Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Summer is turning out to be the season for comedies in San Diego. Particularly at The Old Globe where this summer’s Shakespeare Festival is in full swing alongside productions on both of the indoor stages. But it’s the comedies in this mix that are seizing the day, and this weekend I was lucky enough to see the two best shows the company has this summer season. Perhaps the most satisfying surprise is the honestly funny production of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage, which just opened a little over a week ago. Reza’s worldwide success has largely rested on the advocacy and translation skills of Christopher Hampton who has brought the French language texts into the English language theater world. Critics have been divided on whether this was such a good thing and Reza’s comedies on social mores can come off as coldly clinical. God of Carnage certainly felt like that in its original Broadway production that was later imported to Los Angeles with its four member cast of James Gandolfini, Hope Davis, Bill Pullman and Marcia Gay Harden all along for the ride. The Ahmanson sold seats right and left and people flocked to see TV and movie stars. But despite the laughs and a few significant coups de theatre, that outing made the play feel like a French play being performed in English and acted out with a clinical detachment that left room for big star turns in the midst of a sort of wasteland.

The Old Globe tapped Richard Seer to direct their revival for the White Theater and matched him up with a lovely cast including Erika Rolfsrud, T. Ryder Smith, Lucas Caleb Rooney, and Caitlin Muelder. And somewhere along the way these five artists managed to find a warm, human American comedy of manners among Hampton’s cold translation. Never once do these two couples, who have gathered to discuss the physical fight between their two young boys, come off as anything other than who they are billed to be. They aren’t so much characters as everyday Americans and they find and nail the real humor in the script that is just as easy to play as bitterness. The fact that the show also takes place in the round on the intimate White stage ups the ante for the show. This is not some modernist statement living room we’re watching, but a claustrophobic suburban upper-middle class one. The Old Globe’s excellent new production of God of Carnage gets to have it both ways with familiar logical laughs for the audience as well as the clever surprise moments that audiences have held onto to make the show a success.

Meanwhile the comedy offered as part of this year’s Shakespeare Festival season is As You Like It in a staging under the guidance of festival director Adrian Noble. It’s a show that hits far more right notes than wrong ones with a big hearted Rosalind played by Dana Green. She grabs one scene after the next in this big magical Arden forest that is overflowing with lovers, fools and others. Noble keeps the tone light without plumbing for darker political meanings surrounding the usurping and banishment of Rosalind’s father the Duke. He’s moved the city scenes to the early 20th Century, but the forest scenes are a bit harder to place. Still it’s stylish and attractive and the pacing is fleet. Yet he lets the language breath without too much ponderous overstatement. Not everything is on target though. There are some awkward off-tone moments like the banishment scene that opens the play that evokes the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps more than the banishment of a Duke. But these missteps are relatively few and while it makes no radical statements, Noble’s vision of As You Like It is the strongest offering of this year’s outdoor season in San Diego. The show runs through Sep 29th.

Labels: Old Globe Theater

The summer theater season is in full swing in San Diego where the Old Globe has recently rolled out all of their outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theater productions for the summer. Adrian Noble has returned for the season as Artistic Director for the Globe's 2012 Shakespeare Festival and has stuck with the format of recent years with a comedy, As You Like It, a drama or history play, Richard III, and another classic play. This year the non-Shakespeare classic is Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, directed by Noble in an attractive if somewhat golden-hued production. The play is a fantasy of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial during which a Tennessee school teacher was put on trial for violating state law by teaching evolution to his students. The play is a bit more idea-oriented than narrative-oriented with its speeches from Matthew Harrison Brady, the play’s stand-in for William Jennings Bryan, and Henry Drummond, the ersatz version of
 Clarence Darrow. Of course, the fact that there are people in America who still want to have these inane 100-year-old arguments over evolution does make the show eerie, but its important to remember that the authors had other targets. The play is also a thinly veiled attack on McCarthyism in the 1950s and is as much about socially responsible critical thinking as it is about evolution. What Lawrence and Lee saw as a somewhat out of date debate about science was actually a vehicle for bigger fish.

