Francis Gercke and Maggie Carney in "Misery."                                                           Photo by Daren Scott

            With its taut and terrifying production of William Goldman’s “Misery,” Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company caps an exceptional 2024 season that also included Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” and Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” Each show more unnerving than the next, Backyard demonstrated – as it has practically from its very beginning – that its work is bold and unafraid to unsettle.
            “Misery,” of course, is Goldman’s adaptation of horror novelist supreme Stephen King’s 1987 novel which three years later became a film (written by Goldman and directed by Rob Reiner) best remembered for a towering performance by Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, imprisoned writer Paul Sheldon’s “No. 1 fan.”
            Under the deft direction of MJ Seiber, Backyard Renaissance’s production exploits the smallish confines of the Tenth Avenue Arts Center theater to create a thick air of claustrophobia essential to the storytelling. Not only is crippled Paul (Francis Gercke) trapped in the little Colorado house that belongs to wackadoodle Annie (Maggie Carney), but so are we the audience. It isn’t 10 minutes into the story before we want out of that bed, out of that house, out of the clutches of Annie, whose initial solicitude gives way to mania.
            Furthering the suffocating atmosphere are Curtis Mueller’s muted lighting and sudden bursts of sound (including a kitchen alarm clock and later a horrific gunshot). For this production, Logan Kirkendall is sound designer, Jeffrey Neitzel special effects coordinator.
            I’m not sure why the between-scenes playing of mostly ‘60s pop songs works as well as it does, too. Maybe it’s the incongruity of hearing the cheerful, jangly tunes in the midst of this frightening tale.
            The production opens with Paul already in a sickbed, having been pulled from the wreckage of his ’65 Mustang (hey – that works fine with the pop tunes!) by Annie, a trained nurse who is ministering to him mainly out of sheer adoration. She lives for – and she tells him so, over and over – his “Misery” romance novels, Victorian sagas of heroine Misery Chastain. It quickly becomes obvious, to Paul and to us, that Annie’s devotion is rooted in the crazy zone. Still, as she goes off the rails we’re startled, even when we know something violent is forthcoming.
            I’ll leave out the particulars but will say that they’re as graphically portrayed as possible in a stage production.
            As with Hitchcock at his sliest or Spielberg with “Jaws,” the terror resides in what is not seen or shown … until it is. Goldman’s script of King’s novel, and this Backyard Renaissance production, employ that same dread anticipation and smoldering suspense. The looming question is: Will Paul get out of this?
            None of this would be as effective and gripping without the right Annie and the right Paul. This production has both. Carney, who relocated to Los Angeles several years ago but returns to San Diego (as she did last year for Backyard’s “August: Osage County”), ideally mixes Annie’s doting folksiness and eruptions of ferocity, all while not trying to channel Kathy Bates’ definitive portrayal. Carney’s is an Annie all her own – changing on a dime from hero worship to insanity.
            Gercke is not shackled by the restrictions of playing a character who can’t walk. His anguish and agony, and the cunning Paul employs in attempts to extricate himself from his living nightmare, are vivid and visceral. Just his cries of pain when he tries to crawl on the floor get under our skin. It’s a stout performance that has a desperation all its own.
            Alex Guzman appears for a couple of scenes as Buster, a sheriff who is rightly suspicious of what might be going on in Annie’s house. He’ll be sorry he was curious.
            As a writer, I wonder what I would do if I encountered an obsessive fan. Being neither Stephen King nor Paul Sheldon, I doubt this will happen. But should I ever find himself driving through a blinding snowstorm, I’ll be sure to take it slow and cautious just the same.
            “Misery” runs through Dec. 7 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center downtown.

