Skip to main content
All Posts By

Woody Weingarten

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

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.

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.

Jan 26 2023
Love0

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

By 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/. 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 04 2023
Love0

Legacy film fest on aging offering a variety virtually

By Woody Weingarten

The documentary short “Eddy’s World,” about 98-year-old toy inventor Eddy Goldfarb, screens in the Legacy Film Festival on Aging. (Courtesy Sheila Malkind)

In May 2021, Sheila Malkind, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Legacy Film Festival on Aging, was recovering from a stroke.

“Of course, I’d like to have my body functioning better, but I’m glad I’m alive and still vital mentally and physically,” says the still sanguine Malkind.

The event she founded in 2011 has expanded significantly. Last year’s virtual festival screened 30 films; this time 40, mostly documentaries, will be split into 18 feature programs available online from Jan. 6 through Jan. 22.

A team — Malkind, a curator and a handful of reviewers — pores over possible selections. “If we all say ‘maybe,’ we probably won’t pick the film,” says the 84-year-old festival founder, “but many times we all say ‘yes.’”

This year, several flicks that focus on music won a consensus. Among Malkind’s favorites from the event’s 11th annual edition, she names two: “For the Left Hand” and “The Ten of Us.”

Norman Malone, who mastered the piano and went on a concert tour at age 78, is the subject of “For the Left Hand.” (Courtesy Kartemquin Films)

She loves the first, she explains, “because a man who’d been disabled at an early age, Norman Malone, still mastered some of the most difficult and beautiful music with just one hand.”

The second, which she calls “a fun film,” is about a group of friends who started as teens doing folk music who now have embarked on what the festival website calls “a tour of love, unity, and addressing aging and death with humor and inspiration.”

That pair, as well as many choices in the fest that for the second consecutive year will be 100% virtual, accentuate the positive.

“We want to avoid doom and gloom,” Malkind says. “I believe that no matter what our age, we’re still interested in being alive, in doing whatever we can do. Life can still be exciting in many ways, and we have to take advantage of that possibility, of making old age palatable.”

Former teen folk musicians address “aging and death with humor and inspiration” in “The Ten of Us.” (Courtesy Sheila Malkind)

Other films she touts are:

• “Eddy’s World,” a documentary short by Lyn Goldfarb that centers on the filmmaker’s father. Reports Malkind: “It’s about a toy inventor who’s now 101 (he was only 98 when the film was made) and shows a man who’s delightful.”  Eddy, best known for “chattering teeth” (but who created more than 800 other toys), cheerfully states in the film, “I think that when you do create work, it stimulates your brain and that helps keep your body healthy.”

• “Dear Audrey,” is, Malkind says, “a beautiful film on Alzheimer’s that shows kindness and understanding. It’s very moving — at one point [the husband] goes into the facility where [his wife] is and sleeps in the same bed that she’s in, showing his love and tenderness.”

• “My Mother Dreams: The Satan’s Disciples in New York,” a short film about a widowed Midwestern housewife who becomes obsessed with a Hell’s Angels-ish bikers’ club, won a 1999 Academy Award for best live action short.

• “Golden Age Karate,” a very short short, is about a 15-year-old martial arts champion who teaches senior citizens self-defense at a local nursing home, “giving them the tools to feel in control, connected, and cared for.” It’s part of an 84-minute festival program with a self-explanatory title: Vitality.

Sheila Malkind (Courtesy Sheila Malkind)

With a U.S. Census forecast that by 2035, there will be 78 million people age 65 and older in the country, Malkind aims to flip the attitudes and depiction of older people in Hollywood movies, who “are often still portrayed as irrelevant, sometimes absurd, or they are stereotypical wise elders with limited face time, who give sage advice to the younger, more active characters.” She says, “Most American films do not attempt to portray the richness and variety, nor the triumphs and challenges, of older people.”

Malkind, who grew up in Brooklyn, moved to Chicago, and then relocated to San Francisco in 2003, earned two master’s degrees from Chicago schools. Despite wearing a brace since her stroke, she often walks 40 or 50 minutes in the hills with her son beside her.

