My overall impression
This review first appeared on STAGE RAW****
“This is your city. Welcome home.”
Sometimes traversing the large urban sprawl that is Los Angeles can feel like an odyssey in and of itself – that is why this walking-tour performance Bike Odyssey LA, which takes Homer’s Odyssey and fuses it with Los Angeles, works so well.
We are greeted by a collection of characters who take us on our journey where we meet Odysseus (Jesse Sirkus-Brown), triumphant in the Trojan War and ready to return home. After a sacrifice of kale to the gods, we are given our sailor names and begin our long journey throughout Hollywood. We literally stop traffic to cross the raging seas (aka Santa Monica Blvd.), get caught in a storm, write poetry and drink wine, battle the Cyclops (Vanessa Conlon) built out of a car and road cone, meet Circe (Bree Cardenas), a Hollywood starlet who turns some of the sailors into pigs, and tie Odysseus to a bike so he can sail past the Sirens. After entering the gates of hell by sharing a personal obstacle, we traverse into the land of the dead (where a random woman walking down the street joined us for a bit), and share stories of LA with the Venice Beach lotus-eaters before finally returning home (to the theater) where Odysseus is reunited with his wife Penelope (Linda Ravenswood).
The entire journey is an epic poem to and about Los Angeles. It’s clear that director Brian Sonia-Wallace (who also conceived the show) and his ensemble love this city through their use of history and humor. They blend gang wars, gentrification, hipsters, USC, Hollywood, the 1992 riots, immigration and more into the Greek tale, making it a truly unique story of LA in all of its complicated facets.
The bold ambition of this project is commendable; however, there is still a lot of developing, refining, and fine-tuning that needs to be done. At times the audience participation feels clunky and forced, which takes you out of the experience. It would be nice to have the participation come more organically from the story – which also needs more fleshing out. Since it is such a condensed adaptation, we never really get the expansive and exhaustive arch of Odysseus’s journey home.
Overall, the ensemble is engaging, energetic and enchanting. As we move from place to place on our journey, they create a tribal soundscape, interweaving voices – something that could be developed with more specificity to the story. There’s also some inventive and playful staging. The ensemble want to make sure that we all feel safe and comfortable on this journey together, thus the use of humor in the beginning (and throughout) works well in getting the audience primed to partake of the wine (both metaphorically and literally).
This piece was developed with cycling as part of the experience. Since the Fringe perfs are walking tours, I will definitely try their cycling shows in the post-Fringe Festival future and look forward to seeing how the project continues to develop.
