Earlier this summer, I wrote about the LA-related plays that I saw in West Virginia, of all places. This past weekend, I saw another LA-related play, Open House, that is being produced in LA, of all places.
However, I also hit the I-5 to see three Southern California-related productions that are being produced in San Diego. One of these is at the Old Globe — an adaptation of a classic 20th-century LA tale, Double Indemnity.
The other two are at La Jolla Playhouse. The bigger of these, Sideways, is a much more lavish version of a play that I saw in its premiere last year at the tiny Ruskin Group Theatre in Santa Monica. The other La Jolla show is The Good, the Bad and the I-5, a Second City sketch and improv revue dedicated to satirizing present-day San Diego.
Yes, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner is the topic du jour.
Frank Caeti, Travis Turner, Andel Sudik, Marla Caceres, Mitchell Fain and Kevin Sciretta in “The Good, The Bad and the I-5.” Photo by Todd Rosenberg.
Let’s start with The Good, the Bad and the I-5. It hasn’t received much attention in LA, probably because it’s so San Diego-oriented. Yet it raises an interesting question — why hasn’t Second City done a show like this in LA?
After all, Second City runs a training center on Hollywood Boulevard, as well as similar centers in Chicago and Toronto. It opened a resident company in Santa Monica in the late ’80s, in addition to its continuing companies in Chicago and Toronto, but LA’s didn’t last long. Yet occasionally Second City shows appear in conjunction with other established theater companies — for example, Second City did an Orange County-specific show, Can You Be More Pacific, at Laguna Playhouse in 2010.
And in LA, Center Theatre Group recently announced that Second City will again, for a second holiday season, produce A Christmas Carol — Twist Your Dickens! at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. I don’t want to pre-judge it. Perhaps last year’s debut should have been considered a workshop for this year’s, and the company figured out how to make it better. Unfortunately, it’s hard to forget that last year’s version was one of the worst sketch comedy/improv shows I have ever seen — and I wasn’t the only critic who had such a reaction.
By contrast, Second City’s OC show was much, much better, and so is the current Second City show at La Jolla. Of course it helps that La Jolla’s edition coincides with the continuing saga of Filner’s sexual harassment troubles. It would have been fun to have been in the same room when the La Jolla Playhouse brass and/or the show’s director Billy Bungeroth realized what a gift the mayor was inadvertently bestowing on them. Satirists subsist on the likes of Bob Filner.
Filner sketches begin and end the show, and ripples from the scandal even show up briefly in the rest of it, in the form of brief bits in which women who call a hotline set up to take reports of new charges about Filner are frustrated by the vast number and variety of voicemail options offered by the hotline’s menu.
Marla Caceres, Andel Sudik and Kevin Sciretta
I enjoyed most of the non-Filner material as well, including some deft improvs including audience members or, at least, information drawn from audience members. There were a couple of jokes that mostly eluded me because I’m not from the area — including several references to the suburb of Santee. But it was refreshing to see that these satirists don’t spare wealthy La Jolla residents (in general, not by name) who probably also make up a significant proportion of the playhouse’s board and donors.
Again, why doesn’t Second City do a show like this in LA? Center Theatre Group’s current administration, of course, seems to have an aversion to LA-specific shows, but there are plenty of other companies in LA that might be able to form an alliance with Second City for something much more LA-specific and better than last year’s Twist Your Dickens! Although the poor turnout in recent LA elections has generated a lot of downbeat talk about whether Angelenos care about local politics, my hunch is that many of those who go to theaters probably pay more attention to local politics than LA audiences in general.
**All The Good, the Bad and the I-5 production photos by Todd Rosenberg.
The Good, the Bad and the I-5, La Jolla Playhouse Mandell Weiss Forum, 2910 La Jolla Village Dr., La Jolla.. Tues-Wed 7:30 pm, Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 pm and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm and 7 pm. Through Sept 1. www.lajollaplayhouse.org/second-city-theatricals. 858-550-1010.
Instead of traveling northwest from Santa Monica, which is what the two protagonists do in the story of Sideways, Rex Pickett’s play itself has journeyed southeast from its Santa Monica roots as a stage play, turning up next at La Jolla Playhouse.
There, it has been shepherded by the playhouse’s former artistic director Des McAnuff into a big-time production. With all of McAnuff’s Broadway credits and the obvious enthusiasm with which the audience greeted Sideways when I saw it yesterday in La Jolla, it’s easy to wonder whether the next stop on the play’s road trip might be Broadway.
Patrick Breen and Sean Allan Krill in “Sideways.” Photo by Kevin Berne.
The play had a cast of eight at Santa Monica’s Ruskin Group Theatre last year. Miles and Jack, the divorced and the soon-to-married buddies, respectively, had the lion’s share of the lines. In that earlier production, almost all of the other words that were spoken by someone other than the two pals were uttered by Mia and Terra, their respective romantic interests. As far as I can tell from my memory and from a script of the Santa Monica production, no other women spoke during the Santa Monica version.
At La Jolla, by contrast, other women have speaking parts. We hear from Miles’ ex, Jack’s fiancee, Miles’ mother and his literary agent — who first appears in the very first scene, in stark contrast to the first scene in Santa Monica. Each of these women has more than one scene. So the two men (Patrick Breen and Sean Allan Krill) don’t monopolize the conversation quite as much, and the other women’s voices provide some gender balance. Miles’ mom (Cynthia Mace) gets much of the comedy rolling in her biggest scene, near the top. The total cast now numbers 12.
