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 Bob Turton 

THROUGH APR. 18: The Actors’ Gang, 9070 Venice Blvd., Venice. 310.838.4264 or theactorsgang.com

Photo by Thomas Alleman 

THROUGH MAY 3: Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Av., LA. Tickets: openfist.org or circlextheatre.org

Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman 

Pantages Theatre

I’ve seen the musical Spamalot several times but I realized, sitting in the Pantages for opening night for the national tour resurrecting the 2023 Broadway revival, it’s been almost 20 years since my last viewing when it opened with great glitz and added splendor at the Wynn in Las Vegas.

What has changed? Well, certainly not the outrageously irreverent humor that first saw light of day in the 1975 film parody Monty Python and the Holy Grail, loosely—in the extreme—based on the legend of King Arthur and the mythical kingdom of Camelot.

The musical adaptation, originally starring Tim Curry, directed by Mike Nichols, choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, with music by John du Prez and Python’s fearless leader Eric Idle and featuring lyrics and book by Idle, debuted on Broadway in 2005 and went on to be nominated for 14 Tony Awards, winning three—including Best Musical.

Simply, Spamalot has been a global cultural phenomenon, from its beginning at Chicago’s Schubert in 2004 to its subsequent New York run the following year that ran for 1,575 performances and was seen by two million people.

It played both in London’s West End and toured North America simultaneously for a staggering four years from 2006 to 2009, and second and third national tours took to the road from 2010 to 2012—and then another from 2012 to 2014.

It has been mounted worldwide in Sydney, Barcelona, Cologne, Budapest, Stockholm, Mexico City, Tokyo, Oslo, as well as its two year run at the Wynn and also appeared at Canada’s Stratford Festival. Images of the show even became a series of postage stamps for Britain’s Royal Mail Service.

Idle’s hugely popular slapstick cashcow has proven to be a stroke of marketing genius, generating well over $300 million in ticket sales since its inception. Talk about always looking on the bright side of life, eh? 

This new and even more broadly irreverent retelling of the legend of Arthur and his illustrious Knights of the Round Table, chronicling the outrageously armored and wigged boys’ Keystone Cop-esque search for you-know-what, once again pays quintessential homage to the movie, but here’s where one of two major differences from the original is evident. 

First of all, Nichols’ inaugural production whimsically featured intentionally cardboard-y sets and homemade looking props made to seem as though they were lifted directly from decorations created for a high school homecoming dance in Podunk, Iowa, while the new version takes advantage of one of the American theatre’s most popularized assets: grandly animated and blazingly colorful video projections.

As with many other contemporary musical presentations both in New York and on tour, the visual designs here by Paul Tate dePoo III (honest) are incredibly imaginative, adding immensely to the cartoon-like nature of Idle’s fantasy tale.

I almost chose not to attend the Pantages opening of the current national tour directed by and featuring inventively hairbrained choreography by Josh Rhodes, which again took the Big Apple by the killer bunnies in 2023-2024. My partner Hugh, however, is a diehard Pythonian and, being a few centuries younger than I am, had never seen the musical. And let me tell you, I loved the production as much as he did.

There are once again plenty of gorgeous leggy showgirls to ogle, this time out costumed with true razzle-dazzle by Sesame Street’s Jen Caprio, all of whom flash their feathers and hang on the arm of the newest King Arthur (Major Attaway) and his noble court of worldclass comedic buffoons. 

There are also enough familiar Monty Python references thrown in whenever possible for the multitudes of rabid Flying Circus fans to make this goofy musical more watchable than ever. If anything can wipe away the stress of dealing with what’s happening to our country at the hands of a far more dangerous real-life clown, this is the one. 

The few uninitiated folks under 35 or so who never watch cable or didn’t grow up with parents intent on performing old Python routines in their living rooms might be a tad bewildered when the giggles from the audience come before the gag ends. The mere appearance of a guy on stilts sporting ram’s horns (played with perfect seriousness by Chris Collins Pisano) provokes instant hilarity and the first declaration of the word “Ni” is enough to send many in attendance into wild peels of laughter. Punchlines in Spamalot are almost unnecessary.

