Theater

Clyde’s – Goodman Theatre – October 1, 2022

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I didn’t think to count, but, according to the program, there were 21 sandwiches in this play, set in the kitchen of a truck stop eatery.

The last play I saw with this much food on stage was Sweeney Todd. That time the food wasn’t actually what it was alleged to be in the show (I hope).

Similarly, I doubt that all the ingredients suggested in Clyde’s were as stated, but, this time, I suspect, for convenience and budgetary sakes, not to avoid criminal prosecution.

But that doesn’t mean that the Goodman is cutting corners, as evidenced by the quote in the program from the props supervisor, who had to decide things like, “how many pickles do I need.”

If she messes up and there are too many leftovers, do they take it out of her pay? And I wonder how much food they went through in rehearsals. Did the actors ask to redo scenes so that they could eat more?

Speaking of the cast, their fine performances were highlighted by the fact that no one said their lines with their mouth full, which was particularly important in a performance without captioning.

Porchlight Music Theatre ICONS Gala – Ritz-Carlton – September 23, 2022

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I have now been to the last four Porchlight ICONS Galas, which have provided an interesting progression. The first one was a Sunday brunch that honored Jerome Robbins. He was not present to accept the award, having been dead for 20 years.

In 2020, because of the pandemic, the event became a three-day online affair, and included a pre-recorded interview with honoree Joel Grey, who, I’m happy to say, is still with us.

Last year, with life starting to open up, we were able to honor Chita Rivera in person on a Wednesday night.

This year, the event worked its way up to a Friday night, and not only was honoree Donna McKechnie in attendance, she also sang for her supper (a song from her Tony award-winning role as Cassie in A Chorus Line).

It was a wonderful evening, which means I only have two complaints.

Please don’t pass around exploding appetizers before dinner. Ten minutes in the bathroom trying to clean up my shirt, after biting into a pastry filled with goat cheese, wasn’t in my original plan.

And, if the hotel can go to the trouble of offering three different entree choices, how about also giving us dessert choices.

After all, because of my connection with Porchlight, I was given a Golden Ticket (really) for the event, just as if I were a kid in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, not Willy Wonka and the Vanilla Thingy on My Plate Gala.

The Devil Wears Prada – The Nederlander Theatre – August 9, 2022

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The show started about 15 minutes late. Given the heretofore mixed reviews (which I still haven’t read), I assumed last-second changes were being made to the script for this pre-Broadway run.

The opening set showed a New York street with a crosswalk in the foreground that made me wonder whether the Beatles were about to walk across the stage, Paul barefooted. Alas, no. Maybe after rewrites.

But the set that will linger in my mind was the Eiffel Tower, which rose spectacularly from the ground right before my eyes.

The opening scene of the second act, with finely dressed members of high society walking around, some with parasols, made me think of the Ascot Gavotte from My Fair Lady.

If it seems like the script didn’t have my full attention, I’ll mention that I probably was the only one there, including the actors and the writers, who got the joke when Andy threw her phone away because she no longer wanted to sell (cell?) her soul.

And, besides, because it’s still a work in progress, there’s no list of scenes or musical numbers in the playbill to aid my memory (and, surprisingly, I didn’t receive a press kit). But I know there was a song and dance about being in your twenties I liked a lot, and could remember if I still were.

Though I enjoyed it, the show is mostly about the costumes, the budget for which is probably somewhere around the gross national product of the Netherlands.

So, I clearly am not the target audience. There were a lot of crowd-pleasing fashion references about which I was gratefully clueless.

The whole cast was, of course, first rate, but I wanted to see more of Javier Munoz, who plays Nigel, the juicy role that Stanley Tucci had for dinner in the movie.

It Came From Outer Space – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – July 24, 2022

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This world premiere musical, based on the 1953 movie of the same name, which, in turn, was based on a film treatment by Ray Bradbury (and not on a William Shakespeare play), will probably never play Broadway, but I would not at all be surprised if it turned into a long-running Off-Broadway sensation, where audience members come dressed as aliens.

