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 Slade Segerson 

THROUGH NOV. 2:  Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., NoHo. 818.761.8838 or RoadTheatre.org

Photo by Brian Hashimoto 

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.

THROUGH OCT. 19: Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 Mentor Av., Pasadena. 626.683.6801 or BostonCourtPasadena.org 

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Pasadena Playhouse

It’s hard to imagine Jonathan Spector’s hilarious and uncannily newsworthy Tony-winning play Eureka Day, which began in 2018 at the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley before playing off-Broadway the following year, wasn’t written in the past few months since our current disastrous and inefficient regime took over our government and started on its mission to kill us all.

The action—if you can call it that as the entire play takes place in one room, the library of a progressive private grade school in Berkeley—revolves around a series of board meetings where the participants discuss the school’s soon controversial policies on vaccinations.

At the play’s start, four of the five executive committee members graciously welcome their new member Carina (Charise Boothe), a position traditionally held by a parent new to the school. There are two anti-vaxxers in the group and as pleasantly as it all begins, soon the attitudes and opinions turn virulent no matter how hard the group’s moderator Don (Rick Holmes), the terminally cheerful head of the school, tries to dodge controversy and temper any raised voices.

All this becomes more urgent when a mumps epidemic sweeps through Eureka Day School and the illness of the daughter of Meiko (Camille Chin), the group’s less unshakable anti-vaxxer, infects and causes a major health issue for the son of fellow committee member Eli (Nate Corddry) during a playdate while their unconventional open-relationshipped parents get it on.

Again, it’s somewhat mind-boggling to realize Spector’s topical dramedy was written and debuted two years before our global pandemic, a time when presumably RFK Jr. was still dumping dead bear cubs in Central Park and his infamous worm was chomping on his obviously now compromised cerebellum.

Things become more and more contentious on Wilson Chin’s cheerful Pee-Wee’s Playhouse meets Sesame Street set as the committee spars and turns from spouting pleasantries (Don finishes each meeting reading a passage from Rumi) to a place where the thin veneer of civilization has been worn away to the bone purdy darn quick.

The major voice of contention comes from the overpowering Suzanne (Mia Barron), who has been part of the committee forever and has had several children enrolled in the school over the years. She is quick to let the newcomer know that her tenure there has made her an important adjudicator in the decision-making process at her beloved school, even to the point of showing her an entire bookshelf of enlightened educational material her family has donated to the library.

Suzanne rules the roost with her delicious scones, frequent interruptions, and syrupy pronouncements that only vaguely hide the fact that if she were any more territorial she would urinate in the corners of the room.

The cast is uniformly excellent, able to completely deliver all the sly nuances and hidden personal agendas slyly tucked into Spector’s sharply insightful script—something that clearly is the real star of the show.

Utilizing a preternatural ability to extricate an amazing amount of acuity about the pros and cons of many opposing contemporary viewpoints on both sides of any issue, Spector never resorts to preaching—simply because his incredibly razor-sharp sense of humor could not possibly be more heightened and obliterates any possibility of anyone having time to take offense.

And his perception does not stop at the clashes between these five people (and eventually an eleventh-hour sixth parent played by Kailyn Leilani). One pivotal and incredibly uproarious scene, when the school has closed down while the dangers of the outbreak are analyzed and the committee hosts an online parent roundtable, provides one of the funniest moments in modern theatre.

As they try to keep the zoom meeting on track, above them the entire thread is displayed on a giant screen. What begins with discussions about whether a missing former board member has moved to Vancouver and other such innocuous pleasantries—each followed by one participant’s continuous use of the thumbs-up emoji to follow almost every post, her online profile photo displaying the face of her cat—soon devolves into far more disruptive dialogue so hostile Don can no longer stay in control.

“This isn’t a fringe opinion!” one parent types. “IT WAS IN THE NEW YORKER!”

Soon people are calling one another Nazis and threatening litigation upon each other until Don simply gives up and shuts down the meeting.

