Pizza? Theater Oobleck's "Strauss at Midnight"

As part of this story, we sent a few questions to leaders of the theater community in Chicago and received about forty written responses. Here are excerpts from some of their answers. The full text will also soon be published online.

Any observations or thoughts about Chicago theater in the last decade?

“When one theater has a hit show, its not just a hit for that show, it’s a hit for Chicago.”
—Deb Clapp, Executive Director, League of Chicago Theatres

“I love the shake-ups that are happening as a result of management changes, economic pressures, and influx of new artists. It’s exciting to see the landscape shifting so dramatically, the new work that is being created as a result, and the new artists and management teams that are getting a chance at bat.”
— Kevin Mayes, Executive Director, Bailiwick Chicago

“The first SKETCHBOOK was produced in January 2000 and has gone on to create 135 world premiere short plays with over 1000 different artists for over 30,000 audience members and launching numerous careers.”
— Anthony Moseley, Executive and Artistic Director, Collaboraction Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our decade retrospective, we surveyed more than forty theater companies for their observations to a couple of questions. What follows are their formatted but unedited responses.

Deb Clapp
Executive Director, League of Chicago Theatres (founded 1979)

Any observations or thoughts about Chicago theater in the last decade?
Over the last decade, Chicago has seen the downtown theater district grow and thrive, Goodman moved downtown and several theaters were re-furbished. Lookingglass moved into their new digs on Michigan Avenue and theater has flourished. Several exciting new companies have been established including The House Theatre of Chicago, Silk Road Theatre Project, New Leaf Theatre and Rasaka, among many others.

Is there a “Chicago style” anymore (if there ever was) and has it changed? What, today, distinguishes Chicago theater from anywhere else?
A number of unique characteristics distinguish Chicago theater. We have a unique ecology encompassing a wide range of theater artistry, from spectacle to culturally specific, horror to improv, houses with thousands of seats to houses with 18 seats. Our community is very collegial and collaborative, sharing ideas and resources. When one theater has a hit show, its not just a hit for that show, it’s a hit for Chicago. Our directors, authors, actors, stagehands, producers, all are Chicagoans and all create for a Chicago audience.

Outside of your own company, who or what excites you most about local theater right now?
Chicago is the best place to see and to make theater in the world. A lot of attention from other parts of the country and the world is being paid to Chicago theater right now and while that is wonderful and will inevitably lead us to greater things, what continues to happen every night in Chicago theater brings me joy. Telling our stories and the stories of others, bringing the world on stage every night, that’s what excites me most. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

The best direction is usually transparent; when a play is really working, you’re not thinking about the director. But when it fails, the director inevitably shoulders the blame. Sean Graney, The Hypocrites founder, is never transparent. He likes to work with classic texts and, to varying degrees, reconstruct them with his fingerprints visible throughout. As long as you can accommodate his penchant for out-of-context non sequiturs, it mostly works, sometimes to wonderful effect.

Playwright Charles Ludlam died of complications from AIDS in 1987, in the twilight of Reagan’s reign, still in the early years of the above-ground emergence of gay culture—less than twenty years after Stonewall and less than a decade after the pansexual hedonism of Studio 54. In this environment, cross-dressing camp theater had come of age, with a dint of the avant-garde and a winking naughtiness. When Ludlam died, camp too was on its deathbed, at least as a politically subversive aesthetic idea; it lives on and succeeds or fails these days simply as entertainment palatable to increasingly mainstream audiences.

You might suspect that Ludlam saw this day coming, for his most prolific legacy, “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” first produced by his Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1984, elevated the camp device of sending up cultural conventions into a masterful exploration of film and theater that not only flourished as comedy on the page but, in his construction of the play as an over-the-top quick-change vehicle with two actors of the same sex playing all the roles, male and female, through thirty-five costume changes, has the potential to astonish audiences with its stagecraft. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

There are few plays that can boast a backstage drama to rival the one being seen out front. “The Mystery of Irma Vep, A Penny Dreadful” is one of those plays.

The late playwright-director-designer Charles Ludlam’s comedy, which opens at Court Theatre this weekend, is at once a Victorian-style send-up of the Gothic melodrama, a hyper-verbose mish-mash of recherché literary references and delicious double-entendres, and homage to the midnight horror flicks of yesterday.

At its heart, however, it is a simple show devised entirely around a simple concept, the quick-change.  And yet, as evidenced by the backstage brio and technical wizardry that makes it possible for two actors (Erik Hellman and Chris Sullivan) to take on nine roles and pull off dozens of split-second costume changes, there is nothing simple about it.

Director Sean Graney likens the challenge of coordinating the backstage dance between Hellman and Sullivan and the show’s five dressers to piecing a puzzle together or solving a Rubik’s Cube:  “It’s like Ludlam said ‘Fuck all of you, you’ll never be able to figure this out’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, let’s do it!’”  Assistant Stage Manager Sara Gammage favors the sports analogy, appropriate for a show that demands nothing less than sheer athleticism from all involved (“It’s like designing a playbook, if you were playing basketball or football, and mapping out the Xs and Os and what needs to go where and when and in how much time.”)  And Production Stage Manager Ellen Hay, who oversees everything and is responsible for calling the show’s 300-plus light, sound and special-effects cues (an amount not typical for a non-musical) quips, “This is just another day in stage management…times a thousand.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

When writing reviews it’s rare that I’m able to use the word “powerful.” Still, I can’t think of a better description for Court Theatre and director Ron OJ Parson’s superb revival of playwright August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Indeed the show, which was first performed more than twenty-five years ago, is teeming with themes and ideas—assimilation, internalized racism, the appropriation and exploitation of one culture by —that still resonate with an incredible topicality as if the play had been written yesterday.

