"Three Sisters" at 42nd Street Moon

(L-R) Bill Fahrner (George), Kate Paul (Tiny),
Danny Cozart (Gypsy Hood),
Riley Krull (Mary Barbour)  Song:
"Now That I Have Springtime".
(Photo by DavidAllenStudio.com)

There are only 3 days left to see this charming and beautiful show! For musical theatre lovers, this is a must see. If you don't see 42nd Street Moon's current production of this lost gem, you may never get a chance to see it again.

Everything about this show will keep a smile on your face from the opening curtain to your ride home. The melodies are perfect, the acting is excellent, the choreography lively and fun, and the staging, set and lights are a feast for the eyes.  This production and should be selling out. If it's not, that's only because people think it's a musical version of the Chekov play with the same name. It's not! No Chekov here, just Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein at their very best.

GO HERE to buy tickets!

November 30 - December 18, 2011
The Eureka Theatre

Music by Jerome Kern
Book & Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, II
Directed by Greg MacKellan
Run Time: 2 hours and 45 minutes
A B O U T
KERN AND HAMMERSTEIN'S LOST LONDON MUSICAL SET AGAINST THE WORLD OF DERBYS, CARNIVALS AND WWI BATTLEFIELDS!
Enchanting  and poignant, Three Sisters spins the tale of a traveling carnival photographer and his spirited daugthers.  A roving busker woos the youngest daughter, but the wandering performer's life lures him back on the road.  This National Endowment for the Arts sponsored restoration of Kern and Hammerstein's score include:  I Won't Dance, Lonely Feet, Hand in Hand, Rolling on, Rolling Road, and My Beautiful Circus Girl.

Grease is Again the Word

My favorite thing about going to a show at The Golden Gate Theatre is in getting there. In the distance, I could see the corner of Market and 6th Street. Having had this view many times over the years, I know that safety awaited me at that corner. The wide doors of the ancient and palatial theatre will be open, giving me safe haven as I fling myself through, shielded by the rent-a-guards that buffer the building from the rabble on the street.

I take a deep breath, try to look sort of crazy and pissed off, and begin my four block trek from Taylor and Geary. Wading through the human excrement and puddles of urine, I encounter beggars, pimps, she-males on parade, meth addicts, runaway teens, and a myriad of the rest of the hoi polloi that inhabit San Francisco's Tenderloin District. Finally I reach my destination. I know I'm there because I see the smiling face of Taylor Hicks, the newly anointed Teen Angel, looking down on me. It gives me a sense of peace and otherworldly comfort. Enough of this, lets talk about the show.

Actually I couldn't believe I went to see Grease. A show with no depth, a moral which basically says, "If you want the boy bad enough, act like a slut and make him think he's going to get some and he'll be yours, ... the end." But attend, I did. And what a seat I had! As you can see in the photo my free tickets assigned me to row trillion, seat XX. My head literally rested against the back wall of the building. The place was sold out. Throngs of screaming fans of all ages, girls dressed in costume, boys dressed in costume, middle aged men dressed like the Fonz filled the cavernous theatre. Excitment was in the air. This goofy show actually has a cult following. I was flabbergasted. As for the show, the actors were directed to play to the back of the house, which I appreciated greatly. The choreography was superb, and the director was able to find many comic moments in the show that weren't necessarily built into the book. Beyond this, there really is nothing special about Grease.

What I can't figure out is why I enjoyed myself so much. Was it my memory of Olivia Newton- John playing Sandy on the big screen. I was sixteen and vacationing in Tahoe with my family when the movie was released. I have the distinct memory of seeing Olivia on the big screen in her tight leather pants and doing that thing she did with her eyes. I believe I saw the movie three times in six days.

