Here’s the press release from the side project:

Three new works – and a new mission – premiere at the side project in 2009-10

The side project, founded in 2001 in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood by
Artistic Director Adam Webster, will present three world-premiere plays in
its 2009-2010 season – its first under a new mission which will take the
company into its second decade. All three productions – beginning with the
November world premiere of Laura Eason’s REWIND – bring into sharp focus
the company’s refined mission statement and vision. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Eric Y. Exit

RECOMMENDED

It should be said upfront that I have never been a huge fan of the Marx Brothers. I grew up with their films constantly being on television and could certainly find laughs in individual bits, but their movies always looked like watered-down vaudeville captured on celluloid, right down to Groucho making his one-liners right into the camera as if he were in front of a live audience. As time has gone by, that style of comedy has fallen so much to the wayside that it is actually refreshing now to experience it again, especially interacting with it as part of a live audience, which makes all of the difference.

Faux Marx Brothers are no substitute for the original, to be sure, but happily, they do not pretend to be. What you have with Goodman’s “Animal Crackers” is an attempt to give us an entertainment time-machine, an interactive experiential celebration of what our great-grandparents found diversionary some eighty years ago.  The Marx Brothers films tended to focus on them, understandably enough, since they were the stars of the films and other characters only existed to give them a context for their shtick.  But in 1928, when “Animal Crackers” opened on Broadway, their comedy was only one element of a vast vaudeville tapestry that included singing, dancing, juggling, beautiful chorus girls, et al. When you see a complete show like “Animal Crackers” with all of its trimmings, you can’t help but be struck by how much more diverse tastes were back then. Read the rest of this entry »

Barbara Robertson/Photo: Michael Brosilow

Review: Yeast Nation (The Triumph of Life)/American Theater Company

Wasn’t it Einstein who once famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting different results?

After several New York workshops and a 2007 world-premiere production at Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, Chicago is now receiving the much-anticipated Midwest premiere of “Yeast Nation (The Triumph of Life),” the follow-up musical from the men responsible for “Urinetown, The Musical,” composer Mark Hollmann and lyric- and book-writer Greg Kotis.  After experiencing the production on stage at the American Theater Company—and mind you, I went twice during opening week, once to the official opening and later again to confirm what I had seen that night—I shudder to think what “Yeast Nation” looked and sounded like two years ago.

Its fundamental problem—the fact that “Yeast Nation” doesn’t know what it is nor what it wants to say—basically reduces the piece to a vacuous experience that looks and sounds like a satirical musical but ultimately comes across like an overlong sketch on steroids. It’s the story of a colony of 4-billion-year-old yeast living at the bottom of the ocean, threatened with extinction and oppressed by a tyrannical king afraid of evolution, and it serves up song and dance romance laced with familial and political power struggles. The love story is un-compelling, the Machiavellian machinations predictable and the score banal, but most disappointing is that you never understand what the creators are poking fun at. Is “Yeast Nation” just an excuse to parody more musicals?  Director PJ Paparelli’s staging nods to “Rent,” “Cats” and “The Lion King” certainly suggests so. Is it a ringing (and singing) endorsement for going green?  The colony in collapse in “Yeast Nation” is said to have doomed itself with extravagance and an insular world view. Is it criticizing Darwinism, Modernism or Fundamentalism?  The creators’ deliberate resistance to scientific accuracy in the piece (were yeast really the first organisms to inhabit the planet?) leaves a lot open to interpretation, or maybe Hollmann and Kotis don’t know or care themselves, if their baffling appearance on Chicago Tonight the evening before the press opening is anything to go by.  Spouting cheeky one-liners (“It has a very period feel,” remarked Kotis) and saucy sound bites (“The strangest story ever to be musicalized”), they didn’t seem to have much else to say at all and remained content, it seemed, with their own cleverness at having anthropomorphized and musicalized salt-eating yeast. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Once again the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University is prescribing Chicago a healthy dose of the dance medicine it needs and deserves. Over the past years the historic venue has shown a remarkable commitment to giving some of the world’s best dance companies Chicago premieres or bringing them back after long absences.  Kicking off its 120th-anniversary celebration, Auditorium Theatre brings the Miami City Ballet to our great city for the first time. Under Artistic Director Edward Villella, MCB has become one of the largest companies in the United States and has earned an international reputation for the breadth of a repertoire that stretches from classic to contemporary. Miami City Ballet will show off that dexterity with their Chicago program. Two works by Balanchine, Petipa’s “Black Swan Pas De Deux” and a signature dance by contemporary icon Twyla Tharp share the stage this weekend. (William Scott)

Miami City Ballet performs October 2-4 at Auditorium Theatre, 50 East Congress, (312)902-1500. $30-$89.

Alan Wilder, Kate Arrington and Larry Yando/Photo by Michael Brosilow

There are myriads of problems with “Fake,” an ambitious new play written and directed by Steppenwolf ensemble member Eric Simonson.  The work’s agenda and conclusion—namely, that we perceive the reality around us according to our biases, i.e., a synonym for “belief” in Simonson’s lexicon—is an interesting one, but the juxtaposed episodes that precede it do not end up leading to the work’s finale. It is as if Simonson grafted unrelated episodes as a long prelude that ultimately fail to organically arrive where Simonson wants them to go.

Taking its structure from Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” the play takes us back and forth from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s attempt to prove that the Piltdown half-man, half-ape skull was a fake, to those who are, in fact, about to reveal exactly that some two generations later. It’s a fascinating premise, but aside from the fact that Simonson does not have Stoppard’s gift for language (who does?), his use of historical characters alongside of fictional ones sets up spiderwebs that the play is unable to satisfyingly raise, let alone untangle. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When writing reviews it’s rare that I’m able to use the word “powerful.” Still, I can’t think of a better description for Court Theatre and director Ron OJ Parson’s superb revival of playwright August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Indeed the show, which was first performed more than twenty-five years ago, is teeming with themes and ideas—assimilation, internalized racism, the appropriation and exploitation of one culture by —that still resonate with an incredible topicality as if the play had been written yesterday.

