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 »

RECOMMENDED

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 »

RECOMMENDED

“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 »

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 »

Krapp's Last Tape/Photo: Liz Lauren

Top 5 Shows
“The Brother/Sister Plays,” Steppenwolf
“August: Osage County,” Broadway In Chicago
“Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
“1001,” Collaboraction
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
—Brian Hieggelke

Top 5 Play Revivals
“A Streetcar Named Desire,” Writers’ Theatre
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Steppenwolf Young Adult
“Private Lives,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater
“After the Fall,” Eclipse Theatre
—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Performances
Brian Dennehy, “Hughie”/”Krapp’s Last Tape,” Goodman
Karen Janes Woditsch, “To Master the Art,” TimeLine
Tracy Letts, “American Buffalo,” Steppenwolf
Amy Morton, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Steppenwolf
Mary Beth Fisher, “Seagull,” Goodman
—Brian Hieggelke

Read the rest of this entry »

Denis Lambert and John Scherer/Photo: Tanner Photography

When Irving Berlin wrote the song “White Christmas” for his 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” the story goes that he was expecting “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” the Valentine’s Day number, to be the big hit. Bing Crosby never saw the popularity of “White Christmas” coming either—he reportedly laid down the track that remains the best-selling single of all time in eighteen minutes—but it was Crosby’s gently crooning it to a country newly navigating its way through the horrors and sacrifices of World War II that ended up nostalgically reminding everybody of exactly what we were fighting for in the first place.

Ironically, though “Holiday Inn” was made during the war, the film itself exists in a warless vacuum aside from a patriotic montage of troops, weaponry and FDR shown during the Fourth of July sequence. Thus, its lavish, widescreen and Technicolor remake twelve years later made sure to refocus the attention and title on its breakout song, “White Christmas,” and that song’s own nostalgic relation to the war itself now that the country had successfully achieved victory, peace, stability and prosperity with weapons that had included songs to inspire both the front lines and the home front. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackie Burns and Chandra Lee Schwartz/Photo: Joan Marcus

RECOMMENDED

In April of 2005, the first national tour of “Wicked” that had opened in Toronto only a month earlier came to Chicago for what was to be a six-week run. Broadway In Chicago was already five years old at the time, but the game-changer was BIC’s brainstorm to get into place a Chicago production of “Wicked” that would stay here as long as audience demand would allow after that initial six-week run had ended and the national tour had moved on, essentially providing an unlimited “open run.” Four-and-a-half years later when “Wicked” finally closed in January of last year, it had broken every area box-office record. Meanwhile, that same template was also used for the Chicago run of “Jersey Boys,” which also enjoyed a multi-year if shorter run here; BIC had hoped to duplicate that same success with “Billy Elliot,” which only lasted seven months.

As “Wicked” returns for a holiday run and we have a fresh look at the show, it is worth pondering why this particular play broke every record here while other shows have failed to capture the public imagination in quite the same way. Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago cast/Photo: Michael Meseke

RECOMMENDED

Imagine what would happen if you cross-fertilized the antics and acrobatics of “Cirque du Soleil” with the performer-delineated introspection of “A Chorus Line.”  The result is something akin to “Traces,” the inaugural production of the Broadway Playhouse, the former Drury Lane Water Tower Place purchased and renovated by Broadway in Chicago.

Seven Montreal-based performers—six male and one female—recite personal details about themselves in between performing amazing feats across an intermission-less ninety-minute show that really runs on two parallel tracks: Cliff Notes-style showbiz autobiography and grandiose gymnastic stupid human tricks. Read the rest of this entry »