EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE  

 

CURRENT REVIEWS 

by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER

 

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

 

The Civil Twilight  

Photo by Lizzy Kimball  

Broadwater Studio Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or does she.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THROUGH NOV. 24:  Broadwater Studio Theatre, 1076 Lillian Way, Hollywood. http://theciviltwilight.ludus.com

 

Photo by Cooper Bates 

Fountain Theatre

The groundbreaking Fountain Theatre, currently represented off-Broadway with their transplanted smash hit Fatherland, has given us another socially conscious “ode to the working class,” as I, Daniel Blake’s director and 32-year producing director of the complex Simon Levy commented.

Adapted for the stage from the 2016 British film by Dave Johns, who played the leading role in the Palme d’Or and BAFTA award-winning movie, I, Daniel Blake tells the woebegone tale of a hard-working middleaged carpenter from Newcastle in northeast England who, after a heart attack, is deemed unable to work.

The play follows Daniel (played by the indomitable JD Cullum) as he tries desperately to navigate the bleak and heartless public help institutions in an effort to keep food on the table and a roof over his head. As dysfunctional as our country’s own governmental social system may be, I venture to guess his agonizing Kafkaesque journey through endless paperwork, hours of hold time, and dealing with insensitive employees who obviously couldn’t care less, is even more soul-crushing than our own.

The incredibly gifted Cullum is heartbreaking as this innocent victim pushed to drastic measures to survive as he simultaneously strives to help a displaced young mother and her teenage daughter (Philicia Saunders and Makara Gamble) facing their own struggles to buck the bureaucratic odds.

The production is smoothly guided and sturdily staged by Levy and, as usual, impressively designed on the Fountain’s challenging playing space. The performances are uniformly heartfelt, but sadly the play itself isn’t worthy of the attention. Although it may have worked well on film, onstage it is unrelentingly bleak, achingly predictable, and I would defy almost anyone to not foresee the ending in the first few minutes or to not guess the fate of the desperate welfare mother continuously backed into a corner.

Maybe these themes were new and unexplored to their original British audiences, but there's nothing we haven’t heard many times over. Johns’ adaptation is told in short filmic scenes that hamper the flow of the storyline, while his glaringly two-dimensional characters are given nothing cathartic for the actors to navigate and make more interesting. As hard as the supporting players try to rise above the writing, black hats vs. white hats abound and the script offers them little to explore and shape as their own.

Cullum does a remarkable job breathing real life into his character, while Saunders has the toughest time here. Except for a couple of sweet, loving, brief interactions with her daughter, she is basically left to continuously look tortured when she’s not screaming in frustration and then subsequently begging to be forgiven for her outbursts.

Aside from these limitations, Levy, his designers, and his veteran cast of dynamic actors could not be more committed to rising above the shortcomings inherent in the play itself. Gamble, who made a memorable stage debut as the granddaughter in Pasadena Playhouse’s magnificent A Little Night Music last season, once again proves herself to be a young performer to watch.

Still, as the most important and scary election in our lifetime looms ahead of us in less than three weeks, what I, Daniel Blake beautifully delivers in spite of its theatrical blemishes is a reminder of how urgently we all, like Johns’ goodhearted workingclass Everyman hero, need to join together to lift one another up from the ugliness and communal malaise threatening to destroy everything we hold most dear.

THROUGH NOV. 24: Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Av., LA. 323.663.1525 or fountaintheatre.com

American Idiot 

Photo by Jeff Lorch

Mark Taper Forum

Since its grand opening in 1967, Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum has been a major entity in the ever-uphill quest to increase the profile of the performing arts in our culturally maligned reclaimed desert climes, as well as quickly becoming a prototype for the regional theatre scene in America.

When CTG announced the indefinite closure of the Taper in August of 2023, it took the breath away for us all, especially considering the massive loss of theatres big and small across the country unable to recoup after the pandemic decimated so many art institutions everywhere.

When it was announced last April that the Taper would be reopening this month, it was as though our entire community sent out a clarion call into the atmosphere above the El Lay smog like the Whos of Whoville singing and dancing around their holiday-challenged community Crissmiss tree.

