Second Row Center

The North Bay’s spring season of on-stage blockbusters, which kicked off last weekend with Rohnert Park’s monster hit ‘Young Frankenstein,’ has another massive musical production leading the way into the summer.

But unlike "Young Frankenstein," unlike "Singing in the Rain" (opening next month at 6th Street playhouse), unlike "Shrek: The Musical" (opening next month at the JC’s Summer Repertory Theater), the show that opened at the Napa Valley Opera House last weekend is not based on a hit movie.

On the contrary, a star-making hit movie from 1968 was based on it.

It’s "Funny Girl," the show that made Barbara Streisand a superstar.

With sensational music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill, "Funny Girl" has not been performed on stage much in the last couple of decades, primarily because it’s such a big show, and not a cheap one to produce.

But there are few actresses on the musical theater stage today who do not cite "Funny Girl" as one of the childhood inspirations that made them want to sing and dance on stage. Those star-struck little girls included Napa’s Taylor Bartolucci, who recalls dancing through her house singing those songs - "I Am the Greatest Star," "Don’t Rain on My Parade," "People," dreaming of the day she’s get to sing those songs on stage in her very own production of "Funny Girl."

Cue Lucky Penny Theater, which has pulled out all the stops to bring that dream to life, for Bartolucci and a generation of theater fans who’ve had to wait a very long time to see this show brought back to life.

Directed by Barry Martin with an emphasis on the roiling emotions beneath the glitter, the production makes first-rate use of the elegant Napa Valley Opera House. "Funny Girl" is an old-fashioned tale of theater in the 1920’s, and the experience of watching it gets a boost from taking place in a historic theater like the Opera House.

"Funny Girl" is story of pioneering comedienne Fanny Brice, whose love life never matched her on-stage success, and it features some of the most enduring songs ever written for the stage, In showcasing Brice’s career as a headliner with the famously glitzy Ziegfield Follies, the play has plenty of tap-dancing, show-girl feathering, tuxedoed-tenor singing glamour, and lots of opulent ear and eye-candy.

As Fanny’s dancer BFF Eddie, Anthony Martinez is superb, one of his best performances to date. And James D. Sasser, as Fanny’s gambling heartthrob Nick, is spot-on, classy and cool with a touch of the conman. The supporting chorus is first-rate as well, dancing and singing through a series of costume changes that keep the dazzle going non-stop, despite the occasional off-key bleat from an otherwise energetic live orchestra.

But ultimately, it’s Taylor Bartolucci’s jaw-dropping, heartbreaking performance as Fanny that supercharges the show. Not only can she belt a song, she never lets us forget the insecure little girl beneath the rising Broadway superstar, the funny lady who wants nothing more than to love and be loved, and ends up making all her dreams come true but one.

This is the best kind of Broadway musical: one with as much heart and humanity as glamour and spectacle. It’s easily one of the best, most memorable shows of the year.

"Funny Girl" runs Friday-Sunday through May 19 at the Napa Valley opera House, info at luckypennynapa.com.

It’s May, and the movie theaters are already opening the gates on Blockbuster season, four whole months of lavish, big-budget popcorn movies intended to dazzle audiences with big stars, big effects, and big monsters. Believe it or not, the same thing is happening in the North Bay’s other kind of theater, the one with a stage and a curtain and a live orchestra. This week, a certified, larger than life, big and bold theatrical blockbuster has opened, providing its own kind of razzle-dazzle and star power, and even a few honest-to-goodness special effects.

It’s Young Frankenstein, the musical version of Mel Brook’s classic horror comedy spoof, presented by the New Spreckels Theater Company. Directed by Gene Abravaya with a sense of inventiveness and a clear affection for the material, Young Frankenstein is a good old-fashioned community theater company with lofty ambitions of rivaling professional companies.

They move a few steps closer with Young Frankenstein.

The script, by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan, stays mostly faithful to the beloved 1974 film about Frederick Frankenstein, the reluctant grandson of the infamous monster-maker Dr, Victor Frankenstein. Tim Setzer plays Frederick with less of the manic energy Gene Wilder brought to the movie, but with a kind of grandly crumbling sense of nobility that is funny if not quite hilarious.

The strong cast works wonders in bringing the iconic movie characters to life, with Igor played broadly by comedian Jeffrey Weissman, Inga played with winsome charm by Allison Rae Baker, and Frederick’s hot-and-cold fiancée Elizabeth portrayed with madcap precision by Denise Elia. John Shillington, as the outrageously accented Transylvanian policeman Inspector Kemp and also as the lonely blind hermit shows a knack for big physical gags, and Braedyn Youngberg, as The Monster, is delightfully shell-shocked as the only really sane character in the whole show.

