Category Archives: Theatre

Carolyn and I went to see Wicked last evening at the Pantages up in Hollywood. We liked it tremendously. For those of you who don't know, it's a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman that tells an alternate version (kind of a prequel) to The Wizard of Oz — the movie, not the book. The premise is that Glinda the Good Witch and The Wicked Witch of the West are actually good friends — former roomies, in fact — and that all the main players of Oz are not what you thought. The Wicked Witch isn't all that wicked — and to the extent she is wicked, she has some good reasons for it…and beyond that, the less I tell you about it, the better. I didn't know much of the story going in and I enjoyed it more because of that.

Wicked has been in Los Angeles before and a lady I chatted with at intermission said this production was smaller but better. She's seen the show four times, twice on Broadway, and as of the end of Act One, she was liking this version as much as any. Katie Rose Clarke is playing Glinda the Good Witch and Mamie Parris is Elphaba the Bad Witch. They were both sensational and my Intermission buddy said she'd seen others as good but none better. I also liked Mark Jacoby as the Wizard. If Ron Paul ever does enough to warrant a movie where somebody has to play him, Jacoby's the guy. Looks like Paul, sounds like Paul…and even managed to sound flustered and sincere while promising things that were never going to happen.

But maybe the biggest star is Eugene Lee, who did the art direction. This production is stunning, with imaginary lands designed to be one with the non-universe. I didn't know what Oz looked like going in…but coming out, I sure did. It looked like that, absolutely. One of the many things I don't like about the movie is that the whole thing, including the scenes in Kansas, feel to me like it's all taking place in a soundstage. Last night, Wicked did not feel like it was taking place on a stage. It felt like that proscenium was somewhere over the rainbow. It is well worth a visit and you don't need a house to fall on you to know that.

While I'm at it, I would like to review the Pantages Theater. I love everything about it except for the fact that it's sometimes a lousy place to see a show. It has great history and the feel of a great, classic theater…but it's easy to get a terrible seat there and I've had several. The place seats 2,703. To give you some sense of how "too big" that is: In New York, Wicked plays at the Gershwin which is the second-largest theater in the Broadway area and it seats 1,809. (The largest is the Foxwoods, which is where Spider-Man is playing. It seats 1,903.) The theater where The Book of Mormon is playing and the theater where the new revival of Follies is playing collectively have fewer seats than the Pantages out here.

Be real careful when you book tickets to anything at the Pantages. Row AA is not way up in front as it is in some theaters. A friend of mine made that mistake and sadly discovered that AA is behind Z — in other words, 27 rows from the stage. What they call Orchestra seats there actually go back to row ZZ. The mezzanine is set way, way back and even the front rows up there put you in a different zip code from the actors. [Update]

Wicked is a great show and there are some other good ones coming to the Pantages. If you order tix, stay out of the mezzanine and don't accept any row with double letters. Theater is all about breathing the same air as the performers and you can't do that when you're sitting On Beyond Zebra.

The New York Times has a terrific article up about Stephen Sondheim. It mainly has to do with the current trend of restaging his major works in small, mini-orchestrated productions. I don't know that I like this trend but I suppose it depends on the show and the cast and how cleverly it's all staged.

Also, the American Theater Wing — they're the folks who give out the Tony Awards — have posted a one-hour podcast conversation with Mr. Sondheim. You can download it over on this page or listen to it live there.

Director David Lee is staging a new version of Camelot early next year at the Pasadena Playhouse. Ordinarily, the show is performed with huge sets, elaborate costumes and a large cast. The original Broadway production had 56 people on stage. Mr. Lee is dispensing with the huge sets and elaborate costumes and trimming the cast down to…wait for it…eight. We are intrigued.

We've been tracking the saga here of a touring stage production of A Christmas Carol, which was to have starred F. Murray Abraham, George Wendt, Wayne Knight and James Garner. It was announced by the same folks who mounted the infamous production of the same play last Christmas at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles. That version — which starred Christopher Lloyd, John Goodman and a couple of folks who filled in for advertised stars who didn't appear — was the one I described as "a live Bloopers show."

For this year, the same producer-director announced a touring company that was to play Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore. It was to feature Mssrs. Abraham, Wendt, Knight and Garner plus, in the original announcement, Stockard Channing and Timothy Hutton. Then Channing and Hutton pulled out or were never signed, depending on which account one believes. Then various cities dropped off the touring plan…and now, it's been announced that Chicago is off and the tour is not happening at all. Anyone surprised?

