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"content": "\u003cp>Each time the 1981 Tony winning musical \u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> is produced, it brings to the fore yet another diva’s story. And our collective pop culture consciousness of her gets folded into the layers of \u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b>. In 2010, with a \u003ca href=\"http://www.dreamgirlsonstage.com/\">\u003c/a>\u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> revival opening in San Francisco, the show carries the personalities of Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson (from the 2006 film adaptation) with it, in addition to Jennifer Holliday (the star of the 81 original) and the ghosts of Motown divas past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Everybody knows — or everybody thinks they know — that the Broadway musical \u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> is about Diana Ross and The Supremes. Anybody who knows a bit about the Supremes can see that the play’s Effie White invokes Florence Ballard, the big voiced Supreme who fell by the wayside as Diana Ross’s star rose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The musical’s librettist, Tom Eyen, has insisted that he did not write \u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> with The Supremes in mind. But that might have just been his lawyers talking.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/dreamgirls1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If \u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> wasn’t the musical theater version of a roman à clef, it would be much less interesting. Yes, this is a musical about big voices, big egos, big divas (fun!), cat fights (super fun!), infidelity (of all stripes), glitter (in truckloads!), and synchronized dance steps. All good stuff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the play’s extratextuality is what gives it its texture. It should be a prerequisite to know that: Motown’s Berry Gordy was sleeping with Diana Ross when he launched her career. And that Diana had his child, unbeknownst to him until years later. Or that Jennifer Holliday (who originated the role of Effie in 1981) quit the workshop again and again until they rewrote the play so Effie didn’t get killed off after Act I (although Flo Ballard did die young.) Or that Jennifer Hudson totally should have won Idol but didn’t, but she shot to fame anyway. (Snag, Simon.) Or that Diana Ross once hit a flight attendant with her hat box, which was carrying her dog.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/dreamgirls2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without all the TMZ dish, \u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> is a good enough music industry musical with familiar composite characters whose costumes, hair and musical styles transform from the 1950s through the 1970s. The story follows Effie White (Moya Angela, delivering the goods) as the big, busty diva with a ‘tude. She can belt it out like nobody’s business, but because of favoritism and the music biz’s transformation from an aural art to an audio-visual one, she gets relegated to the back of the band. Syesha Mercado plays Deena Jones, the Diana Ross character (played by Beyoncé in the film.) Like all the characters in this play, her role is utterly underwritten. But we can’t really care: the stylized dances (Robert Longbottom from Michael Bennett’s original choreography) and eye-catching costumes (William Ivey Long and lots of lamé) assert that this is a play that is exclusively about showmanship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/dreamgirls3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With Effie gone, the Dreams are now comprised of Mercado’s Deena and Adrienne Warren and Margaret Hoffman as Lorrell and Michelle, whose plotlines involve boyfriends who won’t leave their wives, if I remember correctly. Chaz Lamar Shepherd plays Curtis Taylor, Jr. the Berry Gordy character and Trevon Davis plays C.C. White, the song writer who Taylor thwarts again and again. Effie goes off to start a solo career that looks and sounds something like Roberta Flack/Aretha Franklin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Angela’s “And I’m Telling You..” is a powerful show-stopper, it’s Chester Gregory as James “Thunder” Early, who wows us throughout the play. Gregory plays Jimmy, a James Brown type, who refuses to tone down his racy act to “break over” to the pop charts. His Gumby-limbed dance moves and raunchy microphone gestures thrill and lift the energetic, but not very memorable songs (Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen’s genre knockoffs) to suitable heights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the movie outperforms this revival, this production underscores the sea change between an era when the music ruled to the modern television age of \u003cb>American Bandstand\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Soul Train\u003c/b>. Using vintage-style, big-screen projections (media design by Howard Werner) behind the live actors, the contrast betweem the eras comes through loud and clear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> runs through September 26, 2010 at The Curran Theater 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>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the play’s extratextuality is what gives it its texture. It should be a prerequisite to know that: Motown’s Berry Gordy was sleeping with Diana Ross when he launched her career. And that Diana had his child, unbeknownst to him until years later. Or that Jennifer Holliday (who originated the role of Effie in 1981) quit the workshop again and again until they rewrote the play so Effie didn’t get killed off after Act I (although Flo Ballard did die young.) Or that Jennifer Hudson totally should have won Idol but didn’t, but she shot to fame anyway. (Snag, Simon.) Or that Diana Ross once hit a flight attendant with her hat box, which was carrying her dog.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/dreamgirls2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without all the TMZ dish, \u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> is a good enough music industry musical with familiar composite characters whose costumes, hair and musical styles transform from the 1950s through the 1970s. The story follows Effie White (Moya Angela, delivering the goods) as the big, busty diva with a ‘tude. She can belt it out like nobody’s business, but because of favoritism and the music biz’s transformation from an aural art to an audio-visual one, she gets relegated to the back of the band. Syesha Mercado plays Deena Jones, the Diana Ross character (played by Beyoncé in the film.) Like all the characters in this play, her role is utterly underwritten. But we can’t really care: the stylized dances (Robert Longbottom from Michael Bennett’s original choreography) and eye-catching costumes (William Ivey Long and lots of lamé) assert that this is a play that is exclusively about showmanship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/dreamgirls3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With Effie gone, the Dreams are now comprised of Mercado’s Deena and Adrienne Warren and Margaret Hoffman as Lorrell and Michelle, whose plotlines involve boyfriends who won’t leave their wives, if I remember correctly. Chaz Lamar Shepherd plays Curtis Taylor, Jr. the Berry Gordy character and Trevon Davis plays C.C. White, the song writer who Taylor thwarts again and again. Effie goes off to start a solo career that looks and sounds something like Roberta Flack/Aretha Franklin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Angela’s “And I’m Telling You..” is a powerful show-stopper, it’s Chester Gregory as James “Thunder” Early, who wows us throughout the play. Gregory plays Jimmy, a James Brown type, who refuses to tone down his racy act to “break over” to the pop charts. His Gumby-limbed dance moves and raunchy microphone gestures thrill and lift the energetic, but not very memorable songs (Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen’s genre knockoffs) to suitable heights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the movie outperforms this revival, this production underscores the sea change between an era when the music ruled to the modern television age of \u003cb>American Bandstand\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Soul Train\u003c/b>. Using vintage-style, big-screen projections (media design by Howard Werner) behind the live actors, the contrast betweem the eras comes through loud and clear.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Dreamgirls\u003c/b> runs through September 26, 2010 at The Curran Theater 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>With its socialist yoking of sex and commerce and marriage and whoredom, \u003cb> Mrs. Warren’s Profession\u003c/b>, George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 play, was quite the shocker in its day. Banned in England at the end of the 19th century, a New York production’s cast and crew were arrested in 1905 and it was again banned — as late as 1955 — in Paris as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In modern times, when nothing is risqué, least of all ideas, the play’s radicalism is tricky to tap. Timothy Near’s room-temperature revival of the play, for The California Shakespeare Festival, does little to generate the excitement of Shaw’s daring ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play begins with the putting on of layers and layers of feminine undergarments — to the forlorn strains of Sinead O’Connor’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8IbqqnBvIQ\">“Factory Girl”\u003c/a>. It’s a perfect selection that suggests a new approach to a period melodrama. O’Connor sings, “I’ve gold in my pocket and silver as well/No more will I answer that factory call.” The stoic resignation in her voice brings a fresh resonance to the plight of women of meager means and scant choices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather than setting the tone for a tale that will mirror the lyrics, the song kinda outshines it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While there’s some intrigue beneath the layers of Victorian frockery and the performances are mostly competent, this new production hardly socks it to us the way any show about sex and money ought to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vivie Warren, with her strong handshake, no nonsense demeanor and pleasure in cigars, is a classic Shavian feminist. A Cambridge mathematician, who is all business and no sentimentality, Vivie is an unconventionally modern girl, played a bit too conventionally by Anna Bullards. Having been educated at consecutive boarding school, she hardly knows her mother and when Mrs. Warrren arrives, Vivie is intent on knowing more. Specifically, she wants to know who her father is. As it turns out, a number of the men in Mrs. Warren’s wake are also wondering what part they may play in Vivie’s parentage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dropping her refined accent, “Mrs.” Warren tells her tale of the white lead factory, the starvation wages, the scullery work and the indelicate industry that ultimately put her daughter through school and made her quite comfortable, thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shaw’s rebuke of the hypocrisy of his culture is deft: “As if a marriage ceremony makes any difference in the right or wrong of the thing,” Mrs. Warren proffers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the moral relativism of it all becomes more complex when Vivie, who had embraced her mother and admired her resilience, learns more and retracts her support. When she finds out that her mother continues to practice this trade — not for necessity, but because she has become accustomed to the finer things in life, Vivie is shocked and outraged at her mother’s capitalist greed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stacey Ross has moments of authentic intensity as Mrs. Warren, even though her speedy delivery isn’t always effective. Andy Murray is a familiar Victorian villain, whose marriage proposal to Vivie reminds us that wives are merely upper crust prostitutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a rector (Rod Gnapp) with a checkered past, his son (Richard Thieriot), a free-thinking Oscar Wild-esque loaf-about and an artist (Dan Hiatt) to contrast Vivie’s pragmatism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erik Flatmo’s appealing set design and Meg Neville’s striking costumes look great against the pale mountains at Orinda’s amphitheater. The music is, once again, imaginative — in one affecting, wordless scene, mother and daughter dance to a classically arranged instrumental of Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time.” Later, there’s Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd (“Money”, of course.