Theater

Photograph 51 – Court Theatre – February 10, 2019

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The title, Photograph 51, refers to Dr. Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray diffraction photograph of the B form of deoxyribonucleic acid that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix, referred to in the play as the secret to life.

Photograph 51 is not to be confused with Area 51, the top-secret military base in the middle of the Nevada desert that has been the subject of much speculation as to its possible contents, including spacecrafts of aliens who, some would suggest, actually are the secret to life on earth.

On the other hand, ever since I was taken on a research tour of pizza places in the early 1970s by one of the eventual founders of Rocky Rococo Pizza and Pasta, it has always been my understanding that olive oil is the secret to life, though there also is support for yogurt in that regard, and the nucleic acid drink available prior to the performance at the Court Theatre wasn’t too bad either.

As to the play, Chaon Cross, whom I have seen in the last few years as Ella in Life Sucks and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, once again gives a strong performance, this time as Dr. Franklin.

The set of Photograph 51 includes two not too subtle spiral staircases and a second level walkway between them that reminded me of the set of Jailhouse Rock, which reminded me that the name of another prison, Attica, sounds a lot like the name of the great 1997 science fiction movie Gattaca, whose title letters G, A, T, and C, stand for guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine, the four nucleobases of DNA, thereby bringing us back to where we started, except that I would be remiss not to also mention Fahrenheit 451 and Dick Butkus as other famous 51s. Now you know why I don’t get much sleep.

 

A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder – Porchlight Music Theater – February 2, 2019

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It seems to me that A Gentlemen’s Guide to Love & Murder could have been titled How to Succeed in Murder Without Really Trying. I easily could envision a young J. Pierrepont Finch (spoiler alert) rising to the top of the D’Ysquith family, to become the Ninth Earl of Highhurst, through cunning, good fortune, and the cool clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth.

As with last year’s Memphis, I preferred Porchlight’s production of A Gentleman’s Guide to the Broadway in Chicago version I saw a few years ago, due, in large part, I suspect, to the intimacy of the venue, which is, nevertheless large enough to provide the set designer the creative liberty to forge a functional and entertaining backdrop to the action.

As with Porchlight’s Gypsy, I was fortunate enough to see the first table reading of A Gentleman’s Guide, which, in this case, afforded me the opportunity to observe Matt Crowle working on the voices he would use for the nine different characters he portrays. And, while that was playful and interesting, it could not have prepared me for the way in which he distinctly inhabits all of them once he’s in costume and afforded the chance to add physicality to the roles. There are many famous death scenes in the theater. For my money, Crowle’s turn as Reverend Lord Ezekial D’Ysquith may be the most entertaining.

That said, I guess I need to see a production of The Complete Deaths (74 of them from the Bard of Avon’s works), which I missed at ChicagoShakespeare Theater in 2016. Hopefully, the play itself will rise from the ashes so that l’ll have another chance.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to be satisfied with a website I found chronicling 100 of the most memorable on screen movie deaths, led, coincidentally, by Alan Rickman, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who gained his greatest fame in America, without really trying, as Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Holiday Inn – Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre – December 23, 2018

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The real name of one of the ensemble members in Holiday Inn is Aaron Burr. Really. But nobody in the play gets shot. And while the depiction of the more famous Aaron Burr in Hamilton is interesting, this Burr’s tap dancing skills, along with those of his castmates, are more fun.

Marya Grandy goes so far as to combine the group’s tapping with moves from Stomp, as she dances with buckets on her feet during one of the numbers. And, in what seems to be becoming a trend, the dancers tapped while jumping rope during one song, akin to, though different from, the jump rope choreography used in Legally Blonde.

While the dancing is great, the cast’s skills go beyond that. Unlike the show Beautiful, where, I hate to break it to you, Jesse Mueller and her successors don’t actually play the piano (though faking it nicely while, as that show’s sound designer explains it, speakers in the piano pump out music supplied from the orchestra pit), Michael Mahler, in the Bing Crosby role in Holiday Inn, does play the piano on stage, and quite well. Seems that Mahler, also is a Jeff Award-winning composer (perhaps he’s related to Gustav).

