"Dame Edna: My First Last Tour": ☼ ☼ BANG BANG baub

Dame Edna is funny, no doubt about it, but she really makes you appreciate Chris Rock. Clearly, there are only a few great comedians who can dominate a stage for an hour and a half or more, and they all do it with a combination of a unique personality and brilliant material. Barry Humphries, aka Dame Edna, tries to do it with his stage persona alone. Edna banters with the audience, she brings audience members on stage, she insults them and watches them react, she tosses them gladioli while singing a silly little ditty and she punctuates the show's opening, the opener to the second act and the finale with amusing videos.

So if the audience just happens to be brilliant, the show might be brilliant, but if it isn't, and it probably isn't more often than it is, and God knows it wasn't yesterday -- then the show goes on 'way too long without much more than a few good laughs and quite a lot of giggles.

Edna is a favorite with the San Francisco audience, as this is the town where she began her ascent in America, and there is lots of innuendo and one particularly wonderful song about her son Kenny, who appears to have many 'friends' here who all love opera and interior design. Edna shot off plenty of good ad libs, such as her comments about the "Nouveau Pauvre" -- that is, the people in the balcony who can't afford better seats -- as well as what she said to the 93-year-old woman in the audience who had been taken to the show as a birthday present: "Dear, you look a lot older than that."

Think Don Rickles in drag, plus a brilliant ending video. Cheapest ticket: $68. It's up to you.


RATINGS: ☼ ☼ BANG BANG baub

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Dame Edna: My First Last Tour" two stars with two BANGLES of Praise and one Bauble of Despair. It's the first time anyone has ever earned two BANGLES and less than three stars. This is because the act itself drags on too long to be worthy of more than two and a half stars, but the elevated ticket price eliminates that extra half a star. Edna is funny but she'd be a lot funnier at $30 in a night club with a two drink minimum.

The first BANGLE of Praise is earned for the wonderful song "My Kenny" in which Humphries pulls off the hat trick: he rhymes 'state trooper,' 'CNN is super,' and 'Anderson Cooper.' The second BANGLE is for her comment when she is tossing her endless supply of gladioli into the crowd: "these gladdies were grown on my organic farm with my own manure." OK, that's the kind of humor you get with Dame Edna. We thought it was funny.

The Bauble of Despair must be given to the jackass in back of this reviewer who began laughing before the curtain came up and continued through every single line for the first ten minutes. It wasn't a laugh, it was a donkey being put through a wood chipper.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the Post Street Theater is proud to..."

"HAW HYUK HARRR HOOOOT BZZZZZZZZZ HYAAAAAA!"

"...present the wonderful..."

"HAW HYUK HARRR HOOOOT BZZ BZZ BZZZZ HYAAAAAA!"

And yet...he was gone, with not a few others, by intermission. So there you go. Two stars, two BANGLES, one bauble and one jackass.

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"Dame Edna: My First Last Tour"
Post Street Theater
450 Post Street, San Francisco
Tue-Sun. through Jan. 4
$68-$100

"The Quality of LIfe": ☼ ☼ ☼ 1/2 BANG

It is rare when the curtain doesn't come up on an A.C.T. show to reveal a multilayered and complex set, usually with a huge staircase and glorious period furniture. Not this time. Jane Anderson's brilliant "The Quality of Life" opens on two chairs and a tree. Bill (Steven Culp) sits in one chair, Dinah (JoBeth Williams) in the other. Though their conversation is about traveling to California to see Dinah's cousin, the subtext reveals that their daughter, Cindy, has died in some terrible way, an event with which neither parent has been able to come to grips. At the end of this short opening sequence, Bill walks away and leaves Dinah crying in her chair.

THEN, the curtain parts again and the true set is revealed: a fantastic yurt, somewhere in the California desert, into which cousin Jeanette (Laurie Metcalf) and her husband Neil (Dennis Boutsikaris) have moved after their home has burnt to the ground, and after Neil has been diagnosed with incurable cancer.



