In one seamless and stirring transition, Allegiance – A New American Musical holds the U.S.’ World War II-era shame up to scrutiny and takes our breath away. Halfway into the second act of this world premiere at the Old Globe, Ojii-San (Grandpa), while faithfully tending the garden he has managed to grow in the rock-hard soil of the Japanese internment camp in which he is forced to live, sinks to the ground, falls still and dies. After his body is gently wrapped in netting and carried away, the stage is transformed into ground zero for the deadly mission of the Enola Gay. Sound throttles the darkened theater, and projected beyond the stage in unearthly light are the ruins of Hiroshima. We remember, and in a flash we feel the weight of our collective conscience.
Yet Allegiance – A New American Musical, written by Mark Acito, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione, with music and lyrics by Kuo, is not bound up in historical shock and awe. Its story of a wrongly displaced Japanese American family is a tender subtext to the big-picture injustice of the internments themselves. Tony winner (for Miss Saigon) Lea Salonga heads an affecting cast as Kei, the daughter and quiet strength of the relocated (from their Salinas farm to remote Wyoming) Kimura family. Though Allegiance’s score is secondary to its important narrative, Salonga soars in numbers including “Higher,” “The Things That Matter Most” and “Gaman” (in Japanese, patience – a personal resolution for surviving the hardships of the internment camps). Telly Leung is Kei’s younger brother, Sammy, who dreams of (as the song goes) “Going Places” and falls, misguided, under the spell of Mike Masaoka (Paolo Montalban), who preaches patriotism but practices betrayal. Then there’s George Takei, who himself was in an internment camp. He is all dignity and grace in the double role of Ojii-San and the Sam Kimura who has grown old and bitter and sad. In addition to the steady hand of director Stafford Arima, Allegiance benefits from choreography by Andrew Palermo, especially in the rebellious internment camp romp “Paradise.” While the show’s lessons are clear, its answers are not easy ones, chiefly to the question “Why?” We may never know.
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What could be more wholesome than a moms-and-daughters Girl Scout getaway in the mountains? Campfires. Sing-alongs. S’mores. If that’s what you’re expecting out of Janece Shaffer’s one-act Brownie Points, now on stage at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado, hold on to your merit badges.
The story of Scout moms Allison (Karson St. John), Deidre (Monique Gaffney), Sue (Cynthia Gerber), Nicole (Kaja Amado Dunn) and Jamie (Erika Beth Phillips) and their unseen daughters camping out (actually they’re inside a cabin) in the north Georgia mountains begins innocently enough. Everything is good-natured chaos, as is typical of trips like these, and the mothers’ chief anxiety is focused on the girls in their charge having a good time. But when the two African-American moms, Deidre and Nicole, discover that bossy Allison has assigned them kitchen duties for the duration of the weekend, all hell (or heck, lest any of the impressionable daughters be listening) breaks out. The tone of Shaffer’s play, directed for Lamb’s by Deborah Gilmour Smyth, shifts from carefree to tense, and the volume is ratcheted up to the level of talking heads on a cable “news” show. The fuse is lit when Deidre calls Allison a racist, and we don’t find out until much later that more than the kitchen assignment had something to do with the accusation. The noisy confrontation and resulting chasm between these two women, with the other three mothers in varied degrees of exasperation, makes Brownie Points anything but a group bonding experience. Or so we think. The last scene, unwinding at 2 in the morning long after the Scouts are asleep, brings all the moms, even the combatants, peacefully together again. So much so that the Carpenters’ saccharine “Close To You” finds its way into the proceedings. There is much baring of soul and conscience in Brownie Points, and to some degree the comic relief ceases to relieve. Once we know Deidre’s story of what happened on her way up to the mountains, the rest just doesn’t seem funny, or much fun, anymore. That could well be playwright Shaffer’s point. If so, a closure more powerful than the one delivered is called for. The Carpenters don’t cut it. Bertolt Brecht believed that theater should be dialectical, not escapist, making it ripe for commentary. Taking a page from Brecht, playwright William Missouri Downs’ The Exit Interview strips the form of its fourth wall, defies structure and fosters an environment for razor-sharp sociopolitical observation.
