Nacho Duato/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

This weekend Hubbard Street dances a program of works by three Latino artists: their phenomenal resident choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo, Mexican choreographer and Princess Grace Award winner Victor Quijada, and world-renowned Nacho Duato, former artistic director of the Compañia Nacional de Danza, soon on his way to take the helm of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Hubbard Street is the first U.S. company to obtain the rights to Duato’s “Arcangelo”—a Baroque vision of heaven and hell. Duato has been in Chicago to teach the piece—a rare treat for Hubbard Street, which has performed his works over the years, but never before had the opportunity to learn from the man himself.

“I enjoy very much working with the company; each year they’re getting better and better. I think now their repertoire is very challenging for the dancers. They’re working with very different choreographers, they tackle different time periods in contemporary work,” Duato says. “And yes, I think it’s one of the best companies in the U.S.” Read the rest of this entry »

Toby Gough

Director Toby Gough’s global cachet is considerable; he has brought Cuban musical productions to Edinburgh Fringe, where his work “Children of the Sea”—theater projects and music workshops for victims of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia—won the festival’s first prize. Gough has produced “Julius Caesar” in Africa and is currently running a show about Brazilian music. But “The Merchants of Bollywood,” billed as the first authentic Indian music and dance spectacular out of Bombay for the stage, which opens at the Auditorium Theatre this week, is the first time Gough has adapted from a filmic tradition.

We corresponded with Gough over email from Singapore the week before the show opens.

You’ve done a number of theatrical productions involving cultures from all over the world, but none seem to have used as specific a generic performance tradition as Bollywood. Did you stay close to Bollywood conventions for this piece? The plot seems to be fairly faithful to Bollywood stories.

Yes, the idea was to take a real life story and put it through the Bollywood mega mixer….

It’s an impossible fantasy, a perfect dream. The experience for the audience is to see a Bollywood film plot unfold before their eyes, in front of the camera, and then we show all the real-life chaos of what making movies in Bollywood is really like. The tiny budgets, the the impossible schedules, the formulaic scripts, the shoots in mountains, the tantrums of the divas and the relentless plagiarizing of Hollywood films to fulfill the demand of the billions of Indians who love what is known as Bollywood Masala! Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Giannina Urmeneta Ottiker

The MCA’s new Global Stage series, part of a remarkably strong lineup of performance at the museum’s theater this year, begins with Vienna-and-Paris-based company Superamas’ show “EMPIRE (Art & Politics),” a postmodern performance using theater, dance and recorded film that combines a re-enactment of a Napoleonic battle, a film-release party in New York and a fictional documentary about Afghanistan. We spoke with founding company member Philippe Riera about metatheater, hybrid performance and history.

Do you think that hybrid theater offers more room for creating messages about the current state of the world? Do we need to be making theater now that is somehow about the digitization and viral spread of meaning in the world now?

The good thing about a stage performance is that you really play with the authentic real people here on stage, before your eyes, and the fake—the action is more a representation of things in a given context. In the case of “EMPIRE,” some spectators really believed we went to Afghanistan to interview Samira Makhmalbaf… So we decided to change the editing of the documentary film to make sure people wouldn’t think we are duplicating capitalistic strategies usually used to abuse people’s naivete. A hybrid art form forces the viewers to wonder about what they see… and what it may mean… This is something we do to activate the spectators’ gaze. It is for us a real strategy to resist against myths and legends, no matter how beautiful they may be…. A strategy of joyful deconstruction. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Nikki Johnson

Jeremy Bloom is singing the body electric—(almost) literally. The Northwestern alum and Drama League Directing Fellow has gathered more than twenty intrepid performers to “rhythmically chant” Walt Whitman’s greatest hits in the buff this Friday onstage at Links Hall in the Chicago premiere of “Leaves of Grass.”

A fan since high school, Bloom was inspired to put the granddaddy of American free verse onstage when he realized that Whitman’s ultra-famous “Song of Myself” “is a series of instructions to the reader.” “He commands: ‘Undrape: you are not guilty to me,’ and ‘The man’s body is sacred, the woman’s body is sacred,’” and so, Bloom explains, “it became clear that some sort of scene in a play of these poems would have to be a celebratory naked celebration.” Read the rest of this entry »

Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

Much musical theater plays to the most maudlin of impulses, shamelessly tugging at the heart. But put Mary Zimmerman, Voltaire and Leonard Bernstein in a room, and you expect something more cerebral. And indeed, “Candide” is.

Voltaire wrote his romantic-tragicomic novella as an enlightened rebuttal to the “philosophy of optimism” holding sway in his time. It’s a philosophy brought to life here in the character of the philosopher Pangloss, and his true believer Candide, who suffer monstrously and yet remain true to the idea that it’s all for a higher purpose. It’s not much of a stretch to find contemporary resonance in political conservatism and religious fundamentalism (and their Tea Party bastard child), both notions rooted in preserving the status quo, and Zimmerman even inserts a line about “intelligent design” early on, just to make sure we get the message.

