EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

"Critics watch a battle from a high place then come down to shoot the survivors."   ~ Ernest Hemingway     

Photo by Matthew Murphy

THROUGH JUNE 22: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 800.982.2787 or broadwayinhollywood.com 

[REVIEW TO COME]

Photo by Teolinda

East West Players

There’s something truly magical and quite enchanted about Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, now opening the 60th season of East West Players, our nation’s oldest and most prolific Asian-American theatre company based right here in downtown Los Angeles.

The play with music features a remarkably tight onstage band playing the joyfully psychedelically-tinged 60s and 70s-era sounds of the LA-based Dengue Fever, musicians who a quarter-century ago first brought to the local music scene the pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodian soul of artists such as Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea, Pen Ran and others, most of whom died or disappeared during the country’s takeover by the bloody regime that all but destroyed their vulnerable country.

The play begins as an infectious confection celebrating their spirited Western-influenced fusion recalling a true Golden Age in the history of contemporary music, but this lighthearted rocking deliverance soon turns to something quite ominous as it segues into the story of the decimation of the then quickly evolving Cambodian lifestyle when the brutal Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) swept through the country, took over the capital city of Phnom Penh, and ruled with Trumpian authoritarian intolerance from 1975 to 1979.

What begins as a piece of theatre that makes you want to shake your air tambourines quickly devolves into a cautioning of the dangers of letting virulent and self-serving monsters take over the reins. With the invaluable help of Jason H. Thompson's dynamic video projections, set designer Mina Kinukawa’s bandstand also transforms into the bleakness of S-21, the real former high school taken over by the Khmer Rouge to become a place where the regime tortured and took over 2,100 lives during its attack on the modern lifestyle of the country at that time—a genocide that before its demise four years later was responsible for the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians, around 25% of the country’s total population.

I suspect a lot of what has made Cambodian Rock Band such a critically-acclaimed production since its premiere in 2018 here at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa has been what former Angeleno theatremaker extraordinaire Chay Yew, now recognized as one of our country's most noteworthy directors, brought to the production since its development at SCR. Rock Band has toured extensively across the country since its local debut, including stops at Berkeley Rep, Washington DC‘s Arena Stage, and in New York at the prestigious Signature Theatre.

Traveling back-and-forth through time with whiplash speed, the play tells the story of a NGO prosecutor named Neary (Kelsey Angel Baehrens), an American of Cambodian descent who has been in the country almost two years in an effort to help put Duch, a notorious master of genocide during the insurrection, behind bars where he belongs. There are seven known survivors of the death camp he controlled, we’re told, but Neary’s organization believes there’s an eighth she’s trying to find with only an old faded photograph to go by—a discovery that, with his testimony, could cinch her case.

As Neary and her coworker/paramour Ted (Tim Liu) pull themselves out of bed in her hotel room, she receives a surprise visit from her father Chum (Joe Ngo), who has arrived unexpectedly from the United States and is returning to his home country for the first time in 30 years since fleeing the political conflict. What happened back then is something he has chosen never to talk about at home, especially with the once-pampered princess of a daughter he dreamed of raising early in his life.

Most of Neary’s knowledge of the subject and interest in the admonitory events that unfolded back then came from discussing it behind her dad's back with her mother, who had no idea herself that Chum was about to max out a credit card and take off to Phnom Penh—not really to see the sights and find familiar places from his youth to look back upon, but more importantly to talk his daughter into coming home, resuming her law studies, and give up this ghost of taking down Duch and dredging up the memories of a time he would rather forget.

There’s a major twist in the story, which in other less gifted hands than the almost palpable close artistic collaboration between the playwright and her inspired director would seem hard to swallow, but the imagination Yew brings to this production makes it possible to buy Yee’s rather farfetched and artistically convenient bump in the storyline, something that 's actually revealed early on in the first act but here will remain undisclosed because it must be experienced firsthand to buy its premise.

All of the musicians in the exceptional onstage band double as the play's various characters, stepping out from behind their instruments and microphones to become the characters in the tale. The Joplin-voiced Baehrens is spectacular in both regards, both as the band’s featured vocalist (based on the real Ros Serey Sothea, one of those artists who went poof during the conflict) and as the daughter finding herself in a crushing situation she did not expect to endure. The performers are all extremely charismatic, but particularly Baehrens, one of the two new actors who have joined the company since its initial run at SRC.

Ngo is exceptionally effective as the father whose most entertaining Ugly American tourist vibe is dashed against the rocks as in flashback he becomes himself as a young man personally caught in the worst kind of nightmare during the takeover. Daisuke Tsuji acts as a glib and energetic narrator almost in the vein of the Emcee from Cabaret, but the character is soon revealed as Duch himself, commandant of the nightmarish S-21 where so many innocent Cambodian citizens were horribly tortured and murdered. His name is fictional, but the character is based on the real-life Kang Kek Iew, a mild math teacher who creepily transformed into someone known as the country’s resident Himmler and is today still serving a life sentence as the conflict’s most fecund mass murderer.

The other actors/musicians are also uniformly committed both to their music and their roles in the drama, with a special shout out to Jane Lui, who smokes on keyboards bigtime. The design elements are impressive, especially Kinukawa’s simple and austere set, a perfect backdrop for Thompson's vivid projections, as well as Derek Jones’ lighting, Linda Cho’s costuming, and particularly Megumi Katayama and Mikhail Fiksel’s crescendoing sound plot which reverberates through the walls of EWP’s longtime home in a converted J-town church.

