"The Tempest" at Round House Theatre

Round House Theatre production photo by Scott Suchman

 Seriously? I'm going to see The Tempest for the third time in a single year? Indeed. We saw it early this year at the Oakland Theatre Project (before I resumed blogging), and again this summer at Ashland. The OTP production was really interesting, and the Ashland one disappointing. But this promises to be something quite different, in part because I know the work of both co-director/adapters. Aaron Posner is a pretty well-known playwright (I quite enjoyed his adaptation of Chekhov's "The Seagull", called Stupid Fucking Bird) and director, and Teller is half of the brilliant magic act "Penn & Teller". So The Tempest with the prospect of real magic seems cool. Also got tipped off by a friend who saw this production earlier in Boston that it was amazing. So, one more Tempest!

The Play

Really, it's Shakespeare's The Tempest. Edited a bit, of course, but on the whole, it's a very standard text.

The Production

Fresh off the previous night's disappointment at STC, we were mildly concerned about this first foray into the Washington, DC, theater scene. The better-known theaters, such as Arena Stage and Wooly Mammoth, were either dark or doing holiday shows we didn't care to see. But this seemed pretty cool. And it didn't disappoint.

First, about 15 minutes before curtain, Ariel (Nate Dendy) comes on stage in pantomime and starts doing little magic tricks with cards, gradually involving some of the audience. That sets the stage nicely. And what a lovely set! Scenic Designer Daniel Conway and Lighting Designer Thom Weaver have made a beautiful, engaging set that works as both a magical stage and a remote desert island. It's really lovely.

Then the play sets in, and we mostly have a pretty standard (fancy) production of the play, but with little bits of stage magic thrown in. The card tricks seem a bit gratuitous, but I suppose they help with the atmosphere of magic. The other really unique touch is that Caliban is played by two actors (Hassiem Muhammad and Ryan Sellers) who are a single being, speaking in unison, and moving in a way that is both monstrous and elegant. It's like nothing I've encountered before. [Interestingly, the OTP production this year used three actors to portray Ariel, but all acted separately, unlike these two who were a single Caliban.]

Most satisfying, after our disappointment at Ashland, was that this production definitely has a point of view: Prospero (Eric Hissom) is clearly throughout trying to atone for his own past misbehavior. He is never seeking vengeance (much to the confusion of Antonio, played by Cody Nickell).

Bottom Line

It's brilliant. Not perfect, but a wonderful production of a very complex and difficult play. The production itself is beautiful, and the acting (and magic) is really solid, enhanced by the vision of the directors. Choreography by Pilobolus and music by Tom Waits rounds out the production.

This was definitely the antidote we needed for the previous night's disappointment. It's a terrific production of The Tempest by itself, but given its innovations, it's a real treat for those who already know and like the play and want to explore something a little different.

The best news is that this one has been extended, and now runs through January 29, 2023, so you can run out to Bethesda and see it! Highly recommended.

"Jane Anger" at Shakespeare Theatre Company

 This was just too intriguing to pass up: a promised mashup of Shakespeare and feminism, set in a plague year. What fun! And we were going to be in Washington, DC, anyway. Perfect. And a chance to check out Shakespeare Theatre Company before we go see their production of King Lear next March.

The Play

Written by Talene Monahon during the COVID pandemic, Jane Anger postulates that famous playwright William Shakespeare, himself quarantined during a plague, is having difficulty writing his next play(s), meant to be an adaptation of an old tale about King Leir. Sure, this sounds a bit like the premise of Shakespeare in Love, but this is definitely a different story. For one thing, the play starts with a monologue by the eponymous Jane Anger, who is based on a real-life person who published a pamphlet in 1589 called "Jane Anger, her Protection for Women".

And after Shakespeare flails about for a bit with his assistant, Francis, Jane Anger literally climbs in through the window and puts her angry wit to work on Will.

The Production

Wow. What to make of this? The lobby of the very nice Klein Theater is full of materials about the real Jane Anger and her ilk. Great stuff: makes me all ready to see a play about an assertive woman who influences a better-known (and able to be published/performed) playwright into improving his works! Sadly, this is not the play we were led to expect.

Apparently playwright Monahon and director Jess Chayes would rather write a sophomoric skit full of gender and bodily-function "jokes". Had I read Monahon's prologue in the program ahead of time, I would have learned that she is "deeply interested in jokes--in puns and gags and potty humor." Oh. Well, then I guess that's what STC wanted to present. I won't say there is nothing of substance around the gags and potty humor, but the balance is way off from what I had anticipated. Instead of using those in service of (as she claims to want) "rupturing history", she instead uses the promise of a feminist overthrow to string together gags and puns, but then never gets to the punch line: We never get to see or hear or even really know much about the supposed better works that Jane Anger would have produced.

It's kind of hard for me to evaluate the cast here. My take at the time was that the acting was way too over-the-top and broad. I suspect that toning down the overt clowning might make the jokes more effective, not less, but perhaps that is just my preference. For what it's worth, Amelia Workman does a pretty good job as the titular character. The others are so thinly written and so broadly performed that it's hard to say how well it's done, and I'm not familiar with any of the players.

Bottom Line

This feels like a missed opportunity. I'm still interested in the question of how a feminist, woman of color might have been able to influence or even subvert a famous writer into projecting their ideas into the mainstream, and what would have resulted. But Monahon, despite feints in that direction, doesn't seem to want to go there. Instead we have a very forgettable piece of fluff, sort of amusing, but not terribly funny, that seems to have even less of a point than the materials hung in the lobby. I'm grateful that I got introduced to Jane Anger, but Jane Anger was not really worth the effort.

I look forward to seeing what STC does with an actual Shakespeare play next year.

"Two Trains Running" at Marin Theatre Company

 Well, this is late. The holidays and vacations and such caught up with me, and I got way behind on blogging the limited shows we went to see. But this one was very good, and deserves mention.

The Play

As I've noted elsewhere, I'm a fan of August Wilson's work. I haven't yet seen all of his ten-play cycle representing African-American life in Pittsburgh during each decade of the 20th century, but I'm working on it. In this case it was a repeat, as we'd seen Two Trains Running at Ashland in 2013.

Set in a run-down restaurant in 1969, the subject at hand is urban renewal. The owner of the restaurant, Memphis, wants to sell his restaurant before it is torn down, but worries that the city will not meet his price. Meanwhile, local mortician and entrepreneur West offers to buy it from him. Meanwhile, Wolf is running numbers on the restaurant pay phone, Holloway is dispensing philosophy and playing chess, while the recently-released-from-prison Sterling is scheming ways to get ahead (and get with the restaurant's sole employee, Risa). And then there is Hambone, who appears to be mentally challenged, feeling aggrieved about a promised ham that he has never received.

As with most of Wilson's cycle, the play is an ensemble piece that highlights the characters who seem both timeless and very much of their time.

The Production

This was really nicely done: well cast and directed, the ensemble works well together to transport us to 1969. Director Dawn Monique Williams keeps the pace moving without rushing it. Within the very strong cast, Lamont Thompson as Memphis stands out with a nuanced portrayal of a man who seems a bit detached from everyone else while focusing on his own crusade, but who actually keeps a close eye on all in the circle of the restaurant. Eddie Ewell as Sterling and Khary L. Moye as West play two sides of a very similar role, both always on the lookout for any angle to get ahead, but currently in very different circumstances.

The whole group does a great job of making the production feel authentic.

Bottom Line

Having recently seen Wilson's The Piano Lesson in New York with a cast of well-known stars, it was refreshing to see again how well Wilson's plays work without the star power. The words and settings are always believable, and the scripts are rich with opportunities for any actor. Marin has done a fine job with this one. Unfortunately, it closed on December 18, so no further opportunities to see it. But a very solid offering.

"It's Christmas, Carol!" at OSF

Oregon Shakespeare Festival production photo by Joe Sofranko

 

I'm not generally a big fan of holiday shows. I have seen more versions of Dickens's A Christmas Carol than I probably need. But when the folks responsible for OSF's recent revivals of a couple of Marx Brothers plays (Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts) decided to do a holiday show (extremely loosely) based on the Dickens classic, I knew I needed to see it.

So off we trundled to Ashland for an overnight stay between Christmas and New Year's, just long enough to see a matinee of It's Christmas, Carol!.

