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.

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.

 

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?)

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

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.