Can LA theater match the drama in DC?
'Cambodian Rock Band,' "Fake It,' 'Four Women,' 'Noises Off,' 'Desperate Measures,' 'Macbeth,' 'Twelfth,' 'Sondheim's Old Friends', 'Harry Potter'. Barbara Beckley, R.I.P.
Are you looking for a theatrical production that might reflect on our country’s current mood of tension and trauma? Or are you trying to escape all that? Or both?
Many of us are on edge as the Trump/Musk team tries to slash services to the public, in open defiance of congressional appropriations — especially as the world’s richest man is the unelected slasher, determined to lower his own taxes and obtain more federal contracts.
Of course playwrights and theater companies have not yet had enough time to react to these events — unlike late-night comics or satirist Andy Borowitz and demonstrators in front of Tesla locations. However, as a drama critic, I’ll give Musk a few points for his decision to dramatize his cause by emulating one of the crazed villains from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” franchise.
Yet there is one stage production in LA right now that evokes — albeit obliquely — our current moment, even though it’s set not in the contemporary United States but in Cambodia during the 1970s. I’m referring to East West Players’ LA premiere of Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band,” in Little Tokyo.
I’m not claiming that Trump/Musk will morph into an Americanized Pol Pot, the violent Cambodian dictator who oversaw the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in the late ‘70s. Still, Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are no secret, and his admiration of the brutal Russian tyrant Putin — at the expense of Ukraine and its democratically elected Zelenskyy — exploded last week.
The world premiere of “Cambodian Rock Band” occurred at South Coast Repertory in 2018, with the same director and four members of the cast who are now performing at East West. Here is how I wrote about it then in LA Observed:
“Yee’s play is about a man who fled the Khmer Rouge in the ‘70s and managed to surface in Massachusetts. There, he raised an American daughter — all grown up in 2008 — who has returned to her father’s previous country in order to help prosecute a Khmer Rouge prison commandant. Little does she know about her father’s personal connection to this war criminal.
It sounds grim, and parts of it are indeed bleak. But the title is our big clue about how Yee manages to make this play lively in the face of death, joyful in the face of profound sorrow.
In a flashback to 1975 in Phnom Penh, the script focuses on the teenagers in an American-influenced rock band — including the future Massachusetts father, just before the Khmer Rouge took charge and enforced an ideology that forbade such Western lures as rock music. This emphasis on the band requires a cast who can credibly perform cover versions of early-‘70s Cambodian pop (and more recent but similarly inspired compositions by the LA-based band Dengue Fever) and then also portray themselves or other characters in 1978 and 2008.
Under the direction of Chay Yew, Joe Ngo does a remarkable double turn, toggling between the younger would-be rock star and the middle-aged immigrant and dad. Daisuke Tsuji plays only one role, the Khmer Rouge prison commandant, but he doesn’t have to age in it…Yee allows this character to stay young, cynically observing the events from a distance, in a style akin to the use of the emcee in ‘Cabaret.’
Nevertheless, with the valuable assistance of the musical stylings that managed to survive the Khmer Rouge, the play doesn’t seem cynical, nor does it even seem sentimental. It feels vibrantly alive.”
All of the above is still valid in the East West production (Yew is still directing, and Ngo and Tsuji are playing the same roles). But as I watched East West’s production, I felt more vague foreboding than I remember feeling in 2018 about the play’s resonance with what’s happening here today, particularly with art and artists.
After all, Trump appointed himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington — even though he never attended the Kennedy Centers Honors event during his previous presidency, after several honorees declined to attend the 2017 reception if he would be there.
His new press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared that “The Kennedy Center learned the hard way that if you go woke, you will go broke.” Yet in the aftermath of Trump’s self-appointment, the venue’s ticket sales fell by 50% and artists canceled scheduled performances.
Also, more broadly, arts organizations that want to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts should realize that DEI efforts will now be seen as defects.
Faking ‘It’ and Making ‘Noises’
Speaking of DEI (“diversity, equity, inclusion”), it’s the primary satirical target of “Fake It Until You Make It,” by Larissa FastHorse, at the Mark Taper Forum. As Steven Leigh Morris points out in Stage Raw, this emphasis makes the timing of this previously postponed production especially unfortunate. It would have been more stimulating to see a spoof of DEI during the Biden Administration, which was DEI-friendly, than it is to see it now — when the president himself wants DEI to be…dead, eliminated, incinerated.