The San Diego Rep is one of five American theaters premiering The Exit Interview, under the auspices of the National New Play Network. Sam Woodhouse directs a cast of six, portraying multiple characters, that includes Rep Artist in Residence and Culture Clash co-founder Herbert Siguenza along with Jo Anne Glover, Linda Libby, Lisel Gorell-Getz and Fran Gercke (plus Rep newcomer Nick Cagle). A free-for-all of vignettes, Exit loosely revolves around the dismissal from a university of Professor Dick Fig (Siguenza) and the on-campus rampage of a masked gunman. But the emphasis is on stinging jabs at Fox News, Jesse Helms, Mitt Romney and institutionalized religion, science and academia. Mid-show commercials for everything from push-up bras to the Rep itself add to the subversive fun, as do Glover and Gorell-Getz as snarky cheerleaders. This Brechtian quest for the truth – and indictment of small talk and small-mindedness – could use some trimming, but it’s a risk that is mostly worth taking. King Lear thought HE had ungrateful children. At least among his three daughters, one of them (Cordelia) was loving and devoted. No such luck in the case of King Henry II, whose three sons elevate selfishness, childishness and nastiness to the level of high art.
North Coast Rep’s 30th-anniversary production of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter (first staged in the NCR’s inaugural season in 1982) is a bit of high art itself. It’s a lyrical historical drama with generous dollops of biting wit and glib commentary, applicable well beyond the 12th-century setting, about power, ambition and family. To a more visceral degree, the war of words and gesticulations between explosive Henry (Mark Pinter) and brainy Eleanor (Kandis Chappell) is nearly as flammable as George and Martha’s in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but with Christmas wine instead of booze. Chappell and the stentorian-voiced Pinter are well-matched combatants in this production directed by Andrew Barnicle, and the embers of Eleanor and Henry’s expiring love flicker just believably enough from beginning to satisfying end. The ostensibly chief conflict of The Lion in Winter is how uneasy lies the head of Henry, which wears the crown of England. That crown is coveted by sons Richard (Richard Baird, brooding), Geoffrey (Jason Maddy, scheming) and John (Kyle Roche, tantruming). Then there’s Henry’s young mistress (Alexandra Grossi) and the matter of his remaining spousal ties to Eleanor, whom he has imprisoned. It’s all very scratched and tangled in a barb wire heap of envy, resentment, sibling rivalry and even oedipal complexity. You may need a scorecard to keep track of all the in-castle machinations, so it’s best to savor The Lion in Winter for its athletic language, for Pinter’s rafters-rattling rants and for the three sons’ one-note but entertaining demeanors. Scenic designer Marty Burnett contributes a cold but regal set, and the chanting musical interludes further the illusion of a troubled Christmastime in the High Middle Ages. Freud would have had a field day in Henry II’s household. Pity he was born seven centuries too late. The Scottsboro Boys, a product of the prodigious team of John Kander and Fred Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago), is no sunny, hum-along musical. The final collaboration between the two before Ebb passed away in 2004, The Scottsboro Boys is based on the true story of nine black teen boys who in 1931 in Alabama were accused of the rape of two white women. It’s also staged as a musical within a minstrel show, an intentionally subversive touch that pulls no sociopolitical punches. One might have foreseen that in spite of its success at Minneapolis’ noted Guthrie Theatre and an Off-Broadway stage, the show closed at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway after only 29 previews and 49 regular performances.
A year and a half after its disappointing reception on the Great White Way, The Scottsboro Boys is getting new life at the Old Globe Theatre, again under the skilled direction of Susan Stroman (The Producers), who also created the show’s choreography. David Thompson (Steel Pier, Flora the Red Menace) wrote the book. Even with a fresh start and all the heavyweight talent behind it, The Scottsboro Boys is still a difficult and painful story to tell to music, and its intentions to enlighten, shock and parody, all in one two-hour act, make for a bumpy ride. Its potency is in the Scottsboro Boys’ ensemble numbers, including “Shout!”, “Chain Gang” and both “Make Friends With the Truth” and “You Can’t Do Me,” those two led by the charismatic Clifton Duncan as Haywood Patterson. He is the story’s conscience and its beacon of courage. On the other hand, numbers such as “Electric Chair,” in which the youngest of the accused Scottsboro Boys (Nile Bullock) is taunted and given a taste of electrification by two “comically” devious prison guards, are uneasy. And the arrival of the accused youths’ second attorney Samuel Leibowitz, belting out “That’s Not the Way We Do Things,” is a spirited but obvious crowd pleaser. This Scottsboro Boys may strain for a consistent tone much of the way, but it soars as it nears its finish, with a minstrel-makeup sequence that is both daring and defiant, and a quietly stirring passing of the civil rights torch to Rosa Parks. Historical and, at times, histrionical, An Iliad is one man’s tireless recounting of the Trojan War, the kind of experience you wish you’d had in that interminable world history class. Henry Woronicz, however, is the “Poet,” not the professor, in this one-act affair running through Sept. 9 at La Jolla Playhouse. When he’s not bounding around the stage en route to the battlefield or the gates of Troy, he’s pantomiming spear-wielding combat, inhabiting the spirits of brave Achilles and heroic Hector, and taking time out for some fortifying “tequila.” His only companion in the storytelling is musician Brian Ellingsen, who from the bleachers provides atmospheric accompaniment on the double bass and other instruments.
