The long Fourth of July weekend has a way of sneaking up on you and making the week before seem hazy and lethargic. So I’m just catching up on the arts news from last week, which had quite a number of sizzlers! Hottest theater news - Chicago version: The Hypocrites, one of the Chicago arts groups that really matter, announced their 2008-2009 season last week. Someone douse me with a firehose, quick, since, from the email release, this Hypocrites season looks to be one of the hottest, and promises to be one of the most-talked about, seasons of any Chicago theater in the coming year. The season-opener is Brecht and Weill’s masterpiece, The Threepenny Opera, to be directed by Sean Graney, one of Chicago’s most risk-taking and wildly inventive directors, at the Steppenwolf Garage. Graney doing Brecht and a musical? Stick me with a defillibrator right now (or better yet, have Christian Bale give me 10 minutes of CPR), my heart is uncontrallably pounding with excitement! The season also includes a production of The Hairy Ape which will be part of the Goodman’s O’Neill festival (with the Wooster Group and the Netherland’s theatrical enfant terrible Ivo von Hove also participating, this festival will definitely not be O’Neill as read in college sophomore English classes); Graney’s three-person Oedipus Rex to be staged promenade style; and the remount of the magnificent David Cromer-helmed Our Town which I raved about here. Hottest theater news - New York version: Broadway will be seeing this fall the acclaimed Royal Court production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with most of its London cast intact, including the fabulously incandescent Kristin Scott-Thomas of The English Patient fame, who won an Olivier Award for her performance as Arkadina. The one big casting change from the London production, though, which has sent various Francis biological and genetic processes into nuclear overdrive is Peter Sarsgaard, brilliant actor/thinking (gay) man’s sex symbol/the-one-guy-I-would-shapeshift-into-Maggie-Gyllenhaal-for, playing Trigorin in lieu of Chiwetel Ejiofor. Just thinking how marvelous (and how hot and sexy) Sarsgaard would be performing Chekhov is enough for a flame-retardant blanket to be thrown over me! I can’t wait to see this production, and I’m booking my flight and buying my ticket soon! Hottest art and culture-related news of the week: Fritz Lang’s hypnotic Metropolis, one of the most influential films of all time, and one of the two German expressionism films that I really admire (the other one being Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) is also famously one of the most incomplete masterpieces of all time. Paramount Pictures, its US distributor, cut out key scenes and characters in order to make it more palatable for the American mass market. A complete version of the film had been thought lost for the past eighty years, until a small Argentinian film museum discovered a copy in its archives. Movie fans have been rejoicing and drinking themselves silly over this news- finally, there will be an opportunity very soon for everyone to see the movie as Lang envisioned it to be. And if the mutilated film version is a classic, everyone’s holding their breath on how masterful the complete version will turn out to be. I first read about the Metropolis discovery on Rob Kozlowski’s blog last week, which had a, ahem, pretty vivid description of its impact on film preservationists.
It’s all about the “duelling” Our Towns this week in Chicago theater news. The much-acclaimed, and very much sold-out, Hypocrites production, directed by, and starring, the current darling of New York’s theaterati, David Cromer, is closing as scheduled this Sunday, June 8, but will be re-mounted for six weeks in the fall, still at the Chopin Theater, and still (sigh of relief!) with Obie and Lucille Lortel-winner Cromer as the Stage Manager. I was blown-away and mashed to a pulp by the production, which I raved about here- it’s on my top three cultural experiences of 2008, so far. Right on the heels of that announcement, Lookingglass Theatre, which had previously announced a production of Our Town for its 2008-2009 season, to be co-directed by August: Osage County’s Anna Shapiro (a sure bet to win the Tony Award next week for Best Director of a Play) and Jessica Thebus, confirms the cast for their production, scheduled to begin in February 2009, which includes ensemble members Joey Slotnick as the Stage Manager, and the most famous Lookingglass alumni of them all, David Schwimmer, as George. For grins, check out this heated January discussion on Chris Jones’s blog about David Schwimmer’s thespic talents being put to use (for good or for ill depending on who’s point of view it is) in Our Town, in which Mr. Schwimmer ultimately jumped into. I am a very avid fan of Anna Shapiro, and admire Jessica Thebus a lot (her production of When the Messenger was Hot was one of my genuinely heart-warming nights at the theater last year), but I am really hard-pressed to conjecture how their Our Town can surpass the gravity-stopping and emotionally-wrenching brilliance of Cromer’s production for the Hypocrites. The Lookingglass Our Town will be going against such a high standard of artistic excellence, and I certainly am crossing my fingers that it can at least approximate it, not necessarily surpass it. And for the record, for those who have never seen David Schwimmer onstage and only know of his work as Ross in Friends, I think you all just have to bite your tongue black and blue, since I do think he is a superb stage actor which he ably demonstrated in Lookingglass’s The Idiot (which I saw probably around a hundred years ago).
I’ve seen a lot of theater everywhere and anywhere so I consider myself a pretty sophisticated, worldly, bordering on the jaded, theater-goer. I like being jolted, startled, provoked, metaphorically bitch-slapped, left with mouth wide-open, when I go to the theater. I dislike sentimentality, corny warm-fuzziness, Pollyanna and American pastoral antics, predictability, tidy resolutions. So I was very perplexed when I first heard that the Hypocrites, one of the most admirably brazen theater companies in Chicago, who staged Sarah Kane’s Psychoses 4.40 as an audience walkaround and placed the actors inside a life-sized aquarium in Maria Irene Fornes’ Mud, had included Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, that warhorse drama of small-town Americana, the most produced play in the US every year, often parodied, sometimes derided, as part of its 2007-2008 season. Our Town? WTF? Granted, I have never seen a live production, and know it from its reputation as well as from the old-fashioned 1940 movie starring William Holden as George and Martha Scott as Emily, but hey, I’m “sophisticated, worldly, jaded” - this play was the one thing that made me think twice about purchasing a Hypocrites season subscription, since it felt so contrarian and out-of-place. But I’ve learned my lesson- never underestimate the intellectual savvy of a group as passionate about theater and as original as the Hypocrites and its Artistic Director, the always surprising Sean Graney. Oh, and read the fine print, because the subscription brochure did say that this Our Town would be directed by David Cromer, the Chicago theater director who has left the New York theatrical community in seizures and lying prostrate at his feet after successfully transferring the magnificent Adding Machine, A New Musical from Evanston’s Next Theatre to off-Broadway. The Hypocrites’ Our Town by Thornton Wilder, directed by David Cromer, is, quite simply, the best play I have seen so far this year.
The long Memorial Day weekend is coming up, and many theater companies are sprinting towards the finish line of their respective seasons, so there are a lot of plays currently running on Chicago’s stages. I thought I’d be able to publish, on a semi-regular basis, the list of upcoming performances I was planning to go to, but it just hasn’t happened, since I had to first keep up with actually being able to go to the theatre with the numerous selections on view (plus my day-and-night consulting job got really busy over the past couple of weeks). For my dear blog readers clamoring for guidance on what to see next, here are some options to consider (and I’d love to hear what folks think after I post on them): Read the rest of this entry »
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