Rusty Strait | Senior Reporter
Hand to God tells us that life is one big puppet show – or does it? The Coachella Valley Repertory is ensured into the live stage like nobody around here in recent history. They ended the season with a study in life as though we were all puppets being manipulated by someone else. However, in the long run, someone else is us.
Built as a musical comedy, this project goes far beyond that. It reveals love, hate and the hypocrisy of organized religion in a series of scenes depicting us as we see ourselves against who we really are.
The play is dark, light, sad, amusing and everything else one can imagine in a stage production. We speak to ourselves through puppets. The language is brutally honest in a very lewd and lascivious way which is really the key to what’s going on. It shows that beneath the surface, we are all corrupt until our souls are cleansed of natural instincts and set on a path to real life.
Young and innocent love, the devil incarnate (a preacher) all combine in situations of anger, destruction, rejection, jealousy and every other emotion of the human dynasty is exposed as what it is – bare-boned life.
This is a play filled with music that started out as an off-Broadway wanna-be that finally hit the Great White Way like the explosion of a nitrogen factory and the story from there has been told in every theater in the land. Do not be misled; this is a serious production not given to those with weak stomachs. It might be X-rated for language, GP for comedy and humanity and yet there is no rating that covers the essence of reality. The thesis is denial, denial, denial.
The star of this epic is a moppet named Tyrone thrust out of the arm of a naive young man named Jason (played brilliantly by Luke Wehner). Keep an eye on this young man. He is headed for stardom in the most meaningful sense of the word. On the one hand, he underplays who he is but explodes into an inner self that is the devil incarnate. Jason is living a life of passage to shy to show his love for a young lady named Jessica (Lea Madda), who once again proves how women are superior when it comes to romance.
Margery (Aleisha Force) is a mature woman with immature ideas who seeks sex as a temporary with a young stud as a substitute for the love she wants from Pastor Greg (Kenny Stevenson) who is so busy tending his flock that he is too blinded by the weeds of guidance to see his own true love.
Ultimately, as one imagines, all reach sanity and contentment (if not absolute paradise) and go on about their lives in peace and serenity.
Craig Wells directs this semi-farce with great decorum, jumping from scene to scene as smooth as a creek over the rocks, never missing a beat. He has assembled a terrific cast of genuine in-the-wool actors to bring about this 90 minutes of belly laughs, tears and amusement. It is well worth seeing and is playing through April 9th—ticket info at (760) 296-2966, ext 16 or www.cvrep.org.
Just sayin’
rustystrait @gmail.com
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