BACK STAGE WEST

January 03, 2002      

        

The Wicked Stage

 

by Rob Kendt

                 

It's official: The Fifth Annual Garland Awards, Back Stage West's way of giving back to the community that gives us so much throughout the year, including comp tickets, will be held at the Alex Theatre in Glendale in March. I've seen two great awards shows there before: the L.A. Weekly Awards some years ago, hosted riotously by members of the Actors' Gang, and the original peer-judged Ovation Awards in 1995, which still stands as the best Ovations show to date.

 

I have to confess that our first Garlands show still remains my favorite, too: 'Twas an intimate two-hour (I can prove itwe taped it) event in January, 1998, at the Coronet, held just a week or two before the final Drama-Logue awards. We had a number from Ragtime, we had David Schwimmer and Noah Wyle and Michael Learned. We had the Butt Pirates of the Carribean. We had Judith Marie-Bergan on crutches, making her way haltingly to the stage to collect awards for The Magic Fire at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. (Is that play ever coming to L.A.?) We had Katy Selverstone jetting from New York just for our little show. We had Ron Sossi recalling (not firsthand, we presume) the Coronet's production of Brecht's Galileo with Charles Laughton. We had a loud drunk in the alley outside the theatre seem to respond to a brassy showtune with a curse about Barbra Streisand.

 

And we had incomparably classy co-presenters in Jenna Cole and Francois Giroday, who stand out in my memory as the quintessence of that modest but marvelous gathering upon a winter's nighta pair of offhandedly glamorous theatre folks who embodied (still do, last we checked) a certain dignity of bearing, of pride in their work, too easily forgotten in this time, and in this place.

 

The Garlands have gotten bigger and even betternow with 20 percent more vimbut it's that original spirit of camaraderie that, we hope, animates every Garlands show, including this fifth annual fte. Producing for me this year is the tireless Raul Espinoza of That Certain Cervantes and National Repertory Theatre Foundation fame. Honorees will be announced in our Jan. 24 issue, the show held Mar. 11. Save the dates and see you there.

 

Michael Phillips has traded the top critical post at the L.A. Times for the same post at the Chicago Tribune, replacing veteran critic Richard Christiansen. That marks just three years at the local rag. Minneapolis native Phillips confessed that he's worked at "5 papers in 15 years, and I don't want to keep moving. I would love it if this turned out to be 'the job.' My wife and I are Midwesterners, so soul-killing grey skies and ass-kicking cold won't faze us." And his one-year-old son? "The chance to see John in a snowsuit sealed the deal. I don't want to miss that." His parting shots for the city of angles? "The theatre here, despite what I might call my L.A. issues, has always given me enough to chew on, on all levels of the food chain." Among his favorites: Murray Mednick's Joe & Betty: "A very tough and special, harsh little play." His least favorite: "That thing with Jenna Elfman and Miguel Ferrer at the Skylight Theatre." (He means Milton Katselas' Visions and Lovers.) "Despite the best efforts of the two actors, it had the very creepy overtone of a vanity production ego tripwith Scientology sign-up sheets in the lobby!" I'll miss Phillips' sharp wit and independent voiceand I wonder when the Times will land a lead critic who thinks of that post as "the job."