Woody Weingarten

Screenshot from Hollywood Does Abortion documentary shows protest outside clinic.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Hollywood Does Abortion is all about Tinseltown not wanting to do them. Or eventually caving and depicting the issue through a right-of-center lens.

The one-hour, 39-minute documentary traces a controversial topic that’s appeared more and more frequently over the decades on bigger home screens and smaller movie-house surfaces. From troubled pre-Roe vs. Wade days through today’s troubled post-Dobbs times. Political progress and retreat.

It features what feels like hundreds of quick cuts — clip after clip from flicks and telecasts and newscasts, plus tons of heads that won’t stop talking. Producers and writers and analysts and you-name-its.

Virtually every position on the subject is explored a bit, so a viewer can’t escape learning something unlearned before.

The dense panorama begins with Norman Lear’s TV heroine Maude shoving history forward by contemplating an abortion, and the public backlash that series generated; it ends with a monotone thought-balloon that we should all be tolerant and try to make the world a little better; and detours along the way for gossip and a peek at Marilyn Monroe’s abortion or miscarriage or whatever that momentary headline-grabbing, national trauma was.

The film — which was executive produced by Rachel Bloom, who will be honored July 18 at with the Freedom of Expression Award at the 46th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival — is interesting but not compelling. That may be due to its being somewhat choppy (fragmented, if you will) and mostly chronological.

Bloom, activist and co-creator and acting star of the CW musical/comedy/drama series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, probably couldn’t care less what critics say about Hollywood Does Abortion because, after having helped spearhead the pet project, it’s now out there, at festivals at least, and from her standpoint, the more publicity, the better.

But the doc isn’t unlike a high-school class in gender politics, emphasizing multiple historic pivots as if they were tiny subheads.

Showing dramatized pre-surgical exam is screenshot from Hollywood Does Abortion.

It flits, for example, from Dirty Dancing and its branding abortion as dangerous, whether illegal or not; to Evangelicals getting heavily involved politically; to Operation Rescue with its attacks on abortion clinics and doctors; to the era of folks again wanting the procedure to disappear under the rug and be safe, legal, and rare; to a tribute to Grey’s Anatomy and how consistent the TV series has been regarding a sensitive coverage of the subject; to the not unexpected reversal of Roe; to the evolution of abortion via a welcomed pill; to the rise of streaming and its shedding of pressures from corporate bigwigs and advertisers.

Hollywood Does Abortion, which has no explosions or car chases or, indeed, any action whatsoever, sidetracks momentarily into the evolution of gay relationships on screen, and to a dozen other headline topics. That’s its biggest flaw, trying too hard to do too much.

But there’s so much content — content that appears to change every second and a half — that pro-abortion activists can find plenty to love. And to hate.

Ditto, anti-abortionists.

Either way, it’s an immersive, mildly intriguing under-two-hour mental road-trip from that Maude show in the fall of 1972 to now.

Picturing happy post-birth, on screenshot from Hollywood Does Abortion, shows how Tinseltown and TV skirt controversial issue.

Woody Weingarten

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Nuns, shown here as convent chorus in Sister Act, provide cover for Deloris Van Cartier, who’s fleeing murderous gangsters. Photo by Eric Chazankin.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

After an astoundingly exciting, fast, feel-good first half of Sister Act, the 21 performers at the 6th St. Playhouse in Santa Rosa couldn’t quite transcend the slightly slower pace in Act II that the script prescribed.

But that was the only visible flaw in the 2½-hour production. In fact, almost every element of the musical-comedy was superlative:

• The smoothly movable set, designed by Laurynn Malilty, was of Broadway quality, better than any seen in the Bay Area in years. Depiction of the inside of a convent was pinpoint perfect, down to the tiniest detail, and all the other backdrops were equally well thought out and constructed.

• Deloris Van Cartier, the role made famous by Whoopi Goldberg in the 1992 Sister Act film as she became a fake nun while hiding from murderous gangsters, is exquisitely filled by Majesty Scott. She’s a quadruple threat who’s obviously mastered singing, acting, comedy, and dancing.

