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June 10, 2012 - "Two Trains Running"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:09:24 -0700

Shakespeare wrote 37 plays.

The first I ever saw was Richard the third. I had a good time and I laughed, hard but silently, when the murderers in the tower killed the prince while hollering “Take that! And that! And that!” because it was such an overused cliché, sounding like something out of a Loony Tunes cartoon - “Take dat, Puddytat, and dat! And dat!” - which was when I realized that Shakespeare didn’t use old clichés. He invented them, using for the first time phrases that went on to be used, and overused, for the next four-hundred-years.

I vowed I was going to see all of Shakespeare’s plays, even the bad ones, live on stage, at least once before I died. At present, of the 37, I still have to see "Timon of Athens," and "Two Noble Kinsmen," but I may have to live a long time because no one ever does those.

Anyway, since I’ve nearly completed my Shakespeare life list, I’ve added another prolific playwright to my theater-going life-list challenge: I am now also trying to see all ten plays in the late August Wilson’s celebrated Century Cycle. Also called The Pittsburgh Cycle, the ten plays were written between 1982 and 2005, each taking place in a different decade of the twentieth century, all but one taking place in Pittsburgh, together offering a view, in rich and detailed stories, of the African-American experience across the last hundred years.

Of the ten, I have now seen seven.

The latest to be scratched of my August Wilson life list is the seldom-staged "Two Trains Running," which Wilson wrote in 1991. Playing though July 7 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, "Two Trains Running" is August Wilson’s sixties play, set just over a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Set inside the rundown Hill District coffeeshop of self-made man Memphis, the play covers the few days in the lives of the folks who’ve made Memphis’ diner the hub of their lives. These are potently rich, real characters, flawed, frail and fleshed out, from Wolf, the flashy numbers runner who seems to be the only one making any money, to the non-nonsense waitress Risa, whose practiced detachment masks a fierce sense of sadness, to the recent parolee Sterling, just looking for a break, to Hambone, the developmentally disabled man-child who Risa gives free meals to. In many ways, Hambone - with his plaintive, oft-repeated cry, “I want my ham!” - who is the heart of the play, steadfastly insisting on getting what was once promised him, in exchange for painting a white grocer’s fence, ten years before. I suspect that in four hundred years, “I want my ham!” may become the “Take that and that” of the twenty-fifth century, and that August Wilson’s writings, all of them, will have provided a similarly wealthy abundance of cultural and literary references. Wilson’s work is that thick with beauty, depth, and lusciously repeatable phraseology.

Directed with loving detail and a strong sense of character by Lou Bellamy - who’s directed more of Wilson’s plays than any other director on the planet - this is a great one for first-timers to Wilson’s world. Arguably the most hopeful of his ten plays, "Two Trains Running" is a generous play, distributing with lumpy impartiality a whole series of happy and semi-happy endings amongst its characters, characters that live such hopeful, hurt, frustrated, optimistic, pessimistic, brilliant and vibrant lives, it is nearly impossible not to want them to get everything they deserve, from ham to happiness, from a fair break to friendship based real, lasting love.

"Two Trains Running" runs through July 7 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. OSFAshland.org.

June 7, 2012 - "The Beauty Queen of Leenane"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 7 Jun 2013 14:07:29 -0700

“You’re old, and you’re stupid, and you don’t know what you’re talkin’ about! Now shut up and eat your oat porridge.”

Those lines, bursting with savage frustration and dark, slap-in-the-face humor, come early on in Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s very first play, "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," which made its debut in 1996. McDonagh must have known he was on to something as he wrote that satisfyingly nasty bit of dialogue, an offhand remark made my the oppressed 40-year-old Maureen to her controlling, belittling, foul, selfish and mean-spirited mom Mag, who spends her days watching television, ordering her daughter around, pouring the contents of her bedpan down the kitchen sink, and devising ways to keep Maureen from walking out the door and leaving her to fend for her own nasty self. Ever since "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," McDonagh has pretty-much owned the title of Ireland’s most aggressively entertaining, lyrically violent playwright. In such works as "The Lonesome West," "The Cripple of Inishmaa," "The Lietenant of Inishmore," “The Pillowman," and "A Behanding in Spokane,” along with the films "In Bruges" and "Seven Psychopaths," McDonagh has left a trail of corpses, amputated limbs, shot-gunned cats, bullets to the head, and general mayhem unlike anything since Shakespeare served a couple of thugs to their mother in the form of a pie. That was in "Titus Andronicus," which might have been part of McDonagh’s inspiration to blend comedy and heartbreak with razor-sharp dialogue and some truly shocking - but surprisingly entertaining - acts of stagecraft brutality.

In Marin Theater Company’s unfortunate new staging of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," the entertainment value, along with the nasty edge, is pointlessly dulled due to some inexplicable directorial decisions and a performance by Maureen Folan, as the daughter Maureen, that is perplexingly . . . well . . . off-the-mark is pretty much the kindest way I can say it. 'Beauty Queen’ was directed by Mark Jackson, whose work on "The Arsonists," at Berkeley Rep, was some of the best directing I’ve seen all year.

But here, his decisions seem to work against everything McDonagh has set up in his brilliantly bold script. Mag, played as a slightly edgier version of Estelle Getty’s character on "The Golden Girls," is deliberately made to be sympathetic, and Maureen, well . . . the surprises lurking in her character are all telegraphed way too loudly. We actually feel sorry for Mag - which is not the point of Mag at all.

As Ray, the hotheaded young man from down the road, and Pato, the dim but sweet-hearted fellow who might be Maureen’s one chance at escape, Joseph Salazar and Rod Gnapp give the show’s best performances, with Gnapp particularly strong . . . and particualrly understandable.

The Irish accents of the other actors, especially when rattled off at superspeed per Jackson’s lickety-split pacing, are often unintelligible, another waste of McDonagh’s juicy writing.

Add to these problems a set that seems determined to undermine the sense of oppressive claustrophobia that McDonagh intended the audience to feel. The tiny, urine-smelling house is instead a slab of a living-room and kitchen floating in space, with no walls, and make-believe doors the actors pretend to open and close.

With this production of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," Marin Theater Company is clearly attempting to take McDonagh’s brutal poetry in a different direction than is usually taken. That’s not a bad thing, when it works.

In this case, is doesn’t, resulting in what is for me, one of the major disappointments of the year.

"The Beauty Queen of Leenane" runs through June 16 at Marin Theater Company, marintheatre.org.

May 29, 2012 - "King Lear"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 31 May 2013 17:00:53 -0700

As the weeks count down toward the middle of June, when the sprawling Elizabethan Theater opens in Ashland and three outdoor shows join those already in progress at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I want to continue my report on the shows that opened in February.

I’ve previously described Amanda Dehnert’s excellent stripped-down reinvention of "My Fair Lady," and David Ivers high-spirited rockabilly makeover of Shakespeare’s "Taming of the Shrew." It’s a tricky thing, bringing something new to plays that are so well known, and so locked in place in the minds of audiences. Getting us to open up to new visions, jarring us out of our comfortable attachment to our fond expectations of these beloved shows, that can be a risky business.

With Bill Rauch’s intense, relentlessly paced take on Shakespeare’s "King Lear," the risks pay off big time, resulting in what is easily the best, most entertaining, upsetting, unsettling, thrilling, and deeply moving "King Lear" I’ve ever seen - and frankly, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen the Bard’s soaring tragedy. But I’ve never seen it like this.

Staged in the round within the intimate Thomas Theater, director Rauch creates a timeless setting, simultaneously happening in modern times and yet with echoes of past generations hanging over everything. "King Lear," easily the Lit world’s most heartbreakingly foolish monarch ever, and one of the theater world’s most demanding roles of all time, is played on alternating nights by two different actors, Jack Willis and Michael Winter, ostensibly to give each other time to rest up for the next emotionally grueling show.

At the start of the show, Lear is ready for retirement. Fond of the perks of being king, but ready to relinquish the responsibilities of leadership, he goes against the counsel of his advisors, and offers to split his kingdom into three pieces, giving rule of them to each of this three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia.

Almost immediately, things go badly, and the hints of Lear’s coming dementia are spied by his daughters, whom Lear goads into competing for the biggest pieces of the pie by telling why they love him more than the others two. When Cordelia, honest to a fault, refuses to play the game, she is disinherited, and Lear’s Kingdom is divided between Goneril and Regan.

For the following three breathtaking hours, told over three full acts with two intermissions, the breaking of Lear’s kingdom continues, everything crumbling into small and smaller pieces, along with his sanity, as the daughters, and their husbands, cheat, lie, conspire, seduce and murder their way deeper and deeper into war, madness and ruin. The pace never slackens, and the inventiveness with which Rauch brings fresh ideas and visuals to the story never wanes.

The cast is marvelous, committing body and soul, and the occasional baring of skin, to the ensuing mayhem, and yet, the aching, breaking, poisoned hearts of these all too human characters are always in view. No matter how brutal or bloody the action, Rauch keeps "King Lear" grounded in stark, brave believability.

It may leave it’s audiences shaken, but its goal is to leave them moved, willing to examine the wise and unwise choices we all make, to question the motivations behind every word of flattery and compliment and to see the broken hearts behind every human cruelty.

"King Lear" runs through November 3rd at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, OSFAshland.org.

May 24, 2012 - "Red"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:28:18 -0700

It’s a matter of simple mathematics.

Each weekend in the North Bay, at least three new plays open somewhere between Mill Valley and Cloverdale. A weekend has three days, and three nights. So, if the average theater reviewer sees one play on each of those nights - assuming there were not four plays opening that weekend, which there often are - then if one does the math, one must conclude that that reviewer, assuming he or she has a spouse who wants that reviewer to spend at least some evenings at home, will not stay married long.

There is simply no way for a mere married mortal to catch all of the theatrical offerings all of the time, no matter how much he or she wants to, which in my case, is definitely the case.

I want to. But I can’t.

Which is why I have not yet seen the 6th Street Playhouse production of John Logan’s remarkable two-actor play, "Red," which ends its three-weekend run this weekend. Which is when I will see it, this weekend, though that will be too late for me to say anything about, it on the air, before it closes.

So . . . let me just say this.

I love this play.

I’m not talking about this particular production, which of course I haven’t seen, but the play itself, which I saw last year when it was presented by Berkeley Repertory Theater. I liked the show so much I immediately bought John Logan’s script, and have read it a couple of times since, just to soak up as much of its heady intellectual art-smart-philosophy and brilliant bad-boy banter as possible.

At 6th Street, where "Red" appears under the direction Craig Miller, the production features actors Charles Siebert and Ryan Schabach, both actors who’ve done seriously good work at 6th Street in the past.

In a way, a play is like . . . a bucket of paint.

How an artist chooses to apply the paint to a canvass can either result in a work of fresh, indelible, unforgettable art . . . or a canvass with some wet paint on it. In one artist’s hands, that bucket of paint could be the beginning of a masterpiece destined to change those who gaze upon it, or the start of a crass commercial product created only to earn a paycheck.

And this, it so happens, is part of the point of "Red," the story of iconic American abstract artist Mark Rothko, and the months-long period in which he painted a series of art pieces for an upscale New York restaurant, which had offered him more money than had ever been offered an artist before.

In real life, Rothko ended up keeping the paintings, and giving the money back. Who does that? And why?

"Red," which unfolds in a series of conversations and arguments between Rothko and his long-suffering assistant Ken, gives one possible set of answers to those questions. Along the way, playwright Logan uses the battle of wills between these two artists as the canvas on which he paints, with gorgeous, glittering swashes of words, his celebration of the power of beauty, intelligence, human worth, and the choices an artist makes in the act of creating art - however you define that amorphous and mysterious word.

That’s a big part of the reason "Red" won the 2010 Tony award for best new play. We have four days left to see it at 6th Street. Nobody can see everything, but based on the script alone, this one should probably not be missed.

"Red" runs Thursday through Sunday, through May 26 at 6th Street Playhouse, 6thstreetplayhouse.com

May 22, 2012 - "The Sound of Music"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:26:19 -0700

A classic musical is a little like a pop standard song, one that every musician wants to sing themselves. Theater, in general, is a little like that. Any production of a well-known show - say, "The Sound of Music" - carries with it a kind of karaoke-vibe: a nervous awareness that, just as not everyone in a karaoke bar can actually sing, not every new production of a great old show will be any good, or have anything original to contribute.

Well, with some musicals, that can be a tall order. Sticking with "The Sound of Music," few American musicals are as well known and beloved as Rogers & Hammerstein’s tuneful tale of an Austrian nun, at the brink of World War II, who becomes a governess and falls in love with the father of the kids she takes care of. The movie version is so well known, that every stage production has to compete with Julie Andrews, music and images so indelible it’s almost impossible to imagine improving on it. So most productions settle for simply copying it.

But every once in a while, a production does manage to bring something fresh to "The Sound of Music," something that no other stage production could possible dream of doing.

In the case of the Mountain Play, the 100 year old institution that stages beloved musicals in the enormous Cushing Memorial Amphitheater atop Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais, what director Jay Manley brings to "The Sound of Music" is sheer, unlimited size.

Expanding to fill the massive stage area of the three-thousand seat amphitheater, the designer Ken Rowland has built a gorgeous, sprawling Nonnberg Abbey for the opening Hallellujahs, sung by a chorus of 24 Benedictine nuns and monks. When Maria, played well by Heather Buck, first sings the "Sound of Music," she is stationed at the center of the amphitheater, belting the tune from a large boulder beside a wind-twisted tree. A few moments later, when Maria is assigned to the household of Captain Von Trapp and his seven children, the Abbey slits into two, each piece pivoting around to create the mountainside mansion of the Von Trapp family. Later, when the Nazis take over Austria, the sight of massive swastikas fluttering over the stage is impressively jarring and effective, as is the sight of an authentic BMW officer’s car accompanied by a motorcycle with sidecar driving up to the Von Trapp mansion.

Even the score has expanded to include all the songs from the original stage production, and two songs written specifically for the Julie Andrews movie.

The Mountain Play always promises a certain amount of spectacle, and with this production of "The Sound of Music," Manley and his cast and crew certainly deliver it. But at the same time, they manage to stay true to the intimacy of the story, which at its center is about people falling in love, struggling to do the right thing in difficult, following their hearts when it would be easier to follow the crowd.

In this case, I do recommend following the crowd up the mountain, for a 'Sound of Music' that is truly memorable.

"The Sound of Music" plays Sundays at 2 pm through June 15. For all the info visit mountainplay.org

May 20, 2012 - "My Fair Lady"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:11:16 -0700

Last week, I started to explain why I've always had a problem with "My Fair Lady," currently playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Despite a score full of unforgettable songs with melodies that are nearly impossible to stop humming once you start, "My Fair Lady" suffers from the same problem I described in Shakespeare’s "The Taming of the Shrew," also running through the season at OSF.

Both shows operate on the assumption that women like being bullied by men.

Sure, in ‘Shrew’ Kate might put up a good show, and a good fight, but in the end, all she wants is a man with the guts to put her in her place, and when he does she becomes jelly to his roll. In many ways, "My Fair Lady" is a Victorian spin on "Taming of the Shrew."

Sure, there are all kinds of other things going on, too. The play that inspired it, George Bernard Shaw’s "Pygmalion," was trying to make a point about he unfairness of class distinction. Henry Higgins is a curmudgeonly expert at linguistics, who encounters a lower-class flower girl named Eliza Doolittle, and takes her on as a student, all to prove that the only thing separating the poor folks from the rich folks, aside from money, is the way they speak.

Shaw, in creating the characters of Higgins and Eliza, shook things up in a big way, challenging long-held assumptions about class and humanity. But then he cavalierly wallpapers the show with misogynist one-liners that seem to be more than just a comment on Higgins’ uncouth attitude. They seem to be inside jokes that all men will get a good laugh from.

In the musical version, which actually adds a happy ending for these two, the misogyny only gets worse. For Eliza to end up with this unfeeling, selfish, narcissistic, borderline sociopath is a tragedy, a disaster of epic proportions, for Eliza anyway.

That’s why I don’t like "My Fair Lady."

So why do I love the version now running at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival?

For one thing, director Amanda Dehnert is a genius.

Understanding the problems plaguing the play, not content to merely stage it with pretty costumes and say, "Oh well, that was a different time," Dehnert has virtually rewritten the play from the inside out - without changing a single line.

The play begins when the doors open for the audience, two grand pianos at the center of the stage surrounded by racks of costumes, piles of props, several actors already present, stretching, warming their voices, and chatting with each other. AT the top of the show, actress Rachael Warren, who plays Eliza, starts up a conversation with the audience, then produces her own cell phone, switches it off, and hides it beneath a bank of lights because, as she says, “I have to do this show now.”

And suddenly, accompanied by just the two pianos and the occasional cast member fiddling a few licks when appropriate, "My Fair Lady" begins, resembling a rehearsal more than a performance, with the cast all sitting on stage in a ramshackle set of chairs, watching the play themselves until called upon to don a costume and take part.

The effect is powerful and immediate.

Without sacrificing a bit of the charm of the characters or the music, it is clear that this is a game, and everyone knows it. That right there might have been enough, but the performances of Warren Jonathan Haugen as Higgins, under the Denhert’s delicate direction, reveal full-ledged human beings beneath the skin of these people. Eliza is allowed to be more than a screeching joke at the beginning and simpering codependent at the end, and Higgins is amazing, a narcissistic bully child-man who behaves the way he does because no one has ever forced him to grow up. Eliza does that, and by the end of the play, each is warier and wiser, and when they come together in the final seconds of the play, which Dennhert allows to happen in the audience, away from the stage where their game has been played, they come together in a ways I’d have thought impossible for "My Fair Lady.” They come together as true equals, each recognizing the strengths and weaknesses in themselves, and each other.

"My Fair Lady" runs until the end of October at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. OSForegon.com

May 17, 2012 - "Funny Girl"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:24:43 -0700

The North Bay’s spring season of on-stage blockbusters, which kicked off last weekend with Rohnert Park’s monster hit ‘Young Frankenstein,’ has another massive musical production leading the way into the summer.

But unlike "Young Frankenstein," unlike "Singing in the Rain" (opening next month at 6th Street playhouse), unlike "Shrek: The Musical" (opening next month at the JC’s Summer Repertory Theater), the show that opened at the Napa Valley Opera House last weekend is not based on a hit movie.

On the contrary, a star-making hit movie from 1968 was based on it.

It’s "Funny Girl," the show that made Barbara Streisand a superstar.

With sensational music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill, "Funny Girl" has not been performed on stage much in the last couple of decades, primarily because it’s such a big show, and not a cheap one to produce.

But there are few actresses on the musical theater stage today who do not cite "Funny Girl" as one of the childhood inspirations that made them want to sing and dance on stage. Those star-struck little girls included Napa’s Taylor Bartolucci, who recalls dancing through her house singing those songs - "I Am the Greatest Star," "Don’t Rain on My Parade," "People," dreaming of the day she’s get to sing those songs on stage in her very own production of "Funny Girl."

Cue Lucky Penny Theater, which has pulled out all the stops to bring that dream to life, for Bartolucci and a generation of theater fans who’ve had to wait a very long time to see this show brought back to life.

Directed by Barry Martin with an emphasis on the roiling emotions beneath the glitter, the production makes first-rate use of the elegant Napa Valley Opera House. "Funny Girl" is an old-fashioned tale of theater in the 1920’s, and the experience of watching it gets a boost from taking place in a historic theater like the Opera House.

"Funny Girl" is story of pioneering comedienne Fanny Brice, whose love life never matched her on-stage success, and it features some of the most enduring songs ever written for the stage, In showcasing Brice’s career as a headliner with the famously glitzy Ziegfield Follies, the play has plenty of tap-dancing, show-girl feathering, tuxedoed-tenor singing glamour, and lots of opulent ear and eye-candy.

As Fanny’s dancer BFF Eddie, Anthony Martinez is superb, one of his best performances to date. And James D. Sasser, as Fanny’s gambling heartthrob Nick, is spot-on, classy and cool with a touch of the conman. The supporting chorus is first-rate as well, dancing and singing through a series of costume changes that keep the dazzle going non-stop, despite the occasional off-key bleat from an otherwise energetic live orchestra.

But ultimately, it’s Taylor Bartolucci’s jaw-dropping, heartbreaking performance as Fanny that supercharges the show. Not only can she belt a song, she never lets us forget the insecure little girl beneath the rising Broadway superstar, the funny lady who wants nothing more than to love and be loved, and ends up making all her dreams come true but one.

This is the best kind of Broadway musical: one with as much heart and humanity as glamour and spectacle. It’s easily one of the best, most memorable shows of the year.

"Funny Girl" runs Friday-Sunday through May 19 at the Napa Valley opera House, info at luckypennynapa.com.

May 15, 2012 - "Young Frankenstein"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:03:00 -0700

It’s May, and the movie theaters are already opening the gates on Blockbuster season, four whole months of lavish, big-budget popcorn movies intended to dazzle audiences with big stars, big effects, and big monsters. Believe it or not, the same thing is happening in the North Bay’s other kind of theater, the one with a stage and a curtain and a live orchestra. This week, a certified, larger than life, big and bold theatrical blockbuster has opened, providing its own kind of razzle-dazzle and star power, and even a few honest-to-goodness special effects.

It’s Young Frankenstein, the musical version of Mel Brook’s classic horror comedy spoof, presented by the New Spreckels Theater Company. Directed by Gene Abravaya with a sense of inventiveness and a clear affection for the material, Young Frankenstein is a good old-fashioned community theater company with lofty ambitions of rivaling professional companies.

They move a few steps closer with Young Frankenstein.

