EDITOR’S NOTE: Twenty years ago, Woody Weingarten talked with composer Marvin Hamlisch, who just died at age 68. This is a slightly edited version of the tribute he filed shortly after that one-on-one interview.

Marvin Hamlisch dresses as if he’s first in line for a sale on invisibility.

The composer’s gray, gray suit looks like it had been pressed only minutes ago. His crisp pink tie attempts to disappear in the pale same-hue shirt on which it reclines. Although his black slip-ons are perfectly buffed, they somehow don’t reflect the light.

Behind that CPA exterior, however, is a soul that struts like a peacock.

Marvin Hamlisch, who by the age of 31 had won three Oscars and a Pulitzer, talks at first like a mama’s boy.

His eyes twinkle from behind rimless glasses and his thick lips curl into an industrial size grin when he describes Lilly.

“I had two wonderful parents,” he begins an interview in a San Francisco hotel suite, but when asked if he has a favorite anecdote, he draws laughter with a quick one-liner: “My mother was a Jewish anecdote.”

“She was the ultimate Jewish mother,” he continues. “When my father came home, she had a meal ready. Eat, eat, eat.”

Lilly and Marvin’s father, Max, taught their boy prodigy to love his music and his Jewishness. Because both had fled Nazi terrorism in Europe, however, they suggested he downplay his heritage.

But Marvin Hamlisch advertises his ethnicity. Like Barbra Streisand, whom he’s worked with, he has his original nose. Like Sandy Koufax, Hall of Famer who also balanced his background against his career, he won’t work on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.

Hamlisch has a piano with 88 keys and a mind with 888 opinions. Ask him a simple question and his mouth starts a marathon.

On cultural lines, for instance: “I feel ecumenical. I don’t like thinking of things being Jewish, Moslem, whatever. A piano is a piano — here, in China, in Tibet. Music is universal. I’m writing for everybody.”

Regarding his best-known creation, Chorus Line, the composer says he particularly enjoys when someone refers to it as “classic Hamlisch.”

In most other instances, Marvin Hamlisch hates to look back. So the man whose career hit a low when his musical Jean bombed in New York not long ago has climbed a new rocket, one with dual exhaust.

First, he’s peddling The Way I Was, a 234-page autobiography from Scribners written with the aid of Gerald Gardner.

It’s unlikely to become a smash because there’s no sex or violence, no kiss-and-tell sizzle.

“I have no desire to talk about old girlfriends,” Hamlisch says. “Why would I want to hurt my wife, to hurt myself, with that crap.”

Besides, he comments, “I hardly ever dated anybody. I had no high school sweethearts because I was working — zoom, off to here; whoosh, off to there.  My mind was always on one thing: ‘Get to Broadway.’”

Writing a book is a learning experience, he says. “It’s very cathartic. You let yourself off the hook for your mistakes.”

Hamlisch’s other new venture is a $7 million show, a musical adaptation of Neil Simon’s Goodbye Girl for Broadway.

“We haven’t had a musical-comedy in a long time,” he says, “and we’ve got comedy up the wazoo.”

Hamlisch worries, though, about the future of big-time theater. “I pray that Broadway will be here a generation from now. Look how many are not going to the theater. It’s too expensive. It’s becoming elitist entertainment. It costs $65 a person, plus dinner, plus parking — if everything goes right, if you get your car back, if you don’t get mugged.”

It’s becoming tougher and tougher, too, to find backers for shows. “Revivals are great for producers,” he notes. “They can raise the $5- or $6 million in a second. But for a new show, you have to audition, you have to play music out of context for very rich people. It’s a degrading way of working.” 

Once things get under way, however, everybody lightens up. “I’m a team player, part of a mosaic. I like it when the whole thing works,” says Hamlisch, who contends that “everything I write is in pencil. I’ll change anything —until we open.”

As for what he wants out of it all, it’s not money, it’s not fame. “My writing will give me, God willing, a legacy,” he says.

 

 

My memory is a trickster so I can’t swear to it. But I do recall seeing George Bernard Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” as a teenager in 1951.

It was my first Broadway show.

I had no inkling then how good Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were as actors.

