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 Jeff Lorch 

Whitefire Theatre

I’d thought in my long life I’d suffered through more than my share of plays about small-minded backward countryfolk and their massively dysfunctional families, but au contaire, it seems. The world premiere of Julie Shavers’ outrageously twisted new The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville, now in a limited run at the Whitefire, proved I had just a little room left for one more.

Although I have to admit Shavers’ rather predictable tale of a Fourth of July family reunion in the rural Tennessee backyard of the miserable Moon family womenfolk covers no new ground, Shavers breathes glorious life into the familiar convoluted goings-on with her unique knack for creating lovable—though suitably exasperating—characters and harbors a deliciously clever off-color sense of humor that takes anything Lanford Wilson ever wrote one step farther.

The one family member who long before fled the dead-end existence of the Moon-scape is the eldest daughter Lucinda (Mamie Gummer), who had made her reluctant way from her adopted home in Los Angeles to be berated by her unhappy kin who wonder if she’s become a lesbian because she no longer wears lipstick and “smells like a woodpile.”

Lucinda’s mother (Gigi Bermingham) is someone, of course, who spouts the gospel with every breath and wails about how hard she’s had to work through prayer to try to exorcise the multitude of pesky demons who inhabit the bodies of her three ungrateful and sinful daughters.

Her view of Lucinda’s life in California has been honed by watching the news (“What you watch is not the news,” Lucinda interjects) and she’s convinced LA is practically a third world country where homeless people have been so infested by rats we have an epidemic of typhus in our courthouses here, that “Mexican rapists wander back and forth across the border,” and all us Hollywood liberals have regular abortion parties and are part of child molestation rings.

You know, like things Donald Trump would say; all that’s missing is a rant about Haitian immigrants eating our household pets.

The remaining female members of the woebegone Moon household, whose male counterparts aren’t present but are talked about so much they might as well be, are Mama Moon’s other daughters, fraternal twins Kitty and Birdie (played by Ashley Ward and the playwright, respectively) and Birdie’s young daughter Lottie (Angelie Simone).

It doesn’t take long to realize the three siblings have spent a lifetime bickering with one another and continuously hurting each other’s feelings—and Lottie, who seems to have shared a genetic knack for perpetual fertility, has also inherited her mother’s sharp tongue.

Then there’s Granny Moon (Juliana Liscio), a bedridden basically offstage presence who continually screams for attention throughout the proceedings and keeps her offspring jumping. Her ornery longevity is not seen as much of a blessing, especially by Birdie, who among other duties has the ineviable task of applying Desynex to her grandmother’s nether regions.

It’s clearly a miserable existence and no one is very pleased that Lucinda has successfully escaped to our left coast while they’ve been stuck behind to deal with a string of often incarcerated husbands and boyfriends, as well as dealing with a Jesus freak of a mother who believes all good church-goin’, bible-fearin’ Christians must be ready to engage in spiritual warfare as the targets of such worrisome archenemies as Al-Qaeda, North Korea, and Hillary Clinton.

Despite the inherent predictability of the modern adult-oriented Ma Kettle genus it commemorates, The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville is lifted from the play’s all-too customary bucolic genre by Shavers’ wonderfully snappy, hilariously irreverent dialogue—as well as her own dead-on performance as the hardboiled and verbally unfiltered sister who’s more than aware that everybody knows how fucked up she is. “It’s right there in the open,” she proudly proclaims, a statement none of her family members make any attempt to dispute.

Her hilarious homespun countrified palaver—perhaps coming somewhat naturally since her program bio proclaims Shavers was actually born and raised in Shelbyville, Tennessee—is continuously punctuated by a riotous barrage of a kind of Hee Haw-inspired oneliners, such as describing drunken swimmers at the community watering hole as “flailing around like an octopus caught in a lawnmower” or warning that her mother has the “caged up nutty look of a wild dog in a Christmas sweater.”

The always watchable Bermingham works seamlessly against her usual refined and gentile type as Mama, making the role her own despite the script describing the character as a “big woman with long white hair who’s somewhere between Gandalf and Stevie Nicks.” Bermingham transcends her drastic physical dissimilarities with Shavers’ scripted vision of Mama, even handling the shotgun she uses to dispatch the farm’s overabundance of rats with a technique that could rival Annie Oakley.

Ward and Simone are perfect foils for their characters’ more colorful relatives, while Gummer smoothly synthesizes an uncanny simplicity and honesty as Lucinda that quickly identifies the character as the moral compass of the clan, the one reasonable outcast with whom us jaded urban observers can better relate.

