theater

What do you do when a creative team mounts an acclaimed production of a beloved play, breaking box office records as one of the most successful shows in your theater’s more than 100-year history? For the Pasadena Playhouse, the answer was clear. You get them back on the boards as soon as possible — say, six months later.

Which is how it came to pass that more than a dozen creatives behind Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” including director Darko Tresnjak and actor Jefferson Mays, have returned to the historic theater for a new production of Swiss dramatist Fredrich Dürrenmatt’s revenge tragicomedy “The Visit,” running through Oct. 4.

“It feels like we just cleaned out our dressing rooms and we’re moving back in,” notes Mays.

The cast and crew of the adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit,” at the Pasadena Playhouse. Many have returned to the venue after helping stage the hit production of “Amadeus” there in April.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

“Amadeus,” which ended its run in April, was a critical and box office hit, so popular that after tickets were gone, additional shows were added — which also quickly sold out. Danny Feldman, producing artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, puts it simply: “Theater is a team sport, and when you’ve got a winning team, you want to keep playing together.”

It was during tech for “Amadeus” that Tresnjak told Feldman of his love for “The Visit,” which he first directed in college. “I quite literally found my calling in life because of it,” says Tresnjak.

Feldman was also a fan — of both the play and working with Tresnjak — and quickly scheduled the show for the new season.

“Our job is to give artists a home where they can stretch and take risks,” says Feldman. “Audiences got to experience this artistic synchronicity during ‘Amadeus,’ and we’re so excited they get to deepen their relationship with these artists as they watch ‘The Visit.’ ”

The respect is mutual. Mays, who has won almost every major theater award in existence including a Tony and an Obie, says the Playhouse is one of the best he’s ever worked at. “It’s certainly the most healthy,” he notes. “They are unabashed theater fans and lovely people.”

Only days earlier, Mays had given what could be perceived as a backhanded compliment. “I said, ‘You don’t run a theater at all, you run a high school drama club,’ ” Mays recalls. “I meant that in the way it’s infused with joy and a sense of play and support and that we can do anything with impunity and embarrass ourselves and they will be there to pick us up and dust us off. It’s just a gorgeous feeling.”

While Mays brought Tresnjak to “Amadeus,” this time the director asked the actor to join “The Visit.” Mays admits he wasn’t very familiar with the text. Tresnjak’s production, which utilizes the 1956 adaptation by Maurice Valency, centers on the small town of Güllen, which is facing financial ruin.

Actors Jefferson Mays and Melinda Page Hamilton star in an adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit,”at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

The townspeople are preparing to welcome back former resident and potential patron Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton), who has become the richest woman in the world since leaving. It turns out, Claire is more than happy to help. But there is one condition: Someone must kill her former lover Anton Shill (Mays), who impregnated and abandoned Claire in their youth.

Audiences expecting an easy villain and a clear case of right and wrong will be surprised as the narrative unfolds with an examination of community, complicity and corruption within institutions of power.

Tresnjak says “The Visit” can’t be described as one thing. “I don’t want to call it a feminist revenge fantasy because that belittles it,” he says. “It’s also an inversion of a medieval mystery play where the Earth Mother is not benevolent. It’s also a fun, nifty stage thriller.”

And as relevant as the day it was written, Tresnjak adds. Dürrenmatt penned “The Visit” as a critique of Switzerland’s neutrality after World War II, which he saw as an abandonment of ethics driven by capitalism.

Tresnjak says he recently directed a scene where one townsperson urges the others to hold out against Claire’s proposition of murder, on the same day news broke that the U.S. Department of Education had pressured the American Bar Assn. to end Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts. “It made me think how in some ways, the citizens of Güllen are better off than we are,” Tresnjak says

“It really is more timely than ever,” agrees Mays, who wonders if that might keep audiences away. In 2007, he starred in the World War I drama “Journey’s End,” which went on to win a Tony Award for best revival. “It was a beautiful play, but nobody came,” he says. “We were at war with Afghanistan and Iraq, and people had enough of war. Sometimes you hold the mirror up to the world, and it reflects it too well.”

Mays jokes he said yes because “it was only fair after I hornswoggled Darko into ‘Amadeus.’ ” The actor is known not just for his versatility but for displaying it in rapid succession. He won the 2004 Tony Award for playing more than 40 characters in “I Am My Own Wife,” and his 2022 adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” saw him take on more than 50 characters.

