Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Nick Ballard and Casey Kringlen Photo: Ed Krieger/Boston Court 2011

Injecting contemporary popular psychology into the stories of Greek mythology has been a staple of theatrical endeavor almost as long as there has been theater. Myth is some of the oldest stories we like to tell about ourselves, and this era is no different from any before it in that regard. Some of the Theater @ Boston Court's biggest recent successes have come from this playbook, such as Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey from last season. (Alfaro had also taken on Electricidad for Center Theater Group a few years before.) This year’s model is Steve Yockey’s obliquely-titled Heavier than…. The topic is the Minotaur in his labyrinth awaiting the latest crop of Athenian heroes including Theseus to arrive. Yockey plays very fast and loose with the Minotaur myth and other legends towards his goal of grafting a modern-day psychological drama about mother-child attachment and abandonment on these events. We meet Asterius, the Minotaur, one day before his 30th birthday dreading the upcoming battle and murder of the Athenians and lamenting his inability to see his beloved mother whom he has not seen since his infancy despite her relative proximity. Yockey also gives us three care-taking chorus women who are more or less the three Fates, constantly making and passing rope throughout the evening and revealing to Asterius images of his mother from the past. There is also a highly amorous and S&M inclined Icarus who repeatedly flies into the labyrinth on test wings in hopes of seducing this built, half-naked man with bull horns though his efforts are largely to no avail. Finally, there is Asterius’ sister Ariadne who appears only briefly to deliver a birthday greeting, and leaving behind the end of a strand of silver thread to this most central part of the labyrinth.

Yockey has a real gift for developing a scene, and one quickly becomes engaged with the interactions between these characters. Abigail Deser's crisp direction creates a urgent flow of events even when the play doesn't feel like it has anywhere to go. The psychological characterizations in the play are kept somewhat in check and don't completely overwhelm the mythological elements. Of course, Yockey’s use of mythology is messy and can be confusing at times even within the play's own logic. The Fates at one moment inform Asterius that they have worked intentionally to guarantee he fulfill his preordained destiny by showing him their visions of his mother. And yet when he finally achieves his destiny, the implication is that the Minotaur is defying the nature of the universe in doing so. It's the dramaturgical equivalent of having your cake and eating it, too. Of course, it's a strategy not uncommon in working with myth, and certainly artists no less than Wagner had a penchant for altering story elements slightly with each iteration inside of a piece to make things fit the way he wanted to at any particular moment. There are many loose ends left dangling in Heavier Than... and if you can look around them, there's a story about the imagined relationship between a mother and her long estranged son to consider.

The production itself is up to the usual high Boston Court standards. The single set looks great and is well lit. The three chorus/Fates, Ashanti Brown, Teya Patt, and Katie Locke O'Brien, are cheeky but their synchronized speech invokes their supernatural heritage. There is more than a little skin to be shown between Nick Ballard's Asterius and Casey Kringlen‘s Icarus who’ve clearly kept up their Cretan gym memberships. Ballard is particularly likable as the young man/monster learning to live with himself in the wake of his mother's abandonment. I was also fond of Jill Van Velzer‘s turn as Pasiphae, Asterius’ mother. Van Velzer was last seen at Boston Court as Hamlet's ex-rocker mother in God Save Gertrude and she is just as interesting to watch here. These likable performances are critical to Heavier Than..., whose lens on them heavily for the show's motion. Even when the mythology boils down to an episode of Dr. Phil, there's enough here to keep things going, and it's a show that deserves to be seen. The show runs through Aug 21.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

Ryan Welsh and Melanie Lora
Photo: Ed Krieger/Boston Court 2010

The Oxford English Dictionary has proven to be a fertile source for narratives over the last decade. Particularly popular in the wake of Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman were stories surrounding James Murray, one of the earliest editors of the OED. It’s also the setting for the quite good new play The Good Book of Pedantry and Wonder by Moby Pomerance, now receiving its world premiere at The Boston Court Theater in Pasadena in a collaboration with Circle X Theater. Of course, while Murray’s Sisyphean task is the backdrop of the story, Pomerance has much bigger fish to fry, and in fact quite a lot of them, in his family drama. The Good Book is actually about the familiar stress and strains of families and particularly the roles of adult children reconciling their pasts while still caring and supporting their elderly parents. In Pomerance’s version James Murray is primarily assisted by a daughter, Jane, whose years of toil and bitter resentment of her absentee brother Paul comes to a head when the prodigal son, a cartographer, suddenly returns from Africa for a visit. And while both children must come to grips with their aging father, in some ways James Murray recedes into the background as a more static character bridging the gap between his two children. Fond memories are revisited, old wounds are reopened, and the Herculean labor of the OED carries on.

