Writer Daniel Handler, best known for his children's books under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket, was scribbling ideas after the death of his father, ideas and characters that would ultimately coalesce into his first play for adults Imaginary Comforts, or the Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit. True to form with some of Handler's earlier work, including 2010's The Composer Is Dead — done with the help of elaborate puppetry at Berkeley Rep — there is a delight in the absurd that runs through the play, as well as compassion for its characters, however they may be flawed. And in tackling adult ideas of loss, loneliness, addiction, self-medication, and delusion, Handler has given us a compelling, often funny, non-linear play, the biggest shortcoming of which may be that all its complicated threads and characters get fixed and tied up a bit too tidily.

The play centers on a female rabbi, Rabbi Naomi (Marilee Talkington), and an emotionally damaged but sincere man she meets on an internet date, Clovis (Michael Goorjian). Clovis chose to meet Rabbi Naomi for coffee because he thought her profile said she was a "rabbit," and he has a peculiar obsession with rabbits that we will ultimately come to learn arises out of a gruesome fairy tale that was told to him by a therapist.

With Beckett-esque minimalism and repetition, and a clever non-linear structure, Imaginary Comforts tours us through the psyches of these protagonists, as well as that of a woman, Sarah (Susan Lynskey), who hires Naomi to preside over her father's funeral — whose father turns out, perhaps too coincidentally, to be Clovis's therapist — and a man whom Clovis met in AA, known only in the program as "Ghost" (played by always funny Danny Scheie, who gets to show off some nuance and pathos in this role) whom he convinces to help act out this absurd story of a rabbit betrayed and killed by a man to whom he gave a child. (Hear more about this from the cast in the video below.)

Suffice it to say, Naomi does a terrible job with the funeral, in part because she doesn't grasp the importance of storytelling, and Clovis is not a particularly good playwright, though not for lack of trying. They, much like Sarah and the Ghost, are all grasping for meaning and solace in a secular and often brutal world, and that's where booze often comes in. Clovis, Sarah, and the Ghost are all alcoholics, as is Sarah's husband Michael (Cassidy Brown), whom we're told she married in Vegas on a bender, kept him around to please her father, and whom she will quickly break up with after the funeral.

Some of the best lines in the play are given to Sarah and to Scheie's character — who at one point says he gave up on sobriety and boring talking in circles of chairs because he'd rather "have a show," and that lately, "I don't even need the show anymore, just one really good line." (I'm paraphrasing.) And Bay Area actress Sharon Lockwood, who plays Mrs. Gold, is delightful if a bit underused in a role that literally consists of crying, laughing hysterically, and annunciating only a single word.

The ideas about the real or imagined comforts of stories and storytelling, no matter how grisly, didactic, or baffling — all of which, as well as a number of funny lines, get summed as basically "the history of the Jewish people," in a running joke throughout the play — are where Handler's play succeeds the most. He has, after all, proved a master of telling stories that delight, scare, and enthrall children.

It's hard to empathize with any of these characters, though, except in a few moments with Scheie's Ghost, because Handler has painted them all a bit flatly — they are types, and as in some Beckett plays, just vehicles for his words more than well drawn people. Also, and perhaps this is a common pitfall of first-time playwrights, loose ends and the allure of unresolved questions are both eschewed in favor of a couple tidy twists at the end that tie things up more neatly than they needed to be tied — I'll just say that a romantic interest for Rabbi Naomi seems neither plausible, necessary, nor the perfect balm for her restless soul that the play tells us it is.

I also left feeling curious as to whether Handler was simply trying to illustrate an easy moral like "addiction is unhealthy," but he says in an interview that he's simply "interested in the mechanisms by which people attempt to fix their own lives" and "interested in the strict regimen that some people go through in order to improve their lives." Those ideas remain largely unexplored, however, and we're instead left with two sober characters who are supposedly "saved" by that sobriety, and one who relapses who may be just fine as well.

The spinning, circular, modular set design by Todd Rosenthal perfectly embodies the time-shifting movement from scene to scene, and Tony Taccone's direction is brisk and comical in all the right ways. I only wish I could have spent a bit more time in these clever characters' heads, or hearing words that felt less calculated coming from their hearts, even if it meant a play that didn't wrap up in a quick 90 minutes with no intermission.

'Imaginary Comforts' plays through November 19. Find tickets here.

Scroll below for two classical music reviews from the past weekend: Traviata at SF Opera and Echoes with the Kronos Quartet.

This season, Operatronica will blend exactly what its ungainly portmanteau says it does: operatic arias and electronic dance music in a nightclub, Mezzanine, this Thursday at 9 p.m. (doors open at 8 p.m.). Taking classical music out of the concert hall and into unlikely venues has proven quite successful. That's the blueprint of Mercury Soul, an event that was held at Mezzanine in its first iteration; or of Soundbox, in a rehearsal space turned into a lounge with a liquor license. In the case of Operatronica, the singers and their Steinway will croon operatic arias in between dance sets, or is it the other way around?

This event is set up by the SF Opera Lab and the performers will all be Adler Fellows. These are the recipients of a year long contract from SF Opera for young artists, singers, stage directors and accompanists. They get to cover the roles of the main characters here, while on the stage of the War Memorial Opera House they fill in the smaller roles of these productions as they polish their craft. It's a launchpad/incubator for an operatic career. Bass Anthony Reed and stage director Aria Umezawa will co-host the event. Reed's electronic cred is unimpeachable: he create some of his own music as part of the duo Roehn. He has a genial personality as an MC, which you can enjoy on his weekly vlog. That's in addition to his role of Dr Grenvil in the current Traviata. I talked to him on the phone last week.

SFist: How would you describe Operatronica?

Anthony Reed: The whole pop-up series for Opera Lab is done through a grant from Opera America for innovative ways to get reach new audiences in different ways. And this pop-up series is one of these ways. We have done a couple of events before at bars and clubs but this is the first one where the purpose is to marry opera music with electronic music or at least find similarities between the two.

I was asked to do this by Sean Waugh in the artistic department who is the curator of this series and he asked Aria Umezawa, who is the director Adler fellow, to host. And they both asked me to do it because of my background in electronic music. I've created a vlog series recently, and they wanted me to document the process of an event like this.

I've been an Adler for three years. These pop-up events started during my first year, and I've done five so far. I've been a part of these as a performer before, but never as a host/MC. Aria and I are programming the entire event, and we are coordinating between the two DJs. It's the first time I've been involved at this level.

The doors open at 8 p.m.and the DJs play until 9 p.m., at which point I will kick the evening off with an aria. Then we will have about a thirty minute set of opera arias and then a twenty minute DJ set and another 30-minute set of opera music, and the rest of the night will be DJs. The DJ will be sampling some aria excerpts into their sets, and we are experimenting a little bit with vocal modifications with microphones to blend the two.

Singers will be accompanied by a live, acoustic piano. It will be the standard piano/singer format except because it's a big venue, and people will be ordering drinks, we will use microphones for the event. There are other occasions where we are going to try to collaborate between singers and DJ a little bit. But I don't want to give away too much.

We are using all the Adler fellows for the event, which is the first time the Opera Lab has used all of them. Two pianists, a director, and nine singers. It will be a lot freer than recital format, and instead of having supertitles, we have created what we are calling super-memes on a projection throughout the venue, that have a lose translation of what people are singing about.

I will be singing La Calunnia from Barber of Seville. For the arias, we wanted something that would be either uptempo, or something rhythmical, with a beat, something that was maybe minimalist in the sense that pop music repeats itself. We wanted to find similarity in the form between the two genres. That was the context. We chose "La Calunnia," "Je veux vivre" from Gounod's Romeo and Juliet, the three tenors on the program will sing "Nessun Dorma," and "Le veau d'or." There will also be a four-hands piano version of "Danse Bohème," and Pene Pati will be singing a cover of "Valerie" with the ukulele. Is it originally an Amy Winehouse song, or was it made famous by Amy Winehouse? We are working out if I can possibly sing one of my original compositions, which is an electronic piece of music, more like pop than opera.

The DJs are part of a collective called Loves Company. It's two DJs from there, Leo Lipsztein and Dan Gahr. One of them has DJ'd a couple of the other events, and I know personally the other DJ through friends. They don't do typical EDM, like what you think of Coachella or Electric Daisy Carnival, they don't do that. They do a more forward-thinking boundary-pushing electronic music, harmonically. They will not play popular music. They won't play the Top 40 hits. They really create the tracks that will work best with one another through more underground electronic music.

EDM does not strike me has harmonically complex.

