Haunting Ghost Sonata kicks off Strindberg cycle
Watching August Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata at Cutting Ball Theater, it becomes clear that without Strindberg, we probably would not have the wonderfully weird worlds of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter or Edward Albee or, in the film world, David Lynch or Spike Jonze. Strindberg, though famous for the naturalism of his Miss Julie, pushed into expressionism later in his career and helped redefine modern theater.
During this, the 100th anniversary year of Strindberg's death, Cutting Ball has launched an ambitious celebration of one of Sweden's greatest pre-Abba exports. The Strindberg Cycle collects all five of the chamber plays Strindberg wrote in 1907 that were performed in The Intimate Theater, which had about 150 seats, not unlike the EXIT on Taylor, where Cutting Ball is in residence. This cycle marks the first time all five of these plays have been performed together in an any language.
Bloody good opening of a spiffy new Playhouse
Opening nights don't come much more momentous than Saturday's gala celebrating three things:
1. San Francisco Playhouse's new theater space in the former Post Street Theatre (formerly the Theatre on the Square, formerly an Elks Lodge ballroom)
2. The launch of the Playhouse's 10th anniversary season
3. And opening night of the rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
TheatreWorks offers Variations on a scheme
When Moisés Kaufman gets to the point in his play 33 Variations, there's resonance, beauty and purpose in it. For nearly 2 ½hours we've been tracking parallel stories: one in the present as a terminally ill musicologist delves into the mystery of why Beethoven wrote 33 variations on a waltz theme by music publisher Anton Diabelli. And the other in the early 19th century as we watch Beethoven, his health and hearing failing him, tackle major late-career works (his Mass, his Ninth Symphony) all while succumbing to an obsession with the Diabelli variations. The two stories do fuse in an interesting way eventually as issues of time, mortality and attention to detail bridge past and present while offering a spark of inspiration and insight into the nature of obsession.
Kafuman's 2007 drama, produced by TheatreWorks and directed by Artistic Director Robert Kelley, takes its time getting to the point. Kelley's production is thoroughly enjoyable and features some sharp performances, but the play itself doesn't cut very deep, and the whole past/present cohabiting the stage thing doesn't really work. In the crudest of terms, the play is an uneasy mash-up of Wit and Amadeus.
Marin's Topdog makes power plays into powerful play
"Know what is and what ain't," one brother advises another in Suzan-Lori Parks' mesmerizing play Topdog/Underdog. Telling what is from what ain't is a tricky business in this deceptively straightforward play about an older brother named Lincoln and a younger brother named Booth. You don't expect men with those names – chosen by their father, who liked a joke – not to come to blows, and given we see a pistol within the first few minutes of the play, it's not really surprising when Parks goes from contemporary to Greek drama in a single gunshot.
Parks' Topdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002, and shortly after the play's run on Broadway, it stopped in at San Francisco's Curran Theatre, where Parks' extraordinary language, rich with urban slang frothed into gritty poetry and laced with deeply felt emotion, made a huge impression and justified all the fuss being made over the play.
Cal Shakes ends season with a moody Hamlet
On exactly the kind of temperate night for which they invented outdoor theater, California Shakespeare Theater opened the final show of the summer season. Hamlet, directed by Liesl Tommy (best known for her direction of Ruined at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in spring of last year) clocks in at about 3 hours and 10 minutes, and there are some glorious things in it. But on the whole, this Hamlet left me curiously unmoved.
But first here's what's good. Leroy McClain as Hamlet delivers a fascinating performance, pouring his heart and mind into the torrent of words that continuously pours out of the moody Dane's mouth. You don't have much of a Hamlet if you're not riveted by the title character, and McClain certainly puts on a good show.
Magic between a tricky spot and The Other Place
There's a slippery quality to Sharr White's The Other Place, the drama opening the Magic Theatre season. The first half of this 80-minute one-act is especially slick as we try to gain our bearings, but White and director Loretta Greco keep tilting the playing field. Just when we think we know what's really going on in the story of a brilliant scientist's life, along comes new information or a trip to the past that reconfigures what we thought we knew.
Memory is a tricky, tricky thing. How accurate or trustworthy are our memories? That's a question that Juliana Smithton should be asking herself, but she's not, because she doesn't know anything's wrong.
Crowded Fire’s Invasion!, or Abulkasem on my mind
The thing to know about Crowded Fire's Invasion! is that it's best not to know too much. There's comedy, mystery, surprises and sinister darkness all lurking about director Evren Odcikin's sharp, crisply performed production. And if you have no idea what's really going on or what could possibly happen next, well, that's all for the better.
