THEATER REVIEW: THE CRADLE WILL ROCK

A scene from The Cradle Will Rock.

This beat goes on

By Ed Rampell

Don’t miss The Cradle Will Rock. The Blank Theatre Company’s production of this proletarian theater classic is as timely today as it was when Marc Blitzstein’s musical premiered – uh, eventually – on Broadway during the last Depression, emerging out of a wave of working class organizing and sitdown strikes. Now, during the current Depression, workers in Wisconsin, Ohio and beyond are resisting attempts to overturn labor’s historic gains made during the New Deal such as collective bargaining, just as the masses are rising against tyranny across North Africa and the Western Asia.

The Cradle Will Rock opens with Tiffany C. Adams’ sultry streetwalker Moll trying to hustle a potential john, as they dicker over prices in Steeltown, USA. Adams delivers a moving, soulful rendition of Nickel Under the Foot, which inspired German playwright Bertolt Brecht to tell Blitzstein he should write an entire musical around this song, according to Eric Gordon’s Blitzstein biography Mark the Music (which, along with a CD of the score by the cast of the Blank’s 1995 Cradle production, is on sale at the Stella Adler Theatre). Adams (who, appropriately, hails from Toledo, Ohio, site of the 1934 mass strike co-led by A.J. Muste) holds her own as Moll, a role that Broadway luminary Patti LuPone has played on New York and London stages.

Adams’ hooker serves as a recurring leitmotif throughout the musical for the prostitution that the capitalist system forces many characters into. These include members of the Tea Party-like “Liberty Committee,” which industrialist Mr. Mister (Peter Van Doren reprises the role he first played in the Blank’s 1995 The Cradel Will Rock) and his “philanthropic” wife, Mrs. Mister (Gigi Bermingham), have recruited and bankroll to stem Steeltown’s rising tide of unionization. With great comic panache these sellouts depict what Karl Marx called “ruling class, ruling ideas,” just as Charlie Chaplin humorously portrayed Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor under an exploitive system in his 1936 masterpiece, Modern Times.

The portrayal of the Committee in this production skillfully and drolly directed by Blank Founder Daniel Henning verges on the Theatre of the Absurd, as the thesps skewer various members of the scientific, media, religious, academic and cultural elite: Dr. Specialist (Rob Roy Cesar), Editor Daily (David Trice), Reverend Salvation (Christopher Carroll), President Prexy (Matthew Patrick Davis) and musician Yasha (Jim Holdridge).

But can the Misters buy everyone? Have they met their match when they confront labor leader Larry Foreman (Rex Smith; back in 1937 Howard Da Silva originated the role)? Foreman sings the title number, and the rocking cradle refers to revolution, which American socialist Eugene V. Debs called, “The boldest word in an language.” When the stage explodes with mass revolt, the workers’ picket signs cleverly bear contemporary corporate references, as does the playbill’s cover.

The Cradle Will Rock was the number one “must see” play on my list of shows I hoped to experience one day. I missed it circa 1999 when it was presented at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum (Geer played Mr. Mister in the Broadway premiere). But Blank’s production not only doesn’t disappoint – it’s also well worth the wait. Henning’s humorous take on Blitzstein’s musical is surprisingly different from the version of it glimpsed in Tim Robbins’ stellar Cradle Will Rock (the best American feature film of 1999), which is more about the struggle to present the play than about the show itself, although scenes of the opera are glimpsed in rehearsal and performance sequences and seemingly more serious.

Except for a piano player tickling the ivories on stage right the current cast appears on a bare stage at the Stella Adler. Did scenic designer Kurt Boetcher botch the set design? Or is this a clever reference to the stirring events leading up to The Cradle Will Rock's 1937 Broadway debut – which, as Robbins revealed in his thoughtful movie, almost never occurred?

Almost 75 years later, as workers continue to fight for their rights, The Cradle Will Rock remains as relevant as ever. Rock on!


The Cradle Will Rock runs through March 20 at the Stella Adler Theatre, Main Stage, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., 2nd Floor, Hollywood, California, 90028. For more information: 323/661-9827; www.ovationtix.com/trs/pr/781235.

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THEATER REVIEW: GREEDY

Want, want, want

By Ed Rampell

Greed is a powerful force that compels and propels human beings, and which has motivated capitalism, as well as some of our greatest artists to create over the years. Erich Von Stroheim directed a silent movie masterpiece with that title during the 1920s, while Oliver Stone’s “greed is good” mantra was recited by Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in another classic, 1987’s Wall Street, which Stone and Douglas revisited with last year’s sequel. Now playwright Karl Gajdusek (whose other plays include FUBAR) is adding to the greed canon with Greedy, a contemporary exploration of this attribute performed by an ensemble cast with some accomplished credits and ably directed by James Roday.

This Red Dog Squadron production is set against the ominous backdrop of a storm that recurs throughout the drama like rainy season at Pago Pago, as Greedy examines and exposes two different groups of characters whose lives become inexorably linked. Louis (Brad Raider) and Keira (Maggie Lawson) have a brother-sister relationship with incestuous undertones. She is a parasite who leeches off of her brother; Louis in turn relies on the money earned by his mannish lover, Janet (Amanda Detmer), who earns her daily bread as a security guard at a hospital.

Janet’s line of employment, as well as one of scam artist Keira’s schemes, links this trio to Tatiana (Ivana Milicevic) and Paul (on opening night Kurt Fuller played Paul). Here, Gajdusek’s drama takes an intriguing twist. Usually, we think of greed as being related to over-acquisitiveness and possessiveness of money and other means of wealth. However, Galdusek reveals, and rightly so, that humans can be overly zealous about acquiring other things. Paul, a defrocked doctor, has a desperate need to be wanted and loved for who he is. On the other hand, Paul’s considerably younger wife Tatiana, an Eastern European immigrant who seems like an on the make mail order bride, yearns to have a baby.

Their marriage reminds of Japanese comedian Tamayo Otsuki’s joke about the millionaire who asks his lover if she’d still love him if he lost everything. “I’d love you – and miss you very much,” is the funny response.

Much of this two-act's action is based on the intertwining of the different groups of characters, who are drawn together through various forms of greed, the play’s unifying principle. Indeed Greedy uses cinematic devices, such as video footage and more imaginatively, the theatrical version of a split screen. The book cluttered set by scenic designer Kurt Boetcher works well, too. The play also uses to good effect two spectral characters who are clad in raingear and roam the theatre before the proverbial curtain lifts, during intermission, etc. It’s a pretty creepy but evocative effect full of foreboding. 

Greedy is well acted with convincing, sometimes chilling performances. Fuller’s Paul, craving, crawling to be liked, is especially affecting, in this complex story with complicated characters that was previously presented in New York. (Note: Apparently, in some performances, Peter McKenzie, depicts Paul.) There are recurring references to Nazism, as well as to Marxism. Perhaps the latter, with its promise of “from each according to their ability, to each according to his needs,” is meant to represent a counterpoint to capitalism, with its dog eat dog, every man for himself, to each according to his greed credo.

By the way, a recurring leitmotif in the drama is the desire to run away and get away from it all at a tropical isle. Pricey Bora Bora is frequently cited, but as someone who has been there a number of times, FYI, although Bora Bora may be, as James Michener claimed, the most beautiful isle on earth, $100,000 is probably not nearly enough money in order to retire at this over-inflated island in French Polynesia, where immigration authorities would presumably refuse non-French citizens residency rights, anyway. So the dream is mere fantasy.

