Theater

New Faces Sing Broadway 1956 – Porchlight Music Theater, at Arts Club of Chicago – October 30, 2019

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When I saw Angela Ingersoll (who made me a most happy fella as the fair lady hosting New Faces Sing Broadway 1956) as Judy Garland in Porchlight’s production of End of the Rainbow a few years ago, I thought she was great (she won the Jefferson Award for her performance) but I had no idea she was the energizer bunny in disguise, given that the Garland we see in that show is drug addicted and near death.

She didn’t wear a rabbit costume and bang a drum for Porchlight’s New Faces Halloween-adjacent show, but, her monster singing talent aside, Ingersoll’s enthusiasm, energy, and electricity made me think of When Harry Met Sally, as I definitely would like to have what she’s having, and need to add her to my growing list of theater obsessions.

As for the new faces themselves, Porchlight once again pulled off the trick of treating the audience to a frighteningly excellent array of talented artists, none of whom, this time, I had ever seen before. Thus, my impressions were fittingly written on a blank slate, as a couple of the performers will be appearing in an upcoming production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, put on by the Blank Theater Company, which is only a couple years old, and previously unknown to me, though I was at the comfortable, though fairly bare-bones space they inhabit at The Edge Theater for the Hell in a Handbag production of Poseidon: An Upside Down Musical.

As amazing as the never-ending parade of wonderful singers who grace these Porchlight programs is, there also is new blood to be found behind the scenes. This show marked the directorial debut of Brianna Borger, whom I saw perform in Southern Gothic.  Next up in the series, New Faces Sing Broadway Now and New Faces Sing Broadway 1987.

Sunset Boulevard – Porchlight Music Theatre- October 18, 2019

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You get a taste of Norma Desmond’s storied fictional career by seeing the various posters and pictures projected on the walls of the set during Porchlight’s Sunset Boulevard, but it occurred to me while watching Hollis Resnik inhabit the role of Desmond that she was seemingly born to play, that a collage of posters representing Resnik’s real 12 Jefferson Award-winning parts would be even more impressive.

Resnik’s tour de force performance of As If We Never Said Goodbye in the second act could be the impetus for award number 13. The other second act highlight worth mentioning is the bathing suit entrance of Billy Rude, as Joe Gillis, which evoked a bobby soxer reaction from a young lady in the balcony, causing Rude to ever so slightly, and amusingly, break character by giving an almost imperceptible wink to the audience.

Clearly, Mr. DeMille, Rude was ready for his close-up, which leads me to inform that the line made famous by Gloria Swanson in the original screen version came in at number seven on the American Film Institute’s 2005 list of 100 movie quotes. And her “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small” was number 24, which puts Desmond in a very select company of characters with multiple attributions, equaled by the iconic Dorothy Gale, Scarlett O’Hara, James Bond, Harry Callahan and the Terminator, and bested only by the immortal Rick Blaine.

As with other Porchlight productions, I left impressed with creative touches that enhanced the experience. In particular, although there isn’t a lot of dancing in the show, the choreographed movements of a couple of the group scenes have a silent era, controlled Keystone Kops feel that fits perfectly with Norma’s hunger for those past days of movie-making and stardom. She never says it, but she could have inspired the Terminator’s “I’ll be back.”

Upcoming Events

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Normally I don’t take up my extremely valuable time, which could be better spent working on my hip flexors, publishing information about upcoming events, but the website has been acting up lately, causing several problems, like no one receiving newly published posts.  So, after two days of chatting with my new best friends in two different tech departments in two different countries, I feel the need to test the system to see if it’s working properly again, and what better way than to annoy my subscribers with unnecessary, verbose emails.

So, without revealing too much information about my clandestine movements, here’s some things you might consider attending.

Arts in the Dark Parade at 6:00 pm on October 19 on State Street.  You can dress up like your favorite movie character or just watch from the sidelines and admire the total lack of shame of the participants.

Sunset Boulevard just opened at the Porchlight Music Theatre, featuring Chicago legend Hollis Resnik as Norma Desmond.   Having attended an invitational rehearsal, I can tell you that the cast is great and the music is wonderful, but I did catch Resnik smoking in the parking lot during a break, which calls for detention.

