THE BONEYARD 

REEFER MADNESS at the Whitley

"Creeping like a Communist! It’s knocking at our doors! / Turning all our children into hooligans and whores!"

It’s a dire warning received when entering the newly created Whitley Theatre, the imaginative new incarnation of the many-times reinvented old King King Nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard, when you arrive to hear a lecture about the evils of that new scourge threatening the children of America. You know, that demon weed called marijuana—which one of the participants in a conspiratorial and somewhat disgusted tone reminds us is a “Mexican” word.

As the lecturer (a stone-faced Bryan Daniel Porter) sermonizes about the new drug’s destructive and soul-crushing properties, his eager ensemble of equally concerned cohorts helps deliver his stern message of evil and avarice by recreating a recent incident of a real life ruination: the downfall of decent young suitably geewillikersy teenager Jimmy Harper (Anthony Norman) at the hands of a smarmy true monster named Jack (also played by Porter).

The time is 1937, folks, and the place is the Good Ol’ USA in this smashing revival of Reefer Madness: the Musical, produced by the 2005 film version’s stars Christian Campbell, Kristen Bell, and Alan Cummings, as well as the film’s original director Andy Fickmam, its bookwriter/composers Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney, Campbell’s producing partner/wife America Olivo, and executive producer Wendy Parker.

It might seem like a major risk, presenting this elaborate recreation of a cult icon during our current crisis attempting to restore live theatre back from the depths of audience apathy after being crushed by the pandemic, especially when the spoils have to be shared by so many creators, but I doubt if financial gain was the main goal this dedicated group of artists thought about when they decided to bring it back. Still, considering how spectacularly and inventively Reefer Madness has returned to the town where it modestly began 25 years ago, in a fair world this production could play on to packed houses in the newly renamed Reefer Den for a long time to come.

That original production, which played right down the street at the tiny Hudson Theatre on Santa Monica Boulevard, was also directed by Fickman and starred Campbell, launching their careers in the nicest way possible. It went on to snag seven LA Drama Critics Circle Awards for 1999, for Best Production, Direction, Score, Choreography (by a 28-year-old Michael Goorjian, no less), Musical Direction, Sound Design, and a well-deserved Leading Performance Award for Campbell, who was also honored as Best Actor in a Musical from my own annual TicketHolder Awards.

Of course, the source of the musical spoof was another cult classic, the outrageously bad 1936 dead-serious instructional film Tell Your Children!, a project financed by a church group intending it to be shown to god-fearing Christian parents as a tool to teach them about the dangers of cannabis use..

Soon after it was produced, however, and realizing quickly how unintentionally funny it was, it was purchased by producer Dwain Esper and re-cut to be distributed on the exploitation film circuit, its horrifically bad filmmaking and acting, as well as its inherent randiness and vulgarity, escaping censorship under the guise of offering valuable moral guidance.

It was rediscovered again in the late 60s and enjoyed a copious new resurrection from my generation, who had another reaction to its message—one I remember personally quite vividly as my partner Victor and I sat in the living room of Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson watching a screening of the film unfold through a thick smoky haze while tripping on two tabs of Clear Light.

What this all-new take brings to this rich history is everything that conspired to make it fresh again and to do so in the classiest way possible, especially by hiring the multi-award winning Spencer Liff, two-time Emmy nominee for TV’s So You Think You Can Dance?, to direct and choreograph. His vision, surely fostered by those original participants with such a fond past with the evolution of the musical, is the heart and soul of this production and his ensemble cast is uniformly onboard in the effort.

Both Norman and Porter (who also plays FDR and a Jesus even more irreverent and lots more colorful than on South Park) are exceptional, even when Jimmy’s horrific (comedic) decline into addiction and madness was hampered on opening night by a temperamental headworn microphone that became so problematic the performance had to take a brief little unexpected intermission.

Thomas Dekker is hilarious throughout as Ralph Wiley, the addicted fallen fratboy whose promise as a future nuclear scientist has dissolved into sentences that end with “whoops… it’s gone” and J. Elaine Marcos is comic perfection as the blowsy Sally DeBain, who quiets her ever-howling newborn infant by blowing marijuana smoke into its baby bottle.

Darcy Rose Byrnes is delightful as Jimmy’s love interest Mary Lane, who goes from a potential steady girlfriend in the Andy Hardy tradition to a scantily-clad vixen with a single toke on one of Jack’s funny cigarettes.

Still, of all the principals, Nicole Parker is a true standout as Jack’s once respectable moll Mae Coleman, whose former family home has become her dealer boyfriend’s “den” and center of his operations. Mae’s continuous wailing to reform and clean herself up is thwarted by even a look at one of Jack’s pre-rolls, making her ballad “The Stuff” one of the musical highlights of the show.

The ensemble of wonderfully game dancer/singers could not be better, performing Liff’s incredibly athletic moves throughout the production’s inventive environmental cabaret staging, where arms and legs often slice through the air so close to the heads of patrons seated at nearby tables that one can feel the wind they generate.

May I make a special shoutout to Patrick Ortiz, who stepped in at the performance we saw for dancer Alex Tho and, particularly since he’s not listed in the printed program as one of the swings, presumably learned Tho’s physically demanding track in record time and did an excellent job of making it his own.

The set and interior Reefer Den design by Mark A. Dahl and Peter Wafer is incredibly clever, enhanced by the lighting design by Matt Richter and what could easily become future award-winning costuming by drag clown Pinwheel Pinwheel.

As the action happens all around the patrons seated at those tables, the waitstaff delivering food and drink (including such treats as nachos piled on psychedelic-green tortilla chips and chicken skewers piercing the ceramic heads of Aphrodite and Michelangelo’s David) are forced to gingerly dodge performers rushing from one place to another. There’s continuous chaos happening everywhere one looks and it’s quite impressive that it all happens so seamlessly.

Above everything, however, the true star of the show is once again the infectious score and quick-witted tongue-in-cheek lyrics created by Murphy and Studney, an Emmy-winning feat that stands up in time splendidly and the exceptional contributions of sound designer Charles Glaudini and the venue’s live band led by musical director David Lamoureux enhance that goal immeasurably.

Truly, this return to the hysterical raucousness of Reefer Madness could not be more welcome as our country fights its conservative-led return to what Trump-era Republicants and other naysayers see as the demise of traditional “family values"—and the current over-the-top exaggerations and risqué nature of the musical’s original campiness make it better than ever before, especially since today you don’t have to hide in the corner of the parking lot to indulge illegally in any enhancers to appreciate its slickly produced silliness.

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AMERICAN IDIOT at the 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.

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CREVASSE at the 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.

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I, DANIEL BLAKE at the 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.

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TOPSY TURVY at the 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 15^th 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! 

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KIMBERLY AKIMBO at the Pantages Theatre

Anyone who's been privy to my usual grumblings concerning the dated nature of traditional musical comedy as opposed to the innovation of contemporary musical theatre will appreciate my excitement about David Lindsay-Abaire’s multiple-Tony-winning 2021 musical adaptation of his also award-winning play Kimberly Akimbo. To me, it’s the quintessential paradigm of how such a transition should work.

Lindsay-Abaire, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his brilliant play Rabbit Hole, once again takes us on a poignant, hilarious, deliciously inappropriate detour into the old Jerry Springer challenge to the American dream. Originating right here in ol’ LA, he received the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Playwrighting in 2001 when the play premiered at South Coast Rep starring Marylouise Burke in the title role.

The unstoppably rule-defying playwright had first garnered both praise and vilification generated from the enormous success of his Fuddy Meers in 1999, as well as for my personal favorite of his prolific body of work, Wonder of the World, before his 16-year-old menopausal heroine Kimberly Levaco grabbed the hearts of theatregoers both here and off-Broadway—then bobbed back to LA in a sparkling return at the Victory Theatre Center directed by Maria Gobetti and starring the inimitable Judy Jean Burns, both of whom won Best honors in my TicketHolder Awards for 2007 for their work.

When it first announced that the play would be turned into a musical with Lindsay-Abaire writing the book and lyrics, and that he would be joined by two-time Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Caroline or Change, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Soft Power) for the project, the equally gifted worldclass artist with whom he had previously teamed for Shrek the Musical, I was sufficiently elated. And speaking of the Tonys, Kimberly Akimbo went on to win five of the little suckers, including Best Musical, Best Score, and Best Book. Now the touring company has landed back home at the Pantages and once again, it’s truly something to celebrate.

As in most of Lindsay-Abaire’s work, Kimberly Akimbo concerns the insular private world of what is on the surface just your typically dysfunctional nuclear family crashing through life circa 1999 in suburban New Jersey.  Kim (a spectacular turn by Broadway star Carolee Carmello) is your classically gawky teenager dressed in costumer Sarah Laux’ Barbie-inspired finery.

She has crushes, she toils with her homework, she plays after school sports right along with everyone else, hanging out at the local “Skaters Planet” ice rink. She is typical in every way except, because of a rare genetic condition, her aging process has been accelerated five times.  Although she can chew gum and navigate the ice with the best of them, Kim passed through her midlife hot flashes at age 12 and appears to now be a mature woman resolutely into her AARP years.

Even more disturbing, it will soon be her 16^th birthday, which her messed-up parents have completely forgotten, and the life expectancy of those afflicted with her ailment is exactly that age. “My whole life has been later,” she laments, “and I don’t want to wait anymore.”

Not that her family seems to care much.  Her mother Pattie (Dana Steingold) has problems of her own with her late-in-life pregnancy; a leg brace; battling rampant hypochondria, including the delusion that she’s dying of cancer; and recovering with bandaged hands from surgery after acquiring carpel-tunnel syndrome through years spent squeezing cream filling into pastries. 

Kimberly’s alcoholic dad Buddy (Jim Hogan) isn’t much help either, breaking most promises to her while ending up “face down in a bowl of peanuts somewhere” each night after his shift as an attendant in a gas station kiosk.  Beyond the obviously warped family dynamics (“Hey, we’re not perfect, okay?” offers Pattie defensively in the understatement of the century), there’s also a murky secret involving the Levacos’ sudden relocation from Lodi to Bergen County.

Kim has two allies in her homeless ex-con Aunt Debra (the show-stopping Emily Koch), who stays alive by sleeping and giving handjobs in the public library, and a moonstruck fellow student named Seth (Miguel Gil), a kid who sees only a beautiful young girl despite the fact that Kimberly looks like a little akin to Margo when they took her out of Shangri-La. Still, both of these characters have their own agendas: Debra wanting to use her niece and her gullible classmates as part of a scheme to cash checks stolen from a mailbox she’s carted to the Levacos’ basement through the streets and Seth because Kim might be the first person to ever see him as an actual person and not the school’s resident nerd.

Tony-nominated director Jessica Stone and choreographer Danny Mefford obviously possess the perfect offbeat sense of humor to understand and enhance the quirkiness of this darkly rich material; it’s a match made in Theatrical Cracker Family Heaven. And there's something quite nostalgic and comfortably old-fashioned about David Zinn's set design, which resorts to rolling pieces and descending flats rather than resorting to today's overused penchant to turn all musical theatre scenery into a series of projections.

Carmello is indelible in the leading role, finding not only the youth and latent valleygirlisms of her doomed character but gently suggesting the heartache Kimberly chokes down on a daily basis is more because her parents seem to have already given up on her than she'd controlled by her disease and the prospect of nearing her early demise. Steingold, Hogan, and Gil play their exaggerated and challenging supporting roles with great conviction, finding touching moments of humanity lurking within the demands presented by playing Lindsay-Abaire’s outrageous characters.

There’s also a clever addition to the original story, a four-person chorus featuring Kimberly’s lovestuck schoolmates who exist in a kind of sweet who-loves-whom limbo reminiscent of the starcrossed lovers from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All four—Grace Capeless, Skye Alysse Friedman, Darron Hayes, and especially the charmingly dorky Pierce Wheeler, who moves a bit like a teenage Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow looking for a brain—are an enormous asset to the storyline and bring continuous smiles to every musical number they enhance.

Perhaps the biggest kudos, however, go to Koch, who offers a wildly unfiltered relative-from-hell so nuts the family moved without leaving a forwarding address. She is a continuous treat and vocally, she slays every opportunity to belt out her version of Miss Hannigan played by Mama Rose. But then, all the voices here are high-powered, especially when given the opportunity to take full advantage of Tesori’s infectious score.

Above everything else that makes this musical retelling of a great play so special is the fascinatingly askew signature vision of its creator, who proves here he can also writes lyrics that somehow signal the clever tongue-in-cheek and often Carlin-esque wisdom of that late-great musical theatre god Stephen Sondheim himself. Who else but Sir Steve and Lindsay-Abaire could conjure rhyming “twist” with “narcissist”?

Beyond even the success of his timelessly spot-on Kimberly Akimbo, David Lindsay-Abaire has taken on the eternal subject of family in the body of his work and finds a way to meld his gloriously goofy humor with a kind of modernday Ibsen or Miller-esque exploration into the heart of what is subtly but systematically destroying our species.  His greatest insight is always finding some random breeze of hope to filter into what seems to be a bleak future for our fugged-up society, one overpowered by so much media hype and skewed politics that we all tend to overlook what is most important in our lives: each other.

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KILL MOVE PARADISE at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Even before James Ijames received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fat Ham, his phenomenal contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the playwright was paying his unique brand of streetwise homage to Sartre’s No Exit, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and several similar episodes of The Twilight Zone with his 2017 play Kill Move Paradise.

Developed in 2016 under the mentorship of Chay Yew for Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theatre and first presented the following year by the National Black Theatre of Harlem, KMP emerged with a bang five years before the huge success of Fat Ham.

Ijames’ prophetically in-your-face earlier work cries out to us about the current horrendous epidemic of ongoing brutality perpetrated against innocent and unarmed African-American men and women—especially by members of what is ironically still called “law enforcement.”

One by one, four young Black men are dropped from a huge chute into a kind of nondescript afterlife waiting room, recent victims of violence stemming from racial injustice who arrive at this ominous destination without rhyme or reason, left on their own to figure out for themselves that they are indeed no longer among the living.

There are no clues where they have (literally) landed except an old computer printer doubling for a teletype machine on one side of the stage pumping out an endless list—a list, the waiting room’s first inhabitant Isa (Ulato Sam) soon discovers, of our country's real-life victims of lethal violence over the past few years.

As Isa almost accusatorially recites each name directly to the audience, many on the list are names we all should shudder to remember, including George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin. This unfathomable pattern of death by cop inspired Ijames to write this play and its message couldn't be more urgent to be heard, even if sometimes it seems protesting such injustice is a dead-end that never seems to go away.

The promise of Ijames is all over the place here, something akin to hearing hints of familiar musical strains from West Side Story wafting briefly in passages from Bernstein’s much earlier score for On the Town.

Still, there's something measurably formulaic about KMP, a sense that we’ve heard these arguments and indictments about the public’s apathy before, a feeling that the creators are preaching to the choir—especially when the actors often come to the edge of the stage to shout out to us, asking if we’re scared of them or demanding to know why we’re just sitting there staring at them instead of doing something about the situation.

Seated directly front row center, I haven’t felt so embarrassingly Caucasian in a long time.

This sentiment echoes the complaints many of the lionhearted and radically upstart contemporary theatre companies proclaim about dealing with the older white audience base who in general would rather be watching something less personally accusatory—a fact all-too glaringly apparent considering the theatre community’s ongoing post-pandemic struggle to keep the doors open.

