Size matters -- Magic's Brothers is a keeper
Comparing The Brothers Size, the second part of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays cycle, to In the Red and Brown Water, the first part, is inevitable but ultimately unnecessary.
These are two very different plays, both extraordinary and both extraordinarily well produced by, respectively, Magic Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. Red and Brown opened first and gave us a broad view of McCraney’s world, a working-class Louisiana town where the mostly African-American inhabitants exist in a purely theatrical dimension between reality and poetry, between fact and folklore.
Gaggles of gays ruffle feathers in La Cage
The irony surrounding Friday's opening-night for La Cage aux Folles at San Mateo's Broadway by the Bay was sweet. Audience members showing up for this glitzy gay musical fairy tale were not able to park in the parking lot of the San Mateo Performing Arts Center (aka San Mateo High School) because there was a football game going on.
That's right: it was the classic collision of quarterbacks and drag queens.
And I think the drag queens won – at least they were more entertaining.
Etiquette is politely impolite
I'm so sorry you missed my performance in Etiquette, the unique show brought to us by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' DARE program. I must say, not to be too boastful, that my performance bordered on brilliant. But the only person who will ever know that is a charming woman named Sylvia, who happened to be visiting from Vancouver to celebrate her 50th birthday (happy birthday, Sylvia, my charming co-star!).
A creation by the UK-based Rotozaza, Etiquette is one of those highly original theater/art experiences that tries to reconfigure the form. For this interactive, two-person-at-a-time show, participants are performers and audience.
With strings attached, Compulsion compells
It's so incredibly exciting to be enthralled by someone or something. In the case of Rinne Groff's Compulsion at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, it's someone and something.
The world-premiere production (in collaboration with Yale Repertory Theatre, where the play ran earlier this year, and The Public Theater in New York, where the play goes next) is ostensibly a roman a clef about the life of Meyer Levin, the journalist and novelist most famous for the novel Compulsion, his fictionalized spin on the Leopold and Loeb murders. Levin's stand-in here is Sid Silver, also Jewish, also from Chicago, also married to a French woman, also obsessed with Anne Frank and her diary.
Cycle revs up in exquisite shades of Red and Brown
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Tarell Alvin McCraney's In the Red and Brown Water feels like ritual. It feels like a party. It feels like living, breathing poetry. And that's a hell of way to begin a prodigious three-play cycle involving three plays, three theaters and one playwright.
It fell to Marin Theatre Company to launch McCraney's The Brother/Sister Plays, a trilogy produced in tandem with the Magic Theatre (up next with The Brothers Size) and American Conservatory Theater (wrapping things up with Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet). It's probably hardest to be first, but you wouldn't know it from the production that shimmered on stage in Mill Valley Tuesday night.
Teatro ZinZanni tames the zaniness
I'll just say it right up front: the first time I saw Teatro ZinZanni, I left the spiegeltent with a raging headache.
That was 10 years ago, and the show was, appropriately, Love, Chaos & Dinner. I've been back a number of times over the last decade, and I really started to see a change when Joan Baez joined the show and took over the dual role of hostess and singer. Having one person who could assay both characters with aplomb (not to mention star power) really gave the show some cohesion it sorely needed.
I returned to Pier 29 recently and surprised myself by actively enjoying the show. Director Norman Langill and his team (co-director/choreographer Tobias Larsson, associate director Elise "Mo" Durocher and associate artistic director Reenie Duff) have really tamed the chaos and found a way to balance comedy, audience interaction, music, circus acts and genuine elegance. This latest version, dubbed Hail Caesar, is a fun and classy show.
Be mindful of Aurora’s Trouble
If only playwright Alice Childress could see Margo Hall's performance in her 1955 play Trouble in Mind now at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company.
Hall has long been one of those Bay Area actors you go out of your way to see, whether she's directing, acting or writing. Somewhat unbelievably, Hall is only just getting around to making her Aurora debut, but what a debut! Hall plays Wiletta Mayer, a successful African-American actress on the Broadway stage. Wiletta isn't biter exactly, but she's learned how to play the race game in order to succeed in her chosen field. She's hardened, and this is especially evident when she's instructing a Broadway novice (Jon Joseph Gentry as John) before they begin rehearsals on a new play with a mostly black cast that's bound to court controversy because it's an anti-lynching screed.
