by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER 

Photo by Craig Schwartz 

A Noise Within

Reviewing a production at A Noise Within usually means bracing for high-caliber classical theatre with a modern edge and no one does this better than LA’s most visionary director Michael Michetti. His innovative staging of Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King is no exception as it deftly balances traditional Theatre of the Absurd with a deeply and highly uncomfortable humanity. He approaches Ionesco’s 1962 play not just as a dusty relic but as a vibrant, frantic, and ultimately moving meditation on mortality.

While the play centers on the outlandish behavior of one King Berenger and his stubborn refusal to accept his impending death, Michetti ensures the production never feels static. Whether intentional or coincidental, the storyline mimics Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ five stages of grief, swinging in 100 intermissionless minutes from the manic energy of a circus to the quiet, chilling stillness of the inevitable end.

The success of any production of the seldom-revived Exit the King almost usually rests on the shoulders of the actor playing Berenger and, in this production, Henri Lubatti—who seems to have along the way studied clowning and acrobatics with stunning results—delivers a portrayal that truly is a tour de force as we watch a bizarrely familiar monarch overpowering our own lives and times. King Berenger bloviates at one point, “I am the state and the state is the state I’m in” as he does everything except hawk his own overpriced and unnecessary ballroom at the expense of his financially strapped subjects, have a graven gold statue made of himself for his worshippers to grovel to, and suggests maybe his face might be added to his unnamed kingdom’s own version of Mt. Rushmore. “Let every living creature die,” he bellows to the heavens, “so I can go on forever.”

This King, who once possessed some now disappearing magical powers, is a leader who has equated his own heartbeat with the health of the universe itself and once commanded the sun to rise. As we watch, however, we see him get smaller and smaller, becoming a sad, delusional loser who crumples into a man who cannot control his own knees, let alone the weather, another plot point echoing our own struggles with environmental crises that no amount of political decree can stop. Berenger’s persona is drowning in ego and Lubatti brings slipping below the waves to glorious life. Watching him demand without success that the sun obey him while his kingdom (literally) collapses feels less like a fairy tale and more like a commentary on our own rapidly more delusional faux-leader who blatantly prioritizes legacy over reality.

As his stoic Queen Marguarite, the original and “senior” of his two wives who share their throne, Joy DeMichelle is magnificently subtle as the personification of the cautionary tale’s cold, hard reality. Although the King insists he’ll die when he wants and when he has the time, she corrects him: “No, you’re going to die at the end of this show.” She doesn’t say this with malice but with bureaucratic detachment, feeling her husband’s refusal to accept his fate is not just foolish; it’s undignified.

DeMichelle perfectly serves as the play’s stern angel of death and spiritual midwife until the eleventh hour when, as her authority grows and his declines, she seems to direct Tesshi Nakagawa’s incredibly lush red velvet-draped set to dismantle itself, representing everything Berenger has lost: order, time, and logic.

As his younger and more recently added second wife, the emotionally fraught Queen Marie (Erika Soto), and as his bellowing and fiercely loyal royal guard (Lynn Robert Berg), the pair represents the enablers, showing us the tragic and comedic ways in which we prop up failing systems and refuse to speak truth to power until it’s too late. While Marguerite serves as the grim conductor of his demise, Marie and the guard provide the desperate, heartbreaking hope that defines our own fear of letting go. To say this production is a modern mirror for all of us to look into and see ourselves is an understatement.

The hilarious KT Vogt and patiently subdued Ralph Cole Jr. as, respectively, the castle’s grumbling overworked chief handmaid and royal physician are both incredibly omnipresent as they observe the disintegration of everything around them, serving as a bridge between the King’s delusions and the harsh, decaying world outside the throne room. While the two Queens represent the philosophical tug between life and death, Juliette and the Doctor depict the practicality of the inevitable.

Vogt is a wonderful asset throughout as Juliette whines under her breath about her chores, highlighting the absurdity of maintaining appearances while the universe is literally ending, reminding her boss of the grueling nature of everyday existence. When she speaks of her cramped room in the palace’s attic or her mundane life, it only underscores the King’s selfishness. She even physically supports Lubatti, acting as a reluctant crutch for a monarchy she no longer respects.

Cole Jr.’s Doctor, who doubles as the court’s executioner, is like Queen Marguarite a realist, his various titles suggesting that neither science or medicine—or even the stars—can stop the flow of time.

Michetti’s creative team is a director’s dream, from Nakagawa’s massive throne room able to go poof by the end to Jared A. Sayeg’s dramatically eerie lighting, Jeff Gardner’s haunted sound design, and costumer Angela Balogh Calin’s regal attire that feels oddly out of place and for Berenger cumbersome, highlighting the irony of it all as he slowly strips his vestments away along with his mortality.

