Theatre Eddys Presents
“The Eddys 2018”
Theatre Eddys’
San Francisco Bay Area Top Theatre
Productions, 2018
This
year, Theatre Eddys attended and reviewed 125 shows locally along with nine
shows in Ashland, Oregon at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Of
the 125 local productions that were plays, musicals, and solo performances, a top
“5 E” rating was awarded to productions of 26 different companies. The most “5 E” ratings for locally produced
shows (versus touring productions) went this year to TheatreWorks Silicon
Valley, a company that had a particularly stellar year with seven 5 E’s, the
most by far ever awarded by this reviewer in one year to one company.
Choosing
“Top Lists of the Year” is made complicated by so many outstanding productions
in a region blessed with so many phenomenal companies of all sizes (over 300
stages in the SF Bay Area). Even more
distressing are all the outstanding productions I did not get to see and are
thus not represented in the following lists – this year particularly so because
I was traveling outside the Bay Area for a total of more than three
months.
In 2018,
one production in two parts stood out as so extraordinarily significant in so
many dimensions to receive a one-time designation of
Most Outstanding Bay Area Production of the Year 2018:
Angels in America: A
Gay Fantasia on National Themes
Part One: Millennium
Approaches
Part Two: Perestroika
Tony
Kushner
Into our current, uncertain,
and troubling atmosphere of 2018, Berkeley Repertory Company opened in April
its production of Part One: Millennium
Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika
of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America
in a production whose messages once again spoke truths relevant to our current
circumstances. And, the production did so in ways magnificently stunning in
every respect. Visually, aurally, intellectually, emotionally – no matter the dimension
– Tony Taccone directed an Angels
that soared to the heavens and back, plunging us into the depths of a hell that
plagued the plays’ years of 1985-1990 but
leaving us with a message more relevant today than ever:
“We are not going away ... More Life, the great work begins.”
leaving us with a message more relevant today than ever:
“We are not going away ... More Life, the great work begins.”
And now for “The Eddys.” Theatre Eddys selects as the best of the best among the 125 local productions seen in 2018:
Theatre Eddys Top 10 Plays in 2018,
San Francisco Bay Area Productions
1. Oslo – J.T. Rogers, Marin Theatre Company
How a
series of secret talks between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat were initiated in
1993 and how they proceeded is the subject of one of the most celebrated plays
of the new century, Oslo by J.T. Rogers. Marin Theatre Company opened its 2018-19
season with a West Coast premiere of the 2017 Tony-winning Best Play in a
tension-filled production that in every respect imaginable was stunning,
engrossing, and eye-opening while at the same time was genuinely heart-warming
and continually surprising with its laugh-aloud humor.
Directed
with uncanny timing, bold touches, and much humanity by Darryl V. Jones, Aurora
Theatre Company's Detroit ’67 (by
Dominque Morisseau) rocked with Motown sounds that soothed and soared, teased
with humor both rich and raw, and shook to the core with historical events
serious and shattering. And all along, Mr. Jones and the incredibly talented
cast ensured that we knew and remembered that headline-grabbing, street-filled
events like the Detroit riots are in the end really about the individuals who
were safe and happy one day in their homes -- until suddenly they were not.
Live
theater has the potential to bring together a group of strangers to experience
an event that will impact each of our separate lives in ways we never dreamed
upon entering. In a gripping, heart-pounding, and emotionally arresting world premiere,
Magic Theatre presented Ashlin Halfnight’s The
Resting Place – a play that forces us to ask ourselves, “What would we do
if our son or brother committed a heinous crime?”
For
San Franciscans still scratching their heads and wondering how in the world
Donald Trump was able to win the last election (and why he seems still to be so
popular in so many places other than San Francisco), all they needed to do is
spend an evening at the American Conservatory Theatre back in October. After
witnessing the stories so grippingly, honestly, and heartbreakingly relayed in
Lynn Nottage’s new play, Sweat, (the
2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), who could not exit the theatre without saying,
“Now I know why”?
Jade
King Carroll directed a magnificent cast with an ability to take everyday life
in a factory where lives are potentially falling apart and show how there are
moments the day is still boring; moments, somehow funny; and moments totally
lonely and scary. Taking the brilliant script of Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew, he, the cast, and the
creative team gave in this shared, regional premiere production both the Marin
Theatre and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley audiences a realistic,
thought-provoking, and emotional glimpse of what Detroit and many other cities
and towns of America endured during what we now call the Great Recession of
2007.
