As Frankie Valli once sang, “Bye-bye, baby, baby bye-bye.”

It’s closing weekend for Jersey Boys, the show the Bay Area has come to love in a big way. I say that with confidence having heard from friends, co-workers, readers and total strangers about how much they enjoyed what is probably one of the most enjoyable musicals of the last 20 years.

I’ve seen the show four times since it opened last December. Family members came to town — they said it was to see me, but really they just wanted to see Jersey Boys – and friends I haven’t seen for far too long also decided to “suddenly” make the San Francisco trip.

Personally, I fell in love with the show about 20 minutes in, when it became clear that this was far from a Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons jukebox musical. By the end of Act 1, I was smitten, and like so many other audience members who have been captured by the show, I felt suddenly like the world’s biggest Four Seasons fan.

My affection for the Four Seasons, which began on opening night of the first national tour, Dec. 1, 2006 at the Curran Theatre in downtown San Francisco, has led to the purchase of various “greatest hits” packages and even some LPs. My two favorites on vinyl are “The Four Seasons Sing Big Hits by Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Bob Dylan” and the 1975 album “Who Loves You,” which spawned the title hit and, my personal favorite Seasons tune, “December 1963 (Oh What a Night).” On the latter LP, I’m also fond of “Harmony, Perfect Harmony” and “Silver Star.”

Even the City of San Francisco is going to miss the Boys. Mayor Gavin Newsom proclaimed Sept. 24 as “Jersey Boys Day” in San Francisco in recognition of all the work the cast and crew did for the AIDS Walk, Richmond/Ermet AIDS Foundation (REAF) and the Dress for Success organization.

Another family member came to town last week to see me/Jersey Boys, and I looked forward to paying one final visit to the show before it closes on Sept. 30 and heads to Chicago. Jarrod Spector, who usually plays Frankie, was on vacation. The people in the row behind us were completely bent out of shape by that fact when they saw the announcement tucked into the program. “But he was just on the Emmys. Why didn’t they tell us he was going to be gone when they bought the tickets?”

All the complaining was for naught. Steven M. Goldsmith, Spector’s understudy, was a wonderful Frankie — very youthful looking but really solid. And Jake Speck, filling in for all of Goldsmith’s roles, was terrific as well.

The show purrs along like a truly fine car doing high speed on a great piece of road. The audience last week was hot — cheering and reacting in all the right places — and everyone seemed perfectly aware that they were just skating in under the wire. They caught the Jersey wave before the tide went out.

I’m going to miss Jersey Boys – and not just because my name is on a quote over the door nearest the box office, well partly because of that, to be perfectly honest, because it’s so satisfying to be linked to a show that I really am crazy about. It was also exciting to have a show in town that excited friends and family enough for them to make a trip.

There are abundant rumors (not to mention official-type Web sites, which have since been slapped down) that say Jersey Boys will be back in San Francisco at the end of the year. Perhaps you should check back here on Monday (Oct. 1) for official word.

Until then, here’s the real Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons singing “December, 1963 (Oh What a Night).” By the way, Frankie and his boys will be performing in concert at the Masonic Auditorium high atop Nob Hill on Saturday, Oct. 6. Click here for information.

Dean Martin can be heard crooning in the background as Christine Andreas scurries around her kitchen, the phone tucked between shoulder and ear, as she conducts an interview and prepares for a party she’s throwing her son in a few hours.

“My son turns 20 in a few days, and when you’re special, you get lots of birthday parties,” Andreas says, referring to her son, Mac, who has Down syndrome. “He moved into a group home last year, and all the families are having an `around the world’ tour, with each family doing a country. We’re doing Italy, so I’m downloading Dean Martin, warming up lasagna and making bruschetta.”

Mac moved into the group home just before his mother embarked on a national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical The Light in the Piazza, which opened in San Francisco in July 2006.

“That show is such a very layered piece,” Andreas says. “It took a while for it to get into my bones. I found it very gratifying. It’s so spare. I want to say it’s like haiku theater, but it isn’t really. You do use few words to convey a lot. It did require me to be a better actor because you take out more, do less and convey more.”

Andreas says she would love to do the role again.

“I would surrender more,” she says about the role of a mother whose brain-damaged daughter is falling in love for the first time. “It’s like good music — the more you sing it, the less you do, the more you let it sing you, work on you. When you get out of the way, interesting stuff happens.”

Piazza, Andreas says, is more lifelike than other shows she has done, from the Broadway revival of My Fair Lady in 1976 to The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1997.

“Even though Piazza is a fable, it’s so distilled down and does so much with so little that the less you do, the more you let the grace run through you and the more honest it is,” she says. “It’s a show that is so full of love. If you do it simply, even if people don’t love every aspect of it, pieces of love come through.”