This play made it clear when it first premiered the kind of urban poet Ijames was about to become but KMP doesn’t have the adroitness and seasoning to more cleverly finesse Ijames’ message his later masterpiece possesses. Luckily, what this production does have to camouflage its rough edges is the incredibly visionary Gregg T. Daniels in the director’s chair.

Daniels keeps the play moving when the dialogue does not, delivering a dynamically kinetic 80 minutes of nonstop action, gloriously assisted by choreographer Toran Xavier Moore, as well as extraordinary lighting and sound created by Donny Jackson and David Gonzalez, respectively, and featuring a cast so obviously trusting and on the same page that the production breaks free of all predictability.

Sam is a powerhouse as Isa, easily commanding the stage at the play’s beginning when for an extended period of time he is the only inhabitant of this sterile and unadorned limboland.

Jonathan P. Sims and Ahkei Togun are also heartbreaking as the next two souls to arrive in this hopefully pre-paradise holding cell, particularly as their characters give in totally to Moore’s astonishingly strident tribal-influenced choreography while Sam chants his lamentable—and extensive—list of victims.

The most remarkable thing about these three performances is how they grow from wary, suspicious strangers to form a kind of familial brotherhood, something that becomes palpable when the last of the group arrives: a young boy (in a staggering performance by Cedric Joe) carrying a futuristic child’s water gun. As miserable as the others are about their own individual fates, how they instinctively band together to protect and care for Tiny is, aside from the Ijames’ built-in ineffaceable sense of humor, perhaps the only hopeful thing presented in the play.

As excellent—and haunting—as this production is, there’s a frustrating feeling that lingers here, an enveloping perception how sad it is these things must still be said at all. There was a long period of my adulthood when I lived in a world of my own making blind to the kind of racial and social injustice at the heart of KMP.

Until nine or so years ago when our former rotting orange nightmare of a national leader signaled the Morlocks that they were welcome to crawl out from under their rocks and be free to admit they think and believe as he does, I honestly thought my early years of perpetual activism protesting racial inequities and social injustices in our poor country had made a difference. Au contraire.

“I always say I hope this play becomes obsolete one day,” Ijames said in a 2018 interview. "That’s like a crazy thing for a playwright to say… but I hope one day that people will say we don’t need to do this play anymore because we are different. We are better. And every time I think we have reached a point where maybe this play is obsolete, it’s suddenly not. And the violence with which that reality comes to me never ceases to take my breath.

"I’m also anxious because I know, by the time this play opens and someone is sitting comfortably in those fabulous seats, perhaps sipping a glass of wine, that list will have grown. I’m anxious because by the time this play closes that list will have grown. I don’t say this to be cynical. I don’t say this to be pessimistic. I say it because, unless we really begin to look at why this is happening—structurally, psychically—we will repeat it."

It seems insane to me that currently over 40 percent of American citizens can't see the face of pure evil trying so desperately to bring back the hatred and destructiveness we’ve spent the last five years trying to erase. Help put James Ijames' Kill Move Paradise on its way to obsolescence on November 4, won't you? That ever-expanding list of names at least deserves that.

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BLOOD/LOVE: A VAMPIRE ROCK POPERA at the Crimson

Just in time for Halloween, Blood/Love, subtitled A Vampire Rock Popera, has taken over the ground floor of the historic space adjacent to the Bourbon Room on Hollywood Boulevard and transformed it into a mad gothic nightclub renamed The Crimson. It's the quintessential place to give revelers past the trick or treating and school carnival age a chance to celebrate what to me is our most exciting and anticipated holiday.

First presented in October of 2023 at another historic venue, The Howard Theatre in Oshkosh, Blood/Love is the lovechild of actor, singer, musician, writer, composer, producer, and the show’s star Carey Sharpe. Obviously a major overachiever, Sharpe left a successful career as a pediatric nurse to reopen the shuttered former men’s-only Eagles Club in her hometown she then restored, renamed for her grandfather, and turned into a performing arts space featuring, besides a theatre, a rentable ballroom for weddings and events as well as an in-house bowling alley (well, it is Wisconsin).

After producing several musicals there, Sharpe decided she wanted to create her own unique entertainment, fusing her love for vampire lore, pop music, spirited choreography, and nightlife into one immersive experience. After a long successful run at the Howard, the production moved onto a sold-out engagement at Manhattan’s Public Theatre before deciding Hollywood was the perfect place for the next phase of its expansion.

Co-written by Sharpe with Dru DeCaro, Blood/Love begins in The Crimson’s new imaginatively appointed cocktail lounge before the audience enters the intimate playing space where the action unfolds all around you, followed by a moonlit DJ-led afterparty in what they’d dubbed The Atrium directly behind the theatre.

The plot revolves around a centuries-old bride of Satan (played by Sharpe, who also doubles impressively on the electric violin) who has been condemned to wander the earth with her two equally weary comrades (The Voice season 20 winner Cam Anthony and co-composer Erin Boehme), living on the blood of humans she desperately longs to become. When she meets and falls in love with a mortal musical superstar (Brennin Hunt, Roger in the 2019 live television presentation of RENT), her life changes—but only briefly when she learns her new love has made a pact of his own, exchanging his soul for superstardom.

Granted, the story is slim, but what Blood/Love features in buckets (seasonal reference intended) is an impressive score by Sharpe and DeCaro, with additional tunes from costar Boehme and Adam “Snake” Kobylarz.

Rocking the venue with 25 songs that shake the walls and featuring knockout choreography by Jonathan and Oksana Platero (DWTS and SYTYCD alum), inventive staging by director Daniel DeClaire, and highly impressive design elements, this is an evening out that could become an annual Halloween event in my crazy and eclectic ‘hood, that charmingly dysfunctional place we affectionately call Hollyweird.

Although for me Kevin Flasza’s sound could use a little adjustment in the intimate space and maybe 19 songs instead of 25 could prove to be a tad less repetitious, this production is wildly and lavishly produced, with incredible costuming designed by Michael Ngo and moodily atmospheric lighting by Tom Sutherland. There’s no doubt, however, that it’s the knockout score and performances by the uniformly fine-voiced ensemble that cast (again, intended) the show's magical conjuring spell.

Sharpe, Boehme, and Hunt have spectacular vocal skills, although it’s Anthony who steals every scene he’s in and should have twice the solo numbers he’s given. Still, the showstopping moment for me was a brilliant and jaw-droppingly acrobatic pas de deux choreographed and performed by the Plateros, perfectly showcasing the talents of two of the most gifted artists in their field working today.

For me, the only thing missing might be a little well-placed blood and gore, particularly at Halloween when it’s so much a part of any vampire story—although considering the close proximity of the audience to the action, perhaps the creators might need a resident drycleaner if that was added. As is, with at least two dancers (including Oksana Platero) sporting hair so long it slapped a couple of fellow performers and one audience member across the face during production numbers, economy of movement might have warranted some readjustment after opening night.

Is Blood/Love the next Hamilton? Well, no. But with its spectacular score, masterly singers and musicians (especially Daniel Cursio and co-composer DeCaro on bass and guitar), and some truly innovative craft cocktails to bring on even more holiday cheer, this could be the best way to spend the fun spooky month ahead.

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CLARKSTON from the Echo Theater Company

In this mess of a world we relentlessly try to navigate on a daily basis, there are two universal gifts offered us in our lives that can heal. One is art; the other is love. Samuel D. Hunter’s Clarkston is proof both are what we need to make our tenuous existence worthwhile.

Now in its west coast debut from Echo Theater and directed by the company’s artistic director Chris Fields, this austerely mounted but hauntingly beautiful production is one of the best presented in Los Angeles this year and its cast of three contributes significantly to that designation.

Hunter’s story takes place in and around a Costco located near the Snake River in Clarkston, Washington, a community named after William Clark, the explorer who in his diaries wrote about discovering the place in 1805 only a few weeks before the Lewis and Clark Expedition first laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean and ended their arduous 862-day journey.

Chris (Sean Luc Rogers) is a local kid and would-be writer trying to survive a horrendous childhood and find his way out of his restrictive dead-end life working the graveyard shift at the big-box warehouse. When he’s assigned to train Jake (Michael Sturgis), a quirky and neurotic transplant from Connecticut obviously on the run from something in his life, a clumsy and difficult start leads to a personal connection neither of them initially foresee.

Jake’s escape is an expedition of his own to find himself. The location was partially chosen because of his obsession with his distant relative William Clark’s diaries but primarily in an effort to get away from middle-class privilege and his well-meaning parents understandably concerned about his recent diagnosis with Juvenile Huntington’s Disease, a degenerative condition that will probably kill him before age 30.

Jake’s Ivy League degree from Bennington College in Post-Colonial Gender Studies isn’t much help either, something unfathomable to Chris, who in turn is desperately applying to programs to further his education and, besides jumpstarting a better life in a better place, give him some distance from his clinging meth-addicted single mother Trisha (Tasha Ames).

The script by the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant recipient Hunter, Obie winner for A Bright New Boise and author of The Whale, is sweetly vulnerable and achingly poignant, creating an indelible portrait of two young people in need and the curative power of human bonding.

Fields’ staging is deceptively simple but his subtle visual touch is omnipresent. During blackouts, the actors don’t race offstage in the dim blue light but walk off slowly and, even in shadow light still obviously in character, first one leaving and then the other, usually exiting in opposite directions.

Before each scene, they re-enter and pull individual narrow sections of a gossamer curtain to the center of the cinderblock rear wall of the playing space. By the play’s conclusion, it has formed one intact backdrop, symbolizing an abstraction of the deepening connection between these two lost souls. It’s a small directorial choice but it’s a brilliant one.

The acting is the quintessential definition of ensemble work at its finest; if I had acting classes this semester, attending this production and having lengthy followup discussions about what these three performers accomplish together would be a class requirement.

Sturgis and Rogers (in an arresting professional stage debut) are truly wondrous to behold as Jake and Chris slowly become less wary and more trusting of each other—in many ways subtly becoming mirror images of one another’s behavioral patterns, something that often happens in great relationships.

Ames’ take on someone aching to but completely incapable of being a real mother to the son she adores is also heartbreaking, especially when it becomes obvious Trisha is never going to be strong enough to change.

As they sit on the bank of the Snake River and eventually along the majestic shores of the Pacific, Jake soothes his troubled friend by reading sections of his ancestor William Clark’s dairies written while seeing the same vista unfolding before him for the first time so many years before.

“It’s a terrible time to be alive,” Jake blurts out early in his characters’ tentative journey of his own making. “There’s nothing left to discover.”

Yet in Samuel D. Hunter’s masterwork Clarkston, Jake’s youthful cynicism is eventually proven wrong. It’s a play all about discoveries—and each one makes the case that no matter how arduous our own trek through life may prove to be, trusting another heart in search of his or her own individual ocean is always worth the effort. 

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SUGAR DADDY at the Wallis

I wasn’t sure how I was going to react to Sam Morrison’s acclaimed solo autobiographical turn in his Sugar Daddy, now playing at the Wallis before it opens on Broadway in early 2025.

Although the show has received glowing notices at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022, off-Broadway at the SoHo Playhouse where it received multiple award nominations and was called the “best new show in New York by the Daily Beast, and journeyng on to sold-out runs in London and across the U.S., I wasn’t sure if it would be something in my own wheelhouse.

Morrison’s story is about his relationship with an older man and weaves through tales of random sex, pride parties and festivals, as well as frequent visits to that gay mecca of rampant steamy indulgence Provincetown. These are all things that, frankly, I have personally never found appealing or even comfortable discussing.

The thing is, although I have been open about my own sexuality since in my teen years when dinosaurs still roamed the La Brea Tarpits, really "out there" and outrageous behavior has always been something I’ve avoided in my life—unless it came from a handful of friends whose deportment was truly inborn and not an affectation to gain attention. As someone always intent on promoting acceptance for anyone regardless of their sexuality and who raised a son with a male partner, most public displays of gayness to me don’t help the cause of being treated as equals in our society.

Too much information? Maybe, but I did want to express where I come from to explain my druthers about seeing Sugar Daddy. This wariness also included my reaction to the title since I would be attending at the Wallis with my lover of nearly 12 years who is 42 years my junior. We have often been asked if I am Hugh’s sugar daddy, which is kinda ironic since his income is about four times better than my own.

What I didn’t know about Morrison’s story is that the older man who was the love of his life was also what he calls a “bear” and that he has always been attracted to overweight older men. When he began to joke about his passion for big bellies, I wanted to disappear under my seat since I am hardly what one would call a skinny-minny.

Although bears are by definition usually lumberjack-looking and hairy, neither of which would describe me, someone who suffers the occasional “May I help you, ma’am?”, right from the get-go the whole thing felt rather too close to home for me.

The point is, it took Morrison about three minutes to win me over completely. His demeanor is obviously totally natural and not in any way adopted for shock value, made all the more copacetic by an absolutely worldclass wicked sense of humor.

His antics are hilarious and although some of the behavior he exhibits freely will surely be shocking to some people, I fell apart laughing. I don’t think anyone ever before has been able to share with an audience his penchant for assplay and rimming, complete with physical recreations of such activities, and induce nothing but wild peals of laughter and applause—and remember, I was in the original cast of Hair.

The other surprise for me was Morrison’s older partner passed away of COVID during the pandemic and, feeling my own mortality bigtime at the moment, this was another issue that might have kept me from attending Sugar Daddy if I’d known beforehand.

The absolutely stunning way Morrison describes his grief and how he deals with it instantly lifts his show from raucous to highly emotive, becoming a heart-rending and moving experience to see unfold. His absolute honesty and the courage to share his innermost feelings with his audience makes this truly one of the most impressive solo shows I’ve ever had the privilege to experience.

With the invaluable aid of director Stephen Brackett, Tony nominee for his astounding work on A Strange Loop and I’ll bet soon to be similarly honored here for its engagement at the Ahmanson earlier this year, Sugar Daddy is one of those definite must-see experiences in an crowded season filled with some wonderful theatrical treasures.

What makes Sam Morrison’s adventures in Sugar Daddy so haunting is his ability to dig incredibly deep and share both what’s intensely personal—something especially viable because he is one of the funniest people on the planet—and to possess the transformative capacity to swivel his audience from shocked to accepting of who he is and how he chooses to live his life. I was gobsmacked and I’ll bet many others will also feel the same.

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THE CIVILITY OF ALBERT CASHIER at the Colony Theatre

New and basically untried musicals are always scary, especially when the creators are trying to walk the perilously thin line between entertainment and a social conscience. Luckily for Angelenos, the current resident hopeful at the Colony Theatre, The Civility of Albert Cashier, is a perfect example of how to do both.

Cashier was indeed a real person, a young Irish immigrant settled in Belvidere, Illinois who in 1862 at age 18 enlisted in the 95th Illinois Infantry to fight with the Union Army against the Confederates.

At the time, the only physical exam required of young recruits, many not even old enough to shave, was for the recruiter to inspect their hands and feet—which was lucky for Cashier, who was harboring a secret well beyond not shaving. Underneath the modest farmhand clothing, the 110lb., 5’3” kid was actually born Jennie Hodgers.

Cashier was a loner, preferring not to share a tent with their fellow soldiers for obvious reasons, but before being mustered out in 1865 at the end of the war, they had marched with the 95th some 9,000 miles, fought valiantly in over 40 battles, and survived being captured and escaping back to their regimen under outrageously crafty circumstances.

