Top 5 Shows

“Caroline, or Change,” Court Theatre

“A House with No Walls,” Timeline Theatre

“The Glass Menagerie,” Steppenwolf Theatre

“No Darkness Round My Stone,” Trap Door Theatre

“The Birthday Party,” Signal Theater

—Monica Westin

Top 5 Shows

“Jon,” Collaboraction

“A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant,” A Red Orchid

“Be More Chill,” Griffin Theatre

“Men of Tortuga,” Profiles

“Picked Up,” Neo-Futurists

—Nina Metz

Top 5 Theatrical Experiences

“Caroline, or Change,” Court Theatre

“Columnibus,” Raven Theatre

“As You Like It,” Writers’ Theatre

“The Comedy of Errors,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater

“Romeo y Julieta” (Staged Reading), Chicago Shakespeare Theater/Shakespeare in Español

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 Guilty Pleasures

“Jarred: A Hoodoo Comedy” by Tanya Saracho, Teatro Luna

“Speech and Debate” by Stephen Karam, ATC

“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” by Sarah Ruhl, Steppenwolf

“The Little Dog Laughed” by Douglas Carter Beane, About Face Theatre

“After Ashley” by Gina Gionfriddo, Stage Left Theatre

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 New Plays

“Kita y Fernanda” by Tanya Saracho, 16^th Street Theater

“The U.N. Inspector” by David Farr and James Sherman, Next Theatre

“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” by Sarah Ruhl, Steppenwolf Theatre

“Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat” by Yussef El Guindi, Silk Road Theatre Project

“Superior Donuts” by Tracy Letts, Steppenwolf Theatre

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

 Top 5 Revivals

“The Maids,” Writers’ Theatre

“The Lion in Winter,” Writers’ Theatre

“Requiem for a Heavyweight,” Shattered Globe

“Plaza Suite,” Eclipse Theatre Company

“The Birthday Party,” Signal Ensemble Theatre

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 Play Revivals

“Our Town,” Hypocrites

“The Lion in Winter,” Writers Theatre

“Requiem for a Heavyweight,” Shattered Globe

“Journey’s End,” Griffin

“M Butterfly,” BoHo

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Memorable Productions by a Smaller Theatre Troupe

“Multi-Purpose Doom,” Sandbox Theatre Project

“The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler,” Dog & Pony

“Termen Vox Machina,” Oracle Productions

“On My Parents’ 100^th Wedding Anniversary,” Side Project

“The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” (original mounting), Gift Theatre

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 Directors

Ann Filmer for “Kita y Fernanda,” 16^th Street Theater

Charles Newell for “Caroline, or Change,” Court Theatre

Sean Graney for “Edward II,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater

William Brown for “As You Like It,” Writers’ Theatre

Greg Kolack for “Columbinus,” Raven Theatre

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 Musicals

“Caroline, or Change,” Court Theatre

“Grey Gardens,” Northlight Theatre

“Tell Me On A Sunday,” Bailiwick Theater

“The Full Monty,” Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre

“All Shook Up,” Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 New Musicals

“Caroline, or Change,” Court Theatre

“Grey Gardens,” Northlight Theatre

“Songs for a New World,” Porchlight

“The Ballad of Emmett Till,” Goodman Theatre

“I Am Who I Am: The Story of Teddy Pendergrass,” Black Ensemble Theater

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Musical Revivals

“Tell Me on a Sunday,” Bailiwick Theater

“Sweet Charity,” Drury Lane Oakbrook

“1776,” Signal Ensemble

“Jacques Brel’s Lonesome Lovers of the Night,” Theo Ubique

“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Circle Theatre

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Worst Musicals

“Shout! The Mod Musical,” Drury Lane Water Tower

“Avenue Q,” Broadway in Chicago

“Dirty Dancing,” Broadway in Chicago

“Russian on the Side,” Royal George Theater

“Gutenberg! The Musical,” Royal George Theater

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Worst Musicals

“Dirty Dancing,” Broadway in Chicago

“The Kid from Brooklyn,” Mercury Theater

“Gutenberg! The Musical!,” Royal George Theatre

“Jekyll & Hyde—The Musical,” Bohemian Theatre Ensemble

“Sweeney Todd,” Broadway in Chicago

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 Operas

“Manon,” Lyric Opera

“The Abduction From the Seraglio,” Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Ravinia

“Lulu,” Lyric Opera

“Porgy and Bess,” Lyric Opera (second cast)

“Don Giovanni,” Chicago Opera Theater

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Productions of Shakespeare

“As You Like It,” Writers Theatre

“Comedy of Errors,” Chicago Shakespeare

“Much Ado About Nothing,” First Folio

“Merchant of Venice,” Boho

“Twelfth Night,” City Lit

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Touring Shows

“Saint Joan,” Shaw Festival Canada, Chicago Shakespeare

“Cirque du Soleil: Kooza,” United Center

“The Drowsy Chaperone,” Broadway in Chicago

“My Fair Lady,” National Theatre London, Broadway in Chicago

“Jesus Christ Superstar,” Broadway in Chicago

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Holiday Shows

“The Christmas Schooner,” Bailiwick Theater

“A Dublin Carol,” Steppenwolf Theatre

“A Christmas Carol,” Writers Theatre

“Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular,” Rosemont Theatre

“The Seafarer,” Steppenwolf Theatre

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Comedy Shows

“Impress These Apes,” Blewt!

