Sisters count in SF Playhouse's 1 2 3
The three daughters of domestic terrorists – activists, as the eldest girl insists on calling them – have moved so often and changed their names so many times they can't really remember who they are exactly. The easiest thing to do is simply number themselves. 1 will be the eldest. 2 will be the middle child and 3 will be the baby.
When we meet these three smart, malleable children, in the world premiere of Lila Rose Kaplan's 1 2 3, they are in a new town about to head to a new school. Again.
Cal Shakes scares up big laughs in vivacious Vep
How appropriate to go (high) camping under the stars in the Orinda hills with the California Shakespeare Theater. One doesn't think of Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep as a play for the great outdoors, but now-former Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone and his dynamic actor duo make a strong case for Ludlam being funny anywhere.
As swan songs go, Moscone picked a doozy, if only because he leaves them laughing.
A toast to Champagne and her wily Poon
Just when it seems all the colorful characters are fleeing San Francisco, along comes an Oasis of (fake) tits and glitter. Yes, Oasis, the new South of Market nightclub, has defied the real estate odds and become a haven for performers of all stripes, including impresario D'Arcy Drollinger, a co-owner of the club along with drag legend Heklina and several other partners.
Drollinger has to be one of the most interesting people working in Bay Area theater.
Trickle down theory: parallel lives in Now for Now
I've never seen anything quite like Now for Now, the new theatrical work devised and performed by Mark Jackson and Megan Trout now at Z Below through July 26 (time is short – go see it). As two dynamic and acutely interesting theater people, Mark Jackson and Megan Trout make for an intriguing combination on paper and, happily, that intrigue (and a whole lot more) extends to the work they have created.
Delightful Matilda mostly avoids chokey
What is it about Roald Dahl that makes his books so ripe for adaptation? Probably the most famous book-to-screen-to-stage example from his canon is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which became a beloved movie musical in 1971 (with the title shifted to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). The 2005 remake by Tim Burton is much less beloved, and the splashy 2013 West End stage musical has been a big, long-running hit and will hit Broadway in the upcoming season.
This is the time: Anna Deavere Smith at Berkeley Rep
If you've ever seen a show by our foremost docudramatist, Anna Deavere Smith, you know the power she has over an audience. She conducts extensive interviews on her chosen topic, then she re-creates portions of those interviews an a cannily crafted show that is theatrical in its presentation and righteous in its political and emotional power. She makes her audience think, feel and converse for days (and beyond). Now, with Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, The California Chapter at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, she is going even further. She's turning her show into a full-blown seminar.
The delights of TheatreWorks' time-twisting Triangle
In the wake of my review of TheatreWorks' world premiere musical Triangle someone tweeted a link to the review and suggested that the show could make it to Broadway. I have some thoughts about that.
Cal Shakes dreams a Dream under the stars
There's so much talk about nature and stars in Life Is a Dream that it seems perfectly natural to be sitting outside on a temperate summer night watching Pedro Calderón de la Barca's 1635 play about thwarting destiny and connecting to the deepest truths of human existence.
California Shakespeare Theater's production of Dream, a beautiful if thorny play, offers the chance to see a work that is all too rarely performed.
Shout to the top with Shotgun's Girls
Would that Caryl Churchill's 1982 play Top Girls was something of a dated relic in its details of the horrors, tribulations, indignities and injustices suffered by women through the ages. Things may have changed in the 33 years since the play's London debut in the era of Margaret Thatcher, but they haven't changed enough. The play, now being given a sterling production by Shotgun Players feels deeper and more relevant than ever.
It's fascinating to see Top Girls in such close proximity to a much more recent Churchill play, Love and Information ...
Flames lick the American dream in Aurora's Detroit
There's a particular kind of fear that grips those who have all the things we're "supposed" to have – jobs, houses, marriages, ideals. The fear, of course, is not in the having of it all but in the potential loss of it all (or even in part). That brutal terrain shaped by anxiety is the real setting of Lisa D'Amour's Detroit, now receiving its Bay Area premiere from Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company.
Reveling in the rambling genius of Eddie Izzard
p>Eddie Izzard was back in town this week with his Force Majeure tour. His San Francisco stop at the Golden Gate Theatre offered congratulations to audience members for being the smartest audiences in town (because they were there, naturally), and allowed fans the opportunity to offer depthless adoration to Izzard, the queenly king of the non-sequitur.