The small but enthusiastic audience clearly enjoyed the premiere. However, be forewarned: even though the El Centro is more diminutive than L.A.’s usual 99-seaters, do try to get a seat in or near the front row. Not only because the heads of other theatre-goers obstructed my fourth row view, but more importantly, for a few seconds at the end, something important is briefly glimpsed onstage (which, of course, your humble and most obedient plot spoiler-adverse critic won’t reveal here, Dear Reader) that is vital to Greedy’s denouement.   

(Greedy runs through Jan. 29 at the El Centro Theatre, 804 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood, CA 90038. For more info: http://www.lajollaplayhouse.org/)

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THEATER REVIEW: RIGOLETTO

Duke of Mantua (Gianluca Terranova) and Countess Ceprano (Valentina Fleer) in Rigoletto. Photo by Robert Millard.

The hunchback of Mantua’s dames and dukes 

By Ed Rampell

I had a hunch that L.A. Opera’s production of Rigoletto, the tale about the titular hunchbacked harlequin, would be hunky-dory. Indeed, composer Giuseppe Verdi called it “my best opera” and it is one of the most superb shows I’ve seen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Verily, this vivid version of the 1851 classic about the comedian with a hump is a humdinger that will leave audiences humming Verdi’s virtuoso melodies.

Verdi’s sonorous score rendered under the commanding baton of James Conlon is, but of course, nothing short of superb. The colorful costumes designed by Constance Hoffman transport audiences back in time to 16^th century Italy. The sets of medieval Mantua wrought by skilled scenery designer Michael Yeargan on a slanted stage that enhances perspective bear a striking resemblance to the haunting paintings by Italian surrealist Giorgio De Chirico -- all that seems missing are the Greek-born painter’s trademark locomotives about to smash into brick walls. A canny choice: because if De Chirico’s canvases visualize frustration, Rigoletto is largely about thwarted love and lust.

Rigoletto was one of the social outcasts Verdi specialized in. Along with Porgy of the Gershwin Brothers’ Porgy and Bess, Rigoletto is one of opera-dom’s greatest physically deformed characters (although it should be duly noted that operas are full of mentally twisted dramatis personae). Baritone George Gagnidze of Georgia (Stalin’s, not Scarlett’s) brings down the opera house as the tortured court jester, those medieval stand-up comics whose comedy clubs were castles and palaces. The disabled comedian bridles at his lot in life, which is to amuse the Duke of Mantua (Italian tenor Gianluca Terranova depicts the raunchy royal) and his feckless, scheming, mean-spirited courtiers. Rigoletto is the archetypal clown laughing on the outside but crying on the inside.

However, the ribald Rigoletto is also a sultan of insults with a cutting Don Rickles rapier-like wit. He joins all the Duke’s men in belittling Count Ceprano (bass Matthew Anchel), who is cuckolded by the libertine (not so) nobleman, and Count Monterone (bass Daniel Sumegi), whose daughter is likewise seduced by the lady killer Duke. Incensed by Rigoletto’s barbs and mockery the count curses the jester.

The curse of Monterone apparently rewrites the Golden Rule, changing it to: “Do not do unto others what you don’t what others to do unto you.” Rigoletto learns this lesson the hard way, as the rapacious, deceptive Duke turns his sexual attentions towards Rigoletto’s own daughter, Gilda (soprano Sarah Coburn, who L.A. Opera aficionados may remember from 2009’s presentation of Giaochino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville). Stung once too often by Rigoletto’s jibes, the courtiers merrily and maliciously turn the tables on the humpbacked not-so funnyman.

Speaking of sopranos, Rigoletto solicits stiletto-wielding assassin Sparafucile (bassi profundi Andrea Silvestrelli) to do a hit on the fickle Duke, who plays with women’s emotions the way Niccolo Paganini played the violin. Sparafucile acts in league with his sister, the bawdy Maddalena (mezzo soprano Kendall Gladen, who previously appeared in L.A. Opera’s equally grand Carmen by Georges Bizet), to entrap and liquidate the randy Duke. But as male chauvinists have it, frailty, thy name is woman, and all hell breaks loose with one of opera’s most colossal disasters and backfires, as Rigoletto gets his “jest” desserts for ridiculing and humiliating so many for so long. The best laid plans of mice and men…

Back during the 1980s I saw a production of Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera, which rather strongly implied that the reason why the hunchback was so zealously overprotective of Gilda was that the deformed father had an incestuous desire to hump his daughter. But there’s none of that Oedipal-like theorizing in this production deftly directed by Mark Lamos. Although Verdi composed the music, the Italian libretto was written by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the play Le roi s’amuse by one of France’s greatest men of letters, none other than Victor Hugo –- who wrote that other masterpiece about a hunchback named Quasimodo.

This opera is a masterpiece and the poignant saga of the man with the hump will leave a lump in your throat.

Rigoletto runs through Dec. 18, L.A. Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown Los Angeles. For more information: 213/972-8001; www.laopera.com

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THEATER REVIEW: LOHENGRIN



Telramund (James Johnson) and Ben Heppner (Lohengrin) in Lohengrin.

Wagner's woes

By Ed Rampell

L.A. Opera premiered Lohengrin on Nov. 20. No, this is not about Lindsay’s smirk in her mug shots. Rather, it’s another one of Richard Wagner’s works, only this time the opera is performed more conventionally, minus the avant-garde razzmatazz of Achim Freyer’s The Ring of the Nibelungen, which had some opera traditionalists’ panties in a bunch. Like The Ring Cycle Wagner explores a Germanic legend in Lohengrin, based on a medieval myth about a knight in shining armor (at least on one silver-clad leg). The original source saga could be roughly compared to the Sir Lancelot and Guinevere British tales of yore, although Lohengrin, of course, has an Aryan twist.

The production directed by Lydia Steier at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, however, has updated Lohengrin to take place during World War I (after Wagner’s death) in Saxony. In any case, like any good knight, Lohengrin (Canadian tenor Ben Heppner) comes to the rescue of a dazzling damsel in distress, the maidenly Elsa (Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski), who has been accused of a heinous crime. They vow to wed, but on one condition: Elsa must never ask Lohengrin about his family origins, or even his name.

But meet the mezzo -- Dolora Zajick as the scheming Ortrud -- who plays Iago to Elsa’s Othello, stirring the pot of suspicion in a classic case of projection. The U.S.-born mezzo-soprano’s character is married to Friedrich von Telramund (American bass-baritone James Johnson), who is a pretender to the title of “Protector of Brabant” and was originally supposed to marry Elsa, before she fell under a cloud of doubt. All hell breaks loose as Telramund alleges before King Heinrich (Icelandic bass Kristinn Sigmundsson) that Elsa has committed a horrific act, and Lohengrin’s rather magical appearance pits the knight against Telramund.

Wagner’s opera comments on many dimensions, including on true love. One can clearly see that Wagner suffered from unhappy marriages, and Lohengrin’s wedding night scene may be the most epic depiction of coitus interruptus in the entire history of art. Talk about love’s labors lost! The story also explores whether lovers should reveal their true inner selves, who they really are, to their partners; as well as the folly of marrying someone you’ve just met, without getting to know their future spouse first. There may be such a thing as love at first sight, but most of these impulsive marital unions are doomed to failure, as Wagner knew.

Lohengrin also observes the issues of faith versus doubt, paganism versus Christianity, sorcery versus religion, conditional versus unconditional love and miracles. The opera ponders secret societies and utopias, too.

