Woody Weingarten

“What’s a jazz and classical flute player like you doing in a bluegrass sextet like this?”

Because I’ve known Matt Eakle for years, I don’t need to ask: He and mandolin doyen David Grisman blend their distinct virtuoso sounds to make extraordinary music.

Matt’s been part of David’s bands for 26 years.

And he’ll be one-sixth of the Grisman sextet at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center, Weill Hall and lawn, at 3 p.m. Sunday, July 12 as part of the Dawg Day Afternoon Bluegrass Festival.

Also on that bill are the Del McCoury Band and dobro master Jerry Douglas presenting the Earls of Leicester.

Asked about his favorite from the upcoming playlist, Matt cites “Watson’s Blues,” which is dedicated to blind guitarist Doc Watson, the first performer to invite David onto a stage at age 17.

The tune gives Matt, who delights in stretching musically, “an opportunity to recreate the classic ‘twin fiddles’ bluegrass sound, something flute players don’t get to do very often.”

Another stretch came recently when he performed in Coblenz, Germany, at a 13th century church — a Bach sonata duet with a pipe organist.

Often, Matt also gets to meander into unmapped melodic territory with David, whose bluegrass sextet explores folk, rock, string jazz, Latin music, klezmer-influenced tunes, soul and funk.

Their collaboration dates to 1985, when David “was auditioning bassists for a European tour and I happened to be at a bassist’s house. I’m a good sight-reader because of my classical training so I was able to read all the songs he’d brought on my first try. We both were astonished at the cool sounds mandolin and flute made when they blended together. Four years later, he called me for a jam session and I ended up in his band.”

The 58-year-old’s actually been playing flute since he was 12 — in junior high.

“They only had a piccolo at first, so that’s what I started on. But when they got a flute a month later, I switched. It was so easy compared to the piccolo that I fell in love right away.”

Later musical training included studying with the son of the San Francisco Symphony’s principal flautist and learning “improvisation by the seat of my pants.”

Not to mention playing alongside virtuoso musicians.

And he’s performed with Jerry Garcia, Stephane Grappelli, Chris Isaak, Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt.

He’s even done a couple of gigs — a benefit for Bread and Roses in Novato and another for homeless men being sheltered in San Anselmo — with my jazz pianist wife, Nancy Fox.

Matt, despite being an environmentalist, lets no grass — blue or otherwise — grow under his feet.

He performs with his own quartet, the Matt Eakle Band; plays with the Murasaki Ensemble, a quintet led by Shirley Muramoto, who excels on koto, a classical horizontal harp-like string instrument frequently used for court music in Japan; puts in tons of freelance appearances; and teaches jazz and classical flute.

The flute player — he’s turned off by the word “flautist” — has sparse spare time.

He runs nearly every day, often barefoot.

Sometimes he runs to the top of Bald Hill, just west of his adopted town of San Anselmo, where he’s lived since 1998 with his wife, Lucia.

He supplements that with pushups and pull-ups (scoliosis forced him to give up standing on his head).

He’s slowed down on yanking out non-native plants from San Anselmo’s Faude Park, however, though he’d done it for years. In fact, as chair of the town’s Quality of Life Commission, I’d handed him a Green Award for his weeding.

Matt’s recorded three albums of his own, from which his favorite jazz piece is “Speak Low.” He admits attributing the Kurt Weill composition “to the wrong person on my CD, ‘Flute Jazz,’ but they don’t care because I send the royalties to the right place.”

What makes him unique as a flute player?

“My emphasis on sound and tone coloration and the fact that I surrender completely to the groove.”

I’ve more than once watched him perform at Iron Springs Pub in Fairfax, where he sways his body like a dancing Spiderman.

That, he explains, is “just my natural reaction, what happens to me, and I try not to interfere with it.”

Future Green Music Center events, in addition to the July 12 Dawg Day Afternoon Bluegrass Festival, include appearances by Jay Leno July 31, Natalie Cole Aug. 1, Steve Martin Aug. 20, Dwight Yoakam Aug. 21, Chris Botti Sept.11, Wynton Marsalis Sept. 17 and Kristin Chenoweth Sept. 25. Tickets: $20 to $175. Information: 866-955-6040 or gmc.sonoma.edu.

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

 [Woody’s [rating: 3]

Instead of “Detroit,” playwright Lisa D’Amour might have named her Pulitzer Prize finalist play “Metaphor, California.”

Or “Metaphor, New York.”

Or, for that matter, “Metaphor, Anywhere.”

The title surely doesn’t signify the real Motor City. It’s  — dare I say it? — just a metaphoric label for a play that’s a comedic depiction of the fiscal scars the Great Recession left on the suburban middle class American psyche.

