Feb 12

Genius

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Since I’m a pretty frequent theatergoer, I’m probably not as easily impressed by  something as the next guy is (so I heartily snorted with scorn and derision at the suburban soccer dad sitting beside me, over –the-moon with pleasure, at the undistinguished, Broadway-bound trainwreck that was The Addams Family last month).  I see a lot of plays I like, and some that I absolutely love, but it’s pretty rare for me to see something that I’m blown away by.  Something that stops me in my tracks to remind me how invaluable theater can be to living a life intelligently and fully.  It happened in 2007 at Steppenwolf during the unforgettable world premiere of August:  Osage County which indisputably proved the power of great theatrical storytelling.  It hasn’t happened since…well, until this week, when I was at the two necessary nights for Steppenwolf’s Chicago premiere of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s genius The Brother/Sister Plays, which already pulverized with shock and awe New York’s jaded theatergoers, including the New York Times’ Ben Brantley, in their Public Theatre premiere late last year. (My usual full disclosure statement:  I am a member of Steppenwolf’s Auxiliary Council, the theater’s young professionals’ board).  Like August, The Brother/Sister Plays, comprised on one night of the longer In the Red and Brown Water and on another night of the two one-acts, The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet, is great theatrical story-telling.  But McCraney’s important magnum opus is more epic, more ambitious, more risk-taking, not only in theatrical form, but in theatrical content as it navigates through explosive threads in the African-American experience (underage pregnancy, homosexuality practiced on the “downlow” among straight men).  The Brother/Sister Plays is heady, intense, exhilarating, wrenching, proof that theater, with its mix of drama, movement, dance, and music, is the most complete live performance experience possible; more importantly, with its scope, its creativity, its emotional magnetism, it’s probably my theater-going generation’s Angels In America.

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Feb 10

Viewing List

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In the spirit of constructive feedback, my friend Joel suggested I add a blog section listing any upcoming performances I’m attending, so folks like you, my dear, devoted readers, could decide whether you would want to attend the same shows or performances, as well.  That’s probably not going to happen any time soon, since my preciously scarce blog real estate is already quite packed with Twitter feeds, blog rolls, and a listing of shows I had recently attended (which provides a general indication of what potentially would be content for upcoming postings).   However, I do listen to my friends suggestions, even if they’re delivered a little curmudgeonly (and I say that lovingly, Joel!), so here then are some of the performances I’m planning to go to this month.  February in all its cold, snowy glory is always seen as the “dead zone” of the Chicago winter season, but if you judge by the number of intriguing, lively, potentially can’t-miss shows, it’s probably more equivalent to July in Maui, arts-wise.

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Dec 19

2009’s Theatrical Treasures

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cchad-deity-2.jpgI’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. 

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Sep 15

Ten Plays to Watch in Chicago this Fall

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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). 

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Aug 14

Hanging In There

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Man, it’s been close to two weeks since the last blog post.  That’s the longest I’ve gone in between posts since From the Ledge began in October 2007.  Yep, it’s been as busy as I expected it to be, if not more so.  Being on the road for business is a young person’s game, and folks my age struggle to keep up with all the physical and lifestyle demands it makes.   But I’m hanging in there, since the end is quite near, with the Buckeye project officially set to close at the end of August, and everyone can finally heave a sigh of well-deserved relief!  On the other hand, with the weekly commute, summer has flown by and I nearly missed one of my regular arts and culture summer events of the past several years – seeing all three new plays being developed at Steppenwolf Theater’s amazing playwriting incubator program, First Look Repertory of New Work.  Because of time constraints and admittedly poor planning on my part, I only managed to see two of the three plays this year.  I’ve been kicking myself for missing Laura Jacqmin’s sold out Ski Dubai, especially since that play was the last opportunity to see James Vincent Meredith and Cliff Chamberlain before their Broadway debuts in the Superior Donuts transfer opening next month in New York.  I thought Laura Eason’s Sex with Strangers, which got a head-scratching (at least on my part) rave from Chris Jones, and Steppenwolf ensemble member Eric Simonson’s Honest, both still needed a significant amount of development, clarification, and tightening.  I liked Honest, about a James Frey-like best-selling writer whose memoir seems to be more fiction than fact, a little bit more, since it had surprising narrative twists and communicated its central thesis-what constituted truth and could someone live a life of lies without being morally disturbed by it- more clearly.  Although Sex with Strangers felt so contemporary, I thought there were a lot of themes that needed to be sorted out and clarified better – was it primarily about the generational differences in the notion of intimacy?  was it about the generational differences in the definition of success?  was it about the difference between a traditional writer’s creative process and a blogger’s?  was it a play about all of these? and if it was, could the intersections have been tightened and smoothed out more effectively?  The plays though were noteworthy in that they both boasted starmaking performances from their male leads – Stephen Louis Grush, whose onstage electricity could provide power for the entire Mid-Atlantic region, was sexy, cocky, vulnerable, and gutsy as the promiscuous twentysomething blogger who fell in love with an older woman in Sex while Erik Hellmann, who I’ve seen mostly play weaker-willed characters in the past, was astounding and utterly believable as Honest’s emotionally disturbed writer who had made lying a way of life, able to shift from charming to unsympathetic in a half beat.  I would love to see these guys with Blackbird’s Mattie Hawkinson in a play soon! 

