The upcoming Marriott Theatre premiere of the new musical "For the Boys" (opening Aug. 26) has cast its two leads. The Broadway performers Timothy Gulan (left)  and Michele Ragusa will play, respectively, Eddie Sparks and Dixie Leonard.

"For the Boys" is based on the 1991 Bette Midler movie, as adapted for the stage by Aaron Thielen.  Marc Robin directs and choreographs. Set in the 1940s, the show uses numbers from the great American songbook.

Others in the mostly Chicago-based cast are Anne Gunn, Summer Smart, Michael Lindner, Bernie Yvon, Johanna McKenzie Miller, Holly Stauder, Michael Weber, Melissa Zaremba, Katheryn Patton, Rod Thomas, Jameson Cooper, John Michael Coppola, Alex Goodrich, Karl Hamilton, Andrew Mueller, Brandon Springman, Zachary Keller, Johnny Rabe and Daniel Coonley.

 
David Henry Hwang's "Chinglish" plays through July 24 at the Goodman Theatre; more information at www.goodmantheatre.org. Read the Tribune's ★★★★ REVIEW.

Leigh Silverman's production of David Henry Hwang's "Chinglish," which had its world premiere Monday night at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, will be on Broadway this fall.

The producers are Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Roy Gottlieb, Barry and Carole Kaye and David and Barbara Stoller in association with the Goodman. New York's Public Theatre, which initially had this show on its 2011-12 season, participated in the development of the piece.

The show, which does yet have firm dates or a specific theater, is expected to land at one of the Shubert houses. Whether the entire cast will be going to Broadway with the show has not yet been confirmed.

The announcement means that a pair of new plays that emerged from Chicago's two leading theaters will be on Broadway this fall: Lisa D'Amour's "Detroit," which premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and Hwang's "Chinglish."

Richards and Frankel are producing both shows.

THEATER REVIEW: "Chinglish" ★★★★ Through July 24 at the Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.; 2 hours, 25 minutes; $25-$73 at 312-443-3800 or goodmantheatre.org

At the moment in David Henry Hwang's "Chinglish" when Sino-American business relations develop to the point a Chinese buyer and a U.S. seller find themselves in bed together, you get a sudden flashback to "M. Butterfly." That brilliant 23-year-old drama, which made this playwright's career, explores how Western men have long been vulnerable to the seductive mysteries of the beautiful, er, women of the East. And so, as you watch two bodies move through space in a Chinese hotel room, you first think that Hwang, America's premiere dramatic chronicler of East-West relationships, has returned to an old theme.

Indeed he has. But China has changed and so — we come to see in this shrewd, timely and razor-sharp comedy premiering at the Goodman Theatre and logically headed to Broadway — has Hwang. The power has shifted in one direction only: East. Skyscrapers now abut opera houses. Bullet trains cut through butterfly gardens. And recession-weary American businessman are left salivating over "the greatest pool of untapped consumers history has ever known."

So the vulnerable party in this 2011 tryst is the American, an unhappily married man whose family business is on the point of collapse and whose striving past is pockmarked with the scandals and past moral failings of the American business and banking sectors, screw-ups followed closely in the new provincial China where names like Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow aren't unfamiliar. China isn't an exotic dalliance for this anxious corporate traveler — it's last-gasp bailout for the desperate.
Meanwhile, the Chinese woman who holds all the cards — and the lucrative contracts — neither flicks her pretty eyes nor looks down like her ancestors. She's in it, and she controls the exchange, entirely for her own purposes and her own sexual pleasure.

Lydia R. Diamond's "Stick Fly," a show that had its world premiere at Chicago's Congo Square Theatre Company, is headed to Broadway, it was announced Monday.

"Stick Fly" premiered in 2006, when Diamond, who now is based in the Boston area, was living in Chicago. It tells the story of an affluent African-American family who vacation on Martha's Vineyard.

