Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard/Photo: Liz Lauren

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Much musical theater plays to the most maudlin of impulses, shamelessly tugging at the heart. But put Mary Zimmerman, Voltaire and Leonard Bernstein in a room, and you expect something more cerebral. And indeed, “Candide” is.

Voltaire wrote his romantic-tragicomic novella as an enlightened rebuttal to the “philosophy of optimism” holding sway in his time. It’s a philosophy brought to life here in the character of the philosopher Pangloss, and his true believer Candide, who suffer monstrously and yet remain true to the idea that it’s all for a higher purpose. It’s not much of a stretch to find contemporary resonance in political conservatism and religious fundamentalism (and their Tea Party bastard child), both notions rooted in preserving the status quo, and Zimmerman even inserts a line about “intelligent design” early on, just to make sure we get the message.

The story of “Candide” is narrative excess in service of a point: the young optimistic is pushed from his life of comfort for daring woo Cunegonde, whose noble lineage is out of his class; from there a life of horrifying misadventures unfurls, depicted to comic extremes, as he works his way around the world and back. Read the rest of this entry »

"Candide" production photo by Liz Lauren

By Dennis Polkow

When Tony Award-winning director Mary Zimmerman is due in early at Goodman Theatre to discuss taking on her first musical, Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” it is obvious that she is tired, having stayed up most of the night revising script pages after a day and night of rehearsals. Today will also be a full day of rehearsals, but tonight will be the first preview of the work. As she is making her way to the table and chairs that her press folks have set up in a quiet area of the building, a beautiful large dog briskly enters, checking out both the area and the reporter. The dog has a Goodman Theatre security tag attached to his collar with his picture that identifies him as “Beary.”

“When I first got him, he was a wreck. He was a pound dog, so he is quite devoted. He is a mix—at the pound they said shepherd-husky, but a lot of people see beagle in him as well. Beagles have that black saddle but huskies often have a very thick double coat and little star as he does. I’m sure he is more than two breeds, by the way. But he’s a good old fellow. I’ve had him since “Pericles” in D.C. This is probably his fifteenth show, maybe? He was full grown when I got him and I’ve had him eight years, so he’s at least ten. I hope he’s only ten. I don’t know how old he is, I have no idea. He’s holding up, and he’s a sweet boy. Tonight he will be exiled from the theater for the first time and will be in the dressing room. He’s just sort of curled up by me in rehearsals most of the time.” Read the rest of this entry »

"La Vista de la Vieja Dama"

By Monica Westin

The fifth biennial Latino Theatre Festival at the Goodman, is centerpieced by “The Sins of Sor Juana,” which has been getting mixed reviews, but the real surprises of the festival’s lineup are two performances by Teatro Buendía. The theater company, one of the most highly regarded in Cuba, has never performed in the US before this month. Newcity spoke with Goodman Artistic Associate Henry Godinez, festival curator, about Teatro Buendía’s style, getting the theater into the country, and revolution.

How did you first become familiar with Teatro Buendía?

The company has played all over the world—Africa, Europe, Australia, obviously Central and South America, even the Globe in London. I first saw them in Cuba in 2003, and I had hoped to bring them to the festival back then, but it was just impossible to bring artists from Cuba under the last political administration. This year, with Obama in the White House, we thought we’d try again and we succeeded… they have their visas, and they fly in tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

Malaya Rivera Drew and Dion Mucciacito/Photo: Liz Lauren

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It speaks volumes about the sad state of human affairs when we can describe the story of the repression and destruction of a great, brilliant woman as fairly predictable fare. Predictable perhaps, but still poignant, especially in light of the continuing unabashed cruelty toward women in parts of the Islamic world even today. Perhaps we tsk-tsk these “uncivilized” cultures a bit too much, for it wasn’t long ago that it was Western culture, with the royal court and the Catholic Church at its core, that destroyed many a great woman (and man, for that matter), in the name of God or king.

