The Theater's in the Very Best of Hands

Last night, my lovely wife Christine and I, along with our dear friends Bob Skir and Jim Newman, went over to the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus to see the Reprise! production of the musical Li'l Abner, starring Eric Martsolf as Abner, Brandi Burkhart as a prefect Daisy Mae, Michael Kostroff as Marryin' Sam, Fred Willard as General Bullmoose, Jamie Luner as Appassionata Von Climax, and Cathy Rigby (yes, that Cathy Rigby) as Mammy Yokum. The show was, to coin an unfortunate phrase, more fun than a sack of squirmin' squirrels. That all the various Reprise! casts manage to stage a show with such elaborate dance numbers in little more than a week's rehearsal time never ceases to amaze me, and this cast was certainly no exception. This show's got a lot of great singing, a lot of great dancing, and a whole lot of laughs.

Sitting front row center as we always do, I did, however, notice something that might not be quite so obvious from a few rows back. The stunning actress Tanea Brooks, who portrays Stupifyin' Jones (and, brother, I do mean stupifyin') looks exactly as if she had been drawn by Abner's cartoonist creator Al Capp; same style of eyes, lips, body, you name it. It just made a memorable character that much more memorable.

There isn't a whole more I can add that my good buddy and master blogger (now why does that sound dirty?) Mark Evanier hasn't already covered in greater detail over on his exceptional website, save to mention that Li'l Abner will be playing at the Freud through next Sunday, February 17th, so if you can lay your hands on some tickets before then, you really ought to. It's an evening well worth your time.

If you'd like a little sample of what I've been talking about, why not click on this handy-dandy link right here and take a quick peek backstage at the production for yourself?

Who says we're not a full service blog?

Wickedly Wonderful

It seems my lovely wife Christine and I have been going to the theater a lot of late. Herewith my report...

Six weeks ago, we attended the season opener of Reprise!, a musical series of which I have spoken often here in the past. This season opened with On Your Toes, one of the lesser efforts by Rodgers and Hart, memorable only for the song There's a Small Hotel and for the mini-ballet Slaughter on 10th Avenue. Still, the Reprise! production was as charming as possible under the circumstances, with a wholly competent company led by Stephanie Powers (of Hart to Hart fame) and Dan Butler (Bulldog on Frasier). We had a fine old time and look forward to the revisionist Reprise! production of the legendary Damn Yankees this November. I'll fill you all in once we've seen it.

Three weeks ago, Christine and I and our dear friend Gillian Horvath went to see the Actors Equity special one night performance of William Finn's wonderful Falsettos, with Malcolm Gets (of Caroline in the City), Vicki Lewis (of Newsradio), and Seinfeld's Jason Alexander (now creative director of the aforementioned Reprise!) leading a talented cast. Although the performers were still on book for much of the production, we found the show to be funny, charming, and ultimately touchingly heartbreaking. Well worth our time.

Last week, Chris and I went to see the road company of Lerner and Loewe's classic Camelot at UCLA's Royce Hall. Lou Diamond Phillips has just stepped into the role of King Arthur, previously played on the road by the great Michael York, and while Phillips doesn't necessarily have the greatest voice in the world, he is certainly the best singer I have ever seen in the role. Christine was thrilled to finally see a show where she knew all the music. While the sets were clearly scaled down slightly for the road, the show remains one of the classics, and the cast was easily up to the task. If Camelot comes to your neck of the woods, it's an evening well worth your time.

Last night, however, was one of the best nights I have spent in the theater in many a moon, as Chris and I and our friend Emily Mayne went to the Pantages Theater to see Wicked! In a word, WOW! Now this is what a Broadway musical is supposed to be. The sets are spectacular. The songs are singable. The story is inventive, compelling, funny, and touching. And the performers bring the house down. The current production stars Eden Espinosa as Elphaba and Megan Hilty as Glinda, both of whom have performed the roles in the Broadway company, with the always-wonderful Carol Kane as Madame Morrible and the charming John Rubenstein as the Wizard. We laughed. We cried. We were heartbroken that it had to end. Christine, who is usually one of the toughest critics I know, absolutely loved the show, which should tell you a whole lot right there. Wicked will be playing in LA at least through next March. We absolutely intend to go see it at least once more. I strongly recommend you do the same. This show gets a resounding five claws up.

In Passing

Your Humble Blogger was saddened today to read of the passing of 76-year-old comedian, actor, director and raconteur Charles Nelson Reilly (of Match Game and Lidsville fame) due to complications from pneumonia. I was fortunate enough to see Mister Reilly perform sans toupee several years ago in the Reprise! production of George and Ira Gershwin's classic Strike Up the Band! and was startled by his uncanny resemblance to an old and dear friend and mentor of mine.

