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| Charlenealdridge Photo by Ken Howard |
Back in the Groove at last
The weekend was a veritable glut of theatre. It began on Friday when I interviewed composer Jake Heggie about his comic opera, Great Scott, which I attended in Dallas October 30. I’ve not missed a big opening of Jake’s since his first opera, Dead Man Walking, premieredin 2000 in San Francisco, the year of our first interview. Great Scott receives its West Coast premiere at San Diego Opera next May, directed by Jack O’Brien, with libretto by Terrence McNally.
Jake was a great friend of my late daughter, poet Laura Morefield, whose long poem titled “The Work at Hand,” he set for a commission received after her death. The piece was premiered at Carnegie Hall in January, premiered in its orchestral setting by Pittsburgh Symphony in May (Michael Francis of Mainly Mozart Festival conducted), and will have its West Coast premiere December 16 at San Francisco Performances, sung by the original interpreter, sensational Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, who just made her Los Angeles Opera debut as Adalgisa. Her collaborators this time are pianist Robert Mollicone and cellist Emil Miland.
Guess who will be there. Honest to God, it’s my final trip of the year.
Honky on PBS-TV
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| Honky company being filmed by PBS"On Stage in America" Jacque Wilke and Francis Gercke Photo by Daren Scott |
The theatrical weekend actually began Friday night, when cancellation of a live theatre date afforded me an opportunity to see San Diego Repertory Theatre’sproduction of Honky on PBS-TV’s “On Stage in America.” Quite a feather in both San Diego Rep and City of San Diego’s caps. The send-up of racism and post-racial attitudes played very well on TV. All should be lauded, including director Sam Woodhouse, whom I personally congratulated Friday night when I attended…
Intrepid Theatre’s production of The End of the Rainbow
Photos by Daren Scott
Peter Quilter’s 2005 drama with music, The End of the Rainbow, is set in a suite at the Ritz Hotel in Central London at Christmas 1968, though one would never know it was the season in set designer Michael McKeon’s beautiful suite. The play, which depicts Judy Garland’s London cabaret comeback appearances, stars the transcendent Eileen Bowman as Judy, Jeffrey Jones as her fiancé, Mickey Deans, and music director/actor Cris O’Bryon as her pianist, Anthony. Marco Rios plays three incidental characters.
In many ways, the situation is a love triangle, a push-me-pull-you exploration of who has Garland’s best interests at heart. It is also a classic case of dependence and enabling. As we all know, Judy Garland, whose addictions stemmed from a pubescent career in the film industry, battled her demons lifelong and succumbed to a barbiturate overdose just months after she married Deans, her fifth husband.
The show, sensitively staged by Christy Yael-Cox, includes Garland hits such as “The Trolley Song,” “The Man That Got Away,” and nine others and concludes with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” from the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, for which the singer, who received a special Academy Award, was immortalized at age 17.
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| Eileen Bowman as Garland |
Bowman is an impeccable singer and an affecting actor. I can’t imagine the show without O’Bryon, also a splendid actor and dazzlingly facile pianist, at the keyboard. Jones, one of the city’s finest actors, does his best with an underwritten part in a play that eventually grows tedious.
Redemptive qualities are the physicality of Yael-Cox’s direction, the beauty of Judy’s glittery gowns by designer Jeanne Reith, Curtis Muller’s lighting and Kevin Anthenill’s well-focused sound design. If the sounds of a drummer and the occasional violin were not live, I could not tell because they were so well integrated.
These finely handled details make Intrepid’s production in the Lyceum Space an absolute must see.
End of the Rainbow continues through November 29 and the Lyceum Space. http://securesite.sdrep.org/single/SYOS.aspx?p=9753
I spent Sunday under the University Heights sign
The adventure began with my favorite breakfast – Park House Eatery’s crab cakes benedict. Then I sat on the patio at Diversionary Theatre,awaiting the first of two curtains.
I had read Tanya Barfield’s Bright Half Life, so thought I knew what to expect – a play that willy-nilly skips through 40+ years of a relationship. However, the power of two live personalities – Rin Ehlers Sheldon and Bri Giger – and the direction of Lydia Fort completely surprised me. Read my full review in this week’s Gay San Diego.
Bright Half Life,performed in 75 minutes without interval,continues through November 30 (no performance Thanksgiving Day)
Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard, University Heights www.diversionary.org or (619) 220-0097.
Innermission in Diversionary’s Black Box
On the same level of the building as Diversionary’s main stage, the Black Box is in late stages of development so far as amenities are concerned (fundraising for further improvements is ongoing). The Black Box may lack refinement, but Innermission’s play selection and production do not.
In the current set up, the audience is seated on folding and other sundry chairs in two sections with only one rise after the first row. In the long run, one assumes, there are plans for risers, which would provide better sight lines, more comfortable seating, more lighting and better sound. Even as is the facility is a grand addition.
Madeleine George’s Precious Little(photos by Adriana Zuniga Williams)is performed by Kathi Copeland, Jyl Kaneshiro andJennie Olson Six.Each portrays numerous characters.All outdo my prior experience of their work. Again, the play is the kind of patchwork described above, though it is presumably chronological, with marvelous creative invention and cleverness. It’s about language, motherhood, nurturing, and intuitive empathy that extends across the constraints of difference.
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| Six as Brodie and Copeland as the Ape |
Nearing the end of a splendid career, a 40something-year-old lesbian anthropologist named Brodie (Six) has become pregnant intentionally. She visits a clinic that specializes in at-risk pregnancies for amniocentesis. Her clinician is portrayed by Kaneshiro. Meanwhile Brodie interviews an elderly Eastern European woman (Copeland) who is one of the last living speakers of her language, which was sublimated to Russian speaking when the country was overrun years ago. Kaneshiro portrays the woman’s avaricious daughter. Copeland is charming as the shy yet feisty elder and also in another role as a great ape.
How these disparate characters intertwine and how Brodie faces the fact of her unborn child’s possible defects present a fascinating study in behavior, human and otherwise. The play’s final image provides one of those unforgettable moments in the theatre, when in a blinding flash one’s heart is ripped open.
Precious Little,which continues through November 21,is certainly a must-see play and an auspicious resurrection for Innermission. Their next production, at the Black Box December 11-20, is Delia Knight’s disappearing act, directed by Kym Pappas.
Interesting to note that Madeleine George is author of The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence, which will be produced by Moxie Theatre November 8-December 6. It’s another fabulous time-jumper, as we follow Watson in four guises over a wide swath of time. Delicia Turner Sonnenberg directs.
It’s a great time for women playwrights. Get out and support their work!