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s these between-the-text flourishes that give this performance a distinct personality. And one wishes there were more original choices because a conventional adaptation of a play that scorns convention just won’t do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mrs. Warren’s Profession\u003c/b> runs through August 1, 2010 at Bruns Amphitheater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.calshakes.org/v4/ourplays/2010/mrswarrens.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit calshakes.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>With its socialist yoking of sex and commerce and marriage and whoredom, \u003cb> Mrs. Warren’s Profession\u003c/b>, George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 play, was quite the shocker in its day. Banned in England at the end of the 19th century, a New York production’s cast and crew were arrested in 1905 and it was again banned — as late as 1955 — in Paris as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In modern times, when nothing is risqué, least of all ideas, the play’s radicalism is tricky to tap. Timothy Near’s room-temperature revival of the play, for The California Shakespeare Festival, does little to generate the excitement of Shaw’s daring ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play begins with the putting on of layers and layers of feminine undergarments — to the forlorn strains of Sinead O’Connor’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8IbqqnBvIQ\">“Factory Girl”\u003c/a>. It’s a perfect selection that suggests a new approach to a period melodrama. O’Connor sings, “I’ve gold in my pocket and silver as well/No more will I answer that factory call.” The stoic resignation in her voice brings a fresh resonance to the plight of women of meager means and scant choices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rather than setting the tone for a tale that will mirror the lyrics, the song kinda outshines it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While there’s some intrigue beneath the layers of Victorian frockery and the performances are mostly competent, this new production hardly socks it to us the way any show about sex and money ought to.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vivie Warren, with her strong handshake, no nonsense demeanor and pleasure in cigars, is a classic Shavian feminist. A Cambridge mathematician, who is all business and no sentimentality, Vivie is an unconventionally modern girl, played a bit too conventionally by Anna Bullards. Having been educated at consecutive boarding school, she hardly knows her mother and when Mrs. Warrren arrives, Vivie is intent on knowing more. Specifically, she wants to know who her father is. As it turns out, a number of the men in Mrs. Warren’s wake are also wondering what part they may play in Vivie’s parentage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dropping her refined accent, “Mrs.” Warren tells her tale of the white lead factory, the starvation wages, the scullery work and the indelicate industry that ultimately put her daughter through school and made her quite comfortable, thank you.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shaw’s rebuke of the hypocrisy of his culture is deft: “As if a marriage ceremony makes any difference in the right or wrong of the thing,” Mrs. Warren proffers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the moral relativism of it all becomes more complex when Vivie, who had embraced her mother and admired her resilience, learns more and retracts her support. When she finds out that her mother continues to practice this trade — not for necessity, but because she has become accustomed to the finer things in life, Vivie is shocked and outraged at her mother’s capitalist greed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stacey Ross has moments of authentic intensity as Mrs. Warren, even though her speedy delivery isn’t always effective. Andy Murray is a familiar Victorian villain, whose marriage proposal to Vivie reminds us that wives are merely upper crust prostitutes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a rector (Rod Gnapp) with a checkered past, his son (Richard Thieriot), a free-thinking Oscar Wild-esque loaf-about and an artist (Dan Hiatt) to contrast Vivie’s pragmatism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erik Flatmo’s appealing set design and Meg Neville’s striking costumes look great against the pale mountains at Orinda’s amphitheater. The music is, once again, imaginative — in one affecting, wordless scene, mother and daughter dance to a classically arranged instrumental of Cindy Lauper’s “Time After Time.” Later, there’s Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd (“Money”, of course.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s these between-the-text flourishes that give this performance a distinct personality. And one wishes there were more original choices because a conventional adaptation of a play that scorns convention just won’t do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Mrs. Warren’s Profession\u003c/b> runs through August 1, 2010 at Bruns Amphitheater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.calshakes.org/v4/ourplays/2010/mrswarrens.html\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit calshakes.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>In the course of 90 minutes and 90 years, the art deco double doors at the Tosca Cafe on Columbus Avenue, swing open probably 90 times to let in immigrants and opera singers, flappers and sailors, thugs and bar flies, beat poets, vets, hippies, disco queers, businessmen, ballet dancers, yuppies and dot-commies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know a 90-minute play is dragging when the Loma Prieta earthquake hits and you think: thank goodness, only two decades to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Tosca Project\u003c/b>, ACT’s world premiere dance-theater work about the life of North Beach’s renowned bar, aspires to be a love song to the singularity of San Francisco and the eccentrics who called this place home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ACT artistic director Carey Perloff and Val Caniparoli (SF Ballet Principal Character Dancer and Choreographer) spent four year years developing the piece — culling tales from the bar’s neighbors, friends and fixtures. And still, besides those deco double doors, hand-carved mahogany bar top, Italian espresso machine and familiar arches, \u003cb>The Tosca Project\u003c/b> is a mere nostalgia-thon of passing decades and their passing dance styles in any city in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/tosca-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nearly wordless piece runs through the decades from Prohibition to Black Tuesday to Pearl Harbor to the Summer of Love to the Dot-Com Boom. Each new era is ushered in by a change in the music on the jukebox (Irving Berlin, Tommy Dorsey, Hendryx, Sylvester…), the introduction of a new dance craze and changes in costume. World events are announced via an old-timey newsreel voice. There’s a cursory sense of checking off the eras. It reminds me of that “classic” YouTube video \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg\">\u003cb>The Evolution of Dance\u003c/b>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The talent of the dancers is clear, even if much of the choreography leans toward the Artistic. A ghost dancer pirouettes across the floor; the old Italian proprietor longs for his lost love. Its all very dreamy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crowd-pleasing jukebox numbers energize strike-a-pose group dances where Hollywood starlets swing and stroll and make us smile. While there are some winning and original moments — a comic pas de duex between a classical ballet dancer and an awkward business man (Sabina Allemann and Peter Anderson) — much of the dance elements are (well-executed) if uninspiring recreations of familiar genres. For a story about 242 Columbus Avenue, it’s surprisingly generic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/tosca-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a sailor smooching his gal goodbye. In the hippie decade, a flower child sits lotus-style atop a Tosca bistro table (holding a flower). A Vietnam vet and a peacenik skirmish. A disco ball descends in the ’70s as cruising gays snort coke and do cornball John Travolta moves. Did Tosca install a disco ball in the 1970s? I don’t think so, but disco ball is an easy signifier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a dancer falters, his limbs uncooperative, that’s AIDS. We may or may not know that the dancer whose body is failing (Pascal Molat) represents Rudolph Nureyev, a friend of the new owner. He is to AIDS what the disco ball is to the ’70s, what the beret is to the beats…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/tosca-3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you read ACT’s program notes, you’ll learn that Tosca does have an interesting history; the bar opened in 1919, just weeks before prohibition went into effect. The immigrant proprietor’s wife cooked up booze on a stove top and snuck it into the bar where it was the secret ingredient in Tosca’s “Coffee Royale.” And yes, the place was lousy with celebs and notorious names. Without background reading, the production really doesn’t stand on its own. As is often the danger in hybrid forms, neither component is truly up to snuff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Tosca Project\u003c/b> runs through June 27, 2010 at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org/site/PageServer\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act-sf.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In the course of 90 minutes and 90 years, the art deco double doors at the Tosca Cafe on Columbus Avenue, swing open probably 90 times to let in immigrants and opera singers, flappers and sailors, thugs and bar flies, beat poets, vets, hippies, disco queers, businessmen, ballet dancers, yuppies and dot-commies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know a 90-minute play is dragging when the Loma Prieta earthquake hits and you think: thank goodness, only two decades to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Tosca Project\u003c/b>, ACT’s world premiere dance-theater work about the life of North Beach’s renowned bar, aspires to be a love song to the singularity of San Francisco and the eccentrics who called this place home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>ACT artistic director Carey Perloff and Val Caniparoli (SF Ballet Principal Character Dancer and Choreographer) spent four year years developing the piece — culling tales from the bar’s neighbors, friends and fixtures. And still, besides those deco double doors, hand-carved mahogany bar top, Italian espresso machine and familiar arches, \u003cb>The Tosca Project\u003c/b> is a mere nostalgia-thon of passing decades and their passing dance styles in any city in America.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/tosca-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The nearly wordless piece runs through the decades from Prohibition to Black Tuesday to Pearl Harbor to the Summer of Love to the Dot-Com Boom. Each new era is ushered in by a change in the music on the jukebox (Irving Berlin, Tommy Dorsey, Hendryx, Sylvester…), the introduction of a new dance craze and changes in costume. World events are announced via an old-timey newsreel voice. There’s a cursory sense of checking off the eras. It reminds me of that “classic” YouTube video \u003ca href=\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg\">\u003cb>The Evolution of Dance\u003c/b>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The talent of the dancers is clear, even if much of the choreography leans toward the Artistic. A ghost dancer pirouettes across the floor; the old Italian proprietor longs for his lost love. Its all very dreamy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crowd-pleasing jukebox numbers energize strike-a-pose group dances where Hollywood starlets swing and stroll and make us smile. While there are some winning and original moments — a comic pas de duex between a classical ballet dancer and an awkward business man (Sabina Allemann and Peter Anderson) — much of the dance elements are (well-executed) if uninspiring recreations of familiar genres. For a story about 242 Columbus Avenue, it’s surprisingly generic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/tosca-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a sailor smooching his gal goodbye. In the hippie decade, a flower child sits lotus-style atop a Tosca bistro table (holding a flower). A Vietnam vet and a peacenik skirmish. A disco ball descends in the ’70s as cruising gays snort coke and do cornball John Travolta moves. Did Tosca install a disco ball in the 1970s? I don’t think so, but disco ball is an easy signifier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a dancer falters, his limbs uncooperative, that’s AIDS. We may or may not know that the dancer whose body is failing (Pascal Molat) represents Rudolph Nureyev, a friend of the new owner. He is to AIDS what the disco ball is to the ’70s, what the beret is to the beats…\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/tosca-3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you read ACT’s program notes, you’ll learn that Tosca does have an interesting history; the bar opened in 1919, just weeks before prohibition went into effect. The immigrant proprietor’s wife cooked up booze on a stove top and snuck it into the bar where it was the secret ingredient in Tosca’s “Coffee Royale.” And yes, the place was lousy with celebs and notorious names. Without background reading, the production really doesn’t stand on its own. As is often the danger in hybrid forms, neither component is truly up to snuff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Tosca Project\u003c/b> runs through June 27, 2010 at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org/site/PageServer\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act-sf.