Second Row Center

A little emotion goes a long way. And music is one of the best communicators of emotion, as Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Billy Joel can tell you.

The richer the music, the deeper the emotional response to it.

Which is why emotions combined with music can be so powerful, and so dangerous. When 2005’s The Light in the Piazza first materialized on Broadway, there was much talk that the show—a musical adaptation of Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novel—marked a return to the kind of gorgeous scores and lyrical drama that fueled the golden age of Broadway. Ignoring decades of rock and pop influences on Broadway, composer Adam Guettel created a score that was lush, orchestral, complex, operatic and deeply, brazenly romantic.
Some people hated it. After years of easy, amiable, non-challenging throwaway tunes, ‘The Light in the Piazza’ just sounded so . . . old fashioned. Because of that, others fell in love with it.
Like music, and definitely like love itself, its all a matter of taste.

In a remarkably strong new production at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, director Gene Abravaya—taking a real risk in tackling something this difficult—has more than met the challenge, assembling a cast of first-rate singers and a stellar chamber orchestra, for what is quite possibly the most beautiful, satisfying, musically competent, and artistically successful show Spreckels Theater Company has ever staged.

And that some of the cast sings and speaks (convincingly) in Italian, that only adds to the impressiveness of the achievement.

Whether all of this is excellence and musical skill is enough to draw an audience remains to be seen, though positive word-of-mouth will certainly help. Based on a book few have read, this is no Mary Poppins. But for audiences loudly clamoring to see something that dares to venture beyond the confortable familiarity of the same old overdone standard musicals, here is your chance to prove it.

Set in Italy in the 1950s, the story follows two visiting Americans, the wealthy southerner Margaret—brilliantly played by Eileen Morris—and her wide-eyed daughter Clara—played by Jennifer Mitchell, whose pure singing voice and expressive face make every emotion and discovery as clear as a bell. When Clara falls in love, at first sight, with the youthful and exuberant Frabrizio—Jacob Bronson—the stage is a set for a series of clashes between Margaret and Fabrizio, between Margaret and Clara, and between Margaret’s own desire to protect her daughter, and to also allow her the love she never has the courage to claim for herself.

The clever, entertaining book by Craig Lucas—who wrote Prelude to a Kiss and Amélie: The Musical—does include scenes spoken in Italian, giving a sense of the lost-in-translation confusion that impedes Clara and Fabrizio at every turn. In one delightful scene in the second act, Fabrizio’s mother—Barbara McFadden, who’s wonderful—drops the Italian to explain in English what her husband—an excellent Steven Kent Barker—has been saying to their other son and his wife—played respectively by Tariq Malik and Amy Marie Webber.

That said, the Italian sequences are so well staged, it’s pretty clear what’s going on.

With some fine design and technical support, and a strong ensemble cast, Spreckels’ Light in the Piazza is a truly impressive show, dripping with music and the dangers and allure of love—and that’s worth experiencing in any language.

‘The Light in the Piazza’ runs Friday–Sunday through Oct. 25 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center. Spreckels online.com

