Deeds & Words

The Carolina Chocolate Drops played at the Mystic Theater on Easter Sunday. The band plays roots music; 1920s black blues, jug band and string band music, jigs, reels, and Scottish airs.  Rhiannon Giddens and Dom Flemons are the founding members. I heard one of their songs on the KRSH last year, and then, when I went to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, I missed them by two days apparently. Well! Not this time.

The Mystic is a wonderful music venue; a former movie palace remodeled. On the first floor, most of the seats have been taken out to make room for a dance floor and a bar. There are seats along the sides, though, and about 75 seats in the balcony. Those seats are terrible; one seat had fabric stretched over empty space and no cushioning whatsoever. A row of old-school folding metal chairs had been added down at the very front. I didn’t care that the seats were bad. The space is pretty, and the acoustics were limpid.

The David Wax Museum Band opened for the Chocolate Drops.  A trio, Dave, Suz and Greg, they had some nice three-part harmonies and wonderful energy. Dave and Suz are the core of that band. Suz plays the fiddle and the jawbone (which, I confess, I didn’t know was an actual percussive instrument), and sings. Greg plays guitar, sings, and plays a percussion instrument. David Wax Museum plays historical Mexican and Mexo-American folk music and some original compositions.  They came out and sang a song called” Jalopy Heart.” I didn’t care for it very much — their harmonies seemed off and the instruments overpowered the voices. David stepped up to the other microphone, while Suz gestured to the sound guy, and suddenly, on the next song, they were much better. They invited Rhiannon and Dom to join them on two songs. Halfway through their forty-five minute set they walked off the stage and wandered through the crowd, playing and singing. David apparently sprinted up the stairs, because he appeared in the balcony, playing the mandolin and singing a lament. Then he rejoined Suz and they segued into a reel.

The Chocolate Drops played a much longer set, and I had to leave before the concert was over (work the next day), so I missed “Jelly Roll,” and “Hit ‘em Up Style.” I did get to hear “Trouble on Your Mind,” which they opened with, “I am a Country Girl,” and an exuberant 1920s Ethel Waters blues song about divorce, called “I’m No Man’s Mama.” The song is hilarious, and Rhiannon belts it out. She plays fiddle and banjo and probably some other instruments, and she sings; low and melancholy or brassy and belting. Dom plays banjo, guitar and the bones. HubbyJenkins plays guitar, mandolin, banjo, and bones. Leyla McCalla is an exquisite cellist with a lovely voice who helps on back-up vocals. They were relaxed, funny, and completely on.

I learned all kinds of interesting things. For instance, I hadn’t known that the banjo was inspired by an African instrument. I couldn’t figure out why roots bands, especially African American bands, played so many reels and jigs until the Chocolate Drops explained about the crossover between poor Scottish immigrants and children of slaves. There’s also just something basic about the music of regular people — folk music.

Rhiannon had some trouble with the minstrel banjo. This instrument had a lower tone; she was going to accompany Dom on a song, but she lost the tuning about a third of the way through. So, she just played it like it was a drum, tapping out a rhythm on the soundbox. It was an awesome piece of music, totally extemporaneous.

IF you get to see them, do it.

It’s August in sunny California, so of course we dressed for the summer; the Sig-O had his shearling vest and I had a jacket and gloves.  People had down parkas, sleeping bags, hats, gloves and scarves.  This is how you dress to watch Shakespeare in the Park in my town. 

The Summer Social, the Rep’s fundraiser, provided dinner and a play for $40/person. You got all the fine wine you could drink and a picnic basket that held a Caesar salad with chicken, a roll and Cowgirl Creamery (Redwood Hill Farms) goat cheese, an Asian pear and some grapes, breadsticks and a package of three specialty cookies.  The baskets were donated by a local realtor. 

Dinner, with wine and dessert, and a play, for $40 a person is a pretty good deal! 

