THE BONEYARD 

STEPHEN SONDHEIM'S OLD FRIENDS at the Ahmanson Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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BAT BOY: THE MUSICAL from Open Fist at Atwater Village Theatre

When Bat Boy: The Musical had its world premiere at the Actors’ Gang in 1997, it was one of the most enjoyable theatrical events of the season.

Based on a series of sensationalized “true” stories appearing in the notoriously ridiculous supermarket check-out tabloid Weekly World News in the early 90s, splashed with headlines about a half-human/half-bat teenage boy discovered living in a cave in rural West Virginia, the deliciously irreverent and equally sensationalized Bat Boy: The Musical went on to an off-Broadway run that netted Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Best Musical awards before moving on to London and great national and international success.

To say this cult classic’s book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming and the lyrics of composer Laurence O’Keefe have held up in time is an understatement. Indeed, in the musical’s suitably raucous revival mounted by Open Fist, a company always so good at acing zany, it may just be even more relevant today.

Back in 1997, I don’t remember leaving the Gang’s old El Centro space feeling there had been any overlying message lurking beneath the inventive silliness of the script but now, 28 years later, the clear connection between our flailing country’s current political nightmare and the good Christian townsfolk of Hope Falls demonizing poor misunderstood Bat Boy because of his obvious differences is front and center.

The musical has evolved to become a tongue-in-cheek indictment of all those deluded A’murkins who voted for a proudly racist documented loser to be the leader of the free world—and even more unbelievably, did so twice. With song titles such as the 700 Club-esque “Christian Charity” at the top of the show devolving into “More Blood/Kill the Bat Boy” in Act Two, the comparison could not be more omnipresent.

Although varying levels of proficiency are also present throughout director Pat Towne’s game and hard-working ensemble playing Hope Falls’ scary body of bigots, their collective eagerness and Jennifer Maples’ precisionally rehearsed synchronized choreography quickly win us over. Despite the soon forgivable unevenness the cast may suffer—and overlooking a few flat notes sneaking in here and there during musical numbers—when this eclectic troupe breaks into Maples’ barn-dance moves, the whole stage lights up with their boundless energy and elicits instant admiration for their infectious enthusiasm.

There are standout performances from Robyn Roth and Bethany Koulias as Meredith and Shelley Parker, the mother and daughter who champion then fall in love with their initially caged houseguest, especially notable in the show’s best ballad, “Three Bedroom House.” And although Amir Levi, one of my favorite theys, spends most of the show as we’ve never before seen him wearing costumer Michael Mullen’s most farmery farmerwear while playing one of the agrarian locals, his true dazzling persona emerges in the second act as a deliciously pagan Pan to deliver the showstopping “Children, Children.”

Still, Bat Boy could never work without someone truly dynamic donning those infamous ears in the title role. Ben Raanan proves himself to be a spectacular musical performer, a native Angeleno and recent NYU grad in Vocal Performance whose bio says he’s “moved back to LA to seek out the theatre community here.”

Well, he found us—and we’re the better for it. Rannan smoothly provides the heart and soul of Bat Boy, particularly in his early feral energy which reminded us of our lategreat pug Genji and later after his "civilization" delivering O’Keefe’s hauntingly plaintive “Let Me Walk Among You.”

Of course, none of this would gel without the cleverly frisky staging of Towne, the Hee-Haw-like elbows-and-knees choreography of Maples, as well as the contribution of Mullen’s whimsical costumes, Brad Bentz’ rustic multi-leveled raw wood set design, Brandon Baruch’s lighting plot, and the spirited onstage band led by keyboardist Sean Paxton.

The only issue needing improvement is the sound, with voices often swallowed up into the rafters of the former warehouse—something surely difficult to overcome but can be tamed since other musicals have performed in the same space and made it work.

Still, the star of this modern classic will always be Farley and Flemming’s playfully jocular script and O’Keefe’s nifty lyrics which feature some worldclass unexpected rhymes that overshadow his less-than memorable score.

