‘JOEY’: A FADING COMIC FACES DESPERATE CHOICE

There’s something about talented actors with bald heads that makes them vaguely dangerous, sexy, disturbing. The skeletal Martin Beck is particularly apt casting as a fading stand-up comic compelled to choose between tent shows and playing the lucrative/hateful Sun City, South Africa.

“Joey,” a West Coast premiere by William Sterritt, is the first production at a comfortable new Equity-Waiver theater, the Park View Stage, in the venerable Park Plaza Hotel.

The personal stories of comedians, as portrayed in the popular media, are so predictably downbeat that you approach them with gloom. “Joey” is no exception. The title character has a supportive wife and agent (Emma Zayne and Rex Benson) and lives comfortably in Long Island, but his once-hot career is dead and the debts are piling up.

Into his desperate life comes an urbane promoter (played with debonair cynicism by David Morton) who offers Joey Sun City and his own sitcom in South Africa. Joey wants it. He’s a comedian, not a politician.

Thus, playwright Sterritt posits the theme of human choice. Beck has a metallic style and a wonderful advantage for an actor: He makes you uncomfortable, even mixing a martini, although his character is consummately ordinary.

Two club scenes sharply depict the character as a performing comic (and subtly capture the loss of talent). And one bizarre nightmare moment at home, under the heightened lighting of Ken Lennon, dramatizes Joey with gargoyle garishness.

Director John Batis maintains a brisk pace but falters with actor Anthony Watts, who overplays his black opposition to Sun City. Watts’ character is so noble, insufferable, and blustery you’d like to strangle him.

Benson’s agent is the old school (you can feel the sweat on his palms) but at least he’s out there. Zayne’s quiet but steely wife is very Jewish (Beck’s Joey, on the contrary, is wisely played with no ethnic distinction).

The stage has surprising depth and set designers Tom Wilkins and Dave Robinson handsomely appoint it. In sum, a promising send-off for a new theater, the brainchild of producer Brenda Carlin (wife of comedian George Carlin).

Performances at 607 S. Park View St., Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 7 p.m., through March 29, (213) 389-0284.

‘ONE-ACTS TO GRIND’

The second program of a one-act festival at the Company of Angels suggests one part Harold Pinter and one part Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.

The plays, developed in the company’s writers/actors workshop, are bravura excursions for the directors and actors. And the curtain-raiser on the two-play bill marks an interesting local debut for playwright Christine Marie.

In her “Fox Finds a Friend,” a neurotic accountant (Kevin Bourland) brings home a flashy dime-store blonde who looks like a hooker but is simply a dreamy secretary. Director Jim McKeny derives much Pinteresque fun out of Carol Zorn’s sweet ordinariness (in contrast to her vivid appearance) and out of the young man’s weird and highly regimented parents, played with insidious chill by Richard Hoffman and Jean Van De Griek.

Gregory Mortensen’s “Holdouts” centers on a wounded Yankee and a Johnny Reb forced to take refuge on a Civil War field. Playwright Mortensen plays the desperate Yank and Gary Armagnac the enemy-turned-ally.

They deliver chiseled portrayals, particularly Armagnac’s gritty Alabamian. The tragic irony of the ending is derivative, but the production, quietly and with evocative costume, prop and lighting values, effortlessly bears its own signature. Byam Stevens directed.

Performances at 5846 Waring Ave., Hollywood, run Saturdays and Sundays, 8 p.m., through March 8 (213) 466-1766.

‘PEPPER STREET’

This musical is so well-intentioned, nourished as it is by teen-aage suicide prevention, heart, hope and even burlesque, that the production itself turns suicidal. It blows up. It’s playing at a perfect clubby venue, the Backlot Cabaret, and it is fair to underscore that the show enjoyed a long run two years ago at the Venture Theatre in Burbank.

The premise is a page out of old Hollywood movies that dabbled in heaven. The concept is workable enough--a teen girl ODs on her evangelist mom’s tranquilizers and meets an angel-in-training who escorts her back to her home, the entitled “Pepper Street,” where she sees humanity, warts and all, and renews the will to live.

But teen-age suicide becomes a hook on which to cavort musically through endless other issues, including drugs, yuppies, sex, machismo, bulimia, evangelism.

Certain moments, most of them featuring the show’s freshest and best performer, Tony Fields, as the charming angel Angelo, cut a nice pattern. But the collection of characters (a blind girl, an overindulged orphan, a condo con man, a corpulent choir boy, a svelte realty assistant with the gait of Big Bird, a shiny aerobics gal) turn the show into a vaudevillian blitzkrieg. This is an ambitious but shapeless production--a heart looking for a body.

Performances at 651 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, run Tuesdays through Fridays, 7:30 p.m., Saturdays, 7 p.m., Sundays, 2 and 6 p.m., through March 29 (213) 480-3232 or (213) 936-1329.

‘AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS’

Trunk songs are numbers written and stuffed in the bottom of the composer’s drawer, perhaps to be fished out for a party some time. That’s what happens at the Matrix Theater, where an infectious tunefest glides through 24 original songs in 80 easy minutes, performed by seven engaging talents.

“An Elephant Never Forgets” has no theme, no urgency, no rockets. It has style, talent, charm. The music is by lyricist Faye Greenberg and composers John Kroner and Jerry Sternbach (the latter at a piano musically directing drummer John Harvey and bassist Keith Bridges).

The production’s most sterling voice is diminutive Christina Saffran’s, but the effect is ensemble vocalizing. It enlists the talents of the vivacious Susan Edwards (who does a sharp Barry Manilow parody in “Born to Write”), the spunky Kathy Garrick, the vivid Cris Franco, the ball-juggling Billy Barrett, and the cool Arnold McCuller and torchy Alaina Reed (whose “He Loves Me With His Eyes” echoes Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Eyes” from the early ‘70s).

The music overpowers Reed and McCuller too much of the time, but that’s the only quibble in a light and artful musical souffle.

Performances at 7657 Melrose Ave., are Mondays and Tuesdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2:30 p.m., through March 17 (213) 852-1445.