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 Martha Swope 

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 and received incredibly deserving Best Director honors for Michael Arden’s 2023 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 brooding, 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 aspect of this 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.

Probably the last thing most people would think of when deciding to interpret real life events as a musical would be the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory supervisor living in Atlanta who 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 legendary Broadway 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 brooding, richly semi-classical score by Brown, Parade is more a dark and brooding opera than a musical entertainment, something made gloriously noteworthy by Uhry’s absorbing account of one of America’s most barbaric moments in our 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 aspect of this mounting of the epic production is that cast. This may be the most gifted group of vocalists gathered together on one stage I’ve been so totally swept away by since 1985 when Porgy and Bess was revived at the Metropolitan Opera House.

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 leaves 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

Photo by Matt Kamimura

Broadwater Black Box Theatre

There aren’t many romcoms that don’t end in romance, yet it seems fairly obvious that the unlikely bond two lonely strangers forge on a desolate subway station bench in the dead of night—on Valentine’s Day, no less—is more about the first breaths of an unlikely friendship than hooking up in Matt Morillo’s promising new one-act Sweet Air.

Morillo’s script is charming, cleverly constructed, and full of topical humor, most of it directed to and something that will be appreciated most avidly by film fans.

Both Robbie and Galen (Jenni Chiaramonte and Newton Mayenge, Jim Chones on the HBO mini-series Winning Time) are having a shitty day, something exacerbated when the next train to take them anywhere else less unpleasant appears to never be coming.

Galen has not only lost his job that very day, but a romantic reunion with his ex, complete with the obligatory flowers and candy, instead became an in-person Dear John letter.

For Robbie, what she’s doing there isn't immediately clear, especially as she covers up her “I FUCK ON THE FIRST DATE” t-shirt under a kitties-and-heart-balloon-adorned sweatshirt and sits next to an omnipresent oxygen tank, albeit one not attached to her nose by the usual obligatory tubes.

It turns out the tank doesn’t contain oxygen at all but nitrous oxide and was stolen by Robbie from the dentist’s office where she once worked earlier that evening as a treat to provide a little Sweet Air in a world full of bad smells—especially in a typically trash-strewn New York City subway station at three o’clock in the morning.

As their prickly relationship-by-necessity grows into a rather surprising alliance rife with more connections than previously would have seemed possible, they become amazingly open with each other about what is stepping on their individual lives—probably thanks to a few generous whiffs of that aforementioned purloined sweet air.

The most infectious element Morillo’s play has going for it is the lovely, charmingly authentic performance of Mayenge, who carries most of the burden of making the improbable scenario real and does so with a remarkably patient grace and a relatable capability to find Galen’s faculty to survive Robbie’s rapidfire quirkiness and continuous red flags.

As his partner in crime, hopefully Chiaramonte will grow and settle in as the run continues. At this early point in performance, she’s rather stuck in one place without digging more deeply into what makes her character anyone with whom Galen would want to engage—particularly in such a confined public locale. Robbie is written as annoying, to be sure, but it is up to the actor portraying her to mine anything endearing about the character that would make her companion want to wait anywhere besides the next bench.

This problem isn’t all hers or even something to dump on the shoulders of director Katie Oliver, who does her best hampered by the play’s truncated timeline, and although it would be fairly painless to blame the playwright, I would instead grumble about the limitations inherent in the showcase under which Sweet Air is being presented.

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is something of a demanding parent, jam-packed rather indiscriminately with product squeezed into a limited amount of time. Just waiting to enter the theatre as the participants of the previous HFF contender attempt to speedily remove their props and furnishings before the creators of Sweet Air can load in their bench and trashcan, it’s hard to imagine Mayenge and Chiaramonte have much time to get into character and give themselves a quiet moment in the space to fill their imaginary fourth wall.

It’s like theatre on the clock, overpowered by the need to wrap things up quickly as the participants of the next show scheduled are probably anxiously waiting out front on Santa Monica Boulevard with their own props and scenery to get into the Black Box and perform their own piece on the same unspoken speed dial.

Where are those handy Pinter pauses when they’re needed? There’s not much room here for Robbie and Galen’s friendship to blossom; at the beginning, no sooner does she yell at the stranger to stop talking and invading her privacy than five minutes later she’s asking him why he isn’t responding to her efforts to start a conversation.

