Woody Weingarten

I’d planned to see Diana Krall last winter, but she got pneumonia and canceled.

I didn’t take it personally. But I was disappointed.

A few nights ago, I went to the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa to see the 50-year-old Canadian.

I was anything but disappointed.

She was fantabulous — both her vocals and piano artistry.

I can’t remember her contralto voice being quite so hoarse or husky before, but I do recall a similar inability to sit still throughout her concert.

My legs shook and my toes tapped — at the same breakneck pace as her foot keeping time.

I also can’t recall her being so self-deprecatingly funny.

Including an oops, immediately followed by the admission, “I hit the wrong key.”

Although some critics of her current “Wallflower” national tour have trashed her 12th album as filled with schmaltzy, sultry covers of pop tunes dating to the ‘60s, I regarded her live selections from that same-titled album only a fleeting distraction from her life’s blood — rollicking jazz.

To ensure that genre remaining predominant, Krall employed five dazzling sidemen.

Most notable was fiddler Stuart Duncan, who bowed, plucked and strummed his way into my heart and ears despite his instrument being a jazz rarity. Though each virtuoso may have deserved equal time, Duncan resembled George Orwell’s pig in “Animal Farm” — more equal than the others.

Together, Krall and crew romped through two unbroken hours of songs, coaxing a good third of them into the showstopper category.

With the best of the best being Tom Waits’ “Temptation,” which spotlighted each guy in electrifying — and sometimes electrified — solo riffs.

Krall, who switched periodically from piano to synthesizer to create a countrified twang or clipped rock ‘n’ roll beat, dipped heavily into standards, a mainstay of her previous concerts — in this case such classics as “Exactly Like You,” “Deed I Do” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

She also invoked the ghosts of Oscar Peterson, playing a few lightning-fast bars from an arrangement of his before claiming she hadn’t learned more, and Nat King Cole, paying homage to that singer-pianist via “You Call It Madness But I Call It Love.”

Only for an instant did she border on boring me — with two straight extracts from the “Wallflower” album.

Instead of sticking with historic conventions, she’d undoubtedly have done better using The Mamas and The Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and The Eagles’ “Desperado” as springboards to jazz inventions like those that thrust her into celebrity.

During the show, a large screen at stage rear projected static wallflowers, blossoming flora and a stylized shot of her twin boys.

I found those accents superfluous to the musical marvels onstage.

Ditto the lights that occasionally blinked from the amps.

I enjoyed, however, Krall’s drawing laughs by inserting strains of “Moon River” into a tune she admitted was “not usually known as a funny song,” and smiles from a confession that “my left hand and my right hand aren’t talking to each other very well.”

I also loved the frequent, idiosyncratic flipping of her long dirty-blonde locks from her face.

And I smiled admiringly when she took her bows alongside her backups — Duncan; guitarist Anthony Wilson; bassist Dennis Crouch; drummer Karriem Riggins; and keyboardist Patrick Warren — rather than alone.

As I look back, I think this Sonoma County performance outranks my previous favorite, a freebie Stern Grove outing in San Francisco where not even the heat or mosquitos could quash my Krall pleasure.

This time, she, who’s been married since 2003 to chartbusting pop-rock singer Elvis Costello and who’s sold more than 15 million albums worldwide, ended a 20-minute encore with “Ophelia,” which again brought the sold-out Person Theater crowd of more than 1,600 to its feet as a single unit.

That segment also had included a swingin’ version of  “The Frim Fram Sauce,” which had been popularized by Cole, and a snoozer, Bob Dylan’s “Wallflower.”

Some fault-finders are hell bent on chastising Krall for “selling out” by concocting a heavily stringed, non-jazzy pop album.

Almost as stubbornly as denigrators bombarded Dylan when he switched to electric guitar.

Count me not among them — in either case.

Upcoming star turns at the Person Theater of the Wells Fargo Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa, will include comedian Lewis Black’s “The Rant Is Due: Part Deux” on Sept. 11, vocalist Frank Sinatra Jr.’s “Sinatra Sings Sinatra” on Oct. 8, and Rosanne Cash with John Leventhal on Oct. 16.  Information: www.wellsfargocenterarts.org or 1-707-546-3600.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or www.vitalitypress.com/

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Jim Dunn’s retired from directing colossal musicals for The Mountain Play in Mill Valley.

But he hasn’t quit doing them elsewhere.

