Racism, history and drama in SF Playhouse's plush Velvet
In its West Coast premiere production at San Francisco Playhouse, Red Velvet provides a plum starring role for the great Carl Lumbly, who tackles the role of Ira Aldridge with depth and gravity. This is a serious actor playing a serious actor whose concern is more for getting the role right than playing into the bile being spewed in his general direction for daring to be a black man playing a black man in the ultra-white world of the theater.
Golden Thread traverses a rocky Highway
In his raggedy reflective vest and with his small voice booming, Traffic spends his days unlike most 8-year-olds: he waves traffic around a hairpin turn and in and out of a tunnel on the perilous mountain highway that links Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan. He is one of the "Pepsi boys" who ekes out a living waving a smashed soda bottle at passing cars, hoping for a few coins thrown his way as a tip. He also catches fish in the river at the bottom of the ravine and attempts to sell those as a snack to passing travelers.
The story of the Pepsi boys is a compelling one – check out this feature in the New York Times – and clearly playwright Kevin Artigue thought so, too. Their lives inspired his play The Most Dangerous Highway in the World, now receiving its world premiere from Golden Thread Productions.
Drag rock nirvana in Beyond the Valley of the Ultra Showgirls
Once the full-out rock song "Flesh Popsicle" has reached its climax, there can be no doubt: Above and Beyond the Valley of the Ultra Showgirls is a bona fide rock musical performed by a raucous five-piece band (that includes a one-woman horn section!) and a raging cast of women, men and men-as-women that would send North Carolinians into fits of moral paralysis. In other words, this is an original drag rock musical that kicks (and shakes) some serious booty.
It should come as no surprise that this two-hour slice of "broad" comedy should come from the pen of D'Arcy Drollinger...
Enchantment, off-key comedy in revised Cinderella
If audiences get confused by this abundance of Cinderella that's completely understandable, especially if they assume that the Rodgers and Hammerstein version has something to do with Disney. Any confusion will only be exacerbated by the 2013 Broadway production, which involved some major revision in the book by Douglas Carter Beane and a production design that looks like it took inspiration from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
Grand adventure awaits at Berkeley Rep's Treasure Island
Mary Zimmerman's work is consistently thrilling. Since I first saw Journey to the West at Zellerbach Playhouse, I have looked forward to seeing whatever Zimmerman makes next. Luckily, her relationship with Berkeley Reperoty Theatre is such that she keeps coming back and back, always with something intriguing and, quite often, magnificent. Her swimming pool-set Metamorphoses in 1999 (also performed at Zellerbach Playhouse) remains one of my favorite nights in a theater ever.
Zimmerman's latest offering at Berkeley Rep is a zesty staging of Treasure Island, and it's a blast.
This Lion is king at ACT
If Benjamin Scheuer were simply a musical act, I'd happily go see him in concert and buy his albums. his voice can go from sweet to gravelly, aggressive to tender, rollicking to romantic even within the space of a single song, and the same can be said for his guitar playing. He puts himself out there in his music, and in addition to being aurally pleasing, his music is also deeply satisfying.
But Scheuer is more than a concert act. He's also a playwright and actor. So his version of a concert is the one-man autobiographical musical The Lion now at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater.
Anne Boleyn seems to be heading in right direction
The relationship between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – adulterous, adventurous and tragic (for Anne) – has long captivated the public imagination. Their story has been told on the page, on the stage and on screens large and small. There's been a shift in thinking about Anne, not as a vixen, home wrecker or overzealous climber but as a smart cookie who was more of a power player behind Henry's throne than we might have thought.
One such exploration can now bee seen on stage at Marin Theatre Company in Anne Boleyn, a 2010 play by Howard Brenton.
Catching up with Colette & Cyrano
So many shows, so little time!
Herewith, a petite voyage to France, first to check in with the writer Colette and then to catch up with the swashbuckling Cyrano de Bergerac. I reviewed both Colette Uncensored at The Marsh, a solo show starring and co-written by Lorri Holt (with Zack Rogow, and Cyrano, a new adaptation of Rostand's tale at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Pure pop pleasure with the Puppini Sisters
Under ordinary circumstances, the fact of wonderful British actor Hugh Laurie sitting a table away from me would be highly distracting. But Sunday afternoon at the Fairmont's Venetian Room wasn't ordinary circumstances: it was the only scheduled US performance of the British act The Puppini Sisters in support of their new album, The High Life.
The afternoon performance, like the sold-out evening performance, was part of the Bay Area Cabaret season, a season that spans Broadway, pop, jazz and, in a grand Puppini embrace, high camp and sterling musicianship.
Tense, riveting Brothers from Crowded Fire
Not much happens in Jonas Hassen Khemiri's I Call My Brothers, a Crowded Fire Theater production at Thick House. But then again, everything happens.
This is a mostly subterranean drama, which is to say, a little happens on the surface – a young man goes about his day running errands and interacting with friends and family – but a whole lot more is happening in his thoughts, his imagination, his paranoia.