• Costumes co-designed by Barbara Page and Carolyn Bartlett, sensationally ranged from quietly spiritual to in-your-face glitzy. All of them add to a theatergoer’s amusement.

• Tracy Hinman skillfully depicted the Mother Superior, wearing her emotions — from disdain to a loving acceptance — on the sleeves of her habit.

• Choreography by Jorey Cantu guaranteed smiles on the faces of audience members. It featured tons of snappy hand movements and even a low-kicking nun’s chorus line.

• Chase Thompson was amazingly rubber-legged and rubber-armed while dancing as T.J., a thug. It was impossible to not laugh at — and appreciate — his exaggerated, comedic body movements.

• Most folks weren’t likely to leave the Santa Rosa theater singing any of the unfamiliar songs (music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Glenn Slater), despite some of the 19 musical numbers being incredibly bouncy or remarkably melancholy. The eclectic score nevertheless successfully moved the storyline by Bill and Cheri Steinkellner along, silly and predictable as it was.

Majesty Scott portrays hiding lounge singer Deloris Van Cartier. Photo by Eric Chazankin.

• Chorus members were mostly cheery, a contagion that spread throughout the packed audience, and soloists were so strong the crowd reacted with frequent wild applause and occasional screeching. Especially memorable were Andrew Cedeno singing “I Could Be That Guy” as Eddie Souther; Isiah Carter as Curtis Jackson, mobster chieftain (‘When I Find My Baby’); and Hannah Passanisi as Sister Mary Robert (‘The Life I Never Led’) — plus, of course, Majesty Scott as Deloris (the title tune) and Tracy Hinman as Mother Superior (‘Haven’t Got a Prayer”).

• The eight-member band in the pit, led by music director and keyboardist Ginger Beavers, played at just the right level so the sound didn’t overshadow any of the individual singers.

• Director Megan Bartlett, along with stage manager Celina Kegerreis, tracked everything at once during rehearsals, then shattered the chaos by helping each performer be precisely where he/she/they were supposed to be.

Put all those positive talking points together and what do you end up with? An exceptional show that fulfills its promise to entertain and let theatergoers have fun, all the while managing to ignore the constant Breaking News.

Sister Act will run through June 27 at the 6th St. Playhouse, 52 W. 6th St., Santa Rosa. Tickets: $31.95 to $55.95. Info: (707) 523-4185 or boxoffice@6thstreetplayhouse.com.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.comand https://vitalitypress.com. His books include Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer, aimed at male caregivers; MysteryDates — How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.

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Bias, here in the form of graffiti, is a major theme of Kintsukurio, an independent docudrama. (Screenshot from Vimeo.)

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Two ordinary families quietly cringe and join a line to the unknown. They don’t know it yet, but they’ll be penned in and guarded without formal charges or a trial, their activities monitored and severely limited, their private items minimized. For years to come.

Kintsukurio, a sympathetic Ikeibi Films docudrama that personalizes the Japanese internment in the United States during World War II, traces those families and their struggles — struggles against a bias that doesn’t disappear after they’re released.

Roughly 120,000 Japanese were interned in America during World War II by the U.S. government.

In a sense, Donald Trump’s current administration is mirroring the horror of sub-humanizing and incarcerating large blocks of people that the government or his allies are afraid of or simply don’t like. Specifically, in this case, by confining hundreds of thousands of undocumented, brown-skinned people it seeks to illegally deport as soon as possible.

Admittedly, the Nazis did even worse. They imprisoned millions of Jews in various countries, cramming them into the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp and other forced-labor camps — killing six million innocents, all told.

Confusion is prevalent in long lines that lead to incarceration. (Screenshot from Vimeo.)

Kintsukurio humanizes the Japanese prisoners by focusing on the two familiar family units (including love, hope, and disagreements), albeit with actors who are sometimes stiff. It features thespians most likely unseen before, so the sense of reality becomes easier. Verbal cliches, rather than stopping a viewer, help that sense as well. So does the knowledge that the fictional story virtually replicates real-life tales.

