AUSTEN POWERS

Shakespeare meets Austen in Santa Cruz Shakespeare buoyant season opener, Pride And Prejudice


The 2019 Santa Cruz Shakespeare season arrived this week with bells on — literally. The bell-ringing motif (as in for whom the bell tolls) recurs throughout the season-opening production of Pride and Prejudice, in which a man and woman who should be perfectly matched find their twin aversions to marriage and each other challenged when the bells of attraction begin to toll for them.

Astute playgoers will notice that Pride and Prejudice was not actually written by Will Shakespeare. But contemporary playwright Kate Hamill's 2017 stage adaptation of the beloved Jane Austen novel is the perfect vehicle for launching the company's summer season on a note of crowd-pleasing goodwill — everybody knows the story, there's none of that pesky Elizabethan dialogue to contend with, and a mood of buoyant fun persists throughout.

Three Sisters: Pullins, Peakes, and Pratt

In Hamill's version, there are only four Bennett sisters, only three of them anatomically correct. (The show's running gag has the eight-person cast scurrying around to cover all 14 roles, whether or not  the genders match up — which fits right in with the SCS commitment to non-traditional casting.)

The eldest, prettiest, and most compliant sister is Jane (Karen Peakes). Lizzy (the excellent Allie Pratt), the surrogate for author Austen's more trenchant social commentary, is the clever observer who pokes fun at human folly, especially the matrimonial maneuverings of the girls' dizzy mother, Mrs. Bennett (Carol Halstead), who is determined to pair up her daughters with suitably wealthy husbands. While Mama relentlessly herds her daughters into the paths of incoming bachelors, Lizzy declares that matrimony is a game she doesn't want to win.

Lizzy's ally in common sense is her patient, irascible father, Mr. Bennett (the always wonderful Allen Gilmore), who tries to steer clear of his wife's schemes. Gilmore also manages a neat about-face as Charlotte, Lizzy's cheerfully gossipy, yet practical-minded best friend.

Gilmore, Pratt and Smiling: No social butterflies

Lydia, the youngest and most wayward sister, is played with bratty exuberance by Madison Pulllins, who switches gears later to play imperious dowager Lady Catherine de Bourgh. (With Peakes hilariously incomprehensible as her veiled spinster daughter.)

As the bookish sister, Mary, who's not so integral to the plot, Landon Hawkins isn't asked to do much but look surly and elicit cries (or shrieks) of alarm every time anyone else in the cast turns to face him. But he's perfectly cast as the male ingenue, fresh-faced Mr. Bingley, who comes courting Jane.

With his tremendous presence and noble bearing, Lindsay Smiling is terrific in the pivotal role of Mr. Darcy, Bingley's friend. A serious, honorable man with absolutely no gift for small talk or silliness, we can see his discomfort whenever he's beset by social butterflies — like the Bennett females — which Lizzy mistakes for arrogance.

Ian Merrill Peakes: Deliciously gauche and creaky

Of course, they're a perfect match for each other in wit and ironic temperament, if only they could figure it out. Smiling makes the war between Darcy's head and heart so palpable, and Pratt's Lizzy is so wryly caustic beneath her chipper demeanor that we wish playwright Hamill had written an extra scene or two for just the two of them, prowling around each other in their lively, eccentric mating dance.

The show's most tireless chameleon is Ian Merrill Peakes, who plays Mr. Bingley's snobbish, tippling sister, as well as the dashing officer and scoundrel, Wickham. But it's in his supporting role as the deliciously gauche and creaky pastor, Mr. Collins, that Peakes steals the show, with his twisted, laborious gait and riotously funny vocal inflections.

Director Paul Mullins, who made such a frantic, hilarious, knockabout farce out of The 39 Steps a couple of seasons ago, works in a more subtle hue here, although the laughs are set up and delivered with the same precision. Dipu Gupta's uncluttered set grouping vintage chairs around a piano, with a suggestion of Doric columns, and B. Modern's simple yet versatile gowns and tweedy gentlemen's outfits beautifully evoke Austen's late-Georgian era.

(Pride And Prejudice plays in repertory with upcoming Santa Cruz Shakespeare productions of A Comedy Of Errors and The Winter's Tale through August 31 in the Audrey Stanley Grove at Delaveaga Park.)

MISSING JAMES

Winds of Change, by James Aschbacher

How do I miss thee?

How do I not?

You pop up in the strangest, most mundane places. There you lurk every time I grab the red tube of Chapstick in the bathroom cabinet. Every Christmas morning, one of the little  packages wrapped up in a scrap of old holiday paper and tucked into my stocking held 3 or 4 tubes of Chapstick, Scotch-taped together. Enough to last me all year!

