Why the Fringe?

According to something called the United States Association of Fringe Festivals, there are 24 such gatherings currently being hosted by U.S. cities stretching from New York State to Hawaii. New York City alone boasts two — FringeNYC and its wintry counterpart, FRIGID New York.

California claims four — San Francisco Fringe Festival, Santa Cruz Fringe Festival, San Diego International Fringe Festival and, of course, the Hollywood Fringe, which this week wraps up its mind-boggling annual avalanche of small-stage fare.

With 290 shows in three weeks, the Hollywood Fringe beggars the imagination along with the collective coverage capacity of L.A.’s critics’ corps. It becomes a heroic feat of endurance to see even a representative fraction and is literally impossible to take in everything. Nor would one want to. The Hollywood Fringe is un-curated. Which means that for every kernel of wheat, there’s going to be a bushel of chaff.

All fringe festivals take their name from the ad hoc collection of shows that crashed the first Edinburgh International Festival by setting up shop along the “fringes” of the officially invited international performing arts companies. To this day, the small-stage movement in London — the British equivalent of New York’s Off-Off Broadway scene — goes by the name of “fringe theatre.”

Ben Moroski, writer-performer of the show on almost everybody’s best of Fringe list: “The Wake” (Photo by Bill Raden)

In that sense, Los Angeles really already has a year-round fringe in a 99-seat theater scene that comprises fecund and artistically daring eddies outside the official mainstream of the city’s big-money regionals and presenting theaters.

And that begs the question: Why would any performer or company in their right minds enter the Hollywood Fringe fray, where the biggest challenge can be simply getting noticed?

To find out, Stage Raw reviewers conducted an informal survey of show-makers and audience members. Not surprisingly, what we found varied to some degree depending on whom we asked.

Director-producer Yukari Black, for example, had never even heard of the Hollywood Fringe. Actor availability meant that her only window of opportunity to stage Tokyo playwright Yukiko Motoya’s Vengeance Can Wait was during June and she happened by sheer chance to book the Underground Theater, an official Fringe venue.

Mostly though, the common denominator that emerged was an appreciation of the Fringe community and its motivated audiences and opportunity. One apparently does the Fringe first and foremost because one can do the Fringe.

Producer Caitlin Hart, whose company The Vagrancy hit Fringe pay dirt last year with Tommy Smith’s WHITE HOT, asserts that the Fringe is “a financially reasonable way to produce a play and still maintain aesthetic.” This year The Vagrancy rolled the dice with Maria Irene Fornes’ The Conduct of Life, because, Hart says, “aside from hitting all the Fringe qualifications — 60 minutes or less, low budget, etc. — the play begs universal questions that are relevant today.”

Carly Weckstein, founder and artistic director of critically acclaimed Illyrian Players — no stranger to theater row — says she decided to make her Fringe debut with John Tyler McClain’s Odessa “to connect more with the LA theater community and present Illyrian Players to that scene.”

For Odessa’s young costume designer, Alana Cheuvront, the rationale was more personal. “When actors, directors, and designers first come to LA, this is where they start their theater careers,” she says excitedly. “There’s no real financial backing. It’s just support from the community, and that’s what LA theater needs.”

“Odessa” costumer Alana Cheuvront (Photo by Jenny Lower)

“It’s such a community here,” agrees writer-producer Kari Lee. “It’s like a larger number of people seem to be really focused on interesting, original theater.” Reason enough, Lee adds, to premiere The Seven Seductions of Taylor Swift, the group-written celebrity satire performed by Illyrian star Thaddeus Shafer. For Lee, the Hollywood Fringe also represents something of an out-of-town tryout — she, Shafer and director Amin El Gamal are using Fringe audiences as lab rats in order to work out the kinks before taking Seven Seductions to FringeNYC in August.

“Seven Seductions of Taylor Swift” producer Kari Lee (Photo by Bill Raden)

Producer-performer Brandon Clark sees the Fringe as an ideal means of developing audiences and brand awareness for his satirical, Sacred Fools-birthed bad movie script serial, Magnum Opus Theater. Magnum Opus played at the first Hollywood Fringe, and this time around, Clark says he is trying to widen that exposure: “As opposed to just doing it on our own and slowly expanding it, [I’m] hoping to sort of jump it into a larger pool of people already eager to see shows in a confined time period.”

Magnum Opus Theatre producer Brandon Clark & member Jaime Robledo (Photo by Bill Raden)

Perhaps the best reason for going fringe, however, is summed up by writer-performer and Hollywood Fringe veteran Ben Moroski — because “L.A. theater is a tough racket. Theater anywhere is. You know, I produced enough in Sacramento as well when I was still living up there to know. It’s just tough to get an audience in a lot of the time.”

Moroski represents something of a Hollywood Fringe success story. He debuted his autobiographical play This Vicious Minute at the 2012 festival, which he says did respectably, and this year returned with The Wake, his one-man black comedy about romantic disillusionment that is topping everybody’s lists for 2014 Best of Fest.

“I think of it as an incubator,” Moroski says of the festival. “It gives you a little more leeway to try things and to do bold stuff and stuff that you want to do. Because there are deals on space rental. And there’s a built-in audience — yes, you have to go get it, and yes, your product has to be good — but there’s a built-in audience that will come see your show that’s not there [otherwise]. … and there’s a lot of weird and wonderful things going on, so I wanted to be part of it again.”

(With reporting contributed by Jenny Lower and Mayank Keshaviah)

The Dog Ate Our Gossip

For those of you who have been dedicated and loyal readers of this column, Stage Rows owes you an apology: We blew our deadline this week, and we are sorry. We wish we had a justifiable reason for being several days late. Sadly, county health officials did not close the theaters because of bubonic plague. Nor did Parliament order that “public stage-plays shall cease and be forborne” to “purge our stages from all obscene and scurrilous jests such as might either be guilty of corrupting the manners, or defaming the persons of any men of note in the City or Kingdom.” Not that thought isn’t without its appeal.

No, our only defense is what we in the gossip business call an unusually dismal week for raking the muck. Despite desperate pleas to our usual suspect sources, it seems that neither idle talk nor malicious rumor could be had for love or money. Mostly, it turns out, because of love.

Such as when a tantalizing whisper reached our ears that a major company development was breaking at NoHo’s ZJU Theater, and Stage Rows set out to get a confirmation only to find itself in the maddeningly ethical position of being love-bombed into silence by its artistic director Zombie Joe. Rather than scoring a leading scoop, we sheepishly agreed to Zombie’s press embargo so that the startlingly good news didn’t sour for the company due to a premature release.

The look of love: Zombie Joe of ZJU (Photo: Bill Raden)

Remember the Serpent’s Tooth, Tobias

Love struck again on Sunday afternoon, but this time at an Odyssey matinee, where we fell head over heels for the theatrical fireworks of director Robin Larsen’s exceptional new revival of A Delicate Balance. We are unashamed to admit that our attraction to the show’s opening weekend was less the opportunity of seeing Edward Albee’s ferociously funny, 1966 excoriation of mid-century WASP complacency than it was our lifelong fan worship of the production’s star David Selby, who first enchanted us when we were mere sprites with his brooding, mutton-chopped romanticism as the lycanthropic Quentin Collins on the ‘60s gothic soap Dark Shadows.

