Schoolhouse Rock started in 1973 -- around the beginning of the end of what Gore Vidal likes to call the "American Empire" -- when a frustrated ad executive noticed that his son was retaining all the lyrics to the Rolling Stones' repertoire but almost none of his math homework. The executive set out to produce one catchy educational song about the number three, and the result was a series of droll Saturday morning cartoons that gave whitewashed lessons in history, grammar, math, and American politics. "Elbow Room" sang cheerily about westward expansion and the future colonization of the moon -- "It's the moon or bust/ In God we trust" -- and "I'm Just a Bill" brightly explained to the children of the new Rome how a bill becomes law in their fair and honest republic.
These kids are turning out in force for Schoolhouse Rock Live!, a touring musical that might remind you more of Zoom! than of Schoolhouse Rock. It's not a cartoon and doesn't even try to improve on the cartoons; it's just a bunch of people in bright shirts, dancing and singing. They wear head-mounted microphones and keep earnest, happy looks on their faces, treating audience members like they haven't aged a day since 1975. The lame excuse for a story to hold the songs together has to do with a teacher who feels nervous on his first day of class. To help him, Dina, George, Dori, Joe, and Shulie pop out of his television and claim to be "all the ideas" in his head. (Not just the cast but the whole audience is implicated. We wouldn't want any snarky comments about how teacher has only five ideas.) So SRL! is a conceptual piece.
The songs come in no particular order. There's "Mother Necessity," about American inventors; "Sufferin' Till Suffrage," about the women's movement; "The Preamble," about liberty and the Constitution; "Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla," about pronouns; and "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here," about the suffix "ly." The singing is expert, but the humor is totally lacking, which still doesn't keep the audience from slurping up the nostalgia. I'm not sure what I expected. I thought the show might have a high camp value, even real potential for irony or at least cleverness; but ABC must have refused to allow any toying with the product, so the result is a lumbering retread of cheesy songs that were better the first time around, on TV. (Apparently Schoolhouse Rock IS back on TV, so I recommend getting up early some Saturday morning instead of shelling out money for this.) What's even worse is the way the audience behaves, milking its own enthusiasm for songs that are absolutely rote, screaming orgasmically like a game-show crowd. "Oh my god, this is so great! Isn't it cool how these songs bring us back to a time when we didn't know what Nixon was doing?" Sorry, no, it's not.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Harm's Way
Death and the Maiden. By Ariel Dorfman. Directed by Persephonie Saucier. Starring Saucier, Brian James, and Mike Mulligan. Presented by Alchemy Arts Theater at the Jewel Theater, 655 Geary (at Turk), through Nov. 2. Call 567-3005.
Death and the Maiden was written in Chile just after Gen. Pinochet was stripped of power, which is to say just after a long reign of tyranny and terror. The people were trying to adjust to democracy again and the victims of the old regime were living side by side with their torturers. Ariel Dorfman sketched his play from this milieu in 1990 after moving back to Chile from a long self-exile, and the script eventually got produced as a film by Roman Polanski.
The version playing at the Jewel Theater right now isn't set in Chile, at least not strictly. Under "Setting" the program gives a few choices:
"A) Anywhere a dictatorship has inflicted acts of violent torture and terror on hu-man beings. B) The tormented mind of Paulina Salas. C) The Beach House of Paulina and Gerardo Escobar. D) All or none of the above."
I think the idea is to make the play universal, but it's distracting. The story is about the Escobars. On the same evening Gerardo is appointed by the country's new president to investigate old state crimes, his car breaks down, and he receives a ride home from a certain Dr. Roberto Miranda. Paulina Escobar (nee Salas) is convinced by the sound of his voice that Miranda is the same doctor who blindfolded and raped her in a military detention center 15 years before (to the strains of Schubert's Death and the Maiden). Miranda spends the night at the Escobars' beach house, and while he's asleep Paulina clubs him unconscious with the heel of a pistol, duct-tapes him to a chair, and gags him by stuffing her warm underwear in his mouth and strapping his face with tape.
This is powerful stuff, vulgar and harsh but with a real human story. For the rest of the play Paulina tries to extract a confession, but the mystery stays intriguingly unresolved. The plot gets a little Gothic toward the end, with revelation piled on revelation, but the basic drama is strong, and Brian James suffers so convincingly as Dr. Miranda you don't want to make him sit there, duct-taped, while you relax during intermission. What doesn't work is the relationship between Paulina and Gerardo: Persephonie Saucier and Mike Mulligan strain whenever they try to act like husband and wife; and to me the blurred setting seems to hint darkly that this catastrophe of state-run terror could happen in America. It could, of course, but it hasn't, and the effect is to cast a science-fiction pall on an otherwise decent play. Dorfman tried to pare a story about victim-cum-victimizer down to its universal essence, and he pretty well succeeded, so I think it would have been stronger to ground the play in its native country, where these things actually happened.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Lord of the Dance
Les Enfants Terribles: Children of the Game. Score and libretto by Philip Glass. Choreography by Susan Marshall. Presented by Cal Performances at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, Oct. 17 & 18. Call (510) 642-9988.
