Theater

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.

Two Days in Court: A Double-Header of Classic One Acts – City Lit Theater – May 5, 2019

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Old lawyers don’t die, they just go to productions of one act plays dealing with trials. Just like small claims court, if you don’t like the first trial, it’s almost time for the second. I figured I could tolerate anything for 45 minutes, although I’ve never experienced waterboarding.

The Devil and Daniel Webster came first. Scratch carries a black box (which looks a lot like the ones I use to hide my cables) that contains a lost soul in the form of a moth that cries out for help, much in the way that David Hedison did in The Fly before he had his head crushed in a mechanical press.

The moth’s existence does not end well either, but, of course, Daniel Webster’s eloquent closing statement convinces a group of damned souls to find for the defendant Jabez Stone despite his written contract with Scratch, and save his soul, in perhaps the greatest example of jury nullification in literature.

The oral contract being contested in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial By Jury deals with a promise to marry, so, once again, a man’s soul is at stake.

There’s no dialogue in Trial by Jury, which caused the audience to be unsure about applauding after each song because the music kept going and the audience didn’t want to applaud over the start of the next song, which was always seconds away, or maybe they, like me, just didn’t want the show to run long.

It occurred to me that I’d never actually sat through a Gilbert & Sullivan show before, and likely never will again, the closest thing being the two times I’ve seen Hot Mikado. As with that show, perhaps if here they had jazzed up the songs and added some tap dancing, I would have ruled in favor of the production.

Bright Star – BoHo Theater – May 2, 2019

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It’s the same old story – (spoiler alert) boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, someone throws the baby off a train.

I didn’t know going in that that last key element of Bright Star was based on the true story of the Iron Mountain Baby (though the other 99% of the play isn’t). I just knew that Steve Martin wrote the book of the play and that there would be bluegrass music by him and Edie Brickell.

I’ve seen Martin’s plays The Underpants and Picasso at the Lapin Agile. I haven’t see his Meteor Shower (or a real one for that matter), but it’s enough just to know that one critic wrote: “Meteor Shower plunges into the absurd without establishing a philosophical grounding for the mania. It’s sitcom Ionesco crossed with a Saturday Night Live parody of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

Following that train of thought (pun intended), I’ve seen Orson Welles’s Shadow, which is a play by Austin Pendleton about Welles directing Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. And Pendleton played in the 1989 Broadway revival of Grand Hotel, which is coincidental to the fact that three of the actors in Bright Star, the scene-stealing Rachel Whyte, Jennifer Ledesma, and Jeff Pierpoint, were in the version of Grand Hotel I saw last year at Theater Wit.

And Pierpoint, who plays Billy in Bright Star, was once the understudy for the character J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying at the Marriott Lincolnshire Theater. Pierpoint, plays Pierrepont, a match made in theatrical heaven.

This was BoHo’s (Bohemian Theater Ensemble) first production at the Greenhouse Theater Center. I ate once at the BoHo (Bohemian House) restaurant in Chicago, and thankfully will never have to again, as it closed last year after four years of operation. Based on Bright Star, I have higher hopes for the theater company.

New Faces Sing Broadway Now – Arts Club of Chicago – April 30, 2019

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This was the fourth Porchlight Sings event I’ve gone to in the past year and they’ve all been great. Hosted by local favorite Lorenzo Rush, Jr., it featured an extremely talented group of ten young performers. Three of them, Chloe Nadon-Enriquez, Kaiman Neil, and Drew Tanabe, are in the current Porchlight production of A Chorus Line.

Nick Druzbanski was clearly a favorite of his fellow performers, bringing hoots and hollers from them even before he opened his mouth. I’m looking forward to seeing him in Drunk Shakespeare. And Cecelia Iole. in singing Phantom of the Opera, hit a note so high that it hasn’t been named yet.

But the highlight of the evening was the Broadway trivia game. Often the audience members selected to play have an impressive knowledge of Broadway. Not this time. The two contestants were right out of a Saturday Night Live skit. It would be kind to say they were pathetic.

They were presented with three questions dealing with Disney productions, none of which either of them came close to answering correctly, either standing there dumbfounded or making unimaginably ridiculous guesses, which I would have written down if I weren’t laughing so hard.

Though everyone else somehow restrained themselves from shouting out the answers, even as the level of ineptitude reached epic proportions, it was clear that the organizers had managed to draw the names of the two least knowledgable people in the room to participate in the game.

And keep in mind, this wasn’t Jay Leno picking people off the street. This was a room full of people who theoretically were big theater fans, even though that wasn’t really necessary. One question asked the name of the play based on a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Shouldn’t that be enough? The lead character was raised by apes. They still had no idea.

Poseidon! An Upside Down Musical – The Edge Theater – April 28, 2019

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This was my first time at The Edge Theater. I like it. It has about 100 seats, very comfortable, with lots of leg room, and cup holders to help you take advantage of the bar, where, appropriately enough for a show about a disaster that disrupts a New Year’s Eve party on a cruise ship, you can preorder drinks for the second act before the show starts.

The show had men in drag playing the parts made famous by Shelley Winters and Carol Lynley in the movie, an ensemble doing double duty in the play as people watching the movie from the front row of the theater and secondary characters acting in the movie, and actors ad-libbing beautifully when a prop misbehaved.

