Marin Theatre Co. gets its yawp on with I and You
Call it the Great Gunder-splosion of 2013. And 2014. San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson has taken over the local theater scene with more productions than you can shake a dramaturg at. Only last week she opened The Taming with Crowded Fire Theatre Company (see my review here), and here she here is, barely a week later, with another world premiere, I and You with Marin Theatre Company (like The Taming, I and You is part of the National New Play Network and will receive several more productions as part of what they call a "rolling world premiere").
Here's what these two plays have in common:
Broadway-bound Carole King bio truly is Beautiful
You know that Beautiful: The Carole King Musical has worked its musical biography magic when, during the curtain calls, the extraordinary Jessie Mueller takes her bow, you feel like you're applauding an actor for her superb performance as King and you feel like you're acknowledging King herself and all of the remarkable work she has contributed over the last five decades.
King herself is nowhere to be found in the creation of this Broadway-bound enterprise except where it really counts: in the music. The story that book writer Douglas McGrath and director Marc Bruni are telling springs out of King's early start in the songwriting business and her emergence as a seminal singer-songwriter of the 1970s, but the show is really a tribute to the craft of songwriting.
Shrew you, shutdown! The Taming gets it right
The word factions is uttered in a way that makes it sound like the filthiest word you can imagine. And, in these tense government shutdown days, it actually is. But when James Madison says the word, you feel it whistling through the centuries like an airborne bomb that keeps exploding every time political idiocy allows factions (it's such an easy word to say with loathing) to hijack democracy.
The world premiere of San Francisco playwright Lauren Gunderson's The Taming couldn't come at a more volatile time. Our government just happens to be in the middle of a crisis that was anticipated, according to Gunderson's play, by our founding fathers. The wise Mr. Madison did his best to avert the power of the special interests, but he compromised to keep our fledgling country steady and strong, at least to start.
Joseph's Bengal Tiger prowls the SF Playhouse stage
The last time San Francisco Playhouse produced a play by Rajiv Joseph -- Animals Out of Paper in 2009 -- the young playwright was becoming one of the hottest writers in the country. TheatreWorks produced his The North Pool in 2011, just as his Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was preparing to bow on Broadway in a starry production that featured Robin Williams as the titular caged beast.
Joseph, with his Tony Award and Pulitzer nominations, has fully emerged as an American playwright of note and his work is back at San Francisco Playhouse to launch a new season, the second in the stellar theater on Post Street.
In Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Joseph has crafted a challenging war/ghost story that wrestles with the very notion of god (or, if you prefer, God).
Well I'll be dipped in pig's blood -- Carrie lives
The bucket of pig's blood is to Carrie the Musical what the chandelier is to The Phantom of the Opera -- you just know both of those suckers are coming down. In fact, Carrie and Phantom have more than falling props in common. They're both essentially horror stories adapted for the musical stage in which the central character is a misunderstood, sensitive soul who gets bullied to the point of horrific violence. The difference is that one has an upper berth on the "most successful musicals of all tiem" express train, and one is a flattened penny on the track underneath that train.
If you've heard of Carrie the Musical it's probably in the context of "musical disasters" or "Broadway's biggest flops."
Cal Shakes' lukewarm take on Winter's Tale
On a refreshingly brisk autumn night, California Shakespeare Theater's A Winter's Tale aimed to tell a sad story with a happy ending. "A sad story is best for winter," or so we're told by a young boy not long for this earth.
Even by Shakespearean standards, this is a strange play, with its jarring shifts in tone, unexplained fits of jealousy, interference by the gods and living statuary. In other words, it's a director's dream – here's a wacky play that needs lots of interpretation and massaging to make it work for a modern audience.
Cal Shakes previously closed the season with A Winter's Tale in 2002 with a massive production in which the audience moved around to accommodate the shift in action from Sicilia to Bohemia. Director Lisa Peterson hauled out screaming teenagers, a school bus and an all-out rave before audience members headed back into the theater proper for the moving, if fantastical, finale.
This time around, we get a wildly different Tale directed by Patricia McGregor, who returns after the triumph of last season's Spunk.
