OUT OF MY HEAD

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OUT OF MY HEAD

Five 20somethings work on resolving personal issues via "free group therapy" as Mechanicals Theatre Group presents Out Of My Head, Ryan Scott Oliver’s highly enjoyable “song-cycle about breakdowns and breakthroughs.”

Though technically Out Of My Head's Los Angeles Premiere, all but three of the songs come from Oliver’s Making Beautiful, which played the Powerhouse Theatre back in 2005, about the time the Pasadena native and UCLA grad moved to New York to pursue his MFA studies at NYU. Unlike Making Beautiful, however, Out Of My Head gives each character a more clearly defined storyline thanks to Kirsten Guenther’s and Oliver’s fresh new book (and several new songs).

Under Jacob Harvey’s nuanced, imaginative direction, Out Of My Head introduces Angelinos to fourteen RSO creations as performed by an all-around terrific cast.

Jeni Incontro is the The Therapist (the only character who doesn’t sing), to whose “Facing Our Issues Head-On” therapy group our quintet have come, each with different issues to face.

They are (in order of first solo):

Anna Bowen as Woman 1, a painter struggling to get her inner thoughts and feelings out of her head and onto canvas, a young woman seeking to find herself as both artist and human being.

Gary Brintz as Man 2, a “Love Killer” who’s looking for someone “smarter and funnier and better” than he is, yet so unwilling to lower his standards that he ends up cheating on the perfect woman—because of her “cankles.”

Saro Badalian as Man 1, a young gay man attempting to reconcile his religious beliefs with his sexuality, someone who hears sexual innuendos everywhere, all the while dreaming of finding a Jesus Freak who’s “hot as hell.”

Emily Clark as Woman 3, who calls herself the “Helen Keller of gaydar” for her inability to distinguish between straight and queer. Although she’d rather date “someone who’s not homosexual,” it may be easier to be rejected for being the wrong gender than for being the wrong woman.

Robyn S. Clark as Woman 2, a hypochondriac’s hypochondriac, who imagines how perfect her life would be if she could find someone who’d love her in spite of her “Overly Dramatic Ways.”

Over the course of Out Of My Head’s seventy-five minutes, these five very different young people sing their hearts out—and grow stronger and braver and more fulfilled in the process.

Song highlights include the opening ensemble number “Making Beautiful” (“I can make something out of me. I’ll show the world that I’m making beautiful.”), Anna’s “Crayon Girl” (“She said it was the neatest bird a sky had ever seen. And I said ‘Mom, it’s not a bird at all. It’s me.’”), Gary’s “Love Killer” (“I’m a love killer, cause I kill love”), Emily’s “Perfect” (“Justin, Blake, Timmy, Beau, they were perfect … and they were perfectly queer.”), Saro’s “Deny Your Creation” (“How can you deny your creation? Why put the apple there and forbid it?”), and Robyn’s “Hypochondriac Song” (“If you can catch it, then I’m sure I’ve caught it, or at least I’ve thought it.”).

“Quartet” has Emily, Gary, Robyn, and Saro revealing all their doubts and confusions about love in gorgeous four-part counterpoint. The amusingly titillating “Kama Sutra” has Saro reading from the infamous love manual as the three woman (faces hidden by feathered masks) undulate to Sydney Blair’s cleverly choreographed moves. “Some Other Way To Feel,” sung in Making Beautiful by the gay character and Woman 3, is now a duet between Men 1 and 2, thereby expressing even more effectively that love is essentially the same for us all, regardless of our sexual orientation.

By the end of the evening, Out Of My Head has allowed us to know all these characters a bit better, even as they themselves have done the same. We’ve also gotten a glimpse of songwriter Oliver’s talents, and those of the all-around terrific ensemble, each of whom couldn’t be better cast, or perform his or her role with greater finesse and pizzazz.

Ryan Cantwell provides impeccable musical direction, accompanying the cast on offstage piano with help from Brian Boyce on drums.

Maxwell T. Robin has designed a splendid therapist’s office set which looks great on the Pico Playhouse stage, especially as lit by the oh-so talented Ric Zimmerman. Cantwell gets additional snaps for his excellent sound design. Kudos too to costume consultants Kathie Urban and Alexander Cole Gottlieb. Out Of My Head is produced by Courtney Bell. Sabba Rahbar is stage manager.

If I have any gripe with Out Of My Head, it’s with its choice of setting. Since there’s nothing intrinsically Big Apple-esque about its characters or songs, why not set it here in L.A., particularly since it was originally written here, by an Angelino no less, and is being performed in Los Angeles by an L.A. theater company? Robin’s excellent projections could just as easily have shown the Los Angeles skyline as Manhattan’s, so why not?

