THE WICKED STAGE

by Rob Kendt

In 2002 I've learned firsthand that, as one director put it to me, "Thems that do can't see." I've performed music in four shows since January, for a total of 75 performances; with rehearsals, that's a lot of nights I haven't spent enjoying one of my job's best perks: seeing lots of great L.A. theatre. I would qualify as an Ovation voter, I guess--those slackers have to see only 25 shows a year--but my theatregoing record for 2002 is my worst since I took this job: 31 SoCal shows so far.

That compares poorly to the 95-plus shows seen thus far by such Back Stage West regulars as Les Spindle and Madeleine Shaner, who will both easily crack 100 by year's end. I have no comparable figures for other frequent theatregoers in my employ, such as Wenzel Jones, Dany Margolies, or Polly Warfield.

I turn to these scribes, informally for the moment (we'll do it formally with our Garland Award nominations in January) to get an early impression of the year. Spindle and Warfield are two of Southland stages' most traveled and authoritative--and voluble--connoisseurs. Spindle said he fondly remembers Side Show at the Colony, a fondness most critics shared (although Warfield admitted she "didn't like it as much as most people did"), and Spindle raved about a pair of "quantum leaps" at already fine Civic Light Opera companies: Performance Riverside's Sweeney Todd and Musical Theatre West's current Mame. For her part, Warfield was smitten with Civic Light Opera of South Bay Cities' Evita, which she called "a production equal to any on Broadway."

South Coast Rep's resident Pulitzer darling Richard Greenberg got high marks from Spindle for The Dazzle and from Warfield for the currently running Violet Hour, which she labeled "his best yet." And Warfield called the currently running Chuck Mee play Big Love at Pacific Resident Theatre "better than its world premiere," which she caught at last year's Humana Festival in Louisville. She is also an admirer of the "often neglected" Theatre Neo, where she enjoyed Coming Attractions and Once in a Lifetime. Spindle is cheered by North Hollywood's under-sung Ark Theatre, opining that "this year's Cloud 9 was even better than last year's Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love."

Consensus favorites, among the BSW critics I polled, were Ziggurat's Red Thread and the Collective's La Gioconda, both boldly physical productions. More divisive shows included such loved-by-some-hated-by-others offerings as the Road's Napoli Millionaria, A Taste of Honey at 2100 Square Feet, the Colony's Laramie Project, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife at the Ahmanson, Nickel and Dimed at the Taper, and The Visible Horse at the Court.

With comparatively few shows under my belt, I hardly feel qualified to venture my impressions of the year, but that's never stopped me before. I'll start with some regrets: I badly wish I'd seen Jessica Kubzansky's staging of Bryan Davidson's War Music, recently closed at LATC, rather than her beautiful, sure-handed, but ultimately pointless rendering of Burn This at the Odyssey earlier this year. I wish I'd seen Wes Walker's Wilfredo at 2100 Square Feet; reviews were mixed, but he's among the few in that self-important Padua Playwrights posse I consistently find interesting (Sissy Boyd is another), whereas their macho guru John Steppling deposited the barren Dog Mouth at Evidence Room; am I the only one who felt that its blowhard severity verged on unwitting camp? In a similar vein Peter Konerko's modest staging of two one-acts by Hank Bunker, The Futon Dialogues and The Interview, reminded me what a rare and precious voice Bunker can be--in part because he doesn't take himself as seriously as some of his peers. (Konerko and wife Trace Turville left soon after for the Big Apple.)

It was but a so-so year for political theatre, as I saw it: Evidence Room's bold but diffuse staging of David Edgar's pretentious polemic Pentecost, the Actors' Gang's limp rendering of the insta-docu-theatre playlet The Guys, the Taper's import of the inventively preachy Nickel and Dimed. The Shakespearean offerings I managed to see were mixed: Joe Jordan's muscular, haunting staging of Macbeth at Sacred Fools, Travis Preston's cruel and unusual King Lear, and Chris Kelley's great-looking but stodgy, stagey Richard III at Theatre of NOTE.

From my criminally short list of play viewings, a shorter list of shows I loved, or at least enjoyed thoroughly: the Colony's Laramie Project was disarming, moving, fleet-footed, and its recent Bea[u]tiful in the Extreme similarly bold, transparently theatrical; Cornerstone's epic Crossings proved that the company still has the stuff to pull off its unique brand of site-specific, socially engaged, seriously entertaining theatre; Destronelli was a first-class excursion into the strange, disturbingly familiar world of playwright Dennis Miles at Theatre of NOTE; Lobby Hero at South Coast Repertory showed Kenneth Lonergan's scruffy observational dramedy to advantage.

And, to revisit one of my disagreements with my peers, I was genuinely transported by parts of that modest little revival of Shelagh Delaney's 1958 time capsule. There's no accounting for tastes, honey or otherwise.