Sometimes even the stubbornly unsentimental can be suckers for sentimentality. You may be one of them during a performance of Chapatti, Christian O’Reilly’s one-act play having its West Coast premiere at the North Coast Rep. The ingredients for soupiness are there: two lonely people finding love again, later in life; a faithful little terrier named Chapatti that we don’t see (there’s no dog on stage) but don’t have to; an old woman’s loving cat – her reason to live – which is run over by a car. But Chapatti (the play, not the terrier), a world-premiere co-production last year between Ireland’s Galway Arts Festival and the Northlight Theatre in Chicago, transcends soap opera. So durable and downright human are its two characters, Dan (Mark Bramhall) and Betty (Annabella Price), that any pity you might feel for them is superseded by affection, and by admiration for each one’s nobility. Without trying they make each other laugh – yes, and make each other cry, too. But what goes on in between is the play’s strength.
The loss of one of the 19 cats that lives in Betty’s house is the (can’t resist this) catalyst for bringing the remote Dan and house-bound Betty together. Immersed, even obsessed, with an old, clandestine love now gone, Dan is no easy catch. But then Betty isn’t truly out to catch him. She wants to be with him, to love him, but also to teach him to live again. Price is remarkably comfortable in her role: uninhibited, un-selfconscious, wise. Bramhall feels more one-note, though his character is established as one in the throes of stifling inner conflicts. When the two characters turn to the audience and speak in monologue, explaining what’s going on and what the other person is feeling, Chapatti sacrifices its natural flow. The play would be lengthier, but more rewarding, without the obvious exposition. Still, Judith Ivey’s direction is affectionate and gentle on the throttle, and she has two actors who are simpatico. One thing more: If you’re wondering where the name Chapatti comes from, it’s an unleavened flatbread popular in South Asia, and a favorite – as is the terrier – of gruff but romantic old Dan.
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Diversionary Theatre’s final performance of its 2015 mini-season, A New Brain, is an ambitious musical production (a cast of 10, over 30 songs) that more often than not hits the right notes. Composer William Finn (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and librettist James Lapine (Into the Woods) wrote this 1998 musical about a songwriter for a kids show who must undergo brain surgery. When A New Brain is good, as during moving tunes sung by Tom Zohar as the protagonist, Gordon Schwinn, and Sandy Campbell as his neurotic mother, it is very good indeed. When silliness intrudes, as it does on a few too-cute numbers with props, A New Brain is just amusing. The ideal way to appreciate it as a whole is to imagine that everything on stage after Gordon’s dire diagnosis is in his head, scatterings of life and memory, joys and fears that sometime make no sense. That’s the marvel of the brain.
Cygnet Theatre’s San Diego premiere of Sons of the Prophet could be regarded as two hours of schadenfreude, the enjoyment in the suffering of another. In Stephen Karam’s 2011 play the unfortunate one is 29-year-old Joseph Douaihy (Alex Hoeffler). He’s lost his father after an auto accident caused by a high school jock’s prank. He works for a certifiable nutcase just so he can get adequate health insurance – which he needs because his once-athletic body is deteriorating, muscle by muscle. He’s suddenly head of a household that includes his precocious, hearing-disabled brother and an uncle who bellows racial insensitivities and takes dumps in a living-room closet converted into a toilet. Oh, and Joseph’s also coming to terms with his homosexuality.
So why do we laugh? We’re not really enjoying poor Joseph’s suffering, but Sons of the Prophet (the title comes from the Douaihys being descendants of “The Prophet” author Kahlil Gibran) is a dark family drama wrapped as a comedy. Even so, the laughter should be more uneasy and uncertain than it was in the crowd on opening night. Maybe the folks were getting genuine kicks out of Joseph’s fear, grief, humiliation and anger. Go figure. Though Sons of the Prophet, directed by Rob Lutfy, is energized by live-wire character turns that include Maggie Carney as Joseph’s boss, Gloria, and Dylan James Mulvaney as younger brother Charles, it is Hoeffler’s show, as Joseph. He is the core and the conscience of the story, whether he’s trying to understand his failing health, his sexuality or his mourning. Even as you wish that old Uncle Bill would just shut up and that Gloria would take a Xanax and chill, you feel the unsettled heart of Joseph skipping beats in the midst of the madness, and you want the best for him. The changing scenes are framed by projected references to Gibran’s ruminations – a thoughtful touch. Yet the pace of the play early on is overly conversational and sluggish. The action and the insights ramp up in the second act, which is highlighted by a school board meeting to end all school board meetings. It’s followed by a quietly affecting conclusion. Gibran may be a cliché, but the contemplative Sons of the Prophet is not. One takeaway from New Village Arts’ production of Walton Jones’ The 1940s Radio Hour; once you hear radio ensemble player Ginger Brooks’ (Marlene Montes) orgasmic commercial, you’ll never think of Eskimo Pies in the same way again.
