At SF Playhouse, pretty is as Pretty does
I've come to learn that when a Neil LaBute play or movie crosses my path, I detour around it, ignore it or make an immediate donation to a women's support or LBGT organization. LaBute is a really good writer – his ear for dialogue is impeccable, and his ferocity for storytelling is admirable. I just rarely like what his characters have to say or where his stories end up.
That said, LaBute's Reasons to Be Pretty, now at San Francisco Playhouse, marks the first time I've left one of the writer's play and not wanted to bash my head against the wall on the way out. Sure, there are traces of misogyny, homophobia and racism (mostly coming from the mouth of one classic LaButian male character). But what's interesting here is that LaBute is being provocative in the name of evolution, of self-actualization, of emotional growth.
Fallaci fascinates at Berkeley Rep, even if her play doesn’t
Oriana Fallaci was a fascinating, riveting person in real life, a crusading, eviscerating journalist whose intensity often made her part of the story. In journalist and playwright Lawrence Wright's world-premeire play Fallaci at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Fallaci lives again, and true to form, she's a compelling personality whose intelligence, drive and complicated emotional life provide an abundance of drama.
As played by Concetta Tomei, Fallaci may be dealing with illness by shutting herself into her New York apartment, but she's still ferocious and prickly.
ACT's Metaphor: a bright balloon that pops
It seems there are two plays battling it out in American Conservatory Theater's world premiere of Dead Metaphor by Canadian plawyright George F. Walker. Three of the characters are broadly comic – one foot in the real world, the other in a dark comedy of extremes. And the other three characters are just plain folks, getting by as best they can with anger, fear and desperation causing storms on a daily basis.
Both of those plays are pretty interesting, at least in Act 1. The comedy is especially biting as the three exaggerations – a politician running for reelection (the marvelous René Augesen getting to show of a real flair for biting comedy), her increasingly agitated husband (a grimly funny Anthony FuscoTom Bloom) acting erratically because of fatal tumor bearing down on his brain.
Playwright Jordan Puckett ready for prime time
We have a Theater Dogs guest writer! Welcome Scott Lucas of San Francisco magazine, who chatted with playwright Jordan Puckett, whose Inevitable runs through March 23rd as part of San Francisco Playhouse’s Sandbox series.Scott Lucas: With the opening of Inevitable, it’s not only the first performance of this play, but the first time any of your plays has been done, right?Jordan Puckett: I’ve had readings of Inevitable before, though it’s had many titles and versions. This is the world premiere. It’s the first production of it, and my first production ever.
Wrestling affections in Impact’s As You Like It
p>Shakespeare didn't drop any F-bombs in his comedy As You Like It, but that doesn't stop Impact Theatre. There are lots of non-Shakespeare asides in this highly edited, streamlined version from director Melissa Hillman, but purists shouldn't despair. Such contemporary additions are usually thrown in during scene transitions or to punctuate a joke that has already landed. And they're a hell of a lot of fun, as is the entire 2 1/2- hour show.
Hillman and Impact often draw from the Shakespeare well, but rather serving the plays up straight, they're turned into potent cocktails, with some darker and bloodier than others. With As You Like It, Hillman and her game cast are reveling in relationships. Some of the more Shakespearean touches in the show – like the characters of Jaques the grump and Touchstone the clown don't fare as well because they're too much on the periphery and don't fit in to the gender-bending love stories jumping through hoops in the center ring.
Spirited new musical Messenger really delivers
Beautiful, ambitious and with the kind of depth we've come not to expect from musicals, The Fourth Messenger is a triumph. This world-premiere work is not perfect...yet. But if any new homegrown musical were even half this good it would be considered a major success.
With a book by Tanya Shaffer, music by Vienna Teng and lyrics by both creators, The Fourth Messenger wants to tell an epic story in an intimate way, and in the most essential ways, that works. Shaffer's book brims with intelligence and wit and Teng's music feels rich in original ways, full of melody and intricacy captured expertly by musical director Christopher Winslow and his four-piece orchestra (the cello and woodwinds are especially expressive).
Director Matt August's thoughtful yet robust production...
Yo, Mofo! SF Playhouse tips a mighty fine Hat
[warning: this review does not hide or disguise the word "motherfucker" in the title of the play at hand]
The comedy, the intensity and all that rough language keeps things skittering right along in the San Francisco Playhouse production of The Motherfucker with the Hat by Stephen Adly Guirgis. The play is this rush of plot and character and language, then the sadness and despair lands. It takes Lionel Richie and the Commodores to underscore it, but man oh man is it there.