Rare
it is to hear of a local staging of Timon
of Athens. In my own thirty-five or so annual visits to Ashland, I have
only seen it once. Not only to be able to see a live production but to have the
opportunity to see one that was so timely and wondrously conceived as the edgy,
electric, and eye-popping version by Cutting Ball Theater was a gift earlier in
this year to the Bay Area audiences of all ages.
A
play that is meant to be heard and not just seen, John Kolvenbach’s Reel to Reel is an aural delight,
several laughs every of its eighty minutes, and yes, sigh-producing with its
heart-touching story of a marriage so ordinary to be nothing short of
extraordinary. Receiving its world
premiere at Magic Theatre, Reel to Reel
was wondrously directed by the playwright himself.
Bill
English masterfully directed the San Francisco Playhouse main-stage production
of last year’s Sandbox Series world premiere of You Mean to Do Me Harm with a tantalizing edge bordering somewhere
between a who-done-it mystery, a spy thriller, and a psychological drama. If
ever I have seen a play recently that my immediate reaction was “I need to see
this one again,” it was this one!
In
the Palo Alto Players’ magnificently produced, regional premiere of Robert
Schenkkan’s 2014 Tony winning Best Play, All
the Way, we as an audience were challenged to ask ourselves if questionable
tactics of a nation’s leader are ever acceptable if the desired outcomes match
our own sense of social and economic justice. Is this in fact “the way things
are done,” and is it in fact ‘the ends’ that truly matter and not so much ‘the
means’?
All was
predictable in what we (i.e., the mostly white, as usual, theatre audience at
Berkeley Repertory Theatre) expected from the kind of family comedy fairview appeared at first to be (i.e.,
one about a modern-day, black family in the U.S.). That is, all was going as we
expected until it definitely was not; and then the joint world premiere between
the Rep and Soho Rep of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s fairview took us into territories not yet crossed by many, if any,
prior premieres on this or any other American Stage.
Five
Theatre Eddys Honorable Mention Plays in 2018
(In
Alphabetical Order of the Producing Company)
--> Finks, Joe Gilford, TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
Theatre Eddys Top 10 Musicals in 2018,
San Francisco Bay Area Productions
1. Soft Power. David
Henry Hwang (Play & Lyrics); Jeanine Tesori (Music & Additional Lyrics). Curran
Theatre
David
Henry Hwang’s (play and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori’s (music and additional
lyrics) Soft Power is a
category-busting “play within a musical.” Beginning as a politically charged
comedy, Soft Power suddenly explodes
into a full-blown musical, complete with a twenty-two-person orchestra. That
the rib-tickling play opens in early November 2016 in the U.S. and then jumps
one hundred years into the future to become a fiftieth anniversary, full
staging of Soft Power, “the world’s
most beloved musical” (produced in now globally dominant China) is just one of
the many brilliant, unexpected delights of this new musical that opened in June
on San Francisco’s Curran Theatre stage.
In
the summer of '69 just as a man is about to walk on the moon, a Jewish family
of four do what New York and New Jersey Jewish families had been doing for
several decades – escape the heat of the City and head to tiny cabins in the
Catskills for fun with friends in the so-called Borscht Belt. Pamela Gray
captures their own exploratory, scary, and transformative first steps into new
territories of life in her A Walk on the
Moon -- a visually, musically, and emotionally exuberant slice-of-summer-life that had its world premiere at
American Conservatory Theatre this past June.
“How lovely life would seem if every man
could weave a dream to keep him from despair.”
It is that message that made Custom Made’s funny, touching, and
impactful January 2018 production of Man
of La Mancha so timely and relevant for an audience in which many are
surely wondering how do we keep hope alive and remain to any degree optimistic
when daily Tweets, threats, and executive edicts seem to be undoing everything
that many of us believe to be sacred.
The
music of Noel Gray and the lyrics of Douglas Furber & L. Arthur Rose have
made this 1937 musical an audience favorite since it debuted in London; and
even though it took one year short of fifty to make it to Broadway, once there,
it remained three years. At 42nd
Street Moon, every number of Me and My
Girl seemed better than the one previous, with the stellar voices truly
outstanding to a person -- maybe the best show (among many memorable shows)
that 42nd Street Moon has done in years!