Then there’s that nagging message hidden among the jokes. I’ve been told recently I’m the only reviewer who could sneak in my personal societal and political dissent while writing about a production of Mary Poppins. I didn’t have to work for that to happen covering Bat Boy: The Musical; it’s all lurking right there as an intellectual aftertaste following your last bite of a state fair funnelcake batter-dipped corndog.

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BACON at Rogue Machine

There has been a slight whiff of controversy surrounding Rogue Machine’s west coast debut of Sophie Swithinbank’s searing Edinburgh Fringe and off-West End award-winning Bacon.

Granted, I had personally been forewarned that experiencing this piece in the Matrix’ living room-sized upstairs Henry Murray Stage could be an unsettling and even harrowing experience—the controversy being that the company should have added some kind of warning label to its announcements and advertising—but still, when asked by director Michael Matthews as I negotiated the stairs back down to the lobby after the performance if I was all right, the only thing that gurgled up from my throat probably sounded as though it came from a wounded animal.

It would be virtually impossible for anyone alive and breathing to not to be triggered by being thrown into the psychological maelstrom of Swithinbank’s 80-minute two-character drama, but for anyone who has survived early sexual abuse in their life, it might just be borderline agonizing.

Designer Stephen Gifford has cleverly transformed the small attic-like playing space above the Matrix mainstage into a cramped London cafe, with blackboard menus on the walls and only a long wooden table and two benches as set pieces. From here, a socially inept young Cockney waiter named Mark (Wesley Guimaraes) tidies up the place as the audience files in, occasionally stopping to help a patron or two find seats or move chairs to offer the best view from one of the makeshift theatre’s three sides.

“This is my story,” he finally begins by addressing us directly, “and I’ve never told it to anyone before so… don’t interrupt… if that’s okay.”

Mark’s story unfolds in two separate time zones: the cafe in the present and four years earlier when he first meets a fellow troubled teen named Darren (Jack Lancaster) when he and his single mother relocate and he begins studies at a new school where hopefully he won't be bullied for his "sensitivity.”

There’s an instantaneous sense of danger when Mark first sees Darren, who exudes trouble just standing quietly across the room. When Lancaster’s Darren moves, he moves with the incongruous grace and tension of a hungry trapped lion and when he speaks, his delivery recalls one of Malcolm MacDowell’s droogs in A Clockwork Orange (and may I offer a shoutout here to dialect coach Tuffet Schmelzle, who definitely knows her stuff).

Although it's quickly apparent this kid isn't someone anyone should feel comfortable approaching, there’s an immediate dance-at-the-gym forbidden attraction between the two young men—and as threatening as Darren may appear to be, he's obviously in desperate need of someone to care about him.

What develops, as Mark’s narrative switches back and forth in time, is anything but healthy and the more intense the boys’ relationship becomes, the more uncomfortable it is to watch it unfold in such close proximity. There are moments it’s almost hard not to instinctively reach out physically and try to stop what’s happening right in front of us, something heightened by the remarkably rich and edgy performances of Guimaraes and Lancaster.

What Swithinbank has forged is one of the most startling and unnerving new works since the early 60s when Edward Bond upended the stodgy London theatrical community when his raw and brutal Saved was widely praised and vilified at the same time, eventually resulting in the end of British censorship and the overreaching chokehold of the culturally powerful Lord Chamberlain’s Office.

The often quite surprisingly poetic Bacon is as equally shocking as Saved but also fully embraces issues of internalized homophobia, agonizing self-hatred, and the disenfranchisement of young people in our society due to the inequities of manufactured class disparities and suppressed sexual orientation.

It would be hard to imagine two actors more skillful at bringing these complex characters to life, right down to their individual abilities to make us fully believe they are teenagers without resorting to overt gimmickry and gee-willikersy deliveries.

Guimaraes is heartbreaking as the vulnerable, introverted Mark, who in a little over an hour goes from a put-together, crisply pressed, agonizingly self-conscious adolescent to a broken, physically diminished young man fighting demons and torn between his feelings of revulsion and temptation.