Some time ago, Jerry Lewis announced that his 1963 movie, The Nutty Professor, would be transformed into a Broadway musical with him as the director. With a mix of rooting interest and skepticism, we've been watching for any trace of it…and lo and behold, there is one. An industry reading was recently held — cast members, friends and investors in a rehearsal hall, performing the material as it currently stands, minus sets or costumes or big orchestra. I'm not going to link to it but one of the investors recently posted to the net a gallery of photos taken that day. They show Jerry, of course…and also Marvin Hamlisch, who's doing the music, and actor Michael Andrew, who has the lead. Paul Shaffer and Richard Belzer were also in attendance as, one assumes, friends of Jer's.

So something's happening with it. Stay tuned for the next installment. I'm starting to think there may be one.

So what happened was that it was announced that Dame Edna Everage would return to Broadway in a one-man…er, one-woman…uh, one-person show. Dame Edna creates great pronoun trouble for those of us who write about him or her. The show was to be called It's All About Me.

But then it was also announced that Michael Feinstein would be returning to Broadway at about the same time in a one-performer show called All About Me.

Arguments supposedly flared about the similar titles. Claims and counter-claims were made. Broadway insiders got suspicious because both shows had announced opening dates in March but hadn't announced theaters…and there aren't that many theaters that might be available then.

Simple conclusion: It's a publicity stunt.

And sure enough, this morning on The Today Show, Mr. Feinstein announced that he and Dame Edna will open in a two-person show called All About Me on March 23. Which was apparently the plan all along.

Cute trick. I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer to see one or the other stretch out for the full evening but that could be quite a presentation. And they're off to a good start, publicity-wise.

A revival of Bye Bye Birdie is heading for Broadway. The new version, which stars John Stamos as Albert (the Dick Van Dyke role) and Gina Gershon as Rosie is set to open in mid-October. Bill Irwin has the Paul Lynde part.

Theater folks are buzzing at reports that the producers are dropping a dance number in Act Two — the one where Rosie, out for a wild night on the town, gets chased around by a bunch of Shriners. The number was in the original production with Chita Rivera. It was in the movie with Janet Leigh. It's been in darn near every production since, including some staged by high schools. But now there's apparently the fear that it's socially inappropriate since it is, after all, about a bunch of older men acting like they're about to gang-rape a lady.

There are a couple of ways of looking at this kind of thing. One is that it's wrong for any producers of anything to get too worried about offending those who might be offended, especially when there's little or no empirical evidence that anyone ever has been offended by whatever it is. A lot of things that never would have bothered anyone — or at least, anyone rational — have been pointlessly changed or omitted because of bad guessing in this category. It's one of those kinds of predictions that's nearly always wrong.

You can also say that there's a duty to the original authors and to history to perform a piece as written. I'm less impressed by this argument as it pertains to something like Bye Bye Birdie. Some creative works feel sacrosanct and others are practically begging to be revised and updated so as to remain successful. I think this one's in the latter category.

Matter of fact, I think Bye Bye Birdie has a great premise and a great score and a really, really stupid book. When they did the movie, screenwriter Irving Brecher rearranged a lot of things, including the insertion of a Disneyesque bit about a hyper-kinetic tortoise and drugging a Russian conductor so that he conducted a ballet at breakneck speed. It was inane stuff but it wasn't any worse than what he was trying to fix, and it may have been an improvement.

This is the first-ever Broadway revival of the show. If they're going to be utterly faithful to the original book, it will be the last, because the whole thing needs a major overhaul. If in the process the Shriners Ballet gets tossed, fine. While one never likes to see the "let's not offend too-sensitive people" mentality prevail, the more important question is whether the storyline works. If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter if that one number is in or out. If the show does work, and it works without it, okay. What I'm getting at is that I think anyone who sets out to revive Bye Bye Birdie has bigger problems than that one number.

Time for another report on my theater-going. Last evening, I went to see the Musical Theater Guild's production of Merrily We Roll Along. The M.T.G., as explained here many times, is a local group of very gifted actors and several times a year, they put on a great old musical in a "concert style" performance, meaning no sets, not a lot of costuming and sometimes, the actors even have to carry their scripts around. Despite the low budget nature of it all, they work wonders.

