5.

Q: How many non-union stagehands does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to hold it and the other to hammer it in.

4.

A theatrical agent is walking down Broadway late one night when he runs into the Devil.

“Let’s do a deal,” says the Devil. “I’ll make the next of every one of your clients a smash hits, your fees will double and you’ll have the pick of any chorus boy or girl you want.”

“Well,” says the publicist, “what do I have to do in return?”

“Well, all you have to do is give me your soul and the souls of your children.”

“Wait a minute,” the agent says cautiously, “What’s the catch?”

3.

A lead Broadway producer gathers his investors for a meeting.

“First of all,” he tells him, “We’ve got Menzel in the lead.”

The investors are overjoyed: “You got Idina Menzel?”

“Well, no,” the Producer responds, “we got Marlena Menzel. She’s done a lot of stock. And she’ll be great opposite LuPone.”

“You got Patti LuPone?”

“No, it’s Frank LuPone. He was the king of Milwaukee theater in the 50s. But,” he says enthusiastically, ” we’ve got Streisand and in a singing role.”

“Barbara Streisand returning to Broadway?”

“No, Becky Streisand.” The Producer responds. “But she’s done everything in dinner theater. She’s flexible. And we round out that cast wtih Goulet.”

“You got Robert Goulet?” asks the investors.

“Yeah,” the producer says, “we got Robert Goulet.”

And everything being relative, it wasn’t bad. An even dozen was my count at Theatre Asylum earlier in the evening when I started my Fringe binge with Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth – although three of us were from Engine28.com.

I didn’t take a survey, but I would be surprised if there was anyone in the audience who wasn’t either a theater writer or a theater artist, other than friends and family of the cast and director. Fifteen minutes into the performance, all I was thinking was, “Who are they doing this for?”

After all, this particular Shepard one-act – an absurdist rock-and-roll shouting match about a pair of crazed vagrants that features a Lobster Man dressed in a red tux and oven-mitt “claws” – would be a tough sell even if you weren’t choosing among 100-plus shows at the Fringe. And, more to the point, even if it were a good performance.

Not that I haven’t seen worse. Actors Justin O’Neill and Claire Kaplan (the two non-crustaceans) have some chops, but it takes extraordinary talent to make such a confrontational piece of theater connect with an audience. This production, the debut of the startup Hungry River Theatre Company, looks more like acting-school scene work – although if it were, I’m sure it would get an A.

Yet, while it is all too easy for a jaded theater critic to pooh-pooh some of the fringier shows at the Fringe, I have to remind myself the audience question cuts more ways than one.

To put it bluntly: I almost didn’t bother to write up this blog post, because I’m pretty sure it, too, will have an audience of about 12, if you don’t count colleagues, friends and family.

As a reporter for a major metro daily, The Arizona Republic, I have thousands of readers every week in the Sunday arts section. But as everyone knows, the newspaper business is on life support – it has been a terminal patient ever since Craigslist took away our top source of revenue, classified ads. So for the past decade, my industry has been scrambling to figure out how to remain relevant and solvent in the digital age. And out here on the Internet frontier, it’s a lot harder to find readers and connect with them.

That is what Engine28, a one-week experiment in “pop-up” journalism has been all about. We haven’t had time yet to decide what worked, what didn’t and what lessons we all will take from it. But the experience has certainly heightened my focus on the No. 1 question: Who am I doing this for?

Take the LA-based comedy trio Sound & Fury’s Spaceship Man, a simply ghastly 70 minutes of self-indulgence that makes water-boarding look like a viable option. And consider that, with fringe shows set in alternative spaces, that can mean there is no escape for the desperate theater-leaver–except right across the stage in the middle of the performance. If you’re the polite type, then you are trapped. So be forewarned.

The publicity for the show claims it’s a sci-fi spoof “ in the signature Sound & Fury style: Vaudeville-Nouveau! Full of song, silliness and sex…ual innuendo!” If only.

It’s interesting to note that the critical raves cited in the group’s publicity come solely from Canadian, British or Australian news sources, which might indicate that S&F can’t buy a thrill where American critics are concerned. Add me to that list.

What poses as broad Python-esque—or maybe Beyond the Fringe-like—humor gets short-circuited early on and devolves quickly into a witless search for meaning within a dopily structured scenario based somewhat on the geeky clichés of Star Trek, Dr.Who, etc.

You keep praying for the end, but it never comes, as the individual players return, time and again, to deliver windy, soul-sucking speeches.

The good news is that the June 19th, 11 p.m., performance at Artworks Theatre & Studio, 6569 Santa Monica Blvd., was the group’s swansong with this piece. On to something better, mates. Anything, really.

Cowboy Mouth, written by Sam Shepard with assistance from Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel in NYC in 1971, presents their love affair writ in metaphor in a one-act play that rocks, or in this case, should rock.

Slim (Shepard character) is obsessively drawn to Cavale (Smith character), who hijacks his secret fantasy of wanting to be a Rock ‘n Roll Jesus, and tries to force it on him. She has worshipped at the altars of Jagger and Dylan, and argues that Slim must step up to the plate:

“People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth.”

Justin O’Neill and Claire Kaplan, directed by Samuel Hunter, give it a good go in Hungry River Company’s suitably ultra low budget fringe production. However,  a less act-y performance — brought down a notch and more off-hand– would serve them well.

Cowboy Mouth requires an actor in the Slim role who is not only a hunk, but who can work rock & roll magic with a guitar. O’Neill falls short in the second category.

Spencer Howard’s Lobster Man is a nice piece of work. A combo of theater of the absurd, deus ex machina, and substi-rock god, Lobster Man provides the mechanism that will allow Slim to break free.

At Theatre Asylum on spunky Theater Row, Santa Monica Blvd.

But the Prohibition era, New Orleans-set permutation of Oliver Twist actually has been in development since the ‘90s. Back then, I caught a promising fully staged version at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia and was intrigued to see how it has evolved, now under the directorial/choreographic supervision of Debbie Allen.

Unfortunately, I’ll be leaving L.A. before the June 28 opening. With the permission from the Playhouse management, though, I’m breaking the usual critical rule of not commenting on a show in previews. (Unless it’s Spider-man, but that’s another story).

Because changes will continue to be incorporated through the opening, I’ll refrain from a full review and, instead, offer a notebook full of thoughts for a production with enormous audience appeal and potential for a long, healthy life.
Spoiler warning: Plot details are revealed in the following.

Act I

Not only does the rousing opener, “Back by Demand,” kick things off in high tap-dancing style, it also nicely sets key plot points and sends the clear message that, while there will be elements we remember from Oliver Twist and/or the musical Oliver!, there will be key differences as well. And terrific dance.

The charming Alaman Diadhiou, in the title role as an orphan child of a white woman and an African-American dancer, gets a strong entrance.

“Meat on the Bones” (one of the tunes I remember from the Philly production) nicely fuses the spirit of Annie’s “It’s the Hard-knock Life” with “Food Glorious Food” from Oliver! Again, smart choices, appealing performances, and terrific dancing/choreography.

Twist’s first number, “I Have a Soul,” is well performed, but the sentiments are too generically ambitious. Oliver
Twist’s appeal came in large part from his meekness. When a character arrives so fully enlightened, where is there to go?

Cleavant Derricks (from Broadway’s Dreamgirls and Big Deal) creates a strong character and is in great voice as funeral home director Crazah Chesterfield, but how necessary is the role?

A challenge of the piece is keeping it close enough, but not too close, to Oliver! And there are some smart adaption moves displayed here. Instead of a Bill Sikes character, we get Twist’s evil uncle Lucius. The Fagin character is now the handsome—but conflictedly criminal Boston—who has a relationship with Della (think Nancy), a woman who knows the secrets of Twist’s background.

Intermission

An irate woman demands to know what’s being done about the long ladies room line. “For $10 million,” deadpans the usher, “We’ll renovate the whole building.”

Act II

With a judge doing shtick out of the Dean Martin Show playbook, another too-focused, Annie-like song by our kid hero (“gonna change the world/for every boy and girl”), and a drama-deadening chorus of unlikely supporters (“One day you’ll be/makin’ history”), an anything-goes courtroom scene destroys the tone built in the first act. And why end the scene with Twist being carried by his new benefactor when he isn’t tired or ill?

Twist gets his first look at photos of his late father and feels a connection without knowing who the man is. The father’s spirit appears and it looks like we are heading toward what could be a beautiful and powerful duet dance. But then the spirits of Al Jolson and Josephine Baker show up and the scene isn’t only ruined, it’s made vulgar (and I mean that in a ‘lacking good taste’ way).

We don’t get the equivalent of the Oliver! co-dependent classic “As Long as He Needs Me” in Twist. But in the desire to make Della strong, her willingness to go along with Boston’s plan to kidnap Twist is difficult to buy.

Tamyra Gray

Tamyra Gray exercises her American Idol-trained skills with Twist’s anthem “Reach for the Sky.” But an inspirational song loses dramatic impact if it’s being sung to someone already inspired. And too much is going on too quickly for what seems to be intended as a “You’ll Never Walk Alone” ending.

Smart, smart move to turn the curtain call into a killer tap number.

Just remember: Any or all of this could change by opening night.

The Pasadena Playhouse presents Twist, through July 17. Book by William F. Brown and Tina Tippit, lyrics by Tena Clark, music by Tena Clark and Gary Prim, directed by Debbie Allen. Details at www.pasadenaplayhouse.org.

Graham Skipper as Herbert West in Re-Animator: The Musical. Photo by Thomas Hargis.

