A role star’s son was born to play
Paige Rogers, who’s directing Cutting Ball Theater’s new production of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 17th century allegory “Life Is a Dream,” began mulling the casting about a year ago. She didn’t have to go far to find the father and son at the heart of this philosophical play about illusion and reality, fate and choice, and the painful love of fathers and sons.
She cast her friend and longtime associate David Sinaiko as King Basilio, and his 16-year-old son, Asher, as Segismundo, the embittered son he imprisoned because a prophecy said the boy would bring disaster on the land and death to his father (he does wreak violent havoc during a brief reprieve). Rogers had seen Asher in a few shows at Marin Academy, where he goes to school and his father teaches, and felt he was right for the role in “Life Is A Dream,” which opens Cutting Ball’s season Oct. 2 in a new translation by resident playwright Andrew Saito. It’s his first professional production.
“I think it’s going really well,” says Asher Sinaiko, on the phone from the Fairfax home he shares with his father and mother, writer and director Annie Elias. “It was pretty intimidating at first, being in a room with a bunch of professional actors and a director. But there’s a good camaraderie in the cast, and they’ve helped me open up in rehearsal and experiment a little more.”
The actor describes Calderón’s dark prince as an intelligent and educated adolescent “who’s confused about the nature of reality and why certain things are happening to him. He struggles to learn what he thinks about the world and who he is. His only context for the outside world is the natural kingdom, what he can see from his prison cell. He has grown up without love, full of resentment and anger. But he has an inherent nobility.”
The Sinaikos first performed together two summers ago at the Phantom Theater in Vermont — which Asher’s father co-founded and where his mother served as artistic director — in a group concoction called “Pure Gold.” This play demands more.
“When you’re playing a role like this, you have to reveal parts of yourself and be vulnerable in a way that I as a 16-year-old don’t want to be in front of my parents or other people. That’s been a challenge. But it’s been really great, because my father is a very, very good actor and the whole cast is fantastic.”
David Sinaiko, who’s performed often at Cutting Ball and other Bay Area theater companies, says his son is doing a smashing job as Segismundo.
“He’s a talented guy, he’s very funny and he works really hard.” Sinaiko would never push any of his three kids into theater, but when “you have a job you love to do and your kids have a passion for it, too, it’s a joy.”
Sinaiko calls Saito’s new translation an interesting mix of the original Old Spanish and vernacular American touches. “He’s very careful and respectful of the text, but he has some fun with it.”
For more information, go to www.cuttingball.org.
Jazz albums, live
Jim Bennett, host of KCSM (91.1 FM) radio’s In the Moment program, which features music recorded live, is presenting a concert series at the Musically Minded Academy in Oakland that honors major jazz artists and sometimes re-creates whole albums. That’s the case Oct. 2, when a band from the Oaktown Jazz Workshops cooks up Art Blakey ’s“Album of the Year,” recorded in ’81 in Paris with an edition of the Jazz Messengers that included a young Wynton Marsalis. Pianist-singer Pollyanna Bush performs Laura Nyro ’s“Eli and the Thirteenth Confession” Nov. 14, and drummer Alan Hall’s Rata-tet tips its hi-hat to Billy Cobham Dec. 5. For more information, go to www.musicallyminded.org.
Dudamel on the air
The performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Friday, Sept. 25, at Cal’s Greek Theater by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra will air live on KDFC radio (and KUSC in L.A.) and stream live with video on the websites of those stations, Univision and Cal Performances.
For more information, go to www.calperformances.org.