Reworked 'Carol' a bit less inspired

A faint scent of spiced cider lurked in the air at the opening night of the American Conservatory Theater's "A Christmas Carol," the company's peppy seasonal favorite, calculated to dispense cheer and dispel the chilly midwinter gloom.

There would no doubt be a lump of coal in the stocking of anyone who'd grouse about a production that wears its merriment so prominently, and director Domenique Lozano keeps Charles Dickens' evergreen tale of Christmas redemption - adapted by Carey Perloff and Paul Walsh, with music by Karl Lundeberg and musical direction by Laura Burton - zipping along, without dwelling too much on any particular episode.

Read more at SFGate.com.

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'The Walworth Farce'

'The Walworth Farce':

Everyone seems to agree that the main thing to know about Enda Walsh's critically acclaimed 'The Walworth Farce,' which the Druid Ireland theater company brings to the Cal Performances stage next week, is that it's OK to be lost and confused, right up through the intermission, maybe even into the second act.

"It's pure genius - it's everything you could want from a piece of theater," says director Mikel Murfi, with the sort of rapid-fire delivery that one imagines is embedded in the play itself. "It's hilarious at times, confusing at times, it's energetic, it's about what we are as people. It's explosive, tragic, incredible stuff. As a book, it was un-put-downable, although I have to say, the first time I read it, I was very, very confused as to what was going on."

Read more at SFGate.com.

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Albany Middle School teacher puts on the hits

There's an earnest cluster of middle school kids up on the stage singing, but it sounds as if the volume is low.

"Exit signs!" booms a voice from the back of the theater. Everyone lifts their chins, and the voices project to the green exit signs at the back of Albany High School's Little Theater as a great bear of a man dressed in jeans and a black Lahaina Divers T-shirt strides up the aisle.

It's the first dress rehearsal of Albany Middle School's annual musical, and veteran drama teacher Tom Gamba is steering the 90-plus-student cast of his latest, "The Directors," toward Thursday's opening night.

Read more at the SF Chronicle website.

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96 Hours: 'Peter Pan': Children get into the act

For an early holiday treat, the high-flying musical 'Peter Pan' fits the bill. But it's more than just a chance to take in an entertaining musical: An afternoon with Children's Musical Theater could also sow the seeds for a budding actor or actress.

The company got its start as the Cabrini Community Theater in 1968, founded by John Healy, himself a young performer who wanted to create a theater accessible to everyone. Deemed the largest youth theater company in the country - and now under the artistic direction of Kevin Hauge - the theater follows an unusually inclusive policy of casting every child who auditions. Last year, according to marketing associate Heather Lerner, thousands of kids turned up at the auditions, and all of them went onstage in at least one of the company's multiple-cast productions."

Read more on the SF Chronicle website.

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Dance Review: Joe Goode Performance Group-Remember the Wonder...

Midway through the performance of Joe Goode's latest "Wonderboy" -- at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through June 15-- the dancers operating the titular puppet abandoned their charge and left him sitting alone in his window, awash in drifting filmy curtains. Such was the storytelling power of this fabulous creature, though, that I continued to stare at him for several minutes, ignoring the dancers downstage. Somehow I wanted to see what he'd do next-- I wanted to catch what his reactions to the unfolding dance would be--even though I was quite aware that as a puppet, he wouldn't...couldn't possibly move.

Goode's latest collaboration with the San Francisco-born, now New York-based puppeteer Basil Twist (they worked together on Paula Vogel's "Long Christmas Ride Home" for the Magic Theater) makes for memorable theater. If the execution is not entirely perfect, the wonderful boy at the center of the story is charismatic enough to carry the show, which plays on a double bill with an abbreviated version of Goode's 1996 "Maverick Strain."

As in "Christmas Ride," the style reflects a modern version of the Japanese bunraku puppet form, in which the operators of the puppet are not only visible to the audience, but play characters of their own. In a strange way, the parsing of Goode's choreography, with slightly self-conscious, inward-seeking movements, makes an excellent match with the range of motion available to the boy himself.