Still the true wonder of this production is Lauren Yee‘s rule-defying script which somehow manages to almost jarringly shift from the excitement of pre-compromised Cambodia to the ugly coup d-etat that marked an end to the kind of progressive joy and permissiveness that the country had come to embrace. If this all sounds eerily familiar after what our own country is in danger of experiencing in its current quickly evolving political situation, it certainly is.

As my old friend and now committed New Yorker Chay Yew mentioned in a conversation with me during the usual EWP pre-show reception, every venue his Cambodian Rock Band has played along the way since its inception in Costa Mesa seven years ago has proven to be timely visit and, as our country is beginning to feel as though we're in the midst of the same kind of brazen oligarchial coup, nothing could be more apropos or unsettling than the timing of its current long overdue debut to Los Angeles audiences.

Perhaps the most chilling line from Lauren Yee’s remarkable achievement comes directed at the math teacher who became a tyrant of unspeakable proportion: “It's been 30 years,” he’s reminded by his broken and still haunted former eighth surviving prisoner, “and you’re still saying you were just following orders.” For all decent and rightfully concerned Americans right now, let that be a warning none of us should take lightly.

THROUGH MAR. 9: East West Players, 120 Judge John Aiso St., LA. 323.609.7006 or eastwestplayers.org 

Photo by Danny Zaan

Ahmanson Theatre

I almost missed one of the best experiences of my life yesterday. I nearly fell for the typically dire TV news reports of polar vortexes and arctic blasts and “storm of the year” dramatics that bordered on making me agonizingly decide to skip the opening night of the North American premiere of the Broadway-bound star-studded musical revue Old Friends, Cameron Mackintosh‘s acclaimed personal love letter to the late-great Stephen Sondheim.

Even as late as 5:45, as I peered out the front door to watch a stream of rainwater rushing down our street, I was seriously considering calling Los Angeles public relations guru extraordinaire Tim Choy and telling him to give away my seats. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized I should be friggin’ willing to paddle down Sunset Boulevard on my living room couch before missing what I suspected would become one of the greatest events in my long seven-decade-plus obsession with all things theatrical.

Magically, as if the universe was on my side for the first time in a long while, at 6:15 the rain simply stopped and my partner Hugh and I were on our way to the Ahmanson for what indeed became an evening I will never forget.

Begun as a one-night gala tribute in May of 2022 celebrating the life and work of Sir Steve as a benefit for his newly established foundation and taking place in the former London Queen’s Theatre that Mackintosh refurbished and renamed The Sondheim, his prolific friend and collaborator quickly realized the production could sustain a commercial run and Old Friends was remounted at the Giulgud in the West End the following year.

Writes Mackintosh in the playbill of his early collaboration on the project with the honoree himself before Sondheim's death in November of 2021: “Our Broadway-bound baby was conceived during COVID as two old friends chatted and gossiped together—Steve tucked up in his country house in Connecticut and me down on my farm in deepest Somerset, both wondering what on earth we were going to do to get the theatre and our shows back up.

“Steve suggested it was time to put together a third review of his work, to follow the worldwide hit (my first!) of Side by Side by Sondheim, the show that brought us and Julia McKenzie together in London in 1976. It was followed by Putting It Together in 1992, which had premiered in England with Diana Rigg and then played New York, first with Julie Andrews at the Manhattan Theatre Club then Carol Burnett at the Barrymore Theatre on Broadway.

“In the midst of our isolation, we started to work. From the off, we wanted to do something different... The material was solely drawn from Steve’s words from start to finish (with a little help from James Lapine). So we started writing our lists—some songs he had on his list, some different ones on mine, but many of them were the same.”

There simply could not be a more fitting living tribute to the brilliance of Sondheim, the most important and celebrated composer and lyricist in the past sixty-plus years. The fully realized production, complete with its spectacular West End design elements, director Matthew Bourne working alongside Julia McKenzie, and featuring choreography by Stephen Mear, has transferred to the Ahmanson with much of its original British cast joined by some of the best performers working on the American stage today.

Still, apart from these original aspects and uber-talented new additions, the most noteworthy cachet that came along on this wondrous ride with Old Friends is another true old friend. Multiple Tony nominee and two-time recipient Bernadette Peters, long considered the quintessential sonneteer of Sondheim and the star of many of his productions, headlines alongside fellow Broadway superstar Lea Salonga, a muse of Mackintosh since opening in London in Miss Saigon in 1989 at the age of 17—a role that won her the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical in 1991.

I have met and have the privilege of spending time with Miss Peters many years ago during her time on the arm of my old friend Steve Martin (someone I gave his first professional job during my tenure as Talent Coordinator of the Troubadour), but never before have I had the intense pleasure of seeing her performing live in all her splendor. Sitting in the opening night audience of Old Friends and experiencing her unearthly charisma in person before I shuffle off my rapidly deteriorating mortal coil is something for which I’m most grateful—and something I found a little perplexing since Peters is a mere two years younger than I am. Somewhere, surely, in some musty attic, there must be an Oscar Wildean portrait of her really going to hell.

Here she brings us some of Sondheim’s most enduring songs, including a brief turn as Dot in Sunday in the Park with George, the same role that won Peters her third Tony nomination in 1984. She also delivers knockout renditions of “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music, “Losing My Mind” from Follies, and aces a surprising turn as a decidedly (intentionally) older but wiser Red Riding Hood with “I Know Things Now” from Into the Woods, the time-honored musical in which Peters created the role of the Witch in 1989.