Even though the play is only about 80 minutes, it feels substantial – not heavy but not frivolous either. Playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri wants to explore the power of language and how that power is fueled by ego, fear, racism and the speed at which words enter and exit the lexicon.
Aurora scores a smackdown with Chad Deity
In professional wrestling, we're told, you can't kick a guy's ass without the help of the guy whose ass you're kicking. Talk about a democracy! Perhaps there's more to learn from the gaudy world of professional wrestling than we thought.
Playwright Kristoffer Diaz, a self-confessed fan of the fake-out body slams and outsize characters of the pro-wrestling world, seems to think there's an allegorical relationship between that world and the United States, especially when it comes to racism and the exploitation of labor in the name of almighty capitalism. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity opens the Aurora Theatre Company's 21st season.
There's certainly truth in advertising with this play – it's incredibly elaborate, and director Jon Tracy's production is enormous.
Talking the talk, or not, in Berkeley Rep's Chinglish
Berkeley Repertory Theatre's season-opening production of Chinglish by David Henry Hwang presents the best possible circumstances to witness communication happening under the worst possible circumstances.
This is what you'd call a serious comedy, which is to say there are big laughs generated by a serious subject. That subject is, essentially, how hard it is for people to listen to and understand one another, and Hwang takes us into an extreme situation to demonstrate the many layers of communication.
If it looks and smells like fish, it must be The Fisherman’s Wife
You don't really expect Japanese erotic tentacle art to be the inspiration for a feel-good treatise on saving a broken marriage. But that's just what Steve Yockey delivers in the world premiere of The Fisherman's Wife, the season opener from Berkeley's Impact Theatre. Taking his cue from the Hokusai woodcut known as "Dream of the Fisherman's Wife," in which a happy lady is serviced by two octopi, Yockey spins a fast-paced, mostly comic adult fairy tale that begins with an epically unhappy husband and wife.
Cooper Minnow (Maro Guevara) is the titular fisherman. He comes from a long line of successful fisher folk, but he's a failure. His wife, Vanessa (Eliza Leoni), couldn't agree more. She claims her seaside life is "undercooked" and she hurls hurtful diatribes at her husband like, "I was bamboozled by the man I thought you were." Ouch.
High on Cal Shakes' spiffy Spirit
Noël Coward was a man of his time in many ways and maybe even ahead of his time in others. For instance, in the delightful 1941 play Blithe Spirit, now gracing the Orinda Hills in a handsome and well-tuned production from California Shakespeare Theater, Coward was way ahead of the ghastly Twilight curve.
No, he wasn't dealing with pale but attractive vampires and shirtless werewolves, but he did understand a little something about mixing mortality and romance. In the play, the ghost of a dead wife returns to haunt her husband and his new wife, but her real aim is to get her beloved to join her on the other side, and she's not above trying to kill him herself to accomplish that goal. To love someone enough to want to spend eternity with them is an intriguing concept, and thankfully Coward played it for laughs, with only a trace of the shadows poking through the peaked meringue of his comedy.
Annie Baker's brilliant, reflective Circle Mirror
At once the antithesis of drama (nothing's happening!) and a complete exposure of the theater's guts and bones, Annie Baker's has a particular genius for creating simplicity of the most complex variety.
Earlier this year, the Aurora Theatre Company got the unofficial Annie Baker Bay Area Festival off to a strong start with her Body Awareness about sexual politics in the small university town of Shirley, Vermont. Then SF Playhouse dazzled with the low-key but brilliant The Aliens, also set in the fictional Shirley, about three unlikely friends, music, death and growing up.
Now Marin Theatre Company in a co-production with Encore Theatre Company conclude the Bay-ker Area Fest with what has become her most popular play, Circle Mirror Transformation. Even more than the previous two Baker plays we've seen so far, this one feels even less like a play and more like an actual experience – something carefully captured in the real world and observed within the artful frame of a proscenium stage.
Gettin’ to the git in Cal Shakes’ glorious Spunk
Zora Neale Hurston writes with zest and zeal. She can move from joy to anguish in a second and still find her way back to hope. All of this is readily apparent in California Shakespeare Company's production of Spunk at the Bruns Amphitheater in Orinda. Sharp and spirited and brimming with talent, these three Hurston stories, adapted for the stage by George C. Wolfe, are poetry and drama and jubilation and as much stirring music as you're likely to hear in 90 minutes in the foggy Orinda Hills.
Wolfe honors Hurston by making sure the audience knows these are short stories – not plays – being brought to life so that we, as a group, can appreciate Hurston's rich, beautiful and musical language. Each of the three stories includes narration of some kind, so the evening never strays from its literary roots. But this is no storytime theater. This is theater that moves. And sings. Boy, does it sing.
