Theater Reviews: The Cradle Will Rock, Alceste, 100 Days

Also Love Letters to Women, Dangerous Beauty, Camino Real and more

Comments (0) By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Thursday, Feb 17 2011

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GO MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS After firing director George Cukor and fearing that his film Gone With the Wind will never get back on schedule, producer David O. Selznick (Roy Abramsohn) essentially kidnaps brainy screenwriter Ben Hecht (Matt Gottlieb) and macho director Victor Fleming (Brendan Ford), forcing them into captivity with only bananas and peanuts for brain fuel until they come up with a script and a shooting plan. There is a kernel of truth to this tale, but mostly it's a frame for farce as the men hurl insults at one another, interrupted occasionally by ditzy secretary Miss Poppenghul (Emily Eiden). The comedy picks up steam and has the audience rapt when, most interestingly, Roy Hutchinson's play takes a turn that's striking for its intelligence. In extremis of weariness and emotional rawness, the repartee begins to sound like the kind of aesthetic and political discussion so well created for the art world in Yasmina Reza's Art. What originally were jibes about Jews running Hollywood transform into important discussions about power, responsibility and the society of 1930s America. Director Andrew Barnicle overplays the farce, but he skillfully handles the more sober moments, complementing the talents of the fine cast. Bruce Goodrich's handsome set provides the perfect atmosphere — especially as it gets trashed through the week of nonstop artistic agony. Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St., Burbank; Sun., 2 p.m., Thurs.-Fri., 8 p.m., Sat., Feb. 12, 3 & 8 p.m., through March 6. (818) 558-7000. (Tom Provenzano)

GO 100 DAYS The title of Weiko Lin's two-character play is derived from an old Taiwanese Buddhist tradition, which dictates that when the parent of an unmarried child passes away, the child must find a spouse within 100 days in order for the spirit of the deceased to transition peacefully. But matrimony is the last thing on the mind of Will (Eric Martig), who revels in his debauched, hand-to-mouth existence as a traveling comedian on the college circuit, where there is a steady supply of booze and female company. But for Miki (Joy Howard) — Will's love of 15 years removed — life is nothing but painful drudgery, made all the more so by old emotional wounds, an unhappy marriage, middle-class monotony and her fear of having children. When Will attends a funeral service for his mother, he encounters a family friend who sets in motion a chain of events that eventually brings Miki and Will together again, allowing another chapter of their relationship to play out. Notwithstanding a somewhat tedious Act 2 involving an overcooked night of drinking and reminiscing, there is much that is engaging. Lin's script bristles with energy and humor, and he invests these characters with a simple, captivating humanity. The cast delivers high-quality performances, under Brett Erickson's direction. Loft Ensemble, 929 E. Second St., L.A.; Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 7 p.m., through March 20. (213) 680-0392, loftensemble.com. (Lovell Estell III)

NR1: DANGEROUS BEAUTY Photo by Jim Cox

NR2: 33 VARIATIONS Photo by Craig Schwartz

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33 VARIATIONS An American musicologist, Dr. Katherine Brandt (Jane Fonda), goes to Bonn, Germany, to visit the highly protected archives of Beethoven's manuscripts. She's possessed by a question: Why, when he was in physical and mental decline, did Ludwig van B. (Zach Grenier) concentrate his godly talent cranking out 33 variations on a minor, quaint waltz composed and commissioned by an Italian music publisher named Anton Diabelli (Don Amendolia), who had only asked for one variation from both LVB and Vienna's other best and brightest composers. In the surrealistic swirl of his often beautiful play, enhanced by musical director Diane Walsh's gorgeous live piano accompaniment, writer-director Moisés Kaufman settles on a deeply refreshing theme that spins the definition of mediocre into the exact opposite of that found in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. Instead, Kaufman keeps snobbery at bay by accusing those who label a work, or a person, as mediocre of being blind themselves. For Beethoven found in Diabelli's prosaic waltz endless opportunities for invention — so much so that he delayed his Requiem Mass in order to keep exploring the tune. And this, the play suggests, is an allegory for how we, too, can find richness in what we wrongly presume to be the mundanities of life. Kaufman spins this idea through the relationship between the specialist, mono-focused Brandt and her dilettante daughter (nice performance by Samantha Mathis). Brandt keeps wondering when the child will settle down and make something of herself. Except for Grenier's slightly cartoonish Beethoven, enabled by the slightly less cartoonish portrayal of his caretaker, Anton Schindler (Grant James Varjas), so far so good. However, it's the play's dramatic crux, making it a star vehicle for Fonda, that undoes the event; for Brandt has Lou Gehrig's disease, a somewhat strained attempt to add the stakes of dwindling time to her search, to parallel her own mortality with that of Beethoven, to infuse the drama with gratuitous morbidity and to give Fonda the opportunity to physically implode before our eyes, which she does with stirring conviction and technique. But this play isn't Margaret Edson's Wit, and its thematic focus isn't mortality, and how one has lived; it's primarily about the relationship between mediocrity and excellence in music and in life, and Brandt's disease crashes into that like an uninvited drug dealer at a masked ball. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m, Sat., 2 & 8 p.m., Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m., through March 6. (213) 628-2772. (Steven Leigh Morris)