San Francisco Weekly August 1, 2012 : Page 14

LETTERS oah , returns after a year hiatus. Pharoah is a talented performer and impressionist whose cadre of celebrity impersonations includes Jay-Z, Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, and Barack Obama. The comedian is a featured player on Sat-urday Night Live and one of the show’s youngest cast members. Given the recent departures of Andy Samberg and Kristen Wiig (and rumors of Jason Sudeikis follow-ing suit), Pharoah is slated to make an even bigger splash in the show’s upcoming 38th season. Catch the laughmaster while he’s still booking the smaller venues. Jay Pharoah starts at 8 and 10:15 p.m. at Cobb’s Comedy Club, 915 Columbus (at Taylor), S.F. Admission is $22.50; call 928-4320 or visit www.cobbscomedyclub.com. JESSICA HILO sfweekly.com SAT /8.4 [FILM] 90 Years Young My Fair Lady Lauren English | [THEATER] CITY Doolittle, Too Late NIGHT+DAY The most salient status symbols in the London of My Fair Lady aren’t walking sticks and pocket watches but diphthongs and fricative H’s. In the Lerner and Loewe musical, norms of speech are so codified by class that phonetics professor Henry Higgins (Johnny Moreno) can guess a Londoner’s origins down to the very street by eavesdropping on a few vowel sounds. Flower-peddler Eliza Doolittle (Monique Hafen) is easy to peg, with Cockney that makes an “oh” into an “aaaaaaah-ow-ooh.” But is she as easy to teach? Higgins bets his colleague Colonel Pickering (Richard Frederick) that, with six months of elocu-tion lessons, he can transform the “draggle-tailed guttersnipe” into a duchess. The musical, which is based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion , seethes with the vitriolic so-cial critic’s rage, but it also features two of the sweetest love songs ever written — “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “On the Street Where You Live” — as well as one of the most understated: “I’ve Grown Accus-tomed to Her Face.” Bill English’s spirited ensemble makes songs immortalized by the 1964 film emphatically their own. Hafen, in particular, shows Eliza as self-possessed yet misunderstood by her world. When she sings “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,” she’s wish-ing for much more than just “lots of choco-late for me to eat,” or, as she says it, “aite.” My Fair Lady starts at 8 p.m. (and contin-ues through Sept. 29) at SF Playhouse, 533 Sutter (at Powell), S.F. Admission is $30-$70; call 677-9596 or visit www.sfplayhouse.org. LILY JANIAK MAD to the Bone [LIT] Masterful director Howard Hawks had a simple strategy: Craft great scenes; string enough of ’em together, and you have a great movie. The Big Sleep (1946), starring Hum-phrey Bogart as smart-mouth punching bag Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as spoiled thoroughbred Vivian Rutledge, executes the formula to timeless perfection. Ray-mond Chandler’s sordid saga of addiction, blackmail, beatings, and murder, adapted for the screen by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman, crams more ugly truths about human nature into 114 minutes than is healthy. It’s on our all-time top 10 list, needless to say, and is a brilliant choice for the opening weekend of the Cas-tro Theatre’s 90th anniversary . The bounty of riches includes a set by vocalist Monique Argent Gannon, an introduction by noir savant Eddie Muller, plus the rumpled king of cool, Robert Mitchum, in Where Danger Lives (1950). The first program of the day, if your heart can take it, begins with banjo-pickin’ Jack Convery and Blackie Norton’s Paradise Club Band warming up the crowd for the Mary Poppins sing-along. Sunday is even more daunting, er, impressive, with the gluttonous double bill of Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane . Save room, somehow, for birthday cake. The Castro Theatre’s 90th anniversary fes-tivities start at 1 p.m. and The Big Sleep begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro (at Market), S.F. Admission is $8.50-$15; call 621-6120 or visit www.castrotheatre.com. MICHAEL FOX lab hard at work developing a love vac-cine as the world teeters on environmental collapse. As his company