Chills in 'Cabaret' X 2, fun in 'frou-frou'
'Blueberries,' 'Unreconciled,' 'Bacon,' 'Hamlet (Solus)' and more. Ron Sossi, R.I.P.
“What good is sitting alone in your room?”…when you could gather with others at one of two current revivals of “Cabaret,” in which Sally Bowles asks that musical question.
And inhaling “Cabaret” might inspire you to do something else outside your room — join a political protest, perhaps? After almost 60 years, “Cabaret” has never seemed more relevant to American audiences than it is right now, in the wake of the Trump administration’s ominous moves toward autocracy.
Of course, “Cabaret” is set at the dawn of the Nazi era in Germany, before Hitler had actually taken over. Parallels to our own situation right now are hardly precise. But it’s obvious that our president (and unelected co-president Musk) are trying to grab as much dictatorial power as possible, regardless of what the Constitution or the courts say. They’re also bent on reducing vital government services that benefit the larger public (Social Insecurity, anyone?), apparently in order to lower taxes for billionaires.
In other words, as you could hear at either “Cabaret” production, “Money makes the world go around.”
“Cabaret” began with a 1937 novella, “Sally Bowles,” by the British writer Christopher Isherwood, based on his relationship in early ‘30s Berlin with a young cabaret singer and aspiring actress, Jean Ross — who later rejected Sally’s disdain for “politics” and became an avid Stalinist journalist and film critic. Meanwhile, Isherwood moved to the US in 1939 and spent more than half of his life living and teaching in Greater LA. He died in his Santa Monica home in 1986.
In 1951, fellow Brit expat John Van Druten, who also eventually landed in southern California, adapted Isherwood’s Sally Bowles story into a non-musical play, “I Am a Camera,” which featured Julie Harris as Sally on Broadway. Then, in the early ‘60s, producer Harold Prince obtained the rights and hired writer Joe Masteroff, composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb to turn “I Am a Camera” into a musical, which opened on Broadway as “Cabaret” in 1966, under Prince’s direction.
Bob Fosse directed a screen adaptation, released in 1972, but for stage fans, the next major adaptations were the handiwork of director Sam Mendes, first in London in 1993 and then in 1998 in New York. That version arrived in LA in 1999 at the 1930-era Wilshire Theatre, where the large main floor was transformed into a cabaret-style configuration — with tables, chairs and upholstered benches.
One of the two current productions, at Jaxx Theatre in Hollywood (south side of Santa Monica Boulevard, just east of the 101 freeway) creates a more authentic impression of a rather sleazy cabaret, because it has only 50 seats, some of them at tables. Cocktails are available, named after songs from the show. Jaxx artistic director Jeremy Lucas plays the emcee as more physically robust than usual — he could double as the bouncer. However, with such limited seating capacity, the rest of the production appears to be sold out. Look for any signs of an extension or a revival.
The other current “Cabaret" is entering its final weekend at the 394-seat Scherr Forum (not at the much larger Kavli Theatre next door) in Thousand Oaks. As I write this, some tickets are still available. Because it’s in a midsize venue, just about any seat provides relatively close proximity to the action. Although you don’t feel you’re in a “sleazy cabaret” as much as at the Jaxx production, the Scherr’s width allows a more realistic backdrop — and a larger scope — for the many scenes that are set outside the cabaret.
Michael Matthews’ staging for 5-Star Theatricals features a more traditionally slim and sinuous Sean Samuels as the emcee. He holds up a snow globe at several moments, using it as a crystal ball, peering into the future — or at least that’s how I interpreted it. Well-known pros Valerie Perri and Ron Orbach play the landlady and her aging Jewish suitor.
The casting of Sally in the two productions is fascinating. If you want to be thrilled by the sound of a larger voice, Emily Goglia will oblige in Thousand Oaks. Jaxx’s Erin Lee Smith doesn’t match that power. But if you read about the origins of “Cabaret,” you discover that many of its creators, throughout its history, believed that Sally should sound like a desperate “second-rate” singer, in her off-and-on employment at the Kit Kat. Perhaps that quality was considered in preparations for the Jaxx rendition.
When Sally is getting to know the American novelist Cliff Bradshaw (Kyle Stocker at Jaxx, Connor Bullock at the Scherr), she momentarily mistakes one of his books as one of his novels, but it turns out to be “Mein Kampf.” He’s trying to learn as much as he can about German politics, he explains. Later we see that his research has paid off, in a way that Sally doesn’t understand. Maybe I should start reading “Project 2025.”
Here there were gas chambers
Meanwhile, at the Wallis in Beverly Hills, we move forward in time to examine some of the horror that followed “Cabaret.” In “Here There Are Blueberries,” from Tectonic Theater Project, director Moisés Kaufman and co-writer Amanda Gronich show us how the staff at Auschwitz spent their time off from their murder machine.