And as for the sequences when the pair is attached to that tank of nitrous, I found it rather unfeasible that they would be talking while inhaling, something I know doesn’t work from a rather...ahem...extensive degree of personal experience with recreational drugs.

There are many things that appear to have been decided too quickly here, such as why Gelen would be wearing a short white designer peacoat on a New York subway platform in the middle of February or why the initial “freezing cold” locale would suddenly get comfortable enough to prompt the pair to strip off their outerwear before the first light of dawn.

How I would love to sometime soon see a more fleshed-out and less hurried version of Sweet Air that would be given more time to find its rhythms and make better sense. Morillo has created a well-written and potentially fascinating exploration of how unlikely modern urban-challenged friendships can, despite all odds, begin to flourish.

The play—and an actor as completely watchable as Newton Mayenge—deserve far more than the bareboned and overly-crowded limitations the anyone-can-play Hollywood Fringe Festival has to offer.

THROUGH JUNE 27: Broadwater Black Box, 6322 Santa Monica Bl., Hollywood. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/11792 

Groundlings Theatre

In a town where everything seems to disappear and only later be lauded as nostalgia—from restaurants and boutiques and, beyond ‘em all, theatres and theatre complexes—no doubt The Groundlings are something of a phenomenon.

In 1974, the lategreat Gary Austin and a group of 50 actors with a passion for improvised sketch comedy and the teachings of Viola Spolin and Del Close from Chicago’s Second City, banded together to create a safe place where they could work out. The company grew and prospered so quickly the following year they moved into a former decorator’s showroom/gay bar/massage parlor on Melrose just west of Poinsettia and today, a mere half-century later, it’s still their home.

I discovered the Groundlings bigtime in the early ‘80s when no week was complete without downing an amazing amount of good party drugs and heading to the troupe’s nondescript brick-fronted 99-seat theatre every Saturday night at midnight to see the coolest and most trendy of all cult destinations of the era: a live, unrehearsed weekly little event called The Pee-Wee Herman Show.

Starring a then-unknown manchild with an unstoppable imagination named Paul Reubens and supported by his devoted comrades from the Groundlings company, nothing for me was ever more fun or more addictively compelling. I even have a tattoo of Pee-Wee dancing the Frug on my left ankle.

There’s no doubt what Gary Austin’s wild adventure has spawned over the last half-century, including in 1982 the establishment of the Groundlings School of Impovisation which today has an annual enrollment of some 4,200 students from around the world.

Over the years, the Groundlings have nurtured and introduced some of the world’s most impressive comic talent including, besides Reubens and his First Lady Lynne Stewart (Miss Yvonne, the Most Beautiful Woman in Puppetland), Conan O’Brien, Phil Hartman, Jennifer Coolidge, Julia Sweeney, Kathy Griffin, Tracy and Lorraine Newman, Jon Lovitz, Lisa Kudrow, Will Farrell, Kristin Wiig, Joey Arias, Mindy Stirling, Casandra “Elvira” Peterson, Anna Gasteyer, Adam Carolla, Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Chris Kattan, and Jimmy Fallon.

Despite its meteoric rise, in the late 1990s the Groundlings’ popularity had begun to somewhat diminish, as everything too often seems to do in the fast-paced “Let’s Do Lunch” trajectory of Lost Angeles, and the troupe fell into a period of deep financial crisis. They found themselves unable to pay their lease obligations on their beloved building and were in grave danger of losing it. That’s when my dear friend and former fellow teacher at the New York Film Academy George McGrath stepped in.

George, best known for his Emmy-nominated turns writing and appearing on TV’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Tracy Ulmann’s Tracy Takes All, as well as scripting the cult classic film Big Top Pee-Wee, came up with the perfect idea to keep the theatre open. He created an all-improvised evening of sketch comedy at its best called Your Very Own TV Show, where an unsuspecting audience member was chosen in an onstage casting session to become the star of his own sitcom—which in the second part of the show was taped live and featured plot points shouted out from the crowd during Part One.

Produced by Jeffrey Lane and directed by George and Emmy-nominated writer-producer Judy Chaikin, every performer, musician, and tech person donated their time and worked for free. The show was an instantaneous success, garnering rave reviews and landing a feature on the cover of the LA Times’ Arts & Leisure section. It played to full houses for almost a year and the Groundlings home was saved.

