On Friday night (Friday the 13th, oooh) the 99-seat theater show was, shall we say, an off-beat experience. Called HOT YOUNG GIRLS ARE EVIL, the show was marketed as a "bloody burlesque show" for Friday the 13th, being performed on only four Fridays at 11pm. A friend who used to work at my company invited me and a few others on this adventure at a venue called The Bootleg, formerly The Evidence Room, near Echo Park and downtown LA. Producing company Orphean Circus has in the past staged some silly shows, and others in the group have seen one of their productions, The 99-Cent Show, in the past and so we thought it would be fun. Saying this show was staged in the lobby makes it sound like it was a small show, but The Bootleg's lobby is huge and they constructed a fairly enormous and elaborate stage for a 99-seat theater production. Still, the experience was a strange one. We came in expecting a hilarious burlesque comedy with blood squirting everywhere; what we got was a dark, charged diatribe against male chauvinism that was neither funny nor interesting. Blood squirted and they danced one burlesque song near the beginning, but for the most party they tried to shocked to shock us with profanity and screaming, but with little to no point. Three guys out looking for a whorehouse come upon a group of girls with a taste for bloodletting. Their desire for cheapened sex leads them into grisly ends: one is strangled, one gets a hand job that ends with his dick getting ripped out of his pants (it was a giant dildo with "blood" soaked strings attached). It was just bizarre, and the plot meandered and went nowhere. The marketing led us to have different expectations, and it would have been okay to be all dark and bizarre if only the play were better. I suppose the most interesting part of the evening was that the whole event had the feeling of being all arty and hip - an 11pm theater show in a converted warehouse, artsy people, bottles of Corona at the bar. Wish the play was better, though.Saturday night I saw HAE KYUNG LEE AND DANCERS at Cal State LA's State Theater. Another one of my co-workers was in the company, so me and a friend ostensibly went to support her, and the glowing LA Times review that came out on Tuesday gave the company some local artistic clout as well. The company is a small modern dance troupe based in LA and gives tours in Korea thanks to titular choreographer's Hae Kyung Lee's heritage, I'd guess. The eight-member company performed "Salm", with the choreographic style based on the slow movement of butoh and traditional Korean dance forms but infused with an athletic modern-dance vocabulary. The dancers hurled themselves onto the floor in spasms alternating with slow traverses across the stage in the chaotic first section - appropriately called 'Chaos'. Then Lee herself danced a 10 minute solo in the second part, 'Revolution'. My thoughts wandered to a dance sidebar in last week's New Yorker about modern choreographers appearing in their own work; it has no relvance to Lee's performance except that I thought it was funny to have read this article so recently and have all the truisms from the article materialize on stage (Lee was the oldest dancer on stage - read the article). The last section, 'Rebirth,' was mesmerizing in its slowness. The dancers, only the younger ones, flowed across the stage slowly, forming groups and doing crazy controlled lifts or formations marching across the stage. It had a stirring, hypnotic quality to it. I cant say I really "got" the performance overall, but I liked that I had seen enough dance to recognize the styles that Lee was quoting. I saw butoh with Sankai Juku at UCLA in November, and Shen Wei Dance Arts was here a few years ago doing a dance heavily based in the slow, statuesque movement as well. And the friend dancing? It was a lot of fun watching her dance as well - you see one side of people at work, and its fascinating to see them get up and perform. They suddenly morph in front of your eyes into one of those creatures you only thought you'd never know; dancers and actors that exist on the other side of the fourth wall.
The weekend was finished off with SLEEPING BEAUTY WAKES, a new musical co-produced by Center Theater Group and Deaf West Theatre at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. This was a high budget spectacle, unlike the other two shows, produced with its own pretty huge set and polished technical elements. And I love going to see musicals (they're just so much fun!). I was particularly keen to see Sleeping Beauty Wakes because I so loved Deaf West/CTG's production of Big River (that link is to a fan site). That show was touching and moving in its combined use of sign language and spoken/sung material; there was a miraculous bridge of communication between the deaf and hearing communities. Sleeping Beauty Wakes didn't quite live up to the level of Big River, but it was cute and creative nonetheless. The story is a spin off of the Sleeping Beauty tale: Sleeping Beauty falls asleep as usual, but doesn't like the prince who tries to kiss her awake, so she goes back to sleep and ends up sleeping for another 900 years. She wakes up in a modern day sleep disorder clinic, kissed awake by a narcoleptic former truck driver working as a nurse in the clinic. It's a fun tale, with a few great songs (plus a lot of others that sounded the same) by the indie band GrooveLily. Whereas the sign language was more fully integrated in Big River, here the show was constructed around what became more of a gimick. Still, wonderful performances from the cast, especially Erika Amato voicing the Evil Fairy and Kevin Earley in the small ensemble, that made the show enjoyable from beginning to end. The show is being performed four times a week for high school students, and was programmed into the season with these youth performances specifically in mind. So I can see how the show ended up the way it did - cute. Still, I enjoyed myself.(Sleeping Beauty Wakes photo of Russell Harvard and Alexandra Wailes by Craig Schwartz, from Center Theatre Group.)
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Earlier today, I saw a regional production of ALTAR BOYZ at Musical Theater West in Long Beach. Oy. I can see how this show was charming and fun in a 200-seat space Off Broadway in New York, but in the comparatively gargantuan, 790 seat Carpenter Center at Cal State Long Beach, the poor little show seemed lost and confused. Perhaps another part of the problem was the very low sound level. The show is a spoof of boy bands: it's a mock concert where a religious boy band group - complete with a cute guy, an ethnic guy, an ambiguously gay guy, a street guy and (randomly) a Jewish guy - perform a pop concert of religious songs. If it's going to be a rollicking concert, then the sound better be pumped up and surronding - the musical theater, softer sound level that MTW uses for a show like Thoroughly Modern Millie doesn't quite work for Altar Boyz. And while the show was charming and cute, I was not engaged. Nice try, though.
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