THE BONEYARD

Jenn Colella (center) and the original Broadway cast of SUFFS 

SUFFS at the Pantages Theatre

I was excited to hear the announcement that Shaina Taub’s musical Suffs would be coming to LA after its groundbreaking run on Broadway which received multiple honors, including Tony Awards for Taub for Best Book and Best Score.

I wasn’t completely sure I could cover Suffs with complete objectivity since I had been hearing about its early workshops and development for several years from my dear friend Jenn Colella, who originated the role of real-life suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt in the production and had been with the show’s artistic journey from the very beginning.

Based on Jailed for Freedom, pioneering early woman's rights activist Doris Stevens’ 1920 memoir chronicling the courageous fight for equality through the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and later the National Woman’s Party.

Germinating from an idea producer Rachel Sussman had way back in middle school, she subsequently gave a copy of Stevens’ book to Taub, who was immediately inspired to create Suffs, thus becoming only the second woman in history to write the book, music, and to star in her own work on Broadway, appearing as Alice Paul, one of the movement’s most prominent leaders and strategists.

After exhaustive workshops and readings, Suffs was set to begin its journey to the Great White Way with a planned production at the Public in 2020 which soon after faced postponement thanks to the onslaught of the COVID pandemic. It was rescheduled to debut at the Delacourt Theatre the following summer as part of the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park season but again, the decision was made to delay it until it’s off-Broadway premiere in April of 2022.

The following spring, while teaching together in Felipe Havranek’s Livin’ Arts acting and musical theatre intensives in South America, Jenn (Tony nominee as the pilot in Come From Away a few seasons past) spoke extensively and with unswerving passion about the project to me and our fellow instructor, choreographer Eric Campros.

Jenn’s commitment to continuing to share Taub’s extraordinary tale of the early 20^th-century emotionally uphill 60-year struggle for voting rights for woman, which led to the establishment of the 19th Amendment to our Constitution in 1920, was a given—and when she received the news while we were working in Buenos Aires that it would be remounted on Broadway the following spring, her excitement was only second to also soon after learning from her wife Mo Mullen that they would become parents to their daughter Morrison, born a few months before the musical’s debut at the Music Box Theatre. It was amazing Jenn could walk around and still touch the ground.

Hardly a story of corn as high as an elephant’s eye or real-good clambakes, Suffs marks an extraordinary moment in the evolution of musical theatre, mostly thanks to Taub’s highly relevant and accessible book and haunting, arresting musical score. Under the direction of Leigh Silverman and featuring choreography by Mayte Natalio, jaw-dropping costuming by Paul Tazewell, and lighting design by Lap Chi Chu among its uniformly dynamic design elements, although I’m sorry I never got to see Jenn leading the original New York cast, the team touring with it on the road could not be more impressive.

Maya Keleher here takes over from Taub as Alice Paul and Marya Grandy as Carrie Chapman Catt, with Danyel Fulton as African American activist Ida B. Wells, Livvy Marcus as Doris Stevens, and Jenny Ashman as President Woodrow Wilson, all topnotch musical theatre artists leading what is surely to be the most awarded ensemble of the season in Los Angeles.

The magnificent vocal power of all the members of this ensemble is nothing short of stunning and what sound designer Jason Crystal has accomplished in the usually acoustically challenged Pantages is something to be commended.

There are many standout performances in the large cast, with particular kudos to the eleventh-hour turn by Gwynne Wood as the grieving mother of a lost soldier whose actual letter to a Tennessee congressman changed the final vote in favor of adopting the history-changing amendment and to understudy Amanda K. Lopez, who stepped in at the last moment on opening night to literally steal the show as socialite turned fervent suffragist Inez Milholland.

Suffs goes to the top of my list as one of the most ambitious and memorable musicals of all time, providing a moving, inspiring, entirely credible, and still enjoyable experience paying long overdue homage to a defining moment in our country’s history while still managing to be a charming character-driven entertainment.

For me, I felt a special connection to Taub’s show-stopping “I Was Here,” sung by Ida and some of the other hardest working suffragists after the passing of the amendment:

“I want your mother to know I was here

I want your children to know I was here

I want your great-granddaughter to know I was here

I need her to know I was here.”

I began my own lifelong commitment to fight for equality and justice as a very young teen, traveling during show breaks and between school semesters to sit in the backs of buses, working tirelessly as a member of SNCC, marching shoulder-to-shoulder in freedom marches with Diane Nash, and onceceven being arrested while storming the pedestrian bridge in Century City. I worked with the Committee to Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 70s and early 80s, wrote articles and later took to the streets again to stir the pot for marriage equality, not to mention the legalization of cannabis.

Now, at 79, I have often felt myself lumped into the mix as nothing but an ineffectual old white dude who some of the younger activists think should just lie down and let the primordial tar cover me from the toes up.

What has been accomplished in the name of rights and justice by others who came before the current stand of cotton should be honored, studied, and appreciated, not passed off as old news. Suffs, in all its glory, does just that.

Personally, the most emotional moment during the opening night performance of Suffs came unexpectedly. It was thrilling to see busloads of schoolkids in front of the theatre, obviously filled with anticipation to be included in what will surely be a pivotal experience in their young and impressionable lives.