When you say EDM what comes to mind is not what they do. The same way if I said pop music and you immediately think of Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, when pop music can also mean Frank Sinatra or Bon Iver. EDM is a larger genre than Zedd or Calvin Harris. That's what you are thinking of as harmonically simple. Of the EDM DJs, Leo and Dan have the ability to find the similarities between electronic music and classical music. They have such a broad palette of electronic music to choose from. We are really trying to show people that opera is not a museum piece, that there are similarities with the music that people might listen to in a car or in a club. Both have a place in modern life.

When you mention Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, what do you think of their vocal ability? Don't you think: hey, I can do better!

I have a couple different minds about this. One is that the expectation for singers now needs to better. When autotune came out, it was used as a crutch, and it created images where pop star didn't have to sing but just be an all-around entertainer. The expectation now is that the singers have to sing like Beyonce and Adele. Arianna Grande is a phenomenal singer. I don't necessarily get bogged down on their technique. What is important is they are able to communicate something, and they can do that with pop music on a mass scale, they are doing a great job. Music is an important part of life.

Operatic singers always have to emphasize the consonants, pop stars never do that!

I think that comes to a difference in style between opera and whatever genre of pop. In opera, we are an acoustic instrument that has to project over an orchestra without amplification. In order to be understood, you have to use consonants loudly. The initial and final have to be clear in order to impart the information with the audience. In pop music, people might hear it on replay ten times in a row, by the end they know the lyric, it's not as important. It's something that I thought about in my own pop writing. If you listen to "Work," by Rihanna, you can't hear the lyrics, I had to look them up.

Did you go to Mercury Soul? The first one was at Mezzanine. Did you talk to Mason Bates, who co-organized it?

I think it's going to be similar to that in a way. It has the two different sets, the DJ and the classical music portion. I think this is going to be more interactive with the audience. I'm hosting the event, there's going to be a conversation with the audience. We pull in the audience in a different way that Mercury Soul does.

Mason just a wrote an opera, and I saw that in Santa Fe and it was very good and San Francisco Opera will be putting it on too. The music is not that far from each other. That's what Mason Bates and Mercury Soul do so well.

What type of music do you write?

The music that I write is more along the line of popular music you hear on the radio, Top 40, with an EDM and also folk flair. I work with a partner in Philadelphia, which is where I went to grad school. It's in a duo that I call Roehn with Adam Pangburn. It's just mostly fun stuff for us to do. We get to write music and create. He has a Master's degree in clarinet performance and I have a Master's degree in opera. We take our classical training and put a twist on the popular music we like to listen to.

You are in your third year and final year of Adler fellow, so what's next?

Basses play fathers, grandfathers, demons, kings, gods, the wise characters or the profound characters. I'm covering Timur in Turandot. I'm also working on the bass solos for Haydn's Creation which I'll be singing with the Nashville Symphony in November.

The Adler year starts at the beginning of January, and ends with the Adler Gala concert or, for me, the final performance of Turandot. After that, I'm on my own so to speak. I've been singing for some managers and will be doing auditions and competitions. Basses play old guys and I'm a youthful looking 28. It's about waiting for my skin to age and hopefully my voice will get richer and I'll become more believable in those old guys part.

We had to reschedule this chat away from the afternoon prior to your performance of Traviata. Doesn't Dr. Grenvil come in only in Act III after it's too late? What's your routine before a performance?

Dr. Grenvil comes in the opening scene, he has a lot of chorus music to sing. I sing in Act I, and Act II scene 2, and then I got my four solo lines in Act III. I wanted to make sure I have time to go to the gym and warm up. And I have to edit some video footage for my vlog. I try to get my body warmed up before my voice, because it's much easier to sing after my body has blood flowing, it's hydrated, stretched out. So I go to the gym and then I warm up throughout the day, make sure I have coffee.

I try to avoid having too many singerisms, the cliche things that singers do to get ready for a show. Some things that people do to get ready are so crazy, and if it works once then you can get stuck with it for the rest of your life. You develop an almost compulsion, and I try to avoid those as much as possible. I try to live my life and trust my voice. Some people will avoid milk, some people won't exercise the day of a performance, some people steam their voice with a steamer in the shower, some eat very specific foods. The more crutches you rely on to help you sing, the crazier you will be when you're unable to do these things. They're almost like rituals that people do beforehand to be completely ready. It's a placebo effect in my opinion. I try to require as little as possible.

'La Traviata' at SF Opera: Maestro Nicola Luisotti has announced this would be his last as a music director for the SF Opera, and the run of Verdi's La Traviata, currently ongoing at the War Memorial Opera House, concludes his tenure. The season is far from over, but he is not conducting the upcoming Manon nor Girls of the Golden West, and former music director Donald Runnicles is returning for this Summer's Ring Cycle. Like Runnicles, Luisotti will be back. And he must, if he can lead again the orchestra as he did in a spellbinding Traviata. Of all his performances that I attended during his eight year run, this ranked as the best. It helped that he had the most perfect Violetta (the "fallen woman" of the title) he could hope for. With a cast of relatively unknowns around here, the three main characters making their San Francisco opera debut, Luisotti led an incandescent performance.

Quick recap: Violetta is a former escort who fell in love and moved in with Alfredo Germont. His dad asks her to quit his son to preserve the family's honor. From the overture, to which Luisotti gave a waltzy lilt despite being in common time, he was in full control of the nuances of the score. He underlined the beginning of E strano with an ominous bass line as Violetta realizes she's in love. "Uh oh, not so fast," the orchestra said. And the orchestra returned to that ominous tone in the couple bars that introduces daddy Germont's arrival in Act II. When he implores her to lie to her dear Alfredo that she's not in love with him, the next phrase is an accented orchestral response that all but blurted "what?" When she does remind Alfredo, prior to leaving him, to love her as she loved him, the soprano melody features long, almost calm notes, but the orchestra echoes underneath with a galloping heartbeat full of dismay. Every time, Luisotti shaped the orchestral language into a clear meaning; and he gave his singers free rein to excel, never overwhelming them despite having his own instrumental story to tell and threading the needle between leading and following them.

Violetta's crib in Act I of Traviata. Not too shabby.

In the role of Violetta, Aurelia Florian makes a revelatory US debut. My money is on her returning soon and often. She has sung Violetta all over Europe, she is supposed to be good at it. But no one is supposed to be that excellent. She started the evening with a voice as crystalline and sparkling as the cup of champagne she was holding. She gracefully somersaulted through the high hurdles of Sempre Libera, her big showpiece that ends Act I. In Act II, her voice became more weighty, more dramatic. Accepting Germont's request to leave Alfredo, she could literally sing in such a perfectly measured whisper that the audience straightened forward in their seat to not miss a note, even though each one was a droplet of Violetta's pain. Her dramatic final agony brought tears running down, and she never oversold it, her acting always spot on. It was a tremendous performance.

She was surrounded by excellent counterparts. Atalla Ayan (Alfredo) has a warm, tender tenor. His a capella duet with Violetta in the first Act was imbued of such overflowing sensuality by both of them, it was somewhere in the range between sexy and explicit. Baritone Artur Rucinski (Giorgio Germont) has his own aria about love, but of the paternal kind. He consoles Alfredo in Act II after Violetta left, and his voice is a soothing balm, deep, rich and comforting. Parents who tended crying babies could immediately identify the tone with which he colored that aria. When later, his son insults Violetta, he found a righteous and raw emotion in scolding his son for dishonoring a woman. The only faux pas of his performance was one of stage directions: he looks at his pocket watch when Violetta warns him she will die of sorrow without Alfredo. I get it, he is not believing her, or he would have second thoughts. But the gesture seemed out of character.

The staging doesn't make itself noticed otherwise, aside from trying a bit too hard to elicit a laugh in the party at Flora's. The chorus (excellent, as always) flows in and out seamlessly. The same goes with the sets: they are elaborate, fancy Parisian and country homes, and they are mostly functional. The singers draw all the attention, and deservedly so. The Adler fellows (and some former ones) compose most of the supporting roles, and Amina Edris and Anthony Reed as Annina and Grenvil respectively get their couple lines to shine.

Kronos Quartet (from left to right, David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, Sunny Yang) in action before Echoes, a spoken word performance in partnership with Youth Speaks and The Living Earth Show

'Echoes,' with Kronos Quartet: Kronos Quartet has been pushing the boundaries of what a string quartet should be for over 40 years. On Saturday night, they were hosted by SF Performances for the world premiere Echoes, a collaboration with Youth Speaks and The Living Earth Show. Youth Speaks is a non-profit dedicated to help young people express themselves through poetry, and most importantly in public. They organize some Teen Poetry Slams, and this show was the distillated essence of such an event: young poets declaiming their words on the stage of Herbst Theater for about an hour with a soundtrack written by Danny Clay and performed by Kronos and The Living Earth Show (Andy Meyerson on percussion and Travis Andrews on electric guitar).