I recall later watching Jason Robards Jr. and Fredric March in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in William Gibson’s “The Miracle Worker.”

For me, acting was king.

And queen.

Then came the gimmickry. My first glimpse of the theatrical trend was when the chandelier crashed down in “Phantom of the Opera.”

That was followed by the helicopter landing onstage for “Miss Saigon” and, much more recently, Julie Taymor’s gloriously imaginative giant hollow puppets and people-in-animal-costumes in “The Lion King.”

Lots of musical charm was sandwiched in between, of course.

Stagecraft ruled.

Now comes “The War Horse” with its semi-mechanical “star,” Joey, a 120-pound, 10-feet-long, 8-feet-tall walking, rearing and breathing steed that takes three puppeteers to operate.

He’s impressive.

But does a gimmick, even a spectacular one, make the price of admission to this magical melodramatic epic worthwhile?

My unwavering answer is, “Yes, yes, and hell yes.”

It was impossible for me not to gaze with delight at the horse puppets (Tophorn is sort of a co-star, a black counterpart to Joey’s red bay, but also arresting are Coco and Heine and a much tinier Joey as a awkward foal).

They become decidedly more real than the human characters — endowed with life-like movements, emotions and sounds.

It’s easy to forget the steeds are moving not because of sinews and bloodstreams but rods and cables and other apparatus, so it’s no wonder when “War Horse” ended at the SHN Curran, the opening night audience gave mild applause to the actors and a standing ovation to the anatomically incorrect stallions.

Before that point, the production was enriched substantially via a white horizontal screen across the center of the backdrop.

The images projected onto it — including World War I battle scenes, rainstorms, skies and buildings — markedly helped the action come to life.

So did the period costuming of civilians and soldiers, inventive sets and props that surrealistically and nightmarishly depicted horrific killing devices such as cannon, planes and barbed wire, and dramatic musical soundbursts that contrasted with the sweet hopefulness of a strolling Irish balladeer.

Only the unmemorable acting by a large cast of cardboard characters (whose dialogue occasionally was too muffled for those in rear orchestra seats) and a trite, predictable storyline were found wanting.

The emphatically anti-war play, strewn with dead human and horse bodies, covers from 1912 through Armistice Day in 1918.

The plot’s a snap to summarize: A drunk trying to outdo his brother buys Joey at auction. The new owner’s teenage son, Albert, bonds with the animal and trains him. The horse is sold to the British Army, and later rescued by a German coward. The teen searches for his equine buddy.

Spotty moments of humor (many provided by a comic puppet goose that’s predisposed to biting) lighten the production, but mostly it’s a austere affair in which war scenes dominate even Joey’s majestic presence.

And where the first section of the 135-minute Tony award-winning show is straightforward and clear, moments in the second act can be momentarily confusing.

Nothing, however, can compete with Joey trotting up and down an aisle.

Because South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company creations are so special, all minor criticism can be shunted aside unless you opt to stay home because, as one woman bemoaned, “You know how I hate war movies — well, this isn’t any easier to take.”

“War Horse” runs at the SHN Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., San Francisco, through Sept. 9. Night performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $31 to $100. Information: (888) 746-1799 or shnsf.com.

And the winner is — drumroll, please — Robin Williams.

Three generations of my family agreed his improv at 142 Throckmorton in Mill Valley became the apex of a recent fun-crammed Bay Area vacation.

The icing on our cake, you might say.

Williams headlined a bill that included funnyman Mort Sahl, who at 85 walks haltingly but retains a keen mind.

I’d planned for us to catch a weekly Mark Pitta & Friends comedy gig so was surprised to find us watching 90 minutes of improvisation as beneficiaries of a scheduling switch.

Set List, with its catchphrase “stand-up without a net,” was being filmed for United Kingdom telecasting.

Each comedian (including Pitta) was captivating, but Williams, undoubtedly his generation’s primo comic genius, exceeded everyone’s highest expectations.

His steel-trap mind was fully transparent.

He instantly absorbed the never-before-seen phrases that flashed on a screen behind him and wove them into a web of delight.

