Joan Crawford Superstar

Joan Crawford Superstar

Chris Chase

Intentional Theatrics

A woman too many currently only know as the callous, abusing mother in Mommie Dearest — a daughter’s memoir and subsequent film that has largely been debunked as totally false — is the focus of Chris Chase’s, Joan Crawford Superstar, now in a totally fascinating and engrossing premiere production by Intentional Theatrics.  With the feel of a live documentary, Joan Crawford Superstar intriguingly provides two viewpoints of the woman who starred in eighty films spanning six decades: That of Young Joan as she starts her career in the mid-1920s as a flapper girl in silent films and of Mature Joan as she is on her death bed in 1977.  The opening scenes of both Joans progress forward and backward, respectively, with dozens of interlocking scenes moving year by year, finally for the two Joans to meet on a monumental night in 1946.  

A script that has taken as few artistic licenses as possible at times becomes a bit encumbered in its spitting out hundreds of tidbits and facts about Joan’s life, but the bio-drama comes to exciting life through the excellent actors portraying the mirroring faces of a younger and older Crawford.  Isabel DeGrandi is a Young Joan who is both light-hearted in nature and dead-serious in determination as she pursues stardom.  Her Lucille LeSueur leaves her home in Texas after overcoming a serious foot injury to land in New York, finding jobs as a dancer both in chorus lines and in club competitions.  She tells us, “If I can get a movie man to like me, I can make a studio love me.”  Her looks, her legs, and her talent gets her noticed; and soon she is in the Hollywood office of Louis B. Mayer who is choosing her in 1925 to be one his next starlets — but not until he runs a contest to get movie fans to come up with a better name for her.  

Lucille is not that happy with his decision to call her Joan Crawford (“That sounds like crawfish”), but whatever “Pops” wants, “Pops” gets.  Soon, the party girl winning trophies nightly at the Coconut Club is America’s sweetheart Cinderella, starring in film after film as a financially or emotionally down-and-out girl swept off her feet by some handsome guy — like maybe her openly gay, handsome pal Billie Haines (Max Seijas) or later with her BFF, the up-and-coming Clark Gable (Will Livingston). 

As we are learning piece by piece of Joan’s early years when she increasingly becomes impatient with being type cast and is constantly bargaining with the reluctant “Pops” for more serious parts, we are also hearing multiple interviews of the elder Joan — now a board member and a global, goodwill ambassador for Pepsi — as she remembers fondly her life and as she still handwrites answers to a thousand fan letters each month.  Donna Turner is outstanding as the vivacious, optimistic Mature Joan who repeatedly assures probing interviewers that she would not change a thing in her earlier life if she so had the chance.  “If I hadn’t had the love, the pain, I wouldn’t be me … And I like being me.”

From both Joans, we hear of her four marriages — only the last which was truly successful — and we hear of her long journey to be recognized by her peers as a serious actor and not just as a flapper made good.  But from Young Joan, we hear an exasperated “I haven’t done anything” as she looks around at others getting better parts and more awards while a minute later, we hear Mature Joan proudly sigh, “I’ve done it all.”  Mature Joan remembers, “I took to being in the camera instantly” while immediately the scene switches fifty years and a nervous Young Joan is coached in her first screen test, “Try to look less terrified of the camera.”  Mature Joan recalls, “I dove into sound with gusto,” while Young Joan’s reaction to being told she must now talk on film is “F-K sound … I’m terrified.”

Those juxtapositioned differences in perspectives (present reality versus fond memories) become the delightfully delicious ways Chris Chase transitions one scene to the next across the two Joans and the ever-collapsing years that they are from each other.  Each actor excellently ages forward or backward with her Joan maturing or becoming younger in their mannerisms, stances, perspectives, and even personalities.  They are aided greatly by the immensely impressive array of decade-appropriate costumes designed by playwright and director Chase, with the Mature Joan especially wowing us with outfits that often are reminiscent of famous photos that are displayed on either side of the small stage in the production’s intimate setting.

Much of the fun and gossip-y aspects of Joan’s earlier life come through the glimpses provided of her relationships with Haines and Gable.  Max Seijas is fabulous as the intense, excitable, flashy handed Billie Haines — an early Hollywood star who deserves his own staged biog.  We learn that this early-film headliner refuses Mayer’s ultimatum to submit to the studio’s demand for a ‘lavender marriage’ and instead continues to live openly for decades with his ‘husband’ while becoming a famous home designer for the stars — aided by his long-time best friend, Joan.  His story is an important and enlightening sub-plot about the effects of the 1934 Hays Act when suddenly films were sanitized of too much bare skin, too explicit love-making, and any hint of acceptance of gays.

Likewise, Will Livingston provides a wonderfully nuanced look at pre-Rhett-Butler Clark Gable — someone Joan helps rescue from B-films to co-star with her eventually in eight films.  Theirs is a true friendship that each clearly wants to be more (especially Clark), but their timing between marriages and divorces never quite works out, as we see in scenes full of both innocent flirting and mutual coaching/support in their careers.

Both Seijas and Livingston play interviewers of Mature Joan as does Erica Flor, who also is hilarious as various ‘hopeful starlets’ seeking advice or a good word to ‘Pops’ from Young Joan.  Beside also an interviewer, Richard Wenzel is “Pops,” Louis B. Mayer, a role that is the least successful of the evening’s portrayals with his never quite hitting the mark to be totally convincing as the famous movie executive.

While there are times when the recounting of films being made (or once made, according to which Joan is the current focus) becomes somewhat like reading a Wikipedia account of Crawford’s life, there is much to relish for even the most casual fan of the great star.  Just learning more about her immense influence on everything from eyebrow width to vodka popularity to the acceptance of women wearing glasses to the immediate popularity of the padded-shoulder look is quite fun.  More important is understand her seemingly sincere early desire and later pride in influencing millions of young women who were inspired by both her films and her real life.  As Young Joan tells Gable:

“I want to tell my friends in the dark cinema that no matter your situation in life, whether you’re an undereducated chorus girl like me or a shop girl like I am in this film, you can overcome adversity to find strength, success, and love if you work hard enough.”

That drive in the Young Joan and that pride in the Mature Joan is a lasting memory of Joan Crawford that I will take from Chris Chase and Intentional Theatrics’ entertaining and enlightening Joan Crawford Superstar.  I can hardly wait the next time my favorite theatre, Palo Alto’s Stanford, offers another Crawford revival on its billing of old films so I can compare the real to the memorable Joan as portrayed by both Isabel DeGrandi and Donna Turner.

Rating: 4 E

Joan Crawford Superstar continues in an eighty minute (no intermission) world premiere production through May 18, 2025, by Intentional Theatrics at 533 Sutter Street, 3rd floor, San Francisco, California.  Tickets are available at https://intentionaltheatrics.com/.

Photo Credit:  Courtesy of Intentional Theatrics