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 »

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 »

Peter DeFaria and Randy Steinmeyer in "A Steady Rain" at Chicago Dramatists

Annoyance Theatre
Coed Prison Sluts: $64,000, 5,380 people

The Artistic Home
Peer Gynt: $19,044 box office, 1,200 people

Chicago Dramatists
A Steady Rain: $21,000 box office,1,500 people at CD, 10,000 at Royal George Theatre
Cadillac: $23,000 box office,1,600 people at CD, 1,500 at Theatre on the Lake

Collaboraction
The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, $150,000 box office, 6,500 people Read the rest of this entry »

The 2006/07 season brought the grand opening of the new Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, following more than $11 million in renovations

Annoyance Theatre (founded 1987)
“We don’t really have a regular operating budget—just plan as we go along.”
—Jennifer Estlin, President, Annoyance Theatre

The Artistic Home (founded 1998)
End of nineties: $62,000
End of zeroes: $164,500

Bailiwick Chicago (founded 2009)
End of nineties: N/A (Bailiwick Repertory is now defunct)
End of zeroes: $120,000 projected 2010

Chicago Dramatists (founded 1979)
End of nineties: $171,000
End of zeroes: $550,000

Collaboraction (founded 1996)
End of nineties: $50,000
End of zeroes: $500,000

Court Theatre (founded 1955)
End of nineties: $2.6 million
End of zeroes: $3.2 million 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: 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 from the MCA:

2009-10 MCA STAGE SEASON

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, announces the 2009-10 MCA Stage Season of contemporary theater, dance, music, and multimedia performances. Additional theater and music programs will be announced at a later date. All MCA performance tickets also include free museum admission for up to a week following the performance. Tickets are available mid-July at the MCA Stage Box Office, 312.397.4010 or www.mcachicago.org.

Nora Chipaumire; photo by Mkrtich Malkhasyan, from the film Nora by Alla Kovgan and David Hinton

Nora Chipaumire with Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks  Unlimited: lions will roar, swans will fly, angels will wrestle heaven, rains will break: gukurahundi
October 1, 3-4, 2009
As exiles from Zimbabwe, dancer/choreographer Nora Chipaumire and master musician and poet Thomas Mapfumo challenge the accepted African branding – war-torn, tribal, and exotic. Known as the “Lion of Zimbabwe,” Mapfumo created and made popular the Chimurenga style of Shona music from Zimbabwe that mixes African rhythms and instruments with politically charged lyrics, which landed him in a  Zimbabwean prison camp in 1979. Chipaumire, a contemporary dancer rooted in African traditions, fuses her powerful and raw movement with Mapfumo’s music and incendiary writing to examine the migrant experience of Africa and the art of Zimbabwe over the course of that country’s downward economic and political spiral. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Chic and deadly, where lavish style adds layers of significance to a sometimes hurried production. A beautifully garish garbage playground that comprises the set suggests the imminent decay of Oedipus’ kingdom, while costumes and props make subtle but smart reference to ancient Greek theater. To say that the show is somewhat superficial by nature isn’t a criticism; the Hypocrites seem to be suggesting the arbitrary and impossibly stark nature of identity and fate for Sophocles, as well as the literal wasteland that the play creates (so that Oedipus’ daughters who come to comfort him at the end of the play are portrayed by empty dresses). It’s both intellectually hip and a magnificent visual spectacle—scenes of Oedipus threatening a feather-crowned Theseus with a staple gun or Jocasta drinking bleach while singing a lounge song into a microphone inside an open port-a-potty do not fade for a very long time. Read the rest of this entry »