Richard Crawford and Diana Ruppe in Daniel Aukin's revival of The Adding Machine / J.T. MacMillan
Some Total
Midway through the La Jolla Playhouse's 60th Anniversary season, watchful spirits – possibly organized by Leslie J. Cohen, the late, longtime Playhouse friend and Trustee to whose memory the production is dedicated – have rallied for a landmark production that serves as signpost to past and perhaps future greatness. Like the reincarnation given Brecht, Chekhov, Sophocles and others during those heady McAnuff start-up years, Daniel Aukin's computer-age understanding of Elmer Rice's 1923 The Adding Machine is a total success greater than the sum of its parts.
With Technicolor vision and a deft grip on both concept and performance style, Aukin has guided a cast led by Richard Crawford to a feast of inventive theatricality with a social stinger.
Holding up without hammering out the aspects of a prescient script by the Pulitzer Prize-winner (for the later Street Scene), Aukin steers well clear of what would make for a long night in the heavy hands of a director bent on making an audience pay for its bourgeois sins. Still, a theater audience, especially a feted opening night crowd, is likely to be more of industry's top than bottom. So to insure that Machine's message about employing understanding with workers is doggy-bagged for revisiting, he injects it into a staging as cool and colorful as sorbet.
Mr. Zero (Crawford, right out of a Max Fleischer cartoon) is a cubby-holed cog at work, totaling figures called out by a co-worker, Miss Devore (a Tautou-esque Diana Ruppe). After 25 years of adding to a firm bottom line, the firm has added nothing beyond subsistence for him. Consequently he must endure the whiney tirades of Mrs. Zero (Jan Leslie Harding, another sight gag), who is the rightful needler on her own nightly phonograph record. As Zero slumps in his Lazy Boy, Harding's pitch-perfect bitch drones what would drive any spouse to embrace the electric chair. Yet, in Aukin's and Harding's hands, it remains endurable and funny, even wryly moving.
A healthy percentage of the credit for this production's success – depending on who brought the ideas to the design meetings – must be shared between Aukin and his designers: scenic designer Andrew Lieberman, costumer Maiko Matsushima, lighting designer Japhy Weideman, the sound designer and composer, Colbert S. Davis IV and Cassia Streb, respectively, and even Mark Adam Rampmeyer's wigs and hair treatments.
Leiberman's platform set is as symmetrical as a boxing ring. The stage floor, bathed in the tropical punch hues of Weideman's lighting cues, has five table-size cutouts. It creates an ironically gorgeous environment for Zero's strange, expressionistic rabbit hole plunge. After 25 years of serving the company, and assuming the loyalty goes both ways, the worker sees that his investment has left no mark. He takes matters into his own hands after a dinner party for the other office numbers reveals, in Aukin's most stylized staging, that they are all nothing more than synchronized robots.
Without a chance of justice at work, and no longer able to muster any personal joy elsewhere in this world, Zero is shown the next one. There, Rice imagines, we are free to make our own heaven if we want it. But, Zero, and one badly damaged earlier arrival, Shrdlu (a riveting Joshua Everett Johnson), are, for different reasons, unable to take advantage. Even after Miss Devore appears, offering an appealing woman's heaven, Zero is just too numb, and opts for a return to the grindstone's ball and chain.
A must see for anyone curious about Rice and his work. According to Associate Artistic Director Shirley Fishman, who championed the script, there are no tweaks (just some cutting of repetitious passages near the very end). Itís a thrill to hear that good insight into the human condition is timeless, even if it means we as a society haven't progressed as far as we'd like to think.
In terms of the Playhouse's progress, it's clearly back on track. I think a night raid is in order to move the "true north" marker that begins the Ashley era from 'Carmen' to this show. I'm sure Mr. Cohen's up for it.
