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"bio": "Claire Light is a Bay Area writer and cultural worker. She has worked for twelve years in nonprofit administration, particularly arts in the Asian American community. Her MFA in fiction came from San Francisco State University, and some of her fiction is published in \u003ci>McSweeney's\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Hyphen\u003c/i>, \u003ci>Farthing\u003c/i>, and a forthcoming issue of \u003ci>The Encyclopedia Project\u003c/i>. A chapbook of her short stories, called \u003cb>Slightly Behind and to the Left\u003c/b>, was published by Aqueduct Press last December. She has taught writing to teens, college students, and adults, and is currently teaching free writing classes through the Oakland Word program. She blogs at \u003ci>Hyphen\u003c/i> and her personal blog \"SeeLight.\"",
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"content": "\u003cp>Around this time of year, theater companies across the country dust off their favorite gothic dramas in hopes of filling a few seats with patrons, and then scaring the bejeebus out of them. San Jose Stage is doing its Halloween thing through November 2, 2008 with a fine production of \u003cb>The Turn of the Screw\u003c/b> by Henry James. Originally written as a newspaper serial before being turned into a novella in 1898, a Benjamin Brittan opera in 1954, and a movie in 1961 (Truman Capote co-wrote the script), James’s ghost story was adapted for the stage in 1996 by Jeffrey Hatcher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Hatcher’s hands, James’s fever dream is spare and unadorned, leaving almost as much to the imagination as if one were reading a book or being told a story round a campfire. Director Rick Singleton has adhered to the playwright’s instructions that there be no props or costume changes. He has, however, given his actors a single chair to sit on, as well as a couple of flights of stairs to climb and descend in order to punctuate the play’s various scene changes. He’s even snuck in a few sound cues, usually in the form of a disembodied voice intoning words like “footfall, footfall” instead of the sounds themselves. Again, our imagination is called upon to fill in the blanks, which only heightens our sense of dread as James’s creepy yarn unwinds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Equally frugal is the casting, which is limited to a single pair of actors. Chloë Bronzan plays “The Woman,” who has been hired by “The Man” (Michael C. Storm) to be the governess of his young niece Flora and nephew Miles (also played by Storm). We never see Flora, although Bronzan paints a fairly vivid picture of the urchin, as does Storm in his capacity as Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper at Bly House where the children have been sequestered by their uncle, the Man.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the first scene, in which the all-powerful Man interviews the subservient Woman, we are given strong hints of sexual mischief between unequals. The Woman is here for a job that only the Man can bestow. She must do anything to get it, including not asking questions about those who have preceded her, not contacting him for any reason whatsoever once she arrives at Bly House, and being willing to get down on her knees to agree to his conditions with the words “I do.” “Success,” he purrs, “I have seduced you.” In fact, the Woman is perfectly happy to be seduced as marriage to her master is her secret, dare-not-speak-its-name desire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Storm does a wonderful job with his various parts, all performed in the same black suit that he’s wearing when we meet him. As Mrs. Grose, he pulls in one arm slightly, as a bird might do to protect an injured wing, and he walks with the subtle shuffle of someone who has done a lot of heavy lifting during her life, but whose body was probably not built for it. Storm gives Mrs. Grose’s voice a feminine lilt, but only to communicate to us that he has shifted characters, not to attempt a full-on female impersonation. His acting, in other words, is as functional and economical as the playwright’s vision for the piece itself. Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Miles, Storm stands erect. His manner is polite, but there’s a Stepford edge to his delivery, as if he knows exactly what to say to an adult to assure them that everything — whatever that everything might be — is okay. Such behavior in a 10-year-old can only be the product of some sort of premature self-knowledge, the contents of which becomes increasingly unnerving as we learn more and more about the boy and the demons that the governess believes are controlling his soul — it is not enough, apparently, that in their prior, mortal forms these ghosts irreparably corrupted and compromised the lad’s flesh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us back to Bronzan, who, unlike Storm, has only one persona to inhabit. Not to take anything away from Storm’s performance, but he has the luxury of being able to move from character to character as the play progresses and its story builds. Bronzan has the tougher task; as the play’s narrator, she must tell us a tale while convincing us that she is actually seeing spirits and specters. At the same time, and by design of the playwright, she must also behave in a way that suggests that she may just be a little bit nuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hatcher did not want his audiences to conclude one way or the other that Bly House is or is not haunted by the pair of lovers and pedophiles who used to roam its halls and grounds. For the record, I’m generally impatient with authors who want to have it both ways in the name of art. We will eventually make up our minds, regardless of the playwright’s aims; why shouldn’t he be forced to show his cards, too?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bronzan only gets her character half right, which is not to say that her performance is a failure. Standing virtually alone on an essentially bare stage, she had me convinced that she was seeing ghosts, and several of her screams and expressions of fright caught me by surprise. Even the way she described the apparitions before her gave me goose flesh, and Storm’s Mrs. Grose lent even more credibility to the governess’s perception of reality when she dropped her mask of reserve and became a co-conspirator with the governess in the dirty little secrets of Bly House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I guess I didn’t notice the moment when Bronzan was supposed to transition from ghost chaser to lunatic, as the playwright would have it, because I figured that Bronzan was playing a governess who was simply going a little bit crazy because she had just seen a couple of ghosts with designs on the children she has been hired to protect. I suppose it would have been a neat trick to have pulled off the intended character arc, but I was more than satisfied by the treat of Bronzan’s performance. She had, as the Man so succinctly puts it, seduced me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Turn of the Screw\u003c/b> runs through November 2, 2008 at San Jose Stage. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.sanjose-stage.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit sanjose-stage.com.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Around this time of year, theater companies across the country dust off their favorite gothic dramas in hopes of filling a few seats with patrons, and then scaring the bejeebus out of them. San Jose Stage is doing its Halloween thing through November 2, 2008 with a fine production of \u003cb>The Turn of the Screw\u003c/b> by Henry James. Originally written as a newspaper serial before being turned into a novella in 1898, a Benjamin Brittan opera in 1954, and a movie in 1961 (Truman Capote co-wrote the script), James’s ghost story was adapted for the stage in 1996 by Jeffrey Hatcher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Hatcher’s hands, James’s fever dream is spare and unadorned, leaving almost as much to the imagination as if one were reading a book or being told a story round a campfire. Director Rick Singleton has adhered to the playwright’s instructions that there be no props or costume changes. He has, however, given his actors a single chair to sit on, as well as a couple of flights of stairs to climb and descend in order to punctuate the play’s various scene changes. He’s even snuck in a few sound cues, usually in the form of a disembodied voice intoning words like “footfall, footfall” instead of the sounds themselves. Again, our imagination is called upon to fill in the blanks, which only heightens our sense of dread as James’s creepy yarn unwinds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Equally frugal is the casting, which is limited to a single pair of actors. Chloë Bronzan plays “The Woman,” who has been hired by “The Man” (Michael C. Storm) to be the governess of his young niece Flora and nephew Miles (also played by Storm). We never see Flora, although Bronzan paints a fairly vivid picture of the urchin, as does Storm in his capacity as Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper at Bly House where the children have been sequestered by their uncle, the Man.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From the first scene, in which the all-powerful Man interviews the subservient Woman, we are given strong hints of sexual mischief between unequals. The Woman is here for a job that only the Man can bestow. She must do anything to get it, including not asking questions about those who have preceded her, not contacting him for any reason whatsoever once she arrives at Bly House, and being willing to get down on her knees to agree to his conditions with the words “I do.” “Success,” he purrs, “I have seduced you.” In fact, the Woman is perfectly happy to be seduced as marriage to her master is her secret, dare-not-speak-its-name desire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Storm does a wonderful job with his various parts, all performed in the same black suit that he’s wearing when we meet him. As Mrs. Grose, he pulls in one arm slightly, as a bird might do to protect an injured wing, and he walks with the subtle shuffle of someone who has done a lot of heavy lifting during her life, but whose body was probably not built for it. Storm gives Mrs. Grose’s voice a feminine lilt, but only to communicate to us that he has shifted characters, not to attempt a full-on female impersonation. His acting, in other words, is as functional and economical as the playwright’s vision for the piece itself. Smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Miles, Storm stands erect. His manner is polite, but there’s a Stepford edge to his delivery, as if he knows exactly what to say to an adult to assure them that everything — whatever that everything might be — is okay. Such behavior in a 10-year-old can only be the product of some sort of premature self-knowledge, the contents of which becomes increasingly unnerving as we learn more and more about the boy and the demons that the governess believes are controlling his soul — it is not enough, apparently, that in their prior, mortal forms these ghosts irreparably corrupted and compromised the lad’s flesh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Which brings us back to Bronzan, who, unlike Storm, has only one persona to inhabit. Not to take anything away from Storm’s performance, but he has the luxury of being able to move from character to character as the play progresses and its story builds. Bronzan has the tougher task; as the play’s narrator, she must tell us a tale while convincing us that she is actually seeing spirits and specters. At the same time, and by design of the playwright, she must also behave in a way that suggests that she may just be a little bit nuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hatcher did not want his audiences to conclude one way or the other that Bly House is or is not haunted by the pair of lovers and pedophiles who used to roam its halls and grounds. For the record, I’m generally impatient with authors who want to have it both ways in the name of art. We will eventually make up our minds, regardless of the playwright’s aims; why shouldn’t he be forced to show his cards, too?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bronzan only gets her character half right, which is not to say that her performance is a failure. Standing virtually alone on an essentially bare stage, she had me convinced that she was seeing ghosts, and several of her screams and expressions of fright caught me by surprise. Even the way she described the apparitions before her gave me goose flesh, and Storm’s Mrs. Grose lent even more credibility to the governess’s perception of reality when she dropped her mask of reserve and became a co-conspirator with the governess in the dirty little secrets of Bly House.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I guess I didn’t notice the moment when Bronzan was supposed to transition from ghost chaser to lunatic, as the playwright would have it, because I figured that Bronzan was playing a governess who was simply going a little bit crazy because she had just seen a couple of ghosts with designs on the children she has been hired to protect. I suppose it would have been a neat trick to have pulled off the intended character arc, but I was more than satisfied by the treat of Bronzan’s performance. She had, as the Man so succinctly puts it, seduced me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Turn of the Screw\u003c/b> runs through November 2, 2008 at San Jose Stage. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.sanjose-stage.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit sanjose-stage.com.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll",
"headTitle": "Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>With a running time of three hours including intermission, Tom Stoppard’s \u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll,\u003c/b> is as much of an endurance test as a Grateful Dead concert, albeit without the painfully late start and interminable set break.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Directed by A.C.T.’s artistic director, Carey Perloff, Stoppard’s characteristically funny and intelligent play is an exceedingly dense affair, even for him. It requires the audience to be steeped in the personalities and palace intrigues of Czechoslovakian politics between the years 1968 and 1990; to appreciate the creative genius of Syd Barrett, the pre-\u003cb>Dark Side of the Moon\u003c/b> founder of Pink Floyd; to know their way around the finer points of communism, both as conceived by Karl Marx and ruthlessly manipulated by Joseph Stalin; and to revel in the nuances of translation and meaning to be found in the ancient poems of Sappho. Did I mention that \u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll\u003c/b> is also a sentimental love story? Consider it mentioned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not that the play’s length and arcane subject matter is off-putting or exhausting. Far from it. The weaving together of so much political history, Greek poetry, and Stoppardian fiction — with a terrific soundtrack that careens from scruffy Rolling Stones to saccharine Beach Boys, early Syd Barrett to late Pink Floyd, mournful Velvet Underground to exuberantly sonic Plastic People of the Universe — is invigorating. After seeing the performance on opening night, I have been thinking about little else, and not just because I am obliged to type my meager observations into a computer. This is a play that stays with you, powerful despite its numerous faults.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stoppard’s fictional story begins in Cambridge in 1968. Real Russian tanks have just rolled through the streets of Prague, prompting a young Czech student named Jan (Manoel Felciano) to inform his Cambridge professor and mentor, an old-school Commie named Max (Jack Willis), that he is returning home. Max, who is defensive about the Red fist that has come out of the east to crush the Prague Spring, is furious with his protégé for failing to complete his studies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or, at least, that’s what I think Max is angry about. Throughout the play, Max’s actions often come off as irrational, as if this man who claims to have only a biological machine between his ears, rather than a mind, might lack either. Only later, when we realize that Max has lots of desires but possibly not a heart, do we surmise the cause of Max’s seemingly random actions. I’m certain that I have not known as many Communist Cambridge professors as Stoppard has, but making Max a heartless blowhard who values the hive over the bees strikes me as an overwrought bit of stereotyping.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Equally suspicious is Stoppard’s decision to kill off Max’s wife, Eleanor (René Augesen), who you know won’t make it to the second act the moment she reveals her breast cancer early in the first. A renowned authority on Sappho, her awestruck female students timidly creep into her home for one-on-one (purely Platonic) lessons. Eleanor struck me as a far more intelligent and clear-eyed creation than poor idealistic Max, so I felt somewhat cheated not to get her perspective on the play’s events as they unfolded. Why do away with her? Keeping both her and Max alive would have made this long play even longer, but from where I sat, Stoppard got rid of the wrong character.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Max and Eleanor’s daughter, Esme (played as a young girl by Summer Serafin), who opens the play writhing on a table while smoking a joint, would like to give her father’s favorite pupil a parting gift — her virginity. Jan is clearly infatuated with this hippie vision of sweet-sixteen. But despite his relative youth, Jan is an old-world gentleman. So, he plucks one of Esme’s cherry LPs to add to his collection of Western auditory decadence and heads home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ostensibly he is going to Czechoslovakia to look in on his mom, but his real motives are not entirely clear. Even the interrogator (Anthony Fusco), who gives him a good Orwellian grilling at customs, can’t understand why he wants to return to Czechoslovakia when all the other intellectuals in the country have chosen to flee. The answer is that Jan must suffer to give Stoppard’s story its arc. As artificial as that may sound, at least the playwright does not have to make up what comes next, since he has just hurled this confused young man, whose sensibility is Eastern but whose musical tastes look to the West, into the real events of Russian-occupied Czechoslovakia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we meet Jan, he’s a familiar, almost familial, guest at Max and Eleanor’s bourgeois Cambridge home, where the hyper-educated dine outdoors on a brick patio amid trellises and greenery. Jan’s flat in Prague is a far cry from that. His meagre journalist’s salary affords him an apartment that has the messy ambience of a student’s crash pad, only more run down. Sure, Jan dotes on his records and hi-fi (he is forever checking his precious collection of vinyl to make sure it is all in order and accounted for), but he cares so little for his furnishings that he repairs the broken foot of a beat-up couch with a stack of books. For Jan, literature is a cheaper commodity than furniture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This business of what Jan really cares about, indeed, what any of the characters really care about, is, I think, a key to the play, more even than the question of whether we are just collections of atoms or ethereal beings possessing unquantifiable souls. Having left Esme, who he never got the chance to properly care about or for, Jan is now on autopilot — a stranger in a strange land — doing what he must to get along.