Storefront Rebellion

The Only Thing Wrong With Chicago Theater

My buddy Nate posted a note on Facebook tonight about what he calls "The Only Thing Wrong With Chicago Theater." I won't link to it, since I don't know if his or your Facebook settings would allow you to read it, but the gist is this: Nate's remarkably young to have accomplished as much as he has in the theater, but he's worked on shows in a number of cities around the U.S., in a number of capacities, and on both commercial and non-profit productions. He's worked in Chicago on the independent commercial production of Gutenberg! The Musical!, the tour of Xanadu and on several productions by the local, non-profit company The New Colony (which is also run by folks I consider friends).

Nate's beef is against what he sees as a bias in the Chicago theater community against commercial theater producers, a job title that's one of (the many) credits he's working toward putting on his resume. To quote briefly:

I love Chicago, and Chicago theatre. I love (and have worked with) storefront theatres (when the shows are done well (companies who do nothing but rip off bad movies ILLEGALLY is not what I call done well).

What do I hate? Storefront elitism and attitude that commercial theatre is the enemy. Please. If anything commercial theatre (everything from Broadway In Chicago down to mid-sized shows that play the Mercury, Drury Lane, Royal George, etc) bring people in and puts Chicago on "the map" as a theatre city, opening the entire community up for more exposure. We're all (storefront, commercial, non profit, whatever) in the same community. Commercial Theatre is not the enemy.

I'd be interested to know what kind of criticisms he's been hearing on his end about commercial theater. I don't get the sense that there's a bias in the Chicago theater community against commercial theater per se, apart from the character that writes Don Hall's blog (no offense meant, Don, but I think of the "Don Hall" that writes Angry White Guy the same way I think of the "Stephen Colbert" who appears on The Colbert Report). For instance, I haven't heard of any local animus towards Million Dollar Quartet in the year or so it's been running here.

I think—and this is admittedly from my limited perspective both as a journalist looking in from the outside and as someone who's only been in Chicago for a little under a decade—that what bias exists against, say, Wicked and Jersey Boys is about the perception that the gorillas in the room get disproportionate attention from major tastemakers, from the Mayor's office to the Tribune Company. (This recent conversation about why the Tribune-owned ChicagoNow's theater blog is branded and run by major Tribune advertiser Broadway in Chicago, for instance, seems to me like a valid topic of discussion.)

I want to be clear about this: I do not think Broadway in Chicago is an inherently evil corporation, nor do I think exporting our work to New York is inherently bad. National media attention for Broadway productions of work by Keith Huff or the cast of Superior Donuts can do us good, and since I can't get to New York as often as I'd like I'm glad to get the tours of Spring Awakening and In the Heights, the pre-Broadway run of The Addams Family and a sit-down run of Billy Elliot. I love storefront theater—hence the title I gave this blog a few years back—but I love big commercial theater when it's good, too. Nor do I equate financial success, or at least achieving the financial solvency to pay artists a living wage, with selling out artistically.

But I do think that too often our local government and local media are going about it the wrong way. For the last few decades, at least, since the rise of Steppenwolf, Chicago's theatrical identity has been tied up in our homegrown, non-profit theaters. Rather than getting our validation from either sending our own work to New York to be patted on the head with cash and prizes, or from becoming an outpost for franchises of works originated there, we should be focusing on making Chicago a theater destination on its own, equal but separate from New York. Come see theater here not because it's a shorter drive from Columbus to see Jersey Boys, but because you can see Tracy Letts's follow-up to August: Osage County and Josh Schmidt's newest musical.

Instead of writing reviews saying that the next Steppenwolf production should go to Broadway, we can write reviews that say if you want to see the next play by Marisa Wegrzyn or Steve Spencer or Emily Schwartz or Justin Palmer, you have to come to Chicago, whether it's a nonprofit production or a commercial one. And you can see Billy Elliot while you're at it. And maybe that's the way to break this branch of our Second City complex.