Last night, I witnessed a beheading, a few murders and a couple of accidental deaths.  Bloody entrails, too, including an unraveled intestine that squirted blood all over me. I never believed these gory acts were real (though I do hope the fake blood will come out of my clothes).  Still, I won’t soon forget seeing Re-Animator:  The Musical.

I didn’t unconditionally love Re-Animator, but I left feeling a bit like a proud parent.   Re-Animator (based on the H.P. Lovecraft camp horror film and playing through mid-August at the Steve Allen Theater) delights in a dramatic aesthetic gaining traction lately, in which awkward stunts, hodge-podge set-pieces and a deliberate desire to expose a show’s nuts and bolts supplant slick production and superficial dazzle.  Provided there’s a strong script and cast, an earnest and contagious “We put this show together for you!” vibe emanates from the stage.  At a time when Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the Broadway musical most determined to wow, has failed to impress many viewers despite all its bells and whistles, small- scale, DIY-style  shows –like Re-Animator, and in New York, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and the recent off-Broadway triumph Peter and the Starcatcher–connect with audiences.

“The audience likes to be put to work, to have their imaginations involved,” says Stuart Gordon, Re-Animator’s director.  “If you do all the work for them, theater becomes a passive experience.”  Doing that “work” requires money, a resource these shows often lack, forcing creative homemade alternatives to fancy props and effects. The Steve Allen’s director Amit Itelman, who was intimately involved in Re-Animator’s development, calls it “making stuff on stage in front of people.” That should be the essence of all theater. “You don’t need realism onstage. We’re playing make believe. Seeing artists try to make something obviously beyond their means. The attempt to pull that off is what’s exciting.”

The cast of Peter and the Starcatcher. Photo courtesy of New York Theater Workshop.

When Spider-Man asks audiences to believe its hero is flying, the fat wires that hoist him above the seats interfere with suspension of disbelief. But in Starcatcher, when Peter falls into the ocean, his cast-mates explicitly hoist him up and buttress his body as the waves would—an effect far more primitive, but more visibly genuine to an audience as well.  In Re-Animator, when a reanimated corpse attacks an actor, that actor chokes himself with the corpse’s stuffed hand. The passionate intent is what matters and ultimately provides a moment of charm, humor or absurdity. “Some of the best sets I’ve seen are made of cardboard,” Itelman says. “It’s about connecting with the performer and the energy of the point of view.”

But precisely because a DIY show exposes its weaknesses, certain skills matter more than in the typical Broadway production. The less tangible elements of the show–unity of vision, character development, even the quality of the score in a musical—cannot falter. Bloody Bloody’s spot-on emo score and charismatic lead allow its audience to appreciate all the more the frantic cast playing multiple roles.  Re-Animator’s  score cleverly references Sondheim, Gilbert and Sullivan and Wagner, but the consistent tongue-in-cheek  tone means listeners won’t confuse parody and self-conscious pastiche.

As Itelman notes, “The point isn’t the wow.” It’s an intimate and genuine connection with the audience. “You’ve fallen in love, so it doesn’t matter if you see the strings.”

Re-Animator: The Musical. Steve Allen Theater. Fri., Sat. and Sun. at 8, through Aug. 14.  800-595-4849. $30.

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The Last Five Years, Hollywood Fringe Festival. Through June 24.

Eventually, the plans of a grown-up Sinclair do include the man she calls Dadio. And after her Hollywood Fringe Festival debut, she has much bigger aspirations for him and the whole family: She dreams of taking her own-woman show and its characters to the New York stage, and eventually back to Hollywood — this time in the form of movie script.

Far-fetched? Possibly. But that’s just how it happened for now-famous Greek bride Nia Vardalos, Sinclair pointed out, when I talked with her about possibilities that may await after the Fringe.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yOqkuDreRA&version=3&hl=en_US]

Born Again Bohemian. Written & Performed by Summer “Rain” Sinclair and directed by Debra De Liso. Hollywood Fringe Festival.  8 p.m. Thursday, June 23 and Friday, June 24; 3 p.m. Sunday, June 26.

Inspired by the experience of playwright/director Aristides Vargas’ brother, a political prisoner of the Argentine dictatorship, La Razon Blindada (“Armored Reason”) is an extraordinary meditation on the endurance of human creativity in the face of hopelessness.

In Rawson prison, a desolate Patagonian pen where the government stashed anyone who dared question the status quo, inmates were kept in solitary confinement for all but a single hour each Sunday, when they were allowed to speak to another inmate so long as they remained seated. If they stood, they would be shot. How did the prisoners use their hour? While some plotted escape (there were two attempts, both unsuccessful), others told stories, allowing their imaginations to carry them beyond the confines of the prison.

In Vargas’ play, two prisoners, De La Mancha (Jesus Castaños Chima) and Panza (Tony Duran), perform a tale inspired by Don Quixote, a free-flowing fantasy overflowing with sly wordplay, rapturous fancy and obscene humor. They remain seated throughout, planted in wooden chairs on casters, and as they talk they roll wildly around the stage, conveying both the claustrophobic confines of the prison and the freedom of creation. Their reverie is periodically interrupted by terror, as the guards walk past and the prisoners freeze, silent and afraid.

Vargas’ script is as funny as it is distressing. Panza’s long comic riff on the sad life of dogs, whom we call our best friends but force to sniff out our bombs and drugs with no more thanks than a pat on the head, had me in fits, and the moment it stopped I felt nothing but the prisoners’ panic.

The 24th Street Theatre wisely chose to present the show in Spanish with English supertitles. The theater’s executive director, Jay McAdams, told me that 24th street used to produce shows exclusively in Spanish or English, which created segregated audiences that have been brought together by the addition of projected translations. I’ve been thinking a lot about supertitles lately, and while I think the ones in La Razon Blindada work quite well, like all the ones I’ve seen, they could have been better.

Even if I spoke no Spanish whatsoever and there were no translations, I would be impressed by this production. Castaños Chima and Duran are such ebullient and present performers that the emotional core of the play would come across regardless. Vargas opted to translate only about three quarters of the script, leaving out much of the profanity and some of the more baroque puns. This worked well; there are a lot of words that are funnier spoken than read, and they would only provide visual clutter.

The supertitles are two lines long in quite large type, projected just above the performers’ heads, and so are very easy to read. Some line breaks were not well chosen,  leaving readers hanging on a preposition. Some translations were over-literal, diminishing the lyrical beauty of Vargas’ prose. All things considered, though, 24th Street’s supertitle work makes a good model for other theaters hoping to produce bilingual theater.

La Razón Blindada, 24th Street Theater. 8 pm Saturdays through June 25. $15-$24.

Jennifer Jajeh, the first-generation Palestinian-American behind the one-woman show, "I Heart Hamas: And Ohther Things I'm Afraid to Tell You," running June 20, 21 and 25 at Theatre Asylum during Hollywood Fringe.

Theatre Communications Group went bold when it scheduled Mona Eltahawy to open its 50th annual conference, which closed Saturday in Los Angeles. 

The Egyptian-American columnist is a mainstay read for those following the tectonic shifts of Middle East nations beyond the headlines. But for theater professionals? It’s safe to say more than one head was scratched at the sight of her name on the schedule.

But Eltahawy’s seeming irrelevance to theater and arts was allayed in short order during her Thursday keynote address. That’s when, almost by checklist, she introduced a roster of artists beloved to Arab Spring shock troops, but new to Americans unaccustomed to art birthing revolution. 

Even if conference goers had no intention of looking up 19-year-old Alexandrian graffiti artist Aya Tarek, Egyptian rapper Ramy Donjewan, or any other Middle East artist Eltahawy accorded high hosannas, they could perhaps relate to her over-arching message of art’s role in reshaping the world. 

“There’s a reason the artist uses the stage,” she told conference attendees at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “It’s because the artist can kick the dictator off that stage and say, ‘I live here, now.’”

The bulk of TCG conference attendees may be gone, but there remain at least two theater productions on tap with Middle East themes at the fore for those foraging the Hollywood Fringe, ending June 26, and beyond. Both are one woman-shows, detonating the accepted myth of Middle East or Islsamic women as subservient voices. 

First is Zehra Fazal’s Headscarf and the Angry Bitch, a solo show at Theatre Asylum, 6320 Santa Monica Blvd. Raised Muslim in a South Asian family, Fazal’s show has garnered more than its share of attention. Winner of Best Solo-Performance award at the 2009 Capital Fringe festival, D.C. altweekly City Paper raved that, “The future of American-Islamic relations could hinge on this one-woman show.” Remaining performance times are June 19, 4 p.m.; June 22, 8:30 p.m.; June 23, 7 p.m. and June 25, 1 and 8:30 p.m. 

Also on tap is Jennifer Jajeh’s I Heart Hamas: And Other Things I’m Afraid to Tell You. Unlike Fazal, Jajeh is Christian, but just as promising in her polemic. If the clips available for view on the Hollywood Fringe site reveal a show heavy on monologues that mock American ignorance of Middle East culture, the possibility of Jajeh venturing toward the contentious topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict tantalizes. Remaining performances at Theatre Asylum are June 20, 7 p.m.; June 21, 7 p.m. and June 25, 12:30 p.m.

LA’s got the big-time comedy thing going–Groundlings, ImprovOlympic, Second City, etc. Places like that can break big-time careers. More modest in scope is Cold Tofu, an improv troupe that features a cast of exclusively Asian Americans.

