"A Christmas Memory" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BFW

How does it get any better? How can any story take an audience, soaked through after a frigid hail-and-rain filled December day, from the wisecrack theater seats of Theater Rhinoceros directly to the countryside of southern Alabama in the 1930s, and do it so easily?

For more than twenty years, a reading of Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" was a one-man affair, with the late Robert Coffman sitting in his red chair center stage and reading one of the most satisfyingly sentimental short stories ever written. He didn't use voices or body language or very much inflection. All he did was read. Capote's language is truly incomparable in this story, and, through the power of performance and the written word, Coffman was able to transport every person, year after year, from the world of glitzy commercial Holiday Land, back to the pine forest, the Christmas trees, the fruit cakes and Mr. and Mrs. Ha Ha Jones.

But Robert Coffman died a few years ago and Theater Rhino hadn't resumed the tradition...until last night, when Word for Word, in conjunction with Theater Rhino, performed a staged reading of the story, using four actors. It was every bit as nostalgic, funny, emotional, heartwarming...which is to say the secret, obviously, resides in Capote's writing. The show is only 45 minutes long and it's the most perfect and warming antidote to yet another dismal day of disappearing 401K.

Alex Moggridge (far left in photo above, taken by this reviewer after the show), plays Buddy with the most perfect child's enthusiasm, while Patricia Silver (on the right) does the same for old Sook. We recently saw Moggridge as Ian the questioning shrink, in Connor McPherson's "Shining City," and Silver as Mrs. Mallon in Lorrie Moore's "Which is More Than I Can Say About Some People," both bravado performances. Even though this evening's show was a staged reading, meaning the four actors carried scripts in hand, there was never a sense of anyone reading instead of acting.

(Incidentally, the two people in the center of the photo are not Molly Noble and Chris Libby, who were both excellent ensemble actors in the performance. Next to Alex Moggridge is JoAnne Winter, Director, and holding the wine bottle is the woman from the audience who won the wine in a raffle!)

Wow. We wish we could see this performance again, but one night was it. Hopefully the Word for Word version of "A Christmas Memory" will become a new tradition at the Rhino each Christmas season, in memory of Robert Coffman, who would be very happy to sit back and watch this one.

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BFW

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "A Christmas Memory" Four Stars with a BFW -- a big, fat Wow. Thanks -- and see you next year?

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"A Christmas Memory"
Theater Rhinoceros
2926 16th Street, San Francisco
NO FURTHER 2008 PERFORMANCES

"Abe Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party": ☼ ☼ BANG

Here's the thing. In school they taught us that Alexander The Great conquered the world. Later we learned he was gay. Does this mean that all gay people are military expansionists? We learned to love Michelangelo's sculpture before we found out his sexual orientation. So do we not like his art any more, now that he is off the scaffold and out of the closet? Or do we like it more?

Enter Abraham Lincoln. Aaron Loeb, whose 'First Person Shooter' was one of the best plays this reviewer saw in 2006 at the San Francisco Playhouse, or at any other playhouse, for that matter, seems to feel that if we learn Abraham Lincoln was gay, long a rumor within the gay community, we will change our opinion about...what? Lincoln? Gay people? Slavery? All three?

Of course, "Abe Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party" is a spoof. Its premise is that there is a parallel between Abe Lincoln's supposed homosexual affair when he was a state senator from Menard County, Illinois, and a right-wing witch hunt against a gay elementary school teacher in the same county in the 21st Century. Honest Abe is not so much a character but a metaphor about tolerance. Cast members play multiple roles and one of these always includes wearing a beard and a stovepipe hat. Lincoln's speeches are quoted, principally the ones about forgiveness.

But the metaphor is shaky and so is the preachy script. After the absolutely terrific opening dance number, complete with seven dancing Abe Lincolns alternating between patriotism and disco-ism, we await a delicious parody. The meal that follows is very long (three acts) and, sadly, there is not much to chew on, once you get past the comment in Act One: "What could be more American than to be pissed off at people who are different than you?" This theme is repeated, ad antebellum, for the rest of a long evening.



Proposition 8: disgusting but true. Bad bigots: sickening and also true, a million times true. We are not whining about the politics, but about the play. If it's a spoof, be funnier. If it's serious, stop making jokes about it. If it's both, make it shorter.

SF Playhouse is allowed to slip up occasionally, since we can't remember the last time it happened. Perhaps once Loeb and the production team rework the material, the Big Gay Dance Party will actually fulfill its author's promise, which is to make us multitask about gay rights: laugh, dance and think at the same time. It's a terrific idea and the show has got to improve with time.