Solonga, to me, was even more of a revelation, maturing both vocally and visually from her youthful appearance as Kim in Saigon into a true Broadway diva-esque leading lady. Aside from tackling the challenging “Loving You” from Passion and “Somewhere” from West Side Story (for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics), her Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd opposite the incredible Jeremy Seacomb was a comic delight and her Mama’s Turn as Rose in Gypsy, out-belting even Ethel Merman and surely sending “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” out into the soggy Music Center Plaza, was truly a theatrical bombshell of a performance I’ll also never forget.

Still, there are many, many other stars showcased here. Gavin Lee delivers a delightful gender-swapping “Could I Leave You” from Follies, London superstar Joanna Riding is hilarious racing through “Getting Married Today” (opposite former LA-based musical theatre hero Kevin Earley) and Jacob Dickey is a standout with “Being Alive,” both numbers from Company, and Bonnie Langford, who at age nine played Baby June opposite Angela Lansbury in Gypsy, brings a strikingly crusty world-weariness to the great Follies’ classic “I’m Still Here.”

As if all this isn’t enough, my ultimate favorite performance of the evening came from Beth Leavel, whose work as Beatrice Stockwell in The Drowsy Chaperone won her a Tony when the show moved from here at the same theatre to Broadway. Leavel’s headshot should go into Webster’s next to the term show-stopping, as her eleventh-hour Act One treat, delivering Company’s always arresting “The Ladies Who Lunch,” even rivals the incomparable memory of Elaine Stritch as Joanne.

There’s not a weak performance anywhere in this ensemble, especially as the cast is led to breath glorious life into the always tongue-in-cheek staging of Matthew Bourne, who with McKenzie at his side once and for all proves he doesn’t need male swans or balletic car mechanics to dish out pure genius. Add in Mear’s Bourne-like choreography, Matt Kinley’s unearthly and most versatile set, Jill Parker’s lavish costumes, Warren Letton’s striking lighting, Mick Potter’s crescendoing sound plot, George Reeve’s elegant projections, and a dynamic full orchestra led by Annbritt du Chateau, and there's nothing about this meeting of Old Friends that won’t take New York by the short hairs when it arrives in the Big Apple this spring.

Oh yes, well, there is one thing missing: the great Stephen Sondheim in the flesh—but considering the monumentally rich homage paid to him here by people who obviously adore and revere him as totally as the rest of the world will for many years to come, his presence last night at the Ahmanson was almost palpable.

THROUGH MAR. 9: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org  

Photo by Jeff Lorch

Geffen Playhouse

I sure needed a good laugh right now and the effervescent revival of Michael Frayn’s uproarious now-classic British theatrical burlesque Noises Off could not have arrived at a more apropos moment. Landing at the Geffen after a successful run last fall at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre directed by its superstar former artistic director Anna D. Shapiro, this production and its nearly intact ensemble cast epitomizes what is meant by the term Ensemble Performance.

On Todd Rosenthal’s incredibly detailed revolving two-story set depicting the living room of an upscale country home in the British provinces, there are eight doors and one quite accessible window here to provide all the slams and painstakingly timed entrances and exits—not to mention the presence of multiple plates of sardines and other constantly disappearing and reappearing accoutrements—that this jigsaw puzzle of theatrical hedonism demands. “That’s what it’s all about,” Noises Off’s play-within-a-play director Lloyd Dallas (Rick Holmes) tells his impossibly dysfunctional cast as he tries to guide them on to the following day’s opening, “Doors and sardines! That’s theatre! That’s life!”

Everything about this play is impossibly silly and totally ridiculous and I loved every minute of seeing it again. Shapiro, who won a Tony Award for her direction of August: Osage County, also developed at Steppenwolf, leads a cast as fiercely as I suspect Leonard Bernstein conducted an orchestra. The result is a quintessential synergy that could not possibly be better, unfolding like a well-oiled machine and clearly rehearsed as though the actors were part of an athletic drill team.

In Act One, as the play's self-indulgent troupe of questionably talented actors rehearse for the premiere of the fictional Nothing On, their woebegone director sits out front in among the patrons in the Geffen audience and tries to keep things flowing as lines are flubbed and dropped, props are misplaced, and the question of whether this is the tech rehearsal or dress rehearsal is constantly in question ("The only thing I like about technicals," one character admits, "is you get to sit on the furniture."). Whichever might be the case, nothing about the play facing a potentially disastrous opening the following evening is working smoothly and, as Dallas notes, they don’t want the audience members in attendance to miss their last buses and trains—a reference to which anyone who has ever performed in regional theatre can relate.

The second act, in which Rosenthal’s massive set revolves before us to show the raw wood multi-level backstage structure of the construction with all of its slamming doors and entrances, begins sometime during the play’s now presumably lengthy run. It’s a time where tensions are at a crisis point between the performers, including one angry actor locked in her dressing room as personal romantic hookups are starting to fray, leading to chases with fire axes and sabotaged costumery—all while everyone has to keep their eye on one ancient actor dragged out of retirement named Selsdon Mowbray (played by Steppenwolf’s beloved 46-year veteran ensemble member Francis Guinan), who has to be watched judiciously to keep him away from the omnipresent battle of whiskey being passed between the players to keep him sober enough to go on.

