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Calling itself the “metropolitan” version of “A Prairie Home Companion,” this monthly live radio-show-cum-podcast takes what Garrison Keillor has been doing for decades and adapts it for a younger, hipper crowd, throwing in more laughs (and more swearing). Led with a mix of wide-eyed earnestness and subtle cynicism by artistic director and head writer Matt Lyle, “The City Life Supplement” even has its very own Lake Wobegone: the fictional north Chicago neighborhood of Ravens Park, where you can get a five-dollar haircut from a Serbian named Milos or listen to your favorite hipster soap opera “As the World Sighs” (set in Wicker Park, natch). Read the rest of this entry »

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In addition to its musical theater productions, Theo Ubique has presented a number of revue shows over the years that have showcased the likes of Jacques Brel, Kurt Weill, Harold Arlen and Stephen Sondheim. The group has never performed a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical before, however, and has decided that its first foray into the crème de la crème of musical theater canons would be a revue of Rodgers and Hammerstein numbers.

Ordinarily, you might expect Theo Ubique to cobble together its own revue of R&H songs as it has with other composers, complete with anecdotes going into the context of a song within a specific show or details about how a particular song was composed. In this case, however, there was already a 1983 revue available and approved by the R&H estate that had been conceived by Jeffrey B. Moss, “Some Enchanted Evening: The Songs of Rodgers & Hammerstein.”

That revue—first done for a New York City hotel—featured two pianos and five performers and was actually somewhat of a “show-within-a-show” concept that had the performers prepare to go on as part of the show before singing solos, duets, trios and ensemble numbers with a decidedly New York cabaret-style feel that even included bits of jazz harmony and touches of swing and swagger, all done to syncopated two-piano accompaniment. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a brilliant sort of “Eureka!” moment revealed early in the staging of “The Astronaut’s Birthday,” Redmoon’s spectacle produced in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, and that is the realization that the array of symmetrical windows composing the facade of the museum’s Josef Paul Kleihues building make a perfect set of panels for a comic book. Once witnessed, you’ll be unlikely to ever look at the MCA without picturing some graphic narrative unfolding within its panes. Created and directed by Redmoon artistic director Frank Maugeri, with a co-creation credit to the company’s co-founder, Jim Lasko, “The Astronaut’s Birthday” is a compelling story, with nice artwork from Donovan Foote and others that pays homage at times to the likes of Jack Kirby (although it retains a circa-seventies superheroes-generic style most of the time) and that purports to draw from the Golden Age of comics and the 1950s sci-fi movies in telling the tale of an innocent bystander drawn, along with his family, into events of cosmic significance. Comic-book nerds like me are more likely to suss out references to the Silver Age from the sixties and seventies, especially in the plot structure and “lessons” learned by the characters. Nevertheless, the whole thing works pretty well as advertised, with some especially nice visual moments when all the panels are brought together to create a single dramatic image. Read the rest of this entry »

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Since 2001, artistic director Pete Guither has been projecting images onto naked performers as part of “The Living Canvas.” “Demons,” their seventh show in Chicago, delves into the mind of a troubled young woman as she transports her sister into the fantastical world she lives in: a world filled with faeries, phantasms and playful creatures. These creatures are boldly portrayed by eight other unclad actors of varying shapes and sizes who are constantly in motion: scrambling up the scaffolding of the set, executing elaborate movement routines, or creating a living wall of art. The psychedelic color displays projected onto the actors and the set coupled with Isaac Mandel’s invigorating sound design exquisitely highlight the simple beauty of the piece. For anyone feeling particularly affected by the summer heat, Guither has a solution for you: take those restrictive clothes off. Seriously. There is a full number designed for audience participation at the end of every show. From the packed house on the night I saw it, and the amount of willing audience participation, “The Living Canvas” is highly regarded not only as a visually striking performance, but as an exciting, interactive experience. (Zach Freeman)

The Living Canvas at National Pastime Theater, 4139 N. Broadway, (773)327-7077, through August 14. $20.

In this numbingly drab one-man show, actor Ben Pardo languidly moves around the sparse stage reciting poetry for a full hour—and although the amount of memorization here is rather impressive, the delivery is decidedly not. From very brief Emily Dickinson and A.E. Houseman pieces, to the lengthy Samuel Taylor Coleridge classic “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—which takes up more than half the show’s running time—Pardo imbues them all with the same lifeless line readings.

