By Robert Avila

MARGA GOMEZ AND family make an enchanting solo act. Bay Area audiences and fans of the New York-based Latina playwright-performer have had glimpses of her flamboyant parents before, but the West Coast premiere of Los Big Names at the Magic Theatre merges autobiography and a tribute to her showbiz familia with consummate wit and grace, as well as an acuity that reveals something of the impetus behind a born performer.

The show harks back to Gomez's desultory upbringing in upper Manhattan, where she watched her Cuban father, "Willy Chevalier," and Puerto Rican mother, "Margarita," perform on (and off) New York's bygone circuit of Latino stages in the course of their romantic and stormy 12-year marriage. Playing her parents as two charmingly glamorous and volatile egomaniacs, Gomez intercuts memories of her stage-struck and somewhat overlooked childhood with a satirical account of her own pursuit of fame in Hollywood three decades later, namely as the peripheral and eminently expendable Jane Edmonds in Barry Levinson's 1998 underwater sci-fi sinker Sphere. (The ethnically closeted Jane was not the only character destined to be bumped off early in the picture. Queen Latifah dies even sooner and more ridiculously, as Gomez demonstrates in a reenactment of her costar's assassination by a gang of jellyfish.)

Astutely directed by Gomez's close collaborator David Schweizer, the show's intertwining accounts create an oblique portrait of the solo performer as a singular work and world unto herself. For while Gomez's generous and irrepressible personality is at its sardonic best throughout a consistently entertaining 90 minutes, there's no mistaking the undertone of loss that pervades her memoir. But in her own show it all becomes the makings of a poignant and triumphant love letter home. (This is nicely reflected in Alexander V. Nichols's exquisite set and lighting design, which takes the patina-covered ruin of an old vertical teatro sign, extends its faded luster to an adjoining screen, and illuminates both with a display of lights and images with which Gomez interacts like a reanimating force.)

If Gomez's preadolescent and adult selves remain largely indistinguishable in her narrative, it's in telling tribute to their mutual need, which naturally manifested itself as an awe of show business but boils down to a more basic human craving for recognition – the rich food her parents feasted on nightly and that she, as a result, received only sparingly. Her first experience before an audience as a part of her parents' act becomes a revelation to a child who ends by imitating her parents in her own show.

That ultimately the stage is the way leading back home, to family and childhood, doesn't change the fact that this is now reality on the artist's and child's terms. (Significantly, when the narrative has Gomez physically returning to her childhood home, it's her imagination that conjures it up again from the dust of a now vacant lot.) This dynamic goes to the heart of Gomez's chosen form. As she says in her program notes, Los Big Names is "the only story I'll ever need to tell." As her audience, we can only hope she's longwinded.

Big and biggleby

Latin families aren't the only ones given to making scenes. Our enjoyment of Nicholas Nickleby's Victorian England thrives on domestic and social scene-making, as California Shakespeare Theater stages playwright David Edgar's highly successful 1980 adaptation of Charles Dickens's episodic comic novel. As directors Jonathan Moscone and Sean Daniels ready part two of the six-plus-hour saga for its August opening, part one is deftly and exuberantly underway, such that its three-and-a-half-hour running time only whets the appetite for more.

A beautifully detailed production all around, Nickleby is a delicate mixture of high comedy, searing social critique, and melodramatic pathos that benefits not least from brilliant casting, beginning with the excellent Stephen Barker Turner as the hero Nicholas, an ingenuous and stalwart young man who – after the financial ruin of his late father throws him, his mother (Nancy Carlin), and sister (Susannah Schulman) into destitution – must make his way in an alternately brutal and wondrous world peopled by villains, victims, and eccentrics. Staged with a winning balance of artful pageantry and focused intimacy, and played with great finesse by a large and multifaceted ensemble who somehow manage to make it all look easy, part one culminates in an ecstatically funny burlesque of Shakespeare. Indeed, the dexterous presentation throughout, and Edgar's respectful yet purposeful shaping of the text, contribute to a work that (in realizing the novel for the stage) realizes the intense theatricality of the novel.

'Los Big Names' runs through Aug. 21. Wed.-Fri., 8:30 p.m.; Sat., 6 and 9 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7 p.m., Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Center, Marina at Laguna, SF. $20-$38. (415) 441-8822, www.magictheatre.org. 'The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Part One,' runs through Aug. 7. Tues.-Thurs., 7:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m. (also Aug. 6, 2 p.m.), Bruns Memorial Amphitheater, 100 Gateway Blvd., Orinda. $10-$55. (510) 548-9666, www.calshakes.org.