By the time the third act begins to unfold, once again shown from the audience’s perspective, we see what has happened during the long touring period, a time when it appears honoring the script and getting things right is no longer a consideration. At this point, it’s now a case for whether things happen at all before the final curtain.

Noises Off, forerunner and inspiration for later plays such as Ken Ludwig’s Moon Over Buffalo a decade later and the entire more recent The Play That Goes Wrong series of productions, was in turn inspired after Frayn observed the backstage antics taking place during the run of another farce he had written in 1970, The Two of Us starring Lynn Redgrave, a piece he confessed he found “funnier from behind than in front.” It must be particularly hilarious to anyone who has ever appeared in or worked on any kind of play in their lives and for me, after all these years since seeing it debut on Broadway in 1983 starring Dorothy Louden and Victor Garber, it simply never gets old.

Perhaps part of my reaction to this revival generates from my own personal memories appearing as flummoxed and pants-dropping playwright Freddie Fellowes in a production of Noises Off in the late-1980s and remembering how impossible it was to make all the door slamming and all the outlandish situations happen in precision time. Ironically, my own memory makes it even funnier, especially when, at one point early on in the proceedings, the estate’s dotty housekeeper Dotty (here played by Ora Jones) is trying desperately to remember her words and which of those damnable plates of sardines are to be carried on and off. “Some of the lines,” she earnestly admits to her frustrated director trying to feed her cues, “have a very familiar ring.”

In our production, two well-known but faded film stars were brought in as the draw to bring in crowds. The actress cast as Dotty, the then long-in-the-tooth star of many popular movie musicals, like her character could simply not remember her lines, where or when she was to move, or what she was to supposed to carry when she did. While the rest of us were working desperately to hit our marks, be where we needed to be, and say what was so important to say, suddenly there she would be in front of us, perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time. And to further exemplify the notion of art imitating life—or was it the other way around?—the other star-turn, again a once very famous early comedian playing the equally aged Selsdon, had to be constantly wrangled by the rest of us to keep him from walking onstage channeling Peter O’Toole in My Favorite Year, a task that rivaled his character at every turn. Keeping up the pace while dealing with these two challenging once-grand Hollywood albatroses was one of the most agonizing experiences I ever have had on any stage and yet now in retrospect, it was also a memorable and priceless experience.

Wherever my glee being privy to the return of Noises Off presented by the Geffen in collaboration with one of the premier theatre companies of our time might have originated, for me it’s still one of the most charming and entertaining plays of the last century—and what Anna Shapiro and this extraordinary cast brings to it four decades after its debut is pure theatrical ambrosia.

THROUGH MAR. 9: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Av., Westwood. 310.208.5454 or geffenplayhouse.org

Photo by Makela Yepez

Mark Taper Forum

Let me start by saying LA-based MacArthur Genius fellow Larissa FastHorse is one of the most promising theatrical voices of today. The initial excitement around her newest play Fake It Until You Make It was dashed last year when the Center Theatre Group was forced to pull all programming from the Mark Taper Forum due to financial constraints. FastHorse could have taken her project elsewhere, but she instead chose to wait patiently and now that the Taper is gratefully back in operation again, the debut of Fake It was one of the most highly anticipated projects announced for 2025.

FastHorse has a unique ability to create, through outrageous humor and farcical shenanigans, material like no other playwright working today. Her highly successful The Thanksgiving Play, which premiered several years ago at the Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland before making its California debut at Capitol Stage in Sacramento and soon after played here at the Geffen Playhouse, is one of my favorite comedies of the decade, and her engaging Tiger Lily-centric adaptation of the classic musical Peter Pan is one of the best reinventions of a dated old warhorse in many years. Add in that the New York debut of The Thanksgiving Play gave her the distinction of becoming the first female Native American playwright to have a work featured on a Broadway stage and the wins are fast, furious, and certainly deserved.

Still, FastHorse’s mission goes far deeper than creating throwback comedies. As she declares in the Fake It playbill, “I’m there to start conversations, start questions. When you leave my plays, if you’ve stopped talking about it before you’ve left the theater, I haven’t done my job.”

Through the preposterous Marx Brothers-esque situations she pays homage to with this new work, a goal she accomplishes bigtime, she presents a rivalry between two nonprofit organizations centering on Indigenous issues. Winona (Tonantzin Carmelo) is the Native American proprietor of the nonprofit N.O.B.U.S.H., dedicated to destroying the invasive butterfly bush plant on native land, while her arch-enemy and glaringly Caucasian adversary River (Julie Bowen) maintains an office adjacent to hers and runs the better funded Indigenous Nations Soaring.

Their bitter over-the-top clashes snare everyone around them into the fray and leads to a kind of Native American Moon Over Buffalo that, lurking cleverly below the humor, calls attention to the ever-present yet ridiculously skewed nature of misplaced ambition—and our era's oversimplification of authenticity. As noted in the program, the irony of creating a play about nonprofit organizations at a not-for-profit theatre complex is not lost on either FastHorse or her director Michael John Garces. “If nonprofit fundraising doesn’t say farce,” she writes, “nothing does. The farcical elements were obvious in bringing together the worlds of fundraising and identity and race shifting.”

As with every farce worth a curtain rising, there are plenty of slamming doors here, as well as mistaken identities and ridiculous situations that rise up to make it all a worthy example of this playwright’s astute dexterity as a wordsmith. It’s an incredibly promising play with what I’m sure will be a suitably rosy future but, unfortunately, it’s yet to bloom. This first pass is not quite ready for prime time, which seems ironic since FastHorse had such a long period of time to tweak it while waiting for the day when it would finally face its world premiere here at the Taper in collaboration with Washington DC’s Arena Stage.