So now who gets to play legendary editor Julius Schwartz in The DC Comics Story?

It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Fabulous!

Well, a week ago tonight, we were back at the Freud Theater on the UCLA campus, not to see No Strings again, Heaven forfend, but to experience another of Reprise!'s Magical Musical Mondays. Unlike the usual Reprise! productions, which run for two weeks, with inventive if simple sets, the cast in costume, and the entire production rehearsed and off-book, MMMs are exactly the opposite. There are no sets, scant rehearsals, and the entire cast dresses in black, and works on book, with podiums lining the front of the stage give the players some place to rest their scripts while they perform. This time, MMM was a staged reading of the infamous 1960s' musical, It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman!

I remember seeing the original Broadway production of this show the same year I graduated High School, and being pretty disappointed in it. After all, I was -- and am -- a diehard comic book fan, and here was a musical that, while certainly fun on some levels, was not taking the characters I loved at all seriously. Of course, since the hottest show on television that year was Batman, in retrospect, this probably should not have been a surprise. Still, the comics fan in me was duly offended and it took decades for that sting to finally scab over.

Last Monday night, all of those old memories faded as my lovely wife and I watched one of the most entertaining performances I've seen so far at Reprise! The sterling cast starred Richard Kind (of TV's Spin City fame) as mad scientist Abner Sedgwick, newcomer (at least to me) Cheyenne Jackson as Clark Kent/Superman, the always-welcome Jean Louisa Kelly (of TV's Yes, Dear) as Lois Lane, and Patrick Cassidy as gossip columnist Max Mencken, a role made famous by his father, the late Jack Cassidy, in the original Broadway production. They were all excellent, with Patrick doing a particularly remarkable job of channeling his late dad, right up to the impish sparkle in his eye and the blinding gleam in his teeth.

I've gotta tell ya, gang, whatever reservations I may have had about the original production were totally erased this time around. The show was a blast, a hoot, in short, totally fabulous. I'm told there were some fair amount of rewriting done to the show's book for this production. The stereotypical Chinese acrobat henchmen were replaced by a mix of various Euro-trash villains, for instance. Whatever other changes were made, they worked. In spades. I laughed my butt off (yes, I'm sitting here now, writing this blog, totally buttless) and I found the songs funny and charming. What a difference four decades can make, huh?

I'd recommend you all rush to see the show but since it was a one-night-only affair, that seems kind of pointless. Guess I'll just have to remember it fondly on your behalf. As ever, just another part of the service.

Yep, It's a Rodgers and Nobody Musical

Friday night, my lovely wife and I went over to the Freud Theater on the UCLA campus to see the final Reprise! production of the season, Richard Rodgers' '60s musical, No Strings. It's the only musical to which Rodgers, who had formerly partnered with lyricist Lorenz Hart, then Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote both music and lyrics, and after seeing the show, it's obvious why.

Stars Scott Bakula (star of Quantum Leap and Star Trek: Enterprise) and Sophina Brown (current co-star of Shark) are fine performers, ably abetted by Matthew Ashford (Day of Our Lives' Jack Devereaux), the wonderful Bets Malone (a Reprise! regular), Ruth Williamson (Nip/Tuck's plastic surgery-obsessed Mrs. Grubman), and an ensemble of beautiful men and women models, do an admirable job with a less-than-admirable show.

The problems are two-fold.

First, the show's book, by Samuel Taylor (who also wrote Sabrina, among many other shows and films), is about a group of characters who, at the heart of them, are self-centered, self-destructive, and not terribly likable. No Strings is the story of how an expatriate American writer, now living more on the largess of his friends than on his talent, and a beautiful model, who has found her fame and her freedom in Paris, meet, fall in love, then ultimately go their separate ways. These are just not people you find yourself rooting for.

The second problem is the music. Aside from the opening song, The Sweetest Sounds, which consists of five verses of the same lyrics being sung over and over again, and perhaps the title tune, there isn't a memorable song in the bunch. In fact, the biggest highlight of the show is the absolutely breathtaking costumes worn by the gorgeous models and designed by the legendary Bob Mackie. There are dozens of them and they are simply stunning.

With Lorenz Hart, Richard Rodgers co-wrote On Your Toes (which, coincidentally, will open Reprise's next season), Babes in Arms, The Boys From Syracuse, and Pal Joey. With Oscar Hammerstein, he co-wrote the legendary Oklahoma!, Carousel, State Fair, South Pacific, The King and I, Cinderella, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music, among others. By himself, Richard Rodgers wrote this. But apparently, he learned his lesson. His remaining musicals, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Two by Two, Rex, and I Remember Mama, had lyrics written by the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Martin Charnin, and Sheldon Harnick. At least Rodgers didn't make the same mistake twice.

