Out of gas – that’s exactly how I feel after a gruelling 2011 hopping around three continents and working non-stop on demanding client projects. I’ve been popping in and out of this blog intermittently for the past several months, because, frankly, at the end of a sixty hour week and several flight segments, all I want to do is curl up on my couch with Thai food and the latest episode of Revenge (coupled with thoughts of eating said Thai food off Joshua Bowman’s eight packs…grrr!). But I have a rare week in Chicago this week, so I thought I’d catch you guys up on the Chicago theater season, which has definitely kicked off with a whizzbang, and has been as hot as the confoundingly unseasonable winter weather. Out of gas is also, literally, descriptive of the subject matter of Enron, Lucy Prebble’s sometimes funny and imaginative, sometimes mannered, parable about the rise and fall of the Texan energy and commodities trading company whose early 2000s demise still has resonance for today’s financial markets meltdown. Timeline Theater’s Chicago premiere is notable for the storytelling, despite the fact that the story itself, as Prebble writes it, isn’t as multi-dimensional and insightful as one expects it to be, especially since the Enron debacle was such an economic watershed that brought down companies and affected the lives of tens of thousands of people.
It is that time of year again when I’m making lists – from things I’m going to give up in the new year (eating pork belly being one of them) to places I’m going to visit in 2011 (return trips to Hong Kong and Vancouver and a first trip to Rio de Janeiro on top of that list) to the various ways I can meet hot chefs in the city (oops, ok, that’s a secret list). I’ve also compiled my annual ten best theatrical experiences for 2010, a list, as always, compiled from the point of view of a passionate audience member. It was another strong year in Chicago theater, and I saw plays everywhere in the city, from the major houses like the Goodman and Steppenwolf, to most of the storefronts, to the basement of an apartment building in Uptown where folding seats were set up in front of washers and dryers. Fantastic!
I made plans several times to catch Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon during its critically-lauded Broadway run a couple of years ago, but, as it happens with some of my best-laid theater plans, they get thwarted by other, more pressing things (hmmm..such as, my real job?!). I had heard and read rave after rave of the play, and of the iconic performances of Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost, so I was quite disappointed that I found the Academy Award-nominated film version with Langella and Sheen re-creating their stage roles to be unexciting and middle-of-the-road (with a pretty unappetizing visual palette of browns and grays, to boot). I must think, then, that Ron Howard, the film’s director, is to blame for the dulling of Morgan’s incisive, exciting, gut-sockingly contemporary writing. For as TimeLine Theatre Company is demonstrating in its dazzling, triumphant, impactful Chicago premiere, directed by Lou Conte in a striking CNN-by-way-of-Sidney-Lumet fashion, Frost/Nixon, the play makes very powerful points about the delusions and self-aggrandizement of public figures, the addictiveness of both fame and notoriety, the role of media in shaping, informing, and distorting perceptions, points that are strongly resonant in our 21st century with the proliferation of latter-day Frosts and Nixons (Katie Couric exposing Sarah Palin’s foreign policy, and overall ignorance in an interview during the 2008 elections comes to mind) brought about by an unforgiving 24/7 news cycle and diverse media platforms, on the one hand, and bolder, more unrestrained actions of public figures, on the other. Timeline’s Frost/Nixon is, simply, one of the best theatrical productions you can see in Chicago this year; and if you’re not spending your money on getting a ticket to see this show, consider yourself shunned from reading this blog.
I’m not really ready to let the summer go just yet (although I could definitely live without the sweat baths I take nearly every week while interminably waiting in the ORD taxi line to get home on travel-frenzied Thursday late nights). But I’ve already began to plan my theater schedule for the upcoming six to eight weeks as Chicago theater companies unveil their fall seasons; I’m also taking several trips during this time period to see some of the more hotly-anticipated productions in other theater-mad cities like ours. My plate will be quite full, but what a satisfying, bountiful harvest it will contain!
I remembered my great excitement as I entered the Broadhurst Theatre to see the New York production of The History Boys (a direct transfer from the UK National Theatre) back in June 2006. It had just won six Tony Awards, including Best Play, a rare feat for a straight play, only previously achieved by the original production of Death of a Salesman in 1949. It was supposed to be a revelatory, unforgettable play, but I was surprisingly underwhelmed. I thought the performances were exceptional (boy, pre-Mamma Mia Dominic Cooper, as Dakin, the object of everyone’s affections, was already radiating blinding star quality all the way out to the New Jersey turnpike), and the writing was smart, erudite, sparkling in some places, Stoppard-lite in others. The reason could have been Nicholas Hytner’s somewhat frigid staging, or maybe it was the Broadhurst’s massive stage and tall ceilings which drowned out the intimacy of the play, or it could have been that I had to turn my head several times to give the Medusa eye and the bared fangs look to the rude, stage-whispering lady sitting behind me who kept on asking her companion to repeat the actors’ dialogue (when she asked him “Is he British” during Richard Griffith’s first scene, I very nearly hissed “Do you want to get out of this theater alive?!”). I really didn’t even take the time to see the movie version which starred the original stage cast. So I was wonderfully surprised by TimeLine Theatre’s intelligently directed, beautifully designed, exquisitely acted Chicago premiere – I just have to say that it is probably the best Chicago production I have seen so far this year. And I am eating my words sans ketchup – I’m shocked that I even thought that Alan Bennett’s writing was Stoppard-lite; it’s in a dizzying class of its own.
Recently Attended Events
- 2/04/2012: Six Characters In Search of an Author (The Hypocrites)
- 2/02/2012: Disgraced (American Theater Company)
- 1/29/2012: Time Stands Still (Steppenwolf Theatre)
- 1/28/2012: Ameriville (Victory Gardens Theater)
- 1/22/2012: Enron (Timeline Theatre Company)
- 12/21/2011: Penelope (Steppenwolf Theatre)
- 12/17/2011: Spring Awakening (Griffin Theatre Company)
- 11/12/2011: Red Light Winter (Mary-Arrchie Theatre Co.)
- 10/16/2011: The Ugly One (Sideshow Theatre Company)
- 10/15/2011: Overweight, Unimportant: Misshape - A European Supper (Trap Door Theatre)
- 10/08/2011: Follies (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre)
- 10/02/2011: Elling (Redtwist Theatre)
- 10/01/2011: Becky Shaw (A Red Orchid Theatre)
- 9/25/2011: Violet (Bailiwick Chicago)
- 9/18/2011: Clybourne Park (Steppenwolf Theatre)
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