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 (now famous for writing new songs for the Cameron Mackintosh/Disney Mary Poppins), also at the Watermill this Christmas.
I’m delighted to get to San Francisco for the second time this year. I was there in March on a holiday, and in three weeks drove 4,000 miles to Yosemite, Lasl Vegas, Canyonlands, Arches, Grand Canyon and back up the coast. I think withs was up there with great challenges but absolutely fantastic! Will be good to stay put in the city this time.

Sweeney Todd continues through Sept. 30 at American Conservatory Theater, 415 Geary St., San Francisco. Tickets are $30 to $82. Call 415-749-2228 or visit www.act-sf.org.

Gotta love the YouTube.
Some genius mashed up the song “If You Were Gay” from Avenue Q and paired it with disgraced Sen. Craig’s emphatic declaration that he is not gay.
Have a look. (This is a clip featuring the original Broadway cast, by the way).

The San Francisco production of Avenue Q closes Sunday. See it if you can.

Opened Aug. 25 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts

TheatreWorks’ Emma charms, delights in world premiere musical adaptation
three [1/2] stars A match well made

Oh the pain of being an eligible bachelor in a Jane Austen novel. All the single women claw at you like cats at a scratching post, and everyone in the county is up in your business like Lindsay Lohan on a bender.

Such is the case with single men Mr. Knightley, Mr. Elton, Mr. Churchill and Mr. Martin in Austen’s Emma. Their very bachelorhood drives the plot and throws everyone in the book into an upright British tizzy.

There are so many flustered emotions and heaving bodices in Austen’s novel, it’s no wonder Paul Gordon took the next logical step and made all these desperately romantic people sing.

Writing the music, lyrics, book and orchestrations, Gordon is the mastermind behind Emma, the world-premiere musical that opened Saturday at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The opening marked a milestone for its producer, TheatreWorks, by being the company’s 50th world premiere.

As far as world premieres go, Emma is in remarkably good shape. Gordon’s score — an easy-on-the-ears kind of chamber pop orchestrated for violin, cello, oboe/English horn and piano — hits all the right notes and captures both the silliness and earnest romance in Austen’s 1815 novel.

Robert Kelley’s direction is fluid and unfussy, with Joe Ragey’s simple, swiftly moving set — which places the small orchestra on top of a pavilion center stage — adding immeasurably to the cinematic speed of scene changes.

But setting really is the least important thing about Emma. All we need to know is that we’re in the town of Highbury, south of London, where everybody’s business is everybody’s business, and the bulk of that business is who’s going to marry whom.

Chief busybody in this story is Emma Woodhouse (Lianne Marie Dobbs), a perky young woman of means with a penchant for matchmaking. She’s not really any good at it, but that doesn’t stop her. By musical’s end, she will have realized her “insufferable vanity” and “unpardonable arrogance,” and that helps us like her from the beginning, even as she sings things like, “I’m awed by my talent” or “Why pick your own mate when I can impose?”

Emma attempts to match her friend Harriet (Dani Marcus) with the town’s new vicar, Mr. Elton (Brian Herndon). What Emma doesn’t realize, in all her ministrations, is that Elton is infatuated with her, not Harriet, which leaves poor Harriet hanging out to dry, especially Emma has encouraged her not to marry the nice farm boy Mr. Martin (Nick Nakashima), who is apparently too low for consideration.

Emma attempts a match for herself with Mr. Frank Churchill (Travis Poelle) if only because, on paper, he’s perfect for her. In the flesh, he also happens to be handsome and charming, but there are no sparks.

The only sparking onstage comes from Emma’s interaction with Mr. Knightley (Timothy Gulan), a sort of family member — his brother is married to Emma’s sister. The two spar like brother and sister, but come Act 2, they both begin to realize that under their quarreling lies something much more intense.

Gordon’s last musical was Jane Eyre, which had a go on Broadway before it hit the regional theaters. TheatreWorks was the first to produce it outside New York, and the 2003 production was admirable. But to be frank, it made little sense to have such dark, gloomy 19th century folks singing.

