Tom Stoppard and "Parade's End"

THIS week on HBO, Americans can catch up with a literary adaptation that hit hard in the UK last year: Parade's End. Godlike playwright Tom Stoppard adapted this series of four short novels by the underrated Ford Madox Ford -- published in the '20s and set around World War I.

Yours truly had a story today on the miniseries and the process of adapting a very long and difficult text. It meant, among other things, that I got to sip coffee with Stoppard at the Chateau Marmont while the crew set up for the Vanity Fair party. (Overall, I'd rather have a serious conversation with a major writer, so I don't mind not being invited this year.)

I have more good cuttiny-room-floor material from this story than I usually do, including a long interview with Benedict Cumerbatch, who plays the lead role. I'll post some of it here once I clean a few things up.

And here is my original ending to the piece, which will make the most sense to those who've seen most of the miniseries:

Tietjens’ wife doesn’t have the same regard for him. Hall plays Sylvia as a lusty, restless redhead – Molly Ringwald’s evil twin. But she’s not, Hall says, simply evil: The actress was in awe of her character’s audacity as well as her contradictions. “I thought, if they don’t hate me by the end of the first episode, I’m not doing my job. And if they don’t like me by the end of the fourth episode, I’m not doing my job. I have to play those extremes.”

            The stubbornness of these three characters puts them on a collision course that resolves in the mini-series’ last scenes. Stoppard, in his initial meetings with the show’s producers, emphasized that this was not going to be a war film: The war serves, instead, as a metaphor for changing times in the same way that Crawley manor does.

            “It was the war that forced British society to go through this sea change,” he says. “In 1918 women got the vote – [though] not all of them. Social values, moral values. All the arts kind of went berserk in the face of the horrors that had been witnessed. And you can see how absurd it would have seemed for Tietjens to hold onto his prewar worldview. Or his view of himself for that matter.”

Photo credit: Nick Briggs/HBO

Richard Thompson's "Cabaret of Souls"

HIS tunes are famously dark. But anyone who's paid attention to Richard Thompson's between-song banter, or seen his semi-comic 1000 Years of Popular Music, know how funny the guy can be. (He was beaten only by Hendrix for The Misread City's poll of favorite guitarist.)

So we wasted no time checking out his Cabaret of Souls, a theatrical staging of the Underworld that is sort of an oratorio, sort of a rock concert with strings, sort of a medieval torture, and sort of like a talent show in hell. And while it's not quite perfect, it's also far better than I'll be able to make it sound, and either the weirdest great show I've seen recently or the greatest weird one.

I'm not going to try to describe the plot of this strange hybrid of a beast except in barest terms. The audience is swept into the narrative even before they enter the hall -- at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica (snazzy arts center, by the way), the parking attendants and ushers wore devil horns. The band -- a chamber orchestra, basically -- limps out like a gang of zombies. A costumed Harry Shearer serves a narrator.

From there, we get a series of songs, some sung by Richard, some by Welsh folkie Judith Owen, some by others, in a variety of styles. Some characters represent variations on the Seven Deadly Sins -- gluttony, pride, and so on. Among the best of these was a gangster's moll whose song, "My Dave," was both tuneful and filled with the kind of self-deception Richard's songs are known for. Is there a songwriter better at capturing the lies we tell ourselves? Cabaret of Souls took advantage of his knack for creating widely disparate characters.

The music was in a huge range of styles, and I'm glad to report that in almost all the songs, it was still possible to hear the wonderful chiming fills he got from his acoustic guitar. (Still baffled how he gets that tone -- I've even played the Lowden guitar designed for him and cannot get close.) Also at this staging was double-bassist Danny Thompson, a Brit-folk hero since his days with Pentangle and a fruitful, longtime Richard collaborator of no relation.

Some concerns: There's an archness and mean-spiritedness to some of the characters that was jarring at the very least. (A few moments recalled the moralism of, say, Roald Dahl.) This was a quasi-medieval setting, and Richard's work is all drawn from the grim and unforgiving world of British and Celtic folk music, so perhaps it was in tone with the show's origins. It was still a bit jarring.

And the piece gets going quite nicely about 10 minutes or so in, but seems a little confused at first as we get various introductions to where we are, what's going on, etc. The piece has, I'm told by friends who saw the Royce Hall performance, been improved and made more theatrical since then. It could still use a bit of refining, I think.

But Cabaret of Souls was also funny, musically adventurous and at times, perhaps in spite of itself, genuinely moving. Richard Thompson continues to confound us.

Remembering Rodney King

IT'S not often that a theater performance stops me cold. But last week's Rodney King, a one-man-show by Roger Guenveur Smith at the Bootleg Theater left me both impressed and a little shaken up at the very least.

When I moved to LA in 1997, the city seemed like a sunny, youthful, high-spirited place after a few years in New England. But underneath the good times, there was a sense that I was living on the scene of a crime, one connected to an four-century old Original Sin.