More presciently, Wagner also sheds light on the cult of personality and mob mentality, as well as militarism. At first, the German soldiers wear Pickelhaube helmets with spikes, but by the third act they appear to be wearing Wehrmacht-style headgear like those worn during the Third Reich. The Nazis rather infamously misappropriated Wagner and his music, although the maestro died six years before Adolph Hitler’s birth. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 agitprop movie Triumph of the Will, a pseudo-documentary directed by essentially a feature/fiction filmmaker, may consciously or unconsciously incorporate elements of Lohengrin. In addition to the whole hero worship aspect, Triumph of the Will opens with Hitler descending from the skies to the adoring masses below in the gothic town of Nuremburg, just as Lohengrin arrives via a black swan (which, in Triumph of the Will, is der Fuhrer’s airplane).

The L.A. Opera production designed by Dirk Hofacker has its share of special effects not unlike last weekend’s other wizardry work, the latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise. 3-D is much the film vogue nowadays, but by George, Hofacker’s set in this three-act show really is three-dimensional! Hofacker’s bombed out church -- most of the action takes place within or outside of it -- is one of the best sets I’ve ever seen grace the stage of the Dorothy Chandler. And not only is the set solid, but it actually moves, in real time. Take that, Avatar!

Without trying to be insulting, some of the oversized performers also give IMAX a run for its money. Unlike its younger sibling, the cinema, opera cares more about singing ability than it does about the looks of its stars, some of whom wouldn’t exactly be playing romantic leads on the silver screen -- if you catch my drift. The lighting by Mark McCullough, plus the changing skies, with clouds, stars, et al, are likewise glorious. It is not an overstatement to say that L.A. Opera’s sets can be true co-stars, like in Lohengrin.

James Conlon ably conducts the orchestra. Surprisingly, the best piece of music Wagner composed for Lohengrin is the sonorous, stirring, brassy Prelude to Act III, which, for my money rivals "The Ride of the Valkyries" and "Siegfried’s Funeral March" from Gotterdammerung (both in The Ring Cycle) as Wagner’s single greatest piece of music.

Nevertheless, there is enough to delight the eye and ear in Lohengrin to make even the troubled Lindsay Lohan grin.


Lohengrin runs through Dec. 12 at L.A. Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown Los Angeles. For more information: 213/972-8001; www.laopera.com

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THEATER REVIEW: TALES FROM HOLLYWOOD

Bertolt Brecht (Daniel Zacapa) and Odon von Horvath (Gregory Gifford Giles) in Hooray for Hollywood.

Hooray for this side of Hollywood!

By Ed Rampell

Local theater’s leftward trend continues with the revival of Christopher Hampton’s 1980s play, Tales From Hollywood, which includes: A rendition of the revolutionary anthem "The Internationale"; Jewish-American screenwriter Helen Schwartz (Jennifer Sorenson) who joins the Communist Party USA; actor J.P. Sarro portraying an L.A.-based Soviet diplomat named Lomakhin in a minor part; and in a lead role, Daniel Zacapa as Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. The latter is essential for Hollywood’s plot, which is about European – mostly German – artistic refugees from Hitler, who fled the fatherland and wound up in La-La-Land.

(By the way, if you want to catch a whiff of the militaristic mindset they were fleeing, see L.A. Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, which is playing through Dec. 12.)

This comedy drama’s émigrés include a rather long-winded, pompous, if anti-fascist, Thomas Mann (Kent Minnault) whose novels include 1924’s The Magic Mountain; his more radical older brother Heinrich Mann (Walter Berry), who wrote the novel that Josef von Sternberg adapted for 1930’s The Blue Angel, which brought stardom to another anti-Nazi German artist, Marlene Dietrich; “Heine’s” wife Nelly Mann (Australian stage and screen actress Ursula Brooks); Salka Viertel (Elizabeth Southard), who was a screenwriter for that other European émigré, Greta Garbo, and hostess of soirees for the Continental exiles; etc.

All of the above dramatis personae were actual historical figures, with probably the exception of Schwartz, who is the girlfriend of the play’s main character, Odon von Horvath (Gregory Gifford Giles). Horvath was another real life personage, although Hampton takes great liberties with him -- dramatic license, and all that. In any case, as Hollywood’s narrator, Horvath plays a role somewhat similar to that of Joel Grey’s emcee in Cabaret, based on the stories by that other Christopher – Isherwood – that deal with related subject matter during at least part of the period Hampton’s play covers.

Hollywood actually goes beyond the 1930s to at least the 1950s, focusing on the interaction between exiled European members of the literati and the movie colony’s studio system. Towards the play’s end the refugees in “the land of the free” confront another form of totalitarianism: The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism, during the Hollywood Blacklist.

Much frustration and fun is derived from the clashes between these highly cultured men/women of letters and the vulgarians at the gates who ran the motion picture industry. In a dual role, Sarro also plays the aptly named producer-writer Charles Money, who is probably a composite character. As a studio cheat and chiseler, Sarro reminded me of the comical Wayne Knight, who played Jerry Seinfeld’s nemesis named Newman in that sitcom.

Zacapa steals the show as Brecht, portraying the cigar wielding German playwright with great comic panache as part Karl Marx, part Groucho Marx. The role as played and written is a droll send-up of Brecht and his Theatre of Alienation theatrical techniques. Not only does Brecht succeed in alienating practically everybody with his endless harangues and egotism, but his Brechtian methods provide much grist for the comic mill, as Zacapa appears in various scenes wielding signs stating what is happening onstage. I may be prejudiced because Brecht is my favorite 20th century playwright, but Zacapa’s performance was my favorite in the play. Viva Zacapa!

Brooks is another stand out as Heinrich’s long-suffering, far younger wife. A stranger in a strange land dislocated from her homeland, Nelly yearns for a younger man’s touch and for the Germany Hitler has stolen from her. Like Odon (whom she pursues), Nelly hides a terrible secret the comedy drama eventually reveals.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed Hampton’s highly literate, droll, insightful Hollywood script. However, I found the transition from comedy to drama to tragedy to sometimes be jumpy. Brecht’s wife, actress Helene Weigel (Niki Blumberg), says and does little, if anything other than appearing in the background. This is a pity because I would have enjoyed learning more about this woman who rocked the theater world as Mother Courage, etc., and she never comes alive onstage in Hollywood. The postwar L.A. production of Brecht’s Galileo starring Charles Laughton as the beleaguered astronomer forced to recant by the church, which was a thinly veiled attack on HUAC (and Stalinism) and quite a cause celebre at the time, is also neglected.

Hampton depicts Brecht’s appearance before HUAC in 1947 around the time the Hollywood Ten also testified. Brecht seemed so cooperative that the congressional committee actually commended him as an example that the Hollywood Ten should emulate. But Hampton does not develop that, nor that Brecht had the last laugh on the HUAC dictators: His “cooperative” testimony merely pulled the wool over their eyes, and immediately after he appeared before Congress, he fled America and wound up in the German Democratic Republic, where he established the famous Berliner Ensemble. (Hampton’s script merely indicates that Brecht returned to Europe – not that he crossed the so-called “iron curtain” into East Germany.)

Poor Brecht: He was one step ahead of Hitler’s invading armies in various European countries, was not especially welcome in the Stalinist Soviet Union during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, left Vladivostok on the last passenger ship out of the USSR before the Nazis invaded Russia, managed to make it to Hollywood, only to eventually have to pack up and flee again from “democratic” America. Good grief! It’s great that Hampton reminds us of these exiles in La-La-Land, and of course the ensemble cast, deftly directed by Michael Peretzian, covers much more than just Brecht and his trials and travails. This play is a lot more than just a bio-play about Brecht. It also has a gloriously sexy nude scene with a thespian wearing only a birthday suit that will make you want to sing "Happy Birthday." No phony blankets or sheets here to cover up the human body. Hampton is one of the few playwrights boldly using the freedom that artists have fought for over the years.