The Play

It's definitely not A Christmas Carol. But it's really fun. We have a narrator who tries to tell the story, but the Ghosts of Holidays Past, Present and Future (who remarkably resemble Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx) keep stepping out of the story and disrupting the telling. Meanwhile, Carol Scroogenhouse, who is supposed to be the subject of the story (and the ghosts' lessons), isn't quite getting it, and, well, things go pretty far off the rails.

You didn't really expect coherence from a Marx-inspired play, did you? I mean, that, and dinosaurs. It's all good.

The Production

It's what one expects from OSF: solid actors, high-quality design and implementation. Really, had they done this good a job with most of their mainstage productions in the season, it would have been a better year.

Most importantly, the return of the trio of Mark Bedard, John Tufts, and Brett Hinkley as the holiday ghosts/Marx Brothers is very welcome and successful. Since the trio also wrote the show and composed the tunes, it's not surprising that their roles work very well for them. OSF regular Christiana Clark is great as the increasingly-frustrated narrator. The rest of the cast is obviously having a good time, and that makes it all work for everyone.

Bottom Line

It's exactly what you expect. It's fun, it's funny, and it's quite well done. It's way better than seeing another earnest retelling of Dickens' story, and much more fun than any holiday movie. I suspect this pandemic-era innovation will be an Ashland holiday tradition for a while. I plan to go see it again next year to see what new madness they've added.

"Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players production ensemble photo by Ben Krantz

I always find it a little difficult to write about shows at Shotgun, because they really are my favorite local theater. And I try to be at least reasonably objective, even though I'm a supporter/donor and board member. That's going to be tough here, because I really like this show.

I saw Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 on Broadway some years back. I have to admit that I wasn't really prepared, and I didn't think the venue was all that conducive to really appreciating the show. It was a big open floor with cabaret tables where folks could drink, and lots of different entrances, so the show itself was a bit difficult to follow. So I've been looking forward to this production in the more intimate setting of the Ashby Stage, though I couldn't really imagine a cabaret setting in there.

The Play

The play itself is a most unlikely thing. Playwright Dave Malloy just doesn't do "normal" musical theater. This blog was still on hiatus last spring, or you would have seen a glowing review of Berkeley Rep's production of Malloy's Octet. And there is a long, meandering story about how Comet came about because of Malloy's production with Shotgun over a decade ago of Beowulf--a Thousand Years of Baggage. But let's just say the script is derived from a small slice in the middle of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel War and Peace. And as the first song, "Prologue", makes clear, it's a complicated Russian novel, and everyone's got nine different names, etc. But it also gives you some mnemonic devices for remembering who is who and how they relate, which is helpful (and Shotgun's program helpfully reproduces much of that).

As the title of the show suggests, Natasha and Pierre are the central characters: she young and naïve, loving her betrothed Andrey, who is off in the war, and he older, awkward, and disenchanted with life (and particularly his life, notably his loveless marriage to Helene. So we follow as Natasha careens through Russian society, wishing for Andrey to return and marry her, distracted by the appearance of the seductive Anatole. While Pierre sits, reads, studies, and drinks, all the time thinking he used to be better, and that he wants to wake up into his life.

The music is catchy, the story is actually remarkably easy to follow, and Malloy does a great job of simplifying things without losing the essence of Tolstoy's characters.

The Production

This is the west-coast premiere of the show, which has run in New York (both off and on Broadway) and a few other places in the east. But as far as I know, it's the first time it's been staged in such a small venue. And scenic designer Nina Ball outdoes herself (which is a very high bar) in reimagining the Ashby Stage as a cross between a cabaret nightclub and an opera house. The audience surrounds the stage, but with room for the actors to move around and interact with the house, and the band is spread around so it feels integral to the room. I love the way the cast sneaks into the room to do choral backup behind one or two singers on stage, adding musical depth without distracting visually. The co-directors, Patrick Dooley (Shotgun's artistic director) and Erin Mei-Ling Stuart (who also choreographed), have done a remarkable job of taking the transformed stage and making it both large enough for the whole ensemble and small enough for intimate solo and duet numbers. The lighting design by Weili Shi contributes a lot to the illusions.

Somehow this space also accommodates a remarkably big band: musical director Daniel Alley and his upright piano is in a pit in the center of the stage, along with drummer Brietta Greger and her whole kit. On one side of the house there are strings (both a cello and double bass), while on the other are woodwinds (clarinet and oboe) and a very versatile accordion/keyboard/glockenspiel player. So it's a very rich musical ensemble, but it suits the space.

The cast is very strong, starting from the title characters. Jacqueline Dennis brings both a powerful voice and a very believable sense of youth and innocence to Natasha, which Albert Hodge brings a brooding, yet explosive, mood to Pierre. There are several other particularly strong singers in the cast, most especially Danielle Cheiken (Mary and others) and Veronica Renner (Sonya). Several others bring both vocal prowess and some serious acting chops to their supporting roles, notably Angel Adedokun (Helene) and Michelle Ianiro (Marya). But even the "minor" characters have their moments in the sun, with James Mayagoitia (Old Prince Bolkonsky) doddering humorously, Roeen Nooran filling numerous servant and ensemble roles, and Weston Scott taking advantage of every second as Balaga, just for fun.

Bottom Line

For some crazy reason, I decided to read War and Peace this summer as sort of self-assigned homework leading into this play. As a result, I appreciate both how difficult it had to be for Malloy to carve a meaningful little slice out of the middle of a ponderous tome, and also how interesting it is to contemplate the characters within this slice, knowing that there is so much more to their stories, both before and after. It really is remarkable that Malloy created such a compelling, moving, and fun piece out of that source material.

And as you have already gleaned from my words above, I believe this is one of the finest pieces of theater to hit the local stages in some time. It's not the same kind of intellectual work that wowed me in This Much I Know this summer at Aurora. But to take this remarkable piece of both literature and music and create an intimate, immersive, interactive stage experience unlike anything I've encountered anywhere recently--that's an achievement. Producing a show of this scope with the quality of this production is pretty expensive, which generally means you have to stage it in a larger house. But Shotgun has managed to fit the show into its friendly confines, and the intimacy of the show really adds to the experience.

Really--go see it. It's not just me--the "little man" in the SF Chronicle's review is leaping out of his chair. You will be, too.

Comet has already been extended through January 15th at the Ashby Stage in Berkeley.

"Indecent" at San Francisco Playhouse

SF Playhouse production photo by Jessica Palopoli

 This is a play we really, really liked at Ashland, and since it was one of the last plays I actually wrote a blog about before I shut things down, I will refer you to that posting for information about the play itself, and I'll just talk about the current SF Playhouse production here.

The Production

I went into this with some trepidation. As you can see from my previous post, I really like this play, and the production at Ashland was excellent. SF Playhouse can do really good productions, but not always, and this is a particularly tricky play, what with all the Yiddish and other languages thrown in, and some obvious cultural issues one could trip over. Still, director Susi Damilano generally does a very good job, and in this case, she does not disappoint.

I'll note up front that the one role that is stable throughout the play, Lemml, the stage manager, was an understudy the night we attended. David Schiller did a terrific job, and had the program not contained an insert indicating that we had an understudy, I would never have known. And that's a good sign for the production as a whole, if one doesn't notice that a major role has been swapped out.

I liked the simple staging of the show, using suitcases as props for many things, and using the uncurtained wings as an area for actors and musicians to rest, change, and observe. I thought that fit the play very well. As with the production in Ashland, I had difficulty seeing some of the projected supertitles from my seat location at times. That seems like something that the designers could have addressed, as we were roughly in the middle of the orchestra section, and I suspect anyone closer to the stage would have had even more difficulty.

Bottom Line

This is a very good production of an excellent play. Of course you should go see it! It runs through November 5th at SF Playhouse.

I was encouraged, by the way, to see the theater much more full than it has been for other recent shows. The orchestra was nearly full, and there were people sitting up in the balcony. I suspect this is a result of both the easing of COVID restrictions (and a concurrent willingness of people to go into indoor spaces) and the quality of this show. In any case, go! See it! Bring your friends. This is the good stuff.

"Dunsinane" at Marin Theatre Company

This one sneaked up on us, so we went on a whim. I have to admit that lately I only venture over to Marin Theatre Company if there is a play or a performer I particularly want to see. I was intrigued by the concept and the playwright this week, so off we went to Mill Valley.