Although it seems problems with the play itself could be a simple answer, I think perhaps the real problem is this company needed about another week or 10 days of rehearsal before opening to the public—as well as perhaps debuting on a more intimate stage where the actors didn’t have to work so hard to project their lines and accomplish visual feats of physical dexterity. CTG’s westside Douglas space would have been a better choice, although granted, it cannot accommodate as many patrons.

As it is, it's as though the actors and their director are not yet completely comfortable in their performances or existing on Sara Rying Clement’s unnecessarily two-story set, grand and colorful though it may be—which it should be noted features a fantastic array of artwork created by Indigenous artists. It’s all quite impressive indeed to see but it swallows up the people on stage frantically running for exits, climbing stairs to nowhere, and traditionally hiding behind every doorway and curtain available to them.

Interestingly, the most successful performance comes from Dakota Ray Hebert in a supporting role as an attorney whose own nonprofit in the same complex works towards clients being able to identify racially and ethnically in any way they choose, while she remains dubious to proclaim her own Native heritage since her family was such a nightmare. Unlike some of her costars, she simply doesn’t arduously labor to deliver the play's steady flow of  wisecracks that could hold their own without straining for excess. Hebert stands out as others around her are still floundering to find the balance between their characters’ reality and the often slapstick-y nature of their roles.

Bowen, a supertalented and well-proven purveyor of comedic material, has a particularly difficult time in her Los Angeles stage debut. Although she has all of the personality that made her character on the long-running TV series Modern Family so much fun to watch, she struggles with body language and how to best utilize her voice to deliver FastHorse’s message without being distracting. Perhaps when the resolute Amy Brenneman takes over the role at Arena Stage after the show’s run here, it will come together more successfully.

Still, I can’t emphasize enough this is a gifted cast that might simply need a little more time to feel comfortable in their roles and working on the cavernous Taper stage, as great as it is to have it back in use. Give Fake It Until You Make It another week or so of performances and I suspect a lot of what seemed clumsy and unfinished on opening night might just fall into place.

THROUGH MAR. 9: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Rogue Machine Theatre

As with everything glaringly apocalyptic descending upon our poor maligned planet since the beginning of 2025, from a shocking political takeover of our divided country’s democracy to unconscionable genocide happening elsewhere on distant shores to terrorism both foreign and domestic to natural disasters close to home caused by climate change, the Los Angeles theatre community also got off to a bumpy start.

Thank Geebus for the indomitable spirit of two venerable LA theatrical institutions, the Road Theatre Company and now Rogue Machine, both of whom helped assuage the bad taste left by a shockingly clueless takedown of a great classic.

Rogue Machine’s Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, its second mounting of a future chef-d'oeuvre by Will Arbery, whose Pulitzer finalist Heroes of the Fourth Turning was one of the best on any local stage in 2023, clearly solidifies that this writer—alongside the Road’s own undeclared resident playwright Steve Yockey—will be among the O’Neills and Williamses and Millers of the 21st century.

As a kid, my homebase was Elmhurst, Illinois, about 20 miles from Evanston, and having later attended school there at Northwestern, I can verify that midwestern winters are nothing short of brutal and, from what my family still there tells me, it’s only gotten worse since my early years there back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

Evanston Salt Costs Climbing takes place in the university town-dominated former wetlands and swampy community that shares the north shore of Lake Michigan with downtown Chicago about 12 miles south. This is where two bluecollar truck drivers make their living during the treacherous winter months spreading salt on the area’s notoriously dangerous roads.

It’s a difficult life for the suicidal Peter (Michael Redfield), stuck in a humdrum marriage with a wife he dreams about off-ing, and his partner Basil (Hugo Armstrong), a Greek immigrant who spends his evenings alone writing fanciful stories, usually set in the warmth of summer, and standing by his kitchen window “playing with his dick.”

Their deadend jobs are in danger of becoming even more deadend as their supervisor Jane Maiworm (Lesley Fera), a deputy administrator for the city’s public works department, attempts to bring Evanston Public Works into a more technologically advanced future by one day implementing a new system of heated permeable street tiles that will render Peter and Basil’s jobs obsolete.

Evanston Salt is remarkably quirky and ironically funny but above all, it's an incredibly newsworthy play, introducing us to four achingly needy ordinary people—Maiworm’s majorly dysfunctional stepdaughter Jane Jr. (Kaia Gerber) being the fourth—desperately trying to find a way to connect with one another and navigate the disintegrating world around them.

Arbery's characters share one common trait: although each longs for that kind of illusive human kinship, they are all too terrified to confront—or more than that, let anyone even get a glimpse into—their individual potentially shameful worldview to be successful at making a connection.

Coupled with the familiar yet indescribable feeling that there’s something lingering underneath everything that “wants us all to die,” these modernday Beckettian characters crash through their lives alternating between monumental moments of near-euphoric hope and petrifying doubt—and no one understand their plight better than their director Guillermo Cienfuegos.

I kept thinking during the performance what it must have been like for Cienfuegos to read Arbery’s densely absurd yet hauntingly topical script for the first time. It would be hard to imagine the idea of directing such an idiosyncratic piece of theatrical indulgence could have been anything but an intimidating concept, but it proved to be a challenge Rogue Machine’s exceptionally sturdy artistic director handled with consummate skill and an equally quirky sense of unstoppable theatricality.