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Oh, the glory of the human voice.
And the power of the human mind to hear one’s own voice, and somehow experience it as beautiful when to other’s it’s . . . not.
Not Beautiful.
Not even good.
Which brings us to Florence Foster Jenkins.
That’s her we are listening to now, from a recording she made in 1944.
Jenkins was, in her time, a famous singer. She once sold out Carnegie Hall, packing the place with people eager to find out if the wacky socialite from Manhatten was really as bad as everyone said she was. The wild thing was, Jenkins was one of the only people who had no idea what she actually sounded like. Was she mistaken, mislead perhaps, mentally ill, or just really, really in love with the idea of being a singer?
Those are the questions that are raised in the play Glorious! by Peter Quilter, running through October 18 at Ross Valley Players in Ross, in Marin County.
It’s a little ironic that in creating a script that celebrates Florence Foster Jenkins, the playwright has created something as eccentric and strange and unexpectedly sweet as Jenkin’s herself . . . and just as mediocre.
In all fairness, there isn’t really much about the Jenkins life from which to build a full story, and this ultra slight, plot-thin comedic farce avoids some of the more interesting things. The result is, well, kind of a one-joke story with no real story.
And the running joke about a really old dog does not count as plot.
There is charm in the story, certainly. But is charm enough?
Glorious! suffers from the same malady that Jenkins did—a woeful insensitivity to tone, pitch, and pacing. And though it makes a herculean effort at turning Jenkins into some kind of self-actualized heroine, it can’t escape the uncomfortable truth that her popularity was, in many way, a deeply cruel joke.
In the Ross Valley Players staging—unevenly orchestrated by the usually excellent director Billie Cox—the best thing about the show is the charming, infectiously upbeat performance of Ellen Brooks as Jenkins.
She’s delightful.
There is also fine additional support by Mitchell Field as Jenkins’ roguish common-law husband St. Clair, a frequently unemployed, alcoholic actor, who depended on his paramour’s money, but seemed genuinely devoted to her and her singing efforts.
Also, good, if a little one-note, is Dan Morgan as the accompanist McMoon, whose transition from grudging employee to affectionate friend provides what little there is in the way of plot. As Maria—Jenken’s cranky Mexican maid, Maureen O’Donoghue does a lot with a slight role, but as an affronted music fan attempting to burst Jenkin’s bubble, Jackie Blue is allowed to do far too much with far too little. Apparently intended as the antagonist of the play, she’s far too ridiculous and cartoonish to be taken seriously, even as comic relief.
As Jenkins friend supporter Dorothy, Ellen Fisher creates a goofy but affectionate caricature of a devoted friend, who might be even crazier than Jenkins.
Through it all, there is an authentic sweetness to the proceedings, but the play is ultimately as lacking in substance and depth as was the infamous singing voice of its hapless subject. Glorious! is diverting and amusing and sometimes funny, but funny in a sad way.
Just like Jenkins.

‘Glorious!’ runs Thursday–Sunday through Oct. 18 at Ross Valley Players. Rossvalleyplayers.com

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A story is an illusion, a series of events that are not really taking place, presented in a way that fools its audience into believing, for a moment, that it is all really happening.
Telling that story in a book or movie is a certain kind of trick, with its own rules and traditions, and telling the same story on the stage is quite another. But transferring a story from one medium to another—say, from the screen to the stage—that may be the hardest trick of all.

Which brings us to ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Amélie.’
Two beloved stories, one a classic book and the other a beloved modern masterpiece of cinema, have both landed on stage in the Bay Area, and each carries its own unique kind of cross-media magic.
At Spreckels Performing Arts Center, in Rohnert Park, Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic pirate adventure ‘Treasure Island’ hits the stage in a compact, robust adaptation by Ken Ludwig.

Someone give me an Arrrrrrr?

Directed with humor and charm by David Yen, staged in the intimate studio theater with exhilarating in-your-face inventiveness and plenty of robust, swashbuckling energy, the crafty condensation of Stevenson’s classic works surprisingly well.
The story, though stripped down a bit, is quite faithful to the book, with the exception of a few lady pirates thrown in here and there—something that might have shocked Robert Louis Stevenson and possibly some of the pirates.
The strong, versatile cast is led by a grounded, impressively non-cartoonish John Rathjen as Long John Silver, often played a bit too over the top, but not here.

In this production, the whole cast slips gracefully in and out of dozens of characters. Animated projections combine with cleverly adaptable set pieces to turn the stage into a ship’s decking with rolling waves over the stern, to an island jungle filled with waving foliage. The effects works well, and if some of the book’s detail and depth of character are swept overboard in the process of translation, the loss is more than made up for in sense of rollicking, high-spirited, double-crossing, sword-clashing fun the able-bodied cast and crew bring to the stage.

Translating the beloved 2001 French comedy Amélie to the stage is a different kind of trick altogether, and turning it into a musical only makes the challenge harder. But with a book by Craig Lucas—he wrote the play Prelude to a Kiss—and with lovely, ethereal tunes by Daniel Messé and Nathan Tysen, this supremely satisfying adaptation—directed with immense creativity by Tony-winner Pam MacKinnon—is a sweet, sneaky surprise of a show.

As Amélie, the café worker who sets out to make the world a happier place, Samantha Barks is everything an Amélie should be—beautiful, sweet, a little wacky, and thoroughly beguiling.
There is a marvelously whimsical sense of innocence in the play, even when incorporating such things as sex shops and orgasms, and the story’s transformation into a musical—rather than proving distracting or cluttered—is so deftly done you might think that the story of Amelie and her bumpy road to finding her own true happiness, was always meant to become a musical.

