One Night In Miami...: Theater Review

Four men of enduring consequence and celebrity -- and inspirational if inevitably flawed alternative models of manhood -- blow off the luxurious Miami Beach celebration of Cassius Clay’s surprise victory over the imposing Sonny Liston on Feb. 25, 1964 to hang out together instead in a Miami hotel in the ghetto. They are Nation of Islam firebrand Malcolm X (Jason Delane), singer-songwriter and music entrepreneur Sam Cooke (Ty Jones), football star and actor Jim Brown (Kevin Daniels) and boxing immortal Clay (Matt Jones). The following day Clay would announce, with Malcolm at his side, his allegiance with the Muslims.

In this world premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre in the Mid-Wilshire district by one of its resident playwrights, Kemp Powers, each man passionately argues his personal perspective on the objectives of racial advancement. The artifice requires them to become megaphones for ideas they have continued to represent with unceasing relevance. But Powers provides colorful dialogue that persuasively crackles with both the charisma and humanity of these iconic figures. The actors skillfully animate them into idiosyncratic and appreciably real individuals as well. Powers knows his history thoroughly, and he deftly avoids the traps of oversimplifying the convictions of complex men.

All of these guys are well-documented, so everyone was shrewd to seek out essences rather than impersonations, and the choices necessarily made are, for the most part, salubrious.

It requires substantial balls to sing as Cooke, especially live. Yet Jones’ sensitivity to the scale of the setting manages to suggest Cooke’s style by tying his musical performance to the acting requirements of his character in the scene, surpassing all unavoidable doubts. All the actors boast surprising nuances: the callowness of the so young and unsophisticated Clay; the hectoring and hustle of Malcolm masking legitimate insecurity and fear; the business acumen of Cooke reinforcing his artistic integrity; and the unmentioned fact that the intimidating violence of Brown obscures his intellectual heft as the one man in the room with a college education.

Above all, One Night in Miami… remains unstintingly interesting. It offers a fly-on-the-wall view of these mythic figures, each articulate in his own way, and despite conflicts, each making valid observations and sharing core values even as they differ on substantive action and attitude. Intriguingly, none invests much stock in the prospects for integration as a practical solution. Instead they emphasize individualism or collective discipline to achieve freedom on their own terms, viewing white society as adversarial rather than as an available collaborator.

Yes, with a fabricated premise, there remains an ineluctable sense of a cartoon, but it’s a well-drafted and intricate sketch, with an uncommon feeling for shading. It gives fine actors good material to play in a congenially theatrical mode.

Still, it should be noted that while the action understandably remains tethered to this one moment in time, and we already know that Cooke and Malcolm would be dead within the year, there is no discernible intimation that in his new identity as "Cassius X" (he would not yet be named Muhammad Ali), the former Cassius Clay would disown Malcolm and pledge allegiance to Elijah Muhammad so soon thereafter, an act he would come to rue in time.

Venue: Rogue Machine Theatre, Mid-Wilshire (runs through July 28)

Cast: Ty Jones, Burl Moseley, Jason Delane, Matt Jones, Kevin Daniels, Giovanni Adams, Jah Shams, Jason E. Kelley

Director: Carl Cofield

Playwright: Kemp Powers

Set designer: Stephanie Kerley Schwartz

Lighting designer: Leigh Allen

Sound designer: Christopher Moscatiello

Costume designer: Naila Aladdin Sanders

Producers: John Perrin Flynn & Roxanne Hart

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Starcrosser's Cut: Theater Review

Lisa Nowak, the deranged astronaut who drove nonstop from Houston to Orlando to pepper-spray her rival officer in a parking lot, receives an intellectually satisfying, meditative exploration in this experimental performance work.

Hanistarot at Son of Semele Theatre, Silverlake (runs through June 16)  

Shawn Lockie, Tom Colitt  

Joseph Tepperman

The bizarre odyssey of Lisa Nowak (Shawn Lockie) has culminated in her interrogation in a Florida lockup by the chameleonic detective-corporal Camuso (Tom Colitt). Sleep-deprived and unhinged, the highly educated and trained Lisa conjures up fantasies, excuses and deceptions, as does the investigator, in his own circuitous and devious way, repeatedly mixing up her identity with another female astronaut who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. Any hints of the tabloid origins of the story are ruthlessly purged in a series of refracted contemplations on the fractured stresses of a spiritually adrift soul.

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Inspired by the transcript of her 2007 police statement, this world premiere presentation sponsored at the Son of Semele space in Silverlake could well be entitled “The Passion of Lisa Nowak,” as it is fundamentally a musical and sound piece as much as a drama. Her tormented rationalizations assume metaphysical dimensions that weirdly echo Jeanne d’Arc and her inquisitors.

The musical composition by David Dominique never merely backs or underscores the action but instead comprises an integral component of the overall expression, just as writer-director Joseph Tepperman’s complicated sound design constitutes every bit as significant a part of the text as his words. Indeed, one could well perceive this as a contemporary classical chamber oratorio, for amplified voices, tape and a piquant ensemble of accordion, flute, viola and electric guitar. To open ears, the advanced tonalities harmonize euphoniously, if with a free-ranging dread.

