Photo: Manuel Harlan

RECOMMENDED

While the mise-en-scene of the play is mostly clutter-free, the alley stage of the Broadway Armory space framed by scaffolding structures, there is one scenic piece that ends up serving a number of resonant functions: it’s a pool table. Simple as it sounds, with its representations of casual gaming, army truck and even womb, the set piece ultimately says a lot about the hometown pride that is characteristic of the Scottish Black Watch. A Highland regiment with hundreds of years of history, it became the center of a controversy during the 2003 Iraq War when the U.S. Army requested that the Black Watch replace its own forces in an area known as the “Triangle of Death.”

Based on interviews with former members of the Black Watch, Gregory Burke’s script retains a certain docudrama spine. Yet between the scenes of jocularity, whether in the pool hall back home or in the thick of it during the war, there is a definite stylistic approach to the material that heightens the inherent drama of battle. Scenes of testosterone vulgarity make way to beautiful ballets with rifle-clutching soldiers or the singing of a swelling Scottish ballad. With the recent dissolution of the Black Watch into the Royal Regiment of Scotland, these stylized elements contribute to its crucially romanticized collective memory. In all, the play is an unadulterated insight into the life of a soldier, a provocative examination of the smaller consequences of foreign policy and a stirring tribute to a centuries-long tradition of pride. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

The National Theatre of Scotland and Chicago Shakespeare Theater at the Broadway Armory, 5917 North Broadway, (312)595-5600. Through April 10.

Here’s the press release from Broadway in Chicago:

BROADWAY IN CHICAGO IS PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE 2011-2012 BROADWAY IN CHICAGO SUBSCRIPTION SERIES:
WEST SIDE STORY; LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE; ANN: AN AFFECTIONATE PORTRAIT OF ANN RICHARDS; MEMPHIS; DONNY & MARIE: CHRISTMAS IN CHICAGO; LA CAGE AUX FOLLES AND COME FLY AWAY. Off-season specials include: CHICAGO, MARY POPPINS, ROCK OF AGES, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and THE ADDAMS FAMILY

CHICAGO (March 29, 2011) – Broadway In Chicago is thrilled to announce the complete 2011-2012 subscription series. The upcoming season will include WEST SIDE STORY; LOVE, LOSS, AND WHAT I WORE; ANN: AN AFFECTIONATE PORTRAIT OF ANN RICHARDS; MEMPHIS; DONNY & MARIE: CHRISTMAS IN CHICAGO; LA CAGE AUX FOLLES and COME FLY AWAY. Off-season specials include CHICAGO, MARY POPPINS, ROCK OF AGES, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and THE ADDAMS FAMILY. Season ticket packages go on sale to new subscribers this Friday, April 1.  Tickets are available now to all shows for groups of 15 or more.  Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Northlight:

Northlight Theatre announces the Broadway hit
[title of show]
as the final selection for the 2011-12 Season

Chicago, IL—Artistic Director BJ Jones and Executive Director Timothy J. Evans are proud to announce the final production of Northlight’s 2011-12 Season, [title of show], the Broadway musical sensation about…creating a Broadway musical sensation.  The production, with music and lyrics by Jeff Bowen and book by Hunter Bell, runs May 4 – June 10, 2012 and opens Friday, May 11, 2012.  Read the rest of this entry »

By Monica Westin

Collaborative performance duo Cupola Bobber, comprised of Stephen Fiehn and Tyler Myers, will be relocating from Chicago to New York this spring—but not before they put on “The Field, The Mantel,” possibly their most rigorously intellectual full-length performance piece to date, in their intimate studio space in Humboldt Park.

In addition to live and durational video performances, Fiehn and Myers have published collaborative writing, often as companion pieces to their shows—and this engagement of text shows in each one of the performances, which often work in thematically embodied essays, diligently researched and richly nuanced. Their last performance in Chicago, “Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me,” commissioned by PS122 in NYC, Links Hall in Chicago and the National Performance Network, combined ruminations about the sea with provocative historical vignettes. Cupola Bobber spent this year touring the piece internationally before returning home to Chicago to work on “The Field, The Mantel.”

