"The Brothers Size" ☼ ☼ ☼ Plus

Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" is the last thing you hear, and it is the message Ogun Size (Joshua Elijah Reese) and Oshoosi Size (Tobie Windham) have been trying to communicate to each other since the opening curtain. "The Brothers Size" is hard-hitting and honest, with three acting performances you will not be able to get out of your mind.



The story is heavy on cultural myth -- the flawed humans on stage all carry the names of ancient Yoruba gods. Ogun is the god of iron and in the story he is the big brother who owns an auto repair shop. Oshoozi is the god of fecundity. Here, he has just gotten out of prison and is bursting to sow his wild oats. Egelba is the Yoruba god of the crossroads. When he tells the truth he lies and when he lies he tells the truth. He is played beautifully by Alex Ubokudom. Egelba the human is the bad devil on Oshoozi's shoulder. The two were in prison together and Egelba remembers their unspoken intimacy there. He wants more. Oshoozi is not so sure.



Author Tarell Alvin McCraney grew up in the projects of Liberty City, outside of Miami, Florida. Perhaps he knows something about momentous decisions. Oshoozi Size has a big one to make -- does he do the easy thing and hang out with Egelba, where he is certain to get back into more trouble, violate his parole and end up returning to prison, or does he listen to Ogun, his elder brother who has been his role model most of his life, and come to work in the car shop, straighten up and fly right?



Octavio Solis is a great director. The show has innovative touches, in some ways like a Word 4 Word production in which stage directions are spoken (and performed) by the actors, and in other ways like a Shakespearean drama where you see the inner torments of each character. You see how impossible it is for Ogun to open up to his little brother, and you also see how much they both long for it. And you can't help but understand the inevitability of the finale.

Author McCraney could scarcely be hotter right now, with three plays premiering within a few weeks of each other. "The Brothers Size" is the second of the "Brother-Sister Plays." Judging from his fecund output, we are guessing Terrel Alvin McCraney has a lot of Oshoozi in him.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ Plus

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "The Brothers Size" Three Stars Plus. Each actor deserves one star each and the show's power and innovation makes it more than a three star production.

This reviewer has a few small stones to toss into the pond. There are no surprises here -- the story ends where you knew it would. The location is Southern Louisiana but none of the actors talk like it. And the show is probably funnier than it shows, since there are jokes and innuendo that fly over the heads of a traditional American theater audience.

But these are small pebbles and should cause few ripples. We have all been Oshoozi and we have all been Ogun. "The Brothers Size" makes us think about tenderness and the price you pay to find it.



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"The Brothers Size"
Magic Theatre
Fort Mason, Building D, San Francisco
Through Oct. 17
$20-$60

"Compulsion" ☼ ☼ ☼ Plus BANG

Rinne Groff's "Compulsion" calls for a lead who is Jewish, middle-aged and has a serious case of schpilkes. Mandy Patinkin can squirm with the best of them -- his performance gives Sid Silver, the fictionalized discoverer of Anne Frank's diary, copious amounts of anger and desperation, self-righteousness and self-loathing. He is a schmuck with charm. He can't let go and he can't sit still. Clearly half-crazy, one minute he is in love with life, the next infatuated with the dead Dutch teenager who, he has decided, must become nothing less than the voice of the Jewish people.



Groff's play is brand new -- The Berkeley Rep production is its world premiere. When it is brilliant it is truly so. The combination of marionettes, handled by a trio of puppeteers from a catwalk above the thrust stage, is inspired. When we see Anne, the subject of Silver's compulsion, she is a gangly and simply dressed marionette with a whitened face, as if half alive. To Sid Silver she symbolizes life itself, but to those around him, especially his wife (Hannah Cabell - more on her stupendous performance in a moment), Anne Frank is an impossible act to follow.

Cabell plays not only Sid Silver's French wife, but also his friend/nemesis at Doubleday Publishing, Miss Mermin. The two performances are both terrific -- you don't realize this is one actor playing both roles until later on when you only see one woman taking her bows. As Mrs. Silver she is patient but restless; as Miss Mermin she is understanding but finally driven over the edge by Silver's intransigence.



