Jason Alexander has been asking himself this very question while preparing to star in “Fiddler on the Roof” at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts — his first stage musical role in decades.
“I’m 65 years old, playing a character that, if you crunch the math, should be about 40,” he told The Times of taking on Tevye, the show’s devout dairyman. “It’s exponentially harder for me now. I can’t dance the way I used to and my best scampering days may be behind me. I’ve had to assess whether or not I could realistically convey this character’s energy and vitality, and really do the role justice.”
Producers are counting on him to do so, and are pulling out all the stops in the meantime. Running through Dec. 1, the ambitious southeast Los Angeles County production features a rich three-dimensional set, a 34-actor cast performing re-creations of Jerome Robbins’ 1964 choreography and a 19-piece orchestra playing Don Walker’s original orchestrations. Already, it’s all paid off: Eleven days before the first performance, the show broke even, setting records for the theater’s season subscriptions and single-ticket sales — a rare return in today’s regional theater landscape.
Jason Alexander stars as Tevye in a revival of “Fiddler on the Roof” at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.
Advertisement
(Jason Niedle)
La Mirada Theatre’s “Fiddler” is already in the black partly, of course, because of Alexander’s star power. Playing the protagonist of the beloved musical has been a lifelong dream for the actor, who’s spent his post-”Seinfeld” days directing and performing in stage shows. The closest he’d previously gotten to doing so were the brief talks to replace Danny Burstein in the fifth Broadway revival of the Joseph Stein/Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick musical, based on Sholem Aleichem stories about a Jewish milkman’s family, faith and community.
“It’s like it was written for him, and he’s bringing all kinds of colors that I don’t think any other Tevye has ever brought to the piece,” said director Lonny Price of Alexander. The two first met as part of the original Broadway cast of “Merrily We Roll Along” in 1981. “People will expect him to be funny in this, which he is, and he’s always been a great singer and dancer. But I think the thing people will take away from this is his range, and his real skill as a dramatic actor. In this role, he’s as equally moving as he is funny.”
This “Fiddler” staging is a return to its original form at Alexander’s request, albeit a costly one. “I love the piece so much, and I wanted the full flavor bouquet of what was intended, and I was concerned that anybody who said they wanted to do it was going to do it on the cheap,” he said.
Advertisement
For example, “It’s so hard these days with the economics of theater to get a large company of actors onstage, but I knew that if you tried to do this with less than, say, 30 people, you can’t fill out the stage enough to present a community. But our producers are wonderful, they’ve said yes to everything we’ve asked for.”
While the production is one of the most expensive shows ever staged at La Mirada Theatre, it is also the fastest in the theater’s history to break even and begin turning a profit. It boosted season subscriptions 22% to a new high, and set a new record for a single day’s ticket sales. Altogether, an estimated 29,000 people will attend the production, with 21% of ticket buyers being first-time patrons.
But the production — and its profits — are possible only because of the theater’s unique business model: La Mirada Theatre is the rare regional theater that’s municipally owned and operated, with the city of La Mirada commissioning the initial transformation of an obsolete movie house and continuing to pay its ongoing production costs, thanks to taxes, ticket sales and additional revenue streams like venue rentals.
Jason Alexander, far right, and the cast of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
(Jason Niedle)
Advertisement
“In addition to paying for the venue itself and the entire staff, the city also provides funding for everything in the theater — the actors, the royalties, the musicians in the pit, the props they’re carrying, the microphones on their heads, down to the flowers in the lobby and the ticket stock you’re holding,” explained producing artistic director BT McNicholl.
“Of course, we do have people who donate, but that’s not the bulk of the support,” he continued. With no board of directors to please or annual donor gala to host, it allows you to really focus on the patrons, McNicholl said. “Ultimately, this is the city saying the arts is a public service, and it’s enriching not just the city of La Mirada and its residents but all those in the surrounding Southern California cities that we’re serving as well.”
McCoy Rigby Entertainment — which repeatedly brought Cathy Rigby and “Peter Pan” to Broadway and on the road, and is transferring a “Mystic Pizza” musical to New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse next year — has been hired to stage La Mirada Theatre’s seasons for 31 years and counting. “There’s no having to raise 50% or 60% of our nut through donations and corporate sponsorships,” said executive producer Tom McCoy, “which, in the world of regional theater, is quite remarkable.”
“It’s such a gift to those of us who love the theater — my God, it’s the difference between life and death,” said Alexander of the theater’s operations. His own former theater company, Reprise, operated on a subscriber model, and the base of financial support to sustain it dried up, he said. But at La Mirada Theatre, the community is willing to sign the deficit check.
