Mark Taper Forum – Dine, Travel & Entertainment

“WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME”

While attending the opening night of “What The Constitution Means To Me” now at the Mark Taper Forum, writer Heidi Schreck encourages the audience to ponder about the importance and how dated the U.S. Constitution is today.

Direct from Broadway, Director Oliver Butler has actress Maria Dizzia open the 100 minute show as an adult Schreck, and a fifteen-year-old Schreck participating in an American Legion debate competition. She asks the audience to become the same group of white male American Legion members who watched and judged her debates when she was a teen.

We learn that Schreck was a pretty good debater, earning enough prize money to pay for her entire state college tuition. A few years ago, Schreck was thinking about the value and inadequacy of our Constitution, especially after our current administration gained power. She believes it’s time to re-evaluate the documents that she was zealous about as a teenager.

Transforming into a teen, Dizzia describes how Schreck had a “buzz cut like Annie Lennox” the 1980s lead singer and songwriter for the band Eurythmics. She talks about her fascination with witches and actor Patrick Swayze.

Actor Mike Iveson appears in the audience as an American Legion proctor. He walks onto the diorama style stage to begin the debate. Scenic designer Rachel Hauck enhances the room with four rows of framed photos of Legion Hall members.

The play focuses on questions asked by Iveson about Amendment 9 and Amendment 14 of the Constitution. The one thing I felt is sometimes it was hard to follow Dizzia transitioning from Schreck’s teenage and adult self. When she reveals intimate details about the sexual and physical abuse suffered by four generations of women in her life, she shares how these experiences relate to these amendments in the Constitution. We learn how it shaped and destroyed each of these women.

The show details how the Constitution was written to protect rich white males, and how women’s rights, immigrants and citizenship rights are teetering today. This personal spin to each Amendment may make some in the audience uncomfortable, as she focuses on sexual assault, domestic abuse, and how immigration is dealt with under our current administration. Taped recordings of Justices Anthony Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasis the points made in this play.

Later in the play, Iveson comes out of character and shares with the audience about his own sexuality and how the Constitution doesn’t always protect him, even though he is a white male.

About 75 minutes into the play Dizzia engages in a debate about why we should modify the Constitution with a precocious 15 year old debater Rosdely Ciprian who believes we should leave it alone. Theatre ushers pass out little blue booklets by the ACLU on the Constitution of the United Stares of America. As the audience listens to these two women debate, they hear their opinions and decide who they believe should win. One audience member is chosen to read her final verdict aloud for all to hear.

Nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play and a finalist spot for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, this show will appeal to history buffs, liberals and feminists, but might make some in the audience uncomfortable as the playwright tackles abortion, equal citizen protection and immigration.

The play runs from Jan. 12 through Feb. 23, 2020.

The cast includes Maria Dizzia, Mike Iveson, Rosdely Ciprian and Jocelyn Shek on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings, and during Sunday matinee shows. Gabriel Marin and Jessica Savage are understudies. Director by Oliver Butler, the creative team includes scenic design by Rachel Hauck, costume design by Michael Krass, lighting design by Jen Schriever, and sound design by Sinan Refik Zafar. The production stage manager is Nicole Olson and the casting director is Taylor Williams.

Tickets start at $79 and are available at https://www.centertheatregroup.org/ or at the box office or by phone (213)628-2772 starting at 10 a.m. weekdays, non on Saturday and 11 a.m. on Sunday. A limited number of $15 student rush tickets are available for every performance. Tickets may be reserved beginning at 10 a.m,, the day prior, while supplies last, and must be picked up at the Box Office with valid student ID. 135 N Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Lackawanna Blues Wins Hearts in LA

Taking my seat during the opening night of Lackawanna Blues, two women named Pam and Sally sat down next to me. They started talking about their friend, writer, performer and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson. They shared with me how Pam is Ruben’s publicist, and that the first reading of Lackawanna Blues was in the living room of Sally’s home. Later I discovered I was sitting next to actress Sally Struthers and her publicist and good friend Pam Sharp.

Ruben’s deeply personal musical montage began with a spotlight shining on Grammy Award-winning blues guitarist, composer, and performer Chris Thomas King. While strumming his guitar, another spot illuminates Ruben standing in front of a brick boarding house with the number 32 above the doorway.

For the next 85 minutes, he reminisces about childhood growing up with Miss Rachel also known as ’Nanny,’ while growing up in Lackawanna, New York. He opens “I didn’t know what love was until I had Nanny’s cooking.”

