Anemic jokes feel tacked on in Onyx’s ‘War of the Worlds’

Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre's 1938 Halloween radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" is the stuff of legend.

The director, adapter and narrator took H.G. Wells' book of the same name and made it into a series of news bulletins that announced an imminent invasion by Mars. Considering that the show Welles was "interrupting" was part of a noncommercial music station, it's not surprising that the drama felt very real and threw much of the country into a panic. Welles, genius that he was, never did play by the rules.

Off-Strip Productions/Chaos Theatre's John Tomasello has theatricalized the material in a number of ways. He makes it a play within a play, so that we see a flustered Onyx Theatre floor manager trying to round up her cast, actors doubling roles for performers who haven't shown up, and the usual missteps that often occur in live performances.

After a series of news bulletins, Tomasello takes us to the scene of the goriest occurrences, where the Martians are close to annihilating the human race.

Tomasello, I think, has picked the wrong material to try to spoof. What's remarkable about Welles' broadcast script is how detailed and realistic it is. We'd have more fun if the broadcast were done seriously and we were made to understand how well Welles managed to paralyze alien-paranoid America. Tomasello's jokes feel anemic, tacked on. And he hasn't given the actors enough to do.

Directors Jason and Jeremy Nino occasionally go overboard with the silliness, but they just as often keep a tight rein on performances.

Glenn Heath is a majestic, eloquent Welles and an equally dignified professor. His work is admirable for its restraint; he never kids his roles.

Ben Stobber is a likable, befuddled broadcaster. He has a marvelous, brief bit where he (now playing himself as an actor) tries to fill in for several missing radio operators by impersonating different pitches in voice. Like Heath, he plays his comedy straight, and he's all the funnier for it.

For 10 bucks, "The War of the Worlds" could serve as an enjoyable prelude to a long night out. But it's an inconsistent show, full of possibilities that rarely emerge.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat @aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.