"Sense and Sensibility": ☼ ☼ ☼ baub

Jane Austen's first published novel, "Sense and Sensibility" was brought out in 1811, only five years before the author's death. Her career was short but her influence has been great, as her novels "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Mansfield Park" (1814) and "Emma" (1815) have cemented her reputation, not only as one of the first great female novelists, but as a chronicler of the tribulations of the young heroine in upper class Georgian England.

Austen's novels are complicated, so Roger Parsley and Andy Graham's adaptation of "Sense and Sensibility", which is having its American Premiere at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, has been greatly simplified. If you love Jane Austen, if you have always had a soft spot in your heart for free-spirited Marianne and her strong sister Elinor, you will feel at home here.

Also excellent are Stacy Ross (who was so good recently in SF Playhouse's "Coraline") as Aunt Jennings, whose primary interest is digging up and distributing gossip; and Mark Anderson Phillips as Colonel Brandon, the older patrician who feels he has no chance with Marianne. Rounding out the cast are Thomas Gorrebeeck as Elinor's suitor Edward (Mr. Good) and Michael Scott McLean as Willoughby (Mr. Bad).

In Jane Austen's day, the eldest brother inherited the family estate and all other children were left on their own. So for young women, the procuring of a husband of wealth was their only means of retaining the lives they had known as children. These men needed to be judged by the standards of the day. If we may compare the three men in the story to bears, we would say that Austen feels Willoughby has too much porridge, Edward too little and the Colonel's is just right.

Every costume designer must dream of working on a Jane Austen novel with so many elaborate period costumes. Fumiko Bielefeldt's gowns -- and the boots! -- are perfect.

But -- and this is something they will have to deal with -- the music! Director Robert Kelley and Sound Designer Cliff Caruthers have chosen to insert songs into the production that they imagine Jane Austen would have loved. This decision might not be a bad one if they didn't also decide that Marianne should sing most of them. So we have the poor distraught young lady, heart in hand as her suitor departs forever, repairing to the pianoforte to sing a jaunty little air. Again and again she turns to face the audience and croon a hey nonny nonny. The mood is shattered each time.

When the ensemble sings together, as on the opening number in Act Two, everything works. But the heroine should not be the chanteuse -- at least, not this heroine. It bogs things down, especially in Act Two which plays long.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ baub

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Sense and Sensibility" Three Stars with a bauble of despair. The actors, staging and costuming earn one star each. But the bauble -- that decision to add warbling songs into the mix -- at this point is a fatal one.

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"Sense and Sensibility"

Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts

500 Castro Street, Mountain View

Through Sept. 18

$19-$69

Photo Credits: Tracy Martin and Mark Kitaoka

"Stuffed and Unstrung: ☼ ☼

There can be few people who were either children or parents of children during the long era of Sesame Street who do not have a soft spot in their heart for muppets, as well as the for the names Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the creators and popularizers of all that marvelous entertainment. Henson and Oz, along with their crews and designers and puppeteers, applied a new, shiny veneer of hipness onto the ancient art of puppetry.

So we looked forward to laughing and feeling young again when we saw the new Henson Alternative "Stuffed and Unstrung" on our calendar, with Brian Henson in charge of a live cast of puppet masters, along with a Master of Ceremonies (Patrick Bristow) to move the whole show along.

It is SO dreary.

The idea is that the muppet audience has now grown up and wants to hear Bristow lob the f-bomb over and over again, wants to hear deafening music during the intermission that drives everyone out into the lobby, wants to have the muppets stuck on lame joke after lame joke about sex and wants to put the whole thing in the hands of an m.c. who manages to be both manic and unfunny at the same time.

The format is "Whose Line is it Anyway? -- the audience throws suggestions at the actors and the actors, holding their puppets high to make them visible on two large tv screens, act out the suggestions, the aim being to show us the magic of puppets and improvisers working together. The tech is fabulous, the gimmicks world-class, the puppets and puppeteers terrific. But it's also exactly what you expect from improv comedy -- some of it works, much of it doesn't, and all the technology in the world cannot make humor out of pretending a muppet has a penis.

They really do need better jokes. Maybe they can find Henny Youngman's muppet somewhere. If they want to give us Borscht Belt raunch it really should be funnier.

But who knows? Maybe this reviewer spent too many years caring for the now-geriatric Oscar, Miss Piggy, Kermit and The Count, even the later, gentler generation of Fozzie and Elmo. Maybe people who spend most of their time at comedy clubs and in pickup bars will find this stuff entertaining. And on that magic night when all the routines work, Bristow calms down a little, the audience produces fascinating characters, they make the screens bigger and the sound system audible enough so you can hear most of the improv lyrics, the show could be brilliant. It could happen.