Now lets talk about Taylor Hicks. The prematurely gray Teen Angel of American Idol fame, uses this production as a platform to launch his new album. Things got strange when during his "Beauty School Dropout" duet with Frenchy the actress blurted out, "I voted for you!" They got stranger when Hicks took out his harmonica and began playing a blues riff, off key, at the end of "Beauty School Dropout" as he ascended into heaven in a giant plastic Ice Cream Cone. At the curtain call, Hicks ran off stage in the middle of it the encore. After the longest curtain call in the history of curtain calls, he reappeared in his characteristic jeans and muted top, microphone in hand and began to sing the single from his new album. You could feel the disdain from the crowd wafting up toward the rafters. I almost choked on it. People in the balcony began to get up from their seats to leave. And in a move of utter brilliance, the lighting guys turned on a half dozen follow spots and shined them directly up into the balcony. Everyone sat down like scolded school children and politely waited for Mr. Hicks to finish selling his album. What made it even stranger was that after the show there were two announcements. One was to throw a dollar in the pot on your way out to benefit Actors' Equity for A.I.D.S., and the second announcement wast to get Taylor's' album, and look for him in the lobby so that he could sign it for you: only in America.

"House of Blue Leaves" author John Guare Delights the House at A.C.T.

Yesterday morning at 10 a.m. several hundred die hard theater fans filled the Geary Theatre to experience the presence of the fabled playwright, John Guare. Guare is most famous for his plays The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation, and Landscape of the Body. His style is witty, funny, and often cruel and startling.

In the foreword to a collection of Guare's plays, film director Louis Malle writes:

Guare practices a humor that is synonymous with lucidity, exploding genre and clichés, taking us to the core of human suffering: the awareness of corruption in our own bodies, death circling in. We try to fight it all by creating various mythologies, and it is Guare's peculiar aptitude for exposing these grandiose lies of ours that makes his work so magical.

The experience yesterday was quite an event to witness. The poor moderator, Michael Paller, who happens to be A.C.T.s Dramaturg and Director of Humanities, barely was able to utter a syllable. Mr. Guare began interviewing himself and never stopped. He spoke with a lucidity and sense of humor that I've rarely seen in any human, let alone a man in his 70s. The only time Mr. Paller was able to actually ask a question was the one time Mr. Guare suddenly had a tinge of guilt for talking so much and the next time when Mr. Guare momentarily lost his train of thought. Beyond that it was all Guare, all the time. And that was fine with me. He is funny! He is thoroughly interesting to listen to. I could have listened to this man for hours and hours. We heard stories of his rise in the New York theatre, his unlikely meeting of Jerome Robins, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. We heard about his start at Cafe Cino with other budding playwrights and artists such as Al Pacino, Bernadette Peters and Sam Shepard. All the stories were told with humor wonderful detail.

I took away a few good lessons from the hour long lecture:

1. Do what you love in life. Mr. Guare said that is father once told him, "son, never work for a living". His father worked on Wall Street and told a young John that the only time he ever felt at peace was the interval of time from when he hit his alarm's snooze button to the moment his feet hit the floor in the morning. His father was a wage slave and he warned John to never become one himself.

2. Take charge of your own artistic life. A woman in the audience asked how young people, such as those in the M.F.A. program at A.CT. could find a life in the theatre. Mr Guare quickly responded that one must take charge of one's own artistic life. He said a theatre company need only be a group of theatre artists who laugh at the same jokes. Like at the Cafe Cino, all you need is an audience and a few cubic feet of space.

3. Remember that all acting is for the audience. Mr. Guare cannot stand plays that seem to ignore the existence of the audience. He emphasized the need to include the audience. It's why his characters often break the fourth wall and why they sometimes spontaneously break into song. Bring them to you and involve them fully no matter how large or small the space.

4. Trust your subconscious. Mr. Guare spends time every day just walking along the beach and allowing himself to free associate. It's how he came up with solving the problem of his play (1974) Rich and Famous. Allow your mind to do it's work. Trust your artistic impulse. Relax.

So go see Mr. Guares updated version of Rich and Famous at A.C.T. ! I have a feeling it will be a great show. The cast is marvelous.

_____________________________________________

First major revival
Rich and Famous
by John Guare
Directed by John Rando

Playwright Bing Ringling yearns to savor the sweet taste of celebrity, and he's hoping play number 844 will be his lucky break. But on opening night, Bing slips into a nightmarish phantasmagoria that shows him just how wrong things can go. From the ingenious mind of John Guare, who brought Six Degrees of Separation and The House of Blue Leaves to the American stage, Rich and Famous springs to life with twisted humor, rapid-fire dialogue, and outrageous new songs freshly scribed by Guare himself. A.C.T. welcomes this newly revised, delicious dark comedy-directed by John Rando (A.C.T.'s Urinetown, The Musical)-in its first major revival since its 1976 New York debut.

