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CTG’s LA Content Continues Its Disappearing Act…And Critic Turns Performer in CTG’s Elephant Room

by Don Shirley | August 27, 2012

Not long ago, Center Theatre Group vowed, via its website, to produce theater that “reflects and informs our own community” through “stories inspired on our own streets” and through “collaboration with other Los Angeles theatres and ensembles.”

Change of plans. That pledge has disappeared from the website.

I had quoted those lines, and linked to them, in three LA STAGE Watch columns since January 2010 (here, here and here), and I had planned to do so again today, in my third annual LA STAGE Watch analysis of the LA orientation of CTG’s latest announced seasons.

But when I looked for those noble-sounding lines on the CTG website within the past two days, I couldn’t find them. They were on a page that was headlined “Artistic Vision.”  But now, when I use the CTG’s website to search for those lines, nothing comes up. When I click the once-active links from my own articles, I’m told “page not found.” [Update: after today's post first appeared, a helpful reader found the now-dead web page I was looking for on a website that finds old pages and sent me a copy.]

I wasn’t the only one quoting those lines. So did the Cultural Events in Los Angeles website. If you go to the bottom of that site’s web page about CTG’s Ahmanson Theatre’s 2012-13 season, you’ll find those same lines quoted — right under the information about the new season.

CTG announced that 2012-13 Ahmanson season just last May 30. So when I saw the phrases in question on this other website, I wondered if perhaps those words were taken from the CTG website as recently as May. Then again, perhaps the Cultural Events in Los Angeles website was simply re-running them from a previous post. However, I found yet another web page that quoted the same phrases in a summary of what happens at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, just last January.

Susan Pourfar, Gayle Rankin, Jeff Perry and Russell Harvard in the NY premiere of Nina Raine’s “Tribes.” Photo by Gregory Costanzo.

But now, with new seasons announced at all three of CTG’s venues, it’s crystal clear that CTG programming continues to blatantly contradict the message that used to be conveyed on the CTG website about the company’s intent to “reflect…our own community” and tell “stories inspired on our own streets.” So apparently someone at CTG figured those words might just as well exit the CTG website.

Let’s look at those seasons.

The majority of the just-announced 2013 season at CTG’s flagship, the Mark Taper Forum, consists of three plays set in the British/Irish isles — two by British writers (Nina Raine’s 2010 Tribes and a revival of the 1967 Joe Orton comedy What the Butler Saw), plus The Steward of Christendom, a 1995 play by Sebastian Barry, set in Ireland in the 1930s and earlier.

Of the other two 2012-13 Taper plays, the Chicago-born and Chicago-premiered A Parallellogram apparently takes place in a time-traveling but not-especially-distinct American location, while the revival of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is set in Pittsburgh more than a century ago.

Tracie Bennett in “End of the Rainbow.” Photo by Carol Rosegg.

The upcoming Ahmanson season also has a propensity for English settings, with Backbeat, a new musical about the early Beatles, and End of the Rainbow — which is about a Hollywood star, Judy Garland, but is set in London. The other Ahmanson productions aren’t set in the UK, but they’re set in locales far from LA or even the West — Seminar on the Upper West Side of New York, Anything Goes on a transatlantic voyage decades ago, The Scottsboro Boys in 1930s Alabama, and Fela! in Nigeria.

The Kirk Douglas Theatre season includes two plays by LA-based playwrights — Jennifer Haley’s The Nether and Marco Ramirez’s The Royale. The former is set in cyberspace but no particular other location, while the latter is about the boxing champion Jack Johnson, who occasionally boxed in LA as well as many other cities. I don’t know whether LA will be mentioned in it, but I doubt it.

LA is briefly mentioned in the current Elephant Room at the Douglas, in the way that comics or magicians who travel to many cities mention a few local references just to tailor their act to each particular crowd. The script purposely mangles the name of one famous local landmark — “Mann’s Chinese Restaurant” — probably in order to demonstrate the ineptitude of these three New Jersey-and-Arizona-based magician characters in the pandering department.

The other Douglas plays are Krapp’s Last Tape and the English-language version of Neva — don’t look for local content in either of these — and a Second City version of A Christmas Carol, which, as in Elephant Room, just might have a few local comments along with the comedy.

Trinidad Gonzalez, Jorge Becker and Mariana Munoz in Teatro en el Blancos production of “Neva,” last year at the RADAR L.A. festival at REDCAT. Photo by Valentina Newman.

So the Douglas comes closer to having a little LA content than the other two theaters, but it’s on a very superficial level.

By contrast, LA content does seem to count for something in one, publicly obscure corner of CTG. That’s CTG’s New Play Production Program. In the program’s fall 2011 newsletter, CTG literary manager Pier Carlo Talenti wrote about three CTG play commissions that sound extremely substantive and extremely local:

“As part of an initiative we’ve titled ‘On the Brink: Three Plays Explore 21st Century California,’ we recently commissioned three Los Angeles-based playwrights to write plays on themes specifically assigned to them. Laural Meade will write a play about the precipitous decline of California’s public school system in the space of one generation; Dan O’Brien will explore how a state with such an astonishing GDP perpetually teeters on the brink of financial collapse; and Evangeline Ordaz will examine the demographic shifts that continually redefine and question the very meaning of the term ‘minority’ in the state.

“We’ve enhanced the commissions with a research stipend that will allow each playwright to conduct her inquiry as she wishes — e.g., honoraria to experts, travel to Sacramento, audio-recording equipment for interviews, etc.”

Kate Arrington and Marylouise Burke in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of “A Parallelogram.” Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Well, that’s impressive. But it would be even more impressive if any of these projects — which have apparently been in the works for at least a year — had materialized into a dramatically successful production on one of the three upcoming seasons. While the topics of these commissions might have some resonances beyond California, surely their greatest resonance would be right here with Los Angeles audiences. Of course, I don’t know how these commissions turned out, or even whether they’ve turned out yet. But if one of them isn’t scheduled soon for a production, continuing developments in these newsworthy fields might require even more research and more rewrites, and they could go into developmental hell –  if they aren’t there already.

Developmental hell is precisely what Michael Ritchie aimed to avoid when he took over CTG and abandoned the organization’s previous labs, which were mostly ethnic-specific. We were told that Ritchie liked to develop plays by committing to actual productions. We saw one such production with Southern California content, Los Otros, just last June at the Taper. But it wasn’t created by Southern Californians, and in fact half of it had been created for a New York production four years ago. An earlier commission, a play set in LA’s porn industry, was also being created primarily by New Yorkers, the Civilians, but it still hasn’t seen the light of day.

If these particular commissions don’t pan out, Ritchie shouldn’t simply give up on finding productions with local content. But that’s precisely what appears to have happened with the seasons that were just announced. Each one of the theaters should have at least one production per season with an undisputed local flavor.

Should we count it as progress that the upcoming seasons at least appear to be less New York-oriented than some of Ritchie’s recent seasons? Not if London has simply replaced New York. Two years ago I wrote that CTG apparently was an acronym for “Center Theatre Gotham,” but now it looks as if it might be morphing into CTGB — “Center Theatre Great Britain.”

Of course even without the language on the CTG website about how CTG “reflects” its community and tells “stories inspired on our own streets,” CTG still calls itself “LA’s Theatre Company” as part of its basic logo. In the program for Elephant Room I was handed last night, I counted 13 references to CTG as “LA’s Theatre Company.”

But if CTG isn’t going to reflect LA any more than it does in the coming season, then why not retire the “LA’s Theatre Company” designation, too? Some other company that’s more interested in reflecting its community and presenting stories inspired on the streets of LA might also be interested in taking over that promotional handle.

 

Dennis Diamond in “Elephant Room”

SPEAKING OF ELEPHANT ROOM, I was sitting in the Kirk Douglas Theatre last night, watching this three-man comedy/magic show. The trio was completing a shtick involving references to the Dalai Lama. One of them crumpled up a piece of paper bearing the Dalai Lama’s image and threw it into the audience. Whoever caught it was instructed to throw it farther back, and then the second catcher was told to toss it again, and likewise the third catcher — who threw the crumpled paper up in a way that made it veer to her left. At that point, without any effort on my part to catch it, the crumpled paper simply landed in my lap. And I was immediately told by Louie Magic (Steve Cuiffo) to please stand.

In shows that involve audience participation, I’ve often wondered if the performers have been told where critics are sitting so as to avoid selecting them. After all, critics are there to observe the show, not to actively participate in it.

In this case, however, the course of the crumpled paper appeared to be completely random. Even if the third catcher had known who I was (and I don’t think she did), she certainly didn’t aim at me when she threw. It just happened to land in my lap.

For a half-second, I considered thrusting it into the lap of the total stranger who was on my right. But I certainly didn’t want to make any public remarks about how I, as a critic, felt that it would be improper for me to become part of the show — such remarks would have made me an even bigger part of the show. So when Louie told me to stand, I did so — and soon, I found Daryl Hannah (Trey Lyford) standing beside me with a live mic.

Louie asked my name. I wasn’t eager to identify myself, and I felt well within my rights not to do so, because included with my ticket was a little note written to critics politely asking if we could “preserve the illusion that the magicians [with their stage names] are real people” instead of identifying them by their real names — Cuiffo, Lyford and Geoff Sobelle.

So I responded with the name “Lama,” as in Dalai — perhaps because it was the first name that occurred to me, given the circumstances, and perhaps because I figured it might allow the Dalai Lama shtick to go on a little while longer. Of course, in retrospect, I realized I don’t have the requisite skills to do improv as the Dalai Lama.

Louie Magic, Dennis Diamond and Daryl Hannah

At any rate, the name “Lama” hardly registered with Cuiffo. I wasn’t even sure he had heard it, so I briefly switched to “Dalai” before finally giving up my half-baked attempt to improvise and resorting to my real name, “Don.” Louie asked me where I was from. I responded with the name of the LA neighborhood I live in, but there was no flicker of recognition, and we simply moved on.

Louie then asked me to think of someone who had “transformed” me in some way. I thought of my wife and daughter, neither of whom was there. But to drag their names into this show without their permission seemed a small violation of their privacy. Then it struck me — two weeks earlier, I had found out that six months before that, my high school drama teacher Jay Dean Jones had died. As the man who, more than anyone else, introduced me to theater, he had indeed “transformed” my life. And as he is no longer among the living, he probably wouldn’t mind if I used his name. In fact, it would be my little way of remembering him in public.

When Louie asked me if I had come up with someone, I said yes. Was I picturing this person in my mind? “OK,” I replied, which drew a little laugh. Louie directed me to write the first name of this completely unknown person, whom he oddly enough referred to as “a young lady,” on a piece of paper. Daryl Hannah, standing next to me, handed me a piece of paper and a marker and I wrote “Jay” on it.

The show’s third character, Dennis Diamond (Sobelle), standing next to Louie, then wrote something on a piece of paper and folded it — after which Louie asked me to utter the name I had written. “Jay,” I disclosed. Dennis unfolded his paper, and there in bold letters was the name “Jay.”

Magic! The audience was duly appreciative.

Louie Magic, Daryl Hannah and Dennis Diamond

As for me, I found myself halfway distracted throughout the rest of the show. I hadn’t felt any butterflies while I was contributing to the act — there wasn’t enough time for them to flutter into my body before I had to “perform.” But I must not have been as relaxed as I thought I was, because as soon as I sat down, I felt a pain in my lower back, as if it had tensed up during the performance — and, now that I was seated again, the pain emerged.

The pain ended soon enough, but half of my brain kept spinning. How had I done? Had I seemed calm and clever? It was lame for me to try to keep the Lama shtick going — after all, it wasn’t my act to control. Why had I mentioned the name of the neighborhood where I live? Did I want to encourage visitors?  When I tell this story to my wife, would she be annoyed that I hadn’t chosen her name? (She wasn’t, later in the evening).

How had the trick worked? Did Daryl Hannah, standing next to me, see what I had written and have some way of communicating it to Dennis Diamond? Why hadn’t I watched him more closely?

Meanwhile, the other half of my brain kept watching the rest of the show. When I read the script this morning, I remembered almost all of it, but I did miss one rather important line, perhaps because I was thinking too much about my own “performance.”

At any rate, because I was a small part of the show, I don’t feel I’m in the right position to comment on it as a critic. Which actually might be what the performers hope for — they certainly don’t want critics to give away any of their secrets (by the way, there are a few double meanings in the last part of the show about “secrets” that might cause a few parents to question whether they want their kids to see it).

In case you’re wondering, on the page of the script that describes my part of the performance, it does not say that Dennis writes the name “JAY” on a piece of paper. Now, that would have been truly spooky.

Elephant Room, Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Tue-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-628-2772.

***All Elephant Room production photos by Scott Suchman/Arena Stage

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Three Men Walk Into an Elephant Room. Or Is It Six?

by Larry Pontius | August 24, 2012

Louie Magic, Dennis Diamond and Daryl Hannah in "Elephant Room"

Editor’s Note: Steve Cuiffo, Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford created “Elephant Room,” opening Sunday under Center Theatre Group auspices at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. The three men also play the show’s three roles — Louie Magic (Cuiffo), Dennis Diamond (Sobelle) and Daryl Hannah (Lyford). In interviews, including the one that follows, Cuiffo, Sobelle and Lyford continue playing their fictional characters, Sacha Baron Cohen-style, and refer to themselves in the third person.

Sometimes suspension of disbelief spills out of the theater.  And so it is when interviewing the cast of Elephant Room, the first show of the season at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.  It is an interview where fact and fiction intermingle and where the truth might be somewhere in there”¦ if that’s even important.

Louie Magic, Daryl Hannah and Dennis Diamond

Featuring Louie Magic, Dennis Diamond, and Daryl Hannah (no, not that one) and created by Steve Cuiffo, Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford, Elephant Room is a comedy about three semi-professional magicians who meet in a basement rec room to practice their craft. It explores childlike wonder, undeserved self-confidence and the mystery of the Elephant Room itself.  Ultimately, as Louie Magic says, “It’s about bringing magic to the people.”

Lyford and Sobelle are co-artistic directors of rainpan 43, a performance art group dedicated to creating absurdist, actor-driven material.  Lyford is also a member of the Civilians and a winner of the Princess Grace Award.  Sobelle has been a member of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron since 2001, and he also studied physical theater at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France. The two of them performed their all wear bowlers at the Kirk Douglas in 2005.

Cuiffo, with a background in sleight of hand and theater, joins the group, with credits that include work at St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Wooster Group and at the New York Theatre Workshop.

But it’s the cast of characters that dominate the show — three magicians who may or may not have been conjured up.  The trio is an eclectic group of personalities.

Trey Lyford aka Daryl Hannah

Daryl Hannah is an easygoing, mullet-haired man who seems to be the shaman of the group — not interested in only stage magic, but also the magic that binds us all together.  Hannah says,   “For me magic is the word. No matter how it’s done or what you’re doing, you’re trying to connect to the magic of the universe.”

