Theater review: 'Love's Labour's Lost' at the Broad Stage

This scenically alluring touring production from England of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which opened Friday at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, put me in mind of an Elizabethan greeting card — or at least one of those gift shop facsimiles that bring on a sudden overpowering urge for tea and scones with jam.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre of London, an outdoor venue on the south bank of the River Thames, strives to give its audience an imaginative approximation of the way Shakespeare’s plays were performed in their own time. The atmospheric productions at this popular tourist destination tend to be sparely appointed, the better to throw into relief the frolicsome period costumes. Music and dance lend a Renaissance conviviality. And the actors pull out all the stops to amuse the groundlings while endeavoring to impress the more poetic sensibilities of the grandees.

As a sprightly if somewhat superficial example of the house style, this “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” directed by Shakespeare’s Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, is broad, joshing and better at coloring in a picture than finely sketching its details. Yet the relentlessly lively, almost manic tempo is perhaps necessary when dealing with an antique theatrical work that’s really more of a verbal opera, composed in a lyrical dialect that isn’t always easy for contemporary theatergoers to decipher.

Remembering Matthew Shepard's story, on stages around the world

The soft whistle of a passing breeze echoed through the performance space. Set on a stage at a distance from the audience, a group of men swayed against a backdrop of Wyoming's hills, as though they were at the mercy of the wind. They moved faintly side to side, side to side.

The swaying image -- moving in one direction and then the other -- resonated throughout the Monday night performance of “The Laramie Project, Ten Years Later ... an Epilogue” at the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage.  The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, which presented the production with Speak Theater Arts and the Broad Stage, opened the show with this rhythmic motion, symbolic of a deeper struggle.

The 2 1/2-hour production centered on playwright-director Moisés Kaufman’s return, with his Tectonic Theater Project, to the city where 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was killed by two young men 1998.  Tectonic originally visited Laramie, Wyo, just after Shepard’s death, which sparked a national dialogue on gay issues and hate crimes, and conducted interviews with the townspeople. In 2008, they went back to follow up. 

“It’s a story about the idea of change and the pace of change,” said Liesel Reinhart, who co-directed the Santa Monica production with Steven T. Seagle. “In California, the Prop. 8 struggle is a tug-of-war, taking us forward and taking us backward. And here’s this story of an incident that happened 11 years ago. By being a part of telling it, we push forward more. The only way for change is to keep the momentum going so you’re not pushed back.”

More than 150 theaters around the globe — from New York to Los Angeles and Madrid to Hong Kong — hosted staged readings Monday night of the play. 

Andrew Lloyd Webber sets opening days for 'Phantom' sequel

"Love Never Dies," the long-awaited musical sequel to the "The Phantom of the Opera," officially has an opening date.

In a statement today, Andrew Lloyd Webber said the musical will first open in London at the Adelphi Theatre on March 9. And it will open on Broadway on Nov. 11, 2010 at an as-yet-unnamed theater. 

Set in Coney Island in New York, "Love Never Dies" picks up 10 years after the story of "Phantom," as the title character moves from his lair in the Paris Opera House to the fairgrounds of the popular Long Island locale. The show will star Ramin Karimloo as the Phantom and Sierra Boggess as Christine in the London production.

"There's unfinished business," Lloyd Webber told a group of journalists in London, according to the Associated Press. "I don't regard this as a sequel; it's a standalone piece." The AP also reported that he wanted to create a new production because he thought the ending of the original was too boring.

Tony-winning director Jack O'Brien will stage the production. The music is by Lloyd Webber, who co-wrote the book; the lyrics are by Glenn Slater.

The album for "Love Never Dies" has been recorded and will be released to coincide with the London world premiere.

The new opening dates represent a delay, because people in the industry had originally expected the show to bow in the fall of 2009 in a simultaneous worldwide rollout.

"Love Never Dies" is also set to open in Australia sometime in 2011.

-- David Ng

Photo: Andrew Lloyd Webber, left, with Sierra Boggess, who plays Christine Daae, and Ramin Karimloo, who plays the Phantom. Credit: Matt Dunham / Associated Press

Monster Mash: Baryshnikov stumps for Broad Stage; Annie Leibovitz sued; Twitter opera unveiled

-- Fast on his feet: Mikhail Baryshnikov works the crowd at a fundraiser to help the Broad Stage in Santa Monica.

-- Could it get any worse? Debt-ridden Annie Leibovitz has been sued by an Italian photographer who claims she improperly used his images.

-- Penny pinching: Hollywood has been loath in recent years to lend a hand to L.A.-based charities.

-- Short arias: London's Royal Opera House finally unveils its much-publicized Twitter opera.

-- Art world controversy: Times art critic Christopher Knight delves into the debate surrounding an archive of artwork attributed to Frida Kahlo.

-- Current events: A play about the Enron scandal appears to be heading to Broadway for the 2009-10 season.