It’s seemingly impossible for her to have anything but an upbeat attitude.

A quote on the festival’s website from 19th century writer and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, who said, “To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent. This is to triumph over old age,” contrasts nicely with a playful quote from Malkind: “I always looked forward to getting older — it’s a part of life, so what the heck.”

Screenings in the Legacy Film Festival on Aging cost $12 per program and $65 for a pass. Visit http://legacyfilmfestivalonaging.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 can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

Dec 24 2022
Love0

3 Jewish comics can make you laugh out loud — even if you’re not Jewish

By Woody Weingarten

Lisa Geduldig

It’s not too late.

To see this year’s Kung Pao Kosher Comedy, that is — an event that features three standup comics who can make you laugh out loud. Repeatedly.

My wife and I did.

It might help if you’re Jewish, living with a Jew, have best friends who are Jewish, or have spent hours and hours of stimulating and amusing conversations with seatmates on El Al plane trips to or from Israel.

Truthfully, though, non-Jews are just as apt to find the show extremely funny.

That’s because all three comedians on the bill, despite each occasionally leaning on a Semitic background, mostly launch anecdotes and one-liners about everyday stuff from their own lives.

The headliner, deadpan Mark Schiff, who’s toured with Jerry Seinfeld worldwide for 15 years and had specials on HBO and Showtime, relies on material about medical conditions and his wife; Ladman, a 67-year-old who holds the record for appearances on Kung Pao with five and has appeared on The Tonight Show nine times, deals mostly with her aging issues; and Orion Levine is a 29-year-old funnyman who rips into his family.

The event has been produced for 30 years by mistress of ceremonies Lisa Geduldig, who capitalized on the idea that hordes of Jewish people spent every Christmas Day in a movie house followed by dinner in a Chinese restaurant, the only kind generally open on the holiday.

So, calculating that she had a built-in audience, she conjured up the idea of an in-person comedy dinner show in spite of never having produced anything before. Her intuition was right, of course, and she had to turn away 200 people her first time out.

Geduldig has noted that the “audience began as 99% Jewish and has expanded to include Chinese-Jewish couples, interfaith ones, singles, families, gays, straights, undecideds, those who are far from home, and just generally people who like smart comedy mixed with Chinese food.”

This year’s anniversary show can be viewed in-person or via a YouTube Live livestreaming. Dinner begins at 5 p.m. with both the in-person show and its live livestreaming cousin an hour later — tonight and tomorrow night.

The show also highlights one lighthearted video anecdote from Geduldig’s 91-year-old mom, Arline, from Boynton Beach, Florida.

The Chinese restaurant site this go-‘round, believe it or not, is Sherith Israel, a synagogue at 2266 California Street in San Francisco — because the New Asia Restaurant, where the event had been held since its fifth year, was closed by the pandemic.

In-person attendees, by the way, receive a special swag bag that includes a pair of wooden custom-printed Kung Pao chopsticks, a packet of Yiddish-proverb fortune cookies, and sundry knick-knacks.

Masks — to block Covid, the flu, and RSV — are recommended when not eating or drinking.

Tickets, which range from $30 to $100, are available at https://www.koshercomedy.com. Part of the proceeds will go to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Dec 10 2021
Love0

Grandfather, granddaughter discuss — in faux interview — children’s fantasy book they co-wrote

By Woody Weingarten

Hannah Schifrin and her grandfather, Woody Weingarten, joke around together. (Photo courtesy Nancy Fox)

 

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Woody Weingarten, author and longtime journalist, is a regular contributor to forallevents.com, Local News Matters and Bay City News. To promote his children’s book written with his granddaughter/co-author and illustrated by Joe Marciniak, he decided the only reporter he could trust with the Q&A was himself. Most reviewers, even politicians who desperately clung to office by yelling “fake news,” admit his faux interrogation is spot on.

WOODY THE INTERVIEWER: Why’d you two write this whimsical book?

Hannah: I thought I could have fun working with Grandpa.

