Getting LOST Onstage
Niki Blumberg premieres her strange new play, 'Love's Labour's LOST: The Musical,' at Theater 150's Summer Shakespeare Festival
BY JOE HANSEN NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
July 16, 2010
Some might say a musical based on ABC's hit television series "LOST" has no place at a Shakespeare festival. In most cases, they would be right.
But what if the mind-bending TV show was mashed with a Shakespeare play? That's the idea behind Theater 150 associate artistic director Niki Blumberg's musical oddity, "Love's Labour's LOST: The Musical," a piece rooted in Blumberg's obsession with "LOST" and loosely intertwined with The Bard's oddity, "Love's Labour's Lost." The contemporary story of Jack Shephard and company will be interspersed with showings of the thoroughly classic "The Winter's Tale" for Theater 150's summer Shakespeare festival.
"What I'm trying to make is a piece of theater that is fun for everyone and also a piece of theater that teenagers can come and see," Blumberg says. "I'm trying to trick them in a way by saying it's a musical about 'LOST' and get them into a theater. ... It's also a really great counterpoint to 'A Winter's Tale.'"
Blumberg has no problem admitting she's a writer and stage performer with some chops - she's a graduate of Emerson College - who is completely taken with a TV show, even after the final episode aired in May.
She's not the only one to experience such infatuation, either, as the wildly popular series took television by storm in 2004. It began with a storyline centered on a group of travelers stranded on a mysterious island after a plane crash, then morphed and expanded into a time-hopping odyssey full of nefarious plots and weird supernaturalism.
Meanwhile, "Love's Labour's Lost" stands as one of Shakespeare's least popular pieces today, but it was a hit in its time, buoyed by timely inside jokes that are unappreciated by modern audiences. It follows four noblemen who swear off love and banish visiting ladies to camp in a field outside the court, before comically falling in love with them.
The two storylines merge in "Love's Labour's LOST: The Musical" when the men on the island decide it is in everybody's best interest to separate the men from the women, and the sexes are eventually partitioned by time.
The Shakespeare/'LOST' mash-up started as a joke. Blumberg had previously put on a production of the actual Shakespeare play and pitched the idea of the fusion in jest. Somehow, though, it took off.
"I said it as a joke, and then I went back and looked at the play 'Love's Labour's Lost' itself," she says. "I don't know. It seemed like it was working."
"Love's Labour's LOST: The Musical" is, first and foremost, a love story featuring fan favorite characters like Jack and Kate and Desmond and Penny.
"LOST" perhaps received the most attention for its engaging, and at times confused, mythology, but Blumberg saw stage potential in the storyline because the show bore one of the hallmarks of any enduring piece of storytelling: good, well-realized characters. That's not to say time traveling and the Smaoke Monster aren't huge parts of its appeal, though.
"First and foremost, the characters are really strong. They're all people you can relate to in specific ways," Blumberg says. "And then there's something about the ambiguity of 'LOST' that's equally frustrating, as well as totally intriguing. There's never a straight answer; it's open to interpretation. I guess it's a thinking man's show. ... I think it's something the writers of the show never intended for us to take so seriously. But we do."
'LOST' and found in Ojai
The incredible Theater 150 in Ojai romps through a new musical farce based on the popular TV series, with unembarrassed zeal
DANIEL KEPL, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
July 20, 2010
Straight up, I have never seen so much as a snippet of, nor could I care less about, the end of the rabidly popular TV series "LOST." Recent, crazed media hoopla about the show was pretty much unavoidable so, being a registered voter and all, I dutifully ingested a sentence or two of breathless conjecture about the series' impending mea culpa. Forget famine in Darfur, the American public's addiction to insubstantial piffle needed to be sated, and the media, en masse, groveled piteously, in sycophantic froth over the puzzlements of the show's finis. Boring.
Having seen, a couple of weeks back, Ojai's gritty little Equity house, Theater 150, perform a perfectly creditable "The Winter's Tale," I wanted to find out what on earth they were up to with another Shakespeare play, "Love's Labour's LOST." The use of upper case for "LOST," and the appendage "The Musical," hinted unambiguously, that something about this adaptation might be a little strange. Scrutinizing the hilariously coy poster for the show (a collector's item) even this anti-popular culture snob, realized that something fun was about to be hatched in sleepy Ojai. I had to see it.
Co-Artistic Directors Chris Natoli and Deb Norton have been in charge of Theater 150 for four seasons, slaving determinedly to bring Equity level productions to Ojai. Like the far more famous Ojai Music Festival though, if the big city folks to the south and Santa Barbara's cultural elite to the north don't attend, enthusiastic Ojai residents won't be able to sustain these professional projects — do the math, it's strictly about population demographics. I've become a fan of this resourceful company of actors, most of whom are underemployed denizens of Hollywood, and I hope Santa Barbara's theater-loving patrons will begin paying attention to Theater 150's work.
No small part of the magic at Theater 150 is a leadership team that encourages fresh talent and ideas. When young Associate Artistic Director Niki Blumberg approached her bosses a year ago, with an idea for her first playwriting project — a spoof on "LOST" with imbedded fragments of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" for quasi-artsy piquancy — they responded enthusiastically. Enthusiasm is the engine that drives Theater 150, together with innovation, enterprise and ingenuity. The proposed project was a no-brainer for this company, and Friday night "Love's Labour's LOST — The Musical" had its debut, in the living room ambiance of Theater 150's crib; while "The Winter's Tale" continued its amphitheater run across the street at Chaparral High School.
When comedy is brazen, shtick's goofy, props silly, and the script one big frothy lampoon, trouble hangs above such a production, like the single hair that suspended Damocles' sword — the slightest mis-schlep, and farce becomes folly. Director Bari Newport kept her wonderful cast in snappy order, controlling, dominatrix-like, the maniacal pace of Ms. Blumberg's zany confection. Streamer string careened in all directions, positing bodily excretions (snot and blood in particular) with gleeful zealotry, to the delight of auditors.
A "polar bear" usurped percussion duties skillfully in the "orchestra" (was that the playwright at the keyboard?), offering appropriate slide whistle commentaries on the more scatological of the countless plot twists and situations, while using the whip-crack with stunning virtuosity to enhance the fun of a face-slapping routine that increased in frequency like a fungus, as the play devolved toward incomprehensibility.
Ms. Newport matched her cast brilliantly to their hapless (for some, multiply hapless) roles; not a single actor was found wanting for comedic élan. Theater 150's company of survivors did just that, working their collective density down by several pounds in the course of Ms. Blumberg's unremittingly madcap thespian maelstrom. Props included clever paper lunch bag puppets; a carnival of colorful (and important) character cutouts; sufficiently grotty "LOST" survival wear; a superbly funny video assemblage that abetted hilariously, the several implausible plot gyrations; inflated palms, hanging vines and lawn chairs as needed, for tropical isle ambiance — laughs were plentiful, and a fun time was had by all, especially the audience.