Jessica Berman and Geoff Elliott in Dear Brutus / Craig Schwartz
Should could wood
Allusions to Shakespeare, parlor game plotting, and a flopped-image mirroring of his famous 1904 Peter Pan give a sense of playfulness to J.M. Barrie’s Dear Brutus, rounding out A Noise Within’s three-play repertory through December 16. But that should not obscure the weightier themes that Barrie has buried, like bittersweet nougat, at the center of the confection. Co-Artistic Director Julia Rodriguez Elliott and her actors and designers have met the demands of this duality, capturing both its comedy-of-manners silliness and mid-life melancholy.
In English letters, Barrie’s creations stand with Lewis Carroll’s as singularly iconic. Like the worlds Alice found through the looking glass and rabbit hole, Barrie’s Neverland continues to inspire developing imaginations more than a century later. Thirteen years after Barrie's timeless fantasy about eternal childhood debuted in London, he returned to the aging theme from another angle. Dear Brutus is set in a childless environment. No children are in the story, or even referenced.
The exception is the mysterious Lob (Robert Towers, a casting bulls-eye), a tiny man of indeterminate age.
Before getting into the script’s merits, which predominate, a quick word about its weakness, which may explain why it is so seldom staged. The boyish Barrie has taken some shortcuts to get to the fun part. To assemble the disparate characters required for the plot, he brings the community’s saddest sorts together in the house of its oddest. As one character points out: "We have been here a week, and we find that when Lob invited us he knew us all so little that we begin to wonder why he asked us." Barrie seems to have had little interest in justifying his set up. It's unlikely people who are filled with the requisite regret would willingly oblige such blind-siding.
But with that quibble nibbled, we happily hoist our suspenders of disbelief and enjoy the ride. The view is another triumph from scenic designer Michael C. Smith, who creates a world of lush mystery and uncertainty. With lighting designer Ken Booth, they conjure up a nice trick with stage smoke to make it appear a mist has settled above the stage floor. Soojin Lee adds another two racks of detailed costumes to a "Fall Collection" she launched in ANW's Winter’s Tale. Rachel Myles’ sound and Laura Karpman’s music provide sonic accompaniment while the actors look and sound natural thanks to Monica Lisa Sabedra's hair and make-up and Nike Doukas’ guidance with dialects.
Lob, hiding his powers under a chosen name that in British slang means a dimwit, could be an aging Peter Pan, in the way Barrie, who was 57 when the play premiered, saw himself. But to not appear he was riding Peter's kite-tails, Barrie instead models Lob after Puck. In fact, one character recalls hearing him referred to as Robin Goodfellow. Another says villagers "remember him 70 years ago, looking just as he does today." Then again, there are possible ties to Peter's world. Lob's valet, Matey (William Dennis Hunt), could be Captain Hook’s First Mate, Starkey, brought back in servitude (which would explain his compulsive stealing.)
The play begins at 10 p.m. on Midsummer Night’s eve. Matey warns the guests that Lob may suggest a trip to a mysterious wood, but insists they not go. But, house-bound and anxious for adventure, they are not to be deprived. They will leave as soon as Barrie introduces us to Mr. and Mrs. Dearth (Geoff Elliott and Deborah Strang), Mr. and Mrs. Coade (Mitchell Edmonds and Sally Smythe), Mr. and Mrs. Purdie (Bruce Turk and Jill Hill), and the unattached Joanna Trout (Abby Craden) and Lady Caroline Laney (Erin Bennett).
The Purdies have a lackluster marriage with a hole in its boat-bottom. Squeezed in on the incoming water is Miss Trout. Barrie shifts the writing pace to light farce for the Purdies' love-triangle scene with Joanna. Like Midsummer mechanicals, they are delightfully dim, and Craden, Turk and especially Hill bring off the comedy nicely. Though our house wasn’t quite ready to make the stylistic leap so quickly, the actors will likely learn to trigger them early enough to permit full enjoyment.
We briefly glimpse the other guests' humdrum lives and lack of fulfillment. As intermission nears, the group
starts off for the wood, but Mr. Dearth, who seems to have done this before, eagerly reveals a better way.
A man with a secret life, and looking a little like Barrie under his mustache, Elliott's Dearth opens the lanai and
everyone except Lob and Mrs. Coade trips into the wood. Rodriguez-Elliott and Smith have fashioned the
trees as columns, to remind us that fantasy is a product of human imagination, not the natural world. The
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Russ Wever, Regan Southard, Myk Watford, Mississippi “Charles” Bevel, Van Zeiler, Stephen G. Anthony, Mark Baczynski, Margaret Bowman and Mike Regan in Hank Williams: Lost Highway / Ed Krieger
Country blues
Everything is in place for Hank Williams: Lost Highway, the Randall Myler-Mark Harelik musical biography filling Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theatre now through December 16. Under Myler’s direction, the vehicle seems to have the right parts on board for an illuminating journey powered by country hits. But, despite a solid actor- musician core led by the sweet-voiced Van Zeiler as the man behind "Your Cheatin’ Heart" and "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry," the ride never seems to stretch its limits. Perhaps that is because we know so well how the road ends.
Country music fans and those fascinated by the Alabama-born legend have plenty of cause to enjoy the show, as it is distinguished by the expert musicianship and singing which lovingly and faithfully recreates WIlliams' playlist. Not only is Zeiler impressive as the man who squandered his break-through talent and place in history, so are the cast members playing the men who provided Williams with both musical and emotional back up. Zeiler is a polished singer who makes Williams’ signature yodel sound easy. His acting range is sufficient to cover the script, although there may be dimension in the intangibles that lie between and behind the lines that an actor of originator Harelik’s talents was able to ferret out.
His band, the Drifting Cowboys, included his two lifelong sidekicks – guitarist Jimmy, played by Myk Watford, and bassist Hoss, played by Stephen G. Anthony. Given their duties as actors, musicians, singers and even cornball comics in the Grand Ol’ Opry scenes, the two are a wonder. The rest of the band is made up of even more accomplished players. As fiddler/mandolin player Leon, Mark Baczynski has only a few lines and pedal steel player Russ Weaver has even less. But they give the show a musical quality that should have audiences filling the aisles with foot stomping.
A fifth musician, Mississippi Charles Bevel, plays Tee-Tot, an old blues singer who sits gamely on the cluttered porch of a country service station and watches time go by, taking his own years one way as it takes appealing young talents like Williams the other way. Bevel serves as a kind of inspirational life coach in the show, standing as a testament to survival, turning hardship into art with no more than a $2 guitar. And, more often than not, forsaking the instrument to perform a cappella. But such a character, and what he represents, seems underused.
Sadly, the story is less exciting than the music. Part of the fault for the downcast storyline, of course, goes to Williams, who took a barnstorming career as a ground-breaking country blues innovator, and flew it like a kamikaze straight into the barn. But the problem also falls to the writers. There is a lot of rendering of songs without suffering their writing – either in the creating or the living. Snatches of lyrics pop up on pieces of paper and out of pockets. Suddenly in Williams’ years of boozing and drugging and womanizing, he comes up with "Lonesome," his real landmark. Zeiler delivers it beautifully, but we don’t really hang on the words as we would had we seen the scars that bore them. Consequently it floats in the air like a pretty paper lantern when it should be out there in the seats breaking our hearts.
As Mama, Margaret Bowman looks and sounds so authentic that one expects to see a dust-covered Greyhound with Alabama plates in the theater’s parking lot. In her flowered dresses and scowl, she is an iron-fisted disciplinarian who insists the band members toe the line. Can we really buy her son being afraid of crossing her one minute and then dry-humping his brand-new girlfriend in the passenger seat as she drives? And when does Papi suddenly start running the band? Somehow Mama silently relinquishes the reins and then wanders off for the better part of the show? Williams demanding wife, Audrey (Regan Southward), like Mama, comes off as surprisingly one-note. And a strange sequencing problem happens when she mentions a summer 1952 event and then divorcing in January 1952.
It’s a beautiful environment though, on a set imported from a production in Arizona. An inset, Victrola- arched proscenium creates a window for the various stages, touring scenes and home life, while Tee-Tot’s service station and a truck stop diner sit like detachable speakers stage right and left. When we get to the Grand Ol’ Opry scenes, several beautifully painted drops cable in like drapes.
Behind the diner counter, "The Waitress" (Stephanie Cozart) listens to the music on a radio and dreams of being taken away from all this. When she finally is, it’s by the singer who is so addled by substance abuse that she must continue imagining what it would be like to meet him, even as he lies at her feet. Giving us the full dimension of Williams is a bit beyond Zeiler's reach, but he can be forgiven, given the singing.
The show has been a big hit and certainly a major reason is the performances. But for all the sights and sounds that are provided, a better sense of the songwriter behind the singer is missing. In "Lonesome," Williams writes, "the midnight train is whining low," but for the Hank Williams train to have that lonesome whistle sound, we need a better sense of the heavy load it carries.
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Brandon Victor Dixon and Nikki Renee Daniels in Ray Charles Live! / Craig Schwartz
Soul on ice
With a title straight off a Vegas marquee, the world premiere of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Ray Charles Live!, at the Pasadena Playhouse through December 9, adds theater’s take on the seminal performer’s life and music to those of non-fiction literature and motion pictures. Where the best book, Charles’ own Brother Ray, let him whisper his story in our inner ears, and the blockbuster film Ray mixed a cinematographic documentary with a sometimes tabloid vibe, Ray Charles Live! shows the unique power of theater to weave a dramatic narrative through a virtual live concert.
Charles’ life was a rags-to-riches success story. He climbed to the top of a music business he helped redefine, all the while fighting the side-battles of blindness and blackness in America. By breaking the seal on the sacred sounds of gospel, and letting them walk the street with the blues, he alienated chunks of the white and black communities. But he helped forge the soul music that did as much as anything in the 1900s to work the truths within African-American music into the general culture. Appropriately, his two 'Live!" collaborators have established their own records of reaching wider audiences without sacrificing: playwright Parks won a Pulitzer for her unflinching yet artful look at racism in ‘Topdog/Underdog,’ and Epps increasingly offers his Pasadena Playhouse as an institutional launch pad for work socially ambitious works. The play is set after Charles’ death at the age of 73 in 2004. Consequently, the title has two meanings: it's a live performance by someone who must return from beyond to make the gig. The deal he struck to get here isn’t important. He is back in a recording studio to lay tracks for a final 'Greatest Hits' record while setting his permanent record straight. The famous Atlantic Records’ producer Tom Dowd, who died two years before Charles, is back at the board, mixing a pit band under the baton of Eric Butler. The musicians have a place of honor across an upstage platform, and serve as both Charles’ live concert accompaniment and session players. The live album will be a "life" album: working Charles’ greatest hits into his life story. But the tunes, when appropriate, will be sequenced to fit key characters and key moments to build the record’s other component, an oral history. The tour guide for the show is Charles’ mid-career persona, played by Brandon Victor Dixon. Jeremiah Whitfield-Pearson plays him as a child in Georgia and Wilkie Ferguson beautifully handles four songs as ‘RC,’ the emerging talent in his late teens, early adult years. The person who shaped him most, his mother Retha, is given warmth and backbone by Yvette Cason, who delivers her songs powerfully, especially a heart- breaking version of Henry Glover’s “Drown in My Own Tears” after the drowning death of Ray’s little brother. We meet Quincy Jones (Phillip Attmore), a life-long friend who met Charles in Seattle, but is little more than name-dropped here, and David “Fathead” Newman (Ricke Vermont), who has a lot more stage time as a bandmember. Other musicians, bandleaders and music industry folks are represented, notably Atlantic founder Ahmet Ertegun (Daniel Tatar, back in Pasadena after ‘The Last Five Years’). Of equal importance to the music, however, are the women in his life. Charles’ long-suffering wife Della B is well-rounded and beautifully sung by Nikki Renee Daniels. And, as two of the his ‘road wives’ from the back-up Raeletts, Angela Teek is a feisty Mary Ann Fisher, while Sabrina Sloan is a sultry, younger Margie Hendricks. Before Parks gets into the storytelling, however, she lets the man who would be Ray prove himself. The curtain rises on a bandstand filled with players. The show-ready Charles is led to the piano and, after introducing himself, takes his seat, tilts his head, and widens the signature smile-snarl that somehow spoke his ecstasy and anger at once. As soon as he and the band launch into a thumping rendition of ‘What’d I Say,’ it’s clear that Dixon knows Charles, vocally and instrumentally. (If he’s not playing the piano, it’s the best fake job we’ve seen.) With the popularity of the book and movie, it’s not necessary to trace the “plot” of ‘Ray Charles Live!’ The usual subjects are covered, and Parks’ narrative conceit permits Charles to indulge in some free-range storytelling, moving things around for dramatic contour and better effect. She doesn’t sugar-coat anything, either, portraying Charles’ womanizing, his emotional neglect of Della and their sons, and his 17-year addiction to heroin, which he kicked decades before he died but never apologized for using. Still, there is a polished, restained quality to the piece that is inevitable with a Broadway-bound show: a prettiness to things, an over-articulation to songs. When we feel the kind of roadhouse heat that could cook this music to the searing point is in the Angela Teek numbers. This is not to sleight any of these fine performers out there doing their job. Cason in particular is a treasure. So are Daniels and Sloan, especially when they join Teek for the show-stopping “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You.” But during those Teek solos, you may hear a husky voice in the inner ear whisper, “That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout.” Still, Dixon is so good that if the show settles in for a Broadway run in 2008 he could own New York. If so, his key to the city will likely be his version of ‘Georgia.’ For one thing, it’s testament to the ability of Charles’ music and personality to triumph over ignorance, since it was adopted as official song for the same state that once banned him after he protested its policy of segregated theaters. On the other hand, it’s Dixon taking the master head on and delivering one of Charles’ most identifiable songs in a way that lets us appreciate both the actor and the originator. The company is deep with talent, but a couple of shout-outs go to Maceo Oliver (back after his parts in ‘Cuttin’ Up’) and to Leslie Stevens, a utility player who not only dances to beat the band, but also serves up a remarkable range of well-toned characters -- from Queen Elizabeth, to a male country singer, to a backwoods schoolmarm. If she weren’t the only white woman on stage you’d never believe it was the same person.