Bryan Banville and Cody Bianchi in "Midnight at the Never Get."                 Photo by Talon Reed Cooper

            The two-hander “Midnight at the Never Get” might seem like a small show for Diversionary Theatre to open its 39th season with. But the West Coast premiere of this play-with-music by Mark Sonnenblick has big and meaningful things to say about love, identity and social justice.
            Bryan Banville stars as Trevor, a cabaret singer in the Village of the 1960s who because he’s gay and his audiences are is relegated to back-room “members-only” clubs that he tells us are subsidized by the mob and regularly raided. But as much as Trevor is devoted to performing, his true love is Arthur (Cody Bianchi), a keyboardist and songwriter he meets who becomes his lover and also his partner at one particular cabaret: the Never Get.
            Banville is center-stage at Diversionary, with Bianchi on keyboards and a sublime three-piece band to their right. The 90-minute show directed by Stephen Brotebeck finds Trevor singing the Great American Songbook-like tunes written (to him) by Arthur while telling the story of their aspirations beyond the Never Get, the arc of their romantic relationship and, achingly, the forces that would divide them.
            Let me step aside for a moment and credit the wonderful, atmospheric songs Sonnenblick composed for this show. The opener, “Mercy Of Love,” and closer, the heart-rending “When It’s Spring Again,” are poignant ballads worthy of that aforementioned Great American Songbook. So are, in between, “Too Late For Me” and “Dance With Me.” He’s also written clever, jaunty tunes like you’d hear in a crowd-pleasing cabaret act -- “Bells Keep Ringing” and “Why’dya Hafta Call It Love” to name two. A sensitive singer and an actor with a strong musical background, Banville embraces all of these with sparkling and tender results. Bianchi may be there more to play the piano than to sing, but it’s his subtle emotion that carries “When It’s Spring Again.”
            It becomes clear early in the going that the cabaret piano player is more than that, and it’s quite easy to accept that Trevor and Arthur are there, resurrecting the past, before our eyes. Their chief conflict will be clear as well: The needy Trevor loves Arthur most. The ambitious Arthur loves his music most.
            Where “Midnight at the Never Get” is most impactful, however, is looming above the relationship between Trevor and Arthur: the harsh reality of a shameful period in American history in which gay men were forced into the shadows and, if they emerged, subject to false arrests, beatings and even worse.
            You know where Trevor’s and Arthur’s tale is headed, but the ending is still a stirring surprise.
            Already a versatile actor as comfortable in a musical as he is in a play, Bryan Banville reaches another level of excellence in this part, reflecting Trevor’s desperate pain while clinging to hope and to his singing. Bianchi, in the more restrained and less likable role of Arthur, is a more than able counterpart, and he plays the piano the way I dreamed of playing back when I was taking lessons.
            In the end, love is complicated beyond lovers’ comprehension, it’s fraught with pain, and sometimes not even the right song can heal, much less promise a happy ending.  
            “Midnight at the Never Get” runs through Nov. 17 at Diversionary Theatre in University Heights.

Abbi Hoffpauir (left) and Samantha Gorjanc in "Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help." Photo by Aaron Rumley

