Joe Cillo

Event 2 June 2012

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June 2012

THE DICTATOR, directed by Larry Charles, starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, and Ben Kingsley.

“The Dictator” is outrageously over the top hilarious; Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, the heavily bearded Admiral General Aladeen, in a militaristic, be-ribboned white suit and cap, is the dictator of the fictional oil-rich country of Wadiya.  In a speech about democracy vs a dictatorship, he riles up the crowd by asking if they want to live in a country that spies on its citizens, arrests them without charge, and imprisons them indefinitely; and also assassinates its citizens who happen to be friends or relatives of suspected terrorists who are in another country at the time.  Hopefully, the audience gets that Aladeen is talking about America, espousing truths that no mainstream media would dare touch.  The self-important major TV newscasts anchors reporting on Aladeen’s every move are portrayed as a bunch of well-groomed, clueless nitwits.
Aladeen’s handlers hire an imposter because Aladeen has decapitated so many detractors that Wadiyans want him killed.  On the lam, Aladeen ends up in New York dressed in the rags of a homeless person; he runs into fellow countryman Nadal (Jason Mantzoukas), whom he thought he’d ordered be-headed.  Nadal now owns a restaurant called Death to Aladeen. He then gets involved with an organic foods co-op run by Zoey (a gamin Anna Faris), who outfits the 6 ft 4 Cohen in a Take Back the Night T-shirt and baggy, baby-blue, thigh-length shorts.  Without even trying, Zoey innocently and naively effects a major change in him.
The film touches on the US dealing with the Wadiyan nuclear enrichment program; the push for an Arab Spring democracy in dictatorships.  Cohen leaves no sensitive issue unscathed such as female infanticide, women’s rights (women, generally), police brutality, racism- Blacks, Jews, Asians, and more.  Still you will not hear an anti-Muslim peep.  There’s some bathroom and high-school jock humor throughout, but the concept is like a Michael Moore documentary only totally fictionalized with bizarre characters, dialogue and scenes.  Ben Kingsley plays Tamir, Aladeen’s right hand man who plots to overthrow him.  He is a dead-ringer for Hamid Karzai, complete with hat and cape, and the only character who plays it absolutely straight.  The audience in the theatre was mostly women and we all laughed out loud throughout.

Director Bradley Parker shot “Chernobyl Diaries” in the manner of the popular scare-fest “The Blair Witch Project” using hand held cameras and like that film, the characters film themselves.   Three young people are in the Ukraine visiting a friend’s brother, Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) who now lives there.  Screen writers Shane and Cary Van Dyke, round out the characters by touching on their relationships, such as Paul’s sibling rivalry with younger brother, Chris (Jesse McCartney, who looks like a young Leonardo diCaprio), and Chris’s love interest, Natalie (Olivia Dudley).  The dialogue shows them to be sophisticated, mature people in that no one says “like” or “anyways.”
Paul bullies the others into joining him and another couple on an extreme tour run by Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) a blocky, shaven-headed, alien-from-another-planet-like dude.  Their destination?  Chernobyl- site of the worst nuclear disaster until last year’s catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan that damaged its Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear reactor, laying waste everything for miles.
The premise of “Chernobyl” is that Russia is keeping secrets of what became of people who didn’t, or couldn’t, evacuate the Ukrainian town of Prypiat, two miles distant from Chernobyl, by order of the Soviet Union.  Everyone was given only five minutes to pack up and leave.  A fleet of buses was conscripted to take the inhabitants to safety, after the nuclear meltdown twenty five years ago.   The film hints that the old, the sick, the invalids, and the infirm who couldn’t leave are imprisoned there to slowly die of radiation poisoning; the healthier ones are not allowed to leave lest they tell others about what’s really going on.  We see this as a possibility in the fate suffered by Amanda (Devin Kelly) as the last survivor.
Billed in the horror genre, first-time director Bradley Parker ‘s “Chernobyl Diaries” will disappoint horror movie fans.  It is slow moving except when characters run through labyrinthine passageways trying to escape things that go bump in the night or flee ravenous beasts; and it is bereft of creepy, supernatural, ghoulish monsters.  Though glimpses of small, bald, or hooded figures are seen in windows or creeping ominously and intently after the tourists making their way around in the dark.
In Uri’s beat up military van, they approach Prypiat once inhabited by hundreds of families whose adult members once worked at the Chernobyl nuclear facility.  They are stopped at the gate by a guard who tells them that the facility is closed due to maintenance.   But of course, Uri knows a secret way in.  They take pictures of the area that once boasted tree-shaded gardens and a playground with a Ferris wheel and other rides, now eerily still and rusted.  Everything is desiccated; and the old concrete Soviet era blockhouse, hi-rise apartments (like Cabrini-Green) are strewn with rubble and rusted metal.
Led by a confidant Uri, they wend their way in the half-light through apartments still furnished with overturned tables and chairs, a school with dust-covered desks and papers strewn around, a hospital ward with rusted iron beds, and here and there lay creepy, tattered, soiled ,eyeless doll, and weird-looking labs featuring weird-looking machines covered with dust and debris.  They hear noises.  Uri assures them not to worry, nothing can live here.   The setting is haunting.   Then something happens to belie Uri’s assurance.  They realize they should not have come, so pile into Uri’s van.  Night is falling.  Predictably the vehicle breaks down; things go from bad to really, horribly bad until there is just one of the six tourists left, then none.  One inconsistency is that the tourists start out exploring Prypiat on foot, yet appear to end up in the damaged reactor itself, two miles away.
I believe Parker’s “Chernobyl Diaries” is timely and important; but it got bad reviews.  People wanted more horror.  What can be more horrifying than a domestic nuclear plant explosion and meltdown which kills people, contaminates and lays waste land for hundreds of miles and for hundreds if not thousands of years?   This could be the future for Okuma, Futaba, and other towns which lie within a fifty mile radius of the 2011 Fukushima disaster.  Most of the footage for “Chernobyl”was shot in Prypiat.   I recommend seeing the Greenpeace and BBC videos of the history of Chernobyl and Prypiat- then and now- on You Tube. Also, tours to Prypiat are as routinely conducted today as there are to the ghost-haunted remains of the prison of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.