Actually, the between-show commercials are the choice bits in NVA’s 90-minute representation of a New York City radio station’s holiday show, “recorded” in front of a studio audience, during the WWII era. A game cast sings and dances to a lot of period standards, and yes, there are the inevitable Christmas numbers, too. A pre-broadcast segment that sort of introduces the characters seems pointless. The show-within-a-show itself, with the very funny Daren Scott as the harried emcee, would be enough on its own. Besides Scott and the aforementioned Montes, The 1940s Radio Hour benefits from the crooning and hoofing of Zackary Scot Wolfe and an impossibly perky Danielle Levas. The always entertaining Tony Houck, on piano, is a jaunty one-man band. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a production of Twelfth Night as beautifully conceived as the one that just opened the Old Globe Theatre’s Summer Shakespeare Festival. Every choice of color, from the azure blue scenic backdrop to scatterings of blood-red roses to Olivia’s ever-changing gowns, is meticulous and exquisite. Each of Feste the fool’s underplayed musical interludes, whether accompanying himself on fiddle or ukulele, intersects the play’s masquerading lovers’ moods or subtly counteracts the mischief of its pranksters. This Twelfth Night is awash in visual and theatrical surprises, all the more impressive for a Shakespearean comedy as frequently staged as this one is.
Much of the praise must go to director Rebecca Taichman, who Globe-goers may remember was at the helm of last year’s lovely and emotive Time and the Conways. Taichman’s intuition about what will touch an audience while propelling the story is very much on view with Twelfth Night. This production is a triumph of unfettered romance (as big as the wheelbarrows full of roses at the start of Act 2) that complements the play’s thinly veiled mistaken identities and broad comic antics (courtesy of Sir Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek, Malvolio and company). Taichman also has an exceptional cast with which to work, including not only its dipsomaniacal Sir Toby Belch (Tom McGowan), hapless Andrew Aguecheek (Patrick Kerr) and insufferable Malvolio (Robert Joy), but a priceless Olivia (Sara Topham) and a crowd-winning Feste the clown (Manoel Felciano). Rutina Wesley’s Viola is plucky and deft with double-takes, and in this roses-happy staging she probably sees more red than she did while co-starring on HBO’s “True Blood.” Riccardo Hernandez’s scenic design and Christopher Akerlind’s lighting combine to ensure that this Twelfth Night, with director Taichman’s vision at the fore, will carry you away, perhaps to a place where love and laughter in equal measure are as sublime as a soothing summer rain. Which, incidentally, arrived at the very end of the Globe’s opening night performance. Sang Feste, alone on stage at the time: “With hey, ho, the wind and the rain.” And it did. Ths enchanting show’s got some magic going for it. The thinking behind the Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival staging of The Comedy of Errors must have been either … a.) let’s do Shakespeare for people who don’t especially like Shakespeare, or b.) this play is so silly and inconsequential we’ll just use it as an excuse to do a “New Orleans in the ‘20s” show. Regardless, this production of the one-act (that’s not a misprint) The Comedy of Errors directed by Scott Ellis tells the story of two sets of twins and all the ensuing confusion, but becomes a big, loud French Quarter party. Besides Alexander Dodge’s stunning sets and Linda Cho’s period costumes, there are beaucoups jazzy interludes performed by strutting musicians and cast sing-alongs of “Down by the Riverside,” “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Tiger Rag.”
Halfway through this Comedy of Errors, everyone in the outdoor theater was letting the good times roll so brazenly you’d never know they were at a Shakespeare festival. The farcical fun aside, that’s kind of a shame. If you travel the theater circuit at all, you’ve no doubt experienced a few heavy-handed productions that employ screen projections to alert the audience as to the significance or definition of a given scene. If executed with technical savvy, this device can have artistic merit. It can just as equally come off as condescending. No need for such a gimmick with Violet, the Jeanine Tesori/Brian Crawley musical based on Doris Betts’ book “The Ugliest Pilgrim” that opens the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s 40th season (congratulations, Rep!). Violet is about the nature of beauty – what it is, what it isn’t, how it’s beheld. This is as clear as a big ‘ol harvest moon hangin’ over North Carolina. Y’awl.