Anyway. I started writing all of this as a response to Nate's Facebook note, before I realized I really wanted to hear what all of you might have to say. So please, pile on.

The gender bias thing

I want to point quickly (and probably futilely, heading into a long holiday weekend) to my latest post at the Time Out blog. Amid the hubbub over Emily Glassberg Sands's report last week on bias against female playwrights, and especially given the sensationalized reporting on her finding that women in power as artistic directors and literary managers were more biased against women playwrights than male leaders were, I wanted some feedback. I asked about a dozen of Chicago's female ADs and LMs (and one key dude) for their reactions to the study. To my delight, nine of them replied.

As for my own opinion, I haven't had time to check out the full 170-page doc yet, but based on the published reporting I think I find some of Sands's methodology suspect—Isaac has noted the discussion raging on one of the theater-related listservs, which I've been following as well. I'd also note that doolee.com, while sometimes useful, is far from what I'd consider a reliable primary source; neither Emily Schwartz nor Tanya Saracho is represented, which strike me as fatal omissions if you're interested in who's getting buzz and commissions and productions in Chicago. But even a potentially flawed study keeps the conversation going; as others have said: This isn't a final judgment, it's a starting point.

Ruined wins the Pulitzer

For the second year in a row, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama originated in Chicago. But this year, I didn’t bother seeing it.

Given what I heard from TOC reviewer John Beer and from theater editor Christopher Piatt, in addition to other friends who saw the Goodman production of Ruined, it sounded like a good but not great play. And considering that the Goodman had stashed Lynn Nottage’s new play on its second stage (as did Manhattan Theatre Club in its subsequent run), it didn’t feel like anyone here was considering Ruined a major new work.

Moreover, Ruined sounded like the kind of do-gooding play that makes itself inherently, and annoyingly, criticism-proof. Stories about the play itself get hopelessly conflated with stories about the play's subjects, or the playwright's process and intentions. I find that plays like Ruined (or The Ballad of Emmett Till, or Black Diamond, or Lost Boys of Sudan or The Laramie Project) lodge a nagging worry in the back of my mind that if I say anything less than glowing about what's on stage, it could be read as a dismissal of the real-life suffering that inspired it.

Was I wrong to take a pass on Ruined? Unless the play takes on a robust enough life to be remounted by another company in Chicago, I may never know. What I do know is this: its run at the Goodman, from mid-November to mid-December, fell during the weeks when I'm normally scrambling to catch up with the year-end plays that my fellow TOC writers think might be contenders for our top ten list. Ruined never came up in that conversation.

AT TOC: Nine new reviews today, including Sketchbook and Cut to the Quick, five stars for ATC's Hedwig and two for the touring A Chorus Line.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa gets super, man

Dallas Theater Center today announced a season that will include a revised version of It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman, with a new book by playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. (They announced some other stuff too, but my nerd brain zoomed right in on this.)

Despite a score by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, It's a Bird is an eye-roller for those of us in the tiny little slice of Venn diagram where comics fans and musical fans overlap. The original book by Robert Benton and David Newman is jokey and generic, and bears little resemblance to Metropolis as we know it from the comics or the various movies and TV shows. Top billing in the Broadway production, which ran just 129 performances, went not to the actors portraying Superman or Lois Lane but to Jack Cassidy, who played a lothario newspaper columnist invented by Benton and Newman. A 1975 TV version only made things worse.

Aguirre-Sacasa knows comics and has written quite a bit for Marvel Comics; given full rein to construct something decent around Adams and Strouse's songs, well, let's just say I have higher hopes for this than I do for Julie Taymor and Bono. Aguirre-Sacasa and I talked comics quite a bit in this December 2007 interview, which centered on Steppenwolf's premiere of his Good Boys and True.

(h/t my friend Mandy at DTC!)

An intervention.