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Out of a sense of self-preservation more than ideology, Jan wants to believe the state propaganda that everything is okay, but he also wants to listen to his music and be left alone. That, it turns out, is a more radical proposition than any of the causes that his friend Ferdinand (Jud Williford) would like for him to take up. Jan derides Ferdinand’s endless protests as “moral exhibitionism.” It’s only when the police beat up fans of his favorite band, The Plastic People of the Universe, that Jan gets politically engaged enough to thrust a petition in Ferdinand’s face. Jan idolizes the Plastics precisely because they stand for nothing. They are the real agents of change, he says, because they are safe from the desire for recognition. As for the kids who were beat up by the police, they deserve support because, unlike traditional dissidents, who hurl Molotov cocktails and words alike at their oppressors, they had not asked for the fight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the payoffs of \u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll\u003c/b>‘s length is that we get a chance to hang out with Jan and Ferdinand long enough to watch their relationship evolve. These men, Felciano and Williford convince us, are good friends, for all their differences. Augesen and Serafin also make the most of the play’s deliberate pace. In the first act, Augesen plays Eleanor and Serafin plays her daughter, Esme. In the second act, Augesen takes over the role of the adult Esme while Serafin plays Esme’s teenage daughter, Alice. Reading the program before the curtain went up, as \u003cb>It’s Only Rock and Roll\u003c/b> blared into the upper reaches of the Geary Theater, I wondered if these two could pull it off. But Serafin convinces us that she is two very different women — Esme, a dreamer who is more interested in the mantra “make love not war” than her father’s “the workers shall own the means of production,” and Alice, whose possession of her grandparents’ school-smarts gene has gotten her into Cambridge a full year early.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Augesen, she is a revelation. I loved her as Eleanor in the first act — from her flashes of anger to the way she would regain her poise to the patience she showed her childish and naïve husband. But as the adult Esme, struggling to fit into a world filled with people, her daughter included, who will always be light years smarter than she could ever dream, her anxieties creep out quietly, revealing themselves in the littlest things. This is a wonderful, smart performance; I could not take my eyes off of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there is one unforgivably sour note to this production it is the set, which takes its inspiration from a photograph of a view up the light well in a Prague apartment building. Like the building’s walls in the photograph, the walls in the set rise away from us, upstage in forced perspective, so that windows and masonry flank either side of the stage, the ceiling above it, and the stage itself. The effect is rather like standing in an M.C. Escher etching, adding a layer of surrealism that is, I would suggest, entirely at odds with Stoppard’s play. We expect playwrights to be indulgent enough to occasionally undermine their own work, but it makes us squirm when a theater company appears to take similar liberties in the name, presumably, of its need for self expression. Max and Eleanor would not have been pleased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll\u003c/b> runs through October 18, 2008 at A.C.T. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act-sf.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "With a running time of three hours including intermission, Tom Stoppard's \u003cb>Rock 'n' Roll,\u003c/b> is as much of an endurance test as a Grateful Dead concert, albeit without the painfully late start and interminable set break.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>With a running time of three hours including intermission, Tom Stoppard’s \u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll,\u003c/b> is as much of an endurance test as a Grateful Dead concert, albeit without the painfully late start and interminable set break.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Directed by A.C.T.’s artistic director, Carey Perloff, Stoppard’s characteristically funny and intelligent play is an exceedingly dense affair, even for him. It requires the audience to be steeped in the personalities and palace intrigues of Czechoslovakian politics between the years 1968 and 1990; to appreciate the creative genius of Syd Barrett, the pre-\u003cb>Dark Side of the Moon\u003c/b> founder of Pink Floyd; to know their way around the finer points of communism, both as conceived by Karl Marx and ruthlessly manipulated by Joseph Stalin; and to revel in the nuances of translation and meaning to be found in the ancient poems of Sappho. Did I mention that \u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll\u003c/b> is also a sentimental love story? Consider it mentioned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not that the play’s length and arcane subject matter is off-putting or exhausting. Far from it. The weaving together of so much political history, Greek poetry, and Stoppardian fiction — with a terrific soundtrack that careens from scruffy Rolling Stones to saccharine Beach Boys, early Syd Barrett to late Pink Floyd, mournful Velvet Underground to exuberantly sonic Plastic People of the Universe — is invigorating. After seeing the performance on opening night, I have been thinking about little else, and not just because I am obliged to type my meager observations into a computer. This is a play that stays with you, powerful despite its numerous faults.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stoppard’s fictional story begins in Cambridge in 1968. Real Russian tanks have just rolled through the streets of Prague, prompting a young Czech student named Jan (Manoel Felciano) to inform his Cambridge professor and mentor, an old-school Commie named Max (Jack Willis), that he is returning home. Max, who is defensive about the Red fist that has come out of the east to crush the Prague Spring, is furious with his protégé for failing to complete his studies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or, at least, that’s what I think Max is angry about. Throughout the play, Max’s actions often come off as irrational, as if this man who claims to have only a biological machine between his ears, rather than a mind, might lack either. Only later, when we realize that Max has lots of desires but possibly not a heart, do we surmise the cause of Max’s seemingly random actions. I’m certain that I have not known as many Communist Cambridge professors as Stoppard has, but making Max a heartless blowhard who values the hive over the bees strikes me as an overwrought bit of stereotyping.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Equally suspicious is Stoppard’s decision to kill off Max’s wife, Eleanor (René Augesen), who you know won’t make it to the second act the moment she reveals her breast cancer early in the first. A renowned authority on Sappho, her awestruck female students timidly creep into her home for one-on-one (purely Platonic) lessons. Eleanor struck me as a far more intelligent and clear-eyed creation than poor idealistic Max, so I felt somewhat cheated not to get her perspective on the play’s events as they unfolded. Why do away with her? Keeping both her and Max alive would have made this long play even longer, but from where I sat, Stoppard got rid of the wrong character.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Max and Eleanor’s daughter, Esme (played as a young girl by Summer Serafin), who opens the play writhing on a table while smoking a joint, would like to give her father’s favorite pupil a parting gift — her virginity. Jan is clearly infatuated with this hippie vision of sweet-sixteen. But despite his relative youth, Jan is an old-world gentleman. So, he plucks one of Esme’s cherry LPs to add to his collection of Western auditory decadence and heads home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ostensibly he is going to Czechoslovakia to look in on his mom, but his real motives are not entirely clear. Even the interrogator (Anthony Fusco), who gives him a good Orwellian grilling at customs, can’t understand why he wants to return to Czechoslovakia when all the other intellectuals in the country have chosen to flee. The answer is that Jan must suffer to give Stoppard’s story its arc. As artificial as that may sound, at least the playwright does not have to make up what comes next, since he has just hurled this confused young man, whose sensibility is Eastern but whose musical tastes look to the West, into the real events of Russian-occupied Czechoslovakia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When we meet Jan, he’s a familiar, almost familial, guest at Max and Eleanor’s bourgeois Cambridge home, where the hyper-educated dine outdoors on a brick patio amid trellises and greenery. Jan’s flat in Prague is a far cry from that. His meagre journalist’s salary affords him an apartment that has the messy ambience of a student’s crash pad, only more run down. Sure, Jan dotes on his records and hi-fi (he is forever checking his precious collection of vinyl to make sure it is all in order and accounted for), but he cares so little for his furnishings that he repairs the broken foot of a beat-up couch with a stack of books. For Jan, literature is a cheaper commodity than furniture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This business of what Jan really cares about, indeed, what any of the characters really care about, is, I think, a key to the play, more even than the question of whether we are just collections of atoms or ethereal beings possessing unquantifiable souls. Having left Esme, who he never got the chance to properly care about or for, Jan is now on autopilot — a stranger in a strange land — doing what he must to get along.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Out of a sense of self-preservation more than ideology, Jan wants to believe the state propaganda that everything is okay, but he also wants to listen to his music and be left alone. That, it turns out, is a more radical proposition than any of the causes that his friend Ferdinand (Jud Williford) would like for him to take up. Jan derides Ferdinand’s endless protests as “moral exhibitionism.” It’s only when the police beat up fans of his favorite band, The Plastic People of the Universe, that Jan gets politically engaged enough to thrust a petition in Ferdinand’s face. Jan idolizes the Plastics precisely because they stand for nothing. They are the real agents of change, he says, because they are safe from the desire for recognition. As for the kids who were beat up by the police, they deserve support because, unlike traditional dissidents, who hurl Molotov cocktails and words alike at their oppressors, they had not asked for the fight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the payoffs of \u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll\u003c/b>‘s length is that we get a chance to hang out with Jan and Ferdinand long enough to watch their relationship evolve. These men, Felciano and Williford convince us, are good friends, for all their differences. Augesen and Serafin also make the most of the play’s deliberate pace. In the first act, Augesen plays Eleanor and Serafin plays her daughter, Esme. In the second act, Augesen takes over the role of the adult Esme while Serafin plays Esme’s teenage daughter, Alice. Reading the program before the curtain went up, as \u003cb>It’s Only Rock and Roll\u003c/b> blared into the upper reaches of the Geary Theater, I wondered if these two could pull it off. But Serafin convinces us that she is two very different women — Esme, a dreamer who is more interested in the mantra “make love not war” than her father’s “the workers shall own the means of production,” and Alice, whose possession of her grandparents’ school-smarts gene has gotten her into Cambridge a full year early.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for Augesen, she is a revelation. I loved her as Eleanor in the first act — from her flashes of anger to the way she would regain her poise to the patience she showed her childish and naïve husband. But as the adult Esme, struggling to fit into a world filled with people, her daughter included, who will always be light years smarter than she could ever dream, her anxieties creep out quietly, revealing themselves in the littlest things. This is a wonderful, smart performance; I could not take my eyes off of her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there is one unforgivably sour note to this production it is the set, which takes its inspiration from a photograph of a view up the light well in a Prague apartment building. Like the building’s walls in the photograph, the walls in the set rise away from us, upstage in forced perspective, so that windows and masonry flank either side of the stage, the ceiling above it, and the stage itself. The effect is rather like standing in an M.C. Escher etching, adding a layer of surrealism that is, I would suggest, entirely at odds with Stoppard’s play. We expect playwrights to be indulgent enough to occasionally undermine their own work, but it makes us squirm when a theater company appears to take similar liberties in the name, presumably, of its need for self expression. Max and Eleanor would not have been pleased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Rock ‘n’ Roll\u003c/b> runs through October 18, 2008 at A.C.T. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act-sf.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>One of the most laudable traits of high-school students is their ability to seize upon a compelling notion and run with it. A profound reverence for the truth, whatever they might perceive that truth to be, has yet to be beaten out of them by experience and exhaustion. Perspective is for the olds, a cheap trick employed by parents and other boring authority figures to keep them down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As most of us learn the hard way, ideals without perspective and values in a vacuum tend to isolate more than liberate, and they are no help when it comes to creating community. Which may explain why each of the characters in \u003cb>Yellowjackets\u003c/b>, a new play by Itamar Moses and the first production of the Berkeley Rep’s 2008-2009 season, appear to move through the play in his or her own bubble of truth, largely blinkered, until the end, to the problems and perspectives of one another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play is set at Berkeley High, whose mascot is the yellowjacket and which happens to sit just a few blocks from Berkeley Rep. Moses, now 30 and a resident of Brooklyn, attended high school there in the early 1990s, at a time when political correctness, as well as its predictable backlash, was in full force. The kids in \u003cb>Yellowjackets\u003c/b> are swimming in this PC soup, as they try to make sense of their racial, cultural, and socio-economic identities. The feeling of isolation that Moses creates is palpable, as students and teachers alike in this desegregated school self-segregate, becoming strangers in their own multicultural paradise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first half of the play’s first act introduces us to 23 students and faculty (played by 11 actors) in a series of rapid-fire, similarly isolated sketches. There’s Trevor (Craig Piaget), the terrified and frail freshman, enduring the taunts and threats of tough guy Guillem (Brian Rivera), who takes genuine pleasure in intimidating the easy-to-tease white kid he sits next to in ethnic conflict and cooperation class. We can tell we’ll want to keep an eye on these two, but should we also pay close attention to the comical Chinese mathematics teacher Mr. Ling (Kevin Hsieh), who can’t control his unruly class? Enjoy him while you can.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there’s principal Franks (Alex Curtis), his arm in a sling after getting caught in the middle of the strobe-lit fight between a pair of rival gangs that opens the play. Don’t concern yourself too much with Franks, but remember Rashid (Lance Gardner), the hard-ass student “cop,” and especially his kid brother, Damian (Shoresh Alaudini), who is the object of principal Franks’s ire. Rashid is always saving his brother’s bacon for one reason or another, and Damian needs a lot of saving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cut to Ms. Robbins (Jahmela Biggs), a stern faculty member who feels it is her duty to inform her class that their school paper, \u003ci>The Jacket\u003c/i>, has just published material that she believes to be racist. Next up is Mr. Behzad (Brian Rivera again), whose agenda includes pushing Alexa (Amaya Alonso Hallifax) to drum up publicity for his assembly on Latin American studies, which he believes to be critical to his students’ education even if the Spanish-speaking students in his class believe he’s wasting their time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At least Moses is now steering us in the direction of something, and that something would be \u003ci>The Jacket\u003c/i> (Alexa is the paper’s photo editor), where we meet the insufferably earnest Avi (Ben Freeman), who is finally getting his shot as editor, much to the consternation of Gwen (Adrienne Papp), who was passed over for the post despite having a more exquisitely ruthless mind. As Avi addresses his staff, nostalgically recalling the glory days of 1991, when the paper’s editor left the front page blank as a protest against the Gulf War, Sammy (Kevin Hsieh again) pays close attention out of a desire to turn his minor sports-writing gig into something significant. Other students heckle him, tossing balled up pieces of paper his way, while his best friend Ryan (Alex Curtis again) lays on his back, pipe in hand, and proceeds to get totally and awesomely baked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that’s not even everyone. One of my favorite bit players in \u003cb>Yellowjackets\u003c/b> is goth-girl Sarine (Erika Salazar), whose petite stature belies her anything-but-mousy spirit. Tamika (Jahmela Biggs again) is also a treat, especially in her scenes with Damian, who is even more of a source of frustration to her than the school administration, which, despite an agreement she had with a recently departed staff member, has informed her that she is one credit short of graduating. While some students are just trying to graduate, others like Gwen are preoccupied with Berkeley High’s most imposing neighbor, Cal — when her mock-trial partner James (Lance Gardner again) is accepted to UC before she is, the devastation and sense of injustice visibly flows from her, and we realize what a monkey Cal must be on the backs of at least some of Berkeley High’s students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although the rush of entrances and exits prevents us from getting to know most of the characters very well, a few performances stand out. Craig Piaget convinced me that Trevor was totally out of his element, the kid everybody picks on and who with each passing day descends deeper into a paralysis of paranoia and fear rather than becoming stronger for the experience. So convincing was his performance as Trevor that I could not quite believe that he also played the glib, self-absorbed Mr. Terrence, \u003ci>The Jacket’s\u003c/i> irresponsible faculty advisor. Brian Rivera also works hard, bouncing from tough Guillem to tougher Officer Sanchez to dogmatic and melodramatic Mr. Behzad. Shoresh Alaudini’s Damian is riveting, as is Adrienne Papp’s Gwen. Another character worthy of note is the high school itself, represented by Annie Smart’s fine set — its chain-link fence, mural wall, and modest-but-effective rows of lockers conjures a time and place that is both realistic and abstract.