The texts focused on this City of ours, and alternated between declaration of love and vignette of life happening on the streets and in the projects and on MUNI. Unfortunately, they were not included in the program, so the words were fleeting and ephemeral, and I probably can't do justice to them. Many lamented violence and the disappeared, and the echoes of the title were in part brought up by the memory of the ghosts of young victims. I paraphrase, but they gave their lives so we could make this place better. The young speakers, Gabriel Cortez, Aimee Suzara, A.M. Smiley, Michael Wayne Turner III, and Tassiana Willis in the double role of poet and singer, each took turn bringing their words to life, all with a poise and assurance that was far beyond their years. These guys were old hands at jumping up and down the stage in and out of the spotlight. It was impressive to witness.

Youth Speaks' Michael Wayne Turner III. Photo: Christian Jessen for SF Performances.

The music was a soundtrack to their words, and it's luxury casting to have Kronos provide such accompaniment. Before the show even started, the quartet was playing a repeated loop with an eerie intensity. No one was taking a bar off, even though the music was simple and cyclical at this point. Composed by Danny Clay and including some bits of MUNI noise, it provided background moods to the text, mostly alternating between a languished melancholy with the string quartet and vibraphone, and a righteous anger, where the electric guitar and the drum set of The Living Earth Show would provide a hard-driving rock beat. The string parts were always in sync, except in a lovely moment where three of the members would lift their bows, living only one echo trailing behind, first the viola, then the 2nd violin, etc. I wish there were a few more such lovely surprises, but the point was to not distract from the impressive youth speaking, and that goal was more than met.

The documentary is a love letter to the outdated — be it typewriters, thank you notes, mom and pop repair shops, or creativity that doesn't start with turning on a computer first.

Director Doug Nichol centers the film on an African-American owned shop in Berkeley called California Typewriter. Owner Herbert L. Permillion III, who worked for IBM for 20 years, opened the store in 1981 and has kept it running, with the help of his two daughters and repairman Ken Alexander, through the rise of home computers, smart phones, and tablets. After all, if turntables and vinyl can make a comeback, why not typewriters?

Several typewriter enthusiasts are also interviewed, though (maddeningly) none of them are identified in any way until the end credits. You'll likely recognize Tom Hanks, a collector with about 250 typewriters, who espouses the virtue of a typewritten "Thank You" note versus an email, something he'll routinely delete as quickly as the "seven seconds" it took to write and send. "Take 70 seconds to type me out something on a piece of paper and send it to me, well, I'll keep that forever," he says.

John Mayer, who never had to make the transition from typewriter to computer as he's not even 40, makes salient points about the built-in obsolescence of computers, and how all the material housed on all of our old hard drives is basically sitting in glorified garbage cans. Unless you printed that stuff out, it's as good as gone forever. So he bought probably one of the last new electric typewriters, and has taken to writing song lyrics with it, noting that there's nothing impeding his creative process — no spellcheck or blinking icon of distraction.

Writers Sam Shepard and David McCullough, neither of whom ever made the transition to tech, also talk about the typewriter's contribution to the writing process, with McCullough noting that without the visual proof of revisions, corrections, and changes, we're losing a valuable look into the thought processes of our creative thinkers and politicians. Shepard notes the tactile satisfaction of feeding paper into the typewriter and hearing and feeling those words slap onto the page.

We also meet a collector from Toronto who travels to San Francisco in hopes of purchasing one of the first typewriters made, based on original inventor Christopher Latham Sholes's design, and Oakland sculptor Jeremy Mayer, who uses typewriter parts — and ONLY typewriter parts — to craft figurative sculptures that include animal and human forms. To some, his work may seem blasphemous, but it's nice to see the symbiotic relationship he has with the California Typewriter shop. They give him the typewriters that are beyond redemption, and Mayer often ends up having a rare part the shop might need for a repair.

It's the scenes in that shop that are the film's most enjoyable. I wanted more of them. A tighter film could have been made with fewer segments on the enthusiasts and users (the Boston Typewriter Orchestra and Poetry Store poet Silvi Alcivar also make appearances) and more scenes showing the genuine love Permillion and Alexander have for their shop and their typewriters. It's infectious, and even a little thrilling watching their ingenious solutions to repairing items that have no replacement parts because, well, there are no replacement parts to be found.

When I was a kid, I had an old Smith Corona typewriter that weighed about 20 pounds, had an old ribbon that had been reused so many times it no longer typed in black but in muted grey, and whose keys had a tendency to stick together in certain combinations. But I loved typing on that thing. Sometimes I would type my own stuff, and sometimes I would just copy passages out of books, just because I liked typing; it made me feel smart.

Eventually I got an electric typewriter (a Panasonic) and I clung to that way into college. My friends had moved on to word processors and laptops (that also seemed to weigh about 20 pounds) by then, but I was convinced I wouldn't be able to write anything if the process didn't involve a first draft that was pen on paper, and a final draft that was typewritten. I'm not certain, but I think it was seeing how easy it was to edit something — removing and rearranging paragraphs and thoughts on the page — that eventually pushed me over to the dark side, and eventually I became convinced I couldn't write anything unless it was via computer.

But whenever I see a typewriter out in the wild — at a friend's, or a flea market — I can't resist going over and typing "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy hound dog" on it. I just love to hear the clack of the keys, and feel the reverberation of those letters hitting that paper. California Typewriter understands that love.

California Typewriter is currently playing at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco, and the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley.

The role of Hamlet is a holy-grail, bucket-list thing for many actors eager to prove they can command a stage for over three hours and convincingly deliver the many famous soliloquies of the brooding Danish prince. More than any other Shakespearean role, Hamlet is a test of virtuosity as well as endurance, with a character who oscillates between grief, cunning, humor, rage, love, vengeance, madness, and pathos, and back again, and again, in the play's long five acts. For actor John Douglas Thompson, the role has apparently always been something he wanted to tackle, with Othello, Antony, and Julius Caesar's Cassius already under his belt, and ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff — who is stepping down from the role after this, her final season — jumped at the chance to give Thompson a stage on which to play the tortured Dane.

ACT's Hamlet is well staged and adequately paced despite its typically daunting length — as written, the play would take over four hours to perform, and it's often cut down as it was here, in this case to three hours, not counting the intermission. And Perloff, as director, takes pleasure in teasing out the many moments of levity in Shakespeare's most complex tragedy. ACT veteran Dan Hiatt plays Polonius with plenty of bowtie-tweaking pompousness and farcical physical comedy; likewise does ACT company member Anthony Fusco, slightly miscast here as Horatio, bring his characteristic querying tone and amused skepticism to his role as Hamlet's closest confidant. And ACT company member Dominique Lozano is flippant and almost comically oblivious as Gertrude — almost too much so — until she's confronted by her son late in the play.

The versatile set design by David Israel Reynoso feels appropriately apocalyptic and industrial, and he uses a simple set of retractable sheer curtains to depict transitions between interior and exterior — Perloff says she wanted something inspired by places like Fukushima and Chernobyl, "places pitting the vulnerability of humanity against the toxicity of the world." The result is a soaring, foreboding set of concrete-textured walls, a fortress that doubles as an asylum, and an abandoned, contaminated nuclear power plant. (In keeping with that theme, they employ the sound of a Geiger counter every time the Ghost enters.)

Possibly the most powerful scene and most effective performance in the production comes in the second half, from Rivka Borek as Ophelia. The ACT MFA candidate is riveting as she portrays Ophelia's descent into madness, moreso than I've ever seen in a stage production — and Perloff's choice to have her don one of her dead father's suits and use a "bouquet" of his bowties for the famous monologue about rosemary and other herbs is an effective and clever one.

But coming back to Thompson's Hamlet: While he is eminently watchable and convincing during many moments in the play, using admirable restraint throughout the character's most well known soliloquies and his ultimate breakdown, I kept feeling distracted by one inescapable thing that is no fault of his. While tons of actors of all ages, many older than Thompson, have played this role for all the reasons I laid out above, I can't say I see it as a role that stands up to age-blind casting. Hamlet is a young prince, still in touch with college friends, prone to the fits of petulance, rage, and moral absolutism that one expects from a man in his twenties or early thirties (the text suggests the character is about 30, but possibly younger). Physically, too, this is a role that requires an actor to bounce, run, and jump all over the stage, and at 53 years old, Thompson is at best a capable Hamlet, just not always a believable one. Also, his voice came off as even slightly hoarse — perhaps just from rehearsing and performing the role in previews in recent days — which added to the distraction. As his father's ghost and his villainous uncle Claudius, Steven Anthony Jones does convincing work as Thompson's elder, but just given the fact that audiences most recently saw Thompson portraying a 70-year-old Louis Armstrong in Satchmo At The Waldorf, I feel like it shouldn't go unsaid that playing the 30-year-old Hamlet requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief.

