The Performant

The Performant New York Edition: Forever Fringe

Andrew Lam
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I’ve been flying all week and boy are my arms tired! But at last I’ve landed, soft in the lap of Brooklyn, from where I’ve been commuting to the 15th annual New York Fringe Festival (say that five times fast). 

Perhaps the largest multi-arts festival in the US, the New York Fringe hosts close to 1200 performances from 194 companies, spread out in 18 venues all over the Lower East Side. Fringers pack the sidewalks and the black box venues from Bleecker Street to the Bowery — just minutes away from Broadway, but light years apart in terms of budget, content, daring.

Hailing from as close to home as Downtown Manhattan to as far away as Australia, each company serves as an ambassador for the theatre scene in their region. Once again, the Bay Area is well represented, not to mention Tennessee (“The Disorientation of Butterflies”), Massachusetts (“Dancing in the Garden”), Kentucky (“Civilian”), Texas (“A.Chekov’s The Darling”), and Seattle (“Virtual Solitaire”), among others.

The possibilities for connecting with performances from around the world, not to mention from our own backyards, are practically endless, just one reason why fringe festivals have grown into the international phenomenon they have, having spread from Edinburgh, Scotland to every continent save Antarctica — and I wouldn’t rule that out as a future possibility.

Just a few days in and I’ve already been a silent witness to one woman’s eating disorder (Craving), been converted to Islam (All Atheists are Muslim), gotten an eyeful at not one, but two boob-related shows (Mama Juggs, The Booby Prize), cheered Rosaline on in Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending, checked out a Zombie Wedding, dropped by a poetry reading given by way-underground poetess and public school security guard Molly “Equality” Dykeman (portrayed by Andrea Alton), and witnessed the birth of a preemptive celebrity biography in Mark Sam Rosenthal’s I Light up my Life. 

I’ve seen a washed-up and forgotten opera singer struggle with her past balanced against the future in The Unsung Diva, a stream-of-consciousness-spouting, post-existential “rabbi,” Moshe Feldstein, whose name has been lovingly smeared in excrement by one of his faithful followers (an act detailed in the “fan” mail he reads onstage), a trio of funny females being funny in Lipshtick, and a very funny, very crude, third-wave existentialist rant from Romania called Nils’ Fucked up Day.

This last piece to me is an epitome of the possibilities of fringe. Where else can “Romania’s most obscene play” find not just a foothold but some real acclaim without spending a fortune in venue rental, publicity, special visas, and all the rest? And where but at Fringe could your average, broke-ass arts lover get a chance to see “Romania’s most obscene play” for a ticket price roughly equivalent to a tepid Hollywood blockbuster with a tub of greasy popcorn on the side? Everybody wins at the Fringe in some way; even the foul-mouthed losers portrayed in Nils (except maybe the guy who is beaten to death with a baseball bat). 

 

The Performant: Cello rock!

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: Cello rock!

Rasputina at the Great American Music Hall

Somewhere at the intersection of the society for creative anachronism and the Wave Gotik Treffen resides the cello-driven, chamber-rock trio Rasputina. Founded by multi-instrumentalist Melora Creager in 1992, the band has long straddled the line between whimsy and steel, with songs that range in topic from giants to vampires, orphans to infidels, E equals MC squared to 1816, “the year without a summer.” 

Decked out in corsets, ruffles, and turn-of-the-last-century fantasywear, fronted by a woman who often speaks with a faux European-High Elvish accent, Rasputina is positioned as far as possible from the center of the pop music arcana without falling completely out of the deck. Eschewing categorization, the band floats effortlessly above petty pigeon-holing, embraced by steampunk creativists, glamour Goths, strings buffs, and plain old folk alike.

Playing for an attentive crowd at the Great American Music Hall on Sunday, show openers UK folk duo Smoke Fairies, was a sweet surprise to jaded ears. Two honey-tongued English roses, each bearing a guitar that they played gently but not tentatively, their finger-picking sure, their voices perfectly complementary. 

Each song contained a shimmering undercurrent of regional inflection. The delicately balanced “Storm Song” lilted like an Irish ballad sung by Moya Brennan or Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, whereas the down-home slide guitar and husky vocals of “Living with Ghosts” evoked a haunting Appalachian melody with a hint of the Indigo Girls circa 1989 in the harmonies. Touring to support their first full-length album, Through Low Light and Trees (V2/Cooperative Music, 2010), Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies have captured the attentions of Jack White and SXSW among others, securing some welcome street cred before their album even hit the shops this side of the pond.

Rasputina too has a newish album out, Sister Kinderhook (Filthy Bonnet, 2010), and mixed several of those songs into their concert set including “Sweet Sister Temperance” (an ode to one Emily Dickinson), “A Holocaust of Giants” (an ode to, well, giants), and one of my personal favorites, “Snow-Hen of Austerlitz,” a melancholy mountain ballad picked out on a half-sized banjo about a feral girl locked in a chicken coop. Older rockers, “Rats,” “Momma Was an Opium Smoker,” and “Saline, the Salt Lake Queen,” also found their way onto the setlist, as well as “Transylvanian Concubine,” (“the oldest song of the Rasputina canon,” Melora Creager pointed out). 

In addition to Melora, the lead cellist and songstress of the band, the group’s current lineup includes longtime Creager collaborator, classically-trained cellist Daniel DeJesus, and Jill-of-all-trades Dawn Micheli who plays the drums in a  more stately fashion than predecessors such as Cabin Fever’s Philosophy Major, or Jonathon TeBeest, which sucked some of the chaotic neutral vibe out of the harder numbers. 

In truth, it was the slower, more thoughtful tunes that rendered the evening triumphal, including a forlorn cover of “Bad Moon Rising,” and the equally mournful “Watch TV”. Creager’s distinctive vocals bent and snapped like the flexible boughs of spring saplings, her breathy vibrato a perfect foil for the mellow rumble of her cello. And though it seems unlikely that the cello will ever replace the electric guitar as the favored instrument of pouting rockers, with Rasputina to blaze the path, it will at least remain a fanciful option for the musical intelligentsia. 

 

The Performant: Serf’s Up!

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Weill Project and Will Kaufman’s Woody Guthrie sing out.

“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.” –Joe Hill

As this year’s annual LaborFest draws to an end, and the organized labor movement is facing an uncertain future as exemplified by the recent Republican victory in Wisconsin regarding collective bargaining, and the disappointing conclusion to the Mott’s strike of 2010, it does the socialist spirit good to soothe the savage breast with music created with an ulterior motive. Political convictions as entertainment have had their misses, but it’s the hits we remember more, whether “learned by heart,” or not.

Though probably best known for the unrepentantly dark murder ballad “Mack the Knife,” Bertolt Brecht collaborator Kurt Weill was a staunch socialist firmly on the side of the underdog. The two pioneered theatrical works about and for the working class, and critical of “business as usual,” in life as well as in theatre. Under the direction of Allan Crossman and Harriet Page-March, the Weill Project, explored a set of seafaring songs from familiar Brecht/Weill musicals like “The Threepenny Opera” to more obscure tunes such as “Youkali: Tango Habanera,” which made an orchestral appearance in a mostly forgotten Weill side-project called “Marie Galante.”

“Marie,” sung in French by soprano Sibel Demirmen, was one of the evening’s most striking offerings. Another was mezzo-soprano Meghan Dibble’s rendition of “Pirate Jenny,” a song which exemplifies the divide between the working classes and their careless capitalist oppressors. Two other vocalists, Harriet March Page and Justin March rounded out the vocal mix, ably accompanied by Martha Cooper on piano and John Bilotta on accordion. Presented as part of Stage Werx Theatre’s <www.stagewerx.org> new music series, Underground Sound, the Weill Project set the bar high for shows to come, and is an ensemble to watch out for.

A staunch socialist closer to home, one Woody Guthrie, came to life in the hands of Will Kaufman whose solo performance “Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travellin’” (as well as his book, Woody Guthrie: American Radical) followed the dusty road of Guthrie’s political awakening through music.

A mean finger-picker, Kaufman played not just Guthrie tunes such as “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” as he described Woody’s visits to the migrant camps and the extra-legal liberties taken by the LAPD and a slew of union-busting vigilantes, but also songs that inspired him towards reaction. Songs like Joe Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave,” Agnes Cunningham’s “How Can You Keep Movin’ (Unless You Migrate Too),” and Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” — a song that galled Guthrie so much he wrote an angry counterpoint “God Blessed America,” which became his best known song, sans the political verses, as “This Land is Your Land.”

Kaufman, an American living in England, was inspired to tackle Woody Guthrie as a subject back in 2006 during a time when “George Bush and Dick Cheney were speaking for America,” in an attempt to connect with and portray an all-American voice closer to his own point of view. I can’t speak to whether or not he’s got the British convinced, but in San Francisco, his sentiments were welcome.

