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We've now seen our first play in Kauai, "She Kills Monsters" from the Kauai Community Players.

I guess it wasn't technically our first play in Kauai, as we saw "South Pacific" some years ago, but that wasn't the same thing: we were still "visitors" then, and it was a pretty touristy activity, put on at a hotel with a fancy dinner and such. This, instead, was very much a local thing.

And, it was a pretty great experience.

The play immediately had my attention, because it was about a young woman who connects with her late sister by playing a Dungeons & Dragons adventure that her sister wrote. And the writing by Qui Nguyen is really top rate: clever and funny and touching.

There was a lot of really clever framed, multi-layered storytelling, of the sort I adore. You at some points could tell that the late Tilly's adventure was being translated through DM Chuck's gamemastering, and so you'd get strong female adventurers filtered through the male gaze ... and it was delightful. (And funny.)

The staging of the play by by KCP was really excellent. There was a lot of great '80s (and '90s?) music set between scenes that really underlined the storytelling, and there was great use of lighting, such as when they strobed the level-boss fights. I couldn't tell which of the staging was in the original play and which was chosen by the folks at KCP, but I'm pretty sure some of that was KCP, and I guess we'll learn more about their style as as we see more of their plays (spoiler there!).

But what as really amazing was the choreography. No, not the hilarious dance off (though that was amazing too), but the fight choreography, which was just stunning. I mean, I literally don't think I've ever seen such well choreographed fights in live theatre. They were swinging around swords and axes in pretty real-time (except in the strobe-lighted slo-mo fights) and there were kicks and hits and people being thrown violently to the ground. I dunno how they did it and made it look so real.

Kimberly has been having new problems with her foot, so we had a front-row seat (so that she didn't have to climb steps), and when no one else sat in the front row at first, I joked to Kimberly that we were in the "splash zone" ... and it turned out that we were really in the splash zone. The fighting was pretty naerly on top of us, and both Kimberly and I wondered at various times if we were going to get hit (but we weren't: the actors were very good at what they were doing).

And beyond that, it was really an inclusive play. I won't spoil it except to say: if it's ever put on near you, see it. I was soooo lucky that this was put on just a few months after we moved here.

And I also appreciate the fact that a few of the actors in the play are gamers over at Eight Moves Ahead. I haven't done much more than say "hi" to them a few times ... because they've been getting in late most Thursdays because they were putting on the play until 9pm or so. But they're folks I'll know better in the future, having seen them play a hilarious DM Chuck and an even more hilarious Orcus.

After the play, Kimberly and I detoured into Koloa for some ice cream, really having a nice, proper date night. Even if I did have to drive down the windy, poorly striped, poorly lit Tree Tunnel Road.

And we decided to definitely become members of the KCP. In fact we'll sign up for one of the higher patronage levels, because we feel we can make more of a difference for such a small theatre than we could have for one of the big theatres back in Berkeley (even the semi-pro ones like the Berkeley Playhouse).
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Alas, our final year of subscription to the Berkeley Playhouse has come to an end. There are two more musicals while we're still in Berkeley, Mamma Mia! and A Christmas Story, and we may watch the first, if we have the time and the energy, because it's got so much great music (and a fun story). But seeing the last play from our last subscription year is yet another milestone.

We started seeing musicals at the Berkeley Playhouse when Seussical caught my eye. We saw that on July 27, 2011. And we've seen every play there since, including Annie twice (in their 4th and 10th seasons). Lots of great stuff, only a few disappointments.



So anyway, our last season-pass play was the musical Big, which is of course based on the movie, a movie that I've never seen.

Obviously it's the story of a boy who wishes to be big and becomes an adult and the hijinx and life lessons that ensue.

And the story of the boy (Josh) is about what you'd expect. He gets his wish and it seems great for a while but he decides it's not wants after all.

But what really surprised me is that Josh felt like he was mainly the inciting event, and that the play was really about Susan, the woman who falls in love with adult Josh. And hers is a terrific story. They have a joint song about him giving her stars, and then she offers a tear-inducing monologue song about the first boy she ever fell in love with. And then as we hit Act II, it's all about how she's learning to dance again and remembering what it was like to be a kid and finding her childlike innocence and joy.

I mean, maybe that's just 47-year-old me seeing Susan as the star of the play and the one whose story moves me, but a 12-year-old kid would say the opposite (while asking what's going on with the "I Want to Know" song sung by Young Josh). But Susan's story really felt like the heart of the play.

(Kimberly and I talked about the fact that Susan might have had a more central role in the musical because there wasn't a Tom Hanks to overshadow her and her story.)

There was some good music, though nothing that really stuck in my head, and some absolutely great dancing. And the plot of working at a toy company is pretty terrific too.

Perhaps I'll have to see the movie sometime, but I think I'll miss the lack of music.



I'd hoped to see one other play while in the East Bay. There's a theatre called the Woodminster, which is up in Joaquin Miller Park. It's an outdoor theatre, and they run about three musicals every summer, and this of course reminded me of The Muny in St. Louis that my grandma Appel used to take me to (and whose season passes have been passed down to my Uncle and cousins). So, I've been wanting to go there for a few years, since I discovered it, but the logistics of getting up there without a car at night are challenging (I mean, I bike up there; I actually just did it on Saturday, but not with Kimberly at night to go to a play). So I thought to look this year at their schedule and it was like the last day of "Newsies", and then they were showing "Billy Elliot", which we saw pretty recently at the Berkeley Playhouse. But their last musical was one whose music I love, and which I've never seen on a stage: "Into the Woods". Perfect, eh? Except it turns out that the days they're running "Into the Woods" are the precise same days that I'll be in Prague at the end of summer. I'm actually getting back at 2.30pm on the last day of the play, so theoretically I could make it to an 8pm showing ... but that just ain't going to happen after 15 or 16 hours of travel, and my still being on Central European Time.

