THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

FROM ZOO TO ZOOEY: Most nights I can find a few familiar faces at Weiland's Brewery, the Little Tokyo watering hole that's become an unofficial hangout for stage folks, and not just those based Downtown. Recently I caught Zoo Districters Graham Jackson, Ben Simonetti, and Mami Arizono there; Simonetti and Arizono, along with the elastic Joe Fria, were the crazies who gave us the brilliant Go True West, a non-Zoo project. In fact, when I first noticed them, Simonetti was talking to the others through a stuffed animal perched on a backpack--par for the course, I thought, but this was actually in preparation for the trio's appearance in Crime Scene, a late-night free-for-all at the LACC-adjacent Sacred Fools Theater, which made its last appearance for a while last weekend. I'd never seen the Scene, and these three didn't exactly persuade me to come check it out, especially as they described the pulpy excesses of Michael Franco's notorious Noche Negro serial, apparently an unbeloved fixture of this Foolish institution.

In the meantime, before they took off, they filled me in on some recent related business. Arizono and Graham, both keyboardists--he on upright, she on squeeze box--were recently engaged for the backup band of hot indie actress Zooey Deschanel's retro-chanteuse act, first at Vermont Restaurant, then at the trendy Hotel Café, and then for a full, star-studded house at the Henry Fonda Theatre (as Graham put it, "Spider-Man and hobbits" were among the audience; broom closets and starlets were reportedly involved). I first saw the wide-eyed Deschanel, so engagingly snide in last year's The Good Girl, as Red Riding Hood in Interact Theatre Company's Into the Woods in 1996. She's come a long way fast; I haven't seen her new film vehicle All the Real Girls, but apparently most of Hollywood has--she's on that precarious cusp of next-big-thingness from which so many coltish talents have teetered. We wish her a happy and Bruckheimer-free future.

Simonetti also filled me in about Zoo District's mysterious trip in September to Kiev, in the Ukraine, to perform Michael Franco's adaptation of Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog for audiences there, with funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Another Zoo Districter had described it to me as a positively hellish experience. Simonetti and Jackson had to agree that the complete absence of hot water and toilet paper made it a very Lonely Planet experience at best; they admitted that Franco's "epic" adaptation was hacked to an 80-minute movement-based piece, directed by Antony Sandoval from a microphone at the center of a beautiful but cavernous theatre; they conceded that Russian audiences seemed lukewarm, particularly older theatregoers, and that a lazy translator who appeared to be making jokes in Russian about the play as they performed it probably didn't help.

But Simonetti did rave about one thing he'll take away from the trip: He said he slipped out of the theatre to get some bottled water before the show and saw "1,400 people walking through the village to see our play," all dressed up and ready for a real cultural event. That struck him as something he wasn't likely to see very often, except perhaps in New York. Indeed, Susan Egan once told me that whenever she tired of playing Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, she'd slip outside before a show; unrecognized without her costume and flowing tresses, she could watch unobserved as kids and their parents arrived, full of anticipation and excitement. A theatre audience can be many things--inattentive, rude, warm, or raucous by turns--but it behooves burned-out theatre artists to catch a whiff of the sense of arrival, of anticipation, that even the most tired audience brings with it. Truth be told, we feel that little lights-going-down flutter at the movies, too; the difference is that in the theatre or the concert hall, the performers get to feel that flutter, too, if they can remember to take it in.

MAMET'S WOMEN: All right, there's a female Odd Couple, there's 12 Angry Women; there's even a pair of actresses I've met who keep talking about doing a female True West. That last one has always sounded a little sketchy to me, frankly. Then I found out about Glengarry Glen Rose, currently at Actor's Workout Studio in North Hollywood. As an acting class exercise, maybe; as a put-on, maybe (but then it should have been called Glengarry Glen or Glenda). Reportedly the intrepid souls at Actors Workout are doing this straight; I can even imagine that some female actors could pull this off; how great is it when, say, we get to see the intrepid talents at L.A. Women's Shakespeare Festival try on Hamlet, Lear, Sir Toby--parts women never get to play? But this gyno-Mamet stunt strikes me as the cheap-shortcut approach, guaranteed to distort a play's original intent. While men have no monopoly on cutthroat sales tactics, to regender Mamet's shady-real-estate cockfight, with its twisted codes of manly honor, makes about as much sense as Death of a Saleswoman or, in reverse, The House of Bernard Alba. Apparently this "revisionist" idea has caught on: There's a casting notice in this week's paper for Next Stage's own female version of the Glengarry, which will no doubt be about as authorized as was that semi-staging of sex, lies, and videotape I reviewed earlier this year.

• What happened to Jackie Chan? Hollywood happened. It's not like he made art films in Hong Kong and "sold out" in the U.S.; he's always been a savvy, crowd-pleasing entertainer, and most of his films have been leaky-bottomed vehicles for his comic/acrobatic genius. But his career choices since he officially arrived as a U.S. star make it look like he consciously studied Arnold Schwarzenegger's playbook but only read the pages on Kindergarten Cop and Twins. The joy has leached out of his presence on-screen, no matter how many brilliant fight ballets he choreographs; they've become self-conscious, as bloated as the entertainment vehicles in which he's embalmed his talent. Even in relatively crappy Hong Kong-made films like Armour of God or City Hunter, there were memorably outrageous stunts that showed his trademark blend of Buster Keaton's shrugging precision with the transparent, eye-defying sleight-of-hand of Peking Opera. And when he did period pieces, as in his best film as director and star, Project A, Part II, he gave all the elements their due--comedy, suspense, action, romance, intrigue, and period. Which is why seeing his recent Shanghai Knights was dispiriting; winks now substitute for grace (a fleet-footed umbrella fight, marred by the soundtrack's endless quote from "Singin' in the Rain"), and dorky anachronisms are played for laughs (1960s British-Invasion pop 'cause, like, they're in Britain). The strategy of pairing him with comic actors--the wiggy Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour films, the shaggy, Dennis Hopper-esque Owen Wilson in the Shanghai Noon franchise--has the effect of making Chan less funny than he can be. Could be. Was.