Dubbed “The Show that Saved the Groundlings,” Your Very Own TV Show has been revived many times over the past 35 years and on June 9, 2025, it came back once again, albeit for the very first time without the onstage participation of the brilliant Lynne Stewart, who left us all wanting one of her warm cuddly hugs this past February 21st.

Mounted as a benefit for the Lynne Marie Stewart Memorial Alumni Fund, once again Judy Chaikin directed and George emceed the delightfully inventive and hilarious proceedings featuring Frau Farbissina herself, Mindy Sterling, who over the years has also never missed being a part of the event, and my other cherished pal and former NYFA colleague Suzanne Kent, the Playhouse’s original Real Housewife Mrs. Renee and the creator of the Groundling’s still enduring Sunday Show in 1982.

During the first section of the evening, the performers improvise a writers’ session, where George and Mindy were tapped to be partners (once the writers of Rhoda, we’re told, fired because they insisted on writing only in the shower), meeting in a dry location to brainstorm the concept for a new pilot.

With the audience choosing all details of the script, from the title (here decided to be Get Me the Hell Outta Here! by an audience member who has obviously been on LA awhile) and deciding the leading character would be a young man named Spin who had a thing for schtupping older women and lived at home in Salt Lake City with his devout Mormon parents (Sandy McCree and John Stark).

“Don’t you get salty with me!” was chosen as his frequent catchphrase. You get the idea.

After another tableaux where the writers pitched their concept to network brass (McCree and former NYFA student Reinaldo Garcia), the stage became a casting office run by Jim Wise and Michael Churven, with Stark portraying a grumpy veteran actor called in to read for the coveted leading role.

Two other two chairs placed in the office’s waiting room were reserved for a pair of unsuspecting members of the audience—with Chaikin beginning her search for the Next Big Thing by asking anyone not an actor among those of us gathered to raise a hand.

The pickins’ were decidedly sparse in the obviously Industry-dominated event, but she finally chose two perfect choices. A very game young guy named Barras auditioned with a scene from Joanie Loves Chachi and was cast as Spin, while the other hopeful, a rather Emo Phillips-y nurses’ assistant named Malcolm was chosen as his stunt double soon called up to perform a tongue-a-licious make-out scene with Stirling.

After being subjected to a quick coaching session conducted by Suzanne Kent as the stern Sister Mary (her persona chosen from the name of my friend Kelly Hughes’ first grade teacher) and her bubbly assistant Sarah Baker, poor Barras was ready and willing to take on Hollywood.

By the end of the intermission, an instantly designed logo was unveiled, as well as an entire video “cold open” lead-in sequence to begin the all-new Get Me the Hell Outta Here! pilot featuring Barras and his wildly eclectic supporting cast. Meanwhile Wise, with the participation of accompanist Willie Etra, had created an entire theme song for the series, complete with some very topical lyrics and rather iffy but cleverly groan-able rhymes.

After a scene where the poor western-clad Spin (the audience decided he had a thing for cowboy culture) is caught sneaking out of the house by his strict parents (“Don’t you get salty with me!,” he warns them), our hapless hero does a speed dating session with some rather scary looking potential hookups played by Kent, Baker, and finally Sterling as his final choice: a pistol wielding “woman with problems” who changes everything for poor salt-free Spin.

Nearly everyone in every scene was given their own personal assistant, each one played by charismatic future star Patrick Steward, and each one an overly eager character saddled with personality traits supplied by us meanspirited viewers intent on not making it easy for him.

Patrick is another NYFA graduate who in 2016 I had the privilege of mentoring as he ambitiously mounted and directed a smashing soldout international student production of HAIR (in which I royally pissed off our tightassed administration by sneaking in a cameo appearance and song as Margaret Mead). Then as now, the talent and enthusiasm that obviously makes this kid exciting to watch work all but stole the show.

To say this one-of-a-kind night out to see Your Very Own TV Show, also hawked in ads as something “You Can’t See From Your Couch,” could certainly once again become a regular event that just might play another year or more if the participants had the time and energy to put into it.