Exquisitely.

Need proof? Check out the Ross Valley Players’ production of “The Pirates of Penzance” at the Marin Art & Garden Center in Ross.

The company’s professionalism, congeniality-packed presentation, and mastery of the 136-year-old musical comedy/light opera may raise your perception of community-theater.

It did mine.

I’d expected it to be fun, but I hadn’t imagined it to be as impressive as it is.

This two-hour show’s as good as anything anywhere in the Bay Area.

Some folks may be more familiar with Capt. Hook’s crew, from this summer’s “Peter Pan” Mountain Play, or Johnny Depp in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie franchise, or, for that matter, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But Gilbert & Sullivan’s tender-hearted pirates, I believe, are funnier.

And more enchanting.

Even though their actions defy logic and common sense.

It’s almost impossible to watch the 22 performers spilling over the stage at The Barn, the RVP’s home, without feeling good.

Especially when the dainty daughters of Major-General Stanley prissily twirl their parasols, the bobbleheaded British bobbies stumble and bumble like Keystone Cops, or the decidedly un-menacing pirates engage in unison foot-stomping — all courtesy of imaginative choreographer Sandra Tanner.

Most audience members grinned from the first lines of the first number past the final curtain.

Like me.

Before the show, Dunn admitted to early birds he chose the show mainly because it was in the public domain, which meant the RVR wouldn’t have to pay royalties (as it would most modern musicals).

But he also informed one woman that, in contrast to the vulgar “Book of Mormon” he’d recently caught, he loved “Pirates” because of its old-fashioned innocence and it being a crowd-pleasing summer diversion.

In my view — one that dates back 70 years to a time when my father introduced me to the frenzied rhythms and lyrics of Gilbert & Sullivan, whose sprightliness and cleverness dad relished — Dunn utilizes his own fondness for G&S to inject a comedic music-hall over-the-topness that works extraordinarily well.

His direction, especially turning minor details into major laughs, is brilliant — as might be anticipated from an 83-year-old who’s been directing and teaching theater arts for half a century.

Everything works.

Even having two couples seated in extra-fee boxes on stage and waving teeny Union Jacks.

The cast as a whole is uncommonly good.

In a word: superb.

But several are even better than that: Norman A. Hall’s Major-General Stanley is letter perfect, setting a sky-high bar for other comic performers. Phillip Percy Williams’ Pirate King weaves exaggeration and energy into a smile-inducing, ideal blend. And Joni DeGabriele magnificently flaunts her coloratura, fancifully flutters her eyelashes and unsubtly scrunches up her face as Mabel, wannabe bride.

They’re all accompanied by the piano talent of Music Director Paul Smith, who, from the first note of the overture to the last note of the show, keeps well within the parameters of feel-good.

All that’s amazingly supplemented by the classic, colorful costumes of Michael A. Berg and the enchantingly spare but picturesque sets by Ron Krempetz.

The irrational plot finds Frederic mistakenly apprenticed to the pirates until age 21 by his nurse. But because he was born on Leap Year’s Day, he’s stuck for an extra 63 years — despite having fallen for Mabel, daughter of Major-General Stanley. The pirates are sympathetic to orphans, so all who run afoul of them claim they’re orphans — including Stanley. Pirates pursue Stanley’s daughters. Police pursue pirates.

It all ends with everything in harmony — or in unison, if you prefer accuracy.

The best of the 28 musical numbers are — as always — the rollicking “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” and “The Policeman’s Lot Is Not a Happy One.”

Nitpickers may gripe about some British accents coming and going like the tide off the shore of Cornwall, the play’s setting, or the old theater’s lack of air conditioning.

Clearly, their joy-ometer is off.

I spied no children in the audience opening night. A pity. Kids would undoubtedly find the frisky silliness to their liking.

As did the child in me.

“Pirates of Penzance” will run at The Barn, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through Aug. 16. Night performances, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets: $17-$33. Information: (415) 456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net

 

[Woody’s [rating: 3]

Anna Deavere Smith beat the odds — and became a theatrical powerhouse.

Despite being an African-American, despite writing one-woman shows with multivarious characters all played by Anna Deavere Smith, despite staging controversial in-your-face portraits of racial conflict.

Now she’s battling the odds again.

But is likely to fail.

In the unique Berkeley Rep’s “Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education,” she takes on the entire American educational system and its undermining attitude toward poor people of color.

