PROVE IT ON ME"I don't like crackers with my soup... that kind of appetite will get me killed," insists lesbian blues singer Georgia Brooks (Sweet Baby J'ai) to Lindsay (Aynsley Bubbico), a wealthy white flapper whose sense of entitlement encompasses Georgia's bedroom. Lindsay argues that you can't see skin color in the dark. Georgia knows better. And so Dee Jae Cox's expository and repetitive play, set during the Harlem Renaissance, bats around the same old dichotomies of white-versus-black and rich-versus-poor as though mentioning hot buttons is the same thing as exploring them. Instead, we get shootings and pregnancies and voodoo spells, and that's enough for audiences who just want acknowledgment that interracial lesbian couples existed in 1929. But paradoxically, there's so little onstage chemistry, it's unlikely we'd root for them to work it out if they were the only lesbians in New York. J'ai does what she can to ground the play in her warm sensuality (singing throaty numbers by Michele Weiss), and there's some odd comic relief from her gin-swilling, chicken-bone tossing Creole aunt (Deborah Kellar). Cox's unending supply of sly double-entendres shows wit, but her resolution doesn't prove that love conquers all — it needs a well-timed stock-market crash. Kelly Ann Ford directs. Los Angeles Women's Theatre Project and Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center at the STELLA ADLER THEATRE, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru March 2. (323) 960-7721 or www.plays411.com/proveit. (Amy Nicholson)
RAY BRADBURY'S INVISIBLE BOY Ray Bradbury's one-act stage adaptations of three of his short stories capture their author's trademark brew of whimsy, sentimentality and future shock. In "Bless Me Father for I Have Sinned," a priest (Jay Gerber) finds his church's confessional occupied by a stranger shortly before Christmas midnight Mass. The stranger unburdens his remorse for childhood character lapses committed 60 years before, including an act of animal cruelty. Turns out the priest has a similar secret — could they be the same person? (Hint: Gerber, who turns in a nice performance, plays both roles, with Peter Strauss' lighting design providing clear cues as to which character is speaking.) "The Pedestrian" is classic Bradbury — a Luddite's lament about technology's dehumanizing touch. Two geezers (Jay Gerber and Michael Prichard) go for a nighttime stroll to smell the autumn air, even though apparently people in the Los Angeles of 2049 never walk, and spend their nights at home in front of giant TV screens. The original, prescient story was published in 1951, but it's not made clear onstage why the two men are eventually stopped by a menacing cop car. "Invisible Boy" looks at an Ozarks conjurin' lady (Roses Prichard) whose spell-casting powers have grown weak — right when she wants to bewitch a young man (Grady Hutt) to keep her company for the summer. This slight story should fill anyone's whimsy quotient for a year. Director Alan Neal Hubbs keeps the action flowing for an hour's worth of stage time. Pandemonium Theatre Company at FREMONT CENTRE THEATRE, 1000 Fremont Ave., South Pasadena; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru Feb. 9. (323) 960-4451. (Steven Mikulan)
Ed Krieger
Grady Hutt and Roses Prichard in Ray Bradbury's Invisible Boy
Francy Cline and Max Brooks in Romeo's Ghost.
Elizabeth Mariner
Dane Biren in Are You Delicious?
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Elizabeth Mariner
Dane Biren in Are You Delicious?
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ROMEO'S GHOST Fifteen years ago at the Complex Theater in Hollywood, Richard Brunner (Richard Scofield) and Kate West (Gia McGinley) performed as Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare's play — a slice of fictitious history invented by playwright Stephen Antczak. And now they've returned as the leading players in different production of the same play, but "with a happy ending." Richard has gone on to be a movie star and alcoholic; Kate, to flounder. A freelance gossip columnist (Franny Cline) for Entertainment Weekly haunts Richard through rehearsals, but not in the same way as Romeo's Ghost (Ben Jones) — a phantom conjured from the lingering memory of Richard's dazzling performance of yore, and a presence intended to throw into counterrelief the clash between emotional and physical realities. That provocative conceit might have stood a chance in a production with even a hint of animation, but Scofield and Jones have such a feeble stage presence, and such hollow voices, that how Richard ever pulled off a forceful Romeo, or became a movie star, emerges as the play's greatest mystery. Director Michael Holmes compounds the matter with sluggish pacing that compromises those jokes on gossip columnists and actors' vanity that somehow bubble up through the tar. McGinley is fine, as is Maxwell Brooks as the producer. Action/Reaction Theatre Company at THE COMPLEX, 6470 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru March 9. (818) 786-1045 or www.romeosghost.com. (Steven Leigh Morris)