Bill and Dinah arrive, and for the rest of the two-act 90-minute performance we are presented with an existential and often hysterically funny dilemma: under what circumstances is a dying man allowed to end his own life? Bill and Dinah have embraced Jesus after their daughter's death, so Bill, especially, is infuriated on religious grounds at Neil's decision to commit suicide. Dinah -- she's not so sure, even about God. "I love the son, but I cannot STAND the father," she says, during an especially hilarious section where she has smoked some pot with Neil and Jeanette while Bill is in the bathroom. "Sacrifice his son in such a cruel way? What kind of a monster is that? Am I high?"



The entire cast is first-rate. The two women steal the show, with Metcalf's Jeanette getting the funniest lines but Williams's Dinah allowed the most growth. We see raw suffering in every line of her dialogue, each slide of her knitting needles, even in the way she stands by herself, lost in thought. This is the kind of performance only a great actress can pull off.

The ending is perhaps a little anticlimactic, but then again so is life. "The Quality of Life" is not about death, but about how we all choose to live. It's terrific.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ 1/2 BANG

After much thought, The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Quality of Life" 3 1/2 Stars with a Bangle of Praise. This is an excellent rating, well earned by the excellent cast, the crisp and excellent direction (by the author, Jane Anderson) and the wonderful set (Donald Eastman) and provocative lighting (Kent Dorsey). The Bangle of Praise is for any number of great lines, like Jeanette's answer to Bill:

(Bill) "Would you like to accept Jesus Christ?"
(Jeanette) "No thanks, I'm good."

We would be looking at a four star production except for one nagging niggle: Neil, though dying of multiple cancers, was able to seemingly recover from his agonizing condition whenever he felt like it to deliver a perfect line or two. But others might not agree. Perhaps the point of the entire show is just this: life is messy and it doesn't always make sense. We feel "The Quality of Life" could have even been longer -- and you don't hear that often on this page.



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"The Quality of Life"
A.C.T. Theater
415 Geary Street, San Francisco
Tue-Sun $20-$65
THROUGH NOVEMBER 23 ONLY

"Evie's Waltz": ☼ ☼ ☼ 1/2 BANG

"Are we going to talk about the gun?" says red-haired, 16-year-old Evie, maybe ten minutes into the play, and from that moment on Carter W. Lewis's 'Evie's Waltz' becomes a parent's nightmare of nightmares.

Evie is Danny's girl friend, and Danny is Gloria and Clay's son. Though we don't ever see Danny, he is the major player in this psychodrama, and his presence is constant, because Danny has hidden himself in the poison ivy thicket above the house, from which vantage point he is pointing a rifle at the barbecue area in his parents' backyard. This means that Evie, Gloria and Clay are in his gun sight at all times, which is an astonishingly good method to create tension. The kid is crazy. He could do anything.

Danny has two ways to communicate: he texts Evie on her cell phone, or fires his rifle at the patio, causing everyone to run for cover. Danny has been suspended from school for carrying a gun to protect himself against school bullies, but it's not this gun, and he and Evie have a lot more to worry about than school.

Marielle Heller is fabulous as Evie, a nuanced-but-unhinged teenager, and director (and Artistic Director of the Magic) Loretta Greco allows Evie to toggle emotionally back and forth, seeing herself one moment as a contentedly doomed Juliet and the next as a Columbine-style avenger. Although Julia Brothers's Gloria and Darren Bridgett's Clay make your skin crawl with their neurotic and cruel bantering, Brothers in particular slowly emerges as the focus on stage. She is the one who is trying the hardest to understand what's going on, whereas Clay is a conniving weasel and Evie -- well, Evie expects to die.



The ending is fantastic theater, and it makes perfect sense. Prepare to be surprised and stunned. "Evie's Waltz" is a dance with the devil through the psyche of the modern family. You will find yourself wanting to scream at the three actors: "Get inside, for God's sake!" But you know they can't. They have to sit it out, like all of us in the audience, if there's ever going to be a chance of making things right again.