The Art Institute is opening its Andy Warhol exhibit for member previews this week, which makes me want to look for clues as to whether he was really an undercover agent spying on extraterrestrial aliens as depicted in Men in Black III.

The Chicago Humanities Festival presents dozens of programs the last week of October.  Just like your insurance company, the festival has been furtively raising prices the last few years, but, unlike your insurer, there’s no competition, so suck it up and treat yourself.

And though I receive no commission for my continuing promotion of her (but should I?), don’t miss Meghan Murphy in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.

 

 

 

 

 

Midsummer (A Play with Songs) – Greenhouse Theater Center – October 4, 2019

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Two self-destructive people, with nothing in common, and with no apparent redeeming qualities, meet in a bar, provide a few early hope-inducing laughs for the audience, sing a couple mildly amusing but forgettable songs, lament about life, meet a variety of uninteresting characters, and somehow survive to be miserable together for at least another day in a kind of weak Scottish relative of the Scorsese movie After Hours.

Midsummer received a lot of great reviews, which highlighted what a fun, exhilarating show it is. Huh? The best laugh line was provided by a Tickle Me Elmo toy, which was not one of the dozen or so characters portrayed by Chaon Cross and Patrick Mulvey, whose talents were the saving grace of the show, which went on for an hour forty minutes, seemed like two hours, and would have been better at an hour fifteen.

The most profound line of the night was offered, twice, like a lot of other lines in the show, by a parking lot machine, the unrealistic nature of which was brought home by the inability of the machine where I parked my car to operate without human intervention by a disembodied lot attendant.

Apparently other potential audience members were smart enough to look past the reviews, as the theater was practically empty. In that regard I felt sorry for the actors, particularly Cross, whom I have greatly enjoyed in recent sold-out productions of Life Sucks, Macbeth and Photograph 51.

As if the script weren’t enough of a burden, the actors also had to put up with the on-and-off stomping from the theater space above that would have distracted me enough to stop what I was doing, bang on the ceiling, and yell out “we’re trying to work here,” which, by the way, would have been the second best laugh of the evening.

Something Rotten – Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre – October 6, 2019

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Nothing is rotten in Marriott’s Something Rotten. While this experience wasn’t quite the same as when I was lucky enough to see Christian Borle in his Tony-award-winning performance as the show’s original Shakespeare, the Marriott production is great, and its Shakespeare, Adam Jacobs, who played Aladdin on Broadway, has the audience in the palm of his hand, just like he had the genie’s lamp.

The show is sort of Forbidden Broadway meets Mel Brooks, with some Puritans thrown in for good measure, and enough colorful costumes to outfit several Renaissance Halloween parties.

If you’ve never seen another musical and know nothing about Shakespeare’s works, you may miss dozens of references and wonder why everyone around you is laughing, but, if that’s the case, you shouldn’t be out in public anyway.

If you can’t enjoyably groan when Toby reveals himself to be Shakespeare in disguise by saying Toby or not Toby, that is the question, stay home.

The show-stopping song, A Musical, contains references to 20 other musicals that fly by so fast that you wish you had an annotation with you. Well, here are a couple, one provided by Theater Nerds, and the other by, of all places, the Wall Street Journal.

The show features one slightly off-center soothsayer; two playwriting brothers with writer’s block; triple threat performers who sing, dance, and cook(?); and an omelet, which, I can’t help myself, was an eggcelent addition.

The cast is uniformly outstanding, but I’ll single out Cassie Slater as Bea because it gives me an excuse for saying that I saw her perform at Steppenwolf in We Three: Loud Her. Fast Her. Funny Her. with Meghan Murphy, whom I never miss an opportunity for mentioning and whom I will be seeing soon as The Lady of the Lake in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.

The Recommendation – Windy City Playhouse – August 18, 2019

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As with past productions, the Windy City Playhouse’s current show provides a different kind of experience, this time moving the necessarily small audience between a dorm room, jail cell, poolside patio, restaurant, bar, and health club sauna, which, as far as I could tell, served no purpose other than to show off the actors’ pecs and the stage crew’s ability to quickly transform the space.

