Woody Weingarten

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Bernie Krause’s been my friend more than 25 years.

In case you don’t recognize it, that statement’s a disclaimer.

A necessity — because the world premiere of “Biophony,” an exceedingly inventive Alonzo King LINES Ballet created collaboratively with Bernie, just exhilarated me.

Which I’m sure would have happened had I never heard of either of them.

“Biophony” is, simultaneously, aural and visual.

But my reaction was visceral.

Without warning, “Biophony” stripped away my desire and ability to experience it intellectually.

I’ve used the word brilliant in reviews before. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d had the foresight to know I’d need it for this three-way alliance (the third partner being English composer Richard Blackford, whose instrumentation has been tapered).

The experimental 38-minute piece opens with the clear chirping of an American cricket.

But the nine-movement work is performed without protracted breaks so I wasn’t always sure when I was being transported to the Amazon or Tanzania or the Arctic to hear a cornucopia of baboons and orangutans and chimpanzees, geese and ducks and exotic birds, wolves and pigs and giraffes, humpback whales, frogs, bees, creaking branches, waves and rain and thunder.

Even after reading the extensive program notes, I wasn’t always certain what critters or environmental elements were making the sounds I was hearing.

And I missed a lot.

A second, third or fourth hearing could be beneficial.

I was sure, though, that the natural sounds became incredibly melodic and worked divinely as a symphonic composition.

I was also positive Alonzo’s magical ballet blended perfectly with those sounds — a ballet that featured 11 dancers fashioning (on terra firma, sea and air) unconventional creature-like movements.

Bernie’d recorded the sounds in the wilds — jungle, tundra, wherever.

Alone mostly.

And in concert, so to speak, with the likes of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.

Almost ­ — after his first ecological recording in Muir Woods and his initial soundscape installation in 1983 for the California Academy of Sciences — 5,000 hours of field recordings of 15,000 species in their natural habitats over a 50-year span.

Presto!

Enter “Biophany,” which consists of handpicked highlights from that collection — soundscapes of animals in self-contained ecosystems.

A unique orchestra-chorus.

In a KQED interview the day of the opening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Alonzo said, “You want people’s…hearts to be opened.”

They were.

In an Exploratorium conversation, he said of his work: “I don’t want it to look like choreography…If it [does], it’s not working.”

He succeeded at that, too.

Alonzo’s choreography is impressionistic and impressive.

Ditto the minimalist costuming (diaphanous wisps can be found hither and thither).

And since the set is basically a black backdrop with tantalizing ambiance and floor mosaics designed by Axel Morgenthaler’s lights, audiences can easily imagine themselves in sundry milieus.

Alonzo, who’s dreamed up close to 200 ballets for the troupe he founded in 1982, conspicuously let the dancers be themselves (alternately original, acrobatic and graceful).

Bernie, meanwhile, mulled if audiences “would get” his underlying message — “an elegy and eulogy” for natural environs that are vanishing because of man-made intrusions.

Time will be the jury.

I must note, however, that ballet purists — especially those whose tastes are limited to productions like “Swan Lake”  — may be unable to wrap their minds around this breakthrough effort.

Is “Biophony” completed? Conceivably not.

In an email to me, Bernie wrote, “With the curtain [going] up in five hours, I’m still in the process of making changes.”

The previous night, after grueling deliberation, he’d eliminated the elephants.

Bernie’s normal conversation often contains heady words unfamiliar to most: Bioacoustician. Geophony. Anthropophony.

No matter. We’ll stay friends even if I don’t fully grok his vocabulary.

Our friendship can’t compare, anyhow, to his with my wife, which dates 62 years to their Detroit school days together.

But back to now.

In a 22-minute prelude, seven members of the Philharmonia Baroque Chamber Players played short pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel while King’s company feverishly blanketed and owned the stage.

Bernie earlier had voiced a tongue-in-cheek fear “Biophony” might replicate the opening of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” — incite tomatoes being thrown.

I saw no fruit hit the stage.