My brother, Steve Brady, is the company’s sole Caucasian, a comedy writer and commercial actor who keeps up his stage chops in appearances with Cold Tofu once a month. So, since I’m here in LA ,covering TCG, RADAR, Hollywood Fringe, etc., it seemed appropriate that I check out the company’s show on Saturday, June 18, at one of their semi-regular venues, the Maryknoll Japanese Catholic Center (222 S. Hewitt Street). Steve’s been in LA for years with mixed success—such is life for actors—but now I had a chance to finally check him out in his LA element.

I hadn’t seen him on stage for years. We both thought the show went all right. Afterwards Steve gave me his personal walking tour of Little Tokyo, which seems to be, ironically, becoming gentrified by Caucasian interests. We passed on an op to sample mochi ice cream, but grabbed some chicken soup (big bowl, big spoon, big flavor!), had a drink at Weiland’s, and finished off the evening cruising past REDCAT for the closing night RADAR LA party. There were people there, but clearly the heart of the evening had been passed by.

Touching down with my brother is always a good thing. But despite the nice little wrinkle of seeing him on stage in LA, the evening’s highlight was sipping whiskey with him at the bar, where we got a chance to talk a little of family and a lot more about life in LaLaLand. We’re the two knuckleheads out of a family of eight children who made the decision to pursue careers in the arts. We share much, Steve and me.

Hark! The Ghost of Franzen! Spring Awakening produced by Lonesome No More!

Back when the musical version of Spring Awakening was still finding it’s footing on Broadway, author Jonathan Franzen published a new translation of Frank Wedekind’s original 1891 German play. In his introduction to the 2007 volume, Franzen excoriates the musical adaptation, calling it “insipid,” “overpraised,” and sullied by “a dense modern fog of sentimentality and bad faith” (the introduction is excerpted in this Huffington Post article).

The Hollywood Fringe festival currently features a staging of Franzen’s translation by the Lonesome No More! theater company, allowing interested fans to compare and contrast the straight play to the musical. Having taken in a performance on Friday, I’d say that, frankly, Franzen doesn’t get it. And this is coming from someone just 3 years younger than the celebrated author not 30.

Putting on Moritz: Too much charisma?

Missing from Franzen’s bitching about “commercial culture” is any consideration of form, not just content, and the emotional impact the musical has that the straight play can only aspire to. Franzen complains that Moritz is transformed into a charismatic rocker, but ignores the despair that is so viscerally expressed in songs like “The Bitch of Living” and echoed by Melchior later in the rollicking “Totally Fucked.” And Martha’s abuse may not be roundly envied in the musical, but who can deny the insistent carnality that saturates the haunting “Dark I Know Well?” And the swirl of teenage sexuality – profane, silly, overwrought and all-encompassing – finds voice in a whole series of songs (“The Word of Your Body,” “My Junk,” “Touch Me”) that Franzen might find reductive but that effectively embeds itself in your brain along with Duncan Sheik’s powerful melodies.

This is not meant to demean the current Fringe festival offering in any way. The production expands the boundaries of the simple black box in innovative ways, particularly in the addition of a peakapoo backstage area where some of the show’s action plays out. Directors Dana Murphy and Patrick Riley have instructed their actors to spit out most their dialogue with near-frenetic intensity, adding a layer of angst on top of the text. The performances, particularly Jennifer Allcott’s assertive Wendla, are first-rate, and the masks (designed by Lori Petermann) that set the adult characters from the youngsters lend a spooky surreality.

The play falls short of the musical in other ways. For instance, it minimizes the victimization that the children feel at the hands of the adults, making the schoolmasters and parents seem just ridiculous compared to the callous and malicious characters in the musical. And certainly, the musical soft-peddles Wendla’s masochism where the play pushes it front and center. But arguments about plot points and subtleties of focus overlook the main difference between Franzen’s play and the Broadway production – the songs. And it’s those songs that give Spring Awakening a vitality that cannot be diminished by the cranky grumblings of an author, regardless of his literary stature.

The accustomed electronic model of the Pod F. Tompkast. The show was rendered live Saturday night at Largo.

Join us as we return to the thrilling days of yesternight! Paul F. Tompkins is on the air!

Or, as the articulate indie-age interlocutor puts it himself, “It is once more nighttime on the internet.”

Paul F. Tompkins isn’t the sort of measured performer treasured by golden age radio producers. His material is manic: contemplative one minute, riotous the next. Laughter spikes at unexpected moments, which would drive old-school audio engineers nuts. A Tompkins joke can fester like a bacterial infection, slowly coursing through your system until it paralyzes you. He himself is not immune, cracking himself up on a frequent basis.

Yet there he sat calmly onstage Saturday night at the Coronet Theatre, poised behind a desk ornamented with big microphones, for a first-time live taping of his monthly Pod F. Tompkast. Tompkins was dressed in quasi-military attire, which in tandem with his trim mustache and clenched-eyebrow glare made him resemble a cross between a British World War I officer and Mr. McFeely from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

“You can’t see it,” he shared, “but I just hit my knees.”

The Pod F. Tompkast is a vortex of several new theater forms, all of which have been around for eons. It’s his combination that’s fresh: golden age radio clichés, talk-show tropes and settled comedic commentary archly laid before the certified hipsters of Largo at the Coronet. He’s shifted his online act into a club which itself shifted locations from a cramped cabaret space to its current theater digs (with outlying bars and lounges) a few years ago.

Tompkins’ resume covers sketch comedy (including the plum postmodern credit of being an actor/writer on HBO’s alt-comedy milestone Mr. Show), cartoon voices and celebrity impersonations, stand-up specials, a double act (with the late Rick Roman), hosting duties (for VH-1’s Best Week Ever), straight acting (There Will Be Blood) and amiable chat-show guesting. He brings all those talents into play on his podcast. The Pod F. Tompkast also relates to some live Largo comedy-and-music revues Tompkins has hosted.

A natural improviser and rambler, Tompkins’ show attempts to be more than the single-voice ramble that this no-longer-newfangled media format has largely settled into. In adding music, guests, sketches and an air of decorum (we won’t go so far to say class), Tompkins sets a high personal standard for his broadcast work—while keeping the proceedings fast and loose.

For the 12th episode, which ends the online series’s first season, the entire show was staged live, recorded before a highly amused but generally civilized audience in Largo’s unhelpfully warm and dark auditorium. This was a moody night, with shadows and suspense undercutting the considerable mirth.

Tompkins invoked classical theater imagery in his sprawling opening monologue, building a long multi-character routine out a random thought that “Knucklehead” might well have been used as a compliment in Shakespeare’s time. He impersonated Ice-T as an aspiring Broadway hoofer. Tompkins’ references traverse pop-culture time and space: He makes a Veronica Mars joke, then makes a joke about having made it a Veronica Mars joke instead of a Sherlock Holmes joke.

For much of the show, there were only three people onstage. Tompkin’s producer/accompanist Eban Schletter was as deeply involved in the moment-to-moment mood swings in the show as the host was, plinking a constant keyboard soundtrack of ominous chords and ambient melodies. Announcer Daamen Krall, on the other hand, conducted his brief vocal duties (in that classic baritone old-world radio voice) then plopped into a chair at the back of the stage and read for most of the show. Which was strangely compelling, amusing in its zoned-out nonchalance.

A white-haired guy lounging in the corner doesn’t exactly make the Pod F. Tompkast sound like a riveting live stage spectacular. But there were plenty of moments for the Largo-goers to appreciate which desktop audiences will only imagine. One of the podcast’s regular features, “the sleepy voice of the internet,” was personified by a silhouette behind a shadow screen. There was a visit from an angel—meant to be a Hobbit, Tompkins explained at length, but that costume hadn’t arrived so a last minute seraphim substitution had to be effected. “A crippled angel,” in fact, he chortled, because the wings would’ve cost extra.

When bright-eyed guest star Judy Greer (known to the cool crowd for a recurring role on Arrested Development and to the family demographic as the pet-oppressed mom in the Marmaduke movie) was announced, she breezed onstage cheerily, only to charmingly breeze right out again, giggling. Another guest was Chelsea Lately regular Jen Kirkman, animatedly explaining her first surfboarding experience.

“It’s a crazy thing,” Tompkins proposed, amid one of the many routines which veered into places far from where they began. “A crazy thing we should have planned out before we started.”

No, he shouldn’t have. Tompkins has a leg up (with banged knee) on other unfettered stand-up. He’s got a set, a spatial sense, a spooky score, upsets and surprises. He’s got theater smarts.

Rebecca Honett appears in TVK

Tüte Voller Kinder: Seizure No. 1 is the short subject screening before Pure Shock Value at Fringe Central.

Sample random quote from a scattershot variety spoof that has everything in its gun-sights:

“If I could go back and not shoot your mom in the head, I would.”

Creators Jason Lind and C. Honett attack their comic social criticism  with a raging vengeance. It opens with a disclaimer you really have to see. It’s on tumblr, along with the rest of this 15 min film. In fact, Tüte Voller Kinder, whose title translates as Bag of Children, is a pilot project for a web series.

TVK features songs like People Putting Things in Their Mouths, which is pretty damn gross– partly because it involves eating fresh “kinder fingers,” and partly because of the way it makes you think about consumption in general. For the song, click here .

The title says it all in the bouncy number: I Wish I Could Have Sex with My Wife as a Lesbian.

My only issue with this mix of apparently politically dissident satire and other stuff is that with all-purpose criticism you wonder –what are their exact issues and targets? American flags, for instance, come into it a lot, and Uncle Sam too, but mostly without context.