The odds are good, in a town this size, that we will run into someone we know.  I saw Lonna and John Necker almost immediately.  Lonna and I shared an office when we were staff trainers together about a decade ago.  John ran his own electrical contracting business.  They are both retired and I have run into them at other Rep shows.  We ended up sitting with them at dinner.  A little later the Sig-O ran into Bruce Nachtigall and his wife Pam.  Bruce and the Sig-O had a Boy Scout connection.  Bruce’s Kiwanis group sponsored the Sig-O’s troop and every year at the Apple Blossom Fair, the troop (and the Sig-O) would help out at the Kiwanis booth.  For the Sig-O, this meant barbecuing chicken, nine hours a day for two days.  Then he would come home and run his glasses through the dishwasher to get the grease off.  No joke. 

One Disaster

No beer!  Last year Lagunitas provided free beer for those patrons who aren’t wine lovers.  And yes, there are some.  This year, none! This is a serious oversight that must be corrected.

Going Once. . .

Lee Farris, rodeo bull-rider and golf course owner in town acted as the auctioneer.  Because of his rodeo background, he had real auctioneer experience.  The auction seemed a bit sluggish compared to last year, but Lee’s auctioneer patter added authenticity.  Someone spontaneously put up a $500 matching donation, and that spurred a flurry of waving hands.  I think they made $1200 on that transaction alone. 

At the end, an audience member asked Lee to auction off a round of golf, with him, at his golf course, and Lee agreed.  John Necker nearly leaped out of his chair, he was so excited.  And he won!  

The Play’s the Thing

 And then the play started.  It’s A Comedy of Errors.  Shakespeare serves up the dish that has become a staple for prime time one-hourdramas and daytime serial television—twins, separated at birth.  This is Shakespeare, so he isn’t going to be a piker and give us one measley pair of twins. Oh, no.  Two sets of identical twins are separated shortly after birth, one twin of each set being raised together as slave and master, unaware of their other halves.  One set ends up in the commercial city of Ephesus while the other is raised in Syracusa.  When the Syracusa master and man go to Ephesus on business, the fun starts. 

I snuggled into my fleece jacket, rested my head on the Sig-O’s shoulder, sipped my Pinot Gris, and let the games begin.

At the beginning of the Rep’s production of MacBeth, a doll-like clown with a lacy mob cap and ruffled petticoats tiptoes onto the stage, followed by a colorful ragamuffin clown.  As they watch, a traitorous Scot is executed and his body thrown at their feet.  Once King Duncan and his men leave the stage, the clowns reanimate the dead man, who becomes, with his swaying torso and perpetual sly smile, a jack-in-the-box clown. 

These are the three witches. 

As other characters die—this is Macbeth after all—they morph into clowns.  The clowns bring a chilly otherworldliness to a play already filled with oracles, omens, ghosts, and the hallucinations of guilty minds. 

The rest of the production is traditional, which makes the inclusion of the clown witches, who also function as bit players such as the assassins, even more sinister and strange.  It is a weird choice in a weird play and it works well. 

Most of the rest of the play works well also. The set seems simpler than it is, and the gaily painted timbers, alternating blue, white, red, yellow and green, make sense once you understand the Carnival of Souls subtext.  One wall is painted red, covered with mirrors in various types of old metal frames.  It’s evocative and powerful.  Most of the performances are good and some are very good, although I wish the director had spent a little more time on the interpretation of the characters.  Scott D Phillips is powerful as Macbeth but I would like to see him as Macbeth unleashed; the role was too constrained by the mannered choreography, especially in the scenes between him and Rebecca Pingree as Lady Macbeth.  Pingree is luminous, but stalks around the stage more like an interpretive dancer than like the loving, murderous woman Lady Macbeth is.  Phillips doesn’t let the role go without a fight; we see the undeniable gleam of envy on his face when he talks about Banquo—who he is going to have killed—because Banquo has a son.  Macbeth has a wife who is fearless, loyal and passionate, but they have no children, and it does seem that this is one of Macbeth’s motivations for the murders he orders.  Phillips also lets us see Macbeth’s toxic pride when he criticizes Duncan’s choice of heir; Duncan’s son Malcolm, even though as the king’s son he is the obvious choice. 

