Bronco Billy: The Musical (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

A young orphan from a cold, unfeeling situation finds themselves an heir to a fortune, and thrust into a place full of strangers.  In this this orphan finds real friends for the first time, and eventually love, as they learn new things.  In the end, the orphan's new family saves the orphan's life, even as the orphan saves them.

No, this is not Harry Potter.  It turns out to be Bronco Billy: The Musical, based upon the movie which starred Clint Eastwood and his then-paramour Sandra Locke.  Perhaps you remember seeing the film when it came out?  Not a bad show, not at all.  But--in the form of a stage musical this story found its proper milieu.  The movie may have been fun, but the whole thing works so much better live, with song and dance, and without the kind of precise realism at which film achieves so well.

The story certainly fits into what we expect from most musicals.  Bronco Billy's Wild West Show is a traveling show in the American West during the late 1970s.  Something about that period feels right but not necessarily essential.  Members of the company are weary, since their dream is fading.  Everything is breaking down.  They cannot afford to fix things.  Nobody has been paid for months.  Then, a random meeting changes everything.

Credit: Ed Krieger

Antoinette Lilly (Amanda Leigh Jerry), heiress to a candy bar fortune now that her beloved father has died, came to Kansas to spread his ashes.  Along the way her sleazy husband John (Chris M. Kauffmann) tries ineptly to murder her.  He even blabs the truth--he is in cahoots with her stepmother Constance (Michelle Azar), because if Anoinette dies within 30 days the entire fortune goes to her instead.  The young woman decides she needs to disappear for a month, and as it happens Bronco Billy (Eric B. Anthony) is looking for an assistant in his act.  Kismet!  Karma!  Fate!  Call it what you will, amid this group of bohemians she at first sticks out like a sore thumb.  But then, she becomes part of them, enjoying her time, giving suggestions that improve the show.  Along the way, she finds a real home, a genuine family, and in the person of Bronco Billy himself, true love.

Credit: Ed Krieger

The songs pretty much make the themes and ideas of the show about as explicit as one can ask.  "Ride With Us" is a recurrent song, inviting the audience to come with the troupe and live their own dream.  "When Everything is Real" is an anthem of hope, of living without lies and trusting others, especially if you find someone to love who in turn loves you.  That Bronco Billy's troupe is full of people who've been hurt and down emphasize this.  Lasso Leonard James (Kyle Frattini) was trying to steal the troupe's truck when he joined the group.  Lefty (Randy Charleville) is a former bank robber, who met Billy when they were both is prison (the latter when his wife accused him of trying to kill her when he walked in on her adultery).  Doc (Benai Boyd) is a former nurse, who now walks with a cane, and who functions as the glue holding the troupe together.

So when you think on it, Antoinette really does fit it--the orphan who doesn't believe in herself, on the run from a so-called family who wants to kill her for money.

Credit: Ed Krieger

But more--and more than the good songs, the consistently fine performances, the clever staging, the general paraphernalia of the musical--it is how the hint we all belong here, we are all misfits looking for a home, for family, for love that gives this show its power.  Silly?  Maybe, compared to the most gritty of real world details.  But a joke works because you laugh, not because it works as some kind of journalistic history file.  A song lifts your heart not by proving as accurate as a math equation.  Just as a story can give comfort, nurture hope, bring a smile to a sad face, a tear to an eye that needs to cry. 

And that is what this show does.  It is fun.  It gives no vast insights into the ambiguity of the human condition (although I love stuff like that).  Rather it breathes on the embers of flames we sometimes need.

Bronco Billy: The Musical plays 8:30pm Fridays and Saturdays, 2:00pm Saturdays and Sundays through June 30, 2019 at the Skylight Theatre (at the end of the alley) 1816 ½ North Vermont
Los Angeles, CA. 90027 (right next to Skylight Books).

Richard III: Introducing the Queens

As some of you know, I am directing a production of Richard III.  

We open April 27 at OhMyRibs on Theatre Row.   For more information check out this link.  And here are the women who are queens in this production.  Queen Margaret is the increasingly maddened widow of King Henry VI.  Queen Elizabeth is her former lady-in-waiting who married the man who usurped Henry's throne, the eventual Edward IV.
Before the play is over, both shall be widows.  Both shall have lost their sons.  Both will have lost their crowns.
And both are giving fantastic performances!  Honestly, it is hard to take my eyes off them when they are on stage!

The Secret of Chimneys (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

Group Rep's production of Agatha Christie's The Secret of Chimneys presses a fair number of buttons.  Whether you enjoy the show depends on which one you enjoy having pressed.  Or not, as the case may be.