Jul 19

Broadway IS in Chicago

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which-precinct-are-these-boys-at.jpgChris Jones is writing on his blog today about what Chicago theater aficionados have been excitedly buzzing about the past several weeks since the confirmation of the Broadway productions of Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain (first produced at Chicago Dramatists in the fall of 2007 and then transferred to the Royal George Theatre for an extended run during the first half of 2008) and of Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts (first produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre in the summer of 2008) came out:  Chicago theater is going to be KING OF THE HILL in the New York arts and culture season this fall, when these two amazing new plays open within days of one another.  I loved, loved these two’s original productions.  Written by Chicago-based playwrights, they are so quintessentially Chicago:  from their shared Uptown setting (as I said in my rave for Superior Donuts:  “Uptown, for me, is a great microcosm of a Chicago in flux, in the midst of change and renewal, but yet still stubbornly, and, at times, proudly, holding on to what made, and makes this city great and unique, both the good and the not-so-good.”) to their distinctive Chicago dialogue and accents (particularly in A Steady Rain) to their uncompromisingly uniquely Chicago points of view on life: straight-shooting, salt-of-the-earth, calloused, pragmatic, a city that’s got it’s people’s backs.  Snobbish New York theater patrons will get the wind knocked out of them!  I am very thrilled to hear too that the entire Steppenwolf cast of Superior Donuts will be recreating their roles on Broadway – our wonderful Chicago-based talent, from Jon Michael Hill to James Vincent Meredith to Cliff Chamberlin, all making their Broadway debuts, will prove once and for all that our city is the go-to city for actors who want to be nurtured and cultivated. A Steady Rain, on the other hand, is going the traditional Broadway mega-star route – instead of the brilliant Randy Steinmeyer and Peter deFaria, Chicago storefront theater actors who definitively created the lead roles here, Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman will be taking them on in New York.  Frankly, I’m ambivalent about this:  I’m thrilled for Huff and Chicago Dramatists, because there will definitely be an audience for the work (Chris is reporting that several millions of advance tickets have already been sold for the play), but I’m not really convinced, having seen the original, that Craig and Jackman are the best choices for these roles.  Tell me where to find a Chicago cop who looks like Hugh Jackman, and I’ll show up wearing only gift-wrapping paper and a red ribbon!  Seriously though, regardless of how good actors Craig and Jackman are (and I saw Hugh in his Tony-winning turn in The Boy from Oz where he was terrific), they’re still stars, known commodities with personas shaped by pop culture (James Bond and Wolverine) so I think it’ll be quite the effort, for me at least, to suspend disbelief that they are indeed truthfully inhabiting the lives of these gritty, emotionally raw Chicago cops (and I hope they’re doing research on those South side accents!).  Regardless, it’s going to be a watershed time for Chicago theater this fall and that’s a GREAT thing!  PS- Since I can’t seem to find the Broadway posters for either A Steady Rain or Superior Donuts, I think no one’s going to complain if I put up these photos of Hugh and Dan instead!