If anything, it’s become better this way.

And that’s not an easy trick to pull off.

‘Treasure Island’ runs Thursday–Sunday through October 4 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, www.spreckelsonline.com
‘Amelie’ runs Tuesday–Sunday through October 11 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, www.berkeleyrep.org

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In Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” the indelible Kate and Petruchio—a feisty, ferocious fiancé and her would-be “tamer”—together discover something truly amazing and surprising. They discover that even after 400 years, people will see a show about two people fighting with each other until they finally fall in love.

Kate and Petruchio are amongst the most famous characters in western theatrical literature, and despite the datedness of the play, and the imbedded minefield of gender issues that are always part of the process of staging the show for modern audiences; people keep coming to see it.

Why? Why not?

The politics of love are not easy today, so why not look at a time when they were even more complex, and see if maybe we’ve learned anything. Besides, part of the pleasure of sitting down to a fresh production of such a well-known play is seeing if the cast, crew, and director will make it somehow seem new, or unpredictable, or surprising—or maybe fail miserably in the attempt.

That’s always a possibility.

I am happy to report that in Curtain Theatre’s rollicking outdoor production—free to the public and running weekends in the Old Mill Park in Mill Valley—the only real failure on display were those few unhappy audience members who failed to bring a sweater or coat, and were visibly shivering in the second act when the Mill Valley fog began rolling in.

As for the production itself, it’s a blast.

There are plenty of fresh ideas, uniformly strong performances, a boatload of clever theatrical flourishes, and a few moments of true genius. The fluid, fast-paced direction by Carl Jordan—here tackling Shakespeare for his first time—results in a buoyant, bouncy fluff-ball of a play, with a stunningly high laugh-to-minute ratio, and gallons of charm and visual razzle-dazzle

The setting and basic attire of the production are fairly traditional, with a live band playing renaissance tunes before the show, but director Jordan lets us know early on that he will be taking a decidedly playful tone with the material, beginning with an original pop-rock-inspired tune that essentially stands as a prologue. In this production, people do tend to burst into song, tossing out snippets of popular rock songs, a few lovely originals by music director Don Clark, and one hilariously heartbreaking rendition of A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

Kate—a splendidly three-dimensional Melissa Claire—makes her initial appearance wielding a chainsaw, stalking across the stage while belting out the lyrics of George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone. Petruchio—played by an excellent Alan Coyne—is not the brutish bully he is often depicted as, but a goofy sweetheart with a giddy knack for improvisational madness, and questionable taste in codpieces.

The marvelous ensemble is too large to give proper credit to all, but notable standouts include a brilliant Heather Cherry as Petruchio’s frazzled servant Grumio, Tom Reilly as Kate’s gracefully befuddled father, Juliana Lustenader as Kate’s shallow-but-winsome sister, Steve Beecroft as the crafty servant Tranio, and an amiably silly Seth Dahlgren as Hortensio, a wildly persistent suitor to Bianca.

And … did I mention the show is free?

After 16 years, Curtain Theatre is still managing to exist solely on the donations audiences happily drop in the baskets at the end of the show.
And trust me—this one is well worth paying to see.

‘Taming of the Shrew’ runs Saturdays, Sundays and Labor Day, through Sept. 13, at Old Mill Park Amphitheater in Mill Valley.

All shows 2:00 p.m. Free.

www.curtaintheatre.org

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“Oh, what fools these mortal’s be!”

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.”

There are a lot of great lines in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but one of my favorites comes close to the end. It’s a theater review, of sorts. Having just witnessed a wacky performance by a band of over-excited tradesmen turned actors, the stern Duke Theseus quiets his nitpicky entourage with the words, “Nothing can be amiss when simpleness and duty tender it.”

In other words, when some is simply done, with great love, it’s just not fair to judge it too harshly.

That’s a lovely thought, and one that certainly applies to Pegasus Theater’s rambunctious and unruly staging of the Bard’s most popular comedy.

On the Sunday I saw it, some of the cast’s performances were a bit, um, ragged, with lines blown or stumbled over. Parts of the action are blocked in ways that make it hard to see from certain places in the audience. Also, the original text has been cut-apart, reduced and re-written, adding new lines like “Everything will be okay!” alongside Shakespeare’s indelible poetry.

