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May 25 2023

New Mensch Hall of Fame will honor seven for social activism, philanthropy, sports, politics

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

One woman started an organization that books free professional entertainment in hospitals, senior centers, special-needs schools, and prisons. Another founded an educational facility that aids ex-felons, prostitutes, alcoholics and addicts.

One guy has given away suits and ties to homeless men, as well as to poor ones with homes, to help them get jobs. Another challenged Major League Baseball’s restrictive “reserve clause,” action that led to players becoming free agents in all pro sports.

Those four are among seven who’ll be honored May 31 by a new Bay Area project, the Mensch Hall of Fame.

You may have heard the Yiddish word “mensch” but have some trouble pinning down its meaning. According to one online dictionary, it’s a label for a person of honor or integrity. Rabbi Yosef Langer, who has led the fervently orthodox Jewish San Francisco Chabad-Lubavitch community for decades, is happy to expand on that definition.

“A mensch,” he says, “is somebody who has the quality of caring for himself and his fellows, for the community and humanity, a person who’s honest, respects others, is compassionate and kind, and is genuine in who they are and what they do.”

Awardees of The Mensch Hall of Fame’s inaugural event will be three women and three men — plus another woman who’ll get lifetime achievement honors.

The awards dip into the worlds of philanthropy, social activism, charity, sports and politics.

Recipients are Mimi Silbert, Tiffany Shlain, the late Mimi Fariña, George Zimmer, Josh Becker and the late Curt Flood — with Dolores Huerta getting the lifetime award.

Though the 79-year-old Langer and his 38-year-old son, Rabbi Moshe Langer, run the project, it was the brainchild of Brian Webster, who volunteered for Chabad for a decade before he became a paid employee a few years ago. To stay with the theme, the elder Langer says of Webster, who once worked for the late rock promoter Bill Graham at the Fillmore, “He’s a mensch.”

Proceeds from the event will benefit The Giving Kitchen, which, according to Moshe Langer, “provides food for financially challenged people,” and the Bill Graham Menorah Project, which is responsible for lighting the huge menorah in Union Square each year and includes a new program “where we gave out 1,000 menorahs last year to spread even more light.”

State Sen. Josh Becker speaks at 2022 Union Square menorah lighting. (Courtesy Chabad SF)

Graham had financed the first lighting of the Union Square menorah, a one-day Chanukah event in 1975. The annual affair there now lasts the entire eight-day length of the holiday.

Chabad, adds Yosef Langer, is now also heavily invested in Noah’s Ark on the Bay, a project that fosters mensch-hood all over the globe, “outreaching beyond the Jewish community — to enlighten, not to proselytize.”

To determine who should receive Hall of Fame honors, the younger Langer says organizers “looked for people in the community that have shown a good deal of mensch-behavior (philanthropy, charity, volunteering).”

Zimmer — the suit-and-tie guy who started the Men’s Warehouse “from the ground up and created an environment where people were happy to come to work, and who started a fund to send the children of workers to college” — was the first selected.

The posthumous awards are going to Fariña, who started Bread and Roses, the organization that sends 1,000 musicians and performers each year to close to 100,000 isolated audience members, and Flood, who sacrificed his baseball career in pursuit of better negotiating positions for players.

The lifetime achievement award to Huerta, 93, recognizes her civil rights and labor activism, including co-founding the National Farmworkers Association, a predecessor of United Farm Workers, with Cesar Chavez.

The other mensch awards go to state Sen. Becker, D-San Mateo, who co-founded New Cycle Capital, a pioneer in building socially responsible businesses; Silbert, who founded the educational Delancey Street Foundation, which supports substance abusers and ex-convicts via academic, vocational and social programs; and Tiffany Shlain, an independent filmmaker and internet pioneer.

Chabad-Lubavitch of San Francisco, which has long been known for its creativity, is part of an international movement with roots in the Hasidic movement of the 18th century that runs an extensive network of educational and social services. Some 3,000 Chabad centers exist in more than 65 countries.

The Inaugural Mensch Hall of Fame Awards, VIP Reception, Auction & Dinner are at 6 p.m. May 31 at The Mint, 85 Fifth St., San Francisco. Tickets are $200. For details, call (415) 668-6178 or visit https://menschhalloffame.org.

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

May 10 2023

Love0

Compelling MTC solo show spotlights music, comedy, flashing lights, live looping

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

Satya Chávez displays anger in Where Did We Sit on the Bus? Photo by Kevin Berne.

Whipping back and forth onstage like a famished tiger about to pounce, Satya Chávez attacks her audience with passion and poignancy.

Along the way, she transforms into a one-woman band and chorus, a one-woman story hour, and a one-woman immigrant history lesson. And she’s mesmerizing in all of it.

In Where Did We Sit on the Bus? — a solo show at the Marin Theatre Company (MTC) in Mill Valley — she musically and verbally, comically and melodramatically traces how the daughter of undocumented Mexicans becomes a consummate performer.

Audience members clap, laugh aloud, and replicate her various rhythms with their toes as she talks, in character as Bee Quijada, about metaphorically being a composite Spanish soap opera, challah French toast, piñata, and, as Emma Lazarus’ poem is quoted at the base of the Statue of Liberty, an integral part of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

By far the most fascinating part of her performance is live looping, whereby she records vocals and/or instrumental riffs and, after hitting pedals or pushing buttons on a pad that contains software, instantly plays it back in real time. She uses that technique, which allows her to sing or play over the recorded track, throughout.

Lighting in Where Did We Sit on the Bus? is spellbinding. Photo by Kevin Berne.

The set itself — a deep cavern containing a series of linear flashing lights that she alternately retreats into and escapes from — also becomes a spellbinding element of the show.