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The Bush Years have inspired much feedback. But so far no one has been brave enough to stage an allegorical romantic tragedy sit-com about the Bush administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Lisa Kron goes there. Back to the days of hanging chads, butterfly ballots and manual recounts. Back to a New York apartment where a few young progressives are incapable of doing anything but switching between CNN and MSNBC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smart and at times engaging and witty, \u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b>, is, none the less, dialectic in the guise of a sit-com in the guise of a play. Talky and long, the play reads like the transcript of that 2am college bull session that covers the nature of democracy, dictatorships, monogamy, architecture, the tax code, gay marriage, race, sexuality, experimental film, Rwanda, Thomas Friedman Op-Eds and… Oh wait, the sun is rising. Or Act I is over. Whichever comes first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/in-the-wake-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through it all, the characters mostly remain on the couch. Ellen and Danny upstairs. Kayla and Laurie from downstairs who are mostly upstairs on Ellen and Danny’s couch. They drink beer and debate politics and discuss the decline of America — in the wake of Bush v. Gore. While the couch remains the same, the newspaper headlines and video clips projected onto the walls flip forward in time: 9/11. Iraq. Katrina. Catastrophe, scandal, jingoism and cowboy diplomacy. What happens in the lives of Ellen and Danny upstairs and Kayla and Laurie downstairs is much less dramatic, but a subtle analogy is forged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heidi Schreck plays Ellen, a brainy, successful, politically engaged “golden girl” who has led a pretty charmed life and has come to feel entitled to her happiness and confident in her goodness. The play’s chief conceit is that, like America — the golden girl of nations — Ellen believes she is good and just and right, even when the facts on the ground don’t bear this out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Somehow, it’s cathartic to watch one of our own fellow do-gooders discover that liberal values are naive and self-serving. (See: Wally Shawn’s \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=UYRNY34iPfoC&dq=wallace+shawn+the+fever&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=_7z6S4vuMZqwMrnw-a0F&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false\">\u003cb>The Fever\u003c/b>\u003c/a>.) In the end, \u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b> is a public self-flogging that will speak to guilty white liberals who like their dress-downs vicarious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/in-the-wake-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Premiering at Berkeley Rep, (and preaching to the choir of lefty Berkeley audiences), the play was written by Kron and directed by Leigh Silverman, who directed Kron’s wonderful 2005 play \u003cb>Well\u003c/b> about health and race. The new play centers on Ellen and her interactions with boyfriend Danny (the affable Carson Elrod), his sister Kayla (a strong performance by Andrea Frankle), her wife Laurie (well played by Danielle Skraastad) and Ellen’s sometimes roommate Judy (Deirdre O’Connell with a comically unsettling lack of affect). On David Korins’ sit-com set, family are neighbors who hang out all the time like Ross and Monica did. The fire escape is for smoking, the TV is for yelling at. And everyone banters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Danny adores Ellen, Kayla respects and admires her, Laurie tries to keep her mouth shut because Ellen is a highly opinionated force of nature. Ellen’s other friend (Emily Donahoe) is enamored of her. All of them aim to please, so Ellen is used to calling the shots. Except for Judy, just back from West Africa where she is a humanitarian aid worker. Raised in poverty and now working in crisis zones, Judy alone can speak practice to principal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s this clash between practice and principal, action vs. intention that gives the play its bite. “Don’t tell me about your morals or ethics, show me your tax code,” says Ellen at one point, understanding that meaning well means very little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are a few scenes where class tensions and the gap between real and ideal are taut enough that we can feel it viscerally. Miriam F. Glover gives a great performance as Judy’s teenage niece in one uncomfortable scene that nearly makes it all worthwhile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Well\u003c/b> was something of a masterpiece because it undermined its own sincerity every step of the way. Like \u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.lisakron.com/well.html\">\u003cb>Well\u003c/b>\u003c/a> also considered the lead character’s self-serving preconceptions and rationalizations while it explored larger socio-political issues. But \u003cb>Well\u003c/b>, which starred Kron, who was 1/5 of the Five Lesbian Brothers, a campy comedy quintet in the East Village, was full of meta-theatrical mayhem, self-deprecation and disobedient characters who refuse to stay on message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>In the Wake,\u003c/b> takes itself way more seriously. And as Al Gore now knows, that can backfire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b> runs through June 27, 2010 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/tickets/index.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Bush Years have inspired much feedback. But so far no one has been brave enough to stage an allegorical romantic tragedy sit-com about the Bush administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Lisa Kron goes there. Back to the days of hanging chads, butterfly ballots and manual recounts. Back to a New York apartment where a few young progressives are incapable of doing anything but switching between CNN and MSNBC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smart and at times engaging and witty, \u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b>, is, none the less, dialectic in the guise of a sit-com in the guise of a play. Talky and long, the play reads like the transcript of that 2am college bull session that covers the nature of democracy, dictatorships, monogamy, architecture, the tax code, gay marriage, race, sexuality, experimental film, Rwanda, Thomas Friedman Op-Eds and… Oh wait, the sun is rising. Or Act I is over. Whichever comes first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/in-the-wake-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through it all, the characters mostly remain on the couch. Ellen and Danny upstairs. Kayla and Laurie from downstairs who are mostly upstairs on Ellen and Danny’s couch. They drink beer and debate politics and discuss the decline of America — in the wake of Bush v. Gore. While the couch remains the same, the newspaper headlines and video clips projected onto the walls flip forward in time: 9/11. Iraq. Katrina. Catastrophe, scandal, jingoism and cowboy diplomacy. What happens in the lives of Ellen and Danny upstairs and Kayla and Laurie downstairs is much less dramatic, but a subtle analogy is forged.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heidi Schreck plays Ellen, a brainy, successful, politically engaged “golden girl” who has led a pretty charmed life and has come to feel entitled to her happiness and confident in her goodness. The play’s chief conceit is that, like America — the golden girl of nations — Ellen believes she is good and just and right, even when the facts on the ground don’t bear this out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Somehow, it’s cathartic to watch one of our own fellow do-gooders discover that liberal values are naive and self-serving. (See: Wally Shawn’s \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=UYRNY34iPfoC&dq=wallace+shawn+the+fever&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=_7z6S4vuMZqwMrnw-a0F&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false\">\u003cb>The Fever\u003c/b>\u003c/a>.) In the end, \u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b> is a public self-flogging that will speak to guilty white liberals who like their dress-downs vicarious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/in-the-wake-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Premiering at Berkeley Rep, (and preaching to the choir of lefty Berkeley audiences), the play was written by Kron and directed by Leigh Silverman, who directed Kron’s wonderful 2005 play \u003cb>Well\u003c/b> about health and race. The new play centers on Ellen and her interactions with boyfriend Danny (the affable Carson Elrod), his sister Kayla (a strong performance by Andrea Frankle), her wife Laurie (well played by Danielle Skraastad) and Ellen’s sometimes roommate Judy (Deirdre O’Connell with a comically unsettling lack of affect). On David Korins’ sit-com set, family are neighbors who hang out all the time like Ross and Monica did. The fire escape is for smoking, the TV is for yelling at. And everyone banters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Danny adores Ellen, Kayla respects and admires her, Laurie tries to keep her mouth shut because Ellen is a highly opinionated force of nature. Ellen’s other friend (Emily Donahoe) is enamored of her. All of them aim to please, so Ellen is used to calling the shots. Except for Judy, just back from West Africa where she is a humanitarian aid worker. Raised in poverty and now working in crisis zones, Judy alone can speak practice to principal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s this clash between practice and principal, action vs. intention that gives the play its bite. “Don’t tell me about your morals or ethics, show me your tax code,” says Ellen at one point, understanding that meaning well means very little.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are a few scenes where class tensions and the gap between real and ideal are taut enough that we can feel it viscerally. Miriam F. Glover gives a great performance as Judy’s teenage niece in one uncomfortable scene that nearly makes it all worthwhile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Well\u003c/b> was something of a masterpiece because it undermined its own sincerity every step of the way. Like \u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.lisakron.com/well.html\">\u003cb>Well\u003c/b>\u003c/a> also considered the lead character’s self-serving preconceptions and rationalizations while it explored larger socio-political issues. But \u003cb>Well\u003c/b>, which starred Kron, who was 1/5 of the Five Lesbian Brothers, a campy comedy quintet in the East Village, was full of meta-theatrical mayhem, self-deprecation and disobedient characters who refuse to stay on message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>In the Wake,\u003c/b> takes itself way more seriously. And as Al Gore now knows, that can backfire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>In the Wake\u003c/b> runs through June 27, 2010 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/tickets/index.asp\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>As \u003cb>Giant Bones\u003c/b> opens, a seemingly stern king known as the Jiril (Jay Smith) begins to read a bedtime story to his unruly children. In fact, the Jiril is reading the first of four Peter S. Beagle stories that make up \u003cb>Giant Bones\u003c/b>. Like the play, now through June 19, 2010 at Exit Theatre in San Francisco, the Jiril’s story is called “Giant Bones,” which is performed by a company of actors moving about in a kind of interpretive-dance pantomime, as recorded voices supply their dialogue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the tale, a boy is rescued from certain death at the hands of a fell beast by a benevolent giant, who then kidnaps the lad lest he reveal the secret of the community of giants that he has stumbled upon. As the boy learns patience, he also learns the customs of the giants, which includes consuming the corpses of their departed fellows. Finally, only one giant is left, the boy’s benefactor, who makes the young man promise to eat her bones when she finally passes away. He does this, and upon returning to his village after an 18-year absence, his patience is rewarded with a loving marriage and exceptionally tall children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is kind of cool, we think, but when does the acting begin?