Unfortunately, however, I had trouble hearing the lyrics in several songs, which I confirmed was not about me upon speaking with another attendee after the show. A small theater shouldn’t have this problem.

I also must object to the serious, heartfelt soliloquy in the middle of the first act that discussed the author’s childhood and why the movie was important to him. I didn’t care. I was there to have fun, and, for most of the show, had a smile on my face. But the speech was too long, too slow, too boring, and more appropriate for the playbill.

That said, slow can be good. I was delighted by the slow motion ballet of furniture being moved and people falling this way and that all over the stage to simulate the capsizing of the ship, although it made me wonder whether, if The Windy City Playhouse, with its affinity for untraditional staging, had been putting on this production, would it have left the stage as is and found a way to turn the audience upside down.

Icons Gala – Porchlight Music Theater – Ritz Carlton – March 31, 2019

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Porchlight Music Theater’s Icons Gala fundraising event included silent and live auctions and a tribute to director and choreographer Jerome Robbins.

While the tribute included some dancing, I doubt that it was original Robbins choreography. There was much more singing, with performances from Robbins shows such as Gypsy, On The Town, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.

The inclusion of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at an event featuring an auction was particularly appropriate. The first recorded auctions were in Greece around 500 B.C., though oddly, the word auction derives from the Latin word that translates as an increase.

The main items sold at early Greek auctions were daughters, sold to be brides. Courtesans also were sold, as in A Funny Thing Happened, which was set around 200 B.C., although, fortunately for me, Porchlight produced a 2015 version that I was around to attend, as I was unavailable in 200 B.C.

Porchlight offered a variety of items for purchase at the gala, 59 in the silent auction, and 6 in the live auction, but, fortunately, unlike ancient Greece, none of them involved the transfer of people, although there were a few that involved people agreeing to subjugate themselves by preparing dinner for the winning bidders. In the hope that someone, anyone really, would prepare a dinner for me, I bid vigorously on one such item, but, alas, came up short.

Bill Kurtis and Donna La Pietra served as emcees for the introductions of the live auction items, or rather she did as he stood by her side looking legendary, before they turned things over to a real auctioneer, who put on a show of his own, compete with flashing lights, but no courtesans.

Noises Off (Nothing On) – Windy City Playhouse – March 17, 2019

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I think the cast of Noises Off did a really good job (as opposed to the squabbling, irresponsible cast of Nothing On, the play within the play), but how would I know? The breakneck pace of Noises Off, which tells the story of an incompetent acting company, allows for the possibility of the cast doing almost anything they want, going off script and improvising, and having it seem like it’s part of the play.

Once again, as it did with Southern Gothic, the Windy City Playhouse does things a little differently. In traditional productions of Noises Off, the Nothing On stage is turned around in the second act to reveal the backstage deterioration of the show. But Windy City leaves the stage as is and takes the audience around back for the second act, which is still the first act of Nothing On, except on a different night, then returning the audience to their original seats to watch the third act, still the first act of Nothing On, except on yet another night, as that show falls deeper into theatrical hell.

Some of the audience gets to climb a ladder to sit on a second level landing during the second act, with their feet hanging over the backstage. I’m not sure whether this is considered prime seating, but it is voluntary. Maybe next time.

Special mention to Rochelle Therrien, as Brooke Ashton, as Vicki, or really to Vicki, who never drops a line in Nothing On no matter what mayhem is going on around her to cause the line to no longer make any sense whatsoever, which would be confusing to the Nothing On audience, but is priceless to the Noises Off audience.

And to Ryan McBride, as Garry Jejune, as Roger Tramplemain, for the best live pratfall I’ve ever seen at the theater, giving no regard for life or limb as he careened down a staircase. He could make a lot of money doing that as part of an insurance fraud scheme.

The Woman in Black – Royal George Theater – February 14, 2019

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In a 1969 appearance on The Tonight Show, George Gobel famously quipped to Johnny Carson, “did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?” The reviews of The Woman in Black, a show that has been running in London for 30 years, have unanimously been highly laudatory, until this one. I’m the brown shoes.

The Playbill notes say that the “early reviews in 1989 paid tribute to [the adapter and director’s] ability to take the audience on a journey whose transport is its own imagination.” During most of the play, I imagined being somewhere else.

The show is supposed to be scary, but my boredom was interrupted only momentarily by some of the sound effects. And though the fog machine at times made it hard to see, there was nothing to see in the first place, including the imaginary dog Spider, the use of which more properly belonged in an introductory improv or mime class. And Spider didn’t even get a credit in the program.

One favorable review admits that “[t]he show is slow to get started.” I’m still waiting. Another admits that “[t]he play [has a] less-than-watertight plot” and a “contrived storyline”. In what universe does that justify a highly recommended?

Yet a third review states that there are three reasons to see the show, one of which is so that you don’t have to go to London to see it.  I can think of other reasons not to go to London, like the food and the weather.  That review also suggests seeing the show because “it has brought light to the long-darkened stage of the Royal George Theatre.” I like the theater, but the play actually brought blackouts and the aforementioned fog, very little light.

If fog is my incentive, I would prefer seeing The Hound of the Baskervilles, which includes a dog that isn’t invisible.