It wasn’t until 40 years later while hospitalized for dementia that Cashier’s true gender was discovered and they soon were put on trial for defrauding the government by collecting their veteran’s pension. No one believed the mentally diminished Cashier had really fought in the war until members of their former regiment came forward to testify not only on fighting shoulder-to-shoulder beside them, but how steadfastly and courageously their friend and fellow soldier had served.

There are so many things to love about The Civility of Albert Cashier, especially the remarkably infectious Dylan-esque score by Coyote Joe Stevens and Keaton Wooden, the emotionally affecting book and some additional lyrics by Jay Paul Deratany, and the kinetic and spirited direction by Richard Israel on Mark Mendelson’s versatile roughhewn labyrinth of a set. 

In an effort to make a full disclosure, I attended the first preview performance of Albert Cashier, partly as a guest celebrating the birthday of producer Christine Russell’s cousin and our dear friend Leslie Bourne, partly due to my schedule when the production officially was set to open (this coming September 7).

Covering a preview is definitely not something I would usually do, but I did so with one clear understanding: if I was not enthralled, I would either not write a review or arrange to return after opening night when I could better judge how things had fallen into place. If I did love the production, however, I would do exactly what I’m doing right here and now.

Simply, I loved it. Except for a few minor druthers, things that surely will be addressed during this final week before the opening night, I feel more than able to promote an excellent and exciting new project.

Aside from some judicious sound balancing needing to be made between the orchestra and the vocals and some also correctable minor adjustments to the evenness of the performances, with Israel’s guidance and a score that could make anyone soar, I have no doubt some mighty fine theatrical sorcery will be firmly in place by this weekend.

Both Dani Shay as the young Albert and Cidny Bullens as their older counterpart give arresting performances, glorious in their musical numbers and heartrending as the title character in the two different stages of their shared difficult but miraculous life navigating the unforgiving world in which they were forced to live in vaguely public hiding.

Shay is especially memorable with Albert’s chest-puffing musical affirmation of their quest “I Gotta Try” and in contrast, Bullens breaks hearts with the older Albert’s recurring requiem questioning their life choices called “What is Real.”

Blake Jenner is a charmer as a conflicted young soldier puzzled by his blossoming feelings for his comrade-in-arms without knowing the true gender of his crush, as is Phillip J. Lewis as the older Albert’s hospital attendant with his eye on a vaudeville career in the big city.

Both performers have their chance to shine delivering some of Stevens’ and Wooden’s best folk-tinged madrigals, Jenner in the sweetly lyrical ballad “Excuse Me Sir” and in a lovely duet with Shay called “The Perfect Home,” while Lewis steps out in the bluesy showstopping treat “Chicago.”

Cameron J. Armstrong is also a standout as H. Ford Douglas, a free Black man desperately wanting to join Albert’s unit, a character who introduces a lovely, gossamer duet to love titled “Follow the Sound” and beautifully performed with Fatima El-Bashir as the absent wife he will never see again.

One huge production number featuring the entire ensemble of young soldiers and choreographed by Hayden J Frederick comes off as an unexpected homage to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, something akin to performing an unlikely but instantly welcoming giant barn dance in the middle of a Civil War battlefield.

Although the castmembers in general are undeniably in varying stages of their professional careers and comfort zones, they all have one compelling thing in common: an amazingly thrilling commitment to the material and a collective ability, thanks to the evocative score and heartfelt book—not to mention Israel’s directorial leadership—to by final curtain bring at least one world-weary and curmudgeonly old theatre critic to tears.

I suspect The Civility of Albert Cashier, although taking place so many years ago, could just about move the stoniest of hearts hardened by our contemporary mess of a society—unless you’re one of those deluded zombie followers of the Tangerine Nightmare, of course, and who knows what planet those people are on.

It’s a fascinating exploration into gender identity, the healing power of acceptance, and a clear plea for all of us to be civil to and embrace one another regardless of how anyone should choose to live their life.

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MEMNON at the Getty Villa Museum Theater / Classical Theatre of Harlem

There’s always something uniquely celebratory about revisiting the world of our most archaic theatrical traditions, to sit in an outdoor amphitheater sharing the thrill of seeing a play unfold live under the stars just as our ancestors first did around 500BC.

In Los Angeles, nowhere provides such an adventure more flawlessly than the Getty Villa Museum Classical Theater, located along the coast near Malibu in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. It’s truly an idyllic locale, surrounded by the incredible beauty of our coastline, a place where smelling the ocean breeze wafting through a complex dedicated to Ancient Greek and Roman art housed among the lush gardens of a recreated Roman country home is part of the experience.

Each summer for the past 18 years, the Getty has presented a classic production, previously offering recreations of works written by fellows with names such as Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. This time out, however, in a coproduction with the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the Getty offers the world premiere of Memnon, an all-new play by Will Power honoring a character mostly ignored in classical mythology, an Ethiopian king who legend says traveled to Troy to fight alongside the Trojans against the Achaeans.

Memnon was a great hero, we’re told, a favorite of the gods who was revered for being as fierce and courageous as warrior as his final adversary, the great Achilles. How Memnon’s story was reduced to near obscurity through the centuries is a puzzlement, particularly since he and the tales of his bravery in battle were once among the most renowned and his dark-skinned image remains one of the most familiar in ancient wall frescos and vase paintings.

Hovering in the air, of course, is the question whether Memnon’s nonrecognition could have anything to do with his race, something the playwright has set out to correct in an epic attempt to restore his story to its proper place in the history of Greek drama.

Beyond that, Power explains, “Thematically, the plays asks what is the nature of betrayal? When does sacrifice become too much? What is the essence of country or, for the ancient Greeks, the polis? What makes a citizen?”

Power has created a fascinating new work, something he says is not meant as a “modern day/ancient linguistic mash-up” but instead is a tale written in iambic hexameter in deference to the poetry of the Greeks and filled with the visual splendor and energy of its time-honored traditions.

In collaboration with director Carl Cofield, associate artistic director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the debut of Memnon is a major achievement, at once grandly reminiscent of its roots and yet perfectly aware of our contemporary sensibilities—although when one expects to be immersed in the wonders of Greek drama, to have it presented in an 80-minute intermissionless format is a bit of a surprise.

The production is austerely but cleverly conceived, beautifully augmented by set designer Riw Rakkulchon’s versatile scaffolding lit by Brandon Baruch and featuring Yee Eun Nam’s projections and Celeste Jenning’s whimsical costuming which combines classic designs with everything from distressed cargo pants to camouflaged Skechers.

Tiffany Rae-Fisher’s choreography is also a redolent asset, as is the dynamic fight direction by Emmanuel Brown, especially in the pivotal battle sequence between Memnon and Achilles (Eric Berryman and Jesse Corbin) that several times smoothly slows down into something akin to filmic Matrix-inspired moments.

The ensemble is generally up to the task, although I would hope after opening night the performers might settle into something more uniformly successful. As is, the actors’ ability to make their characters seem real as they work within the boundaries of the classical style—as well as simply to conquer the vocal challenges of the Getty’s outdoor space—is extremely uneven and too often could possibly actually be hampered by the parameters of their technique training.

The clear exception is Daniel Jose Molina, who as both Polydamas and Antilochus easily commands the stage, delivering one lengthy monologue filled with expository information with the most charismatic of storytelling athleticism and with the ability to project his voice to the very back of the bleacher seating—a gift perhaps strengthened by his five seasons performing with Oregon Shakes.

Still, it’s quite exciting to see Will Power’s ambitious and daring homage to ancient drama thrust full force into our modern methods of commemorating all things theatrical—and there’s no place in the Southland more a quintessential venue to present Memnon than the magnificent Getty Villa Museum amphitheater where hopefully such wondrous projects will continue to come to fruition for many generations to come.

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GRUESOME PLAYGROUND INJURIES at the Davidson/Valentini Theatre at the LA LGBT Center

For any actor who’s spent a large block of time perfecting their craft by participating in scene study workshops, entering the intimate Davidson/Valentini Theatre at the Center and stepping into the world of Rajiv Joseph’s seldom produced 2009 two-hander Gruesome Playground Injuries will feel like home.

To call this production bareboned is a given here. There are only five folding chairs, two racks of clothing, and a pair of small makeup tables downstage facing the audience available to the performers to tell the story of Kayleen and Doug, poster children for the trials and tribulations of growing up in our mess of a modern society.

As a projected graphic of a children’s spinning merry-go-round forms a backdrop to let audiences know the age of Joseph’s pair of troubled kids in each of the play’s time-tripping short scenes, Sofia Vassilieva and Curtis Belz age from age 8 to 38 and back again with only frequent onstage costume changes as their lone visual tool—besides an impressive amount of talent to make it work.

The bond between the characters begins in a school nurse’s office where the eight-year-olds meet, she there with an upset stomach—an ailment that proves to be a far more debilitating issue as the years go by—and he with a gash in his head from riding his bicycle off the school’s roof in an effort to emulate his hero Evil Knievel.

They discover a unique connection in their ability to recognize and ease the pain of one another’s life-altering dysfunctions, a fellowship that never quite turns into a romance but is still a major factor in helping each other navigate the twists and sometimes horrific turns of their problematic individual struggles to survive.

Although the simple black-box production is presented without any discernible glitz, it’s quite a ride back and forth in time, something brought to life by the fearless Belz and Vassilieva, an actress who even makes her sometimes too lengthy and elaborate costume changes fascinating. When she checks herself out in an imaginary mirror in front of her, it’s clear to see she’s seeing an image beaming back at her.

Beginning as a scene project in their Actors Studio workshop, when Belz and Vassilieva had the impetus to mount the entire play, they had the smarts to ask one of their colleagues at the Studio, Hollywood legend Barbara Bain, to join them as director.

Bain—of course, best known as not only the first performer to ever receive a Primetime Emmy Award as Best Actress in a Drama but to subsequently repeat the win three consecutive years in a row—then had the inspiration to bring on Katelyn Ann Clark as her co-director.

“The unique aspect of this,” explains Bain, “was the process by which we, all four of us, discussed, suggested, discussed again, and then decided on all aspects of the show… We listened to each other [and] our decisions were made with respect and joy.”

The results are palpable. This sweetly austere production of Rajiv Joseph’s oddly overlooked Gruesome Playground Injuries, one of our most celebrated young playwright’s most obscure works, is a treat to behold. When this caliber of talented artists collaborate to create, we are all the grateful beneficiaries.

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MEDEA COMES TO OUR TOWN at the McCadden Place Theatre

I loved the reaction on social media when someone read that Tony Foster’s new play, presented by the Lightning Rod Theater Company and debuting at the McCadden Place Theatre, was called Medea Comes to Our Town.

On first glance, the reader posted with amusement at the folly, “I read it as Medea Comes to Our Town... by Thornton Wilder!”

Well, dearheart, that's exactly what it is. Welcome to the cunningly skewed Wonkaworld of Foster, whose work notably morphs from the linear to the nonlinear at the drop of a new thought and this one is hardly an exception.

Foster starts with Wilder’s wildly popular Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 classic play and takes it somewhere no one else could ever have imagined: aboard a time-traveling chariot dropped in the middle of 1909 Grover’s Corners by none other than the title character in Euripides’ classic-classic first performed in the 5th-century BC.

See, although The Odd Couple has a significant presence in Foster’s love-hate ode to the history of theater, Neil Simon this is not. And as if to offer himself up as a sacrifice to anyone who finds his Medea blasphemous or simply too impenetrable to grasp, Foster himself bravely appears onstage playing Wilder’s Stage Manager who traditionally narrates the tale. Along the way, he drops names of playwrights and play titles through the centuries in an almost dizzying assault, often presenting his own thrown-away critique of how they’ve held up in time.

Aside from more traditionally well-known and often over-performed plays, he wonders aloud from his perch on the sidelines if one Noises Off could justify a thousand Moose Murders or if the off-Broadway production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea had failed to teach us anything.

There are by my count, which may or may not have become compromised during the play’s two-and-a-half hour running time, some 70-plus references to plays with varying degrees of notoriety and mentions of playwrights through the ages from Stoppard to David Auburn—including at least a couple of which I was chest-puffingly a part of their inception.

Alina Phelan (who Foster’s Stage Manager admits to us was second choice for the role when Jennifer Coolidge got a movie) leads the cast as the resident Mrs. Gibbs, here simply called the Doctor’s Wife. As is true with the now dated and rather simplistic original character, she is a seemingly contented housewife who dares not dream openly of a life beyond Grover’s Corners but is secretly frustrated with her existence and wishes to see Paris before she dies.

When a breakfast argument between her feuding children (Kate Huffman and Sean Faye) leads to her daughter calling her baseball-obsessed brother a Neanderthal, the Doctor’s Wife is quick to scold, “I won’t put up with evolutionary talk in this house!”

Everything is upended in this bucolic small town when the world's first feminist Medea (Cherish Monique Duke) lands in the town square in her deus ex machina, fleeing her own ancient time period and bypassing Athens with her trusty nurse (Lynn Odell) after murdering her children and destroying her husband Jason’s life.

When the scorned former princess runs into the Doctor’s Wife, everything the housewife knows is immediately upended. Medea tries to educate her new malleable friend in the wonders of carnal abandon, humping the family’s dinner table in a scene that rivals Maya Lynne Robinson’s 2017 performance in Future Sex, Inc. that I previously had acknowledged as the Best Onstage Orgasm ever. This moment alone could prove any future abbreviation of the play’s title as Medea Comes… to be more than justifiable.

She also lends her hostess her chariot and persuades her to go on a journey forward to 1956 to attend the opening night performance of My Fair Lady. She misses the premiere but learns many other things about the world outside her insular town and the confining existence she has there, returning ready to set the place on its ear. Medea, however, has had the opposite revelation and is now more than content to stay in Grover’s Corners and continue having a little romantic fling with the Doctor’s son—which surely by its very nature must be a little more fun than a wooden table.

Jamie Robledo directs Medea Comes… (oh, I do love that) with great whimsy and imagination, keeping the action moving crisply when it could have gotten overpowered by Foster's rhetoric and complex sense of hyperbole. He quite cleverly aces moments that could be overwhelmed by the play’s inherent theatricality, with Greek masks used to present a lighthearted short play-within-a-play version of Abe Burrow’s Cactus Flower or creating Medea’s chariot using a ghostlight to steer and actors seated between two large wheels to become the axle.

The cast is uniformly on target and completely willing to trust Foster and Robledo’s vision. LA stage veterans Phelan and Duke are deliciously over-the-top and play off of one another splendidly, while Huffman and Faye have their own moments as the warring siblings as well as several other eclectic characters—she especially memorable as a New Yawk-accented chippie in a delightful Thalia-meets-Glenda Farrell mask and he portraying Hamlet’s Ophelia stubbornly denying having committed suicide.

Odell is a gift as the aged nurse, particularly delivering a world-weary diatribe about the absurdity of life and what we call our "truth." Still, it's Foster himself who provides the glue that holds things together, at times exposing the nerdiness of being a lifelong theatre devotee and at other times bristling with frustration about whether the theatre itself could be as ridiculously meaningless as the rest of our perceived realities.

As both author and performer, Foster’s ultimate message might be a little murky since it has so many points of view to mentally click on. Although he often celebrates all things theatrical and how from its earliest beginnings it has energized, chronicled, and helped direct the advancement of our species, particularly since the play is chockfull of the history and progression of the artform Foster obviously knows so well, Medea Comes… also asks if the whole thing we so wholeheartedly revere might be a bit of a crock.

