Here’s the press release from the Goodman:
MARY ZIMMERMAN REIMAGINES BERNSTEIN’S CANDIDE IN A MAJOR FALL MUSICAL EVENT;
ROBERT FALLS RE-EXAMINES CHEKHOV’S THE SEAGULL; PLUS NEW WORKS BY SARAH RUHL,
REGINA TAYLOR AND THOMAS BRADSHAW HEADLINE GOODMAN THEATRE’S 2010/2011 SEASON
***THE GOODMAN CELEBRATES A DECADE OF ACHIEVEMENTS AS ANCHOR OF THE NORTH LOOP
THEATRE DISTRICT, STARTING WITH A SEPT. 27 EVENT AT THE ART INSTITUTE’S MODERN WING*** Read the rest of this entry »
Kevin Gudahl and Kate Fry/Photo: Michael Brosilow
RECOMMENDED
Composer Joshua Schmidt scored a surprise hit with Next Theatre’s “The Adding Machine,” so much so that the show went on to have an off-Broadway New York run. Meanwhile, Schmidt has continued creating sound designs and scoring music on demand for various venues and shows around town, as he has for years. “A Minsiter’s Wife” is Schmidt’s second full-scale musical-theater piece, based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Candida.” The idea to adapt Shaw’s triangular romance to music belongs to Writers’ Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam, who commissioned the work and was originally planning to write the adaptation as well as direct it, but wisely realized that was too daunting a task, and so Austin Pendleton was brought in along with Jan Tranen to write the lyrics.
The end result, in its world-premiere production at Writers’ Theatre, has much going for it, to be sure. Read the rest of this entry »
Larry Adams and Catherine Lord/Photo: Rich Forema
RECOMMENDED
Just as “Sweeney Todd” is the work closest to opera in the Sondheim canon, “A Little Night Music” is the closest Sondheim work to operetta, with its consistent use of waltz-like rhythms (virtually everything is in triple meter) and some of his most melodic material, including his most popular song, “Send in the Clowns.” Additionally, it is Sondheim’s most elaborate use of the kind of counterpoint that Leonard Bernstein had experimented with in the climax of “West Side Story,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics, and also includes an orchestration that is at times evocative of Ravel’s “La Valse” and Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier;” musically, it ranks among Sondheim’s most ambitious and adventurous works. As such, it is the ideal vehicle for Light Opera Works to tackle as its first fully-staged Sondheim production in more than twenty-five years, not counting last fall’s Sondheim revue “Side by Side by Sondheim” at the company’s smaller venue. Yes, show voices can sing this stuff, often quite nicely, but oh, isn’t it rich to be able to hear such oft-done pieces heard in context and done up with trained voices that can really due full justice to their nuances and accompanied by the lilts and extravagance of a full orchestra with an ensemble cast in colorful costumes that often literally dances its way in and out of scenes. Read the rest of this entry »
On November 22, 1963, George Hearn was set to perform “Camelot” in Columbus, Ohio. Hearn was playing Sir Dinadan on the first national tour of the beloved Broadway musical but was also understudy to both King Arthur and Merlin the Magician when the news came that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. “The country froze,” Hearn recalls, “but the decision was made that in this special case, namely that ‘Camelot’ had been Kennedy’s favorite play, we would go on. There were no laughs that night, that’s for sure, and there was a solemnity to the occasion, and yes, open weeping, especially during the finale.”
The finale of “Camelot” is where a broken King Arthur, about to go to war with his closest friend Sir Lancelot, has a moment of hope where he discovers that a young boy has stowed away to join up with the knights of the Round Table. How could the boy possibly know anything about the Round Table, Arthur ponders, to which the boy responds, “from the stories people tell.” The revelation that what Arthur has accomplished will be remembered has him knight the boy and intone the memorable benediction that climaxes, “Don’t let it be forgot / That once there was a spot / For one, brief shining moment / That was known as Camelot.”
