Whew. I'm still lagging about a week behind in this New Year. Not a lot of theatre on the brain lately, I'm afraid--though at the periphery, certainly. I'm excited to see that this coming August the Blank Theatre Company will do the West Coast premiere of The Wild Party, Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe's adaptation of the saucy 1920s poem, which starred Toni Collette and Mandy Patinkin on Broadway and will star Valarie Pettiford here--the sultry Julie of the Ahmanson's Show Boat. This is producer/director Daniel Henning's third LaChiusa local premiere, following Hello Again and First Lady Suite. Is it too much to hope for Marie Christine starring Jennifer Leigh Warren? Just asking...
I'm intrigued by the subject, director, cast, and location of Tom Jacobson's new The Orange Grove, coming up in a few weeks. To wit: It will be performed at Lutheran Church of the Master in Westwood, it's directed by Jessica Kubzansky, features such actors as Tom Beyer, Joshua Wolf Coleman, Bonita Friedericy, Don Oscar Smith (and others whose names sound familiar but whose work I don't know as well), and--oh--the subject: a Lutheran church in Los Angeles whose congregation dwindles from hundreds to a handful. It's produced by Playwrights Arena and is apparently adapated from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Would it be un-Lutheran of me to worry that my faith tradition will sustain a few bruises in the process? No matter--with this pedigree, I can't stay away...
Exits and Entrances, one of last year's most world-beating productions, will have its first out-of-town production, at the Ensemble Theatre Company of Santa Barbara, Feb. 4-20. Now what about Off-Broadway?...
There's a reassuring if tentative interview in the new LA Stage with Michael Ritchie, incoming artistic director of Center Theatre Group. Most encouraging is his apparent awareness that L.A.'s theatre scene extends beyond Bunker Hill, and has nothing to be ashamed of...
I didn't catch up with many movies in theatres, though my new DVD player got a workout. The documentary Hell House let me in on more of the background of last year's semi-hit Hollywood Hell House, which lifted various elements from the Texas Assemblies of God church's annual scare-fest, as seen in the movie. The Hollywood version was intended as a straight-faced parody, but I still don't know if this stuff is funny or not...
And I finally caught up with the HBO film of Angels in America, which I realized I had to see after reading John Lahr's recent New Yorker profile of Tony Kushner. The piece promised to discuss the playwright's unique brand of political theatre but ended up giving instead a vivid portrait of his stubborn idiosyncrasies. It circumstantially confirmed what I feared about why, despite several rewrites and restagings, Homebody/Kabul has remained a rambling, torturous slog--clearly no one could persuade Kushner to cut it, or to radically re-think it. I'm gratified, though, for Caroline, or Change, and happy to know that Kushner considers it his best work.
Particularly since the TV miniseries of Angels proves to be such a disappointment--not primarily because of any inherent weaknesses in the original material, which manages to glimmer through despite the film's epic missteps. It's more a matter of casting and tone: Director Mike Nichols had everyone underplay so coolly that most of the play's ebullient, unseemly humor is leached out, and most damagingly from the two characters whose sense of humor in desparate times is their central charm. These would be Roy Cohn, played by Al Pacino as a cackling gargoyle with his own private stash of evil glee he's not sharing with anyone, least of all the inexplicably adoring young Mormon lawyer Joe (the extraordinary Patrick Wilson, in the series' most revelatory performance), and Prior Walter, the play's gayest and fiercest survivor, in which part the strapping, glaringly straight Justin Kirk struggles nobly and entirely in vain. I think Angels will survive as a play, if future productions--like the one I caught on Broadway years ago--can reconnect with the paradoxically serious laughter of the maddening, inspiring figure of Kushner himself.
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