In the meantime, the ridiculously prolific Groundlings offer one-night and distinctively bonkers sketch comedy performances several times each week and virtually any of them will make you fall apart and leave in complete wonder about what these worldclass comic geniuses are able to accomplish.

Information about their schedule can be accessed online at www.groundlings.com—the same location where, if you adored the giant-haired and outrageously sexy Miss Yvonne as much as I did, you can still graciously contribute a few ducats in her honor by first clicking on “DONATE” and then on “THE LYNNE MARIE STEWART MEMORIAL ALUMNI FUND.”

Whatever outrageous thing they do, the Groundlings never cease to astound me. I like to think I’m both a good actor and a funny guy, but unfortunately, improv is beyond me. I can think of funny things to do or say whenever I’ve been confronted in my life and career with such an opportunity, but only on about a 30-second delay. I have no idea how these brilliant entertainers manage to do what they do on the spot—it’s a unique skill I’ve coveted all my life but has always eluded me.

No wonder the Groundlings and their uber-popular School of Improvisation have been around and turning out shows and stars on an inspirational continuous loop for 50 years, while so many less enterprising art entities have fallen by the wayside. There’s simply nothing like them or what they do on the planet earth—and if you should disagree, why, don’t you get salty with me, motherfucker!

INFORMATION ON THE GROUNDLING’S SHOWS AND CLASSES: www.groundlings.com

Photo by Ashley Erikson 

Colony Theatre

What a wonderful surprise. I was understandably reluctant to accept an invitation to review the musical adaptation of the 1998 film The Wedding Singer—which, I have to admit, I’ve never seen. I thought it would be yet another sappy commercially-driven cashcow version of a good old Amur’kin romcom but boy, was I wrong.

Directed by Los Angeles casting director extraordinaire Michael Donovan, this production is truly a diamond in the rough—the rough part being the hit-and-miss reputation of the once-reliable Colony Theatre over the last few years. The Colony’s new producing artistic director Heather Provost obviously has a vision for the complex and if this and the world premiere of The Civility of Albert Cashier last Fall are any indication, the Colony could again quickly become a viable contributor to the prolific LA theatre scene.

Composer Matthew Sklar and lyricist/bookwriters Chad Beguelin and Tim Herlihy have created far more than just another by-the-book jukebox adaptation of a popular chick-flick.  In her opening night speech, Provost mentioned that The Wedding Singer is the biggest production to ever grace the Colony stage and, although she obviously wasn’t around 25 or so years ago for the LA premiere of Side Show, one of my favorite musical productions of all time, this is certainly a beautifully designed and executed effort.

Aside from the Tony-nominated book by Beguelin and Herlihy that pokes delightful fun at '80s big-hair and giant cellphones, not to mention sneaking in a few jabs at Newark, New Jersey, the script is fresh and slyly clever and the story, though still gooey and predictable, is quite charming. Somehow it reminds me a little of the Charles Strouse/Michael Stewart book for the original Bye Bye Birdie way back when the dinosaurs still roamed the Great White Way, a time when what lifted the teenybopper musical fluff from schmaltzy to infectious was their smart and self-deprecated tongue-in-cheek dialogue.

The score is quite engaging. Although it may not feature tunes that will stay floating around in your head for days to come, it certainly delivers songs guaranteed to keep one’s toes a’tapping—especially as delivered by this charismatic cast.

The biggest asset The Wedding Singer has going for it is the hiring of Donovan, who not only stages on Mark Mendelson‘s versatile two-story pop art set with great fluidity, but there’s also the fact that he’s the premier theatrical casting director in Los Angeles and was obviously privy to bring in some of the best musical theatre talent in Southern California.

In the roles played onscreen by Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, Hannah Sedlacek and Blake Jenner, a breakthrough performer last year in Albert Cashier at this same theatre, are perfectly cast as the star-crossed lovers Robbie and Julia. Their individual ballads are impressive, but when they get together for the eleventh-hour duet “Grow Old With You,” they are sensational and downright moving.

There’s also standout featured work from Juliane Godfrey as Julia‘s bestie Holly and Natalie Holt MacDonald as Robbie‘s ridiculously skanky valleygirl-on-steroids girlfriend Linda. Colin Huerta and Chris Bey as Robbie’s lovable bandmates from his former metal band Burning Sensation (get it?), now reduced to playing weddings in an effort to not go back to working at the local Orange Julius, are also a treat. Thanks to the show’s savvy creators, each of these eclectic characters have knockout solo numbers to further show off their crazy-good musical comedy chops.