The other multiple roles are played by Matte Osian, as a series of New York stuffed suits, and also as an Israeli theater director. This is because eventually Silver must relocate to Israel, the only country where he has a ghost of a chance to see his play performed the way he wrote it.



But "Compulsion" rises or falls on the strength of the lead. We bought 95% of Mandy Patinkin's character, but we must warn you that in the other 5% he oozes more schmaltz than your grandmother's chopped liver. Of particular fascination is a scene where Ann appears in bed with Sid and his wife. It is a touching, heart-wrenching scene, perhaps the best in the show, but it is followed immediately by Patinkin singing what is probably a Yiddish lullaby, in a forced tenor that made us cringe. Not the quality of his voice -- he is a vocal performer after all -- but that this lovely scene with a wife coming to grips with the fact that her husband has another "lover" -- the deceased Anne Frank -- could possibly lead to a song? A song?



The brilliant parts far outweigh the negatives, and there is plenty of time for them to iron out the wrinkles. "Compulsion" looks like a play that is going to be around for a long time.

Final note: we really enjoyed the music. Darron L. West's sound design was simple -- solo piano, mainly -- but added greatly to the show.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ Plus BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Compulsion" Three Stars PLUS with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. The BANGLE is for Hannah Cabell's performances as well as for the inventiveness of using marionettes to illustrate the inner workings of the characters' minds. It's a little long and overwrought right now. We would suggest you ignore the rave reviews you are going to see -- get your tickets for the end of the run, when the show, like a good soup, has had a little time for all the flavors to blend.

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"Compulsion"
Berkeley Repertory Theatre
2025 Addison Street, Berkeley
Through October 31
$29-$73 (half price tickets available)

"Olive Kittredge" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

Word 4 Word has a new house. Last night they premiered two short stories from Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kittredge," at Z-Space in the Theater Artaud complex, where the company shall maintain a residency into the near future.

It's never easy to review a Word 4 Word performance because they are always perfect. Really. Every word counts, not only because the actors are so good but because the stories chosen are literary standouts to start with. In the two Olive Kittredge stories, "Tulips" and "River," Patricia Silver is a spot-on perfect Olive, reclusive, cantankerous, sad with unspoken memories but alive with observations about the world she lives in. Warren David Keith plays Jack Kennison in "River," and Paul Finocchiaro plays Henry Kitteridge, in "Tulips," and both are excellent foils for Silver's dissatisfaction.

What a grump she is. At one point, Henry wraps Olive in a hug. Olive rolls her eyes and stares out to space. She says (in narration): "She stood, waiting for the hug to end." In another example, she is worried that she enjoys walking by the river each morning, three miles up and three miles back. "Her one concern was that it might let her live longer."



But she is, in fact, seeking happiness like everyone else in this sleepy town. Perhaps she finds it at the end, perhaps not.



Her relationship with her son Christopher, played by Patrick Alparone, is hinted at in both stories, and he and the other minor characters are excellently rendered by Jeri Lynn Cohen (Mary Blackwell), Nancy Shelby (Louise Larkin) and especially Michelle Bellaver who plays Christopher's momentary wife Suzanne as well as a particularly nasty waitress. The ensemble plays multiple comedic roles, appearing as roller bladers or stroller pushes or an elderly couple walking by the river or gossipers in a local cafe.



These are sad stories of lives advancing with much regret, but the Word 4 Word format always leaves you with a sense of hope, because no matter how bleak their lives, Word 4 Word characters always tell great stories.




RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Olive Kittredge" Three Stars with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. The actors are all excellent and Joel Mullennix's direction gives us plenty of rumination time as well as enough comedy to distract us from Olive's dour sense of impending doom. One of these small bits earns the BANGLE OF PRAISE: The Scots. They persevered!



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"Olive Kittredge"
Z Space at Theater Artaud
450 Florida Street (at Mariposa Street), San Francisco
Through Sept. 26
$30-$40, discounts available

Marin Shakespeare: "Antony & Cleopatra" ☼ ☼

Shakespeare did like his main characters to die slowly, and in "Antony & Cleopatra" both take nearly three hours to do the deed. The 2010 Marin Shakespeare Company production is the sequel to last year's "Julius Caesar," but where that was filled with action, this is longer and has more characters. Caesar figures in both, in the flesh last year, but only in memory this time around.

