“A History of WWII: THe D-Day Invasion to the Fall of Berlin”

John Fisher

Is it because he was just an over-imaginative, hyper-active boy?  Was it the fact his parents had a woods in the back yard that begged to be the site of grandiose war games with the neighborhood gang?  Did he really see himself as a WASP-y kid who needed the thrill of play bullets, bombs, and battles to put some gusto into his otherwise dull life?  Or was it really those well-dressed, deep-voiced Germans that he and his brother first saw one night on TV in Where Eagles Dare that led him to being “totally obsessed with World War II”? 

To witness how many times John Fisher bites his hand while almost drooling uncontrollably whenever he recalls seeing a handsome Nazi on some war film, one begins to believe his self-professed fanaticism about World War II is in fact highly connected to his obsession with those German men in black uniforms full of iron crosses.  During the 90+ minutes of his A History of WWII: The D-Day Invasion to the Fall of Berlin – now in an extended run at San Francisco’s Marsh – the creator and sole performer of the show repeats over and again that same gagging gesture, often while making sounds resembling a dog in heat. 

But that is just one of a series of repetitive, often frenetic acts that John Fisher employs while recounting in incredible details the major, European battles of the Second World War.  Scenes often drawn from movies such as The Longest Day or The Battle of the Bulge are reenacted with the athletic enthusiasm of an eight-year-old as he romps and rolls around the entire floor, jumps and falls with abound as well as bumps into walls and crawls like a snake up an aisle’s stairs.  All along, he somehow convinces us as audience to make the sounds of rat-a-tat machine guns, exploding hand grenades, and whizzing torpedoes – and we actually do so time and again as his friends must once have done in his back yard.  As he and we play out battle after battle (all of which begin to look in this child-play somewhat alike), we hear details, facts, and figures that spit out almost as fast as a machine gun’s bullets.

But wait, there’s more.  These war-time movies have great scores. Our performer is prone to become the full London Philharmonic Symphony and its conductor in order to recreate a famous movie score while at the same time reenacting yet one more scene usually involving one of his handsome Nazis being staved off by an American hero.  All the while, he prods us to become the snare drum section of the symphony.  But by the third or forth time, these scores, scenes, and symphony recreations also begin to all look and sound alike.

As the war progresses from the shores of Normandy finally to the streets of Berlin (and even to the bunker of Hitler himself), a number of side trips are taken into the performer’s childhood with stories about such things as “The Potato Chip Incident” (resulting in a major falling out between him and his older brother) or an encounter with Mr. Reid, the principal of his school.  The Holocaust becomes a special focus for a time, with this historian providing his theory why Hitler was so focused on the annihilation of the Jews (one that frankly is a bit difficult to accept and ignores the prior millennium of anti-Semitism that engulfed much of Europe, leading to Hitler’s “final solution” to the Jewish question). 

The sheer energy that Mr. Fisher brings to his epical rendition of the war is not to be believed until it is experienced.  This is a performance that is a major calorie-burning workout for him, all the while as he never stumbles in spilling forth details and descriptions of the Allied march toward Nazi defeat.  There is no way his audiences cannot walk away without learning some part of this history that may have evaded them previously, and certainly we leave with an admiration for John Fisher’s command of and passion for that history.

But all along, there is this infatuation of the Nazi physique that (in my opinion) begins to wear a bit thin.  Even he admits, “This is what is scary about your World War II obsession … You begin to admire the worst person in history.”  While his fist-biting reaction to Nazis is initially funny, the continuous thread up until the evening’s last scene in a modern art museum is a bit much – especially for those of us Jewish or not who abhor anything connected with Nazism and Hitler himself. 

In the end, for all the energy Mr. Fisher brings, this History of WWII loses some of its impact and begins even to lose some audience members in sleepy nods because of the repetitive techniques and antics of the performer as well as the sheer volume of details (and side trips) related.  Perhaps some continued editing to bring the performance more into the seventy-five-minute range might be just the belt-tightening to make a good show even better.

Rating: 3.5 E

A History of WWII: The D-Day Invasion to the Fall of Berlin continues in an extended run through February 2, Thursdays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. at at the San Francisco Marsh, 1062 Valencia Street.  Tickets are available online at https://themarsh.org/. 

Photo Credit: Paul Tena