THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

"Writing about music," Elvis Costello once said, "is like dancing about architecture." He meant to knock rock critics down a peg with the absurdity of the analogy, but obviously he'd never seen Collage Dance Theatre, the company known for staging its multimedia works in unlikely, usually abandoned buildings: jails, subway stations, newspaper offices, and, with its new Sleeping With the Ambassador, the louche Ambassador Hotel in the mid-Wilshire district. The former Rat Pack hangout where JFK and Marilyn Monroe reportedly had a special love-nest bungalow serviced by a secret underground tunnel, and where the president's brother was shot dead in the kitchen by a Palestinian American with sympathies for the Baath Party, the Ambassador would still seem low-slung and slightly seedy even if it weren't visibly crumbling in places. Indeed, it's no aspersion on director/choreographer Heidi Duckler or designer/co-creator Dan Evans to report that my favorite moment of Sleeping--which leads us from the pool in back, around to the front, and back in through the old Cocoanut Grove nightclub--came just after a jazzy, kinetic dance on, around, and in a decrepit black limo, when we were invited en masse into the Grove. As the overflow crowd spilled around the limo and onto the Astroturf entryway under the red awning, and up the curved stairs of the lobby to the club, the sensation of reenactment was powerful, intoxicating. The audience spends most of the evening as spectators--apart from a chaotic interactive section in the old downstairs diner, in which we're treated as extras for a Hollywood film shoot--but this glittering ascension into the club where Bing Crosby reportedly began his singing career, and which Sammy Davis Jr. later refurbished into the Studio 54-style glitz in which it now remains, was like walking in the wingtips of history. The extended dance that follows inside the club, in which Evans has recreated marvelous approximations of the old fake palms that once adorned the Grove, is a workout for the whole company, as they strip down from disco duds to more elastic, athletic gear and turn the tables on each other, literally. Elsewhere the dance moves are alternately ghostly and playful--it's clear that Duckler and her dancers often simply relish the sheer get-away-with-it spectacle of cavorting in found spaces, of hurtling over couches and splaying over indoor fountains, and this sense of mild transgression can be catching. Even without the dance, though, I would recommend the piece unreservedly as a chance to see this L.A. landmark before it's razed; it runs through June 15. (And as it plays Fridays through Sundays, you can't attend it on Thursday, June 5--the 35th anniversary of RFK's assassination.)

• Songwriter Costello made that crack about dancing and criticism long before he himself was commissioned to write a ballet score of A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Italian company Aterballetto. I caught it last year at the Orange County Performing Arts Center and, though the music was unfortunately piped in, it showcased a sweeping orchestral sound, with relatively square 19th century harmonies leavened by rhythmic playfulness, jazzy longeurs, and the kind of astringent, bittersweet harmonies Costello gravitates toward in his more ambitious pop writing (particularly on his brilliant, under-estimated Juliet Letters record with the Brodsky Quartet). This approach is distinct from that of his colleague Tom Waits, whose cacophonous score for Woyzeck at UCLA's Freud Playhouse last year was played live but sounded, self-consciously, like machine music--or music made by crazy, anthropomorphic machines.

• Speaking of Waits, the Bard of Santa Rosa was recently spotted, of all places, at the Starbucks on Magnolia and Lankershim in North Hollywood. Composer Jef Bek, in the midst of pulling together his rock opera about Evel Knievel, was talking to a colleague about a musician who'd played with Waits--and, after dropping Waits' name repeatedly, he turned to see the man himself, waiting behind him in line. Bek would have said hello, except that just then he received a cellphone call from a Sports Illustrated writer, who wanted to chat about the Knievel project on deadline. Bek told me that while he was in a corner of the Starbucks conducting the interview, Waits peered over at him with a curious, do-I-know-you look. No word on Waits' drink order.

• Speaking of writing about music, I just devoured Mark Eden Horowitz's new Q&A book Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions (slightly mistitled; in Sondheim's case, it should be "minor details are major decisions"). Like Costello, Sondheim writes lyrics so well that his music is given short shrift; he's written among the most ambitious, gorgeous music ever for the Broadway stage, but he's still dogged in some circles by the notion that he can't write hummable tunes, that he's an overly intellectual wordsmith. In interviews ostensibly meant to go over and explain copies of his original handwritten scores, which he's donated to the Library of Congress, Sondheim holds forth on the generations of theatre, and theatre music, to which he's been witness. There's something illuminating on practically every page: I didn't know he loved Porgy & Bess so much (calling Dubose Heyward's lyrics the "best in the American musical theatre"), and I suspected but didn't know how much his Sweeney Todd score is indebted to Bernard Herrmann. Elsewhere he admits his terror at seeming square in his harmonic choices, and how that's occasionally led him astray (more fodder for the naysayers, though I'll take Sondheim's impressionistic dissonances over the pump-organ harmonies of most musical theatre hacks any day). He's said elsewhere that he's essentially a playwright working in song form, but he goes further here--explaining how he stages every moment of a song, and opining that playwrights are essentially actors when they're working. They, and he, get into character to write.

• Performing music in character tonight at the Troubadour will be a bunch of actor/pranksters. Headlining is the band Trainwreck, who come on like Southern-fried, mullet-wearing classic rockers and are allegedly from Detroit (but we think we recognize such talents Tenacious D's Kyle Gass, Actors' Gangster Jason Reed, and Buffalo Nightser Kevin Weisman on the flier). Also on the bill is Supafloss, a so-called rap duo comprising an Afro-wearing Pole named Grotzy Redoodyhouse (OK, Michael Rivkin) and big tall white guy with the hip-hop name Mister Twister (looks a lot like Kirk Ward to me). The opening act is called the Reilly Project; reports are that it's a bluegrass duo of Molly Bryant (a breathtaking solo artist in her own right) and John C. Reilly. Please, no requests for "Mr. Cellophane."