"James and the Giant Peach" at Berkeley Playhouse

Berkeley Playhouse photo by Cheshiredave Creative

My daughter tells me that my knowledge of the collected works of Roald Dahl is woefully inadequate, mostly because I only ever read "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and the sequel about the elevator and then stopped. I was at least aware of "James and the Giant Peach," but never read it myself, either in my youth or to my daughter.

So I felt I was at a bit of a disadvantage going to see Berkeley Playhouse's mainstage production of the musical adaptation of James and the Giant Peach. I need not have worried, because it's not a terribly complicated story line. Maybe the book has more to it, but there's not a lot of substance to the book of this play.

The Play

In the grand tradition of British children's literature, the story starts with an orphaned child (the eponymous James) who gets sent to live with his only living relatives, two aunts named Spiker and Sponge. They are essentialy con artists and grifters who plan to exploit James as their house servant while they live it up on the £27 a month they will get for taking him in. In Dover (that's a plot point).

Meanwhile, James befriends some of the local insects, envying their freedom. And when tasked with chopping down the dismal old peach tree in the yard, he balks, saving the tree. Miraculously (or really, magically), an extremely large--one might even say giant--peach appears on the previously barren tree. Spiker and Sponge see this as a further opportunity to get some unearned income.

But the peach rolls away, down the hill and over the White Cliffs (see? Dover was a plot point) and into the English Channel. Taking with it James and some really large insects and bugs (Spider, Centipede, Ladybug, Earthworm, Glowworm, and Grasshopper). Peaches float, so they float across the ocean, learning important lessons about themselves and others and acceptance and choosing your real family and such. It's a bit treacly, even for children's fare, but that's the story.

All along, there is a magician who keeps popping in to do magic and sing a bit. His presence isn't explained until quite near the end. I found him a bit mystifying, though I guess the explanation at the end makes at least some sense.

But overall, best not to think too much about the plot and such. This is really just a bit of story holding together a lot of singing and dancing and bright colors. It's quite fun and crowd-pleasing. Just don't dig too deeply into the interpretations.

The Production

I've been consistently impressed with the shows I've seen at Berkeley Playhouse, with high-quality acting and music. The Julia Morgan Theater is lovely, of course, but a bit lacking as a modern theater facility. But this is not where we go looking for glitz and polish. This is more of a seat-of-the-pants operation that emphasizes the performances and not the refinement of the sets, lights, and sounds.

Even at that, however, I thought the production values on this show came up a little short. The set was obviously meant to be whimsical, but despite the bright colors it seemed a bit clunky and slow to move (with rather intrusive stage hands moving pieces), and the lighting just didn't reach some places and there were noticeable drop-outs in the sound a times that made it a bit hard to follow some of the dialogue.

But I can't be too critical here: The acting, singing, and dancing were all very good. Some of the performances were really quite excellent, starting with Elliot Choate as James. His singing is really quite strong, and he's only a fifth grader. The group of critters that James floats away with, particularly Christian Arteaga as Earthworm and Brian E. A. Miller as Grasshopper. Maya Sherer as Glowworm manages to be quite winsome, in contrast to her role at the start of the show as the Matron Nurse at the orphanage.

The over-the-top evil aunts (Heather Orth as Spiker and Matt Standley as Sponge) are quite the nasty pair, and often seem set to take over the whole show and chew up all the scenery as well, but director (and founding Artistic Director) Elizabeth McKoy keeps them sufficiently in check so they are merely amusing within the scope of the whole show. Because in contrast to their antics, the interactions of the sensitive insects and bugs could be quite overshadowed, but they manage to hold their own.

Bottom Line

This show definitely falls into the category of amusing pieces of fluff that you can safely take the whole family to see. It's a bit sentimental without being cloying, and wholesome but with a good sense of fun. So as long as you're not looking to think too hard, this could be the show for you. It's well done in a homey sort of way.

