Review: TOPSY TURVY at The Actors Gang

Gods and carneys, talking monkeys, quacks and poets, sharp-tongued vaudevillians and a fractured and very adrift chorus whose experience mirrors our own. Who among you has experienced this much merriment since the last plague?

As artful and heady as this experience most certainly is, TOPSY TURVY is not exactly what it purports to be. That zany title; that promise of a “musical Greek vaudeville,” those crazily dressed messengers and deities....it’s all meant for our distraction, but also for our amusement? Well, not if one has slogged through the last four years and suffered losses of self or others.

The latest play by The Actors’ Gang, written and directed by founder/Artistic Director Tim Robbins, is a melancholy reckoning over the early days of the covid pandemic, a stretch of time in which, ma y would argued, whatever god or gods they worshipped were absent. Oh, those gods are around for TOPSY TURVY, but they’re contemplative, grouchy and decidedly critical of the poor blighters who have disturbed them. 

By blighters, I refer to the chorus, a nonet of men and women with names like, Cletus, Thalia and Persnickety who exist to meet and sing together. “This is,” they frequently say, “what we do.” They introduce themselves harmoniously with a voyage-launching song titled “A life worth living,” and all seems well in chorus land. But when a harbinger (played by Luis Quintana) passes through, warning of “a germ unseen” and urging separation, the chorus is resistant. Then someone coughs, and everybody isolates, in pairs or alone, to figure out ways to sing together while physically apart. As the days of solitude tick by, and the chorus start to despair, in tumble the vaudevillians a trio of “Distractos” seeking to help pass the dead time. Next to arrive are a series of gods, Cupid, Bacchus, Coalicue, Onan, Dionysus and Aphrodite. Can they fix things? No, they cannot. Or if they can, they won’t.

The stage is largely bare throughout with performers isolating on nondescript stools or benches in pools of light. Rynn Vogel’s cheeky costumes give the vaudevillian gods some necessary pizzazz. Taking on a minimum of two roles (or in Quintano’s case, six), Quintano, Scott Harris, Willa Fossum and Stephanie Galindo all have to do some major shape-shifting.

These gods may look different from each other and have different deific agendas, but their messages have a certain familiarity to them, to wit, some version of “you got yourself into this mess. You’ve never really understood what the world is all about anyway. I’ve got it hard now, too. Why are you bothering me?” Not a lot of comfort offered there to our everymen chorus members who eventually realize that their circumstances are lonely indeed. Is love the answer? No, too trite. Or maybe not.

Tonally, Robbins lands this action somewhere between melancholy and doom with strategic shots of humor (all from the visitors) employed for satiric purposes. Even as the chorus members whittle their ranks down from nine to five, they’re not given a lot of opportunity to distinguish themselves from each other. A notable exception is Adele Robbins’s Amaryllis whose honey of a monolog late in the play lays out the character’s decision to live – and possibly die – on her own terms.  (This one’s a family affair. Adele, the playwright’s sister and a long time Actors’ Gang member, is joined in TOPSY TURVY by third sibling David Robbins who provides original music with Mikala Schmitz and is the production’s guitarist and percussionist).

TOPSY TURVY’s score is lovely assemblage of songs, from the rousing opener to the achingly haunting “Dream of Life,” which sees chorus members come together in person a final time before separating forever. Fazeelat Aslam and Charlotte Hacke’s kick off this ballad beautifully with “I remember the bossa nova” followed by Charlotte Hacke’s Thalia picking up the next verse, “I remember the tarantella.”

As the years roll by, creatives will deliver works that can be grouped into the category of pandemic-influenced narratives. TOPSY TURVY will fit right in. 

TOPSY TURVY plays through June 8 at 9070 Venice Blvd, Culver City

Photo of Scott Harris and Luis Quintana by Ashley Randall.         

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