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 Kathy Portie 

THROUGH SEPT. 28: Odyssey Theatre, 2055 N. Sepulveda Blvd., West LA. 310.477.2055 or OdysseyTheatre.com

Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman 

Pantages Theatre / Segerstrom Center for the Arts

It’s kinda ironic that for a guy who’s always grumbling he’s not a superfan of musical theatre in general, I sure have seen—and truly enjoyed—a bunch of ‘em lately. New York hits Some Like It Hot and & Juliet were both delightful, opulently produced, and wonderful escapist fun in the currently discouraging world in which we live.

Now the national tour of the unabashedly bucolic musical Shucked, currently in residence at the Pantages, has once again challenged my usual lack of enthusiasm for my least favorite genre of theatrical benefactions. Shucked immediately felt like Oklahoma! meets Hee-Haw with some blatant Music Man ripoffs thrown in, but somehow I loved it despite it being about as sophisticated as an expanded Minnie Pearl routine.

Make no mistake, this musical has about as much plot as an episode of one of HGTV’s home improvement shows but the downhome charm is contagious and the laughs are nonstop. The thematically corny and often quite deliciously off-color puns are so fast and furious that this production could be eligible to receive a special award at the end of the year for how many Will Rogers-style drawling witticisms have been stuffed into a two-and-a-half hour running time.

“A grave mistake,” our heroine Maizy (Danielle Wade) tells her gran’pa (Erick Pinnick), “was burying gran’ma on a slope.”

Or: “Marriage is just two people coming together to solve problems they never had before.”

Or: “If life was fair, mosquitos would suck fat instead of blood.”

Or: “Relationships are like houseplants… they die.”

You get the picture.

When I was a kid, I was perpetually embarrassed by my redneck Chicago-transplanted wannabe cowboy father. Aside from his typical giant-buckled outerwear and Wilfred Brimley handlebar mustache, his love of country music and things like the Grand Ole Opry and the aforementioned Hee-Haw made my pseudo-cosmopolitan sense of urban pretense cringe.

[ASIDE: The fact that I would end up with a partner who’s a real-life cowboy is not lost on me here.]

The score is by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, whose combined credits drop names such as Kacey Musgraves, Dolly Parton, Kelly Clarkson, Blake Shelton, and Kenny Chesney—again, not exactly the kind of music or artists high on my personal playlist. Still, this cast, led by one of my favorite directors of musical theatre Jack O’Brien, takes this genre of country-centric situations and twangy melodies and deliver them with such balls-out gusto it would be impossible not to appreciate.

This is especially true of Miki Abraham, who as Maizy’s world-weary moonshine-cooking cousin Lulu (“So impressive one Lu wasn’t enough”), is a true dynamo in the role that on Broadway gave another knockout non-binary artist Alex Newell their groundbreaking first Tony. The lusty Abraham’s delivery of the flashy ballad “Independently Owned” is one of the highlights of the evening.

As Maizy’s lifelong boyfriend and modified mullet-sporting hometown love Beau, Jake Odmark is the other most impressive standout in this infectiously game cast, most memorable in his heartfelt solo “OK.” And from the ranks, a loose-limbed and spectacularly over-the-top cameo from Kyle Sherman as a Mayberry-esque and terminally clueless townie named Tank, makes his few brief hilarious moments in the spotlight worthy of exit applause.

The energetic cast aces Sarah O’Gleby’s classically barn dance-inspired choreography, with special praise for the show’s male ensemble appearing as the rural community of Cob County’s farmers and hangers-on, particularly notable when they join together for the raucous eleventh-hour showstopper “Best Man Wins.”

Who’dathunkit that a musical co-produced by country icon Reba McEntire and revolving around an insulated little community dependent on cultivating corn would ever make it to Broadway, let alone garner nine Tony nominations including Best Musical while successfully winning over folks who consider themselves far more enlightened than being stuck listening to songs titled “Holy Shit” and “Ballad of the Rocks.”

Composers Clark and O’Anally, along with bookwriter Robert Horn, a fella who can deliver more groan-worthy jokes than a standup set from Jeff Foxworthy, have created something special indeed: a self-described “Farm to Fable” epic entertainment that completely won me over and would’ve made my late-but-less-than-great dear old dad slap his knees and shout out “Yee-Haw” from start to finish while I crawled under my seat—just like old times.

