Most Jukebox musicals come in one of two formats. Some take a compilation of well-known songs and use them to tell the life story of the songwriter or the performer who made them famous. And some create a fictional storyline within which they shoehorn a bunch of unrelated songs via a contrived plot.  “The Marvelous Wonderettes,” the jukebox musical at Northlight Theatre featuring those gloriously groovy tunes of the fifties and sixties, may be the first to do both.

The first act, set in a fictional high-school auditorium (period-evoking set and details by Michael Carnahan), sees Cindy Lou, Missy, Betty Jean and Suzy (aka “The Marvelous Wonderettes”) providing their 1958 senior prom’s entertainment by belting out recognizable hits such as “Lollipop,” “Mr. Sandman” and “(Love is like a) Heatwave” in a concert format.  There is a small attempt to develop individual character and explore the quartet’s interpersonal dynamics throughout, but most of this act, crafted with the kind of wholesome 1950s pre-psychedelic American sweetness liable to send a modern-day cynic into a sugar coma, is little more than an excuse to stage a K-Tel Golden Oldies musical medley.   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 »

Photo: Peter Wynn Thompson

By Whitney Dibo

In another life, Steve Scott might have directed high school musicals. The prolific Chicago director actually got his start in the classroom—teaching high school and then college in his home state of Kansas. “I originally taught at a small religious university,” he says with a laugh. “Let’s just say I didn’t fit in terribly well.”

That life is a far cry from Scott’s current career as a sought-after freelance director and associate producer of The Goodman Theatre (a job he’s held for twenty-two years). But it wasn’t the straight-and-narrow path that led Scott to his current post. “I never had a system,” he says, “I never had a plan for the next ten years.” In fact, the reputable Scott has no formal directing training—whatever that may say about the necessity of pricey MFA training programs. The origin of Scott’s career stems from directing one-acts in grad school (“They asked me to help because everyone else was busy,” he says) and later from running a summer-stock company in Kansas.

After skipping out of Kansas and heading for the big city, Scott landed a job as The Goodman Theatre’s Director of Education, due to his extensive teaching background. Around that same time, he started directing at small theaters around town. “I would do a production that was reasonably good, so another theater would call me up,” Scott says with a shrug. It was a slow burn, but the consistent high quality of Scott’s work eventually earned him the most valuable currency in the theater community: a good reputation. Seven years later, after a stint as a teacher at The Latin School of Chicago, newly crowned Goodman Artistic Director Robert Falls brought on Scott as his right-hand man. “Bob didn’t want to be burdened with administrative work,” the persistently jolly Scott says without a trace of resentment. “He is impatient with details.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kelly O'Sullivan and Cliff Chamberlain

RECOMMENDED

I remember reading Martin McDonagh’s “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” when it was first published several years ago and thinking that it was the kind of play that Quentin Tarantino might have written had he been a playwright.  I still think this is partially true, at least for the part of the play that demands mutilated pussy cats, human craniums splattering open and onto walls and the severing of human bodies into small pieces, all of these disturbing stage directions simulated, of course, but nonetheless staged convincingly in Theatre Northlight’s perversely enjoyable new revival of the play.  On opening night I couldn’t decide what was more entertaining, watching the performance or keeping my eye on the woman sitting one row in front of me, looking pissed and uncomfortable as she kept flashing a “why did you bring me to this?” angry gaze to her male companion.  Unfortunately for him, she was probably a cat person or card-carrying member of the Anti-Cruelty Society. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the release from Northlight:

Northlight welcomes back Tony Award winners John Mahoney and Rondi Reed for its 35th Anniversary Season

Season to include The Marvelous Wonderettes, Souvenir, Awake and Sing, and A Life

Chicago, IL-Artistic Director BJ Jones and Executive Director Timothy J. Evans are proud to announce the 2009-2010 Northlight Season, which includes Roger Bean’s pop musical, The Marvelous Wonderettes; Stephen Temperley’s comedic musical tribute, Souvenir directed by David Bell; Clifford Odets’ Depression-era classic Awake and Sing directed by Amy Morton and featuring Rondi Reed and Mike Nussbaum; Hugh Leonard’s Irish drama, A Life directed by BJ Jones, starring John Mahoney; and another production to be announced (now updated to include Low Down Dirty Blues). Read the rest of this entry »

By Whitney Dibo

Before Michael Patrick Thornton became the artistic director of The Gift Theatre, he worked at the airport. “Drum roll please,” he says with a sardonic smile, “I actually pushed people in wheelchairs from security to their gates.”

