Excellent cast shines in Hillbarn’s ‘Picasson at the Lapin Agile’
By Keith Kreitman, Contributor

“Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” by fames actor comedian Steve Martin, is a slam dunk for success if a director gets the right cast. Linda Picone at the Hillbarn Theatre in Foster City scores.

Martin surprised the theatre world in 1193 with his retrospective look into the future of the 20th century through an imaginary meeting in 1904 0f two cultural giants, physicist Albert Einstein (Anthony Silk, an Einstein look-alike) and artist Pablo Picasso (Victor G. Carrion)

Martin is a full-fledged art collector and critic, and much of this is woven into the play—actually, more of a 90 minute skit than a conventionally developed plot.

It demands audience attention to follow the theories bounced around among the characters. Martin engages the mind by wrapping humor around these serious themes through his sparkling dialogue and sprinkling some inside jokes into the mix.

It wouldn’t be a Steve Martin creation if it didn’t have some absurdity. Here, he has one bar patron, Gaston (William Davidovich), whose prime contribution to the action, other than some keenly timed humor, seems to be going to the men’s room every few minutes.

The meeting of Einstein and Picasso at the famed Parisian cabaret, the Lapin Agile, is accidental and casual. It occurs several years before the initial works of the two men led to their subsequent fame.

They are self possessed, determined young men in their 20’s who are breaking out of the boxes of mainstream thinking and convention. They will putting straight lines on paper and curved ones on canvas that will shake the world.

They enter into a debate on all sorts of ideas, driven by the conceit of whose ideas would most influence future generations. They come to an agreement that they are both genious soulmates of equivalent importance.

That settled, Martin doesn’t leave it alone. He brings on a strange visitor (Danny Martin), in the image of yet-to-be born Elvis Presley, to test whose fame will shine the brightest in the public minds of the 20th century.

Picasso’s famed lustiness is examined through others who appear that same evening. Suzanne (Heather A. Galli) arrives hoping for another meeting with him after a one-night stand where he gifted her with a sketch. When Picasso arrives, he doesn’t even recognize her, then makes his move on barmaid Germaine (Katherine Dederian), girlfriend of Freddy (Milan Lazich), the bartender.
Freddy occasionally acts as a chorus, making comments directly to the audience. But as a predictor of the future, he’s a bust.

Enter Sagot, Picasso’s agent, the stereotype of a venal art dealer, who fully realizes the future commercial value of the artist’s works and tries to buy Suzanne’s sketch.

Intuding into the debate is Charles Dabernow Schmendiman (Daniel Sally), an irrepressibly optimistic inventor entrepreneur whose last name is appropriately a take-off on the Yiddish word for hapless bumbler.

Director Picone does a good job of keeping the action on track, but perhaps one of the most important elements in the success of this production is the period set of a 1900’s Parisian bar designed by Ron Gasparinetti, arguably one of the best in the bay area.

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