Arts & Culture

I hold this truth to be self-evident: That all plays are NOT created equal. I’ve reviewed around 10 shows at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts and its revival of the 1969 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical 1776 is probably the best play I’ve ever seen there. Not only owing to pleasurable songs composed by Sherman Edwards (accompanied at the La Mirada by a live eight piece orchestra conducted by Jeff Rizzo), along with enjoyable acting, but because it is a rarity from the Great White Way: A historical, fact-based musical explicitly about U.S. politics, insurrection and philosophy.

It’s common to refer to a flick as a good “date movie,” but Nate Rufus Edelman’s Desert Rats is a great “date play.” Another thing I’ve never written before in a theater review is that this 90 minute tense drama with sharp dialogue and behavior featuring underclass criminal characters would make for a perfect film directed by Quentin Tarantino, such as Reservoir Dogs. Indeed, the dramatis personae are very Tarantino-esque, and all of the twists and turns in this underworld milieu are reminiscent of an Elmore Leonard novel.

Writer/director Adam McKay’s Vice, an all-star biographical movie about Dick Cheney is among Hollywood’s top 2018 political pictures. It’s utterly uncanny how Christian Bale completely disappears into his role as the former vice president, just as John C. Reilly does as Oliver Hardy in another biopic being released in America during the holiday season, Stan & Ollie. With his bravura performance Bale has Cheney’s look, mannerisms and sound down to perfection and at times, when Bale is onscreen one feels as if he/she is almost watching a documentary or the TV news and not an actor in a feature. How Bale transmogrified himself from playing Batman to fat man Cheney is truly a feat of astounding acting for the ages, reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s star turn in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull.

Shot in glorious black and white, Cold War’s helmer Pawel Pawlikowski’s won the 2018 Cannes Film Festival’s Best Director award and the film was nominated for Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or. Cold War won six European Film Awards and as of this writing has won a total of 20 prizes and been nominated for another 32. In 2015 Pawlikowski’s Ida was nommed for a cinematography Oscar and earned the Best Foreign Language Academy Award (Ida was Golden Globe-nominated in the same category). Cold War is currently Poland’s official submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar (although it was completely overlooked by the Golden Globes).

If two hours and 23 minutes of nearly nonstop noisy action, violence, CGI and other eye-popping special effects in a superhero movie is your thing, then you will love the mind-boggling Aquaman. It’s put-your-brain-into-neutral for some mindless entertainment mostly beneath the waves at the Lost Continent of Atlantis, DC Comics and Warner Bros. style.

On the other hand, if you prefer character studies, well-written dialogue, originality and good stories, go see another film, such as If Beale Street Could Talk or Vice. At least seven screenwriters share credits (or the blame) for this overblown oceanic epic that is extremely derivative - and not only of a superhero franchise dating back to Aquaman’s 1941 debut during the Golden Age of comics. Indeed, the screen scribbling kleptomaniacs seem to have plagiarized Greek and Roman mythology as far back as Homer’s The Odyssey, as well as Plato, who wrote about Atlantis in Socratic dialogues.

Inspired by a true story, director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis’ Welcome to Marwen is about how a hate crime perpetrated against real life Mark Hoagancamp (Steve Carell) affects the illustrator. Suffering partial amnesia and no longer able to draw, Hoagancamp creates a miniature World War II Belgian village he names “Marwen” peopled by dolls, which he proceeds to photograph. The film has LGBTQ, PTSD, anti-Nazi and art therapy themes.

In 2010 Jeff Malmberg directed the documentary Marwencol (see: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1391092/videoplayer/vi3220441369?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_1) about Hoagancamp’s saga which was very well-received and motivated Zemeckis to shoot a feature about this subject matter which is, at times, rather grim and gripping. How was Zemeckis going to give Malmberg’s 83 minute nonfiction film and Hoagancamp’s traumatic tale the Hollywood treatment?

Jami Brandli’s Sisters Three has an intriguing, promising premise that is similar to Amy Heckerling’s 1995 Clueless starring Alicia Silverstone and 2011’s From Prada to Nada, which updated and adapted to contemporary milieus Jane Austen’s 19th century novels, respectively, 1816’s Emma and 1811’s Sense and Sensibility. In Sisters Three Brandli locates the real life Brontë siblings, who wrote later in the 19th century than Austen did, in the 21st century.

Adapting the Brontës to the social media era is an inspired idea, and Brandli captures the artsy, antsy, angsty anguish that reportedly troubled the three sisters - and their brother, Branwell, who is a palpable offstage presence in this clever production. The playwright extrapolates from what is known of the siblings’ real lives in her modern day-set 90 minute or so one-acter that takes place on a college campus, although it was not clear to me where - but probably closer to New York than Yorkshire.

The Actors’ Gang has long been among my favorite theatre companies. Over the years I’ve attended their hard-hitting dramas and trenchant satires, from Tim Robbins’ early anti-Iraq War Embedded to an adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 that commented on the Bush regime’s torture policy to the antiwar classics Bury the Dead by Irwin Shaw and the docu-play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine about the pacifist Berrigan Brothers and so on. To be fair, the intrepid troupe has presented its fair share of comedies, too - more often than not performed by thesps donning commedia dell’arte masks in original works written by Robbins, such as Harlequino - although these productions often contain heavy doses of social commentary along with hearty laughs.

But with The Gang’s Aphrodite’s Holiday Show it is, as Monty Python pithily put it, time “now for something completely different” at the Ivy Substation. In this 90 minute variety show performed without intermission the usually thought-provoking Gang here lets its collective hair down with a diversion designed to maximize merriment during this season of mirth and goodwill to all people.

Rogue Machine Theatre continues its look back at American leftists - and the persecution of them - with Finks, which alternates onstage at Venice’s Electric Lodge with the peerless Oppenheimer. If the latter recounted the saga of the physicist who co-invented the atomic bomb and leftwing ties in the scientific community, Finks focuses on show biz radicals during the witch-hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee/McCarthy era during the 1950s.

In Finks playwright Joe Gilford dramatizes the blacklisting of his real life parents. Jack Gilford played Hysterium in 1966’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, acted in 1985’s Cocoon was Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1973’s Save the Tiger and is here called Mickey Dobbs (the inimitable French Stewart).

Jack’s wife, stage, radio and screen actress Madeline Lee, appeared in The Goldbergs; I Remember Mama; on the Jackie Gleason and Red Buttons shows, specialized in playing babies and children and in Finks is named Natalie Meltzer (Valerie Claire Stewart).

LA Opera’s bewitching Hansel and Gretel may be the most enchanting, optically opulent opera this reviewer has ever seen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. With its stellar stagecraft , stagemanship and eye- popping, jaw-dropping scenery designed by director Doug Fitch with lighting by Duane Schuler, the audience is transported into a spellbinding, haunted forest full of spirits, including a Dew Fairy (Georgia soprano Sarah Vautour), a Sandman (North Carolina mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven), plus a spooky witch (mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who’s quite the ham).

Suffused with special effects, the overall ambiance evokes a sort of psychedelic Sesame Street with a Big Bird on acid, combined with elements from Peter Pan’s Neverland, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and the Beatles’ 1968 animated feature Yellow Submarine. The original score synthesizes Wagnerian flourishes with Germanic folk music by 19th century composer Engelbert Humperdinck (not to be confused with the 1960s Tom Jones knock-off, a British pop singer who adopted the same Germanic moniker as his stage name).