While returning to his roots, he re-enacts over 20 characters that include a couple of drunks, a few mentally challenged individuals and some physically scarred characters. Ruben’s smooth storytelling is enhanced by his pleasing voice, fluid movements and exquisite harmonica playing.

‘Nanny’ grew up on a tobacco farm in Virginia and moved to Lackawanna in 1956. It was a fertile time, and she invited and brought families to her new town to help them succeed. She bought and opened her own boarding house and charged tenants $30 a week.

Ruben lived in one of the rooms with his mentally ill mother who abandons him in the evenings. ‘Nanny’ notices this and becomes his loving surrogate mother. The audience grew quiet as Ruben shares his stories about how he went everywhere with her.

Sitting next to me Struthers rich laugh was contagious as we both chuckled and giggled as Ruben describes one of the tenant’s Mr. Taylor. “He was a man who looked like a giant negro iguana.” Mimicking how his tongue jumped in and out of his mouth, the scene grew more poignant when we learn how this man died.

He shares that ‘Nanny’ not only took in down-and-out people, but also a baby raccoon, a pig who lived in the basement, a three-legged German Sheppard, hamsters, and others.

The audience roared again with laughter when he demonstrates the scandalous 1960s ‘dog dance’ that some of the tenants would do in the evening. Interspersed between and during these stories, Ruben would pull out his harmonica and play along with King. At times I looked around the audience and noticed many were moving their heads to the bewitching beat before offering another round of beloved applause.

As ‘Nanny’ develops health issues and is admitted into the hospital, Ruben expresses how he wants to die before she does. He doesn’t want to live without her. Lighting designer Jen Schriever silhouettes Ruben beautifully in this scene, as ‘Nanny’ reassures him that he is a breath of fresh air to her, and they will always be together.

This moving tribute for a wonderful woman born in 1905 is similar to what Ruben dedicates in the Playbill to his creative partner and award-winning music composer Bill Sims Jr. For more than 20 years Sims Jr.’s music was the foundation for everything they did together. When they created Lackawanna Blues, Ruben once told Sims Jr. that he didn’t think he could ever do the show without him. Sims Jr. responded. “I’ll be there. You might not see me, but I’ll be there.” Sadly Sim Jr. passed away this year.

After an enthusiastic standing ovation with screams of “Bravo” being shouted from the audience, Ruben took his bow with tears of joy in his eyes, looked toward the ceiling, pointed up, winked and smiled. I hope he felt Bill’s and maybe even ‘Nanny’s’ presence during the opening night of his show. I sure all felt the pleased presence of everyone in the audience.

This review was featured OnStage March 15, 2019.

Produced by Center Theatre Group, the production runs through April 21, 2019.

The design team includes scenic designer Michael Carnahan, costume designer Karen Perry, lighting designer Jen Schriever, and sound designer Philip G. Allen. The production stage manager is David S. Franklin.

Opens Wednesday, March 13 at 8 p.m. (Previews March 5 through March 12) Runs through April 21, 2019.

Mark Taper Forum

Performance Days and Times:

Tuesday through Friday at 8 p.m.

Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m.

Sunday at 1 p.m.

No performance on Mondays.

Exceptions: Added 6:30 p.m. Sunday performances in lieu of a 1 p.m. performance on April 14 and April 21.

No public performances on Tuesday, March 19; Wednesday, March 20; Thursday, March 21 and Friday, March 22.

No 8 p.m. performance on Tuesday, April 16.

Run Time and Intermission:

“Lackawanna Blues” runs one hour and 20 minutes with no intermission.

Ticket Prices: $30 – $109

(Ticket prices are subject to change.)

Tickets are available http://www.CenterTheatreGroup.org

or calling Center Theatre Group Audience Services at 213.628.2772.

Group Sales: 213.972.7231

The Music Center, 135 N. Grand Avenue in Downtown L.A. 90012. Visit centertheatregroup.org.

Go See Valley of the Heart at the Mark Taper Forum

As the front doors opened at the Mark Taper Forum, three Japanese style drummers led the audience into the theatre to see Luis Valdez’s newest stage production Valley of the Heart.

Sitting in my seat, I looked down admiring John Iacovelli’s exquisite wood floor stage displaying rays of sun, and a mesmerizing thin blue line serpentining across the stage representing a long irrigation canal. Below the canal was a patchwork of agricultural fields, representing a fertile California agricultural valley.

In the center of the stage was an empty wheelchair and floor-to-ceiling white Japanese-style shoji screen. These sliding screens are a canvas for projection designer David Murakami’s visual storytelling of immigrant farmers, President Roosevelt declaring war on Japan, and horrific internment camps in California and Wyoming.

