Wilson Jermaine Heredia goes from Rent to Camelot
When Wilson Jermaine Heredia decided to make a splash in the Broadway world, he dove right in and created giant waves. For his performance as the dazzling Angel Schunard in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent he won Tony, Drama Desk and Obie awards and was nominated for an Olivier when he reprised the role in London.
Since that splash, Heredia has worked consistently – his most recent Broadway gig was opposite Harvey Fierstein in the Tony-winning revival of La Cage aux Folles, but for his next chapter, the 41-year-old actor has taken a road that has led him away from his native New York (he was born and bred in Brooklyn) and to a new home and a new life here in San Francisco.
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...
Living history and meeting cute
In which there are reminiscences of an eighth grade field trip to Alcatraz and links to a feature story and a review relating to the TheatreWorks production of Now Circa Then, a romantic comedy at TheatreWorks by Carly Mensch.
Forget Leap Day – it's Purim, biotch!
The year always goes by so quickly. March 7 and 8 – next week, people – is Purim already. Where does the time go?
If you haven't made your festive Purim plans, you should go see The Whole Megillah 2: Uncut, a co-production of The Hub at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and sketch comedy troupe Killing My Lobster. For a second year, the Lobsters, with help from The Hub's Dan Wolf, lampoons all things Purim while adhering to the Purim tradition of telling tales from the Book of Esther, otherwise known as the Megillah.
I interviewed Wolf and Lobster Creative Director Andy Alabran for a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.
Hall's journey from Billy to War Horse to Pitmen
The Bay Area has been pretty good to Lee Hall of late. Last year, his musical adaptation (with music by Sir Elton John) of his movie Billy Elliot received rapturous notices (though closed a month early) at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. It's a show that had already won the British scribe a 2009 Tony Award for best book of a musical.
Hall's Broadway follow-up to Billy was a play called The Pitmen Painters, another exploration of arts influence on the population of Northern England. Now that play makes its West Coast debut courtesy of TheatreWorks in Mountain View.
I spoke with Hall about his many and varied projects for an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle. Click for more.
Delicious theater spiced with fiction
That most scrumptious of Bay Area theater companies, Word for Word, is going the way of the foodie. Yes, Word for Word, the company that turns short fiction into extraordinary theater, is diving headlong into food lit with Food Stories: Pleasure Is Pleasure.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Word for Word's Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter about the show (directed by Theatre Rhino Artistic Director John Fisher) for the San Francisco Chronicle. Also got to chat with one of the authors featured in the show, T.C. Boyle, whose "Sorry Fugu" is a delightful tale of a New York chef battling his nerves and his confidence during three visits by the harshest food critic in town. I did not get to speak with the other author, Alice McDermott, whose story "Enough" is also featured.
Don Reed checks into The Kipling Hotel
I interviewed Don Reed about his new autobiographical solo show The Kipling Hotel, which opens this weekend at The Marsh Berkeley.
You can read the article here.
This is the second chapter in what will likely be a trilogy of solo shows about the Oakland native's life. The first was the phenomenally successful East 14th, which ran at The Marsh for 2 1/2 years – no mean feat for a guy who lives in Los Angeles and works as the warmup comedian for "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno."
Here's what didn't make the newspaper...
Fuzzy no more: life after Disneyland
Last summer at Berkeley's Impact Theatre, Trevor Allen dusted off Working for the Mouse, his finely tuned one-man show about his years as Pluto, Mr. Smee, the Mad Hatter and others on the pavement at Disneyland.
I reviewed the show in June (read the review) and had a chance to interview Allen about the show as he prepared to re-open it at the EXIT Theatre. Read the feature in the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Oh, Maureen! Ms. McVerry revisits the Gershwins
In 1993, an ebullient comedienne with a head full of red curls, danced and sang her way across the stage of the Gershwin Theatre (aka the Presentation Theatre) as the bubbly title character in Oh, Kay! a giddy 1926 musical with a score by George and Ira Gershwin.
Maureen McVerry, long one of the Bay Area’s most reliable musical comedy stars, appeared to have a grand time playing a Jazz Age baby wriggling her way through Prohibition and attempting to win the affections of the handsome Jimmy Winter.
McVerry (seen in the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival production at right) made a memorable entrance with a boat on her back. “’Are you sure this is how Gertrude Lawrence got her start,’ I remember thinking,” McVerry says on the phone from her Potrero Hill home.
McVerry is back in the land of Oh, Kay!, this time as the director. She’s helming a slightly revised version for 42nd Street Moon, which begins previews today (Nov. 2) and opens this weekend.
Kym Barrett designs a Cirque evolution
You don't go to a Cirque du Soleil show just to see the costumes. Audiences are usually slathering for the death-defying acrobatics and goofy clowns. But what separates a Cirque show from the rest of the circus fray is the spectacle, and that certainly has a lot to do with the costumes.
The latest touring Cirque opus is Totem, another artsy epic under a blue-and-yellow striped tent behind AT&T Park. The theme for this show is evolution, and the costumes are by a charming Australian designer named Kym Barrett. She's best known for her work in movies – perhaps you've seen one of the Matrix movies or Speed Racer? If you haven't caught one of those, you can check out her work in the upcoming reboot of the Spider-man franchise and the film adaptation of the hit novel Cloud Atlas.
Project bridges Spacey and SF
The Bridge Project, that transatlantic experiment in blending American and English actors and designers is slowly wending its way to a close after three seasons. The final lap of the project, a collaboration between the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Old Vic in London and director Sam Mendes' production company, is Shakespeare's Richard III starring The Old Vic's artistic director, a dude named Kevin Spacey.
Neither Spacey nor Mendes made himself available to the press to promote the San Francisco stop on the R3 world tour, so I wrote a feature for the San Francisco Chronicle about the Bridge Project itself.
Bill Cain opens a new book for Bible
Bill Cain's last two Bay Area outings, Equivocation and 9 Circles, both at Marin Theatre Company, were absolutely fantastic. So there's reason to be excited about the world premiere of his latest play, How to Write a New Book for the Bible at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. With great compassion, intelligence and humor, Cain writes about his parents and his older brother in a play that flips back and forth in time as Cain cares for his dying mother.
I talked to Cain about the play for an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.
As usual, there wasn't enough space in the story to include all of Cain's interview, so I'd like to include a few more morsels here.
Enter Stage Left: SF theater history on film
Docuemntary film director/producer Austin Forbord (below right) has created a fascinating documentary about the history of San Francisco theater from the post-World War II days up to the present. The movie has its premeire at the Mill Valley Film Festival this week and will likely see wider release soon after.
I interviewed Forbord for a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. You can read the story here.
Puppeteer wakes up the weird to stop bullying
The horrific stories about kids and bullying just keep on coming. Even in the face of something extraordinary like the "It Gets Better" campaign, bullying persists. It may take generations to quell the cruelty, so let's get started.
Walnut Creek native Leslie Carrara-Rudolph is doing something about bullying in the best way she knows how. If you saw the wonderful Muppet puppet improv show Stuffed and Unstrung at the Curran Theatre last month, you saw what a genius puppeteer Carrara-Rudolph is. Well now she's returning to her hometown with a children's show that directly address bullying and self-esteem – but in a fun, family-friendly way for ages 6 and up.
The show is Wake Up Your Weird, and it stars a sock puppet named Lolly Lardpop.
TheatreWorks designs with Sense and Sensibility
In today's San Francisco Chronicle, I talk with TheatreWorks Artistic Director Robert Kelley, set designer Joe Ragey and costume designer Fumiko Bielefeldt about their work on bringing Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility to the stage.