Berkeley Rep champions Emotional girl power
I'm going to paraphrase the title song of Eve Ensler's Emotional Creature, now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Don't tell them not to cry or to calm it down or be so extreme or be reasonable. They are emotional creatures. It's how the world got made. After all, you don't tell the Atlantic Ocean how to behave.
It's a rousing number at the end of a compelling show, and it makes you want to scream and shout and, well, be an emotional creature yourself.
After her all her international success with The Vagina Monologues and the related V-Day events raising millions of dollars to combat violence against women around the world. After all her books and shows and personal struggles and triumphs, Ensler is still turning to theater as a means to agitate, to stir hearts and to make people want to scream and shout.
Just Wilde over Aurora’s Salomania
If only a 94-year-old scandal were sensational in ways we no longer understood, we could look back and wonder what all the fuss was about and why the media underestimated the taste of the general public and why the general public was so content to be constantly underestimated.
Alas, not much has changed since the early 20th century criminal libel suit that American dancer Maud Allan brought against British newspaper publisher Noel Pemberton-Billing after he described the interest in her dance piece Vision of Salomé as the "cult of the clitoris." That was the headline he used in his paper, the Vigilante, to describe the moral reprobates who were attracted to Allan's version of the play by Oscar Wilde, which had been banned since Wilde's very public downfall.
What we learn in Mark Jackson's fascinating and at moments electrifying new play Salomania is that the media, though their aims may be occasionally true, are a pawn in larger political games and panderers to public taste, which they help shape.
Magic time, or what's all the Bruja-ha?
Sometimes names are facts. Like now – there's magic at the Magic Theatre.
The play is Luis Alfaro's world-premiere Bruja, and it's extraordinarily powerful. Even better, it has one foot very firmly grounded in the real world, and the other somewhere else that's hard to describe, but rather than being some twinkly netherworld, this supernatural zone can be dangerous. And deadly.
Being an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, you know this experience wont' end happily. But what you might not know is that Alfaro, who scored at the Magic two years ago with his award-winning Oedipus el Rey, is going to make you care and he'll freak you out a little, maybe a lot.
TheatreWorks’ Wheelhouse takes the road to nowhere
The members of GrooveLily, vocalist/electric violinist Valerie Vigoda, keyboardist/vocalist Brendan Millburn and drummer/vocalist Gene Lewin seem like such nice people. They seemed nice in 2004 when their Striking 12 (a pop-rock re-telling of "The Little Matchgirl") sparked with audiences at TheatreWorks, and they seem even nicer in their new concert cum autobiographical theatrical piece Wheelhouse, now having its world premiere courtesy of TheatreWorks.
The fact that they seem so nice makes it hard to say that I found Wheelhouse uninteresting. Nice but bland. It's like being forced to watch somebody's home movies while they play songs they wrote to accompany them.
Crowded Fire delivers the goods with Good Goods
A little bit weird (in the most wonderful way) and a whole lot good, Christina Anderson's Good Goods is a captivating drama that becomes a highly satisfying love story – or love stories to be exact. Crowded Fire Theater is producing the West Coast premiere, with artistic director Marissa Wolf firmly at the helm.
What's so appealing about this two-act play is that it's old-fashioned and fresh at the same time, mysterious and yet straightforward enough to be almost instantly engaging. You get a sense of community and real human connection intermingled with the supernatural as in an August Wilson play and abundant romance, betrayal and pining, as in a Tennessee Williams play. But this is not to say that Anderson is being derivative.
God of Carnage or Why the end of the world is A-OK
Watching four people try to practice "the art of coexistence," as the playwright puts it, is entertaining but ultimately depressing in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage at Marin Theatre Company. One of the hottest plays in recent memory, Carnage is the perfect storm of contemporary drama. It has one set, four actors and that perfect blend of satirically repulsive comedy and apparent moral heft. Oh, and it has impressive vomit special effects and that most satisfying of dramatic dénouements, the destruction of a mobile phone.
What it doesn't have – not even in this brilliantly produced MTC version – is a satisfying reason for being.
Xanadu the right thing
Summer camp has started early this year, but not to worry. This is some high quality high camp.
We've had a few Bay Area productions of Xanadu, the Broadway musical version of the notorious 1980 movie starring Olivia Newton-John as a roller-skating light bulb, er, sorry, roller-skating Muse (you know, from Mt. Olympus kind of muse). The Retro Dome in San Jose and New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco both did the show last year, but having missed the show during its 2007/08, I was waiting for the Center Repertory Company production that just opened.
I'm so glad I waited.
Before I tell you how fabulous this production is – and fabulous really is the operative word on so many levels – I have to confess to being a Xanadu fan.