RECOMMENDED

Visual jokes are the smartest aspect of this stylish adaptation of Sartre’s existential classic about three malefactors trapped in a tiny room in hell together for all of eternity—the origin of the famous quote “hell is other people.” In this production, the scariest aspect of hell is its interior designers: the set, an inclined, cramped, shocking pink Schiaparelli-esque nightmare with a giant nude statue and ugly powder-blue furniture (with one comfortable chair the characters fight over) is a perfectly awful place to spend the hereafter. Director Sean Graney handles the story adeptly, and if anything with almost too much vitality; the exquisite claustrophobia that marks the beginning of the production gets dispelled by madcap chaos by the end. As the characters begin to admit why they’re in hell and to work their torture on one another, Graney has them pacing like caged animals, pasting torn-out pages of ”Being and Nothingness” on a wall with toothpaste, switching clothes and seducing one another crassly as they destroy the space around them. The action makes the show imminently watchable but results in a frenetic energy that seems less suited to somber Sartre than to farce. Ultimately, it’s a smart, immensely entertaining but psychologically superficial treatment. “I can’t go on without making people suffer,” one character declares; I wish the Hypocrites would let the audience suffer just a little bit of the torture Sartre’s characters go through. (Monica Westin)

The Hypocrites‘ No Exit” plays at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport, (800)982-2787, through July 11.

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 »

Photo: John W. Sisson, Jr.

It’s got a crackerjack creative team behind it, and yet something about the Hypocrites’ “Cabaret” never quite clicks.

It’s certainly not the material; those elements may very well render it impossible to have a bad production of this show. For starters, there’s Joe Masteroff’s lean-but-loaded book that continues to be politically relevant. (Indeed, well-meaning citizens minding their own business and dismissing their country’s political extremists as little more than an annoying bunch of fools: German attitudes towards Nazis in the early 1930s, or that of Americans’ for Tea Party “patriots” in the 2010s?)  Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb’s superb score is packed with melodically rich and toe-tapping-good tunes. And then there’s the structure of the piece itself (the brainchild of legendary American musical theater master Harold Prince), a seamless union of traditional musical numbers that propel the plot and advance characterizations, and those that exist solely to provide ironic commentaries on them, an innovation that years later would be developed and exploited to marvelous use in such other landmark musicals as “Company” and “A Chorus Line.”

The problem here is that the production is as scatterbrained as it is unsubtle. Director Matt Hawkins’ staging never misses an opportunity to highlight a line of sexually suggestive dialogue or double-entendre lyrics to the point of reducing the material’s seediness to something synthetic and slick. Choreographer Marissa Moritz’s work only adds to an overkill of decadence that quickly peters out. 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 »

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.