STAGE: A Strange Loop

A Strange Loop is, well, a strange loop indeed. This meta-musical is a play about a fat gay black writer trying to write a play about a fat gay black writer trying to write a play about … well, you get the idea. Before A Strange Loop, one could scarcely imagine how many internalized phobias, how much baggage a fat gay black theatre-geek wannabe writer might be carrying around. But now you don’t have to, because this play shows you all the baggage in explicit (sometimes painfully explicit) vivid detail, leavened by energetic music and clever funny lyrics. The protagonist, called Usher, lives in Queens and works as an usher for The Lion King on Broadway. The six other actors on stage are all shape-shifting meta-characters, acting out various scenarios from Usher’s colorful imagination. Some of these meta-characters are completely abstract (“Good morning, internalized self-loathing”). Other scenes illustrate imagined conversations with his family (in which his meta-father is called Mufasa and his meta-mother Sarabi, the names of Simba’s lion parents from The Lion King), showing us the disappointment of his father, his parents’ fears of HIV, and the prayers of his mother that Usher’s play will be some mix of gospel and a Tyler Perry show. (It’s quite a scene when that comes to life in his head.) This poor guy is certainly dealing with a lot of shit when even his fantasies end up disappointing and demeaning him. It’s a strange combination of heaviness with music and comedy that could only work in theatre. It is a loop in that Usher ends where he begins, wondering how his play will end, none of his issues really resolved, except that we’ve all watched him explore all his issues in his head, a communal theatrical therapy session. It was strange being made to laugh as this guy is baring his inner demons. In the end, it was provocatively entertaining, there were very talented performers on stage, and I was glad I saw it.

STAGE: The Rhythm of Mourning

Last Thursday, we saw The Rhythm of Mourning by the Bethesda Rep company. On a bare stage with minimal props, a strong cast, with some subtle but effective lighting, costume, and choreography, tells a powerful story about loss and grief. At first we see a woman wordlessly express mixed feelings about the space she has just entered. She is soon followed by a handful of other characters who are talking about her like a kind of Greek chorus, except that Greek choruses spoke with a unified voice, and these characters are arguing with each other. Before long, it becomes clear (if you hadn’t already noticed from the cast of character names in the program – Anxiety, Shame, Hope, Innocence, Anger, Denial, etc) that what we are witnessing is the grieving woman’s internal struggle, her mental wrestling made manifest as a whole cast of emotions and stages of grief. It’s a powerful device deployed to great effect in this production, as the audience slowly learns who she lost, and how, what that person meant to her, and why this place she has entered is so fraught, all while we watch her movingly move her way toward an uncertain closure. We caught it at the Bethesda Rep’s home stage, but there will be a half-dozen more performances through June as part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Check it out!

STAGE: A Transparent Musical

A Transparent Musical, playing at the Mark Taper through June 25, bills itself as a “timely new musical that’s delightfully queer, unapologetically Jewish, and radically joyful.” I think we’d agree with all of that. It was a fitting part of celebrating Pride month. The story (based on characters from the Amazon Prime series “Transparent”, which we never saw) starts with a father summoning her three adult children to come out to them as transgender woman, and the family dynamics that ensue when she comes out publicly at the Jewish Community Center’s Purim spiel. The play really pops in the second act, when multiple characters reveal secret challenges, uncles are lost, nephews are found, and the ghost of Magnus Hirschfeld is summoned. (Hirschfeld was a German physician/researcher and pioneering advocate for sexual minorities in pre-WWII Germany.) Some uncomfortable parallels between Weimar Germany and our present are drawn, as the story takes some unexpected turns to a more joyful and hopeful end. I really appreciated the illumination of some of the transgender experience, like the songs “I’m Here, But Not In My Body” and “What’s In A Name?”  What really gave the play some great color and power was the array of actual trans and non-binary actors performing in both trans and cisgender roles. The Playbill was a panoply of pronouns and it gave the show an extra dimension that underscored its message. We were very happy to have caught this show before it ends.