This much talked about scene elicited such a raucous response from the Playhouse opening night audience that the dialogue as the actors try valiantly to interject some proper protocol into the conversation is totally drowned out—something I’m sure could not be more intentional. As many times as Eureka Day has been performed since 2018, I’ll just bet no one has ever heard the dialogue onstage below the onscreen conversation.

Spector’s play is a delightful indictment of the absurdity of modernday manners and wokeness vs. political correctness, but Eureka Day must be a difficult challenge to stage since the actors spend most of the runtime seated in a line across the front of the stage on plastic stackable patio-style chairs. Staging it must be a nearly impossible feat and unfortunately, the contribution of director Teddy Bergman is the production’s only Achilles’ heel.

Unlike what former Steppenwolf artistic director Anna D. Shapiro brought to the Manhattan Theatre Club revival last season that won the Tony Award for Best Revival, Bergman’s staging is static and too often stationary, both in movement and the tools she offers her actors in their effort to bring their characters to life.

Simply, Eureka Day is a brilliant piece of theatre, a play for the ages, and the cast at the Playhouse is worldclass but overall, this mounting of it makes its audience work far too hard to enjoy it despite the non-stop laughs and Jonathan Spector’s unique ability to skewer us all without alienating anyone with a brain not yet done in by an invasive burrowing invertebrate.

THROUGH OCT. 5: Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Av., Pasadena. 626.356.PLAY or pasadenaplayhouse.org 

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre

I’ve known playwright-on-the-rise Tim Venable since he was a young struggling actor waiting tables and not all that much older than the characters he's created in Rogue Machine’s current world premiere of Adolescent Salvation, the third of his plays debuting with the celebrated company over the last few years and the second directed by the Machine’s artistic director Guillermo Cienfuegos.

The first, debuting in 2022, was Beautiful People, featuring two disgruntled and emotionally disenfranchised suburban teenagers growing up in the 1990s who decide to risk their parents’ wrath and stay up all night on a school night in one of the boys’ basement bedrooms as they compete for top positioning in their two-person social order—and to contemplate the ultimate challenge facing young people in our increasingly mucked-up nation’s out of control gun culture.

Venable’s fast-moving first play was startlingly and horrifically real, providing a glimpse into how too many of our children have been raised in the toxic environment of contemporary American life. Now Venable has brought that kind of collective teenage angst and dysfunction into the present day where most of the issues addressed have only become more twisted and omnipresent.

Venable’s plays, at least so far, have dealt with the convoluted journey of teens and young people in America, yet they have nothing in common with the idyllic world past of Father Knows Best or Love Finds Andy Hardy. They are plays about hope and hopelessness in our dystopian society.

With proper attribution for the title as a passage from my generation’s inimitable poetess/songwriter counter-culture goddess Patti Smith in her 2010 memoir Just Kids (“I immersed myself in books and rock ‘n roll, the adolescent salvation”), Venable’s newest work of provocative contemporary art this time deals with three emotionally stunted teens having a most disastrous sleepover. 

The evening has been arranged by a recently divorced alcoholic mother (Jenny Flack) so her neglected kid Natasha (a remarkable turn by Caroline Rodriguez) might be able to get out of her introverted shell and make friends with the far more socially aggressive daughter of her drinking buddy while the two mothers frequent the only accessible local bar.

Natasha isn’t all that crazy about the unexpected guest (Alexandra Lee) being thrust upon her privacy, especially since Taylor could be the definition of that familiar angry and outspoken teenage bitch supreme. Luckily, she has brought along her best friend, also named Taylor (Michael Guarasci), a sweet young gay boy who somehow manages to continually soften the continually caustic comments of his BFF.

As was the case with Venable’s second play, Baby Foot, which dealt with two other mismatched people trying to boost one another while wading through the snarl of drug rehab—I’ve only heard since I missed seeing it—Adolescent Salvation is staged in the Machine’s tiny second space above the Matrix lobby, a kind of renovated attic perfect for costume storage that has now been utilized for several highly successful productions. 