“They’re saying, ‘We don’t expect you to end the season in profit, just serve the community and make sure they feel like their tax dollars have gone to something worthwhile,’” Alexander said. “I wish that communities everywhere had the benefit of this kind of a funding model. I’m sure it would pay benefits back to the community in triplicate, especially in the areas around the country that are generally underserved in the arts.”
Advertisement
Jason Alexander and Alanna J. Smith in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
(Jason Niedle)
This star-led “Fiddler” came to be because Alexander mentioned his interest in Tevye in a 2022 interview — an article McNicholl shared with producers McCoy and Rigby, the latter of whom worked with him in a 2008 production of “Li’l Abner.” To be turning a profit well before opening night “is encouraging,” said Price, “especially when you ask for something you need, you know that you’re not going to be hurting the theater to get it for you in order to put on the show you want their audiences to see.”
McCoy told The Times that he’s requested production rights to “Fiddler” for a possible sixth Broadway revival. But that transfer is not necessarily Alexander’s goal. In fact, he hopes his turn as Tevye is a reminder to other actors to prioritize productions beyond the Great White Way, or even the immediate city of L.A.
“I will tell you: My manager was not excited about the idea of me doing this role in La Mirada,” he said. “She went, ‘Why are you doing this in La Mirada?’ And I said, ‘Why wouldn’t I do it in La Mirada?’
Advertisement
“To be on Broadway and have a Broadway audience, that’s very exciting — as far as the commercial theater in America goes, that’s our heaven, that’s mecca,” he continued. “But there are audiences that can never get to New York; there are audiences that can’t get to Los Angeles. The idea that they are any less deserving than any other audience? An audience is an audience, and if there’s an audience who wants to see it, and there’s a theater that will invest in it and do it well, it’s worth doing.”
“Fiddler on the Roof” at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.
(Jason Niedle)
‘Fiddler on the Roof’
Where: La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts, 14900 La Mirada Blvd., La Mirada
Advertisement
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday; ends Dec. 1.
Satya Dev’s upcoming heist drama, Zebra, is set for a grand release tomorrow, with the actor expressing high hopes for its success. Kannada star Daali Dhananjaya plays a pivotal role alongside Satya Dev.
Advertisement
To build anticipation, the makers recently released a sneak peek and hosted a special show for a select audience. The latest update reveals that the film’s runtime has been set at 164 minutes (2 hours and 44 minutes), which may feel a bit lengthy for a heist thriller. It remains to be seen how well the film engages its audience.
The movie also stars Priya Bhavani Shankar, Sathyaraj, Amrutha Iyengar, and others. Produced by OldTown Production and Padmaja Films Private Limited, the film’s music is composed by Ravi Basrur, known for his work on KGF.
My first memory of Ted Danson is of him dancing solo to Frank Sinatra in a pool of light on a pier in the movie “Body Heat,” which is all I remember of “Body Heat.”
It set a tone of gracefulness that continues to inform his performances to this day, in a wide range of soft-spoken modes, from “Cheers” to “Bored to Death” to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” to “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” where he appears as a version of himself. He mostly plays comedy, because that’s what a likable actor is liable to be asked to do, but he can work against type with the best of them, as he did as a corrupt billionaire in “Damages.”
That Danson, assumed to be an angel, turned out to be a devil in the first season finale of “The Good Place,” was a massive fake-out that depended on subverting our expectations, not only of his character but also of the actor himself. (That the character became a force for good felt almost inevitably on brand.) He works all the time, and yet one greets every new appearance with a sort of grateful excitement, as if he had been away somewhere for years.
The latest Danson series is “A Man on the Inside,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, but it is in most every other respect a classic NBC Thursday night comedy. It comes from Michael Schur, who created “The Good Place” (a classic NBC Thursday night comedy), with which it shares a philosophical bent, playing with questions of mortality and morality and the meaning of life, explicitly but not pedantically. It’s sweet and serious, and as the series goes on, knockabout comedy makes room for poignancy. But it never stops being funny.
Danson plays Charles, a well-to-do retired professor of engineering, who after a year is still mourning his late wife. Without work or friends — a dramatic convenience that will allow him to find both — he has settled into a comfortable rut, amplifying what we’re to understand is a reserved, cerebral nature; he’s fascinated by facts and figures, but less good with people. He has a daughter, Emily (a marvelous Mary Elizabeth Ellis), who lives a couple hours away with husband Joel (“Good Place” vet Eugene Cordero) and three comically unresponsive kids — Wyatt Yang, Deuce Basco, Lincoln Lambert, oddly brilliant doing essentially nothing. Charles and Emily love one another without being exactly close. She’d like her father to get back into the swing of life, to un-retire or find a hobby, instead of merely mailing her articles he’s clipped from a newspaper. The paper newspaper!