The script, by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan, stays mostly faithful to the beloved 1974 film about Frederick Frankenstein, the reluctant grandson of the infamous monster-maker Dr, Victor Frankenstein. Tim Setzer plays Frederick with less of the manic energy Gene Wilder brought to the movie, but with a kind of grandly crumbling sense of nobility that is funny if not quite hilarious.

The strong cast works wonders in bringing the iconic movie characters to life, with Igor played broadly by comedian Jeffrey Weissman, Inga played with winsome charm by Allison Rae Baker, and Frederick’s hot-and-cold fiancée Elizabeth portrayed with madcap precision by Denise Elia. John Shillington, as the outrageously accented Transylvanian policeman Inspector Kemp and also as the lonely blind hermit shows a knack for big physical gags, and Braedyn Youngberg, as The Monster, is delightfully shell-shocked as the only really sane character in the whole show.

And let’s not forget the scary housekeeper Frau Blücher, played to mind-boggling perfection by Mary Gannon Graham. Her shockingly smutty love-song to the late Victor, “He Was My Boyfriend”, may be the funniest thing I will see all year.

‘Young Frankenstein’ runs Thursday-Sunday through May 19 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, spreckelsonline.com.

May 10, 2012 - The Oregon Shakespeare Festival

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:29:38 -0700

Well, what snow there was has now melted on the Siskiyou Pass, the stretch of I-80 that leads from California into Southern Oregon, so as the last memories of winter cross through spring on their way to being totally forgotten in the summer, people are actually starting to travel again, making the scenic six-hour drive up to the tiny town of Ashland, where the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has actually been up and running since February.

And yes, that was one sentence.

Spring brings out the poet in us, and Shakespeare makes us want to make long winding speeches about pretty much everything, including and especially, Shakespeare Festivals.

Soon, in Ashland, the two indoor theaters facing the beautiful brick courtyard will be joined by another theater which has been slumbering darkly for months, asleep this long recent winter but ready, when the large outdoor Elizabethan Theater opens its doors in June. At any time during the average festival in Ashland, there are several shows to choose from for visiting theater connoisseurs, from the various Shakespearean offerings, to modern classics, beloved musicals and brand new stuff created just for the audiences in Ashland.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be telling you about the shows already running in Ashland, and when the Lizzie opens in June, I'll tell you about those new shows as well. If you've never visited the festival, I encourage you to look into it. Shows will be running through late October, and as one of the largest and best ongoing repertory theaters in the world, the OSF Company is always well worth the trip.

In the Angus Bowmer theater, named after the guy who founded the festival in 1935, four shows are currently running, including new spins on some two very familiar stories about the battle between the sexes!

"Taming of the Shrew," one of the trickier Shakespeare shows to present to modern audiences, is given the Beach Boardwalk treatment by director David Ivers, with a rockabilly soundtrack that makes the show, and it’s love-and-war attitude, not only palatable, but actually kind of sweet and infectious. Kate, is the wild-child outsider of her family, which owns a great deal of the Beach Front Boardwalk of Padua, with a roller coaster and Ferris wheel hovering over the impressive set. When Petruchio arrives, the tattooed, guitar-strumming charmer from out of town quickly falls for Kate, in whom he recognizes a kindred soul, an outcast marching to her own drummer, much like himself. When her father agrees to marry her off to Petruchio, she rebels, vowing to make Petruchio’s life a living hell, until Petruchio, played with a lot more heart and sweetness than usual, decides to tame her using the only means he can think of, which is basically to act crazier and more out-of-control than she is.

The less acceptable parts of Shakespeare’s story, where Petruchio keeps Kate hungry, sleep deprived and off-balance - saying its all because he loves her too much to allow her to eat food that isn’t as perfect as she - that stuff actually works here, because for once the show is played as a true romantic comedy, with a Petruchio and a Kate we really want to end up together, happy at last. Nell Geisslinger as Kate, and Ted Deasy as Petruchio have amazing chemistry together, and watching them fall in love, in fits and starts, is like a special effect unto itself, with the road to romance entertainingly rocky, right up to the final rock and roll-fueled climax.

Improbably, Oregon Shakespeare Festival has paired the best "Taming of the Shrew" I've ever seen with the only production of "My Fair Lady" I haven’t squirmed through.

I'll tell you about that production . . . next time.

May 8, 2012 - "The Shape of Things"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 8 May 2013 18:42:33 -0700

Neil LaBute’s "The Shape of Things" is one of those plays you immediately want to talk about. From its opening moments, when a passionate art student contemplates defacing a fig-leafed sculpture in protest of censorship, there is plenty to discuss, analyze, debate and be challenged by. Labute’s writing is tough, aggressive and packed with deliciously quotable lines. And the story, with characters that are all rich, human, and strongly defined, is immediately engaging and memorable.

Paradoxically, "The Shape of Things" is also the kind of play people might find themselves not wanting to talk about, out of fear that they might spoil any of the juicy, wicked, head-spinning surprises packed into the script. That’s pretty much me. I want to tell you exactly why I love this play, now running at Main Stage West in Sebastopol, but I know I must be very careful in describing it, because the experience of watching The Shape of Things for the first time, without knowing anything about it, is certainly enhanced by a wonderful sense of shocking discovery that many playwrights aim for but so rarely achieve.

So, stepping cautiously, let me say that "The Shape of Things" takes place at Mercy College, a small liberal arts college, possibly based on Brigham Young University, which playwright LaBute attended before his plays got him tossed out of his church. At Mercy, a smart but insecure, slightly overweight, extremely dorky Literature major named Adam is stunned when he attracts the attention of a beautiful, self-assured and slightly intense art major named Evelyn. The initials of her full name spell out the word ‘E.A.T.,’ which is hardly accidental, as Evelyn proves to be voracious in her appetites and darned near cannibalistic in her drive to change the world through her increasingly outrageous artistic statements.

Adam’s two closest friends, Philip and Jenny, are initially impressed at the effect Evelyn is having on Adam, who allows his sexy-but-image conscious new girlfriend to methodically transform his outward appearance - new hair, new clothes, new contacts. But eventually, Adam’s friends grow alarmed as his willingness to change for love leads to more and more extreme decisions.

As Adam, Keith Baker is pretty much brilliant, and Jennifer Coté, as Evelyn, gives a scathingly effective performance, though it might have benefited from a bit more variation and softness, a bit of seduction and sweetness to balance the icy intensity, especially early on when Adam is falling for her. As Philip and Jenny, John Browning and Dana Scott are also very good, doing wonderful things with LaBute’s sardonic language.

Director David Lear never lets the story tilt too far toward the comedic side or the dark side, keeping both is perfect balance in this very dark, but very funny dark-comedy. Sure to provoke debate with its vicious insights and uncompromising pessimism, The Shape of Things is smart, brilliant, nasty, and savagely entertaining.

"The Shape of Things" runs Thursday-Sunday through May 19 at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Mainstagewest.com.

May 3, 2012 - "The Dead Girl"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 3 May 2013 18:01:25 -0700

Director Ann Brebner will be celebrating her 90th birthday this year, and she’s found a heck of way to celebrate. She’s written a play, the bittersweet, slightly supernatural drama "The Dead Girl."

Over the course of her numerous decades in show business, Brebner has directed hundreds of productions, all over the world, from her birthplace in New Zealand, to London, where she learned her craft in the 1940s, to New York City, where she’s staged a number of shows off Broadway. But it’s not until relatively recently that Brebner began tackling the craft of play writing.

In 2008, she adapted Anne Lamott’s novel Hard Laughter.

And now, at last, Ann Brebner has written her first original play.

It opened last weekend, presented by San Rafael’s Alternative Theater Ensemble, a magnificently quirky company which stages top-notch original and classic plays, using Equity actors, presenting shows in odd, make-shift pop-up spaces like furniture stores and art galleries. True to form, "The Dead Girl," which Brebner has also directed, is being presented amidst the jewelry tables and clothes racks of the Avant Garde consignment shop, the cast of four actors perform the play on a cozy living room set in the middle of the store, the audience seated on a ring of folding chairs, about as up close and personal as you will ever find a live theater experience to be.

The title character is 30-year-old Gloria, played with effervescence and charm by Amy Marie Haven.

Six months after her death, Gloria has found herself back at home, apparently required to be a kind of watchful spirit as her mother, Esther and her step-father George, struggle with a mix of pain, loss, guilt and grief - as they awkwardly make plans for a long-delayed around-the-world trip. As Esther and George, Emilie Talbot is wonderfully, achingly fragile, and Charles Dean is surperb. As Gloria’s fiancé Malcolm, David E. Moore is also strong, though a little stiff and stentorian a presence at time. Still, he nicely conveys the inherent decency of this young man, his dreams suddenly shattered, uncertain how to proceed.

These are all good, decent, everyday people, with no dark, third-act secrets to reveal, and that is a big part of the power of this play. It all just feels so painfully, accessibly real. Two parents dealing with loss the way most of us would, with a simultaneous mix of emotional courage and emotional collapse.

Brebner shows us the heroic details of how people work through grief, rediscovering how to live while observing the same old everyday routines - coffee, long walks, crossword puzzles - all the while recognizing that nothing will ever be the same again.

The script does feel a bit overextended at times, with a tad more explanation and resolution than is perhaps necessary, and Brebner’s use of music to underscore the emotion of some scenes was occasionally more distracting than probably intended.

But for its sweet, intimate honesty and its remarkable sense of battered dignity and beauty, Ann Brebner’s "The Dead Girl" is worth a trip to Marin, and as Brebner’s frist original work, was definitely worth waiting for.

"The Dead Girl" runs Wednesdays and Fridays, Saturdays and Sunday through May 19. Visit altertheater.org for information.

May 1, 2012 - "The Full Monty"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:50:38 -0700

Who’d have figured that in reserved, traditional Sonoma County, the promise of six regular-looking guys taking their clothes off would inspire such delirious enthusiasm and delight? But, it does. Or did last Friday night. And yeah, I know, opening night audiences are always enthusiastic, the theater is usually stuffed with the friends and family of the cast and crew, and they cheer and clap and lead standing ovations at a level of excitement and zeal that is often not repeated through the rest of the run.

But there really does seem to be an extra dash of goodwill and hyped-up community cheerleading going on at 6th Street Playhouse, where director Russell Kaltschmidt has staged a somewhat uneven but definitely entertaining new production of the Broadway musical "The Full Monty." Based on the popular British comedy film, "The Full Monty" is the story of six unemployed steelworkers with low self-esteem who concoct a plan to become male strippers, secretly rehearsing, and stressing out, as they get closer to the night their have to take their clothes off, every stitch, for some much-needed money.

Opening night at 6th Street was slightly compromised by some conspicuously unbalanced microphones, with certain singers too soft to hear and others stuck at a level much louder than the other performers. And the singing, too, was occasionally a bit strained. But the cast is packed with charmers, giving lovably indentifiably scruffy and charming performances.

In the musical, the story has been transported from England to Buffalo, New York, this is a very different 'Full Monty' than the movie, with additional characters, and a great deal of additional character development. The music is an aggressively poppy rock-based score featuring tunes that are fun to hear, but then disappear like cotton candy the minute they are over.

The one exception is the show closing burlesque tune Let it Go, which has an appropriately go-for-broke joyfulness to it, and is a rousing anthem as the guys strut closer and closer to the moment of naked truth.

So, do they?

Well, let me put it this way.

After the show, when the cast appeared triumphantly in the lobby, most of the cast were adorned in crisp black t-shirts emblazoned with the words, "We go all the way."

And unlike past productions in the area, there is no blind back light during the big reveal so, yeah, for about a second and a half before the final blackout . . . those guys are naked.

And that moment, somehow, is simultaneously hilarious, moving, and heartwarming. Because, maybe, if these guys have what it takes to follow through, they can actually do what is necessary to get real jobs, recognize the love and support of their families, and put their scruffy but valuable lives back together.

"The Full Monty" runs through May 19th at the 6th Street Playhouse, 6thstreetplayhouse.com

April 24, 2012 - "Pericles, the Prince of Tyre"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:13:47 -0700

In Shakespeare’s lifetime, his epic drama “Pericles, the Prince of Tyre,” was one of his most popular shows. Though seldom performed over the last two or three hundred years, it’s easy to see why the Elizabethans were drawn to it. With it’s emphasis on spectacle, a lightweight plot driven by shipwrecks, pirate attacks, mysterious islands, evil kings, sneaky assassins, heartbreaking separations and improbably reunions, it was like Star Wars of its day, a magical fable that dazzled all who saw it - in spite of its being a bit of a hodgepodge and not exactly “Romeo and Juliet.”

Gradually, though, modern audiences are rediscovering “Pericles, the Prince of Tyre,” seeing it for what it was always meant to be: a big colorful parade of sweeping eye-candy, a pleasantly outlandish, thimble-deep, evening of entertainment, and nothing more.

So why, exactly, in the new production that opened last week at Berkeley Repertory Theater, has director Mark Wing Davies interpreted the play as a dark, grungy, industrial-punk nightmare, confining the sweep and majesty of the narrative to a set that looks like a tire factory?

Using a palate of mostly grays and browns, this "Pericles" is packed with interesting things to look at, much of it cobbled together from bits of assembly-line thingamajigs, walls of stressed brick and metal, pulleys and platforms and whirring, buzzing, humming machinery.

It’s interesting.

It’s memorable.

And occasionally, it does achieve a kind of sheet-metal spectacle, as in the scene where Pericles’ princess-wife gives birth on board a ship, during a brutal storm at sea, the boat suggested by a bouncing, pivoting metal platform on springs, tilting the actors forward and backward violently, as the narrator provides the rain - a very real torrent of water sprayed onto the actors from a massive fire hose, soaking the set, and the entire stage, in a make-believe tempest that is thrilling to watch, even if it remains trapped in the visual constraints of its own fright factory concept.

One of the best things about the show is the live orchestra, under the direction of musician Mark Gwin, who begins the show by teaching the audience a song, and then leads a tight, multi-instrumental band through some truly haunting and exhilarating musical accompaniment.

When the aforementioned hosing down takes place, a giant water-proof curtain is drawn in front of the orchestra, perched above the stage on a second level balcony, and the water bounces down onto Pericles and his shipmates, as the band plays on behind the curtain.

Many of Davie’s ideas, though never boring, stray way beyond the pale, frequently obliterating whatever drama the story itself, and the occasionally mesmerizing performers, have managed to create.

In the scene where Perciles battles a series of suitors for the hand of his beloved princess, having one of the suitors be Batman was just silly.

And normally I like Batman.

Furthermore, the costumes that turn a single actor into three courtiers, with heads of cabbage standing in for the other characters, looked like something Darren Nichols, the theater provocateur from TV’s Slings and Arrows, would have dreamed up.

Still, powered by a strong performance by David Barlow as the unstoppable adventurer Pericles, this production is hardly a failure.

IT does something that isn’t easy.

It takes a forgotten play and makes it strangely unforgettable . . . with the emphasis on strange.

"Pericles" runs through May 26 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. Berkeley Rep.org

April 17, 2012 - "The Arsonists"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:14:55 -0700

"The Arsonists," a very good play about a very bad situation, has just opened a month long run at Berkeley’s Aurora Theater Company, and the participation of Santa Rosa actor Tim Kniffin is just one reason for North Bay theatergoers to take notice.

Fueled by playwright Alistair Beaton’s smart and snappy adaptation of the absurdist 1962 comedy by Swiss playwright Max Frisch, the Aurora, working with acclaimed director Mark Jackson, have unleashed an outstanding, seriously entertaining comic fable about a small town facing an epidemic of arson - and one unexceptional man making all the wrong decisions.

The set-up is deliciously simple.

Someone has been burning down houses.

Their M.O., according to the newspapers, is to befriend the residents of a large house, wrangle and invitation to spend the night, and then start a blaze in the attic before morning.

While the town’s fire fighters patrol the streets, issuing dire warnings against carelessness and complacency, a wealthy homeowner named Mr. Biederman - played brilliantly by Dan Hiatt - is smugly railing against the stupidity and weakness of all who would unwittingly invite such incognito firebugs into their homes.

A slightly unscrupulous businessman, Biederman is smugly convinced of his own middle-class invulnerability. He is decent. He pays his taxes. He occasionally gives to the poor.

What reason would anyone have to harm him.

Then comes the knock at his door.

Actor Michael Ray Wisely plays Mr. Schmitz, a charmingly eccentric, unemployed circus wrestler, who drops by asking Biederman for a sandwich and a bed for the night.

Whatever it is that Biederman expects an arsonist to look like, Wisely’s unmenacing goofball is not it. In fits and starts, Biederman gradually warms to the sad-sack newcomer, his basic sense of decency tangled into knots by Schmitz stories of life as an orphan.

Biederman’s wife, Babette, played by Gwen Loeb, is also suspicious, but even she eventually consents to Schmitz gleefully guilt-tripping guile.

Even after the arrival of the straight-talking, tuxedoed ex-con Eisenring, played with cordial menace by the aforementioned Tim Kniffin, the Biedermans remain reluctant to act. When their guests begin to stockpile barraells of gasoline in the attic, along with fuses and detonators, Biederman rejects any action that would make him look judgmental or condescending.

Eventually, even when Schmitz and Eisenring admit to being arsonists, Biederman has become so wrapped up in his own self-justifications, he becomes an unwitting accomplice in the disaster that is clearly formulating right in his home.

With a tense, superbly escalating sound design built of ambient noise and overlapping melodies, with very real gas barrels dangling over the heads of the audience, "The Arsonists" is superbly staged, very well acted, and wickedly funny, both playfully challenging and unshakably thought provoking.

"The Arsonists" cleverly demonstrates the insidious banality of evil, especially the way in which good, well-meaning people often allow danger to exist and grow, like a wildfire, right under their noses.

"The Arsonists" runs Tuesday-Sunday through -May 12 at Aurora Theatre Company, AuroraTheater.org.

April 10, 2012 - "The Whipping Man" and "Happy"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 12:34:47 -0700

Two new plays opened last week in the North Bay, each deserving of audience attention.

"The Whipping Man," by Matthew Lopez, takes place in April, 1865, just days after the Emancipation Proclamation has freed the country’s millions of black slaves, and hours before the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Directed by Jasson Mindakis, it runs through April 28 at the Marin Theatre Company. In the ruined shell of a once-grand house in Richmond, Virginia, three men have gathered in the dark to wait for what comes next. Two are black, both former slaves, now freed, and the other is white, a wounded confederate soldier, whose father owns the looted, cannon-blasted house they share. His father, only days before, owned the other men as well.

All three, it so happens, are Jewish.

And it’s Passover.

Borrowing a footnote from history, Lopez's ingenious, compelling story springs from the fact that in the American South, in the 1800s, there were over 50,000 Jews, some of whom, being successful Southern property owners, also owned slaves, and taught them to follow their faith.

In the play, over the course of 48 intense hours, the three men, played brilliantly by L. Peter Calendar, Nicholas Pelczar, and Tobie Windham, come face to face with their shared faith, shared history, joined together by the very things that separate them.

While the script is packed with questions and heady contemplations, it is never dry or overly talky. There are moments of visceral force and power, and if some of the men’s secrets and revelations are a bit predictable and melodramatic, the overall experience of The Whipping Man still remains satisfyingly complex packed with puzzles not easily solved, or forgotten.

In the world premiere of "Happy," by Robert Caisely, a very different test of wills is set up in a play that resembles Broadway hits like "God of Carnage," which "Happy" ultimately surpasses, and even has thematic links to "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Directed by Lennie Dean, the play takes place over the course of a single evening, as two couples meet for dinner.

Alfred and Melinda, played by Ed McCloud and Liz Jahren, are a happily married couple, known for their cheerful outlook despite a series of problems - a special needs child, failed careers - that might have knocked other people right out of their positive attitude. Then they come to dinner at the artists loft home of Eduardo, Alfred’s outrageous sculptor friend, played by Brian Glenn Bryson. Eduardo has a new girlfriend, the much younger Ava, played by Rose Roberts.

Ava, at 22 already a practiced alcoholic, does not like happy people. She is a realist, and believes that happy people are deceitful, and so, over the course of the evening, Ava uses every tool at her disposal to expose the hidden disappointments in Alfred and Melinda’s lives, to dismantle their happiness piece by piece.

Because she can.

Ava, well played by Roberts, is perhaps the most vicious, cruel, vindictive, and thoroughly hateable characters I’ve encountered on stage in years, and she’s also one of the most fascinating.

The dialogue is clean and sharp as a razor blade, and the solid cast delivers Caisley’s hard-hitting poetry with a fierce commitment and palpable sense of compassion and raw emotional energy.

As in The Whipping Man, "Happy" leaves its audience with plenty of questions to mull over and debate. Is anyone really happy? And if not, does anyone have the right to mess with another person’s attempt to make the best of what life has given them?

There are no easy answers.

Just a truly excellent new play.

"Happy" runs through April 21st at the 6th Street Playhouse. 6th Street Playhouse.com. "The Whipping Man" runs through April 28 at the Marin Theatre Company, marintheatre.org.

April 3, 2012 - "Enchanted April"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 4 Apr 2013 18:42:50 -0700

Sometimes, a change of scenery is all that’s needed to alter a gloomy outlook.

And it sure doesn't hurt if that change includes an old Italian castle, one or two attractive people in bathing suits and, um, towels, and... a great deal of wisteria to remind us that every winter ends, eventually.

"Enchanted April" is the story of four very different British women who are joined together by a newspaper ad inviting renters to a fortnight in Italy. Presented through April 14th by the Ross Valley Players, nicely directed by Cris Cassell, with a dash of puppy love and a pinch of old-fashioned farce, "Enchanted April" features strong performances, an eye pleasing set, and even a tasteful bit of (very funny) nudity.