Alas.

But we've seen lots of great plays and musicals in Berkeley. And hopefully we will in Kauai too.
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Alrighty, here's my last delayed journal entry while I've been trying to catch up with life. It's not actually important, but I always write about the plays we see, so I should write about our last play!

It was Pippin, which we saw on at its last showing, 13 days ago. We've fallen into the habit of seeing our musicals at their final performance in large part because we're often waiting for something to improve. It's been a rough several years ... . So we wait. But I've actually come to really enjoy seeing a play's final performance, because it's a performance that has meaning to the cast: it's not just another show. There was a proposal at one of the final performances we saw, and this time, the actor who was making the announcements at the end of the show was choking up.

(Actually, I was very confused to then see signs for the show on May 11th-19th, after it had really definitively closed on May 5th when we saw it, but looking around I now see that was for their teen stage.)

Anyway, Pippin. It's a play-within-a-play. Or, it's somewhat more complex than that. It's about a weird traveling carnival troupe putting on a play about Charlemagne's son, Pippin, but there's a lot of fourth wall breaking throughout, with the carnival barker narrating and commenting, and then the lines get quite blurry late on where Pippin actually seems to be facing off against the carnival members, and it's not entirely clear what's happening at which level of reality. I was quite surprise to find that Pippin was a play from 1972, as the concepts feel a lot more modern.

The play was pretty heavily focused on messaging, because the whole thing was about Pippin trying to have an extraordinary life, and basically never being happy with what he has. I thought it was good messaging, but I really didn't know if I was going to be thrilled with the ending or want to throw it against the wall, because I could see them coming down on the wrong side. (Spoiler: they didn't. Pippin recognized his quest for an extraordinary life was a will-o-the-wisp that was just leaving him unhappy with what he had, which is good messaging. But then his son got dragged in, showing the attraction of these false promises to us when we're young. A great ending, even though it turns out that last bit wasn't in the original play.)

Pippin was much more about story and message than most musicals, but there was music too. I appreciated the rock sensibilities of several songs. A few times they tried to use music and dancing to represent other actions (first fighting, then fu**ing) and that was a modern dance failure. There were also some memorable songs. Well, kinda memorable. Two weeks later I have trouble picking them out from the song list. But "No Time At All" was the best, as it set up the final messaging, by talking about how you have to appreciate what's around you. And it was sung by Berthe, the kick-ass grandma. I know there was at least one other that moved me, but ... not sure what it was now.

Overall, a good play, and a bit unusual.

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We saw West Side Story at Berkeley Playhouse today. I'd never seen it before (aside from the brief but memorable parody in Scrubs), but I was impressed by the cleverness of the translation of Romeo & Juliet into the near-modern day and I was less impressed by the music — in part, because it's somewhat sparse for a musical, in part because there were few stand-out numbers, though "America" was great and "The Jet Song" and "I Feel Pretty" are well-known and pretty catchy. I also feel like the music hasn't caught up with the grittier urban setting of the play. Though "America" feels very modern with its argumentative intercuts, "I Feel Pretty" could have come straight out of The Sound of Music.

What really impressed me, though, was the messaging.

I mean, a play about racial animosities, where a somewhat down-trodden group hates the newest immigrants for no particular reason, that's ripped straight from the headlines. But the play goes a lot deeper than that, and is really a psychological tour de force.

To start with, I never understood how pathetic "The Jet Song" was. This was a song sung by a downtrodden underclass who is desperately trying to claim their importance. It's not about loyalty or brotherhood or the other things I assumed form the snippets I'd previously heard; it's hopeless people screaming into the void. This is confirmed by "Cool", which is all about the bubbling anxiety and fear experienced by these people; we may not understand why Trumpites are so desperately afraid of the immigrants coming into this country, but the fact is that the economic, personal, and existential anxiety is there. And then we have "Gee, Officer Krupke", about how these people suffer the tragedy of diminished expectations. Put it all together and you have a very powerful statement about the fears of those who aren't being protected as they should be by our society. That's a long way beyond Romeo & Juliet.

Oh, and I should mention the dancing. Great dancing. No surprise. And great staging. I loved the fact that the Jets were primarily dressed in blue (with some white) and the Sharks primarily in red (with some black). You couldn't get an American flag without both: more great messaging.

Edit: Ha! The kid who played gang-leader Riff in the West Side Story movie was Dr. Jacoby in Twin Peaks! And Tony was Ben Horne!
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Kimberly and I have a long history with Tom Stoppard. Indian Ink at ACT was one of our first dates. We picked up some Tom Stoppard play books in Ireland, but found that reading plays aloud on your own is hard. We watched Invention of Love, again at ACT, that same year. We saw Rough Crossing at the Black Oak Theatre, and it was good unlike our more recent experience there. (What a difference more than a decade makes!) And we rejoined Shotgun Players so that we could see the Coast of Utopia Trilogy, which debuted there instead of at ACT.

So tonight's Arcadia at the Shotgun Players was, I think, the seventh Stoppard play we've seen together.

But we'd read it aloud before, I think as part of Kimberly's old reading group. That's where it's easy to read plays. (And Kimberly saw it previously when it debuted at ACT way back in 1995.)

Great play. It's a narrative in two parts, jumping back between the past of the early 1800s and the present of the late 1900s. We have the historic drama of a country estate at the verge of the Regency Era and the modern tale of academics ("academics") trying to figure out what happened. It's rather delightful as a mystery, with both halves of the story advancing the narrative, and it's rather delightful to see what the modern-day people get right and wrong. As an amateur historian myself, I really identified with their amateur historians in a way that I probably didn't when I read the play around 1999. It was particularly instructive seeing them talk about KNOWING something is right, but not having the ability to prove it (and then sometimes BEING wrong afterward).