On the one hand, none of these family conflict story lines are particularly original. On the other, the setting is unique and Pomerance is wise to pack the show with enough dictionary intrigue to keep things interesting. If there is any problem, it may be that things are a little too packed with two servants, rotating employee/volunteers working on the dictionary, and sundry subplots to accompany it all. The Good Book is a busy play that sometimes seems to be missing a real overarching sense of direction. One may wonder if the dictionary will ever be completed, but this is never really the source of tension in the family drama that seems to percolate along slowly before coming to a somewhat predictable head. At its best, The Good Book manages to evoke the kind of excitement a Merchant/Ivory film might. Director John Langs elicits strong performances from everyone including a particularly good Melanie Lora as Jane and Ryan Welsh as Paul. Accents are largely stable and convincing throughout, and the play manages to evoke a Victorian air without being particularly Dickensian. And though some of the psychological concerns of the characters, including Jane’s rather easy acceptance of her brother’s implied homosexuality, may be a bit out of place for the time period of the play’s action, it’s still a fairly interesting exercise. The Good Book of Pedantry and Wonder is worth seeing and runs through September 5 in Pasadena.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

Robert Mammana and Will Bradley
Photo: Ed Krieger/Boston Court 2010

The Theater @Boston Court continues its 2010 season of world premiere plays this month with the ambitious new play from Tom Jacobson, The Twentieth-Century Way. I’m a sucker for a great title and interesting subject matter and this play has both. Jacobson’s play is based on little-known real events described in Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’ excellent history of gay and lesbian communities in Los Angeles, Gay L.A. Specifically, it concerns two actors who were hired by the Long Beach Police Department in 1914 to entrap gay men involved in sexual activity in public and private facilities in the city in an effort to root out vice. It’s an episode in local history fraught with multiple layers of political and social tension and has inherently dramatic potential.

Or at least one would think. Jacobson takes a rather elaborate and needlessly arch and complicated approach to the story by placing multiple layers of abstraction on top of one another in the plays events. Initially we are introduced to the two actors, Warren and Brown, who occupy the stage alone throughout the 90 minutes of The Twentieth-Century Way. Ostensibly they are meeting as part of an audition that no one else is competing for and soon they are speaking in a meta-fictional way about the roles they will assume in service of their vice work for the local police department. Soon the actors also take on the myriad of other characters, both real and imagined, involved with these events. Scenes rapidly shift and bleed into one another with the actors returning to prior material without warning or pause. This is also set against recurrent episodes of the characters talking to one another in a more omniscient position, commenting on their own roles in the events and their increasingly homoerotic relationship with each another.

Not that the real life actors in question, Will Bradley as Brown and Robert Mammana as Warren aren't imminently capable of handling the johns, police officers, and other assorted people in turn of the century Long Beach. Both are quite good with the extremely convoluted and pretentious dialog. Jacobson is hugely ambition with The Twentieth-Century Way and wants to reflect on it all - gay history and identity, acting technique, construction of the self, sexual identity politics, homoeroticism, and turn-of-the-century hygienic crusades to name just a few. All of this is done in the most arch and “meta” way. Yet with all of this cerebral gamesmanship, there is surprisingly little tension in the piece, which progressively focuses on Brown's moral misgivings about conducting undercover stings and Warren's own sexual identity issues, until everybody gets naked in the last few minutes. In the end the performers make reference to the real audience and their own real names before embracing in a long-avoided and frequently-discussed kiss.