Other than this minor caveat, I heartily recommend Out Of My Head as an introduction to Ryan Scott Oliver’s clever songs, and to some particularly talented young triple-threats, most or all of whom may be new to you, but certainly won’t be for long.

Pico Playhouse, 10508 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. Through August 21. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 7:00. Reservations:
www.mechanicalstheatregroup.com
--Steven Stanley
July 29, 2011
Photos: Matthew Murphy www.MurphyMade.com

A MEMORY OF TWO MONDAYS

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A MEMORY OF TWO MONDAYS

“Attention must be paid to such a person,” declares Linda Loman at the end of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece Death Of A Salesman, eulogizing a husband who woke up one morning to find that the thirty-four years he’d spent as a traveling salesman had been for naught.

Six years later, Miller paid attention to similar lives of fruitless drudgery in A Memory Of Two Mondays, now being given a rare revival at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Group Theatre. Just as their intimate staging of Miller’s All My Sons last year demonstrated the Ruskin’s expertise at bringing the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright to 21st Century life, so does the sure hand of director Amelia Mulkey make this return to Miller territory an unforgettable one.

A Memory Of Two Mondays’ protagonist is a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old Miller stand-in named Bert (Lane Compton), a young man who, just as the playwright himself did in the early 1930s, has taken a job to set aside money for college. A young man with big dreams, Bert toils in the shipping room of a large auto-parts warehouse at the height of the Great Depression, a period during which he and his coworkers were among the 75% of Americans lucky enough to have a job, no matter how exhausting, boring, and unpleasant it might be.

As its title suggests, A Memory Of Two Mondays takes place on a pair of Mondays, the first the stiflingly hot summer day Adolph Hitler took power in Germany (though only Bert is world-aware enough to know this), the second the bleak winter morning that Bert, about to start his college studies, bids adieu to the friends he has made there. Never without a copy of the day’s New York Times or Tolstoy’s War And Peace, Burt subsists on four dollars a week of his fifteen dollar weekly salary (still only $250 in today’s currency), saving the rest for the higher education he knows is his way up in the world.

There is no way up or out for other men and women working beside him day-in day-out for little or no reward, not for Larry (Jason Paul Field) or for Tom (Conor Walshe) or for Raymond (Gregory G. Giles) or for Gus (Richard Leighton). Newcomer Kenneth (Nick Cimiluca) may still have an Irishman’s stars in his eyes, singing folk songs and quoting from Walt Whitman, but not for long, his spirit too about to be crushed by daily drudgery and a newfound love of “the drinkin’.”

Over the course of the titular Mondays (and a seventy-five minute running time), Miller offers us a slice of these workers’ lives, and though not much “happens” plot-wise to the majority of them, the effect of spending time as flies on a warehouse wall leaves the audience impacted and moved by the experience.

Larry has bought a car he can’t afford because he’s “approaching forty” and “What am I going to be careful for?”, though this means that should one of his kids gets sick, “I’ll be strapped.” Tom arrives at work so drunk he is literally catatonic, and although a scene in which his coworkers conspire to make it look like he’s busy at his desk could fit right into a 1950s sitcom, it is no less heartbreaking for making us laugh. Raymond may have the title “foreman,” but that doesn’t mean his life is any more fulfilling than the others’. As for Gus, the Eastern European immigrant’s good-humored wisecracks may well camouflage the burnout of a man who has slaved for twenty-two years, and for what?

A Memory Of Two Mondays’ large cast of characters is completed by spinster receptionist Agnes (Lynn Wanlass), pretty secretary Patricia (Julia McIlvaine), 70something Jim (Paul Denk), shipping clerk Frank (Jeison Azali), drinking buddies Jerry (Timothy George Connolly) and Willy (Val Masouris), a mechanic (Hamilton Matthews), and warehouse owner Mr. Eagle (Billy Ensley).

Though Arthur Miller is working on a smaller scale than usual this time around, the impact of this mere hour and fifteen minutes of Miller is a powerful one. However brief our glimpses into these lives of quiet desperation might be, each character leaves his or her impression. Our hearts ache for those who remain trapped, and particularly for those whose decline we observe over the space of only a few months, and yet we rejoice in knowing that Miller’s surrogate, like the playwright, may well be making his escape to greatness.

An abrupt midstream shift into memory play territory, one which has Bert suddenly breaking the fourth wall, is about the only awkwardness in an otherwise impeccably written and constructed script, and at the Ruskin there is truly not a weak link in the cast of fourteen, making it one of the finest dramatic ensembles you’re likely to see all year, Field, Giles, recent USC grad McIlvaine, and Wanlass making particularly strong impressions.

Still, a quartet of performances stand out highest among the crowd.