If you like satire that’s subversive, outrageous, and appealingly smarty-pants, it’s not too late. Go! Remaining shows at Arts Central are Sun June 19 at 6:30. Also showings June 24, 25.  See Hollywood Fringe [Film] schedule for those times.

Airport hangar-turned-theater Ruskin Group Theatre, at the Santa Monica Airport

Alli Houseworth, marketing director for Washington’s Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, achieved an odd distinction at the TCG conference: She was able to redirect the conversation in two sessions by voicing her objections to panel discussions on Twitter. And even though one might think the mere fact that Twitter influenced the discussions is a sign that TCG’s members are adapting to new technology and ideas – one of Houseworth’s gripes – that’s not the case.

“If we were adapting, we wouldn’t be interrupting the session, it would be the session,” she says.

Houseworth’s tweets became a topic of conversation during Arts Journal founder and Engine 28 director Doug McLennan’s discussion, “The Community Formerly Known as the Audience,” when he was giving examples of the social media behavior of young people. “I really wish this audience would stop laughing at the behaviors of gen y,” she tweeted. Because McLennan encouraged people to text during his presentation, the remarks were brought to his attention in the middle of the session, and he agreed. Two days later, Houseworth watched a panel called “What if … the Future of the Field were in the Hands of Today’s Artists?” with playwrights Marcus Gardley and Sage Lewis, composer Mimi Lien and designer Tanya Selvaratnam. When the panelists brought up the topic of marketing, Houseworth didn’t like what she heard. She tweeted, “I’m so over this conversation surrounding #newplays that implies all marketing directors are stupid and evil.” And then, “I am now officially depressed.” And then, “I AM MARKETING DIRECTOR. I EAT ARTIST FOR BREAKFAST. RARRR!!!”

So who is getting Houseworth so agitated?

1. Playwrights

“I feel like lately, in these conversations with artists – and I have to say, I love artists and I love playwrights – but I’ve been in a lot of conversations with them since the New Play gathering at Arena Stage, and I feel like there’s this perception that playwrights don’t think that marketers can do their jobs. This is a blanket statement, but I’m hearing that playwrights don’t think that marketers are reaching out to their audiences in the right way, so the playwrights have to go do that work. I’m just sort of frustrated because I’m wondering what the playwrights think I do all day … Do you think I live in a bubble? And I’m just a machine and I run print ads and radio ads, and don’t even think, and haven’t even read your play? What do you think I’m doing all day long?”

2. Marketers

“I’m very angry about arts marketing. If you’re not talking to the artist, what are you doing as an arts marketer? Why aren’t we on the ground? Why aren’t we developing audiences – and I’m not talking about young people, I’m talking about all kinds of people … I want to serve your art in the way that you perceive it to be true, but I hope I bring a different truth and perspective to it as well. Especially because I’m supposed to know my own community really well and if you’re coming in from a different city, you might not know my community like I do. I think a lot of what these playwrights are hearing is that marketers don’t talk to them, but we don’t do that at Woolly. We talk to artists all the time. And I think that a lot of my marketing peers do the same. It’s very frustrating … I wonder about these playwrights that say these things … Who is this horrible person who made you believe this?”

3. The change-averse

“These people from the older generation say ‘This is how the millennials behave,’ and perhaps it sounds ridiculous that we tweet or something. And they laugh, and you can’t change if you’re laughing at the behaviors of another generation, or the behaviors of another culture. Would you laugh if someone said. ‘Black people do this.’ Would you laugh? No. So [McLennan is] telling you facts. It’s the truth, and you’re going to have to figure out how to deal with that, and the teenagers [of the session, "A Holistic Approach for Engaging a Teen Audience] felt that too. It’s as if [older people] think it’s weird that you spend this time online, but that’s a behavioral trait and that’s not going to change. I don’t laugh at you because you read the newspaper.”

But Houseworth isn’t ranting idly. She has a few ideas to reduce the disconnect between marketers and artists so that each can understand each other’s roles in the complicated ecosystem of arts and management.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a take-your-artist-to-work day?” says Houseworth. “Come with me for a day and see what I do, and understand the challenges of having to make the bottom line. Look at my revenue projections and look at my staff that I have to make money for, so they can have jobs so you can have a job. Look at how I am advertising, and my vision for the play.”

Houseworth thinks that if playwrights spent more time with the marketing department, the marketing department could teach them about the community they’re bringing their work to.

“What if you came to D.C. six months before we started rehearsing your play, and you hung out with our staff for a day, and met some community stakeholders?” she says. “And we just talked about our values, and what excites us about this particular piece of work. And then you get to know the community, and see a show and get to know our audience.”

Because really, playwrights and marketers are coming from the same place, says Houseworth.

“Artists are going to hate me for this, but most administrators in theaters started as artists at some point,” she says. “I don’t think that most young people are like, ‘I want to be an arts administrator when I grow up,’ or ‘I want to be a fundraiser.’ those things come out of your passion for the art … I can make a shit-ton of money somewhere else, but I care about the plays and new plays and playwrights in particular … I think that most theater administrators are passionate about the art and the artist.”

Taymor is clearly battle-weary from her long slog with Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, which was almost uniformly skewered by the press before she was kicked off the production. But today she took direct aim at blogs, Twitter, and other social media that’s so enjoyed broadcasting her woes.

“It puts us under a lot of pressure,” she told the nodding crowd. “When you’re trying to create new work and break down [old forms] and experiment, an immediate answer from the audience is never good …The audience doesn’t know how to talk about it immediately.”

The flood of insta-critics presents a real challenge for artists: a barrage of unedited, unmediated opinions that can appear at any moment.  But it’s misguided and futile to suggest they shouldn’t be allowed to share their opinions (as considered or shortsighted as they may be) using the communication tools of our time.

As journalists, we’re learning we have to make our work stand apart from the unaffiliated competition. It’s noisy.  But the noise also gives us a pretty strong incentive to make our work better. In the case of Twitter vs. Artist, it remains the artist’s decision how to react.   She can either ignore those tweets, or find a way to benefit from them.

At one point in the Keynote conversation, Copeland slammed New York Times critic Ben Brantley, who wrote that Spider-Man was “so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond repair.” But Taymor suggested it was time to move on. And they did.

And I tweeted it.

“What have you been doing?” screams the agent.

“Well,” says the actor, “I just did a CSI and I’m doing a play in Sudio City. If you’re not busy this weekend, I can put aside a pair of tickets.”

—
Look for more theater jokes, coming soon.–Lou Harry

Read a review of the show by Engine28′s Anthony Byrnes here.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjOJemiOUUY&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]

The following is a short glossary of references:

1. Chelfitsch. Writer/director Toshiki Okada dreamed up Chelfitsch, the name of the company. According to Okada, it’s a  “baby-like disarticulation of the English word ‘selfish.’ ” And it’s intended to “evoke the social and cultural characteristics of today’s Japan, not least of Tokyo.”

2.  Cibo Matto. Music, from classical to Japanese pop, scores the monologues and dialogues. One of my favorites is Cibo Matto (“cheebo motto”), a New York-based Japanese trip-hop duo.  The loose translation of their name is “food madness” and many of their songs refer to food (“Artichoke,” “Beef Jerky,” “White Pepper Ice Cream”).

3. Hot Pepper. Hot Pepper is a free magazine distributed in Japan that includes a restaurant guide and coupons. In a post about Hot Pepper on the Japanese blog q-taro.com: “Years ago, FREE meant ‘not worth anything of value’ and people were suspicious if you tried to give anything away…But for the current generation FREE simply means ‘Yey FREE! Yatta!’”

4.  Motsu hot pot. Motsu hot pot, or Motsu nabe, is a soup made from beef or fish broth, kelp, and vegetables; it’s simmered for several hours. A “temp” office worker in the segment called “Hot Pepper” suggests a restaurant serving Motsu hot pot as a location for her co-worker’s going-away party.

5. Murakami. In “Air Conditioner,” two full-time office workers discuss topics ranging from the aggressive style of talk show hosts to the chilliness of the indoor environment. One worker suggests that it’s “Murakami” who turns down the thermostat, that he “resets it to 23 degrees.” I immediately thought of Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer (“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”) and translator, whose work fits into the magical realism category. A quick check of Wikipedia (also referenced in the show) lists Murakami as a popular name in Japan with a long history, from a 10th century emperor to a contemporary artist.

Chelfitsch: Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech. RADAR L.A. Through Sunday, June 19, at Los Angeles Theatre Center. http://www.redcat.org/event/radar-la-festival

I’m referring to L.A. Theatre Works (www.latw.org), a company that, without sets, without costumes, with scripts-in-hand and with actors never making eye contact with each other, creates audio theater in front of live audiences—and makes those recordings available to libraries, schools, radio listeners and buyers.