THROUGH SEPT. 7: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 800.982.2787 or broadwayinhollywood.com

RETURNING NOV. 11-23: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. 714.556.2787 or scfta.org

Photo by Matthew Murphy 

Ahmanson Theatre / Segerstrom Center for the Arts

What an incredibly entertaining evening in the theatre. I’ve made a few references in reviews lately about big, glitzy Broadway transplants that seem to be geared from the get-go for an eventual run in Vegas at the Mandalay Bay or the Venetian. In the case of the dazzlingly and continually in-your-face national tour of the international hit jukebox musical & Juliet, that’s hardly meant as though that goal is a bad thing.

Produced by and featuring a knockout score highlighting the many familiar pop hits culled from the catalog of Oscar-nominated, two-time Golden Globe and five time Grammy-winning composer Max Martin, as well as a wickedly clever book by the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning and Tony-nominated David West Read, a creator, writer, and executive producer of Schitt’s Creek, you might as well just sit back and enjoy the ride—at least until the rousing curtain calls when the cast quite successfully got the entire audience out of their seats to dance to the music.

Might I mention my nearly 79-year-old ass was up and rocking out right along with the almost every one of the massive Ahmanson Theatre’s energized patrons. Even the most stone-faced opening nighters were moving and swaying, creating a tableaux that must have conjured the image of a gargantuan 1990s-style boy band. I can only hope one of CTG’s roaming opening night photographers got a great shot of all 2,083 of us partying like it was 1999.

This is not saying & Juliet, the imaginative re-envisioning of what happens to Juliet after Romeo dies and she wakes up from Friar Laurence’s sleeping potion and decides she’s not quite ready to join him, is not meant to be anything but what it is: infectious, world-class fun. Slyly, however, after a fairly issue-free first act, there’s more than a little hint of feminine empowerment and equality to satisfy even the most irritatingly left-leaning critics such as Yours Truly.

This is also not saying I wouldn’t always prefer to leave a theatre gloomily contemplating the death of Willie Loman’s American dream, or sad that poor Blanche had to rely on the kindness of strangers, or wondering if that broken Shelley “The Machine” Levene would die in prison. That’s just overdramatic, melancholy me.

I personally would rather musicals that take on powerful contemporary issues facing us all, like Next to Normal or Fun Home or Sondheim’s Passion, but getting any kind of brief respite from the reality of watching everything to believe in crumble around us at the hand of a mad authoritarian and his somnambulant supporters, is right now a consummation devotedly to be wish’d.

There’s no doubt this production—which began in Manchester, England in 2019 before moving on to winning three Oliviers in the West End and nine Tony nominations, including Best Musical, on Broadway in 2023–is a big’un. The glorious & Juliet is surely one of the grandest of the grand visually, with its snappy, deliciously tongue-in-cheek book by Read, chockfull of crafty Shakespearean references and puns upon the original puns, all perfectly complimented by massive, eye-popping sets by Soutra Gilmour, Andrzei Goulding’s elaborate video projections, Howard Hudson’s lighting, and especially the colorfully updated pseudo-Elizabethan costuming by Tony-winner Paloma Young.

Luke Sheppard’s direction keeps things moving at a breakneck pace, but the spirited hip-hop-inspired choreography by Jennifer Weber, eagerly performed with expert precision by this outstanding company, is one of the production’s greatest assets. It’s a joy to see this ensemble of masterful contemporary terpsichoreans, who… well… let’s just say don’t all fit the standard image of what constitutes a Broadway dancer, allowed to show the world they are perfectly capable moving as vigorously and powerfully as their less zoftig castmates. As someone whose physicality greatly hampered my own career over the years, it’s a personal thrill for me to see real people trusted to strut their stuff no matter how much stuff they have to strut.

Of course, the entire production revolves around 25 years of the multi-award-winning chart topping pop songs of Martin, the Swedish composer/producer named ASCAP’s Songwriter of the Year a whopping 11 times. The audience, many of whom are obviously rabid millennial fans of the prolific songwriter, often start applauding and whooping during a song’s first few downbeats, then go wild when they realize how handily Martin and Read have managed to incorporate the familiar tunes into vehicles for the show’s leading characters.

