Spector trial as theater

The LA Weekly's Steven Mikulan has been covering the Phil Spector trial like a theater performance, observing the development of characters and scenes. Hey, you may as well. I just can't figure out yet whether the trial is comedy or drama. They run it under the "Phil Noir" banner in the Considerable Town column. From the latest:

It was late in the afternoon at Department 106, the time that jurors’ eyelids droop and the courtroom’s elderly spectators check their bus schedules, when Phil Spector’s murder trial paused for another sidebar. The two deputy D.A.’s and defense attorney Roger Rosen leapt to Judge Larry Paul Fidler’s bench, but Bruce Cutler didn’t budge from his seat, marking another symbolic diminution of his role in the trial. Only three weeks ago Cutler had bombastically laid out the defense’s theory of how Spector wound up with a dead woman sitting in his foyer. Among other things, the lawyer alleged that star prosecution witness Adriano DeSouza’s difficulty with English cast doubt on the chauffeur’s claim that he heard Spector utter the self-incriminating words, “I think I killed somebody.”

Sure enough, when DeSouza appeared on the witness stand last week, he spoke with a thick Brazilian accent, often forcing the court clerk as well as prosecutor Alan Jackson to ask him to repeat himself — with DeSouza also requesting Jackson to rephrase his questions. Then there was the 911-call playback in which his mangled pronunciation of “Phil Spector” was repeated to DeSouza by a dispatcher as “Seal Inspector.”

Also in the Weekly: David Zahniser peers behind the curtain of the Jack Weiss recall effort.