All the requisite paraphernalia is here, from that lovably terrorizing fluffy red-eyed Jekyll and Hyde-bred bunny to those familiar flatulent taunting Frenchmen to characters calling for the locals to bring out their dead. One guy even gets to carry a rubber joke store chicken. How cool is that? 

Attaway, so memorable as the Genie in Broadway’s Aladdin, is exceptional as Arthur, filling the cavernous Pantages with both his booming voice and infectious personality. Amanda Robles as the Lady of the Lake also has quite astounding lung power, especially in the knockout “Diva’s Lament.” 

Blake Segal is a charmer as Arthur’s poor overloaded loyal servant Patsy, Leo Roberts is a standout as Sir Galahad and the father of the super-gay Prince Herbert—a role that brings another uproariously funny turn by Steven Telsey, who impressively doubles as many other characters, including the Historian (Narrator), Not Dead Fred, and various babies, nuns, and mimes.

As Sir Robin (a role originated by David Hyde Pierce and more recently Michael Urie in this revival on Broadway), Sean Bell is hilarious, particularly in the Al Jolson-inspired “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway [If You Don’t Have a Jew],” which concludes with a dead-on line of willing Knights doing the bottle dance from Fiddler on the Roof.

The entire company could not be more willing to pull out the stops, creating one of the tightest and most watchable ensemble casts I’ve enjoyed in a long time, and musical director Jonathan W. Gorst also deserves praise for leading the production’s spirited full orchestra who keep the performers quite literally on their toes. If anyone thinks, as I almost did, they’ve seen Spamalot so many times that this remounting could not offer anything new, think again. It is as delightful as ever, if not more so.

I mentioned there were two things I remembered fondly about the original production of Spamalot and the second, if you’ll allow the indulgence, is a personal memory. When I last saw the musical in 2007, I was still traveling to Vegas every three weeks or so writing a monthly entertainment-oriented column in the long-gone Salon City Magazine that I called “Vegas Daze.”

My cousin left his personal Camelot not long after and I’ll always be grateful to the folks at the Wynn and the cast of their long-running production of Spamalot for helping send him off to Valhalla with a spectacular Python-esque bon voyage.

“You only live once,” the zanies from Monty Python once quietly plagiarized from a quote by Mae West, “but if you do it right, once is enough.”

THROUGH APR. 12: Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. 800.982.2787 or broadwayinhollywood.com

Photo by Dahlia Katz

Ahmanson Theatre

Excuse me, Center Theatre Group, but what the 지옥 is Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience doing on the cavernous stage of the 2,084-seat Ahmanson Theatre in the first place?

Dealing with a dysfunctional Korean family who run a mom-and-pop 7/11 clone in a quickly gentrifying Toronto neighborhood, if any production should be relegated to small regional stages, if not dinner theatres somewhere far removed from any urban area, it’s certainly this one.

As the grandly mounted David Byrne musical Here Lies Love is cramped into the 739-seat Taper next door, the decision to bring this minor, more than vaguely racist, and glaringly dated piece of “warmhearted” fluff into our town’s largest and most austere theatre is truly a conundrum.

Granted, there's a game cast of five led by the playwright (whose accent is only intermittently understandable), an impressively detailed set by Joanna Yu, and some charming video projections by Nicole Eun-Ju Bell, but still quite honestly the only good thing I can think of to say about Choi’s forgettable and only occasionally funny 2011 play is in its 75-minute runtime it's at least blissfully short.

Simply, Kim’s Convenience is about as tropical as a Mercury dime and is, in the final analysis, a colossal waste of time. I could have stayed home and watched that TV channel that shows round-the-clock vintage 1970-80 sitcoms.