The Play

Superficially, the play is a kind of sequel to Shakespeare's "Scottish Play," Macbeth. It begins as English forces supporting the exiled Malcolm return to Scotland, disguising themselves using greenery from Great Burnham Wood to cover their charge on the castle at Dunsinane. The "tyrant" (i.e., Macbeth) is vanquished by Macduff, Malcolm assumes the throne. And now the fun begins. Because Scotland is not a nation at peace. It remains a collection of rival tribes with shifting alliances and much distrust of both leaders and outside forces. Add a couple of twists now: Queen Gruach (who we would know better as Lady Macbeth) is still alive, and represents a significant threat to Malcolm's rule.

And now we settle into an uneasy peacemaking/occupation/negotiation, as the English just want to settle the situation so it is not a threat to their northern border, and various factions in Scotland want to assume or retain control. The English, represented by General Siward, and the English Army, just want to pacify the situation and go home. But Siward won't leave in defeat--whatever that means to him--and presses onward.

And so we enact on stage the futility of bringing peace to a region using outside military force. Playwright David Grieg (a Scot, if you hadn't guessed) has adopted the British intervention in Scotland in ancient times to stand in for (take your pick) the current relationship of Scotland to the UK, The U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and/or Iraq, almost any situation in the modern Middle East, etc.

The play does get a bit bogged down (only a slight pun intended here), and could probably be trimmed a bit (it runs over 2.5 hours). But hey, that's kind of the point: this is what happens to outside forces trying to impose peace on rival tribes and clans. It's actually a pretty good illustration, and covers both the futility and the effects on both internal and external groups. It's not Shakespeare, and it's not meant to be. It's a contemporary play about current-but-also-timeless issues, and it's rather well written.

The Production

Marin Theatre Company produces this show in partnership with the Conservatory Theatre Ensemble at nearby Tamalpais High School. As a result, there are high school student both acting some of the parts on stage and apprenticing on the creative and production teams. In some ways this works very well. The young actors portraying both members of the invading English Army and young Scots bring a sense of authenticity to those roles. On the other hand, even at their best these teens can't really keep up with the professional actors, and the scenes where they have extensive lines tend to be the parts that drag the most.

That said, the professional cast is top-notch. Aldo Billingslea (Siward) is always strong, and his experience teaching and directing young actors definitely buoys the scenes he shares with the teens, especially early on. Josh Odsess-Rubin (Malcolm) and Michael Ray Wisely (Macduff) are really solid in their roles, and Daniel Duque-Estrada (Egham/Luss) has to cover more ground, but does so admirably. But the real stand-out is Lisa Anne Porter as Gruach. Whenever the queen is onstage, you know it, and you know she is up to something. She has a lot of nuance in her performance, and she brings out the best in those around her, particularly Billingslea.

The set itself is quite simple, which probably helps with a cast that is constantly flipping between specific roles and ensemble parts. And they probably could have found a more effective means of delineating scene changes than simply thumping a spear on the stage each time.

Bottom Line

I will admit that I was a bit befuddled by the time we got to intermission, but a bit of conversation with my friends gave me the insight that I was being a bit too literal and specific in my interpretation of the play. It's sort of mildly interesting as an examination of Scottish history, but once the light goes on and you start to see the situation as representative of other scenarios, including contemporary ones, the richness of the material starts to shine through. So perhaps a bit better job of widening the audience's view early on would help. But overall, I think they play is a good one.

The production definitely has some flaws--I wasn't really expecting to see a hybrid professional/student play when I arrived. I suppose a little more research would have cleared that up for me. I'm sure I would still have gone to see it, but might have had somewhat different expectations.

All in all, I like the play, and I think the production is worth seeing, as long as you recognize going in that this is not going to be a fully-professional show, and that it's probably best enjoyed with an eye toward it being something more/other than a sequel to Shakespeare's Scottish play. So I give it a provisional thumbs-up. Look beyond the amateurish bits and the pros have a lot to say here.

"The Piano Lesson" at Ethel Barrymore Theatre

 Another day, another Pulitzer-Prize winner. Honest, we didn't set out to see plays based on that this trip. It just turned out that four of the seven plays we wanted to see were all winners at some point. For this final show of the trip, we went to see the star-studded revival of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson. We're big fans of Wilson's work, though we haven't quite made it through all ten of the plays in his "American Century Cycle", which has a play set in each decade of the 20th century. The Piano Lesson is set in 1936.

The Play

Siblings in conflict over their shared inheritance--shades of Topdog/Underdog a few days earlier! Only in this case, we have a piano, elaborately carved to represent family members, that is the legacy shared by Boy Willie Charles and his sister, Berniece. Berniece and the piano live with her uncle, Doaker, in Pittsburgh, where Doaker works for the railroad. Boy Willie and his friend Lyman have coaxed a truckload of watermelons up from Mississippi, intending to sell them and use the profits to buy some farmland back home. But Boy Willie needs more money, so he wants to sell the piano. Berniece doesn't want to.

As the story unfolds we learn of the importance of the piano in the family's history. The piano was a gift from a slave-owner named Sutter to his wife, purchased in exchange for two of his slaves, breaking up their family. The wife loved the piano, but missed the slaves, so one of the remaining slaves carved likenesses of them and their whole family history into the piano. These slaves are the ancestors of the present-day Charles family, and it was Boy Willie's father who stole the piano from the Sutter family, which resulted in his death. To complete the circle, it is the Sutter family from whom Boy Willie plans to buy the farmland.

The play revolves around the family members trying to deal with their different attitudes about their past and the value of family and remembrances. 

The Production

The show has a very strong cast. Samuel L. Jackson plays Doaker, and his past history with the play (originating the role of Boy Willie at Yale Rep and understudying it in the original Broadway run) gives him a definite sense of being the patriarch. Jackson's wife, Latanya Richardson Jackson, herself an award-winning actor, directs the production. John David Washington (Boy Willie) and Danielle Brooks (Berniece) bring a lot of strength and fire to the conflicted siblings. Michael Potts as Wining Boy is very strong both musically and in his acting. And Ray Fisher as Lymon is a likeable, if ineffectual, pawn to everyone else. I'm always a little worried when actors more known for their movies show up on stage, but this cast is terrific--they definitely have the chops to play in a big house.

The set is pretty simple, allowing the actors to maintain the focus, with the exception of the extremely intricately-carved piano, which is a spectacular piece and basically serves as a character itself.

Bottom Line

Good play, great cast, well produced. It was a very good ending to our week in New York. I highly recommend it. We saw a preview performance, so I suspect it will keep getting better. The show is scheduled for a 17-week run, so you have some time to catch it.

"A Strange Loop" at Lyceum Theatre

 Another day, another Pulitzer Prize-winning play. This one, A Strange Loop, by Michael R. Jackson, is definitely different from the rest, if only because of being a musical. But we had wanted to see this ever since it took Broadway by storm and also won some Tony Awards, so it was definitely something to see.

The Play

Nothing complicated here: it's a musical about a queer, black man stuck in a job as a Disney theater usher who is writing a musical about a queer, black man writing a musical about a queer, black man writing a musical.... Which is a strange loop (or as we call it in my line of work, and infinite recursion). Usher (which is both the name and the job title of the main character) is having difficulty writing, as he is continuously blocked by Thoughts. Six of these Thoughts are personified by the other six actors in the show, and they variously portray all his hopes, fears, fantasies, and family.

So in addition to being a pretty straightforward story about a young writer trying to create something worthwhile and break into show business, it's also an exploration of Otherness, as various of Usher's attributes keep him from fitting in with what would otherwise be his peer groups. Usher is outside the mainstream in so many different dimensions that it is really difficult for him to connect, though he wants to do so desperately.

That means there is a dialogue going on between Usher's self-acceptance and his acceptance by others, and naturally, there are Thoughts.

Overall I found the play clever and touching, but it eventually got a bit too focused on a note or two (to the point that one of the Thoughts interrupts and indicates that it's too much of gospel parodies and Tyler Perry jabs).

The Production

The production was solid. Clearly the show hinges on the performer playing Usher, and the night we saw the show that was an understudy (Kyle Ramar Freeman). He was very good, and meshed well with the cast. Two of the Thoughts (2 and 6) were also understudies for our performance, but again, it all blended smoothly enough that I didn't notice anything amiss.

The set is fairly simple and bright, enabling us to focus on Usher and his Thoughts. The opening number is really solid, and sets up for a lot more to come, but the energy wanes a bit later on. Still, I was engaged and entertained throughout.