Together they form a technical team spectacularly able to create a world that’s dematerializing, honoring Michetti’s fresh interpretation by using sound, light, and visual cues to create an atmosphere of encroaching chaos. The rumblings of the earth and the staging of characters suddenly dropping from sight serve as a jarring reminder that power is an illusion sustained only by the collective agreement of the governed. When that agreement ends, our everyman King is left with nothing but his longjohns and a crown that can’t stay on his head.

Michetti leans into an on-the-nose political and social angle that morphs Ionesco’s play from a surrealist fable into a sharp reflection of our current national and international dilemma. King Berenger’s demise isn't just an abstract metaphor for death, it’s a biting critique of the fragility of power and the absurdity of modern leadership, ultimately feeling startlingly grounded in our own reality.

From the moment the curtain rises on a kingdom where the borders are shrinking, the population is vanishing, and the country’s leader refuses to acknowledge the literal cracks in the ceiling and on the floor, the parallels to contemporary leadership are impossible to ignore. A Noise Within’s reinvented Exit the King emerges as a scathing 21^st-century satire about the danger of the Great Man myth, amazing in its ability to shift from outrageous humor into being a sad story about a dying guy and then ultimately into a sharp warning about the dangers of an autocrat in denial and the dying system he’s helping to kill off right before our very eyes.

THROUGH MAY 31: A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. 626.356.3100 or anoisewithin.org 

Photo courtesy of Meyer2Meyer Entertainment 

Nocturne Theatre

From the moment the misty lights come up on The Little Mermaid at the Nocturne Theatre, it’s clear director Justin Meyer, choreographer Taylor J. Smith, and their whole intrepid creative team aren’t just dipping their toes into the water here—they dove headfirst into a theatrical abyss and came up with a shimmering pearl.

Even for those who have spent an obsessed lifetime in the darkened wings or velvet seats in reverent worship of live theatre, it’s rare to see a familiar fable reimagined with such visual panache. The Nocturne, the formerly abandoned and once underwater (no pun intended) Glendale Center Theatre, has quickly become known as a space that consistently punches above its weight class and with this clever Disney reinvention without the unlimited bucks, it has transformed its stage into a bioluminescent wonderland that would make Neptune himself green with envy.

The cast is, quite simply, fin-tastic (oooo, somehow I can’t seem to stop myself from puns worthy of the show’s prolific bookwriter Doug Wright). As our heroine Ariel, Jenna-Mae White brings a crystalline purity to "Part of Your World" that makes you forget the Disney artifice and truly root for the girl with the tail. She navigates the stage with a grace that suggests she’s truly buoyant, making the transition from sea to land feel less like a stage trick and more like a triumph of the spirit.

Every great show needs a bit of a seaside bite and the inspired casting of Wesley Moran as Ursula is a delicious choice, devouring the scenery like a shark in a feeding frenzy in costumer Tanya Cyr’s outrageously cool masterwork featuring gigantic, constantly undulating tentacles manipulated by several puppeteers dressed in black. Moran basically steals the show, especially when delivering "Poor Unfortunate Souls" with enough brassy confidence to rattle the rafters.

Sebastian and Scuttle (Darius Aaron Frye and Brendan Lynch) provide the necessary levity, keeping the pacing brisk. Their comedic timing is sharp as they manage to land every Wright-ian pun with the precision of a seasoned vaudevillian—far above my own thematic poor power here to add or detract. Kelby Thwaits as King Triton seems as though he stepped directly out of the original carton itself, Christian and Jonah Lees are wonderful as the waveboard-riding Flotsam and Jetsam, and Nicole Nelson elicits many awwww's as the lovestruck Flounder.

Andrew Gaxiola brings down the house with Chef Louis’ “Les Poisson” and J.D. Wallis is also another standout as Prine Eric’s loyal guardian Grimsley. The entire ensemble of singers and dancers could not be more committed or in sync as various mermaids and others, while the innovative inclusion of arialists (no pun here) Lisa-Marie Burnside and Kimberly Butler provide a truly special Cirque du Soleil-style treat.

Still, surprisingly, the true anchor of this production lies in the royal treatment delivered by the presence of Ben Raanan as the dashing, lovesick Prince Eric. Since Raanan was my TicketHolder Award "New Discovery of 2025" winner for his riveting LADCC-nominated turn as the titular Batboy at the Open Fist last season, I walked in with high expectations—and he certainly didn't let them drift away.

While the role of Eric can often feel like a two-dimensional buoy for the plot to float around, Raanan infuses the character with a soulful, searching quality and his vocal performance is nothing short of shore perfection, carrying a weight and longing that makes "Her Voice" the emotional high-water mark of the evening. He manages to find the humanity behind the crown, playing Eric not just as a royal figurehead, but as a man truly lost at sea until he finds his match.