Theatergoers new to Hamlet are still likely to enjoy this production, especially with the care that's given to highlighting Shakespeare's language, and the many, many turns of phrase that are now woven into English idiom, like "my mind's eye," "woe is me," and "heart of hearts" that originated with this important play. Also, Perloff and dramaturg Michael Paller stayed truer to Shakespeare's end for the play than many do when making cuts, ushering in Hamlet's foil, Fortinbras, prince of Norway, who gets the final words (though as usual, the subplot about Fortinbras avenging his own father's death through war gets a little bit lost in the shuffle of all the main characters getting killed).

Perloff says she pulled Hamlet off the shelf the day after last November's election, "longing to make sense of this altered world by reading something truly great," and she says she was "struck by the frightening resonance to our own time." As Polish theater critic Jan Kott has written, "Hamlet is like a sponge. It immediately absorbs all the problems of our time." This Hamlet does that and then some, in a contemporary fashion, though without any overt gestures — it's a Hamlet outside of time, loyal to the language and as natural sounding as it can be, and it's an auspicious beginning to Perloff's swan song.

'Hamlet' plays through October 15 at the Geary Theater. Find tickets here, or on the Today Tix app.

The New Century Chamber Orchestra opened its season with a new concertmaster, violinist Daniel Hope. The match would rank a 97% on OkCupid, if the orchestra's profile had checked: handsome, passionate, artistic, good listener who is not afraid to take the lead. There is a warning flag regarding fear of commitment for a long term relationship: Hope's title is artistic partner, and he is not assuming the mantle of artistic director. That position is vacant and the orchestra is still scouring other potential matches. They're dating with Hope (lower case too as well), but it's not monogamous. Hope is still involved in previous relationships as music director of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and associate artistic director of the Savannah Music Festival. Hope and the orchestra definitely have some lovely chemistry, which I observed on Sunday afternoon at the Bernie Osher JCC in San Rafael.

I knew of Hope, but read his profile, er, biographical notes in the program. He's no stranger to chamber music, having been part of the Beaux Arts trio for six years; he has played with most major orchestras, has commissioned over thirty works, and has personal relationships with quite an A-list of modern composers that includes Alfred Schnittke, Harrison Birtwistle, Sofia Gubaidulina, or György Kurtág. His recording of Max Richter's Vivaldi Recomposed has reached No. 1 in 22 countries and is, with 130,000 copies, one of the biggest recent classical hits. It is rather bittersweet praise, though, like being named employee of the month at Dairy Queen. Taylor Swift probably sells that many before breakfast. Hope's bio also mentions he has authored four best-selling books, with the Hasselhoff-ian qualifier: "published in Germany." He's a Brit, but he does live in Berlin.

The program in San Rafael (and in San Francisco and Berkeley earlier), in a charming auditorium with cabaret seating and friendly acoustics, bookended a world premiere commission of a violin concerto and a rare find, Orawa, by Wokciech Kilar, with two romantic evergreens. Kilar, who passed away in 2013, wrote the soundtrack for Bram Stoker's Dracula or The Pianist. He also wrote some concert music, including this rather enthralling piece. It opens with a minimalist aesthetic in the Philip Glass vein, and a slow propagation of short arpeggiated motifs. This builds up into a palimpsest of a folk dance recalling Béla Bartók. The two directions merged in an energetic rush and the orchestra gave it a potent forward momentum throughout. It's a great find.

The world premiere of the violin concerto by Alan Fletcher catered to the strengths of the orchestra. They conjured watery ripple textures in the outside movements, enhanced with an eerie breathiness. The second movement, based upon an old Swiss chorale, ran through variations that showed the range of the string ensemble: lush strings in one, pinpoint pizzicato in another, the sound of an organ in the next, or vehemently hacking away in yet another. Hope led the proceedings as the soloist, with a rich and colorful tone and he even took a few bar with his back to us to beat the time for an orchestra which prides itself on being conductor-less. Didn't he get the memo? He probably did not need to anyway, as the musicians listen to each other quite carefully. Even when Hope had returned in the ranks of the small orchestra in the other pieces, they have an uncanny synchronization no matter how fiendish the piece or the tempo.

Mendelssohn's Octet had be re-arranged for 18 musicians, a twist that brought out the symphonic writing of the piece. Mostly, each part seemed to have been tripled and the double bass added its depth here and there. The opening movement's first theme ends in a quicksilver fluttery flourish, and the agility of Hope combined with the synchronicity of the band were admirable. Even in the tutti bits, Hope's sound resonated brightly, standing out effortlessly. The fleet footed scherzo evoked mischievous fairies, with some eerie vibrant colors. The concert ended with Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings, a rich and lush dessert. Its music is as expansive as the piece ahead of it on the program, Orawa, was concentric. I could not help but admire the balance of the sound in the orchestra and wonder how can they achieve such precision without an external third party to hear it from the outside. Some theme is echoed back and forth between section, each phrased with just the proper intensity. The orchestra impressed with its serene composure in the most complex parts, or by its mimetic adjustments in the expressive rubatos of the waltz of the second movement. It was quite a feat, even though they should know their way through the Serenade quite well by now, it is such a mainstay of the chamber orchestra repertoire.

As an encore, a version of "America the Beautiful" provided an urgent and melancholy commentary on today's need for brotherhood, so sweetly that our neighbor had tears in her eyes.

A show that takes 24 hours to perform is by its very conception an act of love and sacrifice — though the cynics who refuse to see it may write it off as indulgent. Such was the full cycle of four six-hour performances by the brilliant Taylor Mac over the last week, and those with avid theater lovers in their Facebook feeds are probably already tired of hearing that A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music was "amazing" and "impossible to describe," as my friends surely are. But it is both of those things, and as I wrote after seeing Chapter II last Sunday, which covered the years 1836 to 1896, Mac's wit and passion shimmer throughout this thing, buoyed by the communal experience he creates around the performances themselves. No one is made is to sit through all of these six-hour chapters — just as they weren't sitting for many uninterrupted stretches during the single 24-hour performance Mac did in New York in October — but rather everyone is pretty much forced to periodically stand, participate, change seats, and/or come on stage and become a piece of the show.

It was, I think, even for Mac, special to be able to stage this show in a venue as grand and big as The Curran — he quipped during Friday's Chapter III, "They wouldn't let us do this show in a real theater in New York. They put the queers in the basement back there." But given the reception it's received, and the fact that the show is already booked for another set of six-hour performances at UCLA in March, Mac seems destined for ever bigger stages, whether it's with a different version of this project, or something new and less daunting of a commitment for theatergoers.

I wish I hadn't had that fear of my own stamina, though — and after all, haven't I been to dozens of music festivals that go on far longer than six hours, with far less of a life-affirming, art-affirming, dazzling payoff than this one? But I did, and the length likely scared off some true lovers of theater and the queer arts, which is a shame. I have to agree with New York Times critic Wesley Morris, who said after the 24-hour performance that it was "one of the great experiences of my life." When have I ever, and when will I ever again, witness an artist at the top of his game, having imagined and honed this epic piece of hilarious, deviant art over six years or more, sing 246 songs, make me scream with laughter, and monologue at me with ideas and historical narratives both urgent and true?

And how do you even "review" a show that is less of a show than a life's work, and one that clocks in at 12 times the length of a normal show, and transcends both drag and the concert genre?

A few snapshots that are bound to stick with me for many years: the look of goofy joy that spread across the room as a thousand ping-pong balls were hurled in every direction during the "queerest Civil War reenactment in history"; the entire theater filled with a shower of colorful balloons, previously passed out to the audience, as War World I ends and Mac emerges "in the 1920s" singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" (despite the deaths of 16 million people); Mac singing a very moving, quiet version of "Big Rock Candy Mountain" to a rapt audience; the somewhat uncomfortable but at that point totally expected laughter as all of the white people in the audience are asked to move out of the center section (the "inner city") and off to the sides to depict the White Flight of the 1950s, while the people of color were welcomed to take their seats; the Cold War being reenacted with the use of two enormous inflatable penises, one red white and blue, and one red with a USSR hammer and sickle on it, set to David Bowie's "Heroes"; ushering in the era of AIDS with Mac's dark and brooding cover of Suzanne Vega's "Blood Makes Noise" as a hovering set of skulls weeping tinsel sat over his head, like a deathly halo; and Mac being left alone on the stage for the final hour, his tireless musical director Matt Ray finally allowed to rest, with a ukulele and a piano and a shimmering pink gown that descended from the rafters, singing a few of the wordy, witty original songs that he saved for this decade, which is less about history than about, as he repeatedly put it, "dreaming the culture forward."