After defining the title as “the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold” to make it stronger, which becomes an overt metaphor, it tracks them from being typical family- and legacy-oriented homebodies through their unpleasant time in confinement (although they can play baseball and dance).

Following their “repatriation,” they discover that anti-Japanese discrimination follows them wherever they go.

The independent feature, which was written and directed by Kerwin Berk and runs two hours and 18 minutes, sharply contrasts a young Japanese male who serves in the U.S. military with those in internment — a soldier who suffers from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, without that diagnosis being available.

In the final analysis, the film is an exercise in determining identity, specifically what it means to be a Japanese American — or, in fact, an anything American.

Kintsukurio isn’t screening in any local theaters, but a Vimeo can be found via www.asianamericanmovies.com

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.comand https://vitalitypress.com. His books include Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer, aimed at male caregivers; MysteryDates — How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.

Woody Weingarten

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As Carol Klyce performs at The Marsh Berkeley, a garment from her childhood, the only memento she still has, hangs behind her in this screenshot.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Shortly after her mother dies of ovarian cancer, her father, a drunk, vanishes into the ozone. Not that much later, she’s forcibly separated her from her four siblings.

“Sometimes,” Carole Klyce admits, “I would just run into the woods and scream and cry.”

The pain and fear are too much. So she runs away.

From a group foster home this time. And next, when the state erroneously labels her an incorrigible troublemaker and starts the paperwork to put her in a mental institution, she runs away.

She runs away from a juvenile correction facility, too.

Into the clutches of a child molester. Into the employ of the Mafia.

And she runs away from both of them as well.

Photograph of Carole Klyce as she is today (by Cynthia Smalley).

Her monologue at The Marsh Berkeley reveals an endless need as a teenage runaway to change her name, her appearance, her skills. She even needs to masquerade as a boy.

Sounds like the life-fodder for a fascinating, emotional, one-person show, doesn’t it? Well, despite Klyce doing her best, her opening night merges all those elements but somehow leaves out the inherent tension, the intensity, the melodrama.

Klyce and director Deb Fink neglect to give different weights to differing story elements. The memoir becomes as exciting as if the playwright/performer were reading an elongated list of streaming channels.

Flight Risk, which runs through June 20, holds promise. But the two-hour, intermission-less show could be pared at least 30 minutes, maybe more, including irrelevant, unnecessary references to JFK and other tangential items. That at least might ensure the monologue not feeling like one incredibly long run-on sentence.

Much more attention also needs to be given the pacing and pitch. And to potential sequences of poignancy, like when she takes charge of her nuclear family at age 12 (including care and feeding of her dying mother), and when she develops a close relationship with her grandfather (“my best friend”), who also dies.

The show might well amplify some of her life’s lowlights sandwiched between a hopeful static-laden recording of “Tomorrow” from Annie and the playwright-performer’s 18th birthday party. It’s certainly important to be able to figure out where she is when she’s bouncing from one place to another (“I can’t remember the last time I took a bath in a real bathtub.”).

Klyce, now a mother of three, grandmother of four, deserves credit for her bravery, for being honest and vulnerable in a show that details six of her teenage years that are vastly more horrific than that of your average kid.

One Saturday evening audience, clearly packed with her friends and supporters, distinctly veered from any negative assessment, however, mildly gasping and otherwise reacting to moments of imminent physical or mental danger or angst, chuckling at almost every gag line or comedic movement, and giving a wrinkled, weathered Klyce a rousing ovation as she bowed.

Flight Risk will run at the Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley, through June 20. Tickets: $25 to $35; reserved seats, $50 or $100; plus $3 convenience fee per ticket. Info: 425-282-3055 or boxoffice@themarsh.org.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.comand https://vitalitypress.com. His books include Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer, aimed at male caregivers; MysteryDates — How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.

Woody Weingarten

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Benoit Monin (right) and Rezan Asfaw flirt and discuss their film in ‘Continuity.’ Photo by Ben Krantz.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

[Spoiler Alert!]