D’Amour says she used Detroit because it had become “a symbol to so many people of the American dream drying up.”

That resonates with me.

Seeing a revival of the Obie winner at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley could seem like witnessing a 100-minute intermission-less dream left too long on a backyard barbecue.

But with more levity than most comedies I’ve watched in several years.

I do have one caveat: None of it sounds funny in print.

And “Detroit” does rank high on my Squirmometer, a personal indicator of how uncomfortable dialogue or characters make me.

Ben (a wide-eyed, slack-jawed Jeff Garrett) has lost his bank loan officer’s job and appears to be toiling feverishly on a website that will launch a startup. Mary (an ultra-solemn, fuming Amy Resnick), his wife, drinks too heavily (to the point of upchucking on a new neighbor) and hobbles because of a painful planters wart on her foot and an even more agonizing burr on her being.

He bemoans accurately that they “don’t have any friends.”

To say their home and lives are broken is to state the obvious.

A big table umbrella unexpectedly shuts on folks beneath it. A sliding screen door won’t open or close properly. A patio chair falls apart.

Financial woes have pushed them way out of their comfort zone.

Still they want to be neighborly so they invite to dinner a pair of rootless recovering addicts who might never have had a comfort zone.

Kenny (Patrick Kelly Jones), who shamelessly admits they have only one towel too dirty to use, and Sharon Luisa Frasconi), who wants “to own up to what I am” — white trash, are a problematic mirror of the older couple’s unease.

As they unveil each other’s secrets, Kenny and Sharon flip the invitation, welcoming Ben and Mary to their digs despite having zero furniture and an equal amount of food (unless you count chips and Velveeta).

Though all four actors do bang-up jobs delineating their characters, Resnick and Garrett radiate, perhaps because their verbiage-laden roles are meatier.

Director Josh Costello effectively stages both antics and melodrama, sharply pulling into focus the question of how we cope with our insecurities when we can’t pay our bills.

The comedy-drama returned my memory to the first home I purchased, a suburban Philadelphia prototype in southern New Jersey created by William Levitt, a man renowned for developing instant all-white ticky-tacky communities out of whole cloth, identical blueprints and tiny plots.

I recalled, too, all the trappings that came with the tract houses.

Which included white picket fences, green lawns, good schools and clothes washed in 99 and 44/100ths percent pure Ivory soap.

But the play impacted my opening night companion more.

Although he viewed it as a flimsy farce and melodrama “rather than something to be considered seriously,” revolving around “unreal characters” he never grew to care about, he somehow let two BART trains pass him by while pondering the significance of “Detroit.”

A lingering, disturbing query: Have we all been living out the Rise and Fall of the American Empire?

Could be.

“Detroit” runs at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, through July 26. Night performances, Tuesdays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $16-$50. Information: 1-510-843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org.

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

Can you imagine the front of the four-story U.S. Bank building in downtown San Anselmo as an oversized fish tank?

Dan Thomas can.

And he’s done something about it.

But it’s taken him 40 years to scratch his inner itch about the structure, to shrink his edifice complex.

His weaponry? Watercolors.

And whimsy.

It happened last month, when Dan, my longtime next-door neighbor in San Anselmo, painted “a series of fantasies conceptualizing how the bank branch might improve its look.”

Until then, the high-rise — by town standards, at least — merely aggravated Dan every time he passed it.

His problem?

“The building, which was constructed in 1962, didn’t fit the surrounding environment.”

Dan sits at my dining room table displaying his watercolor sketches. And jabbering like he’s stumbled onto a second childhood.

“Just before I drew the first parody, the fish tank,” he says, “I thought, ‘Let’s see if I can have some fun.’

“Then, for a second I thought maybe I and the bank could be playful. Maybe the bank would let me decorate it for a couple of months. But then I decided the bankers, a serious lot, would be unlikely to see the humor in it.

“All of this, of course, is strictly in my head — it’s all make-believe.  I haven’t approached U.S. Bank at all. I have no real plan to ask the bank to change anything.”

The sketches, Dan tells me with mischievous twinkles in both blue eyes, involve “humor, what-if’s and a play of colors.”

The bank’s window treatment, explains the retired architect, “is six-inch thick concrete, 16 feet wide, 32 feet high, two feet deep. The top and bottom segments form a complete circle. There are eight circles over all. I used to visualize that the only thing that would [help] would be to make window treatments with fish tanks with live fish. The idea stayed with me. So I finally sketched it, to scale, as if it were an architectural rendering.”

