Musical metamorphoses: 'Fiddler,' 'Pacific,' 'Cage,' 'Back to the Future'
Plus 'Waiting for Godot,' 'A Doll's House Part 2,' 'Antíkoni,' 'The Goddamn Couple...'
The times they are a-changin’ in the musicals currently occupying four of LA County’s larger theaters. And changing times often result in compelling theater. That’s true of three out of these four musicals — but their styles are strikingly different.
This ‘Fiddler’ is still ‘on the roof’
Look at “Fiddler on the Roof,” starring Jason Alexander as Tevye at La Mirada Theatre. The changes within its story are stark — from an opening scene that musically exalts “Tradition” to the drastic upheavals of tradition throughout the rest of the script.
But who would have guessed that this classic (1964) musical is freshly relevant — on two fronts — six decades later?
First, the “Fiddler” narrative is set in Ukraine, early in the 20th century, when it was still controlled by the czarist version of Imperial Russia. Although Tevye’s village of “Anatevka” was fictional, it was supposedly in the area of Ukraine where the source material — stories about Tevye the Milkman — were set by Sholem Aleichem (originally named Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich).
In “Fiddler,” antisemitic Russian soldiers actively abuse the leading characters, who are Jews. Of course, now Ukraine — led by a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy — is under attack by the 21st-century-Putinist version of Imperial Russia.
Additionally (spoiler alert), at the end Tevye and his remaining family members are given a tight deadline to leave. They depart for America, the primary destination for Europeans fleeing oppression. Nowadays, the next US president is vowing to start mass deportations of immigrants on day one — and he initially called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “genius.”
“Fiddler” was created by Jews: Joseph Stein (the book), Jerry Bock (the music), and Sheldon Harnick (the lyrics, and the last survivor of the trio — he died last year). They probably wouldn’t have approved of the recent events that have made “Fiddler” freshly relevant.
Jason Alexander might be the shortest Tevye I’ve ever seen — shorter than many of the other actors onstage. But he enlarges his force field accordingly when he’s making a big point as the Papa. On the other hand, if you still identify Alexander primarily as George Costanza in “Seinfeld,” you might find that Tevye has a few lines and moments that are reminiscent of moods that George might have felt occasionally.
Lonny Price’s staging is top-notch across the boards. He expands the stage to the side aisles at one touching moment in the tale. Valerie Perri is a classic Golda, Tevye’s wife. Their three older daughters are in the gifted hands and voices of Rachel Ravel, Alanna J. Smith and Emerson Glick. Playing the sisters’ suitors are Cameron Mabie as the accommodating tailor, Remy Laufer as the rebellious tutor and Sawyer Patterson as (gulp) the tall Russian who eventually spurns his comrades. Ron Orbach perfectly embodies Lazar Wolf the butcher, and Eileen T’Kaye is an appropriately yappy yenta.
Would you believe that the LA Times hasn’t yet reviewed this “Fiddler”? It plays through December 1.
Perry in ‘Pacific’…but no Pearl Harbor
“The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea,” the opening song of “Pacific Overtures” at East West Players, is the thematic equivalent of the first song in “Fiddler” — “Tradition.” “Floating” describes an extremely traditional, perhaps even more circumscribed culture — in this case, mid-19th-century Japan.
But the Japanese isolation is about to be disturbed — by changes initiated by Americans. In 1853 and 1854, US Navy Commodore Matthew Perry and his gunboats arrived and prodded Japan into opening its doors to trade and relations with other countries.
In 1974, producer Harold Prince announced plans to produce a play by young John Weidman, about Perry and Japan. A few months later, however, Prince decided the project should be a musical, with a score by his frequent collaborator Stephen Sondheim, “who really thought that I was crazy,” Prince later recalled. “I thought, maybe we could do this strange, hybrid musical revue, with a story, but not particularly linear characters…the story of America and Japan.” Sondheim joined the team. So did Hugh Wheeler, who contributed to Weidman’s book. It opened on Broadway in 1976 — as many Americans were beginning to buy cars from Japan, as opposed to Detroit.
