Camelot: ☼ ☼ ☼

Arthur, the once and future King, seems firmly in charge of the Kingdom of Camelot, though if it were up to us we'd side with Lancelot. In this 2013 revival of Lerner and Loewe's 1960 "Camelot," which has become inextricably linked with the early days of the Kennedy administration, King Arthur (Johnny Moreno) is pictured as a dreamer who has come up with a really good idea (the round table) but afterwards has become imprisoned by his own ideology. His relative malaise makes it easy to understand how lovely Queen Guenevere (Monique Hafen) could become infatuated with the French knight and zealot Lancelot (Wilson Jermaine Heredia). You've got a king who talks versus a knight who fights. In the words of a don from a future generation (Michael Corleone): "It was the smart move."

The problem that Lerner and Loewe always had with "Camelot' is that it followed "My Fair Lady." Nobody writes a "My Fair Lady" twice in a row and neither did Lerner and Loewe. So a lot of the music, while pretty good, feels like an out-take from the earlier show. You see Henry Higgins in red velvet whenever Johnny Moreno sings those clever-to-a-fault Broadway lyrics. Like Nina Ball's ruined castle walls on stage, the songs feel a little ancient.

Welcome additions are two tunes that have been restored from the original stage production: "Fi on 

Goodness," sung by all those slovenly Knights who look like they are about to shout "What's in YOUR Wallet?" and "Then You May Take Me to the Fair," where Queen Guenevere is attempting to turn the local lords against the French usurper Lancelot. For us, the other standout is Lancelot's fabulous "C'est Moi," where he manages to tell the world of his incomparable greatness without feeling the least bit self-conscious. Heredia owns this song, as, in many ways, he owns the entire production.

Charles Dean is also excellent, both as Merlyn and King Pelinor. The show is terrific from the opening through most of Act One. After that, it begins to drag. The ending feels abrupt, though in character for a King who seems to prefer being just about anywhere else but in charge.

"Camelot," which was Lerner and Loewe's last stage collaboration and as such harkens back to the golden age of Broadway, is always a must for theater-lovers. We would like to see Johnny Moreno, who was so good in last year's SFP production of "My Fair Lady," a little more dialed in. Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Monique Hafen and Charles Dean are perfect. It's a long summer run and everyone's sword will get a little sharper.

RATINGS:   ☼ ☼ ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Camelot" Three Stars. We get squabbling knights, political ineptitude, sword fights and betrayal: perfect summertime entertainment.

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"Camelot"

San Francisco Playhouse

450 Post Street, San Francisco

(second floor of Kensington Park Hotel)

$30-$100

Through September 14

"So You Can Hear Me" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

Daughter of a jazz musician father and dancer mother, Safiya Martinez inherited a lot of music and motion. A native New Yorker, she grew up on the Lower East Side and then moved to the Bronx. Somehow, with no experience or training, she ended up teaching Special Ed at a Bronx high school where even the cab drivers were afraid to go. Her fantastic solo show "So You Can Hear Me" introduces us to nine of her students, all of whom speak in a Latino Bronxese filled with humor, sadness and a lot of life.

We loved all her characters, some little more than sketches and some more lengthy. Perhaps no pastiche is as memorable as her mother dancing with pleasure around her apartment, after she has just cut off her own bandages after breast cancer surgery. Let's not forget the vibrators in the East River, nor every word out of the mouth of her down-but-not-out student José.

In a town filled with some of the best solo performers in the world, young Safiya Martinez does something we have never seen before. Most solo performers come out of character, smile and let you know they're back to their narration. But Martinez draws it out -- she might take several seconds to remove that hoodie, staring intently at the audience all the while. It is unnerving at first, but very effective as the evening draws on.

She's going to be a star. This is a fabulous show you should not miss.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼  BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog awards "So You Can hear Me" Three Stars with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. Her writing, performance and craft earn one star each. As her show matures and we come to know a little more about her own life, her characters will acquire even more richness. We give the BANGLE for how good Safiya Martinez is already. We can't wait to see more.

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"So You Can Hear Me"

The Marsh

1062 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Thursday, Friday and Saturday through July 20

$10-$20 sliding scale

"This it How it Goes" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

This is how this review goes: we can't tell you anything about the plot. Neil LaBute's 2005 "This is How it Goes," currently running at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre, is vintage LaBute: relentlessly angry and fiercely clever. On its face, the show is about conscious and unconscious racism, but deceit is at its core. The superb cast of three (Gabe Marin [Man], Carrie Paff  [Woman] and Aldo Billingsley [Cody] makes us fidget in our chairs. Three thirty-somethings living in an un-named midwestern town, they think they have a handle on things. But they don't. And neither do we, until the very end.





Marin is the clueless narrator. Warning: not so clueless. Paff is the wronged wife. Warning: you don't know the half of it. Billingsley is aggressively terrifying. Warning: The guy always gets what he wants.