Near the end of the play, after the passage of the amendment, Doris Stevens and her love Dudley Malone contemplate marriage on one side of the stage—the fact that her future husband is played by African American actress Brandi Porter not lost in the message—while on the other side of the stage, Grandy as Carrie Catt wonders with her secret love Mollie Hay (Tami Dahbura) if they, too, will ever be allowed to marry.

When Catt and Hay share a modest kiss, pockets of approving and clearly youthful hoots and cheers rose up throughout the house and especially from the mezzanine, the area where most of those eager and open-minded bussed-in teenagers were seated.

It was an unforgettable moment, giving me a sudden wave of hope for the future of our poor maligned country—a feeling I’ve found nearly impossible to muster in the light of our current national nightmare as a self-serving madman and his cowardly enablers drag us steadily backward into the dark ages.

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HEISENBERG at the Skylight Theatre

For highly animated American expat Georgie Burns, meeting nondescript local butcher Alex Priest in a London train station sparks an instant connection, at least on her part. For one thing, never before has she met a quiet bluecollar Englishman able to refer to a conversation with her as something “starting to get cyclical.” This is the beginning of a gloriously mismatched love affair that is central—no, everything—in Simon Stephens’ remarkable play Heisenberg, now packin’ ‘em in at the Skylight under the astonishing directorial hand of Cameron Watson.

The elephant in the room here is Georgie is 42 and Alex is 33 years her senior. The eccentric, motor-mouthed Georgie (Juls Hoover) pursues the mild-mannered and highly suspicious Alex (Paul Eiding) relentlessly, stalking London butcher shops before finding and showing up at his and promising the unnerved guy that she intends to buy an “amazing amount of meat.”

The relationship eventually develops into a torrid though improbable love affair and, in the intimate Skylight, audience members squirm a tad when the pair shares their first passionate kiss—of course, not me, considering I’m the December in my own long and successful May-December relationship. It all seemed quite familiar to me.

Stephens has created a highly unique play from a rather predictable situation, delicately peeling away the layers of the recently widowed Georgie’s ditsy dysfunctionality and Alex’ intense emptiness and disappointment with life as their socially inconceivable relationship intensifies. As he relaxes his guard and begins to trust Georgie, he recognizes she’s a completely unexpected boon to his world while for her, what may have been something she initiated at least partially for mercenary reasons, their bond eventually makes her mourn the fragility of current times, hanging onto our rapidly spinning planet with both fists. 

“It’s really brief, life,” she tells Alex, “and really quite unfair.”

Eiding is arrestingly and confidently simple as the lonely butcher, his physicality subtly but perceptibly becoming less and less obstructed by both gravity and societal placement as his love for Georgie grows. Even the first time Alex hops youthfully into bed next to her, suddenly resembling a college freshman getting lucky at a frat party, he gets a well-deserved reaction from Heisenberg’s supportive audience. Eiding contributes one of the most remarkable and memorable performances of the year without a second of contrivance in a role that could be a huge gaping trap for any actor.

And speaking of huge traps, Hoover does a masterful job trying to avoid all the ones written into Stephens’ Georgie—and she almost succeeds. I did feel at the top of the show, even though her character is written as such a completely ditzy weirdo, her work still felt as though she was simply working too hard and not getting far enough into the softer underbelly of Georgie’s damaged soul. Also, there is an air of put-togetherness about Hoover that would be hard to overcome in any role, I suspect, where I think Georgie must reflect a kind of diner-waitress hardness and raw sexuality the actor misses.

Mary-Louise Parker in the LA premiere of Heisenberg at the Taper some seven years ago suffered from the same issues but far, far more so—not to mention Parker adopted such a strange choice of quirky vocal gymnastics that I thought for awhile the character was hearing impaired.

Still, thankfully in the last half of Hoover’s performance, she settles nicely into the role as Georgie begins to find security in her new relationship. From then on, I fell into her performance wholeheartedly and believed her every choice.  

Interestingly, Heisenberg worked so much better at the 99-seat Skylight than it did at the Taper, mostly due to Watson’s exceptionally fluid, even dreamlike staging, as well as Tesshi Nakagawa’s starkly simple set, Ken Booth’s moody lighting, and Jeff Gardner’s always evocative sound design. The 700-seat Taper production tried desperately to duplicate its original design in New York at the intimate three-sided Manhattan Theatre Club, also adding audience members onstage on three sides—a decision that proved unwieldy and distracting.

Simply, Watson’s riveting and innovative reinvention of a beautifully gossamer play proves here to be an amazing achievement. 

The title of the play itself is crafty and thought-provoking, insisting we work to unearth what it means at its core, especially since the name Werner Heisenberg never once comes up. Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” developed in the 1920s at Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, is foundational in the field of modern quantum physics. 

“One may say,” he theorized, “that in a state of science where fundamental concepts have to be changed, tradition is both the condition for progress and a hindrance. Hence, it usually takes a long time before the new concepts are generally accepted.”

The relationship between Georgie and Alex is splendidly untraditional and the fact that we, the audience, collectively become accepting of it and even root for the pair to succeed, is a testament to Stephens’ brilliance. 

Interestingly, my friend Penny Stallings, a staunch lifelong feminist who joined me originally for opening night at the Taper in 2017, thought it would be fascinating to see Heisenberg cast in the opposite configuration—that is, featuring an older woman and a younger male as Georgie—and Cam Watson told me after this performance that last year it was performed in a small London theatre with two women as the lovers.

