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

RECOMMENDED

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 »

Usman Ally, Alana Arenas, Lee Stark, Benim Foster/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

Amir is an American of Islamic heritage, his parents from the part of the world now known as Pakistan. He seems fully assimilated in all the ways mainstream America would want him to be: he’s disavowed the religion of his people, married a white woman and, most important of all, become an asshole corporate lawyer who wears $600 shirts. For what aspiration is more American than to be an asshole corporate lawyer?

But no one wants the assimilated Amir. Not his nephew who still clings to the Koran. Nor his wife, who’s using Islam in a  contemporary version of radical chic to establish her career as an artist. And in the ultimate act of identity suppression, he’s immersed himself, it seems, in a world of American Jews—at his law firm, among his social circle. Read the rest of this entry »

Darren Criss (#4) with Team StarKid

With our criteria shifted back to artistic accomplishment in theater, dance, comedy and opera this year, our task got infinitely tougher. Because while the number of performing venues grows at a steady rate, the increase in the number of noteworthy artists seems to grow exponentially. For everyone we name on the list below, we had to leave off five, an embarrassment of riches for Chicago. We made a conscious effort to introduce a meaningful number of new faces to the list this year; the necessary absences should not be construed as a loss of worthiness as a consequence. We often find trends when we do the research these lists require; this year we’re starting to see a more meaningful effort to redefine performance itself in the internet age, from the runaway success of StarKids, to the more calculated endeavors of Silk Road. So what defines a “player”? Consider it some complex stew of career achievement, recent “heat” and, in some cases, rising stardom.

Written by Zach Freeman, Brian Hieggelke, Sharon Hoyer and Dennis Polkow

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Sadieh Rifai/Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

I have a hard time with the concept of forgiveness. It seems like denial of the unacceptable. I come from the Italian school of Vendetta, which stipulates that anyone who does to me and mine will bleed in the streets. Or something like that.

So I can’t understand the Amish community’s response to the 2006 murder of five young girls at a Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania Amish school. The community attended the gunman’s funeral and befriended his widow and family. They did what their faith demanded.

ATC’s simple yet mindbogglingly complex explanation of that decision is a moving testimony to the resilience of spirit and the indomitable nature of love. Read the rest of this entry »

Terry Hamilton gets Fatt

By Brian Hieggelke

When the American Blues Theater ensemble was gathered in the spring of 2010 to vote on the next season, the idea to produce Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” spawned a spirited debate over the relevance of its subject. “We were like, ‘Does anyone even care about unions?’” says producing artistic director Gwendolyn Whiteside.

“And then after we selected ‘Waiting for Lefty,’ all hell started to break loose in Wisconsin,” Whiteside says. “I was fascinated and I couldn’t believe what was going on. And then Indiana erupted, and Ohio, and everything that was going on in world politics. I probably learned more about union politics because of these events in the past year than I had in school.”

School starts early, in mid-August, for the cast of “Lefty.” It’s the opening night of rehearsals and about three dozen or so folks are gathered in a large room that is the Remy Bumppo Rehearsal Space in Lakeview.

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Carol Rose, Jessie Fisher, Kelly Davis Wilson, Sadieh Rifai, Jessica Diaz/Photo: Brett Beiner

RECOMMENDED

It’s hard to remember so much excitement about a theatrical production in such a small space before the show even opened, but this is no small affair. “Grease,” the biggest show to ever come out of Chicago, once owned the  record for Broadway’s longest run and resulted in one of the most successful movie musicals (and soundtracks) in history. But on its way to becoming America’s sweetheart, “Grease” lost its Chicago soul. Until now.

