The Best of A Beast: 2012

Napoleon.

It's been quite a year.

If you've read this blog steadily over the last four years, and especially between the lines, I imagine you can't help but notice that this was the year when people and things started disappearing. Penelope, the Femme Fatale, Isabella, the Manhattans, most of the known associates,The Little Chinese Man, and the frequency of posts- where did they go? I've decided not to reveal all of the reasons behind this just yet, but eventually I probably will when I feel enough distance exists. Amidst all of this carnage (and believe me, it was carnage), I didn't even get around to writing posts about two performances listed below, and really didn't do the justice I intended to a third. Having spent most of the last twelve months changing some things and attempting to right others, I can only tell you it is my full intention to remedy this in the new year.

Looking back, it was also a different year for what made the list. Opera, which was nearly absent last time, came back to dominate this year's model, and even though my Number 1 isn't an opera it truly felt like one, so add one more for a total of six of the ten slots being taken by operas.  It was also a good year for Cal Performances, which presented three of the top ten performances and three of the honorable mentions. San Francisco Opera returned to the list after being absent last year, thank goodness, because let's face it- there is nothing better than opera and when SFO is putting junk on the stage life becomes a bit dull. However, it wasn't a great year for theater- at least the theater I saw, though there were some good things going on at Berkeley Rep which got honorable mentions.

I also saw fewer recitals, attended less dance, films, pop, and jazz performances and little of what I did attend in these areas impressed me this year, so there hasn't been much mention of these.  It's not that I'm getting lazy, at least I hope it's not that, but this has been a year of change and transition and I needed to take some time away from attending performances and writing about them to actually sort some things out. So without any further blather on my part, though  reserving my right to elaborate further on any or all of the items mentioned above or below at a future time, here are the best performances I experienced as an audience member during the last year:

1. Napoleon
Rarely, if ever, have I had the pleasure of experiencing something so completely immersing and engaging on every level of artistry. Abel Gance's 5 and 1/2 hour silent film from 1927  is more than a masterpiece- it's visionary, epic in the truest sense of the word, and fascinates from beginning to end. But the experience was really made sublime by the accompanying performance of the Oakland East bay Orchestra under the baton of Carl Davis conducting his own heroic score. To experience it all inside the exquisitely restored art deco Paramount Theatre was just icing on the cake. This not only lived up to the "once in lifetime" hype- it exceeded it by every measure. I really regret not writing a post about this- maybe one day.

2. Nixon in China
Nixon was the best thing San Francisco Opera has put on the stage of the War Memorial since The Makropulos Affair, and easily stands as the highlight of David Gockley's (who commissioned the John Adams work while he was with the Houston Opera) tenure. Superb casting and a production which really brought the opera's nuances to the fore made for one of the most compelling experiences I've experienced in the house. I was lucky to see it twice during the run, and could have easily enjoyed a third viewing. I regret never going back to write about this in-depth because there is so much to say about it, especially the third act, which many observers seemed to view as a throw-away, but I felt was the heart and soul of the work, a beautifully executed denouement where the main characters gather and internally ask themselves "What do we now after we've changed the world?" and can only respond with "What is left to do?"

3. Certitude and Joy
Erling Wold's chamber opera based on the real events surrounding a woman who sacrificed her own children to God by drowning them in the San Francisco Bay stuck in my head for weeks afterward. Wold's compelling score, played by the recently Grammy-nominated Zofo Duet and the earnest commitment of everyone on the small stage to make this work created something which deeply moved me. I'll never forget how I felt when it ended.

4. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra's Mahler's 9th
As I mentioned in the original post, this performance brought me to tears. Thinking about its effect still makes my eyes swell.

5. Einstein on the Beach
Cal Performances was instrumental in making this revival of the original production happen and as promised, it was something every opera fan should have seen. Like Napoleon, Einstein lived up to the hype. How lucky are we in the Bay Area to live in a place where not one, but two rarely experienced major works of art appear on local stages in the same year?