Anyone
who came in April to TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s The Bridges of Madison County fearing the evening could drip with
sappiness certainly left thinking anything but. The soaring score with haunting
melodies that linger long after final curtain call combined with a director,
creative team, and cast who together wove a story that captured and held full
attention, stirred many, sometimes conflicting emotions that were to be deeply
felt and long remembered.
Stephen
Sondheim (Lyrics). Hillbarn Theatre
Among the myriad of inspired choices Director Erica Wyman
Abrahamson made for the Hillbarn September production of West Side Story was the casting of Ana Paula Malagón as Maria and
of Jeffrey Brian Adams as Tony. Never was there any doubt of the immediate,
magnetic attraction between the two – each initially glowing in innocence and
naivete when it comes to love and each pulled in locked eyes to the other in a
bond that even a brother’s murder cannot break.
With a cast of thirty and an orchestra of
fourteen, Hillbarn Theatre proved that the sixty-plus-year-old musical is as
current, relevant, and impactful today as it was in 1957.
In an
eye-popping, toe-tapping, big-smile-producing Mary Poppins that also has an edgier, darker undertone than most of
its predecessors, San Francisco Playhouse places under the Bay Area’s holiday
tree a gift that should enchant both fans and newcomers to this
fifty-five-year-old favorite (a production that can still be seen through
January 12, 2019).
In
2000, a star-studded team of Elton John (music), Tim Rice (lyrics) along with
Linda Wolverton, Robert Falls, and David Henry Hwang (book) took the Verdi
opera AIDA and transformed it into a
four-plus-year run on Broadway with music that had that distinct Elton John,
rock-and-ballad style. Broadway by the
Bay -- under the masterfully conceived and beautifully inspired direction of
Jason Jeffrey -- opened its own version in November that was a big-stage,
big-sounding Elton John + Tim Rice’s AIDA
that looked and felt Great White Way in every respect.
In
full fury on the compact floor arena of San Jose’s The Stage, Hedwig and the Angry Inch exploded this
past summer. Bay Area favorites Keith Pinto and Ashley Garlick played
gender-fluid Hedwig and her back-up singing husband, Yitzhak, a former drag
queen, as they each took John Cameron Mitchell’s book and Stephen Trask’s
music/lyrics and brought their own electric, ecstatic, and erotic
interpretations to this 1998 Off-Broadway, 2014 Broadway hit.
In a moment of history where young women are
stepping forth to be the leadership voices of #metoo, Black Lives Matter, #NeverAgain, and Time’s Up, Ray of Light
Theatre once again proved that this is the Bay Area company that puts on the
musical stage what most other companies would never risk, probably not even consider.
Giving the female voice to the hero, the lover, the villain, the zealots, the
government leaders, and even the angry mobs of Jesus Christ Superstar brought a new strength, relevance, and
insight into this age-old story. We soon forgot that we were looking at
something from the past and instead were peering into a new reality where young
women are forcibly taking their place as the movers and shakers of our future’s
history.
Five Theatre
Eddys Honorable Mention Musicals in 2018
(In
Alphabetical Order of the Producing Company)
--> The People in the Picture,
Iris Rainer
Dart (Book & Lyrics); Mike Stoller & Artie Butler (Music), 3 Below Theatres and Lounge
-->
Head
Over Heels, The Go-Gos (Songs); Jeff Whitty (Book);
James Magruder (Adapter of Book). Inspired
by The Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. Curran
Theatre (World Premiere)
--> Tuck Everlasting, Chris Miller (Music);
Nathan Tysen (Lyrics); Claudia Shear & Tim Federle (Book). Based on the Novel by Natalie Babbitt. TheatreWorks Silicon
Valley
Theatre Eddys Top 5 Solo Shows in 2018,
San Francisco Bay Area Productions
A
child of Japanese internees herself, playwright Jeanne Sakata ran across a
story so incredible for its audacious and persistent gumption of one man’s
stand against the wartime edict – Order 9066 signed by President Franklin
Roosevelt – that her resulting play, Hold
These Truths, could be at first glance thought to be a work of pure
fiction. But the story that Hold These
Truths tells of one young Japanese American -- born and bred in Seattle,
Washington – is very much true, as the playwright
herself learned in interviewing Gordon Hirabayashi before his death in
2012.