From the iconoclastic juxtaposition of Our Town, which simply explored the meaning and mystery of life, with Medea, one of the earliest depictions of the violent and vengeful nature of human beings, Foster asks if theatre, like our very presence on this troubled planet itself, has any redemptive reason for existing in the first place.

As wonderful and even epic as Medea Comes… may be, however, I am compelled to offer a bit of tough love as well. It is a massive achievement but it’s also in desperate need of judicious pruning.

When my own first play Surprise Surprise was mounted at the Victory Theatre Center in 1994, our director Hope Alexander joined in an intervention with the theatre’s artistic directors Maria Gobetti and Tom Ormeny to get me to make cuts, something I staunchly refused to do; it was as though everything I had ever wanted to say had to be stuffed into one script in case I never had such an opportunity to say it again. A decade later, working on the screenplay for the film version, I chopped and diced without a moment’s concern about losing my artistic voice.

I wish someone had been around to help turn this otherwise incredibly promising masterwork into an intermissionless 90-minute piece because as is, the indulgences of Medea Comes to Our Town dilute and seriously take away from its mission.

Still, Tony Foster’s brilliance as a wordsmith and scholarly knowledge of theatre is something to be applauded and shared. If I were teaching my usual Great Plays and Playwrights class this semester, I’d bring my students to the McCadden Place Theatre to see a most prodigious, thought-provoking, and downright hilarious dissertation on the nature of what I believe is the world’s most enduring and ultimately important artform.

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DIDO OF IDAHO at the Atwater Village Theatre

Life has been something of a slog for poor Nora, an adjunct music history professor at the University of Idaho stuck in a longterm dead-end relationship with her colleague Michael, an English professor and wannabe poet who it soon becomes apparent is playing her bigtime.

In Abby Rosebrock’s devilishly dark, enticingly warped, and often exhilarating new play Dido of Idaho, now in its LA debut from the always daring Echo Theater Company, Nora (the spectacular Alana Dietze) is doing a bit of scheming of her own.

As improbable as it may seem that Michael (Joby Earle) would be careless enough to leave his dysfunctional and drunk mistress alone in the home he shares with his former Miss Greater Boise runner-up wife Crystal (Nicole DuPort) while Nora tries to find her discarded panties after their scheduled weekly toss in the hay, his disastrously out of character decision leads to something that could only be called life altering for our classic modernday heroine.

This opening scene predictably begins in bed where the needy and already disillusioned musicologist sings along to one of her favorite arias from English composer Henry Purcell 1688 baroque opera Dido and Aeneas—you know, the one based on Virgil’s Aeneid where the otherwise valiant Queen of Carthage stabs herself to death in front of her devoted followers after being abandoned by her two-timing Trojan lover.

Get it? “Don’t let me end up like Dido,” Nora pleads to her departing lover, a line that almost doesn’t need to be included.

It takes about a minute to see where Rosebrock is going here although, even though the play’s audience members seated in-the-round circling Amanda Knehans’ resourcefully austere set are clearly meant to be substitutes for Dido’s ardent worshippers, don’t expect an onstage funeral pyre at the end to represent the legendary death of Dido. Rosebrock is far too clever to go there.

It’s hardly a surprise to anyone in attendance, I suspect, that when Nora passes out after drinking the couple’s booze, using Crystal’s nail polish, and rubbing the bed’s toss pillow on her as yet unwashed private parts, the unsuspecting Crystal comes home and starts to threaten her nearly somnambulant intruder with some handy kitchen utensil. Our Dido manages quickly to wake/sober up and convince her clueless rival that she works with Michael and he let her rest there after some sort of psychotic break that afternoon in the school’s library.

Crystal is anything but sympathetic until Nora improvises that she was afraid to go home because her abusive boyfriend might just knock her around again. Soon Crystal is baking her unexpected houseguest chocolate chip cookies—which she really does, making the theatre smell like grandma’s kitchen—and just like that, Michael’s favorite pair of significant others are on their way to becoming unlikely fast friends.

The maternal Crystal declares herself to be Nora’s self-proclaimed life coach, reading her Google content about a new Danish technique to send loneliness and personal maladjustment packing called “Snuggle Alone” and advising her on how to get her mess of a life together.

Along the way, Nora also learns a lot about Michael, someone Crystal admits “is a total shit 43% of the time” who isn’t separated from his wife as he said he was—in fact, he’s about to become a father for the first time, a little factoid not even he knows about yet.

Of course, their rapidly accelerating kinship changes abruptly when Crystal tries to access something on Nora’s iPad and discovers the true nature of Michael’s relationship with her new bestie. Within seconds, she is on the attack and… well… here emerges the playwright’s truly unique ability to completely upend her audience’s comfort zone and send those observing Dido’s updated journey into a near-Cronenberg state of shock.

Methinks Rosebrock is definitely a playwright to watch. Her quirky revelation-a-minute plot and nonstop clever dialogue chockful of double entendres and thrown-away one-liners is skillfully mixed with a survivor’s instinct that eviscerates the selfish and disenfranchising society contemporary millennials and others must navigate in an effort to find love.

Director Abigail Deser proves to be the quintessential person to interpret the dramatist’s signature voice, smoothly guiding her nearly perfect cast on the Knehans’ intimate set, with the viewers surrounding the actors placed so close that at one point an audience member had to uncross his legs as Nora began to hump Michael’s lap close enough for the scene to almost become an unexpected ménage a trois.

Deser’s cast is totally onboard for the rough and often disquieting intermissionless ride, led by the completely mesmerizing Dietze, who as Nora delivers a multifaceted knockout performance in a role that, without her gifts, could deflate the entire production.

Nora drives nearly every scene and the actor playing her must be at once heroic, slatternly, and yet manage to effectively play someone completely absorbed by self-loathing without making us wish she’d just stop whining and shut the fuck up, something a lesser actor could easily mangle.

DuPort is both hilarious and scary as Crystal, a role originally played by the playwright herself, a latterday Stepford wife who keeps her Miss Greater Boise runner-up crown on a well-lit suspended shelf and spouts singsong-y aphorisms on life reminiscent of Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts.

Julie Dretzin is memorable as Nora’s estranged and, in her daughter's mind, long absent mother, whose fundamental conservative religious rhetoric is in conflict with her blossoming romance with her roommate Ethel, the play’s most levelheaded character beautifully played with a palpable wisdom and all-knowing patience by Elissa Middleton.

Earle as Michael, part snake and part poet, is the production’s only miscalculation in an otherwise faultless ensemble. Even considering he’s playing someone intensely narcissistic, if perhaps he modified his one-man show watch-me-act delivery and started to really listen to his scene partner, more believable fireworks might spark between he and Dietze.

With all the twists and turns and jolts (and to be honest, improbabilities) that permeate the most fascinating Dido of Idaho, the final reverse bombsell is that our title character might not be quite as doomed as her namesake ancient queen might have been. Whenever someone can find even the most minimal sense of hope in living life and finding true love in the 21st century, the smallest thing can be potentially monumental.

As Michael leaves, pointing to his most recent unpublished manuscript he wants Nora to peruse, he asks her to keep her "eye out for stereotypes of irrational women." See? Abby Rosebrock is a playwright who can even poke fun at herself.

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HUMAN ERROR from Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre

Usually, if I accuse a play of resembling a sitcom, it’s not meant as a compliment. In the case of Eric Pfeffinger’s smart and topical new comedy, however, now being presented in a quasi-collaboration with the neighboring Groundlings Theatre by Rogue Machine at the Matrix, that very quality is actually one of the things that makes it work.

Granted, the plot of Pfeffinger’s Human Error is slim and highly predictable but his dialogue is clearly contemporary and quite sharp, centering on a premise unique to the times in which we live.

Opening in an midwestern IVF facility in Sylvania, Ohio, where a couple’s frozen embryos have been implanted in the wrong vagina, Pfeffinger pokes outrageous fun at such thorny issues as social inequality, abortion rights, gun control, and our massive blue vs. red state political divide, all delivered under the farcical banner of SNL-style over-the-top comedy.

It’s just what’s needed to make Human Error a great choice for a modern-day sitcom, something akin to I Love Lucy meets All in the Family set in a fertility clinic.

Madelyn and Sameer (Kristen Vaganos and Kapil Talwalkar) are left-wing activists who, respectively, teach yoga and work at a research center studying the effects of comedy on our culture—Sameer's most recent paper is “Tumbling Over the Populist Footstool: Anti-Intellectualism in The Dick Van Dyke Show.”  See, these guys are a couple so woke that Lindsay Graham would disintegrate in their presence as though he was staring at a matched pair of latterday Medusas.

Thanks to the ineptitude of one Dr. Hoskins (Andrew Hawtrey), the couple’s long-awaited future offspring is now germinating in the lower regions of Heather (Lauren Burns), a stay-at-home uber-Christian mom of three boys living in a suburban McMansion with her NASCAR-obsessed husband, a diehard Ohio State superfan named Jim (Kiel Kennedy) who has made a fortune selling car stereos by starring in 43 of his own local cable TV commercials, adores his 152-inch flatscreen, and drives an oversized truck he calls his chariot.

Nonetheless, although the two couples do their best to ignore their differences (“I’ve never spent time with the godless,” Heather admits cheerfully) and it's agreed that our resident Stepford wife will carry Madelyn’s child to term, their highly divergent worldviews quickly become an issue that makes their relationship troublesome to say the least, especially when Jim realizes their new forced friends live across the stateline in Michigan, something he sees as a little worse than finding out Sameer is a serial killer who eats newborn babies.

“I opened my house to you!” he rants. “I showed you my gun collection!”

When Sameer assures him that he doesn’t give a hang about football and then soon after lets slip another little factoid when Jim blurts out, “Next thing you’ll tell me is that you’re a socialist,” the thin veneer of civilization and their newly minted friendship begins to unravel purdy durn quick.

Under the direction of Joshua Bitton, the second best thing about Human Error after Pfeffinger’s clever dialogue is the cast, most of whom understand the playwright’s sketch comedy-like rhythms and throwaways perfectly.

Groundlings Sunday company member Hawtrey sets the tone at the get-go as the stammering and nebbishy doctor whose clinic has made the pivotal human error, acing a wonderfully silly bit since, as an involuntarily reaction to trauma, the poor man can’t stop grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat.

Talwalkar is hilarious as the father-to-be caught in the headlights, trying his best both to calm his perpetually frantic wife while biting his lip listening to Kennedy’s good ol’ bro Jim loudly braying his white privilege at every step of the two couples’ nine-month forced “best buds” journey together. It’s interesting to note that the recurrent theme of Jim and Heather’s overly solicitous reaction to Sameer’s ethnicity is a new take on the role, which was written and previously played as an African-American character named Keenan. As certain as it may be that this would create a more obvious conflict between the characters’ divergent weltanschauung, Talwalkar and Kennedy still totally make it their own.

Burns is wonderful as Heather, whose every speech sounds as though she could have been delivering an answer to a question as a beauty pageant contestant. Still, as much as her character reveals along the way to Madelyn what a narrow-minded and MAGA-brainwashed drone she really is, Burns somehow manages to make her oddly lovable.

The same is true of the hilarious Kennedy, who is the comedic heart of the production. He’s like the secret lovechild of Seth Rogan and Sean McVey, yelling out each line as though he’s a local TV sportscaster overjoyed to be covering the Super Bowl—making it a credit to his talents that I liked his work so much since he instantly reminded me of my own father from whose opinions of the world I fled as soon as humanly possible.

Some of the best scenes are between Burns and Kennedy, both seasoned members of the Groundlings’ main company who I’ll bet have had plenty of time to work together and develop their uncannily smooth ability to connect.

Vaganos as the self-assured and opinionated liberal ready to take on any conservative issue has the hardest task, which is to create a character with at least a tiny bit of a redemptive quality to care about and sadly, she is also the least successful. Her Madelyn shrieks and rants in a vocal range that can only be described as Fingernails-on-the-Blackboard Lite. Unless Vaganos settles in and stops working so hard, one can only hope if indeed Human Error did ever get picked up as a sitcom, the characters of Sameer and Madelyn have already divorced and she’s presented only as an off-camera character now teaching yoga in Borneo or somewhere equally remote.

The truth is—and it has always been so—that art heals. And from the ancient days of Greek drama, when a shrewdly disguised political message was slyly presented through the lens of outrageous comedy, it is a feat to be admired. In a time when our fractured country seems to be choosing to laugh and smile along with Kamala and her sweetly goofy running mate rather than suffer another bout of continuously negative energy and racially fueled anger emanating in waves from a miserably unhappy and perpetually scowling victim of great entitlement, it’s refreshing to watch the four characters with drastically divergent views presented here find common ground.

Let’s hope Eric Pfefferman’s Human Error is a charming and restorative indication of healing times to come.

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CLUE at the Ahmanson Theatre

The classic board game Clue was created in Britain in 1943 and brought to the U.S. by Parker Brothers in 1949. Throughout the years, as players all over the world have continued to eagerly try to solve the mystery of who killed poor Mr. Boddy, the game’s cult-like popularity has continued to stay strong—and the “boddy” count at our late host’s gothic Boddy Manor has continued to pile up.

Clue has since been converted into a series of 18 children’s books, two video games, an all-star feature film released in 1985, as well as several other later movie adaptations. 

In 2017, playwright Sandy Rustin reworked Jonathan Lynn's original screenplay with Hunter Foster and Eric Price to star Sally Struthers at Pennsylvania's Bucks County Playhouse, a production so successful their hilarious pun-a-minute adaptation has been a darling of regional theatres across the country ever since and is now in the middle of a year-long national tour.

I had an great aunt who used to always call things, “Just plain fun,” something I hadn’t thought about for many years until I sat in the darkened Ahmanson to laugh my way through this rapid-paced and utterly charming 90-minute whodunit, featuring physically goofy staging reminiscent of a Monty Python routine by director Casey Hushion and some remarkably grand visual elements from a crack team of well-known New York theatre designers.

The ensemble also features some impressive veteran Broadway talent, led by the inexhaustible Mark Price as the stuffy-with-a-twist (or two) Wadsworth, the manor’s abstruse butler who welcomes the six Clue-less guests of his enigmatic boss. Each oddly eclectic visitor is a stranger to the others (or are they?) and each has been requested to maintain silence when it comes to why they think they have been included in Mr. Boddy’s diabolical game.

The usual suspects (and I mean that quite literally) are all here, played to the hilt by this wonderful troupe of deliciously unfiltered comedians: John Treacy Egan as the blundering Colonel Mustard, who admits that simple communication has always been an elusive thing to him; Michelle Elaine as lusty DC madam Miss Scarlett; Joanna Glushak as the steadily more inebriated senator’s wife Mrs. Peacock; Tari Kelly as Mrs. White, whose five husbands have all disappeared under mysterious circumstances; and Jonathan Spivey as Professor Plum, a disgraced doctor caught with his hand in a patient’s cookie jar. 

The most entertaining performance to watch comes from John Shartzer, obviously the secret lovechild of Jim Carrey and Imogene Coca, who plays a closeted Republican lobbyist, a guy more nervous than Dotard Donnie thinking about debating Kamala. Shartzer’s terminally jumpy Mr. Green seems even less concerned about being outed as a homosexual than being blackmailed for failing to vote for Eisenhower.

