BACK STAGE WEST

November 07, 2002 

        

THE WICKED STAGE

 

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.