Theater Reviews: Something to Crow About, Waiting fr Lefty and more

Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Thursday, Sep 9 2010

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GO SOMETHING TO CROW ABOUT The Bob Baker Marionette Theatre is celebrating its 50th anniversary as a puppet theater for "children of all ages." This 50-year-old production presents a day on the farm, in the shape of a musical revue. In addition to the farmers, Mama and Papa Goat, it features 100 farm critters, including singing watermelons, dancing frogs, a flirtatious fox and Dodo the flapper crow, complete with rolled stockings and a voice provided, via recordings, by Betty Boop. Other "guest" voices include Eve Arden and Pearl Bailey, latter providing the voice for Heloise Horse in her rendition of "It Takes Two to Tango." Also featured is the novelty song "I'm a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch," sung by Petunia and danced by a chorus of Onions. Baker's stage is a cabaret-style in-the-round, allowing audience interaction, with the black-clad puppeteers plainly visible. The show is lavish but tailored to fit the taste of its young audiences, who are served ice cream after the show. The puppets are handsome and clever, and there are plenty of the lame jokes dear to young children, but there's also wit that will appeal to adults. (Birthday parties are welcomed on weekends, with presents for the birthday child.) Bob Baker Marionette Theatre, 1345 West First St., L.A.; Tues.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m.; through Sept. 26. (213) 250-9995, BobBakerMarionettes.com. (Neal Weaver)

WAITING FOR GODOT Sir Peter Hall, Britain's acknowledged master stager of Samuel Beckett's towering foundational text of the modern theater, has been quoted as saying, "All actors should have played Hamlet and been in Godot." By "all," of course, Hall didn't mean "any" but rather only the most seasoned and accomplished of players. Regrettably, it's an attitude not shared by director Timothy McNeil, whose excruciatingly tone-deaf, pasteboard production mostly obliterates Beckett's delicate musicality, rhythms and underlying tenderness through miscasting, mugging and unfathomable directing choices. McNeil's laughs-at-any-cost approach violently distorts the play's central, comic duet between tramps Vladimir (Andy Wagner) and Estragon (Alain Villeneuve) — a comedy based in the pair's desperation to combat the boredom and fill the awful silence of their titular wait — into crude, knockabout shtick. Rather than suggesting the antagonistic synchronicity of lifelong, road-weary sidekicks, Wagner and Villeneuve rarely seem to be on the same stage, never mind the same page. In Wagner's hands, the sensitive, intellectual Didi is reduced to an antic village idiot, robbing Villeneuve's otherwise well-grounded Gogo of his pretension-deflating bite. The evening's coup de grâce, however, is delivered by Charles Pacello, whose wild-eyed, off-the-leash Pozzo plays less like Beckett's "big, brutal bully" than a horror-movie Billy Zane on meth. By comparison, Pozzo's inexplicably Tourette's-afflicted slave, Lucky (a far-too-green Deshik Vansadia) seems a masterwork of dramatic subtlety. Studio C Theater at Stella Adler, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through Oct. 3. (323) 960-7770 or plays411.com/waitingforgodot (Bill Raden)

PHOTO BY DAVID MEISTRICH

Waiting For Godot

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GO WAITING FOR LEFTY This dynamic 1935 one-act launched the career of playwright Clifford Odets, became an important social document and solidified the reputation of the Group Theatre. Seeing it now, 75 years later, reminds us that there was once a blue-collar theater audience, and the issues plaguing the country in the Depression era — corruption, deprivation, injustice and wars between the haves and have-nots — haven't gone away. Some ideas, like the idealization of Stalin's Russia, have been shattered by history, but in other areas, the problems haven't changed, and the audience frequently responded with rueful laughter of recognition. Director Charlie Mount has assembled 16 wonderfully able actors, who provide the kind of gritty passion and vitality that must have marked the original legendary production. The play's action is set in the meeting hall of a taxi-driver's union, where union leaders are company apparatchiks, fighting to prevent a strike, while the rank-and-file are determined to field their own leader, activist Lefty. Along the way we're introduced to a rich cross-section of Depression-era society, until the meeting erupts in violence. Jeff Rack's bleak union-hall set and the seemingly authentic, uncredited costumes evoke the 1930s in a way that has little to do with nostalgia. Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West (near Universal Studios), L.A.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Oct. 10. (323) 851-7977, theatrewest.org. (Neal Weaver)