And, while I have seen and enjoyed Mahler and his costar, Johanna McKenzie Miller, in other shows, I was, as always, relieved to also see one of the Moes, in this case Lorenzo Rush, Jr., who, in the last 15 months, I have heard in Little Shop of Horrors and seen in Five Guys Named Moe, Memphis, and They’re Playing Our Song.

Will Burton, who does a fine job as Ted Hanover, won’t make you forget Fred Astaire (who would?), and there’s no Thomas Jefferson or George Washington dancing with Burr in the ensemble, but I left the theater humming many of the (Irving Berlin) songs, which I didn’t do after Hamilton.

Santaland Diaries – Goodman Theater – December 18, 2018

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Santaland Diaries, David Sedaris’s 1992 essay about working as an elf at Macy’s during the Christmas season, is supposed to be a comedy. Perhaps it was in 1992, but not anymore. The Goodman Theater would be better off just shutting down for the holidays. Its 2016 production, in concert with Second City, of Twist Your Dickens, was unwatchable. Santaland Diaries isn’t that bad, but it’s boring and out of step with the times. Even its mystifyingly good reviews admit that.

The Chicago Reader review of the 2006 Stage 773 production of the Santaland Diaries said “some of the script’s pop-culture references are beginning to show their age” and gave the show a “somewhat recommended”. Yet, interestingly, twelve years later, the Reader gave the Goodman production a “highly recommended”, even while acknowledging that “a few lines in the script have unintentionally traded their comedic weight for dramatic over the years. One antiquated reference to mentally handicapped people, for instance, landed like the proverbial turd in an otherwise tasty punchbowl; it was 15 minutes before [Matt] Crowle regained the trust of the audience.”

Fifteen minutes, out of a 65-minute performance! How can that be a description of a highly recommended show? I don’t know Macy’s return policy, but perhaps this dinosaur can be relegated to Jurassic World. Jokes about cash registers really don’t register anymore. The best line in the show was Crowle’s put down of an unruly audience member.

None of this is meant as a knock on Crowle, soon to star in Porchlight Music Theater’s production of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (where he’ll play eight characters), and whom I’ve seen in other productions around town. He does a fine job. Most memorably for me, his Billie Holiday impression, which obviously transcends the written script, was terrific.  Maybe next year the Goodman should do a Holiday show instead of a holiday show.

The Play That Goes Wrong – Oriental Theater – December 11, 2018

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While the comparison to the play Noises Off is obvious, if it weren’t for all the farcical humor of The Play That Goes Wrong (The Play), one might think of Michael Crichton’s original Westworld, “the ultimate resort, where nothing can possibly go wrong, go wrong . . . .”, and yet everything does.

So, to paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as it might apply to the play, The Murder at Faversham Manor (The Murder) within The Play: How does thee go wrong? Let me count the ways.

Forget the occasional forgotten line, The Murder goes into full Brannon Braga, Star Trek; The Next Generation, Cause and Effect episode, time loop mode with the actors becoming increasingly irritated as they can’t find a way to stop repeating the same lines. If it weren’t so funny, I would have thought it was written into the show as filler.

And then there was the set, or what was left of it by the end of the show. The comic timing of The Play is not limited to the actors. So, while the actors in The Murder break the fourth wall, the walls in The Murder almost break the actors, creating the need for some deliciously funny stand-in work by the crew of The Murder. I would love a behind-the-scenes tour of The Play by its crew, not the dangerously inept crew of The Murder, to see how they manipulate everything.

Query, by the way, are the actors in The Play breaking the fourth wall when the actors in The Murder are speaking to their audience, which, of course, happens to be the same as The Play’s audience?