Perhaps the most joyous revelation I had over these last 18 hours of his artwork (I had seen parts of Chapter I before, so did not go to the first night's performance) was the simple fact that our sometimes broken culture, such as it is, has Taylor Mac in it. Much the way I walked out of seeing Hamilton on Broadway with a certainty that I had witnessed something excitingly new and canon-izable, I walked out of each six-hour chapter feeling grateful, renewed, utterly converted to Mac's idiosyncratic view of our shared world. He was certainly exhausted, and I was too, and that was the point — having this "history on our backs," and all these songs to remember it by, is inherently exhausting, but there is always more energy in us to dream it forward.

"I am not a teacher," Mac insisted during Sunday's final chapter. "I'm not here to teach you and there are definitely people in this room who know more about pieces of this history than I do. I am a reminder." In the end, as much as he obviously aims to delight and amuse, the theater of Taylor Mac is a deadly serious project about activism, knowledge, and the power of art to heal and motivate us — and a reminder that it can in fact do both of those things.

After 24 hours of Mac's simultaneously terrific trolling of our nation's racist, sexist, homophobic past, and his enduring, infectious optimism, I couldn't help but think that we all should be so lucky to do such work, and in between that work, bare witness to the work of others when it reaches for such great heights. American culture — and LGBTQ culture — needs artful reminders like Mac, and hopefully the reach of his art will only widen over time.

Joking Sunday night about people's fears of death, Mac got slightly spiritual, while never letting go of his humor. "I'm not going anywhere," he promised. "I'll be releasing epic posthumous performances for years after I die. You'll never get rid of me."

Here's hoping.

Previously: Taylor Mac: A Joyfully Liberal Carnival Barker To Get Us Through These Terrible Times

Elektra: I once caught Ben Stiller's A Night at the Museum and thought: what a tragedy. Obviously, I wasn't the only one: The production crew at SF Opera decided to use the same conceit of exhibits in a museum taking life in the middle of the night, to feature their own Greek tragedy, Elektra, as composed by Richard Strauss. It was a stroke of genius and a triumphant success.

Elektra was the daughter of Agamemnon, who upon his return from the Trojan war, unfortunately came to realize he had married an axe murderer. His wife Klytemnestra and his cousin Aegisth, who had shacked up while he was away, offed him in his bath (it is not brought up in the libretto, but Agamemnon also had sacrificed his and Klyte's daughter Iphigenia to the gods on his way out, and came back from Troy with his lover Cassandra, stuff Klytemnestra may have found objectionable). Anyhow, Elektra wants revenge for daddy's literal blood bath. She hesitates between waiting for her brother Orest's return to do the deed, or convincing her sister Chrysotemis to do it with her.

Strauss's opera, which opened in Dresden in 1909, is thoroughly modern and rarely performed. The last run at SF Opera was twenty years ago (by far the longest gap in between productions ever here). It is relatively short, clocking at 1h45 but super intense. Alex Ross describes the music in the Rest is Noise as "an onslaught of dissonance and neurosis... The music repeatedly trembles on the edge of what would come to be called atonality; the far-flung chords that merely brush against each other in Salome now clash in sustained skirmishes." So I watched a couple YouTube productions to get a better feel for the piece. It could not prepare me for the actual performance. The sheer force of the 100 musicians delivered a visceral sensory experience that laptop speakers totally failed. The YouTube versions did not have that witty, resourceful and amazing set and staging. And these online streams did not have Christine Goerke, an Elektra for the ages.

Let's start with her: Goerke is on stage for the whole show. Actually, she is on stage even before it starts, as part of a pantomime of visitors checking out an antiquity display. The whole opera splits into a series of scenes where she interacts with her sister, her mother, her brother, her father-in-law, each a rather harrowing confrontation. Her vocal lines are hard edged and broken. Goerke perfectly jumped through the vocal calisthenics, her voice strong enough to cut through the thick orchestral textures. She'd hold a long note and make it blossom and bloom. Her yell of "Agamemnon" gave goosebumps. Most amazingly, she fully embodied her character. Her face, her acting, her hands would be so expressive even when she would be silent. I can't recall a more complete performance by a singer.

The set, by Boris Kudlicka, plays off the cliche that museum equals beige marble slabs. It is modern, sleek and evocative, and has quite a few Jobsians "one more things." A dream sequence opens up like a drawer to show Agamemnon's wake. In other drawers, moments of family life are embodied by a bedroom or a 50's styled kitchen, the domestic quotidian of the objects contrasting with the family drama on stage. The Queen's entrance is almost magical, stepping out of a display case where only a mannequin had been thus far. The costumes wisely avoid (mostly) the Greek togas, and vary between today's dress, some 50s costumes, and Billy Idol for Aegisth.

The orchestra, led by Henrik Nánási, mastered the trickiness of the score. In ever changing orchestrations, the sound would be weaved by a set of instruments then handed off to another, all in a smooth and translucent miracle. The score is decidedly Wagnerian, Elektra could be inserted as an extra act in the middle of the Ring cycle and aside from the mix up of Greek and Norse mythology, none would be the wiser. Nánási brought it to life with in-your-face directness, here a whiff of a macabre waltz, here a swaying barcarolle rhythm, here even a bit of levity during a short harmonic relief when a messenger requests a horse. For Klytemnestra's long monologue, the orchestra gurgles, and simmers and bubbles up, and during Aegisth's murder, we hear the shrieking strings that Bernard Herrman would later recycle in the Psycho soundtrack.

The rest of the singers are uniformly excellent, with some luxury casting in Adrianne Pieczonka as Chrystothemis, Michaela Martens as Klytemnestra and Alfred Walker as Orest in the main roles and no weak link in the supporting roles. After the performance, there was a palpable enthusiasm from the audience, secure in the knowledge it had viewed a one-of-a-kind performance, and which didn't seem to want to go home but bask a little longer in the afterglow of an amazing performance.

Brian Jagde (in blue) owns the David Hockney set stage.

Turandot: The night before, I watched a highly satisfying Turandot, the 1926 Chinese-inspired warhorse by Puccini which had opened the 2017-18 SF Opera season. It premiered almost 20 years after Elektra, but it's safe to say that Puccini went in a much more conservative musical direction: It's grounded in a cozy tonal world, and in a lyrical serpentine melodic language. Unlike Elektra, its namesake heroine is not the main character, and she does not sing until well into the second act. The main role falls on tenor Brian Jagde's solid shoulder.

I recall Brian during a 2009 Merola concert singing an excerpt of Bohème where he pierced the audience's heart with a desperate call for Mimi. It's both a testament to Jagde's voice and to Puccini's keen ability to mushily manipulate your tear ducts. While Jagde has tremendously grown as a singer since, he has built a cottage industry in Puccini roles, singing Tosca and Butterfly on this stage. He brought back that Merola memory in his first invocation for Turandot! Yep, here comes that bright and assured tenor that knives through the orchestra to hit you right in the solar plexus. In the month of the tenth anniversary of Luciano Pavarotti's death, Jagde delivered a magnificent homage to the Italian legend with a perfect Nessun Dorma.

Calaf is the warm blooded lover who challenges Turandot, the icy queen, to woe her. For this first run, Martina Serafin took up that part (there will be another diva, Nina Stemme, in the second run in November/December). I found her voice too shrieky and cold, but she is supposed to be a frigid sociopath who gets off chopping off the heads of her pretenders, so maybe it is the appropriate casting. An Adler fellow, Toni Marie Palmertree, took up the role of Liu, the generous maid who gives her life to save Calaf's, and she is definitely ready for the big leagues. The trio of Joo Won Kang (a leader among equals), Julius Ahn and Joel Sorensen provided comic relief as Ping, Pang and Pong, but they backed up with serious lyricism.

Martina Serafin in the beautiful costumes by Ian Falconer.

Like Elektra, it is scored for a lush and richly orchestrated ensemble and it is impressive to see the same SF Opera orchestra fare so beautifully in back-to-back performances in such contrasting styles. Maestro Luisotti, in his final year-slash-victory lap as music director, coaxed vivid textures and a well paced flow out of his band. He pushed them one step short of obscuring his singers, with whom he symbiotically breathed. Luisotti's last conducting gig as music director opens this week-end with Traviata. We'll look for his returns in the future as an invited conductor, he has a few scheduled.