As much as I admired the idea of The Twentieth-Century Way, I just couldn’t get around the grandiose intellectualization of the piece. Not that there isn’t insight into big issues about sexual identity and the theater, its just that there is never much going on to care about. Even the sexual tension between the two men often falls flat. It’s akin to mental masturbation, only without the masturbation part. The Twentieth-Century Way runs through June 6 at Boston Court in Pasadena. It will live on in August where it will be presented as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

Justin Huen (standing) and Leandro Cano in Oedipus el Rey
Photo: Boston Court Theater 2010

On Sunday I went over to the Theater at Boston Court in Pasadena to see the local premiere of Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey. Sadly there are fewer theater options in Pasadena these days following the recent demise of the Pasadena Playhouse. And after entering the packed lobby at Boston Court on a Sunday afternoon, it was tempting to contrast the two organizations and what factors, including what has been appearing on their stages in recent years, that may or may not have led to these different fates.

Boston Court is a much smaller theater, despite its posh digs, so it may not be as beholden to presenting as broadly popular fare in order to fill those seats. But the differences in programming are still a stark contrast. The Pasadena Playhouse closed following a revival of Camelot and it’s schedule has been packed in recent years with other eagerly audience-pleasing revivals. There have been new works as well, including musical treatments of Ray Charles’ life story and the film Sister Act. Meanwhile, Boston Court is presenting a 2010 season entirely of world premieres. (Admittedly two of those plays, including Oedipus el Rey, have "rolling premieres where they are having a few debuts in rapid succession in different cities around the nation.) New work has always been a big part of the diet at Boston Court mixed in with a good number of unorthodox takes on classics. They’ve had musicals as well, including an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull and a comic-book style fantasy from composer Eric Whitacre to name a few. And while there are certainly many more factors involved in a theater company’s success besides programming, looking at the content of recent seasons one has to wonder – what, in fact, do today's audiences want to see?

I think Boston Court has been, and continues to be on the right track. The all premiere season is a great and challenging idea in times that would encourage many organizations to go into retreat. The first offering in this premiere series is Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus el Rey, a re-envisioning of Sophocles’ drama in a contemporary L.A. barrio. This is not a new tactic for Alfaro who tread pretty much the same course with Electricidad, which had a local premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in 2005. This time around we have Oedipus released from North Kern State Prison where he has been mentored by a blind Tiresias. Upon release from prison, Oedipus commits the murder which will shape his destiny on the streets of L.A. and then moves into a neighborhood where he will soon be working all of the angles.

Alfaro’s reworking of the plot into modern day elements works well for the most part, including a chorus of fellow felons who take on the roles of most of the minor characters at different points. And while the themes of fate and questioning the gods are still central to the adaptation, Alfaro appears to be unable to avoid filling the story with oodles of psychological characterizations and interpersonal conflicts that were not usually concerns of the Greeks. A lot of time is spent on explaining the romance that develops between Oedipus and Jocasta and Oedipus’ feelings toward Tiresias following his momentous revelations. And while all of this may make the story more acceptable to a modern audience, it also seems to weigh things down in a play that is much more about the folly in questioning one’s destiny. But some wounds are hard to avoid opening when they are staring you in the face, and Alfaro’s Oedipus goes for every one no matter how much they bring the action of the play to a dead stop.

Despite this, there’s a lot right about this show. It certainly looks good and is well lit. The performances are all strong especially Justin Huen as an unusually young and virile Oedipus. Director Jon Lawrence Rivera keeps a good balance between the wit and tragedy in Alfaro's adaptation. And while I never felt shocked by the well worn events of the story, I did admire the craft behind it. The play runs for two more weeks here in L.A. before moving on to Washington DC.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

Jill Van Velzer in God Save Gertrude
Photo: Ed Krieger/Theater at Boston Court 2009

Shakespeare is always a good place to start. The thorny bit is where do you go from there. Such is the dilemma over at the Theater at Boston Court where Deborah Stein’s latest play God Save Gerturde is receiving its world premiere. Hamlet’s mother has been a popular source of speculation for artists like John Updike and Tom Stoppard for years so Stein’s more feminist and less Freudian take is welcome. It starts with an interesting idea - what if Gertrude were a punk rock diva looking back on her younger days and regretting the decisions she’s made on her way up the ladder. The revolution is over and what does she have to show for it other than the latest war and a son with stepfather issues. The modes is equal parts Patti Smith, who Gertrude herself invokes more times than is necessary, and Evita Peron. Set it all in an abandoned, war torn theater and you might be on to something.

