LOST in Translation

Shakespeare meets JJ Abrahms in Ojai's madcap musical

VC Reporter 7/22/2010

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes, which advises “There is nothing new under the sun,” is often aptly applied to modern entertainment. In our appetite for diversion, we’ve created a vast market for the storyteller — in television, books, music, games, movies, theatre and more — and the vast majority of these offerings are variations on very old themes, the result a cultural pastiche that derives at intervals and in some measure from the Bible, the Greeks, Shakespeare and/or Sherwood Schwartz.

The latter might be something of a stretch, but it serves to inform (or describe) the wildly imaginative Love’s Labour’s LOST: The Musical! playing at Ojai’s Theater 150 through Aug. 1. A wild blend of Shakespeare’s 16th century comedy and ABC-TV’s island adventure LOST, Niki Blumberg’s off-the-wall tuner might disprove Ecclesiastes’ time-honored maxim — truly, it’s unlikely that you’ve seen anything like this before. Part of Theatre 150’s summer Shakespeare festival, the romp is a rough-edged crowd-pleaser, though the nod to the Bard’s namesake play is thin at best.

Set on a mysterious South Pacific island, a group of castaways struggle to survive a dizzying array of arcane adventures and peril, struggling with romance, interpersonal conflict, a wayward polar bear and a malevolent smoke monster. At least, that’s the arc of J.J. Abrams’ hit TV show LOST, which recently concluded its final season.

Blumberg’s vision adds multimedia effects, puppets and cardboard cutout characters and props, while the polar bear (played in white bear suit by Remington Moses) handles percussion, and Silly String showers the audience, which is arrayed in beach chairs before the ersatz paradise, in would-be arterial sprays.

Blumberg herself is the play’s first character, perching at a keyboard above the trippy DayGlo set, occasionally belting out the author’s refrain and playing the entire score for the ensemble, a well-cast group that ably stands in for Abrams’ iconic castaways. From Caley Bisson’s angsty, lovelorn Jack, to Julee Vadnais’s flighty Kate (like much of the cast, Vadnais does double duty, also playing the corpulent Hurley), Noah Crowe’s rugged matinee idol Sawyer, complete with airbrushed six pack abs (Crowe also plays the malevolent smoke monster), Laura Lee Bahr’s Juliet & Faraday (whose songs steal the show more than once), Karen Zumsteg’s yin-yang portrayal of both the pregnant Sun and Korean-growling Jin, Kerr Seth Lordygan’s Locke (and Desmond and hilarious “master of disguise” Sayid) to the spot-on, soft spoken malevolence of Jeff Reeser’s Ben — each cast member does a splendid job of parodying the deadly serious oeuvre of the erstwhile ABC mainstays.

Consistently at the top of both ratings and critical acclaim in its six seasons, LOST was easy to enjoy, and even easier to lampoon. Despite the drama, the island adventure proved a narrow departure from Schwartz’s Gilligan’s Island, another castaway set piece from which escape seemed steadfastly impossible even as the scenarist’s craft likewise proved increasingly outlandish.

It’s from such narrative convolutions that Blumberg’s comic vision derives, as, like millions of viewers, she endeavored not to only keep up with Abrams’ plot, but to simply try to figure out what the heck was going on. Such is not a problem in her musical, for no matter the plot twists and incomprehensible turns, the journey remains more the point — and the fun — than the destination.

In the end, Shakespeare himself seems to have a comment on the oddball conventions of LOST, ably summing up both Abrams’ clever convolutions and Blumberg’s tongue-in cheek take on it all: “Our wooing,” he penned in the namesake piece, “doth not end like an old play;/ Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy/ Might well have made our sport a comedy.”