EVERYBODY'S GOT ONE 

by TRAVIS MICHAEL HOLDER  

"Critics watch a battle from a high place then come down to shoot the survivors."   ~ Ernest Hemingway   

Photo by Jeremy Daniels 

THROUGH JULY 27: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 800.982.2787 or broadwayinhollywood.com 

Photo by Andrew Ge 

East West Players

Philip Kan Gotanda’s now classic two-hander Yankee Dawg You Die begins with a chance meeting at a glitzy Hollywood party in 1988 between an overconfident young Asian-American actor on the rise, whose main credit at this point is overshadowed by the rumor that he was almost fired from a play in New York, and an established veteran whose long and successful film career, as what he refers to as an “oriental” performer, has spanned many years and includes an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

The main conflict for the ages is typically generational. Bradley Yamashita (Daniel J. Kim) at first gushes to Vincent Chang (Kelvin Han Yee) about being a longtime avid fan of his work but the more he opens his mouth, the more his proverbial foot gets stuck in it. For Vincent, his career has been playing countless stereotypical Asian roles in low budget movies—a term that Bradley quickly corrects, instead saying that the more contemporary description of the older icon’s career is that he's been working in independent films.

What starts off as an excited outpouring of the newbie’s respect for his elder rapidly turns sour, especially when he mentions one of Vincent’s more recent performances in a movie about Tokyo being attacked by a giant salamander, featuring the actor appearing with overgrown hairy facial appliances, made him “look like a fucking chimpanzee.”

The ongoing clash between these two perspectives is quickly evident. Vincent is proud he’s worked steadily in film for years and has never turned down a part offered him. Bradley sees it differently, later referring to his predecessor as someone who spent his life acting like a Chinese Stepin Fetchit.

Indeed, despite his Oscar nomination, most of Vincent’s roles through the years had been playing Vietnamese prison commandants, genuflecting waiters, and other standardized Asian characters, all roles he played willingly while riding along on the wave of what much earlier in vaudeville was derogatorily dubbed the Chop Suey Circuit.

Gotanda’s groundbreaking Yankee Dawg, now in an electrically charged revival at East West Players chosen to honor the company’s prestigious 60^th anniversary year, was first performed at Berkeley Rep in 1988 before being brought to Los Angeles Theatre Center later that year and journeying on to a much-acclaimed run off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 1989.

It was first revived at East West Players in 2001 and the fact that all these years later it is still an important seminal work in the canon of Asian American theatre makes it the perfect choice to mount again nearly a quarter-century later. The conflicts that develop between the brash hopeful, who believes with all of his naivete that he can break barriers and redefine how Asians are represented onscreen, and the world-weary acceptance of his older counterpart who has spent his entire career forced to assimilate into the narrow-minded demands of Hollywood in its heyday, is still a fascinating journey.

Along the way, what initially develops into a prickly adversarial relationship evolves into a bond that changes the life and worldview of each of these two men. Under the visionary direction of Jennifer Chang, who inventively modernizes the production by incorporating live and recorded video projections into this retelling of Gotanda’s cautionary tale, it could not be more pertinent today.

Keeping in mind that much has changed in our industry and Asian actors have today indeed been afforded far more respect and appreciation in our insular universe of arts creation, the world around us still has a long way to go to catch up.

Kim makes an auspicious EWP debut as Bradley, able to find both the character’s early cockiness and, through the production’s intermissionless 90 minutes, successfully morphs into a more accepting guy who finds an all-new respect for someone who might not be that different from him after all.

Still, it is Yee who makes the most solid and indelible impression as Vincent Chang, especially when he stops being respectfully polite and makes sure this upstart knows he wouldn’t be anywhere near where he is in his career if it wasn’t for all the crap that he and his generation silently endured just to survive in the hardhearted and brutal business called show.

Added to the many wonders of this magical and important return of Yankee Dawg and Gotanda’s insightful exploration of Asian American identity and early representation in the entertainment industry is the fact that

                         Shimono and Yee at Berkeley Rep, 1988

We must remember as our country and all we hold dear crashes and burns around us at this terrifying crossroads in the course of human history that it is art that slowly and gradually heals the world. Philip Kan Gotanda’s exceptional wordsmithery helped change the perception and acceptance of Asian actors over the course of the last 37 years—and obviously continues to do so. Much has been accomplished since Yankee Dawg You Die first debuted, yet indisputably we can't stop speaking out now more than ever before.