Bottom Line

I'm glad we got to see this show. It is genuinely different from anything else playing on Broadway, and its quite remarkable that it made it to Broadway at all. Perhaps there is hope yet.

Right after we saw the show, they announced that the production will close on January 15, 2023, so you can still see it for a couple more months, and I suggest it's worth it.

"Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski" at Theatre for a New Audience

Not satisfied with having sat through Tom Stoppard's Holocaust-centered play Leopoldstadt two nights ago, we boldly set out to Brooklyn this afternoon to catch David Strathairn in a solo show at the Theatre for a New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center. This promised to be very heavy.

The Play

 It's not exactly a monologue. The single actor portrays mostly Jan Karski, but also occasionally slips into someone Karski interacts with. It starts as a simple story about him and his background, but ends up focusing on his life in the Polish Underground during World War II, after Germany invades Poland. Karski, who has a photographic memory, becomes a witness and messenger, carrying messages in his mind to leaders of the exiled government.

At one point Karski (who is Catholic) is recruited to observe conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and one of the Nazi death camps, then report what he has learned, first to the Jewish leadership in exile in London, then to the British foreign secretary and then to officials in the U.S., up to and including President Roosevelt. His messages are ignored, and officials later claimed they had no knowledge of the actual situation.

Throughout, Karski reflects on his own life (including his later four decades on the faculty of Georgetown University), his marriage, and many other subjects. But ultimately, his message is about the capacity in every human for good or for evil, and the reluctance to believe horrors, even when irrefutable.

The script is powerful. Apparently it was originally written to have at least one other actor besides Karski, but in the hands of a terrific actor, at least, the solo performance is quite moving.

The Production

The script has been in development for several years, and David Strathairn has been involved throughout, along with a lab at Georgetown that meshes performance with politics (which sounds pretty cool!). After several smaller runs, this five-or-six week Off-Broadway run at the Theater for a New Audience is their biggest yet, and apparently will later turn into at least a limited national tour.

Strathairn is the single actor in the show, although there is a bit of film of the real Jan Karski as well. For a man in his early 70s, Strathairn still displays a lot of energy, and fills the 90 minutes without much of a break to catch his breath, changing his outfit as he goes to subtly reflect changes in Karski's circumstances.

The Karski narrative is a remarkable story, and the play depicts it without much commentary, save for tiny monologues at the start and end. Karski's story is allowed to speak for itself, with an implicit notion that we, unlike his contemporaries, need to heed his warnings.

Bottom Line

This was a tremendous piece of theater, both in the sense that it's an impressive piece of writing and a daunting challenge for the actor, all of which rolls into a simple but compelling message about our responsibility as humans to respond to reports of inhumanity in our time. Although the production does not explicitly mention the situation in Ukraine, there is clearly concern for that.

The show has been extended in Brooklyn for a week, through October 16th. The show we saw on the 9th was supposed to be the closing (and it was sold out). So this would be a good week to see it in Brooklyn. And I'm told that it will be traveling, including to the Bay Area, so watch for it--this is a piece of theater that really needs to be seen.

I would be remiss if I didn't note the conversation going on in my head between this show and Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt, which we saw two nights earlier. Stoppard's play talks about the denial among even those who explicitly knew the Nazi threat, and also shows the dangers of reacting too late. It is a different, but also very personal, reminder of the consequences of looking away when people threaten other people.

"Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge" at The Public Theater

 I have seen TV clips of the debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at the Cambridge Union in 1965, so I thought it would be pretty cool to see that dramatized on stage. So off we went last night to the Public Theater to see their presentation of just that: Baldwin & Buckley at Cambridge. Conceived and developed by the innovative group Elevator Repair Service (whose show Ganz, a dramatization of The Great Gatsby, was so good at Berkeley Rep a few years back (but apparently at a time when I was not blogging).

The Play

In some sense I'm hesitant to call this a play, since it's really more of a declamation of the speeches actually delivered back in 1965. But there is some staging and a bit of acting around it, so we'll just go ahead and treat it as a play, and see where that leads.

The script for the play is, with only slight modifications, a transcript of the actual Cambridge Union debate on February 18, 1965. There were four speeches that night in this "debate" on the question "Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?" Cambridge students delivered the brief opening arguments to introduce the question, and then in turn, the writer James Baldwin and editor/commentator William F. Buckley took up the question in longer form.

I have to put away my expectations from my years as a debater and coach, since this form of debate is more a matter of dueling speeches than actual clash or addressing and rebutting of the statements of the other side. Essentially, Baldwin and Buckley offered separate orations on either side of the question.

At the end of the debate, there is a brief scene between Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, compiled from letters, interviews, and writings of the two.

On the whole, I think the debate itself is interesting, but not particularly compelling on its own. The last scene attempts to add a bit of context and interpretation, but not nearly enough to justify its inclusion in the piece. Since the whole thing comes in at about one hour, it feels somewhat minimal. I would definitely have preferred to see more material, perhaps culled from subsequent writings or interviews with Baldwin and Buckley discussing the debate and the aftermath.

The Production

The Public did a pretty good job with this. I quite liked the use of the intimate Anspacher Theater and the minimal set (two tables with lecterns, and a chair for each). Unfortunately, while Baldwin (Grieg Sargeant) spoke, all I could see was the back of the seated Buckley (Ben Jalosa Williams), so I'm not sure how much he was reacting, emoting, etc. I suspect the aloof Buckley would have reacted very little. And when Buckley spoke, I could see Baldwin reacting a bit, but only a little, seeming annoyed (with justification).

Since there is little direct clash in the debate itself (e.g., Buckley mostly addresses Baldwin's published writings, not his words or arguments in the debate), the audience is left to weigh the arguments themselves. Admittedly, that's what the audience at the actual event did, but for dramatic purposes, that's asking a lot of an audience many decades removed from the actual events and people.

And then the final scene with Baldwin having a smoke while Hansberry (Daphne Gaines) does some ironing with the radio playing quietly seems pretty inconsequential until they both break the fourth wall and address the modern audience directly, which feels a bit jarring in what has otherwise been a straight recreation. That whole little postscript feels inadequate and unfinished.

The truly odd choice, to me, however, is the way Sargeant does a genuinely high-quality impression of Baldwin's vocal and physical mannerisms, but Williams mostly does not do that with Buckley. About three times he slips into Buckley's languid, condescending cadence and upper-class accent, but then reverts again to his own voice and style. I have no idea why. It didn't seem to be done for any particular dramatic purpose. I can only suppose that a prolonged use of that style would have bored and irritated the modern audience, but then why use it at all?

Bottom line

Truly, this all felt like kind of a good idea, but not thought through very thoroughly. It's not very satisfying as a purely historical recreation, nor is it at all satisfying as a dramatic presentation based on the historical event. I can think of lots of ways this could be more interesting, and there are probably many others I haven't imagined. But there has to be something better that can be done with this material than what the Public presents here.

I walked away disappointed in both the effort and the outcome. Baldwin and Buckley both deserve better than this, and the collaboration of the Public Theater and Elevator Repair Service leads the audience to expect that there will be something more and better. But there isn't.

In short, don't bother. Maybe someone will turn this into something good, but as it is, your hour could be better spent elsewhere.

"Topdog/Underdog" at Golden Theatre

 This is a show I've been wanting to read or see for some time. I actually bought the script, but haven't read it yet. Go figure. This revival on Broadway seemed like as good a time as any to catch a good production of it. I'd been really impressed with playwright Suzan-Lori Parks' writing when we saw Father Comes Home From the Wars at ACT several years ago, and was curious to read her breakthrough script.

The Play

Yet another Pulitzer Prize winner, from 2002, this script was apparently a huge hit when I was not paying terribly close attention to the theater scene (something about having a toddler...). Maybe it's jut the fact that the title invokes a favorite eatery of mine. In any case, I wanted to see it.

The show is not terribly complex: two actors, playing brothers down on their luck and sharing a shabby apartment. Older brother Lincoln is retired from being a street-corner practitioner of "three-card monte", and now works (ironically) portraying Abraham Lincoln at an arcade where people pay to pretend to assassinate him every day. Younger brother Booth (the names were a joke from their father) has always looked up to Lincoln, but has never really managed much in the way of work skills other than shoplifting, where he apparently has considerable talent. So between Lincoln's take-home pay and Booth's boosting skill, they get by.