In fact, the dancers (Melecio Estrella, Mark Stuver, Jessica Swanson, Andrew Ward, Patricia West and Alexander Zendzian) have obviously lavished attention not only on their own solos and duets, but also on matching their movement to Wonderboy's choreographed phrases. Perhaps though, there is no one better suited to this danced bunraku style than movement professionals. Accustomed to working in partnership and projecting the lines beyond their own bodies, the human performers generously transfer "realness" to this latter-day Pinocchio.

But making "realness" is also Basil Twist's stock in trade. A master puppeteer, who can seemingly enable any object--puppet or not--tell its own story, Twist imbues his boy with endearing details, an enigmatic lift to the corner of his lips, a sparkle in his eye, that continually draw your attention back to him.

As Wonderboy observed and commented on the workings of the world from his spare metal window frame-- just as the audience was watching from outside our own proscenium/window-- I couldn't help marveling at the enormous empathy I felt for the little guy. When he left the stage, I was a little unnerved and disappointed, like a kid whose friend has moved away, and when he tentatively dips his foot into the flow of life, I sensed a rush of exhilaration at his jetes from place to place. If only we could have flown up the aisle with him at the end.

Visit joegoode.org for more information on the show.

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Global perspective at S.F. Arts Festival

Multiculturalism is the watchword at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, which runs Wednesday through June 8 at a dozen venues around the city and will feature artists from China, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, Spain, Germany and Croatia, side by side with such mainstays of the local arts scene as Joe Goode, Axis Dance Company, John Santos and Earplay. But while the out-of-town visitors are an appealing part of the 5-year-old festival, the brainchild of director Andrew Wood, it also, perhaps even more important, serves as a proving ground for international collaborations and a way of encouraging Bay Area artists to seek out inspirations abroad and bring back fresh ideas to their home base.

Whether through an existing project, like Kim Epifano's collaboration with Shanghai artists on "Speaking Chinese," or an outgrowth of an existing relationship, such as Mark Jackson and Beth Wilmurt's work with Berlin choreographer Sommer Ulrickson on "Yes, Yes to Moscow," or even a reason to fulfill a commission, like Erling Wold's one-man opera for John Duykers, the festival gives performers a venue and springboard for exploring outside their comfort zones.

Read more on the SFChronicle site.

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Takami & Mobu Dance Group's "Illusion 2"

Mobu Dance Group
SomArts Cultural Center
through Feb 3, 2008

Butoh is a strange thing. I'm starting to believe that you have to be in the right mood, in the right space, to really appreciate it. It's like entering an alien, slightly perverse and sometimes creepy world-- not an easy sell to your friends for a Saturday night date.

So, how do you put people in the right frame of mind? I haven't got any perfect answers, but I think that the setup at SomArts--where Takami and Mobu Dance Group have set up for a two-week run of Illusion 2--is on the right track.

Pre-show, you can wander through an art exhibition that includes a mesmerizing sound installation by Oliver diCicco called "Sirens," among other pieces scattered throughout the gallery. In this quiet mood, you wander down a path lit by Kana Tanaka's mesh of glowing dots and globes to the performance space, and decide which side of the stage you want to sit on: far or near.

The air in SomArts' space is a curious mix--a surreal stage world set into the sounds of real life. Sitting in the audience, you can hear the rush of cars speeding along the freeway overhead. There's the quiet echo of the voice of a guy at the front desk answering a phone call, and the opening quartet--for Takami, along with Monique Tajiri Goldwater, Mai Shimizu and Roberta Marguerite Chavez-- is lit only by the greenish glow of the two EXIT signs.

Slowly though, the freeway noises blend seamlessly into an atmospheric sound bed, and almost by accident, you are subsumed into a post-industrial forest. The women mirror each other, playing out episodes, some near and some far from the point of view of each side of the audience, and they pass through the space like ghosts passing through a looking glass.