 I was disappointed that Lady Macbeth acts like a lap-dancer in their first scene together, running over Macbeth’s brief—so brief!—struggle with his conscience and making the regicide seem like a man who is both henpecked and sexually manipulated.  This is not fair to either of the Macbeths.  They are partners, loving monsters, accomplices in a horrid crime and an appalling betrayal of trust.  Macbeth’s act would be treason wherever he had chosen to do it; to kill the king who sleeps under your roof, under your protection, is somehow a more heinous act. To drug his attendants and then smear the dead king’s blood on their hands and faces is another kind of act all together, one Macbeth’s loyal, loving and fiendish wife is willing to do for him.

 Jack Halton, as Duncan and then as a clown who speaks only in falsetto, does a fine job, and I was drawn to Banquo, played by Matthew Proschold, who comes back as a hobo clown.  The most chilling of the clowns was Sonya Smith; a warm, caring Lady MacDuff, rocking her new babe in her arms as she tries to make sense of her husband’s apparent treason, shifts into a fey, flirtatious clown swinging her dead baby as if she were a child and it a doll.  One of the best moments comes near the end of the play when MacDuff (Tim Redmond), about to leave the stage, pauses and glances back.  There is no one alive on the stage, only clowns, only ghosts.  He seems to make eye contact with the one who would have been his wife.  She smiles.  It is not the smile of a sweet and loving wife. 

The dead, the clowns, are citizens of another country. They are the shadow dwellers.  Macbeth is not driven solely by ambition; but by envy and wounded pride.  His wife’s loyalty to him turns down a dark and twisted road.  Strength, courage and energy are put to vile and evil purposes. Prophecies are not what they seem to be. And at the end, what is left are the dead. 

Director Jon Tracey cut the play quite a bit, another fine tradition.  I have to admit I missed, “What?  All my chicks, and their dam, in one fell swoop?” from MacDuff, but that’s a personal preference.  The shorter version keeps the action moving.  You won’t be bored. 

The show runs from July 7 through July 25 at Lives Park.  Bring a jacket.

“In heaven they serve beer for breakfast.”  Loudon Wainwright III

“Dad’s in a bad mood/Dad’s got the blues.”  Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is a guitar god.

Loudon Wainwright III is more of a trickster god, like Coyote or Raven, bringing the audience songs, story-telling, acerbic humor.  When the two team up for duets, magical fire fills the air.

First of all, the venue; the newly renovated Uptown Theater in Napa.  This 1920’s era movie palace has been lovingly restored and is a thing of beauty.  The curved ceiling is painted, including odd medallions with portraits of women’s faces in them; all of the same type, but each slightly different.  I couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be old movie stars or just some idealized It Girls.  The colored glass chandeliers have an Arts and Crafts look to them, and the wall sconces, of rich burnt-orange glass, have the familiar V-shape from the 1930s.  Curlicues of lavishly painted plaster or wood grace the walls.  The stage is surrounded by detailed Art Nouveau designs. The seats were comfortable enough that I wasn’t consciously aware that I was sitting for a two-hour performance.

The $600,000 sound system didn’t hurt either. 

Wainwright played first.  From the first two lines of his first song (“All I can do is play this song,”) he engaged the audience.  He’s a story-teller and a clown, self-deprecating, insightful and wry.  His third song was a charming ditty about how, in the afterlife, you must be able to do all the fun things that were supposedly bad for you in this life; smoke, drink, have sex.  “In heaven, no one says ‘No.’”  The chorus contained the line, “In heaven, they serve beer for breakfast,” which drew a breaker-wave of applause from the audience.

He also writes songs that are thoughtful and personal, such as the touching “The First Loudon,” where he ruminates on what he knows about his grandfather, and what traits have come down through his father’s line, and the eerie “Dead Man’s Closet,” inspired by his father’s death. There is a disturbingly ambiguous line in “The First Loudon.”  Wainwright is looking at a photo and remarks on his grandfather’s “half-clenched fist.”  He says he doesn’t need a picture, because he saw that fist every day.  Later, he comments on his own half-clenched fist.  It’s a haunting line—is it merely the recognition of the hands, or an allusion to legacy of family violence? I guess to really know, I’d have to listen to his son’s Rufus Wainwright’s songs.

