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Woody Weingarten

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Weingarten

Aug 02 2012
Love0

Robin Williams becomes icing on family vacation cake

By Woody Weingarten

Head of dinosaur appears to break through roof of Conservatory of Flowers. Photo: Woody Weingarten

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.

Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire, then.

Robin Williams as Robin Williams, now.

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.”

Academy of Science worker feeds ostrich chicks. Photo: Woody Weingarten.

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

Zach Weingarten is imprisoned — momentarily — in Alcatraz cell. Photo: Woody Weingarten

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

Jul 28 2012
Love0

‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is best film in years

By Woody Weingarten

Quvenzhane Wallis stars as Hushpuppy in “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

 

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.

Jul 20 2012
Love0

Mime Troupe lambastes the 1 percent — and the rest

By Woody Weingarten

The San Francisco Mime Troupe has been performing free shows for just over half a century.

It may be starting to show its age.
“For the Greater Good, or The Last Election, a Melodrama of Farcical Proportions,” might win a prize for longest title but is unlikely to harvest awards for anything else.
Has the troupe, which blossomed in the ‘60s, lost its edge? Perhaps.
Its previous barbed, acerbic quality apparently dissipated when Dick Chaney and George W. Bush stopped being targets.
That’s a shame.
Have the non-silent lampooners turned from biting humor to slight satire a la “Glee”? Perhaps.
That, too, is cause for regret.
They still draw laughs through over-the-top melodrama, at least from intrepid fans, but even devotees are apt to find the technique a tad stale.
The problem may stem from the Mimers trying to be — instead of hardline leftist radicals — even-handed (or, to lift a spurious Fox News slogan, “fair and balanced”).
San Francisco Mime Troupers (from left, Keiko Shimosato Carreiro, Velina Brown, Victor Toman, Ed Holmes, Lisa Hori-Garcia and Reggie D. White) call for “power to the people” during “For the GreaPhoto: Fletcher Oakes.

In this musical comedy, the cast castigates not only capitalists (camouflaged as an oppressed 1 percent) but it lambastes the 99 percent as well (pinpointing welfare recipients and the jobless as well as socialists, occupiers and the naïve).

When the 90-minute show recently played on the lawn of the Mill Valley Community Center, where nearby amateurs propelled a soccer ball throughout the performance, theatergoers cloaked to ward off an evening summer chill munched on gourmet salads and cheeses, dips and roasted chicken.
The affluent Marin County audience of 209, give or take, occasionally shouted approval and clapped at allusions to credit unions, the 99 percent and the occupy movement, and booed references to Mitt Romney’s possible election and Michelle Bachmann being one of the “best minds of our time.”
But it failed to flaunt the fury of outdoor followers in San Francisco’s Dolores Park or any of several Berkeley parks.
And it displayed virtually no reaction to bait such as “There are some things more important than decent and fair in this world — the free market.” Or to wannabe gag lines such as “This country has enough wealth for everyone — as long as we don’t try to share it.”
None of the troupers’ half dozen songs seemed to connect either.
Mill Valley simply may be too tame, too civilized a venue.
Only Green Party stalwart Laura Wells handed out flyers, as opposed to countless proselytizers distributing political vilifications at most other sites where the mimics perform.
Michael Gene Sullivan, who’s been with the troupe since 1988 and wrote this year’s play, also directed “For the Greater Good…” He extorted stellar performances despite his nondescript script, chiefly from Ed Holmes as financial finagler Gideon Bloodgood and Lisa Hori-Garcia as his pampered daughter Alida (and her revolutionary alter ego, Tanya).
Most of the cast did significant double- or triple-role duty, aided by quick changes of costumes designed by Blake More and intentionally unnatural wigs.
Stagecraft by Toman, Ben Flax and Maurice Beesley was delightfully conspicuous, particularly in sequences that simulate a deadly blaze and a rising angel.
Pat Moran, a veteran Mimer, turned out a bland score, lyrics and musical direction that when best felt borrowed from “The Perils of Pauline” or a Buster Keaton short.
Choreography, by Victor Toman, was severely limited to a few movements by a small stage.
Although “For the Greater Good…” is based on a 19th century melodrama, “The Poor of New York,” the storyline’s been upended and updated to 1987 and 2012. Its intent, clearly, was to skewer the billionaires and banking barons who’ve bought elections and fleeced the public while lining their own pockets.
Had it limited its targets to those specific bandits, instead of acting like a Gatling gun, it might have found a more receptive crowd.
Even in Mill Valley.
For a complete listing of upcoming San Francisco Mime Troupe performances of “For the Greater Good, or The Last Election” through Sept. 9, go to www.sfmt.org or call (415) 285-1717
Jul 06 2012
Love0

