Woody Weingarten

My review of “4000 Miles” requires only four words: It’s sweet. See it.

But you have to get there in a hurry — it’s only scheduled to run through tomorrow night.

Prefer a little embellishment? OK then, here goes…

Playwright Amy Herzog, 33, has written a thoroughly charming, tender show about Vera, a 91-year-old granny who’s still a full-blooded Commie-Pinko-Fellow Traveler, and her 21-year-old neo-hippie grandson Leo, a latter-day armchair anarchist stuck in a belated coming-of-age learning curve.

He unexpectedly visits her slightly rundown, rent-controlled Greenwich Village apartment after a cross-country bike trip that’s left him smelly, broke, frazzled, confused and intensely desirous of comfort and love.

He last was there a decade ago, for the funeral of her Marxist editor-writer husband.

More often than not, he calls her Vera or “dude.”

They’re uncomfortable together, and director Mark Rucker underscores those awkward moments by using lengthy pauses that counter the crisp dialogues in the American Conservatory Theater show in San Francisco.

As any semi-astute theatergoer might predict, Vera eventually meets most of the young man’s needs, unscrambling his mind and emotions along the way. He, of course, simultaneously helps her come to grips with her current life instead of focusing on the past or the habituated behaviors that no longer serve her well.

“4000 Miles” is more than the sum of its parts, though: Herzog turns a soft, endearing, often humorous series of vignettes into a sympathetic single-act portrait of, as the old song lyric goes, people who need people.

The play’s most dramatic moments take place offstage or in conversation, yet not once did I think the piece could be improved by an explosion, stabbing or car chase.

The comic drama, which deftly contrasts leftist politics of yesteryear with those of today, is staged without frills: The characters simply talk to each another.

Their venue, Vera’s apartment, should be recognizable as one inhabited by Every American Widow.

But the main characters’ flesh-and bloodness shouldn’t surprise anybody who googled Herzog’s background — Vera was directly inspired by the playwright’s now 96-year-old grandmother (who’s not above protesting in the streets yet).

“4000 Miles” also leans on a six-month stint the writer, then a novice actor, had spent living with the old lady in The Big Apple.

It was a period in which, she has contended, “It wasn’t clear the relationship would survive.”

The playwright also lifts another page from her mental autobiography: She’d made a painful, exhausting eight-week 4,250-mile trip across the United States with Habitat for Humanity.

Plot highlights, ranging from droll to poignant, include Vera detailing her husband’s sexual affairs; the bizarre death of Leo’s best friend, Micah; a misimpression about Leo kissing his adopted sister, Lily; and a granny-grandson stoner session that celebrates the autumnal equinox.

Susan Blommaert, wholly believable as Vera (although the actor is actually much, much younger), finds a synchronistic stage partnership in Reggie Gowland as the youth.

The show, which runs only an hour and 20 minutes without intermission (and which won two Obie Awards for its 2011 Lincoln Center staging in Manhattan), is not a sequel to Herzog’s “After the Revolution” despite Vera being a continuing character.

Speaking of characters, Camille Mana gloriously renders Amanda as a high-energy art student and Leo pickup who’s an almost-one-night-stand. She appears in only one scene but nearly steals the show.

OMG. It seems I’ve written a deluge of words. I probably should have stopped at the pithier “It’s sweet. See it.”

“4000 Miles” plays at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco, through Feb. 10. Performances Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m.; matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $105. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

Has it really been 10 years since I first saw “Wicked” in its pre-Broadway run in San Francisco?

Indeed.

Back when, I thought the show was as deep as a pool that had been drained yet as light and wondrous as an exquisite soufflé.

Recently I went to opening night of its latest incarnation, at SHN’s Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco.

The show, which has grossed more than $500 million over the last decade on the Great White Way, where it’s still financially healthy, was severely restructured before it originally opened in New York.

And it’s been retailored a bit since.

Now, unless you’re in the mood for a dose of heavy Shakespeare or Kafka or perhaps an experimental John Cage-like version of “Les Miz,” you should find this a spectacular divertissement — in every sense of the word spectacular.

The glitz-laden stagecraft — including gigantic sets with their zillion lights ablaze and guaranteeing to keep PG&E in the black for a long time — will keep you, well, spellbound.

And you’re likely to find the sumptuous, ruffled costumes equally stunning.

Expect total visual and vocal candy.

That having been said, the musical comedy’s still as deep as a pool that had been drained yet as light and wondrous as an exquisite soufflé.

The lead role of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, which was padded exponentially since the show’s inception, lies now in the green makeup and extremely capable throat and of Dee Roscioli, a Broadway luminary who’s portrayed Elphaba more than 1,000 times.

The clout of her pipes is amazing to behold.

On opening night, the role of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, was sung by Cassie Okenka, arguably the most skilled understudy since Barbra Streisand exploded onstage in “Funny Girl.”

Replacing the flu-ravaged Patti Murin, Okenka was no slouch in the comedy department, either.

Her enchanting scratchy voice is akin to that of Kristin Chenoweth (who’d blossomed here in the pre-Broadway version and then went to New York wearing full star skin), and her outrageously manic body movements kept the entertainment moving as fast and exciting as magical white river rapids.

