Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

A Noise Within opened the final production of their first season in their new Pasadena home this weekend with Molière’s The Bungler. It was the second 17th-century French play the company has put up this year, the first being Corneille’s The Illusion which continues to run in repertory alongside The Bungler. And while the shows have several things in common, the overall feel of the two are quite different. Most importantly, The Bungler may well be the first show that completely and unequivocally feels comfortable in the troupe's new expanded space. It’s an attractive and very successful show, often despite itself. The Richard Wilbur translation directed by Julia-Rodriguez Elliott maintains Molière’s rhyming couplets in this episodic and somewhat repetitive narrative about a servant whose attempts to bring his master’s amorous goals to fruition are repeatedly thwarted, unintentionally by that self-same master. And yet despite these somewhat outmoded conventions in one of Molière’s earliest plays, The Bungler produces laughs over and over again in the strongest show A Noise Within has done this season.

Visually the production explodes off the stage with lights traveling toward the rear rafters of the auditorium. The design flirts with 17th-century staging conventions. All of the cast are seated at dressing tables at the rear of the stage preparing for the performance as the show starts. Curtains can be drawn to cover up this area, but the entire cast is always at hand for all the action and sometimes provide songs and running commentary on it. Period costumes are occasionally accented with masks, and a tuba provides musical punctuation when called for. There are a few recurring jokes, but nothing is ever pushed beyond the point of funny into the realm of the annoying. The riotous fun is largely under the guidance of the wonderful J.D. Cullum who returns to ANW as the servant Mascarille. He's made several appearances in similar funny side man parts and as with this performance he runs away with the whole show. Mascarille has more great ideas than his master Lelie, played by Michael A. Newcomer, can derail in the course of the evening. The pacing is brisk and the tone is kept light without the show becoming too self-aware or cynical. It's another fine show for A Noise Within and one that promises an even bigger, brighter future with the company now fully engaged in their big bright surroundings.

Labels: A Noise Within

Among all of Shakespeare’s plays, Antony and Cleopatra may have been the most screen worthy. Granted, he had no way of knowing that, but it is filled with the kinds of things that still spell green light for Hollywood studios – exotic locales in Alexandria and Rome, large scale fight sequences, recognizable characters, and a tragic love story. Yet it is the demands of all these things going on in the same relatively short time period while in a condensed space that may make the play a bit less popular to stage than Shakespeare’s others. There are big shifts in tone and a lot of (augmented) history for the audience to digest, and making it all hang together in an entertaining and believable way is no small feat. Pasadena’s A Noise Within kicked off their spring season with a new production of Antony and Cleopatra last month that has a lot to say for itself even if it doesn’t manage to pull all the loose ends together as well as it might.

Central to the play's success are the title roles, and Susan Angelo who plays Cleopatra gives a lusty and engaged performance of the Egyptian queen dealing with the various psychological proclivities of her Roman neighbors. Angelo expertly milks scenes for all they’re worth including her rage with servants who’ve unwittingly become the bearers of bad news about her lover along the way. Opposite Angelo is company co-founder and production co-director Geoff Elliott who gives a comparable, subdued performance as Mark Antony. Antony’s got a lot on his mind at virtually every moment of this story, and Elliott reasonably goes for something along the line of the crisis management approach to the character. Most importantly, the relationship between the two rulers comes off as sincere and intimate against a canvas of political intrigue. Of course, there is a more than capable huge cast besides these two leads including the always enjoyable Robertson Dean as Enobarbus and Max Rosenak as Octavius Caesar.

Yet Elliott, along with his wife and co-director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, doesn’t quite manage to give the show all the gravitas it should convey. The humorous and romantic bits work well, but as the play turns into its final tragic acts things begin to unravel and the deaths of the main characters can ring hollow. In Thursday’s performance certain moments during Antony’s death scene were met with uncharacteristic laughter from the audience and the subsequent scenes seemed to drag on to the end. However, there was other good news in that the company continues to explore and make use of their grand new space. The fight scenes here were bigger and more detailed than any the company has yet done, with Romans rappelling from the fly space above the stage. The cast managed to keep the almost cavernous space of the new theater from overwhelming the proceedings filling the room and drawing the audience in to the events on stage. On balance the company manages to get enough right in the show that it makes for a worthwhile theater experience and certainly much more enjoyment than most Hollywood blockbusters can deliver. The show runs in Pasadena through May 13.

