LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2019E3
latimes.com/arts
CULTURE MONSTER
ART
“Open House:
Gala Porras-Kim”
Museum of
Contemporary Art, L.A.
Monday through May 1 1
$8-$15ART
“Barbara Stauffacher
Solomon:
Breaking All the Rules”
Palm Springs Art Museum
Through Dec. 31
$6-$14ART
“Lari Pittman:
Declaration
of Independence”
Hammer Museum, L.A.
Through Jan. 5
FreeMUSIC
Quinteto Astor Piazzolla
The Soraya
Northridge
8 p.m. Thursday
$36-$79THEATER
Sankai Juku: “Meguri”
Center for the Art
of Performance
Royce Hall at UCLA
7 p.m. Sunday
$39-$935 DAYS
OUT
Highlights of the week
ahead in arts, music
and performance“We’re archetypes, the
two of us, cliches. Smart
brunet with glasses and all-
American blond,” Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg tells
Justice Sandra Day O’Con-
nor in “Sisters in Law,” now
in its West Coast premiere at
the Wallis Annenberg Cen-
ter for the Performing Arts
in Beverly Hills.
Playwright Jonathan
Shapiro, a former lawyer,
based his script on Linda
Hirshman’s dual biography
of the first and second wom-
en to serve on the United
States Supreme Court —
watersheds so recent that
both women are still with us.
(O’Connor retired from the
court in 2006, but Ginsburg
remains famously active.)
Certainly O’Connor and
Ginsburg, as played by the
delightful Stephanie Faracy
and Tovah Feldshuh, re-
spectively, are very different
people, not just in hair color
but in background, philoso-
phy, understanding of the
function of the Supreme
Court and feminist cred.
O’Connor, a moderate
conservative, believes in in-
cremental change; she may
have broken through the
glass ceiling, but she did so
discreetly, not shattering it
so much as carving an open-
ing just her size.
Ginsburg, on the other
hand, is a passionate femi-
nist who’d love to smash that
glass ceiling with a sledge-
hammer. The play distills
these differences (and some
similarities) into a series of
remarkably clear, expos-
itory conversations starting
in 1993, when Ginsburg first
moves into her Supreme
Court office. O’Connor, who
has been the only girl at the
party for 12 years, stops by to
offer a welcome and some
decorating tips.
Ginsburg doesn’t want to
talk mood lighting. She’d
rather dive right into the up-
coming labor law case Har-
ris v. Forklift Systems Inc.,
which she sees as a rare op-
portunity to establish work-
place protections for wom-
en. O’Connor argues that
the court is supposed to ap-
ply laws, not write them. She
also counsels Ginsburg
against being pushy. “Or
what, I’ll alienate the men?”
Ginsburg snarls. “No, you’ll
alienate me,” O’Connor says.
Shapiro’s engaging dia-
logue telescopes the jus-
tices’ personalities into
punchy repartee, balanced
so that neither decisively
emerges victorious. Gins-
burg’s attitude jibes better
than O’Connor’s with ours
now (she decided that time
was up years before the rest
of us), but she’s often drearyand self-righteous. O’Con-
nor panders to the menfolk.
It takes a while to notice
that beyond their beauti-
fully paced and illuminating
banter, nothing much hap-
pens in “Sisters in Law.”
O’Connor and Ginsburg talk
about cases in their respec-
tive offices. They talk in the
robing room. They talk in
Ginsburg’s hospital room in
1999, during her treatment
for colon cancer, although
this conversation actually
turns out to be one of those
hallucinations, attributable
to heavy medication, to
which biographical plays are
oddly prone.
O’Connor retires and
Ginsburg misses her; they
meet again and grieve over
not having made enough of adifference. It’s during the
hallucination that Ginsburg
delivers the “smart brunet
with glasses” line, which
seems out of keeping with
the documentary-style real-
ism that director Patricia
McGregor has otherwise es-
tablished. Yee Eun Nam’s
projections, a trippy collage
of black-and-white images,
videos and headlines track-
ing the progress of time,
along with the soundtrack of
pop hits, conveys an expec-
tation that what we’re
watching is close to what
happened.
The wonderful actresses
(with help from costume de-
signer Melissa Trn and hair
and wig designer Judi
Lewin) look and act uncan-
nily like the justices they’re
portraying. But the play as a
whole doesn’t quite bring
them to life; it oversimplifies
them.
