The "Return to the Caffe Cino" book publishing event on Sunday at San Francisco's Main Library (click here to get to an earlier post about the anthology) was a huge success, with a good turnout for a warm afternoon, and brisk book sales for publisher Steve Susoyev above.
The highlight of the afternoon was a performance of the 1964 Lanford Wilson play, "The Madness of Lady Bright," about a demented New York drag queen reminiscing about his/her youth and the various disastrous loves of his/her life.
Lady Bright was brilliantly performed by local luminary Trauma Flintstone (click here for his/her website), and was ably assisted by Tom Orr and Steven LeMay as The Boy and The Girl respectively, earlier incarnations of Lady Bright and various Loves of Her Life.
Even though the main character is an extremely pathetic drag queen, the piece was revolutionary when it first appeared. Open homosexuality on the stage had just never occurred before, particularly with a character flinging around the word "faggot" in every other line.
During a question and answer period with the audience after the performance, one 50-year-old gay man complained that when he was a teenager there were no "positive role models" since the only gay plays out there were "The Madness of Lady Bright" and "Boys in the Band," which are all about sad queens being mean to each other.
"Don't forget 'Fortune and Men's Eyes,' which was all about male prison rape," Steve Susoyev reminded him, and the 82-year-old playwright George Birimisa said, "when we were writing about gay stuff at the time, we were all homophobic, something I'm not very proud of, but that's just the way it was then." Trauma Flintstone added a perfect, updated coda by saying that he/she never plays the character as "pathetic because they're gay or transgender or what have you. I think this is just somebody who has made a few bad life choices," which elicited laughter from the audience, "and who fell in love with street trade, which is going to leave you very lonely. But this queen is definitely not pathetic on account of being gay."
Hopping across Civic Center Plaza to Herbst Theatre, I caught the second half of a performance by an amateur ensemble called "Symphony Parnassus" (click here for their website).
The conductor of the symphony is Stephen Paulson, who has been playing the bassoon for the San Francisco Symphony for 30 years and has headed this group for the last nine years.
The second half piece was Kurt Weill's "The Seven Deadly Sins," a late collaboration with Bertolt Brecht that's part ballet, part opera, and totally cynical morality tale as the Divided Anna (played by a singer and a dancer) leaves home and family in Louisiana to visit seven American cities where she engages in the aforementioned sins. The greedy family is written for four male voices which were ably dispatched by choristers from the San Francisco Opera: (from left) Jere Torkelsen, Torlef Borsting, Phil Pickens, and Kevin Courtmanche.
There was a production of the work last year at The Crucible, the Fire Art Warehouse in Oakland, but I thought the staging was dumb (click here for a review). This concert version was headlined by ex-"Phantom of the Opera" star Lisa Vroman, who sang beautifully and with perfect diction, and her divided self was played quite wittily by a mannequin. The orchestra was good, though I tend to prefer this music a bit less smooth and a tad more sleazy.
There was an interesting program at the San Francisco Symphony this week of two major pieces by Stravinsky and Mozart that I had never heard before, the 1946 "Orpheus" ballet and a huge, unfinished Mass in C Minor from 1783.
Thanks to Rita at the SFist website, we had press seats in the twelfth row of Davies Hall on Friday evening, where the large chorus thundered the Kyrie Eleison at us.
Her very funny review of the concert can be read by clicking here.
The German conductor Ingo Metzmacher (above left) seemed to be having a wonderful time, and the ascetic Stravinsky ballet was an interesting pairing with the plush Mozart mass.
The Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling (above right), who sang Susanna in "The Marriage of Figaro" at the San Francisco Opera last summer, had the most to sing as a soloist and her voice was perfection in a slightly chilly way. Her Figaro in that production was the Canadian bass/baritone John Relyea, who was also on hand to sing all of about two minutes of music in the hour-long piece, which seemed rather a waste of his excellent abilities. The English soprano Sarah Fox (above left) wasn't in quite the same league, and her concert dress was something of a Golden Globes Fashion Disaster. It was a fun evening.
From 1958 to 1968, on Cornelia Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, there was a boho meeting place called Caffe Cino. The gay Sicilian-American, Joe Cino (below left) served cappuccinos, cannole and free theatre, and along with Judson Church and La Mama ETC, the tiny joint emerged as ground zero for what became known as the Off-0ff-Broadway Theatre. Short plays were performed nightly on a portable 8-foot by 8-foot stage without charging either rent or admission, and the performers were paid by a passing of the hat among the audience at the end of each performance.
According to Edward Albee (above right), who used to hang out there in the early 1960s, "[It] was where young playwrights who knew nothing about what they were supposed to be doing made exciting work, and the failures were as exciting as the successes. It was Eden. I miss it."
The place has fallen out of popular history, which may be corrected thanks to a recently published book by Steve Susoyev, above, who collaborated with the 82-year-old San Francisco playwright George Birimisa (below) on an anthology of plays that premiered at the Caffe Cino along with "memoirs" from the survivors of that time.
Through the miracle of Craigslist, I connected with the two editors last summer when their modestly conceived project had grown into a 500-page monster manuscript that desperately needed proofreading, graphics assistance, and copy editing.
The book was finally published last November in conjunction with a theatre festival in Boston that was performing a number of Caffe Cino plays, and to my utter delight the finished product has turned out much more beautifully than I had ever imagined. (Click here for the Amazon page.)