Compton is absolute perfection as Bert, investing the character with such All-American goodness, heart, and charm as to win over even the hardest-hearted audience member. Cimiluca, one of L.A.’s most dynamic young actors, continues a string of terrific performances with a rich and heartbreaking turn as a man whose optimistic flame burns out right before our eyes. Walshe, whose Irish brogue is the one he grew up with, takes a character whose boozy stupor might end up cartoonish in lesser hands, and makes it painfully real, as is his later transformation into honest-to-goodness functioning human being. Finally, there is the towering work of Leighton, a seasoned actor who so disappears into Gus’s worn-out, worn-down (yet still feisty skin) that it seems less a performance than a simple yet highly complex act of being.

Mike Reilly’s lighting design does more than just illuminate Cliff Wagner’s impressively detailed set, it ups the dramatic impact scene after scene. (That the Ruskin Theatre was once a Santa Monica Airport hangar makes Wagner’s set even more believable.) Kudos go too to Lola Kelly’s period costumes, Christopher Richard’s original score and Karen Landry’s scenic painting. An anachronistic coiled phone cord and Patricia’s too short skirts are minor design flaws. Nicole Millar is stage manager and McIlvaine assistant director. A Memory Of Two Mondays is produced by Mikey Myers and Reilly.

No production of A Memory Of Two Mondays, no matter how great, will ever earn it a spot on a list of Arthur Miller’s Greatest Hits. Those will will remain Death Of A Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible, and A View From The Bridge. Still, this largely forgotten gem is no less a treat for being minor Miller. Like other fans of the greatest American playwright of the 20th Century, I’ll take minor Arthur Miller over major Anyone Else any day.

Ruskin Group Theatre, 3000 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica. Through August 14. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00, Sundays at 2:00. Reservations: 310 397-3244
www.ruskingrouptheatre.com
--Steven Stanley
June 12, 2011
Photos: Agnes Magyari

CHICAGO

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CHICAGO

Just the thought of a community theater trying its hand at the Broadway megahit Chicago is probably enough to send most Kander and Ebb lovers scurrying in the opposite direction, that is unless the community theater in question is Santa Monica’s venerable Morgan-Wixson. As their productions of Urinetown: A Musical, A Chorus Line, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee have demonstrated, the folks at the Morgan-Wixson are more than capable of staging quality musical theater on a tight budget—without the benefit of Equity performers, blessed as they are with directors, designers, and technical staff who know their stuff, and the talent pool of an area as crowded with triple-threats as is Los Angeles.

While the Morgan-Wixson’s Chicago isn’t what you’ll see on Broadway (where the 1996 revival has now surpassed 6000 performances in its fifteenth year), it is nonetheless quite a show, and with tickets running about one-fifth of what it would cost to see the show in New York, one well worth seeing.

Though the Morgan-Wixson production reflects changes brought to the ’96 revival by its director Walter Bobbie, Chicago’s story and songs are the same as those which first thrilled Broadway audiences over thirty-five years ago.

It’s late 1920s Chicago, and vaudeville performer Velma Kelly (Krystal J. Combs) is awaiting trial for allegedly murdering her husband and sister, whom she caught canoodling in bed. Blonde vixen Velma is soon joined in the slammer by ditzy chorine Roxie Hart (Ayelet Firstenberg), accused of murdering her paramour following a lovers’ quarrel. Though guilty as sin, Roxie convinces her patsy husband Amos (Steve Hall) that the man she shot to death was a burglar, and Amos agrees to take the blame for her crime. When slow-witted Amos finally puts two plus two together, he vows to leave his murderous spouse to fend for herself in jail. Roxie is arrested and sent to the Cook County Jail where Velma and a bevy of unrepentant murderesses await their day in court. Roxie soon learns that her only hope of acquittal is defense attorney Billy Flynn (Kevin Yarbrough), a flashy hotshot with a perfect track record for getting his clients off scot-free. News that Billy has taken on Roxie’s case doesn’t sit well with his other client Velma, who refuses share the spotlight with anyone, let alone a nobody like Roxie.

Completing the cast of principals are Matron “Be Good To Mama” Morton (Valerie Rachelle), ever willing to help a nubile inmate in exchange for sexual favors, and sob sister crime reporter Mary Sunshine (V. Perez), a woman who believes that every accused murderess has “a bit of good” in her, and takes it upon herself to make sure that Chicagoans’ sympathies remain firmly with Roxie Hart.

Though Roxie’s story (based on real-life 1924 Chicago hubby-killer Beulah Annan) has been around since Maurine Dallas Watkins’s 1926 play Chicago and the 1942 movie hit Roxie Hart, with Ginger Rogers in the title role, it took book writers Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse to come up with Chicago The Musical’s inspired concept—to stage Roxie’s (and Velma’s) stories as a vaudeville show, with precisely the kind of musical numbers that the two vaudevillians themselves would have performed. It’s no wonder, then, that composer John Kander’s and lyricist Ebb’s songs make for one big, brassy production number after another, with song after song now part of our musical theater lexicon: “All That Jazz,” “Cell Block Tango,” “When You're Good to Mama,” “Roxie,” “My Own Best Friend,” “Mr. Cellophane,” “Razzle Dazzle,” “Class,” “Nowadays,” and more.