The Performant: Super Freaks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Thunderbird Theatre and Foul Play serve it up weird
 
Like swallows returning to Capistrano, there are certain annual events you can count on to lift the spirits and brighten an otherwise soggy outlook. One such anticipated delight is Thunderbird Theatre’s yearly production of an ensemble-created original comedy. Mavens of the shameless spoof, the fabulous T-birds have sent-up pulp detective fiction, lucha libre wrestling, pirate intrigues, Citizen Kane, Conan the Barbarian, vampire romance, and creepy office politics in variously hysterical ways, and a summer pilgrimage to their shows is always effort well-rewarded.

This year’s Thunderbird Special was “SaltyTowers” (the run ended July 23) — a goofy mashup of Greek mythology and the best BBC comedy show ever to feature the line “don’t mention the war.” The opening sequence, involving a traditional chorus, established the basic plot, but it was the next scene, set in the lobby of the hapless, underwater hotel that established the funny. As a string of minor gods, mortals on-the-lam, and a beleaguered mob boss-styled Zeus check-in to Poseidon’s realm, they were waited on by a Portuguese man-o-war, a Dolphin, and Poseidon himself: a world-weary deity in an ill-fitting suit, married to Medusa — a woman for whom the phrase “my little nest of vipers” could actually be taken for an endearment.

The tangled fishing line of a plot might have lost direction now and again, but the buoyant silliness of the Thunderbird crew was unsinkable. Brandon Wiley played a scantily-clad Dionysus with hedonistic abandon; Neil Higgins’ swinging socialite Hermes was equal parts Oscar Wilde and Eddie Izzard; Analisa Svehaug channeled Connie Booth as “Dolly,” a matter-of-fact dolphin receptionist-cum-waterpark
performer; and Thunderbird regular Shay Casey’s Zeus, “a big God with big needs,” nevertheless seemed strangely unflapped by the temporary loss of his tender bits in a mishap involving an angry crustacean (Gilbert Esqueda). Weird science alert: did you know the sting of a Portuguese man-o-war can cause an orgasm? To find out how, you’ll have to see it for yourself.

Meanwhile, across the hallway of the EXIT Theatreplex, an entirely different brand of weird is getting a test-drive at Foul Play’s premiere of Nikita Schoen’s “The Left-handed Darling”. Inspired in part by the imitable Tod Browning film, “Freaks,” Schoen’s first foray into playwriting is tinged with longing, deformity, and a calmly rational madness that doesn’t so much spiral as glide smoothly forward into the dark.

The central character, Calliope (AmandaOrtmayer), is the young daughter of former sideshow performers, Phillip and Constance Darling (Don Wood and Kimberly Maclean). Raised in isolation by her well-meaning yet physically challenged parents (they are unhappily co-joined), Calliope amuses herself by creating hybrid creatures from the body parts of the animals her father “preserves” in jars.

Starved for companionship, she falls in with a group of carnival freaks, played with delicate empathy by Wood, Maclean, Mikka Bonel, and Sean Owens, with a suitably creepy Mikl-em as their barker/overseer, Sugarchurch. Surreal flourishes such as the mysterious puppet entity, Dr Chang, a hauntingly lifelike parasitic twin, Don Seaver’s dissonant soundscape, and a stellar courtroom scene staged by the sideshow performers, create an atmosphere of thoughtful unease that lingers long after the final bow.

THE LEFT-HANDED DARLINGThrough Aug. 13
EXIT Theatre
156 Eddy, SF
(415) 673-3847
www.sffringe.org

The Perfomant: The future’s so bright

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Rejecting planned obsolescence with chiptunes and Front Line Theatre

This week, The Performant turns one, so please excuse me a moment while I stick a candle in my Molotov cocktail, tie it to this big red balloon, and send it soaring. In the oft-imagined dystopian future, this may well be how all our landmark dates will be celebrated, not with a whimper but a bang. We’ll all get drunk on a rare flask of artesian well water, and play pin the tail to the Womprat. As for the party music, it’s tough to predict what we’ll be listening to in the 22nd century, but it’s a good bet that electronics are going to figure heavily into the equation—if only as a way to use up all the obsolete 21st century e-waste sure to be still piled around.
 
Take chip music, for example.

This hardy little strain of underground electronica, also known as chiptune and 8-bit, has been pulsating away for over a decade in its own little corner of the dance floor, creating a sound that is both futuristic and retro. Walking into the DNALounge for the West Coast edition of Pulsewave, New York’s premiere, monthly chip music event, was akin to walking into an 80’s-era video arcade. Primitive, 8-bit graphics loomed large on the projection screen (courtesy of VJ Max Capacity), and the blip and zoom of familiar video-game sounds wedded to danceable beats were being DJed by Doctor Popular. Anybody who’s ever felt compelled to dance along to the theme music of The Super Mario Brothers would feel right at home at a chip music event, where much-cherished Game Boys serve as instruments, a lo-fi medium for creating hi-tech ambiance.
 
Of course, not every chip musician is limited to just 8-bits. San Francisco’s The Glowing Stars featured Lizzie Cuevas on guitar, and Matt Payne on baby blue drums (and canary yellow key-tar), who doubled up on the Game Boy, tweaking the output of their “traditional” instruments with the bloopety-bloop of that iconic device. Morgan Tucker, or Crashfaster , added ominous, vocoder-distorted vocals over dark-edged, almost gothic layers of chiptune before inviting East Bay hip-hop ensemble Spirits in the Basement to rap along. And headliner Bit Shifter, who’s been creating chip music for over a decade, blew the top off with an eminently danceable set of hard yet chirpy, post-EBM deftly coaxed out of his modified Game Boy box. Watch for more chip music marathons in the future as Pulsewave SF goes monthly. It definitely beats dancing alone at the video arcade.   
 
Meanwhile, Front Line Theatre, presenting their “verse-and-movement comedy, ‘Rare Earth’” at CounterPULSE, created an entire world from abandoned electronics. Called Unland, this desolate island was poisoned by chemical landfill leachings and decorated by enigmatic sculptures made of empty consoles, motherboards, and chicken wire (designed by Honey McMoney). An unexpected “Tempest”-style shipwreck brought a wayward Unlander home, and a thinly-plotted revenge scheme emerged from the rusty rubble. Combining modern-day slang, future dilemmas, and age-old conflicts, “Rare Earth” provided a view of the future not too fantastic to accept, but disquieting enough to want to stave off for as long as possible. Finding a use for all those outdated electronics would be a good first step. Someone get Bit Shifter on the phone.

The Performant: Meme trope traditions

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Taking in the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s “2012: The Musical”

Even the most anarchic, atheistic, or contrarian among us deserve the comfort of a few holiday traditions, whatever the season — and come the Fourth of July weekend you’ll find a kindred crowd hundreds strong camped out in the lower quadrant of Dolores Park. Unusually for Independence Day frolics, the focus is not on the consumption of grilled foodstuffs or blowing things up (fine traditions both), but on the opening of the latest San Francisco Mime Troupe show. Although the largest crowds typically show up for the official opening, always scheduled for the glorious Fourth, the preview performances are also well-attended, and it’s not unusual for folks to pick a preferred date that remains constant for years on end. And no matter how fog-bound the holiday itself, somehow the Mime Troupe opening miraculously manages to fall on one of the sunniest weekends of the year, proof perhaps of some insidious cosmic intervention, either on behalf of the Mimes or the ‘Murkins.


Politicized street theatre will always have a rather niche appeal, but the Mime Troupe nonetheless packs parks and indoor venues all over California, and in years past, the nation, with its signature brand of comedic-leftist-satire-with-song-and-dance-routines. For many San Franciscans it may sometimes feel like they’re preaching to the choir, but as anyone who’s ever seen The Reverence Billy on a roll can attest, sometimes the choir needs preaching to same as anyone else. And when it comes to the Mime Troupe, they don’t just talk a good game, but do their best to abide by it. In addition to “overthrowing capitalism one musical comedy at a time,” the Mime Troupe operates as a multi-racial, multi-generational collective, and it’s actually thanks to them, defendants of a little-remembered obscenity case in the 1960s, that theatre companies can perform uncensored in the parks of San Francisco today. Not that there’s anything particularly obscene about this year’s offering—“2012, The Musical”—where the only affront to public decency are the villainous corporate green-washers written into the script.
 
So here’s where it begins. A sunny Saturday in the park. Picnickers and space hoarders arriving hours early to ensure a good seat on the grass. By noon the Troupe is working out last-minutes staging kinks and sound mix, as eager, unaffiliated petition-bearers circulate the area. This year’s theme combines the personal (struggling radical theatre company looking for funding) with the political (when they find it, where is it really coming from, plus a side-plot involving an incompetent Senator running for President at the behest of the Rand Corporation). In keeping with the 2012 trope, a play-within-the-play is staged complete with spandex-clad denizens from the future, mad scientists Nostradamus, and a befeathered Mayan priest. But for the Mimes, it’s the memes they help disseminate that impact most. Self-determined collectivism. Radical inclusion. Art for people not for profit. The uncensored, uncensured use of public space. And an unabashed fealty for showtunes.
 
