Michelle Caravia flanked by (holding flags) Lena Ceja, left, and Alyssa Rodriguez in "La Havana Madrid."                                                                                                                             Photo by Tanya Perez

            If you go to 959. W. Belmont Avenue near Sheffield on Chicago’s North Side you’ll find a hair salon there called Milio’s. Big deal, you say.
            But if the walls of that hair salon could talk …
            Or play music.
            That address once belonged to a nightclub that in the 1960s and early ‘70s was a haven for immigrants newly arrived in America from Cuba, Colombia and Puerto Rico. It was called La Havana Madrid.
            The legacy of that beloved nightspot is celebrated in Sandra Delgado’s play with music, also titled “La Havana Madrid.” Tripling up, La Havana Madrid is also the name of the emcee in this engaging show that based on true stories melds music and history.
            Delgado also wrote the Spanish lyrics for the songs in “La Havana Madrid, which were composed by Cristian Amigo. And in 2023 at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, she also portrayed that glamorous singing emcee in its two-act production.
            At New Village Arts in Carlsbad, Richard Trujillo directs a staging of “La Havana Madrid” that runs through April 27. It features Michelle Caravia in the title role, and it’s her rangy, passionate vocals that are at the center of this pleasing production of Delgado’s show.
            The smallish stage at NVA allows the theater to feel more like a club or cabaret than “La Havana Madrid” might in a larger house. (“La Havana Madrid” world-premiered in 2016, fittingly at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.) But here’s the most welcome development: New Village’s production includes a live band onstage, playing behind a sheer drapery and led by bassist Carlos Odiano, who also gets to be part of the story at times. The group features MC Green on guitar, Joe Aportela on percussion, Carson Inouye on keyboards and Gabriella Hendricks on horns.
            The only disappointment of NVA’s exceptional production last year of “The Color Purple” musical was that it was presented without live musicians. “La Havana Madrid” truly demands a band in the mix – how can you reproduce a red-hot cabaret with recorded music? The ensemble here is lively and tight and conversant with the varied musical styles represented in Amigo’s set list.
            Those songs are interwoven among vignettes about the immigrants from afar who’d settled in Chicago neighborhoods during this dynamic time period – from the “Peter Pan Kids” who fled Cuba to escape the Castro regime to the Puerto Ricans who longed to embrace a home away from home.
            The storytellers are the “La Havana Madrid” cast members: Lena Ceja, Fredy Gomez Cruz, Alyssa Rodriguez, Leonardo Romero and Jawann McBeth.
            Ceja, the Natasha of Cygnet Theatre’s unforgettable “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” last year, is featured in two of the NVA show’s sequences – one a charming meet-cute with Romero, the other a more incendiary turn in Act Two, the more serious and thoughtful half of “La Havana Madrid.”
            Because for all the good times had and joy expressed in that Chicago club many who frequented it found life in their new American home at best difficult to assimilate into and at worst unfriendly, hostile and even violent. This is where the currency of Delgado’s play stands out: Sixty years later immigrants are still being chased down, harassed or detained in this Land of the Free.
            Projections (designed by Michael Wogulis) visually dramatize the history unfolding around the heyday of La Havana Madrid, depicting the Chicago that once was but also the faces of those who struggled to be part of its neighborhoods and to live in peace.
            The combining of music, dance and historical storytelling isn’t always seamless in “La Havana Madrid.” Just as the soulful music and the choreography (by Lilea Alvarez and Tamara Rodriguez) take us away, it’s back to exposition. I didn’t want a sung-through “La Havana Madrid,” but the more music, especially given the presence of a live band, the better.
            I will say this: After seeing “La Havana Madrid” I am more curious, more inclined to know what it was like at the Belmont & Sheffield of the past and to know who found escape and an embrace of home there.
            “La Havana Madrid” runs through April 27 at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad.

Left to right: Jocorey Mitchell, Kevane La'Marr Coleman, Rondrell McCormick, Tristan J Shuler and Xavier Daniels in "The Hot Wing King."                                                                    Karli Cadel Photography