THROUGH JULY 27: East West Players, 120 Judge John Aiso St., LA. 323.609.7006 or eastwestplayers.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Geffen Playhouse

A new play about struggling with addiction, dealing with cognitively aging grandparents, and winning back a parent who’s given up on you. Sounds like a laugh a minute, doesn’t it? Well, surprisingly, it is.

The world premiere of The Reservoir at the Geffen heralds the auspicious professional playwrighting debut of Jake Brasch, someone with a unique ability to reveal more autobiographical shit about himself than even Jonathan Safran Foer could call forth—and who with this play instantly emerges as a major dramatist with a career to watch as it rockets to the heights.

On Takeshi Taka’s minimalist abstract set possibly meant to conjure a CT-scan slide of Brasch’s brain, The Reservoir begins as the writer’s alter-ego Josh (Jake Horowitz in a phenomenal, marathon performance) wakes up on the shore of a Denver reservoir with coughed-up schmutz caked on down the front of his Cosby sweater and little idea how he got there.

Having taken a medical leave from NYU, where’s he’s been a theatre major considering writing a queer-themed 12-step-oriented musical called Rock Bottom, it seems Josh instinctively headed home to Colorado to see if he could once again get sober with the help of his family. His long-suffering mother (Marin Hinkle) has been through this process many times before with her chronically alcoholic mess of a son, however, and isn’t exactly anxious to open her arms for another dose of heartache.

Josh turns to his grandparents for solace and acceptance, but in doing so realizes both sets of his eclectic elders are overwhelmed by problems of their own.

All four of his once-sharply focused grandparents are in the midst of some degree of cognitive decline and Josh, in an effort to save himself through becoming a champion determined to help slow their symptoms, discovers the concept of Cognitive Reserve, a theory that by keeping the mind and body challenged, the descent into dementia and Alzheimer’s can be diminished.

Of course, this is an admirable mission, but is it more about distracting himself to keep him from drinking vanilla extract by the bottle than it is saving them?

It’s obvious and hardly a secret that Brasch is writing about his own recovery and his own struggles with sobriety and finding his way through questions regarding his sexuality, his sense of worth, and trying to unravel how his Jewish roots figure into his battle against those incessant demons.

Creating this amazing work of incredibly personal art is a gift for us all—and the fact that Brasch can accomplish bringing us along on his difficult quest with such a welcomingly twisted sense of humor is revelatory.

His maternal grandmother Irene (Carolyn Mignini) is the worst off, relegated to a care facility and, although no longer really capable of holding a conversation or even acknowledging Josh’s presence, she can sing a few verses of unseasonal Crissmiss carols like a retired member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Her husband Hank (Geoffrey Wade), although still With Us, seems totally unaware of his descendant’s all-too public struggles when he runs into him at a bookstore while looking for a copy of The Fountainhead to give to his gastroenterologist, while his paternal granddad Shrimpy (Lee Wilkof) is not only enlightened but more than willing to make some knee-slapping jokes about Josh’s drinking or his sexuality. 

Still, Josh’s strongest bond is with Shrimpy’s ex Beverly (Liz Larsen), a feisty no-nonsense electrical engineer who helps her grandson more than any of the others—even though she professes outright that she would prefer not to have to be so close and nurturing with him.

Director Shelley Butler is the quintessential partner for the unstoppable imagination and quirky style of Brasch, collaborating with him to implement his balls-out narrative devises, including moments when light changes signal that Josh has left the scene and is instead talking directly to us—prompting after one such episode for Beverly to ask him, “Where do you go when you do that?”

In fact, both pairs of grandparents stay seated upstage through most of the action, ready to step into the story at a moment’s notice and willing to comment on what’s happening even if they’re not really there. It’s a fascinating and wildly inventive example of the lack of limits inherent in creating theatrical magic.

