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"content": "\u003cp>Eight years ago, Brian Copeland debuted his one man play, \u003ci>Not a Genuine Black Man\u003c/i> at the Marsh theater in the Mission. Kudos ensued. What was scheduled to be a 6-week run became the longest running solo show in San Francisco history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, many who loved the show have been anticipating Copeland’s sophomore solo performance, which opened Saturday at the Marsh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s title, \u003ci>The Waiting Period\u003c/i>, refers to the 10 days Copeland was required to wait before his gun license cleared. It refers to the 10 days Copeland needed to wait before he could commit suicide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a great structural concept for theater — an autobiographical clock-ticking countdown to a life or death choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/theater/newsandfeatures/26erik.html?_r=2&ex=1141448400&en=ff84e01674825b5f&ei=5070&emc=eta1\">\u003ci>Not A Genuine Black Man\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, this is a play born of a distinctive experience with true human interest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last time, Copeland wrote about his childhood in the 99.4% white San Leandro and his adulthood as a man accused of not being black enough. A radio personality at KGO, (now a TV host of \u003ci>7 Live\u003c/i>), Copeland had received a letter — the umpteenth of its kind — accusing him of not being “a genuine black man.” He knew this would be his subject when comedy maestro Carl Reiner imparted a bit of writing advice to Copeland; “find the piece of ground that you alone stand on, and write from there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copeland’s singular story started in 1972, when, at age 8, his family moved to San Leandro, which had recently been named one of the country’s most racist suburbs. His account of his experiences with racism, police harassment and housing discrimination was historically illuminating, funny and dare I say, poignant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new show is likewise intrinsically interesting. And potentially poignant; what does one do during the 240 hours when one is waiting to kill oneself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copeland tells us, more or less, what he did do — and what he made his kids for dinner. (Spoiler Alert: Chinese take-out.) His persona is affable and familiar and he has an easy, appealing humor. This in itself goes a long way to win the audience. But his articulation of what he thought and felt during those 10 days is too often too vague.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Certainly there’s an unique challenge in crafting a play about emotional numbness. But if one is going to write from a particular piece of ground that he alone stands on, particularity is key. Copeland’s goal of explicitly conveying the universality of his experience muddies his ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He shifts to other people’s ground in his effort to bring light to this dark place, to the subject of depression and suicide. On a number of occasions he refers to people who are “one of us” — they are part of an unseen community of dangerously despairing people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In between quite a few warmly amusing scenes (he’s clueless at the gun shop, requesting a revolver because he knows its name from the Beatles album), the play slips into an earnest P.S.A.-type inspirational speech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, the performance I attended was a benefit for \u003ca href=\"http://bringchange2mind.org/\">Bring Change 2 Mind\u003c/a>, a non-profit that focuses on the stigma of mental illness. And the monologue works very well as a companion to this group’s mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At times in the play, Copeland reflects the experiences of some suicidal young people who he had interviewed. He performs their interviews \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=56938\">Anna Deavere Smith-style\u003c/a>, presenting the character verbatim.\u003c/p> \n\u003cp>He also plays his daughter, who is really worried about him. And we become really worried about her. Her fear and stress are well-conveyed even tough Copeland’s gift for playing anyone other than himself (particularly kids) is somewhat lacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’d like to have heard more about his kids, and the wife who left him, and the people he is planning to leave. In \u003ci>The Waiting Period\u003c/i>, context and storytelling are a bit wanting. And while the 10 day time-frame is precise, the experience itself is sharp but not vivid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Waiting Period\u003c/i> runs through Marsh 24, 2012 at The Marsh in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/Brian_Copeland.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit themarsh.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last time, Copeland wrote about his childhood in the 99.4% white San Leandro and his adulthood as a man accused of not being black enough. A radio personality at KGO, (now a TV host of \u003ci>7 Live\u003c/i>), Copeland had received a letter — the umpteenth of its kind — accusing him of not being “a genuine black man.” He knew this would be his subject when comedy maestro Carl Reiner imparted a bit of writing advice to Copeland; “find the piece of ground that you alone stand on, and write from there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copeland’s singular story started in 1972, when, at age 8, his family moved to San Leandro, which had recently been named one of the country’s most racist suburbs. His account of his experiences with racism, police harassment and housing discrimination was historically illuminating, funny and dare I say, poignant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new show is likewise intrinsically interesting. And potentially poignant; what does one do during the 240 hours when one is waiting to kill oneself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Copeland tells us, more or less, what he did do — and what he made his kids for dinner. (Spoiler Alert: Chinese take-out.) His persona is affable and familiar and he has an easy, appealing humor. This in itself goes a long way to win the audience. But his articulation of what he thought and felt during those 10 days is too often too vague.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Certainly there’s an unique challenge in crafting a play about emotional numbness. But if one is going to write from a particular piece of ground that he alone stands on, particularity is key. Copeland’s goal of explicitly conveying the universality of his experience muddies his ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He shifts to other people’s ground in his effort to bring light to this dark place, to the subject of depression and suicide. On a number of occasions he refers to people who are “one of us” — they are part of an unseen community of dangerously despairing people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In between quite a few warmly amusing scenes (he’s clueless at the gun shop, requesting a revolver because he knows its name from the Beatles album), the play slips into an earnest P.S.A.-type inspirational speech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, the performance I attended was a benefit for \u003ca href=\"http://bringchange2mind.org/\">Bring Change 2 Mind\u003c/a>, a non-profit that focuses on the stigma of mental illness. And the monologue works very well as a companion to this group’s mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At times in the play, Copeland reflects the experiences of some suicidal young people who he had interviewed. He performs their interviews \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=56938\">Anna Deavere Smith-style\u003c/a>, presenting the character verbatim.\u003c/p> \n\u003cp>He also plays his daughter, who is really worried about him. And we become really worried about her. Her fear and stress are well-conveyed even tough Copeland’s gift for playing anyone other than himself (particularly kids) is somewhat lacking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’d like to have heard more about his kids, and the wife who left him, and the people he is planning to leave. In \u003ci>The Waiting Period\u003c/i>, context and storytelling are a bit wanting. And while the 10 day time-frame is precise, the experience itself is sharp but not vivid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Waiting Period\u003c/i> runs through Marsh 24, 2012 at The Marsh in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/Brian_Copeland.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit themarsh.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Aiming for boldly eclectic, Kneehigh Theater’s \u003ci>The Wild Bride\u003c/i> throws every artistic choice — including the kitchen sink — at its audience. Archetypal mythology is respun with stylized hipness, ethereality, puppetry, black humor, vaudevillian escapades, rhythm and blues music, tinged with Euro-Appalachian Anglo-Slavic-Arabic influences — and lots of Tim Burton. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a valiant effort at avant-garde eclecticism that results in a barrage of clutter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Cornwall-based theatre company wowed me in ’09 with its inventive, cinematic and tightly knit \u003ca href=\"http://www.7x7.com/arts/brief-encounter-vintaged-import-delivering-cheeky-wit\">\u003ci>Brief Encounter\u003c/i>\u003c/a> at ACT. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this time around, a little Ritalin wouldn’t hurt. For all its panache, \u003ci>The Wild Bride\u003c/i>falls rather flat. Under Emma Rice’s creative and hectic direction, the whole is somehow lesser than the sum of its parts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/12/13/wildbride1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Stu McLoughlin\u003cbr>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>The story begins with a Faustian bargain with the devil. Stuart McLaughlin’s devil is a slippery rogue but none-too-menacing. Dressed in a dirt-poor man’s long johns, (a la \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3025574144/tt0094721\">Tim Burton’s \u003ci>Beetlejuice\u003c/i>\u003c/a>), or a shady, 1930s suit, this devil is part Brit, part bumpkin and more of a dirty varmint than a demon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as a musician, McLaughlin is an impish entertainer. Accompanying himself on banjo or guitar, McLaughlin plays a few bluesy songs about the devil, invoking blues great, Robert Johnson who, legend has it, achieved his guitar expertise through a deal he made with the devil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/12/13/wildbride2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Audrey Brisson, Stu McLoughlin, Stuart Goodwin and Eva Magyar\u003cbr>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>The music itself is a success. Stu Barker brings together accordion, violin, bass and some great vocals to create an unadorned country-blues mood that hits the spot. The play hits some speed bumps when McLaughlin narrates in lackluster — and eventually grating — rhymed couplets. Carl Grose’s text isn’t especially inspiring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The devil sets his sights on a young girl and fast talks her father into a trade. Stuart Goodwin plays the girl’s foolish father in a vaudevillian manner; later, he plays her Scottish (why?) prince offering up some amusingly wacky antics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/12/13/wildbride3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Eva Magyar\u003cbr>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>Audrey Brisson stands out as the girl, a wordless role that is well conveyed through unsettling and powerful gestures. At other times, she sings and scats, revealing another side of her talent. Her movements are often mirrored by two other women, who will take turns inhabiting her older selves. Patrycja Kujawska plays the runaway girl, roaming the wild and learning to survive. Éva Magyar plays her older self beating the devil. All three fairly much dance their parts with artful grace. Still, Etta Murfitt’s choreographing is often on the flatulent side of arty-farty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Wild Bride\u003c/i> runs through January 1, 2012 at The Roda Theatre in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1112/5420.asp\">tickets or information\u003c/a>\u003ca> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Aiming for boldly eclectic, Kneehigh Theater’s \u003ci>The Wild Bride\u003c/i> throws every artistic choice — including the kitchen sink — at its audience. Archetypal mythology is respun with stylized hipness, ethereality, puppetry, black humor, vaudevillian escapades, rhythm and blues music, tinged with Euro-Appalachian Anglo-Slavic-Arabic influences — and lots of Tim Burton. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a valiant effort at avant-garde eclecticism that results in a barrage of clutter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Cornwall-based theatre company wowed me in ’09 with its inventive, cinematic and tightly knit \u003ca href=\"http://www.7x7.com/arts/brief-encounter-vintaged-import-delivering-cheeky-wit\">\u003ci>Brief Encounter\u003c/i>\u003c/a> at ACT. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this time around, a little Ritalin wouldn’t hurt. For all its panache, \u003ci>The Wild Bride\u003c/i>falls rather flat. Under Emma Rice’s creative and hectic direction, the whole is somehow lesser than the sum of its parts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/12/13/wildbride1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Stu McLoughlin\u003cbr>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>The story begins with a Faustian bargain with the devil. Stuart McLaughlin’s devil is a slippery rogue but none-too-menacing. Dressed in a dirt-poor man’s long johns, (a la \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3025574144/tt0094721\">Tim Burton’s \u003ci>Beetlejuice\u003c/i>\u003c/a>), or a shady, 1930s suit, this devil is part Brit, part bumpkin and more of a dirty varmint than a demon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as a musician, McLaughlin is an impish entertainer. Accompanying himself on banjo or guitar, McLaughlin plays a few bluesy songs about the devil, invoking blues great, Robert Johnson who, legend has it, achieved his guitar expertise through a deal he made with the devil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/12/13/wildbride2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Audrey Brisson, Stu McLoughlin, Stuart Goodwin and Eva Magyar\u003cbr>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>The music itself is a success. Stu Barker brings together accordion, violin, bass and some great vocals to create an unadorned country-blues mood that hits the spot. The play hits some speed bumps when McLaughlin narrates in lackluster — and eventually grating — rhymed couplets. Carl Grose’s text isn’t especially inspiring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The devil sets his sights on a young girl and fast talks her father into a trade. Stuart Goodwin plays the girl’s foolish father in a vaudevillian manner; later, he plays her Scottish (why?) prince offering up some amusingly wacky antics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/12/13/wildbride3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Audrey Brisson, Patrycja Kujawska and Eva Magyar\u003cbr>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>Audrey Brisson stands out as the girl, a wordless role that is well conveyed through unsettling and powerful gestures. At other times, she sings and scats, revealing another side of her talent. Her movements are often mirrored by two other women, who will take turns inhabiting her older selves. Patrycja Kujawska plays the runaway girl, roaming the wild and learning to survive. Éva Magyar plays her older self beating the devil. All three fairly much dance their parts with artful grace. Still, Etta Murfitt’s choreographing is often on the flatulent side of arty-farty.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Wild Bride\u003c/i> runs through January 1, 2012 at The Roda Theatre in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1112/5420.asp\">tickets or information\u003c/a>\u003ca> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Fela! Is That Rare Broadway Musical That Earns Its Exclamation Point",
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"content": "\u003cp>Pulsing and throbbing and glistening in flashy turquoise or salmon pink, Fela tells us to get up off our feet and “leave the shy outside.” The audience is reluctant (we’re mostly white) but Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician, is very effective at rabble rousing. He knows how to incite a crowd to feel the Afrobeat, to coax them to shake booty and to shake things up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Fela!\u003c/i>, Bill T Jones’ Tony-winning dance-theater production, which opened last week at the Curran, charts the phenomenal career of Fela Kuti, who was an adored icon and the originator Afrobeat music in the late ’60s and the ’70s. A political activist, an agitprop firebrand and, according to Nigeria’s oil industry-fed military government, Fela was a seditious enemy of the state. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The musical is really a “dancical,” a nearly non-stop spectacle of movement, set to Afrobeat music and featuring traditional tribal dance, jazz, stylized dance as well as improvisiational free-form hybrids. The play is set in 1976 during a stadium-style concert in which Fela (who died of AIDS in 1997) speaks to his audience between sets. With humor and eloquence, Fela tells us about his country’s troubles, the government’s corruption and greed, and he talks about his life and work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/fela2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>The cast of Fela!; Photo by: Monique Carboni\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ruminating about colonialism, Fela says, “at first it’s quite nice having new faces around. But then you start noticing things going missin’. Ashtrays. Towels … Petroleum. Diamonds. People! And what do they leave in return? Gonorrhea and Jesus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The show was conceived, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, who co-wrote the book with Jim Lewis. Sahr Ngaujah is quite stupendous as Fela. Although the stage is full of other dancers — men and women (the women also play his 27 wives), the show is essentially a one-man, 2 and 1/2 hour monologue and mega concert. It is Ngaujah’s charm, charisma and boundless energy that is truly the show’s be-all and end-all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, the dancers are talented and exciting. The harem of females is also often funny as the huffy, competitive and territorial wives. And the on-stage Brooklyn Afrobeat band is on fire. But it is Ngaujah as Fela who captivates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between tokes from his joint, (he warns the front row of a contact high) Fela tells us stories of his musical and political education and his innovative, artistic work as a populist activist. He brings us along to London and New York, where he picks up tips from the music of Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and James Brown. New York is where — thanks to a woman he wants to bed — he reads Angela Davis and Malcolm X. “I had to go all the way to America to understand things my mother was trying to teach me all along,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/fela1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Melanie Marshall and Sahr Ngaujah; Photo by: Tristram Kenton\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A saint-like portrait of his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti hovers over the stage throughout the play, inspiring and haunting Fela, and moving, like a too realistic hologram. Fela’s mother was a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Songs include “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” “Suffering and Smiling,” “Sorrow, Tears and Blood/Shine.” The lyrics are sometimes (but not enough for me) subtitled on the wall, but even so, the Pidgin English is not always easy to comprehend. And Ngaujah’s thick accent can also be difficult to discern in speech and song.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some of the most stirring numbers, signs and placards help bring the message home. During the song “International Thief,” the performers parade with placards displaying the names of these thieves: Buhari, Shagari, The World Bank, Shell, Enron, Halliburton.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disturbing climax of the play is a vivid description of a massive government raid of Fela’s compound. Even though the scene is mostly recounted by Fela, it’s very powerful. In a break from the monologue format, women’s voices are heard, accompanied by their images. The wives have been raped and tortured during the raid and the women do not spare the details as they impassively list the abuses they endured.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fela describes how his 77 year-old mother was thrown from a window to her death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less powerful is a more theatrical scene in which Fela ascends a heavenly ladder to where his mother is seated. As Fela’s mother, Melanie Marshal has a powerful, compelling voice, but the dream sequence scene is too stagey and willfully dramatic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the final song, “Coffin for Head of State,” Fela carries his mother’s coffin to the locality of Nigeria’s president. Other colorful child-sized coffins follow, each inscribed with a name, an injustice, a slogan, a condemnation. Noting the price of freedom, Fela asks, “Whose coffin are you willing to carry?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Fela!\u003c/i> runs through December 11, 2011 at The Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/shows/Fela\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Pulsing and throbbing and glistening in flashy turquoise or salmon pink, Fela tells us to get up off our feet and “leave the shy outside.” The audience is reluctant (we’re mostly white) but Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician, is very effective at rabble rousing. He knows how to incite a crowd to feel the Afrobeat, to coax them to shake booty and to shake things up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Fela!\u003c/i>, Bill T Jones’ Tony-winning dance-theater production, which opened last week at the Curran, charts the phenomenal career of Fela Kuti, who was an adored icon and the originator Afrobeat music in the late ’60s and the ’70s. A political activist, an agitprop firebrand and, according to Nigeria’s oil industry-fed military government, Fela was a seditious enemy of the state. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The musical is really a “dancical,” a nearly non-stop spectacle of movement, set to Afrobeat music and featuring traditional tribal dance, jazz, stylized dance as well as improvisiational free-form hybrids. The play is set in 1976 during a stadium-style concert in which Fela (who died of AIDS in 1997) speaks to his audience between sets. With humor and eloquence, Fela tells us about his country’s troubles, the government’s corruption and greed, and he talks about his life and work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/fela2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>The cast of Fela!; Photo by: Monique Carboni\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ruminating about colonialism, Fela says, “at first it’s quite nice having new faces around. But then you start noticing things going missin’. Ashtrays. Towels … Petroleum. Diamonds. People! And what do they leave in return? Gonorrhea and Jesus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The show was conceived, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, who co-wrote the book with Jim Lewis. Sahr Ngaujah is quite stupendous as Fela. Although the stage is full of other dancers — men and women (the women also play his 27 wives), the show is essentially a one-man, 2 and 1/2 hour monologue and mega concert. It is Ngaujah’s charm, charisma and boundless energy that is truly the show’s be-all and end-all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, the dancers are talented and exciting. The harem of females is also often funny as the huffy, competitive and territorial wives. And the on-stage Brooklyn Afrobeat band is on fire. But it is Ngaujah as Fela who captivates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between tokes from his joint, (he warns the front row of a contact high) Fela tells us stories of his musical and political education and his innovative, artistic work as a populist activist. He brings us along to London and New York, where he picks up tips from the music of Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and James Brown. New York is where — thanks to a woman he wants to bed — he reads Angela Davis and Malcolm X. “I had to go all the way to America to understand things my mother was trying to teach me all along,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/fela1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\" alt=\"\">\u003cbr>Melanie Marshall and Sahr Ngaujah; Photo by: Tristram Kenton\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A saint-like portrait of his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti hovers over the stage throughout the play, inspiring and haunting Fela, and moving, like a too realistic hologram. Fela’s mother was a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Songs include “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,” “Suffering and Smiling,” “Sorrow, Tears and Blood/Shine.” The lyrics are sometimes (but not enough for me) subtitled on the wall, but even so, the Pidgin English is not always easy to comprehend. And Ngaujah’s thick accent can also be difficult to discern in speech and song.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In some of the most stirring numbers, signs and placards help bring the message home. During the song “International Thief,” the performers parade with placards displaying the names of these thieves: Buhari, Shagari, The World Bank, Shell, Enron, Halliburton.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disturbing climax of the play is a vivid description of a massive government raid of Fela’s compound. Even though the scene is mostly recounted by Fela, it’s very powerful. In a break from the monologue format, women’s voices are heard, accompanied by their images. The wives have been raped and tortured during the raid and the women do not spare the details as they impassively list the abuses they endured.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fela describes how his 77 year-old mother was thrown from a window to her death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less powerful is a more theatrical scene in which Fela ascends a heavenly ladder to where his mother is seated. As Fela’s mother, Melanie Marshal has a powerful, compelling voice, but the dream sequence scene is too stagey and willfully dramatic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the final song, “Coffin for Head of State,” Fela carries his mother’s coffin to the locality of Nigeria’s president. Other colorful child-sized coffins follow, each inscribed with a name, an injustice, a slogan, a condemnation. Noting the price of freedom, Fela asks, “Whose coffin are you willing to carry?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>Fela!\u003c/i> runs through December 11, 2011 at The Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/shows/Fela\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Desdemona Speaks Her Piece in New Toni Morrison-Peter Sellars Production",