THROUGH April 19: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org

Photo by Jacques Lorch 

Odyssey Theatre

The coolest part of this evening of two seldom performed Pinter one-acts, performed under the banner Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, is the crackling smart and most welcome revival of The Lover, his original 1962 playlet for television written for his wife Vivien Merchant.

Directed by veteran master regisseur Jack Heller and starring Ron Botitta and Susan Priver, two of LA’s sturdiest and most prolific performers, this lovely and tasty little theatrical morsel subtly attacking the bored bourgeoisie of the times by delving into their kinkiest secret sexual desires, could not be much better.

With a grandly Caligari-esque expressionistic set by Joel Daavid, Pinter’s bitingly urbane dark comedy sizzles in the hands of Heller and his talented pawns, who clearly understand how to play material that remains brutally corrosive just underneath the fine silks and satins and swirling scotch in his thinly-veiled send-up of British manners and pretentious civility.

Heller’s crisply effervescent staging of The Lover is a quintessential textbook example of how to play the always challenging dialogue of Pinter, how to make these mannered characters real and hilariously devilish without falling into the many massive traps inherent in any script by one of the latter half of the 20th century’s most unstoppable and groundbreaking wordsmiths.

Oddly, the first act event of Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, the dramatist’s 1991 politics-skewering Party Time, is exactly the opposite.

Set in the same ultra-posh and polished wood-paneled flat during an upscale cocktail party where eight guests discuss country clubs and summering at their country homes while ignoring some kind of ominous military insurrection taking place just outside their windows, could have been something perfect at this particular time in our poor country’s own currently disparaging history, but something is terribly amiss in the playing of it.

In class, the lategreat Uta Hagan once said that when approaching a Pinter script, the very first thing one should do is take a big black marker and cross out all stage directions—especially all the frequent and, to me, inappropriate demands that between lines actors must “Pause.”

Somehow, Heller’s ensemble clearly missed such a memo. The pacing is deadly and in general—with the notable exceptions of Mouchette Van Helsdingen as a stately countess-type trying desperately to fit in and Isaac W. Jay as a dashing young lothario—the ensemble cast hasn't a clue about how to play the difficult postures and eccentric rhythms of Harold Pinter.

It’s rather a shame it was decided that The Lover would be performed after Party Time because personally, if I hadn’t been there to review Sex, Lies and Harold Pinter, I would have definitely made a quiet exit at intermission and missed the evening’s totally outstanding and deliciously satisfying second half.

THROUGH APR. 26: Odyssey Theatre, 2055 N. Sepulveda Blvd., West LA. 310.477.2055 or OdysseyTheatre.com 

Photo by Brian Hashimoto 

Boston Court Performing Arts Center

In the current climate where a brash young movie star on the rise declares no one cares anymore about ballet and opera, it takes a large set of you-know-whats for an intimate theatre company struggling as most are to stay afloat to present the world premiere of an intricately cerebral and low-lying untried play about a pair of research scientists dedicated to studying cephalopods.

Then again, there’s strength in numbers and the fact that my old home-away-from-home the Boston Court joined forces with two other like-minded and dedicated theatre companies to bring Weston Gaylord’s magical Octopus’s Garden to life despite the odds might just mark, as Circle X artistic director Jen Kays mentioned to me opening night, the wave of the future.

It was Circle X that first discovered Octopus’s Garden, I believe, and approached Jessica Kubzansky of the Boston Court and Jessica Hanna of Outside In Theatre to suggest this monumentally serendipitous three-way collaboration—and it was a match made in heaven.

Simply put, the potentially easy to overlook and somewhat analytical little drama could have been a disappointing liability but by pooling their resources and unstoppable enthusiasm, this underdog of an artistic risk may just prove to be LA’s earliest candidate for production of the year.

Lars (Tim Cummings) is a typically nerdy marine biologist who has dedicated his life to studying the intelligence of octopuses, those mysterious creatures of the sea with a decentralized nervous systems, three hearts and, if he can prove his hypothesis to be true, the ability to conjure advanced thinking that could rival—if not surpass—our own.

