Woody Weingarten

“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

[Woody’s [rating: 4]

I thought deceased playwright Noël Coward was so yesterday.

And I feared 89-year-old Angela Lansbury might fit into that pigeonhole, too.

But “Blithe Spirit,” which originally debuted on Broadway in 1941, proves my pre-show presumptions were way off.

All three are charming — despite their antiquity.

In the small but crucial role of second-generation medium Madame Arcati (at the Golden Gate Theatre), Lansbury is an absolute rib-tickling marvel.

It’s a part that earned her a Tony Award for the 2009 Broadway revival.

Opening night in San Francisco, I found the character actor’s physical comedy — as well as her ability to zoom her vocal elevator from squeaky to bass and back again — delightful.

But major kudos also are due Susan Louise O’Connor, whose comic antics in a secondary part are honed so finely they virtually steal the show.

As maid Edith, she manages to transform her earliest lines of  “Yes, mum,” “Yes, mum” and “Yes, mum” into comedic diamonds.

Laugh-aloud gems.

She’s so good at it, and in becoming a mousey creature stuck alternately in fifth and slo-mo gears, she almost outshines Lansbury in the slapstick-with-pinpoint-timing department.

Almost.

Lansbury had the opening night audience in her palm before the curtain went up.

Director Michael Blakemore deserves recognition, though, for acutely and cutely layering the manifold moments of shtick — and for making at least the first half of a protracted 115-minute two-act play move swiftly.

I can offer shout-outs, too, to Charles Edwards as an ultra-correct, ultra-British Charles Condomine, who asks the medium to conduct a séance in his living room so he can use it in his novel, and Jemima Rooper as Elvira, the churlish, lethal dead wife he summons despite remembering “how morally untidy she was.”

Such phraseology may seem archaic in print, but when used on stage it holds up.

Astonishingly well.

“Blithe Spirit,” which followed otherworldly films such as “Topper” and “The Ghost Goes West” into the public’s imagination and favor, allegedly was written in a week.

But Coward’s velocity doesn’t show through.

His wit does.

Adding to the onstage fun are old-fashioned projections of scene names and action, accompanied by screechy sounds from vintage recordings.

As well as ectoplasmic special effects that peak just before the final curtain.

On a personal note, repeated use of Irving Berlin’s “Always,” ancient enough to have been my parent’s favorite song, hit me right in the labonza.

Angela Lansbury’s 70-year career includes harvesting five Tonys, six Golden Globes and an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. She starred on Broadway in “Mame,” “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd.”

She’s best known, of course, for playing Jessica Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote.”

Which I never saw.

In spite of the original series being on TV for 12 years (and the cable re-runs still going strong).

She first awed me, rather, in a 1962 Cold War film thriller, “The Manchurian Candidate,” while playing the conniving mother of a potential political assassin.

Her “Blithe Spirit” characterization couldn’t be more dissimilar.

She portrayed Madame Arcati as a bent, cantankerous, peculiar old lady with a distinctive shuffle. But when it came time to take her bows, the nearly nonagenarian’s body was suddenly erect, and she was smiling and sprightly.

Why’d I like her and this play so much?

Maybe because too many shows nowadays are heavy, heavy, heavy.

In contrast, “Blithe Spirit,” which Coward appropriately subtitled “An Improbable Farce,” didn’t require` me to think about it, chew on it, discuss it, worry about it or dissect it.

All I needed to do was sit back and enjoy it.

It and Lansbury, that is.

Last year, the living legend made headlines when Queen Elizabeth aptly made her a dame.

She’d earned the honor.

And clearly, to steal a line from a hit Broadway show she didn’t star in, she’s still up there in the footlights proving “there is nothing like a dame.”

Especially a spry old one.

“Blithe Spirit” will play at the SHN Golden Gate Theatre, 1 Taylor St., San Francisco, through Feb. 1. Night performances Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m. Matinees, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $45 to $175 (subject to change). Information: (888) 746-1799 or shnsf.com.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]

Let anyone refer to “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” in the past and I’d probably think of the Grateful Dead.

That may be dead thinking now.