They are joined by Elisabeth Yancey as the Frenchest of French maids and Alex Syiek, Mariah Burks, and Teddy Trice in a series of supporting roles and various dead people.

On the surface, there isn’t anything terribly deep presented here besides a welcome dose of pure escapist fun, yet if you do a bit of detective work on your own, you might sleuth out that the story, set amid the conservative political climate of Washington DC in the early 1950s, does manage to slip in a few well-placed jabs at the quickly approaching hypocrisy inherent in the politics of the time. These include periodic references to the ominous presence of Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, an entity that historically proved to be far more scary than anything that happens at the craftily booby-trapped Boddy Manor.

While you're looking beyond the obvious, you may also recognize plenty of comedic references to the iconic board game itself, with Lee Savage’s spectacular set recalling the mansion’s grand main entrance and side rooms that rotate out to reveal locations such as the parlor, the billiards room, and the library. During a mad dash for answers, Colonel Mustard studies an oversized map identical to the original Clue board, while at one point a character holds a familiar manila envelope labeled “CONFIDENTIAL” and, after a trapdoor to a secret room is discovered, Price’s Wadsworth is asked with incredulity who could possibly have designed the place.

“The Parker Brothers,” he deadpans without a moment’s hesitation.

Yeah, my Tante Tilda would have loved every minute of this delightfully silly, breakneck reinvention of Clue. It’s just plain fun indeed.

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THE BAUHAUS PROJECT -- PARTS ONE AND TWO from Open Fist at the Atwater Village Theatre

There’s nothing more courageous—or is it foolhardy?—than developing any epic-scale theatrical presentation, such as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America or Robert Schenkken’s The Kentucky Cycle, both of which were so long and complex, as well as featuring so many characters and intertwined storylines, that they were divided into two parts performed on two separate nights. In Angels, there was even a dinner break suggested between the second the third of each night's four acts.

No playwright working today is a more capable of potentially creating such a grandly risky venture than LA’s own consummately gifted unofficial playwright laureate Tom Jacobson, so news of Open Fist mounting his Homeric two-part play cycle The Bauhaus Project filled our scrappy little theatre community with excitement. Unfortunately, it’s a major disappointment, a work that should more aptly be subtitled The Play About Endless and Not Very Craftily Concealed Exposition.

Jacobson’s works have always taken on enormous artistic challenges, both in scope and in his ability to present narrative obstacles that require the most experienced of veteran artists to untangle. Truly, the history at the heart of The Bauhaus Project could not be more fascinating—or epic, this time out meant in a political and moralistic Brechtian way, not only in physical scope.

Jacobson explores the rise of fascism and antisemitism in pre-WWII Germany and how it destroyed the groundbreaking avant-garde artists of the Bauhaus School, who in the early 20th century had brashly and brilliantly begun to reinvent the very nature of what it meant to be an artist.

The Bauhaus movement was committed to melding beauty with utility, a revolutionary concept the quickly-rising Nazi party was equally intent on destroying as it so clearly advocated personal dissent and free will.

The historical background Jacobson traverses is introduced as a group of five modernday students majoring in five different artistic disciplines are collectively assigned, in lieu of expulsion, to create a visual history of the movement and its subsequent downfall.

The play launches into a play-within-a-play—or should I say three different such plays. Part One tells the story of the original Weimer years of the Bauhaus School (1919 to 1925), while Part Two first covers the period when the once well-funded institution moved under pressure to re-set up operations in Dessau (1925 to 1932), and finally on to its desperate final days in a shabby Berlin warehouse (1932 to 1933).

Director Martha Demson does her best to reign in the components of the story but it may just be beyond the scope of any intimate theatre company, I fear, especially with five forgivably young but rather inexperienced actors trying to navigate playing many of the artists and their detractors who contributed to the rise and fall of the movement.

Featured are such historic figures as the school’s founder Walter Gropius; Swiss architect and designer Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe; abstract painter Paul Klee; Russian artist and author of The Spiritual in Art Wassily Kadinsky; German textile designer Gunta Stolzl; Austrian photographer Herbert Bayer; painter/designer/sculptor/choreographer Oskar Schlemmer; Fritz Ertl, Bauhaus graduate and later Nazi party member who went on to design the buildings at Auschwitz; and even Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler’s widow and infamous early art “groupie” who may have just schtupped almost all of the others.

It’s nearly impossible in this two-part, combined four-hour-plus presentation to keep track of which actor is playing which of these roles, even with their diverse yet generally inexplicable accents and the rather pedestrian device of changing hats, donning sweaters, or adding a swastika armband or two utilized to differentiate between the characters they're delegated to play.

The problem is, these roles need extremely skilled performers and, although all of the actors cast here are obviously talented and ready to further hone their craft, most are not yet quite up to the weighty task at this point in their journey.

Jack Goldwait, as the architectural student on probation who’s cast as Gropius, and Chloe Madriaga as a young Jewish graphic artist who would rather be working on anything else but the group’s difficult assignment, are the standouts in this cast, but the other three struggle valiantly to keep up.

Granted, the members of this “class” are scripted to be quick to admit they are not actors, but more seasoned performers could play that conceit more successfully—the exception being Madriaga, who walks that fine line with surprising natural ease.

John C. Sweet needs more time to study his lines and pick up his cues, while Sang Kim will hopefully in the future realize all his speeches don’t need be delivered with the same downward scowl. Katarina Joy Lopez should have been led by Demson not to shriek and overemphasize almost every line, especially when delivering a Hitler imitation that could have been directly lifted from a Mel Brooks spoof.

Part One ends with no clear resolution to that section of the story, instead offering a projected title “To Be Continued” and no curtain call, forcing audience members to return even if at that point they might choose to call it a day. When Part Two begins, however, the actors deliver a capsulized version of that first part, leaving me with the awareness to offer a piece of advice: if you’re intrigued but don’t want to give up two evenings of your life, obtaining tickets only for Part Two could be far less of a commitment without losing much information not already available to Google.

There’s one other puzzling aspect about this production as patrons both nights are asked to vacate the theatre at intermission while the stage is “reconfigured.” Any time in my life when I have been asked to do this, when returning everything has changed, including sometimes even the placement of the audience. Here, the only thing different is the position of a few of set designer Richard Hoover’s pivotal rolling screens—the same ones we watched being moved around by the actors in full sight throughout the first act.

The history Tom Jacobson scrutinizes in The Bauhaus Project is certainly fascinating, but hey—we live in an era where streaming a documentary on the History Channel delivers the same general information without sitting through two nights and four hours reminiscent of a student presentation at a junior college you were obligated to attend to support the teenage son or daughter of some well-meaning family member.

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DESIGN FOR LIVING at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble

Noel Coward’s once-shocking and convention-defying 1932 comedy Design for Living remains to this day the least frequently produced of his celebrated masterworks, yet the master himself always fondly declared it as his favorite.

The play was originally rejected for production by the stuffy English censors as too shocking for the West End, premiering instead on Broadway the following year featuring the actors for which the three romantically intertwined leading roles were originally written: legendary married couple Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne, joined by the playwright himself.

The Lunts and Coward were longtime friends, having struggled together to stay afloat in their impoverished ramen years in New York a decade earlier, a time when Sir Noel prophetically promised to one day, when they were all tremendous successes, write a vehicle for them to take on as a team effort.

The three focal characters in Design for Living are involved in a far more than platonic relationship that today would mean referring to them as a throuple, with interior designer Gilda (here played by Brooke Bundy) hopping in and out of bed in various Paris, London, and New York flats over a period of several years with two “close” friends: rapidly emerging playwright Leo (Kyle T. Hester, the role originated by the rapidly emerging playwright Coward) and Otto (Garikayi Mutambirwa), an artist also beginning to gain notoriety.

From the beginning, there was much speculation that the characters were autobiographical, fueled by persistent rumors throughout their careers that Lunt was gay and Fontanne had dalliances of her own—and not always liaisons shared exclusively by members of the opposite sex.

For Coward, the carefully crafted flamboyance of his image was intentionally presented to the public as ambiguous—and if anyone actually questioned his sexual orientation, they must have been the same folks who two decades later wondered what "confirmed bachelor” Liberace was looking for in a wife or in the 70s if Barry Manilow had a thing going with Suzanne Somers.

Coward’s self-centered and over-dramatic characters charmed Broadway and although their brazenly amoral lifestyle was condemned then as it still is today in many circles, the play was a tremendous hit, enough so that it finally returned to debut in London, albeit six years later.

There was also a highly popular 1933 film version, directed by Ernest Lubitsch and starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins, that had quickly latched onto the success of the Broadway production. Ben Hecht’s screenplay completely sanitized the risqué aspects of the pivotal triangular relationship, causing the playwright to quip that there were only three of his original lines Hollywood left intact, including “Pass the mustard.”

It’s always fascinating but not always fruitful when some old familiar warhorse such as Design for Living is revitalized and given a fresh new interpretation but unfortunately, Coward’s arch and drolly British jocularity doesn’t work unless played as it was originally written and intended to be delivered.

There’s no doubt director Bart DeLorenzo is one of our most gifted visionaries, brilliantly interpreting and often reinventing many of our most beloved classics over the years, but I’m not sure what he was thinking here—or why he didn’t make a drastic u-turn when he saw how this must have been progressing in rehearsal. To choose to deliver the arch and grandly theatrical dialogue of one of Coward’s intensely British drawing room comedies without adopting the accompanying intrinsic RP-style delivery written into the speech is a major conundrum; there’s a rhythm and musicality to the lines that simply cannot be conveyed by articulating them in an American accent.

Only Andrew Elvis Miller as the continuously flummoxed Edward Everett Horton-esque art dealer Ernest and Sheelagh Cullen as Leo’s suitably shocked Cockney housekeeper Miss Hodge understand and honor Coward’s intended artifice and signature overly-intonated waggishness, while the three leading actors appear unable to keep up with his intention to poke wicked fun at the stiff-backed manners of the era and glibly superficial people he satirizes.

This is especially true of Bundy, who instead of trusting the subtle perfection of the master storyteller’s classic throwaways, delivers every delicious Cowardian witticism directly out front, continuously rolling her eyes and batting her lashes while focusing somewhere above the tech booth where only lighting instruments clutter the landscape. I would love to know what she sees as her personal unseen but ever-present fourth wall besides the tops of the audience members’ heads.

Although there’s one excitingly daring intimate lovemaking dance between the two male members of the ménage that shows what DeLorenzo was going for—an updating with which the socially-stifled playwright would have been thrilled, I suspect, but still there is surprisingly little real chemistry between the three lovers. 

Mutambirwa is the most believable as the continuously delighted and infectiously carefree Otto, but Hester seems out of his comfort zone. He inexplicably plays his heterosexual romantic moments opposite Bundy like a TV sportscaster at a singles bar but his similar intimate repartee between his character and Otto suddenly lands somewhere between Billy Porter and Rip Taylor, even at one point making him comfortable enough to flirt with one of Ernest’s male houseguests.

“You’ve changed, Leo,” Gilda tells her former and future lover. “You used to be more subtle”—something I fear Hester has taken far too literally.

The design elements are all quite impressive, particularly on what must have been a limited budget, and the addition of a soundtrack featuring the clever songs by Coward utilized to introduce each scene is perfectly evocative. Still, nothing is enough to overcome the production’s trio of misinformed leading performances, which result in this highly anticipated but disappointing revival of Design for Living being defeated by a deadly pacing—something which would have instead implemented Sir Noel’s message if played in the tongue-in-cheek style it was originally intended to spoof.

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COMPANY at the Pantages Theatre

Interesting, isn’t it, that the last three productions I’ve reviewed for TicketHoldersLA are the national tour of Clue at the Ahmanson, the world premiere of Tom Jacobson’s Cervasse at the Victory, and now Sondheim’s Company at the Pantages?

To rebuff any rumors possibly circulating stating otherwise, may I assure you I have not decided to only cover plays with one-word titles beginning with the letter “C.”

Fake news.

Now. On to the magnificent reinvention of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s trailblazing musical Company, which first and foremost solidifies how totally ahead of their time the show’s lategreat creators were.

First mounted in 1970, Company quickly wiped out real good clambakes, corn as high as an elephant’s eye, and what to do about the problem of Maria in an instant, proving musical theatre, with storylines involving real life contemporary issues such as dating, marriage, and divorce in an isolating and rapidly morphing society, would become the groundbreaking state-of-the-art descendant of the restrictive, family-oriented genre of musical comedy.

Without the sweeping success of Company some 54 years ago, never would there have been a Next to Normal, Fun Home, Parade, or A Strange Loop, not to mention later Sondheim classics Sweeney Todd, Assassins, Passion, or Merrily We Roll Along.

The pivotal role of Bobby was originally written as a romantically uncommitted Manhattanite in his mid-30s agonizingly navigating the complex and often lonely world of urban single life, while his posse of married friends, themselves in varying stages of happiness, pressure him to settle down and fulfill his obligation to be a breeder.

Perhaps Bobby could not have been played as Bobbie, an unattached female in the same situation, a half-century ago when the independence of what was then called the “fairer sex” was definitely less accepted in a culture slow to deal with change, but today, casting the role as a woman certainly proved to be a stroke of genius.

With characters further doing a bit of gender-swapping to make the new concept work, even Sir Stephen himself loved the new interpretation, thankfully seeing and giving his blessing to the remounting while it was still in previews just before his passing in 2021 at age 91.

He commented in an interview just five days before he left us bereft of his massive talents (but grateful for what he left behind) that one of the true wonders of live theatre is that, unlike film, as an artform it can evolve from generation to generation.

“What keeps theatre alive,” he believed, “is the chance to always do it differently, not only with fresh casts but fresh viewpoints. It’s not just a matter of changing pronouns but changing attitudes.”

The result is this arresting new take on Company, which became the most celebrated musical revival of the season, nominated for nine Tony Awards and winning five, including Best Revival of a Musical and Best Featured Actor for Matt Doyle, whose interpretation of the female character Jamie as a gay male and his performance of the impossibly difficult “Getting Married Today” became a major showstopper in the production.

Matt Rodin takes on the role in the show’s current ensemble now playing the Pantages and again, it’s a turn that becomes one of the major highlights of the production, as does the equally dynamic performance of Tyler Hardwick, who as PJ, one of Bobbie’s three now-male suitors, delivers a knockout rendition of another Sondheim tongue-twister, “Another Hundred People.”

Britney Coleman, an understudy of Katrina Lenk in the New York revival, takes on the demanding role of Bobbie for the tour and does so admirably, although following Lenk is not an easy task. Coleman still seems to be searching somewhat for a bit of the character’s passion and frustrations, but her performance is obviously still blossoming, something especially evident in her dynamic delivery of the musical’s monumental final number, the goosebump-inducing classic “Being Alive.”

Of course, talking about bravely stepping into a worldclass predecessor’s spotlight, Judy McLane as the crusty, world-weary Joanne has the thorniest task of all. When one thinks of Company, the mind immediately goes to Elaine Stritch, whose iconic performance in the role, lifting her ever-present martini glass to the ceiling while throat-belting out the boozy, ennui-permeated eleventh-hour ballad “The Ladies Who Lunch,” is the first thing I’m sure most devoted fans of the musical conjure.

