Great shakes in summer Shakespeare?
Plus 'Treasure Island,' 'Mamma Mia,' 'Angry' at the Geffen, Ruskin Group Trauma, Angeles Stage's fifth birthday.
The outdoors are officially open for Greater LA’s summer Shakespeare.
I’ve already seen alfresco productions of two very familiar choices — “Romeo & Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But let’s begin the discussion with one of the more unusual picks for (these so far rather cool) summer nights — “Coriolanus,” which last weekend opened Independent Shakespeare Company’s season at the in-the-round dale in the Old Zoo area of Griffith Park.
This late-Shakespeare play depicts Rome in early-5th-century BC — post-monarchy, leaning toward being a republic. The title character is a patrician, but he’s also a warrior who clearly understands the risks and costs of combat. In fact, he is forced to display his own war wounds to the public as he follows his mother’s wish that he seek the high office of consul.
Coriolanus doesn’t enjoy pandering to the plebeians, who are hungry for “corn at their own rates.” Are they thankful for his efforts to defeat the nearby Volscians? Not for long. Two tribunes stir up the masses against him. So Coriolanus defects to the Volscians and helps them attack Rome again — a tragic mistake.
The parallels to our own country’s current situation are far from precise. Donald Trump never served in the military. But shortly after his second term began, his ally Elon Musk (who more recently became a temporary trillionaire) led the charge to suspend food and other forms of aid to less developed countries. And this year the president himself started — and lost — his own unpopular war with a secondary power. “Coriolanus” stimulates thought about such recent events to an extent that “Romeo and Juliet” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” can’t.
In its 25th year of LA productions, this is ISC’s first stab (pun intended) at “Coriolanus.” Director David Melville cut an estimated 40% of the original script, and the bare bones of the play’s conflicts are all the clearer as a result. From time to time, electronic musical riffs punctuate and propel the action.
Brent Charles is formidably powerful yet impatient in the title role. ISC artistic director Melissa Chalsma smoothly switches back and forth between two diametrically opposite characters — Coriolanus’s mother and a leader of the hungry plebeians (by the way, when this latter character scornfully pointed out the patricians in the crowd, she gestured directly at the area of the audience where I sat. Hmm…)
In the role of Menenius, a Roman senator who serves as a middleman through much of the play, Lorenzo González momentarily broke into Spanish as he chided some minor characters (“Cabrón!”), which drew a huge laugh from the crowd in the dale — an indication that ISC’s diversification efforts have extended into its audiences as well as its own personnel.
By the way, ISC still offers free admission but will request donations. And while most of the audience walks up a small hill to attend, those with mobility issues can request assistance.
Meanwhile, far northwest of central LA, Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival in Thousand Oaks has opened “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga has opened both “Romeo & Juliet” and its own annual “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
The Kingsmen troupe’s “Midsummer,” directed by Caitlin V. Arndt, is a lively outing. It’s theoretically set in Roaring ‘20s Chicago, which is reflected in the costumes, music and set more than in the text — which still refers to “Athens” (as in Greece). Michael Rubino’s music and Shannon J. Sharpe’s performance as Puck are vital ingredients of the fun. By the way, the venue is in a park on the campus of California Lutheran University, and the space includes a creek flowing behind the stage. This provides a continuous gentle hum of crickets/frogs/cicadas that can be heard behind the actors’ voices and the audience’s laughter.
In Topanga, director Willow Geer uses the many mini-stages of the vast Theatricum arena very resourcefully in a “Romeo & Juliet” adaptation set among mostly Irish-American Catholic New Yorkers on different class levels, in the Gilded Age —1885. The performance of her mother, Theatricum artistic director Ellen Geer, as Juliet’s nurse, is one of the production’s highlights. Though the boss of the company is older even than I am, she moves up and down the Theatricum stairs several times during the performance just about as quickly as any of the other 25 actors. On the other end of the age spectrum, the actors playing title characters (Asher Hagler, Quinnlyn Scheppner) look as if they’re both in their mid-teens; Juliet is IDed as being 16 instead of the original script’s 13.
The Theatricum has also opened the third production of its five-show season, Ellen Geer’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s complicated, late-19th-century novel “Treasure Island,” set in the late-18th-century — first in southwestern England and then primarily in the West Indies (where Stevenson, a Scot, never set foot).
In the program note, Geer wrote that she wants to demonstrate how the young narrator Jim Hawkins (Ruben Jones) matures into adulthood during the many crises he confronts. But this story — which I read as a child but had mostly forgotten — has too many far-fetched crises for any one play. With many of the characters speaking in supposed 18th-century pirate accents, I felt almost lost at sea during much of it. Later, I clarified the plot details by reading a non-Theatricum synopsis — if you’re going to see this, do such research in advance. Geer changed the gender of the abandoned pirate Ben Gunn to “Jenn” Gunn, played by Willow Geer, who also plays the story’s only other substantial female role – the protagonist’s mother.
