Raging with Marty @ ACT's Strand
If Martin Moran wanted to tell me about his trip to the dentist, I would stop whatever I was doing and listen in rapt attention knowing that Moran is a master storyteller and will inevitably find every telling detail, every character nuance, every link to something bigger than just the story he's relating.
ACT attempts to solve Stoppard's Hard Problem
All through American Conservatory Theater's production of The Hard Problem you can feel playwright Tom Stoppard making an effort to be accessible. With a play about the very nature of consciousness – the "hard problem" about not just the knowing about what's at our human core but the knowing about the knowing – there's a danger of a) boring a lay audience with intricate lectures on neuroscience or b) becoming so involved in the intellectual pursuits of the play that actual drama. Stoppard slips a little into both camps during his play's one hour and 40 minutes, but it's hard to fault a playwright for being too smart or too passionate about the subject he's exploring.
ACT crowns a glorious King Charles III
What will happen when Queen Elizabeth, Great Britain's longest reigning queen, leaves the throne? In a hefty helping of royal speculation, playwright Mike Bartlett takes on that question, but does so by way of Shakespeare with a soupçon of Notting Hill.
The result is King Charles III a new history play that traffics in family drama, parliamentary procedure, the liberties of the fourth estate and everything we think we know about Charles, Camilla, William, Kate and Harry. There's sensation and substance, comedy and some genuine emotion mixed in with provocative observations on the relevance of the monarchy in the 21st century.
Reality vs. imagination in ACT's appealing Chester Bailey
In Joseph Dougherty's Chester Bailey, it's reality vs. imagination, and the audience wins.
This world-premiere production from American Conservatory Theater is a modest two-hander performed in the intimate Strand Theater, an old-fashioned feeling play woven through with dry humor and compassion. Think of it sort of as an Oliver Sacks case history come to life with a modicum of theatrical flair.
This Lion is king at ACT
If Benjamin Scheuer were simply a musical act, I'd happily go see him in concert and buy his albums. his voice can go from sweet to gravelly, aggressive to tender, rollicking to romantic even within the space of a single song, and the same can be said for his guitar playing. He puts himself out there in his music, and in addition to being aurally pleasing, his music is also deeply satisfying.
But Scheuer is more than a concert act. He's also a playwright and actor. So his version of a concert is the one-man autobiographical musical The Lion now at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater.
Jonesing for cosmic connection in ACT's Joneses
The topic is: things that have happened. That broad, yet somehow quite specific, statement comes from a character in Will Eno's The Realistic Joneses now on stage at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater. Another broad yet specific topic might be: lives that are lived.
Eno is one of those playwrights whose gift seems to be making raising the bizarre, often absurd experience of human existence to the level of cosmic grace and beauty.
Crazy good music stirs ACT's Unfortunates
The Unfortunates is a strange, antic show with some absolutely glorious music. Now at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, the show is part folklore, part fever dream, part comic book, and all those parts are tied together with songs that bridge folk, hip-hop, jazz and gospel into a stirring Americana sound that doesn't need much plot, character or context to explode with life.
Pops is tops in ACT's Satchmo
John Douglas Thompson is tall and handsome, which is to say, he looks nothing like Louis Armstrong. But so deft is Thompson's performance as the legendary trumpeter in Terry Teachout's captivating Satchmo at the Waldorf that audiences could almost swear they were in the company of the late, great man himself.
Bay Area theater 2015: some favorites
One of the best things about the year-end exercise to round up favorite theatergoing memories of the preceding year is that it can be such a powerful reminder of how much good theater we have in the Bay Area and how many really extraordinary theater artists we have working here. Another element jumps out at me this year and that is how, in addition to great homegrown work, our area also attracts some of the best theater artists from around the world to come and share their work (at the behest of savvy local producers, of course). Herewith, some favorites from the year that was.
Trekking gently through O'Neill's nostalgic Wilderness
Can we agree that Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! is warm and wonderful...and weird? The sepia-tinted 1933 play is a rare light work from tragedian O'Neill, though its fantasy elements – the family O'Neill wished he had growing up rather than the more nightmarish version he depicted in Long Day's Journey Into Night – lend it a rather sad underpinning.
It's almost as if O'Neill strayed into Kaufman and Hart territory long enough to write the four-act play about...
Uneven tone tilts ACT's Monstress double bill
Two of the Bay Area's most interesting theater artists, Philip Kan Gotanda and Sean San José, were asked to adapt a short story from Lysley Tenorio's 2012 collection Monstress for American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater as part of the company's San Francisco Stories initiative and the New Strands play development and commissioning program.
