Jonathan Weir and Shannon Cochran/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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Although Writers’ Theatre is celebrating its twentieth anniversary season, it only began performing musicals a few seasons ago and with mixed results. But with William Brown on board to direct an all-new production of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” perfectly suited to its intimate stage, Writers is giving us a musical production worthy of an important anniversary year.

“A Little Night Music” is the closest Sondheim work to an operetta, with its consistent use of waltz-like rhythms—virtually everything is in triple meter—and some of his most melodic material, including his most popular song, “Send in the Clowns.” It is also Sondheim’s most elaborate use of the kind of counterpoint that Leonard Bernstein had experimented with in the climax of “West Side Story,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics. Musically, it ranks among Sondheim’s most ambitious and adventurous works.

That the acting would be of the highest caliber was no surprise, for that is a Writers’ Theatre trademark. But that the musical component should be rendered so exquisitely was a welcome surprise given the unevenness of past musical productions. Musical director Valerie Maze—who also conducts from the piano and celeste—and her extraordinary tiny orchestra (including a tucked-away harp) render Sondheim’s lush score with surprising richness for such small forces. And each performer sings the score superbly even in the complex ensemble numbers, no small feat for how removed the performers often are from the orchestra. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Agard, Alan Schmuckler, Andres Cruz, Derrick Trumbly/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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That director David Cromer has developed a reputation for an ability to work magic on even the most taken-for-granted shows made his interest in “Rent” particularly intriguing, to say the least. No ordinary show, part of the mystique of “Rent” was the stranger-than-fiction reality that the composer of this updated transposition of Puccini’s “La bohème” from a nineteenth-century Paris garret with tuberculosis looming overhead to a 1990s flat in Greenwich Village with AIDS as the culprit, died suddenly of a burst aortic aneurysm on the night before “Rent” was to open in 1996. A mere thirty-five years old when he died and so living the bohemian lifestyle described in the show that the set designer made sure that the flat actually looked better than the composer’s own so as not to make him feel self-conscious, the late Jonathan Larson never lived to see or benefit from the extraordinary success of a work that he personified both in his life as a struggling artist and his untimely early death. Read the rest of this entry »

This Bailiwick Chicago/New Colony musical collaboration focuses on a dystopian future where every American family is limited to one child; every additional child is raised underground, ignored by the surface world. If you can’t remember that, it tells you so in the program. Five musical numbers reinforce the show’s thesis. We get it already. Read the rest of this entry »

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It has been nearly five years since “Jersey Boys” first took Chicago by storm with a subsequent two-plus-year-run that had it following the Broadway In Chicago “Wicked” template of opening here with a national tour but subsequently creating its own Chicago production. The 2006 Tony Award-winning musical which tells the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons—warts and all and complete with the group’s hits meticulously recreated—has emerged as not only one of the most successful shows of the “ought” decade, but also one of the most emulated. As a national tour made it back to its old haunt the Bank of America Theatre, it was hard not to be swept away by the brilliance of the show which has stood the test of time remarkably well. Read the rest of this entry »

Gerard McBurney/Photo: Todd Rosenberg

By Dennis Polkow

“Musical” and “Shostakovich” are two words few might expect to hear together. “Various people looked at ‘Moscow, Cheryomushki,’” explains the work’s adapter Gerard McBurney over tea, “but the reaction of most presenters in the West was, ‘Shostakovich? Oh, he wrote gloomy symphonies and string quartets. Not exactly a marketing dream.’”