Labels: A Noise Within

Pasadena’s A Noise Within Theater Company is spending much of the Spring in 17th Century France. They’ve had great successes with Molière before and The Bungler will open early next month. But perhaps more unusually, the company is also mounting an adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s comedy-drama-romance L’Illusion Comique from 1636. The play was radical in its day with a number of innovations including a play-within-a-play structure and broad shifts in tone mashing together elements of different genres. And while these devices aren’t unfamiliar to modern audiences, Cornielle’s original can still seem jarring and episodic. The play has enjoyed new found popularity in recent years however after playwright Tony Kushner completed a new translation and adaptation of the play streamlining some of its more circuitous plot turns.

It’s this version that ANW brought to the stage last weekend in its new Pasadena home under the direction of Casey Stangl. It’s a fanciful story with young lovers and sorcerers that looks great on the more expansive thrust stage of ANW’s new space. The company has always managed illusions well, but in Pasadena they have a chance to look grand. The action follows an older man, Pridamant, who has come to the cave of a sorcerer, Alcandre, seeking to learn about the fate of his son whom he had abandoned many years before. Alcandre summons a number of visions that relate episodes from the son’s life in his father's absence. However, each vignette unfolds in a slightly different context with the names of al the players, including Pridamant’s son, slowly changing from one segment to the next. And like Corneille’s original, there is a little bit of everything from romance to the pastoral. But Kusher leans heavily on romantic comedy overall and the main thrust of the drama tells the story of how the son and the young woman he loves become connected and stay that way.

And yet despite the unusual structure and episodic nature of the play, this production is extremely engaging for the most part. Stangl’s sense of timing is key and some of the best artists on the ANW roster have plum roles. Deborah Strang plays Alcandre with an air that is equal parts Prospero and Puck. She interacts very little with the cast of the son’s romantic world which includes a number of stock characters such as a buffoon expertly managed by the very funny Alan Blumenfeld. The dashing Graham Hamilton plays the sons' parts opposite Devon Sorvari’s paramours in a Tales of Hoffmann-inspired way. Abby Craden makes her mark in the conniving maids' roles. Each vignette builds upon the next with parallels drawn between ostensibly different characters throughout the text. The play does have several wistful and melodramatic bits but the show hits all the right notes with its reflections on aging and staying current in a world that rapidly passes us by. This is a great chance to see a relative stage rarity and as usual ANW has put together a high quality, dramatically satisfying take on a play that is remembered for good reason.

Labels: A Noise Within

It’s never a bad idea to bring back a hit. And if you’re A Noise Within, Pasadena’s new repertory theater company you’ve had a number of those to choose from over the years. The company has revived successful productions of Waiting for Godot and Arthur Miller’s The Price in recent years, and for just two weeks, the company has brought back Michael Frayn’s evergreen Noises Off. It looks great, especially in their new Pasadena home. The backstage/onstage comedy calls for a comparatively large set involving two stories that can be seen from both front and behind with 7 doors, a stairwell and all those boxes, bags, and plates of sardines. To look at it, you might not realize that the set for the revival is the same one used in the troupe’s former Glendale home. It looks huge by comparison when not wedged at an angle into a much smaller space. Here with room to spread out, the show seems larger and more physical than before.

Of course, the play is supremely funny. I’d seen the show just recently in a London revival at the Old Vic directed by Lindsay Posner with a number of well-known British actors. To tell the truth, outside of the understandable issue of accents, A Noise Within’s current production was significantly better. Directors and founders Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott have wisely taken a bit broader approach that helps offset some of the more mechanical aspects of Frayn’s staging. There is an immense amount of stage direction here and all of it must look unplanned, which can distract from character development and other important qualities. But Geoff Elliott’s portrayal of director Lloyd Dallas bristles with an unspoken rage and stays completely out of sight for nearly all of the first Act making his eventual arrival from the dark all that more pronounced. Emily Kosloski meanwhile gives Brooke a more clueless edge that heightens the comedy of her character’s complete lack of improvisational skills. Of course, it’s an ensemble cast with many other strong turns and as is usually the case with ensemble comedies, it succeeds mostly because everyone onstage appears to be having as much fun as everyone in the audience ends up having. So, if you haven’t yet seen the show, or are ready to revisit an excellent comedy, you don’t need to get on an airplane, but you do need to act before January 15.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

I caught up with A Noise Within’s second production of the Fall, their second in their new Pasadena home, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms on Sunday. It’s a very good production of a 20th-century play that isn’t the kind of thing that most contemporary audiences quickly gravitate to. It’s filled with the kind of overt psychoanalytic thinking and references to Greek tragedy that can come off heavy-handed. Recent productions of Desire Under the Elms like the one Robert Falls recently took to New York, have dealt with this by running with the outlandish aspects of the story and doubling-down on them with surrealism. Perhaps the greatest achievement of director Dámaso Rodriguez in his staging for A Noise Within is his ability to keep the play relevant despite taking a far more naturalistic approach to the material.

