Sara Porkalob’s grandmother has a story to tell, but nothing could prepare you for what an outrageous story it is.
Grandmother Maria is an irresistibly charismatic and forceful presence as Porkalob portrays her in “Dragon Lady,” her solo cabaret musical at Marin Theatre Company. She’s the picture of indomitable strength as she almost blithely describes growing up working in a Manila nightclub after her father was murdered by gangsters, and her struggles as a single mother of five in a trailer park in Washington state.
Now making its Bay Area premiere at Marin Theatre Company (in association with Walnut Creek’s Center Repertory Company), “Dragon Lady” premiered in 2017 at Intiman Theatre in Porkalob’s hometown of Seattle. It’s the first of a trilogy about three generations of women in her Filipina American family.
“Dragon Mama,” focusing on Sara’s mother (also named Maria), premiered at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater in 2019, and Porkalob just finished performing it at San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre this October. The third will be an autobiographical full-cast musical titled “Dragon Baby.”
The younger Maria, Sara’s mother, takes center stage for one of the most heartrending sections of the play, detailing how she had to parent her four younger siblings as a middle school kid while Maria Sr. disappeared for days or weeks at a time.
Porkalob shifts seamlessly between many characters in the course of the story, and it’s particularly impressive when she’s basically playing all the kids at once in a chaos of voices, wants and needs.
She also, of course, occasionally breaks out in song. There are relatively few songs in the show’s two hours compared to a full-blown musical, but they’re deeply touching and organically incorporated into the story.
There are a few mashups or medleys of popular songs, starting with a hilarious blend of “House of the Rising Sun” and “Gangsta’s Paradise” with original lyrics. The originals composed by Pete Irving have a jazzy, old-time Broadway feel that feels perfect for the story and is beautifully performed by Porkalob and the live three-piece combo hidden behind a scrim, with composer Irving on guitar, Mickey Stylin on upright bass and Jimmy Austin on trombone.
That Porkalob has a wonderfully clear, lovely voice is no surprise, considering that she’s a musical theater star who made waves a year ago for her critical candor in a New York Magazine/Vulture interview, talking about her ambivalence about performing in the recent Broadway revival of “1776” with a cast of female, transgender and nonbinary performers.
But the “Dragon” trilogy is the passion project for which she’s perhaps best known, and rightly so. It’s a wonderful piece of work, exquisitely constructed and performed with a ton of humor and heart. It’s a loving portrait that doesn’t feel the least bit sentimentalized, even if some of it is so outrageous that it’s hard to believe there isn’t some hyperbole involved. (As evidenced by the very different accounts of some of the same events expressed by the two Marias.)
Director Andrew Russell’s staging nicely accentuates Porkalob’s powerhouse performance with shifts in Spense Matubang’s lighting and the like. Randy Wong-Westbrooke’s set conjures a gorgeously swank nightclub with all-red décor full of dragon motifs that answers for both the notorious nightclub of Maria’s past and the casino in which she’s telling Sara the story.
The show is apparently a little different than earlier iterations. In past runs, Porkalob’s grandmother actually made a brief appearance at the end of the show, but she died last year. Somehow knowing that only makes the show more powerful, or at least powerful in an entirely different way.
Maria Sr. may come off as an unstoppable force of nature, adapting to the worst of circumstances with aplomb, but there’s a terrible vulnerability in telling her story, the ugly parts and all. Her being there certainly would drive that home, but the fact is, she is there. Porkalob has seen to that in the care she’s taken in the story’s construction and the palpable love that pervades her performance.
It’s a gripping, hilarious and heartbreaking tale, and the way Porkalob brings it all to life is a triumph.
Sam Hurwitt is a Bay Area arts journalist and playwright. Contact him at shurwitt@gmail.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/shurwitt.
What: “Dragon Lady”
Where: Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley
When: Through Dec. 17; 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 2 p.m. weekends
Tickets: $25 to $67
Information: 415-388-5208, marintheatre.org
Rating (out of five stars): ★★★★★
