Theater review: 'Arias with a Twist' at REDCAT

Dear Santa Baby, this Christmas all I want in my stocking is Joey Arias. My fishnet stocking, that is, because this drag chanteuse works black stilettos, thigh highs and an ever-present microphone like Eartha Kitt in overdrive. In “Arias with a Twist,” now at REDCAT, he teams with celebrated puppeteer Basil Twist in a fantasy cabaret with a ZIP Code nowhere near “Sesame Street.”

A cross-gender, cross-media extravaganza, “Arias” isn’t just mind-bending, it’s mind origami. Imagine a mix of Barney’s wittiest holiday windows, a play list for Judy Garland and a trippy planetarium show, and you’ll get an idea of this foxy, naughty and deliriously entertaining evening.

At REDCAT for an unusually long run, “Arias” should top the list of must-sees for adult Angelenos who want to get their holiday groove on. The California-born Arias recently starred as the Mistress of Seduction in the spectacular Cirque du Soleil “Zumanity” show in Las Vegas. Now the performer is working on a more diminutive scale — the “stage” is a small box and you’ll want to sit close — but there is nothing undersized about this wonderland of curiosities set to song.

After a tease with multiple curtains, the diva is revealed in all her glory. Arias’ entrance will surely rank as one of the most astounding moments in L.A. theater this year. As the REDCAT black box shakes to the music of Led Zeppelin, she appears strapped to an oscillating contraption, about to be probed by aliens. (A close encounter she’s clearly looking forward to.)

Working Thierry Manfred Mugler’s eye-popping lingerie, Arias channels Bettie Page and “Fifth Element” sci-fi camp to create an irresistible creature who is both utterly artificial and absolutely genuine. As Agrado, the cheerful transvestite from Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mother” put it: “You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.”

Theater review: 'Post' at Complex (The Flight) Theater

The suicide rate for members of the Army is expected to top last year’s record-breaking total. “Post,” a minimalist drama written by and starring Donavon Thomas at The Flight Theater, imagines one scenario behind that grim statistic.  

Readjusting to civilian life after a rough tour of Iraq, Michael (Thomas) moves in with fellow vet and longtime friend Chuck (Nathanyael Grey), who works as an EMT. Michael’s dad (David Pantsari) hopes the boys will take care of each other, but just the opposite happens when Chuck’s stalled crush on vegan baker Autumn (Jamie Renee Smith) gets waylaid by Michael. We’re in for a classic love triangle going bad, fueled by PTSD, alcohol and soy bacon.
 
This production, played out in an appropriately dumpy apartment set, is clearly meant to showcase Thomas’ talents. As a performer, he’s an appealing presence, goofy and vulnerable. (The ensemble finds a nice rapport, and an easygoing humor carries some of the flatter scenes.) Director Timothy Gagliardo accentuates the playfulness — there’s a very funny Halloween scene — but lets too much air into the scenes, leaving us to wait for the inevitable violence rather than be surprised by it.

As a writer, Thomas is still discovering how to generate event. The play feels more like a series of improvs than a narrative with a point of view, and it’s not evident what questions “Post” wants to frame. Did war break these men? Are some people just bad? We’re left with loss but not much insight. 

– Charlotte Stoudt

“Post” Complex (The Flight) Theater, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 20. $10-$15. Contact: www.plays411.net. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Photo: David Pantsari, Donavon Thomas, Nathanyael Grey. Photo credit: Ravi Gahunia.

Theater review: 'Tree' at [Inside ] the Ford

Obama drank Bud Light, but in Julie Hébert’s “Tree,” now at [Inside] the Ford, a mixed-race family’s beer summit comes with a lot more kick.

White gender studies professor Didi (Jacqueline Wright) shows up at the Chicago home of African American chef Leo (Chuma Gault) claiming to be his half-sister from Louisiana. Turns out Leo’s mother, Jessalyn (Sloan Robinson), had a passionate love affair with Didi’s father, known only to his daughter as a belligerent racist. The bitter Didi wants to find her father’s love letters, hoping to recover some part of him worth mourning. Leo, caring for a dying Jessalyn, doesn’t want to dredge up the past. The siblings battle it out, with Leo’s young daughter, J.J. (Tessa Thompson), caught in the crossfire.