When Ravinia CEO Welz Kauffman asked Hearn to finally, at long last, play King Arthur Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s the press release from Harris Theater:
MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV, LANG LANG, CHRISTOPH ESCHENBACH, STEPHEN SONDHEIM, EVELYN GLENNIE AND KATHLEEN BATTLE HEADLINE HARRIS THEATER FOR MUSIC AND DANCE 2009-2010 HARRIS THEATER PRESENTS SEASON
SIXTH SEASON AT THE HARRIS FEATURES CHICAGO PREMIERES, HARRIS THEATER DEBUTS AND EXTRAORDINARY ARTISTS
SUBSCRIPTION AND TICKET PRICES REDUCED
CHICAGO, May 6, 2009 – The Harris Theater for Music and Dance today announced its Harris Theater Presents 2009-2010 season. The schedule of Harris Theater Presents events features nine programs, a remarkable thirteen Chicago premieres and includes an impressive and diverse selection of music, dance and conversation by internationally acclaimed artists and ensembles. Highlights of the Harris Theater Presents 2009-2010 season include a rare opportunity to see Mikhail Baryshnikov in a solo dance performance, an evening of insight with the “Master of the Musical,” Stephen Sondheim, the Harris debut of Lang Lang under the baton of his mentor Maestro Christoph Eschenbach, the Chicago premiere of Orquestra de São Paulo with virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, Kathleen Battle’s unusual program of holiday spirituals, and much more. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
For those who wondered what all of that singing was doing interrupting the graphic murders in Tim Burton’s grisly and humorless slasher film “Sweeney Todd,” Stephen Sondheim’s original work is back in town complete with all of the music and humor that was cut from the film with as much tact as if old Sweeney himself had been doing the chopping. No, this isn’t the full boat version served up with full chorus and orchestra as done here by the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia and at Lyric Opera, this is the scaled-down Broadway chamber music version on a national tour where a talented cast of nine sings each role and plays the musical accompaniment on stage along with themselves. It’s a considerable feat, the kind of concept that would be perfect for a more intimate theater but which becomes somewhat lost in the wings of a cavernous house such as the Cadillac Palace. For those who know and love the work, this virtually cabaret-like treatment will be a treat and a meaningful, even if a stiff and concert-like rendering of what is arguably Sondheim’s greatest work. But for those new to the story and the work, the entire cast remaining on stage for the entire show and playing instruments even after a said character has already been, say, killed off, will be a dramaturgical disaster for keeping track of who’s who and what’s what. But if the Demon Barber of Fleet Street can survive undubbed movie stars hacking their way through a truncated score, this approach is a long way up from such cut-throat treatment. (Dennis Polkow)
At Cadillac Palace, 151 W. Randolph, (312)902-1400. This production is now closed.
By Fabrizio O. Almeida
“I trust you to use this information as best you want to use it and I hope it doesn’t sound in any way saccharine or self-serving.” When director Charles Newell speaks there is a quiet intensity to his voice that is as soothing as the white-noise sound of the heater in the Court Theatre lobby. Sitting only inches away, he is clad in jeans and a snug black t-shirt, fit for his 49 years of age, eyes crystal blue. “I lost my mom February 18 during rehearsals. I was with her when she took her last breath. I held her hand and I talked to her as she passed. And that experience, which I’d never had before with anybody, that event happens in this production. Julie is with Billy when he takes for her his last breath. So how we thought about, structured and staged that scene changed radically.” Slightly misty-eyed at this point, a cathartic laugh quickly surfaces. “You know, we theater artists, we’ll steal from anywhere, especially our own life experience.”
For the non-musical cognoscenti, Julie and Billy are Julie Jordan, the simple mill girl, and Billy Bigelow, the rough carnival cad with whom she unexpectedly falls in love, the central characters in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s six-decade-old musical “Carousel,” currently being revived by Court Theatre. Speaking with Newell, however, the knowledgeable musical theater fan can’t help but recall the character of Nellie Forbush, the famous “cock-eyed optimist” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s other musical classic, “South Pacific.” “One has to be in our world today—and also certainly as a working theater artist—a sort of eternal optimist,” Newell says, sputtering with laughter. “After doing a season of ‘Thyestes,’ ‘Titus Andronicus’ and even ‘What the Butler Saw,’ I think it’s time for a little life-affirming theater.”
