KPFA - Bay Area Theater

During the COVID-19 Lockdown, the Bay Area Theater podcast will focus on playwright interviews conducted by Richard Wolinsky over the past few years which aired on Bookwaves, Arts-Waves, and Open Book.

“Don’t Eat the Mangos” can be seen in a video recording through May 11, 2020. Go to the Magic Theatre website for more information.

Ricardo Perez Gonzalez is a playwright of Puerto Rican ancestry, currently based in New York. His most recent play, “Don’t Eat the Mangos” had its world premiere at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in March, 2020 and was forced to close one week later due to the novel corona virus pandemic. His plays have been performed all across the United States, and he recently completed a stint in the writers’ room of the Netflix series Designated Survivor. Photos: Richard Wolinsky.

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KPFA theatre critic Richard Wolinsky updates the state of Bay Area theatre and gives a listing of on-line streaming theatre, both local and national.

Text of update.

During times of stress, live theatre has been out front, enhancing community, relieving anxiety, and pointing the way to better futures. Now, of course, audiences are sitting in their homes, and theatres around the world are shuttered.

Cal Shakes, California Shakespeare Theatre, has cancelled its entire 2020 season The final plays from Bay Area companies of the 2019-2020 season have already been cancelled or will be cancelled as social distancing most likely continues into the summer.

But live theatre does go on, or at least recordings of live theatre, which can be seen by accessing your Roku, your Apple TV, your smart television, or your laptop, tablet or cell phone.

In the Bay Area. Berkeley Rep, Marin Theatre Company and Theatreworks Silicon Valley have all presented their most recent productions, streaming, to ticket buyers, with limited additional purchase days. ACT’s two shows, Gloria and Toni Stone, are still streaming this week. Tickets can be purchased through late in the day April 3rd and streaming ends on April 5th. Go to act-sf.org for more information.

Around the Bay, The Magic Theatre is offering a daily mini-podcast with various playwrights through soundcloud. Go to magictheatre.org. Marin Theatre Company continues to offer its most recent production, Love. For more information, go to Marintheatre.org. Shotgun in Berkeley is planning a series of podcasts of plays and artist interviews, dates undetermined. For more information, go to shotgunplayers.org. Theatre Rhino has been presenting live one-man productions with John Fisher on Facebook Live, including streaming his recent show at The Marsh, Radical. For up to date information and tickets go to therhino.org.

Moving outside the Bay Area. London’s famed National Theatre is streaming free one play each week, all week, starting this Thursday with One Man, Two Guvnors starring James Corden, followed on subsequent Thursdays by Jane Eyre and Treasure Island, with Twelfth Night starring Tamsin Greig beginning April 23rd. You can find those plays on the National Theatre You Tube channel.

Terrence McNally, one of the first casualties of Covid-19, is being honored by LA TheatreWorks with an audio-only recording of Lips Together, Teeth Apart at latw.org. A 2018 documentary on the famed playwright, Every Act of Life, is available at Amazon Prime., which also has film versions of The Ritz, and Frankie and Johnny, and a documentary on Corpus Christi.

The Public Theater is streaming it’s free Shakepseare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing, at thirteen.org, The Metropolitan Opera is streaming, free one opera a day from its 14 year series of theatrical recordings, starting at 7:30 pm and continuing to 6:30 the next day. Go to the Met Opera on Demand app on Roku or Apple TV or Samsung smart TVS, click browse and preview or explore the app on tablets and cell phones to access without logging in.

For dance fans, Aivin Ailey. Org is streaming full length works, dance classes and short films.

Moving into subscription services, you can watch plays first aired on Great Performances if you’re a KQED subscriber, on the PBS app. Many of those same plays, plus many more, can be seen on the BroadwayHD app. That app has a seven day free trial period before paid subscriptions kick in.

Amazon Prime also has a pretty fair selection, though you have to go down several rabbit holes to get there. Netflix is more spotty, focusing mostly on films and TV shows. You Tube also has several full performances and recordings as well, but like Amazon Prime, it requires some effort to find them, and you have to make sure you’re getting the full play, and not a short clip.

Moving forward, most of the Bay Area theatre companies have released their upcoming schedules for the fall. BroadwaySF just sent out information to subscribers about its next season, which includes Hadestown, Moulin Rouge and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Right now, though, we all have to live day by day, and keep our fingers crossed that we will have live theatre back on the baords in the late summer and fall. I’m Richard Wolinsky on theatre for KPFA.

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Aired on Up Front on Thursday, March 26, 2020.

The complete interview can be found as a Radio Wolinsky podcast.

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Stephen Sondheim at 90. The legendary composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim celebrated his ninetieth birthday on March 22, 2020. Lyricist for West Side Story; composer/llyricist for Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George and other shows, he has perhaps made the greatest mark on musical theater since the days of Rodgers and Hammerstein. In this interview recorded in November 2011 at his townhouse in New York City for “Look! I Made a Hat!: the second volume of his collection of essays, he discusses his later works and his career with host Richard Wolinsky.

