What the Butler Saw

"The Spider's Web," Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage Theatre, Long Beach, CA

You don’t need Google to unravel the skein of lies and clues in Agatha Christie’s comic-mystery, The Spider’s Web, directed by Michael David Fox for the Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage Theatre.

You just need to sit back for an evening of sleuth and goof.

Fox elicits a spirited performance out of a solid cast. He had wonderful material – entertaining, literate, a clever set up, a devious resolution - with which to work. It’s not just a mystery (drawing room, polite company, a dead body), it’s English, so the men are tweedy and the women are reedy.

Twists and turns will draw you off the scent. A Cassandra-like wife lies so much that no one believes her when she tells the truth; a secret chamber; a corpse; an uncle who worked for British Intelligence in the Great War; a diplomat husband who will secret the Prime Minister and the Soviet Union’s Foreign Minister Molotov back to the manor for a private, career-enhancing powwow; and a judge with a propensity for cocktails swigged not stirred.

And there are laughs and chortles, as well. It’s like doing Thursday’s New York Times crossword puzzle as Steven Wright provides ambient noise on the telly.

Clarissa Hailsham-Brown (Melissa Leigh), second wife of Henry (Ryan Treller), step-mom of Pippa (Kaylee Bouwens), niece of Sir Rowland Delahaye (Mitchell Nunn), flirter to flirtee Jeremy Warrender (Ryan Young) - that family tree’s a web unto itself – gets an unexpected and harrowing visit from Oliver Abbott (Joseph Byrd), married to Pippa’s mother. Repo-man-ish, he promises blackmail if not grievous bodily harm. For his effort, someone strikes him beastly dead.

Who?

Thence ensues a CSI: English Countryside, led by Inspector Lord (Rick Kopps) and Constable Jones (Todd Gilliam). After some major league detection and some amateur though no less effective and impressive detection, we get one big “Aha!,” crime solved.

Whodunit and why? I’m not saying though I will confess it’s got my stamp of approval.

Fox slyly keeps us chasing after red herrings like a color-blind cat.

With his solid ensemble cast, he juggles culprit candidates with such a light and sure hand that we realize it’s not so much about resolving – perhaps avenging - someone’s murder as it is keeping us guessing who, what, and why.

The cast was puzzle-piece perfect. Leigh made the delightful Clarissa an insouciant, inveterate fibber. Bouwens made us think Pippa murdered Step Dad Dearest by dint of will. Nunn touted with octopus ink ambiguity Delahaye’s work in Intelligence. Treller made us question the real nature of his secret meeting with Molotov. Kopps, with his unplaceable accent, made us wonder what the Lord Lord was up to. And I was sure (I was right) there was more to Rebecca Rainbolt’s Mrs. Elgin the maid and Mildred Peake’s Martha Duncan the gardener than met the eye. A ton more.

Performances are Fri. & Sat., 8 PM, Sun, 2 PM. The show runs until May 5. Tickets are $20-22. The Playhouse is located at 5021 E. Anaheim St. For more information call 494-1014 or visit www.lbph.com.

"Anatol," Pacific Resident Theatre, Venice, CA

There is emotional baggage of the restraining order, 6 o’clock news variety.

And there is emotional baggage of the oh-thank-God-it’s-not-me, dinner party variety.

Arthur Schnitzler’s Anatol, directed by Dan Bonnell for the Pacific Resident Theatre, brims with the second kind.

Such a production: an excellent ensemble performance; an exquisite set; and direction that captures the bipolar nature of the lead character and the era in which he lived.

We laugh with astonishment at someone who readily acknowledges his Achilles heels (an Irish memory; a preference for women in the abstract, not the concrete; a tendency to shake not stir his relationships) but can't do anything about them.

Anatol has to be one of the most interesting (read complex) lovers in drama. He’s romantic but in a Freudian not Byronic way (attractive at first then watch out!). He’s a Cassanova but he’s also an emotional wreck. A bounder, a hypocrite, romantically if not certifiably nuts, this plum role showcases the fine line between love and madness.