                Wings are not my thing. A good story is. So are characters worth caring about.
          “The Hot Wing King” has all three, and I have to admit that once the opening-night performance of Katori Hall’s winning dramedy at Cygnet Theatre was over, I did start wondering if I’d judged wings too harshly.
            Cordell Crutchfield and his sous chefs, aka the New Wing Order, sure know how to cook them. As it turns out, the hotter the better.
            Hall’s play, centered around an annual Hot Wang Festival in Memphis, had an inauspicious beginning, world-premiering on March 1, 2020, at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va. Steve Broadnax III, who earlier this year directed the outstanding “Appropriate” at the Old Globe, was at the helm of that first “Hot Wing King” production, one suspended practically from the start by COVID-19.
            “The Hot Wing King” would return to theaters in safer times, however, and end up winning Hall the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2021.
            At Cygnet under the direction of Kian Kline-Chilton (who just recently directed “We Are Continuous” at Diversionary in University Heights), “The Hot Wing King” is being staged as the theater’s penultimate production before the company relocates from Old Town to its new venue in Liberty Station. With its superb ensemble and a tale that can be affecting a well as joyous, “The Hot Wing King” is an entertaining show with multiple emotional entry points.
            That Hot Wang Festival contest is Hall’s pretext for examining what it means to be a Black gay man, what constitutes a family and how fragile relationships – all relationships – truly are.
            Cordell (Rondrell McCormick, returning to Cygnet three years after appearing in its “Mud Row”) has left his wife of 20 years and two children in St. Louis and moved to Memphis to be with the man he loves. That would be Dwayne (Tristan J Shuler), who has opened his home and his heart even as he harbors doubts about the depth of Cordell’s emotional commitment.
            That’s simmering beneath the surface of an at-first-blush lighthearted story situated primarily in the kitchen, where at the outset Cordell, Dwayne and their New Wing Order team that also includes barber and rabid Memphis Grizzlies fan Big Charles (Xavier Daniels) and the proudly flamboyant Isom (Kevane La’Marr Coleman) are prepping for that wings contest. It’s Cordell’s dream to be crowned the “Hot Wing King.”
            The first 15 minutes or so of the play finds the team in high spirits, in and around the functional kitchen designed at Cygnet by Audrey R. Casteris – cooking, joking, dancing. Though it becomes apparent that Cordell and Dwayne are still working out the full extent of their relationship, events don’t take a major turn until the unexpected arrival of Dwayne’s teen nephew EJ (Jocorey Mitchell) and his shady father TJ (Carter Piggee). They need refuge from something unspecified and unlawful that TJ is up to.
            Because the boy is the son of Dwayne’s slain sister (in a police killing for which Dwayne blames himself), EJ is taken in and upstairs “for the night.” This is enough to incite objection from Cordell, who believes Dwayne is making all the household decisions unilaterally. As the wings contest nears, the stakes heighten, stakes that have little to do with cooking.
            Will Cordell and Dwayne stay together? Can they make it work?
            What about the Hot Wang Festival?
            The two conflicts would seem only tangentially related with one far more important involving as it does Cordell’s and Dwayne’s relationship, Cordell’s identity crisis and the future of a teen-aged boy who because of his father is on the road to no good, though he’s a boy who wants no part of that.
            The prep for the wings competition provides cathartic humor amid the high drama, especially when the playful, unpredictable Isom inadvertently spices the batch to be entered in the contest with extremely hot ingredients. Dwayne’s innocent taste of that misguided concoction, a golden comedy moment, had the Cygnet audience howling on opening night. Me too.
            That diversion does not detract from the weightier narrative – the ensuing confrontations and confessions are often heart-rending.
            Shuler, who’s making his San Diego theater debut with “Hot Wing Kings,” is the standout among the stellar cast. A special nod, too, to young Mitchell, a student at Grossmont Community College, who makes us feel the desperation to be loved and to belong that resides in a boy who’s lost his mother and whose father has lost his way.
            The New Wing Order foursome is a treat to watch when they’re in full cooking and cavorting mode. At the same time, Hall’s script does not waver from its insights into what is Black masculinity, what makes a father a father, and what makes a man a man.
            That all this requires two hours and 45 minutes with an intermission may be understandable, but the play had room for trimming, and it seems to end at least three times before it actually does.
            Who am I to question a writer like Hall, but possibly she over-wrote even as she wrote beautifully. At least the wings don’t get overcooked. Over-spiced, yes, but not over-cooked.
            “The Hot Wing King” runs through May 2 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.

Nicolas A. Castillo and Lark Laudenslager in "Gruesome Playground Injuries." Photo by Estefania Ricalde

            In an uncommon staging device, the two actors co-starring in Loud Fridge Theatre Group’s season-opening “Gruesome Playground Injuries” change clothes or apply makeup right before our eyes in between the eight scenes that comprise this 2009 play by Rajiv Joseph.
            In the case especially of actor Nicolas A. Castillo, who’s portraying a character repeatedly (even wantonly) injuring himself, these inter-scene sequences may stir anxiety, or dread in my case. What will Doug will look like when the story resumes? Where will the stage blood be? How realistic, how unnerving might it appear? Will he be walking with a cane, sitting in a wheelchair or what?
            It’s that tension that accounts for the rather morbid appeal of this one-act play about a friendship/not-quite-romance between Doug and Kayleen (Lark Laudenslager), who at first seems bothered only by stomach pains only to have more serious physical damage of her own later manifest itself.
            Produced in the spare confines of the Tenth Avenue Arts Center and directed tautly by Kaylin Saur, “Gruesome Playground Injuries” is, as they say, not for the squeamish. Even if you don’t buy the effects of the stage makeup, the descriptions of some of Doug’s injuries (in particular the aftermath of a fireworks accident) could roil your stomach. As could Kayleen’s graphic account of the consequences of her eating disorder.
            None of this should come as a surprise. After all, “gruesome” is in the title. Fair and full disclosure.
            The eight scenes of the play span 30 years in the relationship between Doug and Kayleen, who first meet in an elementary school nurse’s office after Doug has ridden his bicycle off a roof. The seven ensuing scenes skip back and forth in time, flitting from the pair’s teen years to their late 30s and periods in between. I’m not altogether sure why Joseph chose to utilize this non-chronological approach other than perhaps to suggest that time in a relationship is fluid or even relative.
            Castillo and Laudenslager are tasked with portraying their characters at very different times of life, from childhood to pushing 40. While Castillo’s Doug comes off demeanor-wise as mostly the same throughout, Laudenslager is able to capture the childlike petulance requisite to the earlier time periods while retaining just enough of it to portray an adult woman who’s never truly grown out of her insecurities and bitterness, most of that resulting from bad or absent parenting.
            Joseph’s script is never completely clear about the true nature of the relationship between his two characters. It’s deeper than acquaintanceship, yet connected in a way by something more complex than romantic attraction. Doug and Kayleen aren’t lovers or besties. They are bound by the daredevil Doug’s inevitable injuries and afflictions. As the years pass, Kayleen’s own injuries become more pronounced, to which Doug responds practically with excitement.
            The Loud Fridge production moves slowly, like a wound that will only heal in its own time, if at all. The lone enhancement to Doug and Kayleen’s quiet encounters and private costume/makeup changes is the recurring playing of “Dream A Little Dream of Me,” variously heard with Mama Cass tenderness or heavy metal thrashing.
            It’s an appropriate tune, because whatever Doug and Kayleen share, it feels like part reverie, part nightmare.
            “Gruesome Playground Injuries” runs through April 26 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center downtown.