The fantasy plotline, a prequel/sequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” hasn’t changed: Elphaba and Glinda are mismatched roommates and schoolyard best friends. They become rivals. They grow and overcome their differences.

Along the way, “Wicked,” in hit-and-run fashion, digs into the subjects of popularity, power and prejudice.

Think about it.

Think, too, about The Emerald City and Dorothy’s shiny red slippers, as well as the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion.

Then, perhaps, think about The Odd Couple meeting The Lord of the Rings.

Opening night of the revival, Kevin McMahon’s thinking was probably elsewhere — on how to suitably step in for the flu-ish Tom McGowan as the wizard.

He needn’t have worried: He was strong.

Strong support also came via the performances of Kim Zimmer as lower-level villainess Madame Morrible; Demaree Hill as Nessarose, Elphaba’s disabled younger sister; Clifton Davis as a goat/scapegoat/professor, Dr. Dillamond; and Cliffton Hall as Fiyero, Glinda’s intended who’d rather be with Elphaba.

But the two-hour, 25-minute production did have a few weak spots.

Words sung in unison by the chorus were sometimes muffled to the point of being indecipherable. Much of the choreography seemed like works in progress, with the flying monkeys flailing wildly and the rest of the ensemble twirling and kicking with bland precision. Superficiality prevailed.

 

And Act I felt a trifle long at an hour and a half.

 

Highlights were not difficult to ascertain, though. They included the first act finale, “Defying Gravity,” which ended with breathtaking special effects; several duet riffs by the two witches; and the lone memorable Stephen Schwartz tune, “Popular.”

 

All in all, hilarity was almost ubiquitous in the audience. Simple lines like “Something’s wrong — I didn’t get my way” evoked big laughs.

 

Belted-out songs, meanwhile, drew big applause and boisterous cheers — even if no one could remember the words or melodies five minutes after leaving the theater.

 

You might pay no-never-mind to that, however, since “Wicked” has more pleasurable big-production numbers per square inch, more buoyance per minute, than any show in recent memory.

 

Versions were previously staged in San Francisco — in addition to the initial 2003 run — in 2005 and 2010. In each of them, the Glinda character came and went in an ostentatious bubble, a quick prompt to the show’s bubbly mien.

 

And with all that effervescence, it was — and is — virtually impossible for anyone who loves flamboyant theatricality to dislike this variation on a familiar theme.

 

“Wicked” runs at the Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco, through Feb. 17. Night performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $50 to $275 (subject to change). Information: (888) 746-1799 or shnsf.com.

 

Cabaret producer Marilyn Levinson has lived in Larkspur a dozen years. But her work has thrived in San Francisco, with its impact felt throughout the Bay Area.

We share muffins in a casual breakfast chat at Corte Madera’s Il Fornaio restaurant. She laughs freely — and often.

Her eyes and conversation sparkle almost as brightly as her tasteful diamond earrings.

She charms me with her first few sentences.

Clearly, she explains, cabaret “can be much more than a show in a tiny dark cavern by a stereotypically aging ex-Broadway songstress in a tight gown dripping with sequins.”

Sooooo much more.

I’m there to glean details about the performances she’s generating at the Venetian Room of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel.

But I also get intriguing onstage, backstage and off-the-record stories about artists she encountered since she swapped lawyering for coordinating Cabaret Marin, which morphed into Bay Area Cabaret.

The nonprofit’s ninth season opened Oct. 28 with “the quintessential cabaret singer, Mary Wilson, in an intimate act that talks about her life after The Supremes,” then continued Nov. 11 with Tommy Tune. Another schedule highlight was a Dec. 9 encore  by movie-TV-Broadway star Peter Gallagher, who prompted one female fan to write, “When he left the stage, I was ready to see his show all over again — and have his baby.”

Levinson finds it impossible to pick only one favorite local cabaret star or moment.

But she did enjoy Tony-winner Lillias White spontaneously yanking off her sharp-pointed high-heels and saying, ‘I’d like to see how you’d feel if you had to wear these shoes.’

Laura Benanti also delighted her by pulling out a uke and confessing “that when

she was a girl, she thought Marilyn Monroe was so sexy when she played ukulele in ‘Some Like It Hot,’ then later realized that the ukulele wasn’t what made her so sexy.”

This six-show season, her ninth, will end with a tribute by Oscar-winning lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman to the late Marvin Hamlisch, on the composer’s June 2 birthday. Hamlisch had been the star when the Venetian Room reopened after being dark for 21 years.

Such offerings are a long way from Levinson’s first Marin productions, which spotlighted an opera singer, Sondheim music and dog stories.

Today, she says, “we try to mix it up, to aim things at difference audiences — like those of ‘Rent,’ Teen Idol and the older-crowd Chita Rivera appeals to.”

The producer’s moment of truth occurred when the last Mabel Mercer Cabaret Convention at the Herbst “was not too well attended despite the great performances. Because it was sad to see the audience dwindling, I thought it important to educate the audience or potential audience to an expanding definition of cabaret.”

Levinson’s introduction to the genre actually came at a little black-box theater in West Village in Manhattan, where she was living at the time. The singer, she remembers, “made me feel she was in dialogue with me in my living room, revealing herself. I just loved that.”

Her intro to show biz goes further back than that, however.

As executive coordinator of the precursor to the San Francisco Civic Light Opera, her mom invited stars such as Bing Crosby, Don Ameche and Mary Martin to their home.

Levinson herself volunteered at the American Conservatory Theatre as a teen, later founded a jazz dance company, worked for Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre, Broadway producer Arthur Cantor and became Yul Brynner’s road manager for his final national tour of “The King and I.”

And then she went to Stanford Law School, becoming an entertainment and intellectual-property lawyer. She wed, had two sons, and cocooned in Larkspur.

The most difficult part of her work now, she discloses, “is the booking process, which begins in New York in the coldest month of the year and can go on for a full nine months after that.”

What makes it particularly tough, she says, “is having to compete for talent with venues three or four times our size.”

As for her biggest reward, that’s seeing what top-notch cabaret artists she can snare.

In that regard, filling out this season will be Marin Mazzie and Jason Danieley, a Valentine’s Day offering Feb. 17; Elaine Paige, March 1; and Nellie McKay paired with Chanticleer, March 23.

Levinson started her cabaret business, she tells me, because she had experienced so much good cabaret in New York and didn’t want to see the genre die.

Obviously, she’s succeeding.

So all I can add is, “Viva cabaret!”

The Bay Area Cabaret series will be held at the Fairmont’s Venetian Room, 950 Mason St., atop Nob Hill, San Francisco, from Oct. 28 through June 2. Tickets: $40-$75 per show, (415) 392-4400 or www.bayareacabaret.org

 

Adrianne Goff could be a magician.

On a recent Saturday night at the Marin Rod & Gun Club, she yanked several rabbits out of a hat — simultaneously — to successfully produce, direct and star in an interactive comic murder-mystery dinner show aptly titled “Trouble at the Tropicabana.”

The slight-of-hand was needed because so many things were going south, as if Murphy’s Law had been cloned and re-cloned by a humorless sitcom writer.

Somehow, Goff managed to make the difficulties vanish — including a pre-show party that lingered too long, 30 aggressive wannabe theatergoers who showed up unexpectedly, waitresses who filled tall water glasses from a tiny pitcher that could replenish only two at a time at tables that sat eight, and a computer that conked out and had to be replaced before any essential recorded music could be played.

Goff’s Band-Aids, chewing gun and similar quick-fixes kept a packed house from shouting, “Adrianne, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

Not incidentally, if that reference means nothing to you, you must have missed each and every episode of the classic “I Love Lucy” series — and each and every one of Ricky’s mangled sentences.

The audience obviously hadn’t missed any. It cackled each time it was expected to during the campy, pun-laden, mistaken-identity, mega-melodramatic antics that took off where the historic and hysteric sitcom left off.

And at least a third of it grinned gleefully while misstepping all around the huge room in a makeshift, voluntary conga line.

None of the deer or elk heads on the walls criticized their dancing.

Goff, who, believe it or don’t, was also responsible for the costumes, was a comic standout as a whiny Lucy, donning a carrot-colored fright wig that intentionally didn’t cover all of her own brunette locks.

She and perfect sidekick Leslie Klor, who inhabited the body of Ethel, were funniest when they dressed in slapdash mustaches and black suits and delivered seamless clowning in the majestic tradition of Mutt and Jeff, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis.

They also were strikingly and stridently amusing in a set piece in which they talked extra fast trying to out-jabber one another.

Another dazzling performance came in the form of Vanessa Vazquez as Cookie, aka the duplicitous siren-vamp Celia B. DeMilo.

The dinner by caterer Stacy Scott that complemented the show was spicy, tasty and, appropriately, Cuban-based.

But not everything hit an “A” level.

The five “Tropicana Girls” would have garnered many more giggles had their simplistic choreography been outrageously klutzy instead of bland.

The often-repetitive script would have evoked a lot more guffaws had its spoofiness not been so faithful to the original and, instead, been translated into more visual, fresh gags.

And, unfortunately, the actors stayed mostly in the front of the audience rather than mingling with it, unlike the last Marin Murder Mysteries production at a smaller venue, San Rafael Joe’s.

The best move of the evening, however, was an ad lib from Wendell H. Wilson, who portrayed Ricky.

When a two-year-old sitting on his dad’s lap at a front table started to cry after a handgun was wielded, he told the boy, “We’re just playing. We’re all gonna have fun.”

Surely, most folks did.

“Trouble at the Tropicabana,” part of the Marin Murder Mysteries series, will play at the Marin Rod & Gun Club, 2675 E. Francisco Blvd., San Rafael, on various dates through New Year’s Eve. Reservations required. Tickets: $40 to $65, including dinner, tax and tip; $30, show only. Information: www.marinmurdermysteries.com or (415) 306-1202.

William S. Paley stands in front of Pablo Picasso’s classic “Boy Leading a Horse” in his New York City apartment.