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ 1/2 BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Evie's Waltz" Three and a Half Stars with a Bangle of Praise. Two stars are for the writing, because Carter Lewis exposes what every parent knows: the line between banal normality and unexplainable tragedy is very, very thin. Heller's Evie rates a full star all for herself, because we end up rooting for her even though we suspect we're going to regret it by show's end. Half a star is for Brothers's Gloria, though her husband Clay probably deserves part of it -- they are both so contemptible.

The Bangle of Praise is for Sara Huddleston's sound -- man, when that gun goes off everything changes. And when it goes off again -- well, just you wait and see.



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"Evie's Waltz"
Magic Theatre
Fort Mason Center, Building D, San Francisco
Wed.-Sun. $40-$5

"Russian on the Side": ? ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ?

Wow! There are probably two audiences watching each performance of Mark Nadler's astonishing 'Russian on the Side,' running through November 16 at the Marines Memorial Theatre. One knows the music and gives out stars. The other one doesn't and holds up question marks. But judging from the enthusiastic Opening Night response, people who didn't understand Nadler's musical references were simply swept away by his virtuosity and silliness. The audience barely let him off the stage at the end.

The backbone of 'Russian on the Side' is a tongue-twisting song lyric, written by Ira Gershwin and sung originally by Danny Kaye in the musical "Lady in the Dark." The song incorporates (and occasionally rhymes) the names of 50 Russian composers. Kvochinsky? Stravinsky? Glinka? These are not simple names, but Nadler has learned a vignette about each one and plays a snippet of music that each composer wrote. At the end, he plays 'em all. If you stay with him, it's hysterical.

For those of us who are familiar with classical music and a few famous show stoppers from the Broadway tin-pan-alley tradition, this show is a rare gem. Nadler's acrobatic antics while in front of, in back of, or on top of his grand piano recall a young Victor Borge; his personality and enthusiasm remind you of an even-more energized Martin Short. Nadler is no classical master, but the dude can play -- with one hand or two hands or no hands. He tells funny jokes and fascinating stories.

What in the world is not to like? This reviewer is coming back and bringing his mother.



But hold on now. What about the masses of people who never heard of Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, Prokofiev or either Anton Rubenstein, the Russian or Artur Rubenstein, the Pole? If you're younger than, say, forty, have you ever heard 'Stranger in Paradise?' Can you relate to the fact that the song's melody was taken from a theme written by the Russian composer Borodine, who subsuquently became the first composer to ever win a Tony Award seventy years after his death?

It's a funny story. But does it sink in? Maybe. Maybe not.

Mark Nadler doesn't care. He's having a ball on stage. Wearing his morning coat, gold vest and red cravat, his fey, Jewish, Broadway manner comes across as honest and appealing. You, the audience, may get lost but you probably won't. The truth is you won't know if you love this kind of thing until you see it, because you've never seen anything else like it.

Sitting at the end of the aisle to the side of the reviewer was a couple, he a bit older than she. The man shouted, laughed, then jumped to his feet clapping his hands over his head at the show's finale. The woman was less demonstrative. He turned and asked his date: "So, how'd you like the show?" and she paused awhile before saying... "well, it was different."

Different, it is. We love it. Go see "Russian on the Side." If you can dig up your old piano teacher, bring her along.

RATINGS ? ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ?

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards 'Russian on the Side' a rare Four Star Rating with a Question Mark at the start and a Question Mark at the end. The question marks are because The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division believes Four Stars translates as "NOW! GO NOW!" But it has no idea if there exists a wide enough audience for this show.

Three stars would not be enough. Three and a half stars with no question marks would probably be OK, and three and three quarter stars with one question mark would also do. But to hell with it. Four stars and two question marks it is. After you hear Mark Nadler sing Frank Loesser's 'The Ugly Duckling' and Steven Sondheim's 'Next,' and play Rachmaninoff's Prelude Opus 3 No. 2 in C-sharp Minor, first relating the sad story of the grand piano master's lifelong exile in New York, we can talk about the question marks. Please comment when you see the show.