While occasionally her performance feels as though it’s been transported from another less broad play altogether, it’s clear Gummer is an exceptional actor who has inherited some worldclass familial chops. I would love to one day see her play Barbara in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, perhaps with her esteemed mother reprising the role of Violet that brought her the 18th of her staggering 21 Oscar nominations (among three wins).

Still, under the direction of Daniel O’Brien, this world premiere mounting of Shavers’ promising and refreshing play is in general a bit of a conundrum, presented at the tiny Whitefire for only seven performances and featuring glaringly bareboned production accoutrements, with black curtains pulled across the stage to indicate new locations and a huge screen featuring projections in place of a real set, while clunky scene changes are accomplished by the actors and a couple of stagehands in black carrying furniture. Why, there are even papier mache tombstones in the family graveyard hand-inscribed with epitaphs worthy of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The script itself suffers in the eleventh hour by quickly wrapped up resolution, especially puzzling when the regurgitating of a dastardly family secret is revealed and then glossed over with disappointing results that leave us thinking, “Wait… what about…?” and when Mama’s fiercely passionate religious beliefs are challenged, she does little to appear sufficiently shocked or to stoically defend her position.

That said, hopefully this brief and imperfect first pass of The Baptist Witches of Shelbyville, with this precision cast and Julie Shavers’ flair for creating endearingly drawn characters, will be just that. It’s a play that in a fair world definitely deserves a rosy future, albeit with some judicious fleshing out and far more professional production values.

THROUGH MAY 1: Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. 818.687.8559 or whitefiretheatre.org

Photo by Bob Turton 

Actors’ Gang Theatre

Well, it certainly has been a week rife with existential dread—and I’m not just referring to the stupefying daily assaults watching an ego-driven and out of control madman systematically destroying our world along with all semblance of civilization and human decency as we know it.

Beginning with Dietrich Smith’s by-the-book stage adaptation of Franz Kafka’s expressionistic 1911-ish masterwork Amerika or, The Man who Disappeared from Open Fist, which warned early 20th-century readers of the dangers of an impending bureaucratic takeover at the beginning of the industrial age, the following afternoon we experienced Cihan Sahin’s startling reinvention of Elmer Rice’s 1923 loudly mechanical dystopian play The Adding Machine, presented by the unstoppable folks at the Actors’ Gang.

If anything solidifies a sense of the internal collapse of the common man in our rapidly disintegrating modern culture, these two disturbing but electrifying examples of theatrical and literary artistic shoutouts are clear examples of what was prophetically perceived to be coming in the century unfolding when they first debuted.

Rice’s The Adding Machine, which preceded his Pulitzer Prize-winning Street Scene by six years, managed to instantly put the inner scream of the last century onto the American stage a hundred years ago, easily equating the rapid rise of industrialism to our current fear of being overtaken with trepidation about the escalation of robotics and artificial intelligence—and where it’s bound to lead us.

In Sahin’s visionary interpretation, as our woebegone bookkeeper anti-hero Mr. Zero (brilliantly brought to life by long-serving Gang stalwart Pierre Adeli) drudges away in his 25^th year contemplating the endless, mind-numbing numbers racing through his head and out into his fingers in his deadening job, behind a gauzy scrim at the rear of the stage a scrawny Sisyphus (Kirk Palmer) repeatedly pushes a giant rock up the former Ivy Substation’s back staircase.

This play is the quintessential offering from the Gang, a perfect vehicle to synthesize founder and 45-year artistic director Tim Robbins’ passion for blending commedia dell’arte traditions, rule-defying experimental techniques utilizing exaggerated physical movements, gestures, and even mask work, while faithfully implementing the bold presentational acting technique known as The Style to disseminate controversial and uncompromising stories.

Poor Mr. Zero. Every day spent endlessly crunching numbers—by hand—tossed out into the still office-stale air by his coworker Daisy (Mariana Jaccazio), someone with whom he has a love/hate but mostly adversarial relationship. Then he wearily comes home each night to his Ethel Mertzian shrew of a wife (the delightfully pestilential Zoe Molina) who drones on endlessly about what a crappy life she has and what a total loser he is—that is, before cuddling up to him in bed and giving him a sweet little loving kiss on the cheek—all while he blankly ignores her with well-practiced indifference.

Yes, poor Mr. Zero, all right, a character clearly representing a living, breathing non-entity in the soon-to-be encroaching machine-driven world. And as begrudgingly comfortable he might appear to be in the acceptance of his dull life being held captive in the jagged, anxious energy of the times as they were a’changin’ in the early 1900s, when his boss (the hilarious Chad Reinhart), who’s never even spoken to him in the past quarter-century of his drone-like employment, tells him despite never once missing a day of work he’s being replaced by a newfangled adding machine, Zero goes ballistic and slits his throat.