I, on the other hand, as half of a surprisingly unexpected 13-year relationship with an amazing guy 42 years my junior also wondered how it would play if Georgie was played by a male, especially if the reticent butcher had never before been part of a gay relationship.

What these three ideas say for Heisenberg and the writing of Simon Stephens (Olivier and Tony Award winner for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Olivier Best New Play recipient for On the Shore of the Wide World) is that his chameleon-strong grasp of human nature and the way our world turns these days, despite the unconscionable temporary troglodyte-populated setback of our American political system, elevates him as one of our most important contemporary wordsmiths of our time.  

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MRS. CHRISTMAS at Aurora Theatre, Long Beach

We are all saturated this time of year with slightly long-in-tooth holiday archetypes such as Rudolph and Frosty and the little drummer boy, not to mention the annual assault by Mariah Carey screeching on an unnerving nearly continuous loop making the absurd claim that all she wants for Crissmiss is whomever at that moment is stuck listening to her ear-splitting plea.

Luckily for us seasonally-challenged Angelenos, our very own celebrated playwright-in-residence Tom Jacobson has delivered a wonderful new musical confection that, in a fair world, will become another classic holiday tradition—albeit a far less tired and/or annoying one.

This year, you can leave the little ones at home with dear Aunt Cora, Rudolph, and Frosty, although I would suggest eliminating Miss Carey if you don’t want to pay to have them in therapy for anxiety issues by their early teens. 

Jacobson’s Mrs. Christmas, a sweetly personal memory play clearly geared for an adult audience with a slightly irreverent sense of humor, is currently world premiering in a small and sweetly cozy 50-seat theatre in Long Beach called the Aurora.

Directed by musical theatre legend Karole Foreman, recipient of such prestigious honors as the Richard Rodgers, Ovation, and Jonathan Larson Awards, as well as an Edgerton Foundation Grant, Mrs. Christmas is basically a solo play featuring a jovial Mrs. Claus-wannabe only referred to as “The Singer.” It’s a demanding role, here originated with great humor and a palpably infectious energy by award-winning San Diego-based powerhouse Linda Libby.

Libby’s only foil in Jacobson’s quick-paced 80-minute romp down one middleaged and hardly holiday-captivated rural Minnesota woman’s descent into her occasionally bittersweet memory lane is her shy accompanist, whimsically played (and played) by Cody Bianchi.

Although loudly expressing directly to the audience her resistance to her late mother’s overpowering obsession with all things Christmas—an immersion that began with making cookies and fruitcakes to freeze each July—coming across the crafting queen’s handmade scrapbook of recipes and Christmas carols begins to soften her memory of how embarrassed she was as a kid when each year her Norwegian mor would transform herself into the self-crowned “Mrs. Christmas,” actually journeying through the streets throwing out candy and delivering treats from her own handcrafted sleigh.

Although fictional, the characters of the singer and her mother are largely based—as are so many of Jacobson’s eccentric chimeras—on people in his personal life, in this case his first choir mistress who “understood teens could be lured by food” and his own craft-happy Aunt Caryl.

Everything about Mrs. Christmas is delightful and Foreman does a masterful job of dealing with the many holiday-oriented props and costumes that appear and disappear faster than the contents of Carrot Top’s ever-present trunk as our heroine discovers and displays to us some of the most cherished mementos of her mother’s annual preoccupation.

While Libby returns upstage frequently to take a little swig from her concealed thermos of glugg, the uber-potent Norwegian mulled wine that used to send my own Danish grandfather to bed by about 7pm each and every Christmas Eve, she regales us with Capote-esque enchanting stories of growing up in the tiny Minnesota farm community of Kadota Township, an actual place that Google tells me had a population of 679 at the time of the 2000 census, but grew to a whooping 805 residents by the year 2020.

Along the way, there are cookies delivered on a tray throughout the audience and candy thrown at us from her mother’s life-size sleigh which dominates Jacqueline Estrada’s set—which itself instantly evokes the most warm and fuzzy holiday-adorned living room anyone would love to cozy up in under a festive afghan throw knitted by grandma back before Christmas became blatantly commercial.

The songs gathered here range from obscure 15th-century carols to a series of impressive brand new tunes penned by a talented collective of contemporary composers—most featuring lyrics by Jacobson.

There is nothing about this welcoming debut that’s not charming, from Libby’s grandly ebullient and animated performance to the elf-costumed Bianchi perfectly complimenting her yuletide Costello with his delightfully deadpanning Grinch of an Abbott.

It seems a given that Tom Jacobson’s infectious holiday confection Mrs. Christmas could become a holiday classic if picked up by a noteworthy commercial venue, maybe as a vehicle for such high-profile Mrs. C’s as Melissa McCarthy or Jane Lynch or Wanda Skyes or Jo Anne Worley or Charlotte Booker or Mary Jo Catlett or even, with more of an emphasis on the singing, this worthy premiere’s gifted director Karole Foreman.

But then, as I sat in the elfin Aurora slipping into my own fertile fantasy daydreaming, I kept thinking how wonderful it would be if that true Spirit of Christmases Past, the lategreat Carole Cook, would descend back to the earth each holiday season to grace us with one more heavenly performance.