Did you know it takes you eyes thirty minutes to adjust to the darkness? Thirty minutes, I think, is probably a good length for a butoh piece. For the--admittedly small--number of butoh pieces I've seen, I feel as though any longer and it becomes too difficult to sustain the concept. Illusion 2 is a little like my chess game, strong opener, but a bit weak on its middle game. At the manic duet between wildly giggling women I felt like we had somehow lost the concept of illusion.

Still, Illusion 2--which runs a little over an hour--has a lot going for it, especially in the visuals, with spectacular set pieces by Kana Tanaka that are well lit by Stephen Siegel. A marshland of glass stalks separate the upper and lower parts of the stage, while dangling rotating cones drift in circles, reflecting rings of light like a laserium show across the audience and stage alike, giving the impression of both fragility and ethereality to the whole piece.

A dancer pushes a rondel of cut glass and shards of dichroic filters into a pool of light and the play of colors it casts onto a screen ignites my mammalian fascination with bright, shiny things. Like Olafur Eliasson's mirrored geometric fantasies, Tanaka's light puzzles have a life of their own, one which transcends awkward, contrived moments (to get the rondel to the other side of the stage, two dancers have to haul the art piece up the steps, trying artfully to maintain butoh style in the process.)

On the whole, though, this is a tighter, more streamlined piece than the earlier Illusion, which I saw at Project Artaud last season. Most effective are moments when one half of the audience is able to observe and therefore comprehend only part of the illusion, an apt metaphor for life. I wouldn't like to give away the ending, which I found jarring, and perhaps unnecessary, but the final images left me with a lasting sense of disquieting serenity.

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Theater Review: "Benedictus"

An Israeli arms dealer and an Iranian politician walk into a convent in Rome. No, it's not a joke, it's the premise of "Benedictus," a collaborative effort by artists from Israel, Iran and the United States, which had its premiere Monday at Potrero Hill's Thick House Theater.

Inspired by an event at the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005 - a widely reported handshake between Israeli President Moshe Katsav, a Persian Jew, and Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, both of whom were born in the Iranian province of Yazd - "Benedictus" imagines a secret meeting in Rome between childhood friends, now enemies, on the eve of an American invasion of Iran.

Read more on the Chronicle site.

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KQED's Spark: Profile of Delroy Lindo

Charismatic, versatile and eloquently formidable, the Delroy Lindo that most audiences know is a dynamic force on both stage and screen. Whether playing manic West Indian Harlem numbers-runner Archie in Spike Lee's "Malcolm X" or sympathetic jazz musician and father Woody Carmichael in "Crooklyn," Lindo's sensitivity and ability to uncover what makes people tick has long been admired. A prolific actor, Lindo has been in more than 45 films and television shows as well as dozens of stage productions...

Read more on KQED.org.

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KQED Profile: Mark Jackson

From Stanislavsky to the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour --where movement intersects with drama is the primary interest of writer, director and actor Mark Jackson, one of the Bay Area's most exciting and original young playwrights.

A graduate of San Francisco State University's Theater Arts program, Jackson's brand of physical theater integrates the kind of theories of gesture and biomechanics that he studied under Gennadi Bogdanov and at the Saratoga International Theater Institute with a modern sensibility to create dramatic works that update age-old ideas of theater and present them in a fresh light to new audiences.

Jackson first came to widespread critical attention when he founded San Francisco's Art Street Theater in 1995. For Art Street, he created seven new plays in his nine-year stint as the company's artistic director, including I Am Hamlet, for which he won his first Bay Area Critic's Circle Award in 2002. Jackson's reinventions of classic plays, such as R&J and Io, Princess of Argos! drew inspiration from sources as varied as Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, but also honed a flair for perceptive commentary on contemporary society.