The show runs through May 6, so you still have plenty of chances to see it.

"The Wolves" at Marin Theatre Company

Marin Theatre Company photo by Kevin Berne

On a whim, we ran over to Mill Valley on Easter Sunday to see the current production of The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe. It's a play about the members of a fairly elite, suburban, teenage girls' soccer team called the Wolves. As a parent of a teen daughter (who does not play soccer), I was interested to see what the play had to say about the lives of these teens.

The Play

This is an interesting play, in that it doesn't have a narrative line per se, though there is a timeline and there is action and plot development, but it's decidedly episodic. Also, considering it's about a soccer team, we mostly see warmups, rather than any actual game situations. So we get glimpses of the girls interacting with one another, from which we interpolate facts about their lives.

The technique is pretty effective, in that it leaves each of us to draw our inferences about what's happening, then later corroborates or refutes our surmises with further information. That part is pretty cleverly handled.

Initially the chaos of multiple conversations going on among a shifting grouping of girls doing stretches and warm-up exercises is a bit confusing, but ultimately the brain catches up, and it is a pretty accurate portrayal of the shifting, multi-threaded conversations that teens partake in.

I found it a bit odd that the players almost never use each other's names, but refer to each other by number. That works as a device in the script, but seems entirely unlike any teen girls I have ever known. This is particularly striking because most of these girls have played together for many years.

Also, the coaching deficiency is rather striking. I can understand having to hire a coach the team isn't thrilled with, but the degree of dereliction in this coach would never be tolerated on this kind of serious team.

But as a result of all this, we have a sort of artificially isolated group of girls which only occasionally devolves into some kind of "Lord of the Flies" scenario of youthful self-rule. Eventually the personalities and life circumstances of the individual girls seep through the numeric-uniform impersonality to give us a feel for who these girls are and what they're up to, individually and collectively.

The Performance

By setting the play in an indoor soccer league, we can justify having a smaller number of players (there are nine in the cast, plus a brief, late appearance by a soccer mom) and the small, bleak, artificially-turfed stage that passes for the indoor stadium. I thought they could have done a little more to dress up the set, but it functions.

The actors are all young women who can pretty much pass for older high-school students (they are supposed to be juniors). The only one who affirmatively seems "too old" for her role is the goalie (Betsy Norton), but she's quite good and one fairly quickly suspends disbelief on that score.

As one might expect, there are a range of skills and personalities portrayed among the team, and the actors do an effective job of establishing their individual personas as well as blending into the team. It's a little difficult to say with any certainty which little quirks might be acting deficiencies and which might be intentional acting choices, so in that sense I just go with the flow and decide that it's all acting and direction.

As it's really an ensemble piece, the individuals don't really particularly stand out (which is why I'm not calling any out by name). The device of having the Soccer Mom (Liz Sklar) arrive toward the end, although important to the plot, didn't seem to work very well. Her interactions with the team didn't seem authentic from either side.

Bottom Line

This is a good show. I wouldn't say it's an especially compelling piece of writing, though it is clever and skillful at times. And the acting isn't (and doesn't need to be) brilliant or showy. As noted, this is an ensemble piece that is about individuals playing as part of a team, not about any particular prima donna(s).

I thought it was all quite effective and interesting, if sometimes a bit contrived. Well worth seeing, especially if you want to know a bit of what the kids are up to these days.

The show runs for two more weekends, through April 15th.

"Heisenberg" at ACT

ACT rehearsal photo by Beryl Baker

As longtime readers will recall, I'm a sucker for a play about science. So when I saw the ACT was doing a show called Heisenberg, that got me going. Werner Heisenberg is, of course, an important character in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, of course, and his role in the development of nuclear physics is well known.