Woody: Yep, fun.

What’s your four-part story about?

Hannah: A wizard grandfather and two mischief-makers, his fairy granddaughter and her best friend, another fairy. It has spells and a magic carpet, too.

Woody: Yep, it’s magical.

Is it based on your real-life relationship?

Hannah: No, I don’t do spells.

Woody: Yep, which is good, ’cause I can’t undo spells.

What does happen in Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates?

Hannah: Oh, an 8-year-old fairy wins the unicorn racing championships. Baby chicks sing jazz instead of cheeping. The sorcerer makes robot characters less scary. And the girls stop “thunder-and-lightning storms, floods, earthquakes and tornadoes all over.”

Woody: Yep, a lot of fun stuff.

Did the fact there’s 70 years between you get in your way?

Hannah: Nope, we’ve really bonded. Besides, I have my friends, and he’s got his.

Woody: Yep.

Did you and Grampa whoop it up when you were little?

Hannah: Well, he’d make up stories when we played together on the floor with my dollhouse, tiny plastic horses and teeny people figurines.

Woody: Yep, and Hannah would always add funny action.

If your book took only several months to write when Hannah was 8, why more than five years to publish?

Hannah: I don’t know. Grandpa was dealing with the details.

Woody: Yep, well, techno glitches, human errors and 2,149 tweaks delayed things.

Who can read Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates?

Hannah: It’s aimed at 6- to 10-year-olds, but grandparents can read it to kids. So can parents. Or other relatives. Or friends. Or neighbors. Or, in fact, anybody.

Woody: Yep.

Where can I buy the book?

Hannah: Through my Grandpa’s new website woodyweingarten.com, at Amazon, at your local bookstore, at Barnes & Noble, at Apple — pretty much everywhere books are sold.

Woody: Yep, nearly everywhere.

Do you two intend to collaborate on another children’s fantasy any time soon?

Hannah: Not in the near future. Although we talk and get together a lot, I’m busy creating a series of videos for TikTok and going to school.

Woody: Nope, not now. Our bond is bonded permanently so I’m comfortable working on a new solo book aimed at adults, The Roving I, and a second edition of my first, Rollercoaster. Admittedly, I do hope to totally avoid techno glitches and human errors for both — and require no more than 1,075 tweaks.

Have you had enough of this interview?

Hannah: Yep.

Woody: Yep.

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.

Aug 22 2015
Love0

Snippets of conversations beguile, titillate and shock

By Woody Weingarten

Writer Woody Weingarten wishes he had ears like this fennec fox so he could overhear more juicy delicacies.

Unlike our federal government, I don’t snoop.

Unlike countless other organizations, I do no surveillance — electronic or other.

Unlike cable news networks and Wikipedia, I don’t spread misinformation, gossip or rumors.

But I do grab snippets of tête-à-têtes from restaurants, park benches and street corners.

And, because what I overhear might end up as fodder for a column, I typically jot down what I catch. This, in fact, is the third compilation of succulent morsels I’ve picked up.

Perhaps these delicacies will beguile, titillate or shock you — maybe even as much as they did me.

To wit…

While asking questions at Town Hall about a new neighbor’s construction project, I overhead a nearby San Anselmo employee say, “I absolutely need to unwind, un-stress and un-overload.”

“I’m done with him,” said a teen girl in the Marin General lobby the week before. “He’s now just a speck in my litter box of life.”

Outside Trader Joe’s in San Rafael, a sly geezer declared — albeit a little too publicly — to his vastly younger female companion, “I have a feeling some prankster put crushed Viagra in my miso soup at lunch.”

A long-haired, college-age guy philosophized outside The Bicycle Works co-op in San Anselmo: “We all know what to do about Killer Bees, but how can we handle Killer Sharks — you know, those anti-middle-class Wall Street venture-capitalist types — or the Killer Publicists, the marketers who clutter up popular films with irrelevant product placements, or Killer Second Amendmenters, those pro-gun jerks who think every kid’s room should be stocked with an Uzi?”