            The so-called fourth wall isn’t just broken in Katie Forgette’s “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help.” It was never there to begin with.
            In this North Coast Repertory Theatre comedy that spoofs the ‘70s and punctures Catholic parish hypocrisies the protagonist, graduate school-bound Linda O’Shea, opens by introducing herself and her at-once traditional and dysfunctional Irish-American family to the audience. Linda, played with likable pluck by Samantha Gorjanc, will face the crowd and share cutting commentary throughout the two-hour play. So will Shana Wride as the feisty, sardonic and uber-clever Aunt Terri.
            It’s like Linda’s doing standup and starring in a wacky family story at the same time.
            But the character tells us at the outset that this is a memory play and that not everything in it happened exactly the way it’s portrayed. This becomes incidental once we’re caught up in the tale.
            The slower first act has to take some time fleshing out the members of the O’Shea clan. Besides Lind they area:
            Her 13-year-old sis Becky (Abbi Hoffpauir), who likes to don a trench coat and pretend she’s Bogart as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. (It seems a bit of a reach that a girl of that age would be as conversant with films from the ‘40s as she is, but whatever.) 
            The girls’ mom, Jo (Erin Noel Grennan), devoutly Catholic and a hard-working “housewife” – a contrast to the liberated Linda, herself devoted to the enlightenment of the fledgling women’s movement.
            Loud and commanding dad Mike O’Shea (Tom Dugan, in one of three roles in “Incident” – more on this), a lunch-pail guy with a lunch-pail bellow.
               And Aunt Terri (Wride), who’s living with the family in the wake of a broken marriage. In spite of her bitterness she is the smartest one in the room.
               Unseen but very much heard from upstairs in the O’Shea home is Grandma, who can out-shout Mike.
             Now you know everybody. There’s the usual extended family back and forth until the moment that Jo asks – make that tells – daughter Linda to clue in Becky on menstruation. And while she’s at, the facts of life too.
              This scene alone, the frankest, funniest truth-telling from one sister to another that you’re ever likely to hear, is playwright Forgette at her best, and at North Coast Rep Gorjanc and the stunned, wide-eyed Hoffpauir nail it.
            The play's titular “Incident” arises from this graphic tell-all: Unknown to Linda, the precocious Becky has secretly recorded their discussion (she likes to play at private eye, remember?) and the illicit recording has been heard by their parish priest Father Peter. Forgette will maneuver some laughs from that name later.
             That’s not all. The first act winds up with a reveal that literally freezes the reacting characters.
Director Jenny Sullivan has her hands full with a busy script complicated by built-in theatrical devices like the freezes and the monologues to the audience and Dugan’s shifting characterizations.      
              On top of all that “Incident” takes a more serious turn in the second act as the conflicts are addressed, highlighted by a showdown between Aunt Terri and Father Peter (also Dugan).
               Happily, everything comes together and this pointed comedy wrings laugh after laugh from its sendup of a strange decade and of Catholic church/school tropes that many theatergoers will remember all too well. “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help” is an entertaining affair that doesn’t bog down into issue commentary but relies instead on a winning cast’s fun with what could be called PG-13 sitcom comedy.
              The costumes by Elisa Benzoni are appropriately ‘70s bland but also include Becky’s Catholic school uniform of a plaid jumper and peter pan collar. Set designer Marty Burnett’s O’Shea house has that olive-green couch and splashes of orange and avocado that, again, we have the ‘70s to “thank” for.
           Seriously speaking, we should thank Tom Dugan and Shana Wride for their memorable performances in this show – Dugan does a Peter Sellers special, playing three parts including one as a woman, while Wride burnishes her rep as one of the most dependable actors in town.
             For a survivor of parochial school like myself, “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help” is a vivid reminder of what I had to survive in the first place.
             “Incident at Our Lady of Perpetual Help” runs through XX at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach.

Veronica Burgess and Julian Ortega in "Masa."                                Photo courtesy of OnStage Playhouse

            Playwright Salomon Maya may not have set out to create a work of magical realism with “Masa,” but his textured drama about family and grief has more than mere shades of the artistic genre characterized by the extraordinary inhabiting the otherwise ordinary.
            In Maya’s world premiere at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista, Lolita, the widow of a beloved husband killed in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, believes that Carlos “speaks” to her in the form of Beatles songs that seem to randomly start playing on the family radio. Then there’s the masa itself, the dough with which Lolita makes her popular tamales. It becomes food for inspiration and athletic greatness among the members of the Argentine futbol team, which is in Mexico City competing for the 1986 World Cup. It’s just eight months after the deadly quake that took at least 10,000 lives.
            Whether there’s any magic in Lolita’s radio or the tamales she lovingly creates is purely speculative, but these narrative contrivances add a fanciful and even touching aspect to the story of a woman so immersed in grief that she cannot leave her home.
            That is a source of frustration and pain for her soon-to-be-18-year old son, Santiago. The boy is grieving himself, but rather than seeking comfort in songs before his time emanating from a radio, he’s working on rebuilding one of the fallen edifices from the quake.
            The fates of Lolita, beautifully played by Veronica Burgess, and Santiago (an earnest Julian Ortega) are soon impacted by the arrival of Gaston (the playwright Maya), who works for the Argentine futbol team. He brings news to Lolita that its players, and most especially its star playmaker Diego Maradona, crave her tamales for performance power; for the searching Santiago, Gaston brings hope of a future out of his claustrophobic home in spite of his deep devotion to his mother.
            “Masa’s” fourth character is Dorotea (Denise Lopez), Lolita’s friend and neighbor who has been “tia” to Santiago all his life. She is the story’s comic relief but also perhaps its most worldly wise presence. It takes convincing Lolita to hide under a table – a flashback to their shared earthquake experience – to begin bringing her friend around.
            The charm of “Masa,” directed by James Darvas, is the dedication to and passion for these characters that the entire cast exhibits. Conversations are fast and frantic at times and emotions jumbled. But Lolita, Santiago, Dorotea and even Gaston feel very real and totally sympathetic.
            Burgess’ Lolita is the play’s heartbeat. Her sadness and her confronting her inner strength constitute the arc of the story. The Beatles tunes on the radio, though whimsical, don’t even feel necessary.
            The masa is, naturally, a metaphor, but Maya doesn’t allow it to become heavy-handed. His is a story of family and friends. The masa is an ingredient. An important one, yes, but it’s her love that nourishes those she cares so much about.
            “Masa” continues through Oct. 27 at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista.