But I did feel whitecaps of applause as the audience — partially stunned by the brilliance of the work, partially stunned by a somewhat abrupt ending — rose to give “Biophony” an extended standing ovation.

“Biophony” will run through April 12 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St. (at Third), San Francisco. Night performances, 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Matinees, 5 p.m. Sundays. Special gala performance, 6 p.m. Saturday, April 11. Tickets: $20 to $65. Information: http://www.@linesballet.org or 1-415-978-2787.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

No one plays board games in the new comedic drama, “Sister Play.”

And there’s no jump rope.

Repartee is the main pastime adult sisters Anna and Lilly engage in, alternating clever lines that guarantee Magic Theatre audiences will laugh loud and long.

Playful, zigzagging yet revealing soliloquies also flow from the mind of writer-director John Kolvenbach to the mouths of the siblings.

The same is true for two other off-kilter characters, Malcolm (Anna’s wooly-headed husband), and William Casy, a enigmatic drifter from Texas whom Lily picks up from the side of a Cape Cod highway.

All their monologues seem to begin with logic but end in amusing morasses of fractured philosophy and religion.

In between?

Non-sequiturs. Hyperbole. Near-gibberish that sounds poetic.

The setting is a rundown cabin to which we’re introduced when Malcolm thinks aloud: “What percentage of this place is mold, do you think?”

But the key question is if family fortresses and defenders can be over-protective.

I unconditionally loved Kolvenbach’s character-driven play.

I loved how all four intimately intertwined — and how so much of the human condition unraveled so quickly.

I loved how long toenails and a foot fetish, towels and the singing of a Roy Orbison tune, “Blue Bayou,” became comic foils.

But always I could sense an underlying seriousness.

Such as an early metaphoric foreshadowing when frantic, Lilly (wondrously fleshed out by Jessi Campbell) insisted that Anna (played with steely older-sister determination by Lisa Brescia) put her total weight on Lilly’s lap.

Such as later discussions of getting pregnant.

Such as the funny asides and mental meanderings of Malcolm (through the artistry of Anthony Fusco, a Richard Jenkins lookalike and soundalike who’s an A.C.T. stalwart), and the marvelous deadpan drawl of Patrick Kelly Jones as William.

Whether the dialogue was rib-ticking or solemn, I couldn’t wait to find out what came next.

Now and then, though, I was faced with pithy character summaries.

I can still hear 30-year-old bed-hopping Lilly saying, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And Anna griping to her late, lamented father, “You left me holding the bag.”

Add to those Malcolm’s assertion that “I’m a pamphlet between two related tomes…written in a language I don’t understand…two books telling one story.”

And this poignant couplet: Anna — “You seem lost.” Lily — “I am.” When this goes to two lines it is hard to follow.

The company’s artistic director, Loretta Greco, showed great perceptiveness when indicating in the program guide that Kolvenbach’s characters here, as usual, “binge on mayhem.”

Some of his skillfully crafted chaos was psychological (probing constructive love vs. smothering love).

Some was tangible (therapeutic book-throwing).

In either case, Kolvenbach’s timing — and each actor’s, in fact — must be labeled exquisite.

Magic devotees were probably already familiar with the playwright’s talent, because Kolvenbach’s “Goldfish” and “Mrs. Whitney” were staged there in 2009.

Yet “Sister Play” proves that even a basically flawless show can’t satisfy everyone.

One elderly woman, after telling me during the opening night’s post-play reception that the acting had been excellent, twice added, “I don’t understand what was funny.”

Rather than be rude, I left my response unsaid:

“In my opinion, almost everything.”

“Sister Play” runs through April 19 at the Magic Theatre, Building D, Fort Mason Center, Marina Boulevard and Buchanan Street, San Francisco. Night performances Tuesdays, 7 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Tickets: $20 to $60. Information: www.magictheatre.org or (415) 441-8822.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

I left “Jewels of Paris” with lingering thoughts of flashy costuming and fleshy lack of costuming.

But that doesn’t mean I overlooked the new revue’s substantial, silly satire.

Or its clever songs. Or unadulterated bawdiness.