Lancaster is nothing short of riveting as Darren, the menacing perpetual troublemaker raised in a loveless lower-class home where his drunken father beats the hell out of him on a regular basis.

What these two arresting actors create together is testament to true ensemble performance, bouncing off one another expertly and oddly, beyond the twisted and doomed nature of Mark and Darren’s relationship, managing to generate an unsettling tenderness in their love that leaves us as observers rather uncomfortable about how much, down deep, we want to root for them.

The design aspects of this production are exceptional, transforming a nearly unplayable space into a perfect venue for this in-your-face drama. Kudos to Gifford and sound designer Christopher Moscatiello for adding to the visceral illusion, as well as Joy DeMichelle for intimacy direction and Jen Albert for fight choreography that keeps things strikingly real and, in Albert’s case, downright gladiatorial.

Still, the superglue that holds this all together is almost palpable—and that’s clearly the astonishingly fluid hands-on direction of Matthews, who not only has guided the vitally epochal elements of Sophie Swithinbank’s Bacon to fruition but has staged the action dazzlingly and with almost perceptible confidence in his own boundless creativity.

Matthews bravely utilizes the inherent claustrophobic nature of the space, the lighting and sound, and the actors themselves continuously repositioning the production’s few set pieces, to create pure theatrical magic that leaves its audience moved, exhausted, and nearly—or in my case totally—speechless.

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SWIPE from Playwrights' Arena at the Los Angeles LGBT Center

There are very few times over the last half-century I haven't been grateful to be part of the ambitious and scrappy Los Angeles theatre community where nonstop hard work and a fierce devotion to breaking rules keep our many large and tiny stages delivering wondrous things an astonishing number of weeks in the year. Since the pandemic, attendance at Southland stages has not rushed back, making it even more difficult for our stalwart theatre companies to keep producing.

One of the most prolific and groundbreaking companies in our town is Jon Lawrence Rivera’s Playwrights’ Arena, which for 33 years has brought unforgettable new works to our local stages, not only in traditional settings around the city but performed in outdoor areas in front of converted warehouse stages, in an underground parking lot, and now, with Swipe, their latest startlingly bold and haunting production, in a reconstructed art gallery within the Los Angeles LBGT Center in Hollywood.

Swipe follows a single older gay man as he arrives home to his cramped studio apartment and spends the evening by himself desperately trying to navigate technology and fighting off the demons of loneliness and despair as an outcast in our basically youth-based society. As he makes his frugal dinner, emptying cans from Walmart while watching Little House on the Prairie on cable, his frustrations begin to intensify, eventually leading him to start swiping through dating site photos on his iPhone looking for a quick hook-up to assuage his overpowering anxiety and sense of emptiness.

Conceived and developed by its director Rivera (recipient of my annual TicketHolder Award for Direction last year in a tie with himself), the role is played by a single actor, although during the run four gifted high-profile LA artists will alternate, making it even more an incredibly unique experience. Adding to this uniqueness is the fact that there’s no dialogue whatsoever; it’s a strictly nonverbal performance. The character goes about his evening with the audience scattered around on all sides within what Rivera and his designers brilliantly created and simply call “Apartment 4.”

The concept was loosely based on German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’ 1971 counter-culture play Request Concert, but for me it also invoked an exercise developed by the lategreat Uta Hagan, something I use frequently in the first sessions of my acting classes. The concept is to completely improvise doing all the remote-control activities you would do when you first wake up, including brushing your teeth, smoothing the bedsheets, finding your slippers, petting the dog, whatever is part of your usual routine. It’s an amazing way of opening up a young actor to being in the moment.

