Theater

The Ballad of Lefty and Crabbe – The Understudy – July 6, 2019

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I’d never before been to the Understudy (50 seats behind a storefront door that’s easy to miss) or seen an Underscore Theatre Company production, which, unbeknownst to me, has been putting on musicals since established in 2010.

As is my wont, I offered the ticket checker/concession person a bit of unsolicited advice about the company’s website, which she said she would pass on, as she wasn’t anybody, just there for the day. At intermission, after seeing her introduce the play to the audience, I returned to the counter and congenially accused her of lying to me, whereupon she (Laura Stratford, I later determined) shyly admitted that she was one of the founders of the company, but had recently stepped down from her position as Artistic Director to focus more on her writing.

Lefty and Crabbe are a vaudeville team that seems to be inspired by, among others, Laurel and Hardy. After they go to Hollywood, Lefty makes a career as a “fat guy falling down,” a specialty if ever there was one. Fortunately, for his health, the actor playing Lefty isn’t called upon to demonstrate that skill for the play. His character doesn’t even fall in love.

The last time I saw a play featuring a vaudeville theme was Thaddeus and Slocum at the Lookingglass Theater in 2016 when the show had to be delayed for twenty minutes in the middle of the performance while one of the actors was whisked away in an ambulance and someone was picked at random from the audience to replace him – I’m kidding about that last part.

Having now seen yet another group of previously unknown to me talented performers, I want to single out Mike Ott as the fast-talking agent, only because his patter seemed well-suited for the role of Harold Hill in The Music Man, which will be my next post.

Six – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – June 29, 2019

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“I’m Henry the eighth I am, Henry the eighth I am I am, I got married to the widow next door, She’s been married seven times before, And everyone was a Henry.” Turns out that’s not the real story about England’s King Henry VIII.

I’ve never seen the musical Nine, which won the 1982 Tony for best musical, but I bet it isn’t 50% better than Six, the part herstory lesson, part rock concert, part dance party, part comedic musical retelling of the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII, which I’m guessing will make its way to Broadway, with awards in its future.

All but one of the very talented performers were new to me, the exception being Abby Mueller, who was Carole King in Beautiful last time I saw her. Now she’s Jane Seymour, not the English actress (who has been married four times in her own right), but rather Henry’s third wife in the chain of “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived, but just for you tonight, we’re divorced, beheaded, live.”

Don’t worry about the list’s suggestion of violent deaths. No one actually loses their head on stage, though a majority of the audience lost their minds, whooping and hollering in reaction to the creative, illuminating, high-energy songs, which, as I learned from reading the playbill, were “queenspired” by a dozen pop stars, ranging from Adele to Beyonce to Rihanna (but, thankfully, not Herman’s Hermits).

My only regret upon leaving the theater was that Henry didn’t have more wives to entertain and educate the audience. I don’t know what the authors have in mind for their next project, but Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands (eight marriages counting Richard Burton twice).

Improvised Shakespeare Chicago – The iO Theater – June 28, 2019

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There appeared to be many repeat attendees at the performance. When the cast asked the audience for suggestions for a title for that night’s play, they were ready with a host of responses clearly thought out ahead of time. Otherwise how would you explain an immediate shout out of the chosen title – The Gift of the Gobbler? One doesn’t come up with that out of thin air in a split second.

So, given that the premise of the performance is not taking a named Shakespearean work and riffing off of it, which I would have known had I read that part of the promotion that said a “fully improvised play in Elizabethan style using the language and themes of William Shakespeare”, what makes this show Improvised Shakespeare? Nothing. That’s just to draw you in, which I’m glad it did.

So what made the product Shakespearean? Well, they used the word proffer a lot even though there weren’t any lawyers or courtroom scenes in the show.

There was a woman playing a man and men playing women and none of them were named Yentl or Tootsie.

There was British royalty, scheming, and a lot of rhyming, but no one named Hamilton.

Enough people died that it suggested either Shakespeare, George R.R. Martin, or Quentin Tarantino, but there wasn’t any nudity, so not Martin, and there weren’t any profanities or racial slurs, so not Tarantino.

Though many of the characters died on stage, none of the actors did, relying on their perseverance, skills and tricks of the trade (both short and long form improvisation “need a mechanism in place to relieve the audience of the excruciating pain of a scene that is not working”) to entertain and move the story forward.

As is often said, dying is easy, comedy is hard.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying – Music Theater Works – Cahn Auditorium – June 15, 2019

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Without conscious effort on my part, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is the third (out of nine) Pulitzer Prize for Drama winning musical I’ve seen in the last eight months. This doesn’t rise to the level of seeing a baseball game in every major league stadium in one season, but it’s all I’ve got.

