I was bummed when I missed Strawdog Theatre’s Red Noses last year. After all the critical acclaim came out, it was one sold-out house after another. So when I heard that Strawdog was remounting it this summer, after a one-week stint at Theater on the Lake, I swooped down on those Red Noses tickets like Bethenny Frankel on baby gear. On the other hand, I have resisted going to Billy Elliot – The Musical since it opened last March for a variety of reasons. I was never a big fan of the movie in the first place, and, although I appreciate the revenue that Broadway in Chicago brings into the city, I’m also not a big fan of “corporate” theater, manufactured and distributed for mass consumption. But when someone passed on a discount code to the show, I jumped on those Billy Elliot tickets as well, just like Bethenny’s fellow New York Real Housewife Ramona at a Chanel sample sale. I know there’s been a lot of ink (both print and online) already spilled over these two shows, so my two cents may not amount to much, but I thought I’d still share my impressions on both, which, in a single word, is… “underwhelming”. I sort of expected that with Billy Elliot, I was really disappointed to feel that over Red Noses.
There’s a compact satellite of the Chicago downtown theater district right off Michigan Avenue at Chicago Avenue. I
‘ve gone quite regularly to the MCA Stage, the performing arts venue of the Museum of Contemporary Art, over the past several months since they’ve had a really exceptionally strong season (including the transformative Gatz, one of my top ten best live performances for 2008). But I haven’t been to the Lookingglass Theater in a while since I’ve never been a big fan of the group (their excruciating The Wooden Breeks in 2007 was one of the most traumatic nights of Chicago theater I’ve had in years), and although I was at Drury Lane Theater Water Tower Place in December for Meet Me in St. Louis, I don’t really make it a regular stop on my personal theatergoing circuit since I find a lot of their shows to be more suitable for the palettes of the tourists crowding the intersection of Chicago and Michigan like spillovers from Epcot Center. So it was quite the coincidence that three of the last plays I’ve seen were ones that were being mounted in the area. I was curious to see what Lookingglass and its reunited famed ensemble would do with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, coming on the heels of an unforgettable version from The Hypocrites and David Cromer which has now transferred off-Broadway. Last weekend, I wanted to catch the Japanese avant-garde performing company, Chelfitsch, which has set the international theater scene abuzz with their unique take on the reaction of Japan’s Gen Y-ers (The Lost Generation) to the war in Iraq, Five Days in March, but had a limited three performance run at the MCA. And then, after a really intense diet of O’Neill, Arrabal, Shakespeare, Shepard, and Peter Weiss by way of Rwanda during the first month and a half of the new year, I needed the rabid theatergoer’s version of an office worker’s mental health day, so I threw all caution and artistic taste to the wind and purchased a ticket for, ok, avid blog readers can gasp now, the touring version of Xanadu, here at the Drury Lane, courtesy of Broadway in Chicago, for an open run. Here then are my thoughts on each of these productions.
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