The story of “Candide” is narrative excess in service of a point: the young optimistic is pushed from his life of comfort for daring woo Cunegonde, whose noble lineage is out of his class; from there a life of horrifying misadventures unfurls, depicted to comic extremes, as he works his way around the world and back. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Lillico and Joy Farmer-Clary/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

With artistic director Barbara Gaines busy directing “Macbeth” over at Lyric Opera, Chicago Shakespeare Theater brought in renowned Shakespearean director Gale Edwards from Australia (veteran of several Royal Shakespeare Company gigs) to helm its season premiere of “Romeo and Juliet.” She, in turn, imported many of her leads from out of town, but no matter: this is an exceptional production regardless of its principals’ pedigrees. Most striking, perhaps, is the design of the show, and for that we have Chicagoans to thank: Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set is astonishing, the back stage opened up to create a long, deep hangar-like space, which functions as Verona streetscape, interior of the Capulet mansion and all other locations in the play. It is neither modern nor classical as befitting the production’s overall design, including Ana Kuzmanic’s wardrobe, which seems to master that balancing act of being of no time and all time at once. Like the story itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Cummings, Linda Gillum/Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

Journalistic integrity and the democratization of the media are the main sticking points in Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about British war correspondents in war-torn Africa. Although certain technological advancements and the rise of the blogosphere and iReporting have altered the very nature of journalism, in the main decentralized, free media outlets are increasingly sucking power and influence from the giant corporations. These issues and questions of objectivity, truth and democracy are meaty ones, and this production does not shy away from them. There are rumblings of an impending coup in a fictional African nation, and Stoppard’s journalists fight to get the scoop on one another. Young, idealistic Milne fights for capital-T Truth, while seasoned vet Wagner mainly wishes to preserve the dignity of his profession, scheming any way he can. “Night and Day” finds lovely expression by Remy Bumppo; Stoppard’s absurdly gorgeous language seems so natural in the mouths of the strong ensemble cast. Especially noteworthy is artistic associate Linda Gillum, who has the tricky job of winning you over with her melodramatic, Hollywood scene-chewing; I promise, it builds to something. And the kid is adorable. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln, (773)404-7336, through October 31.

RECOMMENDED

The House Theatre of Chicago understands how to engage a live audience. Setting up an elaborate multipurpose two-story set, avoiding unnecessary props, providing a live soundtrack and speeding up the action with well-organized montages are only a few of the ways that their latest offering—the gangster drama “Thieves Like Us”—highlights their dedication to keeping theater relevant and exciting. The only downside here is the somewhat generic feel of the story itself. Adapted from the 1937 Edward Anderson novel of the same name, Damon Kiely’s script follows a group of escaped convicts robbing banks throughout Oklahoma. The central character, Bowie Bowers (John Byrnes), falls for the sweet-but-tough Keechie (Paige Hoffman) and the duo attempt to escape the life of crime that they’ve become a part of. Though the story flows nicely, it can’t help but start to feel too familiar before it’s over. But even the slightly predictable ending is offset by the explosively creative staging of the finale. (Zach Freeman)

The House Theatre at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 West Division, (773)251-2195, through October 30.

Alex Goodrich and Erik Hellman/Photo: Michael Brosilow

A hot mess. If there’s such a thing as Shakespeare lite, “The Comedy of Errors,” with its slapstick physical comedy and absurd plot involving two sets of long-lost twins, is it. So when Sean Graney adapts it into a ninety-minute production, it’s easy to imagine that he’ll take a lot of creative license—and Graney does, getting rid of vast amounts of the original script and replacing it with lines that could have come from contemporary mainstream Hollywood comedies. Unfortunately, and surprisingly given Graney’s past work, the show appeals to the lowest common denominator (read: jokes and songs about blow jobs). Recognizable cultural touchstones include “Norbit,” where the part of a kitchen wench is played by an actor in a fat suit as a hideous man-eater who demands, among other favors, a colonic from one of the manservant twins whose character channels Will Ferrell’s persona so completely that it’s actually distracting. Cross-dressing and quick-changes (six actors play twenty-three characters), the theatrical elements that helped make Graney’s production of “Irma Vep” at the Court last year so funny, here feel like pointless showing off because there’s so little substance left to the production. If only Graney had stuck to the comedy that’s already in Shakespeare rather than inserting lines like “I’m gonna drink the shit out of this Diet Coke”—there’s a pervasive sense of anxiety at making the comedy accessible that’s totally unnecessary and, frankly, insulting to any audience. (Monica Westin)

At the Court Theatre, 5535 South Ellis, (773)753-4472, through October 17.

Gregory Isaac, right foreground, Lindsay Leopold/Photo: Suzanne Plunkett

RECOMMENDED

Emily Bronte’s classic returns to Lifeline, presented not as the “Twilight”-referenced melodrama many are familiar with, but as a meditation on emotional bondage, power and control. Heathcliff (Gregory Isaac) and Cathy (Lindsay Leopold) take every opportunity to test their love, dragging spouses, friends and family along on their destructive ride for two generations.

Isaac is classically brooding, Leopold is suitably fickle, wavering between her affection and her desire for wealth and status. Cameron Feagin offers a note of sanity as a servant consistently amazed at this crew’s potential for cruelty.

Adaptor Christina Calvit’s narrative gets bogged down in its own timeline occasionally and flashbacks fail to clarify the flow. But director Elise Kauzlaric stays on top of the pacing, her beautifully choreographed blocking illustrates the ties that bind. Branimira Ivanova’s lush, detailed costumes are appropriately restrictive; Alan Donahue’s set is darkly pastoral. The piece is a twisted, soulful gilded cage. (Lisa Buscani)

“Wuthering Heights,” Lifeline Theatre, 6912 Glenwood, (773)761-4477, through October 31.