TheatreWorks’ musical Earnest fun but unnecessary
In addition to some terrific songs and a perennial reason to scream at Dover to "move yer bloomin' ass," My Fair Lady has left an interesting legacy in the form a highly raised bar to which all classic plays turned into musicals must aspire. Most composers have all but given up trying to transform an already great play into an even better musical and instead turn to movies as grist for the musical mill.
But Paul Gordon and Jay Gruska are still aiming toward the Shavian/Lerner and Loeweian heights. Quite courageously, they have turned Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest into a musical. Being Earnest, their transformed work, is having its world premiere courtesy of TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
Moon’s Carnival: midway between comedy, drama
Watching the 1961 musical Carnival!, a hit on Broadway, it's fairly easy to see why the show was never a candidate for major Broadway revival or a staple of community theaters. The score, by Bob Merrill, has real charm and beauty mixed with pleasant mediocrity. The standout song, "Love Makes the World Go Round," is used to great effect, although the most poignant song in the score is a longing-for-home number called "Mira" that perfectly captures what the show wants to be: a sweet, melodic story with melancholy and pain running not too far under the surface. And therein lies the tricky part. This musical, with a book by Michael Stewart, looks like a happy mainstream musical, but it's much more complex than that. In many ways, it succeeds in being musical comedy and drama, but the creators didn't have quite the sophistication to pull it off – or maybe they felt they were offering as much sophistication or complexity as an early '60s Broadway audience could handle.
Whatever the reason, Carnival! Remains a curiosity, and thanks to 42nd Street Moon, the great reviver of Broadway curiosities, treasures and castoffs, we get to explore Carnival! games in a production that lets us experience what the show does best.
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...
Ship-shape and sassy! Splendid sailing in Anything Goes
With a nasty flu ravaging the country, the best antidote might actually be show tunes. At least show tunes as they're served up in the zippy and utterly delightful revival of Anything Goes directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall. That's not medical advice, of course. It's strictly spiritual – some Cole Porter musical uplift to go with your chicken soup.
Somehow, when this show was on Broadway with star Sutton Foster I wasn't all that interested. Foster, though wonderful in so many ways, seemed at odds with my vision of the worldly, sexy Reno. I'm glad I waited to see the show on tour. Now on stage at the Golden Gate Theatre as part of the SHN season, Anything Goes is just about perfect with the stunning Rachel York at its center.
I believe! Book of Mormon really is that good
Take it on faith: The Book of Mormon is every bit as profane and profound and funny and sweet as everyone says it is. The monster Broadway hit about Mormon missionaries in Uganda is now working its way around the country and just opened a sold-out, five-week run at San Francisco's Curran Theatre as part of the SHN season.
Herewith, The Book of Theater Dogs on The Book of Mormon:
For I believe...
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.
Ah, Men! Betty Buckley tackles the boys of Broadway
In 1985, Betty Buckley was sensational as a boy in the Rupert Holmes musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood (which happens to be back on Broadway at the moment in an all-new production). She was playing Alice Nutting, a famous male impersonator, and the trousers role fulfilled a long-held fantasy of being a boy on Broadway (as a kid growing up in Texas she longed to be a Jet in West Side Story).
Well the 65-year-old Buckley is getting back to the boys in her new cabaret show and CD, Ah, Men! The Boys of Broadway in which she sings more than a dozen songs originally sung by male characters in shows. San Francisco audiences will experience the boyish side of Buckley when she brings Ah, Men! to the Rrazz Room this week (Oct. 30-Nov. 4).
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
Still Misérables after all these years
The 25th anniversary production of Les Misérables now at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN season is annoying and gratifying, pretty much in equal measure.
You have to give credit to super producer Cameron Mackintosh for even attempting something new with such a tried-and-true money maker as Les Miz. He hired new directors and a raft of new designers. They 86-ed the turntable, such a memorable (and thematically important) element of the original Royal Shakespeare Company production and added that now inescapable 21st-century plague, projections.
This musical war horse is certainly refreshed if not necessarily strengthened.
Terri White's Great White Way (and a perfect martini!)
Palo Alto native Terri White grew up and became a Broadway star, thanks largely to her big break in 1972's musical hit Two Gentlemen of Verona, which she also performed on tour at the Geary Theater. There have been dramatic ups and downs in White's career – it is a theater career, after all – but her journey has brought her back to the Bay Area several times, including a double stint in 1994 at the then-named Theatre on the Square in Make Someone Happy composer Jule Styne's last hurrah (White remembers it more as Make Someone Run because it wasn't Styne's best work; he died several weeks after the show), followed by Nunsense 2.
But White's most memorable San Francisco stage experience, at least until she makes her cabaret debut July 10 at the Rrazz Room was in the Cy Coleman musical Barnum in which she originated the role of Joice Heth (singing the memorable song "Thank God I'm Old").
Razzle dazzle and outrage in Kander and Ebb's Scottsboro Boys
The Scottsboro Boys is a musical on crusade. Not for the first time in their storied career, composers John Kander and the late Fred Ebb make some of the worst human traits entertaining all the while championing the underdog and giving splendid voice to those who might be otherwise ignored or forgotten.
The crusade at hand is two-fold: Kander and Ebb, working with book writer David Thompson and choreographer/director Susan Stroman – a copacetic dream team if ever there was one – want to rescue the victims of a particularly ignominious chapter in American history from obscurity. And they want nothing short of exposing the roots of the Civil Rights Movement. They accomplish both goals, and The Scottsboro Boys is as powerful as it is entertaining, and that's saying a lot on both counts.
