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.

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):

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.”

With an archaic-sounding category such as the Best Musical Show Album, it’s no wonder the award (and the winners) don’t make it onto the prime-broadcast.

Still, there are those of us who care about show tunes (the REAL alternative music), and we care deeply that Spring Awakening writers Duncan Sheik (music) and Steven Sater (lyrics) won the 2008 Grammy in that horrible-sounding category (why can’t it be Best Original Cast Recording?). Spring Awakening beat out A Chorus Line, Company, Grey Gardens and West Side Story.

Music writer and fellow blogger Jim Harrington was at the Grammys and called me Sunday afternoon when Sheik and Sater accepted their award (during the lengthy pre-prime-time awards when most of the winners are announced). Read his full coverage of the event on the Concert Blog.

In other show tune-related Grammy news, Henry Krieger and Siedah Garrett won in the category Best Song Written for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media for “Love You I Do” from the movie Dreamgirls.

With that nasty kerfuffle involving the stagehands and the dark Broadway theaters well behind us, it’s time to take a look at what’s going on in New York, where the play is really the thing.

Sure wish I could go see Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, the hottest play on Broadway right now. On a more local front, Letts’ Bug will have its West Coast debut at SF Playhouse in May, filling the slot that was going to be filled with Mark Jackson’s Faust, Part One.

The big news on Broadway recently is that Rent’s lease is up. The pioneering rock musical, which won a posthumous Pulitzer prize for its creator, Jonathan Larson, will close on June 1 and enter the record books as Broadway’s seventh-longest-running musical.

When one musical closes, another one — most likely based on a movie — fills its place.

And here comes Shrek the Musical.

The CGI ogre, who has now starred in three hit movies, will make his musical theater debut this summer in Seattle before moving on to Broadway in November. The creative team behind the DreamWorks musical is impressive (even if the subject matter isn’t): Oscar-winner Sam Mendes is an artistic consultant (and sort of got the project rolling); Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, Or Change); Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole) penned the book and lyrics; and Jason Moore (Avenue Q) is directing.

Moore has said the plot will follow the first movie, when Shrek joins up with his donkey cohort, Donkey, and falls in love with Princess Fiona.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid opened to reviews that were mostly piles of stinking fish. My impression, from reading those fragrant notices is that the show is overproduced, overstuffed and ought to have been thrown back early on. Still, I’d like to see it, if only to watch capable actors skate around on wheeled footwear.

With Mermaid packing in the family crowd, adult interest will shift to Passing Strange, the rock musical by Stew, Heidi Rodewald and director Annie Dorsen that had its pre-New York run at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. The show is transferring to Broadway and begins performances Feb. 8 at the Belasco Theatre.

The cast is the same one we saw in Berkeley in November 2006: de’Adre Aziza, Daniel Breaker, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, Chad Goodridge, Rebecca Naomi Jones and Stew, himself (with Rodewald on bass and vocals in the band).

And finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Shrek isn’t the only ogre on Broadway. Clay Aiken opened in Spamalot.

Lucy Simon and I have something interesting in common. We both saw our first Broadway shows at the St. James Theatre. Hers was Carousel. Mine was The Secret Garden, which just happens to have a score by Simon.

During previews for The Secret Garden, which opened in 1991, Simon recalls standing backstage and feeling overwhelmed to be in the same theater where she fell in love with musical theater.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she says on the phone from her New York home. “I remember thinking, `My God, this is so surreal.’ ”

Simon would go on to receive a Tony Award nomination for her musical work on The Secret Garden, which won Tonys for Marsha Norman’s book, Heidi Landesman’s set and Daisy Egan’s performance as young Mary Lennox, the hero of the story.

More than 15 years later, the show, which received some scathing reviews, has proven to be something of classic. Community theaters produce it often, and here in the Bay Area, there’s a Secret Garden sprouting somewhere every season.

This season, it’s Lamplighters Music Theatre producing the musical with an orchestra performing the original-score orchestrations (a first since the Broadway production). The show opens today in San Francisco and continues through Sunday, Jan. 20, then moves to Walnut Creek for performances Jan. 31 through Feb. 2.

