A Star is Born meets Vegas

Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara. The Geffen Playhouse. 6/25/2009.

Everyone in the world may already know this, since it's seriously late in the show's run, but Louis and Keely Live at the Sahara is a wildly entertaining, incredibly performed romp through Vegas in the '50s and '60s and I absolutely loved it. It's a sweet little cabaret show about the intertwined career and romance shared by bandleader Louis Prima and singer Keely Smith. The complexities of a real life romance and marriage are shoved into the plot of A Star is Born, but like the songs onstage, old familiar standards get a new life through truly inspired performances.

Jake Broder as Louis Prima and Vanessa Claire Smith as Keely Smith are also listed as co-creators and their unique talents and personalities absolutely bring the show to life. Broder as Prima sings and swings and sweats through an hour and 40 minutes onstage without respite. His performance emphasizes Prima's hard-working manic energy and dedication his performance and his audience. The real delight of the show is Smith's Keely; she brings a charm and delight that brightens the stage and defines the show. She plays Keely with a combination of naivety and brashness that make her a fascinating character. The performances in this show define the piece and make it unmissable.

Other delights of the show include Frank Sinatra (played by Nick Cagle) as the villian, who apparently wasn't in the original production at Sacred Fools and Brian Wallis and Michael Lanahan who I've seen often enough recently in Magnum Opus and Serial Killers at Sacred Fools that they feel like old friends. This is another show where I should have brought a musicologist to talk to me about the music, but it seemed like a lot of fun to me.

In terms of gender, I like that Keely was a strong character, but I think that the show put too much emphasis on Prima discovering, teaching and "creating" Smith. It was a bit too much a show about Prima and his art and ego when Smith should have been the star. That was in its way appropriate to the ideas of the show and the spirit of '50s Vegas, but still not something that I like. It's also not how Keely herself tells the story, at least according to the 2000 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. I also think that setting the beginning and end of the show with Prima's death dragged down an otherwise buoyant show and made the beginning a bit rough; this was, first and foremost a love story and idea of looking back on a life didn't add much for me. But despite a few intellectual quibbles, this is a truly fabulous, perfectly entertaining show and I highly recommend it to anyone; my parents loved it!

This show is excellent, and totally worth seeing. They just extended the run until August 2, so get your tickets now!

Space Opera

The Wooster Group. La Didone. REDCAT. 6/16/09.

I find the Wooster Group's work so intellectually and visually stimulating that it nearly overwhelms me. La Didone combines the opera by Francesco Cavalli and Giovanni Busenello from 1641 with Planet of the Vampires, a 1965 Italian horror/scifi film. It's an amazing, surprising combination that explores ideas of gender, technology, and art.

The two pieces resonate together beautifully to implicitly equate love with parasitic alien possession and I'm pretty sure in the climactic sex scene there were giant glowing green penises onscreen onstage. It also deals with the fragmentation of the body through the use of filmic closeups, particularly focusing on hands and arms as characters pass from live to screen in order to interact with the 1960s scifi technology.

As for gender, there were great female characters and a lot of interesting commentary (particularly from the opera) about women as weak, emotional, and faithless in a way that seemed really funny, but was also reinforced by both plots. The sexism seemed intended to be so blatant that it was absurd, particularly when Dido was the center of the entire show.

My thoughts on this piece are yet mushy and unformed. The Wooster Group's work generally takes me a lot of time to absorb and contemplate. There are so many loose threads of ideas to pull on that I don't yet have a full picture of what the piece means to me, but one of my first reactions is that this feels a lot more like a direct mash-up, putting two pieces together to create something new and beautiful in the resonances between the pieces, than a deconstruction and commentary in the way that earlier Wooster Group pieces were. I could be wrong about that, and it's certainly not a negative judgement in any way, but I wonder what other people think.

Anyway, this piece is beautiful and weird and amazing and I wish I had brought some musicologists with me to have a discussion on the relationships between Baroque Opera, '60s scifi and contemporary reality. I've always been a little skeptical of the Wooster Group (even though they're in my dissertation) because they're not nearly as queer and feminist as I am or as I think they should be, but this piece definitely reminded me that they are so intellectually stimulating that perhaps it doesn't matter if I agree with their politics. If you have a chance, please do see this; it will blow your mind in a good way.

127 Easy Steps

One of my favorite performers (and friends) happens to be performing at Highways this weekend and I'm super excited. Scott Turner Schofield's Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps is a new show that hasn't yet been performed in LA and it's an ariel acrobatic choose-your-own adventure romp through multiple genders and identities as Schofield explores what it means to become a man in terms of both gender and maturity. I've read parts of the piece in Schofield's Lambda Award-nominated book, Two Truths and a Lie but I haven't seen the show itself, plus, it's different every time. Schofield allows the audience to choose the stories he tells each night. Schofield's performances are always smart and funny and wonderfully charming and I've thoroughly enjoyed them in the past. You should totally be there!

Voice Lessons

Justin Tanner. Voice Lessons. Starring Laurie Metcalf and French Stewart. Zephyr Theatre. 5/22/09.

Voice Lessons is billed as a romantic comedy of sorts. Perhaps it is, but it's real strength is as a showcase for amazing talent in acting and writing. Tanner's weird, pathetic characters are brought to vibrant, disturbing life by three incredibly talented actors and anyone fortunate enough to sit in that tiny theater for 65 minutes to watch the show unfold is fortunate indeed. The run has been extended until June 28, so if you can, I highly recommend that you rush out and see it while you can.