Marcia Pizzo's Cleopatra is exciting and girl-like when first we meet her, flushed with love for Marc Antony, who has left Rome after Caesar's death and settled in Alexandria with her. (There is the matter of his wife back home, and also of the other noble Romans, none of whom has slept with Cleopatra yet, except for Caesar himself, but he's dead, and maybe Pompey.) Pizzo plays Cleopatra like an oversexed teenager at the beginning, but as she matures we see a woman who -- well, she's not a teenager any more.

Marvin Greene's Marc Antony is a man whose judgement has been destroyed by his love. Of course, what would you do if your girl friend insisted on placing your armor over your private parts before she sent you out to battle? This Cleopatra is some dame. Once the greatest general of them all, Marc Antony now follows Cleopatra around like a tongue-lapping hound. They make not only love but war; even though she keeps betraying him by sailing away in her ships, he keeps accepting her apologies.



Stephen Klum is terrific as Enobarbus, as is William Elsman as Octavius Caesar, someone you'd love to hate, but you can't since he is obviously the only actor on the stage who gets to play someone with a brain. Also, he's taller than the rest of them.

It's always beautiful to laze away an afternoon in the amphitheater at Marin Shakespeare, watching people sitting on their rented seat cushions as the hawks and crows wheel overhead, actors in red and purple parade across the stage and Cleopatra and Marc Antony refuse to die until only a few moments before Taming of the Shrew comes on at 7pm.

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RATINGS: ☼ ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards Marin Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" Two Stars. The Awards Committee has to admit it did not find Antony & Cleopatra nearly as engaging as Julius Caesar. There are no heroes in this play, no great immortal lines from the Bard (though Cleopatra does refer to her 'salad days'), and though the acting was fine and Leslie Schisgall Currier's direction crisp enough, in the end there are just too many arrogant Romans and sleazy Egyptians serving nobody you care about very much. And we all know that Alaric the Goth is waiting in the wings only a few hundred years down the pike and he, eager critic with a tight budget, will make the Romans die a lot faster.

Marin Shakespeare makes enjoying the Bard a lot of fun, with a lighthearted attitude and excellent core of performers. But we have now praised Caesar and buried him. Let's get down to MacBeth, Hamlet, Lear!



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"Antony & Cleopatra"
Marin Shakespeare: Dominican University, Forest Meadows Amphitheatre
1475 Grand Avenue, San Rafael
Through Sept. 25
$20-$35

"The Light in the Pizza": ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

You can't hum a note of it, you can't remember a word of any song they sang and the story is as old as the Tuscan foothills: woman and daughter go to Italy -- Florence, in this case -- daughter falls in love with Italian boy, mother rues her own faded romance, boy and girl get together. Finito.

And yet -- every minute of "Light in the Piazza" is captivating. Composer and lyricist Adam Guettel (yes, he is the grandson of Richard Rodgers) and librettist Craig Lucas, along with brilliant scenic design by J. B. Wilson, costumes by Fumiko Bielefeldt and lights by Pamila Z. Gray, have created a precious Florentine world for us to inhabit. We have somehow become the doting parents of gorgeous-but-flawed Clara (Whitney Bashor), helpless before the onslaught of young love, in the person of handsome Fabrizio (Constantine Germanacos).




The play belongs not to the young lovers but to Margaret Johnson, Clara's mom. Margaret (Rebecca Eichenberger) and her seldom-seen husband in America (Richard Frederick) came to Florence when they were first married. She remembers the glory of the city, but that flush of romance has passed her by. Her telephone conversations with her husband are strained at best. She wishes more for her daughter, who has a mysterious affliction (which for some reason is never apparent to the audience. All we see is a headstrong, amazingly beautiful young woman who just happens to have an operatic voice that can shake the Uffizi).

If you don't fall in love with this woman you don't deserve to be Italian.



Margaret must shepherd the romance along, while looking out for her own attraction to Fabrizio's father (Martin Vidnovic). As she says as Act Two is proceding: "Don't ever take a dream to Italy."