Wilson’s setting for his play is a fictional Chicago recording studio in 1927.  A white record producer and white music manager are trying to lay down some tracks of black singer Ma Rainey (the real life “Mother of the Blues” who recorded with Louis Armstrong and mentored Bessie Smith, among other achievements) performing her signature number, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release announcing the Jeff noms for Equity:

Chicago Theatres Shine in Outstanding Jeff Nominated Productions of 2008-2009 Season

Goodman Theatre and Drury Lane Oakbrook
Top List of Award Nominees

50 Years of The Second City to be Spotlighted
at The Jeff Awards

Thursday, August 27, 2009 – Chicago, IL.   The Jeff Awards today announced 179 nominations in 35 categories for Chicago Equity theatrical productions which opened between August 1, 2008, and July 31, 2009. The Jeff Awards sent judges to the opening nights of 141 productions offered by 57 producing organizations. From these openings, 98 Equity productions were “Jeff Recommended,” which made them eligible for award nominations.

The 41st Annual Jeff Awards ceremony, honoring excellence in professional theatre produced within the immediate Chicago area, will be held on Monday, October 19, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. A pre-show Appetizer Buffet will run from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., and the Awards Ceremony, directed by Michael Weber, will begin at 7:30 p.m. The Second City, celebrating 50 years as a producer, will play a featured role at the Jeff Awards ceremony. Advance purchase tickets, which include the ceremony and the pre-show buffet, are $75 ($55 for members of Actors’ Equity Association, United Scenic Artists, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, and The Dramatists Guild of America). The evening is black tie optional and the public is cordially invited to attend. To purchase tickets, visit the Jeff Awards website at www.jeffawards.org. For more information, contact Equity Chair Diane Hires at equitywing@jeffawards.org. Read the rest of this entry »

Conner, Abercrumbie, A.C. Smith

RECOMMENDED

When August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” appeared more than two decades ago, the idea of an African-American playwright reflecting the African-American experience was still largely a novelty. Here, at last, were fully developed black characters not as imagined by white writers, but an attempt to chronicle the journey of a people attempting to adjust decade-by-decade to the realities of post-slavery America where true freedom still remained largely elusive.

The struggle reflected in “The Piano Lesson,” the 1930s entry in Wilson’s ten-play twentieth-century cycle, is one of legacy, magnificently symbolized in an elaborately hand-carved upright piano uniquely tied to a family’s past and drenched in the blood of its ancestors. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

By Whitney Dibo

The old saying, “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity” seems an appropriate adage for Charlie Newell’s directing career. When the D.C. native originally applied for the associate artistic director position at Court Theatre back in 1993, he couldn’t have known the company was actually in search of a replacement for their retiring artistic director. A lucky break to be sure—but Newell was also firmly prepared for the opportunity: his very first directing gig for Court, a production of Marivaux’s “Triumph of Love,” won a Jeff Award for Best Production. “After that, I guess Court felt comfortable handing over the reigns,” Newell says with a modest laugh.

Fast forward to 2008—fourteen years into Newell’s successful tenure at Court Theatre. Tom Stoppard’s new music-infused play, “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” opens on Broadway, and Court tries to nab the production rights for the Chicago premiere. “They got back to us on a Thursday and told us our request had been declined,” Newell says.

Newell was naturally disappointed, and wondered which major Chicago theater had successfully wooed the producers of “Rock ‘n’ Roll” with bigger royalties and larger production capabilities. The answer came the next day, with a phone call from The Goodman Theatre. “On that Friday, the folks at Goodman called me up and asked me to direct the show,” says Newell, obviously still tickled by the serendipity of it all. “Rock ‘n’ Roll” started previews in the Goodman’s Albert Theatre on May 2 and will run through June 7, with a cast comprised almost entirely of Chicago-based actors. Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Galati (center) and the cast of Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of The Tempest/Photo: Michael Brosilow

By Dennis Polkow

No.  Shakespeare. Ever.  Despite Steppenwolf being the oldest ensemble theater in Chicago, there has curiously been no Shakespeare performed by the company across its nearly thirty-five-year existence.  Until now, that is, with the staging of the Bard’s last play, “The Tempest.”  Why the long drought in the first place, and why end it now?

“Ever since I’ve been in the ensemble,” says Tina Landau, Steppenwolf ensemble member since 1997, who is directing “The Tempest” and is upstairs during a company dinner break two hours before the first preview of the show, “many ensemble members have been longing to do Shakespeare.  Five years ago, I pitched ‘The Tempest’ as one of three plays that I most wanted to do and through a confluence of the right timing and the right season—particularly with this year’s overall theme of the imagination—it finally all came together.” Read the rest of this entry »

Theatrical candy, occasionally delicious but more often a bit cloying, the Court’s seeming answer to seasonal affective disorder is a psychological thriller that delivers less suspense than laughs at its own campiness. The story itself, involving con artists invading an apartment and the blind, petite and spunky woman-child who outwits them in their own game, is very fun, with smart writing and a perfect pace. However, the acting is uneven, running the gamut from John Hoogenakker as a frenzied psychopath to Emjoy Gavino as the flighty heroine, affected and somewhat silly in her seeming attempt to channel Audrey Hepburn, who played the role in the film. For all its banter and suspense-driven plot, the show gets dragged down in awkward moments resulting from this lack of focus, making it not just fluffy but treacly, and the best moments arise when the show seems utterly aware of how ludicrously dated and frivolous it is and lets the audience in on the joke. (Monica Westin)

“Wait Until Dark” plays at Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, (773)753-4472, through April 6.