Sean Hayes is devilish/divine in Act of God
Like parochial school for fans of The Daily Show, the play An Act of God is a curious theatrical experience. All the ingredients are there: bells and whistles set, sharply funny script, charming star. But in the end, as in the beginning, it's more lite than enlightening. Maybe it's too much to ask that a snarky comedy about a grumpy god holding forth before an audience of heathen Americans have some spiritual heft to it, but the script comes close several times but ends up wishing it were a ditzy musical.
A Tour de force for Scheie and Nachtrieb
The tour group is just heading out when the enthusiastic guide, suddenly quite sensible, says, "You will need to extrapolate quite a bit if you wish to enjoy this tour."
That is, at once, an incredibly honest thing for a tour guide – any tour guide – to say because it's almost always true and a subtle wink at the theatrical adventure on which we are embarking in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's beguiling world premiere A House Tour of the Infamous Porter Family Mansion with Tour Guide Weston Ludlow Londonderry, a commission from Z Space tailor made for its vast space and built on the prodigious talents of actor Danny Scheie.
Here's what for the How and the Why at Aurora
Watching a play like Sarah Treem's The How and the Why makes me feel smarter – fractionally but still. To prove my point, I'm going to quote Ernst Mayr, an evolutionary biologist with whom I was unfamiliar before this play. Mayr, as we're told in the play, was interested in the how and the why of things, the mechanism and the function.
Let's apply that to Treem's play, shall we? The how is pretty clear...
Theater as contact sport in SF Playhouse's dazzling Colossal
Colossal at San Francisco Playhouse is a (foot)balls-out theatrical experience that manages to provoke thought and elicit feeling all the while it dazzles with its aggressive stagecraft.
Andrew Hinderaker's play sets up theater as a competitive sport, that is, this play is competing with itself by placing a large scoreboard-type timer above the stage and letting four quarters unfold in real time over an hour. Then there's also the turf-covered playing field (set by Bill English), the bright Friday night-style lights (design by Kurt Landisman) and the ear-piercing whistles (sound design by Theodore J. H. Hulsker). This is more than a stage for a play: it's a playing field ready for intense action.
Jonesing for cosmic connection in ACT's Joneses
The topic is: things that have happened. That broad, yet somehow quite specific, statement comes from a character in Will Eno's The Realistic Joneses now on stage at American Conservatory Theater's Geary Theater. Another broad yet specific topic might be: lives that are lived.
Eno is one of those playwrights whose gift seems to be making raising the bizarre, often absurd experience of human existence to the level of cosmic grace and beauty.
The general awesomeness of Emily Skinner
In the last couple of years, San Francisco went from no Emily Skinner to new and improved now with 200 percent more Emily Skinner. The Tony-nominated actor (Side Show) was suddenly making regular appearances on our stages. In October of 2014, Skinner revealed her star power in 42nd Street Moon's Do I Hear a Waltz? (read about it here),in May of last year, she was a highlight of American Conservatory Theater's A Little Night Music (read about it here). The question is how did we get so lucky?
Word for Word enlivens stories by Donoghue, Tóibín
There is nothing more comforting than a Word for Word production. This extraordinary company's rich stage adaptations of short fiction for the stage can be thrilling, inventive, moving, incisive, funny and thought provoking. And, in that way that great writing can take you into that zone of alternate experience, they can be comforting. Maybe that's akin to the joy of being read to – there is that element in play, but augmented with the beauty of sets, lights, costumes, music and the combined thrill of both reading and live theater.
The new Word for Word show, Stories by Emma Donoghue and Colm Tóbín now at Z Below, comprises two gentle, emotionally rich stories by Irish writers...
Berkeley Rep's Macbeth: Double, double dull, in trouble
Say this for Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Macbeth now on stage at the Roda Theatre: it stars an Oscar winner, a Tony Winner and an Emmy winner. And she's doing some interesting things with Lady Macbeth. People are coming to this production to see Frances McDormand try her hand at one of the juiciest roles in the Shakespearean canon, and it's impossible for McDormand's genius not to shine through despite the uninvolving production that surrounds her.
Slick moves and a cornered Baby in live Dirty Dancing
Oh, help. Someone put Baby in a corner and she can't get out! The corner is actually the stage of the Golden Gate Theatre, where, as part of the SHN season, she is appearing in Dirty Dancing – The Classic Story on Stage, a reasonably entertaining show that feels less like a national touring production and more like a slick, overly faithful film re-creation you might find in a theme park where the loyal fans come to pay homage and wallow in nostalgia.
So much love in Crowded Fire's Mechanics
There's something so odd, so wonderfully odd about Dipika Guha's Mechanics of Love, a world-premiere comedy from Crowded Fire Theater. There's a decidedly offbeat rhythm to this delightful one-act, a sort of controlled silliness underscored by a decidedly serious exploration of just how the metaphorical gears of the heart do (or do not) turn into roaring engines when connected to the gears of another.