If these were original pieces, or even more obscure pieces by renowned writers, these dull recitations may have retained a bit of interest, if only from a scholarly viewpoint, but Pardo has chosen standard texts, including the infamous “Hamlet” soliloquy—yes, the one that begins “To be or not to be!” Pretentiousness, thy name is Pardo.

Even the most stirring Shakespearean dialogue falls flat here: lengthy pauses are deadening to the show’s already bloated running time, the blocking feels like mere wandering and by the end I expected an undergraduate professor to stand up and begin giving notes on basic dramatic delivery. (Zach Freeman)

Gorilla Tango, 1919 North Milwaukee, (773)598-4549, through July 2. $10.

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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

John Sanders, Kate Fry and Rob Lindley/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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When the Noël Coward revue “Oh, Coward!” opened in late 1972, Coward himself was still around but his detached and wry style had fallen way out of fashion. British actor/director/playwright Roderick Cook thought that the time was right to remind us all of what an original voice Coward had been, and the result was a hit show that even Coward himself came to check out in early 1973 in what turned out to be his last public appearance (he died in March of that year).

Cook’s idea was astonishingly simple: two male performers—one was originally Cook himself—and one female performer, all in evening clothes and sipping champagne, singing Coward songs and acting out scenes from his best-known plays. It was a passport to another era, and nearly four decades later, it feels as fresh as ever, at least in the hands of Writers’ Theatre. Entering the performance space in the back of a suburban bookstore, you are offered a glass of champagne as you head into an intimate theater transformed into an elegant, art deco nightclub of the 1930s. Music director Doug Peck greets you in tails as he is playing Coward songs on a grand piano and you find your way to small tables encircling the space in inviting, cabaret style. Read the rest of this entry »

Wayne Wilson, Jerry Kernion, Daniel Passer/Photo: Kristie Kahns

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Traditional Cirque du Soleil fans—and they are legion—are likely to find this latest comedy-packed, vaudeville-style entry in the franchise a perplexing, even tedious experience in that it has little in common with past offerings. “Daniel, help me down from here,” says clown Wayne Wilson, caught on a rising microphone. “I can’t,” says Daniel Passer, “I’m not in the union.” So much for the Chicago topical humor (the show is dress-rehearsing here for a New York opening).

Still, the take-off on American “talent” shows is hysterical, though it is likely to be unappealing to those who actually like such shows. “Is there anyone with any talent here?” says emcee Schmelky (Jerry Kernion), and seat numbers of “volunteers” are read aloud to audition on stage. All are clowns, of course, although out of makeup and just initially “normal” enough that they could pass for actual audience members. Before long, we get a ventriloquist whose dummy is deaf (the ventriloquist silently moves his hands endlessly, imitating sign language), a streaker/contortionist as a “modern dancer” (Patrick de Valette) and “the oldest mime in the world” (Gordon White) who comes on stage with a walker and takes his time to pantomime a large glass box that takes him long stretches of time to make his way across to its four corners.  Cruel humor, to be sure, but funny nonetheless.

As for actual circus acts within the show, these are few and far between, and consist mostly of juggling and a couple of gymnasts, albeit all excellent, as you would expect. What we get instead are elaborate dance routines, colorful costumes and an overdose of skits with no overall theme to any of this other than apparently being scaled-down Cirque du Soleil stuff reconfigured for theater venues.  (Dennis Polkow)

“Cirque du Soleil Banana Shpeel” runs through January 3 at the Chicago Theatre, $23-$98.

Ricky Jay/Photo: Jesse Dylan

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Ricky Jay opened “A Rogue’s Gallery” by reciting a poem that his friend Shel Silverstein wrote for him, in which Jay defends himself against a gun-wielding sore loser with only his playing cards. By the end of the evening, the idea of Jay fighting crime with cards seemed not only entirely possible, but paled in comparison to some of his other feats. Through random and sometimes haphazard processes, Jay selected audience members to join him on stage for various mesmerizing sleight-of-hand effects (he doesn’t call them tricks) in which he somehow managed to inscribe a book to someone before knowing her name, made cards seemingly teleport from one place to another, and blindly charted the course of a knight across a chess board without ever landing in the same space twice, while reciting Shakespeare and spontaneously calculating square roots. He also shared clips from some of the many films he’s been in and consulted on, and generally made people laugh tears with his remarkable stagecraft and wit. It sounds strange, and it was; but the kind of strange that causes every part of you all the way down to the cellular level to wonder how? Read the rest of this entry »

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

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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 »