It’s much more reasonable to accept Austen’s characters singing nonstop about love and fate and heartache. And Gordon’s score — much less bland and far more shaped than many a new musical — provides comedy (“Humiliation,” “Mr. Robert Martin,” “Relations”), heart (“Emma,” “Home”) and even a diva moment or two (“Should We Ever Meet,” “The Recital’). There are moments when the show threatens to become twee — too much singing about strawberries, for instance — but the humor undercuts the preciousness.

The cast is highly enjoyable, with Dobbs, a homegrown Bay Area performer who has truly come into her own as a musical theater star, elevating the entire show with her eminently likable Emma.

The combination of Austen’s sturdy storytelling and Gordon’s masterful music is a match even Emma would approve of, and that’s saying quite a lot.

For information about Emma, visit www.theatreworks.org.

Remember the name James Zongus. You just might be able to say you knew him when.

Though only 12 years old, James, a Foster City resident, has been performing for nearly a decade, and his story is strikingly familiar if you know the song “I Can Do That” from A Chorus Line.

Like the kid in the song, James would follow his two older sisters to dance class, and at age 3, he all but demanded to share the stage with his sisters in The Nutcracker.

“I was at a rehearsal and said, `I want to be in the show!’ So they cast me in a little part,” James recalls. “I got to walk across the stage and do a little bit of dancing. After that I just kept on going.”

James played Oliver in Oliver! with the Bay Area Educational Theatre Company in San Mateo, and last year he was one of the king’s children in the The King and I at American Musical Theatre of San Jose.

When Bowditch Middle School, where James will be in the eighth grade come September, joined with two other schools to produce Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, James played the role of Chip, the tea cup son of Mrs. Potts, the tea pot.

Like Olivier returning to the role of Hamlet, James will once again essay Chip, only this time for Broadway by the Bay.

For his audition, he found a song he thought would be good for Beauty and the Beast, what with its singing and dancing flatware and furniture.

“I sang `Hey, Look Me Over’ because the song has the words `rose’ and `spoon’ and `fork’ in it,” James explains. “It went really well. They laughed.”

In this production, which opens Saturday at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, James, like all the Chips before him, appears to be a tea cup-encased head on a rolling cart. There’s a bit of stage magic involved in Chip’s appearance, but James won’t give away the secret.

When asked if it’s a comfortable way to perform, he will say this: “It’s not comfortable. No way.”

But he’s enjoying working on the show and with Tracy Chiappone, who plays his mother.

“She’s very nice and easy to work with and gives me good advice,” James says.

James’ real mom, Joanne Zongus, says having a performer in the family requires the support of the entire family for both logistical and emotional reasons.

“We told him we’d make the commitment if he was willing to make the commitment and keep his grades up between a 3.5 and 3.8 and keep himself healthy and keep his commitment to his family,” Joanne says. “He’s done really well. I don’t know where he gets it. Neither his father nor I can be in front of a group of people. We’re very proud of him.”

So far, acting is just James’ hobby. Part of his agreement with his parents is that he make sure he’s a well-rounded person.

“In school, James does sports like basketball and golf,” Joanne says. “He serves on the altar for church. It’s a mind-body-soul kind of thing. We feel it’s important that all parts of you are well-rounded.”

James says theater isn’t all that cool in middle school, but in high school, especially if he gets his wish and ends up, like his twin older sisters, at theater-friendly San Mateo High School, the cool factor may improve.

“I feel like in high school, theater will be just something I like to do and no one will judge me for it,” James says.

From there, James has an interesting plan.

“I know it’s really hard to get to Broadway,” he says. “So I’ll get a good college education and then a really steady job — I like construction and architecture; I love to build stuff — then I’ll retire early and do shows at least twice a year.”

James’ practical attitude toward show business was shaped, in part, by his experience doing The King and I at AMTSJ.