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A second tale quickly follows, this one based on a Beagle story called “The Magician of Karakosk.” Now the Renaissance Faire style of the players moves front and center. The queen (Jessica Rudholm), for example, is a squinty eyed conniver; the magician (Rik Lopes), whom the queen has blackmailed to learn his dark arts, is endlessly noble, a man who can communicate with the very elements yet considers himself no more than a servant of his fellow peasants. The supporting actors mug incessantly and are shamelessly obsequious before their fearsome queen, more clowns than actors. To play it straight would have been ponderous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We are just beginning to ruminate on the gentle lessons that playwright-director Stuart Bousel has spread before us when the company begins to take its bows (I loved it when the magician presents his waiting wife with a gift of the queen’s gold crown: “I have no use for this,” she says. “I know,” he replies. “That is your gift to me.”). They turn first to us and we clap, a bit confused as we hear canned applause in the background. Then they turn their backs to us and bow to an unseen audience upstage. A curtain closes, and we are now backstage with them as they bicker about what went right and wrong in the preceding two stories we have just watched them act out. They mock their own intrusion into the play, and ironically bemoan plays with second acts that take too long to get going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This new narrative, which is interrupted one more time in act one by a third Beagle story before dominating act two, is based on Beagle’s “The Tragical Historie of the Jiril’s Players.” Now we understand where all the melodrama and big gestures were coming from — that’s what the Jiril’s Players do, that’s their shtick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I suppose act two could be its own play, the plot of which I won’t give away in the hope you’ll see it for yourself, but it does benefit from the context provided in act one, although 75 minutes is probably a good deal more context than most audiences need.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the time gave me a chance to get to know these marvelous actors, to look forward to them in each new role. For example, Katrina Bushnell is terrific as the player named Kydra as well as the Jiril’s dimwitted son, Davao. And I enjoyed Mikka Bonel’s work as Tai-Sharm alongside Lopes, the King she must marry, and Paul Rodrigues, the Thief who has come to steal her, and her heart, away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly, though, I grew to appreciate the interaction between the company’s leader, Dardis (Lopes), and his leading lady, Lisonje (Rudholm). Their relationship, which seemed so black and white when we first met the company, evolved slowly, subtly. All that was required to see it unfold was a bit of patience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Giant Bones\u003c/b> runs through June 19, 2010 at Exit Theatre in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://giantbonesplay.com/\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit giantbonesplay.com.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As \u003cb>Giant Bones\u003c/b> opens, a seemingly stern king known as the Jiril (Jay Smith) begins to read a bedtime story to his unruly children. In fact, the Jiril is reading the first of four Peter S. Beagle stories that make up \u003cb>Giant Bones\u003c/b>. Like the play, now through June 19, 2010 at Exit Theatre in San Francisco, the Jiril’s story is called “Giant Bones,” which is performed by a company of actors moving about in a kind of interpretive-dance pantomime, as recorded voices supply their dialogue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the tale, a boy is rescued from certain death at the hands of a fell beast by a benevolent giant, who then kidnaps the lad lest he reveal the secret of the community of giants that he has stumbled upon. As the boy learns patience, he also learns the customs of the giants, which includes consuming the corpses of their departed fellows. Finally, only one giant is left, the boy’s benefactor, who makes the young man promise to eat her bones when she finally passes away. He does this, and upon returning to his village after an 18-year absence, his patience is rewarded with a loving marriage and exceptionally tall children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is kind of cool, we think, but when does the acting begin?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A second tale quickly follows, this one based on a Beagle story called “The Magician of Karakosk.” Now the Renaissance Faire style of the players moves front and center. The queen (Jessica Rudholm), for example, is a squinty eyed conniver; the magician (Rik Lopes), whom the queen has blackmailed to learn his dark arts, is endlessly noble, a man who can communicate with the very elements yet considers himself no more than a servant of his fellow peasants. The supporting actors mug incessantly and are shamelessly obsequious before their fearsome queen, more clowns than actors. To play it straight would have been ponderous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We are just beginning to ruminate on the gentle lessons that playwright-director Stuart Bousel has spread before us when the company begins to take its bows (I loved it when the magician presents his waiting wife with a gift of the queen’s gold crown: “I have no use for this,” she says. “I know,” he replies. “That is your gift to me.”). They turn first to us and we clap, a bit confused as we hear canned applause in the background. Then they turn their backs to us and bow to an unseen audience upstage. A curtain closes, and we are now backstage with them as they bicker about what went right and wrong in the preceding two stories we have just watched them act out. They mock their own intrusion into the play, and ironically bemoan plays with second acts that take too long to get going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This new narrative, which is interrupted one more time in act one by a third Beagle story before dominating act two, is based on Beagle’s “The Tragical Historie of the Jiril’s Players.” Now we understand where all the melodrama and big gestures were coming from — that’s what the Jiril’s Players do, that’s their shtick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I suppose act two could be its own play, the plot of which I won’t give away in the hope you’ll see it for yourself, but it does benefit from the context provided in act one, although 75 minutes is probably a good deal more context than most audiences need.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the time gave me a chance to get to know these marvelous actors, to look forward to them in each new role. For example, Katrina Bushnell is terrific as the player named Kydra as well as the Jiril’s dimwitted son, Davao. And I enjoyed Mikka Bonel’s work as Tai-Sharm alongside Lopes, the King she must marry, and Paul Rodrigues, the Thief who has come to steal her, and her heart, away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly, though, I grew to appreciate the interaction between the company’s leader, Dardis (Lopes), and his leading lady, Lisonje (Rudholm). Their relationship, which seemed so black and white when we first met the company, evolved slowly, subtly. All that was required to see it unfold was a bit of patience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Giant Bones\u003c/b> runs through June 19, 2010 at Exit Theatre in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://giantbonesplay.com/\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit giantbonesplay.com.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>With less gritty realism and attention to societal ills than \u003cb>West Side Story\u003c/b>, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s contemporary immigrant story, \u003cb>In the Heights\u003c/b>, gets by on its wits and rhythms. The plot — money troubles, love troubles, apartment troubles — offers nothing nearly as earthshaking as the tamest \u003cb>Ugly Betty\u003c/b> episode. But the energy hardly ever stops pulsing. Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography sparkles; the music energizes. And most refreshingly, for a new Broadway musical, the lyrics propel the story with smart poetry and clever rhymes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s all about the legacy,” raps Usnavi, the young man running the bodega his parents once owned. Portrayed sweetly by Kyle Beltran, Usnavi is the hardworking son of parents who emigrated from the Dominican Republic. They named their son something aspirational — “U.S. Navy,” taken from an American boat they saw when they arrived. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/heights-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>Across the street Nina’s parents, Kevin and Camila, have planned a big homecoming dinner to celebrate their daughter’s return home from her first year at Stanford. She is the local kid who makes good, the one that made it out, the pride of the neighborhood. She can’t bring herself to tell them all that she couldn’t hack it at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arielle Jacobs is lovely and authentic as Nina, the ingenue who has disappointed her parents academically and romantically. Isabel Santiago is full of vitality as Daniela, the brassy hair salon owner who leads a spicy gossip anthem with the refrain, “tell me something I don’t know.” And Shaun Taylor-Corbett brings terrific comic timing to his role as Sonny, Usnavi’s scrappy young cousin. They’ve all known each other forever.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/heights-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>“I used to think we lived at the top of the world, when the world was just a subway street map,” Nina sings. Its one of many canny and touching lyrics in this play. California aside, even Greenwich Village seems a world a way; Vanessa (Sabrina Sloan) works at the beauty salon next to the bodega, and is trying to rent an apartment downtown, but can’t scrape together the money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scraping together money and scraping by are themes that linger throughout the play. They’re underscored with subtle sweetness in the song of the piragua vendor, the old man who sells shaved ice with fruit syrup from his push cart. “Piragua, Piragua” he sings as he scrapes his block of ice and worries about Mr. Softee. “But I keep scraping by the fading light…Keep scraping by.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created the role of Usnavi on Broadway and will play him in the film adaptation, wrote the lyrics and music. The songs propel the story much better than does Quiara Alegria Hudes’s book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Within the genre of urban youth musicals, it’s somewhat refreshing that business competition with Mr. Softee and worrying about scholarships are matters worth contemplating in the theater. No one is getting stabbed or shot. No one O.D.s or dies of AIDS. Yes, there’s some racism — Benny (Rogelio Douglas Jr.) who works for Nina’s dad intuits that. But no one is really disaffected — this isn’t \u003cb>Rent\u003c/b> or \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b> — or \u003cb>West Side Story\u003c/b>. The neighbors here have “paciencia y fe” — patience and faith. Which is a song sung by Abuela Claudia, the barrio elder, played by Elise Santora. She sings of poverty in Havana, and her mama’s words, “Vamos a Nueva York.. Today she grandmothers the block, practices paciencia y fe — and plays the Lotto.