San Diego Magazine / December 2004 / Scores and Stories

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Scores and Stories

THE YEAR 2004 RAISED THE BAR. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing shows originate in San Diego, then go on to gold and glamour in New York and subsequently around the nation and world. This year, however, we were privileged to see three that will add to that glittering list. Two of them, Billy Crystal’s autobiographical 700 Sundays, and Jersey Boys, the wonderful musical about the Four Seasons pop group, bookended La Jolla Playhouse’s season. The third, the hilarious musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, was a highlight in the Old Globe’s very good year.

Sundays opens December 5 on Broadway, with Scoundrels debuting March 17. If Jersey Boys also opens during the 2004-5 season, it raises the intriguing possibility that the Globe’s Jack O’Brien and the Playhouse’s Des McAnuff could be competing in June for the outstanding musical director Tony Award.

All three works, particularly Jersey Boys, are easy picks on my list of 2004’s best. Deadlines force me to make these choices somewhat early, so superior lateyear shows sometimes get neglected. In 2003, that happened with New Village Arts’ Orphans (so to that riveting production, belated congratulations).

Besides Scoundrels, the Globe enchanted my evenings with Don Juan, The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow and As You Like It. The classic Don Juan, under Stephen Wadsworth’s direction and with Adam Stein superb in the title role, was just about flawless. Jenny Chow, smartly directed by Sledgehammer’s ubiquitous leader, Kirsten Brandt, showcased Seema Sueko in the sweetsad story of an agoraphobic young woman who creates a robot alter ego. (Sueko, a hot new multi-talent, followed up with another brilliant performance in Remains, the initial offering by Mo‘olelo, the company she cofounded.) As You Like It was the standout in the Globe’s summer Shakespeare Festival. And it was apparently director Karen Carpenter’s swan song for the organization. She’s leaving her associate artist post to pursue full-time directing.

Three other musicals—two familiar, one not—ranked in my upper echelon. Starlight’s stunning Sweeney Todd and Moonlight’s sinister Cabaret ventured away from both organizations’ usual family-oriented offerings with excellent, if controversial, results. At Cygnet, where non-mainstream works are the norm, director Sean Murray and a cast of three delighted eye and ear with Bed and Sofa, a sung-through adaptation of a 1926 Russian silent film. Not so coincidentally, Sofa and Cabaret starred Eric Anderson, a local treasure. Another treasure, Rosina Reynolds, dazzled in my final favorite, Renaissance Theatre’s Shirley Valentine. Reynolds and director George Flint revitalized Willy Russell’s delightful work about a middle- aged woman finding new zest in life.

Other productions that made me love my job were the North Coast Repertory Theatre’s Breaking Legs and The Chosen, Cygnet’s Fully Committed, 6th@Penn’s Kimberly Akimbo and The Road to Mecca, Lamb’s Players’ Hamlet and Broadway/San Diego’s Hairspray.(The Producers, of course, was again hilarious in its second time through for B/SD.) Noteworthy, also, was the fledgling Poor Players company’s ambitious achievement in staging several Shakespeare works.

EVEN IN A YEAR with so many peaks, there were the inevitable valleys. Lucky Duck flew into the Old Globe as another Broadway hopeful, but crashed in a feathery mess of try-anything jokes, unmemorable music and scrambled story. At Diversionary, Places To Touch Him, a new play about the travails of a gay Latino politician, was embarrassingly miscast and misdirected.

Maybe the Playhouse’s two big winners will obscure its season’s disappointments, which included one play postponed until 2005. Melissa James Gibson’s cryptic Suitcase, about four people who know all the words but not how to communicate, might’ve worked as a 30-minute playlet but plodded on for 90. And then there was Continental Divide, David Edgar’s twoplay epic about a gubernatorial campaign. Like his sprawling Pentecost in 2003, Divide showed that Edgar badly needs an editor. In this contentious election year, his bloated stories of Republican and Democratic campaigns could have raised some provocative questions. Instead, they inspired one: “How much longer?”