So even if there is a familiar Joan-like arc to “The Sins of Sor Juana,” now playing at the Goodman, the particulars of the story of this great poet of Mexico are not as widely known. Brilliant, dynamic and beautiful from a young age, Juana Inés de la Cruz was pre-destined for trouble, and in playwright Karen Zacarías’ fairly straightforward imagining of the circumstances of her life, she finds it. Set at the moment when Juana starts to “lose her voice” thanks to the Church’s inability to abide by its promise to let her write, “The Sins” unfolds in a conventional overlapping story line, with an interwoven flashback that explains how Juana came to the Church and, more importantly perhaps, how she found the raw romantic emotions, both conventional and mildly Sapphic, that would manifest so powerfully in her poems. Read the rest of this entry »

Demetrios Troy, Billy Eugene Jones and Teagle F. Bougere/Photo: Eric Y. Exit

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Having been raised in the 1960s, it is sobering to see how romanticized the civil rights movement has become in successive generations. Few old enough to remember will explicitly recall how common and ugly a phenomenon racism actually was from the white side, nor how vulnerable and clay-footed the participants and leaders of the movement were from the black side. Yes, Martin Luther King was martyred for the movement, and we now have a national holiday named for him. But back then, King—viewed by many as “the most dangerous man in America” as FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover infamously dubbed him—was hated on both sides of the race divide: many whites for his “stirring up trouble,” and many blacks, from Malcolm X to the Black Panthers, for his non-violent approach to getting what many thought should be taken by force.

It all looks so nice and neat decades later, but as playwright Tracey Scott Wilson displays in her remarkable civil-rights-era epic “The Good Negro,” this was a war with frailty on all sides. Wilson, a female African-American playwright, dares to show us both sides of what happened, from the inside. The most chilling moment is when a fictional minister and leader of the movement who is a doppelganger for MLK is giving a powerful sermon on one side of the stage—indeed the only side of the story that we still explicitly hear from the era in the retelling—with the inspiring and powerful platitudes that every school child of every race now knows. Meanwhile, on the other side of the stage is a Ku Klux Klan leader complete with the pointed white hat and ceremonial robes voicing the more commonly heard fear-mongering message in the white community at the time: “First, it’s our toilets, then it’s our jobs, then it’s our daughters’ beds.” As each expresses polar opposite and equally passionate American visions, they come together in unison to say, “Help us, my friends, help us keep the South alive.” Read the rest of this entry »

Heather Wood

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In an ambitious departure from the topical, highly contemporary milieu she’s become known for (most recently evidenced in finest form with “The Crowd You’re In With”), Rebecca Gilman’s “A True History of the Johnstown Flood,” now in its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre,  strives, mostly successfully, to reveal layers of truths about the times we live in through the retrospective craft of a giant historic epic.

A touring second-generation “first family of theater,” the Baxters (Cliff Chamberlain as Richard, Heather Wood as Fanny and Stephen Louis Grush as James, all in fine turns) find their lives and careers intersecting with the vast wealth of the Lippincotts, represented in compelling embodiments of noblesse oblige by Janet Ulrich Brooks as the benevolent patron and Lucas Hall as her son, Walter. When the manmade mountain lake that provides recreation for the rich floods and destroys the working-class town of Johnstown below (in reality, killing more than 2,200 people in 1889, the most devastating disaster in U.S. history at the time),  the play takes a definitive shift in tone. The humorous, airy comedy of manners that makes up the first act suddenly becomes a tragedy that overtly echoes the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Read the rest of this entry »

Greta Honold and Tom Hardy/Photo: Liz Lauren

Expectations were especially high for the world premiere of Brett C. Leonard’s “The Long Red Road” at the Goodman, thanks to the Chicago directing debut of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the casting of rising British film and stage star Tom Hardy in a leading role written for him. And I am pleased to say that the set and lighting design meet those expectations, with the Owen Theatre converted by Eugene Lee into a sprawling thrust stage that squeezes right up to the audience, devouring seats and eliminating the opportunity to establish any distance from the tortuous fare unfolding upon it. It’s a magnificent fusion of two separate households headed by two brothers in two separate states (literally and metaphorically), including not only bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens, but also their places of occupation, a barn and a bar, respectively, the latter where the alcoholic brother Sam spends much of his time communing with the bartender. The homes are interconnected, and characters pass each other like ghosts, suggesting the invisible ties that perpetually bind, even strangle, families. And Edward Pierce’s lighting design is a simple marvel; lamps, across the vast stage, turn on and off to signal the flow of action; the beginning and the end of scenes on a set with no boundaries.