Then to discover the reopening presentation would be yet another grand collaboration between CTG and Deaf West Theatre, once again featuring both deaf and hearing performers, and that it would be a massive reworking of Green Day’s extremely successful Tony-winning 2009 musical adaptation of American Idiot, their pioneering 2004 concept album of the same name, all in the world seemed slightly less discouraging.

As the icing on the cake, it was also announced that the production would also mark the CTG directorial debut of Snehal Desai, who became the third ever artistic director of the beleaguered organization in 2023, and that our town’s own treasured veteran musical director/composer David O would be at the podium—and the keyboards—to rock the helloutta the newly revitalized Taper.

One familiar Green Day song title included in American idiot itself immediately reflected my reaction to all this good news: “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”

A lot was on the line for both the theatre and Desai, but it was hard to imagine the production would not be a celebration. Deaf West has reimagined what theatre could mean for the deaf community, especially having the cajones to believe the already award-winning company could venture into the world of musical theatre.

It all started in 2000 when Deaf West was moving from its grubby original venue in East Hollywood to their new home in North Hollywood and inaugurated the space with the unheard of opening of their first reinvented musical, their spectacular Jeff Calhoun-led mounting of Lionel Bart’s classic Oliver!, where all roles were double-cast with both deaf actors signing and their counterparts speaking and singing. It was pure magic.

The following year, Calhoun returned again to helm a phenomenal presentation of Roger Miller’s Huck Finn musical Big River, which transferred first to the Taper and then reopened on Broadway in 2003, garnering a nomination for Best Revival of a Musical. That collaboration with CTG led to a highly acclaimed revival at the Taper of Pippin in 2009 and in 2015, the company’s reinvention of Spring Awakening transferred from downtown’s Inner-City Arts to the Wallis before heading off to Broadway and multiple Tony nominations.

And now, there’s a spectacular new addition to the company’s success. May I just say this in-your-face CTG/Deaf West version of American Idiot is to me the best production to hit any LA stage this year. As I told David O’s lovely wife Michele East, our seat-mate on opening night, I hope she’s ready for a return to New York next year (where David led the orchestra of Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night in 2022). I can’t imagine a world where this production does not move on to the Great White Way and once again take the town by storm.

Desai’s staging on Takeshi Kata’s three-tiered industrial-inspired set is brilliant, chockfull of unwavering visual splendor and complimented by a design team sure to win many awards, including dazzlingly bold lighting and costuming designed by, respectively, Karyn D. Lawrence and Lena Sands, and featuring welcomingly loud rocking sound by Cricket S. Myers that shakes the 739-seat Taper as never before.

The wildly talented ensemble cast made up of equal numbers of deaf and speaking performers is led by Deaf West superstar Daniel Durant (Troy Katsur’s son in the Oscar-winning Coda) as a miscreant shower-challenged young adult whose dysfunctional life is revealed in Green Day’s “Jesus of Suburbia.” Johnny is an unfulfilled and jaded kid from a broken home on his way off to try to tackle the big city, with former Disney teen star Milo Manheim along for the ride as his voice and shadow, and the uber-talented Mason Alexander Park (Desire in Netflix’ The Sandman) contributing a show-stopping turn as Johnny’s drug-induced alter-ego St. Jimmy.

The storyline features Johnny’s two besties (Otis Jones IV, voiced by James Olivas, and Landen Gonzales, voiced by Brady Fitz), local kids also more than ready to abandon the boring confines of Jingletown, USA, and attempt to shake off their disillusionment with how adults have fucked up our country and its once-honorable mission in the world.

The trio manages to screw things up just as expected, including Johnny’s downward spiral from party drugs to heroin and back again, the unexpected pregnancy of Will’s girlfriend (Ali Fumiko Whitney), and Tunny’s decision to join the military with disastrous results.

The premise is certainly slim and glaringly predictable, making American Idiot less a musical and more a concert-like song cycle built around Green Day’s classic tunes, but when it’s mounted as opulently and cleverly done as it is here, it matters not.