Still, I must admit the main reason I accepted the invitation was to support the inspired casting of Broadway legend Kay Cole as Robbie feisty grandmother Rosie, whose sparkling performance and sprightly dance moves are truly a thing of wonder. Her solo “A Note from Grandma” is a highlight, as are her reactions while testing out Robbie's vibrating bed (it is the ‘80s, remember) which culminate with her line, “Takes me back.”

Cole and Bey bring the house down in the second act with the hip-hop-inspired “Move That Thing” and a special cheer goes up to choreographer Michelle Elkin, who has craftily managed to sneak in a few nostalgic Michael Bennett moves some of us old-guarders may remember from Kay’s turn as Maggie in the original production of A Chorus Line.

In full disclosure here, Kay and I have been friends since 1960 when she and I (and her lategreat and sorely missed husband Michael Lamont) were all 12 and 13-years-old residents of Sweet Apple, Ohio and we sang nightly about whether or not Hugo and Kim really got pinned and if she kissed him and cried.

It’s not often, particularly in Los Angeles, that the most memorable thing about a musical production is the ensemble. This cast is populated by a troupe of incredibly charming triple-threat performers, all brilliant in every regard, especially when assaying Elkin's wonderfully energetic and era-appropriate dance moves.

I spend a lot of time grumbling about how much I dislike corny old-style American musicals—you know, the ones with corn as high as an elephant's eye and where everyone worries about the problem of Maria—but truly for me, The Wedding Singer is a new favorite. Keep it just between us, won’t you? I have my reputation as a curmudgeon to maintain.

As difficult as keeping positive may be in our current national struggle to create art, and considering this effervescent production is only booked through June 29, I hope everyone who loves musical theatre will come out and support it. I can only hope The Wedding Singer ends up being extended again and again for many months to come.

THROUGH JUNE 29: Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St., Burbank. www.colonytheatre.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Mark Taper Forum

All I can say is they I must have better drugs than the rest of my colleagues. Playwright/director Robert O’Hara’s irreverent adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, commissioned and developed right here by the Center Theatre Group and now world premiering at the Taper, has been almost unanimously eviscerated by my fellow members of the LA press community—and I cannot possibly disagree more.

“This is a fucked-up place right here,” a character comments about the proceedings early on, an observation I personally found tremendously promising.

If there’s anything about this production I might have qualms about, it’s the title. If there are any potential patrons out there who aren't familiar with the work of O’Hara, they might think they’re about to see a traditional mounting of one of our most familiar classics, not realizing they’re about to see the title character going down on his Ophelia at first lights-up or watch him push the face of his on-the-side boytoy Horatio into his crotch, giving a whole new meaning to asking his bestie to “Swear on my sword” and “Play on my pipe.”

Later, in a conversation with Ophelia during the time when their mutual love interest has been shipped off to England, he tells her Hamlet has sent him letters too—and in iambic pentameter.

“Oh yeah,” she agrees, “that’s kinda his thing.”

I’ve heard a couple of remarks that ol’ Will must be spinning in his 409-year-old grave thanks to O’Hara’s assault on tradition, but I suspect it would be the contrary; I’m not entirely sure that the often bawdy and sly ol’ Bard didn’t have this exact same thing in mind way back in 1599. I’ll bet he’d applaud this bold and unhallowed interpretation but then, as old as I am, despite rumors suggesting otherwise I actually never met the guy.

Still, maybe it would have been better if O’Hara’s revision had been titled Hamlet Redux or Hamlet Deconstructed so everyone interested would instantly know they weren’t seeing a stripped-down version told in two hours without an intermission and that the production’s last third turns out to be an all-new and rather comedic riff on the original.

While the first two-thirds of O’Hara’s Inappropriate Night’s Dream remains a CliffNotes version of the tale, the final third morphs into an investigation of the pile of bodies stacked up by final curtain. Led by one trenchcoat-clad Inspector Fortinbras (played by Joe Crest, who also impressively doubles as the Oz-like projected head of Hamlet’s Ghost), this unexpected reinvention suddenly transforms into a clever tongue-in-cheek crossover between Columbo and The Pink Panther.