Addressing a diner who’d obviously over-tipped, an elated server in Il Fornaio in Corte Madera gushed, “Grazie, merci, danke, arigatou, toda and asante. Oh, I forgot — thanks a lot.”

A dowager in deep blue dress, diamond necklace and studs outside Mag’s Local Yogurt shop in Larkspur lapped up some vanilla one sunny p.m. “I’m supporting Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio,” she said, “and have donated to both their campaigns. I’m also speaking for them locally, sort of reversing things by putting my mouth where my money is.”

“Arguing with a spouse,” one mid-lifer in front of the Fairfax police station said to another, “is like having a nuclear war — nobody wins.”

I heard, in the Post Office in Ross, a sentence that could never apply to a compulsive-obsessive neatnik, maker of priority lists and lint picker-upper like me: “He’s having a real romance with disorder.”

But I agree with the disheveled mother who chided her ear-budded son outside Bananas at Large in San Rafael, “Once there were songs; now there’s only noise.”

And I definitely could share a grin with the gray-haired gent in pristine white shirt, power tie, filthy sneakers and tattered jeans in San Anselmo’s library who proclaimed, “I love it that I’m old enough to still appreciate — in the face of all this damned technology — paper clips, rubber bands and a plunger.”

Decked-out matron watching road construction in Mill Valley with a gal-pal: “These days more than ever, perseverance trumps perspiration.”

Cynical senior in Fairfax’s Good Earth Natural Foods generalized,  “Those that can, do; those that can’t become politicians.”

A twenty-something father, near the stone dinosaur at Millennium Park in San Anselmo, appeared to be wasting some psychology on his toddler daughter, “Okay, don’t have fun. Don’t have any fun.”

Matronly blonde outside Luther Burbank Savings in San Rafael was waving her arms in a friend’s face: “Our government has definitely completed its wrong-headed transition from the Gold Standard to an Ink Standard. The only question remaining is: How much money can The Fed print?”

A young guy with an unusually high forehead had collared   a sidekick at Drake High School, “There’s only one word to describe her — feckless.”

Loaded down with books on the Kentfield campus of the College of Marin, a student was chatting with his clingy girlfriend. “A few minutes ago John was quoting ‘The Huffington Post,’ then Wikipedia. That’s cool. But I’m still hoping he’ll really go retro and quote ‘Esquire’ or ‘Elle.’”

Finally, while munching on a delicacy at Terra Linda’s High Tech Burrito, a Millennial said to a worker cleaning tables, “Would your family be the basis of a soap opera, sitcom or reality show? Mine could be all three.”

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com/

 

Aug 22 2015
Love0

Drama about blacks in the ‘60s reflects today’s news

By Woody Weingarten

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

Risa (Beverly McGriff) and Bennie Lewis (Memphis, right) get caught up in the musings of Sterling (Keita Jones) in “Two Trains Running.” Photo by Steven Wilson.

“Two Trains Running” is a rear view peek at America’s racial turmoil that concomitantly reflects today’s cringe-worthy headlines.

Despite it being somewhat of an anachronism.

With black playwright August Wilson leaning heavily on the n-word.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner wrote “Trains” in 1991 as one piece of a masterful 10-play series, but neither his language nor ghetto portrait are as edgy as, let’s say, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s in the more recent Brother/Sister Plays trilogy.

I find “Trains” to be more a slice of life, centering on dissatisfaction and anger, than a dissection of racial tensions.

Even though it uses the Civil Rights movement of the ‘60s as a backdrop.

Martin Luther King’s name is dropped, and a rally following the assassination of Malcolm X does get attention in the Multi Ethnic Theater (MET) drama at the Gough Street Playhouse in San Francisco.

All six actors in the work, set in a Pittsburgh diner in 1969, adroitly showcase the period and the black working class while juxtaposing the humor and hope of Wilson’s script.

Although a fan used in a hallway to cool the theater occasionally muffles dialogue.

In “Trains,” the frayed eatery is expected to become a casualty of a reconstruction project. And restaurant owner Memphis worries “the white man” will cheat him by paying too little for the business.