Dennis Diamond, the mentalist of the group, a proud Gemini who loves to cook, speaks softly with a direct gaze.  And then there’s Louie Magic, who likes to call himself “Ladies Man Magic” — he hails from Paterson, NJ and focuses on slight of hand, up-close magic. He has a regular gig doing comedy magic at Dazzles in New Jersey.

They claim the group came together in Buffalo, NY at a meeting of the Society of American Magicians.  Diamond recalls, “They’re not based in Buffalo, it’s a national assembly, but we have a convention once a year.  In 2009″¦”Â  He checks with the others, and then continues, “Back when, a few years ago, the convention was in Buffalo.”

Magic jumps in, “And that’s where writers Geoff, Trey and Steve came in and met us.  They were at the Buffalo convention doing recon.  Saw our acts”¦They had the idea to put us together.”Â  Apparently, the three magicians had been aware of each other for years, but had never performed together, as each has a different style and specialties.

The group points out that it’s rare for an act to consist of three magicians, the normal being one or two.  As Hannah says, “It’s not like Siegfried, Roy and Charlie.  Or Penn and Teller and Nathan.”

Louie Magic, Daryl Hannah and Dennis Diamon in the 2009 workshop of "Next Stop Amazingland." Photo by Craig Schwartz.

That is, of course, one version of history.  Another version — after a successful run of all wear bowlers, Sobelle and Lyford proposed to CTG a show called Dicks, the Magical, with the addition of Cuiffo into the mix.  Diamond disagrees with this particular point. “Kirk Douglas did commission the piece,” he recalls. “Kirk called me.”

Over the next few years, the trio developed the work, studying various magic tricks and creating the characters.  Retitled Next Stop Amazingland, the piece had four performances as a part of DouglasPlus Presentations in 2009.  Following that, director Paul Lazar was added for a CTG-produced workshop in New York City.  Diamond interjects about Lazar, “He’s a task master.”

Hannah agrees and adds, “Sometimes he can very condescending.  He’s a nice guy.  I like some of his films.  But he has a temper on him.”

Renamed Elephant Room, the work — now starring Hannah, Diamond, and Magic — has been performed at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, Arena Stage in Washington, DC, St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and now, finally, opening the current season at the Kirk Douglas.

Diamond says the title of the show comes from a secret magic society of the same name.  He continues, “The roots of the Elephant Room are a little mysterious.  Not absolutely sure what country it started in, although we have our hunches that it might have been in the United States, or one of the Americas.”

Louie Magic, Daryl Hannah and Dennis Diamond in "Elephant Room"

Asked if they are members of the secret society, Hannah responds curtly, “That we are unable to share with you at this current moment.  But the show is inspired by that society.”

The intent of the show is to peel back the curtain to see the magic behind the magic.  Hannah says, “We want to say, like, hey, like welcome, come into our world, come in and see what we’re about.”Â  The writers had become fascinated with the ideologies and the methodologies within the magic community, and they wanted to explore those themes.

“It’s almost like we’re inviting you to a meeting,” says Diamond.

One possible origin of the name Elephant Room has connections with Houdini, if Diamond is to be believed. After a performance at the New Victory in New York City, a stage manager told them that Houdini had performed in the same theater and took them to the trap room, the room beneath the stage.  “We go to a corner of the trap room, and there’s this big metal steel door in the floor.  Like it was born there.”Â  When the door was opened, down a little ladder was a room, 10 feet by 15 feet.

Magic interrupts. “This is the crazy part, when they did the renovations (to the New Victory), this room wasn’t on any of the original plans.”Â  The stage manager told them this was Houdini’s Elephant Room, with apparently, pictures showing Houdini making the room.

Geoff Sobelle aka Dennis Diamond

But Diamond says that the room wasn’t there to help make an elephant “disappear”.  “In no way would it have anything to do with the methodology to have had a secret room two floors below the stage.” So the intent of the room remains a mystery to these experts on magic history.

The piece seemed to click for the writer/performers when they encountered the magicians Magic, Diamond and Hannah.  Before the meeting in Buffalo, says the trio, the work of Lyford, Sobelle and Cuiffo was more about making fun of magicians.  As Hannah recalls, “Then when they started meeting all the different guys, there’s a lot of legit guys at these conventions, you know what I’m saying?  There’s a lot of guys that spend their life and their heart and their soul in the magic.”Â  And that’s when, according to Hannah, the writers turned to the trio as the “real deal thing.”

But maybe not all is happy in this collaboration between writers and the cast.  Hannah contends the writers are using their material for their gain.  He says, “There have been conversations and there have been clarifications, but there haven’t been any real arguments.”

For Magic, the relationship is clear. “They wrote it right, so it’s like a play or whatever, but nobody knows how to do what we do.”

Steve Cuiffo aka Louie Magic

Regarding what an audience can expect, besides magic, the trio seems secretive.  Magic says, “Magic is dependent on surprise.  What’s it going to be?  And no one really knows, and that’s a great state of mind for us, for the audience to be in.”

Hannah, again the shaman of the group, leans in and says with a twang in his voice, “The world needs a lot of things.  But the thing it needs more than anything else, is hope and a little bit of magic, am I right?”

Elephant Room, presented by Center Theatre Group, Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City 90232. Opens Sunday. Tue-Fri 8 pm; Sat 2 and 8 pm; Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Through September 16.  Tickets:$20-50. 213-628-2772. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. Tickets also at the Ahmanson Theatre box office or two hours prior to performances at the Kirk Douglas Theatre box office.

***All Elephant Room production photos by Scott Suchman/Arena Stage

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Playing the Human Family Behind War Horse

by Pauline Adamek | June 27, 2012

Christopher Mai, Derek Stratton, Rob Laqui and Andrew Veenstra in "War Horse"

“The minute the show kicks off, you’re moving — it’s like a freight train. You’re grateful for that 15-minute intermission, just so you can catch your breath, then it powers back up again.” Young actor Andrew Veenstra is describing War Horse. He plays the pivotal role of Albert in the West Coast premiere of the Tony-winning stage spectacle, opening Friday at the Ahmanson Theatre.

The play is essentially a love story between a boy and his horse. Full-sized puppets play the horses.

Andrew Veenstra

Young adult fiction writer Michael Morpurgo’s best-selling 1982 novel War Horse was first adapted for the London stage by playwright Nick Stafford, in association with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. The production received its premiere at the National Theatre of Great Britain’s Olivier Theatre in 2007, then returned to the National in 2008-2009 before transferring to the West End’s New London Theatre in spring 2009.

Its epic story about the sacrifices of love appealed to Hollywood filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who experienced the play in London. Spielberg worked with screenwriters Lee Hall and Richard Curtis to adapt the story as a naturalistic drama for the screen, commencing filming a mere seven months later. Spielberg’s 2011 movie went on to be nominated for six Oscars (but won none).

The stage adaptation that opened in London in 2007 is probably best known for its puppet design by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler.  Making its transfer to the States, the intricate production opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater on April 14, 2011. It went on to score five 2011 Tony Awards, including Best Play. The play’s West End and Broadway productions were directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, with “horse choreography” by Toby Sedgwick.

Jason Loughlin, Rob Laqui, Derek Stratton and Christopher Mai

Veenstra’s Albert is the English boy who forms a deep bond with his beloved horse, Joey. At the outbreak of World War I, Albert’s handsome horse is sold to the cavalry and shipped to France and to the treacherous mud-soaked trenches of the battlefields. Despite being too young to enlist in the British Army, Albert embarks on a dangerous mission to find his horse and bring him back to their idyllic home in Devon.

Once in France, Joey is soon caught up in the horrors of warfare. We follow the horse’s journey as he serves in the cavalry units of both the British and German armies and befriends another army horse named Topthorn.

Now 25 years old, Veenstra’s first acting experience was in the third grade. Drawn to the stage, he performed in plays and musicals throughout high school and college. He went on to study piano performance at the Eastman School of Music in upstate New York and later studied neuroscience at Brigham Young University. That’s where Veenstra delved into performing in on-campus productions such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Seagull. “I kinda blew up a little bit. People were asking, “˜Who is this guy?’” He says he lived in the world of classics for a while before appearing in new works, but he contends that “Originating a role is the best.”

Following his graduation from Brigham Young with a BFA in Acting, Veenstra moved to Manhattan and has been steadily working as an actor for the past two or so years. “I’ve done Hamlet and Two Gentlemen of Verona at D. C. Shakespeare Theatre and I also worked on their world premiere of a David Ives play — I’ve been blessed to have had a lot of opportunities.”

Catherine Gowl, Laurabeth Breya, Nick LaMedica and Andrew Veenstra

Veenstra says he was excited when he was approached for War Horse, but he had to consider the length of the touring commitment. He has initially been contracted for a year. “It’s a great opportunity to tell this story to people who can’t get to New York and to bring the magic that is War Horse to everyone else. It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime chances so I couldn’t say “˜no’ to being able to play this role.”

The production has been re-staged and re-blocked to suit the proscenium of the Ahmanson, as opposed to the theater-in-the-round staging at the Lincoln Center. Veenstra adds that the tour’s script also varies from the New York and London productions. “It’s a different show and we do it a different way.”

As most people hear about War Horse and immediately think of Spielberg’s film, Veenstra emphasizes the dissimilarities, insisting, “The stage play is very different from the film because of the puppets, that are just unbelievably beautiful and amazing.

“The character that I play, Albert, is a boy who lives on a farm in the south of England. He has a simple life. It’s 1914, just before World War I.” A bit of a loner, Albert finds solace in a relationship with a baby horse. “It’s his first deep connection with anyone or anything. They become inseparable friends and grow up together. They fall in love and spend every waking minute together. As adolescents, they go through some rocky times. And then World War I hits.”

Albert’s father Ted Narracott, played by Todd Cerveris, sells Joey to the cavalry for the war effort and obtains a handsome fee. “Joey becomes this officer’s horse and Albert has no say in the matter.” The separation and the thought of his horse out there in the war zone become too much for Albert, who goes in search of his childhood companion.

Adds Veenstra, “At the beginning it’s a story of the boy and his horse. After that separation happens, it becomes two stories of Albert trying to find Joey and Joey trying to survive and re-unite with Albert.”

Andrew Veenstra, Christopher Mai, Derek Stratton and Rob Laqui

The two main horses, Joey and Topthorn, are each operated by a trio of puppeteers. There are also three separate teams of these trios. Veenstra says the puppeteers’ costumes blend with the horse designs, but the production is not trying to hide the puppeteers. “They actually went a different way, by acknowledging their presence so that you then forget they are there, and that happens within seconds.” He marvels, “The first time in rehearsal when the people got into the horse, immediately it became a living, breathing horse. It’s absolutely incredible.” Veenstra says everyone — not just the puppeteers — invest the horse with emotion. “Joey is never anything but Joey. We don’t refer to him as a puppet.”

Additionally, with three separate teams operating Joey, his performance changes from day to day. “At any given time he can do anything. You have to be alive and in the moment every single night,” Veenstra explains.

Embarking on a grueling emotional journey has offered its challenges for the young star. Veenstra laughs when he confesses, “I cry all the time in this show!”  By the final curtain, “when it all comes together, we — like the audience — have all been on this journey. We’ve all been in the trenches of World War I, in the mud, seeing our friends die”¦ This show is so special and unique.”

The stage show features a large ensemble of characters and a cast numbering nearly 30.  Almost all of them whose path crosses that of Joey forge their own connections with the noble creature at the center of this tale.

Playing Veenstra’s farmer parents, Rose and Ted Narracott, are Angela Reed and Todd Cerveris, who happen to be married in real life.

Angela Reed and Todd Cerveris

Speaking of the director of the touring production, Bijan Sheibani, Reed laughs as she recalls, “The casting director knew we were a couple but I think it was forgotten at some point. Bijan said on the first day of rehearsals that he didn’t know when he cast us that we were married.”

Jokes Cerveris, “Strangely we had great chemistry!” Celebrating their eight-year anniversary on the day of the interview, the two of them explain how they first met in grad school while they were dating other people. Five years later they re-connected at a workshop at Lincoln Center and embarked on a love affair.

This is not the first time they’ve been cast in the same show. They performed Lanford Wilson’s two-actor Talley’s Folly together in Vermont. Jokes Reed, “That was a real test of our marriage — but we succeeded!”Â  They also both appeared in the Ahmanson’s LA premiere of the musical Spring Awakening in 2008 and in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego last year.

They both seem happy about the prospect of touring. Reed smiles as she describes the scenario. “It’s fine, especially because we get to be together. We have our dog and we pile into the car and we’re all together.” They seem fairly proud of their dog, named Butley, who is an American Staffordshire terrier. “He’s a big-headed pit bull and he’s adorable and sweet,” gushes Reed. “The cast loves him and he loves touring. He really is a people dog.”

Andrew Veenstra, Todd Cerveris and Angela Reed

Besides their primary roles as Albert’s parents in Devon, Reed and Cerveris are enlisted to perform other roles throughout the play. Reed says she plays three different male soldiers in the course of the two-hour show.

“Horribly wounded soldiers,” Cerveris hastens to add.

Says Reed, “I change costumes about eight times. That’s why it feels like such a great ensemble piece because the whole company — even Andrew, who plays an wounded English soldier at one point — double up on roles.”

Cerveris says they all spend much of the show doing quick changes in the wings. “We’re basically trying to portray a world war, so we need people.”

Adds Reed, “We have these fabulous masks that we wear when we’re wounded and so it’s a little bit stylized.”

After the Los Angeles engagement, the North American tour is scheduled to visit numerous cities, including Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, Jan. 22-Feb. 3.

“I love it,” Reed says. “When the show begins, we all get on this bullet train, and you gotta stay on it. I feel like we’re all in this together.”

War Horse, Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Avenue, Downtown L.A. 90012. Opens Friday at 8 p.m. Tues-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm,  Sun 1 and 6:30 pm, Thur 2 pm on July 5, 19, 26. Dark July 4, and no 6:30 performances on Sun July 22 and 29. Closes at the July 29 matinee. Hot Tix: $20 each may be purchased in advance or, subject to availability, on the day of performance at the box office (no checks). www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-972-4400.

***All War Horse production photos by Brinkhoff/Mogenburg

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LA Stage Times

Features

LA Theater Takes to the High Seas, Part IV: CTG at Sea

by Deborah Behrens | June 15, 2012

Charleston Grill Work

(Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final article in a series about Crystal Cruises’ 17-day 2012 Film and Theatre Cruise. Click here to read Part I, Part II or Part III.)

