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First, a disclaimer: I heard the score to this Dennis DeYoung show on Memorial Day, 1994, visiting the composer’s home, and was immensely moved by it. This was long before the Disney animated musical version, and at that time the working title of this version was “Q-Modo.” The best ballads were already there, and the melodic hooks were far superior, I felt, to the Styx hit parade so associated with its composer. Watching the score come to life at Bailiwick’s Monday night opening, not one note had changed in fourteen years, though what was the torso of a work has been filled out with more, well, ballads, when frankly what was needed was a variety of musical styles and colors reflecting the contrast of actual characterizations. To be sure, there are moments of great beauty here, a feast of melody in a form that thrives on tunes but which sorely lacks them these days. But the words sung and spoken by and large sound as though they are coming from the same place rather than emanating from the diverse characters in Victor Hugo’s novel. Likewise, the harmonizations, orchestrations, modulations and the like have the transparent sound and feel of 1970s pop. These are small problems, however, that are easily corrected given that the skeleton of this work has so much, so right. But unless you’re Cole Porter, musical theater is not a solo art form, and even he had book writers. Kudos—or should I say Q-dos—to director David Zak and his strong cast which deliver the goods on what is important here, namely, the score. But Zak has also offered clever, economical staging solutions to unique problems inherent in the show, including how to make a human gargoyle (George Andrew Wolff) credibly soar in song. (Dennis Polkow) 

At the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. This production is now closed.

“You’ve slipped into my life as easily as vermouth into a glass of gin… quickly and just a bit too smooth,” Angela Arden, the grand dame in Charles Busch’s play “Die! Mommy, Die!” tells her gigolo suitor. It could just as easily be Joan Crawford or Lana Turner in any number of 1960s movie thrillers that serve as the inspiration for this contemporary camp classic. The piece elevated Busch to a larger pop consciousness when he starred in the 2003 film version, and now, for the first time, Hell in a Handbag Productions is introducing “Die! Mommy, Die!” to a Chicago stage.

On film Busch delivers a near exact cinematic match to the look and feel of these old movies; on stage his work is a broader, fast-paced, dysfunctional family drama that captures exactly what is magical about good old-fashioned camp. “Die! Mommy, Die!” is the story of an aging starlet who had lost her luster. She tries to pull her life back together, but has to first navigate a psychologically abusive marriage, ungrateful children competing for her well-endowed lover and a horrible secret that may lead her to desperate and deadly acts. And if her story reminds you of something from Greek mythology, say “Clytemnestra” maybe…well, that is by design.

David Cerda, the artistic director of Handbag, cautions against dismissing this type of theater, one that defines the work of his company, as merely one thing. “People think that camp is all glitz and glamour and wigs and it isn’t,” says Cerda. “These characters are played for real. We approach them like they are real.” Ultimately he believes that makes the work funnier, and despite death, sex and inappropriate family relations, it makes the work more honest and relevant.

“There is other stuff going on in my head,” Busch says, echoing Cerda’s sentiments. It is not enough for this consummate defender of classic stage and film genres to merely make fun of mediocre movies. “Recently, when we were going to do the play again, I began thinking about the mid–sixties and how it was really a turning point for American culture and how Americans see things. All the characters are having trouble adjusting.”

What sets the work of Hell in a Handbag Productions apart from other camp happening in Chicago is perhaps the same thing that sets Charles Busch apart from other playwrights writing it. They both embrace the fun, the shear joy in letting go and being silly and they both believe that camp can have substance. It is hard to believe that a company with Handbag’s aesthetic has not produced one of Charles Busch’s works in its six-year history. Cerda feels that now is the time and this is the show. The large and enthusiastic crowds already showing up to the theater seem to agree with him. (William Scott)

“Die! Mommy, Die!” at the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 West Belmont, (773)883-1090. This production is now closed.

This first post-“Ragtime” show from Lyn Ahrens and Steven Flaherty is as much a departure from that property as imaginable, musicalizing, as it does, a middle-age Irish bus driver’s “coming out” story (actually, the main character is “outed” by a brutal attack by gay bashers soliciting him for sex), his attempt to bring art and Oscar Wilde to a hopeless Irish community theater group and his unrequited crush on a co-worker hunk all while dealing with a dominating spinster sister and his Roman Catholic guilt. Apart from the fact that only those who know the intimate career-destroying details of Oscar Wilde’s own troubles with “the love that dare not speak its name” will get the analogies that are set up that are never specifically explained in this show (like when the main character starts to have visions of Wilde himself), the deepest failing of the show is that the music has so little to do with what the characters are expressing or feeling. Unlike “Ragtime,” where the music tells us everything, the music here obscures as much as it reveals. If that is supposed to be “code” for the way that a repressed individual has to function within a culture where his love cannot be expressed, fair enough, but it makes for pretty boring music that never plummets below American superficial ideals of Irish pabulum pop—which is not helped either by a couple of key performers who can barely sing this stuff and virtually an entire cast that traverse a bewildering variety of would-be brogues. This would actually work far better as either a “straight” drama (no pun intended) or in the hands of tunesmiths who could, ironically, do for this story what Flaherty and Ahrens were able to do so brilliantly for E. L. Doctorrow’s “Ragtime.” (Dennis Polkow)

At the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. This production is now closed. 

