign to lure these women into factories by creating a fictional character they called “Rosie the Riveter.” The campaign worked beyond their wildest expectations and over 18 million women were part of the workforce by the end of the war. 1942-1944 was an emotionally charged time to live in this country. Women were learning how to balance feminity with their country’s needs and every song in this production reflects their determination.
We hear radio announcements typical of the times done with humor and authenticity by Don Tamblyn with his sound assistant Asuka Anderson. Rachel Ferensowicz is Evelyn Mitchell, the young lady who is determined to defy the feminine stereotype and become a hard-hitting reporter, instead of feminine plaything. Her verbal battles with Mr. Walker (Gabriel Cohen) reflect anger women still feel when they are demeaned because of their sex.
Montá Blair gives a memorable performance as Mrs. Tilney Blair who fights for equal pay for black and whites. She is a realist who fears her daughter Biddie (Angel Reyes) will suffer social rejection if she marries her blind boyfriend Henry Biondi (Eric Jepsen). Monica Lenk is Evelyn’s sister so in love with Robert Lampley (Nate Smith) that she enlists in the WAACS and marries him before he is shipped overseas. Although the scenes we see on stage are fiction, they are based on real events of the time. The costumes are vintage forties with the short skirts, the penciled seams to simulate nylons on the girls’ legs, the hats, and the scarves the “rosies” wore to protect their hair from the machinery they ran. The mood of the piece is reinforced by its setting: The audience sits in the hold of the SS Red Oak Victory, the very ship the characters in the play are building.
This production is an energetic, emotionally charged musical event about a memorable and exciting time in American history, with stirring original music by Mitchell Covington, directed with true vision by Kathryn G. McCarty, who also authored the script and lyrics. It is an ensemble piece and although every character has his moment to shine, the overall effect is a group presentation exploring the themes of love, loyalty and discrimination that defined the era. The pace is perfect; the energy never flags and every character IS the person he portrays on stage. “We must remember that our future is built upon the foundation of our past,” said McCarty. “We must keep the flame of World War II bright and build our futures on the knowledge of the dangers of war, and the powers of madmen.”

Indeed, if we are to appreciate where we are today, we need to understand what we once were and RIVETS with its cast of over thirty dedicated and talented performers paints a moving and accurate picture of a time we will never forget
Never in the field of human conflict
was so much owed by so many to so few.
Winston Churchill

IF YOU GO:
Where: Onboard the SS Red Oak Victory
1337 Canal Blvd, Berth 6A
Richmond, CA 94804

When: Until October 24, 2010
Friday & Saturday evenings @ 8:00 p.m.
Saturday & Sunday matinees @ 3:00 p.m.
Tickets: 925 676 5705
www.galateanplayers.com

SUPERIOR DONUTS TAKES THE CAKE

2010-10-12T00:29:00.001-07:00

TheatreWorks presents…
SUPERIOR DONUTS
By
Tracy Letts

Every now and then, we are treated to a theatrical performance that is outstanding on every level. TheatreWorks has outdone its usual solid and professional productions with the staging of Tracy Letts story of a middle aged Viet Nam Vet who has closed the doors to his life. “I was curious about that generation of men, and how they were dealing with that damage now,” said Letts. “As that particular class of boomers leaves middle age and enters into their old age…’” and he continues ” ……the play’s about opening up to your fellow man, in a way that’s generous to the receiver and important to the giver.”

That is a lot to say in a couple of hours and it takes a very talented group of actors to get the points made here across without seeming maudlin or clichéd. Howard Swain is perfectly cast as Arthur, the soured and tired owner of the donut shop who has copped out of life. Arthur, said Swain “runs a little doughnut shop in uptown Chicago.…..he evades the draft, running away to Canada. When he comes back, he’s about 30. He’s missed his formative years. Like the doughnut shop, he’s kind of frozen in time, in 1968.”

The play opens in the little shop in December 2009. That is over thirty years that Arthur ahs been stuck in one place with one attitude and one vision. Lance Gardner as Franco breaks that pattern when he applies for a job in the shop. He is a complete contrast to his boss: he is what a person can become if he reaches for a dream. Franco is filled with hope and excitement about life’s potential despite the unending hardship and poverty he has faced for all his twenty one years. “I hope that the audience will re-discover the vibrancy and possibility of youth,” said Gardner. “As people age and fail to achieve what they once thought possible, they seem to forget that they still can, that there is always hope, and that to make a dream come true, you must awake and take action rather than sleep. They forget that if they don’t climb high enough to fall, they are nowhere.”

And that in a nutshell is what this show tells you. “The play is a box of assorted doughnuts – a vibrant comedy, a gritty coming-of-age drama, a wistful tale of lifelong regrets, a redemptive song of second chances,” says director Leslie Martinson. “Letts explores charged connections between storeowner and his daily customer, an employer and employee, the beat cops and the local merchants, a bookie and his client. Comfort and belonging might be right at hand, but so might shadows from your past.”

The exquisite acting is what sets this story apart from every saga of the disillusioned man getting a new lease on life from n upbeat, unrealistic youngster. The people on that stage are so real it is hard to believe they are acting. Joan Mankin is the homeless Lady, the street philosopher who sees, understands, accepts and survives it all. Michael J. Asberry is the perfect cop who does a lot more for the people on his beat than police work and Julia Brothers will charm you as the lady cop, Randy who is a romantic at heart.

Through all the stage business, all the machinations of the plot, there is Howard Swain and Lance Grander making every scene work not just on a dramatic level but on a deeper psychological reality: the forces that make these people human, and why each character on that stage is every one of us. It is their portrayal and Martinson’s amazingly sensitive direction that elevates this drama into a masterpiece.

“With Superior Donuts, whether you see it as a tale of a Vietnam era man, an encouragement to open oneself to life, the clash of two ways of seeing the world, or all of those things, it is a story full of character and heart,” says dramaturg Vickie Rozell.

This production of SUPERIOR DONUTS is one you will never forget. You will see yourself on that stage, you will remember the heartbreaks you thought would destroy you and realize that through it all there is always hope.

IF YOU GO:
SUPERIOR DONUTS plays through October 31
Tuesdays& Wednesdays 7:30 pm
Thursdays & Fridays 8 pm
Saturdays 2 & 8 pm
Sundays 2 & 7 pm
WHERE: Mt. View Center for the Performing Arts
500 Castro Street
Mountain View
TICKETS: 650 463 1960
www.theatreworks.org

THE SECRETARIES

2010-09-27T20:16:00.000-07:00

THE SECRETARIES
By
Five Lesbian Brothers
Crowded Fire Theater Company
www.cropwdedfire.org
415 255 7846

I am capable of what every other human is capable of.
This is one of the great lessons of war and life.
Maya Angelou

Expect the unexpected when you see the Crowded Fire Theater Company’s production of The Secretaries. You will see five exquisite women dressed to impress sitting at computers looking like the main office of almost any business firm in the world. However, the audience knows immediately that something in this conventional tintype is very, very wrong. “Amidst the secretarial language of clicks and giggles lies a landscape of beautiful high camp and riotous humor that reveals uncomfortable truths about our culture’s attitudes toward women,” says director Marissa Wolf. “The Five Lesbian Brothers walk a delicate line in their writing, offering both an exaggerated artifice and a current of human tenderness that cuts right to one’s heart…..And what better context than side-splitting humor to address the profound cultural fears and assumptions revealed in this play?”

The dialogue, the delivery, the very personas of the five women in this cast is distorted and hilarious, but the plot is somber realism. These women are stereotypes of desperate human beings trying to conform to a world where the rules for them to succeed and to be fulfilled are made by men. It is said that when you suppress someone in one way, their individuality and self-expression will pop out in another. I don’t think I will ever forget the expression on the new girl Patty’s (Elissa Beth Stebbins) face when she is torn between pleasing her boss Susan (Leticia Duart) and being true to the moral values she has always believed true. Peaches (Eleanor Mason Reinholdt) is fat and cannot lose weight. Watch the fury on her face when she looks at Patty and says “You can eat anything and you’re still thin” and you will understand the cruel injustice of the “beauty image” this society has imposed on women. If you are overweight, you don’t fit the picture and you are discarded….and in this play Peaches is fired for just that reason. Her figure is wrong for the job.

The lines in this play are angry and very predictable: They are said by bitter, frightened women determined to find a way to outwit the rules that suppress them. The plot is a thin, ‘We’ll get back at you’ diatribe against men and against heterosexual women. The audience laughs at the satire and the clever remarks, but underneath the wit is a statement that every human being needs to hear.

THE SECRETARIES’ story is not funny. It is real. And it is terrifying. “Holding women to sexualized standards diverts attention from competence and perpetuates gender roles that are separate but by no means equal” said Deborah Rhodes, author of THE BEAUTY BIAS.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the role that secretaries play today in the world of business. THE SECRETARIES examines what happens to a person’s psyche when looks and femininity are the only criteria for survival. The audience sees what can happen when people force themselves conform to a mold they neither accept nor enjoy. “The play examines the ways in which women act as the enforcers of sexism -- turning sexist repression inward by engaging in self-destructive behavior that passes for "self-improvement", says Lisa Kron (one of the five lesbian brothers) on her website. “And, second, it explores the converse notion that women who band together are, by definition, "man-haters." The Brothers explore the "truth" and "myth" of each view with their characteristic irreverent humor.”

“Through parody and camp, THE SECRETARIES walks a fine line, simultaneously exalting and eviscerating constructions of womanhood and gender, attacking feminists and homosexuals right along with mainstream culture,” says dramaturge Sonia Fernandez. “THE SECRETARIES is as shockingly funny and probing today as when it originally ran, in an earlier version in San Francisco seventeen years ago.”

But the Crowded Fire version of this play is far more than a satirical attack on preconceived notions of what a woman should be. It is a beautifully choreographed work of art that combines superb acting, synchronized movement, song and dance into a mesmerizing 90 minutes of social commentary. The costumes are perfect extensions of the characters. The actresses are exaggerations of women every one of us has met and avoided because they are too stylized, too thin and too magazine-perfect to be us.

It is often said that women who are beautiful create expectations they could never ever fulfill; but on the other hand, women who are not slim, or cover-girl gorgeous never have the chance to fulfill any expectation at all. Everyone in this century thinks we have come very far from those narrow guidelines and yet listen to an Australian feminist from the nineties: "Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is, if you don't like it, bad luck - and if you get in my way I'll run you down."

The secretaries in this play band together to murder men because that is what gives them pleasure. The feel imprisoned by the male code of success and they want revenge. This is bone-chilling reality in the style of David Mamet, directed and acted with just enough irony to make it digestible by a talented and thrilling cast of women.

I cannot commend Crowed Fire Theater enough for having the courage to stage this revelatory exposure of what we have not achieved. Do not believe for one moment that women are equal to men, today. We might be able to hold the same positions in business and even government, but we still come home to clean men’s houses, have their babies and mother their children even though we do their jobs even better than they dared to imagine. Do not deluge yourself. Women are not free to be themselves yet and THE SECRETARIES makes this abundantly clear. We still need to act like the definition men have made for us and in this play, we see what can ultimately happen when we rebel.

You can poke a lot of holes in the script and in the clichéd reaction of the characters to each other in this play. Sure, the way they lampoon the demands society and their bosses have made have been said many times before. Nonetheless, THE SECRETARIES makes a statement everyone today needs to hear. It demands that we rebel against these glass prisons we have allowed to be erected if we want to achieve a society where people are people and each one of us can be unique. This production convinces us that we have a long, long way to go to get to where we think we are now.