In this example of documentary theater from two of those who helped create “The Laramie Project,” each actor plays several roles — contemporary and historical — usually without any strenuous attempts to match the looks of the real people, in performances sometimes leaning toward understatement. But the authenticity is in the projected imagery, taken from actual photos that unexpectedly arrived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. We follow the fascinating research that the staff did in order to document the identities of the individuals in the images.
First we see the Auschwitz workers on their days off. Who knew that they relaxed at a summer-camp-style lodge that was part of the Auschwitz complex? Later, however, we see more familiar photos of their victims. The contrast is remarkably jarring — and ultimately quite moving.
Breaking the ‘Glass’
As World War II was in its final months, in December 1944, Tennessee Williams emerged on the national theatrical scene with the premiere of “The Glass Menagerie.” Soon, Antaeus Theatre in Glendale will stage a revival of it, opening May 3.
But in the meantime, a bracing contemporary takeoff on “Glass Menagerie” is still playing, at Boston Court in Pasadena, closing this weekend — “frou-frou, a menagerie of sorts,” by John Anthony Loffredo.
Like the original, it has four characters — a mother, her two young-adult offspring, and a man whom the mother envisions as a husband for her daughter. The mother (Reiko Aylesworth) still fits Williams’ description of the “Menagerie” mama — “a little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place,” but the other characters are quite different from their predecessors in the Williams play.
The daughter (Simone Brazzini) is a gender-confused stoner who usually stays in their room blogging, the son (Patrick Reilly) wears tutus as he practices ballet, and the former “gentleman caller” (Ryan Imhoff) is aptly named “Man,” minus the “gentle.”
“Frou-frou” is a percussive satire about 21st-century gender issues instead of a 20th-century “memory play.” The hunky “Man” moves in and spends much of his time in the nude. Director Zi Alikhan marshals all of the design components into a savory concoction. I laughed a lot, no disrespect intended to Williams or “The Glass Menagerie.”
The written script of “frou-frou” is preceded by a note urging “anyone putting on this play to think of The Twilight Zone S3 E14, Five Characters in Search of an Exit” — a 25-minute episode of the Rod Serling TV series, first broadcast in 1961, which depicts four men and one (female) ballerina trying to climb out of an unearthly hole in which they appear to be trapped. An apt analogy to the play, but the play is much funnier.
Mean memories
Some “memory” plays are much harsher than “Glass Menagerie.” In the solo play “Unreconciled,” at Moving Arts in Atwater Village, Jay Sefton vividly portrays not only himself at different ages but also a variety of other characters in his memories of a priest who abused him and other Catholic school kids in Pennsylvania — and the legal ordeal that he endured later as he sought compensation. The abuse had begun when young Jay was cast as Jesus in a school pageant. Video of the actual pageant, with sly commentary by the adult Sefton, adds a comic component that leavens a tale (co-written with Mark Basquill, staged by Geraldine Hughes) that might otherwise seem predictably grim.
Of course growing youth can abuse each other as well. We’re reminded of this from Sophie Swithinbank’s “Bacon,” upstairs at Rogue Machine on Melrose, staged by Michael Matthews (yes, the same director of “Cabaret” in Thousand Oaks, above). “Bacon” follows the brutal bullying of the new kid Mark (Wesley Guimarães) by deeply disgruntled Darren (Jack Lancaster) at a Catholic secondary school in London. It’s a harrowing two-hander, and the audience in the small confined space is very close when it becomes physical (this is a warning for anyone who might be particularly sensitive to this material).
Echo Theater Company in Atwater Village is also producing an import from England about two youngish people — but here they’re adults who are married. Stephen Laughton’s “One Jewish Boy” covers roughly a decade in their relationship — but not in a straight line from beginning to end. Far too many chronological changes, backwards and forwards, create confusion, for no apparent reason. It seems like a genuine duet — to the extent that I wondered why the title refers only to the “One” character (Ezekiel Goodman) and not his mixed-race wife (Sharae Foxie). But the offstage conflicts seem somewhat contrived, perhaps because there is important information missing about both characters.
Arise, poor Yorick
In the same neighborhood as “One Jewish Boy” and in the same building as “Unreconciled” is Independent Shakespeare Company’s “Hamlet (Solus)”, in which the company’s co-founder and managing director David Melville performs a solo adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic, emphasizing long-dead Yorick more than he was mentioned in the original, through the use of visual sight gags. Melville not only plays the usual roles plus Yorick but also several musical instruments (he wrote the original music and lyrics) and uses a screen for some visual effects (which he might have designed himself — I don’t see anyone else credited for them). It’s all quite impressive, technically, but I would have preferred an equally innovative production with more than one actor, not only for visual variety but also because having one actor play all the roles can be a little confusing at times.
