August 15, 2002
by Rob Kendt
Ambitious near-misses: With a few notable exceptions, that's what
I've seen on L.A. stages in the past few months. I found Interact Theatre
Company's highly praised Death of a Salesman a bit slack
and stiff; it has good, solid performances that catch fire, but slowly, too
deliberately. The Taper's sexy, steely House of Bernarda Alba doesn't quite
connect, either; about half of director Lisa Peterson's cast delivers the
goods, the rest seems wasted. Some critics have found Chita Rivera's Bernarda
not imposing or threatening enough, but the larger problem for me is Rachel
Hauck's stark, beautiful set, which utterly lacks a sense of confinement. These
women don't feel sufficiently trapped, cowed, or pent-up, in part because Hauck
allows them easy exits and diversions in all directions.
More recent tantalizing disappointments, leaky watersheds,
included Evidence Room's Pentecost and Circle X's still-running Laura
Comstock's Bag-Punching Dog. In the first case, the assets were an
irreducibly fascinating cast and a bracing confidence in Bart DeLorenzo's
staging and design elements; problems included acoustics, accents, and
playwright David Edgar's warped POV, which appears to lay problems in a place
like Hungary (and by extension, all the non-Western world, represented
not-so-neatly by an idyllic bunch of angry but nice refugees) at the feet of
the gangster-capitalist West and its imperial forebears, rather than, oh, let's
say, the Soviet Union. (I found Steven Leigh Morris' Beachwood Drive, at Theatre
of NOTE in April, similarly off-key, coming to a sour conclusion with a
boilerplate you-fucking-Americans sermon by a Russian mobster, delivered
bitterly by Lynn Odell.)
Laura Comstock wants to be, and almost is, a
bona-fide piece of old-time musical theatre heaven, with a lively, not-slavish
pastiche score by Chris Jeffries (a little snatch of "Hernando's
Hideway" here, a bubbly nod to Wizard of Oz there), a large, game cast,
frisky choreography by Gerry McIntrye, and a uniquely high level of spit-shined
showbiz panache, courtesy of director Jillian Armenante and her crew. Other
reviews have criticized the messiness of its vaudeville-act structureÑbut I for
one wanted more magic-trick and silly-production-number diversions from the
tiresome main storyline (by Armenante and Alice Dodd), which portrays everyone
on the ground floor of "moving pictures"Ñfrom the cardboard villain,
Thomas Edison, to the equally cardboard heroes he shoves asideÑas
single-mindedly obsessed with posterity and given to windy pronouncements about
how they'll make history, you'll remember their names, ad nauseam. The heart of
a show like this is, or ought to be, a stage-grabbing mountebank like George
Melies (played to lip-smacking perfection by Jim Anzide), who's oblivious to
posterity because he's most alive in the theatrical moment, or prankish loons
like the Lumiere brothers (Joe Fria, Tim Sabourin), who have the show's best
moment as a song and dance magically synchs to the movements of natives in one
of their ethnographic films. It's an inspired juxtapositionÑa moving
pictureÑthat sums up the show's message and medium stunningly, hilariously,
definitively, in a way that mocks those reams of lyrics about inventions and
patent-office competition and the march of time.
All that said, to have theatre makers working at this level of
theatrical and thematic ambition, no matter the results, is honest-to-God
soul-lifting. While I'd prefer to love a production top to bottom, there's a
distinct joy in seeing work so worthy of discussion, of serious consideration,
of argument. And it's heartening to see that, as it continues to grow up, our
local theatre culture doesn't make a fetish of success or surefire
"hits" but instead continues to bring forth and recognize risky,
adventurous, ambitious artists. Ambition, after all, comes on both sides of the
footlights.
¥ Speaking of ambitious, Charles Mee's Big Love will be the
next mainstager at Pacific Resident Theatre. Co-artistic director Marilyn Fox
told me the rights weren't easy to come by, but director Mel Shapiro's New York
connections helped cinch the dealÉ After 15 years, theatre publicist Michael
Patrick has taken a job in New York and shut down his L.A. office, which
memorably repped Greenway Arts Alliance's brilliant They Shoot Horses, Don't
They?, as well as quality fare at the Coast Playhouse. Mazel tov,
MichaelÑand say hello to Rick Miramontez while you're thereÉ A helping of crow:
Tony Kushner apparently will rewrite Homebody/Kabul, postponed
from its scheduled September berth for the Taper's 2003 season. Frank Galati is
slated to direct. And apparently Steven Oxman won't be the new L.A. Times theatre
critic; he left Variety for the East Coast. Win some, lose some.