The thing women have yet to learn is
Nobody gives you power. You just take it.
Roseanne Barr
IF YOU GO
September18-October 9, 2010
Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8p.m.
The Boxcar Playhouse
505 Natoma Street
San Francisco
Tickets: $15-$25 with student/senior rates
www.crowdedfire.org

Bye Bye Birdie in Pacifica

2010-09-26T22:09:00.001-07:00

ONLY ONE WEEKEND LEFT TO SEE BYE BYE BIRDIE
Pacifica Spindrift Players
1030 Crespi Drive
Pacifica, CA 94044
www.pacificaspindriftplayers.com
October 1 & 2@8 p.m.
October 3@ 2 p.m.

IF you want a real “cute attack” add some sparkle to your weekend and go see Spindrift Player’s adorable, energetic and delightful rendition of Michael Stewart’s and Charles Strouse’s musical BYE BYE BIRDIE. “It’s a silly little story about silly little people in a silly little town singing silly little songs with silly little dances,” said director George Mauro. “It’ll be a silly little hoot!”

And he is absolutely right. Twenty-eight enthusiastic, happy people appear on the Spindrift stage, sing and dance their hearts out and captivate the audience from the overture by the Birdie Fan Club with freshly scrubbed, innocent teen-agers roaring: Bye Bye Birdie. I'm gonna miss you so to an imitation Elvis Presley, Conrad Witty (played to writhing, gyrating perfection by Tom Madrigal) right down to the finale when Albert and Rosie decide to tie the knot after 6 long years and move to Pumpkin Falls, Iowa.

In any community production, the direction and pace give it the professional polish that makes it work for an audience, and George Mauro created his own special masterpiece with a willing, hardworking cast as his palette. There are touches in this play that are superb and unforgettable. I doubt if the Broadway production could have surpassed the charm of seeing the sweet and innocent Kim ( Barbara del Castello) in her fuzzy bunny slippers singing “How lovely to be a Woman” or the raw, down home humor of Mae Peterson (Debi Durst) reminding her nerdy son Albert to eat a hot lunch.

The set and the stage co-ordination in this production is nothing less than amazing, in itself a work of visual art. The synchronization of the props and scenery for each segment are choreographed into a fantastic dance done en masse and not one member of this immense cast misses a beat. The pace is everything in this production. There is not a second of dead air on that stage. One has to remind himself over and over again that these people rehearsed their parts after a long day of work or school. They are not professionals who have been trained in theater arts. They are members of our greater community who have donated their time and their creativity to give us a spectacular accomplishment. These are the people next door: the paper boy, the college student, the high school senior trudging home with his back pack of books…all of them have been transformed into real show people if only for the run of the musical they are performing for us. Shannon Maxham’s costumes are works of art and Henry Sellenthin’s set designs give this show the perfect oomph and visual excitement.

You will love every minute of this production: the music, the dancing, the singing and of course the children. This reviewer lost her heart to those children. I can still see Christina Won Pat’s sweet face and hear her lovely voice. I still smile when I think of Hugo (Garrett Hom) disappearing into a trash can with a banana peel on his head and Ursula (Emily Hoover) screaming with love when she sees her idol Conrad at the station. “This is my first production with Spindrift,” said Tom Madrigal. “And I had a ball.”

And so will anyone smart enough to get over to the Pacifica Spindrift Players Theater this weekend. The minute the lights go down, you will shed your troubles and lose yourself in the long ago world of 1958 when we all wore bobby sox and penny loafers; that magic time when little girls dressed up in frothy strapless gowns to dance to the music of the big bands and scream in ecstasy at the sight of crooners like Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and best of the best: Elvis Presley. Now how great is that?

THE BROTHER/SISTER TRILOGY IS HERE

2010-09-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

THE BROTHER/SISTER PLAYS
By
Tarell Alvin McCraney…..
Two Down, One More To Come

Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family. ~Anthony Brandt

In The Red and Brown Water The Brothers Size
Marin Theatre Company Magic Theatre
Through October 10, 2010 Though October 17, 2010

“With In the Red and Brown Water – and in all three of The Brother/Sister Plays – you will find a world that is simultaneously old and new, familiar yet distant,” says director Ryan Rilette. “The setting is a housing project on the Louisiana bayou, but the town is invented and the housing project more symbolic than real. The characters are contemporary, but they exhibit characteristics borrowed from the West African gods for whom they are named…..all these elements combine together to create a world that is uniquely Tarell’s own.”

Marin Theatre’s production of this first play in the Brother /Sister Trilogy is indeed unique on every level. Rilette has combined tribal dance, symbolic language, choreographed staging and symbolic speech to create a parable of what human beings of any color think they need to find a modicum of meaning and peace in their lives. “The people who inhabit the world of the trilogy guide the audience, narrating their own thoughts and actions, peppering the dialogue with ‘he said’ and ‘she exits’, both showing and telling the story,” said dramaturge Margot Melcon. “It is as though they want to make sure you see and hear what’s happening, because they know how important it is.”

It is rare to see something on stage that departs from the usual staging, plot line and dramatic curve that has become standard in theater productions today. The Red and Brown Water is more than a play, beyond mere dance and far more textured than simple storytelling. We meet Oya (Lakisha May) whose passion is running… so gifted that she could well become a champion…yet she gives it all up to care for her dying mother. It is this decision that redirects her journey through life into one that is both uncomfortable and ill suited to her personality, her physical make up and the dreams she once had. Shango (Isaiah Johnson) introduces her to sex, a man named for the god of thunder and lightening. He is courageous; a womanizer who captures her heart despite all the warnings from family and friends that he will never be hers alone. She marries Ogun (Ryan Vincent Anderson) who represents the god of iron, a hard-working, loyal man, steady and kind but, sadly, not very exciting. Yet, of all the people on stage this was the character who seemed most real to me.

Oya’s conflicting loyalties are the driving force of this play. Her inability to have children makes her believe she can give Shango nothing of real value and in the surprisingly twisted ending; she does manage to find something she thinks will satisfy him. It is that very something that kills her.

“The ritual onstage is taking these very old stories…and playing them out with new voices, new bodies, set in new and present times,” says the author, Tarell Alvin McCraney. “Hoping to create evenings that make something powerful, something distant, yet present, something else.”

And that is pretty much the sense the audience gets when the play is finished: Something huge and cosmic happened on that stage that relates to each of us …and yet in many ways … it doesn’t. The dance was powerful, the presentation disturbing and strong and the acting wonderful to see and yet…and yet…were those characters people we know? Did they respond to the forces that threatened them in ways we understand? This production is a parable that teaches us about ourselves, a story that shows how each decision we make in life alters the course we take and changes our ultimate destiny. Oya begins as an athlete of great promise and ends as a human sacrifice, unable to come to terms with her own inadequacies and blaming them for not capturing the love she desires.

In contrast, Magic Theatre’s production of The Brothers Size, magnificently directed by Octavio Solis, is immediate, compelling and unforgettable because it is a story that reflects every one of us. Every character is so real, we feel he is us on that stage, agonizing about human loyalties, sexuality, right and wrong. “The Brothers Size wrecked me,” said Loretta Greco, Producing Artistic Director of The Magic. “It dares to speak of things not spoken. The sublime simplicity of the text leaves room for actors to bring their most fearless work and for us to open our muscular hearts and fertile imaginations.”

The cast of this second play in the trilogy are the characters they play. Joshua Elijah Reese is an older Ogun, the steady, kind and reliable man we met in the first play, but Reese gives him strength of character, goodness and moral fiber that simply is not present in The Red and Brown Waters. In The Brothers Size, he is the force that creates a sense of family; that loyalty and need to protect that defines blood relatives and differentiates them from friends. He is a courageous, strong man, the kind we all want to become. He talks of holding his mother’s hand and watching his brother Oshoosi (Tobie Windam) play, knowing he would always be responsible for his well-being because he was the oldest. Windham is the very essence of the devil-may-care baby brother, just out of prison and coming to terms with his homosexuality. He has so absorbed Oshoosi’s persona that when he is admonished by his brother, he radiates the very guilt and defiance that defines his character. We met a much younger Elegba (Jared McNeill) in the first play, a loveable boy who fathers a child while he himself is still in his teens. In this second part of the trilogy, Elegba (Alex Ubokudom) has grown up into a playboy, a fun loving daredevil who successfully lures Oshoosi into a trap that will send him back to prison.

“The situations are as comical as they are lyrical, and every moment we probe yields more insight into family, manhood and brotherhood,” said Director Octavio Solis. “And we are reminded, page-by-page that this work is a love story. A love story between men with larger hearts than they know how to express.”

Indeed the effect of this particular play is so mesmerizing that the 90 minutes the actors are on stage melt into an instant; an instant when we all realize just what family can mean and what it should be to each of us. We ask ourselves if we would be as strong as Ogun and send our own brother away into the unknown, away from our own protective wing because we know it will save him. Do we have the courage to allow the members of our family to become the unique individuals they need to be instead of forcing them into our own mold? “Ogun wants Oshoosi to be this kind of black man and Elegba says, no, you’re like me: you’re this kind of black man,” said Solis. “……The real danger is revealing the truth about each other and about themselves.”

The Brothers Size will break your heart. It will inspire you. It will force you to look at who you are and where your loyalties must lie. Whatever you conclude, you will never forget the impact of this amazing production on the Magic Theatre stage. The direction is a work of art; the acting, cosmic. There is not one wasted movement, not one lost word. You will leave the theater feeling as though you just saw what your own life can really be about and hope that you can live what you have just seen.

IF YOU GO:

Information on both plays and the ACT production coming at www.BrotherSisterPlays.org.
The Red and Brown Water: www.marintheatre.org
The Brothers Size: www.magictheatre.org.

Great Theater continues in Ashland

2010-08-01T23:37:00.000-07:00

OSF 2010 CONINUES ITS TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE

Whenever I drive up to Ashland to indulge myself in their magnificent productions, I realize how inadequate most of the theater in the Bay Area can be. The plays produced by this amazing company never cease to delight me. They are professionally done, beautifully acted and presented with infinite taste. This is one of the few regional theater companies in the country that consistently operate in the black and once you have seen their productions you will understand why.

HAMLET is a particularly difficult play to make fresh and new because it has been done so many times and its lines repeated over and over again. To be able to make this play seem real on stage is a daunting challenge and director Bill Rauch used modern techniques and dress in an attempt to make it more timely. In many ways, he succeeded and in just as many, he did not. I fear I am an “old school person,” and have always loved the tragedies presented just the way Shakespeare meant them to be staged. Rauch sums up his challenges in this production beautifully: “As interpreters of any Shakespeare text, we are always challenged with how to unpack up to four settings at once: the story’s historical time and place, Elizabethan London (in which the original production was experienced), our audience’s contemporary and local context, and finally, whatever time and place the director and designers select to present the story. ….Taking our cue from Shakespeare’s desire to make direct connections with his own audience, we have chosen a cotemporary setting.”

However the “contemporary setting” seems just a bit inconsistent, and as a result, the characters are not as clearly defined as they are in the original version. Ophelia (Susannah Flood) is a modern, very liberated Ophelia and is actually wired in her speech to Hamlet (Dan Donohue) in the famous eavesdropping scene. Polonius is Richard Elmore who can play any character in any setting with complete veracity. Unfortunately the other cast members did not convince me that they were real people. If Ophelia is a “modern woman” she really would not care if Hamlet was out to “get” his stepfather…indeed she would “give him space.” However, she redeems herself in her death scene which is lovely, poignant and very true.