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By comparison, this young play (commissioned by Berkeley Rep) is still finding itself. At times the characters speak of their situations and stations in life — their perceptions of the truth — with eloquence, but too often Moses appears to suffer from the same ailment as his high schoolers, namely, the inability to see how these individual epiphanies fit into a larger whole. Unable to create a fictional resolution that might have improved upon his experiences at Berkeley High, Moses instead crafts his characters’ epiphanies so that they lead straight to, and only to, personal redemption, which by any measure seems too easy a solution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t mean to suggest that I would have preferred to sit back and gawk as the lives of these characters, who we become quite fond of over the course of several hours, deteriorate just for the sake of gritty realism, but the truths that Moses has them grapple with (Guillem learns that everyone, even Trevor, has a right to his or her humanity; Avi finally realizes that mediating expression can be used as a club to keep people down; Damian goes all soft when he discovers that grace happens) feel pretty saccharine. If Moses is not careful, he may find himself fending off offers from Disney to turn his coming-of-age drama into their next high school musical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Yellowjackets\u003c/b> runs through October 10, 2008 at Berkeley Rep. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets andinformation\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cut to Ms. Robbins (Jahmela Biggs), a stern faculty member who feels it is her duty to inform her class that their school paper, \u003ci>The Jacket\u003c/i>, has just published material that she believes to be racist. Next up is Mr. Behzad (Brian Rivera again), whose agenda includes pushing Alexa (Amaya Alonso Hallifax) to drum up publicity for his assembly on Latin American studies, which he believes to be critical to his students’ education even if the Spanish-speaking students in his class believe he’s wasting their time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At least Moses is now steering us in the direction of something, and that something would be \u003ci>The Jacket\u003c/i> (Alexa is the paper’s photo editor), where we meet the insufferably earnest Avi (Ben Freeman), who is finally getting his shot as editor, much to the consternation of Gwen (Adrienne Papp), who was passed over for the post despite having a more exquisitely ruthless mind. As Avi addresses his staff, nostalgically recalling the glory days of 1991, when the paper’s editor left the front page blank as a protest against the Gulf War, Sammy (Kevin Hsieh again) pays close attention out of a desire to turn his minor sports-writing gig into something significant. Other students heckle him, tossing balled up pieces of paper his way, while his best friend Ryan (Alex Curtis again) lays on his back, pipe in hand, and proceeds to get totally and awesomely baked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that’s not even everyone. One of my favorite bit players in \u003cb>Yellowjackets\u003c/b> is goth-girl Sarine (Erika Salazar), whose petite stature belies her anything-but-mousy spirit. Tamika (Jahmela Biggs again) is also a treat, especially in her scenes with Damian, who is even more of a source of frustration to her than the school administration, which, despite an agreement she had with a recently departed staff member, has informed her that she is one credit short of graduating. While some students are just trying to graduate, others like Gwen are preoccupied with Berkeley High’s most imposing neighbor, Cal — when her mock-trial partner James (Lance Gardner again) is accepted to UC before she is, the devastation and sense of injustice visibly flows from her, and we realize what a monkey Cal must be on the backs of at least some of Berkeley High’s students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although the rush of entrances and exits prevents us from getting to know most of the characters very well, a few performances stand out. Craig Piaget convinced me that Trevor was totally out of his element, the kid everybody picks on and who with each passing day descends deeper into a paralysis of paranoia and fear rather than becoming stronger for the experience. So convincing was his performance as Trevor that I could not quite believe that he also played the glib, self-absorbed Mr. Terrence, \u003ci>The Jacket’s\u003c/i> irresponsible faculty advisor. Brian Rivera also works hard, bouncing from tough Guillem to tougher Officer Sanchez to dogmatic and melodramatic Mr. Behzad. Shoresh Alaudini’s Damian is riveting, as is Adrienne Papp’s Gwen. Another character worthy of note is the high school itself, represented by Annie Smart’s fine set — its chain-link fence, mural wall, and modest-but-effective rows of lockers conjures a time and place that is both realistic and abstract.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By comparison, this young play (commissioned by Berkeley Rep) is still finding itself. At times the characters speak of their situations and stations in life — their perceptions of the truth — with eloquence, but too often Moses appears to suffer from the same ailment as his high schoolers, namely, the inability to see how these individual epiphanies fit into a larger whole. Unable to create a fictional resolution that might have improved upon his experiences at Berkeley High, Moses instead crafts his characters’ epiphanies so that they lead straight to, and only to, personal redemption, which by any measure seems too easy a solution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t mean to suggest that I would have preferred to sit back and gawk as the lives of these characters, who we become quite fond of over the course of several hours, deteriorate just for the sake of gritty realism, but the truths that Moses has them grapple with (Guillem learns that everyone, even Trevor, has a right to his or her humanity; Avi finally realizes that mediating expression can be used as a club to keep people down; Damian goes all soft when he discovers that grace happens) feel pretty saccharine. If Moses is not careful, he may find himself fending off offers from Disney to turn his coming-of-age drama into their next high school musical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Yellowjackets\u003c/b> runs through October 10, 2008 at Berkeley Rep. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.berkeleyrep.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets andinformation\u003c/a> visit berkeleyrep.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Everything in \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b>, the hit off-Broadway musical now running at the San Jose Stage, is shiny. The giant sign that hangs over the stage, displaying “ALTAR BOYZ” in big dazzling letters, sparkles with the light of thousands of LEDs. The rhinestones in the faux-bling cross that hangs from bad boy Luke’s (Darrin Glesser) neck glint in the spotlight during his rap solo. Even the performers faces are shiny, glistening with sweat from singing and dancing for an hour and a half with almost no breaks. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be surprised if they made Sean Patrick O’Connor, who plays Mark, mop the stage after every show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All that pizzazz does little, however, to hide the fact that there’s not much going on underneath. The musical is framed as the last performance of the Altar Boyz, a Christian boy band. Their world tour is coming to an end and, unbeknownst to the rest of the group, Catholic crooners Matthew (CJ Blankenship), Mark, Luke, and Latino Juan (Manuel Romero) have all signed separate, solo deals. In fact, the only group member who hasn’t signed a deal is Abraham, a Jew who wandered into a church one day and ended up being commanded by God to sing songs like “The Calling” (aka “Jesus Called me on my Cell Phone”) and “Church Rulez.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that’s about it for the plot. Other than a few skits and a short interlude about Juan’s parents, the rest of the musical is essentially just that — music. Thematically, each character does have some subtext: Abraham is Jewish and wondering what he’s doing in a Christian boy band, Luke spent time in rehab for “exhaustion,” Juan is an orphan, and Mark is totally gay for Matthew. However, the musical does not spend much time exploring any of those character traits. At one point, it seems as if Mark may admit to his sexual orientation, but he — and the show — ultimately shies away from the subject. Clearly, the creators of \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b> made a conscious decision to keep this show peppy and superficial, and that’s fine for an audience that just wants to be entertained. But anyone hoping for an in-depth examination of the intersection of lifestyle and religion will be disappointed by the musical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That being said, the cast and crew of \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b> do a fantastic job of keeping the audience clapping and laughing. The guys fly over the small stage, doing box steps and ball-changes like they were the New Kids on the Block, and interact both with the four-piece band behind them and the audience seated mere feet in front of them. The show’s script calls for a double entendre, pop culture joke, or horrendous pun about every ten words, and though many of them fall flat, a few land solidly. Lights flash constantly, projector screens display some of the cheesiest animations you could imagine, and a “Soul Sensor” keeps track of the number of souls the Boyz have saved over the course of their show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All in all, \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b> is an incredibly energetic performance, featuring five young actors who leave it all on the stage, and who come out looking like stars for it. The play offers an hour and a half of pure fun unadulterated by anything that could provoke those pesky “thoughts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b> runs through September 21, 2008 at the San Jose Stage, 490 First St., San Jose. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.sanjose-stage.com/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit sanjose-stage.com.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Everything in \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b>, the hit off-Broadway musical now running at the San Jose Stage, is shiny. The giant sign that hangs over the stage, displaying “ALTAR BOYZ” in big dazzling letters, sparkles with the light of thousands of LEDs. The rhinestones in the faux-bling cross that hangs from bad boy Luke’s (Darrin Glesser) neck glint in the spotlight during his rap solo. Even the performers faces are shiny, glistening with sweat from singing and dancing for an hour and a half with almost no breaks. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be surprised if they made Sean Patrick O’Connor, who plays Mark, mop the stage after every show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All that pizzazz does little, however, to hide the fact that there’s not much going on underneath. The musical is framed as the last performance of the Altar Boyz, a Christian boy band. Their world tour is coming to an end and, unbeknownst to the rest of the group, Catholic crooners Matthew (CJ Blankenship), Mark, Luke, and Latino Juan (Manuel Romero) have all signed separate, solo deals. In fact, the only group member who hasn’t signed a deal is Abraham, a Jew who wandered into a church one day and ended up being commanded by God to sing songs like “The Calling” (aka “Jesus Called me on my Cell Phone”) and “Church Rulez.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that’s about it for the plot. Other than a few skits and a short interlude about Juan’s parents, the rest of the musical is essentially just that — music. Thematically, each character does have some subtext: Abraham is Jewish and wondering what he’s doing in a Christian boy band, Luke spent time in rehab for “exhaustion,” Juan is an orphan, and Mark is totally gay for Matthew. However, the musical does not spend much time exploring any of those character traits. At one point, it seems as if Mark may admit to his sexual orientation, but he — and the show — ultimately shies away from the subject. Clearly, the creators of \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b> made a conscious decision to keep this show peppy and superficial, and that’s fine for an audience that just wants to be entertained. But anyone hoping for an in-depth examination of the intersection of lifestyle and religion will be disappointed by the musical.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That being said, the cast and crew of \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b> do a fantastic job of keeping the audience clapping and laughing. The guys fly over the small stage, doing box steps and ball-changes like they were the New Kids on the Block, and interact both with the four-piece band behind them and the audience seated mere feet in front of them. The show’s script calls for a double entendre, pop culture joke, or horrendous pun about every ten words, and though many of them fall flat, a few land solidly. Lights flash constantly, projector screens display some of the cheesiest animations you could imagine, and a “Soul Sensor” keeps track of the number of souls the Boyz have saved over the course of their show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All in all, \u003cb>Altar Boyz\u003c/b> is an incredibly energetic performance, featuring five young actors who leave it all on the stage, and who come out looking like stars for it. The play offers an hour and a half of pure fun unadulterated by anything that could provoke those pesky “thoughts.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Last weekend I watched a futuristic story in which the junk-scavenging relics of humanity — left behind when humans abandoned trash-heaped Earth centuries before — encountered the slick, advanced scout sent to see what had become of their homeworld.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No, I didn’t go see \u003cb>WALL-E\u003c/b> again. What I saw was the premiere production of Liz Duffy Adams’s latest play, \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b>, and what I experienced was a rare moment of storytelling in a discipline often sadly bereft of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> shared more with \u003cb>WALL-E\u003c/b> than a premise and incentive moment. Both pieces bemoan the literal trashing of our geographical inheritance, while delighting in the beauty and functionality of the products of our commercial ingenuity. Both focus on Earth, the scene of the crime. Both film and play, consciously or not, present ritual as the anchor for healthy behaviors that may heal the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perhaps the most telling aspect of Crowded Fire’s premiere production of \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> is its use of materials for set and props. Shelters, doorways, clothing, furniture, decoration, restraints, and even weapons arise from some of our most common and eternal objects: grocery bags, bungee cords, compact discs, and, of course, plastic water containers. A square installation of half-liter bottles creates a window in one wall, and perhaps the production’s most visually sublime moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This set represents Junk City, the only apparent surviving Earth settlement. Centuries ago, most of humanity fled to the terraformed Moon, re-named “New Earth,” leaving behind only those “unfit” to join them. After a recent public controversy a “Nearth” faction has sent a scout to evaluate the remaining Earthlings’ potential for repatriation amongst their fitter kin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This scout, an enthusiastically arrogant bleeding heart named John, naturally gets more than he bargained for from the ignorant savages he has come to save. Captured immediately by a finder couple (people whose “function” in this society is to scavenge useful objects from the junkpile), John’s cries for them to “Listen! Listen!” convinces them that he is calling for The Listener, one of their culture’s two most honored functions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Listener’s job is to stay permanently by a jerry-rigged radio, occasionally speaking into it and listening unremittingly for a response from other possible survivors on Earth. The Listener rejects John, an inhuman “it” to his captors because he does not have a recognized function in their society, and turns him over to the Namer, the other honored position, who identifies the names and functions of unknown objects, and who has his own secret agenda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Listener’s initial refusal to listen to John’s story has deeper reasons behind it than is immediately apparent. Through oral histories recited by the Namer, we learn that Junk City views “lunatics” — humans who abandoned Earth for the Moon — as the worst kind of sinner, no longer human. That each group has something to learn from the other is obviously going to be this play’s moral, but Adams really has little interest in any lessons — beyond minor technological wizardries that, say, boost the power of jerry-rigged radios — the lunatics have to teach Junk Citizens. The fact that a projection of the moon over Junk City is withheld until the final scene underlines the point that the escapes offered by advanced technology do not overhang the struggle to make our world right again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The heart of the play is the original sin of not listening, and the tragedy that befalls the Listener is the result of more than one failure to listen, or to engage. This central inquiry is set off beautifully by the language the Junk Citizens use, which has no articles, invents or compounds new nouns and verbs, and falls utterly silent when it does not wish to speak. The strange words and unfamiliar rhythms of this language force the audience to pay especial attention to the dialogue, so as to not miss or misunderstand anything, making Listeners of us all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The production’s clunkers are not minor, however. In the Listener character’s Harajuku rice peasant costume and tai chi moves, \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> parallels another famous sci-fi movie, \u003cb>Star Wars\u003c/b>, in its shallow and inexplicable Asian fetishism. This stands out particularly starkly in a vague sea of self-explanatory western cultural references, and draws our attention to opportunities Adams or Crowded Fire may have missed to study the cultural syncretism survival necessitates. Junk City, evidently intended to be an Everycity, is resolutely American: the mythos created by its citizens melds US pop culture, Greco-roman mythology, and Christian structure and imagery…but then so does our real mythos. The junk shown here is American junk — a visit to \u003ca href=\"http://www.yelp.com/biz/ichiban-kan-san-francisco\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">J-town’s Ichiban Kan\u003c/a> would give you an idea of how different plastic junk can look on another continent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The performances, while functional, have none of the subtlety or seamlessness required to tease out all the possibilities of this flawed, but often exquisite, script. The difficult dialogue sonetimes sounds like the speakers have mouths full of marbles. The emotional climax fails its grip, owing both to a lack of bass in the performances and an abruptness in the narrative structure. And given Adams’s skillful ability to convey backstory through daily ritual and use, it’s remarkable that she spends so much first-act dialogue having her characters awkwardly TELL us history and premise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still — in spite of info-dumps, actor heavy-breathing, and things that make you go “hunh?” — \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> flows, entertains, and makes you ponder. The piece is a very welcome palate cleanser between continuing seasons of navel-gazing “drama” and unrevealing revivals. It’s more than just challenging: it’s fun, and I’m glad to know that film is not the only medium able to offer a ripping tale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crowded Fire Theater Company’s production of Liz Duffy Adams’s \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> runs Thursdays-Sundays through August 31, 2008 at The Ashby Stage in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://crowdedfire.