Cast: Brooks Ashmanskas, Mary Birdsong, Stephen DeRosa, Gregory Wallace

Creative Team: Scott Bradley (set designer), Laura Burton (musical director and performance pianist), Gregory Gale (costume designer), Jeremy Lee (sound designer), Alexander Nichols (light designer)

Tickets: $14-$57 previews; $17-$71 Tue.-Fri. & Sun. evenings; $22-$82 Sat. evenings and weekend matinees. Tickets are available through A.C.T. Ticket Services, 405 Geary Street at Mason, 415.749.2228, and online at www.act-sf.org.

Jane Anderson's, "The Quality of Life" at A.C.T.

Once in a while a play comes along that not only entertains but contains within it's message and dialogue and subtleties the possibility of changing the hearts and lives of those fortunate enough to see it performed. The show, "The Quality of Life" currently showing at A.C.T. and with only a few days left in the run, is just that kind of play. Jane Anderson is masterful in both her writing and direction of this remarkable work. I left the theatre stunned. I found myself walking up and down Geary Street for about and hour just thinking about what I experienced. The biggest change I noticed in my psyche was that I was actually kind to the many street people begging in the neighborhood. Usually, I feel a sense of caution and fear when I encounter them. But after attending this play that feeling was completely gone. I found this quite remarkable.

The play deals with life and death and love and marriage in Anderson's own unique voice, but at the same artistic level of an Albee or Miller. If you don't see the show in San Francisco, look for it in New York soon. This play is destined for Broadway and in my opinion great things lie ahead for Anderson with her outstanding work.

The Cast:
Laurie Metcalf (Desperate Housewives, Roseanne), JoBeth Williams (Poltergeist, The Big Chill), Steven Culp (A.C.T.'s Blackbird), and two-time OBIE Award winner Dennis Boutsikaris.

The Quality of Life is winner of three 2008 LA Stage Alliance Ovation Awards, including Best Play, Best Playwright, and Best Lead Actress (Laurie Metcalf). It was also nominated for four 2007 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards.

"Tremendous! It entertains, amuses, compels, makes the audience think, feel, laugh, weep. That is theater." —San Francisco Examiner

"A magnetic work of theater. Very funny . . . astounding performances!" —San Francisco Chronicle

"Thoroughly captivating. Beautifully directed . . . wonderfully engaging characters" —Contra Costa Times

"Radiant! One of the most emotionally acute productions of the fall season" —San Jose Mercury News

"Highest rating! Crackling, fast-moving! A powerful play that touches every emotion in the book . . . as passionate and profound as you're likely to see on any stage." —BeyondChron.com

"Touching and thought-provoking . . . skillfully crafted" —San Francisco Bay Times

"A dream cast!" —Los Angeles City Beat

"When I see a production as beautifully written, directed, and performed as The Quality of Life, I thank my lucky stars." —LAStageScene.com

Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'N Roll" at A.C.T.

Tom Stoppard's latest play, "Rock 'N Roll" closes today at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. I attended the matinée performance on Wednesday, so my ears had to compete with the sound of candy rappers, coughing, belching, and the spirited older ladies behind me talking full voice in the false belief that they were whispering due to their use of artificial hearing booster devices.

Keeping up with Stoppard's complex dialogue is difficult enough without having to decipher it through the geriatric sounds of the people sitting next to you. I did get most of it, however.



Five Best Things about "Rock and Roll"

1. As is often the case at A.C.T., Reneé Augesen was a gem as Elanor. There is a scene it which Elanor breaks down emotionally because of her cancer and Augesen had me in tears. She is an actress who seems to take each and every roll she is given turning it into a masterpiece of individual stagecraft.

2. Act II. Act II was excellent. Once we started getting into the relationships in the second act and away from the exposition of Act I, the play becomes complex and compelling.

