By Fabrizio O. Almeida

It was one of the most-anticipated pre-Broadway openings in recent memory, and I had informed friends and colleagues all week long leading to the premiere of “Dirty Dancing—The Classic Story on Stage” that I was genuinely bubbly for what would hopefully amount to—at the very least—a feel-good toe-tapping dance show. But this show didn’t make me tap my toes. And it certainly didn’t make me feel good.

This stage version, at Chicago’s Cadillac Palace before traveling to Boston, Los Angeles and finally to the Great White Way, is of course based on the 1987 sleeper-hit film of the same name. It chronicles the coming-of-age story of Frances “Baby” Houseman, an idealistic teenage girl hungry to change the world, but for the moment enjoying the last wisps of innocence with her family at a holiday resort in the summer of 1963. An unlikely romance blooms with the camp’s sexy dance instructor, Johnny, and dance lessons lead to Baby’s mental and physical transition into womanhood. The film was blessed with the great chemistry between stars Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, a strong supporting cast who delivered writer Eleanor Bergstein’s wooden dialogue with charming aplomb, and two killer soundtrack albums’ worth of music that went multi-platinum on their own. The stage show is not as lucky. There is no chemistry between stage leads Josef Brown (Johnny) and Amanda Leigh Cobb (Baby), the supporting players are unmemorable, the musical numbers are cruise-ship quality at best, and the entire experience is dramatically inert.

I don’t know director James Powell’s body of work but my hunch is that he’s never been at the helm of a major musical before. His work here is as clumsy and awkward as Baby’s initial dance steps. He shows little understanding for the synergy between music and drama, and cannot transition nor focus a scene to save his life. Worse, he’s been given every theatrical tinker toy with which to create—turntables, panels, levitating platforms, concert lights, a half-oval-shaped IMAX-type screen on which to project dazzling video—and yet is simply content to show them off rather then use them to effectively tell a story. Scenes fizzle out instead of melding into one another. A clump of dancers oftentimes fade into a visual monotony. And like a loud radio that someone’s forgotten to turn off, there is a continuous stream of music (dozens of songs, period instrumentals and full-blown numbers make up the evening) that ultimately blends into a two-hour bombastic wall of sound. Powell is incapable of manipulating a successful applause button for some numbers (which must be maddening to his hard-working ensemble) and for a show with “dancing” in its title, there’s far too little dance to enjoy, let alone to assess—co-choreographers Kate Champion and Craig Wilson’s work here limited to some sensual but rarely sizzling Latin ballroom routines, the showcasing of their female dancers’ amazing 180-degree leg extensions and battements, and some high-energy hoofing. As for Bergstein’s book, it is needlessly over-bloated with scenes that could have been cut or re-imagined for the stage. Instead, this show painstakingly goes through the burden of re-creating each and every moment from the movie, down to the last persnickety detail. If the creators wanted the movie on stage, they accomplished this. But since the lackluster performances and dancing never erase the memory of the film, it becomes boring to sit through. When the author does attempt to inject social consciousness into this piece of fluff—perfunctory references to Vietnam; “We Shall Overcome” sung by busboys turned Civil Rights activists—the results are tacky at best, transparently tasteless at worst. If you really care about supporting theater that has something to say about America on the eve of social change you have one final week to catch Court Theatre and director Charles Newell’s exceptional production of Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s “Caroline, or Change,” a musical also incidentally also set in 1963.

