Los Angeles Art Blog

NEW REVIEW GO PURGATORIO

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Photo Courtesy of Societas Raffaello Sanzio

"He longs to make a film" the New York Times reported last year about Italian stage director/set-lighting-and-costume designer Romeo Castellucci. And that longing is more than evident in Purgatorio -- one- third of the director's trilogy (co-commissioned by UCLA Live), based on Dante's The Divine Comedy, presented by Societas Raffaello Sanzio in its U.S. premiere. A mother named First Star (Irena Radmanovic) chops bread at an upstage kitchen table of what one could presume is a spacious estate. With the sound design, the slicing is amplified throughout the auditorium. She calls out to her son, a boy, Second Star (Pier Paolo Zimmermann), who's suffering from a fever. He plays with a toy robot, and the dialogue between mother and son is inane and hollow, culminating with him asking, "Is he coming back tonight?" From the ritual of the food preparation and service, the detailed, robotic rituals undertaken by both characters, and the eventual arrival and tender-empty interaction between husband, Third Star (Sergio Scarlatell) and his wife, Castellucci poses a strategic mystery swirling around what's happening and what's going to happen. There's no mystery, however, to the saturating feeling that this is not going to end well. Purgatorio consists of a series of short scenes, separated by long, elaborate scene transformations into the son's room, a living room, etc - each undertaken with a singular absence of frenzy or even of urgency. Eventually, super-titles provide stage directions for what has happened, and what is about to happen, adding to the sensation of ordinary people in ordinary situations being automatons in what will turn out to be a universe of harrowing and gratuitous cruelty. This is Dante via Artaud, with cinematic special effects in which a visage of the father appears stranded in a forest of poppies, that melt into a cornfield - all seen through the mind's eye of the boy, like from a chase scene out of a horror movie. Castellucci's juxtaposes visual and aural opulence against emotional savagery (one scene is devoted to a character's dance of death). The result is an impressively dissonant blend of visual elegance and visceral disturbance, while the question lingers of whether this all could have been equally well rendered on film. But that would depend on the style and substance of the trilogy's missing two parts. UCLA, Ralph Freud Playhouse, Macgowan Hall, 245 Charles E. Young Drive East, Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru Oct. 31. A presented by UCLA Live. (Steven Leigh Morris)

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The Rachel Rosenthal Company (founded in 1989) is throwing a fundraiser to help celebrate the performance artist's 83rd birthday, past achievements and the upcoming publication of her book on her teaching methods, The DbD Experience, Chance Knows What It's Doing (Routledge). Saturday, Nov. 7, 7-11 p.m. at Track 16, Bergamont Station in Santa Monica. The event features a silent auction of 83 works by artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Llyn Foulkes, George Herms, Mike Kelley, Martin Kersels, Ed Moses, Lee Mullican, Betye Saar, Masami Teraoka, Patssi Valdez, June Wayne and many others. Live music by the fabulous Amy Knoles of the California  E.A.R. Unit and Jean Paul Monsché of the Mad Alsacians and special guests. Desserts by LA's renowned Cake Divas. Wine by Grateful Palate BITCH Grenache, BITCH Bubbly and PURE EVIL Chardonnay. Tickets $25 here

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STAGE FEATURE on Poland, where theater is hip

NEW REVIEW GO
​Photo by Ed Krieger

JUST 45 MINUTES FROM BROADWAY  Suffused with a near-Chekhovian mix of the wistful and the melancholy, playwright Henry Jaglom's world premiere comedy is a delight - an intimate and thoughtful ensemble piece which is as much a paean to the theater as it is a meditation on the perils of living entirely by emotion.  In a picturesque but run down country house in upstate New York (realized in Joel Daavid's beautiful detailed set), a theatrical clan spends what is probably for them a typical fall weekend of histrionics and melodrama. These are people who have lived their whole lives for art - which, one might say, means that dinner is never on time and no one gets up before noon.  Elderly thespian George (Jack Heller) and his beloved wife Vivien (Diane Louise Salinger) are in the twilight of their careers, but regret nothing about a life spent on the road performing small plays.  Also staying in their home is their beautiful, unstable daughter Pandora (Tanna Frederick), who is taking a "rest" from acting after getting over a recent failed romance. The typically "artsy" family chaos turns even more tumultuous with the arrival of the family's estranged eldest daughter Betsy (Julie Davis), who has grown weary of her eccentric family. When Betsy introduces her lawyer fiancé  Jimmy (David Garver) to the family, sparks unexpectedly fly - but the sparks are between Jimmy and free-spirited Pandora. Some overwritten sequences teeter on self indulgence, yet the piece is also wise to the follies of human behavior - and director Gary Imhoff's subtle staging elegantly juxtaposes the warmth and frustration underscoring the relationships within so many families.  The ensemble work is sensitive, yet comically charged, with Frederick's calculatedly daffy turn as the ever-performing Pandora smartly offset by Davis' increasingly angry Betsy. Heller's leonine elderly actor-dad and Salinger's actress mom, tender and sad, wonderfully craft the sense of elders who have never truly grown up, and are amazed by what has happened to their bodies while their minds remain youthful.  Edgemar Center for the Arts, 2437 Main Street, Santa Monica.  Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m. (dark Thanksgiving weekend); thru Dec. 20.(310) 392-7327.  A Rainbow Theatre Company production. (Paul Birchall)

