RECOMMENDED

Based on the Voltaire novella that sought to lampoon eighteenth-century optimism, Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” was written for Broadway in 1956, the show running seventy-six performances before folding, although the magnificent original cast album and the emergence of the show’s overture as a symphonic staple kept the show alive as a cult classic. Hal Prince oversaw revisions of the work in the early 1970s that replaced the original book, both a one-act Broadway version, and a two-act “opera house” version, which is the version that Lyric Opera presented under Prince’s own direction back in 1994.

Bernstein himself allowed but had nothing to do these revisions, where half of his music ended up on the cutting-room floor and the rest re-ordered. “In trying to eliminate what was admittedly a confusing book,” Bernstein told me in 1985, “the adapters also began tinkering with lyrics and where particular songs should be heard in the show, eliminating the overall musical architecture of the work, at least as I imagined it, and also tipping the work in too comedic of a direction.” The composer set out to correct this with his own “final revised version” which he completed and recorded mere months before his death in 1990, but that version has yet to be heard in Chicago.

Porchlight Musical Theatre has opted instead for the minimalist 1973 one-act revision, in many ways the least of all possible worlds of “Candide” performance possibilities. A five-piece orchestra playing this score leaves a lot to the imagination, to be sure, and reduces the fanfare opening of the familiar overture to a solo trumpet line minus the usual and much-needed supporting harmony. One staging element that Porchlight has borrowed from Prince’s own productions is the way that characters use the venue itself for their many comings and goings, which is fun, but unlike Prince’s productions, the audience members are never made part of the action. We, after all, are the real “class” for Dr. Pangloss in his various guises as he seeks to illustrate the absurdity of the optimistic philosophical dictum that the world that is, insofar as it is, is the best of all possible worlds and yet here, the characters interact only with each other and the orchestra.

At ninety minutes plus, this is a long single act and far too much of it is spent with sight gags and vaudeville-like shenanigans that at times make the music seem like a distracting, if welcome, interruption. Thankfully, those songs that are heard are mostly well sung, though needlessly and unevenly over-amplified in such a small space and in the case of the iconic “Glitter and Be Gay,” overdone. Most worthwhile about the production is Ryan Lanning’s Candide, who with his clarion tenor and boyish looks and mannerisms sterlingly pulls off what is usually a rather thankless role. And while the cast performs a rousing finale of “Make Our Garden Grow,” such seriousness and poignancy appear to arrive out of left field given the trivial tone that has largely preceded it. (Dennis Polkow)

Through November 2, Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, (773)327-5252. $37.

RECOMMENDED

Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2” and Maury Yeston’s “Nine” are as different as night and day, literally.  “8  1/2” is detached, cold, existential, narcissistic, a beautiful kaleidoscope of confusion and ambiguity, like the shattered dreams of middle age itself that it so brilliantly and hauntingly seeks to explore.  “Nine,” on the other hand, is an operatic melodrama that is the male prototype for the plethora of “Menopause: The Musical”-type shows that it would spawn.  Both propose the need for an adjustment in attitude as life goes on: Fellini never specifies whether film director Guido has actually committed suicide in “8 1/2,” and that ambiguity is part of what makes the film so endlessly fascinating.  In the musical, however, Guido only imagines his suicide, and such an experience becomes life affirming within the choice to stay alive and accept what life has to offer on its own terms.  “You be nine, and I’ll be forty,” Guido confidently sings to himself as a boy as both go on to live their parallel lives and sort out their own unhappiness, to each his own.  To those who love the film, this is treason, since like the fluidity of life itself, nothing is resolved in “8 1/2.”  And yet, as one who loves the film and who loves musical theater, I found myself taken in by Porchlight Music Theatre’s lovingly crafted production.  Not that “Nine” is an effective adaptation of “8 1/2.”  I doubt that such a thing is even possible, let alone desirable.  But if “Nine” is taken as an overtly optimistic and sentimental musical theater “riff” on “8 1/2,” each works on its own, albeit opposite, terms.  (Dennis Polkow)

At the Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont, (773)327-5252. This production is now closed. 

RECOMMENDED

The phenomenon of performing a radio-style adaptation of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” is an outgrowth of television stations having lost the rights to show the film regularly at Christmastime, as was once the case ad nauseum, and PBS stations started to do televised-radio-broadcast versions instead back in the early 1990s during holiday pledge drives. The American Theatre Company incarnation that the company has been presenting for five years now is as good a version as you are likely to encounter, even expanding the hour-long original 1947 Lux Radio Theatre broadcast with James Stewart and Donna Reed into a fast-moving, ninety-minute version that includes more of the plotline of the two-hour-plus film. This interactive experience has the cast greeting you with a lively sing-along of seasonal songs and even offering you milk and cookies at the show’s end. In between, the audience plays the studio audience of a 1940s radio broadcast of the script, complete with live on-spot sound effects and commercials that tie into the plotline. For such a minimalist experience, it is surprising how effective it is, though undoubtedly it is the over-familiarity that most of us have with every line of the movie that makes it work. With the notable exception of John Möhrlein’s dead-on and virtually hissable Lionel Barrymore as Potter impersonation, most portrayals have been freshly and effectively rethought. Unlike the more upbeat musical version over at Porchlight, this version is not afraid to get really dark and bleak and James Leaming’s George Bailey gets so hopeless and desperate that we really believe that he is about to cash in his chips. (Dennis Polkow)