Still, despite the faults of the book, I found the music to be the primary problem with No Strings. It's the first time in the four decades that I've been going to see live musicals that I ever left the theater humming the costumes.

And THAT...is the State of the Art

As I think I mentioned to you when we start started chatting like this, I absolutely adore Musical Theater. When I was back in New York City last April for the first time in five years, I managed to see eight shows in seven days. From Norbert Leo Butz's Tony-winning turn in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels to the heartwarming retro-musical The Drowsy Chaperone to The 25th Annnual Putnam County Spelling Bee (where I was fortunate enough to be chosen as one of the Spellers) to the surprisingly entertaining Hairspray to the catastrophically awful Elton John tuner LeStat to the wonderfully reimagined Sweeney Todd (and, hey, you haven't experienced Broadway until you've watched the incredible Patti LuPone as a tuba-playing Mrs. Lovett) to the ingeniously twisted Avenue Q to Wallace Shawn's off-Broadway opus The Music Teacher (a terrible show improved immensely by the wonderful performance of my niece Kristina Valada-Viers, not that I'm prejudiced or anything), there wasn't one night when my butt wasn't sitting in an aisle seat somewhere in town, happily transported.

The problem with living in the Los Angeles area is that there are far fewer large theaters to house the big shows. After the Pantages and the Ahmansen, the number drops off precipitously. Oh, there are dozens of much smaller theaters, many of them 99-seaters, so shows do get produced, but generally on a far smaller scale. But, joy of joys, somewhere right in the middle, there is Reprise!

The program began a decade ago, calling itself Reprise: Broadway in Concert. The premise was simple. Three times a year, for about two weeks at a time, a talented cast would revive a classic or little-seen Broadway musical. The costumes and sets were almost non-existent, the cast was working on book, which meant they were carrying their scripts with them on stage, but the entertainment value was terrific. The first production was Promises, Promises, based on the film The Apartment, and starring Jason Alexander of Seinfeld fame. The other shows that season were Finian's Rainbow and Wonderful Town. The second season's shows included The Pajama Game, The Three Penny Opera and Of Thee I Sing. And with each new production, Reprise took another step forward. By the start of the third season and their production of Bells Are Ringing, the scripts in hand were completely gone, there were costumes aplenty and even some pretty inventive if still minimal sets. My lovely wife Christine and I became season subscribers with that third season and we've literally been sitting front row center ever since. I won't mention all the other shows we've seen at Reprise, which, by the way, operates out of the Freud Playhouse on the campus of UCLA. You can find that out yourself in you're interested by clicking on the link above.

All of this is by way of prelude to last Friday, when Christine and I went to see the second of this season's Reprise productions, Steven Sondheim's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, Sunday in the Park with George. Now I'll admit right up front that I'm a Sondhead. With the single exception of Passion, which I've just never been able to wrap my heart around, there isn't a Sondheim work I'm not crazy about. Company may just be my all-time favorite musical, and I've seen God knows how many different productions of the show, just as I have with Sweeney Todd, Assassins, Into the Woods, Follies, Merrily We Roll Along, Pacific Overtures, and all the rest. Still, while Company is my favorite Sondheim show, Sunday... comes in a close second. The first act is the fictionalized version of artist George Seurat's efforts to paint his pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, while the second act focuses on Seurat's neo-artist great-grandson's efforts to bring his own work before the public and how little the business of art has really changed in the past 100 years. If you're a writer, a poet, a painter, an artist of any stripe, it's almost impossible not to know what these men are going through and thus share their pain.

This production was directed by Jason Alexander, coming full circle from his involvement in Reprise's first production, and starred Manoel Felciano (who, coincidentally, I'd seen last April playing Toby in Sweeney Todd) and the lovely Kelli O'Hara (Tony-nominated last year for her role in the Broadway revival of The Pajama Game) in the roles of George and Dot, first assayed on the Great White Way by the astonishing team of Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. And that, in many ways, was the big problem I had with this production, and I will admit it was a personal one. Once you've seen the characters played by Patinkin and Peters, it's almost impossible to imagine them played by anyone else. Both Felciano and O'Hara have wonderful voices and did commendable jobs, but they lacked the commitment, the heartbreaking passion, the originals brought to the roles.

My wife, who had never seen the original production, enjoyed this one quite a bit, but I'll have to give the show six claws up out of a possible ten.

In May, we see the final Reprise production of the season, Richard Rogers' little-seen No Strings. Expect another report from the aisle then.