Storefront Rebellion

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.

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.

Catching up with catching up

I missed a couple of reading recommendations in my Sunday night post.

First, John Lahr's critic-at-large piece about Sarah Ruhl in last week's New Yorker. I haven't seen a lot of Ruhl's work—I missed the Goodman production of The Clean House, for instance—but the Chicago premiere of her Passion Play last fall was one of the most overblown wastes of money I've ever sat through. (And by that I mean the Goodman's money; my ticket was comped.) I've long been a fan of Lahr—I read Light Fantastic, a collection of his long-form New Yorker artist profiles, way back when in college (it was bought from the remaindered stacks at an outlet-mall bookstore, ho ho, ain't that a metaphor about theater in America these days), and recommended him as a serious critic to the Columbia class I spoke to a while back—but his unalloyed adulation of Ruhl, and of her instincts as a playwright that go against everything I've learned as a theater person, test my patience. I'm still willing to give her more chances (oh please, Steppenwolf's production of Dead Man's Cell Phone, please be good), but I'm trepidatious.

Second up is an interestingly concepted, if less interestingly executed, piece by Stuart Miller in Sunday's New York Times. It focuses on the phenomenon of compelling characters that never appear on stage—from Doubt's young black student, to the possibly lecherous teacher in Speech and Debate (which will soon make its Chicago debut at American Theater Company) to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's already-dead Skipper. It's one of those hey-this-is-barely-a-trend stories that still manages to get intriguing responses from the playwrights, directors and actors involved.

Finally, for now, commenter Ed responded to my last post about Northlight's Grey Gardens with some pretty dead-on casting suggestions. BJ, are you listening? I'll happily connect you with Ed for the finder's fee.

Meanwhile, I posted this week's new TOC reviews online tonight: my own of The Talented Tenth and Uncle Vanya and four others, here at the TOC Theater section.

That missing post.

Those of you who visited this site late Saturday or yesterday (and just my luck, it was an unusually traffic-heavy Sunday) may have seen an entry I posted about a comment that came in on the TOC Blog Friday, on this post I wrote about A Steady Rain.

Last night I took down the post I wrote here; I came to the decision that it sets a bad precedent to defend myself point-by-point against the anonymous taunts of commenters who hide behind fake names. But since the post was apparently seen by a good number of folks in the 24 hours it was live—Bilal noticed it, and two other people asked me about it today—€”I thought I should acknowledge my decision.

I stand behind my opinion of A Steady Rain as well as what I said here about where I'm coming from as a critic, and I firmly believe that we can all benefit from more open lines of communication among critics, theater artists and audience members—if I didn't, I wouldn't have started this blog. I thoroughly enjoy the exchange of ideas here, on the TOC Blog, and on all the other theater blogs around with Bilal, Don, Tony, Nick, Marisa, etc., and with our non-blogging commenters who sign their names, from Mark Jeffries to Kerry Reid to Brian Golden to Mia McCullough.

I had a conversation today with TOC's new editor in chief, Frank Sennett, who's been going on an introductory tour of sorts, putting himself out in front of the people the magazine covers. It's a reminder to us that the beats we cover locally are real people, and a reminder to our subjects that the folks reviewing them are real people as well, doing it because we're passionate about our fields. That's a big part of the reason I write here at Storefront Rebellion, too. Giving my opinion about plays is, in fact, my job, and I get paid for it, but I wouldn't be working a job that sends me to the theater 200 times a year if I didn't love theater and hope that all 200 of those plays were going to be good.

Critics are real people, and speaking for myself at least, I'm not "out to get" anyone. I understand that I'm bound to piss some people off from time to time; that's the nature of the beast. If you disagree with me about something, I'm more than happy to have a conversation about it. But I'm being open about who I am and where I'm coming from, and I hope that if you want me to take you seriously, you'll be honest about who you are and where you're coming from too.

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So that's that. Hey look, new reviews! My reviews of the Goodman's The Trip to Bountiful, the House's The Attempters and Greasy Joan's The Misanthrope are up at the newly redesigned TOC website, along with six others. Have at them.

Reading assignments.

Last week I was invited to participate in a forum for a graduate seminar at Columbia College. The class was for Master's students in the arts and media management program, and they wanted me to represent the "working critic." I naturally brought a copy of the cover story we did last month on the Internet's effect on criticism, for which I led a critics' roundtable discussion, to reference in my part of the talk. I was pleased and a little more than astounded to find that not only had another of the panel speakers brought the same issue of TOC, without knowing that I would be there with him, but that the class's instructors had put up part of the cover package on the class website as assigned reading. I also found out that most of the students follow the magazine pretty closely. Most remarkably, one of the students in the section I was participating in was doing a project comparing the criticism of the Tribune's Chris Jones with, um, me. Wow.

I know that pointing you to Time Out content is not the most scintillating of blog content, but I'm on my way to Arkansas for the weekend to celebrate my beautiful sister's wedding, and I want to leave you with something to read. And there's plenty of new material at TOC this week.

I wrote my first long-form review in this week's issue, of Next's American Dream Songbook. It's a really interesting project, and worth seeing just for the first half, Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, which is beautifully rendered. The five new songs by modern composers each have their merits and their drawbacks, and as a compilation they're very interesting. But I was particularly bothered by the race and gender imbalance, as referenced in the last paragraph of my review. It's possible that Next tried to find female and/or non-white composers to participate and couldn't, but I'm really bugged by the fact that Suzan-Lori Parks is the only woman invoked in the dozen or so playwrights pictured on the theater's walls as authors of the American Dream. Where's Lorraine Hansberry? Lillian Hellman? Heck, where's Wendy Wasserstein? Sure, it might be easy for some to write off Wasserstein as a commercial playwright, but if her portraits of the "New Woman" trying to negotiate a balance among career, romance and family in the 1970s and ‘80s aren't those decades' version of the American Dream, I don't know what is.