But the show doesn’t feel any longer than it did in Santa Monica. Scenically, with the resources of La Jolla, the design is much closer to that of the famous movie version, with wide-stage vistas and quick electronic set changes, as opposed to the many choreographed, hand-operated set changes of the Santa Monica version.
At the same time, the play preserves a possibly expendable boar-hunting scene, which we saw in Santa Monica but which wasn’t in the movie. And it still deletes the movie subplot about Jack’s brief, interrupted fling with yet another woman.
In fact, from what I’ve read, Pickett is adamant that the play is an adaptation of his novel, not of the movie — which also was based on his novel. That’s something to think about, for those who are inclined to fret about whether the theater should spend so much time on stage versions of famous movies (and I’m one of those people, from time to time).
Sean Allan Krill, Zoë Chao, Nadia Bowers and Patrick Breen
The fact is that Sideways appears to be a comedy that works as well on stage as it does in the movie theater (sorry, Rex Pickett, but I haven’t yet read the novel). If the movie helped lay the seeds for the play, well, then that’s to the movie’s credit.
This production is also a feather in the cap for the Ruskin. Many of us often wonder why more plays from LA’s 99-seat arena don’t go on to greater glory in larger arenas — and we recently heard the depressing news that Pasadena Playhouse has postponed its scheduled production of the Sacred Fools-originated Stoneface because its star French Stewart got a TV series. So the fact that a Ruskin-developed play has gone on to La Jolla is ample reason for a toast (but don’t expect the free wine tastings that Pickett offered in the Ruskin lobby; you have to pay for the wine at La Jolla).
Miles and Jack are hilariously flawed characters, in very different ways from each other. Their story is irresistible, and it’s one of the best Southern California road stories ever — in whatever medium.
**All Sideways production photos by Kevin Berne.
Sideways, La Jolla Playhouse Potiker Theatre, 2910 La Jolla Village Dr., La Jolla.. Tues-Wed 7:30 pm, Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 pm and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm and 7 pm. Through Sept 1. www.lajollaplayhouse.org/sideways. 858-550-1010.
Speaking of plays based on novels that also were adapted into famous movies — with a lot of Southern California atmosphere on every page, moment or frame — San Diego is also home to a stage version of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, which also became one of the seminal LA-set noir films. The play is in the Old Globe’s smallest and only in-the-round space, the White Theatre.
Michael Hayden and Angel Desai in “Double Indemnity.” Photo by Jim Cox.
Because of the intimacy (and relatively speaking, the transparency) of the space, John Gould Rubin’s staging of the adaptation by David Pichette and R. Hamilton Wright feels almost like a 99-seat version of a play, as opposed to a wide-angle big-deal.
Actually, Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills presented a sub-100-seat staging of Kathrine Bates’ adaptation of Double Indemnity in 2009.
The Old Globe production has a much more sophisticated design than Theatre 40’s staging had. Christopher Barreca’s set offers an especially effective use of what appears to be a translucent scrim — on all four sides of the stage — for rain and underwater effects. But I did feel more of a yearning for the big screen in this production than I did in McAnuff’s staging of Sideways across town, especially in the murder scene at the end of act one. The all-purpose set pieces don’t quite fill the bill for a scene involving a moving train and a tunnel.
The adulterous insurance salesman here is played by Michael Hayden, whose rather boyish features perhaps soften our attitude to a character who is, let’s face it, pretty despicable. Angel Desai plays his literally fatal femme fatale with snarling passion.
Double Indemnity, Old Globe Theatre White Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tue-Wed 7 pm, Thu-Fri 8 pm, Sat 2 pm and 8 pm, Sun 2 pm and 7 pm. www.TheOldGlobe.org. 619-23GLOBE.
Noir plays are popping up in many places. Besides Sunset Boulevard, seen recently in Musical Theatre West’s superb production in Long Beach and Double Indemnity in San Diego, consider Shem Bitterman’s Open House, in the smaller of the two spaces at the Skylight in Los Feliz. It’s set in the present day, but it echoes previous tales of the darker side of LA.
At first it looks like an existential comedy about a real estate agent, Chuck (Robert Cicchini) who’s trying to sell a house on what is specifically described in the program as Colgate Avenue in LA, not far from the Beverly Center.
Eve Gordon and Robert Cicchini in “Open House.” Photo by Ed Krieger.
In its first few scenes, we see nothing except Chuck waiting for potential customers, who don’t show up. Cicchini goes the extra mile in portraying a bored man without boring the audience. Unlike the insurance salesman in Double Indemnity, we never seen him in his office environment. Gradually we learn why.
Finally, a sole possible buyer appears. Martha (Eve Gordon) isn’t terribly impressed by what she sees or by Chuck. But Chuck is persistent, if somewhat tactless, and soon enough she returns and gradually becomes drawn into a greater appreciation of both the house and Chuck. Complications ensue, which probably shouldn’t be discussed here out of respect for the play’s elements of surprise.
The play gradually evolves from existential comedy into a noir-like drama. I can see, in retrospect, why some may feel that the transition isn’t entirely convincing, but I was quite convinced while the play was in front of my eyes. Under Steve Zuckerman’s production, the two performances are intense. And Bitterman’s writing is both more spare and more powerful than in some of his other plays — and it’s powerful in large part because it’s spare.
Open House, Skylight Theatre, 1816 ½ N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. Fri-Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm. Closes Aug 25. http://skylighttheatre.com. 702-582-8587.