Go swashbuckling in search of belonging in this interactive adventure
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Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
Go swashbuckling in search of belonging in this interactive adventure
Pirating, as evidenced by theme park rides and centuries of stories, has long fascinated. Seafaring and sword fighting imply adventure. Dice games? Bluffing and strategy. And if you're really lucky, maybe there's a Call Theatre, a local interactive-focused performance group, has found a way to give us a taste of buccaneering, that is without the pesky consequences of being captured by the Royal Navy — or succumbing to a rum-induced liver one more weekend in Long Beach theatergoers can live out a mini marauding fantasy on an actual ship courtesy of a revival of the troupe's show, 'Pirates Wanted.' It's theater, but it's also a game, one with branching narratives, multiple endings and even life lessons, such as reminders on how to tie a are far deeper themes. Throughout, 'Pirates Wanted' explores how to navigate complicated family drama and romantic relationships when value systems — you know, looting and pillaging versus not — don't align. There's metaphors if you go looking for them, specifically on having to live much of one's life in the closet, but 'Pirates Wanted' places a heavy emphasis on silliness, too.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
Pirates in Long Beach? Go swashbuckling at this campy, interactive show aboard a tall ship
Pirating, as evidenced by centuries of stories and one of the greatest theme park rides, has long fascinated. Seafaring and sword fighting imply adventure. Dice games? Bluffing and strategy. And if you're really lucky, maybe you'll find a mermaid. Last Call Theatre, a local interactive-focused performance group, has found a way to give us a taste of buccaneering — without the pesky consequences of being captured by the Royal Navy or succumbing to a rum-induced liver disease. For one more weekend in Long Beach, theatergoers can live out a mini marauding fantasy on an actual ship at 'Pirates Wanted,' a limited-run revival of the troupe's 2024 show. It's theater, but it's also a choose-your-own-adventure-style game, one with branching narratives, multiple endings and even life lessons. The show is set on board the American Pride tall ship docked at Long Beach's Pine Avenue Pier, a 130-foot schooner that today is primarily used as an education-focused vessel. Stand still and feel the lean and long boat gently rock on the waves. But you'll rarely be stationary on the wood-heavy craft. With a cast of 14 and an audience capacity of 55, 'Pirates Wanted' explores the full top deck of the ship, which is accessible via a small portable stairway. The setup: As audience members, we are to be trained as pirates in 17th century England, with much of the cast performing in exaggerated accents. The drama: Our captain's previous ship was marooned under suspicious circumstances. To complicate matters, a long-lost sibling, also a pirate with his own troubling history, is here to judge the crew's seaworthiness. The show begins with a speech from Capt. Souvanna (Bonnie-Lynn Montaño), who sternly demands a vocal 'aye' from the audience as the ground rules are laid out. Follow them, Souvanna warns, or risk being thrown into the harbor. In moments, we are free to wander and link up with various crew members for our pirating lessons. The so-called 'treasures of the seas' aren't going to be pillaged without our help, and I soon find myself improvising sea shanties and engaging in a game of liar's dice. I stumble over relearning how to construct a knot — important, I am told, in case I'm tossed overboard and need to quickly lasso myself to a raft — but have better luck mimicking a figure 8 with my sword. We have tasks to complete — or games to play, rather — which are ultimately an excuse for conversation. Ask a roaming bard about the previous ship's fate and a host of stories start to unravel and reveal themselves — love affairs, hidden secrets, lost maps and the requisite discontentment among the ship's keep. What would a pirate narrative be without talk, for instance, of mutiny? 'Pirates Wanted' is heavily active, and one won't discover all of the show's narrative paths. Wander, for instance, to a compartment at the ship's bow, and you may hear conspiratorial whispers. Hang in the aft, and there might be talk of a siren on board. I saw others with treasure maps, and only caught murmurs of the romantic soap operas unfolding among the crew. Love letters were lost and recovered, and at one point I was pulled aside, a pirate whispering to me to ask if there was an illicit affair on board between a member of the crew and the British Navy. Like all of Last Call's shows, there are multiple ways to watch — or play. One can opt to be a relatively passive observer trying to overhear conversations and uncover the various storylines. But it's advised to lean in, to hop from character to character armed with questions and the willingness to go on assigned quests. Here, the latter rely heavily on gossip. Early on I was tasked, for instance, with asking the various pirates about their feelings over losing their last ship, only I was told