For the audience of Swipe, however, although it could rapidly descend into an early Warholian exercise in the boredom of everyday life, luckily the actor I saw portraying the character was a true local treasure, actor-playwright Nick Salamone (above left), one of the most arresting and giving performers I have ever known and appeared opposite. Over the years, Nick has played Ui to my Givola in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for Classical Theatre Lab and Ricky Roma to my Shelley Levene in that Mamet-hole’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

Salamone is heartbreaking here as he thrashes his OCD-hampered way through Apartment 4 like a hungry panther looking for something besides concrete and bars to make his life complete. He makes a sandwich and heats up a bowl of soup in the completely functional kitchen corner of Leah Ramillano’s simple yet affective set, never missing a chance to find each quirky nuance that could identify the guy as easily as a fingerprint. Salamone nudges aside the tiny struggling succulent in the center of his small round dining room table to make room for his meager dinner and to add a small candle, but the minute he finishes eating, he wipes down the table, blows out the candle, and the plant is returned dead center to its original position—something that instantly makes the space his own.

I would love to return and see the other three actors, Ralph Cole Jr., Dan Guerrero, and Reggie Lee, following the same general track. I’m sure all three veteran performers bring something to the role individual to them not only emotionally but, according to Rivera, each actor provides his own music to listen to, his own choice of TV show to turn on, his own bedclothes and trickwear to change into. Salamone opens his own mail upon arriving home and, finding a child's drawing among the bills, he attaches it to the refrigerator door with a convenient magnet.

I’m grateful I had the opportunity to see this guy in the role. Salamone’s intensity and Beckettian timing are fascinating to be behold and we are easily drawn into the man’s anguish as we watch him carefully fold and unfold his clothing, replace that hopeless plant, and retrieve condoms from below the socks in his dresser drawer to make them more convenient after someone online has obviously agreed to stop by for a little anonymous rendezvous.

This is certainly a kind of risky and defiant theatre we usually don't see presented and it’s breathtaking how much we can learn from the experience and how this one man’s grief affects us personally. I for one always feel somewhat naïve about how a person goes through life alone. Although I have many friends who prefer to be single, I have literally never been alone myself. Since coming of age many decades ago when the dinosaurs still roamed the streets, the trajectory of my relationships has gone from girlfriend to boyfriend to another boyfriend to my baby mamma to another boyfriend to my wife to the partner for whom I am still a caregiver to a girl with benefits to a guy with benefits and finally, to the love of my life.

I’ve often wondered if being alone could at least occasionally be as empty and traumatic as it is for this character yet I can also say, as someone who has never been without a partner in crime and in life, that sometimes even for two people who are together there can be a collective loneliness that can fall upon each of us like an enveloping shroud.

I was extremely moved and totally mesmerized by Jon Rivera‘s remarkable Swipe which, especially when partnered with his fearless longtime collaborator Nick Salamone, became so real over the course of the 80-minute running time that at one point, as the character took to his bed to try to quiet his yammy-yammies, I had an impulse to call out, “Alexa, play waves in sleep sounds.” That always works for me.

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HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

When a letter arrives to the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. from a gentleman who says he has a photo album he’s kept suppressed for 60 years featuring members of the Third Reich and citizen employees of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp appearing to have a wonderful time in their off-duty hours, historian Rebecca Erbelding (Delia Cunningham) almost passes it over, skeptical that the photos are what the potential donor suggests. “That’s the thing about history,” she admits, “Not all of it is knowable.”

Thankfully, Erbelding decided to investigate the offer further. Very few photos had ever surfaced taken at the Nazis’ most productive death camp but Erbelding’s curiosity persisted and what soon after arrived in her office was something that made headlines around the world. It was a well-cared for album filled with candid images revealing disturbing details about the people it caught forever in time, a disquieting chronicle of their clear collective avoidance of the ugly reality happening around them, the often celebratory daily lives of the murderers of six million people and their willing enablers.

“The frontier between good and evil,” Melita Maschmann, former head of press and propaganda for the BDM (played by LA-based theatrical treasure Jeanne Sakata) testifies, “can run straight through people without our being aware of it.”

Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich’s jarring Here There Are Blueberries chronicles the discovery of these photos marking the darkest side lurking deep within every member of our species, a photographic record of how we tend to look the other way while power-mad monsters achieve their horrific goals by playing upon our suppressed need to feel superior to others.