RECOMMENDED

The girl talk in Theresa Rebeck’s play from the mid-nineties pre-dates anything on “Sex and the City.” The four women depicted here are neither slick nor urbane, but they fall into the same familiar categories: The slutty one, the prim one, the reliable one and the one I shall call Carrie. Rebeck’s gals are less ambitious and status conscious—they are friends and roommates by virtue of cheap rent and a lacking desire to “get a real job,” a phase they refuse to outgrow even at thirty. The setup might seem facile, but I fell for it hard, and the Bailiwick production (a slumber party directed with verve by Victoria Delorio) is one of the better shows I’ve seen in the theater’s studio space. (It boasts an actual, legitimate set by Alan Donahue, and if you’re familiar with this particular space, you know scenic design is a rarity.) It’s Sunday morning and Elly is on the back porch with a bottle of scotch and commitment to emptying it. Soon she is joined by Gayle. Then Jen. The fourth member of the group, Jessica, is at church—and she would not, the girls all agree, approve of Elly’s soapboxing on the “long and honored tradition of getting bombed on Sunday morning.” This is getting bombed with a purpose: Elly is preggers, and diving headfirst into a drunken binge seems like the only recourse at the moment. Out come the long-harbored secrets and resentments, amid the dirty stories and other staples of the genre; the pajama monologues. “God,” says Gayle at one point, “Hitler is such a conversation-stopper.” Or Elly, speaking to the embryo in her belly: “How’s it going in there? You passed out yet?” Things come to a head when Jessica arrives home to find the mini sorority party raging in her carefully arranged, wicker-filled house. Women can be sisterly and then turn on each other with staggering speed, and that’s reflected here. Sienna Harris’s Elly is part Daria, part free spirit. Frequently, hoping to get a laugh for her efforts, she will rub herself against Gayle, like a dog, or a lap dancer. It’s an actorly choice that makes Elly seem very specific and fully dimensional. As Gayle, Rebekah Walendzak is also quite good, putting a matter-of-fact spin on her story about having sex with a guy for money. Her blasé demeanor is obviously a façade. The sex-loving Jen, as played by Audrey Fiegel, might be the weakest link ensemble-wise, but she is believably naive. And though Sarah Denison has the smallest part as the wet blanket Jessica, she pushes the role beyond its stereotypical parameters. You can see a real person behind all her rules and self-imposed limitations, which is more than you can say for “Cashmere Mafia.” (Nina Metz)

At the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Bailiwick Repertory’s annual Directors Festival turns 21 this year and it is getting a makeover and branching out.  The festival, intended to showcase rising directorial talent, will no longer play as a summer series.  The format will extend throughout the year, running in both January and May.  Its scope will also widen to more actively include other performance disciplines.  For festival dates in January, Program Director Matthew Trucano and the team at Bailiwick have asked directors and choreographers to create original works that utilize movement and music.  The four pieces selected vary in style as much as their respective source materials.  In Group A (January 14-16), director/composer Jessica Jackson brings “Porphyria’s Lover” based on Robert Browning’s poem of the same name. Director Brandon Hayes brings “La Commedia e Finita” by David Alex, a commedia dell’arte derivation of Leoncavallo’s opera, “Pagliacci.”  In Group B (January 21-23) Zach Zube creates “(R)Evolution,” a movement piece inspired by the overwhelming conditions of our crowded world.  Director Ira Spector brings “Bethiah Sings” by Lisa Hall, an exploration of non-traditional sexual behavior.   And if that is not enough, stay tuned.  Directors tackle adaptations this Spring. (William Scott)

At the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 West Belmont, (773)883-1090. This production is now closed.

If Rent and Spring Awakening had a baby it would be the “pop opera” “Bare,” now playing for the first time in Chicago at Bailiwick Repertory. It has drugs, sex and plenty of Catholic-school guilt; unfortunately, this baby didn’t inherit the genes that made its parents Tony worthy. No part opera (really marketing people, lets look up the word “opera” before we use it) and too much pop (complete with overworked vocal summersaults), Jon Hartmere, Jr. and Damon Intrabartolo’s writing feels like “High School Musical” if “High School Musical” was a cutter. That said, if you are looking to see some young talent with powerful chords, Jay Reynolds, Jr. leads a skilled ensemble through a score that feels like a rather boring, gay after school special. Oh, and take note of Kathleen Gibson, she has killer timing and stinging delivery. (William Scott)

At the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. This production is now closed.

