'Some Like' musicals, others don't
'The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals,' 'Some Like It Hot,' 'A Beautiful Noise,' 'Fantasticks,' 'The Seagull: Malibu,' 'Opposite of Love,' 'Reel to Reel,' and more
Musicals. They make many theatergoers hot to trot. But musicals leave some other theatergoers cold.
This division is more or less the theme of “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals,” now in its final weekend at El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood. It’s a clever takeoff on the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” films. In the aftermath of a meteor hitting the town of “Hatchetfield,” everyday people suddenly start singing and dancing in groups — even while performing their daily routines, much to the dismay and then to the horror of the buttoned-down musicals-hating title character (Jon Matteson).
In other words, “The Guy” is a musical that mocks musical-theater cliches — but that also acknowledges the apparently otherworldly power of the better moments in musicals. The book is by Nick and Matt Lang, and the music and lyrics are by Jeff Blim, who is also superb enacting several sleazeball roles. Laura Lopez, who plays the non-sleazy (plucky, even) female lead, also directs. My guess is that all of the above people are actually part of a third group of theatergoers — those of us who like good musicals but who also like good satire.
During “The Guy” at El Portal, I was surprised to see that most of the nearly sold-out house seemed to be occupied by fans of the show from the get-go, judging from their audible reactions. Later I discovered that a video of this same StarKid production of “The Guy” — which was shot at the much smaller Matrix Theatre on Melrose six years ago, completed with supertitles and apparently followed by only one change in the cast — has acquired “9.2 M views” and more than 28,000 comments on YouTube.
Presumably most of the spectators at El Portal had already seen the video but were willing to pay money to see it live, in a venue considerably larger than the Matrix. That’s good news, I guess?
Of course the 360-seat capacity of El Portal’s mainstage is about 13% of the capacity of the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, the home of more commercial tours of musicals than any other venue in LA.
Is it ‘Hot’ enough for you?
And the Pantages is where “Some Like It Hot” opened on Wednesday. I have mixed feelings about this musical adaptation of the 1959 Billy Wilder film comedy, with a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and a book by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin.
I appreciate that the lyrics of one of the earlier songs provide a backstory for how Joe (Matt Loehr) and Jerry (Tavis Kordell) became best friends in childhood. This was long before they witnessed a crime that forced them to disguise themselves in drag (Joe became Josephine, Jerry became Daphne) in order to join an all-female band on its way out of Chicago in deepest-Depression 1933 (not 1929, as in the movie). The movie’s dialogue never discusses the mutual history of these two.
Also, the two friends are now of different races, as are members of the band. Perhaps that explains why the band heads for San Diego for a gig at the Hotel del Coronado instead of the movie’s Miami destination, which was in the presumably more strictly segregated South of that era. Whatever the explanation, I always like to see plays that are set in southern California — and by the time the story ends, they're actually in Hollywood, probably not far from the Pantages itself.
My main problem with this adaptation is that the production, directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, is entirely too tap-happy. When in doubt, everyone taps — even the onstage band members, who soon drop their instruments to become obsessive tap dancers.
I have nothing against tap-dancing per se, but it reduces the suspense about whether these people will survive when the gang finally catches up with them. In fact, one of the later scenes has everyone — including, if I witnessed correctly, the gang members themselves, manically tapping their way along with everyone else through a lineup of swinging doors.
However, I’m also glad to see that Daphne, who already was indicating more satisfaction with her adopted womanhood in the 1959 movie than was Joe/Josephine, is now free — in this 21st century adaptation — to be played by actors who use “their” pronouns in their bios and who look, at the end of the performance, as if they might never return to wearing men’s clothes. Apparently Project 2025 has yet to reach the
Pantages.
Neil Diamond times two, now in OC
“Some Like It Hot” was preceded at the Pantages by a July run of the touring version of a very different musical, “A Beautiful Noise,” which is still accessible to Angelenos from now through August 10 at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa.
Its subject is Neil Diamond. In Anthony McCarten’s book, we see and hear Nick Fradiani — as the 20th-century Diamond — performing many of his familiar hits. But we also witness a more-or-less-present-day Diamond (Robert Westenberg) probing his own inner life with a therapist (Lisa Reneé Pitts). She conveniently decides to use Diamond’s lyrics from his own songs as her avenue into his soul. Cue the chorus.
Actually, the chorus is a little too large. In “Noise,” sometimes it seems as if the dancers go into their more frenetic routines simply in order to lower the average age of the onstage population. Then again, the Pantages and Segerstrom are large venues, so perhaps it’s necessary to expand the show visually far beyond Diamond’s sessions with the shrink.
The current relevance of my favorite Diamond song, “America,” might have been underlined a bit more boldly. However, former “American Idol” winner Fradiani is quite convincing as the insecure beginner and as the stadium-filling superstar who shed his first two wives, as is Westenberg as the old Diamond who wonders what it was all about.
By the way, as I mention the size of venues for musicals, I should probably acknowledge that a celebrity-studded “Jesus Christ Superstar” will be performed for three nights this weekend at the Hollywood Bowl, where the capacity is 17,500. In other words, its proportions compared to those of the Pantages are close to the proportions of the Pantages compared to El Portal.
I don’t usually see the Bowl musicals. Not only are the runs very short, but as I recall, many of the audience members look at the action on the big video screens instead of on the stage — and the performances are more concert-style than theater-style.