6. Lohengrin (no post)
If only every production offered by San Francisco Opera were this good. Brandon Jovanovich was perfect in the title role, with an excellent supporting cast, a thoughtful production, and extraordinary conducting from Luisotti as he popped his Wagner cherry. Magnificent on every level- the company should be quite proud of it.

7. Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra's Wozzeck
Had this been a fully staged production and taken place at the War Memorial Opera House it would have easily been number two on this list.

8. Joyce DiDonato and the Alexander String Quartet: Camille Claudel: Into the Fire
While I admired Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's Moby Dick in its San Francisco debut this past fall, I ultimately felt the second act didn't live up to the artistic level and expectations created in its first. It left me wondering what the team could have done with more time to work on the opera, which felt like it was lacking something at its core. On the other hand, this smaller scale work arrived onstage so fully realized in its conception and execution it made me yearn for a larger, full-blown opera to be developed from the material. DiDonato just had what was probably the best year of her career (so far) and in retrospect this concert performance seemed like a harbinger for what was to follow.

9. Christian Tetzlaff and the San Francisco Symphony
The epitome of a rock star performance by a classical musician, and a perfect combination of piece and performer.

10. The San Francisco Symphony's American Mavericks Festival
Last season's Centennial celebration by the San Francisco Symphony had no shortage of highlights, but the return of the American Mavericks festival highlighted so many elements of what makes this organization and orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas so great. Not every moment worked, but the sum of every concert worked extremely well, with each featuring at least one truly memorable and exciting performance, often much more. Criticized by some for not being mavericky enough in its programming, those who actually attended were thrilled to be a part of it- I certainly was, and the next version can't arrive soon enough.

Honorable mentions (in no particular order): An Iliad, Keith Jarrett, Ojai North!, Nameless Forest, You Killed Hamlet, The Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra, Hilary Hahn, and Khatia Buniashvili's dress.

On a personal note, I want to thank Isabella- for everything you've given both from a distance and up close. Thank you Sheila, for being a wonderful listener in many ways. And thank you Thaïs, for killing the Femme Fatale and in doing so forcing me to figure out what's next.

And finally, I'd like to thank you, whoever you are, for reading this. See you next year.

The Best and the rest of Fringe



First of all, congratulations to the Best of Fringe winners-  Tyrone "Shortleg" Johnson and Some White Boys, Jurassic Ark, Stalking Christopher Walken, You Killed Hamlet, or Guilty Creatures Sitting at a Play - all of which will have repeat performances the weekend of September 28 & 29. Check the Coming Up page for dates and times or go to the Fringe website. I read that Legacy of the Tiger Mother also won an award, but perhaps scheduling prevents a repeat performance. I feel pretty good about what I ended up seeing, in that I saw four of these five winners and solidly agree with three of them being voted among the best.

The last night I attended I did see two more performances- the first was The Collector, an "experimental adult puppetry" show staged by Animal Cracker Conspiracy (Bridget Rountree and Iain Gunn). This wordless, eerily mesmerizing hour featured Rountree and Gunn putting their macabre puppets through a series of meetings and encounters, trials and other-things-hard-to-describe, and even more difficult to turn away from, on three small stages, which are simultaneously projected above the center stage. It's a creepy effect, because what's taking place on the stage is quite distorted by the projections, even though it allows the viewer to see details they wouldn't otherwise. There's a narrative that's hard to follow, at least on first viewing, which made more sense when I overheard Rountree explaining it to someone else after the show ended. The gist is that "The Collector"- a foot-tall, dapperly-dressed zombie so painstakingly crafted that even his shoes had heels and soles on them, it is at the mercy of his boss, a sinister monkey that reminded me of the one from "Monkey Shines." The Boss Monkey is a sadist, and the Collector, trapped in an Orwellian dystopia perhaps of his own creation, follows orders, tries to collect on the debts of others, and his efforts don't work out very well for him. How he becomes an oddly sympathetic presence is only an additional testament to the thoughtfulness of what's unfolding on the three stages, abetted by director Lisa Berger and sound designer Margaret Noble. This stayed with me, and as Animal Cracker takes this to other performance spaces, I would strongly recommend seeing it. I look forward to the San Diego duo's return to the Bay Area.

