Yes, my avid blog readers, I have not posted in a week. That’s what happens when you’re thrown into the crazy business travel circuit - I was in Park City, Utah late last week and over the weekend, staying at a faux Alpine lodge resort (incredibly, the resort staff were wearing lederhosen and trilling “Guten tag” during wake-up calls…I thought I was in a really cheesy dinner theater production of The Producers, uhmm, is that you Franz?), then in Cleveland this week, and Phoenix next week. It’s not ideal to be away from Chicago at this time, since there are boatloads of plays opening every week to launch theaters’ fall seasons, but thankfully I was able to see two of the highly-anticipated ones before I got on the first plane out. The People’s Temple is written and directed by Leigh Fondakowski, a co-creator of The Laramie Project, and is the inaugural production in PJ Papparelli’s first full term as Artistic Director of the re-vitalized American Theater Company. Amadeus, Gary Griffin’s production of the acclaimed Peter Shaffer play, opens Chicago Shakespeare Theater‘ s first season after winning the coveted Tony Award for Best Regional Theater last June. Both are strong, notable productions with some really exceptional acting, but with also significant gaps in conceptualization or staging; regardless, both prove that Chicago continues to be the most exciting theater town in America.
Chicago’s top tier arts companies are continuing with their mostly successful efforts to reinvent and reinvigorate classic works in theater and opera (and maybe draw in younger, broader, non-traditional audiences, but more on that later) by framing them within distinctive, imaginative, unexpected “high-concepts”. For me, the pinnacle of this trend so far this year has been the Court Theater’s Titus Andronicus, which I raved about here, where the Shakespearian tragedy was performed as part of the initiation rite for an elite, Skulls and Bones-type, secret society for young men. Over the past week, I went to see productions re-conceptualized in a similar manner: the Chicago Opera Theater’s version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, set in an, ahem, S and M club; and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s play-within-a-play production of The Comedy of Errors, in which a British film company in the 1940s is filming well, The Comedy of Errors, while London is being bombed by the Nazis. Both productions, although still not surpassing the Titus Andronicus benchmark for how successfully a re-conceptualization of a classic piece can provide fresh, relevant, multi-layered insights, are spectacular, and particularly in the case of Don Giovanni, quite the cocktail party conversation starter.
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