The Enchanted April was originally a novel by Elizabeth von Arnim, written in 1922 and largely forgotten by the middle of the century. It might not be known at all today were it not for a 1992 film adaptation of Enchanted April - they dropped the ‘the’ - which starred Miranda Richardson, Alfred Molina and Joan Plowright. It was that film, a low-budget charmer by director Mike Newell, originally released in England as a made-for-TV movie and released theatrically in the United States the next year, which quietly fluttered and flirted its way into the hearts and memories of millions of moviegoers.

Eleven years later playwright Matthew Barber, pointing to the enduring popularity of that film, was able to bring his cleverly magical stage adaptation of Enchanted April to Broadway, in 2003.

No small feat given that Barber had never had a play produced before, and was working as a proofreader and office manager for a Los Angeles advertising agency at the time he wrote the play.

And it was a hit.

Appearing almost out of nowhere, it took the Tony for best new play.

A musical version eventually followed, but it failed to make the same splash as Barber’s lovely streamlined adaptation, which put the emphasis in the characters, demanding that each actor perform his or her own bit of actorly prestidigitation, transforming on stage from prim post-war Brits, dazed by all manner of sadness and loss, into tentative, hopeful, giddy and exuberant human beings, reluctantly but dazzlingly reminded that life does have beauty, and that it is our job to notice that.

Sorry, I’m afraid the play is a bit infectious in its slinky power, and all who see it are in danger of going a bit gooey and happy, inclined to notice colors and flowers and the smiles of happy people, and to write overly flowery reviews.

How perfect then, that "Enchanted April" is running at the Ross Valley Players’ Old Barn Theater, located at the Marin Art and Garden Center, where the walk to and from the theater takes you past acres of flowers, fountains, and smiling people.

"Enchanted April" runs Thursday through Sunday through April 14, at the Ross Valley Players, rossvalleyplayers.com.

March 27, 2013 - "The Price" and "The Memory of Water"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:21:12 -0700

Ever since the book of Genesis, where Cain squabbled with his brother Abel and second-born brother Jacob bought his twin brother Esau’s birthright with a bowl of soup, Human beings have been entertained by conflicted brothers and sisters pitted against each other. From Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear,’ with twisted sisters Regan and Goneril duking it out for the biggest slice of their crazy dad’s kingdom, right through to "The Godfather," and daddy’s boy Michael taking a hit out on his own bad brother Fredo, literature has proved that there’s nothing more engaging and explosive, dramatically speaking, than a good juicy sibling rivalry.

Last weekend, two plays opened in Sonoma County, both dealing with estranged grownup kids coming together to divide up their parents’ belongings, and air a few old grievances at the same time.

Arthur Miller’s "The Price"’ running at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma, takes place in a cramped attic packed with old furniture. This is where middle-aged brothers Viktor and Walter Franz meet up after a 16-year-silence, to sell off the stuff their parents collected over a lifetime success and failure. Featuring solid, satisfying performances by a cast of four, "The Price" is a thick, meaty stew of a play, powerfully directed by Sheri Lee Miller, with Samson Hood as Viktor, the hard-working cop who sacrificed his dreams to care for his ailing Dad, John Shillington as Walter, a wealthy surgeon who stopped talking to his brother after dad died, Madeleine Ashe as Esther Franz, Viktor’s long-suffering wife, and Charles Siebert as Gregory Solomon, the wily antique dealer who arrives to offer an appraisal of all that dusty old furniture.

This is Arthur Miller territory, so there is much more at stake, of course, than which brother gets what and how much. Each brother is wrestling with a lifetime of resentments and self-appraisals, which sort themselves out in a satisfyingly complex manner. Whether everyone ends up with what they deserve is left to the audience to decide. It’s the kind of play that leaves its viewers with a head-full of chewy thoughts and assumptions, a dose of heavy drama presented with a gorgeously light touch.

Meanwhile, at Main Stage West, in Sebastopol, another tale of sibling dysfunction and parental possessions plays out in the form of Shelagh Stephenson’s 1996 comedy-drama, The Memory of Water, directed by John Craven. Mary, Teresa and Catherine have not seen much of each other lately. If not for the recent death of their mother Vi, who died of Alzheimer’s just a few days before the action of the play, they might not be together at all, hanging out in Mom’s bedroom, trying on her clothes and bagging up the rejects while hashing out a couple of decades worth of secrets, revelations, and long hidden betrayals.

Bronwen Shears plays business owner Teresa, all brittle nerves and frozen-fire, and Shannon Rider is Catherine, serially lovesick and headed for another heartbreak. Both sisters have problems - lots of them - but it’s only Mary, an unhappy doctor haunted by past mistakes, who’s started to see poor dead mom, a passive-aggressive ghost who keeps popping up in the bedroom, dressed to the nines, to dispense hard motherly advice, played with grace and a touch of otherworldly distance by Mary Gannon Graham.

Keith Baker and Paul Huberty round out the cast as Teresa’s out-of-patience husband and Mary’s married doctor boyfriend. Though The Memory of Water takes on a few too many tangents and story-threads in its final 30 minutes, the play deliciously delivers a Bible’s worth of familial conflict, swinging wildly between moments of genuine piercing pain, and stretches of spot-on, laugh-out-loud comedy.

The Price runs through April 6 at Cinnabar theater, cinnabertheater.org, and The Memory of Water run through April 6 at Main Stage West, Mainstageswest.com.

March 20, 2013 - "Fallaci"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:52:10 -0700

The most satisfying of dramas are rooted in conflict.

In the theater, characters must come into some kind of conflict with someone, or something, or the resulting exercise is just words on the stage.

When journalist-author Lawrence Wright was commissioned to create a play about the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, he originally thought it would be a one-woman-show. A legend for her hard-hitting, no punches-pulled interviews with the Dalai Lama, Ayatollah Khomeni, Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, and others, Wright assumed that the drama of the piece would spring from Fallaci’s volcanic verbal conflicts with the great men of power she confronted throughout her life. But Wright, author of the bestselling books The Looming Tower and Going Clear, eventually took a very different tack.

He invented a character, a young Iranian-American obituary writer for the New York Times, and turned his one-woman-show into a two-woman test of wills, as Maryam goes head to head with Fallaci, giving the infamously sharp-shooting interviewer a little of her own medicine.

The resulting play, called simply ‘Fallaci,’ opened a six-week run at the Berkeley Repertory Theater last week. Directed by Oskar Eustis, the play features actress Concetta Tomei playing Fallaci with a kind of fierce electric weariness, a performance that eats up the stage all around her, like a black hole, even when she’s doing little but sitting in her chair smoking a cigarette. As ‘Fallaci,’ Tomei makes a magnificent impression, raging, sulking, watching, prodding, purring and seducing her way through the play, as Marjan Neshat, as Maryam, a bit surfacy in the role, compared ot Tomei, effectively evolves from hero-worshipping amateur to full-on talons-bared opponent.

For all of Fallaci’s positive qualities, she was full of contradictions, and Wright’s play gets at a great number of them, including her willingness to play fast and loose with the facts in the interest of prsenting an even more accurate truth. In her later years, for all purposes a hermit in her New York City apartment, having not worked as a journalist in years, Fallaci responded to the events of 9-11 with a series of books and articles critical of Islam. Her book, The Rage and the Pride, was so vicious in her criticism of Muslims, comparing them to rats, condemning Europe for allowing Islam to spread, she sparked riots in Italy, where anti-Muslim mobs used her words in a season of hate attacks.

Through the character of Maryam, a secular Muslim, the playwright is able to challenge Fallaci’s views, setting up a conflict that at times is extremely satisfying, but eventually deteriorates a bit, becoming increasingly confusing and over-laden with ideas, revelations, confessions, accusations. By the end, Maryam, the clever fictional device, threatens to take over the play with her own story of sacrifice and courage in modern-day Iran.

It’s not bad material.

Some of it is potentially riveting.

But by the end of the 100-minute, no-intermission show, Wright heaps on so much material, so quickly, inventing and resolving conflicts every few minutes, that it all becomes a bit overwhelming and exhausting.

That said, fueled by Tomei’s must-see performance, and elevated by Wright’s uncanny knack for infusing every word of dialogue with sparkling, fiery passion, "Fallaci," faults and all, is a play that deserves to be experienced.

"Fallaci" runs Tuesday through Sunday, ending on April 21, at the Berkeley Repeortory Theater. www.Berkeleyrep.org

March 13, 2013 - Acting & "A Few Good Men"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 19:36:23 -0700

Acting isn't easy.

Along with the required talent and craft, an actor must overcome a tremendous number of obstacles.

Bad writing is one.

And believe it or not, good writing can actually be trickier than bad writing. Sometimes, even GREAT dialogue can prove lethal to an actor, because sometimes a particular line becomes so famous, so much a piece of popular culture, that it essentially upstages the actor delivering it.

“Et tu, Brute,” for instance.

“Out damned spot!”

[Lawrence Olivier, saying, “To be or not to be”]

Yeah, that one too.

When a line has been recited so often - played-with, parodied, and voiced by cartoon characters for decades - it works like a punch line waiting to pop, likely to draw unexpected responses from an otherwise engaged audience.

Why?

Because these lines are funny.

Not funny, in the way ‘Who’s on first” is funny. Funny, as in . . . “Hey, wow! Look everybody! There’s that really famous line! And isn't it weird that we just heard it in this play . . . which isn't really that funny.”

For example, we should all pity the poor actor who has to go on stage and say this:

[Marlon Brando, hollering, "Hey Stella!”]

In the movie version of Tennessee Williams’ "A Streetcar Named Desire," Marlon Brando's performance of that line is now so deeply burned onto the social consciousness of the public, it actually gets laughs. At least, it always has when I've seen that play.

This brings me to Aaron Sorkin's "A Few Good Men," running through March 17 at the Santa Rosa Junior College. The student production, directed with sharp focus and clarity by Laura Downing Lee, culminates in a courtroom scene in which a young Navy lawyer goes up against the amiably psychotic Colonel Jessup, played in the popular movie version by Jack Nicholson, whose delivery of one very famous line is now the stuff of pop culture legend.

[Jack Nicholson, growling, “You can’t handle the truth!”]

That’s the line.

At SRJC, Jessup is played by Chris Ginesi, with enough flammable intensity and dangerously gleeful heat to burn down a theater. He is supported by some strong performances, and the scene that leads up to that line is staged with nicely mounting tension.

And, yes, when Ginesi got to that line . . .

. . . it got a laugh.

A big one.

Not because it wasn't well delivered. Ginesi nailed it. It got a laugh because . . . oh I don’t know. You tell me.

I suppose these kinds of lines have lives of their own, and having more or less escaped the context of the original play, they now run around through our culture like movie stars appearing at the door of the local coffee shop.

Hey look, over there, it’s "To-Be-or-Not-Be," It’s "Stella," it’s "You-Can’t-Handle-the-Truth."

And actors just have to deal with it.

The good ones can.

Ginesi, if he even noticed the audience’s reaction, simply plowed forward toward the play’s enormously satisfying climax.

Actors know.

If a performer is given the chance to play a legendary character in a brilliant play, and gets to deliver a line so good everyone knows it by heart, well . . . a bit of inappropriate laughter from the audience is just the price you pay.

I think they’d tell us . . . it’s worth it.

March 6, 2013 - "Bombshell"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 6 Mar 2013 17:37:19 -0800

MUSIC: "Let Me be Your Star," from the “Original Cast Recording of ‘Bombshell.”

LYRICS: Fade in on a girl with a hunger for fame/and a face and a name to remember/The past fades away, because as of this day/Norma Jean’s gone/she’s moving on . . .”

DAVID: It’s a little ironic that the biggest-selling original cast recording on the charts right now is from a Broadway show that doesn’t technically exist. As anyone knows who’s ever caught an episode of NBC’s theater-world soap opera "Smash," the Marilyn Monroe-themed Broadway show at the center of the series is a big, splashy musical called "Bombshell." After a season-and-a-half watching the various writers, producers, directors, actors, dancers, and singers try to get the show opened on the Great White Way, fans have finally been given what they wanted the most: the original cast recording of Bombshell, a show-within-a-show that, as proven on T.V., has some of the best music ever written for the stage, even if it was actually written for television.

MUSIC: "The National Pastime"

Fellas?

Yeah?

Fellas!

Is it?

Hey Team!

Off the benches! It’s Marilyn!

I just got a date!

She just got a date.

With baseball’s Joltin’ Joe!

That lucky so-and-so!
So put me through the paces/run me around the bases/teach me all the things a slugger’s lover should know . . .

DAVID:

Original Cast recordings - don’t call them soundtracks! That’s for the movies! - have fallen off the charts in recent years. So how funny is it that "Bombshell," a hit album about a fake show, might actually reignite interest in the music of Broadway. So the big question is, real or fake, is "Bombshell," the original cast recording, really any good?

Yeah, it is.

With songs by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who wrote the music for the Broadway show "Hairspray," the make-believe album has plenty of vocal razzle-dazzle, with Marilyn Monroe played by American Idol’s Katherine McPhee and Broadway actress Megan Hilty, and appearances by Broadway stars Bernadette Peters and Christian Borle. Taken apart from the television show - which is frustratingly incoherent at times - the music works. Marilyn’s life-story moves through chapters, each defined by one of the famous men she came into contact with producer Daryl Zanuck, Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller and John F. Kennedy, each of who get at least one duet with Marilyn.

The songs range from pop ballads such as "Let me Be Your Star," clearly aimed at being the hit of the show, to splashy ensemble numbers like "National Pastime," a coy celebration of both baseball and sex, and the clever "Don’t Say Yes Until I’m Finished Talking," in which Darryl Zanuck establishes himself as the villain of the show. With 22 songs on the album, there’s a bit of filler, but pound for pound, there’s a lot of good music here. The most heartbreaking song is Marilyn’s late lament "Second Hand White Baby Grand," in which she compares her romantic failures, and her hopes for the future, to the out-of-tune piano she learned to play music on.

The show might be fake, but as "Bombshell" proves, sometimes fake can be real enough to count. And now there’s talk that "Bombshell: the Musical," in a couple of years, really will be heading to Broadway.

That’s the magic of theater.

I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB

MUSIC: "Smash"

I know all the tricks of trade/I’ve even invented a few

Now your interest is mounting/and soon you’ll be counting

The lights, and the nights, and the cash!

‘Cause I’m gonna be a smash!

Yes, I’m gonna be a smash!

Won’t you help me be a smash?

February 27, 2013 - New Plays!

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:45:54 -0800

There must be something in the water.

Suddenly, all over Sonoma County, new plays are springing up, brand new, never-before-seen stage shows thought up by local artists, young and old, and pushed into existence by the efforts of actors, directors, and all the other people who make theater possible.

Where’d all this creativity come from?

Well, the truth is, new theater is nothing new.

The North Bay, and Sonoma County in particular, is home to a number of talented writers, and our colleges have always encouraged young writers to express themselves through the art of writing for the stage. Though new plays are often seen as a risk for a theater company to produce, it’s obvious that without new writers and new plays, the theater would be become nothing but a museum, all retreads of classics and nothing that surprises, challenges and changes. Theater is an evolutionary art form, and to see where theater is in its current state of development, it’s the new plays that reveal the most.

Well, in the next couple of weeks, supporters of homegrown theater, and anyone curious enough to see what’s going on in the minds of local theater people, will have plenty of opportunity.

This weekend, two new plays have their official debuts.

Up in Healdsburg, the Raven Players present the world premiere of local writer Audie Foote’s "The Angel of Chatham Square." Based on a true story his mother told him when he was 8 years old, the play takes place in 1948, and Foote’s mother is the main character, a woman whose path crosses that of a number of New York City homeless people. Following an act of kindness performed by an unlikely stranger, the play shows how a young woman eventually changes the lives of the street people she encounters, and eventually passes the message of tolerance and generosity to her son.

"The Angel of Chatham Square" runs Friday, March 1 through Sunday March 10.

In Santa Rosa, new shows are nothing new for the Imaginists Theater Collective, which regularly creates new works based on old texts, crafting the plays together as an ensemble. Last year’s The Ratcatcher was one of the best examples, and a huge hit for the company that operates out of an old storefront space near Juliard Park. Their latest effort, "Left After Not," is based on the ancient Sufi poem "The Conference of the Birds." It’s a highly experimental piece, in which the actors morph in and out of the personality and movements of birds. The birds, following the original text, are eager to find enlightenment, and fly off in search of the god-like bird who can show them the meaning of their lives.

"Left After Not" runs Friday March 1 though March 16.

On Wednesday, March 13, Sonoma State University presents a whole evening of original plays, all of them just one page long, all of them dealing with the theme of water. The One Page Play Extravaganza takes place in Warren Auditorium, featuring staged reading of over a dozen new short plays written by the students and Faculty of SSU. It’s one night only, at 7:30 p.m., and it’s free.

And also at SSU, running from March 7 through March 30, a brand new play by student playwright Dylan White, "The Séance," becomes the first student-authored play to ever be included in SSU’s main season of plays. Revolving around a funeral in the water-thirsty environs of Fresno, the play is a comic examination of relationships during a literal and metaphorical drought.

And you could be among the first people to ever see it.

Find out more at Sonoma.edu/waterworks.

February 20, 2013 - Theater Awards Season

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:12:00 -0800

It’s awards season in the Bay Area.

And I’m not talking about the Oscars.

The Bay Area Theater Critics Circle does its award thing every year in April, though their wards seldom include Sonoma County theater companies, since so few of the voting critics make it up this far from the Golden Gate Bridge. Luckily, we do have our own awards event, though not that many people know about it yet - the slightly-scruffy, highly unpredictable, charmingly eccentric Stage One Theater Arts Awards, aka, the SOTAs.

This year’s event takes place Monday, March 18 at 7:30 p.m., at the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa. It’s free to the public, and this year, there is hope that the audience will include as many local patrons as it does theater participants. Formed five years ago by stage-loving theater students, most of them from SSU, the SOTAs are currently undergoing a rapid growth spurt, an evolutionary leap away from their long-held reputation as a popularity contest among twenty somethings. The shows honored, for the most part, have been campus productions and youth-focused shows filled with young eager theater artists. While fine and good, such a narrowly-focused award event clearly has left out much of the theater going on in Sonoma County, and as a result, the majority of the companies who make theater in the area have dismissed the SOTAs as unworthy of serious consideration.

Which is a shame.

As lovers of theater, we should be happy when other lovers of theater - no matter how exuberantly unseasoned they might be - take steps to say, "Hey everybody! Look! Somebody put on a play, and we liked it!"

Good feeling generates good feeling, and with theater companies still struggling to put butts in seats, we should support any effort that draws attention to local theater in positive ways.

Well, this year, the SOTAs are making efforts to earn that serious consideration they've long hoped for, and the organizers have taken steps to make sure that the awards will end up going to a wider array of theater artists. They've opened voting membership to all theater companies, inviting some of the most experienced and talented actors, directors, and producers in Sonoma County. This year’s Awards ceremony will have, as its M.C., 6th Street Playhouse’s artistic director Craig Miller, which should lend an element of class and credibility.

Of course, the underlying question is, why is any of this necessary? What do awards matter among artists, for whom the goal is not a trophy but an audience that is entertained, moved, challenged and delighted? The truth is, anything matters that gets people to perk up and think, "Hey, maybe I'll go see a show tonight!" In truth, the most important voices in Sonoma County aren't the people who give awards, they aren't the critics, and they aren't the hard-working artists, young and old, who give the stage their time, energy and talents. The most important voices are yours, the people who go to theater, and then tell people about the shows they've seen.

Word of mouth, positive and negative, has always had far more power to affect a show’s box office than any review, and blog-posting, and any award.

You have the power to change the course of Sonoma County theater. Go see a show, any show, and then talk about it. Because when someone sees a show at a theater they've never been to before, everyone is a winner, starting with that newcomer, waiting in the dark for the curtain to rise, wondering just what it is about live theater everyone has been talking about.

February 13, 2013 - 4 Shows, 4 Reviews

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:10:52 -0800

It’s a blessing and a curse.

In Sonoma County, where there are far more theater companies and theater arts complexes than one would expect from a rural, heavily agricultural area, there is more theater happening every weekend than the average arts appreciator has time to experience. Theater critics, of course, are committed to seeing as much theater as possible, and even then, in a county where two or three new shows open every single weekend, I can’t possibly see everything.

But I see as much as I can, and last weekend I caught three shows that are worth talking about. Well, four shows, since one of them was technically two-shows in one.

So, here I go, my attempt at reviewing, succinctly, all of them, in the time I have remaining in this segment. Ready? Four shows in four minutes. Set your clocks. Go.

First, the two-in-one thing.

"Island Passions," running daily through this Sunday at Sonoma State University (sonomastate.edu) pairs Joseph Hayden’s tuneful but thinly plotted operatic fluffball "The Forgotten Island" with Vaughan Williams’ gorgeously tragic "Riders to the Sea." The first, basically Gilligan’s Island crossed with the career of Maria Callas, is about two sisters stranded on a deserted island for fourteen years, responding to the sudden arrival of two men who may be responsible for their abandonment. It’s silly, but the music is lovely. In "Riders to the Sea," set on a tiny island off the weather-hardened shores of Ireland, awaits word on the fate of her remaining two sons, the other four having all been drowned at sea. The heart-rending music is stately and steady - and it’s very, very sad. Directed by Danielle Cain, with Musical direction by Lynn Morrow, leading a very good orchestra, the singing is mostly strong, the acting less so, given that these are voice students getting their first stab at the stage, but its highly entertaining and worth a peek, to support SSU’s ambitious theater arts program and to cheer on the students.

