Storefront Rebellion

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.

Good Boys and false blurbs.

I still haven't had a truly irritating contextomy, though Steppenwolf's post-reviews ad campaign for Dead Man's Cell Phone, at right, is pretty amusing—instead of stringing together any two consecutive words from the show's reviews, the marketing team cherry-picked adjectives. From my review for Time Out: "Quirky." I probably don't have to tell you that, in context, "quirky" was not a compliment.

I bring it up because of Chris Jones's amusing new blog post at the Theater Loop. Chris cites a conversation at the Broadway rumor mill All That Chat about, as he puts it, "the most egregious misquotes of reviews in service of a show's promotion," in which his review of The Pirate Queen is cited—and as egregious misquotes go, it's a doozy.

Unfortunately Chris doesn't link directly to the chat thread, and my eyes glazed over before I could find it myself. But I did find something of interest that links back to Steppenwolf again. We've all heard by now that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa trimmed about 45 minutes and an intermission out of Good Boys and True between its world premiere at the ’wolf, which opened just before Christmas and played through February and which I quite liked, and its second production at Manhattan's Second Stage, which just closed. But despite the spies I sent to the New York production last weekend (Meg! Gigi! Where's my report?!) and some deductions from Isherwood's dismissive review, I hadn't figured out how the cuts affected the plot. But if this thread can be trusted (as much as any anonymous-ish chat thread can be, I suppose), Roberto's tweaks have changed quite a bit, and not, it sounds, for the better.

New reviews

All I'm saying is, if I could spend the next month going back and forth between Speech and Debate and As Told by the Vivian Girls, I'd be more than happy.

More, including my reviews of Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire and Tom Horan's Curious Dangerous, at the usual place.

Attend the tale. No, seriously.

Last Wednesday I hit up Broadway in Chicago's press opening of Sweeney Todd with Christopher and loved it. So it's with some confusion that I read the multiple comments on Chris Jones's review from people who absolutely hated it.

This was my first time seeing director John Doyle's scaled-down, actors-as-orchestra version—I failed to make it to New York for the 2005 Broadway production with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris—so it was a bit of a revelation. Though I wasn't completely enamored with David Hess's performance as Sweeney—as one friend who saw the show the same night told me at a party this weekend, she wasn't surprised to find his Playbill bio riddled with soap operas—I thought Judy Kaye was a delightful Mrs. Lovett, and the supporting cast (most of whom are actor-musicians who also appeared in the New York staging) was terrific.

My most recent experience with Sweeney was the Tim Burton film version with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, and while I enjoyed the movie, this iteration served mostly to remind me of how much I'd missed what was cut in the film. The flip side of that coin, of course, is that I found myself wondering while watching the show last week if I would get it if I weren't already so familiar with Sweeney Todd. While I may be a little surprised at the virulence of the Theater Loop commenters who wished they could leave mid-performance, they're not alone. I witnessed several patrons tossing their Playbills into the trash can at intermission and leaving, never to return.

I agree, for the most part, with both Chris Jones's review and with Christopher's. If you're a Sweeney fan already, it's worth seeing for Doyle's imaginative staging and the performances of Kaye and the actors playing Toby and the Beadle (I'm writing this from home and my press kit's at work, so I don't have their names at hand). If you don't already know the show, this might not be the right introduction.

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As for other shows I can recommend from the past week, Laura Eason's adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days at Lookingglass is really solid (read my review here), and Monday night I caught the regional premiere of Stephen Karam's Speech and Debate, which pretty much blew me away. I haven't laughed that hard and long at a new play in quite a while. Christopher's reviewing for TOC, but it won't show up for a week and this is a short run, so get your tickets now, I beg of you.

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Other new TOC reviews this week are of the Hypocrites' Our Town (see also my feature last week on director David Cromer), Strawdog's Old Town (they opened on the same night at the same time! Crazy!) and Hell in a Handbag's Die! Mommie, Die! (our first contribution from my fellow Northwest Arkansan Zac Thompson). Have at ‘em.

TOC: Chicago actors issue

Hey, you know the Time Out Chicago Theater cover package I've been hinting at for weeks?

It's here.

In this week's issue, Christopher Piatt and I profile eight of our favorite Chicago actors. Hop over to the TOC site (or better yet, pick up a hard copy to get the full effect of Michelle Nolan's fantastic photos) and read up on the lengths to which Lance Baker, Hollis Resnik, Nicole Wiesner, Michael Patrick Thornton, Trista Smith, Monica Lopez and Rich Cotovsky will go to do theater in Chicago.

Also, in light of the recent blogstorms over actors' pay and the Equity divide, we weigh in with a web-exclusive essay on the actors' union, the Steppenwolf model and non-profit showbiz. Feel free to weigh in with your own comments over there.

Now maybe I can get back to writing over here…

Almost famous

My coworker Andrew pointed out to me today that this blog and yours truly are mentioned in the new issue of Chicago magazine. A few months ago they did a cover story on the city's best websites in various categories, and invited readers to send in their picks to add to the list. For theater, Chicago had listed ChicagoPlays (aka the League's site) and HotTix. Readers' picks, in the May issue, are Theatre in Chicago, The Theater Loop and Storefront Rebellion. (Possibly more—Andrew was literally pointing it out, I didn't get to turn the page.) The new issue isn't on their site yet (they're famously slow at that), so pick up a copy to see the rest of the readers' choices. And thanks to whoever submitted me for inclusion, even though my first thought upon seeing it was, Great, just as I've had two 10-day posting lulls in a row.

