Sentimental Medley
A funny thing happened at TheatreWorks’ opening night of Upright Grand at Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theatre. Before the show started, my dad turned to me and asked if a certain piece of preshow music was Hoagy Carmichael or not. I didn’t know, I said, because while I’m into old-time jazz I’m not much for schmaltzy stuff. It’s not schmaltzy, he objected—it’s sentimental. Then the play started. In the second scene, 12-year-old daughter Kiddo rolls her eyes at the song her dad, Pops, is playing, “Smile” by Charlie Chaplin, and she mocks how schmaltzy it is. “It’s not schmaltzy, Kiddo, it’s sentimental. There’s a difference.”
Us, the Musical
Wheelhouse is a musical that may be of interest if you have a burning desire to learn about the history of the rock band GrooveLily. If that’s something that’s never really occurred to you, not so much.
This List Goes to ’11
It’s a good problem to have: Looking over the list of the 118 local shows I saw this year, I had a hard time narrowing it down to a Top Ten. There are plenty of ways in which 2011 was a tough, lousy, no-good year, but in terms of what I saw on the Bay Area stage, it was pretty damn good. It was a great year for solo shows, between the Marsh (Marga Gomez’s Not Getting Any Younger, Don Reed’s The Kipling Hotel and Geoff Hoyle’s Geezer) and Berkeley Rep (Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and The Last Cargo Cult, Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy and Rita Moreno’s Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup). There were a couple of great visiting performances by screen stars: Kevin Spacey as Richard III, John Malkovich as mass murderer Jack Unterweger. And there were any number of other shows that thoroughly charmed me in one respect or another but didn’t quite crack the Top Ten: Crowded Fire and Asian American Theatre Company’s Songs of the Dragons Crying to Heaven, Sleepwalkers Theatre’s The Nature Line, Shotgun Players’ Beardo and Care of Trees, Impact’s Disassembly, SF Playhouse’s Tigers Be Still. As for what did make it onto the list, I tried to rank them in order of preference, but no matter how many times I tweak it the ranking feels arbitrary. So let’s say that, like one’s own children, I love them all equally, and just hope they buy that.
Orestes Development
THEATER REVIEW: MOUNTAIN VIEW
Show #94: Clementine in the Lower 9, TheatreWorks, October 8.
To the Manners Born
THEATER REVIEW: MOUNTAIN VIEW
Show #79: Sense and Sensibility, TheatreWorks, August 28.
