I park my car outside the brick fortress Costco just before 6 p.m. Crossing Bryant, I gaze at the Southern sky, where mauve clouds flame gold in the dying light. I've been to Thrillpeddlers once before, long ago. I vaguely remember a magical ramshackle den hidden in a gated parking lot. I walk along 10th Street staring through chain-link fence at a row of meter-maid vehicles. I must've gotten the address wrong. I squint at the tiny screen of my iPhone 4. Above my head a demon crouches atop the numerals 575, alongside an antique store window. How very Harry Potter. Could this be the legendary Hypnodrome, where the new revue Jewels of Paris previews on March 12?
I could've parked in this parking lot, I muse prosaically, admiring the overgrown ivy. I knock on the door on the windowless side of the large wooden building. I hear a shriek. That couldn't be a joke doorbell, I only knocked. Egad. The handle turns in my hand. I enter, and shut the door on the mundane world. This high-ceilinged inner sanctum is warm and colorful, full of images and objects tantalizing to the imagination. "Hello," I call, and an unseen voice answers. I enter a theater where two men, oddly attired, discuss available technicians. Then someone across the stage in a blood-red shirt smiles at me with very large teeth.
Russell Blackwood, a director about town, is the underground genius who put the imp back in impresario. Ever grinning, he gives me a moment's tour of his small empire. Stepping off the set, I glimpse a young prop master bent over plastic tubs full of shiny things and gory masks, pass a long table with mirrors surrounded by fantastic odds and ends, go up wooden steps past racks of costumes, and enter a larger dressing area, where we pull out chairs and sit. "You'd like a surface to write on," he says, touching the narrow plank that is the makeup table.
Directors think of everything. All the time. They have to, they can't help it, it's how their minds work. What clinical psychologists call control freaks. Every human talent that mental health professionals pathologize theater puts to good use in an alternative universe where people can be creative, not crazy. It takes a special kind of crazy to run your own theater. Now Blackwood is staging his interview with Blackwell. Fascinating. Theater doesn't stop offstage. Why would it? That's where the best theater happens, if you know how to spot it. I pull out my thermos of tea and settle back to enjoy the one-man show.
Blackwood's been producing director of Thrillpeddlers for 25 years, the length of his relationship with his executive producer and husband, Jim Toczyl, which rhymes with nozzle. They've been staging shows at their Hypnodrome 11 glorious years, with a current budget just under $100K, in a for-profit model, with no board to rein in fantastic theatrical impulses, no unions to cramp outrageous style. Thirty-five people are working on their latest extravaganza, Jewels of Paris, of whom 17 are actors playing three roles apiece, as befits the revue regimen of shifting scenes, changing costumes, song and dance. "Lots of our shows are epic," boasts the expansive Blackwood, who prides himself on running a community theater unconstrained by the aesthetic-death-dealing trammels of non-profit, so-called professional rivals.
At this point, a white-headed man in velvety corduroy ambles in and pulls up a chair. This is mythic music-maker and accompanist to the stars Scrumbly Koldewyn, who whipped up the score for Jewels in a three-month bout of inspiration. The soft-spoken, Punk-inflected ex-hippie is quick to credit talented scribes Rob Keefe, Alex Kinney, and Andy Wenger, whose plays and sketches inspired the songs that mark the difference between the exquisite discipline that is revue and your average 10-minute play festival. Vive la difference! (Long live the difference!) As roles were cast, Scrumbly even wrote music and lyrics to suit individual performers. He'll be on piano every night, assisted by the polymorphously talented Birdy-Bob Watt on every other instrument.
As we sit there chatting in the pre-rehearsal calm two weeks before the storm of performance, the image of Paris hovers, like that drone some idiot sent flying over the Eiffel Tower the other day. Not that Paris. The imaginary Paris of the spirit, an ideal and sometimes real destination for generations of artists and intellectuals who dedicate themselves to preserving and perfecting joie de vivre (joy of living). Legendary American ex-pats Gertrude Stein and Josephine Baker are the jewels of Paris receiving the Thrillpeddler treatment, alongside Viennese Marie-Antoinette and Spaniard Pablo Picasso, in gender-bending send-ups that employ a guillotine and the thousand unnatural props hidden in the Hypnodrome.
Jewels of Paris plays Thurs., Fri. & Sat., 8 p.m. (previews 3/12, 13, 14; opens 3/19) at the Hypnodrome, 575 10th St., SF. Tickets ($30; $35 for Front Row Seats, Shock Boxes, Turkish Lounges): (415) 377-4202.