Theater review: 'Hunger: In Bed With Roy Cohn' at Odyssey Theatre

The image of Roy Cohn on his deathbed is so appealing to playwrights that the 1950s villain, the heavy of the Rosenberg trial and the Army-McCarthy hearings who died of AIDS in 1986, has embarked on a lively posthumous showbiz career. He and his deathbed starred in Tony Kushner’s “Angels of America" as well as in the 1992 cable movie “Citizen Cohn.” Now they're in the world premiere of Joan Beber’s “Hunger: In Bed With Roy Cohn,” directed by Jules Aaron at the Odyssey Theatre.

Here the deathbed is a king-size rococo gilt and wine-colored affair in a fancy hotel room (designed by John Iacovelli), where the hallucinating Cohn (Barry Pearl, as affable as always) dances with his nimble alter ego, “Young Roy" (Jeffrey Scott Parsons), and receives visits from his domineering mother (Cheryl David), lover G. David Schine (Tom Galup), sexy housekeeper/dominatrix (Presciliana Esparaolini), friends Ronald Reagan (David Sessions) and Barbara Walters (Liza de Weerd) and an unexpectedly butch Julius Rosenberg (Jon Levenson).

Beber, who earned her master of fine arts degree from USC at age 67, is unusual for a new playwright in that she watched the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings on live TV. In a program note she recalls feeling “intrigued” by the “dashing” Cohn, recognizing only later how many lives he destroyed. And although her characterization doesn’t redeem him, it is tinged with a maternal pity. 

Stage review: 'MythBusters: Behind the Myths' at Nokia Theatre

No, they don’t shoot a cannon onstage. 

But the cannonball that went astray during the filming of an episode of the Discovery Channel series “MythBusters” in December, damaging two Bay Area houses and a van, was a palpable presence during Sunday’s performance of the “Mythbusters: Behind the Myths” live stage show at Nokia Theatre.

“It’s not something that should be laughed about,” said Jamie Hyneman, when an audience question about the incident sent a ripple of knowing chuckles through the packed house. Both Hyneman and his partner in boyish high jinks (a.k.a., “blowing crap up”), Adam Savage, emphasized that they take safety seriously and that nothing like that will ever happen again.

Which, let’s face it, takes some of the fun out. One of the pleasures of “MythBusters,” in which special effects artists Hyneman and Savage test widely held beliefs (Does the color red really make bulls angry?) through ingenious, usually risky backyard experiments, is the hope that things will go a little wrong and that one of them (most often Savage) will sustain a minor injury. “MythBusters” onstage would have to be less explosive than “MythBusters” on TV (insurance and all that), but it’s hard not to suspect that that wayward cannonball dented the mojo of the 31-city tour, which kicked off Jan. 6. (Next stop, Wednesday in Riverside.) 

Performance review: 'Jackie Five-Oh!' at the Renberg Theatre

Don’t you hate it when you get a role in a Broadway musical, but it’s Grandma in “The Addams Family,” who doesn’t have her own song? Even Pugsley gets a song! And then the critics pan it?

Welcome to the cursed career of Jackie Hoffman. “In this era of dying newspapers, people were inventing newspapers to write bad reviews of ‘The Addams Family’ in,” she grouses in her latest solo show, “Jackie Five-Oh!” 

Running for just two weekends at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center's Renberg Theatre, "Jackie Five-Oh!" is Hoffman’s first appearance here since “The Kvetching Continues” in 2005. She developed both shows with her director, Michael Schiralli, at Joe’s Pub in New York, where her long-standing Monday night cabaret-style gig has made her a cult star.

As her musical director and accompanist, the amiable Bobby Peaco, sings in his introduction (to the tune of “The Addams Family”), “She’s real New York and Jewy.” And in fact it’s easy to imagine a stereotypical L.A. audience responding with puzzled concern to her sour East Coast shtick. It almost seems as though an interpreter might be useful.

Fortunately the audience at opening night got all the jokes, even the darkest, most New York and Jewy ones, on its own.

Theater review: 'Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep' at the Electric Lodge

For a minute I feared that Raymond J. Barry’s new play “Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep” would put me to sleep — right on one of the shoulders so conveniently rubbing mine at Venice’s Electric Lodge.

Barry, a published playwright, is also the kind of actor (most recently seen as Arlo in TV's “Justified”) who would have to work not to be entertaining. But in the program he writes that his play is about the “exploitation of economically weak countries by giant corporations,” as described in John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.” 