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PARANORMAL ACTIVITY at the Ahmanson Theatre

As if the audience wasn’t already on edge after a soggy and difficult trek downtown on a severely stormy Los Angeles night, when the cavernous Ahmanson goes completely dark and the house is virtually attacked by cacophonous, ear-splitting sound, if nerves weren’t already frayed, this should certainly do the trick.

And surely, nothing could be more intentional. One can almost imagine Paranormal Activity’s original director Felix Barrett (his work restaged here by the play’s author Levi Holloway) and sound designer Gareth Fry sitting out front during the play’s initial tech rehearsals wringing their hands together and laughing manically like cartoon villains as the wild and disconcerting blast of ambient noise fills the house.

This unusual opening choice is almost as if the show’s creators are giving us a warning: This is only the beginning, motherfuckers, so get ready to scream out loud and jump out of your seats on a regular basis for the next couple of hours.

Based on the successful Paranormal Activity film franchise of the same name, this stage adaptation, featuring an all-new story of demonic possession out to destroy a young newly married couple, is nothing one would expect to see live onstage at the venerable Ahmanson.

Relocating to London to escape weird and inexplicable happenings in their Chicago apartment that seemed to be quickly unraveling the sanity of the young wife (Cher Alvarez), naturally, as in any such intrinsically spooky yarn you’ve ever seen, it soon appears that the ghostly perpetrator has made the journey across the pond with them. Lou’s husband James (Patrick Heusinger) is not a believer, watching the proceedings unfold as his bride of only a year quickly begins to lose her proverbial marbles.

We, of course, know what is intent on haunting Lou is something tangible, made all-too clear to us by the astounding visual effects brought to life by master stage illusionist Chris Fisher, special Tony Award winner earlier this year for his illusions and technical effects for the Broadway debut of yet another surprising live theatrical adaptation: TV’s popular Stranger Things series.

Holloway has brought along some clever dialogue but in general, this is a fairly—yet forgivably—predictable and by-the-book supernatural adventure, the script mainly utilized as a consistently tricky tool to bring to the stage inexplicable phantasms and visual tricks sure to make one’s jaw drop to just about there.

Alvarez does her best breathing life into the familiar stereotypical role of a wife on the verge of unraveling, alone in her visions with no one there to see what she sees except us, yet Heusinger is far more interesting as the concerned husband. As the tale unfolds, he is also given a better opportunity to develop a far stronger character arc than his costar as James starts to believe Lou isn’t as deluded as he once thought she was.

Although most of the two-act play features only these two actors struggling to maintain their sanity, there are also two lesser characters who briefly arrive to further complicate things.

Kate Fry makes a fleeting appearance as a famous paranormal investigator who uncharacteristically for her breed sprints out of the couple’s house at the very first “Boo!” while Shannon Cochran’s cameo as James’ super-religious mother, who shows up at their door with luggage and a need to bring her son back to Jesus with an annoying little prayer session, has by far the juiciest role—something she plays for all it’s worth.

Fly Davis’ towering, two-level doll house of a set allows for many shriek-inducing twists and chills to materialize, aided considerably by Anna Watson’s moody lighting and Luke Hall’s video effects.

Still, without a doubt it is Fisher’s illusions that are the most impressive element of all in what makes this highly entertaining and innovative Paranormal Activity a production not to be missed and provides a memorable evening out that thrills and chills and actually scares the living begeezus out of anyone with a pulse and an interest in experiencing something unlike anything you’ve ever before seen unfold live and in person.

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THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA at Boston Court Performing Arts Center

Reviewing my dear friend Jessica Kubzansky’s beautifully appointed revival of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana was a decision I actually only made this morning, since I adamantly said I would be coming as a TicketHolder and LA Drama Critics Circle voter and not as a critic. After almost 39 years reviewing theatre, I have to say this was the one time I wasn’t sure if I could possibly be objective about a production.

You see, it was 64 years ago this month when I was cast in the small part of a Mexican beachboy in the original pre-Broadway run of Iguana at the Blackstone Theatre in Chicago during the summer of 1961, surely making me the only 14-year-old Danish Jew to ever be considered for such a role.

Maybe young Latino actors weren’t as available in Chitown way back then in a very different time or perhaps it had to do with the fact that I had worked with the associate producer in another production in New York several years earlier. Viola was in fact someone privy to the horrific event I had lived through the previous year and perhaps she thought a little therapy watching art being created was just what I needed.

Either way, I sprayed massive amounts of jet black Streak ‘n Tip on my blondie little noggin eight times a week and slathered on the Texas Dirt, a powdered makeup that created an iridescent bronze complexion and was banned several years later because it actually contained lead mined in Texas. With my history of cancer, sometimes I wonder if this production had anything to do with me being a five-time survivor of the Big C, especially since I had to cover myself in the toxic stuff all the way to my lower tanline and from my top of my legs down since in one scene I wore speedos that today would probably fit over one thigh.

