Theatre Articles

Note: The Wake is on stage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre until Sunday, April 18. See www.centertheatregroup.org to purchase tickets.

I like to think of the International City Theatre in Long Beach as the off-Ahmanson. That is, the ICT is to the Ahmanson what off-Broadway is to Broadway; it may not be the first theatre that comes to Angeleno minds when craving the stage, but it’s the source of many gems and well worth the drive. The reason isn’t all that difficult to articulate: excellent production values and bravura choices, including Mark Twain’s Is He Dead and Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera from past seasons. Alas, as the ICT’s silver jubilee season gets underway, the inaugural production doesn’t quite meet the high standards set by previous productions. Backwards in High Heels: A Ginger Rogers Musical has all the temperament of a high school play.  

What happens when you take an acclaimed illusionist, wrap him up in a Cirque du Soleil production, and put the whole shebang on a Vegas stage? A lesson in the value of reading reviews before watching your money suffer an irrevocable disappearing act. Of course, as a critic I prefer to approach a play, a movie, a production, without the prejudice of other reviews. It doesn’t usually make a difference what other critics think, but there’s something to be said for the tabula rasa approach. Yet, by Houdini, had I possessed an inkling of the calamity that is Believe – on stage at the Luxor – I would have certainly gone to any one of the other Vegas shows.

There’s a dose of Cirque du Soleil in Daisuke Tsuji’s Sole Mate and Death and Giggles, which is no surprise given his tour as a clown with the Japanese edition of Dralion. The great physicality in his performance — drawing on all the usual clowning disciplines of mime and physical comedy, and more — matched by the ability to evoke an almost child-like sense of wonder certainly distills an essence of the Cirque. The comparison is apt; Death and Giggles is very much a non-narrative piece of performance art more loosely sketched and surreal than coherent and realistic.

The play that needs no introduction gets a woodsy handling at the Theatricum Botanicum. It’s an ideal setting for Shakespeare’s much loved play, and the folks at this little gem of a theatre nestled in Topanga Canyon know it; A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, quite rightly, a signature feather in their repertory cap. Performers zip on and off the built-up stage from a hill or trail, swing from a tree jutting out in the middle of the stage floor – it adds three-dimensional magic to the production. But where this magic was blunted in the Theatricum’s enjoyable but hit-or-miss, overperformed production of Cymbeline, it gets full expression here.

“Spamalot” not only keeps the venerable and ever-silly name [of Monty Python] alive, it delivers more laughs and entertainment in a couple of hours than entire seasons of popular sitcoms.

One of Shakespeare’s later plays gets the fresh air treatment at the Theatricum Botanicum, an outdoor amphitheatre tucked away in Topanga Canyon like the key to a chastity belt. And what a venue it is, with a stage surrounded by woodsy paths that give the actors the opportunity to enjoy off-stage freedom of movement and defined by a versatile set.

The reports of Mark Twain’s death are, as always, greatly exaggerated; his spirited wit lives on. It seems it was living in a file cabinet at U.C. Berkeley until scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin rescued it, gave it some fresh air and exercise, and found it every bit the Twain we know and love. A buff and a shine later, courtesy of playwright David Ives, and voila, a new offering of the quintessential American author’s impish, incisive humour.

“Doomsday Kiss” is an often funny, sometimes moving, always impeccably performed riff on the end of the world in varying degrees of eccentricity. The Bootleg Theater, an intimate theatre space in which seating and stage spill into each other, is itself something of a DIY apocalypse – in a good way. Red brick and pale plywood walls, jury-rigged fixtures, a warehouse atmosphere that keeps alive the theatre building’s previous incarnation as a bra factory – it’s an anti-aesthetic aesthetic that’s not only hip but sets the right tone for “Doomsday Kiss,” a slack gestalt of four theatrical works. Artwork in the lobby aims to prep audiences with an apocalyptic mindset, but the domesticated imagery of mushroom clouds and gas mask ultimately highlights what “Doomsday Kiss” is not; topical. No dire warnings of global warming-related catastrophes nor scenarios of water scarcity or economic collapse; not even that old standby, the fear of nuclear annihilation.

So there I was, a willing participant in the standing ovation, thinking, “Yeah, this is what theatre’s all about.” (After an evening of eloquent, profanity-laced monologuing, what I actually was thinking had a little more pepper to it. But you get the idea.) I would offer another theory as to how theatre “failed” America, and that little devil voice was trying mighty hard to make itself heard above the clapping and cheering. Still: Mike Daisey’s monologue How Theater Failed America, presented as part of the Kirk Douglas Theatre’s extra-curricular DouglasPlus series, is what theatre’s all about. And you only have until Saturday March 21st to catch this excellent micro-run production.