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FRONT OF THE HOUSE

Had a wonky night in Hollywood on Thursday. Was booked that day into one show that I learned, upon my arrival, had been canceled. A gaggle of similarly stranded patrons was annoyed that as of a few hours earlier, the theater's website had mentioned nothing of the cancellation.

Still had time to make an 8 p.m. show down Santa Monica Boulevard, for a performance under consideration for some L.A. Weekly Theater Awards nominations. I showed up by myself right at 8, gave the box office person my name, explained that I was a critic with the L.A. Weekly, that I was on the voting committee for the newspaper's theater awards, and that I'd like, if possible, to "talk my way in."

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NATIONAL THEATRE ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD
​NT's All Well's That Ends Well Photo courtesy of National Theatre of Great Britain

The National Theatre of Great Britain, or a digital incarnation of them, comes to the Mann Chinese Theatre on Thursday, Oct. 1, 7 p.m., for a taped broadcast of its acclaimed production of All's Well That Ends Well. Marianna Elliott's staging includes Oliver Ford Davies and Clare Higgins. Tickets here.

The is part of the theater's National Live program, which sells its broadcasts around the world. Current bookings, beyond the U.S.A., include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxenbourg, Malta, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden. So the sun doesn't set on the British Empire after all.

A complete list of U.S. venues and schedules can be found here

Other National Live productions include Nation, adapted by Mark Ravenhill from Terry Pratchett's novel; and and Alan Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art

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NEW REVIEW GO SHINING CITY
​Photo by Ed Krieger

Conor McPherson's pristine study in urban loneliness, first produced in 2004, unfolds in a Dublin walkup where a sexually confused therapist, Ian (William Dennis Hurley), listens, and listens, and listens some more to the half completed sentences spewed by his despondent client, John (Morlan Higgins), who keeps bursting into paroxysms of sobbing over the loss of his wife, killed in an auto accident. Making matters worse, the couple were estranged at the time, and what will eventually unfold is John's story of his blazingly pathetic and unconsumed adultery with someone he met at a party -- his blunderings, his selfishness, and his need not so much for sex but for the validation that comes from human contact, which his now-late wife couldn't provide to his satisfaction. John is haunted by her ghost, and Ian must ever so gently tell him that what he saw or heard was real, but ghosts simply aren't. (That gently yet smugly articulated theory will be challenged, along with every other pretense of what's real, and what isn't.) While listening to his forlorn client, and answering with such kindness and sensitivity, Ian is himself going through hell: A former priest, he must now explain to his flummoxed partner (Kerrie Blaisdell, imagine the multiple reactions of a cat that's just been thrown out a window) that he's leaving her, and their child, though he will move mountains to continue to support them financially. Ian's plight becomes a tad clearer with the visit of a male prostitute (Benjamin Keepers) in yet another pathetic and almost farcical endeavor to connect with another human being. Director Stephen Sachs' meticulous attention to detail manifests itself in the specificity with which Ian places his chair, in the sounds of offstage footsteps on the almost abandoned building's stairwell (sound design by Peter Bayne), in  the ebbs and flows of verbiage and silence, in Higgins' hulking tenderness, and in the palate of emotions reflected in the slender Hurley's withering facial reactions. This is a moving portrait, in every sense: delicate, comical, desolate and profoundly humane. It's probably a bit too long, the denouement lingers to margins of indulgence, but that's a quibble in a production of such rare beauty. Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through December 19. (323) 663-1525. (Steven Leigh Morris)  

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STAGE FEATURE on Matthew Modine Saves the Alpacas