The story recounts his experience with seven on-stage women (and countless others who don’t appear). By his own admission he dates types: the sexual kitten, the predator, the unavailable married woman, the haughty hottie, et cetera. All here, all played to typecast perfection.

Countless women, same pattern: intrigue of the hormonal variety, inevitable disenchantment; move on to another without finishing the other. Women revolve through his life like Cabinet ministers in the Bush Administration after a mid-term election.

Bonnell understands all this. He undercuts opulence with mania and creates the unnerving story of Anatol ((Matt Letscher) who appears normal enough at the start, Beach Boy-handsome like Owen Wilson. He talks about the trendy things guys (well-educated, men of leisure guys) must have talked about in those days (hypnotize their girlfriends, inquire into their fidelity).

Then you realize that Anatole’s not breezy like Owen Wilson but dark like Brian Wilson. Well-packaged dementia, here we come.

Letscher nails the transformation. You can see why he’s the ladies man: suave, silver-tongued, well-dressed and –coiffed. But the instant one of his women-folk transgresses, i.e., shows the slightest trace of human imperfection, he goes postal: he sibilates like a viper; his face contorts in three directions; and his hands move like he’s conducting three orchestras at once.

His chum, Max (Alex Enberg), cool-headed, not a little cynical, provides reality checks, but to no avail. Interesting guy, Max. But the play’s called Anatole, not Max.

Oh to feast on one Fine set. Laura Fine’s set design was fin-de-siecle scrumptious. Opulent drapery snaked its way up the wall and made insets of peep-show nude women (Anatole’s idealized versions of his flesh and blood consorts), resemble a Gustav Klimt Vienna Secession painting. The wall decoration became part of her shed attire. Nice!

Performances are Thu. – Sat., 8 PM, Sun, 3 PM. The show runs until May 27, 2007. Tickets are $20-25. The Theatre is located at 703 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA. For more info call (31) 822-8392 or visit www.pacifresidenttheatre.com.

"Merchant of Venice," Long Beach Shakespeare Company, Long Beach, CA

All that glitters is not gold?

Wrong!

Directed by Helen Borgers for the Long Beach Shakespeare Company at the Richard Goad Theatre, William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice glitters glam and great.

Borgers boldly ventures to stage a non-PC play whose premise revolves around a Jewish moneylender’s estrangement from his contemporaries, his profit motive, his comeuppance, and some counter-comeuppance.

All in the name of love? No, it’s not The Story of Bassanio (Danny Smith) and Portia (Nina Silver). It’s the story of Antonio who borrows money from Shylock (Don Kindle), so his chum Bassanio can ask for Portia’s hand.

Mercantile-wise, it makes sense. Antonio’s got not a few ships laden with goods for re-sale. What are the chances that not one ship would make it to shore and cause Antonio to forfeit that pound of flesh?

Slim.

Until that reckoning of accounts receivable, it is a love story and a jolly one at that. A rousing “Drink Up, Lads and Lasses,” frames the show. The story brims with vintage romantic comedy: fops (read French) and dandies that must chose, literally, metaphorically, between a gold, silver, and lead box. There are some sweet falling-in-love scenes with Portia and her attendant, Nerissa (Melissa Miller) and some aw-shucks scenes with Bassanio and his friend, Gratiano (Christian DeSario).

But the moment it becomes clear that Shylock will not take triple the money pledged, damn the intervention of the duke of Venice (Clive Rees), the story turns dark.

Kindle’s Shylock was powerful, monomaniacal, and unnerving. With those Marty Feldman eyes and his Young Frankenstein limp, with his constant reference to “I will have my bond" (just like Le Chiffre in Casino Royale), it was clear that revenge, not money, guided his actions. His diabolical red attire was no coincidence.

That little black box theatre then housed a claustrophobic courtroom drama, all the more so since the stage came up within an inch of the first row. We were the jury. And it was a wretched, tough decision we had to make. After all, Shylock was right, right?, until a couple of cross-dressing, pettifogging lawyers (Silver as Portia as lawyer one, Miller as Nerissa as lawyer two) got involved. Figures.