Clockwise from left: Isabelle McCalla, Krystina Alabado, Kate Rockwell and Ryann Redmond in "Regency Girls."                                                                                                                        Photo by Jim Cox

            At its most promising, “Regency Girls” may do for theater what “Barbie” did for the movies: royally piss off the patriarchy while taking a big swing for women’s autonomy, especially when it comes to their own bodies. The Old Globe is calling this world-premiere show “Broadway-bound,” so in the not-so-distant future Middle America could be singing along with Madame Restell, fixer of “female troubles” and disgusted poser of the musical question “Can you believe this shit is still happening in 1810?”
            But for now the Globe is home to “Regency Girls,” a proudly irreverent, loudly rebellious, no-holds-barred musical comedy that goes where “Pride and Prejudice” dared not go. Absolutely it’s an audience pleaser, though at a bloated two hours and 40 minutes I’d like to have been pleased at least 20 minutes less.
            “Regency Girls” was conceived (you’ll see why that’s a play on words shortly) pre-COVID-19 pandemic and before the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade, but it’s assuredly a show for these times – 200 years after the Regency era in England, yes, but alas connectable to those in power on this side of the Atlantic striving to turn back the clock for women. Its creators comprise a potent team: Hollywood-based writers Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan (book), whose comedy credits primarily for television and film are top of the line; composer Curtis Moore (Broadway and television) and lyricist Amanda Green (“Mr. Saturday Night,” “Bring It On,” et al). The notion for “Regency Girls” began with Green, and it’s her consistently clever lyrics that give the production its zing.
            Never during the entire production does anyone either say or sing out loud the A-word, but it’s crystal clear early in the going of “Regency Girls” that unmarried protagonist Elinor Benton (Isabelle McCalla) is desirous of ridding herself of an unwanted pregnancy. The consequence of a night being “occupied” as he calls it by her fiancé Stanton (Nik Walker). That threatens to leave Elinor “Ruined” as goes the ensuing musical lament featuring herself, vacuous sister Jane (Kate Rockwell), outspoken friend Petunia (Ryann Redmond) and Elinor’s very sharp maid Dabney (Krystina Alabado). But the latter then sounds a hopeful note: There’s a woman in London, a Madame Restelle, who knows how to fix “Female Troubles” (the next song in the show).
            Co-writers Crittenden and Allan have described what then happens as a “Wizard of Oz”-like road trip for the four women – Elinor, Jane, Petunia and Dabney – with the end of their Yellow Brick Road being the door of Madame Restelle (Janine LaManna), a character based on a real-life Madame Restelle, a midwife and abortionist who lived in the 19th century.
            But we don’t even meet Madame Restelle until the second act. In the interim, our Regency Girls encounter a comical Robin Hood type who calls himself Galloping Dick (Gabe Gibbs). If that’s less than subtle it’s compatible with “Regency Girls” as a whole, which while shielding the audience from the A-word holds little else back. The excess would seem, well, excessive if not for the urgency of the show’s recurring message, one best articulated by the production closing number titled “We Are Never Going Back There Again.”
            Galloping Dick aside, Act One includes the musical’s best scene and the one that makes the point of “Regency Girls” with comic antics more than preachiness. “Man Things” finds Elinor and Petunia dressed as men and giddily cavorting with the guys raising hell in a tavern. Amid the fun Elinor realizes that not only can she belch out loud with the best of the boys but that when accepted as a man her opinion on things actually matters. By contrast upstairs, above the raucousness, are Jane and Dabney, “Patiently Waiting” side by side and sharing a ladylike raisin for sustenance.
            An inspired sequence.
            The “Regency Girls” creators devised an antagonist to toss into the story – the snooty and scheming Lady Catherine (also played by LaManna), who has learned of Elinor’s pregnancy and of her mission and who seeks to blackmail her into wedding someone else. Thereby saving the dashing Stanton for one of her odd-duck daughters.
            The scenes with Lady Catherine at their center feel overplayed, and that’s saying something in a show with as many bold strokes as this one.
            Nothing’s restrained in Act Two, in which Madame Restelle, whom we finally encounter, tears through the rousing “How Long (in 1810)” like it was a finale, and in a by-comparison-subdued number previously prim Jane “Finds Her Tingle.” No partner needed.
            By the time we get to “Brains and Booty” with the four women clad as if for midnight burlesque, the better to shock the stuffed shirts at a ball, “Regency Girls” has exceeded the speed limit. It’s careened away from what seemed an initial intention to take “Pride and Prejudice” to naughtier and more feminist levels. It starts to feel like too much show.
            Fortunately, this enterprising world premiere regains its footing and its more thoughtful tone in the latter 15, 20 minutes when the messaging centers on choice. (Elinor must do what she must do while Dabney, revealed to be “in trouble” herself, must do what she must do.)
            Comeuppances and pleasing pairings-up are guaranteed from then onward.
            Unquestionable is the sheer energy generated by the principal cast of “Regency Girls.” McCalla, Rockwell, Redmond and Alabado are a mighty and mightily engaging foursome, possessing both comic and vocal chops, each of them. McCalla (“The Prom” and “Disney’s Aladdin” on Broadway) stands out on her own, too, as a worthy heroine that even Jane Austen would approve of.
            Doing double-duty, the stalwart-voiced LaManna would have been better served had she been given more Madame Restelle and less Lady Catherine, and so would the show. Gibbs, meanwhile, makes the most of playing both Galloping Dick and Jane’s duplicitous intended, Dingley, who it’s revealed never met a courtesan he didn’t favor.
            Director and choreographer Josh Rhodes does wonderwork with all that’s going on, practically from the outset. “Regency Girls” is perpetually in motion and that serves it well, especially given its length.
            His “Regency Girls” sure looks and sounds like it’s ready for Broadway. Costume designer David I. Reynoso nails the romanticized period, transporting us back in time – to the English countryside in 1810 -- with a flourish, and music director Patrick Sulken leads a marvelous orchestra.
            “Regency Girls” is funny but it’s quite serious about the better world for women to which it aspires. “Let us speak our truth let us lift our pen,” goes the closing number, “let us roll the tide with the strength of ten / for the just must win ev’ry now and then.”
            “Regency Girls” runs through May 11 at the Old Globe in Balboa Park.

