On Saturday we went the the Mark Taper Forum to see The Glass Menagerie. It seemed an appropriate night for a “little silver slipper of a moon” (next to the Bank of America tower).

It was a great production, and one that really made use of the idea of it being a “memory play.” Most of the productions I’ve seen (including the one I did in high school) tend to switch between past and present as if they were two distinct experiences. This one mixed them together freely.

(Interesting thought: I’ve probably been to the Ahmanson Theater a dozen times or more, and I’ve seen three shows at the Mark Taper Forum…but I’ve never been inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Walt Disney Concert Hall.)

Beforehand we had dinner at The Novel Cafe in Pasadena. Afterward we went looking for someplace where we could grab dessert or coffee, but Sierra Madre had pretty much closed down for the night from what we could see. Solution: a bottle of water, a soda, and a bag of cookies from the grocery store.

About that orange moon.

Along the way back, I dithered over taking the 605 or the 57 until literally the last moment, and decided to take the 605. Less than a minute later, I looked out the window to the right and saw…

…a deep orange half-moon just above the horizon, sitting tilted with the curve facing downward to the right. Just below it were towers of lights, almost certainly the distant skyline of downtown Los Angeles. The lower end of the moon was just starting to flatten out as we lost the view.

If I’d gone the other way with that 50/50 decision, or if we hadn’t taken the time to look for dessert or coffee, we would have missed that view.

Fortunately, we managed to miss the worst of the storm. There was a lull in the early evening, and the cloud layer broke up enough that I could see the moon as I left work. We only hit rain during the post-dinner drive to the show. One moment: clear. The next: lots of brake lights ahead of us. The next: intense rain!

As near as I can tell, the storm passed through just north of the grandiosely-named Great Park in Irvine, where the circus had set up their tent. We could see lightning flashes in the distance, and it was cold and wet and windy, but the sky above was clear. So we reached the show against the backdrop of the moon, Orion and Sirus, lightning, and a giant orange balloon.

Night at the Circus

The show was impressive. I think this is the sixth Cirque du Soleil show I’ve seen* and they’ve all been good. A few acts did look kind of familiar, like the guy balancing on a 20-foot-tall tower of chairs (we’d seen a similar act at the OC Fair last summer), but even those acts maintained the “how the heck do they do that?!” factor. A contortionist act reminded me of someone’s idea back in the early 1990s, never realized as far as I know, to get contortionists to play non-humanoid aliens on science-fiction shows. (These days, you can just use CGI to portray any body structure you want.)

The centerpiece of the show was sort of a giant double human hamster wheel. Two mesh wheels, each with a diameter of perhaps 1½ times the height of the performers, are attached to either end of a scaffolding, which is then suspended from the ceiling so that the entire structure can rotate. Then two performers proceed to run and jump inside the wheels as the whole thing spins around in the air…and then they start running around the outside of the wheels! According to the website, it’s called the Wheel of Death.

The clowns seemed more prominent in this show than in the others I’ve seen, to the point where they basically had two MC characters: one serious, one comedic.

Oddly enough, the show features a rainstorm. There was enough fake thunder and lightning that we probably didn’t recognize the real thing a few times!

The Glass Mendacity is a spoof of Tennessee Williams, mashing together The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Streetcar Named Desire into one messed-up family gathering, played as comedy instead of tragedy. There’s Big Daddy and Big Amanda Dubois; their son Brick (played by a mannequin) and his wife Maggie the Cat; their daughter Blanche and her husband Stanley Kowalski; their youngest daughter Laura; and a gentleman caller, who appears in the final sce–okay, he shows up in scene one and never leaves. It’s funny on its own, but absolutely hilarious if you know the plays being parodied.

The production we saw was at the Ark Theatre. It’s a tiny theater upstairs in the historic building that houses the Hayworth Theatre. In the 1920s, even office buildings had character! The lobby is basically entry-level landing to the rear stairway, but they’ve managed to fit in a small bar and a couple of tables.

