Am I getting old and cranky or are show tunes getting crappy?

Probably a little of both, and I should say very quickly that there’s plenty of new show music that is thrilling, moving, funny, etc.

But I’ve been listening to the cast albums for Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and the against-all-odds hit stage adaptation of Xanadu. And I really dislike them both.

I have friends who have seen both shows on stage. None of them liked Frankenstein very much (”overproduced,” “dull,” “not nearly as much fun as The Producers“), but all of them enjoyed Xanadu because it was able to laugh at itself (and the tickets, unlike Mr. Brooks’ show, weren’t $400).

After listening to the original cast album ($18.98, Decca Broadway), I wouldn’t pay any amount to see the show, even to see my beloved Andrea Martin, who can do no wrong and comes across better than anybody else on the disc.

Brooks’ music and lyrics are pedestrian at best, and he’s stealing from himself. If a musical motif or gag worked in The Producers, then chances are it pops up here in an only slightly different form.

Aside from Martin’s genuinely funny “He Vas My Boyfriend,” the album’s only other real highlight is Sutton Foster’s yodel on “Roll in the Hay.” I’m supremely disappointed in the material given to Megan Mullally, another favorite. Although, mercifully, Mullally’s version of “Alone,” a song cut from the final show, is included and gives her a little something to play with. If you’r a Mullally fan, as I am, I recommend skipping this disc and going straight to her quirky new CD “Free Again” with her band, Supreme Music Program ($ ). The wonky, wonderful disc ranges from “Up a Lazy River” to “Ave Maria.”

I would probably buy a ticket to Xanadu because the terrible Olivia Newton-John movie holds a place in my heart where bad musicals go to rest (right next to Grease 2 and Newsies). I’ve heard wonderful things about Douglas Carter Beane’s hilarious book and Christopher Ashley’s direction — both of which I’m sure are delightful.

But the music on the original cast album ($19.98, P.S. Classics), taken from the movie with more ELO and Olivia Newton-John songs thrown in to beef things up, is not a pleasant listen. It’s not very funny, the campy treatment of the songs makes them almost unlistenable, and Kerry Butler’s mysterious Australian accent (an homage to Newton-John) comes across as harsh, nasal and grating. Mary Testa and Jackie Hoffman, by all accounts the comic livewires of the show, labor to make the funny work on disc, but the laughs — at least for me — were as low as the original Xanadu’s box-office take.

Not wanting to leave this post in a negative place (I’m so California), may I recommend a CD by a group that I was turned on to by a fellow show tune lover: The Puppini Sisters’ “The Rise & Fall of Ruby Woo” (Verbe, $13.98). This is the second disc by the British trio — Marcella Puppini, Stephanie O’Brien and Kate Mullins — and it’s as fantastic as the first. Tight, 1940s girl-group harmonies applied to songs both traditional (”Old Cape Cod,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”) and nontraditional (”Could It Be Magic,” “Spooky,” “Crazy in Love”). This album is more elaborately orchestrated, which is fun, and the girls sound better than ever. Check it out.

Seems like we’ve written this sentence before — because we have.

TheatreFirst, the intrepid small theater company that just will not give up, is moving again.

The itinerant troupe always seems to find itself without a home after having been promised a permanent home. After bouncing from rec room to church to make-shift theater space, Clive Chafer’s group finally found a home in the Oakland YWCA. That worked out …until it didn’t.

Then they nabbed a storefront space in Old Oakland. That worked out … until it didn’t.

But Chafer (above with L. Peter Callender) is not one to give up. He recently announced that TheatreFirst will present the U.S. premiere of Stephen Brown’s Future Me, a London hit that had its premiere in a pub.

And where will the show go on? Chafer says that he has entered negotiations for a building in the nascent arts district of uptown Oakland (near the Paramount Theatre).

“If all goes well,” Chafer writes, “the company hopes to announce a four-show season there, opening in the fall of 2008.”

Meanwhile, “Future Me” will open at the Berkeley City Club on April 4 (after a preview on April 3) and continue through May 4. Tickets are $23-$28 (previews are $10). Patrons younger than 25 are half price.

The Berkeley City Club is at 2315 Durant Ave., Berkeley. Call 510-436-5085 or visit www.theatrefirst.com.

Ha’penny, we hardly knew ye.