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"Russian on the Side"
Marines Memorial Theatre
609 Sutter Street, Second Floor, San Francisco
Tue-Sun through November 16
$39-$49

"Radio Golf": ☼ ☼ ☼ 1/2 BANG

After seeing the Northern California Premiere of August Wilson's final play "Radio Golf," this reviewer was enthused, as well as conflicted. I hurried home to read earlier comments about the play, since its official Broadway opening in 2005. Reviewers seem to be in agreement about the show's one red flag -- the lead is so passive it's hard to come down strongly on his side -- but there is a lot of disagreement on just about every other point.

I believe August Wilson saved the best for last -- his most scathing opinions about society as a whole, and race relations in particular, are delivered through the clear lens of a playwright who knows he is dying of cancer. Through the story of the young candidate for mayor (Harmond Wilks, played by Aldo Billingslea), we see the attempt to gentrify the venerable black district of Pittsburgh, known as The Hill, as part of the same struggle being disputed today across the nation. Assimilation means progress, but it also means bulldozing Aunt Ester's house, the 366-year-old conscience of several of Wilson's previous plays. Placing your development office on the Hill is good for your image but it also means somebody is bound to steal your golf clubs out of your trunk.

Golf: the ultimate symbol, the white power broker's game. It is fatally seductive to Harmond and his partner Roosevelt Hicks (played by Anthony J. Haney) but a golf club is just another weapon to hit somebody over the head with, if you ask ex-con Sterling Johnson (L. Peter Callender).



August Wilson grew up on the Hill, and The Hill is where all but two of the plays in Wilson's monumental ten-play cycle are set. These dramas record nothing less than a cross-section of the African-American experience of the 20th Century, and August Wilson knew what he was writing about. It's old versus new, and by extension good versus bad. It'll be nice to have a Starbucks and a Real Foods, but who will remember the chicken shack where the two old ladies fried chicken all weekend for neighbors lined up around the block? And what about Aunt Ester? Who will remember her?



Old Joe will, that's who. Old Joe is the show. Whenever Elder Joseph Barlow (played magnificently by Charles Branklyn) opens his mouth, wisdom and stubborness emerge in equal measure. He remembers the exact date of everything important that ever happened on The Hill. It's Old Joe's house the developers want to tear down and he's not about to let it happen. He is helped in his refusal to roll over by Sterling Johnson, the show's other sympathetic man of the people. These two men have the playwright's ear, while the forces of modernity, represented by Harmond Wilks, Roosevelt Hicks and Harmond's wife Mame (C. Kelley Wright) are not looked upon with favor.

Or are they? This is the rub. In the end, neither good nor evil triumph. It is reality that rises to the top. The ending is perhaps troubling, but that must be the way August Wilson wanted it. Many believe "Radio Golf" is not "Fences" or "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," but this reviewer is not so sure. Let's stew on it awhile longer.

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RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ 1/2 BANG
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Radio Golf" three and a half stars. Charles Branklyn is so good the author could have written Act Three with only him in it. The cowboy-and-Indian subtext carries a lot of power. And a special BANGLE of Praise is offered to Sterling Johnson for his metaphysical query about the quarter and the vending machine. If you (black people) put your quarter into the machine, and the machine (white power structure) spits it out, whose fault is it? The quarter? Or the machine?

It appears that the author's answer would be: you'd better learn just HOW to put that quarter in, if you ever want to get anything out.