Merrily We Roll Along features a book by George Furth, freely adapting the play of the same name by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. The Kaufman-Hart non-musical version opened in September of 1934 and closed in February of 1935, lasting a disappointing 155 performances. The musical version opened in November of 1981 and closed…in November of 1981. Ordinarily, when a Broadway show shutters after sixteen performances, it goes in the books as a flop and is never heard of again.

But the musical had a score by Stephen Sondheim, to whom the normal rules do not apply. Once the regional rights were available, countless producers and directors lunged to take a shot at it, many regarding it as a challenge to make the show "work." There was so much right with it — particularly the glorious Sondheim score — that trying to fix the flaws was irresistible to some. Let me tell you what the show's about and maybe you'll see what the problem is.

Merrily We Roll Along is about a composer, Franklin Shepard, and two of his friends. Charley Kringas is his partner and lyricist during his early years when the two of them are out trying and eventually succeeding to write hit shows for Broadway. Mary Flynn is a writer herself and a platonic friend of both…though she is very much in love with Franklin, a fact that Franklin manages to never notice as he goes about marrying others. The three of them begin with near-poverty and idealism and eventually cope with their successes by fighting with one another. There's a major rupture when Franklin becomes a successful movie producer and abandons his Broadway career and Charley. He achieves great success but along the way, he leaves behind some of his friends, his first wife and son…and just about all his idealism.

This is pretty much a downer story. It's filled with unpleasant people and bad things happen to the pleasant ones. So there's part of the trouble. The other part is that the story is told backwards. That's right: Backwards. The first scene is the last in the above narrative with Franklin all grown up and assessing what he has become and what it cost him. Then Scene 2 takes place a few years before Scene 1, and Scene 3 takes place a year or so before Scene 2 and so on. The last scene is the one in which Franklin, Charley and Mary are young and poor and starting out on their careers with great high-mindedness and hope and energy. So you walk out of the theater thinking, "Poor kids…they had such wonderful dreams and it all turned out so sad for them."

Is it any wonder the show didn't catch on?

Maybe a little. Most of the songs are quite wonderful and I enjoyed pieces of Mr. Furth's script very much — or I should say, pieces of one of Mr. Furth's scripts. There have been a couple of different revisions but, as a friend said to me in the lobby, "No matter what they do to it, it's still about these talented people who screw up their lives…and the story's still backwards."

The Musical Theater Guild did a first-rate job with this one, as they always do. The leads were so good that I just went out to the garage at 3 AM to get the program book so I could get their names right. Robert J. Townsend was in terrific voice as Franklin, Lisa Picotte caught the tragedy of Mary, and Richard Israel was outstanding as Charley. Yes, this is the same Richard Israel who was so good in another musical I saw two weeks ago and which closed last Sunday. The guy gets around. There are two more performances of Merrily — one on September 24 in Thousand Oaks and another the following day in Long Beach. If you're anywhere near those cities on those dates, you might have a very good time. I did. Even though it's backwards.

The Reprise! theater group stages several classic musicals a year in short run, no-scenery productions up at Freud Hall at U.C.L.A. Tomorrow and Sunday are the last performances of their revival of Kismet, the 1953 musical which had a book by Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, and songs by Robert Wright and George Forrest. Lederer and Davis were adapting a non-musical play by Edward Knoblock, while Wright and Forrest borrowed copious amounts of melody from Alexander Borodin. The reviews of this production said the book was stale and contrived and on one level, they're right…but we had a great time, nonetheless. The reviews also said the score was wonderful and on all levels, they're right…and it isn't just the known hits like "Baubles, Bangles and Beads" and "Stranger in Paradise." There's a lot of wonderful music in this show and it's great that Reprise! gives us the chance to discover or maybe rediscover it.

What really made this production work for me were strong performances by Len Cariou as the Poet, Caryn E. Kaplan as his daughter, Jennifer Leigh Warren as Lalume, Anthony Crivello as The Caliph and just about everyone. And of course, the whole shebang was stolen by my pal Jason Graae, who got every laugh it was possible to get as The Wazir…and then some. Jason has upcoming concert performances in Utah, Palm Springs, Palm Beach, Costa Mesa and Northern California. If you live in any of those places, consult his website for details and go. A wonderful performer.

Not much more to say about Kismet, especially since they only have three more performances and it's doubtful you can rush to any of them. As I always am with these "limited engagement" productions, I am amazed that they can mount an entire show and learn lines, staging and choreography in so little rehearsal time. The whole show is about magic and trickery but the most impressive trick is that they can do it at all. And so well at that.