Booth believes that he could master running three-card monte, or maybe lure Lincoln back into the game, at least long enough to teach him. And there we have the conflict of the play. Two guys with nothing much going on, looking to get ahead, but without much prospect. Lincoln has an ex-wife, Booth a sometimes girlfriend. But that's about it.

The play itself explores the relationship of the brothers and their attempts to guide each other into something better, maybe. Prospects aren't great. As the brother alternately antagonize and provoke each other, they explore their childhood, parental abandonment, and future prospects.

One aspect of the play that's particularly effective is the brothers' use of colloquial black English.

The Production

As a Broadway revival, the production can attract some pretty high-quality talent, and has done so in the persons of director Kenny Leon and actors Corey Hawkins (Lincoln) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Booth). Both are highly successful movie and television actors, but they have impressive pedigrees (Julliard and Yale School of Drama, respectively). Although Abdul-Mateen is making his Broadway debut here, the Oakland native appeared on a local stage back in 2012 when he appeared as Ivan Turgenev in Shotgun Player's initial production of Tom Stoppard's Voyage, the first of three plays in The Coast of Utopia. Unfortunately, he then took off to New York and screen fame before he could do the following two years of Coast.

So I was kind of excited to see this show, and it didn't disappoint. Crisp and succinct in a relatively small theater for Broadway, the production manages to give the feel of Booth's cramped, sparse room while still providing space for the brothers to practice their card sharking. Arnulfo Maldonado's set design is simple and effective, with sharp lighting effects designed by Allen Lee Hughes. But the script and the two actors have to carry the weight of the play, and they do so effectively.

Bottom Line

I have to say the script shows its age a bit. Although it's still an effective show, I suspect that today's audiences are a bit more attuned to stage portrayals of young black men, such that featuring two streetwise, sometimes violent, con men might not be the preferred choice. But the quality of the script and performance provides sufficient depth and insight to make this not an exploitation or a reinforcement of the stereotypes, but rather an examination and explanation of what drives these men to behave in the ways they do. So I found it effective.

That said, although I think it's a quality work, I'm not sure how much it adds to the overall discourse today. I'm glad I saw it, and I would recommend it to anyone interested. But as ground-breaking as it seemed twenty years ago, I think today it's just another good play. There's always room for that, and showcasing these two actors is a worthy accomplishment.

The show opened only recently, and runs into at least mid-January.

"Leopoldstadt" at Longacre Theatre

Production photo by Joan Marcus

 Show number two for this trip is the reason we came at all: Tom Stoppard's latest play, Leopoldstadt, is on Broadway for a limited engagement, and we wanted to make sure we saw it. The other six plays this week are just a bonus. Suffice it to say that a new Stoppard play (and for all we know, this could be the last one) is reason to go out of your way to the theater. So here we are in New York City.

The Play

This is probably Stoppard's most personal play. Having read his biography this past year, I know that over the last couple of decades he has been coming to grips with his sort of hidden family history. He's always known that he and his mother and brother are Czech, and fled their homeland ahead of the Nazis, but apparently it never registered with him that they did so because they were Jewish. So Stoppard assimilated into his adopted country with his new name, and no one ever really talked much about the past.

Leopoldstadt is the story of an extended, prosperous Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 through 1955. With varying degrees of assimilation and intermarriage, the characters discuss (often at great length--this is a Stoppard play) and illustrate what it means to be Jewish, even when they are trying not to be. Needless to say, as time passes through two world wars (and especially the second), it becomes increasingly difficult to escape other peoples' insistence that one is Jewish, even if one has tried to leave it behind.

It's a huge play. There are thirty-eight actors involved, and the show runs over two hours (with no intermission in this production). It can be a bit overwhelming.

And in the end, after the wars, after the death camps, the few remaining family members meet up in Vienna, and the young man who escaped with his mother and stepfather to England has to come to grips with his own past and the stories of the family he doesn't really remember.

It's a very powerful piece of writing. It doesn't have all the wit and word play that we've come to expect from Stoppard (although it's very definitely a Stoppard play--don't get me wrong!), but the characters are rich and interesting, even when there are so many of them that it can be hard to keep track. It's a good, good play, and solidly impactful.

The Production

I have enormous respect for any production of this scale that manages to be comprehensible at all. The sheer size of the cast and the chaos of the opening scene (a family Christmas gathering in 1899) is impressive, but we get a real feel for what life is like.

And the rest of the play takes place in this same room, in this same house (with only a couple of small scenes played outside it) as time passes. The characters age (and die), more are born, and the family home forms the center around which the rest of the world revolves.

The cast is strong. I won't call out any individuals, though there are some who probably deserve it. Suffice it to say that everyone who needs a good performance gets one, and the multitudes of supporting players do their parts fine. Director Patrick Marber does a terrific job of keeping the flow going--the show never drags, though it runs over two hours without an intermission.

The final scene does an amazing job of tying the threads of the story together (and reconnecting the now-English Leonard with his Viennese origins as Leopold). As his other surviving relatives recount the fates of those who didn't make it, you can see the weight dropping on Leo, and feel the weight of all the lost relatives.

So yes, it's a Holocaust story, but it's also very much a personal journey for all the members of the family, and both the script and the production do justice to all the various members of the family--the Jews, the Christians, the converts, the intermarried, the ex-patriots--all coming to terms with what it means to be Jewish, whether in their own eyes or in the eyes of those who decide for them.

It's a powerful and remarkably subtle rendering of a huge and often horrific story, never losing sight of the sweet and personal aspects.

Bottom Line

It's really quite different from most Stoppard plays. If you're expecting the banter of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or the verbal and emotional gymnastics of The Real Thing or Arcadia, you won't find it here. But there is tremendous writing craft and stagecraft involved in this story, and true insight into the playwright's own journey. It is two hours very well spent.

The show is scheduled to run through March 12, 2023. Go see it. Really. It's worth the trip to New York.

"Cost of Living" at Manhattan Theatre Club

MTC production photo by Julieta Cervantes

I'm not sure why I hadn't heard of this play before. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2018 for its playwright, Martyna Majok. Then it ran Off-Broadway for a while, and is now on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. We grabbed two of the very few tickets available on our first night in New York City, starting a run of seven shows in five days--yes, we're back! And two more of those shows also won Pulitzers. Should be a good week!

The Play

The text of the play mostly shies away from the dramatic. It's conversational, not confrontational, and most of the scenes are fairly straightforward, domestic discussions. But there's definitely more to it. There are four characters in the play, two of whom are in wheelchairs, and the other two are in varying degrees their caretakers.

The story of one pair, Ani and Eddie, is pretty difficult. They are separated, getting divorced, and both struggle financially. When Ani has difficulty with retaining a caretaker, Eddie offers to step in. The dialogue between them is sharp and often bitter, but eventually settles into only occasional jabs.

The other pair, John and Jess, doesn't have the same personal background baggage, but there are plenty of issues. John, a graduate student at Princeton, needs a caretaker daily. Jess, a Princeton graduate herself, is struggling to find meaningful employment, mostly working as a bartender. Despite some reservations, John hires her.

As the play progresses, each pair develops kind of a thaw in the initial tensions, but underlying and external issues keep cropping up. And eventually, the story lines intersect, at least somewhat. It's really a good piece of writing, with interesting story lines and believable dialogue.

There are some loose threads, some questions that are not answered, some origins that are not really explained. But that seems to be intentional, and Eddie even says, "the shit that happens to you is not to be understood." This is definitely a play about the shit that happens to people, and some of it is clearly not meant to be understood, just seen and appreciated.

The Production

The set (designed by Wilson Chin) is pretty intricate and striking. Although there are not a lot of different locations, the scene changes can be pretty stark, so the designers make good use of a turntable on the stage and various pieces that fly in from above. That part is very well done.

All four actors are quite strong and mesh well. John (Gregg Mozgala) and Ani (Katy Sullivan) are from the original, Off-Broadway cast.In particular, Eddie (David Zayas)'s opening solo scene is very well done, very effective in setting the stage for the rest of the show, and he and Sullivan portray working-class New Jerseyites quite effectively. Jess (Kara Young) and John (Gregg Mozgala) do a terrific job of portraying the awkwardness of establishing an intimate working relationship from scratch.

All of the portrayal of disability is well-done, particularly because of its authenticity. Sullivan is a double amputee who has competed in the Paralympics, and Mozgala has cerebral palsy. Neither is as profoundly disabled as the characters they portray, but the lived experience is clear and makes the caretaking scenes particularly effective.