I also took in EmergenciPhone!, a production written by Anna Budd, an associate professor of theater arts at Cañada College and staged by the Elsewhere Theatre troupe, which I suspect is made up primarily of students from the college. Though it had some genuinely funny jokes, as it stretched on the jokes grew thinner and the plot grew tiresome. At fifteen minutes it could have been great fun. At an hour, it turned into a slog. Even the cleavage grew tiresome. Well, okay, not really, but almost.

Weird Romance

A maggot blithely threw Schrödinger's cat into the discussion.

I suppose weirder things have happened during the San Francisco Fringe Festival, but Weird Romance, a double-bill of brief but clever one-act plays written Nick and Lisa Gentile, will live forever in my mind for that small, delicious fact. There were three maggots actually, performed by Tavis Kammet, Dan Kurtz and Ashley Cowan,  in Metamorphosize Mon Amor, a punny and amusing comedy. All three actors had excellent timing, delivering the Gentiles'  seemingly endless, Wilde-style puns with aplomb.

The maggot trio was preceded by Russian Roulette, in which two lovers begin to quarrel on the night before their wedding after the would-be groom makes a bad bet with his intended's father about a scene in "The Godfather." The ante continues to rise, eventually turning into a game of "my family is more mafia than yours." William Leschber and Cassie Powell are the lovers, and they have an easy chemistry with each other, though neither convince from an ethnic perspective, which would have given the last third of the play more bite. 

You Killed Hamlet

Watching these mutant, foul-looking offspring who looked like they were conceived during a gang bang involving an alien from Bad Taste, the Michelin Man, Brundlefly and Susan Lowe stride down the hallway of the Exit Theatre complex before the show was disturbing enough. One grotesquely fat, the other sickeningly thin, they looked like human maggots more than anything else. The safest place to sit seemed to be toward the rear, but even that felt suspect, and my suspicions turned out to be true. The audience had an expectant air in it, no doubt fueled by provocative reviews posted on the SF Fringe site from the first show, and of course there's that title, an accusation leveled at anyone present.

They came in with his corpse, abusing it in the most offensive, base manner imaginable, even beyond what I could conjure up in my most venal revenge fantasies. Using their phalluses as weapons, they taunted the dead Danish Prince without mercy. Certainly I nor anyone in the audience had anything to do with this. Or did we?

Naked Empire Bouffon Company deliver the goods in unexpected ways in You Killed Hamlet, or Guilty Creatures Sitting At a Play. It's vile and provocative, but it's also a very sly, smart commentary on a culture busily amusing itself as it slides off this mortal coil, too afraid to talk about serious things, and too busy dumbing itself down. You Killed Hamlet, we all kill Hamlet, every time we click on that link to see what the latest false celebrity did to end up on what's called news, when we spend more time on Facebook than with a book, and when we accept the fact that we live in a culture where the words art and intellectual (and their synonyms) are combined into pejoratives. Natty Justiniano and Ross Travis know this, and aren't afraid to rub your face in your own complicity in this shitty state of affairs- but you probably don't want to talk about it.

Highly recommended. There are two more performances at the San Francisco Fringe Festival: Friday, September 14 at 7:00 PM and Sunday, September 16 at 4:30.

L'extimité

Andrea Isasi in L'extimité

According to its Majorcan-born, Madrid-dwelling creator Andrea Isasi, L'extimité deals "with humor, the micro and macro, intimacy, inside, outside, yours, mine, mine and ours, ours and yours, here, there, the individual, the collective, and the memory..." and much, much, more.

In less than an hour, mind you.

If that description means everything and nothing, or falls somewhere in between the two, and you're okay with that, then you're probably in the right frame of mind to appreciate the work, which is as much a piece of performance art as it is a theatrical one. And though L'extimité might cause a viewer to wonder exactly what the difference is between the two, that's something I can't really discuss- you'll have to figure that out on your own.