The production recycles the old, well worn sets from David Hockney, who is turning 80 this year. They are both whimsical and practical, and place the action squarely in a mythical land that still clearly depicts the story. It also allows the chorus to efficiently move in and out; and what a treat when they are on. Hats off to the chorus director, Ian Robertson.

I've been thinking how best to talk about what I experienced Sunday at Chapter II of Taylor Mac's irreverently epic, hard-to-describe, "performance art concert" called A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music. It is neither a careful history lesson, nor a thorough 24-decade survey of music, popular or otherwise — and it is also not a drag show in any traditional sense, nor a concert piece, nor a theater production like anything else any of us have likely seen (though anyone who saw Mac perform his five-hour The Lily's Revenge a few years ago, or something from the troupe of cabaret stylists and assorted freaks in his Tingel Tangel Club days, when multi-hour performances notoriously went on well into the early morning with no planned stopping point, have at least had a taste of Mac's love for "durational theater"). It is, above all else, a lengthy communal experience curated by a mad and hilarious genius of the stage, with the help of some extremely talented collaborators and musicians, that is like a window into a politically conscious, gender-bending, Radical Faerie-loving, liberal and academic thought-celebrating universe of joy and creativity that many of us feel desperately starved for right now. And it's a time-twisting, durational good time that serves as a balm and a call to action to tortured liberal souls and lovers of music and great drag alike.

As he (I apologize for not using Mac's preferred pronoun, which is "judy," only because it gets confusing in sentences, and Mac does identify as male) has in previous performances both here (in January 2016), and in New York — where he performed the complete 24 hours all at once, with no breaks, last fall — there are a number of rallying cries, raisons d'etre, and house rules that apply to each six-hour show he's performing at The Curran — Chapter I was performed Friday night, and Chapter II was on Sunday from 2 to 8 p.m., with Chapters III and IV, covering 1896 to 2016, coming this Friday and Sunday. First of all, there are no intermissions, though there are brief transitions between the approximately hour-long decade sections, only a few of which he uses to step off stage, with some costume changes happening right at center stage, underwear and all. The audience is free to get up and go to the lobby or bathroom whenever they like, within reason, with some food available in the lobby, though Mac asks that entire sections not all leave at once, because even during the transitions there is typically someone singing or playing music on stage. And like it or not, audience participation is an essential component to this entire work, and you'll be participating if you're there.

For each decade transition there will be a new, equally extraordinary gown by costume designer Machine Dazzle, who is an ersatz character on stage throughout. And each costume somehow references that historical moment — for instance, the Reconstruction era dress features a huge QWERTY "keyboard" across the bust, in recognition of the invention of the typewriter.

As for the rallying cries, there's "Perfection is for assholes," by which he means to excuse any mistakes or missteps that occur — though, remarkably, Mac has approximately 240 songs memorized, including about a dozen Walt Whitman poems that he rattles off as part of the 1846-1856 "smackdown" between Whitman and "father of American music" Stephen Foster, and I only saw him forget one lyric in all of Sunday's five and a half hours. There's also "nostalgia is the last refuge of the racist," which applies to a great number of songs in the Great American Songbook, like "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Dixie." And there's Mac's mantra about performance art itself: no matter what it does to the audience, be it anger, amuse, delight, bore, or annoy them, he has succeeded. "In performance art, there is no failure," he says.

Thus there are going to be moments in all of the decades that are more lull-you-to-sleep ones, or what-the-hell-am-I-watching ones, or holy-wow-this-is-incredible ones. That said, five and a half hours practically breezed by, and I'll let you trust Pete Kane's review of Chapter I for SF Weekly since I sat that one out (having seen half of it last year).

I'm all in for Chapters III and IV, because Mac has structured this lengthy piece partly in the style of a variety show where it's hard to know what's coming next. Some of the structural conceits, like the aforementioned Whitman-v-Foster smackdown, work incredibly well at keeping one's attention, as does his entire section on the Civil War in which he sings various songs to segments of the audience designated as pro-Union and pro-Confederate, and then stages what he's called "the queerest Civil War reenactment in history," which involves ping pong balls flying all over the audience.

For those who got called on stage — I'm looking at you local novelist Andrew Sean Greer and Chronicle critic Lily Janiak! — and there were dozens of them, the experience I'm sure became all the more surreal. Everyone who took part in the bizarro "family dinner" that's used to define the Reconstruction of 1866-1876 was then stuck up on stage for an extra hour as they became Martian extras in Mac's insane version of The Mikado set on Mars (meant to be a comment on Orientalism in general), which went on for another sometimes painful hour, mostly with the use of vocal filters that made everyone sound like The Chipmunks.

As for the history, and being a balm for liberals, this is the ineffable part. Rarely does one encounter a drag performer or theater artist as intelligent, quick witted, insightful, and charismatic as Taylor Mac. When he turns to briefly narrating various points in our nation's history, or gives his hilarious raised-eyebrow asides in reaction to variously offensive lyrics in the songs that are now the vernacular accounting of that history, he embodies the whip-smart, drag-painted queer history professor most of us never had. He doesn't claim or want to present all sides or hyper-accurate details of that history, and he says from the outset this is all going to be subjective. "We are all living with all this history on our backs," he says, "and we all need to figure out how to deal with that to move forward."

Yes, it's a "Radical Faerie realness ritual sacrifice," as he's said before, and the audience is both the sacrifice and the rapt congregation, and Mac is both the sacrifice and the all-knowing leader, as capable of cutting remarks as he is of great pathos and earnestness. He is trying to change the world, one six-hour (or 24-hour) performance at a time, and that is no joke.

Tickets for Chapters III and IV of A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music can be found here, and same-day rush tickets can be found for $35 on the Today Tix app.

Previously: Video: Taylor Mac Discusses His SF Inspiration For 'A 24-Decade History Of Popular Music'

Going into , I'll admit I had some trepidation. Is now really the time for a story about a white girl who wants to become a rap star? Also, didn't 8 Mile already cover this sort of thing well enough? But it didn't take long for Patti Cake$ to quell those fears, thanks to a completely winning performance by Danielle Macdonald as Patti.

Set in an unnamed town in New Jersey, where the Manhattan skyline is a constant visible taunt to those with dreams of making it there (or anywhere), Patti Dombrowski, AKA Killa P, AKA Patti Cake$ (and AKA Dumbo, to the bullies in town) is 23 but still lives at home, working part-time jobs as a bartender and a catering waiter to help support her alcoholic and perpetually unemployed mother Barb (Bridget Everett) and ailing Nana (Cathy Moriarty). She also has notebooks full of rhymes and big dreams, both figuratively and literally (her daydreams are brought to life onscreen) of becoming a rap star, like her idol and fellow Jersey-ite O-Z (Sahr Ngaujah).

Her best friend Jheri (Siddharth Dhananjay) provides her backbeats and choruses, and shares in her big-league dreams, pushing her forward whenever she doubts herself or feels crushed by the Jersey boys who won't ever let her forget her plus-size, white girl status. When Patti sees an open mic performance by a weird African American goth kid (Mamoudou Athie) who calls himself Basterd the Antichrist, she recognizes the musical genius behind his oddball facade, and convinces him to join her and Jheri.

Patti Cake$ is a musical, and it adheres to many of the cliches inherent in musicals; maybe too many — underdog status; meeting your idols; a final Big Show. And like most musicals, it succeeds or fails based on the strength of its music. Luckily, the music in Patti Cake$ is surprisingly catchy, especially when the oddball trio (with the addition of Patti's Nana on a vocal) lays down their first track "PBNJ" (also the name they give their band).

Director and screenwriter Geremy Jasper, who started out as a musician, wrote all the music and rhymes in the film. The result is nice blend of hip-hop and rock, with a touch of industrial. All the main characters in the film rely on music, in some way or another, to get them through the dreariness of their New Jersey lives, and I imagine Jasper's musical background and Jersey native status played a large part in making that feel believable, with some additional heavy lifting from the talented cast.

Bridget Everett is famous for her raunchy cabaret act, and the film definitely benefits from her larger-than-life presence and excellent singing voice, as her character tries to relive the glory days of her rock star hopeful youth. And Dhananjay's Jheri is funny, charming, and the ultimate hype man, both on and off the mic.

But Patti Cake$ would not be half as enjoyable without star Danielle Macdonald. Macdonald is Australian, but she manages the Jersey accent, and more importantly, the vocal swagger needed to convincingly sell all the raps in the film. Her Patti manages to have both pride and vulnerability, and such a belief in music (when she puts headphones on, Jasper shows her literally being lifted into the air by its power) that you can't help but root for her.  The story in Patti Cake$ may not be the freshest, but Macdonald's Patti most definitely is.