Also in this week's issue, my reviews of WildClaw Theatre's The Great God Pan, La Costa Theatre's Stuck and seven other new shows can all be found here.

We've had plenty of content on the TOC Blog this week as well, including my less-than-pleased reaction to Broadway in Chicago's announcement that Jersey Boys is becoming a sit-down production, and Christopher Piatt's rundown of the secretive Orgie Awards Thursday morning (read it, you might have gotten an award without even knowing it). Meanwhile, our Out There reporter Jake Malooley filed a balanced report on blog complaints from numerous sources about financial malfeasance at the Bailiwick.

All of that, along with the compelling content from other theater bloggers (I know I'll be checking in Saturday to see if I'm named in Tony's "Critiquing the Critics" series) ought to keep you occupied. I'll be back next week.

Review day, catching up

New reviews up at TOC's Theater site, a day later than usual due to the Presidents' Day holiday yesterday, include my own of ATC's Augusta and Writers' Theatre's As You Like It.

Since I failed to point to them last week, my reviews in that issue were of BackStage's How I Learned to Drive, Victory Gardens' A Big Blue Nail and Botanic Garden at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse. And as Tony points out, I also had a review in the Kids section of Adventure Stage Chicago's The Cay.

Careful readers will note that I've accidentally been on the Celebrity Female Directors beat, having reviewed plays helmed by Olympia Dukakis (who Christopher interviewed here) and erstwhile SNL cast member Nora Dunn. If only I could have gone to New York for the Kathleen Turner–directed revival of Crimes of the Heart, the loop would be complete. (Both Dukakis and Dunn are strengthening ties with Chicago's theater, with Dunn establishing residency here and expressing her desire to work as a director and Dukakis tentatively signing on to perform at American Theater Company next season.)

Review day updates

New reviews at TOC: Fatboy, Dolly West's Kitchen and 1776. Read the rest of the reviews from Christopher, Novid and Brian here.

That TOC blog post about the Jeffs that I pointed to in my last post erupted into a real shitstorm today. As of this writing, 14 comments, and it was one of the most requested pages on the site today. (And I got a lot of incoming clicks on my own post from various webmails, so at least one of you out there is mailing it around.) So far the defenders of non-Equity theater—many of them theater artists, many of them designers declaring that they're members of their own unions and work on both sides of the Equity divide—are outnumbering the non-Equity bashers nearly 2-to-1, but the bashers will brook no arguments. With statements like "Julie is completely correct. The example she chose (Goodman/Lifeline) is based on sound judgement and is unarguable," well, it starts to feel like you're debating gay marriage with Fred Phelps. I beg of you, non-Equity bashers, tell me who bought you that Hater-ade you're drinking?

In happier traffic news, I got to chatting with a young playwright on the bus Saturday after we'd both attended the panel on female playwrights at Chicago Dramatists that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. (I hope to have some notes from the panel up on the TOC Blog tomorrow.) Eventually I asked her how she'd found out about the panel: was it in TOC's listings, the Reader, maybe she's on Chicago Dramatists' mailing list—this is naturally something that interests me.

She thought for a second, and said, "Oh, you know, I saw it on Storefront Rebellion. Do you know that blog?"

Awesome. And hi, Jenny.

Time Out Chicago activity ahoy!

New reviews up at TOC: mine of About Face's The Little Dog Laughed, Court Theatre's Titus Andronicus, and Black Sheep's The End, Christopher's of Goodman's Shining City, Profiles's This is How it Goes, and Lookingglass's Hephaestus, plus Megan's review of Circle's Boy and Kay's of City Lit's Twelfth Night. Check the TOC Theater section tomorrow afternoon for my interview with new American Theater Company artistic director P.J. Paparelli about his plans for ATC and Raven Theatre's Chicago debut this weekend of his play columbinus. (The blood-soaked Fatboy review won't show up until next week.)

I also wanted to note that, after a long fallow period due to, well, nothing really happening in Chicago theater in the early weeks of January, we're back with a vengeance on the TOC theater blog, with posts about the Legally Blonde reality casting show, a tale of two Our Towns, and the possible multiplicity of Steppenwolf Tony nominations. Keep an eye on it.

Say what you mean

This afternoon, I got an email from my friend Jeremy saying, "I'm happy to see that you guys finally updated your blog."

Believe me when I say we've been trying to. We spent a big chunk of last week trying to find something worth blogging about so that August: Osage County's Broadway opening could move down the list. Two weeks after the fact, it was starting to seem like old news (though what might be the final print word, Hilton Als's less than glowing New Yorker review, just showed up online today). But it's a slow time for new openings, and just the same as I practice here, we only post on the TOC blog when we have something to say. This morning we finally found inspiration.

This weekend, I (obviously) saw Actors Workshop's Three Hotels (review here) and the closing performance of Egan Reich's The Most Liquid Currency in the World, in a very well-acted world premiere by Pine Box Theatre, the company I wrote about here.

I took tonight off to watch the incredibly disappointing Bears game with the guys (and honorary guy Julie); I'm taking tomorrow night off as well before spending three nights in a row at the theater; I'll then head off for several restful days in the theater-free hinterlands (a.k.a. Northwest Arkansas), where I'll relax with the family and hopefully catch up on some of the Oscar season's movies I haven't yet seen—I'm thinking if my Dylan-fan dad hasn't seen I'm Not There yet, and assuming it's actually playing in the land of multiplexes, I'll take him to see it. It'll be a nice rest before the plays start opening again in January.

If I don't post again before then, happy holidays, y'all.