STAGE: Matthew Bourne's Romeo & Juliet

George and I went to the ballet tonight, thanks to Center Theatre Group's Digital Stage program. Matthew Bourne’s choreography never fails to be breathtaking, and when combined with a creative reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet set to Prokofiev’s dramatic score, the result is riveting. Two very talented and very young dancers, Cordelia Braithwaite and Paris Fitzpatrick, bring to life the star-crossed lovers. Their dance duets are charged with passion and energy, with effortless gravity-defying moves that make you wonder whether there aren’t hidden strings. Their fluidity is amazing, and in one remarkable scene they carry off their pas de deux in a prolonged lip-locked kiss. The tale is made contemporary, and reset in some kind of mental institution with an abusive guard, and it is a darker more twisted version of the classic tragedy. But the beauty of the music and the movement captivates with hope for the young lovers right up to their doomed end.

STAGE: What the Constitution Means to Me

Our Constitution, written over 200 years ago, is the most long-lived written constitution in history, and remains perhaps one of the few things nearly all Americans can agree on revering, even as we disagree sometimes vehemently on the specifics of its interpretation. That reverence and that tension are at the heart of the show What the Constitution Means to Me, an autobiographical memoir by Heidi Schreck, who recreates her experience as 15-year old girl delivering competitive speeches on the Constitution at VFW halls for scholarship prizes, then breaks into her present-day 45-year old self to make some more mature reflections on our founding document. Schreck performed her own play for a highly-regarded run in New York, while actress Maria Dizzia has very capably stepped into the role of “Heidi Schreck” for the touring production that we saw at the Mark Taper. In the first part, 15-year old Heidi breathlessly and enthusiastically expounds on her favorite amendments, the Ninth and the Fourteenth (admittedly some of my favorites too), and makes a personal connection (as was required by the contest rules) to her great-grandmother, a German immigrant mail-order bride. There is little to none of a “fourth wall” in this play. Heidi begins by addressing the audience, Shakespeare prologue style, asking us to engage in the re-enactment by pretending to be elderly men in a late 1980s VFW hall. While being “15-year old Heidi”, she occasionally pops out of character for a bit of commentary. This happens more and more, until at some point she drops the 15-year old altogether, and just talks to us directly as herself with 30 years more life experience. (There is some amusing playfulness with theatrical conventions around these transitions, like pointing out that she forgot to include a door in her recreation of the VFW stage, and poking fun at a secondary character who is stranded on the doorless stage when she decides, seemingly impromptu, to drop the fourth wall.) Here is where it gets more interesting as idealization of the Constitution gives way to a more mature realization of its imperfections and limitations as she confronts her own reproductive decisions, as she learns some shocking history of abuse endured by her mother, aunt, and grandmother, and as she rethinks what may really have befallen her immigrant great-grandmother who died at 36 of “melancholia”. The mature Heidi comes to question how well a 232-year old document can give women and other unprotected groups their due when the document doesn’t even mention them, and didn’t even originally envision them as included as citizens nor even as “the people”. At this point, the only logical next step is to stage a debate on the proposition to keep the Constitution or to abolish it and start over. A precocious actual 14-year old girl then comes on stage to engage in a lively debate with Heidi for the final part of the show, but not before putting the audience into the right frame of mind by dividing us with a thought-provoking show of hands. The debate is rapid-fire and compelling, and the winner, as judged by a random audience member, could be different on any given night. It certainly leaves you with something to think about. My favorite quote: "Justice Scalia said that he couldn't tell you what the Ninth Amendment meant if his life depended on it. And I guess it didn't." (The line is an early comic toss-off but with more profound meaning in the larger context of the play.)

Oh, and I forgot to mention the bonus: everyone in the audience was given a pocket Constitution to keep!

