Wicked Little Town

Classic Clown Plus Classic Rock

He was repped by William Morris and he'd booked two pilots. Matt Walker's career was in full swing.

And then he had a dry year and he did the logical thing: He went to clown college and joined the circus.

"I spent a year living on a train, sharing a train car with 14 other clowns," recalled Walker. "You had to hide your cereal if you wanted to eat." The upside: "I got to play big venues like the Louisana Superdome, for audiences of 40,000."

That's a lot bigger than the small houses he plays with the Troubadour Theatre Company, an L.A.-based collective of physical comics and assorted clowns who've carved a unique niche with their adaptations of classic texts to classic rock soundtracks (a sampling: "A Midsummer Saturday Night's Fever Dream," Twelfth Dog Night," "Fleetwood Macbeth," "Romeo Hall & Juliet Oats," and the current holiday show, "It's a Stevie Wonderful Life"). But the Troubies' shtick has been going strong for some time, with no end in sight, and they've managed to book a May-to-December schedule at such berths as Garry Marshall's Falcon Theatre in Burbank, O.C. venues Grove Theatre Center and the Muckenthaler Auditorium, the Ojai Shakespeare Festival, and Santa Monica's Miles Memorial Playhouse. The gig pays enough that his regular troupe -- including such powerhouses as Beth Kennedy, Morgan Rusler, and Michelle Johnson -- regularly turn down other work to do the Troubie thing.

Walker's money gig is directing wraparound segments for TBS Superstation's movies, but he's always been interested in physical theatre, studying privately with masters Bill Irwin and Denis Lacombe, as well as with the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Eventually any conversation I've had with Walker degenerates into a name game: What classics/classic rock hybrids remain undone? There's "Much a Doobie About Nothing," "Merry Wives of Earth, Windsor, and Fire," "Little Richard III," "Pericles, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince of Tyre," "Queen Lear," and such holiday possibilities as "Santana Claus Is Coming To Town," "Smokey and the Miracles on 34th Street," and "Rudolf the Red Hot Chili Peppers Reindeer."

The money may not be as posh, but how can a few stray pilot gigs compare to making up such silly titles for a living?

Actors' Ovations, Quotable Lily

L.A.'s theatre scene is primarily actor-driven -- which is to say the town's glut of talent seeking work is the main reason there's so much theater here. Because of this, most folks assume that it's all showcase crap. But in any talent pool there are those that rise to the surface, and among L.A.'s stage-hopping actors and designers are some exceptional performers. Many local aficianados will tell you the best theater here is as good as the best anywhere.

Last week's Ovation awards -- the 10th annual peer-judged awards given by Theatre LA (oops, their new name is LA Stage Alliance) -- gave out its aqua-green lucite statues to a deserving batch of thesps at the Orpheum Theatre. Apart from directing and writing, acting is the only Ovation category in which actors in small 99-seat theaters compete with those appearing at the Taper or the Geffen. It may have seemed provincial of Ovation voters that this year they seemed to favor actors in small-theater productions. But only someone who hadn't seen, say, John O'Keefe's timely new work or Del Shores' latest tragicomic Southern-fried soap would make that assumption -- a misconception roughly equivalent to assuming that Broadway is the only district in New York to see real theatre.

Host Lily Tomlin opened with a few choice zingers about the world's second oldest profession. In the voice of laconic Midwesterner Judith Beasley, a character not from her popular multi-character show, Tomlin said: "I am not a professional actress. Unlike many of you, I am a real person." She riffed on Edwin Booth's famous analogy: "He said an actor is sculptor who carves in snow. So in L.A., we have an especially hard job." She repeated an exchange with her partner in writing and in life, Jane Wagner: "She says playwrights have a hard job -- they hang their guts out onstage. And I say, actors have the harder job: We have to suck in our guts." She quoted character actress Eileen Heckart, who said, "The longest run I ever had was on the unemployment line."

Most characteristically terse and sharp was Tomlin's report that California now spends the least dollars per capita on the arts of any state in the union. "But now that there's a fellow actor in Sacramento," she deadpanned, "I am confident things will change. Watch out, Idaho!"

Understudy Up for 'Shaggs'

Understudying is among the most thankless jobs in the theater--until you get to go on.

"It's something I really enjoy," said Elizabeth Tobias, who's understudying all the women's roles in the new musical "The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World," about the best worst rock band in history. "You get the rush of opening-night adrenaline that you can rely on to get you through. Also you get to be the fabulous pinch hitter, and do one or two adrenaline-push performances, and everyone thanks you. You don't get that when you do the whole run of a show."

She was on for two performances this past weekend in the supporting role of the Shaggs' put-upon mother -- guaranteed stage time she knew was coming when she signed on, because Laura Lamson, who usually plays the part, had a prior commitment. Tobias said also she's preparing for the possibility that star Hedy Burress may get a film job she can't turn down. The three leads are "really committed to these parts and to this production," though, and she could see them missing performances only "if somone gets deathly ill or they get a phone call from Spielberg."

