Theater Reviews: Echo One-Act Festival, Pope Joan, Taking Over

Also, Vibrating Sun, Pippin, Macbeth and more

Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Wednesday, Jan 28 2009

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Patrick Adams

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GO PIPPIN I know that we’re on the cusp of a Depression and theater audiences ache for frivolity and distraction, but this one really vexes, largely because it’s so damnably seductive. First, Roger O. Hirson’s book and Stephen Schwartz’s music and lyrics combine into what has been one of the most-produced musicals in colleges and high schools in the past 30 years. Add to that Jeff Calhoun’s hypertheatrical staging and choreography of a topflight ensemble in a style designed to accommodate the hearing-impaired actors of co-presenter Deaf West Theater, and you’ve got a extremely glossy carny show in which the central role is bifurcated between the hangdog charm of deaf actor Tyrone Giordano and his voiced alter-ego, Michael Arden. The pair share the stage with a huge ensemble, one revealing through physicality the agony and bliss of Charlemagne’s son, Pippin, as he searches for the purpose of life, while the other gives voice to those expressions through a dextrous vocal interpretation and Schwartz’s somewhat sappy songs, rendered here with effervescent beauty. This is the latest in a series of Candide riffs (much searching for purpose these days), in which Pippin fights in a war, learns about sex as well as domesticity, commits patricide, serves as king, screws up by being benevolent to the peasants and dismantling the army while an Enemy Beyond encroaches: Silly boy. Shut up, go home and tend to your garden. Let smarter people take care of the empire. Your adopted son will dream and make the same mistakes. Pardon me, but this is crap posing as wisdom, truisms posing as truth, especially at a moment in our history when doing nothing but tending our garden has landed us collectively in the biggest sand trap in American history. I couldn’t join the standing ovation on press night. I just couldn’t, I was so pissed off — politically, philosophically. If this were just diversion, I’d have risen to my feet. I love diversion as much as anybody. But I felt in this production a creepy, reactionary underpinning that’s even out of touch with our new government’s position on everybody taking responsibility to pull each other up. And for this shimmering magic act to close out by cautioning us about the seductive qualities of veneer is a fraud of the first rank. The show is so well done, see it for yourself, and see if you’re as annoyed as me. Deaf West Theatre and Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Downtown; Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 p.m.; Sun., 1 p.m. & 6:30 p.m.; (Jan. 31 perf at 8:30 p.m.; Feb. 17 perf at 7:30 p.m.; no perfs Feb. 18-20); thru March 15. (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org. (Steven Leigh Morris)

POPE JOAN Christopher Moore’s musical (he wrote the book, lyrics and music), here directed and choreographed by Bo Crowell, hasn’t quite been in development since 800 A.D., which is when the eponymous female pope (whose existence floats on rumor and speculation), but it must feel that way to the creators of a show that’s been over a decade in the making. There are some really interesting ideas at the core here, but they’re not brought into focus by Moore or Crowell. Priest “John” (a woman in disguise) lives a life of piety to God, which in her mind includes exercising her hearty libido, while the Church parades its wares in any number of different disguises. This all provides the possibilities of an intriguing fable about authenticity and artifice. What we’re served up instead is a largely tedious historical epic about a naïve female child, tenderly played by Whitney Avalon, driven from England to a French monarch’s bed. Through an intricate web of fortune and alliances, not to mention her uncanny skill to raise the dead, she is elected Pope, under the name “John.” (Yes, a few know her secret but have political reasons not to reveal it.) It takes until the middle of Act 2 for her actually to make it into Pontiff’s garb, which is when her callowness comes to the surface; her insistence on feeding the peasants while she’s surrounded by power-mongering clerics is not so far removed from politics in Washington right now. It it were about her naïve piety, this could be a musical remake of Shaw’s St. Joan, but this work’s larger purpose is too muddied to draw that conclusion. Moore seems so determined to tell a biographical history (including opening, largely irrelevant sequences devoted to the fall of the Roman empire and the birth of Christianity, and one cumbersome chunk of expository back story that rounds out Act 1). The effect of all this lumbering narrative, that includes dreadful, archaic dialogue, is that the one striking visual symbol of the central character, stripped and with a crucifix resting on her naked back, isn’t really the essence of much that’s actually being dramatized. A six-piece band onstage isn’t well served by voices that can barely hold a tune (the chorales have the strongest effect), too many supporting actors have scant stage presence, Crowell’s “choreography” is simply movement for non-dancers, and Brent Mason’s set of medieval walls and platforms stifle the allegorical potential rather than giving it the flight of, say, Arthurian legend. Most of whatever glimmers of magic appears on the stage come from Shon LeBlanc’s gorgeous costumes. Stella Adler Theatre, 6773 Hollywood Blvd.; Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; thru January 24. (323) 960-4412. (Steven Leigh Morris)