You well might question the artistic wisdom of a man responsible for such lowbrow TV hits as “I Love Lucy,” “Gunsmoke” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

But William S. Paley, longtime titan of the CBS network, vividly demonstrated through major artworks he collected that he was perceptive and intuitive — and perhaps clairvoyant as to which artists would grow in fame.

“The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,” a new, multi-faceted exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, can prove it.

In the show are masterpieces from Braque, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Miro, Picasso, Renoir, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec and others, many others. Sixty paintings, drawings and sculptures in all.

Impressionism. Post-Impressionism. School of Paris. Modernism.

Exquisite.

And evocative.

Timothy Anglin Burgard, curator-in-charge of American Art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, indicated that the exhibit, organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, to which Paley had bequeathed his collection, simultaneously informs and inspires viewers.

Bulls-eye.

Consider, for example, Henri Matisse’s 1927 painting “Woman with a Veil,” which shows his desire to utilize “a flatness, a two-dimensionality” combined with a classic pose of melancholia to “get at a greater truth…as well as beauty.”

Or two Pablo Picasso paintings from his Rose Period — the 1905-06 “Boy Leading a Horse” (which was owned originally by Oakland poet laureate Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo) and the 1906 “Nude With Joined Hands.”

“Boy,” which portrays a much younger Picasso than the 27-year-old painter who’d already become a master when he brush-stroked it, is visibly a work of genius.

It also was a linchpin of last year’s successful San Francisco MOMA exhibit, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde.”

For “Nude,” the artist painted a definitively sculpted head atop a less-defined body of a woman who is modestly covering her genitalia with her hands.

It’s alleged that Picasso stole the sculpture on which he based the head from the Louvre, returning it when he was done.

The exhibit, not incidentally, is majestically mounted, with paintings given breathing space on shaded walls that make them stand out.

Facts about Paley’s collection can be intriguing. But so can the attendant fiction.

In that category, said Burgard, is the broadcasting innovator’s middle initial, which didn’t stand for anything (though he’d never dissuade folks from believing that it represented his father’s name, Samuel).

Another inaccuracy: Paley was a co-founder of CBS, not its exclusive architect, Burgard noted during his brilliant and witty pre-opening press tour of the exhibit.

Also, Paley insisted “Woman with a Veil” was purchased directly from Matisse. The truth, said Burgard, is that the spinmeister bought it from artist’s son.

One real fact is that Paley’s first art purchase, in 1935, was the 1875-1876 “Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat” by Paul Cézanne.

Another fact is that Paley, as a Jew, had to overcome the rampant discrimination of his time.

He was denied admission to fraternities in college, and despite his subsequent major philanthropy and an upper-crust reputation garnered by owning a string of racing thoroughbreds, he was denied membership in multiple posh clubs.

As a young man, Paley, who died at age 89 in 1990, wasn’t exactly self-made. His father had earned millions manufacturing and selling cigars, giving William S. Paley quite a jump-start.

Paley the Collector, on the other hand, was strictly his own person: The range of the paintings in this exhibit is wider than you might expect.

On the modern end, for instance, are two existential early-‘60s triptychs of distorted faces by Francis Bacon. According to the audio tour, the artist said his portraits were of friends — because if they hadn’t been, “I could not do such violence to them.”

In contrast, on the other end, are two soft 1866-68 pencil sketches by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, “Portrait of a Woman” and “The Jockey.”

A photographic bonus for visitors is a hallway of large images revealing the interior of Paley’s Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, where masterworks adorned the walls.

If you visit the de Young exhibit, make sure to stop in front of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s “Mme Lili Grenier.”

It’s a 1988 painting soul-stripping the wife of a wealthy friend. She’s lounging in a chair while wrapped in a Japanese kimono, her hands toying with a pale blue ribbon. At age 20, she has a smug look of self-satisfaction — reflecting, most likely, how well she married.

Don’t miss it.

In fact, don’t miss the exhibit as a whole.

“The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism” will be at the de Young, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, through Dec. 30. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., except Fridays, when open until 8:45. Admission: $10 to $20, free for members and children 5 and under. Information: (415) 750-3600 or www.deyoungmuseum.org.

 

I’m surprised that, considering their enormous popularity, Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine and other trademarked superheroes don’t show up in professional wrestling circles.

Those figures apparently are confined, principally, to comic books and screen adaptations.

So wrestling buffs have to settle for the more mundane likes of John Cena or past heavyweights like Gorgeous George, Hulk Hogan, The Rock, Steve Austin or Andre the Giant.

Such mental meanderings lead me to Kristoffer Diaz’s “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” one of the season’s worst titles but most amusing plays.

The serio-comic satire, proficiently directed by Jon Tracy, is unique.

The Aurora Theatre Company stage in Berkeley has been transformed into a wrestling ring by set designer Nina Ball and the actors mutated into what one correctly refers to as “caricatures in a world of cartoons.”

To ensure a frenzied atmosphere, the audience is urged during a pre-play warm-up to shout out the characters’ hyperbolic names, boo the villains, cheer the good guys, and perforate the air with outstretched fingers.

The crowd spiritedly follows instructions, lending an exciting interactive quality to the production.