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RATINGS ☼ ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Stuffed and Unstrung" Two Stars for the technology. The two segments with people from the audience brought up to stage worked better than most of the planned numbers. There was one wonderful bit: the one with the computerized puppet interplaying with the actors on stage. We could have watched that all night long.

Jeez, you can't shut this guy up: the music -- the tinkly synthesizer player -- wow.
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Henson Alternative "Stuffed and Unstrung"
The Curran Theater
445 Geary Street, San Francisco
Through August 27
$30-$65

"Fly By Night": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG !

The scores are in for the Opening Night World Premiere of Kim Rosenstock, Will Connolly and Michael Mitnick's new musical "Fly By Night."

Story: Very Good
Acting: Terrific
Music: Pretty Good

Act One is novel and exciting. The music pays off the action, there is plenty of humor and by intermission we still don't know what is going to happen. The table is set perfectly for Act Two.

Right now, Act Two takes a long time to get where it's going, but the blackout scene at the very end ties up most of the loose ends. The show's most meaningful song comes at the end, and you get to exit the theater humming the one riff from Act One that reappears constantly throughout the show. That a fortune teller would be the one who composes the riff makes perfect sense in the fantasy world presented.



We have a love triangle, composed of actress Daphne (Rachel Spencer Hewitt), her kid sister Miriam (Kristin Stokes) and sandwich maker Harold (Ian Leonard, who was so fantastic in TheaterWorks' recent [title of show].



We also have the aptly named Crabble (Michael McCormick), who owns the sandwich shop where Harold works; and Mr. McClam, Harold's father, whose ode to his deceased wife Cecily is the show stopper. Keith Pinto has a smaller part as Joey Storms, the failing playwright.



But good as they all are, the show is stolen -- hijacked -- run away with -- by Wade McCollum, who plays The Narrator. He narrates but he also sings, plays several characters, and puts his stamp on every bit of action. He is seldom off stage. Without the Narrator there is a simple love story; with him we are twisted into a different way of looking at the world.



It's a World Premiere, so there are problems. Right now the show is fantastical, but the music is not. Lyrics are clever, but the four piece rock and roll band isn't given much to play. This isn't fuddy-duddyism -- we love rock and roll as much as anyone and have the blown ear drums to prove it. We'd just like a few more songs as good as the last one.

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG !

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Fly By Night" Three Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE and a Big Fat Exclamation Mark. Having just seen Kim Rosenstock's "Tigers Be Still" we can feel her novelistic touches all over this libretto. The way the story weaves in and out of time is brilliant. The cast, with a special nod towards McCollum, is excellent and so is Bill Fennelly's direction, though we could see them taking a few more chances as time goes on, to match the off-world sense of the plot.




The BANGLE OF PRAISE is for the way they keep Mr. McClam from telling his story for almost two full acts. He tries, nobody will listen. We, like they, think he is just another tired old man living in the past. When he finally gets a chance, he turns out to have not a sleepy story but an incisive and heartfelt song to sing. The way they pace this moment is the stuff of terrific theater.




And the exclamation point: thanks to TheatreWorks for giving new shows a shot, first with the New Works Festival, where "Fly By Night" appeared in 2010, and then working with them to earn a place on the main stage.

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"Fly By Night"
Lucie Stern Theatre
Middlefield Road, Palo Alto
Through August 13
$19-$69

(press photos by Mark Kitaoka and Tracy Martin)

Marin Shakespeare: "Macbeth": ☼ ☼ ☼

"A drum, a drum, Macbeth doth come." From the mouths of the Scottish royalty tumble one famous phrase after another, many of which have embedded themselves in our everyday English language. Flawed Macbeth and evil Lady Macbeth, loyal Banquo and the batty three witches are characters we know as well as any in all literature. As we hear "out, damned spot," "double double, toil and trouble," and "the milk of human kindness" we shake our heads and marvel at how one man could have had so much influence on the way we speak to our world.



And then, when Opening Night is over, the voice of the asp whispers in our ear: if this weren't Shakespeare, if "Macbeth" had been written by the unheralded Joe Plotnik, would we be gushing so over a plot where character development is nil and there are only one emotion (anguish), one motivation (revenge) and one action (slaughter)?

Well, if Mr. Plotnik had written "false face must hide what the false heart doth know" or "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," we probably would.

How many tens and tens of thousands of Macbeths, of Banquos, of King Duncans have there been? For our money, Marin Shakespeare's William Elsman is the craziest Macbeth yet. Under Lesley Schisgall Currier's direction, Elsman infuses Macbeth with great power and presence, but there is little underneath. The eternal question of why a noble Lord would travel so quickly from successful general in battle...



