LA Weekly

 ALTAR BOYZ Co-writers Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker’s cheerful, energetic off-Broadway hit finds itself at the odd crossroads of Forever Plaid and Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. Altar Boyz sends up boy bands in general — and, in particular, the squeaky clean fellas who make up those astonishingly popular Christian rock groups. It’s also a revue, enacted by five strikingly talented performers (Matthew Buckner, Ryan J Ratliff, Jesse Johnson, Jay Garcia and Nick Blaemire) portraying a fictional Christian band. Their songs, a mix of exuberant ballads that extol the virtue, simplicity and innocence of faith, are zippy and earnest, but they can also be interpreted in a variety of hilariously disturbing ways: Every so often the characters’ masks of piety slip oh so slightly, revealing glimmers of lust and greed. In director Stafford Arima’s tight and upbeat staging, the taut production is assured. Christopher Gattelli’s choreography is crisp and wonderfully dynamic. The surprise of the show is how well the subversive satire is integrated into the Christian themes: There’s little rage or anger, and the goofy squareness of Christian rock is depicted with affection, even as its objectives are ridiculed. Broadway L.A. at the WADSWORTH THEATRE, 11301 Wilshire Blvd., W.L.A.; Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m.; thru Feb. 25. (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-7878. (Paul Birchall)

BENT Martin Sherman’s 1979 play created a furor when first produced because it provocatively depicted the persecution of homosexuals as well as Jews in Hitler’s Third Reich. In 1934 Berlin, hedonistic gay wheeler-dealer Max (Tyler Christopher) drunkenly picks up hunky blond Wolf (Andrew Miller), unaware that he’s a Nazi storm trooper marked for death in the Night of the Long Knives. After Gestapo officers raid their apartment and murder Wolf, Max and his housemate Rudy (Stephen Kline) must flee. When they’re captured and en route to the Dachau concentration camp, Max is forced to assist in the torture and murder of Rudy. And, eager to avoid the stigma of the pink triangle, he convinces his captors that he’s not gay but Jewish. The play also chronicles Max’s love-hate relationship with fellow prisoner Horst (Jamison Jones); their relations, constantly under surveillance, culminate in the famous mental-verbal sex scene. Director Crystal K. Craft brings an interesting female perspective to the play, curtailing the male nudity and suggesting that Rudy is Max’s sister/buddy rather than boyfriend. Christopher and Jones bring rich nuance to the deepening relations between Max and Horst, with sterling support from the strong supporting cast. 68 Cent Crew Theatre Company at THEATRE 68, 5419 Sunset Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru March 4. (323) 960-7827. (Neal Weaver)


DANCING AT LUGHNASA A paean to music and Irish womanhood, Brian Friel’s memory play centers on five unmarried sisters living in a small Irish town in 1936. In a spot-on performance, Donald Moore as the narrator, Michael, frames the story with fluid ease, lending Friel’s prose a full measure of eloquence. Michael’s the illegitimate son of Chris (Heather Keller), a moody woman still carrying a torch for the footloose and fancy-free Welsh Lothario (Yancey Dunham) who fathered her child. The family’s secure parochial nest has recently been ruffled by the return, after a 25-year absence, of the women’s brother, Jack (Walter Beery). Formerly a priest-missionary in Uganda, he’s acquired, to the dismay of eldest sister Kate (Mary Linda Phillips), a pronounced dementia and openly expressed admiration for African ritual and tradition. As the clan’s sharp-tongued mainstay, Phillips presides with vitality and focus, while Keller, in moments, capably expresses a lovelorn individual’s desperation. Otherwise, under John Gallogly’s direction, an uneven ensemble inclines to staginess. THEATRE WEST, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; thru March 17. (323) 851-7977. (Deborah Klugman)


THE DOG IN THE MANGER A fable by Aesop tells of a dog in a stable who, out of envy, refuses to let the cattle eat the hay that he, being a canine, cannot eat himself. Lope De Vega’s Spanish classic (smoothly translated by David Johnston) transforms the dog into spinster Countess Diana (Carmen Molinari), smitten with her secretary, opportunist Teodoro (Chris Erric Maddox). She’s too haughty to marry her employee yet too envious to allow him to marry her lady-in-waiting, Marcela (Yvonne Fisher). Director Tiger Reel has assembled some wonderful actors. Molinari’s equivocating Diana has a stylish grandiloquence, and her diction is a reminder of what classical training is for. Also grand is Christopher Neiman’s impish Tristan — Teodoro’s lackey — who bounds across the stage with the agility of Puck. And though the casting of African-American Maddox makes for a very funny satire of this play’s obsession with social rank, Maddox nonetheless doesn’t meet the rigorous demands of the style imposed by the play and by Reel’s wonderfully arch yet lively approach. (Reel can actually afford to rein in some excessive exuberance that pushes stylishness into silliness.) On the night I attended, the lighting was a disaster. Poor Fisher had to deliver her soliloquy of melancholy while bathed in one of the shadows that condemned much of the playing area. Bo Crowell’s impressively lit rolling panels received more focus than the actors, who deserve better. Lovely, colorful knickers-and-boots costumes by Alayna Falco. MET THEATRE, 1089 Oxford Ave., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; thru March 25. (323) 957-1152. (Steven Leigh Morris)


THE EMPTY BED Playwright Sharon Yablon’s new play may be a “two-hander,” but a third, unseen character looms very large in her oddball romance. This would be Mrs. Dandridge, a frail old lady tended to by Miss Pickering (Shawna Casey), who’s been hired on as the invalid’s caregiver. Over the course of 65 minutes Pickering runs into her charge’s rabbity son, Jeremy (Jack Kehler), a middle-aged man who drops by his mother’s house almost as though he were there to water an absent friend’s plants. He soon finds himself competing with Pickering for his offstage mother’s attention and then, in a painfully tentative sequence of encounters, develops a tenderness for the aide. Yablon presents some quirky moments (Pickering dancing to Mrs. Dandridge’s music albums, a territorial feud over the matriarch’s glass menagerie), as well as nicely observed insecurities about aging. (“I think we become something else when we grow old,” says Jeremy, and he’s not just talking about hair loss.) There is also, however, little feeling of momentum onstage. It’s one thing for characters to make opaque confessions (“I’m an Anglophile,” Pickering says, as if she were at a 12-step meeting) but, late in Yablon’s self-directed work, her two personable actors still don’t own their dialogue, and some scenes sound strained. The evening unfolds as a promising examination of love, aging and death, whose truths are more elusive than enigmatic. Padua Playwrights Productions at the STEPHANIE FEURY STUDIO THEATER, 5636 Melrose Ave., L.A.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru March 24. (213) 625-1766. (Steven Mikulan)