Santa Monica, CA (The Hollywood Times) 06/04/2026. It’s one thing to stage a charming and irresistible play, as City Garage is doing with its current production, Limonade Tous Les Jours: A Paris Love Story. But when the offstage relationship is as charming as the play, that’s a real life romantic love story.
“This is kind of a departure for us,” Charles Duncombe admits cheerfully, “to do something that’s purely a love story and more of just an entertainment.” Then he adds, “But there’s also a lot of deep reflections about the nature of love and relationships, what brings people together, what keeps them together, and what drives them apart…”
Which is something that this married and working couple know from their own experience. Their theatre and personal lives are inseparable.
Frédérique Michel, Artistic Director and Charles Duncombe, Executive Director, have built City Garage’s reputation over four decades in Santa Monica, producing bold, provocative, sometimes confrontational, often political theater that wants to shake you, not soothe you. And, from time to time when appropriate to the tale being told, it has included nudity, which is unique in the LA Theatre scene. Limonade Tous Les Jours: A Paris Love Story is completely uncharacteristic of the kind of work audiences have come to expect at City Garage.
Written by Charles (Chuck) Mee — a playwright City Garage has a long relationship with — the play follows a freewheeling young French cabaret singer and an older American man, both coming out of prior relationships, as they circle each other in a Parisian café and around the city, simultaneously falling in love and cataloguing all the reasons it cannot possibly work. It is sweet and funny and surprisingly tender. And in Frédérique’s hands, it has become something more than Mee originally conceived.
In the original script, there are just two characters. But when Cruz St. James, a young performer of exceptional gifts, arrived at auditions, Frédérique was immediately captivated. She created the new role, pulling material from other Mee plays to transform the waiter/bartender into something closer to a guardian angel: a spirit of love who watches over the two would-be lovers, nudging their story forward without their awareness.
Cruz dances (he’s trained in ballet), sings, tends bar, waits tables, and glows with a kind of radiant, category-defying presence that adds an extra joie de vivre to the play. ”He’s fabulous,” Charles says.“Incredible. He loves to perform, he’s happy all the time. He’s got it all.”
Mee was delighted with Frederique’s adaptation. “He was quite happy with it,” Charles says, “because it replicates his own process.” Remixing his own work is something he does himself — he calls it “remaking,” freely borrowing across his own catalog to build new texts.
You begin to understand why Frédérique and Charles are so at home with a love story. They’ve been living one for more than forty years — and it is, as Charles says with evident pleasure, “a very French sort of story.”
Frédérique came to the US with her then-husband. “He was writing for a newspaper, interviewing big stars. And one day he gave me a camera and said, ‘You are taking the pictures.’ And I said I don’t know how to take pictures! He said, ‘Just do this,’ They were big, big stars and I was hoping that each time the photo would work because I had no idea what I was doing. But it did work!”
She had been an actress in France, “But when I came here, I was used to theatre, and here it was like TV, film, an agent, a manager, and it was too different for me.” She was fortunate to meet Ruth Flinkman, who was running the Off Main Theater in Santa Monica. “She was producing, I was directing, and she came to every opening night and is still a huge patron of our theatre.”
Charles was working in film and television when he parked in front of the Off Main Theatre. A sign posted in the window caught his eye: they needed someone to help build a set. He went into the health food store next door, and saw a beautiful red-haired woman dressed all in white, and, as he tells it with a laugh, “Well, that’s the story of my life — I’ll never have the courage to say anything to her.”
Going back to his car, he looked at the sign again. The woman from the health food store was Frédérique, who asked him bluntly, in her strong French accent, “What do you want?” He mentioned the sign. She looked him up and down. “Come back tomorrow at four o’clock,” she said, “and we will see.”
He came back and, as it emerged, he became the entire crew! He bought a saw and a hammer and built the set for her production of Miss Julie. She loved it. Over the next couple of years, working alongside her, he fell in love with her, but found out she was married.
“One day,” Frédérique continues, “my husband said ‘I think this man likes you and you like him.’ So he went to see Charles, they talked and said we must talk to Frederique, and asked me to choose. I said can I have you both? And they said we don’t think that will work.”
Charles continues, “I told him I think I need to step out and I am sorry for causing this confusion. But within a year or so, we came back together.” They all remain friends to this day, spending Christmases and other holidays together, even taking diving trips with one another. “No anger, no resentment, no drama,” Charles says. “It was just like — okay, it’s a new phase of life.”
They’ve been partners in life and in work ever since. The company they built together has remained essentially three people: Frédérique, who directs everything; Charles, who handles design, production, and writing; and General Manager Paul Rubenstein, who does photography, programs, and newsletters. No dues-paying membership, no rotating directorship. Just a company of dedicated performers under one director’s singular vision, sustained for four decades.
“There have been some theaters in France that were like that,” Charles says, “but we’re the only one we know of in this city that is purely one director’s theater.”
The company has lived in many spaces across Santa Monica over the years: the Off Main Theatre, where it all began; the Santa Monica Pier’s old Billiard Building (for a dollar a month); the namesake City Garage itself, an abandoned 1930s police parking structure in an alley, stall markings still painted on the walls, was home for nearly sixteen years.
Currently they’re at Bergamot Art Station, though the future of that arrangement is uncertain. The site has been declared surplus property, with affordable housing development on the horizon. Their lease expires at the end of next year.
The company operates on a budget of roughly $175,000 a year — “peanuts,” as one observer put it, with awe — sustained by grants, individual contributions, and the continued loyalty of people like Flinkman, who has given generously every single year. Only about 20 to 30 percent of income comes from ticket sales. The rest is faith.
What sustains it, ultimately, may be the same thing that makes Limonade Tous Les Jours so unexpectedly moving: the absolute commitment to the work itself. He designs; she directs; they discuss everything; she decides. “If she doesn’t fall in love with a text,” Charles says simply, “she’s not doing it.”
She fell in love with this one. You can feel it in every scene.
Limonade Tous Les Jours: A Paris Love Story is currently playing through June 28 at City Garage, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building G1, Santa Monica. For tickets and information, visit citygarage.org.