But this is all mixed with math. With a very melancholy and symbolic discussion of themodynamics, with fractal geometry (though for some reason that phrase isn't used). And it all melds together wonderfully. It's a story about intuition and genius, about right and wrong guesses, about the inevitably of loss.

In many ways, this feels like a turning point to me for Stoppard, where afterward his plays got denser and more multilayered, and I didn't love the ones that came afterward like Invention of Love and The Coast of Utopia nearly as much. Oh, they had Stoppard's cleverness and wordplay, but they were on the edge of comprehensibility. Whereas this one takes those more complex ideas, but holds them back just enough (and explains them just enough).

Anyway, I did love this one in a way that I couldn't possibly have loved just reading the play almost two decades ago.

It's been extended at the Shotgun for another three weeks, so definitely go see it.

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The first musical I can vaguely recall seeing is The Wizard of Oz. No, not the movie (though I of course saw that too, many times, as it was one of those movies that used to be an annual special, back when there were such things). But, The Wiz, I think, when it showed at the magnificent outdoor Muny in St. Louis in 1982.

So it was delightful to see The Wizard of Oz proper at the Berkeley Playhouse today, as we count down our musicals here in the Bay Area. It was in general a charming production, based on the 1987 RSC production.

It was a very close adaptation of the movie, with all of the notable songs, even The Jitterbug (originally in the movie, but cut, and its footage lost). There was some great dancing, including the aforementioned Jitterbug and the introduction of the munchkins. (What does it say that out of the almost dozen or so munchkins, only two of them were boys, and one of those two, who seemed a bit nervous to be on stage, was the mayor?) Dorothy was great and so was Marvel/Oz (who was a woman, which is the gender-color-blind casting that's much more common for the Playhouse).

The staging was also great. I loved the neutral colors in Kansas immediately transferring to a vivid color scheme when we hit Oz. (Though the munchkins actually had too many colors: it was noted their color was blue, but then they wore the whole rainbow; while for some reason the Winkies always had purple in the background, when that's of course the color of the Gillikins, duh.) We had a rainbow lit across plinths for most of the play, then they became emerald plinths when the cast got to the Emerald City. (Is the rainbow LGBT flag derived from Oz? Apparently not, despite the multiple connections to Judy Garland, though the six colors of the rainbow lit across the plinths mirrored the modern LGBT flag.)

Something that I don't remember in other version of the Wizard of Oz was an extended scene set in Kansas where we met not just Gulch/The Wicked Witch, but also the three farmhands who are the twins of the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion.

Overall, a lot of fun. Not deep, as it was definitely one of the Playhouse's kids' offerings, but better than the modern-day Disney tripe they've done for kids in recent seasons.

Kimberly and I were also very amused by how much fun someone had with the music running in the theater before the play and during the intermission. The first amusing song we noted was "Ease on Down the Road" (which is from the Wiz). Later we heard, Israel Kamakawiwo'Ole's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (albeit, without the "What a Wonderful World" mash-up, which is a bit of a waste), "The Wizard and I" (from Wicked), and "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (from Elton John). There were a few others we couldn't positively identify, but I'd like to see that whole playlist.

Anyway, that was the end of the year at the Berkeley Playhouse, though we have another play next Sunday at Shotgun.
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Dreamgirls opened our final full season with the Berkeley Playhouse. We saw it yesterday, its last day showing.

I knew that Dreamgirls was about the emergence of a female music group in the 60s and 70s, but I'd been expecting a kind of feel good musical about women making their mark on their world and finding success. Instead, we got something much deeper.

For one, I was surprised to find out that it was really about the black experience in the music world, and the extreme compromises that required. We also got a great tour through the influence of black music on the mainstream in this time period, focusing on R&B and soul, but also touching upon doo-wop, taking a large detour through funk, then ending with disco. There was even a pretty terrific showdown between soul and disco versions of the same song toward the end. (Soul won, suggesting that compromise wasn't always needed.)

I was also surprised to discover how closely the story of the "Dreams" in the musical followed the career of the very-real Supremes. This meant there was a lot less of the feel-good and much more of the very real portrayal of the problems implicit in a touring band, as an early member is thrust out despite her superior voice and others rise up, as affairs and payola complicate everything, as varying dreams lead to heartbreak and bold new directions.

The songs were generally strong. There was also a great conceit early in the musical where songs would develop out of conversation into musical numbers and then would be repeated as musical numbers sung by Jimmy Early and the Dreamettes. "Cadillac Car" and "Steppin' to the Bad Side" both developed like this; the latter was my favorite song in the play. I also adored the Jimmy and the Dreamette song sung in Miami where they try very hard to sing to a white audience, but eventually move back to their natural sound. (Jimmy similarly descends into full funk in a late song.)

Overall, a strong musical with lots of good songs that were also different from what we usually hear.

A nice article about the musical trend: The Real Dreamgirls.
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We saw Grease, the musical today. A first for me, as I've never seen the musical or the movie. And, it was ... OK.

The best song of the play is surely "Summer Nights", a song that I've heard a million times, but never knew was from Grease. It's a great song with a clever look at the different points of view of the sexes, and it feels even more fun in the context of the play, as you see the entire cast come together to sing the two sides of the duet. And the rest of the songs: they're OK too. Lots of early Rock & Roll influence. I kept swearing that I was hearing the chords of Ritchie Valens' "Hey Donna" ("I had a girl, Donna was her name ..."). Actually, there was one other that was great, "Born to Hand Jive", but that was largely because of great choreography, which I'm sure is usually the case.

The storyline of the musical was ... basic. It was mostly about a love story between two unlike people (Sandy and Danny). The thing I did appreciate, though, was how many of the other characters got their own songs (Marty's "Freddy, My Love", Kenickie's "Greased Lightning", Roger's "Mooning", Frenchy's "Beauty School Dropout", Rizzo's "There Are Worse Things I Can Do"), revealing who they were in this wide world of 1959 high school.