Mays admits the role of Anton is “a strangely passive and reactive role that I’m still not sure I’m entirely right for,” even going so far as to say, “I can name 10 actor friends who would be better.” But he was bowled over by the director’s passion. “It’s so thrilling when someone approaches you with something they are burning about, and I couldn’t say no.”

Indeed, Anton has a lot to react to; Hamilton’s Claire is the proactive role, forcing the action at every turn. Hamilton is known to TV audiences for her roles on “Mad Men” and “Desperate Housewives,” but she previously worked with Tresjnak on “Bell, Book and Candle” and “Rear Window” and is a big admirer of his work.

Melinda Page Hamilton plays Claire in an adaptation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit.” She is one of a handful of cast and crew that didn’t appear in “Amadeus” this spring.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

“I also tried to see ‘Amadeus,’ but I couldn’t get tickets,” she says with a laugh. She was thrilled to get a call from Tresnjak, who felt it was important to cast L.A. actors and enjoys working with previous collaborators — to the point where he didn’t hold auditions.

“I think traditionally Claire has been portrayed as crazy and evil, and that didn’t interest Darko,” Hamilton says. “I also think post-Epstein, post-#MeToo, post sheer volume of terrible behavior that men get away with, it has a different resonance today.”

Tresnjak says the role of Claire has long been special to him. “This is a woman who owns everything she is, who never tells a single lie or tries to obscure what she wants,” he says. “She is simply making society look at itself.”

Tresnjak’s upbringing was largely influenced by his mother, Maria, an immigrant from Yugoslavia (now Serbia) who served as a military skydiver in World War II. “My mother was a very strong woman, a woman who fought for what she believed in,” he says. “I have no interest in doing something like ‘Streetcar,’ where a woman is being driven out of her mind. I enjoy characters with agency.”

Director Darko Tresnjak has long wanted to stage a production of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit,” a play dear to his heart for many years.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

And he’s thrilled to have found a home that supports his vision, praising Feldman and associate artistic director Jenny Slattery, who was his student when he taught at UC San Diego. “They’re not afraid of big swings and of taking chances, and not only do people seem to appreciate that, they’re coming to see it,” he says.

With two productions in a year, is it too early to hope that this team has found a recurring home at the Pasadena Playhouse? Tresnjak demures, “I wouldn’t want to put that pressure on Danny and Jenny,” but admits he would be thrilled to return. “Of course, I’m very happy here.”

Mays is equally game. “It’s such a rare and wonderful thing in this country to have a sense of company,” he says. “To have so many actors and designers back from ‘Amadeus’ and to return to a place of such support; it feels like something that rarely exists anymore.”

TELLURIDE, Colo. — Standing ovations at film festivals are a rite: part appreciation, part obligation, part a need to stretch your legs after sitting for a couple of hours.

But for an audience to explode and roar their approval in the middle of a movie? That rarely, if ever, happens.

Except it did, midway through the Telluride Film Festival world premiere of Jesse Eisenberg‘s delightful comedy “The Debut.” The applause followed a scene between Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti that took its audience on such an exhilarating journey that there was almost no choice but to cheer in admiration, as if to say: What did we just see?

Sitting in the theater, Eisenberg, producer Emma Stone and Paul Giamatti looked at each other and asked themselves the same question but for a different reason.

“It was hard to process and, at the same time, just so affirming,” Eisenberg told me a couple of hours after the premiere.

The next day, sitting down to grab a quick bite with Moore and Giamatti, that giddy feeling had not dissipated, though, truth be told, they knew this scene was an all-timer from the moment they read it.

Let’s set the stage for you in a way that won’t spoil this constantly surprising film when it arrives in theaters in December and starts piling up acclaim and awards for all concerned.

Moore plays Mona, a meek, thoroughly unseen wife and mother who impulsively decides to audition for a community theater production of a musical titled “Nosy Neighbors,” despite having no experience apart from singing in the church choir when she was 13. The director Jerry (Giamatti) cuts her tryout short, sending her home, only to relent when the woman he’d already cast (Bernadette Peters!) drops out and he has nowhere else to turn.

Mona is, as Moore puts it, a “nice lady.” But she’s not a natural performer. She can’t get into character playing Miss Danielle, the show’s tough, toolbelt-wearing building super. So Jerry takes Mona aside because that’s what he does. As her cast mates note, “He’s going to drag you through the s— and the mud and you have to be ready for the s— and the mud.”