At the end of the day there is simply no point for this stage show to exist other than to milk the “Dirty Dancing” franchise dry, exploit the eighties nostalgia craze and get those people who saw the movie in the theaters twenty years ago—now grown up with jobs—to pay ten times as much to see it in a theater “enacted by meat puppets”, as Financial Times drama critic Ian Shuttleworth so memorably phrased in his review of the original London show. Look, I have nothing against creating a show around a group’s song canon or, as in this case, two best-selling soundtrack albums and a movie. I thought the creativity displayed in “Mamma Mia!” made it one of the best musicals of this decade, and I thoroughly enjoyed the stage version of “Saturday Night Fever” on Broadway. But the creators entrusted with those musical properties at least tried to do something theatrical with the wealth of musical material they had inherited, be it the creation of a wonderfully self-ironic book with which to link ABBA songs (as in the case of the former), or (as in the latter) the transformation of Bee Gees songs from disco kitsch into genuine show tunes belted out by real characters on stage. And although the majority of songs in “Dirty Dancing” are indeed never performed by any important characters in the play, and simply exist as background music playing on a radio, you can still have had drama through dance. Anyone remember Susan Stroman and John Wiedman’s 2000 Tony Award-winning best musical “Contact,” that used pre-recorded music and no singing to tell three dance plays? If not, Google “Contact musical Broadway” and check out how a recording of Robert Palmer’s “Simply Irresistible” is used, along with some inventive swing choreography, to convey a poignant story about the liberating, sensual and redemptive powers of dance, without one single word of dialogue uttered. Drama doesn’t come automatically just because you perform something in a theater, and it’s disconcerting to think that Eleanor Bergstein, James Powell et al believe they have made “theater” with “Dirty Dancing,” or anything approximating something like the aforementioned shows in terms of artistry, emotion or theatricality.

“Dirty Dancing—The Classic Story on Stage” is quite simply one of the laziest pieces of theater-making that I have ever witnessed, seemingly devoid of any imagination or ambition other than to quite literally throw the movie on stage, which it does with all the thoughtfulness and clumsiness of a toddler flinging his food-filled plate against a wall. Indeed, a more appropriate tag line for this show would have been “The Classic Story Shoved on Stage.” This may be acceptable for some—the largest advance sale in London West End theater history; record-breaking productions around the globe suggests as much—but in light of the economy and with the show’s tickets ranging in price from $35 to a staggering $155 for “premium” seats, audiences need to demand more than an overpriced ultimate DVD-extra served up as ersatz drama.

Given that the jury is still out on the Broadway-bound stage version of “9 to 5,” that “Cry-Baby” has flopped and closed in New York and that Broadway insiders have been buzzing about the well-known director/choreographer flown out to Seattle to doctor the ailing “Shrek” musical, maybe they finally are.

“Dirty Dancing—The Classic Story on Stage” plays the Cadillac Palace Theatre through January 17, 2009. Performance dates and times vary. (312)977-1710 for tickets.

“’Caroline, Or Change’ is the largest single production that Court Theatre has ever attempted,”  artistic director Charles Newell tells his company on the first day of rehearsal. “We tried to do it in the past, we tried to figure out when and how, and only now have the stars aligned to make it possible.”

When you start with words written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner and music by Tony-nominated Jeanine Tesori, you start on pretty fertile grown from which to build a solid production. “Its not just about making great music, but how can that music serve the emotional storytelling,” Newell says of the intricately crafted material.

“Caroline, Or Change” is the story of an African-American housekeeper working in a stifling basement laundry room in Louisiana in 1963. The coins that 8-year-old Noah carelessly leaves behind in his pocket are more than just spare change to Caroline and her family. The little issue of change in pockets becomes a catalyst for big drama as the characters, all of them, cope with loss. Blending blues, gospel and traditional Jewish melodies in a complicated score makes the show a mammoth operation and demands expertise.

“You only do Hamlet when you have a Hamlet,” explains Newell of the necessity to have an actress dexterous enough to play the title character in this demanding piece of theater that straddles the line between opera and musical theater. E. Faye Butler is that actress.

“She started her career wanting to be a classical-theater actor, only by circumstance did she begin to develop a career as a musical theater performer,” says Newell of his star. Butler was last seen in “Ain’t Misbehavin’ “ at The Goodman and has worked on every major stage in Chicago. Her abilities with text and character, coupled with her musical ability, give her the arsenal of tools demanded to play the title role.

Once Newell and longtime collaborator and musical director Doug Peck had Caroline, the rest of the cast came together. Then they set to the difficult task of bringing the words to life. “How do we talk about this piece that is about such complicated human emotions that can be perceived as dark and as a downer,” Newell asks, “when in fact the energy and life in the piece is so life affirming?”