In the end, despite set deconstruction, doors banging into heads, and actors in The Murder engaging in foul play, the only real injuries are to the ribs of The Play’s audience members, who are bent over in laughter.

Q Brothers Christmas Carol – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – November 27, 2018

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I keep coming back for more of this hip-hop interpretation of the Dickens classic. But, after seeing it several years in a row, what could still surprise me? This time it was the brief interlude when JQ seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment and go into an improvised description of a dream he had. Scripted or not, it had not only the audience, but also one of his fellow cast members in hysterics.

Everyone knows the Dickens story, but it occurred to me that not everyone may have considered what the Q brothers and their Christmas Carol have in common with the character Q from Star Trek.

Patrick Stewart, who, as Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, had several encounters with Q, also for many years performed a one-man, award-winning show of A Christmas Carol, playing more than 30 characters. Coincidence? I think not.

Q, in Star Trek, is of unknown origin. The Q brothers are of known origin, the northern suburbs of Chicago. I know this because a couple years ago I met an usher at the show who was their high school drama teacher. She was very proud.

Q, in Star Trek, is an extra-dimensional being. The Q brothers are multidimensional, namely writing, singing, dancing, and acting.

Q, in Star Trek, possesses immeasurable power over time and space. The Q brothers, as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future in their Christmas Carol, possess power over time and space, constrained only by the music the live DJ spins and the 75-minute duration of the show.

Q, in Star Trek, used his powers to pass judgment on humanity.

The Q brothers use their powers in Christmas Carol to pass judgment on Scrooge and get him to have some humanity. Spoiler alert – it works.

The Book of Mormon – Oriental Theater – November 24, 2018

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There’ve been almost 300 tv episodes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s South Park, and I’ve never seen even one of them, though I understand that some kid named Kenny has had a rough go of it (having died 98 times in the series, 12 in the shorts, 14 in the video games, and twice in the movie).

But now I’ve seen Parker and Stone’s (and the great Robert Lopez’s – Avenue Q, Frozen) The Book of Mormon twice, and, not being a student of religion, everything I know about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I’ve learned from seeing the play. I’m assuming, of course, that everything in the show is accurate.

Interestingly, in terms of religion-related musicals, I’ve never seen Fiddler on the Roof or Jesus Christ Superstar, though I have seen Damn Yankees.

I got lucky with a main floor discounted ticket and even luckier that no one sat next to me on one side in an otherwise full theater. This did, however, lead to a moment of awkwardness when the woman two seats over, who had put her coat on the seat between us, reached over in the dark to try to get something out of her coat pocket, but instead wound up tickling my shoulder, which reminded me of a joke about a woman and a chicken sandwich in her purse on an overnight bus ride.

The stage also went dark when they blacked it out a couple times during the Turn It Off tap dance. I guess tapping in the dark isn’t that hard for a professional, though I know how hard it is for me to stand on one leg with my eyes closed, which, fortunately, I’m not called upon to do all that often, and never on stage.

And, despite the darkness of the humor, Jacob Ben-Shmuel could be seen stealing scenes as Elder Cunningham, while Kayla Pecchioni lit up the stage as Nabulungi.

Porchlight Revisits 1776 – Porchlight Music Theater – November 15, 2018

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Kevin Rosten Jr., as John Adams, had ongoing problems keeping his microphone on during the first half of the show, but his performance, and his cheek, glistened after someone offstage Scotch-taped the mic into place.

Several of the other men who signed the Declaration of Independence were depicted in the show by female actors. That casting enabled me to watch Heather Townsend, with whom I had the great fortune to act in a short video a few years ago (or rather she acted and I muddled), excellently bring to life John Dickinson, one of the other main characters in the play.

Similarly, Teressa Lagamba gave a rousing performance as Richard Henry Lee.

There also were women playing women in the show (though no men playing women). In particular, I’ll mention Lucy Godinez as Martha Jefferson, a part originally played on Broadway by a right-off-the-bus, 21-year-old from Texas, Betty Buckley, whom I also mentioned recently as the original Edwin Drood and in my blog about Hello Dolly, even though, I reiterate, she was a no show the night I saw that show, not that I’m upset about that.

I saw Godinez, along with Lagamba, in Legally Blonde, where Godinez was a wonderful, high energy member of the Greek chorus. And, as when I saw her perform at Porchlight’s Preview in the Park and Chicago Sings the MGM Musicals, Michelle Lauto, here as Abigail Adams, impressed with her beautiful voice.

Unfortunately, Joseph Foronda, a well-respected member of the acting community, did no justice to the role of Benjamin Franklin. Porchlight’s revisits shows are very short runs that don’t claim to be full-out productions, so I’m not bothered by an actor carrying a script, but Foronda’s eyes almost never left his, giving the impression that he was reading it for the first time, and making me wish that he was the one with mic problems.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood – St. Sebastian Players – November 9, 2018

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How ironic that the same week that I missed seeing Betty Buckley in Hello Dolly because she was sick, I saw The Mystery of Edwin Drood for the first time, given that Buckley was one of the stars of the original Broadway production in 1985, playing Drood, and, perhaps needless to say, I missed seeing her again, as she isn’t a member of the St. Sebastian Players.

Actually, only three of the 20 cast members of Drood are St. Sebastian Theater company members, including one whom I have seen before and who. as the program correctly suggests, has the “creepy parts cornered.”

The rest are all ringers, so why not Betty Buckley? That would have brought some heat to the drafty church basement theater.

That said, the show is unsophisticated fun and young Sarah Myers (new to Chicago), as Drood, showed me enough that I expect to see a lot more of her in productions around town.

But the real ringer is Darryl Maximilian Robinson, as the Chairman of the Music Hall Royale. It’s a huge part that demands not just talent, but also charm during his frequent interactions with the audience in a show that looks for a joke at every turn and has no respect for the fourth wall.

It didn’t surprise me to learn that Robinson is “best known for his original one-man show of Shakespeare and time-travel comedy” called A Bit of the Bard, which I find all the more significant now that it has been suggested that Stephen Hawking, in his final book, has allowed for the possibility of time travel, in contradiction to his earlier “chronology protection conjecture,” in which “the laws of physics do not allow time machines,” thus keeping “the world safe for historians.”

Of course, with time travel, I might have opted to see Buckley in Drood in 1985, and then not bothered to see this production or think about, or use, time travel, and then we’re right back to where we started.

 

Hello Dolly – Oriental Theater – November 6, 2018

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So excited to see Betty Buckley as Dolly. She had a cold on opening night, but the reviews of the show were glowing nonetheless. I waited two weeks to let her recover, which was perfect timing as I could then not be in front of a television watching election pundits drone on for hours about things that either were obvious, irrelevant, undecided, or wrong. I prefer to just see the results the next day.

But, in the immortal words of Robbie Burns, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” And so, upon arriving at the theater, I learned that Buckley would not be appearing, due to illness, replaced by her understudy Jessica Sheridan.

Based upon conversations around me, I wasn’t the only one initially disappointed, but Sheridan won us over with her singing, dancing, and acting. In particular, her performance during the courtroom dining scene brought howls of laughter from the audience, which led me to a website discussing what Carol Channing and Bette Midler were actually eating in that scene in Broadway productions.

The second best ovation may have been when the train between Yonkers and New York City rolled onto the stage. Just one of many impressive costume and set design elements of the show that presented a cornucopia of colors.

The dancing waiters also were a crowd pleaser, though I was struck not so much by their considerable terpsichorean skills, but rather by the grace of one waiter who elegantly reached down in mid-routine to grab something that had been dropped on the stage and toss it into the wings, without missing a beat in his choreographed movements.

All in all an enjoyable evening, capped off by listening to Buckley show off some of her skills in the hysterical Hymm to Her when I got home.