Bay area theater just gets better and better: freeFall Theatre's arrival brought a stunning production to The Studio@620, and just about every other company, from American Stage to Hat Trick, had at least one four-star show sometime during the year. Here's a recap of 2008's very best: if you saw even half of these, you were one happy spectator. [Note: I wasn't able to see Stageworks' The Chosen, but the four-star rating it received from guest reviewer Dorothy Smiljanich landed it on the list.]
1. The Wild Party. Eric Davis' freefall Theatre debuted with a manic, polished musical that was sublimely well acted by one of the most consistently professional casts ever assembled by a local company. This was the Roaring Twenties at their most anarchic, a steaming cauldron in which sex and race, bathtub gin and cocaine merged into a potion that was nearly overwhelming. What would become of Queenie, the vaudeville dancer, and Burrs, the entertainer who loved her — and who was always just a few steps from violence? As their wild party progressed, there was libido and narcotics and aggression and finally tragedy. With Michael John LaChiusa's delightfully jazzy music, the look of anarchy and the feel of perfectly calibrated order, this was a production heads above any other. Wow.
2. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. All of author Tom Stoppard's themes — the confusion of life, the terror of death, the sense of being swept up in a story out of one's control — were there in this superb Jobsite Theater production, and every problem the play had was brilliantly solved by director Katrina Stevenson and her four main actors: David M. Jenkins, Shawn Paonessa, Paul J. Potenza and Matt Lunsford. As the title characters, in black suits and bowler hats, Jenkins and Paonessa come off as buddies so close, they'd nearly become a single organism. And Potenza as the head Player gave the best performance of his life, displaying meanness, depravity, flamboyance and a grotesque earthiness. You couldn't ask for a better staging of this masterpiece.
3. Six Degrees of Separation. The newly remodeled Gorilla Theatre hurried back into importance with a splendid version of John Guare's best play. It's about Louisa and Flanders Kittredge, who take in Paul, a friend of their children who also happens to be the son of Sidney Poitier. Or at least that's what he says — before events go haywire, and a world of needy, lonely urbanites is exposed to everyone's shocked view. Ami Sallee Corley was terrific as upper-class matron Louisa, Bechir Sylvain was impeccable as the devious, pathetic Paul, and Chris Jackson as Rick, a naïve Utah native, gave a poignant performance that reminded us of the fragility of all these supposedly sturdy strivers. Nancy Cole directed superbly. Welcome back, Gorilla.
4. Embedded. We don't get to see much political satire in these parts, so Tim Robbins' indictment of the Bushies and their war was a much-needed reminder of just how potent live theater can be. The Jobsite production featured a six-member coven, all wearing Richard Henzel's brilliantly designed masks and including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Rice, Perle and Wolfowitz. Chanting praises to neoconservative guru Leo Strauss, sexually stimulating each other with evil meditations on starting a war, they looked like hellions out of a Bosch painting, inhuman and maleficent. Now why did we need this war?
5. Souvenir. Yes, Virginia, there really was a Florence Foster Jenkins, and yes, she sold out Carnegie Hall with patrons who came to laugh at her famously terrible voice. But the real surprise is, she was as funny in 2008 as she must have been in 1932. At least, that's what the audiences at American Stage came to discover in Stephen Temperley's musical biography of a woman who couldn't sing and the spectators who adored her for it. When the laughing finally stopped, we were exhausted — and grateful — for so much inspired silliness.
6. Circumference of a Squirrel. John Walch's darkly comic one-man play, at The Studio@620, was about a man whose father was insanely committed to killing squirrels and about the son who was trying to live normally with such a heritage. As directed by Larry Silverberg, Gavin Hawk gave a manic, hilarious and heartbreaking performance, referring to a blackboard on which all his ideas were anxiously diagrammed and trying to explain to us and himself how he lost the wife he still loved. There were other themes — anti-Semitism prominent among them — but it was Hawk's geeky presence as he tried to cling to his sanity that made this production so chilling and so ominously resonant.
7. Burn This. This Hat Trick Theatre production was about acting: the iridescent acting of April Bender as a bereft young woman named Anna and the ferociously intense acting of Kevin Whalin playing the part of her new lover Pale. Bender's Anna was grief-stricken, confused, charming, sexual, afraid of Pale, attracted to Pale, baffled, strung-out and oh-so human. Whalin's Pale was a force of nature, a careening, unpredictable mourner whose misery translated into sex and whose single-mindedness was a shock in a world of compromise. Joe Winskye contributed his best directing ever to a play that made Hat Trick look like a real contender.
8. The Chosen This moving play was structured around the friendship of two young men, Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders, one a modern Orthodox Jew, the other a Hasidic Jew and the son of his community's tzaddik, or spiritual leader. In the Stageworks production, audiences met all four characters — plus one representing the older Reuven — and entered a world of unwavering piety and questioning modern intellect. As vibrantly codirected by Eileen Koteles and Richard Coppinger, Aaron Posner's adaptation of Chaim Potok's bestseller was that rare thing in American drama, a serious look at religion, history and even the meaning of suffering. More dramas should have the ambition — and success — of this one.
9. Moonlight and Magnolias. The premise of this boisterous comedy, presented by American Stage, was that David O. Selznick had called in screenwriter Ben Hecht and director Victor Fleming to save Gone With the Wind — still in production — from becoming a monumental failure. Locking everyone in his office, offering only bananas and peanuts for meals, Selznick tried to force Hecht to rewrite the mammoth script with his and Fleming's help — and by the end of the show, all three men were dizzy, disheveled and shouting out ideas like drunkards at 4 in the morning. Bryan Barter was tiptop as Selznick, Christopher Swan was delightful as Fleming, and Matthew McGee's Hecht was riotously curmudgeonly to the last. Now that's entertainment.
10. An Oak Tree. On one level, An Oak Tree was a poignant drama about a Hypnotist and a Father who encountered one another after the former had run down the latter's daughter with a car. But that was only one level — and this cubist chaos of a play had many more, if only you could follow them all. Most important, the Father was played every night (at Gorilla Theatre) by a different actor, and one who had never seen the script till the first act started. On the night CL saw the show, Emilia Sargent was spectacular, reading her lines as if she'd rehearsed them for weeks, and Steve Mountan, as the Hypnotist, gave one of his best performances ever. The final effect was part Pirandello, part Picasso and all fascinating.
And that's it for 2008. Have a topnotch 2009; and may all your dramas be romantic comedies.
Read all of the 2008 Top 10 lists:
News: Wayne Garcia & Alex Pickett
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2008.