“Regency Girls,” a new musical comedy set in the period of Jane Austen’s novels, begins on a note that fans of “Pride and Prejudice” will savor.
The fate of the Benton family depends on finding husbands for the two oldest daughters, Elinor (Isabelle McCalla) and Jane (Kate Rockwell), both of whom are being courted by wealthy scions. Distress ensues when these savior suitors, who are bound for a yearlong voyage, fail to show up at the appointed hour to bid the ladies farewell. But at the last minute they not only appear but propose, saving the Benton daughters from a fate worse than spinsterhood: family insolvency.
A boisterously vivacious opening number, “A Happy Ending Beginning,” sets the household into ecstatic motion early on in “Regency Girls,” which is having its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe. But happy endings aren’t meant to come at the start of romantic tales and the exuberance proves to be premature.
Elinor, who seems modeled on Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, does something her lively, intelligent and fiercely independent counterpart from “Pride and Prejudice” would never do: She gets pregnant before her wedding day. On the night of their engagement, Elinor and Stanton (a winning Nik Walker) apparently succumbed to their passion, and now that Stanton is at sea with Dingley (Gabe Gibbs), Jane’s horribly snooty fiancé, there seems little hope that Elinor’s situation can be rectified by a rushed wedding.
Jane, far more conventional than her older sister, can only think of how Elinor’s disgrace will ruin her own future. Haughty, hypocritical Dingley, she fears, won’t want anything to do with the family once this scandal goes viral, which in the Regency period translates into a wildfire of whispering throughout polite society.
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Elinor finds an ally in her quick-thinking maid, Dabney (Krystina Alabado), who has a handbill listing the services of Madame Restell (Janine LaManna), a London-based midwife who helps women in distress. It’s not immediately clear why Dabney has this advertisement, but Elinor discovers that she doesn’t have to go through this difficulty alone.
Petunia (Ryann Redmond), a married family friend exhausted by pregnancy and motherhood, volunteers to accompany Elinor to London. Jane, anxious to see that her sister’s awkward matter is discreetly handled, agrees to go too. And Dabney, suspiciously eager, insists that she be included, even if she has “to ride atop the luggage.”
Before you know it, “Regency Girls” transforms into a rowdy road trip. Try to imagine “Thelma & Louise” crossed with Austen’s romantic comedy of manners, “Bridgerton” and some naughty sketch comedy, and you’ll have an approximation of the melange the creators are attempting.
The musical’s book, written by Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan, TV writers with illustrious comedy credits, trades freely in anachronisms for laughs. The score follows suit, with Curtis Moore’s music and Amanda Green’s lyrics setting up the period flavor only to bust out in Broadway-style pop, rock and even hip-hop.
Regency girls just want to have fun, so why confine them to one particular genre or historical epoch? Put them instead in a slow-trotting carriage and see how far they can go.
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The show is both genuinely funny and unabashedly silly, and director and choreographer Josh Rhodes has his hands full reining in some of the sitcom dopiness. This “pre-Broadway engagement” reveals the production’s bright potential. Who could resist a musical comedy road trip celebrating girl power? But the humor grows broader and more ridiculous, as though scripted for a laugh track.
Crittenden and Allan have lively imaginations, but the wild situations they concoct are treated like joke machines. The introduction of Galloping Dick (Gibbs, energetically doing double duty), a Robin Hood-esque Lothario who excites Jane’s romantic interest on the road to London, pushes the zaniness into overdrive.
There are early signs of buffoonery involving a maternal wig. And a cartoonish note is struck when Lady Catherine (LaManna, also pulling off a dual role), arrives on the scene. Stanton’s dragon aunt is up in arms that her nephew is engaged to Elinor when he’s already promised to one of her two daughters, whose names and identities she can’t even keep straight.
But all hell breaks loose when Elinor and her crew discover a chest of bondage toys and dominatrix accouterments during a particularly challenging moment in their journey. At this point, the show crosses a Rubicon — or should I say jumps the shark? The gag, frantic to get a rise, runs roughshod over character and story.