Let us begin with Agatha Christie?  If you are not at least something of a fan of hers, it seems unlikely this play will please.  It agathachristies more than most works by Agatha Christie agathachristie.  Chimneys (of the title) is an old English manor where a collection of characters gather--relatively diverse, an assortment of English and foreigners, upper and middle class, men and women--and who en masse become suspects when a murder takes place.  The plot involves (among other things) some long lost jewels hidden somewhere, a coded message disguised as a love letter, a man and woman falling suddenly in love, a cunning detective everyone underestimates and a startling solution that when you really think about it for too long doesn't quite make sense.

Me, I grew up reading Agatha Christie so these ingredients disturb me no more than does nutmeg on French Toast!

Credit: Doug Engalla

Now, let us be clear.  Christie was a novelist, a better one perhaps than she is sometimes given credit for being, one whose writing emerged from the style of mysteries so intensely popular in the 1920s and 1930s.  Despite having written some very successful plays, she however was not primarily a playwright.  This shows.  I would argue many of the best adaptations of her works (The Secret of Chimneys began as  a novel) over the last few decades took dramatic liberties, including attitudes and details which would never seen publication during her heyday.  The series Poirot with David Suchet is a case in point (a show I adored).  Likewise recently a version of And Then There Were None restored the novel's original, much darker ending.  Not all such adaptations work, of course.

This play adaptation, however, cannot help but feel clunky at times.  Exposition is obvious, characterization remains fairly broad and even cliche, while the concerted efforts to keep all the action inside one (fairly elaborate, and let us note rather beautiful) set feel forced.  But, nothing's perfect and that doesn't mean you cannot enjoy the show!

Credit: Doug Engalla

So how was it overall?  Again, depends on your taste.  In many ways this production, directed by Jules Aaron remains almost too faithful to its origins.  The set piece moves all the parts of the story around with skill and even a bit of dash, but little subtlety or depth.  Having been spoiled by such filmed adaptations as Five Little Pigs, I miss these last.  Rather a lot.  Much of the time the cast plays things in broad strokes that entertain and look great, but never get me much involved.

But--is that the point?  Really?  When it comes to Agatha Christie and her fans I'm not so sure.  Psychological realism, subtle humor, actual drama--I cannot help but feel these are gravy for most audience members forking over their time and money to see a work based on this author.  The meat is the mystery, the set pieces of character and location, the period style, the lushness of costume and set.  In these, the production does very well.  Wouldn't say they hit the bullseye every single time, but "very well" is better than "merely competent" by a long shot.  The characters (for the most part) come across as vivid.  I liked watching the story, even I didn't care whether any one of them lived or died.

So--when you go see a play by Agatha Christie you most likely care about how well it agathachristies rather than how objectively it stacks up against the very best examples of the genre. So this production meets that standard, and I can totally enjoy it on the level.  In fact, I did.  Lots of folks would, I suspect.  But on the other hand this is hardly Christie's best work, even if it agathachristies about as much as you could reasonably ask.

The Secret of Chimneys plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm through May 5, 2019 at the Lonny Chapman Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd, North Hollywood 91601.

Plays I'd Like to See - April 2019

I've been asked to list plays that I'd like to see produced in Los Angeles.  Trying to do such.  Maybe some dramaturgs or directors out there will be impressed/inspired.  We'll see.

Perfect Arrangement by Topher Payne.  A friend of mine was recently in a production of this in Tampa, Florida and won rave reviews.  I found the photos from the production intriguing and finally looked up the script--which really looks fantastic.  Set in the 1950s, it tells the story of an official and his secretary in the State Department given the job of rooting out homosexuals.  But, both are in fact gay, and have married each others' partner as a way to hide in plain sight.  The result apparently combines farce, social commentary, and drama.  I really want to see this play.  And I so hope one of the amazing theatre companies here in Los Angeles will decide this matches their plans and mission statement.

A Shadow Over Innsmouth by Scott T. Barsotti (Visceral Company did his Kill Me some years ago) premiered in 2013 at the Wildclaw Theatre in Chicago.  This was a theatrical adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft's almost-last work, one of the most easily adapted in many ways, and when I first learned of the production I abandoned plans to adapt the story myself.  What solidified my feelings was learning the lead/narrator had been changed into a woman rather than a man.  That frankly feels inspired to me.   And it created a fierce desire to see this play in performance.  Certainly makes a change from the usual Halloween fair of Dracula, The Woman in Black, Turn of the Screw, or horror mazes.  Mind you, I like all of those, but every Lovecraft show I"ve seen here has been splendid!