Limonade Tous les Jours (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

We are living in a time of great tumult, great stress, great events hurtling toward tragedies of vast size.

Hence this show, Limonade Tous les Jours (Lemonade Every Day), by Charles L. Mee proves rather more than a mere distraction. 

Yes, it is a love story (directed by Frederique Michel) between two people--a middle aged Andrew (David E. Frank) and the much younger singer YaYa (Nicolet Anton), each trying to recover from respective failed marriages in Paris.  He's about twenty years older, but she likes older man.  Just as he likes at least more vivacious, unpredictable women.  An never seen friend is the reason they meet, and the chemistry is electric almost at once.

But--here is the thing.  A typical romcom (and I quite like a good example of that genre) involves all sorts of plot elements keeping the lovers apart.  Not so, here.  Absolutely nothing is in their way.  No prior commitments.  Both are in the same city.  Neither has another love interest.  Do they have some secrets they share and/or are trying to keep from each other?  No!  Is there some countdown, spelling some kind of disaster if they don't hook up by a certain hour?  Again, no.  Are other characters tying them up with their own complex storylines, forever interfering with our lovers declaring they feel?  Yet again--NO.

So what is their way?

Each other.  Sincere belief this is a bad idea becomes the center piece of one fascinating conversation after another.  They tell each other all kinds of uncomfortable truths.  Both agree completely the age difference is too much, each has habits that doom any hope of love between them, neither one can ever change enough to ever achieve happiness partnered with them--even as chemistry, the communication, the trust grows by the minute!  Neither of them give one inch to their mutually agreed upon certainties.  At the same time Andrew and YaYa don't walk away--although they never stop insisting they will!  No matter how much he annoys her, she frustrates and insults him, their declarations increasingly mean nothing.

What they feel is love.  Obviously.  Even they know that, but reject it as foolish at best.  Which could be hilarious!  Yet instead it feels equal parts lovely and heart-breaking.  No small feat!

Part of all this lies in a third actor (Cruz St. James) who in turn plays several waiters, at least one dancer, a dress designer, and other roles--a singing, dancing Greek Chorus full not with pronouncements of doom but rather rather wry, gentle, piercing yet somehow kind observations about the human heart.  Again, sung and danced as well as spoken.  

What emerges from all this proves a startlingly kind as well as hopeful portrait of a relationship.  One where a lonely older man and lonely young woman, each living way too much in their words,  yet at the same time are vividly alive.  Especially when together.  Which is a damn fine symptom of love.  Amid so many worries, so many fears, so very many reasons to despair of what they want--in the end, they act.  Not with cynicism.  Not even a little bit.  Looking at each other, touching each other, Andrew and YaYa show themselves as full of hope.  In deed if not in words.

But not only in deed, also in song.  Did I mention in many ways this is a musical?  Most of the songs are in French, but don't worry.  You don't need to under stand a single word.  This is not about words.  

All three performances are as quietly glorious as a perfect haiku, or maybe a simple but exquisite bouquet of flowers.  Or maybe something else exquisite.  Because that word defines this specific play. Exquisite.  Like a drink of something icy and perfect on a hot summer day, or a magnificent blanket in a winter night.

Limonade Tous Les Jours runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 4pm until June 28, 2026 at City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1, Santa Monica, CA 90404.

Exit The King (review)

sPoiLErS AhoY!

I like to praise Los Angeles live theatre as being huge, diverse, brave, and very high quality.

My opinion holds in part because last week I saw the premiere of Exit The King by Eugene Ionesco at A Noise Within.  Not only is this an excellent production of a difficult play, it is the second such I've seen in this city in the last decade!  Both also took startlingly different/wonderful directions as well!

This version, done with kind of spectacular sets, lights, costume design this company's budget can afford, has at its heart a very talented and focused cast.  Such a combination manages to hit an startling number of targets available in this play.  For example, it remains genuinely funny, amid a lot of slapstick and silliness.  

King Bérenger the First (Henri Lubatti) is the title character, monarch of a land in a massive, in fact impossible state of decline.  The borders have shrunk, the water stopped being drinkable, the citizenry are few, far between, and all feeble-minded.  Not only that, the sun burns less bright and sounds grow less loud!  

