Kelly O'Sullivan and Cliff Chamberlain

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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 »

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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.

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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. 

The Gee’s Bend quilts have become a national symbol of the struggle of the civil rights movement, the quilts themselves having appeared in museums and even on postage stamps, drawing attention to the lives and struggles of the African-American women who created them over the decades while singing spirituals and gospel music, reflecting their day-to-day struggles just trying to get by in a segregated South. The idea of telling the story of these women in stage form is an inspired one, but what is ultimately lacking in this Midwest premiere presented by Northlight Theatre despite a solid cast is, well, much of a story. What we get is a lot of talking about the quilts and lots of canned music that sometimes the cast sings along with, but virtually no scenes where the women are actually working on them nor where we as audience members get to see them, so their symbolic status is frustratingly unexplored. What we get instead is a series of isolated and superficial vignettes related to one family over the decades, with little changing to suggest how much time has passed if it weren’t for telegraphed lines telling us, such as, “I’m on my way to Selma to march.” The ladies go and hear Martin Luther King, but instead of getting any sense of how what he said may have affected or inspired them, they talk about what a “right handsome man” he is while they are listening to him. We get a brutal caricature of an abusive husband (though his death scene is the most credible moment in the show), a dutiful daughter, a gentle grandmother, a wise-cracking friend, blah-blah-blah, in short, an overlong after-school-special version of “The Color Purple” without the depth, insight or poetry. (Dennis Polkow)

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

Even though Ella Fitzgerald will forever be known as “The First Lady of Song,” her life was exceptionally uninteresting. Completely devoted to her art, she lived a virtually monastic and nomadic life, taking the gospel of Ella wherever and whenever she could, even after her health had deteriorated to the point where she had to be helped onstage and would have oxygen and a cot waiting for her at stage’s edge. The audience was always Ella’s “family,” wherever she went, and unlike, say, Judy Garland, who always wanted to take the audience home with her and would hit the wagon because she couldn’t, Ella was happy to separate her private and public persona. All of this is why Jeffrey Hatcher’s “Ella” is a disservice to the great singer on so many levels. For all of her obvious talent, E. Faye Butler does not look like, dress like, act like, talk like, nor sing like Ella in any way, shape or form. Her vocal center of gravity is far deeper than Ella’s and all of the vocal “tricks” that Butler displays which are so commonplace among singers—such as over-emoting to create tension, holding back vibrato until a climactic note—are things that Ella herself would never do, and the fact that the opening night audience of this Northlight Theatre production went so crazy for such antics suggests that such an audience would have been bored had it been able to experience the subtlety, playfulness, flexibility and general girlishness of the real Ella. Worse, the four-piece band engaged for this production is a hard-core bebop band with no swing sensitivity, and to quote the Ellington tune that Ella made her own, “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Had a trumpeter played with the over-the-top, bull-loose-in-a-china-shop bravura that trumpeter Ron Haynes constantly displayed, Ella would have restored balance and order. We are also asked to believe that Ella would actually reveal intimate (and fictional) family details in the middle of a concert that are set up in the interest of some semblance of drama but never even resolved. But perhaps the most offensive part of “Ella” is giving her manager Norman Granz credit for Ella’s trademark scat singing when the reality is that Granz was the one who managed to “tame” Ella’s vocal improvisations enough so that she would do straight song renditions of classic standards. All in all, this fictional “Ella” is so off the mark that it comes off more as “The First Lady of Wrong.” (Dennis Polkow)

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

By Nina Metz

This is a ripe time for Chicago playwrights according to Brett Neveu, whose latest work, “Weapons of Mass Impact,” opens Monday at A Red Orchid Theatre. 

Over the past six years or so, no other local playwright has had as much new work produced as Neveu. You’d think the guy has it made. “The problem with that is ‘playwright’ and ‘have it made’—those two things never go together,” he says as we talk by phone.

He made this observation, by the way, from his new home in Los Angeles, where he and wife Kristen moved in August with their daughter, Lia Pearl, who turned 1 last week. “Mostly it was because we had the baby and we needed to have some more stability money-wise—or at least try to get that stability.” Kristen, who is a mixed-media artist, was the first to land a job. She works at Warner Bros. in the art department. And like so many before him, Neveu is hoping to write for television and film.

If he lands a lucrative writing gig—which seems likely, judging by his success to date—he will join the ranks of other nationally known playwrights who subsidize their theater dreams with Hollywood dollars, including Craig Wright (“Six Feet Under”), Theresa Rebeck (“Law & Order: Criminal Intent”) and Chicago’s own Rick Cleveland (who was just hired to write for AMC’s “Mad Men”).

It is a smart move for Neveu, 37, who was supporting his family primarily on teaching jobs (most recently at Northwestern) and playwriting commissions, which pay anywhere from $5,000-$10,000, depending on the theater. Neveu has had no shortage of commissions—companies such as the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Northlight and Writers’ have paid him to write plays. Currently he has commissions from the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York and Royal Court Theatre in London.

I’ve been commissioned many, many times,” he says, but “I’ve only had one theater produce the play they commissioned.” That would be “Old Town,” a musical about backroom political dealings set on election night in Cook County, which debuts in April at Strawdog. “They put it in the season before it was even finished,” a rare show of confidence from a theater.

But Neveu’s artistic home in Chicago is still A Red Orchid, where the claustrophobic dimensions of the stage seem perfectly suited to “Weapons of Mass Impact,” about a trio of kidnapped women who endure interrogation at the hands of their foreign captors—and at the hands of one another. 

The play is part of a trilogy that began with “Harmless,” seen last year at Timeline. (Part three is called “Old Glory” which Neveu is working on for Writers’ Theatre.) The plays each take place in the middle of the current decade, and they focus on how regular folks “mentally deal with the situations that crop up as a result of a country at war in the modern age.”

Despite the heavy subject matter, Neveu’s plays contain a sly sense of humor. He’s not writing jokes. The way Neveu sees it, people are just funny when they talk. “Especially in tense situations.” He doesn’t craft the perfectly articulated argument that would never transpire in real life. He writes dialogue that is riddled with awkward social niceties and subconscious hostility. He writes the way people genuinely talk, which is hilarious if you really listen to it.

The move to L.A. notwithstanding, Neveu is focused on theater. A possible strike by the Writers Guild of America “makes it harder for me [to get a job right now], so I’ll just wait until resolution happens. Whatcha gonna do?” He has a pair of commissions to work on, at any rate.

And more to the point, “My end goal was never to be a screenwriter or a TV writer. My end goal was to be a playwright, and that’s always been the case. Actually, my end goal is to be a writer, whatever it’s for. Actually, my end goal is just to have a job that I like.”

And regardless of what the future may bring, “I will always consider myself a Chicago playwright.”

“Weapons of Mass Impact” opens October 22 at A Red Orchid Theater, 1513 North Wells, (312)943-8722.