However, this isn’t horseshoes and all of this doesn’t quite make it into a cohesive afternoon at the theater. While Gertrude, played here by Jill Van Velzer, is interesting, she has too little to do but repeat herself and wax nostalgic about events that aren’t familiar or detailed enough to generate a narrative. Technically, the work is a musical with punky pop songs from David Hanbury. But none of the songs really move the story forward and only rarely offer a glimpse of the characters internal lives. They make Green Day’s music in American Idiot sound like Verdi by comparison. And for all the punk posturing, the show lacks much edge. While the copious amounts of grey hair in the audience might have appreciated the reference to MTV as a bastion of youth culture, it hardly screams rock and roll. But, of course, the Shakespeare angle always provides some level of interest and at least creates some tension around the question of how God Save Gertrude parallels or ignores Hamlet. But even that will only get you so far.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

The cast of The Pain and the Itch
Photo: Ed Krieger/Theater at Boston Court 2009

Bruce Norris’ recent dark family comedy The Pain and the Itch is finally receiving a West Coast outing this month thanks to the combined forces of Pasadena’s Boston Court Theater in collaboration with the Furious Theater Company. Considering the rather mixed reviews the piece had in Chicago, New York, and London, the play’s longevity is beginning to suggest that it might actually have legs. In fact, given the rather prestigious spaces that have hosted Norris’ grizzly morality tale so far, that two relatively smaller community theater organizations in Los Angeles have banded together to produce it is notable. They’ve done a very solid job overall and make as convincing an argument as anyone else has on the value of the piece.

And get this - The Pain and the Itch has a plot. I mean a real one with an arc and loose ends to be tied up and everything. It's not a psychological portrait or a character study. It concerns the events of two family meetings in a suburban upper middle class home, one on Thanksgiving, and another much later when the family members recount the events of the prior evening to another character whose life has been mysteriously and tragically upended by them. The characters include a young professional couple with stay-at-home dad Clay, who cares for his toddler daughter and newborn son while his wife, Kelly, works. They’ve invited over his PBS-obsessed mother as well as his plastic surgeon brother Cash. Cash has brought his own recently immigrated Eastern European girlfriend of rapidly advancing English skills to round out the intrigue. The holiday meal goes as they usually do in such dysfunctional clans, with the added twist of several mysteries including what creature is taking bites out of the avocados, and where did little Kayla get that horrible genital rash. Both of the plays two scenes transpire simultaneously in the same space and even though the resolution of the action rests on a bit of trickery - a crucial middle segment of the narrative is omitted between acts and only played out in the end – these machinations are enjoyable to watch.

The problem with Norris’ play, though, is that it is also a morality play of sorts. It’s a biting comic satire on the hypocrisy and moral turpitude of the liberal upper middle classes. All of the central characters’ good will is so thinly wrapped in their own racism, fear, and self-loathing that sharp comic barbs lay around every turn. Norris also cleverly wraps all of this with some rather nausea inducing hints at child sexual abuse and other unpleasantries. The insults fly, and laughs are in abundance. But it’s rather an easy target and one that’s handled with the least complexity possible. The points are so hammered home that in the end the laughter is less joyful and more bitter on everybody’s part including the audience. I also thought the pacing was rather stiff in the first act as if director Dámaso Rodriguez was worried that the audience would be quickly lost without a little extra time to digest. Maybe so, but the rapid dialog exchanges sounded very stiff until after the intermission and a little warm up. The performances of the ensemble cast were good, but Katie Marie Davies gets bonus points as the ESL girlfriend who both aspires to and calls into question the American culture she now finds herself in. Fractured accents can be milked for big laughs when done consistently and she repeatedly steals every scene that she's in. There's plenty to recommend The Pain and the Itch. It's just not incredibly sharp in its excavations of the cultural landscape.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

l -r: Carey Peters, Maya Lawson, and Bo Foxworth
Photo: Ed Krieger/Boston Court 2009

It’s been catch-up time for me this weekend, but I did squeeze in a play on Sunday. Unfortunately, it was the wrong one. Courting Vampires, a world premiere by Laura Schellhardt, finished its run at The Boston Court Theater Sunday with a sizable crowd for a last performance matinee. Despite its billing, the play is neither sexy nor very edgy in any way. In fact, it’s a rather straight-forward revenge play desperately in need of some substantial editing. It’s the tale of two sisters – one uptight, Rill played by Carey Peters, and the other a dancing hyperactive free-spirit, Nina played by Maya Lawson. Nina contracts a terminal blood disease that Rill interprets as a sort of vampirism in her inner world and goes on a course to avenge her. Along the way are a number of stock and sometimes amusing scenes with Rill and Nina’s frustration with the world around them in achieving their ends of justice or something like it. A third actor, Bo Foxworth, plays all the men in their lives including the sisters’ father. And, while Schellhardt‘s play does not succumb to the modern theatrical dictum against plot, it is successful at little else.