not to use the word 'feel' in my line of questioning (after all, one must trick a pirate into vulnerability). Throughout, 'Pirates Wanted' explores how to navigate complicated family drama and romantic relationships when value systems — you know, looting and pillaging versus not — don't align. There are metaphors if you go looking for them, specifically on having to live much of one's life in the closet, but 'Pirates Wanted' places a heavy emphasis on silliness too. Last Call over the last three years has established itself as one of the more prolific companies on the city's immersive theater scene, regularly hosting two or three shows per year. The troupe has already announced a winter time traveling production, 'The Butterfly Effect,' set to debut Nov. 8 at Stella Coffee near Beverly Hills. 'Pirates Wanted' last year became one of Last Call's best reviewed productions. 'It definitely was our most critically and financially successful show we put on,' says Ashley Busenlener, Last Call's executive director. 'Who doesn't like pirates on an actual ship?' 'Pirates Wanted' leans campy, a vision of the lifestyle more informed by Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean than any historical fiction. It also tackles subject matter not often seen in pirate tales, such as feelings of being misunderstood and the struggle to be one's true self. 'One of the things that I often notice about pirate media is a lot of the time you see pirates and the majority of time they are white men,' Busenlener says. 'That's not who I think I pirates are. We were very intentional ... in creating a cast that we felt represented what piracy should be.' In turn, many of the actors are female, queer and hail from diverse backgrounds. The goal, says Busenlener, was to show that anyone can be a pirate. 'Pirates are the people who were outside of society,' Busenlener says. 'They were breaking rules and laws and taking power into their own hands. That's something we wanted to reflect.' And it's represented in one of the show's most affecting narrative branches, one in which a half-mermaid spent their life presenting only as human out of fear. It's intimate drama laced with mysticism, an adult theme ultimately handled with a hint of levity for this family-friendly show. It also gets to the heart of Last Call's ambitious with 'Pirates Wanted.' Come for the swashbuckling — and the chance to learn some sword-fighting moves — but stay for the emotional adventure. Just don't be surprised if you leave the pier suddenly talking in a fake British accent.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Forbes
Kristin Scott Thomas On Her Directorial Debut ‘My Mother's Wedding' And Reclaiming Her Story: ‘It Is My Truth'
From L to R: Emily Beecham, Sienna Miller, Kristin Scott Thomas, Scarlett Johansson in 'My Mother's Wedding' Vertical Entertainment Kristin Scott Thomas recently made her directorial debut with My Mother's Wedding, in which she also stars, and which she co-wrote with her husband, writer and journalist John Micklethwait. It was also the occasion for the actor-turned-director to be reunited with her Horse Whisperer co-star Scarlett Johansson, who plays her elder daughter Katherine, a captain in the Royal Navy who comes back to her hometown in England for her mother's wedding. She is joined by her two sisters, Victoria, a famous actress and Georgina, a nurse, respectively portrayed by Sienna Miller and Emily Beecham. While Katherine and Victoria have the same father, Georgina was born from a second marriage. Their fathers were both navy pilots and died when they were very young, only a few years apart. This is a very personal story for Scott Thomas, who based so much of it on her own life. Her own father and stepfather died a few years apart, as they were both pilots in the Royal Navy. In her movie, Scott Thomas used hand-drawn animation as flashbacks when Johansson's character recalls the days her father and stepfather died. 'Memory is a very interesting thing, because people can be in the same room, something will happen, and each person will remember it differently, as we all know. I wanted to create an atmosphere that was slightly unreal and unreachable, you can't quite get a hold of it. So I thought that animation would be a very clever way to do it and keep the memory slightly out of reach. So, the father doesn't have any eyes, he's not quite real yet. He remains a kind of mystery to these girls, but Scarlett's character, Katherine, is the one who is the holder of the images, as I was the holder of the images, because I was the one who was old enough to remember my father,'' said Scott Thomas. She added: 'In fact, the memories that we see, these sections of memories, these are all my memories as a child. So, everything that you will see is what I remember of my father and my stepfather's death. Watching the news, when my stepfather went missing, that's all true. Apart from the location because it wasn't Bosnia because I'm slightly older than that. But the heart in it is all very personal, it is my truth.' Writer, Director, Actor Kristin Scott Thomas in 'My Mother's Wedding' Vertical Entertainment When a movie is so close and so personal to a writer and director's life, can the version of their own story