Why is LATW a must-visit whenever I’m in L.A.? And why do I think it should be considered one of the most important theaters in the U.S.? Here are five reasons:

1. A Broad Range of Offerings. This year, LATW presented Enron, A Raison in the Sun, Becky Shaw, School for Scandal and more. In 2011/12, the ten-show lineup includes A Doll House, Copenhagen, Rhinoceros and Frost/Nixon along with lesser-known works including Michael Hollinger’s Opus and Itamar Moses’ Completeness. Of course, an interesting schedule alone doesn’t an outstanding theater company make. It’s got to have…

2. High Quality. I only get there once every year or two. But in my five visits to LATW, I’ve yet to be disappointed. In fact, Four out of five times, I left exhilarated. The other time it was merely very good. (Okay, so I wasn’t crazy about my sixth LATW encounter—a national tour where the purity of the script-in-hand form was compromised by excess movement, making it feel like a stumble-through rehearsal with actors still on book). Still, high-quality work, in a vacuum, isn’t really enough to be a great company. It also has to have…

3. Wide Reach. LATW’s work may not lead to Broadway or London, but it does reach millions of radio listeners, thousands of libraries, and hundreds of schools. The chances of me getting an opportunity to see a well-cast production of Awake and Sing, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, or Tartuffe are pretty slim. But thanks to LATW, I have access to these and many other works. These are even more appealing given that they feature…

4. Top Theater Talent. Roger Rees, Cherry Jones, Raul Esparza, Stacey Keach, Judith Ivey…the list of highly praised LATW theater actors goes on and on. And, of course, some of them are…

5. Stars. A trip to L.A. isn’t completely without at least one encounter with a bona fide movie or TV star. But why troll the aisles of a Beverly Hills’ grocery store or pay for a tour-guided tram ride in hopes of seeing a name when Elliot Gould, Ed Asner, Eric Stoltz, Hector Elizondo, Anne Heche, Mark Ruffalo, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum and many others sign on for LATW stints?

Nick Cernoch, one of lead actors in PSV

All around the TCG conference and concurrent festivals, theater people are voicing questions and concerns about the viral encroachment of media into theater. Speculation on eventual outcomes abounds. 

Into the fray comes the Furious Theatre Company – premiering a movie. So from the get-go, Pure Shock Value is about as encroached as it gets.

Film was the next logical step for them, according to Managing Director Nick Cernoch. It’s a first film by director Damaso Rodrigues, a co-founding artistic director of the theatre company, and it’s David Hall’s first produced screenplay.

I expected an amateur effort by actors who, understandably, would not necessarily know how to handle the medium’s technical demands or the unique demands of film acting. 

But what I saw was an impressive film with fine acting that comes across as no acting at all. They’ve brought the language of their theatre ensemble into film, according to Cernoch.  Armed with Hall’s, tightly plotted screenplay, they developed the project for a several months, in between the actors’ theater schedules and day jobs. The film was rehearsed, shot, and (well) edited on FCP software in company members’ apartments.

As the movie’s story spills out, it’s made pretty clear to the audience that a character has done something regrettable and the other characters are slow to catch on. There’s a marriage proposal angle: “Dude, marriage is the new dating.”

 And then the main thrust, so to speak: What does it take to get a legit production company to make your movie, and how far would you go to kick the door down? The movie lives at the intersection of  Tarantino, Spielberg, violence, flirtation with an X-rating, and a search for a sign from heaven to assure them that “the Big Man exists and has a keen interest in young Hollywood.”

I noted the low production values, which are cool, and to be expected in a fringe film.  What I didn’t know until afterward was that the crew went to some pains to get that  “fringe” look.  In order to bring production values down to underground level and achieve the desirable grainy look, they fitted their Pana HD camera with a Red Rock Spinning Adapter. 

This is a bold and exciting experiment by a theatre ensemble. A labor of love with a smart mouth and vulgarity to spare, it also has relationships, a crazy sort of depth, and an almost subliminal retro Euro-film feel.  Not to get too grand about this, but in a way this reminds me of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s work.

In introducing the film’s premiere, Ezra Buzzington was excited. He said that this is the kind of programming that defines fringe and the kind of film that he hoped would cross his desk. Do catch Pure Shock Value. Just three screenings are left in this fringe, on June 19,  24^, and 25. Good luck to Furious in its new theatre-film identity. Good news: they have another film project on tap.

Photo: Teatro en Blanco

Teatro en Blanco’s Neva was the first show I saw in this week’s Radar LA festival, and still my favorite of the seven I’ve seen so far. Guillermo Calderón’s script is an extraordinary homage to Chekhov that takes in the playwright, the injustice of Czarist Russia, the disappointment of the revolution and the whole endeavor of theater and moulds it all into a stirring call to arms. I’ve thought about the show a lot since Wednesday and one question keeps returning: Why did Calderón (who also directed Neva) light the show with a space heater? So I asked him. Here’s his answer:

“The heater was sitting in the space where we rehearsed the show. We used it all the time, because we were rehearsing in the cold months of winter and we used it to warm ourselves up. We wanted to work with very little light to convey the idea of an electrical blackout. Experimented with a lot of real theater lights, but we just kept going back to the heater.

“We didn’t want to create a costume drama—the play takes place in the past, but it is about the present. The heater provides us with the opportunity to say that this is a fiction.

“Because it is a real heater, the actors get very hot. We did the play in Havana and they almost died. It’s why they drink water during the performance. It’s supposed to be vodka, but they really have to have water.”

It worked for the Fringe, so let’s try this for the other big festival in town. Above are the most common words in the descriptions of all the shows in Radar LA.

During his visit to Engine28, Ralph Remington, National Endowment for the Arts‘s Director of Theater and Musical Theater, made this audio recording of his essay, “Michael, Obama and Post-Racial Deconstruction,” originally published in the Twin Cities Daily Planet. An Engine 28 exclusive!

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/17365621"]

Engine28.com is partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are Ralph Remington’s and are not necessarily reflective of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Ralph Remington & Grace Suh. Photo by Laura Spencer

Ralph Remington, the Director of Theater and Musical Theater at the National Endowment for the Arts, stopped by the Engine28 offices to check out the newsroom activity. We took a few minutes to exchange views on the state of African-American and Asian-American theater, among other topics. Here’s Remington on African-American History Month, President Obama, Stanley Kowalski, Asians as Whites and how Arabs are unaccounted for in the larger America culture.

Take a listen and let us know what you think:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/17363422"]

Also, here’s Remington on Michael Jackson, President Obama and Black Male Identity.

Engine28.com is partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are Ralph Remington’s and are not necessarily reflective of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Headscarf and the Angry Bitch is described as a “…hilarious hour of story and song.” How Did I Get Here? chronicles Laura Levites’s life, including “…bizarre situations involving emergency rooms, cults, fires, and drug deals.” Carl Kozlowski’s Asleep at the Wheel charts his “decade-long fight against narcolepsy and the array of utterly insane, embarrassing and dangerous experiences” he’s had to handle. Evolution of a Kiss is a called a “comedic romp.” 

Which is comedy and which is theater? Can you guess? (Answer below.)

When asked about categorization, Fringe publicist Stacy Jones says, “Participants are given a choice which category they want to be listed in; we leave it up to them.” One important factor: “There are winners named in each category,” Jones explains, “so people may think about whether they have a better chance being considered as a comedy or a play.”

Fringe organizers only step in when absolutely necessary. “One show – Zombie as Fuck – was submitted under the ‘Fringe Family’ category,” says Jones. “Obviously, we had to change that one.”

(Answers: Headscarf = theater, How Did I Get Here = comedy, Asleep = comedy, Kiss = theater.)

Wondering what the shows are all about? Above, the most common words in the Hollywood Fringe Festival program. Apparently the shows are hilarious solo musical comedies about love, family, friends and America.

 1 Kerry Engel (of engine28), a reviewer for The Arizona Republic:

  “The best was the rape and murder as leapfrog scene.”

***

2 Walter Ryce (of engine28), staff writer at Monterey County Weekly:

“I thought the choreographed dance-rape scene was poetically brutal.”

***

3 Tim McCarty, Artistic Director of Quest Visual Theatre (Maryland):

 ”Any scene without text.”

 When pressed to select just one scene he    chose  “the brothers’ violation/mutilation of  their sister.”

***

The first three respondents concur.  The remaining 2 have other ideas.

***

4 Tony Frankel of Stage & Cinema:

“The opening of the family at the table with the large video projected behind it was the most visuallly exciting. But the rest of the show couldn’t live up to it.

***

 5 Kathryn Osenlund (me)  (engine28 and CurtainUp.com):

  “Best visual was the soldier  dance.   Five soldiers with guns, wearing camouflage fatigues dance against a bright red backdrop.”

After seeing five vignettes at Moving Arts’ “The Car Plays” at REDCAT, though, it occurred to me that this environmental piece devised by Paul Stein should pack its trunk and motor on over to the Garden State. Jersey’s a conducive setting for staging a work where drivers also do some of their best acting, especially gestural.

Hey, I’m talkin’ here!

Bring your kick-ass “Car Plays” to New Jersey, Mr. Stein. We’ve got the parking lots — plenty are abandoned — and you wouldn’t even need professional actors; the locals are colorful enough. Isn’t The Situation’s contract up?

Here are a few tweaks to consider when making your production more palatable for Jersey sensibilities:

– Subpoena the audience.

– Assigning team names like “Route,” “Avenue” and “Blvd” to groups of spectators should be revised to “Construction Ahead,” “This Lane Closed” and “Whassup.”

– Play-goers can jaywalk with abandon on their way to the site.

– One of the playlets, “Shampooed,” has a bobblehead Steelers player on the dash. Very wrong. Opt for a CD hanging from the rearview. Mall hair required for the actresses.

– In L.A., a show sponsor, FlowerPower, distributes nifty vehicle vases to participants. Solicit Little Trees fresheners or EZPass for Jersey swag.

– More bumper stickers are needed on vehicles: “Honk for Hoboken,” “I Brake for Diners,” “What Would Bruce Do?”

– Tolls are collected from show-goers before they enter each car. Deal with it. The “car hops” have to subsidize that rental down the shore.