Lars works alongside a passionate much younger clinician named Tara (Kacie Rogers), who shares his enthusiasm but is intensely frustrated by his reserved nature in trying to make discoveries about how the molluscan class brain creates thought.

Tara secretly fabricates a homemade but complex musical apparatus (hats off to prop designer Nicole Barnardini) that she lowers into the stage-length tank of Sylvia, a giant Pacific octopus Lars discovered while scuba diving and brought back to their lab to study. Sylvia is clearly an astonishingly sentient creature who quickly became the major focus of the scientists’ research.

Tara goes home but when she returns the next morning and downloads what their empyreal charge has created in her absence, everything in her world and the world of Lars instantly changes. Sylvia has composed music unlike anything ever produced, music so labyrinthine, so jarringly sublime, so unrestrained and evocative that it goes far beyond anything anyone human has ever conjured.

When Tara is forced to share Sylvia’s composition with the ever-cautious Lars, it instantly brings her usually emotionally stunted colleague to tears and, when they both subsequently try to listen to the music we all know that brings us pleasure, it sounds harsh and scratchy and weirdly discordant.

They bring in a passionate young hopeful composer-in-training (Vincent R. Williams), someone Tara met and subsequently rejected on a blind internet date. Not only does Lucas have the same reaction to Sylvia’s “music,” it destroys his dreams, finding the unearthly celestial music so inconceivably stunning that suddenly he can no longer write music himself.

It soon becomes a struggle to decide what the next step is, whether or not to share the researchers’ discovery with the world. What Sylvia has generated, they realize, has the potential to alter the entire specter of human consciousness if shared with the world, as it just might be capable of destroying what we know as human passions as drastically as it has for Lucas.

Gaylord’s almost equally indescribably transcendent tale takes us to places hard to imagine, places where passages of what might be singled out as too right-minded and scientifically esoteric instead keep us riveted and on the edge of our seats.

That’s because what Octopus’s Garden explores down deep (if that phrase doesn’t seem too oceanic) is what constitutes being human and leaves us wondering if we as a species are as truly superior to everything else in our wildly mystifying universe we pretend too often to understand.

Bottomline, however, I don’t believe there’s any way this many-sided yet gentle treatise on the misconceptions naturally inherent in our human condition could succeed without the glorious team of artists who have conspired to bring this unprecedented, rule-defying work of theatrical art to fruition.

There’s no argument that director Jessica Kubzansky is one of LA theatre’s most prolific stargazers but this time out, she surpasses everything that has come before it, delivering a hauntingly surreal work of art unlike anything offered before.

Her evocative perception of Gaylord’s unparalleled chimerical modern folk tale makes this all come together splendidly, something clearly echoed by a worldclass design team. It’s almost as though together these passionate visionaries somehow manage to astral project their eager audience into a preternatural place to experience an almost Homeric event—and in a 99-seat theatre at that. It’s as though we’re watching a contextural 3-D cinematic epic without the glasses.

Francois-Pierre Couture’s set is minimal but gorgeously spectural, the versatile Boston Court stage dominated by Sylvia’s gigantic neon-framed tank and accentuated by a collection of hanging square Japanese lantern-esque lamps to add to the abstract sense of design so jarringly juxtaposed with the reality of the researchers’ otherwise drab and antiseptic laboratory.

Karyn D. Lawrence’s lighting is equally otherworldly, as is the atmospheric sound design by Noel Nichols that occasionally feels so underwater that we should all be handed scuba equipment when entering the theatre.

It takes a trio of dynamic performers to hold their own in the grand scheme of things that conspire to bring such theatrical sorcery to life—and these three performers do so seamlessly.

Rogers is particularly powerful as the wildly passionate, sometimes overstepping Tara, delivering the production’s most arresting and richly multifaceted performance, while Williams is heartbreaking as the hotblooded young virtuoso whose hopes and dreams collapse before him.