The second half of Rice’s absurdist saga takes place in the netherworld, with the executed Zero waking up in his coffin next to a fellow seasoned but discouraged eternal traveler to the purgatory-esque Elysian Fields (Adam J. Jefferis), who tells him not to worry about the rigor mortis he’s suffering as it will go away in a few days.

He also runs into two other pivotal characters in his brief stay in the afterlife (they “figure that souls will wear out quicker” if they remain there too long). He is surprised to meet his former coworker Daisy, who has killed herself for love to be at his side again, and Lieutenant Charles (Bert Lahr-clone Brent Hinkley), his guide on the next leg of his journey through the mysterious fog of life after death.

It seemed Daisy always carried a torch for her abusive colleague and Zero admits he harbored secret hots for her, too. It seems death will become the new lovers until he is told there’s no need for the sanctity of the marriage institution in… well… wherever they are, so he bolts from Daisy in a fit of moral indignation.

Soon his guide tells him it’s time to leave the place anyway and journey back to a whole new earthly life—albeit a return to the drudgery of bookkeeping, again as much of a boring existential quagmire as the one he just left behind.

“It don’t make no difference now,” Zero laments. “I might as well be alive.”

Adeli is the heart of this amazing production, providing a quiet, world-weary center to ground the outrageous (intentional) overexaggeration of most of the other performers bedecked in colorful slashes of feral makeup, some hidden behind classic Actors' Gang half-masks worthy of Day of the Locusts. He’s like a 21st-century Kenneth McMillan, a grumbling, alienated Everyman resonating with many of us wondering if our own self-worth will be wiped out by the proliferation of AI.

Jaccazio is also a standout as Daisy, offering another more realistic performance that somehow curiously interfuses with the gloriously brazen caricatures prancing and dancing all around her.

Sahin’s direction is visually ingenious and wildly unpredictable, even if occasionally he lets his actors be a little indulgent in drawing out their scenes a tad longer than necessary.

Bosco Flanagan’s lighting is wondrously evocative and David Robbins, the Gang’s longtime resident master of all things musical and sound-related, does his best work yet. There should be mention also of whomever contributed the production’s well-rehearsed fight choreography but alas, no one is credited in the program—but then again, this is the workshop-heavy, physically well-tuned denizens of Actors’ Gang, right? Such things come with the territory.

It’s not lost to me that, as a veteran fan of almost everything ever created by the Gang’s impassioned band of crazies, over the years I have watched performers such as Adeli, a member for over 20 years; Jefferis, who has performed in over 30 shows with the company; and Hinkley, who as his bio states he was in their very first production and has since “appeared in a slew of shows and also directed a bunch,” have matured from cheeky and eager youthful aerosaltant upstarts into extraordinarily comfortable and finely seasoned character actors.

Clearly, whatever the future will be for our poor ambushed and potentially pernicious country, by continuing to present long overlooked work such as this spectacular revival of Rice’s The Adding Machine, the Gang will be around to entertain us like no other theatrical entity can while boldly speaking out without filter about the state of our society.

Art heals as nothing else I know—and the Actors’ Gang is a shamanistic caregiver unparalleled in its exploration of the architecture of the modern psyche, indomitable in their magical quest to fight for clarity against the specter of subjective truth creeping in all around us.

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

Photo by Thomas Alleman 

Open Fist Theatre Company and Circle X Theatre

In my early teen years, I definitely crashed past the usual youthful interests in homecoming dances and status seeking as warp-speed, instead embracing my darker, more aesthetically morbid side; had I been born later, I’m sure I would have been referred to as Goth. By 14, I was soaking up Kerouac, Genet, Sartre, Nathanael West, and certainly Franz Kafka. Why, I was one dream away from turning into a cockroach myself.

I had an especially powerful connection to Kafka’s Amerika or, The Man Who Disappeared, which told the convoluted and somewhat dystopian tale of Karl Rossmann, a 17-year-old German immigrant in the early 20th century sent packing to the New World after he knocked up his nanny—and for anyone who knows my own personal history or gleaned my past from my “auto-novel’ Waiting for Walk, it shouldn’t be hard to see the parallels.

Told with Kafka’s familiar electrifying edge of wandering into the surreal, I identified greatly with poor Karl. I too felt as though I had in a way been sent away to fend for myself early on since I was hardly the typical example of the perfect midwestern suburban teenager being constantly asked by adults what I wanted to do with my life. That I knew—and no one who heard my answer was terribly happy about it.