Hot on the heels of announcing that the big Irish musical Ha’penny Bridge would be part of its season, the folks at SHN/Best of Broadway have announced that the show has canceled its San Francisco date.

“It is with great regret that we will be canceling the scheduled engagement of Ha’penny Bridge, but as producers we feel that the production is not yet ready,” said Garret McGuckian, producer of the musical, in a statement.

No word yet on what show might replace Bridge. For more information, visit www.shnsf.com.

Opened Feb. 19, 2008 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre

Sex, drugs, drinking, celebrity: Fisher tackles it all in Wishful Drinking
three 1/2 stars

Her mother is famous for, among other things, a movie musical with Gene Kelly and buckets of rain. Now Carrie Fisher is, in a sense, carrying on her mother’s legacy, though she’s singing in the pain.

The central mantra of Fisher’s beguiling one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, now on Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda stage, is “If my life weren’t funny, it would just be true. And that is unacceptable.”

She’s right. Life is too strange and difficult not to have a sense of humor. As Fisher says in the show, when she finds her teenage daughter laughing about her crazy family, she’s glad her daughter can laugh. “That may save your life.”

A wicked sense of humor has been the making of Fisher, whose glittering opening night audience reflected much of what she was talking about in her autobiographical show. There were your basic movie stars – Sean Penn, James Franco. Your music legends – Bonnie Raitt. And the man who Fisher jokingly says “ruined her life,” George Lucas, father of the Star Wars saga and creator of Princess Leia, the role that will follow Fisher to her grave (with stops at comic book conventions along the way).

And then there were Debbie and Eddie. The two people Fisher talks about most, her mother, Debbie Reynolds, and father, Eddie Fisher, were there on opposite sides of the mezzanine. With her on the right, him on the left and Fisher in the middle on stage, it was real-life, Hollywood-theatrical Surround Sound.

Fisher enters singing. While she warbles “Happy Days Are Here Again,” headlines from her storied past flash on the screen behind her (the cozy, high-tech set, the lights and the projections are by Alexander V. Nichols).

She jumps right into the tabloid fodder by addressing her most recent incident: A good friend, a gay man, died in her home. Not only in her home, but in her bed. With her in it. “He didn’t just die in his sleep. He died in mine,” she says.

After taking questions from the audience, Fisher goes back to her childhood and that one time her dad left her mom – for Elizabeth Taylor. But here’s the thing I didn’t know. Before the scandal, Eddie and Debbie were good friends with Elizabeth and her husband, Mike Todd. In fact, Eddie was best man at Mike and Liz’s wedding and Debbie was the matron of honor. Debbie even washed Liz’s hair on her wedding day.

This leads Fisher, with the help of a large chart, to hold forth on “Hollywood Inbreeding 101,” with her family and its assorted, mostly bad, marriages, as examples.

She imitates her mother (“Hello, dear, this is your mother, Debbie”) and makes fun of her father (“He’s had so many facelifts he looks Asian”). She smokes clove cigarettes (the writer of the show, some hack named Carrie Fisher, makes her do it, though the clove part is a concession to tetchy Berkeley audiences) and drinks Coke Zero on ice. She’s not shilling for the soft drink, she says. She really likes this diet soda, while most others, she maintains, “taste like drinking poison from an aluminum wound.”

Costumed (by Christina Wright) in a drape-y look somewhere between gypsy and high-class madam, the 51-year-old Fisher has a low, gravelly voice that’s not ideal for the theater (the microphone helps), but boy does that voice convey dark, cynical humor beautifully.

Fisher is hilarious, which is no surprise to anyone who has read her books (if you haven’t read her most recent, The Best Awful, do yourself a favor and pick it up). What’s more surprising is her good cheer. Even while talking about her failed relationships – divorced from Paul Simon, the father of her daughter leaves her for a man – and her mental illness (manic depressive, bipolar disorder), Fisher maintains a unique brand of bleak optimism, of world-weary hope: The worst will likely happen, but everything will just as likely be fine.

She has a brilliant mind and sharp comic timing. On the page, she tends to be a little brainier, but onstage, she’s full-on Catskills comedian. Whether she’s discussing Princess Leia while wearing the famous cinnamon-roll hair-do wig or molesting an audience volunteer, Fisher is someone you want to hang out with and listen to. The celebrity part of her life appeals to that silly “oh, look! Something shiny” aspect in us, but she’s got substance under the stardust.

