Photo: Joan Marcus

RECOMMENDED

“In the Heights,” which collected four 2008 Tony Awards including Best Musical, soars with the essence of Washington Heights, a neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan and out of the orbit of most New Yorkers that seems to be at once both familiar and exotic. Here, the “exotic”—by musical-theater standards—is conveyed via the language, which flows freely in Spanish in many of the songs; the music, a fusion of Latin rhythms and hip-hop; and the dance (again, hip-hop and Latin). But then there’s the familiar—the narrative arc is something of an homage to “Fiddler on the Roof” without the pogrom, and the score resonates with a Broadway fusion of ballads and big numbers, albeit often rapped. An authenticity of emotions, a rare commodity in musical theater, resonates in the immigrant struggles being depicted around this one corner up at 181st Street. Read the rest of this entry »

The Addams Family at The Oriental/Photo: Samuel Adams

By Brian Hieggelke

As the wind blows the snow sideways this December evening, the weatherman is telling Chicagoans to stay bunkered; the deserted downtown streets reflect their obedience. All save the sidewalk near the intersection of State and Randolph, as TV crews jockey for faces on the red carpet in front of the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre, where more than 2,000 patrons, including a who’s who of backstage Broadway, are gathering for the world premiere of a new musical featuring a AAA list of talent, onstage and off. “The Addams Family,” with multiple Tony winners Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in its leads, a book from the librettists of “Jersey Boys” and so on, is certainly Broadway bound, but tonight—tonight—Chicago is the center of theater in the world.

That’s the story of Chicago theater in the zeroes: the decade in which it grew up and got big. Whether it’s the launch and monumental success of Broadway In Chicago, the maturation and astonishing quality of a remarkable number of small and mid-sized companies or the increasing demand for Chicago product and Chicago talent on Broadway, Chicago theater has fully come into its own. Read the rest of this entry »

2000

Milestones

500 Clown, Steep Theatre, the side project and Teatro Luna are founded

Broadway In Chicago launches as a joint venture between Live Nation and the Nederlander Organization

Goodman departs its original home in the Art Institute of Chicago and moves into $51 million new digs in the North Loop

Chicago Shakespeare moves into a $24 million theater on Navy Pier

Collaboraction produces its first Sketchbook

The City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs opens The Storefront Theater

Passings

Michael Maggio, Goodman Theatre Associate Artistic Director and Dean of The Theatre School at DePaul University Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Joan Marcus

By Dennis Polkow

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky / Mysterious and spooky…”  Well, at least they used to be, before the Addams Family became a Broadway-bound musical.

It all looked so great on paper: Broadway superstars Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth as Gomez and Morticia, the librettists (Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice) and choreographer (Sergio Trujillo) of “Jersey Boys”—how could it miss?

Oddly enough, by forgetting that the perpetual appeal of the Addams Family and the common thread running through its incarnation from magazine cartoon characters to television series to hit movies has been the dark and macabre sensibility of the family itself.

Despite a blizzard, there was not an empty seat in sight at last Wednesday’s world-premiere performance of “The Addams Family: A New Musical” and anticipation was high, even with a slightly delayed curtain due to the weather.

When the lights began going on and off to loud electrical noises and the theater darkened and a spooky, four-note ostinato began sounding, the crowd response was that of rock-concert excitement. By the time a spotlight shown on a single hand (i.e., Thing) peaking out of a red curtain that pulled back to the entire “family” in a cemetery under a full moon facing the audience in its familiar and iconic pose, the cheers were deafening.

As things calm down, Nathan Lane’s Gomez sighs and in a slightly Latino accent says, “Ah, it’s bad to be alive,” before leading the family and its dead ancestors in a low-energy opening number called “The Clandango” that seeks to draw ties to its past that is, as Lane keeps singing, “We are part of a chain.” It is a remarkably squandered moment that cuts the high-energy anticipation level in half. Read the rest of this entry »

