With so much to remember to do, it’s perhaps time to resort back to the old method of tying a string around your finger as a reminder. But what if the string were to be removed? You would forget.
That’s the scenario that begins the quest of “Beau Fib,” or “beautiful lie,” the eponymous anti-hero of the Los Angeles Theatre ensemble’s original musical written by Myles Nye and opening in its world-premiere Oct. 29 at The Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica.
When the string slips off and Beau can’t remember what special occasion has him wearing his good shoes, he embarks on a journey to find out, meeting up with an endearingly heartbroken soldier, a drunken, derelict priest and a callous stripper along the way. They become caught up in all kinds of trouble until eventually, to get out of it all, Beau and company must go to hell and steal for the king.
“I just envisioned as a lifelong Californian my fantasy of what a New Orleans “˜Wizard of Oz’ would be like,” said Nye, a UCLA theater alumnus. “It would be very dark. Lots of alcohol, lots of trouble, good shoes, a brass band, some clowns (and) masks.”
A great number of UCLA alumni are part of the Los Angeles Theatre ensemble, with 10 involved onstage and offstage in this production.
“It’s really fun and exciting to be working with people I went to school with … and have that same foundation,” said Catherine Talton, UCLA theater alumna. Talton plays Beau’s love interest, Purdue, a sophisticated woman who can talk smut and may or may not be a ghost.
The show features a live band and cast members who also play instruments onstage, which, in addition to the usual piano, guitar and bass, includes the musical saw (used in traditional folk music), the melodica (also known as the blow-organ) and the accordion.
The music, composed by John Graney and Andy Hentz, draws influence from a wide-ranging variety of musical styles and genres.
“So let’s say you had a bag, and in it you put Kurt Weill, Tom Waits (and) burlesque ’50s music, and you just shook it really hard and then dropped it out. That’s sort of how it would feel,” said Andy Goldblatt, UCLA theater alumna and director of the show.
Both Goldblatt and Nye describe the sound as loud, raucous, sexy and dirty.
The first act includes a tongue-in-cheek love duet with a dream ballet sequence, while the second act opens with a barbershop quartet, and the entire show closes with a gospel tune.
“I think the one through line to all the music would be, “˜Things that are fun to sing when you’re drunk,'” Goldblatt said.
The look and feel of the play, according to Nye, can be best summed up as “hobo vaudeville.”
The stage will be stripped-down to an extent, set up cabaret-style and will make clear the fact that the venue is a theater.
Characters will exit and enter back from the same location, and no realistic set pieces will be used. Two little stools placed next to each other will represent a log.
“The audience uses their imagination, which I think is scarier than if we had tried to build a scary cobweb-covered set,” Goldblatt said. “It’s always scarier when you use your imagination.”
The show also incorporates magic and shadow puppetry, and contains elements of voodoo and black magic, crafting the kind of spooky stories told in drunken reverie.
“A lot of the play is unclear memory shrouded in darkness ““ those are the ghosts. And what people are haunted by are the things that they can’t remember and the things that they are afraid of losing their memories of,” Nye said.
The play aims to delight through the telling of an engaging story, especially in considering recent times of economic ““ among other ““ woes, to take people away for an evening.
“Certainly, the plays that read the best in my mind are visually striking or, like in this show, just funny and loud and full of overall joie de vivre, and not these ponderings, nonsensical retellings of Chekhov or anything like that,” said Evan Drane, UCLA theater alumnus and producer of the show.
For Goldblatt, putting on a realistic play no longer makes sense amid the current culture of movies and television.
“If it doesn’t feel dangerous and vibrant and live, then you have that question of, “˜Why am I not watching a movie?'” Goldblatt said.
By understanding theater as a place for people to come together and share stories, the show strives to engage a community.
Instead of telling the audience to “sit back, relax and enjoy,” Nye hopes that viewers will be stomping their feet, laughing, shouting and cheering, as “Beau Fib” isn’t a play for the ladies and gents, but for a rowdy crowd.
“If I may have the last word, I would like that word to be “˜sardoodledom,'” Nye said. “It is a nineteenth-century term coined by George Bernard Shaw that means, “˜Plays that are well-wrought but trivial and morally objectionable,’ and that is the genre of this play.”