Janine LaManna as Lady Catherine and Sav Souza as Scutter in “Regency Girls.”
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(Jim Cox)
Some might appreciate the slide into burlesque more than I did, but I was drawn to the complexity of the show’s protagonist, who, in noble Jane Austen tradition, refuses to compromise her intelligence for the sake of men. In a bright, charismatic performance, McCalla’s Elinor brings to life the character’s brainy charm and self-possession. She is the radiant center of “Regency Girls.”
But don’t underestimate Alabado’s Dabney, the nimble-witted maid, who is too dazzlingly resourceful not to make her presence known. Facing class prejudice along with gender oppression, she points out just how unequal English society happens to be. Alabado’s stunning portrayal elevates Dabney from servant to second protagonist.
Together, all of the women rise above their circumstances. Rockwell’s Jane and Redmond’s Petunia, while conceived in more flamboyant comic terms, are granted their own moments of self-discovery. Jane comes to understand that marrying for money isn’t half as satisfying as marrying for love, while Petunia assumes control over her own sexuality, rejecting the idea that she was born to be a baby machine.
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Isabelle McCalla and Nik Walker, center, as Elinor and Stanton with the cast of “Regency Girls.”
(Jim Cox)
“Regency Girls” is the only musical comedy I can think of that includes an abortionist as a key character. Madame Restell, who operates a clinic offering reproductive services for women, delivers “How Long (In 1810)?” a powerful anthem decrying “the holy war” the patriarchy is waging against female autonomy. She can’t believe this militant opposition is still happening in 1810, though she might as well be singing about 2025, so persistent are the parallels.
LaManna brings down the house in a number that spells out what’s at stake in the musical. Marriage might be the all-consuming obsession, but “Regency Girls” makes clear that self-determination is really what these adventurous young women are fighting for.
The production could use some fine-tuning before it heads to New York. The staging, moving from antique to comic kink, accommodates the rapidly shifting story. (Anna Louizos’ mobile scenic design and David I. Reynoso’s playful costumes conjure Regency refinement without being trapped by it.) But sometimes the cast seems a bit frazzled by the musical’s leaps from a more character-based comedy to all-out travesty.
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The happy ending that begins “Regency Girls” is eventually earned, though the conventional romantic story lines are rewritten. Elinor and her posse deserve more fulfilling lives, and with the help of canny Madame Restell, they manage to make their dreams come true on their own terms.
‘Regency Girls’
Where: Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park, San Diego
When: 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 11
Tickets: Start at $45
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Contact: theoldglobe.org or (619) 234-5623
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes, with one intermission.
The movie is called “Heel” and its frenetic opening — a flash-cut glimpse of young, handsome, swaggeringly cruel Tommy (Anson Boon) in drug-fueled party mode — seems enough to explain the title. The next time we see him, though, he’s neck-shackled in the basement of a remote English estate. What follows in Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa’s blackly comic, unnerving thriller is clearly meant to evoke “Heel’s” more obedience-minded reading.
And who would be harshing this hooligan’s buzz with a case of reform-minded abduction? An eerily isolated, rules-driven nuclear family: mild-mannered, soft-spoken Chris (Stephen Graham), haunted Catherine (Andrea Riseborough) and polite son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). They all may as well have sprung from the combined neo-gothic conjurings of Edward Gorey and Harold Pinter. Under Komasa’s direction, the mix of fractured fable and terroristic morality play in Bartek Bartosik’s screenplay is absurd but potent, giving “Heel” enough psychologically twisted juju to nearly always feel like more than the sum of its parts.
Our first glimpse of Tommy chained up, pleading to be let go, is through the eyes of a young Macedonian refugee, Katrina (Monika Frajczyk), being given a tour of the large countryside manor where she’s just been hired by Chris for twice-a-week housework. Katrina, like us, is rightly horrified but she’s in her own bind: undocumented, saved by Chris from the streets, with her signature on a confidentiality agreement and a deportation threat hanging over her. She’s hardly in a position to do much more than accept what’s going on as a grimmer version of her own dead-end predicament.