...to ambition-fueled insanity...



...must be answered not by words but by the actor's performance. A Macbeth this pathological gives us no clue and therefore little to pity.

Darren Bridgett's Banquo is loyal and solid, Alexandra Matthew's Lady Macbeth is evil incarnate at the outset (but strangely passive as time goes on) and Scott Coopwood's Macduff makes us all think that he's the only thane with a brain, the guy we would follow into battle. After all, he with the strongest voice and most dynamic stage presence should be King, shouldn't he?

In the supporting roles, James Hiser's murdering presence is perfectly drawn as well as Madeline Harris's Seyton and Third Witch.



Abra Berman's costumes are fine, as is Mark Robinson's spartan set design. It all comes down to what you think of Macbeth, the man who would be King, and then is, and then isn't. And as for his wife: "look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent underneath."

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards Marin Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Three Stars. It's hard to beat listening to fine actors performing classic Shakespeare, while sitting outside in a small, wooded amphitheatre. Macbeth is not King Lear or even Anthony and Cleopatra. But it grabs you, if only by the majesty of its language.

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"Macbeth"
Marin Shakespeare
Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, Dominican University
1475 Grand Avenue, San Rafael
Through Aug. 14
$20-$35

San Francisco Mime Troupe: "2012-The Musical": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

You always get what you pay for with San Francisco Mime Troupe, but this year you get even more. They trashed Dick Cheney until it was scarier than funny. Now they've got Barack Obama to laugh at and, once again, they're back on course. For our money, the troupe's 52nd season's offering "2012-The Musical" is the best work they've done in years.

Newcomers Cory Censoprano and Siobhan Marie Doherty are both terrific additions to the show, and writer and performer Michael Gene Sullivan takes on an even larger set of roles than he usually does. Lizzie Calogero and Keiko Shimosato, as political theater director and "green" corporate donor are chillingly real, and Victor Toman's singing and dancing are perhaps the best of all. As always, the plot is secondary to the message: Power to the People and Death to the Pigs, of course, but also, as refers to corporate largess: "A Girl Can Get Used to it."



Pat Moran and Bruce Barthol's songs, especially early in the show, are better than ever, particularly Moran's "It's All Dirty Money" and "A Girl Could Get Used To It," and Barthol's "Chains of Regulation." The three band members, who seem to play ten instruments at once, are their usual fashionably virtuosic selves.

A few suggestions for the rest of the season: This year's Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence warmup felt like it went on for days: maybe all their silly puns about dykes and queers have gone the way of Dick Cheney and it's time to come up with something new.

(Although we did love the couplet:
Eight, Six, Four, Two
We're tough dykes and we don't have to rhyme.")

You might think about posting a guard at both sides of the stage to keep the foulmouthed crackheads away. There seems to be one every year. The 2012 model took a full five minutes to scream "get out of my fffff__ing way!" as he passed stage right to left. Yes, we know. Crackheads are people too, but...

And please don't touch Raoul Brody's twisted Star Spangled Banner. This is the best singalong in hootenanny history.

As always, you leave a Mime Troupe show with mixed feelings. One, everything they said was correct, except for the things that are just loony. Two, this is an astonishingly talented cast of actors, writers, producers, singers and performers. It's hard to imagine San Francisco without them.




RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "2012-The Musical" Three Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. The show is entertaining and, for a free show, not too expensive. (You can't NOT throw donations into the various buckets that come 'round before and after the show. And you HAVE to love that t-shirt.) This year's music is better than ever. Of course they take on too many themes. Of course they do.

The BANGLE of PRAISE is for this line: "The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded." And blessings to brother Scott-Heron, who will have enjoyed that tribute.

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San Francisco Mime Troupe: "2012-The Musical"
Various parks and venues throughout the Bay Area
Through August 28
(see sfmt.org for complete schedule)
$ FREE FREE FREE

Matt Smith's "All My Children": ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

Seattle's Matt Smith is a polished performer with many earlier monologues to his credit. Yarns spin effortlessly off his tongue, somewhat in the Garrison Keillor mode, but without any mention of Lutherans. In Smith's new solo show "All My Children," we hear the improbable tale of a man, now in middle age, who looks back on the six most prominent and failed romances of his youth, and after a bit of Googling discovers:

1) His exes all married their next boy friend, and

2) Within three months of breaking up with Matt Smith, each ex was pregnant, and

3) Each ex had one child, and, most importantly,

4) The kids and most of the exes are accessible on Facebook.