The 55-week tour ended in Chicago in July, and since returning to her home in New York’s Hudson River Valley, Andreas has been relaxing and working in cabaret.

She brings her cabaret show, Love Is Good, to San Francisco’s Empire Plush Room Tuesday for a two-week run, and her accompanist, pianist Martin Silvestri, also happens to be her new husband.

“We got married during the Piazza tour,” Andreas says. “We had some time off in Arizona, so Marty and I went and got married in Sedona. I had been courting him for 16 years.”

The newlyweds’ set list will likely include everything from “They Say It’s Wonderful” to a country-western Clint Black tune, with some Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Billy Joel thrown in as well.

“Cabaret, like everything else, can be so full of ego,” Andreas says. “At the end of the night, along with all the high notes, big notes, loud notes and pretty notes, you want to feel you’ve experienced something personal. You want to walk away with the performer’s music and something of that person. When I go see Barbara Cook, I leave thinking, `I have a little Barbara Cook in me now.’ That’s why I like the cabaret form. It scared me initially because it’s so intensely personal. Now I like it.”

Christine Andreas’ Love Is Good opensOct.2 and continues through Oct. 14 at the Empire Plush Room in the York Hotel, 940 Sutter St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 7 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $35-$40 plus a two-drink minimum. Call 866-468-3399 or visit www.theempireplushroom.com.

Visit Christine Andreas’ official Web site at www.christineandreas.com.

Apparently the leap from the Broadway stage to television takes a little longer than previously thought.

If you planned this weekend around multiple screenings of Legally Blonde, the Musical on MTV, you’re going to have to find other ways to amuse yourself.

The MTV broadcast of Legally Blonde, the Musical will not screen until Oct. 13

But the delay means we get a bonus program: a behind-the scenes look at the musical and all the craziness that goes on backstage at the Palace Theatre.

The musical, which was filmed three times, including on Sept. 18 with an orchestra section full of people in pink, will be preceded by a “Pink Carpet extravaganza.” Omigod, you guys!

Just in case the broadcast gets delayed again, you might want to check in at www.mtv.com or www.legallyblondethemusical.com.

Pranks are all well and good…as long as you’re not the vicitm.

Pgranstgroup seems to be a group that pulls elaborate pranks and, in true 21st-century fashion, posts them online for all to see.

They came to my attention because their pranks occasionally involve…wait for it…musical theater.

Who doesn’t love a prank with original songs?

Here’s something Prangstgrup calls “Reading a Dream.” Thanks to JD for the link.

Hmmm. The word “pitchy” comes to mind.
Oh, yes, they have more, including a lecture musical. For more videos visit www.prangstgrup.com.

Opened Sept. 22, 2007 at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center

Broadway by the Bay hits musical target with Annie Get Your Gun

There’s simply no business like Irving Berlin’s show business: grit, glitter, grins and some of the best, most buoyant musical theater tunes ever to hit a stage.

Perhaps Berlin’s best overall package is Annie Get Your Gun, which opened in 1946 and has been kicking up its Wild West heels in one form or another ever since.

San Mateo’s Broadway by the Bay has polished up and loaded Berlin’s Gun with a tremendously appealing cast and a bright, shiny production that defies anyone not to enjoy it from cowboy-hatted top to cowboy-booted bottom.

Annie opened during the weekend at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, and director Alex Perez offers the show at its colorful, tuneful best.

This is not Ethel Merman’s Annie, which is to say this is the revised version that Bernadette Peters brought to Broadway in 1999. Herbert and Dorothy Fields’ somewhat dusty book has been revamped by Peter Stone, who turns the production into a version of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, complete with big-top tent and strings of carnival lights.

The Native-American element — not to mention Chief Sitting Bull’s song “I’m an Indian Too’’ — were deemed politically incorrect, so the new version gives us a bigoted character who eventually learns an important lesson about calling the Indians “savages.’’

Stone’s changes also help streamline the show and keep it moving at a contemporary pace. The changes also keep Berlin’s score in the center ring where it should be.

Musical director Mark Hanson and his 14-piece orchestra do right by Berlin’s infectious melodies, though at Sunday’s matinee, the trumpet got a little lovesick during Annie’s “They Say It’s Wonderful.’’

How do you resist a show that begins with all guns blazing through “There’s No Business Like Show Business’’? Fact is, you don’t.

You climb aboard this warhorse, and whether sharp shooter Frank Butler (David Sattler) ends up with back-country hick Annie Oakley (Virginia Wilcox), who happens to be a sharper shot than the big-headed Butler, hardly matters — as long as everyone keeps singing.