– Plays in the middle lane will move slower than the others because the car in front is from New York or Pennsylvania. Spectators are also permitted to hassle anyone in that car.

– Blacktop, not red carpet, for opening night.

5 Things about Ground to Cloud

1  It’s a light & shadow dance-drama.

2  It’s spiced up with a bit of menace.

3 It’s proof that a lot can be done with old tech.

4 But the devil is in the details. It wants finesse.

5 Don’t let a nice concept go on for far too long.

***

5 Things about Myth and Infrastructure

1 Light & shadow plus great graphics is better than light & shadow alone.

2 It’s a display of technical magic.

3 A giant shadow traversing a projected bright city looks really cool.

4 But there’s a line between cute and cutesy.

5 Even magic diminishes when it crosses that line.

***

5 Things : A sampling of reactions to these two presentations from a captive audience in the elevator apres-show.

 Audience member reactions to Ground to Cloud–

1 It was a good effort.

2 It needed polish.

3 It was like a school project.

The final 2 reactions are to Myth and Infrastructure:

4 It was awesome and happy.

5 The creator’s technical expertise was impressive

None. She gives a note to the stage manager to fix it.

—
Look for more theater jokes soon. That’s a threat. –Lou Harry=

The Company, As you are now so once were we. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

In the production As you are now so once were we (previously staged at Ireland’s National Theater, The Abbey, and Dublin’s Absolut Fringe Festival), large cardboard boxes are stacked and unstacked, hoisted and pushed across the stage. And they’re used as props (doors, beds, tables), as the actors illustrate and re-create one day from four different perspectives.  It’s loosely based on James Joyce’s Ulysses in that the characters also take parallel journeys on an ordinary day (Read Ben Waterhouse’s review here).

The work marks a collaboration of the five members of The Company, a Dublin-based theater ensemble known for incorporating choreographed movement. Engine28′s Laura Spencer caught up with Chilean director Jose Miguel Jimenez in the green room after a performance to talk about how or if the work fits into the “devised theatre” category.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL6CVFTPURM&version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0]
As you are now so once were we. RADAR L.A. Wednesday-Sunday, June 15-19 at Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC). 213-237-2800. 

photo: courtesy of Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)

But first, a brief discussion of prison food. At the end of State of Incarceration, a communal meal is served. As the character Pretty Ronnie says, “This food is for the ones (prisoners) who were denied food.”  Each prisoner contributes items – some stashed under beds – like packets of ramen, to create “The Spread.” The crispy noodles are poured into a clear trash bag, combined with the other ingredients; hot water is poured on top and the mix is kneaded together.

I have to admit, I didn’t try it (I don’t eat meat), but the majority of the audience had at least a taste. And many left behind an empty bowl.

Here’s the recipe for “The Spread”

• 18 packages of soup Ramen noodles: beef-chicken-oriental-shrimp
• 2 bags of Cheetos chips-cheese 1 bag original flavor and 1 hot
• 1 bag tortilla chips, guacamole flavor
• 2 packs crackers-original flavor
• 1 pack of big flour tortillas
• 1 jar light mayo
• 1 jar sliced jalapeños- hot
• 1 jar sliced pickles
• 12 oz. turkey bologna
• 1 pack of small beef sausages
• 4 packs of light tuna in water
• plenty of garlic
• hot water

Courtesy of Los Angeles Poverty Department

State of Incarceration. RADAR L.A. Wednesday-Saturday, June 15-18 at Los Angeles Theatre Center (LATC). 213-237-2800. 

photo from broadwayworld.com

Marsha Norman’s TCG playwriting workshop, “Secrets of the Great Play,” was attended by nearly 100 participants this afternoon, including eminent playwrights Philip Kan Gotanda and Deborah Laufer. Here’s Norman (night, Mother) on:

Story: “The audience only cares about stories that ask questions they are wondering about right now. You don’t ask directions to a place you don’t want to go. And the questions are always: How do we get through? What are our struggles as human beings on the earth?”

The cooked and the raw: “A great play has both something you understand deeply and something you find shocking and perverse.”

Home: “Home is where you are able to speak, where you have a voice.”

Dramatic conflict: “We can’t be without the battle. That’s the hard-wiring. Humans are heart-filled beings who want to go out and do battle to protect their families. That’s why video games are so popular — they let us relive the experience of being engaged in the battle on our own behalf.”

Why Romeo & Juliet should really be called just Juliet: “The main character is the one with the most to lose. Romeo & Juliet is really about Juliet. Face it—Romeo was going to die anyway. But Juliet could’ve married a nice man and been happy.”

More tomorrow on my post-workshop interview with Norman on women in theater and the Lilly Awards.

There are more.

If anyone knows where technology is taking the age-old art of live performance, they must have come here in a time machine. But one thing seems certain: Video is becoming a more and more important element in theater.

The important question is, in what ways? That’s one of the (many, many) things on my mind as I was watching Titus Redux, the neo-Shakespearean anti-war fantasia from Not Man Apart – Physical Theatre Ensemble in collaboration with the New American Theatre. It’s playing through Sunday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center as part of RADAR L.A.

Titus is visually inventive in a dozen different ways, and some of the video – projected on a movie-size screen – works well. In one scene, Titus (updated into an Afghan war veteran suffering from PTSD) is being tortured on camera, and the face of that camera’s “audience” (a bearded terrorist, we presume) towers over the proceedings.

But director John Farmanesh-Bocca also uses video is the way I like least in theater: to further the same action that otherwise is happening onstage, sometimes for minutes at a time. For me at least, this mix of genres is jarring, because film acting and stage acting are truly different disciplines.

And then there’s the simple attention problem.  In one of my favorite scenes, Titus’ daughter Lavinia (Jennifer Landon), dressed in a girlie cheerleader outfit, hunches over a red, Linus-size piano – decorated with a Ken doll and an Elmo juice box – and sings a spare melancholy tune. My eyes were riveted on the actor’s face until the last few seconds when suddenly I realized I wasn’t watching the video. A moment of minor panic: What did I miss?

“We’re all about new ideas,” said Josephson. As he stood in the check-in hall for TCG, conference attendees slowed to view the clips from the show playing on his back. “People have been adjusting my shoulders to see it.”

The video jacket was created by Video Tattoo, a Santa Monica company that creates futuristic multimedia attire. For any future theater presenters looking to make a real statement, Engine 28 recommends the Silver Metal Jacket, which could be repurposed as a costume for any play set in outer space. Each jacket contains a digital screen that can loop up to four hours of video.

Josephson says his company has experimented with plenty of new-media ways to get the word out about their shows, but the video jacket is one of their more offbeat ideas. But even though the bright screen attracts plenty of eyeballs, old-fashioned promotional skills still came in handy: While talking to this reporter, the battery on Josephson’s video jacket ran out of juice, leaving him no choice but to shill his show the dead-tree way, with flyers.

The final two performances of “A Ghost Story” are tonight at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel tonight at 9 and 10 p.m. Read Ben Fulton’s review for Engine 28 here.

We Storify’d it and are embedding it here:

Click here for to listen to the entire talk

Heather Woodbury (left) proposing her environmental piece As The Globe Warms. Photo by Christopher Arnott

The Projects and Proposals session of the Radar L.A. conference Thursday morning was like watching a friendly game of cards, except some of the friends had jobs and dreams at stake.

Eight large ornate round tables were set up in a Biltmore hotel ballroom, tournament style. Folks sat at each table, expectantly shuffling papers they’d been handed. The croupiers were artists aiming to deal the perfect hand. They were looking to get their works-in-progress picked up by the theater producers and programmers who lined the tables. Then maybe the theater dealers  could work that hand into a bolder bid, one which could involve workshops, longterm development and tours.

These were short games. The project-proposers would have ten minutes to lay their artistic cards on the table before moderator Malcolm Darrell sounded a warning. Then the dealers had to pack up their laptops and fliers and add Musical Chairs to their game repertoire.

At one table, Aaron Jafferis was pitching Stuck Elevator, the one-man hip-hop musical he wrote with composer Byron Au Yong. I know Aaron. He interned at the New Haven Advocate back when I was that paper’s arts editor and he was barely out of high school. Over the past 20 years or so I’ve written about his pursuits as playwright, performer and teacher. I’m even quoted in the press materials Aaron was dealing out at the tables. This was a new side of him for me: Aaron’s pitchman persona. He shifted easily from explaining the multi-styled musical mix of hip show to abruptly launching into a few raps from it.

If Aaron was the passionate, unpredictable player, then Stacy Klein, was the methodical, even-tempered one, one who knows the playing field well. Stacy is someone I’ve known Stacy since the late 1970s, when she was a student of my father’s. For the last several decades she’s been the artistic director of Double Edge Theatre, which gestates grand, globally touring shows at their farm in Ashland, Mass. In the ballroom, Stacy was proposing The Grand Parade, a new multi-pronged project inspired by the works of Marc Chagall. Anyone playing her for a farm hick would lose big.

Heather Woodbury is a woman of many faces. I wrote a cover story years ago on her breakthrough piece What Ever: An American Odyssey, a 10-hour, multi-night, one-woman show which had Woodbury juggling around 100 distinct characters. Today, she was in cheery sales mode, pushing an environmentally themed piece in which she’ll play humans and animals. She was straight to the point, ready to play, several steps ahead of you at all times.

Richard Montoya dealing Dopplegangers. Photo by Christopher Arnott.