"headTitle": "Desdemona Speaks Her Piece in New Toni Morrison-Peter Sellars Production | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The last time Peter Sellars tackled \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> his efforts weren’t particularly appreciated. Some audience members left at intermission, critics panned it. \u003ci>The New York Times\u003c/i> called it \u003ca href=\"http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/theater/reviews/28brantley.html/\">“exasperatingly misconceived.”\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two years later, Sellars is still mulling over the play that some ten years ago, he called “a non-stop 400-year-old racist affliction in every high school career.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sellars, a theater director renowned for brazenly refashioning classics, set his \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> in the modern-day world of the United States military. But Sellars newest riff on the play is not a new take on an old play. It is an original play, written by Toni Morrison, about Othello’s wife, Desdemona.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Desdemona Project\u003c/i>, a musical theater work, will have its world premiere on October 26, 2011 at Cal Performances in Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"480\" height=\"274\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/aeWN71gokhU\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>The new play stems from seeds that Shakespeare planted within his text. In a sense, the project is Morrison’s theatrical codicil, a new story which lets the murdered wife have the floor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Enthusing about the new production on the phone from France, Sellars told me that the idea was born of a challenge he put to Toni Morrison over lunch one day, “I happened to mention that there’s a very bad play by Shakespeare called \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> that makes no sense, the characters are not plausible and that Shakespeare never knew any Africans.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Toni spent the next four hours telling me how wrong I was and quoting the play from memory, saying it was one of the great plays, particularly for our time, because it’s not about how they kill what you love, it’s about how they convince you to kill what you love,” said Sellars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Sellars, this really sharpened his thoughts about race in America. His 2009 \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i>, (starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Iago) about “a Black man who had risen to the highest level in power in history,” was being performed just as extreme racism towards the new American President was becoming apparent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sellars said he challenged Morrison to respond to Shakespeare, “to reply to some of the things that really still need to be dealt with in Shakespeare. And she decided to begin with the women.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A largely overlooked line in Act IV of \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> has become the key ingredient in Morrison’s play. Desdemona, who has already been threatened by her husband, sings a melancholic song and says, “I learned it from my maid, Barbary, who died while singing it from a broken heart.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/10/22/desdemona1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>“To use the name Barbary is a deliberate provocation,” says Sellars. In 16th century England, Barbary meant Africa and so this line “leads you to this astonishing thing — that Desdemona was raised by an African woman.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morrison and Sellars interpret this iota of the character’s backstory as a window into Desdemona’s heart, a means to understand her in a deeper way; to understand her affinity with an African man. “She knows him,” Sellars explains. Desdemona was raised by an African woman with African stories and African songs. “When Othello starts telling her stories, she knows those stories.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ci>The Desdemona Project\u003c/i>, Morrison tells the stories that Othello had told Desdemona, the stories that, as she tells her father in Act I, made her fall in love with Othello. And we meet Barbary, Desdemona’s maid. They meet on the other side of the grave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Malian singer-songwriter \u003ca href=\"http://www.rokiatraore.com/_sites/ROKIA_TRAORE/html/rokia_bio.htm/\">Rokia Traoré\u003c/a> sings the role of Barbary and has written the music for the production. An award-winning and acclaimed musician and singer, she and Morrison collaborated, exchanging text and song from New York to Mali and back, over the internet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On stage, both Barbary and Desdemona get to say their piece. “Toni says, for the dead the past and future are the same,” said Sellars. “So she let these women speak. Both retrospectively and also prophetically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Desdemona Project\u003c/i> runs October 26-29, 2011 at The Zellerbach Playhouse in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/performances/2011-12/theater/desdemona.php\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit calperformances.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The last time Peter Sellars tackled \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> his efforts weren’t particularly appreciated. Some audience members left at intermission, critics panned it. \u003ci>The New York Times\u003c/i> called it \u003ca href=\"http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/theater/reviews/28brantley.html/\">“exasperatingly misconceived.”\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two years later, Sellars is still mulling over the play that some ten years ago, he called “a non-stop 400-year-old racist affliction in every high school career.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sellars, a theater director renowned for brazenly refashioning classics, set his \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> in the modern-day world of the United States military. But Sellars newest riff on the play is not a new take on an old play. It is an original play, written by Toni Morrison, about Othello’s wife, Desdemona.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Desdemona Project\u003c/i>, a musical theater work, will have its world premiere on October 26, 2011 at Cal Performances in Berkeley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"480\" height=\"274\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/aeWN71gokhU\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen>\u003c/iframe>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>The new play stems from seeds that Shakespeare planted within his text. In a sense, the project is Morrison’s theatrical codicil, a new story which lets the murdered wife have the floor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Enthusing about the new production on the phone from France, Sellars told me that the idea was born of a challenge he put to Toni Morrison over lunch one day, “I happened to mention that there’s a very bad play by Shakespeare called \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> that makes no sense, the characters are not plausible and that Shakespeare never knew any Africans.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Toni spent the next four hours telling me how wrong I was and quoting the play from memory, saying it was one of the great plays, particularly for our time, because it’s not about how they kill what you love, it’s about how they convince you to kill what you love,” said Sellars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Sellars, this really sharpened his thoughts about race in America. His 2009 \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i>, (starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Iago) about “a Black man who had risen to the highest level in power in history,” was being performed just as extreme racism towards the new American President was becoming apparent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sellars said he challenged Morrison to respond to Shakespeare, “to reply to some of the things that really still need to be dealt with in Shakespeare. And she decided to begin with the women.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A largely overlooked line in Act IV of \u003ci>Othello\u003c/i> has become the key ingredient in Morrison’s play. Desdemona, who has already been threatened by her husband, sings a melancholic song and says, “I learned it from my maid, Barbary, who died while singing it from a broken heart.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/10/22/desdemona1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>“To use the name Barbary is a deliberate provocation,” says Sellars. In 16th century England, Barbary meant Africa and so this line “leads you to this astonishing thing — that Desdemona was raised by an African woman.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Morrison and Sellars interpret this iota of the character’s backstory as a window into Desdemona’s heart, a means to understand her in a deeper way; to understand her affinity with an African man. “She knows him,” Sellars explains. Desdemona was raised by an African woman with African stories and African songs. “When Othello starts telling her stories, she knows those stories.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003ci>The Desdemona Project\u003c/i>, Morrison tells the stories that Othello had told Desdemona, the stories that, as she tells her father in Act I, made her fall in love with Othello. And we meet Barbary, Desdemona’s maid. They meet on the other side of the grave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Malian singer-songwriter \u003ca href=\"http://www.rokiatraore.com/_sites/ROKIA_TRAORE/html/rokia_bio.htm/\">Rokia Traoré\u003c/a> sings the role of Barbary and has written the music for the production. An award-winning and acclaimed musician and singer, she and Morrison collaborated, exchanging text and song from New York to Mali and back, over the internet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On stage, both Barbary and Desdemona get to say their piece. “Toni says, for the dead the past and future are the same,” said Sellars. “So she let these women speak. Both retrospectively and also prophetically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>The Desdemona Project\u003c/i> runs October 26-29, 2011 at The Zellerbach Playhouse in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.calperfs.berkeley.edu/performances/2011-12/theater/desdemona.php\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit calperformances.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "From Puerto Rico To Berkeley Rep, Rita Moreno Stars In Her Own Life",
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"content": "\u003cp>After lightening her complexion and bleaching her hair to replicate Hollywood’s sex symbols and after bronzing her face to play generic Hispanics, Rita Moreno, after more than 70 years in show business, is exposing her “life without makeup.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There aren’t many octogenarians who can command the room and charm the hell out of it with stories, songs, dance and four or five costume changes six nights a week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Life Without Makeup\u003c/b>, which just had its world premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, is the kind of play that very few stars could pull off. It is self-celebratory but not self-congratulatory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Written by Tony Taccone, the theater’s artistic director, and based on many hours of interviews with the actress, the play is more than a tribute to a living legend. It’s an immigrant’s story, a story of Making It in America, and Making It in Hollywood — and also not quite making it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also a mambo down memory lane with a playlist from a bygone era. And although there are gaps where there should be details and details where there should be gaps, Moreno is so personable, it’s a treat just to hear her gab and dish and to sit in awe of her energy and elegance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the play, Moreno (nee Rosita Dolores Alverio) recalls the stormy sea voyage from Puerto Rico to New York with her mother when she was five. She describes the apartment they shared with three other families, the star-filled sky that she gazed upon from her cherished fire-escape. (Stars above the Bronx? Some of this is clearly embellished.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moreno tells of sweatshops, dance classes and the fruit-decorated hat her mother made for her performances, at age 9, as a miniature version of Carmen Miranda. With her easy-going, playful discourse, Moreno recounts how she longed to trade up — from mini-Miranda to a Betty Grable or a Lana Turner. Eventually she was signed to MGM, after Louis B. Mayer envisioned her as “a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nonetheless, Moreno kept getting cast in film roles she considered degrading. She played a mute runaway Indian slave, a Polynesian in a sarong, an Arab in a turban… For these, she perfected what she calls the “Universal Ethnic Accent.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout Moreno’s narrative of hopes raised and dashed, big breaks, bouts of depression and bad breakups (starring Marlon Brando), \u003cb>Life Without Makeup\u003c/b> is illustrated with archival photographs and film clips. We see Elizabeth “the human hourglass” Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and other sirens of the Hollywood studio system. In film clips, we also see Moreno playing various bit parts as the studio’s “resident utility ethnic.” Even after her heralded success in \u003cb>West Side Story\u003c/b>, she was offered mostly roles as gangland girlfriends, mothers of gang members, or whorehouse madams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though she has won all the major entertainment awards (she’s one of only ten performers with an EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) Moreno describes how her career trajectory sputtered forward in a Hollywood (and a country) permeated with racism and sexism. She blends humor with frustration, caustic resignation with genuine sadness. She also explains how her Puerto Rican heritage provided her with the survival skills necessary to push on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She details the comically overwrought nature of the Puerto Rican character, exclaiming, cursing, worrying and overreacting in high-strung Spanish. She humorously mimics her mother’s seductions, schemes, plans and dreams for success in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/09/12/moreno.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom:10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>Moreno mingles the personal and confessional with show biz and slapstick. Bookended by hunky Latin dancers, (Ray Garcia, and Salvatore Vassallo), she sings and dances to several numbers including “Broadway Melody,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses (a comic rendition as her character \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBr2mR91RbQ/\">Googie Gomez, her Tony winning role in \u003cb>The Ritz,\u003c/b>\u003c/a>) and \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy6wo2wpT2k/\">“America”\u003c/a>, the number that her audience is most eagerly awaiting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On opening night, Moreno took a long gulp of water after one dance and used the occasion to coax even more applause out of her audience. At eighty, following a recent knee-replacement surgery that came on the heels of her husband’s death, Moreno is still working hard and is very comfortable in her own body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People say that when you get to a certain age you start to mellow. I have no idea what these people are talking about,” Moreno says at the close of the show. “Mellowing has never done much for me… You need to keep moving… I figure if I keep my spirit in shape, the bones will take care of themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Life Without Makeup\u003c/b> runs through October 30, 2011 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1112/5334.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All photos: Kevin Berne.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>After lightening her complexion and bleaching her hair to replicate Hollywood’s sex symbols and after bronzing her face to play generic Hispanics, Rita Moreno, after more than 70 years in show business, is exposing her “life without makeup.