Ordinary Days is a slice-of-life musical about four people in New York City: a couple just moving in together, a grad student, and an artist. Their stories intersect, and each reaches an epiphany about his or her life over the course of the story. The music reminded me a bit of Stephen Sondheim and a bit of Stephen Schwartz. The cast was good, and the set design did a great job of suggesting various locations in an enormous city.

This was the first show I’d seen at South Coast Repertory’s Julianne Argyros Stage. Somehow I managed to go a whole decade without seeing anything at SCR at all, and the other shows I’ve seen over the last year were all in what used to be the main stage. In my head, I still had the image of the old second stage, a box-shaped studio, up until the point that we walked in the door to see a proscenium stage and a house with a balcony and box seats. I might actually have missed this one, except we ran into one of my music theater teachers from college on the way to Xanadu last month, and he was rehearsing this show as the musical director and accompanist.

Both shows are still running. The Glass Mendacity runs through January 30, and Ordinary Days runs through January 24.

*Hooray for cheap tickets at Goldstar. ← (Darn right, it’s an affiliate link! If you sign up using it, they’ll give me $1 off my next purchase!)

All this could make it the best show ever or an hour and a half of uncomfortable embarrassment punctuated by moments of hilarity, depending on your taste and frame of mind.

Appropriately enough for a story about fusing different genres together, the show itself is a fusion of two types of popular musicals these days: adaptations of movies, and “juke box” musicals that string together previously unrelated songs by an artist or in a particular style.

Personally, I really liked about 10% of it. I finally started to get into the show during Danny Maguire’s flashback/tap dance sequence and the song, “Whenever You’re Away,” but the rest of it just wasn’t my thing, or wasn’t what I was expecting, or something. The rest of the audience seemed to like it a lot better, though.

We ended up at Yamato, a Japanese restaurant that I’d definitely eat at again! I did wonder about the original purpose of the building, since it clearly hadn’t been a restaurant to start with. One of us spotted a plaque outside identifying it as The Westwood Building, built in 1929. Among other things, it did include a bank, which was one of my guesses.

After dinner we went looking for places we could get dessert and/or coffee after the show. The two Coffee Beans were both going to close by 9:00, but the Starbucks was open until midnight, and Diddy Riese was open until 1:00. We stopped in at Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory to get some sugar-free chocolate for Katie, and then made our way over to the theater.

The Show

Bill Cain’s play is a political thriller in which William Shakespeare is commissioned to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I and blow up Parliament. (Remember the fifth of November?) The problem: the king wants him to write the official version of the plot, which has been somewhat…embellished. Shakespeare has to deal with political pressure from the Crown, conflicts among his actors, estrangement from his daughter Judith…and the question of truth: Can he find it? If so, can he afford to write it?

It’s a compelling story — terrorism and torture are topical, and political intrigue is always in fashion — and manages to give you enough information on the background that if you don’t know much about the Gunpowder Plot, or even about Shakespeare, you can still follow what’s going on.

Some familiarity with Shakespeare helps, though. The Globe is rehearsing King Lear at the beginning, and it quickly becomes clear that The True History of the Gunpowder Plot will eventually become Macbeth. References to Shakespeare’s legacy are scattered throughout the play. There’s also a great comedic moment at one point that is only funny if you know about the Porter scene in MacBeth, but it doesn’t interrupt the flow if you don’t know it.

(Some recognizable faces in this production: Harry Groener, the Mayor of Sunnydale from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Connor Trinneer, Trip from Star Trek: Enterprise. Coincidentally, Groener was also in the last play I saw, Putting it Together at South Coast Repertory.)

After the show we walked down to Diddy Riese, but the line was long enough it looked like it might take an hour just to get ice cream. By which time coffee wouldn’t be an option, unless they had some there. So we ducked over to Starbucks for a half hour or so, then drove home.

Off to see Putting It Together at South Coast Repertory.