‘Johnny’ Takes a Seriocomic Journey to Maturity

The opening image of “Johnny on the Spot,” now at the Matrix, is a glowing joint, followed by the toker’s radio-announcer intonations. Thus the title character of Neil Landau’s new play about a Peter Pan-syndrome poster boy’s journey to maturity is introduced.

Johnny (Jason Brooks) fears conformity, as he directly informs us, but the box is closing in. Neither his long-suffering, pregnant girlfriend (Helen Cates) nor his pill-packing mother (Miriam Flynn) think Johnny is ready for fatherhood. Having just lost his insurance job, he quite agrees.

Enter three dead policyholders (Flynn, Richard Burgi and Cort McCown), who have arrived from limbo to send Johnny on a surreal excursion through past, present and future. Taking in, among others, his dead father (Hugh O’Gorman) and unborn scion (Shane Hunter, alternating with Travis Mannon), Johnny’s cosmic sojourn leads to catharsis.

Director Jules Aaron stages this post-Durang parable with sleek expertise. The design scheme is superb, with John Iacovelli’s set, J. Kent Inasy’s lighting, John Zalewski’s sound and Shon LeBlanc’s costumes all spot-on.

The cast is wonderful. Brooks, balancing priceless stoner moments with inner anguish, is marvelously attuned to the affecting Cates. Burgi, McCown and O’Gorman effortlessly negotiate their seriocomic shifts. Hunter is charming, and Flynn’s locomotive delivery hijacks the house.

Landau’s quirky, assured script carries post-larval incongruities, the ghosts erratically integrated and Johnny’s narration evaporating midstream. But merely the emotional tug of the inspired denouement disarms criticism, as does the immensely satisfying trip it concludes.

David C. Nichols

“Johnny on the Spot,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood.

Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends July 7. $25. (323) 856-4200. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Slides Resurrect a

Long-Gone Southland

Historical preservationist, raconteur and piquant social commentator, Charles Phoenix escorts us on a warmly nostalgic tour of a more innocent time in “God Bless Americana, Part 2: The Retro Slide Show Tour of Southern California,” at the Egyptian Theatre’s American Cinematheque.

A passionate collector of vintage photographic slides, the aptly named Phoenix resurrects dying images from the ashes of garage sales and thrift stores, and transforms them into a vibrant mythical record. His particular specialty is America’s fabulously kitschy era--the decades from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Phoenix’s Sunday matinee features color slides solely from Southern California. His Saturday show, “God Bless Americana Part 1: The Retro Vacation Slide Show Tour of the USA,” is national in scope, a collection of vintage tourist snapshots showing Americans at play in the postwar boom.

Don’t expect any fancy theatrical effects or glitzy staging. This is, after all, a slide show. The lights go down, the slides start clicking, and Phoenix, a genial host in a Hawaiian shirt and beachcomber’s hat, starts chatting.

But what slides. And what chat. A lifelong thrift-store enthusiast who started collecting slides a decade ago, Phoenix combs shops and estate sales for boxes of family slides. Working from the notations on the slides, he reconstructs the provenance of each picture, including delicious details that might have passed unnoticed without a keenly analytical eye. Past “excavations” have turned up priceless finds, such as the hundreds of candid shots taken behind the scenes of “The Ten Commandments” by Cecil B. DeMille’s personal assistant.

The pictures range from revealing family shots of the most hilarious stripe to iconic portraits of Los Angeles’ tragically squandered glories--the Brown Derby, the Pacific Electric Red Cars, the fading splendors of Bunker Hill’s doomed Victorian mansions. Some images are painfully ironic, such as that of a small and worried audience that has crammed inside the storefront offices of the American Cancer Society to watch a film on cancer. Look closely--the guy in the front row is smoking a cigarette.

Phoenix, who has published several books culled from his collection, begins his show by intoning that in post-World War II America, “the mood is up, prosperity rules and the standard of living is flying high.” Perhaps that’s an overly halcyon view. But the sun-kissed Southern Californians seen here, standing by swimming pools and new Buicks, are clearly having the time of their lives. And so are we.

F. Kathleen Foley

“God Bless Americana, Part 2: The Retro Slide Show Tour of Southern California,” American Cinematheque at Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Sundays only, 2 p.m. Ends July 14. $20. (866) 754-3374. Running time: 2 hours.

A Rewarding ‘Patience’

Is Helped by Experiment

Ah, the thrill of discovery. It’s what turns people into theater junkies.

One place to experience that rush is Cal State L.A., where an experiment in having students work alongside professionals has resulted in a captivating presentation of the literary love story “Burning Patience.”

Student actors Jonathan Williams and Norma Perez have leading roles in the adaptation of Antonio Skarmeta’s novel (the source for the movie “Il Postino”), and it’s exhilarating to see them hold the stage with as much charm and authority as the veterans who perform opposite them, Henry Darrow and Marta DuBois.