Standing in front of a fan placed on the floor dressed as Superwoman, red cape and dark hair billowing behind her, Isasi begins with a series of poses frequently used  by bodybuilders to show off their stuff. From there she flies off into multiple directions, sometimes simultaneously. As she speaks in English a voice simultaneously translates the words in Spanish over speakers, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, making it difficult to follow either. The net effect is one of only being able to understand what's being said if you listen to it as a conflation of the two languages (it helps to understand Spanish), or can hear them juxtaposed (see above for those themes, compañeros). Soon Alba Alonso rises from the audience and begins to sing. And she sings beautifully. What she's singing, I couldn't tell you, but she's enjoying herself immensely, and Andrea is enjoying Alba, and we in the audience are enjoying their enjoyment and really no one knows where any of this is headed, and then Andrea decides she doesn't want to be Superwoman anymore- it's too confining, so she takes off the boots, the tights, the cape, the shorts, all of it, in favor of a simple black linen dress. A dress in which she can move around.

And the room goes silent.

But there's more she needs to do, including taking the measure of distances and relationships between distances and time and everything in between, and do you know what? All you need is love. Really. All you need is love, but what that really means, when you break it down, can mean many, many things depending on what syllable you stress when you sing the song. And when you change the song into a plea, or a scream, the meaning of the words takes on an entirely different tone. It can feel menacing, scary. But it's love. And that's all you need, even if hearing it this way makes you feel differently. Or just different. Different in a way you never thought about before. It's so different, in fact, you might want to just lose yourself and just jump and down, and hug people, and really, that feels better when there are others doing it with you, don't you know? So get up there and jump up and down and hug that other person, because all you need is love and there is something so decidedly uncynical about how Isasi is putting all of this together that what could be trite in the hands of a less-gifted performer turns into a small magical moment that envelopes the room. And she's so satisfied at having achieved this, she walks out the door, leaving us sad because more would have been nice. Really.

L'extimité plays at the San Francisco Fringe Festival thrice more- September 13 at 9:00 PM, Septmber 15 at 1:00 PM (performed in Spanish), and closes the San Francisco Fringe Festival on Sunday, September 16 at 6:00 PM. Recommended.

Stalking Christopher Walken

BrickaBrack's Stalking Christopher Walken, starring, written and directed by Gabriel Grilli, has a couple of good moments, especially when the troupe is re-enacting what might have happened onboard the Splendour the night Natalie Wood went overboard and wound up dead. It also has great ending that will leave you smiling, but a lot of it feels like padding in an attempt to stretch out 15 minutes of good material into an hour-long show, complete with Walken's own show-within-the-show, which feels out of place within the larger frame of the piece. Ultimately it's like a mash-up of three extended Saturday Night Live skits, all about, all starring Christopher Walken!

Lots of time is spent dancing, sometimes well, sometimes humorously, sometimes more seriously than they can actually pull-off. Katie Tandy does a pretty good job of bringing the Natalie Wood, as does Alexander M. Lydon as Robert Wagner. Jonathan Suguitan is appropriately douchey during the show-within-the-show segment. The rest of the ensemble has an infectious enthusiasm for the material, but it needs more cowbell.

Stalking Christopher Walken is part of the SF Fringe Festival and can be seen September 13 at 10:30 PM and September 15 at 6:00 PM.

Ze Ren, Heng San, and a plug for Jesus

So far, the solo performances this years SF Fringe Festival haven't been the stand-outs, though I did hear strong things last night from someone whose opinion I value about Eileen Tull's Jesus Do You Like Me?, so I'm going to try to make the last performance this coming Saturday afternoon and suggest you do the same. My source also had really positive things to say about The Wounded Stag.