From the moment the sensational Combs and cast launch into “All That Jazz,” executing (choreographer) Combs’ Fosse-inspired moves with precision and pizzazz, you know you’re going to be in for one heck of a show. A savvy Combs is an expert at creating steps that make her ensemble of dancers and “movers” look like Broadway performers without making demands that only professional dancers could meet. And boy do the “amateurs” on stage at the Morgan-Wixson look darned close to pros, from that dazzling opener to “We Both Reach For The Gun” to “Razzle Dazzle.”

Director/musical director Anne Gesling has been staging productions at the Morgan-Wixson for twenty-five years now, and her experience and talent shine in Chicago, the current production taking its inspiration from both the 1975 original and the ’96 revival but not afraid to try something new.

As for the show’s two leads, Combs and Firstenberg couldn’t be more different, and the production is all the better for their lack of interchangeability. Eschewing the girl-next-doorness of her 2009 turn as (Thoroughly Modern) Millie, Combs is all poise, glamour, and panache, while Firstenberg plays Roxie with a goofy, gauche charm that startles at first and then seems absolutely right for the two-bit chorus girl turned fifteen-minutes-of-fame celebrity. Combs is particularly dazzling in “I Can’t Do It Alone,” which has her singing/dancing two parts at once, while Firstenberg is at her daffy best as a human ventriloquist’s dummy in “We Both Reach For the Gun.” Together, in “My Own Best Friend” and “Nowadays,” the duo make for a perfectly (mis)matched team—and earn deserved cheers.

Yarbrough proves a terrific showman as Billy Flynn, showing off first-rate song-and-dance skills in “All I Care About Is Love” and other numbers. The oh-so-talented Rachelle has great fun as prison matron Mama Morton, Act Two’s “Class” making for a hilarious duet with Combs. Perez is a deliciously campy Mary Sunshine showing off a gorgeous legit soprano in the operetta-spoofing “A Little Bit Of Good.” Hall’s take on Roxie’s patsy of a hubby makes him a much realer Amos than usual, and his rendition of “Mr. Cellophane” is particularly touching for it.

Making “Cell Block Tango” (aka “He Had It Coming”) every bit the show-stopper that it’s meant to be are Heather Biede (Annie), Holly Childers (Mona), Combs, Camden Gonzales (June), Michele McRae (Liz), and understudy Ashley Ann Stephens (Hunyak).

Among the ensemble, assistant choreographer Jonathon Saia does striking work as all six murder victims in “Cell Block Tango,” as dance soloist in “A Tap Dance,” and as each-and-every juror in Roxie’s trial, and deserves to be given an individual bow at curtain calls. Jayson Puls (Aaron) is another dance standout, and Brandon Stanford (Fred Casely), Marc Ostroff (Sergeant Fogerty), Brittany Vaughn (Go-To-Hell Kitty), and Deosick Burney (Martin Harrison) do very well in supporting and cameo roles. Brad Combs is a fine Master Of Ceremonies, though his live piano playing throughout the show is overpowered by prerecorded tracks to the point of inaudibility.

Completing the all-around first-rate ensemble are Steven Flowers (Tailor), Danielle Miller, Danielle Morris, Marc Ostroff (Sgt. Fogarty), Alex Pierdant (Bailiff), Laura Wennstrom Sheehan, and Steve Weber (Judge).

Thomas A. Brown’s multi-level, multi-purpose set design serves Gesling’s vision well, a center section popping out when more specific locations (bedrooms, police headquarters, Mama’s digs, etc.) are needed. Rodney Munoz’s costumes belie budget limitations, particularly with Busby Berkeley-ready feathered fans for “All I Care About Is Love,” and Vegas-ready plumed tails for “Razzle Dazzle.” William Wilday’s vivid, colorful lighting works wonders on Brown’s set and Munoz’s costumes.

Larry Gesling is stage manager, assisted by Courtland Budd and cast member Pierdant. Chicago is produced by Adrienne and Jessica Breslow.

Now that rights to Chicago are finally being released to theaters across the country, there may be justifiable concern that not all will be up to the musical’s considerable challenges. In a production they have been waiting years to stage, the talented folks at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre face these challenges head-on and pass the test with flying colors.

Morgan-Wixson Theatre, 2627 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica.
www.morgan-wixson.org
--Steven Stanley
June 25, 2011
Photos: Joel Castro