He also had a thoughtful and sweet song about the dynamics of becoming a grandfather.  At the other end of the continuum, he played the ukulele to accompany himself on the song “Lucky You,” based on the Carl Hiaassen book which has been turned into a play—and sang a bitter and hilarious number about a woman named “Susie” who works at the Durango airport and mistreated his guitar.  Usually, I don’t appreciate rants or songs that use the word “bitch” over and over; in this case, by the end of the song, I was leaning back in my seat laughing helplessly. My friend Kathleen leaned over and said, “I think we all know a Susie.”

At one point after an instrumental bridge in one song, he said, “Whenever I try a guitar riff in a Loud and Rich show, I feel like an idiot.” This drew tremendous applause.

A few minutes after that, Thompson wandered out and they played two blues numbers together.

Wainwright has two new CDs out.  One is called High, Wide and Handsome and he sang the title song.  The other is Songs for the New Depression and most of these are social-commentary.  “Cash for Clunkers” was the best audience sing-along.

Thompson is a bit more reserved, engaging more with his music, at first, than the audience. If you consider the performance as a triangle; performer, music, audience, Wainwright somehow went to the audience first, and brought us back to the music.  Thompson went through the music to get to us.  I know that’s lame, but I don’t know how else to describe it.  As the set went on, he warmed up, but there was always a bit of formality in his interaction that was missing from the trickster who played before him.

Thompson can play music that sounds like thirteenth-entury troubadour material to 1970s vintage hard rock; all on one acoustic guitar. He had just played a slow number—I’m thinking it was “Sunset Song”—when a person down front yelled out a song request.  I didn’t hear what it was.  Thompson said, “Yes.  Thank you.”  The guy yelled it again.  Thompson hesitated, and said, “Yes, I will.  There’s just this, this thing I want to do first,” tuned up his guitar and launched into “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”  At one of the bridges, he went into the standard “Black Lightning” guitar riff, then shifted the tempo and played blues.  It should not have worked, but it did.  After a minute or so of blues magic he brought back the sweet, laddered musical phrase that is the intro to “Black Lightning,” and finished the song. 

Lots of Thompson’s material is dark, whether it’s “Cold Kisses,” about a man secretly going through his lover’s things while she is out, comparing himself to the pictures of former lovers, or “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me,” a driving hard-rock song about the war in Iraq.  “Dad” is short for Bagdad. (“Nobody wants me here; nobody loves me here; Dad’s gonna kill me.”)   As Thompson put it, “All my songs are miserable, but at least some are slow and some are up-tempo.”

Continuing the social-commentary theme, Thompson played his song about Wall Street; “The Money Shuffle.”

For the encore, they played three songs together, included a Grateful Dead song and “Smoky Joe’s Café.”  These are distinct, disparate artists, but there is rapport and respect between them, and together they created synergy in the classic definition of that term. 

Great show.

The Sonoma County Rep e-mailed me to ask if they could print out my comments and tape them in the window like they do with reviews.  I was delighted!  I’ll ignore the fact that this probably means that the show is not getting much attention from the Press Democrat or other news and entertainment sources.  I felt very proud.  The picture is not very good; mine is the second article, the one without the picture.  And they spelled my name right!

The Sig-O was a scoutmaster for 19 years, and this meant he spent one week every summer with his troop at scout camp.  Friday evening I would leave work early and drive up to see the final campfire and watch his troop get their merit badges and their awards (they always won awards).  Of course, at that final campfire, the staff also performed the compulsory Staff Skit. 

Staff skits had certain things you could count on; boys in drag, lots of topical references and in-jokes, and a high degree of energy. Those cool evenings under the redwoods, listening to the bullfrogs bell and watching the skit, are some of my favorite summer memories. 

I say this so that you’ll understand that when I say The Complete World of Sports, (Abridged), currently playing at the Sonoma County Repertory Theater (the Rep) is like a two-hour camp staff skit, I mean it in a really good way. 

