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Feb 26 2023
Love0

MTC’s ‘Justice’ musically spotlights first 3 female Supreme Court judges — and equality

By Woody Weingarten

 

Marin Theatre Company’s Justice portrays first three female judges of U.S. Supreme Court (from left), Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Maria Sotomayor, and Sandra Day O’Connor. Photo by Kevin Berne.

 

The three Justice singers portraying top-court judges can’t compare to The Supremes, but they’re powerful anyway — if you believe the message can be the massage.

That message, of course, translates into a feminist anthem for equality, with undertones of kumbaya and patriotism.

Justice: A New Musical, which runs at the Marin Theatre Company through March 12, dips into the public and private lives of the first three female U.S. Supreme Court jurists, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Sonia Maria Sotomayor.

The three sing and talk of being “an unlikely sisterhood,” but also of crossing the aisle politically. Emphasized, as might be expected, is sexism — on the court as well as in the country — and the notion of “we the people,” which is stressed in both opening and closing numbers.

Outstanding is Lynda DiVito, a Walnut Creek resident with off-Broadway credits who depicts RBG in a voice that reverberates throughout the theater, with facial expressions that instantly convey the feelings her words may or may not say.

Karen Murphy, a veteran of multiple Broadway, off-Broadway and touring company shows, plays O’Connor, the trailblazing first female associate justice, and displays her well-earned pride helping repeal Arizona laws that violated the Equal Rights Amendment.

Stephanie Prentice, who outlines Sotomayor, the first Latina justice, is a Bay Area native who’s appeared withy 42nd Street Moon, San Francisco Playhouse, Shotgun Players, and Hillbarn. In character, she’s particularly poignant when delineating the Puerto Rican’s difficult childhood: a father who drank oo much and agued too much with her mom.

Justice contains 17 musical numbers, mostly trios and duets. It’s basically a sung-through, operetta-like presentation. Its one truly melodic song is “Notorious,” an upbeat, humorous entry performed perfectly by DiVito.

When the three together sing the music by Bree Lowdermilk and lyrics by Kait Kerrigan, they’re tight, clearly well-rehearsed. Direction by Ashley Rodbro is likewise tight.

Karen Murphy (left) plays Sandra Day O’Connor while Lynda DiVito depicts RBG. Photo by Kevin Berne.

What’s absent throughout, however, is tension, except when the musical’s book showcases Episcopalian and staunch Republican O’Connor’s deciding vote in the December 2000 Bush v. Gore was that tilted the presidential election, a choice that caused Jewish leftist Ginsburg pronounced anguish. Here O’Conn cops to wanting a Republican president to replace her; in rebuttal, RBG claims the decision means or entire system will suffer a loss in “confidence in the rule of law.”

The book, not incidentally, is by super-prolific Lauren M. Gunderson, the Marin Theatre Company’s longtime artist-in-residence and a playwright with a rep for pushing a feminist agenda. Justice is the fifth play of hers the MTC has mounted.

Most touching moments in it are when Ginsburg and O’Connor deal with their husbands’ dementia — and then when O’Connor, now still alive at 92, must cope with her own. In “When the Mind Goes,” she sings sadly, “You’re inside a china shop and time is a bull.”

Humor is sporadic, but playful. The RBG character draws chuckles, for instance, when she invites Sotomayor to join her twice-weekly gym workouts at 7 a.m. Sotomayor simply scowls at the notion.

Personal moments, for the most part, connect better with the audience than the recitation of key court cases — such as when Justice spotlights RBG andO’Connor’s cancers.

One of the biggest positive outbursts from the crowd comes, however, when, near the end, confirmation of Black female Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is cited.

References to male justices, meanwhile, are skimpy, including that RBG has been “best buddies” with her philosophical antithesis, Antonin Scalia. Merrick Garland’s blocked nomination is referred to only obliquely, namelessly, and there are no hints whatsoever that Amy Coney Barrett or Elena Kagan even exist.

Justice’s two-story-high set is wonderfully creative. Minimalist. Still, it can turn from a bathroom sink (where RBG and O’Connell are humanized as they wash their hands next to each other), into a desk, into a place where justices are confirmed, to another where they render decisions. The backdrop features massive columns and a high space where the names of major legal cases are projected.

Regarding recent cases, Sotomayor laments about being in the minority, about court life being filled with “rejections and rollbacks.”

Every day is disheartening, she bemoans, “when you’re on the losing side.” But the tone decidedly changes when the court affirms gay marriage.

Even though the regional Arizona Theatre Company premiered an earlier incarnation of Justice in 2022, this 90-minute, intermission-less show is still a bit choppy, bouncing from this or that subject and timeframe, and from the legal to the personal and back again.

But it definitely affirms the history of three feminist icons — and underscores the refrain, “When will there be enough women on the court? When there are nine!”

Justice runs at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley, through March 12. Tickets: $25 to $65. Info: 415-388-5200 or info@marintheatre.org.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime 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.com and https://vitality press.com.

Feb 23 2023
Love0

‘Six the musical’ details Henry VIII’s abuses, successfully flips his wives into modern, rockin’ feminists

By Woody Weingarten

 

The North American touring company of Six, now playing at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. Photo by Joan Marcus.

 

Six wives? Holy history, that’s three more than my total.

I didn’t behead any, of course.

Six the Musical tackles that number (of Henry VIII wives) and turns the 500-year-old sorry saga into extraordinary entertainment — replete with fantastic vocal cords and rock chords, fantastic layered metallic costumes, and a fantastic light show.