Through September 25,
Various locations
Free
(415) 285-1717
www.sfmt.org

The Performant: Trans-cendental Meditations

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Tranimals come out at Nightlife

The time is probably coming when humans will be able to adapt animalian traits, ala “Transmetropolitan,” either as a weekend whim or on a permanent basis. The whole notion is too tempting to remain a fiction forever. Imagine possessing the smooth, insulating skin of a dolphin, the soaring wings of a peregrine falcon, the keen night vision of a bobcat. The desire for such transmogrification is as ancient as recorded history: from Centaurs to Satyrs, Mermaids to Manticores, Mami Wata to the Minotaur, there’s hardly a mythology around without some reference to human-animal hybrids, whether monsters or gods. Years from now, the very notion of “transitioning” might well have to be expanded to include folks shifting between all kinds of bodies and capabilities. Until then, we’ll have to make do with costumery, flaunting temporary feathers and furs like so much wishful thinking.
 
You probably won’t find a denser concentration of fantasy animal drag outside a furry convention than at a “Tranimal” contest — particularly one hosted in the California Academy of Sciences, where accurately portraying animal characteristics is serious business.

At last week’s Pride-themed NightLife (and adult-themed, cocktail-hour weekly event that draws a huge crowd with ever-changing themes), an eager crowd eschewed the planetarium and rain forest sphere to gather in the glass-walled piazza for a mini-Trannyshack show followed by the surprisingly competitive Tranimal contest. “We were afraid no one was going to want to compete,” pageant organizer Heklina marveled as close to 40 contestants jumped on and off the makeshift stage for their 15 seconds of fame. Each costume more elaborate and exotic than the last, all manner of fauna was well-represented. A mysterious, stiletto-heeled figure in a spotted jaguar mask named Latrina (“Oh, how punk,” remarked Heklina); a flame-haired, fur-armed creature of the night called Envy; a surprise appearance from touring circuit star, Scotty the Blue Bunny (“We should just hand you the grand prize now and get it over with”). For the most part though, more faithfully-rendered animals swept the awards: a shy, lighted jellyfish, a spunky, slithery reptile “the Sex Raptor,” and the delicately-finned, giant-toothed “Lady Angler Fish”.

“That’s every gay man’s nightmare of a vagina,” joked Heklina about the lady’s enormous jaws ringed with gigantic, dagger-like teeth that obscured her entire abdomen. Some of the best costumes didn’t even compete. My personal faves, husbands Roger and Joel, looked ready for action as intrepid naturalists covered in giant insects and normal-sized birds, nets at the ready.
 
Down in the aquarium, costuming was scarce, but thanks to the pulsing sounds provided by Honey Soundsystem, and the disco-worthy
lights illuminating the fishtanks, a purely psychedelic experience was still available. Drawn especially to the languid varieties of jellyfish, “ballerinas of the sea,” I found the Soundsystem soundtrack extremely well-suited to the mysterious perambulations of the colorfully-illuminated Medusozoa. In general, all the fish seemed appreciative of the shindig, even Claude, the albino alligator was moved to leap off his usual perch and splash around his swamp domain. True, he might have just been trying to get away, but the possibility that he might have been fantasizing about donning a more human skin in order to join the party was an irresistible notion.

The Performant: Impossible weekend! Or: what to do when there’s everything to do?

Andrew Lam
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Bicycle Music Festival and “A Clockwork Orange Afternoon”

Oh lordy, let me catch my breath. Weekend, you have officially kicked my ass.

Merely mortal, I found it difficult to plot an itinerary efficient enough to be able to hit every event that beckoned my attention over those bright and sunny 48 hours. Would I attend the annual Juneteenth street festival or a lecture on the benefits of zombie domestication? Journey to the End of the Night or a CLASH scavenger hunt? Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings at Stern Grove or Klaus Kinski at YBCA? Cloning myself seems a more attractive option by the day.

Spoiled for choice, and seeking the sun, I was wooed by the Bicycle Music Festival on Saturday afternoon. Located in the comfy meadow just past the De Young in Golden Gate Park, the Bicycle Music Fest kicked off with local folk rockers StitchCraft. Heather Normandale’s Jolie-Holland husk accompanied by her own guitar and Joey “Cello Joe” Chang wafted sweetly in the mild breeze while a team of stationary-bike pedalers powered up the PA system. 

Introduced by festival organizer and Rock the Bike founder Paul “Fossil Fool” Freedman as an “OG” of the Bicycle Music movement, Normandale is a fixture with the Pleasant Revolution bicycle-powered music touring group, including a five-month tour of Europe with fellow BMF-featured performers, The Ginger Ninjas, as well as a participant of the Shake Your Peace 2009 Winter Walking Tour. Next up, Cradle Duende brought the gypsy noise followed by Evan Francis and fellow jazz mafiosos  who played a mellow, sax-heavy set, warm as the rare June sunshine.

Solar-charged, pedal-powered, and ready for shade, I made tracks on Sunday for “A Clockwork Orange Afternoon” at the Edinburgh Castle. A celebration of the 40-year anniversary of the notorious Kubrick film made of the Anthony Burgess book of the same name, choice excerpts were read, and partly enacted, by Castle regulars: Jack Boulware as narrator, pub proprietor Alan Black as a slew of bit characters (including a spot-on interpretation of the Prison Chaplain), and bowler-hatted Crispin Barker as “Little Alex”. 

At 49, the book itself is still pretty spry, alternating between restless and relentless, full of ultra-violence, yes, and weepy devotchkas and the red, red vino on tap — but not far below the shock value of its remorseless protagonist’s actions lies Burgess’ unwavering belief that the basis for our humanity is our power of choice, for good or for ill. 

“When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man,” asserts the prison chaplain doggedly, a statement echoed by Burgess himself in his 1986 essay “A Clockwork Orange, Resucked”. Stripped of his ability to choose his own moral path, and simultaneously losing his ability to listen to Beethoven’s Ninth (for Burgess, a self-taught composer, this was undoubtedly the ultimate cruelty), Alex pays dearly for his state-sanctioned “freedom”. And nearly fifty years later, the dire implications of the “Ludovico technique” still provoke as strongly as any spot of “twenty-to-one”.

 

The Performant: The fast and the furious

Andrew Lam
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FURY Factory turns four

Summertime is festival time in the city, and the streets will stay lively from now to Halloween, barring acts of god/s or unforeseen War on Fun skirmishes. But considering the typical bluster of an average summer day in San Francisco, it’s a relief that a few of our festivals can be enjoyed indoors. 

One example: FURY Factory, a three-week celebration of ensemble theatre hosted by San Francisco’s own foolsFURY Theater that provides the perfect excuse to avoid the elements, located in the comparable warmth of Project Artaud’s four theatre spaces. An eclectic lineup of 31 ensemble companies from around the country, FURY Factory includes talkbacks, workshops, and a forum for discussing excellence in theatre. 

But for most oddiences, the play’s the thing, and there is indeed a plethora of performances to choose from, some of which are even being streamed live on “New Play TV.”

On Saturday afternoon a cluster of kids and young-at-hearts gathered in The Jewish Theatre to watch a light-hearted collaborative effort between two San Francisco-based ensembles — Sweet Can Productions and Coventry and Kaluza – called “Chef Mulchini’s Kitchen”. A buoyant public service announcement regarding the four “R’s” (reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot) as presented by a quartet of capable clowns, “Kitchen” is a visually appealing romp which includes an appearance by a rapping green trash bin, puppet produce, and acrobatics. 

A nerd (Ross Travis, who also plays a brash pentathlete), a robot (Natasha Kaluza), a flirtatious neighbor (Kerri Kresinski), and that mustachioed punster, Chef Mulchini himself (Jamie Coventry), approach the topic of waste reduction with the wide-eyed earnestness of a Sesame Street sketch. You’re more likely to catch the next Mulchini performance at a public grade school than in a private theatre, but the performers themselves can be found in grown-up shows throughout the year, and are well worth watching on any stage.

One of the most buzzed-about events in the festival by far has been the West Coast premiere of Pig Iron’s Obie-winning “Chekov Lizardbrain,” which played for a single sold-out weekend at Z Space. An uncomfortably wry prologue narrated by an ostensibly imaginary occupant of protagonist Dmitri’s mind (both played by James Sugg) opens the show. 

The narrator “Chekov Lizardbrain” wears an ostentatious top hat and tailcoat, but his reptilian gestures and labored mumble undermine the graciousness such attire is meant to convey. His host body, Dmitri, is not much better off. An Aspergian botanist, he is socially awkward to the point of painful, and his interactions with three brothers whose house he is buying take a surreal turn as he recasts their conversations in the context of a Chekovian melodrama. 

The brothers, played by Dito van Reigersberg, Geoff Sobelle, and Quinn Bauriedel, first appear onstage in formal top hats, suit vests, and turn-of-the-century long underwear, underscoring their fantasy-based roles. Peeks behind the stylish red curtain provide glimpses of the murky swamp of Dmitri’s brain, where an initially light-hearted game of “lost and alone” leaves him stranded, inside and out. Though the “rules” of Chekov presented earlier in the show specify that tragedy should happen “offstage,” the melancholy finale in which Dmitri succumbs entirely to his “lizard brain” is not a particularly uplifting one. But the neocortex can sense the humanity in it.