It simply may be too wide a target.

The experimental piece — part drama, part audience participation — covers dense terrain and poses tons of questions.

But it provides only amorphous answers.

I kept waiting for a specificity that never came.

Part of Smith’s “Pipeline Project,” which is seeking to alter school-to-prison practices she contends have decimated the future of a generation, “Notes” is based on 150 interviews she conducted.

In sub-divided sections of an 80-minute first act, she impersonates a riot videographer, an Oakland mentor, a Stockton councilman, a Stanford shrink, UCLA and Johns Hopkins professors, a protestor from Baltimore (where the playwright-performer was born), a Native American ex-con, an emotional support counselor and a high school principal — plus a Philadelphia judge who cried when sentencing a young man because society also was guilty.

She recreates the individuals’ stories precisely as told to her.

That, according to a National Endowment for the Humanities website profile, means “complete with false starts, coughs, laughter, and so on…‘If they said ‘um’…I don’t take the ‘um’ out.’

As in the 64-year-old’s previous shows, Smith’s performance is phenomenally good.

Although her olive drab jacket/shirt and dark pants stay put, she changes personalities by altering facial expressions, verbal pace and timbre — and footwear.

Projected film clips of cops beating blacks and of rioting underline the painful pleas of her portrayal of youngsters being forced into the criminal justice system, of white officials who find few alternatives.

I found it depressing.

But not as disheartening as the ostensibly novel audience breakout sessions about which in a pre-show briefing Susan Medak, Rep managing director, said, “You are the second act.”

The mostly white 23-member group I attended — one of 20 clusters in all — just didn’t come alive.

Its discussion was buried in idealistic but impractical notions, though the writing pads we’d been given carried the printed motto, “The change starts with you.”

Participants proffered suggestions to “move beyond our comfort zone,” “fight racism” and “stop police brutality” — without explaining how.

I had the distinct sense I was at a rally that couldn’t gel.

Smith, who labeled this special presentation “The California Chapter” and a “work in progress,” punctuates all the heaviness with humor.

The opening night audience chuckled accordingly.

If a bit uncomfortably.

It also appeared to dismiss Marcus Shelby’s plucky but sometimes sorrowful jazz bass accompaniment.

Smith, who’s probably best known for her TV roles on “Nurse Jackie” and “The West Wing,” initially gained fame through two early ‘90s documentary theater inventions, “Fires in the Mirror” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.”

The first, dealing with the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn, earned her a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

The second, about the Rodney King verdict aftermath, won two Tony nods.

“Notes” is in effect a variation of the theme.

Smith, who won a MacArthur fellowship for blending theatrical art, social commentary, journalism and “intimate reverie,” believes she’s now delivered “a chance to reimagine and recreate a new war on poverty. Education is a crucial part of that.”

In a dramatic coda, she utilizes circa 1970 quotes from black writer James Baldwin that the problem is “the children and their children.”

Not that much, I guess, has changed.

Yet 45 years have passed.

Smith’s UCLA character adds a thought in “Notes.” The “biggest problem in our country,” he proclaims, “is indifference.”

Anna Deavere Smith’s latest magnum opus may be many things, but uncaring isn’t any of them.

“Notes from the Field: Doing Time in Education, the California Chapter” plays at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley, through Aug. 2. Night performances, 8 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays through Fridays, 7 p.m. Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $25 to $89, subject to change, (510) 647-2949 or www.berkeleyrep.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net

David Brewer, a cherished friend for two decades and a surrogate brother for the one I never had, died a few days ago.

I’m fragile.

In deep mourning.

And reevaluating my life and priorities.

David’s passing didn’t come as a shock. He’d been battling a melanoma for years, and the resultant metastasis for months.

But death — despite my belief the soul, or spirit, transcends it — feels so damned final.

The empty hole it leaves can seem infinite.

It’s likely you have a friend like David, someone you could be even warmer to — no matter how close you have been.

On his deathbed, my psychologist/consultant buddy, still boyishly good-looking despite being sixtysomething, and still a pigheaded St. Louis Cardinals fanatic, revisited his spiritual feelings.

He re-told me of his “awakening” at 19, when he’d deduced that spirit was an embodiment “of compassionate love” rather than the anthropomorphic being others worshipped.

Though the Novato resident had been brought up an ardent Christian and I a Jew, we’d found a joint comfort zone.