She’s got a lot to say about our messed-up culture, about body chemistry, about families, about maturity. But she says it all in such a way that it all sounds like a well-honed comic monologue that just happens to have the incisive direction of Tony Taccone behind it.

I would have loved some more serious Fisher moments in the two-act, two-hour show, but maybe those just aren’t in the repertoire. I’d be very interested, for instance, to hear more about her time at drama college in London, which she says was the “only unobserved” period in her life.

Frank and forthcoming and, I’m delighted to say, occasionally filthy, Wishful Drinking is a theatrical memoir with a whole lot of kick to it. Fisher says that if someone called the show over the top, she’d have to agree. “But imagine what I’m leaving out.”

Wishful Drinking continues through March 30 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets are $33-$69. Call 510-647-2949 or visit www.berkeleyrep.org for information.

Wednesday night (Feb. 20) we’ll experience one of those all-too-rare occasions when we dont’ have to go to Broadway, when Broadway comes to us.

PBS’ “Great Performances” will broadcast the John Doyle-directed Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company on Wednesday night (Bay Area folks, it’s 9 p.m. on KQED-Channel 9). So set those DVRs (or VCRs if you still have them) and revel in the Doyle-ization of Sondheim.

As you may recall Doyle directed Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd to much acclaim, and his gimmick is that he has all his performers play their own instruments. Usually, in my experience, it works one of two ways. If you saw Sweeney first, you thought it was brilliant and though Company was a weak copy-cat effort. But if you saw Company first, as I did, you think that’s where the brilliance lies and Sweeney was sort of a confusing effort to producer a cheaper version of an expensive show.

I loved Raul Esparza as Bobby, the ambivalent protagonist who, on the occasion of his 35th birthday, spends mental energy thinking about all his “good crazy people his friends, his good crazy people his married friends.” In Doyle’s slick, sleek production, everyone who’s partnered plays an instrument, which leaves Bobby, the remote observer, the only one not playing an instrument.

The structure of Company, unlike the more narrative Sweeney, is well-suited to Doyle’s gimmick because the musicianship, combined with the revue-like scenes, provides an arc to the evening that helps pull it all together. It even warms up what is a pretty cold, cynical (not to mention funny) show.

You can watch an excerpt of the opening number here.

Here’s Esparza performing “Being Alive” from last year’s Tony Awards (where Company won a best revival statue):

Opened Feb. 13, 2008 at American Conservatory Theater

Powerful performances tighten ACT’s Knot
Three stars (Powerful, scary)

Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot comes from a terrifying place, and I don’t mean the apartheid-dominated world of South African in the early 1960s, when the play was written.

The horror of Blood Knot is deeply human. It comes from that potential each of us has to be a monster, to let our better selves be trapped by fear, hatred, violence and lust for power.

At the center of the play, now receiving a sturdy production from American Conservatory Theater directed by Charles Randolph-Wright, indeed its only inhabitants, are brothers Morris and Zachariah living in a Port Elizabeth shack.

Zach (Steven Anthony Jones) is dark skinned and spends his days at an arduous, demeaning job that takes a heavy mental and physical toll on him. Morrie (Jack Willis) is much lighter skinned – you might even say he’s white – and though he was gone for many years, he has been living with his brother for about a year, cooking, cleaning and preparing Epsom salt foot baths at the end of along work day.

Act 1, for me, is troublesome. Fugard gives us a glimpse into the domesticity of the two men and hints at the drama to come. But aside from the writing of a pen-pal letter to an 18-year-old woman who turns out to be white and the sister of a cop, there’s more foreboding than drama.

Finally, in Act 2, we get to the dark heart of this family drama. Zach takes the money they’ve been saving to buy a two-man farm and squanders it on buying a fancy suit – complete with hat and umbrella – for Morrie to wear so he can meet the pen-pal girl in Zach’s place (a black man writing to a white woman would be unthinkable) because he can pass for white.

By forcing Morrie to play the game of “white man,” suit and all, Zach opens up a troubling episode that lays bare the brothers’ tangled race issues and leads to violence and, to put it mildly, fraternal upset.

The fact that the men are brothers means they can get to troubling places in one another faster than just about anybody else. They can hurt each other — and, conversely, help heal each other – with alarming efficiency.