Hi there. Wait, wait—it's okay, we don't want you to feel ambushed. We're sorry for telling that little white lie about speed-dating with generous corporate grantors, but we had to find a way to get you here.

We aren't angry; we want to tell you this to help you, because we love you. But the thing is, Chicago theater community, you have a problem. You have an addiction to the same damn shows, and it's hurting us and it's hurting you.

We've tried taking you aside gently to explain how difficult it is to see you treating yourself this way—City Lit opening Old Times one week, Remy Bumppo opening Old Times three weeks later? Multiple Macbeths and multiple Twelfth Nights within weeks of one another? Forget about your "concepts"! It's like one hand isn't talking to the other!

But what really hurts us are the signs that you've no intention of changing your ways. Mere months after the Triple Dracula incident, you announce a Hypocrites Frankenstein even while BoHo's Frankenstein is in the room? That's just hurtful. Not to mention the indignity heaped upon Quest's just-closed Into the Woods by Porchlight's announcement of Into the Woods. And Porchlight's forthcoming revival of The Fantasticks, to be followed a few months later by Promethean's forthcoming revival of The Fantasticks. (Poor Promethean, who opened Tony Kushner's The Illusion in a weird holiday slot that cost them a lot of reviews, only to be eclipsed by Court's announcement of Tony Kushner's The Illusion for next season. As if Promethean's production hadn't happened at all.)

A couple of weeks ago the Guardian's Elisa Solomon put out a plea for productions of critics' best-loved neglected plays. We're not asking for that. (And for the record, we're pretty sure that Fatboy is the only version of Ubu Roi anyone outside of academia has ever enjoyed.) (Then again, our reading tastes run toward the pedestrian; if we were requesting productions of our own favorite plays we haven't seen, there would be far too much Richard Greenberg going on, and we wouldn't have discovered neglected plays we didn't know well, like Marlowe's Edward II.) Nor are we asking for all new works and Chicago premieres (though they are greatly appreciated). All we want is an acknowledgment that, despite the boulders you hang from the flyloft and your intentions to go to Broadway, your production of Desire Under the Elms is still the third we've seen in as many years.

We'll support everything you do as well as we can, Chicago theater community. But please, help us help you. And that means, among other things, a moratorium on Proof.

Magnolia vs. Cherry Orchard

Nine new reviews up at TOC, including mine of Regina Taylor's Magnolia, which opened at the Goodman tonight. (Like most of the press, I attended last night's final preview.)

I was surprised to discover that Taylor's play is very much a point-for-point adaptation of The Cherry Orchard—a fact that wasn't mentioned in any of the advance press materials. (Through this weekend, you can catch Strawdog's Cherry Orchard to compare and contrast.) Even when Christopher Piatt brought up Chekhov in an interview with Taylor a couple of weeks ago, she didn't own up. Maybe after Drowning Crow, her hip-hop–tinged update of The Seagull, got mixed reviews at the Goodman and Manhattan Theatre Club five or six years ago, all parties decided not to draw attention to it this time around? But once you see Magnolia, there's no two ways around it: The secret's out.

I liked several elements of Anna D. Shapiro's production (her first new work in town since August: Osage County), particularly Todd Rosenthal's deceptively sparse scenic design, though my reference to it in the review had to be cut for print space. (Todd's got his August Tony to keep him warm.) Overall, though, as well as Taylor's transposition of Cherry Orchard works technically, it left me a little cold.

And there's this: I didn't realize until I got the program in my hands that Hollis Resnik is Annette O'Toole's understudy. Now, I've mentioned to more than a few people in the past week how much I like O'Toole and was excited to see her on stage. But how much would I rather see Hollis play that part?

Horton Foote

The decade-spanning, ebbing and flowing career of playwright Horton Foote, who died yesterday at 92, seems about as rewarding as a writer could hope for. His mantel was weighted with two Oscars, a Drama Desk career achievement award and a Pulitzer Prize, though no Tony—for a man who penned more than 60 plays and films, his work only rarely crossed paths with Broadway.