The Music Theater Works pre-show talk discussed all nine winners, but, as for this production, notably, Ken Singleton as J. Pierrepont Finch was terrific (though nobody could ever top Robert Morse, who took the part from Broadway to the movies without getting replaced by Vanessa Redgrave or Audrey Hepburn, or having his voice dubbed by Marnie Nixon), and the recorded voice of the book was done by . . . wait, wait, don’t tell me, oh right, Peter Sagal, a role previously performed for Broadway revivals by Walter Cronkite and Anderson Cooper.

Playwright Abe Burrows was one of the recipients of the award for How to Succeed in 1962, which is interesting because his Guys and Dolls was originally selected as the winner in 1951, but, rumor has it, because of his troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the trustees of Columbia University vetoed the award (and none was given that year). They must have been concerned that the difficulty in finding a location for the Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game was meant as propaganda to symbolize the predicted fall of capitalism.

As with the crap game, the lure of easy money finds its way into How to Succeed, which famously features a treasure hunt as a marketing ploy. In that spirit, if you can name the other eight Pulitzer winning musicals, six of which I’ve seen, without resorting to the internet, you win a year’s free subscription to this free blog (restrictions may apply).

Life on Paper – Jackalope Theatre – June 3, 2019

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As any theater goer knows, “Ueber die Anzahl der Primzahlen unter einer gegebenen Grösse (usual English translation: “On the Number of Primes Less Than a Given Magnitude”) is a seminal 9-page paper by Bernhard Riemann published in the November 1859 edition of the Monatsberichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin.”

While I didn’t go to Life on Paper to learn more about the famous (to some) Riemann hypothesis that all nontrivial zeros of the analytical continuation of the Riemann zeta function have a real part of 1/2, I wasn’t scared off by it and a part of me was curious to see how a discussion of it might be worked seamlessly into the dialogue.

And, while I enjoyed listening to a brief exchange about prime numbers and infinity, those of you whose eyes glaze over at the mere mention of a mathematics problem will be relieved to know that the play is not about a series of intricate equations on a blackboard any more than the play Proof is, but rather is a discussion about life choices and a character study of two people thrown together by fate.

Fate, alas, was not on the side of an understudy who had the misfortunate of setting into motion, during a scene change, a series of events that caused a lamp to break on stage. But, given the infinite number of possible outcomes that might have ensued, I’m happy to say that she and everyone else recovered beautifully from the mishap.

I actually found enjoyable, and not distracting, this one-act play’s numerous scene changes in the dark, as they were accompanied by excellent musical selections piped in through the theater’s sound system, though I wish I had paid closer attention as to how the lyrics may have complemented the script or illuminated the storyline.

The Mushroom Cure – Greenhouse Theater – June 2, 2019

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Adam Strauss’s one man show opens with a portrayal of him trying to decide between an iPod and an iriver (a South Korean MP3 player I never heard of before). His well-timed, articulate, and frenzied conversation with himself artfully sets the stage for the show’s comedic inspection of his obsessive compulsive disorder.

Because the show is in a theater, not a club, and is not billed as a standup routine, though it certainly has elements of one, it is sometimes difficult for the audience to know how it should react to Strauss’s abuse of the fourth wall. I found this troublesome only in the sense that there were moments when I felt like the audience didn’t give him the interaction he sought or appreciation he deserved, perhaps debating with themselves as to whether it was appropriate to respond.

Strauss has an engaging personality that makes it easy to sympathize, and frequently emphasize, with his story, for, although most of us probably have not spent 11 hours trying to cook up a foul-tasting psychedelic hallucinogen from mail-order cacti, who hasn’t double or triple-checked that they locked a door or berated themselves at times for indecisively failing to act.

For me, rejecting his offer to the audience to try the concoction he said was cactus juice, which he stirred up on stage, was not one of those times, as he gave no indication that there might be chocolate syrup available to add to it.

At the end of the show, Strauss asks that anyone in the audience who, after listening to him, thinks they have OCD, raise their hand six times, eliciting a nice laugh. But, as with trying the cactus juice, no one did. In the lobby afterward, however, I told him I had been tempted to raise my hand twice. I only told him once.

A Chorus Line – Porchlight Music Theatre – May 24, 2019

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Here’s a multiple-choice quiz. A triple threat is a football player skilled in running, passing, and kicking; a 2019 movie described on Rotten Tomatoes as an “adrenaline fueled and gritty action thriller”; or a performer who can act, sing, and dance.

Of course it’s all three, but the changes in football over the years have eliminated that triple threat and there’s no chance of me ever seeing a mixed martial arts movie. But the Porchlight MusicTheatre’s stage is filled with theatrical triple threats for its production of A Chorus Line, where the adrenaline is flowing and the dancers do a lot of kicking, albeit without a football, because, after all, they are part of a chorus line.

I was at a Porchlight reception two days earlier where I was told by a Board member that the show was sold out for the rest of the run. except for one seat on one night. I’m thrilled to say that that one seat turned out to be right in front of me, a cosmic apology for having placed the tall guy in front of me at West Side Story three nights earlier.