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Ann Noble and Stephanie Stearns / Matt Kaiser
The Course and the Fine
In Be Like Water, receiving its world premiere at East West Players (through October 12), playwright Dan Kwong, whose primary credits are as a performance artist, reveals an ability to adapt the huge issues (racism, mother-daughter stalemates, application of ancient wisdom) to living-room scale. He balances these disparate dimensions so that the expansiveness, danger and instruction of the unknowable elements of his story are just as active in the day-to-day trials of these familiar family characters.
Director Chris Tashima has accepted Kwong's challenge to find four teenagers who can carry most of the show's weight. The toughest roles are the play's lead, Tracy, played by Saya Tomioka, and her friend played by Shawn Huang. For the most part they hold her own. Tomioka is good as the pivotal Tracy. She hasn't figured out how to modulate her big fights with her mom into something more than screaming. And all the kids seem blissfully unaware that the pervasive attitude of sarcasm (as in, "hel-LO") developed since the '70s. It's a contemporary cliche that would be wise to lose. But these are clearly dedicated performers and nuance will come. Fortunately, she is sharing the stage with one of the most wonderful characterizations seen this year.
As the Ghost of Bruce Lee, Cesar Cipriano turns what could be a poster-thick movie star portrait into a tribute to the actor and all the Asian American teens who saw in him a powerful, uplifting on screen reflection. Though Lee's movies never merited more than a B, the star was by default the A-list Chinese actor in America. James Hong, Jack Soo and Pat Morita weren't about to challenge Stallone, Norris and Reynolds in the testosterone department. The emergence of Lee, even in his tragically short life (mirrored by the short life of his son Brandon, who like Dad died just before his biggest film was released), gave young men - like Kwong, one assumes - reason to stride out of a theater with head high.
Cipriano looks like Lee, moves like Lee (at least enough to convince the uninitiated), and is clearly a trained dancer - which adds precision to Kwong and Tashima's big theatrical moment. Also, he delivers his aphorisms with a mix of the ancient sage and the deadpan comic, leaving just enough crack between the two to laugh at himself.
Tracy is an only-child daughter of a Chinese-American father (Michael Sun Lee) and Japanese-American mother (Pam Hayashida). Kwong even manages to encapsulate the Sino-Japanese issues of World War II into this relationship, with references to the occupation playing out in the couple's obvious willingness to overlook the brutalities.) Tracy is a tomboy. It's 1978, and disco is setting the style, and style is seeming very shallow. (Dave Iwataki creates a time-travel sound survey.) Tracy's best friend, a diminutive classmate saddled with the outsized name of Bruce Lee (Huang), is not a fan of the film star, but instead a fan of the dance craze. (Speaking of anachronisms, Lil Lee carries a personal stereo, like a Walkman, which wasn't even introduced in Japan until 1979; Tracy switches off her TV with a remote, which were hardly the stuff of poor kid bedrooms back then.)
Together, Tracy and Bruce keep each other from being friendless. Representing Ms. Perfect is Tina (Ariel Rivera), also of Japanese-American descent. She's a model citizen in the eyes of Tracy's mom because she is always dressed like a lady, and participates in school projects.
Part of the non-ladylike behavior that drives Tracy's mom nuts is her study of - and proficiency at - Kung Fu fighting, something her father tacitly encourages. It has made her a schoolyard force to be reckoned with. The play's lone white kid, Jeremy (Jonathan Decker), embodies racism. He lays on the epithets with such abandon that it won't be surprising if a folding chair comes flying out of the audience at him during a performance. Understandably, when Tracy can no longer take the taunts, she lets him have it.
In something between a hallucination and a visitation, Lee's Ghost appears to Tracy to offer guidance. He is a Sifu, a teacher. In accordance with the old Taoist lesson to "be like water," Lee has attained this afterlife travel pass through understanding of the great teachings. How he arrives is another subtle comic device that the team take advantage of, aided by Alexander Gao's projections, in an example of how East West continues to expand its limited stage. (Though projecting the television show Tracy briefly watches seems like a missed opportunity.) Lee explains to Tracy why water,:which seeks the level and flows around immovable objects, is to be emulated.