In praise of Anthony and Sharon and Lorri and Spike
If you spend any time at all going to theater in the San Francisco Bay Area, you soon see that we have some extraordinary homegrown talent populating our local stages. That's not empty boosterism – rah, Bay Area! – but something nearing actual fact – rah, working Bay Area actors in it for the long haul! In just the last month or so, Marin Theatre Company, TheatreWorks, Aurora Theatre Company, American Conservatory Theater and Magic Theatre have opened their seasons with at least one dazzling, shake-your-head-in-wonder performance by a Bay Area actor.
Now Berkeley Repertory Theatre gives a triple scoop of local actor goodness in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the local premiere of Christopher Durang's Tony Award-winning comedy.
Founding Fathers sing a show tune in ACT’s spirited 1776
American Conservatory Theater opens the new season with canny revival of the 1969 musical 1776 originally produced last year at the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Fla. Tony Award-winning director Frank Galati helmed the patriotic tuner in time for the presidential election (which somehow seems a lot further behind us than just a year), and now he has brought his creative team and his leading players to San Francisco along with a cast fleshed out with some lively locals.
1776 is an unusual choice for a musical and creators Sherman Edwards (music and lyrics) and Peter Stone (book) take a rather unusual approach in that they've crafted more of a play than a musical, but the dozen or so songs somehow work to add a humanizing and emotional layer to a history lesson we think we know but was actually messy and contentious and full of ominous compromise.
Wonky tone buries Magic's Buried Child
By all rights, the Magic Theatre's season-opening production of Buried Child by Sam Shepard, the man who helped build the Magic's national reputation during his 12-year stay from the mid-'70s into the early '80s, should be a triumph. Continuing the five-year Sheparding America celebration of the writer's work, the production should be a potent reminder of just how electrifying, unsettling and beautiful Shepard's writing can be.
This is not that production.
What you should know about Impact’s What Every Girl Should Know
The first thing to know about Impact Theatre's What Every Girl Should Know, a one-act play by Monica Byrne, is that it's a gripping play about matters physical and spiritual. It's also very well produced by director Tracy Ward and an excellent cast of four. This is a play set in 1914 but feels, rather sadly, of the moment because, it seems, there will always be people (old, white men mostly) who want to keep other people (women, mostly) as ignorant as possible, especially when it comes to their own bodies and – heavens forfend – sex.
Byrne's drama is set in the tight confines of Room 14, a four-bed dorm room at St. Mary's, a Catholic girl's reformatory on New York's Lower East Side. The year is 1914, and the church is the ultimate power for the occupants of Room 14.
Personal is political in Aurora’s fiery Revolution
Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company opens its 22nd season with Amy Herzog's smart, moving drama After the Revolution, an ambitious play that juggles American history, the cost of political idealism and how one generation affects another – for good and ill – in a tight-knit family.
This is the same Herzog whose 4000 Miles was so good at American Conservatory Theater earlier this year (read my review here), and this play, which predates 4000 Miles, also features the character of Vera Joseph (who is based on Herzog's own grandmother).
Wesla Whitfield's dazzling Street of Dreams
Wesla Whitfield and Mike Greensill are better than ever, which is saying something as they've been better than most for quite some time. The singer and her husband, the arranger/pianist, haven't been seen regularly here in San Francisco since they moved north a few years back, but anytime they return is cause for attention and celebration, especially when they're part of an auspicious launch of a new cabaret room.
The lovely space is called Society Cabaret, and it's tucked away in the Hotel Rex, right off Union Square.
Bonnie & Clyde live (and die) by the Shotgun (Players)
Somehow it seems entirely appropriate that Berkeley's Shotgun Players are reviving the myth of gangsters Bonnie and Clyde. The celebrated criminals storm the Ashby Stage on the run from the law and nearing the end of their bloody, well-chronicled run of robberies and murders across the American south. They enter an abandoned barn to take cover. He's got a pistol in each hand and she's wielding -- what else? -- a shotgun. She is, it turns out, a true shotgun player.
British playwright Adam Peck's stage version of the Bonnie and Clyde story is not really anything like the revered 1967 movie version except for the basic facts of the story.
TheatreWorks' shining Desert Cities
I sort of fell in love with Jon Robin Baitz more than 20 years when I saw his The Substance of Fire at the Magic Theatre. He was an astoundingly intelligent playwright crafting dramas that felt of another time and from a writer well beyond his years.