Cienfuegos, like the playwright, obviously has a highly developed imagination. Arbery’s script has no stage directions or suggestions detailing how some of Salt’s most unwieldy visual challenges can be accomplished. I know—I looked. The long one-act has no discernible scene change notifications, which makes Cienfuegos’ staging even more amazing, particularly on the Matrix’s often difficult wide and shallow playing space.

Every one of his designers are completely in line with his vision. Mark Mendelson’s set ingeniously switches from the workers’ break room to Maiworm’s living room to the freezing Chicago outdoors seamlessly, anchored in the middle by a workable rusty industrial garage door which noisily lifts to reveal the cab and glaring headlights of Peter and Basil’s salt truck.

Dan Weingarten’s lighting and Michelle Hanzelova-Bierbauer’s projection design perfectly accentuate the bland surroundings dominated by the blizzardy Chicago winterscape, making me wonder along the way if the freezing Colony Theatre-esque temperature inside the Matrix might have been intentional to make us wish we had been handed out a few of costumer Christine Cover Ferro’s coziest woolen scarves and beanies.

All of this, complimented by Christopher Moscatiello’s clattering, echoing, blustering sound design, conspires to bring Salt’s arduous Chicago winter to life.

Of course, everything here would be for naught without this production’s spectacular quartet of performers, who as an ensemble I suspect will be hard to beat for award consideration at the end of the year.

Redfield and Gerber have a harder task in many ways due to the lack of any kind of discernible character arc for their woebegone supporting characters, but both hold their ground beautifully playing off Fera and Armstrong, two of Los Angeles’ most noteworthy and beloved stage veterans.

If Redfield’s casually suicidal Peter is not able to find a way to painlessly pull the plug, he wants nothing more than for his wife to shut up and his Domino’s pizza to be delivered on time, while Gerber’s Jane Jr., “completely bored and terrified every second” of her life, only desires to marry a famous singer and live in a warm tropical place—if only she could leave the living room couch.

As Maiworm, Fera is suitably cheerful and grandly encouraging to the malcontent others as the city official who genuinely cares for her employees despite knowing her ambition to make her department’s task more in tune with the future, particularly since Basil seems adept at going down on her when caught up in their secret decidedly non-work-related relationship. Under the composure, however, it’s not hard to picture Maiworm in mid-scream on Edvard Munch’s infamous bridge.

Still, it is Armstrong whose work absolutely overshadows everything else about this production—and I don’t mean that as a negative observation. This guy is consistently and courageously daring in every role he assumes, someone who onstage you can’t stop watching in all his intricate subtle nuances, and yet he is often over-the-top in a way only he can get away with. He is not only someone easy to call out as a wonderful actor, Armstrong epitomizes what constitutes a truly great artist.

Above everything that makes this an unforgettable experience, however, the true star of Salt is Will Arbery, whose inspiration for his play came while a directorial student at Northwestern, assigned to write a short play inspired by an article in the local newspaper.

What presumably survived from that exercise was this play’s title, something akin to when many years ago, while riding with a friend through the English countryside, Peter Shaffer was offhandedly told about a local story of a young boy’s inexplicable blinding of six horses in a stable where he worked. Haunted by the idea but unable to uncover any other details about the incident, he sat down and wrote a fictional account to relieve his creative OCD. The result was Equus.

One cannot help to wonder what the original newspaper piece disclosed that magically turned into Arbery’s astounding Evanston Salt Costs Climbing. It makes me want to go back to the late 60s when, returning home to the bucolic suburbs of Chicago after an extended period living and working in New York City, the front page headline of the local weekly Elmhurst Press community newspaper upon my arrival was “BOY CUTS FINGER.”

I wonder what a brilliant and worldclass talent such as Will Arbery might have created from that. Whatever it might have been, I would want be there to see it.

THROUGH MAR. 9: Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Av., LA. 855.585.5185 or roguemachinetheatre.net 

Photo by Brian Graves 

Road Theatre Company

After beginning our troubled and worrisome year being force fed a near-lethal slug of (Arthur) Miller Lite, how encouraging to next be treated by the majorly prolific Road Theatre Company to Sleeping Giant, another artistically redemptive and timely new play by Steve Yockey, author of last year’s Mercury in the same space.

Directed by the equally prolific Ann Hearn Tobolowsky, who helmed the aforementioned Mercury, as well as Shem Bitterman’s current smash hit The Civil Twilight at the Broadwater, co-produced by the Road and starring the company’s founder and artistic director Taylor Gilbert, and several other successful productions for the complex. Her work on Mercury and the year before on Alessandro Camon’s Scintilla, also at the Road, was instrumental in both productions receiving TicketHolder Award honors in the Best Plays of the Year category two years in a row.

The supernaturally-inclined Yockey is known for his ability to creep audience members out—and I mean that as a great compliment. This time out, a private fireworks display at the secluded lake house inherited by a young man (Eric Patrick Harper) is meant to dramatize his marriage proposal to his hardly amused intended (Jacqueline Misaye), but instead it awakens a centuries-old sea creature with an all-seeing eye about the size of a Prius. 

This unsettling event unleashes an ominous conversion for all who are subjected to its power to create a kind of mesmeric devotion from people in desperate need to believe in something in a world dominated by confusion and chaos—you know, like today. "Cuckoos,” one of Yockey’s doomed lake dwellers opins about some of the region's more exotic residents, “keep making the same sounds as the world ends.”