Those looking for clearly delineated meanings and conventional logical progression will be frustrated and probably annoyed. The strength of the piece lies in its insinuating allusiveness, which might have grown tiresome save for the pinpoint grounding of the players in moment-to-moment conviction, and the precise and intricate orchestrations of motifs and themes expressed through thoughtfully interwoven speech, distortion, effects or music. Unashamedly abstruse, it manages to sustain interest and involvement through its commitment to juggling ideas through formal gymnastics.

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It might be usefully tightened, a subsidiary skein of references to a condemned inmate on death-watch adds more obscurity than density, and a climactic violent gesture goes down one rabbit hole too many. Yet the invention disdains quibbles in pursuit of its larger poetry of isolation and breakdown, the only journey it is prepared to travel. We can go along, or not, with this determined and challenging vision. 

Venue: Hanistarot at Son of Semele Theatre, Silverlake (runs through June 16)

Cast: Shawn Lockie, Tom Colitt

Playwright-director & sound designer: Joseph Tepperman

Music: David Dominique

Lighting designer: Jose Emmanuel Varcia

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Reasons to Be Happy: Theater Review

NEW YORK – First seen in 2008 on this same stage before transferring to Broadway, Neil LaBute’s four-character dissection of thorny relationship dynamics, Reasons to Be Pretty, is among the playwright’s most mature and satisfying works, distinguished by its uncharacteristic emotional rawness. Picking up the same fractious quartet a few years down the track, Reasons to Be Happy is an engrossing if less impactful companion piece that again tempers LaBute’s sardonic side by allowing a glimmer of compassion for people who seem incapable of sustaining lasting connections.

The play mirrors the structure of the earlier work a little too schematically. It opens with another fierce tirade from an enraged female, followed by a succession of mainly two-person encounters, shuffling back and forth between a soul-deadening workplace and neutral ground. While never quite escaping its more-of-the-same feel, this freestanding quasi-sequel improves as it steadily tightens its focus on the writer’s stand-in, Greg (Josh Hamilton). Via that character, it reflects on the sometimes painful necessity of cutting ties with the past in order to have a legitimate shot at self-knowledge. However, that makes it a rinse-and-repeat variation on Greg's arc in the earlier work.

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When Reasons to Be Pretty premiered, it was labeled the conclusion of a trilogy by LaBute about the cultural premium placed on physical appearance, following The Shape of Things and Fat Pig. The playwright appears to be revising that structural grouping with this new work, which explores interlocking romantic triangles and closes on the threshold of further developments for Greg and Steph (Jenna Fischer) and Carly (Leslie Bibb) and Kent (Fred Weller).

Anyone who saw the previous play will remember that volatile hairdresser Steph is an expert at hurling invective, and that chronically passive Greg, the bookish former warehouse worker who has now graduated to teaching, is skilled at ducking and deflecting. The cause of Steph’s anger this time is the discovery that Greg has begun a relationship with her gorgeous friend Carly, Kent’s ex-wife, a security guard at the plant where Greg and Kent used to work. While Steph has moved on and married since the messy end of her relationship with Greg, she tells him in no uncertain terms that he has crossed a line.

But amid the animosity she feels toward him, Steph’s old attraction to Greg resurfaces. Being someone who lets things happen to him rather than taking the wheel, Greg goes along with the plan to give it another shot with Steph. However, the situation gets more complicated when he attempts to break the news to Carly and she informs him that she’s pregnant.

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Set in the airless suburbs of some unnamed Middle American town, this would be standard soap in most writers' hands. LaBute at least keeps it lively with his honed dialogue and his skill at getting under an audience’s skin by exposing misdemeanors many of us have committed at one time or another in a relationship.

In his depiction of obtuse Steph in particular – and also in The Office star Fischer’s abrasively off-putting characterization – the playwright seems to be actively courting the charges of misogyny that have often been leveled at his work. But though the women are set up to appear manipulative, self-serving and even disloyal, they end up being the more reasonable ones, making rational decisions while the guys mostly amble along being evasive.

When non-confrontational Greg finally develops the backbone to face some personal truths and set out in search of a life, it’s a breakthrough. However, LaBute is too cynical a playwright not to leave some gnawing doubt as to whether Greg is really capable of change.

Directed by LaBute, this is a pithy production of a play that maintains involvement and generates some squirmy humor. But unlike the bristling first chapter that introduced these characters, it never yields a lot in the way of emotional rewards. To be honest, it’s harder to care this time around about any of them, either as individuals or couples.

Fischer and Bibb do what's required of them. But their lack of professional stage experience makes them no match for the guys, both of whom go down murky alleys of male weakness and dishonesty. Playing the least sympathetic character, Weller (USA Network’s In Plain Sight) is arguably the most enjoyable of the four actors to watch, whether Kent is simmering with barely contained hostility, sharing his primitive views on women or dissolving into painful self-pity. His scenes with Greg are the play’s truest. But that's unsurprising given that LaBute has always been most at home when investigating the male psyche, particularly as concerns men's desire of and behavior toward women.