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There aren’t many octogenarians who can command the room and charm the hell out of it with stories, songs, dance and four or five costume changes six nights a week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Life Without Makeup\u003c/b>, which just had its world premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, is the kind of play that very few stars could pull off. It is self-celebratory but not self-congratulatory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Written by Tony Taccone, the theater’s artistic director, and based on many hours of interviews with the actress, the play is more than a tribute to a living legend. It’s an immigrant’s story, a story of Making It in America, and Making It in Hollywood — and also not quite making it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also a mambo down memory lane with a playlist from a bygone era. And although there are gaps where there should be details and details where there should be gaps, Moreno is so personable, it’s a treat just to hear her gab and dish and to sit in awe of her energy and elegance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the play, Moreno (nee Rosita Dolores Alverio) recalls the stormy sea voyage from Puerto Rico to New York with her mother when she was five. She describes the apartment they shared with three other families, the star-filled sky that she gazed upon from her cherished fire-escape. (Stars above the Bronx? Some of this is clearly embellished.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moreno tells of sweatshops, dance classes and the fruit-decorated hat her mother made for her performances, at age 9, as a miniature version of Carmen Miranda. With her easy-going, playful discourse, Moreno recounts how she longed to trade up — from mini-Miranda to a Betty Grable or a Lana Turner. Eventually she was signed to MGM, after Louis B. Mayer envisioned her as “a Spanish Elizabeth Taylor.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nonetheless, Moreno kept getting cast in film roles she considered degrading. She played a mute runaway Indian slave, a Polynesian in a sarong, an Arab in a turban… For these, she perfected what she calls the “Universal Ethnic Accent.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout Moreno’s narrative of hopes raised and dashed, big breaks, bouts of depression and bad breakups (starring Marlon Brando), \u003cb>Life Without Makeup\u003c/b> is illustrated with archival photographs and film clips. We see Elizabeth “the human hourglass” Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and other sirens of the Hollywood studio system. In film clips, we also see Moreno playing various bit parts as the studio’s “resident utility ethnic.” Even after her heralded success in \u003cb>West Side Story\u003c/b>, she was offered mostly roles as gangland girlfriends, mothers of gang members, or whorehouse madams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though she has won all the major entertainment awards (she’s one of only ten performers with an EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) Moreno describes how her career trajectory sputtered forward in a Hollywood (and a country) permeated with racism and sexism. She blends humor with frustration, caustic resignation with genuine sadness. She also explains how her Puerto Rican heritage provided her with the survival skills necessary to push on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She details the comically overwrought nature of the Puerto Rican character, exclaiming, cursing, worrying and overreacting in high-strung Spanish. She humorously mimics her mother’s seductions, schemes, plans and dreams for success in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"//u.s.kqed.org/2011/09/12/moreno.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom:10px;\" alt=\"\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>Moreno mingles the personal and confessional with show biz and slapstick. Bookended by hunky Latin dancers, (Ray Garcia, and Salvatore Vassallo), she sings and dances to several numbers including “Broadway Melody,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses (a comic rendition as her character \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBr2mR91RbQ/\">Googie Gomez, her Tony winning role in \u003cb>The Ritz,\u003c/b>\u003c/a>) and \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy6wo2wpT2k/\">“America”\u003c/a>, the number that her audience is most eagerly awaiting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On opening night, Moreno took a long gulp of water after one dance and used the occasion to coax even more applause out of her audience. At eighty, following a recent knee-replacement surgery that came on the heels of her husband’s death, Moreno is still working hard and is very comfortable in her own body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People say that when you get to a certain age you start to mellow. I have no idea what these people are talking about,” Moreno says at the close of the show. “Mellowing has never done much for me… You need to keep moving… I figure if I keep my spirit in shape, the bones will take care of themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Life Without Makeup\u003c/b> runs through October 30, 2011 at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1112/5334.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All photos: Kevin Berne.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Oh, Naughty Muppets. What Would Jim Henson Think of You Now?",
"headTitle": "Oh, Naughty Muppets. What Would Jim Henson Think of You Now? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Three things that may make many a theater lover run for the hills:\u003cbr> 1. Puppeteers\u003cbr>2. Improv\u003cbr>3. Audience Participation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you feel otherwise, you might want to Run! Not Walk! to \u003ca href=\"http://www.stuffedandunstrung.com/\">\u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung.\u003c/b>\u003c/a> If you like puppets, but are lukewarm about the other two items, you might want to dawdle over there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I am of the latter camp. I am particularly fond of puppets, both in children’s entertainment and as integrated — in a non-gratuitous manner — into theater for adults. (See: my reviews of \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=44215/\">\u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b>\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=34010/\">\u003cb>Compulsion\u003c/b>\u003c/a>.) But I find that improv is often a party trick and audience participation is fun for the participant. Ticket holders should stay seated and the talent should write their own material. \u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung\u003c/b>, an adult puppet show from \u003ca href=\"http://henson.com/alternative.php/\">Henson Alternative\u003c/a>, is not built upon these principles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would seem to be born of the same zeitgeist that brought us \u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b>; our desire to titter at the incongruity of naughty and innocent. Perhaps it’s particularly satisfying to see our childhood icons brought down to our flawed (or dirty-minded) level. The corruption of innocence and the tweaking of sacred cows (or frogs, monsters, pigs..) is taboo, hence irresistible. Sexed up Muppets and Barbie dolls appeal to ironic hipsters who have grown up and now know better than to believe in make believe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And realists/nihilists love to shove sad realities down Pollyanna throats. In the Gen- X film \u003cb>Reality Bites\u003c/b>, Winona Ryder asks “Why can’t things just work out okay, like at the end of a \u003cb>Brady Bunch\u003c/b> episode?” And realist/nihilist Ethan Hawke snarks back: “Because Mr. Brady died of AIDS.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or, to a less tragic effect, \u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b>‘s orange-skinned muppet sings “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” Ah, little puppet of my childhood! We sigh. You too have problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plus, cheery outlooks are annoying. I’m tempted to go onto You Tube right now to provide some examples of NC-17-rated parodies of G-rated iconography, but I know that will take all day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yes, who doesn’t like to imagine Barbie and Ken getting it on. (“Nice As–cott,” Barbie tells Ken in \u003cb>Toy Story 3\u003c/b>, Pixar’s wink-wink to knowing grown-ups.) Or Ken and G.I. Joe? Or Peppermint Patty and Marci. Which brings us to Bert and Ernie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rumors of Bert and Ernie’s longtime romance and domestic partnership have prevailed for so long in popular culture (mostly as irreverent jokes) that some gay rights proponents think it’s only fair for them to marry. You may have heard of \u003ca href=\"http://www.change.org/petitions/let-bert-ernie-get-married-on-sesame-street\">the petition\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"http://www.sesameworkshop.org/\">Sesame Workshop\u003c/a> issued a statement saying that the pair “remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b> does attempt to redress the dearth of gay, felt, hand puppets in society, both with raunch and sincerity. While it depicts porn-loving monsters, sluts and gays, \u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung\u003c/b>, is not a satire of The Children’s Television workshop but something of an homage to puppet visionary Jim Henson. Created by Henson’s son, Brian, the show features The Jim Henson Company’s wonderful puppet characters (80 of them) and the company’s talented puppeteers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a99I7Vsh6dI&w=480&h=390]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, the show invites call outs from audience members who suggest adult situations for the puppeteers to improvise. Yes, naughtiness happens. And yes most of it is more puerile than witty. But, at its best, \u003cb>Stuffed\u003c/b> is interesting because it reveals the strings of puppeteering or, the hand up the bottom (as host Patrick Bristow says) of a muppet in action. Henson, the puppeteers and a few computer geeks take pains to show us how human movements and technical wizardry became fanciful puppet play. We watch the performers carefully maneuvering the puppets in front of cameras and green screens and we can see the large screens where the magic happens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The show incorporates archival footage and live action “recreations” of some of the simple puppet films that Jim Henson made in his 20s in the 1950s and that Frank Oz made in his 20s in the 60s. These scenes are lovely and very simple in their gentle humor and quiet choreography. While Brian Henson is paying tribute to his father’s craft, \u003cb>Stuffed\u003c/b> also shows that dirty words, digital enhancements and game show antics don’t really improve upon this craft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, I am eagerly awaiting the big screen reboot of \u003ca href=\"http://disney.go.com/muppets/\">\u003cb>The Muppets\u003c/b> \u003c/a>, the first new Muppet feature in 12 years! It stars my old friends, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and while I can witness their obvious chemistry, I really would rather not hear about what they do behind closed doors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung\u003c/b> runs through August 27, 2011 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary Street in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Three things that may make many a theater lover run for the hills:\u003cbr> 1. Puppeteers\u003cbr>2. Improv\u003cbr>3. Audience Participation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you feel otherwise, you might want to Run! Not Walk! to \u003ca href=\"http://www.stuffedandunstrung.com/\">\u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung.\u003c/b>\u003c/a> If you like puppets, but are lukewarm about the other two items, you might want to dawdle over there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I am of the latter camp. I am particularly fond of puppets, both in children’s entertainment and as integrated — in a non-gratuitous manner — into theater for adults. (See: my reviews of \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=44215/\">\u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b>\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=34010/\">\u003cb>Compulsion\u003c/b>\u003c/a>.) But I find that improv is often a party trick and audience participation is fun for the participant. Ticket holders should stay seated and the talent should write their own material. \u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung\u003c/b>, an adult puppet show from \u003ca href=\"http://henson.com/alternative.php/\">Henson Alternative\u003c/a>, is not built upon these principles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It would seem to be born of the same zeitgeist that brought us \u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b>; our desire to titter at the incongruity of naughty and innocent. Perhaps it’s particularly satisfying to see our childhood icons brought down to our flawed (or dirty-minded) level. The corruption of innocence and the tweaking of sacred cows (or frogs, monsters, pigs..) is taboo, hence irresistible. Sexed up Muppets and Barbie dolls appeal to ironic hipsters who have grown up and now know better than to believe in make believe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And realists/nihilists love to shove sad realities down Pollyanna throats. In the Gen- X film \u003cb>Reality Bites\u003c/b>, Winona Ryder asks “Why can’t things just work out okay, like at the end of a \u003cb>Brady Bunch\u003c/b> episode?” And realist/nihilist Ethan Hawke snarks back: “Because Mr. Brady died of AIDS.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or, to a less tragic effect, \u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b>‘s orange-skinned muppet sings “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” Ah, little puppet of my childhood! We sigh. You too have problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plus, cheery outlooks are annoying. I’m tempted to go onto You Tube right now to provide some examples of NC-17-rated parodies of G-rated iconography, but I know that will take all day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yes, who doesn’t like to imagine Barbie and Ken getting it on. (“Nice As–cott,” Barbie tells Ken in \u003cb>Toy Story 3\u003c/b>, Pixar’s wink-wink to knowing grown-ups.) Or Ken and G.I. Joe? Or Peppermint Patty and Marci. Which brings us to Bert and Ernie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rumors of Bert and Ernie’s longtime romance and domestic partnership have prevailed for so long in popular culture (mostly as irreverent jokes) that some gay rights proponents think it’s only fair for them to marry. You may have heard of \u003ca href=\"http://www.change.org/petitions/let-bert-ernie-get-married-on-sesame-street\">the petition\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"http://www.sesameworkshop.org/\">Sesame Workshop\u003c/a> issued a statement saying that the pair “remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b> does attempt to redress the dearth of gay, felt, hand puppets in society, both with raunch and sincerity. While it depicts porn-loving monsters, sluts and gays, \u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung\u003c/b>, is not a satire of The Children’s Television workshop but something of an homage to puppet visionary Jim Henson. Created by Henson’s son, Brian, the show features The Jim Henson Company’s wonderful puppet characters (80 of them) and the company’s talented puppeteers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/a99I7Vsh6dI'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/a99I7Vsh6dI'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, the show invites call outs from audience members who suggest adult situations for the puppeteers to improvise. Yes, naughtiness happens. And yes most of it is more puerile than witty. But, at its best, \u003cb>Stuffed\u003c/b> is interesting because it reveals the strings of puppeteering or, the hand up the bottom (as host Patrick Bristow says) of a muppet in action. Henson, the puppeteers and a few computer geeks take pains to show us how human movements and technical wizardry became fanciful puppet play. We watch the performers carefully maneuvering the puppets in front of cameras and green screens and we can see the large screens where the magic happens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The show incorporates archival footage and live action “recreations” of some of the simple puppet films that Jim Henson made in his 20s in the 1950s and that Frank Oz made in his 20s in the 60s. These scenes are lovely and very simple in their gentle humor and quiet choreography. While Brian Henson is paying tribute to his father’s craft, \u003cb>Stuffed\u003c/b> also shows that dirty words, digital enhancements and game show antics don’t really improve upon this craft.