Lady’s Choice
There’s been a weird little theme this season of new musicals at major South Bay and Peninsula theaters based on 1890s British comedies by great Irish wits. First was the world premiere of Being Earnest at TheatreWorks in April, transplanting Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to swingin’ 1960s London, and now San Jose Repertory Theatre gives us the West Coast premiere of A Minister’s Wife, based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play Candida. The musical debuted at Writers’ Theatre in 2009 in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe, conceived and directed by the company’s artistic director, Michael Halberstam. It went on to play New York’s Lincoln Center Theater in 2011, and now comes to San Jose in a new production directed by Halberstam.
Talk (and Talk and Talk) About Juggling
I’ve always loved going to see the Flying Karamazov Brothers ever since I was a kid, so imagine my surprise when their 40th anniversary show at San Jose Rep turned out to be a long lecture on the history of the group, punctuated by all-too-occasional bursts of juggling. My full report is on KQED Arts.
May Be Hobbit Forming
Charles Ross basically has the best job in the world. The solo performer has been touring his One-Man Star Wars Trilogy since 2001, in which he plays all the characters of the original trilogy (fie on the prequels), sings the score, and tosses himself around the stage in a frenzy, encapsulating all three movies in about an hour. In 2004 he added a One-Man Lord of the Rings to his repertoire, based on the lengthy Peter Jackson film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy, but he had to shelve it for years while the stage rights to the trilogy were tied up with a $25 million musical that went from Toronto in 2006 to the West End in 2007, where it ran for a year and was never heard of again. Whereas his Star Wars only required the go-ahead from one guy, George Lucas, getting permission to perform the One-Man Lord of the Rings again proved considerably more complicated. But now Ross’s 70-minute distillation of Jackson’s 11.5 hours of film is up and running again, and it’s playing through the weekend at San Jose Rep, which hosted his Star Wars show last summer.
But We Regress
French playwright Yasmina Reza seems particularly interested in how small things become blown out of proportion. In her ubiquitous play Art, the close friendship between three men is threatened when one of them buys an expensive painting that another one thinks is crap. The Unexpected Man depicts two strangers on a train obsessing over the coincidence that one of them is reading a book that the other one wrote. And in God of Carnage, her 2006 comedy now making its Bay Area debut at San Jose Repertory Theatre, two couples meet to discuss an incident of playground violence between their sons, but their pleasant and civilized chitchat gradually gives way to chaos and savagery.
Rephrasing Cain
If crime doesn’t pay, it’s not for lack of trying. Though it’s a quick and pulpy read, hardboiled crime writer James M. Cain’s 1935 novella Double Indemnity gives some of the same moral lessons as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s literary classic Crime and Punishment—that murder, no matter how carefully planned or covered up, has a tendency to hound the perpetrators to the ends of the earth.
Trophy Lives
When people see a very wealthy, much older man married to a very attractive, much younger woman, they figure they know what’s up: He’s just with her because she’s hot, and she’s just with him for the money, whatever he spends on her and whatever she stands to inherit when he dies. It looks less like a romance than a mutually beneficial transaction. Philip Kan Gotanda’s new play at San Jose Rep, Love in American Times, doesn’t necessarily undermine that perception, but it explores the phenomenon in a fascinating way.
“Light” Could Be Brighter
Marie Curie notwithstanding, the contributions of women to the field of science is an oft-neglected topic, so it’s generally a good thing when something like the 2009 movie Agora or Karen Zacarías’s play from that same year, Legacy of Light, comes along to set the record straight about great female scientists of history.
That’s Nice, Mr. President
Ah, Abe, good to see you. C’mon in, take your hat off, have a seat. I’ll tell you, Abe, it’s bad, real bad. I was at the theater the other night—I know you’ve had bad experiences at the theater, so I hate to bring it up—but I have to say, this one was no picnic either. It was called FDR by Dory Schary. He wrote a Tony-winning play about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but this isn’t it. That one was called Sunrise at Campobello. This FDR is a one-man show that was originally a vehicle for Robert Vaughn in the early 1980s. After your time, I’m afraid, but you’re not missing much.