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit crowdedfire.org or call 415-433-1235.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This scout, an enthusiastically arrogant bleeding heart named John, naturally gets more than he bargained for from the ignorant savages he has come to save. Captured immediately by a finder couple (people whose “function” in this society is to scavenge useful objects from the junkpile), John’s cries for them to “Listen! Listen!” convinces them that he is calling for The Listener, one of their culture’s two most honored functions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Listener’s job is to stay permanently by a jerry-rigged radio, occasionally speaking into it and listening unremittingly for a response from other possible survivors on Earth. The Listener rejects John, an inhuman “it” to his captors because he does not have a recognized function in their society, and turns him over to the Namer, the other honored position, who identifies the names and functions of unknown objects, and who has his own secret agenda.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Listener’s initial refusal to listen to John’s story has deeper reasons behind it than is immediately apparent. Through oral histories recited by the Namer, we learn that Junk City views “lunatics” — humans who abandoned Earth for the Moon — as the worst kind of sinner, no longer human. That each group has something to learn from the other is obviously going to be this play’s moral, but Adams really has little interest in any lessons — beyond minor technological wizardries that, say, boost the power of jerry-rigged radios — the lunatics have to teach Junk Citizens. The fact that a projection of the moon over Junk City is withheld until the final scene underlines the point that the escapes offered by advanced technology do not overhang the struggle to make our world right again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The heart of the play is the original sin of not listening, and the tragedy that befalls the Listener is the result of more than one failure to listen, or to engage. This central inquiry is set off beautifully by the language the Junk Citizens use, which has no articles, invents or compounds new nouns and verbs, and falls utterly silent when it does not wish to speak. The strange words and unfamiliar rhythms of this language force the audience to pay especial attention to the dialogue, so as to not miss or misunderstand anything, making Listeners of us all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The production’s clunkers are not minor, however. In the Listener character’s Harajuku rice peasant costume and tai chi moves, \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> parallels another famous sci-fi movie, \u003cb>Star Wars\u003c/b>, in its shallow and inexplicable Asian fetishism. This stands out particularly starkly in a vague sea of self-explanatory western cultural references, and draws our attention to opportunities Adams or Crowded Fire may have missed to study the cultural syncretism survival necessitates. Junk City, evidently intended to be an Everycity, is resolutely American: the mythos created by its citizens melds US pop culture, Greco-roman mythology, and Christian structure and imagery…but then so does our real mythos. The junk shown here is American junk — a visit to \u003ca href=\"http://www.yelp.com/biz/ichiban-kan-san-francisco\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">J-town’s Ichiban Kan\u003c/a> would give you an idea of how different plastic junk can look on another continent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The performances, while functional, have none of the subtlety or seamlessness required to tease out all the possibilities of this flawed, but often exquisite, script. The difficult dialogue sonetimes sounds like the speakers have mouths full of marbles. The emotional climax fails its grip, owing both to a lack of bass in the performances and an abruptness in the narrative structure. And given Adams’s skillful ability to convey backstory through daily ritual and use, it’s remarkable that she spends so much first-act dialogue having her characters awkwardly TELL us history and premise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still — in spite of info-dumps, actor heavy-breathing, and things that make you go “hunh?” — \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> flows, entertains, and makes you ponder. The piece is a very welcome palate cleanser between continuing seasons of navel-gazing “drama” and unrevealing revivals. It’s more than just challenging: it’s fun, and I’m glad to know that film is not the only medium able to offer a ripping tale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Crowded Fire Theater Company’s production of Liz Duffy Adams’s \u003cb>The Listener\u003c/b> runs Thursdays-Sundays through August 31, 2008 at The Ashby Stage in Berkeley. For \u003ca href=\"http://crowdedfire.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit crowdedfire.org or call 415-433-1235.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The first press release for new theatre company Square MaMa Productions notes that if the group has its way, “recycling is going to be big in Bay Area theatre.” The release goes on to note how Broadway flops like \u003cb>One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest\u003c/b> and \u003cb>The Iceman Cometh\u003c/b> got second lives as off-Broadway revivals and became regarded as great American plays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a fair and even compelling argument, but it doesn’t exactly apply to Tony-winner Terrence McNally’s \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b>, with which Square MaMa co-directors Randy Warren and Suki O’Brien chose to make their company’s debut at Theatre Rhinocerose. Hardly overlooked, the play debuted off-Broadway in early 1974, then moved quickly to a five-month run at Broadway’s Booth Theatre while still retaining the necessary off-Broadway cred to garner an Obie award that year. McNally went on to fame with Broadway hits like \u003cb>Kiss of the Spider Woman\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Love! Valour! Compassion!\u003c/b> Meanwhile \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> stayed off the radar until its 1990 Broadway revival, which bombed despite the best efforts of stars like Nathan Lane and Kate Nelligan. Unfortunately, it also falls short in this revival, but not because of Square MaMa’s cast and crew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The quarter-century since McNally wrote \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> have simply rendered its subject matter and script quaint. The play’s story is split between two high-end health resorts with different approaches: Act One’s Dunelawn, in which couples are encouraged to indulge in their excesses and Act Two’s Ravenswood, in which individuals are medicated out of their bad habits and into a lobotomized state. At Dunelawn, a guru-ish doctor spouts platitudes amidst a bickering Hollywood actor couple, a bewildered East Coast suburban couple and a resident neurotic gay couple. At Ravenswood, a largely mute presiding physician directs a dysfunctional pair of nurses to jab needles into an alcoholic, a wannabe cross-dresser, and an Italian who acts stereotypically Japanese.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sounds like it has some potential. But when judged as such, the “bad habits” to be treated extend to drinking, tobacco smoking and sex (the last mostly referenced with an abundance of winking corniness). This is presumably set in 1974 — well into the sex-and-drugs revolution, and no there’s not a trace of rock ‘n’ roll, either literal or figurative. In this era of rehab, online porn, and reality TV, \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> has near-zero realistic social edge, so the satire simply falls flat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But again, there’s no blaming the cast, each of whom play different characters in each act. For example, Sylvia Kratins shines as both half of Dunelawn’s cartoonishly vain actor couple and Ravenswood’s high-maintenance head nurse, while Tom Juarez shines as both a comically anxious homosexual at Dunelawn and a jaded inpatient loser at Ravenswood. The audience favorite, however, seemed to be the deadpanned 60-something Remi Barron, who plays an instinctively perverted butler at Dunelawn and a hilarious dipsomaniacal patient at Ravenswood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those actors, along with the rest of the cast and the audience, would have been far better served by a play that didn’t suffer from a cutesiness so archaic as to almost render it a period piece. Here’s hoping that Square MaMa come up with a more relevant piece next time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> runs through August 30, 2008 at Theatre Rhinoceros. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.therhino.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit therhino.org or call 415-861-5079.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The first press release for new theatre company Square MaMa Productions notes that if the group has its way, “recycling is going to be big in Bay Area theatre.” The release goes on to note how Broadway flops like \u003cb>One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest\u003c/b> and \u003cb>The Iceman Cometh\u003c/b> got second lives as off-Broadway revivals and became regarded as great American plays.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a fair and even compelling argument, but it doesn’t exactly apply to Tony-winner Terrence McNally’s \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b>, with which Square MaMa co-directors Randy Warren and Suki O’Brien chose to make their company’s debut at Theatre Rhinocerose. Hardly overlooked, the play debuted off-Broadway in early 1974, then moved quickly to a five-month run at Broadway’s Booth Theatre while still retaining the necessary off-Broadway cred to garner an Obie award that year. McNally went on to fame with Broadway hits like \u003cb>Kiss of the Spider Woman\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Love! Valour! Compassion!\u003c/b> Meanwhile \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> stayed off the radar until its 1990 Broadway revival, which bombed despite the best efforts of stars like Nathan Lane and Kate Nelligan. Unfortunately, it also falls short in this revival, but not because of Square MaMa’s cast and crew.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The quarter-century since McNally wrote \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> have simply rendered its subject matter and script quaint. The play’s story is split between two high-end health resorts with different approaches: Act One’s Dunelawn, in which couples are encouraged to indulge in their excesses and Act Two’s Ravenswood, in which individuals are medicated out of their bad habits and into a lobotomized state. At Dunelawn, a guru-ish doctor spouts platitudes amidst a bickering Hollywood actor couple, a bewildered East Coast suburban couple and a resident neurotic gay couple. At Ravenswood, a largely mute presiding physician directs a dysfunctional pair of nurses to jab needles into an alcoholic, a wannabe cross-dresser, and an Italian who acts stereotypically Japanese.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sounds like it has some potential. But when judged as such, the “bad habits” to be treated extend to drinking, tobacco smoking and sex (the last mostly referenced with an abundance of winking corniness). This is presumably set in 1974 — well into the sex-and-drugs revolution, and no there’s not a trace of rock ‘n’ roll, either literal or figurative. In this era of rehab, online porn, and reality TV, \u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> has near-zero realistic social edge, so the satire simply falls flat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But again, there’s no blaming the cast, each of whom play different characters in each act. For example, Sylvia Kratins shines as both half of Dunelawn’s cartoonishly vain actor couple and Ravenswood’s high-maintenance head nurse, while Tom Juarez shines as both a comically anxious homosexual at Dunelawn and a jaded inpatient loser at Ravenswood. The audience favorite, however, seemed to be the deadpanned 60-something Remi Barron, who plays an instinctively perverted butler at Dunelawn and a hilarious dipsomaniacal patient at Ravenswood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those actors, along with the rest of the cast and the audience, would have been far better served by a play that didn’t suffer from a cutesiness so archaic as to almost render it a period piece. Here’s hoping that Square MaMa come up with a more relevant piece next time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bad Habits\u003c/b> runs through August 30, 2008 at Theatre Rhinoceros. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.therhino.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a>, visit therhino.org or call 415-861-5079.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "All's Well That Ends Well",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cb>All’s Well That Ends Well,\u003c/b> now playing through August 31, 2008, at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, is not really a comedy, though it does have many funny moments. Nor is it a tragedy, thanks to its turn-on-dime ending in which all of the problems that the playwright has taken such pains to contrive are suddenly tossed aside. That’s probably why audiences sometimes leave performances of \u003cb>All’s Well\u003c/b> a little bit confused, maybe even let down. “It could have been funnier,” was a comment I heard from more than one person who had seen this current production.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But today, in an age when random is the new black, the play’s shaggy-dog story line and awkward transitions between humor and pathos don’t seem particularly jarring, especially since the performances are as engaging as the directing is inspired. Rachel Fowler captures both of these aspects in a fine, if somber, turn as Helena, a “gentlewoman” to Countess Rossillion (Beth Dixon). Having grown up in the house of Rossillion as the daughter of the recently deceased Count’s physician, she is like one of the family. Which is why her confession of love for Bertram (Erik Hellman), the young Count Rossillion, is at first too much for the Countess. But Dixon guides the Countess’s emotions ably. Indeed, watching Dixon struggle to reconcile her motherly love for her son with her even more layered love for Helena, whom she’d rather was a proper daughter-in-law than a mere ward, is one of this production’s many pleasures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the Countess’s blessing, Helena sets off to heal the ailing King of France (a terrific Paul Vincent O’Connor), who is wasting away with every tick of the clock. Helena has been an observant enough daughter of her father’s healing arts that she’s willing to bet her life with the King for the chance to choose her husband, regardless of her low station in society. Naturally she succeeds, naturally she chooses the immature and emotionally barren Count to be her own, and just as naturally the boy spurns her sincere affections, tramping off to war with his walking id, Parolles (another fine performance this summer for Allen Gilmore, who shined in \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gilmore’s Parolles seems to draw the best from those he shares the stage with, particularly Fowler and Hellman. In one priceless scene early on, Helena parries Parolles’s arguments regarding the non-existent virtues of virginity (he views chastity an overrated commodity; she recognizes his opinion for the self-serving, randy bluster that it really is). Similarly, when Parolles convinces young Bertram to prove his manhood to himself by disobeying the King’s command not to go to war with the rest of the men, of which he is not yet one, Hellman finally trades his character’s sheepish devotion to duty for a pair of stones. Parolles also gives Mike Ryan an opportunity to captivate us as “the Interpreter” during the play’s famous interrogation scene. Ryan injects his character with just enough Niko Bellic from \u003cb>GTA IV\u003c/b> to convince us that Parolles might well believe that his interrogator means business, but Ryan’s accent is not so thick that his character is reduced to parody.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Weaving his way amid these fine performances is John Pribyl as Lavatch, a lecherous, comic trickster “in the household of the Countess.” Pribyl’s Lavatch is genius: Whether he’s shuffling into a scene to stir things up or simply standing on the catwalk above the stage to observe the mess unfolding before him, he serves as the conscience of the community, yet he never comes off as a moralist. Partly, of course, this is due to the fine material Pribyl has to work with, but Pribyl brings plenty to the table. Like a lot of people in the audience, I looked forward to and enjoyed every scene he was in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertram, meanwhile, is determined to become a man by means other than killing. To this end, he pursues a Florence maiden named Diana (Caitlin FitzGerald), who with the help of her widow mother (Saundra McLain) tricks the boy into consummating his marriage with, and impregnating, Helena, thus unwittingly fulfilling his bitter promise to never recognize Helena as his wife until “thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Getting that ring off Bertram’s finger is this play’s variation of Birnam wood marching to Dunsinane in \u003cb>Macbeth.