As a result, my biggest problem was deciding where to focus my attention throughout the show, given that there are often 16 people on stage. So I did the only thing that made sense. I spent a lot of time watching Taylor Lane, as Judy Turner, because she’s the granddaughter of a friend of mine.

She didn’t disappoint, and demonstrated even more acting skills after the show by pretending to be excited when I introduced myself and a couple friends to her, going so far as to request that we have a photograph taken with her to show her grandfather, though perhaps she’s really just a secret fan of my blog.

West Side Story – Lyric Opera of Chicago – May 21, 2019

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that the Lyric Opera’s production of West Side Story has been getting rave reviews. I won’t disagree, even though, with all that dancing, not a single tap is heard.

And, even though, according to the program, the lyrics Stephen Sondheim wrote for West Side Story (at age 25) are not among his favorite accomplishments. He has said “There aren’t any fantastic rhymes.” He has some knowledge in this area. He’s the one who rhymed “personable” with “coercin’ a bull” in You Could Drive a Person Crazy from Company.

In particular, Mikaela Bennett, as Maria, is tremendous. Her clear, crisp, booming voice fills the room. I think she received a deserved, long ovation, but I was sprinting, or at least my version of sprinting, for the exit as I didn’t want to be too late to fill out my evening by seeing the Art on theMart’s current nighttime spectacle, which I will call the River West Side Story.

Interestingly, a substantial number of people hurried up the aisles to the lobby at intermission, only to reverse direction after realizing that it wasn’t yet intermission, that the lights had dimmed to signal a scene change, and that there was, in fact, one song and one rather crucial moment left before the break.

Spoiler alert – I think Tony dies at the end of the show because Maria is crying uncontrollably and shouting out “Tony” over and over again as the lights go out, but the tall guy sitting in front of me blocked my view of that part of the stage, so Maria instead might have been lamenting the fact that The Music Man beat out West Side Story for the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1958. Tony, Tony, Tony!

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – Lookingglass Theater – May 17, 2019

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For those of you who may be wondering whether the Lookingglass production of Frankenstein answers the question of whether Dr. Victor Frankenstein or the creature he created is the true monster, the answer is neither. The monster is the Lookingglass adaptation of the Mary Shelley book.

The book contains a forward wherein Shelley discusses the first telling of the story at a gathering of friends, including Lord Byron and her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. But as the play’s director says in the playbill, the play doesn’t stop there – “I’m fascinated by the blur between Mary’s novel of creation, rejection, and destruction and her own life of love, loss, and abandonment.”

Blur is the right word. The play’s intertwining of the story of Shelley’s life with the plot of the book leaves one spending more time trying to catch the moments when the story is flipping than on the substance itself. At least the writer/director didn’t try to incorporate a third story line about his own life, at least as far as I could tell.

And at least we can always rely on Lookingglass to create fascinating design features . . . except this time. The intricacies attempted in this production demand that the actors spend half their time walking around the set pulling cords, straightening out see-through sheets of materials, and cleaning up the stage floor, pulling all the focus away from the words being spoken.

The actors also do a lot of walking around off the stage in an effort to create a sense of travel, time, and distance, but it just seemed like they were trying to get their steps in for their Fitbits, which, to be fair, I didn’t spot any of them wearing.

The woman two seats over from me fell asleep less than a half hour into the play. Enough said.

Miracle – Royal George Theatre – May 12, 2019

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I saw the Organic Theater Company’s original production of Bleacher Bums in 1977. This world premiere celebration of Cub fans is a much different animal. It’s a musical (promoted as 108 years in the making), there’s no gambling, and no one takes their shirt off in the bleachers, although one of the actors forgot to button up his shirt for one scene, creating quite the pink elephant in the room for an entire song.

Spoiler alert – the Cubs win the 2016 World Series. Diehard Cubs fans who want to relive that moment (that would be all of them) will love this multimedia production and would no matter what got slapped on the stage. But what about the rest of us?

Surprise! I liked it. I’d like it more if the ending had a twist, like Cleveland winning game seven. Maybe save that miracle (currently 71 years in the making) for the national touring company.

I liked the score, with the exception of one song, which I think could be fixed, not that anyone is asking me.  The script is pretty tight, although I spotted an error that can’t easily be fixed, but that shouldn’t be something that would prevent the run from being a hit. I liked the use of the visuals, although the amount of them is a little too much for those of us who would rather not be distracted from the live performances on stage, which are excellent.

Randomly singling out a couple of the actors, I need to see more of Allison Sill, whom I previously loved as Inga in Young Frankenstein at Drury Lane. And I’m looking forward to seeing Jonathan Butler-Duplessis, whose Jeff Award-winning performance in Parade I saw at the Writers Theater, in Goodman Theater’s production of The Music Man, as a warm up for me for the highly-anticipated Broadway revival of the same show next year starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster.