Noise nabs 15 noms, searches within 'Sweeney'
Plus 'Fatherland,' 'Black Cypress Bayou,' 'Winter's Tale,' 'Marilyn, Mom &' more.
In the middle of the annual media frenzy over film awards, which will culminate on March 10 with the Oscars ceremony, did you know that the LA theater awards season is also approaching?
Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle (LADCC) announced its nominees this week. The recipients will be revealed on April 8 (full disclosure — I am an LADCC member). Stage Raw will announce its award winners soon. Unfortunately, no replacement has yet emerged for LA theater’s previous peer-judged honors, the Ovation Awards, which folded along with its sponsoring organization, LA Stage Alliance, in 2021.
As I looked at the 2023 nominees for the LADCC awards, specifically at the list of which theaters received multiple nominations, I was struck by the dominance of A Noise Within in Pasadena. Its productions received 15 nominations. Tied for second place on that list were two much better-known companies, Center Theatre Group and South Coast Repertory, each with eight nominations.
A Noise Within’s larger neighbor, the Pasadena Playhouse, received…only?…five LADCC nominations for 2023 productions. Yet 2023 was also the year that Pasadena Playhouse received the annual Tony Award for a regional theater — which is awarded for its entire history, not for a single season, on the recommendation of the American Theatre Critics Association (fuller disclosure — I am also a member of ATCA). Is Pasadena now the capital of home-grown LA County theater?
Two of the three individual 2023 productions that received the most LADCC nominations (7 each) were A Noise Within’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The third was “Life Sucks,” an Interact Theatre production at the Broadwater mainstage in Hollywood.
But Shakespearean comedy isn’t the only reason to pay attention to A Noise Within. Witness its current revival of “Sweeney Todd,” the now-classic musical with a score by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, based on the old tale of “the demon barber of Fleet Street.” This production has the effect of unofficially extending Pasadena Playhouse’s Sondheim Celebration, which revived “Sunday in the Park With George” and “A Little Night Music” in the first part of 2023 (earning the recently announced Joel Hirschhorn Award from the LADCC) — for the same Pasadena audiences.
Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and “Sweeney” audiences are blessed with an ideal space for it. With 324 seats, none more than eight rows from the deeply thrust stage, ANW’s venue is as intimate as many a sub-100-seat LA space. Still, ANW directors frequently bring the action even closer to spectators, using the two center aisles. “Sweeney” has plenty of action, and we feel as if we are right in the middle of it. I’d much rather see this masterpiece up close in this professional midsize theater than in the 1500-seat theater on Broadway where another “Sweeney” is currently playing.
Yet could “Sweeney” work with only a three-piece band and with the title role played by Geoff Elliott, the company’s co-artistic director along with his wife (this production’s director)? Was Elliott a shoo-in from the get-go because of his…connections? Was his voice up to the demands of a musical that is often tagged with the adjective “operatic”?
Well, at the performance I saw, he was indeed up to the challenges of singing as well as enacting the role. Although he probably hasn’t sung opera (other than ANW’s “Threepenny” kind), his voice is deep and strong. His performance struck a fine balance between Sweeney’s gruff manner and his despondency. Also, for those of us who saw Elliott as the “Man of La Mancha” in the company’s productions in Pasadena and ANW’s previous home in Glendale, it’s fun to watch Elliott successfully shift 180 degrees from dewy-eyed idealism to radical cynicism. As for the trio of accompanists, all that seemed to matter is that the thrilling score still thrilled.
Cassandra Marie Murphy is perhaps younger than the usual Mrs. Lovett, but she’s vibrant, and she and Elliott are very funny in their two comic duets. Strong support arrives from Jeremy Rabb as the judge, Joanna Jones as — yes — Johanna, James Everts as Anthony, and Kasey Mahaffy as Pirelli, plus the entire design team.
I’m not a fan of everything that A Noise Within does — for example, last fall’s “The Bluest Eye.” But there is no doubt that A Noise Within should be on the must-see list of anyone who is interested in classics and/or LA theater. That includes Charles McNulty at the LA Times, who wrote not one word about the company’s breathtaking “Midsummer,” currently a nominations magnet.
Two new plays with northeast Texas ties
As a classics company, A Noise Within isn’t in the business of producing world premieres. But that’s OK, because in LA we usually can count on at least four or five brand-new plays most months, and many of them have opened in February.
Of those, by far the most exciting is “Fatherland,” at the Fountain Theatre, about the remarkably dramatic confrontation between one of the January 6 ringleaders, Guy Reffitt (Ron Bottitta) of Texas, and his young-adult son Jackson (Patrick Keleher). Jackson recorded some of his father’s post-riot words about the event and then turned him — and the recordings — over to the FBI, which resulted in a federal prison sentence of more than seven years, which Guy is currently serving. Meanwhile, Jackson — somewhat estranged from his family — earned more than $150,000 from a GoFundMe campaign.
Stephen Sachs, who recently announced that he is retiring from his long artistic stewardship of the Fountain at the end of the year, assembled the play from official court transcripts, case evidence, and public statements, contributing no words of his own. The only characters on stage besides the father and his son are two attorneys — one from each side of the divide.
