BACK STAGE WEST

April 12, 2001 

        

THE WICKED STAGE

 

By Rob Kendt        

Heard from the excellent Jennifer Erin Roberts, who was so forceful as Maggie the Cat in A Noise Within's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last year. She's in Tuscon, Ariz., working with Arizona Theatre Company on Steven Dietz's new play, Inventing Van Gogh, inspired by the legend of the painter's final, never-seen self-portrait. Dietz seems to have had a lot of productions in regions outside L.A.-- at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Seattle, in Sacramento, and at ATC in Tucson. His Lonely Planet was recently revived by Vanguard Theatre Ensemble in Orange County. But it's been awhile since SoCal viewers have seen a new work from the author of Private Eyes, Rocket Man, Trust, and a popular adaptation of Dracula (one NoCal production of which, we seem to recall, featured local hero Nick DeGruccio as Renfield).

 

¥ So Christopher Liam Moore won't be appearing in Cornerstone Theater Company's contemporary adaptation of Peter Pan with the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in Cleveland, Ohio. Seems the brilliant thesp landed a lucrative gig on a super-secret new reality TV show, said to involve a Truman Show-like premise of actors mingling with contestants in a small town. This sounds a lot like the reported next venture by George Verschoor, a producer on MTV's Fear, from whom Fox Productions has ordered eight episodes of a murder-mystery-in-a-small-town show that mixes actors and "real" people (always love that distinction). We're sad we may never see Chris as the boy who could fly--and over contemporary Cleveland, no less--but then, it's also hard to imagine an actor more ideally suited to improvising opposite non-actors, given his long history with Cornerstone's rural and urban residencies. (Ditto his fellow Cornerstoner, the multi-talented Shishir Kurup, also hired by the TV show.) And we're heartened to learn that another L.A. talent, Circle X member Richard Augustine, nabbed Pan's part, under director Bill Rauch.

 

¥ Is it just us at Back Stage West, or does it seem like a weak year for theatre so far in SoCal? The stuff that's been good has been all fine and well, but there hasn't been much of it to go around. For weeks now, my managing editor, Scott Proudfit, and I have lamented the slim pickings as we look through the list of what's out there to assign to our stable of critics. Maybe--a big maybe--L.A. theatre will be better off with fewer plays worth covering, so we can narrow our focus to the groups and productions that really deserve it. A recent chat with Bay Area correspondent Jean Schiffman found her very high on theatre up north, especially Berkeley Rep's Oresteia in its beautiful new 600-seat space. Meanwhile L.A.'s main mainstage has Alan Alda playing bongos.

 

¥ I have seen some good theatre lately: East West Players' A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a delightful, light-on-its-feet rendition of a show not everyone likes; I've got a soft spot for it ever since I did it in high school (I played a protean). And I found South Coast Rep's Much Ado About Nothing inviting but not satisfying; its 1930s screwball conceit was frothy but labored. Underrated by most critics was Theatre of NOTE's Girl Under Grain, which I found haunting and moving, despite or perhaps because of Karen Hartman's sparse and attenuated script (which one critic strangely labeled "dense"). Laura Stribling's direction didn't try to fill it up so much as plunge right into the empty space at the play's heart; thus isolated in a kind of emotional wind tunnel, actors Cathy Carlton and Catherine Gibson did some of the most affecting and resonant acting I've seen in a while. Nice. Finally, I went to the Hudson Theatre complex recently to catch The Very Worst of Varla Jean Merman, only to be informed that the lead, Jeffery Roberson, was in the hospital with food poisoning. So I slipped into the also running Pages of My Diary I'd Rather Not Read, which turned out to be thoughtful, funny, and engagingly performed--by Betsie Devan, Marissa Manzanares, and playwright Eydie Faye, in a sort of one-woman-show-times-three. Hope springs eternal, even in a lean season.