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/heights-3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>Yes, the Lotto… Abuela’s advanced age… the cost of college or West Village apartments. The flirtations between beauticians and bodega owners… the taxi dispatcher’s apprentice and his boss’ daughter… there are few surprises and no attempts to reign in sentimentality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But somehow, director Thomas Kail manages to catch it before it becomes a sticky syrupy melted piragua of cloying mawkishness. In a genre where more nearly always means too much, \u003cb>In the Heights\u003c/b> is just enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>In the Heights\u003c/b> runs through June 13, 2010 at \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/theatres/index.asp?key=44/\">\u003cb>The Curran Theater\u003c/b>\u003c/a> in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/shows/intheheights\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com. \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/heights-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>“I used to think we lived at the top of the world, when the world was just a subway street map,” Nina sings. Its one of many canny and touching lyrics in this play. California aside, even Greenwich Village seems a world a way; Vanessa (Sabrina Sloan) works at the beauty salon next to the bodega, and is trying to rent an apartment downtown, but can’t scrape together the money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scraping together money and scraping by are themes that linger throughout the play. They’re underscored with subtle sweetness in the song of the piragua vendor, the old man who sells shaved ice with fruit syrup from his push cart. “Piragua, Piragua” he sings as he scrapes his block of ice and worries about Mr. Softee. “But I keep scraping by the fading light…Keep scraping by.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created the role of Usnavi on Broadway and will play him in the film adaptation, wrote the lyrics and music. The songs propel the story much better than does Quiara Alegria Hudes’s book.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Within the genre of urban youth musicals, it’s somewhat refreshing that business competition with Mr. Softee and worrying about scholarships are matters worth contemplating in the theater. No one is getting stabbed or shot. No one O.D.s or dies of AIDS. Yes, there’s some racism — Benny (Rogelio Douglas Jr.) who works for Nina’s dad intuits that. But no one is really disaffected — this isn’t \u003cb>Rent\u003c/b> or \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b> — or \u003cb>West Side Story\u003c/b>. The neighbors here have “paciencia y fe” — patience and faith. Which is a song sung by Abuela Claudia, the barrio elder, played by Elise Santora. She sings of poverty in Havana, and her mama’s words, “Vamos a Nueva York.. Today she grandmothers the block, practices paciencia y fe — and plays the Lotto.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/heights-3.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>Yes, the Lotto… Abuela’s advanced age… the cost of college or West Village apartments. The flirtations between beauticians and bodega owners… the taxi dispatcher’s apprentice and his boss’ daughter… there are few surprises and no attempts to reign in sentimentality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But somehow, director Thomas Kail manages to catch it before it becomes a sticky syrupy melted piragua of cloying mawkishness. In a genre where more nearly always means too much, \u003cb>In the Heights\u003c/b> is just enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>In the Heights\u003c/b> runs through June 13, 2010 at \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/theatres/index.asp?key=44/\">\u003cb>The Curran Theater\u003c/b>\u003c/a> in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.shnsf.com/shows/intheheights\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit shnsf.com. \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Imagination gets a leg up in the new production of \u003cb>Peter Pan\u003c/b>. One hundred computers assist 12 projectors beaming 10,000-pixel-wide images to bring us a computer-generated Neverland splayed across the world’s first 360 degree CGI theater set. Peter, Wendy, Tink and the others soar against this HD backdrop nearly 100 feet up, in the US premiere of this highest of high-tech adaptations of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But is it theater? Or is it more akin to PETER PAN! — The Disneyland Ride? This London import’s immensely immersive, flight-simulating virtual experience feels a bit like a theme park ride or a video game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/peter-pan-1.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This genre, what I might call, “Planetarium Theater,” might herald the future of theater (like 3D CGI is rendering hand-drawn animation quaint and rare). Or it might be a short-lived gimmick — anyone remember the movie \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071455/\">\u003cb>Earthquake\u003c/b>\u003c/a>… in \u003ci>Sensurround\u003c/i>? (That seat-shaking trick was actually preceded by an earlier sensory garnish, \u003ci>Percepto!\u003c/i>, developed by legendary 1950’s showman William Castle to deliver electric jolts to theatergoers during the climax of his 1959 film \u003cb>The Tingler\u003c/b>. John Waters spoofed the practice in 1981, releasing \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082926/\">\u003cb>Polyester\u003c/b>\u003c/a> in scratch-and-sniff \u003ci>Odorama\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m not saying threesixty° entertainment’s \u003cb>Peter Pan\u003c/b> is the \u003ci>Odorama\u003c/i> of live theater. I’m just saying maybe I hear William Shakespeare weeping somewhere beneath Stratford-on-Avon. Because here, the play’s not the thing. It is, however, the launch pad for techno-awesomeness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Peter fetches Wendy, Michael and John and they fly out their townhouse window and over London’s landmarks — Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge — and dive through the Marble Arch — it is super cool. Without a doubt. And we really become part of the experience of flying, with the screens surrounding us and taking us up, up, and away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/peter-pan-2.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scenes of flight — or deep-sea submersion with live mermaids, virtual fish and underwater views of the pirate ship are stunning moments when the live action and the computer-generated scenery seem to interact. At other times, the “theater” part of the play drags. The action and the dialogue are uninspiring and devoid of intrinsic magic. The play is upstaged by the backdrop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Ben Harrison’s aesthetic production has a bit of a Cirque du Soleil thing going on: graceful flying, mid-air somersaulting and an interpretive indigenous person’s yoga-as-“thank you” dance (Heidi Bluehler as Tiger Lily). The whole shebang features some 22 actors, with Nate Fallows as a classic, not especially absorbing Peter Pan. Jonathan Hyde is a zesty Captain Hook. And Abby Ford’s Wendy ultimately demonstrates touching emotional depth. But by and large the acting — and most especially the script, a pedestrian adaptation by Tanya Ronder — is unremarkable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/peter-pan-3.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue Buckmaster’s cool puppetry design helps along the live action whimsicality. On stage, puppeteers manipulate a big floppy sheep dog and a few birds with great attention to the animals’ movements. Their innovative, low-tech construction and execution is a nice contrast to the techno-pizzazz and it owes much to Julie Taymor’s use of puppets in \u003cb>The Lion King\u003c/b>. Especially the ingeniously-designed crocodile. Two men pedal this skate-cycle contraption within the huge framework of a crocodile. Like Hyde’s humorous bad-guy pirate and his hapless subordinates, the Croc is just scary enough to little kids to be fun-frightening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I’m glad the children can still be jolted by such an impressionistic and sculptural crocodile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Pan\u003c/b> runs through August 29, 2010 at The threesixty° theater at Justin Herman Plaza, located at the intersection of Clay Street and Drumm Street, across the street from the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For \u003ca href=\"http://www.peterpantheshow.com/#/tickets_and_info\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, call 1-888-PPANTIX (1-888-772-6849), or visit peterpantheshow.com.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Imagination gets a leg up in the new production of \u003cb>Peter Pan\u003c/b>. One hundred computers assist 12 projectors beaming 10,000-pixel-wide images to bring us a computer-generated Neverland splayed across the world’s first 360 degree CGI theater set. Peter, Wendy, Tink and the others soar against this HD backdrop nearly 100 feet up, in the US premiere of this highest of high-tech adaptations of J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But is it theater? Or is it more akin to PETER PAN! — The Disneyland Ride? This London import’s immensely immersive, flight-simulating virtual experience feels a bit like a theme park ride or a video game.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/peter-pan-1.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This genre, what I might call, “Planetarium Theater,” might herald the future of theater (like 3D CGI is rendering hand-drawn animation quaint and rare). Or it might be a short-lived gimmick — anyone remember the movie \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071455/\">\u003cb>Earthquake\u003c/b>\u003c/a>… in \u003ci>Sensurround\u003c/i>? (That seat-shaking trick was actually preceded by an earlier sensory garnish, \u003ci>Percepto!\u003c/i>, developed by legendary 1950’s showman William Castle to deliver electric jolts to theatergoers during the climax of his 1959 film \u003cb>The Tingler\u003c/b>. John Waters spoofed the practice in 1981, releasing \u003ca href=\"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082926/\">\u003cb>Polyester\u003c/b>\u003c/a> in scratch-and-sniff \u003ci>Odorama\u003c/i>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’m not saying threesixty° entertainment’s \u003cb>Peter Pan\u003c/b> is the \u003ci>Odorama\u003c/i> of live theater. I’m just saying maybe I hear William Shakespeare weeping somewhere beneath Stratford-on-Avon. Because here, the play’s not the thing. It is, however, the launch pad for techno-awesomeness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Peter fetches Wendy, Michael and John and they fly out their townhouse window and over London’s landmarks — Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge — and dive through the Marble Arch — it is super cool. Without a doubt. And we really become part of the experience of flying, with the screens surrounding us and taking us up, up, and away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/peter-pan-2.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The scenes of flight — or deep-sea submersion with live mermaids, virtual fish and underwater views of the pirate ship are stunning moments when the live action and the computer-generated scenery seem to interact. At other times, the “theater” part of the play drags. The action and the dialogue are uninspiring and devoid of intrinsic magic. The play is upstaged by the backdrop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Ben Harrison’s aesthetic production has a bit of a Cirque du Soleil thing going on: graceful flying, mid-air somersaulting and an interpretive indigenous person’s yoga-as-“thank you” dance (Heidi Bluehler as Tiger Lily). The whole shebang features some 22 actors, with Nate Fallows as a classic, not especially absorbing Peter Pan. Jonathan Hyde is a zesty Captain Hook. And Abby Ford’s Wendy ultimately demonstrates touching emotional depth. But by and large the acting — and most especially the script, a pedestrian adaptation by Tanya Ronder — is unremarkable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\" alt=\"\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/peter-pan-3.jpg\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sue Buckmaster’s cool puppetry design helps along the live action whimsicality. On stage, puppeteers manipulate a big floppy sheep dog and a few birds with great attention to the animals’ movements. Their innovative, low-tech construction and execution is a nice contrast to the techno-pizzazz and it owes much to Julie Taymor’s use of puppets in \u003cb>The Lion King\u003c/b>. Especially the ingeniously-designed crocodile. Two men pedal this skate-cycle contraption within the huge framework of a crocodile. Like Hyde’s humorous bad-guy pirate and his hapless subordinates, the Croc is just scary enough to little kids to be fun-frightening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I’m glad the children can still be jolted by such an impressionistic and sculptural crocodile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Peter Pan\u003c/b> runs through August 29, 2010 at The threesixty° theater at Justin Herman Plaza, located at the intersection of Clay Street and Drumm Street, across the street from the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For \u003ca href=\"http://www.peterpantheshow.com/#/tickets_and_info\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, call 1-888-PPANTIX (1-888-772-6849), or visit peterpantheshow.com.