Although Continuity doesn’t reference a dead frog in a boiling pot, the comic tragedy lays out how rising temperatures will inevitably lead to the end of humankind.

The script by Bess Wohl, whose current play Liberation is a current smash on Broadway, keeps theatergoers laughing for about 82 or 83 minutes of the 90-minute, intermission-less absurdist show at the Shotgun Playhouse in Berkeley.

But there’s a gut-punch awaiting at the end of Wohl’s comic tragedy, so if you don’t like twists, or are subject to depression, watch out!

Contrasts are the byword in Continuity, which satirizes Hollywood paragons as well as all those who remain bystanders in the much bigger show — climate change. It also spoofs hypocrisy and Show Biz politics (“The studio feels we have to have an antagonist and not just the weather” and “The film is carbon neutral — they’re planting a bunch of trees.”).

All that springs from the filming and re-filming and re-filming of an eco-terrorist story superimposed on a make-believe melting polar glacial ice cap in the middle of an all-too-real-and-hot New Mexico desert (lured by tax breaks).

Director Emilie Whelan realizes that timing is virtually everything when it comes to comedy, so she ensures that the gags and chaos are spot on. The ensemble cast, a small troupe as well-trained as a small resistance army, proves that laughter can stem from quiet, subtle acting as well as clownish movements.

Ije Success, as Lily, an actress in the film about eco-terrorists, is one side of the comedy coin, tickling the audience’s collective funny bone with a deadpan delivery.

But Matt Standley draws the biggest giggles as a nameless, wordless production assistant who jiggles, wiggles, and bounces through whatever activity’s going on while everybody else ignores him except in his best bit, where he’s wildly searching for the right soft drink in a deep cooler.

Nicholas Rene Rodriguez wields gun as Regina Morones tries to stop him from shooting Ije Success in movie being shot in ‘Continuity.” Photo by Ben Krantz.

Rezan Asfaw portrays the movie’s director, Maria, as an ultra-idealist, convinced she can produce a classic art film that can change the world, while her counterpart, David Caxton (Benoît Monin) is a ultra-practical man willing to remain in the here-and-now and still kick a future climate crisis down the road.

Regina Morones steps into the character of diva Nicole by creating an over-the-top cartoon performance. She exquisitely blends movie magic and non-reality. At the same time, one Nicholas Rene Rodriguez character inhabits a “real life” abs-obsessed body while his second takes on a murderous manner in reel life.

At the total other end of life’s stage — the one in which overwhelming environmental neglect has been around too long already — stands Malcolm Rodgers as Larry, a science consultant. He’s always the bearer of bad news (though, because of his mousiness, sometimes unable to deliver it). He’s not above being despondent because of the future climate destruction (“I’m thinking of moving off the grid to raise chickens.”).

Designer Ray Archie, meanwhile, has created sound effects that envelop the stage like smog-filled clouds top off many city skies — with a wonderfully growing boom-let at the center of an incoming storm.

Said one audience member in a recent Saturday matinee feedback session, “I love plays with a dose of humor to bring truth.” That’s a better perspective, certainly, than the character in the play who declares, “This whole situation is fakey-fake.”

 Overall, Continuity, which ultimately is about the life of the planet vs. the life of any given species, and which decidedly deals with truth vs. illusion, is a triple-“s” winner: superb, sublime, super-funny.

Let’s hope excellent reviews and excellent word-of-mouth can continue to help fill all its seats and motivate theatergoers to leap at least one step beyond the predictable preaching to the choir, and to change the planet’s history before the reiterated metaphoric need to film a particular shot “before we lose the light.”

Continuity will play through June 21 at Shotgun Playhouse, 1901 Ashby Ave., Berkeley. Tickets: $23 to $80. Info: boxoffice@shotgunplayers.org or 510-841-6500, ext. 303.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.comand https://vitalitypress.com. His books include Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer, aimed at male caregivers; MysteryDates — How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.