And yet what’s readily apparent is that this weird, fragile, insular family is genuinely keen on folding Tommy into their lives. They’re also convinced of their unorthodox methods, which hinge on reinforcement and reward. Tommy seems receptive, too, with each invitation to participate in his abductors’ togetherness (meals, movie nights, a picnic). This is when “Heel” is at its most alluringly queasy, a dark commentary on all families as institutions inherently built on confinement and emotional blackmail. (It’s no coincidence one of the movie’s executive producers is Jerzy Skolimowski, who made his own pointed kidnapping allegory with “Moonlighting.”)
Everyone’s broken, so the collective strength of the cast in keeping us on our toes about where this is all headed is a huge plus. The wiry Boon doles out his brash character’s reserves of vulnerability to stunning effect — Tommy is a difficult part and Boon knows how to make it revealing and suspenseful. Graham’s tweaked, sensitive patriarch is tantalizingly far from the heartbreaking dad of “Adolescence” and the gloriously oddball Riseborough makes the most of her faint-voiced mom’s severity. Frajczyk and Rakusen are also pitch-perfect.
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Last year Komasa had another family-centered thriller with “Anniversary,” a movie about politics corrupting a happy home. But we know that equation already. “Heel” is Tolstoy’s happy-family maxim cooked in a mad scientist’s lab. While it sometimes shows its seams as an idea movie, its elegant disturbia has a boldness, recalling that great mind-game ’60s era that gave us “TheServant,” “The Collector,” and the early psychological freak-outs of Komasa’s countryman, Roman Polanski.
In cinema logic, sharks, especially great whites, make excellent characters in animation. From Bruce in Finding Nemo to Mr Shark, the master of disguise in The Bad Guys, these apex predators turn their great gummy mouths with many pointy teeth into jolly good fellows.
In Hoppers, the 30th animation film from Pixar, there is a great white called Diane (Vanessa Bayer), who, despite being a scary assassin, has such sweet, shining eyes and a warm smile that one cannot help but grinning back.
Hoppers (English)
Director: Daniel Chong
Voice cast: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco
Storyline: A fierce animal lover uses a new technology to converse with animals and save their habitat from greedy, self-serving humans
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Runtime: 104 minutes
We first meet Mabel (Piper Curda) as a little girl trying to set all the animals in school free and being sent home for her pains (and also because she bites one of the teachers trying to stop her). Her busy mother drops Mabel with her grandmother (Karen Huie) who shows her the peace and quiet that can be hers if she only stops to listen.
The glade where grandmother Tanaka teaches her this valuable life lesson becomes a special place for Mabel. Years later, after her grandmother has passed, 19-year-old Mabel is a college student and still fighting for animal rights.
Matters come to a head when the mayor of Beaverton, Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) plans to blow up the glade to build a freeway. Mabel tries to get signatures from the citizenry to stop the freeway plans, but that comes to naught as people quickly turn away from the zealous Mabel.
Frustrated, with no recourse in sight, Mabel chances upon a beaver making its way to her university’s biology lab. First worried that her biology professor Sam (Kathy Najimy) is doing some unspeakable animal experiments, Mabel is nonplussed to find that Sam, with her colleague Nisha (Aparna Nancherla) and graduate student Conner (Sam Richardson), have developed a revolutionary technology to transfer human consciousness to robot animal.
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Mabel uploads her consciousness into a robot beaver and sets off to thwart the mayor. Seeing the world from the animals’ perspective gives Mabel a unique point of view. Hoppers has jokes, chases, largeness of heart and solid science — not consciousness-switching with robot animals or flying shark assassins but the fact that beavers are the environmental engineers of the natural world.
The voice cast is wonderful, from Bobby Moynihan as the beaver king, George to Dave Franco as Titus, the prickly butterfly who becomes the insect king after Mabel accidentally kills his mum — the Insect Queen, played with terrifying grandeur by Meryl Streep.