Along the way, as Josh desperately attempts to heal, Brasch finds moments to mine humor in unexpected ways, sending up everything from vegan anarchist co-ops to senior aerobics (with Hinkle doubling as an ‘80s-esque Jane Fonda-like exercise guru who introduces herself as “I’m Jeanette and I’m a visionary”), and on to Shrimpy’s admission that he’s 85% straight but likes to look at images of dicks on his computer.

To say Butler’s cast is golden is a huge understatement. Horowitz is absolutely stunning as Josh, one of those roles that could make any actor sleep 18 hours a day between performances to keep from crashing.

All four actors playing his goofy grandparents are superlative, especially Wilkof’s charmingly off-kilter Shrimpy (no one’s called him Milton since grade school), who refers to his recently diagnosed condition as “diet Alzheimer’s,” and Larsen, who gives a standout tour-de-force performance as the tough but loving Beverly.

Hinkle is almost unrecognizable as she zips between supporting characters, as is Adrian Gonzalez playing a series of characters, including a beach cop, an abrasive psychologist author, and especially as Josh’s patient manager at a local bookstore who's hiding some heady secrets of his own.

This troupe of veteran performers are the heart of The Reservoir, which would never work as well without such talent and a palpable willingness to believe in Brasch’s outrageous over-the-top characters.

Still, it’s all about the discovery of a brilliant new dramatist whose star, with this exceptional debut, has clearly been launched into the stratosphere and I suspect will soon be recognized as one of the brightest in the galaxy.

As it was with early Durang or Charles Mee, some people might be a tad put off by Jake Brasch’s idiosyncrasies, his intrepid honestly, and his willingness to bare his soul, not to mention his delightfully skewed and inappropriate playfulness dealing with some usually dead serious subjects.

Personally, as a longtime primary caregiver to a partner slowly disappearing into dementia and Alzheimer’s, I was more than ready for a good swift kick in my poor-me pants provided by his bold and dark sense of humor.

“How many Alzheimer’s patients does it take to screw in a lightbulb?,” Shrimpy asks.

“To get to the other side.”

THROUGH JULY 20: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Av., Westwood. 310.208.5454 or geffenplayhouse.org

Photo by Joan Marcus 

Ahmanson Theatre

As someone who’s been active in theatre as an actor, director, playwright, and teacher for over seven decades and has been writing reviews of live performance for close to 40 of those years, all despite the uphill journey of championing such things tirelessly in a world more interested in real housewives and eager to know if TayTay and her… er… Tight End are still together, there are times when it begins to feel as though it’s been a waste of time.

I guess burnout is an issue in every profession but for me, when it hits, it hits bigtime, and I begin to wonder if my quest for windmills has been taken over by a geriatric lack of wind.

Then suddenly something comes along such as the six-time Tony nominated revival of Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s 1998 musical Parade, which won the authors Tonys for Best Book and Best Score, respectively, when it was first presented and this time out won for Best Revival of a Musical in 2023 and received incredibly deserving Best Director honors for Michael Arden’s visionary reinvention.

Now energizing the Ahmanson with both its expansive reconceptualization and its uncanny timeliness in calling out injustice and inequality as our own city finds itself under siege by a whole new breed of racists and powermongers, this Parade is far more powerful than squeaky military tanks and embarrassed-looking foot soldiers (once referred to as “suckers” and losers” by the Velveeta Voldemort) could ever conjure.

Uhry’s controversial subject matter for Parade has little in common with musicals about unseemly ogres arriving to rescue feisty princesses or dipshit teenyboppers proving Harvard Law can be an adorable place to study. It is truly the quintessential definition of what constitutes—and what bravely attempts to push the boundaries of—the genre of musical theatre.

Probably the last thing most artists would tackle when deciding to morph real life events into a musical would be the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory supervisor living in Atlanta who, in 1913, was glaringly railroaded and convicted, primarily because of his ethnicity, for the murder of one of his 13-year-old female employees.

It’s an ominous and ugly tale of prejudice, corruption, and broken dreams, yet somehow Pulitzer/Oscar/three-time Tony-winning playwright Uhry, along with lategreat Broadway superstar producer/director Harold Prince, believed the tragic saga of Frank and his loyal wife Lucille was worthy of a musical treatment.