Or copious kitsch.

My afterthoughts insisted on zoning in on a couple of dangling participles and more than a few dangling body parts.

“Jewels of Paris,” a new musical revue presented by the Thrillpeddlers at the Hypnodrome in San Francisco, is clearly a throwback — first by comically reconstructing for me the City of Lights and the artistic revolution that exploded there in the Roaring Twenties, then by jerking me back to old-timey burlesque and shocking campus musicals.

Spoofed effectively along the way are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker, Pierrot (the sad clown of Commedia dell’Arte fame) and — yes, after all it is France — Marie Antoinette.

Yet never would I think this revue might draw audiences from an umpteenth touring company of  “Chicago.”

It’s way too South of Market for that.

“Jewels of Paris” will surely pull in exactly what it aims for: mainly gay audiences (in and out of leather), and heterosexuals interested in a funny show that revisits the kind of original Scrumbly Koldewyn melodies he composed for the legendary Cockettes, the psychedelic, chiefly drag theater troupe he co-founded.

Here Koldewyn puts his fresh musical and lyrical jewels on display, so to speak.

As well as his talents as musical director and piano- and synthesizer-playing accompanist — all the while managing to keep the nostalgic jazzy rhythms alive without becoming overly redundant.

He also contributes to the book (sketches that are also credited to Rob Keefe, Alex Kinney and Andy Wenger).

Just for giggles, naturally.

Lyrics can be amazingly droll. Consider lines such as “They see me as savage and shoeless, but I’m just a flapper from St. Louis” or “Wait — I’ll torture you with my metaphors.”

Noah Haydon, meanwhile, is responsible for the choreography, ensuring each movement (ranging from a mock can-can to simulated sex) be precise enough so none of the 16-member cast (many of whom play multiple roles) stumbles into another on the small stage.

The campy revue’s so professionally staged on a set that’s seamlessly moved piecemeal by the actors undergoing myriad wig and costume changes, in fact, there’s not a single “oopsie” moment.

In addition, extraordinary solo performances are proffered by drag queen Noah Haydon torch-singing “Singer in a Café,” Kim Larsen crooning “Oh What a World,” and Birdie-Bob Watt lamenting “Chic and Tragic” as Pierrot.

Russell Blackwood, the production’s director, induces a well-paced balance between farce and music — and safeguards the overriding theme that human differences must be acceptable.

The ensemble cast raises diversity to new heights.

Actor-singers are white, black and Asian; male, female and possibly other; skinny and fat, tall and short, hunky and frumpy.

But don’t look for a plot. It’s absent.

And direct links to France tend to disappear during the second act of the two-hour performance.

Thrillpeddlers, their website informed me, “have been performing authentic Grand Guignol horror plays, outrageous Theatre of the Ridiculous musicals, and spine-tingling lights-out spookshows in San Francisco for nearly 20 years.”

Guess which of those categories “Jewels of Paris” fits into.

Here, however, is a mammoth red flag.

I recommend you stay far away if you’re turned off by nudity (male and female, frontal and backal), by straight and gay postures that don’t demand an advanced degree in gymnastics but do require open-mindedness, by cross-dressing and other gender-bending, by the mere idea of S&M, or ridiculing depictions of a bearded lady and a hunch-backed “Quasi-homo.”

If you’re adventurous, however, it’s a one-of-a-kind San Francisco treat that could tingle your pleasure palate vastly better than Rice-A-Roni.

Because the back-of-an-alley theater holds only 45 people, with first-come, first-served seating except for a handful of higher-priced boxes in which you can recline (or otherwise unbend), I’d recommended that tickets be purchased in advance.

My wife and I chanced to sit in the Hell box, with its fiery red seat covers and wall mirror at genitalia level.

Perhaps because we enjoy the unfamiliar and rare, it and the show were heavenly.

“Jewels of Paris” runs through May 2 at the Hypnodrome, 575 10th St., San Francisco. Performances are Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m.  Tickets: $30-$35. Information: 1-415-377-4202 or www.thrillpeddlers.com

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

“Public art,” country music singer and visual artist Terry Allen once decreed, “is for the birds.”