The story is filtered through what we see as a darkly atmospheric old film noir produced by something called the Elsinore Picture Corporation, a device further conjured by the production’s incredible design aspects. Clint Ramos’ grandly sweeping yet classically austere set design becomes the quintessential blank canvas for Yee Eun Nam’s moody and often jarring (and certainly potentially award-winning) projections, Lap Chi Chu’s starkly spectral lighting, and Lindsay Jones’ often unearthly sound and original music.

As Hamlet, someone another character observes “thinks he is in a Shakespeare play,” Patrick Ball (an actor unknown to me but makes my now want to start streaming The Pitt) bravely takes on a role even the most seasoned of thespians are reluctant to tackle because of all the pitfalls that most actors, regardless of their station, can fall into headfirst. It usually requires unwavering self-confidence for anyone to play the emotionally tortured Prince of Denmark, but Ball finds a fascinating new accessibility in the character without looking as though his performance is more ego-driven than heartfelt.

His task is aided considerably by O’Hara’s decision to give Hamlet’s familiar soliloquies a freshi innew twist, interspersing Ball’s delivery by alternating passages in echoing voiceovers. It’s as though Hamlet is in a conflicted conversation with his irresolute subconscious and the result is riveting.

Gina Torres is also a major standout as his mother Gertrude, giving a solid weight to the often fanciful and melodramatic ambiance O’Hara adopts in his direction, and Coral Pena adds an exciting street-smartness to her lusty, vaping Ophelia, who at one point sardonically proclaims she has no intention of marrying someone who’s “thirty-something and still a student.”

Hakeem Powell is endearing as the passed-around Horatio (“Everyone’s fucking Horatio,” Ophelia observes), soliciting a collective awwww from the audience when he speculates his relationship with Hamlet seems to be doomed. Fidel Gomez is hilarious as the Gravedigger who constantly corrects his job title as “Groundskeeper and occasionally Gravedigger,” while Ty Molbak and Danny Zuhlke provide more comic relief as Dumb and Dumber-inspired Rosencrantz and Guilenstern.

I would have easily added this ensemble cast to my possibilities for end-of-the-years honors except for the unnecessarily bellowing performance of Ariel Shafir as Claudius and Ramiz Monsef’s slapstick Polonius, which I found indulgent and unwatchable in a Jimmy Fallon sorta way.

There are so many things to praise about O’Hara’s delightfully heretical reinvention, something surely expected for anyone who remembers his Bootycandy or his Tony-nominated direction of the controversial Slave Play a few seasons back.

Here, Hamlet shouts out to Alexa to play music to accompany a rap version of the First Player’s monologue (a showstopping turn by Jaime Lincoln Smith) and when Hamlet is asked as he sits staring at his cellphone, “What do you read, my lord?”, the original “Words, words, words” is again the perfect answer.

I understand how some purists are shocked and offended by Robert O’Hara’s borderline blasphemous vision of one of the most well-known theatrical milestones, but I was all ready for it. Even perhaps the most famous line in any play in the history of theatre is not spared here:

“To be or not to be?” a character sarcastically slams. “That’s not a question… it’s a statement.”

THROUGH JULY 6: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org

Photo by Jason Williams 

Skylight Theatre Company

Recently in my review of A Doll’s House, Part 2 at Pasadena Playhouse, I mentioned if asked to name the best of the exciting new generation of playwrights whose work I felt will stand the test of time, Lucas Hnath would definitely be among them. Also high on the list for me would be Roger Q. Mason, a rule-defying and fearless wordsmith I believe is one of the best and boldest theatre artists of our time.

It seems especially clear that Mason could easily be identified as a direct descendant of the innovative and death-defying spirit of Tennessee Williams in his later days—you know, that time when Tenn explored deeply impudent topics and adopted a lyrical style that backfired for him and caused everybody to insist the last century’s best dramatist had lost his touch. I steadfastly then and still believe he was simply way ahead of his time.

