A galactic sendup for ‘Star Wars’ lovers

Before launching “Star Wars Trilogy in 30 Minutes,” an announcer concludes the usual admonishments about cell phones and photographs with a caution to “keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.”

She isn’t joking. This U.S. premiere of adapter-director Patrick T. Gorman’s bargain-basement truncation of George Lucas’ tripartite sci-fi epic negotiates the Coronet Theatre’s upstairs space at warp speed, packing the wallop of a whiffle-bat light saber. A smash at the 1999 Edinburgh Festival, “Star Wars” recalls every junior high assembly ever encountered. Office chairs with Christmas-lighted legs serve as battling spacecraft, robot R2D2 is a plastic trash can, ad infinitum.

The ensemble is a high-octane machine, walking the tightrope between representation and sendup in a manner recalling the glory days of Second City, if not the earlier, funny episodes of “Saturday Night Live.”

As Luke Skywalker, James Snyder decimates Mark Hamill’s chipper attack. Mark Kelly’s Han Solo and Maia Peters’ Princess Leia carry deadpan echoes of Mike Myers and Janeane Garofalo.

Scott Walker Mullin switches from Darth Vader to Chewbacca on the dime left over from the show’s budget. Steve Josephson is hilarious as both fey C-3PO and incomprehensible Yoda. Jason Major’s Emperor and Michael Cornacchia’s Jabba the Hutt defy description, and their coevals are all rib-tickling.

There is no substance here beyond the one-joke premise. But that joke stretches to galactic levels, recommending “Star Wars” to fans and detractors alike. May the Farce be with you.

-- David C. Nichols

“Star Wars Trilogy in 30 Minutes,” Upstairs at the Coronet, 368 La Cienega Blvd., L.A. Fridays-Saturdays, 10:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 23. $15. (310) 657-7377, (213) 365-3500. Running time: 30 minutes.

*

A bleak look at a literary figure’s life

At the beginning of “Dear Charlotte,” about the early life of Charlotte Bronte, the stage fills with people absorbed in books that are lighted from within. It’s an artful depiction of writing’s ability to illuminate all who come into contact with it.

Joy Gregory’s play demonstrates how Bronte had to find her light before she could share it with others. Having pushed beyond personal hardship, poor self-image and Victorian-era sexism, she is poised, in this show at the Powerhouse Theatre, to revolutionize English romantic literature and become a role model.

Gregory is a founding member of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company, which nurtured artful productions of “The Arabian Nights” and “Metamorphoses.” Like those works, “Dear Charlotte,” directed by Tracy Hudak, uses vivid visuals to help tell its story.

Yet for all of its artistry and despite its inspirational message, “Dear Charlotte” is bleak and depressing.

On a stage shrouded in black except for the colorful book spines lining two towering shelves, Bronte (a prim but resolute Kim Weild) endures the deaths of her mother and three of her five siblings. She is taught that women are to silently bear their burdens while carrying out duties to others. And she is led to believe that the best she can expect, because of her limited means, is to become a governess (shades of “Jane Eyre”).

More happily, she and her siblings (Amber Skalski, Tina Van Berckelaer and Brian Stanton) begin to write stories, symbolized by a joyous cascade of pages from the rafters above the stage. Later, an instructor in Brussels (Robert Patrick Brink) recognizes and encourages Charlotte and sister Emily’s literary gifts, which sets them feverishly scrawling words across every surface they can find.

All the while, Charlotte is forever composing letters -- records of her thoughts, really -- in her mind, hence the play’s title.

-- Daryl H. Miller

“Dear Charlotte,” Powerhouse Theatre, 3116 2nd St., Santa Monica. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Nov. 16. $18. (866) 633-6246. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

*

‘Frost and Fire’ on a misguided path

If your entire life lasted only eight days, it’s unlikely you’d spend any portion of it at “Frost and Fire,” the dance-theater piece based on a Ray Bradbury short story at the Ivar Theatre. As adapted and directed by Zina Bethune, featuring Bethune Theatredanse and California Youth Theatre, the premise of an eight-day lifespan consumed with avoiding sun and snow may be intriguing on the page, but this misguided telling arrives stillborn.

Amid a stage cluttered with Shanan W. Brown and Andrea Finn’s glittering Styrofoam boulders and desiccated fishing nets, Michael Masucci’s ambient videos, and dry ice, the dozen-plus dancers barely have room to pirouette.

It’s the year 5002, but everyone is inexplicably garbed in uncomely, Flintstonian-era costumes, while Zeljko Marasovich’s tedious score hammers like a migraine. Murray Phillips and Bethune’s by-the-numbers choreography has the dancers spending as much time reciting Bradbury’s words and screaming at one another (a good versus evil thing) as they do leaping and rolling around the floor. The nearly 20 scenes have the large cast, including many children, foraging in caves, searching for math formulas and burying the dead.

The saving grace? A studly Trevor Brackney, who partners Raquel Baldwin with ease. As he stalks the stage with feral intensity, his every move is powered with a sure-footedness this production sorely lacks. Even as children’s theater, it’s less than Mickey Mouse.

-- Victoria Looseleaf

“Frost and Fire,” 1605 Ivar Theatre, 1605 N. Ivar Ave., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. $20-$25. (323) 461-7300.

*

Choosing theater as a religion

Two indelible moments typify the considerable humor and impact of “The Big Voice: God or Merman?,” Steve Schalchlin and Jim Brochu’s autobiographical musical at the Zephyr Theatre.

The first occurs mid-Act 1, which charts a passage through the channels of religion and musical theater from the opening number, “Why?,” onward.

