From the Ledge

Apr 15

No Happily-Ever-Afters, Sondheim version

The last production of Into the Woods that I saw was the Broadway revival in 2002 where Vanessa Williams’ super campy, deliciously fag-haggy Witch looked like it served as a beta version of her more fully realized Wilhelmina Slater character in Ugly Betty (which, lamentably, just ended its four-season run, sigh). For me, a devoted Stephen Sondheim acolyte, this show probably belongs in the middle of the pack of the Great One’s dazzling body of work – although it contains some of Sondheim’s most beautifully haunting songs (“Children Will Listen”, “No More”, “No One Is Alone”) and bittersweet insights about the relationship between parents and children, I’ve always felt it to be a little audience-distancing given its messily-constructed interweaving plotlines and complicated musical rhythms. Which I find quite ironic, given the fact that the musical has, as its main characters, some of the most beloved fairy tale characters ever, Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Cinderella, not to mention a Baker and the Baker’s Wife. So I was interested to see what Porchlight Music Theater, which does Sondheim like no other in this city in my opinion, would do to make this work more accessible. Although I liked some elements of Porchlight Music Theatre’s Into the Woods, directed by Artistic Director L. Walter Stearns, I still didn’t come away thinking this work is transcendent Sondheim, unlike so many of his other works.

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Oct 07

Four Plays: Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

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I’ve seen so many theater openings over the past three weeks, I’ve actually been able to pull some of them together with a clever (or in my mind, at least) blog post theme. Here are my impressions on four season openers currently playing on Chicago stages:

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May 21

Re-settings

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One of the great things about our Chicago storefront theater scene is that it is more likely for you to see a gutsy, no-holds-barred re-imagining of a play or a musical, whether classic or contemporary, than to see a straightforward, literal production (so when you come across a memorable one, such as the last year’s exquisite Uncle Vanya from TUTA, you are wonderfully surprised). For an audience member like me, it is always such a thrill to see what kinds of audacious tinkering, overhauling, or re-versioning our various theater companies are up to. Of course, for every successful risk taken, there are many, many other visions that fall flat or go awry, which I think has to come with the territory. I was able to catch two of the re-envisioned productions currently playing in Chicago over the past week and a half or so. Red Tape Theatre, of whom I have heard great things about with regards to their production of Lope De Vega’s Dog in a Manger last year (which I unfortunately missed), is staging a “freely adapted” Enemy of the People, from the Henrik Ibsen play, re-set in 2009, in a Southern Illinois-like small town, with the main character of Dr. Thomas Stockmann turned into a woman, Dr. Tammy Stockman, and other characters’ genders and relationships re-assigned. Porchlight Music Theatre is closing its season with the lovely Flaherty-Ahrens musical Once on this Island, which possesses one of my favorite musical theater scores ever, but without an island or fake palm tree in sight, having re-staged it as a tale told by immigrants living in a Brooklyn Heights-type neighborhood. Although I admired Red Tape’s, director James Palmer’s, and adapter Robert L. Oakes’ sizable cojones in pulling apart Ibsen, I don’t think I totally bought into the new world they’ve created, and I wasn’t really supported by an overall performance level from the cast that put the H in histrionic. I also felt the conceit that Porchlight used for Once on this Island came off as artificial at times, but I was entranced by an energetic, committedly lung-busting, always riveting, although not always tone-perfect, cast. Both are notable, although some concepts work better than others.