…and back to the early ‘30s
“Ybor City,” at the Actors’ Gang in Culver City, is set in almost exactly the same time and place as “Anna in the Tropics,” Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer-winning play about Cuban-born cigar factory workers in a Tampa (Florida) neighborhood around 1929-30. In both plays the workers are supposedly entertained by a professional reader as they roll the cigars. Otherwise, the plays are quite different. At the start of Mariana Da Silva’s “Ybor City,” the readers are reciting non-fictional news, not a novel (such as “Anna Karenina” in Cruz’s play), and their efforts don’t appear to engage the workers at all. This script is bilingual, with supertitles in both English and Spanish simultaneously appearing on curtains. However, it’s also more fantastical — excessively so, when events start becoming a little hazy around the edges.
“Schlitzie: Alive & Inside,” a Rogue Artists Ensemble play by Eric Fagundes, is even hazier around the edges. Schlitzie was a sideshow performer who was featured in Todd Browning’s 1932 film “Freaks.” Rogue Artists’ interim artistic director acknowledges in a program note that this production is “the first big leap of the play’s development.” I usually don’t comment on plays still in development. Still, I’ll note that Schlitzie is played by a large puppet held and voiced by two puppeteers — but the puppet’s lips never move, which limits our ability to see the title character as an actual human being, “alive & inside.” However, the venue — a church from the Victorian era on the Heritage Square street of transplanted mansions and other 19th-century structures moved from elsewhere in LA, is more evocative than the play.
No, it’s not ‘Cats’
And now let’s return to 1965, one year before “Cabaret” began to upgrade our expectations of modern musicals. “Drat! The Cat!” is a musical that opened and quickly closed on Broadway in 1965, with a book by Ira (“Rosemary’s Baby”) Levin and music by Milton Schafer. But it’s now receiving its West Coast premiere from Group Repertory Theatre in North Hollywood, staged by Bruce Kimmel.
It’s set in 1890s New York. The “cat” is a cat burglar. The score’s good enough. The script presents its far-fetched plot, including a romance between a cop and a wealthy heiress, with a big wink. It has one song that was covered by Streisand, a few laughs, strong romantic leads (Alec Reusch and Sydney DeMaria), and a somewhat cluttered look, with musical director Gerald Sternbach’s band occupying the back of the stage in full view of the audience, plus a rather large cast.
The odyssey of Ron Sossi
“Running a theater is crazy: constant, constant, constant stress,” Ron Sossi told me in September 1999 for a Los Angeles Times article. I had asked him about his two mild heart attacks, 15 and 20 years earlier. Doctors had recommended bypass surgery, but he declined, preferring to use less invasive measures of his own.
“You can die or you can live,” Sossi said. “I try to run the theater in a way that opts for the latter.” And after that conversation, he continued to run his Odyssey Theatre, for more than 25 years — until last week, when he died of congestive heart failure at the age of 85.
In that same article, I observed that “although there are older theater companies in L.A., the only other one that has been led by one individual through as many decades” was “the bigger and wealthier Mark Taper Forum, run by Gordon Davidson.” After that article appeared, Davidson continued to lead the Taper until 2005, when he completed his 38-year tenure. But Sossi started the Odyssey in 1969 and ran it until he died. 56 years.
Through most of those years, he was known as an advocate of big, bold, non-realistic theater. He studied with visionary theatrical guru Jerzy Grotowski. In the early years, he frequently produced Brecht, and he performed the title role in Brecht’s “Baal” in 1979. “My personal interest,” he told me, “is in plays that really shake the foundation of eternal verities, that shake our smugness about what life is. I don’t think we have the foggiest notion what life is about."
Yet this was a man who arrived in LA from Michigan for graduate film studies at UCLA and initially became a network television exec, supervising such series as “Bewitched,” “The Flying Nun” and “Love, American Style.”
He started the Odyssey in a space at Hollywood Boulevard and Harvard, which later became a porno theater. The company moved to West LA in 1973, in a space near Bundy Drive, Ohio Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard — and in 1989 to its current position on the west side of Sepulveda Boulevard, south of Santa Monica Boulevard.
Sossi told me in that 1999 interview that he wanted to build a midsize theater there, but the adjacent carwash leased part of the property for more than the Odyssey could afford. “I’d still like to move up to a larger facility and an Equity contract,” Sossi said, but he noted that other 99-seat companies that made that move had an easier path because they weren’t on the Westside, with its more expensive real estate.
As we remember Sossi, let’s not forget that he had a sense of humor. After all, the Odyssey introduced Steven Berkoff’s hilarious “Kvetch” to the world in 1986, at the second Odyssey site, and it continued to play there and at the third Odyssey site until 1993.
Here is Sossi’s LA Times obituary. And here is the Odyssey Theatre’s statement.