Theater Reviews: Divorce! The Musical, Grand Motel, The Jazz Age

Also, Call Me Mister Fry, Blues for Central Avenue and more

Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Wednesday, Feb 18 2009

BLUES FOR CENTRAL AVENUE Willard Manus’ play with music is a spirited glimpse at downtown L.A. of yore and folklore, of Central Avenue’s storied era of jazz clubs and nightspots where the likes of Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and others were frequent headliners. The action unfolds in and around the famous Dunbar Hotel, where Lowell Smith (Wallace Demarrià), fresh from a stint in the Army with plans on starting a record label, discovers the singing prowess of the lovely Roberta Youngblood (Christian Omari) during a night out on the Avenue. She grudgingly allows the aspiring businessman to guide her career, but when her prodigious talents attract the attention of a Hollywood mogul (Charles Anteby), jealousy and racial fault lines emerge, changing the lives of those involved. The story is not overly engaging, and Manus and director Ken Crosby do less than an artful job of telling it. Some of Manus’ characters are only slightly deeper than caricatures, and his writing often lacks polish. Crosby’s clunky direction make a play that clocks in at 90 minutes feel like three hours. These problems are somewhat mitigated by good acting. Lou Briggs serves up snappy music and splendid accompaniment on the piano, and stylish dancing by Barkia A. Croom and Jackie Marriot proves that choreographer Anne Mesa has done her homework. The Little Company Hollywood Civic Light Opera at Write Act Theatre, 6125 Yucca Ave., Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 4 p.m., through March 7. (323) 469-3113. (Lovell Estell III)

Darrett Sanders

Film

Craig Schwartz

Divorce! The Musical

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CALL ME MISTER FRY As a teacher, Jack Fry was once written up by an L.A. Unified bureaucrat for flourishing an elongated pink balloon in his classroom. The fifth-grade instructor was accused of violating the district “zero tolerance for violence” policy; his job threatened, he ultimately escaped with a reprimand. The anecdote furnishes a highlight in Fry’s solo piece based on his teaching experiences in South L.A., where beleaguered teachers cope daily with troubled kids on the one hand and administrative idiocy on the other. Much of this autobiographical chronicle focuses on Fry’s relationship with two particular students to whom he reached out: Anthony, the disruptive offspring of two deaf-mute parents, and Jasmine, a needy child whose single mother could never find time to show up at school. The writer-performer also includes confidences about his own troubled romance and his personal struggles for self-fulfillment. Any veteran of an urban public-school system (as I am) is sure to empathize, and Fry’s wry self-deprecatory manner offers an engaging plus. His bristling references to “No Child Left Behind” also score points. Having said that, the story sometimes comes off disjointed; the script needs pruning, shaping and polishing, while the various characters Fry depicts could be more crisply delineated. Jeff Michalski directs. Crown City Theatre, 11031 Camarillo St., North Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru March 1. (310) 899-2985. (Deborah Klugman)

GO DIVORCE! THE MUSICAL Erin Kamler’s witty and entertaining new musical satire (for which she wrote the music, lyrics and book) takes apart almost every emotional phase of a marital breakup, including the horrors of dating and the hollows of rebound sex, and sets it to chirpy and wry songs that feature some sophisticated musical juxtapositions and harmonies. Musical direction and arrangements by David O. Kamler skirt the apparent danger of triteness, setting a too familiar circumstance to music, by cutting beneath the veneer of gender warfare. This is a study of the decaying partnership of a resentful Brentwood radiologist (Rick Segall) and his aspiring actress wife (Lowe Taylor), goaded by their respective attorneys. The lawyers are the villains here — one (Gabrielle Wagner) a Beverly Hills shark, the other (Leslie Stevens) a swirl of confusion from her own recent divorce and now “temporarily” based in Studio City. These vultures collude to distort the grievances of their clients, who both actually care about their exes, and would be better off without “representation.” They might even remain married, the musical implies. Director Rick Sparks gets clean, accomplished performances from his five-person ensemble (that also includes Gregory Franklin, as the Mediator, i.e., host of an absurdist game show.) Danny Cistone’s cubist set, with rolling platforms, masks the live three-piece band parked behind the action: This includes the ex-groom’s impulsive decision, based in his lawyer’s misinformation, to remove all furniture from his home, where he and ex-bride continue to live — only to find his bank accounts and credit cards frozen. In the song, “We Stuck It Out,” there’s a kind of Sondheimian ennui to the verities of lifelong partnerships. The song is ostensibly an homage to his parents, in whose basement he winds up living. As the Brits would say, marriage is bloody hard work. Hudson Mainstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through March 29. (323) 960-1056. (Steven Leigh Morris)

THEATER PICK FILM Local playwright Patrick McGowan’s new play, Film, has no right to be as good as it is. The central character is the late theater director Alan Schneider (Bill Robens) — known for staging some of the best plays by Absurdist authors, including Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on Broadway, and introducing almost all of Samuel Beckett’s plays to the American stage. Film has no right to be so good because Schneider, in this play, is an insufferable, flailing bully. The play is Schneider’s nightmare — an Absurdist nightmare, naturally — a comedy and inexplicably scintillating entertainment about artistic failure. This biographical story, set in 1965 New York, portrays Schneider’s attempt to make a film from a screenplay by Beckett (Phil Ward). The playwright has come to New York to work with Schneider. Joining them to star in the slogging, portentous film, also named Film (now regarded by some historians as a “masterpiece”), is Beckett’s favorite comedian, Buster Keaton (Carl J. Johnson), long past his prime, spiritually at ease with his station in life, and willing to play along with the clueless intellectuals and a film crew whose patience is sorely tested. Ward’s Beckett is a delightfully rueful, awkward and solitary figure, aching in vain (of course) for the affections of the starstruck yet savvy prop mistress (the lovely Deana Barone). Johnson’s Keaton (Mandi Moss handily plays the comedian in his younger days) has a pleasingly bemused perspective on Schneider’s temper tantrums. Framing the story are slivers of Waiting for Godot in both French and English, and, in another nod to Beckett, a vaudeville in front of a curtain, featuring a kind of Mutt and Jeff routine, here played out by Schneider and the source of his envy, director Mike Nichols (who grabbed the job directing the movie of Virginia Woolf), portrayed as a figure of rare competence by Trevor H. Olsen. Despite the production being slightly too long, director Trevor Biship knows exactly what he’s doing, astutely staging the action (with supplementary archived film clips of Keaton in his prime) on Sarah Palmrose’s emblematic set of a stage within a stage within a stage, each with its own curtain, and together depicting the multiple, clashing realities inside Schneider’s tormented brain. Theatre of NOTE, 1517 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through March 21. (323) 856-8611.