Storefront Rebellion

Latino Theatre Fest: Culture Clash

Last night Monica Lopez celebrated her 29th birthday on the Goodman Theatre's main stage. The terrific performer, one of the eight we spotlighted in Time Out Chicago's actors issue a few months ago, is appearing with the Bay Area performance trio Culture Clash in their show Culture Clash in AmeriCCa, part of the Goodman's biannual Latino Theatre Festival.

Lopez makes her bow in the evening's second half, "Chavez Ravine," a "radio play" history of how a poor, Latino area of Los Angeles became the site of Dodgers Stadium. It's edifying, if unpolished, but it's the first act that's the more compelling. Culture Clash's Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza convincingly and sympathetically portray everyone from a Tijuana gringo to a San Francisco transwoman. The Chicagoland references they've inserted don't always hit their marks, but still: Though ethnically conscious and socially liberal, it's not nearly as cloyingly politically correct as a lot of things I've seen at the Goodman. Maybe Culture Clash is preaching to the choir, but that is, as they say, how you get them to sing. And at the end of the evening Friday, Montoya, Salinas and Siguenza led the audience in singing "Happy Birthday" to Lopez.

AmeriCCa continues through Sunday; the Latino Theatre Fest concludes August 24th.

Monday night roundup

A few of the things that have caught my eye lately:

• Chris Jones really, really wants more Broadway in Chicago–sized theaters downtown. Perhaps we could import some from Philadelphia, which has more big theaters than it can use.
• In the Times, Charles Isherwood laments the lack of large-scale Shakespeare in New York, and cops to jealousy of Chicago Shakespeare and DC's Shakespeare Theatre Company.
• Elsewhere in the Times, Ish also laments the (mostly) shameful history of Broadway musicals on screen.
• Also: Mary-Louise Parker? In Hedda Gabler? Adapted by Chris Shinn? Huh.
• At Decider, the A/V Club's new Chicago-centric site, playwright Laura Jacqmin questions why the Trib and Sun-Times keep reviewing Steppenwolf's First Look workshop series. For the record: Chris Jones and Hedy Weiss on this year's offerings. See also: Deanna Isaacs's Reader column on the topic of reviewing First Look last summer, and since Laura brings it up, I'll link to my two brief posts at Gapers Block two years ago about the kerfuffle over Hedy reviewing the Theatre Building's STAGES fest.
• Tonight I heard composer Andrew Lippa play two songs he's written for the forthcoming Addams Family musical. Lippa was the guest of honor at Monday Nights New Voices, the cabaret showcase that's been imported from New York by young musical lovers David Tomczak and Allen Sledge. Lippa's Addams collaborators Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice—the book writers behind Jersey Boys and the Goodman's upcoming Turn of the Century—were in attendance, as were producer Stuart Oken and Sweet Smell of Success lyricist Craig Carnelia. (Judging by the blatant digicamming in the peanut gallery, those two new songs should be showing up on YouTube any second now.)
• This double-your-pleasure business is the "gift" that keeps on giving. Over the weekend, Eclipse Theatre Company announced its upcoming season, to include John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. That'll be just months after Signal Ensemble's November production of the same play. Read my story on this licensing stuff from last week's TOC.

And while we're back at TOC, it's Monday, which means new reviews. Mine are of Theatre Seven's Election Day (a prime player in the licensing story) and Open Eye's Trust; we've also got Route 66's On an Average Day (also featured in the double vision article) and the American Musical Theatre Project's Dangerous Beauty. Enjoy.

Licentious licensing

This week's TOC Theater opener is brought to you by Microsoft Excel for Mac.

As I mentioned on the TOC blog nearly a year ago, a big chunk of my workweek is spent maintaining our master calendar of productions, processing the press releases that come in from companies all over town and entering them into the Excel spreadsheet that is, in large part, the engine that runs the magazine's theater section—we use it for everything from maintaining listings to scheduling reviews to generating story ideas. For this week, the Master List (as we affectionately refer to it in the office) suggested the story in a more literal sense. Every time I start entering a play title and author into a new row on the spreadsheet, Excel's Autofill feature tries to guess what I'm typing. More and more over the last several months, it's been exactly right—because the play was already on the calendar in a production by another company.

All told, there were six instances in the coming season of duplicate plays (it would have been seven if The Gift Theatre hadn't swapped out their previously announced production of Glengarry Glen Ross, which would have followed Redtwist's current mounting, for David Rabe's Streamers). In two cases, companies who had been the first to announce their productions as Chicago premieres—Theatre Seven with Josh Tobiesson's Election Day, and BackStage with John Kolvenbach's On an Average Day—were scooped by another company.