The nicest moment in the show, which Kwong earns through the steady, honest build of his plot and characters, is a coming together of the sacred and the profane of Kung Fu and disco. Here the Ghost of Bruce Lee and the young, somewhat nerdy Bruce Lee gradually merge fight moves into dance moves and vice versa. It's an original moment that touches this show with magic. Kudos to Diana Lee Inosanto and Ron Balicki, who contributed the martial arts choreography, and Blythe Matsui, credited with the dance moves.
Much of the musical memories, however, come to cover scenery shifts by the busy actors that are adding time to the show and should be refined by Tasumi and set designer Akeime Mitterlehner. Given the great projection screen to help establish location, some simpler piece that doesn't require so much resetting should have been employed. If there's one tip the set design needed, it's the play's title. By being more fluid, the play would also benefit from a Western cliche: less is more.
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John Herzog, Steve Vinovich, and Kyle Coleridger-Krugh / Christopher Trela
The Oy of the Beholder
The character of self-absorbed TV actor Curt Logan may have been miscast for the play within Tom Dudzick's backstage comedy Don't Talk to the Actors, but Steve Vinovich is spot-on to play him. The Laguna Playhouse West Coast premiere (through October 12), is a one-dimensional vehicle that works well in the hands of Rick Sparks' six-member cast. But Vinovich gets a role that is pitched straight for his wheelhouse. As a result, he knocks it - and the production - into next week.
Jerry (Chris L. McKenna), a Buffalo bank teller moonlighting as a playwright, is snatched from community theater celebrity by a chance meeting with a Broadway producer. Don't Talk begins as he and his fiancée Arlene (Emily Eiden) arrive in the dingy New York rehearsal room to which his play, a portrait of his parents entitled The Piano Tuner, has attracted a director from Chicago (Joel Polis), Broadway's "most sought-after" stage manager (Denise Moses), and the two actors: Beatrice Pomeroy (Eileen T'Kaye) and Logan.
Dudzick, who based this script on experiences with his own breakout play, Greetings, initially teases with big issues of chance versus determinism in a neatly rendered distinction between luck and miracles. But, ultimately, it's just groundwork to help excuse the dropping at curtain of a heavy-handed deus ex machina. The happy ending falls with a leaden desperation more at home in the fantasy films of the Depression-era.
By that time however, we've had our fun and are grateful for another chance to see Vinovich give another empty vessel the carefully crafted disguise of sincerity. Like comedy's great male lugheads, Vinovich creates an selfish buffoon we can't help loving. In the middle of serious discussion, what seems to be a deeply held conviction will lose his interest as easily as his LBJ grins slides from his face.
As the awestruck girl in the big city - doubly burdened by a childhood infatuation with Logan - Eiden shows off more than she could in her small part of Taking Steps at SCR last June. She moves effortlessly from unyielding girlfriend insisting Jerry be realistic to moon-eyed pool of jelly when Logan walks in the room. Polis, a journeyman with great instincts, becomes the show's anchor, and with McKenna, one of its two straight men. They admirably do their jobs and let the others - including Moses' depiction of another lunatic stage manager, and T'Kaye's thankless role as the less-than-funny co-star Pomeroy - get the laughs.
And there are laughs, mostly actor driven and certainly plenty for those with a working knowledge of theater. Dudzick can thank Sparks and company - including designers Bruce Goodrich, Julie Keen, Paulie Jenkins, and David Edwards - for making it real, fun and real fun.
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Kelli Sawyer (right) with Kate Monster / Carol Rosegg
Street of dreams
It has taken four years for the musical theater block party called Avenue Q to reach Los Angeles. In 2003, composer-lyricists Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx and book-writer Jeff Whitty premiered their show at off-Broadway's Vineyard Theatre under Jason Moore's direction. The combination of the kind of irreverence that earns cult status for films, bubble-wrapped in Children's Television Workshop references, earned critical praise, gushing word-of-mouth and a move to Broadway. After it won 2004 Tony Awards for best musical, score and book, a lone road company was sent to establish a beach-head in Las Vegas. But that proved a dead-end when the few naughty bits (like a scene in which puppets have sex) was just too much for families more comfortable with Vegas' traditional offerings of gambling and nudity. So, this year Avenue was back on track, hitting the road in a national tour that now parks at the Ahmanson Theatre through October 13.