Director Jo Bonney does a good job of keeping things moving smoothly. There are enough scene changes and dramatic shifts that the play could bog down, but the pacing is crisp and at roughly two hours without and intermission, the play doesn't seem long at all.

Bottom Line

I like the play and the production very much. Although the characters' disabilities are important aspects of the plot, this is not, ultimately, a play about disability. It is instead profoundly about the need for human connections and the difficulty of establishing and maintaining them.

I found the play very moving, even if the closing scene is difficult to comprehend. We don't get pounded with the author's message, but it seeps in from everywhere. Good performances, good script. Definitely worth seeing.

The show runs through the month of October. Check it out!

"Lear" at CalShakes

 King Lear and I go way back. It was the first Shakespeare play that I read of my own accord, back in high school, and I wrote one of my essays on the AP English test about the play. And of course, I've seen it performed a number of times. So I was particularly interested when CalShakes announced that they would host the world premiere of a new translation of King Lear, written and adapted by the terrific Marcus Gardley and directed by Eric Ting. This is the same team that brought us the magnificent black odyssey back before the pandemic, so that bodes well.

I'll add a note about the term "translation" here. The play was commissioned by the Play on! Project that began at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and now exists as a stand-alone non-profit company called Play On Shakespeare. I've always had sort of mixed feelings about the project, which set out to make modern-language versions of all the plays in the Shakespeare canon, presumably without altering the meaning, preferably by restoring the original meaning that might have been lost as the language shifted under the plays.

This play, Lear seems to be a further adaptation of the translation Gardley did several years back as part of that effort. I'm a little unclear as to whether this is the translation itself, or whether that exists as a thing, and then further work went into creating this play for this production.

The Play

I'm not going to try to summarize King Lear here. Suffice it to say the basic, well-known plot of the aging Lear dividing his kingdom among his three daughters based on their professions of how much they love him is still here, along with all the resulting conflicts, madness, eye-gouging, and so on. However (and here is where I have to assume this is the adaptation, not just a modern "translation" of the Shakespearean text), the whole play is set in San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1969, which takes some real imagination to accommodate. The whole cast (but for one member) is black, and the character of Kent is explicitly the countess of Kent, because she needs to be a black woman. This is one of the clear places we have departed the original intent and text. Same when the Black Panthers show up. And eminent domain evictions for urban renewal.

To my ear, most of the language modernizations are fine. Gardley has a good ear and a good writing voice, so his changes there are pretty transparent. I would actually like to see a production of his modern translation of the original King Lear, which is what I thought this was going to be. It wasn't.

A friend of mine summarized the problem rather neatly at intermission, and I'll paraphrase: I would love to see a Marcus Gardley modernizaton of King Lear. I would love to see a Marcus Gardley play that riffs on King Lear to examine the issues of mid-20th-century urban issues. This isn't either one of those, and it doesn't work. Displacement by eminent domain is not the same as a king voluntarily dispersing his lands, or a father favoring his legitimate son over a bastard.

The Production

Here is where I'm struggling to delineate between production matters and matters of the play content. As I just noted, I think the translation of the text is fine, and the acting is generally strong and the technical designs are quite good--simple but not simplistic--things don't have to move around or change much, so the actors are the focus as they ought to be. And I'm pleased that the majority of the actors in the cast are local and quite good. In the current, downsized Bay Area theater scene, any work we can get for these artists is welcome, and it's reassuring to see so many artists I've been missing these past couple of years back on stage.

Any production of King Lear is going to live or die with the actor playing Lear (in this case, James A. Williams). He was generally strong, and has a powerful voice, though I felt he needed to modulate it a bit at times. Lear is a complex character, and a lot of that complexity can come through the variation of volume and tone in his voice. The daughters were generally strong, particularly Goneril (Leontyne Mbele-Mbong) and Cordelia (Sam Jackson). Regan (Emma Van Lare) had a few lapses in her lines, which is hard to take at the penultimate performance in the run. Dane Troy and Jomar Tagatac as half-brothers Edgar and Edmund do a terrific job. Troy particularly works well as "Tom", guiding his blinded father Gloucester (Michael J. Asbery, who has a wonderful, commanding voice). And the always wonderful Cathleen Riddley handles Kent very well, serving as the moral center of the play.

I would be remiss not to mention the excellent, live jazz soundtrack (sometimes augmented by the Black Queen (Velina Brown)) and the overall excellent blocking of the scenes. It's a very effective presentation, with the slight exception of a scene played to the extreme side of the stage, which is utterly invisible to part of the audience in the front rows.

Bottom Line

This feels like a wasted opportunity. With such a good writer and talented artists, this had the chance to be a real landmark production, as we saw with black odyssey. Unfortunately, neither the playwright nor the director seemed to know what they wanted to do, so instead we get a mashup that lurches from King Lear to the Fillmore and back, none of it fitting together. I hope Gardley can go back and find his Bay Area play hiding in the background of Lear. There are certainly enough touchpoints that he could manage it. But trying to incorporate the literal text and plot of King Lear into this completely different scenario is futile, and does a disservice to both.

I'll leave with just a couple of last comments. One of the choices I found inexplicable was the discarding of Lear's fool, who is such a key element of Shakespeare's play. There are lots of ways to interpret the fool, but this play chooses to replace the fool with a stand-up comic (who also sits down in one scene). There's nothing particularly wrong with that, as long as you're not trying to tell the story of Lear. But much of King Lear doesn't make sense without some incarnation of the fool. This strikes me as another case of trying to straddle the translation/adaptation chasm without a clear idea of why or how it will work. It also strikes me that Ting used a similar device (entirely out of whole cloth) in his production of Othello several years back. I didn't think that worked, either.

And finally, the powerful speech that Kent delivers to close the play, which is in some ways the whole justification for making Kent a woman, has the character noting how apt it is that a black woman has to clean up after everyone. That's a great message, but one that is sorely hampered by the fact that the mess in question was largely created by Lear's daughters, who are also black women. Again, a problem that seems to have been created by not knowing what play the writer and director actually want to do.

So I was terribly disappointed in this play. I had very high hopes and expectations, and feel that the artists were not well served by either the writer or the director. Eric Ting, who I deeply mistrusted after he made his CalShakes debut with Othello, had earned my trust with some really good work in subsequent years. Sadly, with this being his final production as he leaves CalShakes, I'm left with a disappointing memory.

I should note that the production closed yesterday, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

"Goddess" at Berkeley Rep

Berkeley Rep photo by Kevin Berne and Alessandro Mello

 Berkeley Rep has become known over the last decade or two as a place where musicals get developed or premiered on their way to Broadway. Starting with Passing Strange and American Idiot and Amelie, then more recently Ain't Too Proud and Paradise Square, Berkeley has become a staging and trial ground for new musicals. The latest iteration is a world premiere of a new musical by a team with a pretty solid track record: it was conceived by Shaheem Ali, composer Michael Thurber wrote the music and lyrics, and the book is by Jocelyn Bioh. I suspect they're already making arrangements to transfer the show to Broadway.

The Play

Set in Mombasa, Kenya, the play is the story of Marimba, the goddess of music and beauty, who has had a falling out with her mother and come to the mortal realm to seek true love. Meanwhile, she gets by in the guise of Nadira, a singer at a trendy club called Mota Mota. There she meets Omari, the scion of the Mombasa political dynasty, just returned home from college in New York. Omari is supposed to succeed his father as mayor of Mombasa, and his fiancée, Cheche, has been making preparations for his campaign while he was away. But Omari just wants to play the saxophone at the club, where he is also falling in love with Nadira.

So the folktale sets up the conflicts between Omari and his parents, Omari and Cheche, Nadira/Marimba and her mother, Nadira and Madongo, the owner of the club who has romantic designs on her. All with a backdrop of the club and its excellent band and crew of colorful, dancing patrons. Lots of singing and dancing, lots of light and color.

The Production

Because this is a show with Broadway aspirations, it's a much bigger, fancier production that we would normally get in a regional theater. The set is large and elaborate. The band is large (and excellent), starting with the Afro jazz music while the audience is getting seated and playing nearly all the way through the show. And the cast is pretty much Broadway caliber: big voices, great dancing skills, etc. The production quality is high throughout. This is a top-notch production.

And it definitely appeals to its audience. This was the first truly packed theater I've been in since the pandemic, and the reception was enthusiastic. I suspect the run will be very successful and the show will go on to New York and do well.

