Theater review: 'Bonnie & Clyde' at La Jolla Playhouse

Bonnie and Clyde, those iconic, felonious sweethearts, whose Depression-era crime spree tantalized the dark side of America’s imagination, have returned from the great tabloid beyond to prove their mythical appeal still has juice. And the occasion provides an opportunity to tweak one of Karl Marx’s most famous dictums: History, as the “Communist Manifesto” author should have said, repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as musical kitsch.

Yes, my friends, this most-wanted (and proud of it) duo are now singing and dancing their infamous tale at the La Jolla Playhouse, where “Bonnie & Clyde” had its world premiere Sunday night .The show—featuring a book by Ivan Menchell (“The Cemetery Club”), music by Frank Wildhorn (“Jekyll & Hyde,” “The Scarlet Pimpernel”) and lyrics by Don Black (“Sunset Boulevard”)—is inspired from historical accounts rather than existing dramatizations. Yet the creators find little to say about the romantic robbers that hasn’t been said more compellingly elsewhere.
 
The production, given a seductive modern staging by Jeff Calhoun (Deaf West’s “Big River” and “Pippin” at the Mark Taper Forum), is not without charm. Tobin Ost’s slatted wooden set, enhanced by Aaron Rhyne’s cunning projection designs and Michael Gilliam’s moody lighting, lends a fresh look to an old caper.

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.

Lee Strasberg: The acting legacy lives on

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, the school founded in 1969 by the legendary acting guru, who died in 1982, and his wife, Anna Strasberg, who is still carrying the torch of Method training with her son David Lee Strasberg, the institute's chief executive and creative director.

For some, the Method is a relic, a throwback to a mid-20th century form of neurotic realism. Yet no one can deny the effect that Method actors have had on American theater, film and television. I can't say I became a theater critic because of such Strasberg-trained talents as Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen Burstyn, and Robert De Niro, but the startling psychological reality they brought to their roles confirmed me in my admittedly odd choice of professions. Estelle Parsons, currently on tour in Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," gives a pretty good indication of the way Strasberg encouraged his students not simply to express the feelings of their characters but to live through them, no matter how ferocious or painful.

For a feature in this Sunday's Arts & Books, I sat down with David Lee Strasberg to see whether the Method has evolved under this new generation of Strasberg leadership. I was particularly interested to hear how the Institute has addressed criticism of his father's pedagogy. And I was just as eager to find out how notable acting instructors from outside the institute assess the current place of the Method in 21st century acting training.

When it comes to the Method, everybody has a strong opinion, though respect clearly outweighed derision. Most experts are more familiar with Strasberg's long tenure as artistic director of the Actors Studio than they are with his still-flourishing school. Yet Los Angeles-based private instructor Sharon Chatten, who has taught at the institute and now operates out of the Sharon Chatten Studio, assures that the institute's faculty “know what they’re doing. It’s not just a name. They know the work.” 

-- Charles McNulty

Photo: Estelle Parsons. Credit: Joan Marcus / Center Theatre Group

Theater review: 'Equivocation' at Geffen Playhouse

Were William Shakespeare one of today’s bloviating Beltway pundits, would he rather appear on conservative Obama-bashing Fox News or liberal Obama-smooching MSNBC?

Inquiring academic minds have long tried to decipher the politics of a writer who had a way of simultaneously flattering and flouting the powers that be. And it’s to the credit of Bill Cain’s drama “Equivocation,” an ambitiously sprawling work of historical fiction starring the Bard himself, that we come to understand something about the poetic shell-game that artists are forced to play to protect their creative freedom along with their truth.

Shakespeare is a huge subject, as the cottage industry surrounding him attests. Critical studies of every imaginable theoretical flavor compete with speculative biography for the number of volumes produced each year. And this Geffen Playhouse production, which opened Wednesday under the somewhat too lenient direction of David Esbjornson, swells with erudition to both the play’s benefit and detriment. Replete with scholarly wit and a surplus of compelling ideas, the drama keeps wandering off its path to explore yet another facet of the man most of us consider the planet’s all-time greatest playwright.