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Sarah McKeregham hams it up as I-reen-ee Adler in Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B while Adrian Deane, as Ms. Sherlock Holmes, tries to figure out what’s going on.
Photo by Robin Jackson.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B is often clever, and as might be expected from the mind of a veteran, feminist comedy writer, delightful and funny.

The problem is that the Ross Valley Players farce is occasionally too clever, bogging down in exposition, verbiage, and some punchlines that are repeatedly repeated until they’re no longer delightful or funny.

Rising above that avalanche of words, despite having to learn about a gazillion of them each, are four extraordinarily fine actors: Adrian Deane (as a marvelously ultra-pompous Ms. Sherlock Holmes); Steve Price (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle villain Professor Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade, and Elliot Monk; Sarah McKereghan (Irene Adler, Mrs. Hudson, and others); and Jennifer La Blanc (an ever-collapsing Ms. Joan Watson).

Although Deane’s purposely robotic characterization may be the sharpest acting job, it’s not the funniest because of the writing by Kate Hamill, who’s penned a batch of successful parodies and in 2017 was named “playwright of the year” by the Wall Street Journal. The writer’s wit is occasionally too cerebral and difficult to access.

Steve Price comically portrays Inspector Lestrade. Photo by Robin Jackson.

Steve Price, whose face is so mobile and voice so cartoonish he makes it impossible to not chuckle frequently, and Sarah McKereghan, whose clowning chops precisely fit the wonder-to-behold cliché, top the laugh-ometer.

 Mary Ann Rodgers must be a better-than-good director, having staged the show so most of those rocket-fast words and concepts are understandable (especially considering the multiple foreign accents).

In truth, a prize should be awarded to those in the crowd who can keep the storyline straight, since it’s rife with subplots and subplots of the subplots. Killings, and faux killings, seemingly come even faster than the gags and character-reveals.

Although the idea of turning the classic detective and his sidekick into females may be intrinsically amusing, the gender-bending device feels underused as a slapstick tool (except in a lesbian scene that’s wonderfully over-the-top).

Sarah McKeregham hams it up as I-reen-ee Adler in Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B while Adrian Deane, as Ms. Sherlock Holmes, tries to figure out what’s going on. Photo by Robin Jackson.

But a piece of the purposely cluttered set — a souvenir skeleton of “I’m-not-a-doctor” Watson — isn’t used at all. Why bother mounting it if you’re going to keep theatergoers futilely waiting for its involvement in one murder or another?

Still, be certain to keep an eye out for Mrs. Hudson, the landlady, and her multi-replicated fumble-fingers. They should ensure laughter.

Don’t miss the buckets of blood either. Third-grade hilarious.

Or the corpse in the tub. Pubescent boy sidesplitting.

Enjoy pop culture and literary references in quip form? It feels as though about 400 of them about yesteryear — mainly books and television shows circa Laverne and Shirley and earlier — are inserted. Some feel especially anachronistic because they belie the fact that Ms. Holmes and Ms. Watson — Apt. 2B is only four years old.

Not incidentally, the title of the “today-ish” comedy may have affected the box office. A recent matinee in Ross found the jam-packed, white-haired audience made up of roughly 20 women to each man. And yet there’s not even a Superbowl, no World Cup.

Billie Cox, who’s earned praise for years for her work with sound, is clearly at the top of her game — everything being timed exquisitely, everything perfectly fitting the action. Also praiseworthy is Valera Coble, who apparently was happy to design costumes that depicted Hamill’s 2021 London rather than the original setting, the 1880s. The garb is so right-on  and so much fun that a lot of it would be great to stash away and wear on Halloween.

The two-hour show is long. It could do with half an hour of paring and the removal of excess jokes that relentlessly resemble AK-47 rifle scattershot.

A final note: Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B is peppered with short political and satirical digs at today’s America. But they’re scattered, almost purposely buried among other quick gags, so they don’t stand out.

It’s unlikely that anyone left the Barn discussing the Trump Administration. They were undoubtedly too busy talking about all the verbal and physical silliness. And whether they liked the show.