Jones and Willis bump through the first act making us believe they are brothers but don’t fully pull us into their world. But in Act 2, their connection to each other and to the ferocious emotions is seismic.

Set designer Alexander V. Nichols fills the ACT stage with sheets of corrugated metal (which capture Kathy A. Perkins’ lights beautifully, especially when the men are fondly remembering a game they used to play in an old car), though most of the action is confined to the center of the stage where he creates an impressionistic shack of wooden slats.

The bleak world of the South Africa the brothers inhabit is effectively evoked in the design, but the most evocative aspect of the production is the music by Tracy Chapman. Mostly underscore, some instrumental, some with vocals, the music is filmic and powerful. At the top of Act 2, Chapman sings (on tape) a beautiful song about the heart of every man while we see video images of South Africa. It’s a glorious moment.

But the play, of course, belongs to Jones and Willis, who, for 2 ½ hours, pull us into quiet lives buffeted by storms both political and deeply personal. Their intensity, especially in the final section of the play, is astonishing, and the deeper they go, the more universal the play becomes.

Blood Knot continues through March 9 at the American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $17 to $82. Call 415-749-2228 or www.act-sf.org.

For my full interview with Barry Manilow see below or click here.

In our conversation, he talked about being a guest coach on “American Idol”: “Most young people sing to their eyelids,” he said. “The yclose their eyes and show their voice off. I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve always needed a theatrical situation in my imagination. I think that’s what the audience is getting. They know something is happening onstage. They don’t know what or why they’re being sucked in when I sing “Somewhere Down the Road” or “When October Goes.” They know I’m not singing to my eyelids, that’s for sure. If more pop singers approached their music and performance like that, they might have a longer career.

His 2001 concept album “Here at the Mayflower” was all about a New York apartment building and its various inhabitants. Some have suggested the album might make a good stage musical. Manilow’s response: “I’d be the first person to say, `Sure, go do it.’ But I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t write it for the stage. When you write a stage musical, that’s not the way you do it. Musicals have a separate batch of rules from albums. But if someone was interested, I’d say do it.”

After he “drops these one-nighters,” as he puts it, which means finishing the series of concerts he’s donig around the country (like the one Feb. 15 in San Jose), Manilow will finish recording his “Greatest Songs of the ’80s” album with producer Clive Davis, and he’ll head back to the Las Vegas Hilton, where his Music and Passion show is a big hit. He says the show will be re-vamped after the summer. “Vegas has been thrilling,” he said. “It’s been a big learning experience. After the fans stopped coming after the first six months, they were just people. Some of them didnt’ know what the heck they were doing there. I really love it. You have to really work. If you get a standing ovation there, they really mean it. When we re-vamp the show, it will be more hit oriented. We wound up promoting the `Decades’ albums, and the audiences loved it, but it got in the way of my own music. It’ll be more hits in the fall.”

On that upcoming ’80s album: “We’ve started putting some songs down. And you know, I think I’m OK with them. I thought my style of music, my voice, would have ended in the ’70s. I think I can do these songs.”

It’s a miracle that even now, Barry Manilow is writing the songs that make, if not the whole world, at least a fair portion of it sing. Could it be magic?

Magic had nothing to do with it. Try hard work, dogged persistence and thousands of “Fanilows’ who can’t smile without him.

Yes, Barry Manilow is still going strong, more than 30 years since his first hit, “Mandy,” unveiled the Manilow musical formula: big, heart-on-the-sleeve ballads sung with utmost sincerity and some good, old-fashioned show-biz brio.

Just when you think the time has finally come for Manilow to fade into pop history, he shows up with a surprise hit album, an appearance on “American Idol” or “Dancing with the Stars” or a long-running hit show in Vegas.

The man never rests. He’s 61 and riding yet another crest of popularity from his three “Greatest Songs of…” albums that have him warbling tunes from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. His show at the Las Vegas Hilton, Music and Passion, has just been extended for another year. He has two DVD sets out — a concert promoting the ’70s album (seen last month on PBS) and a box set of his ’70s and ’80s TV specials.

Though his concert tours have been curtailed by the Vegas show, Manilow is doing a few one-night stops around the country, and he’ll make a rare Bay Area performance Feb. 15 at the HP Pavilion in San Jose.

