Woody Weingarten

Adrianne Goff (right) stars as Lucy Bicardi, and Leslie Klor is Ethel Schmertz, in "Trouble at the Tropicabana," a comic murder-mystery dinner show at the Marin Rod & Gun Club, San Rafael. Photo by Wendell H. Wilson.

Adrianne Goff could be a magician.

On a recent Saturday night at the Marin Rod & Gun Club, she yanked several rabbits out of a hat — simultaneously — to successfully produce, direct and star in an interactive comic murder-mystery dinner show aptly titled “Trouble at the Tropicabana.”

The slight-of-hand was needed because so many things were going south, as if Murphy’s Law had been cloned and re-cloned by a humorless sitcom writer.

Somehow, Goff managed to make the difficulties vanish — including a pre-show party that lingered too long, 30 aggressive wannabe theatergoers who showed up unexpectedly, waitresses who filled tall water glasses from a tiny pitcher that could replenish only two at a time at tables that sat eight, and a computer that conked out and had to be replaced before any essential recorded music could be played.

Goff’s Band-Aids, chewing gun and similar quick-fixes kept a packed house from shouting, “Adrianne, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

Not incidentally, if that reference means nothing to you, you must have missed each and every episode of the classic “I Love Lucy” series — and each and every one of Ricky’s mangled sentences.

The audience obviously hadn’t missed any. It cackled each time it was expected to during the campy, pun-laden, mistaken-identity, mega-melodramatic antics that took off where the historic and hysteric sitcom left off.

And at least a third of it grinned gleefully while misstepping all around the huge room in a makeshift, voluntary conga line.

None of the deer or elk heads on the walls criticized their dancing.

Goff, who, believe it or don’t, was also responsible for the costumes, was a comic standout as a whiny Lucy, donning a carrot-colored fright wig that intentionally didn’t cover all of her own brunette locks.

She and perfect sidekick Leslie Klor, who inhabited the body of Ethel, were funniest when they dressed in slapdash mustaches and black suits and delivered seamless clowning in the majestic tradition of Mutt and Jeff, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis.

They also were strikingly and stridently amusing in a set piece in which they talked extra fast trying to out-jabber one another.

Another dazzling performance came in the form of Vanessa Vazquez as Cookie, aka the duplicitous siren-vamp Celia B. DeMilo.

The dinner by caterer Stacy Scott that complemented the show was spicy, tasty and, appropriately, Cuban-based.

But not everything hit an “A” level.

The five “Tropicana Girls” would have garnered many more giggles had their simplistic choreography been outrageously klutzy instead of bland.

The often-repetitive script would have evoked a lot more guffaws had its spoofiness not been so faithful to the original and, instead, been translated into more visual, fresh gags.

And, unfortunately, the actors stayed mostly in the front of the audience rather than mingling with it, unlike the last Marin Murder Mysteries production at a smaller venue, San Rafael Joe’s.

The best move of the evening, however, was an ad lib from Wendell H. Wilson, who portrayed Ricky.

When a two-year-old sitting on his dad’s lap at a front table started to cry after a handgun was wielded, he told the boy, “We’re just playing. We’re all gonna have fun.”

Surely, most folks did.

“Trouble at the Tropicabana,” part of the Marin Murder Mysteries series, will play at the Marin Rod & Gun Club, 2675 E. Francisco Blvd., San Rafael, on various dates through New Year’s Eve. Reservations required. Tickets: $40 to $65, including dinner, tax and tip; $30, show only. Information: www.marinmurdermysteries.com or (415) 306-1202.

Woody Weingarten

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Picasso’s “Nude with Joined Hands,” from the artist’s Rose Period, features a definitively sculpted head atop a less-defined body.

William S. Paley stands in front of Pablo Picasso’s classic “Boy Leading a Horse” in his New York City apartment.

You well might question the artistic wisdom of a man responsible for such lowbrow TV hits as “I Love Lucy,” “Gunsmoke” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

But William S. Paley, longtime titan of the CBS network, vividly demonstrated through major artworks he collected that he was perceptive and intuitive — and perhaps clairvoyant as to which artists would grow in fame.

“The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism,” a new, multi-faceted exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, can prove it.