The irony of this revelation can only be appreciated if you’ve met Thornton, seen him in a show, or happened to catch a full-body photo of him taken within the last six years. At the age of 23, Thornton suffered what doctors now call a “spinal stroke” that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Well, at least that’s the technical medical term, but in reality no doctor is really sure what happened. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED
“Medicine is food, and food is medicine” declares the kitchen matriarch Po Momma at one point in Northlight’s world premiere of Kenneth Lin’s “Po Boy Tango,” and so too, is this tightly constructed production a true-to-the-recipe dose of healthy brain-food.

“Po Boy Tango” tells the unconventional story of a friendship between a Taiwanese immigrant now living on Long Island, Richie Po, and Gloria B, the African-American hospice worker who also happens to be the second-best cook he has ever known. The first, his deceased mother, was a celebrity chef in Taiwan, and her presence is conveyed through “video” interludes that punctuate the play. Richie convinces Gloria to cook his mother’s famous banquet for his daughter’s upcoming wedding; in return, he’ll partner with her in a lifelong dream of opening a Southern soul food café. Accordingly, the stovetop provides the backdrop for an engaging journey into the nuances of food, heritage and uneasy racial relations. Anyone who’s spent time cooking with friends and family know what a stew can be made out of the interactions between the participants.

Brian Sidney Bembridge’s versatile and contemporary set transforms kitchen to kitchen to kitchen, augmenting the topnotch acting by Ken Narasaki (Richie Po), Jeanne Sakata (Po Momma) and Jacqueline Williams (Gloria B), and efficient direction from Chay Yew that injects the story with enough energy to prevent its potentially inert story line from spoiling.

My principal reservation about the production was the use of pantomimed food rather than the real or simulated thing. The play’s description makes it sound like a sensual feast on the order of the movies “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” and “Big Night”; instead it was like watching children play tea party—not only disappointing but distracting, at least for the first ten minutes or so minutes till I got used to it.  (Brian Hieggelke)

“Po Boy Tango” plays at Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard, Skokie, (847)673-6300 or northlight.org, through February 15.

What makes Chicago’s theater world special? We picked up the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly for clues. In the cover story, “CSI” star William Petersen explains his decision to leave his role as one of the top paid actors in television, earning a rumored $600,000 an episode, to move back to Chicago and Chicago theater: “It was too safe for me at this point. So I needed to try and break that, and the way to do that, for me, is the theater.” EW went on to credit Petersen for much of the show’s success, notably bringing a theatrical ensemble philosophy to play in its production. Or consider the runaway success of Steppenwolf’s “August: Osage County,” which transferred to Broadway,  receiving critical acclaim and multiple Tony Awards, not by shaking it up with Broadway “names” but instead by virtually transferring the Steppenwolf production intact, with the addition of lead producer and fellow Chicagoan Steve Traxler. What makes Chicago theater—or for that matter, Chicago dance or any other form of performance practiced on our stages—special? We’d contend it’s the power of the ensemble, the spirit of collaboration that champions artistic risk-taking and subordinates the commercial. And so, in that spirit, the critical ensemble responsible for Newcity’s ongoing stage coverage presents our take on the most influential people on and offstage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The first thing I’d like to say about the musical “Grey Gardens” (apart from the fact that it’s very, very good) is that its success doesn’t depend upon an audience’s familiarity with the 1975 documentary of the same name and on which it is partially based. In fact, it doesn’t even demand that you know anything about “Grey Garden’s” non-fictional main characters, Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little Edie,” other than they were relatives of late former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill.

What’s also striking about “Grey Gardens” is its sense of humor. And would you expect anything less from a musical about two famous socialites turned infamous bag ladies holed up in a flea-infested estate with fifty-one cats? In less adroit hands this humor could have turned mean, and the story of a co-dependent mother-daughter duo fodder for freak-show camp theatrics. Luckily, the book writer responsible for celebrating and making us laugh with—yet not at—these defiant female eccentrics who lived their lives on their own terms is Doug Wright. Wright, of course, is a gay American playwright who grew up in the Bible Belt and won every major theatrical award, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for “I Am My Own Wife”, his fascinating true story account of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the East German transvestite who survived Hitler and the German Stasi to become an international icon of the gay community until his/her death. In other words, personally and professionally Wright knows a little something about outsiders, oppression and beating the odds. He’s a writer who prefers to probe in lieu of providing answers, which is why I’m not surprised that, as with “I Am My Own Wife,” “Grey Gardens” left me with more questions than answers. In the case of “Gardens,”  when does it all stop mattering—washing your clothes, picking up after your fifty-one cats, basically giving a shit about your hygienic housekeeping? And at what point do we become prisoners and victims of the parental love that nurtures us?