On the road, shuttling from one gig to another, Manilow checks in by phone and says that although his last Bay Area appearance was nearly 10 years ago (also in San Jose), he loves the area.

“I remember playing there in 1973,” he says. “It was a small nightclub. Bette (Midler) had just been there…the Boarding House. It was sort of a hippie nightclub. I got my first taste of the Bay Area audience there, and these people are smart. They don’t suffer fools gladly. I’ve gotten away with a lot of being cute and telling cornball jokes. Can’t do that up there. They want real music, and I have the real music. I didn’t need to do anything but be truthful and make music I believed in.”

Broadway baby

Manilow has been the butt of many a joke. When you’re as popular as he is — last year he was honored for career album sales of more than 75 million copies worldwide — you’re going to peeve the purists.

Still, Manilow has been able to keep his sense of humor and his perspective. He has done his own thing and made forays into jazz (“2 a.m. Paradise Cafe”), show tunes (“Show Stoppers”) and standards (“Manilow Sings Sinatra”). He’s even written two musicals. More on that in a minute.

Whatever music he’s working on — and this is likely a key to his success — Manilow communicates emotion clearly and cleanly. He’s a born musical storyteller.

“I try to sing as if I’m continuing talking,” he says. “I try to make the audience not know the difference between when I finish talking and when I begin to sing. Then, what I do, in my lyrics when I perform, I break down every lyric as if I were breaking down a scene in a play. I create the situation for myself in my imagination. I create a partner who I’m singing to. I know whether I’m in an apartment with my father or grandfather or out in a field with friends. It’s rare anyone cares to do that in pop music.”

Manilow’s technique is much more common in theater, which is something he fully realizes, having been a musical theater fan since his childhood days in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“My first records were cast albums starting with Guys and Dolls, to Finian’s Rainbow to Gypsy and all the great shows,” he recalls. “I fell in love with songs that told stories and songs that had great situations in them and great melodies. Then I found myself onstage singing pop songs, and I was not interested in just standing there and singing. The only way to go, to keep myself sane, was to find situations I could find myself truthful in, even though they were relatively simple lyrics in a pop song. `I Can’t Smile Without You’ or `I Write the Songs’ or any of the songs I’ve had hits with, they are not Sondheim lyrics, but I treat them as if they are.”

Scared again

Raised on show tunes, Manilow, not surprisingly, has tried his hand at writing a musical. His first effort was an offshoot of his hit song “Copacabana (At the Copa),” which ran in London and toured the U.S. (with a stop in San Jose).

With Bruce Sussman, Manilow also wrote Harmony, an original musical about the Comedian Harmonists, a German singing group popular in the 1920s and ’30s during the rise of the Nazi regime.

The show had its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1997, and plans for Broadway were off, then on, then off again. It was a bruising experience for Manilow.

“One of my goals before I croak is to see Harmony produced properly,” Manilow says. “I’m not involved in producing it anymore — that killed me last time — but there are two respected producers who are interested in doing the show. Who knows? In the next year, you might see `Harmony’ in a full-page ad somewhere. As of now, I had to step back and put my defenses up again. It hurt too bad.”

But Manilow has not soured on the idea of creating a musical. The fun, he says, is in the creation and in putting all the elements together.

“Then it turns to money,” he adds, “and the whole thing falls apart. But the creative part is so addictive, so thrilling and so satisfying. After you get past the insanity, everyone goes back. I have loads of composer-writer friends all over Broadway with the same scars I’ve got, and they always go back.”

One of the hardest working men in show business, Manilow claims that the best vacation for him is in front of his keyboard writing songs.

“I try my best,” he says. “I chain myself to a chaise lounge, grease myself up like a tuna fish, sit there and try to read a book. But I can’t do it. I’m much happier in front of my keyboard.”

Manilow is back in talks with Clive Davis, his longtime producer, about a fourth “decade” CD: the ’80s. And he’s writing another concept album similar to 2001’s “Here at the Mayflower,” but with more of a rock bent.

“Right now, believe it or not, I’m studying pop-rock bands like Nickelback and The Fray,” Manilow says. “There’s a bunch of talented young people in that world. This new album has some edge to it, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on out there, and what’s going on is very exciting. I need to scare myself again. This rock ‘n’ roll world is scaring me. I don’t know whether I can do it.”