So over all, I sing “Hooray for Tales From Hollywood”!


Tales From Hollywood runs through Dec. 19 at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. For more info: 310/477-2055, ext. 2; www.odysseytheatre.com

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THEATER REVIEW: THE STORIES OF CESAR CHAVEZ

Fred Blanco in The Stories of Cesar Chavez.

Tossed Cesar salad

By Ed Rampell

Playwright-actor Fred Blanco’s The Stories of Cesar Chavez is part and parcel of an overlooked yet significant theatrical trend stretching coast to coast: Progressive plays about Communists, labor militants, unions, leftists, etc. As during the last Great Depression when “proletarian drama” swept the stage, socially aware theatre is making a comeback. Indeed, the most interesting thing for me about Blanco’s one man show is its depiction of Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino, a theater in the fields, the cultural arm of the United Farm Workers, the union Chavez co-founded with Dolores Huerta, et al. In a vivid scene within a scene, a grower is portrayed by Blanco in a pig’s mask, which is not only a reference to capitalists’ greed, but also suggests the forms Teatro Campesino takes, which includes Commedia dell’ Arte and ancient Aztec and Mayan rituals. Off the pig, indeed.

This is but one sequence and one character depicted onstage during Blanco’s complex one-man show. Other characters include a zoot suiter, a Chicana tortilla maker, a hired goon/strikebreaker and a Molotov cocktail wielding Latino militant, who advocates fighting fire with fire on the fields during the harsh class struggle. The characters mainly speak English, but there is some spoken Spanish; appropriately, the play deals with this still touchy language issue

Blanco portrays all of the roles with panache and authenticity, as he does Chavez himself, an hombre caught in-between right and left who tries to navigate his Gandhi-like nonviolent movement and philosophy between these two forces. Just as Martin Luther King (who Gerald C. Rivers likewise plans to depict in another progressive one-man show) contended with vicious Bull Conner-like racists on the one hand, and with Stokely “The Fire Next Time” Carmichael-like revolutionary nationalists on the other.

Blanco convincingly portrays the labor leader and gives us some insight into what made this civil rights icon tick. Who knew that Chavez wore zoot suits and defied Jim Crow laws right here in supposedly liberal California, back in the day? The play is mostly set during Cesar’s salad days in the lettuce and other agonizing agricultural fields in the 1960s. We experience his religious beliefs, the fasts and the times that tried this man’s soul. Those currently fighting in America for full human rights -- gays, undocumented aliens, exploited workers, gays, etc., -- can learn a lot about social struggles from this powerful, poignant play.

At one point during the drama a campesino displays a short hoe, which compelled the ag workers to bend over, causing them great suffering in the John Steinbeck-like fields. Watching this scene I remembered a story that the late great Bobby Lees, the blacklisted screenwriter of many Abbott and Costello movies, told me, about how during the 1940s the Communist Party raised money from La-La-Land lefties, bought full length hoes, and then drove up north to Salinas or wherever to give them out to the Latino and Filipino farm workers in order to spare them the pain of, literally, backbreaking stoop labor.

Out-of-work actors often “suffer” from that Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland syndrome where the solutions to all their problems is: “I know! Let’s put on a show!” So unemployed or under-used thespians write parts for themselves, and sometimes this takes the shape of one-man (or one-woman) shows showcasing their talents. I don’t know if this was the case with Blanco, who undeniably has talent as both a playwright and actor. In any case, one-person shows can take the form of the actor playing just the lead role, or many different parts, a la Anna Deavere Smith and her “documentary theatre,” most notably her 1994 L.A. riot piece, Twilight: Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way Blanco’s central character, Chavez, gets lost in The Stories of Cesar Chavez's shuffle. The labor leader seems to meander among Blanco’s other dramatis personae, and although this play is billed as being about Chavez, the UFW jefe is only depicted onstage about a third or so of the time.

Another problem with The Stories of Cesar Chavez is its low key ending. The play just seems to sort of peter out and run out of steam. This is a writing and structural issue, as there’s nothing wrong with Blanco’s acting, but rather with his uneven playwriting. Nevertheless, The Stories of Cesar Chavez  has much to commend it and is well worth seeing, especially by theater goers interested in dramatizations about socially conscious subjects, Latino themes, and those who just enjoy great acting. Although I never had the chance to see him in person, when he was depicting him onstage Blanco really brought Cesar Chavez alive for me.

I did, however, meet Cesar’s companera, Dolores Huerta, at a party after the private screening of a documentary produced by Rory Kennedy, the daughter of Bobby Kennedy. (Surprisingly, Cesar’s famous interactions with RFK are not depicted by Blanco, but I guess you can’t cover everything in a bio-play.) Huerta, who is an exceedingly attractive individual, had just returned from her trip to Venezuela with progressive celebrities such as Harry Belafonte, who were eyewitnesses to the 21st century socialism of that other Chavez: Hugo. (It was during this trip that Belafonte made international news by denouncing then-President Bush as “the greatest terrorist in the world.”) I asked Huerta what revolutionary Venezuela was like, and she looked at me and said: “Remember all those things we dreamed about and fought for during the ’60s? Well, they’re doing them now in Venezuela.”

If so, I think this would gladden the heart of the late, great Cesar Chavez, who lives again onstage in Fred Blanco’s moving one-man show – his very own version of Teatro Campesino.






The Stories of Cesar Chavez runs through Dec. 12 at the Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Dr., L.A., CA 90004. For more info: 310/281-8337; www.sacredfools.org




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THEATER REVIEW: MAESTRO, THE ART OF LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Hershey Felder in Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein. 

West side his-story

By Ed Rampell

In Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein actor-playwright-musician Hershey Felder is a one-man band in his fourth one-man show about a renowned composer that has played at the Geffen Playhouse. The other unusual suspects of Felder’s magnificent musical obsession have been George Gershwin, Frederic Chopin and Ludwig von Beethoven. Bernstein, who composed the music for West Side Story, Candide, Trouble in Tahiti, the Marlon Brando movie, On the Waterfront, etc., struggles to live up to his father’s demands proved to be a rhapsody that made Lenny blue (in more ways than one), as we’ll see.

Like Ed Asner’s FDR, recently produced at the Pasadena Playhouse, this 90-minute or so one-man show has no intermission. But unlike Asner’s New Dealer, Felder’s musician must tickle the ivories on a Steinway while he also acts and relates the life story of one of the 20th century’s most renowned conductors, composers, musical mentors and proselytizers. Hershey skillfully pulls off this delicate balancing act with aplomb, bringing Bernstein and his music back to vivid life. We follow Lenny from his troubled childhood to his schooling at Boston Latin and Harvard, his apprenticeships with several conductors, the accidental thrusting of young Bernstein into the limelight at Carnegie Hall, his TV appearances as a sort of musical dramaturge on the Omnibus and other programs, his forays at the Great White Way, Bernstein’s conducting of major orchestras and his angst-ridden journey to become a great American composer.

We also get glimpses into Bernstein’s tumultuous private life: Early intimations of homoeroticism, marriage, fatherhood, his coming out of the closet and abandoning of his beloved wife, Felicia, and the repercussions of his actions.


Bernstein lived to regret his betrayal, if you can call it that, of Felicia. But what haunts the conductor most is his self-perceived failure to live up to the expectations of himself and others that he would compose an immortal classical masterpiece. The tortured maestro flagellates himself over the gap he believes exists in his otherwise admirable, transcendent oeuvre.

