We're pleased and proud to present the world premiere of Shattered Boundaries by Eki Shola.

 

Shola is a community member and brilliant musician who lost her home in the 2017 wildfires. Her life and work were transformed and ever since she's been using music to unite her community in the face of fires, floods, and now - the COVID-19 pandemic.

You'll find all her work at EkiShola.com.

 

Watch the broadcast premiere of Shola's video on NorCal Public Media's Coronavirus Virtual Town Hall for March 24, 2020.

 

The Full Monty, playing at San Francisco's Victoria Theater, will, in the end, win you over. But it's a bit of a slog to get there.

 

Your mileage may vary, but you'll be fighting off the endless machismo, the jokey take on suicide, the backgrounding of women and their stories and the pastiche of a score, not to mention the foregone conclusion that a big final number will make everything OK – until you finally yell "uncle," and allow yourself to see the wooden types filling with blood and air.

 

At that point, very late in the evening, the show finds itself and connects. It's a little engine that could, and does.

 

If you remember the film of the same name, you'll already know the outline of the story. In the Broadway version, Buffalo steelworkers, thrown out of work, see their wives' fascination with a visiting Chippendales show, and plan their own version of the striptease they believe can help them with their debts, both general and very specific (The lead character Jerry Lukowski, played by James Schott, needs money to pay his child support, lest he lose the right to visit his son.)

 

There are moments of pure, musical joy in the show. One of the men, a mousy worker who eventually connects with another man in the troupe, loses his mom and sings the ravishing "You Walk With Me" which turns from a reverie about his mom to a sense of connection with his new friend. Jackson Thea as Malcolm MacGregor has the voice of an angel.

 

Another special number calls on the one black dancer in the newly formed troupe of male strippers to transform from old and arthritic to supple and lithe. Albert Hodge as Noah (Horse) Simmons, delivers that physical miracle perfectly. You will have to battle through the not-too-sly suggestions that "horse" earned his nickname because of his prodigious member, even if he eventually concedes that the nickname is something he doesn't always live up to. It's running joke that the shortest and skinniest of the troupe is, in fact, the one with the "goods." But I have to admit I spent some cringey time coming to grips with all this.

 

As for the two leads, Lukowski and his full-figured friend Dave Bukatinski (Chris Plank) are a pair in the tradition of Laurel and Hardy, a thin one and a fat one, and I'll leave it to you to decide whether the message of body positivity and anti-fat-shaming lands, or is just a muddle.

 

Adrienne Herro and Briel Pomerantz have lots to sing and say as wives of two of the dancers, but they're mostly asked to stand by their man, and the scenes they are in fail the Bechdel test. Sure this is a show about guys, but for me the women, even when they're scaring the bejesus out of guys with potential criticism of their asses and other assets ("The Goods") lack a fully formed humanity of their own.

 

So how did the show, on the way to its baring (almost) all win me over? Once the guys take the stage for their final number, we know them and we feel that they’ve become a bit more than mere types. They're willing to give their all to support each other, to hold their families together, to find community with their hard-pressed neighbors. If only we'd been brought along more intimately and earlier on their journey, we would have been rooting even harder for them to succeed in taking it all off and being able to "Let It Go."

 

[Image: (L-R) Front: Stephen Kanaski as "Ethan Girard," Arthur Scappaticci as "Harold Nichols" and Albert Hodge as "Noah Simmons"; (L-R) Back: Jackson Thea as "Malcolm Macgregor" and Chris Plank as "Dave Bukatinsky" in Bay Area Musicals' production of THE FULL MONTY, directed and choreographed by Leslie Waggoner. Playing thru March 15, 2020 at San Francisco's Victoria Theatre. Photo: Ben Krantz Studio.]

 

Produced by Bay Area Musicals. Running through March 15, 2020 at the Victoria Theater, 2961 16th Street, directed and choreographed by Leslie Waggoner, with music direction by Jon Gallo. 

In the film The Insider, Al Pacino plays crusading journalist Lowell Bergman, as he takes on the tobacco industry and his bosses at the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

 

This fall, Bergman sat before a live audience in Healdsburg and recounted stories of his career, both before and after that notable time. 

 

Bergman didn't invent investigative journalism, but he won a Pulitzer Prize, and a bushel of other awards, practicing it. And his efforts to educate young people in the art of this work have made him one of the craft's most recognizable and respected practioners.

 

Sonoma West Publishers invited Bergman to Healdsburg (he has a home nearby), and in partnership with us at Northern California Public Media, he told some stories he later confessed he'd never told in public.

 

Join us in listening to an hour with Lowell Bergman.

 

 

 

 

I don't have a lot of notes from my experience sitting in the dark on Gypsy's opening night. One says simply "Bernadette Peters."

I had been trying to remember the last time I saw Gypsy, and some quirk of Ariela Morgenstern's performance reminded me that it was the 2003 Bernadette Peters Broadway revival. There were times, in fact, when Morgenstern's performance seemed more like a mashup of greatest Mama Roses – from Ethel Merman to Angela Lansbury to Peters. But the notes she struck were not at the fevered pitch that any of these performers reached.

Digging into the program notes later, I read how director and choreographer Matthew McCoy had tried to bring out a "humanistic approach to the character's relationships…" And suddenly, Morgenstern's turn as Rose seems less like a hodgepodge and more like a dialed down, human scaled sketch of someone who can be played as a monster.

What McCoy gains from his approach to Rose is an expanded focus on the trio that orbits her: daughters June and Louise and her loyal, hapless, and finally exasperated boyfriend and manager Herbie.

Another note: simply "Louise." In fact, the character that draws your attention from the very first "Sing out, Louise" is the sister who seems like she'll simply be a footnote. As the adult Louise, Jade Shojaee increasingly becomes the center of the production. Spoiler alert: it is, in fact, her story that is being told here, as the woman who becomes one of the last century's most famous adult performers, Gypsy Rose Lee.

The directorial choices that create that focus, and place the sympathetic Louise more firmly in the center of the story, make this Gypsy compelling and pull us through the tale of Rose's incredible drive to make either of her girls a star. There's less pathology, more heart here.

What is lost is the "can't stop watching a car wreck" feeling of out of control Mama. But what is gained is the sense of a story that connects to the lives of all of us in the audience.

Some other ups and downs: the band, swinging, accurate and very musical can't help seeming thin at ten players. The direction and choreography work together to keep the show moving and seamless. Some of the musical numbers, which it can be argued are needed to give a sense of the grind and pleasures of vaudeville and burlesque, nevertheless cry out for pruning to move the story along. And the color-blind casting feels just right for a polyglot San Francisco.

If you love Gypsy and want another experience of it that won't erase your memories of powerhouse Mama Roses past, this is for you. In fact, you'll understand for the first time, or perhaps remember, whose story this really is, and how malleable it can be.

The Bay Area Musicals production of Gypsy plays from November 9 through December 8 at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco, 650 Geary Street.

(Image: Jade Shojaee as Louise. Credit: Ben Krantz Studio)

(Image: Ariela Morgenstern as Mama Rose. Credit: Ben Krantz Studio)