Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Hawaii
OVER the years I've often visited my other favorite city, San Francisco, and each time some disaster or other has taken place. I was there for the earthquake of '89, the fire in the Berkeley Hills ‘Disaster Dave’
returns to S.F.in '91 and through various floods, sinkholes, houses careening down cliffs, huge building explosions, major shootouts etc. Now it's getting closer to home. Last year, I learned that a very good friend, Dick Barry, had died here the day before I was to return. This year came the call that another longtime buddy, Bill Cook, had died and his wife, Patti, was asking if I could return to the Big Island to do a "remembrance" at his services, a kind of light-hearted eulogy, which I did. I'm beginning to believe in my S.F. nickname, "Disaster Dave." ...
OTHER than the startling, but not totally unexpected news of the death of Cook, who'd suffered various aftereffects of an earlier heart attack, the worse thing I was hit with in the Bay area was the heat. The day after I arrived it was the hottest it had been on that day since records began being kept in 1886 ...
Life upon the wicked stage
THE isle-style weather was very enjoyable, more so than the five stage works I saw. None knocked my socks off but a couple nearly shocked my socks off. Those would include the American Conservatory Theater's often naked production of Marlowe's "Edward 2," as they called it, and the Berkeley Rep's all-language-bars-off production of the British comedy, "Closer," by Patrick Marber. There was enough naked groping, kissing, simulated homosexual acts, etc., in the former to probably send Marlowe spinning in his grave. "Closer" at least was genuinely funny and the audience quickly became inured to the seven words comic George Carlin said you couldn't say on TV. Well, you can onstage, at least at the Berkeley Rep ...THE well-named evening called "Eric Idle exploits Monty Python," was a disappointment. Despite some funny bits, Idle just isn't a riot with Python wannabes and without John Cleese and company ...
THE musical "Fosse" was a joy, reaffirming the late choreographer's work in shows over the years, an astounding percentage of dances involving hats, more often than not the derby. Hey, it works, and the cast could both sing and dance with the best of 'em ... I felt the Margaret Edson Pulitzer Prize-winning show "Wit," sometimes spelled "W;t," was as over-praised as was Judith Light's performance as the shaven-headed professor dying of cancer. The production uses the same scenery device used in "Edward 2," namely actors pulling curtains across the stage to mask one area while opening up another. And the play ends with Light, apparently dead, getting out of her bed and walking to the side, slipping out of her hospital gown and standing there naked for a few seconds before the final blackout. It seemed like gratuitous nudity at best, though maybe author Edson is saying we enter the ever after in the altogether. But hey, I'm the guy who walked out of Michael Frayne's "Copenhagen" at intermission in London a couple of years ago, and it just won a Tony Award in New York ...
The real world
THE latest in terrible news is that Sheila Sanford, widow of Sam Sanford, has been ravaged once again by cancer after it seemed she'd beaten it. Sheila's battle, Barry's death in Mokuleia last year and Cook in Waimea this year, are the stuff of drama and emotion with no artifice ...
Dave Donnelly has been writing on happenings
in Hawaii for the Star-Bulletin since 1968.
His columns run Monday through Friday.Contact Dave by e-mail: ddonnelly@starbulletin.com