Well, yes ‘n’ no.

“Our fine-feathered friends may be great fans of artwork, for a good reason,” I find myself countering, “but even when they blitz it with their white bombs, it’s still art that human beings can appreciate.”

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m among those humans.

I periodically meander into places not far from my Ross Valley home to re-appreciate stuff I’ve treasured before.

My 8-year-old granddaughter often tags along.

I just like looking. Hannah’s favorites are those she can climb.

So, naturally, she’s long been partial to Sugarfoot, the antlered stag that stands tall on the lawn outside San Anselmo’s Town Hall.

She’s been climbing on the anatomically correct metallic critter ever since she was 3 — so her rump has greatly added to the sheen of the sculpture’s back.

She originally decided Sugarfoot was a lost Santa reindeer who’d chosen my adopted hometown as his.

And was magical.

Now she just considers him a handy place from which she can hang upside down.

Hannah has also enjoyed caressing the abstract marble Bufano bear that stands on a pedestal in front of the Ross Town Hall, a gift from residents Jerry and Peggy Flax.

I, too, like the bear — and most of the work by San Francisco sculptor Benny Bufano.

But I also relish that he was a blunt-speaking peacenik.

He reportedly, after an accident severed it, sent half his “trigger finger” to Woodrow Wilson in protest of World War I.

Years later, after Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, he sculpted “St. Francis of the Guns” out of melted-down weapons turned in by citizens.

I’m pretty sure his Ross bear bears no political statement, though.

The artist, in a tale that might be apocryphal, purportedly advised the town on the animal’s care and feeding, including an admonition to “polish regularly with Carnauba auto wax.”

Early this year, Ross hired a contractor to repair cracks and other damage in the marble. Since then, the town’s prohibited kids from scaling it, even for photos.

Before the fixes, however, we managed to snap a couple of Hannah giving it, logically, a big bear hug.

Since she’s a consummate animal freak (no surprise — her abode, where a barnload of horses used to board, is now home to a dog, a cat, two goats and two pet lizards), she also adores Al Guibara’s bronze statue of Blackie the horse on a Tiburon pasture.

She loves, too, hanging out in Imagination Park — land of a gadzillion selfies, adjacent to San Anselmo’s town hall — with the Lawrence Noble pop-art bronze statues of film characters Yoda and Indiana Jones.

Both are life-sized, although Indy’s about 6-foot-3 and Yoda merely 2-1/2 feet high.

Marin’s most famed artwork, in my view, is the Civic Center, an imaginative structure in San Rafael built after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed it.

The golden spired, sky-blue roofed tourist attraction — a location for the sci-fi movie “Gattaca” and Lucas’ first feature-length film, “THX” — was Wright’s last commission and is somehow still avant-garde today, 53 years after the first section was completed.

I cherish it.

Almost as much as I hate most monochromatic oils hanging in museums that demand I take a wild guess at what bizarre sense of beauty an artist had in mind while slapping paint onto a canvas.

The truth is, virtually any art is problematic for me because it can’t be attached to my refrigerator with a magnet like Hannah’s hand-drawn thingies.

Still, she and I often jointly enjoy examining the charming, playful murals in Fairfax that adorn the tall outer wall of a Bolinas Avenue store or the short wall at the nearby baseball field, as well as the colorful obelisk in front of the Ross Valley Fire Station in downtown San Anselmo.

Not to mention the sky paintings made by jet planes or shifting clouds or blinking stars.

Humorist Dave Barry once defined public art as that which “is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.”

He may be right.

But writer Oscar Wilde was definitely wrong when he proclaimed, “All art is quite useless.”

It’s fun.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 3]

Sophisticated Natalya, 29, is having a premature midlife crisis.

So she flits between rage and passion.

She ignores the steady, boring love of her husband, Arkady, and the fawning adoration of a friend/wannabe lover, Michel, only to fall for Alexsey, her young son’s naïve 21-year-old tutor.