Many young people who eventually became famous were involved in the Caffe Cino scene, including a teenage Bernadette Peters in "Dames At Sea," which opened there as a smash success before quickly moving uptown. One of the memoirs in the book is by the director Robert Dahdah, who originally conceived most of the show but was never compensated for it. He settles a few old scores:
"When I found out that Jim Wise [the composer] had died, I called his collatorator, George Haimsohn, and I said, "Jim Wise is dead. Good." And he said, "Why good?" and I said, "Because he stole my talent, and he never recompensed me for it. And he's burning in hell." And, do you know, two weeks later I read George Haimsohn's obituary in "Variety." So they're both burning in hell but that doesn't do me much good."
In editor Steve Susoyev's introduction, he writes:
"For an early draft of this book, we pondered using the words "Dawn of Queer Theatre" in our title, and many participants ganged up to convince us that such a title limited and insulted the work that Joe Cino nurtured on his little stage forty-some years ago. William Hoffman wrote, "I'll be queer if it'll sell books," but in our first meeting he persuaded me that such was not necessary."
The twenty plays in the volume by the likes of Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, Doric Wilson, Robert Patrick and Tom Eyen, are stylistically all over the map. Ionesco's Theatre of the Absurd, along with Samuel Beckett, seemed to be the dominant influences but what links most of these plays are their desire to shock the audience. What's amazing is how shocking many of them remain.
Helen Hanft (in the two photos above) was one of the acting divas of Caffe Cino, and she recently played the same role in Tom Eyen's "Who Killed My Bald Sister Sophie?" forty years later. From all accounts, the performance was even better than the original. She's quoted in an interview in the book:
"When you saw me play Hanna forty years later, I didn't have to study my lines. The role is riveted in my soul, my brain chemistry. This is a woman with more than a blemish. She's deeply wounded. Outside the role, I was not the easiest person to get along with. I was very envious of people. I always felt like I was being deprived, a victim, when I was victimizing people myself. Toxic people are drawn to the theatre. They think they can get away with their toxicity there."
There are dozens of fascinating characters and stories that are mentioned in the "memoirs" that could fill entire books in themselves. For instance, the Harris family consisted of a World War II veteran, his wife, and their five kids in Florida who in the late 1950s decided to graduate from their amateur theatricals and move to New York City. The family was basically adopted by the Caffe Cino, and Walter Michael Harris (above right) was in "Hair" on Broadway at age 16.
Walter's brother George Harris III (the two photos above) became "the famous blond sticking the famous flower into the famous rifle at the Pentagon," in the words of Robert Patrick.
George then transformed into Hibiscus in San Francisco (above), the soul and co-creator of both The Cockettes and The Angels of Light.
Joe Cino (above), like many of his compatriots in the 1960s, took way too many drugs, principally speed, and in the dark, scary year of 1968, after the death of his lover from drug-induced sloppiness at a summer stock theatre, he committed suicide by locking himself in the cafe, putting Maria Callas on the jukebox, and trying to commit hari-kari. It took him three days to die in St. Vincent's Hospital, and a place and time were over.
At the San Francisco Main Library in Civic Center this Sunday the 21st at 2-4 PM, there will be a free public event with Steve Susoyev and George Birimisa talking about the book and the era.
Plus, there will be a performance of Lanford Wilson's "The Madness of Lady Bright," an important Cino play, done by the legendary San Francisco drag queen Trauma Flintstone. Be there or be square.
A ceremonial swearing in of new city commissioners took place this afternoon at San Francisco's City Hall.
The event, as usual, was held on the balcony in front of the Mayor's Office, and as usual the mayor was about fifteen minutes late.
There was an unusually large crowd of about 100 people for the affair, including Supervisors Dufty, Elsbernd and Mirkarimi.
The very odd Pat Murphy, who publishes the fairly demented San Francisco Sentinel on the internet, seems to have a man-crush on a new heterosexual Supervisor, Sean Elsbernd, now that he has had a violent break with Supervisor Chris Daly.
At one point, Mayor Newsom called Pat over so he could make sure that Murphy's portable tape recorder was on, so that it could capture the mayor's speech from the podium verbatim.
Gavin started off by congratulating the new commissioners for bodies ranging from the Taxi Commission to the Human Rights Commission. There has been quite a bit of controversy in the Board of Supervisors chamber recently over the Newsom administration's inability to fill empty comissioner seats, leaving incumbents "hanging" for years at a time on various commissions, either through inertia or out of political considerations.
With Board President Aaron Peskin at his side, Newsom didn't refer to the controversy, but did mention how unhappy he was about the board cutting the six-figure funds for imaginary new jobs that had been created for two loyal political hacks, Annemarie Conroy and Bill Lee.
Gavin then attempted a self-deprecating joke about having been appointed at age 26 to be the chair of the Parking and Traffic Commission by then-mayor Willie Brown, Jr. "I didn't even know that chair meant president, boy, did I have a lot of on-the-job learning to do." When there was dead silence, he dug himself in a little further. "I mean, we've been attempting to take our own appointments more seriously than that..."
Then he stumbled into, "Well, let's cut to the chase. Let's get you sworn in. You can either stand or sit, just put your hand up..."
It felt like he didn't even know half the people who had been appointed, let alone their names, and the ceremony was lacking any sense of dignity.
The Newsom Administration's youthful Karl Rove, Peter Ragone (above), didn't look amused by the performance. Wait until he catches a glimpse of Gavin's most Fervent Admirer Unleashed over at sfGate. (Click here to get to Beth Spotswood's brilliant debut post as a Paid Blogger.)