Advertisement
In “A Man on the Inside,” Charles (Ted Danson) has a daughter named Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and three comically unresponsive grandchildren, Nico (Lincoln Lambert, left), Wyatt (Wyatt Yang) and Jace (Deuce Basco).
(Colleen E. Hayes / Netflix)
It’s in the newspaper that he comes across a classified ad, reading: “Wanted, Investigative Assistant, Male 75-85, Must have phone.” This brings him to the office of Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), a private investigator whose client (Marc Evan Jackson, also from “The Good Place”) has hired her to look into the theft of his mother’s ruby necklace from her room in a posh San Francisco retirement home. Julie needs a senior citizen to go undercover in that “closed ecosystem” — that is, closed to her — to collect information, identify suspects and report back.
The premise seems improbable, yet the series is based on a 2020 Chilean documentary feature titled “The Mole Agent,” which tells just such a tale. That Charles is, at least to begin with, what Julie calls “the best option in a sea of not very good options,” is of course the point, and the starting point. The bumbling spy is a reliable comic figure, and Charles, masking ill-conceived lies with more ridiculous ones, would seem weird to anyone taking him at face value — if it were any other face than Danson’s.
Advertisement
At the Pacific View retirement community, Julie poses as Charles’ daughter, and when Emily arrives unexpectedly, he introduces her to the director, Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), as “my niece … Julie,” adding an extra layer to the farce. (“My brother, um, had a child, and it grew into her,” he’ll say, making a later awkward introduction.) Emily is skeptical of the whole arrangement — “You know, reading a bunch of Sue Grafton novels doesn’t make you a detective,” she tells her father — but it will also, as it bumps along, bring them closer together. It’s that kind of show.
As a person in his late 70s — Danson is 76 — one would say that Charles is a fish only half out of water in this environment; in his erect bearing and chiseled-profile, lead-actor handsomeness, he remains subtly distinct from his peers. Which is not to say that they’re a sedentary crew: Charles finishes his first night drunk — happy hour begins at 3 p.m. — and stoned, and he wakes up in the morning with two slices of pizza stuck to his back. (“Thank God,” he says to Julie, who has roused him from hungover sleep. “I’m starving.”)
The series also stars Margaret Avery as Florence, left, and Sally Struthers as Virginia.
(Netflix)
Sally Struthers, who doesn’t get as many meaty roles as she deserves, is Virginia, flirty and forward. (“You are tall” are her first words to Charles.) Elliott (John Getz) regards Charles as competition. An affecting Susan Ruttan plays Gladys, a gentle, former costume designer, forgetting things. Solitary Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson) proves a temperamental match for Charles. Florence (Margaret Avery) tempts him into reading Shakespeare, which goes over his head. (Significantly, he’s assigned the “Seven Ages of Man” speech from “As You Like It,” in which life’s last age is described as “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”) And I was glad to see Veronica Cartwright among the crowd, as well — a minor role, but, still, it’s Veronica Cartwright.
Advertisement
From the beginning of his learning curve, Charles charges ahead with a mixture of professional determination, childlike glee and scientific precision — finding the atmosphere “rife with secrets, grudges, interpersonal issues.” He compiles thick dossiers on everyone — when not questioning his fitness for the job. But even as he gets the hang of the work, he becomes more interested in the people than the case. He forges bonds and makes friends, which Julie warns him against. “Being a spy means being lonely,” she says, missing the point of the series she’s in.
While it isn’t as rich and strange as “The Good Place,” “A Man on the Inside” is nevertheless a pleasure on most every level, and, as before, Schur wants more than just to make you laugh. To the extent that it’s sentimental, it’s also clear-eyed, genuine and conceptually rigorous.
Many of us will have had the experience of managing older parents, or trying to. Many of us are old ourselves. Death waits offstage here, in plain sight. All these septuagenarian actors are still working, with years of experience and shelves of awards among them, at the top of their game — even if the people they play are not. In a sense, they’re just pretending to be old.
Directed by Amber Sealey. Starring Phoebe-Rae Taylor, Jennifer Aniston, Rosemarie DeWitt, Luke Kirby, Judith Light, Emily Mitchell, Michael Chernus, Courtney Taylor, Catherine McNally, Kate Moyer, Maria Nash, Jeff Roop, Sharron Matthews, Kim Huffman, Ian Ho, Gabriela Francis, Gavin MacIver-Wright, Maya Lee O’Connor, Nicholas Fry, Miley Haik, Lauren Plech, Nylan Parthipan, Pip McCallan, Isaak Bailey, Christian Rose, Cristiano Buchanan, Anabelle Dietl, and Mia Burke.