This message still communicates with the audience, and in San Diego there were several who applauded and cheered Drummond’s passionate defense of the right and responsibility to think freely in this country. Noble doesn’t always quite manage to hit all the notes in the show, though. The leads, Robert Foxworth as Drummond and Adrian Sparks as Brady were both believable and relaxed, fleshing out their many passionate speeches with real personality. But there was something hazy and softly lit about the show with a physical sensation and busy movement among the cast that made the whole thing feel as much like The Music Man as anything else. The design and physical movement tended toward sunny, bright, and sweetly comic nostalgia bumping up against the more biting political commentary of the show. On balance, though, it’s a worthwhile revisiting of a show that does have contemporary overtones.

Far more successful was Lindsay Posner’s staging of Richard III with its graffiti covered concrete wall sections and angular modern costuming. These are not unusual visual cues for Richard III - a play most design teams find irresistible, placing it among the obvious aesthetic debris of 20th-century fascism. Posner’s team isn’t above that either, but the direction is sharp and quickly paced even in those moments when the level of angst is cranked up higher than it need be. The title role goes to Jay Whittaker who plays the villainous king often with a barely restrained glee that works well for him physically. He’s about the most handsome, physically robust looking Richard III that you’re likely to see and, while he may not look the part of a malformed despot, he makes it work legitimately in his own skin. The women in the cast are uniformly strong including Vivia Font as Lady Anne, Dana Green as Queen Elizabeth, and a particularly commanding Robin Moseley as Queen Margaret. The looming sense of dread and the inevitability of small minds is just as palpable here as in Inheret the Wind with the benefit, of course, of Shakespeare’s beautiful words. It’s a solid quality production that should rightfully highlight this year’s festival.

And, while not a part of the festival itself, right across the plaza, the Old Globe is presenting one of their two big summer indoor shows – Michael Kramer and K.S. Moynihan’s Divine Rivalry. (The other, Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage will open later this month.) The historical event behind Divine Rivalry was the real life meeting between two giants of the Italian Renaissance, DaVinci and Michaelangelo who were brought in to each paint opposing frescos at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio – neither of which was completed. The two artists were contemporaries of one another and did meet for just such an occasion, which, in the play, is presented as a contest sponsored by none other than another Florentine contemporary of the artists, Machiavelli. Interesting fodder to be sure, but Kramer and Moynihan don’t seem to have much to offer in terms of dramatic exploration or development of the material. The show is filled with ironic and unfunny in-jokes all delivered with a winking nod to the audience. The dialog is prosaic and patently dull in much of the performance. The show almost comes off a reportage with little to no poetry. There are some attractive uses of video projection, but its not enough to lend any substance to this particular rivalry. There's plenty of time and opportunity to see most of these shows, particularly on the outdoor stage, which is always one of the highlights of the San Diego summer.

Labels: Old Globe Theater, Out of Town Theater Reviews

Want to see an excellent musical? I mean one of the best things you’ll see all year? Well if you're in Los Angeles, of course, you can go see the Tony-nominated revival of Sondheim’s Follies at the Ahmanson Theater. But let’s say you live farther south. Or let’s say you own a car or have access to one. Or let’s say you can walk enough to get yourself on a train. If any of the above are true, you should do everything and anything under your power to see another great show that just hit San Diego’s Old Globe Theater last week. It’s the west coast premiere of the final completed musical from Kander and Ebb, The Scottsboro Boys and it is nothing short of a stunner. It also was lauded with Tony nominations in 2011 including best musical (though cruelly ignored under the Book of Mormon bandwagon proving again that the Oscars don’t have the market cornered on self-serving industry myopia). And now the show has arrived for the first of two California runs with a stint at A.C.T. in San Francisco to follow this summer.