STAGE: The Last Ship

The musician Sting grew up in the shadows of the shipyards of Wallsend, near Newcastle in northeast England. His stage musical The Last Ship, now playing at the Ahmanson at the start of a national tour, draws on that heritage and experience in telling a multi-layered story of what happens to a small community whose livelihood and whole way of life is bound up with one industry, when that industry is in decline. There are some personal stories in here, about children who want to escape the town, and who chafe against stepping into their fathers’ boots and working in the shipyard like their fathers and grandfathers. And there is a romance suspended when one young man did escape. But the crux of this haunting work is about the shipyard workers and their families, and how they react when the last shipyard is closing down and the last nearly-completed ship is to be torn up for scrap rather than finished. There are some wonderful songs and strong performances in this evocative production, further bolstered by a marvelous set which, through clever use of lighting and projection, transforms from home to pub to shipyard to ship to a seawall where you can see and almost feel the spray of the waves crashing up on it. Though some complained that the show is long, we enjoyed it and found the music, story, and characters engaging. And though it’s set in a specific distant place and time (1980s England), I found it quite relevant and thought-provoking. On the surface, it is a simple union workers versus “the man” story with no pretense about where its sympathies lay. The good salt-of-the-earth union folks are distinct, fleshed-out characters that we get to know and like, while the owner/manager appears just enough to propel the plot, and the government is represented by “Baronet Tynedale”, a thinly veiled caricature of Margaret Thatcher. But the play is actually more thoughtful, giving some depth to the predicament. The workers understand their dilemma, acknowledging that they have only bad choices, and even understanding (while trying not to think about it) that the shipyard may actually come to an end. And while the baronet is cold and charmless, it’s hard to argue with the facts of economic reality that she delivers. There’s no buyer for the ship they’re building because it’s too expensive, and British shipbuilding is no longer competitive on the world market. It is no small irony that this last ship’s name is Utopia, as it is going nowhere. The climax of the show manages to be dramatically very satisfying, while also giving due to the unresolved socio-economic issues that linger. I was still thinking about them days later, even as some of the tunes still sang in my head.

STAGE: The New One

This evening we saw The New One at the Ahmanson Theatre. I hardly stopped laughing this entire show, so I need a moment to catch my breath. If you’re a fan of This American Life, you’ve probably heard Mike Birbiglia before. With his voice and his delivery, he could read a phone book and make it funny, so when he’s really got something to say, it’s hysterical. In this show, he relates his experience of reluctantly becoming a father. Those things that all new fathers probably think at one time or another but would never dare say out loud, he says out loud. And it’s so funny because it’s so true and ultimately so humane. Birbiglia is a stand-up comic by nature, and he turns the Ahmanson into a comedy club, deftly drawing in a few low-hanging audience members into his act. The stage and show are largely devoid of props and set, just a stool, except for one point where props come in to great effect. If you have kids, or if you know people who have kids, or if you’re dead set against ever being around kids, you’ll enjoy this show tremendously.

STAGE: Skintight

We were very glad to have caught the last night of Joshua Harmon’s Skintight at the Geffen Playhouse. It was funny, clever, and leaves you with things to ponder that stay with you after you’ve stopped laughing. Of course it was a treat to see Idina Menzel, who has been with the show since even before the off-Broadway run. (At this point in her career, this is something she would only be doing for the love of it.) Skintight is a very modern family drama. Menzel plays Jodi, whose freshly ex-husband has just married the half-his-age aerobics instructor that he left Jodi for. The play opens with Jodi dropping in on her father, Elliot (Harry Groener), a long-widowed-and-now-gay billionaire fashion designer (a Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger type), ostensibly to surprise him for his birthday, but really just looking for some support. Her studying-abroad son Ben (Eli Gelb), also gay, is coming in for the weekend as well. Elliot lives a very ordered life and doesn’t care for surprises, but Jodi’s about to get a surprise herself. Her father’s latest “partner” Trey (Will Brittain) is 20 years old, the same age as her son. That set-up is a rich vein to mine for both drama and laughs, and this play runs with both. Can one love beauty, or is that just lust? Are relationships all transactional at bottom? What do parents owe children, and what do children owe parents? These are just some of the questions that Harmon smuggles in with the comedy, along with a funny observation about the Ten Commandments, and why tens of thousands of Hungarians might have a Jewish name embossed on their skin. Skin turns out to be a running theme, appearing throughout the play figuratively, metaphorically, and literally: Skin as in the depth of beauty, skin as the beauty of youth and betrayer of age (botox notwithstanding), the skin that Trey unreservedly shows off. Skin as a symbol of kinship, the relationships you’re born with and cannot shed. It’s all there in two acts and a great ensemble performance.