To close its 45th season, Marin Theatre Company has assembled a load of big talent: Producing Director Ryan Rilette, four well-matched Equity actors and a script by Parisian playwright Yasmina Reza, who based this play, “God of Carnage,” on an incident from her son’s teens. It’s a quick (75 minutes) two-handed slap to the audience that builds fast and doesn’t let down until the final minutes.

At the outset, two couples are seated in the Novaks’ apartment, and Veronica Novak opens with, “So this is our statement.” These people are transacting some kind of business, and as the conversation continues – with interruptions and amendments — it’s clear that they are not friends.

The Raleighs’ son Benjamin has fought with young Henry Novak and has broken two of his teeth with a stick. (“Should we say Benjamin was ‘armed’ with the stick, or should we say ‘equipped?’) Bravado was probably involved, but isn’t bravado a type of courage? This is not the type of thing one expects in Cobble Hill Park, which is always so safe, not like Whitman Park.

Alan Raleigh’s cell phone makes the first of many intrusions. Alan’s an attorney whose client, a pharmaceutical company, has discovered an unfortunate side effect from one of its medications just before the shareholders’ annual meeting. Alan’s concerned about insurance coverage in case of litigation.

All agree that Benjamin should apologize to Henry, though Alan chuckles that their son is “a savage.” His wife affirms that Alan has never been “a stroller dad.” Veronica, slipping automatically into her hostess role, offers clafouti and coffee, explaining the secret of combining pears and apples together, then asks if young Benjamin understands that he’s “disfigured” his playmate.

There is talk of a gang; there is talk of a snitch. And there is a genuine gut reaction from Annette Raleigh shortly after her husband gets another phone call and asks for the definition of ataxia.

These four never leave the stage, but outsiders influence the conversation: calls from Alan’s office, calls from Michael Novak’s mother (who might be taking the suspect medication,) and concerns about Nibbles, the missing pet hamster.

Unfortunately, a bottle of rum is brought out. This veers “God of Carnage” into “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” territory, in which the characters drink and bicker and nobody leaves. One final phone call turns the mood and suggests that the carnage is mopping up.

Ryan Rillette has done a brilliant job of moving the players around the stage to indicate their shifting loyalties. Stacy Ross as Veronica Novak performs both the best tantrum and the most tender scene in the play. Remi Sandri shows her husband Michael living out his fantasy of himself as a combination of Spartacus and John Wayne.