-- Stars embrace theater: Edie Falco is part of a roster of big-name talent that will participate in the upcoming season at L.A. Theatre Works.

-- New gallery space: Artist Paul McCarthy is helping to launch L&M Arts in L.A.

-- Dishonor: The British architecture world has its equivalent of Hollywood's Razzie Awards.

— David Ng

Photo: Baryshnikov, with Eli and Edythe Broad. Credit: Dan Steinberg / Associated Press

A Baryshnikov kickoff fundraiser at the Broad Stage

On Friday evening, arts lovers celebrated three marvels close to their heart --- Mikhail Baryshnikov’s first visit to Los Angeles since 2004, the launch of the Broad Stage’s second season and the one-year anniversary of Santa Monica College’s performing arts venue, so geographically desirable for Westsiders.
As playwright David Mamet put it, “I think the sheerest divisor in life is not good and evil -- it’s the 405.”

The happy occasion was the opening gala for the Broad Stage’s 2009-10 season, which raised more than $350,000 for the fledgling venue. The dinner and performance drew many an FOD -- Friends of Dale (Franzen, the Broad’s director) or Dustin (Hoffman, the artistic advisory board chair, who was filming in Canada) – as well as fans of Baryshnikov and the arts. Minglers included major donors Eli and Edythe Broad, plus actors Don Cheadle, Gena Rowlands and Ali McGraw, former Mayor Richard Riordan, author Judith Krantz, Summit Entertainment’s co-chairman and president Patrick Wachsberger and arts philanthropist Ginny Mancini.

The evening’s centerpiece was Baryshnikov’s performance with dancer Ana Laguna of “Three Solos and a Duet,” the first of two evenings here kicking off their international tour's U.S. visit. Los Angeles was an intriguing launch pad for the older dancers’ much-anticipated tour --- their liquid movement seemed to call Hollywood’s youth obsession into question simply by existing (Baryshnikov is 61, Laguna 54).

Dance review: Baryshnikov at the Broad Stage

Dancing at 61 a contemporary program titled “Three Solos and a Duet,” Mikhail Baryshnikov doesn't make it easy on himself -- or his audience.

Opening the second year of the intimate Broad Stage in Santa Monica, he refuses to take refuge in narcissistic nostalgia for his reign decades ago as the world's premier ballet virtuoso. Indeed, in a newly refocused edition of Benjamin Millepied's “Years Later” (a piece that Santa Barbara audiences saw in 2006), he dances along with films of himself at the start of his career, confronting with rueful humor all the feats no longer possible, but also -- through interaction with new video sequences -- challenging himself to reach his greatest current potential.

The Saturday performance proved that what he still has is enviable. One of France's gifts to New York City Ballet, Millepied knows that every dancer looks in the mirror every day to assess new realities. But what if that mirror were a window on the past -- or a vision of personal ambitions in human form? Using music by Phillip Glass and projections by Asa Mader, he and Baryshnikov make self-realization into high drama, with a suggestion at the very end that when the process becomes obsessive, it's time to quit.

In contrast, choreographers from Russia and Sweden show Baryshnikov as a master storyteller. In Alexei Ratmansky's whimsical  “Valse-Fantaisie,” the story is about the creation of Mikhail Glinka's score: a tale of love lost but understanding eventually won. There are movement jokes juxtaposing traditional ballet-mime with streetwise gestures -- passages that showcase Baryshnikov's fabulous use of his hands. And there are plenty of high-velocity ballet steps that melt into nonchalance or switch into twisty modernism and call for absolute precision. They get it, brilliantly.

Critic's Notebook: Billy Bragg does Beethoven

 

We ask a great deal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony these days. Last month at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Asia America Symphony performed it with nearly 400 choristers singing the last movement’s German text of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” 

Two weeks ago at London’s Proms, the eight-member Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, accompanied by a thousand ukes in the audience, heroically strummed through bits of the Ninth. A tour of YouTube offers the “Ode to Joy” sweetly hammered on a dulcimer, eerily squealed on wine glasses and apocalyptically screeched on wailing heavy metal guitars, along with the inevitable Ninth kitsch. Norwegian composer Leif Inge has digitally extended a recording of the Ninth into a 24-hour mind blower.   

Billy Bragg, the British protest singer-songwriter and guitarist who has crossed boundaries between punk and folk, is another surprise Beethovenian. Saturday night at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, he was the headliner of a mixed-genre Ninth-orama.

The brainchild of Kerry Candaele -- who is making a documentary, “Following the Ninth” – the program was also a benefit for CLUE LA (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), a mixed denominational Los Angeles group that promotes workers’ rights. Various performers, be they African or Appalachian, gave the Ninth a spin. At evening’s end, David Benoit conducted the Asia America Youth Orchestra, the Billy Bragg 9 Chorus and four uncredited vocal soloists in the Finale of Beethoven’s last symphony with the U.S. premiere of Bragg’s cheerful new English text.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, 61 and still alight (and coming to Santa Monica)

Given the randomness of finding cabs in New York when you’re in a hurry, I arrived half an hour early at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last week to interview Mikhail Baryshnikov. I let his assistant know I was downstairs, she said "no problem," and I headed for the elevator. When I emerged from the elevator, Baryshnikov was in the hall to meet me, greet me and shepherd me into a waiting conference room.