Clockwise from left: Isabelle McCalla, Krystina Alabado, Kate Rockwell and Ryann Redmond in "Regency Girls."                                                                                                                        Photo by Jim Cox

            At its most promising, “Regency Girls” may do for theater what “Barbie” did for the movies: royally piss off the patriarchy while taking a big swing for women’s autonomy, especially when it comes to their own bodies. The Old Globe is calling this world-premiere show “Broadway-bound,” so in the not-so-distant future Middle America could be singing along with Madame Restell, fixer of “female troubles” and disgusted poser of the musical question “Can you believe this shit is still happening in 1810?”
            But for now the Globe is home to “Regency Girls,” a proudly irreverent, loudly rebellious, no-holds-barred musical comedy that goes where “Pride and Prejudice” dared not go. Absolutely it’s an audience pleaser, though at a bloated two hours and 40 minutes I’d like to have been pleased at least 20 minutes less.
            “Regency Girls” was conceived (you’ll see why that’s a play on words shortly) pre-COVID-19 pandemic and before the overturning by the Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade, but it’s assuredly a show for these times – 200 years after the Regency era in England, yes, but alas connectable to those in power on this side of the Atlantic striving to turn back the clock for women. Its creators comprise a potent team: Hollywood-based writers Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan (book), whose comedy credits primarily for television and film are top of the line; composer Curtis Moore (Broadway and television) and lyricist Amanda Green (“Mr. Saturday Night,” “Bring It On,” et al). The notion for “Regency Girls” began with Green, and it’s her consistently clever lyrics that give the production its zing.
            Never during the entire production does anyone either say or sing out loud the A-word, but it’s crystal clear early in the going of “Regency Girls” that unmarried protagonist Elinor Benton (Isabelle McCalla) is desirous of ridding herself of an unwanted pregnancy. The consequence of a night being “occupied” as he calls it by her fiancé Stanton (Nik Walker). That threatens to leave Elinor “Ruined” as goes the ensuing musical lament featuring herself, vacuous sister Jane (Kate Rockwell), outspoken sister Petunia (Ryann Redmond) and Elinor’s very sharp maid Dabney (Krystina Alabado). But the latter then sounds a hopeful note: There’s a woman in London, a Madame Restelle, who knows how to fix “Female Troubles” (the next song in the show).
            Co-writers Crittenden and Allan have described what then happens as a “Wizard of Oz”-like road trip for the four women – Elinor, Jane, Petunia and Dabney – with the end of their Yellow Brick Road being the door of Madame Restelle (Janine LaManna), a character based on a real-life Madame Restelle, a midwife and abortionist who lived in the 19th century.
            But we don’t even meet Madame Restelle until the second act. In the interim, our Regency Girls encounter a comical Robin Hood type who calls himself Galloping Dick (Gabe Gibbs). If that’s less than subtle it’s compatible with “Regency Girls” as a whole, which while shielding the audience from the A-word holds little else back. The excess would seem, well, excessive if not for the urgency of the show’s recurring message, one best articulated by the production closing number titled “We Are Never Going Back There Again.” But I'm getting ahead of myself.
            Galloping Dick aside, Act One includes the musical’s best scene and the one that makes the point of “Regency Girls” with comic antics more than preachiness. “Man Things” finds Elinor and Petunia dressed as men and giddily cavorting with the guys raising hell in a tavern. Amid the fun Elinor realizes that not only can she belch out loud with the best of the boys but that when accepted as a man her opinion on things actually matters. By contrast upstairs, above the raucousness, are Jane and Dabney, “Patiently Waiting” side by side and sharing a raisin for sustenance.
            An inspired sequence.
            The “Regency Girls” creators devised an antagonist to toss into the story – the snooty and scheming Lady Catherine (also played by LaManna), who has learned of Elinor’s pregnancy and of her mission and who seeks to blackmail her into wedding someone else. Thereby saving the dashing Stanton for one of her odd-duck daughters.
            The scenes with Lady Catherine at their center feel overplayed, and that’s saying something in a show with as many bold strokes as this one.
            Nothing’s restrained in Act Two, in which Madame Restelle, whom we finally encounter, tears through the rousing “How Long (in 1810)” like it was a finale, and in a by-comparison-subdued number previously prim Jane “Finds Her Tingle.” No partner needed.
            By the time we get to “Brains and Booty” with the four women clad as if for midnight burlesque, the better to shock the stuffed shirts at a ball, “Regency Girls” has exceeded the speed limit. It’s careened away from what seemed an initial intention to take “Pride and Prejudice” to naughtier and more feminist levels. It starts to feel like too much show.
            Fortunately, this enterprising world premiere regains its footing and its more thoughtful tone in the latter 15, 20 minutes when the messaging centers on choice. (Elinor must do what she must do while Dabney, admitting to being “in trouble” herself, must do what she must do.)
            Comeuppances and pleasing pairings-up are guaranteed from then onward.
            Unquestionable is the sheer energy generated by the principal cast of “Regency Girls.” McCalla, Rockwell, Redmond and Alabado are a mighty and mightily engaging foursome, each possessing both comic and vocal chops. McCalla (“The Prom” and “Disney’s Aladdin” on Broadway) stands out on her own, too, as a worthy heroine that even Jane Austen would approve of.
            Doing double-duty, the stalwart-voiced LaManna would have been better served had she been given more Madame Restelle and less Lady Catherine, and so would the show. Gibbs, meanwhile, makes the most of playing both Galloping Dick and Jane’s duplicitous intended, Dingley, who it’s revealed never met a courtesan he didn’t favor.
            Director and choreographer Josh Rhodes does wonderwork with all that’s going on, practically from the outset. “Regency Girls” is perpetually in motion and that serves it well, especially given its length.
            His “Regency Girls” sure looks and sounds like it’s ready for Broadway. Costume designer David I. Reynoso nails the romanticized period, transporting us back in time – to the English countryside in 1810 -- with a flourish, and music director Patrick Sulken leads a marvelous orchestra.
            “Regency Girls” is funny but it’s quite serious about the better world for women to which it aspires. “Let us speak our truth, let us lift our pen,” goes the closing number, “let us roll the tide with the strength of ten / for the just must win ev’ry now and then.”
            “Regency Girls” runs through May 11 at the Old Globe in Balboa Park.