Xiao Juan Shu's Ze Ren was another not-quite-ready-for-a-paying audience delivery of personal experiences, though she has an interesting story, and an engaging, warm personality. But (and I know this is becoming a theme here), without some sort of narrative moving toward a climax or satisfying resolution, or performed with a level of insight that makes one leave the theater questioning something about their own life or what have you, 45 minutes of someone talking about themselves, even when the story is told in a linear fashion, can make for a long time. Unless you're really funny, of course.

Ze Ren had an unannounced opening performance, which confused me after Sarah Lau took the stage to perform her 10-minute monologue Heng San- a keenly observed meditation about her family's reactions at her grandfather's funeral. Just as she hooked me with her keen ability to capture nuance and details, the show was over, and having little idea I was watching something other than Ze Ren, I thought really?  That's it? But it wasn't. Lau, who won "Best of Fringe" last year with her one-woman show The Secret Adventures of Fat Woman and Remedial Girl, is a performer whose work I'd be interested in seeing more of.

Ze Ren and Heng San can be seen on September 15th at 9:00 PM.

The Secret Adventures of Fat Woman and Remedial Girl will be performed at 7:00 PM on Sunday, Nov. 25th at Stage Werx on Valencia.

Velma

Mick Renner's Velma, a solo performance named after his mother and dealing largely with his life with her when he was a child, is a superbly acted and convincing portrait, despite the fact it takes awhile to ignore the fact you're watching a man in his late sixties, wearing street clothes, sans wig or make-up (except for maybe a bit of lipstick), acting as a woman from her twenties into her early forties. Broken into three acts which take place during his youth, and bookended by an epilogue and prologue featuring his mom at her mirror, Velma comes across as an interesting woman, though she's certainly not the trailblazer the promotional material would lead one to believe. The play moves along well enough as Renner portrays himself, his relatives and his pals with charm and wit, engaging the audience with his well-developed script and delivery.

Suddenly, out of nowhere in the early part of the third act he pulls the rug out from under the audience by introducing an element to the story that seems meant to shock but only repulses with its abrupt insertion into the play. Probably intended as a revealing, critical moment, it arrives as more of a "What the fuck?" What was obviously a horrible blindsiding in real-life doesn't necessarily play well onstage without a set-up. Once the play veers off in this direction it felt increasingly uncomfortable and self-absorbed, leaving the terrain of poignant memoir and tribute for the lowlands of victimhood and abuse. Had this part of Velma's story been hinted at earlier in the play, its arrival wouldn't feel like such a sudden derailment.  At the conclusion, Renner offered to stay and discuss the play with anyone in the audience who wished to, but I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. Velma plays at the San Francisco Fringe Festival one more time on September 15 at 1:00 PM.

Crazytown: my first psychopath

Jude Treder-Wolff's Crazytown: my first psychopath is a solo show about an art-therapist's first job in a psych ward who quickly finds herself overwhelmed by challenges from the patients and indifference from the staff. Treder-Wolff and musical director Wells Hanley add a few songs into the mix in an effort to make the material more than it is, which essentially feels like Treder-Wolff sharing war stories about her work and how unsettling it was to find herself unprepared to do a job after years spent in training. She does some keen, funny impersonations of a chain-smoking, horny patient and a horribly vile nun, but mostly it's a middle-aged woman from New York in over head, and in need of some sympathy. Treder-Wolff misdelivered more than a few lines during the performance I saw on Sunday night, which only added to a sense that the show really isn't all it could be, coming across instead like a long hour spent on a bar stool next to a someone who unexpectedly breaks out into song, albeit with the best of intentions, only to make one wonder what she's doing there in the first place.

Crazytown: my first psychopath can be seen at the San Francisco Fringe Festival September 14, 15, 16.