I don't think anyone seriously believed Steven Soderbergh in 2013 when he announced, (not for the first time), that he would be retiring from feature films. And, indeed, that retirement ended up being more of a hiatus, as his focus moved to TV projects. Now he's back with the self-marketed caper comedy , his first theatrical feature since 2013's Side Effects.

Set in the world of NASCAR, the film has obvious similarities to the Ocean's franchise (someone in the film even uses the phrase "Ocean's 7-Eleven" to describe the culprits). While the caper aspect definitely invites that comparison, I found it also brought to mind 1998's Out of Sight, my favorite Soderbergh film, for both its inclusions of more middle-to-lower class criminal masterminds (some of whom are slightly lacking in the mind department) and its clever use of flashbacks.

Channing Tatum is Jimmy Logan, a former small-town football star who lost his chance to make it to the NFL after an accident left him with a bad knee. His brother Clyde (Adam Driver) lost his forearm at the very end of his military service in Iraq, so he tends to believe the local legend that the Logan family is cursed with a permanent unlucky streak.

When Jimmy loses his job as a tractor driver for failing to report his minor disability on his job forms and his ex-wife (Katie Holmes) announces she and her new family will be moving out of state and taking their daughter with her, Jimmy realizes he better come up with some money fast, if only to pay for a lawyer to fight for custody.

Jimmy's construction job was under the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina, repairing sinkholes that had started to plague the track. In the course of his work, he learned the facility uses a pneumatic tube system to deliver cash from food and beverage vendors into a vault under the speedway. And thus, a plan to break into the vault is hatched.

Despite trepidation over the whole family curse thing, Jimmy convinces Clyde to come on board, and they both seek out the help of notorious safe cracker Joe Bang (Daniel Craig). As his name may suggest, he's less a safe cracker, and more of a safe-exploder. The one problem is that Joe Bang is in prison, due for release in a few months, and that's time the boys can't wait out. So, a plan to break Joe out and then back INTO prison is added to the caper.

The screenplay by Rebecca Blunt (who, most likely, doesn't actually exist) doesn't lay out the entirety of their plan up front, instead slowly letting the audience in on a scheme that includes the use of cockroaches, fake salt, and gummi bears, as well as the addition of more team members, including Joe Bang's slightly dim brothers Sam and Fish Bang (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid, both hilarious) and Jimmy and Clyde's sister Mellie (Riley Keough), a hairdresser and ace getaway driver who should get her own movie.

Soderbergh's comedies have one winning thing in common, and that's an authenticity and looseness that comes from his actors and their dialog. Some might argue that he's painting these Southerners with a broad brush, and Driver definitely lays on the hee-haw accent a little thick. But there's never a feeling that he's looking down on them or Southern culture in general. And while the actors definitely have fun with their characters (particularly Daniel Craig, who I would have never even considered a possibility for an American comedy), they never mock them.

Logan Lucky also manages to play against expectations. It's a heist movie set at a NASCAR race and hardly features any actual race footage. It's a crime story in which no guns are shot, and what violence does happen is against a truly despicable character (appropriately played by Seth MacFarlane). There's even a prison riot that culminates in a hilarious bit of back-and-forth negotiations between a despicable warden (Dwight Yoakam) and a prisoner, centered on Game of Thrones.

It also manages to work in a completely unexpected final act that is only slightly soured by the addition of Hilary Swank as an FBI investigator whose only purpose seems to be to give the movie the type of ending it doesn't really need. But that's a minor complaint. It's rare that you can enter a film with full confidence that everyone involved knows what they're doing, and they're going to be excellent doing it. And in that way, Logan Lucky is the ultimate caper.

Take the truly raucous, goofy, juvenile humor of recent broadway hits like Spamalot, The Producers and The Book of Mormon, set it in Shakespeare's England in the 1590s, mash it up with an onslaught of musical theater references and toss in plenty of chuckle-worthy wordplay, Shakespearean and otherwise, and you might begin to imagine Something Rotten!, which opened last night at SHN's Orpheum Theatre on its first national tour. While it was obviously a relative hit with Broadway audiences for producers to take the show on the road — it ran a perfectly respectable 742 performances, closing after just shy of two years this past January — it was an over-the-top bit of tedium for the New York Times' Ben Brantley, and won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for leading man Christian Borle. But maybe Brantley was just getting tired of Broadway musicals dipping into what he called "sophomoric" territory with their humor, several months before the earth-shaking arrival of Hamilton in 2015, because I'd feel like a killjoy and a pretentious heel to do anything but cheer this show for all the laughs and dumb-grin-inducing musical numbers it provides, all in a

I don't get how they worked a major tap number into the musical version of Aladdin — which also happens to be part of this SHN season and also features direction and choreography from Casey Nicholaw, who also choreographed Spamalot and Book of Mormon — but I had no probably clapping for the multiple major tap numbers that work their way into Something Rotten!, despite the fact that musicals, as a form, would not exist for another couple hundred years after Shakespeare.

The story centers on the Bottom brothers, Nick (played tireless physical comedian Rob McClure) and Nigel (the winning, wide-eyed, and angel-voiced Josh Grisetti) — both of whom are played by actors who took on these roles in the latter part of the Broadway run. And their problem to solve in Act One is that they're being overshadowed by the arguably overrated Shakespeare, and they need to write a hit before their patron, Lord Clapham (played by the very funny, mincing Joel Newsome) decides to drop them, and Nick's wife Bea (Maggie Lakis) gives birth to a child. Enter a soothsayer named Nostradamus (nephew of the famous one) whom Nick pays to tell him what the next big idea in theater will be — and then comes the show's big show-stopper, a song and dance called "A Musical," in which Nostradamus basically predicts every major musical hit of the latter 20th Century (see video below if you don't care about spoilers). The wires get very crossed, however, when Nick returns to ask him to predict what Shakespeare's next big hit will be, so that he can write it first, and make it a musical. I won't spoil the whole joke for you, but suffice it to say it involves omelettes, dancing nuns, and chimney sweepers.

Nicholaw's direction hits an almost fever pitch of gag-ery by the fifth number and barely lets up thereafter — and sure, plenty of the jokes are groaners. But some of them are truly clever — and some of the lyrics by the duo of Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick are spitfire quips that breeze by almost too fast to garner the laughs they'd likely get on a second listen. And overall, Nicholaw's obvious love of musical-comedy tropes and inexhaustible pacing are elements that keep this reaching for laughs even when you think it can't reach anymore — and brace yourselves for a whole lot of "bottom" jokes.

And I also can't neglect to mention The Bard himself, William Shakespeare, who's being played in this cast by Adam Pascal of Rent fame (he played Roger in both the movie and the original Broadway cast). Something Rotten! depicts Shakespeare like a Bowie-esque rock star who sends men and women swooning whenever he enters a room, and Pascal pulls off this swagger well — as well as the goofy humor the role entails, as old Will is revealed to be a be a petty plagiarizer who's as witty and pleased with himself as he is unafraid to steal from anyone and everyone.

Fans of Shakespeare will get an extra dose of fun via all the references woven into the show, including the character of Shylock, a theater-loving Jew who becomes the Bottoms' producer/patron whom Shakespeare promises to model a nice character after; and a moment when Shakespeare disguises himself and says his name is Toby Belch.

The whole mess is over-the-top to be sure — wait 'til you see the Bottom brothers' pan-fried finished product — but fans of the Mel Brooks genre of humor and musicals combined are damn near guaranteed to leave with smiles on their faces, if not a sore diaphragm.

Something Rotten! plays through September 10 at the Orpheum. Find tickets here, or get $40 day-of rush tickets on the TodayTix app.

Below, the Broadway version of "A Musical," condensed.

SFist’s stance on deplorable teens is well-documented, so we were naturally intrigued to see a new Macbeth send-up that uses inadequately monitored teenagers as symbols of bloodthirsty ambition. MacBitch, playing through August 19 at the Exit Theatre, is a “Frankenplay” that mashes up the seemingly incompatible genres of a Shakespeare palace-intrigue tragedy and a Mean Girls/Heathers-style teen-girl black comedy. Director Ariel Craft, whose recent work The Awakening made the Chronicle’s Top 10 Theater Picks for 2016, creates an all-woman Macbeth reboot that is manic and gruesome, but still a satisfying stab at combining teen comedy and Shakespearean tragedy.