The show is vintage Kander and Ebb. In fact, it is much more so identifiably the heir of shows like Cabaret and Chicago than it is related to the unfinished Curtains that surfaced after a completion in 2006. The Scottsboro Boys, with a book by David Thompson, takes ostensibly weighty material, in this case racism and the early civil rights movement, and gives it that ironic, scathing commentary Kander and Ebb were masters of by dressing it up in immensely catchy familiar folk-influence showtunes. This combination invites controversy, actually inspiring a few protests on Broadway during its 2010 run. The show recounts the real events surrounding the infamous 1930s case of The Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American men who were unjustly accused and eventually convicted of rape charges while riding the rails looking for work from Chattanooga to Memphis. The original trial, where the defendants received little to no representation and were convicted and sentenced to death by an all white jury, became a cause celebre inflaming tensions between the North and South in the earliest years of the civil rights movement.

The highlights of this lengthy decades long story are deftly compressed into an intermissionless 105 minutes for a musical that is clear concise and never drags. The controversy arises from Kander and Ebb’s choice to cast the performance as a single large minstrel show complete with episodes of performers in blackface. It still touches a nerve and I’ll admit to sucking my breath in on more than one occasion when the two stock minstrel characters, Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones, take on any number of the several small ancillary roles in the story not associated with the actors playing the nine accused men. (It’s an entirely African-American cast with the exception of The Interlocutor who serves as judge, mayor and other executive white authority figures.) However, this artistic strategy, using the traditions and images of minstrelsy as a point of departure in examining a legacy of racism and discrimination in the United States is hardly new. Visual artists like Kara Walker and filmmakers like Robert Townshend and Spike Lee have mined similar veins in different ways for decades. But perhaps the most disquieting thing about the juxtaposition in this context is that most American theater goers may not realize how central the minstrel tradition was to developing what would later follow as Vaudeville and what we think of today as the American Musical Theater. The blackface may be gone for the most part, but like all of American culture and history, you don’t have to dig very deep to find some of the horror our modern world was built on.

The songs are among the best Kander and Ebb wrote and they are given superlative performances by this ensemble cast. At the center of the dramatic proceedings is Clifton Duncan as Haywood Patterson who has one of the longest story arcs of any of the accused men. Duncan’s warm effortless voice makes numbers like “Nothin’” and “Make Friends with the Truth” showstoppers. Jared Joseph and J.C. Montgomery also get a chance to stand out from the pack as Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo respectively touring through any number of characters both crude and eerily serious. Director and choreographer Susan Stroman has come with the show to California with its new cast and recreates her sparse, but intensely affecting show, which relies principally on the abilities of its cast to get the point across.

Yes, this is not Jersey Boys. We should all be thankful for that. However, it is great theater and you should not miss an opportunity to see it in either San Diego or San Francisco this year. The Old Globe will continue with the run through June 10.

Labels: Old Globe Theater

It was a particularly good weekend to be in San Diego. Not just because of San Diego Opera’s very good production of Salome, but also because I got to see The Old Globe’s excellent production of Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which is running through February 12. The play comes largely intact with the ensemble cast that helped Mr. Foote get another Tony nomination for best new play in 2009. The cast features two of his own children, Hallie Foote as Mary Jo and Horton Foote, Jr. as Mary Jo’s ne’er-do-well older brother Lewis. Of course, Foote’s family most likely has nothing on the Gordons of Harrison, TX, circa 1987 as depicted in the play. The three adult Gordon children, Lewis, Mary Jo, and Lucille have all gathered at their family’s palatial if somewhat sputtering estate for a dinner at which perennial discussions of money and the fate of the family’s land in the not so distant future are again rehashed. The family matriarch, Stella Gordon, played by the simply incandescent Elizabeth Ashley, seems to change her mind nearly minute to minute about what she wants for the remainder of her life and afterwards. She’s also a soft touch enamored with her memories of the past, and easily persuaded into bad decisions by her children over the objections of the estate's caretakers Lucille and her own child, referred to as Son, who are striving to keep everything financially afloat.

But money stressors are all around as Mary Jo’s husband and children find themselves in increasingly deep water in Houston while Lewis finds himself ever in debt through some combination of gambling and alcohol. Foote takes a darkly comic view of these events and it isn’t long before the thin ice everyone is skating on opens up cavernous cracks as death starts to call for more than one member of the extended family. All of this is reminiscent of Tracey Letts’ landmark August: Osage County but with a far more restrained and subtle tack toward family dynamics. The Gordons may raise their voice, but things never descend into outright violence. Of course, Foote has thrown in more than a dash of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard here as well as the crumbling and inevitable economic realities loom large in the minds of the audience if not the Gordons themselves who are unable to wake long enough to save themselves from either their own greed or from wallowing in a bygone dream of themselves. The critique of the American dream is still front and center for Foote, if not always as brutally scathing as it is in August.