In so many ways, Gurigis' Hat is about growing up, about taking yourself and the world you live in seriously enough to find purpose and pursue it with as much discipline as you can muster. The grown-ups in the play, let it be said, don't do such a good job on the discipline part, although most of them have (or find) some degree of purpose.
Great stories, theater and heart in Word for Word's Men
Sometimes it's too easy to forget we're a nation at war, and that's not at all a good thing to be able to say. But it's true, especially here in the Bay Area bubble, where the war seems especially far away. For that reason, among many others, Word for Word's You Know When the Men Are Gone is a powerful and important piece of theater. Not to mention a moving and beautiful one.
It's nice to see Word for Word, the extraordinary company that turns short fiction into fully staged works of theater without changing the original text, working in such a contemporary mode.
Aurora's Heaven falls well short
There's a lot to like in the world premiere of Anthony Clarvoe's family drama Our Practical Heaven at Aurora Theatre Company. Laughs come frequently, the production itself – full of light and space – is lovely and the six women in the cast are all quite interesting.
If only there were more snap, both dark and comic, in Clarvoe's play.
Magic's Se Llama Cristina or What's in a name?
There are moments when Octavio Solis' darkly poetic writing leaves me breathless. Take this passage from his world-premiere play Se Llama Cristina as two lovers are driving down a lonely highway. The driver looks at his sleeping passenger and says: "And your head is leanin' against the window and the passing cars light up your face like a Hollywood starlet. Famous, then not. Famous, then not."
Truth be told, there are also moments when Solis' writing leaves me befuddled, and that happens, too, in Se Llama Cristina. But confusion and mystery is part of the foundation – albeit rocky a rocky one – on which this intriguing drama is built.
Marin's Godot and the impression we exist
I suspect Samuel Beckett knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote Waiting for Godot and left more questions unanswered than answered. The less specific you are, the more your audience members project their own business onto the characters and their situation.
The world Beckett creates could be the depressed past or the post-apocalyptic future. He could be writing about God and religion or about the hell of human existence. His main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, could be clowns or tragic figures or both. It's all up for discussion, open for interpretation. Everything is symbolic or nothing is symbolic and just is what it is and the population has increased. And that's the genius of Beckett and the joy of his most famous play.
The current production at Marin Theatre Company...
Lopez family aims high in TheatreWorks' Somewhere
In my interview with Priscilla Lopez (see below for the link), the original Diana Morales in the landmark production of A Chorus Line, she calls Somewhere, the play written by her nephew Matthew Lopez now at TheatreWorks, a "dance-ical," meaning not a play exactly, not a musical exactly but a drama infused with dance. That's a great way to describe the show, which features a number of dance sequences.
I reviewed Somewhere for the Palo Alto Weekly. Here's an excerpt...
ACT's 4000 Miles a journey worth taking
How do you make a hug between grandmother and grandson a high point of a play without making it corny or sentimental? That's the trick playwright Amy Herzog and director Mark Rucker pull off in the compelling drama 4000 Miles now at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater.
The moment comes fairly early in this 90-minute one-act after 21-year-old Leo (Reggie Gowland) has surprised his 91-year-old grandmother, Vera (Susan Blommaert) by showing up in the middle of the night after completing a cross-country bicycle trip from Seattle to Manhattan.
Berkeley Rep’s Troublemaker is freakin A for awesome
The joy, turbulence and agony of being a tween are so effectively conveyed in Dan LeFranc's Troublemaker, or The Freakin Kick-A Adventures of Bradley Boatright, that you forgive him his excesses. After all, if you can't be excessive telling the story of a troubled 12-year-old, when can you?
LeFranc's play, now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is a coming-of-age story cleverly disguised as a hyperactive, hyper-verbal adventure story invented by a bright kid with some deep-seeded emotional problems. Constructed in three acts with two intermissions, the play begins as spin on the noir genre. Instead of hardboiled detectives and criminals, we have Bradley Boatright, a Rhode Island seventh grader. And instead of all that cool Sam Spade dialogue, we have Bradley's own invented slang that's a whole lot more lively and fun. The words "freak" and "freakin" carry much of the load, as do "spangles, "intel" and "a-hole." It's pretend swearing to such an outrageous level that it's actually beautiful in its own poetic way.