His initial plan was only to do that one concept, but he became so motivated he concocted a dozen fanciful sketches in only two weeks.

“My idea was to give the Town Council a humorous view of the building — as a cautionary tale — to remind them you can’t turn back once you’ve made a decision. Had the council gone ahead with its original General Plan, the town would have had 10-story buildings.”

I almost choke on the thought.

I like San Anselmo for what it is, a quaint, little town despite being a refuge for coffee buffs, boutique shoppers and upscale bicyclists.

Noticing my discomfort, Dan placates me — grinning.

“Again, remember this is make-believe, even though a real fish tank actually could be built with Plexiglas and a little bit of cork.”

Once he’d retired, Dan returned to an early love — painting. He worked mainly on landscapes, but now again dabbles in abstracts. He’s good enough to have won prizes, including firsts, at Marin and Napa county fairs — as well as Marin Society of Artists juried shows in Ross.

Now 79, he remembers once painting “full time, mostly allegorical paintings, working my way through my religious upbringing as a strict Pentecostal.”

That, of course, is miles from imagining fish in windows at the 46-feet, 6-inch high site, where for years I’ve banked in the tallest building in town.

One of Dan’s watercolors is tied to “the good economic times” we’re experiencing anew, featuring “drinks on the house — cocktail glasses filled to the brim.”

In another, a series of sunglasses symbolize “warm periods — sunny days.”

Soup cans also became a happy construct. Although the Andy Warhol tribute might allude to soup lines, the artist says he intended to evoke “a ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ feeling.”

One striking piece is a light-hearted plea for egalitarianism. Faces become a commercial for both bank and tolerance.

“It means, ‘We serve all nationalities,’” Dan says.

Taken as a whole, the sketches comprise his “first attempt at humor in art — I’m a pretty serious character in a lot of ways — although these may have loosened me up a bit.

“I’m working on one right now where I’m putting a hand-painted silk tie right in the middle of an abstract painting that looks like a vest.”

I postulate he’s now in-vested in projecting a less-serious attitude.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 2.5]

I couldn’t help fantasizing at A.C.T.’s experimental “Love and Information.”

English playwright Caryl Churchill’s plot-less, 57-scene scattergun technique goaded me into it.

I had the distinct impression she’d dreamed — before writing this play — that Samuel Beckett, spouting weighty sentence fragments, was pitted against Harpo Marx’s deadpan and wide-eyed comedic facial exaggerations while Ingmar Bergman flashed myriad disparate images on a split-screen behind them.

“Love and Information,” playing at the refurbished Strand Theater, introduced me to some 140 mostly unnamed characters in 100 minutes.

Through a stellar 12-member cast that magically spun many of the vignettes into gold.

Enthralling.

Yet, finally, a touch frustrating.

As if someone had stolen more than a few pieces of a new jigsaw puzzle I was being asked to put together.

Because so many of the pieces were mere fragments (ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes), audience members got to plug the holes from our personal histories and baggage — though we had to think fast because the next scene always tested our minds instantly after the last, much like one Henny Youngman gagline following another without a breath.

My favorite moments included two men humorously and poignantly misremembering yesterday’s love affair, two teens freaked out because they didn’t know a personal detail about a crush on a guy they both had, two dudes discussing an apparent direct message from God, and a woman reflecting about life and death after being gifted with a red rose.

Not exactly light subjects.

But being inundated with technology was the main target of Churchill’s stylized shorthand, with lust and longing (as opposed to love) finishing a distant second.

By not writing stage directions or character descriptions into the text, and by suggesting vignettes could move from any of the seven segments to another, she gave directors and their whims plenty of latitude.

“Love and Information,” therefore, has varied radically from city to city.

Here, director Casey Stangl did astonishingly well — especially since I occasionally felt as though a carnival mirror had been shattered and I was left to reassemble endless shards.

Introducing the first show produced at the refurbished Strand, Carrie Perloff, the American Conservatory Theater’s longtime artistic director, cited Stangl’s having successfully built the production while the house was “being built around her.”

Perloff also referenced the old Strand, where she teasingly suggested theatergoers might have caught films like “The Rocky Horror Show” or “Deep Throat.”

“Love and Information,” which opened in London in 2012, felt a gadzillion miles from such classic movies — in both tone and concept.

It had no overall arc or linear storyline. Its scenes left the sensation of being almost randomized.

Perhaps because of those elements, the rebuilt 283-seat theater, which cost almost $35 million (and includes an even more intimate stage, The Rueff, which seats only 140), seemed like an ideal venue.

The huge onstage screen in effect became the set. Movable, unattached doors were basically the only addition (except for various tables and chairs used as props).

