Next week Redmoon Theater will unveil their latest collaboration with MCA Stage, “The Astronaut’s Birthday,” a performance about an astronaut’s journey home to earth that will turn the MCA’s front façade into comic-book- and 1950s-sci-fi-inspired frames that incorporate hand-illustrated shadow puppets, live actors and projections. We spoke with Redmoon Artistic Director Frank Maugeri about retro technology and the challenges of the MCA space.

In this piece you make use of a lot of handmade, almost primitive technology—what will the performance look like?

We use close to 700 hand-drawn hand-inked hand-gelled images that will be projected along the entire façade of the MCA. The piece has remarkable colorful generosity to it, though it’s based on the four-color system of Marvel Comics. We chose this simple palette because the press in 1960s comics, one of our major inspirations, only worked with rudimentary colors, and we also play with what feel like press-making mistakes, with washed-out colors at moments. Read the rest of this entry »

U2’s Bono (left) posing to support Lyric Opera and Sir Andrew Davis (right) attempting to sport the Bono look (Courtesy of Lyric Opera)

RECOMMENDED

It was ten years ago that then-new Lyric Opera music director Sir Andrew Davis gave Lyric Opera’s first ever free pre-season outdoor concert, at that point in the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park. The original idea was to offer a season preview to tantalize the public for the upcoming opera season by presenting highlights performed by the same stars who would actually be in those productions.

Over the years, however, the concept has become a catch-all concert, only a fraction of which has anything to do with what will be presented during the season itself; of this year’s eight operas, only two will be represented at this concert. Read the rest of this entry »

Rae Gray & Zoe Levin/Photo: Wayne Karl

RECOMMENDED

Smart theater companies know they have to carve out a niche, and Profiles, I think, has done a better job than most. The plays of Neil LaBute turn up here often, but even the non-LaBute works (recently Tracy Letts’ “Killer Joe”) have a LaButian undercurrent. They are contemporary stories of middle class malcontents—stories that are harsh but smart all the same, and almost always tied up in a knot over the vexing relationship between the sexes. Really, if delicate lyricism is your bag, you should go somewhere else.

Profiles has earned a rep for staging fully adult work that frequently positions very young women (sometimes teenagers) opposite older men—a dynamic that never fails to trigger all kinds of uncomfortable emotions, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing at the end of the day. Thus, the title alone suggests that Deirdre O’Connor’s “Jailbait” (in its Midwest premiere) is a good fit for Profiles, but it’s also just a good play, period. Read the rest of this entry »