In Stephen Sondheim’s "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" - the beloved, amiably lewd 1962 musical sex farce - the locally grown cast delivers huge laughs, with great performances by a solid batch of comic actors. Running through February 17 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center (www.spreckelsonline.com), the show is directed by Gene Abravaya, with musical direction by Richard and Sandy Riccardi. Tim Setzer plays Pseudolus, a Roman slave eager to win his freedom by arranging a series of happy endings for the various members of his masters family. The live pit orchestra hits a few too many sour notes here and there, but it’s the broadly off-the-wall story, and the wickedly over-the-top acting, that makes Forum such a funny thing to behold, and such a lewd-crude kick to watch unfold.

Okay, how many was that? Three? Yes! One to go.

"Shirley Valentine," by Willy Russell, has one more weekend to go at Main Stage West, in Sebastopol (www.mainstagewest.com). The acclaimed one-woman-show, directed by John Shillington, features Mary Gannon Graham in the title role, an unhappy housewife, taken to talking to her kitchen wall, who gets a chance to reclaim a bit of her formerly free-spirited self when she’s offered a trip to Greece. Hey, another island! Graham gives a stunningly heartfelt performance, taking audiences from laughter to tears and back again. For the acting alone, this is one not to miss, but you just have one last weekend.

Whatever you do, see some theater this weekend.

After all, we’re not stuck on some island somewhere.

This is Sonoma County, where the arts are alive and kicking!

February 6, 2013 - Waiting for Godot

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 6 Feb 2013 19:43:48 -0800

Nothing much happens in "Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett’s richly bizarre 1953 play about two friends waiting, waiting, waiting for the arrival of someone named Godot, a guy whose appearance will change their lives. Possibly. Or possibly not. All Estragon and Valdimir know is that Godot has promised to meet them, and they need to wait until he gets there.

So they talk, they debate, they engage in Who’s-On-First-style verbal pyrotechnics, and they chat with the occasional passersby, who always seem to be the same two people - a rich guy named Pozzo and his exhausted servant Lucky.

Mostly though, they wait, and wait, and wait.

When the play was first performed, audiences were deeply divided, and literal fist-fights broke out in the theater, battles between those who believed the play was some sort of theatrical hoax, and those who saw "Waiting for Godot" as a brilliant, game-changing obliteration of audience expectations, a philosophical fable about the meaning - and meaninglessness - of life.

The truth is, "Waiting for Godot" is all of that, wrapped up in one gorgeously strange puzzle-box of a play, its treasures waiting for anyone willing to set aside whatever notions they might have about what theater is.

Beckett, of course, was well aware that his audiences would be a bit flummoxed. Early on in the play, he actually has one of his characters exclaim, “Nothing Happens! Nobody comes. Nobody goes. It’s awful!” Today, audiences laugh at that line, recognizing that Beckett was not only voicing the existential angst of his poor, put-upon characters, but also the rising concerns of the people in the seats, sitting out there wondering what, if anything, it all means.

"Waiting for Godot," now 60 years after its debut, is one of those plays everyone should experience at least once - and thanks to Mill Valley’s Marin Theatre Company, you now have an opportunity to see Beckett’s offbeat masterpiece in a memorably entertaining production, running through February 17 in Mill Valley. Director Jasson Minadakis gives the play an immaculate, beautifully stylized staging, working subtly effective wonders, striking a perfect balance between vaudeville-style laughter and real, compassionate heartache.

Valadimir and Estragon might be clowns, but it’s hard not to feel for them, scuffling about in their ill-fitting clothes, waiting alongside an empty road, with little more than a rock and a tree to gaze at.

Actor Mark Bedard, acclaimed for his work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, plays Vladimir as a man whose brain is always at work, even though if kidneys are not. Adopting a constant feet-to-the-floor shuffle, Bedard never lets us forget the physical discomfort of his character. As Estragon, Mark Anderson Phillips is equally wonderful, bringing a childlike innocence to his role, alternating between bright flashes of optimism and deep despair.

The imperious by-passer Pozzo is played by a mesmerizing James Carpenter, and his Ben Johnson is astonishing as the world-weary Lucky, who delivers one of the most breathtakingly complex and outrageously lyrical monologues ever written for an actor.

So, Is this all a metaphor for life?

A theatrical Rorshach test?

A paradoxical parody of the absurdities of existence?

Of course.

But it’s also the simple story of two long-time friends questioning whether they’d be better off apart than together, ultimately recognizing that it’s the tiny everyday surprises - little occurrences that make today different from yesterday - that make it possible to face all of our tomorrows, and that facing them with someone you care about, even a bum in badly fitting shoes, is a whole lot better than facing them alone.

"Waiting for Godot" runs Tuesday-Sunday through February 17 at Marin Theatre Company. Marintheatre.org.

January 30, 2013 - The Odd Couple

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:45:31 -0800

The characters of Oscar and Felix are not quite 50 years old, but ever since 1965, when Neil Simon premiered his sensationally popular comedy "The Odd Couple," those names have become legendary, recognized world round as the ultimate archetypes of mismatched roommate mojo, enduring icons of sadly contrary cohabitation.

Fire and Ice.

Oil and Water.

Oscar and Felix are back again, courtesy of the Raven Players, which just opened a three-weekend run of Neil Simon’s classic bad buddy farce.

Oscar, of course, is the lovable slob, a divorced sportswriter with a knack for making bad bets.

Felix is the neat freak, a hypochondriac with bad sinuses and a talent for making others uncomfortable with his obsessive aversion to mess.

Thrown together as roommates after Felix is thrown out by his wife, Oscar and Felix - formerly the best of friends - quickly begin to get on each other’s nerves, and the resulting pyrotechnics threaten to tear their friendship apart.

Originally performed on Broadway by Walter Mathau and Art Carney, Simon’s Tony-winning play was adapted to the screen in 1968, with Mathau appearing opposite Jack Lemmon. Next came the long-running television series starring and Tony Randall, and Jack Klugman, who passed away just this last December. In the nineties, a revamped version, called "The New Odd Couple," ran briefly on television, and in 1985, Simon rewrote the play as a vehicle for two female actresses. There was a even a strange 1975 animated Saturday morning T.V. show "The Oddball Couple," in which Oscar and Felix were transformed into a dog and cat named Fleabag and Spiffy.

Still, it is good, now and then, to return to the original source material of those icons we love, which is why Oscar and Felix keep coming back. Though conspicuously dated, with pop-cultural references that lack the sizzle they once carried, there is much that is genuinely funny about these characters.

Now, under the direction of John Green, The Raven Players have given Oscar and Felix, "The Odd Couple," a jaunty, enjoyable revival at the Raven Performing Arts Theater in Healdsburg.

Oscar is played with a gruff and natural charm by Tim Shippey.

Felix, in a somewhat uneven performance, is played by Stephen Cannon, who adopts a kind of dreamy, distanced, passive-aggressiveness in place of the usual high-strung single-mindedness that defines Felix in most versions.

The supporting cast is strong, with Jeremy Boucher leading a pack of local character actors as Oscar’s weekly poker buddies, and Karen Wallace and Tory Rotllsberger delivering delightfully flirty performances as Cecily and Gwendolyn Pigeon, two buxom British sisters, whose hilarious double-date with Oscar and Felix leads to irreparable complications.

Director Green keeps the story clipping along steady, though he misses a few big opportunities to deliver the kind of madcap sitcom energy playwright Simon has built into the script. On the whole, this Odd Couple delivers the goods. It’s a gently funny jab at people who carry their mistakes from relationship to relationship, and the ups, downs and ultimate limits of real friendship.

"The Odd Couple" runs Friday-Sunday through February 10 at The Raven Performing Arts Theater. Ravenplayers.org.

January 23, 2013 - Smokey Joe's Café

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:08:56 -0800

"Smokey Joe’s Café," which just opened a three weekend run at 6th Street Playhouse, is not a musical in the way that Camelot or Mame or Grease or . . . Spamalot is a musical. Smokey Joe’s Café is more like watching a T.V. special featuring the greatest hits from American Bandstand. It’s like listening to the radio, without commercials, without commentary, without an announcer.

In "Smokey Joe’s Café," there is no dialogue whatsoever.

Just rock n roll songs from the fifties and sixties - like a jukebox stuck in overdrive. 40 songs, including a few reprises here and there, every one of them written by rock and roll Hall of Fame winners Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. So . . . we’re talking some of the all time great rock songs ever heard on the radio, or in this case, on stage.

At one point, I considered that, instead of reviewing this show, directed with a snappy sense of fun by choreographer Alise Girard, I shouldn't do anything more than list the songs.

Since there is no story, no characters, no plot, no beginning, middle and end to talk about, simply listing the tunes might be the way to go.

Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown, Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, Pearl’s a Singer, Neighborhood, Dance With Me, I Keep Forgettin’, On Broadway, There Goes My Baby, Spanish Harlem, Stand by Me.

And that’s less than a third of them.

The big surprise is, for the sheer giddy intensity of its concentrated blast of nostalgia, it works. It doesn't have much to say, but it’s fun, and it’s important, now and then, to remember how we saw the world when we were younger, more innocent, and less aware. And nothing takes us back there like music.

Lieber and Stoller met while just teenagers themselves, living in Los Angeles. Abandoning simple love song formulas, Lieber and Stoller borrowed playfully from amongst the vernacular youth speech and slang of the day, imbuing their songs with a potent theatricality that was more than just musically satisfying. Lieber and Stoller’s songs were pure infectious fun.

And they still are.

In "Smokey Joe’s Café," nine performers take turns bringing Lieber and Stoller’s hit parade of tunes to life, making strong use of Girard’s inventively kitschy chorography. Backed up by a first rate band under the direction of Mateo Dillaway, the tunes unspool on a set that resembles a 1950’s dance show. Like a soda stand record player, Girard keeps things spinning, with plenty of clever bits of business worked into the performances of the songs, spanning the emotional spectrum from puppy love to serious heartbreak. Each performer is given an opportunity to display their individual gifts, for belting out a tune, dancing up a storm, or engaging in wacky physical comedy, ultimately transforming the rather thin undertaking into a robust and energetic young artist showcase.

Rock and Roll, as they say, will never die.

"Smokey Joe’s Café" is a good demonstration of why that’s so.

"Smokey Joe’s Café" runs Thursday-Sunday through February 10 at 6th Street Playhouse. 6thstreetplayhouse.com

January 9, 2013 - A Couple of Blaguards

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 9 Jan 2013 14:23:13 -0800

Describing “A Couple of Blaguards," the new show at Cinnabar Theater, is not an easy task. Jokingly referred to as "Angela’s Ashes: The Musical" - according to certain members of the cast - the deceptively delightful, toe-tapping show was written by Frank and Malachy McCourt. Frank McCourt, of course, won a Pulitzer for the heart-breaking memoir Angela’s Ashes, which described impoverished childhood in Ireland. His brother Malachy, an actor, politician, and bestselling author himself, co-wrote Blaguards, which was first performed by the McCourt Brothers, in Pennsylvania.

IT was, according to the reviews, a fairly rough-and tumble production, perfectly suited, I suppose, to the hard-drinking, hard-living lives of the McCourt brothers, who their own mother named the “couple of blaguards” of the title.

A blaguard, in this case, is a lovable rogue with a knack for telling stories and hanging out in bars.

In the Cinnabar production, lovingly directed by Sheri Lee Miller, the setting is a bar, and actors Steven Abbott and Tim Kniffin are the Mc Courts, playing the celebrated Irish raconteurs as the ultimate survivors, two men who've found humor and joy in spite of the difficult stat to their lives.

Unlike their published memoirs, however, this one is mostly all funny. And it has music, too.

The McCourts turn out to be pretty funny guys, with a love for the songs of their youth. Despite the pain they've witnessed, they see life as a big party, and the audience is invited along for the fun, with a live band on stage to back them up whenever they burst into song.

Which happens frequently.

These guys love to sing.

Limerick is Beautiful, Barefoot Days, Irish Rover, There's No-one With Endurance Like The Man Who Sells Insurance. The songs are a catalog of Irish classics and tin-pan alley novelties.

Local band YouKali, joined by musical director Jim Peterson, do a solid job of supporting the two-man cast, filling in with well-chosen transitions between the various stories told, and acted out in hilarious detail, by the two-man cast. The show doesn't have much plot, arranged more as an evening out at the pub than a traditional theater piece. That’s not to say it isn't theatrical.

The tale of Frank’s first communion, in which he nearly chokes on the wafer and ends up being sent to confession, is one early crowd-pleaser. Even the occasional sad story always seems to end with a gentle joke.

With Miller’s guidance, the local stage veterans do a great job of bringing these stories to shimmering life, taking turns playing all the other characters in every Irish-accented tall tale. A quibbler might notice that Kniffin’s accent comes and goes a bit, and that the pace lags here and there, but with the help of a first-rate set that looks as if it were plucked from the back-alleys of Limerick, ‘A Couple of Blaguards’ stands as a charming, sweet-hearted start to the new year, a celebration of life that underscores what the McCourts learned long ago.

Surviving tough times is easier when you keep a sense of humor, and remember to sing as often as possible.

"A Couple of Blaguards" runs Friday-Sunday through January 20 at Cinnabar Theater.

www.cinnabar theater.org.

December 19, 2012 - New Year's Eve

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:55:45 -0800

Well, here we are, the end of the year upon us, the beginning of 2013 waiting to step into view in just under two weeks. Funny about New Year’s. Since most countries on our little planet observe January first as the start of the new year, New Year's Day really is the closest thing we have to a truly global public holiday. On New Year’s eve, in the majority of the nations of the world, fireworks explode, toasts are made, hugs are exchanged.

All around the world, one way or another, people get together to party. Sure, everyone parties in their own way, but the point is, there’s just something we all agree to be special about that moment when we say goodbye to the previous 365 days, and look forward, with hope or trepidation, to the next.

Maybe the parties are to distract us from thinking to hard about the past or the future. I don’t know, but here in the North Bay, each and every year, the local theater community does its part by distracting us, on New Year’s Eve, with special shows, plays, and musical revues, all designed to delight us right up until the clock strikes twelve.

Following a long-established tradition, Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater will kick off its new year with a blow-out party on New Year’s Eve party, featuring the opening-night performance it’s new musical show A Couple of Blaguards. Featuring actors Tim Kniffin and Steven Abbot as the yarn-spinning Irish brothers Frank and Malachy McCourt, the music-filled play is directed by Sheri Lee Miller, with musical direction by Jim Peterson. It’s got outrageous true stories, lyrical poetry, and fantastic Irish tunes, backed up by a first rate Irish band, and it'll be running for three weeks at Cinnabar. But on New Year’s Eve, Cinnabar revelers will get the first peek. Festivities begin at 9:00 with a full run of the show, followed by champagne, desserts, and New Year’s fun right up to midnight.

Cinnabartheater.org has all the details.

In Santa Rosa, the Studio at 6th Street Playhouse has been transformed into a seasonal cabaret, and a series of musical events has been taking place the last few weekends, and will continue right up to New Year’s Eve. This weekend, the fabulous female foursome from last year’s hit musical The Marvelous Wonderettes will be dancing and doo-wopping through a peppy repertoire of up-tempo holiday tunes, entertaining music-lovers through Sunday, December 22nd. The following weekend, leading up to New Year’s eve, the Studio will be hosting the sensational comedy-musical duo of Sandy and Richard Riccardi, performing nightly on December 29th, 30th and 31st). Showcasing new tunes from their just released CD, Tastefully Raunchy, the Riccardi’s will be sassing and satirizing everything they can think of with their patented blend of clever lyrics and smooth lounge-act showmanship. There will be one show at 8 o’clock on Saturday and Sunday, and two shows on New Years Eve, at 7:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. 6thstreetplayhouse.com has the information on the Wonderettes show and the Riccardi Cabaret.

However it is you choose to celebrate the changing of the year, I wish for you a 2013 full of pleasure and success, and I invite you to continue joining me here, every Wednesday, as we talk about the incredibly rich community of artists that we are fortunate to have right here in Sonoma County.

December 12, 2012 - "Christmas Revels" and "A Christmas Carol"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 11:31:37 -0800

In an uncertain world, where disappointments come in many forms, and chaos sometimes seems to be the rule rather than the exception, certain things can be counted on.

The Earth will turn.

The sun will rise.

Winter will bring longer nights, and shorter days.

And in December, lots of folks will gather together to stage "A Christmas Carol."

They will stage other seasonal shows as well, some of them as steeped in tradition as Dickens’ beloved holiday fable, some of them extraordinary. In Oakland, for 27 years now, a group called The California Revels has been staging an elaborate, dazzling celebration of the winter Solstice season that draws larger audiences every year to the Scottish Rite Theater on Lake Merritt.

I'll come back to The Revels, though it does share more in common with "A Christmas Carol" than the month of December. As with the Revels, "A Christmas Carol" is not just built on years and years of tradition. It is itself a tradition, as is American Conservatory Theater’s spectacular annual staging of the play, a first-rate, all-stops-out, theatrical romp through the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge and his long, life-changing Christmas Eve amongst the spirits. A surprising number of families from the North Bay take the annual trek to Union Square in San Francisco, pairing a day in the city, and maybe some ice-skating under the massive Union Square Christmas tree, with a trip to the ACT Theater to watch A Christmas Carol. Once again featuring the great John Carpenter as Scrooge, this year’s production is directed by Dominique Lozano, based on the original direction by Carey Perloff, who wrote this rollicking adaptation with Paul Walsh. Blending the best remembered lines from Dickens book with some funny, effective, and fancifully contemporary dialogue, the story bounces along without bogging down, the clever staging taking us smoothly from each ghostly encounter to the next.

And these are some ghosts, from old dead Marley, waving his chains in the air, to the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, flying, dancing, and hovering across and over the stage with spot-on theatrical trickery.

It runs through Christmas Eve, and it’s a blast, and Carpenter once again delvers the goods: a Scrooge who’s scary, funny, and delightfully moving. His transformation is a thing of beauty, as the Christmas spirits (and the Christmas spirit) finally get through to his wounded, hardened, but not unreachable heart.

Which brings us back to the "Christmas Revels."

During the winter holidays, something happens to people, something that predates Christmas, reaching back to a time when the lengthening nights and cold weather meant a life and death struggle for communities throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The winter Solstice marked the turning point, when the night is as long as it will be, and the sun will now be drawing closer once again. The Revels, better than any other theatrical endeavor, captures the sense of joy and relief of the winter holidays, recreating the songs, dances, traditions and rituals of different cultures and times, right at a time when the fading pagan beliefs were blended and balanced with the growing Christian tradition.

This year’s production, titled the Celestial Fools, takes place in the tiny town of Proseco, Italy, in the year 1520. Three fools, representing the sun, the moon, and the stars, lead the villagers in a pageant celebrating the triumph of the light over darkness and death. It’s a joyous, eye-pleasing, deeply moving, and frequently funny show, as a cast of dozens bring life to a mix of songs and stories, sung in Italian, English, French, Czechoslovakian, and Latin.

The show runs through December 16, with shows on Friday night, two on Saturday and two on Sunday.

Either of these shows are a bit of a drive, but amidst the craziness of Christmas-time, you may find the journey was well worth the effort.

December 5, 2012 - "It's A Wonderful Life"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 5 Dec 2012 14:51:19 -0800

Let’s face it. "It’s a Wonderful Life" . . . is a terrible name for a movie, or a stage show.

It’d be a better name for a self-help book. It’s like giving "Casablanca" the name "People Make Hard Decisions During Difficult Times." It sounds preachy, strident, glib, a little too forcefully upbeat.

And let’s face it, "It’s a Wonderful Life," though possibly the most life-affirming film ever made, is not the least bit glib about the difficulties of life, and doesn't offer easy upbeat answers. In fact, when the movie first appeared less than a year after the end of World War II, critics hated it, calling it depressing and bleak.

So why has the story of poor George Bailey endured, and how did it become on of the best-loved holiday films of all time, now listed on the American Film Institutes list of the top 100 movies ever made?

Because despite it’s light dusting of fantasy, with its inclusion of guardian angels and magic wished, "It’s a Wonderful Life" feels real, and the emotions it carries as George tries desperately to feel that his life is worth something, those are feelings experienced by the vast majority of human beings, at one time or another.

It’s part of the reason we keep returning to the movie, and why this year, there are two completely different theatrical versions of "It’s a Wonderful Life" playing on North Bay stages.

At Marin Theater Company, director Jon Tracy brings George Bailey’s story to life as if it’s being performed by a late-1940s radio show troupe, broadcasting live from Studio A at Manhattan’s WMTC radio station. As snow falls behind plate-glass windows, Tracy’s superb cast of five tackle dozens of voices and characters, performing all the sound effects using jars and whistles and boards and boots , and even harmonizing an ethereal vocal soundtrack.

It’s charming and engaging.

Though the tale unfolds in words, not actions, it is useless trying to resist the gradually building drama of George Bailey’s escalating Christmas Eve breakdown, and the high-wire act conducted by Tracy’s supremely talented quintet of actors is breathtakingly entertaining.

Meanwhile, at 6th Street Playhouse, Sylvia Jones and Craig Miller co-direct a new musical version, featuring memorably snappy songs and lyrics by Marcy Telles, Larry Williams, and Janis Dunson Wilson. The cast is huge, led by Mark Bradbury as George, and Natalie Herman as George’s street urchin guardian angel, eager to earn her wings, and not above picking a pocket to accomplish her goal.

Borrowing a trick from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Clara leads the suicidal, bridge-jumping George from his past to his financial-crisis present, showing him shadows of his life, allowing him to step into the key scenes that form his small-town destiny. It works remarkably well, drawing plenty of sniffles and sympathy right from the get-go.

The cast is a bit uneven, with some weak and wobbly voices which occasionally neuter the melodic appeal of the music. And some of the staging is a bit clunky and distracting at times.

