THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

What to say, dear readers, in my final installment of the Wicked Stage? This column began in early 2001 as a way to catch the overflow of years of theatregoing and scene-watching--perceptions and piques, observations and oddities, connections and conundrums I felt could find no other proper place but a dishy, discursive column like this: part Page Six seen-on-the-scene name-dropping, part pontification, part advocacy, part free-form theatre (and occasionally film) review, part take-no-prisoners rant.

And now I find myself over-full of things to say in parting.

I don't know exactly what sort of theatre coverage you'll find in future issues of Back Stage West. I'll just say that I'm very proud of the critical support and occasional tough love we've given to West Coast theatre, not only with reviews but with features, editorials, special issues (including extensive coverage of the Ovation Awards and the Edge of the World Theatre Festival), and finally our Garland Awards, begun in 1998 (the last year of the Drama-Logue Awards, since we acquired our historic competitor in June of the same year). I especially cherish the memory of printing the reviews of such erstwhile BSW critics as Charles Isherwood, Matthew Surrence, Kerry Reid, Terry Maloney, Scott Chernoff, Daryl Miller, Dani Dodge, John Longenbaugh, George Manet, Jesse Dienstag, John Godfrey, Bari Newport, and Zach Udko. (I wouldn't presume to pick favorites among our current roster of critics, who, I'll venture to say, are the finest and fiestiest writing about theatre in the region, and whom I wish all the best with their new editors.)

I suppose the best way to spend this column is to jog my memory for favorite theatre experiences over the last 10 years at the post. Will you indulge me one last time?