Multiple productions of Shakespeare's more popular plays are unsurprising, but two iterations of Peter Barnes's Red Noses? Overlapping renditions of Pinter's Old Times? This isn't a new problem—both Deanna Isaacs in the Reader and Kerry Reid in Performink wrote about the conflicting "premieres" of Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade in the spring of ’07—but I decided to see if I could get to the bottom of this problem. And I do find it to be a problem: If a theater company can't announce a show for its season, particularly one it's hoping to be a Chicago premiere, without a guarantee that another company won't steal (or at least borrow some of) its thunder, that's a major headache for artistic directors and a potential disservice to audiences.

Happily, execs from licensing houses Dramatists Play Service and Samuel French agreed to interviews with me. I couldn't get hard answers from any of them, as both companies claim to make decisions on production rights and exclusivity (outside of New York or L.A. at least) largely on a case-by-case basis. Contrary to popular wisdom among the theater community, even Equity theaters aren't necessarily protected, as Route 66 (the new, Stef Tovar-led Equity company that beat BackStage to the Kolvenbach play with its currently running production) and Remy Bumppo (whose Old Times will overlap with City Lit's production) demonstrate.

And the multiple-productions issue only scratches the surface of licensing issues in Chicago. Earlier this week, after TOC had gone to press, Strawdog announced it would be replacing its planned production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons with Curt Columbus's translation of The Cherry Orchard. The reason? As Strawdog's Nic Dimond told me today, it's because this fall's Broadway revival of All My Sons might—might—put out a tour, so Strawdog was denied the rights.

Read the print story here, and my TOC blog post about All My Sons here. And even if you disagree with my conclusions, let me know what you think.

Elsewhere: Further advancing my own preference for more process transparency among theaters, audiences and critics, the Tribune's Chris Jones, the Reader's Tony Adler and Kerry Reid, who writes for both publications, sat down for a really interesting podcast interview with Talk Theatre's Anne Nicholson Weber. Check it out here.

CTDB/Performink Season Survey

If you're affiliated with a theater company (and you know who you are), please make sure that your company is completing the Chicago Theater Database/Performink season survey. Not only will the information from the survey be used to compile Performink's annual Season Preview issue, it'll also be the first major test of the CTDB.

Nick Keenan, Dan Granata and a number of volunteers and consultants have been putting in Herculean efforts in the creation of what will be a very useful tool for the entire theater community, and the more data that can be mined in this initial effort, the better the database will be in the long run.

Nearly every known theater company in town has received an email invitation to participate, but emails sometimes get lost, and this is Chicago, where there are new theater companies every day. If you belong to one, check with your company and make sure your info gets counted. The survey is here.

Summer slowdown

As I lamented to some fellow Chicago theater bloggers at last night's Signal premiere (seriously, it was Blogtown USA in the basement of the Chopin, which Rob and I agreed seemed at times to be the only place we see plays lately), it. Is. JULY. And aside from anticipation of the fall season revving up, there's just not much going on to talk about.

Upon further analysis, of course, that's simply not true. Sure, I pulled next week's theater listings for the magazine on Monday and they're easily the slimmest in my year-long memory, but there seems to be more that's worthy of discussion than there was in last July's Letts-aside ennui. After all, I posted eight new reviews to the TOC Theater page today (plus four I didn't mention last week, further down the page). Assuming you're not glued to Mad Men or standing in line for your sixth viewing of The Dark Knight, there's theater to be seen.

Only one of this week's reviews is mine, and it's Laura Jacqmin's Pluto Was a Planet at the Around the Coyote Gallery, which I quite enjoyed. All the intellectualizing in my review aside, it's well played by four actors I'd never seen before. Last week I liked a lot about WNEP's Metaluna, and I continue to recommend MTP's Queer Tale and the Factory's Ren Faire, both of which close this weekend. Dropping all pretense of critical objectivity, I'd also love for you to see Ruby Wilder and Gutenberg! The Musical!, both of which involve multiple friends of mine but which I swear are worth seeing regardless (and they each have two more weekends left).

What do you recommend as worth seeing right now?

[title of review]

The reviews that came out Friday for the Broadway opening of [title of show], taken in aggregate (see Broadway Stars for a roundup), are kind of fascinating.