STAGE: Latin History for Morons

John Leguizamo is a vivacious and compelling teacher in his one-man show “Latin History for Morons”, playing now at the Ahmanson. The motivating premise for this “lesson” is that Leguizamo’s young son is getting bullied at school for being a “beaner” while struggling with an assignment to find a historical hero to write about. As a father, John despairs at the lack of Latinx heroes in his son’s history textbooks, prompting him to do some reading of his own. Thus ensues a lively recount of Latin contributions to American history, going back to Inca and Mayan roots, to undersung characters like Loreta Janeta Velázquez, a Cuban-American woman who disguised herself as a man to fight in the Civil War. The lesson is filled with a barrage of laughs, and I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever sat with a more “live” audience who were laughing out loud, whooping, and applauding with gusto. Amidst the laughs, you’ll pick up some interesting information you may not have known, and it might leave you a bit more thoughtful about the importance of visibility and representation.

STAGE: The Play That Goes Wrong

Sometimes we go to the theatre to be moved, inspired, or challenged, but sometimes we just go to be entertained and have a good hearty laugh. The Play That Goes Wrong, now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre, delivers the latter in spades. We laughed heartily and non-stop. This play is about an earnest but hapless college drama society attempting to stage a murder mystery play, and “Murder at Haversham Manor” (the play within the play) is as brilliant a drama as Fawlty Towers is a hotel. The mayhem begins even before the play officially begins, with last minute set repairs laid bare, and “production staff” roving the audience in search of last minute props and a lost dog, and even drawing an audience member or two into the gags as semi-witting participants. Every conceivable angle of “so bad it’s good” acting is mined, along with every form of actor’s nightmares, from forgotten lines, missing props, missed cues, dialog loops, and set malfunctions. Despite a cavalcade of mishaps, the unstoppable actors rally to their hilarious conclusion. The prowess of the actual actors in executing such extraordinary timing and physical comedy feats is impressive, rivaled only by the stage set itself which is an amazing piece of comic machinery. Not since Noises Off has a watching a play go wrong been such good fun.

STAGE: Lackawanna Blues

Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s one-man (plus guitarist) show Lackawanna Blues is a remarkable performance, an engaging memoir in which he recreates the scenes and characters of his growing up in an extraordinary boardinghouse in 1950s upstate New York. With an absent father and a mother barely in the picture, Ruben was effectively raised by “Nanny”, an indomitable woman who ran several boarding houses and a car service, who played angel of mercy to countless humans and animals in need, and who seemed to run her own 1950s “underground railroad” from her native Virginia to Lackwanna when the metal of the rust belt was gleaming new and industrial jobs were plentiful. Nanny is the heart and soul of the play, but given definition by the great variety of characters who populated the boardinghouse, and their stories. With minimal sets and props, just with changes in voice and posture, Santiago-Hudson brings to life a kaleidoscope of characters on stage, painting a vivid picture of how these people were, and how they appeared in the eyes of a young boy. Through most of this, Chris Thomas King sits on a stool on the side, playing out the blues music of Bill Sims Jr., providing the soundtrack for this story as well as the occasional sound effect. Santiago-Hudson’s delivery is subtly and deftly married to the music, mostly natural speech but sometimes falling into rhythmic patter, and occasionally punctuated by a harmonica solo, but at every point authentic blues. By the end of the play, you felt like Nanny’s boardinghouse was a kind of family, and you’d just got to meet them all. This point was brought home by a gallery of actual photographs, a family album of sorts, on display in the lobby, which so many of us in the audience lingered after the show, delighted to see photos of people we felt like we’d gotten to know.