The show itself is a strange little piece about a troubled woman (Metcalf) who appeals to a local voice teacher (Stewart) to turn her from a community theater bit player into a rock star. Her unorthodox behavior and lack of talent soon result in more talking than singing as both characters become unravelled and quickly surmount normal social boundaries.

The piece isn't particularly queer and is only sort of campy, but it showcases excellent acting and characterization. It takes an everyday situation and exaggerates it to the extremes in a way that is fabulously compelling to witness. It definitely made me want to see more of Tanner's work (I missed Oklohomo a couple of years ago and I've been regretting it ever since). I already knew Metcalf and French were fabulous, and I would gladly go see them anywhere in anything, so this was just an extra special treat watching them demonstrate their craft masterfully.

New Fun at Sacred Fools!

I should go see these:

Madness in Valencia
MAY 22 - JUNE 28, 2009
Fridays & Saturdays at 8pm
plus Sunday Matinees May 24 & June 28 at 2pm
PREVIEW: Thursday, May 21 at 8pm - $12.50

TICKETS: $25
Call 310-281-8337 or Buy Tickets Online

Lust, love, madness, nobles, peasants, high and low humor, and mistaken identities abound in this delightfully earthy play. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega's hilarious play is for anyone who’s fallen in love at the wrong time - and asks, aren’t love and madness really the same thing?

Starring Juliette Angeli, Joseph Beck, Jay Bogdanowitsch,
Wil Bowers, Paul Byrne, Craig Calman, Brandon Clark,
Matthew Garland, Michael Holmes, Vivian Kerr,
JJ Mayes, Laura Napoli & Tyler Tanner

Understudies: Jennifer Fenten & Paul Plunkett

AND COMING NEXT WEEKEND...

the return of MAGNUM OPUS THEATRE: "Abi's Choice"
Fridays @ 11pm, May 29 - June 26

and the start of the SERIAL KILLERS PLAYOFFS!
Saturdays @ 11pm, May 30 - June 27
and Saturday, July 11 @ 8pm
Playoff shows include "A Cat Wrote this Play" and "Seamen! The Musical!" which are awesome and "Vatos in Space!" which sounds fabulous

Fools! Infidels!

Teenagers from Outer Space, "Toast to Our Brother," and "Island Sunrise." Outfest Legacy Project Screening Series. UCLA Film & Television Archive. Hammer Museum. 5/17/09.

The Outfest Legacy Project's tribute to Tom Graeff was awesome! I totally expected there to be huge crowd of '50s scifi fans with lobsters and Rocky Horror-like responses. Instead he audience was a couple dozen queer film enthusiasts (including some cute girls! yay!). The whole event was fabulously entertaining and educational and you (in a vague, general sense) are all fools for missing it!

The thing I found most notable about this screening of Teenagers from Outer Space was the large amount of Gargon action. There were totally more giant lobsters than I remember in previous viewings of the film.

The fabulous Gargon

I learned lots of things at this screening, including the fact that David Love, star of Teenagers from Outer Space, aka Chuck Roberts was Graeff's boyfriend at the time of filming; he disappeared completely in 1959. Ooh! Mystery!

David Love, star and boyfriend to the director

In addition to Teenagers, which is totally better on the big screen, we also watched Graeff's short film about fraternity life, "Toast to Our Brother," which wasn't as homoerotic and campy as I had hoped, but it was still pretty entertaining. It was fun to watch footage filmed on the UCLA campus in the '50s. The short "Island Sunrise" was even more educational; it was intended to be a showcase of the talents of Chuck Roberts and it was strange and depressing short supposed to be about eternal love. It was apparently set to the song "Ebb Tide" but this particular screening was done to Erasure's version of the song, which I suspect gave the whole thing a very different feel.

But the most exciting tidbit that I learned at this film screening was that the last film Graeff worked on was Wizard of Mars, a 1965 scifi version of the Wizard of Oz. According to IMDB the tagline for the film is "Three EARTHMEN and a GIRL encounter the horrors of MARS!" Doesn't that sound awesome!?! We definitely need this for bad scifi night! Of course, it could be as dull as Robinson Crusoe on Mars but I think it's worth checking out.

The Mission Inn

Wow! The Mission Inn is like a cross between the Winchester House and The Madonna Inn!

Tim Miller on Meat and Marriage

Tim Miller. Lay of the Land. Highways Performance Space. 5/16/09.

Tim Miller is good at what he does. What he does is perform political performance art that melds the personal with the political. Lay of the Land is his meditation on the current state of his own civil rights, primarily in relation to marriage. It feels as if it should be performed at protest rallies in front of huge crowds rather than at Highways surrounded by rich supporters (we went to Highways' 20th Anniversary Benefit performance, so the audience was full of Miller's and Highways' friends and family). This show will be great at college campuses and for audiences where everyone doesn't already know Miller and his work. In this case he was preaching to the converted, but it's still a good show to watch. Miller displays excellent skill weaving stories together and advocating for civil rights.

What I was impressed with in this particular performance was an awareness of race that I don't remember from Miller's earlier performances (I could be wrong). Some of this was problematic because it implicitly (if not explicitly) compares Don't Ask, Don't Tell and marriage rights to slavery, Japanese internment, and the genocide of Native Americans. I can understand that this is important in establishing a history of oppression and unequal citizenship, but sometimes I wonder if such comparisons help or hurt in making a case for our civil rights. But overall, I'm glad Miller is at least talking about race and marking his own whiteness, which he did.

Overall, Lay of the Land is a strong piece advocating for marriage rights using Miller's own queer body as the site of the story and the state of the union. Bring anyone and everyone who isn't sure about marriage rights.