Valdez is a legendary storyteller in Latino theater, as the founder of the Obie-Award winning El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers’ Theater), with credits including the award winning “Zoot Suit,” “La Bamba,”and “The Cisco Kid.”

This is a family affair for playwright and director Luis Valdez. His brother Daniel Valdez plays the patriarch Cayetano of the Montano family, and Cayetano’s son Benjamin is Luis Valdez’ talented son Takin Valdez.

It begins with Benjamin as an elderly man, telling the audience his life story about hard working immigrants from Japan and Mexico working side by side if the fields. We meet the Montano family, sharecroppers living on the Yamaguchi farm in Cupertino, CA, long before this area became the headquarters for Apple Inc. Cupertino’s primary economic activity was once agriculture before it became known as the Silicon Valley.

This beautifully written love story focuses on young Benjamin falling in love with Thelma “Teruko” (Melanie Mah) Yamaguchi right before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The choreography of their forbidden love is witnessed while these two harvest broccoli in the fields, and is silhouetted in the upstairs window inside the Yamaguchi home.

Thelma’s immigrant father Ichiro Yamaguchi (Randall Nakano) promotes Benjamin as foreman of the farm, after President Franklin Roosevelt executes his Executive Order and declares war on Japan in 1942. We sadly watch the Yamaguchi family burn and bury everything they own representing their Japanese heritage. When Ichiro turns himself in to protect his family and the farm, I heard nearby audience members sob, as these scenes brought back painful personal memories.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness disappears overnight to hundred of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, as they were forced to report to relocation centers near their homes. Many lived in horse stalls in a San Jose racetrack or the Los Angeles’ Fairgrounds in Pomona until transferred to more permanent wartime internment camps in California, Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Soon Thelma, pregnant with child, and her family are forced out of their house, and Benjamin and his family promise to maintain and protect the farm.

Christy Sandoval as Benjamin’s sister Maruca Montano provides comic relief while enjoying life in the Yamaguchi’s more modern ranch house, demonstrating how the Montano’s life improved, while the Yamaguchi’s life tragically changes.

This emotionally powered production slows down in movement after intermission, as the audience watches a recitation of letters between Thelma and Benjamin. About 15 minutes could be shaved from the length of the play here, yet the lighting by Pablo Santiago, sound by Philip G. Allen and multi-media visual display on the back screens enhance these scenes.

One walks away reflecting on the injustice today’s immigrants are facing as they struggle to provide a future for their American-born children. It’s eerily a repeat of history as our current administration pulls apart families and separates them into relocation camps.

The cast of “Valley of the Heart” includes, Mariela Arteaga, Moises Castro, Justin Chien, Melanie Arii Mah, Randall Nakano, Michael Naydoe Pinedo, Joy Osmanski, Rose Portillo, Christy Sandoval, Scott Keiji Takeda, Daniel Valdez and Lakin Valdez.

The creative team includes set design by John Iacovelli, costume design by Lupe Valdez, lighting design by Pablo Santiago, projection design by David Murakami and sound design by Philip G. Allen. The production stage manager is David S. Franklin.

The play runs through December 9, 2018. Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 1 and 6:30 p.m. No Monday performances. Exceptions: No public performances on Tuesday, November 13 and Wednesday, November 14. Added 8 p.m. performance on Monday, November 19. No 8 p.m. performance on Thanksgiving, November 22.

Tickets are available online at CenterTheatreGroup.org, by calling Audience Services at (213) 628-2772 or in person at the Center Theatre Group Box Office (at the Ahmanson Theatre at The Music Center in Downtown Los Angeles). Tickets range from $30 – $99 (ticket prices are subject to change). The Mark Taper Forum is located at The Music Center, 135 N. Grand Avenue in Downtown L.A. 90012.

This OnStage Blog review was featured on Nov. 10, 2018.

Water by the Spoonful

Latin music sets the mood for Quiara Algeria Hudes emotional journey of Water by the Spoonful. It’s the second story of a trilogy about struggling with addiction and how it can affect one’s social and family life. Each character in Water By the Spoonful has obstacles, flaws and struggles that they must confront in order to move forward.

The 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz offers two main plots that intertwine on the clever set design by Adam Ring. The sparse open room with eclectic furniture, a small kitchen, and two different types of swivel office chairs, that also become different computer stations, as large screens illuminate above the set with screen names that include Haikumom (Luna Lauren Velez), Fountainhead (Josh Braaten), Orangutan (Sylvia Kwan), and Chutes&Ladders (Bernard K. Addison). Throughout the play we watch as they type their name to reveal how they each share a common denominator – they are all crack cocaine addicts who frequent Haikumom’s online recovery support group to seek and maintain sobriety.