As does the comedy, which ranges from her idol-worshipping imitation of Michael Jackson to her schtick about mythological big-jawed Latinos eating whole chickens, pigs, and cows.

So do her rapid mood changes.

To help set those feelings (and evolving thought patterns), she shifts from ukulele to two guitars, from mouth organ to recorder, then to keyboard. She switches musically from a variety of Latin rhythms to hip-hop to self-composing. Her vocals, sometimes at triple speed, move the plot-less, life-journey along (“everything is happening so fast,” she sings).

Yes, a word or a line can be missed unless a theatergoer is paying real-close attention.

It’s also possible to not fully grok Chávez’s perspective as an “intersectional feminist” — that is, one who can provide insight on the blending of a person’s varied social and political identities that in turn can create different modes of discrimination and privilege. The bespectacled performer actually points out her own multiple aspects, being a first-generation American Latina, partner of a White woman, and an actor/singer/instrumentalist/composer.

Satya Chávez is Bee Quijada in Where Did We Sit on the Bus? Photo by Kevin Berne.

As for change, she never alters her outfit — a white blouse, bland brown cargo pants, and white Nike shoes. They’re comfortable enough, apparently, to cover all bases, and to do a somersault in.

The first part of the show, penned by Brian Quijada and directed by Matt Dickson, rockets along, going from a womb-like experience and bomb-like birth through Sunday churchgoing to education in a white-bread neighborhood in Illinois (“all my friends are Jewish”) to the University of Iowa to a New York City relationship with a Caucasian woman. Opening night, however, the performance lasted 15 minutes longer than the advertised 90-minutes. A mistake. The excess was palpable while Chávez crammed in too much of a laundry list before hitting some fire-eating anger.

When it’s over, the performer has answered the title question (and its obvious reference to civil rights spearhead Rosa Parks) with a Latina perspective and depth that can’t help but be admired — and she emphasizes hope, even in situations where many underdogs have been so beaten down.

It occurs to me, upon reflection, that any review of this show may be superfluous: Where Did We Sit on the Bus? must be experienced to be appreciated. It’s that dense, that different, and that’s a good thing.

Where Did We Sit on the Bus? will play at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through May 28. Tickets: $25 to $65. Info: 415-388-5208 or marintheatre.org

May 09 2023

Love0

Smuin ballet’s revival of ‘Swipe’ is offbeat, inspired, stimulating

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

Terez Dean Orr is lifted by Smuin dancers in choreographer Amy Seiwert’s ‘French Kiss.’ (Courtesy Chris Hardy)

An online dictionary lists as synonyms for innovative: original, inventive, ingenious, newfangled.

None of those adequately describe how exquisitely offbeat, inspired and stimulating “Swipe” — one number in the 16-member Smuin Contemporary Ballet’s “Dance Series 2” — is.

Val Caniparoli’s outstanding revived choreography for four men and three women even overshadows the world premiere of “French Kiss,” choreographed by Amy Seiwert, who was just named the company’s associate artistic director.

Caniparoli merges bare-chested male dancers and ultra-dexterous females, bobbing heads and wildly waving flat-handed arms, with selections from “String Quartet
No. 2 with Remixes,” a slightly weird, often drum-thumpingly loud electronic piece by Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of the great Russian composer.

The whole thing isn’t perfect, only 98.3 percent so. The trouble is, it’s virtually impossible to locate the other 1.7 percent.

Smuin dancers are so adept and so smooth, it’s as if the choreographer whispered to the performers separately, “Go out there and see precisely how you can excel while using this framework.” And each of them has.

Smuin dancers (left to right) Tessa Barbour, Cassidy Isaacson, and Terez Dean Orr are excellent in the revival of Val Caniparoli’s ‘Swipe.’ (Courtesy Chris Hardy)

That includes steps that display — in addition many decidedly more familiar — worm-like shimmying on the floor, backwards dancing, and a few moments that resemble the Charleston done sideways.

The word hybrid today often refers to a meeting that’s half in-person, half on Zoom, but the word also applies to the 11-year-old “Swipe,” especially if one considers its wide diversity of dance segments by Caniparoli, who recently retired from San Francisco Ballet after five decades, but will continue freelance work.

“French Kiss,” meanwhile, combines classical movements with subtle and rainbow-colored costuming to showcase tunes by Pink Martini, an Oregon-based band (or, as group members call it “a little orchestra”) that’s spent a lot of time abroad.

The group not only crosses multiple genres with ease — from classical and Latin to pop and jazz, with a light nod to rock — but features more than a dozen musicians, playing songs with roots in 25 languages. For “French Kiss,” it figures, the tunes are soft, sexy, and, well, in Gallic.

Incorporated are segments using a musical backdrop of cabaret torch singer Meow Meow’s “Mon homme marié,” and the most imaginative piece, “Ma solitude,” which spotlights amusing dual footwork by Cassidy Isaacson and João Sampaio (accompanied by two rolling mannequins).

Cassidy Isaacson and João Sampaio appear in Amy Seiwert’s world premiere of ‘French Kiss.’ (Courtesy Chris Hardy)

Filling out the bill are two more traditional, sweet, uncommonly graceful works: “Dream,” with choreography by the company’s late founder, Michael Smuin, that illustrates a piano concerto by Frédéric Chopin, and the opening number, “Sextettte,” with Kate Skarpetowska’s dance moves set to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

L-R, Lauren Pschirrer, Cassidy Isaacson and Brennan Wall dance in Smuin’s company premiere of Kate Skarpetowska’s “Sextette. (Courtesy Chris Hardy)

An unfortunate aspect of this four-dance concert is that only half the theater’s seats were filled at a recent weekend performance in San Francisco, clearly a result of residual fears about COVID, its variants and subvariants. Hopefully that’ll change — if not this season, then the next, which is Smuin’s 30th anniversary. Scheduled programming includes a world premiere ballet choreographed by Darrell Grand Moultrie and an Elvis Presley-themed ballet by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa.

Smuin’s “Dance Series 2” continues May 11-14 at Blue Shield of California Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., San Francisco; tickets are $25-$84. Call (415) 912-1899. Performances also are May 25-28 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $25-$79. Call (650) 903-6000 or visit www.smuinballet.org.
This story was first published onLocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundationhttp://www.baycitynews.org/contact/.

Mar 08 2023

Love0

1970’s ‘Mill Valley’ songwriter’s latest project is ‘Pride & Prejudice’

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

At a rehearsal of Pride & Prejudice – The Musical in Ross are, from left, songwriter Rita Abrams and actors Carrie Fisher-Coppola, Landers Markwick and Pennell Chapin. (Photo by Jack Prendergast)

Rita Abrams can be a mega-inspiration — for older folks who think their creative lives may be over or for those whose 15 minutes of fame dissipated many years ago.

Abrams, at 79, is deep in rehearsal with the Ross Valley Players for “Pride & Prejudice – The Musical,” for which she created music and super-sweet lyrics. The ex-hippie says it’s going well, particularly due to director Phoebe Moyer’s ability to draw extra humor from the show’s pun- and alliterative-laden tunes by suggesting actors change the tiniest gesture or turn of the head.

From left, Heren Patel, Justin Hernandez and Rita Abrams work on a song from Pride & Prejudice – The Musical. (Photo by Heather Shepardson)

The musical opens March 17 at The Barn in Ross and runs through April 16.

It’s a short geographic distance but a far cry from 1970, when the songwriter’s “Mill Valley” became a pop chartbuster while she was in her mid-20s and a teacher in that city. Abrams and her third-grade class at the Strawberry Point School sang her tune on a Warner Bros./Reprise vinyl.

“It was a sudden thing, overnight, they put a rush-release on it, and we were getting calls from all over the world,” she recalls in a recent phone interview. “At first the fame was very exciting, but then I got off-balance. It felt strange to me — the song was my whole life, and it was dizzying. It was hard to handle. If it were now, in the age of social media, I’m guessing I might have been mercilessly ridiculed.”

Rita Abrams (at keyboard) and third graders sing “Mill Valley.” (Photo by Annie Leibovitz, with permission by Rita Abrams)

After Abrams and her small charges generated a follow-up album, the hit song catapulted her into a lifelong music career. She worked on kids’ records and films, pop and novelty songs, commercials, greeting cards, books and musical theater productions such as the well-received “For Whom the Bridge Tolls” and “Aftershocks.”

She has written songs for “Sesame Street,” collaborated with Elmo (Shropshire), who performed the holiday song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” and worked with John Gray to mount a show based on his best-seller, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.” London in 2012, presented by the Ruislip Operatic Society.

“We had nothing to do with the production, and we were barred from it,” she remembers. “They didn’t want the writers anywhere near it because they were afraid that we might change what they wanted. Later, when I watched a video of it, I saw so many things I’d have changed.”

Still, she says, “Emotionally, I really like to sit back and let other people do it. For me, the joy is in the writing.”

San Francisco’s IAM Theatre, now inactive, produced another version, and there was a high school incarnation in Peoria, Illinois, last year. A company in Hong Kong is working on doing a production sometime this year, possibly in the fall.

Brown’s passion for the tale jumpstarted the project, and she convinced Abrams to do the music. Brown isn’t on site for the Ross Valley Players’ rendition, “but she’s accessible by phone or computer” if needed, Abrams says.

“Pride & Prejudice,” of course, is the story of the emotionally repressed 19th century English family, the Bennets. Mother wants to marry off her five daughters and father just wants to be left alone. Enter the iconic love interest Mr. Darcy, and we’re off to the chapel (ultimately).

Ex-Strawberry Point School third graders gathered outside Throckmorton
Theatre on the 45th anniversary of the song “Mill Valley” include, from left, Marisa Tomasi, Kathleen Trudell, Jaina Delmas, Greg Berman, Kelly Martin, Caroline Van Buuren, Cindi Koehn, Scott Garbutt, and Scott Victor. (Photo by Rita Abrams)

Abrams’ favorite song in the show is “‘What Is a Man to Do?” which she calls “a parody that says everything’s a woman’s fault. I like that it has a lot of catchy rhymes and it’s like a tango.”

Currently in a relationship with bandleader-bass player Jack Prendergast, Abrams long ago was married for eight years to a documentarian, and has a daughter, Mia, who was an actor for film and TV in Hollywood but now, at 41, is shifting into a food industry setting.

A few years back, Abrams had to leave the town she helped make famous because she could no longer afford to stay. She says she has no regrets about it: “I love living in a lovely, affordable mobile home park in Novato. And I’m still an honorary citizen of Mill Valley.”

As for what’s next in her future, she says, “I’ve come to the age where the reality is, unless you don’t care if anyone likes it or not, the average time of getting a show from stage to page is seven years, and that’s too hard to deal with. Instead, I want to nurture the shows I’ve already written.”

Ross Valley Players’ “Pride and Prejudice-The Musical” runs March 17-April 16 at The Barn, Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross. Tickets are $15 (youth) -$35 (general). Call 415-456-9555 or visit www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/

To reach Woody Weingarten, a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, email voodee@sbcglobal.net or visit https://woodyweingarten.com or vitalitypress.com.

Feb 26 2023

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MTC’s ‘Justice’ musically spotlights first 3 female Supreme Court judges — and equality

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

Marin Theatre Company’s Justice portrays first three female judges of U.S. Supreme Court (from left), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Maria Sotomayor, and Sandra Day O’Connor. Photo by Kevin Berne.

