Powerful opening night for 'Juvie'

So nice to see a crowded house for local theater, especially in downtown Palo Alto. Last Friday was opening night for Dragon Productions' "Juvie," and even though many of the actors are teens, the audience was certainly broader than just parents.

I hadn't been familiar with Jerome McDonough's script, which takes place during a night in a holding cell, telling the stories of the young people locked up. I found its monologues spare, powerful and very accessible. It had a way of making you feel disturbingly at home in a world you wouldn't want to enter.

After the show, everyone got to go behind bars, the audience mingling on stage with the actors for a reception. Director Paul Sawyer looked justifiably proud of his young cast. The danger with this subject matter is that you can fall into melodrama. But, like the script, the actors found a matter-of-fact side to violence and crime that made the topics even more haunting. They were remarkably natural, in particular Claire Martin as Jean.

For a more thorough take on "Juvie," check out the Weekly this Friday to see writer Elizabeth Obreza's review.

Pictured: Several cast members of "Juvie." Photo by James Kasyan.

Adventuring for your art

When I did a story last month on pipe organs, I had major kudos for Weekly photographer Marjan Sadoughi. To get "backstage" shots of the thousands of pipes packed into the way-up-high reaches of one church, she had to drag her camera equipment up and down ladders and squeeze through mini doorways.

Somehow she managed to tightrope-step along the catwalks -- her elbows in so she wouldn't knock the pipes out of tune -- and snag great photos. I felt like a wimp lifting only a notebook. Pens you can carry behind your ears.

But photographers seem tougher than the rest of us. A perfect example is San Jose photog Joe Decker, who's in the main gallery at the Pacific Art League this weekend for a solo show. I like the fact that his press release mentions not only his photos, but also the fact that he had to climb up crumbly cliffs and ride through frigid water in a dinghy to get them.

It was all part of a three-week photo trip to the arctic -- mostly Greenland and Svalbard -- to create an exhibit called "Above the Arctic Circle."

"I'd always been drawn to spare and difficult landscapes, but also I felt a need to go there soon, as the landscape of the arctic is changing, and I wanted to record what I could," Decker told me last month. Then he was off to Iceland.

Pictured: "Snowy Pinnacles at Dusk," a 2006 photo by Joe Decker showing the moonrise over black pinnacles in East Greenland.

Audition ambitions

One of the most eye-catching email subject lines to pop up lately: "You Wanna Shoot OR BE A President?"

Could be a new Michael Moore movie. Or a reality TV show (is the final rose a bullet or a ballot?). But actually it's an audition notice for a production of "Assassins," being put on in San Jose by the Actors' Theatre Center (auditions are tonight and tomorrow). The company is including a passel of supporting roles, which means you can play JFK or Honest Abe if John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald aren't your cups of tea. Hey, everybody's got the right.

Closer to home, there are a few other interesting musical-theater auditions coming up. Palo Alto Players is holding auditions for "Little Women" in September and "The Light in the Piazza" in January. It'll be a treat to see "Piazza" on a local stage, and I imagine the ambiance of the Lucie Stern Theatre will lend it a nice intimacy.

From photo to film

It sounds strange to say that my favorite-ever Cantor Arts Center exhibit featured photos of old tires and copper mines. But that's art. You never know what you'll end up transfixed by.

About two years ago, Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky brought an exhibit called "Manufactured Landscapes" to the Cantor. In it, he explored the industrial impacts that humans have on the Earth. As I wrote in the Weekly, the photos showed "bright teal pools at the bottom of copper mines, sparkling silver oil-refinery pipes, and a red river of iron discarded from a nickel mine running like tomato soup across an Ontario field."

Strange beauty, almost otherworldly. I think I liked the photos so much because they revealed a world that white-collar me might never see. And in it they found remarkable glints of elegance and visual poetry.

Now there's a documentary film about Burtynsky and his work opening July 20. Also called "Manufactured Landscapes," it follows the photographer traveling through China and documenting "the evidence and effects of that country's massive industrial revolution," as a press release states.

So far, it seems that the film is coming only to the Lumiere Theatre in San Francisco and Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley. But maybe that will change. In any event, for me it's well worth the drive.

Pictured: The DVD cover for the film shows the Edward Burtynsky photo "Nickel Tailings #34, Sudbury, Ontario" (left panel).