Of course, the musical Little Shop of Horrors, also based on a low budget science fiction movie, started off Off-Off-Broadway, then went Off-Broadway for five years, before eventually making it to Broadway and becoming a staple of theaters everywhere.

This show was written by the same two people, Joe Kinosian and Kellen Blair, who won the 2011 Jeff Award for writing the musical Murder for Two, which I loved. As is necessary to fully exploit the delightful silliness of the show, the cast played it straight, although I imagine that there were numerous breakdowns in rehearsals.

In particular I would like to mention Jaye Ladymore, whom I never had seen on stage before (unlike the other players), but who caught my attention last year on the ill-fated tv series 4400. Today I often found myself looking to see her movements and facial reactions, even when the focus of the action was elsewhere, like in outer space.

My Fair Lady – Broadway in Chicago – Cadillac Palace Theatre – July 2, 2022

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As noted in my last blog, I didn’t go to the show last night. But I changed my mind and went today. Sue me.

I’ve seen the movie so many times that it was very hard to disassociate the play from the film while at the theater. Nevertheless, as with the movie, I loved it, and there were some specifics worth mentioning.

First, the terrific voices. The entire cast was a listening pleasure, although I’ll admit that some of the lyrics early in the show were hard to understand due to the Cockney accents and I was thankful that I was already so familiar with them.

Second, the use of the sets, that is the way in which they were moved around and the actors moved in concert with them. For me, it was beautiful choreography.

The show, as in the movie, doesn’t have a lot of dancing, a waltz here, a gavotte there. Despite the fact that Eliza could have danced all night, she doesn’t. It isn’t like, for example, the current Broadway production of The Music Man, which has added tap dancing, because why wouldn’t you when you have Sutton Foster. The only noticeable addition to me was the drag line helping to send Alfred P. Doolittle off to get married in the morning. That was some party.

Everyone knows the music is great, so no point in lingering, other to say that, with all due respect to the great Cole Porter, my all time favorite rhyming lyric, which I sat in the audience anticipating, continues to be the pairing of Budapest and ruder pest in the song You Did It. Alan Jay Lerner really did it!

My Fair Lady – Broadway in Chicago – Cadillac Palace Theatre

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I thought that for a change of pace I would write about something I didn’t do. This won’t become a habit because, after all, I spend a lot more time not doing things than doing them, and would run out of time not to do things if I had to write about not doing them all the time.

So, first, with hard work and a little bit of luck, I had to find the right thing not to do. I opted not to go see the Broadway in Chicago production of My Fair Lady tonight. It wasn’t an easy decision. I love the movie – who doesn’t. I’ve never seen the play. The woman playing Eliza is receiving rave reviews. But . . .

The Chicago critics are somewhat split about some other aspects of the production. And it’s two hours fifty minutes long. No reclining seats at the Cadillac Palace.

A couple of the reviews I scanned focused on issues with the second act. So, I thought, as long as there were good seats available, at half price, and I know how the play ends, why not just go for the first act. Wouldn’t that be loverly?

But inertia is a cruel mistress. I’ve got two e-books currently on loan from the library, a movie I want to rent, and a reclining chair at home, so, even though the Cadillac is not that far from the street where I live, I figured my time might be better spent writing about not going. After all, I’ve grown accustomed to this pace.

Chicago Sings Stephen Sondheim – Porchlight Music Theatre, at the Museum of Contemporary Art – May 23, 2022

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Back when you were still allowed to talk about Woody Allen, people were fond of saying that they preferred his early movies, when he was funny, before Stardust Memories, though there has been good stuff after that, if not of the same madcap variety as say, Bananas.

What does this have to do with Sondheim. Well, I liked his early work better, and, dare I say it, in particular when someone else was writing the music – West Side Story and Gypsy.