Dreamgirls is a flashy dream
Dreamgirls, as a movie, seemed apologetic that it was a musical at all. Set in the Motown-ish world of a Supremes-ish girl group, the story lends itself to abundant music without straining credibility. But on the Broadway stage, the music world was only a façade – the real music came from the musical, you know, when people actually sing about how they feel.On screen, when Dreamgirls had to start singing about emotion rather than just sing, it got sheepish. Oh, please don’t mind us. We’re just going to emote for a minute. We’ll get back to the flashy editing and glitzy Beyoncé moments before you know it.That’s not how Dreamgirls should live. This is a show that needs to be seen on the stage. The touring production of Dreamgirls now at the Curran Theatre (under the auspices of SHN) – the tour that opened last year at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theatre – is dazzling in many ways, but it truly gets that this is a performance work that needs to move and sing and only stop long enough to pour on the diva moments.
Goode shines Light, Frankenstein lives
If you need proof of how lively and diverse the San Francisco theater scene can be, let me direct your attention to two wildly different shows I've seen recently. One is about as old fashioned as it gets, while the other is wonderfully experimental.
For sheer retro-musical theater pleasures, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein – at the Golden Gate Theatre until July 25 – is a prime example of Grade B goods. There was a time on Broadway – think the 1950s and early '60s – when these kinds of shows populated the Great White Way. Taking the term "musical comedy" to heart, these shows have no objective other than to please its audience for a couple of hours. A few laughs, a few hummable tunes, and we're done.
With The Producers Brooks fulfilled a lifelong passion to create a musical theater blockbuster. Now Brooks is settling into his groove with Young Frankenstein, an extremely faithful version of his classic 1974 movie (co-written with star Gene Wilder). As a recycler of his own material, Brooks sticks to the formula that worked for the movie and supplies songs that, while not as catchy as those in The Producers, are appealing.
Sam Harris aims for Jolson & 'Reclamation'
First, two issues that need addressing:- Why isn't Sam Harris performing his new gay marriage anthem "My Reclamation" at San Francisco's Gay Pride celebration? It's a beautiful, moving ode to love and equal rights -- part defiant manifesto, part gorgeous ballad. So far, Harris is not slated to appear on any Gay Pride stage, and that seems, to say the least, like a missed opportunity.- Why isn't "Glee"mastermind Ryan Murphy begging Sam Harris to play one of Rachel's (Lea Michelle) two dads? It's such a brilliant no brainer. Can you just imagine the Harris/Michelle power duets? A show queen's mind fairly boggles.We're thinking about Sam Harris because the big-voiced, Tony-nominated performer is headed back to San Francisco's Rrazz Room, where he triumphed in a last-minute, late-night about a year ago. It just so happens that Harris' gig coincides with all the Gay Pride revelry, which can hardly be accidental. In addition to his new song, Harris' life is practically a paean to the fully integrated, 21st century gay life. He and his husband, Danny, are busy raising their 2-year-old son, Cooper, who after a recent trip to the theater (the child's first) to see Sesame Street Live, told his dads, "Cooper up there, sing, dance with Cookie Monster." You could hardly expect less from the spawn of Harris.
Making theater dance – an ode to collaboration
One of the most exciting things about the world premiere of American Conservatory Theater's The Tosca Project is that it shines a big old spotlight on the riches of the Bay Area.
Here is a revered local theater company venturing into risky territory – a play mostly without words told through dance and recorded music of all kinds – in collaboration with an artist from another revered local company. But get this, that other revered institution is not a theater company.
Yes, ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff has spent four years working with the San Francisco Ballet's Val Caniparoli to create The Tosca Project, a story inspired by – hold your hats again – a piece of San Francisco history. Are you getting all this local, local, local stuff? The legendary Tosca Cafe in North Beach is the subject, from its opening in 1919 by a trio of Italians to its current status as the royal court of Jeanette Etheredge and her literary and cinematic pals, and that history is related via dance, music (opera, jazz, standards, rock) and even some beat poetry.
Entering heavenly Pastures
Spectacular things are happening at the Bruns Amphitheater – on stage and off.
At long last, California Shakespeare Theater is getting a performance venue worthy of its status as one of the Bay Area's foremost theater companies. Improvements to the Bruns include a new box office, new landscaping and, most importantly, a beautiful new 7,850-square-foot building to house its food operations and some spectacular bathrooms (if you ever used the bathrooms in the old endlessly "temporary" facility, you'll appreciate just how spectacular these new facilities really are).
The improvements aren't quite done yet, but they're already upping the ante on the Cal Shakes experience – and just in time for Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone's 10-year anniversary with the company.
So many things to celebrate ̶ not the least of which is the world-premiere production on the Bruns stage.
