Stage Reviews : Good Intentions, Poor Execution in ‘Dancing’

Now here’s a peculiar title--”Dancing the God.” Playwright Patricia Montley has attached it to her play about the uncodifiable feelings and lessons that pass between a dance teacher and her student. It refers, clearly, to the student’s interest in Hindu dance ritual, and, less clearly, to the teacher’s wish for spiritual fulfillment through dance.

In other words, Montley is after the mystery in this process. But at the Burbage Theatre under Ivan Spiegel’s direction, the mystery is made literal, laid out for us like so many legal documents.

Montley’s device for exploring her mystery is the student (Patricia Ponton) bringing up sexual harassment charges against the teacher (Katherine McGregor). The arbitrator is a self-assured lawyer representing the college (Debbie Devine), and though she insists to McGregor that she isn’t her enemy, Devine spends a lot of time cross-examining her.

“Agnes of God” in leotards, then? Not quite, since the issues here are about such un-godlike matters as women’s unspoken erotic desires for each other, a teacher’s pet as a teacher’s surrogate and how emotions and creativity can feed or impede one another. But “Agnes’ ” clunky narrative form (flash-forward to investigation, flash-back to the events) and archly dialectical dialogues clog the play’s better intentions. What stops things cold is the shaky execution of ballet steps, Maureen Kennedy Samuels’ dance-by-numbers choreography, and the cast’s flat reading, especially Devine’s humorless, stridently serious inquisitor.

At 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., on Fridays and Saturdays, 8:30 p.m., Sundays, 7:30 p.m., until Aug. 19. $14; (213) 478-0897.

‘Jack of All Trades’ Is Master of None

When L.A. vanity productions get truly vain, they send out a creepiness like nothing else Hollywood serves up. The particular creepiness of writer-director-star John Fraser Cullen’s “Jack of All Trades,” at the Richmond Shepard Theatre, is Cullen’s belief that he can (a) put on a show, (b) use it as a repository for a scattershot selection of his own songs and (c) make something meaningful out of it.

Cullen plays a Vegas blackjack dealer, but he’s really a stand-in for God, compelling the players around the table to reveal their past sins or tragedies. There is no book and no spine either, just a sloppy display of songs that sound stuck in disco hell (and deeper), fully deserving of the singers who sing them. We’ll pass.

At 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 7 and 10 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m., until Aug. 12. $15; (213) 466-1767.