TT: The ghost of Daisy Mae

This morning I file the first of three Wall Street Journal drama columns from California. Today I review three shows, Reprise! Broadway’s Best’s Li’l Abner, Pasadena Playhouse’s Orson’s Shadow, and the Aurora Theatre Company’s Satellites. Here’s a sample.
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If you know who Al Capp was, you’re probably reading this review through bifocals. “Li’l Abner,” the comic strip about hillbilly life that Capp wrote and drew, ran in newspapers across the country from 1934 to 1977. For much of that time it was enormously popular–enough so that it was made into a musical in 1956, which in turn was made into a movie in 1959. But defunct comic strips have a short shelf life, and “Li’l Abner” had already lost most of its audience by the time Capp retired…
So why is Reprise! Broadway’s Best, the Los Angeles-based musical-comedy troupe led by “Seinfeld”‘s Jason Alexander, reviving a half-forgotten show based on half-remembered comic-strip characters? On paper, at least, I can think of two good reasons: Johnny Mercer, who needs no introduction, wrote the score of “Li’l Abner” in collaboration with Gene De Paul, whose list of hits includes “I’ll Remember April” and “Teach Me Tonight.” But neither man had much theatrical experience, and the songs they cranked out for the show are dramatically static and musically flat….
As City Center’s Encores! series of musical-comedy revivals has proved repeatedly, a stylish staging can make a B-minus musical look and sound better than it is. Alas, this production falls far short of the standards set by Encores! and Connecticut’s Goodspeed Musicals. Too often it reminded me of a competent but dull college show…
Pasadena Playhouse knows a thing or two about celebrity. The list of stars who first shone on its handsome 1925 proscenium stage includes Dana Andrews, Raymond Burr, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Preston and Gig Young. That makes it a suitable place to see “Orson’s Shadow,” in which Austin Pendleton takes a real-life encounter between Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier (who met when Olivier invited Welles to direct a production of Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” in 1960) and spins it into a bitterly witty theatrical meditation on the self-destructive impulse that frequently goes hand in hand with great gifts.
I’m sorry to say that Pasadena Playhouse’s revival, unlike the brilliant Off Broadway production of 2005, never catches fire. Part of the problem–for which Dámaso Rodriguez, the director, may be to blame–is that Bruce McGill plays Welles not as a genius whose character has been warped by frustration but as a blustering joker who somehow stays afloat in spite of everything….
I went to the Aurora this week for the West Coast premiere of Diana Son’s “Satellites,” whose 2006 Off Broadway run I missed. Ms. Son stirred up her share of buzz in 1998 with “Stop Kiss,” then dropped out of sight to have a baby and write for “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” “Satellites,” her first play since “Stop Kiss,” is a glib, preachy dramedy about a biracial yuppie couple (he’s black, she’s Korean-American) who move into a rundown brownstone in a soon-to-be-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood and discover that life in the real world is more complicated than they’d thought. Up to a point “Satellites” is bracingly honest about the deep-seated problems of can-we-all-get-along multiculturalism, but in the end it goes soft…
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Read the whole thing here.