McLane has an impressive Merman-sized voice that could fill Radio City without a microphone, but her performance isn’t up to the lingering memory of Stritch, nor does she get anywhere near the charismatic level of other Joannes who’ve played the role post-Elaine, including Debra Monk, Lynn Redgrave, Ann Miller, Vivianne Blaine, Jane Russell, Barbara Walsh and, of course, Patti Lupone, who won her third Tony and was once again the talk of the town as Joanne in this production’s initial London and New York runs.

Still, the real star of this innovative new look at Company is the jaw-dropping direction of Marianne Elliott, making theatrical magic happen on Bunny Christie’s remarkable, incredibly avant-garde set. Her work is simply like watching Bobbie tumble down a neon-enhanced modernday rabbit hole—quite literally at one moment—with all of us swept along for the ride.

At every moment, Elliott’s work pays respectful homage to Sondheim’s most indelible score, which just might make anyone rethink their priorities for dealing with what our culture demands from us to make us feel successful and fulfilled in this silly and ridiculously challenging and short-sighted world of ours.

This includes a rather negative image of what it means to be married and too-often live a second-hand life of pretend happiness, traumatized by compromise and worried more about what others think of us than to work on who we really are.

At no time in our history has the need for intelligent human connection—rather than being bombarded with the “weird” specter of Morlockian behavior intruding on our lives and the future of our planet—been more urgent.

“Love is Company,” the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim’s title song tell us, and the slice of our collective and most tenuous lives explored in this amazing interpretation of a time-defying literary masterwork could not be more compelling.

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A STRANGE LOOP at the Ahmanson Theatre

It’s interesting that the Pulitzer Prize for Drama is awarded to a “distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life” and two recent Pulitzer winners, James Ijames’ Fat Ham (2022) and Michael R. Jackson’s musical A Strange Loop (2020) both deal with a similar issue: coming of age navigating the hardhearted hardships of contemporary life in our appearance-obsessed society as a young, overweight, self-loathing African-American gay man.

Also interestingly, both plays came to Los Angeles this year—Fat Ham to the Geffen in April and A Strange Loop opening at the Ahmanson last Friday—and they are two of the three best and most important productions to hit our reclaimed desert climes’ stages in a long time.

According to Jackson, his title came from a quote by cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who coined the term to help explain his hypothesis that the “self” is merely a collection of “meaningless symbols mirroring back on their own essences in repetition until death” strikes us all.

A human being, Hofstadter theorized, is the “organism with the greatest capacity to perceive itself perceiving itself perceiving itself ad infinitum.”

Jackson’s mostly autobiographical protagonist in A Strange Loop, a character named Usher who actually works as an usher for the Broadway run of The Lion King as his survival job, is a lonely, “functionally miserable, relentlessly self-critical” overweight gay Black man in his mid-20s writing a musical about a lonely, functionally miserable, relentlessly self-critical overweight gay Black man his mid-20s.

It’s like a literary version of a lithograph by M.C. Escher come to life, complete with hauntingly evocative tunes and incredibly sly lyrics that unconditionally deserved being honored with a Tony nomination and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Score—winning Tonys, by the way, as Best Musical and Best Book.

As Usher, the 20-something Jackson describes as a “mass of undesirable, unlovable, unemployable, unacceptably fat Black homosexual molecules floating through space without purpose or meaning,” newcomer Malachi McCaskill, before being cast in this tour a junior musical theatre major at the University of North Carolina, makes an auspicious debut in a role anyone would make a trip to Robert Johnson’s Dockery plantation crossroads to play.

The other six knockout actors—Jordan Barbour, J. Cameron Barnett, Carlis Shane Clark, Avionce Hoyle, Tarra Conner Jones, and John-Andrew Morrison—play Usher’s ever-circling, unstoppably opinionated inner Thoughts and, in something akin to limning a live musical version of Pixar’s animated Inside/Out, each has his or her own function, including one who supports him lavishly with sugary encouragement and compliments while another reminds him at every turn what a loser he is.

Along the way, as throughout the show Usher is writing the latest draft of his self-referential unfinished musical which is titled—you got it—A Strange Loop, the others double as various and occasionally crossdressing managers and hookups and members of his puzzled, unaccepting family, including a staggeringly heartrending turn by Morrison as Usher's ultra-religious mother, a role for which he rightly received a Tony nomination, as well as Lucille Lortel and OBIE Awards for Featured Performance.

Director Stephen Brackett’s staging and Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography are both remarkably kinetic achievements, navigating Arnulfo Maldonado’s snappy neon-infused set and Jen Schriever’s dazzling lighting, although the most glaring Achilles’ heel of this production is Drew Levy’s murky, often indecipherable sound that buries too much of the dialogue and music in the echoey and sometimes challengingly cavernous Ahmanson.

Jackson’s music is suitably hummable but it’s his book and lyrics that are truly stunning—even provocative since you’d never hear Eliza Doolittle or Emile LeBecque or even that randy lass Ado Annie singing about felching or dingleberries of sucking cock, not to mention McCaskill’s self-destructive character bottoming in a scene simulating receiving the ol’ hairy root from hunky gym-bunny Barbour (appearing as a hunky gym-bunny white man).

For the first 45 minutes or so, there were continuous shocked gasps from the usual rather stuffy opening night patrons seated around me while the woman next to me whispered “Oh, my god” on a continuous loop.

But just as we did when our original cast of well-paid musical flower children first stepped out nekkid on the stage in Hair a mere 56 years ago, the barrage of generally offensive language and visual sexual tableaux assaulting the sufficiently shocked audience here desensitizes them to eventually sit back and listen to what Jackson’s alter ego Usher has to say—especially in McCaskill’s amazing eleventh-hour tortured monologue that’s surely the stuff for which awards are handed out.

“Fuckability is still the lifeblood of the theatre, darling,” Usher is reminded as he discusses his slow and ponderous progress on his script with his literary agent, who instead wants him to accept a pandering “corporate niggatry” position working for Tyler Perry creating a gospel musical to “ride the chitlin circuit,” something which his Perry-loving mother would feel is quite literally devoutly to be wished.

Usher’s response in song is:

“The crap he puts onstage, film, and TV / Makes my bile want to rise!

And if I try to match his coonery / He’d see through my disguise.”

Instead, he states his mission is to create “undercover art” and figure out how to work it and eventually “change the scene for the better.”

May I say, Mr. Jackson, mission unexpectedly and miraculously accomplished despite the insurmountable battle of breaking into the world of corporate theatre.

To me, Michael R. Jackson could be what might have hypothetically happened if Langston Hughes and James Baldwin had a secret lovechild who became a poet—and could also write some dynamite music.

Simply put, A Strange Loop marks the advent of a brilliant and important new talent, something solidified by Jackson as the recipient of a Pulitzer for his bravely raw, brutally honest autobiographical theatrical masterpiece. If he ever decides to write a musical about a dysfunctional, relentlessly self-critical, overweight, gay, blindingly caucasian Danish Jew in his late-70s, he should be sure to look me up.

 *  *  *

PETER PAN at the Pantages Theatre

Oh, lordie, how desperately I needed a carefree and well-timed trip past that second star and straight on to morning, an evening populated by a charming troupe of precocious lost boys led by that ageless fellow who refuses to learn to be a parrot and recite a silly rule, culminating in the dropping of more glittery pixie dust over the Pantages Theatre audience than if Simon Cowell had hit his Golden Buzzer.

It’s a welcome return to Neverland, all right, and this current revival of the 1954 musical version of Peter Pan succeeds in fascinating all the wide-eyed yung‘ns in the audience while their adult companions are invited to stop worrying about the dastardly state of our world for a couple of welcoming hours.

The design elements of this bright and shiny revival, vigorously directed by Broadway triple-threat Lonny Price, could not be much more dazzling. The sets by Anna Louizos are perfectly complimented by Amith Chandrashaker’s lighting and especially David Bengali’s jaw-dropping video projections, while Sarafina Bush’s grunge-based costuming reflects the contemporary retelling of Sir J.M. Barrie’s enduring fantasy tale beloved for well over a century by children of all ages.

Surely the most groundbreaking aspect of this Peter Pan is the updated book by brilliant and rapidly emerging Native American playwright Larissa Fasthorse (The Thanksgiving Play), who craftily introduces all those issues that have made her work a tribute to the troubled history of our country’s Indigenous ancestors into this classic tale originally set in London at the turn of the 20^th century.

From the opening scene, where Wendy Darling (the professional debut of the dynamic Hawa Kamara) is obsessed with one day becoming a doctor and her brother John (William Foon, alternating with Micah Turner Lee) is constructing a model of an early Native American village for a school project and lectures his family members about the disappearance of its displaced inhabitants, it’s not hard to glean that we’re not in Victorian England anymore.

Younger brother Michael (an adorable Reed Epley, alternating with Camden Kwok) talks about YouTube videos while his father (the initially still Hook-less Cody Garcia) whines about smudges on his computer screen and the family, played by a lovely and topical melding of Caucasian, East Indian, Asian, and African American performers, discusses the possibility of replacing their bopping headphone-wearing babysitter (Hannah Schmidt) with a more attentive and reliably trusty sheepdog.

Instead of the title character traditionally played by a woman, a heritage established by the Tony-winning turn of Mary Martin in the original production, Peter is played here by 17-year-old phenom Nolan Almeida, a Yorba Linda native plucked for the role from his studies as a junior at Excelsior High School in Orange County. Almeida brings a wonderfully boyish and athletic energy to the role, as well as a voice that fills the Pantages with its youthful eagerness and richness.

Garcia is a more lovable Hook than usual, especially notable in his delightfully Abbott and Costello-y scenes with the hilarious Kurt Perry as Smee, while up-and-coming folk singer Raye Zaragoza is a standout as Tiger Lily, who in Fasthorse’s adaptation a more heroic character focused on leading her clan and keeping their Native American culture alive on their adopted island.

Dumped in the updating is the glaringly dated Act One finale “Ugg-a-Wugga,” featuring the problematic stereotypical depiction of Tiger Lily’s peacepipe-passing tribe deemed by today’s standards as offensive to Indigenous people. It’s now replaced by “Friends Forever,” a massive, infectious production number show-stoppingly choreographed by Lorin Latarro and featuring the entire remarkably diverse cast.

Although this revamping of Barrie’s story intentionally loses some of the melancholy and the deeper psychological implications lurking deep within the title character’s reclusive idiosyncrasies, his insistence on never growing up leaving us contemplating what personal challenges led up to his self-inflicted isolation, the production could not be much more enjoyable.

This is particularly true for all the captivated and magically transported kids filling the Pantages, whose budding and malleable imaginations just might, with this enchanted retelling of Peter Pan, be sparked with a whole new appreciation for the art of live theatre. To me, nothing else in the world can stimulate the soul of a new generation of potential artists as effectively—and nothing else heals our mess of a world as effectively as art.

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PSYCHO BEACH PARTY from the HorseChart Theatre Company at the Matrix Theatre

It’s always something of a roll of the dice whether a parody of any particular once trendy but long-lost splashy brand from the past will itself hold up in time.

When I appeared in my first revival of Hair in the mid-1980s, our earlier glory seemed dated and simply didn’t hold up, but when the groundbreaking musical was reverently brought back to life again some 15 years later, the return was highly successful even though the message we tried so hard to deliver in 1968 had then morphed into a kind of nostalgia.

A clear exception to the risk of material descending into oblivion with the fleeting and ever-blowing winds of cultural fashion is just about anything created by that outrageously prolific counterculture icon Charles Busch, someone who could out-john-waters John Waters himself long before Divine munched down on his first poodle turd.

Although some younger audience members might need to go home and google Chubby Checker, Jane Russell, or the Bossa Nova—not to mention possibly Kierkegaard and the meaning of “Sartrean existence””—Busch’s classic sendups of the ridiculousness of such things as British cozy-style murder mysteries, 50s B-horror/slasher films starring out-of-work former superstar divas, or sappy old movie musicals, are still all as priceless today as the first time they hit cult status years ago.

Surely the most vulnerable to poke fun at of any old generational warhorse genre is the beach blanket bingo-y movies starring Fabian or Annette and Frankie (google them too, whippersnappers) featuring dialogue such as “Chase, did you hear? Waimea's up! You don't have to jump!" *

Cowabunga, my humor-starved overheated moondoggies, understand this one fact of nature: no one spoofs those ridiculously cheesy early-60s surfer flicks quite as perfectly as Busch—and this smart and colorful remounting of his 1987 off-Broadway gem Psycho Beach Party could not possibly be more swellsville, as one of his characters might interject.

Set in the bitchin’ and most excellent world of Malibu Beach in the summer of 1962, Tom DeTrinis and Ryan Bergmann’s spirited and delightfully tongue-in-cheek direction proves these guys totally get and embrace Busch’s flamboyantly daring original concept at its flashiest.

It’s something echoed in the work of set designers Yuri Okahana-Benson and Nicole Bernardini and the entire creative team—and it begins the moment one enters the Matrix. Beachy props and inflatable pool toys are scattered everywhere one looks as you enter the Kiki Tiki Lounge, the space usually known as the Matrix Theatre lobby, which is open an hour before the show serving all sorts of libations adorned by those tiny little paper umbrellas I didn’t know they still made.

By all means, at least expect a really good complimentary lay… I mean lei.

 Originally titled Gidget Goes Psychotic and changed to avoid any copyright issues, Busch starred in that first production 37 years ago, a huge hit that ran for nearly a year to sold-out houses off-Broadway at the Players Theatre before transferring to Broadway and eventually being turned into a feature film in 2000.

The playwright, author of such heavyweight dramatic fare as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and his Gassner Award-winning The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, became an instantaneous theatrical legend with Psycho Beach Party, playing a staunchly virginal 16-year-old tomboy named Chicklet Forrest, a precocious valleygirl who more than anything in her overdramatic life wants to learn how to surf the big waves.

After much begging and a few sexual innuendos that go directly over her head, Chicklet (played by the incomparable Drew Droege, veteran of two other LA mountings of Busch classics Die, Mommie, Die! and Red Scare on Sunset) is eventually accepted into a tribe of gnarly young surfers, including the world famous king of the waves Kanaka (a hilariously pseudo-butch Karen Maruyama) and a lovable Bill and Ted-esque pair of best bros named Provoloney and YoYo (Daniel Montgomery and Adrian Gonzalez), who begin to realize during the course of the play that their feelings for one another might go beyond the plutonic and into the touchy-feely realm of the homoerotic.

The only problem is, unbeknownst to all concerned including Chicklet, our naive heroine suffers from a psychotic condition triggered by a word or an image that makes her slip into multiple personalities. These include a trailer park-like checkout girl from the Deep South, an elderly talkshow host, a self-absorbed male model, and the entire accounting firm of Edelman and Edelman.

Still, the most dangerous persona taking charge of Chicket’s body and mind is the sexually voracious Ann Bowman, a dominatrix-like character plotting to take over the world, first conquering Malibu and on to Sacramento, then determined to create concentration camps for her enemies (very prophetic of our current threat of a Trumpian future) and finally realizing her dream to star in her own variety show on NBC.

As did his playwright predecessor, the manic Droege, somehow bizarrely evoking an image of Lucille Ball on steroids, works so hard jumping from character to character that I got exhausted just watching.  

He is deliciously complimented by Sam Pancake as Chicklet’s monstrously restrictive no-wire-hangers mother (with an impressively oversized rack and dark secret or two of her own) and a wonderfully balls-out supporting cast all more than willing to take the rabbithole journey into Buschdom at the risk of their own individual senses of self-respect—but then, who needs to worry about that time-wasting shit anyway, right? This is art, people. Art.