Bottom Line

If you're looking for a Broadway-style and -quality musical show, I would say this is probably as good a bet as any of the touring shows currently playing in San Francisco (though I haven't seen them). The show has been extended through October 2nd, so you still have a chance to see it.

However (you knew this was coming, right?), although I found the show enjoyable, I felt like it was mostly flash and not much substance. Like many folk tales, there isn't a lot of depth or subtlety to the story. Once you get the setup, you pretty much know where everything is going. So it's very predictable, which I realize is what a lot of people want in their Broadway musicals. I also didn't find any of the major characters very engaging. Amber Iman (Nadira) is beautiful and sings incredibly, but her character doesn't have much dimension, and her acting doesn't add much to it. Phillip Johnson Richardson (Omari) has some personal appeal, but his character seems pretty set in his entitled ennui, never really convincing me that there's any conflict involved in choosing his preferred life of music over his family obligations. (And for that matter, it's kind of the same story with Marimba/Nadira--she never seems to show any sense that she has any inclination or reason to go back to being a goddess, preferring instead to pursue the path of personal love. Only when the curse placed on her threatens people she cares about does she get motivated at all to resume her goddess job.)

So the moral of the story seems to be "be true to yourself", almost regardless of the consequences to everyone else. It's kind of a bizarre message to be preaching, but it's done with lots of flair and charisma, so that's something.

On the other hand, a full house and an extended run, and an audience full of more young and BIPOC people than I have seen at almost any other show. So Berkeley Rep has another successful cash cow. The question is, will any of these audiences come back for other shows? And how much of the revenue will go to promoting local artists and shows? A big theater like Berkeley Rep can be a tremendous force in the local theater scene, but only if it invests in that local theater scene. Let's hope.

"Man of God" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Ben Krantz

 During the pandemic shutdown, as theaters were experimenting with various flavors of online presentation of plays, my usual reaction was to think that it was better than nothing, but in just about every case I thought the show would be much more effective live on stage. Last night I got my first chance to test that theory, as we went to Shotgun to see Man of God, which had been planned for 2020 and was presented as a Zoom play during the shutdown.

Unsurprisingly, the show is much more effective as a fully-staged production.

The Play

Four teenaged, Asian American girls from a church youth group are on a mission trip to Thailand. When one of the girls finds a camera hidden in the bathroom of their hotel room, the four face a lot of growing up, very quickly. First they turn on each other, but as the realization comes that the camera was placed by the pastor who is also their only chaperone, they quickly have to come to grips with their limited options. As denial gives way to anger, the play dramatizes the cinematic-inspired revenge fantasies they concoct. In the end, they have to confront the pastor in person, and reality has to take the place of the fantasies.

Written by Anna Ouyang Moench, the play explores both the reality of how young women learn to live in a world where they are constantly the subject of the male gaze (or worse), and how neither the reality nor the fantasies of how to deal with ongoing problems like this are satisfying in the end.

The Production

[My usual disclaimer here: I'm a member of the board at Shotgun, and my wife and I are season sponsors. I am friends with members of the cast and crew. Opinions here are solely my own.]

This play is so much richer as a fully-staged production than it could be online. For one thing, the interactions of the characters, both verbal and physical, are much clearer and more meaningful in person. It's one thing to tell something from one Zoom window to another, and quite another to physically move toward someone, raising your voice. Also, as the production photo above illustrates, there is much meaning in the contact of these characters, who are constantly ping-ponging between jousting amongst themselves and realizing that they are also their only support system.

Director Michelle Talgarow (with ample assistance from the lighting design of Gabe Rodriguez and Dave Ragaza) manages to move the girls between their reality and their revenge fantasies deftly and with humor, despite the seriousness of the scenario. This is one of the clear ways the live production is able to do things the online version could not possibly touch. And while none of the four actors playing the girls is an actual teenager, they do generally manage to capture enough of the behaviors and interactions of teen girls to enable one to suspend disbelief.

Another thing that is much clearer when seeing the show in person is that the pastor (Chuck Lacson) is not physically present through most of the action--only appearing onstage during the revenge fantasies and then finally at the end. That makes a big difference in the understanding of the play.

Bottom Line

The play works well, and it clearly speaks loudly to a segment of the audience. There is definitely a sense that young girls, and particularly Asian girls, don't feel seen or heard in society, and that their stories aren't told on stage. This production definitely addresses that, both in its content and in its staging. So that's a big step.

I definitely felt after seeing the show on Zoom that the script was a bit too blunt and the message not as universally appealing as I'd generally want to see in a play. Now having seen it in something more like its intended form, I can see that there is much more subtlety to the story-telling than I was able to get online, and the message is much more clearly directed at a broader audience. This is definitely not just a niche play that panders to those who can relate to the primary characters.

So I feel like the play is well worth seeing. It runs through October 2 at the Ashby Stage.

P.S.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Datebook (a.k.a., "the pink section") has an article by Bay Area journalist Joy Diamond (who is Chinese) about this play. I found her insight informative, as her viewpoint is notably different from my own. One small excerpt:

As much as I love theater, it’s a space in which I feel especially like an outsider, where my race feels particularly noticeable in contrast to the average theatergoer. It’s no secret that both artists and audiences of American theater are overwhelmingly white, and it’s not enough to retroactively fit people of color into the existing canon — we need to introduce new works that reflect and prioritize the diverse perspectives of our population.

“Man of God” does exactly that.

I thought the whole piece was well worth reading. 

"Passengers" at ACT

ACT photo by Kevin Berne

 Several things struck me as odd last night when we walked into the theater to see Passengers at ACT. The first was that it was the first theater I've attended that really seems to believe we are in a post-COVID time: no vaccination check, masks optional (a fact reinforced during the recorded pre-show announcement), and the bar is open downstairs.

The second was that they've obviously done some tinkering with the ticketing system. When I bought my tickets a couple of weeks ago, I scored the last two available seats in the center orchestra section. But walking in, I saw that the section was nearly half empty. There seemed to be a pair of empty seats between each pair of patrons (except in the front rows, which appeared full), so, some kind of social distancing? But we were the only patrons in Row H, and the row behind us was entirely empty. On one hand, better sight lines, or at least the ability to shift a seat or two to avoid sitting behind someone. On the other hand, a huge number of empty seats. I guess this is how they justify keeping their ticket prices so high.

And the third thing was a note inserted in the program explaining that they've renamed the Geary Theater to the Toni Rembe Theater, after a huge, anonymous gift to the company. I guess if I'd been paying attention, there were also banners outside that had the new name. Anyway, nice to see an arts organization getting a big infusion of cash (much of which they are going to put into an endowment). The Chronicle had more information about it today.

The Show

I can't call it a play. It's not a play. It's a multi-disciplinary art performance, combining dance, music, gymnastics, and a lot of circus performances, all written, directed, and choreographed by Shana Carroll. I guess the closest thing I could compare it to might be a Cirque du Soleil show, but on a smaller scale and without the clowns to provide even a modicum of a story line. There is a theme, however. As the name suggests, Passengers is about people on trains, mostly. Among the small amount of verbiage in the show is some talk about how we're all going somewhere, or leaving somewhere. Which I guess is true, but most of us do so without the gymnastics.

The Production

It's really well done. The stars of the show are the circus acts, which are all excellent, as are the gymnastic tumbling bits. The dance is good, but not as polished as the rest. And the sung portions are probably the least-inspired portion, feeling more like a rest period or an excuse to do something else. All the while there are lighting and projection effects that are often distracting, and don't seem to add much to the performance. Ultimately I found that I needed to just focus on the current circus act at any given moment, because the dancing and tumbling and video off to the sides just seemed to be a distraction, and nothing I saw there was as interesting as the current act in the spotlight.

I guess that would be my only complaint, that the show was so busy, it detracted somewhat from the central acts. The choreography and coordination of all these moving parts is impressive, but ultimately not something I can appreciate as much as whatever impossible feat is currently happening on the trapeze, for instance.

Bottom Line

It's a good show, but sort of an odd choice for a theater trying to draw back its audience after the pandemic. It's cool and different and a spectacle, and will likely draw a different audience than your average play. But at the same time, while local theater artists are struggling to get back to work, it would be nice to see the area's largest theater hiring some of them, rather than pulling in a group from outside the area. On the other hand, if this is what puts people in the seats, more power to them.

