Members of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre ensemble display their versatility. Stock photo by Dario Calmese.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Spirituality, grace, energy.

Those elements have since 1958 been trademarks of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre but never more so than now.

The company’s entire three-part Program C, which Cal Performances staged last week at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, leaned more heavily on spirituality than usual — but in no way to the detriment of the other two components.

The program ended with “Revelations,’ the glorious signature piece that closes so many Ailey shows and is, of course, based on a series of Negro spirituals. But “Sacred Songs” (the emotional, sometimes frenzied opener) and “Many Angels” (danced lusciously with traditional dance movements to the solemn music of Gustav Mahler) both also provided a sense of connection to something greater than ordinary men and women.

In the first and third parts particularly, the dancers were so limber, so fluid, that it appeared they might be minus some bones.

And never did theatergoers need be sure their interpretation of the wonderment on stage (including verbal injections of Jesus, the Lord, and Elijah) were correct; it was sufficient to appreciate the seemingly flawless skill of the performers,

The audience was so enthusiastic it frequently interjected bursts of loud applause topped off with spasmodic cheering.

“Sacred Songs,” a Bay Area premiere whose diverse elements were a cornucopia of energy, fluttering wrists and fingers, and a reaching up to the heavens, featured several scenes so riveting they appeared to last only seconds before a blackout.

Its music — by DuBois AKeen — ranged from extreme softness in “Be Still” to frenzied jazz; garments were rapidly switched from jeans and mesh tops for men to pristine, loose-fitting white for both sexes, but their muted impact was immediately overshadowed by the wild energy, unadulterated smoothness, and synchronicity of the dancers’ movements.

Its choreography by Mathew Rushing ensured the whole stage was used superlatively — so well, in fact, it was impossible for human eyes to take it all in at once. Quickly changing focus from one dancer to another became a necessity, as if one were watching a three-ring circus filled with ballet pros.

One segment of the piece opened with a dancer’s hands moving as if she were playing bongo drums — so realistically you could almost see the instrument that wasn’t there.

“Many Angels,” also a Bay Area premiere, began with dancers on the floor in front of a noteworthy backdrop of clouds with light streaming through them. Both music and dance were a sharp contrast in tone to the rest of the performance. Choreography by Lars Lubovich, who also was responsible for the scenic design, flowed as smoothly as angels’ wings might flap in a celestial breeze.

This segment drew polite clapping and commentary about its soft, pale beauty as opposed to the unbridled tribute-yelling earned by “Revelations,” which brought applause from repeat viewers before the curtain rose.

“Revelations,” a 1960 creation choreographed by Ailey himself and colorfully costumed by Ves Harper, was so spirited that what felt like a third of the audience applauded rhythmically in unison to several of its 10 parts, A multitude of ballet-lovers leapt to their feet to sway and clap during the last one, “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham,” which showcased the entire company.

Raucous applause and shouts of joy reverberated earlier when Xavier Mack finished his solo, “I Wanna Be Ready.”

And ultimately the crowd gave an expected standing ovation as the concert concluded, hints of joyous music still resounding in the acoustically superb auditorium.

Dance will be featured in two upcoming shows at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, through Cal Performances: from a Brazilian troupe, Grupo Corpo, which blends classical ballet with folk and popular dance, April 25 and 26, and the Mark Morris Dance Group’s tribute to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” May 9-11. Info: 510-642-9988 or https://calperformances.org.

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

Lawrence Redecker, as crazed Carrier X in “The Boiling: A tale of American nihilism,” stands before a striking projection. Photo by Jay Yamada.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

If you relish theatrical productions that can merge disparate elements into a unique gel, the Magic Theatre’s The Boiling: A tale of American nihilism might satisfy your appetite.

It’s a complicated, offbeat, wannabe thriller that challenges the mental acuity of its audience, which may be left answerless to a carload of questions.

Major themes include roots and the question of if you can go home again, whether human relationships and identity do change, how personal and community histories can be integrated with today’s beings and events, how to deal with major violence in our lives, and whether science and book-learning can protect us from danger.

Plus, where serene birding fits into all of it.

The world premiere that’s presented by the Magic in conjunction with Campo Santo combines acting that ranges from muted subtlety to emotional outbursts, perfectly inserted music that skips from raucous rock to melancholy softness, and striking video, sound and lighting effects that can startle and delight.

Sunhui Chang’s drama, which jumps back and forth in time and from the Carolinas to Colorado, certainly isn’t linear. But there is a storyline:

Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe (left) and John Brougher are befuddled agents trying to track down a killer virus spreader. Photo by Jay Yamada.

Brian, a Korean American virologist from the Midwest, and Vee, a Southern-bred Black detective linked to the Pacific Northwest, team up as agents of a new government agency to hunt down David, a rampaging nomadic Caucasian carrier of a killer virus labeled “the boiling.”