I do wonder how shocking the story points were back in 1971-1972 when the original versions of the musical appeared or even in 1978 when the movie debuted. I'm talking about the kids having frank discussions of sex and pregnancy as they smoke, drink, and make-out. I mean, post the '80s, it seems pretty expected, but it might have been different in the same era that Happy Days (1974-1984) was projecting a white-washed picture of '50s innocence.

The ending of Grease, though, what a mess. Sandy changes everything about what and who she is to be accepted by Danny, which is pretty disgusting on the face of it. Maybe it was intended as a response to Rizzo's "Worse Things", where she says she could "throw my life away / On a dream that won't come true", but if so it's lost by the other ideas of that same song and the fact that there's no connective tissue. Absent that, Sandy's decision comes out of nowhere. Then there's the fact that the play ends on the oft-repeated song "We Go Together", which talks about how they're all going to be together, which links well to Sandy's decision to give up her self-identity for the community, but poorly with the fact that the play has a framing sequence of a twenty-year reunion, where it feels like none of these people have seen each other for years. But, that framing sequence isn't repeated at the end, so again we get a muddy, muddy story. Was the song intended to be genuine or ironic?

I have to wonder if the ending of Grease got workshopped to death, and express some surprise that it's such a popular hit. But maybe it was the same nostalgia as Happy Days, just with a more realistic point of view.
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Today, we saw James and the Giant Peach at the Berkeley Playhouse.

Unfortunately, it was one of the most disappointing musicals that we've seen at the Playhouse, and almost certainly the one with the least ambition. There have been musicals that I didn't love because of stylistic disconnects (e.g., they were old and dated), but this was one that I found almost entirely superficial, in a way that even the Disney musicals aren't.

One problem was the plot, which is nonexistent. Almost nothing happens in the first act, until the giant peach rolls free of the tree and drops into the sea. And even the second act is just a meandering journey with very little actually going on. You could put all the major plot points on a postcard and have plenty of room for an actual letter.

The other major problem was the music, and that's of course how musicals live and die. A good song in a musical needs to (1) move along the plot; (2) reveal depths of the characters; (3) surprise the viewers with revelations about plot or character; and (4) provide subtext that makes the song's words about more than the obvious. The best songs in the best musicals simultaneously and constantly do all of these things. The Giant Peach songs? A few of them gave a tiny bit of character insight, and that was about it.

There were a few songs that I kind of liked, even though none were earworms. But even those were very pedestrian. Take a song about James losing his family (though I can't even figure out its name, looking at the song list, because they're all so generic). It was moving. I shed tears. But it also seemed super-cliched with messages like "when you find something it's never lost again" and "they'll always be there in your heart".

Generally, there was some good messaging, like: your family aren't family if they hurt you; and you choose your family; and if your family sucks you should cheer when they're killed by a giant peach; and we should appreciate everyone's diversity. But what a dull vehicle for those messages.

The only particularly lively thing of the musical was the various bugs in the peach, who only show up toward the end of Act I. That's when the show came alive as it ever was. Grasshopper and Spider were particularly good. Gloworm would have been if she'd gotten any attention. (She was even the one member of the Peach crew who didn't get a postscript.)

A few other good things:

  • A great 30-second interlude at a chocolate factory where a snippet of the oompa-loompa song is sung.
  • A hilarious/terrifying intro where James' parents are eaten by an angry rhino.
  • A fun reveal about the nature of the narrator.

Meanwhile, the villains were over-the-top and awful. I particularly hated the depiction of the villain who was portrayed as overweight and constantly talking about how she wanted to eat something. It was cringe-worthy.

This was one of the very few Playhouse plays that I seriously considered leaving at intermission. But it had been such work getting up there with K's broken foot and damaged hand that it seemed like we should at least repay that investment. And the second half was better than the worst (first).

Skimming the Wikipedia article, I find that the musical didn't even make it to Broadway, due to mixed reviews. No surprise. More surprising that Berkeley Playhouse is lauding it as the "centerpiece" of their 10th anniversary season, and the sort of thing they created the Playhouse for. Which apparently means musicals for 5-6 year-old-ones, who would have probably loved it.
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We saw the Ragtime musical at the Berkeley Playhouse today.

It's based on a 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow, which I read three and a half years ago, after I saw another play called "Harry Thaw Hates Everyone", which features some of the same characters (because Ragtime features several real-life characters).

After I see an adaptation of a novel I often go back to the original source to read it, because it tends to provide deeper insights that you can portray on a screen or stage. It's extremely rare that I see an adaptation and it gives me insights into the original source, but that's certainly the case with Ragtime.

You see, Ragtime is the story of a rich New York family living in the first years of the 20th century. But it also touches upon the stories of many other people, including an immigrant, his daughter, and any number of famous personages (including Evelyn Nesbit, who is the real-life character shared with "Harry Thaw Hates Everyone"). When I read the novel, I loved the historic context of Ragtime (and the correlations I could draw with Our Town, a play about the first years of the 20th century that still haunts me). I liked the patchwork view of the time. But those other stories felt like vignettes, and I didn't feel they cohered into a novel.

That's because I was missing the music. The ragged rhythms. And the play Ragtime used them wonderfully. There were any number of times when a song started out with one group of people, and then more and more groups were brought in, first as counterpoints, then as harmony. That was Doctorow's point, made brilliantly, audibly obvious by the amazing music of Ragtime: we are a discordant, divided nation of the affluent, the immigrants, and the blacks (to note the three major groups that are featured in the Ragtime musical), but we have the potential to come together.

