Musical makes you 'Shout!,' pout Hedy Weiss: Irresistible songs, great voices and a horribly cheesy show. (And by the way, despite the passable take on a Mary Quant dress, the design of those white Courreges boots is all wrong.)That's the verdict on "Shout! The Mod Musical," the revue that opened Thursday night at the Drury Lane Water Tower Place Theatre.
"Get rewrite, get rewrite!" It is very easy to imagine Chicago Shakespeare Theater director Barbara Gaines calling out that classic line as she began work on her new production of "The Comedy of Errors."
The Joffrey Ballet has always had one foot planted firmly in the classical past, while at the same time using the other to take some giant steps into the world of contemporary dance. This is, after all, the company that pioneered the whole arsenal of multimedia tricks (in Robert Joffrey's 1967 "Astarte") and danced a ballet set to a rock 'n' roll beat (Twyla Tharp's 1973 "Deuce Coupe").
Chicago painter's work inspired translation to stage Hedy Weiss: After years of researching the work of fabled Chicago “outsider” artist Henry Darger, and thinking about how to give it a theatrical form, writer-director Devon de Mayo is about to debut her original promenade production, “As Told by the Vivian Girls.”
How is this for ballet mythology? Her father was a chief of the Osage Nation, her mother was Scots-Irish, and she was born on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma. Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief would go on to become Maria Tallchief, one of the great American ballerinas -- renowned for her performances in Fokine's "The Firebird," as well as in such other feathery classics as "Swan Lake" and "The Black Swan."
Thursday, May 8, 2008
'Vivian Girls' keeps audience on toes Hedy Weiss: A special award should be devised for the directors, designers and performers involved in "As Told by the Vivian Girls," the Dog & Pony Theatre production now inhabiting every room, hallway, stairway, closet and bathroom on the two floors of the ramshackle Theater on the Lake building.
A coincidence? Perhaps not. Two one-woman shows opened this week on Chicago stages, both stunningly acted and both unflinchingly focused on women of the Middle East trying to make sense of the chaos so intrinsically woven into the fabric of their lives. Given the neighborhood in which these women dwell, these plays are innately political. Yet it is the deeply personal nature of each work -- one strictly biographical, the other a multifaceted fictional composite -- that makes them so vital, commanding, etched in pain.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
'Emmett Till' is a triumphant retelling of familiar tragedy Hedy Weiss: The story of Emmett Till is such an intrinsic part of Chicago history — and such an emblematic moment in the entire civil rights movement in this country — that any new play about the subject has to be met with this question: What is left to say?
Monday, May 5, 2008
'10 Virgins' a fairy-tale mishmash Hedy Weiss: Beware of plays that conjure up realms of fairy-tale enchantment, whether they be set in fancy castles or -- as is the case in Laura Jacqmin's new play, "10 Virgins" -- a murky, isolated swamp dripping with Spanish moss, where a large family of girls, and one seemingly androgynous witch, exist in a state of uneasy cohabitation.
"Isn't everything in this country a matter of survival? I don't care if you are with the government or a prisoner of it ... whether you are a soldier, a child, a worker, a minister, a Christian, a Kurd, a dog, a man, whether you are an ugly woman who cannot find a husband or the most beautiful woman whom everybody has to have ... you suffer so deeply."
About the fact that Mark Nadler is prodigiously talented there can be little argument. He is, by any measure, a one-man entertainment machine: A deft, self-accompanying pianist, a singer-song stylist of range and versatility, a musical arranger of enormous ingenuity, a clever comic writer, and a general wild man who moves with the sort of manic propulsion that recalls Danny Kaye. All these skills are on display in his loonily brainy escapade, "Russian on the Side," which opened Wednesday night at the Royal George Theatre, and is said to be "Broadway bound."
Consider these statistics alone: The judges for the Jeff Citations -- which honor excellence in Chicago's multitude of non-Equity profession theaters -- saw 143 productions by 61 different companies during the season that ran April 1, 2007, to March 31, 2008. And from that vast array of dramatic and musical activity they came up with 113 nominations in 23 categories.