Ms. Holmes & Ms. Watson – Apt. 2B will run at the Barn, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd. on the grounds of the Marin Art and Garden Center, Ross, through June 15. Tickets: $30 to $45. Info: www.RossValleyPlayers.com or 415-456-9555.

 Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.comand https://vitalitypress.com. His books include Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner’s breast cancer, aimed at male caregivers; MysteryDates — How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.

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Julianne Bretan, center, and an exuberant chorus appear in Novato Theater Company’s “Mamma Mia!” at the Novato Playhouse. (Jere Torkelsen/Novato Theater Company via Bay City News)

by Woody Weingarten, Bay City News

Novato Theater Company’s Marilyn Izdebski’s choreography and lighting design increase in excellence with each musical she works on. She’s been at it for 50 years, and critics are simply running out of words for “incomparable.”

Her light-hearted choreography in “Mamma Mia!” onstage in the Novato Playhouse through June 7 guarantees smiles. She once again has turned community theater thespians of all shapes and sizes into a cohesive chorus. Her choreography is the star of the show; she’s nicely assisted by conductor-keyboardist Nick Brown.

Izdebski — president of Novato Theater Company and a recent winner of the San Francisco Bay Area Critics Circle’s Gene Price Award “for embodying superlative professionalism and passion for Bay Area theater” — dares patrons not to tap their toes to ABBA’s 1970s hits.

In addition, her smooth lighting design nicely parallels the range of moods in playwright Catherine Johnson’s flimsy and illogical storyline.

Marilyn Izdebski, choreographer extraordinaire, works her magic in Novato Theater Company’s “Mamma Mia!” onstage through June 7. (San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle via Bay City News)

Gia Mirra is excellent as Sophie, who switches emotions on a dime from joyous to confused; as are Lauren Sutton-Beattie and Jane Harrington as Rosie and Tanya, Donna’s oldest and best friends. The same goes for the dads: Lorenzo Alviso as Sam, Cordell Wesselink as Bill and David Cole as Harry.

The minimal set and props provide plenty of room for the large cast, who seem to be having as much fun as the audience. All members of the company are wearing mikes, so the song lyrics are clear, even when the chorus is dancing; that can’t be said of many local theaters.

Huda al Jamal’s terrific costumes range from sparkly for chorus lines to pure black for a nightmarish fantasy. And director Lisa Morse does a great job making the show’s bizarre action feel natural (except when the hoofing is appropriately extra-silly).

Notable numbers range from the flirting in “Take a Chance on Me to the bouncy “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and the especially poignant “Our Last Summer.”

The crowd, however, saved up its noisiest enthusiasm for chartbusters like “I Have a Dream,” “S.O.S.,” and “The Winner Takes All,” and kept up the spirit after the bows to sway and clap along to “Dancing Queen” and “Mamma Mia.”

In the lobby after, one elderly man couldn’t wait to tell a friend, “This show could pull you out of a depression.”

“Mamma Mia!” runs through June 7 at Novato Theater Company, 5420 Nave Drive, Novato. Tickets are $25 to $37 at novatotheatercompany.org. 

Reach Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net, https://woodyweingarten.com or https://vitalitypress.com.

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Kristen Gregoriev with a crowd pleaser at Hall Middle School in Larkspur during an eco garden tour on Saturday, May 9, 2026. Gregoriev, a retiree, volunteers with nonprofit Refugia Marin, helping to replace invasive plant species with native plants to cultivate havens for local pollinators. (John Waters via Bay City News)

Kristen Gregoriev may have erred leaving her San Anselmo home accessible to birds and beasts. She walked into her living room a while ago “to find a mama deer had left a fawn the size of a large Chihuahua there, wedged between two flowerpots.”

The “mama had gone off to graze,” she remembers, “but the baby woke up and started screaming. Mama came bounding down the hill and immediately retrieved her.”

Gregoriev swiftly got out of the way, knowing not to interfere with a beast and its offspring, and just let the “rescue” happen.

The incident, she says, was probably the most surprising thing that’s happened in her late-in-life life as an environmentalist.