And let’s not forget the scary housekeeper Frau Blücher, played to mind-boggling perfection by Mary Gannon Graham. Her shockingly smutty love-song to the late Victor, “He Was My Boyfriend”, may be the funniest thing I will see all year.

‘Young Frankenstein’ runs Thursday-Sunday through May 19 at Spreckels Performing Arts Center, spreckelsonline.com.

Well, what snow there was has now melted on the Siskiyou Pass, the stretch of I-80 that leads from California into Southern Oregon, so as the last memories of winter cross through spring on their way to being totally forgotten in the summer, people are actually starting to travel again, making the scenic six-hour drive up to the tiny town of Ashland, where the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has actually been up and running since February.

And yes, that was one sentence.

Spring brings out the poet in us, and Shakespeare makes us want to make long winding speeches about pretty much everything, including and especially, Shakespeare Festivals.

Soon, in Ashland, the two indoor theaters facing the beautiful brick courtyard will be joined by another theater which has been slumbering darkly for months, asleep this long recent winter but ready, when the large outdoor Elizabethan Theater opens its doors in June. At any time during the average festival in Ashland, there are several shows to choose from for visiting theater connoisseurs, from the various Shakespearean offerings, to modern classics, beloved musicals and brand new stuff created just for the audiences in Ashland.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be telling you about the shows already running in Ashland, and when the Lizzie opens in June, I'll tell you about those new shows as well. If you've never visited the festival, I encourage you to look into it. Shows will be running through late October, and as one of the largest and best ongoing repertory theaters in the world, the OSF Company is always well worth the trip.

In the Angus Bowmer theater, named after the guy who founded the festival in 1935, four shows are currently running, including new spins on some two very familiar stories about the battle between the sexes!

"Taming of the Shrew," one of the trickier Shakespeare shows to present to modern audiences, is given the Beach Boardwalk treatment by director David Ivers, with a rockabilly soundtrack that makes the show, and it’s love-and-war attitude, not only palatable, but actually kind of sweet and infectious. Kate, is the wild-child outsider of her family, which owns a great deal of the Beach Front Boardwalk of Padua, with a roller coaster and Ferris wheel hovering over the impressive set. When Petruchio arrives, the tattooed, guitar-strumming charmer from out of town quickly falls for Kate, in whom he recognizes a kindred soul, an outcast marching to her own drummer, much like himself. When her father agrees to marry her off to Petruchio, she rebels, vowing to make Petruchio’s life a living hell, until Petruchio, played with a lot more heart and sweetness than usual, decides to tame her using the only means he can think of, which is basically to act crazier and more out-of-control than she is.

The less acceptable parts of Shakespeare’s story, where Petruchio keeps Kate hungry, sleep deprived and off-balance - saying its all because he loves her too much to allow her to eat food that isn’t as perfect as she - that stuff actually works here, because for once the show is played as a true romantic comedy, with a Petruchio and a Kate we really want to end up together, happy at last. Nell Geisslinger as Kate, and Ted Deasy as Petruchio have amazing chemistry together, and watching them fall in love, in fits and starts, is like a special effect unto itself, with the road to romance entertainingly rocky, right up to the final rock and roll-fueled climax.

Improbably, Oregon Shakespeare Festival has paired the best "Taming of the Shrew" I've ever seen with the only production of "My Fair Lady" I haven’t squirmed through.

I'll tell you about that production . . . next time.

Neil LaBute’s "The Shape of Things" is one of those plays you immediately want to talk about. From its opening moments, when a passionate art student contemplates defacing a fig-leafed sculpture in protest of censorship, there is plenty to discuss, analyze, debate and be challenged by. Labute’s writing is tough, aggressive and packed with deliciously quotable lines. And the story, with characters that are all rich, human, and strongly defined, is immediately engaging and memorable.

Paradoxically, "The Shape of Things" is also the kind of play people might find themselves not wanting to talk about, out of fear that they might spoil any of the juicy, wicked, head-spinning surprises packed into the script. That’s pretty much me. I want to tell you exactly why I love this play, now running at Main Stage West in Sebastopol, but I know I must be very careful in describing it, because the experience of watching The Shape of Things for the first time, without knowing anything about it, is certainly enhanced by a wonderful sense of shocking discovery that many playwrights aim for but so rarely achieve.

