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.

Opened Jan. 9, 2008, American Conservatory Theater

Mamet plows into Hollywood brio with `Speed’
Three ½ stars Hot he-man hurly-burly

David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow may be notorious for allowing Madonna to make her critically reviled Broadway debut in 1987.

But the play, which opened Wednesday at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, should be better known as one of Mamet’s more enjoyable comedies. To be sure, this is Mamet territory, which means the “comedy” is laced with testosterone-fueled ignorance, misogyny and violence.

The really interesting thing about the play isn’t its skewering of Hollywood. That’s easy. People in Hollywood are shallow, greedy arbiters of cultural taste who willingly sell their souls (if they ever had them) in pursuit of sex, fame and fortune.

No, it seems Mamet is after something altogether different here, and Hollywood is as good as any other manly man playground to explore it.

Director Loretta Greco sets the play (which comprises three scenes played out in about 100 minutes) on a Hollywood soundstage (set by G.W. Mercier). We see stagehands place the cut-out palm trees behind the window in the office set. Carts of costumes are rolled across the stage, and big movie lights (lighting by York Kennedy) re-create the Southern California glare.

This is a play, like so many Mamet plays before and since, that belongs to the men. Bobby Gould (Matthew Del Negro) is the new head of production for a big movie studio. His longtime friend and lackey, Charlie Fox (Andrew Polk), is still toiling in the producer trenches, but he’s lucked onto something big.

One of the major stars – think Tom Cruise – has fallen in love with one of Charlie’s scripts and wants to make the movie. So Charlie takes the project, which will be the making of his career – to his old friend Bobby.

The two producers strike a deal to co-produce and are ready to make the presentation to the studio’s head honcho. They can already taste the filthy lucre that will come pouring into their personal coffers.

They call each other old whores and love it. “They kick you upstairs and you’re still just some old whore,” Charlie says to Bobby. “You’re gonna decorate your office. Make it a bordello. You’ll feel more at home…and come to work in a soiled nightgown.”

But then the woman enters. Bobby’s temp secretary, Karen (Jessi Campbell), brings the men coffee, and thus begins the action of the plot as she, knowingly or not, attempts to break apart the Charlie-Bobby love fest.

Speed-the-Plow really is a love story of sorts between the two men. But they’re not in love. They’re in power, which might be even more bonding. Each of the play’s three characters relishes the notion of making decisions, holding sway over people’s lives and livelihoods.

Bobby has the most power because he has the fanciest job. He can green-light a movie or get a movie green-lighted with just a single meeting. When Bobby spends an evening at home with Karen, she messes with his mind (and, to some degree, his heart). She’s been assigned a “courtesy read” of a popular novel from the Far East about the end of the world. She’s supposed to provide “coverage,” which means a summary, and demonstrate why the book would make a terrible movie.

But she falls in love with the book, which is essentially about confronting mankind’s one overriding fear – fear of death – and making peace.

Mamet would have us believe that Karen, for all her supposed naiveté, is just your average ambitious Hollywood bimbo. But in Campbell’s capable hands (and under Greco’s astute direction), we’re not quite sure where Karen’s sincerity ends and her ambition begins.

But as a woman in a Mamet play, she must be punished for coming between the men. Bobby decides to forgo the big-budget, fortune-making movie with Charlie in favor of the world-healing Eastern novel with Karen. Let the punches fly, the blood flow and the male bonding resume. B’bye, Karen.

Del Negro and Polk have crackling chemistry, though, and this is a strange criticism, Del Negro is just too handsome as Bobby. This guy, if he were really a Hollywood power player, would be dripping in starlets, and his bet with Charlie to see if he could bed Karen would be a total no-brainer.

But where it counts, in terms of dialogue and character motivation, the actors are sharp and effective.

When their relationship is threatened – when their power marriage is upset – they come right back to the “old whore” imagery. Charlie says to Bobby, with venom in his voice this time, “You’re a bought-and-paid-for whore, and you think you’re a ballerina cause you work with your legs? You’re a whore.”