The sixty minutes of The Marsh's A Fatal Step were so packed in the
spring with characters, twists and turns as well as screen-worthy moments of
drama that in the end, it was difficult to believe that all that could be done
in just one hour. The length is perfect as is Jill Vice’s satirical, but loving
homage to the femme fatale.
The
musical chameleon Hershey Felder, who has transformed himself at the keyboard
body and soul from Bernstein to Beethoven to Berlin and has at least annually
for the past several years taken the Bay Area by storm, returned in January to
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in maybe his most emotionally gripping portrayal
yet, that of Piotr Ilyich (anglicized to Peter Ilich) Tchaikovsky – a portrayal
he both singly writes and performs entitled Our
Great Tchaikovsky.
Public
interest lawyer and Bay Area social justice activist, Irma Herrera, has spent
much of her life educating friends, teachers, and colleagues how to pronounce
correctly her name. Along the way, she has learned first-hand how engrained
social prejudice is against people of darker skin, even among people who would
be shocked if told they had such prejudice. In her highly entertaining, highly
eye-opening solo show Why Would I
Mispronounce My Own Name at The Marsh, San Francisco, this past autumn, Irma
Herrera walked us through the years of her life using a map of ‘name’ incidents
as her guideposts.
Roger
Grunwald, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, is dedicating much of his
creative talents and his time to ensure the collective memory of what happened
does not continue to fade until hardly anyone in future generations remembers
“a world gone mad.” Taking a story he first told in a short play, The Mitzvah, and turning it into a
fuller, one-man show in which he stars, Mr. Grunwald returned to the Potrero
Stage in order for the Mitzvah Project in association with Playground once
again to stage the 2017, much-lauded, world premiere, The Obligation.
PHOTO
CREDITS:
- Angels in America: Pictured,
Francesca Faridany & Randy Harrison; photo by Ken Levin
- Oslo: ;Pictured,
J Paul Nicolas, Ashkon Davaran, Ryan Tasker, Brian Herndon & Paris Hunter
Paul photo by Kevin Berne
- The Resting Place: Pictured, James
Carpenter and Cast; photo by Kevin Berne
- Sweat: Pictured,
The Cast; photo by Kevin Berne
- Skeleton Crew:
Pictured, Margo Hall, Lance Gardner & Christian Thompson; photo by Kevin
Berne
- Timon of Athens:
Pictured, David Sinaiko & Cast; photo by Liz Olson
- Reel to Reel:
Pictured, Will Marchetti & Carla Spindt, photo by Julie Haber
- You Mean to Do Me Harm: Pictured, Katie Rubin, Jomar Tagatac, Charisse Loriaux & Cassidy Brown; photo by Ken Levin
- All the Way: Pictured,
The Cast; photo by Joyce Goldschmid
- Fairview:
Pictured, Natalie Venetia Belcon, Monique Robinson & Charles Browing, photo
by Kevin Berne and Berkeley Repertory Company
- Soft Power: Pictured, Conrad Ricamora & Ensemble
Members; photo by Craig Schwartz Photography
- A Walk on the Moon:
Pictured, The Cast; photo by Kevin Berne
- Man of La Mancha:
Pictured, Edward Hightower; photo by Jay Yamada
- Me and My Girl:
Pictured, Keith Pinto and Melissa WolfKlain; photo by Ben Krantz Studio
- West Side Story: Pictured, Jeffrey
Brian Adams & Ana Paula Malagón;
photo: Mark
and Tracy Photography
- Mary
Poppins: Pictured, El Beh; photo by Jessica
Palopoli
-
Elton John + Tim Rice’s AIDA:
Pictured, Raquel Nicole Jeté and Shaun Leslie Thomas; photo by Mark & Tracy Photography
-
Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Pictured,
Keith Pinto; photo by Dave Lepori
- Jesus Christ Superstar: Pictured, Janelle Lasalle with Apostles;
photo by Ray of Light
- Hold These Truths: Pictured, Joel de la Fuente; photo, Kevin Berne
- A
Fatal Step: Pictured, Jill Vice: photo by Jill Vice
- Our
Great Tchaikovsky, Pictured, Hershey Felder; photo by Hershey Felder
Presents
- Why
Would I Mispronounce My Own Name?: Pictured, Irma Herrera; photo by Chuck
Revell
- The
Obligation: Pictured, Roger Grunwald; photo by Leo Correa
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