Cemetery Golf

Cemetery Golf, written by Jim Loucks and "based loosely on his childhood experiences in small-town Georgia as a preacher's kid" is an expertly acted 75 minutes of engaging characters- all that's missing is something dramatic to happen. By the time Loucks brings us to the show's conclusion, the denouement feels bittersweet, inevitable, and a tad disappointing, a sensation which may not have felt so acute if the play were shorter. Loucks' characters- himself as a young boy, his sister, mother, father and some others from his father's congregation are vividly brought to life, aided in no small part by his impressive physical ability to fully inhabit these people at the flip of an internal switch- his mother is an especially wonderful interpretation. The dialogues are also rendered in believable prose, delivered with conviction and even when they're not wholly likable, it's hard not to like what he's doing with them. But without a real plot pulling us along, the solo show feels like a tribute to people we don't learn enough about even at this length, and a portrait of a life which most of us (at least those of us not born in the South to a preacher and his wife) haven't lived and wouldn't necessarily want to, though it may resonate more with audiences whose roots are closer to Loucks' own.

At the San Francisco Fringe Festival September 12, 13, 14.

Legacy of the Tiger Mother

Satomi Hofmann (left) and Lynn Craig.

It was during the song "Something Better" that I realized something bigger potentially lurks within Legacy of the Tiger Mother, Angela Chan and Michael Manley's musical comedy about the relationship of a first-generation American-Chinese and her demanding mother. Chan (credited as writer, composer, lyricist, musical director and producer) and Manley (writer, lyricist) have extensive musical and theatrical experience and it shows with this expertly placed song within the play's narrative arc. The song itself, like most of the play's tunes, sounds just about ready for a Broadway stage. I don't necessarily mean that as a compliment, but rather just a fact. Ever since The Lion King it seems Broadway musicals have produced little more than an endless chain of pleasant tunes that go down easily, aren't terribly challenging to sing, fit perfectly into the dramatic moment unfurling on stage, and are almost impossible to recall within ten minutes of leaving the theater (it's no surprise jukebox musicals do well- the songs are simply better than 99% of what's being written for the stage today). It's an odd irony, and a testament to Chan and Manley's skills, that the only song I found annoying in the play was also the most memorable- "Little Miss 1986," and another, "Lazy White Children," could become a viral sensation overnight with the right recording and accompanying YouTube video. Don't scoff- weirder things have happened. But how many one-hour plays have at least two tunes that stick in your head after they're over. Or let me calibrate it another way- Legacy of the Tiger Mother [currently] has only five original songs in it (along with a healthy dose of excerpts from Beethoven and Mozart sonatas) and two of them are stand outs- that's a pretty decent percentage.

So they have the formula down for what currently makes a "show" tune. They also have two very strongly written and acted lead roles an audience can empathize with (whether or not one is Asian and/or female) and there's clarity in the play and especially in this production that makes me think with another forty-five minutes of material and a couple of more characters (a father, an additional child, and a neighbor would do nicely) this show could easily be something bigger, and better.

But it's pretty damn good as it is, and I wasn't even planning on going to see it. The description initially put me off- I thought why would I, a middle-aged white guy, want to go see a play about an Asian woman's mommy issues? But late on Sunday I was willing to catch one last play and I'm glad I did- so far it's been the best show I've seen at this year's Fringe. Sure, Legacy will have entirely different elements that Asian audiences can debate/relate/adore or abhor, but it worked for me as a straight piece of well-crafted, expertly acted (by the marvelous Satomi Hofmann and delightful Lynn Craig) piece of theater- period- and I'd love to see a bigger version of it someday- with additional characters to make what's already good that much better.

Now playing at the San Francisco Fringe Festival- two more performances on 9/11 @ 10:30 PM and 9/15 @ 7:30. Strongly recommended.

Sugar High: A Brectian Bitchslap

We really knew very little about what was going to happen- only that we were going to board a bus from the front of The Exit Theatre and take some kind of theatrical road trip around the City for 90 or so minutes, with the promise of an "immersive theater experience" and "beautiful vistas, gritty urban underbelly and transformational theater." Popcorn Anti-Theater delivered all that more, as the company resurrected itself with Sugar High: A Brectian Bitchslap as part of the SF Fringe Festival, now underway through September 16.

