Glorious Edna! (LAArtsOnline.com)

Dame Edna plays the Ahmanson Theatre

Glorious Edna!

By Ken Werther
Graphics Courtesy of CTG

Batten down the hatches, possums — here comes the comic genius of Dame Edna one last time! Having previously visited the Ahmanson Theatre in 2006 and 2009, the one and only Dame Edna Everage is on her way back to Los Angeles to cap a spectacular 50-year career of celebrated sold-out performances around the world. Arguably Australia’s greatest entertainment export, she will not go out with a whimper…no one is safe from the Dame’s wicked tongue!

In 1955, actor Barry Humphries created the remarkable Mrs. Edna Everage, a purple-rinsed Melbourne housewife now known around the world as the gigastar Dame Edna. She has appeared on stage in theatrical tours of Europe, the United States (including Broadway), and the Middle East, and she has also appeared regularly on television in Australia, Europe, the UK, and the U.S. According to her official bio, Dame Edna is the Founder and Governor of Friends of the Prostate and the creator of The World Prostate Olympics. (You might want to read that last part again.)

Spending a couple of hours with Dame Edna’s take-no-prisoners comedy is a theatre experience like no other. I had the incredible honor of working with her at the Ahmanson in 2006, and I cannot remember ever laughing as much or as hard. Ever! So head downtown for a dose of the most original and relentless comedy to be found anywhere on this planet (and possibly other planets as well)!

Dame Edna’s Glorious Goodbye plays at the Ahmanson Theatre, located at 135 N. Grand Ave, through March 15.

Remarkable Spirit! (LAArtsOnline.com)

Angela Lansbury stars in Blithe Spirit at the Ahmanson Theatre (Photo: Johan Persson)

Remarkable Spirit!

Noel Coward’s classic comedy Blithe Spirit, arriving at the Ahmanson Theatre this month starring the redoubtable Angela Lansbury, was first seen in London’s West End in 1941 creating a new long-run record for a non-musical British play with 1,997 performances. It opened on Broadway later that same year (657 performances) and has since enjoyed several critically acclaimed West End and Broadway revivals, most recently in 2009, winning Lansbury her fifth Tony Award.

Coined “an improbable comedy,” the play tells the tale of novelist Charles Condomine who, hoping to gather material for his next book, invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant Madame Arcati (Lansbury) to his house to conduct a séance. The scheme backfires when his annoying and temperamental first wife Elvira is summoned from the dead and makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles’s marriage to his second wife Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost. As we are fond of saying in America, hijinks ensue!

The history of Blithe Spirit is remarkable. Coward himself adapted the play to film in 1945 and then directed a musical adaptation entitled High Spirits on Broadway in 1964. The play has also been adapted for television and radio, and it is considered to be Coward’s most popular comedy, which, considering the classic canon of work he left behind, is really saying something. So, the question now is, do we believe in spirits? Do we believe in ghosts? It seems we will soon find out!

Blithe Spirit runs December 9 to January 18 at the Ahmanson Theatre.

“What the Butler Saw” (LAArtsOnline.com)

www.laartsonline.com/theatre/
By Ken Werther
Graphics Courtesy of CTG

Twisting plot lines, mistaken identities, slamming doors, blackmail, sexual innuendo, subversive wit, and an outrageous lack of appropriateness… you’re talking my kind of entertainment! Joe Orton’s full-throttle farce What the Butler Saw is the last play written by England’s legendary playwright before his untimely death in 1967 at age 34. Center Theatre Group brings us this comic masterpiece as the last production of the Mark Taper Forum’s 2014 season.

The original production of What the Butler Saw opened in London on March 5, 1969. The play, a timeless tale of sex and repression in a culture gone mad, was decried at the time as scandalous for its character’s raging libidos and rampant mockery of morality. In spite of a small body of work that also included television and radio plays, Joe Orton emerged as one of the seminal playwrights of the 20th century—a direct successor to Oscar Wilde, William Congreve, and Noel Coward. Orton’s other well-known plays are Entertaining Mr. Sloane and Loot, which were presented in repertory, directed by John Tillinger, at the Mark Taper Forum in 1987. Tillinger, a leading interpreter of Orton’s work, returns to direct the savagely funny Butler.

For me, there is nothing more delicious in the theatre than a great farce impeccably directed and performed, and it doesn’t happen often enough. This play is one of the best. I’ve got my tickets and I’m ready to laugh!

What the Butler Saw runs November 12 – December 21 at the Mark Taper Forum.