The only thing missing, according to my archaic recall of a live match in New Jersey, would be a cloud of cigar smoke hovering over the ring.

Because the Aurora is small, the faux wrestlers often thrust themselves in your face.

More distant are twin screens in the rear. They playfully project a variety of images, including deliberately awkward and de-sexed go-go dancing by Elizabeth Cadd.

As well as two wonderful sequences that Photoshop real-life heroes Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King into shots of the flamboyant champ, Chad Diety, and villains like Stalin and Darth Vader with the contender, VP, who changes into a Muslim-terrorist type, The Fundamentalist, who can annihilate foes with a mysterious kick dubbed “The Sleeper Cell.”

You need know nothing about wrestling or its Pay-Per-View paydays to enjoy the ridicule.

That’s because the protagonist, The Mace, a journeyman Puerto Rican wrestler from the Bronx who’s forever cast as a loser, provides all the necessary background.

He intertwines fact, fiction, labor-versus-management feelings, metaphor, social consciousness, seriousness and humor in his narration. At the same time, he deals with characters wrestling with their identities as men, as ethnics, as Americans, as wage slaves.

His is a fast-talking monologue that ties together action scenes as professionally as a doc might stitch a wrestler’s wounds.

Actual wrestling-mat moments, by the way, are chiefly limited to the second act of the two-hour play, which make it pass more swiftly than the first.

Nasser Khan is exceptional as VP (or Vigneshwar Paduar), an anti-stereotype character who speaks six languages, does one-arm push-ups and performs rap.

And Beethovan Oden stands out as Chad, a charismatic giant whose strut replicates actual “champions” of the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE instead of WWF).

Tony Sancho, who portrays Macedonio Guerra (or The Mace), also does well, considering he has about a zillion words to deliver. His speeches thankfully are leavened with bright asides to the audience and countless sardonic one-liners (“It is teamwork even if I’m the only one on the team doing the work”).

If I closed my eyes, I could visualize the WWF’s Vince McMahon via Rod Gnapp’s portrayal of THE league owner and chief conniver, Everett K. Olson, who at one juncture reclines effortlessly on one rope of the ring.

Finally, Dave Maier skillfully rounds out the cast — in multiple roles, including a lithe descent from the ceiling.

Sometimes “The Elaborate Entrance” message is a bit heavy-handed, such as the dollar sign displayed on Chad’s hindquarters. And sometimes it borders on the offensive, as when it derides pro wrestling’s racist and xenophobic attitudes via over-the-top costuming by Maggie Whitaker (an incredibly large Mexican sombrero and ammo belts, for example).

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety” won an Obie and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In my view, it deserved both accolades.

Playwright Diaz, an honest-to-goodness wrestling fan with a full grasp of the genre, has been quoted as saying that the mock sport is a “really wonderful art form but…does tend to play to the lowest common denominator.”

No matter. Diaz has created a let’s-pretend world that highbrow or middlebrow audiences can enjoy every bit as much.

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” runs at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, through Sept. 30. Night performances, Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Tuesdays and Sundays, 7 p.m.; matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $32-$50. Information: (510) 843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org

 

It’s fast-paced.

It’s a clever dismemberment of East-West cultural differences and the mind-muddles created by shoddy translation.

And it’s consistently funny.

The laughter starts even before “Chinglish” — a two-act bilingual comedy at the Berkeley Rep — begins.

Humdrum theater messages about shutting off cell phones and finding exits in case of emergency become a gigglefest by being simulcast incomprehensibly in Mandarin and English.

Mostly, the show’s hilarity doesn’t translate well in a review — the best lines just don’t work on paper.

On stage and in context, though, hilarity is guaranteed.

I guess you have to be there.

As the play unfolds, playwright David Henry Hwang and director Leigh Silverman rarely wait for one chuckle to subside before beckoning the next. I sometimes felt as if I were witnessing a stand-up’s jackhammer delivery rather than a two-hour production.

Supertitle projections of mangled English translations — readable white letters against a gray backdrop — added a steady stream of chortles.

The story, which underscores cultural, political and relationship gaps between citizens of the United States and China, focuses on an ineffectual American salesman and ex-Enron lackey (Daniel Cavanaugh, portrayed exquisitely by Alex Moggridge) who has traveled to Asia to lock up a game-changing contract for his family’s sign-making business.

He quickly becomes entangled with a sexy bureaucrat (Michelle Krusiec as Xi Yan), a British teacher masquerading as a consultant (Brian Nishii playing Peter), and a Communist minister trapped in a futile attempt to save face and freedom (Larry Lei Zhang as Cai).

Krusiec foreshadows the verbal shenanigans that lie ahead when, following a torrent of English words, she declares in Mandarin, “I didn’t catch a word.”

He later offers a perfect parallel to define the farce: “I don’t have a clue what’s really going on around here.”

One set piece, in which the enigmatic phrase “through the back door” repeatedly jumps out, is particularly engaging. Even more sidesplitting is an intercultural jumbled-word exchange reminiscent of the classic Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First” routine.

I also enjoyed watching Moggridge and Krusiec banter at length with a zero-sum understanding until, exhausted, they seemingly agree on a lone point and gleefully high-five each other.