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RATINGS ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Abe Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party" Two Stars with a BANGLE of Praise. The two stars are for Michael Phillis and Sarah Mitchell. Mitchell, in particular, absolutely lights up the stage every time she is featured, in a variety of roles. Phillis is excellent too. A star for each.

The BANGLE of Praise is for the timely interplay between Anton (Mark Anderson Phillips) and Regina (Velina Brown) about the touchy relationship between gays and blacks. There are fascinating issues and Loeb is to be congratulated for pulling no punches.

It's not so hard: just shorten it. A guy at the snack bar, during the second intermission, was overheard saying: "Are you going to just keep this thing going until you sell all the cookies?"

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"Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party"
San Francisco Playhouse
533 Sutter Street, San Francisco
Tue.-Sat. 8pm (some Christmas dates dark), through Jan. 17
$40

"David Hirata and Friends: Magic Holiday": ☼ ☼ 1/2 (adults) ☼ ☼ ☼ (kids)

Illusionist David Hirata has that black magic thing going on and his costar Dr. Kim Silverman looks like Merlin at the Renaissance Faire. In "Magic Holiday," Hirata and Silverman appear to have the dual purpose of entertaining children (the audience, mostly children, howled with delight) and de-mystifying their tricks somewhat, so their audience can...almost...figure out how they're pulling these cool stunts off.

I mean, how does Hirata get the multicolored scarves out of the cylinder, anyway? How does Silverman get the torn dollar bill into the egg? How does one ball become two balls become three balls?

Kids are called out of the audience to help the magicians and they are the cutest part of the whole afternoon. As for the rest of it, adults will find themselves enjoying the show but they will really love watching their kids lose their collective cool. Whereas Wrapping Paper Caper, which follows Hirata's show on weekend afternoons, can be enjoyed by all ages, David Hirata's Magic Holiday is primarily about entertaining kids. It certainly seems to work.

One note: Occasionally, juggler Stefan Fisher stands in for Dr. Kim Silverman.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ 1/2 (adults) ☼ ☼ ☼ (kids)

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Magic Holiday" Two and a Half Stars for adults and Three for children. There are no tricks adults haven't seen before but kids don't care about that. The row in front of this reviewer was packed with children who couldn't stop jumping out of their seat to volunteer for every single stunt. You can't get a better review than that.

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"David Hirata and Friends: Magic Holiday
The Marsh
1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Holiday schedule through Dec. 29 (see www.themarsh.org for complete schedule)
$10

"Wrapping Paper Caper": ☼ ☼ ☼ 3/4 BANG !

Wrapping Paper Caper is every bit as good as it's ever been, and maybe even better. For ten years Marin County's Liebe Wetzel has been doing something we never think is possible, even as we feel it transpiring before our eyes on stage: she gives our imaginations the green light to take us over. Our brains know it's her troupe, dressed in black clothing to render themselves invisible, who are really taking that cardboard toilet paper roll insert, or a piece of red wrapping paper, or a brown rag, and turning them into the dimwitted inspector, the French vamp (The Damsel in Dis Dress) or the scuba-diving creature made out of packing peanuts. But our Christmas-addled hearts hunger to get in on the fun. And so we do. This is the rare show where the children in the audience scream with delight, but don't enjoy the show any more than their parents do.

As Liebe Wetzel's Lunatique Fantastique has continued to create new works, some even for adults, she has made stars out of the most mundane everyday items -- not only wrapping paper but napkins, bread rolls, boxes, newspaper and PVC pipe. Don't expect huge production values -- but do expect to be transported into another realm. Best of all, the show has nothing at all to do with computers or space-age graphics or sound effects. The cast does it all. God, what a relief.



One last note: A ticket is only $10 bucks and the show lasts a little less than an hour. Don't let Wrapping Paper Caper go by another year without wrapping you up in its spell.

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RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ 3/4 BANG !

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Wrapping Paper Caper" Three and Three Quarter stars with a Bangle of Praise. If there were a real story, or a premise, or anything at all to involve the intellect a tad more, Wrapping Paper Caper would be a solid Four Star performance. As it is, the Bangle of Praise is well deserved for the beautiful undersea ballet performed by the scuba diver and the inspector. The exclamation point is just because we feel like it. For something to do with your own kids or kids you import for this purpose alone, we couldn't recommend Wrapping Paper Caper any more highly.

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"Wrapping Paper Caper"
The Marsh
1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Sat-Sun, 3PM, with 2 Monday shows, through Jan. 4
$10

"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