Woody’s [rating:5]

When I watched him transform into George Gershwin in a one-man Berkeley Rep show in June 2013, I’d never heard of Hershey Felder.

Still, I reveled in his virtuosity as a pianist, actor and writer.

And wanted more.

When last fall I witnessed his puissant direction of Mona Golabek as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor in “The Pianist of Willesden Lane,” I basked in another of his talents.

I craved more.

And when I saw him morph into conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein in June of this year’s “Maestro” musical bio, I couldn’t wait for what came next.

Next is now.

“Monsieur Chopin,” also a solo show, is a bio and concert predictably more romantic than the others — musically, at least.

Some of Fryderyk Chopin’s melodies will be as instantly recognizable by classical music buffs as quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s tattoos would be to 49er fans.

But director Joel Zwick, who guided the Gershwin and Bernstein shows as well as the film “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” proficiently has the keyboardist-playwright intersperse less familiar strains.

“Hershey Felder as Monsieur Chopin,” which runs at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre through Aug. 10, transports audiences to the 1848 Paris salon of the “Polish poet of the piano.”

There he hunkers down with an enigmatic, volatile author, George Sand, and entertains painter Eugene Delacroix, a sometimes bff.

And there, I, and an audience that leapt to its collective feet at the two-hour opening night’s conclusion, could appreciate Felder’s piano dexterity and a characterization that overcomes a heavy accent and feels authentic.

His Steinway tones range from ultra-soft to thunderous.

He nimbly plays all or parts of more than a dozen pieces, including three Polonaises (emphasizing their “rise to glory”), a handful of preludes and nocturnes, “Mazurka in A-Flat Major, Opus 50 No. 2,” “Marche Funébre, Opus 35” and “Romanza, E-Minor Concerto.”

Credit goes to lighting designer Richard Norwood for creating instant mood changes, and scenic designer for fashioning a period setting with just an upholstered chair, end tables, mirror and trinket-laden mantle.

Norwood’s pièce de résistance, however, is a gilded frame that borders the stage and heightens what occurs within: historic legitimacy, histrionic biography.

Felder injects heaps of humor, from the play’s get-go to the end of a 30-minute coda with the house lights on (in which he quick-wittedly answers questions from the crowd in character, cleverly improvising occasional anachronistic jests about cell phones and other today-technology).

He’s especially laugh-inducing when Chopin, a child prodigy and adult genius who died prematurely at age 39, sneers at Franz Liszt’s piano playing and works (“scales and arpeggios and so much noise”).

But pathos is even more prevalent.

From the performer’s description of the death of Emilia, Chopin’s sister, to the composer’s frequent sidekick, melancholia (in modern terms, depression).

And from his obsessive hand-washing to his semi-romantic proclivities (focusing on an eight-year relationship with the pseudonymous Sand, a woman he first encounters dressed in man’s clothing and smoking a cigar).

The playwright’s major conceit is to address the audience as if it were a Chopin class, a theatrical device that’s slightly awkward.

But some of his teaching moments are pithy and poetic:

“You must dust the keys with your fingers as if you were dusting them with your breath.”

“Forget your lunatic family and play as if you are playing for God.”

Felder, who’s been a scholar-in-residence at Harvard’s department of music and is married to Kim Campbell, former Canadian prime minister, apparently cannibalized “Monsieur Chopin” from his own, original three-performer construct, “Romantique,” first performed 11 years ago and skewered by critics.

He obviously rewrote, fixed and honed it.

And salvaged it.

So much so that, nine years after its debut, he’s performed “Chopin” more than 800 times to more than 250,000 theatergoers.

So much so that now it’s become a masterwork, a near-perfect integration of recital and biography.

“Hershey Felder as Monsieur Chopin” plays at the Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley, through Aug. 10 and then returns for encore performances Sept. 16-21. Night shows, 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Wednesdays and Sundays; matinees, 2 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $14.50 to $87, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.

You can contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net.

Woody’s [rating: 2.5]

The more things change, the more they stay the same — except they droop.