Henry, we’re told, cut off two of his Tudor queens’ heads and divorced two others. One died of natural causes. One survived.

Despite that bleak-scape, Six the Musical is pure escapism, feminist-style (since its point of view flips from the king to the women). And it gives attendees at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco a chance to steer clear of the reality of their own lives while it distorts the reality of what the show labels “her-tory.”

Like Hamilton, this is revisionist stuff. Big Time.

Yesterday’s opening night audience couldn’t care less, however, about evaluations, academic references, or the possibility that the presentation is in a sense a #metoo-ish reaction to Henry’s abuses. The crowd was too busy screaming with glee and clapping wildly after each of the nine tunes — leaping, in fact, to a standing “o” for the finale and the “encore” that followed it with scads of glitter falling from the rafters.

Didi Romero (center) plays Katherine Howard in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.

It’s clear that the glitzy sextet morphs from being villainous or invisible — and supporting players in royal history — to being 21st Century females who can attain distaff empowerment. Accompanied by lots of clever sexual innuendos and mentions of being “un-friended” and TikTok and other digital entities.

Featured characters are Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr. Each gets to hog the spotlight for a soliloquy in song. Each is modeled on modern pop artists that in a sense reflect her personal story (Rihanna, Beyonce, and Alicia Keys, for example).

The gimmick is that they’re competing — even to the point of nasty cat-fighting — to be lead singer of their girl band, ultimately a sisterhood of sassy, joking divas. The supposed test? Who had the worst time being Henry’s wife?

The theme of the plotless, intermission-less, concert-style, 80-minute, touring BroadwaySF presentation is “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived,” a couplet based on a sing-song melody long favored by British kids.

Lyrics more than once lean on forced rhymes, as when Anna of Cleves contends, “You said that I tricked ya/’Cause I, I didn’t look like my profile pictcha.”

And laugh-lines in Six the Musical aren’t subtle. Consider this interchange: Jane Seymour asks what hurts more than a broken heart? Anne Boleyn responds, “A severed head.” Still, the show shows that beheadings can be funny or entertaining — especially when they’re merely conversational and not as lurid and in-your-face as scenes in Sweeney Todd or Little Shop of Horrors.

On occasion, the subject matter here is cringeworthy. Such as Katherine Howard explaining her molestation at age 13 and desire to be loved — including her attraction to Henry when she was 16 and he was 49, a geezer in those days.

Olivia Donalson (center) portrays Anna of Cleves in Six. Photo by Joan Marcus.

All that considered, the musical is much better than one might expect since it evolved from a concept-album concocted by two Cambridge University seniors, Lucy Moss and Toby Marlow, both triple-threats as playwrights, composers, and lyricists.

Feminists should love that the four musicians on stage behind the six — the “ladies in waiting” — are all women. They’ll probably love as well that Catherine Parr details in “I Don’t Need Your Love” that she managed to fight for female education and wrote books without the king.

The musical, which won 23 awards during the 2021-22 Broadway season, including a Tony Award for best original score (music and lyrics), can’t be taken too seriously. But seriously, you should head down to the theatre — although I strongly urge you check out the lyrics online before going so that they won’t miss a lot of the wordplay that zips by.

Six the Musical will play at the Orpheum Theatre, 1182 Market St., San Francisco, through March 19. Tickets start at $56. Info: 888-746-1799 or tickets@broadwaysf.com.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime 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.com and https://vitality press.com.

 

Feb 20 2023
Love0

Diverse Mark Morris Dance Group uses varied Burt Bacharach music as kaleidoscopic playground

By Woody Weingarten

The Mark Morris Dance Group performs The Look of Love, Burt Bacharach’s music. Photo by Molly Bartels.

The Look of Love: An Evening of Dance to the Music of Burt Bacharach, The Mark Morris Dance Group’s latest, can be appreciated even if the pop composer’s melodies aren’t your fave.

You might end up, in fact, tickled pink (or orange or yellow).

The audience at the weekend’s Zellerbach Hall presentation in Berkeley clearly was thrilled. It not only jumped to a standing ovation but clapped enough to encourage choreographer Morris and his performers to take multiple bows.

 Mary Harriell (left), lead singer in The Look of Love; choreographer Mark Morris (center); and arranger Ethan Iverson. Photo by Trevor Izzo.

The music of Bacharach, whose Feb. 8 death at age 94 unexpectedly turned the Feb. 17-19 outing into a bittersweet memorial, was introduced via a melancholy solo-piano opener by Ethan Iverson — Morris’ musical collaborator and arranger — on “Alfie,” whose questioning lyric set the tone, “What’s it all about?”

Surprisingly, the most innovative moments in The Look of Love came in the form of a little-known, 1958 sci-fi/horror flick charmer, “The Blob.” Dancers ended up in a jammed cluster, moving in slow motion and using colored bridge chairs as props and a barricade while singers simulated Mark David lyrics like a deejay intentionally decelerating an LP for effect. The sequence drew both giggles and guffaws.

Wit and whimsy, of course, have long been Morris staples, along with huge helpings of passion. Indeed, Morris’ most enduring creation, arguably, is 1991’s “The Hard Nut,” a parody of the classic “Nutcracker.”

The Mark Morris Dance Group performs The Look of Love, Burt Bacharach’s music. Photo by Skye Schmidt.