But still . . . the enduring story of George Bailey suggests that a person’s life, flawed or not, is best judged by the impact that person has on others. The same is true of 6th Street’s bumpy but deeply moving show. It grabbed me right from its tearjerker of an opening number - as the people of Bedford Falls all pray in song for their aching friend George - and it lasted right up to the final throat-catching wallop of an ending.

"It’s a Wonderful Life" might be a terrible name.

But in both of these worthy, affecting adaptations, it’s a rich and wonderful story.

"It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play" runs Tuesday-Sunday through December 16 at Marin Theatre Company.
www.marintheatre.org.

"It’s a Wonderful Life: The Musical" runs Thursday-Sunday through December 23 at 6th Street Playhouse.
www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

November 28, 2012 - "Beauty and the Beast"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:51:36 -0800

The holidays are upon us, and while some of us seek out alternatives to the usual sickly-sweet sentiment that is dripped like syrup onto the months of November and December, it is also true that many of us look forward to family-friendly holiday entertainment, happy shows we can share with our children and our parents. Often, we have to sacrifice quality for kid-friendly simplicity, but every once in awhile, we get a big spicy slice of theater that captures the joy and magic of the season while also offering plenty of eye-popping pleasure for those with more sophisticated tastes.

This year, Santa Rosa Junior College has one of those.

The Theater arts department at SRJC has been struggling of late, facing budgets cuts and staff reductions, but one wouldn't know it from the lavish, satisfyingly lush treasure that is Walt Disney’s "Beauty and the Beast," playing through December 8 at the JC’s Burbank Auditorium.

In this whimsical-but-emotionally rich staging, director Laura Downing-Lee unleashes an eye-pleasing spectacle, simultaneously sweet, silly, and bittersweet, crammed with visual magic and clever stage-craft. With costumes and sets that are themselves worth the price of admission, the strong, committed cast collaborates with the technical team to unveil a show that deftly transcend its occasional small opening-weekend problems - a few microphone issues, some occasional off-key squeaks from Richard Riccardi’s otherwise full-spirited live orchestra.

Brittany Law, of Petaluma, is perfectly cast as Belle, the bookish-but-beautiful oddball of her small French village. Charming, fearless, and believably conflicted, Brittany Law’s Belle makes a perfect balance to Zachary Hasbany’s emotionally volatile Beast. At six-foot-seven, the Rohnert Park actor is an imposing presence, and his impressive baritone - though struggling through his few high-notes - powerfully conveys the aching heart beneath the monster’s fangs and fur.

As the Beast’s enchanted servants - all gradually turning into pieces of furniture and kitchenware - the ensemble is delightful, tackling the potentially ridiculous spectacle - with dancing forks and knives and salt-shakers all singing "Be Our Guest" - with so much joy and enthusiasm, one can’t help but be enchanted by the spell of the Howard Ashman’s melodic tunes, and Tim Rice’s snappy lyrics.

When the stage version of Disney’s movie was first announced, back in 1992, there were those, myself included, who assumed the move was a crass-commercial money grab. The big surprise was that the stage version of Beauty and the Beast far surpasses the movie in its depth of character and its heights of emotion. With a number of original songs added to the tale - including the Beast’s gorgeous lament "If I Can’t Love Her" - and with several of the smaller characters given satisfying arcs and slight-but-humorous back-stories, the stage musical became a full-fledged entertainment worthy of the Broadway stage, where it ran for over thirteen years before becoming available for colleges and community theaters.

Which brings it back to Santa Rosa to kick off the holidays. Easily one of the best Sonoma County musicals of 2012, SRJC’s lovely and deeply moving fairy tale is a fitting transition into a season of magic and fantasy.

"Beauty and the Beast" runs Thursday-Sunday through December 8 at Santa Rosa Junior College. Vist santarosa.edu for information.

November 21, 2012 - More Holiday Fun - "The Santaland Diaries" + "Do-it-yourself Dickens"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:19:28 -0800

Last week, I kick-started my annual roundups of theatrical holiday offerings, tossing out brief descriptions of several plays and musicals landing on local stages during the upcoming few weeks. Today, as we prepare ourselves for the Thanksgiving weekend, I’d like to offer a couple of additional suggestions of shows you might just be thankful to have had the opportunity to experience.

Both suggestions take place at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, in Rohnert Park, and both feature the participation of actor-writer-Christmas fan David Yen.

One is nice.

The other is naughty.

Now, one wouldn't automatically believe that Charles Dickens’ heartwarming fantasy A Christmas Carol could possibly make a fitting companion to David Sedaris’s gleefully mean-spirited comedy The Santaland Diaries.

Yen obviously feels otherwise, because from December first to the fifteenth, he’s teaming up with Spreckels to present both shows in repertory, which means back-and-forth-at-the same time, like ping-pong, only a lot more fun.

This appealingly odd double-whammy of an event begins with The Santaland Diaries, marking Yen’s fifth straight year appearing in the popular one-man show. Taking place within a cozy stylized living room set, with Yen mixing actual adult beverages for lucky members of the audience, he relates Sedaris’s outrageous true story about an unemployed actor forced to play an elf at Macy’s New York City department store. It’s a sharp-edged satire of commercialism, greed, and thwarted optimism - and if the past performances of the show, with Yen taking on the role of Crumpet the sarcastic elf, it’s going to be hilarious, and maybe just a tad heart-warming. Yes, there is a brief moment in Santaland where everything seems to be ending the way it always does in a Christmas story - and then it all backpedals to wrap up with a couple of deliciously nasty zingers.

It’s decidedly non-Dickensian.

For a flip-side experience, Yen will be alternating the Elf show with something he calls Do-it-Yourself Dickens, an audience participation adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Each performance, theatergoers will be invited to read aloud from the script of Carol, as everyone sits in a large circle, with Yen portraying Scrooge, the entire group joining forces to bring the words of Dickens’ to life.

He’s broken the script down into a maximum of 40 parts, with some roles definitely suitable for children. Festive holiday drinks will be served throughout the show to give it an extra holiday feel, and because, apparently, David Yen really likes to hand out drinks during his Christmas shows.

Both shows take place in the Spreckles cozy blackbox theater, and discounts are offered for those attending both shows. So as the Turkey on the table is turned in leftovers, and your family and friends wonder what to do the keep the feeling festive, you might want to consider a group excursion to the theater over the next few weeks.

Whether you’re in the mood for something naughty or nice, the North Bay theater community has plenty to make your spirits bright.

Find more information at sprreckelsonline.com

November 14, 2012 - The Holidays

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 19:40:41 -0800

I can never remember. Do The Holidays begin with Thanksgiving - or is Halloween now? Are the Holidays just around the corner, or are we in the Holidays already?

I heard a report recently that some department stores are bucking the trend of kick-starting the holidays in October by refusing to put up Christmas decorations till the day after Thanksgiving. I like that. On the other hand, we all know the holidays are coming, so there’s no harm in planning ahead a little, right?

I mean, just because I’m about to do my fist Holiday-themed segment of the year doesn't mean I think the holidays have started. They don’t start till next week.

Thanksgiving. And the day AFTER thanksgiving, that’s when local theaters begin rolling out their annual holiday theatrical offerings. And there is nothing quite like a live play to get a family or group of friends into the spirit. I know, a lot of people go to the movies during this season, all bundled together before or after a sprint of shopping, but to really make an event, a live play or musical really adds some extra magic and holiday splash.

SO that you can start thinking ahead, here are some of the shows being offered in the North Bay over the next several weeks.

On November 23, the Imaginists Theater Collective presents The Ratcatcher, a world-premiere musical featuring tunes written-and-performed by local roots band The Crux. Based on The Pied Piper of Hamlin, The Ratcatcher, runs November 23 – December 16. The updated story crosses a town hall meeting vibe with that of an off-kilter cabaret show, all steeped in fairy tale magic.

Also opening the day after Thanksgiving is Actors Basement’s slightly wacky and innovative production of Merlyn Q. Sell’s Circus Acts, running November 23 – December 2. Set backstage in a flea-bitten traveling circus, the play is written as six distinct one-acts, each featuring the different dysfunctional members of A circus troupe, all dealing with personal and professional crises. TO make things extra interesting, the show will be performed at the Glaser Center in two separate performance spaces called “rings.” Audience members get to choose whether to begin with ring one or ring two, changing their experience of the show as each choice puts the story in a slightly different order.

This one is rated PG for language, so . . . probably not an option for small children.

The beloved Christmas fable It’s a Wonderful Life materializes in two different versions. At Mill Valley’s Marin Theatre Company the story of poor beleaguered George Bailey and his awkward guardian angel appears as a live “radio play,” in a bouncy adaptation by Joe Landrym running November 27 – December 16. At 6th Street Playhouse, George will be singing his heart our in an original musical version of It’s a Wonderful Life, running November 30 – December 23.

Out in Rio Nido, Pegasus Theater Company brings us a twist on another holiday classic. In Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol, running November 30 – December 23,, the familiar tale is retold from the Point of view of poor shackled Marley, the one-time business partner - now dead as a doornail - of crotchety old Ebeneezer Scrooge.

Finally, though not technically a holiday tale, SRJC presents Disney’s suitably magical family musical Beauty and the Beast, running November 23 – December 8.

There you go. Plenty to keep you busy, and keep a sense of holiday fantasy and frolic, until the season, which hasn't technically begun, finally ends. In January.

Happy Holidays.

October 31, 2012 - "August Osage County" and "Rabbit Hole"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 1 Nov 2012 14:24:16 -0700

Families can be a comfort in times of trouble - or the exact opposite. At 6th Street Playhouse, two different Pulitzer-winning plays are currently running side-by-side in the company’s two theater spaces. Each play takes a look at a family in crisis, each blending humor with grief in fascinating ways - though the families in each, and the choices they make, could not be more unlike one another.

In Tracy Letts’ sprawling comedy-drama "August: Osage County," running one more weekend in the GK Hardt Theater, an alcoholic, once-famous poet has disappeared, gone, vanished without a trace. Presumed dead, his three far-flung daughters, dysfunctional families in tow, return one by one to the sprawling Oklahoma house where their drug-addict mother, Violet, is contemplating her future without her husband.

Caustic, cruel, manipulative, and dangerous - but somehow also bitingly funny - the sarcastic matriarch is played with fire and fury by mollie boice. It’s the role of a lifetime. Violet loves a fight so much she can’t stop herself, even to comfort her daughters in a moment of unspeakable grief. Directed by Craig Miller, the sprawling drama takes place in three acts, covering several weeks, as the family comes together and apart, splitting into pieces in unpredictable ways. It’s one of 6th Street’s most ambitious undertakings, and there are few community theater companies bold and brave enough to tackle a show this large and complex. The thirteen-member cast - though wildly uneven in experience and tone - gives Letts’ glistening dialogue a gleeful and spirited go, as a tangled series of surprises, betrayals, lies, truths, revelations and shattering self-discoveries play out on the vast, multi-level set. Some clunky light changes minimize the intimacy of the story-telling, frequently signaling which part of the set something is about to take place in, and the overall pace stays surprisingly static as the stakes gradually rise for motley assortment of extended family members. Still, as a showcase for one of the greatest American plays of the last decade, 6th Street’s courageous undertaking is worthy of attention.

In David Lindsay-Abaire’s award-winning drama ‘Rabbit Hole,’ which has had a couple of productions in the area over the last few years, the central family is much smaller. Becca and Howie, played beautifully by Dana Scott and Geoff Pomeroy, are still in the stunned and anguished midst of grief following the accidental death of their young son Danny. Each has chosen a different path through the pain, Howie bare-knuckling it through his emotions, attending support groups, forcing himself to watch videos of Danny playing in the park, eager to share his gradual healing with his wife. Becca, for her part, is slowly erasing the daily reminders of her son, packing away pictures and toys, wiping away fingerprints, sending Danny’s dog to live elsewhere. There is a gaping distance between the two, made more complicated by Becca’s sister Izzie, a brilliantly nuanced and smartly detailed performance by Rebecca Patti. Unmarried, free-spirited and frequently unemployed, Izzy announces early on that she is going to have a child of her own, while Becca’s well-meaning mother, Nat, one of Mo McElroy’s best performances in recent memory, just can’t manage to reach through her grieving daughter’s force-field of prickly isolation. Director David Lear brings a depth of feeling to his work here, inventing a lovely opening image that shows us the playfulness and affection that Becca and Howie have lost. His method of showing what Howie sees during his nightly video viewings is equally powerful and inventive. All around the acting is superb and beautifully understated. Rabbit Hole a gorgeously aching, tender exploration of pain and loss and the rocky path through to acceptance and forgiveness.

"August: Osage County" runs Thursday through Sunday until November 4th. "Rabbit Hole" runs Thursday through Sunday until November 11th. Both at 6th Street Playhouse, www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

October 24, 2012 - "Disney on Ice"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:01:57 -0700

The name Walt Disney, like few others in the history of entertainment, sparks a response in people ranging from adoration to revulsion. Born in 1901, Disney is arguably the most influential of American artists, whose cartoon character Mickey Mouse, and hundreds of others developed through his film studio, are among the most beloved - and lucrative - characters ever created. Nearly fifty years after its namesake’s death, at the age of 66, is Walt Disney Company is a model of success, and it’s products - including those characters - are easy to dismiss as mere mainstream commodities, designed without passion by a machine without a heart.

But that would be unjust.

It’s impossible to dismiss the Disney cannon so easily.

The success of Disney, the machine, is directly connected to the passion and heart of its artists, and the universal appeal of those characters.

Last week, a bit reluctantly, I accepted an invitation to attend the press opening of Disney on Ice, running through October 28 at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, before moving to Sacramento for another week. The title of the show, Disney: 100 Years of Magic, one hundred years ago, Walt Disney was eleven years old, so I’m not sure what it is that is being given its centennial celebration. Maybe that was when Disney first began dreaming of telling stories through the medium of the cinema.

Whatever.

Disney on Ice is pretty much what it sounds like.

Ice skaters - good ones - dressed up as Disney characters, acting out scenes from an array of Disney movies. The show covers a lot of ground, skipping about in time. The main Mouse Mickey, with his gal pal Minnie, produces a magic lamp, which produces the genie from Aladdin, who then turns into twenty more genies, skating in formation, some of them turning back-flips.

Say what you will about the inherent silliness of such a spectacle, but I’ve seen a lot of ice skating during the Olympics, and I have to say, if we’re willing to praise an athlete for a death-defying leap performed while wearing a leotard, you gotta hand it to someone doing the same thing dressed in a giant rubber genie suit.

From Aladdin, we move to a slightly surreal homage to Finding Nemo, with giant ices skating fish, fish with heads and tails and fins, but also legs - and little human heads sticking out of their backs. It’s like a science experiment gone wrong, on ice, and yet . . . it’s kind of cool. The show skips along through Toy Story - the highlight being a parade of giant green army men dance-marching in formation - excerpts from the Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Pinocchio, a quintet of Disney princesses dancing with their respective princes, a rousing appearance by the super-hero family from Pixar’s The Incredibles, and perhaps the most effective and artful segment, a fifteen-minute condensation of the story of Mulan, with some truly thrilling skating sequences that blend martial arts with dance, and still tells the story of Mulan with heart and passion.

Yeah, even in a massive money-making machine like Disney on Ice, there is plenty of that old Disney passion and heart, and even some moments of true breath-catching magic.

Though it’s hard to hear over the raucous din of the ten thousand children present, the adults in the audience were letting loose with plenty of their own gasps of pleasure, reacting to the sight of characters they’ve loved their whole lives.

Is Disney on Ice tacky commercialism, or is it innovative art? Is it a crass money-making exercise or a heartfelt salute to the movies and movie characters that still mean something to so many people, that still have the power to make us feel something wonderful.

The answer of course, is that Disney on Ice, is all of that.

And yeah, it’s kind of fun.

October 17, 2012 - "Camelot"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:47:55 -0700

It’s been 13 years since Lerner and Lowe’s beloved musical Camelot was staged in the North Bay. That was 1999, when the Santa Rosa Players produced a big, splashy ‘Camelot’ at the Lincoln Arts Center, their home at the time. That production, directed by actor-playwright Gene Abravaya, is still talked about as one of the best examples of what community theater can be, with the right combination of local actors, musicians, and designers. For good or bad - much like King Arthur and Guenevere and Sir Lancelot, whose outsized myths ‘Camelot’ humanizes - the 1999 production has become the stuff of local legend . . . and legends are all but impossible to beat.

A shiny new production of Camelot - once again directed by Abravaya, now staged by the New Spreckels Theater Company, has just swung open the palace doors, and though it doesn't quite stack up to the misty memories of the 1999 show, it does unleash a number of nifty tricks and splashes of theatrical magic, much of them simply not possible, technically, thirteen years ago. For many, the appeal is the show itself, featuring one of the finest scores every written for the stage, built around a bittersweet love story that dabbles in fantasy but remains grounded in the relationship of Arthur and his reluctant queen, running parallel to Arthur’s increasing commitment to building a society based on goodness and justice over violence and brute force.

As King Arthur, Paul Huberty nails the idealistic nature of the reluctant ruler, a puppy-dog enthusiasm that resurfaces even in times of crisis. It’s a charming, and ultimately heart-breaking performance. As Guenevere and Lancelot, the star-crossed lovers whose passion is the undoing of Arthur and his dreams of a new order of justice, Heather Buck and Anthony Guzman don’t quite generate the kind of heat one hopes for, though both have some fine moments.

Norman A. Hall and Zack Howard bring some of best moments in the show. As the elderly badass King Pelinore, advisor to King Arthur, Hall is gleefully addled, but appealingly tough-as-nails, and as Arthur’s bastard son Mordrid, Howard steals the show with the brilliantly nasty homage to wickedness The Seven Deadly Virtues. And It should be mentioned that John Rathjen, with his dependably solid stage presence and fine singing voice, stands as a bridge between the current production and the 1999 show, having appeared as one of Arthur’s knights in both productions.

Musical director Janis Wilson does a skillful job his her live orchestra, bringing Lerner and Lowe’s lovely score - containing some of best songs ever written for the stage - to glorious, magical life.

Scenic designer Paul Gilger’s gorgeous, sprawling set (rumored to be the most expensive set ever built in Sonoma County) has twin turrets flanking the stage, hand-set Styrofoam bricks, an ever-changing series of doors, walls and platforms, and elaborate projections that transform the castle from interior to exterior, from a jousting field to an enchanted forest.

The set, magically morphing from simple elegance to lavish splendor, is reason enough to visit Camelot again.

‘Camelot’ runs Friday-Sunday through Oct. 28 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Spreckelsonline.com

October 10, 2012 - "Topdog/Underdog"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 12:05:37 -0700

Unless we remember the past, we are doomed to repeat it.

Depending on how you remember history, any number of people said that first. It really doesn't matter.

It was George Santayana.

The point is . . . well, the point is, unless we can recall and learn from our own history, we are unlikely to put an end to the various mistakes we make over and over and over.

In the 2002 Pulitzer-winning drama, Topdog/Underdog, the personal histories of two African-American brothers, Lincoln and Booth - their father had a cruel sense of humor - prove to be as thick with pain and regret as the darkest chapters in America’s past. Unless Lincoln and Booth can avoid repeating their parents’ own worst mistakes, unless they can see past their own self-delusions, they may be doomed to repeat the spectacle of retaliation and despair their names.

In a gorgeously staged new production at Marin Theatre Company, director Timothy Douglas pulls out all the stops in bringing Parks’ poetry fueled, mythically inspired comic-tragedy to life. Douglas understands each of the play’s intricately stacked layers, and knows how to play all the distinct colors within each one, pacing the drama, the comedy, and the slowly building tension, as if each were at the center of its very own play.

Topdog/Underdog is a difficult story to describe. Lincoln, played by an astonishingly good actor named Bowman Wright, is a recovered street hustler, a one-time master of the “three card Monty” con game. After a violent tragedy tragedy left him shaken and guilt-ridden, Lincoln went straight, landing a bizarre but lucrative job dressing up as Abraham Lincoln at a sleazy beachfront amusement park. Customers, we learn, pay for the privilege of pretending to assassinate Lincoln, shooting him in the head with a fake gun. Meanwhile, his little brother Booth, played by Biko Eisen-Martin, also excellent, is a kind of shoplifting savant, jealous of his brother’s legendary skills with the cards, and incredulous at Lincoln’s willingness to spend his days letting strangers pretend to kill him.

Booth has big dreams, and tells big lies to cover the hole he’s felt ever since his parents abandoned him and his brother as children. Part of the power of the play is the knowledge that though these two men are destined for a confrontation that could tear them apart, the bond of love they share may be enough to save them from themselves, and each other. In the hands of director Douglas, the story’s edge-of-your-seat breathlessness is nearly unbearable at times, springing from Parks’ brutally honest, slyly entertaining, and boldly lyrical writing.

Though disturbing at times, Topdog/Underdog constantly surprises with moments of outrageously well-played humor, with some sight-gags that rival anything in any of this year’s comedies. Brilliantly acted, perfectly paced, and packed with raw, real emotion, Topdog/Underdog is easily one of the best productions of the year.

‘Topdog/Underdog’ runs Tuesday-Sunday through Oct. 21 at Marin Theatre Company, www.marintheatre.com

October 3, 2012 - Mill Valley Film Festival

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 4 Oct 2012 12:54:17 -0700

What do Dustin Hoffman, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck, Stevie Nicks, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ang Lee, Helen Hunt, Bradley Cooper, Matthew Lillard, and Ken Burns all have in common, other than they they’re famous, they all work in show business, and they are incredibly creative people? Answer: as we speak, the above actors, musicians, directors and producers are on their way to Mill Valley, California, for the 35th annual Mill Valley Film Festival.