The milieu actually is similar to neighborhoods I watched change as a child growing up in a New York City suburb. Blacks typically saw those shifts through a radically different lens than we Caucasians — not as urban renewal but urban removal.

Wilson’s work features six flesh-and-blood characters searching for empowerment but failing to find it easily.

Each character is well defined.

Bennie Lewis’ bug-eyes quickly convey Memphis’ likability — and frustration.

Keita Jones spotlights job-hunting ex-con Sterling as a confused but determined lover not above stealing flowers from a mortuary or teaching a developmentally disabled fellow a black power anthem.

Beverly McGriff, the only female in the cast, makes me believe Risa, an emotion-blocked cook-waitress with a penchant for cutting her legs is willing to change.

Fabian Herd replicates the shady and selfish character of Wolf, a bookie; Geoffrey Grier (who alternates the role with Anthony Pride) fabricates a tunnel-visioned, mentally deficient Hambone; and Vernon Medearis is appropriately unpleasant as black-clad undertaker/real estate magnate West.

Stuart Elwyn Hall fills out the cast as Holloway, a 65-year-old self-styled philosopher.

Curiously, though, I find the most fascinating Wilson characters to be Aunt Ester, an offstage 322-year-old mythic everyone visits to ward off bad things, and the dead Prophet Samuel, another being who never appears yet one whose coffin visage includes ostentatious bling and $100 bills.

Lewis Campbell, who founded the MET and wears hats as its artistic director, executive director and stage designer, skillfully directs the drama.

His diner set, incidentally, feels totally authentic — the kind I long ago liked to frequent.

Four booths, a pass-through window to the kitchen, an old-fashioned pay phone (where Wolf takes 600-to-1 numbers bets), a blackboard on which daily specials are chalked, and an on-again, off-again jukebox that’s occasionally fed quarters.

Wilson’s language in the play, produced in association with Custom Made Theatre, can be poetic. But it also can ramble.

Brief passages can be amazingly revelatory, though.

As in a Memphis rant: “Ain’t no justice. Jesus Christ didn’t get no justice. What do you think you’ll get?”

Or the effortless characterization embedded in Sterling’s nonchalant declaration that “I drove a getaway car once.”

Or West’s optimistic pronouncement that “life is hard but it ain’t impossible.”

“Two Trains Running” is part of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, sometimes referred to as the Century Cycle, where each play deals with the African-American experience in a different decade of the 20th century.

Best known probably are “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” both examples of intense theatricality.

During this performance, however, I started squirming not long after intermission because the two-act outing runs half an hour too long, barely a few minutes short of three hours.

Still, it’s important to note that Wilson (who was born Frederick August Kittel Jr.) reputedly started writing on a $10 stolen typewriter he’d pawn when money got tight.

I’m glad he found that keyboard.

“Two Trains Running” plays at the Gough Street Playhouse, 1620 Gough St. (off Bush), San Francisco, through Sept. 12. Evening performances, 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets: $20 to $35. Information: 1-415-798-2682 or info@custommade.org

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com/

Aug 22 2015
Love0

Jazz singer-pianist Diana Krall is fantabulous, funny

By Woody Weingarten

Diana Krall

I’d planned to see Diana Krall last winter, but she got pneumonia and canceled.

I didn’t take it personally. But I was disappointed.

A few nights ago, I went to the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa to see the 50-year-old Canadian.

I was anything but disappointed.

She was fantabulous — both her vocals and piano artistry.

I can’t remember her contralto voice being quite so hoarse or husky before, but I do recall a similar inability to sit still throughout her concert.

My legs shook and my toes tapped — at the same breakneck pace as her foot keeping time.

I also can’t recall her being so self-deprecatingly funny.

Including an oops, immediately followed by the admission, “I hit the wrong key.”

Although some critics of her current “Wallflower” national tour have trashed her 12th album as filled with schmaltzy, sultry covers of pop tunes dating to the ‘60s, I regarded her live selections from that same-titled album only a fleeting distraction from her life’s blood — rollicking jazz.