For his acclaimed Death of Meyerhold which premiered in 2003 at Berkeley's Shotgun Players, Jackson turned to the work of legendary and revolutionary theater director Vselovod Meyerhold to craft a powerful, and heady mix of dance, commedia, kabuki, and circus.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

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KQED Profile: Carlos Baron

A childhood in Chile marked by both the lyricism of Pablo Neruda's poetic legacy and the violence of the Pinochet regime flavors the experiences that poet and playwright Carlos Baron has brought to his writings over decades as an exile from his homeland.

After studying sociology and theater arts at UC Berkeley in the late 1960s and early 70s, Baron returned to briefly to Chile to defend the Salvador Allende government, for which he was imprisoned. Upon returning to the Bay Area, in 1975 he helped to found the La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, a cultural meeting ground for Chilean exiles, where he was the first Cultural Coordinator. As a poet and a professional storyteller, Baron's impassioned work has appeared throughout the world at festivals in Cuba, Chile, and the US.

Multiculturalism and Latino theater remain primary interests for Baron, who was also the theater and dance coordinator for the Mission Cultural Center and founder and first artistic director of San Francisco's Teatro Latino. As a professor of theater arts at San Francisco State University, Baron has not only helped to expand La Raza and multicultural studies at the university, but also directs the University's Teatro Arcoiris, or Rainbow Theater, a multicultural theater workshop.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

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Theater Review : Emperor Norton, The Musical

The spirit of rugged individualism is the very lifeblood of San Francisco. It's the kind of place where Starchild can run for County Supervisor, where we not only put a measure to impeach President Bush on the ballot, but dozens of people will go out to Ocean Beach in mid-winter and lie upon the sand to spell the words "IMPEACH" with their bodies. I like to think of it as a city of the grand flourish.

And ever has the City by the Bay been this way, it appears. The city's slogan, "Find Yourself Here," was never more applicable than to the epic figure of San Franciscan Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States, who ruled the nation from his seat of power, a little place on Commercial Street between Kearny and Montgomery. And for those not familiar with the man who was once one of San Francisco's most beloved figures, Kim Ohanneson and Marty Axelrod have devised a rough-hewn tribute to Emperor Norton I, Emperor Norton, The Musical, which runs through April 1 at the tiny Shelton Theater off Union Square.

The production, which had its origins as a cabaret act is undeniably cheesy -- and long -- with a handmade look about it. Painted flats of scenes from the Hyde Street pier or Tadich Grill simply lean against the back wall and the 12-member cast barely fits on the postage stamp sized stage. With little room backstage at the Shelton, the divan that you see in the lobby at intermission makes its way onto stage in the second act. There's a whiff of the sense that this show had roots in a group of pals goofing off and yet there's also something good humored and heartwarming about what is obviously a labor-of-love project. The folksy numbers are cute and despite -- no, perhaps because of -- its amateur moments, it somehow fits the quirky DIY story of the Emp, as he was more familiarly known.

Read more on KQED.org's Arts & Culture site.

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Theater Review: "Homeland"

"Holy smokes, it's the story of my life," I thought during the first act of Homeland, Jay Kuo's terrific new musical, which has been workshopped at the New Conservatory Theatre and arrived as a semi-staged production at the Magic Theatre over the weekend.

A followup to his successful romantic comedy, Insignificant Others, Homeland finds Kuo again mining the local landscape and coming up with a gem of a bittersweet tale about love blooming in the rarefied world of San Francisco.

It's a curious thing that happens quite often in the Bay Area -- a place where I'm startled if I run into a bona fide, born-and-bred local. No matter where we're from though, somehow we all wind up discovering "families" for ourselves. You know the family I mean -- the one with your crazy left wing activist friend, the struggling artist you met in a coffee shop, your wild and crazy, newly-freed-from-the-closet pal, and various interesting and probably left-leaning others. Kuo has built Homeland around just such an extended family, in this case, a loosely-banded guerilla street theater group. As a love story and a tale of the divisive politics of this current generation, it will no doubt connect to audiences at many levels, but for the Bay Area crowd, it will be doubly poignant, because it tells the stories of the people that you and I know -- maybe even the stories of our own lives. And as with all the best musicals, the circumstances in which our heroes find themselves might be farcical, even far-fetched, but it doesn't matter at all, because the characters ring true.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

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Theater Review : "The Forest War"

When art speaks truth, it hurts, and it never hurts so much as in Mark Jackson's stylish new play The Forest War, which runs through January 14 at the Shotgun Players' Ashby Stage in Berkeley.