The three Justice singers portraying top-court judges can’t compare to The Supremes, but they’re powerful anyway — if you believe the message can be the massage.

That message, of course, translates into a feminist anthem for equality, with undertones of kumbaya and patriotism.

Justice: A New Musical, which runs at the Marin Theatre Company through March 12, dips into the public and private lives of the first three female U.S. Supreme Court jurists, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Maria Sotomayor.

The three sing and talk of being “an unlikely sisterhood,” but also of crossing the aisle politically. Emphasized, as might be expected, is sexism — on the court as well as in the country — and the notion of “we the people,” which is stressed in both opening and closing numbers.

Outstanding is Lynda DiVito, a Walnut Creek resident with off-Broadway credits who depicts RBG in a voice that reverberates throughout the theater, with facial expressions that instantly convey the feelings her words may or may not say.

Karen Murphy, a veteran of multiple Broadway, off-Broadway and touring company shows, plays O’Connor, the trailblazing first female associate justice, and displays her well-earned pride helping repeal Arizona laws that violated the Equal Rights Amendment.

Stephanie Prentice, who outlines Sotomayor, the first Latina justice, is a Bay Area native who’s appeared withy 42nd Street Moon, San Francisco Playhouse, Shotgun Players, and Hillbarn. In character, she’s particularly poignant when delineating the Puerto Rican’s difficult childhood: a father who drank oo much and agued too much with her mom.

Justice contains 17 musical numbers, mostly trios and duets. It’s basically a sung-through, operetta-like presentation. Its one truly melodic song is “Notorious,” an upbeat, humorous entry performed perfectly by DiVito.

When the three together sing the music by Bree Lowdermilk and lyrics by Kait Kerrigan, they’re tight, clearly well-rehearsed. Direction by Ashley Rodbro is likewise tight.

Karen Murphy (left) plays Sandra Day O’Connor while Lynda DiVito depicts RBG. Photo by Kevin Berne.

What’s absent throughout, however, is tension, except when the musical’s book showcases Episcopalian and staunch Republican O’Connor’s deciding vote in the December 2000 Bush v. Gore was that tilted the presidential election, a choice that caused Jewish leftist Ginsburg pronounced anguish. Here O’Conn cops to wanting a Republican president to replace her; in rebuttal, RBG claims the decision means or entire system will suffer a loss in “confidence in the rule of law.”

The book, not incidentally, is by super-prolific Lauren M. Gunderson, the Marin Theatre Company’s longtime artist-in-residence and a playwright with a rep for pushing a feminist agenda. Justice is the fifth play of hers the MTC has mounted.

Most touching moments in it are when Ginsburg and O’Connor deal with their husbands’ dementia — and then when O’Connor, now still alive at 92, must cope with her own. In “When the Mind Goes,” she sings sadly, “You’re inside a china shop and time is a bull.”

Humor is sporadic, but playful. The RBG character draws chuckles, for instance, when she invites Sotomayor to join her twice-weekly gym workouts at 7 a.m. Sotomayor simply scowls at the notion.

Personal moments, for the most part, connect better with the audience than the recitation of key court cases — such as when Justice spotlights RBG andO’Connor’s cancers.

One of the biggest positive outbursts from the crowd comes, however, when, near the end, confirmation of Black female Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is cited.

References to male justices, meanwhile, are skimpy, including that RBG has been “best buddies” with her philosophical antithesis, Antonin Scalia. Merrick Garland’s blocked nomination is referred to only obliquely, namelessly, and there are no hints whatsoever that Amy Coney Barrett or Elena Kagan even exist.

Justice’s two-story-high set is wonderfully creative. Minimalist. Still, it can turn from a bathroom sink (where RBG and O’Connell are humanized as they wash their hands next to each other), into a desk, into a place where justices are confirmed, to another where they render decisions. The backdrop features massive columns and a high space where the names of major legal cases are projected.

Regarding recent cases, Sotomayor laments about being in the minority, about court life being filled with “rejections and rollbacks.”

Every day is disheartening, she bemoans, “when you’re on the losing side.” But the tone decidedly changes when the court affirms gay marriage.

Even though the regional Arizona Theatre Company premiered an earlier incarnation of Justice in 2022, this 90-minute, intermission-less show is still a bit choppy, bouncing from this or that subject and timeframe, and from the legal to the personal and back again.

But it definitely affirms the history of three feminist icons — and underscores the refrain, “When will there be enough women on the court? When there are nine!”

Justice runs at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through March 12. Tickets: $25 to $65. Info: 415-388-5200 or info@marintheatre.org.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

Feb 23 2023

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‘Six the musical’ details Henry VIII’s abuses, successfully flips his wives into modern, rockin’ feminists

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

The North American touring company of Six, now playing at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Six wives? Holy history, that’s three more than my total.

I didn’t behead any, of course.

Six the Musical tackles that number (of Henry VIII wives) and turns the 500-year-old sorry saga into extraordinary entertainment — replete with fantastic vocal cords and rock chords, fantastic layered metallic costumes, and a fantastic light show.

Henry, we’re told, cut off two of his Tudor queens’ heads and divorced two others. One died of natural causes. One survived.

Despite that bleak-scape, Six the Musical is pure escapism, feminist-style (since its point of view flips from the king to the women). And it gives attendees at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco a chance to steer clear of the reality of their own lives while it distorts the reality of what the show labels “her-tory.”

Like Hamilton, this is revisionist stuff. Big Time.