Well, they’re whores for each other, and their commitment to garbage-driven commerce (ie, show business) and to their mutual power-love, is terrifying to behold.

Speed-the-Plow continues through Feb. 3 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $17-$82. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org for information.

American Conservatory Theater artistic director Carey Perloff didn’t mince words when introducing playwright Tom Stoppard Saturday morning at a Koret Visiting Artist Series event. She called him the “greatest writer in the English-speaking language.”

Indeed the 70-year-old Stoppard, outfitted in light-brown slacks and jacket with vibrant red socks, has an extraordinary body of dramatic work, stretching back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1967 to his latest Broadway hit, Rock ‘n’ Roll, which follows closely on the heels of last year’s New York triumph, the Tony-winning, three-part epic The Coast of Utopia.

Much of Saturday’s discussion, in front of a full house, centered on Rock ‘n’ Roll, which takes Stoppard back to his native Czechoslovakia. Here are some highlights.

On writing Rock ‘n’ Roll, which goes from Prague Spring in 1968 to the fall of Communism in 1990: “A play writes itself, but you give it a lot of help. The play tells you what it wants to be about and which way it wants to go. Rock ‘n’ Roll is largely about Czechoslovakia, but threaded through is a love story, which is actually out of sight too long, That’s what it’s really about. I intended to push the plot forward to 1997, but by the time the love story is played out in 1990, the play had no interest in going beyond that.”

On his favorite thing written about Rock ‘n’ Roll during its London run: “A journalist wrote that after the play, she cried all the way home. That’s what you want a play about politics to do.”

On the art of dramatic storytelling: “Almost every story is two stories enfolded. You have the play going on, which is transient, ephemeral. In Rock ‘n’ Roll, when the play begins, it’s 1968 and the Soviet Empire is a fact of life. It looks permanent, but it’s not. Then there’s the other story that has entirely to do with human behavior and the way of being human. That’s why the love story made it impossible for the political story to have any juice left.”

On the writing process: “The older I get, the more I sense that you really have to be brave enough to know less than what you think you need to know to write the play. If you start telling it, you end up with something brittle. I’ve written work like that. I know I have. The difference between a good play and a bad play or a good production and a bad production is that the good ones get better as they age and the not-so-good ones get worse. Plays that are true to themselves are never quite ready, but they get more ready the more you do them.”

On going back to Czechoslovakia after the fall of Communism: “I had never been back to my birthplace. My mother had died five years earlier, and her death released me, gave me permission to go. While she lived she didn’t want to look back. There’s so much I didn’t know about her and her family. It was ignorance I was happy to live in. I didn’t care to invigilate my mother.”

While in Czechoslovakia: “My father was a doctor, and as Hitler was getting closer, the chief doctor got all the Jewish doctors out of the country. We ended up in Singapore, just before Pearl Harbor. Ten years ago, when I was back in Czechoslovakia, I met with the chief doctor’s daughter. When she was five, she put her hand through a glass pane, and apparently all the children asked for my father. He sewed up her cut, and she showed me the scar. The scar on this lady’s hand is the only thing I’d got from my dead father…There’s real life handing me a superb novelistic or dramatic trick.”

On consistent threads through his work: “I now see I identify this mania for cross-reference in a given play. That seems to be something I find deeply attractive dramatically. My plays are full of shuttle-and-loom back and forth.”

Perloff reminded Stoppard that he once answered an ACT MFA student’s question, “What do you most value in an actor?” with “Clarity of utterance.” Stoppard elaborates: “That ought to be a given but seldom is. Actors, on principle, refer to say “if” at the beginning of a sentence. They think they say it, but they never do. If fuzzy logic has its place in the world, I supposed fuzzy dialogue has its place.”
Perloff: “But not in your plays.”
Stoppard: “No.”

