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San Francisco Mime Troupe battles robber barons onstage within the parks – Marin Impartial Journal

It’s like old times, or at least like the Before Times. Every Fourth of July, the San Francisco Mime Troupe premieres a new musical comedy political satire that tours Bay Area Parks for the rest of the summer, with donations encouraged to keep the show going.

Only for the last couple of years that hasn’t happened. Though SFMT has kept its hand in during the COVID-19 pandemic with a few radio serial podcasts, the theater collective has held off a return to parks until now.

Now the Mime Troupe is back in parks with a new show appropriately titled “Back to the Way Things Were,” though, of course, the nostalgic title is tongue in cheek. It’s the troupe’s first touring show in Bay Area parks since 2019’s “Treasure Island.”

Written by Michael Gene Sullivan with Marie Cartier, “Back to the Way Things Were” does feature a family attempting to go out and do things after being cooped up at home because of the pandemic, but the show’s not really about COVID at all. It’s about voracious capitalists profiting off human misery and destroying the environment, and basically everything being terrible and getting worse.

Small wonder that Zoe, the teenager at the center of the play, has become so nihilistic. Played with scowling exasperation by Alicia MP Nelson, Zoe volunteers at an unhoused placement center, but she also doesn’t believe there’s any hope for the future and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

By contrast, her parents are blithely optimistic, cheerily singing that things are at last getting “back to the way things were.” Norman Gee and Lizzie Calogero keep up a comically sunny, old-timey mom-and-pop demeanor as Ralph and Alice — yes, like “The Honeymooners.” Ralph is even an ex-bus driver who’s now an Uber driver, while Alice just got a new job as a package sorter at a fulfillment center. Of course, the world outside their door turns out to be a parade of horrors giving just a small sampling of how messed up our society is today.

Aside from Nelson as Zoe, all of the actors play multiple roles. Calogero portrays a harried but dedicated social worker, while Gee shows up as a patient but endlessly delayed client waiting for housing help with his volumes of paperwork.

Andre Amarotico is a smooth and smarmy venture capitalist looking to privatize social services, the glad-handing guy who’s obviously going to become the villain of the piece. He also plays an overworked fast food employee, a helpful street protestor, a predatory cop and a shattered idealist.

Like 2018’s Mime Troupe show, “Seeing Red,” this one involves time travel. Keiko Shimosato Carreiro appears as Book, a seemingly crazed visitor from who-knows-where in a cowboy hat, long duster and coveralls (fun costumes by Brooke Jennings). Book is jumpy and paranoid about all the surveillance devices that we all routinely carry and install that allow a mysterious “Them” to track our movements. (The show’s weakest running gag is about whether to call them “They” or “Them,” as if that were a point of legitimate confusion.) And she keeps trying to draw Zoe into her mission to save the future.

Directed by longtime collective member and frequent performer Velina Brown, it’s a lively show showcasing the Troupe’s trademark quick shifts of scene and character, aided by Carlos Aceves’ versatile set. With music and lyrics by Daniel Savio, who leads the three-piece SFMT Band, the songs in a variety of styles are fairly catchy, especially the chipper title tune.

At 100 minutes without intermission, it’s actually one of SFMT’s longer musicals, as some other recent ones have been just a little over an hour. It’s fast-paced enough that it doesn’t feel overlong so much as meandering, less focused on a particular issue than sampling a smorgasbord of social woes that capitalism has wrought. Like Zoe, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by it all and conclude that we’re doomed — at least in the absence of fanciful sci-fi solutions like the ones she stumbles into. But even so, kudos to the Mime Troupe for calling out America’s broken and sabotaged systems and demanding that we somehow collectively do better.

Sam Hurwitt is a Bay Area arts journalist and playwright. Contact him at shurwitt@gmail.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/shurwitt.

IF YOU GO

What: “Back to the Way Things Were”

When: Through Sept 5; various locations and times, including at 7 pm July 20 at the Mill Valley Community Center, 180 Camino Alto, Mill Valley

Admission: Free, donations accepted

Information: 415-285-1717; sfmt.org

Rating (out of five stars): ★★★★

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