It’s also a bright and sassy revival of one of Charles Busch’s most endearing works I couldn’t recommend more highly. As Chicklet’s alter-ego dimwitted checkout girl might have described the experience, “I ain’t had so much fun since the pigs ate my little sister.”

(  * Barbara Eden to Peter Brown in Ride the Wild Surf, 1964 )

*  *  *

UNBROKEN BLOSSOMS at East West Players

The premise of Philip W. Chung’s new play Unbroken Blossoms is compelling and genuinely eye-opening, exposing the racial inequities in the early days of film and exploring the collateral damage to which it gave rise that affected more than just our town’s most omnipresent cottage industry.

Stung by the worldwide criticism of the not-so subtle racism and bigotry which overpowered the artistic merits of D.W. Griffith’s controversial 1915 silent opus The Birth of a Nation, the great filmmaker (played here by incomparable LA theatrical treasure Arye Gross) struggled to recover from the broadsiding he received from his most famous achievement’s aggressively anti-Black sentiments and the glorification of the Klu Klux Klan.

The Klan, which even then was considered one of our country’s most virulent hate groups—at least before the current hijacked Republican Party and the Trumps and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world reared their ugly heads—was depicted in The Birth of a Nation as “America’s saviors." Subsequently, the film's notoriety has been credited as a major impetus for the resurrection of the KKK, a great misfortune that has obviously had repercussions to this day.

The potentially healing project was Griffith’s 1919 boundary-shattering classic Broken Blossoms, which dared to present the screen’s first interracial romance between a young Caucasian girl and her Chinese suitor (played by Alexandra Hellquist and Conlan Ledwith as the film’s stars Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess).

Chung’s fictionalized version of the troubled creation of Broken Blossoms is seen through the eyes of two Chinese-American men hired as consultants, real-life motion picture pioneers James B. Leong and Moon Kwan (Gavin Kawin Lee and Ron Song), who are utilized more by Griffith as errand boys and are expected to nod and bow and fetch props rather than to actually offer insight.

The trailblazing filmmaker's misogyny and ego-driven decision making are revealed bigtime, especially his clearly flawed defensiveness at the hiring of Barthelmess to play Gish’s lover in “yellowface” and his vehement insistence to not allow his actors’ lips to ever make contact onscreen.

There’s so much to be fascinated (and incensed) by in Chung’s tale; I only wish it could have been told much better. His script is uninspired and achingly predictable, his richly conflicted historic figures written as one-dimensional cardboard characters somewhat reminiscent of one of those documentary films where live actors play Benjamin Franklin or C. W. Post or whomever and are used more to augment the voiceover than to give performances.

When actors as gifted as Gross, Hellquist, and Lee come off as heavy-handed and unimpressive as they do here, something is terribly wrong. All three deserve better, as does director Jeff Liu, who is drastically hampered by the material with which he is expected to make magic happen and further thwarted by Mina Kinukawa’s unwieldy, unfinished-looking set that is as puzzling as the venerable East West Players’ choice to present this severely flawed play in the first place.

Song might have been more successful as Moon Kwan if anyone told him to try to project past the first few rows of EWP's former church playing space, while Ledwith delivers an unwatchably foppish and over-the-top performance that makes it seem as though he’s acting in another play altogether. Even his costars appear to look at him with a faint bit of incredulity, as though they’re not sure what he’s trying to achieve any more than I was.

It’s been a long time since I’ve left such a promising and eagerly anticipated production as disappointed as I was exiting EWP’s prestigious David Henry Hwang Theatre, a place where true theatrical sorcery has been created again and again for almost 30 years—and before that in the company's original more intimate space since 1965.

Truly, I do hope someone one day soon will take all the research and the revelations offered in Unbroken Blossoms and better tell the story so desperately in need of being told, so clear in its message to shine a blinding light directly at the film industry’s ugliest history, to show how far as artists we’ve come and what we still urgently need to achieve as trustees of the potentially pulverizing power that great art wields.

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MRS. DOUBTFIRE at the Pantages Theatre

You couldn’t find a more formulaic, by-the-number modern specimen of a vintage musical comedy than Karey Fitzpatrick and John O’Farrell’s adaptation of the 1993 film classic Mrs. Doubtfire.

If you love that kind of romantic, basically issue free and old-fashioned Rodgers and Hammerstein-style diversionary entertainment, you’re in luck.

On the other hand, if you’re a fan of more cerebral examples of how the genre of musical comedy evolved into musical theatre, such as Next to Normal, Fun Home, or A Strange Loop, the brilliant Pulitzer-winning current tenant at the Ahmanson, you won’t find it here.

What you will find now stopping off at the Pantages is a pure classic musical comedy produced and presented at its most dazzling and consummately seamless.

With direction by the legendary four-time Tony-winning Theater Hall of Fame-honored veteran Jerry Zaks—who just helmed his 26th Broadway show—and design elements slickly created by Hamilton set designer David Korins, six-time Tony-winning costumer Catherine Zuber, lighting by Philip Rosenberg, and sound by Brian Ronan and Craig Cassidy, how could Mrs. Doubtfire be anything but top drawer.

The score by Wayne and Karey Fitzpatrick, Tony nominees for Something Rotten!, is filled with spirited and infectious tunes peppered with a barrage of topical lyrics that provide a foolproof blank canvas for Zaks and choreographer Lorin Latarro to lead an impressive assemblage of some of Broadway’s best triple-threat performers. The dancing ensemble is particularly noteworthy when, linked arm-in-arm as a chorusline of Mrs. Doubtfire clones, they break into a precision send-up of River Dance.

For me personally, however, all this sincere and professional effort would simply get filed deep within my memory banks as yet another commercially-minded theatrical equivalent of Chinese food—you know, an hour later you’re hungry again. Still, as much as I found most of Mrs. Doubtfire nicely done but instantly forgettable, there is one major thing that makes me recommend it with the greatest enthusiasm: the exceptional tour-de-force performance of the Tony-nominated master farceur Rob McClure in the title role.

There aren’t many actors brave enough to follow in the oversized footsteps of someone as iconic as the lategreat comic genius Robin Williams in one of his most familiar and celebrated roles, but McClure does just that. And quite honestly, except for lovingly playing homage to his predecessor’s silly Scottish brogue, the guy somehow manages to totally reinvent the role and clearly make it his own.

McClure’s unique ability to slip from slapstick to sincere emotionality in an instant makes him the quintessential choice to play such an outrageous character—and speaking of instant changes, his expected farcical rapidfire transformations from Danny Gillard to Euphegenia Doubtfire, especially in the notorious restaurant scene where the actor must go almost instantly back and forth between two tables playing both characters, is almost David Copperfield-like in its execution.

Possessed of perfect musical theatre vocal chops, a loose-limbed Ray Bolger physicality, and the ability to charm an audience and win over anyone—except, of course, his onstage ex-wife played by his real-life wife Maggie Lakis—McClure is the best of the best of current musical theatre leading men. Missing seeing his staggeringly perfect performance as Mrs. Doubtfire would be almost criminal, I tellya. Don’t do it. I’m issuing citations.

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THE HOPE THEORY at Geffen Playhouse

Helder Guimarães is a phenomenal magician, all right. When it was first announced he would be returning to the Geffen with an all-new show called The Hope Theory, I went back into my files to check out what I had written about his last appearance there in his spectacular and many-times extended Invisible Tango.

I looked back to my 2023 file. Nope. Farther back. 2022? Uh-uh. I keep accessing my files of older and older reviews and finally found my piece on Invisible Tango—written in 2019. So, it’s obvious everything surrounding this guy is magical, since his last memorable appearance at the Geffen was five friggin’ years ago and is still indelibly stuck in my mind as one of the most unique and jaw-dropping performances I’ve ever experienced.

As with that first time out, The Hope Theory is again directed by Guimarães’ longtime mentor, admirer, and collaborator Frank Marshall, himself a lifelong amateur magician and EGOT-winning producer of such notable film franchises as Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, and the Jason Bourne sagas.

As Guimarães quietly takes the stage entering through the audience, he immediately allows us to see him for exactly who he is: a rather nondescript guy with an easily identifiable Portuguese accent holding a deck of cards—and his genuine non-theatrical humility naturally imbues him with the power to set his audience at ease. 

His welcoming simplicity helps bring his electrifying magic to life when subtly introduced into the story he shares about his immigration to the States. As it unfolds, Guimarães gradually begins to win over our trust as he welcomes us into his first cramped Los Angeles apartment, recreated onstage in masterfully simplistic fashion by that always impressive LA wunderkind designer François-Pierre Couture. 

Throughout the performance, he takes piles of wooden storage boxes and scattered pieces of memorabilia from his life and organizes them into a bookcase display in an attempt to transform his dismal apartment into a home, all the while reminiscing about the struggles of being an invisible twenty-something from another country trying to navigate the cultural inequities of the American experience.

As he attempts to tackle the usual difficulties of establishing a professional showbiz career, for him compounded by his broken English and lack of networking opportunities, he is also quick to admit his uphill battle and sad lessons learned about trust in others were still better than living through the political oppression his family faced while he was growing up in Portugal in the 1980s.

The Hope Theory is all about survival and the necessity of maintaining some kind of hope in a basically uncaring society, although for anyone less scrappy and committed to success as Guimarães, the experience could have easily broken him.

His long journey to American citizenship and the creation of his own personal space is of course peppered with his mind-boggling magic, something reviewers have been asked by Guimarães and Marshall to “refrain from including major plot and illusion spoilers,” but let me say no one in the audience is exempt from possibly being called upon to help prove his abilities are real and completely inexplicable—and opening night that included three of us pressfolk, one of whom nearly crawled under his chair in an effort not to be included.

Witnessing a single card trick from Helder Guimarães alone is enough to make anyone slide to the edge of their seat realizing his unearthly gifts are grounded in something far deeper than first appearances reveal. The underlying message of The Hope Theory comes through this worldclass conjuror and raconteur’s skills and, for a brief time, he makes the chaos we all share these days disappear with the ease of his sleight of hand, shuffling our communal cares and worries back into the deck. 

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GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY at the Pantages Theatre

People are either going to passionately love this one or absolutely hate it. For me, Girl from the North Country is the best new American musical in years—or should I say best new musical about America in years.

I guess it’s no secret for anyone who knows my theatrical likes and dislikes that most musical comedy falls into the latter category in my world. I’ll take stories about barbers slitting throats, housewives descending into bipolar disorder, lesbian cartoonists dealing with their father's suicides, or people paying to pee any day over corn as high as an elephant’s eye or someone growing accustomed to her face. Musical theatre as the antithesis of classic musical comedy is where I get a little giddy.

That said, Conor McPherson’s morality play with music, utilizing the classic songs of Bob Dylan to tell the story of a ragtag group of miserable middle-American people doomed by the Great Depression, should have won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an honor given to a distinguished new play by an American playwright, preferably original in its source and dealing with some aspect of American life. If McPherson wasn’t born and raised in Dublin, this would have—or at least should have been—a shoe-in.

Simply, Girl from the North Country is a stunning achievement. The Olivier-winning and five-time Tony nominee playwright (The Weir, Shining City, The Seafarer) has created a dizzying number of characters, all presented as residents of a ramshackle and soon-to-be foreclosed upon boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota in 1934 swept away in the aftermath of the Depression, each one of them vivid and desperate people grabbing to regain hold of their shattered lives.

Nope, not the Von Trapps by any means.

McPherson directs his own masterwork, fortuitously delivering an evocatively gossamer, almost Carson McCullers-esque quality to the musical that somehow also manages to be extraordinarily theatrical. With 22 sensationally passionate musical theatre performers crowding onto the Pantages’ stage, under less skilled leadership from anyone but the playwright himself, identities could indeed become confusing. Instead, each actor has been gifted with a remarkably clear throughline that makes shaping their simple yet complex characters comprehensible.

Many actors are given their own showcased solo number, unostentatious Dylan ballads brilliantly transformed into anthems for broken people to earnestly tell their stories, most sung centerstage behind an old 30s radio show standup microphone—yet no character is deemed too important to not move set pieces or play onstage instruments accompanying their fellow players’ psalms of hope and redemption.

Somehow, we learn to care about each and every one of these desperate stand-in everymen for those countless forgotten people stuck in dustbowls and breadlines during one of our country’s most challenging periods of time, appearing here as though living embodiments of a Dorothea Lange photograph.

This evocation of the lost souls of America in the wake of the Depression is made real by the contributions of an amazing, truly world-class ensemble of performers, all obviously intensely committed to their characters and the rich source material.

Jennifer Blood, as the mentally lost wife of the boardinghouse’s owner Nick Laine (John Sciappa), is the heart of the production, offering a performance reminiscent of a young Amanda Plummer crossed with the down-home rustic scrappiness of Frances McDormand. And when she ends Act One with a showstopping rendition of Dylan’s 1965 classic “Like a Rolling Stone,” the idea of how to dropkick a finale before intermission reaches a whole new level.

Everyone in the cast is a knockout, palpable in their sincerity and gifted with vocal chops that could guarantee each of them a career well beyond the limitations of musical theatre.

Ben Biggers and Sharae Moultrie are notable as the Laines’ shiftless alcoholic son and quasi-adopted daughter, both of whom have memorable duets with their respective loves, Biggers sharing a haunting “I Want You” with his departing former girlfriend played by Chiara Trentalange and Moultrie in an inventive melody of “Hurricane,” “All Along the Watchtower,” and “Idiot Wind” with her nomadic ex-prizefighter beau played by the extraordinary Matt Manuel.

David Benoit, Jill Van Velzer, and Aiden Wharton are standouts as the once-successful Burke family and their mentally challenged son Elias. Van Velzer, who also doubles quite impressively on the drums, takes over the stage every time she steps up to sing and Wharton knocks it out onto Hollywood Boulevard in a postmortem eleventh-hour gospel-inspired production number version of “Duquesne Whistle” that brings the house down.

Although North Country could easily hold up as a play, the incorporation of Dylan’s songbook is a stroke of genius, his unconventional stylings grounding the piece in a kind of hypnotic pragmatism rather than how other famous songwriters’ music has been employed over the past few years in the conventional jukebox musical genre, adding glitz to sell the show rather than any substance to the story.

That said, perhaps the greatest contribution here aside from the unearthly gifts of Conor McPherson is the cutting-edge sagacity of arranger Simon Hale, whose uncanny and innovative interpretations of Dylan’s tunes—some familiar, some obscure—won him a well-deserved Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.

There is indeed a grimness in the reality presented here, but McPherson also delivers a haunting exploration into the depth of despair into which the human psyche can be thrust and how much that experience can fuck with our species’ ability to choose right over wrong.

Through the bleakness and hardship, there’s an omnipresent glimmer of hope that threads throughout Girl from North Country as this stepped-upon group of tyrannized survivors fight to discover what it is they want in their lives and how they can pull themselves up to make it happen in a heartless world that no longer seems to have a place for them.

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DURAN DURANTONY & CLEOPATRA from the Troubadour Theater Company at the Colony Theatre

Let’s face it: the holidays aren’t the holidays without the Troubies. The beloved Troubadour Theater Company, which for the past two decades has kicked off the season in Los Angeles like a far less annoying Mariah Carey, celebrated their 29th anniversary last December by presenting A White (Album) Christmas, yet another original sidesplitting and decidedly off-centered spoof of a traditional Crissmiss tale set to the music of a popular contemporary composer.

