I’m taking a little bit of a break from theater coverage and sharing my thoughts and impressions on some recent memorable dining experiences in this great food town I call home. The next several blog posts will be restaurant-focused, and hopefully will whet my blog readers’ appetites for more!
Tags: Uncle Mike's Place
Probably one of my leading stereotypically gay traits is that of musical theater queen. I just love me a rousing, bombastic, glitter-and-spangles-and-feather-boa encased showtune (and I’ve been known to break into one after a couple of sidecars with the gays and the gals). I’m a big Stephen Sondheim aficionado, but I’m also an equally fervent John Kander and Fred Ebb fan, with their musical theater masterpieces Chicago and Cabaret (just recently in a triumphant spring production I couldn’t stop raving about) near the top of my list of all-time favorite musicals (Sondheim’s Passion and Sweeney Todd occupy the primo spots). One of my favorite memories of the ‘naughts, for example, is the night I led a drunken, but still definitely on-pitch, sing-along of “Cabaret” at a Montreal karaoke bar (and yes, if I recall, there was a feather boa involved). I think the Kander and Ebb musical partnership was genius, not just in creating memorable, hummable, yet intricately constructed songs, but also in clearly and vividly telling stories and creating characters in these songs that build the singular power and impact of the overall piece (Chicago’s “When You’re Good to Mama”, for example, in one dazzling swoop, establishes both the gritty, protectionist milieu of a woman’s prison and the tough-as-nails yet pragmatic character of the warden, Mama Morton). So there was no doubt in my mind that I would catch The Scottsboro Boys, Kander and Ebb’s final collaboration which they were still working on when Ebb passed away in 2004, in its pre-Broadway engagement at Minneapolis’ wonderful Guthrie Theater, after an acclaimed off-Broadway run. And I am pleased to report that The Scottsboro Boys is audacious and astounding, a musical that is bold, brassy, feet-thumping, as all great musicals are, but also disturbing, uncomfortable, but ultimately inspiring in its powerful closing moments. Despite some nits, I think it’s a must-see show for lovers, not just of musical theater, but of exceptional theater in general.
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’d recall how a couple of years ago, I called into question the existence of a Jeff Awards for excellence in Chicago theater that ignored shows and performances that could be described as “brazen, risk-taking, intellectual, original, rockingly-fresh”. As a passionate and informed Chicago theater-goer, the Jeff Awards were about as relevant to me as a swim clinic was to Michael Phelps. I never felt that these awards consistently and impactfully honored the theater that passionate and informed Chicago theater-goers also embraced. Well, until today. I was so pleased to read the nominations for this year’s Equity wing awards that I nearly broke into a showtune in the middle of my three-hour conference call on defining HR system fields (yep, I live such a glamorous life!). I was especially thrilled that, after many, many years of being ignored, TUTA Theater Chicago, where I am currently a board member, was recognized for the flawless ensemble of Bertolt Brecht’s The Wedding. I was also excited that truly great Chicago productions of the past season, productions that could tower over any production in other theater capitals like New York City and London, such as Steppenwolf’s landmark, urgently resonant The Brother/Sister Plays, Victory Garden’s should-have-won-the-Pulitzer-masterpiece The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, Court Theatre’s powerful Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and hilarious The Mystery of Irma Vep (with a special shout-out to the Best Actor nominations of its quick-changing, multiple-character playing lead actors, the priceless Chris Sullivan and Erik Hellmann), and Writer’s Theatre’s brilliant, nearly-definitive, David Cromer-helmed A Streetcar Named Desire, received well-deserved multiple nominations. Of course, the Jeff Awards wouldn’t be the Jeff Awards without any gasp-inducing oversights, and this year, the single, biggest, almost-criminal omission is that of Matt Hawkins’ fresh, inspired, little boy toughie take on Stanley Kowalski for Cromer’s Streetcar, a performance that metaphorically blew me out of the Glencoe theater and deposited me somewhere northwest of the train tracks by Writer’s, a performance so brilliant, the New York Times’ resident curmudgeon, Charles Isherwood, was slobbering all over it in a front-page review that was carried by both the New York and National editions of the paper. I guess Isherwood and Francis Sadac wouldn’t cut it as Jeff voters this year.