Erica Marie Weisz (left), AJ Knox, Samantha Ginn and Kenny Bordieri in "The Thanksgiving Play." Jason Sullivan / Dupla Photography

            When do good intentions become extremes?
           When they’re in “The Thanksgiving Play,” Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse’s spoof about a teacher, an historian, a street performer and an actress, all of them White, collaborating on a politically correct elementary-school play principally about Native Americans.
            If you took a “Saturday Night Live” skit and had the luxury of stretching it out from say four minutes to 90 you’d have “The Thanksgiving Play,” now onstage at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad. This breakneck comedy stops at nothing when it comes to satirizing the collaborators’ overly sincere efforts to be culturally sensitive and, if you’ll excuse the buzzword, woke. For much of the going, the PC talk is overshadowed by wild onstage antics, from dressing up like turkeys to perform a Thanksgiving-themed take on “The 12 Days of Christmas” to (I swear I’m not making this up) using human-head props as bowling balls. Complete with leaking “blood.”
            With “The Thanksgiving Play,” FastHorse was the first female Native American playwright to have a work produced on Broadway. She undoubtedly is skeptical of the adopted campaigns in theaters and schools alike to more accurately reflect Native Americans like herself (as well as other marginalized groups). Who can blame her? Many who try seem to be either doing the bare minimum or, as is the case depicted in “The Thanksgiving Play,” going overboard to the point that the campaign is minimized or degraded.
             So FastHorse has something important to say.
            It makes for a thoughtful script to read, I imagine. As live theater, it’s hit and miss. That woke talk and all the chaotic hijinks are rather excessive, even in a one-act show.
            Looking at it from outside the audience point of view, “The Thanksgiving Play” has to be one of those shows that’s an absolute kick to be in. The actors get to exercise their physical comedy muscles, don some outrageous costumes (by Sandra Ruiz) and show off their onstage endurance and their improvisational skills. At New Village, director Daniel Jaquez ensures that his cast, led by one of the most gifted physical comedians in town, Samantha Ginn, gets loads of latitude.
            She’s complemented by Kenny Bordieri as her equally “aware” boyfriend/collaborator/street performer Jaxton (what a name!), AJ Knox as the stuffy historian Caden and Erica Marie Weisz as Alicia, the sexy L.A. actress who is mistakenly hired on a diversity-grant tab.
            It’s a fun if nearly out-of-control troupe.
            Just as the characters, led by Ginn’s schoolteacher Logan, make up their Thanksgiving play as they go, THIS “Thanksgiving Play” has the feel of something behind improvised, something being itself made up from moment to moment. With comedy, that doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t always work here. The laughs are big ones, but there could be more of them.
            I’ve long held that “message stories” told with comedy are more effective (and less ham-handed) than those told with drama. If FastHorse had written this as a serious play its characters’ ardent “sensitivity” might have been deadening. She knew what she was doing.
            “The Thanksgiving Play” runs through Nov. 3, giving you lots of time to think about its commentary before the actual holiday rolls around on the 28th. And if you miss it, San Diego State’s Department of Theatre, Television, and Film will stage its own “The Thanksgiving Play” beginning on Nov. 1.

