It’s a mish-mosh, but a delicious one. Anderson Davis and his For the Record Company have made a specialty of turning well-known movies into stage musicals. After working out of a small theatre in Los Feliz, where they adapted things like “Boogie Nights,” Davis and FTR have now teamed up with The Wallis in tackling Richard Curtis’s immensely popular 2003 rom-com, “Love Actually.” A new theatre hybrid is the result. Love Actually Live is part film show, part jukebox musical. It unfolds on a large, multi-level set which has huge screens which double as scenery and slide on and offstage. Film clips are projected on the screens; as they fade in and out the actors enter and exit accordingly, matching and then extending the scenes by bursting into song (and sometimes doing a few dance steps). Aaron Rhyne’s video projections also enhance the action, while in three different locations a 15-piece orchestra lays down an almost continuous musical accompaniment. ”We’re not layering two genres on top of each other,” Paul Crewes (artistic director of The Wallis) said in an interview. “We’re intertwining them. We’ve chopped them around and put them together.” The 20-person cast is fiendishly busy throughout. Each actor took on the persona of at least one of the original actors in “Love Actually,” among whom were such stars as Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Liam Neeson and Bill Nighy. Thanks to Steve Mazurek’s costumes their impersonations were believable, especially so when it came time to interpret the songs from the movie’s soundtrack, some two dozen in all. Snippets of scenes and snippets of songs delivered in a high-tech world—that’s the modus operandi of Love Actually Live. Nothing too long or too deep; just belt out a few key lyrics and give way fast to the next entertainer. Fortunately, there are some thrilling voices in the cast, notably Carrie Manolakos (as Natalie), Rex Smith (as the whacked-out rock star Billy Mack), and B. Slade (as Peter; Chiwetel Ejiofor in the film). They and their colleagues attacked old chestnuts like “All You Need is Love,” “Puppy Love,” “River,” and “White Christmas” (much of the film takes place at Xmas time) and made them sound fresh and appealing. All the nonstop talk and songs about love became, for me, a bit cloying over a 2 ½-hour-long stretch; I felt as if I had eaten one dessert too many at Thanksgiving. But the sold-out crowd at the Wallis stayed happy as the show went on, cheering each scene with increasing, even delirious, enthusiasm. Obviously, folks are still madly in love with “Love Actually.”