It’s as though this slimy creature, so clearly akin to another real-life depraved orange monster who has recently mysteriously been successful in hypnotizing millions of our deluded countrymen into becoming ardent followers, a man clearly intent on destroying life as we know it, becomes a perfect analogy for current events in the news.

It’s amazing how Yockey can continuously conjure such outlandish storylines and then create dialogue that makes it all almost believable. “Everything symbolizes something,” a character muses prophetically. “Just hearing that makes me tired.”

Sleeping Giant is one of his best plays and certainly one of the most unsettling in another near-perfect partnership with Toblowsky, who so obviously “gets” him bigtime, and the unstoppably brave folks at the Road who never flinch attempting something risky. It is austerely but beautifully produced, with a jaw-dropping special effect shock of an ending created by scenic designer Katrina Coulourides and master carpenter Kurtis Bedford that must be praised for making us squirm in our seats.

The cast of four, Misaye, Harper, Andrea Flowers, and Justin Lawrence Barnes, willingly join to become poster children for what constitutes a quintessential ensemble cast, all equally committed to the challenging task of playing various citizens drawn into the bizarre cult of the Butterfly King and delivering Yockey’s darkly comedic material without resorting to a more easily adopted faux-gothic style.

Tobolosky is the obvious glue that binds this all together, not only in her ability to elicit a quartet of impressive performances but in her skill to stage the play’s seven vignettes without a moment’s clumsiness. Anyone who might regularly read my reviews will attest to how vehemently I often grumble about visible scene changes and how moving furniture around in blue light distracts from the flow of a piece, but here these choreographed moves become part of this remarkable play’s preternatural and eerie dreamscape.

We all need a diversion right now and Steve Yockey’s Sleeping Giant, although it hardly makes one feel encouraged that the future might not be a dystopian shambles for our poor maligned country and the world, at least makes us temporarily able to laugh at the prospects for hanging onto our ever-spinning planet for dear life while helplessly in the control of a dangerous and destructive bogeyman of epic proportions intent on destroying everything we hold sacred.

THROUGH FEB. 23: Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., NoHo. 818.761.8838 or RoadTheatre.org

Photo by Lizzy Kimball

Broadwater Studio Theatre

I confess I spend a lot of time when at home enjoying the grisliest of grisly bad horror movies—and as a critic, let me also admit the conundrum here is that the cornier they are the better—but never has a stage nail-biter managed to freak me out.

Although it’s not a traditional thriller, the world premiere of PEN USA and LADCC Award-winner Shem Bitterman’s inherently spooky and even sinister new play The Civil Twilight truly put me on the edge of my seat.

Part of that reaction is the proximity of the action. Entering the Broadwater’s ultra-intimate Studio Theatre, a “room” about big enough to host a small actors’ workshop, the size of the claustrophobic space immediately gives the sense of walking directly into a rundown motel room in a desolate mid-American locale. It’s the kind of place where one first checks the mattress for crawly things and the bathtub for bloodstains—something that actually happened to me once on tour with a play in the boonies—before tentatively unpacking.

There’s a raging storm outside, a weather event nasty enough to send two stranded traveling strangers (Taylor Gilbert and Andrew Elvis Miller) into sharing a cab from the shutdown local airport to this bleak southwestern-themed motel decorated in early Walmart, an annoying development made worse by the fact that the place only has one last room available they’ve reluctantly decided to share.

Ann is a kind of dumpy, salt-of-the-earth suburban wife, while John is a rather put-together businessman-type who keeps things close to the vest and may or may not be someone to trust.

At least he’s good for finding ways to turn on the lights and sleuth out why the room smells as though something died in it—which it has. Soon he is using one of the room’s only two towels to remove a dead ferret or some other now unrecognizable small putrid animal from under the bathroom sink.

The pair soon finds they have a lot more in common than they initially realized, as John is a regionally famous radio personality and Ann, as it turns out, is his professed biggest fan, someone who knows the names of his wife and kids and, figuratively speaking, where all the bodies are buried.

Or does she.

A kind of creepiness soon begins to descend over this purgatory-like motel room like an ominous shroud. Bitterman’s quirky play is full of twists and turns that give the sense that it could have been an old classic Twilight Zone written by Sam Shepard. In fact, when this play closes, someone should grab up the space as is for a revival of Fool for Love.

There are many twists and turns in this tense 80-minute ride and, although some are a tad far-fetched, it feels eerily personal as the audience sits in such close proximity to the performers that, if one sneezed, the other might be inclined to say “Bless you.” After the performance, when introduced to my partner Hugh, Miller actually said it was as though they’d already met since it felt as though he had shared an airplane-sized bottle of Tanqueray with him at the onstage table placed inches from where we were seated.

Under the sturdy directorial hand of Ann Hearn Tobolowsky, the crisscrossing shocks and snaking revelations that crash through the play are sharply realized. Still, there's a far deeper and intentionally camouflaged message here: a kind of lament for the rapid decline of rural midwestern values that leaves the door open for what Bitterman calls “hucksters and charlatans [who] for a few bucks or some cheap outrage offer a path to desperately needed change”—you know, like the current conman pulling the wool over the eyes of half of our countrymen that may just result in him being in a position to soon destroy our society even more than he already has.