There are plenty of inside theater jokes -- the children, for example, who are never seen. Marin breaks through the fourth wall to tell the audience how difficult it is to work with children, what with tutors and the union and all, so we're not going to actually see them during the performance. His narrations take place in dim light (cleverly realized by lighting designer Kurt Landisman), then the lights come back up and Marin flashes immediately back to character and the action proceeds.

We don't want to give away the many turns in the plot, but we can say this: there is a string of racial slurs that may feel gratuitous and out of place. Later, when you think about what has really happened, and how Gabe Marin's Man really feels about Aldo Billnglsey's Cody, the language becomes understandable, if not very nice.

But racism isn't nice, nor is getting what you want at any cost. It's a great show, but you'll be glad you can walk out onto Addison Street and buy a Street Sheet.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼  BANG
The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "This is How it Goes" Three Stars with a BANGLE OF PRAISE. The BANGLE first: Playwright LaBute has the guts to write plays that talk about big issues. We are grateful both for that and for a script that keeps us involved and surprised. All three actors are excellent, though we could use a little more of Man's backstory. Who is this guy? I mean, honestly? Cody and Woman, we get.

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"This it How it Goes"
Aurora Theatre
2081 Addison Street, Berkeley
Through July 21
$32-$50

"Black Watch" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

It is said that when good Scots go to Heaven they hear only accordion music: bagpiping is for the other place. The ACT/National Theater of Scotland's co-production of "Black Watch,"  which is in the midst of a brilliant and successful run at the San Francisco Armory, is an unforgettable night of innovative theater which is so good you can endure the bagpiping that fills the room for a long time before the show begins. You don't have to plug the piper. The show will start soon, and when it does you will be enthralled.

This is spectacle as much as drama. It is ostensibly a history of the fabled Black Watch, a unit of the Scottish armed forces since 1739, with an emphasis on its problematic service in Iraq during the American invasion of Fallujah. These men consider themselves heirs to the tradition of Scottish highland warriors (think Mel Gibson in "Braveheart"). Their speech is misogynistic and potty-mouthed, but we see the fear under their bravado. Nothing in their training has prepared them for suicide bombers. The nobility of hand-to-hand combat is from another age.


In an all-male ensemble cast a few roles stand out: Stuart Martin as Cammy is the one who seems to be thinking things through a little more clearly; Richard Rankin is tough but understands his men; and Stephen McCole is the commanding officer who also plays the legendary Lord Elgin.

The production team is superb. This is a show that has played around the world and learned the craft of putting on a production of this magnitude. Lights, music (these soldiers drill and also sing and dance a little bit), set and costumes all contribute to the excitement. 

Do not expect personal growth. Little is learned by these men. Most discouraging is that the same is true for the governments who have sent them into combat. Scots, Americans and English soldiers are hostage to election year politics. Thrust into the most hostile of theaters of war, the fabled Black Watch can do little but try to survive.

RATINGS:  ☼  ☼  ☼  ☼
The San Francisco Theater blog Awards Division awards "Black Watch" Four Stars. It is exciting as well as novel. But writing about this show misses the point. You must see it. Do so quickly before it ships out for its next deployment.

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"Black Watch"
San Francisco Armory
1800 Mission Street, San Francisco
(between 14th and 15th Streets)
$35-$70
Through June 16 ONLY

"Wild With Happy" ☼ ☼ ☼

Coleman Domingo's "Wild with Happy" is a farce. A gay farce. A gay, black farce. At its best it makes you laugh out loud and appreciate the strange situation into which each character has wedged himself. In the one female role, Sharon Washington (in a double assignment as Adelaide/Aunt Glo) is so good you are not the least bit surprised that she was nominated for an Outstanding Lead Actress Lucille Lortel Award when the show premiered Off-Broadway in 2012. When you leave the theater you are still talking about her.

There is not a lot of meat on these bones, though. Jokes, yes. Insightful comments on the funerary industry, on the morés of black people, of gay people, of church and its reluctance to accept gay people, yes indeed. There is a lot more here too, including alienation and a modern world's reliance on detached communication. But for us the problem is Gil.

As the lead character, Gil (played by Domingo) could help us a lot more than he does. Perhaps his ultra-cool New York sheen says a lot to his target audience, but it doesn't give the rest of us much to go on. It takes until the very end of the show until we get a very small hint of what has been haunting him vis á vis his mother, but Domingo the writer and Domingo the actor take a long time to get us there. The rest of the time Gil mostly kvetches.

"Wild With Happy" is for laughs. The gags are a mile-a-minute, most of them from the deliriously loony mouth of Aunt Glo. "Cremation?" she asks Gil. "We don't do that! Maybe if they're burned or mutilated or too fat to fit in the coffin. But that's it!" You just keep talking, Aunt Glo.

So what are Duane Boutté (Mo) and Richard Prioleau (Terry) doing there anyway? Adoring Gil, mostly. Aunt Glo doesn't go for that. That's why we love her.