I miss him.

But I consider myself lucky — blessed, in fact — to have had him in my life so long.

As a loving, trusted friend.

As a colleague in a men’s group for 10 years.

As a pet sitter in my San Anselmo home for Kismet, my purebred rescue mutt.

I have fond memories, too, of others who’d been essential parts of my life but, in Hamlet’s words, have shuffled off this mortal coil. And there are many: My parents and grandparents, a woman I lived with in Philadelphia, two first cousins who died in their teens.

All told, death in double digits — more than sufficient for any lifetime.

But David’s death has shifted my perspective.

No longer am I irked by the constant road construction on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in San Anselmo.

Or the dog poop I barely miss while walking Kismet in Creek Park.

Or the incredibly long wait at The Hub’s traffic lights.

Instead, I linger longer to watch two newborn fawns in my yard, to catch the wonderment of a sunrise from our deck, to see toddlers frolic in a Ross or Fairfax playground.

My wife, kids, grandkids and friends unsurprisingly have leapt anew to the top of my what’s-important list. I vow to phone and email more.

Yet retain my right to not text.

I choose to elevate my sensitivity at Marin Man to Man, my support group aimed at helping guys whose partners have breast cancer or another life-threatening disease.

And to spend added hours with the 11 friends facing severe health challenges.

I intend, too, to fully appreciate that I’m comparatively healthy — still breathing and able to pound my keyboard long enough to cobble columns together.

Did David’s death, or life, mean more than any of the 8,000 killed in Nepal’s late April quake? He and I’d often pondered that kind of question, always concluding life anywhere was equal to either of our own.

I’ll remember him as an imperfect perfectionist who left behind a lengthy string of wives, girlfriends and broken hearts, but moreover that he was himself even in his last moments — exuding life and love.

Shortly before being hospitalized, my pal, the compleat organizer — he was forever arranging a last-second movie group or dinner klatch or something-else cluster — had corralled a small group of friends. In a sense, it was his last hurrah.

He knew the prognosis.

My 8-year-old granddaughter traipsed along. David, child-less, had attached himself to her years before but decided on the spot that day she’d be his “date” for the party.

So he showered her with attention, including the hugs for which he was famous, and bought her a huge cookie.

Too soon afterward he proved that death can incorporate dignity.

And courage. And joking.

He and I and my wife, Nancy, reminisced and laughed several times during our final conversation.

I doubt if he’d primped for our appearance, but he undeniably did for at least two women who followed us individually.

In tribute to his tangible influence on my life, I hope to assuage my sadness with an amped up zest for living and doing. And to continue fighting for the environment, for the homeless, for equal rights.

I’m sure David would approve.

Contact Woody Weingarten at http://vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net

This year’s five-day Marin County Fair had something to please almost every Jane and Joe — adult or kid.

With a bonus for me.

Why?

Because not only did I enjoy the ever-better entertainment and art exhibits and midway, and a breeze that made July’s heat tolerable, I got to interview typically “invisible,” behind-the-scenes folks who normally don’t get their names into print.

Take, for instance, Karen Katich of Martinez.

She’s been portraying Princess Leia of  “Star Wars” for years. It’s one of her favorite things.

Why?

“Because I saw the original ‘Star Wars’ 11 times when it first came out, and more than 1,000 times since.”

She loves “kids’ eyes getting the size of saucers when they see me, fulfilling their fantasy.”

Anne Garner owns Eleven Roses Ranch in Clearlake Oaks and brought Clydesdale horses for folks to admire.

Plus a couple of 1,600 pound draft mules.

John, the male, apparently was feeling his oats, to use a phrase about 150 years older than the 74 years the fair’s been running.

He repeatedly tried using his teeth to unknot the rope that tethered him to a gate, and upstaged her by playfully nuzzling her blouse again and again.

She explained that he “enjoys chewing garden hoses, rolling in the dirt, and bullying everybody.”

However, she added, “he’s really a coward, afraid of his own shadow.”

She frequently runs into fairgoers she “saw a year ago,” and especially likes “seeing the little kids so excited.”“It’s fun,” she told me, “because everybody’s happy they’re here.”

Rick Creelman of Fairfax is a ukulele player, a regular at Friday night jamborees at Del Medina’s home in San Rafael.