Comedy is difficult. The controlled pandemonium that is  Sports is practically a triumph of engineering; a swirling, perfectly blended contraption of puns, physical comedy, topical comedy, improvisation and audience participation.  Yes, they bring up the lights and interact with the audience three times and even bring audience members onto the stage to assist in the performance at one point.  You can only do this successfully if you have complete faith in your material, your actors and your audience. 

Dodds Delzell, Ben Stowe and Chad Yarish are the three leads, playing sportscasters in the first televised “Abridge-athon,” in which they plan to cover every sport on every continent, throughout history, in just under two hours.  They claim this will be 3,000 sports—in fact they give an exact number that ends with a fraction, but I can’t remember it.  And I think they do it. The three of them are absolutely wonderful; each different and each great. 

Delzell is the ex-jock sportscaster, a sports-partisan whose cultural insensitivity and political incorrectness annoy other two.  Stowe is the “eye candy who knows nothing about sports,” and Yarish is the book-learned intellectual. In addition to these characters, they shift into various other characterizations with each bit. A bit of emotional tension is added as Stowe, who does not want  to cover the Olympics, keeps trying to derail the production so they won’t have to.  Yarish then informs us that they have gotten a note from their lawyers that they can’t call it the Olympics, so they must refer to their final “montage”—I know that’s not a stage term but there’s no other way to describe it—as “Olympish.” 

In addition to intense physical action, spouting thousands of words of memorized dialog, conducting lightning-fast costume changes (okay, well, it’s mostly props, but still) and clambering around on ladders backstage in order to appear in the cutout “screens” that adorn the back wall, our three stalwarts also sing. There’s singing! 

The laughter shifts through the audience as references resonate for different age groups or sport aficionados, but it never stops from the time the show opens. 

I attended a staged reading of this production, which included some of the blocking but few of the props used last night.  It was still funny, but our reaction was that it needed tightening, and the writers heeded that message.   Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, who wrote All the Great Books, Abridged, and several other “abridged” plays, do extensive research. They have a gift for comic timing and great ears for dialogue, managing to make the performances seem spontaneous and even easy. 

There is some sexual material; a condom joke and a bit about gay athletes so parents, be aware. I think kids over eleven or so will find this show hilarious. 

As a bonus, the guys give us a standard with which to determine whether something is a sport or merely a game.  “It’s a sport,” Chad, decked out in Scottish golfing togs, tells us, “if it’s covered on ESPN.”  By their own measure, then, the writers committed an egregious oversight.  They included a cheerleading reference but they did not include cheerleading competitions and dance team competitions.  This is terrible!  And if I hadn’t been so exhausted from laughing when I left, I would have complained to someone about it.

Sunday the Sig-O and I went to hear the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers play at the Jackson Theater.  They played for about two and a half hours, a very lively show if you like Celtic music.  Alasdair Fraser, the founder of the group, was unable to be with them for this concert because of a death in the family. This is their annual concert, and it was plain they missed him, but they did a wonderful job.  A brother and sister team from Seattle, Ryan and Cali McKasson, who participated as kids in one of Fraser’s Valley of the Moon music camps, dropped everything and flew down to join the group in Alasdair’s place. 

About 120 musicians filled the stage; fiddlers, cellists, bassists, guitarists, flautists, and drummers.  And a couple of Celtic dancers.  The McIntosh Pipe Band piped them in. 

The story of this music is that sometime in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, the British banned native music in Scotland.  Like all good tyrants, the British knew that songs, art and story-telling spelled trouble for them because they play on emotion and are helpful tools in fomenting rebellion.  Many Scots fled Scotland.  Some came to the Appalachians, some moved to Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.  They brought the music with them, and kept the original, “real” Scottish music alive, while back at home it got homogenized and “blanded out” by the English influence. At least, that’s the Scottish-style fiddlers say.

