​Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale is an uneasy spectator experience: two hours without intermission in the presence of a 600-pound character, Charlie, who’s been eating himself to death in the aftermath of his lover, Alan, having starved himself to death. Charlie (Andrew Oswald) is a sympathetic but devastating figure, marking the days he has left on this unkind mortal coil, fighting to breathe but more so fighting to forge one enduring bond with his piss ant of a teenage daughter, Ellie (Erin McIntosh). There’s shock value to the sight of this desperate, cerebral behemoth, but that feeling effectively wears off in Hunter’s highly literate drama, now on stage at Cygnet Theatre, and the focus becomes not on the body but on the soul.
            This emotionally taxing play strains for metaphors (right down to its title) as surely as Charlie strains to move across the room, leaning on his walker. And the snarky correspondences from the college students he teaches online are formula teenspeak. It’s the intense character relationships that elevate The Whale, and not merely the obvious Charlie/Ellie dynamic. Charlie’s tough-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside nurse-friend, Liz (Judy Bauerlein) feeds him fast food at the same time she’s trying to keep him alive. Trying to save Charlie, too, but in a spiritual way, is a nobly-intentioned but mixed up young Mormon missionary, Elder Thomas (Craig Jorczak). What, after all, is salvation? It’s one of many questions The Whale proffers.
            There’s no question that director Shana Wride’s star is up to the physical demands of the role. Oswald bears the burden of the fat suit well, and his underplaying approach gives Charlie considerable dignity. (Thankfully the audience is spared any graphic eating sequences.) Oswald’s scenes with Bauerlein ring truest, manifesting the affection between Charlie and Liz, good friends facing the inevitable.
            The Whale is an ominous affair rife with moments when you won’t know whether to laugh or take an anxious breath. While its psychological wanderings and literary allusions complicate matters, it’s really a simple tale if you let it be, one of connections lost and found to oneself and to others. 

​She survived a cyclone in “The Wizard of Oz,” but Judy Garland could not survive the train wreck that was her adult life, one devastated by alcohol and drug abuse, and by the pressures of the kind of superstardom we take for granted today. The last few months before Garland succumbed at age 47 are dramatized in Peter Quilter’s sometimes harrowing End of the Rainbow. As Garland in Intrepid Theatre Co.’s production downtown, Eileen Bowman knocks it out of the park. Her alternating flammability and vulnerability as the beloved but broken Judy transcends an overlong script with many foreseeable plot turns. And when she becomes Judy the front-and-center performer she belts out standards like “Come Rain or Come Shine” with deep-seated passion and swirling torment, all without doing a caricatured Garland impersonation. Jeffrey Jones (as self-serving fiancé Mickey Deans) and Cris O’Bryon (as Garland’s pianist for the London engagement dramatized in the play) offer sturdy support. This is, however, Bowman’s gig and, from somewhere beyond the rainbow, the immortal Judy Garland’s too. 

​For its inaugural production, Francis Gercke and Jessica John’s Backyard Renaissance theater company chose British playwright Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song. It’s a bittersweet triangle tale involving an Englishman who blows things up for a living (Mike Sears), his sad, disillusioned spouse (John) and a high-wired car-wash owner. Each in his or her own way is facing the inevitability of middle age and beyond, and not with the so-called quiet desperation generally attributed to the English.
            Ponderous though it can be, Parlour Song offers many laugh-aloud moments, most of them when Sears’ pitifully paranoid character, Ned, is on stage, such as his feebly trying to get into shape or getting caught listening to a clinical-voiced sex advice tape. Lisa Berger directs this one-act play with a smart understanding of Butterworth’s more existential messages that underlie the domestic turmoil, and with an appreciation for her cast’s particular talents – Sears’ physical comedy, Gercke’s intense energy and John’s sheer plaintiveness. For Backyard Renaissance, Parlour Song marks a propitious beginning.

​Gunmetal Blues’ storyline is dopey and derivative. You’ve got the requisite hardboiled shamus in the well-worn trenchcoat, the familiar leggy blonde who walks in mystery, and a wisecracking piano player who goes by the self-deprecating name of Buddy Toupee. Ho frigging hum. It’s the presence of a few thoughtful ballads by Craig Bohmler and Marion Adler, like “Childhood Days” and “I’m the One That Got Away,” that provide just enough sophistication to elevate this North Coast Rep offering above what otherwise might feel like dinner-theater fare. This Scott Wentworth-penned spoof of noir private-dick movies has been around since 1992 and somehow is still going strong. Guess it will be as long as we keep romanticizing the tropes of an increasingly wearisome genre.   
            All that said, Gunmetal Blues, directed by Andrew Barnicle, does showcase a talented three-person musical ensemble (Matt Best, Tom Versen and Fred Ubaldo, Jr.) and a leggy blonde (Sharon Rietkerk) who can really belt ‘em out.