He came to play with 50 or so UFOs, Ukulele Friends Ohana (which means family or community), though the stage held only about 30 so the rest had to perform while roaming the audience.

This is the group’s fourth fair. They participate, Creelman said, “because it’s fun, a sing-along rather than a real concert.”

It’s also, he noted, “a chance to introduce people to the ukulele and that it’s making a comeback.”

Edward Johnson is a utility worker who lives in Rohnert Park. His fair duties include “doing the trash, keeping the restrooms clean.”

A favorite memory, he revealed, was when he and an assistant supervisor were locking up and unsuccessfully began tugging at a door — from opposite sides at the same time.

Bill Hernandez of Petaluma has been with the Marin County Sheriff’s Department 24 years.

A sergeant, he’s “done one shift a year at the fair” that long. “It’s fun to get out with people who are having fun,” he declared — a contrast with other assignments (patrol, jail, gang enforcement and street crime).

He remembered folks “trying to swim across the lagoon to get to the island” when the gates were shut because the fairgrounds were full.

Christian Williams, a Santa Rosa resident, manned an ice cream giveaway booth.

He and a co-worker handed out, on average, 22 three-gallon tubs each day — one scoop at a time.

Williams was gracious to most freebie-seekers — including me — but flummoxed by a kid who skittered away before I could get her name after she asked, “How much is the free sample of ice cream?”

Emilie Owens of Medford, Oregon, emcee for the pig races, has been doing the fair four years.

She loves how noisy her audience gets.

She recalled cheerleaders forming a human pyramid to embolden their favorite porkers.

And she recollected four pigs sprinting from the trailer onto the raceway to make it an unscheduled eight-pig contest.

Another time, “some pigs got free and just ran around the fairground.”

Zach Lien’s an L.A.-based contractor for Two Bit Circus, which ran the fair’s STEAM Carnival component.

“STEAM,” he elucidated, “is an acronym standing for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. Our games combine those concepts. We teach kids to work together as well as individually. I personally love to watch them trying to figure something out while playing, and it’s fun to watch adults and kids playing a game simultaneously.”

What’d I, personally, think of this year’s extravaganza, which drew 78,000 people who paid admission and 27,000 more who didn’t?

I relished that there weren’t lines for indoor bathrooms or outdoor port-a-potties, that I could find places to sit on bales of hay, that I could easily spill out the dirt that invaded my shoes.

As always, there was too much to do before I tired. But my best measuring rod was that I’d planned to stay an hour and a half.

And left five hours later.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net

[Woody’s [rating: 1.5]

Ethel Merman died in 1984 at age 76 — after giving more than 6,000 Broadway performances.

So the mezzo-soprano’s been lifeless quite a while.

Sadly, I found “Call Me Miss Birds Eye,” a new revue at A.C.T.’s Geary Theatre in San Francisco that’s a tribute to her career, equally lifeless.

It lacks all the brassiness, bravado and sheer energy the big-voiced, big-haired Merman brought to audiences.

Denise Wharmby — as The First Lady of the musical comedy stage — and her two backup singers, Martin Greenwood and Don Bridges, hit every note correctly.

With more than a hint of their native Australian accents.

But without pizazz.

Except when Wharmby, a San Rafael transplant from Tasmania, impressively holds notes for as long as the long-winded Merman might have.

Critics heralded that Queens, N.Y.-born superstar — who supposedly never took a singing lesson — for her precise enunciation and pitch.

Wharmby imitates both well.

Yet fails to capture Merman’s spellbinding over-the-topness.

Impressive, on the other hand, is that the revue is done entirely in Bel Canto style — that is, without a mic or amplifiers, the same acoustical Italian vocal technique Merman utilized for five decades.

It works, not counting when the guys muffle their voices by facing the wings instead of the audience.

The beauty part of “Call Me Miss Birds Eye,” though, is the songlist itself, with the crème de la crème of American Songbook composers represented.

Socko tunes include Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” Merman’s theme; George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” from “Girl Crazy,” the thrush’s first Broadway outing; and Julie Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from “Gypsy.”

And although more than a third of the 33 songs contain astonishingly clever lyrics by Cole Porter, I’d still say the most amusing piece is “New Fangled Tango,” in which the Mutt and Jeff duo use their size difference for comedic effect.

Wharmby’s frequent gown changing can also be entertaining.

Despite my sense that the men occasionally tread vocal water just to give her time to switch costumes.