SYNOPSIS:
Melody Brooks is navigating sixth grade as a nonverbal wheelchair user who has cerebral palsy. With the help of some assistive technology and her devoted allies, Melody shows that what she has to say is more important than how she says it.
Advertisement
Born with cerebral palsy, Melody Brooks (played by Phoebe-Rae Taylor, also born with that condition and unquestionably a significant key to the authenticity on display) is a nonverbal wheelchair user. She is also knowledgeable with ambitions and has a lot to say, but she is limited to communicating through a board attached to her wheelchair tray (a slight, realistic touch that most films about disability seem to ignore the existence of for some inexplicable reason) containing a chart of basic sentences, thoughts, feelings, and moods for simple expression.
Directed by Amber Sealey (from a screenplay by Daniel Stiepleman and based on the novel by Sharon M. Draper), Out of My Mind mainly works because it understands that giving Melody a Medi-Speak device (an electronic tool that reads off whatever is prompted, while also coming with preprogrammed basic phrases and sentences, read aloud in the usual generic computerized voices) won’t entirely solve the problem if everyone from the school faculty to her friends and immediate family vary in their struggles to listen to those words. The issues raised stem from society and the education system, not the disability itself. That’s not to say electronic voice communicators are useless. A voice is a voice, and her father Chuck’s (Luke Kirby) reaction to hearing her daughter “speak” for the first time in which he lets the waterworks flow is a heartstrings-pulling moment that doesn’t ring false.
However, even he sometimes misses the point and gets so caught up discussing what’s best for Melody with his wife, Diane (Rosemarie DeWitt), that they both end up ignoring her in the heat of the moment. He does happen to be the more forward-minded of the parents, as fearless as his daughter is about enrolling into a standard 6th-grade class rather than overachieving in special education. If expectations are already met, why not raise the bar? That alone feels like a mantra most disabled people already live by, consistently feeling the need to prove themselves to able-bodied people who can’t even be bothered to learn that they don’t have to talk to someone in a wheelchair with an awkwardly kind, pitiful tone. Nevertheless, Diane is the helicopter parent raising justifiable concerns over ostracism and bullying.
As for the speaking device, what Melody chooses to say first is equally moving, as it encapsulates and sums up the frustrations and misunderstandings she has felt, even from her family, her whole life. It’s also important to point out that the film isn’t vilifying the parents; caring for a disabled child is tricky, will wear anyone down, and inadvertently cause those miscommunications, or lack thereof. Despite one or two powerful scenes of them standing up for Melody, whether it be from an ablest school system (including a teacher played by Michael Chernus who is technically qualified at the job but is immensely punchable when it comes to his ableism and treating Melody’s classroom presence as a distraction and nuisance), the film primarily sticks with her perspective, sprinkling in some inner thoughts using the voice of Jennifer Aniston.
It’s a device used sparingly, thankfully not overdone. As for why Jennifer Aniston, Melody loves watching Friends, but one is eager to know if that’s also a choice from the book or one encouraged by Phoebe-Rae Taylor. From little details such as classroom desks placed too close together for wheelchairs to fit through the aisles, classmates feeling an awkward pressure of losing “cool” status if they are caught giving friendship a chance with Melody, and grossed-out glances her way as eating messier foods becomes, well, messy to her face, the film understands the pitfalls of public and social disabled life. Again, maybe that’s already in the novel or screenplay, but it can’t be overstated enough that when filmmakers cast disabled actors, it comes with extra layers of authenticity and insight.
Advertisement
Remember that this is still a Disney+ production, so the material has a sanitized, sentimental feel while broadly playing every narrative beat. Once a nationwide quiz competition comes into play, the narrative’s focus shifts there, perhaps too much, even if it still explores Melody’s othering by some of her peers and that enraging teacher. Bluntly put, it all becomes too plot-focused and even contrived. Feel-good songs also repeatedly pop up to remind viewers that the material will never get too challenging. However, a film is sometimes so well-meaning and educationally beneficial that such saccharine material is worth overlooking. Out of My Mind offsets that with a huge heart and a dignified, optimistic, touching performance from Phoebe-Rae Taylor.
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25739950/247386_Elon_Musk_Open_AI_CVirginia.jpg "Inside Elon Musk’s messy breakup with OpenAI")