It’s a testament to Raanan’s versatility that he can pivot so seamlessly from the twitchy, misunderstood angst of a pointy-eared cave-dwelling hybrid to the quintessential, square-jawed nobility of a Disney prince, not to mention his recent turn as the teenaged me in the beginning teaser now germinating into a feature film culled from my 2023 “auto-novel” Waiting for Walk. Seeing him continue to evolve is a reminder of why we keep coming back to the theatre—to witness a star-fish in the making. I expect great things from this major triple-threat talent; he is, quite simply, the reel deal.

Meyer’s staging and Smith’s choreography are Broadway quality, while Cyr’s flashy, splashy designs are like another featured character. Instead of bulky prosthetics, Cyr and Meyer use flowing silks and clever lighting to suggest the undulating currents of the deep. It’s an o-fish-ally stunning achievement. All of the components combine to be a testament to ingenuity on a budget at its ultimate best.

While some might find this a tail as old as time, this exceptional reinvention of The Little Mermaid breathes fresh oxygen into the story. It doesn’t just float; it soars. If you’re looking for a night of theatre that’s deep in heart and high on spectacle, don’t be shellfish—take the whole family. It’s a wave of pure theatrical joy, proving once again that some of the best art in this city is found in the most intimate corners of our local stages. It’s a hightide triumph on just about every level.

THROUGH MAY 31: Nocturne Theatre, 324 N. Orange St., Glendale. thenocturnetheatre.com

Ensemble Theatre Company / South Coast Rep

As much as I love both Santa Barbara and everything that makes productions from the Ensemble Theatre Company performing at the New Vic Theatre sensational, it’s quite a distance from Los Angeles and not a journey I often make. Still, there was no doubt when my cherished longtime friend Hershey Felder told me he was bringing his latest solo show to ETC that my partner Hugh and I were in for a roadtrip.

I was thrilled to be catching Hershey’s The Piano & Me for the first time in ETC’s beautifully appointed performance space I at one time had only experienced looking out from the stage itself, especially since everything he told me about the creation of it in our frequent late night texting rants from every corner of the world made it apparent this newest touring piece was undoubtedly his most vulnerable work yet. 

This freshly conceived production, which swerves from the usual formula of all the previous successful Hershey Felder one-person explorations over nearly 30 years, examining the lives and music of the most famous composers in the history of music, has been making its way through venues such as TheatreWorks Silicon Valley since early this year. The Piano & Me uniquely captures the essence of how one of our time’s most prolific theatrical wordsmiths conjures artistic magic by finally turning his famous Steinway spotlight onto his own life.

After three decades touring the globe mutating into such musical geniuses as Beethoven, Berlin, Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, and Chopin, among many others, Hershey has finally stepped out from behind the masks to reveal the man who has been introducing the world’s most revered composers to us all along, delivering a masterclass in narrative intimacy and proving his own life story is just as haunting and harmonious as those of the maestros he has portrayed.

“Put me in a pool of light,” Hershey confesses at the very top of this haunting rollercoaster ride, “put me in front of a crowd, and I’m going to tell the truth.”

The evening begins not in a grand concert hall, but in the cabbage-scented kitchens of his traditional Yiddish childhood in Montreal, Canada. We meet the young Hershey, a lonely, overweight first-generation immigrant kid whose life instantly changed when he discovered the piano was not just a piece of furniture but a “suitcase for survival” that made the world open up like a painting suddenly come to life. 

Over the years, Hershey has proven he is an authentic musical savant at the piano able to step into the skin of the groundbreaking musicmakers he brings to us, but here he shows he is also a gifted mimic able to populate his tale with a vivid gallery of characters from his own past.

These most prominently include his mother, a gossamer and adoring presence whose early death provided the emotional wound that motivated his future and has remained his fulcrum, and his often distinct father, the taciturn widower whose silence is often filled by the music Hershey writes and plays.

His teachers and mentors throughout the years are also portrayed with sharp, affectionate humor, taskmasters who sternly told him he would need to practice his craft every day for the rest of his life—and I can personally attest to the fact he still does just that. They emerge as heroic figures who forged the rigorous path Hershey steadfastly tread from a six-year-old prodigy who could memorize compositions by instantly seeing all the notes superimposed in front of his eyes to his days as a McGill University scholar and on to later as a young adult when he found his passionate ethnic roots as an interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation.

What makes this multimodal tapestry stand out from his previous biographical portraits, which have been seen by millions in some 6,000 performances internationally since their humble beginnings with George Gershwin Alone right here at the Tiffany Theatre in 1999, is the effortless integration of memory and media. Stefano DeCarli’s projections are sincerely poignant, moving from Felder family snapshots to the shadowed, harrowing imagery of his family’s past in Nazi Germany. These visuals don’t just serve as a backdrop; they act as a secondary narrator, grounding his personal anecdotes in the broader and often tragic context of Jewish identity and inheritance.