Sattler’s gorgeous voice soars through “Show Business’’ and shines in his big numbers, “The Girl That I Marry’’ and “My Defenses Are Down.’’

Wilcox is a marvelous comic actress and terrific character singer. She’s especially effective in the mood-lifting “I Got the Sun in the Morning’’ and in that joyful ode to ignorance and sex, “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly.’’ She also warbles beautifully through the lilting “Moonshine Lullaby,’’ on which she is joined by Abbey Teitelbaum, Lindsay Light and Gabe Hoffman as her younger siblings as well as by the harmonizing trio of Deedra Wong and twins Khail and Nik Duggan.

Unfortunately, Wilcox rushes through the score’s most gorgeous ballad, “Lost In His Arms’’ but makes up for it on spirited duets with Sattler, “An Old Fashioned Wedding’’ and a very funny “Anything You Can Do.’’

Frank and Annie do most of the singing in this nearly three-hour show, but young lovebirds Tommy (Shaun Repetto) and Winnie (Dominique Bonino) get an Act 2 number, “Who Do You Love, I Hope,’’ that’s really just an excuse to show off Jayne Zaban’s high-stepping, yee-haw-heavy choreography. If Repetto’s high kicks get any higher, NASA may need to get involved.

John Duggan provides some dignified comic relief as Chief Sitting Bull, and Cameron Weston as company manager Charlie Davenport and John Musgrave as Buffalo Bill are fine straight men amid the musical merriment. Amy Nielson has the tough job of playing the bigoted Dolly Tate, but she manages some laughs.

If you hear people talking about Broadway by the Bay’s Annie Get Your Gun, and they say it’s wonderful. Darn tootin’, they’re right.

For information on Annie Get Your Gun, visit www.broadwaybythebay.org.

Opened Sept. 22, 2007 at the Bruns Amphitheater, Orinda
Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.

Cal Shakes ends season with royally pleasing Lear
three stars Moving, powerful

Perhaps the Fool said it best: “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.”

Saturday night was indeed cold as California Shakespeare Theater opened the final show of its summer season, King Lear. And sure enough, there was no shortage of fools or madmen in director Lisa Peterson’s production.

The epic grandeur you expect from Lear is here, especially when Alexander V. Nichols’ lights hit the upright metal girders and giant, almost fully rounded arch of Rachel Hauck’s industrial set.

This is not a fanciful production. The rough, scrap yard look evokes a tough world of economic struggle and hardship. Meg Neville’s costumes evoke the glamour of the late ’20s and early ’30s for the royals and the misery of the Depression for everyone else.

Peterson creates some striking stage pictures: a disguised Edgar (Erik Lochtefeld) emerging from a trapdoor, nude and raving as Tom of Bedlam; Edgar’s return to exact vengeance on his bastard brother, with Edgar standing like a superhero in the arch, backlit with stage smoke swirling around his upraised sword; the stormy night that tests Lear’s sanity with great sheets of metal creating thunderous rolls and the ensemble banging on metal barrels and pouring out buckets of water.

And then there’s the gore. Peterson is no-nonsense about the blood. King Lear is a violent upheaval of a play — emotionally and physically — and there’s blood where there should be blood.

Most memorable is the famous eye-gouging scene as the Duke of Cornwall (L. Peter Callender) uses a corkscrew to blind the Earl of Gloucester (James Carpenter). The first eye ends up as so much bloody goo on the stage floor — much to the horrified delight of the audience.

And when Oswald (a crisp, funny Liam Vincent), a snooty steward, gets knocked upside the head, the blood sprays like a scene from a splatter movie.

Peterson goes for that kind of clarity and frankness in the performances as well and mostly succeeds.

Jeffrey DeMunn as Lear bears much of this massive play’s weight on his capable shoulders. If anything, DeMunn’s Lear doesn’t seem quite old or fragile enough, but the actor makes a strong emotional connection with this tormented man whose pampered, self-centered life as a king has left him unable to navigate the real world or real feelings.

The quick-to-anger scenes — as when Lear curses his eldest daughter, Goneril (Delia MacDougall) with sterility or when he calls Goneril and middle daughter Regan (Julie Eccles) “unnatural hags” — have startling ferocity.

And Lear’s heartbreaking sobs as he carries the corpse of youngest daughter Cordelia (Sarah Nealis) ring through the Bruns Amphitheater and the Orinda hills.

The cast is full of dignified, straight-ahead performances — Andy Murray’s Kent, Lochtefeld’s Edgar, Anthony Fusco’s warm, wise Fool — but one performance stands apart from the others.