The play within a play totally lost me. It is done in rap which is very entertaining, but it sacrifices the dramatic impact of exposing Claudius (Jeffrey King) as the murderer. If I hadn’t seen the play before, I would never have figured out why Claudius got so riled up at the skit he was watching. Dan Donohue is an interesting Hamlet, angry, confused and obviously upset but the source of his malaise was unclear to me. His mother, Gertrude (Greta Oglesby) creates little sympathy and doesn’t seem very loyal to either her son or her husband. Jeffrey King in a post show discussion says that in this version, she has no idea that her new husband murdered her old one and cannot understand why Hamlet is so upset by their marriage.

“Ultimately, though, Hamlet mocks us for daring to pluck out the heart of his mystery,” says Rauch.

Indeed Hamlet is a disturbing character but in trying to update emotions that are timeless, we lost the sense that this is a human tragedy on every level. It read more like a dark and shocking horror story. Hamlet plays until October 30 in the Angus Bowmer Theatre

She Loves Me is the diamond of this season. It is a fluffy, frivolous and very sweet love story, perfectly staged, and beautifully paced, a bon-bon to savor long after the final note is sung. “What is it about this intimate story of the now-vanished Old World 1930’s Budapest Parfumerie and its beloved, lovelorn employees, Amalia (Lisa McCormick) and Georg (Mark Bedard) that inspires such constant reinvention? Why do these two social misfits enchant us so completely?” asks director Rebecca Taichman and she answers:”For me, the secret lies in how sublimely real the characters are. This is a group of very real, very lonely working-class shop employees looking for real love. ….My task as a director is to capture the story’s timeless incandescent charm. I know that my heart has opened to its trembling magic.”

And she does her job just right. The singing, the dancing the poignancy of these two wonderful characters, pen pals who love each other in their letters and hate each other in real life is so very human…a not to be missed production on every level. A highlight is the choice satirical restaurant scene with Dan Donohue as the headwaiter and Eddie Lopez as the busboy that defies description. It is no more than ten minutes of this 3 hour production, but it is unforgettable…as is every performance in this gorgeous, spot on production of a time long gone and heartaches as modern and new as tomorrow. She Loves Me plays at the Angus Bowmer Theatre through October 30.

The outdoor Elizabethan Theatre opened June 1 with Twelfth Night, which I missed this year so that I could see Hamlet. I did see Henry the IV, Part One and I loved every minute of it. I am not a fan of the history plays, but this one pulled at my heart strings like no other. “Although Henry IV, Part One takes place in 15th century England, it stands as proof that human nature does not change all that much,” says director Penny Metropulos. “We could find a Hal today, a young man of great promise who parties all night, shuns responsibility and is teetering dangerously on the precipice of dissolution.”

The theme of this play is timeless. It is about family fights and a father and son relationship that solidifies as Henry and Hal join together to defend their country. The play is beautifully staged, fast paced and filled with the very conflicts fathers and sons face today in their effort to bond to one another and appreciate each other’s values and needs. Henry IV, Part One continues until October 9 in The Elizabethan Theatre.

I have always loved The Merchant of Venice. Way back in 1958, I saw Katherine Hepburn as Portia and I still thrill at the memory of the way she infused justice into law. I cannot hear “the quality of mercy is not strained….” without remembering the magic of that evening in Stratford, Connecticut so very long ago. The OSF production is an interesting one and the Shylock (Anthony Heald) is right on the mark. “Is Shylock a comic villain over whom the good Christians triumph…or is he a noble and long-suffering victim at the mercy of evil tormenters?” asks director Bill Rauch. “In a play in which money drives every relationship, we are warned of the consequences of demonizing the “other” and commodifying those we love. “

This production is good but not great, meaningful, but not moving. However it must be said Armando Duran manages to steal the entire show as The Prince of Arragon, Portia’s suitor. The Merchant of Venice is an important play to see because of its plot and because it makes us all question our preconceived notions about race. It is well done and its themes are as important to day as they were in Elizabethan times. This production continues until October 10 in the Elizabethan Theatre.

I loved Well by Lisa Kron partly because it is so very Jewish in its mother/daughter conflicts (and I am all too familiar with those family wars) and partly because the acting is the best I have seen on any stage in a very long time. It has always been my theory that if the cast is excellent, even Mary Had A Little Lamb would be a thrilling experience. Terri McMahon is one of my favorite actresses and she did not disappoint me in this provocative drama. She plays the author, Lisa Kron and she elevates her character from a complaining and shallow human being into a person like every one of us: conflicted, disturbed and trying to understand the forces that made her who she is today. Her mother is Ann (Dee Maaske), and the character Maaske creates is so true to what all daughters see in the woman who bore them that you do not doubt her for a moment. “Well is obviously about issues of illness and wellness,” says director James Edmondson.

Lisa says the play is not about her mother. “It’s not about how she has been sick for years and years and years….”

And Ann says, “This is not about you and me talking. It’s about a bigger sense of making things make sense and finding a pattern that will make things make sense.”

Huh?

The plotline is weak and the message unclear, but these magnificent actresses paint every moment on stage in such vibrant colors that you only realize these script problems after you leave the theater. What you do feel is that you have seen a real mother-daughter relationship just like the one you could have had with your mom with all the love, hate, frustration, resolution, laughter and tears that involves. It is all there and under Edmondson’s direction, it touches every member of the audience. “So. A love song, a mystery play,” says Edmondson. “A play within a play. Maybe that’s what Well is about. Maybe.”

Who knows? Maybe it is just a delicious, amusing and provocative slice of real life. Whatever the play is supposed to be, the treat of seeing these two superb actresses bring it to life, ably supported by Brent Hinkley, G. Valmont Thomas, Gina Daniels and K.T. Vogt is unforgettable theater done with unexpected and delightful panache. Sorry to say Well ended June 18, but I have no doubt it will reappear in local theaters soon so that you to see it and evaluate it yourself. Perhaps you can tell us what it is really about.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF at ACTORS THEATRE OF SAN FRANCISCO

2010-07-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

ACTOR’S THEATRE OF SAN FRANCISCO PRESENTS….
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
By
Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams is a master storyteller whose words are as poetic as they are true to the society we have created and the kind of people it has forged. He says, “I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”

The characters Williams gives us are unforgettable because they are us. At some point in our lives, we are all a Maggie determined to survive and overcome the hurdles life has put in her path or a Brick who escapes into oblivion. We are all Big Mama(Hannah Marks) desperate to believe her family is perfect, her husband really loves her and she loves him. Those of us whose material success has not given them peace or happiness are just as angry, just as unreasonable, just as controlling as the Big Daddy we see on that stage. We look at how we fought to make our goals happen and realize that our money can buy anything but what really matters. It is these searing and true portrayals that are the reason Williams is considered one of America’s greatest playwrights.

Tennessee Williams’ prose is pure poetry. His use of repetition for emphasis makes every speech a song. Because all his dramas have immense sociological and psychological implications, I always prefer seeing his plays in an intimate setting rather than a huge theatre where the actors are so far away and the set so elaborate that I don’t relate to each character as a person. The 77 seat Actor’s Theatre is ideal for this kind of presentation. Each member of the audience feels that he is eavesdropping the Pollitt family as they claw their way to the top of the family hierarchy. There is no wasted word, no meaningless action, no slowing of the pace in this beautiful production at Actor’s Theatre. Director Keith Phillips has choreographed the movement on stage so that every speech is emphasized by the movement of the characters and yet nothing seems artificial or forced. The entire three hour production is a non-stop rat-a-tat-tat of repartee as every member of the family tries to get the upper hand and diminish the others. The dialogue seethes bubbles and often explodes. Each character tries to destroy one another pushing emotional buttons without mercy and with the accuracy of William Tell aiming at that apple.

This is a moving and timely play about the Pollitts, a dysfunctional Southern family fighting one another for Big Daddy’s favors. They have come together to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th birthday on his plantation in Mississippi on a hot August evening in 1955. Big Daddy has been undergoing endless diagnostic procedures and when the play opens the doctors have told him his only illness is a spastic colon. Big Daddy is overjoyed because he has had a reprieve from death and is determined to live what time he has left to the fullest. He tells his favorite son Brick that it took the shadow of death to open the door for him and says, “Life is important. The human animal buys and buys and buys; he hopes one of his purchases will buy him life everlasting.”

The rest of the family knows that Big Daddy has had no reprieve at all. His cancer is so advanced that surgery will not help him and he is on his way out of this life and into the next. Big Daddy, like all of us, thinks that he is eternal and so he has never made his will. The eldest son Gooper (Sean Hallinan) and the two wives, Mae (Carol Robinson) and Maggie are vying for a place in that unwritten document and Brick is far too drunk to care.

Christian Phillips is the most interesting Big Daddy I have ever seen on stage. Big Daddy is usually portrayed as narrow minded, but canny redneck, tough as rawhide, who pulled himself up from poverty to wealth without regard for the people he trampled as he climbed his ladder of success. He manipulates his family like a puppeteer dangles them like marionettes ignoring their need to be individuals. Christian Phillips’ Big Daddy is bigger than life and his performance is no less than thrilling. There is not a false note in his persona; indeed he dominates every scene he is in. He is mesmerizing and has the audience in the palm of his hand the moment he walks on stage.

Phillips portrays a man frustrated and angry at the unexpected results his wealth created. Big Daddy Pollitt is a man all of us have seen before: a successful man who uses his money to lavish what he never had on his family and then discovers that the very luxury and ease he has provided has squelched their ambition and sanded down the challenges that give life its zest and excitement. He surveys what he has wrought with disgust and defeat. Tennessee Williams explains, “Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.”

Those vanities and conceits have smothered the Pollitt family. Big Daddy realizes that his two sons do not have the grit, the strength or the ambition to accomplish what he has done. He is faced with a family of weak parasites who repel him with their lack of drive….except for Maggie. Maggie is determined to grab her dreams by the same coat tails that he did. The two respect and love one another because of the steel core each has that gives them the strength to fight for what they want.

Jennifer Welch is a deliciously human Maggie. You cry with her over her broken dreams and you respect her for her desperate attempt to make this marriage work despite her husband’s obvious distaste for everything she represents. She is a Maggie like no other, vindictive and scheming, yet so very real that one must admire her courage and her determination to save her marriage at any cost. It is very difficult to portray Maggie in a sympathetic light, but Welch manages to make us understand her character even as we recoil at her merciless, amoral and unscrupulous behavior. Maggie cannot stop her marriage from crumbling despite her every effort to paste it back together. Her husband wants nothing to do with her and she knows she is the cause of his hatred. Maggie has always seemed selfish and hard to me, but not so in this production. Jennifer Welch shows us a woman who aches to repair the unintentional damage she did to the man whom she loves more than anything or any one in the world. When she compares herself to a cat on a hot tin roof you realize the futility of all she is trying to do: "What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? I wish I knew. . . . Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can. . . ." Welch gives us an exquisite performance, touching and sympathetic to the core.