Personally, I think if you don’t want to try and make Shakespeare’s words work, then you should have done a different play. Cut a few of Shakespeare’s lines if you have to, but don’t rewrite let, unless your new lines are, you know, brilliant.

Okay, that’s my pet peeve.

Anyway, in the Pegasus production, it hardly matters, because the whole thing is so amiably and passionately presented, done with such a disarmingly life-and-love affirming spirit, whatever quibbles I had while watching it quickly sank into the sun-dappled river in front of which the show is presented, outdoors, under a bridge, the simple set draped in late afternoon light and shadow.

As directed by Beulah Vega, this Midsummer Night’s Dream is clearly a lusty love offering to the river community of Guerneville and the surrounding areas. For one thing, the show is free—well, donations are accepted, and cushy seats are one of the perks available to those donating on the company’s Indiegogo site. Aside from being a literal gift to its audiences, the whole production shouts aloud the joys and pleasures of love.

In this version, the four Athenian lovers, originally written as two men and two women, are all women—Crystal Carpenter, Jessica Anderson, Elaine Koslowski, and Alexis Christenson—and the idea of them pairing up and getting married doesn’t cause anyone in Athens to bat an eye.

The woodland fairies, ruled by King Oberon (Peter Rogers) and Queen Titania (Elizabeth Henry) with the help of the playful Puck (Jake Hamlin), have a lot of fun with the word “fairy,” and are about as sex-positive a group as one could imagine.

Adding to the positives, is Nick Christensen, who as the blundering would be actor Bottom, frequently steals the show, with or without the fluffy donkey head Puck magically gives him.

There is enough kissing, groping, fondling, and stroking in the show to raise anyone’s pulse rate, the audience is encouraged to shout out their own improvisations, and the clever use of Pink Floyd’s The Wall—the actual vinyl album—gets one of the show’s biggest laughs. If you are in love with love, there’s plenty to like in this sexy, silly, entertainingly bubbly Midsummer.

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ runs Friday-Sunday through August 31 at Riverkeeper Park, near Sonoma Nesting Company. All shows at 6:00 pm. Donations accepted. Bring a cushion because the seats are concrete. Reservations recommended through pegasustheater.com

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

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Last week—in my report on Dezi Gallegos’ new show, ‘Yesterday Again’—I spent a lot of time talking about newness, originality, world premieres, fresh spins on old themes…  You know.. Stuff we haven’t seen before.

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, in part because this week marks the one-year-anniversary of my trip to Scotland, where I presented fourteen performances of my own theatrical enterprise, the one-man-show ‘Wretch Like Me.’ Going to Scotland, a land where so much is so old, was nevertheless like a full-immersion baptism in the new, the original, the never-been-seen-before.

I was there for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where something like 2,500 shows were taking place all over the city during that three-week period. In Edinburgh, walking down the street during festival time is like watching a battle between the new, the newer, and the newest. Some mornings, I’d put up a new poster for my show, stapling it a pillar already covered with posters, and people would actually stop to look my new poster… Until the next theater artist came along—sometimes less than a minute later—to slap their own, even newer poster up on that pillar right on top of mine.

That’s a perfect summation of what the festival is like… A feeding frenzy, one that extends beyond the hoards of theater artists trying to woo audience members into their particular show, and also includes those very audience members, because in Edinburgh—at all Fringe Theater Festivals, in fact, including the San Francisco Fringe happening again this September in the City—people show up eager to see something new. They want to be surprised. They want to be shocked. They want to have their socks blown off by the sheer novelty of seeing something no one has ever seen before, to be amongst the first to be exposed to a new talent, a new script, and new idea, or a new spin on an old idea.

I managed to see about 30 shows while I was there, and not all of them were good, but some were unforgettable, and if the price of seeing a great play I’ll never forget is to see one or two that I’d like to forget as quickly as possible… Well, I’ll pay it, because that’s the way the world works, isn’t it?

Yes, I know. The safe and the comfortable do have their place.

One thing I’ll never forget is watching a hundred people fill the lobby before my show began every day, only to watch the majority of them file, not into my show, but into a production of Alice in Wonderland happening in the theater across the lobby. Another hit show was an adaptation of Oliver Twist, reinterpreted and set in Nazi Germany during World War II. A bit of the old with a new… twist.

I get it. I saw some of those shows.