Yesterday’s opening night audience couldn’t care less, however, about evaluations, academic references, or the possibility that the presentation is in a sense a #metoo-ish reaction to Henry’s abuses. The crowd was too busy screaming with glee and clapping wildly after each of the nine tunes — leaping, in fact, to a standing “o” for the finale and the “encore” that followed it with scads of glitter falling from the rafters.

Didi Romero (center) plays Katherine Howard in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.

It’s clear that the glitzy sextet morphs from being villainous or invisible — and supporting players in royal history — to being 21st Century females who can attain distaff empowerment. Accompanied by lots of clever sexual innuendos and mentions of being “un-friended” and TikTok and other digital entities.

Featured characters are Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. Each gets to hog the spotlight for a soliloquy in song. Each is modeled on modern pop artists that in a sense reflect her personal story (Rihanna, Beyonce, and Alicia Keys, for example).

The gimmick is that they’re competing — even to the point of nasty cat-fighting — to be lead singer of their girl band, ultimately a sisterhood of sassy, joking divas. The supposed test? Who had the worst time being Henry’s wife?

The theme of the plotless, intermission-less, concert-style, 80-minute, touring BroadwaySF presentation is “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived,” a couplet based on a sing-song melody long favored by British kids.

Lyrics more than once lean on forced rhymes, as when Anna of Cleves contends, “You said that I tricked ya/’Cause I, I didn’t look like my profile pictcha.”

And laugh-lines in Six the Musical aren’t subtle. Consider this interchange: Jane Seymour asks what hurts more than a broken heart? Anne Boleyn responds, “A severed head.” Still, the show shows that beheadings can be funny or entertaining — especially when they’re merely conversational and not as lurid and in-your-face as scenes in Sweeney Todd or Little Shop of Horrors.

On occasion, the subject matter here is cringeworthy. Such as Katherine Howard explaining her molestation at age 13 and desire to be loved — including her attraction to Henry when she was 16 and he was 49, a geezer in those days.

Olivia Donalson (center) portrays Anna of Cleves in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.

All that considered, the musical is much better than one might expect since it evolved from a concept-album concocted by two Cambridge University seniors, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, both triple-threats as playwrights, composers, and lyricists.

Feminists should love that the four musicians on stage behind the six — the “ladies in waiting” — are all women. They’ll probably love as well that Catherine Parr details in “I Don’t Need Your Love” that she managed to fight for female education and wrote books without the king.

The musical, which won 23 awards during the 2021-22 Broadway season, including a Tony Award for best original score (music and lyrics), can’t be taken too seriously. But seriously, you should head down to the theatre — although I strongly urge you check out the lyrics online before going so that they won’t miss a lot of the wordplay that zips by.

Six the Musical will play at the Orpheum Theatre, 1182 Market St., San Francisco, through March 19. Tickets start at $56. Info: 888-746-1799 or tickets@broadwaysf.com.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

Feb 20 2023

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Diverse Mark Morris Dance Group uses varied Burt Bacharach music as kaleidoscopic playground

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

The Mark Morris Dance Group performs The Look of Love, Burt Bacharach’s music. Photo by Molly Bartels.

The Look of Love: An Evening of Dance to the Music of Burt Bacharach, The Mark Morris Dance Group’s latest, can be appreciated even if the pop composer’s melodies aren’t your fave.

You might end up, in fact, tickled pink (or orange or yellow).

The audience at the weekend’s Zellerbach Hall presentation in Berkeley clearly was thrilled. It not only jumped to a standing ovation but clapped enough to encourage choreographer Morris and his performers to take multiple bows.

Mary Harriell (left), lead singer in The Look of Love; choreographer Mark Morris (center); and arranger Ethan Iverson. Photo by Trevor Izzo.

The music of Bacharach, whose Feb. 8 death at age 94 unexpectedly turned the Feb. 17-19 outing into a bittersweet memorial, was introduced via a melancholy solo-piano opener by Ethan Iverson — Morris’ musical collaborator and arranger — on “Alfie,” whose questioning lyric set the tone, “What’s it all about?”

Surprisingly, the most innovative moments in The Look of Love came in the form of a little-known, 1958 sci-fi/horror flick charmer, “The Blob.” Dancers ended up in a jammed cluster, moving in slow motion and using colored bridge chairs as props and a barricade while singers simulated Mark David lyrics like a deejay intentionally decelerating an LP for effect. The sequence drew both giggles and guffaws.

Wit and whimsy, of course, have long been Morris staples, along with huge helpings of passion. Indeed, Morris’ most enduring creation, arguably, is 1991’s “The Hard Nut,” a parody of the classic “Nutcracker.”

The Mark Morris Dance Group performs The Look of Love, Burt Bacharach’s music. Photo by Skye Schmidt.

Although some pundits wince at the choreographer’s winks to audiences, such as an evergreen in which dancers pat their heart to indicate love, it can nevertheless be fun to see hoofers sneeze at the word pneumonia in “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

Some crowd members appeared slightly befuddled, however, by Morris’ gender-bending, identity changes in “Message to Michael,” where the lead character becomes a “they” instead of a “he” — in a song already laden with heaviness.

Still, most tunes were presented straightforward and unadorned yet showing off the mixed-meter complexity of the music, always with spare sets limited to chairs and cushions, and yet they evoked the imprint of six-time Grammy award vocalist Dionne Warwick, who’s still touring at age 82. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was an exception, with the dancers repeatedly looking skyward while the voices staccatoed the word “Rain” about 71 times before segueing into the rhythms virtually everyone knew.