For those who enjoy stage puzzles that dip into mental masturbation, the play covers several aspects of nihilism, including the concept that the attitude can be a source of despair as well as a catalyst for individual freedom. If you have the patience to look deep enough, you may discover that The Boiling also touches on fundamental nihilistic notions such as life is basically meaningless, without purpose or value; objective moral codes and beliefs don’t exist; and the possibility of knowledge or unbiased truth is nil.

That sounds awfully negative on paper, yet in the skilled hands of the cast of seven, it’s not overpowering but integrated with whatever else is happening onstage — and off, because characters join the chain of events from deep in the seats (and even surprisingly plop down in the front row).

The device of characters reading — in the third person — a book entry that describe themselves and what they’re doing can be seductive. Also alluring is the projection of plot locations in big letters on the stage floor between scenes, perhaps an outgrowth of the author originally conceiving of the slow 95-minute creation as a screenplay.

Jesse Vaughn (front) performs a ritual in “The Boiling” as Jeannine Anderson shuts her eyes in quietude behind him. Photo by Jay Yamada.

Off-putting, unlike a movie or video where the volume can be adjusted by a techie, is the choice by director Ellen Sebastian Chang of having two actors turn their backs to the audience in one long scene, muffling their words despite being mic’d.

From a more positive viewpoint, Lawrence Reducer excels as Carrier X, as do Jeannine Anderson as Miss Lolli (a narrator), and John Brougher as Brian.

All three — part of a metaphoric road trip — help bring the puzzle and story home.   

The Boiling: A Tale of American Nihilism runs at the Magic Theatre, 2 Marina Blvd., Landmark Building C, Suite 260, Fort Mason, in San Francisco, through April 20. Tickets: $35 to $75. Info: 415-441-8822 or https://magictheatre.org

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

Evvy Calstrom-March (center, as Sally Bowles) and Stephen Kanaski (also center, as the Emcee) star in Cabaret. (All photos by Katie Wickes)

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

There’s no perfect show, no perfect production. But the Marin Musical Theatre Company’s interpretation of Cabaret comes within a hair’s breadth of reaching those pinnacles.

The best Bay Area theatrical work of the year, perhaps the season, it stars Evvy Calstrom-March as chanteuse Sally Bowles, the main draw in Berlin’s shabby Kit Kat Club, circa the Roaring Twenties and the rise of Hitler.

Calstrom-March is a joy to watch every second she’s on stage at the Novato Theatre Company (which presented Cabaret). She’s a quadruple threat: vocals that might make many a Broadway starlet jealous; dancing that puts a capital “L” in limber; dramatic acting chops that make you feel with her; and a rubberized face that can deliver comic expressions with ease.

Also completely watchable is Stephen Kanaski, the Emcee, who changes costumes as often as kids check out their smart phones, and who leers and sneers with the best of them — even though actor/singer Joel Grey originally “owned” the role.

Choreography by Katie Wickes — who also seamlessly co-directed the show with Jenny Boynton — derivatively reminds theatergoers of Bob Fosse at his peak with an underlay of classic Jerome Robbins (and that’s not a bad thing). She staged and rehearsed each of the four nightclub dancers so well they seemed to fill the spotlights as if there were two or three times that many hoofers.

Superlative costumes by Krista Lee and Andria Nyland ranged from a military uniform to glitzy, skimpy burlesque outfits to “ordinary clothing” that blended so well it became invisible so they didn’t distract from the plotline.

A trio of instrumentalists, led by music director Daniel Savio just off the stage, doesn’t miss a proverbial beat and couldn’t have supported the cast better with its bouncy jazz rhythms suitable to the era.

Others worth lauding include Daniela Innocenti Beem, who smoothly injects landlady Fraulein Schneider (who feels pressured by the political upheaval to not marry the Jewish fruit peddler she loves) with humor and pathos and a voice that won’t quit, and Michael Lister, who portrays Ernst, a Nazi smuggler, with appropriate sleaze.

Cabaret, as most theatergoers know, is a rough-edged tragic double-love story engraved on a backdrop of Nazism. Today, the 1966 musical again acts as a red-flag metaphor suggesting that extreme nationalism, racism, Antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+ism, and blindness to burgeoning authoritarianism can imperil our frail democracy.

Fräulein Schneider (Daniela Innocenti Beem), a landlady, cozies up to Jewish fruit peddler, Herr Shultz (Jere Torkelsen).

The Marin Musical Theatre Company (MMTC) show isn’t for everyone, certainly — despite the production’s overall superb quality and the show’s Tony award-winning history. MAGA devotees probably won’t like it just because. And anyone who can’t handle its cornucopia of heavy sexuality, debauchery, homophobia, immorality, hedonism, prostitution, and drugs most likely will stay home.