Written and directed with imaginative flair, The Forest War comes in the form of Japanese Kabuki theater, from the choreographed stylized stage movements and tableaux, to Valera Coble's beautifully-textured elaborate costumes, to Jackson's formalized, rhythmic dialogue. It's a classic jidai geki, or Japanese period drama, addressing themes that are timeless and in this case, all too familiar.

The Forest War of the title has been prosecuted by the aging Grand Lord Karug, played by Drew Anderson, and after a decade, the long battles have decimated the country and demoralized its citizens. In theory, the war has been won, and Karug decides to pass the leadership to the peaceable Lord Kulan (Cassidy Brown) instead of his belligerent son, Lord Kain (Kevin Clarke). Thus the stage is set for your classic father/son power struggle. Read into it what you will.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

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Theater Review: Stew's "Passing Strange"

"Stew" is a great moniker for the rock musician-poet-filmmaker, all-around-performing-artist, whose Passing Strange made its bow last week at Berkeley Rep. He's a rich mix of flavors, a bubbling cauldron of ideas and talents, and his latest effort, which takes an autobiographical look at his development as a young black musician, is a kind of spicy recipe based on his life. Some of the ingredients might seem improbable, but the final dish is worth savoring.

Passing Strange takes its title from Othello's description of how he won Desdemona's heart. But as with much of the wordsmithy in this play -- which Stew and partner Heidi Rodewald first developed at the Sundance Institute and which will move on to New York's Public Theater after the Berkeley run -- "passing" is meant to encompass numerous other meanings: passing for white or passing for black, being passed up, passing through, passing on. The word itself has a sense of restlessness that is reflected in the rhythm of the play as well as the music, as it follows Stew's youthful escapades -- a Baptist upbringing in LA and coming of age amidst rarefied surroundings in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Read more on the KQED Arts & Culture site.

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Theater Review : Theatre of Yugen: Noh Pressure Cooker

First let me say that I'm all for the trying. The Noh Pressure Cooker Festival, which ran over three weekends in October, is meant to offer a range of new works by the NOHSpace's resident troupe Theatre of Yugen. Now in its 28th season, this active group of performers studies a variety of techniques centered around the venerable 600-year old Japanese theater form, but their focus in the Pressure Cooker Festival is new work and contemporary stories. Anyone wandering in looking for a classical Noh version of The Tale of Genji is in the wrong place.

If the air of experimentation is admirable, however, the execution still leaves something of a slapdash feeling. Enthusiasm for their work obviously informed the three pieces on display on the second weekend, but the overall impression was that these were works-in-progress that, for the most part, were just not thoroughly thought out.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

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Theater Review: Mother Courage/As You Like It

What a difference good sound and lighting can make to a show. It may sound like the blinking obvious, but when you see the good stuff, you realize how much it elevates a production.

Take the recent shows from Berkeley Rep and Cal Shakes -- Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Shakespeare's As You Like It, respectively -- both of which present smooth, professional results from what can be self-consciously theatrical material. Minor quibbles aside, both shows leave you in a thoroughly satisfied mood and a huge part of that is the effect of the setting, the lights and the music.