I seem to be in the minority, but I loved Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Blvd. at the Shubert in 1993, starring Glenn Close and George Hearn and the sweet Judy Kuhn; I thought it was Webber's first serious score, with a staging that actually improved on some scenes from the Billy Wilder original. And it seemed to be the first of many Broadway-bound shows that played L.A. first and were then treated like damaged goods once they headed East.... The repertory of eight fraught, deadpan comedies by Justin Tanner at the Cast Theatre in Hollywood in 1995 remains among the highest points of my theatregoing anywhere; it highlighted a perfectly seasoned ensemble, on Andy Daley's lived-in sets, that I still miss today (though I'm privileged to count Tanner's leading lady, Laurel Green, as a good friend). While those shows were up, I even used some of the Cast's long-running late-nights as palette cleansers after particularly bad evenings at other plays in the area. My favorite: the bittersweet Teen Girl.... The 1995 culmination of Cornerstone Theater Company's Watts residency, The Central Ave. Chalk Circle, remains fixed in my memory as my best single theatre experience, in many categories: This was the only time a play by Brecht, a love/hate favorite writer of mine, genuinely landed its stark, ambivalent points in our present-day consciousness, thanks to a bold, fleet-footed contemporary adaptation by Lynn Manning; it represented the apotheosis of Cornerstone's vaunted ensemble/ community performance style, in which the gap between such company pros as Shishir Kurup, Page Leong, Christopher Liam Moore, and Armando Molina and such "non-pro" players as Marcella Ramirez, Irma Ashe, Sándra A. Layne, and Aaron Meeks was certainly apparent, in appropriately Brechtian fashion, but was at the same time seamless, of a piece with the material. Above all, while it was not the only example, it was the most visceral demonstration of Cornerstone's audience-engaging work we've yet seen in L.A. I sat next to families of all races and tax brackets, and I think we all shared an experience of that play, in all its humor, horror, and satirical bite. As much as I've loved or been excited by other theatre experiences, Central Ave. represents, in my book, the gold standard of all that theatre can be, not only for artists but also for audiences. Cornerstone came close more recently with last year's peripatetic Crossings, but Central Ave. remains the central event.... In another take on the same Brecht warhorse, The Evidence Room opened its congenial Downtown-adjacent warehouse space in 2000 with Chuck Mee's post-Cold War The Berlin Circle, which could as easily have been called The Berlin Circus. Under David Schweizer's inspired direction, Mee's play became both an update and an inversion of Brecht. I've had many good nights at the ER since, both in the theatre (Saved, Skin of Our Teeth, Don Carlos, a Megan Mullally benefit concert) and at the bar afterward (mostly after the late-night Strip), but none as multifarious, sense-dazzling, dangerously un-slick, and exhilarating as that first Circle.... I've been accused of bias in favor of certain theatre companies, and I'll come clean here: It's true, I do tend to like the troupes that do good work more than those that don't. I'm funny that way. Well, slow and steady wins the race: For the sheer length and consistency of its track record of exciting, unpredictable evenings in a tiny storefront space, nothing beats Hollywood's Theatre of NOTE, where a number of knockout productions span nearly a decade but still stick in my memory: The Interview, Burrhead, Random Hearts, The Duchess of Malfi, Monstrosity, Bing, Yellow Flesh/Alabaster Rose, and the still-running Hamlet, the First Quarto. Through many generations of talent, NOTE has somehow kept it real.... I have so many more I want to mention, as this may be the last place these memories will matter to anyone in print. So I must be brief: For Sondheim, few productions can top the Colony's Putting It Together of 1997, and East West Players' beautiful 1998 Pacific Overtures resonated out of that troupe's brand-new Little Tokyo space like a taiko drum.... And, following East West's move to mid-size was the scrappy Colony, whose homecoming to its new Burbank space was last year's beatific, riveting, ensemble-driven The Laramie Project.... The folks who would form the edgy Zoo District started with an intense Downtown staging of Drums in the Night for Wolfskill in 1997, and to my mind they were never better than in that first show.... A Noise Within's two high watermarks for me weren't Shakespeare but Coward's Design for Living, in Sabin Epstein's sexy, sophisticated 1997 production, and a searing, witty Buried Child, directed by Julia Rodriguez Elliott in 1998.... Daniel Henning's annual Young Playwrights Festival yielded one of his Blank Theatre Company's most inspiring productions, 18-year-old Joseph Alan Drymala's accomplished, astonishing musical Sky's End, in 1996.... The best Chekhov I saw was a NoCal update by Cornerstone called California Seagull, staged in an abandoned store in Santa Monica Place mall in 1995, which boasted an irreverent but soulful script by Alison Carey, matter-of-factly bold direction by Bill Rauch, and a fierce, haunting, unsentimental lead turn by Christopher Liam Moore; I can still see his young writer's defeated countenance by the glow of his laptop. I also loved South Coast's Cherry Orchard the same year.... Speaking of South Coast, its 2001 production of John Guare's Bosoms and Neglect was another high point.... Tracy Young's Dreamplay at Actors' Gang in 2000 was the best thing I ever saw there, showcasing its diverse ensemble and playfully serious theatrical ambitions as well as I ever could wish for. Coming close were 1998's Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella, a co-production with Cornerstone that spanned theatre history with wit and feeling, and the original workshop version of Young's Four Roses, also in 1998, which showed that the troupe could have been called the Actresses' Gang.... Director Jessica Kubzansky always puts on a good show, but the ones I admired most of hers were a sexy but circumspect Heartbreak House at the Colony in 1996 and the droll, fiercely controlled chaos of Havel's The Memorandum at the Odyssey in 1999.... I felt I witnessed, with the 1997 American premiere of Ragtime at the Shubert, one of the most auspicious openings in musical theatre history--a millennial masterpiece. I returned three more times.... I wish I could have returned three times to Laural Meade's whirlwind multimedia meta-theatrical tour de force, Harry Thaw Hates Everybody, at Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1999…. After years at regional theatres around the country, director Sheldon Epps brought his exuberant Ellington/Twelfth Night remix Play On home to the Pasadena Playhouse in 1999, and I've seldom had more sheer fun at a musical.... I have a soft spot in my memory for Actor's Co-op's 1940s Radio Hour of 1994, not least because it featured the avuncular David Schall, may he rest in God's peace.... Though its political implications rankled me, I had to admit that The Lysistrata Project, staged in March by a fiercely committed collective of theatre rebels as a protest on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq at the historic Wilshire Ebell, was a one-of-a-kind L.A. theatre happening, as timeless as it was timely.... The seasoned hands of The Matrix topped themselves with their exquisite, pained Waiting for Godot in 2000, with two powerhouse casts that included the late, great David Dukes.... The late Ron Link's direction was seldom as sinuous yet in-your-face as in his 1998 staging of the tawdry, haunting Melody Jones at the now-razed Theatre/Theater space on Cahuenga.... Jeffrey Dorchen's Ugly's First World at Actors' Gang in 1999 was a brilliant, ungainly, silly, philosophical horror sci-fi comedy that played as if Caryl Churchill and Philip K. Dick had collaborated on an episode of Mystery Science Theatre.... The best two solo shows I saw were Roger Guenveur Smith's eerie, tetchy A Huey P. Newton Story, in an early version at the Actors' Gang in 1995, and Geraldine Hughes' recent Belfast Blues at the Black Dahlia, an intimate, cathartic family epic.... And while the Taper's best years predated my tenure here, I still have fond memories of a tense, immediate, wholly entertaining 1997 production of David Hare's Skylight, with Brian Cox and Laila Robins.

