Photo: Eleanor Berman

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

“Angels in America, Part I”: An angel appears accompanied by a flash of light so bright you have to block your eyes. An aural cluster of classical compositions (Stravinsky, Verdi) blasts while the incessant sound of fluttering wings catches up to your heartbeat, an experience akin to the THX Dolby Digital surround sound in a movie theater that vibrates from up and under your chair and into your body.

“Adding Machine”: A visual journey into an expressionistic world of chiaroscuro lighting effects and dark sensibilities.

“Picnic”: You enter the theater and are enveloped in a world of live tree branches and gorgeous green grass.

“Our Town”: A fugue of smells—the aroma of coffee percolating and bacon sizzling—from a kitchen so real you could move in yesterday.

These are David Cromer moments. Read the rest of this entry »

Tara DeFrancisco, No. 36

In this town of performers—theater makers, dancers, comedy creators—you’d think it’d be pretty easy to assemble a list of artistic influencers and innovators. And it is. The challenge is paring that list down to a mere fifty. It’s a testament to the wonders of the performing-arts culture in Chicago that we easily came up with about 200 names when we set out to create this year’s version of The Players. Unfortunately, we’re only listing a fraction of those worthy of your attention, but that’s the problem with an abundance of riches. Hopefully you’ll see a handful of recognizable names and a whole lot more you’ll start noticing from this point on. We’ve retooled the criteria for this year, focusing on onstage artistic achievement, rather than the backstage influence of artistic directors, executive directors and the like—who will get their day again next year. Let the arguments begin. Read the rest of this entry »

By Emily Torem

Jesse Weaver’s “The Artist Needs a Wife,” slated for its world premiere at the side project theatre this week, is not a play to see if you’re feeling low. It’s about “trying to imagine what life would be like if you were a complete and utter failure,” says the Virginia-born playwright whose career is anything but—his last production at the side project, where he is an ensemble member, “On My Parents’ One Hundredth Wedding Anniversary,” drew critical raves. The plot of “Artist” centers on “fairly fucking old” washed-up artists: Mott, a DJ and Freud, a painter, along with Freud’s discarded muse, known only as “Whore.” The characters live in a futuristic world of Weaver’s imagination. “When I started writing it, I didn’t know much about DJing. It looked so cool and so hip. I was wondering: this art form seems so new and so uniquely of our time, what is it going to be like in 50 years? Are these guys going to be mixing in old folks homes in 2070?” We chatted with Weaver over the phone and via email from Virginia—he’s currently living in Ireland, where an earlier version of this play appeared at the Dublin Fringe Fest—to get some insight into his work.

What inspired you to write a play about failure?
I was in my mid-twenties [when I started writing it]. Living in my friend’s basement apartment—especially when you’re working in Chicago theater where everyone has to have a day job—there’s this feeling of, “Oh my god, I’m going to be 50 and doing [this] the rest of my life. In your mid-twenties, you’ve been sort of written a blank check. [You’ve been told] you’re very talented and you’re very cool and the world’s going to fall at your feet, and then you [learn] it’s not going to and you start to feel sorry for yourself and are going to end up this crusty old man in the basement—that was a personal feeling that sort of stoked the play. I started sharing these thoughts and found I wasn’t the only one with those feelings. Read the rest of this entry »

The Addams Family at The Oriental/Photo: Samuel Adams

By Brian Hieggelke

As the wind blows the snow sideways this December evening, the weatherman is telling Chicagoans to stay bunkered; the deserted downtown streets reflect their obedience. All save the sidewalk near the intersection of State and Randolph, as TV crews jockey for faces on the red carpet in front of the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre, where more than 2,000 patrons, including a who’s who of backstage Broadway, are gathering for the world premiere of a new musical featuring a AAA list of talent, onstage and off. “The Addams Family,” with multiple Tony winners Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in its leads, a book from the librettists of “Jersey Boys” and so on, is certainly Broadway bound, but tonight—tonight—Chicago is the center of theater in the world.

That’s the story of Chicago theater in the zeroes: the decade in which it grew up and got big. Whether it’s the launch and monumental success of Broadway In Chicago, the maturation and astonishing quality of a remarkable number of small and mid-sized companies or the increasing demand for Chicago product and Chicago talent on Broadway, Chicago theater has fully come into its own. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our decade retrospective, we surveyed more than forty theater companies for their observations to a couple of questions. What follows are their formatted but unedited responses.

Deb Clapp
Executive Director, League of Chicago Theatres (founded 1979)

Any observations or thoughts about Chicago theater in the last decade?
Over the last decade, Chicago has seen the downtown theater district grow and thrive, Goodman moved downtown and several theaters were re-furbished. Lookingglass moved into their new digs on Michigan Avenue and theater has flourished. Several exciting new companies have been established including The House Theatre of Chicago, Silk Road Theatre Project, New Leaf Theatre and Rasaka, among many others.

Is there a “Chicago style” anymore (if there ever was) and has it changed? What, today, distinguishes Chicago theater from anywhere else?
A number of unique characteristics distinguish Chicago theater. We have a unique ecology encompassing a wide range of theater artistry, from spectacle to culturally specific, horror to improv, houses with thousands of seats to houses with 18 seats. Our community is very collegial and collaborative, sharing ideas and resources. When one theater has a hit show, its not just a hit for that show, it’s a hit for Chicago. Our directors, authors, actors, stagehands, producers, all are Chicagoans and all create for a Chicago audience.