Here’s Manilow singing his “Weekend in New England” with a pre-Oscar Jennifer Hudson:

In his highly enjoyable book How Does the Show Go On? An Introduction to the Theater (Disney Editions, $19.95), Thomas Schumacher recounts, in no particular order, all the jobs he’s had in his life, from childhood in San Mateo to the top of the heap as president of Disney Theatrical Productions.

The list is as follows: “shoe salesman, costume dyer, actor, gift wrapper, director, bus boy, production assistant, kitchen worker, box-office treasurer, custodian, film executive, driver, teacher, puppeteer, movie producer, playground leader, stage carpenter, sound operator, sandwich maker, stage manager, personal assistant to a famous actress and, most recently, Broadway producer,” he writes.

Whew.

“I want kids to see that you can end up doing a lot of different things before you end up doing what you always dreamed you’d be doing,” Schumacher says over a cup of tea at the Four Seasons in San Francisco.

He’s back in the Bay Area — he left about 30 years ago — to promote his book, which came out last fall and has already sold out its first printing.

The night before, he was in San Jose for an event at Children’s Musical Theatre, where he talked to a group of 200 local young performers whose questions, he says, were “outstanding.”

The showman in Schumacher, 50, also came out during the event. He brought a trunk of props from various Disney shows — a funny wig from Mary Poppins (made, as he told the kids, from “fur off a yak’s butt,” which you can bet got a laugh), a baby doll from Tarzan that “leaked” water on a volunteer from the audience, and a shattering vase from Poppins.

While in town, Schumacher was also on Ronn Owens’ KGO radio show. He was supposed to do 10 minutes and ended up staying for an hour because people kept calling and asking questions — mainly about family members who wanted to work in the theater.

“It was amazing all the people who called,” Schumacher says. “You’d never find people calling to talk about theater like that in L.A.”

One of the callers was an old friend who appears in Schumacher’s book. There’s a photo of a young Tommy Schumacher doing the splits in a Peninsula Civic Light Opera production of Hello, Dolly! (he was Barnaby Tucker), and Barbara Squire, the actress who played Dolly, also in the photo, called to say hello.

Similarly, later that night at the book signing, the intimate group — maybe two dozen people — included many of Schumacher’s friends, family members and teachers.

Several of those teachers receive shout-outs in the book: “Teachers have immeasurably enriched my life,” Schumacher writes. “And there is no one I’m more grateful for every time I enter a theater than the wonderful people who were and are my teachers, whether in school, in life or in theater.”

He specifically mentions three from San Mateo: Marian Haworth, who taught him about technical theater at age 14; Roy Casstevens, who taught him about directing at 15 (“and not a day goes by that I don’t use some aspect of what I learned from him”); and local choreography legend Berle Davis (“everything I know about discipline, practice and respect in theater goes back to Berle”). A fourth teacher, John Cauble, set Schumacher on a producing track at the University of California, Los Angeles.

After all he’s accomplished in his career, Schumacher finally got around to writing a book, the kind of book, he says, he would have been crazy about when he was a theater-hungry kid.

Indeed, the book is a trove of theatrical information. Schumacher illuminates every aspect of the theater, onstage (actors), backstage (designers, crew) and offstage (publicists, house managers) using examples from Disney shows including Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Tarzan, Mary Poppins and the latest Broadway hit, The Little Mermaid.

Soon after the book hit the shelves, Schumacher was warned by friends that the primary audience would be MAGU, i.e., “maiden aunts and gay uncles.”
But kids — and plenty of adults — are eating up the book.

One of Schumacher’s friends, the great lighting designer Natasha Katz (whom Schumacher profiles in the book), admitted that, though she has worked in the theater for a long time, there were things she learned from the book.

“That has happened more than once,” Schumacher says. “Theater professionals and people who think they know all about theater are afraid to admit that there are things they don’t know. I’ve been told there’s a secret audience for the book of theater people filling in their knowledge gaps.”

Now that Little Mermaid is up and running (after an opening delayed by the stagehands’ strike), Schumacher is turning his attention to other Disney Theatrical projects.

Upcoming is a reading of The Man in the Ceiling, a new musical by composer Andrew Lippa and author Jules Feiffer (based on his book of the same name). Also in development is a show based on the book Peter and the Starcatchers by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry, which is sort of a prequel to Peter Pan.