The story is part Whatever Happened to the Children From Those Experiments? and part The Revenge of the Sexy Assistant of the Not-So-Very-Mad Doctor. To divulge more would spoil the fun, but where you end up on this journey will likely delightfully surprise you (bring a warm jacket- and maybe a flask), though perhaps it won't reveal too much to suggest carrying a torch with you should you like roasting marshmallows. Popcorn Anti-Theater will return to staging regular theater-on-the bus next month. In the meantime, I recommend getting on board for this confection.

The bus leaves the Loin again on September 13th @ 7:00 and 10:30 PM, September 14 @ 7:00 and 10:00 PM, and September 15th @ 7:30 and 10:30. I advise going on the earlier ride if your partial to views, though the later show could provide a more pleasantly menacing, disorienting experience. 

Tyrone "Shortleg" Johnson and Some White Boys

Before the show, my date and I returned to a place where we once conducted some nasty business. It felt good to be back at the scene of this particular crime with her, and I wondered if lightning was going to strike twice. It didn't, but we still had a good time. I would have stuck around, because things were just getting warmed up there, but we had a show to get to in a seedy part of town. Right around the corner, that is.

We entered the 50 Mason Social House and took a seat on the long banquette lining the wall. The room had a good-sized crowd, though not packed- not bad given that the President was speaking at the moment. The band came on first- six white guys in shades, white shirts with ties, black pants. The bass player looked like Steve Cropper with a bad rug, the guitarist like Jeff Buckley. Tyrone stood at the back of the crowd. I saw him take out a flask and hit it for a hard swig. A man's voice boomed through the room, introducing the great bluesman from Beaumont (goddam), Texas and Tyrone made his way to the stage. He's never seen this band before- he was pulling a Chuck Berry or something, and he was obviously pissed off to find himself playing with what he called a bunch of "hippies."

It took about a minute before the set was derailed by lighting problems. The man with the mike shut it down- told us all it would be about five minutes that turned into ten. Tyrone kept on taking sips from the flask. A belligerence entered his voice. He fronted off the man with the mike, who told him to watch himself- they didn't want another incident like the notorious one that happened in Newport. That problem with Joan Baez. Then someone in the audience said something funny about Bob Dylan, and Tyrone told us his truth about what really happened that night. Yeah, there was drinking involved that night.

The more he drank, the more Tyrone became "Shortleg" and Shortleg likes to tell a tale or two. Talking about his days in the whorehouses. Messing with the women. Telling us about his mama. She really laid him low one day. You can see why the man is the way he is once he tells that story. Damn.

He has a fondness for Willie Dixon and Leadbelly and can't stand white guys like Pete Seeger appropriating the blues. If you're gonna do it, do it like Johnny Otis did it. Like they do it on 7th Street in Oakland. He made the band take their shades off. Turns out the guitarist is just a kid. More Ricky Nelson than Jeff Buckley, but damn, the kid can play the blues like he was born to it. The kid's name is Jeremy Goodwin. Remember it. Turns out his dad was in the band too, on sax- a cat named Rick Goodwin. The trumpet player- a guy named Dennis Aquilina, did the "Hand Jive" and they have some British dude named Richard Trafford-Owen on the harp who knows a thing or two. Shortleg called him Ringo. How come British dudes always have three names?

The bass player, Steve Ekstrand, had an attitude. Sittin' there reading a magazine while Shortleg was schooling the room. Some gruff went back and forth. I though it might come to blows. And all of this was going on while they were trying to tape some stupid dance show for TV. Crazy. The man on the mike kept flipping out every time Tyrone said something about "titties" or when he'd grab himself. Behind it all, keeping the Bo-Diddley beat on the drums was Jeff Weinmann. Pretty funny to watch it all go down, but man, let me tell you- that Tyrone has some stories, and he can really belt the blues.

When he finally broke character at the end, it was a small shock to see the man behind all of this- Wayne Harris, who had just delivered an amazingly involved and nuanced performance, come across as an altogether different person than who we had just watched and heard for over an hour. Impressive.

The show repeats September 8, 12, & 14. Highly recommended. Check out the SF Fringe Festival site for details. And don't be late!