Before the show on opening night, actors mingled with the lobby crowd and performed shtick such as dancing wildly to plugged-in music, burying oneself almost catatonically in an iPhone, coughing and sneezing loudly and frequently. A huge LED screen flashed brief previews of what was to come inside — plus other glimpses of items relating to communication (such as binary numbers, Pig Latin and a tagger spraying graffiti with gaudy paint).

Inside, the screen at the rear of the stage — which later would feature eclectic images that incorporated photos of Market Street — showed a live feed of the audience itself.

Besides the quasi-trauma of seeing myself projected, I was subjected to a surreal moment:

Early in the play, a patron’s cell phone went off, adding a bouncy pop tune to the ambience. Had I not been sitting next to the guy, I undoubtedly would have thought it was yet another disconnected part of the play.

Unlike Churchill’s “Cloud Nine,” “Top Girls” or “Serious Money,” “Love and Information” might be a perfect fit for anyone with a short attention span.

And maybe — in today’s exhaustingly frenetic fast-everything world in which “USA Today” and “TMZ” head the most-read, most-watched lists — that could apply to all of us.

“Love and Information” plays at the American Conservatory Theater’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., San Francisco, through Aug. 9. Night performances, 7 p.m. Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, Matinees, 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tickets: $40 to $100. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

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

 

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

I can’t remember ever feeling as white as when I saw “Choir Boy,” the new Marin Theatre Company drama.

The play, which provides scaffolding for the notion of tolerance, is incredibly powerful.

And incredibly black.

Playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney immediately sets the tone with a black prep school commencement where the words “sissy” and “nigger” are hurled at a gay student.

I thought I’d been color-blind all my life.

I’d banded on civil rights issues in the early ‘60s with militant black attorney Paul Zuber and self-styled radical lawyer Paul Kunstler.

Earlier, I’d joined my father in welcoming into our home in a New York suburb what then were called Negroes. I’d enjoyed rhythmic, bluesy “race records” spun by “Moondog” (deejay Alan Freed) and spirituals by Mahalia Jackson and less famous African American artists. I’d been moved beyond belief by Billie Holiday wailing “Strange Fruit,” a musical lamentation for a lynching.

I thought I’d earned my liberal stripes.

In 100 “in-your-face” minutes, “Choir Boy” showed me I’ve been practically delusional.

Being Caucasian inevitably precludes a total understanding of the black condition.

“Choir Boy” is markedly pertinent today, when city after city in the United States face sharper racial divides than in decades.

During rehearsal of the show, director Kent Gash told his actors: “No play happens in a vacuum…As we have seen in recent events in Baltimore, African American male lives are at risk. It’s hard not to feel like an endangered species sometimes.”

But “Choir Boy” is more than more an eye-opener — it’s a masterpiece.

I’ve seen four previous plays by MacArthur “genius” grant winner McCraney — April’s “Head of Passes” at the Berkeley Rep, and each part of his “Brother/Sisters Plays” trilogy at the MTC, A.C.T. and Magic Theatre.

Each was extraordinary. Each was formidable.

This drama is better still.

Craney seems to be growing exponentially as a playwright as he matures (he’s only 34 now).

“Choir Boy,” a coming-of-age story but so much more, pits a gifted homosexual scholarship recipient, Pharus, against Bobby, a student with current and historic family ties to the Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys.

That fictional school is based on real black history.

Before desegregation, about 100 such schools existed in the United States (only four remain today), which I hadn’t known.

Jelani Alladin instills vitality and reality in Pharus, a young man caught between a desire to be accepted and one of being himself, a theme that’s also reflected in other characters, particularly David, a conflicted, wannabe pastor played by Forest Van Dyke.

Pharus contrasts sharply with Bobby, hot-headedly portrayed by Dimitri Woods as a privileged rebel.

The play, which premiered in London in 2012, is not without periodic injections of humor. But it’s the anguish and poignancy that are unforgettable.

And mind-blowing.

Each of the seven “Choir Boy” cast members is superb, with each of the six black performers layering individualized vocal chops onto their thespian skills.

Ken Robinson, who plays Headmaster Marrow, a rule-oriented man steeped in tradition, has the richest, deepest voice.

None of the others are vocal slouches, though.

Spirituals — both familiar (such as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “Wade in the Water”) and not — are sprinkled throughout.

They definitely buoy the drama.

Were the originals uplifting and freeing, or did various slave songs include “coded messages”? A cerebral onstage debate may feel like a distraction from the plot yet is a meaningful connection to black history.