Alex Guzman and Eileen Bowman in "Looped."                                                           Photo by Daren Scott

            The title of what would be her last film, “Die! Die! My Darling!”, sounds like something Talullah Bankhead would have told someone with whom she was royally pissed off.      
            Near the end of her life, however, around the time this horror film was produced, she may have been most pissed off with herself.    
            That’s just one comment playwright Matthew Lombardo makes in his two-act tragicomedy “Looped.” By 1965, when “Die! Die!” was in post-production as it is in this play, Bankhead had long immersed herself in a regimen of heavy drinking, chain smoking, drug use and random acts of sexual activity, with men or women. She may have come off like an aged party girl with the cutting wit of Dorothy Parker and the profane vocabulary of Joe Pesci in “Good Fellas,” but again as we surmise from “Looped,” Bankhead was broken and even rueful about the at-times-respected career onstage and in film that she’d abandoned.
            “Looped” imagines a fictitious moment in time in ’65 in which a staggering Bankhead is summoned to an L.A. studio to “loop” or record one leftover line for “Die! Die! My Darling.” Suffering the slings and arrows of her unpredictability is a young film editor, Danny, whose frustration level soon ventures off the charts.
            Roustabouts Theatre Co.’s current production of “Looped” at the Legler Benbough Theatre in Scripps Ranch is mesmerizing and, as you might figure with a story like this one, funny and sad at the same time. Its star is Eileen Bowman, who does wonder work as Bankhead, a flawed force of nature with a glass of bourbon (or Scotch in this case) in one hand, a cigarette in another, and a head full of recriminations, sodden memories and an eccentric sort of worldly wisdom earned during a long if on-the-downhill career.
            Alex Guzman’s Danny is suitably flummoxed and infuriated by Talullah. In a pretty much telegraphed plot turn, he gets to do much more in the play’s second act.
            Completing the cast and only briefly seen is studio engineer Steve (Chris Braden).
            As much as Lombardo’s entertaining script does, director Phil Johnson accomplishes the tricky feat of maintaining dramatic tension while also allowing the proceedings, especially in Act One, to be frothy and nostalgic. Even when Bankhead is bordering on out of control she’s just human enough, just sympathetic enough, to make us care, even worry for her.
            Much of that credit also goes to Bowman, who in this vivid characterization is no doubt introducing many theatergoers to a personage whose name they may have heard -- but that’s it. In point of fact, Talullah Bankhead had her stellar turns as an actor, both in film (Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat”) and on stage.
            Lombardo’s script pointedly addresses Bankhead’s experience with Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” how she turned down the part of Blanche DuBois, how she later played the character in a revival in Florida, mocking herself as the audience mocked her. It’s in this conflict-within-a-conflict that “Looped” is at its most affecting, as is Bowman.
            The play’s second act is quite a departure from the first and to some extent heavy-handed and edging toward sentimentality. But the larger-than-life Bankhead, with a dedicated Bowman in her high-heeled shoes and wrap-around fur, is decidedly not one for sentiment. Even if she calls everyone “dah-ling.”
            “Looped” runs through Oct. 20 at the Legler Benbough Theatre in Scripps Ranch on the campus of Alliant International University.

Caleb Eberhardt (left) and James Udom in "Primary Trust."                                   Photo by Rich Soublet II