Rodriguez also takes a traditional tack with the material, focusing heavily on the relationship between elderly Ephraim Cabot’s son, Eben, and Ephraim’s very young, brand-new wife, Abbie Putnam. Eben’s long standing desire to inherit the family farm is soon challenged by his new-stepmother’s plans until it is supplanted (and conflicted) by their desire for one another. Before you can say Oedipus, tragedy ensues. But this central relationship works with two young increasingly well known local faces, Monette Magrath as Abbie and Jason Dechert as Eben. Magrath strikes just the right tone of menace and desperation in Abbie while Dechert comes off as beautifully bruised in as believable a way as possible given the circumstances. William Dennis Hunt portrays an Ephraim more damaged than deadly here, but the combination of these three occupying the majority of the play’s action works quite well.

Better yet, the production itself suggested ANW’s continued adjustment to their new surroundings. John Lacovilli’s two story set, the Cabot family farm, expands to fill the available space more naturally than the concurrently running Twelfth Night. The overall feels was more relaxed and intimate, drawing the audience in from a greater distance into the thrust stage area. Sightlines at the Pasadena space are greatly improved and the cast is far more exposed from every angle demanding more from everyone. The cast and crew delivered all this on Sunday. Luckily, you’ve got two more chances to see Desire Under the Elms this weekend before it and Twelfth Night close for the holidays with the company returning in January with a short revival of their hugely successful production of Noises Off.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

On Saturday I headed over to Pasadena to see the new kid in town. Although already 20 years old, A Noise Within, is changing the theater landscape in L.A. again by transitioning from being Glendale’s premiere repertory theater company to being Pasadena’s with their move to the historic Stuart Pharmaceuticals building on Foothill Blvd. The powers that be in Glendale, unable to realize when they are about to lose a good thing, dropped the ball allowing A Noise Within to make a move from a dilapidated and cramped space on Brand Boulevard into a new, more permanent home that is the theatrical equivalent of winning the lottery. That’s not to say the company didn’t work incredibly hard to make this move happen, having raised million of dollars in the most inhospitable economic climate to make this dream a reality. They and their many supporters have worked long and hard for this move and the contrast between the new and former sites is immense.

Remember those cramped miniscule restrooms? Gone. Recall climbing those flights of stairs or waiting for the unpredictable elevator? No more. How about the uncomfortable, tiny seats? The new space has double the capacity with modern, comfortable and closer seating all around the thrust stage. The new location also boasts Edward Durell Stone’s mid-century modern façade complete with its fountain and beautiful clean lines while vastly increasing the space for virtually everything the company could want to do from storage and dressing rooms to ample space for audience services. If you’ve attended ANW performances in Glendale in the past, your jaw may well drop at the transformation, which makes the company seem less like a scrappy start-up and more like the seasoned troupe and educational powerhouse they are.

But A Noise Within is still a theater company and they kicked off their season at the end of last month with a new production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. It’s an exuberant and joyful comedy that comes as a celebration for the company and its future. Director Julia-Rodriguez Elliott has moved the action of the play from Illyria to an imagined mid-century Cuba at Carnival time. It’s bright, colorful and filled with dancing. But like any organization that has undergone a major transition, this Twelfth Night is a reminder that A Noise Within will also have to take some time to artistically adjust to the new space as well. The Glendale site may have been cramped, but it provided for, an albeit forced, intimacy. The Pasadena auditorium is by comparison cavernous and drawing an audience in may not involve or require all of the tricks it did previously.