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, I am eagerly awaiting the big screen reboot of \u003ca href=\"http://disney.go.com/muppets/\">\u003cb>The Muppets\u003c/b> \u003c/a>, the first new Muppet feature in 12 years! It stars my old friends, Kermit and Miss Piggy, and while I can witness their obvious chemistry, I really would rather not hear about what they do behind closed doors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Stuffed and Unstrung\u003c/b> runs through August 27, 2011 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary Street in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>“Let me down easy,” is a phrase that comforted Joel Siegel, the ABC film critic who died of cancer in 2007. “I see a hand, carrying me to the ground, gently,” he told Anna Deavere Smith before his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her new show, \u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b>, Smith once again employs her craft as a human tape-recorder to invite us to meditate on the themes of death and dying, illness, resilience and care giving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early nineties, Anna Devere Smith was credited with creating a new form of theater. It is theater-as-journalism or anthropologic performance. But it is language that Smith is really after. Smith’s performances consist of the verbatim reiteration of transcribed interviews. She captures cadence, dialect, the music of language as she embodies the characters she recreates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1992, Smith staged \u003cb>Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities\u003c/b>. The following year, she staged \u003cb>Twilight: Los Angeles\u003c/b>. Both plays concerned specific clashes of races that had recently erupted into urban violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With uncannily deft dialects, Smith voiced the views of blacks, whites, Jews, Latinos and Asians. The presence of one person communicating such a cacophony conveys, on a purely impressionistic level, our shared humanity. She emerged as a pioneering cultural historian cum performance artist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/letmedown-1.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her newest performance piece, \u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b>, Smith does not build her play around a specific event or place; at its core it is a philosophic piece that transcends place and culture. Smith travels from Washington to New Haven to Texas to South Africa to New Orleans to talk to people about the human body, its unyielding physical capacity and its ultimate mortality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She interviews doctors, patients, academics, supermodels, theologians, elite athletes and politicians and finds — not surprisingly — that there are many different philosophies and approaches to dying, terminal illness and patient care. To the extent that the show is political, there is pretty much a consensus that quality health care is something available to the rich and denied to the poor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/letmedown-2.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And perhaps the most powerful segment of the performance speaks — eloquently — to this subject. Smith channels Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, a physician who worked at Charity Hospital during the six 100 degree days when the New Orleans hospital was left with no electricity, food or water after Katrina. Kurtz-Burke describes her initial certainty that the government would help, and her growing realization that the patients, and the black nurses she worked with, were correct in their understanding that, in fact, they had been abandoned. The doctor’s words are heartbreaking as she comes to grasp the experience of the poor, underserved population. Help is not coming and the system is not there — and has never been there — to assist this community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are other amazing moments that reveal courage in the face of exceedingly painful intimacy with tragic death. Smith’s portrayal of Trudy Howell, who cares for AIDS orphans in South Africa is equally wrenching. Howell’s impossible task is to bring comfort and a sort of preparation to parentless children who will die very soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who have seen Smith’s previous work, \u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b> is not the stunning revelation of Smith’s brilliant technique that it was the first time around. The first or second or third time you see Smith work her magic it really feels like the channeling of persons both renowned and voiceless; the power of the performance will take your breath away. Here, the technical skill is still impressive, if somewhat less awe inspiring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whether or not Smith’s magic is novel and whether these characters are as compelling as those in other shows (some are indeed not), Smith’s most significant accomplishment is in revealing the impact of the spontaneously spoken word. As she lets her subjects talk and think and hesitate and talk some more, what emerges is often quite magnificent. And we are struck with the spontaneously spoken word’s ability to communicate surprising truths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b> runs through July 10, 2011 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/4556.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All photos: Joan Marcus.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“Let me down easy,” is a phrase that comforted Joel Siegel, the ABC film critic who died of cancer in 2007. “I see a hand, carrying me to the ground, gently,” he told Anna Deavere Smith before his death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her new show, \u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b>, Smith once again employs her craft as a human tape-recorder to invite us to meditate on the themes of death and dying, illness, resilience and care giving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early nineties, Anna Devere Smith was credited with creating a new form of theater. It is theater-as-journalism or anthropologic performance. But it is language that Smith is really after. Smith’s performances consist of the verbatim reiteration of transcribed interviews. She captures cadence, dialect, the music of language as she embodies the characters she recreates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1992, Smith staged \u003cb>Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Other Identities\u003c/b>. The following year, she staged \u003cb>Twilight: Los Angeles\u003c/b>. Both plays concerned specific clashes of races that had recently erupted into urban violence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With uncannily deft dialects, Smith voiced the views of blacks, whites, Jews, Latinos and Asians. The presence of one person communicating such a cacophony conveys, on a purely impressionistic level, our shared humanity. She emerged as a pioneering cultural historian cum performance artist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/letmedown-1.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In her newest performance piece, \u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b>, Smith does not build her play around a specific event or place; at its core it is a philosophic piece that transcends place and culture. Smith travels from Washington to New Haven to Texas to South Africa to New Orleans to talk to people about the human body, its unyielding physical capacity and its ultimate mortality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She interviews doctors, patients, academics, supermodels, theologians, elite athletes and politicians and finds — not surprisingly — that there are many different philosophies and approaches to dying, terminal illness and patient care. To the extent that the show is political, there is pretty much a consensus that quality health care is something available to the rich and denied to the poor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/letmedown-2.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And perhaps the most powerful segment of the performance speaks — eloquently — to this subject. Smith channels Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, a physician who worked at Charity Hospital during the six 100 degree days when the New Orleans hospital was left with no electricity, food or water after Katrina. Kurtz-Burke describes her initial certainty that the government would help, and her growing realization that the patients, and the black nurses she worked with, were correct in their understanding that, in fact, they had been abandoned. The doctor’s words are heartbreaking as she comes to grasp the experience of the poor, underserved population. Help is not coming and the system is not there — and has never been there — to assist this community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are other amazing moments that reveal courage in the face of exceedingly painful intimacy with tragic death. Smith’s portrayal of Trudy Howell, who cares for AIDS orphans in South Africa is equally wrenching. Howell’s impossible task is to bring comfort and a sort of preparation to parentless children who will die very soon.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those who have seen Smith’s previous work, \u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b> is not the stunning revelation of Smith’s brilliant technique that it was the first time around. The first or second or third time you see Smith work her magic it really feels like the channeling of persons both renowned and voiceless; the power of the performance will take your breath away. Here, the technical skill is still impressive, if somewhat less awe inspiring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whether or not Smith’s magic is novel and whether these characters are as compelling as those in other shows (some are indeed not), Smith’s most significant accomplishment is in revealing the impact of the spontaneously spoken word. As she lets her subjects talk and think and hesitate and talk some more, what emerges is often quite magnificent. And we are struck with the spontaneously spoken word’s ability to communicate surprising truths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Let Me Down Easy\u003c/b> runs through July 10, 2011 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/4556.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All photos: Joan Marcus.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>“I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” wrote Samuel Beckett in a line that would come to crystallize much of his work. Beckett’s epigrammatic oxymoron describes the experience of many of Anton Chekhov’s characters, some 75 years before that. Long before Vladimir and Estragon waited and waited for Godot, Olga, Masha and Irina waited and dreamed and planned and never actually got to Moscow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chekhovian inertia and ultimately inescapable ennui, is in full bloom in Berkeley Rep’s \u003cb>The Three Sisters\u003c/b>. This is the West coast premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s new version of the 1901 play. In the Berkeley-to-Broadway \u003cb>In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)\u003c/b>, Ruhl showed us that the desperation in the constricted lives of Victorian women could be comedic gold. But her take on Chekhov is much more sober.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chekhov himself described \u003cb>Three Sisters\u003c/b> as a “comedy” and indeed the self-pitying iterations and reiterations and resolutions (followed by stasis) is an absurd state of affairs. Chekhov went on to deem this play “vaudeville” and while I have never seen it performed that way, it has been demonstrated that Chekhov was a pioneer of black comedy. But what is one person’s tragi-comedy is director Les Waters’s idea of strum und drang.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/three-sisters-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Emily Kitchens, Wendy Rich Stetson and Heather Wood\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Waters’s capable production of Ruhl’s straight-forward script, we pity these daughters of the evaporating aristocracy. They see themselves as in exile, helpless to do anything but long for their past. In this production, we take them for their word when they tell us that they are trapped by their circumstances. If they have said the same thing 20 times by ACT II, if they imagine escape but never pursue it, woe is them. But their treadmill angst could also be perceived as pathetic and comic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While tedium is critical to the characters’ condition, some of it wafts audience-ward too. The interminable contemplation of life and death and the meaning of it all grows wearisome over the play’s three hours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/three-sisters-3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>James Carpenter, Thomas Jay Ryan, Heather Wood and Bruce McKenzie \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each time the women bemoan their lives it’s as if they have never said it before. They wallow in their misery with little self-awareness. Wan and winsome, Heather Wood plays the youngest sister, Irina whose youth is fading along with her vitality and hope; Wendy Rich Stetson plays the stoic Olga, the eldest sister, who eventually takes the headmistress position she swore she would never accept. Dressed in black and cloaked in gloom, Natalia Payne plays Masha, the married sister who can barely swallow down her bitterness. Throughout it all, the three comfort each other that next year they will move to Moscow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps the nuanced performances of sad heroines who are tragic, pitiable \u003ci>and\u003c/i> funnily so, isn’t successful here. But there is comedy in more conventional places. The characters who have married into the family are blathering, clueless clowns who annoy the sisters and provide great comic relief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/three-sisters-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Natalia Payne and Keith Reddin\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keith Reddin is perfectly imbecilic and unctuous as Masha’s husband Kulygin. He is a self-important school-teacher with the irritating (amusing) affectation of declining Latin nouns incessantly and grading people’s behavior. Reddin’s character is a classic cuckold. He’s a buffoon who is oblivious to Masha’s contempt — or her affair with Colonel Vershinin (Bruce McKenzie.