It’s not often that I find myself slumped in my theater seat completely engulfed with laughter, but that happened to me at during the glitter whirlwind that is John Bisceglie’s SF Follies.
Harking back to the days of Florenz Ziegfield, Bisceglie puts forth his vision in his definition of follies: “a lavishly produced review using song and dance that features glitzy costumes, dynamic performers and outlandish humor.” Check, check, and check. Clearly produced as a labor of love, SF Follies succeeds in dazzling the audience with its fifteen performers on a tiny stage. It may be cut-rate lavishness, but you wouldn’t know it from the glitter, the plumes, and the eye-popping colors of the many, many costumes.
Follies loosely narrates the history of San Francisco from a cheery song celebrating the genocide of the Ohlone Indians, through the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake, the Roaring Twenties, the beatniks of the fifties, the Age of Aquarius, the dot.com boom, to the presence of a self-intoxicated Gavin Newsome presiding over the Same Sex Chapel of Love.
The history is narrated in a pleasurably literate script, whose documentary style is constantly undercut by song-and-dance numbers, anachronistic references to contemporary culture, and acts of gratuitous lunacy. The latter part of the show is structured around the hopeless search of a Midwestern couple for affordable housing to lampoon the various neighborhoods and current scene of Baghdad by the Bay. (Oakland is characterized by the wailing of police sirens.)
The hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show energy of the young performers in infectious. (They dance! They sing! They change costumes at the speed of light!) I was smiling like an idiot by the end of the introductory song, featuring the entire cast in red dresses, red vests, red bowler hats, shaking red tambourines. The audience, a cosmopolitan mix of the hip, the young, and the mature, broke into spontaneous applause during the Age of Aquarius number.
One lovely touch was the montage at the show’s end of vintage footage from San Francisco’s history accompanied by a wistful piano rendition of “I Left My Heart.” After laughing at the City’s eccentricities for the previous 90 minutes, this retrospective allowed us to feel the love we have for this beautiful, wacky place.
John Bisceglie is something of a one-man band: author, director, producer, costume, set designer, and publicist. He comes to the task with a long history of community theater production and has brought with him a posse of theater friends who have worked with him in the South Bay. The fact that SF Follies is self-produced makes its cheerful, self-aware professionalism all the more admirable. Even the program is beautiful and unusually detailed. The costumes alone are worth the price of admission.
True to the “all dancing, all girls” tradition of the follies, the performers are disciplined and synchronized. The show takes off at top speed, and the very fact that the lighting keeps up is a tribute to the designer and technician. Ditto for the musical arrangement and sound design. This kind of breeziness is not easy to achieve. As the actor Donald Wolfit said on his deathbed, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”
Further highlights: unexpected appearances of the Nearly Naked Miner, the bag-lady mermaid crooning “Cash, Not Just Care” in her customized shopping cart, the Gilbert and Sullivan take-off of “The Very Model of a Modern City Meter Maid,” and the male ballerina in toe shoes and tutu interrupted in his Swan Lake turn by a flying … no, you’ll have to see that one for yourselves.
Have I convinced you to go? I hope so. But get your tickets in advance. In spite of the fact that the show has not been widely reviewed, word of mouth is already filling the seats of the “intimate” Actor’s Theater.