Interesting though the Trojan War may be for buffs (Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson’s play is loosely based on Homer’s “The Iliad”), this production is not as theatrical as it should be, even with Woronicz’s animations. An Iliad rises above the stationary when it turns metaphorical, as when Woronicz recites chronologically and at machine-gun speed mankind’s wars over tortured time. The waste and the futility speak for themselves. With Romneyomics making the campaign rounds and the divide between the haves and the have-nots a rhetorical flash point, could there be a better time to revisit the Reaganomics era of David Mamet’s scathing Glengarry Glen Ross? The 1984 Pulitzer winner about the desperate men at a Chicago real estate office is a grim reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
La Jolla Playhouse’s Christopher Ashley directs a Glengarry that hasn’t aged in its cynicism or verbal brutality. The slow death of its salesmen, at least internally, remains morbidly fascinating, even as Mamet’s strafing F-bombs predominate. The central figures are by now archetypes to anyone who’s seen Glengarry Glen Ross before or remembers the fine 1992 film adaptation. They seem suspended in purgatorial time, forced to atone for not closing enough deals: blustering Dave Moss (James Sutorius), who translates his resentment into the pivotal scheme to burglarize the realty office and steal the coveted “premium leads”; George Aaronow (Ray Anthony Thomas), beaten down and running out of hope; and Shelly Levene (Peter Maloney), a “legend” past his prime with just enough faith left in him to keep from doing the Dutch (Mamet-speak for suicide). Even the comparatively successful Richard Roma (Manu Narayan) is in fierce competition not only with his fellow agents, but with a creeping part of himself that wants to F-bomb it all. Narayan’s performance as Roma, which manages gestures of tenderness toward the pitiable Shelly, is the stoutest among a cast that also includes Johnny Wu as office manager John Williamson and Jeff Marlow as a sad-sack client of Roma’s. The thing is, Mamet’s incendiary script itself overwhelms those speaking his words. The play is caught up in the cadence and sting of its exchanges and denunciations. Mamet, who once toiled in a Chicago real estate office, is always on your mind. Even sympathetic Shelly is just the least bit elusive to us. The Playhouse staging nevertheless is on target. Ashley’s taut direction is complemented by two superb sets (the Chinese restaurant and the tumbledown office) by Todd Rosenthal. You can almost taste the gimlet and feel the chalkboard dust on your fingertips. Half of Tanya Saracho’s Kita y Fernanda is spoken in Spanish, but you don’t have to be bilingual to be moved by this thoughtful play’s treatises on class distinction, friendship and identity. The final production of Mo’olelo’s 2012 season is also one of the company’s best on record – smartly performed by Cynthia Bastidas (Kita) and Gabriela Trigo (Fernanda) with solid support from Melba Novoa (as Fernanda’s mother) and the versatile Olivia Espinosa (in three roles), and staged in a fast-moving but wholly absorbing 90 minutes.