Says James’ mom: “Doing that show, I think it dawned on him what it meant to perform professionally. There were a lot of New York actors there who had left their families behind, and … it can be kind of hard.”

James says the hardest part of that show was balancing rehearsal, performance, school work and the commute from Foster City to San Jose.

“I barely made it through,” James says. “But when I’d get to the theater, it was so much fun, and the sets were so intricate and everything that I forgot about everything else and had a wonderful experience.”

Broadway by the Bay’s Beauty and the Beast continues through July 29 at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center, 600 N. Delaware St., San Mateo. Shows are at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; plus 2 p.m. July 21 and 28. Tickets are $17 to $42. Call (650) 579-5565 or visit www.broadwaybythebay.org.

Though it hasn’t exactly rocked the world, Patty Griffin’s musical, 10 Million Miles, has opened at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company. It’s the story of Molly (Irene Molloy) and Duane (Matthew Morrison), drivnig from Florida to Massachusetts. Molly is pregnant and plans to give up the baby for adoption, and Duane is just kind of hoping to wander into something better.

Now, my idea of heaven is to sit in darkened room (or perhaps a coastal deck at sunset) listening to Ms. Griffin’s music for hours. She is among the most humane, most gifted singer/songwriters out there. And the fact that she pushed herself outside the regular boundaries of recording and concert performance is a thrill in itself.

John Lahr’s review in the New Yorker is quite nice. He likes the direction by Michael Mayer (a recent Tony Award winner for Spring Awakening), who Lahr credits with “successfully mining new seams of expression in the American musical.”

Of Ms. Griffin’s music he says: “Griffin’s musical palette may be limited, but she has a genuine lyrical gift, and her compassion and candor are delivered in a refreshing folk idiom…Griffin writes well about the exhilaration of love, and she parses melancholy with a special bittersweetness.”

The New York Times review is less lovely, but Ben Brantley (who gives me a rash anyway), who says there are stretches of longeur, when “suddenly you glimpse a ray of beauty that, however fleeting, makes you glad you came along for the ride.

Most of those moments come courtesy of Patty Griffin, the immensely talented, country-hybrid, cult composer and performer who has lent 15 of her songs to this show, which features a book by the playwright Keith Bunin. Ms. Griffin, whose work has found its largest audience through recordings by higher-profile acts like the Dixie Chicks, writes cameo-carved songs that create complete emotional portraits of specific people.”

He also adds: “10 Million Miles still sparkles with signs of hope, not for this show’s future prospects, but for the use of country-inflected music in narrative theater. When the four cast members sing, you often feel as if you’re looking right inside them, to the point of violating their characters’ privacy. This is never truer than when the singer is Mare Winningham, a film and television actress who emerges here as a musical performer to reckon with.”

Here’s hoping the show has a long, successful life and that — oh, please, oh, please — that it receives an original cast recording.

It ahd to happen: the battle of the Dreamgirls JHs — Jennifer Holliday (Broadway’s original Effie) and Jennifer Hudson (Hollywood’s Oscar-winning Effie). It’s from the BET Awards earlier this week.

A salute to the big musical winners from Sunday’s Tony Awards: (from left) Frank Langella, best actor for Frost/Nixon, Christine Ebersole, best actress for Grey Gardens, Julie White, best actress for The Little Dog Laughed and David Hyde Pierce, best actor for Curtains.

The number from Mary Poppins, a little “Chim Chim Cheree,” “Step in Time” and “Anything Can Happen,” came across very well, but my favorite was “Show People” from Curtains (below). And Audra McDonald’s “Raunchy” oughta sell a few tickets.

First, to clarify a few things: in another era, Marin Mazzie would be the biggest kind of Broadway star (think Ethel Merman or Carol Channing) and composers would be falling all over themselves to write shows for a singing actress who can do everything from broad comedy to heart-wrenching drama, all the while hitting the most glorious notes imaginable..

Another clarification: her first name is not pronounced like the county north of the Golden Gate Bridge. It rhymes with Sharon. And her last name rhymes with hazy.