And in addition to the actors mentioned above, I must acknowledge some of the best and brightest I've had the pleasure to see on L.A. stages in 10 years, including Denise Poirier, Ames Ingham, Gary Kelley, Ben Simonetti, Katy Selverstone, Greg Itzin, Dina Platias, Marc Wolf, Alvin Ing, Danny Hoch, Chris Wells, Joe Fria, Christian Leffler, Alice Dodd, Jenna Cole, Jon Palmer, Ellis E. Williams, Tom Fitzpatrick, Trace Turville, Rosita Fernandez, François Giroday, Cynthia Ettinger, Sarah Phemister, Patrick Towne, Laurie Metcalf, Armando Durán, Daniel T. Parker, Susan Egan, George "Jiddu" Haddad, Orville Mendoza, Ellen Ratner, Tracy Middendorf, Richard Werner, Jim Anzide, Jacqueline Wright, Richard Allen, Brian Newkirk, Pamela Gordon, Robert Pescovitz, Dana Schwartz, Tish Hicks, Emily Hong, Jon Amirkhan, Peter Van Norden, Yvette Cason, Evie Peck, Elizabeth Ruscio, Michelle Duffy, LaChanze, Geoff Elliott, Keone Young, Rebecca Gray, Will Ferrell, Carol Burnett, Julia Campbell, Kirk Ward, Judy Jean Berns, Scott Conte, Natalie Venetia Belcon, William Salyers, Jodi Carlisle, Cindy Katz, Jill Hill, Omar Gomez, Hillary Tuck, Susan Dalian, Marilyn McIntyre, Neil Vipond, Barbara Passolt, Jennifer Griffin, John Fleck, Marcia Mitzman Gaven, Thea Constantine, Kandis Chappell, Kate Mulligan, Susan Brindley, Donald Sage Mackay, Rosemary Boyce, Clinton Derricks, Peter Howard, Catherine Gibson, the entire Burglars of Hamm ensemble, John Amirkhan, Bonita Friedericy, Lego Louis, Andrew Ableson, Hank Bunker, Tony Forkush, Jennifer Coolidge, Mitchell Edmonds, Nike Doukas, Beth Kennedy, Molly Bryant, Jennifer Erin Roberts, and Joel Swetow. (And these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.)

I must give a nod to my theatregoing home-away-from-home, Ashland's Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I saw definitive productions of Othello, Tongue of a Bird, Seven Guitars, The Night of the Iguana, Henry IV, Part I, Stop Kiss, Troilus and Cressida, Enter the Guardsman, and many others.

I had the coincidental good fortune to appear in some L.A. shows as a musician, from Stanley Soble's production of Marat/Sade at Pacific Resident Theatre in 1994 to last year's An Appalachian Twelfth Night at the Globe Playhouse. These weren't, of course, a part of my job, but I think I've been better at my job--both as a critic and as the editor of an actors paper--for these behind-the-looking-glass experiences.

I had meant to write more about film and television in this column, but the last film I loved was a documentary, Spellbound, and the only TV series I cared about, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, died in May. And so the end of a rich, rewarding era comes at last, and the future beckons. We can't go on, we must go on. I'll see you at the theatre.