Between the irritating travelers who cut in front of you to try to board the plane before their group number is called, the screaming babies and restless toddlers with their parents sitting indifferently by, and the drunken, sweaty men who plop into your private space in the hotel bar while you’re trying to nurse your gin and tonic in stony silence, those who travel for business like I do know exactly the meaning of “hell is other people”. That’s the most famous line of Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic existentialist play No Exit about three people in hell doomed to spend eternity together in a small, crooked, locked room. It’s a play that’s strangely incandescent yet ruthlessly biting, hilarious yet at the same time cynical and pessimistic. It’s a play, then, I think, that’s totally up the alley of The Hypocrites and its hyperkinetic cultural savant of an Artistic Director, Sean Graney. I enjoyed their staging of No Exit for what it was and I’ll enthusiastically recommend it to all. I have to wonder, though, whether Graney’s tongue-in-cheek, undeniably hip, cultural potpourri of a production dilutes Sartre’s bite, making the play more of an intellectual sprint than a half-marathon, as it should have been.
For an arts-savvy city like Chicago, arguably one of the most important cities for theater in North America, I find it odd that many of the musicals I’ve seen staged in this town in recent years tend to ply the safe and conventionally sound route. I guess we like our straight plays bold, risky, and gutsy, while, other than a few exceptions (Adding Machine: A Musical comes to my mind), we like our musicals dazzling, uplifting, and sing-along-to bombastic. So I was really looking forward to seeing The Hypocrites’ Cabaret, guest directed by the House Theater’s Matt Hawkins, because this is one Chicago theater group that’s probably not going to take musical theater on any of its usual terms. I went in with some trepidation, though, for several reasons. First, this is one of my most favorite musicals of all time, ever since, as a teenager, I was captivated by the Bob Fosse/Liza Minnelli film, which I saw over and over again on VHS. I’d be devastated if songs were truncated or re-arranged or messed with in the spirit of “re-invention”, something the Hypocrites have been known to do with dramatic material in the past. Second, there’s already that iconic Sam Mendes “re-invention”, the revival co-directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall, which transferred from the Donmar in London to Broadway and lasted for 6 years and 2,377 performances. I saw that production several times, once with the acclaimed original cast of Alan Cumming, Mary Louise Wilson and Ron Rifkin and the first replacement Sally Bowles, Jennifer Jason Leigh. No one who’s ever seen that show in New York, or the touring production that came to Chicago several times in the ‘naughts, will ever forget the indelible ambisexual explosiveness and searing political commentary that Mendes drew out of the text. It’s so unforgettable, I guess, that the Chicago Tribune’s terribly dismissive review of the Hypocrites’ work used it as the guide to point out how this version of Cabaret failed (memo to the Trib’s theater section: Mendes had one interpretation, not the definitive interpretation). I’m glad to disagree with the Trib once again: I think the Hypocrites’ and Hawkins’ Cabaret is terrific, astounding, confidently and boldly amped-up, a play with songs, more Brechtian annotation than Sidetrack “Showtune Sundays”, a musical, finally, that this sophisticated theater city deserves.
As avid readers of this blog know, I have pretty definitive ideas on what I like when it comes to theater (challenging material, creative re-envisionings) and on what I don’t (inanity, inauthenticity, audience pandering). Sean Graney and The Hypocrites are definitely often in the “like” column, and sometimes even in the “very much liked” one; I strongly feel that they have an abundance of collective creative genius which is not often surpassed in the city’s storefront theater scene. Although I admired elements of Graney’s new adaptation of Frankenstein, the first time the Hypocrites, a truly edgy storefront theater group was performing at MCA Stage, a truly edgy performance space and presenting entity (why did it take so long?), I left the show discombobulated, the second straight Hypocrites production (after Oedipus) that I didn’t really buy into.
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).
As most of my friends can attest, I love overwrought, from Almodovar to Bizet, Bette Davies to Dalida. And what can be more overwrought than Greek tragedy, with its ridiculous twists of fate, and all types of mayhem from incest to murder to self-mutilation to sexual outrageousness? I think the most memorable contemporary productions of Greek tragedies that I have seen are the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously, that embrace the over-the-top nature of the tale, but at the same time preserve the inherent insights on human fallibility and the role of destiny and circumstance (one of my favorite productions, for example, was the New York production of Sophocles’ Electra several years back in which Zoe Wanamaker as Electra and high-heel wearing Claire Bloom as Clytemnestra performed in a gigantic sand pit, a theatrical device both riveting and inane). So I was very excited to see The Hypocrites and its Artistic Director Sean Graney’s take on Sophocles’ Oedipus since if there was going to be a group in Chicago who’ll redefine Greek-style outré, it’d be them.
As my avid blog readers know, I am an enthusiastic supporter of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s performance season, known as MCA Stage. I whole-heartedly agreed with one of my Chicago culturati friends when he said that MCA Stage is like our own version of the Brookly Academy of Music (BAM) in New York, the one institution in the city that has the vision, the commitment, and yes, the balls to present cutting-edge, risky, courageous, potentially audience-distancing work from both US-based and international arts organizations. The fact that they brought New York experimental theater Elevator Repair Company’s mesmerizing seven and a half hour Gatz last year (one of my top ten cultural experiences ever!) makes me want to throw money at them, regardless of what they’re showing. They just released their 2009-2010 season this week, and I’m already itching to open my wallet. I’m a little surprised, and a tad disappointed, that MCA Stage only has two straight-up theatrical offerings next year: our very own The Hypocrites is putting on an original adaptation of Frankenstein (October 21-November 1, 2009) from Artistic Director Sean Graney, to be staged in his trademark promenade staging; and experimental theater provocateur Young Jean-Lee’s The Shipment (March 26-28, 2010), a “Black identity politics” show using a mix of song, dance, theater, and stand-up comedy, which may make the Wooster Group’s controversial The Emperor Jones seem like an Easter garden brunch by comparison. There’s a very strong dance focus this year, with dance greats Lucinda Childs and Anna Halprin, and contemporary dance groups that have never been seen in Chicago such as the John Jasperse Company, as part of the season, but the one performance I’m looking forward to is a potentially bombastic collaboration between London-based choreographer Akram Khan and the National Ballet of China called bahok, from the Bengali word for “carrier”, which explores issues of cultural and national identity within the throughline of multi-cultural passengers stranded in an airport. It sounds ridiculously good! You can view the entire MCA Stage season here.
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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