“Dragon Lady,” Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles, Sept. 12 – Oct. 6, 2024
Sept. 13, 2024 | By Bruce R. Feldman
In Brief: An emotional roller coaster of a story of three generations of a Filipino family. Sara Porkalob’s tour-de-force performance will make you laugh, tear up, and clap until your hands are sore.
Sara Porkalob stars in "Dragon Lady" at Geffen Playhouse (Photo: Jeff Lorch)
In Dragon Lady, Sara Porkalob vividly recounts the misfortunes, disappointments, occasional joys, and the life lessons she learned from her indomitable grandmother and neglectful mother.
The story starts on the morning of the 60th birthday party for Maria Porkalob, Sr., the feisty matriarch, who escaped childhood deprivation as a teenager in the Philippines in the 1950s by landing a job in Manila as a nightclub singer and occasional call girl.
She falls in love with an American serviceman and moves with him to Bremerton, Washington where she gives birth to Sara’s mother. Maria, Jr. is an irresponsible parent, disappearing for days on end, leaving Sara and her four younger siblings to feed and fend for themselves.
Sara the actor is alternately riotously funny and deeply touching as she brings all of these damaged but loving people to life on stage, expertly mimicking their various accents and mannerisms and switching back and forth between characters in a split second.
Porkalob’s tour-de-force performance will make you laugh, tear up, and clap until your hands are sore.
Porkalob commands the Geffen stage in a dazzling display of showmanship as she relates in a fast-paced two hours incidents from her own childhood and stories that her grandmother and mother passed down to her.
She also sings. Fourteen musical numbers are interspersed into the narrative, starting with a parody of “House of the Rising Sun” (“There is a house in the Philippines…”) and including the standards “Sway” and “Love for Sale” plus original compositions by Pete Irving who also sings in a melancholy deep baritone and leads a soulful three-piece combo on stage.
The action takes place in a vibrant, kitschy Oriental lounge setting, the expert work of designer Randy Wong-Westbrook. Director Andrew Russell shaped Porkalob’s impressive solo turn.
Cash-strapped theaters like one-person shows because they’re inexpensive to produce. Performers love them because they get to hog the limelight for two hours. And, who doesn’t like to be the center of attention?
As solo shows go, Dragon Lady is right up there with the best.
“Dragon Lady,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90024, geffenplayhouse.org, (310)-208-2028
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