Theater Reviews: Jane Austen Unscripted, A Skull in Connemara, Model Behavior

Also, The Todd and Molly Show, Dai, Stormy Weather and more

Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Wednesday, Feb 4 2009

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GO A SKULL IN CONNEMARA Playwright Martin McDonagh — a four-time Tony nominee — is known for his rhythmic, ungrammatical dialogue and a worldview that’s comic, unsparing and just. He sets his plays in Irish villages so small and overgrown with past grievances, neighbors remember 27-year-old slights that didn’t even involve them. Here, a part-time gravedigger named Mick (Morlan Higgins) and his sop-headed assistant, Mairtin (Jeff Kerr McGivney), are assigned to disinter the bones of Mick’s wife, dead of a car crash officially, but the bored locals, like old widow Maryjohnny (Jenny O’Hara) and Thomas the cop (John K. Linton), have long whispered that she was murdered by her husband. Under Stuart Rogers’ measured direction, Higgins feels capable of dismissive violence — say, flinging hooch in Mairtin’s eyes — but we’re reluctant to see the killer who could be hibernating within his bearish frame. Instead of plumbing the comedy’s bleak cruelty, the production plays like a cynical — and highly watchable — Sherlock Holmes story: The focus is on the villagers’ thick webs of past and present tension, which spin into an obsession with fairness, where characters glower, “Now I have to turn me vague insinuations into something more of an insult, so then we’ll all be quits.” Jeff McLaughlin’s fantastic pull-down set converts from a living room to a cemetery, with grave pits as deep as Higgin’s thighs are thick. Theatre Tribe, 5267 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through February 28. (800) 838-3006. (Amy Nicholson)

GO STORMY WEATHER Mirrors mirrors on the walls. That’s what you’re seeing all over the stage in James Noone’s set, as Lena Horne (Leslie Uggams), now aging in the 1980s, observes her younger self (Nikki Crawford) through the travails of a difficult life. Her torments include having to surrender custody of her one, infant son, Teddy, to her estranged husband (Phil Attmore), as she chooses to leave New York to accept an offer by MGM Studios in Hollywood. For a light-skinned African-American chanteuse swimming upstream toward stardom in post–World War II America, the crosscurrents she encounters include the kind of stock bigotry (lobbying notto play maids in the movies) and gossip surrounding her secret, tempestuous marriage to Jewish arranger Lennie Hayton (Robert Torti). Another mirror image includes the resentful adult Teddy (Joran Barbour) and Horne’s father, Teddy Sr. (Cleavant Derricks). Ensnared in Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunt of the ’50s, and thereby shunned by the Hollywood studios, Horne finds employment in France (of course) and on Broadway. The despondency caused by waking up one day and realizing that she’s lost all the men in her life, including Teddy from kidney disease, raises the question of how one endures life’s tempests. (As Linda says in Death of a Salesman, “Life is a casting off.”) Such are the metaphysics of Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s musical, suggested from the Horne’ biography, LenaHorne,Entertainer, and punctuated by more than two-dozen classic jazz-pop hits, including “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Hooray for Hollywood,” “When You’re Smiling,” and the eponymous “Stormy Weather” — all accompanied by a 12-person orchestra perfectly conducted by musical director Linda Twine, and beautifully sung by members of the large ensemble. In her adaptation, Cohen frames Horne’s journey down memory lane via conversations with her life friend and rival, Kay Thompson (Dee Hoty). Though Horne’s snide attitude toward this “friend,” once attached to the Hollywood studio that betrayed her, creates a brittle and nicely unsentimental repartee, their conversations — being locked in the past tense — bog things down dramatically. Michael Bush’s staging compensates for this drawback with sheen, partly because the songs are often so nicely tethered to Randy Skinner’s sleek choreography, mostly because of Crawford’s knockout voice and sexy charisma, and the tender-sassy interpretations by Uggams. Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 4 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; through March 1. (626) 356-7529. (Steven Leigh Morris)

Courtesy of Lillian Theatre

DAI (Enough)

Kevin Berne

Stormy Weather

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TAKING STEPS Alan Ayckbourn’s 1979 sex comedy boasts a variety of riotously farcical situations, droll dialogue and hilarious, yet believable characters. However, like many of Ayckbourn’s plays, at the piece’s core, the underlying themes of heartbreak, midlife disappointment and greed suggest a much darker work teetering on a razor’s edge of despair. Boorish, but wealthy bucket- manufacturing tycoon Roland (Marty Ryan, nicely smug) plots to purchase a rundown Victorian mansion to please his trophy bride, Elizabeth (the splendidly kittenlike Melanie Lora). But when Roland arrives home to find that Elizabeth has packed her bags and fled, he drinks himself into oblivion, forcing his nebbish lawyer, Tristam (Jonathan Runyan), to spend the night in the spooky house. Complications ensue when Elizabeth returns home, and, in the dark, mistakes a snoozing Tristam for her horny husband. The visual gimmick behind Ayckbourn’s comedy is that, although the play is set on three floors of a mansion, all the action takes place on the same stage level, with the actors moving amongst each other, without connecting with each other. It’s a gag that tires fairly quickly, and co-directors Allan Miller and Ron Sossi quite rightly underplay the wearisome gimmick in favor of emphasizing the play’s more adroit character-driven comedy. A few cavils: The British dialects are haphazard, which inevitably causes some of the performers to bypass some layers of irony. Still, the ensemble work is mostly deft, with Hoff’s bloated pig of a husband, Lora’s selfish and flighty wife, and Runyan’s innocent waif lawyer being wonderfully vivid, three-dimensional, and unexpectedly dark characterizations. Odyssey Theater, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A.; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through March 22. (310) 477-2055. (Paul Birchall)