Forgive the southern flavor. You can’t help it with a story that unfolds entirely in the 1960s American South. Violet (a stridently impressive Hannah Corrigan) is on a pilgrimage from her Carolina hometown to visit a Jimmy Swaggert-like televangelist (Jason Heil, working up a sweat) whom she hopes can heal the facial disfigurement she’s suffered with since a childhood accident. On this multi-stop bus trip, she meets a couple of young soldiers, macho yet insecure Monty (Jacob Caltrider) and an intense African-American sergeant, Flick (Rhett George), and so begins an unlikely love triangle. Paralleling all this is a re-creation of young Violet’s (Katelyn Katz) relationship with her father (Jason Maddy) whose ax it was that accidentally scarred his daughter. There aren’t a lot of narrative surprises in this nearly-20-year-old show, and Violet’s metamorphoses from joy to despair and back again late in the going stretch credulity. But the performances directed by Sam Woodhouse are rock-solid, and the musical score, while not boasting numbers that will stay with you for very long, has something for everyone: country, blues, bluegrass, rock and especially gospel. “Raise Me Up,” the highlight of the Hope Church sequence, is a real barn-burner thanks to Lula Buffington and a backing choir. Set as it is in 1964, there is historical perspective in Violet. The most potent point made is that prejudice and fear of those who look different from us is as alive today as it was then. What’s most noteworthy about San Diego Musical Theatre’s current production of West Side Story is where it’s being produced: downtown at the Spreckels Theatre. It’s a new home for SDMT, which had been staging its musicals in the North Park Theatre, a venue that’s OK for bands but frankly underwhelming for live theater. So it was a little disappointing to find the acoustics at the Spreckels for West Side Story, one of Broadway’s great, ground-breaking classics, so tinny, at least when I was there Saturday night. Let’s hope that’s an anomaly. As for the production, it’s top shelf – smart, jazzy choreography by Randy Slovacek, exciting fight scenes between the Jets and Sharks, and, among the talented ensemble, Natalie Nucci as a sexy, sassy and indomitable Anita.
Mark St. Germain’s Freud’s Last Session is about a fictional meeting between Sigmund Freud and author C.S. Lewis. At Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado, with Lamb’s Artistic Director Robert Smyth is Freud and Fran Gercke plays Lewis. So riveting is this dialogue between two intellectual giants as they debate life, death, sex and the existence of God that experiencing it so soon again was no chore. For those who have never seen Freud’s Last Session, you have a thought-provoking 85 minutes in store. Smyth and Gercke are in complete command throughout on Brian Prather’s comfortable set, and the specter of Britain’s entry into World War II looms ominously over the proceedings. Smyth’s makeup even has him looking like the father of psychoanalysis.
As leftist manifesto, Herbert Siguenza’s Steal Heaven is kick-ass, skewering deserved reactionary targets from the ‘60s through today. Of course sociopolitical commentary is nothing new to Siguenza, one of the founding members of the Chicano troupe Culture Clash. But as a work of theater, Steal Heaven, directed at the San Diego Repertory Theatre by Siguenza and Todd Salovey, is rather contrived.
This starts with the setup: In 2017, when the White House is occupied by President Paul Ryan, a “laptop activist” named Trish (Summer Spiro) is accidentally shot to death during a solo protest. She comes to in “limbo,” where none other than Abbie Hoffman (Siguenza) explains that if she proves herself worthy, she will be returned to her earthly body to carry on the cause of justice. And so Abbie’s training of Trish begins, with the ‘60s leftist and the contemporary leftist trying to find common ground while mocking each other’s philosophical contradictions and instruments of demonstration. Popping in and out in comic cameos is Mark Pinter, variously portraying Einstein (colorfully), George Burns with stogie as God (so-so), Richard Nixon in mask, Steve Jobs, Julia Childs (a howl) and others, including John Lennon (the Liverpool accent could use work, but he’s got the look down.) Cogent points about the oppression of the right, the insanity of war and the desperate need for peace fly like angry birds, and the tension between Abbie and Trish turns problematic when it is revealed that as a solider in Iraq she killed five people. John Lennon (Pinter) comes to the rescue, explaining (and I just can’t see Lennon, violently anti-war, doing this) that Trish did what she had to do and must forgive herself. But it brings Abbie and Trish together and ensures her eligibility to return to Earth. Music from the ‘60s and ‘70s and evocative screen projections (Trish’s acid trip truly is one) add layers to the otherwise predictable revolution polemics. So does the appearance on screen of a “bullshit meter” that takes no prisoners, left or right, and merits some of the most raucous laughs. Steal Heaven is a one-act affair but it could use some paring (Spiro’s rap number?) But its intentions are noble ones just the same. |
AuthorDavid L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic. Archives
May 2024
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