Warren David Keith as Alan Raleigh depicts the perfect successful man who’s also a social embarrassment, and Rachel Harker’s Annette gets an audience cheer when she takes charge of her husband’s cell phone.

Meg Neville has costumed the characters in family groups: the Novaks are stylishly casual, the Raleighs more formal. Set designer Nina Ball has provided a comfortable, sleek apartment with one brick wall hung with African masks and two vases of blood-red tulips. All these details are significant.

An audience member leaving the theatre behind us was comparing this play with its film counterpart and said, “The movie lags. This one really moves!”

“God of Carnage” will be at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Avenue in Mill Valley, through June 17, every day but Monday. Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are at 8:00 p.m., Wednesday is at 7:30 p.m. Matinees are Thursday, June 7 at 1:00 p.m., Saturday, June 16 at 2:00 p.m. and every Sunday at 2:00. Sunday evening performances are at 7:00 p.m.

THE TEMPESTReviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics CircleThe summer solstice has yet to arrive and already director Jonathan Moscone has produced this summer’s classic: THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare.Now, through June 24th, the California Shakespeare Theater at Bruns Theater in Orinda will echo with the thundering gale of Prospero’s conjured storm.Clear articulation and measured pacing bring the Elizabethan English into sharp comprehensible focus.Each year we perilously distance ourselves further from the lingua of the Bard; Shakespearean directors and actors must work harder to bridge the expanding linguistic chasm.Shakespearean scholars rightfully argue that THE TEMPEST is both neoclassical and Shakespeare’s greatest work.Sadly to many scholars, it signals Shakespeare’s intention to retire from theater: as Prospero gives up black magic, so too did Shakespeare, after writing THE TEMPEST, give up the magic of the stage.One of the bay area’s most versatile and gifted actors, James Carpenter, brilliantly executes his craft as Alonso, the repentant King of Naples.That dazzling diva of bay area stages, Catherine Castellanos, embraces two diverse roles: Caliban (part fish, part man, part redolent monster) and Antonio (the evil usurper of Prospero’s Milanese crown). And why burn fossil fuels getting to Ashland when a star of Ashland, Michael Winters, has traveled to the Orinda stage.Michael Winters is magnificent as that vengeful sorcerer and castaway: Prospero, a displaced monarch who doesn’t mad, he gets even, and don’t ever call him Stormy; he hates that.Comic relief is provided by Nicholas Pesczar, in the form of that besotted jester, Trinculo, who does his best to empty a bot of jettisoned port before he drinks his first drop of water.Set designer Emily Greene has created a most imaginative and intelligent set; she has moved the action right to the edge of the audience, where it should be.Rather than being tempted to utilize the retreating back forty, MS Greene keeps the action focused, seemingly within the reach of the audience; no one needs opera glasses, a lorgnette or 3-D glasses to have a sense of intimacy with the show.Choreographer Erika Chong Shuch achieves a remarkable balance: while no one wants to see Prospero’s island turned into a Broadway stage, it must be recognized that Jonathon Moscone’s signature approach to directing is kinesthetic; fluid movement; not trudging on and off stage.While MS Shuch’s choreography does not result in the hoofing you’d see in a musical it wonderfully links movement to the emotional baseline of the play.California Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST is not merely a performance, it is a production, an event, a confluence of art forms, an intersection of great imaginations.Rarely do this many artistic geniuses converge on one stage; THE TEMPEST should not be missed.For tickets call the Cal Shakes box office at 510.548.9666 or visit info@calshakes.org.

River City, Iowa has everything a town needs on July 4, 1912: a grocery store, City Hall, livery stable and modest house with a “Piano Lessons” sign in the window. It also has a train downstage and a 14-piece orchestra out of sight in back, so when the train begins to move, we know we’re not in Iowa anymore. We’re on Mt. Tam.

Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” was a success as soon as it opened on Broadway in 1957, even though it had to compete with “West Side Story” down the street. It won five Tony awards and ran for more than a thousand performances. And the secret to its long success is evident in the opening scene. The combination of songs with setting is superb.

