"South Pacific": ☼ ☼ ☼ baub BANG

Richard Rodgers' melodies and Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics are always timeless. Their ground-breaking musical "South Pacific," which debuted in 1949, not only introduced iconic songs like "Bali Hai," "Some Enchanted Evening" and "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair," but also attempted to deal with racism, a subject never before discussed in a major Broadway musical. As always, Rodgers and Hammerstein were at the cutting edge of musical theater. What they did influenced a generation of writers who followed them.

The 2008 Lincoln Center production, which arrives at the Golden Gate Theater for a six week run, packs the pit with a live orchestra, using Rodgers' original scores and orchestrations. No tapes! No synthesizers!

The curtain opens on a spare but beautiful set by Michael Yeargan, showing French planter Emil de Becque's villa on an unnamed South Pacific island. We meet his two dark-skinned children who will figure in the eventual plot. De Becque (Rod Gilfry) enters with Ensign Nellie Forbush (Carmen Cusack) on his arm. She sings "A Cockeyed Optimist."



And that's about it for "South Pacific." De Becque and Cusack lack even a small demitasse cup of chemistry, but they are hot tamales compared to what happens when Lt. Joe Cable (Anderson Davis) comes on the scene. His romance with Liat (Sumie Maeda) is so silly, while remaining extraordinarily unsavory, it smacks of last-minute changes that just don't work.



True, "South Pacific" is a traditional show that needs an understanding hand at the helm. Director Bart Sher and Musical Staging Manager Christopher Gattelli may be hampered by the Golden Gate proscenium stage; still, characters walk in circles, barely avoiding bumping into each other, as they try to hit their marks to stop dead in their tracks and sing another song.

Highlights of the evening all come in a far more concise Act Two: "Happy Talk," sung by excellent Keala Settle as Bloody Mary, followed by "Honey Bun," "You've Got to be Carefully Taught" and "This Nearly was Mine" convey all the spirit and soul of the original show with none of the plodding set-up of Act One (which lasts a full 90 minutes-plus, all by itself).

Do you cut a classic? They certainly could. Act One is interminable. It makes us all long for our own Bali Hai, which is back home listening to Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin.

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ baub BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "South Pacific" three stars with a Bauble of Despair followed by a BANGLE OF PRAISE. We who love classic American musical theater should go see this production because, well, just because. They don't come along very often. Don't expect magic, but do expect beautiful melodies, sung by singers whose timing should get better as the run progresses.

The bauble is for Lt. Joe Cable. He has nice pecs and a pretty tenor, but his role calls for depth. He gives us little.

On the BANGLE side, Matthew Saldivar's Luther Billis is filled with heart and soul. His energy is in stark contrast to the leads. Some enchanted evening, this production may work beautifully, but not yet.



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"South Pacific"
Golden Gate Theatre
1 Taylor Street, San Francisco
Through Oct. 25
$30-$99

"Brief Encounter": ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG BANG BANG BANG

If A.C.T.'s production of Noel Coward's "Brief Encounter" were any better they'd have to tear down the old Geary Theater and build a shrine. The staging is without parallel -- the combination of theater and film and old-time English roadhouse irreverence, plus Noel Coward's incisive songs -- and a love story! The only thing they could have done better was to have figured out a way to get everyone in the city into the theater -- leave idiot TV, brain-dead video games and violent cop killer films behind and discover what a brilliant theater experience can be like, if only rarely.

The year is 1938 and the story is so simple -- woman and man meet briefly in an English train station. He is a doctor and removes a cinder from her eye. It is all very innocent until love's thunder begins to crash all around them. That thunder is everywhere, loud with pounding waves, trains blasting through the stage and a backdrop of the beginning of world war; but there is also soft thunder, composed of winks and touches and knowing glances, as we see the everyday lives and loves of the workers in the tea shop. For them, love is simple:

"Any little fish can swim,
Any little bird can fly,
Any little dog
Or any little cat
Can do a bit of this
And just a bit of that.
Any little horse can neigh
And any little cow can moo,
But I can't do anything at all
But just love you."