The ten day extravaganza of movie watching and star-gazing begins this Thursday night, with screenings of the brand new film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ and David O’ Russel’s new oddball dramedy, Silver Lining Playbook.

After the movies, there’s a big party in the streets of Mill Valley.

That’s pretty much the recipe for the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Movie—movie—movie-star—party.

Shake well and serve with a nice glass of wine.

Easily one of the best film festivals in America, the MVFF has sputtered a bit in recent years, with a bit less cinematic electricity than expected, but this year, the juice is back on, and the line-up of films, big and small, is perfectly exactly what one expects from an institution celebrating it’s 35th birthday. For trivia buffs, this means that the very first Mill Valley Film Festival took place in 1977. That was the year Star Wars came out, and even with the entire world lining up to see George Lucas’s science-fiction fantasy, enough people stepped over to visit the fledgling film fest that it was given a second year, and a third, and now it’s one of the best respected events of its kind.

SO, it’s kind of fitting that in addition to stars like those mentioned above, this year’s MVFF also includes a screening of Star Wars. Yes, Episode IV: The New Hope, will be celebrating ITS 35th birthday at the festival, with a massive shindig and screening on Monday, October 8, at the Cinema Theater in Corte Madera, one of the last single screen movie theaters in the area.

With over one hundred movies, there is something to fit most cineastes’ carefully cultured tastes: Including Oscar-bait such as Ben Affleck’s political thriller ‘Argo,’ and Helen Hunt’s sex-with-an-iron-lung-guy drama The Sessions, plus a sneak-=peek at dazzling animated spectacles such as Dreamwork’s ‘Rise of the Guardians,’ giving the superhero treatment to iconic holiday figures such as the Easter Bunny, The Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus, the badass Santa, with the words Naughty and Nice tattooed on his forearms.

Dreamworks animation guru Jeffrey Katzenberg will be on hand to present that one himself.

Of course, Film festivals, like street-corner artists, draw all kinds of people, and for every patron ponying up the bucks to rub shoulders with the famous folk, there are dozens more eager to just watch the movies, especially tiny, unknown gems unlikely to appear in theaters anywhere else.

Among this year’s more fascinating finds is Nancy Kelly and Kenji Yamamoto’s stunning documentary Rebels With a Cause, about the activists who saved Pt. Reyes National Seashore from development. Check it out. It’s a good one.

The Mill Valley Film Festival runs October 4 –14 at various venues throughout Mill Valley and San Rafael. For full schedule and tickets visit www.mvff.com

September 26, 2012 - Other People’s Money

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 19:45:05 -0700

Some people don’t have enough money.

And some people have all the money they need, but still want more.

Riding a recent wave of North Bay theater taking a hard look at issues of economic injustice and the growing frustration of the 99-percent, two new productions are treating local theater goers to different sides of the same profit-and-loss coin.

At Cinnabar Theater, Dario Fo’s "We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay" is an over-the-top, outrageously farcical, Monty Pythonesque comedy springing from the desperation faced by working class people who just can’t seem to get ahead, no matter how hard they try. It’s bleak material, but in Fo’s hands, it becomes one of the funniest, most audaciously weird comedies of the year.

Directed by Laura Jorgenson with an eye for physical comedy and a nearly perfect sense of pacing, "We Won’t Pay" begins when a working class housewife, Antonia, is caught up in a spontaneous mob protest, joining hundreds of women all over her city in raiding the local market, where prices are shooting up astronomically day by day, carrying off whatever groceries they can carry, chanting, “We won’t pay! We won’t pay!”

That’s just the beginning. After sharing her bounty with her best friend, Margherita, who hides the groceries beneath her coat, a mountain of lies begin to pile up, beginning with Antonia’s spur-of-the-moment fib, when her husband Giovanni notices the strange bulge beneath the jacket, that Margherita is pregnant. This is news to Margherita’s husband Luigi, and as the police begin a house to house search for the stolen groceries, all hell breaks loose in a colliding series of misunderstandings that push credibility to the hilarious breaking point.

The result is creative, crude, ridiculous, and more fun than one would expect from a play that frequently delves into some very dark territory, as the gap between those who have nothing, and those who want to keep it that way, grows disturbingly wide and dangerous.

The cast is agile and game, fusing the energies of the great 1950’s situation comedies with the anything-goes antagonism of Jon Stewart or Steven Colbert. The script gets a tad preachy in its final moments, which is regrettable. The audience may have been laughing their butts of, but the underlying truth in Fo’s sharp-sighted satire is always painfully clear.

In Jerry Sterner’s "Other People’s Money" - running through October 6 at Main Stage West - the point of view switches from the workers to the bosses. Andrew Jorgenson is the cagey but kind-hearted President of a new England wire and cable company, a 77-year-old institution that becomes the object of financial desire for a crude, lascivious, greedy businessman named Larry Garfinkle, aka, Larry the Liquidator.

One of the tricky little treats in Sterner’s play is how Larry - obviously the villain, greedy and self-serving - is also playful, fun-loving, and brutally honest. He’s a likable monster, going head-to-head with Andres, the likable Saint. It’s one of the factors that makes Other People’s Money such a complex and entertaining ride. Directed by Elizabeth Craven, the play incorporates a nifty turntable set, rotating from the cramped offices of the Cable and Wire factory to Larry’s opulent New York skyscraper. Far less slapsticky than ‘We Won’t Pay,’ it covers some of the same territory, only from the perspective of the people making the decisions that affect the workers and their families.

Timely and troubling, "Other People’s Money’’ is wickedly funny, savagely realistic, and monstrously good.

"Other People’s Money’’ runs through Oct. 6 at Main Stage West. Visit MainStageWest.com.

We Won’t Pay, We Won’t Pay runs through October 7 at Cinnabar theater, Cinnabaretheater.org.

September 25, 2012 - The Normal Heart and The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:52:02 -0700

Time changes a lot of things.

Time might not heal all wounds, but it can help us to understand our most painful memories a little bit better, and to learn from those memories in ways we couldn't have as the events were first unfolding. Right now, in the Bay Area, two extraordinary plays have opened, each giving us the opportunity to review moments in our collective memories that changed the world, moments steeped in tragedy and loss, and to use the perspective of time to achieve a measure of healing and insight.

One is a revival of Larry Kramer’s ground breaking 27-year-old drama ‘The Normal Heart,’ about a group of activists struggling through the first few years of the AIDS epidemic, and the other is a sequel, of sorts, to Tectonic Theater Company’s eye-opening ensemble piece The Laramie Project, about the murder of gay student Matthew Shepherd, in Laramie Wyoming, in 1993. In that original piece - which has become a staple within college campuses and community theater groups, the members of the New York City’s Tectonic Theater traveled to Laramie in the days immediately following the brutal murder of Shepherd, who was lured from a downtown bar, tied to a fence, and savagely beaten to death by a pair of men who confessed to killing the friendly political science major because he was gay.

In The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, running for two more weekends at Napa Valley College, the lingering shame of an entire community, ten years after the fact, has defined and transformed the town of Laramie, in ways both expected and wholly surprising. In Laramie, many townsfolk are desperate to simply forget what happened, angry at the fresh attention brought with every anniversary of the murder. Others have been changed forever by those events, dedicating themselves in various ways to keeping Shepherd’s story alive - whether some folks want it that way or not.

Elegantly and sensitively directed by Jennifer King, the production boasts a remarkably strong cast of experienced and student actors. Ten Years Later revisits many of the characters from the first, who bring us up to speed on what they’ve been doing for ten years. In what is easily one of the most gripping and intense exchanges I’ve seen on stage all year, one of the theater members visits murderer Aaron McKinney, in prison, in hopes of locating a glimmer of remorse. The conversation goes somewhere else entirely, and the result is unforgettable.

The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later is an amazing piece of documentary theater, a raw, mesmerizing, deeply moving and lyrical patchwork, delving into the heart of America, revealing a torrent of revelation, denial, sadness, rage, and heartbreak.

In San Francisco, presented by American Conservatory Theater, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart is doing something similarly powerful and heartbreaking. Now thirty-plus years after the first diagnoses, AIDS has killed millions all over the world. Kramer’s alternately chilling and deeply-affecting drama was written just a few years into the epidemic, as a group of gay friends battle indifference, fear and each other to gain attention for a disease society tried desperately to ignore. Gorgeously acted and powerfully staged, the play uses statistics and death toll numbers like poetry, vividly capturing a moment in time when the world changed forever, examining the choices that steered the course of a plague that continues to this day.

‘The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later’’ runs through Oct. 7 at Napa Valley College Performing Arts Center. Visit Napavalleytheater.org. The Normal Heart runs through October 7 at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater in San Francisco. Visit act-sf.org.

September 19, 2012 - Theater & Politics

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:27:05 -0700

Here we are. It’s the middle of September, Election Day is just seven weeks away, and the political pot is starting to boil all around us. From the signs declaring candidates’ names and pleas to vote yes or no on various propositions, to the slickly unnerving commercials on radio and television, the social and economic condition of our county, our state, our country and the future of the world are being hotly debated. Of course, artists are as concerned with such matters every bit as much as politicians. From the beginning of human civilization, art has been one way that people examine the condition of the world, alternately identifying those elements that are delightful and life affirming, and those elements that are infuriating, aggravating and depressing.

Theater, too, has many flavors, and political theater is alive and well in Sonoma County, from plays that overtly tackle issues of immigration and unfair wage structures, to shows that sneak social issues into the mix along with humor, pathos, and even a little music.

Next month, Sonoma State University launches WATERWORKS, a season-long look at the way business, politics, human need and human greed affect the way we use, control and think about water. First up, running October 3-14, it’s Mac Wellman’s site-specific comedy, Bad Penny, which looks at some of the powerful mythological images of water that have always underscored our relationship to Oceans, rivers, lakes and streams. Information can be found at Sonoma.edu/waterworks.

Also in October, at Santa Rosa Junior College, issues of race, racism, and the need to express oneself in artful ways collide in the 1956 comedy-drama ‘Trouble in Mind,’ by Alice Childress. Running October 5 through 14, the play takes a backstage look at African-American actors struggling with the way society pigeonholes them, especially on the Broadway stages of the 1950s. Find out more at santarosa.edu/theatrearts.

Already running at The Imaginists Theater Collective, in downtown Santa Rosa, is a timely restaging of Clifford Odets incendiary 1935 drama ‘Waiting for Lefty,’ which examines the economic and deeply personal impact of a possible New York City taxi driver’s strike. Performed by a multicultural ensemble with plenty of passion, in a rough-and-tumble style that intentionally emphasizes energy, realism and spontaneity over audibility and vocal clarity, the flash-back-filled tale is a palpably angry examination of what happens when the profits of business are prized over the needs of the people - workers and consumers - upon whom those businesses depend. The play has just three performances left, this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Details available at theimaginists.org.

Finally, opening this weekend at Cinnabar Theater in Petaluma, its Italian playwright Dario Fo’s comedically outrageous political parable, ‘We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay,’ with a title that pretty much says it all - twice. When a pair of pushed-to-the-limits housewives take part in a massive act of social protest, stealing groceries as a statement against the high cost of staying alive, a series of escalating misunderstandings take place, mixed together with Fo’s conspicuously Marxist philosophical musings. Visit cinnabartheater.org.

Just a sample of the kind of thoughtful, open-hearted, mind-expanding theater that is always happening somewhere in Sonoma County, available to those theatergoers hungry enough to step outside their comfort zone, and beyond the limits of their own tastes and preferences, and go looking for it.

September 12, 2012 - "The Great American Trailer Park Musical"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 5 Sep 2012 13:29:46 -0700

It’s no surprise that something called "The Great American Trailer Park Musical" is going to going be at least a little bit in poor taste, that it might tend to exult in its own low-rent trashiness. Directed by Barry Martin, running through September 30 in the Studio at the 6th Street Playhouse, The Great American Trailer Park Musical is definitely in poor taste, deliriously so, from the Greek chorus of beer-guzzling sirens who act as singing, dancing narrators to the strippers, toll collectors, agoraphobics and magic-marker-sniffers who make up the rest of the cast of characters. Written by Betsy Kelso, with music and lyrics by David Nehls, the decidedly-PG-rated endeavor drops enough F-bombs and gut-busting trailer trash clichés to fill a cart at the 99-cent store.

This is one funny show, cleverly staged in the studio’s intimate space, which has been neatly transformed into a the Armadillo Acres Trailer Park, with a live band perched way up above the stage overlooking the action, which clips along like a fist-fight at a Nascar race. Norbert, played with redneck charm by Craig Miller, just wants his wife Jeanie - a first-rate job by Julianne Lorgenzen - to take a step out of their trailer, where she’s been cooped up since their baby was kidnapped 20 years ago. Things heat up, in more ways then one, with the arrival of stripper-on-the-lam Pippi, played with energy and plenty of heart by Taylor Bertolucci.

In fact, beneath the jokes about light beer, the ice capades and conjugal visits to guys on death row, this play is all heart, as the tragic triangle of Norbert, Jeanie, and Pippi all reach deep to discover who they really are and want to be, aided by a score that combines laugh-out-loud lyrics with genuinely heart-felt longing.

As the gossipy local girls Betty, Lin and Pickles, Daniella Innocenti Beem, Shannon Rider, and Alise Girard are magnificent, playing their specific stereotype with all it is worth, still managing to keep each character just grounded enough to inspire sympathy and affection. As Duke, Pippi’s psychotic ex-boyfriend, Mark Bradbury transforms himself into a character so over the top he becomes almost unrecognizable from the other characters he plays hit jaw-dropping commitment and energy.

At its core, The Great American Trailer Park Musical is a story of family, of people running from one or looking for one, and finding it in a community that might not be particularly classy, but has somehow figured out how to see the best in everybody, no matter how they live their lives, who they love, or what kind of house they choose to live in.

The Great American Trailer Park Musical runs through September 30 at the 6th street playhouse, in Santa Rosa.

http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

August 29, 2012 - "The Liar"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:50:05 -0700

There are few things more lovely, more sweet or sublime than a well-crafted, musical, perfectly penned . . . um, rhyme.

In a poem or song or couplet, or in a play, when the words begin to ring with a pleasing twin similarity, its strangely satisfying to the ear. On the other hand, when a rhyme is forced, or tortured, and strained or . . . just plain bad, well that’s a situation guaranteed to cause an allergic . . . itchuation.

Of course, when such auditory abominations occur on purpose, and everyone is in one the joke, the result is often less nefarious that it is hilarious, or at least funny, as in The Wizard of Oz, when The Cowardly Lion is asked what he’d do to a rampaging elephant, and he says, “I’ll wrap him up in cellephant,” or in the poet Ogden Nash’s remark on the questionable Australian edibility of kangaroos:

“Those with cookbooks as well as boomerangs,
Prefer him in tasty kangaroomeringues.”

Kangaroo meringues.

Ouch, and . . . yeah!

Such rhymes are so wrong they are somehow right. Now, imagine an entire play built out of such stuff.

In David Ives ‘The Liar,’ the celebrated playwright unleashes an outrageous exercise in rhyme-busting verbal perversion—taking his poetic license and folding into auditory origami, constructing one of the wackiest and giddiest comedies in recent memory, fueled by the sheer delight in messing with the English language in increasingly inventive ways.

Running through September at San Rafael’s Forest Meadows Amphitheater, a presentation of the Marin Shakespeare Company, The Liar is a smart comedy about stupid people. Ives has loosely adapted his script from Pierre Corneille’s 1644 play Le Menteur, a 368-year-old text written entirely in rhyming couplets.

Ives maintains the basic plot of the story, and uses the rhyming structure as an excuse to pair the words “Louvre” - the Paris museum - and “Move-re,” “Isabelle” and “visa-belle,” even offering the elastic observation, “You cannot speak the truth / to Christian, Muslim, Hindu or . . . Jew-th.”

Director Robert Currier brings plenty of comic sass to the play, which follows the romantic antics of a compulsive liar named Dorante, played with tongue-tickled glee by Darren Bridgett. The dashing Dorante has come to town in search of a wealthy woman to marry. Every chance he gets, Dorante tells lies, making up a false history, spinning a wild web of fabrications, each one more outrageous than the last. Unflappable, he tells new lies to explain his old ones, somehow always managing to keep ahead of everyone . . . until he doesn’t.

And that’s just the beginning.

When Dorante encounters the vivacious Clarice and her lovely-but-reserved gal pal Lucrece, the rhyming names somehow confuse him. Though he is Instantly smitten with Clarece, and unimpressed with the silent Lucrece, whom he nicknames “the clam”, Dorante somehow gets their names mixed up . . . leading to layer upon layer of misunderstanding and disaster and, of course, more lies and then, more rhymes.

The cast is first-rate, sinking its collective teeth into Ives outrageous and ridiculous wordplay with a joy matched only by the script itself. The story is frequently confusing and the plot jumps make less sense than one might hope, but then, the plot is not the point of The Liar.

Late in the show, Dorante tells Lucrece, the silent-one with whom he suddenly falls in love, “You may be a bivalve . . . but you’re my valve.” The point of The Liar is solely to give David Ives the opportunity to write lines like that one.

‘The Liar’ runs Fridays - Sundays through September 23, at Forest Meadows Amphitheatre on the Dominican University campus in San Rafael. Visit www.marinshakespeare.org for all the information.

August 22, 2012 - 110 In the Shade

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 13:22:32 -0700

In the long-forgotten 1964 musical 110 In The Shade, all anybody wants is rain - literal and metaphorical. The tiny town of Three Point, a tight-knit community of farmers, ranchers and other decent folk, has been suffering through a long heat wave. And for Lizzie, the lonely dreamer whose future seems to offer nothing but a life of caring for her father and two cowboy brothers, her own romantic dry-spell looks unlikely to end anytime soon either.

Lizzie isn't looking for much, either, just a good plain man who loves her for who she is. Even that may be unrealistic, according to her loving but unsentimental family, who worry that Lizzie’s plain looks and outspoken demeanor will turn away the local Sheriff, File, who may be the last available single man in town.

Now running at Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater, under the direction of Elly Lichenstein, with musical direction by Mary Chun, 110 In the Shade is one of those old-fashioned musicals that really does seem old. The datedness of the material, with songs featuring Lizzie fretting over becoming an Old Maid, musical numbers built around the womenfolk’s eagerness to feed and pamper all the hardworking hungry men, the play’s un-ironic embrace of pre-feminist American life does seem a bit crusty and dusty around the edges. Still, the 50-year-old artifact of a bygone era has been given a warm and affectionate staging at Cinnabar, making a pleasant experience out of what is, ultimately, a pretty weak script.

Based on Richard Nash’s celebrated 1954 play The Rainmaker, 110 In the Shade was created by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the duo behind the far more tuneful show, The Fantasticks. With a book by Nash, adapting his own script, One-Hundred-And-Ten was a modest hit when it first appeared, running more than a year on Broadway, but the show quickly faded away. Not until 2007, when a major, Tony-nominated Broadway revival popped the show back into public awareness, did the show gain much attention. Over the last five years, though, it’s become increasingly popular among community theater companies, schools, and fans of Broadway’s theatrical back catalog.

And now . . . it comes to Petaluma.

The story, stretched out a bit to include Jone and Schmidt’s songs, follows the same plot as The Rainmaker. In the midst of a stultifying heat wave, a silver-tongued con man named Starbuck appears in town, promising that for one-hundred-dollars, he will make it rain . . . within 24-hours. Played with a gleeful sense of sleezeball-charm and a lightning-bolt-charge of self-confidence by Tim Kniffin, Starbuck quickly captures the imaginations of everyone in town. Everyone, that is, but Lizzie, and her skeptical brother Noah. Lizzie, played well by opera singer Kelly Britt, eventually warms to Starbuck’s wily charms, especially when he sets out to convince Lizzie that she is far more beautiful and desirable than she, or anyone else, has seen. Before Starbuck’s 24-hours-are up, Lizzie will undergo a profound personal awakening that takes everyone - her father, brothers, and especially herself - by surprise.

But it takes a long time to get there.

Jones and Schmidt’s songs are pretty, but instantly forgettable, disappearing from memory as fast as a drop of water on a frying pan. Still, there are marvelous moments here, including Starbuck’s big sales-pitch number, well staged by Lichenstein, through to Lizzie’s spectacular, beautifully acted second-act moment of self-discovery. As Lizzie finally begins to see her own inner worth and beauty, Britt actually transforms before our eyes, somehow glowing with delighted confidence and power.

It’s a spectacular moment.

The story may be thin, the ideas might be a bit creaky and old, the songs may not be very memorable, but that one charming and magical transformation might be impossible to forget.

‘110 in the Shade’ runs through September 2 at Cinnabar Theater.

Visit www.cinnabartheater.org

August 15, 2012 - Pinky.

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:44:02 -0700

Guest critic Mark Fuller reviews David Templeton's "Pinky."

August 15, 2012 - Circle Mirror Transformation

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:12:01 -0700

Goulash Goulash Goulash! Mock Mock, Mock mock. Mock Mock. Goulash Goulash.

There’s an acting exercise, a classic, in which student actors have a conversation using only nonsense words, but try to transcend the limits of the words and find some real honest emotion in the conversation anyway. It sounds ridiculous, but it can be an effective way to dig deep into the underlying emotions of a scene and train yourself to not let the words carry the moment.

That beneath whatever passes for the script, the heart of the play is the connection between the actors on stage.

In Annie Baker’s 2009 play, ‘Circle Mirror Transformation,’ a small group of acting students stumble through a series of silly-sounding exercises, gathered in a classroom studio at a Vermont community center, and end up unearthing emotional connections that none of them expected or hoped for, making tiny self-discoveries, falling and out of love, and identifying strengths and weakness, doing some of that while saying things like Goulash Goulash Mock Mock Mock.