The results make up the double bill Monstress now at the Strand, and while both plays...
Crazy about Guirgis' Riverside at ACT
There's a crackling vitality on stage the Geary Theater as American Conservatory Theater opens its 49th season with Stephen Adly Guirgis' Between Riverside and Crazy. The play is this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, which doesn't necessarily guarantee it will be an interesting play, but if you've seen any of Guirgis' previous work – produced locally by San Francisco Playhouse and Custom Made Theatre Company – you know that this is a muscular, compassionate and deeply interesting writer.
If Riverside isn't as gritty as some of his other work, it more than makes up for that with its fresh approach to the classic American dream-type play.
Fractured tales confound in ACT's Love and Information
Confounding and captivating in equal measure, American Conservatory Theater's debut production in the newly renovated Strand Theater certainly lives up to its title. Caryl Churchill's Love and Information sounds like a generic title for just about anything in our short-attention-span world, on or off line, and that seems to be part of the point.
More like a curated collection of scenes and short films than an actual play...
Ladies' night at ACT's Music
In the 1970s, Stephen Sondheim was on some kind of roll. From Company to Follies to Pacific Overtures to Sweeney Todd, the decade found at the peak of his considerable powers. He was – and is – a musical theater superhero, but in the midst of all that musical and lyrical genius, he dropped a nearly perfect show that was at once a classic musical – operetta almost – and completely contemporary.
A Little Night Music is a dazzling combination of light and funny, clever and romantic with sharp and incisive, deep and dark. The show has elegance and a light touch with an undercurrent of regret, sorrow and misery to keep it from floating away.
ACT's Strand Theater: the new jewel of mid-Market
A vermillion treasure inside and out, American Conservatory Theater’s new Strand Theater on Market Street is – or should be – the future of San Francisco. This beautiful city is in crisis at the moment, the crisis known as boom, and its character is fading visibly each day. Our diversity, our artists, our culture disappears a little more with every swing of a giant construction crane as gazillion-dollar condos and apartments crowd the airspace.
City government’s slow reaction to this crisis of rampant success means we have lost people and organizations we’ll never get back. Galleries, theater companies, artists, musicians, dancers, actors gone, and with them, a piece of what made San Francisco special. And how have our fearless leaders responded in offering assistance to the evicted, the rent increased, the displaced, the non-tech zillionaires? A shrug and a promise of “meh.”
Speaking words of wisdom, Mother Mary testifies at ACT
Has any mother ever inspired so much and such varied art?
Colm Tóibín's Testament, now at American Conservatory Theater, is another in a long line of interpretations of Mary, mother of Jesus. In is version, which started life as a Dublin play, then became a novel before being turned into a different play on Broadway last year, Toibin is interested in the humanity of Mary, a mother first and foremost, and a citizen caught up – rather unwillingly – in a dangerous rebellion.
Directed by ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff and starring revered Canadian actor Seana McKenna ...
Irwin and Shiner: Old Hats are the best hats
I will be the first to admit that clowns have never been a favorite of mine. Not circus clowns, not hobo clowns, not mimes, not even a lot of commedia dell'arte rigamarole. Occasionally, however, I get it – I get the comedy, I get the poignancy, I get the masterful balance of comedy and tragedy in the pursuit of laughs. And by far my favorite clowns – the ones who do it better than just about anybody – are Bill Irwin and David Shiner.
ACT's epic Orphan dusts off ancient tale
American Conservatory Theater concludes its season with The Orphan of Zhao an epic tale of revenge that some scholars think stretches back to the fourth century BCE. It's a tale as old as time, and the first act of this 2 1/2-hour show feels like a millennia itself. But once the revenge gears really start grinding, there's an interesting story here. I reviewed the production for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Simplicity, beauty woven into ACT's Suit
Simplicity translates into great beauty in The Suit, a skillfully wrought tale that originated as a story by South African writer Can Themba and has been directed for the stage by the legendary Peter Brook who adapted the story with Marie-Hélène Estienne and Franck Krawczyk.
The Suit, adapted from a previous stage version by Mothobi Mutloatse and Barney Simon, is offered as a contemporary fairy tale in the Grimm style. A charming narrator (Jordan Barbour) tells us that this is the kind of story that could only come out of oppression (such as apartheid), but while that feels heavy and ominous (and for good reason), Brook and his team demonstrate such a light touch that we're charmed as the trio of musicians emerges.