Storefront Rebellion

Non-Equity Jeff Award noms: Massive Secrecy Fail

If you have even half a shred of vested interest in the Non-Equity Jeff nominations, you've likely already seen the list today after the Sun-Times briefly, and erroneously, posted it online this morning, a day early. (The Jeff committee gave the list to select members of the press yesterday morning, embargoed until midnight tonight.)

The committee was hoping that nobody saw it, but faster than you could say "tweet," the news was speeding across the internets. (Hint: At least one person copied and pasted it into a Facebook note. I'm not saying who.) Regardless, the nominated cats are pretty much out of the bag.

What you haven't seen is Nick Keenan's favorite rebuttal, TOC's "They wuz robbed," in which Christopher Piatt and I deliver a hearty WTF for the egregiously overlooked. (As Nick is already aware, he's ineligible for inclusion this year. And deservedly so.) Our take will be going live on the TOC blog at midnight, along with the complete, non-embargoed list of nominees. I'll post a link, along with the full list, here then.

UPDATE: TOC's response.

And the nominees:

Talk Theatre in Chicago Podcast

I'm this week's guest on the Talk Theatre in Chicago Podcast with Anne Nicholson Weber (full disclosure: Anne is a once and hopefully future TOC contributor), which just went live.

I haven't listened to the edited version—and may never, I hate hearing myself talk—but in the interview we discussed my background and my approach as a reviewer, the give-and-take between my writing for TOC and here at Storefront Rebellion, what I look for in reviewers (including a bit of a disagreement over my professed desire to recruit some more non-white-male writers), and of course, my impending takeover as TOC's theater editor and what I hope to accomplish with our coverage going forward. It's worth a listen, I hope.

Time Out Chicago's new theater editor: me

I'm much more used to reporting news than being news, but as the Tribune's Chris Jones and the Reader's Tony Adler have already reported, Christopher Piatt has decided to step down as Time Out Chicago's theater editor effective a month from today; I'll be taking the reins.

It's a tough decision for Christopher, but after nearly five years on the job he's feeling the burn and wanting to pursue new things, which is perfectly understandable. He and I have had one of the best working relationships I've ever experienced, and I'm very sad that he won't be sitting at the desk next to mine anymore. But I'm excited about taking over and finding new ways to meet the ever-expanding challenges of covering the arts in an economic environment that's difficult for artists and media alike. As beats go, Chicago theater is an amazing one to have, and I'm thrilled to stay on it.

Web presence matters.

Nick has a terrific post today about You And Your Website. It gets a little wonky (in a good way!), but I love what he says about New Leaf's website:

For a company that was tiny and had no money, this pro-bono design was the get of a lifetime. We still get comments, in a market five years older, about how great our site looks. That site has caught the attention of artists just landing in Chicago, and we get the privelage of working with them first… because we had a web presence that was simple and sleek and showed us off.

This reminds me of one of Terry Teachout's guidelines for theaters inviting his attendance: "Web sites matter--a lot. More often than not, your site will be my introduction to your company. You don't have to cram it full of cutesy-pie bells and whistles, but the smarter the design, the greater the chance that I'll give it a second glance." Absolutely true.

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.

Much more on ATC

Following up on my last post on the American Theater Company dustup, let me point you to Kerry Reid's take at PerformInk. I have to agree with the anonymous commenters on the TOC story who've snarked that Kerry's version is much more thorough, though I'll point out that Kerry had about 2,000 more words with which to tell the story than our ~750. Not to mention that as a trade paper, PerformInk (to which I've happily contributed year-end essays for the last two years) gets to assume its readers have insider interest, whereas we at TOC have to make a story accessible for general-interest readers in a much smaller number of words.

That said, Kerry's story jibes with my understanding of the issues based on the nearly two dozen interviews we conducted; I wish we'd had the space to tell it as thoroughly as she does. (And, for those who bring up Steppenwolf, Martha Lavey politely declined my request to weigh in on how to successfully run an ensemble.)

Elsewhere, scheduling quirks resulted in an unusually small three reviews in this week's TOC. My takes on Steppenwolf's Tempest and Chicago Shakespeare's Twelfth Night will run in next week's issue, but I might try to get them online later this week.

American Theater Company's messy divorce

As promised, TOC's take on the ATC/American Blues Theater split.

It isn't nearly so cut-and-dried as you'd guess from the minimal details that were reported elsewhere. There are a lot of hurt feelings involved (news flash: artists can be sensitive), but I do believe this will ultimately be good for everyone.

UPDATE: I posted a bit more at the TOC blog. Feel free to comment over there.

Slow news month

Earlier today, someone left this comment on my last post:

7 blogs in a month... I almost wonder why I've bookmarked Storefront Rebellion. Have you grown tired of blogging?

Sorry if you don't feel like you're getting your money's worth, Alex. It's true, things have been a little light lately. I think it's just that time of the season—we're nearing the end of the cycle; even at TOC we often find ourselves struggling at this time of year to find ways to write about things that don't sound like something we've already written this season. Sometimes I intentionally refrain from saying things here that I'm itching to say because I'm working it up as forthcoming TOC content. And sometimes, yes, I might have something in mind to write about here, and when I get home at 10 or 11 at night after a full day of writing about theater at work and catching a show on the way home, I open up my MacBook and find that writing more about theater is the last thing I want to do.

But here's the thing: I've been blogging for eight years, long enough to know that that feeling comes and goes. Inspiration and enthusiasm come when they come. That's why I've never promised any posting quota and I don't worry about my pageviews here. If I were charging for content or otherwise trying to run Storefront Rebellion as a business, that would be different, but I've never had any illusions about "monetizing" SR or any other Web 2.0 bullshit like that. There are plenty of other blogs that do the business of regurgitating press releases, if that's what you want. I write here when I feel like I have something to say. It's nice to know I have readers who care enough to call me out, but that isn't going to change. Thanks for asking.