Of course, the piano, an extension of Hershey’s very soul, remains the main character, but instead of a curated Greatest Hits of a single composer, this time we are treated to the music he most dearly loves and so generously shares with all of us. He weaves through Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” Mozart’s “Turkish March,” Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” pieces by Liszt and Bartók, and as an encore the night we attended, Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”

One of the most impressive moments comes when Hershey plays an incredibly intricate piece of classical music he wrote himself—at age eight. We are all of us transported into a brave new realm of artistic human endeavor we seldom get to experience as our days are commendeered by stepped up timelines, quickly wandering attention spans, and social media. I tellya, the transition between spoken word and virtuoso performance throughout this presentation is so seamless you often don't realize where the story ends and the music begins.

This newest creation from a guy who never stops creating is a profound fullcircle moment for someone who has spent his entire life honoring others; here, he honors the craft itself and the resilience required to keep on keeping on and playing the music that shows the best of who we as a species are. 

It is a heartbreaking, hilarious, and ultimately triumphant evening that reminds us why one man seated at a piano can move us so deeply. Art heals as nothing else in our lives and boy, do we need to heal at this outrageously discouraging point in the evolution of the human experience as we hang on for dear life while our troubled planet spins wildly out of control around us.

Don't miss the golden opportunity to experience a powerful moment in theatrical history. Santa Barbara may be a trek from home for many and indeed, Hershey’s run at ETC only runs through May 10, but it then moves on to South Coast Rep next month before opening for a much-anticipated off-Broadway run at 59E59 in July and August. Without the shadow of a doubt, The Piano & Me gifts us with the unearthly wonder of the remarkably galvanizing Hershey Felder at his most authentic—and, as such, at his most brilliant.

NOW CLOSED: Ensemble Theatre Company at the New Vic, 33 W. Victoria St., Santa Barbara.  etcsb.org

PLAYING JUNE 9 - 21: South Coast Repertory Theatre, 655 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. 714.708.5555 or scr.org

Photo by Cooper Bates 

Echo Theater Company

Chris Field's Echo Theater has always been a place where the walls feel thin, not because of the architecture or the occasional sound of the Amtrak trains roaring by behind the reclaimed warehouse space, but because the emotional stakes of their productions tend to leak directly into the laps of the audience. Their latest brave and unapologetic world premiere, For Want of a Horse by Olivia Dufault, is no exception. It is a startling, thrillingly bizarre and off-the-wall interrogation of the limits of human connection and, more specifically, a rigorous deconstruction of the word empathy.

We often treat empathy as a soft, passive emotion, a feeling for someone or something. In the hands of Dufault, however, who has spent her career exploring the visceral boundaries of the “other”—vividly explored in her previous and most notable work, the cockfighting drama Year of the Rooster—her Quixote-esque mission is to blend the outlandish with the visceral as she moves away from traditional domestic tropes. This time out, she insists we accept the concept of empathy as a grueling, active labor by introducing us to a third wheel that defies easy categorization: in this case, a horse named Q-Tip, a symbol for tackling the validation of a reality that’s not your own, even when that reality is presented in a language you don’t speak.

Dufault’s For Want of a Horse is a radical labor revolving around two characters who beg to be seen. At the center of this hurricane is Griffin Kelly in a remarkable turn as Q-Tip, who becomes the catalyst for a couple’s domestic dissolution. Calvin and Bonnie (Joey Stromberg and Jenny Soo) are young marrieds living a basically quiet suburban life until their world is upended when Calvin confesses his long repressed sexual attraction—to horses.

Bonnie, a kindergarten teacher who views herself to be a progressive and supportive partner, refuses to judge her husband. Instead of leaving him, she encourages Calvin to embrace his true self, believing that their love is strong enough to withstand this revelation, ultimately suggesting they bring a horse into their lives to keep their marriage intact. They acquire Q-Tip, a huge Arabian mare who in her monologues to us reveals she is both dependent on ancient, steadfast realities and detached from human morality at the same time.

Calvin finds a sense of community and liberation in his new romance while also sharing a kinship with his friend PJ (Steven Culp), someone he met in a zoophile chatroom who shares his proclivities and is himself in a committed relationship with a dog.

Soon Bonnie begins to realize her intellectual commitment to radical empathy is in direct conflict with her emotional reality. Her attempts to be the perfect, understanding wife lead her into a spiral of isolation and resentment while Q-Tip remains an enigmatic center of the conflict, an innocent party caught in the middle of a very human psychological crisis.

As the situation becomes increasingly volatile, For Want of a Horse forces a confrontation over the nature of consent and the limits of unconditional love, shifting deftly from a dark comedy about taboo desires into a tragic examination of how far one person will go to save—or destroy—a relationship.

As Calvin and Bonnie struggle to navigate the presence of Q-Tip, we see the systemic failure of their own fragile bond. The title, evoking the “for want of a nail” proverb, suggests that a single failure of empathy can lead to a total collapse. If we cannot perform the radical act of seeing the being standing in front of us, the entire kingdom of any relationship is lost. As the couple’s relationship buckles under the weight of the comely mare’s presence, we see that the want of a horse is really the want of recognition. The play suggests that the collapse of our social and personal structures stems from a failure to perform the radical act of empathy—the kind that requires us to look past the snorts and neighs of our differences to find the sentient being beneath.

