Campo Santo's Premiere Run Of OTTO FRANK Comes to The Magic Theatre in March

The Magic Theatre's first Home Resident Company- Campo Santo is honored to announce a limited engagement of the Premiere Run of Otto Frank, a new performance piece created and performed by incomparable star of film, television, and stage Roger Guenveur Smith, with an original score and live sound by award winning musician Marc Anthony Thompson.

Otto Frank will perform from March 12-27, 2022 on Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 3pm and 8pm, at Magic Theatre's Fort Mason location (Fort Mason, 2 Marina Blvd., Building D, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94123). Each show will be followed by a post-show discussion with Roger. Single tickets range from $20-$70 and are on sale now at MagicTheatre.org. Tickets are also available as part of a 2022 Season Pass (still available for a limited time).

From Lead Director Sean San Jose:

Getting to work with a master of Guenveur Smith's caliber is a dream come true and too, a continuum of working with maestras y maestros. For us, Campo Santo, we get to further push narrative and continue to cleave out this ever evolving aesthetic of live performance that keeps us connected to the real world and the spirit world. What Guenvuer Smith and Thompson create together touches on some many things- but is the ultimate in experiential performance. Campo Santo was honored to have him write and direct a piece for us, Casa de Spirits, which premiered at Yerba Buena in 2018. This is also a return to the Magic Theatre, where they had an historic run of "A Huey P Newton Story," that then went all over the world and later was turned into a film. And, as exciting as this new piece, Otto Frank, is- it is the beginning of more pieces from both Guenveur Smith and Thompson individually, that will be created for Campo Santo at the Magic Theatre.

In what can only be described as a resurrection by a singular imagination, Otto Frank is Roger Guenveur Smith's latest solo performance piece, first performed in a limited fashion in 2020 and then only a few select virtual performances through the pandemic. Plans for any run of performances for this incredible piece have been thwarted and stalled by the scheduling madness of the past two years. The power of the piece and the potential in any creation by Guenvuer Smith were enough to have the piece selected to be part of the launch of this year's Under The Radar Festival at The Public Theatre in New York City. The timing of the variant cases forced the festival to be canceled. The misfortune for the festival has made this premiere run even more precious and eventful. This new work has effectively been readied and steeping these past years and now will live in a full run. Otto Frank begins its incantation and psychic interview with these special performances at the Magic Theatre. Otto Frank is a piece both outside and within our own moment. It is a song, a poetic reverie carved from curiosity, sadness, rage, and an abiding empathy. Smith inhabits the father of Anne Frank as he weaves through time, navigating loss, his own motivations as steward and creator of her legacy, and the terrible sense of tragedy in his time and our own.

From writer/performer Roger Guenveur Smith, on the origins of his Otto Frank:

I was invited to Amsterdam to perform a solo piece called "Rodney King" and the first place that I went was the Anne Frank house. And I was able to absorb there what I had only ever been able to imagine: this man returning from the war, to silence. To an empty room which had been full. That experience that Rodney King - of all people- took me to has continued to influence me and hopefully to inspire and to bless this particular project.

And we know a lot of and about Anne Frank, his daughter. But we don't know a lot about him, Otto Frank, her father. The survivor. Who lost his wife and two daughters in the Nazi Death Camps. It was he who gave Anne that diary on her 13th birthday and it was he who impossibly received it again. It was him who struggled through months to read it. And it was he that decided to share it with the world.

From an interview with the Temple Israel of Hollywood.

Roger Guenveur Smith will be accompanied on stage by his long-time collaborator and musician Marc Anthony Thompson, aka leader of Chocolate Genius, who will create the score and perform sound live. The two have created nearly a dozen pieces together, mainly with Guenvuer Smith creating the text and performance, and Thompson creating original scores and live sound design.

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