NEW REVIEW GO MEDEA

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Photo by Michael Lamont

There's admirable ambition in David Sefton's first effort producing a spectacle from the ground up, for UCLA Live. And director Lenka Udovocki's lucid and visually astute rendition is right on track for the scale and substance of such an undertaking. She stages the play on a floor of sand against the rude concrete back wall of the palace beyond, with a corrugated steel door and shed (set by Richard Hoover). There's also a visual motif of power lines that crackle and short- circuit, and the play is accompanied by a chorus of Cal Arts and UCLA students, who sing much of their dialogue in unison while the Lian ensemble underscores scenes with musical riffs played live onstage with Persian instruments. This is an elegant and elegiac production. The challenge of this and, we hope, future endeavors like it, is to overcome the time constraints that mitigate against the military precision of movement and the vocal dexterity and comfort levels of ensembles that have been performing together for years. In the title role, Annette Bening reveals intelligence and raw emotional honesty but not the range so essential for this Herculean role -- compared to say Yukiko Saito's Elektra (for Tadashi Suzuki) whose voice transforms from the gravel pits to the that of a songbird in an instant; or Maude Mitchell's Amazonian Nora in the Mabou Mines Dollhouse. Bening's Medea and her Jason (Angus Macfadyen) play out their respective agonies with unwavering conviction, which includes some evocatively harrowing tenderness, but this epic still dwarfs them. UCLA, Freud Playhouse; through Oct. 18. Info here. (Steven Leigh Morris) See Theater feature on Thursday

Check back here Monday afternoon for review of April Fitzimmons' The Need to Know at the Actors' Gang; Don Nigro's Scarecrow presented by Ice2Sand Productions at the Avery Schreiber Theatre; Victoria E. Thompson's Underground Woman at Theatre Unlimited Studios; Danai Gurira's Eclipsed at the Kirk Douglas Theatre; Deconstructed Production's The Mystery of Irma Vep, at The WeHoChurch Space; Naked Boys Singing at the Macha Theatre; Fielding Edlow's The Something -- Nothing at The Lounge Theatre; Kitty Felde's The Gogol Project, presented by Rogue Artists Ensemble at Bootleg; and Conor McPherson's Shining City  at the Fountain Theatre

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NEW REVIEW GO SAVIN' UP FOR SATURDAY NIGHT
Photo by Jason Charnick

A thunder'n'lightinin' romance between ex-spouses crackling around a restraining order lies in the vain heart of Jeff Goode (book) and Richard Levinson's (songs) new musical, set in an undisclosed locale that sounds a whole lot like west Texas. And though this is a countrified variation on Erin Kamler's urban and urbane Divorce! The Musical, that played at the Coast Playhouse earlier this year, director Jeremy Aldridge does double-duty to seduce us into an environment, as he did with last year's hit at this same theater, Louis & Keely, Live at the Sahara. David Knutson's set transforms the theater into small town canteen/gas station, with plastic L.P records and American flags pinned to the wall. Jaimie Froemming's Texas costumes can make you feel a tad out of place for leaving that shirt with the fringe and the cowboy boots in the closet. And there are other striking similarities between Savin' Up and Louis & Keely: a marriage on the rocks, an onstage band (honky-tonk rather than jazz, consisting of musical director/guitarist John Groover McDuffie, who's also on Pedal Steel; Peter Freiberger on bass; Dave Fraser on piano; John Palmer on drums; and Al Bonhomme, alternating on guitar). Levinson's songs are a throwback to early Elton John, when he was working with Bernie Taupin, with a twist of Randy Newman's harmonic grandeur. Each of the two acts opens with a ballad accompanied just by piano ("Dr. Bartender" and "Small Town") that have simple yet haunting harmonic progressions from John's earliest albums, and the shit-kicking Act 2 "Gotta Lotta Rockin' To Do" is a musical nod to John's "Saturday Night's Alright (for Fighting)." Also echoing Louis & Keely is a dimension that makes this show just right for L.A. -- a prevalent tension between narcissism and the capacity to give of oneself, that's perfectly embodied in the delusions of Eldridge, Jr. (Brendan Hunt), a local homophobe who believes he possesses the charisma and style of Elvis Presley. In fact, he has a slight speech impediment and a deranged glint in his eye. His singing act dominates the bar, with his name in lights as a backdrop. (A number of the bulbs tellingly need replacing, like in his own emotional circuitry.) Can he win back his ex, Lucinda (the vivacious Natascha Corrigan) - a woman of machine-gun wit and fury who works double time to penetrate the impenetrable veneer of Eldridge's ego? Things get touchy, when Eldridge's long time friend, bartender Doc (the bear-like Bryan Krasner) finally has the guts to make a move of Lucinda, while sweet Patsy (Courtney DeCosky) cares for Eldridge - but not that much. It's a thin entertainment, enhanced by Allison Bibicoff's sashaying choreography, but an entertainment nonetheless. Its tone of sentimentality sprinkled with metaphysics is embodied in the song "Here," beautifully rendered by Rachel Howe, who plays a daffy waitress. The place and people can make you so insane, you want to flee, she croons:  "And I know someday/We're all just gonna disappear/So I want to take the time right now to say/I really love it here." Sacred Fools Theatre, 660 N. Heliotrope Dr., L.A.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., Oct 4 & 11, 7 p.m.; through Oct. 24. (310) 281-8337. (Steven Leigh Morris

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Robert Millard

​Finally, someone got it right. For the past year and a half, I've seen operatic and balletic love stories featuring mature performers in roles that suggest, if not emphasize, relative youth: The Giselles and the Juliets, for instance, or the hot and lusty Carmen's Don Jose, played in the L.A. Opera production by a rather dumpy middle-aged tenor who sang well but had about as much chemistry with his costar as did the 89-year-old gentleman snoring next to me. Of course it makes sense in opera and ballet that the stars are older, but on stage, there should be some sparks, no? (By the way, the original production of Carmen, overseen by Bizet himself, featured a 31-year-old Don Jose.)

