Working hard, playing harder….

It was McBroom, of course, who penned Midler’s big hit title tune to the 1979 film The Rose; and Manchester began her career as a solo singer/pianist in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side, where she met Midler and became a back-up singer for her (and subsequently appeared alongside her in the 1991 film For The Boys). I’ve been a fan of McBroom’s for years, ever since she came to London’s Pizza on the Park in the 1980s; but this was the first time I was able to see Manchester live, and it was terrific to see them both – not least on a bill that was so reasonably priced with tickets at just $25 and $40 a piece. (And not a drinks minimum in sight – in fact, drinks beyond bottled H2O were strictly prohibited in the splendid Herbst Theatre with its walls of ornate murals, that is part of the War Memorial Veterans building).

And on Sunday I saw two very different one-person shows, but both exemplifying what the author and performer of the first, Steven Fales, kept signalling as a desperate need to attend NA: Narcissists Anonymous. He may have been only joking, but it disguised a larger truth. I suppose it goes with the territory to an extent: the very fact that someone thinks their own story is compelling enough to hold an audience for up to an hour and a half has to entail a degree of narcissism. But with this kind of show its as much about the telling as it is about the story, and Fales – who has previously turned his personal life journey from devout married Mormon family man to gay, excommunicated sex worker in a one-man show Confessions of a Mormon Boy, seen off-Broadway in 2006, has now reformatted it as a cabaret confessional, now called Mormon American Princess.

This is a well-trodden path, of course, and Fales fails to bring too much that is fresh to it. He’ll have to move on at some point from seeking to try to exorcise his demons in public; but along the way he is at least a likeable presence and (if you like that sort of buffed and boyish hairless look) cute enough. The trouble is, though, that he’ll get older and so will the story he’s telling. The lesson of David Drake should be salutary: in 1992 he created a long-running confessional monologue called The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, and eight years later starred in a film version. At that point, he was interviewed by The Advocate, and was asked, “Are you ready to say good-bye to The Night now?” he replied, “Yeah, I’m done. It’s been transcendent to secure it on film, so that it’s always there for other people to enjoy, and to reach people that I could never reach. Now I have other stories to tell. I need to move on.” He did – and when I last met him, he was editing pictures for a Broadway theatre website.

But there’s an even scarier prospect: turning some shallow episodes from your life story into a celebrity acting vehicle for a celebrity who can’t really act, which ups the ante to make it even less appealing. Such is the fate of Bobby Goldman’s real-life account of entering the internet dating game in Curvy Widow that followed the death of her writer husband James Goldman, now being performed at San Francisco’s Post Street Theatre by Cybill Shepherd. I met Goldman over twenty years ago when she the maddeningly over-protective wife of her husband’s interests in Follies, the Sondheim musical that he had written the original book for, when it was finally brought to London by Cameron Mackintosh and premiered at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1987; but I remember, too, that Cameron credited her at the time as being instrumental in making it happen at all.

This play, however, that sees her now seeking to follow in her late husband’s footsteps as a writer on her own account, is what Dennis Harvey’s Variety review describes as “the most primitive kind of expensive vanity project”. Goldman, he says, “has written what appears to be autobiographical monologue as confident of its sassy charm as it is monumentally wrong in that confidence. This brassy yet mostly witless self-amplification of a titanic ego lacks the faintest awareness of how spoiled, abrasive and unsympathetic it comes across to those of us not living in the hermetically sealed universes of the Donald Trumps and Martha Stewarts.” Reporting how, during its Atlanta try-out last year, star Shepherd had “reportedly line-stumbled through a text that critics considered unsalvageable,” he points out that it was refined and rewritten since; but then adds, “one can only ask: If this is the improved version what the hell as onstage in Atlanta?”

You sort of have to admire Shepherd’s vanity, or maybe insanity, to want to expose herself in this way; one-person shows are awfully lonely (especially, as Steven Failes points out, the after-show cast parties) – and there’s no one there to help you get through it. But then Shepherd has never allowed her own lack of ability to stand in her way: a few years ago she actually dared to come to London as a cabaret singer (making public this private pursuit with some 11 albums, apparently, to her name). This production does little to advance either her acting prowess – or up San Francisco’s current theatrical ante.

A feature in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday pointed out that many of San Francisco’s leading theatrical institutions are in a state of flux, with new artistic leaderships on the cards; but the most striking statistic to me was the reference to “the area’s more than 200 theatre companies”. That’s an awful lot of theatre happening in the Bay Area; but it’s striking in the midst of all the apparent activity here to find that all three of the major commercial houses, the Orpheum, Curran and Golden Gate, are all dark. Posters outside the Golden Gate boldly proclaim the legends, “Broadway is passion”, “Broadway is magic” and “Broadway is escape”; but they clearly missed the one, “Broadway is dark”.