“We have to look for ourselves in every picture,” Erbelding explains to the Wallis’ rapt audience, as Kaufman and Gronich’s urgently important Pulitzer Prize finalist debuts here for a far too short run.

Everything about this production, as with Kaufman and his highly acclaimed Tectonic Theater Project’s previous masterworks The Laramie Project, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, is based on real events, a majority of the text coming directly from interviews with the real people depicted in the story, as well as transcripts and court testimonies, all accompanied by huge projections of the authentic photos themselves.

“This album portrays the world the Nazis envisioned,” observes Erbelding’s superior Judy Cohen (Barbara Pitts), "the world they wanted to live in, a world in which there were no Jewish people or any other so-called ‘undesirables’,' only the victors.”

Among the most perplexing of the collection is a photo of a group of young teenage girls who worked in the camp’s administrative offices, seated in a line on a fence or along a wall holding bowls of fruit. The beautifully handwritten caption below it read, “Hier girt es blaubeeren” or “Here there are blueberries.” They each look like incredibly happy, carefree kids having a swell time, as do many other images of the camp’s bosses and most appreciated of their workers enjoying vacation time at Solahutte, the resort built adjacent to Auschwitz along the Sola River. In the middle of the group of girls sits Kurt Hocker, the assistant to Auschwitz’ SS commandant Richard Baer and believed to be the creator of the photo album itself.

After the war, most of these young women testified they had no idea what was going on elsewhere in this camp but history has proven this was not the truth. These cheerful, fresh-faced youngsters enjoying fruit grown on the banks of the river were responsible for, among other duties, ordering the gas that dispatched the 1.1 million “undesirables” killed at Auschwitz.

Everything about this presentation is emotionally devastating and so very timely, especially the “What would you have done?” nature of the tale. How Kaufman as director has brought all the elements together and has orchestrated the mechanics of the projected images and the characters’ interactions with them makes Blueberries a mesmerizing, indelible experience in ways it’s almost impossible to fathom, made even more galvanizing by eight superlative performances by a knockout ensemble of actors who skillfully morph from one character to another.

Cunningham, Sakata, and Pitts are particular standouts, as is Marrick Smith as the haunted grandson of Rudolf Hoess, known as the architect of the camp and administrator of its deadly mission. The entire ensemble is worthy of great praise in their ability to tell their story with remarkable understatement, letting the actual words of these basically ordinary people make the major impact—truthfully not an easy task when the storytelling could so easily become theatricalized.

As Judy Cohen almost casually observes in her conclusions studying these eerily prophetic photos of relaxing and smiling normal-appearing people who were systematically transformed into unrepentant mass murderers, “People who want to build empires cannot afford to be squeamish.”

Sitting in the audience at the Wallis as our own country crashes and burns at the hands of a sick man intent on destroying everything we as a people stand for as he fiddles our morality away and designs his best TV bites, the parallel smacking us in our too often complacent faces watching Here There Are Blueberries unfold could not be apparent.

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CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND at East West Players

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ALABASTER at the Fountain Theatre

In all my years writing theatre criticism, I’ve made it a rule not to read other reviews until after I’d written my own. This policy changed for me at the beginning of 2024 when I returned as a member of the LA Drama Critics Circle and found one of the new features since my departure from the group 17 years earlier is an online private weekly listing where members can make a brief statement about their support—or lack of it—for the productions they’re covering.

It has surprised me since then how contrasting our opinions often are but at no time have I been in such a drastic antithetical position from my learned colleagues then concerning comments about Audrey Cefaly’s Alabaster, now in its LA debut at the Fountain. This is the reason I’ve explained this polarity of opinion, since several of my peers at the LADCC, folks whose views I greatly respect, loved this production—one even listing it as a priority for other members to potentially check out.