Hébert’s characters — profane and stubborn — have an ornery charm.  Director Jessica Kubzansky honors “Tree’s" poetry without letting it sink the drama, and pushes her cast away from sentimentality.  Every performance is strong, but Gault’s Leo provides essential gravity. Guarded and sardonic, he deflects his sister’s emotional salvos with steady wit. (Didi: “My father always wanted a son like you.” Leo, dryly: “He had a son like me.”)

Theater review: 'Just Imagine' at NoHo Arts Center

Between 1962 and 1969, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote 180 songs that would score the emotional life of generations. "Just Imagine," Tim Piper's uneven but fervent tribute to Lennon at the NoHo Arts Center, takes us through the creative journey that started it all.

Tribute shows have to meet impossible expectations: On one hand, they must conjure the legend in question, yet if they give us exactly what we expect, there's no surprise. "Just Imagine," directed by Steve Altman, lives somewhere between real gratification and slight lull with its steady menu of Beatles and Lennon gems.

Piper, with his tea shades and overgrown hair, makes for a credible Lennon, and his vocal stylings and intonations are impressive. He delivers strong versions of "Money," "Revolution," "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "Come Together" and "I Am the Walrus." And while the band rocks on, an elaborate video show plays above them, featuring archival photos and thematic images.

So far, so entertaining. Unfortunately, Piper's accompanying monologue reliving Lennon's tumultuous life is self-conscious and often lugubrious. This overwritten confessional can sap momentum, which then has to be restarted by a new song. Kudos to the band, Working Class Hero, led by Greg Piper on bass, which never lets the audience drift too far. (Sound designer Jonathan Zenz and sound operator Greg Feo keep the energy high without deafening the crowd.)

The best moments come when Piper sticks to the music. After intermission, acoustic guitar in hand, he takes requests, revealing a command of the Lennon library and an appealingly straightforward performance style. At another point, Piper uses "We Can Work It Out" to demonstrate the distinction between Paul's mastery of melody and John's more bluesy approach; it was the collision of these styles, Piper suggests, that yielded genius. The brief music lesson is a fascinating analysis that deserves more stage time.

The latter part of the show features Lennon's post-Beatles work, including "Woman," "Watching the Wheels" and, of course, his classic peace anthem, which never seems to loses its relevance.

Hard-core Beatles fans probably won't learn anything they don't already know but will savor the chance to goo-goo-ga-joob with favorite songs. Yes, iTunes may be convenient, but nothing matches "Strawberry Fields Forever" live, dense and ecstatic, raining down around your ears.

-- Charlotte Stoudt

"Just Imagine," NoHo Arts Center, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Dark Nov. 27-Dec. 6. Ends Jan. 2. $35 to $55. (866) 811-4111 or www.justimaginetheshow.com. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Theater review: 'No Man's Land' at Odyssey Theatre

Harold Pinter named the four characters in “No Man’s Land” after real-life cricket players, and in Michael Peretzian’s assured revival, now at the Odyssey Theatre, the game is in full swing. In the play, this quartet haunts a Persian-carpeted study, but their moves are as competitive as anything on the green fields of Lord’s Cricket Ground.
 
After a chance meeting in a pub, down-and-out poet Spooner (the wonderfully seedy Alan Mandell) has been invited back to the well-appointed townhouse of Hirst (Lawrence Pressman). The successful but aging man of letters lives under the bizarre care of two yobs, Briggs and Foster (Jamie Donovan and John Sloan), who may or may not be lovers. Spooner wheedles his way into Hirst’s confidences, in hopes of regular hot meals and a daily quotient of alcohol. Did they once know each other at Oxford, or is Hirst just humoring him?
 

Theater review: 'Crime and Punishment' at A Noise Within

Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" is both a gripping thriller and a major doorstop. Now at A Noise Within, you can polish off this dense classic in less time than it takes to clear downtown L.A. at rush hour. Condensing 600 pages of Slavic nihilism into 80 minutes is a feat in itself, but adaptors Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus nearly capture the roiling soul of this 1886 masterpiece.

On Michael Smith's two-tiered wooden set featuring a shabby chaise lounge and a rickety flight of stairs, two relationships play out: An inspector (Robertson Dean) investigating a brutal murder plays cat and mouse with prime suspect Raskolnikov (Michael A. Newcomer), who finds himself drawn to the quiet strength of a prostitute (Holly Hawkins).

