The Wild Party (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

Almost three years ago, I was invited to see The Wild Party, the latest musical from the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica--and I so looked forward to it!  Then, Covid hit.  But, the folks running this theatre had their plans and they kept to them!

Andrew Lippa's musical, based a poem written in the 1920s, is really almost an operetta.  Like Evita for example it has very nearly no dialogue at all.  Instead we get one intense, entertaining, often startling, sometimes disturbing musical number after another, setting up the event of the title, and most especially our hosts--Queenie (Serenity Robb) and Burs (Hamilton Davis) a dysfunctional couple in the 1920s, a pair who came together like a pair of serpents and then tied each other into a series of emotional and sexual knots.  But when Burs goes too far, Queenie suggests a party.  It will be fun, she says, and he agrees!  Her plan however is to humiliate and hurt him, as part of this dangerous, powerful, ugly yet addictive dance they do.

The party itself makes up the bulk of the show, and of course things do not go according to plan.  Keep in mind this is the 1920s, in the wake of the 1918 Pandemic (the most terrible in history) as well as a what seemed like a never-ending war.  Women were fighting for political rights, new artforms and styles were emerging, racial and economic tensions were sky high, while deep into Prohibition booze still flowed and subcultures defiantly flourished.  Sound familiar?

Central to what follows are Kate (Kaitlin Doughty) and her dashing, quietly handsome beau for the evening Mr. Black (Deonte Allen).  Because Kate, frenemy of our hostess, has the hots for Burs and intends Mr. Black as bait to drive him into her arms, in revenge or a rebound.  Initially Queenie thinks this young man, who feels out of place among this bohemian crowd, the perfect catspaw, even as he himself finds her extremely charming.  

Then, she actually starts feeling something for him, as he does for her.  Worse (or better?) Burs begins to suspect as much.  This might be a way out for them, an escape from the spiral of bitterness and lustful pain at the heart of their life together.  She wonders, can I just leave?  Why haven't I before now?  He in turn wonders why he cannot let her go, cannot even face the prospect.  

As I suspected early on, somebody is not going to survive this party.  It will spiral into all kinds of directions, inhibitions and lies shed more swiftly (if more awkwardly) than garments as the night goes on and on and on.

Again, the music, dance and singing is very nearly non-stop.  It helps create this amazingly decadent world, one equal parts fascinating and repulsive, beautiful and toxic, free and in some ways enslaving.  Through pretty much everything--direction by Kristin Towers-Rowles, music direction by Daniel Koh, choreography by Michael Marchak, fight choreography by Amanda Newman--the party and its members (somehow not really guests) come to vivid life.  The double triangle remains in the center ring of this circus, with all four leads wonderfully alive and real across a range of emotions and situations.  But the entire ensemble do splendidly as well.

Some standouts include Emily Sotelo as the delightfully (?) predatory lesbian Madeleine, Spencer Johnson as the boxer Eddie, and Mirai as Mae, Eddie's mini bombshell of a girlfriend.  These and other characters get solos or sometimes numbers of their own, many of which make a kind of dream sense as the party (and show) continues, with reality slipping away, giving way to the terrifying delights of Truth.  Everyone deserves a mention--Eric Eberle, Sam Gianfala, Jonathon Saia, Steve Weber, Holly Weber, and Kelsey Weinstein. 

The Wild Party plays Fridays andSaturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m  until October 9, 2022 at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre, 2627 Pico Blvd, Santa Monica 90405 

Sex & Love in the Modern Age (review)

 Spoilers Ahoy!

This review has come late, and for that I do apologize.  Sex & Love in the Modern Age is the latest exploration at ZJU of a given theme, in word (including both song and poem) as well as movement, including dance.  It consists of a ten member troupe acting out a series of vignettes.

So what we experience is a kind of odyssey, an exploration of so many pitfalls and nuances of simple (and not nearly so so simple) human connection.  Yes, the meeting of the two rare individuals in a crowd not staring into their iPhones.  Yes, the fear of intimacy amid temptations of availability.  Humor from the potential perverts might find in the internet here.  A dash of lesbian bondage there.  An almost surreal but potentially just real example of parents giving the "talk" to their gay son on prom night.

And if this sounds like the theatrical equivalent of paint-by-the-numbers, then I've given the wrong impression. Instead we get a kind of variety show which achieves more than mere entertainment.  While exploring the pitfalls and even some dangers of human connection, the performers actually make one.  With the audience.  The show doesn't simply come up with one funny skit after another (for one thing, they aren't all funny--some even are a tiny bit heart-breaking).  It hits the chord of deja vu.  These are our hopes as well, and our fears.

