Dave and I saw 42nd Street Moon’s production of One Touch of Venus on Thursday. It’s a charmer. The show is an insubstantial farce but it has a witty and gently ribald book by S.J. Perelman and a terrific score by Ogden Nash and Kurt Weill and it’s strange that it’s so rarely done. I would think it would be perfect for community and semipro theaters.

The cast is good all around, but the standout I thought was Tom Orr as Taxi Black — I’ve only seen him in supporting roles at 42nd Street Moon and I hope I’ll get to see him in a bigger role one of these days. (Dave and I wanted to go see his one-man show a few months ago but our schedules didn’t allow it, dammit.) He’s a terrific comic actor. I thought his brilliant shtick throughout the “Doctor Crippen” number at the end of the first act — mugging and sinister leering and some remarkable moments of pantomime — was maybe the funniest thing in the show, and he was just as good elsewhere.

(I know the number somehow from some recording I haven’t listened to it a long long while and I can’t think what it is — one of the Ben Bagley albums? — but I don’t think I ever noticed before the similarities, in terms of both musical structure and dramatic function, between it and “The Saga of Jenny” from Lady in the Dark. After the show I was humming “Doctor Crippen” and found it very easy to slip into “Jenny” and back again, even in the middle of a stanza.

Who’s Crippen?
Never heard of Crippen,
Lying in a felon’s grave.
Deserved a bed of roses
But history discloses
It was all for Ethel LeNave!

It makes me wonder to what extent the writers and Weill may have been consciously using “Jenny” as a model for the “Crippen” number.)

Nina Josephs is very good as Venus, and one of the highlights for me was her song “That’s Him”. Anil Margsahayam is very funny as Rodney but his singing is a bit weak and in places is made worse where he modifies his vowels too much to get more sound, which is an operatic trick that doesn’t work so well when you’re singing in the audience’s language. I thought many of the songs were taken at a little too brisk a pace, and the ballads in particular would have a lot more weight if allowed to breathe a little more. “That’s Him” was allowed to breathe and it was delicious; “Speak Low” wasn’t and it didn’t make the same effect, even though it’s the big hit song and repeated several times during the show.

Oh my, Dave and I went to see Tammy Grimes singing at the Plush Room last night. I’m glad we did. She’s in her 70s, and her hands shake a bit, and her voice wavers a bit too, but she can still hold an audience, at least a cabaret-sized audience. I still can’t really connect the cozy and plumpish woman I saw, who ought to be cast in a sitcom as somebody’s affectionate if slightly offbeat grandmother, with the flamboyant, headstrong, and eccentrically mannered force of nature she once was, but when she’s singing, you can’t miss that wonderful hazy timbre of hers, and she still has a lot of charisma and stage presence.

There were the expected songs from Molly Brown of course, and I suppose she had to do something from High Spirits though I wouldn’t have minded if she hadn’t — Molly Brown at least has the distinction of being one of the best scores ever written for such a poorly constructed musical, the album just a delight to listen to even if actually sitting through the show a second time is enough to sate your appetite for the story for the rest of your life, while High Spirits is even more poorly constructed (if I ever get around to writing a book on how to craft the book for a musical or opera, the book for High Spirits could serve as the Bad Example for the chapter on how to integrate your songs with your story) and has an routine and uninspired score to boot.

But Ms. Grimes did a whole bunch of other show and pop songs, including a really good “Rose of Washington Square” and a powerful “Pirate Jenny” that made me wonder why for crying out loud she doesn’t have two or three more Weill songs in her set. There was a song from an off-Broadway musical she won an Obie for, I’d never heard of it and can’t now remember the name, but the song was very nice, very wry, sort of a rewrite of the drinking song from School for Scandal but written from a woman’s point of view instead of a man’s.

But even some of the more ordinary songs were delightful, she sang them with so much warmth and charm and meaning. A very enjoyable evening.

