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.

RECOMMENDED

This superb, song-packed revue of the early works of Stephen Sondheim created in the mid-1970s in Britain and lovingly revived by the Theo Ubique Theater Company reveals that while his lyrics clearly extend the legacy of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, there has never been a single, discernable Sondheim compositional style. Indeed, as you listen to nearly half the score to both “Follies” and “Company” interspersed with various Sondheim early hits and rarities, you begin to realize what a jarring transition it is to hear songs that contain Sondheim lyrics to the music of other, more melodically gifted composers such as Jule Styne (“Gypsy”), Leonard Bernstein (“West Side Story”) and Richard Rodgers (“Do I Hear a Waltz?”) against the songs from shows in which Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music (the music is undeniably subservient to the lyrics). But Sondheimaphiles have always valued witty words over mediocre music, and there are plenty of both in this remarkably entertaining showcase, in which five spirited performers, an offstage narrator and singing pianist perform these songs as if their lives depend on it. The cast captures the “devil may care” sophisticated subtlety and cutting-edge irony of even the most familiar Sondheim numbers and the punchy counterpoint of the ensemble numbers—no small feat, as countless bad Sondheim performances frequently demonstrate. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It was fifty years ago that “West Side Story” brought to full maturity the style of musical theater that had been pioneered by Rodgers & Hammerstein in the early 1940s with such works as “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel,” a style that put as large an emphasis on dance as it did music, and insisted that musical numbers actually carry forth the action, not merely comment upon it. Choreographer Jerome Robbins had conceived of a contemporary updating of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” that would play out on New York’s Lower West Side against a Catholic/Jewish backdrop as far back as the late 1940s, but it was composer Leonard Bernstein who made the change to Puerto Ricans versus the children of European immigrants, having wanted to incorporate the Latin rhythms and tri-tone harmonies of the bebop revolution a la Dizzy Gillespie with the slang language and speech patterns of the movement (“cool,” “Daddio”) used by the whites, and mambo rhythms and spicy Latin syncopations became trademarks of the Hispanics in an era when “world music” was a phrase only uttered by ethnomusicologists. The amazing thing about “West Side Story” is not only how swinging and fresh it remains musically, but with the current illegal immigration debate, it may well be more socially relevant today than when it was premiered. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Being uncomfortable in a theater can be an indication of the effectiveness of a work when the material itself is uncomfortable. But uncomfortable does not begin to due justice to the feeling you have sitting in the intimate-becomes-claustrophobic space of the Theatre Building Chicago during Porchlight Music Theatre’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s rarely produced “Assassins” when several notorious presidential sharpshooters start toting their all-too-real looking and sounding guns in your face and sing solo and in chorus about the motivations for their bizarre behavior in wanting to kill a president. Director Michael Weber has taken great care that assassins that we would recognize—John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley and “Squeaky” Fromme—look and sound the parts, and are presented as lost souls who are the dark underbelly of the American dream. They, like the rest of us, want to be noticed, loved and happy, but when they are unable to achieve this or anything else in their lives, they make a downturn with destiny, a narcissistic nod to notoriety. It is a somber story that few of us may want to think about, yet is chillingly compelling precisely because their actions are part of the fabric of our national identity, albeit a dark corner of that identity indeed. (Dennis Polkow)

Fri-Sat/8pm, Sun/2:30pm. Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, (773)327-5252. $25-$32. Through Mar 11.  This production is now closed.

RECOMMENDED

This superb, song-packed revue of the early works of Stephen Sondheim created in the mid-seventies in Britain and lovingly revived by the Theo Ubique Theater Company reveals that while his lyrics clearly extend the legacy of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II, there has never been a single, discernable Sondheim compositional style. Indeed, as you listen to nearly half the score to both “Follies” and “Company” interspersed with various Sondheim early hits and rarities, you begin to realize what a jarring transition it is to hear songs that contain Sondheim lyrics to the music of other, more melodically gifted composers such as Jule Styne (“Gypsy”), Leonard Bernstein (“West Side Story”) and Richard Rodgers (“Do I Hear a Waltz?”) alongside songs from shows that Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music to and which the music is undeniably subservient to the lyrics as a result. But Sondheim fans have always valued witty words over mediocre music, and there are plenty of both in this remarkably entertaining showcase in which five spirited performers, an offstage narrator and singing pianist perform these songs as if their lives depend on it. The cast captures the “devil may care” sophisticated subtlety and cutting-edge irony of even the most familiar Sondheim numbers and the punchy counterpoint of the ensemble numbers—no small feat, as countless bad Sondheim performances frequently demonstrate. For those who savor Sondheim, this revue is the best area production since Ravinia’s “Sondheim at 75” series. For those seeking to understand what all of the fuss is about, this is the perfect primer. (Dennis Polkow)

Fri-Sat/8pm, Sun/7pm. No Exit Café, 6970 N. Glenwood, (773)743-3355. $22, $40 with dinner one hour prior to show. Through Dec. 10.

A fractured fairytale show too sophisticated for children and too juvenile for adults, “Into the Woods” is one Stephen Sondheim musical that has always had an audience identity crisis—which may explain why performances of it are relatively rare. This Marriott Theatre revival will certainly attract Sondheimaphiles on that fact alone, but those seeking the tongue and cheek irony that can make the show click will be disappointed in that most of the fairytale characters are playing it straight in this production, missing the satire of the lyrics and James Lapine’s comedy with overdone seriousness and tentative timing. Sondheim’s deceptively simple ditty-filled score is also not well served here—its punchy counterpoint is often blurred with key characters delivering unconvincing performances due to timing miscues. (Dennis Polkow)

Wed 1pm & 8pm/Thu-Fri 8pm/Sat 5pm & 8:30pm/Sun; 1pm & 5pm. Marriott Theatre, 10 Marriott Drive, Lincolnshire, (847)634-0200. $45. Through Nov 19.

RECOMMENDED

It has become a cliché in music-theater circles to claim that the role of Mama Rose in “Gypsy” is the greatest Broadway score ever written for a female lead and indeed, in terms of demanding the most of both a top-flight actress and a first-class singer, the role is in a class by itself. That Patti LuPone, who came to prominence originating the completely sung Broadway role of “Evita” but whose acting was deemed too superficial to remain in “Sunset Boulevard,” has agreed to tackle a role for more dramatically demanding at a stage of her career when her pipes are not what they once were is a fascinating development, but the bets are high that LaPone would not take a risk like this if she wasn’t able to pull it off. But even if the performance is a bona fide train wreck, like last week’s pre-New York Ravinia tryout of Elaine Stritch’s new show, even that should be interesting. Thus, all theater-loving eyes and ears will be on Ravinia this weekend as LaPone attempts her first-ever Mama Rose in a staged production directed by Lonny Price and in the classy company of the Chicago Symphony—conducted by Paul Gemignani—playing the full orchestrations of this beloved Jule Styne score, which in case anyone forgot contains such iconic Broadway classics as “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Let Me Entertain You” with the last lyrics that a young Stephen Sondheim wrote for another composer.(Dennis Polkow)

“Gypsy” plays at Ravinia Festival, August 11-13 at 7:30pm, Lake-Cook and Green Bay Roads, Highland Park; (847)266-5100. 

New York may be the town most connected to Stephen Sondheim, but Chicago has a long association with him as well, so a weekend-long, free Lollapalooza-like celebration of the musical theater of Sondheim spotlighting Chicago performers that will take place throughout Millennium Park is not quite as out of left field as it may appear.  (Dennis Polkow)

Millennium Park, between Michigan and Columbus, and Randolph and Monroe, (312)742-1168. Free. Read the rest of this entry »