At American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron, (773)409-4125. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

One of the great ironies of Frank Capra’s classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” is the despairing context in which George Bailey’s guardian angel paraphrases the titular optimistic phrase in the climax of the film: George is desperately digging away the snow from his dead brother’s grave because George wasn’t there to save him from a drowning accident, and George also learns that the men that his brother saved during World War II are dead as well. It is a horrifying moment, made all the more so by Dmitri Tiomkin’s haunting yet subtle score. If “Life” were going to be made into a musical, then too bad that Tiomkin never wrote the music, because the music to this 1989 version is serviceable, but forgettable, and far too “wonderful” in its ethos. That said, the lyrics to the songs work well by and large, particularly as the hopes and joys of the various characters are introduced song by song, and the stellar cast of Porchlight Music Theatre’s production brings them off beautifully, particularly Jayson Brooks’ George Bailey, who gives the character such a unique spin that you almost forget James Stewart’s iconic stuttering. It all works quite nicely until George’s suicide attempt, and then things get bizarrely operatic with characters bursting into song during what should be the show’s darkest moments. It reminded me of Leonard Bernstein admitting that he tried and tried to set Maria’s climactic indictment speech with the gun to music in “West Side Story,” but it just wouldn’t work. But lovers of the classic film will still find plenty to feast on, and a whole new imaginative take on characters that you thought you knew are given a new, if sometimes overexuberant, lease on “life.” (Dennis Polkow)

At the Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 West Belmont, (773)327-5252. This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

Jason Robert Brown’s “Songs for a New World” is a remarkable work, a cabaret cantata or song cycle every bit as evocative as, say, Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” but in a genre, namely musical theater, that doesn’t really do song cycles. After playing Off Broadway and spawning a cast album, the piece went on to become a favorite of theatre companies with smaller resources because it only calls for a cast of four, though it would be hard to imagine a better cast of four than Bohemian Theatre has assembled to raise the rafters with this work. Not only is each cast member a superb singer with an immense dynamic range but each is able to act out the characterizations of each of these character-driven storysongs as if they were truly telling their own story. Fresh from his extraordinary success as Coalhouse Walker in Porchlight’s production of “Ragtime,” Jayson Brooks brings that same prayerful pathos to his “New World” characters, including leading “Flying Home” as an anthem finale (the song order has been shifted here, but quite effectively). Alanda Coon relishes her roles as well, particularly her take on Mrs. Santa Claus fed up with Old Saint Nick but Michael Arthur and Jess Goodwin are equally memorable in their offbeat roles. Also deserving kudos are director Elizabeth Margolius for her convincing conception of the work and music director and pianist Andra Velis Simon for the extraordinary range of moods she is able to evoke. (Dennis Polkow) 

At the Theatre on the Lake, 2401 N. Lake Shore, (312)742-7994. This production is now closed.

Given that the Lloyd Webber version of “Phantom of the Opera” is still selling out on Broadway after nearly two decades, what do regional theaters do to take advantage of the unparalleled public appetite for singing “Phantom”s? They perform Maury Yeston’s “Phantom,” of course, as the late Candlelight Dinner Playhouse did for over a year with great success a decade and a half ago and in the wake of Porchlight Music Theatre’s smash success with “Ragtime,” the company is hoping that lightning may strike twice. In its purest form, “Phantom” is, of course, a classic “Beauty and the Beast” tale, but it is precisely that element which gets lost in the shuffle of this adaptation, which prefers instead to wildly speculate on the nature of the Phantom’s rather dysfunctional family. Instead of an inverted love scene where the Phantom learns that it is he, not Christine, that is incapable of loving his hideous-looking self, this Phantom instead has a love scene of another sort with a long-lost family member that shows that he’s really not so bad, he’s just misunderstood because he was rejected because of a birth defect and was raised hiding around in an opera house. Other than one murder and the chandelier incident—and even those are sympathetically explained away in this telling—all of the villainy and mystery of the original “Phantom” has been cleaned up so that instead of a monstrous genius, we are given the Elephant Man with a cape fetish. The original motivation for the Phantom wanting to help Christine is to take her away from her boyfriend by having her devote herself exclusively to her art form, but here, she doesn’t even have a boyfriend until rather late in the show. This version is willing to go down all sorts of dead-end plot mazes that have nothing to do with the original story, but when all is said and done, the big climax of any “Phantom”—namely, the unmasking—never even happens and the audience is never given the payoff of even a glimpse of the character’s face. Kind of like, uh, forgetting to show us the hump on your back if you’re doing “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” (Dennis Polkow)

At the Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 West Belmont, (773)327-5252. This production is now closed.