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Around Town
Janis Joplin back from Broadway, a Musical Comedy Whore, Inside the Creole Mafia and The Antaeus Company’s Picnic
By Myron Meisel
JOPLIN, Photo by Joan Marcus
When our daughters were still young, yet old enough, we determined to take them on their first trip abroad to Europe. There was some protest: Why travel to Venice, when they could go to the Venetian in Las Vegas, where their grandparents lived? We responded they knew well from personal experience the New York New York Hotel in Vegas certainly wasn’t a substitute for Manhattan, let alone Brooklyn, home of their other grandparents.
Their first morning in a foreign country we were touring St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, when the younger one, then 12, ushered me aside to inquire hushedly: “Is this the real thing, or an imitation?” Oh yes, my darling, it is indeed the real thing.
These were memories occasioned by the return of the hit musical show A Night with Janis Joplin to the Pasadena Playhouse, from which it had moved to Broadway and garnered a Tony nomination for star Mary Bridget Davies. They raised nagging and possibly unanswerable questions about issues of authenticity, simulation and maintenance of tradition.
Though this was my first encounter with the piece, it had continued to develop after the initial Pasadena run before opening on Broadway, and this version reflects that ultimate incarnation. Most meaningfully, the Blues Singer, originally performed by one woman, is now divided among four contrasting singers who additionally incarnate Joplin influences from Bessie Smith to Etta James, Odetta, Nina Simone and Aretha Franklin.
All these powerful singers, including Davies, suggest their immortal forebears with carefully selected imitative inflections, without resorting either to parody or impersonation. Similarly, the musical arrangements by Len Rose are superficially evocative while subtly updated and, frankly, somewhat scrubbed clean. Unlike End of the Rainbow, which constructed a drama about the decline of Judy Garland, here there is only a ghost Janis hosting her own revue comprised of pearls on a string threaded by reminiscence and “and then I sang. . .”
Readers ought to realize that critics are as prone to distractions and funks as any other member of the audience, and their faculties, however mustered for their own performance that conjures up their writing, can wax and wane. I happened to see five musical shows in the space of the week, all set to familiar, and mostly good, songs, even as the respective productions varied in interest. I must confess to having been unreasonably prone to disengage, compounded no doubt by the unaccustomed humidity.
Accordingly, while A Night with Janis Joplin was on its own terms unquestionably a rousing, imaginary concert, I must admit to unfairly subjecting it to a double bind: alternately annoyed by its deviance (and pretense) of authenticity and equally unnerved by the many sweet spots of enthusiastic pleasures it could elicit, some nostalgic, other just showbiz savvy.
Creator, writer and director Randy Johnson has reduced the endeavor to its most commercially broad gestures while remaining functionally close enough to suggestions of the genuine article that the experience doesn’t feel fraudulent. (He’s got a long track record of success in the sub-genre, ranging from Always, Patsy Cline to Conway Twitty, Elvis, Louis Prima and even Bolton Sings Sinatra, Mike Tyson’s solo show and Pope Benedict’s visit to New York.)
Indeed, with even mild susceptibility, the full-throated singers, slick band with tarted-up brass and reeds, and Davies’ surpassing rapport with the audience all contribute to a good-time boogie vibe that surmounts the waxworks risk, socking sock across a rousing communal camaraderie with something vaguely redolent of how blues and soul bled discernibly into white folks’ rock.
In short, just because I had a curmudgeonly night and am so irretrievably absorbed in this music at its roots and sources that I cannot abstain from nits and picks, doesn’t mean that the more easily gratified cannot have themselves a legitimately Broadway/Las Vegas brand experience.
Whatever one’s views of the Los Angeles theater scene, perhaps the single observation on which everyone can agree is that it does not lack for solo shows, so much so that I find myself scrambling as dextrously as I can manage to ration my attendance at them over the course of a season. They can be good, sometimes extraordinary, and then there is that vast parade of mediocrity that never surceases.
As my fifth musical theater entry of the week, David Pevsner’s licentious Musical Comedy Whore! provided a welcome, refreshing tonic even in the airlessly virtuous, energy-saving Highways space where it played two performances last weekend, doubtless to resurface again to what should be an appreciative target audience boasting both coarse tolerance and finer sensibilities.
Pevsner has been a conscientiously working actor for decades, perhaps most noted for his long runs in When Pigs Fly and Party in the 1990s, and his not-quite-a-standard “Perky Little Porn Star” warbled in Naked Boys Singing. Earlier this year, also at Highways, in Michael Kearns’s ambitious Bang Bang, he memorably incarnated a psychiatrist with a gay practice who morphs into a serial-killing Mr. Hyde that with a deft disicpline transformed stereotyped cliches of deviance into transgressive metaphor.
In hindsight, his previous one-man musical To Bitter and Back (2001) now seems like an earlier feint at a charming intimacy that in this far more mature and revealing incarnation, more frankly owns his history and attitudes surrounding both his sexual identity and vocation as an actor.