Borgers took what could have been a twittery love story and turned it into something as taut and dramatic as the courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. And it wasn’t just the script. Silver’s Portia was gossamer lovely; Smith’s Bassanio was a foursquare guy.

The inclusion of live music, some of it written by our own Edmund Velasco, especially a very funny song (Lyrics by the Bard, music by Velasco) in which Portia and Nerissa use rhyme to lure Bassanio to pick the right box, was a nice touch.

It’s period and entertaining but it’s contemporary and relevant. The play’s complex, the production seamless.

Performances are Thu. – Sat., 2 PM, Sun., 2 PM. The show runs until Mar. 31. Tickets are $10-15. The Theatre is located at 4250 Atlantic Ave. For more info call 997-1494 or visit www.lbshakespeare.org.

"The Ice-Breaker," Laguna Playhouse, Laguna Beach, CA

The only inconvenient truth about David Rambo’s two-person The Ice-Breaker, directed by Art Manke for The Laguna Playhouse is that it closes next weekend.

This excellent – and timely – production tells the story of a pilgrimage that Sonia (Monette MacGrath) - young, precocious, frenetic, to say the least - makes to the desert hermitage of Lawrence (Andrew Barnicle), reclusive scientist, surly, not a little mad.

She wants him to read her unwieldy first draft of a thesis that incorporated and then expanded upon his pioneering work in the field of climatology.

She had found – read, absorbed - his journal in Antarctica, a journal in which he recorded his musings poetic on the intersection of art and science. A True Believer, she tracked him down.

He won’t touch the thesis, for reasons that soon become plain.

The rest of this wonderful story describes how she crosses the line from acolyte to colleague, from inquirer to lover, from fan to friend.

The script’s top notch. At times it enchants – it could be a love story but it’s not, really; at times it illuminates like those dinky stars that twinkle above the set; at times it plumbs the depths of betrayal.

Rambo plucks the discussion of climate change out of the forum of politics and careerism (though both characters did get gored by the same erstwhile colleague) and places it in a more humanistic context, one to which we can more readily relate.

Throughout the story he maintains a metaphor of fire and ice. Frozen ice caps, frozen hearts, both of which can both melt.

We are chilled by the ice that is not just Lawrence’s field of study but by his demeanor and the reasons for it.

We are warmed by the sun of the desert setting as well as the heat put off by Sonia’s high spirits, especially her charming entrance (“She asks, boldly”), high metabolism, and juvenile propensity to arson.

The images are rapturous: Sonia reads an entry from the journal in which Lawrence muses about the oxygen that escapes these ice core drillings, oxygen that Napoleon and other historical figures breathed.

The performances will astound you. MacGrath made Sonia a bundle of energy, high strung, to say the least, but in a way that gets into your heart, not under your skin. She made us understand the double-edged sword of the precociousness of genius: she was bubbly, enthusiastic, and curious, all good qualities for a scientist, all good qualities to set her up for a big fall from jealous cohorts.

Barnicle’s made Lawrence troubled, deeply-troubled. Arid like the desert. Watch how he shows Sonia the door early on, her thesis unread. Watch how he blossoms like a flower on a cactus when she returns. And watch him tell the stories of his professional and marital betrayal and the loss of his daughter, the person to whom he addressed his journal. Great job!

Performances are Tue. – Sat., 8 PM, Sat. & Sun., 2 PM. The play runs until March 18. Tickets are $25 - $65. The Playhouse is located at 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. For more information call (949) 497-2787, ext. 220, or visit www.LagunaPlayhouse.com.

"Moonlight and Magnolias," Long Beach Playhouse Studio Theatre, Long Beach, CA

Did you know that Victor Fleming, director of Gone with the Wind, didn’t want a cut of the gate because he felt the film would be a bust?

Or that Margaret Mitchell, the novel’s author, originally wanted Groucho Marx to play Rhett Butler?

You’ll learn a whole lot more about the birthin’ of the epic and laugh yourself silly in the process when you see Ron Hutchinson’s comedy, Moonlight and Magnolias, directed by Michael Ross for the Long Beach Studio Playhouse.

Hutchinson treats us to a great behind the scenes story of the Old Hollywood movie machine. David O. Selznick (Tony Cicchetti) has just fired George Cukor from the direction of Gone with the Wind because, among other things, of an alleged bathroom bump with Clark Gable. He brings in script doctor Ben Hecht (Jack Millis) and pulls Victor Fleming (Brian J. Page) off the set of Wizard of Oz a scant few weeks before it’s conclusion, to save the day.

Problem is, there’s no working script, Hecht is the only guy in America who hasn’t read the novel, and he and Fleming fight like cats and dogs.

What follows is the five days the three spent locked in Selznick’s office forging one of the greatest films ever made, though you wouldn’t know it from the peanut shells on the floor.

For the production to work, Michael Ross had to install a sense of urgency, a ticking clock; and then he had to undercut the thing with Murphy’s Law vignettes.

He did so and then some. He got the most out of his characters, especially Cicchetti’s excellent Selznick. Vivien Leigh wants to return to England during the interval; Selznick goes apoplectic. He’s losing $50,000 for each non-shooting day; he becomes manic and delirious. He has to prove himself to him father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer; he vows not to give up (and keeps him waiting on the phone for the duration of the show). And he has to redeem his father’s name (His silent film director father Lewis lost everything in the Twenties); we all know how that turned out: he produced a wildly successful movie.

Comic gems abound. Page’s brilliant enactment of Melanie delivery on the sofa (“Push! Push!”); Cicchetti’s hilarious rendition of Prissy admission that "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!; "Hecht’s realization that, frankly, my dear, Mitchell had anti-climatically ended her novel with no real resolution of the story of Scarlett and Rhett; and Andrea La Vela’s wonderful performance as Miss Poppenghul, the “Yes, Mr. Selznick” secretary.

Two things mitigate the show’s otherwise bravo tone.

Jesse GrothOlson’s long in the tooth set doesn’t connect to the presumed opulence of a Hollywood mogul.

We endure two yawner interludes in which Hecht rails too much against Hitler and the treatment of Jews in Hollywood and beyond. Valid concern, wrong play.

Performances are Fri. & Sat., 8 PM, Sun., 2 PM. The show runs until April 14. Tickets are $20-22. The Playhouse is located at 5021 E. Anaheim St. For more info call 494-1014 or visit www.pbph.com.

"445: Shakespeare's Henry," Cal Rep, Studio Theatre, Cal State Long Beach, Long Beach, CA

Bawdy and romantic, heroic and redemptive, Cal Rep’s production of 445: Shakespeare’s Henry, conceived and directed by Thomas P. Cooke at the Studio Theatre, is a bold incursion into the intersection of the historical and the personal.

It tells the compelling story of ne’er do well President, I mean Prince, known to his barfly chums as Hal (Josh Nathan), who becomes King Henry V. Along the way he overcomes his propensity to party and pull pranks in the company of such rapscallion riff-raff as John Falstaff (Debbie Taylor), much to the chagrin of his father, King Henry IV (Donald Formaneck).

Eventually, Hal amends his errant ways and leads England to victory over France in the Battle of Agincourt.

With great aplomb Cooke melds the salient bits from the first two parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and the Bard’s Henry V. Hence the title. If it wasn’t so seamlessly done – if it didn’t tell such a taut and powerful story – we could dismiss it as the triumph of technique over narration, as something, dare I say it, French and deconstructionist.

Instead we have two story lines that resolve in a glorious battle and the ever exquisite Kiss Me Kate (Princess Katharine – Beth Froehlich) scene.

First I commend the minimal set. I don’t know if Maureen Weiss conceived it as such but the opening sequence, in which all 13 characters sit in chairs which hover to the back of the stage, was a stroke of genius. From the opening, the story presented itself as a game of chess coiled with all manner of gambits, openings, and sacrifices. Warriors fought their battles with clashing tables that made me think of Rock-em Sock-em robots. Blood pooled in rivulets of red light. Excellent!

Second I commend the cast as a whole, well-knit, colorful like a tapestry; and especially three performances that will keep you coming back for a little more Harry in the night.

Formaneck’s Henry IV was formidable and stubborn, not a little proud and, thus, not a little tragic. He appeared all the more kingly when compared to his rakish son.

Nathan’s Hal was credible as a rogue and he was even more credible as a king. Witness how his tone of voice changes in the scene when Falstaff the bum hied to freeload off his newly-crowned pal, Hal, who thereupon ordered him to keep a distance of no less than ten miles between them.

Marvel, too, at Taylor's Falstaff. Bigger than life, more expansive than the time in which he lived, she made him a metaphor for living in the moment, even when the moment passes and friends from a former era morph into someone else and you’re left holding your tankard of grog, agog.

Performances are Tue – Thu, 7 PM, Fri & Sat, 8 PM, and Sat, March 10, 2 PM. The show runs until March 10. Tickets are $15-20. The Theatre is located in the Theatre Arts Building on the Cal State campus. For more information call 985-5526 or visit ww.calrep.org.

"In Arabia We'd All Be Kings," Elephant Theatre Company, Hollywood, CA

In Stephen Adly Guirgis’s In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, directed by David Fofi for the Elephant Theatre Company, Cheers meets Charles Bukowski and we mine the seam of the seismic shift of the Guilianization of Times Square.

Guirgis’s punch-in-the-stomach script limns the hellish lives of the denizens of a Hell’s Kitchen bar who not only have to tread water but also must face the tsunami of gentrification that swells just beyond the Hudson.

The action revolves around a bar that so brims with veracity that at break you want to veer stage left instead of stage right for that Sam Adams at break.

On second thought, you wouldn’t. You’d have to wait forever for that drink – the new owner wants a more upscale crowd – and then deal with Lenny (Jason Warren), erstwhile jailbird, who browbeats Skank (Steven Schub), speed freak, boyfriend of Chickie (Jade Dornfeld) for his taste in music, his Mick Jagger impersonation, his very existence.

Then Lenny gets knocked down the food chain of vulnerability when Demaris (Carolina Espiro), daughter of Lenny’s woman, Daisy (Bernadette Speakes), goofs him into revealing his victim status of a certain behind the bars sex act. Demaris in turn decides she’s had enough of her mother’s sass and pulls out a gun and whacks Daisy to the ground.

But it’s not Lenny’s story, it’s not any one character’s story, it’s the travails of a troupe of misfits that from the outside you would dismiss with a nose-cringe as you drink your Americano, no cream, but for whom, from the inside, from our view, you cannot help but empathize.

That’s Guirgis’s achievement: he’s set up these characters with their own tragic trajectories and catapults them against a backdrop of socioeconomic vectors; as if they could be swept under the carpet of time. Exquisitely wrought in their own selves, they also constitute part of a larger fabric.

Fofi’s takes this spirited and exceptionally talented ensemble and plant them on their bar stools, on their bus stop benches. Then he catapults them into a world that evolves as they hustle for the mother of all coffee beverages, for money to gratify their urges, for money to regain their self respect, for the money to find love and recover love.

The cast sparkles in this dark story. Dornfeld makes Chickie world weary-witty (“Hey baby, wanna party?”) when she tries without success to teach Demaris how to hustle and, a few moments later, morphs to the resigned and tragic when she admits that – duh! – she’s got a drug problem. Espiro makes Demaris a no-nuanced De Niro Taxi Driver, a powerful survivor prone to overkill.

Sammy (Dan Gilvary), the Norm of the Leonard Cohen crowd, sums up, in the subjunctive, the production’s thrust, when he utters the words of the title, as if the only solution was to be anywhere but here.

The play runs until March 17. Tickets are $20. The Theatre is located at 6322 Santa Monica Boulevard, in Hollywood. For more information call (323) 960-4410 or visit www.elephantstageworks.com.