Will Durst: "Boomeraging - From LSD to OMG" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

It probably helps if you've been around the block a few times, circled back and then forgot where you were going, but even if you're not a boomer Will Durst will make your shoulders ache from laughing. Or maybe it's bursitis.

Every Tuesday night until November, Durst will be helping us use the Marsh as an alternative to going to the gym. He is so danged funny. We get 90 minutes of joke after joke after joke, but we also are allowed inside a little bit this time. Durst has always made us laugh, but it's nice to hear him talk about his family (especially his Dad -- one of our favorite moments is watching him do his father's four-part groan when getting out of a chair).

Basically, it's a rant. 

Durst is 61. He thinks that is old, only not in comparison to igneous rock formations. He remembers (so do we) being his parents' TV remote control. ("You! Get up and change the channel!") He remembers when doing drugs didn't involve a co-pay. Bada-bing bada-boom.

But he also comments on being invisible as you get older, and he is kind enough to give us the meaning of life:

"It ends."

"Boomeraging" is Will Durst's most satisfying show yet and the best part about it is we can go back every couple months on a Tuesday night and watch the whole thing evolve. 

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼  ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Boomeraging - From LSD to OMG" Four Stars. Sure, it's a solo performance, and sure, there is no staging to speak of, and sure, he doesn't change costumes nor does he have one (visible) tattoo. He's just a very funny man. We feel better when we come out than when we walked in. And now we know why our Dad was always fiddling with the change in his pocket.

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Will Durst: "From LSD to OMG"

The Marsh

1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Tuesday nights through November 6

$15-$35

"The Arsonists" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The play is delightful, the message not so much. Written in 1953 in his native Czechoslovakia, Max Frisch seems to be lampooning blind totalitarianism at the same time he is sticking it to the wealthy who choose to live with their heads in the sand. The issue here -- a businessman who has invited two arsonists into his attic because he is afraid to appear too terribly bourgeois -- is one we can relate to easily. We see what we choose to see, even with our house about to burn down around us.

You have to love the two arsonists -- Tim Kniffin (Eisenring) and Michael Ray Wisely (Schmitz) never pretend to be anyone except who they are. Bottom line: they love burning things up. Schmitz (seen above with Gwen Loeb as Mrs. Biedermann) is also a pathological liar, and he has figured out that his tales of personal woe elicit embarrassed generosity from others, especially Mr. and Mrs. Biedermann.

We know Biedermann (Dan Hiatt) is a bumbling plutocrat, but it takes us awhile to realize he is also guilty of mistreating an ex-employee.  Perhaps it is this guilt that causes him to try so hard to appease Schmitz with good cigars, excellent food and accommodations in the very attic that every person in the theater, except for Biedermann, knows Schmitz is planning to burn down.

We love the attic scenes. It is theater of the absurd mixed with a touch of The Simpsons, as Biedermann  absolutely refuses to acknowledge what he is staring at with his own eyes. There is an epidemic of arson in the city? You have dragged barrels of gasoline into my attic? No, nothing out of the ordinary here.

 The firemen and their (lengthy) unison chanting seem a little strange -- as much absurdist theater from the mid-50s seems to us now. But the message remains strong. If someone tells you they are intent on burning down your house -- they probably will.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼ BANG
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Arsonists" Three Stars with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. The sets, acting and direction (Mark Jackson) earn one star each. Special mention to Dina Percia for her delightfully frustrated Anna. We give the BANGLE to the bad guys -- who doesn't love bad guys who are truly bad? Especially when they have such nice smiles?

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"The Arsonists"
The Aurora Theatre
2081 Addison Street, Berkeley
Through May 12
$32-$50

"Being Earnest" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

Oscar Wilde was a lamp light of modernity in the fog of 1890s London. Irish by birth, he took shots at English society and relationships at a time when it was easy to be ostracized for being different. (You have to love a man who entered the US in 1882 by stating: "I have nothing to declare but my genius.")

"The Importance of Being Earnest" was written in 1895, five years before the author's death. It was fresh then. But it is 2013.

Victorian society has become an easy target, even when set on Carnaby Street in the mod 1960s, so we would have loved to see Paul Gordon and Jay Gruska, the songwriting team with a pedigree for taking classical stories and turning them into musicals, try a different approach then one familiar English cliché after another. The World Premiere of Gordon and Gruska's "Being Earnest" has some cute songs and funny moments, but that's about it.

Euan Morton and Hayden Tee, as the two would-be Earnests, are fine singers, as are Mindy Lym as Gwendolen Fairfax and Riley Krull as Cecily Cardew. But the songs are one-trick ponies, one jumpy and witty tune after another. There are two standouts: "Brothers," the show's featured song, which is repeated throughout the show with changed lyrics, and "Cecily," sung by Morton in Act One.