Crystal Serenity departs the turquoise waters of the Caribbean and sails up the Eastern Seaboard for the final leg of Crystal Cruises’ 2012 Film and Theatre Cruise. Guests shop on Ft. Lauderdale’s tony Las Olas Boulevard or skim the Everglades by boat before heading north to Rhett Butler’s birthplace and home of the annual Spoleto Festival USA — Charleston, South Carolina. Plantation tours, gallery visits and leisurely meandering through the historic City Market highlight our visit to this arts-centric town, which lays claim to the first building constructed solely for theatrical performance in the US. The final roster of F&T lecturers and performers entertain guests as the ship completes the 17-day journey into New York City.

Tippi Hedren (r) with guest at “Terrifically Tippi” themed cocktail party; Photo by Paragon Pixels

Friday, May 4 – Ft. Lauderdale

We dock in the first U.S. port since leaving Los Angeles on April 21. All passengers must disembark from the ship and undergo a face-to-face US Immigration inspection at the shore side terminal. Once through, many head out to guided or self-planned shore excursions while others wait for Serenity to pass inspection before re-boarding. Cell phones, iPads and laptops are noticeable everywhere as this is the first stop in nearly two weeks where domestic cell reception and free WiFi is available.

Stephen and Catherine Shultz stand in a foursome with producer/director Karen Cradle and actress Tippi Hedren. The Rolling Hills residents are long time supporters of the Shambala Preserve in the Antelope Valley and sit on the executive board of the Hedren-founded Roar Foundation that supports Shambala. Their appearance on the ship is a surprise gift to the animal activist who recently boarded in Grand Cayman. The couple are also active participants in the LA theater community via Norris Center for the Arts and Reprise Theatre Company.

Poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film “The Birds”

Steve checks his email via Blackberry when he turns to Hedren and says, “Do you know that Melanie is doing a play?” No, she replies — she hadn’t heard that her daughter, actress Melanie Griffith, had joined the cast of Scott Caan’s No Way Around But Through at the Falcon Theatre. It is a surreal moment.

Later that afternoon, the ship hosts a paparazzi-style red-carpet event in the Palm Court to honor Hedren, star of The Birds. Guests may opt to have their picture taken with the Hitchcock blonde in front of two massive Klieg lights. A full-size poster from the film stands at the entrance. Some people take turns imitating Hedren’s iconic screaming pose before entering the room.

The “Terrifically Tippi” reception serves up canapés with film-themed toothpicks and wine from Vintage Wines Estates, with labels featuring the actress. Hedren makes a toast and thanks everyone for coming. We continue practicing our reactions to live birds attacking us.

Sue Van Dyke, Barbara Abrams and Editor-in-Chief Deborah Behrens re-create “The Birds” poster at the Tippi Hedren cocktail party; Photo by Paragon Pixels

Saturday, May 5 – Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie

Until today, actress Kate Burton and husband Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group, have been able to maintain a relatively low profile. The cruising neophytes boarded two days ago on Grand Cayman and have spent their time acclimating to pampered ship life while dining with CTG donors and friends. They are the featured speakers in the Galaxy Lounge this morning, moderated by USC’s Dr. Drew Casper. The trio gather at the Bistro, Burton’s favorite new daytime hangout, to prep prior to the Q&A session. When asked about the Tony nomination for best musical for the musical Leap of Faith, which premiered at the Ahmanson Theatre in fall 2010, Ritchie admits he was shocked, given the show’s poor ticket sales. He was expecting a closing notice any minute. [That public announcement is made three days later on May 8].

Once inside the Galaxy, the two proceed to charm the audience with tales of their polar-opposite upbringings. Burton, born in Geneva to the legendary Richard Burton and then wife Sybil (now Christopher), grows up in New York City, becomes stepdaughter to Elizabeth Taylor and stepsister to her brood, attends Brown University aiming to become a diplomat, then starts rehearsal for her first Broadway show (Present Laughter directed by George C. Scott) on the day after she graduates from Yale Drama School.

Dr. Drew Casper, Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie during talk on Crystal Cruises’ Film and Theatre Cruise; Photo by Tere Tomlinson

A self-described “Irish Catholic bum,” Ritchie is raised in a blue-collar family in a town with no theater — Worcester, Mass. After failing to make the baseball team, he gets cast in a high school musical revue directed by a man who ran New Jersey’s Surflight Theatre. At 15, Ritchie apprentices there and finds his “tribe” among the summer stock company. He does 70 musicals in 7 years. He flunks out of a local college after his sophomore year, then subsequently heads to New York with $36 and a bag of dirty laundry that is stolen his first night there. Ritchie survives by doing various backstage technical jobs until he lands his first stage manager gig Off-Broadway, which is a disaster. His second stage manager gig is an out-of-town Ohio tryout for Candida that unexpectedly transfers to Broadway. Producers want to ditch the 22-year-old newbie but star Joanna Woodward backs him. “Without her, I would not be sitting here today.”

Coincidentally, the two met 30 years ago today during Burton’s audition for Present Laughter. Casper asks if it was love at first sight. “I think we’re going to have different stories here,” Ritchie interjects as the room erupts into laughter.

Burton replies,  “Go ahead, honey. You talk first.”

Director Scott had stage manager Ritchie read his part with each of the actresses up for the ingénue. Ritchie says he fell in love with Burton the moment she came in but then heard from Scott she was dating his eldest son. (It turned out to have been in high school).

Kate Burton tells audience how she first met Michael Ritchie at a Broadway audition; Photo by Tere Tomlinson

As Burton takes up the story, she corrects Ritchie’s memory and recalls that during her audition, he was actually reading a woman’s role (which would be played by Dana Ivey). “I did think: very cute, can’t act at all.” This gets a big laugh. “I’ll never see him again.”

Burton got the role. After taking the train from New Haven to Grand Central Station, a taxi cab waited at the curb. “The driver says, “‘where are you going, little lady?” she remembers. “I say, “‘I’m going to Broadway!’” The audience goes wild.

“The very first day we sit down for the table read. I sit across from this chubby young actor who is playing the crazed playwright. His name is Nathan Lane.” Burton says she spotted Ritchie out of the corner of her eye. “He has a suntan as he does now and was standing with his friend Ted, the assistant stage manager. I said to Nathan, “‘who’s that guy?’ “‘Some beach bum,” growls Lane via Burton’s imitation. Lane winds up being an usher at their wedding.

The three-time Tony nominee discusses her reluctance to become an actress having seen the business firsthand via her family, taking the time to prove herself, working in theater versus television or film, acting opposite her famous dad, why everything she learned coalesced at 40 for Hedda Gabler, being a trustee at her Brown alma mater and how Grey’s Anatomy unexpectedly “put her on the map.”

Casper asks Ritchie what his criteria is for choosing plays. Ritchie says he looks first for theatricality. “There are a lot of great stories that can be told but not necessarily theatrically. There’s great sermons you can hear but there’s nothing theatrical about that. There are books you can read that don’t translate to the stage. It’s hard to define what theatrical is. It doesn’t mean bells and whistles or music. Some of the most theatrical things you can see are someone sitting alone on a stool in a spotlight.”

Michael Ritchie explains how he got started in theater as Kate Burton listens; Photo by Tere Tomlinson

Because of Center Theatre Group’s size, the next thing he looks for is range. “If I’ve chosen a new musical, I look for an old drama. If I choose a play that’s very plot-driven, I look for a play that is actor-driven. My responsibility is to present the broadest range of theater to the greatest number of people first in Los Angeles and then across the country.”

Ritchie discusses the success of CTG’s educational outreach and play development programs, then admits the hardest thing to get from young playwrights is a story. “They write characters very well, they write incidents and interactions very well, but there is not a plot.” He cites today’s ADD-style media-in-sound-bites culture for contributing to the demise of the narrative arc. “It’s much harder to find nowadays.”

Back at the Bistro

Kate Burton in the Crystal Cove mezzanine

After lunch, Burton and Ritchie settle in at a window table at the Bistro to discuss the cruise and the opportunity it provides for one-on-one interaction with CTG’s donors on board. Crystal’s 2012 Film & Theatre Cruise represents a new partnership between the two organizations, following a similar one established with the Music Center and its Spotlight Awards program that led to the 2009 launch of Crystal’s popular Emerging Artists cruises.

The couple had previously led a donor trip to London but it didn’t provide an opportunity for the same level of personal discussion. “It’s a lot more structured with plenty of cultural activities,” says Ritchie. “It’s fun but what’s nice about this is we can sit down with everyone for a minimum of a few hours.”

“It’s not stressful,” interjects Burton.

“That certainly doesn’t happen for me on opening nights or at cocktail hours where I feel like I’m rushing through saying hi to people,” Ritchie continues. He adds that several passengers came up after their talk asking how they could contribute to CTG, and a current donor couple planned to raise their contribution to the next level.

Both admit they had no idea what to expect on this cruise. Burton hadn’t been on a ship since the QE2 with her father and stepmother in 1969. When asked if she’d sailed on their infamous private yacht Kalizma, Burton smiles and replies, “I was on that all the time. I had a room.” Ritchie kids her and says he had his own room too as a child, one that “I shared with my sister!” Both laugh. He clearly relishes playing the rascal scalawag to her jet-set childhood.

Michael Ritchie shows off his version of cruise wear in the Avenue Saloon

Burton reports she is slated to direct her first professional play, The Other Woman, at Berkeley Repertory, in February 2013. She has previously directed two MFA student productions at USC as well as an evening of Shakespeare and Tchaikovsky with Gustavo Dudamel at the LA Philharmonic last year.

Ritchie is the midst of selecting his next seasons for the Ahmanson and the Kirk Douglas. “When I go back, it’s going to be a blood bath for a week as we make decisions. We’ve got one touring show, Anything Goes, and then we’re building from scratch. Nothing’s available. The Pantages has Book of Mormon. So we’re going to duke it out when I get back. Some of it is logistics, some of it desire, some of it the ability to finance and availability. The Kirk Douglas is pretty well set.” (Since that conversation took place, the Ahmanson and Douglas seasons have been announced).

The Mark Taper is the wild card, he says. “I’ve usually got a dozen plays in mind for the Taper. Sometimes I carry around the same play for five years and then don’t do it.” Ritchie wants to do Venus in Fur with its star Nina Arianda and is negotiating with the Broadway producers who are considering a tour, which would eliminate the Taper for consideration. “It would make a good early anchor for a season. Then it would allow me to make my next decision because I have X.”

When asked whether play readings are helpful to his selection process, Ritchie says no. “Everybody wants to put on a play reading. I used to go to them and I would get frustrated. It may be illuminating to the director or the playwright, but I could never judge a play better or worse when someone read it to me. I can read and I can control my time better. To me one of the big factors is, do I want to turn the page? Is there a story there? What’s going to happen next? Turning the page is huge for me. It’s how I assess the play.”

Jill Clayburgh’s Carole Lombard dress from 1976′s “Gable and Lombard”

Later that afternoon Karen Cadle presents “Unforgettable Legends of the Silver Screen” in the Starlight Lounge. She offers up personal memories of legends ranging from the “enchanting” Audrey Hepburn who believed “Paris is always a good idea” to Ernest Borgnine, whose mother never asked him as a child about what he had learned in school that day but rather “how many people did you make laugh?” Cadle also reads select line items from stars’ demand lists including Jerry Lewis’ two-pager for a Rome appearance that requires “extra wastebaskets in every room” to Joan Collins’ request for CNN to be on in her hotel suite upon her arrival.

At teatime in the Palm Court, Greg Schreiner stages a second costume extravaganza entitled “Out of the Closet with Hollywood Revisited.” The Crystal Ensemble of Singers and Dancers once again model iconic film and television costumes from his extensive collection.

Sunday, May 6 – Charleston, South Carolina

Crystal Serenity passengers stream into this charming Confederate port city heading for its historic Charleston City Market. Four blocks long, this open-air potpourri of vendor stalls features everything from gourmet food items to local artisan crafts. One of the oldest in the country, the market was built in stages from 1807 to 1830 to originally house produce, meat and fish merchants. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney deeded the land to the city for use as a public market in perpetuity or it would revert back to the family.

Cabbage Row, the real life setting for “Porgy & Bess’” fictional Catfish Row; Photo by Palmetto Carriage

Meanwhile, other guests embark on various excursions including Boone Hall Plantation, the inspiration for Ashley Wilkes’ Twelve Oaks home in Gone With The Wind; Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired; carriage rides throughout the city’s beautifully preserved historic district and a walking tour of its numerous art galleries and the Gibbes Museum of Art. The town’s current economic well-being is due in large part to concerted civic and private efforts to support and promote its local artists, cultural institutions and heritage to attract like-minded patrons from around the globe.

This Southern Belle boasts of a lengthy theater legacy with new bragging rights earned from the past week’s Tony Awards announcement. The Gershwins’ Porgy & Bess received 10 nominations on Tuesday for its revival of the George and Ira Gershwin opera, which author DuBose Heyward set in the city’s then Cabbage Row tenement under a fictional “Catfish Row” moniker. The original name comes from the cabbages and other vegetables sold there before it was privately acquired in 1928. Today the complex on 89-91 Church Street that once housed 10 families is a pair of town homes with specialty shops below.

Since 1977, the city has played host to the annual Spoleto Festival USA, a 17-day performing arts feast held in historic theaters, churches and outdoor spaces. It features performances by both renowned and emerging performers in theater, opera, dance and music. This year’s line-up (in late May and early June) includes the American premiere of the Philip Glass opera Kepler, a new work by Mike Daisey, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet and Dublin’s Gate Theatre doing Noel Coward’s Hay Fever at the Dock Street Theatre.

Dock Street Theatre. First building in the US built exclusively for theatrical performances (1736)

Built in 1735, the historic Dock Street Theatre “was the first building in America built exclusively to be used for theatrical performances.” It opened February 12, 1736 with The Recruiting Officer. The original building was destroyed by fire and the Planter’s Hotel built on its grounds in 1809. One of the city’s theatrical troupes took up residence there while performing at the neighboring New Theatre. Actor Junius Brutus Booth, father of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, frequented the luxurious hotel, as did wealthy planters. It fell into disrepair after the Civil War and was heavily damaged by an 1886 earthquake. The abandoned relic became a 1935 WPA restoration project whose purpose was to construct a new theater using the hotel’s existing shell and grand foyer. It re-opened in 1937 with then writer-in-residence DuBose Heyward in attendance.

The 450-seat theater underwent a $19 million renovation in 2010. Today the venue is home to Charleston Stage Company, South Carolina’s largest professional theater company, currently celebrating its 35th season.

Footlight Players

Not far away is the The Footlight Players, Charleston’s oldest continuously performing theater company, founded in 1931. A successful series of one-act plays encouraged the company to incorporate in 1932, and it purchased an old cotton warehouse two years later. Footlight performed at venues around town until finally converting the warehouse into an actual theater in 1941. Over the next 45 years it produced seasons at both the Footlight and the Dock Street Theater until taking up permanent residence in 1986.