The movie transferred this story--in which Chilean poet Pablo Neruda finds himself mentoring his young postman in the fine arts of writing and wooing women--to the Italian island of Capri during Neruda’s exile there in the 1950s. The play, however, takes place from 1969 to ’73 in the poet’s beloved Isla Negra, a Chilean coastal village. Snezana Petrovic, a design professional on the faculty, renders the waterfront setting with a colorful sense of heightened realism. It’s life-size folk art, dreamily lighted by visiting professional James L. Moody.

Anything could happen in a place like this, and under the imaginative direction of theater department chairman Stephen Rothman, it does.

As the postman, Williams is like a puppy nipping at the poet’s heels--so irresistibly playful and so hungry for attention that Darrow’s Neruda can’t help but spend a few minutes each day tossing metaphors for the young man to retrieve.

Awakened to the power of words, Williams’ postman begins to lavish them on the young barmaid who has captured his heart. Teeming with life and confident she has found her soul mate, Perez defies her deliriously overprotective mother (DuBois) in hopes of rewriting her future into a Nerudian poem.

Daryl H. Miller

“Burning Patience,” State Playhouse, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, L.A. Today-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. $10. (323) 343-4118. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Familiar Material,

Resourcefully Handled

Referential echoes haunt “Snowing at Delphi,” receiving its local premiere at the Hudson. Catherine Butterfield’s 1993 examination of holiday-bound yuppie angst emulates a latter-day Philip Barry social comedy, albeit one refiltered through “Friends.”

The setting is an upstate New York cabin where hosts Sarah (Linda Park) and husband Nick (Graham Sibley), a former child star, are introduced at rise playing parlor games with squabbling Gary (Mike Hyland) and Marcy (Debra Azar). The subsequent arrival of Sarah’s college crony Allan (Michael Popp), in tandem with his unexpected, very expectant companion Brenda (Kimberly Dawson) initiates the plot.

Of principal concern is Sarah, as her bustling serenity conceals traumas newly triggered by streetwise Brenda’s directness. Meanwhile, Brenda entreats publisher Gary to read the posturing Allan’s sociological diatribe, while Allan discovers muse potential in the neurotic Marcy. A weekend of shifting alliances and revelations unfolds.

Wendy McClellan’s direction is resourceful, negotiating the split-focus locations with admirable ease. Given that these are more archetypes than characters, the appealing cast demonstrates uniform proficiency.

Park and Dawson embody their apposite women with equivalent acumen, and Azar’s acidic vulnerability is very apt. All three men are likewise adept, especially considering their roles are virtually interchangeable in twentysomething requirements.

This predigested quality marks Butterfield’s script, sound in basic notion while presuming audience identification beyond what the explicated subtext as dialogue can sustain. Despite the respectable intent, such familiarity seems like postdated Lifetime TV, which is perhaps its ideal destination.

D.C.N.

“Snowing at Delphi,” Hudson Avenue Theatre, 6537 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 29. $15. (323) 856-4200. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Historical Context

Lifts ‘Picon Pie’

Those who became familiar with Molly Picon during her later career, when she was a ubiquitous character actress in everything from A-list feature films to television commercials, may not have been aware that the sweet old lady with the oh-so-familiar face was actually a luminary of the Yiddish theater whose career spanned about 80 years before her death in 1992.

Rose Leiman Goldemberg undertakes a comprehensive and respectful retrospective of this once well-known but now largely forgotten actress in “Picon Pie,” her original musical play now receiving its world premiere production at the Santa Monica Playhouse. The piece recapitulates Picon’s life from her early roots in vaudeville to her ascension as the undisputed queen of 2nd Avenue, the “Yiddish Broadway.”

The play, briskly directed by Chris DeCarlo, features Jack Kutcher as Jacob Kalich, Molly’s husband-manager. But the piece is essentially a one-woman show, a diverting but somewhat episodic character study brought to full life by Barbara Minkus, the petite dynamo who plays Picon. Minkus is a warm performer with a powerhouse voice well-suited for the beloved Yiddish standards that are prolifically interspersed throughout. Music director Beth Ertz, who contributes the show’s incidental original music, accompanies Minkus on keyboards, backed up by clarinet and saxophone.

Picon was a precocious performer who got her start playing boys in the early days of the last century. A lifelong star who was married to the same man for 58 years, she was a staid and sensible lady--hardly a fitting subject for a dishy tell-all. Yet Goldemberg drums up what dramatic tension she can by emphasizing Picon’s early abandonment by her father, along with her various financial and marital woes.

The most affecting scenes derive not from Picon’s personal biography, but from the sweeping historical context of the 1920s and her return tour to Europe after the Holocaust.

It is this wrenching material that allows Minkus to show her authoritative range, from the antic to the resonantly anguished.

F.K.F.

“Picon Pie,” Santa Monica Playhouse, 1211 4th St., Santa Monica. Thursdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 8.; Sundays, 6.. Ends Sept. 1. $23.50-$25.50. (310) 394-9779, Ext. 1. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.