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Robert Hurwitt
03/29/11
The San Francisco Chronicle
Fear the Beard, indeed. Actually, "Beardo,"
the oddly captivating new Shotgun Players musical, has nothing to
do with a certain relief pitcher. It's about the even more intimidating
bearded giant Rasputin, the Mad Monk who held the last ruling Romanovs
in thrall and may have hastened their downfall.
Not that there isn't a genuine San Francisco Giants connection,
of a sort. Beardo is played by Ashkon Davaran, whose music video
of the team's playoff anthem was a huge YouTube hit.
"Beardo" is also the first offering in Shotgun's 20th
season, which the adventurous company is celebrating with an all-world-premiere
lineup. As if that weren't risky enough, this latest mock epic from
the inspired Banana Bag & Bodice creators of "Beowulf:
A Thousand Years of Baggage" - playwright Jason Craig and composer
Dave Malloy - requires the services of not only actors who can sing
but also of an onstage string quintet and, at one point, a chorus
of three dozen Russian peasants.
It's an exciting and for the most part intensely enjoyable venture,
even if some elements don't cohere: It strains for cute effects
at times, and the ending needs work. Craig's book is for the most
part clever and provocative. The actors and Artistic Director Patrick
Dooley's stagings are magnetic. And Malloy's score revels in echoes
of everything from American and Tuvan cowboy to Prokofiev, Bartók,
Kurt Weill, Borodin and Tchaikovsky.
Purists may scoff at some of the details, but "Beardo"
is no history lesson. It's a riff on the Rasputin legend, from the
hypnotic sway he exerted and the bouts of drinking and sexual overindulgence
to his famously prolonged assassination.
No actual names are used. Davaran's Beardo is less conniving huckster
or Russian Orthodox mystic than confused, penniless cowboy troubadour
with a "stowaway" celestial voice in his head (we hear
it too). He seems an oddly easygoing conundrum at first, in conversation
with Josh Pollock's hilariously unflappable peasant - until he exerts
himself in a slyly erotic conversion of Sarah Mitchell's suspicious
peasant's wife to his doctrine of repentance.
By the time he gets to the tsar's palace, Beardo and choreographer
Chris Black have honed his seduction technique to an electrifying
hoedown-tinged tango with Anna Ishida's intense Tsarista. Ishida
is terrific, wailing an operatic country aria as the mocked foreigner
in the court of her husband (Kevin Clarke's dithering Tsar).
Beardo soon has Tsar under his spell too, in Clarke and Davaran's
cute rollover/sit up/beg routine. His sway over all the women in
court comes off in a funny but overdone orgy number, complete with
gilded strap-on. By contrast, the mystic's attempt to heal the Tsarista's
beloved hemophiliac son is played with moving delicacy by Davaran
and Juliet Heller's half-puppet Delicate Child Boy.
As intriguing as most of the book is, Craig could repeat some jokes
less ("Poison him with poison" is cute once) and develop
other aspects more. But "Beardo" rides pretty high on
its impressionistic scenes and Malloy's enticing score. The quintet
and Davaran provide expert accompaniment. The voices ring true in
every song. And when that large chorus lifts the rafters in sober,
a cappella peasant chorale, the effect is nothing less than magic.
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