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also very entertaining is the utterly obnoxious Natasha, who becomes the wife of Andrei, (Alex Moggridge as the chronically unhappy brother of the Prozorova sisters.) With a veneer of sweetness, she confuses haughtiness with gentility. A layer of mean hides her desperate insecurity and Emily Kitchens brings a necessary energy to her role as the comic villainess.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These two are buffoons who are puffed up imitations of nobility. But the family’s relationship with their social class is more complicated. Written at the brink of the Russian Revolution, Chekhov’s sisters wax nostalgic for the halcyon days of Russian aristocracy, culture and refinement. Yet they are equally idealistic about a bold, bright future for their generation. Irina, in particular, believes she admires and craves the life of laborers and those who work for a living. She complains about being “a young woman who wakes at twelve o’clock, then has coffee in bed, then spends two hours dressing. . . Oh, how awful that is!” After several jobs as a menial laborer, she’s soon complaining again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As is their wont.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” wrote Samuel Beckett in a line that would come to crystallize much of his work. Beckett’s epigrammatic oxymoron describes the experience of many of Anton Chekhov’s characters, some 75 years before that. Long before Vladimir and Estragon waited and waited for Godot, Olga, Masha and Irina waited and dreamed and planned and never actually got to Moscow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chekhovian inertia and ultimately inescapable ennui, is in full bloom in Berkeley Rep’s \u003cb>The Three Sisters\u003c/b>. This is the West coast premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s new version of the 1901 play. In the Berkeley-to-Broadway \u003cb>In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)\u003c/b>, Ruhl showed us that the desperation in the constricted lives of Victorian women could be comedic gold. But her take on Chekhov is much more sober.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chekhov himself described \u003cb>Three Sisters\u003c/b> as a “comedy” and indeed the self-pitying iterations and reiterations and resolutions (followed by stasis) is an absurd state of affairs. Chekhov went on to deem this play “vaudeville” and while I have never seen it performed that way, it has been demonstrated that Chekhov was a pioneer of black comedy. But what is one person’s tragi-comedy is director Les Waters’s idea of strum und drang.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/three-sisters-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Emily Kitchens, Wendy Rich Stetson and Heather Wood\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Waters’s capable production of Ruhl’s straight-forward script, we pity these daughters of the evaporating aristocracy. They see themselves as in exile, helpless to do anything but long for their past. In this production, we take them for their word when they tell us that they are trapped by their circumstances. If they have said the same thing 20 times by ACT II, if they imagine escape but never pursue it, woe is them. But their treadmill angst could also be perceived as pathetic and comic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While tedium is critical to the characters’ condition, some of it wafts audience-ward too. The interminable contemplation of life and death and the meaning of it all grows wearisome over the play’s three hours.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/three-sisters-3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>James Carpenter, Thomas Jay Ryan, Heather Wood and Bruce McKenzie \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each time the women bemoan their lives it’s as if they have never said it before. They wallow in their misery with little self-awareness. Wan and winsome, Heather Wood plays the youngest sister, Irina whose youth is fading along with her vitality and hope; Wendy Rich Stetson plays the stoic Olga, the eldest sister, who eventually takes the headmistress position she swore she would never accept. Dressed in black and cloaked in gloom, Natalia Payne plays Masha, the married sister who can barely swallow down her bitterness. Throughout it all, the three comfort each other that next year they will move to Moscow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps the nuanced performances of sad heroines who are tragic, pitiable \u003ci>and\u003c/i> funnily so, isn’t successful here. But there is comedy in more conventional places. The characters who have married into the family are blathering, clueless clowns who annoy the sisters and provide great comic relief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/three-sisters-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Natalia Payne and Keith Reddin\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keith Reddin is perfectly imbecilic and unctuous as Masha’s husband Kulygin. He is a self-important school-teacher with the irritating (amusing) affectation of declining Latin nouns incessantly and grading people’s behavior. Reddin’s character is a classic cuckold. He’s a buffoon who is oblivious to Masha’s contempt — or her affair with Colonel Vershinin (Bruce McKenzie.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also very entertaining is the utterly obnoxious Natasha, who becomes the wife of Andrei, (Alex Moggridge as the chronically unhappy brother of the Prozorova sisters.) With a veneer of sweetness, she confuses haughtiness with gentility. A layer of mean hides her desperate insecurity and Emily Kitchens brings a necessary energy to her role as the comic villainess.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These two are buffoons who are puffed up imitations of nobility. But the family’s relationship with their social class is more complicated. Written at the brink of the Russian Revolution, Chekhov’s sisters wax nostalgic for the halcyon days of Russian aristocracy, culture and refinement. Yet they are equally idealistic about a bold, bright future for their generation. Irina, in particular, believes she admires and craves the life of laborers and those who work for a living. She complains about being “a young woman who wakes at twelve o’clock, then has coffee in bed, then spends two hours dressing. . . Oh, how awful that is!” After several jobs as a menial laborer, she’s soon complaining again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As is their wont.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The people on line down the block on Valencia Street on Friday were seniors, older adults and mostly non-hipster types. Certainly not the usual Mission crowd. These were ticket holders lining up at The Marsh, to see Geoff Hoyle’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/geoff_Hoyle.html\">\u003cb>Geezer\u003c/b>\u003c/a>, a one man show, ostensibly about geezer-hood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Geoff Hoyle, a master clown, mime and physical comedian, was there less to ruminate about aging than to showcase his talent and take us on a walk down his memory lane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His skill is impressive. His walk down memory lane — less so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle takes us back to his childhood in a working class family in Northern England, to his youth when his less-than-erudite dad saw his son’s theatrical spark and gave him a volume of Shakespeare; he takes us back to his naughty (theatrical) disruptions in Latin class; to his first audition… to a host of other moments — sprinkled with pantomime and sentimentality — that launched Hoyle’s career.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle trained as a mime in France, with Marcel Marceau’s teacher and went on to \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickle_Family_Circus\">Pickle Family Circus\u003c/a> renown and became part of the new vaudeville, a genre popularized by Bill Irwin. He made a terrific red-billed Hornbill (Zazu) in the Broadway production of \u003cb>The Lion King\u003c/b>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His comic turns in Berkeley Rep productions and ACT plays (often as Commedia dell’Arte manservents and wise fools) often provided memorable moments of comedy. But his ventures into the solo form have fared less well. \u003cb>A Feast of Fool\u003c/b> was a fragmentary medley of Hoyle’s funniest feats. \u003cb>The First Hundred Years\u003c/b> was full of prop-heavy sight-gags and mediocre mirth-making.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle’s routines are mostly old school and often old hat. He is technically marvelous, but his original material is wanting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle begins with a geezer-pleaser — a terrific and terrifically grody pantomime of all the new and long hairs growing in all the wrong places — he pulls foot-long hairs from his ears and nose and tells us about other icky bodily changes that are assaulting his aging body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Interspersed with vaudeville and British Music Hall antics are scenes and interchanges that tell Hoyle’s story. There are moments of impressive clowning — in one striking feat, Hoyle brings an overcoat to life, giving it a will of its own. In between shtick, he provides reenactments of pivotal conversations in his life, embodying teachers, parents, and employers. At his father’s deathbed, Hoyle imparts that he has made good and is now playing the West End. It’s a slushy “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charlie Chaplin could bring wistfulness to his clowning. But even he never attempted an autobiographical one-man show — or talking. And some of the most dazzling moments in Hoyle’s shows are the wordless ones. Still, after 40 years of clowning around, even a mime is wont to wax nostalgic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Geezer\u003c/b> runs through May 29, 2011 at The Marsh in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/geoff_Hoyle.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit themarsh.org or call 800-838-3006.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The people on line down the block on Valencia Street on Friday were seniors, older adults and mostly non-hipster types. Certainly not the usual Mission crowd. These were ticket holders lining up at The Marsh, to see Geoff Hoyle’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/geoff_Hoyle.html\">\u003cb>Geezer\u003c/b>\u003c/a>, a one man show, ostensibly about geezer-hood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Geoff Hoyle, a master clown, mime and physical comedian, was there less to ruminate about aging than to showcase his talent and take us on a walk down his memory lane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His skill is impressive. His walk down memory lane — less so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle takes us back to his childhood in a working class family in Northern England, to his youth when his less-than-erudite dad saw his son’s theatrical spark and gave him a volume of Shakespeare; he takes us back to his naughty (theatrical) disruptions in Latin class; to his first audition… to a host of other moments — sprinkled with pantomime and sentimentality — that launched Hoyle’s career.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle trained as a mime in France, with Marcel Marceau’s teacher and went on to \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickle_Family_Circus\">Pickle Family Circus\u003c/a> renown and became part of the new vaudeville, a genre popularized by Bill Irwin. He made a terrific red-billed Hornbill (Zazu) in the Broadway production of \u003cb>The Lion King\u003c/b>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His comic turns in Berkeley Rep productions and ACT plays (often as Commedia dell’Arte manservents and wise fools) often provided memorable moments of comedy. But his ventures into the solo form have fared less well. \u003cb>A Feast of Fool\u003c/b> was a fragmentary medley of Hoyle’s funniest feats. \u003cb>The First Hundred Years\u003c/b> was full of prop-heavy sight-gags and mediocre mirth-making.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle’s routines are mostly old school and often old hat. He is technically marvelous, but his original material is wanting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hoyle begins with a geezer-pleaser — a terrific and terrifically grody pantomime of all the new and long hairs growing in all the wrong places — he pulls foot-long hairs from his ears and nose and tells us about other icky bodily changes that are assaulting his aging body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Interspersed with vaudeville and British Music Hall antics are scenes and interchanges that tell Hoyle’s story. There are moments of impressive clowning — in one striking feat, Hoyle brings an overcoat to life, giving it a will of its own. In between shtick, he provides reenactments of pivotal conversations in his life, embodying teachers, parents, and employers. At his father’s deathbed, Hoyle imparts that he has made good and is now playing the West End. It’s a slushy “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Charlie Chaplin could bring wistfulness to his clowning. But even he never attempted an autobiographical one-man show — or talking. And some of the most dazzling moments in Hoyle’s shows are the wordless ones. Still, after 40 years of clowning around, even a mime is wont to wax nostalgic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Geezer\u003c/b> runs through May 29, 2011 at The Marsh in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.themarsh.org/geoff_Hoyle.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit themarsh.org or call 800-838-3006.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The Congo has been called “the rape capital of the world.” Sadistic systematic rape is part of everyday atrocities that continue in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, despite the fact that the war officially ended in 2002.