It was while working at the Chicago Cultural Center several years ago that writer-director Devon de Mayo first encountered the work of the fabled Chicago outsider artist, Henry Darger.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Chicago politics come alive in musical, but it's no landslide Hedy Weiss: “Old Town,” the new musical by Brett Neveu (playwright-lyricist) and Mikhail Fiksel (composer) — now on view at Strawdog Theatre in what might best be described as the world premiere of a polished workshop — looks at the personal and public dynamics of a political dynasty.
Director PJ Paparelli arrived in Chicago last November to become artistic director of American Theater Company. And not only did he survive his first long, cold winter here (no surprise, as he had been running a theater in Alaska), but he almost immediately enjoyed a major success at Raven Theater, which staged the Chicago premiere of "Columbinus," a brilliant show, co-written with Stephen Karam, that was rooted in the student massacre at a Colorado high school.
Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" comes to the rescue whenever we forget the common post office box for the human race.
Monday, April 28, 2008
A world traveler, getting his eyes full Hedy Weiss: Maybe it's the delicious clockwork nature of the whole adventure. Or its droll, "Pink Panther"-like humor. Or the clever magnetic map that makes it so easy to track the breathless voyage by land and sea. Or maybe it's the winning delicacy of the East-West romance that begins to bubble up over teacups that can't quite find their equilibrium at sea.
PEGASUS PLAYS: The 2008-2009 season at Pegasus Players, 1145 W. Wilson will include the following:
Friday, April 25, 2008
New take on 'Sweeney' charms us to distraction Hedy Weiss: Early on in British director John Doyle's "high-concept" take on the Stephen Sondheim classic "Sweeney Todd" -- now in a national touring stop at the Cadillac Palace Theatre -- I found myself asking this crucial question: "If I didn't know the story from having seen this show countless times before, would I have even the vaguest clue about what was going on?"
It all began when singer-pianist Mark Nadler, the Iowa-born, Interlochan-trained, New York-based cabaret artist, learned "Tchaikovsky (and Other Russians)," the tongue-twisting patter song by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin that was first performed by Danny Kaye in the Broadway musical "Lady in the Dark." The song contains a rhyming list of four dozen Russian composers, and the rule is this: The faster and clearer you can sing it, the better.
The quest to find, foster and showcase new plays and promising playwrights has become an essential part of the mission of nearly every theater company in this city and beyond.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
History turns confusing and amusing Hedy Weiss: In a program note for "Lewis and Clark Cross the Euphrates" -- a clever, blackly comic, phantasmagorical, graphic novel-like chronicle that stitches together some of this country's more ill-advised historical chapters -- playwright Robert Schenkkan comes clean about his decidedly partisan view of American history.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Politics get personal in terrific 'Fiorello!' Hedy Weiss: 'Fiorello!" is back at TimeLine Theatre, two years after the company's wildly ambitious, wholly exhilarating and downright rare revival of this Pulitzer Prize-winning 1959 Broadway musical first played to sold-out houses and found itself unable to keep pace with the demand for tickets.
On the heels of such recent hits as Keith Huff's "A Steady Rain" and Bill Jepson's "Cadillac," Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago, has announced the premieres of the three plays that will anchor its 30th anniversary season. They include:
Great music can inspire great choreography, and sometimes a great choreographer can even bring heightened life to a mediocre music. But there also are times when a choreographer selects a brilliant piece of music and then fails to rise to the level of the score.
Friday, April 18, 2008
'Sweeney Todd' does double duty
Stephen Sondheim's grand guignol musical "Sweeney Todd" has had several
different Broadway incarnations, been seen on the stages of both opera
houses and regional theaters, and, most recently, been turned into a
high profile film starring Johnny Depp as that demon barber of Fleet
Street.