From the coins in a cup next to the washing machine to the death of a mother, “Caroline, Or Change” is about coping with life. After years in the works, Court Theatre is finally ready to bring that struggle to stage. (William Scott)

At Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, (773)753-4472, through October 1926.

Imagine, a “Carousel” with no carousel. From the opening “Carousel Waltz” performed by a tiny, piano-led chamber orchestra with a single toy pony strung up over the proceedings for the entire evening like a piñata waiting to burst, you could tell that Charles Newell’s minimalist take on the work that many consider Rodgers and Hammerstein’s masterpiece was going to take a dark spin all of its own. No worldly Billy Bigelow (Nicholas Belton) here: a very boyish Billy makes his entrance in dark colors, sporting a “Mack the Knife” derby and distractingly approximating something between a Cockney and slang Bostonian accent (think “Marky” Mark Wahlberg before the diction lessons, or those old “Saturday Night Live” skits when the Kennedys would stand around with soup bowls saying, “Gawd chawda”). Once the singing starts, the goal is apparently to keep tempos slow and stodgy but ironically to get off of vowels as quickly as possible and allow consonants to quickly stop melodies cold, so the “if” of “If I Loved You” becomes something akin to a quiet dog bark with the emphasis on the air-stopping “f” sound instead of the short “i” sound that a singer uses to sustain pitch and beautiful sound. In other words, Court Theatre might as well as have been doing Molnar’s darker “Lilliom,” the basis for “Carousel” with background muzak, and saved the licensing fees to the R & H organization. Not that there aren’t some nice moments: Belton is genuinely moving in the “Soliloquy,” even if there is little singing, just some tune-carrying now and then, and makes his death scene effective, even if the interpretative decision to change the death from an accident to a suicide makes the work’s life-affirming finale dramaturgically absurd. And thankfully, Ernestine Jackson is allowed to sing the shit out of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” once she is allowed to sustain her vowels, but in a production where the secondary and usually boring couple Mr. and Mrs. Snow generate more sparks than the romantic leads, stop the show, I want to get off. (Dennis Polkow) 

At the Courth Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, (773)753-4472. This production is now closed.

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

“I trust you to use this information as best you want to use it and I hope it doesn’t sound in any way saccharine or self-serving.” When director Charles Newell speaks there is a quiet intensity to his voice that is as soothing as the white-noise sound of the heater in the Court Theatre lobby. Sitting only inches away, he is clad in jeans and a snug black t-shirt, fit for his 49 years of age, eyes crystal blue. “I lost my mom February 18 during rehearsals. I was with her when she took her last breath. I held her hand and I talked to her as she passed. And that experience, which I’d never had before with anybody, that event happens in this production. Julie is with Billy when he takes for her his last breath. So how we thought about, structured and staged that scene changed radically.” Slightly misty-eyed at this point, a cathartic laugh quickly surfaces. “You know, we theater artists, we’ll steal from anywhere, especially our own life experience.”

For the non-musical cognoscenti, Julie and Billy are Julie Jordan, the simple mill girl, and Billy Bigelow, the rough carnival cad with whom she unexpectedly falls in love, the central characters in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s six-decade-old musical “Carousel,” currently being revived by Court Theatre. Speaking with Newell, however, the knowledgeable musical theater fan can’t help but recall the character of Nellie Forbush, the famous “cock-eyed optimist” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s other musical classic, “South Pacific.” “One has to be in our world today—and also certainly as a working theater artist—a sort of eternal optimist,” Newell says, sputtering with laughter. “After doing a season of ‘Thyestes,’ ‘Titus Andronicus’ and even ‘What the Butler Saw,’ I think it’s time for a little life-affirming theater.”

