Reprise! Broadway's Best presented a production of DAMN YANKEES! (Nov 7, 8pm) that opened two weeks ago, featuring a significantly updated book and score: the setting is moved from the 50s to the early 80s and the Washington Senators become the Los Angeles Dodgers (who is the production's sponsor, conveniently) among the most significant changes to the book. It's window dressing, though, compared to what amounts to the most significant change: reorchestrating, nay "updating", some of the songs. We get "Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo" in hip-hop, "Heart" with a calypso beat, and "The Game" as a huge gospel number sung by Lilias White. As awful as it all sounds, these adjustments, for the most part, come across fairly amusingly; it's a bit jarring at first when the song you thought you knew is now being sung very differently, but eventually you come to accept it and the production's eccentricities. What the show lacks is a real reason for all those changes; they're all just there, without a dramatic or conceptual justification - we giggle and then the show moves on to its next "update." Keeping the evening afloat is a truly fantastic cast: Ken Page as Old Joe, Ty Talor as Young Joe, Cleavant Derricks as the Devil, Lillias White in one of the bit roles who knocks it out of the theater with the gospel version of "The Game", and Jackee Harris who steals every scene that she is in with a tiny bit part. Lee Martino provides reliably fresh choreography, as he did with Reprise's wonderful summer production of On Your Toes; Jason Alexander directs. The show runs through Sunday.
Center Theater Group has imported EN UN SOL AMARILLO (MEMORIAS DE UN TEMBLOR (Nov 10, 2pm) from Bolivia, with Teatro de los Andes telling the survivors' stories of a huge earthquake that rocked the Bolivian countryside in 1998. The individual accounts are presented as monologues that are visualized on stage in incredible, but highly simple images using very low-tech theater. In one story, a survivor tells about how his children were lost when his house collapsed; while he is speaking, he is drawing a stick-figure drawing of his children using sand on a table top. When the earthquake "hits", thetable is lifted up, and the sand image slides off the table into a cloud of dust. The show also carries a large political component, as the survivors relate how politicians promised them every form of help, but delivered little or nothing - towards the end of the piece, we the audience are given wads of paper to chuck at the politician characters. As moving as some of these images were, ultimately the lack of a dramatic narrative left things a bit cold for me - it felt like an extended lecture. Nevertheless, it was educational to hear about the earthquake and the response to the disaster, especially in light of our country's own response to a disaster like Hurricane Katrina and the fact that LA sits in the middle of earthquake country. The show plays through Sunday.
Two Saturdays ago, Susan invited me to see COLEMAN LEMIEUX & COMPAGNIE (Nov 10, 7:30pm), a French-Canadian modern dance troupe from Montreal who performed a mixed bill of contemporary choreography by James Kudelka, National Ballet of Canada's principal choreographer and former artistic director. Contemporary here is used in opposition to the pointe-shoe, classical stuff that might be seen at NBOC or even American Ballet Theatre. My previous exposure to Kudelka's work has been through the ballet companies, so this was an interesting other side to see. I didn't like the first piece on the program very much, "Fifteen Heterosexual Duets," which seemed more like fifteen run-of-the-mill modern dance duets than anything with any specific or even 'heterosexual' meaning. "Soudain, l’hiver dernier," a short duet for two men was much more interesting: there was a non-sexual subtext to this dance, as one man clung to the other out of some undefined need. The soundtrack had the voice of an old man singing the same melody repeatedly, perhaps it had something to do with an old person clinging to a younger one? "In Paradisium" closed the program with a rush of energy. The piece kept moving and moving and building and building through its three movements, set to a pulsing new-agey score by Michael J. Baker. The show was at Theatre Raymond Kabbaz on the campus of Le Lycee Francais de Los Angeles, which I didn't even know existed, so discovering this new theater was part of the fun of seeing the show. The theater itself isn't ideal for dance, though - a poor rake in the auditorium made it hard to see over people's heads, so I sat on the armrests in the last row in order to see - but it was intimate nevertheless. James Kudelka himself put in an appearance to watch the show.
When I first saw Alan Bennett's play THE HISTORY BOYS on Broadway, it was after the hype machine had already processed it, declaring it The Best Play, Like, Ever. I found it overwrought and talky, despite highly engaging performances from the brilliant original cast (maybe the performances were what threw the New York theater intelligentsia into hysterics?). So it's not like I jumped at the opportunity to see the current production at the Ahmanson Theatre - the first major stateside production after Broadway - but I went anyway. This time, though (Nov 13, 8pm), I was prepared for it to be talky, so I was able to focus more on play's discussion of a some probing themes: the nature of education and how "one size fits all" doesn't work for everyone, the various trials and tribulations of growing up, the nature of history and how it can be presented, and for that matter, how education is presented. It's certainly a "smart" play with all that Britishness and academic blabber, but still there are times that the play heads in too many directions at once. As for the production, the big question here is whether or not this cast will live up to the original one, and for the most part, this American cast holds its own. The put-on accents are pretty passable (the glaring exception being the headmaster role), and as the older teachers, Dakin Matthews and Charlotte Cornwell make remarkable individual interpretations of roles that live in the shadow of their creators (Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour, respectively). Of the boys, Alex Brightman and Seth Numrich, as Posner and Dakin, made the best impressions. I found myself enjoying the show much more this time around, perhaps because I wasn't sitting there scratching my head, going "This is it? The best play on Broadway?" (Nov 13, 8pm)*
And a few other straggler reviews from more than a few weeks ago...
