Oct 03
When I met a cute twentysomething guy a couple of weeks ago at an event and he asked me how old I was, I quickly answered “37”. Oops, I’m not 37, but I guess I’m already at that age when a little white lie is oddly comforting because it doesn’t include the number forty in it (and for the record, that adorable boy thought I was 35, ha!). The great Tennessee Williams wrote about our deep-seated fear of aging and its attendant harsh reminders about our limitations and mortality in Sweet Bird of Youth, an overwrought piece of business about an aging movie star (supposedly modeled after Williams’ friend Tallulah Bankhead) and her companion, a younger, but also fading, male hustler. They’re back in the guy’s hometown in Southern Florida where he plans to spirit away his former girlfriend, the love of his life, even under threat of castration from her big-time politician father. It’s rarely revived so when I read last year that David Cromer fresh off his magnificent take on Williams’ masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire in Chicago was planning a Broadway revival with Nicole Kidman and James Franco in it, I was ready to buy plane tickets to New York. Well, the fickle Franco dropped out (I guess he prefers to collaborate with gay porn directors instead?) and the production was cancelled. The Goodman Theater picked it up and thank goodness for that, because this Sweet Bird of Youth now has the glorious Diane Lane, a true movie star, playing the larger-than-cinematic-life movie star Alexandra del Lago in an inspired, freshly well-thought out performance that is ferocious in its steeliness and self-preservation.
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Tags: Goodman Theatre
Oct 02
I saw Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses right after it transferred to Broadway in 2002, after a much-heralded off-Broadway run that began two days after the September 11 attacks. It was one of the highlights of my theatergoing life till that point – Zimmerman’s luminous yet bittersweet adaptation of Greek myths that dealt with death, separation, loss, and transgression bowled me over, and left me sobbing like the New Yorkers sitting around me (seeing tears in a New York theater audience was, and still is, as surprising as seeing tears in a, well, crocodile). It was also the first show that I saw that had a swimming pool as part of the performance space, and I thought then, wow, who would have ever thought to stage a play in a pool? In the ten years since, I’ve seen so many more plays with pools; I’ve seen so many more plays, period, so I’ve become as I’d like to believe a jaded, savvy, not-easily-impressed theatergoer. So when I went to see Zimmerman’s re-staging of Metamorphoses which opened the 25th season of Lookingglass Theater (where she is an ensemble member), with the original design team and with a cast comprised of many of the original Chicago and Broadway cast members, I was a little apprehensive: would this play affect the older, wiser, more skeptical, more self-possessed Francis differently? Should I just have left it well enough alone as a fond, burnished memory of my cultural upbringing? Since 2002, I have had lots of life changes as well, including the significant life-marking loss of my Mom, my greatest influence and cheerleader, in 2006, so I was pleasantly surprised to find out that seeing Metamorphoses this time around was actually a more illuminating and, to a certain extent, gut-wrenching experience. It was also a more optimistic one. Like all great theater, Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses puts up a clear-eyed mirror to your own life – with age and experience, its reflections and reverberations become richer and more profound.
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Tags: Lookingglass Theatre
Sep 26
As you my dear readers know, despite my penchant for outsized theatricality, I am also a sucker for brainy plays (cue Tom Stoppard, Frank Galati’s adaptations of Haruki Murakami). I love navigating through intricately-constructed narratives, subtext-filled dialogue, dense themes, and clever meta-theater. Admittedly however, I also, at times, can find some wordplay-heavy and idea-laden theater to be distancing. Ultimately, I want my theater to hit me as much and as forcefully in the gut and in the heart as it does in the noggin. Two really smart plays from two very smart playwrights have opened over the past couple of weeks in Chicago: Remy Bumppo’s revival of Edward Albee’s 1975 Pulitzer-prize winning play, Seascape, directed by new Artistic Director Nick Sandys, and Victory Gardens’ Chicago premiere of Bill Cain’s recent work, Equivocation, directed by the indispensable Sean Graney. Both are intellectually interesting plays, and the playwrights have intriguing things to say…and say them non-stop. Both are talky, heady work, but both have also been enlivened and given a lot of heart by superlative acting. In my opinion, Seascape, because of a dominant, remarkable performance by Annabel Armour, is the more successful in transforming the work from one that is chilly and removed from the audience, a trap that Equivocation does not fully escape from.
