|
Take a little bit of selling your soul to the devil as in the classic Damn
Yankees, mix with a bit of Hollywood nostalgia ŕ la the recent Tales of
Tinseltown, and sprinkle with 50s sci-fi spoofs like last season’s It Came
from Beyond, and you’ve got Lost in Hollywoodland or “The
Slugwoman from Uranus,” which just played a four-performance
quickie at the Unknown Theater before heading off to New York for a
festival run in August. This silly but fun bit of fluff tells of Dexter
Webster, a nerd of a production assistant’s assistant, who signs a
contract with Malatoff Dyáblik (aka the devil) in order to become a
famous Hollywood director.
The cast is first rate, from Scott Bridges, suitably geeky, to Molly
Alvarez as his eager love interest, to Tamara Zook as glamorous
Carlotta DeLongpre, to big baritone voiced Jesse Merlin (so good in
Beastly Bombing) as Edwin MacManoff, to Joseph Corri and Beau
Hirschfield as Dyáblik’s comic henchmen Abra and Kadabra. Stealing
scenes right and left with his off-color malapropisms (“It’s time to pay
the pooper. Frank Crapra) is book/lyrics writer Alex Wexler as Russian
devil Dyáblik. Chris Covics deserves special credit for his ingeniously
simple black and white folding screen of a set, which quickly mutates
from the Hollywood sign to the office of a studio head and then to a
soundstage.
Offstage star of the evening is musical director Jonathan Dinerstein,
pretty much nonstop (and flawless) at the keyboard. Choreographer
Diana Wyenn and director Dan Oliverio can look forward to a
successful New York run and L.A audiences will be able to catch a full
run production at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills in April. Unknown Theater
July 28/29 @ 2:00 July 30/31 @ 8:00; 1110 Seward Street, three blocks
East of Highland, 50 feet North of Santa Monica Boulevard.
--Steven Stanley
|