New Eve Ensler play hopes to motivate young women

By Woody Weingarten

“Emotional Creature,” a new Berkeley Rep play by Eve Ensler, is all about empowerment and diversity for young women.
And universality.
Ensler’s obituary undoubtedly will start with the phrase “creator of ‘The Vagina Monologues,” referring to her word-medley that’s been translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries.
   
But now, while she’s alive and well and dripping with success, she’s into promoting what she calls the V-girls, members of a youth movement she believes will “amplify their voices and ignite a global girl revolution through art and activism” — to, in effect, reshape the world.
Ensler’s involvement stems from the fact that, according to the United Nations, “one in three women will be beaten or raped during her lifetime.”
The V, she explains, stands simultaneously for victory, valentine and vagina.
Cast of Berkeley Rep’s “Emotional Creature” brings Eve Ensler’s words to life. 
Photo, courtesy kevinberne.com

“Emotional Creature” focuses on all three of those elements in a string of disparate vignettes in a monologue-montage punctuated by singing and dance.

Consider the following:
• A high-school clique disses an outsider, keeping her off balance by changing from moment to moment who and what’s “in.”
• Youths jauntily swap sexual details with friends.
• Girls show obsessions with body image (focusing, for a change, on a nose job rather than boob enhancement) and clothing (short skirts are not an invitation to rape).
• Barbie symbolizes the unattainable — as well as the inability of women to communicate about their plights.
• Third-world women become sexually enslaved, or are forced to suffer clitoral mutilation.
“Emotional Creature,” based on Ensler’s best-selling novel, “I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World,” also rips stories from news headlines (or, perhaps, episodes of “Law and Order”).
It dramatically bares, for instance, the suicide of a gay teen not bullied by peers but rejected by her parents.
Although the show does inject sporadic bits of humor, most of its exposition and delivery are hyper-serious — ranging from melancholy ballads to an anthem-like piece that extols a dozen activists such as Angela Davis, Joan of Arc, Julia Butterfly Hill and Anne Frank.
A world premiere tightly directed by Jo Bonney, “Emotional Creatures” — which runs under an hour and half — is headed for off-Broadway in the fall. 
Meanwhile, each of the six current cast members — Ashley Bryant, Molly Carden, Emily S. Grosland, Joaquina Kaulkango, Sade Namel and Olivia Oguma — is a pro at a young age. Individual skills with accents are especially deserving of plaudits.
There’s always a touch of polemic in Ensler’s creations. “Emotional Creature” is no exception.
Before the show starts, for example, projected images include statistics that scream at you: “The body type portrayed in advertising as ideal is possessed naturally by only 5% of American females.” “When asked to cite their hobbies, 80% of girls aged 13-18 listed shopping.”
Once “Emotional Creature” begins, the proselytizing doesn’t end. Heavy-handed rhetoric runs wild: “Would you rather be called a dyke or a bitch?” “Would you rather be killed in a high school shooting or a nuclear war?”
When it’s over, cynics may find the play and its weighty messages to be an expanded update on the 1971 hit song by Helen Reddy, “I Am Woman,” aimed this go-round at younger females.
My wife, an older female, thought the show was impressive — and important.
That figures. She has a vagina.
I wasn’t as touched. I found it superficial and riddled with old news.
But then, of course, I’m missing that key organ.
“Emotional Creature” plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley, through July 15. Night performances, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Wednesdays and Sundays, 7 p.m. Matinees, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14.50 to $73, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.
Jul 06 2012
Love0