Adam Guettel, of course, is in a bind. Anything he does that sounds like his grandfather would be pilloried by the legion of Richard Rodgers lovers across the land. So he writes tunes, but they are to modernistic melodies. You don't get "If I Loved You" or "Oklahoma!" Instead, you get a modernistic "Light in the Piazza," which is lovely as it is being sung by Clara but could never be repeated by you or anyone else. You don't hum back Adam Guettel any more than you do Igor Stravinsky or most Stephen Sondheim.

But that's the deal. These songs work beautifully within the context of the story. The story does not exist simply to showcase the songs. It doesn't hurt that the characters are all equipped with operatic voices. You feel their angst as well as their happiness, even if, later on, you can't remember exactly what they sang.



(Where do these beautiful people with huge voices come from anyway? Is there a planet where they clone people who look and sound like Whitney Bashor and Constantine Germanacos? Is it in New Jersey?)

We must also give very special thanks to the chamber quintet that plays the music, especially written for fewer pieces to suit regional theater. This is a difficult score to play in sync with actors. If they had done what most theaters do these days, i.e. replace the violinist, cellist, bassist and harpist with one synthesizer player, the music would have none of the sweetness and texture that is crucial to the score.

But that's the musician talking. The theater critic was totally captivated by "Light in the Piazza" and hopes you will be too.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Light in the Piazza" Four Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. No show since Peter Pan (in May) has earned this high a rating, and give the crinkly curmudgeon who grimaces as he hands out these stars just one or two songs to hum back and the rating would have been higher. The cast is fabulous. While the trio of Eichenberger, Bashor and Germanacos control our emotions, the supporting cast shines as well, moving across a stage as easily as our hearts sail through this tale of young love.



The BANGLE of PRAISE is for director Robert Kelley. Nothing stands out and everything stands out. This means Robert Kelley has directed with that perfectly invisible hand.

And it's not Shakespeare. Nobody dies. Hurray!

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"The Light in the Piazza"
Mountain View Center for Performing Arts
500 Castro Street, Mountain View
Through Sep. 19
$19-$67

Trouble in Mind: ☼ ☼ ☼ PLUS!

The play is great but this fact, gleaned from the press-pak, is astonishing: Playwright Alice Childress was the first black woman in America to have a play professionally produced. What year was that? 1850? 1910? No, 1952.

Small surprise that three years later, after a very successful off-Broadway first run of her new play "Trouble in Mind," Broadway beckoned. They told her they would love to run her play on the big stage if she just wouldn't mind making...a few changes.

They wanted to take her play-within-a-play -- a story about black actors fighting to keep an anti-lynching play from being watered down with white stereotypes about black people -- and water it down, turning it into a feel-good drama. Childress refused and the show never got to Broadway.




You couldn't write irony like this, because nobody would believe it.

The new Aurora Theater production of "Trouble In Mind" feels fresh, which is to say that racial divides in America may not be as cast in concrete as they were in Childress's time (she died at age 78 in 1994), but they are certainly still there. The show does not feel like a period piece, it feels like America 2010, and if you don't think so just look at Al Manners.

Tom Kniffin is perfect. His Al Manners, the white director, is the patronizing and sexist creature everyone in the audience recognizes. He makes us squirm. Perhaps in 1955 a white audience would not have found him quite as odious -- and he certainly has his own troubles -- but today we see him more clearly. Certainly the black actors in the play-within-the-play will do anything he says, since all are desperate just to have a job. As the excellent Rhonnie Washington (as actor Sheldon Forrester) says, "I still owe the doctor. I need this job."



Sheldon's monologue about a lynching he saw as a small boy (he is the only one in the room who actually ever saw one) is memorable -- Alice Childress wanted to make sure we all felt the true horror, in this case seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old. Equally memorable is the show's moral center, Willeta, when she decides to turn up the volume on racial stereotyping, for the benefit of Al Manners.



Meanwhile, the banter between Wiletta (Margo Hall), Millie (Elizabeth Carter), Jon (John Joseph Gentry), Judy (Melissa Quine) and Sheldon continues unabated. Each actor is trying to do what Al Manners tells them to do, but we can see all they really want is to stay employed.