Ravi Kapoor as Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, is the play’s one traditional scheming, egotistical bad guy, and he feels, with his fedora, orange shirt and tie, like he’s visiting from a production of Guys and Dolls. His early monologue about destroying his brother, is extremely loud and delivered in a bizarre New York tough-guy accent.

It’s an off note in an otherwise sturdy production that proves, in its three hours, to be moving and powerful — a suitably affecting end to yet another stellar Cal Shakes season.

For information about King Lear, visit www.calshakes.org.

Opened Friday, Sept. 21, 2007

Shotgun’s lyrical Bulrusher finds poetry in love and Boont
Three stars Beauty and Boont to boot

In Shotgun Players’ Bulrusher, the characters most definitely harp the ling.

Set in Boonville, in the heart of Mendocino’s Anderson Valley, in the mid-’50s, Eisa Davis’ drama traffics in Boontling, the language peculiar (and we do mean peculiar) to that part of the state.

A goofy regional dialect made up of, as one character puts it, “secrets and jokes,” Boont is full of funny words like “lews n larmers” for “gossip” and “gorm” for “food.” Characters slip in and out of the dialect (with its abundance of expressions for sex) throughout the 2 1/2-hour play, and there’s a handy glossary in the program.

But you don’t have to know the words to get the general idea if something is “bahl” (good) or “can-kicky” (angry). There’s a certain poetry that infuses Davis’ play and its dreamy monologues, bluesy songs and rhythms of everyday speech.

“Bulrusher,” a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, is an ambitious coming-of-age story about an orphan called Bulrusher (Kirya Traber, above) — so named because she was found as an infant, abandoned in the bulrushes of the Navarro River.

The African-American baby was raised by a single male school teacher, called Schoolch (Terry Lamb), who’s mostly silent unless he’s angry.

Bulrusher grew up an outcast in the small town, where the only other black person was a logger named Lucas (D. Anthony Harper, below left), who now spends his time wooing the local madam (Louise Chegwidden) when he isn’t partaking of her employees’ services.

When we first see Bulrusher, she’s standing amid the towering redwoods of Lisa Clark’s beautiful forest set. She’s wading through the river in the pouring rain. Water, we later learn, is an important factor in Bulrusher’s life.

She can see into peoples’ futures by touching water they’ve touched. And when she’s in the river, the river speaks to her and tells her the weather.

Branded a witch, Bulrusher is content making a living selling oranges and keeping to herself. One of the town boys (Cole Smith, below right), who used to make fun of her as a child, is now intent on making her his girlfriend, though he’s not quite brave enough to put his arm around the town’s only “colored girl’’ in public.

Bulrusher’s placid world is upended by the arrival of Vera (Jahmela Biggs), a beautiful, somewhat mysterious young black woman from the racially troubled city of Birmingham, Ala.

It’s from Vera that Bulrusher learns about what it means to be black in 1950s America — separate doors, backs of busses, lynchings and the like.

Co-directors Margo Hall and Ellen Sebastian Chang elicit warm, believable performances from their actors, with Traber’s Bulrusher especially affecting. There’s extraordinary innocence and passion — and later anger and violence — in Bulrusher. She’s a fascinating character made even more so in Traber’s honesty.

Smith as Bulrusher’s suitor has tremendous energy and charm, and Biggs as Vera has such fascinating allure as an enigmatic stranger that it’s no wonder Bulrusher becomes obsessed with her.

Playwright Davis, a Berkeley native and niece of activist Angela Davis, deals with major issues such as race, sexual awakening and civil rights in such personal ways they hardly seem like issues.

Act 1 tends to blur when the story veers away from Bulrusher, but Act 2 pulls everything together in ways both powerful and slightly melodramatic.

Davis has powers as a writer to find beauty in almost everything, and her play pulses with compassion and life.

And Bulrusher has the kind of satisfying, uplifting ending you can only find in live theater — vibrant, poetic, immediate and thrilling.

Now that’s a bahl doosey boo.

For information about Bulrusher visit www.shotgunplayers.org.

Parents get dragged into the darndest things by their kids.

Aw, c’mon, Dad, you know you want to do it. C’mon, Mom, it’s really fun!

For John Duggan (above, center), it didn’t take too much arm-twisting for his twin sons, Mikhail and Nikolai — Khail and Nik to their friends — to pull him back into the world of theater.

Though he had been involved in theater in his younger years as a performer and a director, Duggan began concentrating more on his career in video-game graphics, especially when the twins came along 15 years ago.

That’s when Duggan and his family moved to Redwood City so he could design games for the likes of Sega, Sony and Disney.