The cast is uniformly golden, although the other three fine actors bow to the haunting performance of Kelly, who is nothing short of brilliant, delivering a true masterclass in physicality. As a transgender artist, Kelly brings a meta-textual weight to the role that cannot be ignored.

There’s a profound irony in watching a human being inhabit a character that the world refuses to see as human, demanding recognition while being met only with confusion or dismissal. Without the crutch of a literal costume, she conveys the equine spirit through a tilt of the jaw, a sharp exhale, and a restless, powerful energy. While the audience is gifted with Q-Tip’s richly poetic internal monologues, revealing a soul of immense depth, the human characters onstage hear only the snorts and neighs of an animal, creating a heartbreaking empathy gap that mirrors the experience of anyone who has ever had to fight to be seen as their authentic self.

The production values at the Echo Company’s home in the Atwater Village Theatre complex remain as suitably austere and top-tier as always on Alex Mollo’s simple yet effective set that leans into the claustrophobia of the setting, forcing the audience to sit in the discomfort of the aforementioned “other,” making it impossible to look away from the mirror Dufault has held up to our own capacity for connection.

It is a concept that could have been more fully and successfully explored were it not for the production’s only Achilles’ heel: the clunky and pedestrian staging by director Elana Luo. With a stage as wide and physically accessible at the Echo’s well-trod (if you’ll excuse the pun) space, Luo’s choice to have her actors drag the same clunky furniture on and off over and over again in blue light was a total distraction when the omnipresent bed that becomes a bench and a chest utilized for costume changes could have easily become stationary objects on various areas of the stage instead captured by Matthew Richter’s usual imaginative lighting plot.

Even with that druther, For Want of a Horse is a significant production, a take-no-prisoners piece of theatre that manages to be both intellectually rigorous and deeply visceral. It isn't just a play about a horse; it is a play about the exhaustion of existing in a world that demands you translate yourself into a recognizable form, emerging as a riveting, beautifully acted, and courageously off-centered piece that doesn’t just ask for your applause—it asks for your evolution.

Dufault is truly a groundbreaking wordsmith, an architect of the strangely whimsical and a potentially fearless voice in contemporary theatre. Her history as a trans woman writing for the stage, screen, and even comic books, informs every line of this script. She has a singular gift for taking an absurd premise and using it to slice open the most private nerves of a relationship. She asks us: Can you love something you don’t understand?

The saga of Q-Tip and who really needs what more, lingers long after the house lights come up, forcing you to wonder what horses in your own life you’ve been failing to truly hear.

THROUGH MAY 25: Echo Theater Company, Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Av., LA. EchoTheaterCompany.com or 747.350.8066 

Photo by Mike Palma 

East West Players at the Aratani Theatre

There was a palpable sense of homecoming at the Aratani Theatre in the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center last night as East West Players returned to this iconic stage as part of their “Diamond Legacy” season to raise the curtain on a newly refined production of the 1958 musical Flower Drum Song.

Serving as the grand finale of the venerated and long enduring company’s 60^th anniversary season, this revival isn’t merely a revival of a mostly overlooked Rodgers and Hammerstein classic; it’s a reclamation.

In this new interpretation of a show once created for traditionally white-only Broadway audiences, thanks to a perfectly revised and theme-sharpened new book by none other than David Henry Hwang, it becomes a boldly reenvisioned mirror of the modern immigrant experience—although this is something sadly now also nauseatingly challenged by the current state of American politics and its Destroyer-in-Chief, an ugly scourge that hangs over this production and the lives of us all like an enveloping shroud.

After the release of the 1961 film version of the musical, which as presented was rife with casting issues and fears that Asian Americans would take offense at how the characters were portrayed, FDS was basically put on the shelf marked "UNPLAYABLE" before Hwang dusted it off in 2002 and gave it a more equitable life.

Now, under the direction of EWP’s artistic director Lily Tung Crystal, this even fresher look at the once severely dated storyline proves with the right hands at the helm, even a glaringly sappy golden era musical can somehow be made to feel urgently contemporary.

The heartbeat of this production is Hwang’s 2026 all-new version of his own now 24-year-old updated Tony-nominated book. While the original original often felt like a tourist’s view of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Hwang’s latest incarnation, polished to a gleaming sheen, digs deeper into the grit and grace of the notorious City by the Bay in the 1960s.

We follow Mei-Li (performed by the luminous and golden-voiced Grace Yoo) as she flees a changing China after the arrest of her politically dissident father, carrying only his treasured antique flower drum and his traditional Chinese opera heritage into the neon-lit, jazz-infused world of Grant Avenue.  