In the show are masterpieces from Braque, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Miro, Picasso, Renoir, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec and others, many others. Sixty paintings, drawings and sculptures in all.

Impressionism. Post-Impressionism. School of Paris. Modernism.

Exquisite.

And evocative.

Timothy Anglin Burgard, curator-in-charge of American Art for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, indicated that the exhibit, organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, to which Paley had bequeathed his collection, simultaneously informs and inspires viewers.

Bulls-eye.

Consider, for example, Henri Matisse’s 1927 painting “Woman with a Veil,” which shows his desire to utilize “a flatness, a two-dimensionality” combined with a classic pose of melancholia to “get at a greater truth…as well as beauty.”

Or two Pablo Picasso paintings from his Rose Period — the 1905-06 “Boy Leading a Horse” (which was owned originally by Oakland poet laureate Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo) and the 1906 “Nude With Joined Hands.”

“Boy,” which portrays a much younger Picasso than the 27-year-old painter who’d already become a master when he brush-stroked it, is visibly a work of genius.

It also was a linchpin of last year’s successful San Francisco MOMA exhibit, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde.”

For “Nude,” the artist painted a definitively sculpted head atop a less-defined body of a woman who is modestly covering her genitalia with her hands.

It’s alleged that Picasso stole the sculpture on which he based the head from the Louvre, returning it when he was done.

The exhibit, not incidentally, is majestically mounted, with paintings given breathing space on shaded walls that make them stand out.

Facts about Paley’s collection can be intriguing. But so can the attendant fiction.

In that category, said Burgard, is the broadcasting innovator’s middle initial, which didn’t stand for anything (though he’d never dissuade folks from believing that it represented his father’s name, Samuel).

Another inaccuracy: Paley was a co-founder of CBS, not its exclusive architect, Burgard noted during his brilliant and witty pre-opening press tour of the exhibit.

Also, Paley insisted “Woman with a Veil” was purchased directly from Matisse. The truth, said Burgard, is that the spinmeister bought it from artist’s son.

One real fact is that Paley’s first art purchase, in 1935, was the 1875-1876 “Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat” by Paul Cézanne.

Another fact is that Paley, as a Jew, had to overcome the rampant discrimination of his time.

He was denied admission to fraternities in college, and despite his subsequent major philanthropy and an upper-crust reputation garnered by owning a string of racing thoroughbreds, he was denied membership in multiple posh clubs.

As a young man, Paley, who died at age 89 in 1990, wasn’t exactly self-made. His father had earned millions manufacturing and selling cigars, giving William S. Paley quite a jump-start.

Paley the Collector, on the other hand, was strictly his own person: The range of the paintings in this exhibit is wider than you might expect.

On the modern end, for instance, are two existential early-‘60s triptychs of distorted faces by Francis Bacon. According to the audio tour, the artist said his portraits were of friends — because if they hadn’t been, “I could not do such violence to them.”

In contrast, on the other end, are two soft 1866-68 pencil sketches by Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, “Portrait of a Woman” and “The Jockey.”

A photographic bonus for visitors is a hallway of large images revealing the interior of Paley’s Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan, where masterworks adorned the walls.

If you visit the de Young exhibit, make sure to stop in front of Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s “Mme Lili Grenier.”

It’s a 1988 painting soul-stripping the wife of a wealthy friend. She’s lounging in a chair while wrapped in a Japanese kimono, her hands toying with a pale blue ribbon. At age 20, she has a smug look of self-satisfaction — reflecting, most likely, how well she married.

Don’t miss it.

In fact, don’t miss the exhibit as a whole.

“The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism” will be at the de Young, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, through Dec. 30. Hours: Tuesdays through Sundays, 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m., except Fridays, when open until 8:45. Admission: $10 to $20, free for members and children 5 and under. Information: (415) 750-3600 or www.deyoungmuseum.org.

Woody Weingarten

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In “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety,” the champ (Beethovan Oden, center) confronts VP (Nasser Khan) as The Mace (Tony Sancho) looks on. Photo by David Allen.

I’m surprised that, considering their enormous popularity, Spiderman, Batman, Wolverine and other trademarked superheroes don’t show up in professional wrestling circles.

Those figures apparently are confined, principally, to comic books and screen adaptations.

