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 Javier Vasquez  

Reviewed for TicketHoldersLA by H.A. Eaglehart  

Tony Award-nominated Ghanaian American playwright Jocelyn Bioh has created her award-winning and prophetically timed Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, which premiered on Broadway in 2023 before American audiences at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

This sensational work of art has since been on tour for the last two years and is now ending its run here in Los Angeles, now playing at the Mark Taper Forum through to November 9th.

The ancient Greeks felt theatre was significant in its ability to allow society to reflect upon itself. In a world of artificial intelligence and fake news, where truth has become ideological, my faith in the power of theatre has only grown. Relatability supersedes debatability, making live performance our last hope in this country.

Shout out to Whitney White for the incredible direction of this important story. She makes daring choices from the very beginning, including having the players deliver lines directly out to the audience, thus breaking the fourth wall.

This is a clever and essential choice for setting the audience up to be prepared for the best monologue in the entire play delivered by Victoire Charles as Jaja herself, dressed in her wedding gown and all ready to claim her American Dream. Unaware, her story will soon to be completely destroyed by the hatred threatening to unravel the social experiment of our Founding Fathers.

Claudia Logan is a standout playing Bea, Jaja's oldest friend who has been working with Jaja since the hair braiding shop was merely an idea they talked about while cleaning people's houses. Her subtlety and nuance capture the story's intention of letting us witness a day in these characters' lives. Her performance knits together the beautiful complexity of dual culturalism in our country.

Logan delivers one of my favorite lines in the entire play when Jordan Rice playing Marie, Jaja's daughter, is in tears over her mother being arrested in an immigration sting and asks Bea, “What happens if it isn't okay?” and Bea responds, “Then it won't be okay, but then after it will be okay.”

Nominated for five 2024 Tony Awards, Best Costume Design absolutely makes sense. Scenic designer David Zinn, costume designer Dede Ayite, and wig, hair, and makeup designer Nikiya Mathis contribute significantly to White's vision.

Together they manifest an intricate ensemble, captivating the audience to the point it allows actors to perform entire wig and wardrobe changes onstage without ever drawing attention away from focus on Bioh's words.

Shout out to Production Stage Manager Brillian Qi-Bell and the entire cast for being on the road for two years yet still able to end the show in LA with the enhancement acquired only by the years of dedication to telling this essential story to American audiences nationwide. Lighting designer Jiyoun Chang and video designer Stephania Bulbarella capture the pulse of Harlem and set the overall captivating mood engrossing the script.

I would also like to shout out Artistic Director Snehal Desai for his great contribution at Center Theatre Group. He took the reins during a tumultuous time for our great city's theatrical scene.

My partner Travis Michael Holder has been reviewing LA theatre for decades and I have been fortunate enough to be seeing and reviewing theatre with him for the last 13 years—time enough to be able to recognize Desai's personal touch at CTG's new direction with a focus on plays championing diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a Navajo born on tribal land, it goes without saying how exhaustive it has been my entire life watching Hollywood portray my culture with actors like Johnny Depp wearing feathers and Texas Dirt.

I am so very lucky to be in Los Angeles for this production because for the last two months, I have been in Amherst building a massive challenge course on the main campus for the University of Massachusetts. I have a 20-year career in community development and inclusivity, and during my time in Amherst,  a friend invited me to dinner where we discussed careers. Mine led into hers and she shared stories about her work teaching English to immigrants. Recently, one of her students from East Africa disappeared and nobody knows where he is. Not even his family in Africa.

Never before has this country seen the type of leadership now coming from Washington, which is why the University of Massachusetts hired Alpine Towers and myself to build a challenge course for teaching leadership and community development. We need empathy education on campuses and stories like Jaja’s African Hair Braiding on stages now more than ever as the current Administration silences the Kennedy Center and defunds the Arts across the country.

A final shout out to everyone I saw onstage: Melanie Brezill, Leovina Charles, Victoire Charles, Mia Ellis, Tiffany Renee Johnson, Claudia Logan, Michael Oloyede, Abigail C. Onwunali, Jordan Rice, Bisserat Tseggai, and Morgan Scott. These phenomenal performances give voice to the silent masses, our fellow Americans, currently living in the daily reality of being zip-tied and disappearing simply because of how they look.

THROUGH NOV. 9: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Av., LA. 213.628.2772 or CenterTheatreGroup.org 

Photo by Jeff Lorch 

Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre

I’ve known playwright-on-the-rise Tim Venable since he was a young struggling actor waiting tables and not all that much older than the characters he's created in Rogue Machine’s current world premiere of Adolescent Salvation, the third of his plays debuting with the celebrated company over the last few years and the second directed by the Machine’s artistic director Guillermo Cienfuegos.

The first, debuting in 2022, was Beautiful People, featuring two disgruntled and emotionally disenfranchised suburban teenagers growing up in the 1990s who decide to risk their parents’ wrath and stay up all night on a school night in one of the boys’ basement bedrooms as they compete for top positioning in their two-person social order—and to contemplate the ultimate challenge facing young people in our increasingly mucked-up nation’s out of control gun culture.

Venable’s fast-moving first play was startlingly and horrifically real, providing a glimpse into how too many of our children have been raised in the toxic environment of contemporary American life. Now Venable has brought that kind of collective teenage angst and dysfunction into the present day where most of the issues addressed have only become more twisted and omnipresent.

