Cheshire Isaacs

If you're not familiar with Shakespeare's original, you'll have absolutely no clue what's going on.

I'm a big fan of Berkeley's Impact Theatre. The company stages high-energy productions in a little cave below La Val's Pizza on Euclid; if their shows often lack polish, they usually make up for it with plenty of gusto. But boy howdy -- when they're off the mark, they're off the mark.

Impact's new production of Twelfth Night starts with a clever concept that goes exactly nowhere. Director Melissa Hillman sets Shakespeare's comedy in the seaside kingdom of Hollywood, with all of the characters connected to something called "Illyria Studios." Orsino (Seth Thygesen) is a self-absorbed heartthrob, Olivia (Ara Glenn-Johanson) is the starlet he wants to woo, and the rest of the characters are more or less underlings who mill about the soundstage.

That would all be fine, except Hillman pursues the concept so half-heartedly that it never makes any particular amount of sense.

Love it or hate it, you probably haven't seen anything quite like it. Boxcar Theatre's Rhino, adapted by Evren Odcikin from Eugène Ionesco's Rhinocéros, takes a well-worn absurdist piece and makes it more absurd than ever.

In Odcikin's ingenious staging, the audience stands alongside the actors, everyone shifting position as the action migrates from one spotlight to the next. The result is about as intimate -- and as bold -- as theater gets.

Ionesco's play, first produced in 1959, is a parable about conformity in general and totalitarianism in particular. Odcikin compresses the action (the show runs under an hour), but the general arc remains the same: one by one, the characters transform into rhinoceroses until a single man remains -- a human anomaly among the rhino herd.

Emily McGowan, Cindy Goldfield, & Arturo Galster

Brava's world premiere of the musical Scalpel!, which closes its run on April 17, appears to have pilfered its actors' outfits entirely from the Designing Women costume closet. This is not necessarily a bad thing: for a show that satirizes the excesses of the fashion world, it makes sense to dress everyone as if they belong on mid-'80s television.

Written and directed by D'Arcy Drollinger (whose other credits include a comedy called Shit and Champagne), Scalpel! is basically The Manchurian Candidate set among the wealthy women of New York's Upper East Side. The story, such as it is, revolves around an aging socialite named Jacquelyn (Cindy Goldfield) who finds herself at the center of a nefarious plot to turn Bergdorf shoppers into brainwashed assassins.

Subtlety is not the intention here. It's the sort of show where someone gets strangled with a tampon string, and where an entire song is devoted to a lethal injection of Botox. Drollinger stages the proceedings with a lot of gusto--including a few ingenious fight sequences staged with the help of Bunraku puppeteering--and the audience understandably roars with approval.

The show needs a little work before it's ready for the next level: the dialogue includes more bad puns than seem totally necessary, and some of Drollinger's satirical jabs feel dated. (Isn't it about time we retire the joke where a woman can't register any facial expressions because she's on Botox?) However, on its own very campy terms, Scalpel! is a riot--a deliriously wacky mock-thriller that, in the words of one character, "puts the 'sass' in 'assassination.'"

Kevin Berne

Marco Barricelli and Olympia Dukakis in Vigil

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If you're going to ACT's Vigil because you want to see a performance by Oscar-winner Olympia Dukakis, prepare to be mildly disappointed.

Oh, you'll see her. She's onstage for nearly the entire show. You just won't hear much from her -- maybe about a dozen lines total.

I like Dukakis but wouldn't call myself a rabid fan, so her near-silence doesn't particularly bother me. What does bother me, though, is that the play is about an hour too long and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is.

Vigil concerns a misanthropic ass (Marco Barricelli) who leaves his job to visit a dying aunt (Dukakis). Convinced that he might have something to gain from her impending death, he hangs around for months devising ways to end her misery.

That's a fine setup for a play. But playwright Morris Panych stuffs his script with so many obvious jokes -- then repeats those jokes over and over again -- that it becomes very tiresome very quickly. (The fact that ACT's easily amused audience keeps laughing at the same goddamn thing is another problem altogether.) Add in some very weak slapstick, and you have a show more suited for community theater than for a place reputed to be as good as ACT.