STAGE: Cinderella

I had seen Matthew Bourne's Cinderella twenty years ago when it opened, and was delighted to see it again. The choreography is riveting, a perfect match to the jaunty and evocative Prokofiev music. The dancers seemed at times to defy gravity and physiology, sometimes floating in air, sometimes bending at odd angles, other times bending fluidly as if they were a liquid being poured from one space to another. All of it served to wordlessly convey the characters in the story, from the creepy unctuousness of the step-brothers and the imperious evil of the step-mother, to the reticence turned blossoming of Cinderella and the desperation of the pilot after he’s lost her. The Cinderella story is of course well known, but it has been creatively re-set into London 1940, where Cinderella (who has step-brothers as well as step-sisters) meets a handsome RAF pilot and then they get separated in the confusion of the Blitz. The staging is fantastic, beautifully conjuring WWII London, complete with the sounds of bombers flying overhead and air raid sirens. The Act II ballroom scene is a marvelous showcase of dancing followed by a beautiful pas de deux between Cinderella and the pilot. The “angel” (the fairy godfather?) has some breathtaking moves. What a feast for the eyes and ears.

STAGE: America Adjacent

Being the home of “the industry” and thanks to actor’s union rules, LA is blessed with a bounty of 99-seat theatres, often providing high quality productions. I was treated to some of that on Sunday at the Skylight Theatre in Los Feliz. America Adjacent is set in a small one-bedroom apartment somewhere near Hollywood, packed with six Filipino women and a couple of babies, all confined to the apartment. The women are all pregnant or recently delivered, coming to America so their children will have the advantage of US citizenship. While such a play could have easily verged into polemic, this script (by Boni Alvarez) focuses on the very human stories of these women, why they came, what they hope, and how they cope with being confined in such close quarters. Their backgrounds and situations vary. One is rural and naïve, one is religious, one is more educated, some are conformists and peacemakers while others are risk takers and rule breakers, but all share sacrificing for the sake of their children. It is engaging and moving, and I am glad I saw it.

On Sundays, Skylight Theatre presents a conversation series immediately after the show, and this Sunday’s guest was none other than Jose Antonio Vargas, whose book Dear America I had just read. Being a Filipino undocumented immigrant, he clearly had much to relate to in this play, and talked about the experience of being “TNT”. The Tagalog phrase tago ng tago, which means being in constant hiding (literally “hiding and hiding”), abbreviated TNT, is slang for an undocumented person. Until you hear stories like these women or Vargas being TNT, you don’t appreciate the psychological toll it can take. In the conversation, several people also spoke of how powerful it was for them to see a play with Filipino actors playing Filipino characters, not something often seen. (As a gay man of a certain age, I can relate to that.)

STAGE: Love's Labour's Lost

Rounded out our Oregon Shakespeare Festival with a rollicking production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. We anticipated fun when we laid eyes on the eccentric set, and the show filled the promise. Who knew the Bard wrote a rock musical? The costumes were clever too, playing on the color imagery in the language, all white at first, increasingly splashed with tempera paints, then all red in Act IV, and all black at the end. A fair amount of ad libbing suits this play, including a bit with a smartphone. Such good fun!

STAGE: Romeo and Juliet (OSF)

Just back from a marvelous production of Romeo and Juliet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Elizabethan Theatre. Very well acted, beautifully staged. That beautiful language, and so heartbreaking no matter how many times you see it. "My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, for both are infinite."

STAGE: Waitress

The heroine of the musical Waitress is Jenna, who works at a diner in an unnamed southern town, and has a creative genius for making pies with fanciful names and unexpected combinations of ingredients. This show takes an unexpected combination of ingredients – an abusive husband, an unwanted pregnancy, extramarital affairs, women trapped by hard economic circumstances – and bakes all of that into an unexpectedly delicious feast for the eyes, ears, and heart. The choreography is impressive, with the cast dancing around and the diner’s tables, tray carts, and pantry shelves often playing moving parts in the dance. The Sara Bareilles tunes are charming with witty lyrics that define the characters and propel the story, and Desi Oakley as Jenna does a great job serving them up with impressive stylings like falls and runs near the end of big long notes. Charity Angél Dawson was sassy as Jenna’s friend and co-worker Becky, and shined in her big number “I Didn’t Plan It” at the top of Act Two. And Oakley has some lovely duets with Bryan Fenkart (Dr. Pomatter), particularly “A Really Good Bad Idea” at the end of Act One. Despite some dark and heavy themes, there’s enough sugar in this pie to balance it. I smiled a lot and laughed, including a couple tipping-head-back roaring laughs, at the same time as appreciating its more serious commitments, but it is dessert in the end. If you have a chance to catch this while it’s still at the Pantages (through Aug 26), we recommend it.