Although some pundits wince at the choreographer’s winks to audiences, such as an evergreen in which dancers pat their heart to indicate love, it can nevertheless be fun to see hoofers sneeze at the word pneumonia in “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”

Some crowd members appeared slightly befuddled, however, by Morris’ gender-bending, identity changes in “Message to Michael,” where the lead character becomes a “they” instead of a “he” — in a song already laden with heaviness.

Still, most tunes were presented straightforward and unadorned yet showing off the mixed-meter complexity of the music, always with spare sets limited to chairs and cushions, and yet they evoked the imprint of six-time Grammy award vocalist Dionne Warwick, who’s still touring at age 82. “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” was an exception, with the dancers repeatedly looking skyward while the voices staccatoed the word “Rain” about 71 times before segueing into the rhythms virtually everyone knew.

The dancing often shone, in sync with Bacharach’s music (which smoothly dips into Brazilian rhythms, jazz and rock) but occasionally becoming more compelling than the repetitiousness of the dancers’ hand and body movements. Meanwhile, Iverson’s arrangements built an exquisite showcase for lead vocalist Mary Harriell, who can alternately be sultry, soulful, a belter, or a jazz singer scat-riffing, a thrush whose voice is amazingly larger than even her massive Afro; backup singers Clinton Curtis and Blaire Reinhard, consistently impeccable in the pit behind Harriell; and Jonathan Finlayson, whose trumpet sometimes punctuated the songs with spurts exuding joy.

Burt Bacharach. Photo, courtesy Cal Performances.

Once in a while, though, Hal David’s unsentimental and sometimes pessimistic words clashed with Morris’ upbeat brainstorms.

Domingo Estrada Jr.’s mini-solos stood out among the dancers, not unlike toddlers in a playground glided, twirled, pranced, stretched, skipped, ran, jumped, rolled on the floor, and stiff-armed the air like a running back on a football field.

Never to be ignored is fashionista Isaac Mizrahi, whose costume designs justified a gush or two. Primary colors blended with slightly less prominent hues, all in subtle collage patterns. Tunics and skirts and dresses, shorts and long pants, long sleeves and sleeveless, no two dancers dressed alike. Overall, a rainbow kaleidoscope — similar to the varied skin tones of the performers.

The 66-year-old Morris, a Seattle native, has been immersed in music since he was 8 and, after seeing a performance by the José Greco flamenco company, decided to become a Spanish dancer. Three years later, having taken classes, he started performing professionally. His entrance into choreography was delayed, however — until age 14. He launched this troupe in 1980, and quickly developed a reputation for experimentation and out-of-the-box humor that gave him the label “bad boy of modern dance.”

This presentation is basically a juke-box musical without book. Underscoring that notion was Morris’ injecting “What the World Needs Now,” the 65-minute, intermission-less program’s second number that featured a circle dance, the most prevalent motif in the Cal Performances concert; “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” in which dancers repeatedly turn into jacks-in-a-box sans box, “Walk on By” (which had the audience toe-tapping in unison), “Always Something There to Remind Me,” “I Say a Little Prayer” (the finale), and the title tune.

Iverson, who’d previously teamed up with the choreographer for 2017’s Pepperland, a tribute to the Beatles, got over-the-top gushy when talking to a scribe for The New York Times last year. “I would put Bacharach up there with Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin as part of The American Songbook,” he was quoted as saying. “These are songs you hear once and never forget.”

The arranger’s opinion about Bacharach being in the composing firmament could be debated, surely, without demeaning the songwriter’s talent.

During the pandemic, Morris was forced to cancel after a lone Zellerbach show because of a Covid outbreak. His company has been performing in Berkeley for more than 30 years, though. And this new outing indicates, with apologies to poet Robert Frost, that he has miles to go before he sleeps.

Upcoming dance concerts at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley include Step Afrika! on Feb. 25 and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from April 11 to 16. Info: 510-642-9988 or https://calperformances.org.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime 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.com and https://vitality press.com.

Feb 15 2023
Love0

Cara Levine’s exhibit at Contemporary Jewish Museum probes racism, grief, trauma

By Woody Weingarten

Archived items from “This Is Not a Gun,” a collaborative work in which Cara Levine and community participants created wood sculptures of objects that police mistook for weapons being carried by civilians whom they shot, are shown. (Courtesy Cara Levine)

Injustice. Guns. Mourning.

Climate change. COVID-19.

Healing.Los Angeles artist Cara Levine ties them together at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum in a solo exhibit apt to touch — and disturb — many people.“

Cara Levine: To Survive I Need You to Survive,” on view Feb. 16 through July 30, is intended “to deepen awareness of injustice and inequity, create space for communal grief and mourning, and encourage informed action.”

Using video, sculpture and installations, Levine, 39, explores systemic racism, anti-Semitism, climate change and the ongoing trauma of the pandemic.

The exhibition is trifurcated.

The most prominent part is “This Is Not a Gun,” an ongoing work created in 2016 in collaboration with activists “to grieve victims of police violence and share their stories.”

It consists of wood carvings that Levine made, and ceramic objects community members made, of items civilians carried that police claimed to mistake for guns.

The work stemmed from a list of 23 items mentioned in a Harper’s Magazine article called “Trigger Warning.”

The CJM issued a statement in connection with the work: “While this exhibit has been long planned, we recognize that it is opening against the backdrop of the recent acts of egregious police brutality and gun violence, the most recent in a long line of tragic and horrific instances of senseless violence in our country.”

Grief is a crucial component, too, of “Carve: The Mystic Is Nourished from This Sphere,” a kindred segment of the exhibit curated by Qianjin Montoya, CJM assistant curator. The site-specific installation created for the museum takes the form of a hole carved into the gallery space.