Granted, Panych does have a pretty good twist up his sleeve, but that twist isn't nearly good enough to sustain two hours of uninspired comedy. In fact, there's barely enough here for a decent one-act play -- which might explain my powerful desire to bolt at intermission.

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Paul Addis is back, and he's ready to crash the system.

Remember back in 2007, when Burning Man suffered from a case of premature burn? The guy responsible for the arson was local performer/provocateur Paul Addis. At the time, he was about to embark on a tour of Gonzo: A Brutal Chrysalis--his one-man show about Hunter S. Thompson--but he ended up in a Nevada prison instead.

After serving one year of a four-year sentence, Addis is once again a free man. Now he's back in San Francisco with a brand-new solo show, this time with the fetchingly nonsensical title Dystopian Veneer.

So what's it all about? Take it away, Paul:

Dystopian Veneer is an unconventional, darkly comedic satire about a few various causes and effects loose in the current phase of human society. ... The typical lines separating stage performance from real life will be disregarded, and the audience brought into new roles as contributors, instigators, and willing agents thereafter. This is not a show for those who are desperately clinging to failing structures and crippled traditions. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to consciously crash a system in order to promote effective reconstruction, take a trip through Dystopian Veneer.

Have I ever wondered what it would be like to "consciously crash a system in order to promote effective reconstruction"? Frankly, no. But then I've never considered vandalizing a wooden effigy in the middle of the desert, either.

For more on the upcoming show at The Dark Room, check out Laughing Squid, which has some excellent background on Addis, along with a video preview of what audiences might expect. The play opens on April 30 with a second performance scheduled for May 7. For tickets, go right here.

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Image Courtesy of: Courtesy of mellopix.com

Johnny (John Gallagher Jr.) and St. Jimmy (Tony Vincent) in American Idiot.

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Now we can add American Idiot to the list. The world premiere of Green Day's rock opera received very little love around here, but it proved successful enough in its time at Berkeley Rep to prompt a run on the Great White Way. Previews begin tonight at the St. James Theatre, with an official opening on April 20.

We haven't heard the end of it, either: new rumors hint that Tom Hanks may be optioning the musical for a feature film. None of this should be too surprising when you consider that Green Day's 2004 album sold over 14 million copies worldwide -- but even so, Berkeley Rep deserves huge praise for helping maintain the presence of Bay Area theater on the national stage.

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I haven't seen everything at the Marsh - the theater runs so many performances at any given time that it's tough to keep up - but I've yet to see anything really awful. Which is saying something, actually, since the Marsh specializes in one-person shows, and I've seen enough terrible one-person shows to make me very leery of them. (Nothing's worse than watching some guy enact his boring midlife crisis on a bare stage for 90 minutes.)

Right now, the Marsh's offerings are even stronger than usual. Dan Hoyle just premiered his much-anticipated The Real Americans (review forthcoming in the February 24 issue of SF Weekly). And Ann Randolph (of Squeeze Box fame) is back with an extended run of Loveland, the story of a cheerfully-deranged woman taking her mother's ashes from California to Ohio.

People often compare Randolph to the late Gilda Radner, and for good reason. Randolph's alter ego, Frannie Potts, has a clenched, manic energy similar to Radner's Rosanne Rosannadanna, and both characters are fond of wild-eyed digressions. But one of the most striking things about Loveland--and what differentiates it from Radner's freewheeling improvisations--is how the show is both maniacally entertaining and thoughtfully constructed. It traces an arc from the West Coast to the Midwest, with Potts passing the time by reminiscing about her chain-smoking mother (and occasionally fantasizing about the pilot's sultry, come-hither voice).

The result is hilarious, yes, but also unexpectedly profound. And even though I could've done without some of the play's more heart-tugging moments, Loveland is reason enough to agree to watch Ann Randolph do just about anything.