Dane Agostinis, Emily Behny/Photo: Joan Marcus

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First, the bad news: this non-Equity touring version of “Beauty and the Beast” at times feels rather flat in its energy and timing. It often seems like the performances are being called in and that comic lines and gags, for instance, feel forced and are being laughed at more for the sheer familiarity of the material than for the spontaneity of their delivery.

But there is also good news: while the couple at the heart of “Beauty and the Beast,” Emily Behny’s Belle and Dane Agostinis’ Beast, separately turn in quality performances, this is one of the only times that together the couple has the chemistry of, well, a couple. You actually buy that the pair are falling in love and that doing so has a transformative effect on the Beast. All of this feels organic and like the real deal rather than the more often than not artificial pretense of most incarnations of this production.   

That, taken with Alan Menken’s superb score and the colorful costumes and sets do make this more of a plus than a minus. And children being exposed to Menken’s songs in any way, shape or form will only increase their appetite for good show music in the long run. But taking children familiar with the songs from the animated version to the live version of “Beauty and the Beast” can also be viewed as an investment in their theater-going future. (Dennis Polkow)   

At Ford Oriental Theatre, 24 West Randolph, (800)775-2000. Through August 7. $18-$85.

Emily Yetter and Ciaran Joyce/Photo: Kevin Berne Tinkerbell

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Another “Peter Pan?” Been there, done that, to death, in fact: books, plays, television, cartoons, action-adventure flicks, et al. Happily, this is not just another “Peter Pan” but a contemporary and distinctively British take conceived around London’s Kensington Gardens, the setting where J. M. Barrie was first inspired to create the boy who won’t grow up more than a century ago.

“Peter Pan” has always theoretically been a property for both children and adults, but most versions tip far more to kids—Disney animated version, Spielberg’s “Hook”—or to adults, the Mary Martin Broadway and television version, most Baby Boomers’ first encounter with a transgender character.

What makes this threesixty version effective is that it really does work for both children and adults. And not just as the familiar narrative that “Peter Pan” has now been for generations—and everything we know and love from the story is here—but also as an experience of the story since the production’s dazzling effects are so seamlessly incorporated into the familiar tale.

The setting is a state-of-the-art circus-like tent, a more elegant and more atrium-like version of what Cirque du Soleil has put up for their shows here. The tent itself is actually a theater in the round but with the spectacular addition of the “scenery” being 360 degrees around the action and audience with projected, digital moving images. That’s wonderful enough when you’re in the Darlings’ home or on Never Land itself, which really do come across as elaborate three-dimensional settings. But the real attraction is the shifting and moving images so that when Peter, Wendy and the gang start to fly on suspended wires, we see them against the backdrop of moving scenery of the London skyline, and even going through open gates, etc., until there are only clouds and stars. Read the rest of this entry »

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“People who think they’re happy just haven’t thought about it enough.” This line, spoken by Alice Ripley’s character Diana to her psychiatrist in one of many doctor-patient scenes in this feel-not-so-good musical, conveys the complex emotional truths at work in this Tony and Pulitzer-winning show. “Next to Normal” chronicles the struggles of Diana and her family with her chronic mental illness as they stand by her and fight to live a “normal” life. It’s a sophisticated work, with a running subtext about our culture’s reliance on pharmaceuticals to “solve” our problems—not just our actual illnesses, but also the everyday strife of living in the modern world—by keeping ourselves in a medicated, drone-like state. (We used to rely on television for that!) At the same time, it tells truths about family far more universal than those usually conveyed in either the gothic dysfunction or saccharine optimism that predominate the stages these days. Here, the parents function not only as mother and father but also as lovers and companions; their kids have their own struggles playing out in a life completely distinct and separate from the life of the family. But of course no one escapes from home.

Chicago is being treated to a production as close to Broadway as we might get, with a spectacular set (that recalls the set of “Working”), made up of stacked compartmental rooms that hold not only family secrets, but also the band—really more like two bands, with the music’s blend of rock ‘n’ roll and more classically structured show tunes. And at the center of the show we have Ripley, who starred on Broadway and won a Tony Award for her performance. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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“The Merchant of Venice” is the most problematic work of the Shakespeare canon and remains the longest-running and most performed high-profile work of art that can still be routinely interpreted as anti-Semitic. One way that modern, especially post-Holocaust performances often deal with performing it is to make its Jewish character Shylock somehow more sympathetic as if to say, “See? The Bard didn’t really pen such a bad Jew after all.”

In a performance as stunning in its subtlety as in its chilling, bare-bones simplicity, F. Murray Abraham refreshingly makes no attempt whatsoever to make his Shylock even remotely likeable. That is a fascinating strategy flying against the standard approach that many contemporary actors have taken with this role that seek to portray Shylock as a good “everyman” who’s just been pushed over the edge.

By riding into the hatefulness and the weaknesses of the character head-on, we are reminded that indeed Shylock is an everyman, but an everyman whose flaws have to do with his own issues and inadequacies, not his religion. As longtime University of Chicago professor of history and religion Martin E. Marty once brilliantly put it to me, “If you start out SOB and end up Born Again, the end product is SOB-Born-Again.” That is Shylock in this version: a jerk in any religion, in any culture. Yes, there are the anti-Semitic remarks and actions of the characters surrounding Shylock which fuel his own insecurities, but here, these are merely aural wallpaper to a man so rotten to the core that he feels more at home in the world of hate and exclusion than he does love and inclusion. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Joan Marcus

When I was in grade school, my parents saw “Hair” in Los Angeles. Their program book became my version of National Geographic, where I’d sneak occasional peeks at the “tribe” in their native state—that is, in the legendary nude scene that ends Act I. The cast album played so much in our home that it was a soundtrack of my second grade. So I was quite excited to finally see the show last week, since it’d made such a lasting impression.