We learn Orangutan is a recently sober 26 year old college graduate who moved to Japan to seek sobriety and possibly meet her birth mother. This unknown woman gave her away before she was adopted by an American family. Orangutan is active in the chat room and longs for a real relationship without one consisting of letters and numbers on a keyboard. Her closest screen friend is Chutes&Ladders, a black “50 years old on a good day” man. He was the the “kid who ate crayons” and now works at the IRS as a paper pusher. “Life is messy and disappointing,” even though he has remained clean for 10 years. With a strained relationship with his son, he is too afraid to reach out to him for fear of rejection, so he keeps “staying in a box” and not venturing out of his comfort zone.

Chutes&Ladders pours salt into newcomer Fountainhead’s wounds, making him face his successful businessman facade. He’s a crack head with a wife who has no idea. Chutes&Ladders is brutally honest about how Fountainhead “is in for the fight of his life, if he really wants to get sober.” To gain sobriety, one must “pursue feeling good, no matter how bad it feels.” Each day, “staying clean is like tap dancing on a mine field.”

Odessa/Haikumom cleans toilets as a janitor and seeks redemption from a horrific event that happened while she was a crack addict. Committed to sobriety, she creates a recovery chat room. As the site administrator, her mission is to save others and enforce peace among the strong personalities entering her online community.

When her sister dies, the lead character Elliot (Sean Carvajal) comes back into her life seeking financial help for a proper burial for his aunt. This isn’t the first time Carvajal played this role. He starred in the off-Broadway production in 2016, and looks thrilled to be in Los Angeles bringing Elliott to life once again.

We learn after intermission what “Water by the Spoonful” means. Elliott tells the story to his cousin Yazmin (Keren Lugo) of how he and his little sister were so sick that they couldn’t hold anything down. When their mother Odessa/Haikumom took them to the doctor, he told her to give each child a spoonful of water every five minutes. As a crack head, Odessa couldn’t do it and Elliott’s baby sister died from dehydration. Elliot was found by Social Services, who took him away to live with Odessa’s sister.

Elliot is an abuser too, not crack, but opiates. After an honorable discharge from the Marine’s and four leg surgeries, Doctors give him as much pain medication as he wants to help with his injury and slight limp. He also takes it to block out the war ghost (Nick Massouh) who haunts his nightmares repeatedly throughout the play, saying “Can I please have my passport back” in Arabic. Massouh is versatile, also playing Professor Aman who interprets the war ghost’s haunting demand, and a policeman in a Japanese train station.

Music plays a big part in this show and Yazmin enters as a college music teacher, lecturing to her class (the audience) about John Coltrane’s deeply spiritual work, A Love Supreme. As one of Coltrane’s masterpieces, the song resonates his personal troubles, and struggle with drug and alcohol addiction.

Throughout the play we see how drug abuse leads to isolation, poverty and tears families apart. We learn how community, family, forgiveness, and courage help in the recovery process.

The play ends with Yazmin helping Elliot with their aunt’s dying wish, to have her ashes spread in Puerto Rico. It’s a moving scene as the two stand above the set in a lush Puerto Rican rain forest. With the help of lighting design by Yi Zhao, sound designer Jane Shaw and projection designer Hannah Wasileski, one can just imagine a waterfall, as mist and later water rushes down and sweep the ashes away.

Since this is the first show I’ve see in the Elliot trilogy, I’m not sure why the war ghost is constantly repeating “Can I please have my passport back.” It seems every character is seeking something, and at the end, come to terms with reality and finding oneself.

With the damage from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the Mark Taper Forum had a sign displayed titled Give To A Good Cause! The Hurricane Relief Campaign Pa’ Arriba Puerto Rico is a campaign that Elliot Trilogy playwright Quiara Algeria Hudes supports. Pa’ Arriba is raising money to provide survival supplies and adopt service organizations in Puerto Rico, with a focus on the towns of Vieques, Arecibo and Utuado. They are helping families whose homes were leveled in the storm to relocate to Philadelphia. You can donate to www.elliottrilogy.org #puertorico.

This review is also featured OnStageBlog.

Head of Passes at the Mark Taper Forum

Who knew that Tony and Emmy nominated Phylicia Rashad, who many people fondly remember as Clair Huxtable on the long-running iconic 1980s television show The Cosby Show, could move every single audience member into tears with her electrifying, King Lear-style soliloquy during the opening night of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play Head of Passes?

Rashad, dubbed “The Mother” by the African-American community at the 2010 NAACP Image Awards, plays a raging Southern matriarch that desperately wants her children to unite as a family. She is a religious woman who seeks God’s guidance throughout the chaotic events happening in her life.