On working on an adaptation of Chekhov’s Ivanov: “I love doing it, searching for the utterance – how to say it. It’s an immensely difficult thing. I don’t read Russian and work from a literal translation. I know this work has a deep significance, but I’m not exactly sure why. I sit at my desk (I tend to work at night) putting the literal translation into exactly right English. I go to bed thinking, `That went well. As good as I can get it. Chekhov would be delighted.’ Come back in the morning, and it’s as if the Polish au pair girl had re-written it. I can only do this work for a couple of hours at a stretch or I lose contact with the English language. You’re either too close to it or too far away.

On something strange happening while working on the Chekhov: “I’m interested in the aside. Ten years ago, adapting The Seagull, Dorn (the doctor) is alone on stage talking. I worried about whom he was talking to. Do you look the audience in the eye or just say the speech? I found that breaking the fourth wall doesn’t break the play. The play carries on undeterred, and that goes against logic.”

There are some theater treats heading our way in 2008. Here’s a mere sampling.

The show I’m most excited about also seems the furthest away. The national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening is slated to start sometime in the second half of the year, courtesy of SHN/Best of Broadway. Spring Awakening was the best thing I saw on Broadway last year, and I eagerly anticipate the tour and the chance to hear the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater score performed by exciting young singer/actors.

A close second on the old excitement meter is Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, her autobiographical solo show coming to Berkeley Rep in February.

At SF Playhouse, Theresa Rebeck, a hot-hot playwright at the moment, arrives with the West Coast premiere of her The Scene starring “Melrose Place” alum (and Berkeley native) Daphne Zuniga. The show opens later this month.

At American Conservatory Theater, the most intriguing offering this spring is ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy about a brother and sister who fall in love…with each other. The show begins performances in June.

TheatreWorks in Mountain View ushers in the new year with Wendy Wasserstein’s final play, Third, which begins performances next week. But the real excitement comes in April when the company mounts Caroline, or Change, the astonishing Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical.

At Berkeley’s Shotgun Players, the summer show will be Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, but the big excitement comes at the end of the year when director Mark Jackson (Death of Meyerhold) returns to take a whack at Macbeth in December.

This summer, California Shakespeare Theater gives us some really good reasons to head into the Orinda hills: Jonathan Moscone directs Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (July) and Timothy Near is directing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (August).

And this one is a little iffy, but should the fates conspire, Thick Description will bring back former Bay Area actor Colman Domingo (fresh from his Broadway turn in the musical Passing Strange) in his autobiographical solo show A Boy and His Soul. Proposed show run is July. Keep your fingers crossed.

I’ve already offered up my Top 10 list of 2007’s best Bay Area theater (see it here).

That’s all well and good, but there was way too much good stuff in 2007 to contain in a polite numbered list. What follows, in no apparent order, are some of the year’s most distinctive theater moments (mostly good, some not so much).

The shows in the Top 10 were really great shows, but so were these. This is my honorable mention roster:

– American Suicide, Encore Theatre Company and Z Plays
– Pillowman, Berkeley Repertory Theatre
– The Birthday Party, Aurora Theatre Company
– Pleasure & Pain, Magic Theatre’s Hot House ‘07
– After the War, American Conservatory Theater
– Heartbreak House, Berkeley Repertory Theatre
– Tings Dey Happen, Dan Hoyle and The Marsh
– Annie Get Your Gun, Broadway by the Bay
– Des Moines, Campo Santo, Intersection for the Arts
– Richard III, California Shakespeare Theater

Favorite scene: Didn’t even have to think twice about this one. The dinner scene in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s adaptation of To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Director Les Waters, working from Adele Edling Shank’s script, fashioned a multilayered scene that would have made Woolf herself proud. A boisterous family dinner, warmly illuminated by candles, allows us into the head of each of the diners without ever losing track of the dinner conversation. Extraordinary and beautiful — and vocally choreographed like a piece of complex music.