Fractured tales confound in ACT's Love and Information
Confounding and captivating in equal measure, American Conservatory Theater's debut production in the newly renovated Strand Theater certainly lives up to its title. Caryl Churchill's Love and Information sounds like a generic title for just about anything in our short-attention-span world, on or off line, and that seems to be part of the point.
More like a curated collection of scenes and short films than an actual play...
TheatreWorks delights with devilish Angels
Boredom, desire and champagne make for a potent cocktail in Noël Coward's 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, now receiving a lively production from TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
Director Robert Kelley delivers an elegant outing for this zesty comedy that keeps its focus on two live wire ladies – Jane and Julia, best friends since grammar school.
Women rock the Night at Cal Shakes season opener
Last year, California Shakespeare Theater offered an off-season touring production of Twelfth Night that featured an all-women cast and made stops in prisons, homeless shelters, senior communities and the like. It was a stripped-down, wonderful production, and apparently its impact was strong enough that outgoing artistic director Jonathan Moscone (he bids adieu in August after he directs The Mystery of Irma Vep) decided to pull the play into the company's 41st season.
With a different director (Christopher Liam Moore), this is a very different Twelfth Night but with two key returning players and one overriding concept.
Ladies' night at ACT's Music
In the 1970s, Stephen Sondheim was on some kind of roll. From Company to Follies to Pacific Overtures to Sweeney Todd, the decade found at the peak of his considerable powers. He was – and is – a musical theater superhero, but in the midst of all that musical and lyrical genius, he dropped a nearly perfect show that was at once a classic musical – operetta almost – and completely contemporary.
A Little Night Music is a dazzling combination of light and funny, clever and romantic with sharp and incisive, deep and dark. The show has elegance and a light touch with an undercurrent of regret, sorrow and misery to keep it from floating away.
Gently with a chainsaw: Heathers really sings
Funnier and feistier than the movie on which it’s based, Heathers: The Musical is an exceedingly successful screen-to-stage adaptation, and San Francisco’s Ray of Light Theatre is just about the perfect company to produce it.
Heathers, which features a score and book by Laurence O’Keefe (of Bat Boy and Legally Blonde fame) and Kevin Murphy, (Reefer Madness, “Desperate Housewives”), is dark and damaged in all the right ways. But the musical amps up the fun factor with the ideal amount of camp. It winks and nods to the 1989 movie but...
Empty Nesters explores a grand marital canyon
A marriage heads over a cliff, literally, in Garret Jon Groenveld's The Empty Nesters, a co-production of PlayGround and Virago Theatre Company and part of PlayGround's 19th annual Festival of New Works.
Luckily, the cliff in question is on the western rim of the Grand Canyon, and there happens to be a popular tourist spot called Skywalk that allows visitors to make a u-shaped jaunt on a glass walkway, with the canyon floor more than 3,000 feet below them.
One man, two guvnors & 102 belly laughs
Francis Henshall may be one sandwich short of a picnic, as they say, but that's one of many reasons One Man, Two Guvnors is so much fun. Francis' hunger literally drives the first act's zaniness, and truth be told, once that hunger is satisfied, the farce loses a bit (but certainly not all) of its oomph. Thankfully there's a perky skiffle band on stage to keep things bouncing along.
Oh, if only all adaptations could be this fun. When playwright Richard Bean decided to pull Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century comedy into a specific time and place in the 20th century – Brighton, England, 1963 – he did so with an eye to heightening and broadening the comedy from its Venetian origins.
ACT's Strand Theater: the new jewel of mid-Market
A vermillion treasure inside and out, American Conservatory Theater’s new Strand Theater on Market Street is – or should be – the future of San Francisco. This beautiful city is in crisis at the moment, the crisis known as boom, and its character is fading visibly each day. Our diversity, our artists, our culture disappears a little more with every swing of a giant construction crane as gazillion-dollar condos and apartments crowd the airspace.
City government’s slow reaction to this crisis of rampant success means we have lost people and organizations we’ll never get back. Galleries, theater companies, artists, musicians, dancers, actors gone, and with them, a piece of what made San Francisco special. And how have our fearless leaders responded in offering assistance to the evicted, the rent increased, the displaced, the non-tech zillionaires? A shrug and a promise of “meh.”