STAGE: The Band's Visit

Saw another wonderful musical this evening, The Band’s Visit, along a similar theme to yesterday’s show, of a small town unexpectedly hosting foreign visitors. In this case, an Egyptian police orchestra heading for an Israeli cultural exchange program ends up in the wrong town, and spends the night. It’s an inventive excuse for some great Arab music, charming vignettes of characters in a remote town, and sultry songs.

STAGE: Come From Away

Another fantastic musical this evening, Come From Away. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, dozens of airplanes were diverted to the small town of Gander, Newfoundland, a remote part of Canada, where a town of 7000 people unexpectedly hosted thousands of confused passengers for several days before US airspace was reopened. This moving and charming musical tells that story, as a great ensemble of a dozen actors plays several dozen roles. Who knew such a heartfelt evening of theatre, and such a heartwarming tale of hospitality could come from the world’s worst air travel experience. After the show hanging out at the stage door to greet the actors, we met a couple who traveled from Newfoundland to see this show. They were getting the cast to autograph a Newfoundland flag. Such nice people, just like in the show!

STAGE: Dear Evan Hansen

This evening we saw Dear Evan Hansen, the winner of last year’s Tony for Best Musical and five other Tony awards. The award-winning lead actor was recently replaced by Taylor Trensch, who we’d seen in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Don’t know what that other guy was like, but the new guy is outstanding. What a great show, very moving, an original gripping story, and great performances all around. Of course we hung out at the stage door to greet the stars.
(Update 10/2018: We loved this show so much we saw it again when it came to LA.)

STAGE: Bent

We saw some breathtaking theatre last Saturday at the Mark Taper, in their production of Bent by Martin Sherman. The play is a powerful, horrifying chronicle of gay life in Germany during the rise of the Nazis. It begins in the liberal, decadent Berlin of the 1930's (picture Cabaret), but where Cabaret merely gestures at the horror to come, Bent actually takes us there, as the play's protagonist, Max, goes on the run, is captured, and ultimately transported to Dachau. Max does what he needs to do to stay alive in the grip of captors with a vicious talent for treatment calculated to lacerate one's soul and strip one's humanity. There was a moment when Max was broken like Winston at the end of Orwell's 1984, yet this story goes beyond that moment as Max, through Horst, a man he meets on the transport, learns to rediscover and reclaim his humanity and dignity even in the face of evil. The arc of this story is heart-stopping, and the enactment of it that we saw on Saturday night was gripping. The performances were all electric and spot-on, particularly Patrick Heusinger and Charlie Hofheimer as Max and Horst, and Will Taylor as Rudy, and all the rest of the cast. The direction by Moisés Kaufman was fantastic, so creatively realizing this story, and pulling out all the stops of the theatre craft. The stage, lighting, and especially the sound were used to marvelous effect (such as creating a train just from sound and light).

This play originally premiered in 1979, illuminating the previously little-known persecution of gays under the Nazis, and establishing the pink triangle as a reclaimed symbol of gay pride. Thirty-five years later, it remains as relevant as ever. One of the most frightening things was just realizing how quickly a liberal society can be taken over by jackboots. Germany in the early 1930s was not so different from America in the 1970s or even now for that matter, and yet how quickly complacent liberals fell under the boot. (I'm currently reading a book that tells a similar story of Tehran circa 1980.) I know that several memorable scenes from this play will haunt me: the SS bursting into Max and Rudy's apartment, when Max is forced to betray his own love, the amazing scenes of Max and Horst making love without moving or touching each other, and the electrifying end.