Richard Montoya, the esteemed Culture Clash co-founder who has a bunch of other collaborations and solo projects on deck, asked everyone at each table their name before beginning his soft-key spiel for an urban realism show he’s co-developing called Dopplegangers.

Joan Schirle, adorned in a crown of plastic marijuana leaves to promote her Mary Jane—The Musical. played the “Who are you?” card as well, and when I identified myself as “I’m with the press,” she chided “That doesn’t exempt you from being a person. What’s your name?” The hippie warmth fit her pot show pitch.

There were other drama dealers circling the tables, but those I’ve mentioned were the cardsharps whose styles I knew best, whose faces I could study, whose hands I tried to guess.

I suspect the other folks at the tables were making similar judgements. Should they show excitement? Play close to the vest? Bet big and early on a prestige project?

The last bell rang and the tournament wound down. Today it was all poker faces and card shuffling. The big winners, and the full houses, may not be revealed for years.

“This is the hottest show in town,” the guy says just before curtain. “I can’t believe someone is wasting a ticket.”

The show begins. It’s hilarious. But all the guy can think about is the empty seat next to him. And that obsessive thinking ruins the first act for him. He just can’t focus.

At intermission, he says to his date, “How could someone let a hot seat like that go to waste.”

The man in the seat on the other side of the empty overhears this and meekly says, “May I explain?”

“Yeah,” says the guy. “What’s the deal?”

“Well,” says the meek man, “My wife and I are theater lovers and we were so looking forward to seeing this show and we’ve had our tickets for months.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, she passed away.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” says the guy and, after a respectful pause, adds, “Couldn’t you find any friend or family member to join you?”

“No,” he says. “They’re all at the funeral.”

Look for #7 in the Theater Joke Countdown soon… – Lou Harry

Tough love from Simon Cowell (Photo: American Idol promotional image/ Fox)

As much as Engine28.com is a theater journalism blitz, it’s also an experiment. As reporters, we want to figure out how to make our work more useful to those who read/watch/listen to/consume it. Even the toughest critics among us are in it for the love of the game (it certainly isn’t for the big bucks) and just like theater makers, we hope to serve, and maybe even please, our audiences.

And so I ask:

Dear Theater Practitioners:

• Beyond visibility for your production/work, what should theater journalists provide?
• What’s the issue we overlook most, or seem to avoid covering?
• Would you ever consider making changes based on a review?

Dear Audiences:

• Do you care about reading a review of a show that you haven’t seen, or may never see?
• When you read a review, are you looking for context, a thumbs up/down, or something more?
• Are we “biased” about certain subject matter? What would it take to overcome that perception?

And the question all good reporters ask at the end of interviews: What else should I have asked about?

Start the conversation in the comment box below. Speak now or forever hold your peace. Or at least until we post our next review.

The Hollywood Fringe Festival opened last night, kicking off frantic blast of performance. With 215 shows in 10 days, the Fringe crams as much theater into just over a week as happens in my hometown—Portland, Ore.—in an entire year. Remarkably, very nearly all of the productions are from southern California, making the topic of Tuesday’s Culture Monster panel—”Is LA a Theater Town?”—seem even more ridiculous. Where exactly are all these shows coming from? Click through the link for a map that breaks them down by city of origin.

The show’s well worth a second look. But I was most curious about how it would play before a flashy opening night crowd at the fancy Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City in summertime versus how it went over back in bitter February at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
Both times, the decidedly domestic Method Gun was billed as part of offbeat international theater series: Yale’s No Boundaries (“a series of global performances”) and L.A.’s Radar Festival (“an international festival of contemporary theater”). Nothin’ particularly global or international about this claustraphobic cluster of leiisurely theatermaking, unless you count that an unseen character is said to have fled to South America. But audiences accept it as a piece that takes you new places, and so it does.
The L.A. audience I saw last night seemed to arrive more prepared to laugh, while the Yale one I sat in on Feb. 25 was more expectant, up for whatever this multi-emotive company felt like unleashing. The air of folks waiting to be amused threw off some bittersweet moments near the beginning of the slow-building play.

The Yale audience had enough Yale School of Drama students in it to turn The Method Gun’s inside jokes about Stanislavski or Stella Adler into some of the night’s big collective laughs, while L.A. roared at the sociopolitically incorrect prospect of white, perky, ponytailed actress Hannah Kenah spouting Spanish as “the Mexican Woman” who sells flowers late in A Streetcar Named Desire. In New Haven, the laugh was bigger when Kenah portrayed “Colored Woman” elsewhere in the show-within-a-show. In both locations, laughs at any performance of Method Gun are going to be skewed by how many people in the audience have produced Streetcar themselves and choose to let you know that by laughing more loudly and knowingly than anyone else.

Stage lighting made a huge difference in how a pivotal dance to that schmaltzy‘70s AM pop hit “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest went over. (I won’t reveal the choreographic details of that bit, since it’s plenty revealing and uplifting itself). It was uproarious both places, but darker and more mysterious in L.A.; literally dark for such a buoyant moment.

The show’s full of sight gags and surprises which I was pleased to find can still excite on a second viewing. Then there are the quirks of live performances. I don’t remember Lana Lesley misspelling “MADNESS (as “MANDESS”) in chalk on the floor at the Yale Rep, as she did at the Kirk Douglas, and it was fun watching whether her co-stars would try to cover up her gaffe.

I regularly see cool shows more than once, but seldom do I get the chance to check how they play to audiences in such far-flung communities, especially when done by such an audience-aware show as The Method Gun. Again, without giving anything away, the audience has a stake in how the show ends. In L.A. some audience choices were primed to amuse, and brought eruptions of laughter. In New Haven, there was more of a ceremonial caste to the show’s wall-projection coda.

The Method Gun isn’t a firmly fixed and impermeable show. It acknowledges its audience and interacts with them fearlessly; when somebody in the balcony didn’t have a pencil with which to write down the name of her “guru,” as instructed at the show’s outset, actor E. Jason Liebrecht made a couple of attempts to toss her the writing implement before rushing up the stairs and delivering it personally. The Rude Mechs company works an openness and familiarity into their often off-putting work.

The overall sensation I got from reacting to The Method Gun going off on opposite coasts of the U.S. is akin to seeing a scrappy indie rock band do the same set in a college-town club and then in a record-industry hotspot. Same set, same energy, same pace, same banter with fans. But one was more atmospheric and the other more of a showcase. Luckily, The Method Gun’s target audience allows for both, and it hit the mark both times.

Director Shawn Sides (center) as Elizabeth Johns in The Method Gun. Photo by Craig Schwartz

Shawn Sides, Raelle Myrick Hodges, Guillermo Calderon and Richard Montoya delivered manifestos during Radar LA’s The Future of Theater panel moderated by Mark Valdez, national coordinator for Network of Ensemble Theaters. Here are some of their words envisioning the future of this art form:

Shawn Sides, Co-Producing Artistic Director of Rude Mechs
“My manifesto for the future (with apologies to Yvonne Rainer) is no manifestos! In the future we will all say no to dogma, no to rules about how the play is structured, no to narrative and journey, and no to plot points, no to bookends, no to empathy with the characters, no to the distancing effect (fuck-off Brecht), no to exposition, no to curtain speeches, and curtain calls and talk backs, no to any dictates about how a play functions and what a play is for, because in the future, we’ll all admit, we have no idea.”

“In the future our stages will be full of kids making plays and audiences making plays and shows that are more like parties and less like church. Amen.”

Raelle Myrick Hodges, Artistic Director of Brava Theater
“In the future, theater will celebrate its technical directors and stage managers as much as it celebrates its actors and designers. Particularly when we talk about devised work.”

“The future of theater will all be international work. I’m not sure where people are living where they’re not hearing say French, then English, then Spanish, then Russian, but that’s my walk from Brava to my house downtown in San Francisco. So I think that we are working towards this international world of collaboration that allows a place for all of us to be able to participate and have a space for ourselves.”

Guillermo Calderon, Director of Teatro En El Blanco
“Maybe theater can come up with a solution to poverty, violence and war. Maybe theater can come up with an alternative to capitalism, Maybe theater can make us intelligent and happy. Maybe theater can save us all, maybe. Theater has to be ambitious. Where I work theater is very bad business.  Nobody makes money, but we kind of like it that way.”

“We have theaters. All over the world people gather in small rooms and do something unprofitable, something absurd.  Why do we go? We go for the two seconds of a true aesthetic experience.  A true political, striking, eye-opening moment…”

Richard Montoya, Author and Co-Founder of Culture Clash
“Welcome to the other LA, the shadowy LA, where devised works wait for us out there, lurking in the dark places the parks near taco trucks where poor and trust fund Anglo hipsters alike eat their meat tacos.”

“We need not look for European structure and revolution. Our drama is here in these streets the wild west, the wild kingdom, mountain lions and people walk, deer and coyote on Mulholland, near Sunset, inner Chinatown…”

The other Mark Russell

We’re hearing a lot this week about RADAR L.A. co-director Mark Russell…not to be confused with political humorist and PBS stalwart Mark Russell.

Since such confusions are increasing likely in a Googled world, we at Engine28 supply the following as a helpful guide to differentiating the two:

RADAR’s Mark Russell can often be found at the Public Theater.
Satirist Mark Russell can often be found on public television.

RADAR’s Mark Russell is involved in arts administration.
Satirist Mark Russell mocks presidential administrations.

RADAR’s Mark Russell was executive director of PS 122.
Satirist Mark Russell often performs around zip code 20002.

