Arts & Culture

Half a century ago artistic director Ron Sossi founded the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, and since 1969 the company’s epic artistic odyssey has made this theatrical venue one of Los Angeles’ best, a repository of culture where this reviewer has enjoyed many a production. To commemorate and celebrate the auspicious 50th anniversary, it’s presenting the “Circa ’69” season, with revivals “of significant and adventurous plays that premiered around the time of the Odyssey’s 1969 inception,” according to a press release.

The first of the 10 such plays is Joe Orton’s Loot, which opened in the U.K. in 1965. Bart DeLorenzo, who directs the current production at the Odyssey, claims the British playwright’s work hasn’t aged. But I beg to differ - the punch of Loot has been diluted by time. Orton’s two act spoof of Agatha Christie-like mysteries featuring detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple on the page and stage may have jolted auds 54 years ago, but for today’s theatergoers (many of whom did not return to their seats after intermission) Loot is passé. What was a “black comedy” when it debuted is now merely gray.

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival took place in from June 13-30. According to the Fringe’s 200 page program: “The Hollywood Fringe Festival is an annual, open-access, community-derived event celebrating freedom of expression and collaboration in the performing arts community… Participation in the Hollywood Fringe is completely open and uncensored. This free-for-all approach underlines the festival’s mission to be a platform for artists without the barrier of a curative body. By opening the gates to anyone with a vision, the festival is able to exhibit the most diverse and cutting-edge points-of-view the world has to offer.”

Staged in around 30 theaters in the Hollywood area, the HFF is Los Angeles’ counterpart to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland. In 2017, 2,000 performances and 375 shows were mounted during HFF. Theater artists travel from near and far in order to participate in this unfiltered fest. For example, the Polish-Australian troupe Drama Theatre Fantazja flew all the way from Sydney to present The Trial of Dali, an 80-minute play about the infamous surrealist painter, at The Complex Hollywood’s Ruby Theatre.

Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum’s current production of An Enemy of the People is not to be confused with CNN’s chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s book The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America or the new Trump biography by Jonathan Swift entitled Enema of the People [LOL!]. Rather, WGTB’s two-acter is a version of iconoclastic Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 comedy drama, freely adapted by the Topanga amphitheater’s Artistic Director Ellen Geer.

Co-directed by Geer and Melora Marshall, this Enemy is re-set in the presumably fictitious town of South Fork, South Carolina in 1980. By moving the time and location of Ibsen’s work from 19th century southern Norway a century later to the Southern USA during the presidential race between Democrat Pres. Jimmy Carter and GOP candidate Ronald Ray-gun, this WGTB iteration opens Enemy up to an exploration of issues of greater relevancy for today’s theatergoers.

A new film by Will Watson, called Soldiers Without Guns, ought to shock a great many people — not because it utilizes a yet more gruesome form of violence or bizarre form of sex (the usual shockers in movie reviews), but because it recounts and shows us a true story that contradicts the most basic assumptions of politics, foreign policy, and popular sociology.

Trailer Here: https://youtu.be/ImwipiavM8k

Bougainville Island was a paradise for millennia, inhabited sustainably by people who never caused the rest of the world the slightest trouble. Western empires fought over it, of course. Its name is that of a French explorer who named it for himself in 1768. Germany claimed it in 1899. In World War I, Australia took it. In World War II, Japan took it. Bougainville returned to Australian domination after the war, but the Japanese left piles of weapons behind — possibly the worst of the many forms of pollution, destruction, and lingering effects a war can leave in its wake.

It’s not HBO, it’s live theater as a pack of a dozen or so merry “spanksters” mount a madcap musical spoof of the beloved fantasy series Game of Thrones and try to put the Eros into Westeros. An amiable if mischievous Benji Kaufman plays George R.R. Martin, who introduces and more or less narrates this revival of Shame of Thrones: The Musical, a two-act send-up of that author’s characters and their medieval swords and suits of armor setting.

Shame enjoys poking fun at the backstabbing and sexy hanky-spanky that were the hallmark of Martin’s novels and HBO epic about the cutthroat quest for the Iron Throne. The humor and story ranges from the satirical to slapstick to vaudevillian. Many of the popular long-running series’ beloved dramatis personae are impersonated in the musical parody, from saucy wenches to muscular knights and warriors.

Every once in a very long while a work of art comes along that is so well done and important that a critic feels compelled to not only review it, but to champion the piece in the hope that more people will discover and experience it. Such is the case for this reviewer regarding Long Beach Opera’s The Central Park Five, composed by Anthony Davis and libretto by playwright and screenwriter Richard Wesley. The LBO-commissioned opera has world premiered during the 30th anniversary of this tragic miscarriage of justice, when five Black and brown teens were wrongfully convicted of the brutal beating and rape of a white jogger in 1989.

As America ponders the impeachment of Trump and investigating him for crimes a young South American female director has made a documentary about another large democratic nation that recently underwent the ordeals of impeaching one president plus the trial and imprisonment of an ex-president. Petra Costa’s The Edge of Democracy is a sprawling nonfiction epic depicting the rise then fall from power of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (TP), with the senate’s removal from office of left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff.

The former guerrilla’s ouster was followed by the conviction of her mentor, TP co-founder and ex-President Lula de Silva. Being found guilty prevented the popular labor leader from running for the presidency again to replace his protégée Dilma. Strangely, in his trial the absence of a crucial piece of evidence is viewed as “proof” of Lula’s alleged corruption in the Alice in Wonderland judicial proceedings.

Originally taking place in the sensuous demi-monde of 1840s Paris, in LA Opera’s current iteration director/production designer Marta Domingo has reset Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata during the Roaring Twenties. This revival of Domingo’s Art Deco vision of Verdi’s vintage version injects new visual flare into the opera that was first performed in Venice in 1853. Although the original’s “demi-mondaine” dames (who, in today’s parlance, might be called “high class hookers”) have been replaced by flappers in Domingo’s rendition, the plot of Verdi’s opera (Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto adapted Alexandre Dumas fils’ 1848 novel La Dame aux Camélias) is essentially the same.

The second act of Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum’s must-see Moby Dick - Rehearsed has some of the most exciting action scenes this critic has ever seen performed on the live stage. When the whalers harpoon and pursue the Great White Whale the thrilling sea chase could be called the “Topanga Sleigh Ride.”

Orson Welles is best known for his work behind and in front of the movie camera but before he went Hollywood with the 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane the “boy wonder” was famous for his stage work. From Dublin’s Abbey Theatre to Broadway, during the 1930s the prodigious “prodigy” mounted memorable plays, notably the so-called Voodoo Macbeth at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, The Cradle Will Rock (which a superb Tim Robbins’ 1999 film reminds us was literally shutdown at the point of a bayonet) and a modern dress version of Julius Caesar that cleverly invoked fascism.

Rogue Machine Theatre, which won 2018’s Best Season Ovation Award, is known for pushing the envelope with plays that challenge conventions. A number of the edgy theatre company’s productions deal with the thorny theme of racism, including the stellar One Night in Miami, a rare revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, American Saga: Gunshot Medley - Part I (on July 6 Rogue Machine is remounting Dionna Michelle Daniel’s searing drama) and Dutch Masters.

The latter was directed by Ovation Award winner Guillermo Cienfuegos, who also helms Rogue Machine’s curtain lifter of its new season at Venice’s Electric Lodge, David Jacobi’s Ready, Steady, Yeti, Go, as part of a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere. Like the above mentioned dramas, Yeti also deals with the subject of bigotry - but with a big difference.