It turns out, though, that Jerry is the one who isn’t ready for what’s about to happen. Sitting in a chair on the theater stage, Jerry holds an envelope containing cash, telling Mona that it’s her job to make him hand over the rent. It’s an acting-class exercise designed to make you listen, react and dig into your character’s truth. Moore begins with a whisper and builds to a roar as Mona improvises a manic rant that involves rats and the plague.

Suffice to say, Jerry hands over the rent.

“When I read that scene, I stood up, put my iPad down and started doing laps around my dining room table,” Moore remembers. “I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. I was just like, ‘Oh my God! Aaaaaaagh!‘”

“It was five pages long,” Giamatti marvels. “Jerry just needs Mona to be better. And then he sees that maybe she could actually be kind of great. He cracks her open and he’s like, ‘Oh wow, who is this lady? Who the hell is this?’ The funny thing about that scene is s— like that happens in classes.” He turns to Moore. “Did that ever happen to you?”

“I had an audition for a university, actually, where they threw chairs in front of me while I did the monologue and made me climb over the chairs,” Moore says, laughing. “I look back on that now. I was 18 years old and I was like, “What?’ Yeah. It was really strange. They’re trying to get you to react authentically and be alive.”

She smiles at Giamatti. “Hopefully when you get to be our age, you don’t need that.”

Though the scene has Mona improvising, it was performed as written, down to every last pause.

“Everyone keeps asking if we improvised and I’m like, ‘Hell, no,’” Moore says. “Jesse’s like the Coens. Everything’s there on the page.”

Adds Giamatti, “It’s incredibly specific. You follow his punctuation. The commas matter in his writing.”

“What’s so f—ing delightful about about working with Paul is that his sense of timing and rhythm is so tight,” Moore continues. “That scene is a set piece that requires you to work in tandem and you need somebody to hit it back with the same intensity and the same speed.”

When Eisenberg first met Moore, he told her flat-out, “I don’t want you to worry about this scene.” He knew it was a bear, with pages and pages of lines, so he told her he’d have a teleprompter on set.

“That section, all that crazy s— she goes off on, that would be really hard,” Giamatti says.

“And I was like, ‘Phew, that’s fantastic,’ because I knew all I would do would be to worry about all those lines and be so scared,” Moore says. “But because he said that to me, I never worried. And I didn’t need the teleprompter.”

They shot the scene in one morning, just Moore and Giamatti alone on the stage with the rest of the crew downstairs in the video village. There was an energy on set, spiked by an unusual number of visitors (“People knew,” Giamatti says) and then they went to work.

“I remember the first time you really hit that speech and they called cut, I just couldn’t stop grinning,” Giamatti tells Moore. “And I reached out and just kind of held you for a second because I was like, ‘That was amazing.’ I wanted to convey just how great it was, what you were doing.”

Moore beams. “I just love him. Just love him, love him, love him. I have so much gratitude for Paul.”

“To watch you be a bad actor was so hilarious and then you would you would modulate it and change it,” Giamatti continues. “Watching her was the experience that Jerry was having. It was such a joy.”

The scene is the beginning of a simpatico relationship between Jerry and Mona, mentor and protege, predicated on the power of imagination and how it can make outcasts feel seen and heard.

“Everyone wants to be known as who we are, even though it’s so scary for us to really reveal it,” Moore says. “There’s a real mind-altering power in just being yourself.”

Grammy-winning singer Jill Scott brought her “To Whom This May Concern” album — her first in more than a decade — to life at Inglewood’s YouTube Theater last week. Backed by a razor-sharp 11-piece all-male band (including background singers fittingly dubbed “Freeman”), Scott moved effortlessly through a two-hour set filled with songs from the genre-expansive album along with several fan favorites like “He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat)” and “Gettin’ in the Way.”

Enforcing a phone-free policy at her personal request, the North Philadelphia native kept the audience intensely locked in — hanging onto her every word and every seemingly impossible note she struck with ease. Before long, it was easy to forget that we didn’t have our devices. Smiles filled the intimate room. Couples danced together. Strangers sang to each other in joyful unison, while others closed their eyes or held their hands on their chest in complete awe of witnessing a veteran artist in her element.

Jill Scott is on tour for “To Whom This May Concern,” her first album in over a decade.

(Jada Imani M)

In her only interview during the tour thus far, we caught up with Scott backstage to talk why she never performs a song the same way twice, how removing devices makes concerts better and why she thinks “To Whom This May Concern” deserves several accolades.

I’m still coming down from all of the energy from the show. How are you feeling post-show?