Hope that helps.—Lou Harry

1. “We have over 300 small theaters in town.”

2. “There’s a lot of artists making multidisciplinary work.”

Diane Rodriguez

3. “We have theater in every single community, including East Los Angeles, so each neighborhood has a theater.”

4. “There are five mid-sized companies that are Equity. And three of those are theaters of color. So the mid-sized companies are those that are not 99 seats — mid-sized companies pay their actors, they have contracts with Equity … and of the three, one is Asian, one is a black company, one’s a Latino company.”

5. “I can go to Malibu, I can go to Downtown at REDCAT, and I can go to Culver City and see theater pretty much every night.”

Each specialist is taken into an isolation booths, completely from from external stimuli. Each booth contains a trio of baseball-sized metal balls.

The booths are then sealed off.

After two days, the architect’s booth is opened. She has constructed a geometrically-perfect pyramid with the balls, yielding insights into stress dynamics and materials tension.

The surgeon’s booth is opened. She has placed the balls in a formation that hints at the nature of the unexplored regions of the human genome, solving some fundamental questions involving genetics and DNA.

The props manager’s booth is opened. The booth interior is a shambles and there are no balls to be found. The scientists’ naturally asked what happened.

“Okay, okay,” says the props guy, “I admit I did lose the first ball. But I swear I don’t know what happened to the second one, and besides, you only gave me two balls to begin with.”

Look for Theatre Joke Countdown #8 soon. –Lou Harry

Photo: Teatro en Blanco

There’s a lot of great language in Teatro en Blanco’s Neva, which plays this week at Radar LA (see Kerry Lengel’s rave here). Here are five of my favorite passages from Guillermo Calderón’s script, in my own, likely inaccurate translation.

Olga: What do you see? You see Olga Knipper, a cracked woman, an ex-everything, a reptile skin.

…

Aleko: I imagine a revolution. One day after the strikes, the Czar goes to live in the countryside and we find ourselves orphans, and there is a war, we’re so hungry that the simple folk like me have to eat human flesh. Until one day we go to the station in Finland and await a new leader, a bald man, electric, full of sawdust, and with him we enter the French museum by the Neva river.

…

Aleko: Thus are we poor folk, we have fewer bones and those few we have are bigger, we are uneven. I have mouse bites on my buttocks. I smell like a woman, where I should smell like a man and I don’t know how to love without wanting to hit, kill, vomit, pray, drink and return to loving. The most important organ in my body is my appendix, and I want to put it in your kidney and watch you sweat.

…

Aleko: I imagine all those soldiers, workers and peasants, die and float in the river, they were killed by the new Czar, the new Caesar. I only wanted vodka, Champagne, rifles, onions, liberty without got and the woods. I imagine I will go on loving Russia. I imagine winning a patriotic war and making a bitch fly through the cosmos will be worth the effort/trouble. I am in love with Russia.

…

Olga: I like servile sex, I like to speak obscenities in German and make gutteral sounds. After sex I fall asleep, but I wake up feeling like cooking and cleaning the house. I like you onion smell, I like to see you defecate, I will treat you like a child, I will make you cry, I will give ou my placenta to eat, I will love you.

Seriously pondering this kind of a question would be considered indulgent navel-gazing by many theater professionals in cities like Washington, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Dallas. Does anyone in Cincinnati give two hoots whether “Hollywood” also wants to be “Broadway?” And has anyone is the LA theater world given a millisecond of thought to wondering whether Jacksonville is a theater town?

I’m from Richmond, VA, a town known for being the capital of the Confederacy and a center of tobacco production. It is neither anymore and yet the tension between those desperately holding on to that legacy and those working their darndest to rid the city of those stains drags on. So, as someone who’s seen a battle like this at the tail-end of a 150-year old struggle, I would kindly assert: “Let it go.”

Even if more and more movie production is done in Vancouver these days, LA will always be Hollywood to those east of California. And, for better or worse, there will always be only one Big Apple. The folks in the trenches making theater, damn good theater, in LA or Des Moines or Richmond, should leave the big questions to the philosophers.

Show Box LA's Anatomy Riot at the Alexandria Hotel. Photo: Julie Potter

Forget dessert. How about a gilded ballroom full of body-based performances inspired by machines? That’s not what I had in mind when I went to dinner at The Gorbals in the lobby of the Alexandria Hotel, but the signs reading “Anatomy Riot” enticed some Engine 28 folks and me enough to wander upstairs into a vast ornate hall that could have been in Imperial Russia. I had stumbled into Show Box LA‘s performance series organized by Meg Wolfe and guest curated this evening by Lauren McCarthy and Megan Day Daalder. Sure, I was in town for theater, but I didn’t expect to find it here.

I joined the several dozen performance goers settling into chairs as one woman began writing on the wall upside down in a handstand with her heels covered in bandages and charcoal. She scraped squiggles on the walls for the duration of the eleven short performance works that followed, leaving smudges on the paint of the royal hall.

The experimental evening included “internet aware art” (offline art influenced by online conventions) with a smart dialog between Justin Streichman and Danielle Furman acting as a judge responsible for conducting name changes. Instead of a name change, Streichman requested a “refresh” of his current name, as one might refresh a web page. In DDR: Human Only Version, Megan May Daalder enacted several committed rounds of the video game Dance Dance Revolution deliberately stepping in patterns around a square. Increasing the tempo with each round, her body became the machine of jerky movement required to progress in the game.

Discovering this under-the-radar performance community in the ballroom makes this strange trip to dinner a reminder that theater is indeed everywhere – and that DDR is still a great game.

Since they were clearly indicating that the situation was not a positive one, they refrained from naming names.

We have no reason to be so discreet.

Anyone remember Family Week, directed by Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs)? —Lou Harry

A: One hundred and one. One to climb the ladder and screw in the bulb and the other hundred to say “That should be me up there.”

Look for #9 soon. –Lou Harry

No, I’m not talking about the big theaters/little theaters controversy reported here. I’m talking about the assumption that Los Angeles is the only town with the initials L.A.

What about Los Alamos, New Mexico? Or….okay, what about Los Alamos, New Mexico?

So in the interest of fairness, I ask: Is Los Alamos a theater town?

Located about 882 miles from Los Angeles, Los Alamos does have an arts and crafts fair, a chalk walk, a series of coffee house concerts, a kite festival, and a potentially interesting Samba Project.

Alas, the only theater touted by the Los Alamos Arts Council is an annual visit from the Montana-based Missoula Children’s Theater.

So, no, Los Alamos is not a theater town.

At least, not yet.—Lou Harry

Well, depending on your route, there are 30 miles of road separating Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena and Pacific Resident Theater in Venice.

For our New York friends, that’s about the distance from JFK Airport to Newark Airport.

(And for our Canadian friends, that’s the distance between Toronto and Oshawa, Ontario.)

Now you know.—Lou Harry

Chad M. Bauman

Folks at the conference are supposed to brainstorm around “What If…” Meanwhile, DC’s Arena Stage Director of Communications Chad M. Bauman has stared down those fears, considering that the end of nonprofit status might “allow us to create our own destiny”:

“Would it eliminate our reliance upon a funding source that at best is dubious these days[?] We wouldn’t have to consult the tea leaves to see if we were going to get our rationing of government funds or face the devastation that comes when those funds are cut at the eleventh hour.”

“Corporate sponsorships are primarily about visibility and client entertainment. I would guess that marketing officers aren’t going to care if a theater is a non-profit institution or not when deciding where to spend their sponsorship dollars. They care about the value of the opportunities the theater can provide.”

"Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech" presented by Chelfistch (Photo: Toru Yokota)

“Welcome to cubist theatre from the country that invented sushi … Auteur director/choreographer Okada seems to be equally concerned about the shortage of work for his generation and the horror and banality of office incarceration.”

LA Times section cover - Monday June 13, 2011

As a journalist from out of town, I arrived in LA last weekend with hopes of boning up on previews of the upcoming theaterpalooza (four festivals in two weeks). But I found the newspaper of record was more interested in the Tonys (based in the town I’d just come from). Don Shirley of LAStageTimes.com says television is to blame: “Will the Times ever precede the Ovation Awards or LADCC events with a series of long feature stories about the contenders? Perhaps, but only when the Ovation or LADCC awards ceremony is broadcast (as opposed to cablecast or streamed) live.”

But Shirley says the Tonys coverage is just the most recent in a long line of offenses. The LA Times‘ arts blog Culture Monster sponsored a panel discussion Tuesday night, billed as a discussion of  The Role of L.A. in the National Theater Scene. Panelists included actor/Actors’ Gang AD Tim Robbins, Broadway producer Marc Platt, and Center Theatre Group’s Michael Ritchie.  (Engine 28‘s Ben Fulton captures the highlights of the panel here.)

But LA Bitter Lemons’ Colin Mitchell say the Times completely ignored the 99-seat house scene:

"Brewsie and Willie" presented by CALARTS Center for New Performance / Poor Dog Group (Photo: Scott Groller)

The rap on LA theater is that there isn’t much. And what there is just serves as a vehicle for film actors trying to get their big break. Not so, argues LA Weekly’s Steven Leigh Morris.  He soundly refutes that assumption with a short history of LA theater (a must-read for all out-of-towners squatting here for the week) and a case for the home-grown scene — with local playwrights and experimental works cultivated for decades.

“As for achieving greatness, which is entirely in our hands, what remains possible? And when exposed in the national spotlight, will that suggestion be taken seriously, or reduced to a joke of Shakespearean mirth?”