But the hint of nostalgic melancholy gives Dividing the Estate its unique sensibility. It is always a very funny play, but the expansive and beautiful homestead set can do little to disguise the socially claustrophobic family relationships playing out within its walls. Michael Wilson’s direction makes room for everyone in this large ensemble to shine but Ms. Foote and Ms. Ashley are given particularly juicy bits and understandably draw more attention. So while the show may not be a revolution in theater, it does promise for a very fun and hopefully hugely successful run in San Diego. See it before you lose the chance to.

Labels: Old Globe Theater

At Christmas time, stages are typically filled with either the most familiar entertainments or family-friendly fare. In San Diego, as one approaches the plaza outside of the two indoor stages of The Old Globe, there is a large tree decorated in various Dr. Seuss related items in conjunction with the company's production of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which is playing to big crowds. But there is another holiday treat going on right next door in the White Theater with a decidedly more adult attitude. It's a new musical called Some Lovers with book and lyrics from Spring Awakening's Steven Sater and music by Burt Bacharach. The single act has many things going for it, but primary among those is a reminder of what a potent songwriter Bacharach is. Of the songs that make up the score, there's not a dud in the bunch.

On the surface, the show is based on O. Henry's “The Gift of the Magi”. Some Lovers chronicles the ups and downs of a multi-decade love affair through a series of Christmas-time meetings between a couple that is preoccupied with Henry's classic tale. They often read or recite it to one another and, unsurprisingly, parallel some of the key events in the story. The couple is represented on stage by two pairs of performers: a younger version of Molly and Ben: Jenni Barber and Andrew Mueller; and an older and wiser pair played by Michelle Duffy and Jason Danieley. All four performers occupy the same physical space and at times interact with their past/future selves in imagined ways trying to undo the past or remake the future of this unfolding relationship.

But as much as the story owes to “Magi,” perhaps the more dominant archetype here is Sunday in the Park with George. Ben's career as a budding songwriter through its ups and downs is all-consuming, often leaving Molly feeling like a third wheel to Ben's relationship to his art. Of course, Ben's tendency to compose on the piano provides a perfect setting for Bacharach's songs of heartbreak and love gone wrong. The four performers are all given some big solo moments, but the show heats up most in the quartets where past and present intermingle freely. There were some intermittent pitch problems in these group moments and it sounded like Danieley had a worrisome widening vibrato at times. But overall the show's musical qualities are strong and the performances from Mueller and Duffy were first rate.

The show's a pleasure, even if it could probably use a little tightening. After the clouds begin to gather over the young couple's new love, there is a certain repetitiveness to Ben and Molly's conflicts. One argument begins to feel just like the next and a sense of the overall direction and movement of the show gets lost. But for an holiday show with this much lovely music that serves as a respite from family stressors and yet another Nutcracker and Messiah, Some Lovers has little competition. The show runs through December 31 in San Diego so take advantage of this break from the hectic holidays before its gone.

Labels: Old Globe Theater

The Old Globe Theater continues to press forward with new work and home-grown revivals as is its wont this season. The fall is underway in Balboa Park with two new offerings that showcase some of the ambitions of San Diego’s largest theater company. Probably the most talked about show of the fall south of Los Angeles is the revival of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, which opened up just over a week ago. The show grabbed headlines before it reached the stage after both its original lead and director were jettisoned for reasons political and artistic. Oddly enough, to see the final product a week into its run shows little damage from such contortions. The star, Matt McGrath, seems ideal as the diabolical transvestite Frank 'N' Furter. (The new director for the record is James Vasquez who replaced Oanh Nguyen two weeks before performances.) McGrath's is a little less glam rock and a bit more kinky of a performance compared to the one that most will be familiar, that of Frank 'N' Furter's originator, Tim Curry. But McGrath manages to obliterate those intrusive comparisons. He’s surrounded by a lovely enthusiastic cast including Jason Wooten as Riff Raff, Laura Shoop as Magenta, Kelsey Kurz as Brad, and Jeanna de Waal as Janet. They all work hard to keep the energy level fierce and moving forward through this packed, brisk show.