Photo of Stephen Sondheim by Richard Wolinsky, copyright 2010.

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KPFA theatre critic Richard Wolinsky discusses theatre closings, streaming plays by Bay Area theatre companies, and theatre you can watch on-line, including how to watch shows from Berkeley Rep, ACT and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.

Text of commentary:

Live entertainment has shut down all across the Bay Area. This is particularly problematic for local theatre companies. Shows that were in the midst of their runs were forced to close early. Shows in rehearsal shut down, never to open. Shows on the schedule and in pre-production involving set, lighting and costume design, even before rehearsal have been cancelled. Free-lancers who were already reeling bedue to the collateral damage of AB 5, which affected theatre companise relying on gig economy workers, now are in bigger trouble. Actors, directors, lighting designers, set designers and other key technical staffers are all out of work. But expenses — from rent to insurance to utilities do go on, and all companies will move toward the red. The fallout will be severe, and we don’t yet know its full extent. Some companies will fold. And we also don’t know when this will end, or how it will end, which means it’s wishful thinking on the part of artistic directors when they say they’ll cancel the upcoming show, but not the one after that, and they all know it. When a show is cancelled, it’s hard to reschedule because cast members often have commitments far into the future. In this summer of Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday, special productions of Follies at SF Playhouse or the two versions of Merrily We Roll Along at 42nd Street Moon will especially be missed if they are cancelled.

We also, of course, don’t know when this will end, which means it’s probably wishful thinking on the part of most artistic directors when they say they’ll cancel the next show, but will produce the one after that. Nobody knows.

Of the larger companies, Marin Theatre Company, San Francisco Playhouse, Shotgun, and Aurora are all dark for the current and next production, at least. The Curran has cancelled performances of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Broadway SF of Hamilton until May 1st. Again, wishful thinking, but we’ll see.

The Bay Area’s three largest non-profit theatre companies Berkeley Rep, ACT and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley have all negotiated separately with the various unions to stream recordings of their most recent shows on-line. How to see the shows and the dates involved are different for each.

If you have a ticket to either of the two Berkeley Rep shows, the two ACT shows or the Theatreworks show, you’ll be sent, or have been sent, an email with instructions on how to access the streaming recording.

Berkeley Rep’s upcoming show School Girls, or the African Mean Girls Play, was scheduled to play the Roda. A recording was made at a performance following two tech rehearsals. Costumes weren’t completed and there was no audience. The general public can buy tickets to see the show streaming at Broadway HD through the Berkeley Rep website, Berkeleyrep.org, or by calling the box office at 510-647-2949, through tomorrow, Friday March 20th, at 5 pm. Ticket holders only for Culture Clash Still in America can still see a recorded performance, and e-mails are being sent out. All ticket holders will have two weeks to see their respective shows.

Over at ACT, Gloria at the Strand was in the middle of its run, and Toni Stone had just completed its opening performance when the shows were shut down.

Patrons who had purchased tickets prior to the cancellations can also see the shows in their own homes on the Broadway HD app or website. For new ticket buyers interested in streaming Gloria and/or Toni Stone, go to www.act-sf.org or call A.C.T. at 415-749-2228. Purchasers will receive a link to a password-protected site from A.C.T. to view the production. Ticket buyers have until Friday, April 3 at midnight to purchase tickets and all ticket holders have until Sunday, April 5 at midnight to view the recordings online. ACT is asking ticket buyers to consider choosing a price point for themselves that feels generous, as well as financially accessible, keeping in mind the number of people in their household who will be watching the production.

Theatreworks was playing They Promised Her The Moon by Laurel Ollstein at the time they closed down. The show will be available for streaming by patrons who have already bought tickets to the show, and e-mails will be sent when the negotiations are finalized. For up to date information you can go to theatreworks.org. Ragtime, which was scheduled to be the next show for the company, has been moved to spring, 2021.

For those who need their theatre fix, there is Broadway HD, which has a free 7 day trial period in which you can binge as many shows as you can. Both Amazon Prime and Netflix have theatrical recordings, but you have to search really hard to find them, going down several rabbit holes, but they’re there. There’s also Kanopy, a free streaming service from your local library that has an incredible line-up of films and recorded plays. There’s a monthly limit on what you can see, and your library pays $2 for each viewing, but it’s free to you.

A personal plea here: If you have tickets for cancelled performances at any theatre venue in the Bay Area. Please consider ripping up the tickets rather than asking for a refund. This is true for companies like Marin Theatre Company, SF Playhouse, New Conservatory, Brava, Piano Fight or Shotgun, or Bay Area Musicals, 42nd Street Moon, Ubuntu, Aurora, Virago, I can’t name them all, and down to the smallest theatre company or school production, as well as the various community theatres that keep the canon of musicals and classic plays alive. Just as with restaurants and small businesses, we don’t know what will survive the shutdown, and the more that stay open, the richer the entire Bay Area will be. Think about it.

I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA. If you miss any information I’ve given here, feel free to contact me at Richard at kpfa.org

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