Pancho was a very minor role, but one I accepted eagerly knowing I’d be working with the great director Frank Corsaro and a topnotch cast that included Bette Davis, Margaret Leighton, and Patrick O’Neal. When Iguana opened in the fall of 1961, two weeks before my 15th birthday, it was an extremely different play then it eventually became, the first production Tenn created without the guidance and mentorship of director Elia Kazan. It was Kazan who had molded his wild imagination and obsessiveness into something more or less coherent in all of Tenn’s previous triumphs, including A Streetcar Named Desire and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both of which had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

The big problem was, Tennessee saw Iguana as his first comedy, but the Chicago critics certainly did not. Soon after our opening night, the nightmarish Miss Davis had our amazing director fired and Tenn himself came into Chicago from St. Louis where he had been recovering from gangrene after a dog bite.

From the moment he arrived, racing around with a walker but still somehow able to find inappropriate places to make his hands wander on a too-early world-weary teenage kid wearing some mighty scanty costuming, every day the cast would meet on the stage of the cavernous and historic Blackstone, reworking and rewriting and trying out new things that evening.

Since I had such tiny part and was still trying to slog through high school in the nearby suburb of Elmhurst where my parents lived, I was told I didn’t need to be at these rehearsals, something to which I responded with a resounding au contraire. This was an extraordinary opportunity to observe theatrical history being molded right before my eyes and I didn’t miss a moment. I would sit in the front row of the empty theatre and not move a muscle through the entire process of watching The Night of the Iguana become the great classic of the American 20^th-century theatre as it is now recognized today.

All that said, the idea of reviewing a production of Iguana, even with the incredible vision of the Boston Court’s artistic director Jessica Kubzansky holding the reigns, was not something which gave me any enormous sense of confidence, especially as I consider the Boston Court one of my most cherished theatrical homes in Los Angeles, having appeared there as an actor three times since its inception in 2003 and it was also the place that hosted a showing of my New Orleans paintings and Tennessee Williams portraits during former co-artistic director Michael Michetti's bold revisioning of Streetcar several years ago.

I hearby officially change my mind. This production is absolutely a glowing representation of a truly magnificent work of art. It is beautifully designed, brilliantly acted, and directed with an obvious passion for honoring the words and poetry of Williams more than I’ve ever seen accomplished in a previous mounting of the classic since our groundbreaking production—which of course ended up extremely successful after Tennessee’s five-week rewrite session which culminated in closing our Chicago run just before Crissmiss of 1961.

Iguana quickly transferred to New York for its Broadway debut later that month, a journey I was not asked to join, partially because of my age and partially because when Davis found out how old I was, she wasn't too pleased about the opening segment where she and I were discovered in a cabana at the back of the stage performing more than just the usual amount of stagecraft.

I began as Poncho, the character who beds Maxine at the top of the play and when the then-unknown Christopher Jones was hired to replace me in New York, James Farantino, the other unknown actor who originally played the second beachboy, took over my role. That summer, however, I was contacted and told Jones was off to Hollywood under contract and I was asked to replace him for six weeks during my summer vacation from school. So eventually, I ended up playing both Pancho and Pedro, Maxine’s boytoys who did little more than look fetching and retrieve the guests’ luggage for their stay at the rundown Costa Verde Hotel on the west coast of Mexico at Puerto Barrio.

So that’s the story of my history with Iguana and now may I say, what Kubzansky, along with her artistic and design team at the Boston Court, have done to breath life back into this production is quite impressive.

Do I have my druthers about some choices here? Of course I do. Iguana has been a part of my life for 64 years and it’s hard not to remember some of what was originally discovered and evolved during the play’s reworking in Chicago—not to mention looking back at the real rain that fell from the fly tower at the end of Act One or Lincoln, the live iguana Jimmie and I actually brought onstage and tied up under the veranda for all to see as the play unfolded.

One major change happened in the process as Tenn rewrote and we performed the changes: Davis’ role, the lusty hotel owner Maxine, gradually became a lesser character and the part of Hannah, the Nantucket spinster played by Margaret Leighton, definitely became the pivotal role in the production, something that surely helped Davis find the chops to play a monster like Baby Jane Hudson only a few years later.

As Maxine at the Boston Court, the casting of bigger-than-life African American actress Julanne Chidi Hill is a stroke of genius. She brings something to the role I’ve never seen before, including in the performance of Davis and subsequent Maxines such as Maureen Stapleton, Shelley Winters (with whom I worked when I came back into the show that summer), Sylvia Miles, and even Ava Gardner in the classic 1964 John Houston movie, perhaps her most radiant film appearance of all. None of these noted actors ever quite found the moments of basic loneliness and humanity Hill brings to the role.

As the most pivotal characters, however, Riley Shanahan and Jully Lee, although both phenomenal actors and incredibly well cast in these multifaceted roles, for me both lack something that perhaps only I or a few people left who were part of the original production (Lane Bradbury, who originated the role of Charlotte, and I are now the only surviving members of the original cast) or perhaps those few who saw it still with all their faculties and among the living might grasp.

Of course, Margaret Leighton would be a hard act to follow anywhere, much to Davis’ extreme vexation and leading her to leave the show after only four months in New York. Maggie was not only nominated but won the Tony Award in 1961 for Best Actress and Deborah Kerr in the film version should have won an Academy Award for her best performance ever on film.

Lee has a great capacity for understanding Hannah, but there was something so magically ethereal about Maggie’s Hannah, a madonna quality that I have never seen any actor ever find again in the role. Lee is wonderful but there’s a pragmatism and schoolteacher-ishness about her performance that, although interesting and also valid, I personally felt missed the unearthly, gossamer delicacy that makes the role one of the most entrancing on any stage. If the initial impression of Hannah is not of fragility and wondering how she could possibly continue to exist in the harsh world of her travels, when her monumental strength becomes apparent, the effect is far less impactful.