But even though last minute artistic decisions may not wreck the show, it doesn’t mean that everything comes off despite the above strengths. The performance I saw was plagued with a variety of sound problems early on. But more problematic than this is the source material itself. Rocky Horror, despite its cult status, has never been a bonafide, out of the box hit on either stage or screen at least here in the U.S. The show’s M.O. is usually to flop and then live on like some zombie gathering steam in the after life. The charm of both the film version and the live show has always come from the sense of community experience the show engenders in its repetition. The costumes, the shouted responses, the props—all of these add up to something that is much greater than the sum of the show’s farcical but crumbling, nonsensical plot. And while the show can rock, as it certainly does at The Old Globe, the performance that may count most in the show is that of the audience. Presenting Rocky Horror in a large theater like The Old Globe engenders a diverse audience that is not completely in on that community experience. And if the newbies outnumber the initiated, the shouted responses to the actors on stage may seem odd and some of the funniest jokes go missing. As is currently the practice for theatrical revivals for Rocky Horror, the theater sells “participation bags” filled with approved props for the audience members. And while that encourages safety and makes for an easier clean up, it doesn’t make the show pop and zing like it can. Still the cast goes a long way to sell this sexy campy material, and I found McGrath’s performance alone worth seeing.

Across at the White Theater was the world premiere of Matthew Lopez’ Somewhere. The title refers to the famous Leonard Bernstein song from West Side Story. The musical and the eventual filming of that show serves as a backdrop to Lopez' play about a family with dreams of fame in New York City in the early 1960s. That Puerto Rican family, the Candelarias, have just been evicted from their apartment in the wake of the urban development project that will destroy their neighborhood to make room for the Lincoln Center. It’s the same neighborhood that serves as backdrop for Bernstein’s musical, although the action in Somewhere resides entirely inside the Candelaria’s apartment. The dancing is still there, though, in that all of the Candlaria clan, Inez and her three children Alejandro, Francisco, and Rebecca, are brimming with dreams of fame and artistic endeavor. Lopez mixes the scenes of the play with elaborate dance numbers for everyone in the cast, many evoking the choreography of Jerome Robbins, who serves as a Godot-like figure in the story.

Sadly the structure beyond this is pretty predictable. Will Alejandro who has buried his dream to be a dancer on Broadway be able to drag his family into reality long enough to avoid the wrecking ball when his mother refuses to leave their condemned building? Will the family ever be able to face the truth that the father has abandoned them for a better life in California? The show is predictable and formulaic despite lyrical moments that are meted out so slowly that the 2 hours and 45 minutes of the show feel much longer. The performances are nice, though. Everyone gets to dance here including Priscilla Lopez as Inez, and a wonderful Jon Rua as Alejandro. Leo Ash Evens is the more successful friend of the family, Jamie, who has a wonderful if inexplicably platonic duo number with Alejandro. Lopez' Somewhere seems happiest when it's dancing and there is thankfully a lot of it in this otherwise slow, undercooked play.

Labels: Old Globe Theater

Things are looking up here at Out West Arts. The above promo photo came in the email today and it sure is making the upcoming production of Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show at The Old Globe Theater in San Diego look more and more promising. (Photo by Henry DiRocco.) The seated gentleman is Matt McGrath who stars as Frank 'N' Furter and the tall drink of water is Sydney James Harcourt who’ll play Rocky Sept. 15–Nov. 6 in San Diego. So don’t say I never did anything for you. And speaking of doing for you, I’m in the process of completing the design elements on Out West Arts version 6, which will roll out at this very address next month and I’m contemplating changing some of the functionality of the site. But before I do, I thought I’d ask for input from regular readers. What do you like or dislike about the site? What would you like to see that isn’t here or think I should drop? Feel free to leave comments or email me and we’ll see what develops.