Alvin Ailey troupe shows full range of talents
The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater invariably attracts a large, festive, irrepressibly buoyant audience, and Wednesday night’s opening night performance at the Auditorium Theatre — marking the start of the company’s 50th anniversary season — was no exception.
The horrors of recent school massacres unquestionably have invaded our psyches, and several strong plays attempting to deal with this phenomenon already have found their way onto stages here. But now, as part of the Hip-Hop Live + Reel Festival that will run April 24-27 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (with a full schedule of live shows, film screenings, workshops and more), the subject will get the "hip-hop theater" treatment.
The Absolut vodka company got itself into a whole lot of hot water recently when it launched an ad campaign for Mexican consumers that depicted the southwestern United States as part of Mexico -- much as it was on an 1830s map of the region. That controversy came to mind again as I watched San Francisco-based playwright Octavio Solis' "Dreamlandia," now in a richly imaginative, handsomely designed production by Teatro Vista.
For those worried that summer might not ever arrive in Chicago this year, a good omen is now in the air. The Chicago Park District has just announced the eight-week season for Theater on the Lake, its annual festival of work performed in the barnlike space at Fullerton and Lake Shore Drive. On tap will be remounts of some of the best productions of the 2007-2008 Off-Loop theater season, including:
I first heard the story of "Hana's Suitcase" a few years ago when NPR aired a Canadian documentary about a remarkable project undertaken by the Children's Holocaust Education Center in Tokyo. It explained how in 2001, the center acquired a suitcase bearing the name "Hana Brady" that was once the property of a girl about which only these facts were known: She was born in Czechoslovakia in 1931 and died in the Auschwitz concentration camp at age 13. Her brother survived and ended up in Toronto.
The Auditorium Theatre has been working hard to expand its international dance offerings beyond such surefire box office draws as the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet companies. The adventurous lineup just announced for its 2008-2009 International Dance Series suggests it is feeling confident enough in its audience now to go the extra mile and present two of the most galvanic (if less instantly recognizable) companies now at work on the global scene.
Armitage puts punk sensibilities on display Hedy Weiss: Kansas-born Karole Armitage has been part of the international dance scene for decades, initially as a dancer but for many years as a choreographer. And she was a border crosser from the start, moving from ballet, to modern, to pop (she was dubbed "the punk ballerina" by Vanity Fair in the early '80s, with her jagged work in pointe shoes and her cropped, corn-silk-blond hair helping to support the image).
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Second City serves musty 'Old Men' Hedy Weiss: With a show pegged to the presidential campaign ("Between Barack and a Hard Place") already here and gone, the Second City has followed up with "No Country for Old White Men," the zippily titled revue that opened Sunday under the direction of Jim Carlson. Unfortunately, it feels more like a lame duck than a fully viable candidate charging toward this summer's conventions. With a few exceptions, its sketches are old and tired. And (maybe it's the Viagra effect) when all else fails, sex is the subject.
Eugene O'Neill might be the big granddaddy of American theater, but next year's festival at the Goodman Theatre, designed to pay homage to the playwright, also will demonstrate that he has become an influential part of the global theater family.
Monday, April 14, 2008
'Knute Rockne' premiere wins one for the Gipper Hedy Weiss: It might be close to heresy to confess this, but I couldn't care less about football. Yet I was completely enthralled by "Knute Rockne, All-American," the richly emotional, beautifully crafted, multidimensional new musical now receiving a fast-paced, sophisticated world premiere at Theatre at the Center in Munster, Ind. The theater, quite fittingly, is a relatively short drive from Notre Dame University's South Bend campus, where the story of the coach who put college football on the map played out for real during the 1920s.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Bickering, shtick and pith Hedy Weiss: Life has a funny way of trumping art. While waiting for the lights to come up on "Better Late" -- the world premiere play by Larry Gelbart and Craig Wright at Northlight Theatre -- the elderly couple sitting next to me provided an unexpected prologue. "Why are you so mean to me?" asked the woman, speaking to her physically feeble husband. She then turned her attention to her program.
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