Left to right: John-Andrew Morrison, (unidentified soldier), Ivan Hernandez and Carmen Cusack in "3 Summers of Lincoln." Photo by Rich Soublet II

            The first actor onstage in La Jolla Playhouse’s world-premiere musical “3 Summers of Lincoln” is Evan Ruggiero, dressed as a Union soldier with an amputated leg. He’s tap dancing. Setting the percussive tone for the opening number “Ninety Day War.” Reminding us – and we do need reminding – that the American Civil War lasted more than 1,400 days. Reminding us of the toll in maiming and death (some 620,000) that the war between fellow Americans took in the 1860s. Reminding us of the human cost of any war.
            This before we even meet Abraham Lincoln, who in this richly conceived and thought-provoking production is portrayed by Ivan Hernandez as enlightened and principled but also fallible, even misguided at times. As written by Joe DiPietro (he also co-wrote the show’s ruminative lyrics with Daniel J. Watts), this is not the iconicized, ever-forebearant Lincoln portrayed in old movies by Henry Fonda or Raymond Massey, or even the later, more nuanced Daniel Day-Lewis take on the 16th president. Wary of and conflicted about the consequences of his presidential actions at first, this Lincoln finds his courage, his resolve and his power in the second act of this sweeping musical.
            The epic “3 Summers of Lincoln” was conceived during the height of the pandemic. Its arrival in 2025 is an auspicious one and another bright achievement for the Playhouse ‘s Christopher Ashley, who is directing this production to begin this, his last year as artistic director before moving to New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company.
          This is a crucial, quintessential American history lesson enlivened for the stage by its fresh characterization of Lincoln and by Pietro’s multifaceted and bold envisioning of Mary Todd Lincoln (Carmen Cusack at the top of her game), Gen. George B. McClellan (Eric Anderson, given the juicy task of channeling Trump at his Trumpiest once the Union officer becomes a political rival of Lincoln’s) and most of all abolitionist Frederick Douglass, played with strength and great charisma at the Playhouse by Quentin Earl Darrington.
            The show’s music by Crystal Monee Hall mines multiple genres rich with the resonance of Americana and reflects the human drama and tension of the time period – there’s the anthemic tune one moment (“A Country Better Than This”), and the tender (“In Each Letter”) another. There are  moments of humor too (the soldiers’ ribald “Scarlett the Harlot”).
            Exhilarating choreography by Jon Rua and Watts is realized by a spirited ensemble, with its frequent tap dances performed with military-like precision. The production team that includes Derek McLane (scenic design), David Bengali and Hana S. Kim (projections) and Toni-Leslie James (costume design) has collaborated on a look that is both period and contemporary.
            Not that the relevance of “3 Summers” is debatable. The issues of a divided nation – in this case, literally divided –of racism and of the breadth and reach of the presidency are urgent  ones. By show’s end we can’t help but long today for not only a commander-in-chief like Lincoln but for a principled freedom fighter like Douglass who can remind him that he is a president for all people.
            It’s the duality of that relationship that defines this show, named for three consecutive summers in the Lincoln-Douglass dynamic. While each orates musically in Act One (Hernandez’s “The Impossible Position” followed by Darrington’s “Here I Am”), it’s in the trimmer, less-expository, more emotional second act that they finally meet face-to-face at the White House.
            This particular scene, in which each defies the other’s expectations and never backs down, is ingeniously staged, with both characters confiding their surprise and new respect for the other to the audience.
            Concurrent with Lincoln and Douglass coming together is the question of the Civil War itself and its purpose: to reunite the country or to end slavery for good? The answers become points of passion for not only the two giants and for Lincoln’s recalcitrant cabinet members, but for Mary, for Douglass’ own family, for Lincoln’s butler and confidante William Slade (John-Andrew Morrison), for Mary’s confidant, activist Elizabeth Keckley (Saycon Sengbloh).
            Then there’s the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s historic, even revolutionary declaration, and how and when (if ever) it will be issued.
            There’s so much to unpack about “3 Summers” that it could be said that the show tries to do too much, that the first-act scene-setting is strained, that a character here and there could be excised. This is the case with many if not most brand-new shows, musical or otherwise. Yet if and when some smoothing out happens, it won’t be easy. Even the seemingly smallest narrative touches add something memorable to the storytelling, whether it’s the at-the-time-unheard of use of the telegraph to communicate from Washington with the military command in the field, or Shakespeare buff Lincoln and Slade amusingly acting out a famous scene from “The Scottish Play.”
            If there’s any doubt about the Abraham Lincoln of “3 Summers” being unlike any you’ve seen or heard before, the rallying cry of the closing “A Radical Shouts ‘Now!’” should dispel it. Ivan Hernandez by this time has made Lincoln his own – a man who, as gatekeeper of the sacred democracy entrusted to him by those who founded this nation, let justice and conscience be his guide. A man who wasn’t afraid of the fight needed to keep that trust.
            Lincoln was re-elected in 1864, beating McClellan in the Electoral College 212-21.
            Now that’s a mandate.
            “3 Summers of Lincoln” runs through April 6 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre.