Brick is Big Daddy’s favorite son: a former athlete and sports announcer who has descended into the depths of alcoholism, hating his marriage, hating his family and despising himself. The Bricks I have seen in other productions wallow in self pity and dissatisfaction that is all the more difficult to swallow because it is uncomfortably real. However, Nicholas Russell’s interpretation adds a deeper dimension to the role. He gives us a disillusioned man who reached for his own star and could not understand why his grasp was so far from his reach. The shame of homosexuality and the shadow of guilt it has cast on Brick Politt is the driving force of the play. To Brick, the only pure love he has ever given or received was from Skipper, a man so torn by his own conflicted loyalties that he killed himself with alcohol. Brick is well on the way to ending his own life the same way because alcohol is the only way he can escape his own personal hell. He tells his wife and his father over and over again that he needs to drink until “That click I get in my head makes me peaceful.”

The father and son have no real connection; they live on opposite pages of reality. Big Daddy tells his son he wants them to have a real conversation but Brick answers, “There just don’t seem to be much to say.” His pain at the cruelty of life is so great he cannot reduce it to one source. It defies definition: “It’s not one thing, it’s the whole thing.” He says.

This is the third time Actors Theatre has presented this beautiful play, and the production they offer is professional and polished, a gem on every level. There is no weak link in this cast; every character is perfectly drawn. This play explores what happens to the human psyche when truth, ambition and fantasy collide. “We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it,” says Williams. The Politt house is indeed aflame with no way to save it.

Actor’s Theatre is to be commended for taking on such a complex, challenging play, one that is so difficult to make meaningful to today’s audiences. Few women in the twenty-first century would stand for the kind of verbal abuse that both Maggie and Big Mama receive. Women today do not have to fawn over relatives they detest or allow their men folk to diminish them to survive. As I listened to the hatred, the anger and the merciless jabs the characters thrust at one another, I was reminded of the time when men dominated their families and women accepted their abuse because they relied on their husbands for every advantage, from the food they ate and the roof over their heads to the money they could spend. I remembered the way men used women and battered them with words, deeds and fists because they believed that was their right. Women had no legal recourse and no avenue of appeal. We often wonder whether women have achieved real equality with men or if they have only taken on more tasks for less compensation, emotionally and physically. If Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does nothing else, it convinces us that we have come a very long way, no matter how far we still have to go.

IF YOU GO:
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Wednesdays –Saturdays
8:00 PM until September 4, 2010
Actor’s Theatre of San Francisco
855 Bush Street (Btw Mason & Taylor)
San Francisco, CA 94108

Tickets and Information:
ph: 415-345-1287
fax: 707-748-4327
alt: 415-345-9582
information@actorstheatresf.org

COWARDLY THINGS: an unforgettable theatrical experience

2010-07-14T22:50:00.001-07:00

COWARDLY THINGS
Reflections and inspirations from all things Noel Coward
Starring CINDY GOLDFIELD & SCRUMBLY KOLDEWYN
Directed by Michael Phillis
July 8-31
New Conservatory Theatre Center
25 Van Ness Avenue
San Francisco, CA

Sarcastic or sentimental, bitchy or sweet,
There has never been anyone quite like him.
John Kander

If you see no other production this summer, you must get out of your chair, shut the TV and expand your mind with Cindy Goldfield and Scrumbly Koldewyn in their intelligent and mind stretching production COWARDLY THINGS. This is a cabaret that is more than its music, better than its lyrics and finer than the themes the combination of song and dance presents: it is an unforgettable gem: a musical and social statement that casts a searing light on the human condition and the lies we tell ourselves about who we really are. The show is directed by the award winning actor, playwright and solo performer Michael Phillis but one cannot tell if it is his direction or the chemistry of these two talented performers that makes this cabaret such a memorable event. I suspect it is both. The set was designed by Kuo-Hao Lo and it is a masterpiece of understatement: elegant, tasteful and never intrusive. It completes the show’s statement but never overwhelms the movement or the mood of the production.

The songs were chosen to offer a musical exploration of Noel Cowards works with a few additions that are composed in his spirit. Noel Coward’s wit and social commentary delighted audiences for six decades until his death in 1973. He is recognized as a master showman, one of the finest talents of the Twentieth Century. It is amazing how this particular selection of over thirty tunes speaks to us as urgently today as each song did when it was written. The two singers added two songs by Sandy Wilson from The Boyfriend ( A Room in Bloomsbury & Poor Little Pierrette), songs by Rogers & Hart and a few others with a nice smattering of Cole Porter. The show ends with the unforgettable Cole Porter masterpiece, You Don’t Know Paree.

Goldfield and Koldewyn have been performing together since 1994 and the chemistry between them is magic on every level. They received the Dean Goodman Choice Award for Cabaret performance in 2000 and celebrated their 10th anniversary show at NCTC in 2004. They revive an often ignored tradition of elegant, sophisticated presentation, done is perfect taste.

This is a show that must be seen and heard to be properly appreciated. Words alone cannot recreate the spell cast by these two very talented artists. Koldewyn was the founding member of The Cockettes and his first original show tunes were for their shows. His musical The Cockettes’ Pearls Over Shanghai is currently enjoying a revival at the Hypnodrome in San Francisco. Goldfield is a two time recipient of both the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle and the Dean Goodman Choice awards. These two performers sing, dance and present us with a musical feast so delicious, one hates to see it end. “When we began the work of putting together this show, we began to see things with our usual Goldfield & Koldewyn slant- to deconstruct and tangentialize, to take a cue from his mad social commentary on everything under the sun, to sing a Coward song and see where it leads us.”

It leads the audience into an evening of delight…superb music, provocative lyrics in a setting to die for performed by two superbly gifted human beings. Don’t miss his show. It is a jewel.
The wit and wisdom of Noel Coward's lyrics will be as lively
and contemporary in 100 years' time as they are today.
Tim Rice

IF YOU GO:
When: July 8-31, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 pm in NCTC’s Theater 3
Tickets: $20-$28 available at 415 861 8972; www.nctcsf.org

BECOMING WHO I WILL BE

2010-07-13T22:00:00.000-07:00

THIS IS ME

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited
And gives us what we have earned. - Gerald Brenan

I have always had a need to communicate my thoughts to others. I began when I was ten years old, composing essays and poems sending them to magazines and newspapers. That writing eventually expanded into several published books. I have two degrees in education because I am compelled to teach others what I think I know. It is my way of sending my ideas out into other minds and testing their validity in the area of public discussion. That way, I can alter and adjust my own thinking and avoid getting stuck in one channel. These two needs dovetailed when I took to the stage to do comedy at the age of 71. The comedy soon branched out into storytelling and then cabaret. Sadly, my stories, which are a direct result of my writing and the truest observations I share, are my least attended shows. The comedy and the cabaret are sufficiently different to attract a fan base. My goals have changed as I have aged, but now that I am 77 years old, my goal is to produce compelling shows that break down the preconceptions that age is inept and incapable of creating quality entertainment that appeals to everyone of every era. Creativity is not unique to one person. It is in us all and doesn't stop until we do. Its appeal is universal and enduring. Mine has grown, changed and expanded over the years because I have never let life happen. I have lived it.

This year, I am putting up two shows at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
GRANNY’S GONE WILD is stand up comedy about being an old lady, laughing at the things people think that aging is and loving what I am right now. People often ask,”Why should I listen to jokes about being old?” and I say “Because I am your future….if you are lucky. And isn’t it better to no longer fear the process…because I revel in every wrinkle, every new thing I learn and new way I live. You will too when you get to where I am.” GRANNY’S GONE WILD is comedy at its worst with a touch of song guaranteed to destroy to your digestion. I have the dubious title of THE WORLD’S OLDEST COUGAR and I am on the prowl. I rap about age; I sing about it and I tell jokes about what it has done to me. My show is horrifying proof that even though your body parts drop to your ankles, they still can move with enough zest raise an eyebrow….but nothing else.

My late night show is a revival of AGING IS AMAZING, the show that made the headlines in the London Times in 2008 and won STAR OF THE BRIGHTON FESTIVAL in 2009. It was so well received in Edinburgh in 2008 that I decided to give people who have not seen it a chance to experience an old lady doing a strip tease that excites no one but my chiropractor. I am hoping people will want to indulge their funny bones with my silly songs and parodies. I want to make everyone in the audience need to grow old along with the bouncy, outrageous and delectable me, in a rollicking hour of nonsense.

I will be taking my shows to Dublin after Edinburgh and hope to get them “down under” as soon as I can afford airfare. In the fall I will also present them in the San Francisco Bay Area and try to get them before the rest of the United States before I am too old to romp around like a teen-ager showing off a body that should be kept under wraps.

I still believe in miracles, especially the ones I create myself.

The thing I am most proud of is that I have managed to write, stage and produce my several shows and bring them from San Francisco to Fresno and Marin, across the ocean to Edinburgh and then to London, Brighton and Rome while living on a tiny pension, without any help from anyone. My work has been appreciated and even praised, with four and five star reviews and audiences that return every year to see what else I am up to. I have proven that you don’t need a lot of money to get noticed on a stage and you don’t need a whole team to make you a star. All you need is a dream and the determination to make that dream happen.

I like to be asked why I am doing this when other people my age are playing bingo and sitting in front of a television set, afraid to drive at night, bored by the limitations they think their body has given them and afraid to try something new. My answer is so simple: “Because I can. And because I can, I will.”

My ultimate goal is that my shows become recognized for what they are: a new definition of what aging can be for us all. I so hope that the glass walls I meet wherever I go because I am old and a woman (and believe me both are in operation far more than we believe) will dissolve and everyone my age or older would get out of his chair, put on his tap shoes or his motorcycle helmet his tutu or his body suit, whatever he fancies and dare to fly to the moon, reach for the stars and be more tomorrow than he is today.

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright
The longer we live, and the reason of everything
Appears more clear. - Jean Paul Richter

WOODY GUTHRIE AT MARIN THEATRE COMPANY

2010-06-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Marin Theatre company presents
WOODY GUTHRIE’S AMERICAN SONG
Extended until June 26, 2010

A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it
Or who’s hungry and where their mouth is…
Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie wrote songs about hard times , about the Great Depression , unemployment and war. He was one of our most astute social commentators and he made his point with music. Peter Glazer adapted his songs and writings into a two act production that traces Guthrie’s life and the stunning result is Marin Theatre’s production: WOODY GUTHRIE’S AMERICAN SONG. Glazer directed this musical and the result is a beautifully staged, moving melodic drama, sung by Lisa Asher, Berwick Haynes, Sam Misner, Matt Mueller and Megan Pearl Smith with a three piece band. The pace is perfect, the audience appeal immense. The plot carries Guthrie from his beginnings in Oklahoma and follows him coast to coast from California to New York. The show features over two dozen of his most famous songs blended into a dramatic piece that is unforgettable. It reflects Guthrie’s love of all humanity, his empathy with those who suffer needlessly under an impersonal system that punishes those who lack opportunity.

Guthrie was a figurehead for the folk music movement and inspired musicians like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. He sang about social injustice and he sang about the trials of the common man. "I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose,” he said. “Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are either too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that....songs that run you down or songs that poke fun of you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood."

“When the country was rocked by the financial crisis and people began losing their homes, Woody’s music felt immediate, important, urgent, ‘of the moment,’” said Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis.

Don’t miss this beautifully produced musical drama. It is all Woody Guthrie would have wanted to celebrate his name and carry on the tradition of song that he began. Guthrie has been called the voice of the people. He wrote over 1,000 songs and did more than any other musician to endear American folk music to us all. He is a national treasure and everyone who loves music and believes in its power to heal and to comfort owes it to himself to experience this heartwarming production. This singing is perfection, the melodies infectious, the direction superb: a perfect entertainment on a summer’s night.