So’s the performance of the sole white in the all-male cast, Charles Shaw Robinson, who’s believable as Mr. Pendleton, a compassionate teacher who’d marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and participated in countless sit-ins.

You probably know somebody just like him.

Rotimi Agbabiaka, as Junior Davis, Bobby’s enabler and sidekick in delinquency, is responsible for most of the humor (though the Pharus character has his share).

And filling out the cast is Jaysen Wright as Anthony (“AJ”), a sensitive athlete-scholar.

The play, it should be noted, includes full-frontal nudity.

Alladin — in a post-play “talk-back” response to a question — explained it well: “The nudity is more than about being naked. It’s a moment when the audience is being asked, ‘Are you comfortable in your skin?’”

Most significantly, the play shows that African American men, like all others, are not one-dimensional, not stereotypes, but complex human beings.

It’s a lesson I’m unlikely to forget.

“Choir Boy” plays at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through June 28. Night performances, 7 p.m. Sundays; 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees, 1 p.m. Thursdays; 2 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $10 to $55. Information: (415) 388-5208 or marintheatre.org.

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

 

Donations of $500 and iPods — from students at San Domenico School in San Anselmo — got the ball rolling.

So residents of WindChime of Marin, a memory-care facility in Kentfield, just over the line from Ross, now can derive pleasure from personalized music playlists on the digital devices.

As a bonus, the portable players typically open what’s been called “a backdoor” to memory and the mind.

I call it a coming-out party.

Stemming from an unpretentious program that can temporarily steer men and women back from the isolation that dementia, Alzheimer’s and other serious ailments sometimes dictate.

“The more specific the playlist,” explained Tanja Obear, WindChime’s activity director, “the more effective it is. And it’s best if songs from the teenage years to the mid-20’s, their ‘fun-time,’ are selected.”

But there’s a wide spectrum of likes, Tanja noted, “ranging

from music of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s to others — younger — who want to hear Led Zeppelin.”

Gina Pandiani, president of Marin Activity Coordinators (MAC), cleared my attendance at the group’s recent 90-minute meeting at WindChime. There, nine women watched three snippets from a documentary, “Alive Inside,” and discussed how “Music & Memory,” the program that generated the video, could be implemented throughout the county.

I was encouraged.

I’d screened the video about a month before. And wept.

It was that touching, that inspiring.

A clip from it, featuring “Henry,” a dementia patient “awakened” by music from his iPod, has gone viral.

More than 11 million views.

And counting.

A thousand senior facilities and nursing homes have instituted the memory program so far. But the hope is for way more — 16,000 in the United States, 65,000 throughout the world.

WindChime began with only 10 iPods.

By the time MAC met, all but three of 48 residents had playlists (after a three-month process to fully implement the program).

The biggest problem the facility encountered, reported Bradlee Ann Foerschner, its executive director, was “keeping all the iPods charged.”

Not really an obstacle.

The music itself can occasionally be challenging, though.

One meeting attendee encountered “a banjo player who wanted only bluegrass music on his iPod” and insisted he “couldn’t abide Frank Sinatra.”

Marie Van Soest, a WindChime resident who’d previously lived in San Anselmo, differed.

She adores Sinatra.

And oldies like “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “New York New York” and “Lady Be Good.”

She told me she looks forward to hearing them.

Again and again.

The main aim of “Music & Memory” seems achievable.

That is, to improve the quality of life for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, for the depressed and infirm, for the lonely, for the elderly in general — by supplying easy access to music they once loved.

“The program’s not going to reverse the effects of dementia,” said Bradlee, “but it’s going to evoke memories from the past — and the joy of those memories.”

Cognitive abilities can improve as well as mood.

I’ve seen both happen, in fact, while watching my wife, Nancy Fox, play piano and provide patter in senior and memory-care facilities in Marin.

Immobilized residents mouthed words from long-forgotten tunes.

And rhythmically tapped their toes and fingers.

I’ve watched deer-in-headlights eyes light up — and stay alert for a while.

“Music & Memory,” I’m also convinced, can cut costs by reducing the need for certain medications. And it can produce residents’ desire to interact with others.

Bradlee gave an example.

One WindChime resident is French and “loves to dance to the music. Her entire playlist is French songs. She’s very sweet to watch, and wants everyone else to hear what she hears, to enjoy what she enjoys.”

Some residents prefer keeping to themselves, however.

Another resident, Bradlee observed, just blissfully and wordlessly “plays invisible piano.”

Virtually everyone involved with the iPod program listed the same caveat: Despite its genuine promise, personalized music is no magical cure.