I'd long ago decided that most CIRQUE DU SOLEIL shows are all the same thing, just wrapped up in different, pretty packaging. And with ticket prices ever increasing, it's hard to convince myself to plop down my own money for it. But when somebody else does? Well, the situation changes. Anyway, regardless of who paid for my ticket, Cirque's newest tent show CORTEO (Oct 3, 8pm) was extremely enjoyable. Cirque du Soleil is never just about acrobats and trapeze artists: it's always a full on theatrical spectacle. And Corteo's spectacle, created and directed by Guy Laliberté, is particularly mesmerizing in its fluidity and its dreamlike imagery of angels, beds and large balloons that sail slowly through the sky. Staged inside Cirque's traveling tent village (its no longer a single tent nowadays) - which, in LA, was pitched at the Forum parking lot at Inglewood - the show's imagery falls back on lore of the old traveling circus. A dreaming clown imagines his own colorful funeral procession, with his circus friends and angels hovering overhead. The stage is a long platform that divides the in-the-round auditorium in two, and a complicated rigging system hangs above, allowing the various flying things - the aforementioned angels, scenery, acrobats - to smoothly transition on and off. It's clear a lot of work went into the technical wizardry, and it's a huge part of the show's appeal that such amazing spectacle is pulled off so effortlessly. The tech crew even gets a curtain call of its own! The acts themselves are reliably applause-worthy, with the heart of the show in the antics two "little people" - one is so small that she flies up when balloons are attached to her - who both clown and do acrobatics. The show does falter somewhat at the end: all the creative energy seems to run out of steam and the show just suddenly stops instead of getting an appropriate finale, but overall, Corteo is still pretty great for an evening's entertanment - a truly theatrical spectacle on a grand scale. The circus is currently set up at the Orange County fairgrounds.
I saw BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY the same weekend as Fall for Dance in Orange County, except that I had come down with a cold by this time and thus viewed the show from within a misty cloud. Bill T. Jone's works are more full on dance theater than typical concert dance, and in BLIND DATE (Oct 12, 8pm), there was talking, poetry, projections, projections of poetry, film clips and live singing in addition to the contemporary and contact improv choreography. (This theatricality is especially interesting to observe in light of Jones' Tony win for choreographing the musical Spring Awakening.) The poetry and spoken text had a lot about individual cultural identity, and also spoke of anti-war things - one long passage simply stated statistics of human death from either a war, genocide or natural disaster. I'm not going to venture an interpretation for the evening's over arching theme because I spent plenty of time trying to catch my running nose, but I will say that I was thoroughly engaged - visually - by the stage activity the whole time. The most interesting part was an improvised movement game: two dancers walked around on the stage, one screamed "ME!", fell backward towards the floor, and the other ran over to catch the other before completely falling. This game continued as more and more dancers entered the stage - when one dancer (chosen at random by hand draw backstage) cried "Me," everyone on stage rushed over to catch him/her. It was a game, yes, but in the context of the piece, one could see it as a representation of individual cries for help and the community that rushes to support the cry.
Michael John LaChiusa's LITTLE FISH (Oct 10, 8pm preview) is about a woman who tries to quit smoking, an experience which drives her to say, "I never knew what I was really like until I tried to quite smoking." Traits of "really like" include insecurity, an inability to show compassion, and a whole host of other faults that nevertheless end up making the character endearingly human - to the audience anyway. Little Fish is one of those "post-modern" musicals (I steal that term from a Playbill feature article that lumped LaChiusa, Jason Robert Brown and Adam Guettel into this category) where the world is hardly cheery and rosy, and where the songs are more introspective and, well, gritty than in a R&H show. In Little Fish, the story comes at us in a stream of consciousness fashion, zipping back and forth between the present and the past as bumps in the story remind the main character of this or that. The Blank Theater Company's production, directed by Kirsten Sanderson, whisks us along through this all very quickly, before any of it become depressing or sad - and we get to languish more on her hope to improve herself. The whole thing becomes a nice study of people trying to figure out who they are. A very strong cast puts a cap on it all: Alice Ripley (from Side Show on Broadway) and Chad Kimball - both pictured above - made particularly strong impressions. The show was very intimate by nature of the space: a 53-seat hole in the wall room with seats and a set shoved inside - to go to the bathroom you had to walk across the stage. But still, they did some great stuff in there. The Blank has been particularly good to LaChiusa's work; two years ago The Wild Party got a fantastic staging at the Hudson Mainstage across the street. And now, LaChiusa apparently liked the Blank's Little Fish enough to use them cast for a cast album.Photos credits -- Damn Yankees: Michael Lamont, En Un Sol Amarillo: Craig Schwartz, Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie in Fifteen Heterosexual Duets: Michael Slobodian, The History Boys: Craig Schwartz, Cirque du Soleil: Marie-Reine Mattera, Bill T. Jones: Paul B. Goode, Little Fish with Alice Ripley and Chad Kimball: From the Blank Theatre Company web site.
More Turkey weekend blog catch-up to come: Pina Bausch at UCLA.
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