            “Primary Trust” is a quiet play. So quiet that on opening night its silences made audible the squeak of patrons shifting in their seats inside La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre. So quiet that I couldn’t help but hear the woman sitting next to me sniffling and stifling sobs as the contemplative tale wound toward its denouement.
            Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a beautiful piece of writing that just in places translates to compelling live theater. Its protagonist Kenneth, a sensitive but (as we will learn) broken man residing in his thoughts, comes alive only when he’s at his regular hangout, Wally’s, a neighborhood tiki bar. There, he downs Mai Tai’s and converses with his friend Bert – who no one else can see. The rest of the time it’s sssh! Kenneth is in his head. Do not disturb.
            This makes for very slow going.
           There is a story here. Kenneth (Caleb Eberhardt) of fictitious Cranberry, N.Y. loses the job he’s toiled away at (presumably in quiet) for 20 years in service of the chain-smoking owner of a bookstore. That is but half of Kenneth’s life, the other being his perpetual happy hours spent with Bert (James Udom, whom we can see) and all the Mai Tai’s at Wally’s. When a server there, Corrina (Rebecca S’manga Frank), befriends the out-of-work Kenneth, she affably steers him toward a possible opening at the town’s Primary Trust bank. In spite of a mightily awkward interview there with the bank boss Clay (James Urbaniak), Kenneth is hired and his “new life” begins.
            Sort of.
            As the bank teller job and the growing platonic friendship with Corrina inch Kenneth somewhat out of his shell, the presence of Bert – his buddy, his confidante, his conscience, his source of calm and succor – begins to lessen.
            Kenneth, who discovers humbly that he’s good at bank telling, is entering the world. The question Booth poses is: Does he really wish to?
            I’m not certain this question is truly answered. “Primary Trust” in its soft, deliberate way takes us to the point of Kenneth’s reckoning, to the self-determination we want for him, but no further.
            Knud Adams, who directed “Primary Trust” in its Roundabout Theatre Company Off-Broadway premiere last year, directs again at the Playhouse. I’m sure he’s true to Booth’s script, but the pace of this production is much too slow for me. A character study such as this naturally can be more inward, more measured in its evolution, but “Primary Trust” demands keen and patient attention from the audience, and faith that it’s headed somewhere fruitful.
            The bell recurringly rung by musician Luke Wygodny onstage, perhaps to suggest that we are going in and out of, or out and in of, Kenneth’s head, feels like a contrivance. No quarrel otherwise with his nearly muted musical accompaniment.
            I will say this: Eberhardt’s is an expressive, deep-toned voice that pierces the silences of “Primary Trust” sublimely. It’s most effective midway through the 95 minutes when he ascends the steps up into the Forum audience for a revealing monologue. By necessity he’s required to reveal, often without even speaking; this is best accomplished during an awkward (though sweet) scene with Corrina over martinis at a swank boite – undoubtedly the only swank boite in Cranberry.
            Urbaniak is given the play’s one openly comedic moment at that boite as a waiter cautiously delivering the martinis as if he’s carrying glasses of nitroglycerin.
            For her part, Frank must morph instantly from one server at Wally’s to another when not playing the kind and sympathetic Corrina. She also gets to incite Kenneth’s one uncharacteristic lapse in interiority when portraying a cranky customer at the teller’s window.
            The set by Marsha Ginsburg reflects in miniature scale the buildings of little Cranberry and accentuates the very smallness of the world Kenneth occupies, a world from which he’s never traveled.
            This aside, the most telling prop of “Primary Trust” is the ubiquitous Mai Tai. It has been Kenneth’s comfort, his life’s routine, his conduit to Bert. Its exotic floral presentation, its party-down connotations are everything Kenneth is not.
            But Kenneth isn’t as alone as he thinks he is. That could be what Booth has to say for all of us during those times when even our most sanguine selves feel like retreating deep inside or escaping into a Mai Tai world.
            “Primary Trust” runs through Oct. 20 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre.

Rachael VanWormer and Brian Mackey in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Photo courtesy of Lamb's Players Theatre