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Tags: Remy Bumppo, Victory Gardens Theater
Sep 24
As a Chicago cultural connoisseur, I really had high hopes for the International Exposition of Contemporary/Modern Art & Design, known around town with its less convoluted nickname of Expo Chicago. I was a big fan of the early editions of Artropolis, the umbrella brand for that conglomeration of art fairs hosted by the Merchandise Mart (Art Chicago, Next, the international antiques fair, etc.) in the late ‘naughts, which unfortunately petered out to a sad, unmemorable, uncared for shadow of its old self (in recent years the fairs individually and collectively came off as slightly upscale versions of the Old Town Art Fair and that is not a compliment) until the Mart mercifully cancelled it early this year. Expo Chicago was going to recapture Chicago’s art fair glory days before pesky upstarts like Art Basel Miami and New York’s The Armory Show came on the scene, something Artropolis/Art Chicago/Next ultimately failed to do. From the buzz, Expo Chicago was going to be our attempt to put on a world-class art fair that will attract galleries, artists, collectors, and just plain old art lovers from all over the world. Having attended the 2011 Hong Kong Art Fair, one of the significant stops in the global art world circuit (and soon to be rebranded as Art Basel Hong Kong in 2013), I’ve had a taste of the experience of a true world-class art fair for a plain old art lover like me. I was blown away by what I saw last year in Hong Kong – it was an education and, at times, over-stimulated immersion in the latest, greatest, most exciting artists, techniques, and approaches (seriously, a hologram installation inspired by Samuel Beckett?). I was not blown away by what I saw at Expo Chicago, which ran from September 20-23. And maybe this was where I had a proble,m: in Chicago, the art fair primarily catered to the (safe? mainstream?) tastes and interests of collectors and the elite art galleries that run after them, and not to the art lover/patron. Which is fine, since art fairs need to make money in order to be viable (and gosh, there was a plethora of Chicago media articles tracking art sales at the fair as if they were the ups and downs of NASDAQ), but did anyone say to Expo Chicago’s organizers that today’s art lover/patron may be tomorrow’s Ai Weiwei collector, or better yet, next decade’s Ai Weiwei?
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Tags: Expo Chicago, Hong Kong Art Fair
Sep 19
I know it sounds so cliché, but this year, time did fly by, like Dreamliner-speed fly by. After a blur of a difficult summer, I’ve suddenly found myself in early September and right smack at the beginning of Chicago’s fall arts and culture season, the fifth one I’ll be writing about since From the Ledge’s inception in 2007. Yes, five years writing this blog – I can’t believe it myself. And it’s so fitting that my fall arts season officially begins with Chicago Opera Theater (COT)’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, the first new Chicago production of the well-worn but well-loved opera in 17 years, in an English translation by Jeremy Sams. The Magic Flute was the first opera I ever saw way back when during the medieval times (actually Manila in the 1970s which, in some aspects, was similar), and was one of the first cultural experiences I distinctly remember; it obviously played a role in shaping the smart, curious, discerning, not to mention fabulous, cultural cognoscenti I’ve become (ahem). I’ve actually always found The Magic Flute to be a fun romp, a shimmying, dazzling, light-hearted ball of operatic silliness and grandiosity, sometimes incoherent, mostly engaging, a great introduction to opera for children and those unfamiliar with the art form. COT’s production, despite some questionable design and directorial choices, doesn’t disappoint – it’s an accessible, fast-paced, gloriously-sung production which should win operatic converts all around.
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Tags: Chicago Opera Theater
Aug 27
I am back. Finally. It has been a beatch of a summer between 15 hour workdays for weeks on end, lingering physical wear and tear, and a distressing week-long business trip into the dark unknown that is central Pennsylvania where gay Asian men from Chicago are about as common as two-headed dogs with wings and pig hooves. Jeah (in the words of that adorable boy Ryan Lochte), it’s been rough. Fortunately, theater in Chicago during the dog days of August is often quiet, so I didn’t feel too guilty, hmmm, sleeping instead of writing a blog post. But the fall theater season is creeping up on us, and I was able to catch a couple of shows that opened this weekend. Interestingly enough, both are quite distinctively-written and staged, and pretty gutsy: Sideshow Theatre Company is mounting the US premiere of German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Idomeneus, an intriguing and quite political take on the Greek myth of the Cretan king’s return to his country, while Vitalist Theatre is presenting the Midwest premiere of British writer Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water), about envy and loyalty among a group of artist-friends, maddeningly yet at times hypnotically staged. Both are risky, adventurous, demanding productions, so I was pretty thrilled to see the packed houses at the performances I attended. Chicago audiences are definitely not pushovers!
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Tags: Sideshow Theatre Company, Vitalist Theatre
When I met a cute twentysomething guy a couple of weeks ago at an event and he asked me how old I was, I quickly answered “37”. Oops, I’m not 37, but I guess I’m already at that age when a little white lie is oddly comforting because it doesn’t include the number forty in it (and for the record, that adorable boy thought I was 35, ha!). The great Tennessee Williams wrote about our deep-seated fear of aging and its attendant harsh reminders about our limitations and mortality in Sweet Bird of Youth, an overwrought piece of business about an aging movie star (supposedly modeled after Williams’ friend Tallulah Bankhead) and her companion, a younger, but also fading, male hustler. They’re back in the guy’s hometown in Southern Florida where he plans to spirit away his former girlfriend, the love of his life, even under threat of castration from her big-time politician father. It’s rarely revived so when I read last year that David Cromer fresh off his magnificent take on Williams’ masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire in Chicago was planning a Broadway revival with Nicole Kidman and James Franco in it, I was ready to buy plane tickets to New York. Well, the fickle Franco dropped out (I guess he prefers to collaborate with gay porn directors instead?) and the production was cancelled. The Goodman Theater picked it up and thank goodness for that, because this Sweet Bird of Youth now has the glorious Diane Lane, a true movie star, playing the larger-than-cinematic-life movie star Alexandra del Lago in an inspired, freshly well-thought out performance that is ferocious in its steeliness and self-preservation.
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