But as Noel Coward knew, it's never quite that easy. When Alec (Milo Twomey) and Laura (Hannah Yelland) feel waves of passion, we get waves of passion.



"Brief Encounter" was an iconic English film, directed by David Lean in 1945. The question was whether a modern American audience would accept an affair that appears modest by 2009 standards. Oh, my, not to worry. There is a set piece (coupled with film footage) of Alec and Laura riding in a canoe. They fall in the water, so they then must dry their clothing. This scene is so charged with electricity there is not one breath escaping from the audience, as Laura removes her skirt, and Alec his vest, and they sit on a log, together but yet not, as the extraordinarily prescient song "Go Slow, Johnny" is performed in the background. The music appears to be flowing from Laura and Alec's hearts, while their repressed emotions battle to break free.



The scene may be a metaphor for Coward's own life, a gay man writing in the 1930s and 1940s, and it's hard to imagine a song fitting a scene any more perfectly.

Every member of the cast is brilliant. The comedians are funny, the lovers are both tragic and understandable, the musicians weave in and out of the drama and everyone can dance. There are puppets. One minute the cast is in front of us on stage and the next they are with us, in the audience, watching "Brief Encounter," the black and white film being projected on a screen. At times they walk though that screen and merge with film footage of themselves on that train, or in that canoe. The whole shmear is breathtaking.



Love comes and love goes. We have to leave the theater when the curtain comes down, but we don't want to.

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG BANG BANG BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Brief Encounter" it's highest rating in years: Four Stars with FOUR BANGLES of PRAISE. We understand that Four BANGLES ought to round off to the next level of Five Stars. There is absolutely no reason that this isn't a Five Star Show, except...well, what if we like the next one more? Sometimes ratings make no sense. The show couldn't be better.

One BANGLE of PRAISE is for Beverly Rudd who plays various roles, most notably Beryl the waitress in the tea shop. She can do anything at all, plus she has a clear Val Diamond-like voice to boot. Another BANGLE is for the live musicians, who intertwine with the action so we never allow our hankies to distract us from the fact that we are also watching a musical. Emma Rice's spot-on perfect direction and stage adaptation grabs the third BANGLE and the entire mixed-media Kneehigh Production takes home the fourth -- and there could have been more. The boat train. The Rachmaninoff piano finale. We could have handed out BANGLES like M&Ms. The large bag.

So what are you waiting for? Get yourself downtown and take the one you love. Make it her birthday present and blow for the best seats. Thank me later.

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"Brief Encounter"
A.C.T. Theater
405 Geary Street, San Francisco
Through Oct. 4
$20-$80

"Yellow Face": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

It took the full forty minute drive home from Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. When the reviewer left the theater he wasn't sure if he'd liked David Henry Hwang's "Yellow Face" or not. Unquestioned was the brilliance of the show's concept -- that every person wears one face that the public sees, but there is another person, with a different face, underneath. Perhaps we humans change faces much as a snake discards skins, which is to say we grow.

Inevitable growth seems to be Hwang's conclusion -- the younger playwright, whose face was that of the Asian activist, battling "Yellow Face" (the trivialization of Asians in films and on television, even to the point of hiring Caucasians to play Asians in roles written for Asians), now has grown older and perhaps wiser. He has come to see that there are other issues involved here. Perhaps he has a new face, or perhaps the old one just has a few more lines in it.

The young D.H.H. (played thoughtfully by Pun Bandhu) finds himself in the exact situation he has protested against ten years earlier. For his new play, which is opening in only a few weeks, he desperately needs to find a macho, Asian lead. But there don't seem to be any. At the last minute, Marcus (Thomas Azar) appears -- a white man who has discovered he can pretend to be Asian because no one will actually come out and ask him his ethnicity -- they are either prohibited by law or afraid of seeming racist.