The Secret Garden marked the first Broadway score by Simon, the older sister of pop singer Carly Simon, though she had worked for years attempting to turn Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series into a musical.

“There were always book problems,” Simon says of the musical that never came to be. “It’s hard to do something so episodic. And it was my first time. Some of the songs were terrific, and I’d like to be able to use them in something.”

Simon, whose father Richard was a co-founder of publisher Simon & Schuster, was surrounded by music throughout her childhood. With sisters Carly and Joanna, who became an opera singer, Lucy would sing three-part harmonies. Even simple requests such as, “Please pass the milk,” would be sung.

Lucy and Carly teamed up in the ’60s as the folk duo the Simon Sisters, and Lucy later struck out on her own as a singer-songwriter.

Looking back on her duo days, Simon says she admires the harmony.

“If you listen to those recordings, you can still hear those harmonies in my music and in Carly’s music. I can think of two of my songs, including `Wick’ from The Secret Garden, that were influenced by those harmonies from when we were teenagers.”

After taking time off to have two children, Simon attempted to revive her singing career, but when she got up on stage, she remembers thinking: “This doesn’t feel right. I’m a mother now.”

But music had always been a significant part of her life, and she realized that the songs she liked to write were the ones that told stories — not about herself but about other people. That led her to musical theater, where she was able to write for a whole cast of characters.

“When I compose, I use my voice, so when writing for characters I had to expand my range, especially for the male characters,” Simon says.

Having been a singer, Simon says composing with her voice, as opposed to on a piano or a guitar, for instance, was a natural.

“I understand the value of having the right note on the right syllable with the right expression,” she says. “I guess my strength is being able to translate emotion into music.”

Since Secret Garden, Simon has been hard at work on a musical version of Doctor Zhivago, which had its premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse and is now slated for production later this year in London.

She’s also re-teaming with Norman on a musical adaptation of Wuthering Heights called Heathcliff.

Why does Simon put herself through the rigors of creating musicals?

“I can’t but do it,” she says. “I have to write. I have to sing. I have to make something. Whether it is ever heard or not, well…, maybe The Secret Garden will be the one everyone will know, and people will ask, `Whatever happened to Lucy Simon?’ But that’s OK. Secret Garden has gone out into the world very nicely. It’s my love child and is precious to me. I feel it was a gift given to us that we now give back to the world.”

The Secret Garden is at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco, this weekend. It moves to the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek, Jan. 31-Feb. 3. Tickets are $11-$46. Call 415-978-2787 or 925-943-7469 or visit www.lamplighters.org.

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.”

So many fine gift ideas, so little space. Let’s get started with some great theater books.

In the realm of books about theater, this year’s standout comes from San Mateo native Thomas Schumacher, who also happens to be the president of Disney Theatrical, the producer of such hits as The Lion King and Mary Poppins. Schumacher’s How Does the Show Go On? An Introduction to the Theater (Disney Editions, $19.95) is geared toward the young theatergoer (ages 9 to 12), but it’s a hugely entertaining look at the entire theatrical picture, from the beginning of a show to the most intricate details of daily production.

The Bay Area can’t get enough of the musical Jersey Boys. For the most avid fans, there is, of course, a coffee-table book. Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons (Broadway, $40) contains the show’s libretto, lots of photos and a thorough guide to the real Four Seasons and their Broadway counterparts.

You think you know everything about The Sound of Music? Think again. Author Laurence Maslon has assembled the ultimate look behind the scenes of the world’s most beloved movie musical. The Sound of Music Companion (Fireside, $40) covers every aspect of the show, right up to the British reality TV show that allowed viewers to vote on the actress who wound up playing Maria on London’s West End.

The hottest show on Broadway is the multi-Tony Award-winning Spring Awakening. Fans already have memorized the great cast album, so give them Spring Awakening (Theatre Communications Group, $13.95), the libretto (by Steven Sater) and a new adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s original play by novelist Jonathan Franzen (Faber and Faber, $11.70). Franzen hates the musical, by the way, so it’s interesting to see how the play and the musical diverge.

