If you’re tired already of the holiday spirit, then how about some murder, revenge, madness and bloodshed, where the only spirit is a manifestation of your guilt? Westmont’s production of “Macbeth,” whose only spirit is the manifestation of guilt, should satisfy.
Performed with a five-woman cast, this “Macbeth” strips an already speedy play — one of Shakespeare’s shortest — down to 45 or 50 minutes.
Christmas shows at the Ensemble Theatre headquarters during Jonathan Fox’s tenure as artistic director have been well-meaning but slight. As an antidote to serious drama they have provided some polite laughs with plays that usually wear out their welcome by the second act. Last year’s “Tea at Five” was more successful, a Katherine Hepburn bio that worked precisely because it wasn’t about Christmas.
And now with “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” Ensemble has a great show on its hands. There’s no mistletoe to speak of, just wolfsbane to ward off lycanthropes. But it is imbued with a very silly, crazed energy, just what we need as the year comes to a close.
“It Had To Be You,” the charming two-character comedy by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna, earned several standing ovations last year in its Circle Bar B Theater run. The odd couple of Sean O’Shea and Tiffany Story, along with director Bill Egan — together known as Acting Up Productions — are back for a second go ’round this year. They’ve moved, however, and have taken up residence at the Center Stage Theater for a production to open this Thursday.
In this swift-moving farce, a down-on-his-luck theater producer named Vita Pignoli comes to the downstairs apartment of the kooky Theda Blau, after she auditions for him. He’s come for what he sees as a one-night stand. She sees his enthusiasm as artistic interest and the visit as her big break, and insists he reads her “masterpiece” and help her find a publisher. The book is awful, of course, and the apartment is kind of claustrophobic, but Vito just can’t seem to leave.
Murder. Mystery. Mummies. Vampires. Wolfmen. Is this Christmas? At Ensemble Theater Company, it sure is, with the preview night Thursday of “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” a very light, very ridiculous work of theater meant to bring some levity in the middle of a dramatic season. Featuring only two actors but over eight roles, the evening requires many quick costume changes behind the scenes (over 30!), and loads of gender switching. In other words, yes, we have men in drag. Deck the halls!
Charles Ludlam wrote 29 plays in his short life, most of them comedies. Many are considered by critics and companies to be unmountable, as they were so intertwined with Ludlam’s persona. But “The Mystery of Irma Vep” is not that kind of play. Possibly Ludlam’s crowning achievement, it provides a series of memorable characters as well as postmodern pastiches of everything from “Rebecca,” “Wuthering Heights” and “Gaslight” to penny dreadfuls and Universal horror movies. His company was called the Ridiculous Theatrical Company — located in Greenwich Village, New York City — and the name indicates what Ludlam was after.
Who’s in the driver seat of your life? That’s the metaphor at the center of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play opening at UCSB’s Performing Arts Theatre next Friday.
If you are Li’l Bit (Alexia Dox), the young female protagonist, you’ve been giving the steering wheel over to Uncle Peck (Eduardo Fernandez-Baumann), your aunt’s husband, who for several years was in a secret sexual relationship with you. Told from the older Li’l Bit’s perspective, with frequent flashbacks to her time with Uncle Peck, “How I Learned to Drive” is, in playwright Vogel’s phrase, “Lolita from the girl’s point of view.” It is also about how we learn from those who abuse us and how we can be hurt by the people who want to help us.
Looking at SBCC’s production of “Machinal,” this revival of a 1928 play, one can peer back into a time of anxiety, where on one hand industrialization was changing society at a rapid pace, where city life was all anonymity and alienation, and on the other hand, one can see a time when social mores were changing and becoming more liberal. There was awareness of being stuck in a machine, but no sense of how to get out of it. At the same time, we can look from 1928’s perspective and see how a lot of “Machinal” reverberates though dystopian fiction in the following decades.
But unlike one particular film contemporary, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” there is no hero to free us from our chains. Unlike Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” there is no tongue-in-cheek humor or a male protagonist. And unlike Orwell’s “1984” or Huxley’s “Brave New World,” this isn’t the future.
As the flower children saunter onstage and take their places on the crazy quilt of blankets, the band strikes up the opening bars of “Aquarius.” Suddenly, the question arises: Is this the right time to be celebrating the Woodstock generation? With such a grim economy outside, the cheery and hopeful up-with-people overture of this now-classic musical seems less like a balm for our ills and more like a poke in the eye from the past.
But last Saturday night at Center Stage Theater, Out of the Box Theatre Company managed to pull off this revival without sinking into irony, and it did so with talent, vitality and some self-deprecating humor.
Milt Larsen’s parents were both magicians. They owned a magic trick novelty shop back in the 1930s and ’40s, and Larsen recalls spending many childhood hours in the stockroom. He’d open every box, learn the trick and put it back. There was no escaping it — from then on, the young Milt was destined to become a magician.
Now, 55 years later, after becoming synonymous with American illusionary arts through his Magic Castle club, Larsen brings his annual family-friendly magic acts to Lobero Theatre for its third appearance.
When David Sabel was a young man studying theater at Northwestern University, he was far, far away from the theater companies that he studied. It wasn’t until age 19 that he was able to travel to London and check out National Theatre, among others. Today, he is a producer of National Theatre Live, bringing live simulcast plays to any theater with the technology, including UCSB’s Campbell Hall. And nobody has to buy an airplane ticket.
“I would have killed to see these productions when I was studying,” Sabel says. He is, of course, speaking of the six-play season that kicks off Tuesday with “A Disappearing Number,” conceived and directed by Simon McBurney.
WARNING: REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
The setting of Alan Brody’s play is 1944 Brooklyn, where modest apartments were small, the denizens were mostly women waiting for their men to return from the war, and America was in flux between the scrimping and saving of the wartime effort and the flowering of post-war prosperity and consumerism. As Mr. Brody shows it, some women were decorating bars of what would soon become a cage, and some were realizing that there was more out there in the wide world.
In this new play enjoying its West Coast premiere at the opening of Ensemble Theater’s 2010-11 season, we meet three housewives whose lives are all about to be upturned with the arrival of a new neighbor.