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But Asian Shmasian. D.H.H. needs Marcus -- so he has to figure out a way to convince himself and his Asian supporters that Marcus is actually -- Eurasian. When he discovers Marcus's father is a Russian Jew, he introduces Marcus as 'Marcus Gee,' and then manages to pass him off as Siberian, and therefore -- somehow -- Asian enough.

The idea is so preposterous it feels completely natural.

Ah, if only the whole play was as strong as that million dollar concept. But that's basically it. There is little drama, less build-up, limited excitement, and only one character who is ever developed. But that one character almost saves the show.



The riveting Francis Jue plays H.W.H., the playwright's father. Though Jue, as well as co-stars Robert Ernst, Amy Resnick, Howard Swain and Tina Chillip play multiple roles, it is when Jue is the father and Pandhu the son that our insides are touched. When we see the old man, who loves his adopted America more than life itself, and has always dreamed of being Jimmy Stewart, now persecuted by the FBI later in his life, while never losing his faith in his country, we understand the issues clearly.

The rest of the play is more slapstick, as other members of the cast (Jue included) lampoon newscasters and US Senators and the media in general. They may be mimicking actual events, but drama it ain't. And with the exception of Tina Chillip's amusing Fred Thompson, they're not all that funny either.

It is as if Hwang needed to get D.H.H. out of his system. He is a gifted writer and if he wants a new face, he can have a new face. We don't really care which face he chooses, but we hope his next play will have a little more plot and heart.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Yellow Face" Three Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. It's too bad, really -- it's such a good idea but it just isn't a four star show. Francis Jue is brilliant. As H.W.H., as Margaret Cho and as the spurned Asian actor passed over for Marcus Gee, Francis Jue earns his own BANGLE OF PRAISE.

"Yellow Face" will give you several belly laughs, and you will drive home thinking about your own face and how it looks to others and to yourself, and that's what great art is supposed to do. When you get home, you will very likely think, as this reviewer does, that you're happy you saw the show.

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"Yellow Face"
Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts
500 Castro Street, Mountain View
Through Sept. 20
$26-$62

"Awake and Sing!": NO RATING

There will be no review of the very entertaining Clifford Odets' play "Awake and Sing!," playing at the Aurora Theatre through September 27. This has nothing to do with the crackerjack cast's interpretation of the 1935 classic -- it has to do with the new start time for Tuesday Night performances at the Aurora: 7pm. When the reviewer arrives at 7:45 for what he assumes is the normal 8pm curtain, there is little to do but wait until Intermission, with the others who made the same mistake, have a cookie and then go in for Act Two.

Act Two, by the way, is really good. Rod Gnapp is as noirishly creepy as always as Moe, Ray Reinhardt is a terrific patriarch of the Berger family while Ellen Ratner and Charles Dean are excellent as the second generation parents. The puppy seen above enters briefly, receives an AWWWWWWW! from the audience, and exits. But the real show-stopping role belongs to Anthony Nemirovsky, as Sam, the about-to-be-jilted husband. Seeing only Act Two makes us want to see Act One, which we will do soon.

But the Aurora must be used to this because they were all set up with listening devices in their office. The reviewer and his wife and one other couple sat there listening with headsets to the end of Act One being performed on stage a hundred feet away, and to tell the truth it was a lot of fun. Odets wrote this play in 1935, during the Golden Age of Radio, and the dialogue felt just like it would have while gathered around the Motorola in the parlor seventy five years ago. We could hear that the characters were sitting at a dinner table and we saw that table in our minds, heard their Philadelphia accents and imagined what each person looked like when we heard his or her voice.

When you're in the theater, you don't see the actors running through the backstage hallway to get from one onstage exit to another onstage entrance, but you do see them when you're in the office. You hear them on the headsets leaving the stage, then watch them silently tear through the hallway, pause outside the door to adjust their hair, then hear them enter on stage through the headsets again.

It's too bad about radio. What did we get? TV. Sheesh.