And is it a life-confirming coincidence that a lushly scored musical, despite an ill-deserved reputation for mawkish sentimentality in the general pop-cultural consciousness, almost caps off a brutal season of theater that reflected in its most raw and crudest terms how horrible the world can be (“Thyestes”) and how people may be stuck in their same cycles of violence (“Titus”). “My mother had been terminally ill for a couple of years. And though I made a choice to do this piece instinctually and for many reasons, I’m sure one of those reasons, without being in any way deliberate about it, was ‘oh my God, how am I ever going to survive her death?’ Because I have been and always will be very close to my mother.” If musical-theater purists have criticized Newell in the past for emphasizing the drama at the expense of the music, one cannot imagine “Carousel’s” eleven o’clock number, the anthemic “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” being turned into an intellectual exercise or anything less than an uplifting musical moment to melodically assault the emotions and soothe the sense of tremendous loss. Adds Newell, “It’s no accident that I’m doing a piece of theater in which there is this idea that we never walk alone.”

Looking ahead, there’s no denying that given Court’s musical production history (“Guys and Dolls,” “Man of La Mancha,” “Raisin” and now “Carousel”), Newell’s pronouncement that Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and Jason Robert Brown’s “Parade” are favorites and on his musical short list, and the fact that composer Jeanine Tesori’s “Caroline, or Change” has been slated for next season, the musical may be here to stay. Indeed, could Court be gearing itself up to become Chicago’s version of England’s Royal National Theater, an institution committed to the traditional repertoire but reviving and giving the same serious treatment to the musical? Newell erupts into laughter. “I think that’s a great way to put it. I hadn’t articulated it so specifically. I certainly don’t feel like we have to do a musical every year but as I learned from my mentor, the late great Garland Wright who was the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, musicals are as much a part of the American classical repertoire as any classic text. We actually invented them.”

And lest straight-play purists now worry that Court’s sacred season spots—those typically filled by Shakespeare or obscure pre-nineteenth-Century European classics—will give way to musicals populated with man-eating singing Venus flytraps or little red-haired moppets singing about “Tomorrow,” Newell is quick to allay such fears. “Life is short. We only have a certain amount of time so we might as well spend it on something that has some complexity and depth involved, at least that’s my emphasis and prejudice.” And then that laughter creeps in again. “At least we didn’t do ‘Sweeney’ as the musical. Too much! Too much!”

“Carousel” at Court Theatre, 5535 South Ellis, (773)753-4472. This production is now closed.

It was a gamble for Court Artistic Director Charles Newell to stage “Titus Andronicus” as a play-within-a-play black comedy. In this modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare’s original, Newell imagines the denizens of an elite country club-like clique “reading” the play for their entertainment—scripts in hand are periodically referenced throughout—and initially treating the macabre machinations with mock pretense. It’s as if Newell concluded that it would be unrealistic to expect modern audiences not to laugh at the overkill of barbarity in a work that includes rape, dismemberment, self-amputation and cannibalism, and decided to beat them to the comic punch, creating a “Titus” that labors over bits of slapstick comedy, encourages puerile ad-libbing from the actors and seems to elevate the ridiculousness and emptiness of the violence to the level of its grotesquerie. This is a bold idea and one that might have worked had this vision been applied consistently through the bitter (and bloody) end. But following the scene in which Titus’ daughter is raped, has both hands amputated and her tongue cut out, Newell shifts emotional gears and the production suddenly seems to want its audience to care, to consider the play’s philosophical dimensions on violence and compassion—that have all but been dismissed thus far—and to inorganically go from a state of irreverent jocularity to Senecan stoicism. It feels like a directorial cop-out, as well as insulting to the intelligence of the seasoned theatergoer and irresponsible towards the Shakespearean newcomer. In performance the rhythm is lost (the last forty minutes feels like four hours), the spectacle feels empty (the spectacular architectural set is by Leigh Breslau and music is taken from Peter Gabriel’s mesmerizing soundtrack to “The Last Temptation of Christ”), a talented ensemble is wasted (a fantastic mix of ethnicities and experience) and poor Timothy Edward Kane in the title role makes a scant impression. Given the audience’s lack of emotional and psychological investment about the only impression Mr. Kane unwillingly makes is that physically he seems much too young for the part, often considered a test run for Lear, and that he lacks the necessary gravitas because either he is incapable of it or never could have hoped to achieve it amidst such meaningless pomp and circumstance. A failed experiment in confusing meta-theatrics, “Pointless Andronicus” would have been a more befitting title for this gamble that never pays off. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, (773)753-4472. This production is now closed. 