So wrestling buffs have to settle for the more mundane likes of John Cena or past heavyweights like Gorgeous George, Hulk Hogan, The Rock, Steve Austin or Andre the Giant.

Such mental meanderings lead me to Kristoffer Diaz’s “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” one of the season’s worst titles but most amusing plays.

The serio-comic satire, proficiently directed by Jon Tracy, is unique.

The Aurora Theatre Company stage in Berkeley has been transformed into a wrestling ring by set designer Nina Ball and the actors mutated into what one correctly refers to as “caricatures in a world of cartoons.”

To ensure a frenzied atmosphere, the audience is urged during a pre-play warm-up to shout out the characters’ hyperbolic names, boo the villains, cheer the good guys, and perforate the air with outstretched fingers.

The crowd spiritedly follows instructions, lending an exciting interactive quality to the production.

The only thing missing, according to my archaic recall of a live match in New Jersey, would be a cloud of cigar smoke hovering over the ring.

Because the Aurora is small, the faux wrestlers often thrust themselves in your face.

More distant are twin screens in the rear. They playfully project a variety of images, including deliberately awkward and de-sexed go-go dancing by Elizabeth Cadd.

As well as two wonderful sequences that Photoshop real-life heroes Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King into shots of the flamboyant champ, Chad Diety, and villains like Stalin and Darth Vader with the contender, VP, who changes into a Muslim-terrorist type, The Fundamentalist, who can annihilate foes with a mysterious kick dubbed “The Sleeper Cell.”

You need know nothing about wrestling or its Pay-Per-View paydays to enjoy the ridicule.

That’s because the protagonist, The Mace, a journeyman Puerto Rican wrestler from the Bronx who’s forever cast as a loser, provides all the necessary background.

He intertwines fact, fiction, labor-versus-management feelings, metaphor, social consciousness, seriousness and humor in his narration. At the same time, he deals with characters wrestling with their identities as men, as ethnics, as Americans, as wage slaves.

His is a fast-talking monologue that ties together action scenes as professionally as a doc might stitch a wrestler’s wounds.

Actual wrestling-mat moments, by the way, are chiefly limited to the second act of the two-hour play, which make it pass more swiftly than the first.

Nasser Khan is exceptional as VP (or Vigneshwar Paduar), an anti-stereotype character who speaks six languages, does one-arm push-ups and performs rap.

And Beethovan Oden stands out as Chad, a charismatic giant whose strut replicates actual “champions” of the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE instead of WWF).

Tony Sancho, who portrays Macedonio Guerra (or The Mace), also does well, considering he has about a zillion words to deliver. His speeches thankfully are leavened with bright asides to the audience and countless sardonic one-liners (“It is teamwork even if I’m the only one on the team doing the work”).

If I closed my eyes, I could visualize the WWF’s Vince McMahon via Rod Gnapp’s portrayal of THE league owner and chief conniver, Everett K. Olson, who at one juncture reclines effortlessly on one rope of the ring.

Finally, Dave Maier skillfully rounds out the cast — in multiple roles, including a lithe descent from the ceiling.

Sometimes “The Elaborate Entrance” message is a bit heavy-handed, such as the dollar sign displayed on Chad’s hindquarters. And sometimes it borders on the offensive, as when it derides pro wrestling’s racist and xenophobic attitudes via over-the-top costuming by Maggie Whitaker (an incredibly large Mexican sombrero and ammo belts, for example).

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety” won an Obie and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In my view, it deserved both accolades.

Playwright Diaz, an honest-to-goodness wrestling fan with a full grasp of the genre, has been quoted as saying that the mock sport is a “really wonderful art form but…does tend to play to the lowest common denominator.”

No matter. Diaz has created a let’s-pretend world that highbrow or middlebrow audiences can enjoy every bit as much.

“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity” runs at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, through Sept. 30. Night performances, Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Tuesdays and Sundays, 7 p.m.; matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $32-$50. Information: (510) 843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org

Woody Weingarten

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Michelle Krusiec and Alex Moggridge star in “Chinglish,” a comedy at the Berkeley Rep. Photo, courtesy kevinberne.com

It’s fast-paced.

It’s a clever dismemberment of East-West cultural differences and the mind-muddles created by shoddy translation.

And it’s consistently funny.