Photo Credit:  Sebastian Munoz

In the end, we even make a connection not just with the content, but the cast themselves.  And other members of the audience.

For the record, plenty of Zombie Joe regulars can be seen, including Nicole A. Craig, Jennifer Novak Chun (she of the cello), David Wyn Harris, Ian Heath (not naked once for a change) and Roger K. Weiss.  Others in the cast are Lee Quarrie, John Santo, Jacquie Waldman and Julian Zambrano.  I mention Callie Williams last simply because I want to praise her pipes--strong singers have their own special magic, like extremely fine dancers, and she is one.

Sex & Love in the Modern Age plays at ZJU 4850 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, CA 91601 (just south of the NoHo sign, north of Camarillo) Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30pm until March 26. Unless there is an extension.  I hope there is.

Love Sucks! (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Love Sucks, the latest entry from the True Focus Theater, proves to have a slightly misleading title. Appropriate, completely so, but given the tenor of our times maybe we expect a harsh condemnation of how relationships go wrong.

This proves to have nowhere near so narrow a focus.

Directed by Vanessa Cate and Angie Hoover, Love Sucks turns out to be a series of vignettes in different forms -- scenes, poetry, pantomime, dance, even a ten minute play by Cate I'd seen before (one of the perhaps three plays such length I've ever thought genuinely good).  The choreography in various pieces from Natalie Hyde and Cheryl Doyle showed a real power, and in the former's case (whose dancing I've seen for years now) an impressive pushing at boundaries.

Photo credit: Vanessa Cate

Sometimes what we saw was hilarious, for one reason or another. I'm still trying to figure out what special chemistry made Tucker Matthews singing a pop song (straight--he did nothing overtly funny) so very funny.

Another particularly hilarious bit had not a word of dialogue, but told the simple (okay not simple but incredibely perverse) story of a blind date that seems like one of those instant moments of clicking between two people.

Other moments were sweet, at times very sad.

Yet other moments, scenes and things shared with us other--sometimes very strange--aspects of this compulsion we seem to have, to find someone with whom to share the loneliness, to taste the days and nights together. Why do we do that, one might wonder? Is it really so instrinsic to human nature that we seek out someone, looking for that perfect companion, that other side of our wounded soul?

Photo credit: Vanessa Cate

This play doesn't seek to answer that question. It rather explores the beautiful foolishness, the silly and horrible mistakes, the hunger we keep trying to fulfill one way or another. We see a breakup so terrible and humiliating we want to crawl under our chairs--yet we laugh. How very human.

Remembrances of love gone away, for one reason or another. Unrequited love creating a seemingly hopeless triangle, which then becomes something...well, crazy. Maybe. But it might work. We'll never know.

It all seems very familiar, though. At least it did to me. Because even though my life has not had nearly as much romance as I'd've liked, this all rang true. Very nearly too much at time. The experience I find most powerful in any form of drama is recognition of myself. A promiscuous lesbian, a loser lying about having crabs, a young man kept as a slave, a married woman yearning for the girl she left behind, a gay man hopelessly in love with a straight one -- what Love Sucks made me feel was how each of these were me. Each of them were all of us, if only we'd admit it.

Love Sucks plays Sundays at 7:30pm at Zombie Joe's Underground Theater, 4850 Lankershim Blvd (just south of the NoHo sign)., North Hollywood, CA 91601 until August 30, 2015.  Tickets are $15 and in my opinion well worth it.

"Varney The Vampire"

For years, fans of vampire fiction have heard the name. Sir Francis Varney. AKA "Varney The Vampyre." The central villain of a 'penny-dreadful' novel of the 1840s, all 220+ chapters (you read that right--chapters!). Long before Count Dracula, before Barnabas Collins or Louis the interviewee, Sir Francis Varney was the original reluctant vampire. Methinks a lot the reason for that is easy to understand. Like Dark Shadows over a century later, The Feast of Blood (as it was also known) come out as a serial. With a need to stretch out stories for as long as possible, the format pretty much forced authors to explore facets of their characters which otherwise might have been ignored. To engage their readers week after week, on some level the writers had to make their subjects compelling. A pure villain is boring. A mysterious one is interesting. A villain whom you find yourself rooting for in some sense is the kind of stuff publishers dream on.

Well, I recently got around to actually reading this huge tome. Much has been written at one time or another about how Bram Stoker must have read Sheridan LeFanu's "Carmilla" prior to composing his classic "Dracula." For the record, I pretty much agree--although there is absolutely no solid evidence Stoker ever read that novella. I am also inclined to think that LeFanu must have read Varney The Vampyre at some point. Among the tropes present are:

A portrait of the vampire from life.