I want to acknowledge here that I seem to be the only critic in town to have mostly negative thoughts about Alabaster. The conundrum might be explained partially by director Casey Stangl’s clumsy and artificial staging and her glaring ineffectiveness guiding performances to ring true—or perhaps the culprit could be the fact that I attended the Sunday matinee performance of the show in what is almost always a dreaded second week slump and found myself to be, at age 78, perhaps the second youngest audience member (my partner being the first) in attendance.

Or maybe the problem might have been exacerbated by the fact that at the intimate Fountain we were seated literally two feet from the bed where about 90% of the action claustrophobically unfolds. Where other writers found the performances of the two actors inhabiting the bed to be, and I quote, “remarkable,” “charismatic,” and “convincing,” I felt in such close proximity they seemed ready for a few days off.

For me, both Virginia Newcomb and Erin Pineda (whose work I’ve long admired) as potential lovers June and Alice could have basically called in their performances from home this time. For me, there wasn’t a moment of real connection that passed between them, making the blossoming relationship between the lost and needy characters feel disconnected and completely one note—that one note being obviously gifted actors resorting to perpetually pained expressions to tell their story.

With shoutouts to Alison Brummer’s exceptionally unsettling lighting (meant as a good thing), Andrea Allmond’s crashing sound design, and Ly Eisenstein’s evocative Saul Bass-inspired videos, I also have to admit I found Frederica Nascimemto’s set a true puzzlement, with that aforementioned bed dominating what is presented as June’s cramped bedroom, leaving Newcomb and Pineda stuck awkwardly navigating an oddly constricting playing area while virtually the entire other half of the stage, depicting the barnyard of June’s family farm, stays almost entirely unused throughout the play.

More successful are Carolyn Messina and Laura Gardner, who have the even more difficult task of playing the farm’s resident goats—and yes, you read that right: goats.

Messina is actually quite successful making the cranky but compassionate Weezy come to life as the inexplicably evolved domestic capra hircus who does yoga, eats couscous out of a takeout box, and has the uncanny ability to, between bleats, address the audience directly and converse quite eloquently with June.

Gardner, as Weezy’s dottery and ancient (nonverbal) mother Bib, has a lovely moment near the end that proved to be the most poignant and unforced passage in the entire play—although I did almost expect a huge tire to descend from above and carry Bib away while she belted out a heartfelt rendition of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Memory.”

Although I appreciated the dark humor of Audrey Cefaly’s script and am always ready to get lost in imaginative and skewed explorations into bending reality onstage, the promising magical aspects and quirkiness never gels with the subject of indescribable trauma and healing by finding someone who can (here literally) embrace one’s emotional and physical scars.

Again, maybe it was a second Sunday afternoon slide in Alabaster's run that took the performers off their game and kept me from appreciating what could have been moving study of redemption and the healing power of love.

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NOISES OFF at the Geffen Playhouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT at the Mark Taper Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EVANSTON SALT COSTS CLIMBING at the Rogue Machine Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SLEEPING GIANT at the Road Theatre Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DEATH OF A SALESMAN at the Colony Theatre

If any critic in any discipline takes pleasure in writing a negative review, in my opinion they should find another vocation. I’m lucky the last eight years to host my own website, since in my many years writing for Back Stage, Entertainment Today, and other publications, I was usually assigned plays rather than having the ability to choose what I wanted to cover. These days I have the luxury of choosing things I am almost certain I will enjoy supporting.

Such was definitely the case given the opportunity to attend this new mounting of Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 classic Death of a Salesman at the Colony featuring veteran film actor Joe Cortese in the coveted role of Willy Loman and the always luminous Frances Fisher as his long-suffering wife Linda. I was extremely excited to kick off what I’m still confident will be another banner year in theatrical achievement for Los Angeles with what I was sure would be a guaranteed artistic milestone.

To say that this Death is deadly would be more than an understatement. How I would have loved to be able to say only wonderful things but unfortunately, under the somnambulant direction of Mark Blanchard, the result is more the death of a classic. It’s hard to imagine what enticed Cortese and Fisher to be a part of this; he is a sturdy veteran performer with an incredibly prestigious resume of film roles and Fisher is simply one of my favorite actors on the planet, a distinction she has confirmed over and over again, both in film and on LA stages.

