Threads Bare

By T.E. Kalem

ZOOT SUIT

Directed and Written by Luis Valdez

Choreography by Patricia Birch

After seeing some shows, one is tempted to say, "I gave at the office." Moral solicitation for worthy causes is an old and honorable U.S. custom. So is a distaste for indignity and injustice. But, barring isolated instances, the theater does not lend itself comfortably to social polemics and underdog rhetoric. What too often happens, and Zoot Suit is a case in point, is the reduction of the stage to a soapbox and the meaningless ritual of preaching to the already converted.

Zoot Suit takes up the cudgels on behalf of the Mexican Americans who call themselves Chicanos. The place is Los Angeles in 1942, where a gang of pachucos (zoot-suited teenagers) were mass-convicted of a murder on virtually kangaroo-court terms. Street riots followed the next year.

Playwright Luis Valdez has tried to shape this tale as a mixture of myth, documentation and fantasy, but he never gets past the ABCs in any category. Edward James Olmos is electrifying as the embodiment of the mythic hero known as El Pachuco, but the script short-circuits him, and he is reduced to cynic snarls and stylized struts. Daniel Valdez is winning as a gang leader with unstained valor. He is stalemated in a TV-style love triangle between his loyal Chicano girlfriend (Rose Portillo) and a Jewish minority-rights defender (Karen Hensel) of inflammable zeal.

If there had been a savory ethnic core to the musical, it might have taken flight, but both the music and the dances are grounded in standard World War II U.S.O. fare. A raging hit since its debut at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, Zoot Suit, unlike California wines, has not traveled well.

--T.E. Kalem

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