And on the page, “Awake…” may well resemble a leaflet thrust at you on Hollywood Boulevard: hysterical, vague and unlikely to have any effect on the phenomena it decries. Anyway, don’t corporate power mongers program their GPS devices to avoid the (renewable energy-powered) Electric Lodge? Even if some malfunction landed them there, the artistic director’s preshow lecture on solar power would scare them off. The ones left are the choir, and what can we do about anything?

But on the stage, “Awake,” starring Barry with Joseph Culp (Don Draper’s surly father in those stylish “Mad Men” flashbacks) and the lovely Tacey Adams, is a masterpiece of comic ensemble acting, a true triumph of style over substance. 

It's David Cromer's 'Our Town' -- we just live there

To interview the director David Cromer, whose production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” will open at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on Jan. 18, is to feel subtly but masterfully directed.

If you’re slow with a follow-up question, he’ll prompt you: “Can I elaborate? Sure.”

While you’re still trying to turn on your digital recorder, he has already teased out the subtext: “The scene in ‘Our Town’ when Emily asks her mother, ‘Mama, am I pretty?’ That’s such a giant part of every moment. You want to ask a great question here, I want to give a great answer. We both want to be ‘pretty’ in this scenario.”

Leaving you to grapple with this insight into your character, he picks up his cellphone. “I’m not checking messages, but I need to take a picture of the shadow of that orchid on the wall because it’s really beautiful.”

You wonder if maybe one reason critics and audiences have responded so worshipfully to Cromer’s “Our Town,” which began in a quirky little Wicker Park theater in Chicago and moved on to run for 500 performances off Broadway (the longest run in the play’s history), is that they were directed to do so.

Theater Beat looks at the best of 2011

The Times’ Theater Beat reviewers – Philip Brandes, F. Kathleen Foley, Margaret Gray, David C. Nichols and Charlotte Stoudt – spend the year prowling Los Angeles area theaters, especially the smaller ones, and providing their opinions of what they see there every week on Culture Monster and in the Friday Calendar section.

Here are some of their favorites (and a few less favored) of 2011 theatrical offerings.

Best New Play:

Charlotte Stoudt: Tie between “Pursued by Happiness,” by Keith Huff, staged at the Lankershim Arts Center by Road Theatre Company and “Extraordinary Chambers” at the Geffen

Kathy Foley: A tie between Nick Salamone's “The Sonneteer” at the Gay and Lesbian Center's Davidson/Valentini Theatre, and Tom Jacobson's “House of the Rising Son,” Ensemble Studio Theatre Los Angeles' production at the Atwater Village Theatre.

David C. Nichols: “House of the Rising Son” by Tom Jacobson

Philip Brandes: Penned in the early 1900's, the pair of one-acts from “Peter Pan” creator J.M. Barrie in “Barrie: Back to Back” weren't technically new, but leave it to Pacific Resident Theatre to re-discover long-neglected chestnuts with tremendous heart.

Margaret Gray: “Girls Talk” by Roger Kumble

Theater review: 'The Christmas Present' at Sacred Fools Theater

In art as in life, Christmas has its dark side. For every Scrooge and Grinch transfigured by the spirit of giving, somewhere a Raymond Carver character is shouting, “That’s the last Christmas you’ll ever ruin for us!” at her drunk husband.  

Those who like their Christmases on the rocks, with bitters, will feel right at home at Sacred Fools Theater’s U.S. premiere of “The Christmas Present,” written and directed by Guy Picot.

The play is subtitled “a dark British comedy,” but even the most cynical American may find it longer on the dark and the British than the comedy. Although the tale of a borderline sociopath and the grouchy prostitute he’s hired to spend the holiday with him in a hideous hotel room — she’s his “present”  —does provoke laughs, they’re closer to Nietzschean yelps of despair than Yuletide jollity.

Miserably divorced Colin (Troy Blendell) has hired “Salomé” primarily for companionship. Or so he explains to the lovely, accommodating woman (Sasha Higgins) who arrives after he has hidden a knife under the bed. This Salomé turns out to be a fantasy; a second knock heralds the actual prostitute (Mandi Moss), a belligerent harpy. Scenes of their squabbling alternate with tenderer, if creepier, imaginary interactions between Colin and the hooker of his dreams.

Blendell’s Colin is a deceptively average-looking “bloke” whose unctuous good humor keeps giving way to twitching rage. Higgins brings a quirky sweetness to her slight role. But the play doesn’t really come to life until the fiery Moss shows up in her sweatpants and starts laying waste to Colin’s delusions. Ultimately, for all its bile and threats, “The Christmas Present” pulls its punches, delivering not a bloodbath but its own darkly comic, very British Christmas miracle.

