Darren Criss (#4) with Team StarKid

With our criteria shifted back to artistic accomplishment in theater, dance, comedy and opera this year, our task got infinitely tougher. Because while the number of performing venues grows at a steady rate, the increase in the number of noteworthy artists seems to grow exponentially. For everyone we name on the list below, we had to leave off five, an embarrassment of riches for Chicago. We made a conscious effort to introduce a meaningful number of new faces to the list this year; the necessary absences should not be construed as a loss of worthiness as a consequence. We often find trends when we do the research these lists require; this year we’re starting to see a more meaningful effort to redefine performance itself in the internet age, from the runaway success of StarKids, to the more calculated endeavors of Silk Road. So what defines a “player”? Consider it some complex stew of career achievement, recent “heat” and, in some cases, rising stardom.

Written by Zach Freeman, Brian Hieggelke, Sharon Hoyer and Dennis Polkow

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Here’s the press release from Theater Wit:

THEATER WIT ANNOUNCES 2011-12 SEASON, PLUS CHICAGO’S FIRST NETFLIX-LIKE LIVE THEATER MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM

Become a Theater Wit Member, see the company’s Chicago debuts of Jason Wells’ The North Plan, Kim Rosenstock’s Tigers Be Still, David Sedaris’ The Santaland Diaries, plus Chicago’s most diverse slate of off-Loop plays and musicals, whenever you like, as often as you like

CHICAGO, July 20, 2011 – Theater Wit Artistic Director Jeremy Wechsler has been busy pinning down the company’s 2011-2012 season line-up, which boasts the Chicago premiere of Jason Wells’ spine tingling apocalyptic drama The North Plan, the Midwest debut of Kim Rosenstock’s hot new dark comedy Tiger Be Still, plus the return of Chicago’s favorite alt-holiday comedy, The Santaland Diaries. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Johnny Knight

RECOMMENDED

The works of Stephen Sondheim have been a Porchlight Theatre staple over the years, though thus far, the company has presented mostly Sondheim’s linear works with clear narrative and straight-ahead musical numbers; “Sunday in the Park with George,” the 1984 far more abstract and, at times, virtually operatic Sondheim work about the genesis and contemporary significance of a major work of art that is a Chicago institution, namely, Georges Seurat’s “Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte” (“A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”), is an immense undertaking for the company that, happily, is paying off handsomely. 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: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

If you don’t like musical theater stay away from this island. It is not the show that’s going to change your mind. However, if you find yourself inclined to get swept away by stories told through a beautifully complicated but accessible score, Porchlight’s “Once On This Island” might work for you. Penned by Stephen Flherty and Lynn Aherns, the story is a retelling of the classic “The Little Mermaid” set on a Caribbean island where the color of skin, not scales and fins, creates a chasm between two lovers.  Porchlight’s production is re-imagined so that the storytellers are immigrants living in an urban neighborhood, weaving the tale to calm a frightened little girl. Concepts are always tricky, and when you are dealing with work that is strong they can just get in the way. That’s what happened here. The neighborhood and its inhabitants appear rather antiseptic. I found myself wondering if I was watching the musical set on Sesame Street. Performers are expected to evoke real, hardworking people, while the movement is far from pedestrian. When the cast starts singing though, hardly any of that matters. This is what it should sound like. Powerful and exuberant, songs should lift your soul and move your feet. They do. Lead by Melanie Brezill as Ti Moune, a girl on a journey, the audience is in good hands. She is sweet and powerful and the production is better for having her as a guide. The spirit of this show and the emotional core of the music far out-sing the concept imposed upon it. For that reason go see it. Uou’ll leave wanting to dance. (William Scott)

“Once On This Island” runs through June 28 at the Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, (773)327-5252, porchlighttheatre.com. $37.

David Rhee, Keith Uchima, Erik Kaiko and Peter Sipla

RECOMMENDED

When Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” first appeared on Broadway back in 1976, few knew quite what to make of it.  World War II was as close to the show opening as we are now to the American Bicentennial Celebration that the piece was in part written to commemorate.  The story of the Westernization of isolationist Japan told from the Japanese perspective as imagined by white guys, the show began with Japanese-born film star Mako as “the Reciter” taking a samurai position and screaming at the audience and acting as narrator and commentator on kabuki-style staging with an all Asian-American cast singing Western-style show tunes.  The brainchild of producer Hal Prince, the show began as a straight drama but along the way, Prince thought that music could help the viability of the work, and Sondheim became involved.  Well, at least Broadway portrayals of Asians in musicals had come a long way since “Flower Drum Song.” Read the rest of this entry »

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.