So why isn’t Marin Mazzie (you said it correctly that time, good job) a monumental star? The simple answer is that Broadway doesn’t create those kinds of stars anymore. In the world of contemporary Broadway, Mazzie is among the best of the best. She sang naked in Sondheim’s Passion, hated men with glorious vehemence in Kiss Me Kate and heralded the dawn of a new age in Ragtime.

Currently, Mazzie is getting big laughs as the Lady of the Lake in Monty Python’s Spamalot on Broadway, but she’s taking a break to do her cabaret act at San Francisco’s Empire Plush Room June 12-17.

She was supposed to share the bill with her husband of nearly 10 years, the singing actor Jason Danieley (The Full Monty, Candide), but he’s in the new Broadway musical Curtains, and what with all the Tony Awards hullabaloo, he couldn’t get away.

So we get Mazzie on her own, and it just so happens she had an already prepared cabaret act waiting in the wings.

“I actually created this show for the Osher Jewish Community Center in Marin,” Mazzie says on the phone from her New York home. “I think that was about three years ago. David Loud, my musical director, and I needed to put something together, and we looked for music we love and can learn quickly.”

So what they did was create Yes, It’s Today, a collection of songs by Hello, Dolly! legend Jerry Herman and Cabaret and Chicago songwriting duo John Kander and Fred Ebb.

“I’ve worked with all three of them, and this is my tribute to them,” Mazzie says. “I’ve loved all of them, and all their music my whole life. It’s a really entertaining evening with lots of hits and stuff you might not know.”

Herman’s lightness is played off of Kander and Ebb’s darkness in intriguing pairings such as “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret with “Before the Parade Passes By” from Dolly or “Time Heals Everything” from`Mack and Mabel with “Isn’t This Better,” a Kander and Ebb song written for the movie Funny Lady.

If you saw the Kander and Ebb revue And the World Goes Round at the Curran Theatre in 1992, you saw Mazzie in the cast along with Karen Ziemba (who’s now partnered with Mazzie’s husband in Curtains).

“That was one of the first times I’d ever really been in San Francisco,” Mazzie recalls. “We were there for a month, and I just fell in love with the city. I remember it being a wonderful experience, with great audiences. On New Year’s Eve, we took over a piano bar, and our pianist, Jim Moore, played, and we sang show tunes until 4 in the morning. Those were the days when I could do that sort of thing.”

Mazzie had such a wild run on Broadway, with show after show after show, that she decided to step away from the eight-show-a-week grind. She was gone for about three years and spent a good deal of time in Los Angeles pursuing television work.

“I relished that time off,” she says. “The whole TV thing was new to me, and I actually enjoyed living in L.A. The business is completely different and the lifestyle is completely different. In New York City alone, whatever you do, it takes energy just to walk outside. In L.A., it’s sunny, you get in the car, and you’re in your own little pod.”

But when Mazzie came back to New York, and especially after taking over Lady of the Lake in Spamalot last September, she realized she missed Broadway.

“I didn’t miss singing every day,” she says. “But when I started in the show, I realized how much I had missed it.”

Unlike meatier roles in Ragtime and Passion, Mazzie says playing a crazy woman in a Monty Python comedy has its challenges and its rewards.

“To be in a show where, literally, people just laugh for two hours, that’s a pretty damn good thing,” she says. “At the end of the show, we sing `Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,’ and we all feel a little hopeful. Then we go home, see the news and read the papers and don’t feel so hopeful. But then we sing it again the next day.”

Next September, Mazzie and her husband are taking an actual vacation — no concert dates, no recording, no show business of any kind — to celebrate their tenth anniversary.

“Being married and being in the same business, we constantly strive to keep our lives about us,” Mazzie says. “We connect, we check in, we don’t sit and talk business all the time. We have a life together, and we constantly remind ourselves that we always need that. Obviously, sometimes it’s easier than others. Right now, it’s really hard to have time together. He has Sunday nights off, I have a show. But we do both have Mondays off.”