‘Scottsboro Boys’ skewers racism via satire, minstrels

By Woody Weingarten
The minstrel-show framework of “The Scottsboro Boys” may be irritating for several minutes — until the brilliance of the device osmoses into your brain cells.
Outmoded burlesque and tambourines become the underpinnings of our oppression of blacks.
By limelighting a defunct racist motif, along with faded components such as the cakewalk and tap-dancing, the musical effectively makes white racism prance before your eyes like a carnival mirror distortion.
It might make you writhe, though.
And when the American Conservatory Theatre production ends, you may experience a slightly bad aftertaste — not from the show but from the realization that  racial discrimination isn’t dead. Case in point: southern states currently trying to block minorities from voting in 2012’s presidential election.

The Interlocutor (Hal Linden) is flanked by Mr. Bones (Jared Joseph, left) and Mr. Tambo (JC Montgomery) in “The Scottsboro Boys,” playing at the American Conservatory Theater. 
Photo by Kevin Berne.

The musical starts with solo banjo-pickin’ followed by a tableau of nine teenaged black boys unjustly accused and repeatedly convicted in Alabama of raping two white women in the 1930s.

It ends by detailing how pathetically they fared as men.
In between, there’s enough in the two-hour, intermission-less show to offend anyone who’s distressed by racial inequality — seasoned with enough hope to believe the future will be better.
The ensemble cast is excellent, with strong voices and equally strong dramatic and comedic chops. It’s so forceful in a true team effort it’s hard to pick a standout, even though Jared Joseph as Mr. Bones and JC Montgomery as Mr. Tambo glisten in their exaggerated postures.
C. Kelly Wright also turns in a subtle, stellar performance as a symbolic black woman, The Lady, mute until the very end.
Metal chairs are used, surrealistically and effectively, to represent everything from jail cells to a train car. Unfortunately, their sheer cleverness could detach theatergoers from emotions the storyline might otherwise evoke.
The surrealistic flavor is intensified by black men portraying whites, the lone Caucasian in the cast being former “Barney Miller” TV star Hal Linden as the Interlocutor.
It’s also odd, though purposefully staged that way, to find two black men playing caricatures of the white female accusers via bug eyes and clown-like gestures.
Barbed lyrics by Fred Ebb repeatedly bring you back to reality, however.
Consider a tune that begins with allusions of grits, honeysuckle and “mammy” but morphs into cross-burnings and lynchings.
In contrast, burlesque humor seeps from David Thompson’s book, including this grisly exchange: “What do you call a black boy in an electric chair?” “A shock absorber!”
“The Scottsboro Boys” has a running subtext about telling the truth.
But the harshest truths stem from moments of painful satire. A “white” St. Peter, for example, informs a black man he can enter Heaven but he must go “through the back door.”
A score that’s basic John Kander, alternately bouncy and mournful, is counterbalanced by Ebb’s edgy words. Check out a bigoted prosecutor verbally abusing a recanting witness with claims she accepted “Jew money” for her testimony.
None of that should be surprising, considering Kander & Ebb’s semi-obsession with mankind’s underbelly (as evidenced by their “Cabaret,” “Chicago” and “The Kiss of the Spider Woman”).
Costumes here are extraordinary, ranging from ragtag garb of the defendants to the crisp, pristine whites of the minstrels. Also exemplary is the lighting, especially in instances where creative silhouettes dance behind live characters.
Although “The Scottsboro Boys,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, played but 49 performances on Broadway in 2010, the opening night San Francisco audience couldn’t have cared less. It clapped and cheered throughout, then rose in unison for a standing ovation.
One exiting woman intoned uncomfortably, “It’s painful to re-experience all those civil wrongs before they became civil rights.”
But another theatergoer probably spoke for most when she declared, “Wow! Everything about it was wonderful.”
“The Scottsboro Boys” plays at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco, through July 22. Night performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 7 or 8 p.m. Matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $95. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.