Simon Stephens' play, however, has nothing at all to do with the scientist or science. The popular perception of Heisenberg's work boils down to a single concept, known as the uncertainty principle, which is loosely understood to mean that an outside observer cannot simultaneously know the position and momentum of a quantum particle with any precision. This is (as with most of quantum physics) both extremely counterintuitive and wholly inapplicable to life on the human scale. This has to do with the way an observer affects objects being observed, but again, this applies only to observations of quantum effects, not humans or human-scale objects.

That doesn't mean it can't serve as something of a metaphor, which is roughly what Stephens attempts here. More or less, this play says if you know where you are, you can't know where you're going, and vice versa.

The Play

But enough of theory, let's talk about the play. Alex is a 75-year-old butcher who likes to sit in train stations, even though he doesn't like to go places. He loves being in London, though. One day as he sits on a bench in the station, the loud, flighty American Georgie approaches him and immediately starts telling rather bizarre, incoherent, and untruthful stories. Although bemused and somewhat annoyed, Alex finds himself somewhat engaged by the whole encounter.

Next we find Alex working in his butcher shop, when who should walk in but Georgie? She has tracked him down using her super Google powers, so now we think she's a psychotic stalker. But it turns out she only wants to con him out of enough money to go find her son in New Jersey. Maybe. Meanwhile, Alex is rather stoic and lonely, seems to know he's getting toward the end of his life (which appears to have no other people in it, at all, except one girlfriend of his youth), so what has he got to lose by talking with his stalker?

So they date. Alex gives a really exceptional speech about listening to all kinds of music, though it ends with a facile appropriation of the notion that the music isn't in the notes, but the spaces between them. They go to bed. Because, you know, why not?

For reasons good or ill, they end up going to New Jersey together, despite his stated aversion to travel and her inability to keep a story straight. It seems to be a fairly quirky but workable relationship. End of play.

So it's a character study, which is not generally my cup of tea, and it rates as fairly implausible, even if you try to apply some pop-culture version of the Heisenberg principle to human interactions. We never know where the relationship is going, or why. Just deal with it.

The Production

The acting carries the day here. Bay area stalwart James Carpenter is outstanding in his portrayal of Alex. The staid, soft-spoken butcher has an incredibly expressive face and subtle body language. Sarah Grace Wilson can't possibly be as annoying as her portrayal of Georgie, so I give her credit as an actor. Together they manage to have a degree of chemistry (or physics--see? I can make facile science jokes, too!) that seems unwarranted by anything in the script, but manages to make the bizarre relationship tenable.

The first couple of scenes are truly irritating, with Georgie creating a situation that any but the ever-patient Alex would have extricated themselves from. But once we pass peak irritation, it just becomes a strange and quirky (if still somewhat predatory and exploitative) relationship, fitting the tropes of many a romantic comedy. It really is only because the acting is so exceptional that one can really stand to see it through.

The set design is clever, with an octagonal wooden platform that can raise sections to serve as a bench, a butcher's counter, a bed, a restaurant table, etc. But on the big Geary Theater stage, the two people feel truly isolated (which is apt, because there are no other characters in this story except mentions of Alex's long-ago fiance and Georgie's gone-to-Jersey son). Maybe that isolation is meant to mean more than the characters' lack of social connections, and somehow ties into the faux-physics notions, but mostly it just seems like an awful lot of stage space for what is essentially a very small play.

Bottom Line

As is often the case with the genre of modern romantic comedies, one has to completely suspend disbelief and just go with the fact that for some reason these characters find some attraction in one another, despite the efforts of one or both to demonstrate that any such attraction is at best masked behind cynical attempts to defraud or at least mislead. At least the quality actors in this production make at least a plausible attempt at showing some changes in the characters that can justify why they eventually pair up.

As a character study, I guess it's OK. As a vehicle for two really good actors, it's excellent, and worth seeing just for that. But I wish they had a more plausible vehicle that actually justifies the time and effort of the artists. because of them it's pretty good, but feels like it really ought to be better.

The show runs for another week, through April 8, at ACT's Geary Theater.