Tobias is a regular L.A. theatre actor and producer, but by day she runs a children's theatre company as well as the "classroom enrichment" programs for the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, where she's also worked as an actress (and an understudy). "Enrichment" doesn't refer to her bottom line. "The only thing that pays less than acting is teaching," she joked. "I made more money on a Siemens cell phone commercial I did last year that aired only in Britain than I did the whole year teaching."

But having a day job that's at least related to her performing is a plus -- and there may be some truth to the notion that the more work you do, the more comes to you. She's started to "cook" a little more, as she put it, with on-camera bookings for commercials and episodic roles.

They say you've got to be ready when opportunity knocks. Maybe this is why Tobias doesn't mind understudying: What better practice for the everyday life of the L.A. actor than to always be waiting for the call that offers the job that starts right away?

Rising Arizono

Mami Arizono turns up in the strangest places: as a performer with the theatre company Zoo District, as a strange multi-instrumentalist imp in the Sam Shepard deconstruction "Go True West," as the accordionist for Zooey Deschanel and Sam Shelton's retro swing band the Pretty Babies (that's Mami in the middle, though her face is blocked).

This past summer she turned up as a director in her native Japan at the Toga Summer Arts Festival. Lest you have a vision of a Roman-themed beerbust, Toga happens to be the name of the hometown of performance training pioneer Tadashi Suzuki, whose intensive techniques have been embraced and taught by many American companies.

Arizono directed a scene from a play well-known in Japan, Yukio Mishima's "My Friend Hitler." The scene called for just two actors, but she snuck in an extra two silent "movement" performers, one of them her boyfriend (and "Go True West" co-star), non-Japanese-speaking Ben Simonetti.

The reception was good enough, she said, that it's about "80 percent sure" that the hit "Go True West" will visit Japan next spring for a performance at Suzuki's own theater in Toga. Are Japanese audiences familiar with the original "True West," I wondered?

"I don’t think so," she said. (Actually a production was just up in Tokyo.) "But it's not a wordy show, it's a lot of movement, so it'll be good for Japanese people."

Accordion to Mami, at least.

Actors Drop Out for Upstage Moves

Actors who work in L.A.'s pervasive Equity 99-Seat Plan -- more commonly known as "Equity Waiver," since it essentially waives most union protections and mandates a mere $7-15 per performance -- often leave shows, either temporarily or for good, to take well-paying work in film and TV. There's no shame in it. It's really the only way many of these thesps can make ends meet -- but it does mean that from week to week even the best 99-seat show can vary widely in quality. Some theatres have to cancel or postpone performances; some hold the curtain for as much as a half hour while an actor races into town from a shoot in the desert.

In what may be an encouraging sign, some local actors have had to dump their 99-seat shows for better-paying work ... in local theatre. Chet Grissom opened as Grumio in Zoo District's recent staging of "Taming of the Shrew" at Downtown's Orpheum Theatre, but had to drop out for a part in "Terra Nova" at South Coast Rep. Kamal Marayati (sometimes credited as Kamal Maray) was slated to appear in Cornerstone's current "You Can't Take It With You: An American Muslim Remix" (scroll down) at LATC, but landed an understudy/ensemble part in "Homebody/Kabul" at the Taper.

And last year director Jessica Kubzansky lost three leads -- Mark Bramhall, Robertson Dean, and Jenna Cole -- from her production of "Measure for Measure" at A Noise Within when they were cast in the Pasadena Playhouse's Noel Coward confection, "Star Quality". Mixed blessings all, but at least these actors are staying on the boards.

Disney Hall's Casting Call

Think of them as "Behind the Music," L.A. Philharmonic-style.

Disney Hall won't just have one gala opening (there's a series of galas, in fact, Oct. 23-25, with the last one a star-studded showcase of film music produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg). In November a series of "First Nights" will feature live actors enacting playlets amid and around the music. Actors will portray Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Nijinsky, for instance, discussing the creation of "Le Sacre du Printemps" (The Rite of Spring), at the Nov. 7 performance by the L.A. Phil. The author for that evening's text is none other than John DeLancie, best known as Q on Star Trek and a busy regional theatre actor as well. Others planned include an actor as Beethoven for the Dec. 19 performance of Ludwig's 5th. (Might we suggest the title "Deaf Jam"? Ouch, sorry.)

It's an idea that proves either really interesting or really cheesy. Either way it's nice to know that the L.A. Phil is giving a properly theatrical flair to its biggest opening since Buffy Chandler christened her namesake pavilion. It makes us wonder if the "Matrix Revolutions" premiere, scheduled for Disney Hall on Oct. 27, will have any live component (understanding that Keanu Reeves and "live" are not words one readily associates).

Scene and Unseen

If deaf actors can be in a musical on Broadway, it would seem to follow that blind actors should get a shot at on-camera work. There aren't many doing it -- Peter Seymour's suave turn in a recent Crown Royal commercial is one of the few high-profile examples, and the blind characters in some clever recent commercials for Kohler and Pontiac were played by sighted actors.