A chance sighting between two young women at an immigration reform march in Chicago prefaces a look back at two very different girls thrown together in a big Texas house. Fernanda, the privileged daughter of Mexican nationals, is pampered but lonely in that big Texas house until the arrival on the premises of Kita, the daughter of the undocumented Mexican maid. The sisterly bond between them is forged in simple, mutual recognitions but also in episodes of anger and pain that cut to the quick. Kita is the fighter and the idealist that Fernanda wishes to be. Where adulthood takes them, and what happens when they meet again after 14 years apart, is as sobering as real life, which sometimes resists even the most ardent fight for change. You will be changed by Kita y Fernanda. Start with a title like The Underpants and you get an automatic cackle, or at least a hee-hee or a ha-ha. More of the latter is elicited by North Coast Rep’s production of a broad comedy adapted by Steve Martin. Yes, THAT Steve Martin – comedian, actor, banjo player, novelist and, in this case, playwright. Martin’s The Underpants is based on German Expressionist Carl Sternheim’s 1910 morals-busting play Die Hose. It has its moments, but excuuuuuuze me, Mr. Martin, The Underpants is a funnier title than it is a show.
Though it premiered 10 years ago off Broadway, The Underpants is just now having its San Diego premiere, directed by Mark Pinter and opening North Coast Rep’s 31st season. Set in Dusseldorf shortly after the turn of the 20th century, The Underpants waffles uneasily between anti-establishment commentary and near-slapstick. When oppressed (and suppressed) wife Louise (Holly Rone) accidentally drops her underpants during a town parade for the king, stuffy and chauvinistic husband Theo (Matthew Henerson) harrumphs and goes to the toilet a lot (actually, too much), while two turned-on witnesses to Louise’s mishap (Jacob Bruce and Omri Schein) vie for the married couple’s room for rent. Louise’s upstairs crony Gertrude (Clarinda Ross) pops in to encourage her frustrated friend’s infidelity … and discovers that there’s another side to blustering Theo. It’s all sincerely overplayed. Schein seems to be auditioning for a Mel Brooks picture. Bruce, one of the aspiring lovers in the first four scenes, goes all Will Ferrell in the final scene as the monocled king. The sweet-faced Rone comes to resemble a horny Mary Poppins. Consummate pro Jonathan McMurtry turns up as a third would-be renter, but too late to elevate the proceedings above good time had by all. The zaniness has Martin’s stamp on it, but as with some of his own performing shtick, it’s hit and miss. There isn’t one sight gag here as howling as Navin R. Johnson’s “The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here!” exultation in “The Jerk.” As for mocking the neo-priggishness of our times, The Underpants is rather flimsy. A Room With A View is the kind of romantic musical that audiences a couple of generations ago would have loved, a charming tale that cozily couches its underpinnings of suppressed passion and self-awakening in otherwise merry Edwardian mannerisms. Even its nude scene – three fellas splish-splashing in a hot-spring bath – is as benign as it is good-natured.
The Old Globe Theatre’s production of a musical by Marc Acito (book) and Jeffrey Stock (music and lyrics) based on the 1908 novel by E.M. Forster is impeccable in its costuming (nod to Judith Dolan) and scenic design (ditto Heidi Ettinger), and a few nifty special effects (rainfall and an exploding tea kettle to name two) heighten the multisensory fun. That there seems little at stake, dramatically speaking, in the story of Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch (Ephie Aardema) is mostly mitigated by all the trappings. Yes, we understand that the sensuality of Florence and its demonstrative love for la vita and romance intoxicates Lucy. And yes, we perceive easily enough that life back in Windy Corner, England, pales by comparison, in spite of Lucy’s being surrounded by her doting (though sometimes irritating) family. We know what lovestruck Lucy ultimately will do when making the choice between stuffed-shirt Cecil Vyse (Will Reynolds) and free-spirited George Emerson (Kyle Harris). With A Room With A View, it’s more about the journey than the destination. Jeffrey Stock’s score inhabits nearly every bit of the journey, backgrounding dialogue as well as teeing up cast members for big numbers (Lucy’s “A Room With A View” and “Ludwig and I,” George’s revealing “I Know You,” Charlotte’s confessional, rather tacked-on “Frozen Charlotte”). The ragtime-inflected “Splash” is the most memorable tune, but as much for its crowd-pleasing romp in the raw as anything else. Aardema and Harris are pleasant as the lead lovers, but they can’t match Glenn Seven Allen (he of the impressive operatic tenor) and Jacquelynne Fontaine as their Italian counterparts and inspiration. One look at this pair and you’ll want to book your trip to Tuscany, get struck by love yourself, get a room, and who cares if it has a view? |
AuthorDavid L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic. Archives
May 2024
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