Still, Gina, who’s also the Community Life Services director at Aldersly in San Rafael, suggested the devices offer “a perfect way for volunteers to step up” since residents need only push a single button to start or stop the music.

Bradlee summed up why she’s sanguine about the program: “I’m always talking quality of life and this program enriches the residents lives.”

One coordinator’s reaction was succinct: “It’s such a great idea — so cool.”

I concur.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

Good things come in threes.

Like “Annie the Musical,” which just opened at the SHN Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco.

It has, to start with, bouncy tunes, talented cast and uplifting theme.

It also has a knack of bringing synchronized pleasure to three generations — at least in my family.

My 8-year-old granddaughter, Hannah, loved it.

So did Laura, her mom: mid-lifer. And so did I: geezer.

Issie Swickle, a 9-year-old Floridian whose long brown hair was cut and dyed red for her “Annie” title role, is absolutely professional.

And has a strong voice.

Yet I believe two other performers have even more charisma.

The first, scene-stealing Lynn Andrews, turned orphanage queenpin Miss Harrington into the best villainess since Glenn Close’s portrayal of Cruella de Vil in “101 Dalmatians.”

Andrews, like Melissa McCarthy, uses her plus-sizedness as a hilarious comic prop.

She’s so over-the-top it’s impossible to stop grinning when she’s on stage — whether singing like a snarling witch in “Little Girls,“ embellishing a raunchy song-and-dance trio such as “Easy Street,” or lip-synching a Jello commercial.

Then there’s a challenger to Shirley Temple as cutest kid actor ever, Lilly Mae Stewart, who sings, dances and even cartwheels as Molly, one of seven little orphaned girls.

She’s a teeny 10.

Speaking of cute, Sunny, a 4-year-old rescue terrier mix who plays Annie’s adopted pooch, Sandy, fits that bill.

Hannah, in fact, confided that one of her favorite “Annie” moments was “when Sandy yawned.”

Her others included two numbers, “It’s the Hard Knock Life” and “Tomorrow, “ the show’s optimistic anthem, and the fun idea of bunk beds (though she wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lower).

Laura, meanwhile, “thoroughly enjoyed the show, which can be appreciated on both adult and kid levels.”

She’s right, of course.

Though most youngsters will be clueless about The Great Depression and Hoovervilles, FDR and the New Deal, or, indeed, orphanages, they certainly can comprehend kids’ plaints about drudgery, meanness and a desire to be part of a family.

When “Annie” first appeared on Broadway in 1977, it won seven Tony’s, including best musical.

Martin Charnin, who doubled as lyricist, directed it then. His direction of this touring company is his 19th go-round.

“Annie” spotlights a capable cast of 25 (plus or minus the dog), and an orchestra of 21. And although the girls shine in choreography by Liza Gennaro, particularly a number featuring a Rockettes-like chorus line, their high-pitched voices make words difficult to distinguish.

Some theatergoers might consider the show’s length — about 2-1/4 hours — excessive for younger children.

Others might object to Annie not looking like the original comic strip character.

Until she’s “gussied up” in Act II by billionaire Daddy Warbucks’ minions. That’s when her straight hair suddenly turns curly and she dons the red dress we all recognize.

Some also may find fault with a knife threat, a doll’s head being torn off, and the word “damn” being used repeatedly.

Never, however, is Annie anything but an optimist, spouting such niceties as “You gotta have dreams.”

The show’s an old-fashioned happy-ending creation likely to force you to hum songs by Charles Strouse, who also co-wrote “Bye Bye Birdie.”

A key by-product, by the way, stems from SHN joining the St. Anthony Foundation in its “Socks in the City” campaign. Seat-holders are asked to bring a new pair to a performance and deposit it in SHN Golden Gate Theatre lobby barrels. Collected items will be given the homeless.

Because my family isn’t homeless, Hannah could smile a lot during “Annie.” And Laura could smile while watching Hannah smile.

And I could smile while watching them both.

Hannah’s mere existence gave me an excuse to go in the first place. I probably wouldn’t have without her, and I’d have been the loser.

But I believe after this run is successful, “Annie” will turn up again — tomorrow.

“Annie the Musical” runs at the SHN Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St. (at Market), San Francisco, through June 14. Night performances, 5:30 p.m. Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays. Matinees, noon Sundays, 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Tickets: $40 to $160 (subject to change). Information: (888) 746-1799 or shnsf.com.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

My wife nailed it.

“You gotta look at it in a historical perspective,” she told me as we exited A.C.T.’s “A Little Night Music” amid my doubts about how to assemble this review.

So I started thinking about time.

• About the musical’s setting being Sweden at the turn of the 20th century.