The ending is a little ambiguous, and we wish we could know a little bit more about Wiletta and Sheldon. Act One is the true rarity in modern theater: it's too short. When the lights come up for intermission you can't believe it. That's how Alice Childress wanted it -- you find yourself immersed in her world.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ PLUS!

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Trouble in Mind" Three Stars Plus! This same rating could be suggested by ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG but there is no real BANGLE of PRAISE here. No actor nor piece of dialogue stands out from the rest. But "Trouble" is more than a ☼ ☼ ☼ play, if not quite as nuanced and fleshed out as ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼.

Alice Childress grew up in the Harlem Renaissance and is the author of the novel "A Hero Ain't Nothin' but a Sandwich." Perhaps it is finally time to pay this ground breaking writer more attention.

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"Trouble in Mind"
Aurora Theater
2081 Addison St., Berkeley
EXTENDED through Oct. 3
$33-$45

"Dreamgirls": ☼ ☼ BANG

Ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough to describe the new traveling "Dreamgirls," currently running at the Curran through September 26. The highs are monumental -- notably, the costumes and costume changes (305 costumes and 175 wigs used during a single performance), several of the leads (none more spectacular than Chester Gregory as Jimmy "Thunder" Early) and the quintessential show-biz story itself of the unknown girl group rising to unfathomable success (not the Supremes, but The Dreams).



And no discussion about Dreamgirls cannot include the incomparable sets -- you won't see a more interesting-looking stage anywhere than Robin Wagner's Scenic Design at the Curran, with lights by Ken Billington and mixed media by Lightswitch. Even stripped down from the enormous Broadway original, this is a feast for the eyes.

The costumes, most of the leads and the sets themselves are ample reason to want to come see the current production. You've seen the movie -- come grab a taste of what it looked like originally on Broadway, when the show premiered in 1981.



But in the interest of honest disclosure, just as a conversation about Dreamgirls must include staging, so it must also include the music. Tom Eyen (Book and Lyrics) and Henry Krieger (Music) MUST have been listening to the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Tammi Terrell and Gladyce Knight. Right? Marvin Gaye? The Temptations? What about catchy tunes? Catchy, danceable tunes? Catchy, danceable, joyful tunes? Catchy, danceable, joyful and infectious tunes that peg themselves into your skull like a sticky pad you can't remove?

None of that here. Zzzzzip. Act One sets you up for a musical payoff and Act Two puts you to sleep. Although the audience screamed and applauded for Moya Angela, who plays the sympathetic part of Effie White, made famous first by Jennifer Holliday and then Jennifer Hudson, and though Ms. Angela's acting was first rate, it has to be mentioned that her pitch in Act Two was...let's just say problematic. We are not talking about a note here and a note there.



Hey, these things happen and it may have been Opening Night jitters. We leave that to you to decide. And there is no pitch so perfect that these lyrics cannot injure:

"Walking down that wrong road
There was nothing I could find
All those years of darkness
Could make a person blind"

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Dreamgirls" Two Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. First, the bangle: Chester Gregory and Chaz Lamar Shepherd. Gregory, who had the moxie to play Jackie Wilson, arguably the greatest soul singer who ever lived, on Broadway in "The Jackie Wilson Story," puts the OW! in shOWstopper! We want them to stop this silly story and just give James "Thunder" Early another half dozen songs. Sings! Dances! OW! Similarly, Shepherd's gospel voice, though it only gets hinted at a few times, is beautiful, in an Al Green kind of mystical way. And yet he plays the most hardboiled character of all, the Berry Gordy figure, the driven visionary. Shepherd and Gregory are two excellent reasons to catch "Dreamgirls."

Syesha Mercado as Deena, Adrienne Warren as Lorrell, Trevon Davis as C.C., Milton Craig Nely as Marty and Margaret Hoffman as Michelle are also excellent. The mountains are high in Dreamgirls and many may choose to ignore the valleys.



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"Dreamgirls"
Curran Theater
445 Geary Street, San Francisco
Through Sept. 26
$30-$99