Greatest guilty pleasure: Legally Blonde, The Musical, had its pre-Broadway run early in 2007 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theatre, and though it had its problems, it was a heck of a lot of fun. The best number was the lengthy “What You Want” in which sorority gal Elle Woods (Laura Bell Bundy) decides to apply to Harvard. In true musical fashion, the number sweeps through time and space, coursing through months of effort and from Southern California to the hallowed halls of Harvard. Jerry Mitchell’s choreography incorporates a frat party, the Harvard selection committee and a marching band.

Favorite image:The green girl in Berkeley Rep’s The Pillowman.

Favorite couple: Francis Jue as Mr. Oji and Delia MacDougall as Olga Mikhoels in Philip Kan Gotanda’s After the War at ACT. The sweetest romance was also the most surprising: a shy Japanese man and a recent Russian immigrant, neither of whom speaks much English.

Speaking of MacDougall: It was a good year for the actress (seen at right with the fur and tiara), who died memorably in Cal Shakes’ King Lear and ended 2007 with a superb, hip-swiveling, lip-pursing performance in Sex by Mae West at the Aurora.

Favorite tryout: Joan Rivers is more than a red carpet personality and an experiment in plastic surgery. An avowed theater lover, Rivers got down to some serious (and seriously funny) business in The Joan Rivers Theatre Project at the Magic. She combined stand-up with drama as she told an autobiographical tale of growing old in show business. The play was far from perfect, but she gets an A for effort.

Best ensemble: Behind every good show is a good ensemble, in front of and behind the scenes. But the one that comes to mind that, together, elevated the play was the fine crew in TheatreWorks’ Theophilus North (left) directed by Leslie Martinson.

Biggest disappointments: There were a few of them. I adore Kiki and Herb (Justin Bond and Kenny Melman), but their summer gig at ACT was in desperate need of a director. Berkeley Rep hosted Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Oliver Twist, and while it was good, it didn’t reach anything approaching the heights of David Edgar’s Nicholas Nickleby. I complained about this in the review, and I’ll complain about it again: In ACT’s The Rainmaker, when the rain falls at the end, the actors should get wet. That’s the whole point of the play. In this version, the rain fell from above, but the actors were behind it and only pretended — acted if you will — the wetness. Lame.

Most gratuitous nudity: Actors bare all emotionally _ it’s what they do. But this year saw some unnecessary flesh, most notably in ‘Bot at the Magic, Private Jokes, Public Places at the Aurora and Two Boys in Bed on a Cold Winter Night. Costumes are a good thing.

Favorite quote of the year: It was uttered by the food critic Anton Ego (and written by Brad Bird) in the brilliant Pixar/Disney movie Ratatouille. As a critic (or what’s left of one), the words really hit home. And they’re true.

Here’s a taste: “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”

Happy New Year. May your stages in 2008 be full of the discovery of the new.

For a third time, American Conservatory Theater is asking us to think and write like David Mamet. Hot @#*$in’ dog.

In conjunction with its upcoming production of Mamet’s Hollywood-lambasting play Speed-the-Plow, ACT is now accepting short play submissions in the unique style of Mamet, which is to say, lots of short, spiky sentences, and lots of foul language.

Ten winning scripts will be selected by a panel of judges including ACT associate artistic director Pink Pasdar and dramaturg Michael Paller.

Says Pasdar: “The contest is a great way for new and experienced playwrights to introduce themselves to us by emulating the style of one of America’s wittiest and most distinctive writers.”

ACT’s graduating class of MFA program students will present the winning pieces in public readings in Fred’s Columbia Room at the American Conservatory Theater on Jan. 25 and 26. The public is invited to attend, but reservations are recommended. Call 415-439-2446.

As for enterting the contest, the rules are simple. Submissions may be no more than three pages, include no more than four characters and fit within one of three categories: rewwrite a classic film scene a la Mamet; a scene depicting a Mamet character rexperiencing a “Hollywood” moment; or Mamet characters placed in an iconic film moment (think Ricky Roma from Glengarry Glen Ross as Jerry Maguire).