In the week before the exhibit’s opening, Levine has been etching into the hole notes of grief submitted by the public. Throughout the run, she’ll do more. The hole serves as a starting point for a symbolic adaptation of the practice of shiva, the seven-day mourning period in Judaism following the death of a loved one.

“To Survive I Need You to Survive” was inspired by communal grieving in an interfaith service following mass shootings. (Courtesy Cara Levine) 

The title part of the exhibit is a large-scale sculpture created in response to mass 2018 shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Marshall County High School in Benton, Kentucky.

It was inspired by communal grieving in an interfaith service that featured collective singing of Hezekiah Walker’s gospel melody “I Need You to Survive.”

Lyrics included:

“I need you, you need me

“We’re all a part of God’s body…

“You are important to me, I need you to survive.”

Cara Levine, whose exhibit “To Survive I Need You to Survive” is on view at San Francisco’s Jewish Contemporary Museum, is pictured in her L.A. workshop. (Photo by Ashley Randall, courtesy Cara Levine) 

Regarding “This Is Not a Gun,” the artist — who earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Michigan and a master of fine arts degree from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco — said the list of objects in the magazine story gave no context for the killings, leaving her feeling empty, powerless and angry. “So, I set out to meticulously carve each object from wood as an act of prayer, respect and remembrance,” she said.

She partnered with local people of color, artists, activists and healers focused on race equity, and began holding collaborative workshops.

Levine, whose work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and participatory events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Anchorage, Tel Aviv and Kyoto, received pushback after previous incarnations of “This Is Not a Gun.” That, she said, was “about being a white woman and what do I know about police brutality, and that’s a fair criticism.”

However, she added, “Though I’m the founder, it’s been a vastly collaborative project…[TINAG] is about … something you can take away and share with your loved ones. … investigate your own biases. We begin with a conversation around a table, and bring it further outward and further outward and further outward.”

Levine, an adjunct associate professor at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, also links chronic pain and disability with her artistic endeavors. In part, it’s because she suffered for more than a decade after tearing a tendon in her left ankle and spending four years trying everything but an operation. “By the time I had my first surgery [of two],” she laments, “the tendon had completely shredded.”

A portion of her pain has also been debilitating migraines.  She laments that her “pain is not only physical, but part of my life-path — a constant opponent.”

But a nine-month internship with Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development (NIAD) art center in Richmond more than a decade ago helped her cope. She remembers her first day, when a blind artist walked by her and proclaimed, “Oh yeah, I used to be a butterfly.”

That opened her up. She said, “I felt a kinship with her. I’d felt like an outsider as a child, having had a mother who was sick a lot and brothers with whom I fought a lot, so I spent a lot of time making up games and stories. I felt a familiarity. You are expressing things I’ve been told not to express but that are in me too.”

In considering how Jewishness informs her work, she said, “I’ve been fortunate to be raised by parents who exposed me to the privilege I was raised in and how that contrasted to the inequities in our society. [I also was taught that being] part of a people who have escaped from slavery and who have spent generations being persecuted meant an interest in social justice with a priority, a focus on caring for the whole world.”

A high school teacher jumpstarted an interest in art for Levine, who said she identifies as queer.

She fell in love with clay. Now, she said, “It’s important for me to make things as a sculptor. The handmade process gives me a connection to the work that’s important to the subject matter.”

In 2021, in an interview on the ThisIsColossal website, she said, “When Trump was elected, it compounded a lot of the fears I had. … I was having nightmares all the time. …I felt like [marginalized people were] going to be exterminated in a really disgusting way—immigrants, disabled people, women, trans folks, people of color, like everybody now was having to protect themselves like their lives were on the line.”

Then came the Harper’s article. And she was motivated.

Levine said she hopes the CJM exhibit “can transcend the woke mentality. I think everybody experiences the blahs. This exhibit hones in on shared suffering.”

“Cara Levine: To Survive I Need You to Survive” opens with a free reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Feb. 16 at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 738 Mission St., San Francisco. Registration is required; visit rsvp@thecjm.org or call (415) 655-7824.  Tickets to the exhibition, which runs through July 30, are $14-$16; free for ages 18 and under.  Go to thecjm.org or call (415) 655-7800. 

A free “This Is Not a Gun” workshop at 2 p.m. April 22 at the CJM features Levine and Angela Hennessy, an Oakland artist and a survivor of gun violence. Participants will create replicas in clay of objects mistaken for guns that will be added to an archive of more than 300 objects.

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/. 

Woody Weingarten can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

Feb 13 2023
Love0

Dan Hoyle probes White privilege — with his mouth and heart — in one-man show at The Marsh Berkeley

By Woody Weingarten

It’s easy to see Dan Hoyle in Talk to Your People. It’s easy to hear him. But it’s virtually impossible to absorb everything he says.

The one-man, multiple-character show, which runs at The Marsh Berkeley through March 11, is incredibly deep and dense — so dense, in fact, that it could take a second (or third) viewing to get it all.

It’s certainly more opaque than his last show, Border People, which focused on tribes different from his own liberal Caucasian cultural backdrop.

Hoyle, Talk to Your People

Hoyle, a consummate performer, here in his seventh show continues his documentary-style outings that stem from interviewing countless people, a methodology he calls “the journalism of hanging out.” In this case, those people were mainly in Oakland, where he lives, and its hills.

But also, apparently, as far away as West Marin.