The dancing often shone, in sync with Bacharach’s music (which smoothly dips into Brazilian rhythms, jazz and rock) but occasionally becoming more compelling than the repetitiousness of the dancers’ hand and body movements. Meanwhile, Iverson’s arrangements built an exquisite showcase for lead vocalist Mary Harriell, who can alternately be sultry, soulful, a belter, or a jazz singer scat-riffing, a thrush whose voice is amazingly larger than even her massive Afro; backup singers Clinton Curtis and Blaire Reinhard, consistently impeccable in the pit behind Harriell; and Jonathan Finlayson, whose trumpet sometimes punctuated the songs with spurts exuding joy.

Burt Bacharach. Photo, courtesy Cal Performances.

Once in a while, though, Hal David’s unsentimental and sometimes pessimistic words clashed with Morris’ upbeat brainstorms.

Domingo Estrada Jr.’s mini-solos stood out among the dancers, not unlike toddlers in a playground glided, twirled, pranced, stretched, skipped, ran, jumped, rolled on the floor, and stiff-armed the air like a running back on a football field.

Never to be ignored is fashionista Isaac Mizrahi, whose costume designs justified a gush or two. Primary colors blended with slightly less prominent hues, all in subtle collage patterns. Tunics and skirts and dresses, shorts and long pants, long sleeves and sleeveless, no two dancers dressed alike. Overall, a rainbow kaleidoscope — similar to the varied skin tones of the performers.

The 66-year-old Morris, a Seattle native, has been immersed in music since he was 8 and, after seeing a performance by the José Greco flamenco company, decided to become a Spanish dancer. Three years later, having taken classes, he started performing professionally. His entrance into choreography was delayed, however — until age 14. He launched this troupe in 1980, and quickly developed a reputation for experimentation and out-of-the-box humor that gave him the label “bad boy of modern dance.”

This presentation is basically a juke-box musical without book. Underscoring that notion was Morris’ injecting “What the World Needs Now,” the 65-minute, intermission-less program’s second number that featured a circle dance, the most prevalent motif in the Cal Performances concert; “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” in which dancers repeatedly turn into jacks-in-a-box sans box, “Walk on By” (which had the audience toe-tapping in unison), “Always Something There to Remind Me,” “I Say a Little Prayer” (the finale), and the title tune.

Iverson, who’d previously teamed up with the choreographer for 2017’s Pepperland, a tribute to the Beatles, got over-the-top gushy when talking to a scribe for The New York Times last year. “I would put Bacharach up there with Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin as part of The American Songbook,” he was quoted as saying. “These are songs you hear once and never forget.”

The arranger’s opinion about Bacharach being in the composing firmament could be debated, surely, without demeaning the songwriter’s talent.

During the pandemic, Morris was forced to cancel after a lone Zellerbach show because of a Covid outbreak. His company has been performing in Berkeley for more than 30 years, though. And this new outing indicates, with apologies to poet Robert Frost, that he has miles to go before he sleeps.

Upcoming dance concerts at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley include Step Afrika! on Feb. 25 and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from April 11 to 16. Info: 510-642-9988 or https://calperformances.org.

Feb 15 2023

Love0

Cara Levine’s exhibit at Contemporary Jewish Museum probes racism, grief, trauma

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

Archived items from “This Is Not a Gun,” a collaborative work in which Cara Levine and community participants created wood sculptures of objects that police mistook for weapons being carried by civilians whom they shot, are shown. (Courtesy Cara Levine)

Injustice. Guns. Mourning.

Climate change. COVID-19.

Healing.Los Angeles artist Cara Levine ties them together at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum in a solo exhibit apt to touch — and disturb — many people.“

Cara Levine: To Survive I Need You to Survive,” on view Feb. 16 through July 30, is intended “to deepen awareness of injustice and inequity, create space for communal grief and mourning, and encourage informed action.”

Using video, sculpture and installations, Levine, 39, explores systemic racism, anti-Semitism, climate change and the ongoing trauma of the pandemic.

The exhibition is trifurcated.

The most prominent part is “This Is Not a Gun,” an ongoing work created in 2016 in collaboration with activists “to grieve victims of police violence and share their stories.”

It consists of wood carvings that Levine made, and ceramic objects community members made, of items civilians carried that police claimed to mistake for guns.

The work stemmed from a list of 23 items mentioned in a Harper’s Magazine article called “Trigger Warning.”

The CJM issued a statement in connection with the work: “While this exhibit has been long planned, we recognize that it is opening against the backdrop of the recent acts of egregious police brutality and gun violence, the most recent in a long line of tragic and horrific instances of senseless violence in our country.”

Grief is a crucial component, too, of “Carve: The Mystic Is Nourished from This Sphere,” a kindred segment of the exhibit curated by Qianjin Montoya, CJM assistant curator. The site-specific installation created for the museum takes the form of a hole carved into the gallery space.

In the week before the exhibit’s opening, Levine has been etching into the hole notes of grief submitted by the public. Throughout the run, she’ll do more. The hole serves as a starting point for a symbolic adaptation of the practice of shiva, the seven-day mourning period in Judaism following the death of a loved one.

**“To Survive I Need You to Survive” was inspired by communal grieving in an interfaith service following mass shootings. (Courtesy Cara Levine)**

The title part of the exhibit is a large-scale sculpture created in response to mass 2018 shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Marshall County High School in Benton, Kentucky.

It was inspired by communal grieving in an interfaith service that featured collective singing of Hezekiah Walker’s gospel melody “I Need You to Survive.”

Lyrics included:

“I need you, you need me

“We’re all a part of God’s body…

“You are important to me, I need you to survive.”

Cara Levine, whose exhibit “To Survive I Need You to Survive” is on view at San Francisco’s Jewish Contemporary Museum, is pictured in her L.A. workshop. (Photo by Ashley Randall, courtesy Cara Levine)

Regarding “This Is Not a Gun,” the artist — who earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Michigan and a master of fine arts degree from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco — said the list of objects in the magazine story gave no context for the killings, leaving her feeling empty, powerless and angry. “So, I set out to meticulously carve each object from wood as an act of prayer, respect and remembrance,” she said.

