An Ideal Husband & A Fire

Earlier this year, after we got our season tickets to the Berkeley Playhouse, I started keeping an eye out for other local & cheap plays. I knew that the Playhouse musicals were something that I would especially like, so I wanted to find some things that would particularly interest Kimberly.

One of the first places I looked was campus, who has a Theater, Dance & Performance Studies program, and I was happy to discover that one of their plays for the year was Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. Knowing that Kimberly is a Wilde fan, I thought it was an ideal play, and we attended it this evening.

The play itself was quite good. I am constantly shocked by how topical and insightful Wilde's plays remain. At first the witticisms seemed a bit excessive, but as they hit their stride, I was able to better appreciate them (and it made me think fondly of Moonlighting, whose banter often felt in the same style to me). Beyond that, there are lots of really insightful topics in the play: honesty in marriage; what should disqualify people from public office; what self-sacrifice can cost; etc. There's also one entirely delightful, beautifully written case of mistaken identity which entirely makes the third act of the play.

With that said, I'm sorry to say that the production of the play wasn't as good. Lighting and sets were fine. Costuming varied from stunning to sackcloth. But I was really surprised to be massively underwhelmed by the acting.

I do have to say, that they started off with a big disadvantage. Since TDPS is a student program, they have a bunch of younger people, and most of them looked like they were playing dress-up as a result (especially for the older roles). But, and I really hate to say it, most of the kids didn't seem that talented at acting. They rushed their lines and gave them no inflection, so it was like everyone was reading off cards. It was really easy to miss the important bits of a speech or the surprising bits or the witty bits because the actors just blurred through them all. Oh, and there was some really serious overacting and some hideous accents. I've seen more skill & verisimilitude at some LARPs.

There were, thankfully, exceptions. I think two and a half of the four leads of the play were good (two were and the third grew on me). At least one of the more minor characters was too. But I was really surprised that the ratio was so bad in a theatre program at a world class school. I mean, I've been to a lot of community theaters, from the Masquers at Point Richmond to the Berkeley Playhouse plays, and they're usually excellent to the man, but UC Berkeley only seemed able to turn out 4 or so actors who were any good.

(I want to say maybe that's all you can expect from young'uns learning their craft, but the [much younger] orphans in Annie the other week were all good, and the Annie was excellent.)

Anyway, a surprise, and I think that Kimberly and I are going to be a little less interested in going to TDPS in the future.

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On the way home, we saw a huge number of emergency vehicles surrounding Telegraph and a huge plume of billowing smoke coming up from somewhere around the former La Fiesta Building or Intermezzo. Water was pouring down Dwight, and it now seems to have reached our street.

I'm fairly confident the fire department will have it contained, but I'll have to see what the damage is in the morning. I think Moe's is the only thing up there that would genuinely hurt me if it were gone, and the fire seemed to be a half-block north of that.

Fire & Bombs

So, turns out it was a really big fire last night: a 5-alarmer with about 20 fire trucks responding. The location was right where I thought it was: the building that once included La Fiesta and still included Intermezzo and Raleigh's. And four floors of apartments above them. The fire apparently burned up from the basement and was going for 6 hours, so there's presumably not much left. Intermezzo and Raleigh's are historic losses, but they were also on the road downward since they came under new ownership recently.

The mayor was talking about demolishing the building, which will unfortunately leave a very blighted corner, including: the empty lot where a transient hotel burned down 20 years ago (and which hasn't been rebuilt due to an absentee landlord, but twenty years later the city is starting to make sounds about taking over the lot since there are over half-a-million dollars of fines and fees unpaid on it); what will soon be an empty lot where these buildings were; and the empty shell of Cody's. Amoeba Records is the only business still standing at that corner, and as someone I spoke to today said, how much longer do they have? (Though I believe that physical books will continue to exist at some price point because of the clear advantages over eBooks, I can't say the same for CDs.)

I went up to Moe's just now, and though they were open (bless their hearts!), Telegraph was still closed to cars north of Dwight. So, both Moe's and that part of Telegraph were a ghost town. And north of Moe's pedestrians couldn't even get through.

Our part of south Berkeley still smells like smoke. Not as bad as last night, though, when it infiltrated our house and I couldn't smell anything else. I actually woke up this morning with a sore throat and a corner of a headache, which I would guess was due to the smoke.

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Meanwhile, over in Oakland today, there were disasters of an even more man-made nature. After Occupy Oakland got taken down (AGAIN!) earlier in the week, the "protestors" (increasingly druggies, drug dealers, anarchists, and homeless people in recent weeks) announced that they were going to march to an empty lot in Uptown and take it over today.

So I was gaming at Endgame today, and that part of town was perfectly normal, other than the helicopters overhead in the late afternoon. But when I started biking home and got near 19th Street (where the lot lies), I saw increasing numbers of people. Upon arriving at the lot I was very surprised to see the chain link fences that had once surrounded it ... gone. The lot was also filled with people playing loud music and celebrating.

For a few moments I didn't know whether to think well of the people for expressing general enthusiasm or poorly of the police who let this unlawful mass tear down chain link fences and take over a lot, all of which actually belongs to someone who expected the police to protect his interests (not that the police have been very good at that in the 12th-19th Street corridor, around Broadway & Telegraph, in recent years).

Then a big glass bottle exploded like a fucking bomb about 5 feet from my bike. Because some asshat had chucked it into the middle of the street, trying to hit me or a car, I don't know which, but it was definitely thrown with violence intended. I cringed momentarily, waiting for glass shards to hit me, but luckily I ended up being just outside the radius of shrapnel. That, however, decided me what to think of the scum-sucking assholes who now make up the Occupy movement in Oakland. Because I'm sure biking through Oakland during a light drizzle, I really looking like the fucking 1% that they pretend to be protesting.

(In reality, as I've increasingly been thinking is the case, any progressivism in Occupy Oakland has been subverted by scum.)

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When I got home, I read up about what was going on, and learned that the police had been standing around that lot to keep protestors out of it, when they marched this afternoon. And that damned moron Jean Quan had them continue standing there and watching as they ripped apart the fences, tore them down, and move onto the property.

Good going, guys. That's the same attitude we've seen in the past from Oakland police, politicians, and worthless political commentors that leads them to stand and watch looters and rioters, because they're just "expressing their views".

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Don't get me wrong: the glass-bottled assault occurred just a block away from the new 19th street commune. I'd be a bit leery of Oakland within a block of that or so (which sadly includes the Fox and the Paramount theaters). However 17th or 16th Street or so, and further south, is peaceful and pleasant. Actually probably a lot nicer now that the Occupiers have been driven out of the civic center.

And even that wariness won't keep me from riding right by that lot next week if I want to visit Uptown (though the rain & holiday might!). I've never been willing to cowtow to thugs and bullies, and that's sadly what the Occupy 19th Street motion now represents.