STAGE REVIEW : Taking a Spin at a ‘Big Show’

Call it interactive theater--theater where the audience gets to be in the play. An early example was Ayn Rand’s “The Night of January 16th” (1935), where the spectators became a jury. A current example is New York’s “Tony and Tina’s Wedding,” where everybody throws rice and kisses the bride.

Then there’s “Tamara.” Who wants to pay $55 to shlep around a marble villa watching expensive people commit the seven deadly sins? Lots of us. “Tamara” has been running for five years.

Two new shows promising inter-action opened in Los Angeles over the weekend. The first was “A Night in Casablanca”--as in Rick’s Cafe Americain, supposedly re-created at 157 N. La Cienega Blvd. (213) 988-1048. This has some amazingly bad actors slinking around the restaurant pretending to be Nazis, while we at the tables sip champagne in plastic stemware and wonder what theater in Los Angeles is coming to. Cost for the evening, which includes an intermission repast, is $55. Rent the movie.

“The Big Show,” presented by the Actors’ Gang at the Powerhouse in Santa Monica, promises to “put the audience on the hot seat” as it examines U.S. involvement in Central America. This means that we become a “studio audience” for a metaphorical “game show” whose contestants may remind you of certain figures in the recent history of Nicaragua.

The United States (represented by our cheerful cohosts, Lee Arenberg and Shannon Holt) has fixed the wheel--so where she stops, everybody knows. As the applause sign blinks on, we in the audience find ourselves cheering like nitwits, even though we disapprove of the real-life events being alluded to. We know a spoof when we’re in one.

This is fun, but it is by no means the same as being put on the hot seat. Take out the interaction, and “The Big Show” is traditional agitprop. Oppression is all their fault--the bullies and the zanies who exploit the nice people like ourselves. Who puts these clods in power is never addressed.

As a political Saturday morning cartoon, “The Big Show” has its moments. Arenberg as the emcee is all smiles and ill-disguised contempt for the fatheads who would watch a show like this when they could be out making a buck, which is obviously his mission.

Holt makes his co-host (and wife) a nervous ditherer with a pool of goodwill that her hubby lacks. She actually believes that that “game” will work out to the benefit of the natives involved, and in the second half of the evening she takes the show on location--at which point it seems to change to “2 on the Town.” Writers R. A. White and Michael Schlitt aren’t very rigorous about following the rules of their own game, and that fuzzes the form of the piece.

Under Schlitt’s direction, the company tears into the show with its usual enthusiasm. Ned Bellamy is fine as the fellow who warms up the studio audience and as a sawed-off (literally) dictator named Anton Bulldoza, and Brent Hinkley is wonderfully goofy as a quiescent coffee-growing peasant who talks exclusively in verse.

The company’s one performing problem, common to many actors who grew up with the tube, is that they don’t know how to speak at a low volume without losing energy. Since energy is the Actors’ Gang’s specialty, this needs remedying.

At 8 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Closes July 1. Tickets $10. 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. (213) 392-6529.