Mini-musicals
But LA also has a few musicals playing that are even more intimate than El Portal, thanks to our many fewer-than-100-seats venues.
Santa Monica’s Ruskin Group Theatre, near the city’s airport, is reviving perhaps the granddaddy of all intimate musicals, “The Fantasticks,” by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, which ran 42 years in its original off-Broadway production, beginning in 1960.
I’ve seen the show in several incarnations. Its signature song “Try to Remember” is a classic — and let’s just say that it’s especially resonant as we age and, well, try to remember. As for the show itself, I usually enjoy it as pleasant whimsy, not as anything more substantial.
The first act is constructed around the idea that two neighboring fathers build walls between their homes, on the pretense of keeping one’s son and the other’s daughter apart from any possible romance. But they’re secretly hoping that their supposed opposition to the courtship will actually draw the young couple together. So they arrange an outlandish scheme to stage a fake kidnapping so that the young man can “rescue” the younger woman. (No mothers, who might have stopped this notion in its tracks, appear to exist in these homes).
Can the good vibes continue through the second act? You’ll get no spoilers here. Elina de Santos’ staging is perhaps most notable for the extreme disparity in height between the two actors playing the dads.
At the Zephyr Theatre on Melrose, Chromolume Theatre is offering what appears to be the first LA-originated production of “The Bridges of Madison County,” the musical based on the best-selling romance novel by Robert James Waller. It depicts a brief affair between an Italian war bride in post-war Iowa and an itinerant National Geographic magazine photographer who passes through her town while capturing images of the titular bridges. The touring version of the original Broadway production played the Ahmanson Theatre in 2015.
The Chromolume staging, closing this weekend, is relatively bare-bones, which exposes the flaws of Marsha Norman’s book more than what I recall from the Ahmanson staging. But Jason Robert Brown’s score — yes, he wrote the score for the far more powerful “Parade” — comes across well enough. Kyle Critelli, as the photographer, is quite magnetic in both voice and physicality. I saw a completely prepared and capable understudy, Rachel Williams, as his lover.
From Malibu to Manhattan to Mississippi
Moving on to non-musicals, the Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga has opened one of its more locally relevant productions — “The Seagull: Malibu,” director Ellen Geer’s adaptation of the Chekhov classic, set in the 1970s. The Theatricum is just a few miles northeast of Malibu, where actual seagulls fly (as opposed to the birds that probably flew in Chekhov’s 19th-century Russian interior).
I especially like the performances of Susan Angelo as Arkadina and Willow Geer as a pot-smoking Masha, although I’m not sure that Masha, who always dresses in black, would be attracted to a Constantine (Christopher Glenn Gilstrap) who here is dressed in conspicuously bright colors that don't sufficiently reflect his depression. Constantine’s play-within-the-play appears to suggest the specter of global warming more than usual, which makes some sense, although I'm not sure that Constantine would have been aware of this as early as the 1970s.
Theatricum regular Melora Marshall isn’t part of the Topanga season this year. Instead, she devoted her summer to directing the LA premiere of “The Opposite of Love,” at the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood. Playwright Ashley Griffin co-stars as Eloise, a New Yorker whose wealthy family included an uncle who started molesting her at the age of 3. Now she’s an adult living by herself in a glitzy uptown Manhattan apartment. She decides to achieve a comfort level with her body and with sex by hiring a considerate male prostitute (Evan Strand). What could go wrong?
Griffin’s script and Marshall’s direction of two terrific performances achieve a lot of credibility, thanks in part to the intimacy coordination of Celina Lee Surniak. Her credit is listed in the program right after Marshall’s. This play requires a great deal of sensitive physicality, although it never becomes visually X-rated. And Eloise’s post-sexual-trauma plight has acquired unexpected urgency since the Epstein/Maxwell/ Trump news erupted.
Angelica Chéri’s “Berta, Berta,” an Echo Theater production in Atwater, also features an unmarried couple, but in a very different environment — Mississippi, 1923. Berta (Kacie Rogers) has been married and then widowed when her previous lover Leroy (DeJuan Christopher) re-enters her life, while on the lam from the law. Unfortunately, the script — with too many confusing supernatural elements — wasn’t ready for its premiere.
Marriage-go-rounds
John Kolvenbach’s “Reel to Reel”, at Rogue Machine’s Melrose home in a co-production with HorseChart Theatre, examines a 55-year marriage with two younger actors playing husband and wife at 27 and 42 and two older actors playing the same couple at age 82 (although the older actors aren’t actually that old). The initial chronological introduction of the young couple is an awkward “meet-cute” scene, but the rest of the play works well enough except for one constant and distracting gimmick — all of the actors create sound effects throughout the 90 minutes (the title refers to what appears to be the obsession of Maggie, the wife, with using old-fashioned reel-to-reel recording technology). Why?
Peter Lefcourt’s “Ménage à Quatre” is a fairly amusing LA-centric hetero-married-couples sex farce. Despite the production’s venue, the tiny Davidson/Valentini Theatre at LA’s LGBT venue, the only gay character is the narrator, who also plays several smaller roles. Is it credible that the two straying members of this closely-knit quartet would start an affair? I have my doubts, but the performances are convincing enough in Ryan O’Connor’s staging, and — as in “Some Like It Hot” — I enjoyed the frequent name-dropping of familiar SoCal locations.
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