Bewitched? No, bothered and bewildered at SF Playhouse
Oh, how I would love to tell you how a graceful and convincing performance by Lauren English and a sturdy production by Bill English rescues John Van Druten's 1950 comedy Bell, Book and Candle from the heap of mediocre mid-century plays that have become irretrievably dated. And while Team English is indeed in good form here, the play itself is an attempt at enchantment that fails to enchant.
It very well could be that this play has been forever ruined for me by the TV show "Bewitched," which for eight seasons never failed to delight me as a witch made a family with a mortal man in a world with a closed collective mind where issues of magic were concerned. The TV show, which was inspired by Van Druten's play as well as the 1942 movie I Married a Witch, featured a blithe central performance by the ever-enchanting Elizabeth Montgomery, who somehow seemed above all the slapstick mayhem surrounding her. Members of the magic world were played for big laughs, none more so that Agnes Moorehead's delicious Endora, the mother-in-law from character actress hell (or heaven, depending on your point of view).
Holy Zuzu's petals! Get into the spirit with Wonderful Life
At a certain point, no matter how much you love Dickens or get your heart cockles warmed by Scrooge and Tiny Tim, you've had it. Enough already with A Christmas Carol. Some years you just need to take a Carol break and find a little holiday spark elsewhere.
This year, if you're searching for an alternative to Ebenezer and his ghosts, I recommend you head to Marin Theatre Company and spend some time with George Bailey and Clarence, his Angel Second Class. It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play takes Frank Capra's much loved 1946 film and turns it into a stage experience by transforming it into a radio play. As re-conceived by Joe Landry, we're in a Manhattan radio station on a snowy Christmas Eve as five actors play all the roles and create all the sound effects for a streamlined version of Capra's story.
Magic camps it up with Another Way Home
Director Meredith McDonough's production of Another Way Home, a world-premiere play by Anna Ziegler, at the Magic Theatre, is so sharp, so expertly performed and executed it may take a while to realize that the play itself is a fragment that doesn't amount to much or really even make much sense. There's a play in there I'd like to see, but it's not the one that Ziegler has delivered.
Like John Guare did in Six Degrees of Separation, Ziegler has a well-heeled Manhattan couple address the audience directly as if whatever story they're about to relate has had little effect on them beyond another story from the "anecdote jukebox." They're speaking from the other side of the events that comprise the action of the play, and that distance is a chasm that the drama only occasionally bridges in the play's short, 75-minute running time.
One more walk around Carmelina
Charming — that's the word that kept running through my brain while watching the 42nd Street Moon production of Carmelina, the largely forgotten 1979 musical by Alan Jay Lerner (of My Fair Lady and Camelot fame) and Burton Lane (of Finian's Rainbow and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever fame).
It's easy to see why this gently old-fashioned show didn't make it in the late '70s. Based on the Gina Lollobrigida comedy Buena Sera, Mrs. Campbell (the same inspiration for Mamma Mia!), the musical feels as if it's from a different time.
Thornton, a Wilder and crazy (wonderful) guy
Of the four short Thornton Wilder plays that comprise Aurora Theatre Company's Wilder Times, one is grating, one is darkly funny, one is poignant and one is so brilliant, so moving it almost erases the memory of the other three.
To begin with, these four one-acts were not written to be performed together, but director Barbara Oliver and her Aurora crew saw links between the first two, "Infancy" and "Childhood," written in 1962, and "The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden" and "The Long Christmas Dinner," both written in 1931. Together, they form a sort of piquant portrait of human lives, beginning to end, with special attention given to family dynamics. It's interesting that the plays more concerned with death and time were written first, and the plays dealing with our most formative years were written 30 years later.
The power you're supplyin', it's Elektra-fyin'!
Suddenly, we're awash in Greeks. Must have something to do with the upcoming election. Everyone's feeling deeply and internationally tragic. We have An Iliad over at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and now at American Conservatory Theater, we have Sophocles' Elektra in a muscular and potent translation/adaptation by Timberlake Wertenbaker.
As it is, this Carey Perloff-directed Elektra has some gripping moments, most courtesy of core company member René Augesen in the title role. I lost track, but I don't think there was one moment in this 90-minute production when her face wasn't shiny with tears.