Old Charleston has more than 2,000 landmarked 17th-19th century buildings on cobblestone streets. One of them is the Pink House, said to be the oldest standing tavern building in the South. Built in 1690, the three-story Bermuda stone structure was also a bordello and features only one room per floor. It now houses an art gallery.

Will Mackenzie, Karen Morrow, Greg Schreiner, Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie after Morrow’s cabaret performance in the Avenue Saloon

The ship lifts anchor at 5:00 pm. Guests hear Serenity’s official sail away song — Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” — for the last time on this voyage as we pull away from shore en route to New York.

But before spirits can sink too low, one of Broadway’s favorite belters, Karen Morrow (The Grass Harp, The Mystery of Edwin Drood), performs her “Life Upon a Wicked Stage” cabaret act in the Avenue Saloon accompanied by Greg Schreiner. Theatrical anecdotes and favorite show tunes bring loud laughter and applause from guests and director pals like Will Mackenzie and John Bowab. Her set is way too short but caps a great day of Southern hospitality.

Monday, May 7 — Last Day at Sea

Dr. Drew Casper and Susan Claassen lead the final day of Film & Theatre Team Trivia

Dr. Drew Casper presents his last Hitchcock film lecture on Psycho which he calls the “most written about and profiled film in the world.” Hitchcock made a monster movie in which the monster is the boy next door, Casper explains. The film is about isolation — “We are all in our own private traps and no one gets out of it.” There is no one to identify or sympathize with in the movie, forcing audiences to face their own loneliness. Psycho changed film exhibition because of its “no entry” policy once the film began, Casper adds, before he thanks guests for becoming his family on the voyage.

Next, he and Susan Claassen host the final round of Team Trivia in the Palm Court. A softball question regarding Mame’s last name draws a laugh from John Bowab’s team. The director helmed the show for numerous leading ladies including Angela Lansbury in the 1983 Broadway revival. Their gang ultimately triumphs and wins individual trophies.

The winning team, which included director John Bowab and actress Anne Russell

Veteran make-up artist and agent William Squire lectures on being “Ready for the Red Carpet: Your Personal Hollywood Style” and does a make-up session for the game Karen Morrow. His three make-up no-nos are: 1) wrong foundation color, 2) too much blush and 3) too much eyeliner. Squire’s number one suggestion is topping eyelash tips with a touch of blue mascara over the black to bring out the whites of the eyes.

Guests are busy packing and making final arrangements for tomorrow’s disembarkation in New York. Addresses and emails are exchanged. Toasts are made to new friends during the final dinner in the main dining room. Cruise director Gary Hunter hosts the farewell show of comedians, singers and dancers. He bids everyone farewell, safe journeys and a return visit soon.

Tuesday, May 8 – New York City

Some guests rise early to watch the ship sail past the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor on an overcast morning. Others awaken to see veranda furniture being swapped for new models prior to the ship’s Atlantic crossing.

Serenity has sailed 5,782 nautical miles and 6,649 land miles since it departed from San Pedro on April 21. A measurable distance in miles, but immeasurable in memories. Travel, like good theater, transforms you. Combining the two can be a powerful catalyst for change. Just ask the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. May more LA performing artists and theater companies sail the high seas as those cultural ambassadors. And may Crystal Cruises and other cruise lines continue to provide the stage for them to do so.

***All photos by Deborah Behrens unless otherwise noted.


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LA Stage Times

Columns, News

From México to California, in Los Otros and Charity

by Don Shirley | June 4, 2012

Two of LA’s major stages are currently occupied by the premieres of productions about the México-Southern California connection ““ a rare and exciting coincidence.

I frequently nag our theatrical movers and shakers to tell more local stories. And many of our most interesting local stories are rooted in the inherent drama within the relationship between the United States and México. So I suggest that LA audiences should see both of these new works — although both of them could be improved.

Michele Pawk in "Los Otros"

They’re quite different in structure. Los Otros at the Mark Taper Forum has only two actors. It’s a short musical, without an intermission, but its time span ranges over much of the 20th century and into the 21st. Charity at LATC has a cast of nine, and not only is it longer, with an intermission, but it’s part of a trilogy of three plays about one family. Although that trilogy covers an even wider time span than that of Los Otros, Charity itself is set in 2005.

Los Otros isn’t entirely brand-new. An earlier version of the first half, “Tres Niñas,” opened in New York in 2008. The New York Times review of that production, which I read after seeing the Taper version, gives the impression that the script of “Tres Niñas” hasn’t changed very much in four years. But the director, Graciela Daniele, and performer Michele Pawk are different, and it’s now coupled with “Dos Hombres,” also by librettist and lyricist Ellen Fitzhugh and composer Michael John LaChiusa. Together these two solo mini-musicals make up Los Otros.

“Tres Niñas” is told from the perspective of a non-Latina woman (the character is identified only as “Woman”) who has encounters with Mexican immigrants in 1952, in 1967-1968, and a few years later.

She’s a child in 1952, when she and two of her friends in National City, near San Diego, smuggle food to a Mexican family who has illegally crossed the border. Fifteen years later, in Burbank, she’s a divorced mother of two who goes to Tijuana with her ex in order to smuggle a Mexican nanny across the border. In the “˜70s, she seduces an 18-year-old immigrant whom she meets at a North Hollywood taco stand.

Julio Monge

“Tres Niñas” and “Dos Hombres” are solo storytelling sessions in which the performer sings most of the time ““ so maybe the style should be called “storysinging” instead of storytelling. The creators emphasize subtle details, as opposed to grandstanding generalizations, in the words and in the music. In “Tres Niñas,” these details add up to a panoramic view of this woman’s fascination with these otros in her life ““ including her occasional fears as well as her customarily warmer feelings.

In the New York production, Woman was played by Victoria Clark, who happens to be one of the stars of Follies right now ““ at the Ahmanson Theatre, next door to the Taper, also under the auspices of Center Theatre Group. If you’ve seen Clark and know about her roles in the original “Tres Niñas,” it’s difficult to avoid wondering what she would do with the Los Otros role. Pawk, who’s currently playing the Woman, is convincing enough as a strapped and lonely single mother, but her singing occasionally strays from sounding realistically strained to distractingly shaky.

“Dos Hombres” follows “Tres Niñas,” and this time we’re following a US-born Mexican American man, beginning with the Mexican hurricane that prompted his mother to migrate to el norte, before he was born.

Julio Monge

The primary home of Man (yes, that is this character’s non-name) is in Carlsbad, also in San Diego County. But summertime work takes his family to the plum fields farther north. Here, as a kid who’s about the same age in 1945 as Woman was in 1952, Man has a memorable encounter with a friend in the upper story of the Anglo overseer’s house.

By 1994, Man is an accountant and the lover of “a white man who was once the escort of Ava Gardner” ““ so perhaps we’re somewhere in the vicinity of LA. The 1994 cultural references flow somewhat too specifically through Fitzhugh’s word processor in this scene. We also catch glimpses of Man at 75, enjoying a shower in what is apparently 2008.

Near the end of “Dos Hombres,” the writers attempt to connect it more literally to “Tres Niñas.” Woman re-enters the stage ““ if I understand it correctly, it turns out that her ex-husband is now Man’s lover, and she’s on great terms with both men. But this other man is completely unseen, and the device feels wobbly. It’s an illustration of the problem inherent in so many solo shows, in which a character who never appears on stage is pivotal to the plot and cries out for a flesh-and-blood manifestation. It’s too bad that Los Otros is stuck with just two actors.

Julio Monge plays Man, without the occasional distractions of Pawk’s singing voice, although perhaps our ears give him more latitude as he’s sometimes portraying a 75-year-old singing in the shower. Daniele ““ a Latina immigrant herself (although she’s originally from Argentina, not México) ““ has devised a silken production that respects the material’s understated qualities.

Los Otros, Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., LA. Tues-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2:30 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Closes July 1. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-628-2772.

***All Los Otros production photos by Craig Schwartz

Sal Lopez, Evelina Fernandez and Ofelia Medina in "Charity"

Center Theatre Group’s commission for Los Otros was apparently inspired by a desire by CTG artistic director Michael Ritchie to develop “stageworks that were California-based,” according to Fitzhugh ““ but I’m sure many LA artists would like to know why he had to go to New York to find artists capable of creating something about California (granted that Fitzhugh did, however, grow up in California).

At LATC, by contrast, Latino Theater Company is accustomed to using Southern Californians to create material that’s set in southern California. Last year’s Hope was an exception for its setting ““ it’s set in Phoenix, which is where playwright Evelina Fernández grew up. However, her family moved to California when she was a child, and Charity, the second produced installment of her loosely autogiographical Mexican Trilogy, is set in LA.

Charity picks up the tale of the family originally depicted in Hope, last year at this same LATC theater. We have yet to see Faith — which will present the earliest chapter of the trilogy.

Oddly enough, one of the characters who is expected to be featured in Faith is also the top-billed role in Charity. Here, in 2005, she’s more than a hundred years old ““ known as Nana, she’s the great-grandmother of the family’s youngest member Valentina, who’s already a young adult. The veteran Mexican actress Ofelia Medina plays Nana, top-billed ahead of the regular members of Latino Theater Company.

Lucy Rodriguez, Geoffrey Rivas, Rudy Ramos, Esperanza America Ibarra and Evelina Fernandez

Nana doesn’t exactly take over the play. You could argue that the play’s central character is Gina (portrayed by the playwright herself), Valentina’s mother. Gina’s in a serious funk since the death of her son Emiliano, who was a soldier in Iraq, and is turning back toward the Catholic Church, as reflected in her endless fascination with the TV coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II ““ who opposed the war, she notes. She’s in conflict with her husband and daughter over her inability to return to the living, and she’s disconcerted by the arrival of another young man, a distant relative who has just emigrated from México with starry-eyed notions of what life in the US in general and life in LA in particular is like. Gina’s three siblings also provide various avenues into the 21st century.

Yet the play begins with an excessively long monologue (mostly in Spanish, with English supertitles) by Nana, who’s living upstairs. And it frequently veers from the more up-to-date actions of the younger family members downstairs to Nana’s conversations not only with those younger family members but also with Nana’s long-since-deceased ex-husband and the dead young Emiliano, who visit her from the afterlife.

That’s too much stage time for Nana. Presumably she will be one of the central characters of Faith, so I couldn’t help but wonder why she’s such a major character in Charity. Because she’s one step away from a death that her granddaughter considers long overdue, and because she frequently converses with ghosts, she casts a pallor over large chunks of the play, which otherwise comes to life when the focus shifts to the contemporary conflicts of the downstairs characters. Sure, Fernández and Medina (under the direction of José Luis Valenzuela) try to make Nana a funny as well as a grim presence, but these attempts sometimes come off as the sort of stereotypically cute gestures that younger people often write for the very old.

Rudy Ramos, Evelina Fernandez, Jonathan William Cruz and Ezperanza America Ibarra

The goal of the Latino Theater is eventually to produce all three chapters of the trilogy more or less simultaneously, or perhaps in rapid succession. Based on the tremendously evocative and vibrant Hope, I’ve been hopeful for the success of this endeavor, but the current state of Charity requires a more charitable disposition. Still, I have faith that the eventual trilogy will come together and might ultimately be strengthened by the chance to rewrite parts of Charity before it’s produced again.

Charity, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Theatre 1, 514 S. Spring St., LA. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 3 pm. Closes Sun (June 10). www.thelatc.org. 866-811-4111.

***All Charity photos by Ed Krieger

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LA Stage Times

Columns, News

LA STAGE INSIDER

by Julio Martinez | May 17, 2012

Nancy Evans Doede

NEWS“¦ To promote more tuner awareness among Latinos, New York”“based The Broadway League has created Viva Broadway, a new audience-development partnership with the Hispanic community, to help bridge the world of Broadway and Latino audiences around the country. Among its stated goals is a pilot program in Los Angeles (TBA) and other major Latino centers around the country. “The goal is to draw from an untapped market while making Broadway more relevant to Hispanic families and their lifestyles.” To date, only one member of the 32-person Viva Broadway advisory board is based in LA: theatrical marketing consultant C. Raul Espinoza“¦Recently established Porticoes Theater at St. James United Methodist Church in Pasadena now has a resident dance company. Nancy Evans Dance Theatre, founded in Sep 2009, inaugurates a series of four performances, beginning June 1 with premieres of Vigil, Inside Out and American Tourister, all choreographed by artistic director Nancy Evans Doede. Performances continue June 2, 8 and 9, with added participation of Lineage Dance Company, Frit and Frat’s KIN Dance Company and Robert Salas’ Movement Theatre CoLab”¦Providing always-needed community financial support, Mercedes-Benz of Laguna Niguel has signed on to be official sponsor of Laguna Playhouse 2012″“13 season, which begins July 3 with the premiere of Roger Bean’s latest retro tuner, Marvelous Wonderettes: Caps & Gowns”¦LA Opera celebrates its sixth season of LA Opera on Air by offering a season-opening double-header weekend of Tchaikovsky’s prerecorded Eugene Onegin (May 19 at 10 am) and Puccini’s La Bohème (May 20 at 2 pm), broadcast live from Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, airing on Classical KUSC 91.5FM, hosted by Duff Murphy. LA Opera on Air begins broadcasting nationally and internationally July 7 on WFMT Radio Network”¦

Tracie Bennett as Judy Garland

PREMIERES”¦ Peter Quilter’s play with music, End of the Rainbow, starring 2012 Tony-nominated Tracie Bennett as Judy Garland, helmed by Terry Johnson, is making its West Coast debut in conjunction with CTG/Ahmanson Theatre“˜s 2012″“13 season, Mar 12-Apr 21, 2013″¦Much closer at hand, West LA”“based Odyssey Theatre is presenting the premiere of Grace Notes & Anvils, “a gentle, funny and deeply touching guided tour of a “˜place’ most Americans go to, but few feel free to talk about,” scripted by Ron Marasco and Brain Shuff, helmed by Marasco, debuting May 26″¦Valley Village”“based Eclectic Company Theatre is hosting the debut of The Theory of Silence, focusing on the mysterious doings in a small town following the disappearance of a popular family, scripted by Jeff Folschinsky, helmed by Chelsea Sutton, opening June 1″¦Write Act Rep in Hollywood continues its 2012 season with the debut of Geeks! The Musical! wrought by Thomas J. Misuraca (book and lyrics) and Ruth Judkowitz (music), helmed by Bennett Cohon, following “the adventures of a gaggle of geeks though the San Diego Comic Book/Sci-Fi Convention..as they sing, dance and debate if Batman could beat Spider-Man in a fight.” It opens June 9″¦The two-hander Glennie & Maple Break Up, chronicling “the fight(s) two headstrong people must make (or have) just to stay together,” scripted and helmed by Paul Hoan Zeidler, featuring Etienne Eckert and Charles Pacello, debuts June 14 at Elephant Stages, in conjunction with Hollywood Fringe Festival 2012″¦