Spirited by Jean Cocteau, the dance-opera Les Enfants Terribles: Children of the Game dissolves -- and reverses -- conventions of opera and, more broadly, theater. Singers commingle and share roles with dancers; the performance spills right into the pit, where Philip Glass and his fellow keyboardists pound out tunes next to a dancer's gesticulations or a singer's soaring lament; and, while the dance-opera adheres to opera's propensity for deluxe spectacle, the grandiosity here is a refraction of the characters' overblown and obsessive imaginations. The last in Glass' trilogy of Cocteau operas gets us inside the latter's psychological fascinations by exploding them onto the stage. This spectacle is inside-out.
In Cocteau's work, narcissism flirts with a desire to die. In Orpheus, the poet enters the world of the dead through a mirror. In Beauty and the Beast, Beauty's transcendent power comes to life in the shadow of the beast of night. In Les Enfants Terribles, brother and sister -- "two halves of the same body" -- obsess over their respective "other half" in the fantasies they bury themselves in.
Similar in effect to the original Enfants' claustrophobic interiors, the inexorably repeated small scales of Glass' score -- evolving so slowly that you only notice if you're concentrating -- set the tone for the dance-opera: There's no exit from the children's tight, dark world. But, like those few moments in the film when the siblings left their room, ephemeral melodies ride on top of -- and defy -- the score's boxed-in minimalism. It's as if these melancholic forays were running up the down escalator to hell: They're not going to overcome the drama's pull toward an annihilating conclusion, but they remind us how disturbed we might feel if we weren't submerged in it all.
The drama heats up quickly. The clear plastic screens separating us from the dancers and singers lift one by one. By the time the children's mother dies, reducing to zero the presence of adults, all the veils between the performers and us have been stripped away.
We're faced with a narcissistic play as absurd as it is ominous. The film conveyed the siblings' excessive investment in one another through the confined spaces they wrangled in; the dance-opera uses multiplication. Four Pauls (dancers Marlon Barrios Solano, Mark DeChiazza, and John Heginbotham, and singer Philip Cutlip) and four Lises (dancers Kristen Hollinsworth, Krista Langberg, and Eileen Thomas, and singer Christine Arand) climb all over one another to lay claim to a fragile bed. Lises ride the hips -- squeezing and hugging hard -- of Pauls. Some Lises strut and preen like animals staking territory while other Lises coolly stare and a few Pauls mope and flail about. Pauls line up to slap, and Lises to smack-kiss, an intruder -- a non-Paul/Lise. Pauls teasingly jab the forehead of Lises, who impassively wait for more. Doubled and redoubled, the monstrosity of the pair's affection and contempt for one another -- and for themselves -- becomes abundantly clear.
We know they'll ruin each other: It's cemented in their character -- and in our fascination. They'll never escape one another because we're not tired of them -- and if we aren't, why would they be?
But inside their annihilating fantasies, a new fact arises: Paul's death. To indicate we're no longer in the internal domain of "The Game," a curtain falls between the performers and us. We've been returned to basic surface realities -- things like the difference between being dead and being alive, between us and them. The clean division this coda exacts is Cocteau's worst nightmare. The fertile convergences that characterize Cocteau's work -- the bleeding of death into life, image into interiority -- rupture because Paul, and then Lise, are irreversibly dead. This rupture, more than simply the deaths themselves, is what makes Les Enfants Terribles a Cocteauian tragedy. So, stuck on the side of the living, we are hungover -- left numb. We stood at the lip of danger and then were forcibly rescued by dimwitted fact.
-- Apollinaire Scherr
Mark and Sean
"The Return of Mark Eitzel." By Mark Eitzel. Solo Pieces of the Quilt. Performed by Sean San Jose Blackman. Part of the Solo Mio Festival at Fort Mason Center, Sept. 17-Oct. 19. Call 392-4400. (Pieces returns, Nov. 1 & 2, at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley. Call (510) 849-2568.)
Two local artists who should get more attention played short but excellent gigs at the Solo Mio Festival, which ended two weekends ago. The first was Mark Eitzel, who gets some attention in the rock world, especially after the album he cut recently with Peter Buck, but wider audiences still don't know much about him. His records are full of moody, plushly produced songs, and his voice has the crooning romance of someone like Morrissey or Robert Smith from the Cure. The Solo Mio gig -- with no echoey drums, no soft piano accompaniment -- was totally different, maybe because having to deal with an audience up close made Eitzel nervous. He played an acoustic guitar, chatted, sang, and gossiped, sometimes in the space of one song. His rendition of "Cleopatra Jones" improved on the recorded version, to me, partly because he quit in the middle to make fun of his own guitar playing and then related a dream he'd had about his last tour, involving a clown. He finished the song only when he had nothing else to say.
