2024 Audience Reviews

Company: Mikala Bierma
Show: PARTS
Venue: The Southern Theater

Confetti and cake-spattered fun

Mikala Bierma is a powerhouse performer, and she's having a damn good time with this energetic show. It's lewd and crass and funny and messy and all the things that people look for in a solo Fringe show. I wish it could have landed at a bigger conclusion than "I was born to be a loud character actor, and I've finally decided to own it!", but it's a hell of a ride, and you will laugh a lot.

Company: Alex Church
Show: Dutch: Made in America
Venue: Open Eye Theatre

A smart and incisive look at a very flawed man.

It's hard to talk about Ronald Reagan. The man is such an icon in American politics--worshipped as a near-god on the Right and reviled as a purely malevolent force on the Left--that any discussion of him as a actual, breathing human being is virtually guaranteed to go off the rails almost immediately. (I hate to come off as a both-sideser, but most of the problems progressives trace back to his time in office date back much further, and his actual policies throughout his presidency would have today's Republican party screaming "RINO!" at him constantly).

Alex Church's "Dutch" avoids looking at the fallout of Reagan the Politician and focuses on Reagan the Person, guiding us through an increasingly hallucinatory series of interactions with figures from his life (all played to great effect by Stephanie Kahle). It attempts to chart how Reagan, the son of staunch New Deal Democrats, who helped organize student protests in college and who rose to become the leader of the strongest union in Hollywood could possibly morph into the eternal torch-bearer of an ideology that delighted in burning down unions and gutting the welfare state.

"Dutch" presents us with Reagan not as an icon, but as a middling actor rapidly aging out of the Western films that fueled his modest career, increasingly embittered by the perceived rejection of his peers and so desperate for approval that he would sign on to any ideological part that would give him status and power. Church is not doing a dead-on impression of Reagan, which is good, because whatever version of Reagan you have in your head is the result of some blown-out story you were told about him anyway. The show constantly plays against the image you have pre-installed about just about every character in the show: FDR is a frantic sock puppet hurling insults at young Ronny; Jimmy Carter is presented not as the kind and charismatic Sunday school teacher we think of him as today, but as the swaggering, scheming black hat that Hunter S. Thompson described as "the meanest SOB I ever met"; Nancy Reagan is not the sweetly out-of-touch grandma keeping a personal astrologer on hand and telling kids to "just say no", but the hard-driving, sly manipulator that spawned a thousand salacious rumors during her own ill-fated acting career; and ol' Dutch himself is shown not as the bold, moral, family values leader his party touted him as, but as the indecisive, regretful divorcee who barely involved himself in the lives of the children from his first marriage and left a boozy, womanizing trail all over LA.

It's all fascinating, clever and well acted and worth your time to see, even if you don't know anything about Ronald Reagan, or if you think you already know everything you need to know about him.