Overall, Ragtime was one of the most amazing performances I've seen at the Berkeley Playhouse. It apparently has their largest cast (because they couldn't use the same actors for different roles as they often do, because the whole ensemble came together for many songs). It had some of the most intricate stagework (with lots of mobile platforms that were constantly moved, even during the scenes). It had great writing (which moved between scene and narrative). It had moments of wonderful humor. And it had songs which were mainly memorable for the bombastic renditions of ragtime melodies that often featured the entire cast working together. It was a play that almost left me exhausted because it was so wonderful but also so active.

And the topics are unfortunately very true to America 110 years after the setting of the play, 40 years after the writing of the novel, and 20 years after the production of the musical. Racism, bigotry, the plight of immigrants, misogyny, the reduced role of women in society. Love, hatred, division, unity.

It was an awesome experience. Go see it. Though probably not with young children.
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K. and I were both pretty surprised when we saw that Berkeley Playhouse was doing Annie again, because we'd just seen it there a year or two ago.

Except it turns out it was six years again. I decided that repeating such a popular kid-oriented play at the Playhouse six years later was probably OK.



And, it was fun to see all the songs performed again. However, K. pointed out that one of the show's problems is that its best song is the second one.

I agree.

That's "Hard Knock Life", by the way, a song that usually has great choreography involving mops and buckets and usually has great percussive undertones to the song. And it's high energy and clever.

(Nowadays, I'd expect to see "Hard Knock Life" as an 11 o'clock number, but I don't think Annie has one.)



I liked the five-years ago Annie better because I thought the choreography was better; K. liked this one better because she though the directing was better, creating an improved throughline for the story.



The most amusing change this time around was that they had a live Sandy on stage this time (as opposed to a stuffed animal last time).

Oh, managing an animal on a live stage was clearly challenging though. That dog was constantly bribed with treats to run to Annie here and to stay on a chair there. He's going to be a fat doggie by the end of the show.

He also became obsessed with the orchestra during "Tomorrow" and started barking crazily. I think it was intentional, because I've seen Sandy barking uproariously in counterpart to "Tomorrow" before, but it was still hilarious to see the dark getting more and more obsessed with what going on understage, before the barking started.



I noticed that all the orphans (including Annie) were older this time around too.



Anyway a fun play. It's showing at the Berkeley Playhouse until the 23rd. Great entertainment for the Friday or Saturday before Christmas if you've already burned through The Last Jedi (which instead, we'll probably see on Friday or Saturday).



Here's what I wrote about Annie six years ago.
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Today we saw Sister Act: The Musical at Berkeley Playhouse. I've never seen the original, but it looks like the plot points are largely the same. The big difference is in the music. Apparently, the original had pop music from the time, while this one has original music, much of it with a disco feel, because the time period has been moved back to 1977-1978.

One of the things that amused me about the play is that it feels like someone sold it as "The Sound of Music, but set entirely in the nunnery". You see, a stranger comes to town (the nunnery / the Van Trapp estate). She teaches the residents (nuns / children) how to sing. They're brought together by this. Then villains descend (gangsters / Nazis) and the nuns gang up to protect the outsiders (the Van Trapps / Deloris). The musical even highlights this similarity by having Deloris gush early on about the nuns fighting the Nazis in The Sound of Music, then having one of her nuns sing a quick do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do.

Early on, I was troubled a bit by some of the racial politics, as the play was mocking the differences between an urban black woman and this largely white monastery. But it quickly moved on, and the rest of the musical was about the unifying powers of music and sisterhood. Something that really charmed me about the excellent writing of the musical was that it did a great job of strongly characterizing several of the characters, so that it didn't feel like a play about just Deloris, but also Sweaty Eddy, Mary Margaret, and the Mother Superior (at the least).

The most disappointing thing about the musical was that I found most of the women's songs just OK. I think that's because most of them didn't reveal character, like the best musical songs do. Instead they tended to reveal themes (e.g., Deloris' initial song was about heaven, then she and the nuns sang many songs together that were well-constructed religious songs that blended Deloris' jazzy gospel with religious teaching). But I also don't love gospel; it's OK. The exception was Mother Superior, who had some intriguing philosophical songs, where she was often talking to God. Oh, and Mary Margaret's "The Life I Never Led" was pretty good. So maybe it was just Deloris and the Nun Ensemble's songs that weren't as great as the rest.

The best songs, obviously, were then from the men, which was a bit sad in a play peopled by so many strong women. Curtis Shank had a great murder/love song about Deloris called "When I Find My Baby", that we think may be what made some people decide at intermission that perhaps they didn't want to return for the second half with their children. Then Sweaty Eddie had "I Could Be That Guy", an "I Want" song, but one that really went to the core of his character, that had some great choreography, some shocking costume changes, and made him the star of our local show due to the terrific performance.  Then the bad guy's henchmen had a hilarious song about seducing nuns called "Lady in the Long Black Dress".

And how can you fault lyrics that rhyme "Mary Magdalene" (twice, I think) and "transubstantiation" (once, I think)?

Good actors and singers, as usual. Sweaty Eddy was the hit, as I said. A few tripped up lines, because this was opening weekend. 

Irreverent and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. It's showing for the next month.

shannon_a: (Default)
We closed out the season at Berkeley Playhouse this afternoon with Tarzan: The Stage Musical. It was entirely meh.

I can't totally blame the Playhouse, because it was a real dog of a show. The problem starts with its plot, which is all over the place. It's a story about a boy avenging his parents death! (And oh boy, the start of the play is gruesome with the killing of said parents by a leopard on stage and later the killing of that leopard.) No, it's about an outsider finding his own family. No, it's about an abusive adoptive parent. No, suddenly at the end of Act I, it realizes that it's a Disney play and it rather quickly introduces an insipid romance. No, it's about bad guys destroying nature. Then the big finale is about Tarzan finding out who he was, which was literally only an issue for one song, far far earlier in the play. There is no through line, and the rapid-fire introduction of all these various elements meant there was no real characterization and no real plot development along the way. (OK, a little bit, mostly about Tarzan and his ape mom.)

