‘Vaudeville” at Variety Arts; ‘Crossings’ at Melrose; ‘Sojourn at Ararat’ in Pasadena; ‘Santa Union’ by Teatro Viva!; ‘Chinese Zero’ at Heliotrope

Vaudeville has returned as the last hurrah for the downtown Variety Arts Theatre. The grand old building, for 11 years the home of Milt Larsen’s Society for the Preservation of Variety Arts, has been sold off to avoid foreclosure proceedings. But Larsen’s fading dream of a music hall entertainment center is not a ghost just yet.

The joint is perking for a flickering moment with a going away party, “Vaudeville Is Alive!” Only 100 or so faithful filtered in for Wednesday’s champagne opening night, but they got a show. Like a tattered New Orleans jazz band turning it on en route home from the cemetery, these performers caught the spirit of a vanishing art.

The show’s unqualified treat is 74-year-old tap dancer extraordinaire Gene Bell, whose soft-shoe and high-stepping act is enthralling and phenomenally cheering.

In fact, all the performers are in sharp form: comedienne Diane Nichols, ventriloquist Jerry Layne, film lyricist Richard M. Sherman playing the piano and singing several of the Sherman brothers hit Disney movie songs--and “The Great Tomsoni, Poland’s Greatest Magician” with his arch, unamazed blonde assistant.

This group plays through Sunday to be replaced by a whole new set of vaudevillians next week.

A sousaphone is featured in Gene Casey’s three-piece New Old Bijou Band, and a dapper Larsen presides as emcee. The show opens with rare film clips and TV kinescopes of such vaudeveville greats as Ray Bolger, Ed Wynn, Leon Errol and a captivating one of Jack Benny, George Burns and Bing Crosby hoofing on “The Jack Benny Show,” from a 1953 CBS broadcast.

Here’s a holiday show for kids they’ll not likely have the opportunity to see again--at least not in the atmosphere of a gilt-edged relic like the Variety Arts Theatre.

At 940 S. Figueroa St., Wednesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., matinees Sundays and Thursday, 2 p.m., through Dec. 18. Tickets: $4.75-$9.50. (213) 488-1456.

‘Dangerous Crossings’

The technical and creative work on display in these two British one-acts, “Dangerous Crossings” at the Melrose Theatre, is a delicious divertissement on the vicissitudes of marriage and romance.

The multiple role-playing by John Boyle and Jan Cobler in Michael Frayn’s farcical, witty “Chinamen,” about a host and hostess hurtled into growing panic as they receive dinner guests who can’t stand the sight of each other, is vivid and even blithesome.

In Noel Coward’s “Still Life” (basis for the film “Brief Encounter”), 10 actors create rich portraits of characters in a railway station waiting room. As the anxious, bedazed central lovers who are married to other people, Philip Persons and Leslie Paxton catch the quiet agony of their characters’ doomed, unfulfilled passion with an impressive subtext of tension.

The director of both plays is Jack Manning, whose focus in these divergent cases is evidence he knew exactly what he wanted and got it. Set and lighting design by Stephen Bennett, particularly in Coward’s train station, complete with hissing engine steam and wonderful coppery, faded waiting-room decor, is an exceptional Waiver achievement. Jill Beber’s waitress and Robert Sicular’s conductor are as real as tintypes.

At 733 N. Seward Ave., Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., through Dec. 18. Tickets: $13-$15. (213) 466-1767.

‘Sojourn at Ararat’

It is ruefully true, as this two-character epic dramatic paean to the Armenian people makes clear, that the world remembers the Holocaust but not the massive genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. That is certainly one reason to see “Sojourn at Ararat” at the Balcony Theatre at the Pasadena Playhouse. But it’s not the main reason. The production, with chameleon-like grace and exquisite craft, achieves vast scale with a lightness of being.

It illuminates through the dramatization of three dozen Armenian poems “the scattered beads that cannot be restrung” of a culture largely ignored and forgotten.

Real-life husband and wife Gerald Papasian and Nora Armani staged this work last year at the Ensemble Studio Theater. The production is part of the California Arts Council’s touring program set to perform in Europe next year. The timeliness, of course, is that Armenia is in the headlines again.

With spare props--a scarf, an apron, a drum, a couple of chairs, and reams of yellow paper which serve all kinds of imaginative purposes--the engaging, burly Papasian and the deft, bedazzling Armani create textured characters and substantial momentum.

The production’s focus, spanning the pre-Christian era to the present day, is on the strength of a tribe of people whose “wars are never won,” as William Saroyan is quoted, “whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard.”

Yet at the end, Papasian’s Armenia is unbroken, enduring in the lingering line: “to die like a tree--serene and proud.”

At 39 S. El Molino Ave. in Pasadena, today, 8:30 p.m., Saturday, 5:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. Tickets: $19. (818) 356-PLAY.

‘Santa Union’

This new play by the newly formed Teatro Viva! Ensemble has important and fresh things to say about growing up gay in the barrio. But it is also artless, uneven, and self-conscious in a ragged production at the Theatre of Light.

Those gaping flaws are devastating but you remain absorbed to a point because of the veracity of the play’s Los Angeles Latino setting and its stinging indictment of gay-bashing in a macho, East Los Angeles Catholic culture.

Playwright-director Roberto Ochoa-Schutz’s “Santa Union” (“Holy Union,” as in marriage between gays) charts the anguished odyssey of a young, college-educated Mexican/American man (Conrad Corral) who falls in love with an Anglo male (James Miller). What makes this play different is the particular Latino venom and embarrassment that this passion incurs.

Mexican/American “cholos,” as the protagonist delightfully rides them, are also dramatized as prejudiced against their own people who happen to come to California directly from Mexico.

The best actor is Pablo Gallegos as the youth’s’ fiercely hidebound father who’s mercifully unaware of his son’s persuasion. But Gallegos, fatally, is underused in the show.

At Theatre of Light, First Methodist Church building, 6817 Franklin Ave., Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., through Dec. 17. Tickets: $12.50. (818) 962-3781.

‘Chinese Zero’

Playwright-director David Beaird’s macabre “Chinese Zero” at the Heliotrope suggests an overripe exercise out of the ‘60s. It stars the well-known Anthony Geary as an iconoclastic, legless street urchin on a skateboard.

The single other character is a spoiled, hapless, desperate Southern debutante trapped on a ghetto street corner with Geary as her only companion. She is forgettably played by Courtney Walsh.

Geary has some moments as a scabrous, non-stop talker and Beaird has his moments with an outrageous under-the-debutante’s-dress scene and some occasionally risible dialogue. Geary is flavorful, actually, but this one-act is maddening in its dialogue pointing to intimations of mortality.

At 660 Heliotrope Drive, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 p.m., through Dec. 17. Tickets: $5. (213) 660-4247.