Should we consider it
condescending that the
looks of pioneering women
are still discussed in the
same breath as their accom-
plishments, or should we
take it as a compliment?
Let’s face it, women just
bring it — even while chang-
ing the world.
When Ginsburg once was
asked, “When will there be
enough women on the
Supreme Court?” she pro-
vocatively replied, “When
there are nine.” That would
be a triumph for humanity —
and nearly enough looks for
a wall calendar.“SISTERSin Law’s” Sandra Day O’Connor (Stephanie Faracy, left), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Tovah Feldshuh).
Kevin ParryLive while you can —
that’s the big takeaway of
many a story, and it’s always
a goody.
It works like gangbusters
in the 1993 movie “Grumpy
Old Men,” a curmudgeonly
comedy about small-town
neighbors whose lifelong
feud leaves them stewing in
the past while their golden
years race toward sunset.
Amid all of the orneriness,
Jack Lemmon and Walter
Matthau generated their
usual backhanded warmth,
and the piece remains fondly
remembered enough to
make it ripe for movie-to-
musical treatment.
So now we have “Grumpy
Old Men: The Musical,”
which emerged in 2011 in
Winnipeg, Canada, and
resurfaced last summer in
Ogunquit, Maine. Refine-
ments have been made
along the way, and McCoy
Rigby Entertainment and
La Mirada Theatre for the
Performing Arts have lined
up to give the show a try.
Despite above-the-title
placement, Hal Linden, Ken
Page and Cathy Rigby do
not occupy the movie’s Lem-
mon, Matthau and Ann-
Margret roles. Don’t be dis-
appointed, though. They’re
onstage a lot, and the leads
are strong, recognizable
players: Mark Jacoby, Greg-
ory North and Leslie
Stevens.
Whereas the movie was
just crass enough to give it a
bit of crackle, the stage ver-
sion feels as though it’s writ-
ten entirely in insults and
double entendres. That
didn’t seem to faze the open-
ing-night audience, which
tittered at each scandalous
line. The score — a slick
Broadway sound echoing
pop styles from the 1940s
through the ’80s — also kept
the room energized.
Yet like too many film
adaptations, this one fails to
live by that old Latin maxim:
First, do no harm.
The story is set in a riv-erside Minnesota town
where ice fishing lends pur-
pose to long winters. More of
Wabasha’s townsfolk are
part of the action now; un-
fortunately, they’re all exag-
geratedly kooky.
The central characters
are more cartoonish too, but
not pushed quite so far.
Swapped epithets and
one-upmanship are daily
routine for next-door widow-ers John Gustafson (Ja-
coby) and Max Goldman
(North). Then an artsy, ex-
otic out-of-towner (Stevens)
moves in across the street,
and triangulated romance
propels the rivalry to new
levels. Jacoby wins the audi-
ence’s empathy as the more
introspective combatant.
Page lends his natural
warmth — and lush bass —
to a life-affirming role as theguys’ mutual pal, while Lin-
den plays naughty boy as
John’s randy, 94-year-old
dad. New to the story is
Chuck’s sweet if daffily liter-
al-minded cousin, portrayed
in an unbreakable deadpan
by Rigby.
Matt Lenz directs here,
as he did in Maine, where
Linden, Jacoby and Stevens
all performed. The sets,
props and costumes — envi-sioning Wabasha as a folksy
place of cozy old homes and
scruffy pines — have been
rented from that produc-
tion.
Who created the show?
You’d have to be a trivia
hound to recognize them.
Composer Neil Berg wrote a
rock musical called “The 12,”
seen in Denver. The lyricist,
the late Nick Meglin, was an
editor at Mad magazine. The
book is by Dan Remmes, an
actor-writer whose plays in-
clude the locally produced
“What Doesn’t Kill Us.”
The songs, with their cle-
ver wordplay, are a nice addi-
tion. Otherwise, ugh. Plot
tweaks tilt the feud toward
mean-spiritedness. The
characters’ cartoonishness
hollows the story. The dia-
logue’s amplified sexuality
develops an edge. And the
story’s resolution — its heart
— gets rushed.
Net result: a considerable
loss of the movie’s warmth.