Tags: Jeff Awards
I made plans several times to catch Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon during its critically-lauded Broadway run a couple of years ago, but, as it happens with some of my best-laid theater plans, they get thwarted by other, more pressing things (hmmm..such as, my real job?!). I had heard and read rave after rave of the play, and of the iconic performances of Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost, so I was quite disappointed that I found the Academy Award-nominated film version with Langella and Sheen re-creating their stage roles to be unexciting and middle-of-the-road (with a pretty unappetizing visual palette of browns and grays, to boot). I must think, then, that Ron Howard, the film’s director, is to blame for the dulling of Morgan’s incisive, exciting, gut-sockingly contemporary writing. For as TimeLine Theatre Company is demonstrating in its dazzling, triumphant, impactful Chicago premiere, directed by Lou Conte in a striking CNN-by-way-of-Sidney-Lumet fashion, Frost/Nixon, the play makes very powerful points about the delusions and self-aggrandizement of public figures, the addictiveness of both fame and notoriety, the role of media in shaping, informing, and distorting perceptions, points that are strongly resonant in our 21st century with the proliferation of latter-day Frosts and Nixons (Katie Couric exposing Sarah Palin’s foreign policy, and overall ignorance in an interview during the 2008 elections comes to mind) brought about by an unforgiving 24/7 news cycle and diverse media platforms, on the one hand, and bolder, more unrestrained actions of public figures, on the other. Timeline’s Frost/Nixon is, simply, one of the best theatrical productions you can see in Chicago this year; and if you’re not spending your money on getting a ticket to see this show, consider yourself shunned from reading this blog.
Tags: TimeLine Theatre Company
I’m not really ready to let the summer go just yet (although I could definitely live without the sweat baths I take nearly every week while interminably waiting in the ORD taxi line to get home on travel-frenzied Thursday late nights). But I’ve already began to plan my theater schedule for the upcoming six to eight weeks as Chicago theater companies unveil their fall seasons; I’m also taking several trips during this time period to see some of the more hotly-anticipated productions in other theater-mad cities like ours. My plate will be quite full, but what a satisfying, bountiful harvest it will contain!
Tags: Court Theater, Goodman Theatre, Guthrie Theater, Kneehigh Theatre, Shakespeare Theater Company, Signature Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, TimeLine Theatre Company, Tricycle Theatre Co, Writer's Theatre
When I saw Catherine Zeta-Jones screech through “Send In the Clowns” during the Tony Awards telecast, looking and sounding like she just escaped from Nurse Ratched’s ward, I felt relieved I didn’t shell out those 110 buckaroos for a ticket to the first-ever Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. But, almost miraculously, that same week of CZJ’s Tony fiasco, just like a pink ribbon-festooned thunderbolt from the big musical theater palace in the sky, Night Music’s producers announced that Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch, musical theater legends and consummate Sondheim interpreters, would replace CZJ and Angela Lansbury as the actress Desiree Armfeldt and her mother for the rest of the run (well, until November 2010). The shriek that emanated from my loft upon reading the news was something that would not have been out of place in Nurse Ratched’s ward, for sure. I absolutely had to see this production – the ultimate musical theater aficionado fantasia; Peters and Stritch performing Sondheim together is the Broadway musical equivalent of a foie gras-white truffles-champagne dinner. And it is quite the marvelous production (despite my pre-existing quibbles with the work itself, and the mystifying artistic decisions that director Trevor Nunn made), with Peters, in my book, giving the definitive rendition of “Send In The Clowns”, arguably the definitive Sondheim song, and Stritch, mesmerizing, unapologetic Stritch, performing a unique, will-never-be-seen-anywhere-else interpretation of “Liaisons”, another classic of the Sondheim catalog.
Tags: Broadway
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