Unfortunately now is not the time for substantial new content, as I've got a review to write for tomorrow morning ("and 250 words to go before I sleep"). But next week's issue of TOC will go a long way toward explaining why I've written so little here the past few weeks.

I will leave you with one thought that occurred to me while watching tonight's (re)opening of Fiorello!, TimeLine's remount of its 2006 hit production. (And why this was on my mind will also become clear next week.) The newly reopened Fiorello! is nearly indistinguishable from the version I saw two years ago: same director, same music director, same set, same staging, largely the same cast. In 2006, it was a non-Equity production, but as of this remount, TimeLine has adopted Equity contracts. The single Equity actor in this production is Rebecca Finnegan, recreating the role she played last time before she joined the union. I wonder if some of the more rabid commenters in the recent debates here, at the TOC Blog and The Theater Loop would consider this iteration inherently more professional?

(P.S. Chicago mag: to the question of cute or annoying, I'd have to go with annoying.)

Has it been that long?

Dianna called me out yesterday morning for going ten days without posting here. Mea culpa. I honestly hadn't realized it had been that long. If you knew the amount of writing I've been doing for TOC you might forgive me (though some of that won't appear in the magazine for a few weeks yet).

As for what is available now, I reviewed The Gift's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and Profiles' In a Dark Dark House in the current issue. I also wrote on the TOC blog this week about Victory Gardens' season announcement, which includes our latest dose of playwright Sarah Ruhl. My experience with Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone at today's Steppenwolf press opening hasn't gotten me any more excited about that—more on that in my review in next week's TOC.

For pure entertainment value, allow me to point you to this bit of brilliance on a friend-of-a-friend's LiveJournal: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as a Sonic commercial. And, scene.

Towards a Green Theatre*

Leaning my head back to "rest my eyes" Monday night on the long Blue Line trip to the Gift Theatre, I found myself looking up at one of the many ads promoting Chicago's valiant effort in this Saturday's Earth Hour, otherwise known as the "shut off the lights from 8pm–9pm" campaign. Thanks to primary sponsor Leo Burnett's world headquarters here, Chicago is the lead city in the U.S.; the ad agency recruited the Chicago cast of Blue Man Group to film a TV spot showing them shutting off power to the Briar Street Theatre.

It occurred to me that I haven't heard from any of the many theaters with productions running this weekend—including Blue Man Group—that they'd be cancelling performances (or even just pushing them back to 9pm to match the letter if not the spirit of the campaign).

Knowing nearly as well as every TD who's maxed out a storefront venue's capacity that theatrical lighting takes a lot of juice (as do other technical aspects of many productions), I did a quick search for info on greening our theaters. I remembered Patrick at backstagejobs.com recently mentioning the prospects of LED lighting, and through Patrick I found Mike Lawler's ecoTheater blog, which looks to be an invaluable resource for information on initiatives toward sustainable theater. Mike also links to the Green Theater Initiative, which seems to be mostly a placeholder at this point.

What can you tell me, theater makers? What are your companies doing to conserve energy? What more could they be doing? And in the shorter term, are any theaters out there participating in Earth Hour this week?

UPDATE: All three Broadway in Chicago theaters will darken their marquees for an hour Saturday night, kicked off by an Elphaba appearance outside the Oriental (though Wicked and Jersey Boys will still go on inside). Nice start. Who else?

*I had to break two AP Stylebook rules to make the Grotowski reference work. It buuuurrrrns.

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Elsewhere, my reviews of Bailiwick's A Man of No Importance and Theater Wit's Feydeau-si-Deau, along with six other new reviews, are posted at the TOC website.

Catch-up from the week

I'm supposed to be writing a review right now of Congo Square's The Talented Tenth; assuming I can get it cranked out, it'll be online at TOC by tomorrow evening. Since I'm still trying to sort through my thoughts about the show, I'm procrastinating by blogging here instead. (As a 7-year blogger, I can tell you that procrastination is a huge blogging motivator.)

I had a bit of a break this week, in that I only saw two plays. But a good deal of interesting news came up in the course of the week. Let's hit it bullet-point style:

Back in the saddle again

I got back to Chicago late Monday night, and I'm immediately making up for my four days away from the city by hitting the theater six days in a row. The things I do for you guys.

Last night I attended the press opening (or re-opening, rather) of A Steady Rain, Keith Huff's hit Chicago cop drama that ran at Chicago Dramatists last fall. It's now back in an open commercial run at the Royal George. I missed seeing it the first time around (one of my many 2007 regrets, but try as we might, we can't see everything), so I was really excited to catch it now. But then…well, maybe all the glowing reviews created unrealistic expectations in me, but I was underwhelmed. You can read my thoughts on the show at the TOC blog.

While you're over there, check out the TOC website's new design, which went live tonight. (Here's a direct link to the Theater section, highlighting our interview with Ambassador of Awesome Lois Smith.) And keep checking back, as we've received major season announcements this week from the Court, Goodman and Steppenwolf, and we'll probably be responding to those in the coming week.

One last note, referring back to my post last week about the cancellation of Assassins at Arkansas Tech. On Sunday, while I was in Arkansas, one of the local papers ran a fairly in-depth piece about the brouhaha; the skinny is that, in the face of pressure from across the country, including from Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman themselves, Ark Tech will let the show go on for four performances next weekend.