AROUND TOWN“¦ Anaheim Hills”“based Chance Theater is planning to exhaust its patrons into supporting the company by offering its first-ever 24-hour Chance-a-thon fundraiser, “24 hours of nonstop pleasure,” kicking off May 25 (7 pm) with Liz Holt’s Super Amazing Mini Cabaret, concluding May 26 (7 pm) with Insiders After-Party. Along the way, Chance is putting forth an hourly smorgasbord of theatrical, musical and variety fare””including Jerry Springer: The Opera finale choreography, wherein audience members “learn to tap dance and curse at the same time.””¦Back in LA, Ovation Award”“winning Rogue Machine continues its 2012 season with The New Electric Ballroom, set in a remote Irish fishing village, focusing on the troubled lives of three sisters “trapped by the past, the future and each other,” scripted by 2012 Tony nominated Enda Walsh (Once), helmed by Rogue AD John Perrin Flynn, opening June 9″¦Long Beach”“based International City Theatre (ICT) is offering master-of-onstage-mayhem Ken Ludwig’s 2004 scramble of Shakespeare and slapstick, Leading Ladies, “a delightful romp about mistaken identities, human foibles, and loves lost and found,” opening June 8, helmed by Richard Israel, co-artistic director of  the currently-on-hiatus West Coast Ensemble”¦Back in Hollywood, the Fountain Theatre/Deaf West Theatre collaboration of Cyrano“”scripter Stephen Sachs’ signed/spoken adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, helmed by Simon Levy“”is adding a whopping four-week extension to its run at Fountain Theatre, reaching out through July 8″¦Aforementioned Odyssey Theatre is extending the run of Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov, translated by Paul Schmidt, helmed by Bart DeLorenzo, through June 15″¦ And A Noise Within is offering a youth training program, Summer with Shakespeare, for ages 10 to 18, “which demystifies Shakespeare’s verse and grooms young artists to be Shakespearean performers,” at its new Pasadena facility, June 25­”“July 14″¦

Director Dave Barton and Producer Bryan Jennings

THE THING IS”¦ “The playwright Mark Ravenhill, who is English, probably is most famous for his stage work Shopping and Fucking (1996). I have directed 10 productions of seven of his plays; so I have staged more of Mark’s works than anyone in the United States. This play, which examines the culture of the art world, uses choreography but is not a musical, even though there is music in it. It was written initially for four characters, without any stage direction whatsoever. The characters were named A, B, C and D. I saw the premiere in London. Because I’ve worked with Mark so much over the years, he has allowed me to do carte blanche with it here in LA. What we did was take the lines, threw them into a hat and pulled them out kind of randomly among 11 actors. The language is brutally poetic. It was originally performed as a movement piece, and we are doing it as a movement piece as well. We are working with a pair of wonderful choreographers. The ensemble is made up mostly of performers from Rude Guerrilla, a company I ran in Orange County for 15 years. We closed that company about two years ago, and this new ensemble (22 players for Monkey Wrench Collective) is going to be producing almost exclusively in LA from now on. We will just rent space as we go.” “”Dave Barton helms the LA premiere of pool (no water), scripted by Mark Ravenhill, opening May 18 at Flight Theatre at the Complex, 6472 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Production continues Fri-Sat at 8 pm, Sun at 2 pm, through June 17. Tickets: $21. (800) 838-3006. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/238689. A Hollywood Fringe Festival entry. Advisory: contains nudity, adult situations”¦

Armand Volkas

INSIDE LA STAGE HISTORY”¦ In 1976, recent UCLA grad Armand Volkas is a member of LA-based Synthaxis Theatre Company, led by Cyndi Turtledove. Given the opportunity to direct, Volkas decides to create a theater piece through improvisation, an analysis of the legacy of the Holocaust on the lives of the second generation, which he titles Survivors. After four months in development, the play opens April 15, 1976, at Synthaxis, earning a rave review from Sylvie Drake of the LA Times, leading to months of sold-out performances. As a son of Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters, Volkas realizes he now has a Jewish ensemble on his hands and he should do something with it. Admiring the goals and philosophies of Artef (Arbeter Teater Farband or Workers Theater Group) Players Collective””a Yiddish dramatic group, active in New York from the late 1920s to 1940″”Volkas creates The New Artef Players, serving as its artistic director with fellow Synthaxis alumnus Paul Caplan-Bennett taking on the responsibility of managing director. Discovering its identity as it goes along, the company creates works that investigate the complexity of contemporary Jewish life, including shows for the theater as well as pieces designed to tour schools and community centers. Between 1976 and 1982, The New Artef Players performs in various LA venues””including the Cast Theatre, Pan Andreas Theatre, Church in Ocean Park and briefly in its own space in Hollywood, producing such works as William Gibson’s Golda, Donald Freed’s Inquest (featuring Peter Weiss as Julius Rosenberg), Joshua Sobol’s The Night of the Twentieth, helmed by John Levey, and the West Coast premiere of Leah Napolin’s adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl. Touring shows include company-created Tsimmis Playgrounds and Tales of Chelm, as well as The Fruit of Her Hands, scripted and helmed by Susan Obrow. In the late ’70s, Volkas turns down newly established University of Judaism’s invitation to make New Artef its in-house theater company, fearing the conservative stance of the university will conflict with the ideals of New Artef. During this time, Caplan-Bennett leaves the company to take over management of Roland Dupree Dance Academy. In 1982, Volkas decides he is becoming more of an administrator than a creative artist and closes the company. Moving to the Bay Area, Volkas founds The Living Arts Counseling Center in Oakland, as well as serving as artistic director of the Playback Theatre Ensemble”¦

– The Julio Martinez scripted and produced ARTS IN REVIEW, produced weekly on KPFK 90.7fm, is on hiatus until June 14″¦”¦

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LA Stage Times

Features

LA Theater Takes to the High Seas

by Deborah Behrens | April 25, 2012

Ocean-going vessels have long offered rich terrain for musical theater settings, ranging from Cole Porter’s 1930 Anything Goes to the 1966 parody Dames at Sea that recently opened at Burbank’s Colony Theatre. Contemporary cruise ships today provide something with real world value — brand exposure and audience development opportunities for performing arts organizations.

Susan Claasen as Edith Head and Tippi Hedren

Last weekend Crystal Cruises launched its 2012 Film and Theatre Cruise with noted members of the Los Angeles theatrical community slated to perform or lecture, including Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie, Emmy winner and three-time Tony nominee Kate Burton, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, 2010 Ovation Award nominee Susan Claassen (A Conversation with Edith Head), Broadway legend Karen Morrow (The Glass Harp, Mystery of Edwin Drood), plus Broadway/cabaret star Christine Pedi, (Little Me, Forbidden Broadway) –  who also hosts Sirius Radio/XM’s The Broadway Breakfast.

For the film portion of the cruise, Dr. Drew Casper, professor of critical studies at USC’s School of the Cinematic Arts and holder of the first Alma and Alfred Hitchcock Chair in American Film, leads lectures/screenings of Hitchcock’s films as well as moderating a Q&A with actress Tippi Hedren. Also featured are Hollywood Revisited producer and pianist Greg Schreiner, who leads a tribute show featuring authentic costumes from his collection, veteran producer Karen Cadle and Hollywood stylist William Squire.

The 17-day F&T cruise, which travels from LA through the Panama Canal to NYC, is a maiden voyage for Center Theatre Group, GMCLA, Claassen and Casper. CTG’s participation in part stems from the success of Crystal’s Emerging Artists cruises featuring the Music Center’s Spotlight Awards finalists. Each year gifted high school students from Santa Barbara to San Diego audition and compete in ballet, non-classical dance, classical voice, non-classical voice, classic instrumental and jazz instrumental categories to be part of Spotlight’s mentorship program. The process includes a semi-final master class and grand finale evening of performances at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

23rd Annual Music Center Spotlight Awards Grand Prize Finalists

Spotlight director Jeri Gaile selects the students for each sailing who perform for the ship’s guests and participate in public master classes led by a master teacher. The program is the brainchild of Crystal Cruises’ manager of production operations and entertainment integration, Christopher Escamilla.

“I’ve always been involved in some sort of performance and theatrical people since I was little,” he explains. “I don’t come from a family who understood the arts but somehow I have it instilled in my DNA. I always told myself as a kid, if I was ever in a position where I could orchestrate things that would benefit the theater world of performers or producers, that was going to be my personal goal.”

Escamilla has worked for the Century City-based luxury cruise line in various capacities for 14 years, first with the production show side of the entertainment department before moving into show and event development. Unlike some other cruise lines who contract in entertainment, Crystal’s mainstream shows are all produced in-house with a cast on payroll.

In 2005, he started crafting events for Crystal’s world cruises. The lengthy duration of each voyage coupled with a high ratio of repeat passengers dictated the need for a constant stream of new and diverse programming daily. His success with those led to a request to create new theme cruises for the company.

Performer Karen Morrow

“I don’t own a TV by choice because I’d rather go out to theatrical events,” he offers. “But I looked at pop culture and American Idol’s success and thought, how could this be “Crystallized” so it became a Crystal product.”

Research led him to the Music Center’s Spotlight Awards, but it took two years for the idea to move through internal channels before a serious meeting with Gaile. They hit it off immediately and, after a year of development, launched the first three Emerging Artists cruises in 2009.

“Crystal guests are very embracing of young talent,” states Escamilla. “They love to go behind the scenes and they also love to be charitable. The Music Center and specifically Spotlight has gotten a number of contributions from guests being exposed to the program on the ship. We do a master class at sea with someone affiliated with the Spotlight program as the teacher so they can see why that is important.”

Audience interaction brings guests further into the artistic process and provides a teaser for guests to witness an evening performance several nights later. “It’s done just like the finale program at the Dorothy Chandler every year. Then we let each of the kids have individual focus on different parts of the ship, like an opera singer doing arias in the atrium.”

An outpouring of support coupled with the success of the program led Crystal to host seven back-to-back Emerging Artists cruises to Alaska in 2011, a first for theme programming in the cruise industry, according to Escamilla.  Three new EA trips with different destinations are scheduled for 2012.

The CC/CTG Connection

 

Lecturer Dr. Drew Casper

News of the Emerging Artists cruises’ success reached CTG offices via overlapping guests/patrons and sponsors.  Escamilla met Patrick Owen, CTG’s deputy director of development, at a cocktail party and sat down with him in January 2011 to discuss developing a theater-related program CTG could market and sell that would benefit its outreach programs.

“He said we’d love CTG to be involved in a theater-themed cruise,” Owen explains. “I said that’s great, but it has to make money and advance our donor cultivation efforts.”

Deborah Deming of Frosch Classic Cruise and Travel had concurrently contacted Escamilla noting the success of Crystal’s Emerging Artists cruises and his first two theater-themed cruises. A 20-year cruise industry veteran, Deming specializes in fundraising and philanthropic travel through helping non-profit organizations put together programs that make money for the organization. She pays for the trip’s marketing so there is no cost to the non-profit and provides a 5% return from stateroom bookings made via their efforts. The only requirement is that members or supporters book through her.

Lecturer William Squire

One of the latest to participate is Ventura’s Rubicon Theatre Company, which recently announced a late October 10-day cruise from Montreal to New York featuring Amanda McBroom and George Ball and led by Rubicon artistic directors Karyl Lynn Burns and James O’Neil. A portion of the cruise fare will benefit the company’s educational programming.

“I’m someone who wished she would have been an actress and is instead a travel professional,” admits Deming. “I love going to the theater and saw what Christopher was doing with the Emerging Artists cruise. I said why aren’t we tapping into the donors who love the arts and support these kids to go on a cruise and watch them perform?”

Crystal had previously hosted film and theater cruises for 15 years, but they mainly involved showing movies on board.  Escamilla’s bosses asked how he might enhance and integrate the theme more fully into the guest experience. Starting in 2010, he began programming people like John Loesser, who discussed his father’s works at the same time the Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was a Tony nominee, coupled with a appearance by former How to Succeed star Michele Lee, as well as behind the-scenes footage playing on the ship’s channels and promoting ticket sales.

Shows like Jim Brochu’s Zero Hour and Rita McKenzie’s Ethel Merman’s Broadway became part of themed stage matinees as well.

Michael Ritchie and Kate Burton

Escamilla brought Deming in to discuss promoting a fundraising theater cruise to CTG supporters with Owen. He in turn asked to combine it with Angels’ Night, CTG’s biennial fundraising event for its education programs, hosted by its women’s auxiliary group, Center Theatre Group Affiliates, most recently in October. Deming kicked off the promotion with a cocktail party in Beverly Hills last May.

The question of Michael Ritchie and Kate Burton’s participation on the ship came later in the process. Owen admits he didn’t think Ritchie would be interested. “First it was can you help sell this and then would you be interested in participating. When he first heard about it he was totally on board. He will pretty much do anything we ask to help with the fundraising. Actually he and Kate were excited about the possibilities.”

The couple will join the ship for the last third of the voyage and be featured in a public Q &A session while interacting with CTG donors in private events. Crystal will also run a CTG-created commercial featuring its education programs on its onboard TV channel. When asked to comment about their upcoming appearance, Ritchie sent this email reply: “Kate and I have never been on a cruise before, so this was the perfect way to begin. I can’t imagine a better working vacation than to be surrounded by CTG supporters and theater lovers.”

Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles Sets Sail

Christine Pedi

With shows featuring gay icons such as Tippi Hedren, Edith Head and Christine Pedi slated for his third F&T cruise, Escamilla saw an opportunity to market to the gay and lesbian community. But he also wanted to feature a local gay organization, so he contacted the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. He spoke to interim executive director Christopher Verdugo, told him about Deming’s fundraising travel program and CTG’s pending involvement. Additional meetings outlined what would be an appropriate presentation for Crystal’s fairly conservative audiences.

“I’m not a rainbow flag-waving person, but I am still shocked today by people’s attitudes about race, religion and sexual preference,” says Escamilla. “I thought maybe I could do something about that. Why not share songs and uplifting stories with an underlying message to embrace others? So the boys are doing a Salute to Hollywood-style show followed a next-day conversation presentation that allows the guests to see who they are as people. Their last performance is a soaring mini-concert in the ship’s two-story atrium.”

This marks the first time a gay men’s chorus is performing as featured entertainment on board a commercial cruise line and is also the first sea-going venue for GMCLA. Eight men from the critically acclaimed 230-member choir are performing on the Crystal Serenity under the direction of their new artistic director E. Jason Armstrong, who recognizes the unique opportunity the voyage offers them.

“We’re being able to perform and expose the GMCLA brand to a community of people that aren’t normally part of our demographic,” he explains. “Which goes hand-in-hand with our mission statement. It also allows me to enrich the lives of our member artists, which is one of my duties as artistic director.”

