How Stars Are Born? The SF Mime Troupe Shows Us How

Enterprise Tech How Stars Are Born? The SF Mime Troupe Shows Us How Giovanni René Rodriguez Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about the past, present, and future of citizen empowerment Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Sep 4, 2022, 03:08pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The political comedy group’s latest harvest of talent plays twice more this Labor Day weekend Since 1959 – give or take a pandemic – as sure as the earth orbits the sun, the San Francisco Mime Troupe has toured summer parks in the Bay Area with its modern take on an ancient tradition of high-voltage political theatre.

It’s an annual ritual – the thing I often write about, in other contexts – older than Burning Man, though springing from the same well of cosmic crazy. And if you happen to be in San Francisco today or tomorrow – and not melting on the clay of Black Rock Desert – you might want to check out the talent the Mime Troupe has harvested this summer . Among the cast, musicians, and crew are two young actors who are certain to rise in stature in the years to come.

Alicia M. P. Nelson and Andre Amarotico DavidAllenStudio.

com I caught the 2022 edition – called Back To The Way Things Were – last week in Lake Merritt, Oakland. Midway through this trippy, cartoony satire – that’s the style, rooted in the old Commedia dell’arte tradition – on post-pandemic nostalgia, I was reminded of how many great music-and-theater practitioners got to hone their chops on the Mime Troupe’s simple but magical makeshift stages. I did some quick research.

Legendary producer Bill Graham; Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh; playwrights Marcus Gardley ( whose adaptation of King Lear premieres this week at Cal Shakes) and Tanya Shaffer; actors Peter Coyote, Colman Domingo, Dred Scott, Wilma Bonet, Marga Gomez, Brian Rivera, Michael Gene Sullivan (co-writer of this year’s show, with Marie Cartier; Sullivan recently won a Guggenheim fellowship), and Velina Brown (director) all built and stomped the boards for the Mime Troupe. Along the way, the company has inspired generations of activists (I among them), and picked up a Tony Award, earning a cool place in Commedia history. But for my pass-the-hat donation, I’d bet that the Mime Troupe’s least appreaciated achievement to date is how it has tweaked the “star-maker machinery,” to paraphrase Joni Mitchell.

I mean no disrespect with this reference to entertainment capitalism (in Forbes, of all places!). To the contrary, the humane, artist-driven discipline of the Mime Troupe’s methods is something to behold, and study. And it’s something that theater folks don’t talk often enough about.

To continually turn out great talent, the Mime Troupe has relied on three tried-and-true practices that come up in related worlds with marked consistency. The first: the formation of an actual repertory. As I have written before in this column, that’s a rarity these days in the theatre world, where shrinking audiences and rising costs have all but decimated the idea of a “Rep.

” With the generous support of the Mime Troupe’s patrons and the public park donations of the hoi polloi, the company manages to get by. MORE FOR YOU The 5 Biggest Technology Trends In 2022 ‘Enthusiastic Entrepreneurs’: Pre-IPO Statements On Profitability Prove To Be Larger Than Real Life The 7 Biggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) Trends In 2022 The second thing is the performance regime. The Troupe, as is typical, is completing a summer tour with both weekday and weekend shows to reach people when they are available and where they happen to be.

Repetition with many audiences was the secret ingredient for both the Grateful Dead and The Beatles, who revelled with their fans by perfecting their licks and shaping them to fit the moment. And for the Mime Troupe, playing outdoors means there’s no need for in-house decorum. Fans can laugh and scream when an actor hams it up.

In the old days, you could throw flowers or tomatoes to make your point. But this, friends, brings us to the beauty part. What makes the Mime Troupe such a wondrous organic generator of talent is how it mixes the old and the new.

The centuries-old Commedia archetypes with contemporary themes. The virtuosic loopy band (led by Daniel Savio, lyricist for the show), spinning time-bending renditions of Burning Down The House , The Time Warp, and I Will Survive for the pre-show crowd. And, yeah, the veteran actors mixing it up with some fresh young faces, like Alicia M.

P. Nelson , who brings down the house in scene two with a diva-worthy dystopian aria. And Andre Amarotico , who in one scene manages to play both a time-traveling robber baron and a fast-food worker.

He gets the best line of the show, explaining capitalism. “The whole idea of it is to buy something valuable at a low price from an idiot who thinks it’s going to be worthless, and sell something worthless at a high price to a different idiot who thinks it’s going to be valuable. Ingenious, really.

And so easy to manipulate. ” Amarotico, like the rest of the cast (Keiko Shimosato, Lizzie Calogero, and Norman Gee) makes performing lines like this look easy. The mark of an artist who’s truly coming into his own.

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