Last night I attended the annual Burbank Chamber of Commerce gala, this one celebrating the City of Burbank’s centennial. One of the interesting things about living in Burbank is finding yourself in the same room as people you grew up watching on television. Case in point:  Two of the celebrity guests were Jo Anne Worley and Debbie Reynolds.

Now, if you’re involved in theatre in Los Angeles, you’ll run into Jo Anne Worley at least a few times, and you’ll know when she’s there. As her Wikipedia page notes, even as a girl she worried she was too loud. I saw a musical “Lord of the Rings” spoof a year or two ago here in town and part-way through it, as everyone laughed along, I realized, “Jo Anne Worley must be here.” And she was. I grew up watching her on “Laugh In.” I was too young to enjoy the show — back in the days of three channels plus whatever UHF qualified as, I remember wishing it would end so something else would come on — and now the show is too dated to enjoy in reruns or specials, so this is one zeitgeist I missed. But the “Laugh In” performers were clearly wonderful, including Jo Anne Worley, who last night unabashedly sang comic two songs (one of which my wife kept singing later — which had me wondering again when it would end and something else would come on).

I grew up knowing who Debbie Reynolds  was, but I can’t tell you why, except that my mother always spoke fondly of her. Pressed by my wife to name one of Ms. Reynolds credits, just one, I came up dry. Ms. Reynolds is clearly very smart, and aware of this situation, because she introduced herself as “Debbie Reynolds — Princess Leia’s mom.” Showing off her fine figure at age 78, she also had the line of the night:  “I would have shown you my tits, but my legs are better.” (I’ll take it on faith.) Debbie Reynolds was a 16-year-old student at John Burroughs High School, my son’s alma mater, when she was crowned Miss Burbank. Burbank has been good to many notable people. I think the most famous person to come from my birthplace, Mullica Township, was the Jersey Devil, and I hear that Port Republic is trying to claim him. She was a very good sport about her age, apologizing if her voice was raw (it wasn’t) because she’d been giving so many interviews on the occasion of Elizabeth Taylor’s death. (“They’re calling me,” she said, “because I’m the only one left.” She also made a couple of good jokes about Liz Taylor stealing her husband — the gist being that she could have him.)

Some years ago, my wife and I went to see Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca because I wanted to “while we still can.” (And, indeed, that turned out to be Imogene Coca’s last performance — and she was wonderful.) Valorie had no idea who they were. A friend and I got to see Charles Nelson Reilly’s amazing one-man show, which ran four hours (I’m not exaggerating) and which I wish was still going on, and that turned out to be not long before he died. I didn’t set out to see Debbie Reynolds in particular, but she and Jo Anne Worley both were fun and bawdy, and made for a great evening, and now I’ve got another memory of seeing great performers live and in the flesh.

As I’ve written here before, digital technology and the internet allow me to do pretty much everything I wanted to do when I was kid but couldn’t because I didn’t have access to people or tools, and couldn’t afford it. But now I’ve got potentially full access — everyone does — through the internet. It’s allowed me to make some very interesting connections — to the founder of Cosmic Encounter (a game I bought at a science fiction convention when I was 14, and which the next generation of Wochners now plays as well), who once commented on this blog; to writers like Christopher Priest and Mike Daisey (who’ve also commented here); and to people whose work I admire and follow, like David Thomas of Pere Ubu. My latest interesting connection:  I just got an email from a PhD candidate in Egypt who is doing her dissertation on American drama;  she found my website and blog and wanted to know my thoughts about playwriting. I’ve made theatre friends in England and Iceland and Turkey and even New Jersey through the internet. It’s a thrill to add Egypt.

I was saddened but not surprised to learn of the death of playwright Lanford Wilson. I knew through Marshall Mason that Wilson had been failing. Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize-winner, a founder of one of our most important theatres (Circle Rep), and a writer noted around the world — but somehow, his death didn’t make the home page of the Los Angeles Times website. A sad statement indeed.