In the role as the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, Shanahan is also quite arresting but again, what’s missing for me from my unique perspective is how shattered and shaky Patrick O’Neal was right from the character’s first entrance back in 1961. There’s a healthiness and a vitality in Shanahan that I found disturbing from the get-go that leaves Shannon’s final tortured, overwrought monologue only able to land somewhere where O’Neal began.

It’s a monologue that provided one of the most memorable moments in our production because it was so jarringly frantic and rapidly spewed out that you had to fight to hear the words, leaving audience members to wonder if it would end with Shannon falling over dead by the time Hannah comes back onstage and says she’s been listening from around the corner the whole time.

One of my favorite Los Angeles actresses and a treasure to our community is Ann Noble, who is glorious in almost everything I’ve ever seen her do. Her Judith Fellowes, however, the stiff-backed leader of the tour of middle-aged schoolteachers Shannon is conducting through Mexico from the Baptist Female College in Blowing Rock, Texas, is a bit too broad and cartoonlike to work completely. This role has always been a juicy assignment for any actor, but somehow Noble misses some subtlety to make us also feel an underlying sense of empathy for Miss Fellowes rather than just find her a character brought along for comic relief—although I’ll bet Tenn might’ve found her take to be absolute perfection.

Aside from my minor quams, all again strictly from a very idiosyncratic perspective from my history with the play, this is a magnificent production, a tremendous tribute to the greatest playwright and perhaps the greatest poet of the last century.

It is a production that also could not be more timely in some respects. I remember at age 14 realizing Shannon‘s speech about the destruction of the environment and about people worshiping their god as a “senile delinquent,” made my little head explode and helped me see and understand the world from a whole new perspective.

This dynamic mounting of The Night of the Iguana, under the leadership of one of our best Los Angeles directors, is among the finest stage productions to hit any Los Angeles stage this year.

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JAJA'S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING at the Mark Taper Forum

Reviewed for TicketHoldersLA by H.A. Eaglehart 

Tony Award-nominated Ghanaian American playwright Jocelyn Bioh has created her award-winning and prophetically timed Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, which premiered on Broadway in 2023 before American audiences at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

This sensational work of art has since been on tour for the last two years and is now ending its run here in Los Angeles, now playing at the Mark Taper Forum through to November 9th.

The ancient Greeks felt theatre was significant in its ability to allow society to reflect upon itself. In a world of artificial intelligence and fake news, where truth has become ideological, my faith in the power of theatre has only grown. Relatability supersedes debatability, making live performance our last hope in this country.

Shout out to Whitney White for the incredible direction of this important story. She makes daring choices from the very beginning, including having the players deliver lines directly out to the audience, thus breaking the fourth wall.

This is a clever and essential choice for setting the audience up to be prepared for the best monologue in the entire play delivered by Victoire Charles as Jaja herself, dressed in her wedding gown and all ready to claim her American Dream. Unaware, her story will soon to be completely destroyed by the hatred threatening to unravel the social experiment of our Founding Fathers.

Claudia Logan is a standout playing Bea, Jaja's oldest friend who has been working with Jaja since the hair braiding shop was merely an idea they talked about while cleaning people's houses. Her subtlety and nuance capture the story's intention of letting us witness a day in these characters' lives. Her performance knits together the beautiful complexity of dual culturalism in our country.

Logan delivers one of my favorite lines in the entire play when Jordan Rice playing Marie, Jaja's daughter, is in tears over her mother being arrested in an immigration sting and asks Bea, “What happens if it isn't okay?” and Bea responds, “Then it won't be okay, but then after it will be okay.”

Nominated for five 2024 Tony Awards, Best Costume Design absolutely makes sense. Scenic designer David Zinn, costume designer Dede Ayite, and wig, hair, and makeup designer Nikiya Mathis contribute significantly to White's vision.

Together they manifest an intricate ensemble, captivating the audience to the point it allows actors to perform entire wig and wardrobe changes onstage without ever drawing attention away from focus on Bioh's words.

Shout out to Production Stage Manager Brillian Qi-Bell and the entire cast for being on the road for two years yet still able to end the show in LA with the enhancement acquired only by the years of dedication to telling this essential story to American audiences nationwide. Lighting designer Jiyoun Chang and video designer Stephania Bulbarella capture the pulse of Harlem and set the overall captivating mood engrossing the script.

I would also like to shout out Artistic Director Snehal Desai for his great contribution at Center Theatre Group. He took the reins during a tumultuous time for our great city's theatrical scene.

My partner Travis Michael Holder has been reviewing LA theatre for decades and I have been fortunate enough to be seeing and reviewing theatre with him for the last 13 years—time enough to be able to recognize Desai's personal touch at CTG's new direction with a focus on plays championing diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a Navajo born on tribal land, it goes without saying how exhaustive it has been my entire life watching Hollywood portray my culture with actors like Johnny Depp wearing feathers and Texas Dirt.