In the future, I’m likely to think instead of “The Cable Car Nymphomaniac,” a clever, bawdy musical comedy by the new FOGG Theatre troupe in San Francisco.

It’s that good. That fresh. That funny.

Its sex component was inspired by real events: In 1964, ex-dance instructor and Michigan transplant Gloria Sykes hit her head on a pole when her cable car lurched. Her suit against San Francisco five years later claimed the accident had caused a “demonic sex urge” that forced her have relations with more than 100 guys. The jury awarded $50,000.

Drugs in the show aren’t prevalent, merely a couple of joints (including one hand-me-down laced with slapstick).

And while the wide-ranging music is unlikely to fascinate Deadheads and is hardly integral to the storyline, its absence would greatly have diminished my enjoyment.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll indeed, just not your garden variety.

The situation lends itself to exaggeration, for sure, and being an easy target for parody. So it may surprise that the overriding theme of “Nympho” has less to do with sexuality per se than how a torpid housewife rouses to make her own choices.

(Although a major sub-text is that females are still being vilified for being sexual in the 21st century.)

I must admit, however, that “Nympho” left me a little flustered.

Praising virtually everybody connected with a production isn’t my usual critical style.

But consider, for instance, Tony Asaro.

He’s one of three FOGG founders, and doubles as its artistic director. Here he also deserves major credit for extraordinarily bright and sometimes salacious lyrics (“I’m the bourbon that melts your ice” and “adjust your slacks ‘cause here comes Gloria”).

He’s also composed 17 inventive melodies that gambol from hard rock to doo-wop to dissonance.

At the same time, Kirsten Guenther’s scythe-sharp book keeps the nearly two-hour, intermission-less show thrusting forward.

Director-choreographer Terry Berliner’s ingenuity becomes visible especially via a whimsical tango lesson and when comical angels flap their wings.

Berliner, who utilizes ensemble members in both male and female roles, clearly plays to his seven-member cast’s strengths.

Particularly David Naughton as Bruce, an uptight lawyer trapped in an outmoded morality; Steven Ennis, who excels in several cartoon-like, rubberfaced light-in-the-loafers roles; and Alex Rodriqguez, who wrings guffaws from super-seductive Eduardo and a mega-cheery plastic-ware peddler.

None of the other actor-singers are slouches either.

Take the company’s executive director, Carey McCray, for instance, who portrays hard-edged Esther, Bruce’s intern who contemptuously observes that “there is a system and it works as long as a woman knows her place.”

And who then roars, “Men fix the world — women fix lunch.”

Or Rinabeth Apostol as Gloria, the young woman saddled with constant male vibrations, someone who allegedly “sends out a carnal SOS.” Or Courtney Merrell as Bruce’s wife, Bryce, a gal desperately seeking herself. Or Hayley Lovgren, who energetically fills out the ensemble.

By the way, I found all the singing voices two octaves above adequate.

Supported effectively by Robert Michael Moreno’s keyboard and his four musical cohorts.

Oops! Almost forgot Jeff Rowlings.

His ingenious set design turns three cable car images and four wooden benches into about 217 stagecraft sensations.

I’d also be remiss if I ignored the costuming of Wes Crain, who jauntily contrasts Gloria’s ditzy glitziness with a fortune cookie-spouting guru’s over-the-topness.

FOGG, an acronym for Focus on Golden Gate, wants to examine the Bay Area’s history, communities, heroes, concerns and ideologies. So yes, “Cable Car Nymphomaniac” is indeed San Francisco-centric, including a lyric asserting that Gloria “gets around — from Laurel Heights to Union Square.”

But the locale’s only a backdrop.

I can easily see the musical doing well with sophisticated audiences in New York, St. Louis, London — actually, anywhere people would enjoy originality, wit and assorted music.

If a problem exists with the show, it’s that Asaro and company have set an incredibly high bar for their next production.

And the one after that.

And…

“The Cable Car Nymphomaniac” will run at Z Below, 470 Florida St., San Francisco, through Feb. 8. Night performances, Wednesday through Saturday, 8 p.m. Matinees, Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Tickets: $25-$30. Information: (866) 811-4111 or www.foggtheatre.org.

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

[Woody’s [rating: 5]