Jessica John and MJ Seiber in "The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens."                         Photo by Daren Scott

            Eat your heart out. That’s what keeps going through my mind now that I’ve seen “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens.”
            I’m not going to explain that, just as I’m not going to attempt to explain much of what goes down in this world-premiere production at Backyard Renaissance Theatre Company’s Tenth Avenue Arts Center home.
            Playwright Francis Gercke, who is also Backyard’s artistic director, leans on “magical realism” when describing the two-hander he started working on during the COVID-19 pandemic. (No wonder “Dark Heart” has the pulse of a fever dream running throughout it.)
            Magical realism, a device most commonly associated with the work of Latin and South American writers, posits an external world in which the extraordinary intrudes upon the otherwise ordinary – and it’s accepted among its characters without shock or amazement. Think Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” or Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate” or Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits.”
            Gercke’s play (his second) certainly comes with an ordinary setting – a dingy, trash-strewn trailer somewhere in the Southwest desert, the furnishings of which by comparison make my very first apartment look like a suite at the Ritz Carlton. For extraordinary there’s a phone that rings though it’s off the hook, cartons of eggs and cans of Chock full o’ Nuts that materialize in the fridge or in cupboards, and by the way, a sliding opening in the roof atop which is … alien life?
            So I don’t know if this is magical realism as much as it is sci-fantasy, psychodrama or the sort of just-run-with-it spookiness on which the late great David Lynch thrived and into which the likes of J.J. Abrams has ventured.
            There is a premise here. Cindy (Jessica John) is inhabiting this squalid trailer by her lonesome when almost immediately there’s an angry banging on the door. After seeming to take a few shots at the arrival through a window, she reluctantly admits an excited, wounded Dooley Stevens (MJ Seiber). He’s there, he growls at her, to get back something she stole from him.
            That’s just the beginning of a winding, twisting, turning narrative that is variously unpredictable and unfathomable. Intentionally so. If we never truly get to know who Cindy is (even if we do learn why she’s holed up in this trailer) or who or what Dooley is, that’s just one more mystery, one more groping in the darkness, one more plummet down the elevator shaft.
            It’s a testament to the stamina of both actors and the chemistry they share that for two hours they’re able to maintain peak emotional pitch while also exercising physicality when called for and not receding into cartoon characters. Cindy and Dooley are real enough – everything around them? Jury’s out on that.
            Like many newborn plays, “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” could use some refining. One surprise or stunner follows hard upon another, to the extent that even as a wild ride it can be excessive. As the story chugs along fueling apprehension one’s nerves are raw, though the brain may be sore.
            Just don’t think it through? Don’t try to figure it out? Not so easy for somebody like me, but then I’m one who can’t resist seeking order in chaos.
            “Dark Heart” is Hannah Meade’s Backyard directorial debut. This affords me an opening to congratulate her on recently winning a Craig Noel Award from the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle (of which I am a member) for directing Chalk Circle Collective’s “Constellations.” Also kudos to “Dark Heart’s” scenic designer Mathys Herbert, who took home a Craig Noel for his work on Cygnet Theatre’s “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.”
            “The Dark Heart of Dooley Stevens” runs through March 15 at the Tenth Avenue Arts Center, downtown.