Yoo anchors the emotional stakes of the evening from the very beginning, as her quietly optimistic rendition of "A Hundred Million Miracles” isn’t just a charming introductory number but a quiet manifesto on pure survival. She finds a perfect counterpoint and enjoys a palpable chemistry with Scott Keiji Takeda as her hard-to-get love interest Ta, who along with Yoo shares the two most noteworthy voices in the production. 

The same unfortunately cannot be said for Krista Marie Yu as the sexy vixen Linda Low, the showgirl who Mei-Li must overshadow to put herself on Ta’s distracted romantic radar. Although Yu is charming in the role and dances up a storm, her vocal powers make her more a double-threat player than a triple one. As charming and funny as she is in the show's most popular song “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” let’s just say her vocals are at least the only thing about her that’s flat.

That number is far more impressively conjured at the show’s tacked-on EWP encore by the standout Kenton Chen as Harvard, the company’s resident and somewhat light-in-the-loafers dresser who longs to be a star himself and, thanks to this production, gets his chance bigtime in the show’s personalized post-ending ending.

The legendary Gedde Watanabe is also a major asset here as Chin, the Chinese Opera star turned janitor in the not-so brave new world, offering a performance that balances the comedic requirements of the genre with a poignant, lived-in weariness. His sweetly furtive eleventh-hour ballad “My Best Love” might have been my favorite number in the entire show.

The generational friction is further ignited by the ever-amazing Emily Kuroda, who brings a steely, sophisticated wit to Madame Liang. Although her well-meant but vocally slender musical belt number “Chop Suey” survives basically from the production number that surrounds it, Kuroda understands the specific rhythm of Hwang’s modernized text as a woman navigating two worlds, providing much of the evening’s pseudo-intellectual weight. 

Marc Oka as delightful throughout as Wang, the San Francisco theatre owner desperately trying to keep his doors open while being staunchly stubborn about presenting only tradition fare, who is soon compromised—or is it dazzled?—into becoming something akin to Sessue Hayakawa transforming into P.T. Barnum. His specialty number in “Gliding Through my Memoree,” complete with his rather substantial belly protruding from Harvard’s purloined sailor costume, is a showstopper—as is "Don't Marry Me," his hilariously non-lovers’ duet with Kuroda.

Visually, the production could have been a feast, especially if it had been performed in EWP’s o in wn home down the street, a quaint and warm let's-put-on-a-show-esque reclaimed church where sometimes the less professional elements of a largescale musical can easily be overlooked because of the venue itself. At the cavernous Aratani, however, sometimes Chen-Wei Liao’s sets and the show’s other design elements are swallowed up by the austere nature of the space itself.

Janelle Dote Portman’s choreography clearly marries the rigid, poetic movements of Chinese opera with the explosive, mid-century Americana of the swingin’ urban nightclub scene of the era it depicts, becoming one of FDS’s most visual representations of the show’s central theme: the messy, beautiful process of the difficult assimilation from one culture into another.

If there is a flaw in Flower Drum Song, it has always been the struggle to reconcile the broad strokes of old style musical theatre with the nuances of the real-life Asian American experience. However, Tung Crystal’s direction leans into those contradictions rather than smoothing them over and the result is a production that feels deeply respectful of its roots while remaining fiercely protective of its characters’ humanity.

With an uber-enthusiastic opening night audience obviously ready to cheer, as the final notes of R&H’s sometimes predictable and not often enough exciting score hit the massive auditorium, gamely interpreted by musical director Marc Macalintal and his onstage orchestra, we are swept from the final production number somewhat clumsily rewritten to be endemic to East West Players and led into a rousing standing ovation.

Immediately it was instantly clear, despite any reservations that aren’t at all hard to overlook, that the prolific EWP team has once again done more than just put on a show. They have reminded us that our precious life stories are not static artifacts but living, breathing things that deserve to be revisited, revised, and above all celebrated.

THROUGH MAY 31: Aratani Theatre, 244 San Pedro St., LA. eastwestplayers.org or 213.625.7000

Photo by Robert Sturdevant 

Road Theatre Company

Los Angeles wunderkind playwright Tom Jacobson’s newest and most idiosyncratic work, now world premiering at the stalwart Road Theatre, chronicles a fascinating descent into the divine—and the damned.

For 35 prolific years the Road, under the fiercely dedicated leadership of founder and artistic director Taylor Gilbert, has been a sanctuary for championing and presenting only ambitious new works, but Jacobson’s Hell Mouth is a venture courageously taken on even beyond that well-earned mantle. It is a work awash in a singular, ultimately haunting scale as it delves into a young man named Tim (Danny Lee Gomez), whose name is surely intentionally only one vowel away from the author’s own for a reason. Jacobson, a master of blending meticulous historical research with the surreal, has this time out clearly crafted his most personal work, a piece that feels less like a play and more like an incantation.