Interestingly enough, the talented Alexander V. Nichols designed the lighting for both shows, and for both, Gina Leishman created original scores. Well, gifted professionals are always in demand, especially when their work makes you look so good.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

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Theater Review : Super Vision

The Netizens of the world are in the midst of an identity crisis -- there is more information publicly available about each of us, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we have less to fear from the government's Echelon agencies snooping on our reading lists than we do from Amazon.com's patented shopper profiling technology. Heck, even the government is turning to the online giants to get its info. AOL recently ignited a firestorm by making public a detailed record of their users' online searches. They didn't have names attached to the searches, but the New York Times found it almost laughably easy to identify user No. 4417749 simply by analyzing what subjects she searched on.

This mounting identity crisis is precisely the subject of Super Vision, an elegantly, beautiful and disquieting multimedia production by The Builder's Association and studio dbox, which I caught at the Yerba Buena Center forthe Arts. Mixing cutting-edge computer technology with real-time action, it's a show that makes a powerful impact, visually and viscerally.

Read more on KQED.org's Art & Culture site.

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Theater Review: "Permanent Collection" at the Aurora Theatre

I remember the first time I was ever drunk on art. Early in my college career, my Dad called. He was coming to Philadelphia by train and we were going to visit a mysterious place that a friend had told us about called the Barnes Foundation. He secured an appointment and I met him at the station in Merion, PA, about ten minutes outside of Philly on what is familiarly known as "the Mainline."

To get to the Barnes, you must pass the kind of immense mansions and neatly manicured estates that inspired Agnes Nixon to create the people and places of soap operas like All My Children and One Life to Live.

"What the heck is inside this place, anyhow?" we wondered as we walked through the Doric portico decorated with tiles of clearly African motif. Inside? A treasure trove of not just African but Egyptian, Greek, and Navajo art, not to mention some 181 paintings by Renoir, 46 Picassos, 59 Matisses, and more Cezannes than I had ever seen in my entire life. It was like seeing hundreds of old friends -- ones you'd known for years, but had never seen before. We had entered the playhouse of Dr. Albert C. Barnes, educator, art collector, and something of a cranky old codger.

That was back in the early nineties, shortly before the history of this mind-bogglingly priceless art collection took the tragic turn documented in Thomas Gibbons' intriguing play Permanent Collection.

Read more on KQED.org's Arts & Culture site.

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KQED Profile: headRush

The Oakland-based guerrilla performance group headRush is serious when it comes to taking their message to the streets. You can find them performing their brief but high-energy sketches not only in theaters, festivals and cafés, but also on sidewalks and in parking lots. The group brings its brand of urban poetry and satire to audiences wherever it finds them.

The brainchild of a trio of teacher-actors -- Rosa González, Simón Hanukai and Xago (Luís Juarez) -- headRush debuted at Oakland's Jahva House in September 2003. Calling themselves a "psycho-politico spoken-word theater crew," González, Hanukai and Juarez hoped to exhort and incite their viewers out of passivity using Chicano "teatro," a satirical agitprop style made popular in the 1960s by Luís Valdez and the farmworkers' El Teatro Campesino. Setting up wherever there is space to move, headRush's off-the-cuff improvisations and audience involvement recall the immediacy of Campesino's "actos," or one-act plays, which might have been performed on the back of flatbed truck or on a picket line.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

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Theater Review: Bigger Than Jesus

Rick Miller
“Bigger Than Jesus”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley
Jun 20-24, 2006
Nobody has more issues than a lapsed Catholic. “All of the guilt, with none of the calories,” is what one of my friends used to say.

And lapsed Catholics lurk everywhere. I myself wanted to be a nun when I was nine years old. Maybe it was the ritual, the easily memorized litanies and the clear-cut rules that appeal to those at that first level of Piaget’s stage of moral development. No doubt my lapsed Catholic father was very much relieved when I stopped serving pretend Masses with Necco Wafers and talking about taking the veil.

Rick Miller’s one man show “Bigger than Jesus” -- which plays this weekend at Zellerbach Playhouse as part of Cal Performances’ season –reminded me of the view of religion that comes through childlike – which is not to say childish – eyes. I want to say it’s a naïve view, but not naïve in an ignorant sense, but rather in an innocent one.