​In spite of its inclusion of 25 songs made famous by Elvis Presley, the jukebox musical All Shook Up is about as King-like as those innocuous movies Elvis made in the ‘60s, like “Tickle Me” and “Girl Happy.” This Joe DiPetro-written show draws much more on its other inspiration, Shakespeare’s comedy of romancing and masquerading, Twelfth Night. Everybody loves (or lusts) for somebody sometime in All Shook Up, which kicks off Moonlight Stage Production’s 2015 summer season. The good-natured confusion about who the somebodies are, coupled with a likable cast, distinguishes this Moonlight show. Too many of the Elvis songs, on the other hand, come off as watered down, with only ballads like “Follow That Dream” a good fit for the story. Interestingly enough as well for a show channeling Elvis, the most electric performances are delivered by actresses Vonetta Mixson, Tracy Lore and Christine Hewitt.
 

​North Coast Rep in Solana Beach has opened its 34th season with Ken Ludwig’s madcap comedy The Fox on the Fairway. Few playwrights write madcap better than Ludwig, whose Lend Me A Tenor four years ago was one of NCR’s most memorable recent productions. But Fox on the Fairway, about love, golf and a high-stakes contest between two warring country clubs, is an exhausting exercise in farce and physicality. Its prop hi-jinks are obvious ones, its plot antics strained. The six-person cast directed by Matthew Weiner goes all out, it must be said, and Jacquelyn Ritz, sexy, saucy and smart all in one, continues to be one of the NCR’s most delightful regulars. 

​Though not all of its choreographed, wordless love stories have a happy ending, the Old Globe’s world-premiere In Your Arms is a joyous experience for the theatergoer and a triumph of artistic collaboration. Its 10 vignettes were written by major playwrights including Christopher Durang, Terrence McNally and David Henry Hwang. Tony winner Christopher Gattelli is responsible for the direction and for the diverse, frequently exciting choreography. The original music is by Stephen Flaherty (Ragtime), with lyrics by his collaborator Lynn Ahrens.
            The overarching theme of the vignettes, most of which tell their stories completely in dance (from an impressive ensemble), is romance. While we get the cutesy (Alfred Uhry’s “Love with the Top Down”) and the overly sentimental (Marsha Norman’s “Life Long Love”), we also get Nilo Cruz’s sensual “The Lover’s Jacket,” Lynn Nottage’s heart-stopping “A Wedding Dance,” Carrie Fisher’s hilarious “Lowdown Messy Shame” and, best of all, Hwang’s clever, cinematic “White Snake.” There’s something for every taste and every lover.

​What better time than now, with certain wannabe presidents re-energizing racism and intolerance, to remind ourselves of the heroes, some of them unsung, who fought so hard for civil rights? One of those unsung, or for many little known, was Bayard Rustin. It was Rustin who, at the behest of civil rights icon A. Philip Randolph organized the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He did so while in the midst of great personal sacrifice and with his detractors trying to use against him – and the march – the fact that Rustin was gay and had early ties to the Communist Party. This makes for a gripping story.
            Michael Benjamin Washington wrote and stars (as Rustin) in that story: La Jolla Playhouse’s world-premiere production of Blueprints to Freedom: An Ode to Bayard Rustin, directed by Lucie Tiberghien. In recounting the genesis of the 1963 march, the turbulent days leading up to it and the day itself, Washington is, one could argue, overambitious. The first half-hour of the one-act Blueprints is talky and theatrically rather static, a history class in the stage lights. But director Tiberghien, who was at the helm of the Playhouse’s stupendous Blood and Gifts a few years ago, opens up the action and adds sweep to the history, thanks in part to Neil Patel’s inspired scenic design and a supporting cast including stentorian-voiced Ro Boddie as Dr. Martin Luther King., Jr. and Mandi Masden as committed march organizer Miriam Caldwell.
            But Blueprints, which was developed during the Playhouse’s DNA New Work Series last year, is very much Washington’s showcase. It is clear from both the intelligence of the script and the quiet relentlessness of his performance that Rustin and his story are a part of him. Like the history of civil rights itself, Rustin often took one step forward only to suffer two steps back. But also like those in the movement, he never gave up, even when weary heart and body must have tempted him to do so. For its joyous moments as well as its sorrowful and dangerous ones, Blueprints to Freedom: An Ode to Bayard Rustin should be experienced, discussed and remembered.