Theater review: 'Mary Poppins' at the Ahmanson Theatre

 
Mary Poppins wafted into the Ahmanson Theatre on her magic umbrella Sunday evening, and even those who think they’ve outgrown her carpetbag of enchantment will have to admit that her timing is, to use one of her pet phrases, “practically perfect.”

The show, while not intended as a holiday entertainment, takes on a special glow as the days get dark early and merriment is placed on family to-do lists. (Sure, Mary can be a bit of a martinet, but wouldn’t you rather jump into a painting with her than clock more overtime with Scrooge?) More surprising is the tale’s recessionary relevance. Live-in nannies may be a thing of the past, but the story of a cold, uptight banker who discovers his humanity at home after his career falls off the hinges is like some kind of post-Lehman Brothers-WaMu fairy tale.

This musical adaptation of P.L. Travers’ classic invention, a co-production of Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, tries to reconcile the sharp edges of the original stories with the cheerier Walt Disney film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke (the latter of whom made a surprise appearance at the curtain call on opening night, looking impossibly young and dapper). The high-flying spectacle, running on the rocket fuel of such memorable movie numbers as “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” can't help being delightful. But the contrasting tones between Travers and Disney aren’t any more blendable than oil and water.

Theater review: 'Baby It's You!' at Pasadena Playhouse

If the Shirelles can’t quite do for “Baby It’s You!” what Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons did for “Jersey Boys,” please don’t blame the music. The sound of this path-breaking girl group, which skyrocketed up the charts in the early ’60s with such hits as "Dedicated to the One I Love" and 'Soldier Boy," still has an infectious charm. But these singers deserve a better-written vehicle for the roller coaster of fame than this patchwork musical, which opened Friday at Pasadena Playhouse.

The show’s authors, Floyd Mutrux (who also directed) and Colin Escott, have actually focused the drama on the person who discovered the Shirelles, Florence Greenberg (Meeghan Holaway), a  housewife from Passaic, N.J., who went on to build a leading independent record company. She’s a fascinating figure, a Jewish woman who crossed racial and gender lines on her way to establishing a rhythm and blues dynasty, but her trailblazing tale isn’t told with much subtlety or depth, and the group that ignited her success ends up looking like a quartet of well-coiffed ciphers.

Greenberg’s personal and professional struggles seem as if they’re being sign-posted with stick figure drawings (Holaway has a pungent presence, but she can’t breathe life into moribund lines), while the historical themes of the character's journey are bullet-pointed as though for an intermediate-school quiz. We encounter the character early on arguing with her husband, Bernie (Barry Pearl), about wanting to find work in New York. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and think I coulda done something,” she tells him after singing a few lines from the song that will one day be one of her company's big sellers, “Mama Said.”

Theater review: 'The Walworth Farce' at Freud Playhouse

Family lore isn’t just innocently passed down. It’s carefully scripted, regularly rehearsed and slyly refurbished when needed. Ever notice how the stories with the slipperiest facts tend to get revived most often as if in fear that their protective deceits might finally peel away for good?

Enda Walsh, one of the hottest names in contemporary Irish playwriting, doesn’t simply find in these observations the theme for his bizarre, brazenly original and utterly poleaxing tragicomedy “The Walworth Farce,” which is being presented at the Freud Playhouse through Sunday as part of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival. The engine of his drama is powered by a father’s insistence that his two sons ritually enact with him a vaudevillian version of their shared history — complete with props, wigs and costumes for both sexes.
 