"Being Earnest" is well constructed, acted and directed. It will bring a smile to your face. Just don't look for too much more.

RATINGS ☼  ☼  ☼  BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Importance of Being Earnest" Three Stars with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. If you love Oscar Wilde, you'll enjoy a familiar, entertaining evening of thee-a-tah. The BANGLE goes to Costume Designer Fumiko Bielefeldt for Gwendolen's Carnaby Street dress and matching boots, plus the white hat. When you call up a single memory of this production, it's going to be this dress.

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"Being Earnest"

Theatreworks

Mountain View Center for Performing Arts

500 Castro Street, Mountain View

Through April 28

$23-$73

"The Happy Ones" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

Liam Craig is a great actor. He plays Walter Wells as if he has climbed inside his skin. At the start of the play, Wells proclaims that he, his wife and two kids, and his close friend Reverend Gary Stuart (Gabriel Marin) have the perfect lives. These Southern Californians are indeed the happy ones. But then the phone rings and Walter's world is turned upside down. For the rest of the play we see him attempting to climb out of an enormous emotional hole and he goes about it with class. Craig and author Julie Marie Myatt give Walter what we almost never see anymore -- a suburbanite with a soul. Walter's life has been challenged, but he is determined to get through it on terms that he and we can applaud.

Gabe Marin's Gary is the world's worst clergyman and he knows it. The pastor of the Universalist Unitarian Church, he is a wandering soul fatally attracted to divorcee Mary-Ellen Hughes (Marcia Pizzo). Gary and Mary-Ellen try to comfort Walter, but their efforts are as clumsy as everyone else's. We can safely tell you there is death involved, but this is not a story about death. When they wheel in Bao Ngo, played by the amazing Jomar Tagatac, a touching story begins, where anguish and mistrust lead slowly to friendship.

We cannot give Tagatac enough credit. His suffering has enveloped him, but he maintains a restraint that would, with a lesser actor, come across as unreal. Liam Craig's character drives the show, but Bao Ngo is the one we cannot forget.

Director Jonathan Moscone, and Scenic Designer Erik Flatmo have developed a pinpoint choreography with the stage crew to make many scene and prop changes occur flawlessly on the Magic's small stage. It's like a show within a show -- and they have to do it with the lights out.

There are memorable quotes, but they're all spoilers so we're not going to give you any. "The Happy Ones" is one of the best shows we've seen this year and you won't want to miss it.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼  ☼
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Happy Ones" Four Stars. Acting, Directing, Staging and Writing all merit a full star each. We love how the plot turns with a big surprise in Act One, and we then set out on a great ride through to the end of Act Two, when the author pays us off and thanks us for our efforts.

It is also nice, as Producing Artistic Loretta Greco says at the outset, to have "a strange thing happen in the middle of the play: people get up and leave the theater. This is called an intermission." Intermissions are becoming as rare as lengthy attention spans in today's theater, often with good reason. Not here. We've got a lot to think about.

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"The Happy Ones"
The Magic Theatre, San Francisco
Fort Mason Center
Building D, Third Floor
Through April 21
$22-$62

"Reasons to Be Pretty" ☼ ☼ ☼

Lauren English (Steph) has The Stare. Greg (Craig Marker) can't stand up to it. Few can.

At the same time, one of Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing good short stories is to always give your reader at least one character to root for. Perhaps this is the heart of our problem with Neil LaBute's "Reasons to Be Pretty." The Stare notwithstanding, LaBute has not given us anyone we feel like cheering.

The four person ensemble works hard. Steph and Kent (Patrick Russell) get to throw spectacular temper tantrums. In fact, Steph does it twice.

But we are asked to make sense out of her nuclear meltdown anger at her boy friend Greg for saying something that appears to have been, at worst, a silly comment by a silly boy. We are asked to have sympathy for Steph's friend Carly, the security guard (Jennifer Stuckert), who is a uniformed and uninformed shrew. Most of all, we have to keep putting off our strong desire to grasp Greg by his shoulders and shake him until he lets the air out of Kent's tires and change cities. 

In the terrific "Fat Pig," another work in LaBute's trilogy that deals with human foibles about personal beauty, we saw something vicious and uncomfortable. The author was angry. Here, though we like the acting and director Susi Damilano paces the show well, LaBute feels distant. Instead of venting he is lampooning.