The piece, which will be produced by Alicia Keys, is to be directed by Kenny Leon, who directed Denzel Washington in "Fences" on Broadway. "Stick Fly" is slated to open at the Lyceum Theatre in New York in December.

The historic, 1,888-seat Paramount Theatre in Aurora says that it has already sold almost 10,000 subscriptions to its new slate of self-produced musicals, beginning this fall.

As a point of comparison, Drury Lane Theatre has 25,000 subscribers and the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire has about 40,000 (one of the biggest subscription bases in the country). But both of those musical houses have been around much longer.

The four-show season includes "My Fair Lady" (Sept. 14-Oct. 2), "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" (Nov. 2- 20), "A Chorus Line" (Jan. 18-Feb. 5) and "Hair" (March 14-April 2).  These are Equity-affiliated shows with a live orchestra in the pit. Prices are very low: subscription tickets to all four productions start at $70.

Before deciding to self-produce, the Paramount presented mostly non-Equity touring productions, usually for a week or less.

THEATER REVIEW: "Shout!" ★★½ Through Aug. 14 at Marriott Theatre, 10 Marriott Drive, Lincolnshire; Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; Tickets: $41-$49 at 847-634-0200 or ticketmaster.com

If there's one thing that most of the songs in “Shout!” — the musical revue of British pop songs of the 1960s, as recorded by women like Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield — have in common, it's the clash of freedom and obligation in a newly seductive city. Whether it's “I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself,” “To Sir With Love” or “You Don't Have to Say You Love Me,” and whether the lyrics are by Hal David or Tony Hatch or Don Black, these songs are a fascinating mix of sex, nervousness, feminism, little-girl-lost and revolutionary guts. If you look at the most popular song titles of the era, those miniskirted girls strutting down Carnaby Street in Swingin' London sure had a lot of questions: “Who Am I?”; “How Can You Tell?”; and, most musically thrilling of all, “How Can I Be Sure?”

Who could, in a world that was constantly changing?

None of this forms much of a part of the show currently at the Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire.

THEATER REVIEW: "Middletown" ★★★ Through Aug. 14 at Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.; Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes; Tickets: $20-$73 at 312-335-1650 or steppenwolf.org

At one point in Will Eno's wonderful new play “Middletown” — a piece that's a bit like Thornton Wilder's “Our Town” if it had been penned by Dr. Seuss and edited by Samuel Beckett — a character suddenly feels moved to discuss the linguistic difference between the word “rock” and the word “people.” “'Rock,'” he opines from the stage of the Steppenwolf Theatre, “has a real honest ring to it. ‘People' feels like an afterthought.”

Like a lot of things in a play that seems quirky but actually is profoundly wise, you have to think about that one for a while. Here's another one: talking about botulism, another citizen of Eno's small town of Middletown wonders if this word might actually refer not to a disease but to “a philosophy of really bad choices.” Get it?

But let's go back to “rock” and “people.” If you do think about it — and if that sounds like a drag, this review is not your review and this play it not your play — you'll surely conclude that the guy's observation has merit. And from there, perhaps, you might start wondering why people, who created our language system even as rocks were just sitting around on the ground, chose to imbue an inanimate object with such gravitas and themselves with the wimpiest of monikers. What the heck does that say about our lack of confidence in ourselves? And at that point, as at other points, “Middletown” would be working its spell.

Eno, who also wrote the acclaimed piece “Thom Pain (based on nothing),” is an unusual writer, to say the least.

Where most contemporary playwrights would just write the word “hello,” Eno will typically write, “hello, hi, how are you?” and protect that trifecta from an editor. Not only is his dialog uncommonly rich and poetic, it free-associates with the most rare and delicious kind of abandonment. His characters start talking, it invariably feels, without actually knowing where their sentence is going to end, or even what they are going to say. But that's not to say that the resultant play is pretentious or formless or academic or esoteric or even just plain weird. Actually, “Middletown” (like the Wilder model) is tightly focused on what matters in small-town life: finding ourselves born, dying, relating to others, finding our place, searching for personal meaning, fighting off loneliness, passing the time.

