Two new musicals, both produced first in Chicago and both based on early 20th century literary creations, opened West Coast premieres last weekend. I’ll take Adding Machine over Loving Repeating.
Adding Machine: A Musical, at the Odyssey Theatre, is a sharply jagged musical version of Elmer Rice’s famous 1923 play about the hen-pecked wage slave Mr. Zero. On the occasion of his 25th anniversary as a human adding machine, Zero expects a promotion, but instead he’s replaced by an inhuman adding machine, prompting him to murder his supervisor. After he’s executed for his crime, he finds himself in a surprisingly benevolent afterlife. But he’s almost as much of a misfit there as he was before he died, and soon he’s on his way back to start over on the planet he despises.
Clifford Morts, Kelly Lester in ADDING MACHINE. Photo by Ron Sossi.
The bleak irony and liberating expressionism of this play must have shocked the complacency of the pre-Depression, pre-Wilder, pre-Brecht Broadway. Even today this musical is eye-opening – literally, in that it’s hard to imagine anyone falling asleep during it, and figuratively, in that it seems readymade for today’s depressingly depleted workplaces.
Joshua Schmidt’s score maintains an unsettled and unsettling sound almost from beginning to end, the primary exception being a conventional-sounding love solo for Zero’s workplace colleague and would be-mistress Daisy, “I’d Rather Watch You,” which sounds like a sop to those who want to be able to hum at least one tune after they leave the theater. The libretto was adapted by Schmidt with Jason Loewith, who relates in a program note that he got his professional start at the Odyssey in the early ‘90s.
The Odyssey’s artistic director Ron Sossi directs with his usual vigor. Clifford Morts makes sure that his Mr.Zero – so sad-sack at first, as Mrs. Zero (Kelly Lester) berates him – explodes into a pugnacious ball of rage as the full dimensions of his fate become known to him. His singing, smooth and controlled at some moments, becomes raspy and strained, as his life and his afterlife become more strained. Lester is a convincing shrew and Christine Horn a sad and ultimately heartbreaking Daisy, although believing that she would “rather watch” Mr. Zero, instead of her male colleagues closer to her own age, is a stretch.
Charles Erven’s set looks a little budget-constrained, but did I detect a sign of Sossi’s interest in eastern religion and the idea of reincarnation in the form of the big green hoop that dominates center stage?
Loving Repeating, a Musical of Gertrude Stein, at International City Theatre, also deals with circularity, and it has a much prettier set, as well as prettier singing of a prettier score – it’s one pretty production, as staged by caryn desai. It’s also pretty innocuous and annoying.
Gertrude Stein’s poetry is not the reason most people find her fascinating. They’re more interested by her role as the openly lesbian doyenne of the Lost Generation between the world wars than they are by her little experiments in poetic form.
Yet Frank Galati seems to have been much more intrigued by her poetry – and the idea of adapting it into lyrics – than he was by her inherently dramatic life. His adaptation, set to music by Stephen Flaherty of Ragtime fame, purports to show how her life was reflected in her poetry and vice versa, but her largely incoherent and dimension-free poetry tends to dominate the stage at the expense of her strikingly contoured biography.
The title itself – Loving Repeating – signals the problem. Most theatergoers don’t love extreme repetition in the theater. “A rose is a rose is a rose” is interesting enough, for maybe a minute or two, but an entire production filled with this kind of language is, well, boring. Only near the end of Galati’s script, with a few puns on the word “gay” and reflections on mortality, does the script dip ever so slightly beneath the shiny surface.
The last couple of seasons at International City have been fascinating—in 2009, I called ICT’s season one of LA’s best and most challenging, but 2010’s seemed more carefully designed to appeal to broader tastes. Loving Repeating is an odd hybrid—it won’t alienate the masses with its overall mood, which is almost relentlessly upbeat, but it might well scare audiences off because of its relentlessly abstract form. By contrast, Adding Machine: A Musical is a downer in its mood but downright gripping in its form.
Adding Machine: A Musical, Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West LA. Thur-Sat 8 pm; Sun 2 pm except Feb. 27 at 7 pm. Closes March 20. 310-477-2055. www.odysseytheatre.com.
Loving Repeating, International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thur-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Closes Feb. 13. 562-436-4610. www.InternationalCityTheatre.org.
A group of strangers gathers in a room for a form of therapy. Two productions build on that premise in very different ways.
Circle Mirror Transformation, at South Coast Repertory, is Annie Baker’s almost microscopic look at the creative drama class offered by a small-town Vermont community center. It requires very little suspension of disbelief, under Sam Gold’s lucid direction and with a terrific cast of five. The audience knows what’s going on here most of the time, in even the silences.
As satire, Baker’s play can’t match Land of the Tigers, LA’s own recent dramatization of people gathered for a drama class. But although Circle Mirror Transformation certainly garners a few laughs, satire clearly wasn’t Baker’s goal.
Linda Gehringer and Brian Kerwin in CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION. Photo by Scott Brinegar.
Baker explains it well in her author’s note in the script: “Without its silences, this play is a satire, and with its silences it is, hopefully, a strange little naturalistic meditation on theater and life and death and the passing of time.” While it might be of particular interest to theater people, “life and death and the passing of time” are subjects that should interest just about anyone.
In Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble’s Group: A Musical, at the Powerhouse, the strangers gather for actual therapy, not for drama instruction that transforms into therapy. But they get drama, in spades. This particular group has a strange twist—they’re encouraged to sing instead of talk. Everyone knows that music can express emotions that might be difficult to simply speak, so this therapist urges everyone to sing out. And he has provided a three-piece band to facilitate the process.
Suspension of disbelief is all-important here, more so even than in most musicals in which people suddenly start singing their feelings. In those musicals, most of us learn not to dwell on the artificiality of the convention, but here, extemporaneous singing is an explicitly stated part of the process—and therefore hard to boot out of your brain.
This process inevitably makes us wonder whether performance anxiety would make these characters feel more even more self-conscious and inhibited. If they’re worrying about how their singing and their rhyming is going, can their expressions be truly genuine? Does the therapist somehow know in advance that they can at least carry a tune – wouldn’t it be embarrassing if they couldn’t? Doesn’t the presence of the musicians, who speak hardly a word, raise additional ethical questions? Of course at the same time, we realize that the characters are being played by actors who have memorized their lines.
If you can get past all that, most of the characters are somewhat intriguing, and writer Adam Emperor Southard (who also composed, with Josh Allan Dykstra) has given them an ample, perhaps excessive, load of repressed problems, as well as conflicts among members of the group. Before the show moves on to its next production, the creators should re-think the wisdom of giving one member of the group a terminal illness.
I’d like to see that next production, however. In a world of American Idol wannabes and karaoke bars, the concept might not be far-fetched as it initially seems, and admittedly the musical textures can add variety and life to what otherwise might sound like endless kvetching and whining.
Circle Mirror Transformation, South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Nightly, 7:45 pm, Saturday and Sunday matinees 2 pm. Closes Sunday. 714-708-5555. www.scr.org.
Group: A Musical. Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Tonight-Sat 8pm. Closes Saturday. www.latensemble.com.