Considering Martin’s collaboration with some of the most heavyweight musical stars of the past quarter-century, including Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, N*SYNC, The Weeknd, Demi Lovato, Pink, and many, many more, the program credit is listed as “Max Martin and Friends.” Some of the most famous tunes included in the whooping 32-song cycle are “I Want It That Way,” “Baby One More Time,” “Oops! I Did It Again,” “Since U Been Gone,” “I Kissed a Girl,” “Roar,” “Larger Than Life,” “Blow,” “Fuckin’ Perfect,” “That’s the Way It Is,” and “Can’t Stop the Feeling.” You get it: epic. No wonder they’ve called the uber-prolific Martin the Shakespeare of Pop Music long before & Juliet was a twinkle in his eye. Ironic, isn’t it?

On top of all the other high points of this production, there is the cast, featuring some of the best vocal talent assembled in one place in a long time. In the title role behind the &, Rachel Simone Webb commands a true star-making turn as the all-new and nicely “woke” Juliet, a quite feisty young maiden who is suddenly unwilling to let others, from her soon reanimated husband of four days to her controlling parents, make life decisions for her. And as a singer with lung power to rival Byonce, Webb could one day soon become a major star right up there with some of the artists who originated the songs she belts right out into the Music Center Plaza.

Cory Mach has a field day as the stuffy Shakespeare, around dealing with his long-suffering wife Anne Hathaway (Teal Wicks), who early on arrives on the scene to demand her husband rewrite the ending of his famous play with her input. Wicks is wonderful as Anne, bringing a kind of all-elbows Sutton Foster-y presence to the wife also intent on finding her own voice.

Mateus Leite Cardoso is a delight as Francois, the painfully introverted nobleman who becomes Juliet’s new intended, as is Nick Drake as Juliet’s bestie who soon shows her reluctant fiancé what his true nature really is. Drake stops the show assigned to deliver the unlikely ballad “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” a task he quickly makes all his own. Kathryn Allison is also noteworthy as Juliet’s faithful nurse, especially in her scenes falling in love—on her own terms as well—with Francois’ Bluto-esque yet eventually softhearted bass-baritone father Lance (Paul-Jordan Jansen).

Ben Jackson Walker, Broadway’s original back-from-the-dead protagonist whose name has been removed from the musical’s title, gratefully returns to the role during the show’s LA run. Walker was born to play this Romeo, a rascal cocksmith who, before finding his true love, had trouble keeping his codpiece in his tights. By the end, however, overwhelmed by the strength and maturity his love has managed to adopt, his Romeo becomes a whole new person desperate to win her back. It’s not often a frothy musical features a character with such a drastic arc to navigate and it’s hard to imagine anyone nailing it more effortlessly than Walker.

The rest of the ensemble couldn’t be better, especially in their ability to keep things moving at fever pitch at all points.

I have to say I couldn’t have enjoyed & Juliet and what has gone into it to make it so spectacular on every level more, but I do think over time, unlike other musicals I’ve found as impressive, this one might not stay in my addled brain as indelibly as others. It’s kinda like that old adage about Chinese food, that it could not be more delicious or tasty but an hour later you’ll be hungry again.

I can live with that and, I suspect, the creators and the producers of & Juliet will be able to as well. Howsoever it eventually lingers in my overworked memory banks, respect for everyone involved and for unique commitment to get a couple of thousand old duffers out of their seats and jammin’ to Max Martin’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” by the show’s end, is an accomplishment not even Rodgers and Hammerstein or Sir Stephen ever made happen.

THROUGH SEPT. 7: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org

SEPT. 9 THROUGH SEPT. 21: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. 714.556.2787 or scfta.org

Photo by Matthew Murphy 

Pantages Theatre / Segerstrom Center for the Arts

Yeah, there’s no doubt this is one of those big glitzy golden goose of a crowd-pleasing musical guaranteed to dazzle and someday maybe end up in an open run on the Vegas Strip.

Still, the national tour of the third stage adaptation of the 1959 classic film Some Like It Hot is much more than that. It has a heart bigger than almost all of those other popular film-to-stage conversions combined.

First of all, there’s the infectious toe-tapper of a score by the legendary Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, whose catchy tunes for Hairspray won them a well-deserved Tony among many other honors, as well as an incredibly creative adaptation by Matthew Lopez, Tony-winner for The Inheritance, and Amber Ruffin, Emmy-nominated writer for Late Night with Seth Myers and A Black Lady Sketch Show.

If those credentials aren’t instantly impressive enough, the show is directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, Tony-winner for both Aladdin and The Book of Mormon and responsible for much of the success of The Prom, Mean Girls, Something Rotten!, The Drowsy Chaperone, and Spamalot. In other words, someone who has given us all hours and hours of world-class enjoyment and wonderment.