Sally Bowles (Evvy Calstrom-March, center) and Kit Kat Club girls come on strong.

Regardless, classic Broadway music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, a team that also spawned another Great White Way blockbuster, Chicago, remain a perfect fit. Several of the tunes, in fact, can be sung or hummed or whistled as you leave the theater, an endeavor that’s almost as dead as the proverbial dodo if you think about more modern musicals.

Joel Grey, not incidentally, gets cited online by Wickes and Boynton, in lieu of a production prologue, by reprinting an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times last November.

In it, he sounds an alarm about “the dangers of apathy” and distraction — as he simultaneously warns us about being seduced by a sense that we are facing dark times but “they won’t really affect our own day-to-day lives.”

That sense, he notes, echoes “the tragically shortsighted assessment of so many European Jews in the 1920s and ‘30s.”

The MMTC/Novato Theatre Company co-production of Cabaret will play at the Novato Theatre Company, 5420 Nave Drive, Novato, through April 13. Tickets: $35 to $50. Info: 415-883-4498 or info@marinmusicals.org.

Actor Richard Dreyfuss (Dylan James Pereira, front) gestures while the other main performers in the film Jaws, Roy Scheider (Nathan Luft-Runner, left) and Robert Shaw (Matt Cadigan), look on in a dramedy at the Left Edge Theatre, The Shark Is Broken. (Photo by Dana Hunt)

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

The Shark Is Broken may be billed as a comedy but might better be viewed as a drama peppered with laughs.

The 95-minute play details the real-life, repugnant interactions of actors Richard Dreyfuss (Dylan James Pereira), Robert Shaw (Matt Cadigan), and Roy Scheider (Nathan Luft-Runner) off and on the set of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 cinematic blockbuster, Jaws.

Tensions spring from shooting delays caused by pre-CGI and AI mechanical devices — intended to power the threatening shark — conking out. Add to that a feud between a young Dreyfuss and an aging Shaw (known as much for his Shakespearean roles and his writing as for his Hollywood work) that sets a troublesome tone throughout.

Scheider, a more stoic, professorial type, can’t elude Shaw’s negativity either. When he bemoans the two-month ocean shoot in Martha’s Vineyard as “a long time to be stuck together,” Shaw one-ups him: “It’s an eternity.”

Many scenes in the Dana Hunt-directed play replicate precisely what happened. At least that’s what Ian Shaw, the actor’s son, would have us believe. It was he who co-wrote the play with Joseph Nixon (never shrinking from repeatedly depicting his dad as a stumbling drunk).

The Shaw character, who alludes to his own father killing himself when the actor was 12, is fully cognizant of his shortcomings and how they affect others. He refers to priding himself for being able to act at all after “a tidal wave of booze” and notes that he can find himself “with a drink in my hand as a reward for not drinking.”

Trying to cozy up to the British actor, and hopefully eliminating an avalanche of putdowns, Dreyfuss brings his elder joy by looking for and finding two hidden bottles of booze. But he also dumps the contents of yet another bottle, an action that transforms a war of words into more physical combat.

Much of the play’s humor is pitch black, with sarcasm being the main coin of the theatrical realm. Early on, the panic attack-prone Dreyfuss fears for his career because the film they’re in could end up being like Planet of the Apes“without the monkeys.”

In brazen contrast while alone in the show’s funniest moments later, he presents a mocking imitation of Shaw.

Starring in The Shark Is Broken are (from left) Dylan James Pereira, Nathan Luft-Runner, and Matt Cadigan. (Photo by Dana Hunt)

Together, the three characters touch on a gamut of subjects: father-son relationships, philosophical and scientific journeys of the mind and mouth, and pointed references to Nixon (“tricky Dickie”), the Silent Majority, and Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Harold Pinter,

To pass the time, they gamble on cards and a British coin-flip game — and almost constantly refer to their previous hits, as well as films that crashed and burned, and other actors.

They also debate their billing and who is the film’s star, their egos never letting them think for an instant that it’s the animatronic shark.

Just before their final scene, in both reel and real life, Shaw indicate he doesn’t think much of Jaws and goes on to trash Spielberg’s next unnamed project that will become E.T. — the Extra-Terrestrial with one pejorative word, aliens, and then predicts that the film industry in the future will be limited to churning out “sequels and rewrites and sequels.”

Snarkily, he also says, “Do you really think anybody is going to be talking about this in 50 years?”

The Shark Is Broken will play at the Left Edge Theatre of the California Theatre, 528 7th St., Santa Rosa, through April 11. Tickets: $22 to $33. Info: 707-664-play or https://leftedgetheatre.com.

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