Posted at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
THEATER REVIEW: "Sunday in the Park With George" ★½ Through Oct. 31 at Stage 773 (formerly Theatre Building Chicago), 1225 W. Belmont Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes; Tickets: $38 at 773-327-5252 or www.stage773.com. With Brandon Dahlquist as George, left.
This is a golden age of off-Loop musicals, because so many Chicago companies have discovered that intimacy and heart substitute well for spectacle and fear. They've understood that all you really need is craft, honesty and a distinctive creative idea that takes into account your circumstances. It is a message that Porchlight Music Theatre should take more to heart.
The crippling problem with L. Walter Stearns' disappointing production of Stephen Sondheim's masterfully scored “Sunday in the Park With George” is that it suffers from a complete lack of self-awareness. It feels like a second-rate emulation of the kind of “Sunday” you might find at a bigger theater — a place where there is more room to re-create the creation of Georges Seurat's painting “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” where the orchestra doesn't have to be crammed in the back, where a loud fan doesn't rattle through the proceedings, where the actors, the set and video projections don't all end up in one big visual heap with no discernible focus or point of view.
Posted at 12:21 PM in Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago, Stage 773 | Permalink | Comments (10)
I understand the dilemma. Taking young people to the theater is both a joy and a responsibility. But unlike movies, shows don't come with ratings like “PG-13” (thank heavens). Unless you know the title, you have to figure it out from hints. And producers, of course, have a vested interest in saying that their show is for everyone. So that's what they usually do.
My correspondents invariably start out by noting the uncommon intelligence and maturity of the child or grandchild in question and the open-mindedness of the adult going with them. But, as one person put it, “we don't all want to be squirming in our seats.”
Indeed not.
The questions have come thick and fast this week because of my review of “A Chorus Line.” The Marriott Theatre's production is fabulous and, as I noted, this is one of those shows that can change a young person's life. But questions also often are about “Billy Elliot,” the Broadway musical in a 10-month Chicago run and that features kids using profanity (which somehow seems to be a bigger issue live than at the movie theater).
And there are a lot of other shows that bring up the same question. What about “Big River”? “Wicked”? “The Lion King?”
Posted at 9:47 AM in "Billy Elliot the Musical", Broadway in Chicago | Permalink | Comments (8)
Keathley's death (he was 85) was announced by the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, where Keathley served as artistic director from 1985-2000. The theater said that, honoring Keathley's wishes, there would be no services.
Keathley's role in Chicago theater history is significant. In 1957, Keathley directed the first production of the two-act version of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge" for the Studebaker Theatre Company. The producers were Danny Newman and Bernie Sahlins.
In 1968, Keathley came back to Chicago to head up an in-the-round dinner theater attached to the Ivanhoe Restaurant, 750 W. Wellington Ave. As Richard Christiansen wrote in 1999, "he turned it from a second-rate operation presenting lame comedies with lame stars into a powerhouse commercial operation." In the early 1970s, the Ivanhoe was the leading commercial theater in Chicago.
Among Keathley's achievements at the Ivanhoe was a famous 1969 production of Tennessee Williams' "The Rose Tattoo," staring Rita Moreno. Keathley also worked with Williams (who was then in the midst of a depression) on the world premiere of the play "Out Cry," which took place at the Ivanhoe in 1971.
Continue reading "George Keathley, once a major player in Chicago theater, dies at age 85" »
Posted at 5:13 PM in Obituaries | Permalink | Comments (6)
We have a fascination with the men who built the bomb. It's hardly surprising. You could certainly argue that other scientists did a good deal more for humanity than the wizards at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s, but when it comes to the creation of raw power in a laboratory, nothing competes with plutonium. Regardless of your views of the moral legitimacy — or lack thereof — of dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you still have to wonder at how the guys who did the science just went home for dinner.
And they all had a connection to Chicago.
Louis Slotin, the brilliant Canadian physicist and chemist who rose to the position of chief bomb builder at Los Alamos, didn't get to just go home for dinner, or return as planned to the faculty of the University of Chicago. On May 21, 1946, Slotin was conducting an experiment at Los Alamos that involved creating the first stages of a nuclear reaction. His hand slipped and the plutonium went, as they say, “supercritical,” unleashing on Slotin a dose of radiation comparable to that felt by someone just down the street from the explosion of an atomic bomb.
Posted at 11:59 PM in A Red Orchid Theatre | Permalink | Comments (0)
Roger Miller died of lung and throat cancer in 1992. The chain-smoking “King of the Road” was only 56 years old, and he'd just discovered how good he was at writing scores for Broadway musicals.
I can never watch “Big River,” the masterful adaptation of Mark Twain's “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” without wondering what other great songs Miller might have written. It's not William Hauptman's book that sets “Big River” afloat — most of its charm can be attributed to the timeless quirks of the source — but it's Miller's stunning progression of songs. You've doubtless seen musicals where your toes would love to tap, if only there were a real tune in the house. You never have that problem at “Big River,” where the sticky, zesty numbers just keep on comin' like the good times: “Muddy Water,” “Waitin' for the Light to Shine,” “Arkansas,” “River in the Rain.” I'd better stop before I take up space listing the whole score.