Massive miscommunications tend to retain a vise-like grip on the audience’s funnybone. Such as when Moggridge tries to mumble “I love you” in Mandarin but it comes out, the third time around, as “Frog loves to pee.”

The more serious shades of “Chinglish” brought to my mind the real-life scandal revolving around Gu Kailai, wife of deposed political leader Bo Xilai. She was just given a two-year reprieve from the death penalty imposed for murdering a British businessman, and that is likely to be reduced to a life sentence.

For the record, there’s no reference in this play — which was written before the scandal erupted — to murder.

But the 55-year-old, Los Angeles-born Hwang, who won a Tony for “M. Butterfly” and an Obie for “Yellow Face,” obviously can “kill” at the box office. He just received a $200,000 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award for his body of solo work covering a 32-year span.

For “Chinglish,” on the other hand, he worked closely with a translator — because Hwang speaks only English.

The show, a co-production with the South Coast Repertory, had a four-month Broadway run starting in October 2011. After playing in Costa Mesa next January, it will go to Hong Kong, where it will be a March festival entry.

In Berkeley, revolving, beautifully designed sets by David Korins prove how rapidly locales can be switched.

And basic-black, we-mean-business costumes by Anita Yavich are impeccably functional. Brilliantly contrasting is her outlandish garb for a male Chinese translator: white shoes and ostentatious argyle sweater.

Sound by Darron L. West (particularly effective between scenes) and lighting by Brian MacDevitt (stretching from subtle to blinding) are both executed seamlessly and augment theatergoers’ pleasure.

“Chinglish” has time to play with only a few of the 10,000 Chinese calligraphy characters that comprise the language. Despite that, the show’s clearly a double-barreled winner.

With that appraisal in mind, I’m convinced you should seriously consider seeing it — twice, perhaps.

“Chinglish” plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley, through Oct. 21. Night performances, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinees, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14.50 to $99, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Twenty years ago, Woody Weingarten talked with composer Marvin Hamlisch, who just died at age 68. This is a slightly edited version of the tribute he filed shortly after that one-on-one interview.

Marvin Hamlisch dresses as if he’s first in line for a sale on invisibility.

The composer’s gray, gray suit looks like it had been pressed only minutes ago. His crisp pink tie attempts to disappear in the pale same-hue shirt on which it reclines. Although his black slip-ons are perfectly buffed, they somehow don’t reflect the light.

Behind that CPA exterior, however, is a soul that struts like a peacock.

Marvin Hamlisch, who by the age of 31 had won three Oscars and a Pulitzer, talks at first like a mama’s boy.

His eyes twinkle from behind rimless glasses and his thick lips curl into an industrial size grin when he describes Lilly.

“I had two wonderful parents,” he begins an interview in a San Francisco hotel suite, but when asked if he has a favorite anecdote, he draws laughter with a quick one-liner: “My mother was a Jewish anecdote.”

“She was the ultimate Jewish mother,” he continues. “When my father came home, she had a meal ready. Eat, eat, eat.”

Lilly and Marvin’s father, Max, taught their boy prodigy to love his music and his Jewishness. Because both had fled Nazi terrorism in Europe, however, they suggested he downplay his heritage.

But Marvin Hamlisch advertises his ethnicity. Like Barbra Streisand, whom he’s worked with, he has his original nose. Like Sandy Koufax, Hall of Famer who also balanced his background against his career, he won’t work on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.

Hamlisch has a piano with 88 keys and a mind with 888 opinions. Ask him a simple question and his mouth starts a marathon.

On cultural lines, for instance: “I feel ecumenical. I don’t like thinking of things being Jewish, Moslem, whatever. A piano is a piano — here, in China, in Tibet. Music is universal. I’m writing for everybody.”

Regarding his best-known creation, Chorus Line, the composer says he particularly enjoys when someone refers to it as “classic Hamlisch.”

In most other instances, Marvin Hamlisch hates to look back. So the man whose career hit a low when his musical Jean bombed in New York not long ago has climbed a new rocket, one with dual exhaust.

First, he’s peddling The Way I Was, a 234-page autobiography from Scribners written with the aid of Gerald Gardner.

It’s unlikely to become a smash because there’s no sex or violence, no kiss-and-tell sizzle.

“I have no desire to talk about old girlfriends,” Hamlisch says. “Why would I want to hurt my wife, to hurt myself, with that crap.”

Besides, he comments, “I hardly ever dated anybody. I had no high school sweethearts because I was working — zoom, off to here; whoosh, off to there.  My mind was always on one thing: ‘Get to Broadway.’”

Writing a book is a learning experience, he says. “It’s very cathartic. You let yourself off the hook for your mistakes.”

Hamlisch’s other new venture is a $7 million show, a musical adaptation of Neil Simon’s Goodbye Girl for Broadway.

“We haven’t had a musical-comedy in a long time,” he says, “and we’ve got comedy up the wazoo.”