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is, to say the least, a challenging topic for theater. And yet Lynn Nottage’s play, \u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b>, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Drama Desk Award, the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play, the Lucille Lortel Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, an Obie Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> opened at Berkeley Rep last week and it is a disturbing, beautifully acted and choreographed play. And anything but a good time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Wendell B. Franklin, Carla Duren, Zainab Jah and Tonye Patano\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’ve read about the ongoing mass rape of Congolese women, transpiring over the last decade, you are probably sick to your stomach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ruined” is the euphemistic term used to refer to a woman whose body has been savaged by rape. The particulars are mostly left to the imagination in the play. In many cases, Congolese women have been butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood such that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. Some who have received treatment use colostomy bags because of internal damage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the details and the statistics are overwhelming, they are not unknown. Newspaper articles about the sexual violence and about the government and rebel armies are there to read. Nottage had a different approach. She went to East Africa in 2004 and interviewed Congolese women about their lives. An African American from Brooklyn, Nottage shaped these stories into a drama, a theatrical performance that, under Liesl Tommy’s solid direction, could let these women “speak for themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Carla Duren is held back by Kola Ogundiran and Okierete Onaodowan \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet, while the subject matter is powerful, this composite biographical documentary approach doesn’t successfully employ the power of theater — as an art form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set in a deceptively appealing honky-tonk bar, each of the women in this play has a different back story, a different trauma they are running from, hiding from or recovering from. Tonye Patano plays Mama Nadi, the tough cookie queen bee who runs the bar and brothel. Patano, who played a likewise surly and charismatic part in the TV show \u003cb>Weeds\u003c/b> (as a pot-dealing mama) is terrific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like the war profiteering Mother Courage, Nadi is a commanding survivor. Like Brecht’s entrepreneur, she sells her wares, in this case women and whiskey, to an endless stream of soldiers. She doesn’t choose sides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, Nottage presents her with compelling ambiguity. Is Nadi exploiting or protecting the girls she employs? Will she stand up to the thugs or give them free booze? It’s complicated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The war in the Congo has been called “the African equivalent of Afghanistan,” because of the conflict’s enduring violence and complexity. Both the government army and the rebel soldiers are corrupt opportunists and ruthless rapists. There are no good guys, and so no one is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Carla Duren and Pascale Armand\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sophie, who cannot walk straight (one can readily imagine why) is a newcomer to Nadi’s quasi-sanctuary. Carla Duren plays the terrified and traumatized girl, who is, unluckily for her, the pretty one. And although Nadi has designated Sophie “off bounds” to the groping men, protection only goes so far in this climate of lawlessness and self-preservation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s Sophie who gets to sing with the band, rather than serve whiskey and sex. She sings melodious, mellow songs with a vitalizing African rhythm. And it’s the music in \u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> that gives the audience some reprieve and, with Sophie and the other women up on stage, some hope that happiness can still exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And there are other moments of warmth. Oberon K.A. Adjepong is charming as Christian, the voice of male decency and moral outrage. His humor and clowning brighten the bar and he seems to be one of the few there who refuses to give up on these women. Pascale Armand plays Salima, a wife and mother whose vivid account of the brutality she has survived is horrid and horrible to hear. Zainab Jah’s Josephine, the third woman working the bar, is another type; hardened and cynical. She has been there the longest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Original music and sound design are from a musical collective called \u003ca href=\"http://www.brokenchordcollective.com/listen.html\">Broken Chord\u003c/a> (Daniel Baker and Aaron Meicht and rap lyricist Earl David). Their talents are immense, their contribution is invaluable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the onstage band alleviates the play’s tension, hip hop and rap introduce an unsettling, threatening male energy that feels like a battle cry. The soldiers, drunk, stoned and tweaked on testosterone, initiate an intimidating, muscular and fascinating dance sequence, taking turns peacocking, and center-staging. They mesmerize with an athletic sexuality that’s breathtaking and very frightening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rivetingly choreographed by Randy Duncan, this scene uses kinetic movement to communicate menace and control — it’s nearly an interpretive dance of the energy of gang rape. And the scene is one of the few times that \u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> is truly theatrical. Here, the play uses the craft of theater, not transcripts, to show and not to tell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> runs through April 10, 2011 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/4526.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org or call 1-888-427–8849.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Congo has been called “the rape capital of the world.” Sadistic systematic rape is part of everyday atrocities that continue in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, despite the fact that the war officially ended in 2002.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is, to say the least, a challenging topic for theater. And yet Lynn Nottage’s play, \u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b>, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Drama Desk Award, the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play, the Lucille Lortel Award, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, an Obie Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> opened at Berkeley Rep last week and it is a disturbing, beautifully acted and choreographed play. And anything but a good time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Wendell B. Franklin, Carla Duren, Zainab Jah and Tonye Patano\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’ve read about the ongoing mass rape of Congolese women, transpiring over the last decade, you are probably sick to your stomach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ruined” is the euphemistic term used to refer to a woman whose body has been savaged by rape. The particulars are mostly left to the imagination in the play. In many cases, Congolese women have been butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood such that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair. Some who have received treatment use colostomy bags because of internal damage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the details and the statistics are overwhelming, they are not unknown. Newspaper articles about the sexual violence and about the government and rebel armies are there to read. Nottage had a different approach. She went to East Africa in 2004 and interviewed Congolese women about their lives. An African American from Brooklyn, Nottage shaped these stories into a drama, a theatrical performance that, under Liesl Tommy’s solid direction, could let these women “speak for themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Carla Duren is held back by Kola Ogundiran and Okierete Onaodowan \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet, while the subject matter is powerful, this composite biographical documentary approach doesn’t successfully employ the power of theater — as an art form.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set in a deceptively appealing honky-tonk bar, each of the women in this play has a different back story, a different trauma they are running from, hiding from or recovering from. Tonye Patano plays Mama Nadi, the tough cookie queen bee who runs the bar and brothel. Patano, who played a likewise surly and charismatic part in the TV show \u003cb>Weeds\u003c/b> (as a pot-dealing mama) is terrific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like the war profiteering Mother Courage, Nadi is a commanding survivor. Like Brecht’s entrepreneur, she sells her wares, in this case women and whiskey, to an endless stream of soldiers. She doesn’t choose sides.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so, Nottage presents her with compelling ambiguity. Is Nadi exploiting or protecting the girls she employs? Will she stand up to the thugs or give them free booze? It’s complicated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The war in the Congo has been called “the African equivalent of Afghanistan,” because of the conflict’s enduring violence and complexity. Both the government army and the rebel soldiers are corrupt opportunists and ruthless rapists. There are no good guys, and so no one is safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined4.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003cbr>Carla Duren and Pascale Armand\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sophie, who cannot walk straight (one can readily imagine why) is a newcomer to Nadi’s quasi-sanctuary. Carla Duren plays the terrified and traumatized girl, who is, unluckily for her, the pretty one. And although Nadi has designated Sophie “off bounds” to the groping men, protection only goes so far in this climate of lawlessness and self-preservation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s Sophie who gets to sing with the band, rather than serve whiskey and sex. She sings melodious, mellow songs with a vitalizing African rhythm. And it’s the music in \u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> that gives the audience some reprieve and, with Sophie and the other women up on stage, some hope that happiness can still exist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And there are other moments of warmth. Oberon K.A. Adjepong is charming as Christian, the voice of male decency and moral outrage. His humor and clowning brighten the bar and he seems to be one of the few there who refuses to give up on these women. Pascale Armand plays Salima, a wife and mother whose vivid account of the brutality she has survived is horrid and horrible to hear. Zainab Jah’s Josephine, the third woman working the bar, is another type; hardened and cynical. She has been there the longest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Original music and sound design are from a musical collective called \u003ca href=\"http://www.brokenchordcollective.com/listen.html\">Broken Chord\u003c/a> (Daniel Baker and Aaron Meicht and rap lyricist Earl David). Their talents are immense, their contribution is invaluable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/ruined3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the onstage band alleviates the play’s tension, hip hop and rap introduce an unsettling, threatening male energy that feels like a battle cry. The soldiers, drunk, stoned and tweaked on testosterone, initiate an intimidating, muscular and fascinating dance sequence, taking turns peacocking, and center-staging. They mesmerize with an athletic sexuality that’s breathtaking and very frightening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rivetingly choreographed by Randy Duncan, this scene uses kinetic movement to communicate menace and control — it’s nearly an interpretive dance of the energy of gang rape. And the scene is one of the few times that \u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> is truly theatrical. Here, the play uses the craft of theater, not transcripts, to show and not to tell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ruined\u003c/b> runs through April 10, 2011 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/4526.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org or call 1-888-427–8849.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A “homecoming” may invoke images of warmth and tears, a thanksgiving dinner perhaps, family members reunited after too, too much time. In Harold Pinter’s \u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b>, the title is facetious, as are any niceties that may be uttered by family members in this brutal nasty household.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Funny-peculiar — and moreover funny-spooky, surreal and unsettling, \u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b>, opened on Wednesday at the American Conservatory Theater. The production is riveting — even though the audience really didn’t know when to laugh; everything is funny. And nothing is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes Pinter’s play absurdist — and not tragic — is the way in which things slip from bad to worse, how plausible meanness slides into blasé bizarreness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nobody really rips one another to shreds; no one busts the fourth wall of decorum, verbal decorum that is. But when dear old dad reunites with his long absent son, when brothers gather together, the family kills with a menacing kindness. Even endearments — “dear dad” and “my son” are spoken with a dripping, hateful sarcasm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Written in 1964, the play seems to mock domestic dramas where the past haunts the present, like \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Day%27s_Journey_into_Night\">\u003cb>Long Day’s Journey in Night\u003c/b>\u003c/a>. It seems to parody the unexpected cruelty of a play like \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Afraid_of_Virginia_Woolf%3F\">\u003cb>Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?\u003c/b>\u003c/a>, which was staged two years earlier. Indeed, Pinter’s Max and Lenny and Teddy and Joey make Albee’s George and Martha look like a happily married couple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/homecoming-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack Willis plays Max, a mean-spirited father of three grown sons, two of whom still live with him. His brother Sam, (Kenneth Welsh) lives with them too, in a house where harshness and bitterness are as thick as the cigar smoke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Into this simmering swill walks the son who got away — Teddy, who arrives with his chilly wife, Ruth. Played with apt refined inertness by Anthony Fusco, Teddy is a success in America, a scholar, a father, a husband. But his wife isn’t really facilitating Teddy’s above-it-all superiority. René Augesen captivates as Ruth, a sphinxian minx who navigates — or does she steer? — the unexpected goings on as they warp from odd to psycho.