Of the stories that make their way into every telling of the Charles’ story, a favorite is about how he sized up a woman’s physical appeal. While shaking hands, he politely slid his left hand along her right wrist. As acupuncturists check the human body through points on the ear, Charles’ gauge was all in the wrist. His long-held inside joke, his personal definition of ‘eyes of the beholder,’ must have given the signature grimace- grin full flower. But it was the redefinition of music that makes him important. And if ‘Live’ doesn’t redefine theater as a whole, it is turning at least one theater into L.A.’s hottest club through December 9. And that’s reason to smile.
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Ryan Yu in Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordan Hirabayashi / Michael Lamont
Say can you see
Gordon Hirabayashi grew up just like millions of first generation Americans. His parents leaned on the language of their homeland but learned English as they insisted it be their children’s native tongue. He embraced his country’s freedom of religion and association, both of which he grounded in the Quaker concept of friendship. He would pursue both education and romance as a free man, not as some gerrymandered hyphenate. However, as with all people of color in America, otherness would be forced back upon him from birth, and his calling card in society would be his genetic code.
Then, with the outbreak of World War II, he and his family, his community and the Japanese American population, would be further ostracized, distanced from all other immigrant segments and citizens of color. In response to attacks by the nation of Japan, naturalized and native-born Americans of Japanese descent were uprooted and boxed away in rough camps hidden in inhospitable areas across the country. Ironically, Hirabayashi's ingrained reverence for his country – or at least its stated principles – only deepened under the indignities and, after first becoming an obstacle to the incarceration process, he would become an advocate for the trampled U.S. Constitution, eventually standing for justice before the justices the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordan Hirabayashi, receiving its world premiere at East West Players through December 2, first-time playwright Jeanne Sakata turns this extraordinary story into a detailed play for one actor. A faithful and inventive staging by Jessica Kubzansky sets up a showcase for the considerable talents of Ryun Yu, who inhabits Hirabayashi as well as the male and female people who played roles in his life.
Dawn’s Light is set upon Maiko Nezu’s visual haiku. Simple, textured lines full of resonance set off an upstage surface where beautiful black and white photography unobtrusively assists the storytelling. Yu himself does the minimal set adjusting: sliding an angled panel of rough wood from use as a sign to a position as the wall of his internment quarters or court chamber. The two wooden chairs that he frequently rearranges recall the unflinching simplicity of Quaker design and philosophy.
The label that this is "inspired by a true story" seems to be more for legal than literary purposes. As Sakata explains in a program note, Dawn’s Light "is a work blending historical fact with fiction, and certain actual events have been compressed or altered in terms of chronology or content for dramatic purposes." While such disclosure could give detractors a toe-hold on dismissal, there is little indication that the key dramatic events that stretch this 95-minute one-actor one-act have compromised the scope or importance of what is being described.
Sakata has set herself a significant challenge and realized it in great measure. However, even at an hour and a half, and despite the always-engaging work of Yu and Nezu’s and Kubzansky’s images and ideas, it falls into a midsection slowness that suggests there may be 10 minutes worth of pruning to be found in the narrative folds. Reducing use of the hindering device which requires Yu to play both sides of Gordon’s conversations with others, would also speed things up. Where possible, converting those exchanges into longer monologue passages that reveal plot, ideas, prejudices, etc. through character would break things up. It would also give Yu deserved breathing room to ripen these other voices into individuals. He already does a lot fleshing out what he can within the quick-change rhythm of "he said, she said" back-and-forths.
That said, the play and production are a beautifully realized window into a scandalous episode of hypocrisy. Sakata’s intersecting of Quaker and American ideals juxtaposes two systems that are inherently about equanimity. The haunting opening, made almost hypnotic by John Zalewski’s sublime sound design is one of those great coming together moments in theater: Yu’s no-nonsense delivery, softened by the actor’s easy accessibility, presenting Sakata’s serious exploration of the idea of "self-evident" truths, within a visual context of art-museum beauty is unforgettable. Not surprisingly, it returns to bookend the show.
These scenes, like the show as a whole, not only encourage us to better see the crime done to the Japanese-Americans of the mid-20th Century, but also to look past them to the horizon ahead. The framers of the constitution chose those words "self-evident truths" carefully. In a sense it was a way of exonerating themselves as revolutionaries: "We’re not making this up: everybody knows it." Well, everybody knew it was wrong to intern Japanese Americans 60 years ago, and everybody knows it’s wrong to incarcerate people without charges today. And, it will always be wrong to engage in systematic torture of prisoners. It’s never just about the accused. It’s about the accuser, too. As Sakata’s title allows, collective consciousness may never proceed past the state of mere dawning. But it’s for the artists like her, Kubzansky and Yu, to make sure our focus is drawn in the direction of the light.