But watching something you are familiar with, and walking out having gotten exactly what you expected, as reassuring as that is, is nothing compared to the thrill of walking into a show about which you know nothing, and being blown away but something that took you places you didn’t even know you wanted, or needed, to go.

What if we somehow could sustain that Festival State-of-mind for the rest of the year, right here in Sonoma County, all of us eagerly reading the calendar listings to see what’s opening at one of our many Bay Area theaters, scanning the page to see what’s new and exciting—or what’s old in an exciting new way—taking a chance and throwing ourselves into the unexpected mystery of adventure that defines the theatrical experience.

I know that would be good for the many theater artists who work to bring you something new every week. And for you, who knows? It just might change your life.

So why not plan to see some theater this weekend. Do it. The new, the old, and the new-and-old, it’s all waiting at a theater near you.

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It’s a mystery, a challenge, a puzzle, a conundrum.

How do you keep theater alive and interesting, when the majority of your audience has proven their relative preference for familiar shows, revivals of familiar shows, and shows based on familiar movies or T.V. programs, and takes a wait-and-see attitude when presented with a play that is un-familiar, in development, or brand spanking new.

“New,” apparently, while clearly something we get excited about when it’s a new car, a new baby, or a new ride at Disneyland, suddenly becomes a liability when it’s a play opening in your neighborhood between local productions of “Noises Off” and “Oklahoma.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with those.

They were each new once, and in their time, they each changed the face of modern theater, which needs a good change of face, and change of pace, every so often – just to stay alive.

All of which brings us to the multiple-award-winning 19-year-old playwright Dezi Gallegos, whose brand-spanking-new play “Yesterday Again,” opened last weekend in the Studio at 6th Street Playhouse. First, let me congratulate and salute my friend Sheri Lee Miller, director of “Yesterday Again.” As one of the best directors in the North Bay, her willingness to step forward and help bring to the stage a new work by a young playwright is in itself extraordinary.

Then there’s the production, featuring as strong a cast of veterans and newcomers as you are likely to see anywhere, including performances by Marty Pistone, Sharia Pierce, John Browning, Pam Koppel, Barry Martin, and Craig Miller, all taking on roles that reveal sides of their acting chops you likely have never seen before. Lesser known emerging actors fill out the cast – Alyssa Jirrels, Isaac Jay, Lyla Elmassian, Lucy London, Olivia Marie Rooney, Jack Wolff, Maxx Zweers, and I should fully disclose that another is my son, Andy Templeton, just one of the young players who you will want to be watching out for in the future.

The play itself is an ambitious, rambunctious, slightly confusing, intensely engaging puzzle box of a story that will surely make a lot of people wonder how a 19-year-old came up with it at all, let alone carried it off with so much insight, artfulness, and fearlessness.

Taking place in the past, the present, and the future all at once, “Yesterday Again” explores the notion that our lives begin with infinite possible futures, and that with every choice we make, those possible futures change, and in some case are eliminated. As the parallel stories of two college students, Eric and Bella, each play out, we see their past experiences playing simultaneously, with other actors playing Eric and Bella as the children they were and the adults they will, or might, become.

The material is tough, with explorations of trauma and abuse, and various damaging collisions of sexuality, friendship, family and love, and though the script at times feels a tad over-reaching, the beauty of the performances and the strength of the direction carries us over such road bumps on a powerful wave of emotion, mystery, and dramatic tension.

“Yesterday Again,” the play, is the past, the present, and the future of Sonoma County Theater, all at once. It’s not flawless, but if you love theater, it’s well worth your time – because, trust me, you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

And that’s a good thing.

“Yesterday Again” runs this weekend, Friday through Sunday, at 6th Street Playhouse (www.6thstreetplayhouse.com) and then moves to Lucky Penny Community Arts Center in Napa from August 7-16. (www.luckypennynapa.com).

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

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It is better, they say, to give than to receive.

That must be why so many groups gather so often to give so many awards to so many people for their efforts in so many different art forms connected to so many different award-worthy fields of endeavor. Though most people in show business are buzzing about the upcoming Emmy awards, about 75 people gathered together on Monday, July 13, to watch the offbeat, quirky annual distribution of certificates known to local theater people as The Sonoma County Stage One Theatre Arts Awards, otherwise known as The SOTAs.