And we are thrilled to report that in the role of Albee’s suburban patrician Tobias (opposite his former Falcon Crest costar Susan Sullivan), David has lost none of his breathtaking capacity for making goose flesh. His show-stealing rendition of Tobias’s chillingly self-revelatory lines about a pet alley cat sets the evening’s bloodcurdling emotional pitch and that is paid off in Act 3, when David brings down the house in Tobias’s lacerating howl of terror over the paralyzing emptiness of his existence.

The breathtaking David Selby with Susan Sullivan in “A Delicate Balance” (Photo: Enci Box)

A Delicate Balance is not a one-man-show, of course, and Susan Sullivan (David’s former Falcon Crest costar), O-Lan Jones, Deborah Puette, Mark Costello and Lily Knight all deliver superbly memorable performances. But they were not the reason we lingered in the Odyssey lobby after the show with our pen and program at the ready … and lingered … and lingered … until eventually somebody from the theater tactfully pointed out that the Odyssey also has a back door and that David — pro that he is — knows how to use it.

Which, come to think of it, may help explain why our favorite member of the accursed Collins family was more accurately the late, great Jonathan Frid.

The Wright Stuff

To be honest, at least part of this week’s gossip drought can be attributed to the mental fog in which we’ve been toiling since picking up a stubborn cold on our return flight from New York that has made the simple act of stringing sentences together not unlike wading waist-deep through heavy molasses.

What we believed to be our uncanny ability to contract whatever seasonal virus is floating through a passenger jet turns out to be no isolated talent. Or so confirmed our personal health consultant and daughter-of-a-former-flight-attendant Jacqueline Wright when we phoned her the other day while in the midst of our white-knuckle deadline panic.

The lovely Jacqueline Wright (Photo: courtesy of Jacqueline Wright)

Jacqueline also happens to be one of our town’s busiest and most versatile acting talents as well as an accomplished playwright renowned for her mordantly witty and poetically incising stage explorations of romantic love in works such as 2011’s Have You Seen Alice?, her 2008 collection Spider Bites and 2004’s Eat Me. For the past six months, however, she has been testing the East Coast’s work opportunities while on a six-month professional sabbatical, mostly in Lisa Peterson’s staging of playwright Marlane Mayer’s The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters that closed in December at Playwrights Horizons.

Despite thriving on the low winter temperatures and high artistic voltage of Manhattan’s winter stage scene — and, she reports, the excitement of reading for both Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information at Minetta Lane Theater and SoHo Rep’s An Octoroon (playwright Branden Jacobs–Jenkins’ hit adaptation of 19th century slave melodrama by Dion Boucicault) — Jacqueline is now officially returned to L.A.’s bosom and is already back in harness.

What eventually lured her home, she admits, wasn’t simply missing her main romantic squeeze, the stage director and screenwriter Adrian Cruz, who has been hard at work since February with the launch of a new SyFy Channel series scheduled to premiere in November. Rather, it was the opportunity to do the new Mickey Birnbaum play Backyard with director Larry Biederman that is set to open at Echo Theater in Atwater on May 30.

Jacqueline describes the play, that she says she’s been with since its first reading in Kansas 8 years ago, as an outrageously fun and exhilarating look at the suburban backyard wrestling phenomenon.

“I love his writing!” she enthuses about Birnbaum. And what’s not to like about any show with a dream cast that also includes Hugo Armstrong, Richard Azurdia, Ian Bamberg, Adam Martin Rocha and Esmer Kazvinova? And in wrestling tights! Jacqueline confirms that the entire ensemble will be in the ring performing all our favorite leapfrog body guillotines, neck-breakers, wheelbarrow face-busters and head-scissors take-downs on an actual wrestling canvas.

Making sure the bouts play out both safely and spectacularly is martial multi-talent Ahmed Best, who is an original STOMP cast member, was the voice of Jar Jar Binks and seems to hold a black belt in everything. “He is the best fight choreographer I have ever worked with,” Jacqueline declares flatly. And we’re not about to argue the point.

What We Did on Our NYC Vacation, and the Charlies!

What We Did on Our NYC Vacation

As the crow flies, the distance between Los Angeles and New York is approximately 2,449.79 miles. As we fly, on the other hand, New York is somewhat more distant, the miles being considerably dearer for mere mortals without expense accounts or a Stage Raw travel budget than they are for birds.

L.A. on 42^nd Street

Playwright Donald Margulies and Bart at KTCHN (Photo: Bill Raden)

So imagine our relief when we chanced by the Glass House Tavern off Times Square to find veteran stage director Bart DeLorenzo of Evidence Room fame holding court over a table of fellow L.A. stage exiles. Never mind that chance had a helping hand from Bart himself, who had texted us earlier that day that more than our terrible thirst might be slaked by a Glass House stop — namely that a dirty vodka martini (or three) might offer a solution to our quandary of how to make this week’s Stage Rows more  L.A.-relevant as we natter on self-indulgently about our seven days in NYC.

Outside the Acorn on opening night (Photo: Bill Raden)

Bart, of course, was in town putting the final touches on his Off-Broadway transfer of last year’s Odyssey hit Annapurna to the Acorn Theater in a co-production with The New Group. While the show represents a homecoming of sorts for co-star and Broadway veteran Megan Mullally (Grease, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Young Frankenstein), Stage Rows was surprised to learn that it would mark the NYC debuts of both Bart and Mullally’s costar Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation).

L.A. transplant Deirdre Murphy and L.A. lighting designer Michael Gend get convivial (Photo: Bill Raden)

Matching us glass for glass was stage manager Deirdre Murphy, who said she took advantage of the Off-Broadway transfer of Heathers: The Musical, which had a three-week tryout last September at Hollywood’s Hudson Backstage, to permanently relocate from Los Angeles, and Annurpurna lighting designer Michael Gend, who blamed his New York gig for skipping out on the LA Weekly awards, where his compatriots from last year’s Matrix production of We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 took this year’s LAWee for Production of the Year.

Dakin Matthews & Bart DeLorenzo at Times Square’s Glass House (Photo: Bill Raden)

Then, as the conversation drifted to the uncanny number of Los Angeles theater folk currently drawing paychecks in the vicinity of the Great White Way, in an even more uncanny bit of timing that might have been straight out of a DeLorenzo production, in walked Antaeus co-founder and L.A. stage éminence grise Dakin Matthews for a nightcap following a performance of the Broadway musical Rocky, in which Dakin essays the Burgess Meredith role of Mickey, the beleaguered boxing trainer desperate for his shot at the big time. The show, Dakin reports, seems to be holding its own in the wake of a critical drubbing by Ben Brantley and is pinning its hopes on robust houses when the tourist season begins in earnest next month.

It was no coincidence, however, when we found ourselves seated next to Dakin at the Annapurna premiere, as we had shamelessly cadged tickets from Bart at a moment when his defenses were laid low by the combination of expatriate bonhomie and whatever they were mixing at the Glass House bar. We are happy to report that the show seems a somehow bigger and crisper and altogether more satisfying production than its Odyssey incarnation. Part of the “bigness” might have stemmed from the fact that Thomas A. Walsh’s battered Airstream set had magically stretched since its Odyssey run to fill the Acorn’s more commodious stage. But to our minds, Megan and Nick’s chemistry had acquired the kind of Lunt-Fontanne dimensions needed to power Sharr White’s personality-driven drama about the destructive self-absorption of even great egocentric artists.