The versatile poet/playwright/actor Lynn Manning recently participated in an ABC minority talent showcase facilitated in part by Media Access, and though he confessed to me that he didn't feel he auditioned well, he did leave the casting folks with a copy of his short film "Shoot", which was picked up for distribution at Sundance 2001 by Hypnotic.com.

He was at Cornerstone Theater Company's recent fundraiser, the Bridge Awards -- he worked with the company in its historic Watts residency in 1994-1995 -- and told me he was on his way to Zagreb, Croatia with his one-man show, "Weights," about his rough transition as a young man from sight to blindness, which he's toured all over and has pitched to HBO as a TV movie.

The first time I saw Lynn onstage, in Cornerstone's "Central Ave. Chalk Circle" (which he adapted from the Brecht), I didn't know he was blind until about 20 minutes into the show. Disability, in many cases, is in the eye of the beholder.

Camryn Manheim as Laura Bush?

Would Camryn Manheim consider it a compliment that she makes a very convincing Laura Bush? At least, the First Lady as filtered through Tony Kushner's fertile polemical imagination. Manheim cum Mrs. Bush appeared this week opposite Stephen Spinella as an Angel in a reading of the opening scene of Kushner's next play, "Only Those Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy."

The title comes from a line in "Brothers Karamazov," don'tcha know? And the springboard for the play, Kushner explained in a Q&A following--he was at UCLA's Royce Hall to talk about his work, including his "Homebody/Kabul," soon to open at Mark Taper Forum--was his finding out that the First Lady's favorite novelist is none other than Dostoyevsky.

The scene read by Manheim and Spinella imagines Mrs. Bush on a school visit to read to children, only in this case to youngsters who happen to be dead and Iraqi. With perfect aplomb, she says, "I'm sorry that you're dead--but all children love books!" As bald-faced as that premise sounds (and problematic, since one thing Mrs. Bush's husband might be credited with is in effect ending the sanctions that led to so many children's deaths), the nascent tidbit exhibits Kushner's characteristic wicked wit, outrage and empathy. Now who's in line to produce that?

Two other Tony bits: Mike Nichols' version of "Angels in America" will air in two parts on HBO on Dec. 7 and 14. And Kushner is writing a screenplay about Eugene O'Neill's attempted suicide at 23. Perhaps he's in L.A. for more than just a theatre opening?

Egan's 'Cabaret' return illustrates the NY/LA dilemma

Susan Egan returns to the lead in "Cabaret" in New York this week, which will wrap its up 5-year-plus run in November. She wasn't the show's original Sally Bowles, of course--that was Natasha Richardson, followed by a reportedly middleweight Jennifer Jason Leigh and an OK Molly Ringwald, among others. I happened to catch Egan in the show in 1999, and she was tremendous--a pixilated-pixie Sally, small and tragic, like Julie Harris in the movie of "I Am a Camera." You could see how far this angel had fallen.

Her return to Broadway comes after several years back on the West Coast, where she cut her teeth. A Seal Beach native who worked from CLOs to the Sacramento Music Circus before landing a part in Tommy Tune's "Bye Bye Birdie," she made her break as Belle in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" and came West with the show.

And while she's done a little bit of theatre here--the local premiere of "Hello Again," a big Taper production of "Putting It Together"--and recently taught at her alma mater, the Orange County Performing Arts High School, Egan's real aim out here, natch, has been to land on-camera work. She did have a regular role as a Vegas showgirl on the series "Nikki," but she was aiming higher. Indeed, what she told me last year about her career strategy gave me pause: She wanted to make a name for herself on series TV so that she could open a show on Broadway. She was right, I guess: Stars aren't minted on Broadway anymore, or folks like Douglas Sills or Sherie Renee Scott or Michael Cerveris or Carolee Carmello would be stars. Broadway producers want marquee names, and increasingly that mean film and TV stars: Matthew Broderick, Melanie Griffith, Kathleen Turner. If they also happen to be great theatre actors, like Nathan Lane or or Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hugh Jackman, all the better.

But this kind of thing cuts both ways. I know countless young actors who hit a ceiling with parts in L.A. and retreat to New York to be taken seriously as actors by doing theatre there--after which they're hailed as the next hot commodity. Mark Ruffalo, for instance, did theatre for years in small L.A. dives (including some Justin Tanner plays), but it took the Off-Broadway run of "This Is Our Youth" to get him noticed. He had casting directors from L.A. approach him after that show in New York and say, in effect, "Where have you been hiding?" And he told them, in effect, "In L.A. busting my ass to get you to notice me!"

This kind of circular industry logic--find hot actors in New York to cast in film and TV so one day they can really open a New York stage play--is like some kind of bicoastal attention deficit disorder. Which is why the only real answer to the actor's dilemma, "Should I go to New York or L.A.?" is "Yes."