Baitz has continued to turn out compelling dramas over the decades, but it was his stint in Hollywood that seemed to really recharge his theatrical battery. After a not-so-great experience in the world of network television, Baitz wrote what might be his best play yet, Other Desert Cities, which receives its local premiere from TheatreWorks.
I reviewed the play for the Palo Alto Weekly, an excerpt of which follows.
Good People is good theater at Marin Theatre Co.
There's something to be said for a play that is simply good. Not earth shattering or even profound. It may not take the form of drama in new and exciting directions or reinvent the notion of entertainment, but a good play does indeed entertain.
David Lindsay-Abaire is a smart, funny, compassionate writer who makes good plays (and happens to have a Pulitzer Prize on his shelf for the play Rabbit Hole). They have depth and feeling and almost always a good laugh or two (or three). His most recent arrival in the Bay Area is Good People, a slice-of-life comedy/drama receiving its local premiere as the season-opener for Marin Theatre Company.
And here's what's really interesting: not only is the play about something – choices, luck and the American class system – but also manages to be heartfelt, thoroughly entertaining and, at times, even a little unsettling.
Drag, disco, divas and - surprise - delight in Priscilla
Musical theater's rush to turn every movie into a Broadway show has taught us to tread carefully and lower our expectations. For every Billy Elliot or Hairspray or The Producers there's a Cry Baby or Catch Me If Yo Can or The Little Mermaid or Shrek or Sunset Boulevard or Sister Act or Leap of Faith or Young Frankenstein and the list goes on. And on
So it's understandable to come to the splashy Broadway musical adaptation of the absolutely charming 1994 movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with some trepidation. Banishing original music and lyrics in favor of '70s and '80s disco and pop hits further lowers the bar of expectation as the tale of two drag queens and a transsexual on a road trip through the Australian outback makes its way to the stage
The surprise, then, is that Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical is actually quite fun and not devoid of charm.
Twenty years on, Word for Word as brilliant as ever
Here we thought Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart were giving a master class in the fine art of the theater. Turns out there's an equally good master class happening at Z Below, the climate-controlled new space (formerly Traveling Jewish Theater) underneath Z Space. That's where the geniuses (genii?) behind Word for Word are celebrating their 20th anniversary with a sharp-tongued, warmhearted show called In Friendship based on the stories of Zona Gale.
The nine women who founded the company, including artistic directors Susan Harloe and JoAnne Winter, are all performing in the show (all together for the first time, which seems hard to believe). So there's more going on here than just another show.
Looking at the stars: Cal Shakes fans flames of Wilde's Winderemere
If you want, as Oscar Wilde did, to make cogent and funny points about men and women, husbands and wives and the notion of good people vs. bad people, what better way to do that than by putting Danny Scheie in a dress and letting him unleash his inner Dame Maggie Smith?
Scheie's performance as the Duchess of Berwick in the California Shakespeare Theater's production Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's first major theatrical it, is one of many pleasures in director Christopher Liam Moore's beguiling production.
Donna McKechnie charms in uneven cabaret show
Broadway legend Donna McKechnie, the original Cassie in A Chorus Line, has talked and sung about her life in San Francisco. In 2001, she brought Inside the Music to the Alcazar Theatre. The Tony Award-winner is back in town, still chatting and warbling about her storied life, but this time in a much smaller (and shorter) show in a much more charming room (Feinstein's at the Nikko).
To Sirs with love: Pinpointing Pinter at Berkeley Rep
What pure theatrical pleasure it is to spend two hours in the baffling world of playwright Harold Pinter with Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stewart as our guides. These two fascinating craftsmen, under the direction of the equally astute Sean Mathias, are a show unto themselves in the choices they make, the characters they draw and the relationships they forge with each other and with the audience. No Man's Land may be about some sort of limbo between the vibrancy of youth and the incapacity of old age (or, more simply, between living life and just waiting for death), but in truth, it's a masterful workshop in which gifted thespians practice their craft.
Pinter's play itself is an enigma (as so many Pinter plays seem to be). What is actually going on? Well, two older gentlemen, Hirst (Stewart) and Spooner (McKellen) have met at a pub near London's Hampstead Heath and have returned to Hirst's well-appointed home for a few (dozen) nightcaps.