That’s the heart of “A Month in the Country,” a lightweight comedy of manners weighed down by a touch of the mustiness I should have expected from a play penned in the mid-1800s by Ivan Turgenev, Russian novelist famed for “Fathers and Sons.”

Yet the ensemble cast of Ross Valley Players largely keeps things effervescent and, through its professionalism, overcomes the sluggish pacing the playwright built in.

Not to mention his repetition.

The dozen community theater thespians were good enough, however, to ward off my sporadic desire to snooze.

I admired, too, other elements of the play adapted in 1992 by Irish dramatist Brian Friel (a Tony Award-winner for “Dancing at Lughnasa”):

• Friel’s updated language (“I’m not one of his college sluts”).

• Costume designer Michael A. Berg’s fetching women’s attire (a calculated contrast with his unexciting men’s formal ware).

• The artistic accomplishments of Ken Rowland, who’s created more than 100 extraordinary set designs for the company since 1982 but out-extraordinaried himself with this show’s elegant ebony-and-rose vision of a posh country estate (universal enough to have been located in the Hamptons as easily as Russia).

• Director James Nelson’s brave choice to absent anticipated Russian accents while not limiting actor Ben Ortega’s Hispanic inflections in the role of Michel — and then including comedic German dialect by Mark Shepard as Herr Schaaf (a character with a penchant for malapropisms such as calling himself “a lecher” when he means archer).

Unusual, besides, is the use of offstage actors mouthing interior musings for several characters.

Particularly outstanding performances are turned in by Shannon Veon Kase as Natalya; Wood Lockhart, the veteran workhorse of the RVR troupe as Dr. Shpigelsky, a “bitter, angry peasant” hanger-on who prefers being a matchmaker; and Ortega.

Despite the farcical facets of “A Month in the Country,” Turgenev’s pre-Chekhovian thesis might be summarized by one character declaring “I’m afraid all love is a catastrophe” and another proclaiming “when you find yourself enslaved by love…you’ll know what real suffering is.”

Cynical? Perhaps.

Snarky?

Without doubt.

But great fodder for what advance publicity tells us “A Month in the Country” does — let us laugh at our own foibles (and sometimes misguided appetites).

And yes, the 150-minute period piece is long, as well as long-in-the-tooth.

But that having been said, it’s ultimately as cheery as the recorded bird sounds played before the show starts.

“A Month in the Country” plays at The Barn Theatre, Marin Art & Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through April 12. Evening performances, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Thursdays, 7:30 p.m. Matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $14 to $29. Information: (415) 456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 4]

Actor-comic Ron Tobin has mastered, I’d guess, at least 17 voices and 42 verbal sound effects.

Or maybe it’s the other way around.

Plus, give or take, 28 accents.

He can instantly change faces — and identities — by distorting his mouth or brow and scrunching up or widening his eyes.

His elastic body and swinging hands can conjure up hysterically dysfunctional and hysterically funny men, women, dogs and a cat.

During a one-man show at the Del Valle Theater — “My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy!” — Tobin portrayed, in quick succession (and with exquisite comedic timing) a nasal stewardess, a cabbie from a Middle East country, a guru from India, an 83-year-old Jamaican gated community guard, a phlegm-ish uncle  — as well as the constantly bickering title characters based on writer-comic Steve Solomon’s ethnically divided parents.

I’m normally a tough audience for comedians. But Tobin made me laugh out loud repeatedly.

The show isn’t seamless, though.

It’s uneven, and may lean too heavily on potty humor.

It also becomes fleetingly awkward when a singular poignant grandma moment unexpectedly interferes with the cresting comedy.

And some of its gags and situations are older than Moses.

Like the clichéd notion of his wife loving sex — until the second they wed.

Promotional materials call the monologue “one part lasagna, one part kreplach and two parts Prozac,” and say it’s really all about leaving dinner “with heartburn and a headache.”

But I’m pleased to report “My Mother’s Italian” is much funnier than its publicity.

I couldn’t begin to count all the one-liners crammed into the two-act, 100-minute show that ran for two years in New York City and has toured internationally in more than 200 cites since.