A kind of scar seemed ripped through the city  when I drove past the intersection of Florence and Normandie or along Olympic Blvd -- names I first heard in news broadcasts. Nineties LA was, for me, simultaneously hedonistic and haunted.

All this came back to me at the Bootleg the other night. I should not say anymore -- I'll add that while this was a one-man-show by most measures, the sound design and lighting were excellent and made the whole thing work, and the Bootleg is becoming one of my favorite venues in town.

I won't say anything else about his King performance, except to say that Smith was sparked to put it together by King's death on Father's Day.

I wrote about Smith here, last year. Here's hoping that several of his shows, including this powerful, painful Rodney King project, get return engagements.

The Roots of a Theater Company

THIS week my Influences column looked at Ellen Geer, who runs the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum. For those many miles from the wilds of Topanga Canyon: This is a theater company, in a very rustic setting, founded by her father, blacklisted actor Will Geer, known to many as Grandpa Walton.

William Holman Hunt painting
inspired by "Measure for Measure"

Ellen Geer spoke to me about her family's struggles during the Red Scare, how she survived them, and about some theater figures who helped inspire her acting and her artistic direction of the theater company.

Here's the story. I'm hoping to check out one of their Shakespeare plays over the next few weeks.

Elaine Stritch and Her Inspirations

EVERY two weeks, I speak to a performer coming to town and ask them about their influences, figures who drove them into a life in the arts or helped shape what they do. But my latest subject -- Broadway's tough dame Elaine Stritch -- was having none of it.

Here is my latest Influences column, which I nearly had to rename.

She was also surprised to note that despite the success of her Elaine Stritch at Liberty in LA in 2002, Saturday night's Sondheim program at Disney Hall marks her first appearance there. Somebody, she said, must have it out for her. "Maybe Mickey Mouse."

Playwright Donald Margulies in the Southland

RECENTLY, I had the good fortune to spent part of the day strolling through the Orange County Museum of Art's Richard Diebenkorn exhibit. This enchanting show of the California painter's Ocean Park paintings was even better because I took it in with a trained painter who could point out what I might have overlooked. That this former artist was the New York/New Haven playwright Donald Margulies made the afternoon even more delicious.

Diebenkorn's Ocean Park, No. 129

The playwright was in the OC for a revival of his play Sight Unseen -- which South Coast Repertory developed and premiered 20 seasons ago. David Emmes, company co-founder, directs, this time around, this play about a Brooklyn painter who's visiting England at a moment of both triumph and doubt. My story is here.

Margulies -- whose plays specialize in deeply uncomfortable tales of the creative class -- turned out to be very good company. He talked about giving his students Eric Fischl paintings to spark writing a scene, and asks them to write a monologue from the point of view of a Diane Arbus portrait.

South Coast Rep, Costa Mesa

And I can't say anything more about this publicly, but I'm quite eager to see his work with HBO on an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex bear fruit.

The Roots of Stew

Talented as he is, he's become one of Los Angeles's least likely success stories: A hipster cult figure, the toast of Silverlake and Highland Park, who moves to New York and suddenly hits, with a Broadway show and a Spike Lee film. But Stew has always been unpredictable.

In today's paper, I spoke to Stew about the figures who've inspired him from outside the familiar pop and rock worlds. He came up -- here -- with a wide-ranging mix, from Godard to Alfred Brendel.

One of my favorite quotes from Stew didn't find its way into my story due to lack of space. "Some people said about me and Heidi, the reason you guys are still good is you never got too famous. That's the single most important thing -- if we'd gotten big when we were 25 we'd be sitting by the pool."

Remembering Spalding Gray

THERE'S a new collection of journals by the great actor and storyteller Spalding Gray, with a tribute event tonight at the Laemmle Sunset 5. (More detail here.)

Soon after Gray's 2004 disappearance -- it was eventually deemed a suicide -- I spoke to several theater and performance figures who walk in Gray's footsteps. I wrote:

With his mix of despair, humor, preppy shirts and New England dryness, he was sometimes called "the WASP Woody Allen." But many of those inspired by his techniques went in very different directions. Some created aural collages; some explored their ethnicity; others became ranters. John Leguizamo, Danny Hoch and Eric Bogosian, at various times, did all three.

HERE is that story, which includes discussions with Anna Deveare Smith ("He introduced me to the idea that normal human behavior is performative") Julia Sweeney, Tim Miller and Eric Bogosian.

The Roots of Christine Ebersole

YOU'VE got to be in awe of an actress who can portray both Little Edie and Big Edie from Grey Gardens. Winning a Tony for the feat is not likely easy, either.

I spoke recently to Christine Ebersole, the actress and singer who's done everything from Tootsie to Saturday Night Live to Noel Coward. That piece, part of my Influences series for the LA Times Culture Monster page, is here.