\u003c/b> While Bertram is slipping it to Helena, who he thinks is Diana, Helena is slipping a similar, but not identical, ring onto the lad’s finger (at Helena’s direction, Diana had made Bertram’s loan of his ring a condition of their midnight rendezvous). Conveniently, Helena has received this second ring earlier in the play from the King himself, for no other reason, we may reasonably suspect, than to satisfy the demands of this arbitrary plot twist. Indeed, Helena is only able to insinuate herself into the affairs of Diana and make them her own because she has been able to do what the entire Italian army has failed to accomplish, namely, track the French forces and her beloved to their safe haven amid Diana and her mother’s open-air laundromat. For someone whose entire life has been about serving a master, albeit a generous and compassionate one, Helena is surprisingly purposeful and strong-willed when it comes to going after what she wants. No wonder all Bertram can do, when confronted with the double whammy of imminent fatherhood and the return of his family jewel, is to resignedly stammer his love for victorious Helena. I didn’t believe him for a second.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Tim Ocel works this imperfect story and solid cast like a skilled painter at his easel. Assisted by the handsome costumes of B. Modern, whose between-the-wars suits and dresses were only topped by the \u003cb>For Whom The Bell Tolls\u003c/b> uniforms worn by the soldiers of France, Ocel creates painterly tableaus with his characters. We can, for example, immediately tell who the sycophants are in the King’s court because they are the ones in the matching dark suits, dark ties, and pressed white shirts. The women of Florence, in contrast, are a meadow of floral prints, whose very hems seem to soften the hard edges of the function-before-form set. Finally there are the aforementioned soldiers, outfitted in leather jackets, boots, and berets. It’s not complicated, and not at all random, just clear and effective theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>All’s Well That Ends Well\u003c/b> runs through August 31, 2008, at the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cb>All’s Well That Ends Well,\u003c/b> now playing through August 31, 2008, at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, is not really a comedy, though it does have many funny moments. Nor is it a tragedy, thanks to its turn-on-dime ending in which all of the problems that the playwright has taken such pains to contrive are suddenly tossed aside. That’s probably why audiences sometimes leave performances of \u003cb>All’s Well\u003c/b> a little bit confused, maybe even let down. “It could have been funnier,” was a comment I heard from more than one person who had seen this current production.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But today, in an age when random is the new black, the play’s shaggy-dog story line and awkward transitions between humor and pathos don’t seem particularly jarring, especially since the performances are as engaging as the directing is inspired. Rachel Fowler captures both of these aspects in a fine, if somber, turn as Helena, a “gentlewoman” to Countess Rossillion (Beth Dixon). Having grown up in the house of Rossillion as the daughter of the recently deceased Count’s physician, she is like one of the family. Which is why her confession of love for Bertram (Erik Hellman), the young Count Rossillion, is at first too much for the Countess. But Dixon guides the Countess’s emotions ably. Indeed, watching Dixon struggle to reconcile her motherly love for her son with her even more layered love for Helena, whom she’d rather was a proper daughter-in-law than a mere ward, is one of this production’s many pleasures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With the Countess’s blessing, Helena sets off to heal the ailing King of France (a terrific Paul Vincent O’Connor), who is wasting away with every tick of the clock. Helena has been an observant enough daughter of her father’s healing arts that she’s willing to bet her life with the King for the chance to choose her husband, regardless of her low station in society. Naturally she succeeds, naturally she chooses the immature and emotionally barren Count to be her own, and just as naturally the boy spurns her sincere affections, tramping off to war with his walking id, Parolles (another fine performance this summer for Allen Gilmore, who shined in \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gilmore’s Parolles seems to draw the best from those he shares the stage with, particularly Fowler and Hellman. In one priceless scene early on, Helena parries Parolles’s arguments regarding the non-existent virtues of virginity (he views chastity an overrated commodity; she recognizes his opinion for the self-serving, randy bluster that it really is). Similarly, when Parolles convinces young Bertram to prove his manhood to himself by disobeying the King’s command not to go to war with the rest of the men, of which he is not yet one, Hellman finally trades his character’s sheepish devotion to duty for a pair of stones. Parolles also gives Mike Ryan an opportunity to captivate us as “the Interpreter” during the play’s famous interrogation scene. Ryan injects his character with just enough Niko Bellic from \u003cb>GTA IV\u003c/b> to convince us that Parolles might well believe that his interrogator means business, but Ryan’s accent is not so thick that his character is reduced to parody.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Weaving his way amid these fine performances is John Pribyl as Lavatch, a lecherous, comic trickster “in the household of the Countess.” Pribyl’s Lavatch is genius: Whether he’s shuffling into a scene to stir things up or simply standing on the catwalk above the stage to observe the mess unfolding before him, he serves as the conscience of the community, yet he never comes off as a moralist. Partly, of course, this is due to the fine material Pribyl has to work with, but Pribyl brings plenty to the table. Like a lot of people in the audience, I looked forward to and enjoyed every scene he was in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bertram, meanwhile, is determined to become a man by means other than killing. To this end, he pursues a Florence maiden named Diana (Caitlin FitzGerald), who with the help of her widow mother (Saundra McLain) tricks the boy into consummating his marriage with, and impregnating, Helena, thus unwittingly fulfilling his bitter promise to never recognize Helena as his wife until “thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Getting that ring off Bertram’s finger is this play’s variation of Birnam wood marching to Dunsinane in \u003cb>Macbeth.\u003c/b> While Bertram is slipping it to Helena, who he thinks is Diana, Helena is slipping a similar, but not identical, ring onto the lad’s finger (at Helena’s direction, Diana had made Bertram’s loan of his ring a condition of their midnight rendezvous). Conveniently, Helena has received this second ring earlier in the play from the King himself, for no other reason, we may reasonably suspect, than to satisfy the demands of this arbitrary plot twist. Indeed, Helena is only able to insinuate herself into the affairs of Diana and make them her own because she has been able to do what the entire Italian army has failed to accomplish, namely, track the French forces and her beloved to their safe haven amid Diana and her mother’s open-air laundromat. For someone whose entire life has been about serving a master, albeit a generous and compassionate one, Helena is surprisingly purposeful and strong-willed when it comes to going after what she wants. No wonder all Bertram can do, when confronted with the double whammy of imminent fatherhood and the return of his family jewel, is to resignedly stammer his love for victorious Helena. I didn’t believe him for a second.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Tim Ocel works this imperfect story and solid cast like a skilled painter at his easel. Assisted by the handsome costumes of B. Modern, whose between-the-wars suits and dresses were only topped by the \u003cb>For Whom The Bell Tolls\u003c/b> uniforms worn by the soldiers of France, Ocel creates painterly tableaus with his characters. We can, for example, immediately tell who the sycophants are in the King’s court because they are the ones in the matching dark suits, dark ties, and pressed white shirts. The women of Florence, in contrast, are a meadow of floral prints, whose very hems seem to soften the hard edges of the function-before-form set. Finally there are the aforementioned soldiers, outfitted in leather jackets, boots, and berets. It’s not complicated, and not at all random, just clear and effective theater.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>All’s Well That Ends Well\u003c/b> runs through August 31, 2008, at the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>There’s something about the 1980s that just doesn’t sit well in the early 21st century. Try as we might to be nostalgic for the big shoulder pads, the moody British techno-pop, and all that Nicaragua-Contra cocaine that kept everyone partying till dawn at Studio 54, our affection for the decade is strained. As it began, it saw the final and irreversible commodification of art, a soul-sucking enterprise that compromised the spirits of all but the most independent-minded artists. As it progressed, a plague know as the “gay cancer” would be identified as AIDS, kill a matinee idol named Rock Hudson, and become an international health nightmare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the commodification of art and the scourge of AIDS are more germane to a contemporary discussion of Lanford Wilson’s \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b>, now through August 31, 2008, at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, than the company’s artistic director, Marco Barricelli, might have hoped. First performed in 1987, \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> amply covers the former in the person of one of the play’s two secondary characters, Burton (David Arrow), a rich kid turned richer screenwriter who is extremely clear-eyed about the value of his particular means of artistic expression. “Movies,” he says, “are some banker’s speculation about how the American adolescents want to see themselves that week. Period. They’re produced by whores, written by whores…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At least Arrow’s self-absorbed Burton is aware of the cesspool he’s swimming in, which gives his shallow character context and, ironically, depth. Larry (Stephen Bel Davies), the play’s other secondary character, is a flamboyantly gay caricature who has no such advantage, at least based on the stereotype that Wilson created for our amusement. Back in 1987, when \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> was first performed, it was apparently enough to introduce an openly gay character like Larry to straight audiences. No doubt Wilson felt that he needed all the queen-like mannerisms and mock-salacious preoccupations with sex that he could get, lest the suits and evening gowns in the audience miss what was then something of an act of artistic bravery. Davies delivers this act expertly. But from the vantage point of 2008, the omission of any reference whatsoever to AIDS, to say nothing of the impact it unquestionably must have been having on the lives of Larry and his late gay roommate, Robbie, threatens the credibility of the subsequent drama between the play’s two principles. Why Barricelli thought this incomplete time capsule of a play would resonate with contemporary audiences is a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At its core, \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> is the story of two opposites exploring their uneasy mutual attraction in the wake of a devastating shared loss. We meet Anna (Yvonne Woods) first. Even in 1987, this bohemian dancer with the rich boyfriend (that would be Burton) must have seemed a cliché, with all her speeches about the importance of her work and how her dedication to it has prevented her, until only recently, from realizing that her 32-year-old biological clock is ticking. Though it’s not said in so many words, part of her dismay and guilt over the loss of her and Larry’s dear friend and beloved roommate must be the realization that she’s chosen to spend a good deal of time hiding out in the company of men inclined to do little about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s more we learn about Anna before we meet her opposite number. She is supposed to be in shock from the death of Robbie, who has died in a freak boating accident. Yet somehow this tough artist, who with her sinewy exterior and lone-wolf individualism feels perfectly at home in her gritty industrial loft in pre-Giuliani lower Manhattan, can’t handle the familiar social conventions of Robbie’s funeral. The primary cause of her vexation, she tells us, is that Robbie’s relatives had never seen him dance, which for Anna is itself a kind of death. Sheltered from the reality of the young man’s sexuality, the family assumes that Anna must be Robbie’s girlfriend. This and a few other events combine to give Anna a full-on freak out session, which Woods’s Anna recounts with perverse glee. A bit of a drama queen, this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Into her life bursts Pale (Gene Gillette), Robbie’s foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, gun-toting older brother. Pale and Anna, it would seem, have nothing in common. Even their mutual link to Robbie is imperfect: She lived and created art with Robbie for three intense and fulfilling years. Pale is 12 years older than Robbie, so he barely knew his younger brother. Yet Anna cannot help but feel a connection to Pale, and is undone by, among other things, the physical resemblance between the two.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Woods as Anna is good, using her dancer’s frame effectively, but Gillette’s Pale is the revelation of this show. Pale is no still water but he does run deeper than you’d expect. This is a guy who is literally burning up from the inside out. He’s forever taking off his shoes and shirts and opening the windows wide, even though there’s a New York winter outside. To look at him you’d think he was a fidgety, hair-trigger extra on \u003cb>The Sopranos\u003c/b>, but beneath his vulgar exterior is an artist of sorts, a man of culture who can cook, knows his Vivaldi, Puccini, and Shostakovich, and, to hear him tell it, likes getting laid and clean underwear in equal measure. None of which explains precisely why Burton, for all his success, wealth, and good looks, doesn’t have a chance against a head case like Pale. But then no one ever said the heart was a logical organ.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Naturally these two come together, and the story of how they do so and what happens next holds more than a few surprises. Throughout, the props and set-dressing details ring true, carefully signaling the time period in which the story takes place, which makes Wilson’s cultural and historical omissions all the more glaring. I suspect that at some point in the future it will be enough for this play to simply be a story of two unlikely people finding each other in difficult circumstances, without too much regard for the environment that alternately nurtures them and saps their will. Until then, \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> remains a vintage that would probably benefit from a bit more time in the bottle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> runs through August 31, 2008, at the Theatre Arts Mainstage at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>There’s something about the 1980s that just doesn’t sit well in the early 21st century. Try as we might to be nostalgic for the big shoulder pads, the moody British techno-pop, and all that Nicaragua-Contra cocaine that kept everyone partying till dawn at Studio 54, our affection for the decade is strained. As it began, it saw the final and irreversible commodification of art, a soul-sucking enterprise that compromised the spirits of all but the most independent-minded artists. As it progressed, a plague know as the “gay cancer” would be identified as AIDS, kill a matinee idol named Rock Hudson, and become an international health nightmare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the commodification of art and the scourge of AIDS are more germane to a contemporary discussion of Lanford Wilson’s \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b>, now through August 31, 2008, at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, than the company’s artistic director, Marco Barricelli, might have hoped. First performed in 1987, \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> amply covers the former in the person of one of the play’s two secondary characters, Burton (David Arrow), a rich kid turned richer screenwriter who is extremely clear-eyed about the value of his particular means of artistic expression. “Movies,” he says, “are some banker’s speculation about how the American adolescents want to see themselves that week. Period. They’re produced by whores, written by whores…”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At least Arrow’s self-absorbed Burton is aware of the cesspool he’s swimming in, which gives his shallow character context and, ironically, depth. Larry (Stephen Bel Davies), the play’s other secondary character, is a flamboyantly gay caricature who has no such advantage, at least based on the stereotype that Wilson created for our amusement. Back in 1987, when \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> was first performed, it was apparently enough to introduce an openly gay character like Larry to straight audiences. No doubt Wilson felt that he needed all the queen-like mannerisms and mock-salacious preoccupations with sex that he could get, lest the suits and evening gowns in the audience miss what was then something of an act of artistic bravery. Davies delivers this act expertly. But from the vantage point of 2008, the omission of any reference whatsoever to AIDS, to say nothing of the impact it unquestionably must have been having on the lives of Larry and his late gay roommate, Robbie, threatens the credibility of the subsequent drama between the play’s two principles. Why Barricelli thought this incomplete time capsule of a play would resonate with contemporary audiences is a mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At its core, \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> is the story of two opposites exploring their uneasy mutual attraction in the wake of a devastating shared loss. We meet Anna (Yvonne Woods) first. Even in 1987, this bohemian dancer with the rich boyfriend (that would be Burton) must have seemed a cliché, with all her speeches about the importance of her work and how her dedication to it has prevented her, until only recently, from realizing that her 32-year-old biological clock is ticking. Though it’s not said in so many words, part of her dismay and guilt over the loss of her and Larry’s dear friend and beloved roommate must be the realization that she’s chosen to spend a good deal of time hiding out in the company of men inclined to do little about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s more we learn about Anna before we meet her opposite number. She is supposed to be in shock from the death of Robbie, who has died in a freak boating accident. Yet somehow this tough artist, who with her sinewy exterior and lone-wolf individualism feels perfectly at home in her gritty industrial loft in pre-Giuliani lower Manhattan, can’t handle the familiar social conventions of Robbie’s funeral. The primary cause of her vexation, she tells us, is that Robbie’s relatives had never seen him dance, which for Anna is itself a kind of death. Sheltered from the reality of the young man’s sexuality, the family assumes that Anna must be Robbie’s girlfriend. This and a few other events combine to give Anna a full-on freak out session, which Woods’s Anna recounts with perverse glee. A bit of a drama queen, this one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Into her life bursts Pale (Gene Gillette), Robbie’s foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, gun-toting older brother. Pale and Anna, it would seem, have nothing in common. Even their mutual link to Robbie is imperfect: She lived and created art with Robbie for three intense and fulfilling years. Pale is 12 years older than Robbie, so he barely knew his younger brother. Yet Anna cannot help but feel a connection to Pale, and is undone by, among other things, the physical resemblance between the two.