Rodriguez-Elliott’s direction and her cast were on emotional overdrive on Saturday with everything pitched just a few levels higher than necessary at times. The energy sometimes overwhelmed the poetry and natural humor of the text. The anachronisms set up by the change of setting were mostly handled well. While it was somewhat odd watching sword fights replaced with machete battles, the voodoo ritual complete with (fake) dead chicken in Act IV when Sir Topas taunts the imprisoned Malvolio, played by the company’s co artistic-direct Geoff Elliott, was priceless. There were some lovely performances from Deborah Strang as Maria and Anthony Mark Barrow as Feste among others. So much bodes well for A Noise Within in their new space. The company has great talent resources and has proven over the years that it can come up with inventive and creative solutions under tight constraints. It's certain that they'll continue to excel now that they have much more room to maneuver.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

Deborah Strang as Bessie in Awake and Sing!
Photo: Craig Schwartz/A Noise Within 2010

It’s unusual for me to have a weekend where I see more than one local theater production here in L.A. and have them both turn out to be really good. But it does happen, and I’d be remiss not to mention these two particular offerings since both are definitely worth seeing. First was a comedy that, believe it or not, actually produced some genuine laughter. I’ve always thought Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was sort of a passé sex comedy with great songs. Like a Benny Hill episode scored by Benjamin Britten perhaps. But I must admit that the current revival being offered by Reprise on the UCLA campus is bright and bawdy even if it is the kind of thing that you could envision yourself enjoying as much at age 12 as you do now. It’s a modest production and director David Lee has cast the show with an eye to performers who don’t so much play the parts as play the actors who originally made the parts famous. Foremost among these are an excellent Lee Wilkof as Pseudolous and Michael Kostroff as Marcus Lycus. But as odd as this may sound, it works quite well. Perhaps a lot of this is due to the strength of Sondheim’s music and lyrics. Still, not even this score is indestructible and there are a few numbers that could use some more punch such as “Everybody Ought to Have a Maid.” But for the most part, the musical performances were well done and a comedy that actually delivers on the promise of laughter is sadly rarer than it should be. Funny Thing will continue through the end of next weekend.

Erich Bergen as Hero and Lee Wilkof as Pseudolus
Photo: John Ganun/Reprise 2010

However, if you’re not in the market for comedy tonight, you might want to consider the surprisingly fresh and tight production of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! that just opened up at A Noise Within in Glendale. Odets 1935 melodrama trades in the political and social concerns of the period with a Bronx family struggling to get by in tough times. It might seem like Odets’ story of class struggle would be woefully dull and out of date, but the cast at ANW under the direction of Andrew Traister manage to keep the interpersonal intensity so high that the play flies by. Of course, at the center of this great production is Deborah Strang, one of ANW’s most valuable players. It is not unusual for entire productions to hang off her shoulders. What is unusual is that Awake and Sing! is one show in which even the players new to the company have no trouble keeping up with her. Adam Silver ‘s frustrated son Ralph was as real and heartbreaking as Molly Leland’s performance as his sister Hennie. And, although he's not new to ANW, Len Lesser's Jacob was notable for creating real attachment with the audience in a part with the lion's share of the political content. The show has no difficulty finding the human and dramatic elements among the sociopolitical sparring, making the play feel urgent and very contemporary. It’s a super show that runs through May 23 in Glendale. Oh, and congratulations to the company in reaching their $10-million fundraising goal to break ground on their new much swanker space in Pasadena. They deserve a bigger, brighter, and more functional home.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews, Reprise

L to R: Robertson Dean, Michael Newcomer, Holly Hawkins
Photo: Craig Schwartz/ANW 2009

Any week that I find myself in Glendale on more than one occasion is an unusual one. But so it was with the opening of what will hopefully be one of the last seasons for A Noise Within in their current, not so attractive digs in the Masonic Temple Building on Brand Avenue. On Sunday, company co-founder Julia Rodriguez-Elliott informed the crowd that the company hoped to break ground on a bigger and better new Pasadena site this year though they still have a little way to go with their fundraising before the project is fully underway. It’s a good cause, especially considering the amount of educational activities the company is involved in, so here’s hoping they reach their goal soon. Plus the Glendale location just looks more and more gloomy as the years go by.

In the meantime, the company has opened this Fall with two productions that make the most of the current space’s limitations. On Sunday I caught the company’s new 90-minute grand condensation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It’s a gutsy and good idea if not entirely successful. The cast is reduced to just three players. Robertson Dean and Holly Hawkins handle a variety of male and female roles while a third, Michael Newcomer, carries the whole production as Raskolnikov. Major renovations are enacted on the text including the wholesale removal of story lines and characters, which helps to keep things moving in a taught and suspenseful way. However, the play is also missing the novel's view of the inner life of Raskolnikov. Without the ability to know what he’s thinking, the audience can only rely on what he has to say and in Marilyn Campbell and Curt Colombus’s adaptation, more often than not he comes off as a cipher. Furthermore, Dostoevsky's writing is filled with that particular Russian blend of the funny and the morbid that never seems to happen in this staged Crime and Punishment. The production, directed by Craig Belknap, takes place in a single claustrophobic room with doors and a small stairwell at the rear. Creative lighting helps to maintain a claustrophobic feel, but despite these good looks, its not quite enough to keep the piece alive.