• About Ingmar Bergman, whose 1955 partner-switching film, “Smiles of a Summer Night,” was heavily mined in 1973 by Stephen Sondheim for his “Night Music” music and lyrics and Hugh Wheeler for the book.

• About its revolving door sexuality and aging themes retaining their relevance in 2015.

My wife’s always liked Sondheim better than I, branding his lyrics, humor and internal rhymes brilliant (we agree his music’s more non-melodic and difficult than most Broadway composers).

I’d never argue with his genius, yet he’s always been too bleak for my tastes.

Sondheim’s initial materials for “Night Music,” it should be noted, were much darker and melancholy than eventually staged.

No surprise.

But “Night Music” does include one of my favorite ballads, the show-stopping “Send in the Clowns,” as well as the lilting “A Weekend in the Country.”

I also admit to enjoying three short, wistful pieces that together put the time arcs in focus (“Now,” “Later” and “Soon”).

And a tone poem extolling the glories of yesterday (“Remember”).

And the waggish “You Must Meet My Wife.”

I was less enthusiastic about “The Miller’s Son,” which the opening night crowd applauded wildly because of a powerful delivery by Melissa McGowan as Petra, a sexpot maid who frequently flaunts her body in hopes of a hook-up.

Yes, it’s the actors who ultimately make the difference, especially Tony Award-winner Karen Ziemba as a disarming, lusty older stage star, Desiree Armfeldt.

Also topping my list is Patrick Cassidy, a Great White Way veteran who plays Fredrik Egerman, Desiree’s then-and-now suitor despite having being married for 11 months to an empty-headed, still virginal 18-year-old Anne (Laurie Veldheer) who contemplates studying Italian only “if the verbs are not too irregular.”

Others I applaud are Dana Ivey as Madame Armfeldt, family matriarch whose facial expressions bring to mind the best of Maggie Smith and who believes that “to lose one’s husband can be vexing…but to lose one’s teeth can be a catastrophe,” and Emily Skinner as Charlotte Malcolm, wife of a philandering warrior (she cynically thinks “love is a dirty business…disgusting…insane”).

Deserving her place in the sun, too, is Brigid O’Brien, a Novato eighth-grader previously featured in The Mountain Play’s “Sound of Music” and “Music Man” and the Ross Valley Players’ “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Here she portrays Fredrik’s teenage daughter, Fredrika, and is quite remarkable.

For any age — but particularly for hers.

Most of those singing voices are excellent (so commendable, in fact, they make Paolo Montalban’s in the Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm role seem humdrum).

And costumes and hats by Candice Donnelly are so lush — in effect, a parade of fashion worthy of a de Young Museum exhibit — they nearly outdo everything else on stage.

The plot?

Well, it resembles a classic French sexual roundelay and could play as a farce if it didn’t want to deal at least superficially with life’s major dilemmas and dramas.

Lust’s the operative word.

Fredrik pines for Desiree, who excites Count Carl-Magnus, too. Madame Armreldt pines for royal liaisons past. Henrick, Fredrik’s son, pines for Anne. And Petra pines for males in general.

Mark Lamos, who was challenged to equal legendary director-producer Hal Prince, who led the ‘73 “Night Music” version, directed this company.

But he accomplishes his apparent goal — to make the show, like its onstage waltzes, “all about flirtation and eroticism.”

He’s aided by Val Caliparoli’s elegant choreography that incorporates lots of mystery, masks and twirling.

Bottom line: Although flawed, the musical’s a grand peek into youthful passions and aging memories, a who-wants-to-bonk-who tableau set against a midsummer night’s dream-setting at a country estate to Sweden in the late 1900s.

It’ll probably still be playing somewhere in 3015.

“A Little Night Music” plays at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco, through June 21. Night performances, 7 p.m., Tuesday, June 2 and Sunday, June 21; 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $20 to $140. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

“Peter Pan” is the most age-appropriate musical performed on Mt. Tam in several years.

For my granddaughter’s bracket, at least.

Hannah has now reached the ripe old age of 8.

With minimal prompting, she told me she really liked the dancing, the costumes and the songs.

But best of all, she said, were the special effects.

“It was fun watching them fly. I wish I could have done that.”

“But I didn’t like Captain Hook,” she added, forgetting to mention that she never likes a villain (no matter how droll).

When I complimented her for her behavior throughout the picnic-show afternoon, she rebuked me for calling her “a young lady” because, “like Peter, I don’t want to grow up — it’s cool being a kid.”

Though she generally enjoyed “Sound of Music,” the last Mountain Play she’d attended, it didn’t enchant her as much as this particular show did, and I doubt she’ll be nearly as mesmerized with next year’s Romeo and Juliet update, “West Side Story” either.