Gay Men’s Chorus Los Angeles (clockwise from top center): Douglas Gardiner, Tod Macofsky, Mark Cramer, David Sperber, Ryan Slattery, Christopher Etscheid, Ethan Lin and Martin Bierbrier

Armstrong oversaw an audition/interview process to select performers for the F&T gig. He needed men who were not just talented but who could also act as GMCLA ambassadors for the cruise’s duration. Approximately 10 percent of the choir tried out. He conducted the music auditions, while Verdugo and former GMCLA executive director Thom Lynch did the interviews. The perspective performers were asked general questions about GMCLA history and their personal stories.

The eight performers selected, who range in age from mid-20s to early 50s, with one year to 14 years experience with the choir, include Martin Bierbrier, Mark Cramer, Christopher Etscheid, Douglas Gardiner, Ethan Lin, Tod Macofsky, Ryan Slattery and David Sperber.

“I think we have a good representation both age and race wise,” says Armstrong. “It’s a miniature snapshot of who GMCLA is. We’re more than just a group of singing and dancing guys. We’re a community of men who each have a unique story. We all use music to tell that story, heal whatever wounds we have in our lives as a result of some of the atrocities from those stories and share with one another. Music has been part of every civilization in existence. It’s fundamental to the human psyche. We try to use that power to share our lives.”

While Armstrong plans a mix of octet-styled arrangements and solo numbers for the full show ““ “who better than gay men to sing a Hollywood theme?” — he believes the group’s outreach presentation will be of equal significance. Armstrong plans to use that time to showcase “one of the cornerstones” of why GMCLA exists.

“Our Alive Music Project (AMP) outreach program,” he explains. “We’ll present a condensed version of what we bring to the schools — our message of anti-bullying, acceptance and empathy for all types of minorities. The guys will introduce themselves and tell the audience what they do. We’re not all hairdressers, singers and actors. We have realtors, pr executives, Harvard grads. Successful men who happen to be gay.”

GMCLA’s AMP got another significant boost recently when the California FAIR Education Act was signed into law in 2011, compelling California public schools to include contributions of LGBT people in educational textbooks and social studies curricula. AMP, which has been offered for free in public schools for the past five years, meets the state-mandated criteria for content.

Armstrong admits that one of the greatest challenges in planning GMCLA’s participation was deciding how far do they push the envelope. “We want to respect that which is Crystal Cruise and their branding, but we also want to be true to our branding. So there will be some uniquely GMCLA throw-ins. But that’s part of our identity and it would be wrong for us to deny or temper that.”

(This is the first in a series of articles chronicling Crystal’s 2012 F&T cruise. Stay tuned for behind-the-scenes stories on putting up various shows, bargaining for the ship’s rehearsal space and interviews with LA performers/lecturers on their maiden voyage. To read Part II, click here.)

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LADCC’s Big Winners — Rogue, Odyssey, Ebony, CTG

by LA Stage Alliance | March 19, 2012

Daniel Bess and Dorie Barton in "Margo Veil"; Photo by Enci

Rogue Machine won more Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards than any other company — five plus a special honor for its season — at LADCC”s 43rd annual ceremony Monday.

The Odyssey Theatre and Evidence Room shared four awards for their co-production of Margo Veil, and the Odyssey also won a separate award for sustained excellence. Ebony Repertory Theatre received four nods, all for A Raisin in the Sun in the production’s original run last year at the Nate Holden, and Center Theatre Group garnered four awards for four separate shows.

Among individual productions, the four won by Margo Veil and A Raisin in the Sun led the pack. Margo Veil shared outstanding production honors with Rogue Machine’s Small Engine Repair, which won a total of three awards, and A Raisin in the Sun shared outstanding revival honors with Reprise’s Cabaret and Theatre Banshee’s The Crucible.

Anne Gee Byrd won acting honors for both leading (All My Sons) and featured (I Never Sang for My Father) performances.

The ceremony was held at A Noise Within in Pasadena. The hosts were Jason Graae and Lesli Margherita.

The recipients of the 2011 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards are as follows:

Production

  • Margo Veil, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room, Odyssey Theatre
  • Small Engine Repair, Rogue Machine, Theatre/Theater

Scott Mosenson, Kenya Alexander, Kevin Carroll and Deidrie Henry in "A Raisin in the Sun"; Photo by Craig Schwartz

McCulloh Award for Revival

  • A Raisin in the Sun, Ebony Repertory Theatre, Nate Holden Performing Arts Center
  • Cabaret, Reprise Theatre Company, Freud Playhouse
  • The Crucible, Theatre Banshee

Direction

  • Andrew Block, Small Engine Repair, Rogue Machine at Theatre/Theater
  • Sean Branney, The Crucible, Theatre Banshee
  • Bart DeLorenzo, Margo Veil, the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room at the Odyssey Theatre

Writing

  • David Harrower, Blackbird, Rogue Machine at Theatre/Theater
  • John Pollono, Small Engine Repair, Rogue Machine at Theatre/Theater

Jon Bernthal and John Pollono in "Small Engine Repair"

Writing (Adaptation)

  • Dakin Matthews, The Capulets & the Montagues, Andak Stage Company at NewPlace Studio Theatre

Music Direction

  • Gerald Sternbach, The Robber Bridegroom, International City Theatre
  • Mike Wilkins, Jerry Springer: The Opera, Chance Theater

Choreography

  • Andy Blankenbuehler, Bring It On: The Musical, Center Theatre Group at the Ahmanson Theatre

Musical Score

  • Mark Nutter, Re-Animator: The Musical, Steve Allen Theater

Linda Park and Anne Gee Byrd in "All My Sons"; Photo by Karen Bellone

Lead Performance

  • Sam Anderson, Blackbird, Rogue Machine at Theatre/Theater
  • Anne Gee Byrd, All My Sons, Matrix Theatre
  • L. Scott Caldwell, A Raisin in the Sun, Ebony Repertory Theatre at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center
  • Edi Gathegi, Superior Donuts, Geffen Playhouse
  • Lisa O’Hare, Cabaret, Reprise Theatre Company at Freud Playhouse

Featured Performance

  • Anne Gee Byrd, I Never Sang for My Father, New American Theatre at the McCadden Theatre
  • Dermot Crowley, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Center Theatre Group and Druid and Atlantic Theater Company at the Kirk Douglas Theatre
  • Deidrie Henry, A Raisin in the Sun, Ebony Repertory Theatre at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center
  • Casey Kramer, Dolly West’s Kitchen, Theatre Banshee

Ensemble Performance

  • A Raisin in the Sun, Ebony Repertory Theatre at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center
  • Margo Veil, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room at the Odyssey Theatre

Solo Performance

  • Tom Dugan, Nazi Hunter “” Simon Wiesenthal, Theatre 40 at the Reuben Cordova Theatre
  • Charlayne Woodard, The Night Watcher, Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

Set Design

  • Richard Hoover, House of the Rising Son, Ensemble Studio Theatre””LA at the Atwater Village Theatre

Lighting Design

  • Paule Constable, Les Misérables, Center Theatre Group at the Ahmanson Theatre
  • Jeremy Pivnick, House of the Rising Son, Ensemble Studio Theatre””LA at the Atwater Village Theatre

Costume Design

  • Philippe Guillotel, Iris, Cirque du Soleil at Kodak Theatre

Sound Design

  • John Zalewski, Margo Veil, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room at the Odyssey Theatre

Specialty

  • Eric Anderson (fight choreography), Gospel According to First Squad, Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble at Powerhouse Theatre
  • John Boesche (projection design), Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie, Geffen Playhouse
  • Tony Doublin, John Naulin, John Buechler, Tom Devlin, & Greg McDougall (special effects), Re-Animator: The Musical, Steve Allen Theater
  • Shana Carroll, Boris Verkhovsky, Pierre Masse (acrobatic performance design), Iris, Cirque du Soleil at Kodak Theatre

Unique Theatrical Event

  • Standing on Ceremony, Joan Stein and Stuart Ross in association with the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center’s Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center at Renberg Theatre

Special Awards

The Ted Schmitt Award for the world premiere of an outstanding new play was awarded to David Wiener for Extraordinary Chambers. The award was accompanied by an offer to publish by Samuel French, Inc.

The Polly Warfield Award for an excellent season in a small to mid-size theater was awarded to Rogue Machine. The award was accompanied by an honorarium, funded by the Nederlander Organization.

The Bob Z Award for career achievement in set design was awarded to Kurt Boetcher.

The Angstrom Award for career achievement in lighting design was awarded to Lap Chi Chu. The award was accompanied by an honorarium, funded by Angstrom Lighting.

The Margaret Harford Award for sustained excellence in theater was awarded to the Odyssey Theatre.  The award was accompanied by an honorarium, funded by contributions from the theatrical community.

The Joel Hirschhorn Award for outstanding achievement in musical theater was awarded to Lee Martino.  The award was accompanied by an honorarium, funded by an anonymous donor.

The Milton Katselas Award for career or special achievement in direction was awarded to Matt Shakman. The award was accompanied by an honorarium, funded by Katselas Theatre Company.

The Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle was founded in 1969.  It is dedicated to excellence in theatrical criticism, and to the encouragement and improvement of theater in Greater Los Angeles.

The 2011 voting members of the LADCC consisted of:  F. Kathleen Foley (L.A. Times), Shirle Gottlieb (Gazette Newspapers, StageHappenings.com), Hoyt Hilsman (Back Stage, The Huffington Post), Mayank Keshaviah (L.A. Weekly), Amy Lyons (Back Stage, L.A. Weekly), Dany Margolies (Back Stage), Terry Morgan (Variety), Steven Leigh Morris (L.A. Weekly), David C. Nichols (L.A. Times, Back Stage), Sharon Perlmutter (TalkinBroadway.com), Melinda Schupmann (Back Stage, ShowMag.com), Madeleine Shaner (Park La Brea News/Beverly Press, Back Stage), Les Spindle (Back Stage), Bob Verini (Variety), and Neal Weaver (Back Stage).  Joining for 2012 is Pauline Adamek (L.A. Weekly).

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LA Stage Times

Columns, News

The History Plays, Starting With American Night

by Don Shirley | March 12, 2012

American history can be dramatized in many ways. I saw three productions this weekend that employed very different styles, with the common goal of provoking us to think about where our nation has been.

By far the most exciting of the three is Richard Montoya’s American Night: The Ballad of Juan José.

Although Montoya has the sole writing credit, American Night was “developed by” Culture Clash (the trio with which Montoya rose to prominence) and the show’s director, Jo Bonney. Montoya is one of the actors, as is fellow Culture Clash co-founder Herbert Siguenza. They both play many roles, but the play also has seven other actors. The third Clash member, Ric Salinas, was in the audience on opening night at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.

History is hardly unknown territory for Culture Clash. The Mission, which served as the group’s primary introduction to LA in 1990, satirized the way Father Junipero Serra treated the Native Americans, among other subjects.

But American Night is the best Culture Clash-related production ever. It attains an unprecedented cohesion between its central narrative and its historical references ““ and between its comedy and its poignancy.

That narrative centers on Juan José (René Millán), a Mexican immigrant who is cramming for his US citizenship exam, scheduled for the next day. He has been granted an expedited path to that status, because, as a former Mexican police officer who wouldn’t take bribes, he would be in grave danger if he were to return to his drug-war-torn homeland.

Yet he has mixed feelings about his opportunity. He left a pregnant wife in Mexico, and she has now given birth. As he falls asleep over his books, his dreams transport him to other eras, in scenes that often depict troubling moments from America’s past. His wife (Stephanie Beatriz) appears in different guises in most of these scenes.

Juan finds himself alongside Lewis and Clark, at the signing of the treaty that ended the Mexican American War, in West Texas during the 1918 flu pandemic, at a San Francisco labor rally, at Manzanar during World War II, in a boat fleeing Castro’s Cuba, at Woodstock.  He encounters Jackie Robinson, Emmett Till, Joe Arpaio and Ben Franklin ““ among others.

These surreal flashes from the past (and the present, in Arpaio’s case) are stocked with enough gags to give them the quality of a comedy revue. And it might look like a rather scattershot panorama — if Montoya didn’t keep drawing us back to the story of José, his wife, and his ambivalence about becoming a citizen and, in the process, turning his back on Mexico.

Director Bonney, an Australian immigrant who herself became a citizen four days after Barack Obama was sworn in as president, has been working with most of these actors and designers since the play’s 2010 premiere at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The production spent last month at La Jolla Playhouse, which is co-producing this run with Center Theatre Group. So it’s been honed for more than two years, resulting in a sharpness of script, design and performance that has never been topped by Culture Clash.

This doesn’t mean that the production has lost Culture Clash’s usual improvisational ability to change a few details in order to respond to recent developments, as in a gag on opening night that alluded to Rush Limbaugh’s latest outburst about birth control.

I have already given credit to American Night for helping improve Center Theatre Group’s record of doing productions with LA connections. I had earlier seen the Oregon premiere and expressed regret that the show was opening in Oregon, not LA. Then, a year later, after CTG had announced the current production, I wrote this: “Frankly I can’t remember how specifically it’s set in LA. But it’s certainly an LA story ““ the tale of a Latino immigrant studying for his citizenship test. Judging from Culture Clash’s habit of stuffing local references into its productions, almost to a fault, I’ll be surprised if the Douglas production isn’t very much locally-targeted.”

In fact, LA references (even a mention of Calabasas) dot the current script, primarily during the dream sequences that make up most of the play. But is the main narrative — outside the dreams — actually set in LA? I asked this question in advance of seeing the show Sunday. Montoya’s answer, received through a CTG representative, says that he “has not set the play anywhere specifically, on purpose. While there are many references to multiple locations in Los Angeles, including Echo Park, UCLA, Malibu, Northridge and J-Town, it is not set specifically in Los Angeles.”

Interesting ““ and very savvy. A couple of Culture Clash’s productions have been so laden with LA references, that they would probably be difficult to produce in most other areas, or so I’ve speculated.  Not so with American Night. It wouldn’t be that difficult to substitute this show’s LA place names with references to locations in other cities. And while LA is certainly the home of more Mexican immigrants than any other US city, it’s a national phenomenon now, of course ““ witness the restrictive laws that even Alabama has instituted to discourage illegal immigration.

This play, of course, isn’t about illegal immigration per se ““ Juan José apparently crossed without his papers, but he obtained a green card relatively easily because of his history, and now he’s taking his citizenship test. Many immigrants wouldn’t be eligible to do that for years, even decades. Montoya has also taken care to allow a few apparently non-racist voices to be heard who make the case that immigrants take American jobs or lower pay scales. Through these steps, he has probably made his play more easily digestible by audiences throughout America.

