Storefront Rebellion

The more things change…

I'm killing time in the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, irritated that my 3:15 flight back to the city has been delayed by at least an hour and a half by the snowstorm in Chicago, and further irritated that the airport's wi-fi access, which was free the last time I flew out of here, is now for-charge.

As long as I've got the post-holiday I-just-want-to-get-home grumps (and obviously I don't have any Chicago theater news), I thought I'd share the two things that irritated me the most over my stay here this week. (Don't worry, family, neither of them is about you.)

Weekend wrapup

Some quick notes on the theater weekend, here and elsewhere, after staying up late to write reviews of both the shows I saw today: The House's Nutcracker and Rubicon's Chicago premiere of Dog Sees God; look for reviews at TOC online late Monday and in print on Wednesday.

• First, speaking of the House, they got another bit of national exposure with a feature on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. The text is online, but put on your headphones and click Listen Now for the full effect.
• Friday night I visited the new home of the infant fringe group La Costa Theatre for the first time. I still don't know how the two-year-old company can afford a permanent space of its own, but the venue, an expansive if out-of-the-way former karate studio on North Elston at Irving Park Road, is rife with possibilities assuming they can work out the acoustic issues (concrete-block walls without sound dampeners make for a lot of echo). My review of the show, Brotherly Love, will follow in TOC's post-Thanksgiving issue.
• Speaking of acoustics, on Saturday I caught up with New Leaf Theatre's production of The Dining Room. I'm still dubious of the script—A.R. Gurney will have to try harder to get me to feel sorry for the plight of rich, uptight, country-club-going WASPs with maids—but the production was impeccably acted, and all the cast aside from New Leaf's Marsha Harman and the Hypocrites' Steve Wilson were entirely new to me. And to get around to the sound, New Leaf's resident sound designer Nick Keenan did amazing things. There were no props in the show—all mimed—but Keenan wired speakers to the underside of the tabletop to center the sounds of plates and silverware being set down and ice cubes clinking in cocktail glasses, all timed to the expert movements of the actors. Nick has recently started a must-read blog dealing with issues of collaboration and technology in storefront theater; you can find it here.
• In elsewhere news of import to Chicago theater, the weekend talks between Broadway's stagehands and producers broke off tonight without resolution, and the producers canceled all affected shows through Nov. 25, meaning August: Osage County's scheduled Tuesday opening is, at the very least, postponed. This time, at least according to Local One's statement, it was the producers who left the table. For more Chicago context, check out my conversation with August's Fran Guinan last week, and my post about the New York media speculation that the longer the strike goes on, the more it could affect road productions like those of Broadway in Chicago.
• Speaking of Broadway in Chicago, Chris Jones had a lengthy piece in Sunday's Tribune on the road group's new, largely single-handed control by the Nederlanders.
• Also of note in the Sunday Trib, an interesting commentary by Carina Chocano of the LA Times on the changing gender roles in film comedies.