I don’t often begin a review by mentioning the work of the director. In this case, however, Jessica Hanna deserves an early shout out. The main influence that turned the critics and the public against Williams was a major career-defining moment in his work which happened just prior to the creation of The Night of the Iguana. It was at that point in his celebrated career that he began his lifelong feud with his great mentor and collaborator, master director Eli Kazan. Without Kazan at his side to help corral so many diverse flashes of thought and the genius of Williams into a cohesive narrative, his plays were all over the place.

Fascinating as their journey may be, I suspect from what I’ve seen that Roger Q. Mason can occasionally get lost in their themes and strikingly contemporary poetry. Like a modernday Kazan, in helming Mason’s Hide & Hide, now in its world premiere at the Skylight, Hanna has proven herself to be the perfect accomplice to help them frame their thoughts and ideas and make it all more accessible. Together, Mason and Hanna are posterchildren for what this kind of electric artistic collaboration can bring to fruition.

Hide & Hide could go sparking off into so many different directions but between Hanna’s inventive staging and the incredibly creative lighting design by Brandon Baruch, Mason’s continuous flashes of genius are both glorified and yet contained in a way that’s as important to the storytelling as the writing itself.

Set in the darkest shadows of Los Angeles’ often harsh Land of Unequal Opportunity in the 1980s, Constanza (Amielynn Abellera) and Billy (Ben Larson) are both newly arrived outsiders to our world of potential plenty, she a bright and educated Filipina here illegally and wary of deportation, he a teenage runaway escaping from a Texas gay conversion camp surviving on the mean streets as a rentboy.

The two meet at the infamous now-defunct Studio One nightclub in West Hollywood and form an unlikely bond, forged from their mutual need to find their individual though highly diverse identities, their universal struggle to be free, and their pursuit of the illusive American Dream—something in 2025 which now sadly seems more an ancient myth than anything attainable except in the rarest of cases.

Their possible quick fix is a shaky one as they enter into a sham marriage that will give Constanza her citizenship and offer Billy some desperately needed stability. It’s a solution that's clearly doomed when viewed by an audience hardened to the facts of life some 45 years in the future and compounded by the dastardly dealings of a destructive ego-maniac intent on destroying our country and banishing the term “Land of the Free” for all time to come.

Abellera is stunning not only as our rapidly crumpling heroine slowly losing all sense of self-worth, but in a series of side characters, including her greedy aunt advising her how to make her fortune as she did by giving up her ideals and as Ricky, a sleazy lawyer and human trafficer who drains everything he can get from Constanza, including her self-respect, and takes advantage of Billy’s youth and any scrap of dignity he has left.

Larson, a recent graduate of USC’s School of Dramatic Arts, makes an auspicious professional LA stage debut as the sweet and compromised kid from the boonies who can turn in a heartbeat into a potentially savage caged animal ready and willing to strike. With a little more seasoning, opportunity, and encouragement, Larson will certainly grow into an actor I for one will be excited to watch evolve.

Hanna’s sharply choreographed staging makes the actors’ lightning-speed transitions between characters and the places they inhabit cleverly accessible, again complimented by Baruch’s arresting lighting plot, set designer Christopher Scott Murillo’s stark vision of an eerily dystopic Los Angeles, and Amelia Anello’s excellent and often discordant sound.

Mason’s writing is gritty, bold, and often downright hilarious, never losing sight of the message that anyone outside of society’s norm in our culture has a continuous uphill battle to keep their head above the ever-encroaching waves. While the overworked concept of the American Dream originally promised an ethos that every person in our poor maligned country had the right to personal freedom and the opportunity to attain a better life, Hide & Hide reminds us that such a once-perfect ideal has twisted and devolved into an ugly grab for wealth, power, and social mobility, leaving far too many worthy individuals ready to give up and take a midnight walk into those very waves that taunt us all relentlessly.

*  *  *

I would also like to share an essay here sparked by Hide & Hide written by H. A. Eaglehart, my life partner and prolific wordsmith in his own right. Interesting that Hugh also immediately saw the connection between Roger and Tennessee Williams, and so completely and passionately observed the importance of a voice so near—and yet so far—from his own. This isn’t meant as another review of the play, yet there are significant crossovers here I thought readers would find interesting. It’s wondrous how similarly—and differently—art can impact each of us:

Every year traveling across Navajo Nation in tour coach buses packed full of 12-year-olds eager to raft the Colorado River, the ninos always ask me why I left my homeland. “Where you live matters,” is always my answer. If I wasn't living in Los Angeles, it wouldn't be possible to take 12-year-old Angelenos to the last place in America still free, almost the last place still clinging to pride. Pride and freedom walk hand in hand with Navajo.

