BACK STAGE WEST
November 07, 2002
by Rob Kendt
Live theatre can
be a contact sport: As a critical colleague of mine reports, at a recent
performance of Beauty Queen of Leenane at the Hudson Backstage, a fireplace poker wielded by one
of the actors went flying into the audience, striking an audience member in the
face. After 20 minutes of ice applied to the theatregoer's face, the show went
on--and the injured party remained to watch the show. The action reportedly
resumed with the actor who'd let loose the projectile saying something like,
"This looks like a fine poker," to the audience's nervous laughter.
Other memorable
showstoppers from this year: In May I received a horrified phone message from
critic Madeleine Shaner, who had witnessed Jenny Woo, the lead in Stephen
Legawiec's Red Thread
at the Gascon Theatre Center, take a thwack to the head with a large wooden
dowel; Woo went down, there was blood, and the show did not resume that night.
But it turned out to look and sound worse than it was--no serious damage to Woo--and
the show went on fine for the rest of the run. And, of course, in September
there was the opening night onstage collapse of Mimi Cozzens in Fellow
Traveler at Malibu Stage
Company, which derailed the show for a while until Cozzens rallied and
continued. I've broken a guitar string in a live performance before, which is
nerve-wracking but no reason to call 911 (which, by the way, is a good argument
for people having cellphones in the theatre, as long as they're turned off
during the performance).
¥ How low can you
go? If you were to ask this question of a pole-dancing stripper, it would be an
entirely professional inquiry. But in the case of Dailey Pike and his
strip-themed musical All Men Are Dogs at the Coronet Upstairs, I mean it less charitably: He wrote one
of the most vicious letters I've ever read to our critic Dany Margolies after
she called Dogs the
"worst show I've ever reviewed." I quote from Pike's charming
missive, in which he coyly imitates critic's blurbs about Margolies if she
herself were reviewed: "I won't say exactly what she is, but it starts
with a C, ends with a T, and has a world governing organization in
between." Pike's mature sign-off: "In closing let me add, drop dead
you vitriolic bitch." That's bad enough; we critics can dish it out, and
we can take it, even when the two are disproportionate. What seals Pike's
character for me is, as he promised in his letter, that he shamelessly pulled a
few words from Dany's review for a print ad in LA Weekly: "high comedy, a farce, an allegory,
a cleverly penned and wittily directed production." Omitted from these
fine words is what preceded them: "This could have beenÉ."
¥ Stage to film: Dead
Girls Diary, a six-hander
by Amy Heidish that ran at the Actors' Lab in April, is being turned into a
film by some unlikely folks: a bunch of gearheads at Black Box Digital, the
place where visual effects for such big-budget films as Minority Report and the upcoming Daredevil are concocted. Turns out these movie
computer whizzes just want to tell character-driven stories, too: Said producer
Mark Russell (no relation to the PBS windbag), "It's a teriffic actor's
piece, about three young actresses in L.A. in their mid-20s. One of them starts
seeing a new guy who carries around the diary of his dead girlfriend, and the
diary kind of seeps into their everyday lives." Jamie Neese is directing
Heidish's own adaptation (for casting info, see "Currently Casting,"
page 36); in his review our critic Brad Schreiber admired Heidish's character writing
and dialogue but thought it would work better on film than it did onstage. One
of Black Box's other credits intrigued me: The company did the digital effects
for Simone, the
preposterous movie about a synthespian starlet. Is that ever going to be reality?
I asked Russell, who would know as well as anyone. "There are so many
terrifically talented actors in Los Angeles," he replied. "The need
to create digital actors seems silly." Can I get a witness?
¥ Memo to
Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, Musical Theatre International, and all
other major rights holders: Buy a map of Southern California, will ya? Right
now there are concurrent productions of Mame at Musical Theatre West and Cabrillo
Music Theatre, productions of The Woman in Black at the Road Theatre and Pasadena
Shakespeare Company, and productions of Once in a Lifetime at GTC Burbank and Hudson Avenue Theatre.
And just last week, Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts in Santa Maria had
to cancel its production of the Broadway hit Proof; Dramatists had given PCPA the rights,
then subsequently approved rights for another production at the nearby Ensemble
Theatre Company of Santa Barbara to run a few months before PCPA's Proof. PCPA will instead mount the perennial Private
Lives--which will no
doubt be announced by another nearby company in a month or so. I still remember
the flap in 1994 when MTI approved a college production of Assassins at Rio Hondo Community College in
Whittier, not realizing its proximity to the yet-to-be-mounted L.A. premiere at
Los Angeles Theatre Center. I enjoyed both productions, but still.