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>There’s a beautiful moment late in \u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b>, now through May 23, 2010 at the Dragon Theatre in Palo Alto, when the polish director of a regional theater company’s production of Anton Chekhov’s \u003cb>The Three Sisters\u003c/b> is bidding his leading ladies adieu. Funding problems are threatening to scuttle the production, but that’s not why the revered Chekhov expert Wikewitch Konalkvis (Mary Horne) has packed his bag: His work here is done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Naturally Casey (Jennifer Jane Parsons), who will play Olga in \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b>, Lisabette (Meredith Hagedorn), the wide-eyed Irina and Holly (Kristen Lo), a TV actress slumming for a bit of Hollywood street cred by taking the Masha role, want to know what the great director thinks of their performances. Though of disparate backgrounds, the women playing Chekhov’s sisters share the curse of having been told they lack talent, so they crave either confirmation or denial of this soul-killing charge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Konalkvis waves off their insecurity. “You are good enough,” he says, “to do the Chekhov you are good enough to do.” It’s not meant as a put down, it’s just a fact. As the director of umpteen productions of \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b> (he’s sort of lost count), Konalkvis has seen better, and worse. The important thing for him is that in this production, the women who play his Olga, Masha and Irina have given it their all. He can ask for no more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This sentiment, mushy as it sounds here, is what makes \u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b> such a perfect play for small companies like the Dragon. The self-referential play, which cheerfully acknowledges its narcissism throughout, is less about how three actresses use \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b> for their own ends — for Holly it’s a career move; for Lisabette it’s a first big break; for Casey it’s the chance to work while she still can. Rather, \u003cb>Anton\u003c/b> is about the theater world itself, where regional companies toil in the shadow of Broadway and community theaters are the poorest of cousins to the regionals. The further down the food chain you get, the less talent it is presumed you have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For this production, the seven-member cast has done the best version of \u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b> that it is good enough to do, which, in this case is saying a lot. The actors are uniformly strong, both individually and overall, creating surprisingly little hierarchy between the three principles and the rest of the cast. Horne, Vera Sloan and Lonnique Genelle all give memorable, multi-character performances. Even Lauren Burniges, whose Joby is limited by design, makes brief but spirited appearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to Horne’s Konalkvis, I liked Sloan’s Jackey, the artistic director of San Antonio Actors Express, who rambles for hours without managing to express the company’s mission, as well as her Ben, whose male ego is so flattered by the advances of a TV star that he gives up his wife and two kids. Men are such dopes, we think, but Sloan’s Ben still manages to come off as sad and sweet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lo’s Holly is also fun to watch, convincing us that her I-me-me-mine character is completely devoid of a soul. And Parsons as Casey is funny and heartbreaking, a woman, as she puts it, who at 36 is still paying off 40-grand in student loans and whose reward for having screwed every leading man on the East Coast is the opportunity to play their mother.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a big reason why this \u003cb>Anton\u003c/b> works so well is Hagedorn’s Lisabette. With her crackling Texas accent, guilelessness and cheerleader enthusiasm (she’s forever clapping her hands to applaud the pronouncements of her superiors), Lisabette is the one with the least to lose by the failure of the San Antonio production of St. Anton’s \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b>. She also has the most to learn, and watching the realities of the theater business sink in without entirely altering her effervescent worldview is as delightful as it is inspiring. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b> runs through May 23, 2010 at the Dragon Theatre in Palo Alto. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.dragonproductions.net/activities/next-season/anton-in-show-business.html\" target=\"offsite\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit dragonproductions.net.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>There’s a beautiful moment late in \u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b>, now through May 23, 2010 at the Dragon Theatre in Palo Alto, when the polish director of a regional theater company’s production of Anton Chekhov’s \u003cb>The Three Sisters\u003c/b> is bidding his leading ladies adieu. Funding problems are threatening to scuttle the production, but that’s not why the revered Chekhov expert Wikewitch Konalkvis (Mary Horne) has packed his bag: His work here is done.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Naturally Casey (Jennifer Jane Parsons), who will play Olga in \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b>, Lisabette (Meredith Hagedorn), the wide-eyed Irina and Holly (Kristen Lo), a TV actress slumming for a bit of Hollywood street cred by taking the Masha role, want to know what the great director thinks of their performances. Though of disparate backgrounds, the women playing Chekhov’s sisters share the curse of having been told they lack talent, so they crave either confirmation or denial of this soul-killing charge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Konalkvis waves off their insecurity. “You are good enough,” he says, “to do the Chekhov you are good enough to do.” It’s not meant as a put down, it’s just a fact. As the director of umpteen productions of \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b> (he’s sort of lost count), Konalkvis has seen better, and worse. The important thing for him is that in this production, the women who play his Olga, Masha and Irina have given it their all. He can ask for no more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This sentiment, mushy as it sounds here, is what makes \u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b> such a perfect play for small companies like the Dragon. The self-referential play, which cheerfully acknowledges its narcissism throughout, is less about how three actresses use \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b> for their own ends — for Holly it’s a career move; for Lisabette it’s a first big break; for Casey it’s the chance to work while she still can. Rather, \u003cb>Anton\u003c/b> is about the theater world itself, where regional companies toil in the shadow of Broadway and community theaters are the poorest of cousins to the regionals. The further down the food chain you get, the less talent it is presumed you have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For this production, the seven-member cast has done the best version of \u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b> that it is good enough to do, which, in this case is saying a lot. The actors are uniformly strong, both individually and overall, creating surprisingly little hierarchy between the three principles and the rest of the cast. Horne, Vera Sloan and Lonnique Genelle all give memorable, multi-character performances. Even Lauren Burniges, whose Joby is limited by design, makes brief but spirited appearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to Horne’s Konalkvis, I liked Sloan’s Jackey, the artistic director of San Antonio Actors Express, who rambles for hours without managing to express the company’s mission, as well as her Ben, whose male ego is so flattered by the advances of a TV star that he gives up his wife and two kids. Men are such dopes, we think, but Sloan’s Ben still manages to come off as sad and sweet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lo’s Holly is also fun to watch, convincing us that her I-me-me-mine character is completely devoid of a soul. And Parsons as Casey is funny and heartbreaking, a woman, as she puts it, who at 36 is still paying off 40-grand in student loans and whose reward for having screwed every leading man on the East Coast is the opportunity to play their mother.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a big reason why this \u003cb>Anton\u003c/b> works so well is Hagedorn’s Lisabette. With her crackling Texas accent, guilelessness and cheerleader enthusiasm (she’s forever clapping her hands to applaud the pronouncements of her superiors), Lisabette is the one with the least to lose by the failure of the San Antonio production of St. Anton’s \u003cb>Sisters\u003c/b>. She also has the most to learn, and watching the realities of the theater business sink in without entirely altering her effervescent worldview is as delightful as it is inspiring. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Anton in Show Business\u003c/b> runs through May 23, 2010 at the Dragon Theatre in Palo Alto. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.dragonproductions.net/activities/next-season/anton-in-show-business.html\" target=\"offsite\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit dragonproductions.net.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Following in (if it’s very lucky) the Broadway-directed footsteps of \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b>, is the latest \u003ci>album musical\u003c/i> to fist pump its way across the Berkeley Rep stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can call it an album musical to distinguish it from a \u003ci>Rock Opera\u003c/i> (\u003cb>Tommy\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Hair\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Passing Strange\u003c/b>) or a \u003ci>Movical\u003c/i> (\u003cb>Billy Elliot\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Spamalot\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Young Frankenstein\u003c/b>) or the \u003ci>Juke Box Musical\u003c/i>, (\u003cb>Mama Mia\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Jersey Boys\u003c/b>). And we call it an \u003ci>album musical\u003c/i> because in these days of 99 cent iTunes downloads, the music of concept and “seminal” albums has a unifying coherence that’s worth keeping intact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Folks who love Matthew Sweet’s 1991 album, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b>, would agree with critics who rated it as one of the top 100 pop albums of the ’90s. One critic wrote that \u003cb> Girlfriend\u003c/b> was the pretty record that everyone played when they were pretending to be listening to Nirvana.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you were one of those Matthew Sweet fans, then this play, a sweet and simple chamber musical, no doubt had you at “Girlf–.” I’m not sure why I wasn’t listening to this music in the ’90s. My radio dial was permanently tuned to Alice Radio where all good indie rock fans were stationed. I was all about Sinead and REM and it would seem I would have been a sucker for this record, which Sweet said was the outcome of his divorce. But downloading the songs now, I don’t feel particularly warm or fuzzy. Or particularly impressed with the music. Or nostalgic. And for these types of gimmick and/or homage spin-offs, for which the play is itself an afterthought, the loyalty to the source material’s the thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b>, which grafts a plot — or at least some character-driven action — onto Green Day’s “seminal” 2004 post-punk album of the same name, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> is a slip of a two-character play built around a record. \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b> was mostly a 90-minute music video that rocked with rage against the general suckiness of everything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> — from the happier ’90s — is all sweetness, harmony and pop musicality. So instead of a rock musical’s energy, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> (the play) is a more intimate play about relatedness. The music necessitates a love story, but how do you capture the tenderness of falling in love in a media world where a vaguely compelling movical romance requires three possible fathers, a Greek island and an impending wedding?