What absolutely worked for me were the numerous set-ups about the aging process — especially hearing loss (maybe you had to be there, but mom hears “Lebanese” instead of “lesbian”) and bodily non-functions.

And the obvious ethnic jibes (“What are genitals?” “Those are the people who aren’t Jewish”).

Most of the jokes, such as those, play vastly better on stage than they read in a review. And the laughter they provoke is appropriately contagious.

A guy behind me saw the show in San Diego with Solomon and found it side-splitting enough to see again with Tobin.

He couldn’t stop laughing the second time around.

The cackles of several women near him were so raucous they nearly drowned out the next three punch-lines.

Tobin had learned his script well. But he also inserted an amusing smidgeon of reality. In a five-minute encore, he riffed about having gotten lost while trying to find the Walnut Creek theater where I saw him perform — after I, too, got lost.

“Tell your friends,” he mockingly pleaded, “not just about the show — about how to get here.”

“My Mother’s Italian, My Father’s Jewish & I’m in Therapy!” will run through March 29 at the Del Valle Theater, 1963 Tice Valley Road, Walnut Creek. Evening performances, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 6 p.m. Matinees, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $45 to $65. Information: www.LesherARTScenter.org or 1-925-943-7469.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 3.5]

One plus one can add up to more than one might expect.

My wife keeps me busy by endlessly assigning me unwanted tasks.

Like finding her lost cell phone.

And umbrellas.

My search parties are mobilized weekly.

Not long ago Nancy phoned from downtown San Anselmo while walking our little white rescue mutt.

No, she hadn’t misplaced our biodegradable poop bags.

“Please come and rescue me,” she wailed. “I’ve lost my keys again.”

I scoured virtually every inch of her trail — Creek and Inspiration parks, block after block of San Anselmo Avenue, the lawn of Town Hall.

I pushed aside foliage where Kismet had deposited some stinky stuff and Nancy had bent over to collect it. I checked each early-blooming flower, each parked vehicle. I kicked aside fallen leaves that had accumulated at curbside.

I stopped counting at 1,439,574.

Diddly squat.

Happily, a young lad found the keys soon after we’d retreated to our home. He turned them into the police, whom we’d been smart enough to notify.

Losing this ‘n’ that has for sure become too habitual for both of us.

As well as for a slew of our aging friends.

On a whim, Nancy and I crafted a list — and noticed that losing something isn’t necessarily bad.

When she partially lost her hearing, for instance, she could no longer hear my snoring.

And when I lost my taste for alcohol, weed and Pall Malls, she — not to mention my liver and lungs — was grateful.

Losses also can fill our mental safety deposit box of anecdotes.

Nancy once got a Jaguar tour of the Civic Center parking lots when she coaxed a young attorney into helping her locate her vanished Camry by pleading, “Pretend I’m your mother.”

Then, of course, there’s the negative side of the ledger.

Topping my list of worrisome recent disappearances is my diminished eyesight, abetted by cataracts.

To counteract my growing anxiety, I’ve stooped to regularly kissing the rings of Kaiser Permanente ophthalmologists and optometrists in San Rafael.

At the bottom of my list of worries are my granddaughter’s missing and wiggly baby teeth. I’d be willing to bet the 8-year-old doesn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy anymore but firmly believes in the five-dollar bill she gets for slipping a tooth under her pillow.

Lost through inflation along the way has been the value of a buck. I used to give my kids a quarter. And I felt no deprivation whatsoever even though my parents stiffed me completely.

Some losses undeniably are permanent.

My underwear somehow evaporated in Europe, for example, while quick drying on a wine rack.

Nancy’s luck with AWOL clothing is infinitely better. A hotel employee once took the trouble to mail her back an unwashed, wrinkled nightgown from a Bahamas vacation.

But the truth is, my wife doesn’t fret in advance about losing things.

That’s mainly because she strongly believes in karma and always returns what she finds.

I can verify this fantastical account about a wallet she found: When she called the owner to inform her about it, the woman was dining with Nancy’s dermatologist.