If only the play lived up to its setting, or even its opening, where the audience is greeted by the characters Sam and Annie enjoying a graphic and vigorous shag. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from the Goodman:

MARY ZIMMERMAN REIMAGINES BERNSTEIN’S CANDIDE IN A MAJOR FALL MUSICAL EVENT;
ROBERT FALLS RE-EXAMINES CHEKHOV’S THE SEAGULL; PLUS NEW WORKS BY SARAH RUHL,
REGINA TAYLOR AND THOMAS BRADSHAW HEADLINE GOODMAN THEATRE’S 2010/2011 SEASON

***THE GOODMAN CELEBRATES A DECADE OF ACHIEVEMENTS AS ANCHOR OF THE NORTH LOOP

THEATRE DISTRICT, STARTING WITH A SEPT. 27 EVENT AT THE ART INSTITUTE’S MODERN WING*** Read the rest of this entry »

Krapp's Last Tape/Photo: Liz Lauren

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The constant level of high-quality theater to be had on both the Equity and non-Equity levels in Chicago is nothing short of astonishing, to be sure, but every now and then a performance comes along that manages to stand in a class all by itself. Such is the case with the double-bill of two one-act masterpieces by two fascinatingly different yet similarly iconic twentieth-century playwrights of Irish descent, Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, performed by a single extraordinary Irish-American actor—Brian Dennehy—who came up with the inspired idea of pairing and performing these two works together.

The Dennehy/O’Neill alliance originated under Robert Falls at Goodman nearly a quarter of a century ago and climaxed with last season’s O’Neill Festival which spotlighted the Dennehy/O’Neill/Falls “Desire Under the Elms.” In fact, Dennehy and Falls actually presented “Hughie”—a forty-minute work O’Neill wrote during the period of his greatest genius at the end of his life as part of a planned series of short plays that became a rara avis when he destroyed the other entries—just six years ago, at that time simply allowing it to stand on its own.

That experience proved inadequate enough that Dennehy began experimenting with adding another one-act to be paired with “Hughie” at other venues, initially settling upon a comedic Sean O’Casey opus that Falls came and saw and thought was a mismatch that trivialized O’Neill. It was Dennehy who finally came up with “Krapp’s Last Tape,” a forty-five-minute Samuel Beckett work also from the period of his greatest genius, as a bookend for “Hughie,” and that configuration was presented two summers ago at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, with Falls directing “Hughie,” Canadian director Jennifer Tarver helming “Krapp’s Last Tape” and Dennehy in both. A huge success, that experience has been enlarged and brought to Chicago, with New York and national tour aspirations. Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer Tarver/Photo: Liz Lauren

This week Goodman opens its highly anticipated marriage of two one-acts about aging, regret and mourning lost choices:  Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie” and Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” The lineup of artists involved is formidable: Robert Falls continues his collaboration with Brian Dennehy in “Hughie,” who plays against Joe Grifasi in this play about the ways we deceive ourselves in order to go on. This act about the tragedy of “just going on” culminates in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Beckett’s masterpiece of a one-man show about an aging performer who confronts his early self through recorded diaries that painfully chronicle a lost love. “Krapp’s Last Tape” relies on the contrast between the youthful hope in the tapes and the decayed abjection of older Krapp—also played by Dennehy and directed by Toronto-based director Jennifer Tarver.

Tarver, who directed Dennehy in the play at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival two years ago, is no Beckett newbie. She garnered acclaim for her curation of five Beckett shorts in 2006, and with a background in music as well as dramaturgy, she’s an easy match for the musicality and rhythm of Beckett’s prose. Newcity talked with Tarver the week before previews about space, composition and the demands of directing Beckett. Read the rest of this entry »