What makes their work so compelling are the additional elements of Cupola Bobber’s homemade, minimal visual aesthetic and their charmingly inelegant, often hamhanded choreographed movements. This combination of the physically gawky and the elegance of their theoretical and philosophical explorations results in an absurdity that’s both very funny and profoundly humane.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from Porchlight Music Theatre:

Porchlight Music Theatre Chicago
Announces its
2011–2012 Season Featuring
the Sondheim Musical Revue Putting it Together,
the Chicago Premiere of Harvey Fierstein’s A Catered Affair,
and Jonathan Larson’s Rock Musical tick, tick… BOOM!

CHICAGO—Porchlight Music Theatre, nationally recognized for developing innovative new works, reimagining classic productions, and showcasing musical theater’s rising stars, announces its 2011-2012 season.  The season will open with legendary composer Stephen Sondheim’s musical revue Putting it Together (September 2 to October 16, 2011), followed by the Chicago premiere of multi-Tony Award winner Harvey Fierstein’s A Catered Affair (February 17 to April 1, 2012), and conclude with tick, tick… BOOM! (April 27 to June 10, 2012), an internationally acclaimed musical by Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winner Jonathan Larson. Putting it Together will play at Theater Wit, 1229 W Belmont Ave. The remainder of the season will play at Stage773, 1225 W Belmont.  Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Antoine Tempé

By Sharon Hoyer

When Reggie Wilson answers a question he tries to hand you a complete story, traveling down side streets, pausing in front of windows and cracks in the pavement, gathering all the details he can carry. When asked the origin of his current project, a collaboration with Senegal-based choreographer Andréya Ouamba entitled “The Good Dance—dakar/brooklyn,” he begins with his family roots in Alabama and Mississippi, follows them up to Milwaukee where he was raised, takes it to New York where he currently resides (being sure to mention influential colleagues like Ohad Naharin), then sets out across the globe, talking about his research and travel in the Caribbean, West Africa and Central and South Africa. When asked if there was a story behind the name of his company he began, “there’s a story. There are lots of stories.”

Fitting then that Wilson should cast his raft on two very long and storied rivers—the Mississippi and the Congo—and follow their tributaries where they might carry him, doing his best to notice similarities along the way. Most immediately notable: both have violent histories and both nurtured cultures that spread through their respective continents. First and foremost, the music. Wilson says, “It’s strange that both of those places had dark histories, but how much impact the music had that came out of those regions. The Mississippi Delta blues, gospel music and jazz from New Orleans all the way up to Chicago and Minneapolis… I even put in the relationship to the Detroit motor city sound. The Congolese music has that same kind of reach and impact. You think of rumba as coming from Cuba, but it came from the Congolese slaves and traces back to Angola and Central Africa. That’s what got me started thinking about the central African impact. It didn’t matter if I was in a nightclub in Johannesburg or Dakar or Morocco or Nairobi; by the end of the evening everyone was playing the Central African music.” Read the rest of this entry »

Katrina Miller

Jackie Taylor’s created a magical place up on Beacon Street with musicals that have the congregational energy and spiritual uplift of a religious revival meeting—without the religion. It would require a very dark soul to leave one of these shows in a bad mood. This latest work, written, produced and directed by Taylor, as so many Black Ensemble shows are, follows her successful formula of a fairly thin plot built around show-stopping songs backed by a rockin’ live band, in this case mostly the creations of Luther Vandross. “All In Love Is Fair” tells the story of six romantic couples (including a love triangle) in the fictional town of Love, Illinois. Rhonda Preston and Zachary Boyd are particularly compelling as the fiftieth-anniversary celebrants who start confronting mortality, and the supersized Vasily Deris brings the house down—and a tear to a few eyes, including mine—with his robust renditions of a couple of Vandross classics. Katrina Miller once again stands apart for her comic poise as Katie, the busybody narrator. In many ways, the experience is like an intimate concert; your level of enjoyment is predicated on your passion for the slow jams that make up its offerings.