Here’s a train carrying a load of traveling salesmen. The train jounces along the track, smoke billowing from its engine, as the salesmen complain about the handships of their trade in rhythm with the rails: “Whaddaya talk! Whaddaya talk!” and “You gotta know the territory!” Their main complaint is a black sheep salesman known as Harold Hill, whose latest racket is selling uniforms and instruments for an imaginary boys’ band, even though he doesn’t know music, and he doesn’t know the territory. And who is that fellow waving goodbye and getting off in River City?

“The Music Man” contrasts the rascally Hill with the honest and loyal Marian, her deserving family and the rivalries of their town. Hill is outgunned from the start.

This is a love story set to Meredith Willson’s lyrical music and told against Ken Rowland’s lovable-town backdrop. Much is being made of this year’s Mountain Play, as it is director James Dunn’s thirtieth and last. For his finale, this fine director has pulled together a group of seasoned actors from all over the county. Familiar names light up the program: Susan Zelinsky (Marian Paroo,) Stephen Dietz ( Mayor Shinn,) Randy Nazarian (Marcellus Washburn,) Gloria Wood (Mrs. Paroo,) Erika Alstrom (Ethel Toffelmeir,) Sharon Boucher (Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn) and Bob Wilson (Constable Locke.) Robert Moorhead (Harold Hill) has played this part three times in other venues, and even the children are already stage veterans. Brigid O’Brien (Amaryllis) was Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Jeremy Kaplan (Winthrop Paroo) has performed in seven musicals.

The barbershop quartet and the anvil salesman are additional of-the-period entertainment.
There are 61 cast members, 14 orchestra members, a marching band and a horse in this production.

Backstage, Pat Polen has woven Americana into costumes designed in all variations of red, white and blue. Debra Chambliss leads the band, and Rick Wallace has choreographed the dance numbers.

“The Mountain Play Experience” is exactly that. Audiences take most of their day for this event, and some of them do it every year in groups. Just being in the amphitheatre is part of the fun, but so is the remarkable view over the treetops and down to the Pacific. A few stalwarts hike both ways from Mill Valley, most take the bus at least one way, and some drive. Everybody brings water, a hat and comfortable shoes. The play starts at 2 p.m., but playgoers should plan to arrive at least an hour before. Ticket prices vary from $15 to $40 with no admission for children three and under. Reserved seating and group discounts and more information are available at www.MountainPlay.org.

Because of the approaching fire season, this uplifting show will play only June 3, 10 and 16, and will close June 17, Father’s Day.

On opening day, Jim Dunn did not come out for a curtain call, even though there were calls for “Director! Director!” That clamor will continue. After thirty years on the mountain, Mr. Dunn knows the territory.

Ross Valley Players are producing Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana” in tribute to the playwright’s 100th birthday last year. Williams’ last visit to The Barn was in 1979 for “The Glass Menagerie,” his first big success. That play won him a Pulitzer. He was thirty-four then.
Two years later, he came up with “Streetcar Named Desire” and then, when he was forty-four, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and another Pulitzer. “Night of the Iguana” was produced in 1961, when the playwright was fifty. A number of significant changes had happened in his life by then.

By the ‘60s, Tennessee Williams had come to terms with his own homosexuality and had formed a long partnership with Frank Merlo. He had not overcome his alcoholism, however, and had also developed an increasing dependence on prescription drugs. Merlo developed lung cancer and died in 1963. By the end of the decade, Williams’ brother had him hospitalized for his addictions.
“Night of the Iguana,” reaches back to a 1940 trip to Acapulco in which young Williams bonded with another writer who was also in desperate condition. The notes he took then formed the basis of a short story that eventually became the play.

This work isn’t set in the south, but in Mexico, in the fictional Puerto Barrio. All its characters are troubled. The Rev. Lawrence Shannon is trying to restore himself in the church, maintain sobriety and fend off the advances of Maxine, the innkeeper. Increasingly slovenly, Maxine satisfies her lust with her Mexican houseboys and then complains that they lack discipline.

Prim, ladylike Hannah arrives pushing her grandfather’s wheelchair. Her life is devoted to his needs. “Nonno” is a poet, as was Williams, but he’s almost ninety-eight now. They scratch out a bare existence selling Nonno’s poems and Hannah’s sketches of tourists.