Bart, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullaly and the boys of The New Group do the step-‘n’-repeat at KTCHN (Photo: Bill Raden)

Afterwards, when we again bumped into him at the Annapurna after-party buffet down the street at KTCHN, Bart expressed his own satisfaction over the show even as he prepared to catch a return flight to LAX later that night to begin rehearsals the following day on the new Steven Drukman play Death of the Author, which is set to open at Geffen Playhouse on May 20. As if to round out the exquisitely coincidental L.A.-ness of the evening, Bart then introduced us to boyishly professorial playwright Donald Margulies, whose own Daniel Sullivan-helmed premiere of his new play The Country House is set for a June 3 opening at the Geffen, where it will overlap Death of the Author. The shows mark a reunion of sorts for Margulies and Bart, who worked together on the Geffen commission of Margulies’s Coney Island Christmas that Bart directed in 2012.

Some Little Places to go to Where They Never Close

Lest we give the impression that we spent our entire vacation above 23rd St., we’d like to serve notice that we also took in a stately if traditional Threepenny Opera by Martha Clarke at Atlantic Theater and had the honor of getting blown off by David Byrne’s publicist (such is the renown of Stage Rows in NYC) for comps to Here Lies Love, Byrne’s acclaimed Imelda Marcos-in-a-disco musical at the Public.

That was before we headed downtown to Grand St., where Abrons Arts Center restored our faith in the vibrancy and diversity of New York’s avant-garde stage scene with playwright-director Richard Maxwell’s mesmerizing staging of his most recent play Isolde, a dryly funny examination of the ineffable divide between the lofty aspirations of high art and the earthy pragmatism required to bring it to light.

Tony Torn (right) and unknown friend post-show at “Ubu Sings Ubu” (Photo: Bill Raden)

The most pleasant surprise of our trip turned out to be running into our old friend Tony Torn, whose inspired Ubu Sings Ubu was also playing at Abrons. Tony is an old veteran of Dar a Luz, the experimental performance company founded in Los Angeles by the late, great Reza Abdoh. After Reza’s tragic death in 1995, Tony went on to become a member of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric company at St. Mark’s Church.

Tony confirmed that Abrons is having what he called “an incredible season.” Before Ubu and Isolde, it hosted Julie Muz‘s sold-out Beauty and The Beast, and before that was Pig Iron Ensemble‘s Twelfh Night, which also became a critically acclaimed smash.

For Ubu, Tony and poet Nicole Peyrafitte ran Alfred Jarry’s original French text through Google Translate and then “musicalized” the results by mashing the “adaptation” together with live covers of the ‘70s punk band Pere Ubu. As the Macbeth-like despot Pere Ubu, Tony is a hilariously brutish overlay of Mussolini, Curly of the Three Stooges and Dave Thomas in a show that brilliantly recuperates the prankish radical punch of Jarry’s symbolist text by (re-)plugging it into the angry anarchic dissonance of its namesake band. All that and Tony rocks to boot!

Kinda free, kinda wow! Charlie!

Nyla Arslanian, Martha Demson (grasping her coveted Charlie) and Joe Spano at the 28th Annual Charlie Awards (Photo: Michael Schwartz)

On our return to the bosom of the Left Coast, we were pleased to see that Los Angeles culture did not entirely grind to a halt during our absence. One of the most promising signs of resilience came on Sunday at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. That was when the Hollywood Arts Council belatedly honored the Open Fist Theatre and its Artistic Director Martha Demson with one of its annual Charlie Awards for significant contribution to the theater arts. Which is an understatement in the case of Martha and Open Fist.

The timing of the award couldn’t be more propitious. Both Open Fist and Celebration Theatre — two of the city’s most respected small stages that until recently anchored the opposite ends of Santa Monica Blvd.’s fabled Theatre Row — made headlines last year for being the latest victims of rising rents tied to commercial real estate development and gentrification that has been steadily pricing longtime theater companies out of Hollywood.

For the presently itinerant Open Fist — whose identity has been traditionally tied to a permanent home — the Charlie nod is more than a boost to flagging company morale. The event brought Demson together with Hollywood’s political elite — the likes of Councilmember Tom LaBonge and Congressman Adam B. Schiff — best equipped to open doors for Open Fist and to stem the flight of legitimate stages from L.A.’s longstanding cultural corridor.

The theater company turns 25 this year, and Demson says that she remains determined to celebrate its birthday in a permanent home in Hollywood. And while she says there have been some encouraging leads, the most promising development has been commitments from powerhouse companies like Celebration and Rogue Machine to partner with Open Fist in acquiring a property and transforming it into a three-company theater center. Whether the lucky neighborhood for that cultural jewel turns out to be Hollywood or, say, Atwater, remains to be seen.

Vanity Fair, the LAWees, and the End of Jacob Sidney’s Mustache

Vanity Fair to Los Angeles Theater: Drop Dead!

There are many metrics that one may use for judging the relative health and wellbeing of any city’s live theater scene. For example, one can count the gross number of annual stage productions, a method regularly employed by LA Observed critic Don Shirley when he wrote for LA Stage Times. By that admittedly rough measure — 628 above-the-Equity-radar shows in 2013 according to Don — the city stages appear to be in fairly robust shape.

Others, like celebrity-befuddled Vanity Fair scribe Jimmy Im, prefer to count how many stage shows feature Hollywood star spawn Rumer Willis cavorting in breezy West Hollywood cabaret homages to pedigreed movie directors like Baz Luhrmann, Martin Scorsese, the Coen Brothers, Garry Marshall and Quentin Tarantino. Not surprisingly, L.A. theater rates pretty “bad” on the Im meter.

To be fair, Jimmy isn’t what we at “Stage Rows” would strictly call a “theater critic.” Neither, in fact, have any of his primary employers, such as Business Traveller, Travel + Leisure, Out and Hollywood Reporter, where Jimmy has exclusively drawn paychecks as a travel writer. Such distinctions were apparently lost on VF editor Graydon Carter, who ran Jimmy’s fawning write-up of a show called For the Record: Tarantino at the nightclub DBA on Santa Monica Blvd., under the headline “Can Quentin Tarantino and Rumer Willis Save L.A. Theater?”

Any intended irony by Carter fell flat for those that have spent the better part of their professional lives toiling on both sides of L.A. stage curtains. LA Weekly’s chief theater critic (and SRAW editor) Steven Leigh Morris, who quickly fired off a sharply-worded rejoinder on the paper’s “Public Spectacle” arts blog, noted that L.A. stages are already chock-full with both movie and TV actors, thank you. And, Steven added, Los Angeles regularly feed NYC’s voracious legitimate-stage appetite with highly regarded shows.

Off-Broadways most recent L.A. import

For their part, Boston Court’s executive director Michael Seel and Colony Theatre’s ex-executive director (and current head of Hollywood’s imminent Immersion Theatre) Trent Steelman penned a Facebook protest over the magazine’s slur on behalf of the Theatrical Producers League of Los Angeles. In an open letter addressed to Carter, the producers took issue with Carter’s glib attempt to revive a rather tired and ill-informed Manhattan-centric prejudice and invited Im to explore the actual theater that exists in abundance beyond the bars of WeHo.

L.A. Theater Saves Itself (Again)

Unlike Vanity Fair, when we at “Stage Rows” wish to take a single-evening measure of L.A.’s relative stage quality, we simply turn up at the LA Weekly Theater Awards for the short list of any year’s best of the best. And this year was no different.

Production of the Year: “We Are Proud to Present . . . ” Matrix Theatre Company (Photo by Bill Raden)

The “LAWees,” which likes to tout itself as the West Coast’s kissing cousin to NYC’s Obies, turned over Monday’s 2014 edition at downtown’s Exchange LA to the horror specialists at Zombie Joe’s Underground for what by the end of the night had already been unofficially declared the best LA Weekly Awards show ever.