We also love Erik Flatmo's set, especially the way he pictures the car chase during the road trip South. The Cinderella room -- well, it just may be the Happiest Place on Earth.

RATINGS: ☼  ☼  ☼

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Wild With Happy" Three Stars. Go to have your funny bone tickled by Sharon Washington. 

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"Wild With Happy" 

Mountain View Center for Performing Arts

500 Castro Street, Mountain View

Through June 30

$23-$73

 Photo Credit: Tracy Martin and Mark Kitaoka

"Terminus" ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG!

"It's a voice I'm certain I recollect, someone I taught in school, I suspect, then am sure of. Yes. A girl named Helen I had for maths. A fucking mess. Though that's a tale best told at another time. For now, she's saying she needs an abortion. Fine. I ask her how many months she's gone, she says 'Nine.'"

---Character A, from Mark O'Rowe's "Terminus"

Read that out loud and you will pick up the lilt of the internal rhymes. Mark O'Rowe's one hour forty-five minute (no intermission) "Terminus" consists of three characters giving ten to fifteen minute monologues, one character following the other, all told in what sounds like verses from a Poetry Slam. It's not an easy evening. You need every ounce of concentration just to make sense of what you are watching and hearing. But give it awhile, because once the story takes on a form you may find yourself, as we were, spellbound.

Things will begin to pop into your head. We thought of Vikram Seth's magnificent "The Golden Gate," a novel about San Francisco written completely in sonnets. The connection is how something can be at once so literary and full of heart.

The three actors (Stacy Ross, Marissa Keltie and Carl Lumbly) are nothing short of brilliant, which is admittedly an easy word to use. So consider this: since they never speak at the same time, nor do they interact with each other, it is a necessity for each character's next monologue to continually one-up the previous one, or the show will drag. It never does. Ross's secret guilt gives her surprising strength, Keltie's innocence brings her to the strangest love this side of Star Wars, and Lumbly is just plain terrifying. Each actor has a reserve, and that reserve has another reserve under it. By the end of the evening they have used themselves up. You find yourself wondering how they will do this show every night for the length of the run.

But after the show, Lumbly said: "I can't wait for tomorrow."

It's dark and smoky in the theater, but this makes sense since we are apparently in Hell. Robert Brill's coal-mine like set and Gabe Maxson's smoke and low light seem perfectly reasonable when faced with issues of life, death, afterlife, monsters, rape, worms, payback, Bette Midler and a goodly collection of Irish guilt. 

You won't see another show like "Terminus" this season. But after Opening Night there are only 17 performances left. If you love great acting and writing, and we know you do, please don't miss this one. 

RATINGS: ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG!

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Terminus" Four Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. Each actor plus director Jon Tracy earn one star each, while the Bangle goes to Artistic Director Loretta Greco for having the courage (and, apparently, a supportive Board of Directors) to mount this peformance. "Terminus" makes you squirm. And stretch. Did we mention squirm? We can't stop thinking about it.

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"Terminus"
The Magic Theatre
Fort Mason Center, Building D
San Francisco
Through July 15

"Abigail's Party" ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

An English play written in 1977 about tasteless middle-class people would normally be greeted with a smile and a nod or two. It was that way the last time Mike Leigh's "Abigail's Party" came through town in 1998 at the old Aurora. But this time San Francisco Playhouse has an ace up its sleeve -- Susi Damilano. She may have born to play the role of Bev. A fine comic actor, Damilano allows Bev to be so crass and oblivious that you would strangle her if you could stop laughing. The crasser she gets, as when she is dancing seductively with Tony (Patrick Kelly Jones), the more we gasp. Damilano and the rest of this fine cast make a lightweight play memorable.

Jones, with his barely contained disgust for both his wife and the party he has been forced to attend, and Remi Sandri as Lawrence, Bev's henpecked real-estate salesman husband, give a strong undercurrent to the story. Angela (Allison Jean White) and Sue (Julia Brothers) have no defense against Bev's aggressiveness. They sit and watch as Bev realizes her goal to to get everyone drunk so she can torment her husband. 

Amy Glazer directs. The show is a true two act play and longer than we are used to seeing these days, but does not drag. And you get a surprise ending which, thinking about it later, isn't really much of a surprise. If you were Lawrence, you'd do it too.

 RATINGS:     ☼ ☼ ☼ BANG

The San Francisco Theater Blog Awards Division awards "Abigail's Party" Three Stars with a BANGLE of PRAISE. The cast, direction and story earn one star each and Damilano's performance brings home the Bangle. Nobody takes the easy way out -- Amy Glazer does not allow Damilano to leave character for an instant, nor does Julia Brothers stand up and scream as we might expect. One word of warning: they smoke real cigarettes and cigars. Some of us love it. Be aware.

"Abigail's Party"
San Francisco Playhouse
450 Post Street (2d floor of Kensington Park Hotel)
San Francisco
Through May 24
$30-$100