The laughter starts even before “Chinglish” — a two-act bilingual comedy at the Berkeley Rep — begins.

Humdrum theater messages about shutting off cell phones and finding exits in case of emergency become a gigglefest by being simulcast incomprehensibly in Mandarin and English.

Mostly, the show’s hilarity doesn’t translate well in a review — the best lines just don’t work on paper.

On stage and in context, though, hilarity is guaranteed.

I guess you have to be there.

As the play unfolds, playwright David Henry Hwang and director Leigh Silverman rarely wait for one chuckle to subside before beckoning the next. I sometimes felt as if I were witnessing a stand-up’s jackhammer delivery rather than a two-hour production.

Supertitle projections of mangled English translations — readable white letters against a gray backdrop — added a steady stream of chortles.

The story, which underscores cultural, political and relationship gaps between citizens of the United States and China, focuses on an ineffectual American salesman and ex-Enron lackey (Daniel Cavanaugh, portrayed exquisitely by Alex Moggridge) who has traveled to Asia to lock up a game-changing contract for his family’s sign-making business.

He quickly becomes entangled with a sexy bureaucrat (Michelle Krusiec as Xi Yan), a British teacher masquerading as a consultant (Brian Nishii playing Peter), and a Communist minister trapped in a futile attempt to save face and freedom (Larry Lei Zhang as Cai).

Krusiec foreshadows the verbal shenanigans that lie ahead when, following a torrent of English words, she declares in Mandarin, “I didn’t catch a word.”

He later offers a perfect parallel to define the farce: “I don’t have a clue what’s really going on around here.”

One set piece, in which the enigmatic phrase “through the back door” repeatedly jumps out, is particularly engaging. Even more sidesplitting is an intercultural jumbled-word exchange reminiscent of the classic Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First” routine.

I also enjoyed watching Moggridge and Krusiec banter at length with a zero-sum understanding until, exhausted, they seemingly agree on a lone point and gleefully high-five each other.

Massive miscommunications tend to retain a vise-like grip on the audience’s funnybone. Such as when Moggridge tries to mumble “I love you” in Mandarin but it comes out, the third time around, as “Frog loves to pee.”

The more serious shades of “Chinglish” brought to my mind the real-life scandal revolving around Gu Kailai, wife of deposed political leader Bo Xilai. She was just given a two-year reprieve from the death penalty imposed for murdering a British businessman, and that is likely to be reduced to a life sentence.

For the record, there’s no reference in this play — which was written before the scandal erupted — to murder.

But the 55-year-old, Los Angeles-born Hwang, who won a Tony for “M. Butterfly” and an Obie for “Yellow Face,” obviously can “kill” at the box office. He just received a $200,000 Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award for his body of solo work covering a 32-year span.

For “Chinglish,” on the other hand, he worked closely with a translator — because Hwang speaks only English.

The show, a co-production with the South Coast Repertory, had a four-month Broadway run starting in October 2011. After playing in Costa Mesa next January, it will go to Hong Kong, where it will be a March festival entry.

In Berkeley, revolving, beautifully designed sets by David Korins prove how rapidly locales can be switched.

And basic-black, we-mean-business costumes by Anita Yavich are impeccably functional. Brilliantly contrasting is her outlandish garb for a male Chinese translator: white shoes and ostentatious argyle sweater.

Sound by Darron L. West (particularly effective between scenes) and lighting by Brian MacDevitt (stretching from subtle to blinding) are both executed seamlessly and augment theatergoers’ pleasure.

“Chinglish” has time to play with only a few of the 10,000 Chinese calligraphy characters that comprise the language. Despite that, the show’s clearly a double-barreled winner.

With that appraisal in mind, I’m convinced you should seriously consider seeing it — twice, perhaps.

“Chinglish” plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley, through Oct. 21. 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 $99, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.

Woody Weingarten

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Marvin Hamlisch, back when

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.

Woody Weingarten

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Andrew Veenstra (right foreground) portrays Albert in “War Horse,” while Christopher Mai (left), Derek Stratton and Rob Laqui (underneath the superstructure) work the huge puppet. Photo: Brinkhoff.

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.

Woody Weingarten

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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

Woody Weingarten

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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.

Woody Weingarten

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

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).

Woody Weingarten

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