Yet despite such “big” questions, “Grey Gardens” is a musical, and at times an old-fashioned musical comedy at that—ultimately entertaining, occasionally tuneful, sometimes openly sentimental, and funny. The first half, depicting Edith and Edie in their socially healthy younger years, is chock full of composer Scott Frankel’s charming, Tin Pan Alley-inspired musical numbers boasting Michael Korie’s Sondheim-like clever lyricism. Act two, set three decades later at which time mother and daughter are reclusively living out their sad and lonely existence, emphasizes thoughtfulness over wittiness in its character-driven meditation on thwarted and unrequited love, reprises musical leitmotivs to haunting effect (“The Girl Who Has Everything”), and gives us a tender ballad in “Jerry Loves My Corn,” musically reminiscent of “Into the Woods’” “No More” but with the maverick lyrical sensibility of David Yazbek’s “You Rule My World” from “The Full Monty.” Although it’s not a score whose original cast recording I’m running off to buy anytime soon—I could have used a few more memorable tunes—in the theater it does its job by holding your attention and by contributing to the work’s overall beautifully strange oeuvre.

This Northlight staging stars Hollis Resnik in the role of Edith during the first half and the adult Little Edie for the second, and her ability to convey both of her characters’ psychological eccentricities during song, without going into crude caricature and while sustaining her melody lines, proves that she remains Chicago’s first lady of the musical theater. BJ Jones directs and Marla Lampert is responsible for the amusing musical staging. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd, Skokie, (847)673-6300. Tue 7:30pm/Wed 1pm & 7:30pm/Thu 7:30pm/Fri 8pm/Sat 2:30pm & 8pm/Sun 2:30pm & 7pm. $25-$59. Through December 28.

RECOMMENDED

Not counting the teenage girl I spotted attending with her parents, I swear this thirty-something critic was the youngest audience member in an ocean of octogenarians at a recent matinee performance of Northlight Theatre’s impressive world-premiere comedy “Better Late,” co-authored by Larry Gelbart and Craig Wright and helmed by Artistic Director BJ Jones. And yet, it says something of this funny, deliciously sharp and ultimately moving work that it had everyone of every age engaged and entertained for ninety straight minutes. The straightforward set up is fodder for your typical sitcom: a middle-aged California couple makes room for the wife’s curmudgeon of an ex-husband, in his twilight years, frail of health and necessitating a place to crash, despite the protests of acerbic husband number two, for whom wife left husband number one. Cue the “three’s a crowd” comedy and chaos. At first it seems that Gelbart and Wright are content for giggles at the expense of the geriatric set: “Have you seen how the nurse sponges him down?” muses Linda Kimbrough’s wife to which second husband John Mahoney dryly responds, “Like working on the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Yet even as the one-liners become racier (Mahoney’s character later alludes to a caretaker’s ethnicity when he comments on her daily arrival as the “changing of the Filipino guard”) or hysterical (At the cemetery Mahoney’s character is chided for evoking “God” too many times and replies with, “It pays to kiss a little ass around here”), the piece doesn’t settle for being just a comedy for grown-ups. Indeed, beneath that veneer of comic genius lies a big and generous emotional heart happy to explore the complex subjects of friendship, marriage and mortality, and unafraid to tackle profound questions on the ineffable nature of love and fidelity. Mike Nussbaum (giving an expert performance) and Steve Kay (as his son on the sidelines) round out Northlight’s twenty-four-karat cast, and Jones’ expert production is played out on Jack Magaw’s smart and minimalist set whose clean lines and chic lighting are straight out of Metropolitan Home. Like the writing, it’s exquisite. (Fabrizio O. Almeida)

At Northlight Theatre, 9501 N. Skokie, Skokie, (847)673-6300. This production is now closed.