 

FURY Factory 2011

Through June 26

Project Artuad

499 Alabama, SF

(415) 685-3665

www.foolsfury.org

 

 

The Performant: A pox upon’t

Andrew Lam
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The Coen Brothers meet The Bard in Much Ado About Lebrowski

The best parodies are born from admiration for the targeted subject, be they the tortured plot twists of Spaceballs, the foppish mop-tops of The Rutles, or the beleaguered hero’s quest of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. In a swoop guaranteed to appeal to worshippers of high and low culture alike, the Primitive Screwheads’ remount of last year’s hit mash-up Much Ado About Lebrowski manages to pay homage to one of the most-produced playwrights in the English language (ye olde Billy Shakespeare) and a pair of our most intriguing modern filmmakers (the Coen Brothers) in one borderline-blasphemous production, with enough in jokes and innuendo from both to keep aficionados of either on their toes. 

Lines from plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth pepper the tortured syntax of the SoCal-meets-soliloquy text while characters from Raising Arizona and songs from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou mix effortlessly in with the endless “drinks of Russia White” and nihilist antics. 

Admittedly more closely calibrated to the many ludicrous tropes of the Coen Brothers’ film than those of Much Ado About Nothing, the Screwheads’ version begins with the appearance of three minstrels (John Carr, Paul Trask, and Sam Chase) who lead the room in a rousing rendition of “Ring of Fire” before launching into “Tumbling Tumbleweeds”, straight from the movie soundtrack. A fetching chorus line (Tara Navarro, Sarah Leight, Audra Wolfmann, and Suzanne Taylor) briefly set the scene before the Dude, henceforth dubbed “the Knave,” Geoffrey Lebowski (Alfred Muller) is hauled to the stage by two thugs (Karl Schackne and Omeid Far) who dunk his head in the commode — strategically located in the lap of a guy in the front row. From that point, no-one in the oddience is safe, the invasion of “space personal” a tried-and-true Primitive Screwheads tradition. 

Without a budget for much in the way of special effects (or props, or set…) the show very much relies on the merits of its actors, most of whom ably play multiple roles in the confused comedy of errors that transpires. Muller portrays “the Knave” with just the right blend of apathy and outrage, and his bowling buddies Sir Walter and Sir Daniel are hilariously inhabited by Steve Bologna and Omied Far (“Shut the firk up, Daniel!”). 

Inflatable beach balls rolled down the center aisle serving as the makeshift bowling lane, and a gigantic wooden sword as Sir Willaim’s weapon of choice. Dream sequences of giant bowling pins, Viking helmets, and an inexplicable pink unicorn are perhaps less visually psychedelic but no less hilarious than the ones from the movie, and the obvious willingness of the oddience to suspend disbelief and play along, partly assisted by rounds from the inexpensive bar, makes The Big Lebrowski as much a participatory event as spectator sport. And while “a knave by any other name would abide just as well,” you’d be hard-pressed to find any as up to the challenge as those who call the Primitive Screwheads family. Of course that’s just, forsooth, my opinion, man. 

 

Through June 25

 Fri-Sun 8 p.m., $20-25

Cellspace

2050 Bryant, SF

(415) 648-7562

www.primitivescrewheads.com/2011

 

The Performant: Bar Crawl

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Burroughs and Shakespeare served neat, no chaser.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A man walks into a bar. Ouch! Just kidding. A man walked into a bar. He idly scoped out a handsome youth leaning against the wall (Jorge Rodolfo De Hoyos Jr.) and began to sing: “I could use that, if the family jewels weren’t pawned to uncle junk…” Music swelled from the five-piece chamber orchestra in the corner of the stage: pizzicato on the violin, a bowed double bass, high-pitched urgent keys. An angular, haunting, sometimes dissonant music; just what you might expect the score for an operetta based on the semi-autobiographical William S. Burroughs II novel Queer to be.

The man onstage inhabited a familiar silhouette — rumpled suit jacket, a wide, silk tie, soft fedora — but rather than the reptilian demeanor of Burroughs’ legend, this representation of his protagonist Lee (Joe Wicht a.k.a. Trauma Flintstone) was both lusty and manic. He pursued the object of his desires, the diffident American Allerton (James Graham) with a single-minded frenzy, over-shadowed only by trembling bouts of junk-sickness and a burgeoning obsession with the psychotropic yage, or ayahuasca plant of South America.

Premiered in 2001, the Erling Wold operatic adaptation stuck to the text of the original pretty faithfully, the addition of Cid Pearlman’s silent balletic choreography lending the entire production the quality of an extended dream sequence. The show ended as it begins — in an expat bar somewhere in Mexico city—the slumped character of Lee as alone as in the opening sequence, older but not wiser, his longing for Allerton unabated, them usic underscoring his solitude in mournful adagio. 

Meanwhile, at the Café Royale, briefly transformed into The Boar’s Head Tavern of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and V by the ever-ambitious San Francisco Theatre Pub, an adaptation of both (called The Boar’s Head, natch) played to a full house on Monday night. Concentrating mainly on the scenes set in the infamous pub, The Boar’s Head tracked the coming-of-age of the king-to-be, Prince Hal (Bennett Fisher), and his relationships to the two men who shaped him most—his austere father, the king (Ted Barker), and the jocular, petty criminal, Falstaff (Paul Jennings).

With no clearly defined stage space, the actors roamed around the whole room as well as on the Mezzanine, giving their pub-set play an air of authenticity better than any spray-painted flat and borrowed barstools could ever hope to. Their inventive use of space included using the pool table as an erstwhile deathbed, and the end of the bar for, well, the end of the bar, where Falstaff called repeatedly for his cup of sack and the French princess Katherine (Larissa Archer) learned halting English, body part by body part.

At the play’s end, the newly coroneted Hal banished the lusty Falstaff from his presence for a distance of 10 miles. Despite the somewhat gloomy resonance with Lee’s downfall from the night before, it’s actually encouraging to note that the libertine spirit has been under attack for literally hundreds of years and has yet to succumb entirely to the guardians of dour morality. At the very least, we should toast its tenacity with a cup of sack.

The Performant 45: Oh Rapture, up yours!

Andrew Lam
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1

Gearing up for the end times with Hoodslam

Well another Armageddon scare has come and gone and we’re all still here, as is my dirty laundry which I was letting pile up on the off chance that I wouldn’t need it again. Not that clean clothes were necessary to attend the Judgment Day edition of Oakland-based, amateur-wrestling-and-sideshow-freak extravaganza, Hoodslam. 

Housed in the strategically ramshackle Victory Warehouse, a couple of scenic blocks from the Oakland Greyhound station, the Hoodslam ring loomed large in the confines of what could be euphemistically referred to as the foyer. Cheerfully inebriated fans crowded in on three sides, a colorful wall of graffiti framed the fourth, a makeshift door led to the “dressing room,” and a chainlink barrier shielded the house band, Einstye, in classic “Blues Brothers at Bob’s Country Bunker” style. “You can cut the tension in this room with a knife,” wry match commentator Kevin Gill remarked. You could have cut the great cloud of cigarette-booze-and-blunt fumes with same.

In the best tradition of punk rock wrestling shows like the sorely-missed Incredibly Strange Wrestling, Hoodslam mixes costumed characters, fabricated grudge matches, aggro posturing, loud music, and theatrical bodyslamming with a healthy dose of humor and a pinch of what-the-fuck. But where the flamboyant weirdness of ISW was definitely a product of San Francisco’s love of themed masquerade parties and the slickly produced Lucha Va Voom is 100 percent LA, the scrappy phenomenon that is Hoodslam retains a thoroughly Oakland vibe. 

The sensation of being a first-time Hoodslam attendee is something akin to having a crack pipe in one hand and a spliff in the other, with a Steel Reserve going five rounds with a half bottle of NyQuil in the fight cage of your alimentary canal. It’s disorienting. It’s vaguely unsettling. And it’s a hell of a crazy ride.

On Friday, in preparation for the end of the world, a good two dozen Hoodslam “legends” showed up to settle some scores and create new ones (just in case we’d all live to fight another day). Contestants included a bi-polar clown, a French mime, an invisible man, a stampeding rhinoceros, a Winnie-the-Pooh lookalike armed with a garbage can, an unusually tall leprechaun, an Al Bundy clone, ISW remnant Otis the Gimp, the demonic Reverend Hellfyre and his passle of Zombie slaves, and a fanged Mexican werewolf—the dreaded chupacabra! 

There were even some wrestlers who could really fight: the acrobatic, bare-chested Juiced Lee for one, and native son, the masked El Lucha Magnifico, “the most evenly-matched men in Hoodslam.” 