Arkansas Baptist Schalchlin grows up pulled between the ministry and songwriting; Brooklyn Catholic Brochu between the priesthood and theater queendom. This leads to the first touchstone, when Brochu’s family friend Mr. Zimmerman takes him to see “Gypsy,” starring daughter Ethel. The subsequent reverent epiphany -- “It was like church, but with energy!” -- is priceless.

The other signpost arrives early in Act 2. Having ended Act 1 waxing romantic in the lovely ballad “Near You,” Schalchlin casually changes direction.

His fathomless eyes belying his smiling voice, Schalchlin announces, “I had it,” conveying an entire universe in a single syllable.

Under Anthony Barnao’s elegant direction, the attunement of these life partners is effortless, with Brochu an acerbic hambone and Schalchlin an affecting morph of Keith Carradine and Mr. Rogers.

Their Harold Rome-meets-Windham Hill score has redundancies, indicating a need for pruning. Some overkill blurs the mesh of quips and honesty, and referring to their hit “The Last Session” without providing an excerpt for unexposed audiences seems counterproductive.

Nevertheless, the lingering afterglow suggests that the biggest voice in question belongs to neither God nor Merman, but to both performers and their witty, inspiring confessional.

-- D.C.N.

“The Big Voice: God or Merman?,” Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., L.A. Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Nov. 17. $20. (323) 852-9111 Running time: 2 hours.

*

‘Cinema’ picks up where action ends

An art form advances only through experimentation, which is why it’s good to have a company like City Garage on the scene. An insatiable curiosity drives this Santa Monica company, resulting in productions that sometimes set imaginations afire (“MedeaText”), others times baffle (“The Girl in the Flammable Skirt”) and almost always challenge and provoke.

Its newest presentation, “Cinema Stories: Ceremonies of Unendurable Bondage,” falls, alas, into the baffling category. Like other of the company’s recent projects, however, it seeks new ways of fusing live action and projected images, a fascinating field of inquiry.

The show is built from seven short stories by Charles A. Duncombe Jr., with the texts divided up to be spoken (there is little actual dialogue) by actors executing stylized movements in front of video projections. Duncombe, City Garage’s managing director, states in a program note that the stories share common themes of love and loss. But this viewer didn’t pick up on those topics so much as a pervasive sense of the “unendurable bondage” mentioned in the subtitle, whether to a person, a place or a social code.

Among the surreal visions staged by artistic director Frederique Michel: A business-suited man (Laurence Coven) falls in love with a naked goddess (Kathryn Sheer) while, in the background, waves surge onto a palm-framed shore. A woman (Cynthia Mance) loses her voice to a fluttering in her throat, then coughs up a blue butterfly that transforms, on the screen, into a creature that is part butterfly, part man. A Magritte-like bowler-hatted gentleman (Mathew Gifford) is alarmed to find the world transformed into the stifling cityscape envisioned in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” A leather-clad party girl (Maia Brewton) hits the open road as God’s traveling companion, with the black ribbon of highway unspooling behind her. A weeping woman (Mance) is rebuked by a gallery of brutal men, including a masked one who participates silently from the screen.

Tantalizing but very nearly impenetrable.

-- D.H.M.

“Cinema Stories,” City Garage, 1340 1/2 4th St., Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends Dec. 15. $20. (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

*

An undermined, updated Medea

Whatever impassioned arguments against gay persecution might fuel Cherrie Moraga’s “The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea” at the Celebration Theatre, this new play does its cause little good by misappropriating the classic Greek myth.

A curious narrative mutation plunks Medea (Lina Gallegos) into a near-futuristic Tex-Mex internment camp for homosexuals and other outcasts from the post-revolutionary nation of Aztlan (the history is summarized over a bingo game to get us economically up to speed). In and around the fun at the local lesbian bar, an eerie shamanistic chorus, eclectically clad in ritualistic war paint and sadomasochistic accessories, writhes and intones portentous (OK, pretentious) warnings. We’re not in Corinth anymore, Toto.

Re-settings can be opportunities for creative invention, but always at the risk that the updates will suffer in comparison with the source. That is sadly the case here. In the original story, Medea was a woman as much sinned against as sinning -- the innocent, castoff victim of a callous, unfaithful husband who traded up for a landed princess.

Here, the cause of Medea’s banishment is her lesbian affair with Luna (Adelina Anthony, who also directs); Luna, in turn, feels threatened by the men in Medea’s life. Instead of Medea’s being the victim of a triangle, she’s at the center of one, which undermines her moral high ground.

This Medea’s outraged husband, Jason (dour Melody Butiu), isn’t willing to accommodate her infidelity (the insensitive brute). He is, however, willing to take her back on a monogamous footing; perhaps it’s a strategy of manipulation, and his disdain for homosexuality is bigoted, but the reconciliation offer seems genuine. In that light, his intention to take a new Apache bride becomes less a betrayal than a way of moving on from a failed relationship.

Jason isn’t even allowed back onstage for the denouement, Medea’s somewhat unconventional approach to childrearing. In place of the original’s slaughtered babes, Medea’s 13-year-old son, Chacmool (Ramon Granados Jr.), is no innocent; he’s a borderline gangbanger desperately in need of a father. In fact, it’s the boy’s stated desire to live with Jason that drives the clingy Medea to slip him some poison.

Anthony’s staging includes some striking video-enhanced visual flourishes, and a steamy love scene with Luna establishes Gallegos’ Medea as a very hungry woman indeed. But this indulgent, muddled and overlong howl of a play stretches the moral fabric of Euripides’ tragedy past the breaking point.

-- Philip Brandes

“The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea,” Celebration Theatre, 7051B Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Nov. 24. $20. (323) 957-1884. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.