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Woods as Anna is good, using her dancer’s frame effectively, but Gillette’s Pale is the revelation of this show. Pale is no still water but he does run deeper than you’d expect. This is a guy who is literally burning up from the inside out. He’s forever taking off his shoes and shirts and opening the windows wide, even though there’s a New York winter outside. To look at him you’d think he was a fidgety, hair-trigger extra on \u003cb>The Sopranos\u003c/b>, but beneath his vulgar exterior is an artist of sorts, a man of culture who can cook, knows his Vivaldi, Puccini, and Shostakovich, and, to hear him tell it, likes getting laid and clean underwear in equal measure. None of which explains precisely why Burton, for all his success, wealth, and good looks, doesn’t have a chance against a head case like Pale. But then no one ever said the heart was a logical organ.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Naturally these two come together, and the story of how they do so and what happens next holds more than a few surprises. Throughout, the props and set-dressing details ring true, carefully signaling the time period in which the story takes place, which makes Wilson’s cultural and historical omissions all the more glaring. I suspect that at some point in the future it will be enough for this play to simply be a story of two unlikely people finding each other in difficult circumstances, without too much regard for the environment that alternately nurtures them and saps their will. Until then, \u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> remains a vintage that would probably benefit from a bit more time in the bottle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Burn This\u003c/b> runs through August 31, 2008, at the Theatre Arts Mainstage at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Somewhere in the middle of the first act of \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig,\u003c/b> I realized that I was already plotting my next trip to UC Santa Cruz’s Theatre Arts Mainstage to see this wonderful play at least one more time before it closes on August 31, 2008. I don’t pretend to be the world’s most seasoned theatergoer, but this is the best thing I’ve seen since I had the good fortune last summer to attend a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of \u003cb>Henry IV, Part II\u003c/b> in Stratford-upon-Avon, with the great David Warner as Falstaff. Now \u003cb>Bach\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Henry\u003c/b> could not be more different, and I suppose some might say that the comparison is perhaps a bit heady, but I left both performances similarly exhilarated, filled with the same sense that I had just witnessed a play that was not only entertaining and superbly performed, but also, in its own modest way, important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play opens with 18th-century organist and composer Johann Friedrich Fasch (Stephen Caffrey) standing in a pool of light, reading a letter that he is about to release by carrier pigeon to his wife, Anna. Costumed in a green velvet coat that’s richly trimmed in gold brocade, with traditional buckled shoes at his feet and gray hose to his breeches (B. Modern lavished similar detail upon each of the play’s seven characters), and crowned with a stunning wig of long curly locks that sits on Caffrey’s head like a mane tops a lion’s (Jakey Hicks’s hairpieces somehow captured each character’s personality perfectly), we know from the first words out of Fasch’s mouth that playwright Itamar Moses is not going to be playing this one entirely straight. While Moses is obviously serious in his meditations about art, religion, and free will, he also appears to be equally serious about not taking such fraught topics too seriously. “My darling Anna,” Fasch begins, “By the time you receive this letter, I will have sent it.” Such Marx Brothers-meet-Yogi Berra logic permeates Moses’s hilarious and intelligent piece. Before long we will come to anticipate such pronouncements, occasionally they will prompt a groan, but we laugh, sometimes against our better judgment, as if, like the characters in Moses’s play repeatedly complain, we had no choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Fasch’s letter brings his wife, whom he addresses by a string of pet names, each more ridiculous than the last, and us to the anteroom of the Thomaskirsche in Leipzig, 1722, the lights come up and we see that Georg Balthasar Schott (Larry Paulsen) has been sitting at the church’s door throughout Fasch’s speech. Fasch, we have learned, is here because his former teacher, the great Johann Kuhnau, who as the head of the Thomasschule once showed Fasch unparalleled favor before naming another as his favorite, has summoned Fasch to his side because he is dying and wishes to choose a successor to what is the most prestigious post for an organist in all of Germany. Fasch, of course, assumes that his teacher has had a change of heart about which of his students was his favorite after all. Blinded by his desire for reconciliation, Fasch sets aside his conviction that man guides his fate after birth, trading it instead for the convenient certainty that destiny has brought him to this particular time and place to teach a new generation of Johanns and Georgs that predestination is nonsense. Fasch may fancy himself a clear-eyed progressive, but like the rest of the characters in this play, and by implication, us, he can also be a fool. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schott has not been as blessed as Fasch was when it comes to the affections of Kuhnau. Though he grew up in Leipzig and is an accomplished enough musician to have become a peer of Kuhnau’s as the organist of a less prestigious church, Schott never attended the Thomasschule or had the opportunity to study under Kuhnau. Schott wears these slights openly on his ample, black sleeves. His history and psychological wounds are just a few of the many reasons why he feels so proprietary when it comes to granting a string of rivals, beginning with Fasch, access to Kuhnau, who is playing a private concert for himself inside. “What brings you here?” he asks Fasch suspiciously. “Stagecoach, primarily,” comes the reply. “And, for this last portion, my feet.” Ba da bump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so the farce begins in earnest, as Moses, with a good deal of excellent accompaniment from director Art Manke, mines this traditional (in other hands, tired) theatrical form to its fullest. On a certain level, \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b> is as substantial as a bag of cotton candy from the boardwalk down the hill, a sack of empty calories whose spun circumstances and slapstick humor seem entirely at odds with an 18th-century costume piece about a group of back-stabbing, German Lutheran organists. But Moses’s writing is so smart, his jokes so well timed, and his characters so sympathetically drawn that we embrace the disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t want to ruin the rest of the play for you by revealing anything that comes next, but I’d be remiss not to at least mention the fine performances of this tight-knit company of actors. Caffrey is commanding as Fasch, the free spirit whose early rejection of the Lutheran principle of predetermination no doubt clouded the affections of his dear Kuhnau. Especially good is his speech early in the second act (a tip of the cap to lighting designer David Lee Cuthbert, who managed to build a prison out of nothing but shadows) when, in encouraging Anna to write a fugue, he reveals to the audience what must have been one of the then-24-year-old Moses’s motivations to write a farce about an arcane corner of music history, set in the very quaint-sounding Age of Enlightenment, no less. (Why, you have to wonder, wasn’t Moses writing a prequel to any of the numerous comic-book franchises that every summer splatter like June bugs in the teeth of Hells Angels on the screens of suburban multiplexes? Did his emails to Burbank to help shape the latest Broadway musical version of the latest mediocre Disney cartoon go unanswered? Happily for us, he chose to burrow deeply into this profound and silly story.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Paulsen is equally good, entertaining us as his character careens between tenderness and duplicity, surprising us when he explodes in controlled Lutheran rage. The gambling forger Georg Lenck (Allen Gilmore) was perhaps my favorite of the bunch. His noble facade, punctured by his endless schemes to separate everyone he meets from his coin, make his final crumbling almost heartbreaking (okay; it’s mostly just funny). Drew Foster (Johann Martin Steindorff), Paul Vincent O’Connor (Georg Friedrich Kaufmann), and Mike Ryan (Johann Christoph Graupner) round out the fine cast. Foster is an imperious brat, who gets to turn the other cheek, shall we say, in act two. O’Connor is absolutely terrific as Foster’s dottering enemy, who, true to the farce form, knows a good deal more about life and art than his bumbling and blustery exterior lets on. I liked this guy (both the actor and his character) a lot. And then there’s Ryan, whose clown-like fright wig, expressive face, and well-founded paranoia perfectly mirrors his character’s fate, if that’s what we may call it in the context of this play, to be acclaimed as the second greatest organist in all of Germany.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what of Johann Sebastian Bach, you ask, the organist in the play’s title? See you at the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b> runs through August 31, 2008, on the Theatre Arts Mainstage at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Somewhere in the middle of the first act of \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig,\u003c/b> I realized that I was already plotting my next trip to UC Santa Cruz’s Theatre Arts Mainstage to see this wonderful play at least one more time before it closes on August 31, 2008. I don’t pretend to be the world’s most seasoned theatergoer, but this is the best thing I’ve seen since I had the good fortune last summer to attend a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of \u003cb>Henry IV, Part II\u003c/b> in Stratford-upon-Avon, with the great David Warner as Falstaff. Now \u003cb>Bach\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Henry\u003c/b> could not be more different, and I suppose some might say that the comparison is perhaps a bit heady, but I left both performances similarly exhilarated, filled with the same sense that I had just witnessed a play that was not only entertaining and superbly performed, but also, in its own modest way, important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play opens with 18th-century organist and composer Johann Friedrich Fasch (Stephen Caffrey) standing in a pool of light, reading a letter that he is about to release by carrier pigeon to his wife, Anna. Costumed in a green velvet coat that’s richly trimmed in gold brocade, with traditional buckled shoes at his feet and gray hose to his breeches (B. Modern lavished similar detail upon each of the play’s seven characters), and crowned with a stunning wig of long curly locks that sits on Caffrey’s head like a mane tops a lion’s (Jakey Hicks’s hairpieces somehow captured each character’s personality perfectly), we know from the first words out of Fasch’s mouth that playwright Itamar Moses is not going to be playing this one entirely straight. While Moses is obviously serious in his meditations about art, religion, and free will, he also appears to be equally serious about not taking such fraught topics too seriously. “My darling Anna,” Fasch begins, “By the time you receive this letter, I will have sent it.” Such Marx Brothers-meet-Yogi Berra logic permeates Moses’s hilarious and intelligent piece. Before long we will come to anticipate such pronouncements, occasionally they will prompt a groan, but we laugh, sometimes against our better judgment, as if, like the characters in Moses’s play repeatedly complain, we had no choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Fasch’s letter brings his wife, whom he addresses by a string of pet names, each more ridiculous than the last, and us to the anteroom of the Thomaskirsche in Leipzig, 1722, the lights come up and we see that Georg Balthasar Schott (Larry Paulsen) has been sitting at the church’s door throughout Fasch’s speech. Fasch, we have learned, is here because his former teacher, the great Johann Kuhnau, who as the head of the Thomasschule once showed Fasch unparalleled favor before naming another as his favorite, has summoned Fasch to his side because he is dying and wishes to choose a successor to what is the most prestigious post for an organist in all of Germany. Fasch, of course, assumes that his teacher has had a change of heart about which of his students was his favorite after all. Blinded by his desire for reconciliation, Fasch sets aside his conviction that man guides his fate after birth, trading it instead for the convenient certainty that destiny has brought him to this particular time and place to teach a new generation of Johanns and Georgs that predestination is nonsense. Fasch may fancy himself a clear-eyed progressive, but like the rest of the characters in this play, and by implication, us, he can also be a fool. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schott has not been as blessed as Fasch was when it comes to the affections of Kuhnau. Though he grew up in Leipzig and is an accomplished enough musician to have become a peer of Kuhnau’s as the organist of a less prestigious church, Schott never attended the Thomasschule or had the opportunity to study under Kuhnau. Schott wears these slights openly on his ample, black sleeves. His history and psychological wounds are just a few of the many reasons why he feels so proprietary when it comes to granting a string of rivals, beginning with Fasch, access to Kuhnau, who is playing a private concert for himself inside. “What brings you here?” he asks Fasch suspiciously. “Stagecoach, primarily,” comes the reply. “And, for this last portion, my feet.” Ba da bump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so the farce begins in earnest, as Moses, with a good deal of excellent accompaniment from director Art Manke, mines this traditional (in other hands, tired) theatrical form to its fullest. On a certain level, \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b> is as substantial as a bag of cotton candy from the boardwalk down the hill, a sack of empty calories whose spun circumstances and slapstick humor seem entirely at odds with an 18th-century costume piece about a group of back-stabbing, German Lutheran organists. But Moses’s writing is so smart, his jokes so well timed, and his characters so sympathetically drawn that we embrace the disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t want to ruin the rest of the play for you by revealing anything that comes next, but I’d be remiss not to at least mention the fine performances of this tight-knit company of actors. Caffrey is commanding as Fasch, the free spirit whose early rejection of the Lutheran principle of predetermination no doubt clouded the affections of his dear Kuhnau. Especially good is his speech early in the second act (a tip of the cap to lighting designer David Lee Cuthbert, who managed to build a prison out of nothing but shadows) when, in encouraging Anna to write a fugue, he reveals to the audience what must have been one of the then-24-year-old Moses’s motivations to write a farce about an arcane corner of music history, set in the very quaint-sounding Age of Enlightenment, no less. (Why, you have to wonder, wasn’t Moses writing a prequel to any of the numerous comic-book franchises that every summer splatter like June bugs in the teeth of Hells Angels on the screens of suburban multiplexes? Did his emails to Burbank to help shape the latest Broadway musical version of the latest mediocre Disney cartoon go unanswered? Happily for us, he chose to burrow deeply into this profound and silly story.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Paulsen is equally good, entertaining us as his character careens between tenderness and duplicity, surprising us when he explodes in controlled Lutheran rage. The gambling forger Georg Lenck (Allen Gilmore) was perhaps my favorite of the bunch. His noble facade, punctured by his endless schemes to separate everyone he meets from his coin, make his final crumbling almost heartbreaking (okay; it’s mostly just funny). Drew Foster (Johann Martin Steindorff), Paul Vincent O’Connor (Georg Friedrich Kaufmann), and Mike Ryan (Johann Christoph Graupner) round out the fine cast. Foster is an imperious brat, who gets to turn the other cheek, shall we say, in act two. O’Connor is absolutely terrific as Foster’s dottering enemy, who, true to the farce form, knows a good deal more about life and art than his bumbling and blustery exterior lets on. I liked this guy (both the actor and his character) a lot. And then there’s Ryan, whose clown-like fright wig, expressive face, and well-founded paranoia perfectly mirrors his character’s fate, if that’s what we may call it in the context of this play, to be acclaimed as the second greatest organist in all of Germany.