Angles In America

Troupe gets mixed results with a small-scale 'Angels in America'

The Pulitzer Prize-winning play’s two parts — — have been done in many large theaters, the 1993 Broadway production winning the Tony Award, the version at London’s Royal National Theatre earning widespread acclaim. A superb touring version played Miami’s grand, historic Gusman Center for the Performing Arts in 1995.

Still, the very intimacy and Brechtian theatricality of , though some of that improvement is due to the power, insight and humor of Kushner’s remarkable script. The performances range from good to subpar, though there are more than a few moments when the play potently coalesces on the theater’s small black-box stage.

Blending a hard-hitting overview of 1980s politics with painfully personal stories, tracks the disintegration of two relationships. Louis Ironson (Larry Buzzeo), a gay intellectual fond of delivering sociopolitical analysis in the form of monologues, is stricken when he learns that his former drag queen partner, Prior Walter (Larry Brooks), is developing the telltale lesions of AIDS-associated Kaposi’s sarcoma. As he withdraws from the relationship, Louis finds himself increasingly attracted to Joe Pitt (Brian McCormack), a married Mormon lawyer fighting hard to bury his true sexual orientation.

That truth is something Joe’s valium-addicted wife Harper (Elizabeth Aspen) can’t bear. Escaping into drug-induced hallucinations, Harper is an agoraphobic handful. Her needs, and Joe’s determination to avoid acting on his desires, keep Joe from moving to Washington for a Justice Department job arranged by vulgar powerbroker Roy Cohn (yes, Roy Cohn, the closeted McCarthy-era lawyer).

Robo-James' Time Machine: Angels in America - Tuned In - TIME.com

When you remake a TV show that used to be a pop-cultural phenomenon, you're remaking the idea of it as much as you are the show itself. That is, when ABC airs its reboot of Charlie's Angels (or in this case should we call it a re-booty?), only part of the intended audience will be people who saw and remember the original. In fact, given the advance of time and demographics, those people may be the audience ABC cares least about. Then you have people who remember the show only atmospherically (through artifacts like the famous Farrah poster, &c.), those who have seen only the Drew Barrymore movie, or those, like me, who vaguely remember seeing it as a kid but only faintly remember what the original was like.

The idea behind the new version is that it's a tougher, darker version of the Angels, more akin to a show like Nikita. So it's worth going back to the original—or at least the introductory sequence above—to see what it's supposed to be tougher and darker than.

The first thing that jumps out (besides the reference to "three little girls," which survives, slightly altered, in ABC's new pilot) is the change in the origin stories. In the new Charlie's, in keeping with current action-thriller operating procedure, the Angels are former outlaws who've been given a second chance. What the old one emphasizes is that these are police women, who are being given a first chance to really do their jobs after they've been lady-tracked into desk work or traffic policing. Besides the women's-equality angle, the premise shares a common thread with a lot of 1970s' TV, which is a post-Watergate suspicion of government; after all, it's the police department that failed the Angels, until Charlie "took them away from all that."

Of course, this feminist message doesn't distract the intro from showing us the real driving purpose of the show, which is to show us Farrah Fawcett-Majors in tight tennis shorts, Jaclyn Smith climbing out of a pool, and so on. (The Angels, evidently, hewed to a strict off-duty fitness regimen that also required them to be as hot as possible at all times.

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