DVDs
This was the year of the movie musical — or maybe I should say the good movie musical. If your gift recipient loves musicals, make sure he or she has Hairspray (New Line Home Entertainment, $34.98 for two-disc version, $28.98 for single-disc), the joyous movie version of the Broadway hit; Once (20th Century Fox, $29.99), a fascinating and musically rich love story about an Irish street musician and an interesting woman he meets by chance; Colma: The Musical (Lionsgate, $27.98), a locally grown musical with catchy tunes and a better-than-average cast of characters. The best of the big-ticket DVD items this year is The Noel Coward Collection ($79.98 BBC/Warner), a veritable treasure trove of Cowardly delights. The set contains seven discs and runs some 19 hours (plus another 12 hours of bonus material that includes interviews, radio plays and more). The plays included are Private Lives (with the delectable Penelope Keith), Hay Fever, Design for Living, Present Laughter, A Song at Twilight, Mr. and Mrs. Edgehill and Tonight at 8:30.

This isn’t a CD, but while we’re on the subject of Coward, this year saw the release of a fantastic volume of Coward’s letters: The Letters of Noel Coward (Knopf, $37.50), edited by Barry Day. The beauty is that the book contains letters both from and to Coward, whose beastly wit entertains in every epistle.

CDs
The fine folks at PS Classics, the show-minded label that, in addition to turning out excellent original-cast albums, allows musical theater performers the chance to show their vocal stuff, have released some terrific new discs just in time for the holidays.

The best of the bunch is Lauren Kennedy’s Here and Now, a marvelous collection of show music and pop. Album highlight is Andrew Lippa’s “Spread a Little Joy,” followed closely by Jason Robert Brown’s “In This Room” and Adam Guettel’s “Through the Mountain” (from Floyd Collins). Kennedy’s voice is so vibrant — at times so Streisandian — it’s irresistible.

PS Classics also is offering two more Broadway divas: Tony Award-winner Victoria Clark (Light in the Piazza) with Fifteen Seconds to Love, a solid collection mixing standards (“Right as the Rain,” “I Got Lost in His Arms”) and newer material (Ricky Ian Gordon’s “The Red Dress,” Jane Kelly Williams’ “Fifteen Seconds of Grace”); and Andrea Burns (soon to be on Broadway again in In the Heights) with A Deeper Shade of Red, a set that mixes Joni Mitchell (“Chelsea Morning”) with Stephen Sondheim (“What More Do I Need?”) and Melissa Manchester (“Through the Eyes of Grace”) with Kate Bush and Rodgers and Hammerstein (“Man with the Child in His Eyes/Something Wonderful”).

PS Classics’ Songwriter Series with the Library of Congress’ latest offering is a doozy: Jonathan Larson: Jonathan Sings Larson. The composer of Rent, who died tragically the night before his show opened, is heard singing demos and performing live, and the disc paints an incredible portrait of an artist full of talent, humor and ambition. The accompanying DVD features four live performances from Larson’s gig at New York’s Village Gate.

OK, I know this isn’t local, but I’m still excited about it. And it’s in our state and time zone, so technically it’s local.

Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles recently announced that it will host the world premiere of 9 to 5, the Broadway-bound musical based on the 1980 movie starring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton.

Here’s the really good news: Dolly has written the music and lyrics for the show — her first-ever musical.

The show opens next fall, Sept. 3 through Oct. 19 at the Ahmanson Theatre.

The book is by Patricia Resnick, co-author of the movie, and Joe Mantello (Wicked) is slated to direct.

The cast includes Allison Janey (The West Wing) as in-charge Violet Newstead (the Tomlin role). Stephanie J. Block (Wicked, The Boy from Oz) will be fumbling office worker Judy Bernly (the Fonda role). And Megan Hilty (Wicked yet again) will be country gal Doralee Rhodes (the Parton role).

“It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to write a musical, and now I have the chance to not only make Doralee sing, but to bring all of Patricia’s wonderful characters to life on stage through music,” Parton said in a statement. “I think I’m gonna like it around here.”

For information visit www.centertheatregroup.org or call 213-628-2772.