Northwestern University’s Theatre and Interpretation Center is currently presenting three productions of its brand new “Masters-in-the-Making” series, which features the work of three third-year MFA student directors. The works include David Greig’s “The American Pilot,” “The Who’s Tommy” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel. “The idea is to celebrate the kind of capstone experience of these three young directors,” Artistic Director Henry Godinez says. “We’re putting them together in the same quarter, almost as sort of a festival.” Godinez says the idea of putting the productions together—instead of scattered around the year, as they were in the past—helps them earn attention. “My feeling was that [the productions] would get lost in the midst of the rest of the season,” Godinez says. “I felt like this would be exciting and it would be advantageous to make an event out of it. Of the productions, Godinez says, “All three [directors] have chosen projects that are personal to them. They have a comment to make about the way they view the world in which they live.” The “Masters-in-the-Making” series runs through March 14. (Tom Lynch)

RECOMMENDED

Who would have thought that this silly opera buffa of the bel canto era would end up being one of the highlights of the current Lyric Opera season?  Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love” is one of those works that endures primarily because of its rapturous melodies. Its far-fetched “plot,” such as it is—an illiterate country boy in love with a wealthy land owner who competes for her affections with a lout of a military officer by buying a barker’s magic love elixir—is hardly compelling. One opera lover was overheard complaining that in contrast to the current Lyric “Tosca,” where every main character ends up dead, how boring it is that everyone in “Elixir” actually lives. Oh well.

Death tolls aside, there are aspects of this production that make it a “must see.” The quality of the singing itself is extraordinary and, overall, this is the finest “Elixir” to be heard here in many, many years. Lyric has routinely used “Elixir” to spotlight a particular singer—this was the second opera Pavarotti ever sang here—but the supporting cast has usually been immensely uneven, making this a long evening when you hear singers with stodgy voices attempt to traverse the many runs, scales and trills of the piece. Here, however, we actually have a cast who not only can actually sing this stuff, but that is credible dramatically in doing so. Read the rest of this entry »

Playwright Tanya Barfield’s Pulitzer-nominated “Blue Door” is ambitious in the range of topics and emotions it throws into its stew, from terror to humor, from classic questions of black identity—if you play the white man’s game, are you black enough?—to more contemporary versions surfacing in the age of Obama, such as, is it time to stop fixating on racial identity issues once and for all? But some stews, no matter how delicious their individual ingredients, end up tasting rather blah. And that’s the problem here: plenty of choice wordplay, funny bits and heartbreaking stories that, when mixed together, fall apart.

Lewis finds himself alone, his life something of a mess. He involuntarily “seeks” answers in his ancestors, who come to him in a series of sleepless waking dreams one night. How does this great grandson of slaves, now a member of the intellectual elite as a college mathematics professor, end up so unhappy, in search of “the why” of his life? Read the rest of this entry »

On the stage are multiple video screens. Each screen plays a separate series of very short clips from film, animation, rehearsal footage—any number of two-to-three second images of a human body in motion. Dancers watch and mimic the simultaneous motions depicted on the screens, performing physical tasks by command. This is live processing, a performance approach conceived by actors in the Wooster Group in New York, and adopted by choreographer and Guggenheim Fellow Koosil-ja Hwang as a means to study movement without the burden of narrative or characterization. In an effort to eliminate the political traps of interpretation, Koosil-ja creates a video score of movement material never before seen by the dancers; the demand on the performer is to connect immediately with the images, freeing their mind from judgments about who or what is performing the movement on screen—though many images are pulled from famous films—and replicate what they see. This game of referential Simon Says has an ambitious goal: to create movement free of signification, to transform the dancer’s body into a conduit for pure motion, liberated from conceptions of identity like age, gender, even motivation. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The question of whether the two separate “packages” of “The Brother/Sister Plays” can be seen on their own was a bit of a topic at the press opening on Saturday, one which those of us who saw both can only offer a hypothetical yes to. But we can unequivocally say that seen together they form an epic new work of theater with a power that grows deeper and richer with each installment. Not bad for a 29-year-old playwright, Tarell Alvin McCraney, who crafted the strongest of the three plays (the two shorter works are seen together) while still in school.