Eitzel's reputation rests on his songwriting; his music opens brooding, sullen rooms where you can muse on double-bladed lyrics like, "Those who haven't seen the death of love don't know what to believe in." At the show, his deadpan manner between tunes balanced the brooding nicely. It would be irresponsible to print the gossip he related, but one part had to do with the sexual history of a certain famous actor in a certain current movie about being or maybe not being gay. "This is gonna end up in some rag somewhere," he lamented.
Sean San Jose Blackman is the other local artist who deserves more attention: He performed a few short works from the Pieces of the Quilt project. The Alma Delfina Group -- "Teatro Contra el SIDA" -- has been gathering skits on AIDS-related themes to perform at benefits. So far Pieces has pieces by 18 writers, including Edward Albee and Tony Kushner, and Blackman gave eight of them an electric performance on Solo Mio's final weekend. The funniest skit was "Clinica," by Danny Hoch, which showed a nervous Dominican homeboy arguing with his friend in an AIDS clinic. He was nervous about how the neighborhood would talk if someone saw him in the waiting room; he was full of race and class prejudice; he thought maple syrup could kill HIV. "It's like the acids or some shit," he said. "I heard it from some dude." Blackman wore a rolled wool cap and a thin goatee, talked with a faintly Latino accent, and brought the right dose of comedy and feeling to every skit. "Ya Vas, Carnal" was a sharply unsentimental portrait by Herbert Siguenza of the Mission artist Rodrigo Reyes, who died of AIDS, and "Silica," by Octavio Solis, brought to life not just an unnamed high-energy queer, but also his friends Paul, Sonja, and Freddie, during a joy ride through San Francisco. The main character wore glasses -- "the double trance of horn-rimmed silica stuck to his face," as his lover put it, a little effusively -- and with the frames on his nose Blackman became a whole cast of seamlessly defined characters. His sense of silence was masterful; he segued between pieces without begging for applause, and I think the audience held back only out of respect for the silence.
-- Michael Scott Moore
Whistle Blowers
Caribou Tribute. By Mark Romyn and Philip Worman. Directed by Lissy Walker. Starring Romyn, Worman, Eric Nelson, and Steve Bellinger. At the Exit Theater, 156 Eddy (at Turk), Oct. 3-25. Call 673-3847.
Caribou Tribute won this year's "Best of the Fringe" award, which is a dubious honor based on a chaotic and uncontrolled system of voting. Not that Caribou hands-down doesn't deserve the award; but it also doesn't necessarily deserve a revival at the Exit any more than a few other Fringe performances. "Most Unusual of the Fringe" might be a better billing, since about half of the hourlong performance is devoted to showcasing two men -- Mark "Toots" Romyn and "Whistlin' Phil" Worman -- who really know how to whistle.
They're known as the Whistleaires, and they seem to have written a farce about an all-male community club like the Elks or the Lions for the sole sake of getting their whistling act onto a stage. The community club is "The Royal Order of Caribou," and six of its members file on at the beginning dressed like purple-robed druids with antlers. When the Grand Exalted Buck calls roll, it's clear that most of the club is absent. They declare their purpose -- "duty to God and country and to obey the laws of the herd" -- and then give an extended tribute to a passed-on Caribou named Ray "Cappy" Morris, a grown-up frat boy who's honored stage left with a large black-and-white portrait. You get the idea after a sobbing eulogy or two that Cappy was kind of a jerk. The satire is sometimes funny, sometimes not; one good line comes from a dense Caribou who declares, "There is no 'I' in 'community.' "
Cappy was the Whistleaires' fictional manager, so the tribute from Toots and Whistlin' consists of a four- or five-song set. They whistle along with ABBA, the Partridge Family, and a few equally cheesy bands, not just matching the tunes but harmonizing with each other and even improvising solos, I think, during one song. The whistling is phenomenal. Toots and Whistlin' can warble and tweet like birds. Whistlin' plays straight man to Toots, who ingratiates his lanky, eccentric self to the audience and gets carried away at one point with a story about a dirty Latin American revolutionary with "disgusting, rippling muscles." He wears a plaid jacket over bright red polyester pants, and smiles by squinting and baring his teeth, like William F. Buckley Jr. Romyn's grasp of his satirical character is so complete it feels out of place in the show. The Whistleaires seem to have a cult following. The night I saw them three drunk women sat in one corner and giggled, even when the show wasn't funny. They whistled long before any whistling was to be done and they talked out loud to the actors. No one onstage seemed to know who they were. My friend thought they were part of the show, but since the cast ignored them for the duration it was clear by the end that they were just drunk.
-- Michael Scott Moore