Modeled after the PBS show "Sesame Street," Avenue Q has an educational vibe that underlies all the life lessons in Whitty's never-formulaic dialogue, the helpful cartoon videos by Lopez, and more than 20 pop tunes sung by the cast of humans and puppets. The puppets, who recall characters like Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie and others, are not here to help kids, however. They're just here to help co-opt the most successful franchise in children's television, creating a kind of foam-rubber Rent by which to explore those baffling years between leaving home and buying our own.
Issues associated with setting out on our own, like confusion over identity, sexuality, values and purpose are the stuff of people in their 20s and 30s. Here, thanks to this aura of children's programming, the writers take license to say anything. They apply the directness and innocence of kids, who haven't lived long enough to watch what they say, to the neurotic world of adults, who seldom say what they feel. The incongruity of children's puppets singing "You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You're Makin' Love)" and "The Internet is for Porn" fills Avenue Q with a giddy anarchy. These songs, and others like "We're All A Little Bit Racist," are more in-your-face and incendiary on paper than they play, which probably explains the unusual step of not listing the musical numbers in the program.
The primary story follows the puppet Princeton, brought to life by Robert McClure, a 23-year-old trying to find his purpose in life before making any professional or personal commitment. His affections become divided between the nurturing Kate Monster, a good girl from the other side of the gene pool, and a trampy seductress named Lucy the Slut. Kelli Sawyer provides the hands and voice for both. In addition to Princeton's story line, there's one involving roommates Rod and Nicky as Rod discovers his true sexual orientation and Nicky gets thrown out on the street when he seems unsympathetic.
The cast's three humans include Christmas Eve, a Japanese immigrant played by Angela Ai, her boyfriend Brian, a wannabe stand-up comedian played by Cole Porter (yes, that's his name), and Gary Coleman, played by Carla Renata. It's the Gary Coleman, the former child television star after his fortune was squandered. Now he manages one or more of the buildings on Avenue Q.
The cast delivers the songs, the comedy, the muppet voices and the everything's-okay cheeriness demanded by the show's conceit (even when it's barely noticeable beneath a sad or dramatic section). Sawyer and McClure, who get the big numbers that carry more story and emotion, are the stand-outs.
The way the four puppeteers work the half-dozen puppet characters adds to the show's sense of candor and honesty. Just as kids play with dolls by wriggling the frozen-faced things while they provide voice and expression, the 'Avenue Q' puppeteers make no effort to hide their presence. Like ventriloquists who forgot to keep their mouths shut, they act out each line of dialogue as their hands animate the characters' faces. Even Minglie Chen, who is the second puppeteer in a couple of the more elaborate puppets (like Nicky), acts out the lines in tandem as the lead puppeteer, usually Christian Anderson, provides the voice.
Tthe bizarre dichotomy is best represented by the Bad-Idea Bears, a pair of syrup-falsettoed Teddies who pop up to offer advice at key moments. But these two are not here to coach virtue. They want people to stay out all night and pout when their human friends can only afford a six-pack instead of a case of beer.
Unless your 10-year-old has just returned from a year at sea, this is probably too salty for the kids in the family. Still, if you love musical theater, you'll want to study how a show that begins with a tune called "My Life Sucks" and ends with one about how unsatisfactory things are, can provide one of the most uplifting experiences in theater this year. On the other hand, if you loved watching the Muppets for their barely contained subversive undercurrent, this is a must. It's like the Broadway staging of what Jim Henson and Frank Oz might have come up with in their heydey, after they'd put the censors to bed and brought out the good hash.