Hamilton captures the internal conflict of a guy who has outgrown his environment and the associations that come with it, yet up to now has struggled to see himself someplace else. As the heart of the play, however, he lacks the yearning ache that Thomas Sadoski brought to the same character in Reasons to Be Pretty. But perhaps that’s missing in the writing.

Venue: Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York (runs through June 29)

Cast: Leslie Bibb, Jenna Fischer, Josh Hamilton, Fred Weller

Playwright-director: Neil LaBute

Set designer: Neil Patel

Costume designer: Sarah J. Holden

Lighting designer: Ben Stanton

Sound designer: Robert Kaplowitz

Presented by MCC Theater, by special arrangement with the Lucille Lortel Theatre Foundation

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Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: The Musical: Theater Review

The insinuating art of cross-dressing performance goes maniacally mainstream in this theatrical adaptation of the 1994 movie (written and directed by Stephan Elliott and starring Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce), now in its national tour at the Pantages in Hollywood after nearly 550 performances on Broadway.

Where the film had emphasized gently outlandish comedy and reservoirs of vulnerability, live on stage it exponentially ups the quotient of flamboyant spectacle and boisterous zingers, rowdily roughing up the audience in the cause of tolerance. It’s obscure what meaningful significance there may be to effect the substitution of negative stereotypes by positive ones, though this cold, cold heart did eventually thaw sympathetically from the sheer onslaught of unstinting determination to entertain. There are assuredly worse sins in the popular culture.

Aging drag performer Tick (Wade McCollum), aka Mitzi, receives an invitation from his most sympathetic (and otherwise inexplicable) wife to Alice Springs in the heartland of the bush to perform at her casino in order finally to meet his young son who is of an age now to need his reluctant, emotionally uncertain, father.

He enlists Adam (Bryan West), aka Felicia, an irrepressibly irresponsible, Madonna-admiring youth and the aging Bernadette (Scott Willis), a former headlining lip-syncher from the classier days of gestural subtlety. (For those not in the know, the titular Priscilla is the bus they acquire for the journey, which after being graffitied with a slur acquires a coat of shocking pink.)

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The songs consist entirely of jukebox oldies mostly redolent of 1980s club days, from Madonna to Diana Ross to, most absurdly, Jimmy Webb (there actually is a cake left out in the rain), all of them quite familiar to many generations of listeners.

The selection is pointedly inspirational, not inspired, regrettably ignoring the fact that the underworld of disco was a fervent incubator of enduring art and expression, virtually none of which was ever heard by suburban white straight fans during the unendurable post-Saturday Night Fever craze. Nevertheless, like Beethoven’s Ninth, which can prevail with its transcendence intact however amateur the execution, the Gloria Gaynor anthem I Will Survive never fails to score, and this show is smart enough to deploy it as both the first and second act curtain number.

Then there are the costumes. Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner won the Oscar for their designs in the movie but vastly outdo themselves here as the sheer volume and extravagant fantasy make a Catherine Martin-Baz Luhrmann vision appear blushingly modest by comparison. It’s as if Australia has been bedecked as Oz. While too much may be more than enough, the glittering excess remains persistently amusing throughout, a cornucopia of delight one waits to exhaust its welcome yet never does.

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In fact, the dogged professionalism of the production may both underlie its shortcoming of vision and be its saving grace. The actors, all seasoned veterans, know how to hold the stage and impart the necessary emotional information with broad clarity and touching skill, though depth is pointedly avoided. For a show that is amply long at two-and-a-half hours, it’s a blessing that it gets better as it goes along.

Best by far is a flashback memory of the classic Les Girls revue from the 1960s, featuring a young vision of Bernadette in full follies fashion doing the Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields immortal A Fine Romance with a transporting flair that hints at a grace otherwise outside the ken of this unconstrained crowd-pleasing frolic.

Venue: Pantages Theatre, Hollywood (runs through June 16)

Cast: Wade McCollum, Scott Willis, Bryan West, Joe Hart, Taurean Everett, Nik Alexzander, Chelsea Zeno, David Koch, Christy Faber, Travis Taber, Babs Rubenstein, Emily Afton, Bre Jackson, Brit West

Director: Simon Philips, based on the original New York direction by David Hyslop

Book: Stephan Elliott & Allan Scott, based on the 1994 motion picture The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert by Elliott

Choreographer: Ross Coleman, recreated by Joshua Buscher

Costume designer: Tim Chappel & Lizzy Gardiner

Production designer: Brian Thomson

Lighting designer: Nick Schlieper (with Jonathan Spencer)

Sound designer: Jonathan Deans & Peter Fitzgerald

Music Supervision, arrangements: Stephen “Spud” Murphy

Orchestrations: Murphy, Charlie Hull

Music Director: Brent Frederick

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