Playwright John Bisceglie got into the Follies racket in the
1990s with San Jose Follies and San Jose Follies Strikes
Back, two goofy musical revues that dredged up a lot of
little-known San Jose folklore, made fun of city landmarks, and spent a
lot of time joking about the blandness of San Jose. Which, Bisceglie
finally realized, was precisely what made the show kind of tiresome.
San Jose just didn’t lend itself to follies the way other cities did
— namely, its more glamorous cousin up the Peninsula. There was
only so much humor you could ring out of jokes that skewered Great
America and the Light Tower. So this year Bisceglie moved into more
fertile terrain. His new production, SF Follies, offers a whole
new set of japes within a lively musical cabaret. The fifteen-person
cast plows through three centuries of San Francisco history in about
ninety minutes, belting pop tunes from the ’60s and ’70s (with the
lyrics slightly tweaked), and mocking everyone from Father Serra to
Gavin Newsom. For Bisceglie, an online marketer who probably won’t quit
his day job any time soon, this play is, undoubtedly, a tour de
force.
Take that with a grain of salt. Probably the best thing about SF
Follies is the costumes, which are quite stunning. Culled from
thrift stores or painstakingly sewn by Bisceglie’s merry band of
clothiers, they include flashy boas, bird plumage, rhinestones,
sequins, antebellum dresses with bustles, intricate lace detailing, a
Swan Lake ballet tutu made to look like a dead swan, and big
Victorian hats that apparently began with cardboard scaffolding. The
Ohlone tribe members who emerge in the play’s opening wear flapper
dresses. The Beat poets don matching black turtlenecks and berets. A
homeless woman with a shopping cart is dressed as a mermaid. Members of
the new “green” generation lower their carbon footprint with dresses
made of newspapers and recycled cardboard. Bisceglie directed the
costume design team and spends a large chunk of his program notes
describing their whole process of scavenging raw materials and sewing
them together. It’s where the bulk of his creativity lies.
Aesthetic pleasures notwithstanding, the play offers a good-times
romp through centuries of textbook history and urban legend, though
roughly half of it takes place within the last twenty years. Most of
Bisceglie’s jokes fall in the cornball realm and only occasionally
warrant a real eye-roll — like the Ohlone-Spaniard duet about
genocide, sung to the tune of The Brady Bunch, or the moment
when two actors board a BART train and hear a fusillade of bullets in
the background. But a lot of the script is genuinely —
surprisingly — funny. After the assassination of Harvey Milk, a
newly empowered Diane Feinstein emerges in Barbarella garb.
Unsure if she’s ready to manhandle an entire city while furthering her
political ambitions, she recruits superhero cohorts Barbara B. and
Nancy P. to form a Charlie’s Angels-type corps. Naturally, a
large swath of the script goes to the worthy cause of lampooning Mayor
Gavin Newsom, played by actor Brett Hammon as the ultimate tool. He
presides over an ill-fated gay marriage in City Hall, at which two
actors march down the aisle singing Going to the chapel and
we’re/sorta gonna get maaaarrried. Bisceglie also ridicules the
mayor’s controversial “Care Not Cash” 2002 ballot measure, which
slashed General Assistance payments to San Francisco’s homeless. In
what’s probably the only (sorta) poignant moment of SF Follies,
actress Jujuana Sharon Williams sings, pleadingly, for “Cash not Care,”
dressed in a radiant mermaid costume.
There’s no doubt that John Bisceglie loves San Francisco. Amidst all
the irreverent satire he includes a gorgeous black-and-white video
montage with rare archival footage. He also genuflects to all the
noteworthy icons: Herb Caen, Patty Hearst, Bill Graham, the Brown
Twins, the Sutro Tower, and KOFY TV 20. The references never get too
hip or obscure (Dave Eggers and all his enterprises remain absent,
thankfully, as does Frank Chu “the twelve galaxies guy”), and there are
a few surprising holes. (What about the Fillmore? The SF Giants? Why do
the Guardian sex ads get a bigger nod than ex-Mayor Willie
Brown?) Still, it’s pretty San Francisco-centric, and, aside from a
chorus-line number about high real estate prices, most jokes wouldn’t
make sense to a foreigner. (Unless you’ve suffered through the
agonizing, horribly expensive, time-consuming experience of having your
car towed in San Francisco, you probably won’t understand why so much
stage time gets devoted to the song-and-dance about DPT). Also, some of
the material has a short expiration date — any reference to the
Chronicle might have a completely different connotation six
months from now. But overall Bisceglie comes up with a fun, glitzy, and
fairly comprehensive production that, with a few revisions, could
survive into next year.