To ensure that genre remaining predominant, Krall employed five dazzling sidemen.

Most notable was fiddler Stuart Duncan, who bowed, plucked and strummed his way into my heart and ears despite his instrument being a jazz rarity. Though each virtuoso may have deserved equal time, Duncan resembled George Orwell’s pig in “Animal Farm” — more equal than the others.

Together, Krall and crew romped through two unbroken hours of songs, coaxing a good third of them into the showstopper category.

With the best of the best being Tom Waits’ “Temptation,” which spotlighted each guy in electrifying — and sometimes electrified — solo riffs.

Krall, who switched periodically from piano to synthesizer to create a countrified twang or clipped rock ‘n’ roll beat, dipped heavily into standards, a mainstay of her previous concerts — in this case such classics as “Exactly Like You,” “Deed I Do” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

She also invoked the ghosts of Oscar Peterson, playing a few lightning-fast bars from an arrangement of his before claiming she hadn’t learned more, and Nat King Cole, paying homage to that singer-pianist via “You Call It Madness But I Call It Love.”

Only for an instant did she border on boring me — with two straight extracts from the “Wallflower” album.

Instead of sticking with historic conventions, she’d undoubtedly have done better using The Mamas and The Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and The Eagles’ “Desperado” as springboards to jazz inventions like those that thrust her into celebrity.

During the show, a large screen at stage rear projected static wallflowers, blossoming flora and a stylized shot of her twin boys.

I found those accents superfluous to the musical marvels onstage.

Ditto the lights that occasionally blinked from the amps.

I enjoyed, however, Krall’s drawing laughs by inserting strains of “Moon River” into a tune she admitted was “not usually known as a funny song,” and smiles from a confession that “my left hand and my right hand aren’t talking to each other very well.”

I also loved the frequent, idiosyncratic flipping of her long dirty-blonde locks from her face.

And I smiled admiringly when she took her bows alongside her backups — Duncan; guitarist Anthony Wilson; bassist Dennis Crouch; drummer Karriem Riggins; and keyboardist Patrick Warren — rather than alone.

As I look back, I think this Sonoma County performance outranks my previous favorite, a freebie Stern Grove outing in San Francisco where not even the heat or mosquitos could quash my Krall pleasure.

This time, she, who’s been married since 2003 to chartbusting pop-rock singer Elvis Costello and who’s sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, ended a 20-minute encore with “Ophelia,” which again brought the sold-out Person Theater crowd of more than 1,600 to its feet as a single unit.

That segment also had included a swingin’ version of  “The Frim Fram Sauce,” which had been popularized by Cole, and a snoozer, Bob Dylan’s “Wallflower.”

Some fault-finders are hell bent on chastising Krall for “selling out” by concocting a heavily stringed, non-jazzy pop album.

Almost as stubbornly as denigrators bombarded Dylan when he switched to electric guitar.

Count me not among them — in either case.

Upcoming star turns at the Person Theater of the Wells Fargo Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa, will include comedian Lewis Black’s “The Rant Is Due: Part Deux” on Sept. 11, vocalist Frank Sinatra Jr.’s “Sinatra Sings Sinatra” on Oct. 8, and Rosanne Cash with John Leventhal on Oct. 16.  Information: www.wellsfargocenterarts.org or 1-707-546-3600.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or www.vitalitypress.com/

Jul 22 2015
Love0

Community theater’s musical ‘Pirates’ defies logic but enchants, amuses

By Woody Weingarten

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Norman A. Hall portrays a blustery Major-General Stanley in “The Pirates of Penzance.” Photo by Robin Jackson.

Phillip Percy Williams plays a swashbuckling Pirate King in “The Pirates of Penzance.” Photo by Robin Jackson.

Jim Dunn’s retired from directing colossal musicals for The Mountain Play in Mill Valley.

But he hasn’t quit doing them elsewhere.

Exquisitely.

Need proof? Check out the Ross Valley Players’ production of “The Pirates of Penzance” at the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross.