Deadline for all submissions is Jan. 11 and winners will be announced Jan. 16. Prizes include ACT theater tickets, dinners in fine restaurants and, of course, the chance to have your play performed.

Find more information at www.act-sf.org/mamet.

ACT’s `Rainmaker’ shakes, rattles and pours
Two ½ stars Dusty and dreamy

You’ve got to hand it to American Conservatory Theater. When reviving a musty old relic like N. Richard Nash’s 1954 melodrama The Rainmaker, you need to something to shake it up, and having a 5.6 earthquake during the opening moments of opening night is one way to do that.

So maybe it wasn’t planned, but when the former Geary Theater (virtually destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake) started rumbling and swaying, and the stage lights started shaking, you couldn’t help thinking: God/the Universe/Oprah would never have done this during a David Mamet play.

All praise to actor Jack Willis, who, with the curtain only just raised, sat on the stage and rode out the earthquake like the pro that he is. And props to the audience as well for barely muttering a sound and agreeing as one that remaining seated for a play is far more important than panicking and running for cover.

Who knew The Rainmaker could be so exciting? We arrived expecting rain and got rattled. Ain’t theater grand?

It was a surprise to see Nash’s Rainmaker listed in the ACT season lineup. Isn’t this the same play that has become the dominion of community theaters far and wide? I’ve seen two local productions – one at the Contra Costa Civic Theatre and one at the California Conservatory Theatre – and both were just fine.

Seeing ACT’s sturdy, beautifully produced, Mark Rucker-directed version, I hoped maybe the play would reveal itself to be a true American classic. It didn’t.

The play is still the sweet, dusty crowd pleaser it’s always been, whether in the form of the 1956 Katharine Hepburn-Burt Lancaster movie or the 1963 musical (revived on Broadway earlier this year starring Audra McDonald).

There’s nothing wrong with pleasing a crowd, and the ACT audience did seem pleased on opening night. But in truth, The Rainmaker is the dehydrated version of The Music Man, which is the brassy version of every other story that aims to reward faith, inspire hope and make people feel life, no matter how ugly it is (or you are), is worth living.

Certainly, Rucker’s production is hampered by the traditional three-act format. With two intermissions, the steam is definitely out of the dramatic machine by Act 3, when Nash’s attempt at creating some O’Neill-ish, Moon for the Misbegotten dramatic romance between his spinster, Lizzie Curry (Rene Augesen) and the con-man, Starbuck (Geordie Johnson), fails to spark.

What the production does have going for it is a slick, efficient set (by Robert Mark Morgan), effective costumes (by Lydia Tanji) and sharp lighting (by Don Darnutzer), all of which allow Rucker’s excellent cast to warm up the play to near-dramatic heights.

Willis is the epitome of Western warmth and compassion as H.C. Curry, a single father to the unmarried Lizzie (Augesen’s usually blond locks are hidden beneath a mousy brown bun), stick-in-the-mud Noah (hey, where’s the ark, oh wait, that’s getting ahead of the story) and randy youth Jim.

Stephen Barker Turner as the prig brother and Alex Morf (a member of the ACT Master of Fine Arts Program’s Class of 2008) as the love-struck kid are terrific. Morf wrings all possible laughs from Jim’s prairie exuberance, which helps percolate the show’s 2 ½ hours considerably.

Rod Gnapp doesn’t have a whole lot to do as the sheriff (think Andy Griffith in Mayberry), and Anthony Fusco is a closed-off deputy (think Don Knotts with a soul) who eventually breaks through his shell and reaches out for Lizzie.

But not before Starbuck does more than reach. The metaphor of drought and a promise to make rain applies mainly to Lizzie’s love life, so when she gets “visited” by the con-man and finally becomes visible to the deputy, the rains ensue.

It’s all pretty pat – but sweet and nice and all that – and made all the more interesting by interesting actors.