Outside the hotel, honking loudly for attention, is a busload of Baptist female tourists, demanding the comfortable accommodation that Shannon, their tour leader, had promised. One of the women, Charlotte, is only sixteen, and she’s already had an affair with Shannon, for which she expects him to marry her. Charlotte’s chaperone, Miss Fellowes (Sandi Rubay) rages continually and vows reprisals. Further, a big storm is brewing, and a captured iguana, which “tastes like Texas chicken,” is scuffling around below.

Even Tennessee Williams cannot resolve this situation satisfactorily. The play’s ending forecasts itself a long way off.

As Lawrence Shannon, Eric Burke is onstage almost all the time and has an exhausting load of script. We want to like Rev. Shannon, but he makes this impossible when he defends his seduction of Charlotte with, “she asked for it.” Maxine (Cat Bish) copes with isolation by being overly upbeat and sloppy, while Hannah (Kristine Ann Lowry,) fits Shannon’s description of her as “a thin, standing-up female Buddha.”

Nonno (Wood Lockhart) seems to dodder more when he wants attention. He recites his poems in a strong voice, especially the epic he’s been working on. Young Charlotte (Kushi Beauchamp) escapes Miss Fellowes long enough to beg Shannon to let her help him.

Jake Latta, the substitute tour guide, is played by Mark Toepfer, Hank, the bus driver, by Richard Kerrigan, and Maxine’s two houseboys by Eric Sadler and Noah Benet.
“Night of the Iguana,” directed by Cris Cassell, will be at The Barn Theatre in the Marin Art & Garden Center, Ross, Thursdays through Sundays until June 17. Thursday performances are at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.
Ticket prices range from $17 to $25. An audience “talk back” with the actors and director will be offered after the matinees on May 27 and June 10.

For complete information, call 456-9555 or see www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

THE GREAT DIVIDEReviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics CircleThe Shotgun Players of Berkeley are presently performing THE GREAT DIVIDE.Brilliantly directed by Mina Morita, the play uses Ibsen’s AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE as a template.Adam Chanzit has moved the setting from a Norwegian town just downstream from the fetid mill town of Molletal, to a sintered town in Colorado which has the fortune, or misfortune, to be perched on top of a flatulent vein of Marcellus shale.Although the geography or geology may be a little off, Chanzit has correctly depicted the dubious benefits of extracting natural gas from shale via fracturing.As human nature would have it, the indigent townspeople of this Colorado hamlet are slavering over the possibility of real jobs, royalty checks, cheap energy, bigger houses, glitzier cars, better cuts of meat and cable service with 500 channels.A decent shot at the American Dream has everyone poised for moral compromise, spring loaded to the environment be damned position and willing to sacrifice the common good for the sake of the common good.While the local economy has never been so robust, it is a pity the same cannot be said for its withering denizens; the townspeople and, more sadly, the innocent goats are stricken by all the ancillary side effects of drinking shots of benzene with their well water.Hovstad, an earnest whelp of a journalist (duplicitously played Ryan Tasker) is taking notes for his Pulitzer Prize entry, while Doctor Katherine Stockmann is taking water samples and offering bottled water and evacuation as an antidote to the malaise.Just as the town is beginning to smell the benzene tainted lucre, Doctor Stockmann (played righteously by Heather Robison) succeeds in temporarily driving off the drilling and fracking company; the people are not happy, you can almost hear their plaintive yelps, “Shane, Come Back” to the spoilers.Needless to say, Doctor Stockman does not become a viable candidate for the town council or mayor, nor is she elected to the state assembly; if the town had a Shirley Jackson style Lottery Doctor Stockman would have won it hands down.The Shotgun Players are the obvious choice to spot light this timely issue of environment and ground water versus cheap energy prices and avarice; the Shotgun Players occupy the moral high ground; they are possibly the greenest and most environmentally friendly theater in the country; their photovoltaic array not only powers their Klieg Lights, it produces a surplus of electrons that are force fed to PG & E.Sure this is an election year, but if you are thinking of political or social activism, you might want to witness what happens to the Stockmann family when Citizen Katherine sticks her head into the powder keg.THE GREAT DIVIDE will not only entertain you, it will challenge you intellectually and might even get you to trade the 12 mpg SUV for a bicycle and swap those archaic incandescent bulbs in for LEDs.As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”Don’t miss THE GREAT DIVIDE; it runs now through June 24; call the box office at 510-841-6500 or surf over to www.shotgunplayers.org.