Iconic songstress Joni Mitchell once said about the 1960s, “It was just a dream some of us had.”
That statement sums up the aging-hippie theme of “That Perfect Moment,” the 90-minute comedy/drama playing at the Little Victory Theatre in Burbank through Jan. 17.
Penned by Charles Bartlett and Jack Cooper, with a couple of original songs by Sky Keegan, the play presents four middle-aged friends whose band experienced one perfect moment of rock history during the Summer of Love, 40 years earlier.
While three of the band mates have managed to move on to adulthood with all its dream-shattering responsibilities and compromises, man-child Mark Vanowen (Tait Ruppert) has spent all his years afterward trying to recapture the glory of that summer, when drugs were plentiful, sex was carefree and music really meant something.
And he thinks he might have scored a comeback for the band by way of an upcoming tribute tour (sort of like the over-hyped “return” tours of Aerosmith or AC/DC), if he can only get the guys back together to rehearse. A problem he conveniently overlooked is that he’s already sold the rights to all the group’s songs to the drummer, Skip (Bruce Katzman), who has since abandoned his liberal, pot-fueled persona to become a money-grubbing (gasp) Republican with a much-younger trophy wife.
Pony-tailed Mark is willing to sacrifice even his marriage for this dream, but as Oscar Wilde said, for a man to relive his youth, he need merely repeat his follies.
Band mates Skip, Al (John Bigham) and Gabe (Guerin Barry) arrive for a holiday party just as Mark’s wife, Sarah, (Kelly Lester) is stomping off, suitcase in hand, fed up with Mark’s guitar, his rock posters and his childish tantrums.
“I thought it was about us,” she wails of his hippie life obsession.
“It is,” Mark insists. “But how can you choose between the Beatles and the Stones?”
Mark’s strategy session with Skip goes about as well.
Playwrights Bartlett and Cooper have written some terrific one-liners, much as if they are used to working on episodic television or SNL skits. But the arc of the story becomes forced and inorganic as it moves along.
Other plays have explored men friend’s soul-revealing secrets, notably Jason Miller’s “That Championship Season” and Yasmina Reza’s “Art.” But the “Perfect Moment” guys are so cookie-cutter that I could clock the arrival of each character’s confessional moment without looking at my watch.