For those who aren't familiar, [title of show] is an ouroboros-like meta-musical about its own creation. Authors Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen wrote a musical about their attempt at writing a musical for entry in the 2004 New York Musical Theatre Festival, which subsequently debuted at the 2004 New York Musical Theatre Festival with Bell and Bowen and their friends Susan Blackwell (once upon a time half of NYC's downtown mainstays the New Wondertwins, with now-Chicagoan Rebecca Finnegan) and Heidi Blickenstaff, playing characters named Hunter Bell, Jeff Bowen, Susan Blackwell and Heidi Blickenstaff. It went on to a successful Off-Broadway run in 2006, before an unlikely opening on Broadway this week, cast (and character names) intact. The show's progress has been documented in an Internet series called The [title of show] show. Does your brain hurt yet? (Full disclosure #1: I haven't seen [title of show] in any of its incarnations, so I'm going on what I've read and heard.)

Friday's Broadway reviews are split nearly evenly among love-its and hate-its—as amNewYork (amNewYork? Really?) predicted. The New York Times, the Sun, the AP and TheaterMania are among the love-its; the New York Post, Bloomberg, Newsday and the Wall Street Journal are among the hate-its.

As a New York friend pointed out to me Friday, many of [tos]'s pans called it narcissistic or too small for Broadway, and/or pointed unfavorably to the Broadway-level ticket price as something unseemly for a small-cast, small-set, piano-only show. Some seemed downright offended that such an inconsequential show was playing in a Broadway house. Such quibbles never came up in reviews of the show's Off-Broadway run, according to my friend. (Did the critics complain about this stuff when Elaine Stritch's one-woman-and-a-pianist solo show played the Great White Way six years ago, I tried to remember?)

I couldn't help but wonder about the similarities between [tos]'s Broadway reception and that of the recent Chicago premiere of Gutenberg! The Musical!, which shares with [tos] a goofy, less-than-reverential take on musical theater. (Full disclosure #2: The New Yorker who's producing Gutenberg's Chicago debut is a friend of mine.) I loved Gutenberg, as did my twentysomething guest at the opening, and my colleague Christopher Piatt dug it as well; meanwhile, some self-styled Chicago critics suggested outright that it was a show for younger audiences. (Check out Gutenberg's Theatre in Chicago entry for a roundup of its reviews.)

Is the love of the [tos] and Gutenberg style—call it the "process satire," maybe—a generational thing? [title of show] has amassed a definite cult following among younger theatergoers, and, as noted by at least one New York theater blogger, [tos] can count among its haters some of the oldest guard of critics. (Full disclosure #3: The one-time Off-Broadway show The Big Bang has a superficial similarity to Gutenberg, in that they're both framed as backers' auditions, and I fucking despised Big Bang when it premiered here in a Philadelphia transfer two years ago, but Big Bang's "humor" was more dated Catskills than backstage insider.)

In my interview with Gutenberg's creators a few weeks back, I touched on the current generation's acceptance of cult audiences and insiderisms, from Waiting for Guffman to 30 Rock. Are [title of show] and Gutenberg part of that tradition? And if so, how large are they allowed to get? What would Charles Isherwood, Clive Barnes and John Simon make of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind—where all the playwrights are purportedly playing themselves—if they saw it at the Neo-Futurariam? Would it be different if TMLMTBGB were on Broadway? And if so, why?

All in the timing

In my positive review of the Factory Theater's Ren Faire! A Fistful of Ducats in last week's issue of TOC, I said this:

Among the many things first-time playwright [Matt] Engle gets right is one that the Factory rarely does: He keeps it short. At a trim 90 minutes, Ren Faire! seems under tighter control than the company’s beer-fueled, often bloated antics can be…

In the comments for the online version of the review, one "Sir Lord Baltimore" calls me out, saying, "95% of all of the Factory's shows are UNDER 90 minutes...just to keep it real..."

Now of the 11 shows the Factory has opened since TOC launched three and a half years ago, Ren Faire! is the sixth that I've reviewed, and at the time I was writing about it two weeks ago it certainly felt shorter than many of the rest. But since TOC lists running times for reviewed shows, I was able to go back and fact-check myself, and Sir Lord Baltimore has got me. Of those six shows, only one has come in above an hour and a half—at a hefty 1:40.

I don't know why Ren Faire! seemed tighter to me than some of those other Factory shows. I generally dig the Factory aesthetic, but even in other positive reviews I've noted that the shows felt overstuffed. Could be this is the first one that seemed to be exactly the length it needed to be. But I'll cop to being wrong on the facts.