RATINGS: (1) NO RATING and (2) Zero ☼ baub baub baub BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division will give no rating for "Awake and Sing!" until we see the show in its entirety.

However, the Reviewer is given No Stars with Three Baubles of Shame, the lowest review possible. He really should know better. On a brighter note, his beautiful wife is awarded a grateful BANGLE OF PRAISE because she didn't say "Didn't you CHECK the time before we LEFT?" even once. Thanks, Hon.

Sorry for the glitch, fans. We'll review later with Act One under our belts once and Act Two twice.

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"Awake and Sing!"
Aurora Theater
2081 Addison Street, Berkeley
Through Sept. 27
$15-$55

"Julius Caesar": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

There are certainly more renowned Shakespeare Companies than Marin Shakespeare and many finer venues than the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre at Dominican University, but there can't be a nicer place in Northern California to see Shakespeare in late August. Every seat is a good one, the nights are warm and gorgeous under a million stars and the actors and staging are terrific.

Through Sept. 26 you can see Barry Kraft in the underperformed "Julius Caesar." Kraft is a Shakespeare veteran and does an admirable job, but the historical tragedy is really about the relationship between Marc Antony, the victor, and Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators. Jay Karnes gives Brutus a brooding, patrician bearing, while Jack Powell's leering smile makes Cassius every bit as evil as Shakespeare intended. Marc Antony is harder to buttonhole -- William Elsman plays him as someone who truly loved Caesar, but is every bit as anxious as the others to become the new top dog in Rome. Karnes makes us trust Brutus, though he is a conspirator; Elsman, on the other hand is a bit too smarmy. Should we like him? Should we mistrust him?

"Julius Caesar" really should be performed more. This play is like your favorite "Greatest Hits" soundtrack, with famous speech after famous speech appearing one after the other.

Marc Antony, to the Roman people as he stands over Caesar's dead body:

"Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him
The evil that men do lives after them
The good is oft interred with their bones
So let it be with Caesar."

Caesar says of Cassius:

"Let me have man about me that are fat
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o'nights.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous."

Brutus encourages his fellow generals to strike, after Caesar's death:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures."

Marc Antony eulogizes the dead Brutus:

"This was the noblest Roman of them all
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world: "This was a man!"

The senator Casca says:

"This is all Greek to me."

The soothsayer tries to warn Caesar:

"Beware the Ides of March."

One could go on and on, because Shakespeare does. Act One is fast paced, as all the plot points are outlined and characters introduced, but Act Two becomes bogged down in offstage battles, all of which lead to the suicide of one conspirator after another. This may have been the theatrical convention in Shakespeare's time, but today it tends to drag. Act One is worth its weight in gold; Act Two just makes you appreciate Act One.

Many theater goers bring picnic hampers, or you can buy nice-smelling dinners at the amphitheatre, to take down to your seat with your rented seat cushion (nice idea: hard wooden seats). Remember, however: Shakespeare is never in a hurry. The entire show takes two and one half hours with one intermission.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Julius Caesar" Three Stars with a BANGLE of Praise. Kraft, Karnes and Powell each earn a star for their ability to make us care a lot about a play none of us appreciated in High School English; the BANGLE of PRAISE is for the overall production, sets, costumes and all those stars overhead.

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"Julius Caesar"
Forest Meadow Amphitheatre, Dominican University, San Rafael
Fri - Sun through September 26
$15-$30

"East 14th Street": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

Of the long list of one-man and one-woman show performers that have graced the stage at the Marsh over the last several years, perhaps no one else can make their face do what Don Reed's can. The cast of characters from his early life includes his buddy Steak Face, the sage pimp Trout Mouth, Little Donny's two brothers, one a player constantly dispensing awful advice and the other the toughest kid in the neighborhood, though so gay that he embarrasses other gay people. And let's not forget his father, though with Don Reed's dad it's not the face but the voice that makes us love this man. Of course, the story is centered around little Donny himself, known throughout his childhood as "Blinkie," for obvious reasons.