I am hot from the inside, and it’s gonna take me hours to calm down. [Laughs]

You’ve always described music as an intimate, two-way conversation between you and the audience. For this tour, you created a strictly phone-free space. Why did you decide to do that and how did this shift the experience for you as a performer?

In a couple of ways. One part is that it’s terrifying because there’s no buffer between me and them, so that’s actually scary, but I embrace it. The other part of it is that it’s wonderful because people initially come in kind of nervous about not having a buffer between myself and the space or themselves and space. Then I watch them gradually release, and I get a kick out of that every night. That’s my favorite part.

I’m surprised to hear that it’s scary for someone like you who’s been performing at such a high level for so many years.

Because I care. It matters to me. I really want them to have a good time. I really want them to release some things, allow themselves to be. If you want to make out, if you want to dance, if you want to cry, if you want to shout, or put up your hands in the air, or sit still, I want them to be able to do that. I think it’s important. That’s the relationship. That’s the real relationship between artist and fans of the music. It’s the connection between the music. I’m here to [be of] service. I’m here to push the ship along, but it’s really their relationship with the music and I’m a conduit. That part is probably one of my other favorites. You have to relinquish your id and allow the thing to be the thing. I think sometimes you can practice the joy and the life out of a thing. We practice a lot, but then we forget everything we practice so that it’s alive. My musicians’ freedom is mandatory. It’s a part of the job. So if they show up and play the exact same thing in the exact same way every night, they’re probably not going to be around very long. I need them to be wide open and to rediscover the music every night from their perspective. It’s their 11 perspectives on stage, and then of course there’s the lighting designer. I need him to be free. Don’t give me the same light at the same time every night. Even front-of-the-house sound engineer as well as our in-ear monitors, everybody is playing a part. “What does she need? Let’s read her. Let’s, you know, pay attention. What does she want?” It’s a lot of fun.

You could see really feel that from you and your entire band.

Tonight was a different audience. They were very attentive. Last night they danced all night long from the very beginning. I couldn’t even see the floor. Tonight they were listening. I know it’s a Wednesday night. Everybody’s got to go to work [the next morning], but they were beautiful. The listening audience is probably my favorite. They get quiet and I’m like “Oh, it’s so scary. Am I doing the right thing?” [Laughs] But that means they’re listening. Who doesn’t want to be heard?

Your son came out with you tonight. How was that experience for you?

It’s beautiful to see. He told me Tierra Whack is not traveling with us because she has a new album out, “Whack’s Museum,” so she’s a little busy. He was like, “Mom, how do you feel about me doing the second verse?” and I was like “Be at sound check tomorrow with a mic in your hand.”

He looked so comfortable on stage.

He does. It’s kind of scary. Super exciting. I don’t know what he’ll want to do, but he’s working our set, so he’s a part of the crew. So after he does his performance, he puts back on his blacks and he does his job, and I love that for him, to have that sense of responsibility. He’s exceeding anybody’s and everybody’s expectations. He’s so good at this. All the clothes you see, he steamed up.

He’s really working his way up.

Yes, you must earn your way.

Your album “To Whom This May Concern” released in February, and it feels like a love letter from your favorite auntie. There’s lessons about learning from your mistakes, honoring your ancestors and loving yourself. Now that your fans have been living with these songs for several months, I’m curious if performing them live has shifted your relationship with them at all?

No. On a great night, I like telling the stories that I’ve read. I like embodying them in front of other people. I like watching them experience them in a new way. I’m a fan of that. It just makes it more and more true. Then I see how many people are singing along and how many people are looking at me, and I’m like “Yesss.” It’s reaching the people and I know it’s going to be different because there’s a different audience every night. So I’m thrilled about the project and how it’s touching people. You hope you don’t work this hard at a thing for it to fall on deaf ears, and I know how microwavable music has been, but I believe the cream rises to the top. It’s been a beautiful 26 years. I look forward to 26 more — in my way.

Your album has been receiving a lot of praise from fans and critics. There’s still a few months before the Grammy nominations are announced, but at this point in your career, how important is that recognition to you? Is it as important as it was when you first started your career?

I think I deserve it. That’s all. [Flashes a smile]

I mean everything about this project from beginning to end is blood, sweat and tears. I stayed up many nights just to write, a hunger in my belly and a savage appetite. And I mean it. Everything is true and I love that for me. That’s the kind of thing that takes time and I think musically, it’s incredible. I think the stories are awesome and intentional, and everything about it, from the planning of it to the marketing, has been from my soul, and I think it deserves several.