When the twins were about 7, Duggan got them interested in theater by introducing them to San Carlos Children’s Theatre, and they loved it — so much that they have agents and are seeking commercial work.

“Now they’re into musical theater and are taking dance and voice,” Duggan says. “That’s when they started browbeating me about auditioning.”

Khail and Nik were intent on getting cast in Broadway by the Bay’s Annie Get Your Gun, and their dad decided he’d give it a shot as well.

On Saturday, when Annie officially opens in San Mateo, you’ll find the Duggan twins in the ensemble as roustabouts and circus folk, and you’ll find John Duggan as Chief Sitting Bull, the Sioux warrior.

“The funny thing is that I’m half Japanese, half Irish-American,” Duggan says. “I was taught you always do your research, so I read up on Sitting Bull. He was bowlegged and short. He became a medicine man because he couldn’t move as fast as the other warriors. He was the strategic one. Learning that was helpful, but I don’t think the audience would care to see me doing my impersonation of a bowlegged person.”

Annie Get Your Gun, with a glorious score by Irving Berlin, was inspired by real-life people Annie Oakley, Frank Butler and Sitting Bull, and was originally written for Ethel Merman in 1946. By the time it was revived on Broadway in 1999 for Bernadette Peters, Sitting Bull’s song, “I’m an Indian Too,” had been cut for being outdated in its attitude toward Indians.

“That’s OK,” Duggan says. “My singing voice is pretty good but not as broad as it used to be. My voice teacher says I used to be a high tenor. Now I’m a `guy getting older’ tenor. I’ve lost a lot of the higher notes. I still sing in the opening and other ensemble numbers.”

In some productions, Sitting Bull is played nobly. In others, he’s a more comic character. Director Alex Perez saw Larry Storch, of “F Troop” fame, play the part on Broadway, and that’s the direction he wants Duggan to go.

“I’m playing it for laughs,” Duggan says. “I’m trying to stay true to the character while channeling Larry Storch. Our job is to get the audience members out of their seats laughing.”
Duggan says the best part of this whole “Annie” experience, in addition to returning to the stage after more than 20 years away, is being onstage with his sons.

“I looked at them and realized that in three years they graduate, go off to college and start their own lives. I want to grab as much time with them as I can now.”

“Annie Get Your Gun” continues through Oct. 7 at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, 600 N. Delaware St., San Mateo. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays (plus 2 p.m. Sept. 29). Tickets are $17 to $42. Call 650-579-5565 or visit www.broadwaybythebay.org.

Great actors wait for it — that defining moment when, as actors and as men, they are seasoned enough to tackle one of theater’s biggest mountains: the title role of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Jeffrey DeMunn scaled that peak, but there was a slight hitch: He was only 26 years old playing an 80-plus-year-old man.

“We had lost our Lear toward the end of the run, and I was in the cast as Edmund,” DeMunn says. “I was picked to fill in.”

Now, 34 years later, DeMunn is taking another crack at it. He’s playing Lear in California Shakespeare Theater’s season-ending production opening Sept. 22 in Orinda.

DeMunn is a familiar face from TV (“Law & Order”) and movies (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), but this is his Bay Area theater debut.

He got the gig when director Lisa Peterson did a reading with him and pulled him aside to talk about the possibility of Lear.

“I had been offered the chance to do Lear a couple of years ago, and I wasn’t quite ready,” DeMunn says. “Then this opportunity came along, and I wondered: How many times are they going to ask?”

So here he is about to essay one of the most extraordinary, most difficult roles in the theater.
For the last six months or so, DeMunn has been spending time with the script, thinking about it and letting it settle into his brain. His take on Lear, he says, is fairly simple.

“Lear is a child. He hasn’t grown up,” DeMunn says. “Everyone has been telling him how great he was his whole life because everyone knew he would one day be king. He hasn’t thought about a lot of things. He hasn’t taken in other human beings, hasn’t seen other humans — only himself. Everyone’s in his movie.”

For DeMunn the play is all about a man finally waking up to the world after having ignored (or been sheltered) from it all his life.

“Lear is like Achilles in `The Iliad’ in that he’s growing up,” DeMunn says. “This is the process of a man over a long stretch of battle growing up.”

King Lear continues through Oct. 14 at the Bruns Amphitheater, just off the Gateway/Shakespeare Festival exit on Highway 24, one mile east of the Caldecott Tunnel, Orinda. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays; 4 p.m. Sundays (plus 2 p.m. Sept. 29). Tickets are $32 to $60. Call 510-548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.

In case you missed it, here’s the San Francisco (soon to be Chicago) cast of Jersey Boys performing on the Emmy Awards in a tribute to another set of Jersey boys — “The Sopranos.”