McBurney—a composer, arranger, broadcaster and musicologist best known in the area for his popular “Beyond the Score” presentations at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra which he has overseen, written and narrated since that program’s inception in 2006—was commissioned in the early 1990s to take the piece’s large orchestration and make it performable for a production in his native England. Read the rest of this entry »

Amira Sabbagh, Joel Kim Booster, Joyee Lin, Jaii Beckley, Danny Bernardo, Christine Bunuan, and Dipika Cherala/Photo: Michael Brosilow

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Consider the holiday that many Americans just celebrated: a god, with a three-part persona, is one-third executed, only to return from the dead in, natch, three days. And part of the celebratory ritual is an act of metaphorically cannibalizing the deity. And, to top it off, add in painting the eggs of chickens and a mysterious rabbit who delivers confectionery fauna. Pretty exotic stuff if you were an alien or even just raised on the other side of this planet. This is the kind of cultural self-examination that “Re-Spiced: A Silk Road Cabaret” brings to mind as its cast of color plows through a carefully organized songbook of American and British tunes old and new that address, in some way, Asian and Middle Eastern themes. Woven into a clever and entertaining pastiche of songs, many focused on the “exoticness” of the East, are text excerpts drawn from the Western canon, the likes of Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton and Friedrich Nietzsche that punctuate or counterpoint the verses.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Some called him a prophet. When he died of AIDS-related causes in 1997, more than a million people attended his funeral.

And now Fela lives. At least as long as Tony nominee Sahr Ngaujah is playing him on stage, the Afrobeat pioneer and political activist from Nigeria is brought to life in an astonishing performance. Ngaujah sings with his explosive band, grabbing a sax and taking the instrumental lead on several occasions. He dances with his “queens” and vamps effortlessly with the crowd in a show designed to portray the final show ever at his Lagos nightclub, The Shrine. He rouses the audience with his story of fierce activism in trying to change his corrupt government, even in the face of immense persecution and personal loss. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Joan Marcus

Attempting to trade on the success of “High School Musical” and the myriad of musicals-derived-from-popular-films shows, “Bring It On: The Musical” is in part a corporate creation of Universal Pictures Stage Productions based on the studio’s popular 2000 cheerleading movie. The show has an impressive pedigree on paper with a host of Tony Award winners that include a libretto by Jeff Whitty (“Avenue Q”), music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda (“In the Heights”), music by Tom Kitt (“Next to Normal”) with direction and choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler (“In the Heights”).

Currently halfway through a pre-Broadway tour, the show is still quite cumbersome in its current form, and that’s not counting what scenes and songs may have already been cut along the way. Like “In the Heights,” this is a show that is both through-composed for many scenes, which is to say, huge portions of the dialogue are set to music, and yet the show is also excessively chatty between the musical portions. Unfortunately, there is a serious disconnect between the dialogue and the songs, which are rarely melodically driven or interesting musically. Read the rest of this entry »

Van Hughes, Joshua Kobak/Photo: Doug Hamilton

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Originally a 2004 concept album by Green Day, “American Idiot” is not your typical Broadway show. Staged like a rock oratorio rather than a book show, the show’s set is a cross between “Rent” and U2’s “Zoo TV” tour with its many television monitors that are often reflecting the world and the feelings that its characters are expressing.

Many traditional Broadway-style show lovers have complained about feeling a disconnect to this show because it is so different from those that they are used to, but that is part of the charm of “American Idiot.” I was concerned going in that some of the delightful ambiguities of the album would be made linear and direct for the show, but thankfully, such is not the case. This is a show where the template is actually the rebellious hootenanny optimism of 1960s-style folk-rock but arranged here for maximum soloist to chorus effect. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Robert Kusel

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In the world of musical theater, the genre is divided between B.S.B. (Before Show Boat) and A.S.B (After Show Boat), so revolutionary a work was “Show Boat” when it first premiered nearly eighty-five years ago. So revolutionary, in fact, that we have to almost remind ourselves that “Show Boat” began life as a 1926 novel by Edna Ferber.

Composer Jerome Kern read “Show Boat” upon its publication and immediately became excited about transforming the story to the musical stage. He even called a journalist friend to arrange a meeting with Ferber, who told Kern that she couldn’t imagine her dark tale taking life as a musical comedy. Kern won her over and soon hired a then largely unknown thirty-year old librettist by the name of Oscar Hammerstein II to write the book and lyrics for the show. Read the rest of this entry »