The biggest drawback is the verbose and lengthy scenes, which carry on well past the point of dramatic necessity or character development. Little is left to the imagination of the audience on either of these points throughout two and a half hours. Worse yet, the material seems incredibly dated. Despite the vampire overlay, there is clearly a reference to a terminal sexually transmitted blood disease, which even in 2009 is hard to see as something other than HIV. It’s this dramatic tweaking of a story about HIV by any other name that gives the play a feeling of being ripped directly from the headlines of 1991. And while there may be a big theater audience just looking for something to tear them away from A Different World reruns, I somehow doubt it. Even Edward Albee realized that HIV as a dramatic source of motivation and angst had been totally played out by the time he finished The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? in 2002. I suppose there could be something more intense in Courting Vampires somewhere, but it needs to be quite a bit darker and more bloody to get there. The production design was excellent, however. Kurt Boetcher, under the direction of Jessica Kubzansky, has put together a very sharp looking production that appears to hide many secrets. In traditional Boston Court style, the set was clever with a floor covered in a matrix of trap doors that mimicked file drawers, which the cast often opened to uncover all sorts of props and escapes. As a representation of the overly structured and regimented world of Rill’s inner life, it works very well. Sadly little else about the production did.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

l - r: William Salyers, Karri Krause, and Hugo Armstrong in The Sequence
Photo: Ed Krieger/LAT 2008

Paul Mullin’s new play, The Sequence, which is currently on stage at the Boston Court Theater in Pasadena, deals with a major science story of the last decade. Specifically, it’s about the “race” to complete the Human Genome Project by rival scientists Craig Venter and Francis Collins as told by an ambitious cub reporter covering the story. Sadly, it’s the kind of play where the drama is moved along by the reading of dueling press releases. It’s also the kind of science play where a character in need of blood work will bring their own already drawn and packaged in the correct test tube to the appointment to have it drawn. More odd, one is likely to receive those test results in the 21st century by answering a red, ringing rotary phone.

Mullin’s play is burdened with a dizzying array of cliché theatrical props all in the service of a confused and complicated web of plots, sub-plots and a need to explain an undesirable amount of factual scientific information on the stage. At the center of this swirl is a female reporter Kellie Silverstein who acts as mediator and interpreter of conflicts between the government’s main researcher, Collins, and his more brash and cavalier private industry colleague, Venter. She stands around imploring people to make things “sexier” to appeal to “the sidewalk.” She’s also supposed to provide some emotional context with a whole sideline about her own fear of being tested for a breast cancer gene she may carry. It’s hard to care much, though, when there is so much cornball dialogue and visual effects to get through before reaching that destination.

All of this is amazingly laid at the feet of just three actors. With a script this bad it’s hard to judge the acting. It often seemed to me that these folks were just trying to survive a rather daunting two hours with little hope of payoff. The play did look all right, and the Boston Court folks did manage to keep up the production design elements despite some of the laugh-inducing items mentioned above. But I think this is probably not the play you need to go see right now.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

Sabrina Sloan, Rende Rae Norman and Eileen T'Kaye
Photo: Ed Krieger/Boston Court Theater 2008

A lesson for the new century – Max Bialystock’s downfall is not the result simply of unbridled ambition but of poor execution. In Mel Brooks’ The Producers he famously stages the worst musical imaginable in the hopes of guaranteeing a flop—and his success. But things go awry when he overshoots his mark, “Springtime for Hitler” becomes a comic hit. If he wanted to ensure a financially profitable flop, he might have wanted to aim lower, say with Anton Chekhov instead. Sure it may seem that the Russian’s plays scream out for musical adaptations, but they are not as easy as you might think.

