PROFILES SETS SEASON: Profiles Theatre, the exceptionally successful storefront operation at 447 N. Broadway, recently wound up a complete season devoted to plays by Neil LaBute. Now it is gearing up to celebrate the 2008-2009 season -- its 20th anniversary -- with five new plays by contemporary writers. Included will be:
GIORDANO AT THE HARRIS: When the Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago company makes its annual visit to the Harris Theatre for Music and Dance this fall (Oct. 24 and 25), it will pay tribute to its founder and guiding light, Gus Giordano, who died this past March. A program of new and revived works by choreographers who were mentored or inspired by Giordano will fill the bill, including: A revised staging of Billy Siegenfeld's "Getting There"; Giordano's own "Wings," a solo being recreated by Susan Quinn; Nan Giordano's "Taal," a blend of Indian and jazz rhythms; "Giordano Moves," the Nan Giordano-Jon Lehrer piece for 10 dancers that captures Gus Giordano's movement style over the decades, with an original jazz score by George McRae; Sherry Zunker's "The Man That Got Away," a comic "duet for one"; and Lehrer's "Ritual Dynamic," an ensemble piece. Tickets: (312) 334-7777.
The 19 performers who comprise the cast of About Face Youth Theatre's new show, "Fast Forward," are not professional actors, yet they seem utterly at home onstage. And because they fearlessly wear their hearts on their sleeves, they manage to generate the kind of genuine emotion you might expect from far more seasoned performers.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Eclipse Theatre's revival of 'Plaza' is worth checking out Hedy Weiss: First comes a surprisingly dark tale of a middle-class marriage that has sadly gone sour in the most predictable ways. Next is a comic tale of celebrity worship that now, four decades after it first appeared onstage, seems like a harbinger of a phenomenon to come. And finally, there is a classic case of pre-wedding panic that unfolds in pure farcical style.
Monday, July 21, 2008
One choreographer stands out in Chelonia Hedy Weiss: For modern dance choreographers, a college teaching job is about as good as it gets. Unlike writers, painters and composers, choreographers need two hard-to-come-by resources: A studio in which to create work, and a sure supply of dancers on which to mold new pieces. Working at a school with a theater arts and dance department goes a long way toward supplying both.
"Zoom, zoom, the world is in a mess," wrote Ira Gershwin, in a song from the 1937 Fred Astaire film "Shall We Dance." He went on to suggest that the only remedy for such a state of affairs was to "Slap That Bass" and get some playful rhythms going.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Writers get 'First Look' at their new plays Hedy Weiss: Nothing is more valuable to a playwright than to see what happens when his or her words make that gargantuan leap from the page to the stage, with audiences providing essential feedback. Affording playwrights that opportunity is the main objective of First Look Repertory of New Work, Steppenwolf Theater's summertime showcase of plays staged in rotating rep at the Merle Reskin Garage Theater.
NEW PLAYS: Victory Gardens Theater, that longtime champion of new plays, is trying something new this summer in the form of a project dubbed “Ignition.” The summer festival, funded by the Ford Foundation, has been devised as a showcase for “emerging writers of color under age 40,” and will present staged readings of six plays selected from 120 entries nationwide and internationally. It is hoped that the readings, running Aug. 7-10 at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre, 2433 N. Lincoln, will be the source of future Victory Gardens workshops and mainstage productions, and that they also will attract the attention of theater organizations around the country.
'Walking With Dinosaurs' turns back the clock
They are not the skeletal giants of your parents' and grandparents' generation -- those lumbering but static monsters who still dominate the halls of some of the world's greatest natural history museums. No, the majority of the 15 dinosaurs who will traipse around the arena stage of the United Center in "Walking With Dinosaurs" are a hybrid of live theater techniques and film-studio-style puppetry.
Note to dance fans: The Chicago Cultural Affairs Department and Millennium Park will present two special evenings of dances by some of Chicago's most intriguing small- to mid-size companies, with performances taking place at various Millennium Park sites from 4-6 p.m. Aug. 18 and 20. Admission is free.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
A tea party well worth attending Hedy Weiss: It is only fitting that a theater company named Lookingglass should enjoy one of its greatest successes with a show that does, indeed, catapult its audience straight down the rabbit hole of shape-shifting experience, high into the stratosphere of illogical thinking and directly through the mirror of off-kilter (but supremely controlled) illusion.