To what should we ascribe this creative “omission”? Perhaps, like his literary contemporary, Truman Capote, Bernstein’s celebrity overshadowed his artistry. Why tackle the clacking keys of that typewriter or piano, grapple with your muse as you strive to create -- often a painful, nervewracking experience requiring the utmost concentration, shutting all else out -- when one is invited to hobnob with Jackie O. and exchange bons mots with the beautiful people at Elaine’s instead? Especially when one’s celebrity status also pays the rent, and there’s no pressing economic impetus to create.

I don’t know to what extent the Manhattan glitterati, Broadway success, Hollywood excess, and so on enticed and distracted Bernstein, as it did Capote (his childhood friend Harper Lee apparently learned this lesson well, and after To Kill a Mockingbird’s wild success, she shunned the limelight that consumed Truman). But I have a different interpretation as to why the composer of the play that revolutionized Broadway felt like an aesthetic flop. It really doesn’t matter if one co-creates (with choreographer Jerome Robbins and lyricist Stephen Sondheim) a West Side Story, or Candide, with its mellifluous music enlivening Voltaire’s enlightening tale or the sonorous score for On the Waterfront, and so on, and bring so much joy to millions of children (I still remember Lenny’s wonderful explication of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf) and adults. What matters is that if you have a parent who belittles you and tells you that you’ll never amount to anything, even if you illuminate the lights of the Great White Way, Tinseltown and the world with your artistry, you and your work will never be good enough, and never will be, you bad boy. There was a lot of trouble in Bernstein’s Tahiti. (I’m no Sigmund Freud, but perhaps this may also help to explain the apparently bi-sexual Bernstein’s psychosexual tension?)

These are insights I took away from Felder’s drama, along with what a huge role Judaism -- in particular that religion’s mystical side -- played in Bernstein’s life and on his music. This was quite a revelation. What’s missing in this bio-play is the rather well-known fundraiser Bernstein threw for the Black Panther Party at his posh Park Avenue penthouse pad, and which Tom Wolfe ridiculed in his 1970 book Radical Chic &a Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. For the Virginia born and raised Wolfe, whose father edited The Southern Planter journal, white guilt was the rationale for Bernstein’s Panther bash. But even if the soiree took place in a duplex I prefer to believe that the son of a Russian Jewish émigré might have had compassion for and solidarity with members of another oppressed minority. Who’da thunk it?

But you can’t include everything in a bio-play, even one as ably directed by Joel Zwick, who also helmed Felder’s preceding dramatic triptych of composers. Maestro does have great acting and stellar music, as well as imaginative projection design rendered by Andrew Wilder, as the play does include some archival footage of the conductor, plus other striking images. Randall Arney is Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein's artistic director, while the estimable film/TV helmer Gilbert Cates, who has produced 14 Academy Awards ceremonies, is the Geffen’s producing director. For those interested in music, theatre, gay subjects, Judaism, obviously Bernstein himself, and virtuoso acting, don’t miss the latest installment of Hershey’s philharmonic factory. Bravissimo!


Maestro, The Art of Leonard Bernstein runs through Dec. 12, at 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood Village, CA 90024. For more information: 310/208-5454; for more info: www.GeffenPlayhouse.com

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THEATER REVIEW: WATSON, THE LAST GREAT TALE OF THE LEGENDARY SHERLOCK HOLMES

Watson (Scott Leggett) and Moriarty (Henry Dittman) in Watson, The Last Great Tale of the Legendary Sherlock Holmes.

Footsie play

By Ed Rampell

Who is the West’s most famous Afghan War veteran? Some may think it’s Pat Tillman, the late pro-footballer-turned-Army Ranger, subject of a recent documentary. But in my opinion, the answer is elementary, my dear reader: The best known Western veteran of the Afghanistan war, albeit back in the 19th century, is John Watson, the Brit better known as Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick, Dr. Watson.

He, rather than Arthur Conan Doyle’s scientific sleuth, is the lead character in the Sacred Fools' Watson, The Last Great Tale of the Legendary Sherlock Holmes, which is an extremely imaginative, clever spoof that had the audience howling with delight and applauding throughout the premiere of the almost two-and-a-half-hour production.

Since circa 1900 there have been more than 222 Holmes productions, and director-playwright Jaime Robledo robs numerous sources to create a send-up that is, in the end, his own unique work of art, as well as a humorous homage to literary icons. Robledo merrily loots Doyle (in particular his 1893 The Final Problem, which was intended to be Holmes’ last adventure, recounted by the faithful Watson), Nicholas Meyer’s superb The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and more.

In tone, Watson, The Last Great Tale of the Legendary Sherlock Holmes also comically cribs from the stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s, The 39 Steps, with its small cast frenetically and funnily playing multiple roles. In theme, Watson explores Sherlock’s sexuality (or lack there or, perhaps, his homoeroticism), and the cocaine use of a character primarily known for his logic, just as Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond did in the 1970 film, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Although Meyer, Wilder and Diamond made much of Holmes’ penchant for things going better with coke, it should be noted that 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the very first movie with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, ends with Sherlock exclaiming: “Oh, Watson - the needle!”

Robledo’s partners in crime include a Baker Street’s dozen or so of highly skilled thespians trodding the boards -- sometimes at breakneck speed. The cast is amiably led by Scott Leggett as a rather corpulent Dr. Watson. The slim Joe Fria, who has previously won an LA Weekly Best Comedic Performance award, portrays the consulting (or in this case, insulting) detective with great comic panache. Onstage, the two look more like Laurel and Hardy than Watson and Holmes, and they deserve to win more prizes for their waggish performances.

As should French Stewart (Third Rock From the Sun), who does a Peter Sellers-esque turn in a dual cross-dressing role, with his side-splitting, bawdy Queen Victoria worthy of Sellers’ droll depiction of the Duchess of Grand Fenwick in the classic 1959 satire, The Mouse That Roared. (BTW, the playwright errs here by having Queen Victoria referred to as “Her Highness” -- that is for mere princesses, while the correct appellation, “Her Majesty,” is reserved for monarchs. Veddy English and elementary, my dear Robledo!) Stewart’s uproarious Freud is decidedly less sympathetic than Arkin’s compassionate shrink in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.

If Vanessa Redgrave played Sherlock’s love interest in that film, the curvaceous Rebecca Larsen lustily portrays Irene Adler -- the only woman to have ever outwitted Holmes -- with sly wit in Watson. Henry Dittman is ditzy as a mustache twirling Professor Moriarty, the “Napoleon of Crime.” There are too many other members of this ensemble cast to single out, but Lisa Anne Nicolai typifies the thespians, as a background player moving about scenery and the like onstage, such as chests that are supposed to be the moving cars of a careening train in one death defying scene, or the white cliffs of Dover in another. As all hell breaks loose onstage, in that Buster Keaton “Great Stone Face” tradition, she somehow never manages to so much as crack a smile. In the face of such hilarity, even Stanislavski would be impressed by Nicolai’s stoic restraint.

Robledo deftly directs his madcap players, and is ably abetted by a creative collective: Scenic designer Erin Anne Brewster, scenic painter Nicole Agredano, costume designer Jessica Olson, lighting designer Matt Richter, composer Ryan Johnson (what would a Holesian saga be without violins?) and assistant director Monica Greene. Watson, The Last Great Tale of the Legendary Sherlock Holmesis a virtuoso case study not in scarlet but in how small, low budget theater can, with imagination, innovation and verve creatively craft special effects to conjure up far-flung locales, sumptuous sets, and the like. Puppetry, shadows, curtains (effectively doubling as, of all things, fog) and more set the scenes. We travel from London to Constantinople (or is it Istanbul?) and beyond on a diminutive stage in a 66 or so seat theater. It’s obvious that these Fools have a Sacred esprit de corps. Bravo!