 -- Margaret Gray  

“The Christmas Present.” Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope Drive, L.A. See website for schedule. Ends Dec. 24. $15. Contact: www.SacredFools.org or (310) 281-8337. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

Photo: Prostitute (Mandi Moss) and client (Troy Blendell) share post non-coital non-bliss in “The Christmas Present.” Credit: CM Gonzalez. 

Theater review: 'David Dean Bottrell' at Theatre/Theater

Some of us are born with a gift for transforming the raw material of life into tales so tedious, self-aggrandizing or bitter that acquaintances dread sitting next to us. Meanwhile, other people’s anecdotes sell tickets. 

As a member of the former category, I console myself that I just haven’t had enough interesting experiences to join the latter. That’s why I so resented my enjoyment of “David Dean Bottrell Makes Love: A One-Man Show” at Rogue Machine at Theatre/Theater. 

Bottrell, a former Kentucky farm boy, is an L.A. actor-comedian-writer on the fringe of success. He has a troubled relationship with his dad, a failed long-term relationship with an alcoholic actor and some painful and embarrassing match.com encounters, and he longs for love. Yeah, well, join the club. I can go on and on about bad dates too, yet my audience never shrieks with hysterical recognition.

Bottrell’s acerbic, well-structured writing reminds me a little of David Sedaris’, but the delivery is what makes it work. Lithe and dapper, Bottrell has one of those animated faces that’s hard to pin down. It can look haggard or boyish, handsome or Muppety. He speaks in a crisp, heightened style that brings to mind a less prissy David Hyde Pierce, and his nerdy charm makes his shifts from folksy sentimentality to vulgarity all the more bracing. When a match.com acquaintance advises him that he’d get more action with a sexier screen name, Bottrell sheds “Mr. Nice Man” for increasingly explicit nomenclature. 

Theater review: 'Vigil' at the Mark Taper Forum

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” says Nell in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.” Morris Panych, a playwright with a distinctly Beckettian sensibility, offers support for this claim in “Vigil,” his mordant 1995 tragicomedy now playing at the Mark Taper Forum. The production, directed by Panych and starring Marco Barricelli and Olympia Dukakis, ran last year at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

If Beckett hadn’t used it first, “Endgame” would be a good title for “Vigil,” in which a middle-aged misanthrope, summoned by his elderly, failing aunt, rushes to her bedside and waits for her to die. Actually, he urges, badgers and harangues her to die, taking increasingly macabre action to speed the process along. 

Kemp (Barricelli) met Grace (Dukakis) only once before, 30 years earlier, when he dreamed that she would rescue him from his miserable childhood. He has always resentfully assumed that he just wasn’t charming enough. (“Do you think I enjoyed playing the accordion for you? Did you think ‘Camptown Races’ was my idea?”) 

Grace, a fragile, snowy-haired invalid living in cluttered squalor, unable or unwilling to talk, appears to have no idea who he is. 

Theater review: 'Hairspray' at Carpenter Performing Arts Center

After Act 1 of Musical Theatre West’s “Hairspray” at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, my companion said she loved it. Except … um … why was that man wearing a dress? Not sure I could explain the historical and sociopolitical significance of drag to a 7-year-old in 15 minutes, I said, “Because it’s funny?” (Thank goodness intermission ended before she could ask, “Why?” It just is!) 

In the 1988 John Waters film that inspired the Tony-winning musical, the drag queen Divine plays Edna Turnblad, mother of plucky, plump Tracy. Actors as diverse as Harvey Fierstein and John Travolta have filled the late cult star’s ample housecoat. Here, Jim J. Bullock commits to every step in Edna’s journey from grouchy laundress to diva, bringing down the house in “Timeless to Me,” her electrically campy duet with her much smaller husband (impish Barry Pearl).

“Hairspray” is a confection, as pastel and pillowy as the ever-climbing hairdos of the teen stars on “The Corny Collins Show,” the Baltimore dance program where Tracy (the perfectly adorable Victoria Morgan) gets her break. Tracy uses her stardom to campaign for acceptance of diverse races and girths, confronting anti-integration forces — Amber Van Tussle (Lauren Smolka), her rival for “Miss Hairspray 1962,” and Amber’s mother (Tracy Lore) — about as formidable as lemon extract.