At the same time, American Night might easily serve to make those audiences more open to immigrants of whatever legal status. As it points out, the ancestors of most native-born Americans arrived here without all the proper papers.

American Night grapples not only with immigration, of course, but also with the larger issues of the gap between the American dream and some of the details of American history. In other words, this is a play about seemingly intractable issues that usually make Americans feel bad.

But its central narrative is so humanizing, its wit is so irrepressible and its ending is so upbeat that it qualifies as a genuine feel-good play. Is that a worthy compromise? I think so. To audiences who feel conflicted about these subjects, Montoya is saying “yes, we can” and “Sí, se puede.”

American Night: The Ballad of Juan José, Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Tues-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 and 8 pm, Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Closes April 1. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org. 213-628-2772.

The second of the three productions that I saw over the weekend that touch on American history ““ Hunger: In Bed With Roy Cohn ““ closed Sunday, so I’ll be brief.

Playwright Joan Beber employs a fever-dream structure that has similarities with Montoya’s in American Night. But the surreal scenes in which mid-20th-century Communist hunter and closeted gay attorney Roy Cohn consorts with figures from his past lack any secure attachment to a living protagonist — Cohn is depicted as looking back on his life from purgatory after his death from AIDS.

Barry Pearl and Jeffrey Scott Parsons; photo by Michael Lamont

An even greater problem is that Cohn’s life doesn’t relate to any currently burning issue in the same way that Juan José’s does in American Night ““ or the way that the Cohn segments in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America did when that play was introduced in the “˜90s.

So the parade of imagery skillfully assembled by director Jules Aaron, choreographer Kay Cole and the design team for the production at the Odyssey Theatre often seemed like much ado about very little. Perhaps scholars of that era or Cohn in particular might have been fascinated, but the play needs a sturdier portal for general audiences.

By contrast, the third play of this group has a seemingly exploitable connection to a currently burning issue, but it doesn’t take advantage of it.

For The Pentagon Papers, at Santa Monica Playhouse, J-Powers (aka John Powers) read thousands of pages of the titular documents ““ the behind-the-scenes accounts of America’s involvement in Vietnam that ignited extreme passions when they were first leaked to the press in 1971. The papers were officially declassified only last year.

J-Powers has the laudable goal of illuminating what went wrong for a post-Vietnam generation. Perhaps young people today could draw lessons from the Vietnam era that might apply to the current war in Afghanistan. So he recruited a cast of eight young adult actors, most of whom appear to have been born years after the Vietnam war ended and the papers were released.

Brian Sounalath, photo by PowerPlayz

They pass the narrative around in segments that never last more than about five minutes per person — this rotation of personnel adds a degree of visual variety. But the actors never engage in dialogue with each other ““ they’re like a team of graduate students taking turns making a group presentation in class, and the seven who aren’t speaking at any given time are usually sitting on the sidelines.

Unfortunately, Powers keeps his script shackled far too closely to the tone of the original documents. Of course he had to boil them down extensively in order to fit two hours, but he tries to retain the flavor of the documents themselves, so that we hear endless reports of this memo and that report, with unexplained acronyms flying around the stage and historical personalities remaining insufficiently introduced.

Perhaps realizing that his script could be deadly without additional staging enhancements, he has his cast members execute rather contrived gestures as they plod through the information. They use a few simple modular boxes, props and simple suggestions of costumes in ways that sometimes distract as much as they enhance. Behind them is a screen with a parade of titles and dimly lit still photos that are often difficult to identify.

It’s hard to discern why this information is being staged publicly, as opposed to read privately. The material would be easier to follow in the books themselves, which you could go back and re-read. Perhaps Powers feels that most people would prefer a two-hour synopsis instead of reading the documents themselves, but attracting a couple dozen people to a small theater on a Sunday afternoon in the already blue environs of Santa Monica is hardly the most efficient way to spread the word.

The Pentagon Papers, Santa Monica Playhouse Other Space, 1211 4th St.., Santa Monica. Sun 3:30 pm. Closes March 25. http://SantaMonicaPlayhouse.com. 310-394-9779.

I finally made my way to see Independent Shakespeare Company’s new Atwater studio on Saturday. The company, which charges no admission at its Griffith Park productions in the summer, charges $20 for tickets to its studio production of Hamlet, which also was seen in Griffith Park last summer.

Independent Shakespeare attracted so many people to Griffith Park last year that I considered the crowds and the lack of permanent seating somewhat mixed blessings. The performances sometimes sounded as if the actors had to push their voices to make themselves heard. By contrast, everyone in the 49-seat studio has a close-up view, and the actors can be more subtle. Melissa Chalsma’s staging remains bare-bones, in terms of design, but the text is able to breathe much more fully in the small space. It’s one of the clearest and most communicative Hamlets that I’ve seen in LA.

The actors are working on Actors’ Equity’s 99-Seat Plan, as opposed to the Equity contracts ISC uses during the summer. In comments to the audience after the show, David Melville (the star of Hamlet as well as the company’s co-founder and managing director) revealed that a plan is afoot to try to provide ISC with a more permanent facility in the Old Zoo section of the park, which might serve to increase the effectiveness of the summer shows as well.

Hamlet, 3191 Casitas Ave., #168, Atwater, LA. One remaining performance of Hamlet, Sat March 17 at 5 pm. Scheduled for Sundays March 25 and April 1 at the studio is Melville in a solo rendition of the first part of Nicholas Nickleby. www.iscla.org. 818-710-6306.

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Columns, News

Music Makers. Erection Fires Blanks. Road’s Rage Rep.

by Don Shirley | February 13, 2012

Burbank’s two midsize theaters are alive with the sound of music. The West Coast premiere of Damian Lanigan’s Dissonance at the Falcon Theatre opened one week after the Colony Theatre opened its revival of Jon Marans’ Old Wicked Songs.

These are not musicals. Both plays employ “classical” music (in the broad, colloquial sense of the word), but Dissonance is set just a few years ago and Old Wicked Songs is set in 1986.

Skip Pipo, Elizabeth Schmidt, Peter Larney and Daniel Gerroll in "Dissonance"

LA theatergoers are not likely to have seen Dissonance. However, they might have heard that it’s about a string quartet and might then confuse it with another play about a string quartet ““ the play that the Fountain Theatre produced to considerable acclaim in 2010. But that one was Michael Hollinger’s Opus.

While the Fountain’s Opus was the first time that many of us saw a play about the backstage backbiting among the members of a string quartet, not all plays about the backstage backbiting among the members of a string quartet are the same.

Dissonance is the better play ““ its narrative turns don’t feel contrived in the same way that some of those in Opus did.

Lanigan is a British writer who now lives in Brooklyn, and his subject is an apparently British-based quartet now preparing for its New York debut. The group is named after and run by the first violinist James Bradley (Daniel Gerroll). The violist Paul (Skip Pipo) is also British, but the second violinist Hal (Peter Larney) and the cellist Beth (Elizabeth Schmidt) are younger Americans — former students of the boss.

Daniel Gerroll and Peter Larney

James is a witty but cruel tyrant, and Paul his most submissive target. Hal, on the other hand, talks back, immediately challenging the tempo of the group’s rendition of Mozart’s “Dissonance” Quartet in the first scene after the first (recorded) music stops. It’s the first indication of the many sources of tension that swirl below the surface of this seemingly well-coordinated unit.

Both James and Hal have a previous romantic or sexual history with Beth. This old wound suddenly gets scratched when Beth gets a side gig as a tutor/consultant to a rock star, Jonny (Jeffrey Cannata), who has left his own group to begin a more introspective solo career. He’s interested in adding a cello ““ or an entire string quartet ““ to his arrangements.

Another issue is whether a former mentor of James will attend the concert. James feels that he hasn’t quite reached the level of his mentor and he’s sensitive about it.

As in Opus, the quartet’s playing is mimed. But in Dissonance, one additional musical number is performed live — Cannata sings and plays a song from Jonny’s repertoire (actually by Warren Malone, with new lyrics by Lanigan).

Whether recorded or live, the music reflects and reinforces what’s happening in the play, with a dose of Britten near the end eloquently expressing the apparent imminent dissolution of the group. Crispin Whittell’s staging is in harmony with Lanigan’s script at all times. Gerroll repeats the role he played in the Williamstown premiere and later in New York with total command, but the others rise to his standard. I can’t remember a better non-Troubie production in the history of the Falcon.

Dissonance, Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank. Wed-Sat 8 pm, Sun 4 pm. Closes March 4. www.FalconTheatre.com. 818-955-8101.

***All Dissonance production photos by Chelsea Sutton

The script of Dissonance contains a few references to the mixed emotions that often surge through great music, and that’s also a topic of Old Wicked Songs, the Jon Marans masterpiece at the Colony. This play hasn’t been seen much in LA County since it was introduced to LA at the Geffen Playhouse in 1997, and it’s well worth either a discovery or a re-visit..

John Towey and Tavis Ganz in "Old Wicked Songs"

A brilliant young American pianist, Stephen Hoffman (Tavis Danz) who already feels burned out at age 25, arrives in Vienna in 1986, hoping for new inspiration from a master teacher. However, the (offstage) teacher requires this consummate solo technician to first study accompaniment for a few weeks with Josef Mashkan (John Towey), whose methods involve making the pianist sing as well as play ““ perhaps in order to get him to think more clearly about the broader context of the music he performs. Stephen, whose arrogance is on the level of the much older James in Dissonance, isn’t happy about this assignment.

But Old Wicked Songs is about much more than music or about the familiar arc of the old-timer and the young whippersnapper who finally learns that he doesn’t know it all. It’s set against the context of former Nazi Kurt Waldheim’s campaign for the Austrian presidency in 1986 and the fact that both of its characters are, at first, pretending not to be Jewish. The play is at least somewhat autobiographical ““ as was explained in an LA Times interview with Marans in 1997.

Tavis Danz and John Towey

For a play that isn’t explicitly about the Holocaust, Old Wicked Songs packs considerable power in dealing with its indirect subject. And, once again, the music is ““ pardon the pun ““ both instrumental and vocal in accomplishing this goal. Near the end of the play is a riveting scene in which Mashkan finally speaks about his experiences from decades ago ““ but we don’t hear his words or even see his face. We hear the music while we’re watching Stephen’s face. I would say that this is an unforgettable scene ““ if I hadn’t, in fact, forgotten it. But in retrospect I’m glad I forgot about it, because its power in this production was more of a revelation.

The Colony’s director, Stephanie Vlahos, is a former professional opera singer herself, and her knowledge of the interplay between teacher and student is probably more authentic than you’ll encounter in most revivals of Marans’ work. She has found two actors in Towey and Danz who convincingly play and sing their own music without relying on recordings ““ and they are no less convincing in their spoken dialogue.  This is a remarkable revival of a play that appears to be close to achieving classic stature.

Old Wicked Songs, Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St, Burbank. Thur-Fri 8 pm, Sat 3 and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. www.ColonyTheatre.org. 818-558-7000.

***All Old Wicked Songs production photos by Michael Lamont

Perhaps I shouldn’t have referred, above, to Old Wicked Songs as Marans’ masterpiece without having seen all his plays, but I have seen his The Temperamentals (last year at the Blank Theatre), Jumping for Joy (at Laguna Playhouse) and now his latest, The Cost of the Erection, at the Blank. I liked The Temperamentals, but I can’t say that either it or the other two is likely to be remembered as a masterpiece.

Robin Riker and Michael E. Knight in "The Cost of the Erection"; Photo by Michael Geniac

It’s possible that Marans is still working on The Cost of the Erection. Besides the Blank Theatre’s just-opened production, a concurrent version in Pennsylvania has a different title ““ A Raw Space. So perhaps it’s still a raw script. Whatever it is, it’s nowhere near the level of The Temperamentals and it’s a far, far cry from Old Wicked Songs.

In Erection/Space, architect Mark (Michael E. Knight) and his wife Susu (Robin Riker), who is an independently wealthy publicist for architects, have just bought a Manhattan apartment with a spectacular view but without any interior design ““ in other words, a raw space. For reasons that are never sufficiently explained and never approach a threshold of plausibility, Susu asks over rival architect Rod (James Louis Wagner) and his wife Brenda (Kal Bennett), with whom she has bad blood ““ and then she asks both men to come up with designs for the space in what amounts to a competition.

Kal Bennett, Robin Riker and James Louis Wagner in "The Cost of the Erection"; Photo by Rick Baumgartner

Marans also tosses in a dead child, infidelities, an unlikely scene in which Brenda is caught snooping in Mark’s office, and a shower in an area of the apartment which had been considered as a possible shower site but which we thought was still “raw.” Scenes are played twice from different perspectives, and the raw stage is eventually filled out with curtains as dividers and a couple of brightly-colored pieces of furniture ““ but without any increase in credibility or any well-expressed larger point.

The two couples are cast here by director Daniel Henning as being at least a decade apart in age, but any generational differences hardly crop up in the actual script. The West Coast title is a pun ““ get it? ““ that’s about on the same level as Marans’ naming a character Rod and then giving him a low sperm count and eventual impotence.

It’s time to go back to the drawing boards.

The Cost of the Erection, Blank Theatre, 2nd Stage, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. www.theblank.com. 323-661-9827.

Speaking of designing a raw space, you should see what Desma Murphy did with the Road Theatre Company’s little venue. She designed one extremely realistic, detailed set that serves equally well for two plays that aren’t connected by author or characters.

They are connected, however, by a little more than the rustic lakeside setting, with a back porch of a house on stage left and trees on stage right, and the lake itself unseen off the  stage right side.

Chet Grissom and John Gowans in "Finding Fossils"

Both plays are also about fathers and their children.

The off-night play, Ty DeMartino’s Finding Fossils, is mostly about an middle-aged son (Chet Grissom) and his distant, crotchety and recently widowed dad (John Gowans), who lives out at the family’s lakeside summer home. The son, who is a director of TV soap operas in Manhattan, is gay, but the father-son alienation apparently started long before anyone realized that. A third character, one of the father’s friends (Mark Costello) who never married, tries to mediate.

The play is predictable but also poignant, with authentically lived-in performances by all three men, under the guidance of Suzanne Hunt.

The main weekend attraction, Theresa Rebeck’s The Water’s Edge, is as much about the mother as the father. It’s a modern take-off on the ancient Greek story that featured Queen Clytemnestra even more than King Agamemnon, with their surviving children Orestes and Electra resenting their father’s long absence and his role in the death of their sister Iphigenia.

Nicole Farmer, Paris Perrault and Patrick Rieger in "Water's Edge"

In Rebeck’s version, Richard (Albie Selznick) returns to his family’s country home in the hills above New York, after 17 years of absence in the wake of the drowning of a young daughter in the lake. It was entirely an accident, he maintains, but his wife Helen (Nicole Farmer, alternating with Stephanie Michels) won’t accept that. She’s distressed by his homecoming, as is daughter Eric (Paris Perrault), but son Nate (Patrick Rieger) appears more open to the idea ““ and to the fact that Richard is accompanied by a younger girlfriend (Lauren Birriel).