A lot of the praise must be heaped on choreographer Jennifer Weber, who impressively showcases the worldclass troupe of dancers—half of whom are deaf, mind you—and David O, who leads a knockout rock orchestra that could play any arena in the civilized world.

Also admirable is the barrage of a constant video word salad created by David Murikami featuring Billie Joe Armstrong’s gritty yet almost Parnassian lyrics projected on the set as the songs unfold. As someone who spent my young adult years earning my living in the “Golden Era” of the music business in the late 60s and the 70s, it’s interesting how many times I hear people today say the now legendary stars of those fine days were the last true poets and how sad it is the music has devolved so drastically over the ensuing years.

Let me tell you: the advent in the 1990s of artists such as Armstrong and the enduring message of Green Day’s socially conscious music makes American Idiot timelier than ever. Unlike so many of the artists of "back then" who have recently left us, I feel grateful to still be around a half-century later to appreciate this event, something I believe will one day be recognized as one of the most innovative and groundbreaking productions of 2024.

THROUGH NOV. 16: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org  

Topsy Turvy 

Photo by Ashley Randall

Actors’ Gang Theatre

Founded by Oscar-winning film star Tim Robbins 42 years ago and still active under his continuing leadership, the Actors’ Gang has produced more than 150 plays in LA and has toured 40 states and five continents in its mission to honor the sacred heritage of live theatre by introducing unconventional new works and creating exciting reinterpretations of the ancient classics.

It’s been a little bit David Lynch, a little bit what the company calls “The Style,” and a whole lot of worshipful homage to the 15th-century traditions of Commedia dell’arte that conspire to energize the Gang and simply, nobody does it better.

Starting its journey in garages, art galleries, street corners, and late night takeovers of small venues, the company's unswerving search for theatrical windmills has never wavered—that is until the pandemic put a major obstacle in their path as they strive to create, educate, and inspire through their art.

Although the Gang members continued to try to adapt their workshops and educational outreach programs to online formats, Robbins could not shake the sense that something vital was missing. From that came Topsy Turvy (A Musical Greek Vaudeville), now world premiering at the Gang’s theatre for a limited run before heading off to the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Romania, certainly with more international tour dates to follow.

Written and directed by Robbins—his 15th original play to debut at his theatre since 1982–the roots of Topsy Turvy sprout both from classic Greek theatre and the deliciously lowbrow tenets of burlesque.

As the unity of a 10-person modern Greek chorus is upended due to a widespread pandemic that keeps them from being able to meet in person, they turn to the gods—you know, the old ones with names like Dionysus and Aphrodite—to seek their wisdom and help mend the divisiveness in their ranks destroying their ability to harmonize.

Explains Robbins of his inspiration: “What was missing was what theatre reliably provides, a place of gathering and community. The Gang could not meet in its shared space… and for some, there was something tragic and wrong about their theatre being closed, something ominous and unsettling about gathering places all around the world being shuttered.”

The result is Topsy Turvy, limning that overwhelming sense of loss many of us are still experiencing four years later. It is one of the earliest theatrical responses to the experience that took such a huge chunk out of our lives and as so, presented in the usual-unusual modus operandi for which the Gang has become known, nothing and no one is left without a voice, from the unnerved members of the chorus to the gods themselves.

Robbins also strikingly directs his latest international-bound project, leading a wildly game cast of zanies who are, as always, fearless in their willingness to go beyond the bounds of any restraint in creating their characters, this fearlessness the outcome of working together in the Gang’s rule-challenging ongoing workshops.

The members of the chorus searching to “find the virtue in loneliness” are each distinctive, presumably developed from being given the freedom to bring their individual roles to life from the first gasp of artistic birth. And together, their musical moments are also quite impressive.

Although a musical director is not officially credited, I would suspect another Robbins, brother David Robbins, who has created, performed, arranged, and designed the sound for many of the troupe’s productions since 1985 (even contributing improvised musical accompaniment for the Gang’s workshops), should be acknowledged here for helping the chorus find their perfect harmonies.