And, like the protesters on the street and the young girl splashing in the beach water or scootering on the concrete, all of whom appear in videos on a screen before and behind Hoyle, his agenda is straightforward: He wants the audience to deep-dive with him into complicated concepts such as systemic racism, culture-canceling, and White privilege — especially that last item.

His well-honed tools are his way with words (which ranges from simple and coarse to complex and eloquent), his skill with physical comedy and exaggeration, and, unlike his previous outings, a talent for utilizing rap and other genres of music to sneak-ease the viewer into digesting his messages.

Hoyle’s updated work is masterful, as are his playwriting abilities. The only thing missing, just like in previous creations, is a close-up depiction of females. They’re a second-hand presence, materializing only through the lips of the males.

Hoyle, Talk to Your People

To its credit, Talk to Your People, which had a mid-pandemic run in San Francisco a year ago, explores not only how society got to the current apparent low point it’s at but how it can move forward, using heart instead of brains.

The performance, developed and directed by Charlie Varon, an exquisite one-man show artist himself, spotlights Hoyle’s mash-up that spotlights, among others, a still-arrogant White corporate burn-out who in a former life was a combo hippie jock, a guy with “the soul of an activist” who isn’t anymore, an Argentine Marxist techie fidgeting because he’s discovered he’s an elite, and a Jewish PhD who’d been forced to read Dante’s Inferno when he was seven, who’d spent years as a White jazz musician, and who proclaims he’s “as neurotic and sensitive as anyone.”

Hoyle mouth-meanders in heartfelt, often poignant ways about filling in application boxes for ethnicity, “crypto versus cash,” defunding the police, unemployment, Black Lives Matter, Airbnbs, and being bi-racial.

He sprinkles Talk to Your People with descriptions of a guy bemoaning another who only has “one type of wine glass,” the idea that “people are beginning to live in their emotion,” and the notion that we all “should go back to middle school” to re-learn how to get along with each other.

It’s not all introspection, polemic, or talk about re-segregation, though. The show contains extraordinary moments of tenderness — for instance, when Hoyle portrays a father who often interrupts his conversation with a compadre to help his toddler take an invisible rocket to the moon.

Yes, there is some blurring that happens in Hoyle’s panoramic, 75-minute delivery, and an audience member needs to be forgiven if he or she or they doesn’t immediate grok who’s who onstage (even with the simple, effective costume changes that instantly change him from bare-chested beachgoer with beer in hand to, let’s say, a character whose shiny white sneakers distract).

If theatergoers want him to tie everything up with a neat multi-racial ribbon, they’ll be disappointed. Some may be put off, too, by lots of run-on sentences or casual swearing.

On the other hand, those who seek out tour de force solo performances and aren’t nettled by a smattering of flaws will be grateful he and his muses finished the piece.

 

Talk to Your People runs at the Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston Way through March 11. Tickets, $25 to $100. Info: https://themarsh.org or (425) 641-0235.

Woody Weingarten, a longtime 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.com and https://vitality press.com.

Jan 26 2023
Love0

Comic jogs with a dog, finds meaning in life in ‘He Wants to Run’  

By Woody Weingarten

David Kleinberg shares his experiences, and lessons learned, from jogging with a boxer named Butler in his one-man show “He Wants to Run” at The Marsh in San Francisco. (Courtesy David Kleinberg) 

 

David Kleinberg, a Renaissance man who has appeared as a standup comic on the same bill as Robin Williams, Dana Carvey and Richard Lewis, is only mildly obsessed with killing.

He’s fond of saying that when you succeed at comedy, you “kill the audience,” and when you don’t, you “die on stage.” He adds: “‘Kill or be killed,’ as my old drill sergeant used to say.”

Kleinberg was fully aware of those well-worn aphorisms as he painstakingly prepared a new one-man show. But just when he was ready to perform it in Marin, the pandemic peaked and — what else? — killed in-person performances.

“It was the worst possible timing,” laments the San Francisco native.

Now, though, “He Wants to Run,” his updated, improved monologue about a guy who doesn’t particularly like jogging or dogs — yet befriends a neighbor’s boxer and runs with him for almost 13 years —will open at The Marsh San Francisco on Feb. 4.

The truth-based show — written and performed by Kleinberg, directed by Mark Kenward and developed with David Ford — also focuses on the pleasures and pitfalls of owning a vacation home in an impoverished area on the Russian River in Cloverdale, as well as what the pooch, Butler, taught him about dying and living.

Kleinberg insists he’s always preferred basketball to jogging. The 79-year-old quit shooting hoops only two months ago after getting a pinched nerve that was painful: “ I took it as a signal to stop — I wanted to walk off the court rather than be carried off,” he says.

But he started running at his summer place for add-on exercise.

Despite his intense desire to run alone, he remembers that whenever he’d start, Butler would follow and go after him: “Essentially, he wore me down. He’d wait for me to come out, then fly across the road, jump in the air, put my running pants in his teeth, and pull me toward the road so we could run.”

David Kleinberg’s latest show covers what happened to him after he took up running. (Courtesy David Kleinberg)

As he aged, Butler got fatter and slower.

And despite their longtime connection, Kleinberg adds, “The ironic thing is there isn’t one single picture of us running together. Our relationship was never about Instagram.”

Kleinberg transitioned from comedy to one-man shows long enough ago to have created three others: “The Voice,” about his sex addiction and subsequent two decades of recovery, as well as his homophobia; “Hey, Hey, LBJ!,” about his four years as an information specialist in Vietnam (“My job was to go out with soldiers and to shoot pictures when people were shooting us”); and “Return to the Scene of the Crime,” about his traumatic trip back to Vietnam, where some of his buddies had been killed or wounded half a century before.