And is it a life-confirming coincidence that a lushly scored musical, despite an ill-deserved reputation for mawkish sentimentality in the general pop-cultural consciousness, almost caps off a brutal season of theater that reflected in its most raw and crudest terms how horrible the world can be (“Thyestes”) and how people may be stuck in their same cycles of violence (“Titus”). “My mother had been terminally ill for a couple of years. And though I made a choice to do this piece instinctually and for many reasons, I’m sure one of those reasons, without being in any way deliberate about it, was ‘oh my God, how am I ever going to survive her death?’ Because I have been and always will be very close to my mother.” If musical-theater purists have criticized Newell in the past for emphasizing the drama at the expense of the music, one cannot imagine “Carousel’s” eleven o’clock number, the anthemic “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” being turned into an intellectual exercise or anything less than an uplifting musical moment to melodically assault the emotions and soothe the sense of tremendous loss. Adds Newell, “It’s no accident that I’m doing a piece of theater in which there is this idea that we never walk alone.”
Looking ahead, there’s no denying that given Court’s musical production history (“Guys and Dolls,” “Man of La Mancha,” “Raisin” and now “Carousel”), Newell’s pronouncement that Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and Jason Robert Brown’s “Parade” are favorites and on his musical short list, and the fact that composer Jeanine Tesori’s “Caroline, or Change” has been slated for next season, the musical may be here to stay. Indeed, could Court be gearing itself up to become Chicago’s version of England’s Royal National Theater, an institution committed to the traditional repertoire but reviving and giving the same serious treatment to the musical? Newell erupts into laughter. “I think that’s a great way to put it. I hadn’t articulated it so specifically. I certainly don’t feel like we have to do a musical every year but as I learned from my mentor, the late great Garland Wright who was the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, musicals are as much a part of the American classical repertoire as any classic text. We actually invented them.”
And lest straight-play purists now worry that Court’s sacred season spots—those typically filled by Shakespeare or obscure pre-nineteenth-Century European classics—will give way to musicals populated with man-eating singing Venus flytraps or little red-haired moppets singing about “Tomorrow,” Newell is quick to allay such fears. “Life is short. We only have a certain amount of time so we might as well spend it on something that has some complexity and depth involved, at least that’s my emphasis and prejudice.” And then that laughter creeps in again. “At least we didn’t do ‘Sweeney’ as the musical. Too much! Too much!”
“Carousel” at Court Theatre, 5535 South Ellis, (773)753-4472. This production is now closed.
RECOMMENDED
The least popular of Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway shows, “Passion” can be a tough nut to crack. Composed with music virtually throughout but mostly recitative and rarely aria, the work is essentially a chamber-music opera in a single, unrelenting act that unspools its story via a series of letters across an unconventional love triangle. Based on the Italian film “Passione d’amore,” Sondheim gives us an actual experience of obsessive love so vivid that anyone who has had the experience of either being the chaser or the chased can find it unbearably overwhelming. Chicago director Gary Griffin, fresh from his Broadway success with “The Color Purple” (ironically, also a show about a series of letters), brings transparency to the work’s often polyphonic structure by using a second tier for the “offstage” letter writers and recipients, but also quite effectively for the eerie, offstage chorus when needed in some unexpected and powerful moments. Every detail of the show has been rethought in a manner than brings greater clarity and motivation to the proceedings, most notably Ana Gasteyer’s stunning performance as the homely and obsessive Fosca, by far the definitive interpretation of this role thus far. Rather than take a Broadway diva and put a mole or two on her, Gasteyer totally embodies her characterization not only via her appearance—here more plain than ugly—but this is a broken woman in every respect and every desperate syllable she utters and sings reflects that, and yet, there is something shining through underneath attractive enough to warrant interest. But her would-be lover Giorgio (Adam Brazier) is no boring hunk, as he often is, but a flesh and blood person of depth and substance, as is his lover Clara (Kathy Voytko). (As in the Broadway production, the two are naked in the opening scene). If you have any interest in compelling music drama, miss this production at your own peril. (Dennis Polkow)
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 East Grand, (312)595-5600. This production is now closed.
By Dennis Polkow
How did a white guy from Rockford end up directing the biggest all-black musical ever to hit Broadway? “It’s a question I get a lot,” admits a grinning Gary Griffin, relaxing in the upstairs library at Chicago Shakespeare Theater after an afternoon rehearsal for Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion,” which begins previewing October 2, “usually along with, ‘What is Oprah really like?’”