Young Queen Marie (Erika Soto) refuses to believe one word of this.  She insists the kingdom and king himself remain a vital as ever, even as the latter can barely stand without help.  His Majesty agrees with her, even as Queen Marguerite (Joy DeMichelle) and the Doctor (Ralph Cole Jr.) insist on the truth.  The King is dying.  In fact, he has maybe ninety minutes left.  Give or take.  Until the curtain, anyway.  Against the backdrop of all this, Juliette the maid/cook/scullery/seamstress et al (KT Vogt) and the Guard (Lynn Robert Berg) try to make sense of this all.  Juliette's life is horrible, tough, full of back-breaking labor and no joy.  The Guard recalls the glories--and yes, the atrocities--of the King's fantastical, horrible, and frankly unbelievable past (including his invention of the airplane).  Mostly, though, the King struggles with increasing desperation and decreasing ability to understand his inevitable End.

Now, this is widely regarded as an example of the theatre of the absurd.  Yet we feel for the characters.  Recognize their own pain, their sometimes courage, as well as periodic terror and/or heroic efforts to hold back the night.

Is this what is absurd?  Yes.  So too every word spoken by each character, half of which make no sense, most of the others consist of brave or foolish (sometimes both) efforts to face DEATH.  Because words remain imperfect tools at their very best, at their most moving, most beautiful.  What about the ones who accept this looming doom?  Are they absurd?  Of course!  Just as the King himself, as he sinks into darkness against his will, struggling with shrinking awareness and power to somehow do what we all think we would do--refuse to give up, to surrender, to rage against the dying of the light.  He too is absurd.

For that matter, isn't it absurd we watch and hear all this, feeling for people who do not exist, could not exist, and who in the end do not really die?  Not yet, anyway.

Not the mention the cast, the playwright, the director (Michael Michetti) and all the wonderful artists who fashioned this performance...!

Absurd how all this pretending about nothing real, somehow also reminds us both of the absurdity of it all--and also makes us feel exactly what these fake people would feel if only they existed.

Just as if we existed.

Exit The King has performances Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7: 30 p.m. as well as  Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. until May 31, 2026 at A Noise Within, 3352 E Foothill Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91107.

Warsaw (review)

Spoilers ahoy! 

Warsaw by Paul Webb just premiered in Long Beach, a very humane drama entwining love, grief, guilt, forgiveness, and genuine fear.  I have very mixed feelings about it--but anything I might say may come across as nit-picking.  Maybe it is.

The play centers around a Doctor (Anna Van Valin) and a Priest (Bruce Nozick) who talk while one of the former's patients is being slowly awakened from a medically induced coma following a horrible car accident.  Said patient, Krystina (Suzanne Ford) left a powerful impression on both these folks, not least because the Doctor right now is going through a horrific breakup with David (Eric Scoufaras), which involved the death of her brother.  She blames herself and David for her brother's death.  Meanwhile as Krystyna starts to emerge from her coma, she has dreams in which she is in therapy discussing her marriage, her politics, her background in general. 

Plenty of surprises proceed to pop up.  For example, both the brother's death and the accident which crushed so much of Krystyna's body were directly caused by nothing less than 9/11!  We begin to realize before long this is 2001, in the wake of the attack.  More, though, all this begins also to entwine with the Warsaw Uprising in 1944!  Hence the title!  Meanwhile we meet and get to know the very nice young man (Spencer Del Carmen) who was driving the truck in Krystyna's accident.  

But the heart of this story is a series of coincidences (or destiny) bringing the past and (more or less) present together.  Let me be very clear--that was cool.  As an inspiration, as a story, as an idea this makes for juicy stuff, the stuff of sometimes great theatre.

Would it were indeed great.