Like 'Jersey Boys,' some plays need to smoke Hedy Weiss: Playwright Tennessee Williams had his vices. He smoked, he drank and he downed no small number of pharmaceuticals. He also wrote plays capable of burning a hole in your heart -- plays filled with characters who frequently engaged in similarly bad habits that made them all the more real, and all the more true to the time and place in which they lived.
Monday, July 14, 2008
'Wonka' a world of pure illumination Hedy Weiss: In a program note for his production of "Willy Wonka," the 65-minute family musical by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley that opened over the weekend at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, director Joe Leonardo notes that Roald Dahl was not particularly happy with the first film version of his hugely popular children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Apparently he found its star, Gene Wilder, too "odd [and] aloof" in his portrayal of the candy-making magician-mogul.
You really had to be there to sense the full magic of the event. Suffice it to say that the Chicago Shakespeare Theater gave Chicago audiences numbering in the thousands a gift of great, dreamlike beauty and pure mischief this weekend as it presented France's Compagnie Transe Express in "Maudits Sonnant," the free outdoor spectacle that unfolded 200 feet in the air above Navy Pier's Gateway Park.
----- TEATRO LUNA'S "HOODOO": Teatro Luna, Chicago's all-Latina theater company and the winner of several non-Equity Jeff Awards this year, has announced its next production: the world premiere of Tanya Saracho's "Jarred: A Hoodoo Comedy." The show, with a cast of five, is described as a comedy for "anyone who has ever had a broken heart and tried to put the pieces back together by any means necessary." It will run Aug. 31-Dec. 14 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago. For tickets, go to brownpapertickets.com/event/38173.
Earlier this season, when veteran Off-Loop theater producers Sharon Evans and John Ragir announced they were stepping away from their two-decades-long stewardship of Live Bait Theater, Evans noted she would continue to produce the Fillet of Solo series that had become one of the hallmarks of the company's eclectic programming. As she explained, this showcase of the distinctive storytelling potential of individual writer-performers was just too dear to her heart to surrender.
The programs of Chicago's Muntu Dance Theatre invariably offer far more than thrillling African-rooted dance, folkloric theater and altogether irresistible drumming and percussion. They are genuine works of cultural anthropology, as well.
Though I don't quite know precisely what sort of magical wand director Jim Schneider waves over his Circle Theatre actors when he begins to work with them, I do know that its effect on the three exceptionally tricky productions he has crafted recently -- Noel Coward's "Design for Living," Oscar Wilde's "The Ideal Husband" and now Coward's "Hay Fever" -- could not be more sublime.
Kevin Heckman, who has spent the past seven years as managing director and producing artistic director of Stage Left Theater, will become the managing director of Evanston's 28-year-old Next Theatre beginning Aug. 5.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Up, up and away with 'Hourglass' Hedy Weiss: Superhero stories are invariably action-driven. That clearly makes dance the ideal art form to be employed by anyone hoping to give such tales a third dimension. And this is precisely what choreographer Mark Yonally has done in "The Hourglass and the Poisoned Pen," his full-length "superhero tap dance opera," created in collaboration with Chicago-based cartoonist Andrew Pepoy, combat choreographer Kyle Terry, musical mix-master Andrew Edwards and the 11 wonderfully expressive performers of Yonally's Chicago Tap Theatre.
Gary Sinise has done it. So has John Malkovich. And now it's the turn of Terry Kinney, another Steppenwolf Theatre veteran trying his hand at directing a feature film.
Actor Sean Fortunato has not been getting much sleep lately. By day, at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, he has been rehearsing the title role in "Willy Wonka," the family musical by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley based on Roald Dahl's classic children's novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- a story that already has served as the inspiration for two major movies, including one starring Gene Wilder (1971) and another starring Johnny Depp (2005).