The 95-minute show would definitely improve via still or video projections, extra props, and choreography not limited to hands.

Instead of merely relying on the changing colors of a huge backdrop caricature of Merman.

Having previews, moreover, might have eliminated missed cues, vocal timing that was off, and an embarrassing moment when an exiting Wharmby almost knocked Bridges over.

Adding continuity would be advisable, too, since details presented about Merman’s life are skimpy — there’s not one allusion to her penchant for telling vulgar stories and dirty jokes in public, and only a quickie reference to four marriages that “wilted as quickly as the wedding bouquets.”

The show’s title, a play on the words of a Merman hit, “Call Me Madam,” refers to the star rejecting a change Berlin wanted to make within a week of opening.

She unnerved him with, “Call me Miss Birds Eye. It’s frozen.”

Merman, who loathed anyone sharing her spotlight, would have loved the idea that when she died every Broadway house dimmed its lights upon hearing the news.

And she’d have loved that 30 years later her fame hasn’t dimmed.

The musical director of “Call Me,” Graham Clarke, doubles as artistic director of Acoustic Voice of Australia, which produced and is presenting the revue. He firmly believes this pre-Broadway outing is a choice vehicle for those who want to immerse themselves in Merman songs and nostalgia.

That’s wishful thinking, I suspect.

Opening night, many patrons were checking watches with regularity — and about a quarter of the crowd left at intermission.

Clearly an audience that reviews a show with its feet.

“Call Me Miss Birds Eye” plays at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco, through July 19. Night performances, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Matinees, 2 p.m. Saturdays. Tickets: $20 to $65. Information: (415) 749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.net

“What’s a jazz and classical flute player like you doing in a bluegrass sextet like this?”

Because I’ve known Matt Eakle for years, I don’t need to ask: He and mandolin doyen David Grisman blend their distinct virtuoso sounds to make extraordinary music.

Matt’s been part of David’s bands for 26 years.

And he’ll be one-sixth of the Grisman sextet at Sonoma State University’s Green Music Center, Weill Hall and lawn, at 3 p.m. Sunday, July 12 as part of the Dawg Day Afternoon Bluegrass Festival.

Also on that bill are the Del McCoury Band and dobro master Jerry Douglas presenting the Earls of Leicester.

Asked about his favorite from the upcoming playlist, Matt cites “Watson’s Blues,” which is dedicated to blind guitarist Doc Watson, the first performer to invite David onto a stage at age 17.

The tune gives Matt, who delights in stretching musically, “an opportunity to recreate the classic ‘twin fiddles’ bluegrass sound, something flute players don’t get to do very often.”

Another stretch came recently when he performed in Coblenz, Germany, at a 13th century church — a Bach sonata duet with a pipe organist.

Often, Matt also gets to meander into unmapped melodic territory with David, whose bluegrass sextet explores folk, rock, string jazz, Latin music, klezmer-influenced tunes, soul and funk.

Their collaboration dates to 1985, when David “was auditioning bassists for a European tour and I happened to be at a bassist’s house. I’m a good sight-reader because of my classical training so I was able to read all the songs he’d brought on my first try. We both were astonished at the cool sounds mandolin and flute made when they blended together. Four years later, he called me for a jam session and I ended up in his band.”

The 58-year-old’s actually been playing flute since he was 12 — in junior high.

“They only had a piccolo at first, so that’s what I started on. But when they got a flute a month later, I switched. It was so easy compared to the piccolo that I fell in love right away.”

Later musical training included studying with the son of the San Francisco Symphony’s principal flautist and learning “improvisation by the seat of my pants.”

Not to mention playing alongside virtuoso musicians.

And he’s performed with Jerry Garcia, Stephane Grappelli, Chris Isaak, Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt.

He’s even done a couple of gigs — a benefit for Bread and Roses in Novato and another for homeless men being sheltered in San Anselmo — with my jazz pianist wife, Nancy Fox.

Matt, despite being an environmentalist, lets no grass — blue or otherwise — grow under his feet.

He performs with his own quartet, the Matt Eakle Band; plays with the Murasaki Ensemble, a quintet led by Shirley Muramoto, who excels on koto, a classical horizontal harp-like string instrument frequently used for court music in Japan; puts in tons of freelance appearances; and teaches jazz and classical flute.

The flute player — he’s turned off by the word “flautist” — has sparse spare time.