faces a crisis in dystopia, his ex-lover Grace Wright is hired to lead his drug development team, intent on creating a love activator that will reintroduce passion and romance to the world. Playwright Patricia Milton says she wrote the play as an adaptation of “The Frog Prince,” in which the princess doesn’t turn the frog into a prince with a Disney kiss, but instead throws him against the wall. In a world of unintended side effects, the violent act represents the necessity to love completely and sometimes uncomfort-ably in order to renew the human psyche. Believers starts at 8 p.m. (and runs through Aug. 25) at StageWerx, 446 Valen-cia (at 16th St.), S.F. Admission is $15-$25; visit www.stagewerx.org. NEHA TALREJA | CONTENTS | SUN /8.5 [ACROBATICS] FREE SF WEEKLY his may be the best year for MAD magazine since it debuted 1952. Not only is it MAD ’s 60th anniversary, but there have been a great number of new publications and events in the last year that finally give serious thought to the vast influence of this un-serious publication. They include a beautiful four-volume collection of Al Jaffee’s legendary MAD fold-ins, a hardcover portfolio of contributing artist Jack Davis’s work, the relaunch of DC’s MAD Archives series, and a retrospective exhibition of original MAD artwork going on now. Tonight, the museum hosts master cartoonist Tom Richmond for a discussion and demonstration to celebrate the release of his latest book, The MAD Art of Caricature . The winner of the National Cartoonists Society’s 2011 “Cartoonist of the Year” Reuben Award, Richmond has contributed to MAD for over a decade, where he carries on the publication’s long tradition of celebrity caricature as practiced by artists like Davis, Mort Drucker, and Angelo Torres. Tonight’s event includes Richmond’s own tips on cartooning, plenty of behind-the-scenes MAD stories, and a book-signing. Tom Richmond starts Friday at 7 p.m. at the Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission (at New Montgomery), S.F. Admission is $5; call 227-8666 or visit www.cartoonart.org. CASEY BURCHBY | EAT T [THEATER] Love’s Grimm Outlook There are pills for being sad, pills for being anxious, hungry, scared, dysfunctional in the bedroom, perpetually awake, perpetually asleep, and so on. Why not tend to the root of all distress and just vaccinate ourselves against heart-break? In this romantic comedy, it seems the only way to manage looming tragedies is to keep your heart safe. In StageWerx’s produc-tion of Believers , Rockwell Wise stays holed up inside a remote Tattoo and piercing shop Body Manipula-tions recently turned 23. It’s celebrating, naturally, with a night of acrobatic feats, Rus-sian trapeze, body suspensions, contortion, and an exceptionally high pain tolerance. How does a piercing shop run off and join the circus, you might ask? “I had been train-ing at the circus center in Chinese acrobatics and teeterboard on my days off from work,” says Director Paul Stoll. “I discovered very quickly that the physical challenges in circus arts were even greater than those faced in piercing or suspension.” Faint-hearted folks, take note: This ain’t your average acrobatic show. Flying Tiger Circus , an annual ordeal, has been known to incorporate flesh hook trapeze, hot metal, straight ra-zors, nails, rope, and skewered biceps, along with more benign (but no less impressive) aerial-ist and hand-balancer acts. Stoll promises, however, that the show is more art than gore. “It has to be something pretty and amazing to watch.” Perform-include Manasaurus Rex, THIS CODE ers Iron Monkey and Snow Ape, TO DOWNLOAD OUR FREE IPHONE APP and the dizzyingly dazzling FOR MORE EVENTS Chloe Marvel Light Axelrod, OR VISIT with a special appearance by sfweekly.com pancake juggler Scot Nery. There Will Be Blood | FILM | | SUCKA SCAN | MUSIC A UGUST 1-A UGUST 7, 2012 CAMERA HEAVEN Traditional Thai Massage 30-min $ 30 90-min $ 80 60-min $ 55 120-min $ 105 accept credit cards, appointment recommended, walk-ins welcome Voted SF's Best Camera Store Professional Camera Repairs Retail & Accessories We Buy Used Cameras For Cash! 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