The unbridled feistiness of the combatants was matched only by the rowdiness of the fans (“fuck the fans,” cheerfully reminded ring announcer Ike Emelio Burner on several occasions), whose profane chanting, frenzied pounding on the mat, and blow-by-blow heckling gave the event a post-apocalyptic edge, though the apocalypse wasn’t scheduled to arrive until the next day.

“Wrestling is a form of theatre designed to generate mass hysteria,” former ISW wrestler and book author Count Dante remarked in his Wired magazine interview. At the smackdown between the mass hysteria of Hoodslam vs. the mass hysteria of the pending Rapture, the former definitely took the win.

The Performant: Spank it!

Andrew Lam
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0

Austin invades SF with Christeene Vale, Wammo, and Guy Forsyth

There’s glamour. Then there’s Glamour. And then there’s Glamour’s myriad permutations, like Drag Glamour. And Drug Glamour. And Diva Glamour. Glamour makes respectable what might otherwise be considered merely ostentatious, excessive, or gauche. Elusive but instantly recognizable, there’s no doubt that glamour can enthrall. But frankly, sometimes it bores. 

There’s nothing boring about Christeene Vale. 

One part Iggy Pop, one part New York Dolls, and one part complete mess, Vale is pure punk rock without the guitars. Headlining Some Thing at the Stud, appropriately on Friday the 13th, Vale stumbled onto the stage dressed in decidedly unglamorous rags, a shredded t-shirt, and a flesh-colored thong, bruises decorating her hairy thighs, lipstick smeared half across her face like a terrorist clown. 

Accompanied by a burst of driving electronica, Vale began gyrating suggestively, not in a softcore “come hither” kind of way, but in a down and (really) dirty way, tugging at her g-string, spreading her literally filthy cheeks. 

Rapping over the rhythm at breakneck speed, the tweeker-twitchy tranny demanded that the crowd “Fix My Dick”. Clever and gross, lyrics such as “I’ll let you chew on my crab cake the hell with the first date just slide me the beefsteak” fell from her lips as easily as the gobs of spittle she spat at the front row. 

The rest of her set was just as confrontational—and just as hilarious: “Workin’ on Granma,” “Slowly/Easy,” “Tears from My Pussy” (a downbeat little R & B ballad with a Casio-tone hook). Creatively fearless, Vale managed to be both explicitly offensive and unexpectedly romantic. “There’s room at the table for all of us,” could well have been the anti-glamour message being propagated, though there’s an equal chance it was something a little less precious like “let’s get drunk and fuck tonight”.

Austin darlings the Asylum Street Spankers may be no more, but musicians still have to eat, y’all. Even the Sex Pistols had their Filthy Lucre tour, though that calculated stadium spectacle was a far cry from this convivial parlor act of former Spankers Wammo and Guy Forsyth, who teamed up at the Red Devil Lounge to play a few favorites. 

Blessed with a wicked slide guitar, Forsyth killed on Blind Willie Johnson’s “God Moves on the Water,” and on his own rocking, talking tune “Long Long Time” (“we used to dream about heroes/but now it’s just how to beat the system”). Wammo alternated between playing percussion on a plastic suitcase and adding “horns” to the mix with his harmonica, a kazoo, a spot of Tuvan-style throat-singing, and a jump onto lead vocals for humorous tunes such as “Beer,” and my personal favorite “Leafblower,” which sounded like a parody of a Kurt Cobain song, a sort of nasal whine ruminating on the evil of the 8 a.m. leafblower outside one’s window (“good thing I don’t have a gun”). 

They might not have an official band name yet, but as a duo, Wammo and Forsyth still managed to provide a spanking good show. 

 

 

The Performant: Vice squad

Andrew Lam
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0

The Thrillpeddlers take on Poe, plague, and poop

In Edgar Allan Poe’s grisly tale The Masque of the Red Death, a group of wealthy nobles hole up in a fortified abbey to avoid the ravages of a mysterious ailment sweeping the countryside, which causes its victims to sweat blood and keel over dead in the streets. 

Led by their host, Prince Prospero, they gather beneath his roof and weld the gates shut against the outside world, availing themselves of the comforts he provides: food, wine, and “all the appliances of pleasure”. Six months into their isolation the Prince arranges a masquerade ball, a gala affair that fills seven rooms, each decorated in a different color. In his zeal to describe at length how each room even boasted windowglass the color of the décor, and how the partiers were costumed with “much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm,” Poe neglects to describe much of the evening’s entertainment. 

Fortunately for the curious, the gender-bending, genre-blending ensemble The Cockettes decided to reimagine the spectacle in their final show, Vice Palace, now being revived by the Thrillpeddlers in their way-off-market digs, the Hypnodrome.

As grotesque and depraved as Poe must have imagined the desperate pastimes of the filthy rich to be, it’s my guess that he wouldn’t have come up with entertainments half as perverse as those showcased in Vice Palace. 

Wrangled into place by flamboyant, fabulously-coiffed hostess Divina (Leigh Crow) and her crop-wielding, high-bosomed secretary Bella (Eric Tyson Wertz), the entertainers went right for the gusto early in the “yellow room” with a buxom burlesque dancer (Tina Sogliuzzo) and a ribald ditty about a camel’s hump(s) performed by dishy tattooed “boy toys” Steven Satyricon and Joshua Devore (the artist formally known as Tober Brandt). 

Next followed a lascivious ode to tantric sex, a bawdy, bloody ballad about Caligula, a Cockettes classic “A Crab on Uranus (Means You’re Loved),” and a sweetly-sung solo performed by Birdie-Bob Watt as Vagina Dentata about her life as a floating turd. Incidentally, this last song included a “scat break”. Of course it did! But even this paled in comparison to the titillating, wordless “Flesh Ballet” performed by an acrobatic (and totally nekkid) Ste Fishell.

The greatest thrill of the production is watching how easily the company weds their long-standing focus on the Grand Guignol with their more recent forays into Theatre of the Ridiculous territory in a single piece. Incorporating all of the gratuitous violence and bloodshed of the former, with the audacious camp of the latter, this show provides a quick and dirty primer on their longstanding love affairs with both. Blood, babes, beefy love slaves, boss wigs, striking black-and-white costumes (designed by Kara Emry), creepy blood effects (Rob Fletcher), and terrific tunes (Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn): this charming little anti-musical has something in it for everyone, with the possible exception of Poe. But he’s dead. 

 

Vice Palace: The Last Cockette Musical

Through July 31, $20-35

The Hypnodrome

575 10th St., SF

(415) 377-4202

www.thrillpeddlers.com

 

The Performant: Herrre’s Johnny!

Andrew Lam
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0

Entering The Room

Harley-Davidson. Twinkies. Michael Jackson. Some things are so uniquely American they practically ooze stars and stripes, no matter how far across the borders they stray.

Another all-American tradition – right up there with Miller-in-a-can and Wheel of Fortune – has got to be Bad Movie Night: the deliberate screening of movies so awful they make the viewer scream tears of laughter, or sit in horrified silence, too traumatized by dubious production values or script incoherence to muster the strength to tear their eyes away.

The compulsion to celebrate these cinematic misfits holds a singular place in our national consciousness. They even feed our civic pride: what may be California’s best-loved cult flick of the decade The Room is set right here in San Francisco, with plenty of slo-motion shots of the Golden Gate Bridge to prove it

“I’ve seen this movie 25 times now,” confessed Red Vic employee-owner Sam Sharkey during his introduction, a slightly desperate gleam in his eye. As the opening credits rolled over some stock-style footage of the sun sparkling on the bay, the Palace of Fine Arts, and the California Street cable car, the oddience immediately set phasers to “heckle”. When the credit for director of photography, Todd Barron, flashed on the screen they shouted as one “Fuck you, Todd!” When the door to a non-descript, upscale apartment swings open and “Johnny” (Tommy Wiseau) walked into his living room, the theater erupted into an ecstatic cheer.

“Hi babe,” he responded as if on cue, though of course he was really speaking to his co-star Juliette Danielle, cast in the unenviable role of Tommy’s whiny girlfriend, Lisa.

None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, which perversely is part of what makes the flick such a guilty pleasure. It’s simply impossible to feel bad for these jerks, even if they are trapped in a movie world they didn’t create. Besides Tommy, who appears perpetually zonked on airplane glue and speaks with an outrageous accent of indeterminable origin, and Lisa, who appears to be about 30 years younger and only living with him because, as her acerbic mother (Carolyn Minnott) points out, she can’t support herself, there’s his best friend Mark (Greg Sistero), a preternaturally handsome youth who allows Lisa to seduce him, Denny (Philip Haldiman), a socially-inept teenager who manages to almost get shot in a nefarious drug deal gone awry, and random friends who drop by to have sex on Tommy’s Ikea-issue living room sofa.

For aficionados of cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show and events such as Midnight Mass with Peaches Christ, a screening of The Room will seem familiar. Scripted cat-calls, impromptu sound effects, the tossing of footballs and, more importantly, spoons don’t deviate overmuch from the generally accepted cult movie experience.