IF YOU GO :
Marin Theatre Company
397 Miller Avenue
Mill Valley, CA
415 388 5208
www.marintheare.org

ALL MY SONS AT SAN FRANCISCO'S ACTOR'S THEATRE

2010-06-02T23:31:00.000-07:00

Actor’s Theatre of San Francisco presents:
ALL MY SONS
by
Arthur Miller

Make the lie big. Make it simple.
Keep saying it and eventually they will believe it.
Adolph Hitler

"A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong--if there is any root to life,” said Arthur Miller. “Because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long."

In ALL MY SONS, Miller shows us what can happen when we believe that all that matters is the pursuit of our own ambitions. His play asks us to examine what our moral responsibility is to one another. Charles Keller (Nicholas Russell) tells his father, Joe (Randy Hurst) ”Once and for all you must know that there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it.”

But Joe disagrees. “There is nothing bigger than the family,” he says and he convinces himself that his motivation excused his crime when he sent defective airplane cylinders to the US Armed Forces and caused the death of 21 pilots in World War II. “Joe Keller is a Tragic Hero of our time whose fate is brought about by a flaw within his own character examined through the conflict of responsibility,“says director Joyce Henderson who also gives a spectacular and sensitive performance as Joe’s wife Kate. “Joe’s trouble is not that he is unable to tell right from wrong, but that his cast of mind cannot admit that he, personally, has any viable connection with its consequences.”

This play is set in 1947 and yet its themes are as important today as they were 63 years ago. All Miller’s plays have an immediacy about them because they reflect his preoccupation with "the powers of economic crisis and political imperatives which bad twisted, torn, eroded, and marked everything and everyone I laid eyes on,” he said. “So that by force of circumstance I came early and unawares to be fascinated by sheer process itself. How things connected. How the native personality of a man was changed by his world, and the harder question, how he could in turn change his world. . . . You can't understand anything unless you understand its relation to its context."

This is a difficult play to stage. We must love the characters even as we abhor their actions. Joe Keller is not a bad man although he did terrible things: He was responsible for the deaths of 21 pilots; he shifted the blame for his actions on his partner and refused to accept that the price of his actions cost him his own son. “It’s dollars and cents, Chris,” he tells his son. “Half the God damned country has to go if I go.”

And later, “A man can’t be a Jesus in the world.”

Actors Theatre has done a magnificent job of bringing this play to life on its stage. The cast cannot be complimented enough for portraying characters that existed before most of them were born who reflected values that hopefully have softened with time. The people on their stage were real human beings…so believable they could have lived next door to every member of the audience. The result was a moving, meaningful drama that is a pertinent as today’s headlines.

Actor’s Theatre is a small group of dedicated people with limited resources that never shrinks from the challenge of bringing important theater to its loyal audience and making it come alive. Every production is a credit to the acting community.

Do not miss ALL MY SONS. The play will make you re-evaluate your own motives and examine your personal integrity. It takes a talented and dedicated cast to touch your heart and still make you wonder at man’s unintentional inhumanity to man. Joyce Henderson’s dedicated cast do just that. It is a joy to watch them perform. The direction strikes just the right note; the acting is beautifully paced and true on every level.

Actors Theatre’s next production will be Tennessee Williams CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF opening early July. Once again this creative and enterprising group will show us that theater is timeless when it addresses the eternal human condition and exposes its universal hopes and fears.

It’s not whether you win or lose,
It’s how you place the blame
Oscar Wilde

IF YOU GO:
Performances 8 PM through June 26, 2010
Wednesday –Saturday
855 Bush Street
San Francisco, CA
TICKETS: www.ticketweb.com
415 345 1287

WHO AM I?

2010-04-20T19:24:00.001-07:00

WHAT I SEE

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.
The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over
And let the Beautiful Stuff out.” -- Ray Bradbury

I walked into the Octopus Lounge not long ago and there, at the door was a very young man carding everyone before he stamped their hands and allowed them into the inner sanctum. I paused in front of him and I smiled. So did he.

I waited for him to ask me for my Driver’s License. I smiled again. He stamped my hand. “Don’t you want to see my ID?” I asked.

He laughed and motioned me through the door. I didn’t move. “I thought you HAD to check everyone’s identification before they can enter a bar,” I said. “Isn’t that the law?”

“OK,” he said. “Show me your driver’s license.”

I handed it to him but he didn’t even glance at it. “Good picture, isn’t it?” I said.

He nodded and I entered the bar, but I was really puzzled. I KNEW he hadn’t really read my birth date because the print was very small and you had to squint to see it: OCT. 11, 1933. How on earth did he know I was over 21? I didn’t feel any different than the other people in that bar. Did I have some mysterious characteristic that told him I was old enough to drink?

Not long after that, I had a blind date with a lovely young man, nine years my junior. We decided to have a meal at a late night college hang-out in Berkeley. We walked in the door and the joint was jumping (as they said back when I frequented joints that jumped). As soon as the two of us entered, the place became silent. The waitress (who was blonde, lithe and six feet tall and towered over both of us ) stooped over and said with an” I’ll bet anything they’re both hard of hearing” expression on her not-yet twenty-year-old face, “Were you looking for someone?”

My date, whose name was Brian and had a very short Irish temper, said, “No. We want to eat dinner.”

She smiled and the shine of her teeth was blinding. “Follow me,” she said taking those giant steps that healthy Viking types take. We sprinted behind her to a table in the middle of the chaos (that had resumed). “I prefer a booth,” gasped Brian. She walked VERY fast.). “And I need to sit next to my lady so I hear what she is saying.”

Our waitress patted his balding head and assumed an “I knew they couldn’t hear, poor old things” expression. “Of course,” she said and ushered us to a booth opposite the Ladies Room in the back hall. “Will this work?” she roared. “Would you like a beer?”

“I’d like tea,” said Brian, “Decaffeinated…and you, darling?”
I smiled up at the waitress and across at my new paramour. “I’ll have what he’s having,” I said. “But I take mine with caffeine.”

At this point, another couple came into the place and the waitress waved them over to a table without leaving our side. “Why didn’t you usher THEM to their seats the way you did us?” I asked.

This time she patted MY head. “Because they can walk,” she said. “I’ll go get your tea.”

I turned to Brian, who was cleaning his glasses and shouted into his good ear. “Was it me or was she being condescending?”

Brian frowned. “WHAT?” he said.

The next day, a very tall, very idealistic Indian student at Stanford invited me to trip the light fantastic (as they used to say when I did not risk a hip to trip it) with him at Roble Gym on an undergraduate dance-party night. I was delighted and I dressed in a full skirt, high heels and a loose blouse (to set up a bit of a breeze when we waltzed.) The two of us entered the auditorium. The music blared. All the dancers moved instantly to the left of the dance floor with high energy and great zeal. Aravind (my sweet cub-let) and I stood isolated on the far right. “Why did they move away to the other corner?” I asked my stand-in for Fred Astaire.

“They’re afraid they’ll step on you,” he said. “Let’s dance.”

And we did. We waltzed, we lindy-ed, we two-stepped we swung, I in my swirling skirt, he in his beautiful, un-calloused bare feet. As we left I distinctly heard one of the other dancers say, “Why did Aravind bring his grandma to the dance? It is awfully late for someone her age to be out, don’t you think? “

Her partner said, “That isn’t his Grandmother, stupid. She is Jewish. It must be his professor.”

“Well,” said the young lady, hiking up her jeans to cover her navel and clucking her gold-ringed tongue. “That’s one way to get an A.”

The next morning I awoke, my head filled with lilting memories of a night well spent and looked in the mirror. I saw a tiny very old lady who looked like my deceased mother after a hard day throwing insults at the cruel, angry world she created. I was shocked. How did SHE get in here? I closed my eyes to erase the image and recalled those wonderful moments moving to the soaring rhythms of Johann Strauss in that lovely boy's arms. The imprint of that soaring melody filled my heart and I could feel the way it propelled my feet across the waxed floor of that magic gymnasium. I opened my eyes overwhelmed with the beauty of that memory. I looked once more in the mirror and this time I saw ME.

“Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.” -- Les Brown

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD IS BACK

2010-04-18T23:17:00.001-07:00

Theatreworks presents…
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Prejudice is the child of ignorance.
William Hazlitt

If you have not read this book or seen the movie starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, you have missed one of the most important stories of the last century defining where America was in the thirties and the direction we dare to hope it has gone. In 1960, Harper Lee wrote this semi-autobiographical novel about her father and her own loss of innocence when she comes face to face with the harsh realities of prejudice and anger in Macomb, Alabama. This play is something every person who wants to understand his humanity and the responsibility it entails must see. I cannot say the Theatreworks production lives up to the strength of the book, but it is a good show and several actors keep the pace moving toward its horrifying yet satisfying conclusion.

The book sold over thirty million copies and has been translated into over forty languages. The very reading of it makes a huge difference in peoples’ lives. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and to this day has never been out of print. “As American as pecan pie and courtroom drama, TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD is also a universal story, pitting humanity’s potential for compassion against its proclivity for hate,” says Director Robert Kelly. “It contemplates injustice through the unformed and uncomprehending eyes of a child….It also articulates a cautionary lesson for any democracy that the minority may not always make the right or the honorable choice.”

The novel’s central character, Atticus Finch is patterned after Lee’s father and that character has had a tremendous impact on the legal profession’s vision of what an honorable lawyer can be. He has become the personification of someone who can walk in the shoes of his clients and understand why they most do what they do to survive. Anthony Newfield does a fine job of portraying Atticus, a character bigger than life on a multitude of levels, and Howard Swain who plays three different characters with artistic integrity and heart steals this reviewer’s heart. His wife, Nancy Carlin plays a character not in the book, Miss Maudie Atkinson and it is she who narrates the story. Rod Gnapp is the red-neck, prejudiced, hateful Southern cracker, Bob Ewell. He plays his part to perfection, never over-acting, always too real for comfort.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a difficult challenge for any theater company because it has been done so well in so many different media. The book is a masterpiece; the movie unforgettable, a classic of its kind. It is all but impossible to cram a dense, beautifully written novel into a two hour play. Christopher Sergel’s dramatization is good but not great. The children somehow get lost in the shuffle of scenes moving back and forth. Characters that should have shone were lost in the direction. Still, the play itself is too important to miss. See it; think about it and ponder the realities of the injustice every minority faces that still is glossed over by the majority. “Can we grow into caring and responsible adults in a world dominated by conflicts between races, governments, religions and political points of view?” asks Kelley. “TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD shows us a world of intolerance through the eyes of a girl and a country filled with immense hope and unlimited potential. America would grow into a better place than the one we see in Alabama, 1935.”

The question we must ask ourselves as the final curtain descends on this disturbing and socially important drama, “Is Robert Kelley right? Has this country really improved enough given what we know and what has happened in our turbulent angry history? Are things really different for people of color, for people who are out of the conventional accepted box?

I am not sure they are.