“Shatter,” Pat O’Brien’s solo show at Second City e.t.c.

“Steve and Jordan, Respectively” i.O. Theater

“Brother, Can You Spare Some Change?” Second City e.t.c.

“PennyBear: A Collection of Miniature Plays and Curious Diversions,” Apollo Theater Studio

—Nina Metz

Top 5 Female Performances

Janet Ulrich Brooks, “Golda’s Balcony,” Pegasus Players

Christina Anthony, “Brother, Can You Spare Some Change?” Second City e.t.c.

Erin Barlow, “Red Angel,” LiveWire

Sarah Goeden, “13 Dead Husbands,” Sansculottes Theater

Rachel Quinn, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Circle Theatre

—Nina Metz

Top 5 Male Performances

David Cromer, “Our Town,” The Hypocrites

Usman Ally, “Celebrity Row,” American Theater Company

Steve Wilson, “Red Angel,” LiveWire

Edward Thomas-Herrera, “The Last Days of Beast,” Live Bait’s Fillet of Solo Festival

Daniel Behrendt, “Beggars in the House of Plenty,” Mary-Arrchie

—Nina Metz

Top 5 Out-of-the-Box Performances

“Inner Space,” Joffrey Ballet’s American Moderns

“Walking Mad,” Hubbard Street Dance Winter Series

“The Young Ladies Of…,” About Face Theatre

“Dr. Egg and the Man With No Ear,” Redmoon Theater

“One on One,” Hubbard Street Dance Winter Series

—William Rogers

Top 5 Dance Shows by Chicago Companies

“The Sky Hangs Down Too Close,” Lucky Plush Productions

“Nuevo Folk,” Luna Negra Dance Theater

“De-Evolution of Mudwoman,” Breakbone DanceCo

“Vintage Modern,” Same Planet Different World Dance

“American Moderns,” Joffrey Ballet

—Sharon Hoyer

Top 5 Overrated Productions

“Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe,” House Theatre

“Dirty Dancing,” Broadway in Chicago

“Shining City,” Goodman Theatre

“The Glass Menagerie,” Shattered Globe Theatre

“Scenes from the Big Picture,” Seanachai Theatre

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

Top 5 Theatrical Disappointments

“Dirty Dancing,” Broadway in Chicago

“Les Miserables,” Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre

“Yohen,” Silk Road Theatre Project

“Richard III,” Strawdog Theatre

“Macbeth,” Greasy Joan & Co.

—Fabrizio O. Almeida

 

The real tragedy of this unconvincing production lies in the painfully obvious contrast between the overwhelming talent of the SITI company and what ends up being an underbaked adaptation of the Scottish play that isn’t quite “Macbeth” but firmly prevents itself from being anything else. “Radio Macbeth” is literally a staged, painfully condensed reading where actors play… actors, but the meta-theater immediately feels like a cheap trick: there are hints of relationships between characters, but nothing that holds attention for long, and there are almost no lines that aren’t Shakespeare’s. The show purports to be an actors’ rehearsal of “Macbeth” taking place in a late-night abandoned building, and focusing on the soundscape of the show—the strongest elements of the show are the striking sound effects created by a variety of microphones and the actors’ obvious mastery of their voices as they deftly plow through lines. It’s not clear, then, why the actors spend all their time during this rehearsal rearranging endless chairs for no apparent reason, putting on clothes, taking off clothes and circling each other in stilted, choreographed ways. The visual element ends up being another tragic sacrifice. More often than not, “Radio Macbeth” comes across as presumptuous and indulgent, and more frustratingly, it doesn’t go anywhere, for the abridging that’s done to get the show under ninety minutes cuts far too much of the original play for it to remain coherent. (Monica Westin)

At Court Theater, 5535 South Ellis, (773)753-4472. Through December 7.