One of the big bugaboos of Holmesians is the portrayal and interpretation of Dr. Watson, whom many feel has been slighted onscreen as buffoonish and boorish, such as the often blundering Nigel Bruce opposite Rathbone in about 14 Universal films from 1939-1946. Strict keepers of the Sherlockiana flame may cry, “Is nothing sacred, fools?!” at the liberties Robledo and his acting accomplices take with Doyle’s characters, just as strict Freudians may resist his analysis of the founder of psychoanalysis. But I feel that Robledo’s robbery is more tribute than plagiarism, and true to Watson and Sherlock’s spirit, unlike Guy Ritchie’s 2009 rip-off of the brand Doyle artistically built up.

In addition, by upturning the usual emphasis on Holmes at Watson’s expense, and telling this tale from the good doctor’s viewpoint, Robledo sheds new light on the characters and stories. Along Watson’s way, we come to realize that it was the writer Watson, who chronicled Sherlock’s cases in Doyle’s adventures, who was really the great observer, not Holmes, with his much-vaunted deductive reasoning process.

After Doyle tried to kill his beloved literary creation at Reichenbachfall, Switzerland (not at Dover as in Watson, The Last Great Tale of the Legendary Sherlock Holmes!) in 1893’s The Final Problem outraged fans forced Doyle to bring his character back to life in 1903’s The Adventure of the Empty House. And here we are, 107 years after Professor Moriarty and Holmes’ tumble down that 393-foot Swiss waterfall, still enjoying new works based on Doyle’s immortal characters. (PBS is also airing a modern day, British-made version of the Holmes sagas.) What Robledo’s Watson, The Last Great Tale of the Legendary Sherlock Holmes proves is that the only thing that could kill Sherlock is dying from laughter. That is a risk theatergoers must happily take in order to enjoy this Baker Street irregular which I predict has a long life ahead of it beyond the Sacred Fools.

Watson, The Last Great Tale of the Legendary Sherlock Holmes runs through Dec. 11 at the Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Dr., L.A., CA 90004. For more info: 310/281-8337; www.sacredfools.org

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THEATER REVIEW: LUCIA MAD

Actors Meg Wallace, Pamela Daly, Robert Ross and Ian Patrick Williams in Lucia Mad.

Jung girl, get out of my mind

By Ed Rampell

One of the great things about mediums such as novels, film and theater is that they can serve as sort of time machines, bringing certain far away places, long ago times and historical personages back to life for us to meet. And so it is with Don Nigro’s Lucia Mad. For me, the best thing about this play is that it dramatizes fascinating real life notables. Among them: Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (Kenn Schmidt), Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (Robert Ross), Irish novelist James Joyce (Ian Patrick Williams) and the least famous of the lot -- but nevertheless this work’s titular character -- Joyce’s daughter, Lucia (Meg Wallace).

Other theatergoers may find the drama’s exploration of insanity to be the most compelling thing about Nigro’s play, which Steve Jarrad – who ably directs the taut Collaborative Artists Ensemble cast – assured me is fact-based, and not a work of whimsy.

The author of 1922’s Ulysses embarked on epic odysseys of his own; I remember seeing a statue of James Joyce sitting at a table in the Café Ulysses in Pula, a Croatian seaside town with superb Roman ruins -- including the world’s sixth largest still standing ancient Roman amphitheatre -- where the Irishman taught English circa 1905. (Not in the arena – at a language school, possibly a Berlitz, primarily for Austro-Hungarian Naval officers in those halcyon days before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated.) The expatriate writer’s Homeric peregrinations also took the exiled Dubliner to Trieste, Zurich and Paris, where much of Lucia Mad is set. There, Lucia meets Beckett, an acolyte of her father’s whom she falls madly if unwisely in love with.

Alas, poor Yorrick, this uninvited love goes unrequited, and Beckett spurns her advances and requests for a “thumping” humping, et al. I think Ross quite captures Beckett, who he depicts as an extremely distant, alienated individual (with an enlarged prostate the size of “an eggplant,” we are told) incapable of expressing love. Ross is spot on: this is precisely how I’d imagine the author of Waiting for Godot, that landmark 1953 Theatre of the Absurd work about impotence, to be.

Depending on your point of view, Wallace delivers a harrowing, bravura portrayal of Lucia, as she descends into madness. Or one may find watching her angsty performance as gratingly disturbing as fingernails scratching chalkboards. Instead of the portrait of the artist as a young woman, Wallace’s Lucia has all the sensitivity, troubles and the like often associated with artists, but none of their gifts to express and render them in tangible form. So, Lucia has the worst of both worlds, if you see what I mean. While her brilliant father invented literature’s stream of consciousness, Lucia suffers from scream of unconsciousness, externalizing her troubled interior monologues. (What’s that old cliché about the fine line between genius and insanity?) Lucia also suffers from a lack of, shall we say, free associations with members of the opposite sex.

Compounding matters is a two and a half hour script (including a 10-minute intermission) that is repetitive and could be cut by 30 minutes or so. (Nigro is reportedly a prolific playwright of James Joyce-like dimensions, who has written 200-plus plays – if you can believe it.) Fortunately, this intense production presented at L.A.’s NoHo Arts District is leavened with a wry wit and Joycean word play.

Schmidt plays, well, the archetypal analyst as C.G. Jung, who treats -- or rather tries to -- the troubled Lucia when, I suppose, the Joyces are living in exile in Switzerland. But this emotionally searing drama reminded me more of R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, with its emphasis on the psyche’s inner odyssey of insanity, than it did of the Jungian fascination with symbolism and the collective unconscious.

Alas, Lucia’s Molly does not bloom, and she is doomed. But what makes and drives her mad? In the end, I couldn’t quite figure out what was bugging poor Lucia or what sent her to the bughouse. Pamela Daly is a sympathetic mother as Nora Joyce (supposedly the real life prototype for Molly Bloom). Williams’ Joyce may be a bit aloof, but he’s jovial enough and a concerned parent, if somewhat (but not excessively) prone to imbibing, as well as obsessively intent upon scribbling the Great Irish Novel. He doesn’t seem to be molesting and abusing his poor misbegotten daughter. Maybe it was this footloose author of Ulysses’ endless odysseys that sent his daughter off the deep end? Or was it genetics? In any case, Lucia is a woman with a screw loose who doesn’t screw loosely -- aye, there’s the nub of the rub. Finnegan may wake, but poor Lucia, alas, never does.

Lucia Mad is being performed through Nov. 21 at the Sherry Theatre, 11052 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601 on: Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m.; and Sundays at 5:00 p.m. For more info: 322/860-6569; www.Plays411.com/luciamad

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THEATER REVIEW: THE TRAIN DRIVER

On track with history

By Miranda Inganni

Inpired by a newspaper story, The Train Driver, the latest play by South Africa's preeminent playwriter, Athol Fugard, is a wonderfully non-sentimental ride through one man's harrowing trip through loss, post-traumatic stress disorder, recovery, violence and, finally, peace.

Starring Adolphus Ward and Morlan Higgins as Simon and Roelf, respectively, the play tracks itself in a desolate graveyard in a South African shantytown where the black Simon is in charge of burrying the "unnamed ones." Amongst the rabble, rather than roses, Afrikaner Roelf insists Simon assist him in the search of the black dead woman (and her baby), who has haunted him ever since the train he was conducting ran them over in her suicidal act.