Miller, a one man tour-de-force, gathered kudos for his “MacHomer” a Simpson’s-inspired telling of Macbeth, which Berkeley Rep presented earlier in the year. In Bigger Than Jesus” though, he delves into the story of the Messiah and the underpinnings of Christianity.

Loosely framed on a Catholic mass, Miller’s 75-minute play ranges across space and time, with Miller playing Jesus as, variously, a drawling professor-cum-Borscht Belt comedian, a proselytizing minister, and a hyperactive flight attendant. It’s a versatile performance that Miller reels off with deceptive ease, but like a child’s game of playing Mass, at the end it left me unmoved and oddly uninterested in asking any of the bigger questions like, Who is this God anyway?

Early on, we find ourselves at the start of Mass. Those with any kind of Catholic background found ourselves murmuring “Thanks be to God,” at appropriate moments, without even thinking about it. Someone speaking with priestly intonation in a darkened room and then pausing for our response – it just seemed natural.

The production itself, designed by Ben Chaisson and Beth Kates and directed by co-writer Daniel Brooks, is superb. A video screen in the back and a smooth white floor that doubles as a white board make a simple set, but Chaisson and Kates meld video and sound together to make the kind of seamless experience that is incredibly difficult to achieve. Live video cameras that feed real-time images merge with pre-recorded tape and live action with a skillfulness that eludes a lot of theater productions these days.

It’s a clever production, and Miller makes a genial host – never too pushy with ideas, always inclusive.

Often lurking under the rational skin of a lapsed Catholic is an undercurrent of rage, or at least indignation. But there’s no rancor to Miller’s performance and his journey plays more like a didactic lecture, rather than any kind of commentary. I wished he had a little more bite. His notes on the portrayal of the historical Jesus, the development of the Christian faith and its place in the world today aren’t new, by any means, and it felt as though he were perhaps a little afraid to utilize the fullness of sarcasm that I sensed lurking behind the words.

Still, Miller attacks the stage performance with phenomenal vigor and he can be raucously funny at times. At one point he prowls the house, planting a kiss on the mouth of a surprised man in the front row of the audience. He turns the camera on us and exhorts us to wave our arms ridiculously in the air as if we were at a revival meeting.

“Quick, get your arms up before he comes over here!” my husband hisses at me. “You saw him, he’s crazy!”

And a re-enactment of the Last Supper using a five-inch plastic Jesus action figure (I believe I’ve seen the package and it says that he has “poseable arms and wheels in his base for smooth gliding action”) bopping along to a send-up of “Gethsemane” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” is utterly hilarious.

But Miller can also be touchingly honest and open about his own confusion. Perhaps his best moments are the revealing ones, where we find out little snippets of what he himself believes. But so much of the show is him not being Rick Miller that I began to wonder if he were afraid to directly address his own religious confusion.

In the end, the bigger questions were still there, waiting to be asked.

This review originally appeared on KQED.org.

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KQED Profile: Basil Twist

“Puppetry is much deeper than people give it credit because it’s about life and death and what is the frontier there.”

-- Basil Twist

A San Francisco native, Basil Twist first became interested in puppetry through his mother, who was president of the San Francisco Puppeteers Guild. After stints working with designer and Broadway director Julie Taymor and the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in New York's Central Park, Twist became the first American to study at France's École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette.

He lives in New York's Greenwich Village, where he dreams up his shows and constructs puppets in a basement workshop. Spark caught up with Twist in San Francisco, where he was collaborating with dancer Joe Goode and playwright Paula Vogel to stage "The Long Christmas Ride Home" at the Magic Theatre.

Twist first made a splash in 1995 with "The Araneidae Show." Since then, he has won a Bessie Award for the show and been nominated for a Drama Desk Award for "Tell Tale." Though well versed in traditional forms, Twist often creates his own blended styles, pushing boundaries to adapt them to new theatrical expectations.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

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