            In a little play called “Hamlet,” Polonius opined that “brevity is the soul of wit.”
            Obviously, Shakespeare never met Oscar Wilde.
            Yeah, yeah, they lived and wrote in different centuries, but the point is this: While perhaps no one composed wittier one-liners than did Wilde, he also crafted a language all its own that politely resounded with sharp-tongued humor and sophisticated repartee.
            There’s no greater demonstrate of this ingenuity than in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” the quintessential Wilde drawing-room farce that’s more delicious than the cucumber sandwiches man-about-town Algernon Moncrieff devours in Act One.
            Lamb’s Players Theatre, which has staged Wilde’s “A Woman Of No Importance” and “An Ideal Husband,” is presenting “The Importance of Being Earnest” for the first time, with Kerry Meads directing. Meads couldn’t have asked for an ensemble more game for the fanciful fun of this spoof of Victorian properness. Brian Mackey and Michael Louis Cusimano are brisk and spirited as the benignly adversarial friends Jack Worthing and Algie Moncrieff, both of whom will covet the name “Earnest” as a ruse to win the hands of Gwendolen Fairfax (Rachael VanWormer) and Cecily Cardew (Lauren King Thompson) respectively. The latter pair’s initial meeting, the catalyst for the men’s device ultimately coming a cropper, is one of the best played scenes in the production.
            It’s David McBean, stealing every moment as Gwendolen’s snobbish mother Lady Bracknell, who takes the last bow at show’s end. He more than earns his due. I dare you not to laugh out loud. McBean knows he’s the audience pleaser, too, facing the house to deliver many of Lady Bracknell’s most elitist and patronizing pronouncements.
            Deborah Gilmour Smyth is a perfect Miss Prism here, and Brian Salmon sputters superbly as the country reverend Dr. Chasuble for whom Miss Prism yearns.
            Meads’ direction ensures that every moment counts in this wordy (though what words!) affair -- even the set changes, accompanied by the music of Chopin, handled by house servants Merriman (Geno Carr) and Lane (John Rosen). If the cast members overplay their hands at times, this can be forgiven. The principals of “The Importance of Being Earnest” are extravagant and theatrical. These actors deserve plaudits for handling the daunting complexity of Wilde’s banter and humorous oratory.
            Lamb’s’ Jeanne Reith has the cast lushly costumed, right down to the set-striking man servants. That set, designed by Sean Fanning, is a drawing-room delight as well.
            There’s no escaping the fact that “The Importance of Being Earnest” is a period piece. Audiences today that gorge on streaming sitcoms and more contemporary-minded live theater might regard Wilde’s classic as a snooty anachronism. If so, they should pay heed to the subtitle he gave this play: “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.”
            So there.
            “The Importance of Being Earnest” runs through Nov. 10 at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado.

George Krissa (left) and Brady Dalton Richards in "Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors."     Photo by Jim Cox

            Of the three shows by Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen that have been produced at the Old Globe, “Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors" is by far the funniest. Like “Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show” and “Crime and Punishment, A Comedy” this one is drawn from a famous work of literature. In this case it’s Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel “Dracula.” Greenberg, who directs, and Rosen send up the Count and the entire vampire genre – alas, it’s become a genre – with madcap ingenuity that could only play out in the Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre.
            What stands out for me with Greenberg’s and Rosen’s “Dracula” are the golden opportunities for the quick-changing, fast-moving little cast to demonstrate physical comedy at its bloody finest. Yes, the script is sharp and cleverly contemporary at times, rife with sexual innuendoes that would gladden fans of “True Blood” and double entendres enough to fill two 90-minute plays. You have to have game actors to make it all work.
            Greenberg and Rosen have them.
            At the forefront is Drew Droege, whose double duty (each time dressed as woman) as man-hungry Mina Westfeldt and vampire hunter Jean Van Helsing soars over the top, but why not? Droege comically rules the stage.
            A charismatic Drac is a requirement, of course, and George Krissa carries the day as a dashing Transylvanian Count in black leather pants, flexing his muscles, suggestively stalking his prey and at the climax of the story actually making Dracula a semi-sympathetic character. We don’t want him staked to death.
            Brady Dalton Richards’ Jonathan Harker is a proper English solicitor at first, the timid half of a romance with gutsy and beautiful Lucy Westfeldt (Gizel Jimenez). Bitten by the Count later in the going, he becomes something entirely different (and much more to Lucy’s liking).
            Like all of the others except for Krissa playing multiple characters, Linda Mugleston alternates with audience-pleasing alacrity between Lucy and Mina’s stuffy dad Dr. Westfeldt and the lunatic Renfield who as in the novel becomes Dracula’s raving foot soldier.
            As usual, the White Theatre proves versatile when it comes to staging a wild comedy. Here it can be neon disco one minute, haunted castle the next, all without utilizing bulky or intrusive props. The inventive cast under Greenberg’s direction believably and quite hilariously simulates rides in horse-drawn carriages, exhausting descents down castle steps, frantic flights from flitting bats and peeks inside coffins in search of Drac.
            Greenberg and Rosen have taken narrative liberties with Stoker’s novel, reimagining some of the characters and shifting gender with a couple. But within their spoof is a healthy respect for the motif and legend that Stoker created. Laughs are more integral than frights to their “Dracula,” but remember – it is titled “A Comedy of Terrors.”
            “Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors” runs through Nov. 3 at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre.