East 14th St. is the coming-of-age story of little Blinkie, as he moves from one end of Oakland's East 14th St. to the other, from the middle-class home of his mother and stepfather, where knocking on doors for the Jehovah's Witnesses is a way of life, to the heart of the ghetto, where his father lives, who just happens to be an excellent and efficient pimp. That's P.I.M.P., for "Put it In My Pocket."

Donnie doesn't realize his father is a pimp at first -- "I just thought he was really into hats." But it doesn't take him too long to realize that partying is a whole lot more fun than proselytizing for Jesus.

The arc of the show is the same as many other one-person shows where a comedian is the focal point -- early childhood, joke, joke, joke, a little older, joke, joke, joke, and looking back, joke, joke, joke. The form can feel dated at this point, especially the apparently-mandatory section towards the end where the performer chokes back tears before loosing another joke or two.



Don Reed overcomes the form by being funny, by nonstop motion and some really good dance steps. His audience is younger and blacker than most Marsh shows and the material feels a little like a profane sit-com, which makes sense since Reed got his start in television.

But it's all good. "East 14th St" offers a fun evening watching a terrific performer. There isn't a lot of meat on these bones but there is still plenty to chew on. We have to agree with Don Reed's father: "Can you dig it? It can be dug by me."

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "East 14th Street" Three Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. The material is good, Reed is a seasoned performer who knows how to please an audience and you just have to love Steak Face. The BANGLE of PRAISE is for the really funny segment where Donny is forced by his stepdad to knock on the door of his friend Steak Face's house, on whose sister Donny has a stuttering crush. Delivering the Word was never quite this embarrassing. It's one of several excellent moments as we travel up and down East 14th Street.


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"East 14th Street"
The Marsh
1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Fri-Sun, through October 10
$20-$35 sliding scale

"Rick Reynolds: Mid-Life At The Oasis": ☼ ☼ BANG BANG

There's something right about Rick Reynolds -- he's a seasoned performer with a lot of humorous bits, and his show "Mid-Life at the Oasis" strikes a lot of chords with the audience. He has gone through some tough times for sure, but appears to have come out standing on his own feet.

He emotes freely about his alcoholic mother and series of defective stepfathers ("As shitty as my childhood was, it was much better then what the adults had"), about social mores ("why did women have to wise up on our watch?"), about the n-word and the c-word, about depression and love. His show peaks with a hysterically funny bit about doing a comedy show at the maximum security prison in Vacaville.

But there's something wrong too. He's got that used car salesman look in his eye. This reviewer laughed a lot but kept an eye out for the fine print, which in this case means feigned sincerity. Reynolds says he's nervous and insecure but gives no sign of it, neither in the way he moves about the stage nor in his material. He utters many homilies, and they are indisputably true, and he is able to recite, in alphabetical order, a list of 100 reasons to go on living, which probably included baby birds and cute kitties, but thinking about his show afterwards you don't feel like inviting Rick Reynolds over to meet your sister.

Here is a comedian who says his finest moment would be the headline: "Rick Reynolds Found in a Pool of Blood." This would be a big improvement over "Comedian Found in a Pool of Blood." It's a funny bit. Most of the audience loved him. You may too.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ BANG BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Rick Reynolds: Mid-Life At The Oasis" Two Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. It might have been three stars, if he were easier to like. Stevie Wonder has been blind for 59 years. That's tragic. Rick Reynolds is 57 and hasn't had sex for six and a half years. Big deal.

The BANGLE of PRAISE is for that amazing performer's-nightmare story about having to insult all the rapists and serial killers in the prison, just to get a laugh. In fact, let's raise it up to two BANGLES for just that bit. It's a classic, and one you'll tell your friends about.

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Rick Reynolds: Mid-Life At The Oasis
The Marsh
1062 Valencia St., San Francisco
Through August 30, Sat 5pm, Sun 7pm.
$15-$22