The in-your-face intimacy of their 35-seat Henry Murray Stage has had magical results with the productions I’ve seen performed there, especially Sophie Swithinbank’s riveting two-person Bacon earlier this year, which actually had the smell-worthy aroma of our favorite culinary obsession wafting through the space as rashers were slowly cooked right behind the audience’s heads.

This time out, however, I think the choice of presenting Adolescent Salvation in the cramped reinvented storeroom might have been a mistake—especially during a massive heatwave on a Sunday sfternoon. What initially was certainly unique, staging yet another entire play in this space is becoming somewhat gimmicky.

The imaginative set design by Joel Daavid is incredibly visceral, depicting Natasha’s cramped and memorabilia-crowded bedroom and includes a walk through her closet beginning when entering the first floor staircase leading to the theatre upstairs. Although dodging hanging clothes and contemplating an eclectic array of teenaged treasures is absolutely ingenious, once you’re seated, it becomes more cumbersome than exciting.

The problem is the action in this minuscule playing space needs to revolve around Natasha’s bed and there’s simply not enough room to maneuver around it without making audience members have to pull in their feet and wince as sudden movement and violent action (well choreographed by Ned Mochel) unfolds too close for comfort, even if making us squirm in our seats is part of the desired effect. 

Where such a thing has aided and even enhanced other productions mounted in the Murray, here it's somehow more distracting than propitious. Perhaps the “stage center” placement of two matronly overdressed and obviously shocked older ladies sitting about a foot from the bed, their reactions in full view of of the rest of the audience, exacerbated my reaction here, especially when about halfway through the performance they found it okay to start loudly whispering to one another.

The subtle performance of Rodriguez is absolutely revelatory, completely riveting in her ability to stay totally focused and in the moment no matter what the challenge, and her eleventh-hour scene with Flack as her significantly toasted mother returns home from the local Margaritaville offers the best acting and best writing in the production.

As the two Taylors, I found both actors less successful, each intent on hammerng in their characters’ individual traits in case we don’t get it. While Guarasci plays it stereotypically light-in-the-loafers, losing the dearness of what a sweetheart his Taylor really is, Lee’s sharp-tounged, eye-rolling performance is so one-note it results in not caring much about what happens to her. One last scene where her Taylor redeems herself as a potentially sympathetic friend after all comes too late and inadvertently hints at what the actor has been missing all along.

As a surprise and mostly uncredited fifth character, Keith Stevenson could really be good and actually does manage to become a sympathetic figure when his conduct should leave him to be something of a villain—although not to me personally since I’ve found myself in my life in a similar situation. Still, Stevenson’s inaudibility in his one scene is exceedingly frustrating. The Murray Stage might be crazily intimate, but lines still must be delivered with enough clarity and projection to be heard.

Still, Venable’s Adolescent Salvation is a raw, jarringly disturbing play, an unbridled view of what our fucked-up country and its plethora of self-absorbed absentee parents have done to emotionally destroy our own future generations. 

We as a society have passed on a culture of misogyny and violence that has dehumanized and robotized our young, from our entertainment options that proudly boast the number of people who are blown away by gun violence to our bloviated and bigoted opinions overheard at the family dinner table while discussing our dastardly, elaborately self-destructive choices in elected officials too egocentric to consider the future of our dying planet. 

Unfortunately, none of this emerges as an Orwellian science-fictionalized warning. The exceptional gifts of Tim Venable, so brilliantly chronicling who we are and what we as a people have become, is sadly not that difficult to imagine.

Just turn on the evening news.

THROUGH OCT. 12: Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Av., LA. 855.585.5185 or roguemachinetheatre.net 

Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman 

Pantages Theatre / 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.

CLOSED: Pantages Theatre

RETURNING NOV. 11-23: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. 714.556.2787 or scfta.org

Photo by Matthew Murphy 

Pantages Theatre / 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.”

CLOSED: Pantages Theatre

RETURNING OCT. 7-19: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. 714.556.2787 or scfta.org

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