This manic carnival, stupendously brought to life by the celebrated Galway-based theater company Druid Ireland under the direction of Mikel Murfi, is set in a condemnable London apartment, designed by Sabine Dargent with just the right touches of cooped-up squalor. Here, Dinny (Michael Glenn Murphy), a Cork man who fled to England under strange circumstances without his wife, has more or less immured his two sons, Sean (Tadhg Murphy) and Blake (Raymond Scannell) to live in the fun house of his distorted memories. Crowded together, the sons try to make room for their own poignant recollections “of the smell of Mammy’s cooking” and the chicken that was still stuck in the wool of their jumpers when they first came over as tots.

'Once and For All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen' at Freud Playhouse

Like most teenagers, their blare precedes them. The sound is raucous, almost violent, as though a living room is being invaded by savages and its contents thrown in the air like confetti. These hormonal hoodlums are practically begging an authority figure (preferably one wheeling a vacuum) to step in to impose a little punitive order.

Curiously, when the 13 boisterous adolescents eventually appear in Ontroerend Goed’s “Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen” — a UCLA Live International Theatre Festival offering from Belgium running through Saturday at Freud Playhouse — they hardly seem to be having the time of their lives. In fact, the impression is similar to one of those wildlife programs, in which bear cubs, intent on independently exploring the world, make mischief the moment mama bear leaves them alone to go food-shopping.
 
If the child is father of the man, as Wordsworth instructed, this charmingly rambunctious hourlong physical theater collage serves as a reminder that the high schooler is the incompletely domesticated animal beneath the human.

Theater review: 'Saturn Returns' at South Coast Repertory

In “Saturn Returns,” which opened Friday at South Coast Repertory, playwright Noah Haidle takes his inspiration from the heavens, structuring his play in 30-year intervals to reflect the time it takes Saturn to return to its position at the moment of a person’s birth. Astrologists believe that these periods mark epochal shifts, and Gustin, a radiologist portrayed by three different actors, confirms this theory during his long and lonely life.

Nick Ullett plays Gustin at 88, Conor O’Farrell plays him at 58 and Graham Michael Hamilton plays him at 28. Kristen Bush takes on the roles of the three female characters he conflates into an elusive dream of happiness: Loretta, his young wife destined to die tragically young; Zephyr, his hippie daughter, who struggles to wrest free from her father’s suffocating embrace only to suffer a fate every bit as cruel as her mother's; and Suzanne, his flinty nurse, whose friendship he covets more than her care.  

For a guy pushing 90, Gustin is in remarkably good shape. Death may be discernible, but it’s not yet at the front door. Consequently, his story — a retrospective stroll, in which the past resurfaces in the present — has no more urgency than an afternoon nap’s worth of scattered reminiscences

Theater review: 'Purgatorio' at Freud Playhouse

 
The orderly aesthetic wasn’t what I expected.

When I asked a theater intellectual friend who knows the Italian scene fairly well what she thinks of Romeo Castellucci, the radical stage auteur from Cesena, she offered a three-word reply, “Artaud, Artaud, Artaud,” invoking the French stage poet Antonin Artaud, who envisioned a “theater of cruelty” in which anguish could be alchemized into mysticism, preferably ringed by fire and doused in blood.  

Yet “Purgatorio,” the piece Castellucci created with his company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio — one of Europe’s preeminent experimental theater collectives — seemed, at least in the early going, more calmly cinematic than Artaudian. The rhythm of this UCLA Live International Theatre Festival offering, which runs through Saturday at the Freud Playhouse, was initially too languid, its surfaces too polished and its mood too vérité to merit such a comparison.

Dante wasn’t much in evidence in the beginning either, though the production (part of a trilogy that includes “Inferno” and “Paradiso”)  is said to be “freely inspired by the ‘Divine Comedy,’ ” and there’s no doubt that a few audience members making early exits were as frustrated as souls in limbo by the work’s stubborn refusal to disclose its secrets. I was as bewildered as anyone by the whispered voices and dim lighting, but I was also mesmerized by the assured style of the mise-en-scène (in addition to being the director and co-choreographer, Castellucci is responsible for sets, lights and costumes, and the result is a truly holistic approach to visual storytelling).