Nathan Madden as Frank 'N' Furter in "Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show."   Karli Cadel Photography

            I’ve seen “Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show” so many times now, including twice at Cygnet Theatre, that I find myself looking at the crowd as much as I watch the action onstage. It’s fascinating. There are the longtime, diehard “Rocky Horror” fans who dress in drag and glitter. There are the longtime, diehard “Rocky Horror” fans who shout out “asshole” when Brad is mentioned or “slut” when Janet is mentioned – as well as other lines, some of which I can’t repeat here. Then there are the “virgins,” as narrator Linda Libby called them at Cygnet: folks seeing this show for the first time who sit there, arms folded, heads cocked, eyes glazed, unable to process what they’re seeing and hearing.
            If “Rocky Horror” was ever shocking – maybe it was 50 years ago when it premiered – it certainly isn’t shocking now. Guys in leather, in teddies, in high heels? Been there, seen that. Simulated sex? Even puppets and cartoons went there a long time ago. Audience participation? Today they call it “immersive.”
            None of this is to suggest that “The Rocky Horror Show,” back at Cygnet in Old Town, is anything less than silly, nostalgic fun. For those longtime diehards, neither the characters nor the music-filled story will ever get old. For people like me who’ve seen the show a couple of times and don’t care if I ever see it again, I have to admit that there’s a lot to laugh and smile about with “Rocky Horror” and that the costumes alone (bravo, Jennifer Brawn Gittings!) are worth paying to see. (Full disclosure: I didn’t have to pay the other night.) Plus O’Brien’s catchy songs don’t get the respect they really deserve. “Rocky Horror’s” is a damned fine score. Most remember only the dance-along “Time Warp” ditty, but there are several well-crafted tunes, from the cleva “Dammit Janet” to “Science Fiction/Double Feature” that opens and closes the show.
            Is there any of you reading this who don’t know the “Rocky Horror Show” story line? That two goody two shoeses, Brad (Drew Bradford, in nerdy glasses) and Janet (Audrey Deubig, she of the darling Dorothy Hamill haircut), run out of gas and wander unknowingly into the castle of the omnipotent transvestite from another planet, Frank ‘N’ Further (Nathan Madden, who’s terrific)? That they witness the high-heeled, corseted mad scientist bringing to life his own version of Frankenstein’s monster – the buff, golden-locked Rocky (Josh Bradford)? That B & J get lessons in pleasure (how’s that for a PG euphemism?) from Frank?
            There. That’s about it.
            Cygnet, which stylishly staged “Rocky Horror” a few years ago with Artistic Director Sean Murray as Frank ‘N’ Furter, does so stylishly again, this time with Murray directing. The cast is horribly good: Besides Madden, Bradfords Drew and Josh, and Deubig, Jasmine January, Shanyeyah White and Allen Lucky Weaver are aces as Frank’s lackeys Columbia, Magenta and Riff Raff. Jacob Caltrider rolls into the action late in the going as the wheelchaired scientist Dr. Scott, and Libby narrates/presides with a twinkle in her eyes.
            Nods also to Luke H. Jacobs’ choreography and the projection design by Blake McCarty that recalls those beloved sci-fi flicks from the ‘50s. I get a wistful charge out of seeing a glimpse of Robby the Robot from “Forbidden Planet” or Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” or Gene Barry and Ann Robinson shocked by a Martian in “The War of the Worlds.”
            See? I have a soft spot for sci-fi. Drag, not so much, but there’s just enough sci-fi in “Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show” that I keep going to see it even after I’ve told myself the previous time “Enough already.”
            “Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show” runs through Nov. 2 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.