If there is one advantage to a show with such advance high expectations as Mel Brooks’ musicalization of his 1974 film “Young Frankenstein” bombing in New York as badly it did, it is that Chicago gets it sooner than the shows that succeed on the Great White Way so that we have a chance to decide for ourselves. In this case, it becomes an endless and fascinating game of “What went wrong?” as you experience an excessive and heartless show that is to the Broadway musical what George Lucas’ “Howard the Duck” is to the movies. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Perhaps you’ve noticed the lack of daring and imagination being deployed in the Broadway musical as of late where most of the hot and not-so-hot “new” shows tend to (1) musicalize an already well-established brand-name film or other such property, (2) satirize a show-within-a-show with a nod and a wink or (3) string together a pre-fabricated soundtrack with well-established hit tunes.  The fact that “Spring Awakening” does not fit into these tried and true formulae for what makes a hit Broadway musical and yet became exactly that, would be enough reason to check it out, but happily, this unconventional show not only breaks the mold, but does so with considerable flash and style. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When Israeli actor Chaim Topol first played Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” in Tel Aviv back in the 1960s, he was a young man in his twenties, still on active duty for the Israeli Army.  Yet as the son of Polish-Russian Jewish parents who, like the fictional milkman Tevye and his family, had been forced out of Eastern Europe, Topol transformed the role from the purely comic interpretation originated by Zero Mostel on Broadway to something more poignant and truer to the musical’s original source material, the Yiddish short stories of Sholem Aleichem.  Despite his relative youth, Topol’s portrayal was so authentic and invigorating that he was chosen to open in the role on London’s West End, which led to director Norman Jewison choosing him to star in the 1971 film version, despite enormous studio pressure for Jewison to go with an older and more established bona fide movie star.

Some twenty years later when Topol had reached his early fifties, at long last the actual age of the character Tevye, he embarked on a national tour of “Fiddler”—including a memorable stop here at the Civic Opera House—that would later land on Broadway, and he would go on to reprise the role in London in 1995, his real-life daughter playing his daughter.  Now 73 years old, Topol began an international tour in January that is being billed as the “Topol Farewell Tour.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Joan Marcus

RECOMMENDED

After enduring the horrors of “Dirty Dancing” and “Xanadu” live, you might be tempted to swear off attending musicals derived from cult movies altogether, but “Legally Blonde: The Musical” works so well on every level that audiences of every access point will enjoy it. For starters, if you are a fan of the 2001 Reese Witherspoon movie about a sexy “dumb” blonde who follows the boyfriend who dumped her off to Harvard Law School, all of the elements that made that movie so funny and so poignant at the same time are here: the charming lead, the girlfriends, the exercise guru accused of murder, the good and the bad lawyers, the law students, the horny professor, a pool worker with a secret, a UPS guy with a “big package” and even the adorable Chihuahua and bulldog.  What the musical can do, however, that the film cannot, is express its life-affirming message about prejudice and standing up for yourself through song and dance that makes that message even more potent and entertaining. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Paul Kolnik

RECOMMENDED

Not counting the recent 2006 Broadway revival, there hasn’t been a major production of “A Chorus Line” since 1990′s Broadway Tour of America, a company that hit the road not long after the Broadway original concluded its record-breaking fifteen-year run.

There have always been, of course, umpteenth opportunities to see the show via the regional circuit, many of them carbon copies of creator, director and co-choreographer Michael Bennett’s iconic original.  (Besides inspiring an entire legion of Broadway hoofers with the show—much like Robbins and Fosse had done before him with theirs—Bennett’s legacy includes a core of second- and third-generation dance captains who have reproduced every classic step for subsequent generations.)  And yet, I don’t think the show’s ever looked as good, or moved as well, as the production now blazing the stage of the Oriental Theater courtesy of Broadway In Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal

RECOMMENDED

Even though “Rent” finally came due on Broadway last September after an extraordinary twelve-year run, national tours of the show of various talent levels continue to do brisk business across the country.  The end of the New York run, however, afforded the unique opportunity to create a topnotch, standard-bearing tour incarnation called “Rent: The Broadway Tour” by employing cast members fresh from the Broadway production as well as original cast members, who were willing to tour with the show in the roles that they had originated back in 1996.  Both Pascal (Roger) and Rapp (Mark) created their roles off-Broadway and maintained them through the show’s initial huge Broadway success and reprised them in London and in the movie version, although Joliet native Rapp also starred for a time in the initial Chicago run, wrote a book about the “Rent” phenomenon and actually made his professional acting debut downtown as a child extra in “Evita.”  The chemistry between these two performers was a factor in the show’s initial success, even though both are now in their late thirties, i.e., nearly twice the age of their characters at this point.  But unlike, say, elderly opera stars decades older than the young, impoverished artists that they are portraying routinely appearing in Puccini’s “La bohème,” the work that “Rent” is based on, Pascal and Rapp both look much the same as they did back when the show first opened, still sing and act superbly and move with extraordinary energy and are able to convincingly blend in with their much younger colleagues.  Read the rest of this entry »