Summer will have begun by the time you read this column, which usually can be registered in a change in the theater temperature if not on the thermometer mounted outside your bedroom window. Most theaters are catching their breaths before fall reboots, making way for the productions that typically arise in summer months (lots of outdoor Shakespeare), and then there are the surprises, several of which are highlighted here.
At the top of the list you can find Call Me Miss Birds Eye: A Celebration of Ethel Merman. This biographical musical revue runs July 8-19 at the Geary Theatre, although it is not an ACT production. The producer is Australia's Acoustic Voice, a company that foregoes amplification in a repertoire that ranges from classical to pop. With optimism, the Miss Birds Eye engagement is billed as a "pre-Broadway run."
For those not versed in Broadway lore (or legacy brands of frozen foods), the title comes from Merman's riposte to songwriter Irving Berlin, who violated her edict against changes less than a week before an opening. But several days before the opening of Call Me Madam, Berlin excitedly suggested some changes to a song. No dice, Merman bluntly told the legendary songwriter. "Call me Miss Birds Eye," she famously said. "It's frozen."
Denise Wharmby, a native of Australia and now a Bay Area resident, stars as Merman, and sings from the vast song catalog Merman introduced on Broadway. Wharmby has toured with Acoustic Voice and was once a member of Britain's satirical musical troupe Fascinating Aida before falling in love with a San Francisco musician and relocating here. Martin Grimwood and Don Bridges also perform and help narrate the story that takes Merman from her 1930 Broadway debut in Girl Crazy to her 1959 triumph in Gypsy.
The show came about when Acoustic Voice uncovered a script written by London theater critic Jack Tinker for a 1985 series of showbiz revues staged in the West End. "As the only theater company in the world that works exclusively with the Bel Canto technique, Acoustic Voice has long celebrated Merman's talent," Artistic Director Graham Clarke said. "Now we look forward to sharing her life and songbook in its most authentic form."
Tickets are available at (415) 749-2228 or act-sf.org.
'Sordid' & 'Salome'
There are two summer surprises coming up at New Conservatory Theatre Center, first with a stand-up visit from the creator of Sordid Lives, and then the premiere of a glam-rock, faux-queen reinterpretation of Oscar Wilde's Salome .
Del Shores is best known as a writer, with Sordid Lives and Southern Baptist Sissies among his credits, but he's also a raconteur who performed his Sordid Confessions show at the late Rrazz Room several years ago. He's now bringing his newest standup act to NCTC, where his plays Southern Baptist Sissies and Yellow have been presented. Del Shores: SINfully Sordid will have performances on July 31 and Aug. 1.
Shores, who has theatrically mined his Southern Baptist background for comedy, now looks to a more contemporary topic: the aftermath of gay divorce. As a single man redux, Shores talks about bad dates, navigating through Grindr, Tinder, and OKCupid, and what it's like to be on the prowl again as "a minor gay celebrity."
And then it's on to a rather liberal interpretation of Oscar Wilde's recounting of a Biblical seductress rebuffed by John the Baptist, with unhappy results for him. Salome, Dance for Me begins a four-week run at NCTC on Aug. 5, with the lower-cased trixie carr starring in the one-woman show developed through the theater's Emerging Artists program.
A well-known SF faux queen (basically a woman pretending to be a man in drag who pretends to be a woman), carr wrote the score with Robert Mollicone. Director Ben Randle is a frequent carr collaborator, and their previous work includes Hold Me Close, Tiny Dionysus: A Greek Comedy Rock Epic at CounterPULSE. In the new show, the brutal ancient story collides with 21st-century debauchery in a multidisciplinary musical based not only on Wilde's play but also on the Richard Strauss opera Salome.
Ticket info on the NCTC shows is available at (415) 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org.
Pipelines to prisons
Berkeley Rep lends a serious side to summer with its special attraction. In her latest one-woman show, Anna Deveare Smith speaks in the words and personalities of dozens of people she interviewed about the connection between increasing early expulsions from high school and subsequent incarceration �" what she calls "the school-to-prison pipeline." Notes From the Field: Doing Time in Education, the California Chapter begins a three-week run on July 11 at Berkeley Rep, which developed the piece in collaboration with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Smith has performed her solo shows internationally, and Berkeley Rep audiences have seen her tackle topical subjects in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Fires in the Mirror, and Let Me Down Easy. Directed by Leah C. Gardiner and with musical guest Marcus Shelby, the new show takes different tacks in its two acts. The first act follows in her tradition of portraying multiple characters derived through interviews. In the second act, Smith invites the audience to enter into an exchange about how an educational system that sheds off future lawbreakers might be redirected.
"This thing I'm working on is to really be a member of a conversation," Smith told web magazine AlterNet last year. "I hope, in our audience, there will be judges and professors and jailers and kids. And what am I? I'm an artist. I want to bring that fact of being an artist into the conversation. It's not about a finished work of art. It's about using certain skill sets I've developed over time to convene this conversation."
Ticket info at (510) 647-2949 or go to berkeleyrep.org.