Actors often talk about how a set can shape a performance. Audiences at the Vau de Vire Society's The Soiled Dove get a taste of that the moment they step into the Tortona Big Top at Alameda Point's Radium Runway.
Nestled on the waterfront between the Alameda Naval Air Museum and the USS Hornet Museum, the 12,000-square-foot Italian circus tent is otherworldly. Sights out of the 1890s, the recorded sounds of hot jazz, and a sweet, unidentifiable smell all greeted the crowd of this circus and burlesque hybrid on Saturday, August 15.
The stage features a runway with VIP seating on each side. A hotel corridor set occupies the second floor, stage left; directly opposite, Sgt. Splendor, the six-piece house band that excels at blues-rock and Americana, plays and serves as a Greek chorus. Art is displayed and for sale in the left and right wings, with rectangular tables and bar seats for most of the audience.
Set in Alameda at a “notorious establishment of ill repute” in the 1890s, the current Soiled Dove storyline tells the tale of a missing patriarch, an empowered matriarch, a long-suffering daughter, and a still-trying-to-find-himself son.
The family dynamics are fun, if sometimes exhausting in a proto-reality television melodrama way. The circus acts — ribbon and ring aerial work, objects spun with hands and feet, sharpshooting — are dazzling and leave you aching in sympathy. (This is a 21-and-over show, and the burlesque element means a PG-13 amount of skin.) The interaction between the band and cast was simpatico, though the volume was a bit too loud during parts of the dinner show, causing some of the clever dialogue to be incomprehensible.
Joan Baez's return as a featured artist makes this year's staging a show within an already worthwhile show. Some of her paintings hang as part of the extended floor display, with portraits of everyone from Mick Jagger and Lana Del Rey to Anthony Fauci and the late Representative John Lewis. She revisited the great American folk song “House of the Rising Sun,” which she recorded on her self-titled 1960 debut. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member also performed her signature song, “Diamonds & Rust,” accompanied by Sgt. Splendor's co-leaders, Kate Vargas and Eric McFadden, on acoustic guitars. Two women in the front row sang along word for word, which gave the moment an extra charge.
Baez dipped into the songbook of her former collaborator Bob Dylan. First, she performed a comic rendition of “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” in character as the twin brother of Caesar, the show's host. Singing at the back of the floor in front of the bar, she sported a handsome mustache that rivaled Caesar's. Later, she and the Soiled Dove's first family sang “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” together at the stage-right set.
If Baez is the headline draw, Frank Ferrante's Caesar is a bucket-list performance in its own right. A gifted physical comic best known for his award-winning Groucho Marx, Ferrante put his quick wit on full display when he pulled two audience members onstage during both the dinner and main shows. Whether spitting out double entendres, making pop-culture references, or even breaking into song, Ferrante was an energetic marvel.
The Soiled Dove runs on Friday and Saturday nights through November 7. There's a dinner show with a three-course meal and a main show, with tickets for the former also good for the latter.