“Pacific Overtures” is Sondheim’s most audacious departure from standard musical narrative expectations. And yes, even in the lustrous revival that former East West artistic director Tim Dang has staged for his former company — complete with haunting music and dance sequences — the book is still something of a hot mess.
At first the script concentrates on two minor Japanese officials (played by Adam Kaokept and Brian Kim McCormick) who were designated to confront Perry — and then examines their shifting relationship through the subsequent decades. This part of the script works well enough.
But near the end, they disappear as we quickly leap forward more than a century — in the process ignoring the monumental confrontation between “the leading characters…America and Japan” that began at Pearl Harbor and culminated in the first use of atomic bombs over the skies of two Japanese cities. I’m not alone in noticing this. The original production’s choreographer Patricia Birch referred, in Craig Zadan’s book “Sondheim & Company,” to “skipping over the events of the forties…we really made a tremendous jump there.”
Still, despite this giant gap in the script, Dang’s revival is worthwhile for its sounds and sights. Jon Jon Briones’s Reciter is a solid rock in the unruly concept. Dang adds a brief but crowd-pleasing reference to one recent update — Japan’s export of Shohei Ohtani to LA. And East West bolsters its reputation as America’s “Pacific Overtures” specialists — this is the company’s third production of it.
The caged birds sing again, but time travel wears thin
The big changes launched by “La Cage aux Folles,” currently in Sam Pinkleton’s shimmering revival at Pasadena Playhouse, occurred within the sheer facts that, in 1983, it was the first Broadway musical that was mostly populated by openly gay characters — and that it became a big hit, even though it opened soon after the arrival of HIV/AIDS.
Jerry Herman’s catchy old-school show tunes became popular standards. And the laughs and warmth generated by Harvey Fierstein’s book (based on a Jean Poiret play), set in a St. Tropez drag-queen nightclub, might have helped dilute the extra homophobia of the early AIDS era.
In Pasadena, Cheyenne Jackson exudes charisma as Georges, the nightclub proprietor, who lives upstairs with his lover and star attraction, the much more troubled and temperamental Albin (Kevin Cahoon). In fact, might this Georges ever consider making himself the star attraction? There’s an idea for a sequel.
The actual plot is minimal compared to the spectacle. David Reynoso’s costumes, Ani Taj’s choreography, David Zinn’s sets and Stacey Derosier’s lighting certainly fill the stage. But the story’s main conflict, such as it is, arises when the couple’s straight son Jean-Michel (Ryan J. Haddad) becomes engaged to the daughter of a conservative, anti-gay politician. Jean-Michel has a request that enrages Albin. The meeting of the families is memorable. So too is the casual, unnoted use of a walker by Haddad, an actor who has cerebral palsy.
Composer Herman contracted AIDS two years after “La Cage” opened. But he survived and lived to the age of 88, dying in late 2019. The man who wrote the show’s anthem “I Am What I Am” was what he was.
Finally, the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood is currently hosting the Broadway tour of the “Back to the Future” musical, based on the 1985 time-travel movie. That phrase “time travel” of course indicates plenty of changes taking place — much of the story is set in 1955 — but I quickly grew tired of all the extreme implausibility. The production has plenty of vivid special effects. You might remember that a DeLorean vehicle is what transports the protagonist across the decades. But the technical wizardry seems designed to make us say “wow” while forgetting that the narrative itself is so weak.
‘Godot’ returns, and so does the new Nora
If all the substantive changes taking place in those four musicals (above) are just too much for you, the antidote is “Waiting for Godot,” at Geffen Playhouse. Here, the times are not a-changin’.
In Samuel Beckett’s absurdist trailblazer, the characters keep waiting — and waiting — for change. “Waiting for Godot” is perhaps most rewarding when you’re seeing it for the first time. Although you might quickly realize that its stasis is very different from more conventional narratives, you might still be uncertain of how it will end.
I won’t offer a spoiler for any first-timers. But if you’ve seen several productions, seeing yet another version seems almost literally pointless — and predictable. Or at least that’s how Judy Hegarty Lovett’s staging at the Geffen struck me.
