REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
GRADE: A
While “Angels” has played the Valley before, it has been years since it has been produced here. The Stray Cat Theatre’s marvelous version is a superlative staging in the gifted hands of director Ron May and a perfect cast of marvelous local performers who rise to the play’s tremendous challenges artfully. For the opening weekend, the play’s first part, “Millennium Approaches,” was the three-hour plus tour de force.
I was one of the lucky people who saw the piece in its initial Los Angeles and New York stagings and, like those masterpiece versions, the Stray Cat production is just as gripping and emotionally engaging as it makes audiences understand what this crisis did to the world.
Commanding the production is Louis Farber’s nuanced Roy Cohn, a man afraid to reveal his medical status which tells us much about Cohn’s hypocrisy. He is a vicious, manipulative scoundrel and Farber lets us see Cohn’s awful side but he also reveals the more thoughtful and believe-it-or-not caring side of this opportunist.
Marshall Glass plays emotional Prior Walter, a gay man not ashamed to let everyone know who he is. Devon Mahon is the cautious but experimental Joe Pitt who must handle his unsuspecting wife, Harper, played with sincere trust by Courtney Weir who then must confront that her protective circle is shattered by her husband’s gay admittance.
Michael Thompson is a flamboyant Belize, a homosexual unafraid of being his own person. Nathan Spector is Prior’s steadfast and faithful partner, Louis Ironson, who can’t believe what Prior expects of him but is always true to him even at the lowest moments. If there is a problem, the performers projection sometimes made it difficult to understand every word of dialogue.
Stray Cat Theatre’s “Millennium Approaches” is a remarkable staging and makes one anxious to see what the company does with “Perestroika.”