Jeff Goode’s latest Christmas-season offering plays like a bad “Saturday Night Live” sketch; it’s vulgar, uninspired and cliché, winking and nodding all the while. Santa’s been forced into rehab, and the audience is welcomed into the theater as attendants at an AA meeting where seven incarnations of Old St. Nick have gathered to ramble on about the woes of their profession. Goode seems desperate to show us how funny he is, and it’s the death of what could otherwise (maybe?) be a fairly entertaining Yuletide spoof. The first act consists of each Santa delivering a long monologue, one after the other, each a broad character sketch peppered with just enough pedophilia and “motherfuckers” to make it, I guess, “edgy.” But the script allows for no real interaction between the characters onstage, a shame considering that director Robert Bouwman has an ensemble of clearly talented actors who are working very hard in service of a script that doesn’t deserve their efforts. (Valerie Jean Johnson)

At the Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, (773)883-1090. This production is now closed.

Generating considerable protest when it opened in England because of portraying God and Jesus as using the “f” word as guests on the Springer show, the protests ironically only served to generate ticket sales and interest in a work that might well have otherwise gone unnoticed. Its producers have been trying to mount a New York production for years, but religious ridicule as a rule is outside the boundaries of tourist-friendly Broadway. And so, Bailiwick Repertory, the Chicago theater group best known for its all naked male musical revues, is culminating its twenty-fifth-anniversary season with the high-profile North American premiere of this very British import that calls cookies biscuits and just happens to be set in Chicago, drawing the city and the American Midwest at large in exaggerated caricature with Anglophile elitism and ridicule. The one-trick pony gimmick, of course, is to cross-fertilize the lowest of lowbrow culture—a.k.a. the Springer show itsel—with the most highfalutin and highbrow of all art forms, grand opera. And the joke does work well when the guests who have trained voices sing their bizarre stories with great seriousness as if they were true operatic arias. But several of the voices are not trained, and their attempt to emulate an operatic voice comes across more like nails on a blackboard caterwauling more than legitimate singing. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Thrill me” is not a bad translation of Jean Cocteau’s standing demand of art: “Etionnez-moi.” Whether composer and playwright Stephen Dolginoff had Cocteau in mind when he created his musical version of 1924’s contender for crime of the century, he has undoubtedly produced a thrilling piece of work. Bailiwick premieres this look at the local anti-heroes with a satisfying, if minimal, staging, driven by the coruscating tension between charismatically nihilistic Richard Loeb (Eric Martin) and his starry-eyed beau Nathan Leopold (Scott Gryder). Both actors are in fine voice and ably convey the carousel of giddy excitement and grim anxiety that the duo rides. One might have moral qualms about the liberties taken by Doginoff’s script. The suggestion that Leopold only reluctantly went along with Loeb’s grisly thrill-killing scheme, intoxicated by his adoration, borders on romanticizing a character who appears, according to the factual record, as bloodthirsty as his pal. Eighty years after the fact, though, the dramatic license may be forgivable, particularly when the results are as rewarding as these. Neither would-be ubermensch comes off looking terribly appealing, and the last-minute twist that Dolginoff has concocted is as satisfying as any Hollywood thriller. (John Beer)

This production is now closed. 

RECOMMENDED

Just in time for the Gay Games comes an angst-ridden coming-of-age story of a gay high-school wrestler who is grappling with sexual-identity issues while being surrounded by macho teammates who compensate for the implicit homoeroticism of the sport’s intimate masculine contact by explicitly preaching and practicing homophobia, even becoming involved in a gay hate crime. The script, written by Jim Provenzano after his novel of the same name, seems to be unsure of where it wants to go and tries to tackle way too much, but is most moving when it focuses on the conflicted feelings of the young male couple who discover themselves out on the mat, as it were, and are simultaneously attracted and repelled by the very aggression that seems to drive both the homoeroticism and homophobia that engulfs them. These themes were more fully explored in “Blade to the Heat,” but a strong cast and no-holds-barred realistic combat choreography both on and off the mat that at times is almost painful to watch, along with plenty of muscle-bound guys in tights and even in nude shower scenes should find an appreciative audience. Presented as part of Bailiwick Repertory’s 2006 Pride Series. (Dennis Polkow)

“Pins” plays at Bailiwick Arts Building, 1229 West Belmont, (773)883-1090, through July 23.