From the Ledge

As I was tweeting about this week, there’s so much Chicago theater and so little time.  Which is a great thing.  But I’ve seen several shows this spring season that I really wanted more from.  For me, ultimately, the best theater boils down to the best writing.  If the text is lacking, or fragmented, or seemingly-unfinished, or needing three more drafts to make it watchable, then the play is still unsatisfactory despite the best direction, acting, or design that it may have.  Here’s a roundup of some recent shows I’ve seen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Griffin Theatre, Steep Theatre

As I was settling into my seat at the performance of The Iceman Cometh at the Goodman Theatre, the woman sitting behind me said loudly to her companion, “I think this is the same place we sat in during The Addams Family.” Ok now, wrong theater, honey.  And wrong frame of mind to have at The Iceman Cometh, Robert Fall’s mammoth, demanding production of Eugene O’Neill’s mammoth, demanding play about a group of drunken down-and-outs in 1912 New York City given one brief, final ray of hope to reclaim their lives and redeem themselves by a jovial, tenacious traveling salesman, Theodore “Hickey” Hickman, who turns out to have secrets of his own.  It was going to be a long four hours and forty minutes for this woman and for us sitting around her if she thought Nathan Lane’s Hickey would be anything remotely resembling The Addams Family’s Gomez or The Producers’ Max Bialystock or even The Birdcage’s Albert, all iconic Lane roles.  But like the rest of the packed house that night at the Goodman, this person, bless her soul, stuck it out for the entire nearly five hour production, entranced, I would hope, by the power of O’Neill’s language; and the searing, impeccable interpretation of these words from Falls, his thoughtful designers, and an unsurpassable, astounding cast, including Lane whose ultimately gut-wrenching, indelible Hickey was truly memorable – a triumph in a role sometimes referred to as the Mt. Everest of American theatrical roles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Goodman Theatre

In early 2009, I said that Frat, the second production of the new theater company The New Colony, was “a terrific example of youthful, raw, blistering, ferocious, hungrily-acted and directed Chicago storefront theater”.  Later that year, I said of their Calls to Blood that it was “…gut-punching, heart-breaking, tears-inducing, and throat-catching, quite simply one of my more memorable nights at any theater recently.”  Since 2009, The New Colony has won Broadway in Chicago’s Emerging Theater Award, brought Calls to Blood (re-titled Hearts Full of Blood) to the New York Fringe Festival, and had a bona-fide water-cooler summer hit last year with 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche.  There is no doubt that The New Colony is a vital, pivotal part of the city’s ever-thriving storefront theater scene.  And as an audience member who has followed the theater company since its inception, it has been a thrilling journey.  So I’m really confused and disappointed that their latest production, the original rock-musical Rise of the Numberless, in collaboration with another stalwart of the storefront scene, Bailiwick Chicago, is possibly one of the most ill-advised shows I’ve seen in the past twelve months. Just like the hipsters that throng the Bucktown cross-streets of the Flat Iron Arts Building where it is being performed, Rise of the Numberless is calculatedly-styled, with every pulsating song, fake-angry choreography, and meticulously-set-designed grime strategically placed to evoke a hip-cool-glam-cutting-edge-(insert other buzz words here)-production.  And just like these Bucktown/Wicker Park hipsters (and many of them will probably be flocking to the show because it sounds and looks, oh, so cool), the production feels hollow and superficial, with none of the “blistering” and “heart-breaking” qualities that I found with the theater’s early shows which I loved.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Bailiwick Chicago, The New Colony

As a gay man who grew into adulthood in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tony Kushner’s two-part theatrical masterpiece, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, was the definitive cultural marker for my generation of gay people. The play gave articulate voice, unequivocally and unapologetically, to our sense of self, our concerns, our contradictions, and our perspectives on government, history, and community- both ours and the broader social environment. I read it, I read articles and reviews about it, I saw the indelible HBO mini-series, which was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Meryl Streep and Al Pacino, but I’ve never seen a theatrical production. Since I moved to Chicago in 1998, there had been two significant productions in the city, both of which I missed:  David Cromer’s legendary, talked-about-in-hushed-tones version for The Journeymen in 1998 and Sean Graney’s take for The Hypocrites in 2006.  So I was really excited to see Charles Newell’s new revival for Court Theatre, which, notably, has Kushner’s support and participation, and it did not disappoint. Straightforwardly directed, electrifyingly acted, fluidly designed, Court’s Angels in America is 7  hours of gloriously compelling theater (3 hours for Part I: Millennium Approaches and 4 hours for Part II: Perestroika), with Kushner’s powerful, unforgettable writing, trafficking in both big, global themes, and personal, intimate tragedies, still undeniably relevant in a 21st century American socio-political-cultural milieu that is already an alarming echo of the play’s 1980s Reagan-era setting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Court Theatre

I find it a little ironic that steps away from the old Water Tower, where some people have told me they feel “so cool” coming to the theater to see a famous Chicago chef cook Mexican mole onstage amidst acrobatic acts, real theatrical artistry is in demandingly unapologetic glory at the MCA Chicago.  I’ll leave the dinner spectacle being passed off as theater to others, and recommend, without hesitation, to the smart, discerning, globally-oriented set the myriad of performance pleasures at Teatr Zar’s The Gospels of Childhood Triptych, currently at the MCA in a too-brief run until Sunday, April 1 as part of its essential MCA stage programming.  I can confidently say that the $35 ticket was one of the best uses of my money in the past half year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: MCA Chicago

When I first read in the Goodman Theatre press release last year that the 2011-2012 season will include a new production of Tennessee William’s Camino Real to be adapted and directed by the controversial Spanish director Calixto Bieito, I got that somewhat-nauseated, partly-titillated sense of anticipation usually reserved for bungee jumps or an e-Harmony first date – am I ready for this? Is Chicago ready for this?  I’ve been reading about Bieito in various opera blogs over the years, and I’ve been flabbergasted by the accounts of his deconstructed opera productions which elicit both passion and outrage in equal measure: a violent Aida in Basel transported into a European football stadium, with no pyramids in sight; an infamous Don Giovanni in London set in a Madrid parking lot and chockfull of drug-crazed orgies and anal rape; an ultra-sexual Abduction of Seraglio in Berlin set in a, well, sex club; a see-it-to-believe-it Parsifal in Stuttgart updated to some post-apocalyptic world with a, gulp, zombie chorus. Will there be fornicating zombies, then, at the Goodman, or something even more depraved?  And how will Chicago theater audiences, known for its inherent Midwestern reserve, but also for its embrace of the maverick and risk-taking, respond to a director who has managed to shock and awe “been-there, seen-that” global cultural capitals like Berlin and Barcelona?  Well, I gotta say, I want to give the Goodman and its Artistic Director, Robert Falls, a rousing, extended ovation (and my subscription money for next season) for having the huge cojones to bring Bieito, truly one of the most important performing arts directors in the world, to Chicago. His version of Camino Real is dazzlingly dreamlike, both painful and wondrous in its beauty, a masterful piece of theater that is not commonly seen around these parts.  And I feel very strongly that for Chicago to truly claim its place as a global cultural capital, our audience needs to see and embrace work by someone like Bieito who operates in a unique, elevated artistic realm. Otherwise, we should just be happy to remain flyover country.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Goodman Theatre