IF YOU GO:

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD continues through May 9, 2010

WHERE:
Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts
500 Castro Street, Mountain View, CA

TICKETS & INFO: 650 463 1960 or www.theatreworks.org

I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

ALONE ISN'T LONELY ANYMORE

2010-04-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

SINGLES MEETING SINGLES

Happiness never decreases by being shared.
The Buddha
It isn’t easy being single in the Bay Area. It isn’t easy being single, period. “But you have to be happy with yourself first before you can have a relationship that lasts,” Trent, a twenty-five year old poet told me. “It was when I was most content living alone that I started dating my current girlfriend. We’ve been together for 3 years.”
Is that the secret? Do you have to love being single before you can shack up with someone? Do you have to get used to the silence, get a dog to welcome you and learn to listen to your favorite music with no one there beside you? ”I’m happy alone, too,” said Michael Hearn, a sometime bartender, sometime philosopher in his late thirties. “But there are times when I get lonely. The Singles Scene here in San Francisco is really a tough situation for everyone. You have to learn to embrace rejection to survive. If you can do that, you can do anything. After all, there are a million ways to say no and you have to recognize them. Yes is yes.”
Hearn has dated them all: young, old, smart, dumb, black, white, red and yellow…and if he hasn’t dated them, he has watched them try to connect with each other at the bar where he serves them the drinks that ease the tension and mask the fear. “If I waited for a woman to make the move, nothing would happen,” he said. “Whenever you’re looking for it, you’ll get nothing. The trick is to exude availability. Then you’ll get anything you want.”
The modern woman is an independent one. She has figured out her priorities and she is strong enough to go after what she wants: usually a man with money…any age. She doesn’t want to be coddled and she doesn’t want to be romanced. She certainly is not going to spend HER income on HIM. “Younger women don’t want to accept you for who you are,” said Jose, a twenty two year old Latino sitting at Hearn’s bar. “They won’t let a man act like a man.”
Perhaps that is why Hearn loved dating older women. He didn't have to worry about being politically correct when he was with his lady. He loved the attention he received and he recalled coming home exhausted when his partner was a woman over ten years his senior. “She drew my bath, poured me a drink and created a wonderful meal for me,” he said. “And she didn’t even expect sex. She just wanted me to feel better. “
More and more, older women are seeking younger men because they are tired of guys their own age and their lack of interest in excitement and romance. “A young one doesn’t fall asleep on you,” said Pam Tent, who is now in a very satisfying winter/spring relationship. “And you can be in charge.”
You don’t have to be too picky about when to have sex with a younger guy either. “If it looks right and feels right, it’s probably worth sitting on,” says author Pamela Tames. “I’m bad but you’re allowed to be when people start calling you an “older woman.”
That is fine and very fun, if you want a temporary fling. Hearn points out that if it you are in it for the long haul, a young, eager paramour brimming with testosterone, can become a bit much. “No self respecting woman in her fifties would want a guy in his twenties,” he said. “Too much bull shit.”
Now that he is approaching forty, he is thinking about creating a family. “These days, I am looking for someone younger,” he said. “Sure I look for beauty, but that’s just the physical part. I want intelligence too and I refuse to settle. In the past, I’ve had a lot of ‘almosts’ but I do not want to compromise my standards.”
No one wants to settle for less, of course, but we all need to look in the mirror now and again and see what we are asking the other person to accept. “A good relationship means compromise,” said Hearn.
No one argues with that, but first you have to create the relationship. Man is a social animal and even if you love your private time, you still need to stand up, stretch and get out among others. If you are more a thinker than a drinker, are you fated to try the internet or just sit home? “Somewhere between the late eighties…and the new century all of the interesting men had disappeared,” said Tent. “When I went on the internet, I stumbled upon a rogue’s gallery of slightly imbecilic-looking horn dogs of all ages. Some were hopeless romantics; others were savvy skin-trade creeps.”
And all of them posted the picture they wanted YOU to see and described themselves the way they wished they really were. If a single person in the Bay Area wants reality, the internet is not the place to hunt. But where does a single go who wants good conversation, a bit of dancing and possibly a glass of wine?
This was the dilemma Rich Gosse faced thirty two years ago, and unlike most of us who see a situation, complain about it and do nothing, Gosse took action. He created The Society of Single Professionals, a non-profit organization for adults of all ages with a website (http://www.thepartyhotline.com) that offers free personal ads, dating advice, and travel opportunities, and features a variety of parties every month. “I was a single guy who wanted to meet single women,” he said. “So I joined the board of a non-profit singles organization and helped plan singles parties. The challenge is to figure out what to do to break the ice at some of these events. We have many mixer games plus wine tasting, dancing and other activities that help people mingle with strangers.”
The singles parties Gosse puts together target every age group and every interest. “The purpose of our events is to provide an alternative to the bar scene for singles to meet a new friend and/or a romantic partner,” he said.
His group sponsors several theme dances every week from a Blue Jean Ball to an Advanced Degrees Mixer, cougar and silver fox events and a Blast From The Past dance. “We started in a church with free rent and pride ourselves that our events are always affordable. Now we are the world’s largest non-profit singles organization. Countless people have met new friends, romantic partners and marital partners at our events.“
Gosse has also written eight books that share the wisdom he has learned from creating these events for so many years. He has been featured in Oprah and Donahue, and is considered America’s foremost authority on finding a romantic partner. His latest book “You Can Hurry Love,” is an action guide for singles tired of waiting. “Most people wait for Mr./Ms. Right. And that’s unfortunate because life is all too short,” he said. “Looking for love doesn’t have to be a long and lonely experience.”
His book doesn’t just give you a philosophy or try to change your attitude. It explodes the myth that everyone interesting is taken and that love at first sight is the way to go. Gosse offers very specific advice on every topic from how to dress to how to start a conversation. He points out that a good way to hurry love is to engage in an activity the opposite sex loves best.
I was considering blowing up airports or putting on a red jacket hunting innocent animals but I am such a lousy shot I risk shooting myself in the foot and end up hunting for romance in a convalescent home. I do not particularly want to be a nurse, so instead I decided to scout the universities for a young one who won’t die on me and a professor with a mind for dinner table conversation. I can send the boy to the library to finish his homework while I feed the old one his soup and ponder the state of the world.
Love is definitely the answer to it all, but the trick is finding it in your own heart first. “Love life and life will love you back,” says Arthur Rubinstein. “Love people and they will love you back.” All too often we know what we want but we don’t understand the process of how to get it. When it comes to romance, first you meet the person, then you become friends and then that little spark grows into romance. “Meeting someone special requires hard work,” says Gosse. “Open yourself to those around you who are also searching for love and your hope will become a reality.”
For some of us, that love is waiting at a singles dance; for others, at the office and for those who are happily single, it is right in their own living room, but it is always there.
For a crowd is not company,
And faces are but a gallery of pictures,
And talk a tingling cymbal,
Where there is no love.
Francis Bacon ESSAYS.

VIGIL ..so worth your time

2010-04-14T12:45:00.001-07:00

American Conservatory Theatre presents…
VIGIL
Starring Marco Barricelli and Olympia Dukakis

Old age is the most unexpected of all
The things that happen to a man.
Leon Trotsky

There is an island at the end of life that we all hope to reach and yet, when we arrive we discover it is a lonely, empty place. WE have survived, but no one else in our world is left to share it with us. Everyone wants to live to be one hundred years old but they always add the codicil “IF I can still be independent.”

What they forget is that independence is not enough. Man is a social animal and living in unintended solitary confinement is not a pleasure. More and more people are reaching 100 and beyond these days, well over 100,000 worldwide and when they arrive at their 10th decade, they often find that they are faced with intellectual and emotional isolation. Their friends are dead; their immediate families are deceased and their relatives have drifted away. Physical independence is more challenging. Too often financial resources have been drained by their longevity.

It is this situation that Playwright/ Director Morris Panych and his partner, Designer Ken MacDonald addressed in the ACT production of VIGIL. Panych has written over fifty plays and his hallmark is his exploration of what makes life worth living in a world increasingly defined by miscommunication, lack of shared standards and loneliness. His protagonists are often social misfits who have found bizarre solutions to the barriers they face. Marco Barricelli is that protagonist in his role as Kemp.

The play opens when he enters what he thinks is his Aunt Grace (Olympia Dukakis)’s apartment because he has received a letter from her saying” I am old and dying.”
She responds by throwing her hairbrush at him. It is obvious that he is not there to comfort her. He wants to be first in line when her estate is apportioned. He is the only living relative and she is on her way out…or so he thinks. However Grace does not die immediately. In fact, she hangs on to the thread of life for many months after Kemp’s arrival. At one point he is so exasperated he says to her “Why don’t you just die?”

When people laugh at that line, it is not because it is funny. They laugh because it is a thing they might have thought but would never dare to say. “But there ‘s kind of a delicious sharing of a true feeling, deep in your guts, that there is something very difficult about the situation,” says Panych. He continues, “We are just so selfish now. We’re so concerned about doing our own thing because we don’t live in family groups anymore. We live in weird urban groups, so family is seen as ‘a problem’. Vigil addresses that. “

Grade does not answer Kemp and as a matter of fact she said something like 14 lines in the entire play, but she is very much present and very muck a part of what we see happening on stage. “Even though VIGIL is a series of monologues, it’s very much a dialogue,” says Barricelli. “I am very dependent on Olympia.”

While he waits for Grace to expire, Kemp describes his dysfunctional childhood with an alcoholic mother and a manic-depressive father who shot himself. “Between them,” Kemp says,”They destroyed every illusion I ever had.”

Kemp lives with Grace for almost a year, even celebrating Christmas with her and the two develop a kind of love for each other that is heartwarming on every level. The acting in this play is what makes it worthwhile. The first act takes the joke of the old lady and the voracious relative ready to grab what she leaves behind and milks it to death. How many times have we seen this situation? How many times have we laughed at it because we are afraid we could actually face it ourselves? Shakespeare discussed the problem of the old and their inheritance way back in 1603 in KING LEAR. Puccini’s GIANNNI SCHICCI addressed this theme with a comedic twist in 1918. The idea of how to keep the ancient from spending all they have left on themselves and leaving nothing to their heirs is even more pertinent and more outrageous today with people living longer and accumulating more assets as they age. The difference between these classics and VIGIL is the spin Barricelli and Dukakis put on the plot. They elevate a joke told too many times, and a theme pounded flat into a love story that leaves us weeping and transformed at the end of the play. VIGIL manages to make us believe that there is something essentially good in us all and it will come out if given a chance.

“I was thinking about how important a time it is for a show like this to happen, when you are having this conversation about health care…there’re so many people out there who are so against this idea of people helping other people. It’s just shocking. So I think it’s a good time to talk about responsibility and what we owe each other and society, and I think this play does that in a kind of compassionate, funny, interesting, quirky way,” says Panych.

“For me the play is about disenfranchisement, and the tremendous longing and tremendous need being fulfilled in ways that are the least expected.” said Barricelli. “It’s about two disenfranchised lonely people finding… I want to say finding comfort in each other, but it only comes through misguided attempts and failure and… I don’t know: you’ll have to come and see for yourself and make up your own mind. “

IF YOU GO:

VIGIL continues until April 18, 2010
Tuesday-Saturday @ 8 pm
Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday @ 2 pm
Additional performance 4?11 @ 7 pm

Where: American Conservatory Theater
415 Geary Street
San Francisco , CA 94208

Tickets: $10-$82
415 749 2228
www.act-sf.org

SOUTHERN OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL IS GOING STRONG

2010-03-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

OSF CELEBRATES 75 YEARS OF THEATRE

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland is off to a running start once more, celebrating seventy-five years of fine productions with an ambitious program that promises to challenge and delight us, as it always does. The 2010 season opened February 26, in the Angus Bowmer Theatre with William Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet, directed by Bill Rauch. On February 27 in the same theatre, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened. This production is directed by Christopher Liam Moore, who directed last season’s hugely popular Dead Man’s Cell Phone.

