Theater Reviews: Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story, Bachelorette

THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR According to legend, Queen Elizabeth I was so taken with Falstaff in Henry IV that she ordered Shakespeare to write another play depicting the Fat Knight in love — and she gave him two weeks to do it. The result is as close as the Swan of Avon ever came to being the Elizabethan Neil Simon. The play has always been a crowd pleaser, and so it is here. This production is set in Middle America (Dean Cameron's handsomely painted set suggests the Great Plains). Falstaff (Archie Lee Simpson) is depicted as an aging, impecunious hip-hop artist, in a flashy salmon-colored suit. He sets out to seduce two respectable married women, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page (Susan Foley and Heather Roop), and gets a triple comeuppance for his pains. Peter Leake contributes the most stylish performance, as Mrs. Ford's maniacally jealous husband, and Saundra McClain shines as the universal go-between Mistress Quickly. Spike Steingasser is the amiable but dim Welsh parson, and Joseph A. Cincotti is the choleric French doctor who's hell-bent on marrying Page's daughter (Victoria Engelmeyer) and her substantial dowry. Director Dennis Gersten gives the piece a brisk, broad, not overly subtle production. Los Angeles Shakespeare Company at the GLOBE THEATRE IN TOPANGA, 1909 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru March 1. (310) 455-9400 or www.shakespeare-usa.com. (Neal Weaver)

THEATER PICK THRILL ME: THE LEOPOLD & LOEB STORY Stephen Dolginoff's 2003 musical strolls down murder's memory lane to the case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two precocious law students whose thrill-killing of 14-year-old Bobby Franks shocked Jazz Age America. The show opens with a middle-aged Leopold (Stewart W. Calhoun) telling his parole board how he earned a life-plus-99-year sentence. In a bold artistic choice (or possibly from budgetary necessity), librettist and composer-lyricist Dolginoff compresses the 1924 crime into an 85-minute story populated only by the killers. Gone is lawyer Clarence Darrow, whose brilliant trial-summation speech spared the two the death penalty, and gone is the crime's Roaring Twenties Chicago backdrop, which could have provided an ensemble's worth of colorful characters. Instead, we're drawn into an erotically claustrophobic relationship between the needy Leopold and his bullying, Nietzsche-reading lover, Loeb (Alex Schemmer). Calhoun and Schemmer have just the right chemistry to make this asymmetrical relationship believable — and strangely endearing at times. Dolginoff's songs, guided by pianist Michael Paternostro, tend to be spare but affecting declarations, veering, at times, between Sondheim and Simon & Garfunkel territory. "Nothing Like a Fire," sung by both as a warehouse they've torched on a whim goes up in flames, captures this musical's ebulliently dark mood. Director Nick DeGruccio knows the difference between thrill and shock, and keeps the evening from lapsing into Grand Guignol. He is aided by Steven Young's moody lighting plot and Tom Buderwitz's set, which is dominated by spiraling platforms that rise above a blood-spattered cyclorama. Havok Theatre Co. at the HUDSON BACKSTAGE, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd. (enter on Hudson Ave.); Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 & 7 p.m.; thru March 2. (323) 960-4429. (Steven Mikulan)

Michael Lamont

Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story: How to make a killing

Related Content

• Theater to See in L.A. This Week, Including Jeff Goldblum as a Writing Teacher
  October 25, 2012
• What Critics -- and Theater Artists -- Are Feeling When Critics Come See a Show
  January 3, 2013
• Theater to See in L.A. This Week
  April 18, 2013
• A Renowned Cardiologist Never Dreamed of Being an Actor...Until His Son Joined the Eight-Hour Play Gatz
  November 30, 2012
• Theater to See in L.A. This Week, Including a Jacobean Incest Melodrama
  May 16, 2013

More About

• Michael John Walters
• Nathan Leopold
• Travis Clark
• Weddings
• Theatrical Plays

THE TIME MACHINE It's a safe bet that writer-director Phil Abatecola and producer-lead performer Julian Bane are big fans of this H.G. Wells science-fiction classic and have always wanted to stage it. Popularized by the 1960 movie starring Rod Taylor, Wells' Victorian novel was a cautionary tale about violence and class warfare, and the propensity of the human race to engineer its own destruction. The story tells of a Time Traveler (Bane) propelled hundreds of thousands of years into the future; there he attempts to liberate a defenseless community of young people called the Eloi from their carnivorous oppressors, the Morlocks. This adaptation appropriates chunks of the film's dialogue and features a model of the time machine that resembles the one in the film. Besides this impressively constructed prop, the production's pluses include a proficient set design (uncredited) that incorporates portable backdrops for wilderness exteriors. (The changes are smoothly executed.) The most notable production elements are designer Marie Brabant's costumes and Joseph Slawinski's striking sound design, which, in tandem with the strobe lighting (no designer credited), create a futuristic ambiance. The performances are another matter, however. Despite earnest efforts, none rise to a professional level. The drawing-room scenes (in which the Time Traveler recounts his adventures to his upper-class colleagues) are stagy, while the more wild and woolly sequences where the Morlocks assault the traveler are well-choreographed but as verbally caricatural as a comic strip. WOMEN'S CLUB OF HOLLYWOOD, 1749 N. La Brea Ave., Hlywd.; perfs Fri. & Sun., 8 p.m.; thru March 14. (310) 473-4422 or www.­timemachinetheplay.com. (Deborah Klugman)

GO VICTORY Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru March 9. (323) 663-1525 or www.fountaintheatre.com. See Stage feature.