All Shook Up arrives at NoHo’s El Portal Theatre with its entertaining mix of Elvis Presley hits and jukebox musical plot in a big-stage production featuring top-notch professional leads performing on a community theater-like set backed by a talented but mostly too young ensemble.

Borrowing inventively from Shakespeare, Joe DiPietro’s clever, funny book updates Twelfth Night’s romantic misadventures to the year 1955 the better to feature a character Elvis himself might have played in one of his ‘50s/‘60s movies.

Brent Ramirez burns up the stage as Chad, whose sudden arrival in “a small, you-never-heard-of-it town somewhere in the Midwest” guarantees that its residents’ dull, go-nowhere lives will never be the same again.

Tomboy Natalie (Natalia Vivino) falls so head-over-heels for the town newbee that she disguises herself as “Ed” to get closer to the hunk of her dreams, thereby setting off a chain of unrequited loves that Shakespeare would have been proud to call his own.

Chad crushes on new-gal-in-town, brainy blonde museum proprietress Miss Sandra (Laura Dickinson), as does Natalie’s father Jim (Scott Strauss), who himself is loved from afar by saloon owner Sylvia (Vonetta Mixson), while Miss Sandra only has eyes for “Ed.”

Meanwhile, geeky Dennis (Philip McBride) pines after Natalie, who started the whole thing in motion when she got it into her head to dress in male drag.

Only Dean and Lorraine (Sam Herbert and Zoe Reed) luck out in love, but since Lorraine is African-American Sylvia’s daughter, theirs is a “forbidden” relationship and hardly the kind to please Dean’s bossy prude of a mom, mayor Matilda (Tracy Lore), whose “Mamie Eisenhower Public Decency Act” outlaws singing, dancing, touching, and kissing, with black-&-white love topping the list of no-nos.

From the show-opening “Jailhouse Rock,” featuring an Elvis-pelvised Chad backed by black-and-white striped prisoners and prisonerettes, to a “Heartbreak Hotel” belted out by the “alcohol enthusiasts” who frequent Sylvia’s run-down honky-tonk, to town newbie Chad’s hip-swiveling “Come On Everybody,” two-time Tony winner Di Pietro’s clever, cohesive book fits a bunch of preexisting songs into a multiple-plot storyline every bit as niftily as his plot fits them.

Stage and screen vet Barry Pearl proves a fine choice to assume directorial reins as Studio C Performing Arts and its teen students move their Fall 2017 production from the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center to the considerably larger El Portal with the addition of several seasoned Actors Equity guest artists.

A number of lead performances stand out, chief among them Ramirez, who captures Chad’s sexy swagger and drawl while singing and hip-swiveling to do Elvis proud.

Vivino’s Natalie combines feminine charm, boyish spunk, and a Broadway belt while McBride’s Dennis pines with nerdy sweetness and hits some gorgeous higher-than-high notes along the way.

Dickinson’s divalicious Miss Sandra, Lore’s hilariously imperious Mayor Matilda, and Mixson’s warmly maternal Sylvia bring years of Equity credits and some of the best pipes in town to their roles.

Herbert and Reed are teenage charmers as forbidden sweethearts Dean and Lorraine, Strauss is every girl’s Father Knows Best as Jim, and Panico earns eleventh-hour laughs as the lips-sealed Sheriff Earl.

Ensemble members Joah Ditto, Michael Dumas, Sophia Fox, Maya Gallipeau, Augusto Guardado, Drew Lake, James Matthew Johnson, Quinn Meyer, Jade McGlynn, Jamie McRae, Grant Measures, Nicholas Meyer, Khemuni Norodom, Jenna Stocks, Rianny Vasquez, and Jessica Wallace show off considerable talent in one high-energy production number after another choreographed to imaginative effect by Keenon Hooks and Cassie Silva while harmonizing under Emily Cohn’s assured musical direction.

Unfortunately, though some may be out of college, most appear still in their teens, making Sylvia’s bar seem a haven for underage drinking while misrepresenting small-town age diversity and giving song-and-dance sequences a school-musical feel that jars with the production’s professional (and, in some cases, decades older) leads.

The transfer from the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center to the twice-as-big El Portal has created problems greater than merely geographical, the larger theater’s cavernous stage needing far more than a handful of cumbersome community theater-style set pieces and a plain upstage scrim to give a production the professional look the NoHo landmark would seem to promise, and Gary Mintz’s not particularly imaginative lighting (including lots of follow-spot glitches on opening night) doesn’t do Thomas Brown’s sets any favors, though to do the production credit, Kristi Reed’s costumes are colorful 1950s treats.

Sound designer John Sherman does a mostly fine job of mixing vocals and a behind-stage band cut down from Broadway’s fifteen instruments to five.

Corey Womack is stage manager.

With ticket prices more than double Simi Valley’s and virtually as high as those you’d purchase to see a professionally designed, full-orchestra 5-Star Theatricals production in nearby Thousand Oaks, All Shook Up doesn’t provide equivalent bang for your bucks. Lead performances shine, but this isn’t the All Shook Up its Equity stars and classy venue would seem to suggest.

The El Portal Theatre, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.
www.elportaltheatre.com

–Steven Stanley
April 13, 2018
Photos: Ed Krieger

Tags: El Portal Theater, Elvis Presley, Joe DiPietro, Los Angeles Theater Review