I am so very lucky to be in Los Angeles for this production because for the last two months, I have been in Amherst building a massive challenge course on the main campus for the University of Massachusetts. I have a 20-year career in community development and inclusivity, and during my time in Amherst,  a friend invited me to dinner where we discussed careers. Mine led into hers and she shared stories about her work teaching English to immigrants. Recently, one of her students from East Africa disappeared and nobody knows where he is. Not even his family in Africa.

Never before has this country seen the type of leadership now coming from Washington, which is why the University of Massachusetts hired Alpine Towers and myself to build a challenge course for teaching leadership and community development. We need empathy education on campuses and stories like Jaja’s African Hair Braiding on stages now more than ever as the current Administration silences the Kennedy Center and defunds the Arts across the country.

A final shout out to everyone I saw onstage: Melanie Brezill, Leovina Charles, Victoire Charles, Mia Ellis, Tiffany Renee Johnson, Claudia Logan, Michael Oloyede, Abigail C. Onwunali, Jordan Rice, Bisserat Tseggai, and Morgan Scott. These phenomenal performances give voice to the silent masses, our fellow Americans, currently living in the daily reality of being zip-tied and disappearing simply because of how they look.

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SOME LIKE IT HOT  at the Pantages Theatre and Segerstrom Center for the Arts

Yeah, there’s no doubt this is one of those big glitzy golden goose of a crowd-pleasing musical guaranteed to dazzle and someday maybe end up in an open run on the Vegas Strip.

Still, the national tour of the third stage adaptation of the 1959 classic film Some Like It Hot is much more than that. It has a heart bigger than almost all of those other popular film-to-stage conversions combined.

First of all, there’s the infectious toe-tapper of a score by the legendary Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, whose catchy tunes for Hairspray won them a well-deserved Tony among many other honors, as well as an incredibly creative adaptation by Matthew Lopez, Tony-winner for The Inheritance, and Amber Ruffin, Emmy-nominated writer for Late Night with Seth Myers and A Black Lady Sketch Show.

If those credentials aren’t instantly impressive enough, the show is directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, Tony-winner for both Aladdin and The Book of Mormon and responsible for much of the success of The Prom, Mean Girls, Something Rotten!, The Drowsy Chaperone, and Spamalot. In other words, someone who has given us all hours and hours of world-class enjoyment and wonderment.

The towering and incredibly detailed art deco set is from Broadway royalty Scott Pask, Natasha Katz is responsible for the exquisite lighting, and the costuming by Gregg Barnes won him his third Tony. Not chopped liver in the design department here either by any means.

When KA debuted at the MGM Grand, I had a several-day backstage access to the creative team as they were about to open the show and during an interview I asked French-Canadian costume designer Marie Vaillancourt what the main difference was between designing for the Cirque and for the small experimental Montreal theatre company from which they grabbed her.

Her answer was immediate: “Le budget.”

There’s obviously been no expense spared in the creation of the quintessential musical presentation of Some Like It Hot yet, unlike so many other productions taking on a project of this size and scope, none of it gets in the way of the storytelling.

The original Oscar-winning screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, itself based on the 1935 French film Fanfare of Love, was perfectly written for the times in which it debuted, but what Lopez and Ruffin have contributed could not be more contemporary and offers such a boost of diversity to the story that miserable ogre Donnie Two-Dolls might ban it from playing the Kennedy Center—or whatever his minions bent on outrageous distraction achieve renaming it by then.

Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon in the film), the irresistible Sugar Kane (the iconic Marilyn Monroe role), and bandleader Sweet Sue (originally played by my lategreat pal Joan Shawlee) are all African American in this new version, and Daphne's smitten millionaire suitor Osgood Fielding III (the Joe E. Brown role) is now Mexican American and only goes by his given name Pedro Francisco Alvarez when he’s at his swank nightspot in Mexico (“The world reacts to what it sees,” he explains to Daphne, “and in my experience the world doesn’t have very good eyesight”).

Sue’s band members are more feminist warriors than gum-chewing “delicate flowers” and when a promoter tries to skimp on their pay, they attack him with the song “Zee Bap,” which includes in the lyrics:

“Black or White or Latin, Asian, Christian or Jew,

It’s awfully nice to know we can all parlez-vous…

And when we band together, girls,

I'm certain that you'll find,

We're a family that's linguistically intertwined."

The guy pays them triple.

Of course, the biggest change is what happens to Jerry (Tavis Kordell) when he starts getting used to being Daphne. “I finally feel seen,” he admits to his lifelong friend Joe (Matt Loehr), “but I don’t have a word for what I feel.”

Luckily, they do have a song, “You Coulda Knocked Me Over with a Feather,” a true showstopper that, thanks to the brilliant Kordell, is the highlight of the entire musical. And as far as fighting stereotypes is concerned, when Daphne is asked by Joe if they intend to make this transformation permanent, they answer, “ Maybe tomorrow a suit and tie… I like having options.”

Kordell and Loehr, along with Ellis-Gaston as a far less ditzy Sugar than the wide-eyed “I’m not very bright” persona adopted by the super-smart Miss Monroe, Tarra Conner Jones as the Bessie Smith-esque Sweet Sue, and especially Edward Juvier as an unexpectedly all-singing, all-dancing Osgood, could all not be more perfectly cast.