And the messaging is often troublesome as well. I mean, we know that Disney romances are going to be utterly unrealistic and offer bad modeling for young adults, but Jane falling in love with someone she can't even communicate with, mainly because he's mostly naked all the time ... that's horrifying. And then after a play that was mostly about finding family, Tarzan and Jane are totally OK with Tarzan abandoning that family, until he's guilted into staying by his abusive adopted father's death. And then Jane leaves her family, and that's totally OK and not even commented on, because she's the woman. Meanwhile, the ape-murderer is just wheeled away in a cage like it's no big deal (which turns out to be a [BAD] change from the movie.)

And the music, it's almost totally soulless and unmemorable. (I kind of liked "I Need to Know", which was the one thing that tied to Tarzan's who-I-am finale, but mainly because its tune reminded me of Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower")

SIGH.

The actors actually weren't great either, though that might have been the poor source material. The young Tark was superb: gymnastic, emotive, and enthusiastic. But she appears in one scene. The older Tark was pretty good too, but his relationship with Tarzan was one of the things that notably suffered in this horribly truncated script. Jane was the third best, but beyond that we're getting into "OK" land. (There wasn't anyone bad, because this is the Berkeley Playhouse, but just a lot of "fine".)

The best performers in the play? Actually the back-up dancers, who did many awesome, acrobatic dances. And when the backup dancers are the best thing about the play, that's a bad sign.

The Playhouse was trying to figure out how to make their Tarzan as "immersive" as the Broadway experience, and they did so by making heavy use of their center aisle and their side aisles. At one point we had a snarling leopard swinging mere feet from us. Kimberly wasn't doing entirely well during the play and was not pleased when apes, having looted the Porter camp, ran up our aisle and tried to encourage her to bang on a metal mixing bowl. No amount of frantic shaking of her head deterred the apes. I finally had to rescue her by leaning over and giving the bowl a ba-bam.

And that was Tarzan.

Next up Sister Act, which I'll have to see early on, before life becomes some amount of busy in October.

PS: The most memorable song of the day was actually Schoolhouse Rock's "Three Ring Government", which we listened to while walking to the Playhouse after talking about how Trump doesn't play well with others and thinks he's the boss of the whole gov't. I thought it kind of sad that a cartoon song overshadowed a whole Broadway play until I learned that it (and many other Schoolhouse Rock songs) was written by Lynn Ahrens, who went on to become the broadway composer of Seussical (our first, excellent Berkeley Playhouse play) and Ragtime (which is showing next year and I'm now enthusiastic about).
shannon_a: (Default)
Urinetown. That's pretty much San Francisco, isn't it? Maybe Berkeley too? Except the play says it's all our towns.



We actually went the play today with our friends M. and K. and daughter M. I think this is a first for us at the Playhouse, as we're usually solitaire goers. But we had a nice lunch with them at the Blue House in the Library Gardens, then a nice walk through campus (after walking a few scummy blocks of downtown Berkeley), then we saw the play. It's a nice bit of community and hanging out.



So, the play. It's satire and social commentary. It's about corporations taking over and plutocracy given precedence over human necessities. (Yes, like peeing.) It's also about rebelling, and how the rebellion can be as bad the corpocratic fascism, though I find the message gets a bit more muddled there.

That's because the play is also about Broadway, about the expectations of musicals, and how artificial some of them are. There was a lot of fourth-wall-breaking in the person of narrator Officer Lockstock. And there was a lot of exaggerated shock ("Whaaaaaaaat?") and more useless pirouetting than I've seen in two or three musicals. A lot of it was pretty hilarious, which is a good way to couch serious commentary. But the messaging got a little confusing because of those two competing issues: was the way the rebellion became what it despised actually about the rebellion against corpocracy or was it a strike against the happy endings of musicals. I dunno.

Throughout the early part of the play, I felt like every song came from a different musical, which was cool. Some of it felt very classic, and some of it felt modern. Near the end of the first act, everyone started waving flags as they rebelled, and that was the first one where I could directly spot the influence, which was of course Les Miserables. Then the second act started off with Russian dancing, which was clearly influenced by Fiddler on the Rooftop (To Life!) and Kimberly quickly recognized the finger-snapping of the next song as influenced by West Side Story. That was another fun element. (And it turned out that we got many of the direct references, though I later discovered that the wonderful gospel song that I couldn't recognize but seemed so familiar was influenced by "Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat", from <I>Guys & Dolls</i>; and I've never seen two of the other influences <i>The Threepenny Opera</I> and <I>The Cradle Will Rock</i>).

Overall a fun play, a thoughtful play, a weird play, and for at least one scene a shocking play. As usual there were great actors at the Playhouse, including Lockstock (our narrator), Hope (our female lead), and Little Sally (our youngest rebel). I'd recommend it, except that was the last performance.
shannon_a: (Default)
K. and I saw our newest musical at the Berkeley Playhouse today, Billy Elliot: The Musical. It was most excellent, and a good panacea to mediocre plays of late.

The well-known story (based on the film) is of a boy who wants to become a ballet dancer, in a '80s mining town, where it was even more taboo. However that '80s date is also key, because it's right at the heart of Margaret Thatcher's dismemberment of England and in fact the story is set during a mining strike.

And personally, it was that historical story that really touched me. Of people losing their way of life*. But it wasn't just about livelihood, it was about community. This mining village was truly a family, and many of the songs that touched me most ("The Stars Look Down", "Solidarity", "Once We Were Kings") focused on that.

However, it was also hard not to be touched by the pathos at the heart of many of these peoples' lives, and their stern determination to forge on (for example: "Grandma's Song", "Mum's Letter", and "Deep into the Ground").

It was really a beautiful distillation of a whole way of life.