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

The children at the end of Roman playwright Seneca’s “Thyestes” are slaughtered and dismembered by their score-settling and cuckolded uncle Atreus, served up to their father Thyestes in a feast to end all feasts, and their blood is used to lace the “family” wine. And if you know your Greek history, it only gets worse, since “Thyestes” is the prequel to what will become one of the best and bloodiest family soap operas in history—that of the House of Atreus, in which child murder begets filicide begets homicide begets matricide and so on. “It’s a very violent play,” director Joanne Akalaitis says, her workday afternoon uniform consisting of glasses and a black V-neck sweater over a crisp white button-down shirt, exactly what you might imagine the chair of the Theater Department at Bard College, a position Akalaitis currently holds, to wear. “It’s about violence in the family. I think we are living in extremely violent times where values are corrupted on every level from the government on down. When the government is corrupt it seeps down into all of society and into families. And Seneca is relevant because of that.”

Having first directed at Court ten years ago with her production of Euripides’ “The Iphigenia Cycle” (a later part of the Atreus story), returning to Chicago is always something of a personal and artistic homecoming for Akalaitis, a graduate of the University of Chicago who has family in Oak Park. “I’ve known [Court artistic director Charles Newell] for a long time, since he was my assistant on productions at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and the Public Theatre in New York. Then he became famous and important and hired me. Charlie knew about this play, I didn’t.”

Having personally been given the rights to the Midwest premiere of this version of “Thyestes” by translator and playwright Caryl Churchill, Akalaitis has been waiting two years to do it, an opportunity that also seems to incorporate her emphatic love of the classics and of Rome, the city in which she began her research earlier this year for this production. (“I think it’s the greatest city in the world besides New York. It’s fantastic.”)

A typical argument against staging Seneca is that he, unlike the Greek playwrights and poets, wrote for the page and not the stage. And despite the fact that a Greek “Thyestes” is non-existent, English-speaking productions of Seneca are rare. There is Peter Brook’s famed 1966 production of Seneca’s “Oedipus” at London’s Old Vic, staged around the time of the Vietnam War. In 1994 British Director James McDonald staged this translation of “Thyestes” for London’s Royal Court amidst the slaughter in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. And now Court Theatre sees a noteworthy revival in 2007. This interesting production history makes me wonder if Akalaitis thinks that as a society we’ve reached a point of barbarism that only Seneca can reflect. And if with this production she might be holding up a mirror to twenty-first-century America, a YouTube nation that makes it possible to view the beheading of an American journalist at the touch of a button and where football players are expelled from the NFL for murdering dogs. While refusing to sanction such a thesis, she is nonetheless quick to respond. “They [Roman society] were the greediest. People were living in a society where people were going to the Coliseum to see Christians dressed in dog skins, mauled by beasts and killed. That was entertainment. Thousands of people saw that. It was their daily television. They had this kind of snuff theater where real criminals were cast in a play and at the end of the play they were crucified or executed in front of the people. That was the end of the play. And so death and violence was very much a part of the daily life of this society and probably more than any society, with the exception of Africa and Cambodia.”

And on the subject of stage violence? “Susan Sontag says that all evil, all horror can be assimilated by a contemporary audience. She may be right, I don’t know. I think when you get involved in the murder of children and the eating of children that then you may have crossed a line. And there are kids in this production.” She pauses. “There are some laughs in this, too, oddly enough. Working with this company and working on this script I have utter exhilaration about it because it’s a chance for an audience to listen to poetry.”

“Thyestes” is in previews at Court Theatre, 5535 South Ellis. The show opens September 29 and runs through October 21.