As “Stage Rows” wandered among the Exchange both during and after the show, we overheard such superlatives repeatedly echoed — not the least from Deborah Lawlor of the Fountain Theatre, who briefly joined “SR” on the sidewalk, where she was smoking. Although fuming might be a more accurate word — over the fact that Fountain’s revival of The Normal Heart didn’t reap a single honor despite multiple nominations. When we reminded her that the Fountain has harvested more LAWees in top categories over the years than probably any other stage in town, Deborah admitted that she was maybe being a bit unfair. She then began talking about the show itself and how blown away she was by this year’s edition, adding that she has been at every LA Weekly Awards show since its inception in 1979. (Is there a LAWee for that?)

LAWee Excellence in Criticism laureate Myron Meisel of “The Hollywood Reporter” and L.A.’s dean of critics Don Shirley (Photo: Bill Raden)

Written and directed by Zombie Joe and Denise Devin, and choreographed by Devin, the evening was marked by a brisk pace and spectacular production numbers. In-between, the Zombie crew doled out this year’s awards to deserving winners in record 90-minutes, while turning the tables on usually stage-shy critics by forcing them out in front of the footlights as presenters.

An incandescent Colin Mitchell being supported by ZJU’s Sebastian Munoz and Corey Zicari as Debbie Devine accepts her best director’s LAWee (Photo: Bill Raden)

Most notably, these included non-voters Colin Mitchell of Bitter Lemons and critic Steven “I Never Met a Show I Didn’t Like” Stanley of Stage Scene LA. Stanley, of course, lives and breathes small-stage theater, so it was somewhat endearing to see him up on stage soaking up the spotlights. What actually surprised us was how aglow the oft-cynical Colin was. Part of that incandescence was the degree to which the Bitter pundit was lit up by whatever he was ordering at the bar. Most of it, we realized, was from the symbolism of being onstage — that after founding Bitter Lemons five years ago as a soapbox and the city’s aggregator of critical opinion, Colin was somehow finally not only being officially embraced by the community but was being taken to the very bosom of its most über-cool core.

“LA Weekly” and “SRAW” critic Lovell “Been There, Seen That” Estell takes in the glamor (Photo: Bill Raden)

The awards also proved to be a reunion of sorts, which we discovered when we bumped into Celebration’s co-artistic director Michael Sheppard at the bar. It turns out that we both used to be denizens of the same notorious Chicago nightclub, Berlin, which recently celebrated its 30^th anniversary back in the Windy City.  This, of course, was back in the mid-‘80s when we were but a pimply college student and Michael was … Misty, the most notorious drag queen of the North Halsted Strip!  Sadly, though we knew of Misty, we never actually “knew” Misty back in that day, if you know what we mean. Now we can only fantasize.

2014’s Uninvited

One show noticeably thin on either LAWee nominations or wins this year was the critically acclaimed Rogue Machine production of One Night In Miami. But don’t believe for an instant that Miami star Kevin Daniels is losing any sleep over it. The show scored big at the recent Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards, taking away prizes for Best Production and Best Ensemble. Additionally, The Ted Schmitt Award for world premiere of an outstanding new play was awarded to first-time playwright Kemp Powers.

“One Night in Miami”‘s  Kevin Daniels scores at LADCC (Photo: Jayne Calucag)

When we spoke to Kevin at the LAD Sissies, he was high on the March 6 premiere his new USA network comedy, Sirens, the Americanized version of the hit Britcom about paramedics. Kevin’s character is openly gay, which doesn’t remotely faze him. “What’s cool about the show,” Kevin told us, “is that the two guys — Johnny, played by Michael Mosley, and Hank, my character — are friends and it’s totally natural. . . They’re just best friends.” Really. We don’t know about USA’s show-runners, but back where we hail from there’s an expression that goes something like, “where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.” Which, as it concerns the priggishness of American TV, is another way of saying, hope springs eternal.

Jacob Sidney Makes the Ultimate Sacrifice to the Max

We at “Stage Rows,” who have been a big fan of the great Jacob Sidney were saddened to see that the Theatre Movement Bazaar star was recently driven to the extreme act of cutting off his trademark handlebar mustache in order to kick off his crowdfunding effort to mount his dream production of Hamlet, which Jacob is calling Hamlet Max, for the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Jacob says that his 90-minute cut has been taken from the Second Quarto (Q2) rather than the more canonical Folio for an overall effect that he promises is more efficient and emotionally raw. According to his Indiegogo site, he’s also taking character inspiration directly from the Bard’s source — the Norse myth of Amleth, in which the funeral that Hamlet encounters on his return from England is his own. Sounds terrific, Jacob. The good news is that Jacob turns out to be just as dashing — albeit in a less old-timey way — with a naked upper-lip. So, please, get out your checkbooks! Don’t let Jacob’s mustache pass into history in vain.

Jacob Sidney before (Courtesy of Jacob Sidney)

Jacob Sidney after (Courtesy of Jacob Sidney)

L.A. Theater Goes Global

Despite a less than hospitable reception by L.A. critics, we made it to the closing weekend of Playwrights Arena’s production of Cinnamon Girl, the original musical about the travails of a Ceylonese plantation worker (played by Jennifer Hubilla) and featuring a book and lyrics by playwright Velina Hasu Houston and a score by Nathan Wang. It turns out that even mostly tepid reviews don’t necessarily translate into the end of the line for an L.A. musical. Or at least according to the show’s director Jon Lawrence Rivera.

“Cinnamon Girl” (Photo by Blake Boyd)

During intermission, Jon broke the news the production has been invited to an international musical theater festival in Beijing, China. It seems that the Chinese have offered Playwrights Arena $17,500 to cover expenses for the August festival. They’ll be taking four of the L.A. actors — Hubilla,

Leslie Stevens, Peter Mitchell and Anne Yatco — and the Chinese will supplement the production on their end with English-speaking/singing actors that Wang will cast and whom Rivera will direct in what’s described a shorter “synopsis” rendition of the show. Rivera also said he’d be willing to send SRAW daily dispatches from the festival, which we think sounds like a better gig for Vanity Fair’s travel-theater writer Jimmy Im.

Dateline Los Angeles . . . Where the Theater Ain’t Easy

Dateline Los Angeles — Where the Theater Ain’t Easy

When it comes to understanding the decline of theater and its dwindling cultural reach in the early 21^st century, there are as many diagnoses out there as there are proposed cures. Though sometimes one must read between the lines to glean from which narrative page a specific prescription has been written.

Here in Los Angeles, for example, where there is consensus only that things couldn’t be more dire, the powers at CTG apparently decided that L.A. theater’s most alarming symptoms were too few restrooms, not enough imported shows from New York and way too much support and development of homegrown writers and plays. So they wrote a prescription called Michael Ritchie and, a decade later, the only difference for the patient seems to be that the audiences are ten years older; self-sustaining, L.A.-based playwrights are far fewer; and the producing playhouses that might mount their work are on a fast track for the endangered species list.

A Stink Bomb from Abroad

For Stage Rows’ favorite gadfly, L.A. native son and multiple-times expatriated playwright John Steppling, the scorched earth of L.A.’s theater landscape proved so grim that, several years ago, he again decamped for northern Norway, where he appears to have given up playwriting for international cultural criticism.

