While watching The Tosca Project at ACT, I kept wanting to make contact with an overcoat. Nearly a decade ago, down the block at the Curran Theatre, director-choreographer Susan Strohman's Broadway hit Contact was on its national tour. With little spoken dialogue, the production told a series of simple stories through movement, dance, and pre-recorded popular music that retains a striking emotional power to this day. A few years later, ACT itself presented The Overcoat, a Canadian import in which Morris Paynch and Wendy Gorling took a Nikolai Gogol story and created a heart-breaking spectacle in which a large cast, though not necessarily trained dancers, used movement and Shostakovich's music to tell the story of a faceless office-worker momentarily empowered by a tailor-made overcoat.
Peter Anderson played the poor schlep in The Overcoat, and that the Canadian performer now has a role in The Tosca Project suggests that ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff was encouraged by The Overcoat, and perhaps by an earlier contact with Contact at the neighboring Curran, to explore this hybrid form that develops from a melding of dance and theater. Unfortunately, despite a long gestation and the visible results of arduous labor, The Tosca Project provides neither the inventive movement nor an involving story that combine to create a memorable work.
The setting is clever enough. The Tosca Cafe in North Beach has provided a window on, and a home to, a changing society for 90 years. Specifically, its view is on a specific neighborhood, and while trends born there reached into the broader culture, and outside events certainly impacted on both the cafe and the world in which it exists, Perloff and collaborator Val Caniparoli of the San Francisco Ballet have tried so hard to incorporate nine decades of American social patterns that the charm of the locale's specificity gets muffled in a miasmatic swirl of flappers and hippies and soldiers and beatniks and ballet tutus and yuppies and cell phones and even a disco ball to briefly herald gay lib before AIDS is invoked over snippets of broadcasts that provide occasional historic contexts.
There are remnants of the actual history of the Tosca Cafe used to provide the suggestion of a through-line, but they are weakly invoked and don't create much of an involvement. If the choreographed movements had more than just hints of clever surprise, the story's weak brew could more easily provide a binding sustenance. Only three characters are identified with a name, generic though they be, and they are Jack Willis as Bartender, one of the founding figures of the cafe (and sporting a terrible Italian accent); Rachel Ticotin as Immigrant, who represents current owner Jeannette Etheredge and her mother Armen Bali; and Gregory Wallace as Musician, though his duties seems to be mainly sweeping and answering the phone.
Seven dancers play scores of the patrons who pass through the establishment, and while their contributions are estimable, the steps they are given seldom seem more than generic representations of whatever era we are flitting through. To both Perloff and Caniparoli's credit, the production maintains an energetic fluidity that sustains its 90 minutes that, incredibly enough, represents 90 years of life at 242 Columbus Ave.
The Tosca Project will run through June 27 at American Conservatory Theater. Tickets are $15-$87. There will be an Out with ACT performance and reception on June 23. Call 749-2228 or go to www.act-sf.org.