Hamlisch worries, though, about the future of big-time theater. “I pray that Broadway will be here a generation from now. Look how many are not going to the theater. It’s too expensive. It’s becoming elitist entertainment. It costs $65 a person, plus dinner, plus parking — if everything goes right, if you get your car back, if you don’t get mugged.”

It’s becoming tougher and tougher, too, to find backers for shows. “Revivals are great for producers,” he notes. “They can raise the $5- or $6 million in a second. But for a new show, you have to audition, you have to play music out of context for very rich people. It’s a degrading way of working.” 

Once things get under way, however, everybody lightens up. “I’m a team player, part of a mosaic. I like it when the whole thing works,” says Hamlisch, who contends that “everything I write is in pencil. I’ll change anything —until we open.”

As for what he wants out of it all, it’s not money, it’s not fame. “My writing will give me, God willing, a legacy,” he says.

 

 

My memory is a trickster so I can’t swear to it. But I do recall seeing George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” as a teenager in 1951.

It was my first Broadway show.

I had no inkling then how good Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were as actors.

I recall later watching Jason Robards Jr. and Fredric March in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker.”

For me, acting was king.

And queen.

Then came the gimmickry. My first glimpse of the theatrical trend was when the chandelier crashed down in “Phantom of the Opera.”

That was followed by the helicopter landing onstage for “Miss Saigon” and, much more recently, Julie Taymor’s gloriously imaginative giant hollow puppets and people-in-animal-costumes in “The Lion King.”

Lots of musical charm was sandwiched in between, of course.

Stagecraft ruled.

Now comes “The War Horse” with its semi-mechanical “star,” Joey, a 120-pound, 10-feet-long, 8-feet-tall walking, rearing and breathing steed that takes three puppeteers to operate.

He’s impressive.

But does a gimmick, even a spectacular one, make the price of admission to this magical melodramatic epic worthwhile?

My unwavering answer is, “Yes, yes, and hell yes.”

It was impossible for me not to gaze with delight at the horse puppets (Tophorn is sort of a co-star, a black counterpart to Joey’s red bay, but also arresting are Coco and Heine and a much tinier Joey as a awkward foal).

They become decidedly more real than the human characters — endowed with life-like movements, emotions and sounds.

It’s easy to forget the steeds are moving not because of sinews and bloodstreams but rods and cables and other apparatus, so it’s no wonder when “War Horse” ended at the SHN Curran, the opening night audience gave mild applause to the actors and a standing ovation to the anatomically incorrect stallions.

Before that point, the production was enriched substantially via a white horizontal screen across the center of the backdrop.

The images projected onto it — including World War I battle scenes, rainstorms, skies and buildings — markedly helped the action come to life.

So did the period costuming of civilians and soldiers, inventive sets and props that surrealistically and nightmarishly depicted horrific killing devices such as cannon, planes and barbed wire, and dramatic musical soundbursts that contrasted with the sweet hopefulness of a strolling Irish balladeer.

Only the unmemorable acting by a large cast of cardboard characters (whose dialogue occasionally was too muffled for those in rear orchestra seats) and a trite, predictable storyline were found wanting.

The emphatically anti-war play, strewn with dead human and horse bodies, covers from 1912 through Armistice Day in 1918.

The plot’s a snap to summarize: A drunk trying to outdo his brother buys Joey at auction. The new owner’s teenage son, Albert, bonds with the animal and trains him. The horse is sold to the British Army, and later rescued by a German coward. The teen searches for his equine buddy.

Spotty moments of humor (many provided by a comic puppet goose that’s predisposed to biting) lighten the production, but mostly it’s a austere affair in which war scenes dominate even Joey’s majestic presence.

And where the first section of the 135-minute Tony award-winning show is straightforward and clear, moments in the second act can be momentarily confusing.

Nothing, however, can compete with Joey trotting up and down an aisle.

Because South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company creations are so special, all minor criticism can be shunted aside unless you opt to stay home because, as one woman bemoaned, “You know how I hate war movies — well, this isn’t any easier to take.”

“War Horse” runs at the SHN Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco, through Sept. 9. Night performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $31 to $100. Information: (888) 746-1799 or shnsf.com.

And the winner is — drumroll, please — Robin Williams.

Three generations of my family agreed his improv at 142 Throckmorton in Mill Valley became the apex of a recent fun-crammed Bay Area vacation.

The icing on our cake, you might say.

Williams headlined a bill that included funnyman Mort Sahl, who at 85 walks haltingly but retains a keen mind.

I’d planned for us to catch a weekly Mark Pitta & Friends comedy gig so was surprised to find us watching 90 minutes of improvisation as beneficiaries of a scheduling switch.

Set List, with its catchphrase “stand-up without a net,” was being filmed for United Kingdom telecasting.

Each comedian (including Pitta) was captivating, but Williams, undoubtedly his generation’s primo comic genius, exceeded everyone’s highest expectations.

His steel-trap mind was fully transparent.

He instantly absorbed the never-before-seen phrases that flashed on a screen behind him and wove them into a web of delight.

Yes, much of his humor, and that of the other verbal clowns, wasn’t for little kids — especially an uproarious rendition of a talking vagina.

But my 15-year-old grandson, Zach, roared.