Cummings has the difficult task of finding the sweet spot between Lars’ lifelong fervor to make important scientific breakthroughs and struggle to do so in small analytical baby steps. His one breakout monologue as he loses himself describing finding Sylvia while on a dive is nothing short of enthralling.

Still, ironically these three fine actors are limited here by their humanity, overshadowed by Octopus’s Garden’s grandly unique and omnipresent non-human performer: Sylvia herself. As brought to life by puppet designer extraordinaire Emory Royston, who also choreographs the creature’s undulating underwater ballet, Sylvia is the unexpected star of the show.

The continuous movements of the graceful replicated octopus are executed by three performers dressed all in black—Zachary Bones, Perry Daniel, and Danielle McPhaul—manipulating long poles reminiscent of classic Thai shadow puppets. Their work and the direction of Royston deserve special honors at year’s end.

And speaking of honors, how do the members of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama nominating committee find their potential candidates? As I understand it, the drama jury each year reviews scripts by American playwrights produced not only in New York but in regional theatres across the country, taking into account the particular productions from which they emerged.

If any play this year deserves consideration by the Pulitzer board, I for one wholeheartedly would nominate Weston Gaylord and his enchanting, gripping, exceptionally mesmeric Octopus’s Garden, a thought-provoking study in what constitutes being a conscious and sentient being just as worthy to be alive as we are.

EXTENDED THROUGH APR. 5: Boston Court Performing Arts Center, 70 Mentor Av., Pasadena. 626.683.6801 or BostonCourtPasadena.org

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Mark Taper Forum

What a monumental achievement for artistic diversity in Los Angeles is the west coast debut of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s Here Lies Love, the first non-replica regional production of the four-time Tony-nominated Broadway musical to be seen anywhere. With clever design adaptations to make it work in the Taper playing space and direction by Center Theatre Group’s artistic director Snehal Desai, the production features an all-Filipino cast and, as Desai proudly stated in his opening night speech, it was developed by an almost entirely AAPI creative and design team.

The ingenuity here is exposing the inhumane injustices of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ brutal dictatorship in the Philippines from 1965 to 1976 and managing to do so under the glittery camouflaging banner of a rousing disco-pop musical. Below the flashiness of Here Lies Love lurks a premonitory message showing how the Marcos’ bloody reign mirrors the frightening and ever-expanding dangers brought upon our own country by the corruption and pouty dysfunction dogging the obscenely aggressive administration of our current manbaby-in-chief.

Featuring the original concept and an outstanding score by one of my personal musical heroes David Byrne (who, I might add proudly, I first introduced performing with his Talking Heads to Los Angeles audiences during my tenure as talent coordinator of the Troubadour a few centuries ago), the origin of Here Lies Love is quite fascinating, based on Byrne’s obsessive research on the Marcoses.

It began as a 2010 song cycle concept album produced in a made-in-mythical-heaven collaboration with Fatboy Slim, who was instrumental in popularizing Great Britain’s “big beat” genre in the 1990s, and the title of the album was lifted from a comment made by Imelda Marcos when she first viewed the body of her husband, saying that she wanted the phrase “Here Lies Love” inscribed on her tombstone.

Byrne explained about the master plan back then:

“The story I am interested in is asking what drives a powerful person, what makes them tick. How do they make and then remake themselves? I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if, as this piece would be principally composed of clubby dance music, one could experience it in a club setting? Could one bring a story and a kind of theatre to the disco? Would that be possible and if so, wouldn’t that be amazing?”

The greatest risk taken in this production is the abandonment of the musical’s previous dance party setting. In New York, the entire orchestra section of the Broadway Theatre was removed to become a huge dance floor, virtually making the mezzanine the first row of traditional seating. Instead, Desai places the action in a Filipino TV studio as one of the country’s popular daytime televised variety shows replaces the New York premiere's dance-friendly nightclub surroundings.