Yes, much of his humor, and that of the other verbal clowns, wasn’t for little kids — especially an uproarious rendition of a talking vagina.

But my 15-year-old grandson, Zach, roared.

So did my other grandson, who’s 24; my son, 46; and my wife, who’s been on the planet only two years less than my 74 years.

She, in fact, labeled the show “quintessential improv. Sahl was as sharp as a tack and Williams as sharp as two tacks.”

I shared all their euphoria.

I’d been in the theater many times, mostly to hear readings of plays by Writers with Attitude.

But the remodeled nonprofit theater, which dates back to 1915 when it showed Charlie Chaplin flicks for a few pennies, is also the site of concerts and jam sessions that include the likes of Joan Baez and Woody Allen (individually, not as a duet).

It’s worth supporting.

While planning the vacation for “the boys” from the East Coast, I couldn’t help but think I had 7,150,739 places to choose from — one each Bay Area resident might recommend.

At least that’s what it felt like when I invited suggestions from friends and colleagues.

The ideas poured in.

One of the best notions was the San Francisco Movie Tour, a three-hour bus ride featuring 70 clips from 60 films shot in the city, way beyond the anticipated “Bullit” and “Vertigo.”

If “Mrs. Doubtfire” star Robin Williams turned into the vacation cake’s frosting, this journey represented sparkling candles.

Wylie Herman, an actor well versed in cinematic lore, guided us. Humor and Hollywood back-lot scraps copiously trickled off his tongue.

When discussing the filming of the Mike Myers’ comedy, “So I Married an Axe Murderer,” for instance, he cited a Tinsel Town truism feared by actors and adored by Realtors: “The camera adds 10 pounds and five bedrooms.”

Zach called it “the best tour I’ve ever seen of San Francisco.”

And his father, my son Mark, gave it “two thumbs up — for a good balance between the films, the facts and the city sights.”

Another of the family favorites was a visit to the California Academy of Sciences, which is featuring a new exhibit and planetarium show, “Earthquake.”

A couple of dubious moments resurfaced for my wife and me since we’d been downtown when the Loma Prieta tremor hit in 1989. Though I was decidedly nervous about being in the “shake house” when it started rattling, I survived the faux temblor — and my trepidation — as I had the real one.

“The boys” appreciated it more.

They also liked the permanent displays — the waddling penguins, the spiral Rainforests of the World and the always-exhilarating underwater creatures of the Steinhart Aquarium.

But all of us expressly reveled in the ostrich chicks, then 16 days old.

Noted Drew, my older grandson, “I liked the babies the best of anything. It’s amazing how they’ve learned to walk so quickly.”

Alcatraz, of course, is on or near the top of almost everyone’s list of tourist musts. It was no exception for us.

A walking tour of the site last used as a prison in 1963 was jammed with facts, facts and more facts, none more significant for me than solar panels having been installed in June to generate 80 percent of the power need.

Mark grinned broadly at being “locked” behind bars in a cell, a piece of the colorful audio tour created by Chris Hardman and his Antenna Theatre.

“It was interesting seeing things from a prisoner’s point of view,” he said, flaunting his mastery of

understatement.

My wife Nancy agreed, adding that she was staggered to find “prisoners had been segregated. I’d never thought about that before.”

Hardman had also drummed up The Magic Bus, a 2-hour multimedia “time machine” tour of San Francisco that stresses the Summer of Love and the city’s Haight-Ashbury heyday — an era that, as the narration says, was “full of optimism, full of life.”

Music from the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” decade blasted through the bus as retractable screens depicted scene after scene of local happenings, interviews about acid trips and psychedelics, and a historical context.

They transformed each of us into a Dr. Feelgood.

We also got off on wearing 3-D glasses that made the bus wallpaper and souvenir booklet photos jump out.

But I wept again when the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King flashed before my eyes and brain.

Nancy and I, who’d consciously experienced the ‘60s, liked the bubble-discharging ride better than my kin, one of whom had been a toddler and two who hadn’t even been conceived.

Our pleasure was even enhanced by bumper-sticker wisdom offered by the hippie-clad tour guide: “Life is to be lived, not just tolerated.”