Labels: Old Globe Theater

Winslow Corbett and Miles Anderson. Photo: Henry DiRocco/Old Globe 2011

San Diego’s Old Globe Theater continued its winning summer Shakespeare Festival with The Tempest. After a very satisfying Much Ado About Nothing earlier in the week, Adrian Noble’s staging of The Tempest succeeded in most ways relying on old-fashioned stagecraft. Noble is the current Artistic Director of the Old Globe’s Shakespeare Festival and one of the preeminent authorities when it comes to Shakespeare on the stage, having led the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1990-2003. His experience pays off splendidly in this rather minimal Tempest with its relatively few props and empty stage. Right from the beginning he creates perhaps one of the most exciting shipwrecks I’ve seen in this play with nothing more than some light blue parachute material, basic percussion and his cast. His sinking sailors flap their own costumes in the wind of the make believe storm in a way that references period practices in a modern way. This instinct for theatricality remains throughout with the cast providing much of their own artifice in a play at its very heart about magic.

Ben Diskant as Ariel in San Diego Photo: Henry DiRocco/Old Globe 2011

At the center of the show is Miles Anderson’s Prospero, who remains at all times somewhat above the fray going on around him. In this production, Prospero often seems on an even footing with Ariel played here by Ben Diskant. I’ve seen a lot of Ariels in my time and Diskant is certainly the most ripped abs-wise I’ve come across. And when he appears winged with his blue mane standing on end there is no doubt about the fear he can manage to conjure up in the hearts of Prospero’s targets. The other standouts in the production were the comic pairing of Adrian Spark’s Stephano and John Cariani’s Trinculo whose drunken carousing provides the counterpoint to the play.

The play itself call for music, so employing a composer is always seen as a good idea. The Old Globe brought in Shaun Davey to write music for the songs in the text as well as a few additional pieces at other points in the show. It’s atmospheric and provides needed structure for scenes such as the masque in Act IV, which in Noble’s version is conducted by a trio of puppets maneuvered by the members of the cast acting as island spirits. As with Much Ado About Nothing, sometimes the vocal and musical abilities of the cast didn’t quite live up to the music they were given to perform, but the cast was invested in those aspects of the performance throughout as well. I also wanted at times a bit more edge to the proceedings. Prospero comes off as more as kindly grandfather than a usurped nobleman. Meanwhile the tortured Caliban is more of a comic inept conspirator than a vengeful enemy of Prospero. And the ending of the show is awash in a squishy, feel-good air sprinkled with perhaps a bit more fairy dust than is necessary, ending with a valedictory song and the cast entering the audience to shake hands before returning to the stage like it was a Unitarian service. But this is a play populated with plenty of magical creatures, so too much fairy dust is certainly preferable to too little, and Noble and the Old Globe have a highly successful Tempest on stage for the rest of the summer.

Labels: Old Globe Theater, Out of Town Theater Reviews

Jonno Roberts and Georgia Hatzia Photo: Henry DiRocco/Old Globe 2011

San Diego’s Old Globe Theater has officially kicked off their Summer Shakespeare Festival this year, which includes new productions of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. And while outdoor Shakespeare abounds everywhere these days, The Old Globe has a history of remarkably strong productions from great directors that make an ideal quick weekend getaway for anyone whether or not they live in Southern California. On Wednesday I caught the last of the three productions to open this Summer, the Ron Daniels-directed Much Ado About Nothing and was taken with how refined and multi-layered it was. Los Angeles audiences will remember Daniels’ last Southern California offering, the Los Angeles Opera world premiere of Daniel Catán’s Il Postino, which opened the season here in 2010. Daniels does many smart things with Shakespeare’s comedy, but my favorite is that he doesn’t exactly treat Much Ado About Nothing like it is one.