Not that is is by any stretch of the imagination bad.  Not at all!  But the complexity of the setting and background do get in the way--more, I would argue some elements of the play don't quite work.  Some of this script frankly requires threading rather a lot of needles to create the impact I think the writer strives for.  I don't believe all those needled ended up threaded, and my suspicion remains the play did not need all those needles.  One was a trap the play contains and which the production fell into--namely, sentiment versus honesty.  Two love stories run in a weird tandem throughout.  Me, I love weird, and thought the parallel stories should have worked.  In my view, neither quite landed.  A lot of those stories for example were explained rather than seen--although the production tried to show what they could.

Again, you may call this nitpicking.  Again, I want to emphasize this is neither a bad play nor a bad production.  Yet again, what I'm writing about are a cluster of nuances which makes this play not achieve a bullseye.  

More, your mileage may vary.  The love story are clearly meant to offer hope and insight--which they can do.  The interplay of the Holocaust with the attack on the World Trade Center intrigues and provokes thought.  Not one actor gives a bad performance, and we end up liking these characters.

I just feel the script needed some major polishing.  

Warsaw plays Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays @ 7:30 p.m. & Sundays @ 2 p.m until May 17, 2026 at the International City Theatre, Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center’s Beverly O’Neill Theater, 330 E. Seaside Way, Long Beach, CA 90802

Blue Kiss (review)

 Spoilers ahoy! 

I am running behind on my reviews for a variety of reasons (including an eye infection) and I want to apologize to the Ruskin Group for this failure.

Blue Kiss by Stephen Fife is not a play with which I was familiar.  So I sought to learn as little as possible going 'in' because I prefer zero expectations of any kind.  Went in a little nervous because 2026 has so far been an amazing year with every single production so far turning out somewhere between "very good" to "excellent in every way."  The pattern had to break sooner or later, right?

This show did not disappoint.  Was not the exception.  Continued the pattern.

Blue Kiss (the title refers to a nickname for someone--which spoils absolutely nothing) is a "two hander," which means it consists of an entire cast of exactly two actors--in this case  Susan Carolina Rodriguez and Todd Casey Morris.  Did not recognize either of their names (no surprise in a city this size) but am mightily impressed by their performances.  A "two hander" puts the overwhelming weight of a play onto two artists, and neither one gets any real moment to relax.  Nobody leaves stage for more than one minute or so, and given this remains life not filmed no camera ever pans way or cuts to the other character.  Both are in the room with us, practically every single moment.  The challenge--which these two meet with grace and power--is to remain absolutely in the present, in the moment for every single second.

The entire play takes place in an apartment wherein Todd's character gets ready to start tutoring Susan's on her upcoming SAT essays.  Clearly there's a lot of tension from the moment the lights rise as the tutor engages in a somewhat fraught conversation the phone.  Nothing overt, just a hint of pressure, patience, judgment, and a whole brew of very natural dynamics between individuals.  We get a sense of someone complex, with many a hidden issue.  When the student arrives, we instantly get more tension as these two very, very different people try to engage with each other from an obvious range of different patterns, values, habits, and (more subtly) pains.

By now of course I figured out what many of the audience no doubt had already--these two have some as-yet-unrevealed connection waiting to pretty much explode.

Director Mike Reilly deserves a lot of credit for keeping this show on course.  The explosion happens, not in a single atomic blast but more like a few firecrackers, then a grenade or two, ending up with an intense series of artillery barrages!  Kudos to the writer for creating such an intricate emotional mine field here, including the fact both these people react to the world in wildly varying ways.  Both are full of wounds, full of scars.  Some still open and bleeding, or ready to open again.  Neither has anywhere near the right answers, although both believe they do.  But their complexity, brought to life by these two performers, makes every shock both startling yet feel absolutely inevitable.

And I felt for them both.  So much.  Both are right, both are wrong.  And after getting to know them as well as I did, my reaction was (among other things) to forgive.  Not in some generic sentiment, but reacting to what I now know--which, incidentally, includes hardly a single point of similarity between their issues and soul-scars and my own.  It did not matter.

Hopefully, I've conveyed a little of how powerfully the script, direction, and performances moved me.

Blue Kiss plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm until May 17, 2026 at the Ruskin Group Theatre 2800 Airport Ave. Santa Monica, CA 90405.