The towering and incredibly detailed art deco set is from Broadway royalty Scott Pask, Natasha Katz is responsible for the exquisite lighting, and the costuming by Gregg Barnes won him his third Tony. Not chopped liver in the design department here either by any means.

When KA debuted at the MGM Grand, I had a several-day backstage access to the creative team as they were about to open the show and during an interview I asked French-Canadian costume designer Marie Vaillancourt what the main difference was between designing for the Cirque and for the small experimental Montreal theatre company from which they grabbed her.

Her answer was immediate: “Le budget.”

There’s obviously been no expense spared in the creation of the quintessential musical presentation of Some Like It Hot yet, unlike so many other productions taking on a project of this size and scope, none of it gets in the way of the storytelling.

The original Oscar-winning screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, itself based on the 1935 French film Fanfare of Love, was perfectly written for the times in which it debuted, but what Lopez and Ruffin have contributed could not be more contemporary and offers such a boost of diversity to the story that miserable ogre Donnie Two-Dolls might ban it from playing the Kennedy Center—or whatever his minions bent on outrageous distraction achieve renaming it by then.

Jerry/Daphne (Jack Lemmon in the film), the irresistible Sugar Kane (the iconic Marilyn Monroe role), and bandleader Sweet Sue (originally played by my lategreat pal Joan Shawlee) are all African American in this new version, and Daphne's smitten millionaire suitor Osgood Fielding III (the Joe E. Brown role) is now Mexican American and only goes by his given name Pedro Francisco Alvarez when he’s at his swank nightspot in Mexico (“The world reacts to what it sees,” he explains to Daphne, “and in my experience the world doesn’t have very good eyesight”).

Sue’s band members are more feminist warriors than gum-chewing “delicate flowers” and when a promoter tries to skimp on their pay, they attack him with the song “Zee Bap,” which includes in the lyrics:

“Black or White or Latin, Asian, Christian or Jew,

It’s awfully nice to know we can all parlez-vous…

And when we band together, girls,

I'm certain that you'll find,

We're a family that's linguistically intertwined."

The guy pays them triple.

Of course, the biggest change is what happens to Jerry (Tavis Kordell) when he starts getting used to being Daphne. “I finally feel seen,” he admits to his lifelong friend Joe (Matt Loehr), “but I don’t have a word for what I feel.”

Luckily, they do have a song, “You Coulda Knocked Me Over with a Feather,” a true showstopper that, thanks to the brilliant Kordell, is the highlight of the entire musical. And as far as fighting stereotypes is concerned, when Daphne is asked by Joe if they intend to make this transformation permanent, they answer, “ Maybe tomorrow a suit and tie… I like having options.”

Kordell and Loehr, along with Ellis-Gaston as a far less ditzy Sugar than the wide-eyed “I’m not very bright” persona adopted by the super-smart Miss Monroe, Tarra Conner Jones as the Bessie Smith-esque Sweet Sue, and especially Edward Juvier as an unexpectedly all-singing, all-dancing Osgood, could all not be more perfectly cast.

Still, the true star of this Hot revamping of an already entertaining tale is Shaiman and Wittman’s award-winning score and, above everything that makes this production one not to miss is Nicholaw’s knockout Tony and Drama Desk-awarded choreography. It’s interesting how over time the signature dance moves of artists such as Bob Fosse, Twyla Tharp, Matthew Bourne, and Alvin Ailey have become instantly recognizable and now, after years of appreciating the work of Casey Nickolaw, I’m purdy sure I could pick out his work in an Olympic dance-off.

Of course, it would be impossible to appreciate Nicholaw’s handiwork without an ensemble cast able to keep up with his talent. This may be a touring cast but you’d never know it—and literally every castmember, from the leads to Daphne and Josephine’s horn-totin’ bandmates, to every waiter, gangster, and G-man, dances like Honey’s proverbial wind and tap their way in precision unison across the stage like an eclectic chorusline of Gregory Hines clones.

I came away from this fresh and effervescent revinvention of Some Like It Hot not only pleasantly charming but I also realized, as we made our way through the crunch and into the majestic Pantages lobby, I was experiencing a satisfying new boost of appreciation for who I am—or should I say, who we all are or deserve to be.

As Osgood Fielding III once so eloquently noted, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

CLOSED: Pantages Theatre

RETURNING OCT. 7-19: Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. 714.556.2787 or scfta.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