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.