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"Radio Golf"
TheatreWorks: Mountain View Center for the Arts
500 Castro Street, Mountain View
Tue-Sun through November 2
$23-$61

"May Day Parade": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

"Diggigi doo BOP doo doo de BOP. Shaka shaka BOOP taka taka de dak!" Wayne Harris doesn't enter stage left, he MARCHES all over it. He's a big man with a lot of energy and he uses it all. Once his 90 minute recollection gets moving, recounting the day he first got to march in the annual May Day Parade in his native St. Louis, as an eight year old child, the ride never stops. Harris plays all the characters from that day in the 1960s -- most memorably his grandmother Mama Bell, who walks with bent over posture, balancing her 'shelf bootie' -- a rear end so big you can carry a tray on it. Family standouts as well are Harris's gentle mother, his hard-working railroad porter father, his brother and his aunts, the deacon's son with the foul mouth, as well as the many wonderful church goers, teachers and beauty shop operators who line the street as Wayne marches by.

Like all one-person shows, the performance is probably more important than the writing. Harris is a fine writer, and "May Day Parade" has many wonderful lines and a terrific flow, but Harris, who has been a performer all his life, dominates the stage in a way most soloists cannot. You can easily see him acting other people's material as well as his own.

One favorite moment is Harris's depiction of the 'Letter Girls,' a group of oversized young women from Beaumont High who, having been judged too large to become cheerleaders, get their moment in the sun dancing to James Brown at the May Day Parade.

Harris informs us that today the May Day Parade in St. Louis is sponsored by McDonalds and it no longer takes place in the 'hood. But his description of the way it used to be makes us all long to have been there, marching down the boulevard, staying in step and keeping it real.

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RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards 'May Day Parade' three stars with a Bangle of Praise. Two of the three stars are for Harris's writing and performing, but the third is for all those drum lines. He is such a musical force on stage that it is hard to stay seated in your little red chair. This viewer wanted to stand up and form a Second Line right behind him.

There are several moments that deserve special mention, but the Bangle of Praise is for after the march, when eight year old Wayne relaxes in the park, shoes off, feeling the cool grass on his feet, surrounded by his loving family. He is, in Harris's words: "...sitting on the triumphant side of the struggle." We are so happy for him. And for us.

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"May Day Parade"
The Marsh
1062 Valencia St. San Francisco
Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3, through Nov. 9
$15-$35 sliding scale

"Shining City": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG baub

It's not often that you sit through an entire show, waiting for an ending that you don't realize is coming, but then when you see that last scene, which lasts on stage no more than ten seconds, you say to yourself "Ah HA! THAT'S what we're talking about! All right!"

Then, a few seconds later, you turn to the lovely lady sitting next to you and say: "What the hell was that?"

Riding home from San Francisco Playhouse, where Conor McPherson's 'Shining City' is having its Bay Area Premiere through November 22, after you get a chance to mull it about for awhile, you realize you just saw a perfect, perfect, perfect ending. The ghost, see, and John's still in Dublin and he doesn't need her anymore, but Ian, well, he does because, see, he's going down to Limerick and that's not gonna work out, 'cuz the ghost, see.

McPherson is Irish, which explains a lot, because nobody does guilt and loss of faith quite like the Irish. It must be all the rain. Not one character can ever finish a sentence -- everything fades out into an existential sigh. Paul Whitworth's John is having a nervous breakdown as he sits on the couch of brand-new therapist Ian (Alex Moggridge), who has his own demons staring him down. John is guilty because he's been a rat to his recently deceased wife, Ian has run out on his family, and Ian's girl friend Neasa (Beth Wilmurt), has just had a casual affair with a mutual friend. Their angst is thick. Of course, it's raining.



Do we believe in ghosts? Nope...yikes, but what's behind the door? You'll see. It's a great yarn. But if a black cat crosses your path on your way into the theater, think about going to see Jersey Boys.

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG baub
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards 'Shining City' three solid stars, one each for the two principal actors and one for Amy Glazer's precise direction, which manages to keep us interested through a mountain of talk. The ending is so good it earns a Bangle of Praise all by itself. However, the obligatory Moment of Gayness between Ian and Laurence (Alex Conde) makes so little sense it earns its own bauble of despair.

But no worries. Don't miss 'Shining City.'



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"Shining City"
San Francisco Playhouse
533 Sutter Street, San Francisco
Through Nov. 22
Tue-Sat. $40