What’s it like?  It’s meant to be jigged to, waltzed to, clapped and stomped to. When it’s mournful, it’s really mournful, because that bow can drag out a low quavering note in a way you can’t drag out a guitar or bass note.  It’s full of verve and drama. It’s fire and earth with a good beat, and dancing in the aisles is encouraged.

You’ll either be vastly entertained or terribly frustrated by Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone.  The key to your reaction will be in the first five minutes of the play.  If you decide to accept Jean’s motivation and her actions in those early moments, you will have no trouble suspending disbelief for the rest of the performance.  And you will have to suspend disbelief.

Write-ups describe the play as surreal and non-linear.  I think it’s purely linear, but then I read science fiction.  It is surreal.  In fact, if anything it tries a little too hard to be surreal. It is also funny, weird, dark in spots, and very sweet, with a sweet ending.

The set uses a large screen at the back with various images projected onto it to augment the scenes.  Umbrellas predominate, and umbrellas are a recurring theme in the play.  Umbrellas, and cell phones.  Red umbrellas and the color red figure prominently in the sets and the costuming.  I don’t know why, exactly, I just know it works.

The acting made this show for me.  As always, Scott D. Phillips turned in a smooth and generous performance as Gordon, the dead man.  Hey, just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you don’t get lines.  Gordon is a bad and selfish person, but there has to be something to like about him, and Phillips helps us find it.  I take Scott Phillips for granted.  I always expect a performance that’s better than just good, and he never disappoints, and I never say enough about that. And I haven’t here either, really, but someday I will.

Bronwen Shears, so hissably evil as Milady in last year’s Three Musketeers has a different problem.  She is awesome, but her character is a caricature, a blend of Natasha Fatale and Jessica Rabbit.  This is intentional and Shears plays it to the top, but I miss the chance to see more subtlety from her.  (I wish the play had allowed for selfish Gordon and sinister Other Woman to have some scenes together—they would have been tense and hilarious.) Shears is still great.  “And I can walk in these shoes,” is one of the best-delivered lines in the play.

Edward McCloud plays Dwight, Gordon’s neglected younger brother, with honesty and vulnerability, and he’s sexy. 

The three performers who tear up the scenery are Elena Wright, Mollie Boice and Priscilla Locke as Jean, Mrs. Gottlieb and Hermia respectively. Locke, as Gordon’s widow, does one of the best drunk scenes ever.  Ever!  Mollie Boice is a force of nature as his eccentric mother.  Many actresses would not be able to rise above the moth-eaten fox stole, the overdone make-up and the hat with the fingertip veil and the pheasant feathers, but Boice wears the costume, it does not wear her.

Jean is the pivotal character of the play, and Elena Wright informs her with innocence, imagination and a strange sense of obsession.  “Things that are ringing have to be answered, don’t they?  Don’t they?” she says, perhaps explaining her initiating actions.  Jean wants to make things—not things, the world—better, and she believes, or wants to believe, that things connect; people connect, voices connect, souls connect. Wright is luminous in this naïve and slightly dangerous role.

The Main Street Theater is tiny, so much of the action takes place in the aisles and right in front of the stage.  A little more action than usual, in the performance I saw.  During the dinner party scene, while Jean and Dwight were awkwardly getting to know each other, Jean’s wineglass tipped over, rolled in a half circle and fell to the floor, chiming as it shattered.  Wow, great sound effects!  It sounded like a real glass broke.  Awkwardly, Jean and Dwight struggled to clean it up, using his mother’s place cards and their red napkins, all the while talking about vegetables and stationary stores.  I’m thinking, “They break a glass every night?  That must get expensive.  It must be some kind of special fake prop-plastic.”  I moved my foot and it crunched on a piece of glass.  I picked it up.  Real glass, a piece about the length of a flash-drive.  In the next scene, Dwight and Jean sat on the edge of the stage, right in front of me, and lights winked off another big shard of glass, right by their hands.  This seemed. . . I don’t know, a little dangerous for the actors.

During intermission I asked one of the associates if the glass was part of the performance.  “Oh, yes, every night,” he said.

“I thought so,” I said.

