BACK STAGE WEST
April 12, 2001
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.