Gregoriev, retired since 2016, is now immersed in gardening at home as well as varied public sites of Refugia Marin, where she helps replace “invasive plant species” with native plants, and “cultivates a haven for local pollinators.”

She loves it.

The “spiritual nature of gardens can be really soothing in this time of chaos,” she says.

But she doesn’t love it all the time.

 “Gardening is a real leap of faith that something’s going to work, that critters aren’t going to get to it, that there isn’t going to be a lethal heat spell no matter how much you’ve watered.

 “Nature’s a bitch. Something you’ve been nurturing gets eaten. Something’s always dying.”

It wasn’t long after Gregoriev joined Refugia Marin in 2023, she says, that “they pounced” because of her 40-plus years in nature-centric small businesses. So she’s become the nonprofit’s treasurer, putting in about 30 volunteer hours a month working with gardens and numbers.

(Brian B. Beard via Bay City News)

The nonprofit was founded in 2021 in Corte Madera’s Town Park by its then-and-now executive director, Dana Swisher, an award-winning, longtime second-grade teacher at the Neil Cummins Elementary School in Corte Madera.

“She kept looking on the other side of a fence and seeing a fallow strip of weeds,” explains Gregoriev, who knew her through the Marin Monarch Working Group. So, Swisher finally stopped thinking about it and instead spent the requisite time — with the ultimate help of about eight board members and about 80 volunteers — to transform the strip into a thriving native plant habitat.

Refugia Marin’s purpose now, according to its website —www.refugiamarin.org — “extends beyond conservation; we strive to educate the community about the myriad benefits of native plants while creating thriving wildlife habitats.

“By forging strong partnerships with schools, community leaders, and like-minded organizations, we work together towards our shared goal of enhancing the natural beauty of our community and creating spaces for people to enjoy.”

Refugia (a plural word that means safe havens) is a volunteer organization except for three paid employees whose public spaces include the Pollinator Garden at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael and the People’s Garden in Cove Park, Corte Madera.

Its latest project is Habitat Garden, behind the new Larkspur Library, that’s intended, according to the website, to “serve as a visible demonstration of climate-resilient planting and local biodiversity.”

Gregoria has gardened at all the sites except the library and Hall Middle School’s outdoor classroom in Larkspur. “I’ve done a lot of weeding, lots of pruning, planted a couple of trees, planted seeds, and weed-whacked with a new, lighter electric machine,” she says. “It’s very rewarding to see an area that you’ve tended.”

The Refugia Marin Habitat Garden blooms in Corte Madera Town Park in Corte Madera on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Kristen Gregoriev via Bay City News)

She’s also “done outreach, staffed tables set up at events like May 9’s Eco-Friendly Garden Tour and other community events.”

She’s been engrossed, too, in Refugia Marin’s highly successful April 28 fund-raiser, An Evening in Conversation at the Lark Theater with best-selling journalist and CNN series host Kara Swisher, Dana Swisher’s sister-in-law, and acclaimed Fairfax author Anne Lamott.

Gregoriev maintains that she’s “super-fortunate” to be able to work with the organization’s volunteer nature enthusiasts, a “wonderful group of people — bright, funny, smart, diligent. I’m the Old One, going to be 70 in September; everyone’s younger than me, the youngest in the mid-30s.”

Though happy, she regrets coming “pretty much late to the party. I was a passive environmentalist who only became active after I retired (although I’d designed environmental T-shirts that kids would want to wear).”

She says it’s “nice to work in areas other than my own because I have too many deer here.” But she still revels in changing her backyard into a pollinator paradise.

Gregoriev prefers working with plants native to California “because they’re more suited to our climate and they’re more beneficial to the pollinators — bees and butterflies — because they’ve evolved over time to have a beneficial relationship with each other.”

Her favorite public site is “the original town park, because I’ve seen the most evolution, watching one-gallon plants really take off and become more beautiful.”

Her favorite plants? “The Ceanothus, a shrub with  beautiful purple flowers that butterflies really go for; the Pitcher Sage, another shrub that smells unbelievably good to me, that has beautiful bell-like delicate pink flowers, and, as for a tree, the California buckeye, which supports all the caterpillars which in turn support the songbirds, the small birds that snatch the caterpillars to feed their babies.”