And amid winters like
Wabasha’s, you need all the
warmth you can get.THEATER REVIEW
By Daryl H. Miller
“GRUMPYOld Men: The Musical” with Gregory
North, left, Ken Page, Hal Linden and Mark Jacoby.Jason NiedleA good portion of “Las
Mujeres del Mar” (The
Women of the Sea), a new
play from “Riverdale” writer
Janine Salinas Schoenberg,
is in Spanish. Supertitles are
used, but only sporadically.
That’s not as much of an
impediment to non-Spanish
speakers as you might think.
In this Playwrights’ Arena
production at Atwater Vil-
lage Theatre, the interac-
tions among Schoenberg’s
characters are so emotion-
ally specific that we can in-
terpolate the meanings
without words.
This generational saga of
three Latina women, whose
trials and tribulations span
some 30 years, commences
as Virginia (Dyana Ortelli)
loses her beloved fisherman
husband (Israel López
Reyes) to the sea, then flees
her grossly abusive second
husband (Eddie Ruiz) with
her little girl, Marina (Adri-
ana Sevahn Nichols).
They reach the United
States but find no safe har-
bor here. As Marina grows
up, she becomes subsumed
into the drug culture of Los
Angeles and winds up in
prison, and Virginia must
step in to raise Marina’s little
girl Lupe (Gabriela Ortega),
who is seduced into the
gangs and becomes preg-
nant at an early age. It is only
belatedly that we realize the
seemingly saintly Virginia
allowed Marina to be sexu-
ally abused by her rotating
retinue of boyfriends, an
11th-hour revelation thrown
in without sufficient fore-
shadowing. Once Marina isreleased from prison, her
lifelong estrangement from
her daughter is resolved in a
city minute.
Despite the occasionally
knee-jerk plot, the unfolding
events are largely secondary
to the tonal coloration and
empathetic depth. That
overdue reconciliation be-
tween Marina and Lupe
jerks its fair share of tears,
and Virginia’s frequent
interactions with her long-
dead first husband give a
magical-realistic tweak to
what might otherwise have
been a pedestrian tale of life
on the margins of the Ameri-
can dream. Director Diane
Rodriguez and an able cast,
which also includes Valenti-
na Guerra and Camila Rozo,
invest Schoenberg’s play
with a bracing realism that
makes its detours into the
mystical all the more effec-
tive. Among the design el-
ements, Mextly Couzin’s
lighting design is a standout,
while original music by Ad-
am Schoenberg (the play-
wright’s husband) is intrin-
sic to the wistful mood.
“Las Mujeres” never
holds back its passion, fire
and commitment. It’s a mov-
ing parable of motherly love,
imperfect but enduring.DAUGHTERand mother in “Mujeres” are played by
Gabriela Ortega, left, and Adriana Sevahn Nichols.Kelly Stuart‘Sisters
in Law’
Where:Wallis Annenberg
Center for the Performing
Arts, Lovelace Studio
Theater, 9390 N. Santa
Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills
When:8 p.m. Mondays-
Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.
Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30
p.m. Sundays, through
Oct. 13
Tickets:$60
Info:(310) 746-4000,
thewallis.org/sisters
Running time:1 hour, 30
minutes (no intermission)‘Las Mujeres
del Mar’
Where:Atwater Village
Theatre, 3269 Casitas
Ave., Los Angeles
When:8 p.m. Saturdays,
4 p.m. Sundays, 8 p.m.
Mondays, through Oct. 14.
This Saturday’s show is at
4 p.m. instead of 8 p.m.
Tickets:$20-$40
Info:(800) 838-3006,
playwrightsarena.org
Running time:1 hour, 25
minutes‘Grumpy
Old Men’
Where:La Mirada Theatre,
14900 La Mirada Blvd.
When:7:30 p.m.
Wednesdays-Thursdays, 8
p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m.
Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays;
ends Oct. 13
Tickets:$14-$84
Info:(714) 994-6310,
lamiradatheatre.com
Running time:2 hours,
25 minutesTHEATER REVIEW
Imperfect but
enduring love
Three generations
of Latinas persevere
in a play by a writer
for TV’s ‘Riverdale.’
By F. Kathleen FoleyTHEATER REVIEW
Holding court with flair
Pioneering justices
make a formidable
pair in ‘Sisters in Law’
at the Wallis.
By Margaret Gray
Yearning for a warmer ‘Grumpy Old Men’