Living it to the fullest, for us, meant additional stops at Pier 39, where we all marveled in the Mirror Maze (one of seemingly endless tourist attractions and views, restaurants and shopping opportunities there), and the Conservatory of Flowers, where we saw “Plantosaurus Rex,” an exhibit of “living fossils” (prehistoric plants), along with models of dinosaurs (with one ostensibly sticking its head through the roof).

When all was said and done, though, the biggest vacation takeaway for me was the discovery that “the boys” walked too fast for Nancy and me to keep pace.

I guess it’s appropriate that the Summer Olympics are in full swing: We definitely need to pass the foot-race torch.

Tourist info is available for 142 Throckmorton at (415) 383-9600, www.142throckmortontheatre.org; San Francisco Movie Tour, (800) 979-3370, (415) 624-4949, www.sanfranciscomovietours.com; Academy of Sciences, (415) 379-8000, www.info@calacademy.org; Alcatraz, (415) 981-7625, info@alcatrazcruises.com; Magic Bus, (415) 855-969-6244, info@MagicBusSF.com; Pier 39, (415) 705-5500, www.pier39.com; Conservatory of Flowers, (415) 831-2090, www.conservatoryofflowers.org

 

Although I did think “The King’s Speech” was a splendid movie, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is the best film I’ve seen this century.

Stand aside, Meryl Streep. Get out of the way, Natalie Portman.

The movie’s six-year-old star, Quvenzhane Wallis, could well become the youngest ever to win an Oscar for best performance, though Shirley Temple was given a special honorary juvenile award at the same age.

The former non-actor seamlessly makes everything on this original cinematic canvas seem real, authentic despite blending elements of mythology and parable with premature coming of age and a gritty, perilous bayou life on the wrong side of a New Orleans levee.

Wallis’ character, Hushpuppy, is also six.

She’s watched over by her alcoholic, dying dad, Wink (Dwight Henry), a loving, protective father who wants his legacy to be his survival skills.

“Beasts,” a Sundance and Cannes award-winner narrated from Hushpuppy’s innocent and imaginative point of view, ultimately is about man’s uneasy coexistence with nature.

It’s about a storm as ugly as Hurricane Katrina that threatens to bury everyone and everything in its wake. Global warming runs wild, ice caps melt and the rise of the water shadows the rising temperatures.

It’s about mystical, carnivorous aurochs — prehistoric creatures that resemble giant boars and, surrealistically, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — that trample all life in their path.

It’s also about Hushpuppy’s quest, while distanced from her ragtag home in the Bathtub, a swampland off the coast of southern Louisiana, for her dead mother who “swam away” and disappeared years before.

But, finally, it’s about faith in throwaway family and friends and makeshift rafts that may outlast the danger, and about faith in life itself.

The film’s components work in flawless concert to yank an audience into uncomfortable places it may not want to go — including a close-up view of government workers more concerned with regulations than humanity.

Aided by a passionate, throbbing musical backdrop, the fictional tale sometimes provides tension that may seem to override all else.

But flashes of love and bonding manage to quash that sensation.

Photography can range from blurry images of the girl to breathtakingly panoramic views of rising waters and crumbling homes constructed of detritus.

Like life, the camera, characters and story constantly shift. Regardless, it’s hard not to be magnetized to the screen through the 93-minute fantasy.

First-time director Benh Zeitlin has taken the allegorical screenplay by co-writer Lucy Alibar from her play, “Juicy and Delicious,” and knitted together diverse factors and a childlike voiceover that could make me forget the hand-held camera and think I was in a forgiving hallucination.

Some folks won’t like this film, and will label it too airy-fairy. Others will discount it as quickly as they do Terrence Malick movies.

It’s certainly not for 14-year-old boys only in need of flatulence jokes and car chases.

But for me, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is an amazingly touching fable about a universe where everything connects, if only for a moment — a magical merger of components as polarized as the lyrical poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the booze-colored harshness of Charles Bukowski.

If you even come close to being a film buff, or appreciate art or just like good, non-formulaic movies, this needs to be at the top of your must-see list.

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is playing at the Rafael Film Center, 1118 4th St., San Rafael, and other Bay Area theaters.