PIPPIN
Orange County Performing Arts Center
January 6, 2007, 8pm
Ugh. This touring version of the recent Goodspeed Opera House production wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t particularly good either. It was overstuffed, over directed and over gimmicky. The cast was decently talented, but the microphones weren’t really picking up their voices and everything sounded subdued. The dancers were talented but the choreography was overly reminiscent of Bob Fosse’s benchmark choreography for the original late 70s Broadway production, without reaching anywhere near the heights of Fosse’s original. Perhaps this production worked better in the smaller Goodspeed Opera House, because here, it was swallowed up by the cavernous Orange County Performing Arts Center’s Segerstrom Hall. The 3,000+ seat theatre is immense; it works well for ballet and opera, but tends to eat Broadway touring events alive unless they are huge shows like The Lion King or Wicked. But then again, it could depend on the show because I also saw Urinetown there from Tier 3 and loved it.Photo of Andre Ward and the company by Diane Sobolewski. Courtesy of the Orange County Performing Arts Center.
13
Mark Taper Forum
January 4, 2007, 8pm
It's cute, but it's not much more than that. The show's gimmick is that it is about being thirteen years old, performed a cast that is mostly 13 years old themselves. The best part of the show is the clever songs by Jason Robert Brown (of the Broadway musical Parade, which flopped at the box office but was widely regarded as an artistic success, and The Last Five Years, an insightful and touching show that has played all over the regional theatres). In 13, the songs try to get right to the root of all that pain, awkwardness and joy that was being thirteen years old: in the opening number, they sing “I wanna fly, wanna drive, wanna get rich, wanna get out, wanna get my braces off, wanna get my nose pierced, wanna grow my hair long / But all I keep hearing is ‘No you’re not ready, no its not time yet, no its not right now, wait until you’re older!” I sense a missed opportunity to make the show relevant to more than just kids who are 13 years old - if the book had been better written, it might have been fun as an older person to look back on that awkward time. The show is so irrepressibly cheerful and energetic, though, that it all reads like a Disney Channel show. Though it was written before the High School Musical explosion (and even its flawed state is much better than HSM), 13 has the unfortunate timing to be produced right in the midst of the mega-hit. Comparisons seem inevitable, and even the show's creators seemed to be trying to tap into that energy. Hopefully, though, they will do some good work to the show on its road to Broadway.Photo by Craig Schwartz, courtesy Center Theatre Group.
SISTER ACT: THE MUSICAL
Pasadena Playhouse
December 13, 2006, 8pm
Alan Menken penned the songs for this stage musical adaptation of the popular Whoopi Goldberg movie of the same name, and this production clearly has greater aspirations than small regional theatre houses like the Pasadena Playhouse. But the show will have to go through some big work before it reaches for anything higher. Parts of the show are wonderfully airy, cheerful and bright – mostly the scenes with the nuns – but other parts are so embarrassingly bad and/or boring that you want to bail out of the theatre for the Sister Act-less world outside. So at least they’ve got something going for them. But you also wonder what the point of making a musical of the movie is – wasn’t the movie enough? Adaptations of Hairspray, The Producers and Billy Elliot reinvented their storytelling for the stage, or their stories had a compelling enough reason to be retold in a different way. With Sister Act, they maybe tried to add their own touches, but they mostly aren’t able to latch on to the charm and energy of the film – they only try to.Photo by Craig Schwartz, courtesy of the Pasadena Playhouse.
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