Finding is, naturally, the flip side of losing.

My 75-year-old wife recently unearthed an old, old, old supposedly lost outfit in the way-back of her closet.

She wore it just for giggles while strolling with Kismet in Fairfax one evening. A woman she didn’t know approached her just to say, “What a magnificent vintage dress.”

Without losing a beat, Nancy answered, “Thanks. It goes with the face and body — I’m vintage too.”

Losing things is hardly a new experience for us.

In fact, my wife and I wrote a song called “Lost It Blues” for our unproduced musical revue, “Touching Up the Gray.” And we’re still living out the lyrics, despite having composed the piece 16 years ago.

“I’ve lost 2 billion pens, 3 dozen pinky rings

“Over the last 40 or 50 years.

“And where’s the car I just parked

“With all its dings.

“I’ve lost count of what I’ve lost.

“It’s so embarrassing.”

But the song ends on a more serious note by referring to what we both consider our biggest loss — our youth:

“Time is irretrievable,

“It is unbelievable

“I had time on my hands,

“But now it’s lost.”

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Sandy Riccardi is an accomplished New York comedienne-actress.

Tall and attractive.

With a robust, polished singing voice.

Pianist Richard Riccardi has played with San Francisco’s symphony, opera and ballet companies — and accompanied Pinchas Zuckerman, Joel Grey and Diahann Carroll.

But he’s short and bald. And has a gravelly singing voice.

Yet he’s Sandy’s trophy husband.

She even sings an incomparable homage to his hairless head.

At Petaluma’s Cinnabar Theater recently, the pair presented a loving, charming cabaret act, “My Raunchy Valentine,” that made me laugh aloud often and feel good for 90 minutes.

Mostly, the rib-tickling diva vocalized and mugged.

Mostly, Richard played.

With tongue permanently implanted in cheek, and with lyrics that leaned toward the clever, they started with the downside of texting and tweeting (“you don’t quite care enough to call”) and ended with gallows humor from a Rodgers and Hart tune about serial husband-icide.

In between, they dealt with a “Southern girl’s mating call — ‘I can hardly taste the liquor,’” waggish fallout from forgetfulness and blame, and other comic pitfalls of the wrinkling process (with a pill-filled bottle doubling as a rhythm instrument).

I did find the “My Raunchy Valentine” title a touch misleading, though.

The Riccardi duo performed several tunes with double entendre after double entendre but its major focus was on the snags and snares of relationship.

They used their own as comedic fodder.

Sandy noted, in fact, that they total five marriages between them — and illustrated “Our Perfect Family” with a stage-length scroll featuring stick figures of the blended family (including three nurses from Fiji).

“He’s a glutton for punishment,” she noted of her husband. “I’m the third wife Richard has seen through menopause.”

The couple offered many original numbers, then interjected amusing parodies of such familiar ditties as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “Memories” and “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

Twice, the pair — married six years with 4 million YouTube hits under their collective belt — paused the merriment to execute love ballads penned for each other. Once, Sandy apologized for being saccharine (“we were supposed to be anti-Hallmark”).

All in all, I found the show fluffy and fun.

And I definitely could relate to their occasional public expressions of love.

To continue our Valentine’s Day tradition, I’ve already purchased the hundreds of tiny candy hearts I’ll hide in my wife’s music books, desk drawers and medicine cabinet — and tuck into various clothes in her closet.

I know she’ll undoubtedly take similar liberties with my things.

And if the past is any indication, we’ll still be finding each other’s sugar treats for months and months. And smiling.

And that’s the way we like it. After all, we consider each other a trophy spouse.

Even though we, too, have five marriages between us.

“My Raunchy Valentine” was part of the Sunday concert series at Cinnabar, 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N., right off Hwy. 101, Petaluma. Upcoming shows in the series, all beginning at 7:30 p.m., include The Ring of Truth Trio on March 15, Red Hot Chachkas on April 19, Le Jazz Hot on May 17 and Amanacer Flamenco on June 14. Tickets: $15 to $30. Information: (707) 763-8920 or cinnabartheater.org.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 4]

Did the National Football League mutate into a life-threatening disease?