For those who have never seen this moving and still timely play, the story portrays a completely dysfunctional Southern family on the brink of falling apart. The Pollitt family gathers to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th birthday on their plantation in Mississippi on a hot August evening in 1955. Big Daddy is dying and no one is telling him, and that isn’t the only secret that hasn’t been told. Last produced at OSF in 1984, Christopher Liam Moore directs this production, and has chosen to use Williams’ 1974 version of the play. The cast of 13 features Stephanie Beatriz as Maggie, Danforth Comins as Brick, Michael Winters as Big Daddy, Catherine E. Coulson as Big Mama, Rex Young as Gooper and Kate Mulligan as Mae.

Tennessee Williams’ prose is pure poetry and this cast spits it out like exquisite machine gun fire. Not a word is lost, not an emotion spared; the entire three hour production is a non-stop rat-a-tat-tat of vicious, cruel, furious barbs at one another spewing over the audience. Stephanie Beatriz is a Maggie like no other, vindictive, scheming and yet so very human that one must admire her courage and her determination to save her future at any cost. It is very difficult to portray Maggie in a sympathetic light, but Beatriz manages to make us love her character even as we recoil at her merciless, amoral and unscrupulous behavior. Michael Winters creates a Big Daddy bigger than life in an amazingly hard-hitting performance. There is not a false note in his persona and indeed he dominates every scene he is in. He is mesmerizing and has the audience in the palm of his hand the moment he walks on stage.

This is a complex, challenging play to make real to today’s audiences. Few women in the twenty-first century would stand for the kind of verbal abuse that both Maggie and Big Mama (Catherine Coulson) receive. They do not have to fawn over relatives they detest or allow their men folk to diminish them to survive.

In this production, the shame of homosexuality and the shadow of guilt it has cast on Brick Politt is the driving force of the play. To Brick, the only pure love he has ever given or received was from his best friend Skipper, a man so torn by his own conflicted loyalties that he killed himself with alcohol. Brick is well on the way to ending his own life the same way. As I listened to the hatred, the anger and the merciless jabs the characters thrust at one another, I was reminded of the time when men dominated their families and women relied on them for every advantage, from the food they ate and the roof over their heads to the money they could spend. I remembered the way men used women and abused them because they believed that was their right. Women had no legal recourse and no avenue of appeal. We often wonder whether women have achieved real equality with men or if they have only taken on more tasks for less compensation, emotionally and physically. If Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does nothing else, it convinces us that we have come a very long way, no matter how far we still have to go.

On February 27, an adaptation by Joseph Hanreddy and J. R. Sullivan of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, directed by OSF artistic director emerita Libby Appel also premiered on the Angus Bowmer stage. Appel’s production was staged in a minimalist way with an emphasis on dancing and music. The cast of 24 features Elijah Alexander as Mr. Darcy, Kate Hurster as Elizabeth Bennet, Judith-Marie Bergan as Mrs. Bennet, Mark Murphey as Mr. Bennet, Nell Geisslinger as Jane Bennet, Susannah Flood as Lydia Bennet, Christine Albright as Mary Bennet, Kimbre Lancaster as Kitty Bennet, Christian Barillas as Mr. Bingley, John Tufts as Mr. Wickham, James Newcomb as Mr. Collins and Demetra Pittman as Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

If you loved the book as I did, you will find that this production reduces the complexities of Jane Austen’s plot into a simplistic soap opera filled with misconceptions and cardboard heroes and heroines frosted with a predictable and comforting happily-ever-after ending. As in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I wonder at this play’s ability to connect with a modern day audience where women do not need men to protect them and where all of us know that each human being is a phantasmagoria of good, bad and sort–of. Today we have no Galahads, no Juliet’s, no Cinderella’s or Rhett Butlers. We live in a world populated by flawed human beings with no easy answers and no certain endings. In this production, we are expected to buy plastic people going through the motions of love and disillusionment. The music and dancing are lovely. The costumes are divine. However, the script has sanded Austen’s grit and lost her bite. I would doubt that we would ever find a Darcy or an Elizabeth in real life, so quick to judge, or so easily convinced that they have erred.

Other plays in the OSF season include Lisa Kron’s comedy Well in the New Theatre, directed by OSF veteran James Edmondson and opening on March 27 is Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Ruined, directed by Liesl Tommy. On July 3, the world premiere of American Night will open. The play, written by Richard Montoya and Culture Clash and directed by Jo Bonney, is the inaugural production of OSF’s American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle.

In the Bowmer, She Loves Me, directed by Rebecca Taichman will open April 24, and the world premiere stage adaptation by Ping Chong of the film by Akira Kurosawa, Throne of Blood will premier July 24. Ping Chong also directs.

The outdoor theater will open June 11 with Shakespeare’s ever popular comedy Twelfth Night, directed by guest artist Darko Tresnjak, and The Merchant of Venice, directed by Bill Rauch. Also playing on the outdoor stage is Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, directed by another OSF veteran, Penny Metropulos performed until October 10.

IF YOU GO:
More information is always available at www.osfashland.org
Box Office (541) 482-4331 or (800) 219-8161.

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER

2010-03-15T23:31:00.001-07:00

Actor’s Theatre of San Francisco presents …
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER
By
Tennessee Williams

It takes two to speak the truth –
One to speak and another to hear.
Henry David Thoreau

I have always believed that the only place to see and understand the impact of social truth is on the stage. Here the playwright dares to show us what the historian and the biographer dare not say. We see the reality we have hidden from ourselves and we come face to face with the rationalizations we make to keep us from protecting the misunderstood. Nowhere is this more evident than in a Tennessee Williams production. This play takes place in the Garden District of New Orleans and reflects Williams’ anger at his domineering mother and his guilt because he was unable to stop her from having his sister Rose lobotomized. His sister appears in many of his plays and she is always, sensitive, beautiful and misunderstood. It is the magic of Williams’ writing that makes the world love her just as he did.

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER lays bare the prejudices and fear that surrounds homosexuality, even today. It makes us feel the power one unscrupulous human being has over the weak and vulnerable. That person is Violet Venable (Joyce Henderson). She is determined to cloak the memory of her son in chaste beauty and keep his true character a secret from everyone including herself. She uses every weapon her wealth gives her and cares not whom she harms in the process. She offers to finance the psychiatrist (Dr. Sugar, played by Mark Bird) if he will lobotomize her niece Catherine (Larissa Archer) because she knows what her son Sebastian was. Mrs. Venable uses the terms of Sebastian’s will to threaten to disinherit Catherine’s family leave them penniless. The woman is detestable and yet we understand the force of her motivation because we have felt it when we too have been desperate to hide the truth. We believe in her lack of scruples because we have all known and feared someone just like her in our own lives. Mrs. Venable is willing to use any means to conceal uncomfortable truth even from herself and her money is her weapon.

How many times have we known a truth that no one believes? How many times have we fought the horror of witnessing something we dare not describe? This knowledge and the horror of what Catherine saw has traumatized her, as well it should. She saw the brutality of her cousin’s death and that experience became an ever-present nightmare she cannot erase. The memory is so intense that when she is given a “truth” serum, she still cannot tell the story in the first person. It is too painful because it is real. “He – he was lying naked on the broken stones…and this you won’t believe! Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it! It looked as if- as if they had devoured him!...” she says and we KNOW she is giving us truth.

The characters in this play are so real they could be your neighbors. There is good and bad in each of them and these actors give them life. Although, it is set in an earlier time and place, the action could take place as easily tomorrow as it did on that torrid summer day in Spain in 1930. It takes a talented and creative group to keep this drama valid and this cast is up to the challenge. Christian Phillips directs the production and his cast mesmerizes us from the moment the first line is spoken. The set keeps us there; the costumes are just right. This is a low budget play that would suffer from a more costly and elaborate production. SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER is an experience painted in beautiful language that expresses the dark and sordid underbelly of being human. Joyce Henderson, Larissa Archer and Carol Robinson sweep us into their characters and Phillips pace keeps us there.

We leave the theater and the world we trusted seems different to us. We have seen its shadow and we wonder if we could be those people we just saw on that stage. Would we dare to destroy another to preserve a memory? Would we be so horrified by truth that it would destroy us?

You owe it to yourself as a human being and as a lover of fine literature to experience this compelling production. It continues until March 27, 2010. It is not to be missed.
Ye shall know the truth,
And the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley
IF YOU GO:
Where: Actors Theatre
855 Bush between Mason & Taylor
Box Office: 415 345 1287
Performances Thursday-Saturdays 8 pm
More information: www.actorstheatresf.org

The Foreigner

2010-03-08T22:08:00.001-08:00

The Crystal Spring Players present:
THE FOREIGNER
March 12-March 14, 2010

If you have never seen this provocative comedic take on our preconceived attitudes and stereotypes, don’t miss this very lovely performance by the Crystal Spring Players. The production is directed by Kathleen Maxwell and she has managed to keep the action fast and engaging, the dialogue sharp and real and the cast so wll orchestrated that the action is very like a dramatic dance.
This play was written by Larry Shue and had a record-breaking run at New York’s Astor Place Theatre where Shue played Charlie Baker, who dubs himself “the world’s dullest man. In this production, Steven Mattes plays Charlie Baker and gives it his own special touch. THE FOREIGNER is a comedy with a heart. It is a sweet, funny, scary play about people’s need to fit in and their ability to create family from strangers. The Crystal Springs cast never lets you forget that message.
This production shines because of the combination of Shue’s touch for sharp, comedic repartee and an ensemble that respond to one another like clockwork. The direction, the acting and the meshing of all the elements of good drama work so well that they elevate the story into something greater and more touching than a superficial farce. Charlie Baker is a man who has been defeated by life and is so sure that life has made the correct judgment about his inadequacies, that he adopts a lifestyle that expects rejection. He sees himself as a nothing and wants to wallow in his inadequacies. Yet we love him because he is such a defeated and confused man. When we meet him, he has no respect for himself and when we leave him he is a powerful human being who understands that he can do whatever he believes in, if he will but try.
Charlie Baker is introduced to Betty Meeks, (Pamela Forensi) owner of a failing, remote fishing lodge in Georgia as someone who cannot understand a word of English. Forensi has internalized her character to the point where it would be very difficult to convince her audience that she isn’t really Betty Meeks. Her comedic timing is perfect and her character shines from the moment this play opens until its finale. She never overshadows the other characters and yet she always shines. When she meets Baker, she is charmed to think that he cannot speak English and hails from some exotic land never defined in the play. From this misconception, the comedy takes off with predictable ploys like Meeks shouting at Baker to make him understand her, to the stupid sister, Ella (played with beauty and heart by Jennifer Mattes, who steals this show for me). I do not believe I have ever seen a more touching and delightful sequence than Ella teaching Charlie English with a southern accent so thick it defies pronunciation coupled with a faith that he can master a new language in no more than ten minutes, because she is teaching it to him.
Despite a devious plot that involves prejudice, the KKK and a preacher gone bad, and a series of predictable twists and turns that only farce can make palatable, this is a meaningful story of how we humans nourish each other and the magic that can happen to us all when we treat one another with love and respect.
The production is fast paced and that pace keeps us from noticing the artificiality of some of the characters as they gallop through the machinations of uncovering the bad guys and saving the good. No matter. The puns are perfect; the laughter makes up for it all.
When the final curtain falls, no one really cares if the people on stage were real or if the plot makes sense. Every member of that audience had way too good a time to nit pick veracity, depth or message. This is a play that is fun in every sense of the word and the only sad note is that its playwright was killed in a plane crash in 1985 and can give us no more of his marvelous comedic creations.