A hypnotic power the vampire has over one's victims.

A reluctance on the part of the vampire to do more ill than absolutely necessary.

A strong hint that the vampire is in fact related to the target of his predations, i.e. an ancestor cursed with eternal life.

A genuine regret, akin to self-disgust, the vampire shows for his condition.

One is not only reminded of Carmilla, but also Barnabas Collins! Likewise there are some precursors to elements of Dracula here as well -- Varney's cat-and-mouse game with those who know what he is, his interest in real estate, his use of more-than-one hiding place, etc. This is also the first known (well, to me anyway) use of fangs in a vampire tale -- complete with those now tell-tale double punctures.

But all that is historical perspective. How does it measure up as a story?

Well...

It certainly begins with a bang. Arguably the most famous passage in the book is at the very start, with a young lady accosted in her bed chamber by a befanged creature of the night. Honestly, it never really gets better and rarely is as good from there onwards.

The young lady in question is Flora Bannerworth, one of three children and their mother living at Bannerworth Hall. Precious few clues exist as to the Hall's location, other than somewhere in the country not far from a cathedral. There is no reference to a port or river. Even more perplexing is the time period, which varies between the early XVIIIth century and the Napoleonic Wars. Flora is the kind of waif one expects in such a tale. Much is made of her extreme beauty, her shattered nerves after the assault on her person, and of her utter devotion to her fiance Charles. She has two brothers. Henry Bannerworth is a wishy-washy sort, while George doesn't seem to have a personality at all. In fact, George eventually vanishes altogether and no one ever mentions him again. There is also Mr. Marchdale, a middle-aged man who is a family friend, and of course Mrs. Bannerworth, who seems to have as much personality as some potted plants. She faints at one point. Well, nearly everyone does at some point in all this.

In essence, Flora's screams wake the family. They chase the ravisher of young Flora out of the house and he is shot. But no body is found, and there's a strong hint he (Varney) was resurrected by the beams of a full moon. Everyone insists that the assailant looks exactly like the portrait in Flora's room, one Marmaduke Bannerworth (an unfortunate name) from a century past said to have committed suicide. Unlike one might expect, folks immediately suspect a vampyre is responsible and check out the nearby Bannerworth tombs to learn if Marmaduke (really--Marmaduke? What were they thinking?) is still there. Sure enough, not only is his lead-lined coffin intact, it is also empty.

Now the Bannerworths are in financial trouble because the late Mr. Bannerworth tried to rebuilt the family fortunes at the gaming tables, resulting in near-total ruin. Given that Henry and Flora now look upon their ancestral home with horror, and are having trouble keeping any servants (because by now the unnamed village is rife with tales of the blood-sucking dead), they luck out that a local gentleman sends a letter offering to buy Bannerworth Hall outright and for a good price. This gentleman turns out to be none other than Sir Francis Varney, a dead (or undead) ringer for the aforementioned portrait.

Varney, it seems, is most desperate to gain Bannerworth Hall for himself. Precisely why is not made clear -- just as his actual history and identity are a confusing mess. Is he indeed a Bannerworth? Or a medieval knight? Or a Royalist from the reign of Charles I? But along the way, Charles (whose beloved Flora wants him to leave lest she become a vampire and start feasting upon him) challenges Varney to a duel, then vanishes amid a flurry of forged letters. In truth, he is kept imprisoned in the dungeons of the former (now ruined) Bannerworth Hall nearby. His stranger Uncle shows up and tries to help the family deal with the unearthly menage, while a Dr. Chillingham insists he won't believe in the supernatural even if he sees it with his own eyes -- and he in turn conjures up another origin for Varney as a hanged highwayman ressucitated via a medical experiment. One person in the household proves to be in league with Varney, while no less than three riots by locals result in the destruction first of Varney's home then of Bannerworth Hall itself.

At this point the story is perhaps twenty percent done! There are yet explosions, sea journeys, attempted suicides, the transformation of a young woman into a vampire, a weird account by Varney of his own origins, following his own suicide via volcano to come!

Still, there is a kind of charm and power to the book, sprawling and overblown as it is. It is surprisingly edgy, as some of the illustrations show. And there's something appealing about the whole set-up.

Honestly, what came to my mind was that this should be re-written, adapted by someone into a more readable (for modern viewers) form, maybe taking the metaphors a bit more graphically and inserting genuine S-E-X into the narrative. Maybe akin to The Darker Passions: Dracula but with less spanking.