Friday night Dave and I saw Smuin Ballet at the Palace of Fine Arts. I thought it was a terrific program. Amy Seiwert’s Objects of Curiosity, a world premiere, is an abstract dance; it seemed to me to be nothing revolutionary but attractive and interesting. Michael Smuin’s Duettino is a flashy trifle that lets a pair of good dancers show off a lot. Smuin’s Stabat Mater, choreographed in response to 9/11, is very powerful and beautiful, though the mixing of images suggestive of the Stabat Mater and of 9/11 is startling and I’m not sure what the point of the juxtaposition is. The last piece on the program, Reinin’ in the Hurricane, is delightful, a series of short turns set to popular country-western songs, beginning and ending with “Don’t Fence Me In”.

I thought two Asian male dancers, Koichi Kubo in Duettino and Kevin Yee-Chan in Reinin’ in the Hurricane, were standouts, both of them pulling off a lot of flashy moves with a lot of charm. All in all a very enjoyable evening.

Then last night Dave and Terry and I went to the Hypnodrome to see Thrillpeddlers’ Shocktoberfest!! 2007: Maker of Monsters. Thrillpeddlers specializes in recreating Grand Guignol, and a few years ago they acquired their own tiny theater, the Hypnodrome. Dave and I have seen most of the Shocktoberfests since the first one at the Exit Theater, and we both thought this was the best one ever. They’ve done individual plays that have worked as well for me — I especially remember The Crime in the Madhouse, which Dave and I both found particularly disturbing — but this is the first show they’ve done where I felt like they were at their best all the way through from beginning to end. The actors played more consistently with conviction, and even those who have been Thrillpeddlers regulars for a while seemed to have improved a level or two in believability. The stage effects were more consistently effective and something downright beautiful, and the overall shape of the program was very satisfying.

The Grand Guignol recipe was a program of very short plays, a mix of sex farces and lurid Nightmare-on-Elm-Street style melodramas with lots of sadism, terror, stage blood, and other gruesome effects. The first play on the bill was The Maker of Monsters, which we’re pretty sure they did once before in a Shocktoberfest back in the Exit, but it was much much stronger this time around. This was followed by a series of three very short skits based on three very unusual — yet very popular in terms of the number of Google searches made per day — sexual fetishes.

After an intermission, The Colossus is a creepy, brooding play about a sculptor who loses his beloved four-year-old daughter in a fire, and The Bloody Con is a silly farce about four convicts forced to take part in a gruesome medical experiment, and is as much as anything an excuse for a lot of stage blood and other effects. But it ends the show on a note of silliness and fun.

Dave and I just got a note from a director friend of ours asking if we have any disco-style mirror balls we could lend Theater Rhino for their 30th anniversary revue next week. They only have four so far, and they want more.

Hard to believe that Theater Rhino doesn’t have a box of 38 mirror balls in storage somewhere. Surely this is not the first time in 30 years that a director at Rhino has thought of having lots and lots of mirror balls on stage at all once. First time in 30 weeks, maybe.

Dave and I saw Hysteria at the Aurora Theater today. I think there may well be a gripping play to be found somewhere in the whole unpleasant business of Freud’s recantation of his own seduction hypothesis, but this isn’t it. The farcical parts aren’t really very farcical — you don’t create a farce just by having characters hide in closets and slam doors a lot — and the serious parts are terribly earnest, one-sided, and clumsily contrived.

I have no idea what Dali is doing in the play — even though he’s the funniest character on stage, he has nothing much to do with anything. I got the feeling that the author was figuring if Tom Stoppard could write a play about James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin all being in the same city at the same time, then by God he could write a play about the fact that Dali once visited Freud.

The play is occasionally funny — especially an unexpected series of events near the end — but only occasionally. At other times it’s pretty lame. Usually it’s neither all that bad or all that good, just uninspired and, I thought, oddly predictable.