Marti Gobel in "we are continuous."                                                                  Photo by Talon Reed Cooper

            Time-wise, “we are continuous” is ambiguously set in “Now and Here” according to the program distributed at performances at Diversionary Theatre, which is staging Harrison David Rivers’ one-act play. While the script feels very much out of the late 1980s, there’s a timelessness about this taut family drama that examines acceptance (and lack thereof), the resiliency of hope, and the love between partners and between a mother and son.
            That’s a lot of ground to tread in only 80 minutes. But about one-third into the story, when all to that point has seemed happy-happy-joy-joy between a mother (Marti Gobel), her son (Elliot Sagay) and the son’s husband (Eli Wood), the crises and the conflicts of “we are continuous” come to the fore. While the mother, Ora, is day by day coming to terms with her beloved son Simon’s sexuality, her unseen husband is having none of it and has gone so drastic as to search for evidence that Simon’s choices are the result of some prior sexual abuse or impropriety.
            This intolerance and denial leaves Ora and Simon struggling on their own terms to maintain what has been a lifelong loving relationship, and Simon and husband Abe feeling like shunned outsiders.
            When an even more dramatic crisis arrives, the stakes of this play are heightened threefold, as is the threat to the already fragile connection between mother and son.
            Rivers has crafted “we are continuous” as an amalgam of in-the-moment scenes and recurring monologues delivered by Ora, Simon and Abe. Some are expository, designed to move the story along from each character’s individual perspective. Others – and those that are most effective – are reflective and soul-baring. It’s a theatrical strategy that I found a little bumpy. I was far more invested in “we are continuous” when the characters are interacting in whatever combination than was I in monologues that can come off as stagey.
            Regardless of the play’s structure, Diversionary’s production is enhanced by the fierce and sympathetic presence of Gobel as Ora and, complementing her, Sagay as Simon. The “we” in “we are continuous” has to be mother and son, who no matter what will share a devotion that rises above.
            Meanwhile with nuance and sincerity, Wood enables the Abe character to become more than an understanding lover-turned-husband.
            Director Kian Kline-Chilton, in making his Diversionary debut, has been in conversation with playwright Rivers and as such demonstrates his comprehension of the arc of “we are continuous” and its emotional flash points, which though we may suspect are coming nonetheless arrive with suddenness and impact.
            It was Rivers, a friend and collaborator of Diversionary Artistic Director Sherri Eden Barber, who first recommended that position to her after the departure of Matt Morrow from the helm of the University Heights company. So it makes sense that Rivers’ “we are continuous,” which premiered in 2022 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, would be among the first productions of Barber’s stewardship. Even with the uneasy melding of monologue and action its presence at Diversionary is auspicious and its love story an important and perceptive one.
            “We are continuous” runs through March 9 at Diversionary Theatre in University Heights.

            It’s been said that in Ishinomaki, a Japanese town ravaged by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and its resulting aftershocks and tsunamis, that drivers of taxis encountered ghost passengers in the back seats of their cabs. This is the point of exploration of Keiko Green’s world premiere “Empty Ride.”
            The one-act play at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre is the product of a Globe commission and appears a year after it was workshopped at its annual Powers New Voices Festival. Green’s “ghost story” as she has called it is a thoughtful and mostly understated reflection on what’s left behind after death, and on that thin line existing between this world and the next.
            For a ghost story it’s not especially scary, nor does it bid to be. “Empty Ride” has its sudden, startling shocks, most of them invisibles facilitated by Avi Amon’s sound design, Mextly Couzin’s lighting and an anxiety that accompanies driving a taxi at night through unfamiliar streets, or simply being in the dark. That anxiety is heightened by the deliberate pacing forged by director Sivan Battat.
            As with any effective storytelling apt to chill the spine, “Empty Ride” relies upon what we don’t see rather than what we do.
            That these disturbances come in a theater-in-the-round  with ostensibly nowhere to hide is part of the ingenuity of this staging.
            The taxi driver in “Empty Ride” is young Kisa (Michele Selene Ang), an artist from Paris, who has returned to her hometown of Ishinomaki five years after a tsunami all but leveled it and in the process swept away her mother. Her father (Jojo Gonzalez) is weak and very ill and still consumed by grief. Kisa dons a cab-driving uniform and takes over his one-man business – after having been instructed to transport fares only in the daylight hours.
            The fiercely independent Kisa departs from this advice soon, and it’s by night that she hears if not sees things she cannot explain, things that rattle her to the core.
            A figure, if not a ghost, from her past enters the picture when in picking up a fare, Kisa rediscovers Toru (Major Curda), a young man with whom she may or may not have been romantically involved. There is room for doubt. Beside Toru and completely in charge of him -- and seemingly everything around her -- is his sister Sachiko (Jully Lee), a real estate pro who seeks to revitalize the devastated town, and to make lots of money while she’s at it. Part of doing so will directly impact Kisa and her father, adding another layer of conflict to what might or might not develop between Kisa and the eager, likable Toru.
            Playwright Green’s other character is an American, Alex (David Rosenberg), who lives next door to Kisa’s father and has been looking after him – nowhere near to her satisfaction. Alex has been given a monologue articulating what he swears was being haunted by the unseen in Ishinomaki.
            To recount how this all plays out would be to spoil “Empty Ride’s” denouement, one not entirely unexpected but nevertheless lovely and contemplative.
            Of note is how the illusion of a taxi in motion is accomplished in this show; it’s as if somehow in this confined space we’re in the back seat of Kisa’s cab ourselves.
            Ang’s genuinely human performance is equaled by Gonzalez’s, though he has far less stage time. Curda’s Toru tamps down the cockiness at just the right junctures. Lee’s character is the broadest, though this establishes an important contrast between brother and sister, and, in their own confrontation, between Kisa and Sachiko.
            In spite of his harrowing ghost story, the Alex character feels the least essential – that’s no slighting of Rosenberg’s portrayal.   
            A story at first simple but quickly vast and searching, “Empty Ride” is further demonstration of the prodigious Green’s imagination and perceptiveness. It’s also quite a ride.
            “Empty Ride” runs through March 2 on the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Stage in Balboa Park.