Yes, Billy's story was touching too. Yes, the dancing was beautiful.

Oh, and I loved some of the staging too (which I expect comes right from the script). Billy learning to dance as police and miners play hide and seek, sometimes dancing on their own (that's in "Solidarity") and Billy dancing with his older self ("Swan Lake"). Beautiful.

Overall, my favorite Berkeley Playhouse play in a while. And 20 days left if you're in Berkeley and want to see it.

* Your political assignment for the week is to compare and contrast the miners of Durham with the blue collar workers of the Rust Belt, both losing their way of life, one turning to each other, the others to Donald Trump.
shannon_a: (Default)
Yesterday night, Kimberly and I went to see The Importance of Being Earnest, put on by the Actors Ensemble of berkeley up at the Live Oak Theatre.

I think we've grown somewhat spoiled by our local community theaters, Berkeley Playhouse and Shotgun Players, because they've bother grown to be entirely professional companies. While the Actors Ensemble of Berkeley, it was ... well, amateur.

I was somewhat forewarned when we were sitting in the teenie lobby, waiting for them to open the doors. A couple of old folks were there running things, and they were talking about stuff like maybe they should think about running some ads (for the show ending in a week) and how they had just 16 pre-orders (thankfully, the small theatre ended up being more than half full).

Inside the theatre, the sets were OK. Kimberly says the costumes were generally badly fitting, though I scarcely noticed.

The play somewhat disturbingly started with one of the servants sitting on stage reading for 10 minutes. As the clock ticked to 8:10 for a show that was supposed to have started at 8:00, with the servant on stage the whole time, I began to wonder if we'd tricked into some performance art BS. Fortunately we then got started for real.

But the acting ...

The big problem was Lady Bracknell, and that's a pretty big problem in "The Importance of Being Earnest". She was constantly forgetting her lines, and the rest of the time she seemed like she was on the verge of forgetting them. There'd be a lag, and then she'd blurt it out, stomping all over the actual content of the line along the way. Which is a shame because Bracknell of course has many of the best lines in the play. But we really didn't to appreciate any of them (except a couple I appreciated because I knew they were coming). The program book said the actress has been in theatre for 40 years, and even did some Off-Broadway, so it makes me feel bad that she might be losing what she loves to do.

Chasuble meanwhile was horribly overacted. And I couldn't tell if he was also forgetting lines or if the big pauses and stutters were more bad overacting. Earnest (Jack) was wooden. But things improved from there. Prism was OK. Gwen and Cecily were good.

And Algie, he saved the play. The actor was quite good, and he has most of the other really good lines. And he was very amusingly (and appropriately) constantly eating. He sometimes used this to purposeful humor such as one line he gave that was largely muffled by what he was eating, but which had to have been intentional because Jack then repeats what he says. And this all led to the funniest moment of the play, when Algie was eating muffins and accidentally spit some of it back on himself. He seized the moment (and the ejected muffin bit) and thew it violently down in great agitation, and you could see that he was just barely containing laughter. And on he went.

As for the play itself: it's Oscar Wilde. The play really feels like an excuse for everyone to spend two hours exchanging witticisms. And, if it feels a bit unbelievable at first, you soon lose yourself in the cleverness.

So, a fun play, thanks largely to the writing and the Algie.

(This is just the second play we've seen at Live Oak Theatre, the first being Rough Crossing, in 2001.)
shannon_a: (Default)
We saw Beauty & The Beast at the Berkeley Playhouse today, the 1993 musical based on the 1991 film, and I found it pretty meh.

Let's be honest, the plot is problematic. Beast imprisons Belle and holds her in his castle until she loves him. Meanwhile, her other suitor Gaston tries to win her over with sexual harassment and trickery. At least Belle's "I Want" song is about wanting to see the world ... though she pretty quickly forgets about that.

It also felt a little cookie cutter when compared to The Little Mermaid, out just a few years earlier. "Part of Your World" could have described Belle's desire to live beyond her provincial French village and the animated objects could have sung "Kiss the Girl" when they were trying to help Beast and Belle to fall in love, to end their curse.

Meanwhile, the actual music in Beauty & The Beast just wasn't nearly as good. The eponymous "Beauty & The Beast" is quite memorable and original, and the rest ... ? Not so much. In fact, I was shocked that the leads don't really have any good songs. "Beauty & The Beast" is sung by Mrs. Potts, while other songs that are pretty decent, such as "Gaston" and "The Mob Song" are ensembles. Belle and the Beast do have several songs of their own, but none of them stand out.

I think the musical is also hurt by the whole enchanted castle motif. The gothic elements can carry very well (and Berkeley Playhouse did so), but the animated objects: not so much.

The first Act was the most troublesome. Very little happens. Various people are mean or creepy. Beast is a jerk and Beauty hates him. The second Act was much better, and is the only thing that redeems the play. The heel turn toward Belle and Beauty loving each other is so sudden that it's a little hard to swallow, but seeing them together works better and we get lots of action.

Overall, I wasn't that happy when Berkeley Playhouse suddenly went heavy into Disney last year with Peter Pan and The Little Mermaid and this year with Beauty & The Beast and Tarzan. But, I liked Peter Pan and really enjoyed The Little Mermaid. The Beauty & The Beast was more what I expected: shallow and unmemorable.

(Ironically, I'd been looking forward to this one after the success of the last few and how catchy the theme song is; I just didn't know that was it.)

PS: Despite the fact that this musical didn't really strike me, Berkeley Playhouse's production was good. Belle was great, and thank god we live in a community where a very accomplished actress and singer can take the role without comment or complaint even when she isn't white. The staging was quite nice. The beast's costuming was very strong. But they weren't working with the best material.
shannon_a: (Default)
Surprise! The new Berkeley Playhouse play isn't a musical. Oh, there are a few short numbers, and somewhat surprisingly this played on Broadway and won some Tonies, but it's not really in the same category as an actual music. And that was a bit disappointing, because I'd been looking for a light-hearted musical today.