He runs nearly every day, often barefoot.

Sometimes he runs to the top of Bald Hill, just west of his adopted town of San Anselmo, where he’s lived since 1998 with his wife, Lucia.

He supplements that with pushups and pull-ups (scoliosis forced him to give up standing on his head).

He’s slowed down on yanking out non-native plants from San Anselmo’s Faude Park, however, though he’d done it for years. In fact, as chair of the town’s Quality of Life Commission, I’d handed him a Green Award for his weeding.

Matt’s recorded three albums of his own, from which his favorite jazz piece is “Speak Low.” He admits attributing the Kurt Weill composition “to the wrong person on my CD, ‘Flute Jazz,’ but they don’t care because I send the royalties to the right place.”

What makes him unique as a flute player?

“My emphasis on sound and tone coloration and the fact that I surrender completely to the groove.”

I’ve more than once watched him perform at Iron Springs Pub in Fairfax, where he sways his body like a dancing Spiderman.

That, he explains, is “just my natural reaction, what happens to me, and I try not to interfere with it.”

Future Green Music Center events, in addition to the July 12 Dawg Day Afternoon Bluegrass Festival, include appearances by Jay Leno July 31, Natalie Cole Aug. 1, Steve Martin Aug. 20, Dwight Yoakam Aug. 21, Chris Botti Sept.11, Wynton Marsalis Sept. 17 and Kristin Chenoweth Sept. 25. Tickets: $20 to $175. Information: 866-955-6040 or gmc.sonoma.edu.

Contact Woody Weingarten at www.vitalitypress.com/ or voodee@sbcglobal.ne

 [Woody’s [rating: 3]

Instead of “Detroit,” playwright Lisa D’Amour might have named her Pulitzer Prize finalist play “Metaphor, California.”

Or “Metaphor, New York.”

Or, for that matter, “Metaphor, Anywhere.”

The title surely doesn’t signify the real Motor City. It’s  — dare I say it? — just a metaphoric label for a play that’s a comedic depiction of the fiscal scars the Great Recession left on the suburban middle class American psyche.

D’Amour says she used Detroit because it had become “a symbol to so many people of the American dream drying up.”

That resonates with me.

Seeing a revival of the Obie winner at the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley could seem like witnessing a 100-minute intermission-less dream left too long on a backyard barbecue.

But with more levity than most comedies I’ve watched in several years.

I do have one caveat: None of it sounds funny in print.

And “Detroit” does rank high on my Squirmometer, a personal indicator of how uncomfortable dialogue or characters make me.

Ben (a wide-eyed, slack-jawed Jeff Garrett) has lost his bank loan officer’s job and appears to be toiling feverishly on a website that will launch a startup. Mary (an ultra-solemn, fuming Amy Resnick), his wife, drinks too heavily (to the point of upchucking on a new neighbor) and hobbles because of a painful planters wart on her foot and an even more agonizing burr on her being.

He bemoans accurately that they “don’t have any friends.”

To say their home and lives are broken is to state the obvious.

A big table umbrella unexpectedly shuts on folks beneath it. A sliding screen door won’t open or close properly. A patio chair falls apart.

Financial woes have pushed them way out of their comfort zone.

Still they want to be neighborly so they invite to dinner a pair of rootless recovering addicts who might never have had a comfort zone.

Kenny (Patrick Kelly Jones), who shamelessly admits they have only one towel too dirty to use, and Sharon Luisa Frasconi), who wants “to own up to what I am” — white trash, are a problematic mirror of the older couple’s unease.

As they unveil each other’s secrets, Kenny and Sharon flip the invitation, welcoming Ben and Mary to their digs despite having zero furniture and an equal amount of food (unless you count chips and Velveeta).

Though all four actors do bang-up jobs delineating their characters, Resnick and Garrett radiate, perhaps because their verbiage-laden roles are meatier.

Director Josh Costello effectively stages both antics and melodrama, sharply pulling into focus the question of how we cope with our insecurities when we can’t pay our bills.

The comedy-drama returned my memory to the first home I purchased, a suburban Philadelphia prototype in southern New Jersey created by William Levitt, a man renowned for developing instant all-white ticky-tacky communities out of whole cloth, identical blueprints and tiny plots.

I recalled, too, all the trappings that came with the tract houses.

Which included white picket fences, green lawns, good schools and clothes washed in 99 and 44/100ths percent pure Ivory soap.

