Point Break LIVE!

by The Scene on April 14th, 2008

It’s been a theatrical trend of late to turn popular movies into plays.  Yes, Hairspray and The Producers were quite successful but we’re pretty sure that none of them are going to even be able to hold a candle to Point Break LIVE!  Yes, Point Break, the 1992 extreme-sports blockbuster where where the acting is a thick as the sexual tension between Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, is has it’s own stage adaptation.

In an effort to capture the “rawness” of Mr. Reeves’ performance,  the Johnny Utah character will be selected at random from the audience and will read the entire script off cue cards.

This being San Francisco, this show got its own holiday.

Tickets here. 

Tings Dey Happen

by The Scene on April 4th, 2008

Once in a blue moon, we see a play that just blows our fucking faces off. Dan Hoyle’s one-man show, Tings Dey Happen, currently playing at The Marsh is one of those shows. For the uninitiated, The Marsh is a space that mainly hosts and helps develop solo performances–and even though Tings fits the bill for a one-man show, it’s easy to forget that there’s only one person on stage.

The play is a the story of Hoyle’s experiences as a Fullbright scholar studying oil politics in Nigeria. The story is told though conversations with people he met during his travels, however we never hear Hoyle himself speak. Instead, Hoyle jumps from persona to persona of people talking to him. We never directly get his side of the story, but since Hoyle is, at first, an outsider and then gradually gains a kinship and understanding of the Nigerian people, his reactions become our reactions. His connections with (and impersonations of) characters like an intensely tortured guerrilla fighter, a crass, but well-meaning, American oil company contractor, are deep and multi-layered, a cynical and over-worked warlord, and a couple of philosphical storytellers who also happen to be drug dealers are multi-layered and engaging.

Not only is it entertaining, but if you want the real story of how oil, corruption, colonialism, apathy, and, most of all greed, have ravaged Nigeria, there’s no better place to go to find out.

Verdict: Go (What are you waiting for?  Get up off your ass and buy tickets; the show closes on 4/19)

The Government Inspector

by The Scene on March 27th, 2008

We headed over to A.C.T. for their premiere of Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector last night and, we must admit, we enjoyed ourselves.  We were a bit apprehensive going in because even though it’s a great script, a madcap farce about a small provincial town in pre-revolutionary Russia that is thrown into chaos when word comes that a high-ranking government official from the capital is headed in to secretly evaluate the towns government offices, we’ve had bad experciences with the director’s work in the past.  Carey Perloff, who is also the company’s Artistic Director, a number of years ago directed Tom Stoppard’s Invention of Love for the company and it was literally the worst thing we have ever seen.  In any format or genre.  It was worse than the novelization of Men in Black II; worse than the Wii game, The Ninjabread Man; worse than the time we were riding our bikes and saw a homeless lady screaming at the top of her lungs while masturbating at a bus stop.  It was much worse than all of those combined.  We still have nightmares about being trapped in the theatre for nearly three hours thinking, “how the fuck could they make Oscar Wilde the most boring fucking character in the history of everything?”.  It scarred us for life.  You can see why we might have been a little apprehensive going in.

But, all in all, the play was pretty decent.  There’s a pretty high level of madcap silliness, the local magistrate raises geese in the courthouse and there’s a pratfall about every three minutes.  The broad physcial comedy worked uniformly better than the banter, which made us think that either the translation of the script could have been better or timing was a bit off.  If the problem was the latter, we’re pretty sure it’ll get better deeper into the show’s run.

Our biggest problem with the show was that, at times, it dragged.  Interestingly, the more people there were onstage, the less this problem was evident.  A light comedy like this needs to be snappy - the audience should never be able to catch their breath - and this most decidedly wasn’t.  There we’re non-comedic pauses you could drive a truck through.

That being said, there were some standout performances.  Gregory Wallace, who plays the charlatan the townspeople mistake for the real government inspector is a non-stop bundle of energy and Geoff Hoyle, who delivered one of the greatest performances we’ve ever seen when he guest-hosted Teatro ZinZanni, was a riot every time he stepped on stage.

Verdict: Go (but give it like a week or two until they iron the kinks out)

June In A Bit Of A Mess

by The Scene on March 21st, 2008

In 1934, a young girl, June Robles, was kidnapped in Tucson, Arizona.  She was held in a box for 19 days and then, without explanation, a letter was sent to the authorities telling them where to find her body buried.  Miraculously, when they dug up the box in which she had been trapped, she was still breathing and without a scratch on her.  Playwright Octavio Solis takes this mysterious tale as his jumping off point for his world premiere new musical, June In A Box, now playing at Intersection For The Arts.  June, now an old woman, is transported back to time she spent trapped in the box all those years ago and tries to make sense of what happened to her – why, after all these years, she feels like she never really made it out of the box. 