And it was from his Norwegian fortress of solitude that John last week laid out his prescription in the pages of Stage Raw for what ails us. There was nothing terribly unfamiliar in his polemic — at least for those of us who know John. For him, the disease is always the reactionary drift of culture, and his preferred dose of salts – a “political vision of resistance.”

What was new was the maestro’s unkind words for the circle of allied playwrights, avowed Steppling disciples, and former members of John’s own Gunfighter Nation playwrights’ group workshop, who have been soldiering on in L.A.’s avant-playwriting trenches in his absence.

John seemed to single out writers like Sharon Yablon, Wes Walker and Kevin O’Sullivan, who, in recent years, have added free, so-called “one-off” evenings of short-short works, staged in non-traditional spaces, and which have become crucial and exciting audience-friendly entry points for L.A.-birthed experimental stage writing.

But John will have none of that. “Mounting semi-rehearsed skits in backyards or bars,” the Norwegian curmudgeon declaimed, “is like getting genital warts from that guy or girl who looked better at closing time: playwright as genital-wart sufferer.” Ouch!

Neither, it seems, does John care for the reports he’s apparently been getting about the successor playwriting workshops — presumably those run by Guy Zimmerman and Walker — that have sprung up to continue the Gunfighters’ work; what he describes as “a slightly toxic vibe in today’s playwriting workshop culture; and that is workshop as self-help, or therapy.”

What is especially ironic is that John’s arctic blast against his former associates comes at a moment when those same writers have been putting up some of the most worthwhile and vibrant Los Angeles stage work — short-run and long-run — in recent memory.

Playwrights Doing God’s Work

Playwrights Sissy Boyd and Kevin O’Sullivan compare salon notes (Photo: Bill Raden)

At the top of that list is the spectacular Sissy Boyd-Wes Walker show, Riddance, which just closed a three-week run at Highland Park’s MorYork Gallery. But one of the unsung heroes of the scene on which John pisses is ex-Gunfighter and current Walker-workshop rising star Jeptha Storm. Storm has stepped into the breach as co-producer at Hollywood’s Lost Studio to help its financially beleaguered artistic director, the renowned acting teacher and director Cinda Jackson, generate enough ticket income to pay the rent.

Los Angeles stage hero and rising playwright Jeptha Storm Lost in thought (Photo: Bill Raden)

Lost Ireland star Max Faugno and Lost Studio’s Cinda Jackson (Photo: Bill Raden)

Jackson, who has headquartered several Steppling companies, including Circus Minimus and the Gunfighters, has been left struggling in the wake of the departure of a children’s Shakespeare workshop and longtime tenant Les Enfants Magiques! To help out, Storm has organized several multiple-weekend themed evenings of short-short plays.

The latest of those was a very solid evening called Lost Ireland, which closed on Sunday. Featuring new short plays by Cheryl Slean, Yablon, Steppling’s own son Lex Steppling and Coleman Hough, some of the program’s most thrilling moments turned out to be the contemporized supernatural fables written by Storm and his cohort and ex-Gunfighter writer John Bower; they marked these writers as talents to watch out for.

In addition, on Saturday, the Walker workshoppers unveiled the first of what they are promising will be a regular series of semi-public and free afternoon salons that, for lack of a better title, we are calling the “Saturday Salon with Nathan Birnbaum.”

Alan Mandell gets grilled by playwright-intellectual Nathan Birnbaum (Photo: Bill Raden)

Birnbaum, a playwright, UCLA adjunct professor of theater and the thinking man’s Charlie Rose, interviewed the legendary and longtime L.A.-based stage actor, mentor and producer Alan Mandell before a rapt audience that included SOSE actors-about-town Melina Bielefelt, and Betsy Moore, more or less fresh from her stunning turn as Joan Vollmer in the Sacred Fools’ production of the William S. Burroughs bio-drama Bill & Joan.

Mandell listens as playwright Joe Nava drives home a point (Photo: Bill Raden)

At 86, Alan turns out to be a very entertaining and practiced raconteur and, of course, in addition to serving on Stage Raw’s Advisory Board, is a living link to the two great watersheds of postwar American literature and the English-language stage: the Beats (via San Francisco) and Samuel Beckett. Alan famously made history as Lucky in the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop staging of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin penitentiary, before being directed by Beckett himself as Nagg in a 1967 staging of Endgame. Los Angeles stage veterans may know Alan better as a leading light (Consulting Director) at the old LATC, from where he helped launch the career of the late, great performance-theater genius and Dar a Luz founder Reza Abdoh.

The salon was hosted by the punk rock documentarian and political activist Susan Ricketts at her Lafayette Park artist’s studio. Susan’s space proved the perfect venue for both Nathan’s interview and the very convivial after-party, at which we helped hold up the host bar while chatting with Bielefelt and Moore about their very cool-sounding upcoming SOSE show, Woman Parts, which is not, apparently, a sequel to the Vagina Monologues but, rather, more a feminist riff in the spirit of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls.

Jason’s Drunken Rohr

The truth of what fightin’ Jason Rohr packs in his critical punch

George Jean Nathan once observed that it is easier to write an interesting derogatory review than an interesting favorable one — an assertion that was borne out last week when Stage and Cinema’s Jason Rohr fired a deliciously woozy broadside across Stage Raw’s bow from the op-ed pages of Bitter Lemons.

The piece, in which Jason used the extended metaphor of a blackout booze binge to imagine himself gutter drunk enough to write for Stage Raw, is a classic of Jasonian critical wit, albeit without, shall we say, the journalistic rigor of a Don Shirley. Jason pounced on a single week’s data set of Stage Raw content that, he crowed, proved conclusively that “90% of the reviews are 100% positive,” and that SRAW was merely Steven Stanley boosterism in slightly more sober surroundings.

The un-argued assumption being that a telling measure of critical ability or integrity can somehow be deduced from a simple love-hate ratio of picks and pans.

Let us hasten to interject that Jason is one of our favorite L.A. reads. To encounter his sweetly-persuasive and highly-fanciful gonzo impressionism is, to borrow Nathan’s own words, to experience “the unstrained simplicity that so often is just around the corner from profundity and much nearer to it than the strained complexity which frequently passes in the drama for lofty thought; and … a little of the wayward music that colors and enlivens life.”

So what if his math abilities suck?

After consulting Stage Rows’ own crack team of statisticians (i.e., our computer-nerd brother in Cleveland), it turns out that when the data set is widened and all of SRAW’s reviews (at the time of this writing) are compared to Jason’s own output since January, the mighty Rohr turns into something of a hollow whimper: Jason’s nine raves and three pans make him 75 percent Stanley to SRAW’s own 49 percent positive rating based on 16 pans and 15 recommends. All of which adds up to nothing at all.

Note to Jason: Apparently the “enriched uranium glow” you were detecting last week was merely the reflected rays of your own red face. But it’s a good look on you, dude.

Tectonic Issues of Our Stage

The Shocking Nature of Nature

For those of you that may not have noticed, the spring equinox silently descended on Los Angeles a week ago Thursday — March 20 at 9:57 a.m. to be precise.

In places like New York or Chicago, the date is greeted with a great psychic sigh of collective undress and the surreal spectacle of the populace instantly taking to parks and the streets in little more than tee shirts and running shorts, regardless of what the actual mercury reads. In Los Angeles, however, where such dress is a 24/357 phenomenon, determining the current season entails more than merely noticing bared flesh and a lack of snow.

