Results tagged “sfist_reviews”

Some collaborations between Hollywood people and non-Hollywood artists yield magical results -- take Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' work on Where the Wild Things Are, for example -- but in the case of Erased James Franco, the hour-long art film made by the artist known as Carter with Hollywood actor James Franco occupying the central role, the results are confused, mundane, and borderline pretentious. Billed as a riff on Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (which is owned by the SFMOMA), the film is meant to be an "erased performance" in which Franco appears in a non-descript setting reading random lines from all of his previous work, including the Spiderman films and the TV show Freaks and Geeks (at the time of shooting, in June 2008, Milk had not yet been released). There are a few inspired moments in the piece, but they mostly involve performances not originally given by Franco, where he performs monologues from other films like Todd Haynes' Safe or John Frankenheimer's Seconds, which starred Rock Hudson -- we especially enjoyed a brief telephone conversation Franco has with Julianne Moore, with her words clipped from lines from Safe. But the majority of the film features long, labored shots of Franco writing on loose-leaf paper, waving his hands, drinking water, answering phones, moving a chair around, and walking in and out of a room.

The production currently playing on the thrust stage at Berkeley Rep -- while American Idiot finishes out its raucous pre-Broadway run in the Roda Theater -- is Tiny Kushner, a collection of one-act plays written by Angels in America scribe and Pulitzer-winner Tony Kushner. The plays were all written in the 90's and 00's and originally produced in this grouping by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Though they all bear some familiar Kushner-esque markings -- psychotherapy, fictionalized portrayals of real people, fantastical premises involving the afterlife, politicized critiques of the government -- they are relatively unconnected pieces and deserve to be discussed separately. So here goes, in brief:

What do you get when a liberal, obviously embittered playwright sets out amidst the second term of the second Bush Administration to write a political satire about a conservative, buffoon-ish, sitting president whose poll numbers rival "Ghandi's cholesterol numbers" and a lesbian speech writer who wants to marry her partner? You get "November," an already dated-feeling and minor play by the whip-smart David Mamet that plays for mostly cheap laughs and a handful of clever one-liners. [Spoiler alert: We're now going to reveal several of the play's plot points.]

Probably like many of you, we've always liked the idea of A Midsummer Night's Dream (and the title) more than the play itself -- at least what we remembered understanding about it from reading it in high school and watching the 1999 film with Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christian Bale and Calista Flockhart. Whether it's the whole invisible faerie-people interacting with humans thing, or the spells being cast that change peoples' personalities thing, or the Elizabethan English thing, it's a play that needs to be directed well to keep everything clear and entertaining to a modern audience. Suffice it to say, if you even remotely like this play or have never seen it performed, CalShakes' latest production is the one to see.

Theater fans may have heard about the 2008 Lincoln Center revival of South Pacific, which took home a bunch of Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Musical, Best Direction and Best Scenic Design. That production is now starting its national tour with a new cast, which kicked off this week at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, and we can see what at least some of the fuss was about over the original production. It's a grand tribute to mid-twentieth century American musicals and boisterously faithful to one of the favorite scores of the genre. And with all its glorification of the unsung heroes who waited out much of WWII on quiet islands in the South Pacific, it gives modern audiences a glimpse of the rabid, just-post-war nostalgia for wartime stories that American audiences had in the late 1940s and 50s.

Noël Coward may have died thirty-six years ago, but his work remains as adaptable and relevant as ever, as proven in the second Bay Area production of a Coward play this year -- after CalShakes' Private Lives this summer. This show is Brief Encounter at the A.C.T., which is actually the name of the 1945 movie made from Coward's 1939 play Still Life, which he considered to be one of his best. The production comes direct from London and originated with the Kneehigh Theatre Company in Cornwall, who got their start in 1980 doing experimental children's theater and hence the name "kneehigh." It's directed and brilliantly adapted by Emma Rice, who brings to the show an incredible freshness of vision, complete with a number of experimental touches and a host of Noël Coward-penned songs which serve as interludes between scenes and which were never part of the original play or film.

There probably hasn't been a true rock opera produced for the stage since "The Who's Tommy" -- "Rent" and "Spring Awakening" come from more pop traditions in our book and basically amount to musical theater scores with electric guitar on top -- but Green Day's "American Idiot," which just had its world premiere at Berkeley Rep, definitely qualifies. The music is urgent, driving, and loud. Whatever you feel about Green Day, there's a theatricality and consistent narrative element to their music that lends itself well to staging, and it's accomplished in this show with a lot of art and only a little of the cheesiness that many associate with musicals.

If you're a theater nerd, you might already know the most famous aspect of Samuel Beckett's two-person play Happy Days, which is currently being performed at the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda. This is the play with the woman buried up to her neck in dirt -- not to be confused with Endgame, which features two legless characters who live in trash cans -- and it's getting a rare and riveting staging here in the East Bay. Part dark-humored feminist allegory, part existentialist experiment, it takes balls to attack this play, both as director and performer.