However, the problems with “Fake It Until You Make It” go beyond bad timing. You might think that this first Taper play by a Native American (FastHorse is Sicangu Lakota) would speak substantively about Native Americans, but think again. “Fake It” is a farce — a genre that often results in having nothing significant to say about anything other than “what fools these mortals be!”
Unfortunately, this farce didn’t generate many laughs on opening night, and not only because DEI is no longer as juicy a target as it might have been before Trump returned to the White House.
The play is set in a shared space for several struggling non-profits, two of which are competing for the same grant. “The doors, offices and stairs all move, primarily through actor choreography,” according to the script’s lengthy description of the set. This staging is so complicated that it took far too long for me to get my bearings about who was who and what was where.
Director Michael John Garcés might try to endow the play with more clarity and a stronger funny bone in its next production. However, I won’t be going to see it at the co-producing Arena Stage in Washington DC, where it will open in early April (with Amy Brenneman in the “white savior” role instead of the Taper’s Julie Bowen).
In DC, it’s likely that any prospective spectators who compare the play’s lame satire to the much more satirically tempting stew that is currently running rampant within the White House, just a few blocks from Arena Stage, will find the play less interesting. But I’m looking forward to reading the reviews.
Also playing in LA right now are an additional indigenous-oriented play and one much better-known farce.
Laura Shamas’ (Chickasaw) “Four Women in Red,” at the Victory Theatre in North Hollywood, follows four Native women as they get to know each other while they are pursuing a common goal — finding female relatives and friends who have disappeared. Of course this is a more substantive subject than the topics discussed in “Fake It Until You Make It.” But the total focus on the four searchers — with no onstage representation of the victims, the officials, or even the possible perps — feels somewhat restrictive and static.
The other farce in LA is “Noises Off,” at the Geffen Playhouse — one more revival of the 1982 backstage farce by Michael Frayn. He reportedly got the idea for it while watching another farce from the wings, and finding it “funnier from behind than in front.” So he wrote a farce in three acts. We first observe a tech rehearsal of a terrible (fictional) farce, “Nothing On,” from the front, then from backstage during a performance, then from the front again as the “Nothing On” tour is disintegrating.
Unfortunately, at least in Anna D. Shapiro’s staging, the second “from behind” act of Frayn’s play is the funniest and the third act feels somewhat superfluous, making me increasingly impatient as the noises kept going “on” instead of “off.” But then maybe I’ve seen too many productions of “Noises Off.” A Noise Within has staged it four times — beginning in Glendale in 2010, before the company moved to Pasadena.
By the way, this rendition of Frayn’s farce appeared first in Chicago last fall at the co-producing Steppenwolf Theatre, where Shapiro was once the artistic director (2015-2021). In the Chicago Tribune, critic Chris Jones’ reaction to it was lukewarm but he preferred the third act to the second.
Three takes on Shakespeare
In the first speech in “Desperate Measures,” at International City Theatre in Long Beach, a character comes right to the point of this musical, with book and lyrics by Peter Kellogg and music by David Friedman.
Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” she says, is “what they call a problem play/I saw the problem right away/Can’t understand half what they say/So we fixed up the words a lot/Plus we threw out half the plot/The storyline was too complex/But we kept all the parts with…sex.”
The original setting of the play, circa-1600 Vienna. has been changed to “the late 1800s somewhere out west” — which is to say, the American Wild West. In the primary surviving part of Shakespeare’s plot, a prospective nun (Gabbie Adner) can spare her condemned brother (Aaron Gibbs) from execution only if she has sex with a local authority figure (Christopher Karbo). Can she fool this lecherous governor by arranging for another woman (Madison Miyuki Sprague) to take the novitiate’s place in his bed?
This irreverent adaptation of a classic, replete with rhyming couplets even outside the songs, lacks the more serious quality of the original. Laughs and a happy ending for the characters that we like — including the local sheriff (Daniel A. Stevens) — are obviously the primary goals. But the final destiny of the novitiate is actually more satisfying and convincing here than it is in the original.
The performances, staged by Todd Nielsen and accompanied by a three-piece band directed by Daniel Gary Busby, are delightful, with some first-rate musical-theater voices propelling us toward that happy ending.
Meanwhile, the latest “Macbeth,” at A Noise Within, was announced as “set against the haunting backdrop of New Orleans from the late 19th century through the 1920s” — and this description is repeated in the printed program. So we’re prepared for a look at this much darker tragedy that could be almost as revisionist as the treatment of the “problem play” in “Desperate Measures.”