My own experiences with Foote's work are minimal but powerful. The screen versions of To Kill a Mockingbird, which Foote adapted from Harper Lee's novel, and The Trip to Bountiful, filmed more than three decades after its stage debut, were both required viewing for my high school AP Lit class. I read The Young Man from Atlanta in college, which I found at the time to be a profoundly empathetic reframing of the Southern drawing-room drama. And just under a year ago, I was lucky enough to see the Goodman's remount of Signature Theatre Company's Bountiful revival, which I reviewed here.

The Times obituary by Wilborn Hampton, Foote's fellow Texan whose biography of the playwright is due in September, does justice both to Foote's lasting impact and to the writerly life. I particularly like the last graf:

“I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing,” he said in a 1999 interview. “I write almost every day. I’d write plays even if they were never done again. You’re at the mercy of whatever talent you have.”

Jon, dear

Apologies for the radio silence here of late, but compressed early holiday deadlines at the day job, a marked downturn in the amount of theater I've been seeing (because we outsourced most of the holiday shows to the broader TOC staff) and the traditionally ramped-up December social calendar have left me with little time for blogging. But there are some unique events this weekend I'd like to point you to.

Collaboraction's Jon (reviewed here), a terrific adaptation by Seth Bockley of the short story by George Saunders (pictured), with the killer trio of Lucas Neff, Kelly O'Sullivan and Guy Massey at the core of a rocking cast, is closing this Saturday, and there are a couple of bonuses tacked onto tonight's and tomorrow's performances. Tonight, catch a preshow panel discussion on the state of Chicago theater sponsored by the Sundance Theater Lab, the Driehaus Foundation and the League of Chicago Theatres; panelists include Redmoon's Jim Lasko, Henry Godinez of the Goodman and NU, and About Face's new artistic director Bonnie Metzgar. Starts at 5:30.

Tomorrow night, Saunders himself will be in attendance, and will host a postshow talkback with Bockley. Use the discount code "friend of JON" here to get $15 tickets.

Boy Detective doing quite well for himself, as it turns out

A young musical theater composer named Adam Gwon is the winner of the fourth annual Fred Ebb award, which he picked up in New York last night. Great, I support supporting young musical theater composers.

I'm fairly certain Gwon's work, which includes adaptations of the Fitzgerald story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," Wharton's Ethan Frome and Wedekind's Lulu along with several original works, hasn't been seen in Chicago. But what's of note to us here (aside from the whole supporting-the-continuing-health-of-the-musical bit) is buried deep in the last graf of the press release (oops, I mean "article," sorry Playbill.com!): "He is currently working on an original musical with playwright Sarah Hammond, commissioned by Broadway Across America, and an adaptation of Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails, commissioned by Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA."

Joe Meno is, of course, a Chicagoan (and not-for-nothing one of Time Out's Cultural Heroes). More to the point, Chicago theatergoers know that Boy Detective has already been adapted for the stage. Meno's own version was produced by the House Theatre two summers ago, months before the book itself hit the shelves (aside from the shelves of the House's swag booth at the Viaduct).

Gwon's one of a handful of young composers with musicals in development thanks to a grant program administered by Signature and "under the guidance of Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer" (careful with that). Hard to tell how involved, if at all, Meno is in Gwon's work; perhaps he'll weigh in here.

3-2-1 Content

There's an interesting discussion going on at Tony's blog about whether we in the theater community/blogosphere/barroom discussion are putting too much emphasis on business models, nonprofit statuses and playwright demographics (to name a few) and not enough on the actual content on stage.

It's late-late-late enough in the evening of a long day that I can only hope for clarity, but I've had a few conversations in the last couple of days that relate to this and I want to get some unformed thoughts down before they get away from me. I think a lot of the things we've been talking about in recent months are (in)directly related to content in ways we may not realize.