But for San Franciscans, The Room provides more than just an outlet for poking fun at a film, it’s a way for us to poke fun at ourselves. Though filmed mostly in LA, the random shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marina, and Alcatraz conspire to remind the viewer that the movie is partly a love letter, albeit sloppily written, to San Francisco. A city which embraces even its most incongruous misfits.

“If a lot of people loved each other,” Tommy as Johnny perseveres, despite all evidence to the contrary, “the world would be a better place to live.” We are all Tommy Wiseau now.

 

The Room screens monthly at The Red Vic Movie House

 

The Performant: Sing like everyone’s listening

Andrew Lam
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0

Electric Party Songs and The Darker Side of Broadway

However you feel (or don’t) about the Beat Generation, you have to give Allen Ginsberg credit for his ability to transcend the limitations of that motley crew, always pushing forward and outward in his beatific search for the sublime. Perhaps no other modern poet has better exemplified the endless fluctuations of the underground, and how to eternally roll along with them. Our own Holy Fool: queer Buddhist Jew, vagabond truth-seeker, and the King of May. In all the ways that count, Allen Ginsberg was, and will always be, America.

And America, like it or not, will always have an influence on the global arts arena, so it is perhaps not surprising that the small band of multinational artists who comprise the “open program” of the Italy-based Workcenter of Jerzy Growtowski and Thomas Richards have embraced America, and Ginsberg in particular, in their touring productions I am America and Electric Party Songs.

Using Ginsberg’s poetry as a catalyst, Electric Party Songs was developed with social gatherings in mind, mashed ecstatic texts with Southern spirituals, “Capitol Air” with call-and-response. 

Displaying a chummy familiarity despite the less-than-intimate setting of the SFMOMA lobby, the performers began by praising the creative energy of excess, first as a duet between Alejandro Rodriguez from Argentina, and Lloyd Bricken from Alabama, then quickly incorporating the eleven-person cast. Bursting with exuberance like Kerouac’s “fabulous yellow Roman candles,” they may have been dressed liked a runaway chorus line from a revival of Hair, but their intuitive chemistry was pure Digger. 

Eventually, in a manner that Ginsberg would undoubtedly have approved of, the gleeful club abandoned word-for-word renditions of his poetry, and moved into a set of African-American spirituals, a focal point of much of Workcenter’s current research. A moving rendition of “Adam in the Garden” found several performers mixed into the oddience, keeping time and murmuring response, while in the center of the polite circle, the song leader Alejandro romped and wriggled with Davide Curzio (Italy), giggling, entangled, pulsing outwards, pushing forward: all innocence. By the end of the set it was impossible to believe they haven’t been here with us all along, hovering genially at the edges of our consciousness, just like the spirituals and the venerable poet that gave their electric party its juice.

Belters, babes, and consummate showmen – and that’s just the production crew! If Boxcar Theatre’s tongue-in-cheek tour of The Darker Side of Broadway, a dizzying slew of doomed ditties sung by most of the cast and crew, was an indicator, their upcoming production of Little Shop of Horrors (which opens May 20) should be a rip-snorter.

Highlights included a heartfelt West Side Story duet between ensemble member Amy Lizardo and “Ronnette” Nikki Arias (“A Boy Like That”), a tense, downtempo “Pimp’s Tango” from Threepenny Opera, between John Lewis (who will play Seymour) and Bryn Laux (who will play Audrey), and a hilariously bawdy “Glitter and Gay” from Candide performed by assistant director Lauren Doucette. After a terrifically evil rendition of a Shockheaded Peter song from artistic director Nick Olivero, a smashing performance of “The Cell Block Tango” from Chicago brought down the house, leaving us with appetites whetted like Audrey II’s for fresh blood, with a side of campy cheese.

 

The Performant: I’m aware of the dark

Andrew Lam
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0

David Thomas and Joanna Haigood explore the shadows of the American Dream

“There’s no real trick to living life like a ghost,” David Thomas assures an excited contingent of experimental music enthusiasts from a makeshift stage set up in performer Erica Blue’s Oakland warehouse residence. Best known for his iconoclastic avant-rock combo Pere Ubu, Thomas’s stage persona may be less openly confrontational than in younger days, but he wears the mantle of curmudgeonly grand-père with a sense of historical imperative. 

Accompanied by multi-faceted musician (and jovial straight man) Ralph Carney on clarinet, Thomas’s additional instrumentation involved nothing more than a small button accordion punctuated by a few spare samples pulled up on a cigarette-ash-streaked iPad. His singing voice was weathered yet resonant, like the creaking of an old barn door, and he made good use of the melodic rumble of his speaking voice in the conversational manner of a clairvoyant storyteller, interspersing long, poetic passages from works such as “Mirror Man” with tragic-comic tunes such as “Sad.Txt.” admonishing that “time will catch up to you/like it caught me too.” Within each song shimmered an elusive portrait of the America of the dispossessed: roadside cafes and long lonesome stretches, broken hearts attached to broken people, living ghosts, and dark spaces. “I’m aware of the dark,” he crooned during his encore, while an empathetic shiver passed through the room. 

Opening act, The Wounded Stag, an inventively disturbing collaboration between performance artist Dan Carbone and musician Andrew Goldfarb, a.k.a. The Slow Poisoner (plus a cameo appearance by dancer Erica Blue) provided a worthy introduction to the darkside, with lyrics like “please don’t let me go to heaven with a swollen gun in my pocket,” and “aren’t we all already dead?” Crooning, warbling, screaming, even grunting like a monkey, singer-lyricist Carbone’s expressive use of props and masks underscored his theatrical background while Goldfarb, another amiable foil, provided the swamp-rock tinged musical ballast with his electric guitar and a single, expressive kickdrum. 

On the other side of the Bay Bridge, Joanna Haigood’s Zaccho Dance Theatre company was remounting their 2008 exploration of racism in America, The Monkey and the Devil at YBCA. Inventively set in an installation known as “a house divided” (designed by Charles Trapolin), two section of a single wooden edifice split in two and mounted on shaky, unbalanced foundations, Monkey featured two couples, one black, one white. Mocking each other’s mannerisms and posturing for dominance, the women started the piece off, culminating in a pitched battle royale in a boxing spotlight “ring”. Settling back into their separate quarters, they proceeded to hurl racially-charged epithets at each other in muted monotones until abruptly the tenor of the scene shifted to one of palpable threat as the men leapt to the top of each “house” and then through the windows, menacing the women with silence and measuring tapes which coiled and uncoiled like whips.

In the final tableau, each couple danced in desperate tandem, being spun violently around and around by a member of the other duo to a soundtrack of waves and traffic which crashed over their bodies slamming against the wooden walls of their unstable fortresses. After a pause the cycle resumed itself, this time with the men in the posturing position. Then once more with the women, an endlessly repeating loop, as fitting a metaphor for the persistence of racism in America as any written word.

 

 

The Performant: Here be pirates

Andrew Lam
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0

Joining the saltwater chorus at the monthly Chantey Sing at Fisherman’s Wharf

Landlubbers arise. San Franciscans of the not long-distant past were a sea-faring folk, and you don’t have to scratch the surface very far to dig up old salt. Sailboats, houseboats, fishing boats, and ferries all still have their place in the bay, churning in the wake of container ships and visiting cruise lines, and the waterfront pubs are still prime locations to be regaled by gusty tall (ship) tales by grizzled old-school longshoremen and maritime amateurs alike.

One of the most unexpected legacies of our boating heritage is the monthly Chantey Sing aboard The Balclutha, a historic square rig docked at the end of the Hyde Street Pier. Six months shy of its 30-year anniversary, the Chantey Sing is one of those wonderfully hidden-in-plain-view pockets of locals-only camaraderie that you could spend years of urban assimilation hoping to stumble upon.

That singing in public is one of the top-rated social anxieties in America is a statistic that has blissfully passed the Balclutha by, and on the first Saturday of every month its shelter deck fills up with as mixed a group in terms of age, background, musical ability, and general sea-worthiness as any 120 year-old square-rigger could possibly hope to attract. Anchored at the end of Hyde Street pier and maintained by the National Park Service, the Balclutha sails no more, but when night falls and the tourist dives on Fisherman’s Wharf become flatlander-infested, the comfortable embrace of the historic ship welcomes Chantey novices and old hands alike.

Like any style of call-and-response work song, the typical sea chantey takes its rhythm from the work involved, in this case a slowly rolling pace punctuated by rollicking bursts of chorus, meant to be sung while heaving to or hoisting sails. Themes revolve predominantly around certain bodies of land or water, ladies left behind, dangerous capes, and rough seas, with songs of a salacious nature given a deserved airing after the 11 p.m. mark. Anyone is free to lead a song, and although some chanteys are certainly more immediately recognizable than others – the Pogues-immortalized “South Australia” for instance — the wealth of material ensures a comfortable four-hour singalong with no repeats. 