Is the sport too lethal to survive?

An ensemble cast tackles such questions head-on in “X’s and O’s (A Football Love Story),” a world premiere play at the Berkeley Rep.

And not unlike 320-pound offensive linemen relentlessly pounding the weakest links of a defense, it repeatedly bellows that if the NFL doesn’t radically change, it will become extinct.

Soon.

If I hadn’t previously agreed with that conclusion, the docudrama wouldn’t have convinced me — because its Gatling gun approach, covering every angle while targeting the league, blunts its punch.

The play focuses on head trauma.

On CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative disease of the brain that can only be diagnosed post-mortem, actually.

But it also probes other life-altering injuries, ever-changing rules, fans’ mindset, financial inducements, segregation, class warfare.

All serious topics.

Director Tony Taccone makes sure, however, to inject humor that mitigates the heaviness.

Using clever slo-mo pantomime.

A bevy of one-liners.

And sight gags — with the funniest, in my eyes, being a foul-mouthed caricature of an Oakland Raiders-type fanatic cloaked in football gear (accented by a skull on his chest).

“X’s and O’s” was written by super-fan K.J. Sanchez with Jenny Mercein, one-sixth of the acting ensemble and daughter of NFL running back Chuck Mercein, best recalled for his Green Bay Packers’ stint in the 1967 “Ice Bowl” championship game when the wind-chill factor registered minus-48.

They based their piece on interviews.

With players and their kin, parents of young hopefuls, fans, physicians and academics.

While nurturing the commissioned play in The Ground Floor, the repertory theater’s arm that develops new work, the playwrights changed names to protect the innocent.

And, I’d suggest, the guilty.

The ironic title titillates me, considering that the play boldfaces the negative. But the “love story” is distinctly a torrid affair between fans and a league that generates $10 billion a year while maintaining its status as a nonprofit.

Dwight Hicks, 58-year-old ex-San Francisco 49er safety who earned two Super Bowl rings and played in four Pro Bowls, is the show’s box-office draw.

The athlete-actor faltered several times opening night as if struggling to remember dialogue. But he, like the others, portrayed multiple characters and otherwise acquitted himself well.

Acting wasn’t the show’s decisive factor, though.

The mood was.

The docudrama’s imaginative high-tech set helped. It featured a canopy and walls with, first, a diagram of a football play (with its traditional X’s and O’s), then myriad projections of the game’s history, violence and popularity.

Despite its core being prickly, the show sometimes felt tedious (though only 80 minutes long).

Aficionados knew the facts.

A program article by Madeleine Oldham, dramaturg and director of The Ground Floor, referenced the 1990s when ex-players “seemed to be exhibiting things like memory loss at relatively young ages, mood swings, or personality changes.”

Evidence “of a link between football and brain injury reached a tipping point” in 2005, she wrote, after an autopsy on 50-year-old Pittsburgh Steeler ‘Iron Mike’ Webster showed “the inside of his brain mirrored that of a much older man.”

Many NFL alumni, Oldham added, “were often dealing with headaches, depression, the inability to remember simple things, lack of focus, substance abuse, or thoughts of suicide.”

“X’s and O’s,” like football itself, doted on statistics.

My online search verified them: More than 5,000 player-plaintiffs quickly signed onto 250 concussion-related lawsuits against the league. Add 1,000 if you count spouses.

Numbers aren’t at risk, though.

Human beings are.

That, of course, is the point of the play, in which I found numerous memorable lines.

Such as, “I love watching someone suffer” and “How do you go from superman to man to nobody?”

Sportscasts have recently been riddled with endless speculation about “Deflategate” and which New England Patriots player or employee let air out of the championship game balls.

Somehow I believe questions raised by “X’s and O’s” are more imperative.

 “X’s and O’s (A Football Love Story)” will run at the Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison St. (off Shattuck), through March 1. 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-$79 (subject to change). Information: www.berkeleyrep.org or (510) 647-2949

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