Smith's unflappable and affable delivery makes you almost believe that there is a human being on this or any other planet who would actually do what he then did, armed with the above information: he called up every one of the children of his exes and tried to convince them he was their real father. If anyone could make you believe this is a true story, Smith could. But, in the end, as uniquely enjoyable and at all times humorous a tale as he spins, its sheer unlikelihood makes it really hard to believe a word the man says.

Now then, nobody has to believe that Dan Hoyle's stories are word-for-word true, but you can imagine he actually did travel around the country talking to citizens. You can believe that Jeff Greenwald shaggy cow tale about the clerk at the Calcutta Airport. Ann Randolph's Frannie is just plain nuts. Of course she would do what she does.

But calling your exes' children and telling them...no, no, nah. Nobody could POSSIBLY be this stupid -- especially somebody as cool and collected and, seemingly, held together without any visible welds, as Matt Smith appears to be.

So you don't buy it, but you still love listening to it. The characters he talks about (he does not try to imitate their voices) are fascinating, especially once his "daughter" Rita bursts into the picture. You love Mitsuo and Carter. You recognize yourself in Boyd. The story ratchets up when the characters actually begin to interact. And the $100 Koobie Doobie is absolutely priceless and worth the price of admission all by itself.

After the show, this reviewer's friend said to him: "Why would a man actually DO something like that?" The answer, of course, is "WELL, HE WOULDN'T!" But so what? The idea is incongruous but you still can't get enough of it.

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards Matt Smith's "All My Children" Three Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. We have the strong sense that if Smith wishes to take this story deeper it could become a classic. Who were the moms? What was going on during his flings with them? Do we recognize the kids in their moms? And how could the kids interact more, and for what reasons of their own? Above all: what possessed this man to do it in the first place? "All My Children" is a brilliant idea and perhaps it will become even more so as time goes on.

The BANGLE of PRAISE is for both incidents involving Koobie Doobies. You have to close your mouth before you start to laugh and then you can't stop.

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"All My Children"
The Marsh, Berkeley
2120 Allston Way, Berkeley
$20-$35
Through July 23

"Billy Elliot": ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

In the world of entertainment, the hardest thing to do is write a story that can be explained in one sentence. But try this: "English lad from coal country wishes to be a ballet dancer instead of a coal miner." And there you have Billy Elliot, the Musical, originally a film and now a stage show, with music by Elton John and book and lyrics by Lee Hall. The show was a well-deserved smash on Broadway and is now touring across America.

You are pretty much guaranteed to love the show, if you meet the following qualifications:

1) You like underdogs
2) You like underdogs who can dance
3) You like underdogs who can dance and are sweethearts.

It will help, but it is not absolutely essential, if

4) You can understand a word of Northern English dialog.

If you meet qualifications 1-3, Number 4 is not a deal breaker. Obsolootly nowt.



This is a long show (nearly three hours) and the the role of Billy is an arduous one. For this reason, and perhaps also due to child labor law, they have five different actors on board to play the title role. On opening night we saw 15-year-old local hero J.P. Viernes. He is an excellent actor, if perhaps a bit of a nervous dancer in front of the hometown crowd. His friend Michael (Jacob Zelonky, age 12), in a far more abbreviated role, was funny and fabulous, as were dance instructor Mrs. Wilkerson (Faith Prince) and Billy's Dad (Rich Hebert).

If you are among those who see Elton John's name on the music credits and fear you will be getting more dumbed-down Disney, fear not. The songs in Billy Elliot, particularly in Act One, may make you love Sir Elton again. The first four numbers in the show are all knockouts, from the impressive opener "The Stars Look Down," through "Shine," the emotional "We'd Go Dancing" (sung by Patti Perkins as Billy's grandmother) and the exceptional "Solidarity," which does what Broadway used to do: the song involves your heart while the choreography, where a child's dance class intermingles with angry striking miners and hardnosed police, brings you to your feet.



There is much to enjoy about Billy Elliot. The success of the show depends on how much you identify with little Billy. On Opening Night this was easy, but there are four other Billys waiting in the wings. Some will be stronger dancers and some will be stronger actors. The role needs both. Billy Elliot will dazzle you.

RATINGS ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Billy Elliot" Four Stars. It's a show you don't want to miss. The ratings would perhaps have been somewhat higher if the size of the Orpheum stage had permitted more fluidity and range of motion from the dancers. This is probably one of those shows you'll wish you got to see in New York. But it is still a solid four star production and worth every quid.

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"Billy Elliot (The Musical)"
Orpheum Theater
1192 Market Street, San Francisco
Through September 17
$35-$200