The irony is that Griffin’s involvement with “The Color Purple: The Musical,” which closes a nearly six-month Chicago run at the Cadillac Palace Theatre on September 30 before heading off to San Francisco, actually predates Oprah Winfrey’s by a couple of years. “It was in this very room that [producer] Scott Sanders met with me when I was here directing [Sondheim’s] ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ back in 2002. At that point, there were only a handful of songs and a different book writer, but there was an authenticity there that I really liked.”
Griffin admits that some of his colleagues are surprised to see him back home in Chicago after directing such a big show that is still running on Broadway and wonder why he hasn’t packed up and moved to the Big Apple. “I’m a Chicagoan,” says Griffin in a very matter of fact manner, “and while I do have a New York apartment for all of the work I do there, I still have the same place I had in Andersonville for the past fourteen years. This is still—and will always be—home. And for me, the reward is in what you do. I learned as a young director not to do anything in the theater for the money. Of course, you have to make a living, but the challenges are too great to do anything that you don’t love doing.”
Griffin has been criticized by some for bringing some New York talent to Chicago for “Passion,” when plenty of Chicago talent was on hand. “The irony is that I brought my musical director, for instance, from New York because I wanted him to see how a Chicago production is done,” Griffin says. “There is much more focus on the work here and much less of the pressure and gossip that surrounds everything you do in New York.”
Griffin got the theater bug by coming to Chicago from Rockford to see shows “as soon I could drive,” he recalls. Two memories particularly stand out for him: “My senior year in high school, which was 1978, I saw ‘A Chorus Line’ at the Shubert three times. It spoke to me so powerfully about theater and the struggles of the individual in the theater world. A show like that does what any great show does—it makes you feel less alone by dramatizing a particular struggle that is universal. And then, coming to Steppenwolf productions, particularly ‘Balm in Gilead,’ which knocked my socks off.”
Although Griffin did play a member of the Jets in a high school production of “West Side Story,” he admits that it was the backstage stuff that fascinated him more than appearing onstage himself, which motivated him to major in theater at Illinois State University. “I had heard that all of the Steppenwolf folks had attended ISU, so that was enough for me. I headed off with the intention of directing shows.”
Upon graduation, Griffin moved to Chicago and began directing “some really small-time stuff that nobody saw, just a few friends and family members” before he began directing shows for Pegasus Players and Apple Tree Theater in Highland Park. His real break came when late Drury Lane impresario Tony DeSantis hired him to be the artistic director of Drury Lane Oakbrook in 1993 and suddenly Griffin was in the position of directing several shows a year. “That was an amazing experience,” he says, “not only because I got to do a number of shows I had always wanted to do but never had, but also because I learned so much about how shows were structured and put together. And Tony was a theater producer in the old David Merrick mold, so I learned how to please a crowd and how to take care of an audience, which is an invaluable thing to know and is one of the main reasons that I get along well with commercial producers.”
And what is Griffin’s take on “Passion,” one of the least-performed shows of the Sondheim canon? “Sometimes with Sondheim,” he says, “it just takes time. It’s a great show, but it’s newer and we don’t know it as well. I fell in love with it doing a couple of numbers from it for last year’s ‘Sondheim in the Park’ in Millennium Park, enough to want to do it, and immediately thought that the space at Chicago Shakespeare is so ideal for it, because it not only reveals the intimacy of the work, but the work’s structure is more transparent because we are able to set up a simultaneously vertical instead of a horizontal stage.”
Griffin has chosen former “Saturday Night Live” comedienne and former “Wicked” star Ana Gasteyer to star as the mysterious Fosca, having worked with her on a couple of musical workshops in New York before she donned the green makeup here in Chicago for “Wicked.”
“She is a remarkable performer,” says Griffin, “who not only can sing up a storm, but she brings such depth to a text. It is amazing how someone who has a comic sensibility can discover hidden corners even in a ‘serious’ work that the rest of us would simply miss.”
“The Passion” runs at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 East Grand, (312)595-5600, through November 11.