Celebrity notes: Rainn Wilson plays the more assertive Vladimir while Aasif Mandvi plays the more aggrieved Estragon. The visitors from an even more painful sphere, the dominant Pozzo (Conor Lovett) and his slave Lucky (Adam Stein), remain just about as inscrutable as the leading characters.
By the way, near the end of the Wikipedia article on “Waiting for Godot”, I learned that at least a half-dozen sequels to Beckett’s original have been written or even produced. I’ve seen none of them. But I wonder if any of them might be of greater interest now than yet another production of the original.
Speaking of sequels, the Beverly Hills Playhouse is currently presenting Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Lucas Hnath’s sequel “A Doll’s House , Part 2” in repertory. I had no interest in seeing Ibsen’s original yet again, but I wanted to see Hnath’s “Part 2” for a third time. I had liked it more the second time I saw it, at Long Beach’s International City Theatre in 2022, than I had in its pre-New York premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. And I indeed found Allen Barton’s staging in Beverly Hills a refreshing take on an old classic. Of course it’s now much closer to many Angelenos than the previous productions in Orange County and Long Beach.
Does ‘Antíkoni’ need ‘Antigone’?
Native Voices, the professional company that produces new plays by indigenous writers under the aegis of the Autry Museum, is using a room at the museum’s Southwest Campus (formerly the Southwest Museum of the American Indian), on the southeast slope of Mt. Washington in northeast LA, for the premiere of Beth Piatote’s “Antíkoni.”
The play’s title and elements of its plot are derived from Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy “Antigone.” You may recall that in that classic, a royal-family niece defies her uncle Creon in order to provide a proper burial for one of her slain brothers, whose body had been left to rot on the field of battle.
Piatote’s contemporary adaptation, staged by Madeline Sayet, is set mostly in or near a museum in Washington DC. The museum director Kreon (Frank Henry Katasse), the title character’s uncle, is pleased that he has been able to purchase artifacts and even the bones of two Native warriors — brothers who were fighting each other and who apparently died more than a century ago — from a private collector in Europe. He plans to add these remains to the museum collection. But his Nez Perce/Cayuse niece Antíkoni (Erin Xáalnook Tripp) believes that these relics should be returned to the Native nations (in the Pacific Northwest) to which the men belonged.
The production takes place in a room where such relics were once stored — before the entire Southwest Museum collection was moved to the Autry’s relatively new Resources Center in Burbank. Unfortunately the play’s venue — never intended to be a theater — lacks adequate acoustics and has only makeshift audience seating.
The play itself doesn’t seem quite ready for a full production either. Its connection to “Antigone” is the source of most of the problems. In the Greek classic, the heroine is the younger sibling of the man whose body is dishonored, while in “Antíkoni” the supposed heroine wasn’t even born until decades after the deaths of the deceased; I didn’t hear that was she was even a direct descendant. Her attachment to her crusade feels theoretical and “virtual” in the contemporary sense, not personal.
The dramatic momentum also is somewhat hobbled by too many pauses for folkloric stories told by a Greek chorus of aged “aunties” and by diction that sometimes sounds like a deliberate attempt to imitate the formalistic phrasing that might have been used in a decades-old English translation from the ancient Greek.
The play’s fascinating thematic kernel shouldn’t have to rely so much on its wavering conceptual connections to Greek tragedy.
Hark! The herald neighbors shout
Yes, a Christmas play arrived before Thanksgiving. But it’s probably the most irreverent Christmas play that will debut this season — the prolonged title is “The Goddamn Couple Down the Hall (Oh….and Merry Christmas!)”. It’s at Theatre West, in the Cahuenga Pass between Studio City and Hollywood.
Playwright Mark Wilding (“Our Man in Santiago” at this same venue in 2021) whipped up a spiked eggnog of a play, directed by Charlie Mount. He combines two squabbling young-adult sisters, their parents and their male companions — one of whom is the evening’s exacting chef — with a touch of possible murder mystery emanating from the arguing inhabitants of the next-door condo. I won’t say anything more specific about what happens, other than to note that laughter is plentiful, if not exactly festive.