January 24, 2002
Kubzansky is among the few true freelance theatre directors based
in Los Angeles, and increasingly she's getting paying work out of town. We
begrudge her no outside projects, but it would be a great loss to our local
theatre scene if she traveled out of town too often. She has consistently
mounted some of the most intelligently imagined, visceral but thoughtful
productions in L.A. for the past decade, at theatres ranging from the Colony to
Pacific Resident Theatre to the Odyssey. Last year alone she directed two
full-length productions, Anatol and A Servant to Two Masters, and a short
L.A. run of Moscow (a Garland winner in 1998), prior to its Edinburgh Festival
Fringe appearance. For Buffalo Nights, she made Anatol, Schnitzler's
episodic examination of bachelor sex and longing, resonate and sting with wit
and bracing clarity; for International City Theatre, she turned a brilliant
cast loose in the playground of A Servant to Two Masters, all the
while keeping them on point with the frothy central story. Kubzansky's gifts
are many-layered: With her loving but unflinching honesty about the vagaries of
human behavior, she really cuts to the heart and brain of a play. She does this
by casting great, versatile actors and challenging them, and by creating fully
theatrical worlds, a step beyond or beneath mere naturalism. She marries design
and impulse, the intellectual and the sensual, like few others stage directors
we've seen. (Come to think of it, we'd love to see her take on a Stoppard
play.) Next up is Lanford Wilson's Burn This at the
Odyssey. We'll be there.
The dapper and reserved LeBlanc is among the go-to costumers for
productions at venues as far-ranging as the Civic Light Opera of South Bay
Cities, Actor's Co-op in Hollywood, the Interact Theatre in North Hollywood,
and the Colony Studio Theatre. He's also known to turn up in unexpected places,
such as at the Greenway Court Theatre for the Greenway Arts Alliance production
of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Wherever theatregoers are lucky to
see his meticulous work (one is tempted to call it seamless but for the
suggestion of a pun), the LeBlanc name on a program is one mark of quality they
can trust. And not just generic quality: LeBlanc's designs expertly reflect
character, class, period, and directorial concept with an economy that neither
rules out sumptuousness when appropriate nor becomes distracted by frills.
As the owner of Valentino's Costumes in Van Nuys, LeBlanc has a
large collection of costumes. But, as he said in a recent conversation, he
bristles at the notion that he's just a costume rental facility--or, worse yet,
that when companies hire him for a specific costume design that his whole
warehouse is theirs for the taking. LeBlanc is among that small, select group
of paid professionals in Los Angeles theatre who are more than worth the money.
In a cluttered white house on a quiet block in Long Beach, sound
designer John Zalewski sits among rickety musical instruments, stacks of
reading material, half-finished paintings, and other accoutrements of a life
filled with art and curiosity, and he collects and shapes weird sounds. It's
not a knock to say you can recognize a Zalewski sound design almost
immediately: There is the inventiveness and arcana, the obscure music loops,
the odd effects, but above all there is the clarity and force of his soundscapes.
They sound like sculpted noise, or more precisely, like noise being sculpted--no
one does booming and grating like Zalewski. Last year he didn't just do his
usual brilliant pre-recorded work on such Evidence Room shows as Don Carlos and Delirium
Palace, and on Bottom's Dream's 3 Voices; in a welcome
diversion, he appeared onstage as Luigi, a "gondolier," playing live
sound effects along with the lazzi in International City Theatre's A Servant
to Two Masters. Live or on tape, Zalewski makes us sit up and listen.