Still, the true star of this Hot revamping of an already entertaining tale is Shaiman and Wittman’s award-winning score and, above everything that makes this production one not to miss is Nicholaw’s knockout Tony and Drama Desk-awarded choreography. It’s interesting how over time the signature dance moves of artists such as Bob Fosse, Twyla Tharp, Matthew Bourne, and Alvin Ailey have become instantly recognizable and now, after years of appreciating the work of Casey Nickolaw, I’m purdy sure I could pick out his work in an Olympic dance-off.

Of course, it would be impossible to appreciate Nicholaw’s handiwork without an ensemble cast able to keep up with his talent. This may be a touring cast but you’d never know it—and literally every castmember, from the leads to Daphne and Josephine’s horn-totin’ bandmates, to every waiter, gangster, and G-man, dances like Honey’s proverbial wind and tap their way in precision unison across the stage like an eclectic chorusline of Gregory Hines clones.

I came away from this fresh and effervescent revinvention of Some Like It Hot not only pleasantly charming but I also realized, as we made our way through the crunch and into the majestic Pantages lobby, I was experiencing a satisfying new boost of appreciation for who I am—or should I say, who we all are or deserve to be.

As Osgood Fielding III once so eloquently noted, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

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SHUCKED at the Pantages Theatre and Segerstrom Center for the Arts

It’s kinda ironic that for a guy who’s always grumbling he’s not a superfan of musical theatre in general, I sure have seen—and truly enjoyed—a bunch of ‘em lately. New York hits Some Like It Hot and & Juliet were both delightful, opulently produced, and wonderful escapist fun in the currently discouraging world in which we live.

Now the national tour of the unabashedly bucolic musical Shucked, currently in residence at the Pantages, has once again challenged my usual lack of enthusiasm for my least favorite genre of theatrical benefactions. Shucked immediately felt like Oklahoma! meets Hee-Haw with some blatant Music Man ripoffs thrown in, but somehow I loved it despite it being about as sophisticated as an expanded Minnie Pearl routine.

Make no mistake, this musical has about as much plot as an episode of one of HGTV’s home improvement shows but the downhome charm is contagious and the laughs are nonstop. The thematically corny and often quite deliciously off-color puns are so fast and furious that this production could be eligible to receive a special award at the end of the year for how many Will Rogers-style drawling witticisms have been stuffed into a two-and-a-half hour running time.

“A grave mistake,” our heroine Maizy (Danielle Wade) tells her gran’pa (Erick Pinnick), “was burying gran’ma on a slope.”

Or: “Marriage is just two people coming together to solve problems they never had before.”

Or: “If life was fair, mosquitos would suck fat instead of blood.”

Or: “Relationships are like houseplants… they die.”

You get the picture.

When I was a kid, I was perpetually embarrassed by my redneck Chicago-transplanted wannabe cowboy father. Aside from his typical giant-buckled outerwear and Wilfred Brimley handlebar mustache, his love of country music and things like the Grand Ole Opry and the aforementioned Hee-Haw made my pseudo-cosmopolitan sense of urban pretense cringe.

[ASIDE: The fact that I would end up with a partner who’s a real-life cowboy is not lost on me here.]

The score is by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, whose combined credits drop names such as Kacey Musgraves, Dolly Parton, Kelly Clarkson, Blake Shelton, and Kenny Chesney—again, not exactly the kind of music or artists high on my personal playlist. Still, this cast, led by one of my favorite directors of musical theatre Jack O’Brien, takes this genre of country-centric situations and twangy melodies and deliver them with such balls-out gusto it would be impossible not to appreciate.

This is especially true of Miki Abraham, who as Maizy’s world-weary moonshine-cooking cousin Lulu (“So impressive one Lu wasn’t enough”), is a true dynamo in the role that on Broadway gave another knockout non-binary artist Alex Newell their groundbreaking first Tony. The lusty Abraham’s delivery of the flashy ballad “Independently Owned” is one of the highlights of the evening.

As Maizy’s lifelong boyfriend and modified mullet-sporting hometown love Beau, Jake Odmark is the other most impressive standout in this infectiously game cast, most memorable in his heartfelt solo “OK.” And from the ranks, a loose-limbed and spectacularly over-the-top cameo from Kyle Sherman as a Mayberry-esque and terminally clueless townie named Tank, makes his few brief hilarious moments in the spotlight worthy of exit applause.

The energetic cast aces Sarah O’Gleby’s classically barn dance-inspired choreography, with special praise for the show’s male ensemble appearing as the rural community of Cob County’s farmers and hangers-on, particularly notable when they join together for the raucous eleventh-hour showstopper “Best Man Wins.”

Who’dathunkit that a musical co-produced by country icon Reba McEntire and revolving around an insulated little community dependent on cultivating corn would ever make it to Broadway, let alone garner nine Tony nominations including Best Musical while successfully winning over folks who consider themselves far more enlightened than being stuck listening to songs titled “Holy Shit” and “Ballad of the Rocks.”

Composers Clark and O’Anally, along with bookwriter Robert Horn, a fella who can deliver more groan-worthy jokes than a standup set from Jeff Foxworthy, have created something special indeed: a self-described “Farm to Fable” epic entertainment that completely won me over and would’ve made my late-but-less-than-great dear old dad slap his knees and shout out “Yee-Haw” from start to finish while I crawled under my seat—just like old times.

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With fava beans and a nice chianti...