PHOTO OF MICHELE SELENE ANG BY RICH SOUBLET II

Alan Rust and Rosina Reynolds in "Other Desert Cities."                                       Karli Cadel Photography

            Having now seen Jon Robin Baitz’s “Other Desert Cities” twice – 12 years ago at the Old Globe and just Saturday night at Cygnet Theatre – I’m convinced that this is a tense drama that succeeds more because of its actors than its script.
            In Baitz’s 2011 play, daughter Brooke Wyeth’s yuletide visit to her parents’ home in Palm Springs in order to get their approval for her soon-to-be-published, damning family memoir is muddled, motivationally speaking. She’s a grown woman, albeit with a troubled past. So why does she really care about their approval? Her relationship with them, owing to political and more serious familial issues, has been long difficult; and does she show up with this red-hot memoir, one painting her parents as “monsters,” as strident mother Polly Wyeth refers to it, actually believing they won’t freak?
            More lacking in the narrative is the reason why Brooke was driven to substance abuse and to the brink of suicide, and is still obsessed on a daily basis she says, with the brother she lost. A brother who went down those roads himself, was complicit in a deadly act of political statement-making, and did commit suicide? She spends much of Act One aching out loud about how she and Henry were soulmates, emotionally inseparable. But it isn’t until the very end of “Other Desert Cities,” in a postscript scene, that we’re told how the two siblings were so very close.
            “Other Desert Cities” is also overstuffed with the presence of Brooke’s other brother, Trip, a “lowly” television producer who is annoying in the first act before playing a more relevant role in Act Two. (This despite or because of, depending on how you look at it, the old dependable pot-smoking scene.) The same could be said for the character of Polly’s sister Silda, lately of rehab, broke and living with Polly and her husband Lyman. Her role in the drama, which doesn’t feel very essential at the start, also becomes more key to the story later on.
            All this said, as with the Globe production of “Other Desert Cities” a dozen years ago that was elevated by the performances of Kandis Chappell as Polly and Robert Foxworth as Lyman, Cygnet’s has Rosina Reynolds and Alan Rust playing the Wyeths. For me, the reaction of the parents in Baitz’s play is even more important than that of the Brooke character, portrayed at Cygnet with an edgy resolve by Melanie Lora. The scenes without them have nowhere near the reverberations generated by those that do.
            Neither Trip (Geoffrey Ulysses Geissinger) nor Silda (Debra Wanger) is really that complicated, try as Baitz may have done to make them so. Everyone else in this Christmas-time confrontation-fest – for that’s what it is – is on the surface strong yet beneath that fraught with doubts and hurts from long past. Brooke’s memoir, “Love and Mercy,” seems guaranteed to bubble everything to and over the surface.
            Much is made of the political difference between the Ronny and Nancy-loving parents’ and everyone else, but these references smack of contrivance. The interpersonal crises of “Other Desert Cities” are far deeper.
            As always, Reynolds commands the stage like few actors in town. She could speak the phone book (if we still had phone books) with eloquence and clarity, but more than that she never fails to create a character, and Polly Wyeth is the fulcrum of “Other Desert Cities.” Strong support from Rust adds to the perception and the understanding that Brooke’s parents may have been intoxicated by the early-2000s glamour and selfishness of the GOP upper crust but they still love their “lib” daughter, even as they battle with her like only family members can.
            The Brooke and Polly characters as written often speak in oratory in “Other Desert Cities.” Lyman and Trip and Silda less so. There are times when these people don’t sound real. Yet we do give a damn about what happens in this Palm Springs living room, a marvel of mid-century modern décor designed by Andrew Hull, complete with panoramic picture-window view of the San Jacintos.
             The Wyeths, mired in profound, roiling differences and complications that will only worsen as “Other Desert Cities” proceeds, will be forced to learn on all sides. Embraces are few. Mostly their salvos come from neutral corners of that cozy living room.
            Cygnet’s Sean Murray directs with the actor’s instinct with which he consistently directs. Voluble as it can be, “Other Desert Cities” maintains its momentum toward a surprising ending. Lora’s tortured but principled Brooke may not be a very sympathetic character for most of the going, but when her world gets rocked … well, find out for yourself.
            Then drive out to Palm Springs, where the San Jacintos and a more serene atmosphere await.
            “Other Desert Cities” runs through March 2 at Cygnet Theatre in Old Town.