Dave and I went last night to Festival Opera’s production of Ned Rorem’s recent opera based on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

One of my longtime rules of thumb about musical theater and opera librettos is: Don’t adapt a much-loved classic unless either (a) you’re going to change it radically and subvert everyone’s expectations or (b) you’ve achieved much-loved classic status yourself, like Verdi adapting Othello. Otherwise you’re only begging everyone to compare what they actually see and hear not just against the original but against the idealized mythicized version of the original they carry around in their heads. You can be handsomer than somebody’s college boyfriend really was, but you can’t be handsomer than somebody’s fond memory of his college boyfriend — first, you just can’t be; and second, even if you could be, he would not allow you to be; and third, even if he allowed you to be, he would resent you rather than appreciate you for it.

A related rule of thumb of mine: Beware of adapting as a musical or opera any work that you know about only because you were assigned to read it in school or because your high school or college did a production of it. That’s the wrong kind of relationship to have with a work you’re adapting, like agreeing to spend a romantic month on a tropical island with someone because you’ve read his biography and admired it. Respect is great but if something about him isn’t actually getting you hard, you’re going to be bored long before it’s over. So unless you’ve reread The Red Badge of Courage on your own a couple of times since graduation just for the pleasure you get from the story, don’t try adapting it. It’s not that it can’t make a great musical or opera — I believe that anything can make a great musical or opera if you understand what needs to be done and you’re willing to do it. It’s that that relationship with the source is the wrong vantage point from which to have that understanding and that willingness. It’s that you’re not the right person to adapt it, and you’d do much better to keep looking for something you are the right person to adapt.

Our Town falls down on both of my rules of thumb and, in spite of some interesting music along the way, the result is plodding and heavy and charmless. Much of the time it felt to me like the librettist and composer were just going through the motions. Did either of them ever find an answer to the crucial question of how this story is going to be enhanced by singing it? Was either of them really excited to be telling this story in this way? If so, I don’t think it shows in the result. Except for a haunting piece sung by the dead in the cemetary in act three, I never felt the singing contributed anything; rather, it slowed everything down and made ponderous what is charming in the play.

The third act worked best, or maybe failed to work the least, because the play turns dark in the third act and the words there can bear a little better the stately gravity of this setting. But at the same time, act three of the play depends for its effectiveness on the seeming lightness of acts one and two. Telling us in act three that all that charm and lightness in the first two acts was concealing a great tragic emptiness seems kind of silly when when there has in fact been no charm or lightness, when everything has been plodding heavily along all the way through.

The libretto plods along heavily, too, and on a first hearing seems to consist of dialogue sections that should have been tightened for musicalization but weren’t, punctuated here and there by sections meant for set pieces written in clumsy rhymed couplets.

As I write this, I catch myself tending to idealize Our Town in my mind, to go beyond “you know, the opera doesn’t handle this element of the story well” to “oh, this was sooooooo good in the play!” Actually, while I like Our Town okay, it’s not a big favorite of mine and I wouldn’t go very far out of my way just to see it. But that’s what happens in the audience’s heads when you adapt something with that kind of iconic stature in the culture. There’s something in our brains that makes us unconsciously defend and glorify our icons, even if we never gave them much thought before they were challenged.

I have been extremely busy for several months and also as a result very tired in my limited spare time, and now I am way backed up on things I should have been blogging about as they happened.

Most important is to get the word out on things that are still around and won’t be for all that much longer. So.

On July 4 Dave and I saw the first preview of Shaw’s Man and Superman at Cal Shakespeare. Wonderful production, lovely weather, all in all a terrific evening. I was surprised and grateful to discover on reading the program that they were going to do what I would have thought to be impossible: include the “Don Juan in Hell” sequence and get us out of there in time to catch BART.

Man and Superman, like so many of Shaw’s middling late plays, is overstuffed with philosophical talk and also very long. Performed without cuts, the play can easily run four, four and a half hours — while we were waiting for the show to begin last night, the man sitting to my right was saying to me that the last time he had seen it, they had even done it with a dinner break between acts two and three.