Surprise! The new Berkeley Playhouse play is a comedy. Pretty full-throated. Oh, there's some serious theming about childhoods and responsibility and doing good. But there's a lot of funny too.

I suppose I should back up: Peter and the Star Catcher is a Peter Pan prequel. We get Peter and the Lost Boys and the first Wendy (Molly) aboard a ship. And Captain Hook is there too and even pixie dust, if you know where to look.

The play is divided into two parts: the first Act is about setting up all the parts and putting them into position, and was definitely the slower of the parts; the second Act is about dumping everyone on the island, setting off all those explosions, and seeing what happens, and is definitely the more delightful half.

The humor in the play was very mixed. It ran the gamut from fart jokes and slapstick to rather clever word play and playful anachronisms. Unshockingly, I found the first dull, but appreciated the last. Actually, I was humored by some of the slapstick, like god-save-the-queening a banana.

The connections to Peter Pan were well-done and fun, particularly in the few cases where they subverted expectations.

The staging of the play may have been the most notable thing, because it was innovative and interesting. I think part of this was used to hold up the flabby first half of the play ... but it did so. For example in one scene Molly races through the ship looking for pigs, with a series of ladders being used to represent his trip and the actors playing out momentary scenes as she burst into each room. There were lots of practical effects like that, representing the sea, flying, and more. They even fought with rock-scissors-papers.

Overall, I enjoyed the play, though some of it was over-the-top and some was under-the-belt. But, it was generally fun, and a fine extension of mythology. I love ever-growing mythologies.

It really makes me want to see Finding Neverland, to add to my trilogy of Peter and Wendy, Peter Pan, and now Peter and the Starcatcher.

(And I hope the next Playhouse play is actually a musical!)
shannon_a: (Default)
Today K. and I saw The Little Mermaid at the Berkeley Playhouse. I was surprised to read that the stage adaptation was a relatively recent thing, dating back to just 2007 or 2008. Which I suppose explains what Aladdin was still showing in New York when I was there.

Anywho, as far as I can tell I've never actually seen the Disney movie. However I was familiar with several of the songs from my Broadway channels on Pandora (particularly "Part of Your World" and "Under the Sea").

Overall, the music was quite nice. My favorite two were Sebastian's songs, "Under the Sea" and "Kiss the Girl" which are both obviously calypso. I think that unique style is what really makes them shine. (And I was unsurprised to discover that they were the two up for awards.) But I also loved the songs by the Daughters of Triton, particularly "Daughters of Triton" (which to me felt reminiscent of "So Long, Farewell" from The Sound of Music) and "She's in Love" (which sounded like it came right out of Hairspray). I know some of the songs are purposefully references to older songs, but if any of those was intended, I don't see any discussions of that.

As for the story: it's good enough. A typical Disney princess. Ariel's 'I want' song, "Part of Your World" almost feels like it could be swapped with "A Whole New World" from Aladdin. But I appreciate the fact that the few times in which it looks like Ariel is going to entirely give up her agency, she draws back: she ultimately saves herself from Ursula and after Triton and Erek both try, then Triton says she can decide for herself ("speak for herself", K. points out) when Erek asks to marry her.

Overall, an enjoyable play. I'd like to see more other stuff, not more Disney, but they have a few more coming up next season.

PS: Gotta guess that the lesbian unrequited love subtext between Flounder and Ariel was totally not in the movie ... but obviously in the musical.
shannon_a: (Default)
Today we saw a play of To Kill a Mockingbird at the Berkeley Playhouse. It was a wonderful performance that left me in tears. And that's because it's a wonderful book. It's a bit harder to review the play on its own, except to say that it faithfully reproduces and abridges the book.

I thought it was pretty clear that lot of Harper Lee's prose was reproduced exactly. An older Jean Louise Finch shares the stage with the younger actors and as she narrates you can hear Lee's voice.

And it's such a wonderful story that Lee tells. About community and racism. About personal courage and personal cowardice. About innocence ... lost.

The staging by Berkeley Playhouse was also quite beautiful. There was a massive woodcut of a tree as the backdrop, with some sort of screen behind it that glowed with a variety of colors. In the first act, as Scout and Jem enjoyed their final summer of innocence, it was lit bright oranges and purples, and you could feel the sun-kissed days streaming by forever. Then we opened the second act on the trial of Tom Robinson, and a black curtain was pulled up behind the tree. It receded when the trial did, but the bright colors were gone. The backdrop was now gray, lighting up to a somewhat vibrant blue only when Bob Ewell tried to murder the kids. The wonderful staging made me appreciate the wonderful structure of the book even more, because you could see how that trial was the dividing point between innocence and maturity, as Scout and Jem were brutally thrust into adulthood by it.

The actors were great too ...

But the whole play was surprisingly subdued. It was offered as a quiet story, and that somehow felt appropriate, because it let the harsh edge of this story cut through. But it did keep any of the actors from being able to step out and really excel (though Jem managed to overshadow the stage at times).

Anyway, great book, great show. We actually didn't attend the last show for once (because I'll be in New York next Sunday), which means it's still showing for another week. And it's highly recommended.



The play made me want to reread To Kill a Mockingbird, which I don't think I've read since high school. Shockingly, I don't think we have a copy of this book in our house, despite it being one of the top books from American literature.

However last year I decided I had no interest in alleged sequel Go Set a Watchman. I don't really care about the hi-jinx involved in its publication, and whether Lee approved it. I lost interest when I learned that it assassinates Atticus Finch's character. Then I lost even more interest when it came out that the publisher was purposefully misrepresenting the book, and it was just an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. I generally don't feel the need to see the early drafts of any of the books I love; the polished, published one is good enough, thank you.

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