From the Ledge

I was bummed when I missed Strawdog Theatre’s Red Noses last year.  After all the critical acclaim came out, it was one sold-out house after another.  So when I heard that Strawdog was remounting it this summer, after a one-week stint at Theater on the Lake, I swooped down on those Red Noses tickets like Bethenny Frankel on baby gear.  On the other hand, I have resisted going to Billy Elliot – The Musical since it opened last March for a variety of reasons.  I was never a big fan of the movie in the first place, and, although I appreciate the revenue that Broadway in Chicago brings into the city, I’m also not a big fan of “corporate” theater, manufactured and distributed for mass consumption.  But when someone passed on a discount code to the show, I jumped on those Billy Elliot tickets as well, just like Bethenny’s fellow New York Real Housewife Ramona at a Chanel sample sale.  I know there’s been a lot of ink (both print and online) already spilled over these two shows, so my two cents may not amount to much, but I thought I’d still share my impressions on both, which, in a single word, is… “underwhelming”.  I sort of expected that with Billy Elliot, I was really disappointed to feel that over Red Noses.

As my avid blog readers know, I was stopped breathlessly in my tracks by Matt Hawkins’ brilliant Cabaret for The Hypocrites earlier this year.  I was also dazzled by Strawdog’s recent production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan that had the energy and the bravado of an artsy loft house party.  So my expectations, I guess, were pretty high coming into Red Noses.  Unfortunately, I think my issues start with Peter Barnes’ material, about an idealistic priest who seeks to spread joy and humanity during the darkest days of the medieval Plague, which isn’t on the same level of skill or complexity as the other two plays.  I think the play, as written, is a little too precious and cute-sy, and although it makes some salient points about religious hypocrisy and the fact that social institutions tend to become distanced and out-of-touch with its members and stakeholders, it’s also not terribly interesting. Hawkins’ staging hips it up – the large ensemble performs in modern dress, music director Mike Przygoda sprinkles rousing musical numbers of late 70s/early 80s pop songs (“Faith”, “Only the Good Die Young”, etc.) throughout the show to annotate the narrative, yellow gook is slapstick-splattered all over the stage either by puking, or in a really kinda gauche move, pissing, to represent the horrors of the Plague.  Unfortunately, unlike Cabaret, where Hawkins’ direction was masterful, mature, and controlled, his work in Red Noses is a little too slap-happy, giddy, and all-over-the-place, which makes the show feel less like a clearly-conceptualized work, than an advanced Improv workshop.  I’m also a little disturbed that this production feels very similar to the just-closed The Good Person of Szechuan  with the same energetic pop musical numbers; the casual, very contemporary demeanor of the cast;  the whole sense of play in addition to play-acting.  Since Red Noses is an earlier production, I have to wonder whether some of the play’s artistic decisions influenced Szechuan so much so that what I thought was fresh and daring in the latter was really an echo of the former?  I don’t think there’s anything wrong in incorporating what previously worked, but I’d also hate to see theaters become one-trick theatrical ponies in the future.

The acting, of course, makes up for some of the show’s shortcomings.  Once again, this production showcases some of our city’s best actors in impressive ensemble work.  The priceless Matthew Sherbach, who can make you convulse in breathless laughter with the rise of an eyebrow, is irreplaceable as one half of one-legged, ballet dancing twin brothers.  Anderson Lawfer is wickedly funny, but never campy, as the blind musician LeGrue.  Shannon Hoag once again demonstrates her impressive comedic chops as a sex-starved nun.  And John Ferrick, as the inspired and inspirational lead character, Father Flote, is radiant, affable, and pretty darn sexy.  He makes the somewhat silly premise believable- with his charisma and boundless enthusiasm, it is conceivable that he could indeed bring together a group of hopeless, miserable, surrounded-by-death people to believe in redemption and salvation.

 If Red Noses comes off as somewhat messy, Billy Elliot, on the other hand, is technically polished, so polished, in fact, that it seems every emotion, every line, every friggin’ musical number is calculated and meticulously constructed – musical theater by blueprinting.  I didn’t really buy into the film and its story of a boy who finds himself through dance set against the backdrop of the 1980s coal miners’ strike in the UK, and I thought Julie Walters’ Oscar-nominated dance teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson, was overbaked and overmugged.  Thank goodness the fabulous Emily Skinner gives the musical’s Mrs. Wilkinson interesting layers – she encourages Billy’s passion for ballet since she recognizes his special talent, but you also get the sense that it’s also a way for her to live vicariously through him her what-could-have-beens.  Skinner is always a fantastic musical theater performer (her Gooch in the Kennedy Center’s Mame several years ago continues to be one of the more memorable performances I’ve seen), and she makes Mrs. Wilkinson brassy and brittle, but also warm-hearted.  The Billy in the performance I saw, Tommy Batchelor, looks a little like Jamie Bell from the film, and is a fantastic dancer, but he doesn’t have some of the edginess that Bell so memorably imbued in the movie.  His performance, though, of the showstopping “Angry Dance” which closes the first act is riveting, intense, technically superlative, and absolutely worth the price of admission.   The rest of the cast is terrific, with huge props to Susan McMonagle who gives the small role of Billy’s dead mother a clear inner life.

Despite the performances and the creative staging of the musical number “Solidarity”, which co-mingles scenes from Mrs. Wilkinson’s dance class with scenes from the front-lines of the strike, Billy Elliot, like the film, still feels too emotionally uninvolving to me.  It’s partly because I don’t think Elton John and Lee Hall’s songs have the genuine heart-stopping emotion of the best of musical theater; they play more like artsy commercial jingles (and there’s no song that you memorably hum after the show, the trademark for me of the best musicals).  It’s also because a lot of the musical numbers have been staged by Stephen Daldry, the film’s director as well, as big, bedazzling, bombastic crowd pleasers intended to elicit whoops and thundering applause from a casual theater audience on a night out on the town.  You get the bang for your Broadway in Chicago buck, but you also don’t get the wondrous quality of musical numbers that grow organically out of a well-written book.  And that’s a shame, because the best musicals make you whoop and applaud and stomp your foot because you want to, not because you’re expected to.

Red Noses is running for two more weekends, until August 15, at Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway.  Billy Elliot – The Musical is running until January 15, 2011 at the Ford Theater for Performing Arts/Oriental Theater, 24 W. Randolph.

Tags: Broadway in Chicago, Strawdog Theatre Company