Now in its seventh year, the stated purpose of the SOTAs is to honor theater artists and theater productions taking place in Sonoma County. The SOTAs have earned a fair share of criticism over the years for awarding the lion’s share of their honors to shows that, how do I say this delicately, are sometimes conspicuously less deserving of the word “excellence” than shows that were either minimally mentioned or not nominated at all – Main Stage West’s exceptionally strong “Other Desert Cities” is one example from this year’s list of howlingly embarrassing omissions.

To the organization’s credit, under the direction of president Lito Briano, clear efforts have been made to make the distribution of awards more balanced and fair, and to do that more in the future, companies who feel they deserve more attention will have to step forward and work harder to get their own fans and followers to join as voting members.

With the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle having stepped up in the last few years to finally notice the work being done by some (but not enough) Sonoma County theaters, the SOTAs will have to step up their game even more to retain any semblance of relevance and credibility in the future.

I say this with all hope that the SOTAs will do just that, because many of the smaller community theater companies and student productions honored by the SOTA’s certainly deserve some recognition, so vital are they as an engine of training and community good will throughout the theater scene.

With all of that said, allow me to offer my congratulations for the twelve awards taken home by Santa Rosa’s 6th Street Playhouse, which donated it’s G.K. Hardt theater for the awards ceremony.

Amongst those 6th Street artists honored were Best Director Bronwen Shears for her work on “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” actors Lennie Dean and Danielle Innocenti Beem for their performances in ‘Beauty Queen’ (that would be Lennie) and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (that would be Beem), actor Mike Pavone for “Clybourne Park,” and actor Dallas Munger for “The Glass Menagerie,” that last one also winning awards for best scenic and sound design, and tying for Best Overall Production with “Phantom of the Opera,” performed by Santa Rosa Junior College.

‘Phantom’ was the second-biggest winner of the night, also taking awards for Best Vocal Performance for a Male and Female – that would be Ezra Hernandez and Megan Fleishman – and other awards, including best costume and best makeup design.

Mary Gannon Graham won the Best Actress award for her amazing work in Main Stage West’s “Mother Jones in Heaven,” coincidentally now playing again in an encore run of the show featuring music by Si Kahn. And Raven Players won for best stage props for the prop-dependent drama “In the Next Room: or, the Vibrator Play,” and yes, you may feel free to make jokes about the props needed for a play of that name.

Congratulations to all the winners, and even those who did not walk off with a certificate, because the truth is, when there is this much good theater going on in a community of this size, everyone is a winner, especially the audience.

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

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For those who prefer not to travel far for their onstage entertainment, and like to avoid any excursions into foreign territory, there are, fortunately, a tremendous number of nearby theater companies. But for those who like experiencing the new and exotic, and don’t mind working a bit to get there, may I suggest a trip to San Francisco, and Faultline Theater Company’s impressively performed light-and-dark comedy “Shiner,” by rising playwright Christian Durso.

The play runs through July 26 at the Tenderloin’s very-cool Pianofight venue, where up to five or six different plays, concerts, or comedy shows might take place on a single evening in one of the venue’s two theater spaces.

Might I suggest a pre-show brew in the lobby, which is actually more like a laidback bar-bistro with a small stage of its own. Don’t worry about missing the play. Each performance is announced five minutes before curtain, summoning theatergoers from their drinks and snack to whichever theater-space their particular show is running in, like an airport announcement that your flight is now boarding.

And speaking of flying, the two-person cast of “Shiner,” Monica Ho and Adam Magill, manage a rather remarkable feat of high-wire actorly daring-do, playing thirteen-year-olds despite being obviously at least ten years older than that. They pull it off, spectacularly at times, capturing in their bodies and faces the doubt-ridden, hormonally amped, molten and morphing psyches of their young, intense, categorically at-risk characters.

Set in Los Angeles in 1994, when the Grunge Rock movement was stirring up the youth of America, Kurt Cobain was still alive, and Nirvana ruled the hearts and minds of a generation of disaffected young people.

In “Shiner,” that generation is represented by Margot, the possibly ADD-affected founder of an afterschool club she’s named the Grunge Rock Underground National Great Escape, which of course spells GRUNGE. To the club of one – evidently no one at school wants to associate much with the hyper-intense Margot – comes the lonely Jake, who knows nothing about Grunge rock, but likes the idea of joining a club, assuming the members – in this case . . . Margot – will have him.

