MASK

Will someone please stop Ricahrd Maltby, Jr. from directing again! His latest fiasco is part of the cheap trend of musicalizing every movie ever made, this time it’s MASK, the Cher/Eric Stoltz film which seems like an odd choice to begin with but actually shows an unusually powerful potential for musical dramatization, but this world premiere mess at the Pasadena Playhouse isn’t it.

Set in the world of hippie bikers, this show is as nitty-gritty as non-alcaholic beer. This show is so unfocused it seems in slow-motion. The charcters are so generic and bland that when drama actually occurs we almost miss it. Excpet for the strange choice of makng the Mother a crystal meth addicted, white trash, hippie baker, overbearing Jew...inexplicably leading to a hippie biker Jewish wedding scene...huh?! Give kudos to Michelle Duffy for attempting to embody this mess of a character. As Rocky the disfigured terminally ill son, Allen E. Read reduces the character to a whiny simp.

The score is full of Charlie Daniels hinted pop schlock that doesn’t come anywhere near the rockin’ thats needed.

Mr. Maltby, Jr. isn’t known for his book musical story-telling (The Civil War, Ring Of Fire) so it’s no wonder this show is such a mess and I’m sure the creators of ‘The Piarate Queen’ wish they would’ve looked at his track record before taking his advice in completely destroying their show.

THE SEVEN

A bold contemporary take on Sophocles is no easy feat with today’s TV attention-spanned audiences, but La Jolla Playhouse is one of the country’s cutting-edge theatres and goes where no one else dares to go and as theatre-goers we are the lucky reciprients of it’s audacity with THE SEVEN, a hip-hop take on Sophocles’ Greek tragedy ‘Seven Against Thebes’, a continuation of the Oedipus tragedy and his ill-fated sons.

Told in Greek tragedy chorus style, the poetics of hip-hop makes this a perfect match and luckily the musical style is improved from hip-hops usual immature lyrics here telling the story while using todays vernacular.

The cast are all first rate singer/dancers that obviously are enjoying ‘Spring Awakening’s Bill T. Jone’s hip-hop choregraphy. Energy abounds.

The only crtitcism is that the lighting doesn’t equal the inventivesness of the rest of the show and the direction seems to be on one level the whole time. But this is cutting edge powerful innovative theatre that The La Jolla Playhouse seems alone in advancing.