The first play ever that I bought a ticket for was Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” in 1980 (directed by Marshall). It continues to serve as an inspiration — I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of theatre tickets since then. In an odd way, though, that wasn’t my introduction to Lanford Wilson’s work; in 1975, Norman Lear adapted a sitcom from Wilson’s play “Hot L Baltimore.” The show concerned prostitutes, a gay couple, an illegal immigrant, and every other sort of inner-city urban entanglement in a cheap hotel, a milieu utterly foreign to my backwoods semi-suburban middle-class youth. The show came with a mature-audiences warning at the beginning, which guaranteed that my 13-year-old self was going to watch it.

The playwright leaves us on the eve of opening night of two revivals of his work:  Steppenwolf is preparing to open “Hot L Baltimore” in Chicago, and “Burn This” is running right now at the Mark Taper Forum here in Los Angeles. A friend invited me for April 1st; I can’t make that date, but I’ll see it another night while it’s here. If you’re not in Chicago or LA, don’t fret; Lanford Wilson’s plays are always playing somewhere, and they always will.

Forget the Sinister Six. For Spider-Man, the real challenge is outliving the damage this musical is doing to his reputation. Courtesy of Ward Sutton and the Village Voice, here’s his cartoon perspective on how the show went wrong.

Last night, while I was out seeing something else (which I’ll be writing about later today), “Julie Taymor” was trying to salvage her reputation. This clip shows the predicament she’s in — for now.

Mike Daisey’s on-stage investigation of Apple and its impact on the world, which closes today at Berkeley Rep, continues to make waves in the tech sphere, as this piece in today’s New York Times shows. I didn’t get to see it while it was running in the Bay Area — as ideal a home for it, I think, as Hamlet found his uncle’s court to be when he wanted to see his little play staged — but I suspect I will in some place, at some time:  It now moves on to Woolly Mammoth in Washington, DC, and then Seattle Rep.

While I’m somewhat on the subject, I should note that I’m writing this from a MacBook Pro while snowbound in the mountains above Banning, California. I have a wifi signal — although it’s iffy — but my AT&T iPhone can’t connect to the cellular network. One of the regulars here asked a highly placed AT&T executive about getting cellphone coverage up here. His response, I was told:  “Get Verizon.”

Can’t swing the money to see that Broadway show featuring everybody’s favorite web-slinger? You’re in luck:  Here’s information about the five-buck Spider-Man alternative, which in addition to being super cheaper, includes beer.

I just came across this new video about Moving Arts, the theatre company I co-founded in 1992. You know you’ve built something successful when now you find out by accident about marketing initiatives like this, when you’re even name-checked in the video, and you had no idea about it previously. (In other words: They don’t need me any more. Sniff sniff.)

By the way, I saw the one-act festival mentioned herein last week and there’s some terrific work in it. I’m sure that at some point I’ll be stealing that set-design concept, which ingenuously unifies the five plays. Here’s where to get tickets.

We’re less than two weeks out from The One-Day New Play Playwriting Workshop I’m running with Trey Nichols. Click here for more info. To answer some anticipated questions: no, you don’t have to already be a playwright to enroll; yes, actors do well with this; and no, we don’t give feedback in this style:

A week and a half ago, I proposed that the Spider-Man musical might have been better if they’d had an actual Spider-Man writer involved.  Sounds like the producers have now gotten one of those involved — and, importantly, it’s one who is also a playwright.

The unanswered question is:  What could be changed in the script that could make the show better? In my experience, every production gets its own culture — its own informing ethos — that is distinct from what’s in the script; Apple and IBM may both make computers, but they do them rather differently, and what we see is a reflection not just of the different plans on paper, but of the different company cultures. A theatrical production is mounted by a production company, and that company culture is difficult to change. Once you get too far into the rehearsal process, it’s difficult to change directions, and “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark” is a show that, more or less, for better or worse, seems to have opened, and long ago. (It has also been widely reviewed, and savagely panned.) Add to that that this is supposedly the most technically demanding show in Broadway history; what significant changes can be made when you’ve already got that much physical hardware in place? And finally:  With a show that is already legendary for the injuries incurred in some very dangerous stunts, how much will producers want to risk in changing how the rigging and pyrotechnics and whatnot work in relation to the script?

It’s a lot to overcome. I hope they can work it out.