3. The humor. There are some hilarious moments in Stoppard's dialog that the actors delivered with perfect timing. They seemed to come out of nowhere which made the moments even more delicious.

4. Jack Willis. Like Augesen, Willis is a compelling force on stage. I didn't like some of the acting choices but it doesn't matter. He does everything with such conviction and power that any strange moments are immediately forgiven. For instance there was a moment in the second act where he loses his temper far beyond what the situation seemed to require. However he follows it up with a drive that justifies the prior awkwardness. That takes conviction and confidence as an actor. What I really admire about Willis and Augesen is that they are always so clear about the story and every thing they do on stage seems to always serve the story. Even though both actors posses loads of charisma, they never use that to personal advantage. The story is the thing.. the play is the thing.. and they focus all of their exceptional talents toward advancing the plot and making it as layered and rich as it can be.

5. Manoel Felciano as Jan, the central character. Despite some extremely mundane exposition in Act I, that I believe Stoppard should rewrite, Felciano did a wonderful job in this very layered and difficult roll.

Did you see the show? Let's hear your opinion!

That's it. Go see a play!

San Francisco Theater Festival

Last year I had the opportunity to perform in a short piece at the San Francisco Theater Festival. This thing is a blast! I highly recommend that you go and check it out!

This year I get to do it again with The Pear.

There will be everything you can imagine there and it's all free.

Featured at the 2008 festival:

-AfroSolo presents Angela Dean-Baham as Black Patti
-Amiri Baraka’s provocative plays of black experience, including his new play, “Sisyphus Syndrome”
-Lamplighters Music Theatre’s “The Mikado”
-Best of Playground’s one act plays
-Aleshia Brevard & Gina Grahame's transsexual production of "One Damn Man!"
-Oh My Godmother, gay Cinderella
-Best of the Buddy Club, 16 great children’s shows
-Improv Groups: Blue Blanket, BATS, SPF7, Big City & Stagebridge's Over-50 Improv
- The Pear Avenue Theatre performs two short pieces

Ozard a Hit in Her Show - Bitter and Be Gay

Friday night the Octavia Lounge, a quaint San Francisco dinner club hosted a fantastic show by talented performer, Carly Ozard. The place was packed with over one hundred fans of this up and coming cabaret singer with a strong background in musical theatre.

First of all, I must give a disclaimer. Carly is a good friend and I helped her with the production in terms of publicity and direction and general moral support. But don't listen to me. She had the audience in the palm of her hand for nearly two hours. The show ended with multiple standing ovations and they were well deserved. Filled with wonderful song choices, hilarious conversation, and touching moments about her life, the show, "Bitter and Be Gay", is based on Carly's true to life romantic foibles. It's funny and heartbreaking all at the same time. Carly has the uncommon ability to interpret lyrics as if they were own and touch the hearts of those lucky enough to hear her sing.

Hopefully, we'll get to see this show at another venue soon. Carly is well known in the inner circle of San Francisco cabaret singers and I bet she'll soon become a fixture of San Francisco night life and entertainment.... unless she does something crazy like move to New York!

Hear Carly on her MySpace Page.

Who's Afraid of Edward Albee?

Yesterday I sat in the front row at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco and watched Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin turn my gut into a cauldron of anxiety. I've read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf a couple of times, of course. But, I have never seen it done on stage. Edward Albee must have had an absolutely awful childhood. And, he must be an absolute genius. As is always the case with Albee, I find myself laughing often and with gusto, while inside I'm becoming slowly but surely upset at what I see unfolding before me. In the hands of this cast, which also includes Kathleen Early and David Furr and directed by Anthony Page, this Virginia Woolf is scathing, hilarious and very disturbing. Sitting in the front row didn't help ease my inability to escape the verbal violence going on before me. I literally felt I was sitting there in the living room with them. Kathleen Turner is just amazing. Never do you feel that she's acting. It's as if the part was written for her and she knows it in her bones and her soul. I actually found myself feeling profoundly sad for her. She was visibly exhausted during the curtain call. No wonder, her performance is an absolute master class in realistic theatre.

If you have a chance you must see this show. I won't say that you will leave feeling happy. You might even be upset, but it will change your life and make you examine your own grief.

There are only two days left.

Tickets