But the play impacted my opening night companion more.

Although he viewed it as a flimsy farce and melodrama “rather than something to be considered seriously,” revolving around “unreal characters” he never grew to care about, he somehow let two BART trains pass him by while pondering the significance of “Detroit.”

A lingering, disturbing query: Have we all been living out the Rise and Fall of the American Empire?

Could be.

“Detroit” runs at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St., Berkeley, through July 26. Night performances, Tuesdays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $16-$50. Information: 1-510-843-4822 or www.auroratheatre.org.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or at www.vitalitypress.com

Can you imagine the front of the four-story U.S. Bank building in downtown San Anselmo as an oversized fish tank?

Dan Thomas can.

And he’s done something about it.

But it’s taken him 40 years to scratch his inner itch about the structure, to shrink his edifice complex.

His weaponry? Watercolors.

And whimsy.

It happened last month, when Dan, my longtime next-door neighbor in San Anselmo, painted “a series of fantasies conceptualizing how the bank branch might improve its look.”

Until then, the high-rise — by town standards, at least — merely aggravated Dan every time he passed it.

His problem?

“The building, which was constructed in 1962, didn’t fit the surrounding environment.”

Dan sits at my dining room table displaying his watercolor sketches. And jabbering like he’s stumbled onto a second childhood.

“Just before I drew the first parody, the fish tank,” he says, “I thought, ‘Let’s see if I can have some fun.’

“Then, for a second I thought maybe I and the bank could be playful. Maybe the bank would let me decorate it for a couple of months. But then I decided the bankers, a serious lot, would be unlikely to see the humor in it.

“All of this, of course, is strictly in my head — it’s all make-believe.  I haven’t approached U.S. Bank at all. I have no real plan to ask the bank to change anything.”

The sketches, Dan tells me with mischievous twinkles in both blue eyes, involve “humor, what-if’s and a play of colors.”

The bank’s window treatment, explains the retired architect, “is six-inch thick concrete, 16 feet wide, 32 feet high, two feet deep. The top and bottom segments form a complete circle. There are eight circles over all. I used to visualize that the only thing that would [help] would be to make window treatments with fish tanks with live fish. The idea stayed with me. So I finally sketched it, to scale, as if it were an architectural rendering.”

His initial plan was only to do that one concept, but he became so motivated he concocted a dozen fanciful sketches in only two weeks.

“My idea was to give the Town Council a humorous view of the building — as a cautionary tale — to remind them you can’t turn back once you’ve made a decision. Had the council gone ahead with its original General Plan, the town would have had 10-story buildings.”

I almost choke on the thought.

I like San Anselmo for what it is, a quaint, little town despite being a refuge for coffee buffs, boutique shoppers and upscale bicyclists.

Noticing my discomfort, Dan placates me — grinning.

“Again, remember this is make-believe, even though a real fish tank actually could be built with Plexiglas and a little bit of cork.”

Once he’d retired, Dan returned to an early love — painting. He worked mainly on landscapes, but now again dabbles in abstracts. He’s good enough to have won prizes, including firsts, at Marin and Napa county fairs — as well as Marin Society of Artists juried shows in Ross.

Now 79, he remembers once painting “full time, mostly allegorical paintings, working my way through my religious upbringing as a strict Pentecostal.”

That, of course, is miles from imagining fish in windows at the 46-feet, 6-inch high site, where for years I’ve banked in the tallest building in town.

One of Dan’s watercolors is tied to “the good economic times” we’re experiencing anew, featuring “drinks on the house — cocktail glasses filled to the brim.”

In another, a series of sunglasses symbolize “warm periods — sunny days.”

Soup cans also became a happy construct. Although the Andy Warhol tribute might allude to soup lines, the artist says he intended to evoke “a ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ feeling.”

One striking piece is a light-hearted plea for egalitarianism. Faces become a commercial for both bank and tolerance.

“It means, ‘We serve all nationalities,’” Dan says.

Taken as a whole, the sketches comprise his “first attempt at humor in art — I’m a pretty serious character in a lot of ways — although these may have loosened me up a bit.

“I’m working on one right now where I’m putting a hand-painted silk tie right in the middle of an abstract painting that looks like a vest.”

I postulate he’s now in-vested in projecting a less-serious attitude.

Contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net or http://vitalitypress.com