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make it gay. It’s an ingenuous way to breathe new life into an old-fashioned love song. Put two boys in the front seat at the drive-in. Now that’s a first kiss! A first gay kiss is a crackerjack way to shake each of us into remembering the power of the first kiss, all first kisses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/girlfriend-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>And so kudos to Todd Almond, who wrote the book for \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> and director Les Waters who reintroduces the scary-ecstatic tension of the crush, the phone calls, the small talk, the last ditch attempt to make your breath smell better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I can’t decide if gay-ifying the story is a nifty way to distract the audience from an underwhelming narrative with underdeveloped characters and mediocre dialogue. Or a striking device to communicate the universality of romance and to reawaken our empathy for the all encompassing hugeness of the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryder Bach and Jason Hite play two Nebraska boys who spend their summer after high school going to the same drive-in movie each night. As Will, the lighter in his loafers boy, Bach is full of wit and charisma. He’s an outsider at school, the 98lb weakling to Mike, the popular football hero type. But he’s also the one who knows who he is and is very comfortable in his skin. As Mike, Jason Hite is a strong singer but not as strong an actor. Their sliver of a story is sweet but it’s very under baked. The play could not stand alone without the music and the music, while pleasant enough, doesn’t have the power to carry the play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/girlfriend-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>There’s one terrific exception where story and song are finally in sync — as the boys sing \u003cb>Evangeline\u003c/b>, pretending to be the character in the B-movie they’re watching. They’re goofing around and the singing seems spontaneous, not just because it’s in the script. Too often, the musical performances feel slapped on and poorly integrated. The fusion of music and theater seems very very random, because this is not a simple boy meets boy story. It’s a boy meets boy and they both really, really like the music of Matthew Sweet so sometimes they sing it story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> runs through May 9, 2010 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/tickets/index.asp/\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Following in (if it’s very lucky) the Broadway-directed footsteps of \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b>, is the latest \u003ci>album musical\u003c/i> to fist pump its way across the Berkeley Rep stage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We can call it an album musical to distinguish it from a \u003ci>Rock Opera\u003c/i> (\u003cb>Tommy\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Hair\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Passing Strange\u003c/b>) or a \u003ci>Movical\u003c/i> (\u003cb>Billy Elliot\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Spamalot\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Young Frankenstein\u003c/b>) or the \u003ci>Juke Box Musical\u003c/i>, (\u003cb>Mama Mia\u003c/b>, \u003cb>Jersey Boys\u003c/b>). And we call it an \u003ci>album musical\u003c/i> because in these days of 99 cent iTunes downloads, the music of concept and “seminal” albums has a unifying coherence that’s worth keeping intact.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Folks who love Matthew Sweet’s 1991 album, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b>, would agree with critics who rated it as one of the top 100 pop albums of the ’90s. One critic wrote that \u003cb> Girlfriend\u003c/b> was the pretty record that everyone played when they were pretending to be listening to Nirvana.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you were one of those Matthew Sweet fans, then this play, a sweet and simple chamber musical, no doubt had you at “Girlf–.” I’m not sure why I wasn’t listening to this music in the ’90s. My radio dial was permanently tuned to Alice Radio where all good indie rock fans were stationed. I was all about Sinead and REM and it would seem I would have been a sucker for this record, which Sweet said was the outcome of his divorce. But downloading the songs now, I don’t feel particularly warm or fuzzy. Or particularly impressed with the music. Or nostalgic. And for these types of gimmick and/or homage spin-offs, for which the play is itself an afterthought, the loyalty to the source material’s the thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b>, which grafts a plot — or at least some character-driven action — onto Green Day’s “seminal” 2004 post-punk album of the same name, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> is a slip of a two-character play built around a record. \u003cb>American Idiot\u003c/b> was mostly a 90-minute music video that rocked with rage against the general suckiness of everything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> — from the happier ’90s — is all sweetness, harmony and pop musicality. So instead of a rock musical’s energy, \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> (the play) is a more intimate play about relatedness. The music necessitates a love story, but how do you capture the tenderness of falling in love in a media world where a vaguely compelling movical romance requires three possible fathers, a Greek island and an impending wedding?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make it gay. It’s an ingenuous way to breathe new life into an old-fashioned love song. Put two boys in the front seat at the drive-in. Now that’s a first kiss! A first gay kiss is a crackerjack way to shake each of us into remembering the power of the first kiss, all first kisses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/girlfriend-1.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>And so kudos to Todd Almond, who wrote the book for \u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> and director Les Waters who reintroduces the scary-ecstatic tension of the crush, the phone calls, the small talk, the last ditch attempt to make your breath smell better.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I can’t decide if gay-ifying the story is a nifty way to distract the audience from an underwhelming narrative with underdeveloped characters and mediocre dialogue. Or a striking device to communicate the universality of romance and to reawaken our empathy for the all encompassing hugeness of the first time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ryder Bach and Jason Hite play two Nebraska boys who spend their summer after high school going to the same drive-in movie each night. As Will, the lighter in his loafers boy, Bach is full of wit and charisma. He’s an outsider at school, the 98lb weakling to Mike, the popular football hero type. But he’s also the one who knows who he is and is very comfortable in his skin. As Mike, Jason Hite is a strong singer but not as strong an actor. Their sliver of a story is sweet but it’s very under baked. The play could not stand alone without the music and the music, while pleasant enough, doesn’t have the power to carry the play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003ccenter>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://a.s.kqed.net/img/arts/blog/girlfriend-2.jpg\" style=\"margin-bottom: 10px;\">\u003c/center>\n\u003cp>There’s one terrific exception where story and song are finally in sync — as the boys sing \u003cb>Evangeline\u003c/b>, pretending to be the character in the B-movie they’re watching. They’re goofing around and the singing seems spontaneous, not just because it’s in the script. Too often, the musical performances feel slapped on and poorly integrated. The fusion of music and theater seems very very random, because this is not a simple boy meets boy story. It’s a boy meets boy and they both really, really like the music of Matthew Sweet so sometimes they sing it story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Girlfriend\u003c/b> runs through May 9, 2010 at Berkeley Repertory Theater. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org/tickets/index.asp/\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>William Shakespeare just might be churning and spitting in his grave in response to yet another liberal interpretation of \u003cb>Othello\u003c/b>. The tone is set early when Iago drunk dials Lady Desdemona’s father on her cell phone. I was apprehensive about what might follow, hoping this production would not strike the same pose as Baz Luhrmann’s outright corny suburban interpretation of \u003cb>Romeo + Juliet\u003c/b> with Leonardo DiCaprio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Executive director and founder of the African-American Shakespeare Company, Sherri Young, tinkers with sexuality, gender, race and a hint of war and technology in \u003cb>Othello\u003c/b>. Shakespeare’s immense vocabulary is left untouched so viewers at least know they are in the right building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Iago is distraught when Othello overlooks her and chooses Cassio to be his second in command. Self-pity sparks revenge; Iago informs Venetian Senator Brabantio that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with Othello. Othello is an African Moor, which makes him an unfit match in Brebantio’s estimation, and so begins the drama. Yet, all this talk of Venetians comingling with Moors leaves one a little confused as to why the scene is set in Iraq.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Young consolidates Shakespeare’s cast to five actors, removing some characters and combining others. Desdemona’s father Brabantio is mentioned but never seen or heard in Young’s production. Roderigo is a Venetian man who has feelings for Desdemona and assists Iago in Othello’s demise. Young morphs Roderigo and Iago into one irate lesbian played by Aimee McCrary. The gender switch is an intriguing twist that complicates Iago’s plot to destroy Othello’s marriage. It seems no coincidence that McCrary is an African American actress playing the role of a racist who belittles Othello for his African roots (behind his back of course). One cannot be sure whether it was Young’s intention to extend intrigue to irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Iago warns us from the beginning, “I am not what I am.” Hopefully McCrary is not as dry in real life, delivering her lines like a stand-in at the start of the play. As the action gets going, McCrary redeems herself. Iago’s delight in her own malice is made clear through the actor’s facial expressions, which enrich the meaning behind the character’s mischief while adding much-needed comic relief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The least significant female role is by far the best played by Meggi Hai Trang as Emilia, Desdemona’s attendant. Jeff Handy’s Othello is no match for Trang’s absorbing and natural delivery. It is unclear if Desdemona is absolutely annoying or if it’s Vivian Kane’s portrayal of the aristocratic lady. Sam Leichter as Cassio has spunk where it counts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The set design by Joel Eis allows three worlds to merge on stage at the African American Arts & Culture Complex. On the left is a bar with a few stools where Iago pours alcohol down Cassio’s throat and begins to plant her seeds of deceit. The stage is a smidge too far for my outdated contacts to decipher what those framed pictures are about on the fake stone wall behind the bar. Taking center stage is a rigid-looking brown leather office chair where Othello sits from time to time while Desdemona tends to his headaches. Props to the right set the military tone. Nothing says Iraq like a wall covered in macramé of various green tones, representing lush vegetation beyond. Stretched before the green wall is a line of sandbags piled four high. Before the sandbags sit a small wooden crate and a red cooler on which Iago sits early in the play to plot, plot, plot!