Sometimes, however, nature gives us a gentle push. Like Friday’s magnitude 5.1 temblor that arrived around an hour past most curtain times. Earthquakes are the one authentic California production value about which New Yorkers can only dream.

Rocking REDCAT out of its Wits

We spent the critical moment in the subterranean surroundings of Silver Lake’s Cavern Club Theatre, waiting for the start of Homecoming Queen’s Got a Musical, Julie Brown and Kurt Koehler’s chronically ‘80s-damaged camp fest. Whether it was the Casita del Campo margaritas or the tectonic suppression of so much Aquanet and teased Dynel on one stage, we noticed not a wig out of place and thus passed the jolt blissfully unaware.

A pensive and post-show Timur (Photo: Bill Raden)

Over at REDCAT, however, the story was somewhat different. Timur and the Dime Museum were about a half hour into their performance of rock composer Daniel Corral’s Collapse: A Post-Ecological Requiem when the jolt sent a portion of the audience running for the lobby. The band, so our report goes, literally never missed a beat as unflappable frontman Timur Bekbosunov neatly covered by incorporating the tremor into the show’s apocalyptic theme.

Such coolness under fire does not surprise us. Stage Rows was among Thursday’s opening night’s audience and can testify that everything about Timur’s stage presence and Corral’s new tunes positively reeked of coolness. The requiem song cycle definitely marks a break with Dime Museum’s previous Kurt Weill-ish, cabaret leanings into something far more approximate to glam and even goth, prompting more than one post-show comparison of the poperatic vocalist to Queen’s Freddie Mercury or The Cult’s Ian Astbury.

In addition to Timur’s velvety pipes, inviting those comparisons was a stage swagger worthy of Jagger and a stage wardrobe that out-Bowied Bowie (and had Stage Rows’ jaw down somewhere near our feet). Opening the evening in a black, floor-length duster, Roman dog collar and funerary liturgical stole, the singer changed mid-set into a spectacularly glittering gold-brocade black suit with full jabeau and ruffled shirt cuffs, then performed the finale in a half-man’s evening suit/half-black tulle cocktail dress with an LED-lit flounce.

After the show, as we dove head first into Moscow mules courtesy of sponsor Tito’s Handmade Vodka, we bumped into L.A. fashion-art designer Victor Wilde of Bohemian Society, who owned up as the man responsible for both Timur’s new look and the band’s post-apocalyptic stage-wear. Wilde said that he and his Bohemian Society posse (including fashion publicist Tracie May-Wagner, her director-husband Philip Wagner, deejay-designer Payam Imani and producer Joshua Dutal) had just deplaned directly from Tokyo Fashion Week in order to see Timur put the to-die-for collection through its rock-star paces.

Post-apocalyptic god of fashion Victor Wilde and publicist Tracie May-Wagner (Photo: Bill Raden)

Make it so, Dr. Crusher

EST-LA’s glamorous Gates (Photo: Bill Raden)

Over in Atwater, Stage Rows checked into the closing night performance of EST-LA’s The Ugly One staged by our new favorite director Gates McFadden. (See Deborah Klugman’s feature interview with Gates, Atwater Village Development Project.) Gates is also EST’s artistic director but may be better known as Dr. Beverly Crusher from the late ‘80s-early ‘90s TV cult hit Star Trek: The Next Generation. We are happy to report that the smartly mounted and hilarious plastic surgery farce had lost none of its edge or energy, forcing its peerless stars Robert Joy, Eve Gordon, Tony Pasqualini and Peter Larney to come back out for repeated bows before an adoring audience.

Before the show, Gates, who is in the midst of EST’s Winterfest play reading series, confided to Stage Rows that Trekdom immortality does, apparently, have its advantages: For one, she was able to able to save EST some badly needed stage bucks by getting all the medical instruments used in The Ugly One’s harrowing surgery scenes donated by an Ohio medical supplies salesperson and Next Generation fan that Gates met at a convention.

For another, Gates’ USS Enterprise commission also got EST a gig with Wisconsin Public Radio and Public Radio International’s Three-Minute Futures writing contest for short-short sci-fi stories. The company, she said, was going into the studio in the morning to record the three top entries (that she said are astonishingly good) as radio plays that will then go into syndication by the public radio networks.

Elegant Cowardice and Shameless Sycophancy at Twilight

A Song at Twilight’s Bruce Davison and Sharon Lawrence (Photo: Michael Lamont)

At last week’s press night for Pasadena Playhouse’s perfectly pitched revival of A Song At Twilight, Stage Rows got all flustered by a rare (for Pasadena) Ed Begley, Jr. sighting. The actor and famously under-endowed Westsider (in the carbon-footprint department, that is), said he was there to support pal and colleague (and Noel Coward lookalike) Bruce Davison, who is magnificent as Coward’s venom-tongued, closeted gay writer Sir Hugo. Too bashful to approach Ed ourself, we nonchalantly sidled over to eavesdrop on the star of our favorite rock parody (This is Spinal Tap) just as he was asked the question that Ed’s long devotion to conservation and the environment invariably raises: “Did you take the bus to the theater?” another fawning lobby sycophant queried.  “No,” Ed admitted.  “I took my electric car!”  He then added, “..but, you do know, I rode the subway to the Oscars last week!”

Elsewhere in the throng we glimpsed L.A.’s ubiquitous wunderkind of the small stage, director Jaime Robledo, who eagerly chatted about his promotion to ubiquitous wunderkind of the Equity stage in the Pasadena Playhouse’s upcoming and scaled-up relaunch of last season’s Sacred Fools triumph, Stoneface. Jaime  noted that, while deadpan funny man French Stewart — along with most of the original cast — has signed on, the challenge, Jaime confided to us, is to “expand the work so it fits the larger space of the Pasadena Playhouse stage.” Stoneface is slated to open June 3.

Finally, in the “Blast from the Past” department, we were thrilled to bump into long-time local theater reviewer Rob Stevens, former Frontiers scribe and magnanimous potentate of the legendary Robbie Awards.  Rob told us that after several years mostly “out of the scene” and living out of town, he is back in town and online, where he is reviewing for Bob MacKray’s blog “Stage Happenings.”  And while he refused to say whether or not the Robbies are to be resurrected, Rob beamed as reminisced about once running into Tony Award-winning actor Christine Ebersole, and her recalling winning a Robbie as an early career highlight.

This Just in From Our Paris Correspondent

We at Stage Rows readily admit that L.A. is a veritable desert compared to Paris in terms of its artistic legacy. When it comes to mixing culture with public conveniences, however, we are happy to report that the City of Angels in no way takes a backseat to the City of Lights —  or so it would seem from this report filed from Stage Rows’ Paris bureau by art critic Henri de la Trine:

Paris’ internationally renowned, art-rich but pissoir-poor Louvre (Photo: Henri de la Trine)

While at the Louvre Museum over the weekend, Stage Rows was aching to use the toilet. Unfortunately, the men’s room closest to the gallery of old masters was being cleaned. We followed an attendant’s directions très vite to the opposite side of the world-class, albeit unbelievably gargantuan and under-plumbed facility. There, a long queue was already waiting for one of three men’s room stalls. When Stage Rows finally got to the front of the line, no cubicle opened for what was, for Stage Rows, a long, long, long-suffering 10-minutes. At last, an elderly woman emerged from the cubicle, washed her hands, and passed by the row of urinating Frenchmen. Nobody turned or said anything, as though this was the most normal sight in France.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

BY BILL RADEN, with additional reporting by PAULINE ADAMEK and STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

Theater critics and gossip columnists as a class tend to be a rather narcissistic bunch. It is not a closely held trade secret, however, that whenever a critic criticizes, he or she is really writing about him or herself, some more than others, of course.

