Theater review: 'Waiting for Godot' at the Mark Taper Forum

"Waiting for Godot,” Samuel Beckett’s existential classic, is held in such high regard by highbrows that average theatergoers may feel intimidated by the play, as though a pop quiz might be awaiting them after the curtain call.

But don’t let the passion of professorial types deter your visit to the Mark Taper Forum, which has mounted a marvelous revival of the work starring two esteemed Beckett interpreters, Los Angeles’ own Alan Mandell as Estragon and Ireland’s celebrated son Barry McGovern as Vladimir.

Under the incisive direction of Michael Arabian, the play is treated not as a symbolist pageant or a philosophical gag machine but as an encounter with two tattered souls whose plot is the master plot of our lives: filling up the time that has been bafflingly granted to us during our stints on planet Earth.

This isn’t the funniest “Godot” I’ve seen, but it’s definitely the most tenderly affecting. Mandell at 84 is as spry as a man half his age, but his pratfalls are those of someone with too much experience to pretend that bruises don’t hurt and beatings are a laugh riot. His comedy echoes down a corridor of years. McGovern, whose musical Irish voice could soothe the rankled hearts of terrorists, has the stern straight-man shtick down pat, but his eyes glisten with empathy even as Vladimir’s patience frays.

Theater review: The 'Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King'

Can a white guy say anything interesting about race? That’s a question raised this spring by the recent run of Bruce Norris’ tart “Clybourne Park” and now “The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King,” Andrew Dolan’s polished but talky drama at Ensemble Studio Theatre LA’s Atwater playing space.

Dolan chooses George and Martha’s neighborhood to plant his rhetorical land mines, an Albee-esque world where the epithet “adjunct professor” is used as a put-down and a turn-on simultaneously.

Maverick social worker-turned-professor Simon (Philip Casnoff) marries his African American grad student, Lashawna (Tracey A. Leigh), much to the raised eyebrows of fellow faculty members Augustus (Carlos Carrasco) and Janine (Judith Moreland).  When Lashawna’s troubled younger brother, Anquan (Theo Perkins), is expelled from the college for theft, he moves in with the couple and the battles begin.

On Tom Buderwitz’s shabby chic living room set, “Mistresses” plays like drawing room comedy, punctuated by (too many) lectures on history, race and theater given by its professorial posse. Rod Menzies directs an impressive ensemble, with a deft Perkins and saturnine Casnoff generating the most chemistry as unlikely friends.

Theater review: 'The Illusion' at A Noise Within

“The Illusion,” Tony Kushner’s very free adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 17th century play, “L’Illusion Comique,” has been prolifically produced since its first staging in 1989. A tragicomic fantasia on the evanescent nature of love, “The Illusion” predates Kushner’s  “Angels in America” by just a few years. 

A great theatrical experimenter in his own right, Kushner is the ideal adaptor for Corneille’s ground-breaking experiment, which blurs reality to a sometimes frustrating degree.

In her current staging at A Noise Within, director Casey Stangl cannot always redress the desultory nature of the material, yet the production fascinates on many levels.

The action commences in the shadowy cave of Alcandre, the magician (Deborah Strang.)  Wealthy Pridamant (Nick Ullett), asks Alcandre and her amanuensis (Jeff Doba) to help him ascertain the fate of his estranged son (Graham Hamilton), whom he disinherited some years ago.

Alcandre shows Pridamant visions of his son’s adventures with various lady loves (Devon Sorvari), tricky servants (Abby Craden) and jealous rivals (Freddy Douglas.)  Reality shifts and the characters’ names change along with their circumstances. As Pridamant voyeuristically looks on, he is plunged from hope to despair and back again by the diverse fates his son enjoys/endures.

Theater review: ‘Diary of a Madman’ at Actors Circle Theatre

Maniacal laughter echoing through the opening sound montage doesn’t pose much spoiler risk, given that the name of the monologue we’re watching is “Diary of a Madman.” Still, in the classic Nikolai Gogol short story on which Ilia Volok and Eugene Lazarev’s new stage adaptation is based, the protagonist’s mental unraveling follows a distinctly accelerating progression — an arc that’s somewhat obscured when the character comes charging out of the gate in full-blown nutcase mode.

Manageable length and first-person narration have made the work a recurring choice for solo performance. This effort benefits from director Lazarev’s and star Volok’s shared Russian heritage—their original translation feels crisper and more contemporary than ubiquitous public domain versions.

It’s particularly effective in evoking the Gogol story’s vivid mix of the comic and horrific.

With demonic glint and flamboyant gestures, Volok certainly lives up to the title as Poprishchin, a mid-grade civil service nonentity. Opening with his stalker-ish obsession with his boss’ daughter, the narrator’s delusions become increasingly grandiose and his grip on reality more tenuous.

Rather than stressing period specificity, the adaptation (down to the threadbare set) frames his breakdown as a timeless response to a colorless, dehumanized existence.

But the fact that Poprishchin’s madness is obvious from the outset leaves Volok nowhere to go except the no man’s land of over-the-top, actorly clichés of madness, and a tendency to embellish lines with pregnant dramatic pauses makes the piece slower going than it needs to be. 

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-– Philip Brandes

“Diary of a Madman,” Actors Circle Theatre, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 31. $20. (323) 960-7770 or www.plays411.com/madman. Running time: 1 hours, 20 minutes.

Photo: Ilia Volok. Credit: Rochelle Perry.