In my simplistic mind, the roles of Juliet and Giselle should always be given to either young stars or as a way to introduce the best dancers or singers in the corps, as in theatre and film. Meryl Streep is, after all, playing Julia these days, not Juliet! So it was with great relief and pleasure to see L.A. Opera's new production, The Elixir of Love (L'Elisir d'Amore), featuring two bright new, young performers, the tenor Giuseppe Filianoti and the soprano Nino Machaidze.

BABY IT'S YOU

The jukebox musical that's been playing since the spring at the Coast Playhouse, will be the final entry in the Pasadena Playhouse's fall season, playing November 6-Dec. 13. (It replaces Laughing Matters, by Iris Rainer Dart, Mike Stoller and Artie Butler.)

The musical tells the story of Florence Greenberg and her company, Scepter Records, "of how classic records like 'Baby, It's You,' 'Soldier Boy,' and 'Twist and Shout' came to be made," as Greenberg took the male-dominated music industry by the horns.

Casting to be announced later.

ROYAL COURT THEATRE

Tuesday, Sept. 15, at 8 p.m., Rogue Machine hosts a salon with RCT playwrights Phyllis Nagy and Ron Hutchinson, and actress Katherine Tozer on how that theater has sustained its reputation for decades as an incubator of important new British plays. Yours truly will moderate. No charge, but an RSVP is recommended.  

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CORPORATION, COOPERATION AND COMMUNITY

Bill Bushnell weighed in this week in a very belated response to a correspondence surrounding a commentary by Mike Daisey published in February in The Seattle Stranger, stemming from a late-night party conversation Daisey had with an old friend, a '40s-something, renowned Seattle stage actress who was tossing in the towel on theater.  That decision, she said, came after getting Equity work in a regional theater and understanding how the actors she so admired were playing "for wealthy audiences whose [tax return] rounding errors exceed the weekly pittance that trickles down to [the actors].
 
In 1985, With $20 million in funding from the City of Los Angeles, Bill Bushnell took the helm of the newly converted, four-venue Los Angeles Theatre Center on Spring Street. After generating a national reputation for ground-breaking new work, as well as unorthodox reinterpretations of classics, and as a result of alleged fiscal mismanagement and political infighting too byzantine to regurgitate here, LATC failed to meet a bond debt in 1991, and effectively ceased programming at the end of that fiscal year. Among the reasons for the tardiness of Bushnell's response to Daisey's commentary is his current "perch" high in the Ecuadorian Andes.
 
Writes Daisey:

"The institutions that form the backbone of Seattle theater--Seattle Rep, Intiman, ACT--are regional theaters. The movement that gave birth to them tried to establish theaters around the country to house repertory companies of artists, giving them job security, an honorable wage, and health insurance. In return, the theaters would receive the continuity of their work year after year--the building blocks of community. The regional theater movement tried to create great work and make a vibrant American theater tradition flourish.

NEW REVIEW GO BRIGHT IDEAS

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Photo by Shashin Desai

"All the world's a stage, and our children our players," advises a tutor to parents Genevra (Amie Farrell) and Joshua Bradley (Brian Stanton) in Eric Coble's chipper comedy inspired by the playwright's own preschool panic attack. The Bradleys' offstage son Mac is on the wrong end of 3 -- in months, he'll be 4 -- and his chances for a kind success that would be set in concrete depend on getting him off the waiting list for the area's best preschool, or so warn the over-achiever breeders at their playground. The obstacle is Genevra's recently divorced co-worker Denise (Meghan Maureen McDonough) who just bought her child's slot by donating her family's fortunes to build the school's new Aquatics Center. When the couple invites Denise over for some poisoned pesto -- the better to get her tot sent away to live with his dad -- Coble's script giddily underlines its allusions to Macbeth ("Is this a mortar and pestle I see before me?" frets Genevra). Caryn Desai's chirpy direction prefers laughs to moral agonies, and her comic ensemble, rounded out by Louis Lotorto and Heather Corwin, keeps the tone quick and fun. This isn't aiming to usurp the Bard's place in the canon, but Coble enriches his semi-serious premise with a layer of class resentment and modern masculinity issues that intensify as Stanton's very-funny patriarch struggles to wash the phantom basil from his hands. International City Theatre, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach; Sat.-Sun., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru Sept. 20. (562) 436-4610. (Amy Nicholson)

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