The loosely structured story of a Louisiana family across three somewhat timeless generations is told through a series of vignettes, dreams, songs, dances, etc.—a list of parts that can’t begin to sum its whole. “In the Red and the Brown Water,” the “sisters” play, chronicles the heartbreak and sacrifice that love in all its forms (familial, passionate) engenders when Oya, played with effusive joy and heartwrenching pathos by ensemble member Alana Arenas, seems to pay a life of consequences when she passes up a scholarship to care for her ailing mother. “The Brothers Size,” the second play chronologically and the first play of the second package (less confusing than it sounds) is a masterpiece of brotherly love, both the sparring and laughing that bonds real brothers, as well as the mysteries of friendships, perhaps even more, that can bond men. Phillip James Brannon and K. Todd Freeman will tear your heart apart and make you smile with pleasure as they jam to the sounds of Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness.” The final play, “Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet,” explores more explicitly a subject raised in the earlier plays, that is, the love that dare not speak its name, when the marvelous Glenn Davis, now playing the son of the character he’d inhabited in the earlier plays, goes through the experience of coming out, as filtered through the African-American experience. Read the rest of this entry »

 

 

RECOMMENDED

It’s fashionable to treat the works of playwright Clifford Odets as out of fashion. Accordingly, productions are relatively rare for a writer who gave the social unrest coming out of the Great Depression its voice, the writer most associated with the legendary Group Theatre, one of the most influential theatrical ensembles in American history.

But times have changed of late, and the out-of-favor socialist notions espoused in Odets’ work suddenly have renewed relevance. After all, the day that Northlight’s well-crafted revival of his masterpiece, “Awake and Sing!” was to open, I turned on NPR to hear Mad Moneyman Jim Cramer telling the host that our recent economic meltdown proved Karl Marx right. Marx! Hell, Cramer even trotted out Trotsky for praise.

Today’s economic misfortunes are recurring echoes of the economic backdrop of this 1935 play, with one major exception: there was a progressive utopian ideal at work then, the idea that from the carnage a better world, a better economic system would emerge, as expressed to and through the character of Ralphie Berger (played with suitable earnestness by Keith Gallagher). These days, the doctrine of capitalism seems at little risk from either side of the politcal divide, and the great hope is not a better tomorrow but simply a return to a better-working yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

As part of this year’s especially strong Rhinocerous Theater Festival, Tympanic steps up to join the ranks of B.T. Scott, Chris Bower and numerous cutting-edge local theater companies. “And Then It Burst” is by no means the best show on at Rhinofest, but it’s earned its place in the rotation. Composed of four short vignettes by George McConnell running in quick succession, the show surpasses the ten-minute-play festival structure with smart transitions (characters from different plays crop up throughout stage changes, making the piece feel surprisingly coherent as a whole). The individual plays are a mixed bag; at best, they’re beautiful meditations on repetition and power in language and relationships (McConnell constantly plays with words in off-kilter and often very funny ways). The weaker plays fall victim to pseudo-profound banality—for example, a depressed businessman trying to tell another suit about his suicide attempt. What’s provocative and difficult to know is how invested the playwright was in trading in cliche for a particular purpose; each play’s relationship to truisms is different, but they saturate each to varying degrees of success.

At Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, (773)508-0666. Through February Feburary 11.

RECOMMENDED

Unfortunately, there was only one performance of Chris Sullivan’s creepy, gorgeous, hilarious, and profoundly one-off show at Rhinofest this year. However, “Mark the Encounter” has been in development for years (it shows), and so it’s possible there will be another incarnation in Chicago, though its creator plans to take it on the road before that happens. If and when it does, it’s an important one to see—rarely do we get a chance to see a performance piece that has been as meticulously worked as Sullivan’s, nor one that incorporates truly arresting—and at times brilliant—writing, perfectly disturbing comedy and a sense of the absurd delivered with droll understatement.