Karl was forced in Amerika to face a ridiculous barrage of challenges in his young life, which to me always seemed an insurmountable series of events for anyone to try to adapt the work for the stage.

Writer/producer/editor of children’s programming Dietrich Smith has done just that—and the result is monumental. His adaptation of Amerika, now returned to the Open Fist after an initial run there last fall, is nothing short of epic. It’s a sprawling, extremely respectful homage to Kafka, who envisioned a future for our species 100-plus years ago that frighteningly doesn’t seem too far from the truth at this particular place in time.

With the help of an astoundingly innovative and unstoppably visionary design team, Smith has proven that, with a lot of brash confidence and a buttload of imagination, intimate theatre doesn't need to be all painted black cubes and recycled Goodwill couches.

On Frederica Nascimento’s Caligari-like set made up of levels and platforms and modular cubbyholes stuffed with model sailing ships and steampunk gears and bolts, poor Karl (played by transplanted South African disciplinary artist Oqalile Tshetshe in what must be an astronomically exhausting LA professional stage debut) wanders through each and every period Kafka thrusts him into headfirst.

In the production’s nearly three-and-a-half hour, two intermission-worthy running time, our young hero bounces from the steerage bowels of a massive ship to the Manhattan mansion of his industrialist uncle (a juicy turn from the always-sturdy Pat Towne) to wandering the open roads with a pair of untrustworthy opportunistic also European-transplanted wags (Elliott Moore and Matthew Goodrich) to being taken in by a goodhearted hotel restaurant manager (Maria Mastroyannis) and given a job running one of the facility’s many elevators.

From there, after being railroaded by an outrageous accusation, Karl faces possible jail time and is eventually thrust into Amerika’s most out-there location: a bizarrely freakish theatre company that may be located in the afterlife or just may have something to do with Oklahoma.

I always saw the final chapter of Karl’s journey as something unearthly—especially since it occurs after he chooses to take a swan dive from a third floor balcony. In Smith’s adaptation, the entrance to the Theatre of Oklahoma is populated, as it is in the novel, with angels blowing trumpets to welcome prospective castmembers, but somehow in translation, many of the more magical aspects of the story are blurred and some of the more surreal touchstones that made the story on the page so mystical get lost in the stagecraft.

I’m not saying anything here should be eliminated or condensed—although I do think that there should be a published warning, especially for members of the scrutinizing press, of the production’s Homeric running time—but I do wonder if the playwright should have stepped away and let someone direct who was less personally embroiled in seeing his longtime dream come to fruition.

Aside from perhaps needing someone less involved with a fresh perspective to take the reins, Smith also appears to have focused so completely on the story and the implementation of the design facets of his passion project that the actors have suffered being ignored.

The acting, although occasionally noteworthy—particularly Towne, Mastroyannis, Jade Santana in a hilarious quickie as a somnambulant Italian elevator boy, and Jeremy D. Thompson in a rich variety of eclectic characters—is in general a mixed bag. Seldom are performers working in the same playing style or even at the same volume, things that hurt the production immensely.

Still, the aforementioned stagecraft is worth any misses, from A. Jeffrey Schoenberg’s meticulous period costuming to seven-time Oscar winning Gary Rydstrom’s redolent and often echoing soundscape to Gavan Wyrick’s suggestive art deco-tinged lighting which so sumptuously bathes Nascimento’s highly versatile set in wild geometric light.

And then there’s Elizabeth Moore’s striking huge paintings on drops depicting New York City and every other location along Karl’s travels and the whimsical, comic book-like projections designed by legendary Courage the Cowardly Dog creator John R. Dilworth that take this Amerika to a wonderful new level, bringing out some of the novel’s welcome comedic aspects that the performances often miss.

Whatever the misses are here, the overall effort is quite remarkable. Smith’s adaptation finds all the sly Kafkaesque complexities and colors that, as in the source material, are camouflaged by the narrative: the eternal battle between the haves and the have-nots, the shabby treatment of individuals deemed lesser than others, and the search for a reason to be alive in our puzzling and too-often apathetic society.

Amerika or, The Man who Disappeared was one of Kafka’s earliest novels, written when he was in his late 20s and without its author ever having stepped foot in America. It remained unpublished until after his untimely death at age 40 and was unleashed into print against his fervent wish that it never would be made public.

Dietrich Smith has done an incredible job transforming Amerika for the stage. To me, breathing life into a classic antagonist whose doomed search for personal identity and the rapidly disintegrating American Dream in an uncaring world is far more interesting and relatable than anything Arthur Miller ever imagined.

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 

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