This intense production, by Yale graduate McCraney, is directed by Tina Landau, and filled with poetic prose, mostly recited by Rashad, as her faith is tested.

The play opens with scenic design by G.W. Mercier’s clapboard wood house with brick trim set where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. Lighting designer Jeff Croiter and Sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen’s create a storm brewing with the sound of wind, rain, and thunder. The timing of this show is set in the distant present, which is eerie to watch as Houston, Florida and Puerto Rico recently were ravaged by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

As family and friends gather at the family home to celebrate Shelah’s birthday, Croiter gives us hints that the story is moving down a dark path, with the periodic popping of a light bulb hanging on string after each lightning and thunder burst. The roof starts leaking throughout the house as the unrelenting rain pounds outside. Mopping up the water is one of the first challenges in this contemporary parable inspired by the Book of Job. What looks like a tidy living room filled with pink upholstered furniture and rug, becomes saturated with water.

Continue reading my review by clicking on this link – Head of Passes in The Stage Review

Seeing Mary Louise Parker in Heisenberg

I’ve never seen the Mark Taper Forum stage transformed to look like a fashion runway, and chuckled when I heard one audience member ask an usher “Is the stage always going to look like this?”
Scenic designer Mark Wendland’s stage worked well for the two award winning performers Denis Arndt (Tony nominee) and Mary-Louise Parker (Emmy, Tony and Golden Globe winner) in HEISENBERG. Both reprised the roles they played on Broadway in 2016.
Written by Tony Award and two-time Olivier Award winner Simon Stephens, HEISENBERG is set in London and opens on a train platform. The play is named after German Nobel Prize winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is known for his contributions to quantum mechanics.
It begins with the house lights on as Arndt and Parker walk onstage. Austin R. Smith’s lighting dims and David Van Tieghem’s distinctive pinging sound alerts the audience to the first scene and others that follow. Throughout the play, Drama Desk Award winning director Mark Brokaw has both characters move the two tables and chairs at each scene change.
Arndt plays Alex Priest a 75 year old butcher who lives a very simple life. He never married and lives alone. This “silver fox” seems an unlikely suitor to Parker’s 42 year old explosive and loquacious Georgie Burns, who befriends Alex after planting a kiss on the back of his neck. Looking for a Sugar Daddy to fund her trip to America, this improbable human connection becomes even more unbelievable when we learn she lies to Alex about her job and marital status, while dropping F-bombs throughout the show.
There is hardly any costume changes by designer Michael Krass, because the cast is onstage the entire show without an intermission. Dressed casually in somewhat neutral colors, I did like Georgie’s shiny black shoes, and found Alex dapper in a denim jacket.
Georgie pursues Alex by visiting his butcher shop after finding it on Google, much to his surprise. Parker’s explosion of words, rarely gives her any breaks to catch her breath in this demanding role. We learn she talks, because she is afraid of what people will think of her. She knows people will reject her if she stops, just as her 18 year old son did. Georgie tells Alex her son wants nothing to do with her and broke off all connection with his mother by moving to New Jersey.
When Georgie asks Alex to take her out on a date, she calls him a “wily old fox.” After the date, it leads to going back to Alex’s house to sleep together. As Georgie says, “and I don’t mean sleep.” It’s a tender scene and awakening for Alex, causing him to cry. The human connection is dramatic with a pinch of comedic confetti. Georgie asks Alex for money to travel to the United States to find her son. Alex realizes its premeditated from the minute she noticed him on the train platform. Since these two grow a mutual affinity to one another, she feels bad asking. When Alex shows up at her job at a school and insists she take the money, she does with an offer for him to accompany her, “We live once – we can’t go around wasting it.”
At the end, when Georgie and Alex take the trip and can’t find her son, she has so much sadness that she could “fill a well.” She grabs Alex’s hand and they dance together. Holding each other closely, she asks Alex if he would go anywhere with her? When he assures her that he would, you realize that the play is about how these two lonely and unlikely souls, enrich each others life. Knowing someone wants to be with you and share in your life journey is a lot better than living alone.

This article was published in THE STAGE REVIEW – https://thestagereview.net/2017/07/12/guest-review-explosion-words-heisenberg-mark-taper-forum/

12 of the Best LA Theatrical Performances in 2016

I’ve been blessed to see some of the best theatrical productions in Los Angeles in 2016, as a guest columnist for an informative East to West Coast Theatrical Review and News site – The Stage Review.

Here are my top 12 shows that inspired me to write the following reviews –