You know it’s an unusual opening night when you have to squeeze past Marilu Henner to leave the show. Her presence in the audience was not coincidental; she’d been an undergrad at the University of Chicago when she was cast in a rinky-dink production of a new musical in the old Kingston Mines Theatre, as the first incarnation of Marty. The rest, as they say, is history. “Grease” was set in Rydell High, a stand-in for the Taft High School of co-creator Jim Jacobs’ youth, and the characters and much of the play’s songs and references were inherently Chicago.  And, befitting the story of hormone-raging high schoolers at the end of the fifties, it was raunchy. Jacobs’ partner in grime Warren Casey is no longer with us, but, at the urging and assistance of American Theater Company artistic director PJ Paparelli, who directs this show, Jacobs reconstructed the now-ubiquitous sanitized and Chicago-free “Grease” back to a reasonable approximation of the show that audiences saw that  fateful night in 1971 when it first opened. With tales of the reconstructed, R-rated and Chicago-centric production seemingly everywhere these past weeks, curiosity was certainly piqued. But would it be more than a mere curiosity? Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from American Theater Company:

AMERICAN THEATER COMPANY’S 2011-12 SEASON INCLUDES
THE CHICAGO PREMIERE OF THE AMISH PROJECT,
PATRICK MEYERS’ K2, THE WORLD PREMIERE OF TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ ESCAPE,
AND A CO-PRODUCTION OF RENT WITH ABOUT FACE THEATRE   Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Leahy, Philip Earl Johnson, Lia Mortensen, Noah Schwartz/Photo: Chris Plevin

RECOMMENDED

This new play by Dan LeFranc, which began life as a forty-minute one-act, runs like a time-lapse portrait of a multi-generational family over the course of a good half century or so. To put it another way, imagine the prologue from Pixar’s “Up,” the sweet couple seen at every high and low of their life together, but also imagine they had children, and their children had children, and so on. LeFranc packs an amazing number of scenes into the play’s seventy-five-minute runtime, and while this attempt to etch a grand narrative of the modern American family often feels cloyingly typical, and even exhaustive in its breadth, its depths are painfully and humorously familiar. An agile cast of four boy/girl pairs, at four stages of life, breathes life into Sam and Nicole, their parents and children and lovers, showcased well in Dexter Bullard’s effective, minimalist staging. (Neal Ryan Shaw)

American Theater Company, 1909 West Byron, (773)409-4125. Through March 6.

As the economy slowly lifts us back to our feet and we look around, we see a remarkable sight: a performance industry in Chicago that survived the worst recession since the Great Depression wholly intact. Sure, we had a few brushes with death, and no doubt a few very small, very new theater companies threw in the towel, as they do even in good years, but unlike many other cities across the country, we’re in pretty good shape. How good? The League of Chicago Theatres issued a press release last week proclaiming our town as America’s theater leader, with more than 250 professional theaters, including four Regional Tony Award winners, and a combined annual budget of $250 million serving five million audience members. Add in our thriving dance community, a comedy scene that’s the envy of the nation and two world-class opera companies and you’d have to say we’re doing pretty damn good. But neither the economy nor any cultural organization is fully out of the water yet, and the dramatic uncertainty injected into the political sea by Mayor Daley’s decision to call it a day means Chicago’s performance community will need some steady hands at the wheel these next few years. Accordingly, for this edition of The Players, we’ve broadened our horizon and taken a closer-than-ever look at the individuals in charge of the financial fitness of our local institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Christina Nieves and Edgar Miguel Sanchez/Photo: Chris Plevin

RECOMMENDED

A geeky brilliance and an unexpected wave of rousing feminism lives at the heart of “Welcome to Arroyo’s”, Kristoffer Diaz’s new play at American Theater Company directed by Jaime Castañeda. It’s a world premiere, but the play’s been knocking about at readings and festivals since 2003. Diaz, of course, is the exciting Latino playwright whose first commercially produced play, last season’s “The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity,” Diaz’s love letter to professional wrestling, just nabbed a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in drama. With “Arroyo’s”, Diaz once again taps his inner pop-cultural geek—this time for hip-hop—as well as his inner feminist, to produce an urban comedy that dares to place women at the birth of modern-day hip-hop.

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