So did my other grandson, who’s 24; my son, 46; and my wife, who’s been on the planet only two years less than my 74 years.

She, in fact, labeled the show “quintessential improv. Sahl was as sharp as a tack and Williams as sharp as two tacks.”

I shared all their euphoria.

I’d been in the theater many times, mostly to hear readings of plays by Writers with Attitude.

But the remodeled nonprofit theater, which dates back to 1915 when it showed Charlie Chaplin flicks for a few pennies, is also the site of concerts and jam sessions that include the likes of Joan Baez and Woody Allen (individually, not as a duet).

It’s worth supporting.

While planning the vacation for “the boys” from the East Coast, I couldn’t help but think I had 7,150,739 places to choose from — one each Bay Area resident might recommend.

At least that’s what it felt like when I invited suggestions from friends and colleagues.

The ideas poured in.

One of the best notions was the San Francisco Movie Tour, a three-hour bus ride featuring 70 clips from 60 films shot in the city, way beyond the anticipated “Bullit” and “Vertigo.”

If “Mrs. Doubtfire” star Robin Williams turned into the vacation cake’s frosting, this journey represented sparkling candles.

Wylie Herman, an actor well versed in cinematic lore, guided us. Humor and Hollywood back-lot scraps copiously trickled off his tongue.

When discussing the filming of the Mike Myers’ comedy, “So I Married an Axe Murderer,” for instance, he cited a Tinsel Town truism feared by actors and adored by Realtors: “The camera adds 10 pounds and five bedrooms.”

Zach called it “the best tour I’ve ever seen of San Francisco.”

And his father, my son Mark, gave it “two thumbs up — for a good balance between the films, the facts and the city sights.”

Another of the family favorites was a visit to the California Academy of Sciences, which is featuring a new exhibit and planetarium show, “Earthquake.”

A couple of dubious moments resurfaced for my wife and me since we’d been downtown when the Loma Prieta tremor hit in 1989. Though I was decidedly nervous about being in the “shake house” when it started rattling, I survived the faux temblor — and my trepidation — as I had the real one.

“The boys” appreciated it more.

They also liked the permanent displays — the waddling penguins, the spiral Rainforests of the World and the always-exhilarating underwater creatures of the Steinhart Aquarium.

But all of us expressly reveled in the ostrich chicks, then 16 days old.

Noted Drew, my older grandson, “I liked the babies the best of anything. It’s amazing how they’ve learned to walk so quickly.”

Alcatraz, of course, is on or near the top of almost everyone’s list of tourist musts. It was no exception for us.

A walking tour of the site last used as a prison in 1963 was jammed with facts, facts and more facts, none more significant for me than solar panels having been installed in June to generate 80 percent of the power need.

Mark grinned broadly at being “locked” behind bars in a cell, a piece of the colorful audio tour created by Chris Hardman and his Antenna Theatre.

“It was interesting seeing things from a prisoner’s point of view,” he said, flaunting his mastery of

understatement.

My wife Nancy agreed, adding that she was staggered to find “prisoners had been segregated. I’d never thought about that before.”

Hardman had also drummed up The Magic Bus, a 2-hour multimedia “time machine” tour of San Francisco that stresses the Summer of Love and the city’s Haight-Ashbury heyday — an era that, as the narration says, was “full of optimism, full of life.”

Music from the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” decade blasted through the bus as retractable screens depicted scene after scene of local happenings, interviews about acid trips and psychedelics, and a historical context.

They transformed each of us into a Dr. Feelgood.

We also got off on wearing 3-D glasses that made the bus wallpaper and souvenir booklet photos jump out.

But I wept again when the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King flashed before my eyes and brain.

Nancy and I, who’d consciously experienced the ‘60s, liked the bubble-discharging ride better than my kin, one of whom had been a toddler and two who hadn’t even been conceived.

Our pleasure was even enhanced by bumper-sticker wisdom offered by the hippie-clad tour guide: “Life is to be lived, not just tolerated.”

Living it to the fullest, for us, meant additional stops at Pier 39, where we all marveled in the Mirror Maze (one of seemingly endless tourist attractions and views, restaurants and shopping opportunities there), and the Conservatory of Flowers, where we saw “Plantosaurus Rex,” an exhibit of “living fossils” (prehistoric plants), along with models of dinosaurs (with one ostensibly sticking its head through the roof).

When all was said and done, though, the biggest vacation takeaway for me was the discovery that “the boys” walked too fast for Nancy and me to keep pace.

I guess it’s appropriate that the Summer Olympics are in full swing: We definitely need to pass the foot-race torch.

Tourist info is available for 142 Throckmorton at (415) 383-9600, www.142throckmortontheatre.org; San Francisco Movie Tour, (800) 979-3370, (415) 624-4949, www.sanfranciscomovietours.com; Academy of Sciences, (415) 379-8000, www.info@calacademy.org; Alcatraz, (415) 981-7625, info@alcatrazcruises.com; Magic Bus, (415) 855-969-6244, info@MagicBusSF.com; Pier 39, (415) 705-5500, www.pier39.com; Conservatory of Flowers, (415) 831-2090, www.conservatoryofflowers.org