Roelf is, understandably, traumatized by the event, having witnessed this dark brown-eyed woman throw herself and her young baby in front of the train that he was driving, and through the duration of the play experiences and expresses anger, frustration and finally acceptance of his participation in this horrific event. However, the guilt felt by the conducter not only works on the personal experience felt during this suicidal act of a black woman and child, but, on a far grander scale, The Train Driver is about every Afrikaner's participation, regardless of degree and intent, in South Africa's Apartheid.

Directed by Stephen Sachs, The Train Driver is an intimate portrait of grief and understanding told in the intimate setting of The Fountain Theatre. Both Ward and Higgins do a very fine job (the audience -- consisting of many high school students -- probably should have clapped a bit longer for the actors then they did) of conveying their characters' situational emotions -- and emotional situations -- with understatement and breadth of character.

The only drawback is the play was the sound effects: the carrion-eating bush dogs, gang attacks, flashbacks to the train accident and memories of childhood songs, to name a few. They were annoying and intrusive. The production did not need them.

Otherwise, The Train Driver is a moving play that touches on subjects from grief and loss to social status and the ultimate human connection of one man's, two men, story within the context of a larger South African history.

(The Train Driver runs through December 12 at The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Avel, Los Angeles, Ca. 90029. For more information: 323/663-1525; http://www.fountaintheatre.com/)

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THEATER REVIEW: WHEN GARBO TALKS!

 

Silver screen history sizzles onstage

By Ed Rampell

What is stardom? The charismatic, larger than life distilled essence of attributes, often sensuous, that dazzles audiences basking in the imagery’s refracted light. And few stars knew stardom like Greta Garbo, the female lead in classics such as Flesh and the Devil, Camille and Ninotchka.

The new musical with book and lyrics by Buddy Kaye and music by Mort Garson, When Garbo Talks!, is a highly entertaining, insightful depiction of the Swedish actress’ rise from Stockholm shop girl (with big feet!) to sultry La-La-Land superstar.

Jessica Burrows pulls off the near impossible, convincingly rendering the title character -- well known for being so unattainable -- in flesh and blood, with Garbo-esque glimpses flashing across her visage. In the play we first encounter Greta Lovisa Gustafsson auditioning for one of Sweden’s top directors, Mauritz Stiller (a dapper Michael Stone Forrest). The Helsinki-born Jew proceeds to mold the Nordic adolescent aspiring actress into his notion and image of feminine beauty, including renaming her “Garbo.” Stiller gives Greta her first lead role while she’s still just a teenager, the 1924 silent film, The Atonement of Gosta Berling, which impresses MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer (a delightfully zesty, conniving, backstabbing Matthew Henerson).

Mayer tricks Stiller and his discovery into going Hollywood, and they soon decamp for that SoCal silly hooey valley where publicity is the currency of the land. The studio chieftain proceeds to ace the Finnish helmer out of the picture and then tries to out-Svengali Stiller by molding Garbo’s motion picture persona not so much in his own image, but in that of what the audience will buy tickets to go see at the flicker shows.

The relationship between Greta and Stiller is intriguing. According to the play, Greta lusted after the director who was old enough to be her father (her own dad died when she was about 14). Although they even lived two-gether, their relationship remained chaste, as both Garbo was bisexual and Stiller was gay. Ironically, the creator of the ideal of female sex appeal was a homosexual. (When Garbo Talks! drastically downplays Garbo's lesbianism.)

After Mayer’s Machiavellian machinations and manipulations tears their moviemaking asunder, Stiller observes “his” creation making love to John Gilbert (the dashing and surprisingly tender Christopher Carothers) in a steamy scene in Flesh and the Devil as it is being shot at the studio. This further crushes Stiller, who -- unlike the heterosexual, handsome Gilbert -- is unable (or unwilling?) to sexually fulfill Garbo. Creatively crushed and romantically thwarted, the director, an utter flop on that boulevard of broken dreams, returns to Sweden, where he dies within a year or so. The musical does not say what Stiller died from, and given the current spate of gay suicides, it’s all the more poignant. Pleurisy was reportedly the actual cause of death, but I wouldn’t rule out a broken heart.

Garbo also broke the heart of her leading man on and off the silver screen, John Gilbert, who was known as “the Great Lover.” Tales of their lovemaking were legendary -- the stuff that Hollywood Babylon movie myths are made of. Supposedly, they practically had to be pried apart by heavy machinery during orgiastic sessions in their studio bungalow in between scenes in order to get them back into costume and onto the set. Their 1927 film, Love, was cleverly promoted as “Garbo and Gilbert in Love.”

If Garbo’s relationship with Stiller was about art, and her affair with Gilbert was about sex, Greta’s dealings with Mayer are about commerce, as the movie mogul seeks to make the European actress into as valuable a commodity as possible. 

Garbo’s conflicts with Mayer as she resists being exploited as a mere moneymaking machine for MGM reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, which set the Depression era proletarian drama in the motion picture milieu of the studio system. Whether an assembly line worker in an auto plant or a superstar in Hollywood’s dream factory, they’re all just peons, hired hands. And the former shopkeeper knew a salesman and shuckster when she saw one. 

This may all be pretty serious stuff, but When Garbo Talks! balances it out with a light touch and lots of singing, dancing and humor. Nick Rogers as Mayer’s alleged hood, Eddie Mannix, may be manic and menacing, but he’s also comic. Along with the audience and MGM secretary Ida Koverman (Teya Patt), Rogers and Henerson as L.B. have heaps of fun hoofing about the stage, singing and doing that old soft shoe in numbers reminiscent of the vaudeville some of the moguls emerged out of. The trio performs some dizzyingly daffy, goofy foot stomping pieces with great panache, while Burrows shows off her lovely pipes in some show stopping Garbo-esque solos. Overall, When Garbo Talks! is a rollicking romp through film history, from the end of the silent era to the beginning of talkies. Like La Jolla Playhouse’s Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin, this is another musical ideal for movie buffs, as well as for avid theatergoers who like to tap their tootsies to lively tunes and ivory tinkling.
  
I thoroughly enjoyed this musical, but to me, its ending was too upbeat. Well, what could you expect from a play co-created by Buddy Kaye, whose claim to fame is that he wrote the theme for I Dream of Jeannie, one of the boob tube’s more insipid series? (According to press notes, after Buddy died, his son, Richard D. Kaye, worked on the book with director Jules Aaron.) Throughout the musical the onetime Stockholm hat saleslady yearns for “my winter dream” -- the land of her birth. But Garbo never moved back to live in Sweden. Nor did she remain in Tinseltown

While this film historian would have preferred a more downbeat denouement; in that Mayer tradition, this world premiere musical that’s closing the International City Theatre’s Silver Anniversary Season, certainly gives the people what they want.

When Garbo Talks! runs through Nov. 7 at the International City Theatre, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 East Ocean Blvd.. Long Beach, CA., 90802. For more info: 562/436-4610; www.InternationalCityTheatre.com)

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THEATER REVIEW: LA VICTIMA

Another staged revolution

By Ed Rampell
 
Don’t be a victim of circumstances, get thee to LATC ASAP to see La Victima before it closes. The Latino Theater Company’s 25th anniversary production is a generational saga that follows the Villas and Mendozas, two families originally from South of the border, and their trials and travails in El Norte. These Mexicans-cum-Mexican-Americans are subjected to the vicissitudes of revolution, war, immigration policies and the twists and turns of the labor market in a capricious, opportunistic U.S. economy that exploits then expediently deports immigrant workers, depending on fluctuations of the market.