The glaring problem is the casting of Cortese and Fisher in the first place, both of whom are at least a generation beyond the age where they can be believable as the Lomans. Willy is said to be 63, which makes his descent into dementia and his problems keeping his job and paying his bills heartbreaking, and Linda, we’re told, has “not yet reached 50.” It’s hard to imagine why Cortese’s continuously mumbling Willy hadn’t retired long ago and when their son Biff (Cronin Cullen) repeatedly calls his mother “Pal,” it seems the affectionate term MeeMaw would be more appropriate.

With the notable exceptions of Cullen and Robert Smythe as his brother Happy, the rest of the cast is almost embarrassingly inadequate to be supporting such major stars. Paul Ganus as the ghost of Willy‘s brother Ben, clad in an oddly ill-fitting white linen suit, delivers all his lines in a cartoon-like bluster as he struts onstage in each entrance pounding his ever-present cane on the stage floor for attention—and occasionally seeming as though lifted from a production of Noises Off as he has trouble finding his special spectral spotlight.

Gary Hudson as Willy’s neighbor Charlie turns in a far better performance if only he didn’t feel the need to turn out to the audience with each line he deems important, but perhaps the most outrageously what-was-he-thinking performance comes from Brian Guest, first in his depiction of Charlie’s young son Bernard and later in a bizarre cameo as the waiter in the play’s pivotal restaurant scene. As the awkward teenager, he utilizes every comedic caricature trait except wearing a beanie with a propeller on top and later as Stanley, he appears to be paying homage to early Dan Aykroyd at his silliest. As Willy and his sons sit in the café having a serious conversation, Guest upstages the action entering with a crooked walk and facial expressions to match, looking a bit like Beldar without his cone. Where was a director here when he was so desperately needed?

Actually, 90% of this production’s failures land firmly on the shoulders of Blanchard‘s indulgent direction, with staging that is not only clumsy but often unplayable—as when Ganus stands stage center staring into the abyss while totally obliterating an important scene between Willy and Linda taking place directly behind him on a staircase—but more importantly, how he let his players flounder and resort to search inappropriate measures on their own is truly puzzling.

Every actor, including those as gifted as Cortese and Fisher, needs a directorial eye, something that is simply nowhere to be found here. Even the choice to lift a crudely constructed papier-mâché tombstone out of the stage floor complete with wrinkled corners or decorating Ben’s briefcase with glittery stickers from the Party Store are clueless, but to let Fisher hug a post that represents a solid wall on Justin Huen’s abstract set as she talks about how much she loves her home is downright unconscionable.

Cortese, who has obviously never been counseled to help find a character arc, delivers his lines so slowly and indistinctly throughout that it’s hard to care what happens to the poor guy, especially since his performance adds about 15 extra minutes to an already disastrously indulgent production. He comes off more like a geriatric mafia don rather than a failing everyman lamenting the loss of his own personal American dream—and when Willy makes his final decision how to deal with his future, Cortese shuffles offstage as slowly as he moves throughout the rest of the three-plus hour performance and within seconds, a crash is heard when it’s hard to imagine he even had time to get into his car.

The only reason to see this production is to experience the wonder that is Frances Fisher from her earliest scenes to Linda’s final heart-wrenching monologue but sadly, what could’ve been a brilliant performance is also hampered by the decision to continuously hit us over the head showing the era’s treatment of women, something overemphasized by Linda always entering carrying an omnipresent laundry basket or opening her sewing kit to perform her housewifely chores. We get it, okay? More than that, without encouragement and guidance from a better director to show us the character’s inner strength and resiliency, even the brilliant Fisher is left swimming upstream.

It pains me greatly not to have better things to say about this Death of a Salesman but unfortunately, it truly is a production that almost made me angry to have to sit through.

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