LA Review: 'Modigliani'

There's something unsettling about the late Dennis McIntyre's 1980 minor classic "Modigliani," something that overpowers the potential allure of this skewed, downwardly spiraling biography of the tortured painter and the now sacrosanct bohemian Impressionist art scene in early 20th-century Paris. Although McIntyre's dialogue is lush and often movingly lyrical, his consistently stumbling and violently drunken characters are so blatantly without redeeming qualities that after two acts of listening to them wailing about their lot in life it all becomes a bit wearisome.

What lifts this fine revival and manages to turn McIntyre's dreary treatise into something to behold, however, is the burly, intensely frenetic staging of director Bjorn Johnson, himself a master of physical theater. Johnson's earthy, intensely sweaty, and often brazenly erotic vision falls somewhere between vaudeville and the theater of the absurd, as though it was originally meant to be filmed by Jean Renoir but ended up as a Warhol biopic crafted by Paul Morrissey.

Johnson has assembled the quintessential cast to fully embrace his concept. As the title character, Matt Marquez contributes a lithe but creepy, almost ratlike quality to the doomed painter, strikingly offset by the voluptuously graceful yet ballsy performance of Nicole Stuart as Modigliani's long-suffering mistress Beatice. Daniel Escobar and Nasser Khan are wildly over the top as his perpetually pickled drinking buddies Maurice Utrillo and Chaim Soutine, while Jon Collin Barclay brings an appropriately smug authority to blue-blooded art dealer Guillaume Cheron.

Considering the size and depth of the Open Fist Theatre Company stage, it might have been wiser to simplify the frequent scene changes by creating new areas with lighting instead of moving furniture, eliminating the opportunity for actors to bump into one another in blue light.

Samuel Beckett was a happy man when audience members ducked out of one of his plays in boredom or frustration, even going so far as to sit by the door in the last row of the theater to thank them personally for leaving. Here, despite this crackerjack team of creative artists, as the dirt-poor future master painter waits for his Godot in the person of Cheron, who may or may not represent him, McIntyre's repetitiveness becomes simply, well, repetitious.

Presented by the Open Fist Theatre Company and Amedeo Productions at the Open Fist Theatre Company, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. May 1Ð24. Tue.ÐThu., 8 p.m. (323) 882-6912 or www.openfist.org.