But Chicago Sings was about Sondheim, so no Bernstein or Styne tunes. And, because those of us who support the theater are supposed to be aficionados, we were “treated” to a number of songs that the average Joe (not to be confused with last season’s 13-episode TV show I liked but that has not been renewed – again I’m on the wrong side) might not have picked from his other shows.

As for the performances, I will call out Laura Savage (as I have done several times before), who lights up the stage, and Mark David Kaplan, whose Pretty Little Picture as Pseudolus made me laugh (which was permitted in early Sondheim shows).

But enough about substance. The food was good. The registration line not so much. And, thankfully, no one fell down the winding staircase on their way back down to the auditorium for the show after drinking at the reception.

Spring Awakening – Porchlight Music Theatre – April 28, 2022

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This was my second opening of the week. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first day of the new Whole Foods near me the day before.

The performances at both were fine, but, even though it’s not a classic, I prefer the song from the Whole Foods commercial, Every Beat Of My Heart, by the Du-Ettes, to anything I heard in Spring Awakening, even Totally F**ked, which mostly stood out for the impressive one-handed cartwheel one of the actors did during the “dance break.”

Spring Awakening won the 2007 Tony for Best Musical, beating out Curtains, Grey Gardens, and Mary Poppins. For my money, I would have given the award that year to the not-even-nominated Legally Blonde, which, I guess, wasn’t deep enough, but sure was a lot more entertaining.

So I had to find things other than the play’s hit-me-over-the-head messages to think about while waiting for the final curtain.

The intellectual Melchior made me yearn for Michael Fitzsimmons, the biker loner character who spouted poetry in Peggy Sue Got Married.

Melchior’s obsession with Faust reminded me that I still remember, from high school, the first eight lines, in German, of Goethe’s Prolog im Himmel, which I repeated over and over in my mind to help pass the time.

I also thought about Franz Liebkind, whose play, when put in the right hands, turned out to be a lot more fun.

And, finally, I wished, if I were going to see a musical based on a 19th century German children’s story, that it be an adaptation of the Katzenjammer Kids.

Now and Then – Oil Lamp Theater – April 17, 2022

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First, this play is not Now and Then, The Musical, and more accurately probably should be named Then and Now, though, admittedly, that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well, and Now and Then more accurately describes how often it’s produced.

The first time I attended a show at the Oil Lamp Theater, in early 2020, I saw a play with eight characters, seven of whom weren’t actually there. This time there were four characters, two of whom could only have been present if someone found a way to bend the laws of physics.

Back then, in prehistoric times, the theater had a doorman and a BYO policy. Those halcyon days are gone, but, more importantly, the free chocolate chip cookies remain a feature.

The play was solid, evidenced by the fact that I managed to stay awake despite the complete lack of ventilation, a problem I overcame by holding my breath (sort of automatic with a mask on anyway) throughout the first act and then stepping outside for some fresh air at intermission.

And, though the theater only seats 60 people, the one bathroom only accommodates one person, so my breath wasn’t the only thing I held in during the second act.

 

Moulin Rouge! The Musical – James M. Nederlander Theatre – April 7, 2022

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I’ve been to the actual Moulin Rouge, or at least to the sidewalk right in front of it. I will always have fonder memories of that moment than my time spent shivering in the Nederlander Theatre (their ventilation system definitely works), while trying to recognize all 70 of the show’s songs, credited to 161 writers, each of whom receives a royalty payment proportional to how long their song is in the show and based on a cut of the revenue. Anything to pass the time.

As my mind wandered, I also wondered how many different colors were represented in the amazing array of costumes, and wish I had thought to count them. There are currently 120 Crayola crayon colors. More colors, even, than songs in the show, in case anyone asks you.

The other thing I did a lot of was stare at Libby Lloyd, playing the part of Nini, whose dance moves, for my money, made her the star of the show, or at least the most visible star, as the musical arrangements and the orchestra’s ability to seamlessly flow from one fraction of a song to the next, were noteworthy (ergo this note).