THE SPECTACULAR SUPERHERO VARIETY HOUR! As the show’s MC Ben Dickow comments, “Part of why these sketches are all DC Comics is because Marvel’s are so good, it’s hard to make fun of them.” Indeed, the vaudeville-inspired Captured Aural Phantasy Theater’s latest production pokes at the unintentional bloopers and goofiness of the Golden Age comics, and the potential to throw a rollickin’ good show is sensed in the company. But this particular outing feels as half-baked as the hippie scene in the skit in which the Teen Titans stumble upon a marijuana-smoking “mystic.” Some of that blame is due to feeling their way around a new space — the company, having completed a two-year residency in downtown’s creepy-cool Alexandria Hotel, debuted its show last Friday at Bootleg. Unfortunately, albeit kind of fittingly, a nearby Latino gospel radio program bled into Captured Aural’s sound until midway through the evening. The constant crackling of spirited preaching seemed to throw the company off and distract the audience. Though the structure of the program, a mix of stories, songs and general silliness, is tight and true to its “variety” tag, the cast couldn’t seem to find its stride, and laughs were fewer than they could’ve been. They finally began to regain their footing with the last, and funniest, sketch of the night, “The Joker’s Comedy of Errors,” a real comic who would be at home among Saturday Night Live’s “Ambiguously Gay Duo” cartoons; but this superhero showed up a little too late to save the day. Captured Aural Phantasy Theater at Bootleg Theater, 2220 Beverly Blvd., L.A.; Fri., 7:30 p.m., thru April 22. bootlegtheater.com. (Rebecca Haithcoat)
GO THE TEMPERAMENTALS The term NHI was a code word used by Los Angeles police in their case files in the 1950s. It stood for NO HUMANS INVOLVED, and referred to any cases concerning homosexuals, African-Americans, Latinos or other minorities the cops considered undesirable. In those days of virulent homophobia and institutionalized repression, gay activist Harry Hay (Dennis Christopher), designer and Viennese refugee Rudi Gernreich (Erich Bergen) and their friends, Chuck Rowland (Mark Shunock) and Bob Hull (John Tartaglia), organized the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights organization in the U.S. They referred to themselves as “Temperamentals” — a code word for gays. They also embraced the cause of Dale Jennings (Patrick Scott Lewis), the defendant in the first legal case to successfully challenge the LAPD’s entrapment policies. They were a colorful crew: Hay was married for 11 years, and fathered two children before he came out. As a former communist, he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in his later years he founded the Radical Faeries. Playwright Jon Marans employs theatrical shorthand and presentational style to tell a wide-ranging, complex tale, and director Michael Matthews gives it a lively staging, assisted by an able and engaging cast. Blank Theatre Company at the 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun, 2 p.m., thru May 22. (323) 661-9827, theblank.com. (Neal Weaver)
Photo by Tris Beezley Photography
The Spectacular Superhero Variety Hour!
Photo by Greg Gorman
The Temperamentals
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VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho has enjoyed inordinate success — he sold 65 million copies of The Alchemist and set the Guinness World Record for the most-translated book by a living author. But on stage and screen, his stories founder. Both Warner Bros. and Harvey Weinstein have struggled to adapt The Alchemist, while a $9 million version of his 1998 novel Veronika Decides to Die, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, has languished unreleased in America. This is not surprising — especially after watching Taylor Ashbrook and Beth Ricketson’s nearly three-hour attempt to wrangle this book into submission. Ricketson plays the titular Veronika, a pretty Slovenian librarian who swallows a should-be-fatal dose of sleeping pills out of boredom. Every day is the same, she sighs to her two doctors, both so casual and unprofessional that they should be disbarred. When they tell Veronika that her suicide attempt destroyed her heart and left her with just five days to live, she spends days one and two trying to die faster, trolling for more pills when she could just do jumping jacks. Coelho is like Ken Kesey crossed with Deepak Chopra. Every line is a proclamation on sanity and civilization. The adapters have been intimidated into thinking they need a 12-person ensemble and dozens of speeches about clocks and sexual deviants and the Book of Genesis to make a single point: Conformity is nuts. When Veronika has an emotional breakthrough, masturbating in front of a hunky schizophrenic (Jonathan Trent), she tells three characters about it in three separate but equally pointless conversations. And at the end, there are flashbacks to lines people said just 15 minutes before. If Ashbrook’s cast was stronger, the length would be less arduous, but the on-the-nose performances are exemplified in a scene where Ricketson bangs on a piano and screams, “I couldn’t be what you wanted!” Eclectic Company Theatre, 5312 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Valley Village; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 7 p.m., thru May 15. (818) 508-3003, eclecticcompanytheatre.org. (Amy Nicholson)