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Getting funky with the Bard is sweet inspiration onstage Hedy Weiss: Make no mistake about it: "Funk It Up About Nothin'," the new "ad-rap-tation" by the Q brothers (the same creative pairing that was behind that goofy hit "The Bomb-itty of Errors"), will never be a substitute for "Much Ado About Nothing," Shakespeare's eternally sophisticated, verbally bristling comedy of morals, manners and reluctant romance.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Goodman's 'Misbehavin' ' is big and bold spectacle Hedy Weiss: It has been 30 years since a little cabaret revue called "Ain't Misbehavin'" made the leap to Broadway, ran for more than 1,600 performances and catapulted five performers (including Nell Carter) to stardom.
Josef Brown, now in the London production of "Dirty Dancing," will reprise the role of Johnny Castle in the U.S. tour that kicks off Sept. 28 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre, 151 W. Randolph.
Monday, June 30, 2008
'Donuts' a familiar recipe Hedy Weiss: Oh, Amerika! (And yes, the invocation of Kafka's early, unfinished novel, which begins as a 16-year-old immigrant boy sails past the Statue of Liberty for the first time, is wholly intentional.) True, the title of Tracy Letts' new play, "Superior Donuts," which opened this weekend at Steppenwolf Theatre amidst ongoing excitement about his immensely successful Pulitzer and Tony-winning play, "August: Osage County," serves up an admittedly more pedestrian vision.
Ensemble Espanol puts flair in 'Flamenco Passion' Hedy Weiss: Ensemble Espanol's eloquent and invariably intensely dramatic "Flamenco Passion" program, which received three performances this weekend at Skokie's North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, began with the rumble of horses' hooves and the projection of an impressionistic image of horses in mid-flight.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Breakfast with Tracy Letts Hedy Weiss: Talk about a hard act to follow. For the past year, playwright Tracy Letts has been basking in the sort of phenomenal success that few playwrights ever enjoy. Think of it this way: Were he a horse, he'd have won the Triple Crown, and then some. Letts' play, "August: Osage County," the tragicomic portrait of an American family, bolted out of the starting gate in its Chicago premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre last summer.
These days, Billie Letts is probably best known as "Tracy Letts' mom" -- the mother of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright whose dysfunctional family drama, "August: Osage County," debuted at the Steppenwolf Theatre and has become the toast of Broadway. And while she is more than happy to be described that way, the truth is Billie Letts was doing very nicely herself in the "high-profile writers" department some years before her son stole the spotlight.
The term "death-defying" has likely been part of circus lingo for as long as circuses have existed, and for as long as seemingly ordinary mortals have attempted to perform feats that put most people in a state of sheer terror or giddy disbelief.
Perhaps the show known as "Gutenberg! The Musical!" might provide a few chuckles as a 15-minute sketch performed as an appendix to one edition or another of "Forbidden Broadway," the popular New York-generated satirical revue. But as a two-act show performed in the confines of the Royal George Theatre's uncomfortable third-floor studio, it very quickly outlives its welcome with material (and direction by Alex Timbers) that is by turns heavy-handed, overworked, dumb and cheesy.
There is something about summer evenings in Chicago that gets dancers (and their audiences) all limbered up and ready to go. This weekend, for example, dance lovers can choose from three wildly different programs that share one particular element -- a devotion to storytelling (in all its guises) as opposed to just movement.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Production of Noel Coward's 'Hay Fever' worth catching Hedy Weiss: Though I don’t quite know precisely what sort of magical wand director
Jim Schneider waves over his Circle Theatre actors when he begins to
work with them, I do know that its effect on the three exceptionally
tricky productions he has crafted recently — Noel Coward’s “Design for
Living,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Ideal Husband” and, as of its Wednesday
night opening, Coward’s “Hay Fever” — could not be more sublime.
--- "BREL" EXTENDS: Theo Ubique's sensational world premiere production of "Jacque Brel's Lonesome Losers of the Night," which initially was slated to close July 20, will now run through Aug. 30. The show, conceived and directed by Fred Anzevino, is frequently sold out two weeks in advance. It is running at the No Exit Cafe, 6970 N. Glenwood, with a dinner package optional. Tickets: (773) 743-3355.
Summer in Chicago means one thing: outdoor music and food fests. Ravinia has started, Taste of Chicago is coming up, Pitchfork and Lollapalooza, oh my! Plus, all the Tastes of Randolph Streets, Taste of Whatever Avenue, Your'hoodfest, on and on...