Even with Desai’s visually glitzy staging and an ensemble featuring some knockout vocal talent and original choreography by William Carlos Angulo performed by a precision troupe of highly spirited dancers, still this reinvention of the original Broadway production barely masks one glaring weakness: a rather badly written book and confusing storyline that, without the razzle-dazzle, makes little sense as a historical timeline.

The evolution of Imelda Marcos in the show’s intermission-free 90-minute runtime from sweetly innocent farm girl to a real-life Cruella de Vil is a hard transformation to swallow. It seems here as though one incident, finding her notoriously womanizing husband (it’s said he fathered as many as 17 illegitimate children) in bed with his mistress Dovie Beams suddenly changes Imelda into the infamously hardened prima donna who, in her public quest to Make the Philippines Great Again, basically vows to take over the power while enriching and glorifying herself at the expense of her country.

Again… sound familiar?

In spite of the script’s impossibly expeditious metamorphosis of Imelda Marcos, Reanne Acasio does a remarkable job bringing the character to life despite the uphill task Byrne has left her to overcome. She is surprisingly believable as both the youthful impoverished Imelda and as the monster she becomes, doing her best throughout to smooth out the journey despite the Jekyll and Hyde-like character arc challenge she faces.

Joshua Dela Cruz is also a standout as her early boyfriend Ninoy Aquino, who leaves her in the dust to pursue political gain and later becomes a fierce adversary of her rise to power, as is Carol Angeli as her best childhood friend who, during her latterday Countess Dracula period, Imelda coldly has imprisoned after Estrella does an interview revealing the power-mad diva’s humble background.

In Desai’s altered vision, what was originally the role of the nightclub’s DJ who narrates much of the story, RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Aura Mayari becomes “Imeldaific,” a kind of alter ego shadow figure who mirrors Imelda’s extravagant lifestyle and well-documented passion for disco. Try as Mayari might—and as spectacularly as dressed by costumer Jaymee Ngernwichit—the role is oddly out of place, suffering from the lack of a convincing throughline that never pans out.

The highlight of the entire production is the eleventh-hour appearance of Joan Almedilla, the original Imelda when Byrne’s song cycle was first performed in concert at Carnegie Hall in 2007. As the grieving mother of Ninoy Aquino, who Imelda may or may not have ordered assassinated, Almedilla is astounding, delivering the musical’s most haunting balled, “Just Ask the Flowers,” over the casket of her martyrized son.

The design and creative aspects are all suitably grand, including Arnel Sanciano’s TV studio set, Marcella Barbeau’s lighting, Yee Eun Nam’s projections, and especially Ngernwichit’s incredibly colorful and evocative costuming.

Musical direction by Joe Cruz and Jennifer Lin does yeoman’s duty with the infectious and continually noteworthy score, but unfortunately one of the most conspicuous omissions hampering an otherwise well-appointed production is the music is prerecorded. The rather tinny and clearly passionless canned accompaniment considerably drags down the splendor of an otherwise lavishly appointed presentation.

Whatever its theatrical quagmires, this AAPI-spawned locally reborn reinvention of David Byrne’s passion project is a significant achievement; not only does it cleverly scrutinize and bring attention to a dastardly history of a time not long ago when an authoritarian political regime all but destroyed a country, it also pays homage to the courageous citizens of the Philippines’ homegrown People Power Revolution who bravely stood up to the madness and brought it to a stop.

This is truly an urgently important and most welcome cautionary tale that, beyond the flashes of the production’s overhead mirrored ball, its spashy costuming and choreography, and the casting of some splendid performers with praiseworthy vocal power, Here Lies Love is obviously meant to remind us as Americans of all colors and creeds that the people of our country now under seige have a duty to band together and end the insanity.

THROUGH APR. 5: Mark Taper Forum, 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?

NOW IN ITS THIRD YEAR! 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