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cast seemed to engage the audience directly in such an intimate setting, often making eye contact, which felt like a challenge. But whenever the challenge was met, it distracted from the play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Tragedy tends to be a fascinating subject but the evening was a bit too much of a mess to be enjoyable. Changing the location from Venice to Iraq detracted from a desired cohesion. Something close to gripping was achieved by morphing the characters, though ultimately few of the added devices integrated well with Shakespeare’s intentions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the better part of two hours, the final bows and dimming of the lights are met with a joking chant for an encore from an elderly gentleman to my left, “We want Macbeth! We want Macbeth!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The African-American Shakespeare Company’s production of \u003cb>Othello\u003c/b> runs through April 18, 2010 at the African American Art & Culture Complex in San Francisco. \u003ca href=\"http://www.african-americanshakes.org/performances/index.html\">For tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit african-americanshakes.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>William Shakespeare just might be churning and spitting in his grave in response to yet another liberal interpretation of \u003cb>Othello\u003c/b>. The tone is set early when Iago drunk dials Lady Desdemona’s father on her cell phone. I was apprehensive about what might follow, hoping this production would not strike the same pose as Baz Luhrmann’s outright corny suburban interpretation of \u003cb>Romeo + Juliet\u003c/b> with Leonardo DiCaprio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Executive director and founder of the African-American Shakespeare Company, Sherri Young, tinkers with sexuality, gender, race and a hint of war and technology in \u003cb>Othello\u003c/b>. Shakespeare’s immense vocabulary is left untouched so viewers at least know they are in the right building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Iago is distraught when Othello overlooks her and chooses Cassio to be his second in command. Self-pity sparks revenge; Iago informs Venetian Senator Brabantio that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with Othello. Othello is an African Moor, which makes him an unfit match in Brebantio’s estimation, and so begins the drama. Yet, all this talk of Venetians comingling with Moors leaves one a little confused as to why the scene is set in Iraq.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Young consolidates Shakespeare’s cast to five actors, removing some characters and combining others. Desdemona’s father Brabantio is mentioned but never seen or heard in Young’s production. Roderigo is a Venetian man who has feelings for Desdemona and assists Iago in Othello’s demise. Young morphs Roderigo and Iago into one irate lesbian played by Aimee McCrary. The gender switch is an intriguing twist that complicates Iago’s plot to destroy Othello’s marriage. It seems no coincidence that McCrary is an African American actress playing the role of a racist who belittles Othello for his African roots (behind his back of course). One cannot be sure whether it was Young’s intention to extend intrigue to irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Iago warns us from the beginning, “I am not what I am.” Hopefully McCrary is not as dry in real life, delivering her lines like a stand-in at the start of the play. As the action gets going, McCrary redeems herself. Iago’s delight in her own malice is made clear through the actor’s facial expressions, which enrich the meaning behind the character’s mischief while adding much-needed comic relief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Much has been made of the fact that \u003cb>Frank Langella’s Cyrano\u003c/b>, which debuted at the Roundabout Theater in New York City in 1997 and is now running at City Lights in San Jose through April 18, 2010, is a good deal shorter than Edmond Rostand’s 1897 original. That production typically clocks in at more than four hours. At two and a half hours, including intermission, \u003cb>Langella’s Cyrano\u003c/b> is still a substantial evening of theater, but with Jeff Kramer in the title role, I wish it had gone the full four.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer brings panache to his portrayal of the character who popularized the word. He is all bravado and bluster when circumstances demand, commanding the stage as the other players wither and wilt before him. So convincingly does Kramer channel the character’s boundless will that, at times, we believe that this warrior poet could indeed slay 100 men singlehandedly. When he tells us that he is too proud to be a parasite, we wish we could always say the same; when pride causes him to go to his death rather than confess the truth to the woman he has always loved, we want to admire his irrationality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kramer’s Cyrano, we immediately believe, is a man whose rapier wit is as sharp as his sword, whose way with words could melt the heart of the fairest maiden. Most importantly, behind Cyrano’s confident boasts and satisfied smiles, Kramer gives us tinges, and then torrents, of melancholy and despair, the products of a profound insecurity that pervades his being despite his formidable intelligence and physical skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem, of course, is his enormous nose, which in this City Lights production is long, craggy, and deformed. It’s not just big (every time Kramer dons and doffs his baldric, I worried he might inadvertently rip the cursed thing from his face) but ugly, too. It is a singularly disgusting nose, an eyesore, a catastrophe. Kramer wears it like a crown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the story of Cyrano is not a cautionary tale about the limits of self esteem. Rather, it’s a tragedy — although at times hilarious — about unrequited love. The object of Cyrano’s affection is Roxane, played here by Sarah Griner. Roxane’s smile is so rapt, her gaze on would-be lover Christian (Joshua Marx) is so fixed that sparks seem to fly between the two. And when she flirts with her older, deformed cousin Cyrano to ask that he protect her beautiful Christian, breaking Cyrano’s heart in the process, her flirty, self-absorbed insensitivity is painful and glorious to watch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other actors who shine in this fine production include Lucinda Dobinson, whose servant girl Lise doesn’t utter a single line but whose face is a mirror of empathy as she hovers around Cyrano, echoing his pain, hopes, and dreams. Derek McCaw is also good in several roles, especially early on as an irredeemably terrible actor. And Steve Lambert’s Ragueneau is a fine drunken cook, whose amiability and baking, if not his poetry, repeatedly draw saviors such as Cyrano to his side.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Frank Langella’s Cyrano\u003c/b> runs through April 18, 2010 at City Lights Theater Company in San Jose. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.cltc.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit cltc.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The principal conceit of \u003cb>O Lovely Glowworm, or Scenes of Great Beauty\u003c/b> is that the play’s interminable string of uneven scenes — few of which approach beauty, let alone greatness — are the products of the overactive imagination of a profoundly melancholy goat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Said goat, a figment of playwright Glen Berger’s surreal imagination, has reportedly spent 15 years before, during and after Work War I tied to a post near a garbage dump outside the hovel of his owners, a would-be inventor named Macmann (Philip Mills), whose fondest wish is to invent a flushable toilet so that his name would be attached to every privy in Ireland, and his mother (Mairin Lee), whose fondest wish is to die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It goes on like this for almost three hours, with the goat (animated via remote control and voiced by Tobie L. Windham) mostly at center stage. Windham spends much of the play’s first act crouched on the roof of the aforementioned hovel as he gives voice to the goat’s fantasies of life as a tramcar conductor, or perhaps as a racehorse or dog. The goat repeatedly tells us that he is deaf, blind and suffering from an undefined and unbearable pain. Windham bays and bleats for relief, which the goat gets toward the end of Act I, when Macmann finally summons the nerve to shoot the pathetic creature in the head.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, we are not yet rid of the intolerable beast, who continues to conjure arbitrary daydreams for his perverse amusement, if not ours. In plodding succession, he summons, kills off and then reanimates a Belgian-front deserter named Marveaux (Kyle Schaefer), his childhood chum Halliwell (David Jacobs), and Philomel (Emily Kitchens), a mermaid who lures men to their doom from an island in the middle of a whirlpool-and-eddy-infested lake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why should we buy into this, why should we believe the fevered musing of a deranged goat? His scenarios are presented to us as if they must contain clues to not just the goat’s suffering but ours, too. They are meant to be parables, these dismal tales of misfortune and woe, but Berger’s goat is so capricious and stands in such contempt of its creations — changing their circumstances (at times sadistically) — that the perspective is simply not to be trusted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The set only compounds the signal-to-noise ratio. The theater at Zeum is a terrible place to see a play, but the \u003cb>Glowworm\u003c/b> set is like a \u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/spark/profile.jsp?essid=4330\">David Best\u003c/a> sculpture gone bad. I liked the idea of hiding Belle Epoque dioramas in compartments carved out of mountains of trash, but they faced the wide splay of seats almost straight on. How easy it would have been to tilt the compartment on stage left a bit to stage right so that its interiors could be better viewed by those sitting house left. Same problem for the blacksmith’s workshop and mermaid lair perched above it on stage right. And if you are sitting in one of the back rows, forget about seeing the action (if you can call actors crawling on the floor “action”) downstage. This place is bad enough for theater — such choices only make the experience worse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All that said, at times the play is quite funny in its sense of the absurd (for example, the mundane musing revealed in the firing-squad scene), and I liked the scene between Jacobs and Kitchens in which Halliwell finally agrees to permit the duplicitous Philomel to shave his neck with a straight razor. I also believed Lee as the mother, who covers her ears with pillows and puts a chamber pot over her head whenever her Pollyanna-like son sings his idiotic songs of devotion. That seemed honest enough, and hats off to Mills for selling the sap hard. But mostly I shared the unscripted sentiments of Jacobs, who uttered an exasperated and unprintable epithet when the carabiners for his fly system became momentary tangled. Dude: I feel your pain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The A.C.T. M.F.A. production of \u003cb>O Lovely Glowworm, or Scenes of Great Beauty\u003c/b> runs through February 7, 2010 at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit act-sf.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
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"order": 8
},
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},
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"order": 1
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
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"meta": {
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"source": "WNYC"
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"id": "fresh-air",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"hyphenacion": {
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"jerrybrown": {
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"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"order": 18
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"title": "Latino USA",
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"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
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},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
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"masters-of-scale": {
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"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"source": "WaitWhat"
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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