Since its inception in 1995, the Troubie’s “ringmaster” Matt Walker has adapted and directed over 40 such productions, one more delightfully ridiculous than the next. Past productions have included It’s a Stevie Wonderful Life, Little Drummer Bowie, A Christmas Carole King, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein-Doors, and Frosty the Snow-Manilow, so the titles alone should give you a clue if you’re not already a confirmed fan of their particular form of entertainment. I don’t think a year has gone by when I was here in LA that whatever these guys did that year was not a part of my festivities.

Walker and his disciples knock their performances into the stratosphere year after year, selling out every show they conjure. Still, the initial success of the troupe came from their non-holiday musical matchups based on classic plays, including Twelfth Dog Night, A Midsummer Night’s Fever Dream, Romeo Hall & Juliet Oates, As U2 Like It, Julius Wheezer, and most recently at the Getty Villa, Lizastrata.

Although free of fake snow and cardboard gingerbread accoutrements, these outings from Walker & Company are even more inventive, a tradition that rises to a whole new level with the Troubie’s current outing now playing at the Colony, Duran DurAntony & Cleopatra.

More than ever, Walker has here chosen to stick to more of the Bard’s original dialogue, which makes their improvised and faux-improvised asides even funnier and there’s something about the cheery music of Duran Duran that makes it more hilarious—especially accented by the punctiliously rehearsed and highly energetic choreography by Walker, John Paul Batista, and Suzanne Jolie Narbonne.

Walker as Mark Antony and his longtime co-conspirator Rick Batalla as Caesar could not be better choices to meld Shakespeare with Marx Brothers-inspired slapstick, something ol’ Will’s comedies strived for quite shamelessly on occasion. This homage works like gangbusters with one of his most well-known tragedies originally presented in 1607, as ancient Egypt and Rome are reset somewhere closer to home and we’re told that notorious pirate of the Mediterranean Pompey has claimed territory as his own from Upland to Diamond Bar (his ship is named “Pompey Sea / Pompey Doo”).

The big-voiced Cloie Wyatt Taylor, most recently seen as Lizastrata herself, is wonderful as that other feminist heroine Cleopatra, Queen of Covina and West Covina (Batalla’s Caesar is Emperor of Echo Park), and when she gets a little overly dramatic draped across her fainting couch, Walker is quick to remind her this is Shakespeare, not Tennessee Williams.

The ensemble is uniformly in proper Troubie mode, with two standout performances from newcomer Matt McCracken as a Lurch-like Soothsayer with some serious rocker chops and Philip McNiven as both the Friar Tuckian Lepidus and as Caesar’s tit-tassel-twirling wife Octavia (a regular shopper at the Colony’s adjacent Burlington Coat Factory).

As usual, a deadpanning Beth Kennedy is hysterical as a resurfacing gap-toothed messenger “more abused than a PortaPotty at Coachella” since she keeps getting run through by spears, and both Narbonne and Katie Kitani are swell as Cleo’s devoted attendants.

Mike Sulprizio’s well-padded Pompey, clearly inspired by Brando’s Godfather, and LA theatrical stalwart Rob Nagle as Enobarbus and that scurvy pirate Menus are also standouts, especially when Nagle delivers his croaky but spirited production number “Girls on Sand.”

Musical director/keyboardist Ryan Whyman leads the excellent Troubadorchestra (Whyman, Kevin Stevens, Carlos Rivera, and Mike Abraham) and Narbonne’s costuming, culled from the original designs of Sharon McGunigle, is masterfully inventive and wonderfully wacky.

Worldclass clown Matt Walker’s Duran DurAntony & Cleopatra is a particular pleasure and a perfect distraction from the rest of the world right now. Of course, there’s really nothing not to love about anything presented by this filter-free band of zanies (unless it’s the ever-present arctic blast emanating from the Colony’s overachieving air conditioning system) but for any ardent camp follower of the Troubies, there is one obvious thing missing this time out.

I mean, I know it’s not the holiday season but… couldn’t there maybe also be a Summer Warlock?

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SINGULARITIES OR THE COMPUTERS OF VENUS at the Road Theatre Company

Science, we’re told by a character in the Road’s world premiere of SINGULARITIES or the Computers of Venus, is a series of contradictions working together to make truth.

Three female astronomers from different periods in time work toward the same goals in the world premiere of Laura Stribling’s arresting new play, each contributing important discoveries about the mysteries of the universe, and each functioning under the thumb of their male counterparts who take credit for their explorations.

For anyone naïve to the perceived notion that women are not given their due as equals in the scientific community—let alone the world—will be challenged by Stribling’s poetic yet to-the-bone text, which includes a trio of real-life historical figures, women toiling in 1789 to the post-Civil War era to modern times.

Stribling employs a fascinating device, seamlessly and innovatively melding history and fiction, with groundbreaking astronomers Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) and Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), as well as author/poet/abolitionist/suffragette Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) as major protagonists, each presented interacting with some equally interesting fictional characters beaten down by the inequities of being a member of what was long dismissively referred to as the “fairer sex.”

All three sections take place in the same observatory at different periods in time, the first storyline featuring Herschel (Avery Clyde) confronted by a young admirer named Elizabeth Leland (Noelle Mercer) who longs to have a career as rewarding as what she envisions her mentor’s must be, but instead she is consumed by the demands of the late 1800s expectations of the role to which a woman must conform.

A century later, as Mitchell (Susan Diol) is visited by her friend Howe (Blaire Chandler), the temptations of breaking the bonds of society’s demands as their relationship turns to love overwhelms the great scientist, while in the play’s last coupling, the yearnings are reversed.

Set in the present time, Sophia (Krishna Smitha), the assistant of the former boss of astronomer Lena (Lizzy Kimball) is sent to spy on her research by her main competitor, but along the way she enters into totally new territory for her when she instead falls in love.

In the first act of SINGULARITIES, the three storylines unfold consecutively, while in the second part, they begin to defy the restrictions of time and scenes between the time zones are cleverly woven together. This is accentuated as the older characters stand watching as the others, despite the loosening of acceptable norms, still must deal with the same issues that originally kept them from achieving their objectives, receiving the recognition they deserve, and living their lives without judgement both personally and professionally.

The production, playing in repertory with Peter Ritt’s sadly far less successful High Maintenance, is elegantly austere, neatly sharing Brian Graves’ appropriately simple set that augments the serenely psychedelic projections by Ben Rock. Beginning with an extended 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque light show highlighted by Derrick McDaniel’s lighting and David B. Marling’s sound, the feeling is rather like a live imageless tribute to Koyaanisquatsi, the 1982 documentary favorite of all us inveterate stoners everywhere.

Directing one’s own play is often a huge mistake, but Stribling’s imaginative and often-choreographic staging of her SINGULARITIES is as mesmerizing as her intelligent and often quite strikingly lyrical text.

Her cast is quite superb, uniformly believable in their committed and heartfelt effort to create characters striving to uncover the mysteries of the solar system as they fight the need to find love that reaches beyond what the societies of their various timeframes find appropriate.

Kimball and Smitha are especially touching in their starcrossed emotional journey, while Chandler brings a delightful spirit to the already spirited Howe, who in real life worked magic to change the injustices and male-dominated partisanship of the America she so passionately advocated.

The always sturdy Clyde is quite compelling to watch as Herschel, the discoverer of several comets including one named after her, even though the character’s achievements and career never quite crawled out from the shadow of her more famous brother William. Unfortunately, Clyde’s performance is somewhat hampered by a rather indecipherable German accent further frustrating due to her low volume, at least for the ancient ears of this particular 938-year-old observer.

Beyond everything, SINGULARITIES or the Computers of Venus, developed from scratch in the Road’s fourth prolific Under Construction workshop, is a remarkable effort, although promising new playwrighting voice Laura Stribling could still judiciously trim the more repetitious exposition and eliminate the need to include some clever but unnecessary historical elements, no matter how artfully they have been woven into her script; a 90-minute runtime without intermission would be more than enough to tell her exciting and timely tale.

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FATHERLAND at the Fountain Theatre

According to Merriam-Webster, the second definition of the term "swan song” is:  “A farewell appearance or final act or pronouncement.”

Last month, just as his new play Fatherland was set to world premiere at the Fountain Theatre, the continuously groundbreaking facility’s artistic director Stephen Sachs announced his retirement from the pioneering 78-seat non-profit space he founded in 1990.

I proudly consider myself part of the Fountain family, having appeared there as the Witch of Capri in Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore directed by the Fountain's producing director Simon levy, with Karen Kondazian and yours truly traveling on to play our roles at the annual Tennessee Williams Literary Festival in New Orleans, and in a special encore presentation of the award-winning Hollywood Fringe Festival hit The Katrina Comedy Fest by NOLA playwright Rob Florence.

Over the past 33 years, the Fountain has produced 36 world premieres and 54 U.S., west coast, or L.A. debuts, each chosen to reflect a unique cultural voice with a fierce determination to make waves and to serve our town’s incredibly diverse ethnic communities.

During that time, Sachs has directed dozens of award-winning productions at the Fountain and across the country, authored 18 of his own plays, including the comedy-drama Bakersfield Mist that has toured extensively and was presented in London’s West End, and among numerous other achievements gave a welcoming theatrical home to Athol Fugard where several of his newest plays were introduced to the world.

And so, Fatherland might indeed be Sachs’ crowning achievement while helming the Fountain and nothing could be more celebratory. Created as a “verbatim play,” meaning every word spoken and all situations presented in the script come from actual court transcripts and testimony, interviews with the real people involved, and public statements, it provides a riveting, unsettling experience that will hopefully (intentionally) haunt us all as we watch the current unconscionable election season unfold in our poor befouled country besieged from within.

Although the two leading pivotal characters are only listed as “Father” and “Son,” Sachs’ play is indeed written about Guy Reffitt of Wylie, Texas (where else?), the first defendant convicted and jailed for his involvement in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and his son Jackson, who made the incredibly brave and heart-wrenching decision to turn his father in to the F.B.I.

As the blusterous deluded father in Sachs’ scarily cautionary tale, one of our community’s scrappiest and most prolific theatrical treasures, Ron Bottitta, is nothing short of magnificent in the incredibly demanding role.

From loving dad slinging burgers in the backyard to rabid conspiracy theorist ready to overthrow the government in a brief 80-minute ride, Bottitta brings an uncanny believability to the challenge, making his character alternately both pitiable and absolutely terrifying. It is a tour de force performance that, if I were currently back teaching the craft on a daily basis, I’d insist each and every one of my acting students attend to see a true master craftsman at work.

As his 19-year-old son, the trajectory of the Carbondale, Colorado native and LA newcomer Patrick Keleher’s journey from backpacking around 11 African counties, Asia, and Australia to his current incarnation being cast in Fatherland is the stuff of which, in a fair world, future legends could possibly begin.

Back in his hometown after reading about the Fountain’s search to cast his character, on a whim and with a lot of chutzpah Keleher flew to LA, auditioned for Sachs, and the next day while debarking back home from his brief trip, received a text that he’d been cast.

His performance is a gripping, amazingly multi-layered thing of wonder, quite unexpected from someone who hasn’t been around this nasty ol’ business long enough to have become disillusioned or have had time to doubt himself in any way. Resembling a kinda corn-fed, farm-grown version of a modernday James Dean, Keleher is the heart of this production as a sensitive kid torn between his love for his father and his family and what he knows is a twisted assault on the very fabric of democracy.

Guy Reffitt began his career as an oil worker and eventual rig manager before the 2016 collapse of the price of oil. Losing his $200,000-a-year position as an international oil industry consultant, he moved his family back to Texas and, as his savings began to dissipate, his interest in politics concurrently began to move dangerously right as he sucked in Trump’s laughably masturbatory The Art of the Deal.

To the horror of his son, he linked and quickly fell under the twisted spell of a virulently ultra-conservative Texas militia group called the Three Percenters—naming themselves that because they believed only three percent of A’murkins had the cajónes to stand up against what they saw as a police state.

“When tyranny becomes law,” Bottitta’s father bellows to his horrified son, himself turning in the other direction after the murder of George Floyd, “revolution becomes duty.”

This of course leads to him becoming instrumental in calling for 10 million equally deluded souls to join him and his ragtag tribe of racist fake Christians for the infamous storming of the Capitol under the spell of that orange-hued monstrous antihero unable to believe he lost an election and enjoy a brief almost orgasmic high that made him finally “feel like a fucking American.” Eventually, of course, his euphoria led to Reffitt’s sentence of 87 months in federal prison.

What Fatherland perhaps inadvertently exposes is what causes such a person to become radicalized. It’s not necessarily a "patriotic" rational calling for justice and change as it is a desperate need to be a part of something, to be right about something, to be better than others in a world that has continually left such people behind and their voice unheard. It’s what my partner and I refer to as Little Pee-Pee Syndrome, a far more dangerous version of souping up one’s car with oversized wheels and a sound system able to blast all those people who ignore you on that arduous and treacherous road we call life.

Under Sachs’ passionate leadership and sharply fluid direction on a nearly bare stage framed by Joel Daavid’s exquisitely simple set and Alison Brummer’s jarringly effective lighting plot, Bottitta and Keleher are mesmerizing as their characters’ relationship tragically devolves and their lives are forever changed by the boy’s commitment to help spare our democracy from his father and his twisted band of treasonous cohorts.

As the defense and prosecuting attorneys grilling the son in court, characters here utilized as conduits to present the material—again completely gleaned from actual testimony and other statements craftily manipulated by Sachs to become a play—Anna Khaja and Larry Poindexter are sufficiently serviceable in roles which by their very nature are rather thankless.

Kudos are especially in order for Khaja, who must introduce each of the play’s new thought by the questions her U.S. Attorney asks the boy. As I try to impart to every actor I coach, dialogue is best memorized by learning lines thought-by-thought but, as with the psychiatrist Dr. Martin Dysart in Peter Shaffer’s classic play Equus, Khaja must have had to learn her lines in some kind of sequence without the benefit of prompts from the lines themselves; one random question asked out of the proper scripted order and she could singlehandedly wipe out pages of dialogue.

To say that Fatherland is arresting and highly polished playmaking is a given but still, as brilliant and perfectly seamless as this production and its performances may be, it is by nature not something that can simply be referred to as an entertainment. It is incredibly disturbing and, as any such project sadly preaching basically to a likeminded choir, I wish there was a way it could be presented to a far wider audience. It might even change the minds of people we as left-coast liberals only began to realize existed and were about to crawl out from below their Morlockian rocks with the rise of that malevolent antichrist Donald J. Trump.

So, I mentioned Merriam-Webster’s second definition of the term “swan song” at the beginning. Actually, the first is:  “A song of great sweetness sung by a dying swan.” This in no way reflects the retirement of Stephen Sachs from the incredible theatrical space that has benefited immeasurably from the many projects he has championed into existence despite what must have been some thorny challenges and ups and downs over the past three decades.

One can only hope that, although Sachs has quite literally left the building, his new life will lead him to develop many, many more amazing artistic statements such as the world premiere of his remarkable Fatherland. This “swan song” isn’t sung by a swan on his way off to Valhalla by any means; it signals the flight of a great and unstoppably majestic creature with an enormous wingspan ready to travel off into new directions that will surely prove the betterment of everyone and everything in his path.

BODIES in Las Vegas, 2007  /  Photo by T.M. Holder