In the third act, stuck in Spain during a motor trip from London to Nice, Jack Tanner has a dream in which he is Don Juan Tenorio, some time after he has been dragged to Hell. It’s a long and talky dream sequence, full of philosophical musings on the true nature of Heaven and Hell and other matters, and as much fun the play of ideas is, the overall story of the play is certainly coherent without it, so the play is often cut down to more manageable size by simply cutting this sequence. In the only production I’ve seen before this one, that’s what was done. And to make up for cutting such a wonderful sequence from the full play, the dream sequence by itself is sometimes performed as a one-act play under the name “Don Juan in Hell”.

That’s an easy but unsatisfying solution, shortening the play by cutting one of its most distinctive and colorful features, rather like the Japanese television station that is said to have shortened The Sound of Music for broadcast by cutting all the songs. So I’m happy to say that in this production they manage to include “Don Juan in Hell” and still keep things down to three hours and a quarter by (a) a lot of skillful trimming and condensing of the text all the way through, (b) having only one 15-minute intermission, and (c) having everyone speak their lines at a pretty brisk clip.

The production is terrific. The set and costumes are witty and delightful and uncomplicated. One beef: I know that the anachronisms in the philosophizing are part of the fun of the dream sequence, but I could have done without the Devil rolling in the drinks cart, mostly because the audience guffawed so loudly at the sight of Doña Ana opening up a can of Tab that it completely drowned out her line; but it was a first preview after all and maybe by opening night they figured out how to keep that from happening. And overall it’s a beautiful production visually.

The acting is terrific all around. Elijah Alexander is particularly remarkable as Jack Tanner/Don Juan, because just memorizing so many long speeches and being able to speak them so quickly and yet intelligibly and convincingly all by itself would have been quite a dazzling feat of technical skill, so that the fact that he gave such a dashing and delicious and funny performance at the same time is gravy. Peter Callender, whom Dave and I last saw giving a magnificently intense and angry performance in Permanent Collection at the Aurora, looked like he was having a lot of fun playing an intense and angry man for laughs this time around in the character of the wealthy Roebuck Ramsden. Susannah Livingston was terrific as the sweetly manipulative Ann Whitefield, but didn’t seem as well grounded in her character when she was playing Doña Ana in the dream, I’m not really sure why. Maybe the nerves of the first performance.

Anyway, it’s a production worth remembering and savoring and Dave and I are hoping to get back for another performance.

Dave and I saw a preview of After the War at A.C.T. last night. The ensemble is absolutely terrific, the set steals the show more than once, but the play itself is dour, earnest, slight, and longwinded. It has something of the feel of what you’d get if you took a slice-of-life play like Juno and the Paycock and muted both the comedy and the tragedy way, way, way down. All is enveloped in permanent twilight, mood-wise.

Despite the many characters living together in the boarding house, the playwright doesn’t have much of a story, and yet it takes him two long acts, three hours in all, to tell it. For a while, I was interested in getting to know the characters, who are a colorful and extremely varied bunch. But an hour and a half later, at the end of the first act, the lights went up and I was still waiting for a story to begin.

(The last scene of the first act has the characters gathering to watch Perry Como on a new television set, which is more than a little reminiscent of the gramophone scene in Juno and the Paycock. But, unlike Juno, the scene is not used to make much of a point about the characters, nor does it lead anywhere in terms of story.)

The story doesn’t get around to beginning, not really, in the second act either. What little dramatic tension there is has mostly to do with who is currently or was formerly sleeping with whom in the boarding house, and who knows and doesn’t know about it. When the various secrets come to light, though, nothing much comes of them. The playwright seems to deliberately shy away from anything that might smack of dramatic conflict or action. He’ll spend a scene building up to the moment when one character finally confronts another with what he or she knows, and then the confrontation comes, and there are maybe two or three short lines and a blackout. Say what? The scene changes take longer than most of the conflicts. Which is maybe only fair, as they are also a lot more interesting to watch. But conflict is the bread and butter of drama, and these ought to be the most important and interesting and crucial scenes in the play. Yet the playwright just tosses them away, over and over again.