The company’s professionalism, congeniality-packed presentation, and mastery of the 136-year-old musical comedy/light opera may raise your perception of community-theater.

It did mine.

I’d expected it to be fun, but I hadn’t imagined it to be as impressive as it is.

This two-hour show’s as good as anything anywhere in the Bay Area.

Some folks may be more familiar with Capt. Hook’s crew, from this summer’s “Peter Pan” Mountain Play, or Johnny Depp in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie franchise, or, for that matter, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But Gilbert & Sullivan’s tender-hearted pirates, I believe, are funnier.

And more enchanting.

Even though their actions defy logic and common sense.

It’s almost impossible to watch the 22 performers spilling over the stage at The Barn, the RVP’s home, without feeling good.

Especially when the dainty daughters of Major-General Stanley prissily twirl their parasols, the bobbleheaded British bobbies stumble and bumble like Keystone Cops, or the decidedly un-menacing pirates engage in unison foot-stomping — all courtesy of imaginative choreographer Sandra Tanner.

Most audience members grinned from the first lines of the first number past the final curtain.

Like me.

Before the show, Dunn admitted to early birds he chose the show mainly because it was in the public domain, which meant the RVR wouldn’t have to pay royalties (as it would most modern musicals).

But he also informed one woman that, in contrast to the vulgar “Book of Mormon” he’d recently caught, he loved “Pirates” because of its old-fashioned innocence and it being a crowd-pleasing summer diversion.

Dainty daughters of Major-General Stanley in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” include (from left) Kathryn McGeorge, Dana Cherry, Katie Sorensen, Chloe Hunwick and Arden Klizer. Photo by Robin Jackson.

In my view — one that dates back 70 years to a time when my father introduced me to the frenzied rhythms and lyrics of Gilbert & Sullivan, whose sprightliness and cleverness dad relished — Dunn utilizes his own fondness for G&S to inject a comedic music-hall over-the-topness that works extraordinarily well.

His direction, especially turning minor details into major laughs, is brilliant — as might be anticipated from an 83-year-old who’s been directing and teaching theater arts for half a century.

Everything works.

Even having two couples seated in extra-fee boxes on stage and waving teeny Union Jacks.

The cast as a whole is uncommonly good.

In a word: superb.

But several are even better than that: Norman A. Hall’s Major-General Stanley is letter perfect, setting a sky-high bar for other comic performers. Phillip Percy Williams’ Pirate King weaves exaggeration and energy into a smile-inducing, ideal blend. And Joni DeGabriele magnificently flaunts her coloratura, fancifully flutters her eyelashes and unsubtly scrunches up her face as Mabel, wannabe bride.

They’re all accompanied by the piano talent of Music Director Paul Smith, who, from the first note of the overture to the last note of the show, keeps well within the parameters of feel-good.

All that’s amazingly supplemented by the classic, colorful costumes of Michael A. Berg and the enchantingly spare but picturesque sets by Ron Krempetz.

The irrational plot finds Frederic mistakenly apprenticed to the pirates until age 21 by his nurse. But because he was born on Leap Year’s Day, he’s stuck for an extra 63 years — despite having fallen for Mabel, daughter of Major-General Stanley. The pirates are sympathetic to orphans, so all who run afoul of them claim they’re orphans — including Stanley. Pirates pursue Stanley’s daughters. Police pursue pirates.

It all ends with everything in harmony — or in unison, if you prefer accuracy.

The best of the 28 musical numbers are — as always — the rollicking “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” and “The Policeman’s Lot Is Not a Happy One.”

Nitpickers may gripe about some British accents coming and going like the tide off the shore of Cornwall, the play’s setting, or the old theater’s lack of air conditioning.

Clearly, their joy-ometer is off.

I spied no children in the audience opening night. A pity. Kids would undoubtedly find the frisky silliness to their liking.

As did the child in me.