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A British critic once wrote that all of Pinter’s scenes can be reduced to the question, “whose on top right now?” In \u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b>‘s masculine household, violence and menace are familiar weapons. But when a woman enters the house — her red dress an arresting contrast to the dull palate and grimy walls — sexuality is the sharpest tool in the arsenal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Max is a butcher by trade, skilled with the meat cleaver. Youngest son Joey is something of a meat head, a boxer who works “in demolition.” (Adam O’Byrne plays the guileless pretty boy.) But it is the oily, unctuous Lenny, whose occupation is shadier, who is the best match for Ruth’s brand of stealth combat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/homecoming-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Lenny, Andrew Polk is a threatening and electric creep. Early on, he and Ruth have a tense dance of words in which small talk and manners evolve into intimidation and challenge and a psychological poker game over a glass of water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under Carey Perloff’s effective direction, what’s uncomfortable becomes inappropriate and what’s inappropriate becomes twisted and nonsensical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What transpires is so enigmatic, I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise. But for Pinter, it’s much more about the mood, the plot is just a vehicle. Pinter’s nightmare is not scary or even surprisingly awful. What is often most unsettling about a bad dream is that, within its own context, everything seems normal and it is difficult to identify how it is not. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only the audience, (outside looking in), who sees that something is very, very wrong. Pinter is a master at drawing us into this twilight sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b> runs through March 27, 2011 at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org/press/homecoming.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act-sf.org or call 415.749.2228.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All photos: Kevin Berne.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A “homecoming” may invoke images of warmth and tears, a thanksgiving dinner perhaps, family members reunited after too, too much time. In Harold Pinter’s \u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b>, the title is facetious, as are any niceties that may be uttered by family members in this brutal nasty household.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Funny-peculiar — and moreover funny-spooky, surreal and unsettling, \u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b>, opened on Wednesday at the American Conservatory Theater. The production is riveting — even though the audience really didn’t know when to laugh; everything is funny. And nothing is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes Pinter’s play absurdist — and not tragic — is the way in which things slip from bad to worse, how plausible meanness slides into blasé bizarreness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nobody really rips one another to shreds; no one busts the fourth wall of decorum, verbal decorum that is. But when dear old dad reunites with his long absent son, when brothers gather together, the family kills with a menacing kindness. Even endearments — “dear dad” and “my son” are spoken with a dripping, hateful sarcasm.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Written in 1964, the play seems to mock domestic dramas where the past haunts the present, like \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Day%27s_Journey_into_Night\">\u003cb>Long Day’s Journey in Night\u003c/b>\u003c/a>. It seems to parody the unexpected cruelty of a play like \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Afraid_of_Virginia_Woolf%3F\">\u003cb>Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?\u003c/b>\u003c/a>, which was staged two years earlier. Indeed, Pinter’s Max and Lenny and Teddy and Joey make Albee’s George and Martha look like a happily married couple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/homecoming-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jack Willis plays Max, a mean-spirited father of three grown sons, two of whom still live with him. His brother Sam, (Kenneth Welsh) lives with them too, in a house where harshness and bitterness are as thick as the cigar smoke.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Into this simmering swill walks the son who got away — Teddy, who arrives with his chilly wife, Ruth. Played with apt refined inertness by Anthony Fusco, Teddy is a success in America, a scholar, a father, a husband. But his wife isn’t really facilitating Teddy’s above-it-all superiority. René Augesen captivates as Ruth, a sphinxian minx who navigates — or does she steer? — the unexpected goings on as they warp from odd to psycho.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A British critic once wrote that all of Pinter’s scenes can be reduced to the question, “whose on top right now?” In \u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b>‘s masculine household, violence and menace are familiar weapons. But when a woman enters the house — her red dress an arresting contrast to the dull palate and grimy walls — sexuality is the sharpest tool in the arsenal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Max is a butcher by trade, skilled with the meat cleaver. Youngest son Joey is something of a meat head, a boxer who works “in demolition.” (Adam O’Byrne plays the guileless pretty boy.) But it is the oily, unctuous Lenny, whose occupation is shadier, who is the best match for Ruth’s brand of stealth combat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/homecoming-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Lenny, Andrew Polk is a threatening and electric creep. Early on, he and Ruth have a tense dance of words in which small talk and manners evolve into intimidation and challenge and a psychological poker game over a glass of water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under Carey Perloff’s effective direction, what’s uncomfortable becomes inappropriate and what’s inappropriate becomes twisted and nonsensical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What transpires is so enigmatic, I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise. But for Pinter, it’s much more about the mood, the plot is just a vehicle. Pinter’s nightmare is not scary or even surprisingly awful. What is often most unsettling about a bad dream is that, within its own context, everything seems normal and it is difficult to identify how it is not. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only the audience, (outside looking in), who sees that something is very, very wrong. Pinter is a master at drawing us into this twilight sleep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Homecoming\u003c/b> runs through March 27, 2011 at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org/press/homecoming.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act-sf.org or call 415.749.2228.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All photos: Kevin Berne.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The darling muppets, who loiter on the clean-scrubbed stoops of \u003cb>Sesame Street\u003c/b>, are beloved, it’s true. But like all things bright and shiny and incessantly innocent, it’s kinda tempting to sully them a bit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which is why shows like \u003ca href=\"http://www.avenueq.com/Avenue%20Q\">\u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b>\u003c/a> have had such success. What was once an Off-Broadway parody of \u003cb>Sesame Street\u003c/b> — featuring a porn-loving monster and hot felt-on-felt action — became a Broadway hit, spawning a Vegas show and a national touring company. Smirking at sanctity is no longer a fringe fetish. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rumor that Bert and Ernie are boyfriend and boyfriend has been bandied about since the first \u003cb>Sesame Street\u003c/b> graduates hit puberty. There’s something inherently funny in thinking about wholesome children’s puppets in adult terms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s funny because it’s perverse — the notion, that is, that these strictly waist-up lovable naifs have a life below the waist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a fine tradition of sullying G-rated iconography with our dirty little minds and revamping childhood staples with the not-so-sunny realities of life outside of PBS children’s programming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Remember, if you will, the sublime \u003cb>SNL\u003c/b> parodies of \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2X1hf8w7qs\">\u003cb>Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood\u003c/b>\u003c/a>, with Eddie Murphy as a ghetto version of the friendly cardigan-wearing neighbor, “Can you say scumbucket?” he ask the camera after receiving an eviction notice from his landlord.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Avenue Q, folks are more upstanding, but life is still disappointing. “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” sings Princeton, a recent college grad, (who happens to be an orange-skinned puppet). Scouting out a cheap apartment on a familiar-looking block of brownstones, Princeton encounters Gary Coleman, (queue the comedy of nostalgia) who, inexplicably, is the building’s super. The former child star turned sad sack is on hand to further illustrate that Avenue Q is the boulevard of broken dreams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The promises of childhood (every one of us is worthy and special and respected, yada yada) turns out to be as flimsy as that charming brownstone facade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It Sucks to Be Me” is Avenue Q’s musical retort to the ethos of Bob and Big Bird’s cloying “Aren’t You Glad You’re You?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s the clash between TV idealism and “reality-based” reality that makes some of us want to pop their balloon. Most parents want to shoot Barney, don’t they?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was the similar impetus at work in \u003cb>The Brady Bunch Movie\u003c/b>. It’s really satisfying (to those of us who had our face smooshed against the window of that split-level suburban home) when that bunch of Pollyannas gets real life thrown at them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You actually don’t even have to leave the real PBS \u003cb>Sesame Street\u003c/b> to find that reality is getting in the way of old school happiness; These days the cookie monster advocates a balanced diet, loves his veggies and tells kids “A Cookie is a Sometimes Food” (Damn you Michelle Obama!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the Tony Award-winning \u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b> (conceived by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, who wrote the music and lyrics, book by Jeff Whitty) strives to be irreverent — some muppets are gay and some are porn addicts or sluts. Songs have titles “You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Makin’ Love),” “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and “Schadenfreude.” But in the end, it’s really just another felt boy-meets-girl monster, felt boy-loses-girl monster story. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b> runs through February 27, 2011 at The Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com or call 888-SHN-1799\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Remember, if you will, the sublime \u003cb>SNL\u003c/b> parodies of \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2X1hf8w7qs\">\u003cb>Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood\u003c/b>\u003c/a>, with Eddie Murphy as a ghetto version of the friendly cardigan-wearing neighbor, “Can you say scumbucket?” he ask the camera after receiving an eviction notice from his landlord.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Avenue Q, folks are more upstanding, but life is still disappointing. “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” sings Princeton, a recent college grad, (who happens to be an orange-skinned puppet). Scouting out a cheap apartment on a familiar-looking block of brownstones, Princeton encounters Gary Coleman, (queue the comedy of nostalgia) who, inexplicably, is the building’s super. The former child star turned sad sack is on hand to further illustrate that Avenue Q is the boulevard of broken dreams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The promises of childhood (every one of us is worthy and special and respected, yada yada) turns out to be as flimsy as that charming brownstone facade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It Sucks to Be Me” is Avenue Q’s musical retort to the ethos of Bob and Big Bird’s cloying “Aren’t You Glad You’re You?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s the clash between TV idealism and “reality-based” reality that makes some of us want to pop their balloon. Most parents want to shoot Barney, don’t they?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was the similar impetus at work in \u003cb>The Brady Bunch Movie\u003c/b>. It’s really satisfying (to those of us who had our face smooshed against the window of that split-level suburban home) when that bunch of Pollyannas gets real life thrown at them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You actually don’t even have to leave the real PBS \u003cb>Sesame Street\u003c/b> to find that reality is getting in the way of old school happiness; These days the cookie monster advocates a balanced diet, loves his veggies and tells kids “A Cookie is a Sometimes Food” (Damn you Michelle Obama!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the Tony Award-winning \u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b> (conceived by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, who wrote the music and lyrics, book by Jeff Whitty) strives to be irreverent — some muppets are gay and some are porn addicts or sluts. Songs have titles “You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You’re Makin’ Love),” “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” and “Schadenfreude.” But in the end, it’s really just another felt boy-meets-girl monster, felt boy-loses-girl monster story. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Avenue Q\u003c/b> runs through February 27, 2011 at The Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com or call 888-SHN-1799\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"soldout": {
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