The gardening she’s doing, she says, brings her “delights and quiet satisfaction. I’ve done this kind of gardening since I was in college at U.C. Davis.”

As for toiling behind her own place, she says, “When we first moved in, we tried to plant anything that the deer wouldn’t eat. Now, I’m really trying to plant native, and I am finding some things the deer are not so fond of.”

Asked what the favorite plants in her yard are, first she answers flippantly, “Anything that grows,” then more seriously adds, “I have a lot of Milkweed for the Monarch butterflies.”

Gardening, she muses with obvious joy, “is a dialogue. You do something and then it does something. It’s not a one-way thing.”

Woody Weingarten

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Jean (left), Irv (center) and Larry discuss old photo of Irv in Pictures from Home. Photo by David Allen.

By WOODY WEINGARTEN

Check out the upscale, retirement-age parents in their San Fernando Valley tract home where the wife’s real estate commissions have kept them afloat for years while the husband’s played golf thrice weekly and continually raged.

In Pictures from Home at the Marin Theatre through May 31, the lives and personalities of the Sultan parents — Irv and Jean — are methodically deconstructed by their demi-adult photographer son, Larry, who frequently sleeps over on weekends after traveling down from Greenbrae. Instead of a stuffed animal, he’s long been caressing a camera and recorder apparently borrowed from the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts, where he’s been teaching.

All three performers are Equity pros; all three easily bring their real-life characters to life on a cluttered stage set dominated by a large screen onto which still-photo after still-photo extracted from home-movie reels is projected.

Larry, as play’s narrator, has fond memory of portrait of his dad. Photo by David Allen.

Irv, a razor salesman and Schick V.P. who bears only a slight resemblance to everyman Willie Loman and who’s depressed because no one seemingly can afford “hopes and dreams” anymore, firmly believes photos depict events as they are. Larry, the son who’s decidedly more artistic, has spent the last 10 years working on a photo-cum-book project to prove that pictures can show more than bare reality, that they can judiciously recall memories in a way that some might label fiction or exaggeration.

He also acts as the 105-minute, intermission-less, fascinatingly different play’s narrator.

Jean, meanwhile, tries to skirt the ongoing debate, has convinced herself she’s “in charge,” and grumbles that she’d “just like a couple of nice photos for the fridge.”

The one-act Pictures from Home is sprinkled with lots of verbal and physical humor, so much you might think it would be enough to leaven the extremely weighty drama. Not quite.

That’s because what they’re discussing is too personal, too intimate, too raw. It’s visceral rather than cerebral, even when comparing generations.

The problem, if it is any problem, is that playwright Sharr White and director Jonathan Moscone have re-created a family that’s virtually everybody’s, regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status, or geography. “That was my father up there,” one exiting theatergoer was heard to say.

Dad is played brilliantly by Victor Talmadge as a sad, vulnerable loudmouth who talks over everybody and tries to emasculate his son because he feels powerless himself. Though he appears to lack empathy, he contends that the “key to success is empathy.” Mom, portrayed by Suzan Koosin, flawlessly spends a good part of the play flitting from one edge of the stage to another while trying to get her husband and son to put down their verbal swords. Larry is well-crafted by Dan Cantor as an immature, cowed offspring unlikely ever to grow up.

The dramedy, which is based on a photo memoir by the real Larry Sultan, opened to critical acclaim on Broadway in 2023, with Nathan Lane as Irv.

No matter who’s in the role, though, when Larry’s proposal becomes a reality, Irv neither understands nor accepts the artsy concept and still feels invaded. “I see you’ve got pretty much every photo I don’t like in the book,” he bemoans.

Pictures from Home will run at the Marin Theatre, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through May 31. Tickets: $38 to $94, plus a $6 handling fee per total order. Info: 415-388-5208 or www.MarinTheatre.org.

Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting 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 via his websites,https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com

Woody Weingarten

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