Take Gulls, the world premiere musical currently on stage at The Theater at Boston Court. With book and lyrics by Nick Salamone and music by Maury McIntyre, the adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull boldly takes a play that is thorny to begin with and replants it in 1959. A gutsy move to be sure, but more so when one considers the many transpositions and reassignments that are needed to keep this boat moving. Though to be fair, if Chekhov were writing today the interracial-gay-love-affair-between-two-US-Navy-men-during-WWII subplot might well have made the final cut of the original. Oh yes there is a lot here to chew on and, after about three hours, one’s jaws are achingly tired. But at least there is a happy ending. (Though somehow not for the gay couple, but isn't that always the way in the theater?)

The music itself is jazz-influenced and often quite catchy. There are some great numbers, especially for Rendé Rae Norman who stars as the pushy actress-mother Irenie Bennett. The whole piece works not unlike a Handel opera where all of the 9 major characters get their own arias and moments to shine in each act. The production is set on a single New York City rooftop and as is typical for Boston Court it appears that no expense was spared on the production relative to the theater's small size. That’s true of the cast as well, which features the likes of such talents as Clinton Derricks-Carroll who fills an essentially unnecessary narrator role with some of the evening's liveliest moments. The ingenue role is occupied quite strikingly by Sabrina Sloan, an ex-American Idol finalist and a darn good vocalist. Director Jessica Kubzansky keeps everyone moving, which is no small task given the overly involved and complicated machinery of the story and a rather large cast.

But all is not well for a work that seems both overly explained and hopelessly confusing at the same time. So in an A for effort world, Gulls might soar, but here on earth, we are left to wonder and hope that somewhere, someone is making a killing off of this rather reaching failure.

Labels: Boston Court, LA Theater Reviews

l-r Hila Plitmann, Marie M. Wallace and Juli Robbins
Photo: Ed Krieger/Theatre at Boston Court 2007

Ever sit in a dark theater and think, "What the hell am I watching?" Well I had one of those days on Sunday at Pasadena’s Theater at Boston Court where the world premiere musical Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings is currently running. This is the first musical theater work from composer Eric Whitacre who has developed quite a reputation for his choral compositions in recent years and received a Grammy nomination earlier this year for his excellent recording, Cloudburst. After years in development with co-lyricist David Norona including several concert and semi-staged performances of earlier incarnations, Paradise drops down now fully formed here in LA. Whitacre, who takes credit for both the music and book and shares credit for the lyrics, has put together a hugely ambitious production with two hours of largely electronic dance music with accompanying solo vocals and chorus. The score is catchy and Whitacre is quite adept in setting the rather introspective lyrics throughout even if his high-NRG brand of dance music feels about five to ten years out of date. The music is presented in the best possible light, however, due largely to the vocal talents of its star and Whitacre’s wife, soprano Hila Plitmann. Ms. Plitmann has proven herself a talented and adventurous performer in her many appearances with the LA Philharmonic and she is in excellent form exhibiting clarity and control that make everything else melt away when she is center stage. One must admire her for an overwhelming commitment to this role, especially considering the trade in overblown adolescent comic book fantasies going on around her.

Despite the wonderful music and excellent performance from Plitmann, Shadows is burdened with a wince-inducing scenario and book that obliterate everything in their paths. This “epic” concerns a group of young angels who are de-winged by their parents and indefinitely entombed in a self-contained community for their protection following their parents' impending defeat at the hands of evil-doers. In the intervening 17 years, waiting for their parents to return, the children have develop a Lord of the Flies-style society that involves tattoos, colorful hair extensions, and martial art battles for trinkets. Or, in short, it’s a gay disco version of Mad Max. Or maybe the anti-Spring Awakening. Things get progressively sillier and needlessly complicated in as plotless a manner as possible from there. Finally, the train crashes into the inevitable conclusion with seemingly pointless secrets revealed and hearts changed. It's all much ado about nothing even if it at times quite stylish ado. Oh, did I mention the anime? No stone was left unturned in the audio-visual department which had the strange effect of making me long for the meat and potatoes realism of Wicked.

Still, Whitacre and all do deserve an A for ambition. The choral and vocal writing here are quite good and there is no doubt that Whitacre continues to be a composer to watch. On this first outing, drama may not yet be his thing, but I suppose bigger successes have grown out of larger failures than this. Plus it's good to see where all those Elfquest fans ended up.

Labels: Boston Court, Eric Whitacre, Hila Plitmann, LA Theater Reviews