No equivocating: this is good theater
Marin Theatre Company's Equivocation is enormously enjoyable theater.
I liked Bill Cain's play last summer when I saw it at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and I still like its muscular, hugely entertaining theatricality. The Marin production, directed by Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis, is more intimate but just as rewarding.
The cast boasts some of the Bay Area's finest – Anna Bullard (the lone woman in the cast), Lance Gardner, Andrew Hurteau, Craig Marker, Andy Murray, and Charles Shaw Robinson – as they crawl around J.B. Wilson's scaffolding set that reminds of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. Where else would you want to set a story of William Shakespeare, or Shagspeare as he's called in the play?
As Cain's play imagines Will attempting to write a piece of propaganda theater for bonny King James (and his henchman, Sir Robert Cecil) and discovering that what he writes has to be the truth or nothing, something very interesting happens. Cain's immense knowledge of Shakespeare's plays and British history coalesce into a drama that feels recognizably human yet epic in its scope and more than just a little bit contemporary.
Beach Blanket still defying gravity
There's no big anniversary, but there's still something to celebrate. Steve Silver's Beach Blanket Babylon is going on 36 years old and is brighter, fresher and funnier than ever. Members of the press were invited to come check out the show recently, and it's easy to see why producer/co-writer Jo SchumanSilver and director/co-writer Kenny Mazlow are eager to spread the word that the country's longest-running musical revue is in tip-top condition.
At this point, Beach Blanket is a reliable brand. You know you'll get a few things when you head to the Club Fugazi, nestled cozily in bustling North Beach. You'll get broad comedy (often delivered by comic broads), maniacally merry music from every era (Bill Keck is the musical director), fantastic (in every sense) costumes topped by towering hats and the precision popping of popular and political culture. As much as the show changes to accommodate current events and personalities, some things never change. Snow White looks for love and, in the end, turns into Madonna – complete with Jean-Paul Gaultier boob cones – and flies over the audience.
The current edition of Beach Blanket, in addition to some hilarious and timely skewering, finally lands on a way to make that Madonna makeover relevant.
And the Party rages on!
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I loved it before and I love it even more now.
About a year ago, Word for Word and Theatre Rhinoceros joined forces for an evening of three shorts stories by gay writers adapted for the stage (in true Word for Word fashion, not a letter of the original text is changed). That production was a tremendous example of the Word for Word art – taking what's great on the page and making it even greater on the stage. (Read my original review.)
Jesus and his extraordinary Mississippi moonwalk
On the theatrical spectrum, this is the exact opposite of the sitcom-ready Sunset and Margaritas now at TheatreWorks (read my review of that play in the Palo Alto Weekly here), which is to say this is challenging, thought-provoking material given the kind of sharply etched production that inspires curiosity and wonder. There's nothing easy about Moonwalks, and that's a good thing. Gardley, working with director Amy Mueller, weaves myth, folklore, American Civil War history, personal family history and musings on race in this country.
Truce is out of sight
You could describe Marilee Talkington in a number of ways, starting with the fact that she is going blind. She is partially sighted, visually impaired, visually handicapped, sensorily challenged; she has low vision or no vision. She has been called Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Helen Keller. And those are only a few of the descriptions that come up in Talkington's compelling 90-minute solo show Truce at San Francisco's Noh Space.
After seeing the show, other descriptions that come to mind: dynamic actor, intriguing writer and astonishingly deft performer.
Duct tape and yuks: holding comedy hostage
How strange it is to see two wildly different comedies at two different theaters and find they have something in common: plot twists that involve the restraining of characters by tying them down with duct tape.Since when did that become an element of slapstick? Has someone alerted Abbott and Costello?At the SF Playhouse, more than half the cast spends the second act bound to chairs with duct tape and plastic wrap (with extra cling, no doubt) in Stephen Adley Guirgis’ Den of Thieves. And down in Palo Alto at the Lucie Stern Theatre, the TheatreWorks production of Sunsets and Margaritas by José Cruz González also hauls out the sturdy gray multi-use tape to restrain a major character. One more instance of this and we’d have ourselves a trend (apparently a trend only requires a trio of appearances).
Intersection breaks walls, audience follows
Watching the audience on stage at Intersection for the Arts was a stunning experience. Sometimes theater companies trying to push boundaries and break down walls really do get it right.
The show in this case is Oakland playwright Chinaka Hodge'sMirrors in Every Corner, and the companies involved in bringing it to life are many: Intersection, Campo Santo and The Living Word Project'sYouth Speaks theater company. They say it can take a village. In this case, it takes a community.