Left, Rondi Reed, Thomas J. Cox, and John Mahoney in “The Outgoing Tide” at Northlight Theatre.

As we approach the half-way point in the year, a pause to pick our top performances so far.  Greg Kot, Michael Phillips, Howard Reich and John von Rhein and I all came up with our Top-5 lists from the first months of 2011.

Read my picks for THEATER here. Three of the five  shows are still playing; link to the reviews to the right or check out the Tribune Stage Guide photo gallery.

Read the others' lists for MOVIES AND MUSIC here.

 
THEATER REVIEW: "Marisol" ★★ Through July 31 at The Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark St.; Running time: 2 hours; Tickets: $28 at 866-811-4111 or www.theartistichome.org

In Jose Rivera's “Marisol,” New York City is a terrifying place: crime-ridden, graffiti-strewn, filled with displaced souls and not so different, really, from a war zone. No wonder its central character acquires a guardian angel.

The great Puerto Rican playwright penned this piece in 1992 — toward the end, really, of the great urban decline and just prior to the law-and-order cleanups that created, depending on your point of view, a reborn Manhattan or an increasingly expensive and stratified urban theme park where most Americans can barely afford a hotel, let alone an apartment. Either way, it's incontrovertibly true that American cities have changed, and this play seems to look back on a very different New York City.

Although this is certainly a creative, honest and well-acted staging of a play that's among Rivera's most interesting and visceral works (it's a good example of why the overused term “magic realism” has become so inadequate), I kept waiting for John Mossman's production at The Artistic Home to explore what this work means in the here-and-now. That does not really happen; this isn't a production that makes the case for its own relevance. That's often a danger in a theater company that concentrates primarily on the craft of acting.

 
IN PERFORMANCE: "The Homosexuals" ★★★ Through July 24 at the Richard Christiansen Theatre in the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes; Tickets: $28 at 773-871-3000 or www.aboutfacetheatre.com

Philip Dawkins' ambitious, substantial and deeply impressive new play, “The Homosexuals,” begins with a disaster: Catherine Zeta-Jones winning the Tony Award.

“For singing,” spits out Peter, one of the group of gay Chicagoans whom this play follows — or, more accurately, whose lives it rewinds through the first decade of the 21st century. He peers at the results of the 2010 Tonys in his copy of the Tribune. Peter (Scott Bradley) is an old-fashioned homosexual: he likes his news on paper. The young man breaking up with him, Evan (Patrick Andrews), is of a different breed altogether. He was in grade school during the height of the AIDS crisis. And although he is vaguely aware of iconic gay plays like “The Boys in the Band” and “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” he read them in a class promoting diversity. He did not live them. And he surely does not care about swishy musicals.

Precisely what that means for this young everyman is at the core of Dawkins' sweeping drama, one that begins at the end of the decade and progressively moves back in time, finally ending with another Tony Award house party just after the turn of the millennium. With a little more work, Dawkins will have a play that deserves some major subsequent productions after this About Face premiere at the Richard Christiansen Theatre. He clearly wants to update those earlier plays that charted the ways gay American men, scarred by discrimination, found family and community in each other.

Dawkins does so by turning that conceit on its head. “The Homosexuals” begins with togetherness but charts a progressive course towards isolation, as its central characters love and lose each other and Evan, part hero and part anti-hero, tries to figure out what it means to be gay in a decade when, as his friend Tam (Elizabeth Ledo) wryly observes, “there are no dirty words. Every term has been reclaimed and is now either empowering or ironic.”

Empowering. Ironic. Where does that leave a young man, arriving in Chicago from Iowa at the age of 20? What does it mean to be gay in a decade that contained the promise (and, for some, the disappointment) of the Obama presidency? Those questions are all under review, as is the question of whether those powerful gay communities, formed in crisis, are becoming increasing fractured. Whether that represents diversity or dissipation is the real question of this very fine new play.