We've seen Kander and Ebb working this particular vein before: politics, horror, victimization and good, old razzle-dazzle. We saw it in Cabaret, where singing Nazis made the blood run cold; we saw it in Chicago, where cynicism and celebrity trumped humanity; we saw it in Kiss of the Spider Woman, where revolutionary zeal was squashed but the human spirit is not. This is not to say that Scottsboro is a re-tread in any way. There are echoes of other shows, other songs, but this compact, deeply felt show ratchets up the disturbance factor with its very form.
David Thompson on racism, history and making it all sing
David Thompson is the first to admit that regardless of the show itself, he would do anything to work with John Kander, Fred Ebb and Susan Stroman, three major theater artists with whom he had collaborated on And the World Goes 'Round, the 1987 revival of Flora the Red Menace and Steel Pier.
"Working with John, Fred and Stro has been an extraordinary gift and privilege," Thompson says on the phone from his home in Millburn, N.J. "They come from a kind of theater that really understands the craft of telling a story and telling it well. We begin every work session with 'what if' and just throw ideas out there. Working with them, they've always found a way to inspire me to do better and bigger work – not in a grand way – their talent is so huge that everybody they work with brings the best possible work they can to the table."
Don't wanna see no more American Idiot
The inevitable homecoming is upon us. The Broadway musical version of Green Day's American Idiot, which had its world premiere in 2009 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, has returned to the Bay Area as part of the SHN season.
As an employee of Berkeley Rep at the time of the show's premiere, I was deeply immersed in the world of Green Day, big Broadway producers and a world of expectations riding on the shoulders of this 90-minute rock 'n' roll extravaganza. It was a blast to have an inside seat for the creation of such an exciting show. But my vantage point also prevented me from really seeing the show with fresh eyes.
There were things I liked about it and things I didn't. The Green Day score, especially as orchestrated, arranged and supervised by Tom Kitt, was by far the best part. Kitt succeeded masterfully in capturing the rock pulse of the music and then finding ways to infuse it with range and emotion it didn't have on record.
I had trouble connecting to the bare-bones story of three 20something friends battling their apathy in the suburbs...
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.
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.
Disney’s Lion King roaring back to San Francisco
p>According to the Wall Street Journal, the King really is the King of Broadway.
News came down last month that Disney's The Lion King is now Broadway's all-time highest grossing show. It's a title the regal hit stole from The Phantom of the Opera. The cumulative gross is staggering: $853,846,062 and counting.
Timing of the news couldn't have come at a better time. Lion King's Tony Award-winning director, Julie Taymor, happened to be in town with producer and president of Disney Theatrical Productions President, Thomas Schumacher. They were with a small group at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville to promote the return of The Lion King to San Francisco this November as part of the SHN season at the Orpheum Theatre.
Feeling gleeful with Darren Criss
When Darren Criss was a kid going to American Conservatory Theater's Young Conservatory, he attended one of the company's annual galas. Joel Grey was the headliner. Now Criss, all grown up and all of 25, is the headliner for this year's ACT gala.
To say that San Francisco native Criss has been on a rocket to fame ever since his first appearance as Blaine Anderson on the hit FOX series "Glee" would be to understate his rise to national prominence. He's had hit records and spent three weeks on Broadway (last January he replaced Daniel Radcliffe in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying).
How Criss has managed to keep a level head on this meteoric journey is a mystery, but in a conversation with the multi-talented young actor on a recent Friday morning, he came across as not only charming and grounded but also, perhaps not surprisingly, intelligent and funny.
I interviewed Criss about this Sunday's headlining gig at ACT's Expect the Unexpected gala this Sunday (April 15) for an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.
There wasn't enough room in the story to include everything we talked about, so here are some of the "deleted scenes" if you will.
Faith Prince & Jason Graae: a perfectly delightful duet
He says he’s been a fan of hers since he was a child. She says he makes her pee.
Quips fly fast and furious when talking to Jason Graae and Faith Prince, especially when they’re talking about each other. Graae and Prince are the latest double act on the circuit, and it’s about time. Seriously. These two have known and loved each other for years, ever since they met in college at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music.
Now bosom buddies Prince and Graae and hitting the road together in The Prince and the Showboy (and there’s a long subtitle with their names and awards attached, see the info box below), coming to the Rrrazz Room this weekend (March 25-27) for three performances only.
Yo to the Ho! Pirates rock in Penzance
Singing pirates automatically make me think of two things: the original Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland with their rousing "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)" and the dreadful and utterly loveable 1982 movie musical flop The Pirate Movie starring Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins as Mabel and Frederic, respectively, in a pop-rock adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance. Along with Grease 2 (also 1982), this is one of the worst movie musicals ever and, also like Grease 2, one of my all-time favorites. For a taste of The Pirate Movie, see the videos below. Would that I could show you the whole, terrible thing. We'd have so much fun.
I'm thinking about singing pirates because I had the pleasure of seeing Berkeley Playhouse's production of The Pirates of Penzance this weekend.
Spirit but no soul in loud Bring It On musical
Like a weak episode of "Glee" shot up with steriods and stuffed full of anti-depressants, Bring It On: The Musical sends up a rousing cheer for the robotic vapidity of the new Broadway. The real shame about this overblown movie-to-stage adaptation is that it's chock full of appealing, talented and boundlessly energetic young performers, but their sparkling humanity is mostly lost in the non-stop machine of this depressingly mechanical, surprisingly shrill effort (a part of the SHN season).
Targeted to an age range of teens to twentysomethings who slavishly recite lines from the 2000 movie starring Kirsten Dunst as a beleaguered cheerleading squad captain, this musical has a startling pedigree with its multi-award-winning creative team. You'd think among this heavily lauded crowd of artists that someone could have located a little heart or a moment of actual human connection. But no. This is musical by committee, and a strenuous effort it seems to have been.