I should not spoil it, but despite the very fine names on her list (Carol Lombard, Joni Mitchell), I was most impressed with the words of the late New York theater director with whom she closed out our conversation.

Actor Roger Guenveur Smith

TODAY I have a story in the LA Times on the actor Roger Guenveur Smith, who has acted in a number of Spike Lee movies and chronicled American -- and especially California -- history through his solo theater pieces.

One of them, Juan and John -- about a fight between Dodger John Roseboro and Giant Juan Marichal -- comes to the Kirk Douglas Theatre this week.

I'm traveling this week, so have to be brief... But HERE is my piece. Smith's work is smart and energetic and well worth checking out.

New Arts Hall on Westside

BEVERLY Hills has long had a connection to the movies, as well as a reputation for shameless excess. The city is taking a step in a different direction with a new arts center: Ground will be broken in April, with plans to open the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in 2013.

HERE is my LA Times piece about the center, which will, in the words of executive director Lou Moore, present  "theater, music, dance, small operas and professional children's theater. Coupled with that, we're going to have a children's theater school for serious-minded children," including residencies in which students work with visiting artists.

The center will be built in and around an old 1930s post office with WPA style murals: A glass walkway will lead to a 500-seat theater where larger performances will be put on. The whole thing has been delayed -- I wrote about this originally in 2006, when the opening was supposed to be just three years away -- by an environmental review and the approval process for a parking lot. (This is southern California, after all.)

Stew and The Negro Problem Return to LA

RECENTLY I had the pleasure to speak to two of the heroes of '90s indie LA, Stew and Heidi Rodewald. The duo -- then known as The Negro Problem -- have since moved to New York and become "show folk" with the musical Passing Strange. Spike Lee made it into a movie.

HERE is my story on the past and future of Stew and The Negro Problem.

Two LA shows -- Saturday at the Getty and Tuesday at the Echoplex -- are their first in five (!) years. See you there.

Shocked and Appalled at UCLA

David Sefton -- generally the most intriguing and unpredictable of Los Angeles' arts showmen -- has resigned from his post running the UCLA Live series that takes place at Royce Hall and other venues. Sefton, a native of Liverpool, is being coy about this, but it's hard not to imagine that someone as passionate about his programming, and about his particularly fervent niche of high and low, stepping down unless he received considerable pressure.

Here is the LA Times story which runs tomorrow. Writes Mike Boehm: 'He said Thursday that he quit in response to "a major rethinking and restructuring" of the program that his bosses at UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture are undertaking in response to "increasing fiscal pressures" brought on by the poor economy and the state's fiscal woes.'

In the 13 years I've been in LA, only Esa-Pekka Salonen of the LA Phil has been a more exciting local force in the arts. I recall the jolt the arrival of the irreverent Scouser sent through the local cultural community, and went to as many of these offerings as I could. Here is my LA Times story on Sefton concentrating on his wild theater offerings.

One early sign that a short-sighted and stupid decision might be coming was UCLA's recent (and barlely announced) canceling of the International Theater Festival, the key to Sefton's annual programming and some of the most daring avant-garde performance I've ever seen, from Societie Rafael Sanzio to Complicite to the more traditional but still bracing Shakespeare performances by Mark Rylance's Royal Shakespeare Company. The best coverage of this is by Steven Leigh Morris. (Dean Christopher Waterman of UCLA says ticket sales had been low.)

I also wrote a cover story on Sefton for New Times LA soon after he arrived: I spoke to or corresponded with a number of cultural luminaries, including Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson and late great deejay John Peel, and all sung Sefton's praises and talked about his transforming of London's South Bank Centre. Christ, here's a guy who brought Scott Walker out of reclusion!!

"When I arrived I was an enfant terrible, and now I'm an eminence gris," Sefton told Boehm. "It takes just 10 years."

Living by Chance With Rachel Rosenthal

IF laurie anderson was a parisian-born octo-genarian theater pioneer she might be rachel rosenthal. for rosenthal -- to whom many figures of the american avant-garde are indebted -- john cage's "indeterminacy" proved as influential as the velvet underground's dazed strum was on anderson's generation. (okay, that's enough metaphors for one paragraph.)

here is my profile of rosenthal, who extols the importance of "chance" in art and life and recalls new york in the 50s with cage/ cunningham/ rauschenberg/ johns.

she also talks about saturday's birthday party at Track 16 Gallery, her new book ("the dbd experience") and the improvisational theater troupe she launches early next year.

meeting rosenthal was a real trip -- a major iconoclast, associated with radical feminism, animal rights and her own shaved head, who is also into a courtly woman with a gertrude stein haircut and a soft, pan-european accent. (she calls herself a gay man inside a woman's body.)

my favorite quote that didnt make the article: "much of what's called performance art is not interesting to me. i'm not interested in shock -- there's enough shock in everyday living, every time you turn on the tv."

Photo credit: Michael Childers