He started laughing.  “No!  No, it wasn’t planned!  We all jumped when we heard it out here!  They’ll be delighted to hear you thought it was part of the play.”

To be fair, this play is probably easier to manage if you have trouble distinguishing performance from reality, as I apparently do.

Dead Man’s Cell Phone plays one more weekend.  If you like good acting and things that are out of the ordinary, check it out.  And if you find a dead man’s cell phone, you probably shouldn’t answer it.

http://www.the-rep.com

 (707) 823-0177

104 N Main Street, Sebastopol, CA  95472

M for Mystery Bookstore in San Mateo hosted the premiere performance of “The Maltese Omelette,” written by Michael Kurland. The play is performed in period costumes as a late 1930s radio play, complete with an announcer, a sponsor, and several commercial breaks.

Imagine the Maltese Falcon with every character as someone from a nursery rhyme. Sam Spud is a San Francisco detective and the libidinous Humpty Dumpty is his partner. When the alluring Ms. Muffet comes with a request for help, Humpty can’t resist her. Soon he is dead, scrambled, poached. Enter the gunsel Georgie Porgie and his boss, the sinister Wee Willie Winkie. You get the idea. Sound effects and music are included, and the show’s sponsor, Majestic Motor Oil, provides a plummy-voiced announcer who also reads the commercials. (“Majestic Motor Oil, your car will purr for it,” and later, “Remember, Majestic Motor oil spelled backwards is Lio rotom citsejam!”)

The performers of this pun-filled and hilarious bit of comedy included the author Michael Kurland himself (Humpty Dumpty) and several noted Bay Area writers including Cara Black, Marta Randall, Linda Robertson, Richard Lupoff and Peter Beagle. It is no coincidence that several of them have stories in the new Sherlock Holmes anthology edited by Kurland; Sherlock Holmes, the American Years, which was on sale (autographed) after the event.

It helped that the full house—all of the roughly 35 seats were taken, and there were some people standing around the edges—appreciated the references, groaned at the puns, and laughed at all the right places. We couldn’t get enough of the egg references: “That Dumpty, he thought he was pretty hard boiled,” or the surrealism, as when Georgie threatens Sam Spud—“It’s a lemon curd with double whipped cream—this pie is loaded!” There’s even a Dan Brown bit, when Wee Willie Winkie begins to explain in detail about how “Goosey Goosey Gander” is really an encoded map to the Maltese Goose:

“I came upon an old man/who would not say his prayers/I grabbed him by the left leg/ and threw him down the stairs.
“The left leg, Mr. Spud—the left.”

Writers are often considered introverted, but this group didn’t seem shy. The acting was good quality, with the two best performers portraying Ms. Muffet—who later reveals that her real name is Mary Q Contrary—and Sam Spud. Peter Beagle does double duty as both the violent gunsel—or would it be piesel?—Georgie, and as beat cop Jack Spratt. My friend and teacher Marta Randall does a fine job as the announcer, and Richard Lupoff manages to convey Sydney Greenstreet-like menace into his interpretation of Wee Willie Winkie. Actually, “interpretation” may be a bit grandiose for this performance. Cara Black provided sound effects and a bit part, and Linda Robertson did the music.

Like most live performances, there were glitches—most notably two with the sound effects. They just added to the fun.

M for Mystery is a wonderful mystery-themed bookstore. I hadn’t been there before but I will have to go back. The space is long and wide, filled with shelves on rollers, so setting up for their many author and writing/reading events is easy. Staff were wonderful, helpful, friendly and funny. The place is dedicated to mysteries but has other books as well, and is beautifully decorated with masks and posters of book covers. I didn’t get much time to browse the shelves (although I did manage to buy four books) and to do the place justice I would need at least two hours. There is a new coffee place, Kaffeehaus, just opened next door. Staff there were also friendly and upbeat. The coffee was a little bland, but the bakery case treats looked awesome and I’d be filling to force myself to try them again.

The group may perform the play again at Copperfield’s in Petaluma, and will be performing in the city during LitQuake in October. Dig out your spats,dust off the fedora, and plan to come on out!