There’s a certain campfire chumminess about the event, right down to the marshmallows in the hot chocolate (bring your own mug!) but instead of wandering off to get lost  in the woods, the restless patron of the Chantey Sing can wander off to explore the ship itself: the captain’s close quarters, the vast cargo hold, the galley, the poop deck. And though the proceedings are considerably less rum-soaked and catastrophic than the typical night-out-at-sea in 1886 might have been, the experience does provide a bracing injection of salt-sea mystique to even the most landlocked veins. 

 

Chantey Sing

First Saturdays of the month 8 p.m., free

The Balclutha, Hyde Street Pier

2905 Hyde, SF

(415) 561-7171

www.nps.gov/safr/historyculture/chantey-sing.htm

 

The Performant: Stupid is in the eye of the beholder

Andrew Lam
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0

St. Stupid and Karen Finely ride again

For anyone who could count that high, Friday’s St. Stupid’s Day parade marked its 33rd anniversary — a year that was also auspicious, it should be noted, for that famous first martyr, Jesus Christ Superstar. Will St. Stupid, revered patron of the First Church of the Last Laugh, succumb to a similar fate as JC? 

Methinks not. The Romans have yet to suss out the threat St. Stupid’s low-maintenance doctrine poses to their empire building, and the Stupids are not about to let them in on that little secret. After all, on the surface it seems pretty benign, a bit of only-in-San-Francisco color for the die-hards to cherish and the tourists to gawk at. But beneath the greasepaint, dirty balloon animals, and silly sloganeering (“Dum is Sexy,” “I Can’t Afford an Actual Sign,” “Serfs Up!”), there’s still a feverish drop of pure dada shivering in the mix.

Of course, before you can have chaos you must first have a veneer of order. There’s a certain ritual solemnity to this carnival of fools and surprisingly strict adherence to the “stations of stupid,” a chain of locations stretched throughout the Financial District. 

These include the statue of the bare butt mechanics, the sunken plaza of slack, the banker’s heart, this last a huge chunk of polished black marble squatting malignantly outside the Bank of America HQ. The route provides ample opportunity to poke fun at the suits sticking their puzzled heads out of high-rise windows and demystify the sacred symbols of commerce, particularly the old Pacific Stock Exchange (now a fitness gym) with an annual “sock” exchange in which the crowd pelts each other with holey/holy footwear. 

Within the cast of carousing hundreds there are even set roles, in particular that of the Bishop Joey, a.k.a., parade founder Ed Holmes, who leads the parade with as much pomp and circumstance as a man in court-jester dishabille can. Like any good parade there are noisemakers, chants (“No more chanting, no more chanting”), and even a float bearing three iconic Doggy Diner heads — plus Wavy Gravy — but they are all mere means to justify an end, and in the best tradition of participatory anarchy, what you take away from the experience is very much equal to what you put in.

What has performance artist Karen Finley taken away from a lifetime of participatory anarchy? Finley’s a woman who has been derided as obscene by racists, who uses confrontational nudity to inflame not loins but synapses – an act of protest that can be likened to that of the infamous Nigerian “curse of nakedness.” 

Reading excerpts from her new book The Reality Shows, Finley kept her clothes on, but still provoked a few good reactions imagining a love match between George W. and Martha Stewart, embodying the persona of a cranky New Yorker (“no, USA Today is not a real paper, no, I do not want to just ‘hang out’”), and portraying a woman who loves to fuck amputee veterans of the first Gulf War. In fact, her quiet confidence and leopard print outfit made her seem exactly like the kind of person who could roll with the St. Stupid’s Day festivities for the right reasons, if only because there are no wrong ones.

 

The Performant: The Empire has no clothes

Andrew Lam
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The Performant: The Empire has no clothes

Adventures in Naked Empire’s bouffonery

An evening spent in the presence of the Naked Empire Bouffon Company is always an unsettling experience. It can be difficult sometimes to assess who is actually performing for whom, as bouffons are wickedly adept at reading individuals and pulling them however briefly into the spotlight not as props, but as human beings with something to hide.

Unlike clowns, who often devise situations during which the oddience may laugh at them, bouffons laugh at the oddience from a position of almost comically aggressive power. It can be as simple as an offhand observation (“recently dyed,” one bouffon sniffed at a blonde streak) or a direct poke at a cultural or time-sensitive taboo (“surely it’s still too early to be referencing radiation in Japan”), but once they’ve got you in the crosshairs of their uniquely confrontational form of physical theatre, a bouffon shoots straight from the hip.

“As a citizen I am consistently impressed by how much of the “unsayable” the bouffon is allowed to say and by how well people hear it,” writes Naked Empire artistic director Nathaniel Justiniano. Justiniano first experienced the art form at the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre and was immediately attracted to its audacious commitment to the truth.

“(It’s) a corkscrew type of energy…boring into the audience and sniffing out the muck we try to hide.” But despite the element of improv, Bouffon performance is also tightly scripted, allowing the performers a tightly structured framework to work within, and break out from when it becomes relevant to do so.

Performing as part of the Home Theatre festival in an artist’s warehouse dubbed the Main Street Theatre, Justiniano and company member Ross Travis performed two solo shows starring their Bouffon alter egos: Zooka Splat and Cousin Cruelty. 

Nathanial Justiniano’s Cousin Cruelty addresses his audience. Photo by Ross Travis 

Ross as Zooka burst into the room, screaming a war cry and dressed in tattered camouflage. He circled the crowd knowingly, leaping on the backs of the sofas they sat in, leering at their shock. Like a one-man Mad Max, he ably deconstructed the post-apocalypse genre of action films and doomsayer surrender in a series of vignettes that mapped out the bizarre terrains of alien abduction, zombie uprisings, nuclear holocaust, and macho bullshit. 

Justiniano’s Cousin Cruelty, a lewd giggling juggernaut of murderous impulse and fart jokes bounded out, shopping bag in hand, looking for trouble. Trouble came in the form of an orgy of mimed bloodshed — until from the shopping bag, a querulous puppet demanded to be released. 

Between the puppet’s script – a passionate, twelve-minute long speech denouncing the death penalty, delivered by Orson Welles in the 1959 film “Compulsion”— and Cousin Cruelty’s gleefully chaotic depictions of the origins and implications of violence, the oddience would have been pushed out of their “theatre-going” comfort zone even without the addition of the personal attentions bestowed on them by puppet and puppet-master alike. 

The laughter these twisted creatures provoked was genuine, but with an edge of unease, which is exactly the effect Justiniano is looking for.

“This laughter is uncomfortable….(It’s) the laughter that humans tend to find comforting when the silence or truth is too heavy.”

Intrigued by buffoonery? Check Naked Empire’s website for upcoming classes in this uncomfortable art

 

The Performant: Any way you want it

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The Performant: Any way you want it

Bad hair days gone wild at Rock of Ages
 
That distance makes the heart grow fonder does go a long way in explaining the recent resurgence of hair metal. Somehow despite all better judgment, a spangled veil of wistful nostalgia has fluttered over that particular genre of music you probably loathed when you had to listen to it blaring non-stop from every corporate rock station in the nation [or while guys in eyeliner and leopard tights were beating you up in high school for being a flannel-wearing, Smiths-loving faggot -ED.].

But nowadays stone-washed denim is the new sepia-tone, and don’t think the canny producers of the touring, glam-rock “jukebox musical” Rock of Ages don’t know it. Any show where scantily-clad beauties hand out custom-made lighters at the door (ok, little flashlights) to hold up at the appropriate moments, that is to say every five minutes, is staged quite emphatically to push your most embarrassingly sentimental buttons. But it’s such an eagerly goofy emphasis that you can’t really resent the blatant manipulation. You’ll probably even wind up singing along.


 Full of ear-worms and eye-candy, Rock of Ages has a classic “busbo/ aspiring rock star” meets “cocktail-waitress-stripper-actress waiting for a break” storyline straight out of an MTV music video on heavy rotation. I almost expected Beavis and Butthead to show up during the finale and give it their classic “this rocks/this sucks” treatment before heading over to Burger World to set things on fire. What rocked: the hard-working live band conducted by keyboard player Brandon Ethridge and not so subtly dominated by lead guitarist Chris Cicchino, the gleefully tacky Sunset Strip aesthetic that permeated every designer’s work from crimped wigs to paraphernalia-covered stage wings, the endless stream of frighteningly familiar songs you can barely even find in karaoke joints anymore—“Sister Christian,” “We’re not Gonna Take it,” “Cum on Feel the Noize,” “Every Rose has its Thorn”.

What sucked is what sucked back in the 1980s, namely where’re all the ladies at? Out of 30 songs, only Joan Jett and Pat Benetar (plus a smidge of Lita Ford) represented the women-in-rock, and most of the female cast members didn’t even get so much as a character name or a few good laugh lines, but instead got to settle for lap-dancing like they meant it. Couldn’t they have snuck just one Wendy O. Williams riff in there? And though Constantine Maroulis as Drew played one of the most sweetly affable lead roles in any musical since Seymour of “Little Shop of Horrors,” and has a great set of rock pipes to boot, I was reminded of the quote about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did “backwards and in high heels” when Elicia MacKenzie as Sherrie took the stage and belts out a show-stopping “High Enough,” by Damn Yankees. A good girl gone bad never sounded better.
 