A revolutionary production when it became the first rock musical on Broadway in 1968, it’s not hard to imagine the resonance “Hair” had in the same year as the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Not only was it upending the status quo of musical theater, but it held up a mirror to a generation waging an uprising, and was as much a communal happening as a traditional show presented by a cast to an audience.

This revival arrives with stellar credentials: like the original, it’s a production of The Public Theater, now with American Repertory Theater’s Diane Paulus at the helm and contemporary dance’s Karole Armitage handling the choreography. It won the 2009 Tony Award for Best Musical Revival. And it functions reasonably well as a period piece: you can see why it shocked the establishment in its time with overt pansexuality, celebration of drug use, anti-imperialist themes and freewheeling miscegenation. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Dave Rentauskas

By Benjamin Rossi

The premiere of The New Colony’s “So Many Days,” the young theater company’s first short film, feels unmistakably like a gathering of friends. A live band made up of company members croons bluegrass tunes about Oriental lovers and drinking till you die; everyone seems to know the words. Someone in the company had sent out an email encouraging people to wear flannel shirts in homage to the short’s early sixties Deep South setting, but it’s difficult to distinguish those who complied from the rest of the hipster crowd.

A makeshift bar set off in a corner of host Collaboraction’s small space serves whiskey and PBR in Solo cups as company members greet people in the Flat Iron Arts Building’s third floor landing, asking, “So who’s your friend in the company?”

With “So Many Days,” the barely three-year-old New Colony is taking a novel, if not entirely unprecedented, step towards filmmaking. It’s just one more in a series of remarkable moves for the theater group. And while it is a modest beginning, New Colony members say its latest effort is a harbinger for things to come. But as its projects become more ambitious, the company may come up against obstacles that bedeviled other attempts by Chicago theaters to jump from stage to screen. Read the rest of this entry »

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Governor Walker, eat your heart out. It’s hard to imagine a more timely and heartfelt Illinois response to the labor crisis in Wisconsin than a revival of the 1977 musical version of Louis “Studs” Terkel’s 1974 bestselling book “Working.” Using his ever-present tape recorder, Terkel interviewed a wide variety of workers about their attitudes concerning work and uncovered a wealth of information about the extraordinary thoughts of “ordinary” workers.

Several of the stories were turned into soliloquies with songs penned by Craig Carnelia, Micki Grant, James Taylor, Mary Rodgers, Susan Birkenhead and Stephen Schwartz that were given a 1970s pop-rock sensibility and were often discussing jobs that were cutting-edge for the time, but the references had become rusty and irrelevant. With new songs added by Lin-Manuel Miranda to update things a bit but more significantly, the show figured out two important ways to bridge the three-and-a-half decade time gap.

First, much as the 1982 televised “American Playhouse” production had done, have Terkel himself and his tape recorder (in this case four of them) frame the proceedings. Since Terkel passed away in 2008—and you could imagine him kicking himself that he missed this onstage opportunity—his voice and photos are used to recall his powerful persona, which does help ground this material in time and space. Read the rest of this entry »

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“That sure isn’t how I remember it,” remarked one theatergoer, “but wow!” No, this is not your Mom and Dad’s “Les Miserables,” this is an incarnation completely rethought and reworked for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Many diehard “Les Miz” fans may end up missing aspects of the original, but others—myself included—will find it a vast improvement on the original production.

The fundamental flaw of the work used to be that if you come to “Les Miz” cold, even at more than three hours in length, you didn’t have the slightest clue as to what was going on. Characters came and went so quickly—in those days, literally with a circular turn of its massive set—and character development was so weak that the audience was given little chance to know the characters, let alone care what happens to them. But then, why would you try to skim over the entire epic Victor Hugo story in Reader’s Digest terms? Why not just tell one segment of the story, but in three-dimensional terms?

In a sense, that is what this new streamlined production attempts to do by fleshing out the narrative with a staging and production design with enough variance that it is able to highlight what is going on rather than the cavernous blackbox approach of the original which counted on a Robert Rauschenberg-like jigsaw puzzle of stuff that would come and go and transform into various shapes and patterns, including a battlefield barricade. When the pieces weren’t moving, the circular stage was, characters whisking in and out of scenes as if they were on a pillory, every turn representing a passage of time from the next day to decades later. Visually, the current production is quite Hugo-esque, the set designs based on his actual artwork. And via sophisticated computer graphics, these scenes quickly morph from one scene to another often to eye-popping effect. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Joan Marcus

As if the Dolly doppelganger in the form of American Idol runnerup Diana DeGarmo and the digitized projection of Dolly narrating the show within the face of a huge center stage clock weren’t enough, there was a third Dolly on hand at last Wednesday’s opening night of the national touring production of “9 to 5”: Dolly Parton herself.

Escorted by Governor Pat Quinn, who officially proclaimed the occasion—which just happened to be Parton’s sixty-fifth birthday—as “Dolly Day” in Chicago, Parton took the stage in a magenta fringed outfit and told anecdotes to the audience about everything from filming “9 to 5,” her first movie, to getting to know and love Chicago when she filmed “Straight Talk” here. The audience interrupted at one point with a spontaneous chorus of “Happy Birthday,” and Parton seemed genuinely touched and gushed with her signature Southern charm and said, “That’s just about the sweetest thing that ever happened to me!”

If only the rest of the evening had been as entertaining. Read the rest of this entry »