Venable’s plays, at least so far, have dealt with the convoluted journey of teens and young people in America, yet they have nothing in common with the idyllic world past of Father Knows Best or Love Finds Andy Hardy. They are plays about hope and hopelessness in our dystopian society.

With proper attribution for the title as a passage from my generation’s inimitable poetess/songwriter counter-culture goddess Patti Smith in her 2010 memoir Just Kids (“I immersed myself in books and rock ‘n roll, the adolescent salvation”), Venable’s newest work of provocative contemporary art this time deals with three emotionally stunted teens having a most disastrous sleepover. 

The evening has been arranged by a recently divorced alcoholic mother (Jenny Flack) so her neglected kid Natasha (a remarkable turn by Caroline Rodriguez) might be able to get out of her introverted shell and make friends with the far more socially aggressive daughter of her drinking buddy while the two mothers frequent the only accessible local bar.

Natasha isn’t all that crazy about the unexpected guest (Alexandra Lee) being thrust upon her privacy, especially since Taylor could be the definition of that familiar angry and outspoken teenage bitch supreme. Luckily, she has brought along her best friend, also named Taylor (Michael Guarasci), a sweet young gay boy who somehow manages to continually soften the continually caustic comments of his BFF.

As was the case with Venable’s second play, Baby Foot, which dealt with two other mismatched people trying to boost one another while wading through the snarl of drug rehab—I’ve only heard since I missed seeing it—Adolescent Salvation is staged in the Machine’s tiny second space above the Matrix lobby, a kind of renovated attic perfect for costume storage that has now been utilized for several highly successful productions. 

The in-your-face intimacy of their 35-seat Henry Murray Stage has had magical results with the productions I’ve seen performed there, especially Sophie Swithinbank’s riveting two-person Bacon earlier this year, which actually had the smell-worthy aroma of our favorite culinary obsession wafting through the space as rashers were slowly cooked right behind the audience’s heads.

This time out, however, I think the choice of presenting Adolescent Salvation in the cramped reinvented storeroom might have been a mistake—especially during a massive heatwave on a Sunday sfternoon. What initially was certainly unique, staging yet another entire play in this space is becoming somewhat gimmicky.

The imaginative set design by Joel Daavid is incredibly visceral, depicting Natasha’s cramped and memorabilia-crowded bedroom and includes a walk through her closet beginning when entering the first floor staircase leading to the theatre upstairs. Although dodging hanging clothes and contemplating an eclectic array of teenaged treasures is absolutely ingenious, once you’re seated, it becomes more cumbersome than exciting.

The problem is the action in this minuscule playing space needs to revolve around Natasha’s bed and there’s simply not enough room to maneuver around it without making audience members have to pull in their feet and wince as sudden movement and violent action (well choreographed by Ned Mochel) unfolds too close for comfort, even if making us squirm in our seats is part of the desired effect. 

Where such a thing has aided and even enhanced other productions mounted in the Murray, here it's somehow more distracting than propitious. Perhaps the “stage center” placement of two matronly overdressed and obviously shocked older ladies sitting about a foot from the bed, their reactions in full view of of the rest of the audience, exacerbated my reaction here, especially when about halfway through the performance they found it okay to start loudly whispering to one another.

The subtle performance of Rodriguez is absolutely revelatory, completely riveting in her ability to stay totally focused and in the moment no matter what the challenge, and her eleventh-hour scene with Flack as her significantly toasted mother returns home from the local Margaritaville offers the best acting and best writing in the production.

As the two Taylors, I found both actors less successful, each intent on hammerng in their characters’ individual traits in case we don’t get it. While Guarasci plays it stereotypically light-in-the-loafers, losing the dearness of what a sweetheart his Taylor really is, Lee’s sharp-tounged, eye-rolling performance is so one-note it results in not caring much about what happens to her. One last scene where her Taylor redeems herself as a potentially sympathetic friend after all comes too late and inadvertently hints at what the actor has been missing all along.

As a surprise and mostly uncredited fifth character, Keith Stevenson could really be good and actually does manage to become a sympathetic figure when his conduct should leave him to be something of a villain—although not to me personally since I’ve found myself in my life in a similar situation. Still, Stevenson’s inaudibility in his one scene is exceedingly frustrating. The Murray Stage might be crazily intimate, but lines still must be delivered with enough clarity and projection to be heard.

Still, Venable’s Adolescent Salvation is a raw, jarringly disturbing play, an unbridled view of what our fucked-up country and its plethora of self-absorbed absentee parents have done to emotionally destroy our own future generations. 

We as a society have passed on a culture of misogyny and violence that has dehumanized and robotized our young, from our entertainment options that proudly boast the number of people who are blown away by gun violence to our bloviated and bigoted opinions overheard at the family dinner table while discussing our dastardly, elaborately self-destructive choices in elected officials too egocentric to consider the future of our dying planet. 

Unfortunately, none of this emerges as an Orwellian science-fictionalized warning. The exceptional gifts of Tim Venable, so brilliantly chronicling who we are and what we as a people have become, is sadly not that difficult to imagine.

Just turn on the evening news.

EXTENDED THROUGH NOV. 21: Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Av., LA. 855.585.5185 or roguemachinetheatre.net

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.

CLOSED: Pantages Theatre

THROUGH NOV. 23: 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