“Pirates of Penzance” will run at The Barn, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through Aug. 16. Night performances, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets: $17-$33. Information: (415) 456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net

 

Jul 22 2015
Love0

Unique Berkeley Rep show faces racial conflicts but may miss mark

By Woody Weingarten

[Woody’s [rating: 3]

Anna Deavere Smith portrays Johns Hopkins research Professor Robert Balfanz and many other characters in “Notes from the Field.” Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com.

Anna Deavere Smith beat the odds — and became a theatrical powerhouse.

Despite being an African-American, despite writing one-woman shows with multivarious characters all played by Anna Deavere Smith, despite staging controversial in-your-face portraits of racial conflict.

Now she’s battling the odds again.

But is likely to fail.

In the unique Berkeley Rep’s “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education,” she takes on the entire American educational system and its undermining attitude toward poor people of color.

It simply may be too wide a target.

The experimental piece — part drama, part audience participation — covers dense terrain and poses tons of questions.

But it provides only amorphous answers.

I kept waiting for a specificity that never came.

Part of Smith’s “Pipeline Project,” which is seeking to alter school-to-prison practices she contends have decimated the future of a generation, “Notes” is based on 150 interviews she conducted.

In sub-divided sections of an 80-minute first act, she impersonates a riot videographer, an Oakland mentor, a Stockton councilman, a Stanford shrink, UCLA and Johns Hopkins professors, a protestor from Baltimore (where the playwright-performer was born), a Native American ex-con, an emotional support counselor and a high school principal — plus a Philadelphia judge who cried when sentencing a young man because society also was guilty.

She recreates the individuals’ stories precisely as told to her.

That, according to a National Endowment for the Humanities website profile, means “complete with false starts, coughs, laughter, and so on…‘If they said ‘um’…I don’t take the ‘um’ out.’

As in the 64-year-old’s previous shows, Smith’s performance is phenomenally good.

Although her olive drab jacket/shirt and dark pants stay put, she changes personalities by altering facial expressions, verbal pace and timbre — and footwear.

Projected film clips of cops beating blacks and of rioting underline the painful pleas of her portrayal of youngsters being forced into the criminal justice system, of white officials who find few alternatives.

I found it depressing.

But not as disheartening as the ostensibly novel audience breakout sessions about which in a pre-show briefing Susan Medak, Rep managing director, said, “You are the second act.”

The mostly white 23-member group I attended — one of 20 clusters in all — just didn’t come alive.

Its discussion was buried in idealistic but impractical notions, though the writing pads we’d been given carried the printed motto, “The change starts with you.”

Participants proffered suggestions to “move beyond our comfort zone,” “fight racism” and “stop police brutality” — without explaining how.

I had the distinct sense I was at a rally that couldn’t gel.

Smith, who labeled this special presentation “The California Chapter” and a “work in progress,” punctuates all the heaviness with humor.

The opening night audience chuckled accordingly.

If a bit uncomfortably.

It also appeared to dismiss Marcus Shelby’s plucky but sometimes sorrowful jazz bass accompaniment.

Smith, who’s probably best known for her TV roles on “Nurse Jackie” and “The West Wing,” initially gained fame through two early ‘90s documentary theater inventions, “Fires in the Mirror” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.”

The first, dealing with the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn, earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

The second, about the Rodney King verdict aftermath, won two Tony nods.

“Notes” is in effect a variation of the theme.

Smith, who won a MacArthur fellowship for blending theatrical art, social commentary, journalism and “intimate reverie,” believes she’s now delivered “a chance to reimagine and recreate a new war on poverty. Education is a crucial part of that.”

In a dramatic coda, she utilizes circa 1970 quotes from black writer James Baldwin that the problem is “the children and their children.”

Not that much, I guess, has changed.

Yet 45 years have passed.

Smith’s UCLA character adds a thought in “Notes.” The “biggest problem in our country,” he proclaims, “is indifference.”

Anna Deavere Smith’s latest magnum opus may be many things, but uncaring isn’t any of them.

“Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, the California Chapter” plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley, through Aug. 2. Night performances, 8 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays through Fridays, 7 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $25 to $89, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net