So, stepping cautiously, let me say that "The Shape of Things" takes place at Mercy College, a small liberal arts college, possibly based on Brigham Young University, which playwright LaBute attended before his plays got him tossed out of his church. At Mercy, a smart but insecure, slightly overweight, extremely dorky Literature major named Adam is stunned when he attracts the attention of a beautiful, self-assured and slightly intense art major named Evelyn. The initials of her full name spell out the word ‘E.A.T.,’ which is hardly accidental, as Evelyn proves to be voracious in her appetites and darned near cannibalistic in her drive to change the world through her increasingly outrageous artistic statements.

Adam’s two closest friends, Philip and Jenny, are initially impressed at the effect Evelyn is having on Adam, who allows his sexy-but-image conscious new girlfriend to methodically transform his outward appearance - new hair, new clothes, new contacts. But eventually, Adam’s friends grow alarmed as his willingness to change for love leads to more and more extreme decisions.

As Adam, Keith Baker is pretty much brilliant, and Jennifer Coté, as Evelyn, gives a scathingly effective performance, though it might have benefited from a bit more variation and softness, a bit of seduction and sweetness to balance the icy intensity, especially early on when Adam is falling for her. As Philip and Jenny, John Browning and Dana Scott are also very good, doing wonderful things with LaBute’s sardonic language.

Director David Lear never lets the story tilt too far toward the comedic side or the dark side, keeping both is perfect balance in this very dark, but very funny dark-comedy. Sure to provoke debate with its vicious insights and uncompromising pessimism, The Shape of Things is smart, brilliant, nasty, and savagely entertaining.

"The Shape of Things" runs Thursday-Sunday through May 19 at Main Stage West in Sebastopol. Mainstagewest.com.

Director Ann Brebner will be celebrating her 90th birthday this year, and she’s found a heck of way to celebrate. She’s written a play, the bittersweet, slightly supernatural drama "The Dead Girl."

Over the course of her numerous decades in show business, Brebner has directed hundreds of productions, all over the world, from her birthplace in New Zealand, to London, where she learned her craft in the 1940s, to New York City, where she’s staged a number of shows off Broadway. But it’s not until relatively recently that Brebner began tackling the craft of play writing.

In 2008, she adapted Anne Lamott’s novel Hard Laughter.

And now, at last, Ann Brebner has written her first original play.

It opened last weekend, presented by San Rafael’s Alternative Theater Ensemble, a magnificently quirky company which stages top-notch original and classic plays, using Equity actors, presenting shows in odd, make-shift pop-up spaces like furniture stores and art galleries. True to form, "The Dead Girl," which Brebner has also directed, is being presented amidst the jewelry tables and clothes racks of the Avant Garde consignment shop, the cast of four actors perform the play on a cozy living room set in the middle of the store, the audience seated on a ring of folding chairs, about as up close and personal as you will ever find a live theater experience to be.

The title character is 30-year-old Gloria, played with effervescence and charm by Amy Marie Haven.

Six months after her death, Gloria has found herself back at home, apparently required to be a kind of watchful spirit as her mother, Esther and her step-father George, struggle with a mix of pain, loss, guilt and grief - as they awkwardly make plans for a long-delayed around-the-world trip. As Esther and George, Emilie Talbot is wonderfully, achingly fragile, and Charles Dean is surperb. As Gloria’s fiancé Malcolm, David E. Moore is also strong, though a little stiff and stentorian a presence at time. Still, he nicely conveys the inherent decency of this young man, his dreams suddenly shattered, uncertain how to proceed.

These are all good, decent, everyday people, with no dark, third-act secrets to reveal, and that is a big part of the power of this play. It all just feels so painfully, accessibly real. Two parents dealing with loss the way most of us would, with a simultaneous mix of emotional courage and emotional collapse.

Brebner shows us the heroic details of how people work through grief, rediscovering how to live while observing the same old everyday routines - coffee, long walks, crossword puzzles - all the while recognizing that nothing will ever be the same again.

The script does feel a bit overextended at times, with a tad more explanation and resolution than is perhaps necessary, and Brebner’s use of music to underscore the emotion of some scenes was occasionally more distracting than probably intended.

But for its sweet, intimate honesty and its remarkable sense of battered dignity and beauty, Ann Brebner’s "The Dead Girl" is worth a trip to Marin, and as Brebner’s frist original work, was definitely worth waiting for.

"The Dead Girl" runs Wednesdays and Fridays, Saturdays and Sunday through May 19. Visit altertheater.org for information.