that is being acted in front of the camera, unveil new layers of truth and a new point of view they didn't have before? Scott Thomas said, 'Well, that's what's so interesting. You can write something, in your imagination and voice, you can imagine how something is gonna go, and an actor will turn up, we have amazing actresses, and they will just take it somewhere else, and it's so interesting to see how that happens. Sometimes they wanna take it to a place, that you don't think is the right place, and you have to bring it back, and because they're all extraordinary, they're able to do that very easily. And sometimes they'll show you something that you had never thought about and it's an absolute revelation.' She added: 'So it was really thrilling, certainly for me it was a huge privilege to watch these people work, because when you're an actor and you're acting with them, you can't watch them because you're busy. But watching them from behind the camera, you just see this incredible talent, and it is such an honor to be able to watch that. Now as an actor, I feel enriched by this experience of directing, because I understand more how my colleagues and my co-actors in the scene are able to do what they do. I'm pretty impressed now. I was quite blasé about talent before. Now I see how it sort of all works.' Even though it was an enriching experience, directing and acting for the first time in her own movie proved to be quite difficult for The English Patient star. I asked Scott Thomas what she learned about herself as an actor directing other actors. She said, 'When I was acting in this movie, I found it very, very difficult. That was really hard, really, really hard, because you have to be wearing two hats at the same time. So what I would do is, when I would watch the scene back, I would put my hand over the bit of the screen when I was on it and when I didn't want to see me, so I could concentrate on the others. Because as an actor, I'm sort of drawn to critique my own performance and I didn't want to critique as an actor, I wanted to critique as a whole, in a whole scene with all the other people. So it got quite complicated, it certainly made me a more sympathetic actress on set. I now understand much more why you have to do it again, why this isn't gonna work, and why they want certain tone taken down, or augmented or whatever.' 'My Mother's Wedding' Vertical Entertainment Scott Thomas is no stranger to working with actors-turned-directors, from Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer , to Sydney Pollack in Random Hearts , so I asked her if directing her own movie and acting in it gave her a new perspective on those earlier experiences. She said, 'Oh yes. I was much, much younger when I worked with them. But I've worked with a lot of actors-directors, I found them to be very generous to work with, as directors. And sometimes I'd get nervous when they were acting and I now understand why, because it is so hard to act for yourself, it's very, very difficult! But I really do enjoy acting with somebody who understands how it works, and it isn't just a question of lifting your chin or scrunching your eyebrows together, it comes from a much more different place. And directors who understand how to unravel a scene to get what you're really trying to say and to get to the heart of something, that's always very useful.'' Over the years, Scott Thomas spent a lot of time responding to the press often referring to her life and childhood as tragic. This was a narrative she was very much looking forward to reclaiming in her movie. In one scene of My Mother's Wedding , Miller's character is invited to a talk-show, where she is labeled as a victim and as a tragic story. I asked the actress how important it was for her to write this scene in the movie and if it was a way to claim ownership of her own life and childhood. James Fleet and Kristin Scott Thomas in 'My Mother's Wedding' Vertical Entertainment She said, 'I felt it was important to underline that, yes. One of my favorite lines in the film, when the character played by Thibault de Montalembert, 'Le Grand Fromage' says, 'You're such a tragic family!' l'm like 'I'm sorry, what?' So that always makes me laugh!' She added: 'To be labelled as a tragic childhood is quite upsetting, actually. I really enjoyed my childhood. Yes, there are terrible things that happened, but you kind of climb over those terrible things, they become, it sounds very brusque and quite cruel to say, but it's character forming, it makes you who you are. You know, I've learnt to become very resilient, and in fact the loss, the knowledge of death at such an unnaturally young age, and the repetition of death, at an unnaturally young age, gave me a kind of engine, a motor and a battery for being able to play these characters, that have touched a lot of people, whether it's Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral , or it's The English Patient. These are all people who have a kind of secret sadness to them, which I was able to conjure up quite easily, because that was part of my makeup. Now, luckily, thank goodness, at this ripe old age, I have now managed to let that go, and move on to these things. But for a very long time, it was a motor of mine.'