Thanks to their sense of innovation and the richly semi-classical score by Brown, Parade is more a dark and brooding opera than it is a musical entertainment, something made gloriously noteworthy by Uhry’s absorbing account of one of the most barbaric moments in our country’s troubled history.

Brown’s contribution is the icing on the cake, giving a surprising number of performers in the 33-member ensemble their own individual chance to shine—and shine they do.

Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of this particular mounting of the epic production is the cast. Under the exceptional musical direction of Charlie Alterman, this may be the most gifted group of vocalists gathered together on one stage I’ve been swept away by since 1985 when Porgy and Bess was indelibly revived by the Metropolitan Opera.

In the demanding role of Leo Frank, Max Chernin gives a dynamic, many-faceted performance that also quickly rises above the traditional limitations of musical theatre, growing and maturing and becoming ever more courageous as the character faces the inevitability of his fate.

As his stalwart wife Lucille, Talia Suskauer also finds a clear arc as the unstoppable spirit of her character’s evolution from dutifully subservient spouse to fiery, assertive advocate for her husband’s vindication becomes a clear path that would be easy to find a tad implausible.

Together, Chernin and Suskauer manifest a love and devotion between two people that is nothing short of awesome, something solidified by their emotional duets, “This is Not Over Yet” and the hauntingly beautiful eleventh-hour ballad “All the Wasted Time.”

As I mentioned, Brown has given almost all of the supporting players their own individual spotlight in his stirring song cycle, from Chris Shyer as standup Governor John Slaton (the mood-lifting “Pretty Music”) to Jenny Hickman as the grieving mother of the teenage victim (“My Child Will Forgive Me”) to Andrew Samonsky and Griffin Binnicker as the Trump-like villainous prosecutor and future Governor Hugh Dorsey and his pretend-pious ally Tom Watson (“Somethin’ Ain’t Right” and “Hammer of Justice,” respectively).

As the threatened witnesses coached to lie on the stand by Dorsey, Danielle Lee Greaves as the Frank’s compromised housekeeper (“Minnie’s Testimony”), and Robert Knight and Ramone Nelson as two factory workers led astray (“I Am Trying to Remember” and “That’s What He Said”), are all unforgettable in their own right.

In the musical’s prologue, “The Old Red Hills of Home,” Trevor James and Evan Harrington perfectly set the mood for the then-still rural Atlanta community fiercely proud to fight for their country, while perhaps the most infectious supporting performance comes from Jack Roden in an auspicious professional theatre debut as Frankie Epps, the dear, sweet young kid swept into the fervor of war, displaced values, and the enveloping shroud of racism and national pride. His rendition of “It Don’t Make Sense” is a heartbreaker.

Casting director Craig Burns and the Telsey Office deserve exorbitant praise for assembling this incredible, uniformly inspirational troupe of actors with voices beyond the best—but of course, the catalyst for what makes them so able to be incandescent is the gorgeous, heroic score by Jason Robert Brown, heir to the mantle as one of the greatest musical theatre composers of all time, each magical link of its chain forged through the years by the likes of George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, and Brown’s obvious mentor Stephen Sondheim.

Aside from the genius of Brown and the once again current urgency of Uhry’s message about intolerance and cultural confiscation in pursuit of ruthless political ambition, what lifts this revival into the stratosphere is the Tony-winning vision of director Michael Arden, who breathes a whole new passionate, highly kinetic life into an originally quite austere production that even the legendary Harold Prince himself failed to deliver with any palpable ardor.

Along with the choreographic team of Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant, most of the large ensemble seldom leave the stage, often when not in the action staying seated as observers on either side of set designer Diane Laffrey’s political platform of a playing space adorned with patriotic stars-and-stripes banners.

The continuous three-ring circus of movement is grand in scope and could have proven to be a boldly precarious choice but instead, it makes this production radiate with one of the best uses of design elements and performance showcasing in the history of modern stagecraft.