Steve Weingartner (Richard III) and Deborah Strang (Margaret)
Photo: Craig Schwartz/ANW 2009

All in all though, this literary adaptation still fared better than A Noise Within's other new production, Shakespeare's Richard III, which, I will admit, I didn’t make it all the way through. It’s a straight-forward period production directed by Geoff Elliott. It started promisingly with an eerie dark and craggy set, again with attractive lighting. But what transpires on these darkened steps is nowhere near as foreboding as it could be. The evening’s Richard III, Steve Weingartner, seems a little too user-friendly in this role, though he's a talented and likable actor in many of the prior productions I've seen him in. He mugged at times and his Gloucester comes off as more irritating than dangerous or evil. There were some strong contributions in Act I from Deborah Strang and Susan Angelo but with Project Runway beckoning at intermission, it wasn't enough to hold me through the rest of the evening.

Labels: A Noise Within

[L-R] Robertson Dean (The Count), Susan Angelo (The Countess), Lenne Klingaman (Lucile)
Photo: Craig Schwartz/ANW 2009

A particularly strong spring season comes to a close in the next few weeks at A Noise Within in Glendale. Having opened quite good productions of The Taming of the Shrew and Ibsen’s Ghosts, the company closes the season with the veritable icing on the cake, Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal. Probably more telling, though, is the play's second title, Love Punished. While Anouilh’s works are no stranger to these shores, they’re not the most commonly produced plays and when one comes along of this quality, it’s really a must see. (In fact none of his works have seen a Broadway stage in nearly a decade.) A mid-century French master, Anouilh was interested in characters burdened with a purity of idealism in a world that is more oriented toward the functional and practical. The idealists don’t tend to do well in these collisions. however, the plays are often populated with more than a little humor.

The Rehearsal is set in a country manor in post-WWII France where an aristocratic couple is rehearsing an 18th-century play to be performed as an entertainment at their upcoming ball. Amongst the other members of the cast for this play within a play are the lovers of both the count and countess, an old childhood friend of the count’s, the countess’ lawyer and his young ward. The count finds himself in peril of violating the ground rules of his very open relationship with his wife by falling in love with this much younger daughter of an employee. When they do, all hell breaks loose. But this is the 1950s and this is before the kind of cynicism that might populate such a story on a modern screen. Instead, there’s a lot of psychoanalytic babble and plenty of sharp wit. There is also an unusual sense of disorientation in that the characters remain in period costumes for the whole play despite the mid-20th century setting of the larger work. They are always getting ready or just finishing rehearsing. Further complicating things is that the events of the “inner” play closely mirror the events of the “outer” one. And while this may seem like a worn conceit to a more modern audience, I found it worked rather well in this context in that it is not a point discussed ad nauseum by the characters themselves.

At the center of a very good cast is ANW regular Roberson Dean as the Count who appears every inch the refined married man about to plunge off the cliff of his own desire. His young paramour is played by Lenne Klingaman with a bracing and direct honesty that again belies all the work that went into this performance from the whole company. Even company director Geoff Elliott turns in a rather restrained turn as Hero, the count's friend who goes from comic relief to center stage over a handful of hours. And while it doesn't end in a big hug, The Rehearsal is just the kind of play to make you wonder why you don't go to the theater more often. It's onstage through May 24.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

Deborah Strang and Joel Swetow
Photo: Craig Schwartz/ANW 2009

Have I mentioned before how much I love Deborah Strang? She’s a remarkable actor and one of the key performers at A Noise Within, the repertory theater company currently located over in Glendale. You have an excellent chance to catch her now in a big starring role as Mrs. Alving, the widow who occupies Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts. The play concerns family secrets played out in the context of unraveling illness. It’s not unlike a 19th-century August: Osage County without the rapid-fire insults. This very well done production is as clear-headed and direct as you could wish for in the hands of director Michael Murray. The story and its psychological underpinnings are certainly from another era - Mrs. Alving is contending with the horrible implications of her deceased husband’s drunkenness and promiscuity while her newly returned son buckles under the symptoms of a tertiary Syphilis infection. It’s hard to imagine how shocking this play must have seemed at its premiere in the late 19th century. The Freudian and Foucauldian implications are immense. But Murray carefully steers the play away from either the melodramatic or the academic keeping the personal relationships at the center of the performance.