In an early deportation scene the young Amparo (the versatile Alexis de la Rocha) is tearfully separated from her son Sammy (Oliver Rayon), who remains behind in Los Angeles. This tearing asunder of the family sets the trajectory of La Victima’s plot, as the adult Sammy (powerfully played by Geoffrey Rivas) grows up to become a Korean War soldier and then a conflicted migre.

Although it was originally written by El Teatro De La Esperanza in 1976 and was the Latino Theater Company’s very first show, La Victima is, unfortunately, timelier than ever. It is also part of the SoCal stages' current left-tilting trend featuring favorable depictions of communists, leftists and unions, including: Il Postino (with Placido Domingo as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in L.A. Opera’s Spanish language opera); Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin; Voices, A Legacy To Remember (which depicts singer/actor/activist Paul Robeson); Carry It On! (which depicts Woody Guthrie and Lillian Hellman); and a revival of Clifford Odets’ classic proletarian drama, Waiting for Lefty. To be sure, the red flags fluttering on the LATC stage are emblazoned with the United Farm Workers’ black union eagle, but with its bold portrayal of a huelga (strike) the Latino Theater Company is sort of to the left of and complementing Waiting for Lefty, which ends with laborers (and audience members) merely calling for the strike that actually takes place onstage in La Victima.

Amparo’s daughter Antonia (an impassioned Lucy Rodriguez) is a strike leader, and all hell breaks loose when a concerned Amparo shows up at the UFW rally -- and the empire strikes back. The ultimate plot twist is worthy of O. Henry, and reveals that the real victims are those who collaborate with the powers-that-be, as soldiers, Customs agents, etc.

La Victima is also radical in form, opting for a bold Brechtian style skillfully directed by Jose Luis Valenzuela, artistic director of the Latino Theater Company and LATC. The highly stylized form fully enhances and complements the play’s progressive content. In particular, the music provided by the performing and recording team of Cita and Ricardo Ochoa serves to enliven and heighten the emotions and story of this production, which is more of a play with music, as opposed to being a musical per se. Cita has great verve as La Cantante; clad in a low cut, sexy flamenco type of dress, with her shaved head and brash style, this sexually ambiguous singer-cum-performance artist looks and sounds as if she just jumped off the stage of a Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht musical. Imagine if Lotte Lenya had portrayed Mac the Knife instead of Jenny in Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera, and you’ll get the picture – well, sort of, because Cita kind of has to be seen and heard to be believed. Choreographer Urbanie Lucero and sound designer John Zalewski have done yeomen’s work here bringing this piece of epic theatre alive with ringing, singing music, song and dance.

As has the ensemble cast, with most of the actors artfully performing multiple roles and deftly directed by Valenzuela. Veteran actor Sal Lopez (Zoot Suit; Beverly Hills Chihuahua) plays, among other parts, a wily coyote who smuggles Amparo (the only character depicted by that other stage and big/little screen veteran, Lupe Ontiveros) back across the border, hidden beneath the driver’s seat of his truck. Kudos to Alexis de la Rocha, who, in addition to playing young Amparo and Janie, has a great comic turn as the nerdy, sexually aggressive Rosita, who tries to seduce Antonia’s (Lucy Rodriguez) brother Meno (Luis Aldana), who seems as unsure of his sexuality as he is of participating in the UFW strike. (A good Reichian point, by the way, linking potency and oppression.)

This highly enjoyable, rousing, thought and emotion-provoking production of La Victima is a revival worthy of celebrating the Latino Theater Company’s silver anniversary. It is in both English and Spanish, with supertitles clearly projected on the rear wall of the dialogue and lyrics in the language that is not at that moment being said or sung. But as La Victima reminds us, to paraphrase Eugene Debs, from “stachka” to “huelga,” “strike!” is one of the boldest words in any language. Don’t miss this people’s play. Ole y venceremos!

(La Victima runs through Oct. 31 at the Los Angeles Theatre Centre, 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, 90013. For more info: 866/811-4111; www.thelatc.org)

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THEATER REVIEW: ANNA IN THE TROPICS

(Eric Gutierrez) and (Claudia Vazquez) in Anna in the Tropics. Photo credit: Donald Songster.

From Russia with lust

By Ed Rampell

One of the best things about works of art is that they can transport you far away and long ago, such as to Tampa, Florida, 1929, like in Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics. I’d thought that all of the Cubans living in the Sunshine State were, like the playwright, refugees from Castro’s Cuba. But Holy Desi Arnaz!, muchacho, was I ever wrong. According to Anna in the Tropics, which is at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, Cubans had migrated to Florida long before Fidel and Che ever marched out of the Sierra Maestra Mountains and into Havana and history.

This drama is about Cubans working in a family-owned cigar factory near Tampa, who tamper with boredom by hiring lectores to read aloud to the mostly illiterate workers as they roll tobacco, etc., for hours on end. Who’d a thunk it, in this day and age of TV or computers in the workplace? I had also never heard of this long lost profession, which preceded audio books by a century or so. You learn something new every day (especially when you go to the theater).

Instead of merely relieving employee ennui, the young, dashing Juan Julian (played with palpable panache by Eric Neil Gutierrez) adds sizzle and sexual tension as the new reader in town, who chooses Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina -- from which the play’s title is derived -- as his first book. When he arrives on the boat from Cuba, the repressed Marela (TV veteran Vanessa Marquez, whose roles include Nurse Wendy Goldman on ER) literally wets herself.

Julian’s steamy recitations of Tolstoy’s racy Russian romance enthralls the female workers, but causes dissension among the factory’s males. He becomes enmeshed in the proletarians’ sexual entanglements, with the philandering husband Palomo (Serafin Falcon) and his wife, the spurned, smoldering Conchita, played to the hilt by Claudia Vazquez as a wife seeking some payback, pleasure and reconciliation. The reader also comes between her virginal sister, Marela, and Cheche (angrily portrayed by Arturo Medina), who yearns for modernization of the cigar manufacturing processes and Marela. The lectore’s passionate reading of Tolstoy’s novel about infidelity, illicit love, etc., mirrors the play’s plot and incites the instincts of the cigar rollers. (In this case, Sigmund Freud is wrong, and a cigar is not just a cigar.) Perhaps listening to lectores was the 1920s’ equivalent of cruising Internet porn in the office?

The tensions in act one explode in the second act, as the drama devolves from a character study into sexual violence and gunplay. The drama becomes more War and Peace than Anna Karenina. Alas, this is unfortunate, as I would have preferred to have continued exploring the interior lives of the Cuban transplants, instead of watching the latent become manifest, with the type of action Hollywood flicks are fraught with. But what do I know? Cruz won the Pulitzer Prize for this play.

In any case, Anna in the Tropics is an insightful rumination on how the written -- and spoken -- word affects us, the most erotic work about literature and libido I’ve seen since 2008’s film, The Reader. These are also the most passionate tobacco rollers to appear onstage since Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Corky Dominguez ably directs the ensemble cast, with effective evocative lighting by Stephanette Isabel Smith. And Sierra Madre is an exquisite Alpine village with parrots and stunning views, and visiting here enhances the overall theatergoing experience found at this out-of-the-way mountaintop Playhouse. Yes, Virginia, there is culture in the San Gabriel Valley.

(Anna in the Tropics runs through Nov. 13 at the Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd., Sierra Madre, CA 91024. For more info: (626) 355-4318; http://www.sierramadreplayhouse.org/)

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