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what of Johann Sebastian Bach, you ask, the organist in the play’s title? See you at the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b> runs through August 31, 2008, on the Theatre Arts Mainstage at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Father Brendan Flynn (Cassidy Brown) is a man who likes to tell stories, which he does every Sunday at St. Nicholas church in the Bronx, and through August 10, 2008, at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, where TheatreWorks is presenting John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play, \u003cb>DOUBT, A Parable\u003c/b>. The 90-minute, intermission-less production is uniformly excellent, from the clever and effective staging by Tom Langguth, to the very strong performances by the play’s four fine actors, who, I’m told, were primarily directed by TheatreWorks dramaturg, Vickie Rozell, even though TheatreWorks artistic director, Robert Kelley, shares the credit in the program, although I have grave doubts that this rumor is actually true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s what it feels like to doubt and to be doubted — neither is pleasant. Which is to say, go see this play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> opens, Flynn is preaching to his congregation about the virtues of doubt. “Doubt,” he tells his 1964-era, Irish and Italian flock, “can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” JFK, our nation’s first and last Catholic president, had recently been assassinated. Pope John, who began the process of making the Mass more accessible to parishioners by, among other things, allowing the congregation to recite its prayers in English instead of Latin, had died a few months before. In short, Flynn’s audience is suffering from what he characterizes as group despair. Which is not to say that their situation is hopeless: When you are lost, he consoles them, take comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Kimberly King) is the polar opposite of the warm-hearted, compassionate Father. The principal of the church’s school, Sister Aloysius is a woman of extreme moral rectitude, who looks at a ballpoint pen and sees a pagan idol to the sin of sloth. Her intimidating, no-nonsense office is “decorated” with a photograph of His Holiness. Feared by students and colleagues alike, she believes the world is a hard and heartless place, a cesspool bursting at the seams with evil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Sister Aloysius’s paranoia is acute, it is grounded in experience — she lost her husband in World War II. So when one of her teachers, the deferential Sister James (Kristin Stokes), stops by her office for a meeting, Sister Aloysius makes it her mission to shake the bunny rabbits and puppy dogs out of James’s idealistic young head. In fact, Sister Aloysius wants Sister James to keep an eye on Father Flynn because Aloysius has doubts about him, specifically regarding the propriety of his relationships with some of the school boys. Innocent that she is, Sister James is taken aback by Sister Aloysius’s suspicions. James is clearly infatuated with Father Flynn, so much so that at one point Sister Aloysius interrupts her gushing with a curt “You’d trade anything for a warm look.” When all is said and done, wouldn’t most of us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No doubt the back and forth between the two women had some audience members squirming in their seats, as if THEY were being given the third degree by Aloysius and not the wide-eyed James. But King’s nasal monotone is almost too spot-on a caricature of the classic penguin. The Aloysius that King conjures has a keen sense of humor, and although no one would dare call King’s creation a softy, it would have been interesting to see the character played with a bit more menace. That said, King and Stokes make a good team, which in this case is more than enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius is not the only one at the church who likes to play the mentor, taking selected individuals under her wing. Between sermons, Father Flynn is the school’s basketball coach, which gives him the opportunity to expose his young charges to his beliefs about everything from the length and cleanliness of one’s fingernails to the ways in which one must deceive one’s adversary when preparing for a shot at the foul line. No coincidence, I’m sure, the lecture on deception, which, when added to his occupation as a teller of tales, quickly coalesce into an unsettling pattern. Could that crazy penguin be right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We find out soon enough when Father Flynn is summoned to the principal’s office for a meeting with Sisters Aloysius and James to discuss the upcoming Christmas pageant. Flynn believes the songs performed at the pageant should be expanded to include tunes parishioners are hearing on their radios, songs like “Frosty the Snowman,” which both James and Flynn love but Aloysius thinks encourages a belief in the dark arts (her objection is that a magic hat makes Frosty come to life). Carefully, Aloysius steers the conversation to the subject of a boy named Donald, the school’s only black student who, James claims, returned to her classroom from a private meeting with the Father smelling of booze.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many clever devices in \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> is the way Shanley uses the exact same circumstances as justifications for the diametrically opposite views of Flynn and Aloysius. For example, Flynn resents Aloysius’s accusation because its delivery by her to him flies in the face of the very church rules on authority and chain of command that Aloysius holds so dear. It is authority, after all, that permits Aloysius to bend the impressionable mind of a subordinate to her will. Similarly, Aloysius believes herself to be a better messenger of God because of her unflinching adherence the scripture’s finest print. Flynn believes he’s more holy because he’s acting upon the dictates of the church’s current leaders, who, he seems to suggest, would wholeheartedly approve of his idea to take some of the boys on an overnight camping trip — in the interest of breaking down barriers between the church and the community, of course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I haven’t revealed more than you have probably already heard or will quickly surmise when you settle into your seat, but to say just about anything else would begin to tread into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that even though Shanley has said that the play’s second act begins when the audience starts discussing its doubts about Flynn’s motivations and Aloysius’s zeal, I doubt that a churchyard who-done-it with a do-it-yourself ending was really all the playwright had in mind. Doubt, after all, is evidence of humanity, whose appearance will always trump even the most clever plot twists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>DOUBT, A Parable\u003c/b> runs through August 10, 2008, at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $26 to $64. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatreworks.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit theatreworks.org or call 650-903-6000.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Father Brendan Flynn (Cassidy Brown) is a man who likes to tell stories, which he does every Sunday at St. Nicholas church in the Bronx, and through August 10, 2008, at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, where TheatreWorks is presenting John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play, \u003cb>DOUBT, A Parable\u003c/b>. The 90-minute, intermission-less production is uniformly excellent, from the clever and effective staging by Tom Langguth, to the very strong performances by the play’s four fine actors, who, I’m told, were primarily directed by TheatreWorks dramaturg, Vickie Rozell, even though TheatreWorks artistic director, Robert Kelley, shares the credit in the program, although I have grave doubts that this rumor is actually true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s what it feels like to doubt and to be doubted — neither is pleasant. Which is to say, go see this play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> opens, Flynn is preaching to his congregation about the virtues of doubt. “Doubt,” he tells his 1964-era, Irish and Italian flock, “can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” JFK, our nation’s first and last Catholic president, had recently been assassinated. Pope John, who began the process of making the Mass more accessible to parishioners by, among other things, allowing the congregation to recite its prayers in English instead of Latin, had died a few months before. In short, Flynn’s audience is suffering from what he characterizes as group despair. Which is not to say that their situation is hopeless: When you are lost, he consoles them, take comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Kimberly King) is the polar opposite of the warm-hearted, compassionate Father. The principal of the church’s school, Sister Aloysius is a woman of extreme moral rectitude, who looks at a ballpoint pen and sees a pagan idol to the sin of sloth. Her intimidating, no-nonsense office is “decorated” with a photograph of His Holiness. Feared by students and colleagues alike, she believes the world is a hard and heartless place, a cesspool bursting at the seams with evil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Sister Aloysius’s paranoia is acute, it is grounded in experience — she lost her husband in World War II. So when one of her teachers, the deferential Sister James (Kristin Stokes), stops by her office for a meeting, Sister Aloysius makes it her mission to shake the bunny rabbits and puppy dogs out of James’s idealistic young head. In fact, Sister Aloysius wants Sister James to keep an eye on Father Flynn because Aloysius has doubts about him, specifically regarding the propriety of his relationships with some of the school boys. Innocent that she is, Sister James is taken aback by Sister Aloysius’s suspicions. James is clearly infatuated with Father Flynn, so much so that at one point Sister Aloysius interrupts her gushing with a curt “You’d trade anything for a warm look.” When all is said and done, wouldn’t most of us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No doubt the back and forth between the two women had some audience members squirming in their seats, as if THEY were being given the third degree by Aloysius and not the wide-eyed James. But King’s nasal monotone is almost too spot-on a caricature of the classic penguin. The Aloysius that King conjures has a keen sense of humor, and although no one would dare call King’s creation a softy, it would have been interesting to see the character played with a bit more menace. That said, King and Stokes make a good team, which in this case is more than enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius is not the only one at the church who likes to play the mentor, taking selected individuals under her wing. Between sermons, Father Flynn is the school’s basketball coach, which gives him the opportunity to expose his young charges to his beliefs about everything from the length and cleanliness of one’s fingernails to the ways in which one must deceive one’s adversary when preparing for a shot at the foul line. No coincidence, I’m sure, the lecture on deception, which, when added to his occupation as a teller of tales, quickly coalesce into an unsettling pattern. Could that crazy penguin be right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We find out soon enough when Father Flynn is summoned to the principal’s office for a meeting with Sisters Aloysius and James to discuss the upcoming Christmas pageant. Flynn believes the songs performed at the pageant should be expanded to include tunes parishioners are hearing on their radios, songs like “Frosty the Snowman,” which both James and Flynn love but Aloysius thinks encourages a belief in the dark arts (her objection is that a magic hat makes Frosty come to life). Carefully, Aloysius steers the conversation to the subject of a boy named Donald, the school’s only black student who, James claims, returned to her classroom from a private meeting with the Father smelling of booze.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many clever devices in \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> is the way Shanley uses the exact same circumstances as justifications for the diametrically opposite views of Flynn and Aloysius. For example, Flynn resents Aloysius’s accusation because its delivery by her to him flies in the face of the very church rules on authority and chain of command that Aloysius holds so dear. It is authority, after all, that permits Aloysius to bend the impressionable mind of a subordinate to her will. Similarly, Aloysius believes herself to be a better messenger of God because of her unflinching adherence the scripture’s finest print. Flynn believes he’s more holy because he’s acting upon the dictates of the church’s current leaders, who, he seems to suggest, would wholeheartedly approve of his idea to take some of the boys on an overnight camping trip — in the interest of breaking down barriers between the church and the community, of course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I haven’t revealed more than you have probably already heard or will quickly surmise when you settle into your seat, but to say just about anything else would begin to tread into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that even though Shanley has said that the play’s second act begins when the audience starts discussing its doubts about Flynn’s motivations and Aloysius’s zeal, I doubt that a churchyard who-done-it with a do-it-yourself ending was really all the playwright had in mind. Doubt, after all, is evidence of humanity, whose appearance will always trump even the most clever plot twists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare Santa Cruz",
"headTitle": "Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare Santa Cruz | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>If you like watching \u003cb>Gossip Girl\u003c/b> on The CW and you’ve never seen an actual performance of \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> before, then maybe, just maybe, the current Shakespeare Santa Cruz production of the William Shakespeare’s most popular play is for you. Lots of handsome, testosterone-fueled young men run shirtless around the fake-stone stage; Juliet (Caitlin FitzGerald) is suitably self absorbed, rich, and beautiful; and Romeo (Charles Pasternak) is a lover who brings it, at one point dangling from the industrial metal catwalk that links the second floors of the set’s two main structures before executing a chin up to give his beloved a kiss. Ooh. Ahh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play begins promisingly enough. Romeo, the only son of Lord and Lady Montague, is alone in his tree fort, gazing bleakly into the darkness. Juliet, the only daughter of Lord and Lady Capulet, is standing at her iconic balcony window in a whisper of a dress, her body the embodiment of a sigh. Each is searching the blank night for something to fill the voids in their lives, yet each is unaware of the other, let alone their shared longing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, before we have a chance to consider what we know lies ahead for the world’s most famous star-crossed lovers, a tangle of gypsy clichés commandeer the stage. Pretty much without exception, the men are all brutes who appear to shop at Urban Outfitters and are only lacking matching distressed My Chemical Romance t-shirts from Hot Topic to complete their ridiculous costumes. The women are girl-can’t-help-it teases who bang tambourines but aren’t afraid to use a knife when the advances of their male counterparts turn brutal. High spirits and the promise of sex quickly descends into lust and violence. Within seconds the rabble are at each other’s throats, armed with swords, switchblades, and Dustbusters. By the time Prince Escalus (Gene Gillette) strides into this hormonal mosh pit to reign in the riot between the shirts and the skins (most of the Montague men wear only open vests above their belts), the only thing that rings true is the prince’s characterization of his subjects as beasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civility momentarily restored, it’s time to meet our heroes. We are introduced to Romeo by his cousin Benvolio (Erik Hellman), who seeks out the sulking lad on behalf of his worried uncle and aunt. Benvolio learns that unrequited love is the cause of Romeo’s Emo ‘tude, although the words that Shakespeare has put into the mouths of this randy pair suggest that for Romeo, it may have been more of a case of blue balls than a broken heart. I liked this scene a lot, with Romeo and Benvolio getting comfortable in their characters as they lounge carelessly on the skirts of the uncomfortable stage. The scene blossoms even more with the arrival of a Capulet servant named Peter (Mick Mize), who is like a live-action version of the hapless Linguini character in \u003cb>Ratatouille\u003c/b>. In the first act, anyway, when Mize is given free reign to play his character like the clown that he is, he steals just about every scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over at the house of Capulet, we learn about the barely 14, Converse-clad Juliet through the eyes of her nurse (Saundra McClain), even though her alcoholic, stiletto-heeled, Bride-of-Frankenstein-hairdo mother (Yvonne Woods) shares the stage. As Juliet’s nurse recalls the day her precious charge was born, she and Lady Capulet shave the slouching girl’s legs and underarms in a funny and charming scene that made me think of a pampered Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s \u003cb>Marie Antoinette\u003c/b>. Would that FitzGerald had been given the latitude by director Kim Rubinstein to sustain this childlike version of Juliet throughout the play. It was more engaging, and felt more true to Shakespeare’s character, than the Gwyneth Paltrow turn that dominates the second act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two doomed love birds meet at a party at Juliet’s house, where she sings a Karaoke version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with various Capulet women on backup vocals. During her performance, Juliet dances with a pair of would-be suitors, including the tragic Paris (Jon Gentry). Both men dance like complete numbskulls, a mean trick on the director’s part to help ensure that we have no sympathy for them vis-a-vis Juliet’s eventual affection for her Romeo. Paris always struck me as a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than a villain, so the director’s decision to manipulate the audience’s impression of the man through the use of cheap theatrics seems, well, cheap. I have no problem with putting small household appliances in the hands of random actors, or giving us a window on a character by having her conjure Mama Cass, but the systematic dehumanization of Paris is one of this production’s numerous sins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, the most serious problems with Rubinstein’s \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> are not her stylistic choices — costumes that range from ancient Budapest to contemporary Alphabet City, for example — but the substantive changes she has made to Shakespeare’s play. While Paris is being dehumanized, Romeo is being transformed into a character for whom we have faint sympathy. For almost three hours, Pasternak’s Romeo wails and whines his lines at the same bellowing pitch. At times he literally stumbles about the stage, so drunk with grief that he can barely keep himself erect as he bawls his lines to the heavens. Good grief this guy is tiresome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Romeo is no mere victim of blood (he’s a Montague) and circumstance (in love with a Capulet). When he eventually kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (David Arrow) he does so by stabbing the man in the chest not once, as in the original, but twice. Not content with this 100% increase in Romeo’s violence toward Tybalt, Rubinstein directs him to knife Juliet’s cousin again, this time in the back, after which he slits his adversary’s throat. Granted, the fight scene between Romeo and Tybalt is one of the better physical sequences of the play, but the Romeo that the audience sees appears too practiced at, and too familiar with, the killing of men. What, we wonder, could Juliet possibly see in this violent cad? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Would that there were more moments like the scene in which the nurse reports Romeo’s murder of Tybalt to Juliet on one side of the stage (“I saw the wound,” she tells Juliet, to which my son leaned over to me and muttered “Which one?”) while Friar Laurence (Richard Farrell) informs Romeo of his banishment from Verona for the crime. Or the moment early in the second act, when the gypsies are joined by a very gifted Erik Hellman, who reveals to us that Benvolio is not only a good friend to Romeo and, apparently, the only young male Montague who knows how to button a shirt, but he is also an accomplished guitarist. By the end of this spoiled play, which I won’t spoil for you any more than I already have, Rubinstein flirts with Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet’s final moments on Earth, except unlike Luhrmann, she doesn’t deliver anything resembling a payoff to the audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> runs through August 21, 2008, at the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "If you like watching \u003cb>Gossip Girl\u003c/b> on The CW and you've never seen an actual performance of \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> before, then maybe, just maybe, the current Shakespeare Santa Cruz production of the William Shakespeare's most popular play is for you. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you like watching \u003cb>Gossip Girl\u003c/b> on The CW and you’ve never seen an actual performance of \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> before, then maybe, just maybe, the current Shakespeare Santa Cruz production of the William Shakespeare’s most popular play is for you. Lots of handsome, testosterone-fueled young men run shirtless around the fake-stone stage; Juliet (Caitlin FitzGerald) is suitably self absorbed, rich, and beautiful; and Romeo (Charles Pasternak) is a lover who brings it, at one point dangling from the industrial metal catwalk that links the second floors of the set’s two main structures before executing a chin up to give his beloved a kiss. Ooh. Ahh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play begins promisingly enough. Romeo, the only son of Lord and Lady Montague, is alone in his tree fort, gazing bleakly into the darkness. Juliet, the only daughter of Lord and Lady Capulet, is standing at her iconic balcony window in a whisper of a dress, her body the embodiment of a sigh. Each is searching the blank night for something to fill the voids in their lives, yet each is unaware of the other, let alone their shared longing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, before we have a chance to consider what we know lies ahead for the world’s most famous star-crossed lovers, a tangle of gypsy clichés commandeer the stage. Pretty much without exception, the men are all brutes who appear to shop at Urban Outfitters and are only lacking matching distressed My Chemical Romance t-shirts from Hot Topic to complete their ridiculous costumes. The women are girl-can’t-help-it teases who bang tambourines but aren’t afraid to use a knife when the advances of their male counterparts turn brutal. High spirits and the promise of sex quickly descends into lust and violence. Within seconds the rabble are at each other’s throats, armed with swords, switchblades, and Dustbusters. By the time Prince Escalus (Gene Gillette) strides into this hormonal mosh pit to reign in the riot between the shirts and the skins (most of the Montague men wear only open vests above their belts), the only thing that rings true is the prince’s characterization of his subjects as beasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civility momentarily restored, it’s time to meet our heroes. We are introduced to Romeo by his cousin Benvolio (Erik Hellman), who seeks out the sulking lad on behalf of his worried uncle and aunt. Benvolio learns that unrequited love is the cause of Romeo’s Emo ‘tude, although the words that Shakespeare has put into the mouths of this randy pair suggest that for Romeo, it may have been more of a case of blue balls than a broken heart. I liked this scene a lot, with Romeo and Benvolio getting comfortable in their characters as they lounge carelessly on the skirts of the uncomfortable stage. The scene blossoms even more with the arrival of a Capulet servant named Peter (Mick Mize), who is like a live-action version of the hapless Linguini character in \u003cb>Ratatouille\u003c/b>. In the first act, anyway, when Mize is given free reign to play his character like the clown that he is, he steals just about every scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over at the house of Capulet, we learn about the barely 14, Converse-clad Juliet through the eyes of her nurse (Saundra McClain), even though her alcoholic, stiletto-heeled, Bride-of-Frankenstein-hairdo mother (Yvonne Woods) shares the stage. As Juliet’s nurse recalls the day her precious charge was born, she and Lady Capulet shave the slouching girl’s legs and underarms in a funny and charming scene that made me think of a pampered Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s \u003cb>Marie Antoinette\u003c/b>. Would that FitzGerald had been given the latitude by director Kim Rubinstein to sustain this childlike version of Juliet throughout the play. It was more engaging, and felt more true to Shakespeare’s character, than the Gwyneth Paltrow turn that dominates the second act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two doomed love birds meet at a party at Juliet’s house, where she sings a Karaoke version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with various Capulet women on backup vocals. During her performance, Juliet dances with a pair of would-be suitors, including the tragic Paris (Jon Gentry). Both men dance like complete numbskulls, a mean trick on the director’s part to help ensure that we have no sympathy for them vis-a-vis Juliet’s eventual affection for her Romeo. Paris always struck me as a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than a villain, so the director’s decision to manipulate the audience’s impression of the man through the use of cheap theatrics seems, well, cheap. I have no problem with putting small household appliances in the hands of random actors, or giving us a window on a character by having her conjure Mama Cass, but the systematic dehumanization of Paris is one of this production’s numerous sins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, the most serious problems with Rubinstein’s \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> are not her stylistic choices — costumes that range from ancient Budapest to contemporary Alphabet City, for example — but the substantive changes she has made to Shakespeare’s play. While Paris is being dehumanized, Romeo is being transformed into a character for whom we have faint sympathy. For almost three hours, Pasternak’s Romeo wails and whines his lines at the same bellowing pitch. At times he literally stumbles about the stage, so drunk with grief that he can barely keep himself erect as he bawls his lines to the heavens. Good grief this guy is tiresome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Romeo is no mere victim of blood (he’s a Montague) and circumstance (in love with a Capulet). When he eventually kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (David Arrow) he does so by stabbing the man in the chest not once, as in the original, but twice. Not content with this 100% increase in Romeo’s violence toward Tybalt, Rubinstein directs him to knife Juliet’s cousin again, this time in the back, after which he slits his adversary’s throat. Granted, the fight scene between Romeo and Tybalt is one of the better physical sequences of the play, but the Romeo that the audience sees appears too practiced at, and too familiar with, the killing of men. What, we wonder, could Juliet possibly see in this violent cad? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Would that there were more moments like the scene in which the nurse reports Romeo’s murder of Tybalt to Juliet on one side of the stage (“I saw the wound,” she tells Juliet, to which my son leaned over to me and muttered “Which one?”) while Friar Laurence (Richard Farrell) informs Romeo of his banishment from Verona for the crime. Or the moment early in the second act, when the gypsies are joined by a very gifted Erik Hellman, who reveals to us that Benvolio is not only a good friend to Romeo and, apparently, the only young male Montague who knows how to button a shirt, but he is also an accomplished guitarist. By the end of this spoiled play, which I won’t spoil for you any more than I already have, Rubinstein flirts with Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet’s final moments on Earth, except unlike Luhrmann, she doesn’t deliver anything resembling a payoff to the audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> runs through August 21, 2008, at the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Is director Bill English crazy — or simply just ambitious enough?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For some reason, the SF Playhouse’s Artistic Director decided to rehearse a cast of mostly part-time actors to put on the stage version of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s legendary \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> in four short weeks. But they’ve done it. In fact, it’s a testament to San Francisco’s downtown theatre scene that the Playhouse pulled off an impressive interpretation that spotlights some of the best of this city’s talent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make no mistake — producing this play is a serious task. Consider its legacy: over 42 years, five major revivals (two Broadway, three West End), and an Oscar-winning film adaptation that sealed the fame of Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> has become an institution. Thankfully, the mercilessly short prep time didn’t prevent the Playhouse cast and crew from producing a deft, passionate interpretation that brought the sold-out house to its feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set in Berlin in 1930 during the Nazis’ rise to power, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> centers itself at the decadent Kit Kat Klub and focuses on two doomed love stories. One of these is between British cabaret performer Sally Bowles (played by the director’s daughter Lauren English) and newly arrived young American writer, Cliff Bradshaw (Daniel Krueger); the other is between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider (Karen Grassle, who played Ma in the ’70s TV series \u003cb>Little House on the Prairie\u003c/b>) and elderly Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schultz (Louis Parnell). Key to the play is the Emcee character — played by the inimitable Bryan Yates Sharber — a one-man Greek chorus who presents the performances at the Kit Kat as prescient commentary on the state of society in Weimar Germany. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>English smartly takes his cue from the two ’90s London revivals directed by Sam Mendes, which among other things results in a more sexualized take on the book — one that highlights Cliff’s bisexuality and includes boys among the Kit Kat girls. The choreography for the Kit Kat numbers is heaped with polyamorous crotch-grinding and ass-slapping, an extra touch of bawdiness that works well both for its own sake and in contrast to the tenderness of the older couple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also like Mendes, English resourcefully uses the musical talents of many of his cast members in the 8-person Kit Kat band, resulting in brilliant moments like Sharber being tossed his clarinet to vamp on eight quick bars in the middle of the tune “Money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With such a squeezed schedule in front of him, English made crucial casting decisions for the Emcee and Bowles characters. Grey’s ownership of the Emcee role in the original Broadway show has made later interpretations by stars like John Stamos and Neil Patrick Harris seem like well-crafted clonings. But rather than mimicking Grey’s famously mincing, marionette-ish persona, Sharber projects a brassy, physical, almost lion-like character, and pulls off both lusty song-and-dance numbers and ominous narration with aplomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, a successful \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> depends on a larger-than-life Sally Bowles, and Lauren English indubitably delivers the goods. As an actor and singer, she’s definitely got the personality to fit such a wide-ranging role. Both her wonderful smirk in “Don’t Tell Mama” and the genuine hysteria she injects into the tragic title tune speak volumes of her capability, and she’s an excellent counterpoint to Krueger’s skillful take on the anxious Cliff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, English’s production team has truly sealed \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b>‘s success. Tatjana Genser’s versatile stage management showed a real instinct for economizing space, while both Valera Coble’s costuming (especially the simple black-and-red outfits in “Two Ladies”) and Mike Oesch’s intuitive lighting design amplified both the show’s glitz and its sense of tragic irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, on paper, English’s scheduling for \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> does seem mad. But on stage, it’s simply excellent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> is playing at the SF Playhouse. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfplayhouse.org/season0708/cabaret.php\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit www.sfplayhouse.org or call 415-677-9596.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Is director Bill English crazy — or simply just ambitious enough?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For some reason, the SF Playhouse’s Artistic Director decided to rehearse a cast of mostly part-time actors to put on the stage version of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s legendary \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> in four short weeks. But they’ve done it. In fact, it’s a testament to San Francisco’s downtown theatre scene that the Playhouse pulled off an impressive interpretation that spotlights some of the best of this city’s talent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make no mistake — producing this play is a serious task. Consider its legacy: over 42 years, five major revivals (two Broadway, three West End), and an Oscar-winning film adaptation that sealed the fame of Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> has become an institution. Thankfully, the mercilessly short prep time didn’t prevent the Playhouse cast and crew from producing a deft, passionate interpretation that brought the sold-out house to its feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set in Berlin in 1930 during the Nazis’ rise to power, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> centers itself at the decadent Kit Kat Klub and focuses on two doomed love stories. One of these is between British cabaret performer Sally Bowles (played by the director’s daughter Lauren English) and newly arrived young American writer, Cliff Bradshaw (Daniel Krueger); the other is between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider (Karen Grassle, who played Ma in the ’70s TV series \u003cb>Little House on the Prairie\u003c/b>) and elderly Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schultz (Louis Parnell). Key to the play is the Emcee character — played by the inimitable Bryan Yates Sharber — a one-man Greek chorus who presents the performances at the Kit Kat as prescient commentary on the state of society in Weimar Germany. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>English smartly takes his cue from the two ’90s London revivals directed by Sam Mendes, which among other things results in a more sexualized take on the book — one that highlights Cliff’s bisexuality and includes boys among the Kit Kat girls. The choreography for the Kit Kat numbers is heaped with polyamorous crotch-grinding and ass-slapping, an extra touch of bawdiness that works well both for its own sake and in contrast to the tenderness of the older couple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also like Mendes, English resourcefully uses the musical talents of many of his cast members in the 8-person Kit Kat band, resulting in brilliant moments like Sharber being tossed his clarinet to vamp on eight quick bars in the middle of the tune “Money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With such a squeezed schedule in front of him, English made crucial casting decisions for the Emcee and Bowles characters. Grey’s ownership of the Emcee role in the original Broadway show has made later interpretations by stars like John Stamos and Neil Patrick Harris seem like well-crafted clonings. But rather than mimicking Grey’s famously mincing, marionette-ish persona, Sharber projects a brassy, physical, almost lion-like character, and pulls off both lusty song-and-dance numbers and ominous narration with aplomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, a successful \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> depends on a larger-than-life Sally Bowles, and Lauren English indubitably delivers the goods. As an actor and singer, she’s definitely got the personality to fit such a wide-ranging role. Both her wonderful smirk in “Don’t Tell Mama” and the genuine hysteria she injects into the tragic title tune speak volumes of her capability, and she’s an excellent counterpoint to Krueger’s skillful take on the anxious Cliff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, English’s production team has truly sealed \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b>‘s success. Tatjana Genser’s versatile stage management showed a real instinct for economizing space, while both Valera Coble’s costuming (especially the simple black-and-red outfits in “Two Ladies”) and Mike Oesch’s intuitive lighting design amplified both the show’s glitz and its sense of tragic irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, on paper, English’s scheduling for \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> does seem mad. But on stage, it’s simply excellent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> is playing at the SF Playhouse. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfplayhouse.org/season0708/cabaret.php\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit www.sfplayhouse.org or call 415-677-9596.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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