He’s helped in no small part by the captivating Strang. She’s on stage virtually the whole show and portrays Mrs. Alving’s ambivalence without any of her own. It’s a vibrant and at times lusty portrayal complemented by a number of other excellent performances from Joel Swetow as Pastor Manders, J Todd Adams as Oswald, and Jaimi Page as Regina the maid. Like many of Ibsen's works Ghosts exposes the hypocricy of Victorian morals. To a 21st-century audience, this is an easy target and this play in particular runs the risk of seeming obvious. But the performances across the board remain remarkably restrained. These characters are easy targets handled with great care by an exemplary crew. The production will remain on stage through May 9.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

Geoff Elliott and Deborah Strang
Photo : Craig Schwartz 2008

Luckily for those of us not getting married to the son of big tobacco in front of a limestone cross last weekend, there were plenty of other entertainment options. In my case, I went over to A Noise Within in Glendale for their current production of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, which in some ways seemed reminiscent of imagined events in the state of Texas. Both sets of characters reel under the influence of faith in the midst of a very hot day. Williams' disparate souls tend to have more complicated and interesting issues to resolve and ANW’s cast and crew have mounted another very fine production of this American classic.

I have a soft spot for this mid-Century psychoanalytic stuff and I’ve always felt that ANW is particularly skilled with this sort of material. The cast of course features many of the company’s regulars – Geoff Elliott as Rev. Shannon, Deborah Strang as Maxine Faulk, and Jill Hill as the “Nantucket spinster” Hannah Jelkes. Elliott, of course, can be overwrought at times, and the success or failure of the productions he stars in often rest on how well the piece tolerates this approach. Rev. Shannon and his desperation seem a good fit here, and Elliott is completely believable. Hill seems to be channeling Katherine Hepburn in a part that seems to be more or less written as a character Hepburn played in many other places. But the real glue that holds this together is Strang who is the biggest and best reason to see this revival of Iguana. She is all flesh and unbridled desire and veritably steals every seen she is in.

Director Michael Murray wisely keeps the focus on the underlying religious aspects of the play.
Williams is interested, more than anything, not simply in how his characters deal with their faith but, more broadly, human mercy and kindness. Murray finds not just tormented souls but one's that can still express their divine qualities. The production will run through May 25.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews

Elijah Alexander as Don Juan and Libby West as Donna Elvira
Photo : Craig Schwartz 2008

I’ve been meaning to write about the very good production of Molière’s Don Juan now on stage at A Noise Within over in Glendale for a couple of weeks. Shame on me for not doing so sooner because it’s the best show there yet this season. Funny without being over-the-top, it’s a sharp production that milks the episodic nature of the tale for every last drop of wit. I choose to lay most of this at the feet of Michael Michetti, probably the strongest director working in the local LA theater scene today. His work at the Theater at Boston Court is always worthwhile and the set designs and guidance he gives the Noise Within troupe is remarkable.

Molière’s tale of this particular rake’s progress is disjointed and typically the real challenge is providing some sort of unifying vision for the production. Michetti achieves this by using a strong visual motif that incorporates modern dress, a bright color scheme, and certain print-inspired design elements to create a production that makes reference to the period of the action but is not beholden to it. Michetti is also wise to keep the focus on J.D. Cullum whose comic turn as Sganarelle drives the show. However, these visual elements are never allowed to overwhelm the production with cynicism or sly self-parody. Of the women in the cast Abby Craden nearly steals the show and Libby West again delivers a strong performance. Elijah Alexander is quite good as Don Juan and is well cast here. He is attractive enough to be the lothario, but not so much so as to upset the comic balance of the cast. His soap opera training serves him well in this poly-amorous context and he comes off as believable throughout.

Now there are some rough spots. The damnation scene is a good idea but carried off too clumsily here. This is, of course, partly Molière’s fault given how little time he leaves between a rather rapid series of events in the final act. Still there is plenty of reason to see this very strong production and lucky for you, even though I’m slow in getting this comment on-line, there are nine performances left through the end of May.

Labels: A Noise Within, LA Theater Reviews