There’s not necessarily much innate novelty to Pevsner’s autobiography as an abashed, nice Jewish gay kid growing up in Skokie (coincidentally, also the childhood location of the eponymous Shiv, currently at The Theatre @ Boston Court, suggesting that while the neighborhood has changed, the anomie less so), becoming sexually active in college, partaking of the groaning board of options in pre-plague New York, constantly testing his active libido against the strictures of his stunted esteem (yoked, as it was, to a forceful sense of self).
Literature and cinema have traversed this territory extensively, so what Pevsner has to contribute is his own felicitious grace as a storyteller, his shameless candor not least about his own nagging shame, and his knowing command of the idiom of musical theater. The songs, written and mostly composed by him in collaboration with others, have a fluid patter that may not challenge Gilbert & Sullivan but do no dishonor to their tradition. The infectious opening number, “Fancy Boys”, which had been an alternative working title, particularly captures the double lens of embracing historic slurs while affectionately appreciating their signficance in their original context. It’s catchy, proud, savvy and unafraid.
In a typically piquant, rueful moment, he recalls the indignity of being cruised whilst wearing a beard for his role on Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof during that period of the 1990’s when unshaven hair was blatant man-repellent.
Indeed, Pevsner’s fearlessness challenges the audience to match his graphic, often humorous, descriptions of an array of sex acts (fisting and rimming, inter alia) with a nonchalant acceptance that when it comes to identity, and to survival, nothing is either forbidden or vulnerable to the uselessness of digust.
Nevertheless, as someone who has been exposed to a great deal of explicit narrative, it has been extremely rare to feel, as the lights came up, as if I had been consigned to the role of Little Bo Peep.
Pevsner’s insights into himself are inspiritingly free of rationalization and cant, and a bracing attitudinal corrective to the saccharine dating rituals that comprise Girlfriend, distantly kindred material currently at the Kirk Douglas. Overall, there’s a lot more whoring than musical comedy (I might have preferred a slight adjustment of the balance, given his talents, or perhaps a more daring interpenetration of the two).
Musical Comedy Whore! achieves neither transcendence nor a pat sense of closure because Pevsner’s innate honesty recognizes that neither has yet occurred in his life and maybe never will. Still, as an entertaining and physical confident performer and writer, he makes rather complex and difficult feelings clear, and his salacious humor never seeks a laugh at the expense of bracing emotional forthrightness.
And, as so often the case, this “one-man” show most certainly benefits mightily from the collaborative contributions of deeply experienced others, the evidently disciplined hand of director Randy Brenner and the always welcome ministrations of Gerald Sternbach at the piano (with apt vocal interjections).
(Incidental disclosure: David Pevsner happens to be a far-removed cousin. I met him once, eating lunch together with our mothers, late last century.)
Inside the Creole Mafia, Mark Broyard and Roger Guenveur Smith’s wickedly sly vaudeville on themes of color distinctions, deservedly won a 1993 L.A. Weekly Award and remains a welcome and still subversive exercise in educational hilarity every time its creators are generous enough to revive it.
Incinerating any lingering stench of minstrelsy, these irrepressible performers with supple political awareness engage and implicate the audience in the finer distinctions of “not too dark” comedy. I have successfully dined out for years in New York City initiating the otherwise sophisticated into the gradations of the notorious “paper bag test.”
If you fail to wince at old Hollywood lines like this from The Penguin Pool Murders (1932) – “There’s an octoroon in the kindling” – Broyard and Smith will enlighten you. Their satire skillfully mixes the saliently contemporary with a fond critique of tradition: it’s affectionately discomfitting.
Playing only six performances at the Bootleg (where it also emerged, ever more meaningfully, in the aftermath of Katrina – Steven Morris in his review discerned affinities between this burlesque with Chekhov), you are encouraged to grab your tickets with alacrity before its veteran fans snap up them all. Just don’t sit in the front row, if you don’t want to be shanghaied into becoming a part of the celebratory dance of triumphant physical liberation and teasing derision: free your mind and your ass will follow, indeed.
PICNIC, photo by Geoffrey Wade
My colleagues largely concur that one sure cure for August doldrums would be to encounter the deeper stuckness of Labor Day weekend 1952 in small town Kansas, in The Antaeus Company’s lovingly crafted revival of William Inge’s Picnic, To be so transported to an elevated emotional place chases the blues as effectively in its way as Janis Joplin’s keening stylings.
While the movie showed off unmistakable virtues of star casting, the original play itself is more vivid theatrically being stripped of at least a further layer of the coded euphemism redolent of the era. And as Antaeus double-cast shows move further into their run, the mix-and-matching grows both more shaken and stirring, and the intuitive awareness of a true acting community greatly enhances the dynamics of this fine work by a playwright whose superb later efforts (often done in reading workshops by Antaeus) remain severely under-appreciated (A Loss of Roses, anyone?).
A Night with Janis Joplin, The Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 4 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; through August 16, https://pasadenaplayhouse.org
Musical Comedy Whore! Highways Performance Space (closed)
Inside the Creole Mafia, Bootleg Theatre, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; August 9-22, (213) 389-3856, www.bootlegtheater.org
Picnic, The Antaeus Company, 5112 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Thurs.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. through Aug. 16. www.antaeus.org; (818) 506-5436