Although anyone who knows the original knows how badly this is likely to end, Rebeck’s dialogues and Sam Anderson’s staging keep us interested anyway. Although some have interpreted this 2006 play as a case of male-bashing, I was impressed with Rebeck’s efforts to make us understand Richard’s point of view ““ in fact, it’s more comprehensible than Helen’s ultimate act of revenge.

The depiction of the two adult children features some new wrinkles. Nate displays behavioral tics that might indicate some kind of mental illness, perhaps as a way of preparing us for the horrific final scenes. But despite his halting speech patterns, he also comes across as awkwardly appealing in his own way ““ his conversation with his father about his job at a bookstore is, strangely enough, one of the play’s most compelling moments. Meanwhile, Erica ““ although memorably bitter ““ is almost totally free of guilt in the play’s final moments. This is one of the best Rebeck plays I’ve been ““ clearly on a level above the Taper’s Poor Behavior last year.

Road Theatre’s rep, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Finding Fossils plays Wed-Thur 8 pm, Sun 7 pm. Closes March 25. The Water’s Edge plays Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Closes March 24. www.RoadTheatre.org.  866-811-4111.

***All Finding Fossils and The Water’s Edge production photos by Chris Goss

A TV SERIES ABOUT CTG? By the way, Rebeck of Water’s Edge and Poor Behavior fame is now the writer and most active producer behind Smash, the new NBC drama series about the making of a Broadway show. She also was the interviewer to whom Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie offered his unforgettable exclamation, “Fuck subscribers!” last year.

With the ratings success (last week, that is) of Smash, perhaps Rebeck’s next TV series will examine the behind-the-scenes drama at a Hollywood-adjacent non-profit theater company, with a dashing artistic director who resembles, say, ex-presidential candidate Jon Huntsman?

Hey, NBC, it’s right under your nose. You can send the finder’s fee to my agent.

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Calligraphy on an Equity Contract, Examining Heralds

by Don Shirley | November 19, 2010

In the late ’80s, Los Angeles Theatre Center was, at the very least, L.A.’s second most important theater company, almost up there with Center Theatre Group. With its cluster of three mid-size theaters and a couple of 99-Seat Plan spaces, all feeding into a spacious lobby, LATC created a lot of buzz. But as the years passed, the warning signs of the company’s 1992 financial collapse became hard to ignore.

Recently, the facility has been somewhat renovated by the current management team, the Latino Theater Company – which produces its own shows, on Actors’ Equity contracts, two or three times a year.  And the neighborhood around LATC is much livelier than it was two decades ago, now boasting plenty of nearby apartment dwellers and dining opportunities.

Still, during too much of the year, those three mid-size LATC theaters are either dark – or they’re filled by companies who work on the 99-Seat Plan. In those cases, only 99 of the seats (usually in the street-side Theatre 2) are for sale, leaving companies to try to find creative ways of making the space seem more filled, as Robey Theatre did in its recent The Reckoning.

So it was great to hear that part of the James Irvine Foundation’s $225,000 grant to LATC/Latino Theater Company in June is being used to help one of LATC’s other resident companies, Playwrights’ Arena, produce its first show on an Equity contract – the premiere of Velina Hasu Houston’s Calligraphy.

<p>Emily Kuroda and Melody Bitiu. Photo by Ed Krieger</p>

Emily Kuroda and Melody Butiu. Photo by Ed Krieger

Playwrights’ Arena produces new plays by L.A.-based playwrights. New plays are always a hard sell – but they’re also a vital part of L.A.’s theatrical landscape. Producing more of them on Equity contracts, above the 99-seat level, recognizes the importance of this kind of work and could conceivably draw more attention to the plays.

Staged in LATC’s downstairs Theatre 3, Calligraphy continues Houston’s series of plays inspired by her own family’s dramatic odyssey. In Asa Ga Kimashita, which East West Players produced in 1984, a young woman in post-World War II Japan defied her conservative father and ran off to America with an African American/Native American G.I. In Houston’s best-known play, Tea, which L.A. first saw at the Odyssey Theater in 1991, that same Japanese woman is stranded at an Army base in Kansas with a small group of other war brides, one of whom commits suicide.

Calligraphy is set in the 21st century, initially in Kansas (although that location isn’t clear until a little too late into the first scene). A just-widowed woman (Emily Kuroda) has a history strikingly similar to that of the inter-marrying migrant in Houston’s earlier plays. But she also has a different name, Noriko. Her daughter Hiromi (Melody Butiu) has come to Kansas from her home in L.A. for the funeral of her father, Noriko’s late African American husband Eamon (Kevin Daniels).

After that first scene, Noriko moves to L.A. to be closer to her daughter. We see mother and daughter dancing a sometimes tender, sometimes adversarial psychological tango with each other over the mother’s increasing dependency. We glimpse Noriko’s Alzheimer’s-affected memories and visions of her Japanese-based romance with her late husband.

We also go to contemporary Japan, where Noriko’s older sister (Jeanne Sakata) still tsks-tsks over Noriko’s move to America with a black man – while simultaneously waging war with her own daughter, the very Westernized Sayuri (Fran de Leon). The cousins Hiromi and Sayuri frequently use Skype to compare notes on their mothers and the rest of their lives, and they conspire to eventually re-unite their estranged mothers in Japan.

The play has a few too many incidents that are unlikely and insights that are all too likely. The scenes with Noriko and Hiromi, who is apparently Houston’s alter ego, generally ring true. But after Noriko wanders away from home into Venice Boulevard traffic, causing an accident and mistaking a policeman for her late husband, wouldn’t her daughter think twice about pursuing the plan for the two of them to travel to the other side of the world? Not in this play.

Meanwhile, the scenes in Japan are cluttered with references to an offstage man whom both mother and daughter covet, romantically, and with some further – albeit mild – confusion about locations. At one point, mother and daughter apparently move together to some vague location in the suburbs, but why they do so is under-explained. The most surprising aspect of Houston’s perspective is that she questions the common U.S. assumption that the Japanese treat the elderly better than Americans do.

It’s a pleasure to watch four of L.A.’s best actresses, directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera, in the play’s sometimes delicate and sometimes abrasive exchanges – although all four appear about five or 10 years too young for these roles.

The calligraphy that Noriko pursues is represented in Ann Sheffield’s spare but elegant set design.  Its meaning as a metaphor for the aging process is explained in a playwright’s note – although we can’t actually see the fading ink of older calligraphy, to which Houston refers. Still, the metaphor provides a lyrical lift to a play that’s sometimes too prosaic.

Calligraphy, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Theatre 3, 514 S. Spring St., downtown L.A. Thur-Sat, 8 pm; Sun, 3 pm. Closes Dec. 12. Dark Thanksgiving Day. 866-811-4111. www.thelatc.org.

At first, Jon Cellini’s Heralds also looks like a somewhat prosaic piece in need of some theatrical adrenalin – and soon enough, it gets that needed jolt, in spades.

<br />Jeff Kerr McGivney and Rob Mathes in Heralds. Photo by Stuart Rogers.

Jeff Kerr McGivney and Rob Mathes in Heralds. Photo by Stuart Rogers.

On the first day of his new job as editor of a Kansas City newspaper, Joe (Jeff Kerr McGivney) glances at a cartoon lampooning creationism and quickly approves it without much thought. The newspaper and its advertisers are soon hit by a massive protest movement from the followers of Pastor Bob (Pete Gardner). A tired rehash of an episode from the old Lou Grant TV series?

Not quite. Among the characters who comment on the action are Socrates, Galileo, Goebbels, and an imprisoned Iranian journalist. And, without giving too much away, let’s just say that the entire production assumes a meta-theatrical tone that might make Pirandello proud.

Cellini takes us on a wild adventure.  What begins as a simple censorship flap assumes unexpected poignancy on its more realistic level and a breezily timeless relevance on its less realistic level.

Along the way, a few of the realistic details don’t feel quite convincing – would Joe really not even wonder why no cartoonist’s name was attached to this particular cartoon? There could have been a little more information about how Joe got the job – was it due more to his engagement to the daughter (Annie Tedesco) of the boss (Andrew Bloch) than it was to his talent?

But in the context of the greater suspension of disbelief that Cellini requests, such questions are trivial. Stuart Rogers’ staging for Theatre Tribe makes sure that the ending is funny and grim in about equal measure – a great combination for the makings of an entertaining and provocative evening.

Heralds, Theatre Tribe (within the El Portal Theatre complex), 5267 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Thur-Sat, 8 pm. Dark Thanksgiving weekend. 800-838-3006. www.theatretribe.com.

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Going Local: Tales From Hollywood, Making Paradise

by Don Shirley | October 29, 2010

Center Theatre Group hasn’t always neglected its own community in its programming choices. After I recently wrote about the current CTG’s deficits in that department, I was reminded of CTG’s past efforts along those lines when I saw a revival of the CTG-originated Tales From Hollywood at the Odyssey Theatre.

Three decades ago, Gordon Davidson – then the artistic director of CTG’s Mark Taper Forum – commissioned Tales From Hollywood from playwright Christopher Hampton. The Taper produced it in 1982.  Part of it is set in the Pacific Palisades house where Davidson lived (and still lives).  An earlier owner of the house, émigré screenwriter Salka Viertel, hosted salons there for some of the writers who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe. These writers are the subject of Hampton’s play.

Talk about local programming – I wonder if any other artistic director has ever commissioned a play that’s partially set within his own abode. Has Davidson’s CTG successor Michael Ritchie checked the history of his own L.A. residence to see if any ideas for plays are lurking there?

<br />Gregory Gifford Giles, left, and the dinner guests at what would later become Gordon Davidson's house, in Tales From Hollywood. Photo by Enci.

Gregory Gifford Giles, left, and the dinner guests at what would later become Gordon Davidson's house, in Tales From Hollywood. Photo by Enci.

Michael Peretzian’s staging of Hampton’s play is an engrossing and often witty glimpse of the melancholy milieu that his subjects inhabited. They were exiles in a beautiful, sunny region, where the commercial imperatives of Hollywood were almost as difficult to understand as their fractured English. Back home, their culture was crumbling, with family members and friends sent to the death camps. The ironies were almost too blatant.

Hampton chose to narrate his tale through Ödön von Horváth, a real-life Hungarian playwright who was killed in 1938, in an accident in Paris, but who might well have become one of those émigré writers in Hollywood had he survived. Gregory Gifford Giles is a revelation in the role, nimbly switching between an American-accented English when he speaks directly to other émigrés or to the audience and a thick Middle European accent when he speaks to the play’s American characters.

Hampton, a Brit who has worked as a Hollywood writer, also adapted four of von Horváth’s plays into English, including Tales From the Vienna Woods a few years prior to Tales From Hollywood. So he obviously feels a kinship with von Horváth. By establishing the dead Hungarian writer as his narrator, he advises us that he’s wielding his artistic license.

However, as usual with historical fiction that involves some real-life historical figures, I found myself wondering how much was history and how much was fiction. The play’s final scene feels especially artificial. Hampton tips his hat to a plot twist out of Sunset Boulevard, and it almost seems more fitting for his future libretto for the stage musical version of Sunset Boulevard than it is for this play.

Still, in the hands of Peretzian and company, Tales From Hollywood is generally convincing in its grasp of the spirit of that era. And it’s good to be reminded that once upon a time, CTG generated imaginative new plays set in Los Angeles.

Of course it’s even better if a company can look beyond its artistic director’s house and find inspiration among other local subjects. Certainly Davidson’s CTG did so, fairly often. But probably no other company matches the record of Cornerstone Theater in regularly producing plays about our home turf. So it’s fitting that Cornerstone chose to celebrate its own 25th anniversary by producing a new musical marking (a little belatedly) the 25th anniversary of the cityhood of West Hollywood.

The result is Making Paradise: The West Hollywood Musical! – and its site-specificity extends to the fact that some of the scenes from 26 years ago took place in the same Fiesta Hall, within West Hollywood’s Plummer Park, where the production is staged.

<br />Making Paradise's opening number "1984". Photo by John C. Luker.

Making Paradise's opening number "1984". Photo by John C. Luker.

With that kind of immediacy and with a cast that includes some West Hollywood residents as well as a nucleus of professional actors, Making Paradise maintains a vibrant spirit that’s almost irresistible, despite some surprising problems within Tom Jacobson’s libretto.

Unlike Tales From Hollywood, Making Paradise doesn’t include any real-life people within its cast of characters. Probably many of those who helped give birth to West Hollywood are still alive, so a more documentary-like tone might have led to problems of hurt feelings or even lawsuits. Still, the overdone plot that Jacobson cooked up feels unnecessarily contorted and, at times, unclear (which also happens to have been my reaction to the recent non-Cornerstone production The Web, which was written by Cornerstone artistic director Michael John Garcés, who co-directed Making Paradise with Mark Valdez).

However, Making Paradise is also powered by a lively score by Deborah Wicks LaPuma, with some sharp-edged lyrics by Shishir Kurup – when they can be understood, that is. This isn’t always the case given the acoustics of this space, especially when sung by the less professional singers. Kyle de Tarnowsky leads a five-piece band at the back of the stage.

The scenes are divided between 1983-1984 and the fall of 2009. Now let’s hope that someone produces a strong new work soon about something that’s happening in L.A. County in the present day. Cornerstone’s upcoming Hunger Cycle might serve that purpose. Change the names if you must, but at least part of our far-flung theater scene should try to assume the role of town crier.

Tales From Hollywood, Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A. Thur-Sat, 8 pm; most Sundays 2 pm; Sundays Nov. 14 and Dec. 19, 7 pm; Wednesdays Nov. 3 and 10, 8 pm. Closes Dec. 19.  310-477-2055. www.odysseytheatre.com.

Making Paradise: The West Hollywood Musical!, Thur-Sat 8 pm, Sun 3 pm, Fiesta Hall within Plummer Park, 7377 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Wed-Sat, 8 pm, Sun Nov. 7, 2 and 7 pm. Closes Nov. 7. www.CornerstoneTheater.org.

<br />Ann Randolph in Loveland

Ann Randolph in Loveland

One of the most exciting solo shows in years, Ann Randolph’s Loveland has two more performances at the Santa Monica Playhouse, Thursdays at 8 pm. Surely this broadly comic yet also delicately nuanced performance, about an outspoken woman’s cross-country flight following the death of her mother, deserves a longer L.A. run, on days other than Thursdays (she’s been flying up to the Bay Area for weekend performances of the same show). L.A. producers, take note.

Loveland, Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th St., Santa Monica.  Thur 8 pm. Closes Nov. 18. 800-838-3006. www.brownpapertickets.com.

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