As many of you know, I would rather go through a colonics session multiple times than sit through a Chekhov play. I’m also of the view that, after TUTA’s remount of their 2007 hit last year and Strawdog Theater’s current offering, we need another Uncle Vanya production in this city in the same way we need another increase in parking meter rates- befuddling and unwarranted. However, the Uncle Vanya that the famed Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg (one of the three European theaters designated as a prestigious “Theater of Europe”) brought to Chicago last week and weekend as part of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s World Stage series, was not your run-of-the-mill, patience-thinning, narcolepsy-inducing Uncle Vanya, despite running close to three hours, and being performed in Russian with English surtitles. This was a beautifully wrought, immersively conceived, meticulously detailed production performed with astounding clarity by Chekhov’s countrymen, bringing with them the invaluable weight of cultural associations and lineage. This was as good a Chekhov production as you’re going to see ever in your lifetime (and I was very thrilled that this was the hottest cultural ticket in town last weekend, with all performances sold out).
I’m not a theater critic, nor a theater practitioner. I’m just a regular, passionate theater aficionado who writes a blog (and who pays for most shows that I go to see). And it was wonderful to be a regular, passionate theater aficionado who wrote a blog in 2009 in Chicago, when great-not merely good, not just serviceable-theater was available every weekend night. 2009 began with the Goodman Theatre’s Eugene O’Neill Festival, a singular, unsurpassable program of theatrical bravado that I will always remember, and which even long time Chicago residents marveled at. But 2009, for me, was also a year of getting a thrilling first look at world premieres; of seeing plays in random places, whether it was in a warehouse in Ravenswood, inside the rehearsal hall of the Goodman theater, or on the actual stage of the MCA; of discovering new theater companies putting on plays with so much impressive, balls-out fierceness; of finally being validated in my very firm, vocal belief that it is Chicago, not New York City or any other self-proclaiming town, that is the theater capital of the US.
The biggest laugh I had over the weekend (more so than the bellyaching guffaws I tried hard to suppress while watching pseudo-hipsters pretend to look impressed by some atrocious art during the West Loop gallery openings last Friday, but that’s a topic for another blog post) was over New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood’s almost sheepish admission – in print, for everyone to read -that New York theater, specifically Broadway, should be considered the east side of Chicago, given the number of Chicago-originating productions and artists currently on stage in New York. Thank you, Mr. Isherwood, but our fair city already has an east side, so we don’t really need to annex New York City. It was still pretty hilarious, though, to finally see the snobbish, self-promoting, out-of-touch Times theater section admit what many of us passionate theater aficionados have known for a while now – that the vital center of American theater has already migrated from the Big Apple to the City of Broad Shoulders. So while one-step-behind New Yorkers will be drooling over chi-town exports Superior Donuts, A Steady Rain, and David Cromer (making his Broadway directing debut with revivals of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound, running in repertory) this fall, theater-forward Chicago audiences will be immersing ourselves in some of the best theater this side of the Atlantic. I’ve compiled below my annual list of the ten must-see theatrical events in Chicago this fall, most of them world premieres, never been seen anywhere; hopefully I’ll bump into many of you in some of them. You never know, but that obscure, low-key, storefront production you paid twenty bucks for may be next year’s frenzy-inducing hot ticket in New York (exhibit A: A Steady Rain).
Sometimes, when I go to the major Equity theaters in Chicago, it almost seems like I’m sitting down with a Dancing with the Stars DVD marathon. One night, you see dazzling, perfect-leg-kick kind of work ala Shawn Johnson or Melissa Rycroft, and then on other nights, there’s unbelievably atrocious work that recalls Steve Wozniak’s unspeakable, Worm-incorporating samba. So after an ill-conceived Macbeth that undeniably proved that plays with nudity, video-projections, and electronica music scoring could be as boring, unsexy, and old-fashioned as a bocce tournament in a retirement home, Chicago Shakespeare offers up a very modern and hip, cleverly-designed Twelfth Night, directed by the hip and clever British director Josie Rourke. But then, after the once-in-a-lifetime, transformative artistic experience of the Eugene O’Neill Festival at the Owen theater, the Goodman decides to follow those perfect plays with a world premiere of a baffling, incoherent, ultimately soporific “magical realism” play, Asian style, by a highly-regarded female playwright, Naomi Iizuka’s Ghostwritten, one of the greatest disappointments I have had in my recent arts and culture-watching. The highs and lows of Chicago theatergoing can be so maddening!
Last Sunday evening, in what was supposedly spring in Chicago, as I miserably waited for the train to arrive on the Brown Line platform, pelted by freezing rain and snow, standing in slush, I wondered what kind of perfect past life (maybe filled with warm, tropical breezes, constant sunlight, and boys in thongs?) did I have that I should be paying for it in this life. The weather for the rest of the month may continue to be unseasonably cold, but the city’s performing arts scene is continuing to warm up and sizzle, with tons of major theater and music events to go to. As my monthly public service announcement to my avid blog readers, I’m giving a preview of the noteworthy performances and events I’m planning to go to in the month of April.
For me, as a regular Chicago theatergoer, the one thing that makes the recent Chicago Shakespeare Theater Tony Award for Best Regional Theater so well-deserved, and so important for the city, is that they’re the one Chicago theater company, bar none, which has consistently and visibly brought to Chicago audiences the great work being created in other artistically vibrant countries. Over the years, their World’s Stage series has brought in Peter Brook multiple times, France’s James Thieree and La Comedie Francaise, the UK’s Complicite and Cheek by Jowl, South Africa’s Foundry Theater, and Ireland’s Abbey Theatre; this year the program includes the British director Tim Supple’s acclaimed Midsummer Nights Dream, spoken in eight languages, and set in the Indian subcontinent. I am passionate in my belief that we are a great theater town, in terms of the variety of work on view, the brilliant creativity of our homegrown talents, and the sophistication of our audiences, but if there is one thing we lack, in my view, which our sister North American theater capital New York City has, it is access to theater coming from different countries. In addition to Midsummer and the other World Stage production, Sweet William, this coming theatrical season will also see Ivo von Hove (whose astounding New York work I’ve been privileged to attend) and his Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s version of Mourning Becomes Electra, and Brazil’s Compania Triphal as part of the Goodman’s Eugene O’Neill festival, as well as Japanese performer-director-writer Toshiki Okada’s chelfitsch at the MCA’s performance series. As far as I know, that’s it.
Recently Attended Events
- 8/31/2010: The Scottsboro Boys (Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis)
- 8/22/2010: Carousel (Light Opera Works)
- 8/18/2010: Frost/Nixon (Timeline Theatre Company)
- 8/11/2010: A Little Night Music (Walter Kerr Theatre, New York City)
- 8/07/2010: Hesperia (The Right Brain Project)
- 8/03/2010: Billy Elliot - The Musical (Broadway In Chicago at the Ford Center for Performing Arts)
- 7/25/2010: Red Noses (Strawdog Theatre Company)
- 7/23/2010: F**king Men (Bailiwick Chicago)
- 7/18/2010: A Guide for the Perplexed (Victory Gardens Theater)
- 7/11/2010: A Parallelogram (Steppenwolf Theatre Company)
- 7/10/2010: Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida (Bailiwick Chicago)
- 7/09/2010: La Visita de la Vieja Dama (Teatro Buendia at the Goodman Theatre)
- 7/08/2010: Eros (National Pastime Theater)
- 7/04/2010: The Lieutenant of Inishmore (Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles)
- 6/27/2010: Equus (Redtwist Theatre)
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