The thing about Miller (if you're a fan of his other music, you'll know this) is that he was the rare composer with wit. I'm not talking about Miller's lyrics; I mean the melodies. That's why his unpretentious tunes, rooted in the music of rural America, are such a perfect match for Twain: They're perky, devilish, jovial, and yet they carry an emotional and humanistic sting in their tale that gets you right where you live, especially when you're not far from Twain country. The score to “Big River” is a masterpiece, and it's always a pleasure to hear it performed.
The new Bohemian Ensemble Theatre production of this treasured material is performed in the most intimate of the lovely new theater spaces inside Theater Wit. You're pretty much right there on the raft with Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, waving to that old adventurer Tom Sawyer, somewhere on the banks.
Posted at 6:23 PM in Bohemian Theatre Ensemble, Theater Wit | Permalink | Comments (1)
"Pandemonium: The Lost and Found Orchestra," a new show from the creators of "Stomp," has set dates for its Chicago run. The show will be at the Bank of America Theatre from Oct. 12-17. Tickets go on sale Friday at www.broadwayinchicago.com.
Billed as "a symphonic musical event, "Pandemonium" premiered in Britain in 2006.
Like "Stomp," the show uses unconventional items as sources for percussion and includes comedy and bravura physical feats, but this newest show has much more expansive symphonic ambitions. And it features a local choir at every stop, conducted by Luke Cresswell, one of the creators of "Stomp."
Posted at 1:43 PM in Broadway in Chicago | Permalink | Comments (0)
After 35 years — oh my! — the musical “A Chorus Line” is no ordinary piece of musical theater. Despite the flash, the pizzazz, the catchy Marvin Hamlisch tunes, the “step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch, again,” this is at heart the story of the struggles of ordinary laboring people. In its celebration of craft and toil — and its depiction of the inevitable wear on our bodies and souls — it's no different, really, than the great Studs Terkel's “Working.”
And for an audience, especially for a young audience, it has a similar revelatory and transfixing power.
“A Chorus Line,” about a group of Broadway performers auditioning for spots on a chorus line, has for dancers become a sacred text. There's irony there, because “A Chorus Line” has roots in exploitation. In an era when few paid attention to the residual value of his or her own life story, a bunch of dancers bared their souls and spilled their secrets and allowed the late Michael Bennett to control the tape. Only in 2008 did some of those original cast members have their roles as authors more justly recognized. The stories that are enthralling audiences — and Sunday night's audience was hanging on every note and step — at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire are rooted in real strife.
Posted at 4:57 PM in Marriott Theatre | Permalink | Comments (1)
THEATER REVIEW: "Theories of the Sun" ★★½ Through Oct. 3 at Theatre Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $20 at 773-975-8150 or www.sideshowtheatre.org
All of the great plays in the world are about death. More particularly, they tend to be about the arbitrary and, well, stubbonly non-negotiable way in which it wreaks its destruction. “Theories of the Sun,” the heady and over-stuffed new play by Kathleen Akerley, a Washington, D.C., playwright, offers an interesting twist on that subject.
How would you feel, it asks, if your time on this Earth was unlimited?
Your first reaction might be that eternal earthly life would be a blessing indeed. But Elizabeth Sweeny (Scottie Caldwell, left), the central character in the play with an unusual relationship with mortality, begs to differ.
She points out living to see the death of your own children is something devoutly not to be wished. And, to look beyond that, there’s another matter. Life would get, well, boring, if it stretched ahead in an unlimited way (although then again …). Perhaps you just can’t know until you are in that situation. “There is,” observes Akerley’s Elizabeth, “only so much beauty.” Really? If you say so.
“Theories of the Sun” has one of those plots that is easy to spoil, so I won’t say precisely what happens after the play opens in the lobby of a rather strange Paris hotel. But I will say that both Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard are characters in the existential drama, which might tell you that Akerley likes to play with meta-narratives and enjoys a little insider pool.
Continue reading "'Theories of the Sun' by Sideshow Theatre: Cheating death in a Paris hotel" »
Posted at 2:40 PM in Sideshow Theatre Company, Theater Wit | Permalink | Comments (0)
THEATER REVIEW: "The Invasion of Skokie" ★★★ Through Oct. 10 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $32 at 312-633-0630 or www.chicagodramatists.org
In 1977, the National Socialist Party, a derivation of the American Nazi Party, announced its intent to hold a march in Skokie. That odious provocation crystalized an incendiary debate. On the one side was freedom of speech: the ACLU-backed right of any group of Americans to assemble in a public place of its choosing and say what it wants to say. On the other was the seemingly competing right of Americans to live peaceably in their community, free from fear, intimidation and attack.
And, as everyone at the time well knew, Skokie was no average community. As political scientist Philippa Strum noted in a book about the controversy, one-sixth of the Jewish citizens of predominantly Jewish Skokie in 1977 were either directly related to Holocaust survivors or were Holocaust survivors themselves.
Steven Peterson, who grew up on the North Shore, sets his intense new play, “The Invasion of Skokie,” one year after the neo-Nazis had been granted the right to march by the U.S. Supreme Court and were planning to put it into practice somewhere around Touhy Avenue in the summer of 1978. Chicago Dramatists staged the world premiere on Friday night. George Van Dusen, the current mayor of Skokie, was in the audience.
The action in Peterson's play takes place in the ordinary backyard of a middle-class Skokie family and revolves around the central question of how far you should go to protect your family, your neighborhood, your faith.
Posted at 10:57 AM in Chicago Dramatists | Permalink | Comments (1)
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