There’s a lot of yelling, which, in my opinion, often replaces more interesting subtlety, and which I find annoying enough in a normal theater space, but when you’re three feet from the actors, it makes me want to close my eyes and go to a happy place.

The actors do a fine job of ignoring audience members while moving among them, except on those occasions when interaction is intended, as when one of them took me by surprise by calling out my name and delivering to me a cold, awful tasting shot of coffee in the middle of a scene, the occasion of which I nonetheless intend to add to my stage resume as an uncredited role.

It’s a serious show, but I found the delivery of the message to be somewhat convoluted, with unnecessary details inserted for no apparent reason other than to fill time. In particular, I couldn’t help but cringe when a lawyer asked his client to sign something that bore no relation to the thread of the story and would be a clear violation of legal ethics rules. I later felt compelled to go to the playwright’s webpage and send him a message citing the rule he had his character breaking. I’m sure that will go over well.

I love the creativity of the Windy City Playhouse, but The Recommendation does not get mine.

Chicago Sings 25 Years of Porchlight – Museum of Contemporary Art – August 5, 2019

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The first Porchlight production I ever saw was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in the 2014-15 season. Portentous perhaps, as a funny thing happened to me on the way to their 25-year celebration – my “good” knee collapsed 5 days in advance.

But, on the hope that the pre-show hor d’oeuvres would be comforting, I decided not to let a little thing like another grade whatever sprained ligament deter me from attending, though I decided to forego the cocktails given how wobbly I already was on two bad knees and a single vintage 1968 wooden crutch that made me look like I was there to audition for the role of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.

There were luminaries in the audience and the performances were great, but the highlight of the evening for me was very slowly and carefully making it down and up the stairs to my seat and back twice without further injury, which leads me to my one complaint about the evening – NO DESSERT at intermission, even though it had been promised.

Among the performers, I’ll mention two Five Guys Named Moe alumni, Lorenzo Rush, Jr., and James Earl Jones II, who is back in town with the touring company of Come From Away; the wacky Bill Larkin, whose one-man show I recently wrote about; and triple threat Laura Savage, whom I’ve had the good fortune to see recently in Sweet Charity, Holiday Inn, A Chorus Line, and The Music Man.

The evening also included the presentation of the Guy Adkins Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Music Theater in Chicago to Gary Griffin. Having seen nine productions directed by Griffin, I can attest to his results, but listening to his choppy, rambling, somewhat incoherent acceptance speech (he assured us he was only drinking water), I wondered how he communicates with his actors. Perhaps, as in The Music Man, it’s the think system.

The Music Man – The Goodman Theatre – July 7, 2019

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I would rather see a Neil Simon play than one by Shakespeare, so it should come as no surprise that I smiled for two and a half hours while watching The Music Man (despite what I considered a rather drab performance by the leading man), just knowing, that at some point, the Wells Fargo Wagon would be coming down the street, to the roars of the audience, creating even more excitement than an Amazon delivery.

I didn’t find the play dated. To me, River City is like Brigadoon, a pastoral place, frozen in time, that seems uninviting if you’re a cynical New Yorker or an anvil salesman, like the ten-time Jeff-nominated, scene-stealing Matt Crowle, but, eventually, idyllic, if you’re Tommy Albright in Brigadoon, or Harold Hill, who realizes that there was nothing till there was Marian, and the beautiful singing voice of Monica West.

When Hill jumps off the train, it reminds me of the passenger, who definitely didn’t know the territory, in the Twilight Zone episode A Stop at Willoughby, a place around the bend, when he jumped into “sunlight and serenity.”

The Music Man features a wonderful group of townspeople that fittingly includes three of the actors I last saw auditioning for roles in Porchlight Music Theatre’s production of A Chorus Line in May. No solos for them this time, but Laura Savage and Adrienne Velasco-Storrs, along with Ayana Strutz (great name for a dancer), help light up the stage.

I don’t know if Meredith Wilson, through Professor Hill, introduced the “think method” of learning to play an instrument as a wink and a nod to the then incipient Suzuki method of instruction, but Rock Island and Ya Got Trouble are still my favorite rap songs.

Seventy-Six Trombones is the signature song of the show, but the best line is Hill’s concession that he always thinks there’s a band. With a nod to another show, that should be everyone’s new philosophy.

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).