What follows is a remarkable journey that begins with friendship – a friendship built around a mutual sense of isolation and family dysfunction – and quickly moves into something like love, before turning dark and unsettling, sometimes uncomfortably so.

The early scenes in this 80-minute one-act, with the live band Lyon Grove on stage to contribute an appropriate underscore, are full of fun and angsty youthful energy, as our tragically but adorably earnest twosome shout out a spontaneous list of everything that sucks, or co-write a letter to Kurt Cobain informing him of their plan to score tickets to see Nirvana, then jump off the freeway overpass and thus dies happy.

As few don’t know, the dark side of the grunge movement, as exemplified by Cobain’s overdose and death, is not all lighters and fist-pumping, and playwright Durso is to be commended to for not ignoring that fact in his emotionally complex play.

The disturbingness of Jake and Margot’s plan notwithstanding, when their home lives push them to even more extreme outsider behavior, even then going out it in ways that reveal their youth and innocence, those episodes pack a serious wallop.

The play’s ambiguous ending retains its original manic-depressive sense of simultaneous joy and pain, and will probably give you lots to talk about on your drive home from the City.

“Shiner” runs through July 26 at Pianofight. www.pianofight.com

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

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“Twelfth Night” is amongst Shakespeare’s most popular plays, in part because the story is so accessible, and the situations so universally funny. Typical of the Bard, humor and tragedy are never far from each other. A young woman, Viola, grieves for her twin brother Sebastian after surviving a shipwreck in which she believes he drowned. Cast ashore in a strange country, she disguises herself as a man, donning an outfit matching that of her brother, who soon shows up – surprise! – wearing the same thing.

They are now identical.

Viola, having taken the name Cesario, finds employment with the local Duke, whom she instantly falls for. The Duke’s in love with the wealthy Olivia, who’s mourning her own brother’s recent death, and swears she will never love any man, but changes her mind the first time she takes a look at Cesario, who of course is actually Viola.

Wacky subplots involve of Olivia’s drunken cousin Toby Belch and the clueless Sir Aguecheek, Olivia’s servants Maria and the self-righteous Malvolio, and a freelance jester-singer-trouble-maker named Feste – all of whose paths begin to cross Cesario’s in increasingly complicated, potentially life-threatening ways.

Meanwhile, believing his sister to have drowned, Sebatian can’t understand why everyone in this strange land seems to know him, some trying to kill him and others trying to take him to bed.

It’s great stuff, all served up with Shakespeare’s patented sense of poetry and escalating crisis.

What’s tricky about a play so well known and well loved is presenting it freshly. How do you bring something new to a show so thoroughly mined and milked that virtually everything findable in it has been found?

That’s the task set before director David Lear and the Shakespeare in the Cannery crew, the relatively new company that last weekend opened its sophomore season in the old cannery ruins in Railroad Square. With a uniformly talented cast, and a strong vision by Lear, this production manages to both hit the notes we love to hear in a staging of “Twelfth Night,” and somehow find a few more I, for one, have yet to have heard.

Without altering the text, Lear has found a way to balance the play’s extremes, making the comedy funnier by attending to the details of the drama. Certainly, Lear – known for his innovations and sometimes unconventional approaches – does make a few changes, the most obvious being Feste the Jester, who here has been split into TWO, played as twins or clones or BFFs by Haley Bartels and Brandon Wilson, both delightful.

The other obvious splashes of invention are largely stylistic, from the tennis shoes worn by most of the cast to the black lipstick and corsets worn by several of the supporting ensemble.

As Viola and Sebastian, Kot Takahashi and Carmen Mitchell are not just wonderful at making you care about their plights, they look a lot more like each other than in most productions of “Twelfth Night” I’ve seen. I don’t have time to mention everyone by name, but special mention must go to April Krautner’s Olivia, arcing from gloom to puppy love with immense charm, Clark Miller and Brian Abbott as Toby and Aguecheek – managing to be silly and kind of sad at once – and the magnificent Alan Kaplan in the play’s trickiest role, that of Malvolio, who as the subject of one of literature’s most famous practical jokes, must transform from ridiculous to near-tragic, without altering the tone of the shenanigans all around him.

Congratulations to Lear and his entire team.

By finding the new in something so old, this is a Twelfth Night to celebrate and savor.

Twelfth Night runs Fridays and Saturdays at 7pm through August 15. Visit shakespeareinthecannery.com

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

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