The story is described as a blend of art history and heretical theology, juxtaposed with being a heart-wrenching family drama. In it, Tim is caught between two worlds: his Lutheran-austere upbringing and—at first glance, at least—sheltered Oklahoman mother Lois and his dying father Russell (Gilbert and Tony Abatemarco) and a pseudo-sophisticated and ridiculously pretentious Hancock Park fashion icon named Spencer (also played by Abatemarco in one of the play’s most challenging narrative obstacles) who may just be owner of a previously unknown painting of Judas by Caravaggio. It shouldn’t take anyone who’s been around LA a few decades to realize Spencer is based on the lategreat and rather charmingly monstrous Mr. Blackwell, someone with whom both Jacobson and Yours Truly worked and knew personally, perhaps rather too well.

Employed as an acquisitions manager for a tony LA art museum (Jacobson worked for years as a fundraiser for LACMA), Tim struggles to reconcile his humble midwestern roots with the extreme wealth and ostentatiousness of the LA art world—there’s even a sly plot point about his worrying his parka-clad mother might just land on Spencer’s annual “Worst Dressed” list.   

The play is described as having “blood, profanity, and meta-commentary,” which fits perfectly with the high-intensity, almost industrial energy that makes this playwright’s work so unique. It deals with hidden secrets, intense transformations, and the pressure of being caught between two different lives.  

Set against a backdrop where the veil between the mundane and the macabre is dangerously thin, Hell Mouth follows Tim and his ultra-sophisticated but hardened former New Yawk-er fine art broker Samara (again played by Gilbert) as they navigate their career-making task of getting Spencer to donate his possibly historically important canvas to the museum. His journey quite literally takes him from LA to Oklahoma to Provence, France to try to unearth details about Caravaggio’s mysterious and never substantiated death—and perhaps, at least in the hallucinations Tim begins to suffer, on to a metaphorical and possibly even literal visit to the Valley of Hell itself.

The script is a dense thicket of language, rich with wit, and chockful of existential dread. Jacobson doesn’t only demand a lot from his actors, he asks a lot of his audience as well, refusing to hand over easy answers and instead layering the plot with thematic questions about redemption, legacy, and the literal and figurative pits we flawed humans tend to dig for ourselves.

Having myself been closely connected not only with Blackwell—whom I personally befriended bigtime while for several years editing his weekly column in the Tolucan Times and then taking it and him along with me in the early 90s when I moved on to be editor of the now defunct Beverly Hills Post—but Tom and his husband Ramone Munoz have also been pals almost as long. His up-until now unproduced Hell Mouth has been on my radar for some time, although I just learned from him opening weekend at the Road that he actually wrote it 18 years ago after the death of his own father.

One of the reasons the play remained in a drawer so long was the intense difficulties of presenting it, especially as the actors playing the parents and LA art-fashion figures must switch identities, as well as clothes and wigs, at lightning speed. Luckily, the Road secured the collaboration of one of the company’s finest and most imaginative directors of past successes Ann Hearn Tobolowsky who, along with a crackerjack design and creative team, has finished the puzzle, managing to make the intimate Road space feel cavernous and claustrophobic at the same time.

The staging leans heavily into the supernatural requirements of the text without ever veering into camp. The visual palette is striking, with Mark Mendleson’s austere yet versatile and highly modern set utilizing deep dark red shadows and sharp, angular light designed by Derrick McDaniel that easily suggests the encroaching darkness of the story’s titular gateway to Hell itself. Add in Nicholas Santiago’s masterful video projections, a combination evoking something between Hieronymus Bosch and the real-life images of works by Caravaggio himself, and the result is a masterclass in mood over literalism.

While the script is undeniably wordy, Tobolowsky’s direction keeps the energy taut, ensuring the philosophical debates never stall the forward momentum of the plot. The success of any Jacobson play always rests on its actors’ ability to handle rhythmic, heightened dialogue without losing the human pulse beneath it.

In this premiere, Gomez delivers a grounded, soulful performance that acts as a necessary anchor for the play’s more complex elements, while the undeniably arresting chemistry between veteran thespians Gilbert and Abatemarco provides the emotional stakes needed to make the play’s cosmic consequences feel personal.

Hell Mouth is undeniably a challenging, rewarding piece of theatre that commands its audience to work almost as hard as its performers. That Tobolowsky and her team have successfully found a clear pathway to do just that perfectly reaffirms Tom Jacobson’s status as one of the most erudite, gifted, and daring playwrights of our time. It isn’t merely a story; it’s a sensory experience that lingers long after the final blackout. For those who prefer their theatre with a side of intellectual vertigo, this is an essential sit.

THROUGH JUNE 6: Road Theatre Company, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., NoHo. 818.761.8838 or RoadTheatre.org  

Photo by Cheryl Mann 

Diavolo l'Espace

In the rich and sprawling landscape of the Los Angeles dance community, the pioneering Diavolo: Architecture in Motion has always been the equivalent of heavy metal music transformed into the truly thrilling environment of the LA movement scene. 