But this is a theater blog, and I don't feel qualified to really comment on circus, gymnastics, and dance. So I'll just say it's a fun time, worth seeing. It runs through October 9th at the newly-rechristened Toni Rembe Theater.

Ashland, 2022

 After a two-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we were finally able to return to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year. Like all theaters, they are having to come back a bit tentatively, so I have to say the scope of the festival was dramatically less than what we're used to. But it was a treat to be back in lovely Ashland, seeing some of our favorite artists.

So, what's changed?

The two most striking changes in the festival this season were the reduction in the number and scope of the plays offered, and the absence of rotating repertory casting.

The 2022 festival season contained seven total plays, down from the previous eleven. But it wasn't just the number of plays that was reduced. There are fewer performances of each play, and many of the plays are just smaller. For example, one show had a single actor; another had three, and yet another five. This is not a comment on quality--those shows I listed were among the very best we saw. But it reflects both the difficulty of producing a large show when one needs to take precautions to prevent spreading disease and a caution about expending resources on a show when it's uncertain how many people will actually come to see it. The scheduling of the shows was also spread out so that there was no overlap at the middle of the season as there has often been. Some shows ended in July, others didn't begin until August. So it wasn't possible to see all the season's offerings in a single visit. We settled on making two trips, which was fine.

Another victim of the pandemic was repertory casting. Needing to isolate the cast and crew of each show meant that repertory casting was essentially impossible. Overlapping casts and crews would greatly increase the risk of spreading illness across multiple shows, so this seemed a reasonable precaution. It was disappointing to us in the audience, who enjoy seeing actors stretching across a variety of roles. And I imagine it must also have been a blow to the actors who rely on that level of work.

The bottom line here is that there are fewer shows, fewer performances of each, with smaller casts and no chance to be cast across shows. That means a lot fewer opportunities for each artist--a dramatically scaled-down festival.

I should add that another thing that has gone somewhat missing in all this is the festival's eponymous bard: of the seven plays, there were only two Shakespeare works. Although I realize the pandemic necessitated a retreat from the festival's commitment to produce the entire canon of Shakespeare's work in a decade, this pacing suggests that they might be backing away from the canon even more than that, which would be disappointing.

But what about the plays?

Between our two trips, we managed to see all seven of the shows on offer. Of those, I would say two were outstanding, two were very good, and the other three were disappointing on some level.

The best

On each of our visits, we saw one outstanding play, clearly better than the others. For what it's worth, both were in the Thomas Theater (the smallest, black-box theater), but both were ambitious new shows.

unseen

This was the show for the first half of the season in the Thomas. Written by Mona Mansour and directed by Evren Odcikin, it was a west coast premiere. The central character, Mia (Helen Sadler) is a conflict photographer who has been documenting the conflict in Syria when something happens. Her memory has holes, and her ex-girlfriend, Derya (Nora el Samahy), and her mother from California (Caroline Shaffer) try to help her piece together what physical and psychological trauma has landed her here.

The acting, design, and direction for unseen were all amazing. It was clearly the best show we saw on our first visit.

Confederates

After unseen closed, Confederates took over the Thomas Theater, and it's another powerhouse production. Another west coast premiere, this one's by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Artistic Director Nataki Garrett. The writing is just brilliant, with more layers than I can fathom, and the production design brilliantly illustrates the parallel challenges navigated by a modern-day black university professor and an enslaved woman during the American Civil War. We know from Sandra (Bianca Jones)'s opening monologue that this is going to be difficult material, and it is. And while Sara (Erika Rose) demonstrates from her first scene that she well knows the difficulty of staying in line with the masters while still trying to remain true to herself and her family, Sandra's similar conundrums only become apparent as the play progresses.

Using the other actors to portray characters who fill remarkably similar roles in the lives of the two women, on a stage that places the professor's office and the slave shack side-by-side (great scenic design by Nina Ball!), we get a visceral appreciation for both how much and how little has changed over the decades between their lives. I can't do justice to this play in this brief summary. It runs through October 29--go see it!

The next level

Two more shows stood out as being good productions, definitely of a caliber I expect from OSF.

How I Learned What I Learned

This is a show I had seen before (but not blogged about; it was in May, 2019, while I was on blog hiatus). Ubuntu Theater Project (now Oakland Theater Project) co-produced this show with Lorraine Hansbury Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. It's a one-actor show by August Wilson, sort of autobiographically describing his life as a black man in America (or more particularly, Pittsburgh, where he grew up). That production starred Steven Anthony Jones, and he again played the role in Ashland.

I had thought the Ubuntu production was good, though Jones had some lapses. I thought he was much better in the Ashland version: both more confident and more personal. And it didn't hurt to have a bigger budget, so better lighting, a fancier set (also by Nina Ball!), etc. It was just a more polished and convincing production. As noted earlier, a solo show is not something I would ordinarily go to Ashland to see, but the quality of the production was definitely up to their standards.

King John

One of the few Shakespeare history plays I had not yet seen in person (though I have seen a filmed version from Stratford), this was a fairly unconventional staging, directed by Rosa Joshi of the upstart crow collective (who co-produced this), with a cast that is all female or non-binary. After a few minutes, the gender thing just stops being an issue, and you just get into the drama. I have to say that they play (though the ending is a bit weak) holds up very well: it's much clearer, more direct, than most Shakespeare histories. And the cast was really solid, with particular props to Jessika D. Williams as the Bastard (she had impressed me several years ago at CalShakes).

This is another show that is still running, through October 29. If you're making the trip to see Confederates, you can see this, too. Worth it!

The other three

I don't have a lot to say about these. I'll just write about them in the order we saw them. Suffice it to say that none of these would justify a trip all the way to Ashland, but it's not a complete waste of your time to see them if you're there.

The Tempest

I hate putting this on the list of inferior productions, but it belongs there. I love the play in general, and a number of my favorite actors are in the cast. The problems I saw here were directorial. As far as I can tell, either director Nicholas C. Avila didn't know what message he was trying to send, or he didn't figure out how to craft that message out of his actors. But when we saw the show in early July, it had been running for a month, and still hadn't found a direction. Maybe it's better now. I hope so, but I don't have a lot of hope. It's still running, through October 15. But mostly it felt like a waste of a lot of talent, and that's not something I've ever encountered at OSF before.

Once on This Island

This show is very well done. Good music, dancing, energy. Unfortunately, there is no real substance to the story. It's pretty much a story about the happy downtrodden Haitians trying to live happily in the shadow of the colonizing French. And the dream of crossing the racial/class barrier that gets thoroughly thwarted. So it was kind of pleasant, but quite unsatisfying. I'm not sure what the point of this was. Also still running, through October 30th.

Revenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation

I had such high hopes for this one. It's by Qui Nguyen, who wrote Vietgone, which I've seen twice and loved both times. And this promised to be sort of similar, a musical about a queer, swashbuckling woman (Julie d'Aubigny--a real, historical figure), trending toward superhero status. I just feel like the show wasn't ready for prime time. It felt very uneven, maybe unfinished. My expectations of a show at OSF are for something definitely more polished. And it was compounded by the fact that the sound mixing was terrible. Every time actors started to sing with the band, their voices got dropped, making it difficult to hear what they were singing. That's pretty inexcusable.

Again, there's some real talent in the cast and design crew. We even had to postpone seeing this from early July (rain) to September, and it still felt unfinished, and the sound was a problem. That's very disappointing. You, too, can still be disappointed if you go see it before it closes on October 14.

Summing Up

It was awesome to be back in Ashland, both times. The town is much as we remembered it, though a number of businesses did not survive the shutdown, and some of our favorite restaurants have folded. But there aren't a lot of empty storefronts, and new restaurants (some of them excellent) have opened.

That said, we were there for the Independence Day weekend in July, and where Ashland would normally be packed to the gills, there were tables at restaurants, empty seats in the theaters, and parking spaces available. The outdoor theater shows had pretty good crowds, but the indoor theaters felt about half or maybe two-thirds full at best. On a holiday weekend in the peak of their season. When we returned in September (after Labor Day), it was definitely not crowded.

So I have to say I'm concerned about the future of the festival. Fewer shows, lower ticket prices, fewer performances, smaller crowds. All that adds up to a serious drop in revenue. I can only imagine that they must be struggling. And next year's season looks to be much the same: seven shows, including a solo show, only two Shakespeare plays. and so on. I hope by next year people will feel more confident about going out and about, taking trips to see theater and such. Only time will tell.