On his website (davidkleinberg.weebly.com) under the heading “upcoming gigs,” it says he’s recently “been hibernating in the solo theater world. We’ll warn you when he thinks about returning to standup.”

Kleinberg’s interest in comedy stemmed from going to the hungry i in North Beach while he was in his early 20s, seeing Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Mort Sahl and Bill Cosby. (Tangentially, his prime memories of Robin Williams aren’t about his appearance with him, but the two times he interviewed him for the San Francisco Chronicle where he spent 34 years, including a long stint as Datebook editor, after starting as a copy boy at 17).

“I interviewed him just before ‘Good Morning Vietnam.’ It was really hot, and I agreed with him that it was ‘a beautiful global-warming day.’ The other time, we were again talking about climate, and he said about it, ‘People are like addicts. They won’t do anything until they hit bottom.’”

After Kleinberg left the Chronicle, he and his wife Pat ran Elderhostel education-travel programs in Tiburon for two decades. “We were a great team,” he recalls. “I work fast and sloppy, she works slow and meticulous. We’d have three courses at a time, as diverse as ‘Operas of Puccini,’ ‘Middle East Conflicts’ and ‘French Impressionist Art.’”

What lies ahead? Possibly another one-man show: a dark social satire (that he started as a science-fiction novel some 35 years ago) about a 495-pound gorilla trained to play fullback for a professional football team.

“He Wants to Run” runs Feb. 4-12 at The Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia St., from Feb. 4-12. Tickets are $20- $100. Call 415-282-3055 or visit themarsh.org.

 

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/. 

Woody Weingarten, a longtime 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.com and https://vitality press.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 04 2023
Love0

Legacy film fest on aging offering a variety virtually

By Woody Weingarten

The documentary short “Eddy’s World,” about 98-year-old toy inventor Eddy Goldfarb, screens in the Legacy Film Festival on Aging. (Courtesy Sheila Malkind)

In May 2021, Sheila Malkind, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Legacy Film Festival on Aging, was recovering from a stroke.

“Of course, I’d like to have my body functioning better, but I’m glad I’m alive and still vital mentally and physically,” says the still sanguine Malkind.

The event she founded in 2011 has expanded significantly. Last year’s virtual festival screened 30 films; this time 40, mostly documentaries, will be split into 18 feature programs available online from Jan. 6 through Jan. 22.

A team — Malkind, a curator and a handful of reviewers — pores over possible selections. “If we all say ‘maybe,’ we probably won’t pick the film,” says the 84-year-old festival founder, “but many times we all say ‘yes.’”

This year, several flicks that focus on music won a consensus. Among Malkind’s favorites from the event’s 11th annual edition, she names two: “For the Left Hand” and “The Ten of Us.”

Norman Malone, who mastered the piano and went on a concert tour at age 78, is the subject of “For the Left Hand.” (Courtesy Kartemquin Films)

She loves the first, she explains, “because a man who’d been disabled at an early age, Norman Malone, still mastered some of the most difficult and beautiful music with just one hand.”

The second, which she calls “a fun film,” is about a group of friends who started as teens doing folk music who now have embarked on what the festival website calls “a tour of love, unity, and addressing aging and death with humor and inspiration.”

That pair, as well as many choices in the fest that for the second consecutive year will be 100% virtual, accentuate the positive.

“We want to avoid doom and gloom,” Malkind says. “I believe that no matter what our age, we’re still interested in being alive, in doing whatever we can do. Life can still be exciting in many ways, and we have to take advantage of that possibility, of making old age palatable.”

Former teen folk musicians address “aging and death with humor and inspiration” in “The Ten of Us.” (Courtesy Sheila Malkind)

Other films she touts are:

• “Eddy’s World,” a documentary short by Lyn Goldfarb that centers on the filmmaker’s father. Reports Malkind: “It’s about a toy inventor who’s now 101 (he was only 98 when the film was made) and shows a man who’s delightful.”  Eddy, best known for “chattering teeth” (but who created more than 800 other toys), cheerfully states in the film, “I think that when you do create work, it stimulates your brain and that helps keep your body healthy.”

• “Dear Audrey,” is, Malkind says, “a beautiful film on Alzheimer’s that shows kindness and understanding. It’s very moving — at one point [the husband] goes into the facility where [his wife] is and sleeps in the same bed that she’s in, showing his love and tenderness.”

• “My Mother Dreams: The Satan’s Disciples in New York,” a short film about a widowed Midwestern housewife who becomes obsessed with a Hell’s Angels-ish bikers’ club, won a 1999 Academy Award for best live action short.

• “Golden Age Karate,” a very short short, is about a 15-year-old martial arts champion who teaches senior citizens self-defense at a local nursing home, “giving them the tools to feel in control, connected, and cared for.” It’s part of an 84-minute festival program with a self-explanatory title: Vitality.

Sheila Malkind (Courtesy Sheila Malkind)

With a U.S. Census forecast that by 2035, there will be 78 million people age 65 and older in the country, Malkind aims to flip the attitudes and depiction of older people in Hollywood movies, who “are often still portrayed as irrelevant, sometimes absurd, or they are stereotypical wise elders with limited face time, who give sage advice to the younger, more active characters.” She says, “Most American films do not attempt to portray the richness and variety, nor the triumphs and challenges, of older people.”