Unlike Mean Girls and Heathers, MacBitch features adult actors mimicking teenage girls with a “we lived through this” sensibility that is unafraid to go full slapstick. Macbeth’s archetypes are mixed with stereotypical teen movie tropes, and the script shifts gears between plainspoken contemporary dialogue and classic poetic verse. Many of the modern updates to the source material are clever gifts that keep giving, like the three witches’ use of "cootie catcher" paper fortune tellers as black-magic talismans, or John Carpenter-inspired visual tricks employed in scene transitions.

In the Macbeth role of “Maxine,” we have Lauren Hayes, who has done legit Shakespeare before (San Francisco Shakespeare Festival’s Hamlet, 2015) and it really shows. She’s got a technical talent for delivering iambic pentameter credibly to the modern ear, and her comfort with both highbrow and lowbrow elements keeps this curious mashup afloat when it’s not sure which genre to be or not to be. A grisly body count does indeed accumulate in several scenes that are difficult to watch, but Rebecca Hodges (“Seymour”) does some uproarious, heavy comic lifting that takes off much of the edge.

Sketch comedy excess sometimes gets the upper hand in this production, but the hypnotic, almost-constant presence of the three witches onstage keeps MacBitch consistent with Macbeth’s dramatic, psychological roots. These goth witches are mesmerizingly choreographed, and beautiful, horrible monsters you cannot take your eyes off of.

Strict originalist Shakespeare fans may find this zany update to be “not Shakespeare enough.” There are Madonna lyrics interspersed into the Bard’s text. Some of the parody points — like a crude gag on the “washing hands” allegory that I thought was genius — require a certain emotionally arrested, Beavis and Butthead sense of humor to fully enjoy. That won’t appeal to the sensibilities of all Shakespeare people. But if you’re four paragraphs deep into a theatrical review of a teeny-bopper Shakespeare parody, there’s an awfully good chance that MacBitch would appeal to you.

MacBitch’s run coincides with our summer of teen mob attacks on BART, but that’s a Medium thinkpiece for another day. If you’re up for a bawdy but very smart comedic Shakespeare adaptation, the Exit Theatre is the damned spot to be out at for the next two weekends.

MacBitch plays through August 19 at the Exit Theatre. Tickets here.

Thanks to the 1996 movie The Birdcage, the charming and ahead-of-its-time story of La Cage Aux Folles is well known to American audiences. Less well known to contemporary audiences is the 1978 French film of the same name, and the subsequent 1983 American musical adaptation with music by Jerry Herman and book by Harvey Fierstein. It stands as one of those stunningly progressive relics of the pre-AIDS era when, at least in Europe and in certain circles here in the U.S., the idea of a homosexual couple together for 20 years being the heroes of their own family dramedy wasn't so crazy — and was ripe fodder for a tidy story about conservatives learning to accept libertine worlds they don't understand.

So, kudos to San Francisco Playhouse for reviving the musical and letting it prove that equality, such as it stands, wasn't won in a day, and that there was once a fictional drag queen named Za Za who helped Americans understand what a sympathetic gay person was.

The current production, which opened on Wednesday, is shouldered by two excellent vets of the musical stage, John Tracy Egan as Albin, and Ryan Drummond as Georges, both of whom have the vocal chops to stand on much bigger stages than this one — and Egan has in fact once before stepped into shoes filled by Nathan Lane, who played the American film version of this character, when he took on the role of Max Bialystock in the final two years of the Broadway production of The Producers. Drummond is sympathetic and at ease in the "straight"-man role of Georges, serenading his husband of 20 years with songs like "Song on the Sand." And Egan gets to take command of the stage multiple times as the melodramatic, painfully fey Albin and his domineering drag persona Za Za, and he is equally comfortable as both — and as pretend "mother" to the son he and Georges raised, Jean-Michel (played by the charming and also talented Nikita Burshteyn).

You surely know the story of the son who comes home to his gay dads to say that he's engaged and that his fiancée is the daughter of an arch-conservative politician who won't be able to accept their lifestyle. As a favor, he asks his father and Albin to pretend for a night that they're straight, that Albin doesn't exist, and that his biological mother return to fill in the role she never actually played in real life. In the stage version, the mother doesn't ever make an appearance the way she does in The Birdcage — she simply sends her regrets and Albin sneaks off to don some drag and fill the role at the last minute. Also, this version takes place around a drag club in Saint-Tropez, not in Miami.

I should note that Egan gets to shine brightest at the close of Act 1 when he reprises "I Am What I Am" as a cathartic outburst after he's given the insulting news of having to pretend he didn't raise Jean-Michel.

The cast is buoyed by some other solid comedic talents, particularly that of Brian Yates Sharber as Jacob, the "maid" to Georges and Albin; and Lee Ann Payne as meddling restaurant owner Jacqueline. And the ensemble, particularly the drag troupe known as the Cagelles, all do fine work livening the stage, especially in the opening number, "I Am What I Am."

Director Bill English exhibits an ease with the logistics and tone shifts of this musical, and scenic designer Jacquelyn Scott presents an impressive set on a massive turntable that does triple duty as nightclub, apartment, and outdoor cafe. A shout-out, too, to local drag queen Laundra Tyme who worked here as the cast's wig designer.

SF Playhouse fills an important niche in the city with their small-scale yet highly professional musical productions, and La Cage Aux Folles is no exception. It's also fun and punctuated with plenty of endearing music, and you'll likely find yourself humming "The Best of Times" for days.

'La Cage Aux Folles' plays through September 16 at SF Playhouse. Find tickets here.

Over last weekend, the SF Symphony ended its 2016-17 season with some fireworks: a dazzling performance of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet. Like his Requiem, Romeo and Juliet is an odd bird, a choral symphony loosely following the path of Beethoven's ninth in bringing in a choral component, and even more loosely following the text of the Shakespeare play. It's the end of the season, but the performances will live on, as they were recorded for later release on the SFS Media label.

Written for a large orchestra and chorus, Romeo and Juliet features three singers, none of whom assumes the roles of the piece's namesakes. Berlioz explained thus: Many composers have written sung love duets for this pair, so why should he? His is a symphony first, and it's incumbent on the orchestra to capture the emotions in music. And it does so brightly, you almost don't need the program to follow what's going on.

Tenor Nicholas Phan thus gets to sing about Queen Mab, hardly the first character who comes to mind when you think of R&J. He did an outstanding job, bringing levity and humor combined with surprisingly perfect French diction. Sasha Cooke gets a slightly meatier part, where she gets to feature her sweet tone and to break the fourth wall and sing about Shakespeare's poetry.

It's bass Luca Pisaroni who scores the biggest part as Friar Lawrence, and in a deep voice, midwifes a ceasefire between the Capulets and the Montagues. He changed his tone to shift to the colors of the text, here upset when relating the mess of the lovers' death, there booming when speaking the voice of God, and majestuous in the final reconciliation. The chorus sang very cleanly, almost too perfectly and delicately when I expected a more ribald colors in a scene of revelers returning from a party.

Yet, the orchestra tells most of the story and with Berlioz's vivid textures and evocative melodies, there is no need for words. The heart of the piece is a melancholy love scene in a delicate and tender adagio. The long, lyrical and winding melody aches of desire, delaying its resolution for as long as it can. Combined with lush orchestral swells, you hear Wagner-before-Wagner (who admitted being impressed, and clearly was inspired, by the work).

Inventiveness drives the orchestration throughout: the party at the Capulets is scored for pizzicato cellos and tambourine, in a joyous dance, interfered with ominous trombones. The orchestra scherzo for Queen Mab features in a sweet barcarole that at some point includes two harps and bells, with the same eerie colors as the contemporary Midsummer Night Dream of Mendelssohn. The scoring is so brilliantly modern that the end of Juliet's funeral cortege, a heartbreaking lament sung by the chorus, ends on the flute repeating the same note over and again, bringing — of all people — Philip Glass (!) to mind.

MTT conducted with a clear attention to the details of the score, but with a sweep that kept the ninety-some minutes piece moving along and never once did he let our attention wane, from the vivacious viola opening to its last chapter, when the whole orchestra joins force in an exhilarating final burst. It's hard to imagine a more perfect symbol of togetherness and reconciliation than such large scale orchestral harmony.

The SF Opera concluded its season as well, inviting 23,000 to attend Don Giovanni at AT&T Park on Friday night. The chilly evening didn't seem to dampen the enthusiasm. Ildebrando D'Arcangelo was a swaggy Don, Erin Wall a strong Donna Anna, and Stanislas de Barbeyrac made us want for more in the smaller part of Don Ottavio. The set was however rather drab, with large frames hanging from the rafters, to inform us Giovanni is a self-absorbed narcissist. Luckily, we couldn't see much of it as it was shot and broadcast on the AT&T screen in mostly close-ups. SF Symphony and SF Opera both kick of their next season after Labor Day.