The talent must run in the family as sister Adele Robbins, herself a 30-year member of the company, is an eager member of the chorus here and, aside from writing and directing Topsy Turvy, the overachieving Tim has also composed six exceptionally evocative songs and lyrics for his “musical vaudeville.”

As the summoned gods who interrupt the frustrated members of the chorus in danger of losing their moxie and no longer able to "find meaning in distraction,” Luis Quintana and Scott Harris are special standouts as the Vegas lounge-like comedy team of Cupid and Bacchus, the latter gleefully noting that since the lockdown began there’s never been a time when wine has been more appreciated.

Harris also proves his versatility doubling in the more serious role of the Biblical character Onan and as Dionysus, arriving to blast our species for the systematic destruction of our planet—and prompting a chorus member to point out that “all the gods seem so grouchy.”

Perhaps the most chilling indictments of human behavior which has directly caused the Topsy Turvy nature of our world we live in comes from Guebri Van Over as Aphrodite and a dynamic showstopping turn by Stephanie Galindo as Aztec goddess Coatlique, who accuses us all of our planet’s impending destruction and near distinction of our Native American ancestors.

Quintana, back as aptly named Barnum-esque master of ceremonies Distracto, leads a raucous troupe of street-style carnival magicians, hypnotists, and particularly Megan Stogner as a wonderfully entertaining monkey anxious to escape from her cage. All contribute to bring welcome comic relief to lighten up the proceedings between the sharply accusatory monologues by gods and others shaming our species for the rampant disregard of our planet and the responsibility of creating a “society in chaos, a society that has lost its sense of up and down.”

If there’s anything to criticize in this impressive and freshly innovative production, it might only be a sense that, between the circus-like comedic interludes, the harsh diatribes delivered to the audience by the gods begin to feel a bit like too much sermonizing. I believe this is only something noteworthy here in Topsy Turvy’s Los Angeles debut where, especially considering the general hipness of the Actors’ Gang devoted audiences, the issues raised seem to be preaching to the choir.

Robbins notes that the themes and warnings present in his latest opus are “intended as a catalyst for a conversation” and I kept thinking as it was unfolding how much its message will resonate, educate, and in a way apologize to the participants of the Romanian Sibiu Festival and to audiences anywhere it will subsequently travel.

“We are living in an aftermath of disorder and disarray,” Robbins explains of his quest for windmills. “Theatre is here precisely for these times. It has the potential to unite us. It can inspire laughter, bring us songs that touch our hearts, raise difficult questions and dichotomies, remind us of our shared humanity.”

In other words, art heals—and nothing could be more potentially healing than the fiercely creative magic generated by Tim Robbins and the invincible members of the Actors’ Gang.

UPDATE:  After knockin’ em dead at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Romania, the Malta Theater Festival in Poland, and The Csokonai National Theater in Hungary, Topsy Turvy returns home triumphant! 

THROUGH NOV. 16: The Actors’ Gang, 9070 Venice Blvd., Venice. 310.838.4264 or theactorsgang.com

Crevasse 

Photo by Matt Kamimura

Victory Theatre Center

In 1938, brilliant but discredited German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl came to Hollywood. Her mission was to attend per-arranged meetings with the most influential film industry executives, the same folks not interested in distributing her documentary Olympia, an epic film which commemorated the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin.

Despite the fact that her movie intentionally focused on the athletes of the Games and was purported to try to harbor peace and unity in our ever-conflicted world, particularly paying worshipful deference to our own American hero and four-time medal winner Jesse Owens, it was Riefenstahl’s personal reputation that thwarted her efforts to see her baby reach our shores.

The snub was basically the result of her infamous 1935 propaganda feature Triumph of the Will, clearly glorifying the potentially ominous events which had unfolded the year before in Nuremberg at the Nazi Party Congress, a gathering which celebrated its leader and the man who had commissioned Riefenstahl to make the film. Her Triumph des Willens chronicled a turning point for world politics attended by some 700,000 supporters of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler—you know, that pre-Trumpian maniac who promised to Make Germany Great Again.