The play is running until August 27 at the Marin Theater Company in Mill Valley. Circle Mirror Transformation—the name of one of the acting exercises the characters engage in—is an odd play, performed straight through for two hours with no intermission.

Directed by Kip Fagan with a strong sense of pace and an appreciation for how to use lengthy silence, the play is a series of short scenes, some less than a minute, linked together by elegantly sound-filled blackouts.

Silence is one of the things Annie Baker is known for, as is a style of writing that strives for a kind of naturalism and believability not often seen in the theater. Baker is not interested in writing the kind of plays everyone else is writing.

In Circle Mirror Transformation Baker’s best instincts and most frustrating quirks all collide. She ignores conventions, which can be frustrating and confusing, while still packing in plenty of tiny little pleasures: rich, recognizable characters, complexly layered dialogue, big laughs that come linked-together with gasps of discomfort and dread—all of it wrapped up in a package aggressively designed to feel real.

The cast is made of MTC veterans, some of the best actors in the Bay Area, which is good because this is very challenging material for any actor, and the entire cast repeatedly finds brilliant ways through it all. When not lying on the carpet counting to ten, sitting in a circle passing funny facial expressions from person to person, or posing other students into tableaux resembling their most painful memories, the students all try, desperately, clumsily, to makes sense of it all.

That goes for the audience, it takes far too long to figure out who these people are and how they relate to each other, which is a major fault. And those “transformations” which eventually do take place among these motley characters are infinitesimal, by most dramatic standards.

Of course, life seldom follows the rules. Life, like each of Marty’s exercises, rarely makes much sense. That’s part of the reality that Baker is showing us in her flawed-but-fascinating, achingly odd Mirror.

‘Circle Mirror Transformation’ runs Tuesday-Sunday through August 26 at Marin Theatre Company. Visit www.marintheatre.org

August 8, 2012 - Unsung Heroes

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 8 Aug 2012 17:08:12 -0700

Do you ever read the program notes when you go to the theater? Those extra pages inside the program that offer an explanation from the director, maybe a list of names of people doing things with the word 'Design' attached them, perhaps a short essay from the resident dramaturge . . . if you happen to be attending a theater that has a dramaturg.

If so, you might have asked yourself . . . who are these people, and what exactly do they have to do with the show I'm about to see?

And what the heck is a dramaturg?

A dramaturg, such as the brilliant Margot Melcon at the Marin Theater Company, is a person within a theatre company who deals mainly with historical and literary research, maintaining the accuracy of a company's productions, and often helping to develop translations or adaptations of plays and/or operas, and often writing notes for the program.

It's just one of many things people do in the theater that few theatergoers actually understand or know much about.

Aside from the obvious--the playwright, the director--many of the job titles listed in your average theater program are a little mysterious, their assignments either vague, confusing or merely peripheral. Most of these folks never get a mention outside the program notes, rarely if ever, getting their names dropped in the reviews, if there are reviews.

I admit it.

In my reviews, I seldom mention the set designers--like David Lear, David Wright, Wayne Hovey, Paul Gilger, or Eddie Hanson--or the light designers--such as April George, Theo Brigant, John Connole, and Tony Ginesi, who, by the way, also designs sets like nobody's business--though I do mention such folks on occasion, when I feel that I have the space to do so. My excuse is that, in a review, I usually have very few words to describe the show and give the necessary information, and the opportunity to describe the efforts of the costume designer and the fight choreographer is a luxury I seldom am given. So I usually focus on the elements I assume most people want to know about, and the poor unsung heroes of the stage community are left unsung.

That's a shame, really, because without the hardworking folks who do all of those mysterious things, there would BE no local theater.

This includes, of course, local stage managers like Paulette Ryker-Staker, Emily Smith, Lori Hercs, Patrick Taber, and many others, who assist the director during the rehearsal process, reminding the actors of their lines when called upon, and then essentially running the show once it has opened to the public. During a show, the Stage Manager does everything from opening and closing the theater, to sweeping the stage, to informing the actors when it's time to take places, to sitting in the booth pushing buttons to make the lights come on and the music play and the projections project. On occasion, there is an Assistant Stage manager, who takes some of these responsibilities themselves.

Even those positions which seem to be obvious, such as the set designer, often include responsibilities most people don't know about, such as model making. Yep, few set designers don't build a small model of the set first just to see how the thing actually will function. And any mention of Light Designers really should include the fact that light designers spend a great deal of their time climbing up and down ladders, hanging heavy metal objects high above the set.

These folks really are the heroes of local theater, doing jobs that aren't that glamorous, perhaps, but absolutely necessary, and are often carried out with as much passion and creativity and love for theater as anyone you might see reciting lines on stage.

So next time you read through your program, make sure to read their names and give a silent thank you for their efforts.

Without them, the show you're about to watch would be a lot less special.

August 1, 2012 - Matinee

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 2 Aug 2012 10:48:59 -0700

Last Sunday afternoon, just one or two adrenalized minutes before the hour of 2:00, I stood backstage at the Studio at 6th Street Playhouse, peering through the curtain as an assemblage of theater patrons found their way to their seats for a matinee performance of my romantic comedy ‘Pinky,’ and I found myself suddenly wondering exactly how the afternoon matinee came to be such a concrete foundation of the theatrical arts.

We all know what a matinee is. It’s an afternoon performance.

But where did it come from? And why do different theaters hold their matinees at different times.

At the 6th Street Playhouse, the 2:00 matinee has been pretty much the set in stone, in part because it serves the needs of those subscribers, often senior citizens, who prefer to be home well in time for dinner after the show. The same goes for Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater, where the company is about to open a three-week run of ‘110 in the Shade,’ a musical adaptation of the classic Richard Nash play The Rainmaker, created by the same team that gave us The Fantastiks.

At the Pegasus Theater, out at the Rio Nido Lodge in Rio Nido - where the company is currently staging Colette Freedman’s edgy and entertaining dark comedy Sister Cities - the 4:00 Sunday matinee has been the norm for the last couple of years, serving those folks who prefer to take the scenically stunning drive out to the river, and back again, by the still gleaming light of day.

The 4:00 matinee is always the tradition at the outdoor Marin Shakespeare Company shows, where all performances take place out under the stars at San Rafael’s Forest Meadows Amphitheater. While most of MSC’s shows begin at 8:00, even on Sunday evenings, patrons eager to see this year’s Hawaii-themed A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, or the rarely staged history King John can also choose to see the show in the light of the afternoon sun.

But that’s not the end of it.

Some theater companies stretch the meaning of the afternoon matinee to the very edge of its definition.

At Main Stage West, in Sebastopol, where William Goldman’s ‘The Lion in Winter’ opens a three-week run this weekend, after a buzz-building run in Rohnert park in July, Sunday matinees always take place . . . at 5:00! The same is true for Rohnert Park’s Narrow Way Stage Company, where next month a run of the classic comedy ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ will include Sunday matinees at 5 pm.

So . . . what does that word matinee actually mean?

Matinee is a French term, derived from word matin, meaning . . . morning, which comes from the Latin word matutinus, meaning “of the morning,” springing from the Roman name, Matuta, the goddess of the dawn.

Wait a second. If the word Matinee actually comes from the word morning, then how come it now refers to something that almost always happens in the afternoon?

The answer is simple.

When theater first began, ages and ages ago, there were was no electricity, so for theater to be effective, it was almost always staged outdoors during the daylight . . . in the afternoon. When there was ‘cause to stage a show earlier than that, the first matinees were staged . . . in the morning.

Eventually, the word was generalized to mean merely, any earlier-than-usual performance of a show.

So there you are.

The next time you decide to see a play in the afternoon, you’ll know what Matinee means, as you arrive early to take in the show, and that it doesn’t matter whether your matinee is at 2, 3, 4 or five.

The only thing that matters is that you not be late.

July 25, 2012 - King John

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 19:38:14 -0700

Marin Shakespeare Company presents: King John

Through August 12th
Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University, San Rafael

Shakespeare's play KING JOHN was hugely popular during his lifetime. It was also the subject of the first film ever based on a Shakespeare play ; a two-minute 1899 silent film in black and white shows Herbert Beerbohm Tree enacting King John's death scene.

One of the reasons the play was so popular is that in it Shakespeare romanticizes King John, showing him as savvy politician reluctant to cause harm to his nephew Prince Arthur, whose claim to the English throne was stronger than was John's.

In reality, John was a disastrous ruler with a reputation for violent rages, few military successes, and a history of increasing taxes on the populace. His disagreement with the pope over who should be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury led to his excommunication, which made all marriages and christenings in England unlawful, a spiritual penalty which the English people abhorred. John's abuses of power were so vast that he was eventually forced to sign the Magna Carta, which guaranteed basic rights to his subjects and the king's acceptance that he could not exercise his will arbitrarily.

When John later tried to ignore the Magna Carta, he initiated a civil war during which he contracted dysentery, lost his treasure while trying to cross a rising river, and died while in flight. That Shakespeare was able to portray John as a smart politician, full of morality, with a legitimate claim to the crown, showed the Plantagenets in an exalted heroic light. The play is a gloriously rousing story of English patriotism. It it full of humor, wisdom, and dramatic excitement. We are thrilled to bring this little performed play to the Forest Meadows stage this summer.

Box Office and Information: 415/499-4488
Ticket information online: http://www.marinshakespeare.org/pages/ticketorder.php

Marin Shakespeare Company - San Rafael, CA 94913
Phone:
- Management (415) 499-4485
- Education (415) 499-4487
- Box Office (415) 499-4488
E-mail: management@marinShakespeare.org
http://www.marinshakespeare.org

July 18, 2012 - Peaseblossom

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:54:06 -0700

Peaseblossom

by Patrick Devon

Presented by Main Stage West
and
The Sebastopol Shakespeare Festival

Preview July 12 @ 7pm; Shows July 13-15, 19-22, 26-28 @ 7pm. Tickets $20 General; $15 Students/Under 30; Free for children 12 and under!

Shows held at Ives Park, located on South High and Willow Streets in Sebastopol.

Peaseblossom is a farce based on Shakespeare’s most beloved comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The quarreling royal fairies is a favorite subplot of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, but what really happened between the scenes with the fairies? This year the Sebastopol Shakespeare Festival is going to show you just that story. Peaseblossom and his friends, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed are going to figure out hilarious ways to solve their, and our, dilemma.

Starring a combination of actors and dancers from Sonoma County and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Mary Gannon Graham, Paul Huberty, Lauryn Hochberg, Allison Rae Baker, Eric Thompson, David Yen, Bronwen Shears, Brenda Reed, Chris Sword , Peter Warden, Braedyn Youngberg and many more. This play was written by OSF playwright Patrick Devon and workshopped by actors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Please join us for a picnic!

More information:
Main Stage West - 104 N. Main St., Sebastopol CA 95472
Phone: 707-823-0177
http://www.mainstagewest.com/peaseblossom/

July 11, 2012 - Summer Repertory Theater 2012

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 17:36:18 -0700

Summer Repertory Theater 2012 Season @ SRJC

Avenue Q and Xanadu
___________________

AVENUE Q - through August 11
Burbank Auditorium - Santa Rosa Junior College Campus

Winner of the Tony "Triple Crown" for Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book, AVENUE Q is part flesh, part felt and packed with heart. AVENUE Q is a laugh-out-loud musical that tells the story of a recent college grad named Princeton who moves into a shabby New York apartment all the way out on Avenue Q. There, he meets Kate (the girl next door), Rod (the Republican), Trekkie (the internet sexpert), Lucy the Slut (need we say more?), and other colorful types who help Princeton finally discover his purpose in life!

While, many characters are portrayed by puppets in the style of Sesame Street, this show is not for children: mature audiences only.

_______________________________________________

XANADU - through August 5
Burbank Auditorium - Santa Rosa Junior College Campus

XANADU follows the journey of a magical and beautiful Greek muse, Kira, who descends from the heavens of Mt. Olympus to Venice Beach, California in 1980 on a quest to inspire a struggling artist, Sonny, to achieve the greatest artistic creation of all time — the first ROLLER DISCO! (Hey, it's 1980!) This hilarious, roller skating, musical adventure about following your dreams despite the limitations others set for you, rolls along to the original hit score composed by pop-rock legend Electric Light Orchestra and includes, "Magic", "All Over The World", "Suddenly", "I'm Alive", "Evil Woman", and "Have You Never Been Mellow" to name a few.

For dates and times, information here: http://www.summerrep.com/calendar.html

Ticket information: http://www.summerrep.com/ticket.html
Box Office: 707-527-4343

Summer Repertory Theatre - Burbank Auditorium
1501 Mendocino Avenue - Santa Rosa, CA 95401
http://www.summerrep.com
Directions and map: http://www.summerrep.com/contact.html

July 4, 2012 - More Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2012

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Mon, 9 Jul 2012 13:07:21 -0700

Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Madea/Macbeth/Cinderella; The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa

Madea/Macbeth/Cinderella
Through November 3 - Angus Bowmer Theater

The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa
Through October 13th - Elizabethan Stage/Allan Pavillion

OSF’s 2012 season runs through November 4, offering 790 performances of 11 productions.

Tickets remain available to previews and most opening performances. Patrons can save 40 percent on preview tickets. Please check ticket availability online or call the Box Office at 541-482-4331 or 800-219-8161. This season all “C” tickets are $ 21 for all performances.

An Important Note about Matinees, Parking and Access
Matinees will begin at 1:30 p.m. through the entire season. The city-owned parking facility next to the New Theatre is available for parking. Cost of parking is $1.00 during the day and $3.00 at night. For a map of the campus and directions, please visit our website.

More information at http://www.osfashland.org

June 27, 2012 - The Producers

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 18:40:58 -0700

Here's to Failure!
Sixth Street's 'The Producers' full of joyous energy

Mel Brooks' The Producers has had quite a ride, evolving from cult classic 1968 film to 2001 Broadway monster to its current status as a popular community theater staple. Not bad, given that the show's primary selling point is tastelessness. This is a show that combines show-stopping musical numbers with fraud, lechery, geriatric sex, dancing Nazis, spinning swastikas and a super-swishy gay Hitler.

Of course, modern American musical theater is all about pushing the boundaries while simultaneously serving audiences who want good singable songs and great big laughs. In the new season-closing production at Sixth Street Playhouse, director Craig Miller walks that line, maintaining just enough Brooksian tastelessness to please fans of big, broad comedy, while using the somewhat overstuffed enterprise as a showcase for a spectrum of local talent, young and old.

The story is essentially the same as in the movie. Unscrupulous Broadway producer Max Bialystock (a strong-voiced Matlock Zumsteg, best known for his local improv troupe the World's Biggest Comedy Duo) teams up with neurotic bookkeeper Bloom (Jeff Coté, who struggles a bit with the songs but delivers plenty of farce).

Convinced that they can make more money from a flop than a hit, they set out to produce the worst play they can find, settling on a script titled Springtime for Hitler, a loony labor of love by a closeted Nazi pigeon-keeper named Franz Liebkind (a hilariously committed Mark Bradbury). Then there's the flamboyantly untalented director Roger De Bris (Larry Williams, charmingly offensive as the gayest of gay stereotypes), and the sexy wannabe actress Ulla, played to the bombshell max by April Krautner.

Crammed with theatrical inside-jokes ("I'm the man who invented theater-in-the-square! Nobody gets a good seat!"), the show is a bit overlong, with the actors milking the spaces between lines a bit too often, and the orchestra (under the spirited direction of Janis Dunson Wilson) hitting more than its share of key-challenged notes.

But it's the joyously naughty energy of the large cast that makes the whole thing work. A bit of tightening would serve the show well, but as The Producers moves into the last three weekends of its five-week run, there's no denying that it proves, once and for all, that sometimes bad taste can be a good thing.

'The Producers' runs Thursday–Sunday through July 15 at Sixth Street Playhouse. 52 W. Sixth St., Santa Rosa. 8pm Thursday–Saturday, 2pm Sundays, with additional Saturday matinees on June 30, July 7 and July 14. $15–$35. 707.523.4185.

June 20, 2012 - The Oregon Shakespeare Festival

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:47:24 -0700

Tony Award–winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2012 season is underway.

Shakespeare offerings include Henry V, directed by Joseph Haj, and As You Like It, directed by Jessica Thebus on the outdoor Elizabethan Stage.

Henry V: The spoils of war
A gifted young English king makes a rash decision to go to war. Against overwhelming odds, Henry V achieves heroic stature, leading his country to victory, conquering France and winning its princess. But the king’s hands are dirty. There’s a terrible cost in human life and ruthless acts of moral ambiguity. In a propulsive, provocative production with contemporary resonances, Shakespeare’s rousing history crowns Henry’s complicated three-play journey from disaffected prince to legendary king.

Age recommendation: best suited for students 12 and up who can handle the violence and have some preparation for the political intricacies of the story.

As You Like It: Can one desire too much of a good thing?
When your life is at risk and you flee court to find refuge in the woods, it’s good to have a clown along. Stepping into the magical Forest of Arden with the philosophical fool Touchstone and her cousin Celia, Rosalind disguises herself as a young man and takes a walk into self-discovery. In this brave new world, she finds other court exiles—and the man she loves! Falling in love and learning who you are by acting the part are at the heart of this sumptuous, Victorian fantasy production in which romantic playfulness builds to a woodland wedding extravaganza.

Age recommendation: the plots are many and the language often complex, and therefore this delightful comedy will be best enjoyed by students 10 and up.

OSF’s 2012 season runs through November 4, offering 790 performances of 11 productions.

Tickets remain available to previews and most opening performances. Patrons can save 40 percent on preview tickets. Please check ticket availability online or call the Box Office at 541-482-4331 or 800-219-8161. This season all “C” tickets are $ 21 for all performances.

An Important Note about Matinees, Parking and Access Matinees will begin at 1:30 p.m. through the entire season. The city-owned parking facility next to the New Theatre is available for parking. Cost of parking is $1.00 during the day and $3.00 at night. For a map of the campus and directions, please visit our website.

More information at http://www.osfashland.org

June 13, 2012 - The Tony Awards - Is Theatre Still Important?

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 16:57:33 -0700

The Tony Awards - is theatre still important?

June 6, 2012 - "God of Carnage" / "Night of the Iguana"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 6 Jun 2012 14:31:02 -0700

Marin Theatre Company presents "God of Carnage"

Through June 24th

Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning comedy God of Carnage certainly has its fans. But then so does the sport of Australian dwarf-tossing.

As evidenced by the erratically orchestrated production running now at Marin Theatre Company, Reza's jumpy tale certainly shows potential for farcical exploration of the human condition. A recent production in San Jose focused on moments of slapstick and over-the-top performances, which matched the story's edge-of-believability twists and hairpin turns of character development.

At MTC, director Ryan Rilette - one of the Bay Area's boldest and best directors - takes a risk in paring the comedy back, presumably in order to expose the sharp edges of Reza's caustic social commentary. All it ends up exposing, though, is the weakness in Reza's too obvious writing (or, to be fair, perhaps the oversimplicity of the English translation by Christopher Hampton). It's like taking Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, toning down the slapstick and using it to present a hard-hitting view of racism and alcoholism in the Old West. Without Brooks' humor turned up to maximum, all you'd be left with is a sloppy story with unconvincing characters.

In Carnage, two middle-aged New York couples - the Novaks (Stacy Ross and Remi Sandri) and the Raleighs (Rachel Harker and Warren David Keith) meet to discuss the recent playground fight between the couples' 11-year-old sons. At the Novaks' pristine apartment, furnished metaphorically with a wall of tribal masks above a low bookshelf of literary tomes, the foursome begin well-intentioned enough but quickly devolve into grotesquely base and uncivilized behavior.

To his credit, Rilette keeps things clipping along; the play runs just under 90 minutes, with no intermission. And yet its all-around unpleasantness makes it feel much longer. By suppressing what few opportunities for laughs exist in the play, Rilette leaves his actors, and the audience, with little to do but wait for the ugly evening to end.

'God of Carnage' runs Tuesday–Sunday through June 24
Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, CA.
Showtimes vary.
Tickets: $ 34 – $ 55.
Phone: 415.388.5208
www.marintheatre.org
________________________________

Ross Valley Players presents: "Night of the Iguana"

In the exotic world of the Mexican coastal jungle, Tennessee Williams has given us an equally exotic collection of characters in search of redemption. Shannon had been an Episcopalian clergyman, but has fallen from the grace of the church and has been employed as a tour guide by a second-rate Mexican travel agency.

He has abandoned a bus full of American Baptist women and sought refuge in a cheap hotel near the coast. The hotel is run by Maxine, a fading recent widow who still holds large appetites for a man in her life.

New arrivals there are Hannah, a younger artist who tries to make a living selling her paintings; and Nonno, her grandfather who is also a poet. And tied to a post in the yard is a captured iguana – like the others seemingly at the end of his rope. Williams mixes these characters into a steamy, passionate and dramatic search for redemption that is counted among his very best plays.

Performances: Through June 17th
Tickets: $ 17.00 online - https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/238488
Box office phone: (415) 456-9555 ext 1
Box office email: boxoffice@rossvalleyplayers.com

Ross Valley Players
30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. - Ross, CA 94957
Phone: (415) 456-9555 ext. 3
http://rossvalleyplayers.com

May 30, 2012 - Fool For Love

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:47:42 -0700

"Fool For Love" - A Co-production of Main Stage West & Imaginists Theatres

Through June 3rd @ Main Stage West - Sebastopol
June 6th through 17th @ Imaginists Theater - Santa Rosa

"There isn't a movie in this town that can top the story I'm gonna tell."