I believe this play is one of the year’s most unique and hauntingly memorable, especially considering a great writer’s good fortune to have developed it in collaboration with a director as accomplished as Tobolowsky and two veteran actors as consistently efficacious and arresting as Gilbert and Miller.

As John, Miller’s calm demeanor that hides a frightened and miserable trapped animal ready to spring is a remarkable accomplishment, only slightly overshadowed by the jarring intensity of Gilbert, who with this performance caps a long career of consistent excellence. Her work here, finding both a strength and vulnerability in the multi-faceted role of Ann, is the performance of a year in a year full of great performances in Los Angeles, a miraculous thing since it was born and cultivated in this unobtrusive and nondescript playing space.

Druthers? Only a few. Joel Daavid’s set is impressive but not dirty and grubby enough for how the room is described, while both actors sometimes come off less troubled by the icky conditions in which they find themselves than they should be, especially after first finding a decomposing critter as an unwelcome roommate.

When Miller takes off his wet jacket, he seems to know where the hook to hang it is located without a quick look around an unfamiliar space and when Gilbert turns down her bed, she appears far too confident that it doesn’t need a little exploration to prove it isn’t somewhere where one would be less inclined to wiggle their toes.

Without a doubt, however, Shem Bitterman’s The Civil Twilight is a totally unexpected eleventh-hour diamond in the rough that tops off our dynamic 2024 season with a bare-boned yet gleaming gem of extraordinary theatrical brilliance. I wanted to go home to take a shower and, in this case, that was a good thing.

THROUGH FEB. 23: Broadwater Studio Theatre, 1076 Lillian Way, Hollywood. http://theciviltwilight.ludus.com

El Portal Theatre

Longtime Los Angeles weatherman Fritz Coleman retired in 2020 after four decades delivering his signature uncannily cheery forecasts on a daily basis but at age 76, his solo show Unassisted Residency, which plays once monthly at the El Portal’s intimate Monroe Forum, proves he’s still got the chops to deliver a jocular and lighthearted tsunami to his eager and most loyal fans.

Coleman began his career coming to LA to pursue his passion for standup comedy in the early 80s after first achieving success as a well-loved deejay radio personality in Buffalo, New York.

As the story goes, a producer at NBC caught his act one night at a local club and began to woo him to become a weatherman at KNBC-TV since our weather here was so consistent that he felt it needed a little on-air boost of humor to make it more interesting.

Delivering the daily forecast with a twinkle in his eye beginning in 1984 didn’t stop Coleman from continuing to chase his original dream by performing on local stages in several successful live shows, including his hilarious award-winning turn in The Reception: It’s Me, Dad! which played around town for several years to sold out houses.

Now, after leaving NBC four years ago, Coleman is back but the demographics have changed—or I might politely say… matured.

In my own case, as someone a year older than Coleman, his focus on finding the humor in aging is most welcome. In Unassisted Residency, the comedian talks about the challenges life has to offer in these, our so-called golden years, from physical deterioration to losing contemporaries on a regular basis to navigating the brave new world of technology and social media.

As his opening warmup act, the very funny and professionally self-deprecating Wendy Liebman notes, while looking out at the sea of gray hair and Hawaiian camp shirts in their audience, that Coleman chose to present his show as Sunday matinees so his target audience can shuffle our drooping derrières on home before dark.

Along the way, he also tackles subjects such as retirement communities, nonstop doctors’ appointments, incontinence, and Viagra, not to mention having grown up sucking in our parents’ omnipresent clouds of secondhand tobacco smoke and that generation’s lackadaisical attitude toward our safety and our health, all before moving on discuss to his all-new admiration for those heroic modern educators who during the pandemic had the patience to deal with zoom-teaching his grandkids.

The one thing he doesn’t talk much about is the weather—that is beyond mentioning how grateful he is that our current heat wave didn’t deter those gathered from venturing out of our caves and offering as a throwaway that one of the reasons he retired four years ago was climate change. Although he never says it, he doesn’t really have to; we get that even for someone as funny as Coleman, everyone has their limits when it comes to the potentially catastrophic future for our poor misused and abused planet.

Then when he launches into reminiscing about the amazingly incessant search for sexual gratification in our younger years (that time Stephen King once wrote when the males of the species all look at life through a spermy haze) and how that has changed since then. As a now single guy still looking for love—with some choice remarks about online dating sites—he tells a rather steamy tale about one date that proves it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, something of which I can definitely relate.

I first met Coleman in 1988 or 1989 when I did a feature interview with him as a cover story for The Tolucan (the more industry-oriented and less Evening Women’s Club-ish-pandering predecessor of the Tolucan Times).

He was gracious and charming and kept me laughing so hard back then that I couldn’t take notes fast enough, a knack he not only hasn’t lost but has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years. I couldn’t help wondering how many of the audience members at the Forum have been following him since then and for whom the topic of not-so gently aging hits home as dead-center as it did me.

This doesn’t mean you have to be 70-something to appreciate Fritz Coleman’s hilarious gift for creating homespun storytelling in his ever-extending monthly outing called Unassisted Residency.

My partner Hugh, who is a mere 42 years my junior and was quite literally at least three decades younger than anyone else in the audience last Sunday, laughed longer and louder than anyone else in the audience—perhaps a reaction to hearing me bitch continuously about getting old for the last 12 years?

PLAYS one Sunday each month at the El Portal Theatre’s Monroe Forum Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo.  For schedule: www.elportaltheatre.com/fritzcoleman.html