Doubling back to ‘Bass’

Jennifer K Mahal

On a cosmic scale, somehow it makes sense to Louis Fantasia that

he will be performing “The Double Bass” next week at the Orange

County Performing Arts Center after an eight-year hiatus from the

Patrick Suskind play.

Fantasia, who learned the instrument at age 14, had just bought a

new bass last year when the Philharmonic Society called and asked if

he would be willing to resurrect the piece for the Eclectic Orange

Festival.

“The bass showed up the day before the phone rang,” said the

53-year-old over a fruit bowl and a cup of coffee at a restaurant

near downtown Los Angeles. “I wish I was making this up.”

Fantasia had another such funny moment when his parents came to

see the play years ago.

“My mother, in her infinite wisdom, says ‘I don’t remember Patrick

going to school with you,’” he said. “I said, ‘He’s German, mom. I’ve

never met him.’ She said, ‘How does he know all this about you?’”

The one-man play follows the obsessions and frustrations of a

double bass player in a West German state-supported orchestra.

Excerpts from Brahms, Mozart, Schubert and Dittersdorf are played

throughout “The Double Bass,” which mixes musical history with comedy

and a touch of romance.

The double bass player “is obsessed by beauty,” said Fantasia, a

theater critic for KCRW-FM (89.9). “Here he has a big, ugly duckling

of an instrument and he wants it to sound beautiful.”

In part, his need to make the double bass beautiful is tied into

his need to have Sarah, an opera singer whom he has a crush on,

notice him. The player considers screaming her name in the middle of

his performance to get her affections.

“He hopes if he plays beautifully, she will notice him, and she

doesn’t,” Fantasia said. “He hopes what we all hope, that the people

we want to fall in love with us will see us for our inner beauty.”

Fantasia never intended to act in “The Double Bass.” When he saw

the play in Berlin in 1988, he wanted to direct it.

“It struck a chord,” said the man who in 1993 was called “one of

L.A.’s finest directors” by the Los Angeles Reader.

When he couldn’t find the right actor, he decided to tackle the

project himself. The first performance was at the Wallenboyd Theater

in 1998. Opening night, Fantasia said, he had a moment when he

thought he was going to go onstage and throw up from nerves.

“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll throw up, invite them all to the house for

drinks, and pretend this never happened,’” Fantasia said.

He managed to keep it together, and the play went on to run for

seven years with stops across the country.

Leupold, who prefers to go by one name, was the stage manager for

that first performance. He later became the play’s director.

“The challenge this time has been to take the character and

progress him,” Leupold said. “Obviously the actor is not the same

age, so we have to give age to the character.”

The play remains the same, but age has given Fantasia and Leupold

more insight into the lonely instrumentalist.

“Life gives us lessons and we come out of them with more

understanding of where we are and how to relate to the work,” Leupold

said. “When we approach or re-approach a work, we take that with us.”