So boasts the Tequila-swilling rodeo stuntman Eddie (Brent Lindsay), deftly derailing the intended movie date of his ex-lover May (Amy Pinto) and her gently baffled would-be boyfriend, Martin (Keith Baker), in Sam Shepard's disturbing, off-kilter 1984 drama Fool for Love.

Running through June 3 at Main Stage West in Sebastopol and immediately moving to Santa Rosa's Imaginists Theatre Collective for two more weeks, the award-winning play is typical Shepard, in that it carries his own particular mythical and mystical view of the American West. It also comes with its own set of challenges to anyone brave enough to mount the show.

Instead of the dozens and dozens of toasters required for his fraternal opus True West, or the headless deer carcass demanded by A Lie of the Mind, Shepard merely calls upon the producers of Fool for Love to put microphones in the walls of the motel room set, amplifying the sound of every angry door slam, every violent bash and crash of actors into the ever-reverberating walls.

Kudos to director Beth Craven, set designer David Lear and sound designer Doug Faxon for pulling it all off, along with one or two other tricky bits of Shepardian stagecraft (exploding horse trailer, anyone?).

The "story" at the heart of the play, the one Eddy begins to tell about halfway through the relentless 85-minute one act, may not even be true, but it's a whopper. Prompted and provoked by the ghostly, rocking-chair-bound old man (John Craven), Eddy begins to describe the rocky roots of his on-again, off-again romance with May, who eventually picks up the story, adding a few details that even the dead guy in the rocking chair didn't know.

One doesn't really "enjoy" a play like Fool for Love so much as one surrenders, eventually, to its eerie, mesmerizing intensity. Shepard's tale of damaged lovers, sons, daughters and parents veers in and out of some truly outrageous, occasionally uncomfortable material. And yet, somehow, the play is frequently funny, a testament to the superb acting of its entire cast. Though defying typical theatrical plot structures, Fool for Love works as a kind of extreme acting exercise, a tightrope act of commitment and dramatic honesty, demanding a great deal from its audience - but even more from its performers.

Main Stage West - 104 N. Main St. - Sebastopol, CA.
Phone: (707) 823-0177
- Tickets - Reserved seats:$ 25 Gen.; $ 20 Seniors and Under 30
- “Pay what you will at the door” (limited number of tickets set aside)
- Purchase tickets online: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/240344

The Imaginists Theatre Collective
461 Sebastopol Avenue, Santa Rosa, California 95401
Phone: (707) 528-7554

Purchase tickets online: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/185214

Pay All You Can Night is June 7, 2012. Tickets for this show available at the door only.

Advance Tickets Prices:
$ 16 - Under 25 and Seniors (62+) with valid ID
$ 18 - Adults

At the Door:
$ 18 - Under 25 and Seniors (62+) with valid ID
$ 20 - Adults

- SEATING: General admission
- Doors open 30 minutes prior to performance
- Please arrive early
- Absolutely NO LATE SEATING
- TICKET RELEASE: Unclaimed reservations will be released 10 minutes prior to the start of the show

May 23, 2012 - Born Yesterday

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:36:22 -0700

Heather Gordon returns as Billie Dawn in 'Born Yesterday'

Cinnabar Theater - May 25 - June 10, 2012

"Billie is probably my favorite character I've ever played," says Santa Rosa–born actress Heather Gordon, describing Billie Dawn, the iconic showgirl-sex-object she portrays in Cinnabar Theater's production of Born Yesterday, the classic 1946 stage comedy by Garson Kanin. "They don't write a lot of great female characters like this anymore," adds Gordon.

From where Gordon sits backstage at Cinnabar, before tonight's rehearsal, the raucous sounds of electric saws and pounding hammers can be heard seeping in from the stage area, where the elaborate multilevel set is being built. All that noise forms a bustling soundtrack to our conversation, as Gordon talks about why she's returned to Sonoma County, taking a break from a busy career as a film and television actress to play a part at a small theater in Petaluma.

"There's just something about Billie that I identify with," says Gordon, who first played the part six years ago at College of Marin and immediately fell in love with the charming but undereducated Billie, longtime mistress of thuggish businessman Brock (played by Gary Grossman). Eager to make an impression in Washington, D.C., Brock calls upon the well-spoken newspaper reporter Paul (Paul Huberty) to give Billie a few lessons in how to behave in educated society, lessons that result in Billie's unexpected rise in consciousness, which eventually challenges everybody's assumptions about who she is, including her own.

"A woman who looks a certain way gets treated a certain way," Gordon observes. "People put labels on her. There's something so innocent and pure about Billie, and yet she's got this fight and this hunger. Her journey is so fun to play."

Gordon, who may identify with Billie yet is anything but undereducated, earned her masters degree at Harvard, where she studied at the American Repertory Theater, afterward journeying to Russia for a stint at the Moscow Art Theater. Gordon next landed an agent, and has been busy working her way upward in Hollywood ever since.

Last year, Gordon was featured in the award-winning independent film Seducing Charlie Barker. She's filmed commercial and television pilots and has made several films, including the upcoming comedy December Dilemma with Sean Astin and Richard Benjamin, and the animated film Skyforce. While in town for Born Yesterday, she's shooting the independent comedy Tony Trans Am.

The last time Gordon appeared onstage in the North Bay was four years ago in Sixth Street Playhouse's production of Robert Reich's political satire Public Exposure. Her co-star in that show was Sheri Lee Miller, who now directs her in Born Yesterday.

"When Sheri reached out to me," Gordon says, "asking me to consider playing this role in this production, it just tugged at my heart, because I love this show so much, and I love her. As much as I enjoy doing on-camera work, there's nothing like theater."

Gordon feels that the experiences she's had over the last several years are giving her plenty of material to draw upon as she returns to the role of Billie Dawn.

"At times, I've felt very much like Billie feels, a fish out of water," she admits. "Living on the East Coast, going to Harvard then to Russia—it was very overwhelming. I'd never lived out of the Bay Area, and suddenly I was thrown into this whole other world. L.A.'s been a cakewalk compared to all of that!

"I've learned some of what Billie learns," she adds. "Life is full of surprises and challenges, but you grow, you adapt, and you learn. You get savvy pretty quick, or you're done. That's what Billie does. She's savvy. She's a survivor. I think we both are."

Tickets: $ 25 General; $ 22 Seniors 65 & Over; $ 15 Age 22 & Under
Purchase tickets online: http://click4tix.com/showdates.php?s_id=CINBORN+1112&rtt=6
More ticket information here: http://www.cinnabartheater.org/1/cinnabar.info.tickets.html

Cinnabar Theater - 3333 Petaluma Blvd. North - Petaluma, CA 94952
Phone 707.763.8920
Email: http://www.cinnabartheater.org/1/cinnabar.info.contact.html

May 16, 2012 - Queen of the Fright: SOUVENIR

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:24:25 -0700

6th Street Playhouse presents: SOUVENIR

May 11th - 27th - Studio Theatre

For more than half a century the name Florence Foster Jenkins has been guaranteed to produce explosions of derisive laughter. Not unreasonably so, as this wealthy society eccentric suffered under the delusion that she was a great coloratura soprano when she was in fact incapable of producing two consecutive notes in tune. Nevertheless, her annual recitals in the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton hotel brought her extraordinary fame. As news of her terrible singing spread, so did her celebrity. Her growing mob of fans packed her recitals, stuffing handkerchiefs in their mouths to stifle their laughter which Mrs. Jenkins blissfully mistook for cheers. The climax of her career was a single concert at Carnegie Hall in 1944. Famously, it sold out in two hours. SOUVENIR, by turn hilarious and poignant, tells her story through the eyes of her accompanist, Cosme McMoon. Faced with her boundless certainty, Cosme comes to revise his attitude, not only towards her singing but to the very meaning of music itself. As the play ends the audience enters her world completely, finding there the beauty she'd heard in her head all along. SOUVENIR is a musical odd-couple for the ages.

Single Ticket Prices:
- Fri & Sat at 8:00, Sun at 2:00: General $ 25 / Senior (62+) $ 20 / Youth (13-21) $ 20
- Thurs at 8:00, Sat at 2:00: General $ 20 / Senior $ 15 / Youth $ 15

- Purchase tickets online: http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com/box-office/buy-tickets/
- Email: boxoffice@6thstreetplayhouse.com
- 24- hour voice mail: (707) 523-4185 ext 1
- Box Office Hours:
Tuesday - Friday: 1:00 - 4:00 pm
Saturday:11:00 - 2:00 pm

6th Street Playhouse - 52 West 6th Street - Santa Rosa, CA 95401
http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com
(707) 523-4185
6th St. Playhouse is wheelchair accessible.

May 9, 2012 - Mountain Play 2012: The Music Man

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 9 May 2012 13:50:42 -0700

2012 Mountain Play: The Music Man

2012 Season Performance Dates: May 20, 27; June 3, 10, 16(Sat) and 17

All shows start at 2:00 pm

A valentine to small town, U.S.A., Meredith Willson’s The Music Man follows the fast-talking, charismatic traveling salesman Harold Hill (Robert Moorhead) as he cons the people of River City, Iowa into buying musical instruments and uniforms for a marching band he knows will never come to be. The town’s lovely Marian the Librarian (Susan Zelinsky) just may end up being Hill’s trouble with a capital “T.” Last seen on Mount Tamalpais is 1993, this Tony award-winning, critically acclaimed Broadway classic is a timeless salute to Americana and small town values. Set in River City, Iowa on the Fourth of July, The Music Man is full of whimsical characters and a musical score rich with the sounds of barbershop quartet, marching bands and songs that have become popular standards such as “Seventy Six Trombones,” “Wells Fargo Wagon,” “Gary, Indiana,” “Goodnight My Someone,” “Ya Got Trouble” and “Till There Was You” which rose to even greater popularity after being recorded by The Beatles. Always a popular favorite, the musical inspired two films - the 1962 version starred Robert Preston as Harold Hill and Shirley Jones as Marian and in 2003 starred Matthew Broderick and Kristin Chenoweth of Wicked fame.

Purchase tickets online: https://tickets.mountainplay.org/TheatreManager/1/login&event=0

Opening Seating Ticket Prices:
- Adult General Seating (Ages 21 to 64): $ 40
- Senior General Seating(Ages 65 plus) :$ 35
- Young Adult General Seating (Ages 14-20): $ 30
- NEW Children's General Seating (Ages 4-13): $ 15 Children come half price!
- Children 3 and Under: FREE
- Tickets available ONLINE are the least expensive way to purchase
- Reserved Seating is available by calling our office at 415.383.1100
- Prices increase $2 per ticket for phone orders.
- A $5 order processing fee applies to all orders.
- NOTE: Group Discount does not apply to Children's Half Price Tickets.

Mountain Play - Cushing Memorial Amphitheater Highway 1 on Mt. Tamalpais; parking extremely limited, so hiking, carpooling or taking shuttle recommended. All shows 2pm.
- Information: 415.383.1100
- info@mountainplay.org
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mountain-Play/117194175182
- http://www.mountainplay.org

May 2, 2012 - Alchemia/Theatre for Life: The Adventures of Pin Pin

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Fri, 4 May 2012 11:34:10 -0700

Theatre for Life presents: The Adventures of Pin Pin

Glaser Center - May 4th and 5th
6th Street Playhouse - May 8th - 24th

All Theatre for Life projects are intended to deliver a message of tolerance, celebration, and self-empowerment to youth in the public schools as well as the community at large. Our actors have performed throughout the Bay Area in a variety of venues, including local classrooms and museums. Our desire is to inform and encourage a positive way for children and adults to look at “difference,” and to identify and celebrate the multiple ways in which we are the same.

The Adventures of Pin Pin, this loose adaptation of Pinocchio is our newest performance piece, and features choreography by Erika Smallen, music by Brett Fenex, direction et.al by Liz Jahren, and beautiful acting by our incredible artists. The Adventures of Pin Pin is a tale of self-discovery, self- respect, friendship, standing up to bullying, and the value of just being who you are. Created for individuals who can use a gentle reminder that at heart, no matter what our personal circumstances, we are all very much the same.

The Adventures of Pin Pin plays at the Glaser Center (547 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa) Friday, May 4, at 10:30am and 7pm, and Saturday, May 5, at 2pm and 7pm. It continues May 8–24 at the Sixth Street Playhouse Studio (52 W. Sixth St., Santa Rosa), Tuesday–Thursday mornings at 10:30am. Suggested donations $ 7 for the early shows, $ 15 for evenings, with proceeds making it possible to give stipends to the actors.

More information available at 707.547.7644.

April 25, 2012 - "Silver Spoon"; "The Marvelous Wonderettes"

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:07:02 -0700

The 6th Street Playhouse presents: The Marvelous Wonderettes

April 20-May 13 - In the GK Hardt Theatre

The Marvelous Wonderettes takes you to the 1958 Springfield High School prom where we meet the Wonderettes, four girls with hopes and dreams as big as their crinoline skirts! As we learn about their lives and loves, we are treated to the girls performing such classic '50s and '60s songs as "Lollipop," "Dream Lover," "Stupid Cupid," "Lipstick On Your Collar," "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me," "It's My Party" and over 20 other classic hits!

Tickets:
Fri, Sat @ 8:00 & Sun @ 2:00: General $ 35; Senior (62+) $ 30; Youth (13-21) $ 30; Children (5-12) $ 15

Discount Thurs at 8:00 & Sat at 2:00: General $ 28; Senior $ 23; Youth $ 23; Children $ 15

Box Office Hours: Tuesday - Friday: 1:00 - 4:00 pm
Saturday: 11:00 - 2:00 pm
Email: boxoffice@6thstreetplayhouse.com
24- hour voice mail: (707) 523-4185 ext 1

6th Street Playhouse - 52 West 6th Street, Santa Rosa, California in Historic Railroad Square
http://www.6thstreetplayhouse.com

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Main Stage West presents: Silver Spoon

- April: 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28 - 8:00pm; Sunday April 29 at 5:00 pm
- May: 3, 4, 5 - 8:00 pm

West Coast Premiere – Set in the late 1960s, “Silver Spoon”, the new romantic musical comedy by Amy Merrill (book) and Si Kahn (music and lyrics), is a love story about the dividing lines of personal convictions and class. Polly Bullock is leading a double life, working by day in her family’s Wall Street brokerage firm while editing a radical underground newspaper by night and falling for Dan, a passionate organizer for the national grape boycott. At the heart of “Silver Spoon” is the age-old struggle between family commitments and discovering your true identity.

Tickets: $ 20.00 - $ 25.00
Purchase tickets online: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/214731

Main Stage West - 104 N. Main Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472
Ph 707.823.0177
http://mainstagewest.com/silver-spoon-7

April 18, 2012 - Oregon Shakespeare Festival

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:13:02 -0700

Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2012

Tony Award–winning Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2012 season is underway.

The season features Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, directed by Laird Williamson; The White Snake, adapted and directed by Tony Award-winning Mary Zimmerman; George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind’s Animal Crackers, directed by Allison Narver; a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Seagull by Libby Appel that Appel also directs.

Romeo and Juliet (February 17 – November 4) by William Shakespeare

The White Snake adapted from the ancient Chinese fable by Mary Zimmerman (February 18 – July 8).

Animal Crackers (February 19 – November 4) Book by George S. Kaufman & Morrie Ryskind; Music and lyrics by Bert Kalmar & Harry Ruby; Adapted by Henry Wishcamper

Seagull (February 23-June 22) by Anton Chekhov and adapted by Libby Appel

Shakespeare offerings opening later this season include Troilus and Cressida in the New Theatre, directed by Rob Melrose. On the outdoor Elizabethan Stage, OSF stages the final episode in the saga of Prince Hal in Henry V, directed by Joseph Haj, and As You Like It, directed by Jessica Thebus. Also on the Elizabethan Stage will be Alison Carey’s world premiere adaptation The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa, based on Shakespeare’s play and directed by Christopher Liam Moore.

The fourth show to open in the Angus Bowmer Theatre will be the three-ring tour de force, Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, adapted by Bill Rauch and Tracy Young from the plays by Euripides, Shakespeare and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Directed by Rauch and Young, it’s a one-of-a-kind theatrical musical adventure.

The final show to open in the Bowmer is a world premiere play by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan, All the Way, also directed by Rauch. Part of American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle, the play looks at the tumultuous first year of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s presidency.

Also playing in the New Theatre is Party People, another world premiere production that is part of American Revolutions. Created by Universes (Steven Sapp, Mildred Ruiz Sapp and William Ruiz, a.k.a. Ninja), the play digs into the story and legacy of the Black Panthers and Young Lords through a mix of theatre, poetry, jazz, blues, hip-hop, boleros and salsa.

OSF’s 2012 season runs through November 4, offering 790 performances of 11 productions.

Tickets remain available to previews and most opening performances. Patrons can save 40 percent on preview tickets. Please check ticket availability online or call the Box Office at 541-482-4331 or 800-219-8161. This season all “C” tickets are $ 21 for all performances.

An Important Note about Matinees, Parking and Access Matinees will begin at 1:30 p.m. through the entire season. The city-owned parking facility next to the New Theatre is available for parking. Cost of parking is $1.00 during the day and $3.00 at night. For a map of the campus and directions, please visit our website.

http://www.osfashland.org

April 11, 2012 - Don Giovanni; Othello

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:53:42 -0700

Cinnabar Theatre presents: Don Giovanni

Through April 15, 2012
Music by W.A. Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte
Sung in English
Mary Chun, Music Director
Elly Lichenstein, Stage Director

Widely regarded as one of the greatest operas ever written, Don Giovanni is a brilliant combination of stark human tragedy and ironic comedy, set to music of limitless genius. The young nobleman, Don Giovanni, treads dangerously: morally reprehensible, rapacious and remorseless, he relentlessly pursues his own pleasure. But eventually even the most entitled must face that moment of truth.

Tickets $ 35 General; $ 32 Seniors 65 & Over; $ 25 Age 22 & Under Purchase online: http://click4tix.com/showdates.php?s_id=CINGIOVANNI+1112&rtt=6

Cinnabar Theater - 3333 Petaluma Blvd. North - Petaluma, CA 94952
Phone 707.763.8920
www.cinnabartheater.org
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Marin Theatre Company presents: Othello

Through April 22nd

Experience Shakespeare at his most taut and tense as we pit two of the best actors in the Bay Area against each other in psychological single combat. Don’t miss Aldo Billingslea as Othello and Craig Marker as Iago on our intimate stage.

The mercenary Moor Othello, general of the Venetian armies, has just married Desdemona, daughter of a powerful senator. But their delight cannot last long. The villain Iago will see to that. He is jealous for having been passed over for promotion by Othello in favor of the untested gentleman soldier Michael Cassio. He will stop at nothing until he uses Desdemona to destroy the two men he hates.

With 19 Shakespeare productions under his belt, Artistic Director Jasson Minadakis (2010 San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award winner for best director) helms this timeless, tragic tale of love, deceit, jealousy and murder.

Evenings - Tue, Thu, Fri & Sat 8:00pm; Wed 7:30pm; Sun 7:00pm

Matinees Thu Apr 12, 1:00pm; Sat Apr 21, 2:00pm; Sun 2:00pm

Call or see website for ticket pricing.
Tickets online: https://tickets.marintheatre.org/public/show.asp?shcode=5
Box Office: Phone: 415.388.5208
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 12-5
Email: boxoffice@marintheatre.org

Marin Theatre Company - 397 Miller Avenue - Mill Valley, CA 94941-2885
Phone: 415.388.5200
Email: info@marintheatre.org

April 4, 2012 - RED

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 4 Apr 2012 14:30:34 -0700

Red @ Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Written by John Logan
Directed by Les Waters
Main Season | Thrust Stage
March 16 – May 12, 2012
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission

Paint it Red! The passionate play that swept Broadway comes to Berkeley Rep, staged by Obie Award-winning director Les Waters. At the height of his fame, Mark Rothko struggles in his studio to finish a major series of murals. The brilliant master wrestles with his new apprentice in a battle of wits over a bucket of paint. John Logan, the Oscar-nominated author of Aviator, Gladiator and Hugo, won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for this feverish 90-minute drama that spans the spectrum of human emotion. From grief and fury to joy and hope, it’s all covered in Red.

Box office: 510 647-2949
Purchase tickets online:
http://tickets.berkeleyrep.org/single/psDetail.aspx?psn=5351
Email: customerservice@berkeleyrep.org

Berkeley Repertory Theatre - Thrust Stage
2025 Addison St, Berkeley CA 94704
http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1112/5351.asp

March 7, 2012 - The Wizard of Oz

robin_pressman@krcb.org — Wed, 7 Mar 2012 13:20:31 -0800

The Imaginists Theatre Collective Presents
Project 104 in The Wizard of Oz

An original adaptation of the classic by L. Frank Baum

"Raise less corn and more hell!"--Mary Lease, Kansas Populist, circa 1890.

In this time of tornados with homes uprooted, mortgages defaulted, munchkin millions unemployed, cowardly lions at the nation's helm, and congress peopled by scarecrows, it's time, the Imaginists say, to revisit Oz!

March 8, 9, 10, 11; 15, 16, 17
Performances at 8 p.m. Sunday performances at 5 p.m.
Pay All You Can Night: March 8, 2012

Tickets $ 12 and $ 15
Purchase tickets locally at:
Atlas Coffee Company | 300 South A Street, Unit #3, Santa Rosa
Share Exchange | 531 5th Street, Santa Rosa
Or online: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/185210

SEATING: General admission
Doors open 30 minutes prior to performance
Please arrive early - Absolutely NO LATE SEATING
Contact tickets@theimaginists.org for more information.

The Imaginists Theatre Collective - 461 Sebastopol Avenue - Santa Rosa, CA 95401

http://www.theimaginists.org