She partnered with local people of color, artists, activists and healers focused on race equity, and began holding collaborative workshops.

Levine, whose work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and participatory events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Anchorage, Tel Aviv and Kyoto, received pushback after previous incarnations of “This Is Not a Gun.” That, she said, was “about being a white woman and what do I know about police brutality, and that’s a fair criticism.”

However, she added, “Though I’m the founder, it’s been a vastly collaborative project…[TINAG] is about … something you can take away and share with your loved ones. … investigate your own biases. We begin with a conversation around a table, and bring it further outward and further outward and further outward.”

Levine, an adjunct associate professor at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, also links chronic pain and disability with her artistic endeavors. In part, it’s because she suffered for more than a decade after tearing a tendon in her left ankle and spending four years trying everything but an operation. “By the time I had my first surgery [of two],” she laments, “the tendon had completely shredded.”

A portion of her pain has also been debilitating migraines. She laments that her “pain is not only physical, but part of my life-path — a constant opponent.”

But a nine-month internship with Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development (NIAD) art center in Richmond more than a decade ago helped her cope. She remembers her first day, when a blind artist walked by her and proclaimed, “Oh yeah, I used to be a butterfly.”

That opened her up. She said, “I felt a kinship with her. I’d felt like an outsider as a child, having had a mother who was sick a lot and brothers with whom I fought a lot, so I spent a lot of time making up games and stories. I felt a familiarity. You are expressing things I’ve been told not to express but that are in me too.”

In considering how Jewishness informs her work, she said, “I’ve been fortunate to be raised by parents who exposed me to the privilege I was raised in and how that contrasted to the inequities in our society. [I also was taught that being] part of a people who have escaped from slavery and who have spent generations being persecuted meant an interest in social justice with a priority, a focus on caring for the whole world.”

A high school teacher jumpstarted an interest in art for Levine, who said she identifies as queer.

She fell in love with clay. Now, she said, “It’s important for me to make things as a sculptor. The handmade process gives me a connection to the work that’s important to the subject matter.”

In 2021, in an interview on the ThisIsColossal website, she said, “When Trump was elected, it compounded a lot of the fears I had. … I was having nightmares all the time. …I felt like [marginalized people were] going to be exterminated in a really disgusting way—immigrants, disabled people, women, trans folks, people of color, like everybody now was having to protect themselves like their lives were on the line.”

Then came the Harper’s article. And she was motivated.

Levine said she hopes the CJM exhibit “can transcend the woke mentality. I think everybody experiences the blahs. This exhibit hones in on shared suffering.”

“Cara Levine: To Survive I Need You to Survive” opens with a free reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Feb. 16 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 738 Mission St., San Francisco. Registration is required; visit rsvp@thecjm.org or call (415) 655-7824. Tickets to the exhibition, which runs through July 30, are $14-$16; free for ages 18 and under. Go to thecjm.org or call (415) 655-7800.

A free “This Is Not a Gun” workshop at 2 p.m. April 22 at the CJM features Levine and Angela Hennessy, an Oakland artist and a survivor of gun violence. Participants will create replicas in clay of objects mistaken for guns that will be added to an archive of more than 300 objects.

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/.

Woody Weingarten can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

Feb 13 2023

Love0

Dan Hoyle probes White privilege — with his mouth and heart — in one-man show at The Marsh Berkeley

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

It’s easy to see Dan Hoyle in Talk to Your People. It’s easy to hear him. But it’s virtually impossible to absorb everything he says.

The one-man, multiple-character show, which runs at The Marsh Berkeley through March 11, is incredibly deep and dense — so dense, in fact, that it could take a second (or third) viewing to get it all.

It’s certainly more opaque than his last show, Border People, which focused on tribes different from his own liberal Caucasian cultural backdrop.

Hoyle, Talk to Your People

Hoyle, a consummate performer, here in his seventh show continues his documentary-style outings that stem from interviewing countless people, a methodology he calls “the journalism of hanging out.” In this case, those people were mainly in Oakland, where he lives, and its hills.

But also, apparently, as far away as West Marin.

And, like the protesters on the street and the young girl splashing in the beach water or scootering on the concrete, all of whom appear in videos on a screen before and behind Hoyle, his agenda is straightforward: He wants the audience to deep-dive with him into complicated concepts such as systemic racism, culture-canceling, and White privilege — especially that last item.

His well-honed tools are his way with words (which ranges from simple and coarse to complex and eloquent), his skill with physical comedy and exaggeration, and, unlike his previous outings, a talent for utilizing rap and other genres of music to sneak-ease the viewer into digesting his messages.

Hoyle’s updated work is masterful, as are his playwriting abilities. The only thing missing, just like in previous creations, is a close-up depiction of females. They’re a second-hand presence, materializing only through the lips of the males.

Hoyle, Talk to Your People

To its credit, Talk to Your People, which had a mid-pandemic run in San Francisco a year ago, explores not only how society got to the current apparent low point it’s at but how it can move forward, using heart instead of brains.

The performance, developed and directed by Charlie Varon, an exquisite one-man show artist himself, spotlights Hoyle’s mash-up that spotlights, among others, a still-arrogant White corporate burn-out who in a former life was a combo hippie jock, a guy with “the soul of an activist” who isn’t anymore, an Argentine Marxist techie fidgeting because he’s discovered he’s an elite, and a Jewish PhD who’d been forced to read Dante’s Inferno when he was seven, who’d spent years as a White jazz musician, and who proclaims he’s “as neurotic and sensitive as anyone.”