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Brenda Hattingh and Kim Hoy in Calling Aphrodite / Shashin Desai
War Torn
Leave it to a woman who owes her existence to a love that owed its existence to war, to write a play that brings together those opposing forces. Calling Aphrodite, Velina Hasu Houston's unifying new drama, is receiving its world premiere under Shashin Desai's direction at the International City Theatre in Long Beach through September 23. And the director's light touch in design and performance has made the most of this coup for his theater, allowing a beautiful play to breath and radiate meaning on many levels. His two leads tailor finely drawn characters, always allowing the words and images within the script to do the heavy lifting.
For Aphrodite, Houston - whose Japanese mother and African American father met in Japan after the war - returns as she did in her best-known work, Tea, to those years leading to her birth. There, as here, she explores the way Japanese women had to adjust their sense of personal and cultural aesthetics in the tangled wreckage of the post-war world. In Tea, the women have followed their soldier husbands back to a base at the center of America and formed their own kind of island nation within the foreign culture.
Calling Aphrodite introduces two sisters reaching adulthood in 1940s Hiroshima. Keiko (Kym Hoy) is older than Shizuko (Vivian Bang) by a couple of years. Though she is constantly complimented on her surface beauty, dressing in traditional kimono as if to underscore its timelessness, she is more concerned with deeper meanings of the phenomenon, and explores those questions in inner dialogue with Aphrodite (Brenda Hattigh), an expert on the subject.
The story follows the sisters and two doctors, the American Dr. Everett (Barry Lynch), who served U.S. troops during the war and now tries to help traumatized Japanese, and their local Hiroshima physician (Blake Kushi). Keiko begins the play enamored of American culture, particularly films starring Susan Hayward. Even though her country and the U.S. are at war, Keiko can separate these nations' exhibition of love and beauty from their engagement in war and domination.
Until the bombs drop. Then the challenges of maintaining her distinctions of beauty and integrity between hostiles are put to the ultimate test. Houston integrates classic themes of beauty, war, love, tragedy and so on without ever blurring her portraits of real women. When one chides the other with, 'You only loved what he looked like,' we're hearing the stuff of myth wrapped in a teenage taunt Similarly, the central question of beauty's mixed blessing echoes in larger contexts. Keiko and Shizuko think the American planes have spared their city because of its natural beauty. Once the land and people have been so ravaged, beauty abets the enemy as they suspect that the bombers chose Hiroshima because it was clearer and more beautiful over that city that day as compared to other cities obscured by clouds.
The less-is-more use of masks is also a plus. Aphrodite is "covered" only by a white eye mask, as if she peeped through a door's mail slot as the other side was being spray-painted. Productions suffer when actors' faces are covered, eliminating the most animated agent on stage. Thankfully Desai resorts to a full mask only briefly. Instead, we get a more powerful sense of theatrical masks and the real-life masks of enhancing make up or disfigurement by scars.
The cast is anchored by its leads, Hoy and Lynch, who navigate what could slide into treacly melodrama in the wrong hands.
One dramaturgical note is a possible red herring in Dr. Everett's references to his wife, who first fails to accompany him, then separates from him, and is then back in his life (or he has remarried) without any apparent need for this arc. Though it never gets in the way of the storytelling, it hints that Houston may have been laying the groundwork for Keiko to allow herself thoughts of a deeper emotional connection with him. A romance between doctor and patient is not where this play wants to go, but the internal workings of a once-beautiful woman reckoning her powers after damage to her image, is the kind of area Houston is after. A word to Keiko that they are back together, without disturbing the non-relationship, might be what the story wants. And, since Everett's only age requirement is that he have a son of military age, if in future productions a director casts Lynch as young as late 30s or 40, this angle would have to be sorted out one way of the other.
As Calling Aphrodite unfolds we feel the sure hand of a playwright whose interest in craft is matched by her interest in humanity. When both aspects are at this high a level, theater opens both the hearts and minds of its audience members. She is fortunate to have such a production with which to launch it. From the opening pluck of ancient Japanese instruments, the balletic first entrances, and the framing of Don Llewellyn's beautiful, furniture-less set we experience an integrated production that totals more than the sum of its parts. Credit Desai with making the most of a great opportunity to premiere the work of an important American writer.