Mazzie says she and Danieley joke in their act (which they’ve recorded, “Opposite You,” on PS Classics) that being married 10 years for actors is like anyone else being married for 60.

For information about Mazzie’s cabaret act, visit www.empireplushroom.com.

Applause, applause to Jeremy Aufderheide, the Web master behind BlueGobo.com, an extraordinary Web site featuring an enormous collection of Broadway-musical video clips stretching back to the 1950s.

Clips come primarily from variety show performances, Tony Awards telecasts and promotional spots, and the site is a good way to lose a few hours of your life.

As we head into Tony Awards week, spend a little time with some musicals of the past.

To get you started, here’s a crusty old favorite of mine: Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme sining the title song from their one and only Broadway show, Golden Rainbow. They make it seem so effortless.

In New York recently, I had an amazing experience with Ricky Ian Gordon, an extraordinary composer who has written for the theater (My Life with Albertine, Dream True) and for the opera (his adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath recently premiered at Minnesota Opera).

Sitting in the apartment he shares with his boyfriend, Kevin, Gordon was talking about his upcoming trip to Berkeley — he performs alongside fellow composer Jake Heggie and Alameda’s resident opera star, Frederica von Stade, on Sunday, April 29, as part of the Cal Performances season — and he brought up a poem by James Schuyler called “Virginia Woolf” that he had set to music and that will be performed on Sunday.

Being a man of music, just talking about the song was insufficient, so he got up and sat at his spinet piano and indicated that I should sit next to him. Then he played the song and sang it full out.

The experience of sitting next to a composer performing his own work is mesmerizing, and the song itself, full of the intricate, haunting melodies Gordon is famous for, is spectacular. If Sunday’s version is anything like Gordon’s, the audience at Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus should be blown away.

Gordon says his half of the concert will be typically him, which is to say, a little bit of a lot of things.

He’ll be joined by Heggie on a four-hand piano piece, “Ring-a-Ding-Ding,” followed by vocal performances by von Stade and others of songs with texts by Emily Dickinson, James Agee, Stanley Kunitz, Edna St. Vincent Milay and others.

There won’t be anything from his well-received The Grapes of Wrath (libretto by Michael Korie), although that epic endeavor will arise again in Utah next month and in Pittsburgh and Houston in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

So how does a composer like Gordon, with feet in both worlds, decide if something is musical theater or opera?

“There’s nothing I can’t do in the theater, but I do feel often like there’s this thing you face with musicals: the critics,” Gordon says. “You’re writing for critics who don’t know how to write or talk about music. I often feel musically misunderstood in the theater.”

There were parts of The Grapes of Wrath, Gordon says, that sounded like musical theater, but musical theater along the lines of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess or Weill’s Street Scene.

“My vocabulary includes music in the American vernacular,” Gordon says. “There are moments when it sort of explodes in operatic texture, while other moments could feel like a musical. Then you’re back into an aria. The truth is, that is so my aesthetic. To me, that’s me doing what I do. I had room to spread out in this opera and just be so Ricky. That’s what was totally fun about it.”

Just because he’s found success in the modern opera world (the Metropolitan Opera has even been sniffing around), Gordon insists he has not forsaken the world of musical theater.

He and Korie (also the lyricist for the Broadway hit Grey Gardens) are working with playwright Craig Lucas on a commission for the Signature Theatre about a major choreographer at the end of his life trying to come to terms with who he has been as a human being and an artist.

He’s also working with the director/writer Tina Landau on spiffing up an old project, “States of Independence,” and creating another opera, Morning Star, with William Hoffman.

“Yeah, I have a lot coming up,” Gordon says. “I’m going to sort of do it all.”

Theater in Song: Music by Jake Heggie and Ricky Ian Gordon is at 3 p.m. April 29 in Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus near Bancroft Way at College Avenue. Tickets are $62. Call (510) 642-9988 or visit www.calperformances.net.