With original songs composed by local jane-of-all-trades, Beth Custer, the play attempts to strike a balance between the documentary naturalism of June’s situation and the impressionistic flourishes of the astral-projection time travel, the human/coyote hybrid nature of June’s kidnappers, and all the songs.  Unfortunately, most of the time the play has a lot of trouble finding the sweet spot and instead collapses into a pool of melodrama.  It has its moments but, more than anything else, it feels messy and unfinished; as friend of ours put it, “more interesting than good.”  Beth Custer, who does everything from classical to trip-hop, does a good job with the music.  The songs themselves aren’t great, but the background music gives the proceedings much-needed tension. 

Verdict: Go (but don’t expect the world)

Waiting for Stephen Colbert

by The Scene on March 20th, 2008

We went over to the opening of Will Eno’s world premiere new play, Tragedy: a Tragedy, at Berkeley Rep last night and it was pretty good.  Berkeley Rep has been billing Eno as “Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation” and, to our ears, that rings about right. 

Imagine this: it’s the act break in the middle of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  The messenger boy has just told Vladimir and Estragon that Godot isn’t coming today and they all go home, or wherever, for the evening, leaving nothing but an empty space filled with the night.  Now, what is the Channel 3 local news team rushed in a started doing an up-to-the-minute breaking news coverage of the night, which has just fallen.  Tragedy is the story of that news team quickly falling into an void of absurd and existential terror.  Much like in Beckett’s masterpiece, nothing technically “happens” but the fun part here is watching just exactly how nothing happens.

In Godot, there’s a resignation in all the waiting, but here, since the characters are also on TV, that resignation is often replaced by pure heartbreaking terror.  Luckily, that pure heartbreaking terror is really really funny.  Eno loves words and some of the best lines in the play comes when he’s playing word games.  Puns abound.  Words are defined and redefined, almost always recursively.  The play’s best line: “Once my uncle gave me a dictionary for my birthday.  I hated it.  I thought it was the long, sad, confusing story of everything.”

That said, it’s nowhere near a perfect play.  It kind of runs out of steam with about 15 minutes to go and, even though it only runs 70 minutes, it still could have used some cutting.  Even so, director Les Waters did an excellent job working with what has to have been one hell of an unwieldy script.

Verdict: Go (although it wouldn’t hurt to get a little high first but, you know, only a little).

Jukebox Stories

by The Scene on March 7th, 2008

We headed over the Impact Theatre, which is conveniently located in the basement of the Berkeley pizza parlor, yesterday evening and saw Jukebox Stories: The Curse of the Creamy Foam and we have to say that were mightily impressed.

Jukebox Stories is a collaboration between storyteller/playwright/blogger Prince Gomolvilas and singer/songwriter Brandon Patton and takes the form of a slightly post-modern revue where Prince would tell a story or do a monologue and then Brandon would sing a song. Some of the stories and songs were chosen at random by audience members and some, well, Prince and Brandon made doubly sure they got in. Like Prince’s story about how he wrote a an essay for AOL about the level of gayness of High School Musical 2 (”on a scale of 0 to gay, it’s off the charts”) that caused a firestorm of controversy. Apparently, the meanest thing you could ever do to a 13 year old girl is to suggest that Zac Efron might be more than casual acquantences with Dorothy. Dude is hilarious. Brandon is no slouch either. He is easily one of the most inventive acoustic guitar players we have ever had the pleasure of watching work. He’s a good songwriter too, don’t get us wrong, seamlessly switching back and forth between goofy humor and heartfelt emotional heft the way he does is no easy feat, but some of the stuff he did on that acoustic we ain’t seen nobody do before.

The set is dressed up to look like someone’s college dorm room, or someone’s first “on their own” apartment. You can imagine that if you went into the bathroom the roll of toilet paper would be sitting on top of the toilet and not in the toilet paper holder (if you catch our drift). The effect is the creation of an intimate atmosphere where the line between the audience and the performers is intentionally blurred. There are contests, we were the lucky winners of a box of Darjeeling Limited promotional tea bags, and a couple musicians, from a band called Paper Mache that Prince and Brandon has discovered at an open mike night played a couple songs. Laid back, unpretentious and fun.

Jukebox Stories: Curse of the Creamy Foam runs at the La Val’s Subterranean Theatre in Berkeley until 3/22.