Playwright Roger Q. Mason wrote a play Hide and Hide, which just opened at the Skylight Theatre in Hollywood. I highly recommend seeing this production. The story takes place in Los Angeles and in my personal opinion it's influenced by the work of Tennessee Williams in many ways. My only qualm with the play is I'm tired of theatre and film portraying Los Angeles as a dangerous place for youth.

Everywhere is dangerous for humans, period, and in many places like Boulder Colorado, Palestine, or Ukraine it's a lot more dangerous for children. I'm tired of Los Angeles being portrayed as this place lacking in values and creating a horrific void hungrily devouring innocent people left and right. Give me a break. Some of the most wholesome down-to-earth folks I know live in Los Angeles and almost all of the awful people I know wear red ball caps and live in Middle America.

Hide & Hide has a Midwest character traumatized from an exploratory experience at a summer camp while growing up. Seeking an identity leads him to LA where he is further taken advantage of. Roger, the playwright, gives this character a jaw-dropping monologue at the end of the play which brilliantly reflects Tennessee's line in The Night of the Iguana as Shannon attempts to “take the long swim to China.”

I would love an honest play based in the reality depicting the real Los Angeles as a place where kids are allowed to be kids and explore the epitome of self-discovery without being subjected to the self-hatred destroying the rest of this country and planet. If the character in Roger’s play had gone to Griffith Park Boys Camp back in that summer of his youth, there would have been no stigma to create the trauma embodied within him.

The first chapter of my autobiography, Urban Native: the Musings of a Queer Navajo Cowboy in Hollywood, states I'm sick of Los Angeles being stigmatized as the Throne of Satan, while America's Heartland gets portrayed as Andy Griffith's Mayberry despite its residents busily doing the devil’s work by reelecting Trump to once again legalize gay conversion therapy summer camps. I want a play where Los Angeles is portrayed in the role normally given to small town America steeped in common sense and good old values, while the evil role full of debauchery always pinned on LA instead gets handed to small town America. I mean, Griffith Park Boys Camp actually has “Griffith” in the name, for crying out loud! Where do you think they filmed The Andy Griffith Show? North Carolina?

It's not bragging to talk about the amount of success we are having in experiential education right now. We're designing after school programs, creating outdoor adventure departments, impacting thousands of kids every month, and building new challenge courses in SoCal at historic rates. We are almost to the point where kids in Los Angeles have more access to outdoor adventure programming than kids who live in rural states. This is why I currently do not live on the Navajo Nation, because I can champion my people's values more loudly in Hollywood.

Normally I'm not into Pride parades—and you could say this is hilarious considering where we live. This year is different, however, as so much hate is brewing across the world against LGBTQ rights. The LA Pride Parade is the oldest Pride event in the world and Travis and I live inside the rectangle of the parade route. I couldn't be more proud of my mailing address than I am right now, because there's nothing more hated by Trump's voting goons than a big giant Pride Parade broadcast around the world.

There are photographs of newlywed Navajo gay couples predating the Civil War, meaning Shiprock, New Mexico has got Los Angeles and New York beat by centuries when it comes to LGBTQ rights. And I was born in one place and have lived in the other two. How gay is that? My mom remembers when she was in high school and the Shiprock HS basketball ball team, the Chieftains, would champion the LGBTQ community during home games. Whenever off-reservation white high school teams came to play against the Chieftains in Shiprock (where I was born), all the Navajo would attend holding hands with someone of the same sex. Even heterosexual Navajo would attend holding hands with other heterosexuals. The Evangelical parents of the white team players were always horrified, which made the Navajo community very happy.

Fun fact: the first challenge course I ever worked on is at the Shiprock High School in New Mexico and the first summer camp where I became the challenge course manager is in Hollywood, CA. This is why I say it matters where you live.

THROUGH JUNE 29: Skylight Theatre, 1816½ N. Vermont Av., LA. www.skylighttheatre.org/hide-and-hide 

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