By Valerie Jean Johnson

“Late at night in the guts of an abandoned theater, a company of actors gathers to rehearse Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” They soon realize that they’re not alone. As they are drawn deeper into the Bard’s most magnetic play, the ghosts that have haunted the story since its inception hover and encroach.”  So goes the story behind “Radio Macbeth,” the latest offering from the renowned New York City-based SITI Company. Founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki, this ensemble-based theater company is no stranger to Chicago, having made the city both a regular stop for many of the nearly thirty shows they’ve toured around the US and abroad over the past sixteen years, as well as a home for an annual two-week intensive training workshop in the summer. This will be their second time taking the stage at Hyde Park’s Court Theatre, after the highly successful 2006 run of “Hotel Cassiopeia,” written by the company’s resident playwright Charles L. Mee. And whether the play be by Mee, Noel Coward, August Strindberg or a completely original work devised by the ensemble, each production carries the indelible strength that comes from SITI’s singular (and rigorous) style of training and development. I caught up with artistic director Anne Bogart about the working life of SITI Company, the desire to take on arguably the Bard’s best (and bloodiest) tragedy, and the delights to be found in being haunted.

For our readers who may not be familiar with SITI Company, would you please tell us a bit about your process of devising work as an ensemble?

We work very collaboratively.  I start by describing the world of the play and I tell the actors and designers and all involved everything that I have imagined about our production.  Then we put our heads together and begin to work.  Except for songs and dances, which we develop and practice every day, we always rehearse in the order of the play, never skipping.  Once we have staged one scene, we move on to the next, in order.  It is a slow process.  When we get stuck we wait until consensus about how to move forward.

SITI Company’s first foray into the work of Shakespeare was “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” What were the driving influences behind the decision to tackle “Macbeth?”

Well, we had such a grand time working on “Midsummer” that I was anxious to tackle another Shakespeare.  And why not move from one of his greatest plays to the next?  These two plays are thematically and structurally diametrically opposite which seems right when moving from one to the next.  Also, “Macbeth” was the very first play I ever saw as a child and it is what made me decide to become a theater director.

“Radio Macbeth” is presented as an adaptation from Shakespeare. How do you define “adaptation” in this way? How much of Shakespeare’s original script is a direct part of this piece?

We are not doing the entire play, rather it is a cutting of the original.  A few of the bits are rearranged but ultimately I believe that we have stuck rather faithfully to Shakespeare’s play.  We try to keep out of the way of the rich language and situations.

Director Darron L. West describes “Macbeth” as “the ultimate ghost story.” What about ghosts entices you personally, and artistically?

I believe that all theater is ultimately about dead people; giving dead people voice.  The Japanese Noh theater, for example, was originally built over graveyards.  The actors stamped the ground to allow the spirits from below to inhabit their bodies.  This sounds morbid, I know, but it is actually quite delightful to allow for the voices and memories of the past to be filtered through one.

So, are there any superstitions in the company about saying “Macbeth” in the theater?

Oh gosh, we joke around about it.  Ultimately though, I do not think that we are overly superstitious.

What’s next for “Radio Macbeth?” Will the tour continue after the run here in Chicago?

Absolutely!  I hope to tour the play for many years.  But I will state here that I share the company’s enthusiasm for performing in Chicago in particular.

At Court Theatre, 5535 South Ellis, (773)753-4472, through December 7

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.

RECOMMENDED

Beginning on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, “Caroline, or Change” is a perceptive but gentle study of a southern Jewish family and their African-American maid in the early 1960s. Tony Kushner’s show had its first incarnation as an opera before becoming a musical, a fact immediately evident in the way that the text and music seamlessly narrate the series of events that follow when Caroline is told she can keep the change that Noah, the child of her employers, leaves in his pockets. This material could all too easily have become trite in other hands, but Kushner’s writing and Jeanine Tesori’s complex score combine the pathetic and the irreverent marvelously. The Court’s decision to use children and young people in four of the extremely demanding parts is daring, and they are as remarkably successful as the rest of the cast, with Melaine Brezill keeping up with E. Faye Butler’s impeccable “Caroline” as her daughter Emmie, who in the most memorable scene debates with the Jewish grandfather about the uses of nonviolent resistance. (Monica Westin)

At Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, (773)753-4472, through October 19.26.

“’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.

RECOMMENDED

Leslie Lee’s classic of African American theater has its premiere in the Midwest decades after it opened in New York—and it’s about time. The play is tightly-written, honest, moving and often extremely funny in its depiction of a middle-class black family in the 1970s. Director Ron OJ Parson carries out the writer’s intention to let the audience feel emotionally included in the story, and the acting is superb all around, Cynthia Kaye McWilliams in particular stealing the show in the grandmother’s flashbacks (which work beautifully with the rest of the plot). The only major shortcoming is that while the play itself is a complex scathing satire, this production is almost too easy to sit through—for example, making a white man whose presence in the life of a black woman is both multifaceted and sinister comes across as a ridiculous fop, allowing the audience simply to laugh uncritically at him. There are several moments of this kind where it’s too easy to avoid the discomfort that Lee intended. Ultimately, though, the show still has great power and insight and is not to be missed. (Monica Westin)

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

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.