Whew! It’s the last full week of June and the long fourth of July weekend will soon be upon us. Where was I during this month? Oh right, working on a couple of big deals, and shuttling between New York and Chicago (not to mention having to go out to Schaumburg for a couple of days and getting stuck in notorious, nefarious I-90 traffic). This month felt like I was on a bullet train to nowhere; which is not good for an arts and culture blogger. I can’t believe I haven’t been in a theater since June 1 when I was underwhelmed by Mary-Arrchie’s Beggars in the House of Plenty. Well, the deals have been put to bed and hopefully the next couple of weeks will be a little bit quieter, with more time and focus to savor Chicago’s thriving summer cultural life. Who wants to work like an ox plowing a muddy field during the heightened heat and humidity of July?
I have tickets next week for Tracy Letts’ breathlessly anticipated new play, Superior Donuts, follow-up to the unparallelled success that is August: Osage County, about a donut shop in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, which will close out Steppenwolf’s season. I can’t imagine the hawk-eyed scrutiny and grand expectations (not to mention the demented cattiness of envious haters like Ben Brantley and Hilton Als) that will greet this play, although Tracy has said that this is a more modest, more intimate story than August. Me- I’m just excited to see more of Tracy’s work, because I know it’s going to be unique, powerful, and engaging, regardless of dramatic scale or scope. Superior Donutsis the main story at Steppenwolf this summer, but it’s not the only work that’s on view for those of us who’d rather experience provocative theater than lie on a boat the whole day on Lake Michigan or join the drunken hordes after a Cubs game in Wrigleyville. For the past five summers, Steppenwolf has also been putting on an innovative, new play development program at the Garage Theater called First Look Repertory of New Work. As part of the program, the theater offers 100 audience members a really rich opportunity to observe the new play development process from staged reading to design presentations to rehearsals to actual production. I’m not participating this year because of my crazy work schedule, but during the past two years I did, I found it to be theater geek nirvana. The privilege to see the playwright, director, actors, and artistic staff in a creative laboratory environment is amazing for someone like me who is passionate and intensely curious about the art form. I am sure all three plays will be exciting, but I am particularly intrigued by Perfect Mendacity, by Jason Wells, who wrote the well-received Men of Tortuga during the first year of First Look (which, by the way, was staged for First Lookby now-Broadway sensation Amy Morton) and directed by the brilliant David Cromer, who just directed my most favorite show of the year thus far, the Hypocrites’ Our Town. The combination of Wells and Cromer could be very combustible.
On the film front, as an alternative to the usual mindless summer escapist entertainment (yes, sure, I’m dying to see Wanted), you should head on over to the Siskel Film Center. I love the Siskel’s programming, which is always top-notch. This July, there are two retrospectives that every film buff should absolutely be checking out. First, there’s the ongoing Luchino Visconti series. Visconti is one of the key forerunners of the Italian neo-realist cinema with films like La Terra Trema and Ossessione(due to rights issues, both are not part of the Siskel retrospective), who ultimately went on to direct some of the most over the top, lavish, visionary cinema portraying the decay and decadence of the affluent class such as The Leopard, The Damned, and Death in Venice,with lots of homoerotic subtext and a little bit of giddy camp. If decadence and homoeroticism isn’t your thing, then go see the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers series (on second thought, hmmm…. ) Some of my most pleasurable movie going moments when I was growing up in the Philippines was watching on Betamax (yikes, this is quite the blog post on ancient history) movies like Top Hat and Swing Time. I loved Ginger’s outfits, and first realized from watching her sashay and glide in them, that a feather boa could be a gay guy’s best friend.
Speaking of gay guys, the arts and culture news that caught my eye last week was the New York City Opera’s commissioning of a new opera based on, hold my breath till I need a defillibrator, one of my best movies of all time, Brokeback Mountain. OK, combining that film and the operatic art form (not to mention the waves of, shall we say imaginative, images of opera hunks such as Nathan Gunn, Erwin Schrott, and Mariusz Kwiecien as Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, in, and, ahem, out, of costume) probably gave a lot of gay men cardiac arrest for ten seconds. Personally, I am keeping an open mind and looking forward to what Pulitzer prize-winning composer Charles Wourinen has in store for us, but I’m not really sure that the operatic art form, which has an intrinsic quality of grand emotions and larger-than-life personas, would lend itself to a short story and a movie that revels in precise, delicate, shaded, well-nuanced characterizations.
Recent Comments