Outside of your own company, who or what excites you most about local theater right now?
Chicago is the best place to see and to make theater in the world. A lot of attention from other parts of the country and the world is being paid to Chicago theater right now and while that is wonderful and will inevitably lead us to greater things, what continues to happen every night in Chicago theater brings me joy. Telling our stories and the stories of others, bringing the world on stage every night, that’s what excites me most. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

RECOMMENDED

The best direction is usually transparent; when a play is really working, you’re not thinking about the director. But when it fails, the director inevitably shoulders the blame. Sean Graney, The Hypocrites founder, is never transparent. He likes to work with classic texts and, to varying degrees, reconstruct them with his fingerprints visible throughout. As long as you can accommodate his penchant for out-of-context non sequiturs, it mostly works, sometimes to wonderful effect.

Playwright Charles Ludlam died of complications from AIDS in 1987, in the twilight of Reagan’s reign, still in the early years of the above-ground emergence of gay culture—less than twenty years after Stonewall and less than a decade after the pansexual hedonism of Studio 54. In this environment, cross-dressing camp theater had come of age, with a dint of the avant-garde and a winking naughtiness. When Ludlam died, camp too was on its deathbed, at least as a politically subversive aesthetic idea; it lives on and succeeds or fails these days simply as entertainment palatable to increasingly mainstream audiences.

You might suspect that Ludlam saw this day coming, for his most prolific legacy, “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” first produced by his Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1984, elevated the camp device of sending up cultural conventions into a masterful exploration of film and theater that not only flourished as comedy on the page but, in his construction of the play as an over-the-top quick-change vehicle with two actors of the same sex playing all the roles, male and female, through thirty-five costume changes, has the potential to astonish audiences with its stagecraft. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Michael Brosilow

By Fabrizio O. Almeida

There are few plays that can boast a backstage drama to rival the one being seen out front. “The Mystery of Irma Vep, A Penny Dreadful” is one of those plays.

The late playwright-director-designer Charles Ludlam’s comedy, which opens at Court Theatre this weekend, is at once a Victorian-style send-up of the Gothic melodrama, a hyper-verbose mish-mash of recherché literary references and delicious double-entendres, and homage to the midnight horror flicks of yesterday.

At its heart, however, it is a simple show devised entirely around a simple concept, the quick-change.  And yet, as evidenced by the backstage brio and technical wizardry that makes it possible for two actors (Erik Hellman and Chris Sullivan) to take on nine roles and pull off dozens of split-second costume changes, there is nothing simple about it.

Director Sean Graney likens the challenge of coordinating the backstage dance between Hellman and Sullivan and the show’s five dressers to piecing a puzzle together or solving a Rubik’s Cube:  “It’s like Ludlam said ‘Fuck all of you, you’ll never be able to figure this out’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, let’s do it!’”  Assistant Stage Manager Sara Gammage favors the sports analogy, appropriate for a show that demands nothing less than sheer athleticism from all involved (“It’s like designing a playbook, if you were playing basketball or football, and mapping out the Xs and Os and what needs to go where and when and in how much time.”)  And Production Stage Manager Ellen Hay, who oversees everything and is responsible for calling the show’s 300-plus light, sound and special-effects cues (an amount not typical for a non-musical) quips, “This is just another day in stage management…times a thousand.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Paul Metreyeon

A colorful but unsubstantial adaptation of “Frankenstein” that ultimately feels derivative both of the novel/Karloff film and the Hypocrites’ previous work. In a Newcity interview earlier this fall, Sean Graney expressed his intention to piece the show together out of  various “dead material” from previous adaptations, but in this skeletal version, much of the story is lost and the show itself is what feels dead. With bloody dolls hanging from the ceiling, creepy suicides in wedding dresses, and the Hypocrites’ aggressive promenade style, the show is visually appealing (though you have to work to see the cast much of the time—the MCA space feels cramped, and the actors moved around out of my view more than half the time no matter how hard I tried to keep up). Acting is energetic but often  inconsistent and even uncontrolled, and the schizophrenic mood—horror and screaming with tacked-on modern one-liners like a running joke about canned cheese—keep the show from building up real dramatic momentum. The bottom line is that while their treatment of “Oedipus” breathed new life into the play last spring, the Hypocrites and Graney make a mistake in believing that they need to make “Frankenstein” colorful, edgy, and modern to make it interesting. I found myself more often than not simply watching the black-and-white Karloff film, projected behind the stage, and finding it more moving than the anxious, histrionic postmodernism in front. (Monica Westin)

At the MCA, 220 East Chicago, (312)397-4010. Through November 1.

Sean Graney and The Hypocrites are knee-deep in Victorian and Gothic literature this fall. Graney’s both directing “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” a comic satire of Victorian melodrama at the Court Theatre in November; and leading The Hypocrites in a new adaptation of “Frankenstein” at the MCA in October. Newcity talked with Graney about playwriting and mad science.

Reading about this production, which combines several versions of “Frankenstein,” including the iconic 1931 Boris Karloff film, I’m struck by this multiplicity of versions in a story that’s about a literally cobbled-together character. How did this approach come about?

I’ve always loved the novel and wanted to adapt it for some time, but it’s really difficult to adapt for stage—as this great, huge novel with switching between different points of views—without resorting to amateurish narration. I’ve been trying to gain access to it for some time, and it was finally when I was watching the film we know as “Frankenstein” that I realized how little the film had to do with the novel—and that freed me to realize as long as it’s about a dude making another dude, I can make a script. Then I started playing with source material, pulling as much  dead source material as I could from “Prometheus Bound,” “Macbeth,” Marlowe’s “Faustus,” quotes from scientists and inventors, creating my own mash-up piece of Frankenstein art. 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 »