Baryshnikov doesn’t like to waste time. At 61, he defies age as he once defied gravity. He may be a grandfather, graying now, but the fabled Russian dancer has the stride and carriage of a young man. He is small for a dancer, just 5-foot-7, but muscular and fit in his T-shirt and slacks. He works at the ballet barre every day, he tells me, and he looks terrific.

Why shouldn’t he? Life has been good to him. He’s just back from vacation after touring several European countries, and on Friday he launches a U.S. tour with dancer Ana Laguna at Santa Monica College’s Broad Stage. Besides running an arts center, touring and raising four children, he has in recent years courted Carrie Bradshaw on the last season of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” inhabited Beckett plays at the New York Theatre Workshop and published a book of his own photography. As he says in his lightly accented, idiosyncratic English: “I have the life of seven cats.”

But dancing professionally at his age comes at a price. “Nobody is born a dancer,” Baryshnikov wrote in the 1976 book, "Baryshnikov at Work." “You have to want it more than anything.” He has had many surgeries, particularly on his right knee, and says experience has been a good teacher. “I know the shortcuts for my body, how long it takes to warm up, what I should do to dance this particular piece,” he says. “I’ve been hurt quite a few times.  The more injuries you get, the smarter you get.”

To read the story in Sunday's Arts & Books section, click here.

--Barbara Isenberg

Photo: The dancer at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Credit: Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

Shakespeare's Globe returning to Southern California

Shakespeare's Globe, the renowned London theater company, is returning to the U.S. in the fall in a tour that will make two November stops in Southern California -- at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica and at UC Santa Barbara.

The company will perform Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" using a traditional Elizabethan staging that involves elaborate costumes and a mostly bare stage. In London, the company allows certain audience members to experience its productions as "groundlings" -- standing viewers who verbally and sometimes physically react to the performers. There's no word yet if the company will replicate the groundling experience while on tour, but Culture Monster will update you as soon as we know.

The engagement at the Broad Stage will officially open Nov. 20 and run through Nov. 29. Previews run Nov. 19 and a matinee Nov. 20. Culture Monster first reported on the Globe's engagement at the Broad in April. The other tour dates for "Love's Labour's Lost" were announced this week.

Dominic Dromgoole is directing the production, with Jonathan Fensom designing the visual aspects and Claire van Kampen composing the music.

Shakespeare's Globe has performed in L.A. before, most memorably perhaps in 2003 at UCLA in a production of "Twelfth Night," starring Mark Rylance.

Keep reading for the Globe's entire U.S. itinerary...

Music review: Fuzjko Hemming at the Broad Stage

 

Fuzjko Hemming gave the first of two piano recitals at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on Friday night.  Her appearance was heavily promoted on Japanese television, and the audience appeared to be mostly Japanese. Ticket prices were high – $60 to $100 – but both the Friday and Sunday concerts sold out. The 74-year-old pianist has sold more than 2 million CDs in Japan over the last decade, but the Fuzjko phenomenon hasn’t yet crossed the Pacific with the general public. I’m not so sure that it will. But I could be wrong.

Her full name is Ingrid Fuzjko von Georgii-Hemming, and she has a compelling story. She was born in Berlin to a Japanese mother and Swedish-Russian father.  She grew up with her mother in Japan in poverty.  A child prodigy, she learned on a broken-down piano.  At 16 she lost hearing in one ear from an infection, but forged ahead, studying in Tokyo, Berlin and Vienna.

In interviews Hemming speaks of getting support from such great musicians as Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, pianist Shura Cherkassy and composer Bruno Maderna.  She says she was known as an old-fashioned romantic who played freely from the heart. She also painted fanciful depictions of cats.  But she was poor, lived without heat and got another ear infection, which left her deaf.

Triumph over adversity was long coming. She moved to Sweden, continued to study music the best she could and worked as a janitor in a psychiatric hospital, where she also played for the patients on an old upright.  Slowly, she regained 40% of her hearing in one ear, and that, she found, was the bare minimum necessary to relaunch her career. She returned to Japan, where a 1999 television documentary made her famous. 

On stage, Hemming comes across as eccentric. She was dressed Friday in a flamboyant gypsy ensemble of scarves and sashes for the first half and something colorfully kimono-like for the second.  She opened with two Debussy favorites: “Clair de Lune” and “Jardins sous la Pluie.”  But before beginning the next work, Beethoven's "Tempest” Sonata, she took a long look at the keyboard and then got up and walked off stage.