Malkind, who grew up in Brooklyn, moved to Chicago, and then relocated to San Francisco in 2003, earned two master’s degrees from Chicago schools. Despite wearing a brace since her stroke, she often walks 40 or 50 minutes in the hills with her son beside her.

It’s seemingly impossible for her to have anything but an upbeat attitude.

A quote on the festival’s website from 19th century writer and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, who said, “To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent. This is to triumph over old age,” contrasts nicely with a playful quote from Malkind: “I always looked forward to getting older — it’s a part of life, so what the heck.”

Screenings in the Legacy Film Festival on Aging cost $12 per program and $65 for a pass. Visit http://legacyfilmfestivalonaging.org/.

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/. 

Woody Weingarten can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

Dec 24 2022
Love0

3 Jewish comics can make you laugh out loud — even if you’re not Jewish

By Woody Weingarten

Lisa Geduldig

It’s not too late.

To see this year’s Kung Pao Kosher Comedy, that is — an event that features three standup comics who can make you laugh out loud. Repeatedly.

My wife and I did.

It might help if you’re Jewish, living with a Jew, have best friends who are Jewish, or have spent hours and hours of stimulating and amusing conversations with seatmates on El Al plane trips to or from Israel.

Truthfully, though, non-Jews are just as apt to find the show extremely funny.

That’s because all three comedians on the bill, despite each occasionally leaning on a Semitic background, mostly launch anecdotes and one-liners about everyday stuff from their own lives.

The headliner, deadpan Mark Schiff, who’s toured with Jerry Seinfeld worldwide for 15 years and had specials on HBO and Showtime, relies on material about medical conditions and his wife; Ladman, a 67-year-old who holds the record for appearances on Kung Pao with five and has appeared on The Tonight Show nine times, deals mostly with her aging issues; and Orion Levine is a 29-year-old funnyman who rips into his family.

The event has been produced for 30 years by mistress of ceremonies Lisa Geduldig, who capitalized on the idea that hordes of Jewish people spent every Christmas Day in a movie house followed by dinner in a Chinese restaurant, the only kind generally open on the holiday.

So, calculating that she had a built-in audience, she conjured up the idea of an in-person comedy dinner show in spite of never having produced anything before. Her intuition was right, of course, and she had to turn away 200 people her first time out.

Geduldig has noted that the “audience began as 99% Jewish and has expanded to include Chinese-Jewish couples, interfaith ones, singles, families, gays, straights, undecideds, those who are far from home, and just generally people who like smart comedy mixed with Chinese food.”

This year’s anniversary show can be viewed in-person or via a YouTube Live livestreaming. Dinner begins at 5 p.m. with both the in-person show and its live livestreaming cousin an hour later — tonight and tomorrow night.

The show also highlights one lighthearted video anecdote from Geduldig’s 91-year-old mom, Arline, from Boynton Beach, Florida.

The Chinese restaurant site this go-‘round, believe it or not, is Sherith Israel, a synagogue at 2266 California Street in San Francisco — because the New Asia Restaurant, where the event had been held since its fifth year, was closed by the pandemic.

In-person attendees, by the way, receive a special swag bag that includes a pair of wooden custom-printed Kung Pao chopsticks, a packet of Yiddish-proverb fortune cookies, and sundry knick-knacks.

Masks — to block Covid, the flu, and RSV — are recommended when not eating or drinking.

Tickets, which range from $30 to $100, are available at https://www.koshercomedy.com. Part of the proceeds will go to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Dec 10 2021
Love0

Grandfather, granddaughter discuss — in faux interview — children’s fantasy book they co-wrote

By Woody Weingarten

Hannah Schifrin and her grandfather, Woody Weingarten, joke around together. (Photo courtesy Nancy Fox)

 

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Woody Weingarten, author and longtime journalist, is a regular contributor to forallevents.com, Local News Matters and Bay City News. To promote his children’s book written with his granddaughter/co-author and illustrated by Joe Marciniak, he decided the only reporter he could trust with the Q&A was himself. Most reviewers, even politicians who desperately clung to office by yelling “fake news,” admit his faux interrogation is spot on.

WOODY THE INTERVIEWER: Why’d you two write this whimsical book?

Hannah: I thought I could have fun working with Grandpa.

Woody: Yep, fun.

What’s your four-part story about?

Hannah: A wizard grandfather and two mischief-makers, his fairy granddaughter and her best friend, another fairy. It has spells and a magic carpet, too.

Woody: Yep, it’s magical.

Is it based on your real-life relationship?

Hannah: No, I don’t do spells.

Woody: Yep, which is good, ’cause I can’t undo spells.

What does happen in Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates?

Hannah: Oh, an 8-year-old fairy wins the unicorn racing championships. Baby chicks sing jazz instead of cheeping. The sorcerer makes robot characters less scary. And the girls stop “thunder-and-lightning storms, floods, earthquakes and tornadoes all over.”

Woody: Yep, a lot of fun stuff.

Did the fact there’s 70 years between you get in your way?

Hannah: Nope, we’ve really bonded. Besides, I have my friends, and he’s got his.

Woody: Yep.

Did you and Grampa whoop it up when you were little?

Hannah: Well, he’d make up stories when we played together on the floor with my dollhouse, tiny plastic horses and teeny people figurines.

Woody: Yep, and Hannah would always add funny action.

If your book took only several months to write when Hannah was 8, why more than five years to publish?

Hannah: I don’t know. Grandpa was dealing with the details.

