Theater Reviews

Including this week's picks, Jerker and The Tina Dance.

Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Wednesday, Aug 2 2006

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The Tina Dance

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IN THE CHIPS! Mac MacDonald and Dan Snellenbarger’s spoofy new musical attempts to warn us about cyberspace and the military-industrial complex. The gentlest thing to say is that this piece is far, far from ready for an audience. Following an interminable, clumsy overture, the show’s tinny recorded music offers little support to four very weak singers in a play that is almost completely sung-through. It is under-rehearsed — we can only speculate that author MacDonald is reading most of his lines for the character of General Major because he had to step into the role at the last moment. Technically the production looks like an in-class acting project with folding tables, black cloth and old computers representing a state-of-the-art, military computer room. John Dickey’s lighting adds a few moments of sophistication — but one wonders why there is an extended strobe effect in a scene where the actors stand perfectly still. ECLECTIC COMPANY THEATER, 5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru Aug. 26. (818) 508-3003 (Tom Provenzano)KING LEAR British director Patsy Rodenburg delivers a curiously careless, abstract production of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Though there are fine actors here, including Robert Mandan (Lear), Lawrence Pressman (Gloucester), Diane Venora (the Fool) and Jayne Brook (Goneril), their efforts are constantly undermined. The awkward, uncredited set is a long, narrow ribbon of space flanked by audience members. Actors have no room to maneuver or make effective entrances and exits, and there’s no atmosphere or sense of place. Putting modern business suits on the men straitjackets them, and somehow sanitizes their work. The play itself has built-in credibility problems, which loom large here because they’re never addressed. And what we see seldom matches what we hear. We’re told that Kent is being put in the stocks, but we see him being bound (unsuccessfully) with thin plastic police restraints. When Lear says, “Pray you undo this button,” there is no button. And Shakespeare’s alarums and excursions are replaced by the offstage sound of a helicopter. Deprived of its melodrama and spectacle, the play becomes too genteel and oratorical to justify its three-hour running time. ELECTRIC LODGE, 1416 Electric Ave., Venice; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 2 & 7 p.m., thru Sept. 3. (800) 836-3006. (Neal Weaver)THE KITCHEN SINK Writer-director Meghan Gambling’s well-intentioned dramedy about four college girls fumbling towards graduation attempts to capture the last baby steps out of immaturity, but instead exposes its own. While the play has truthful, if hazy, ideas about self-created anxiety, insecurity, best-friendsmanship and modern male chauvinism (in which dudes have learned to disguise their condescension in compliments and shrugs of incomprehension), it’s more sitcom than theater. Jess (Olivia Henderson) is the straight-shooting broad embarrassed by her gooey emotional center; Cal (a solid Amanda Deibert) is the mellow artist; Margo (Audrey Malone) is all lipstick and feelings, while Avy’s (Jenny Morgan) got the marriage-minded boyfriend and predictable future that crept up on her like a fungus. The show’s many choppy scenes (some as short as 40 seconds) make the two-hour running time feel like watching a very special episode of Saved by the Bell: The College Years that’s been flooded with commercial breaks. A handful of scenes show that Gambling has an ear for male characters. The hippie (Dan Miller) toying with Jess’ heart is a spot-on creation, and as Avy’s demonized boyfriend, Rudy, Brian Meredith grounds his conservative, bullheaded ball-and-chain in a redeeming sincerity. DORIE THEATER AT THE COMPLEX, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; thru Aug. 6. (323) 960-7863. (Amy Nicholson)

GO LOBSTER ALICE Kira Obolensky’s surrealistic comedy speculates on the six weeks in 1946 that Salvador Dalí spent at Disney Studios working on a short, never-completed, animated film. It was during this same period that Disney animators were laboring on the full-length version of Lewis Carroll’s hallucinatory children’s tale Alice in Wonderland, and the two stories collide here with amusing results. There’s also a real-life Alice (Dorie Barton), a Disney secretary who finds life at the studio becoming curiouser and curiouser. She works for Finch (Nicholas Brendon), a timid, buttoned-down type in charge of the Alice film, who’s beaten a hasty retreat from their office romance. Assigned to supervise the Dalí film, Finch becomes increasingly unglued after working with Dalí (Noah Wyle), a flamboyant, pop-eyed, scarf-tossing, cape-twirling artiste who throws the office into chaos. Director Daniel Henning elicits a superb performance from Barton, but the confrontations between Finch and Dalí would be more effective at a lower volume. Robert Prior’s phantasmagorical set is wonderfully surrealistic, with actors entering and exiting from inside a couch. The costumes, also designed by Prior, are equally eye-catching. THE BLANK’S SECOND STAGE THEATER, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 & 7 p.m.; thru Sept. 3. (323) 661-9827. (Sandra Ross)UNFINISHED AMERICAN HIGHWAYSCAPE #9 & 32 In Carlos Murillo’s 90-minute work, eight individuals are driving somewhere in the American night, each burdened by problems comic and ominous. These are not the anarchic highway spirits of Jack Kerouac, but small people bedeviled by life’s petty indignities and destiny’s larger insults. How these drivers cross paths, as the focus darts back and forth among them, and how their dilemmas are resolved, form the evening’s tension. Director Jessica Kubzansky’s mise en scène is dark and memorable, but Murillo’s script often feels like a fragmented roundelay of conversations with the “road” thrown in less as a metaphor than as a convenient connecting device. THEATER @ BOSTON COURT, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru Sept. 3. (626) 683-6883. (Steven Mikulan) See Stage feature next week.