That’s the greeting card text I wrote 30 years ago.

My gag line again came to mind as I watched the Ross Valley Players’ new production of Wendy Wasserstein’s “Old Money.”

The play’s all about social climbing, generational gaps, moolah, art and real estate — with dual roles for each of the eight actors. But it feels stodgy and stilted despite the playwright’s renowned skill with barbed dialogue.

Her construct may be too clever, her play too New York.

Wasserstein invites us into a lavish mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

There we witness two dinner parties.

Jeffrey Bernstein, an arbitrage kingpin played as a man of equanimity by Geoffrey Colton, hosts the first — at the beginning of the 21st century.

The second, nearly 100 years earlier, spotlights Johnny DeBernard as a boisterous robber baron, Tobias Pfeiffer.

Colton doubles as even-tempered retail tycoon Arnold Strauss, and DeBernard also personifies Sid Nercessian, a Tinseltown director who repugnantly spews an f-bomb every fourth word.

All the actors do well, no mean feat considering they’re burdened with a plot unnecessarily complicated and convoluted.

Director Kim Bromley admittedly struggled with the plotline complexities and mélange of Wasserstein characters (“I had to read it three times to grasp the scope of it,” she writes in the program).

She suggested opening night reviewers feel what the characters feel.

I couldn’t.

Perhaps because Wasserstein — known for her intelligent, independent but self-doubting female characters trapped by male power — thwarted me by pricking too many heavy subjects.

Relentlessly, she tackles youthful rebellion and self-destruction, aging and death, legacy and immortality, Jewishness and assimilation, platonic relationships and sexuality, snobbery and acceptance.

Which almost bury all her valiant attempts at humor.

The script of the two-hour, two-act comedy of manners, which premiered off-Broadway in 2001, immediately tells theatergoers what they’re watching — an examination of how new money becomes old money (and what impact that evolution has on its wealthy stakeholders).

The problem is that the theme gets underscored over and over.

Mind-numbingly.

A single summation, such as the scene in which Bernstein and Pfeiffer engage in a verbal mine’s-bigger-than-yours debate about influence, would have sufficed.

Striking, however, are spot-on costumes by Michael A. Berg that range from elegant to flamboyant and instantly allow audiences to know which characterization an actor in inhabiting, and a ideal set by Michael Walraven, replete with large paintings and a massive always-needing-polish wooden railing.

Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer and a best play Tony in 1989 for “The Heidi Chronicles,” isn’t above contrasting schmaltziness and whimsy. Check out, for instance, her having one actor stylishly dance the Gavotte but later prance in a lobster costume.

The playwright’s signature one-liners are numerous:

• “If the rich aren’t happy, who the hell will be?”

• “I like the opera. Big girls with elephants. Isn’t that enough?”

• “I’m having trouble ignoring you tonight.”

Top-notch performances are turned in by Gillian Eichenberger as both silver-voiced servant and self-destructive daughter; Robyn Wiley, as outdated as the figure sculpted by her character, Auntie Mame-ish Saulina Webb; Karen Leland as strident publicist Flinty McGee; and Jesse Lumb as sons of both Bernstein and Pfeiffer (and part-time narrator).

Add to the mix Wood Lockhart, who may hold the record for most RVP performances and is wistful as Tobias Vivian Pfeiffer III, and Trungta Kositchaimmongkol, snarky as underwear designer Penny Nercessian.

“Old Money” has many amusing and edifying moments yet, in the final analysis, couldn’t excite me.

And it somehow felt both long and long in the tooth (though not quite as antiquated as Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The Rivals,” the 1777 play it references) — despite anachronistic references to Jennifer Lawrence and Silicon Valley.

If asked to stick my two cents in, I’d have to say earlier works by Wasserstein — who died of lymphoma at age 55 in 2005 — were much easier to bank on for laughs or insights.

The RVP recently produced some incredibly good entertainments.

This wasn’t their best choice.

“Old Money” will run at The Barn, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through Aug. 17. Night performances, Thursdays at 7:30, Fridays and Saturdays at 8; matinees, Sundays at 2. Tickets: $13-$26. Information: www.rossvalleyplayers.com or (415) 456-9555.