Woody: Yep, well, techno glitches, human errors and 2,149 tweaks delayed things.

Who can read Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates?

Hannah: It’s aimed at 6- to 10-year-olds, but grandparents can read it to kids. So can parents. Or other relatives. Or friends. Or neighbors. Or, in fact, anybody.

Woody: Yep.

Where can I buy the book?

Hannah: Through my Grandpa’s new website woodyweingarten.com, at Amazon, at your local bookstore, at Barnes & Noble, at Apple — pretty much everywhere books are sold.

Woody: Yep, nearly everywhere.

Do you two intend to collaborate on another children’s fantasy any time soon?

Hannah: Not in the near future. Although we talk and get together a lot, I’m busy creating a series of videos for TikTok and going to school.

Woody: Nope, not now. Our bond is bonded permanently so I’m comfortable working on a new solo book aimed at adults, The Roving I, and a second edition of my first, Rollercoaster. Admittedly, I do hope to totally avoid techno glitches and human errors for both — and require no more than 1,075 tweaks.

Have you had enough of this interview?

Hannah: Yep.

Woody: Yep.

This story was first published on LocalNewsMatters.org, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http://www.baycitynews.org/contact/. 

Woody Weingarten can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitality press.com.

Aug 22 2015
Love0

Snippets of conversations beguile, titillate and shock

By Woody Weingarten

Writer Woody Weingarten wishes he had ears like this fennec fox so he could overhear more juicy delicacies.

Unlike our federal government, I don’t snoop.

Unlike countless other organizations, I do no surveillance — electronic or other.

Unlike cable news networks and Wikipedia, I don’t spread misinformation, gossip or rumors.

But I do grab snippets of tête-à-têtes from restaurants, park benches and street corners.

And, because what I overhear might end up as fodder for a column, I typically jot down what I catch. This, in fact, is the third compilation of succulent morsels I’ve picked up.

Perhaps these delicacies will beguile, titillate or shock you — maybe even as much as they did me.

To wit…

While asking questions at Town Hall about a new neighbor’s construction project, I overhead a nearby San Anselmo employee say, “I absolutely need to unwind, un-stress and un-overload.”

“I’m done with him,” said a teen girl in the Marin General lobby the week before. “He’s now just a speck in my litter box of life.”

Outside Trader Joe’s in San Rafael, a sly geezer declared — albeit a little too publicly — to his vastly younger female companion, “I have a feeling some prankster put crushed Viagra in my miso soup at lunch.”

A long-haired, college-age guy philosophized outside The Bicycle Works co-op in San Anselmo: “We all know what to do about Killer Bees, but how can we handle Killer Sharks — you know, those anti-middle-class Wall Street venture-capitalist types — or the Killer Publicists, the marketers who clutter up popular films with irrelevant product placements, or Killer Second Amendmenters, those pro-gun jerks who think every kid’s room should be stocked with an Uzi?”

Addressing a diner who’d obviously over-tipped, an elated server in Il Fornaio in Corte Madera gushed, “Grazie, merci, danke, arigatou, toda and asante. Oh, I forgot — thanks a lot.”

A dowager in deep blue dress, diamond necklace and studs outside Mag’s Local Yogurt shop in Larkspur lapped up some vanilla one sunny p.m. “I’m supporting Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio,” she said, “and have donated to both their campaigns. I’m also speaking for them locally, sort of reversing things by putting my mouth where my money is.”

“Arguing with a spouse,” one mid-lifer in front of the Fairfax police station said to another, “is like having a nuclear war — nobody wins.”

I heard, in the Post Office in Ross, a sentence that could never apply to a compulsive-obsessive neatnik, maker of priority lists and lint picker-upper like me: “He’s having a real romance with disorder.”

But I agree with the disheveled mother who chided her ear-budded son outside Bananas at Large in San Rafael, “Once there were songs; now there’s only noise.”

And I definitely could share a grin with the gray-haired gent in pristine white shirt, power tie, filthy sneakers and tattered jeans in San Anselmo’s library who proclaimed, “I love it that I’m old enough to still appreciate — in the face of all this damned technology — paper clips, rubber bands and a plunger.”

Decked-out matron watching road construction in Mill Valley with a gal-pal: “These days more than ever, perseverance trumps perspiration.”

Cynical senior in Fairfax’s Good Earth Natural Foods generalized,  “Those that can, do; those that can’t become politicians.”

A twenty-something father, near the stone dinosaur at Millennium Park in San Anselmo, appeared to be wasting some psychology on his toddler daughter, “Okay, don’t have fun. Don’t have any fun.”

Matronly blonde outside Luther Burbank Savings in San Rafael was waving her arms in a friend’s face: “Our government has definitely completed its wrong-headed transition from the Gold Standard to an Ink Standard. The only question remaining is: How much money can The Fed print?”

A young guy with an unusually high forehead had collared   a sidekick at Drake High School, “There’s only one word to describe her — feckless.”

Loaded down with books on the Kentfield campus of the College of Marin, a student was chatting with his clingy girlfriend. “A few minutes ago John was quoting ‘The Huffington Post,’ then Wikipedia. That’s cool. But I’m still hoping he’ll really go retro and quote ‘Esquire’ or ‘Elle.’”

Finally, while munching on a delicacy at Terra Linda’s High Tech Burrito, a Millennial said to a worker cleaning tables, “Would your family be the basis of a soap opera, sitcom or reality show? Mine could be all three.”

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or check out his blog at www.vitalitypress.com/