While this structure created enough fireworks to fill the 80-minute running time, I found myself wanting to know more about the women in the family — Guy’s wife and the couple’s two daughters, one of whom called for “life in prison” for Donald Trump. I found a more comprehensive portrait of the household in the Washington Post, by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff. I’ll be surprised if this family saga isn’t turned into a movie eventually, with a budget beyond the ability of a Fountain production. Still, I appreciated the in-your-face performances a few feet away from my seat, as directed by Sachs.
The domestic scenes in “Fatherland” occur in Wylie, Texas, northeast of Dallas. All of Kristen Adele Calhoun’s “Black Cypress Bayou,” in its premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is set about 150 miles to the east of Wylie, in the titular bayou, near the town of Lodi, Texas. That’s where the connections end.
Calhoun’s play wasn’t ready for its world premiere, at least on the night I saw it. I felt that I had to read the script — and I did after leaving the theater — in order to clarify what was happening at times. The narrative has an excess of unexpected and sometimes unlikely surprises. The tone eventually shifts from realism into fantasy, but the entire play takes place in that one realistic set, where too many of the plot strands are revealed almost entirely through past-tense dialogue among a mother and her adult daughters. It’s easy to get lost in a bayou, and that’s what happens to Calhoun’s play.
It’s also easy to get lost in the intricate plot of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” The biggest achievement of Elizabeth Swain’s staging at Antaeus Theatre in Glendale is that I could follow the bouncing ball, in part because of a rigorously spare less-is-more scenic design from Frederica Nascimento. The rocky terrain within
Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is still quite obvious from our 21st century perspective, and the running time still seems a bit excessive. Ann Noble is very memorable in one of the most vivid roles, perhaps helped by the fact that, unlike 10 of the 14 actors, she doesn’t have to play more than one character.
But back to world premieres, closer to LA
Marilyn Monroe. I’m not sure if that name means much to today’s younger generations, but just the movie star’s first name attracted one of the largest audiences I’ve ever seen at the midsize International City Theatre in Long Beach for the Sunday matinee during opening weekend of writer/director Luke Yankee’s “Marilyn, Mom & Me.”
The fan-club members who attended probably know this, but you might not realize that Monroe was born in LA and grew up, very tumultuously, in nearby locales including the South Bay city of Hawthorne (not far from ICT), Hollywood, Compton, the Westside Sawtelle district, Van Nuys — where she attended high school — and even Catalina. I learned most of this from Wikipedia. A great LA play might be lurking within Monroe’s bio.
Instead, this play focuses on the relationship between Yankee’s mother, the late and much-admired actress Eileen Heckart (Laura Gardner, who is required to age 45 years in the role), and Monroe (Alisha Soper). They met when they were cast as best friends in the 1956 movie “Bus Stop” (when Yankee wasn’t yet born). For Yankee (Brian Rohan plays him as an adult and, less convincingly, as a very young child) this apparently was a big deal. But he hasn’t succeeded in making the play all that gripping to the rest of us. It feels unfocused and long-winded.
Catya McMullen’s “Arrowhead,” produced by IAMA Theatre in Atwater, takes place in the elevated lakeside town northeast of LA, featuring young contemporary Angelenos. It’s somewhat focused on a self-identified queer woman who finds herself attracted to a man — and then pregnant. But too many characters, each with somewhat different sexual orientations/preferences, show up in the play. The idea that all of them would be together in Arrowhead seems more like a social-science experiment than a realistic scenario. Indeed, in an interview, McMullen said that the idea to set the action in Arrowhead occurred when she was there “on a little solo writer’s retreat.”
Perhaps ‘Three’ should have been set in LA
Playwright Nick Salamone has returned to Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” for inspiration, as he did in the musical “Moscow,” which was produced twice in small LA theaters more than two decades ago. But “Three,” a new take on Chekhov’s play co-produced by Playwrights’ Arena and the Los Angeles LGBT Center, at the Center’s theater on McCadden Place in Hollywood, doesn’t emphasize any yearning for “Moscow.” Salamone writes (in the online program) that he “wanted the audience to see themselves in the characters in a direct way” — and most of us are glad not to be in Moscow right now.
So why does he set this new adaptation at an army base “in the far north of the upper [American] Midwest” in 1946, 1982, 1995 and “the present day,” and then add to the confusion by aging the characters by only five years in the entire play, as Chekhov did in the original? Why not simply set the play in contemporary LA over the course of five years? Perhaps because Salamone (or so he said elsewhere) also “wanted the adaptation to live in the the world of the last 80 years of American life,” which is fundamentally at odds with the original timespan of Chekhov’s play.
The restructuring is distracting, and because the performance style remains mostly realistic, the burden is heavy on some of the fine actors to convincingly age five years instead of the 78 years in which the adaptation is set.
Any hope for LA theater coverage on LAist?
In case you’re wondering, Larry Mantle, of AirTalk at LAist, responded via email to the first section of my last Angeles Stage, “LA should start a TheaterWeek,” without expressing any final opinion about the proposal. I sent him a return email, but I’m sure he’s swamped right now — he’s hosting a live conversation with LA Times veteran journalist Patt Morrison Friday at Occidental College and then the annual FilmWeek Oscar preview, a live event at the Orpheum Theatre, on Sunday afternoon, in addition to his regular LAist duties. I’m at least glad to see that he appreciates the value of live, in-person events, such as theater. I hope we can continue the conversation about LAist coverage of longer-running theatrical productions when he isn’t quite as busy with his own live conversations.