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The House that Geoff and Julia Built
“We have disagreements, but we almost always end up being on the same page,” said Geoff. “We’ve always been able to [co-direct], because we simply think in the same way.”
Frederique Michel and Charles Duncombe’s City Garage
“At the age of 16,” Michel says, “I knew right away that I wanted to work as an actress on stage and then that was it. I was in love with the theater and will always be in love with the theater, and right now I am suffering, because I am not working in the theater.”
David Melville and Melissa Chalsma’s Independent Shakespeare Company
“We generally know what’s going to set each other off so we really try not to get stuck in each other’s territory,” Melville explains. Furthermore, says Chalsma, “We are blessed with amazingly calm, go-with-the-flow kids [an 18-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son]. They are doing okay through all this, fortunately. They share a love of Saturday Night Live sketches, so we watch a lot of those!”
Diane Rodriguez, Remembered
“Diane loved living large. She loved being the bridge, the connector. She loved people to thrive. She loved to support artists. She loved to have a great laugh.”
Jack Stehlin and Jeannine Wisnosky Stehlin’s New American Theatre
“How do we stay together?” Jack muses. “How do these couples . . . longevity? When it gets so bad, the other person is not as bad off as you, and they can hold the fort while you can’t.”
Words That Dare Not Be Spoken
“You may ask, as Tevye put it, what right does a critic or commentator have to prescribe or exhort on behalf of what perhaps ought to be regarded as an internal conflict between actors and their organization? No right. Instead: an interest, a concern, and indeed, an obligation, to speak out as voice for the audience, the community, the culture, the body civic and the business health of Los Angeles, all of which involves vital concerns of all of us.” — Myron Meisel
Home/Sick and Speaking in Tongues
“The Assembly’s production of ‘Home/Sick,’ a reimagining of the Weather Underground experience from 1969 to 1978, now running at the Odyssey Theatre, may play for different audiences as a cautionary tale, an exasperating inspirational example, or even (sentimentality be damned) nostalgia. How could I help but smile when the activists chant Mao’s “Dare to Struggle! Dare to Win!” the identical year we used the same axiom as our college football cheer.”–BY MYRON MEISEL
Hedda Gabler and 42nd Street
“Heinrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler remains a titanic creation that still demarcates the theater’s passage into modernity. Its protagonist is the embodiment of contradiction, from the diamond-like clarity of her individuality to her ultimately inscrutable motives. Does she represent the rudiments of an emerging feminist consciousness? (She’s blazingly complex and refuses to conform to prescribed gender roles.) Or does she represent a twisted male perception of the confounding power of female assertion?” — BY MYRON MEISEL
Theatre of the World: A Grotesque Stagework in 9 Scenes (L.A. Philharmonic); The Impresario & First the Music, Then the Words (Pacific Opera Project)
“Certainly one of most substantial musical and theater events this year, the world premiere of Louis Andriessen’s Theatre of the World, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in Walt Disney Concert Hall for only two performances in May represents a prestigious coup for the orchestra and venue that will surely be more thoroughgoingly recognized and appreciated when it opens in Amsterdam in June at the co-producing Dutch National Opera.” — by MYRON MEISEL
The Hairy Ape, The Pajama Game, In and Of Itself
“Class warfare has surged and ebbed in the U.S. public consciousness during harder or more prosperous times throughout the past century, but the distorted perversion that it is something waged by the poor upon privileged victims gets exposed as a disingenuous lie by Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 The Hairy Ape – an anguished cry on behalf the exploited and dismissed.” — by MYRON MEISEL