It’s not that this isn’t a common enough way of doing things in plays, God knows. It was typical of a lot of mainstream American playwrighting style for a lot of the first half of the 20th century. But it’s hugely unsatisfying. Thing is, if the playwright spends some time early in the play getting the audience interested in the fact that there’s this latent instability in the situation, investing emotional importance into whatever this ticking bomb is that could go off and disrupt things for the characters in a significant way, then, when the bomb is made to go off and it just sputters and fizzles out, it only tells us that the situation was never really worth our concern in the first place, that we have just been wasting our time thinking there was anything going that might matter to the characters. Of course, real life is like that sometimes, but a play isn’t real life, a play is a carefully constructed presentation designed to communicate some sort of view of real life. Quite a different thing. The playwright has had all the time in the world to decide where to direct your attention, and if he or she has done it by implying that this something is vitally important to these characters that you’re being led to care about, and then he or she shows you later that what was presented as being important to these characters isn’t important to them after all — then you’ve been led on a wild goose chase, and rather pointlessly.

What dramatic climaxes there are in the second act seem to occur when characters reach the point of arguing about who has been the most downtrodden by life, whose personal history constitutes the heaviest burden. This is the kind of play where at a climactic moment someone actually shouts, “Your shame! What about my shame!” (I commented on this to Dave afterward, and he said the line that stuck in his memory was, “Because it matters! Because it has to matter!” An awful lot of the dialogue in the second act is like that.)

The most passionate conflict in the play occurs in the second act when a Japanese-American man and a black man, who have been good friends up to this point, quarrel bitterly about whether the mistreatment by America of the Japanese-American man, who spent three years in the worst of the internment camps during World War Two, is significant when compared with that of the black man. The fact that one of the two men is carrying a gun during much of the quarrel doesn’t do much to disguise the fact that these are less characters in a story than they are mouthpieces for opposing viewpoints in the debate the author wants to have with himself. The gun is never fired, nor does anyone so much as threaten to fire it. Nor does the debate come to any conclusion; the author has carefully constructed it, just as he has everything else in the play, so as not to lead to anything that might look like dramatic motion.

Well, that’s not quite true. At the end of the play — and stop me if you’ve heard this one — several of the characters leave the boarding house, suitcase in hand, their fates uncertain. Wandering off into the permanent twilight.

From today’s SFGate.com:

Why not take credit for all of a writer’s life?

“When writers Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice approached McAnuff with the idea for Jersey Boys, there was no script, just the idea. ‘I didn’t like it very much,’ McAnuff recalls by phone from San Diego, where he’s in rehearsals for Aaron Sorkin’s new play, The Farnsworth Invention, at the La Jolla Playhouse. ‘Marshall and Rick were very gracious about the rejection. And even after I turned them down twice, they were very persistent. So we came up with the outline together. I helped them with the structure.’ (“Jersey Girls are quick on their feet,” Feb. 14)

We can finally put to rest any lingering doubts about who is responsible for the success of our little offering, Jersey Boys, currently at the Curran Theatre. It is, of course, the director. Le spectacle, c’est lui. I see him now, goose quill in hand, fingers raw, eyes bloodshot from his tireless restructuring of our 72-page “idea.”

Would that I had known him years ago so he could have restructured the screenplays for Sleeper and Annie Hall and Manhattan and Simon and Lovesick and The Manhattan Project — they might have won awards and gained some critical acclaim. Or instructed William Shawn in the proper restructuring of my New Yorker pieces.

But I was naive then and didn’t know enough to be persistent. Twice we offered him the crown and twice he refused it, it says. Sheer modesty. We offered it to him 139 times. Only after we doused ourselves with gasoline and lit a match did he agree to interrupt his restructuring of the book for Dracula, the Musical to heed our pleas and, as a bonus, instruct us in the niceties of the musical theater: how to arrive fashionably late, how to humiliate the cast, how to create an atmosphere of collegiality rivaled only by a board meeting at Hewlett-Packard, how to give interviews that, for sheer fantastic invention, rival anything out of Lewis Carroll.