You can contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net.

 

Patrice Hickox would prefer I think of her as ordinary.

She isn’t.

The Fairfax resident’s a real-life Energizer Bunny.

Without floppy ears.

A perpetual motion machine with platinum-hued hair and hands that intermittently sketch pictures in thin air. A do-gooder everlastingly battling for one cause or another.

Since I’ve tilted at a few windmills myself, I like that.

Still, no matter how much she achieves, she’s never able to rest on her laurels.

 

She is resting one recent Saturday, however, on a memorial bench at the edge of Bolinas Park in Fairfax she fought hard to get installed at the end of May.

Not quite relaxed.

Trying to figure out how she best can help Marin’s foster children keeps her mind flashing like a July 4th sparkler.

She can’t know a Marin County Civil Grand Jury will shortly issue a report saying more funds must to be spent on the issue, more communication must occur between foster parents and social workers, and more access to therapy must be provided those neglected kids.

What to do? What to do?

She and I are together, me armed with interview pad and pen, she momentarily staring off into the distance at a bald hill she knows must be preserved.

Of course.

One cause at a time isn’t her style.

She’s also thinking about finding a way to replace “the dingy, worn-out, style-less sign announcing the Town of San Anselmo.”

And improving local median strips.

How?

“Re-plant, re-think, re-design,” she tells me.

The artsy wood bench we’re on is dedicated to the memory of her friend, Nancy Helmers, an environmental activist who died last year at age 82.

Patrice tactfully declines to reveal the political obstacles — “the kerfluffle, the brouhaha” — she had to vault to make it happen.

She’s just glad it’s a done deal.

Nancy had served on the county’s Open Space Committee for 10 years, as well as many other boards, and had been as non-stop energetic as Patrice.

She also was an unrelenting firebrand when it came to pushing petitions. “No one could collect a signature like Nancy,” Patrice tells me. “No one would say ‘No’ to her.

The two women met in 1988 when Nancy was collecting names in favor of creating a multi-purpose park on the 28 acres of the Marin Town and Country Club, which was being eyed by a developer.

The pair stopped the development from happening.

But they couldn’t come up with an effective plan to raise enough money to build their dream park.

“Instead, we became friends,” Patrice remembers. “We were both birders and environmentalists. We hiked, and we eventually collected thousands of signatures for a lot of things that failed.”

There were, however, sporadic triumphs.

Such as Lansdale Park in San Anselmo, a pocket-sized space with a children’s playground — or, as the town’s website says, “just what the neighborhood needed! Parents can enjoy a coffee-to-go from the nearby café while watching their children play outdoors.”

Patrice recalls “they were going to put condos there, but we got a petition to stop it. We got two grants from the Buck Fund, and got students from the White Hall Middle School in Fairfax to help. It was great.”

Her awareness began shortly after reading Rachel Carson’s best-selling “Silent Spring,” which detailed the detrimental use of pesticides.

“I was off and running after that,” she says. “I stopped eating meat and started paying attention. I was 14.”

As a Manhattan teenager, she’d attended be-in’s in Central Park, marched in Washington against the Vietnam War, and rallied for civil rights.

“I guess I’ve been a die-hard liberal ever since I figured out what that was,” she says.

Sometimes Patrice, who’s lived in Fairfax since 1995 with Charlie, her musician husband of 41 years, volunteers longer than she’d intended.

She helped out at WildCare for more than 10 years, for instance, “raising hundreds of baby things — from snakes to foxes to raccoons and squirrels.”

If she could accomplish anything in the world, what would it be, I ask. She replies without hesitation: “Get rid of Putin and Assad.”

Then she says, “I think I’d like to be empress of Oakland and just fix that city.”

And then, after a slight pause, she adds seriously, “Anything that I’d be effective at — so I wouldn’t have to beat my head against the wall again.”

I smile.

Since I’ve tilted at a few windmills myself, I understand completely.

You can contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net