Theater review: 'Sight Unseen' at South Coast Repertory

 

 Donald Margulies’ “Sight Unseen” returns to South Coast Repertory, where the play had its world premiere in 1991. And it’s safe to say that every new production of this critically acclaimed work is a unique experience.

This revival, directed by founding SCR artistic director David Emmes, is absorbing through and through, but it demonstrates the challenge of balancing the competing perspectives of the play. One side dominates here, making “Sight Unseen” seem ultimately more parochial than it should.

Depending on who’s playing Jonathan, a painter whose career has brought him fame, fortune and a New York Times Magazine cover, and Patricia, his ex-girlfriend living in England with her fellow archaeologist husband, the play’s balance of meaning will shift. This is of course true for all good dramas, but the situation in “Sight Unseen” is somewhat more pronounced as the play is a study of a character who bears quite a few similarities to his author.

Theater review: 'Once' on Broadway

Broadway musicals spawned from movies are usually big, brash, bawdy affairs — think “Sister Act” and “Priscilla Queen of the Desert,” two giddy disco balls launched last season.

The gossamer charms of a small, whimsical Irish film such as “Once,” John Carney’s entrancing 2006 sleeper about a brief encounter between a Dublin street musician and a pixieish Czech immigrant, would seem to have little chance of surviving in today’s heavily sequined theatrical marketplace.

“Falling Slowly,” the Oscar-winning tune written by the movie’s stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, is as beguilingly romantic as it is sweetly melancholy, but an 11 o’clock number it definitely isn’t.

So it’s a little surprising, though very satisfying, to report that the musical “Once” has made a happy Broadway landing at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, which has converted its stage into an old-fashioned Irish pub to make everyone feel, if not quite as cozy as they did at New York Theatre Workshop, where the work debuted late last year, at least just as relaxed and welcome.

Theater review: 'A Room With a View' at the Old Globe

E.M. Forster knew how to weave a narrative spell as well as any 20th century English novelist. He was the master of building romantic suspense out of psychological repression. His most famous dictum, “Only connect,” is routinely shown to be much harder in good English society than it sounds.

The moviemaking team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory had great success in mining Forster's oeuvre for lavish epics that couldn't get enough of those grand manors, rolling lawns, prep-school haircuts and fancy tea services. The stage can't compete on the same pictorial front, but plots this well devised and characters this richly distinctive are too valuable a resource to pass up. Which brings us to “A Room With a View,” the rather rudimentary musical version of Forster's 1908 novel that's having its world premiere at the Old Globe.

With music and lyrics by Jeffrey Stock (“Triumph of Love”) and a book by novelist and playwright Marc Acito (who also contributed additional lyrics), the show attempts in as straightforward a manner as possible to translate the novel from the page to the singing stage. This tale of a young English woman's awakening in Florence to the glories of art, love and unruly human nature is efficiently synopsized by Acito. The songs by Stock carefully set up the characters while briskly advancing the action. But the work doesn't pulse with genuine passion — it has the feeling of a commissioned exercise that's competently yet unimaginatively pulled off.

Theater review: 'Why We Have A Body' at Edgemar Center for the Arts

 

"For five decades I have struggled to say something more than 'Where could I have put my pocketbook?'" 

That line is an emblem of the epigrams of "Why We Have A Body," Claire Chafee's surreal 1993 comedy at the Edgemar Center for the Arts.

The aforementioned quip comes from ever-exploring Eleanor (Barbara Bain), a self-delineated "feminist, archaeologist, historian and bilingual student of the human brain." But "Body's" chief focus is on her daughters.

Mary (director Tanna Frederick) is a wild-eyed head case and serial convenience store bandit who obsesses over Joan of Arc. Lili (Alex Sedrowski) is a private investigator whose romance with the married Renee (Cathy Arden) gives "Body" what plot it possesses.

Theater review: ‘Jesus Ride’ at Son of Semele

From the 33 biopics he's studied quite, um, religiously, writer-performer Mike Schlitt reached an inescapable conclusion about the way the story of Jesus has been portrayed on the silver screen: “The guy had father issues.”

With ample supporting evidence from movie clips ranging from camp to classic, Schlitt’s funny and slyly perceptive multimedia solo show, “Jesus Ride,” recounts his first-hand experience with the crass commercialization of theology as a roundabout way of coming to terms with father issues of his own.

 

The son of a successful TV writer, the self-described “Jew-ish” but unapologetically secular Schlitt weaves his lifelong passion for movies through an engaging narrative about his unlikely post-production job (for which he was totally unqualified) at the newly opened Sony Pictures High Definition Center. His first project at the short-lived facility involved a wooden, vacuous retelling of the New Testament for the video portion of a motion control ride installation in a religious theme park (hence the monologue’s title). 

Theater review: 'Death of a Salesman' on Broadway

The Great Recession is the unbilled star of Mike Nichols’ Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — the scene-stealing specter, invisible but ever-present, that gives the production its ferocious relevance more than 60 years after the play’s birth.

But there is a member of the official cast who is doing just as powerful a job of reclaiming the drama for a new generation. That performer is Andrew Garfield, the rising Los Angeles-born, British-raised actor who captured attention as the brooding, ethical Eduardo in “The Social Network” and whose casting as the new Peter Parker in “The Amazing Spider-Man” is likely to catapult his celebrity to intergalactic heights when the film is released this summer.

But Hollywood fame seems rather trifling when held up against the wrenching artistry of Garfield’s portrayal of Biff, elder son of Willy Loman, the protagonist of Miller’s tragedy of the common man, here played by Philip Seymour Hoffman with commanding bluntness.