Diavolo is most widely known for dominating the austere Pasadena Civic stage over the 12th season of America’s Got Talent in 2017 and for opening the 2024 Grammy telecast with Dua Lipa. Their signature performances have played in 250 cities and 14 countries around the world to an estimated 100 million significantly gobsmacked patrons.

Still, for me the most indelible personal connection came in February of 2005 when I was invited up to Las Vegas to cover the entire opening week of Cirque du Soleil’s long-running KA at the MGM Grand for Entertainment Today, where I was not only granted several days backstage access to meet the newly-bonded and remarkable troupe of unearthly gifted artists from all over the world, I also had the privilege to sit in on the final rehearsals and observe the design and structural tweaks before the show’s spectacular opening night.

I might also mention the Cirque’s typically flashy and unreal opening night party in the MGM Grand Garden Arena, dominated onstage by a huge ice sailing ship manned by partially-clothed worldwide members of the troupe brought to Vegas as they always are for every opening night, lasted until noon the following day. It was quite a trip, I assure you, one I will never forget where I also made friendships that have stayed strong for the past 21 years.

As part of my press access, I was also given permission to interview KA’s insanely talented designers and creative team, including the show’s charismatic Paris-born choreographer Jacques Heim.

Heim is the inspiration, driving force, and creative director of Diavolo, which he founded here in 1992 and his company is still today only one of three dance entities to survive our fickle and quickly bored reclaimed desert climes over the past 25 years.

Getting to hang out and pick the fertile brain of this incredibly innovative artist, one of the first choreographers to blend modern dance with acrobatics and gymnastics, forming what the LA Times once noted as the “dance bridge to the 21st century,” was one of the highlights of my stay.

Diavolo’s latest production, ESCAPE, currently running through mid-June at their own unique creative space downtown at The Brewery, trades the stadium spectacle for something far more raw, vulnerable, and—quite literally—sweaty.

Tucked away in the exciting and electric arts district in the company’s permanent home and studio Heim calls l'Espace Diavolo, ESCAPE is a 70-minute exploration of the human struggle against a chaotic world. 

While the company is famous for its gravity-defying feats, since it’s being performed in this eclectic private former warehouse studio, this production brings the audience literally within five feet of the action. With only 90 seats in the house, the massive yet somehow intimate black box setting transforms the performance from a distant marvel into a shared endurance test.

Watching 22 worldclass artists grapple with Heim’s self-designed signature architectural metal structures at such close range is staggering. You don't just see the athleticism; you hear the breath, you feel the vibration of the wood and the steel, and above all, you sense the sheer stakes of the danger involved.

The performance is propelled by a high-octane soundtrack—a mix of pop, EDM, and rock spanning from the 1970s to today. This sonic backdrop mirrors the surreal landscape of ESCAPE the performers must navigate. Themes of survival and community aren't just subtext here—they are the literal foundation of the show.

However, the intimacy of the space is a double-edged sword. On the night I attended, the atmosphere inside the black box reached a fever pitch. The energy was electric, but the temperature within the venue was equally intense. The physical toll of the performance isn't just felt by the dancers, as the audience is also plunged into the human struggle for air and space. It is a testament to the power of the work that even when the environment becomes overwhelming, the sheer beauty and drama of the movement remains undeniable.

Breaking—or should I say smashing—the fourth wall, Heim’s vision for ESCAPE extends beyond the performance itself. The show aims to break down barriers, offering pre- and post-show interactive opportunities where guests can actually ride the colossal structures themselves. It is a rare chance to touch the art that usually exists behind a proscenium arch.

I would imagine most people find one or two performers in any dance or group performance to focus on throughout the show as I always tend to do. In this case, my attention kept returning to a young man smaller in stature than most of the other male dancers named Evan Hernandez. Although his positioning in less prominent places during the show and his youthfulness made me think maybe he is a newer member of the company, I also found him to be, besides equally gifted athletically, one of the more graceful and passionately  committed members of the troupe. Expect great things from him in the future.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that ESCAPE is a one-of-a-kind visceral and breathtaking experience that captures Diavolo’s 34-year legacy in a pressure cooker. It is bold, it is loud, and it is undeniably Los Angeles.

Just a word of advice: despite the fact that at the box office they pass out quite effective little personal electric fans to each patron and even though you should bring along a sweater or jacket just in case Dallas Raines turns out to be full of crap the day you attend (this is LA after all), definitely dress light under the layers and prepare for a real workout yourself—even from your seat.

It isn't easy to endure but what an opportunity to understand at close range just what each and every one of these 22 phenomenal artistes must undergo physically on a daily basis to bring us such undeniable sorcery.

THROUGH JUNE 14: l’Espace Diavolo, 616 Moulton Av., LA. www.daviolo.org/escape 

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?

NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR! 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