Because whatever else is present in our mix of opinionated ignorance, dead-certain arrogance and the post-traumatic stress of an emotionally deprived childhood, our capacity for talking about ourselves seems boundless.

Which is our way at Stage Rows to beg your indulgence; as this week proved rather thin on freshly squeezed fruit of the grape vine, we devote the column even more than usual to gossiping about us.

STAGE RAW: 33%-BITTER

Amid the almost universal citywide rejoicing over last week’s triumphant, Phoenix-like launch of Stageraw.com — the site that we at Stage Rows have been modestly trumpeting to our mother back in Toledo as the “e-Messiah of Los Angeles theater” — emerged at least one less-than-impressed customer. Colin Mitchell, the editor and provocateur-in-chief of the theater commentary and review-aggregate site Bitter Lemons, indulged in a little criticism of his own, namely of SRAW and its world-class crew of rough-and-ready stage reviewers.

Colin didn’t literally call us “the elephant graveyard of L.A. stage critics.” He did, however, snipe at our design and overall philosophy, which he compared to a smoky, oak-paneled old “gentlemen’s club that allows women members.”

But that was only after he took Stage Raw editor Steven Leigh Morris to task for both establishing the site as a non-profit and for stubbornly refusing to recognize the Darwinian triumph of global capitalism or join Colin in embracing the sheer ecstasy or the “basic science” of “survival-of-the-fittest” marketplace competition.

And while it sounds to us as if Colin may be eying a spot on the national Republican ticket for 2016, in the ensuing comments thread, it was Bitter Lemons’ own Kevin Delin that stepped forward to correct his Bitterness on the grounds of Colin’s hazy economic theory. And while Kevin didn’t say whether he approved or disapproved of SRAW, he did carve Colin a rather impressive second nether-orifice with dispassionate clinical precision. And for that, Stage Rows joins an anonymous BL commenter in seconding Kevin’s nomination for president.

Speaking of Elephant Graveyards . . .

What 20 years of marriage can do: from the Mikulan-Ross’ party invitation

Anybody squinting their eyes last week in Echo Park might have understandably mistook the home of former LA Weekly theater editor Steven Mikulan and his wife, ex-Weekly critic Sandra Ross, for Santa Monica Blvd.’s theater row, circa-1994.

The Mikulan-Rossses in a moment of haunting deja vu (Photo: Janet Grey)

Stage Rows joined the Mikulan-Rosses in a celebration of their 20^th wedding anniversary that brought out some of the town’s coolest stage stars of today and yesteryear from out of the woodwork and both sides of the curtain.

Shannon Holt and Michael Sargent critique the vow-renewal rite (Photo by Bill Raden)

Paying tribute was playwright Michael Sargent and his partner, actor Erik Hansen, Evidence Room member Shannon Holt, emeritus Paduan Tina Preston, lighting designer Anne Militello, actor-playwright-critic Harvey Perr, retired Stage and Cinema publisher John Topping and ex-theater critic and current LA Weekly chief film critic Amy Nicholson, and playwright Sharon Yablon.

Ross conceived of the event as a tongue-in-cheek black mass/St. Patrick’s Day party and provided a rich assortment of suitably themed sacraments and sacred brownies. The centerpiece was a Crowley-scented vow-renewal rite performed by the Rev. Stephen Mack, PhD and Thelemite Church of Love adept and arts writer Lisa Derrick that paid uncalled-for homage to the Mikulan-Ross’ renowned fondness for extreme protraction and performance art “boredom effects.” The celebration’s highpoint, however, may have come after, when Ross set up a mock confessional in an inner-room sanctum and recruited Stage Rows to hear the hair-raising sins of a seemingly endless parade of less-than-penitent partiers.

They Live (Again)

Two years into the re-expatriation of playwright and Gunfighter Nation playwrights leader John Steppling to Norway, Gunfighters Wes Walker and Sissy Boyd have finally landed on their feet and at Highland Park’s Moryork Gallery for their latest collaboration, an evening of hybrid performance art/theater called Riddance.

Composer Robert Oriol and and Riddance co-mastermind Wes Walker (Photo: Kevin O’Sullivan)

Stage Rows made it to the show’s opening on Friday and is happy to report that the results are stunning — all the more so as it gave us the opportunity to hobnob and shamelessly fawn at the feet of its legendary star Meg Foster at the post-show party. Foster, who just happens to occupy a privileged place in the Stage Rows Pantheon for her work in John Carpenter’s ultra-hip ‘80s alien invasion flick, They Live, was joined by her manager Chris Roe and Riddance cast members Gill Gayle, Chris Kelley, Zoe Canner and Michael Kurtz. Bowing and scraping (and drinking) was playwright and Padua Productions head Guy Zimmerman, playwrights Cheryl Slean, Michael Hacker and Sharon Yablon, and actors Lake Sharp, Jim Storm, Suzanne Fletcher, Rachel Whitman, Kim Debus and Pharmacy’s Kevin O’Sullivan.

And This Just in from London . . .

Stage Rows was in London this week, meeting with lit managers at the Young Vic and Royal Court theatres to discuss possible exchange programs with Stage Raw, when we sited Nicola Walker (MI5 aka Spooks in Britain, Last Tango in Halifax) in The Cut café off the Young Vic’s lobby. A script in hand and sipping java at a large table, Walker was palling around with colleagues when she got up, smiled sweetly at Stage Rows while passing by, and told us that she’d just spoken with MI5 star Peter Firth, who told her Brit Secret Service series was being made into a movie. In one of the later TV episodes, Walker’s character, Ruth Evershed, gets killed off. Walker quipped that she’ll be spending much of the movie dead. She smiled once more before disappearing into a rehearsal of Arthur Miller’s View From the Bridge, directed by Ivo van Hove.

And This Just in from Westwood . . .

Rumors are flying that, more deeply than was previously reported, the truculent and autocratic personality of a certain septuagenarian film director is directly implicated in the recent demise of a certain major equity revival of a certain 1957 classic of the British stage. The whispers have it that after the ill-fated show’s first temperamental English star walked over the director’s bullying and brutish behavior, and an American marquee name was rushed in as a last-minute replacement, the production was scuttled on the eve of previews after its second English star walked in protest over the director’s humiliating sack of the replacement actor in front of full cast and crew. What could have possibly possessed him? Such demonically unprofessional behavior — even by Hollywood standards — would be enough to make even Linda Blair’s little adolescent head spin.

Stage Rows

BY BILL RADEN

We at Stage Rows would like to formally thank Stage Raw for inviting us to share the hottest if not-very-well substantiated L.A. stage rumors and bald-faced show plugs in this, the inaugural of what we hope will be a regular weekly column of scandalmongering and sludge-raking among the personalities that make the Los Angeles stage scene the fractious, fecund and incestuous community that it is.

Spring has Sprung, Early

Following a rather bleak and inauspicious January and early-February, the L.A. stage erupted in recent weeks with an explosion of unusually muscular must-sees, including Echo Theater Company’s world premiere of Tommy Smith’s deliriously transgressive pedophile black comedy, Firemen, (starring the sizzling Rebecca Gray), and, next door at EST-LA, director Gates McFadden’s gut-splitting L.A. premiere of the dark Marius von Mayenburg plastic-surgery farce The Ugly One.