This is all to say that “Mark the Encounter” is very smart and at most times seemingly the work of a deranged consciousness. The show follows a dream logic, beginning with a doctor convincing a woman to donate her newly vegetable husband’s heart to a creepy marionette named Fred. Fred appears again as the fantasy of the dead man’s alleged brother Nosmo, whose insanely funny, and very very sad inner life turns out to be the expressionist hinge around which the short scenes rotate. Nosmo has a Peruvian mountain man living where his heart used to be (dysphemistically called a homunculus). His fantastically depraved and hilarious fantasies of seducing his brother’s widow run up against deeply unhealthy psychotherapy sessions that easily outstrip the subject’s usual treatment. Other scenes, intertwined and undermining one another, including an undertaker with the hustle of a used-car salesman and a series of horrific funeral elegies delivered with professional deadpan, somehow do more than stay afloat. This show embodies the niche between performance art and theater that Chicago desperately needs filled, and it does so in a damn smart, damn funny way. (Monica Westin)

Rhinofest.com

A beloved and iconic 1960s musical that is rarely revived, “Funny Girl” is so associated with canonizing the career of Barbra Streisand and was so tailor-made to her performing style that few attempt to tackle it unless you have one hell of a leading lady who can sing her heart out, make you laugh and break your heart all in the same show.

The great irony, of course, is that vaudevillian Fanny Brice, upon whose career “Funny Girl” is based, was a subtle and smoky contralto, not a belting soprano like Streisand. As an anchor of the Ziegfeld Follies, Brice had made a specialty of comedy along with “victim” torch songs where she came out and poured her heart out about mistreating men, about which she knew so much that a movie was made about her life that so offended her that a successful lawsuit ensued. Her son-in-law and producer Ray Stark sought to set the family record straight with a film version of her life that would be so whitewashed that few took interest, so Stark decided to do a backstage Broadway musical instead.

Unable to secure the rights to Brice’s songs, who was dead by then, a new score was commissioned from Jule Styne, of “Gypsy” fame. As with “Gypsy,” Styne’s score was such a tour de force that Anne Bancroft, the original choice for Brice who was just off of her Tony and Oscar for “The Miracle Worker,” pulled out. Name performers of the day such as Carol Burnett and Edye Gorme were considered but ultimately Streisand, who at that time was still singing at clubs in Greenwich Village, was secured. Though the show was a triumph, it became more about Streisand than Brice, a problem for anyone else trying to do the show ever since. Read the rest of this entry »

 

 

RECOMMENDED

Crass,  hilarious and unexpectedly tender, this production takes one of juvenile Brecht’s fairly undeveloped plays and turns it into a showcase for gorgeous theatricality of all kinds. The story—a young man and his not-so-secretly pregnant bride host a disastrous wedding party full of stock terrible relatives and eccentric, lecherous friends—is predictable; for example, the young man proudly points out at the beginning of the evening that he’s made all the furniture, which then proceeds to fall apart in classic slapstick ways as the social gathering becomes more and more chaotic and eventually ends in ruins as well. But it’s the way that everything falls apart that’s so incredible here; the joy in this show comes from following the characters sparring verbally, groping one another’s spouses, and reciting wildly inappropriate stories and songs, often all at the same time. Musical interludes—such as a cuckold husband’s attempts to play “I can’t help falling in love with you” on the guitar, or Andy Hager’s inimitable lecherous song-as-toast, provide yet another layer of gratification. If the show sometimes toes the line of the pornographic (there are, perhaps, a few too many moments of simulated sex), its pure joy at exhibitionism and stagecraft  keeps the show from feeling merely vulgar. (Monica Westin)

TUTA‘s “The Wedding” plays at the Chopin Theater, 1543 West Division, (847)217-0691. Through February 14.