At the press opening, the front row was populated with a group who went crazy over the songs, hands in the air, singing along and conveying a pure joy that we rarely see in the theater. Sure, the shows can be a tad shaggy, with mics cracking at times, and storylines a bit thin, but there’s no avoiding the “Power of Love” unleashed in this intimate space. (Brian Hieggelke)

At Black Ensemble Theater, 4520 North Beacon, (773)769-4451. Open run.

Amy J. Carle with Lawrence Grimm, Thomas J. Cox, Adrian Danzig and Kevin Douglas/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

It’s not a big surprise that the somewhat airy, twee writing style of Sarah Ruhl makes this “Orlando” less verbally piercing than the original Virginia Woolf novel, and the show is nothing if not thematically light, even as it takes on the big questions about romantic love and personal identity. But what Ruhl and director Jessica Thebus, who are longtime collaborators, pull off is somehow entirely fitting for a novel that began as an extended love letter from Woolf to her sometimes lesbian lover. A young nobleman during the Renaissance, Orlando is a favorite of Queen Elizabeth at court; he falls in love with a Russian princess; he travels to Istanbul as a consul, where he wakes up from a centuries-long sleep to find himself a woman in order to face our last three centuries of history. Ruhl is faithful to the epic plot of the story, and if the writing is occasionally insipid, Thebus easily makes up for it with inspired physical theater. A four-man chorus, comprised of 500 Clown’s Adrian Danzig and three of Lookingglass’ most agile performers, breathes life into the show with graceful clowning and exquisite choreographed movements. The technical theater is equally beautiful, with layers of billowing curtains and delicate but powerful lighting design. Overall, the performance is pure romance. (Monica Westin)

At Court Theatre, 5535 South Ellis, (773)753-4472. Through April 10.

Stephanie Umoh and Jared Zirilli

This is the second local production of Elton John’s “Aida” programmed in the wake of last year’s “Billy Elliot” mania—ironically, “Billy” did not even last long enough to be around for this déjà vu vu vu, if you count the fact that the original work gestated in Chicago over a decade ago.

“Aida” represents the third and final collaboration between Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice, all for animated Disney films: “The Lion King,” “The Road to El Dorado” and “Aida,” which was never made. Based on the Verdi opera as it was adapted for a children’s book by soprano Leontyne Price, the definitive “Aida” of her generation, an “Aida” concept album was recorded in 1998, much as Rice had done with his longtime collaborator Andrew Lloyd Webber for properties such as “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita” before they became stage works.

When the animated version fell through, Disney Theatrical put together a mammoth stage adaptation with Goodman Theatre’s Robert Falls as director and one of three credited co-writers, always the signal of a troubled past. It was that version that previewed in Chicago with Heather Headley (Nala in the Broadway “Lion King”) and Adam Pascal (the original Roger in “Rent”) in late 1999 before hitting Broadway in March of 2000, though not before the elephantine scenery that had so many problems—even infamously injuring Headley and Pascal here in Chicago—was simplified before opening on the Great White Way. Read the rest of this entry »

With dashes of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and high-concept improv, the premise of “The Literati” is deceptively simple: to take some twenty-odd literary classics, boil them each down to about fifteen-minute adaptations, and let the audience randomly choose five of them by rolling a giant die (“The Device,” as the cast calls it). Never fear, however, as knowledge of these classics isn’t a requirement. The writer/performers—Nick Freed, Derek Jarvis and “Koncept”—manage to come up with a formula that allows for the maximum number of jokes with a minimum of effort. Sprinting from the first line of the book to the last, though, there’s often little time for anything but broad humor and slapstick, much of it centered around the cast’s own misunderstanding of the work at hand. But in a fast-paced, high-energy comedy like this, there’s often little time to do anything but laugh, either. It’s the kind of show where “Balzac!” is exclaimed as an expletive. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Chicago dell’Arte at the Athenaeum, 2936 North Southport, (800)982-2787. Through April 17.