And a final note about the final scene (if you don’t want to know how the show ends, avert your eyes). It’s nice to have a rain effect that looks like rain in the final moments of the show, but why do none of the actors get wet? It’s such a cop-out to let the skies open up and drench absolutely no one. Lizzie should be drenched for her curtain call, but the actors emerge bone dry. Talk about draining the metaphor.

For information about The Rainmaker, check out ACT’s newly revamped (and lovely) Web site.

In response to my interview with Sweeney Todd orchestrator Sarah Travis, I received an e-mail from Jenifer Tice, who had some interesting thoughts on the whole actors-as-musicians phenomenon (in director John Doyle’s Sweeney Todd, currently at American Conservatory Thaeter in San Francisco, the actors are also the orchestra). With Jenifer’s permission, I want to share some of her observations and encourage you to leave your thoughts — either via a comment on the blog or e-mail me at cjones@bayareanewsgroup.com.

I find the idea of having actors/singers multi-task as the orchestra to be a very disturbing trend. I want to see the full performance of the character, and adding this layer detracts from the performances, as least for e. It seems like a cheap parlor trick. (Case in point: Watching Raul Esparza accompany himself as he sang “Being Alive” at the Tony’s was annoying to me — that is not why I go to the theater. Let a pianist play the song while he embodies the character of Bobby. His take on Bobby was somewhat overwrought anyway, but having him play piano for himself put me off his performance immediately. This is not a hotel lounge act; it’s an expensive theater ticket. And I want an orchestra!) The fact that Judy Kaye should have to learn to play the tuba (”marginally” by her own account) in order to play Mrs. Lovett seems absurd to me. Having actors serve as the orchestra also fights the whole illusion of their being these characters. Although I admit it would have been fun to watch Patti Lupone play the tuba (for five minutes anyway), I loved the concert version a few years ago when she & George Hearn were not distracted by instruments or elaborate sets and played the hell out of their roles. Sometimes less is truly more. Actors have more than enough to do, and talented musicians deserve the gig. Audiences paying over a hundred bucks a seat deserve better, too. I hope this will be a short-lived gimmick.

Opened Sept. 4, 2007

Demons and all, Sweeney Todd resurrected at ACT
Three stars Merry musical mayhem

Let’s go straight for the jugular here: When it comes to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the most important factor is the Stephen Sondheim score.

Directors can do their good work with the show. Harold Prince turned the original 1979 Broadway production into grand-scale opera, but the glorious music and the genius lyrics were the star. Nearly 30 years later, British director John Doyle stripped away the 27-piece orchestra and giant cast to expose, yet again, a masterful score by a musical theater composer working at the peak of his craft.

San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater opens its 41st season with Doyle’s bare-bones Sweeney. The production is essentially the Broadway tour – a pre-stop if you will – and it’s exciting and thrilling but unfortunately flawed.

Performed in Doyle’s “actor musician’’ style, the 10 actors play their own instruments. They are cast and orchestra all at once. Why? It’s cheaper. And Doyle’s direction is so precise, and his stage pictures so arresting, it’s actually quite interesting.

The concept works largely because the performers are so dazzlingly talented and because it’s always interesting to watch people play instruments. Aside from concerts and trips to the symphony, we don’t get to see instruments played all that often.

Sondheim’s score – bolstered by Hugh Wheeler’s sturdy book, which is, in turn, based on Christopher Hampton’s 1973 play – shines in any context. Surprisingly, the actor-musician approach doesn’t slight the music. Sure, this is a chamber musical version – spare, eloquent, a little raw and messy – but it suits the madness of the story. The glorious excess of the original orchestrations is replaced by music supervisor/orchestrator Sarah Travis’ lean, attractive arrangements.

In telling the story of a deeply angry, razor-wielding barber exacting revenge on his enemies by slicing their throats and baking their remains into savory meat pies, Sondheim is writing in three basic styles.