When her planned visit came directly on the heels of Kristallnacht and after the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League took out a full page in the Hollywood Reporter criticizing her arrival and hinting at the rumor that Riefenstahl was the mistress of der Fuhrer himself, all but one of the meetings with the studio heads was cancelled. The only executive who did not jump ship was Walt Disney, something perhaps even more notable since he was the only one of the men who was not a Jew.

We’re told that Riefenstahl wasn’t happy about this turn of events in the world premiere of playwright extraordinaire Tom Jacobson’s arresting two-hander Crevasse, now playing at the Victory Theatre Center co-produced by its director Matthew McCray in collaboration with the Victory’s founder and artistic director Maria Gobetti.

Riefenstahl (Ann Noble) didn’t much like the Faustian thought of selling her “soul for Hollywood notoriety” in the first place, but when Disney, then mainly known as the creator of that red lederhosen-wearing rodent and struggling financially to keep his cartoon studio afloat, emerged from the rubble of her visit as the only person willing to meet with her, she was ready to skedaddle right back to the Homeland.

It was her manager Ernst Jeager (Leo Marks) who persuaded her to stay, reminding his client that the “Michael Mouse Club” had more members than the Hitler Youth. Although she saw the proposed meet-and-greet as akin to a “funhouse mirror facing true reality,” she reluctantly agreed to stay.

Marks also plays Disney, as well as Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, while Noble appears as Jeager’s doomed Jewish wife Lotte and also briefly as an FBI official interrogating him. Both stunningly gifted performers send their already soaring individual recognition as two of our town’s finest actors into the stratosphere with this auspicious debut of one of Jacobson’s best and most fascinating plays.

Noble and Marks’ rapid onstage transformations between these characters and the play’s many locations are smoothly accomplished thanks to McCray’s incredibly fluid staging winding through set designer Evan Bartoletti’s series of shimmering gossamer draperies, possibly meant to subtly conjure the symbolic image of a glacial Crevasse, a deep crack in the ice that here evokes the real life moment when the cool and stiff-backed Midwestern demeanor of Walt Disney was potentially melted by the fiery and seductive ambitions of Leni Riefenthal.

Azra King-Abadi’s striking lighting, Michael Mullen’s provocative costuming, Nicholas Santiago’s clever but ghostly projections of Bambis and dwarves and bald mountains, and especially John Zalewski’s metallic Metropolis-esque sound plot, beautifully augment this bareboned but highly evocative production, while from somewhere below the expert razzle-dazzle emerges a rather scary tale of the potential selling of one’s soul and abandoning one’s ethics in return for wealth and success.

Perhaps the most shocking and frightening image I’m left with might be Marks as the milquetoast but later well-known anti-Semite Disney, sometime after Riefenstahl has asked him if he’s a “puppet of Hollywood or a real boy,” hiding behind a stuffed toy of his famous Mouse and doing his beloved creation’s signature voice while raising one plush arm at an angle as he intones “Sieg Heil.”

Hollywood is, as Tom Jacobson reminds us, a place where the creation of art and beauty is expensive—and in his Crevasse’s final tableaux, featuring Disney sitting alone under a desk lamp as he picks up the red-covered copy of Mein Kempf  Riefenthal has left him, the suggestion of the abandonment of one’s ideals in the face of the profitability of pure evil could not be more disturbing.

What an ominous business model for the creation of the world’s greatest and biggest motion picture and theme park empire Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto might have been—something our current returning equally malevolent candidate for President is not at all skittish to embrace.

THROUGH NOV. 10: Victory Theatre Center, 3324 W. Victory Blvd, Burbank. 818.841.5421 or thevictorytheatrecenter.org 

Unassisted Reality 

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 new 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.

Although my partner Hugh, who was quite literally at least three decades younger than anyone else in the audience last Sunday and is a mere 42 years my junior, 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?

EXTENDED to play one Sunday a month through 2025: El Portal Monroe Forum Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo. www.elportaltheatre.com/fritzcoleman.html

 

See? I'm an angel.