Still, you can’t necessarily blame the boys that there just weren’t very many girl bands playing unapologetic cock rock back in the day, and not every nostalgia trip has to pack along a roadmap to political correctness. Like the proverbial fountain of youth, Rock of Ages has the magical ability to turn its audience into a pack of fourteen year-olds on an ephedrine-and-Aqua Net binge, which sounds pretty heinous, but somehow manages to be totally awesome instead.
 
Through April 9
Curran Theatre
445 Geary, SF
$30-$99
(888) 746-1799
www.shnsf.com

The Performant: Life is a BOA

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Bay One Acts festival turns 10

“Life is like a Boa,” the random stranger at the bus station (Nicole Hammersla) announces to the sweetly bemused young man (Ray Hobbs) she has marked as her test subject. Cleverly referencing both the reptile and the Bay One Acts festival — through March 26 at Boxcar Theater — in which she is performing, Hammersla goes on to demonstrate the action of being constricted by a giant snake, first on herself, and then on Hobbs. It’s a reference that perhaps doesn’t stand up to close examination, but for a moment at least you go with it. Life is like a snake sometimes, and sometimes a play. Sometimes coiled around you, smothering, dangerous, and sometimes unfolding swiftly before you, like a message pulled from an unexpected bottle washed to shore. 

At the Bay One Acts festival, now in its tenth year, there’s plenty of the unexpected tucked inside the eleven shorts plays by local playwrights, running in repertory through March 26. Sunday I saw a lineup of six (“Program two”) as wildly divergent in tone and intention as a group of strangers in the bus station thrown together by chance—the shared goal is to survive the ride. In Daniel Heath’s  “Twice as Bright,” Nicole Hammersla’s bus station character, Jen, announces to Hobb her intention to have a fifteen-minute love affair with him before her bus comes. “All I want from life is an abundance of wonderful things,” she explains as she slinks around him with calculated insouciance, trying to avoid the afterburn of a relationship gone wrong by fanning the brief, bright flame of a new one.

Far removed from the slightly sordid staging ground of the bus station, Megan Cohen’s “A Three Little Dumplings Adventure” is set in the claustrophobic confines of a home in the ‘burbs, where three manic little dumplings dressed identically in baby pink and powder blue, blaze a trail of wreckage in search of the hidden world they know only as their mommy’s room. Unlike a lot of “updated” fairy tales that seek to show how it would be really literally possible to live in a shoe or a pumpkin, and suck the blood out of the scary bits, “Three little Dumplings” replaces blood with gleeful venom and madrigals with choreographed electropop numbers. Murderous, foul-mouthed, impossibly cute, whatever truth the dumplings are poised to reveal is sublimated by the hurricane force of their spontaneous safari, their inability to grow up the not-so-stealthy weapon of their appeal.

Yet another completely different chord is struck by the 11th Hour Ensemble’s newest movement-based work, “Cloud Flower”. Eerily apropos for this particular moment, much of the piece is set in and inspired by the bombing of Hiroshima, and includes a tableau of corpses, fires, a rescue, a song perched on the edge of a dream. Streaks of ash-black paint trickling down the faces and hands of ensemble members, recalling the effects of devastation. Especially in light of the looming possibility of a present-day nuclear crisis in Japan, the heart of the piece is almost too tender, too overwrought to bear, but in terms of life and art imitating each other, there may be no better time to see it than right now.

Through March 26
Boxcar Playhouse
505 Natoma, SF
$20-$32
www.bayoneacts.org

The Performant: Lady in Red

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Cirque Noveau and Carletta Sue Kay blaze and seduce 

Even though nothing I saw over the weekend had anything remotely to do with Mardi Gras (Sunday’s Motown Parade in the Fillmore, was on the radar, but I melt in the rain), subtle little visuals kept it very much on my mind. In fact, as I type this, it nags me that I’m missing out on another Rosenmontag, Rose Monday, which is being celebrated all across Germany, a blowout which rivals the best Carnival celebrations from around the world, packed with parades, costumed revelry, and oceans of bier. I’m trying to compensate with a Rammstein CD and a 21st Amendment IPA, but really, it isn’t the same. Let “next year in Cologne” be the rallying cry! There are so many ways to dream.

Despite there not being any roses in my Montag, rose red colored my weekend. First found swirling in the startling tsunami of stage blood spilled by Impact Theatre in their Russian-mafia-meets-Romeo-and-Juliet adaptation, it also glowed wickedly, stretched across the muscled torsos of the performers of Cirque Noveau, in a production that closed last weekend entitled Devil Fish. 

Somewhat hampered by a plot line as thin as a contortionist’s body-stocking, the Circus improved immensely whenever they dropped the narrative and amped up the acrobatics. The sultry “Devil’s Advocate” Haley Vilora, in glittering red tiger stripes, contorted her body across the stage and through the air, a mesmerizing, gelatinous ooze. Peruvian performer (and show director) Angelo Rodriguez strutted across the stage as the Devil, and also took to the air with his signature cube. And Calvin Kai Ku entertained as a lovelorn clownfish with the hots for aerialist Morgaine Rosenthal, who floated on a set of straps with partner Ryan Webb, her red dress fluttering in the spotlight, a victory banner. 

Something tells me that recondite crooner Carletta Sue Kay knows a little about victory. I first encountered the beau-dazzling alter ego of Randy Walker in a whorehouse off the Carquinez Straits, singing longingly as if to an empty room of heartbreak, male beauty, and candy canes. Part torch singer, part small-town librarian with a knack for Karaoke show-stoppers, Carletta Sue’s enviable pipes turn often hilarious lyrics into rough gems of wisdom such as “is there a lot of dog shit in Paris?/I don’t know why I never noticed it before/Until you said goodbye to me in Paris/it’s just not the same to me anymore.” 

At Sunday’s show at the Makeout room (with the Suicide Dragons and the Sandwitches), the stage was lit red as always, which took the frump out of an embroidered sweater and peasant skirt combo and infused CSK with outlaw glamour, especially when she wailed into the mic like a soul train diva. The crowning moment of the show was definitely the stirring rendition of “If I Was Your Woman,” a song that Carletta promised would fuck her up. I don’t know how she sounds today, rasping through Rosenmontag like some film noir private eye, but on Sunday, her voice was a banner, bathed in red. 

 

The Performant: Pop up the jam

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Appear and disappear at Noise Pop with Nobunny and Battlehooch

There’s a pop-up explosion going on out there, and it’s insidiously cornering the market on all our fun. It’s become well nigh impossible to stumble down the street without coming across a pop-up “gallery boutique ramen restaurant poodle salon performance space” and even more impossible to not want to avail oneself immediately of its fleeting charms. It’s the precarious ephemerality of pop-up ventures that makes them so enticing—the knowledge that at any moment the ability to tap into this particular experience will be gone forever. Granted, if you examine any particular moment in time closely, you’ll come to a similar conclusion, but sometimes it’s best to just go with the spontaneous flow, even if it’s a little bit manufactured.


How appropriately ingenious it was for Noise Pop to insert some pop-up action on the side of purveying the other kind of pop, as in music, as in the full-on winter blues-buster the festival has become, joining Indiefest as the other best reason to bundle up and brave the frosty February chill. There was the month long operation of the “Noise Pop Pop-up Shop” (say that five times fast) with Upper Playground as well as the weekend pop-up-culture extravaganza that was the “Culture Club” at Public Works. A genial mish-mash of all the popular arts—to gawk at, to buy, to make, and to listen to—Noise Pop’s pop-up experiments definitely ratcheted up their cool quotient and added a new dimension to their overall poppiness.

Of course it wouldn’t be Noise Pop without the noise, plenty of which was to be had at the venerable Bottom of the Hill, a festival mainstay. A double-header bill of Nobunny and Battlehooch (with the Exrays and The Downer Party) brought the werewolf-masked, face-painted bunny-hoppers out in force, freak flags flying proudly. And while it always inspires a certain awe to watch a man in furry dishabille pogo wildly and exhort the crowd to “Do the Fuck” themselves, the boys of Battlehooch closed the show with a satisfying bang. Less swashbuckling and more math rock than their moniker might suggest, Battlehooch’s sound bounces gleefully between influences, part Mother’s of Invention, part Devo: a solid guitar foundation swooping into psychedelic dissonance (AJ McKinley), a completely non-ironic synth (Ben Judovalkis), vocal modulations set on a channel somewhere between “Peter Murphy” and “Ivan Doroschuk “ (Pat Smith), a kickass one-man woodwind section (Thomas Hurlbut), and lyrics featuring baby sharks. Plus facepaint and a video montage of urban decay. Honesty, at this point, any band that gets hipsters to mosh like it’s 1989 gets my vote, and on that score alone, Battlehooch delivers the goods, and brings the noise. Pop.

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