Cirque Du Soleil Acrobats and dancers light up the stage
in Cirque Du Soleil’s "Dralion."
Cirque du Soleil’s “Dralion” The Queen
Mary (800) 678-5440 Through April 7
After almost 20 years of doing circus shows, Cirque du Soleil
continues its tradition of combining exotic daredevilry with
beautiful music and enchanting clowns. “Dralion” is
nothing new, but it reinvigorates the formula with a few surprises.
The show basically charts a kind of evolution of man from the
primitive elements of the earth. Each element (fire, water, wind,
earth) gets a different color, mirrored in the costumes. While not
presenting a definite story as in other Cirque productions, the
premise is barely plausible, but certainly works as a segue between
various acrobatics. There is no novelty in the acrobatics, except
that it features the invention and energy of a young Chinese
troupe. Starting out the show was the adorable Zhao Yashi doing
single-hand balancing while contorting her body. Other acts include
diving through hoops, a ballet on light bulbs and mass jump-roping.
As in other Cirque productions, the stunts have to be seen to be
believed. The most interesting aspect of the show was the clowns,
who hilariously parody the acrobatics while portraying caricatures
of Italians. The show presents European dolts against a backdrop of
Asian extravagance, which actually makes the audience identify more
with the clowns than the acrobats. In the end, the show works
because it plays on viewers’ fantasies while bringing them
down to earth via the clowns. The contrast makes it doubly
wonderful that audience members can laugh and be amazed all at
once.
Howard Ho
“The Blue Room” The Pasadena Playhouse (626)
356-752 Through April 21
The lights are low at the Pasadena Playhouse. Heavy fog billows
over the lip of the stage. A woman, all legs, passionately kisses a
man in a black leather jacket. Her skirt is impossibly short. One
taut leg wraps insistently around his waist. They don’t make
a sound. A stark-white caption appears above their heads, projected
against the top of the stage. They are dubbed “The girl and
the cab driver.” For now. David Hare’s “The Blue
Room,” like its infamous inspiration, “La Ronde,”
constructs a chain of 10 sexual encounters between 10 individuals
over the course of one year. While “La Ronde” uses ten
different actors to portray the roles, “The Blue Room”
ambitiously calls for just two. These entwined figures onstage are
destined to embody a whole slew of lovers, each overlapping and
leading to the next. The girl will sleep with the cabbie, who will
go on to sleep with an au pair in the next scene, and so on. This
pattern begs a few questions. Is there any hope of remaining one
consistent person throughout life? What makes one person distinct
from all other persons? And how does this relate to sex? The
Playhouse’s rather elderly audience waits in frozen
anticipation. After all, they’re catching a show that
recently boasted a sold-out run, not to mention a nude Nicole
Kidman and some full-frontal male cartwheels, on Broadway. Of
course they expect the unexpected. Unfortunately, the biggest
surprises in this production are the vocal stylings of its two
actors, Arabella Field and Lenny Von Dohlen. Field is shrieky and
nasal and hopelessly affected. Von Dohlen is generally muffled.
They seem to be hailing from a great distance, and distance
naturally thwarts communication, not to mention intimacy. In
subsequent scenes, when the actors are called upon to portray
different characters, there is an astonishing lack of variation in
their delivery. Even their postures are stagnant. The larger
ensemble of “La Ronde” seems increasingly appealing.
The brief, supposedly controversial moments of nudity are sterile,
as though they are being glimpsed in a hospital room. It’s
better to keep those curtains closed.
Kelly Haigh
“The Have-Little” Marilyn Monroe Theatre
(323) 650-7777 Through April 14
Although corruption has the potential to destroy innocence, in
the play “The Have-Little,” innocence never darkens.
“The Have-Little” centers around Lillian’s
(America Ferrera) journey from a girl to a woman. As Lillian
strives to discover her identity within the turbulent South Bronx
during the 1970s, she faces poverty, alcoholism, drugs and the
tense relationship between her separated parents. The title of the
play comes from Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” and
captures the theme of poverty ““ “There are but two
families in the world, Have-Much and Have-Little.” From the
beginning of the play, the production thrusts the audience into
Lillian’s tumultuous life with darkness and loud, violent
fighting filling the theater. The uneasy feeling this creates only
increases as the play progresses. In one scene, Lillian’s
father José (Julian Scott Urena) asks Lillian to whip him for
certain thoughts he has. This scene is powerful in that it creates
as tense a feeling within the audience as on the stage. The play
effectively makes audiences relate to the inescapable violence and
poverty of the South Bronx. The feeling of claustrophobia is
heightened by the setting of the entire play in Lillian’s
apartment, providing the same trapped feeling that the characters
experience. Playwright Migdalia Cruz crafts “The
Have-Little” in such a way as to never let the audience
relax. Just when viewers think there will be a scene where Lillian
is safe and happy, it erupts into conflict. Cruz also brilliantly
uses humor to juxtapose and therefore accentuate the pain in the
play. Despite the challenges Lillian faces, she maintains a sense
of innocence at the end of the play, wonderfully portrayed by the
talented Ferrera. Although the audience might leave the play with a
sense of despair, there is also the inspiring knowledge that
Lillian never succumbs to the hate and violence around her.
Esther Pasternak