There’s the fist-in-your-gut melodrama of “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd’’ and “City on Fire!’’ There’s the broad humor of British music hall in “The Worst Pies in London’’ and “By the Sea.’’ And there’s the lilting melodies so gorgeous you practically melt by the end of “Johanna,’’ “Pretty Women’’ and “Not While I’m Around.’’

The brilliance of “A Little Priest,’’ the Act 1 closer, puts the song in a class by itself. Sung by Sweeney and his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, the song imagines filling meat pies with every kind of human, from vicar to fiddle player. It’s a real man-devouring-man number with the kind of humor and bit that most musicals dream of achieving.

The score is served well in Doyle’s 2 ½-hour production (music direction by David Loud), but the Gothic drama suffers.

Doyle, who also designed the rough-hewn production (though Richard G. Jones is responsible for the stark, imaginative lighting) begins the show with a vague concept: we’re in an asylum of some kind complete with straightjackets and white lab coats. It’s a shadowy idea that never really amounts to much. (Hey, kids, Marat/Sade sings Sondheim!).

This production is so sharp I desperately wanted it to slice into the show more effectively. I hoped for chills and thrills but settled for pleasant entertainment.

The cast – seven of the 10 were involved with the Broadway production – is able to shuttle between playing instruments and performing scenes, but few of the performances truly connect.

A brilliant observer (my date, actually) said it was like we were watching the understudies get ready for the big show. And that’s it exactly.

David Hess as Sweeney has scaled down his demons, which is appropriate for the chamber musical setting, but he’s never really scary enough.

Judy Kaye as Mrs. Lovett is appealing and vocally sure, but she misses laughs all over the place. There needs to be something crazy, sexy, sleazy and saintly about Mrs. Lovett, and Kaye is still finding her way through the role.

Benjamin Magnuson and Lauren Molina as the young lovers Anthony and Johanna make a strong impression with their cello duets, and the impressive Edmund Bagnell is as strong vocally as he is on the violin.

The big disappointment is Keith Buterbaugh as the evil Judge Turpin, who pulls a Woody Allen and attempts to marry his adopted daughter. Buterbaugh’s great on the trumpet, but there’s no menace in his performance. Much better at conveying smiling immorality is Benjamin Eakeley as The Beadle.

There’s brilliance in Sweeney Todd, and that comes through in this production, which is, in the end, vivid enough to keep you from missing the full production. If only the razor were sharper.

For information about Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, visit www.act-sf.org.

American Conservatory Theater’s season-opening production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is wowing audiences in San Francisco with its stripped-down intensity, nerve-jangling performances and bloody stagecraft.

The show boasts the same director — John Doyle – who jolted audiences with Sweeney in London and on Broadway, where he won a Tony Award for best director.

As on Broadway and in London, Doyle’s accomplice in this bloody musical feat (if you don’t know the story, a barber enacts revenge by slitting certain customers’ throats and then, with the help of the crazy lady downstairs, bakes them into meat pies) is musical supervisor and orchestrator Sarah Travis.

Travis’ work on Sweeney is nothing short of miraculous. All the performers play their own instruments. There is no orchestra. This means that, when Mrs. Lovett (the crazy baker lady) and Sweeney (the throat slicer) have a number, the remaining eight cast members have to provide musical backup.

She and Doyle have worked on a number of what Doyle calls “actor musician” shows, including Mack and Mabel and Fiddler on the Roof.

I conducted an e-mail interview with Travis from her home in England.

Q: How difficult is it to find performers who are strong enough actors for the story and equally strong as musicians for the exacting demands of Stephen Sondheim’s score?
A: It never ceases to amaze me just how many talented, multi-skilled performers there are out there, on both sides of the pond. With every new show we discover a whole new batch of people. For the last 10 years I have been working on “actor musician” shows, mainly in the U.K, and there is an ever-growing pool of experienced performers in this field, and also many new ones coming through the training system. There is even an “actor musician” course in London now bringing on new talent.
The auditions are fun — it’s always good to have an instrumental lineup in mind, but it doesn’t always work out exactly as planned, and luck sometimes does play a part. On the last day of the original U.K. Sweeney auditions, for example, two cellists auditioned one after the other, and they ended up playing our Joanna and Anthony. I had never envisioned they would both play the same instruments, let alone cello, but it just seemed right — and it’s been that way ever since.