Hoyle mouth-meanders in heartfelt, often poignant ways about filling in application boxes for ethnicity, “crypto versus cash,” defunding the police, unemployment, Black Lives Matter, Airbnbs, and being bi-racial.

He sprinkles Talk to Your People with descriptions of a guy bemoaning another who only has “one type of wine glass,” the idea that “people are beginning to live in their emotion,” and the notion that we all “should go back to middle school” to re-learn how to get along with each other.

It’s not all introspection, polemic, or talk about re-segregation, though. The show contains extraordinary moments of tenderness — for instance, when Hoyle portrays a father who often interrupts his conversation with a compadre to help his toddler take an invisible rocket to the moon.

Yes, there is some blurring that happens in Hoyle’s panoramic, 75-minute delivery, and an audience member needs to be forgiven if he or she or they doesn’t immediate grok who’s who onstage (even with the simple, effective costume changes that instantly change him from bare-chested beachgoer with beer in hand to, let’s say, a character whose shiny white sneakers distract).

If theatergoers want him to tie everything up with a neat multi-racial ribbon, they’ll be disappointed. Some may be put off, too, by lots of run-on sentences or casual swearing.

On the other hand, those who seek out tour de force solo performances and aren’t nettled by a smattering of flaws will be grateful he and his muses finished the piece.

Talk to Your People runs at the Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way through March 11. Tickets, $25 to $100. Info: https://themarsh.org or (425) 641-0235.

Jan 26 2023

Love0

Comic jogs with a dog, finds meaning in life in ‘He Wants to Run’

By Woody Weingarten Woody Weingarten

David Kleinberg shares his experiences, and lessons learned, from jogging with a boxer named Butler in his one-man show “He Wants to Run” at The Marsh in San Francisco. (Courtesy David Kleinberg)

David Kleinberg, a Renaissance man who has appeared as a standup comic on the same bill as Robin Williams, Dana Carvey and Richard Lewis, is only mildly obsessed with killing.

He’s fond of saying that when you succeed at comedy, you “kill the audience,” and when you don’t, you “die on stage.” He adds: “‘Kill or be killed,’ as my old drill sergeant used to say.”

Kleinberg was fully aware of those well-worn aphorisms as he painstakingly prepared a new one-man show. But just when he was ready to perform it in Marin, the pandemic peaked and — what else? — killed in-person performances.

“It was the worst possible timing,” laments the San Francisco native.

Now, though, “He Wants to Run,” his updated, improved monologue about a guy who doesn’t particularly like jogging or dogs — yet befriends a neighbor’s boxer and runs with him for almost 13 years —will open at The Marsh San Francisco on Feb. 4.

The truth-based show — written and performed by Kleinberg, directed by Mark Kenward and developed with David Ford — also focuses on the pleasures and pitfalls of owning a vacation home in an impoverished area on the Russian River in Cloverdale, as well as what the pooch, Butler, taught him about dying and living.

Kleinberg insists he’s always preferred basketball to jogging. The 79-year-old quit shooting hoops only two months ago after getting a pinched nerve that was painful: “ I took it as a signal to stop — I wanted to walk off the court rather than be carried off,” he says.

But he started running at his summer place for add-on exercise.

Despite his intense desire to run alone, he remembers that whenever he’d start, Butler would follow and go after him: “Essentially, he wore me down. He’d wait for me to come out, then fly across the road, jump in the air, put my running pants in his teeth, and pull me toward the road so we could run.”

**David Kleinberg’s latest show covers what happened to him after he took up running. (Courtesy David Kleinberg)**

As he aged, Butler got fatter and slower.

And despite their longtime connection, Kleinberg adds, “The ironic thing is there isn’t one single picture of us running together. Our relationship was never about Instagram.”

Kleinberg transitioned from comedy to one-man shows long enough ago to have created three others: “The Voice,” about his sex addiction and subsequent two decades of recovery, as well as his homophobia; “Hey, Hey, LBJ!,” about his four years as an information specialist in Vietnam (“My job was to go out with soldiers and to shoot pictures when people were shooting us”); and “Return to the Scene of the Crime,” about his traumatic trip back to Vietnam, where some of his buddies had been killed or wounded half a century before.

On his website (davidkleinberg.weebly.com) under the heading “upcoming gigs,” it says he’s recently “been hibernating in the solo theater world. We’ll warn you when he thinks about returning to standup.”

Kleinberg’s interest in comedy stemmed from going to the hungry i in North Beach while he was in his early 20s, seeing Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Mort Sahl and Bill Cosby. (Tangentially, his prime memories of Robin Williams aren’t about his appearance with him, but the two times he interviewed him for the San Francisco Chronicle where he spent 34 years, including a long stint as Datebook editor, after starting as a copy boy at 17).

“I interviewed him just before ‘Good Morning Vietnam.’ It was really hot, and I agreed with him that it was ‘a beautiful global-warming day.’ The other time, we were again talking about climate, and he said about it, ‘People are like addicts. They won’t do anything until they hit bottom.’”

After Kleinberg left the Chronicle, he and his wife Pat ran Elderhostel education-travel programs in Tiburon for two decades. “We were a great team,” he recalls. “I work fast and sloppy, she works slow and meticulous. We’d have three courses at a time, as diverse as ‘Operas of Puccini,’ ‘Middle East Conflicts’ and ‘French Impressionist Art.’”

What lies ahead? Possibly another one-man show: a dark social satire (that he started as a science-fiction novel some 35 years ago) about a 495-pound gorilla trained to play fullback for a professional football team.

“He Wants to Run” runs Feb. 4-12 at The Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia St., from Feb. 4-12. Tickets are $20- $100. Call 415-282-3055 or visit themarsh.org.

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/.