Any thoughts I may have had bubbling up lately about the ineffectual nature of the championship of great art—especially as the American theatre still fights with all its might to crawl back into relevance since the end of the pandemic—have been sent packing. The excitement this thrilling new materialization of the overlooked wonder of Parade, and the sheer brilliance and importance of what Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown gifted the world 27 years ago, has renewed my sense of purpose in a fresh and exhilarating way.

THROUGH JULY 12: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org

El Portal Theatre

Longtime Los Angeles weatherman Fritz Coleman retired in 2020 after four decades delivering his signature uncannily cheery forecasts on a daily basis but at age 76, his solo show Unassisted Residency, which plays once monthly at the El Portal’s intimate Monroe Forum, proves he’s still got the chops to deliver a jocular and lighthearted tsunami to his eager and most loyal fans.

Coleman began his career coming to LA to pursue his passion for standup comedy in the early 80s after first achieving success as a well-loved deejay radio personality in Buffalo, New York.

As the story goes, a producer at NBC caught his act one night at a local club and began to woo him to become a weatherman at KNBC-TV since our weather here was so consistent that he felt it needed a little on-air boost of humor to make it more interesting.

Delivering the daily forecast with a twinkle in his eye beginning in 1984 didn’t stop Coleman from continuing to chase his original dream by performing on local stages in several successful live shows, including his hilarious award-winning turn in The Reception: It’s Me, Dad! which played around town for several years to sold out houses.

Now, after leaving NBC four years ago, Coleman is back but the demographics have changed—or I might politely say… matured.

In my own case, as someone a year older than Coleman, his focus on finding the humor in aging is most welcome. In Unassisted Residency, the comedian talks about the challenges life has to offer in these, our so-called golden years, from physical deterioration to losing contemporaries on a regular basis to navigating the brave new world of technology and social media.

As his opening warmup act, the very funny and professionally self-deprecating Wendy Liebman notes, while looking out at the sea of gray hair and Hawaiian camp shirts in their audience, that Coleman chose to present his show as Sunday matinees so his target audience can shuffle our drooping derrières on home before dark.

Along the way, he also tackles subjects such as retirement communities, nonstop doctors’ appointments, incontinence, and Viagra, not to mention having grown up sucking in our parents’ omnipresent clouds of secondhand tobacco smoke and that generation’s lackadaisical attitude toward our safety and our health, all before moving on discuss to his all-new admiration for those heroic modern educators who during the pandemic had the patience to deal with zoom-teaching his grandkids.

The one thing he doesn’t talk much about is the weather—that is beyond mentioning how grateful he is that our current heat wave didn’t deter those gathered from venturing out of our caves and offering as a throwaway that one of the reasons he retired four years ago was climate change. Although he never says it, he doesn’t really have to; we get that even for someone as funny as Coleman, everyone has their limits when it comes to the potentially catastrophic future for our poor misused and abused planet.

Then when he launches into reminiscing about the amazingly incessant search for sexual gratification in our younger years (that time Stephen King once wrote when the males of the species all look at life through a spermy haze) and how that has changed since then. As a now single guy still looking for love—with some choice remarks about online dating sites—he tells a rather steamy tale about one date that proves it ain’t over ‘til it’s over, something of which I can definitely relate.

I first met Coleman in 1988 or 1989 when I did a feature interview with him as a cover story for The Tolucan (the more industry-oriented and less Evening Women’s Club-ish-pandering predecessor of the Tolucan Times).

He was gracious and charming and kept me laughing so hard back then that I couldn’t take notes fast enough, a knack he not only hasn’t lost but has sharpened considerably over the past 40 years. I couldn’t help wondering how many of the audience members at the Forum have been following him since then and for whom the topic of not-so gently aging hits home as dead-center as it did me.

This doesn’t mean you have to be 70-something to appreciate Fritz Coleman’s hilarious gift for creating homespun storytelling in his ever-extending monthly outing called Unassisted Residency.

My partner Hugh, who is a mere 42 years my junior and was quite literally at least three decades younger than anyone else in the audience last Sunday, laughed longer and louder than anyone else in the audience—perhaps a reaction to hearing me bitch continuously about getting old for the last 12 years?

PLAYS one Sunday each month at the El Portal Theatre’s Monroe Forum Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo.  For schedule: www.elportaltheatre.com/fritzcoleman.html