Go see Ren Faire!, playing through August 2nd. It's great stuff. And while I've got the Factory's attention, let's consider this the beginning of my subversive campaign to see Toast of the Town remounted. (Engle includes a very subtle callback to that 2005 play in the current one.)

At TOC today, four new reviews—strangely enough all of which are playing on the same half-mile stretch of Broadway.

Smoke ’em if you got ’em

The more thought I've given to this smoking ban thing, the more I think it could be a real problem. I spoke about it this afternoon with aldermen Brendan Reilly (42nd ward), who introduced an amendment this morning to provide waivers for onstage smoking, and Ed Smith (28th), one of the biggest champions of the smoking ban. Check out the TOC Blog for the full report.

Where there's (no) smoke…

If you want to get people's attention, take away the things they really value. Like foie gras. Or their ability to watch other people smoke.

Seriously, 96 comments! I wonder how many of those commenters actually go to theater. Even Jersey Boys.

I agree with Chris's assessment that there needs to be some middle ground, whether it's allowing for herbal cigs or what. And I can't stand those asshole audience members who start noisily hacking at the sight of even a prop cigarette; whoever complained about Jersey Boys was not being harmed. Nor am I down with those who whine that it's all for the children—that seeing Fake Frankie Valli smoking will make the kids start smoking. Um, the Four Seasons as depicted in Jersey Boys also commit crimes, develop crippling gambling habits, cheat on spouses, and hang out with mobsters, but I don't hear anyone worrying that those habits will rub off on the kids too. (I imagine these are the same people who'd insist that even the bad guys can't smoke in the movies.)

But the practical problem with the "artistic exception" is one of scale. An audience member at the Bank of America Theatre isn't undergoing any real harm from the actor smoking 200 feet away from them on stage. But I certainly don't want an actor smoking when I'm sitting two feet away from them in a small, enclosed space like the Side Project or in the Bucket at Live Bait—and I've definitely seen some shows in small spaces since the smoking ban went into effect that included cigarettes for no reason other than defiance.

So if we interpret the ban as it's intended, we can't allow smoking in storefront shows? You can light up on stage, but only in a proscenium house? Only at matinees? Chris is right that we can't just pretend no one in the world ever smoked. There are legitimate artistic reasons for having characters smoke cigarettes (or cigars, pipes, joints, bongs, and hookahs, for that matter). The question now is, how do you accomplish it?

Dang-Blasted premieres

According to this brief item in Monday's New York Times, Sarah Kane's Blasted "will make its American debut at SoHo Rep as the first show in that theater’s 2008-9 season, the artistic director Sarah Benson has announced."

It immediately occurred to me that such a statement might come as a surprise to Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, which mounted Blasted in January 2007 (with Helen Sadler and Guy Van Swearingen, right).

And in fact, the most cursory research (i.e. the first page of results from a Google search for "Sarah Kane Blasted") returns evidence of a production by this California theater in 2004.

What gives, SoHo Rep? Or is this a Times blunder?

UPDATE: So it appears that Blasted has been produced in Chicago in 2007 and in both Dallas and LA in 2004, but the actual American premiere was likely by Seattle's A Theater Under the Influence in February, 2004 (this Seattle Times review refers to it as such). Blasted also just made its San Francisco debut last month (albeit in a British production).

Matt Freeman and the commenters at his blog (thanks for the link!) suggest variously that SoHo might have the "professional" (which to most licensing agents is a synonym for Equity) debut, that a production must be reviewed to be considered the premiere, and that terminology like "premiere" is simply contractual.

I can't speak for the productions in other cities, but A Red Orchid is an Equity company and their production last year was definitely reviewed (you'll notice I linked to one above). Isaac's theory, that it's a contractual thing, seems highly illogical and kind of shady—and therefore thoroughly plausible. If that's the case, Blasted has been seen in at least five cities around the country before making its "American debut." Still hoping to get this figured out for good.

UPDATE 2: Just spoke to someone at SoHo Rep's press agent's office, who said their release only calls it the New York premiere, and suggested it's a Times mistake. The press release regurgitators at Playbill make no mention of debut status. As much fun as I'm having being indignant, I suspect it's a combination of a mistake on the part of whatever intern created this page on SoHo's site, and poor fact-checking at the Times.

UPDATE 3: I'm not sure commenters here are allowed to use HTML tags (TypePad recently revamped things in ways I have yet to understand), so I should provide a link to Marisa's post that Bilal references below. Oh! Wait! As of 11pm central time Monday night, the NYT has amended a correction. SoHo Rep's production will be the New York premiere, not the American premiere. Guess that settles that.