But why be churlish? I owe the man. He wrote our show, ate my dinner, married my wife and fathered my children. For all I know, he may have even written this letter.

MARSHALL BRICKMAN
co-author of Jersey Boys
New York City

Dave and I saw Farm Boys at the New Conservatory Theater one more time last Sunday. It plays for one more weekend, last chance to catch it. The house was sadly far from full on Sunday afternoon (not uncommon for a play that’s extended its run — so much of the publicity has gone out with the old closing date that it’s hard to get the word out that the play is still running), so I feel the urge to do a little evangelism. Go see it. You can probably even get half-price tickets at Theater Bay Area or Goldstar, which will allow you to see it twice for the price of a regular ticket, and the play both benefits from and deserves being seen twice.

Even though, as I’ve said, I think there’s more elusiveness in the writing than is good for a play, Farm Boys has at its core a story that I found honest, moving, and poetic. It’s about a man going back to the place where he spent his unhappy childhood, about him facing up to the regrets of his past, about having to forgive himself for the angry young men he once was and most of all for the misunderstandings and hurts he caused without intending to, just from having been so armored against the world around him that he failed to recognize honest love when it was offered to him.

I grew up in the ‘burbs of Orange County, California, and not the farms of Colby, Wisconsin, but let’s just say it hasn’t been hard to see parallels.

This time around I was familiar enough with the play to pay more attention to its construction, both for good and for bad. Actually, in terms of dramatic technique, I found more to carp with than savor. Sometimes I wanted to stop the play and say, no, no, please listen to me, please don’t let your characters change the subject here, not yet, you’ve just got to let them express themselves more strongly so we know more clearly what’s in their hearts and not have to infer it gradually over the course of the play from all this roundabout suggestive hinting.

The great strength of the play is not its construction, but that all that roundabout suggestive hinting also contains much lovely and authentic and deeply moving poetic dialogue, and tells the story of a brief relationship between two men that is like none I can ever remember seeing or reading, yet rings (to my ear, anyway) very true. I know it doesn’t sound like much out of context, but I am going to be haunted for a good long time by the lines “How far did you run, John? Was it far enough?” They come at the climax of the play and I tear up just typing them and remembering the moment, the mixture of sweetness and painful regret they encompass.

The theatrical flair with which the play mixes realistic scenes, conversations with a ghost, soliloquys for the ghost in an afterworld that looks like a beach on Fire Island, and 20-year-old flashbacks, is stunning. The actors do an amazing job of switching modes in the blink of a lighting change.

Yet I also wish the writers had been more willing to signal to the audience early on what the scheme was. I understand the delight of letting your audience gradually figure out what’s going on over the course of the play, and I do remember the pleasure I felt the first time I saw it, when during the first speech in the second act it dawned on me what the beach was all about. But I think there would have been even greater pleasure in being able to appreciate the subtle magic in the first act more fully without having to see the play a second time.

Given that anyone who decides to go after reading this is probably only going to get to see it once anyway, I feel like I want to give a few hints, hopefully not enough to spoil the pleasure of finding things out but just enough to help you keep your bearings through the play and appreciate more of it the first time around. So if you’re going to go see it and you hate even mild spoilers, stop reading here right now and skip to the next entry, because I’m about to give away a short list of

Things I Wish Were Made Clearer Earlier in the Play

1. As the play starts, Lyle has just died. The beach is his afterworld.
2. In addition to Lyle’s soliloquys on the beach, the play shifts — sometimes suddenly — between scenes in the present and memories of Lyle and John’s relationship 20 years in the past.
3. When Lyle is lit with yellow light, he is a ghost and the time is the present. The lighting changes when we flip into a memory.