Wilson’s setting for his play is a fictional Chicago recording studio in 1927.  A white record producer and white music manager are trying to lay down some tracks of black singer Ma Rainey (the real life “Mother of the Blues” who recorded with Louis Armstrong and mentored Bessie Smith, among other achievements) performing her signature number, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Hamman, Carmine Grisolia and Tom Hickey/Photo: Chris Ocken

A war veteran once said of his filthy combat experience: “It’s the same mud; they just cart it from war to war.” This time the mud’s at the Battle of Agincourt in the fifteenth century as a ragtag band of English soldiers head once more into the breach. Will (an amiable Kyle Hamman) is a put-upon Irishman looking for a quick end to a dirty war. He convinces mercenary thugs Bardolph (Tom Hickey) and Nym (Carmine Grisolla) to help kidnap King Henry (John Henry Roberts) and sell him to the enemy.

The hard-working ensemble does what it can; the comic timing’s on point, Matt Hawkins’ fight choreography is energetic and funny. But Matt Pepper’s script never really launches, never shows us the stakes the characters face or gives us someone to root for; its end is unsatisfying. The raging conflagration of this battle is more like a weak campfire. (Lisa Buscani)

“St. Crispin’s Day” plays at Strawdog Theatre Company, 3829 N. Broadway, (773)528-9696, through October 31.

John Pierson, Luke Holladay, Vanessa S. Valliere/Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

There are those who find the Neo-Futurists scary any time of the year, so the thought of the avant-garde ensemble actually setting out to be scary for the Halloween season sounded intriguing, to say the least.  As you wait for your Edgar Allan Poe-themed tour to begin, you notice, ever so subtlely, the presence of a beautiful-but-hushed-and-pale young woman sitting in a corner copiously planting herself in dirt, an upside-down take on Poe’s fear of premature burial. Old photographs surround her, some which she buries along with her, and at least one audience member has her program spirited away and buried along with the photos. A personable and playful but mysterious guide clad in a black robe and hood with a half glow-in-the-dark facemask greets our group in silence and throws a glowing red bouncing ball to see who will go first.  Entering a long, scary hallway full of Andy Warhol-like portraits of well-known dead people, we make our way to a room based on Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” where a game audience member is given a palette of real paints and a brush and invited to paint a slowly deteriorating model on a video screen. Our aesthetic host, meanwhile, judges the quality of each, crumbling up ones that the rest of us decide do not represent honest artistic efforts.  A room devoted to “The Tell-Tale Heart” has audience members reading free riffs on the tale from a deck of cards (two of us had to chime in with punctuated “thump-thump” sound effects) but to careful and heartfelt direction from our silent guide. Read the rest of this entry »

Most Jukebox musicals come in one of two formats. Some take a compilation of well-known songs and use them to tell the life story of the songwriter or the performer who made them famous. And some create a fictional storyline within which they shoehorn a bunch of unrelated songs via a contrived plot.  “The Marvelous Wonderettes,” the jukebox musical at Northlight Theatre featuring those gloriously groovy tunes of the fifties and sixties, may be the first to do both.

The first act, set in a fictional high-school auditorium (period-evoking set and details by Michael Carnahan), sees Cindy Lou, Missy, Betty Jean and Suzy (aka “The Marvelous Wonderettes”) providing their 1958 senior prom’s entertainment by belting out recognizable hits such as “Lollipop,” “Mr. Sandman” and “(Love is like a) Heatwave” in a concert format.  There is a small attempt to develop individual character and explore the quartet’s interpersonal dynamics throughout, but most of this act, crafted with the kind of wholesome 1950s pre-psychedelic American sweetness liable to send a modern-day cynic into a sugar coma, is little more than an excuse to stage a K-Tel Golden Oldies musical medley.   Read the rest of this entry »

James Morris, Deborah Voigt/Photo: Dan Rest

In these trying economic times, Lyric Opera management is taking no chances: not only is the company presenting one of its most conservative seasons in the company’s fifty-five year history, but it broke off contract negotiations last Friday night with the Lyric Opera Orchestra, which had rejected a shorter season and wage freezes, i.e., a significant reduction in pay.  That management appears to have the upper hand was indicated by the fact that the Orchestra went ahead and performed at Saturday’s gala season opener without a contract. In better times, the Orchestra would have been on strike and the performance cancelled, but at least orchestra members were passing out pamphlets to the black-tie and gown set that walked down the red carpet leading to the doors of the Civic Opera House explaining their plight. Inside, too, there were indications that the recession was having an impact: the usual opening-night complimentary champagne became $9 a glass after Act I; the party favors handed out at evening’s end—a company poster—were “one per couple,” ushers literally grabbing them out of patrons’ hands who hadn’t heard.

Inside, the company was presenting its most-oft-performed tried-and-true Italian warhorse, Puccini’s “Tosca,” an opera by an Italian about Italians and written for Italians, and in most past seasons of the company long known as La Scala West, sung by Italians, or at least an Italian somewhere in the cast or in the orchestra pit. Not this time around. Soprano Deborah Voigt, a stellar Wagner and Strauss interpreter (neither are being heard in this budget-crunching season) and best known outside of the opera world for her celebrated weight-loss surgery after being fired by Covent Garden because her ample size made her unable to wear a kinky designer’s costume, sang the title role, a strange bit of miscasting. Read the rest of this entry »