IF YOU GO:
THE CRYSTAL SPRINGS PLAYERS
2145 Bunker Hill Drive
San Mateo, CA 94402
Reservations: 650 345 2381
March 12: The Champagne Gala
Other performances: March 13,18,19 20@8p.m.
March 14@ 7 pm.

Kids under 14 free with a paying adult.

FOREVER BROADWAY

2010-03-08T21:19:00.001-08:00

BROADWAY IS ALIVE AND WELL

FOREVER BROADWAY premiered live at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, February 27, 2010 to a sell-out crowd. If you missed this delightful revue of all your favorite Broadway melodies, you can catch the encore performance March 21st @ 3 p.m. at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. The show is the ultimate all singing, all dancing salute to Broadway’s best. It features semi-professional performers who are either new to the stage or still hoping to make their mark. Listening to them will convince you that there is an unbelievable amount of unrecognized talent out there that needs to be showcased and encouraged. The cast’s enthusiasm and love of song adds an extra dimension to the fine singing and dancing that graced the Herbst Theater stage on this first performance.

Although this is an ensemble piece, some singers added a special shine to their presentations. Désirée Goyette added her own personal touch to Unusual Way from NINE and Send in the Clowns from A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC with the ensemble, and Suzanne Henry sent us to heaven with Stars And The Moon from SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD. The truth is that it was the entire company who stole this show. Every number synchronized music and dance with all the excitement and magic that spells Broadway to all of us who love musical theater.

Josh Fargher’s imaginative choreography makes accomplished dancers out of every member of this enormous cast and John Bisceglie has a knack for capturing our imaginations in many exciting and unexpected ways. We saw it when he gave us The San Francisco Follies, last year. This huge tribute to San Francisco was crammed into the tiny Actor’s Theater and played to packed houses for thirteen weeks. It was named one of the top ten Best Bay Area shows of the 2009 season.

FOREVER BROADWAY is no less an accomplishment. It is a theatrical gem on every level: the music, the dancing, the voices and the excitement that emanates from the stage …all make for a spellbinding evening. These performers love what they are singing and the audience responds to them as much as they thrill to familiar, beloved and ever-appealing music that has earned its place in our hearts. These melodies thrilled us first on the musical stage and they have proved their longevity in this spectacular revue.

Bisceglie keeps the pace varied and fast moving, with no less than 55 songs in the first act and 30 in the second. Each song brings back memories of the show that featured it and the audience is hard pressed NOT to sing along with the melodies that have earned a permanent place in our hearts.

Don’t miss the encore March performance. ”Join our dynamic 60 person ensemble as they sing and dance their way through 100 years of Broadway,” says Bisceglie. “Our high energy show combines a super selection of Broadway classics with songs from today's hottest shows, filled with comedy, dance and beautiful music.”

I agree.

For more information:
Box Office: 415-392-4400
www.foreverbroadwaysf.com

Crepes on cole: a great place to meet firends

2010-02-23T23:52:00.001-08:00

Crepes on Cole
100 Carl Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
415 664 1800

This crepery has the rare distinction of offering good food, well served with generous portions for reasonable prices. It is open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner and its menu caters to a wide variety of tastes. The menu boasts fifteen savory crepes served with house potatoes and mixed greens. You can build your own crepe choosing from 23 items to add to the basic crepe @ $6.75. Each additional item costs 75 cents. A favorite at this clean and very busy restaurant is the chicken pesto crepe with provolone cheese, onions, marinated chicken, pesto, tomatoes and mushroom’s. There is a nice selection of omelets also served with house potatoes and a bagel or toast You can also design your own omelet from the same list of additions you can put in a crepe. There are six varieties of egg dishes including San Francisco Benedict (poached eggs on sautéed spinach and English Muffins topped with Hollandaise Sauce) or a smoked tofu scramble for the vegetarians among us. Customers can select six varieties of pancakes or French toast and three combinations of granola with seasonal fruit. There are plenty of side orders, soups and sandwiches. The dessert crepes are immense, enough for two people to share. A favorite is the Banana-Chocolate Crepe with banana, semi-sweet chocolate topped with whipped cream and the Raspberry blintz, too scrumptious for words, both for $6.25.

Crepes on Cole also offer several kinds of salads, each meal in itself. Their beverages include a variety of juices, coffees, wine and beer.

The restaurant is open until 11 pm on weeknights and midnight on weekends. The owner will let you sit there for hours playing scrabble, chatting with friends or using your laptop. This is not a fancy place, nor a romantic hideaway. The food is fine, the staff is welcoming and ambience as comfortable as sitting at your own kitchen table. If you are into a gourmet experience, you can do much better; but if you want a good meal and a leisurely visit with friends over a coffee or a glass of wine, this is your place.

San Jose Opera's MARRIAGE OF FIGARO

2010-02-23T23:10:00.001-08:00

San Jose Opera presents……..
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO

I love the productions Irene Dalis presents at Opera San Jose. I love them for many more reasons than the quality of her productions, even though they improve at every performance. Dalis offers countless young singers the opportunity to experience performing in full scale, well directed, and highly polished opera before they have actually arrived at the professional level. She trains them, she grooms them and she nurtures them, coaxing the best from their voices and their acting abilities. Because of her tutelage and the care she takes with each one of her protégées, each performance is truly lovely, well acted and beautifully sung. THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO is no exception. It is especially difficult to present an opera so familiar to its audience that every misdirection, every sour note will be instantly detected. Opera San Jose does not disappoint us.

In the production I saw, the scene stealers were Rebecca Schuessler as the countess, Jennie Litster as Susanna and Tori Grayum as Cherubino. The entire cast worked well together but these three shone. The performance was well paced and charming. After all, how could Mozart NOT be delightful?

One of the joys of going to this company’s productions is to watch the singers grow into their roles. Rebecca Schuessler was a stellar Manon, far surpassing the very exceptional talents of the others in her production. In THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, she outdid herself once more. When she sings of lost love and happiness in the exquisite aria Dove sono i bei momenti – "Where are they, the beautiful moments" she will tear your heart out. She is telling us of the way so many marriages grow stale and how little we can control the process. You almost forget she is singing, so real are the sentiments she expresses, so true for anyone who has been in love. Jennie Litster is the irrepressible, clever Susanna to a musical T and I do not believe I have ever seen a more adorable Cherubino (Tori Graynum) on any stage. I have been treated to this opera in San Francisco and in Edinburgh countless times and these three singers were as touching and as thrilling as the most professional of them.

THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO was written 186 years ago by Mozart when he was thirty years old. The theme of infidelity and the value of marrying for love still ring true today.
This opera is worth seeing both for the exquisite music and the beautiful voices that sing it. The direction is good and the enthusiasm of the cast actually palpable. The opera is over three hours long, but it will seem like only moments for the rising of the curtain in Act I until it descends with everyone singing happily every after in Act IV .

IF YOU GO:
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO continues until February 21, 2010
Tickets and information: 408 437 4450
www.operasj.org

The next production: Puccini’s La Rodine
April 24-May 9, 2010

THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE

2010-02-23T22:22:00.000-08:00

Foothill Music Theatre presents….
THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE

If you have never seen a production directed by Jay Manley, you owe it to yourself to get to Foothill Music Theater’s production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee before this beautifully crated confection closes March 7th. The show is has everything you could possibly want in a musical: it is touching, funny and magnificently performed. The production runs Thursdays-Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm. There are 2 pm Saturday matinees 2/27 and 3/6.

Dr. Jay Manley founded this innovative, exciting music theater in 1985. His intention was to produce rarely seen, neglected musicals but it has been going on so long that he has pretty well done them all. (At least, all that are worth humming). His casts are usually non-equity performers, often students and bay area singers and dancers who love to perform. That love of the stage is apparent in every show I have seen there. Each production (and I have been attending them since 1986) is a full scale work of art. The scenery is just right; the costumes amazing and the performances polished diamonds. These productions are not small scale imitations of the more highly touted and expensive extravaganzas seen on professional stages. Not at all. Each show has special touches only Dr. Manley can add. He has a magic touch that makes each performance unforgettable. In this production, we actually see Jesus right there loving us all.

I am not the only one who thinks Jay Manley is a genius. He has received numerous Dean Goodman “Choice” awards for his work and Bay Area Theatre Critics nominations for his outstanding direction and production. He directs two or three plays each season and every one of them are as good if not better than anything you will see at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater or on Broadway. The actors and actresses lucky enough to work with Dr. Manley revere him, as well they should. He has mastered the art of bringing out the inner genius in anyone he casts. He does all this on a shoe string budget that no audience member could possibly detect. A show directed by Jay Manley can hold its own and even surpass the financially opulent productions that ask us to pay a small ransom for the privilege of seeing their expensive costumes and elaborate sets. When Dr. Manley takes on a project, he makes it glow. His direction guarantees that it will be a highly polished, beautifully paced, delightful theater experience.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is no exception. Mark Hanson’s musical direction is right on key and Kateri McRae outdid herself creating energetic, fast moving choreography that transformed the entire cast into “tween” versions of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. SPELLING BEE showcases the joys and pitfalls of cut-throat competition between six adorable young oddballs (played by adults, but they will fool you, I promise) as they spell their way through the contest. The judges’ lines are truly choice and their introductions and asides keep us laughing even as feel the tension inherent in this kind of contest. We watch egos disintegrate and confidence wane as one by one these very special children are eliminated and the winners circle narrows.

Every parent should see this show not just for the music and terrific dancing, but for what the book has to tell us about the pressures we too often inflict on our youngsters. We live in a society that honors achievement. We inundate our children with lessons and training and games that they feel they must win if they are to be valued. We forget that winning is so meaningless in the larger scheme of things. You don’t have to be better than the person next you. All you have to be is yourself. Would that our children knew that and their educators taught them to mine their individuality. After all, isn’t that their gift?

As I watched this talented cast participate in a contest with rules older than school itself, I realized how cruel it is to tell a child he needs a prize to be appreciated. Don’t get me wrong. No one preaches to you in this production. Yet, you cannot help but sense how misplaced the tension and the tears are when you watch these children compete. It will become clear to you that our schools have forgotten how to deal with individuals, instead of tabulating scores on a test. The sad thing is that all of us faced the same pressure and most of us accepted it as the way of the system. The winners and the losers in this production show us how foolish that assumption is. Every character in the bee is a special and very loveable human being. He do not have to be the best speller to capture our hearts.

I would be hard put to highlight one actor’s performance over another in this musical. I have to say that Kristin Walter as the former winner of Three Bees and hostess of the 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee stole my heart, but so did Alicia Teeter as Olive Ostrovsky, whose mother was meditating in India and whose father never managed to get to see her excel in the Bee (or pay her entry fee). Gregg Zigler and Water M. Mayes as Logianne Schwartzandgrubenierre’s two daddies touched me in ways that you must see to understand. Their lines were sharp and funny, but the sentiment behind their love for their daughter brought tears to my eyes. In fact, watching this musical as it spotlighted our parental stereotypes was like enjoying a yummy dessert that I didn’t want to end. And when it did and I exited the theatre, I had to remind myself that the losers didn’t really lose. They ware acting, for heaven’s sake.

You could have fooled me.

IF YOU GO:
THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE
LOHMAN Theatre
Foothill College
12345 El Monte Road
Los Altos, CA 94022

Tickets; 650 949 7360
More information: www.foothillmuscials.com