Theater Reviews

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Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Monday, Feb 5 2007

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(Photo by Jason Mohler)

(Photo by Vitor Martins)

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WAGNER AND MENDELSSOHN, MUSIC AND WOMEN In his pedantic drama, Cornelius Schnauber imagines the last two hours in the life of German composer Richard Wagner (Don DeForest Paul), who holds forth on his own greatness and the shortcomings of his fellow composers. He is visited by the ghost of Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn (Jerry Weil), who challenges his anti-Semitism, and, with a ghost’s foreknowledge of the future, accuses him of inspiring Hitler, the Third Reich and the Holocaust. (In his prescience, he also tells Wagner about Viagra.) Wagner’s wife, Cosima (Addie Daddio), appears, to reinforce his anti-Semitism, and serve him tea. He is also visited by the shade of Carlotta Grimaldi (Sharon Edrei), with whom he shared an intense infatuation. The play is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have a working knowledge of Wagner’s operas, and unsatisfying to those who do. There is virtually no action, much potted history and literary name-dropping, and some romantico-mystical debate about the character of Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal. Director Flint Esquerra and his actors strive mightily to enliven the inert material, but they don’t have a chance. Only Edrei, beautiful in a wonderful costume by Howard Schmidt, breathes life and conviction into the deadwood. MET THEATRE, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., Hlywd; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru March 11. (323) 957-1152. (Neal Weaver)

CRITICS IN THE VIEWFINDER: Judgment at Annenberg Last Thursday, New Yorker senior theater critic John Lahr was the keynote speaker at an invitation-only event held at the REDCAT Theater by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. His talk, “Critics or Crickets,” during which he discussed the state of theater criticism, taking the familiar tack of separating “critics” from “reviewers” — the old Wildean price-of-everything-and-value-of-nothing demarcation. The audience was receptive, and no part more so than the field of critics, both local and from around the country as part of an annual institute hosted by USC and the National Endowment for the Arts. Was Lahr, who currently lives in London, going to grade us? Would we be judged crickets? As a speaker, Lahr projects a slightly rumpled charm that eschews ingratiating gestures while camouflaging blunt opinions. Chief among these is his reasonable belief that some hands-on experience in theater is essential to the making of an understanding and empathetic critic who writes for the theater and not just for a readership. He pointed to his own early apprenticeship at Lincoln Center and involvement in the award-winning Elaine Stritch: At Liberty. Early on he alluded to the Guardian’s eminent critic Michael Billington as a good “reviewer” who, apparently, falls short of the critics’ Acropolis, occupied by the late Kenneth Tynan and others. Lahr, however, surprised his audience by aiming his sharpest adjectives at The New York Times’ Ben Brantley, whom he excoriated as a man whose real love was not the theater but his own dismissive voice. He proceeded to quote some of Brantley’s harsh notices, along with former New York magazine critic John Simon’s snippy epitaphs. Lahr didn’t address the difference between critics who, like Brantley, must crank out their reviews within hours of seeing their show, and those, like himself, who have the luxury of a week or more to digest and analyze a work. Still, he made an erudite case against what he called “the diagnostic intelligence — the mind in a hurry,” while appealing for writing that considers artistry with context. Critics left the REDCAT duly informed, chastened — and resolved to resist the impulse to chirp. (Steven Mikulan)