LA Weekly

THE BALD SOPRANO Eugene Ionesco’s brilliant absurdist farce unfolds in a universe dislodged from logic and even common sense. Yet, even in this bizarre world, a good laugh is still a good laugh, thanks to director Frederique Michel’s assured staging that comes marbled in cool irony. A middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Jeff Atik and David E. Frank in drag), relaxes in a suburban living room not far from Paris, after having had a delicious dinner. Mrs. Smith rhapsodizes about the meal, while her genial hubby replies in incomprehensible grunts and gurgles. Suddenly, the Smiths’ friends, Mrs. and Mr. Martin (Cynthia Mance and Bo Roberts), show up on the doorstep — and soon the characters are squawking, babbling and ejaculating random bits of nonsense. Are they a pair of typical suburban couples? Or barking animals at the zoo? It’s best to simply roll with Ionesco’s wonderfully random and playfully chaotic plot, which Michel sets with impeccable comic timing. The performers rattle off the non sequiturs with glee and gusto — at times the piece resembles a long Monty Python sketch. Frank’s turn as Mrs. Smith is particularly droll — he plays the character as a frumpy suburban matron, but with buggy, lunatic eyes. Atik’s harrumphing hubby and Mance’s seriously deranged Mrs. Martin are vivid, multidimensional characters. CITY GARAGE, 1340½ Fourth St. (alley), Santa Monica; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5:30 p.m.; thru Dec 16. (310) 319-9939. (Paul Birchall)


DAMN YANKEES As its new artistic director, Jason Alexander is determined to remake the production company Reprise! Broadway’s Best, which he hopes to shake out of its penchant for the “pleasant.” His first outing is a reimagining of the classic 1950s white suburban musical about baseball, as a 1980s African-American urban entertainment on the order of Dream Girls. He was given permission by the various estates, so it’s on the up-and-up, but ignoring how the Adler and Ross score and lyrics don’t fit the concept is on the down and down — not offensive, just a mismatch. Gone is Ray Walston’s conservative, crew-cut devil in favor of Jimmy Earl (played by Cleavant Derricks), who cons an aging baseball fan (gorgeous-voiced Ken Page) into a deal to trade his soul to become a great ball player — he becomes Joe Hardy (charming Ty Taylor). Much of the singing is exhilarating — Lillia’s White’s rendition of “You Gotta Have Heart,” for example, is so powerful, we understand why this great vocalist is here in the tiny role of a neighbor. Alexander’s betrayal comes from a string of stale jokes, added for this production. Among them, Jackée Harry’s parody of her own hilariously obnoxious television persona from the ’90s. Reprise! began with simple concert versions of musicals. In this new vision the show is entirely staged, but with sets and costumes that appear to have been pulled from the mothballs of some provincial Civic Light Opera. UCLA FREUD PLAYHOUSE, Wstwd.; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 & 7 p.m.; thru Nov. 18. (310) 825-2101. (Tom Provenzano)


DEAR BRUTUS Magical woods float around the countryside, like clouds, in J.M. Barrie’s little-known 1917 fantasia. (Barrie is better known as the author of Peter Pan.) When the forest shows up in the back garden of eccentric Lob’s (Steve Weingarten) estate, the invited guests wander in and find themselves reinvented — given the opportunity of a second chance in life, to undo regrets. What will they do with it? And what does that say about destiny and the underlying characters of servants and masters, of devoted wives and philandering husbands? Barrie mingles the whimsy and humor of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with one of the core ideas from Julius Caesar in a frolic about love and loss that’s splendidly directed by Julia Rodriguez-Elliott. It’s as timeless and truthful as a view from a helium balloon. A NOISE WITHIN, 134 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; in rep, call for schedule; thru Dec. 16. (Steven Leigh Morris) See Theater feature next week.


DAWN’S LIGHT: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi The good news is that a local mid-size theater has the guts to stage the first play of a new playwright. The bad news is that what’s on the stage looks just like the first play of a new playwright. Jeanne Sakata’s biographical one-man show chronicles — in the most tedious sense of that verb — the journey of Gordon Hirabayashi, a Seattle-based Japanese-American who defied curfew orders targeted at Japanese-American U.S. citizens during WWII, and sued the federal government for the racist internment of his family. (No Italian- or German-American U.S. citizens were imprisoned for their ethnicity. Hirabayashi refused deportation to the relocation camps, and served time instead at various federal detention centers.) Among the play’s virtues is the stark reminder — in the same week that the LAPD announced plans to “map” the locales of Muslim enclaves for purposes of national security — that official racism is part of our historical fabric. As portrayed by Ryun Yu (wobbling on his lines opening night, yet revealing impressive versatility and mimicry in his portrayals of dozens of characters), Hirabayashi clings to his indignation over the gap between America’s founding documents and her official actions — a light ocean wrapped around a dark one, to cite the play’s central metaphor. He loves the U.S. Constitution, especially its preamble, like a child who loves the idea of the tooth fairy. The narrative that shows him blithely coping with institutional bigotry against the Japanese in pre-war Seattle is the stuff of pro forma victim politics, yet it takes a scenic detour when a local judge permits him to serve an outdoor prison sentence in Tucson, on the condition that he get there himself. (He hitchhikes there, the marshal in Arizona can’t find his records, and offers to set him free; Hirabayashi jovially insists that the marshal look again.) Despite its charms, and for all Yu’s impersonations, the play has a desolate, antitheatrical feel, the stage equivalent of a lounge crooner working through his oeuvre with “and then I wrote” transitions. Director Jessica Kubzansky tries in vain to mitigate the shrinkage with Maiko Nezu’s snappy historical projections and enveloping set of platforms and a sliding “concrete” wall. Still, in a play that aims to have Hirabayashi loom large, Yu looks awfully small and lonely out there. EAST WEST PLAYERS, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Little Tokyo; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. (no perf Nov. 22); thru Dec. 2. (213) 625-7000. (Steven Leigh Morris)