That’s not to say this isn’t a funny show. It is, with plenty of laughs and some of the wittiest insults and language play that Shakespeare wrote. But Daniels knows that even Shakespeare’s most un-“problematic” of comedies harbor much darker sides than they are sometimes given credit for. Much Ado About Nothing is on one level a comic war between the sexes. It’s typically given a zingy, lighthearted twist as barbs fly between the shrewish Beatrice, played here by a lovely and very engaging Georgia Hatzis, and her flustered sparring partner Benedick, played by an equally pleasing and awfully attractive Jonno Roberts. The chemistry between these two characters drives this play, and these are performances to savor.

But not everyone walks away from this battle unscathed, and much of Much Ado About Nothing rotates around false accusations of infidelity, public humiliation, and a young woman faking her own death. Faith and friendship are tested and there are some beautiful reflections on these topics that get lost easily with too zany an approach. The Old Globe and Daniels have managed a near perfect balance: one that preserves the promised comedy while making the pretenses of these laughs problematic enough to give the show weight and motion.

The production moves the setting to the early 19th century, which gives the proceedings an attractive look with period costumes in a rather sparse outdoor set. The pacing is good, and things move along quickly without being rushed. There is a minimal amount of singing and dancing for the cast to perform and some of it comes off better than others. Not all of the supporting cast come through as strongly as Roberts and Hatzis, but these are secondary issues. The show is quite good, and since it runs through September 24, you should have plenty of time to get down to San Diego to see it.

Labels: Old Globe Theater

The cast of Rafta, Rafta... Photo: Henry DiRocco 2011

The Old Globe in San Diego officially opened performances of Ayub Khan-Din’s comedy Rafta, Rafta… last weekend after some unexpected cast changes for the play’s West Coast premiere. The play originated at Britain’s National Theater in 2007 where it was a big success and had a well-received Off Broadway run in New York the following year. The play is a fairly faithful adaptation of a much older one, Bill Naughton’s All in Good Time from 1963, which was later turned into a 1966 film version entitled The Family Way starring John and Hayley Mills. The story concerns a young newlywed couple who elect to move into the home of the groom's parents for economic reasons. Soon, however, they are confronted with his inability to consummate the marriage, which in short order becomes public knowledge in the households of both families in a small working class British community. And while this may sound old fashioned for source material of a contemporary revival, Khan-Din’s interest in recasting all the characters as part of a South Asian community in contemporary Britain provides an interesting and modern twist. For a community that still prizes interpersonal behavior and values that may seem somewhat antiquated in the larger Anglo majority society, the travails of Naughton’s original play make sense in a new context.

The humor and melodrama here is genteel, but there are a number of genuine laughs throughout Rafta, Rafta…. Kamal Marayati, who took over the role of Eeshwar Dutt well into the play’s rehearsals in San Diego, is winning as the magnetic head of the blue-collar Dutt clan whose son Atul, played by Rachid Sabitri, has just wed Vina Patel, played here by Mahira Kakkar. Atul’s belittlement by his father is a constant sore spot for his mother, Lopa Dutt, played by Geeta Citygirl Chopra in one of the standout performances in this excellent ensemble cast. Vina’s parents, Laxman and Lata, played by Nasser Faris and Gita Reddy respectively, come from a somewhat higher economic echelon, but their family dynamics tie the Patels closely to the Dutts independently of their children’s marriage. This is not a play that turns on shocking revelations or big set pieces and director Jonathan Silverstein keeps the energy level of the cast high without letting it overwork the material. Rafta, Rafta… does recall a more straight forward approach to its emotional content even if some of the sexual politics the story turns on may be stale even for this particular group of characters in this particular community. Perhaps a broader concern for Rafta, Rafta… in this outing, though, is how well its story translates to American audiences. Sure there are plenty of laughs, but for everyone that lands, there appear to be another that misses the mark due to particulars of the British working class life and the large community of immigrant South Asians in Britain. And while the South Asian diaspora reaches into the Southern California fabric as much as it does the British one, jokes about honeymoons in Blackpool and the sort may have more bite on the other side of the Atlantic. But there are still plenty of laughs that do make an invitation to this particular wedding party one worth attending. Rafta, Rafta... runs through April 24 at The Old Globe in San Diego.

Labels: Old Globe Theater, Out of Town Theater Reviews