Those detonations were echoed across town at The Odyssey, where Murray Mednick again demonstrated why he is this city’s literary-stage éminence grise with Villon (featuring the always-mind-blowing Peggy Blow), his layered, philosophic and funny meditation on the theater as refracted through France’s medieval lumpen poet laureate.

Bart Catches his Breath, Briefly

The Breathless Bart DeLorenzo (Photo: Pauline Adamek)

Also in-house at Odyssey was Bart DeLorenzo’s fabled Evidence Room and its production of Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play (that closed on Sunday), in which the inimitable Shannon Holt displayed a versatility at nationalistic megalomania even we never previously dared suspect, playing Queen Elizabeth, Adolf Hitler and Ronald Reagan, albeit not at the same time.

Stage Rows managed to corner the hardest working man in stage biz at LADCC’s recent nominee reception party — yes, the habitually awarding LAD Sissies are finally acknowledging Bart’s directing genius with something called “The Milton Katselas Award,” which we presume has nothing at all to do with Dianetics.

Bart says that after workshopping the new Steven Drukman play Death of the Author over the next two weeks, he’s shooting comet-like to NYC to remount his 2013 Odyssey hit Annapurna Off-Broadway with The New Group and, following the opening-night cast party, is red-eying it back to Westwood to get up Death in time for its May 20 world premiere at the Geffen. Whew! We’re out of breath even typing that.–Reported by Pauline Adamek

SoHo on the Pacific, Sort-of

Wooster Trojan Greg Mehrten panders to SOSE’s Melina Bielefelt at Kate Valk’s Standard birthday fete (Photo: Bill Raden)

Some of the loudest concussions rattling the city’s cultural fenestration came via a flurry of frenzied stage experimentation that fleetingly gave our staunchly middlebrow burg the avant frisson of downtown NYC, circa 1981.

Making the biggest noise was Wooster Group’s polarizing and provocative world premiere of Cry, Trojans! (Troilus and Cressida) at REDCAT, director Elizabeth LeCompte’s razor-smart and dizzyingly radical attack on Shakespeare’s rarely produced antiwar play, and which featured LeCompte’s ironized “re-appropriation” of Hollywood-appropriated Native American history and gestures.

Typically, the town’s cadre of well-made-play panderers (aka the mainstream bloggers/critics) sorely missed the point, which left the show without a defender and vulnerable to polemical brickbat attacks and screams of “racist!” carried out by narrow identity-politics absolutists on REDCAT’s Facebook pages. Out of all of L.A.’s theater artists, only the valiant (and embarrassingly talented) stage designer Matt Richter seemed to have the cojones to rush in where other Angel(eno)s feared to tread, as Matt made repeated pleas for the show in comment threads on Bitter Lemons.

SOSE’s Melina Bielefelt toasts the one-year-more-beautiful Kate Valk at downtown’s Standard Hotel (Photo: Bill Raden)

The Woosters themselves seemed unperturbed by the fracas at a post-show birthday party on the rooftop of downtown’s Standard Hotel for its incandescent leading lady, the magnificent Kate Valk. Amid pounding dance music and what looked like lots of bored, 20-something metrosexual Russian mobster types (and the odd fashionista club kid) lounging around the Standard’s over-upholstered pool-side bar, the likes of REDCAT’s Mark Murphy, Poor Dog Group’s Jesse Bonnell and Son of Semele’s Melina Bielefelt attempted to carry on conversations with the birthday girl and Woosterites LeCompte, Cynthia Hedstrom, Scott Shepherd and Greg Mehrten.

Mehrten, the show’s decidedly oily Pandarus, said he’d been passing his off-time locked in his REDCAT-provided hotel room and taking advantage of the Standard’s bountiful room service. (Nice work if you can get it.) He did, however, admit to attending an exclusive Oscar party at the lavish hillside home of L.A. performance-art legend John Fleck — an affair that was conspicuous by the presence of bicoastal stage director David Schweizer and the absence of uninvited Stage Rows. (Note to self: Never mention fair-weather Fleck’s name in digital print again!)

Rob Zombie star Jeff Phillips and Villon’s Gray Palmer imbibe at Pharmacy (Photo: Bill Raden)

One guest list on which Stage Rows did find itself was impresario-playwright Kevin O’Sullivan’s triumphant revival of his free evenings of one-off experimental theater called Pharmacy. After being booted from its Chinatown home two years ago during an ownership change, Pharmacy finally landed at the downtown-adjacent Monty bar, which was filled by a well-oiled capacity crowd for a stellar evening opened by an outrageously funny Mark Boone, Jr. (Sons of Anarchy) and Justin Tanner star Chloe Taylor, with appearances by poete maudit John Tottenham and the likes of Darrett Sanders, Corryn Cummins, Mike Wiles and Suzanne Fletcher in works by O’Sullivan, Wes Walker and Sharon Yablon.

A post-show Mark Boone, Jr. chills outside Pharmacy (Photo: Bill Raden)

The final show in what totaled up as an L.A. avant-garde trifecta is the premiere of experimental-stage collective Poor Dog Group’s long-anticipated opus, Five Small Fires, which features a riveting ensemble (Brad Culver is especially on fire) in a smart and tightly mounted, 75-minute riff off the House of Atreus that is cut into a wittily self-referential and knife-edged exploration of the cult dynamic at play in any avant theater group. Go see it!

The newly legalized Cat Ventura and Jonney Ahmanson enjoying experimental bliss in Five Small Fires (Photo: Jesse Bonnell)

And when you do, be certain to give your felicitations to Fires stars Jonney Ahmanson and Cat Ventura, who revealed to Stage Rows that they are newly hitched! The avant — and now state-sanctioned — couple assured us that the announcement was a Stage Rows exclusive, and it would have been had not PDG’s Facebook page scooped us by a good three months.

Avant-art power couple Lewis Klahr and Janie Geiser pose at Covell Wine Bar

Stage Rows got its revenge, however, by crashing PDG’s victory celebration at Hollywood’s Covell Wine Bar and getting belligerently tipsy on some excellent Argentinian sparkling wine in the company of experimental collagist-animator Lewis Klahr and his wife, filmmaker, avant-garde puppeteer and Automata gallery founder Janie Geiser.

PDG’s free-bassing Brad Culver at Covel Wine Bar (Photo: Poor Dog Group)

Also at the party was director and CalArts theater honcho Travis Preston, who said he had come straight from LAX and that, earlier that morning, had been in Hong Kong as part of a Pacific-rimming logistics trip in advance of the international tour of his Getty Villa stage hit Prometheus Bound. The highlight of the trip? Seoul, South Korea, enthused Preston, a city that he said now boasts one of the most vibrant and edge-cutting performance scenes on the planet. (Calling Mark Murphy.) Their cars aren’t so shabby either.

And This Late-Breaking Blind Item From the Stage Rows Archive (circa 1956)

What renowned Broadway playwright and author of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof openly admitted in a Key West bar that he was not only a friend of Dorothy‘s but of a known Key West practitioner of outlaw “perversion?” Or, as our exclusive source puts it, “How do you think it would sound all over the world if folks began thinking America’s leading playwright wrote with a limp wrist. How do you think it would look in the history books?” Hmm. We at Stage Rows couldn’t say, though we suppose it isn’t entirely improbable that an appreciator of Broadway musicals should find a home in the theater.

As always, any reader tips, gossipy tidbits and — most importantly — party invitations (host-bar only, please) will be gratefully accepted at rows@stageraw.com.