At her age, she has no concept that Nicole Heifer was responsible for the Jerome Robbins-like choreography of “Peter Pan,” Heidi Leigh Hanson for the primary-color costuming, or Michael Schwartz the fast-paced direction.

But I do.

So I mentally jotted down that all three deserve high praise.

God or Mother Nature, too, for making the day perfect at the outdoor Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre in Mount Tamalpais State Park on Highway 1 in Mill Valley.

Not too hot. Not too cold.

As the baby bear kept saying, “Just right.”

Although we, as usual, had prepared — by layering — for virtually any weather.

Admittedly, however, I wasn’t prepared to enjoy the musical as much as I did.

I guess that means that in my final analysis, the show must be age-appropriate for grandparents, too.

“Peter Pan,” the Mountain Play, will be performed at 2 p.m. Sunday, June 7, 14 and 21 and Saturday, June 13. Tickets: $20 to $40 (children 3 and under, free). Information: (415) 383-1100 or www.mountainplay.org.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

The new Berkeley Rep farce, “One Man, Two Guvnors,” stirs the most good feelings — by far — of any feel-good show this season.

Despite the play being a throwback to English music hall shtick (with vaudevillian antics, burlesque sight gags, a little male crotch-grabbing, the breaking of the Fourth Wall, an avalanche of alliteration, a spot of audience participation, and skiffle band/faux Fab Four music tossed in just for the fun of it).

All wrapped in a whopping, fluffy cornball.

But the entire theatrical patchwork quilt — and 15-member acting ensemble — made me grin, smile, chortle and laugh — from beginning to end.

Quite a feat considering the first act’s 90 minutes long, the second another hour.

Don Donohue recently played a somewhat serious character, Richard III, in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and has played the villainous Scar in “The Lion King” on Broadway.

Here, as Francis Henshall, he’s what I’ll describe as a farce of nature.

He’s as skilled, exquisitely timed and rubber-bodied a clown as Pickle Family grads Bill Irwin or Geoff Hoyle, which is high praise indeed.

So easily muddled he can convince himself he’s his own alter ego, Francis fights with himself — verbally and physically. And he turns the moving of a trunk, and serving a feast while he’s starving, into pantomine works of art.

Donohue’s magnificently supported by, in particular, Ron Campbell as Alfie, a fright-wigged, off-balance geezer with a penchant for falling down stairs; Brad Culver as Alan Dangle, wannabe lover and wannabe actor always prepared to ham up his imagined lines; and Danny Scheie as Gareth, screechy-voiced food-server and scene-stealer.

Scheie, not incidentally, delivers the funniest pre-show cell-phone/exit instructions I’ve heard in eons.

The zany, simplistic plot?

The protagonist is hired separately but simultaneously by two men — Roscoe Crabbe, a dead gay mobster now being impersonated by his twin sister, Rachel, and Stanley Stubbers, a snooty criminal who’s her lover, her brother’s killer and a guy prone to such inane comments as, “I felt like a floral clock in the middle of winter.”

Francis’ main job is to flit between the two without either learning about the other.

Sounds like a farce to me.

Relying heavily on suspending belief about mistaken identities.

Since it is a farce, I’d expected dozens of slamming doors. Director David Ivers, a San Rafael, native, didn’t disappoint me.

But he manages to inject virtually everything he thought might add manifold touches of silliness — including oodles of slapstick and other visual hocus-pocus, non sequiturs, pure babble and off-center lines (such one from Rachel, who’s terrified of moving to Australia because she’d have to face “a terrible — outdoorsy — life”).

The play, written by Richard Bean, is set in 1963 Brighton. But it’s really an update of “The Servant of Two Masters,” a 1743 Italian Commedia dell’arte  style work by Carol Goldoni.

Almost 300 years old and still hilarious.

Not too long in the tooth after all.

The current South Coast Repertory co-production — which trails the show’s Broadway opening by only four years — features a quartet of lively musicians — two guitarists, a bass and a washboard player — who perform original Grant Olding tunes under the rubric “The Craze.”

Yes, it’s all unabashedly British — but there are definite overlays of rockabilly and Beatles and an estrogen trio oozing glitz.

“One Man, Two Guvnors” ends up being unadulterated joy, and doesn’t miss a comedic trick.

Well, that’s not quite true: I saw no pie in the face.

“One Man, Two Guvnors” plays at the Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley, through June 21. Night performances, 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays, 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays through Saturdays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $14.50 to $89, subject to change. Information: (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org

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