Theater review: 'Stray' at Black Dahlia Theatre

Sometimes even a village can’t raise a child. In “Stray,” co-produced by Black Dahlia Theatre and Chalk Repertory Theatre Company, playwright Ruth McKee looks past the feel-good glamour of international adoption and finds plenty of loneliness.
 
Working in a Ugandan AIDS clinic, opthamologist James (Matt Gaydos) falls for free-spirited Rachel (Analies Lorig), a white Kenyan. They adopt an orphan, Daniel, and bring him to the U.S. for the requisite better life. But memories of his family’s murder torment the young boy, and soon he’s acting up in school, much to the consternation of his teacher (Jennifer Chang), the evenhanded principal (Angela Bullock) and a child psychologist (Eileen Galindo). 
 

Theater review: 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' at Theatre 40

Virginia Woolf may have disapproved, but Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story of split personality, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” says as much about modern psychology as a shelf full of Freud. Now running at Theatre 40, Jeffrey Hatcher’s expressionistic stage adaptation of the 1886 novella gets a bold — occasionally blunt — treatment by director and designer Jeff G. Rack. Using little more than smoke, a two-way mirror and a revolving upstage door, he creates a fun house ride through a haunted psyche.
 
“Jekyll” plays in a Victorian London hooked on the “C.S.I.” of its day, namely public dissections of working-class folk who died in grisly ways. Dr. Henry Jekyll (Darren Tyler Morgan), a crusader against such practices, attempts to isolate the beast in man’s nature in order to cure it. Naturally, his plan goes horribly wrong, and soon the good doctor is transforming nightly into the rageful Mr. Hyde (primarily played by Scott Roberts), given to beating men into pulps and carving up prostitutes.
 

Theater review: 'Children of the Night' at the Beverly Hills Playhouse

Turns out Bram Stoker was once a vampire’s assistant. The “Dracula” author’s day job was managing actor Henry Irving, a Victorian A-lister whose massive ego sucked the life out of his entourage — and was the inspiration for Stoker’s immortal count.

Scott Martin imagines the two artists' clash in his spirited but curiously bloodless musical, “Children of the Night,” now at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.

May, 1897: Backstage at London’s Lyceum Theatre, Stoker (Robert Patteri) desperately tries to interest Irving (Gordon Goodman) in playing Dracula in a staged reading of the unpublished novel, pitching the project as a much-needed commercial venture. Irving refuses, even after his wife, the great Ellen Terry (Teri Bibb), intervenes on Stoker’s behalf. Is Irving’s resistance jealousy, snobbery, or does it signal a rift more profound?

Director David Galligan’s lively production is first-rate, with Broadway and West End veterans in the lead roles (the musical direction is by Ross Kalling). Martin serves up the pleasures of the backstage genre, and “Children” contains what may be the first song devoted to the superstition of never saying the name of Shakespeare’s Scottish play aloud in a theater.

Theater review: 'The Happy Ones' at South Coast Repertory

Hollywood loves unlikely buddies: Oscar and Felix, Elliot and E.T., House and Wilson. But in Julie Marie Myatt’s wry and affecting “The Happy Ones,” now at South Coast Repertory, tragedy makes for a very odd couple.

Orange County, 1975: Appliance salesman Walter Wells (Raphael Sbarge) lives the California dream: a beautiful wife, great kids, a pool in the back of his sunny modernist home. But when a disaster suddenly upends his life, Walter is utterly bereft. His best friends, Unitarian minister Gary (Geoffrey Lower) and uninhibited divorcee Mary-Ellen (Nike Doukas), harass Walter into pure survival, plying him with liquor and relentless good cheer. 

But it’s Vietnamese immigrant Bao (Greg Watanabe), the man who inadvertently destroyed Walter’s life, who becomes the only person that can help him reclaim it. At first Bao appears like a ghost in Walter’s now-silent house. Walter resists, but this slim, monosyllabic figure makes him soup, then plays the occasional game of checkers, and finally shares his own dark history. It’s to Myatt’s immense credit as a writer that this improbable friendship seems not only credible but inevitable. Who else would understand Walter except someone who directly shared his pain?

Myatt keenly observes the way one person’s tragedy becomes a Rorschach test for everyone around him. Like people spouting platitudes at a funeral, Gary and Mary Ellen desperately make nice around Walter, as though egg nog will dispel cosmic sadness. “Happy” wonders who is living the more authentic life, Walter or his swinging friends? Is it better to acknowledge pain or drown your sorrows? What’s your narcotic of choice — religion, sex or pro football?