Q: It seems that putting a show like this together is an incredibly intricate puzzle. Not only do you have to pare down the orchestrations (the original Broadway production had 27 players, this one has a maximum of 10), you have to figure out which of the actors is available at any given time to play when they’re not needed in a scene.
A: I have a sort of imaginary chart in my head. It gets pretty cluttered in there at times, too!
The process is indeed a jigsaw puzzle. With Sweeney now, it’s all pretty set in how it’s staged and who plays when, who moves a chair when, and so on. But when a show is first produced, it’s pretty complicated.
I can have a rough overview of how a piece will develop through pre-rehearsal discussions with the director and designer, but moment to moment, it’s impossible to know exactly who does what when.
So my only option is to over-orchestrate so that it gives us more choices in rehearsals. It then becomes a form of bartering, looking for the best choices all round, and inevitably, I start to strip the orchestration down to free up people for staging and begin to mold the sound I want as rehearsals progress.
I am re-orchestrating sometimes right up to previews and always thinking on my feet _ that’s the bit of the process I love.

Q: The production now at ACT will go on to tour the United States. How closely is it modeled on the Broadway production?
A: We did indeed set out to follow the Broadway blueprint when casting the tour. Several of the original Broadway cast are coming back to do the tour, so that was a great start. Judy Kaye, who is playing Mrs. Lovett (and who took over for Patti LuPone on Broadway), has learned to play tuba especially for this production — a fantastic achievement!
Otherwise, there have been a few tweaks and re-orchestrations, but nothing too complicated. We were very lucky this time, as it can be much more involved. It only takes one character with a slightly different instrumental lineup to affect the whole scoring — it can be a nightmare!

Q: Sondheim himself has said this production of Sweeney is the one that “comes closest to Grand Guignol, closest to what I originally wanted to do.” What have your interactions with Sondheim been like?
A: Sondheim has always been incredibly supportive and generous about my work on Sweeney. He has always let me get on with the job and has trusted the process all the way. He will come into rehearsals and listen with fresh ears and make suggestions or give notes once the show is up and running. He is always positive, and I find him a great teacher and inspiration.

Q: When you and John Doyle set to work on Sweeney, what kind of sound did you have in mind?
A: John always envisioned a claustrophobic, intimate chamger interpretation with a constant underlying feeling of the inevitable.
Musically, I wanted it to feel like a roller coaster — once the first bar is played, the tension starts to build, and it never lets up. We hope that the audience is pulled along with it. We took out some original applause points to keep the tension building right through. Sondheim’s score has a claustrophobic feel, and John’s set has a hemmed-in, coffin-like look, especially when the lights filter through the cracks in the boards.
I think the smaller orchestration for this production helps this stifling effect, as it draws the audience in to the story. I think Sondheim’s brilliant score has made my job easy with all its dramatic tension, its gritty harmonic construction and at times its soaringly beautiful melodies. The show is simply a masterpiece.

Q: So what’s next for you, Sarah? Are you aching to work with a full orchestra whose members never have to act?
A: I’m not really sure. I’m always a little scared of bigger orchestrations. If someone asked me to score West Side Story for 35 players, I’d probably run a mile! I’m always learning as I go, and finally accepting that it’s OK to make mistakes. I don’t tend to plan things, so anything that comes along presents its own challenges. As long as work is varied and fulfilling, than that’s OK.
Meanwhile, I have been busy this year in the U.K. working on an actor-musician version of Martin Guerre at the Watermill Theatre (where Sweeney began), a pantomime at the Barbican called Dick Whittington, ongoing cabaret work with my act Drop Dead Divas, and I am about to start scoring Honk, a version of “The Ugly Duckling” by Stiles and Drew