Yet the promoted update of “Macbeth” remains very spotty here. Wendell Carmichael’s costumes carry most of the century-ago load (but in one shirtless scene Kamal Bolden’s Macbeth looks more like a modern Macbuff). No geographical references have changed from the originals in Great Britain. When the characters talk about the king, they mean a royal Scot — not, say, the early New Orleans jazz musician King Oliver. Even Nicholas Santiago’s impressive “projection” designs look vaguely French Quarter-ish in only one scene. We hear muted music when the door opens during the dinner party, but it’s too brief and inaudible to identify it as, say, ragtime.
The most impressively audacious moment of Andi Chapman’s staging is the beginning, when a silent Lady Macbeth (Julanne Chidi Hill) sits on the stage, apparently cradling a sleeping newborn — until she suddenly throws open the swaddling clothes, which ascend with no baby in sight. The wordless suggestion is that the Macbeths have been unable to conceive a child. But the rest of the production feels anti-climactic, especially as it becomes distractingly obvious that its own announced setting is largely slighted.
A third entry in the current Shakespeare scene is “Twelfth Night,” directed by Armin Shimerman at Antaeus Theatre in Glendale. Kate Bergh’s whimsical, eye-catching costumes suggest the early 20th century even more than those in “Macbeth.” Most of the mirth arises from the usual sources — the secondary characters (played by Joel Swetow, Kitty Swink, Rob Nagle, Alberto Isaac and John Allee). But I can’t say that anything — other than perhaps the costumes — stands out as unusual. And the supposed resemblance between the play’s twin siblings isn’t remotely convincing.
The big tours — Sondheim and Potter
In the wake of Stephen Sondheim’s death in 2021, I wrote that LA should nurture a theater company explicitly devoted to the works of Stephen Sondheim. No one seized my suggestion and created such a company.
In the meantime, we have another Sondheim revue, “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” (the “Stephen” is absent from the title in the program yet appears elsewhere — I have no idea why), at the Ahmanson Theatre on its way from London to Broadway. It was “devised by” Cameron Mackintosh, directed by Matthew Bourne, featuring Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga as its two stars but also employing 17 other actors. They perform 40 songs, and the onstage orchestra plays the brilliant overture from “Merrily We Roll Along” as the entr’acte after the intermission.
I had a great time, even though I prefer Sondheim shows intact. Besides the two stars’ several turns, I especially appreciated the women’s seen-it-all solos, “The Ladies Who Lunch” sung by Beth Leavel and “I’m Still Here” sung by Bonnie Langford. One quibble — why was “The Road You Didn’t Take” from “Follies” missing? Although it’s sung by a male character, it registers deeply for anyone over 50 — which is to say, most Ahmanson subscribers.
A half-dozen Sondheim shows aren’t represented at all, but fortunately we’ve seen revivals of two of them — “Assassins” and “Pacific Overtures” — recently from East West Players.
Meanwhile, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is at our largest regularly-used theatrical venue, the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. As someone who never read a Potter novel or saw a Potter movie, I tried to prepare for the play by reading some of the many Potter articles in Wikipedia, including the article about this play in particular. But inside the theater, I soon felt lost at sea.
Sure, flashy effects abounded, but their overall impact gradually diminished — ho-hum, what’s one more flash of light or disappearing costume? It didn’t help that I was seated so far back that I could barely make out the actors' faces. At intermission I moved to a somewhat closer seat, but by then it was too late for me to become involved. I don’t understand why this is a play and not another movie — fans of the movies probably wouldn’t have to consult Wikipedia before attending and they could see details of the faces.
Barbara Beckley, R.I.P.
Barbara Beckley co-founded the Colony Theatre Company in 1975, originally at 1944 Riverside Drive in Elysian Valley (between the 5 freeway on the east and the Glendale Freeway on the west). As the company’s producing director and then its artistic director beginning in 1984, she became its most visible mover and shaker — almost literally, in fact, because she presided over its move in 2000 from its sub-100-seat venue (now the Elysian comedy club) to the Colony’s current 268-seat location at the Burbank Town Center. This was an important moment in the growth of LA’s midsize professional-theater scene (along with similar moves by four or five other companies).
“I don't know what motivated the other mid-size leaders to move up from 99 seats, but my number-one motivation was to be in a position to pay professional actors meaningful wages and benefits,” Beckley once wrote to me in an email.
An online article from American Theatre is how I learned, after my January post, that Beckley died on January 26. Written by playwright Doug Haverty, it’s a glowing tribute. Prospective nonprofit theater producers would be well advised to read it.
Here is a profile of Beckley that I wrote for the LA Times in 2002. And here is what the Colony sent regarding Beckley’s life, with plenty of photos.