“Both of these shows are small shows,” Schumacher says. That is a decided to contrast to the typical Disney spectacular such as the glitzy Mermaid.

Before either of those shows has completed its long journey to opening night, Schumacher will be hopping the globe as he and director Julie Taymor figure out how to make The Lion King both larger and smaller to fit into various international venues.

He’ll have to decide what’s next for Mermaid _ London or Japan? _ and, along with co-producer Cameron Mackintosh, launch the Mary Poppins UK tour and, eventually, the North American tour, and retool Tarzan for Hamburg.

“I love, love, love what I do,” Schumacher says. “It’s agony rarely and joyful mostly.”
There will be another book, he says, whenever he and collaborator Jeff Kurti can get around to it. There’s no definite plan, but the book will likely offer another glimpse into the theater world.
Until then, Schumacher will continue to flog How Does the Show Go On?

“I’m like the Gideons with this book,” Schumacher has joked more than once. “I want one in every house.”

Opened Feb. 11, 2008 at SF Playhouse Stage II

Mee’s melancholy Gone goes down easy
Three stars (Sad beauty)

No man was ever born
but he must suffer.
He buries his children and gets others in their place;
then dies himself. — Sophocles

Those words open Charles L. Mee’s grief-stricken but strangely joyous Gone, having its Bay Area premeire from Crowded Fire Theatre Company at SF Playhouse’s Stage II in San Francisco.

The ever-entertaining Mee (Big Love, “Fetes de la Nuit’’ at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Wintertime at San Jose Repertory Theatre, Summertime at the Magic Theatre) always takes an unusual approach to his plays. He borrows liberally from any source that happens to interest him. There’s almost always good music (also mostly borrowed), and the final creation is often an enjoyable theatrical collage.

Gone is what Mee calls a “fragment’’ play. And that’s as good a description as any. He takes chunks of Sophocles, Proust, Ginsberg, Updike, Alphonse Daudet and Philip Larkin – not to mention the New York Times obituary page and random blogs. Oh, and Mee has included pieces from some of his own plays as well.

With such a variety of sources and no plot or consistent characters, the task before director Marissa Wolf is to create not a play so much as a tone, a feeling, an experience. When other writers attempt this fragment thing, the results tend to be pretentious and boring. Mee values humor and music, two combatants against boredom, so Wolf already is at an advantage.

Rod Hipskind’s set consists of doors – some useable, some leaned up against the wall of the small black-box theater. In the center of the performance space is a sort of sandbox filled with dark soil – not unlike a fresh grave.

The set also consists of many and varied lamps, which play an important role in Jarrod Fischer’s lighting design, which often consists solely of a single lamp being held by an actor. This is a dark evening, figuratively and literally.

The text, as intoned by Shoresh Alaudini, Kalli Jonsson, Marilee Talkington (above) and Mollena Williams, is dominated by themes of loss. You’ve got your death, your love loss, your wiped-out civilizations.

It’s moody to be sure, but not grim. Part of that has to do with the music. For Odetta’s “Another Man Done Gone,’’ for instance, the cast is doing sort of a spiritual dance in the sandbox. For Montgomery Gentry’s country-fried “Gone,’’ Jonsson lip synchs, and the other cast members provide back-up (choreography throughout the show is by Humu Yansane).

Between the country songs and spirituals, we get a healthy dose of Proust’s madeleine moment from Swann’s Way, a musing on the tragic, love- and pleasure-filled lives of cicadas and some insight into the world of Ruth M. Siems, inventor of Stove Top stuffing on the occasion of her death.

It’s all rich and compelling and beautifully performed, but I must admit, after about an hour, I found myself longing for character and story. Some elements, such as Proust and Sophocles, make repeat appearances, but the fragment nature of the show couldn’t overcome my need for narrative.

There’s pleasure, fleeting (as in life) to be sure, amid the pain and loss, and that’s the triumph of Mee’s show and Wolf’s production: that we seize on the joy when it arises. But then we head back to Sophocles, who leaves us in, as he puts it, “Egyptian blackness’’ with, “Time makes all things dark and brings them to oblivion.’’

Gone continues through March 2 at SF Playhouse Stage II, 533 Sutter St., San Francisco. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $15 to $25. Call 415-433-1235 or visit www.crowdedfire.org.