FULL DISCLOSURE: A man is writing this column. He may be clueless. His wife thinks so. She says she knows why Steph reacts as strongly as she does. This puts her husband in a difficult position. He says he would never say something as stupid as what Greg said about Steph. He gets The Stare.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Reasons to Be Pretty" Three Stars. It's all in the writing -- we want to know sooner why Steph goes so over the top, which is crucial to liking or being confused by the show. We have no idea until the end, and the final scene lasts a long time.

Bill English's set is spectacular -- you walk into the theater and run right into the wall of a giant white lunchroom. The new roundabout (a gift, by the way, from Berkeley Rep and "Chinglish") makes the set and some sharply executed scene changes possible. The production is a treat to watch.
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"Reasons to Be Pretty"
San Francisco Playhouse
450 Post Street (second floor of Kensington Park Hotel)
San Francisco
Through 5/11/13
$30-$70

"The Mountaintop" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

Mmmm hmmm hmmm! After seeing the regional premiere of Katori Hall's brilliant "The Mountaintop," which runs at the Lucie Stern through April 7, we are asked not to divulge the secret which takes a lighthearted, humorous story and turns it into something you will not be able to stop talking about.

In that top photo you are looking at Martin Luther King (played by Adrian Roberts), standing at the door of Room 206 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the hotel's service employee Camae (Simone Missick), on her first night on the job, who has been sent up to bring Dr. King a cup of coffee.

Innocent enough. Dr. King wonders what has happened to his associate Ralph Abernathy, who has been sent to bring back a pack of cigarettes. Great sexual tension develops between Martin and Camae, enough that you are quite certain that this story will end up in one of those two motel beds.

Mmmm hmmm hmmm! Well, now.

Part of the tremendous power of this show revolves around us understanding what fate will befall Dr. King the next day, which means the author is free to dwell on historical backstories that we sometimes forget, such as the struggle between the violent and nonviolent wings of the civil rights movement, as well as the view that Dr. King had come to represent a more upper class of African American, while the down-home common man was far more ready to fight than talk.

When this show opened in New York, the leads were played by none other than Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett. But the show got lukewarm reviews. Seeing Roberts and Missick, you wonder how these two parts could possibly be played any better. Missick, especially, is a show stopper. The ending -- well, we've said all we are allowed to, except this: please do not miss "The Mountaintop."

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Mountaintop" Four Stars. The two-person ensemble wins two of them, Anthony J. Haney's perfect direction wins another (We are already Haney fans, going back to his direction of Lynn Nottage's "Intimate Apparel"), and of course playwright Hall earns the fourth. When Dr. King says "...they hate so easily and we love too much..." we are both saddened and reminded of how far we've come and how high that mountaintop remains.

"The Mountain Top"
Lucie Stern Theater
1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto
Through April 7
$23-$73








Photo credit: T. Martin and M. Kitaoka

Kurt Bodden's "Steve Seabrook: Better than You" ☼ ☼ ☼

Kurt Bodden is the real-live actor and writer who becomes the self-absorbed Steve Seabrook, self-help guru, for 70 minutes a night. "Better Than You" is the name of Seabrook's would-be franchise, which currently includes workshops, bottled water and golf tips. Bodden must be more familiar than he would want us to know with the actualization industry.

We see two Seabrooks, one with the lights on speaking to his audience: "You can have everything you've ever wanted with very little effort!" and one backstage during breaks, where we see his inner confusions. Christopher Meyer's light changes help us identify which mode Seabrook is in, though the real tipoff is Steve Seabrook's heaven-inspired smile.

We know that smile. It makes us cringe. But it also feels real.

This may be the gorilla in "Better Than You"'s room -- Kurt Bodden is really good, but Steve Seabrook's seminar is not particularly convincing. We never see why anyone would pay $1147 for a weekend with this vacant man -- he doesn't give anyone a thing. Perhaps this is the point -- that these classes are worthless -- but it feels as if Bodden is searching for something deeper. Perhaps this could be driven home better with some kind of interaction with a fictional workshop participant? We would pay to see Kurt Bodden, because he is a terrific physical comedian, but we'd demand our money back in an instant from Steve Seabrook.

There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. Our favorites are the paper boy and the dog story, and Seabrook's admonition to his class: "I have good news and bad news for you. People who are more successful than you are no better than you. That's the good news. The bad news is that people who are no better than you are more successful than you are."

He'll make you squirm, and that's good. Steve Seabrook right now is, down deep, a good guy. He probably could be a little less decent to start out, so we could watch him, along with his class, discover the "Little U in You."

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Steve Seabrook: Better than You" Three Stars. Kurt Bodden gives you a fun evening and you don't have to spend $1147 to get it.

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Kurt Bodden's "Steve Seabrook: Better than You"

The Marsh
1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Friday and Saturday through March 30

$15-$35