Now, I have to buy my own, not to mention that Santa doesn’t come to fill my stocking anymore. (Ditto the Easter Bunny, the Valentine’s Day Bunny, or the Birthday Bunny, who used to pile up an assortment of Ferrell’s Doughnuts on my breakfast plate!)

Vitamin time. You used to set out my daily dosage on the counter above the kitchen sink at breakfast time — in a little aluminum dish that once held a tea light. The empty dish sits there still, neglected, because by the time I remember to take the vitamins, I just pour them out of the bottle into my hand and gulp them down. Another domestic ceremony lost. Another little nick out of my quality of life.

The quiet. When I come downstairs mid-morning, there’s no longer the clinking of your paint brush’s metal collar against the water glass, the distinctive sound of my Art Boy so industriously painting away. “Pee time?” you’d ask, as I came galumphing down on my usual routine. “Or tea time?”

(Not that I have time for a second cup of tea, most days. I’m too busy dragging myself off to the store, to the movies, to yoga, or texting for rides for all of the above — all things I so blithely used to let you do for me, without even thinking about it.)

Plum season. Lucky enough to have bought a house on a property full of fruit trees, we often had to give away excess pears, figs and limes by the basket if we couldn’t eat them fast enough. But not plums. Sweet, juicy, wine-red Santa Rosa plums were your favorite fruit!

It was an event every summer when you found the first ripe one that had fallen to the grass; after that. you haunted the tree like Marley’s Ghost every morning, picking the ripest ones for breakfast. And you never wanted me to “waste” them in a tart, which is where most of the extra pears ended up. Plums went directly into your face!

The 25th of every month: it only reminds me that another 30 days have passed in the ever-widening gap that now separates us.

HIVE MIND

Women of '60s rock celebrated in Cabrillo Stage's Beehive

The '60s are having a moment right now, at least, the music of the '60. Besides the just-opened, Beatles-themed movie Yesterday  and the ironic use of some choice '60s anthems on the soundtrack of The Last Black Man In San Francisco, along comes the Cabrillo Stage season opener, Beehive.

Subtitled "The 60s Musical," the name suggests an homage to the girl groups of that era, which is certainly a major part of the show, especially in its first half. But Beehive also aspires to celebrate a diverse slate of women rockers, from Connie Francis to the Supremes to Aretha to Janis Joplin.

The show was created in 1985 by Larry Gallagher as a nightclub revue, which explains why it's a bit short on book. When the performers talk onstage, it's usually in brief snippets of narration setting up the context in which the playlist unspools.

More than 30 tunes are performed with gusto by the six-woman cast: Kiana Hamzehi, Jennifer Taylor Daniels, Lindsey Chester, Jessica Pierini, Sadie Rose, and Catarina Contini.

Lindsey Chester delivers a knockout set of Janis Joplin tunes

Director Gary John La Rosa also did the choreography — from demure girl-group syncopation to the butt-shaking gymnastics of Tina Turner. Skip Epperson's single, functional set consists of vinyl-inspired discs in all colors hanging down from the rafters, and a large, round record-shaped portal draped in shiny fringe through which the performers enter and exit.

A six-piece combo appears on a balcony upstage, led by Musical Director Jon Nordgren. The effect is like a giant, sparkly juke box with live performers providing your hit parade — no quarters necessary.

At times, the costumes and wigs don’t correctly match the era of the song being performed. (The opening number references girl groups of the early ’60s, but the women are dressed in Swinging London outfits from mid-decade.)  

But all these performers can sing up a storm. Should you feel compelled to join in (and believe me, you will), audience participation is strongly encouraged!
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Photos by Jana Marcus

DELETE THE BEATLES

Band erased from history in sly, audacious Yesterday

Imagine if The Beatles had never existed. It was devastating enough for me as a teenager when the band broke up. How could life as we know it go on? If there had never been any Beatles, I rationalized grimly, at least we wouldn't know what we'd missed.

In his antic and audacious new movie, Yesterday, director Danny Boyle poses an even gnarlier idea: suppose The Beatles had existed, and enjoyed their incredible nine yeas of productivity together — but then suddenly disappeared from the collective memory of basically everyone on Earth?

Everyone but one guy.

Imagine the potential for comedy (not to mention plunder and exploitation) if that guy were a struggling singer-songwriter who could take his pick from the entire song catalog of the Fab Four, certain that no one in the audience had ever heard of John, Paul, George, or Ringo.

Scripted by veteran Richard Curtis (Four Weddings And A Funeral; Love Actually), for the ever genre-bouncing Boyle, Yesterday is a sly, persuasive morality play about the wages and nature of success dressed up as a pop-cultural comedy.

It's also as entertaining as hell, especially for those of us who do remember The Beatles, thank you very much, and will appreciate every in-joke, downbeat, and visual and audio cue Boyle employs with such shameless glee throughout his tall tale.
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