The animals are delightfully delineated, from the spaced-out beaver, Loaf (Eduardo Franco) to Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor) the grumpy bear. The animation is lovely, with each of the animal and human characteristics clearly outlined. From the mayor’s grasping to Sam’s brilliance, Mabel’s fervour to Loaf’s stillness, and the different animal monarchs’ regality, it is all given marvellous life.
ALSO READ: ‘The Bride!’ movie review: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s glam-goth Frankenstein can’t hold its stitches
The “pond rules” ensure that the animals are not completely anthropomorphised — a sticky point in animation films where carnivores and herbivores hang together without even a sneaky licking of lips!
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Smart, funny, exciting, honest, and touching, Hoppers is the kind of film you can watch with the bachcha party and elders alike, with a happy grin. And then there is Diane of the red, red lips and sparkly white rotating teeth — yes, Hoppers boasts that level of detailing.
A moment of silence for all the comedians, late-night-show writers, political satirists, memers, animators and random influencers who just lost a wealth of inspiration.
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary, was fired Thursday by President Trump, ending the 13-month tenure of a political figure whose bravado, cruelty, incompetence and commando cosplay inspired more wickedly funny material than Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and Sean Spicer combined.
Social media’s so-called ICE Barbie, the first Cabinet secretary to leave the Trump administration during the president’s second term, was a font of material for “South Park,” “SNL,” late night and thousands more sketch artists, impersonators, musicians and everyday trash posters. She never disappointed, unless you were looking to her for feasible, humane immigration policy enforcement.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)
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Drama and spectacle marked her brief career, from posing in front of a packed holding cell at El Salvador’s maximum security prison CECOT, where the DHS had shipped and detained deportees, to casting herself as an agent of action in multiple ICE raid videos. Donning a big gun and long, flowing locks of hair, she insinuated herself into operations, vamping for the camera in a bulletproof vest while masked agents rounded up fellow humans like cattle.
Grim, to be sure, but at least she contributed a shred of comic relief (unintended, of course) to our new, sad reality of federal agents invading American cities and abducting people off the streets, out of their cars and from their homes.
“South Park” skewered Noem in unprintable ways. “SNL” brought back Tina Fey to play Noem. Dressed in a lavender pantsuit, too much makeup and brandishing a massive firearm, she introduced herself as “the rarest type of person in Washington, D.C.: a brunette that Donald Trump listens to.”
The endless stream of memes across social media date back to 2024, when in her memoir Noem recalled shooting and killing her 14‑month‑old dog, a wirehaired pointer named Cricket, after deciding the dog was “untrainable.” Gov. Gavin Newsom later trolled the DHS and Noem with a meme captioned “Kristi Noem’s Dog Obedience School: She’ll Treat Them As Good As She Treats Brown People.” The mock ad featured a smiling woman holding a gun and kneeling beside a dog.
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If it seems cruel, consider that the DHS posted holiday-themed deportation memes around Christmas, proclaiming that federal agents were stepping up removals “for the holidays,” with a “holiday deal” offering a free flight and $1,000 to those who self-deport. One X post featured an AI-generated image of federal agents in Santa hats with the caption, “YOU’RE GOING HO HO HOME.”
Noem’s dismissal comes on the heels of two congressional hearings this week where she was questioned about her response to the ICE killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis (she incorrectly called Good a domestic terrorist and claimed Pretti was involved in an act of domestic terrorism). She was grilled about the department spending $172 million for the purchase of two jets, the nature of her relationship with top DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski, and her $220-million DHS ad campaign starring none other than Kristi Noem. She testified in the hearings that Trump approved the ads. He said he knew nothing about them.
Her firing triggered an immediate rush of snarky content across social media, and a sharp a comment or two from prominent politicians. “Shouldn’t let the door hit her on the way out,” said Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker.
But all is not lost for those needing a laugh at Noem’s expense, or at the expense of the DHS, for that matter. The president said Thursday that Noem would take on a new, freshly invented role: Envoy for The Shield of the Americas. He described the position as one that will lead “our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere.” The job title and description already sound like the basis for a villainous political satire, without even trying.
And for the new guy taking the post? He’s Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a former MMA fighter. Let the memes begin …