My ultimate impression? No ho ho, multiple bottles of rum and violent murders.
The movie takes it all
If we’re going to discuss plays by non-Greeks that are set in Greece, as we were a few paragraphs ago (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), let’s move forward a few centuries and talk about the musical “Mamma Mia!,” currently in a touring version at Center Theatre Group’s Ahmanson Theatre, in downtown LA’s Music Center.
Its score was written by two Swedes, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (AKA ABBA). Its less important book was written by a Brit, Catherine Johnson. But then “less important book” might be too kind. How about “flimsy book, but who cares? People are there for the vintage MTV-era, jukebox-musical ABBA hit parade.”
That’s true of the production at the Ahmanson, and it delivers the desired goods. Nonetheless, after seeing it, I finally watched the 2008 “Mamma Mia!” movie, directed by the same Phyllida Lloyd who is credited as the stage show’s director — and the film delivers far more goods. Specifically, it displays landscapes and seascapes of the Greek islands that we can’t picture on a stage. The movie also offers, yes, star quality, with Meryl Streep playing the innkeeper whose daughter has secretly invited the three men who might be her father to her upcoming wedding.
No longer ‘Naked’
Of course star quality doesn’t last forever, and that’s likelier in live theater than in the images frozen within a film from the past. Pearl Cleage’s “Angry, Raucous, Shamelessly Gorgeous,” at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, reflects on the decline of star power in the non-profit theater world.
In “Angry…”, we hear that Anna (Charlayne Woodard) created a sensation decades ago when she performed a solo called “Naked Wilson.” In it, she stood naked on stage, reading male monologues from August Wilson’s plays, to point out the silence of the African American women in the great master’s plays. This damaged her American career, so she moved to Europe, where she became famous as an African American diva playing classical angry-women roles.
Now she has returned to the USA for a theater festival in Atlanta. She is under the mistaken impression that she will again perform “Naked Wilson” on her home turf. She soon learns that while she will be honored, the piece itself will be performed by an actress 40 years younger than she is.
LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s staging features several strong performances, in a script that has somewhat strained plotting. The most interesting performance might well be the least showy — from Denise Burse as the star’s manager, who is acutely aware of her client’s psyche. Considering what playwright Cleage has to say about August Wilson’s work, I noted with interest to read in Burse’s bio that she has appeared in five of Wilson’s plays.
Ruskin Group Therapy
Ruskin Group Theatre currently has two productions on the two stages of its new digs in Santa Monica. The two plays effectively confront different types of family trauma in front of sympathetic audiences. Right now, let’s call the company Ruskin Group Therapy.
In the larger of the two small spaces, Samuel D. Hunter’s “Grangeville” begins with telephone calls between two half-brothers. Jerry (Jeff LeBeau) lives in their childhood home town — Grangeville in northern Idaho — where he and his wife have recently split up. He needs to discuss the family finances with his half-sibling Arnold (Tim Cummings), an artist whom he had bullied during their childhood. Arnold’s career prospered because of his depictions of Grangeville, but he now lives in the Netherlands with his husband.
As smartly staged by John Perrin Flynn, drama ensues. But the double casting of each actor as the spouse of the other main character, late in the play, struck me as motivated either by actors’ natural desires to display their versatility or the writer’s desire to make productions less expensive, and it distanced me slightly from the material.
Meanwhile, in the Ruskin’s smaller space, Rachel Sorsa’s solo performance in Ian McRae’s “Painted Ponies” is quite moving, as directed by Elina de Santos. Sorsa plays a bedraggled woman whose six-year-old disappeared from her life after he was abducted from a merry-go-round 24 years ago. Now, because her own death from cancer is imminent, she’s recording a YouTube about what happened, including the aftermath when she was briefly considered a suspect. She hopes that her son might someday see it — that is, if he is still alive and watches a lot of YouTubes.
Jeff Gardner’s delicate sound design was somewhat effective, but it also had to compete with occasional noises of airplanes across the street at the Santa Monica Airport — at least during the matinee that I saw.
Angeles Stage turns five
The first installment of Angeles Stage appeared on June 19, 2021, as LA theater was beginning to emerge from the COVID closures. However, most of that first post was devoted to discussing backstage developments that occurred during the pandemic. The first edition that offered opinions on several productions posted on July 14, 2021.
So, happy birthday, Angeles Stage. Are you ready for kindergarten?
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