Will Fink Anton Chekhov is arguably the best playwright since Shakespeare; he is unequivocally one of the great playwrights of history. The Raven Theatre, with Michael Menendian at the helm, has decided to try their hand at his last, and (according to Chekhov himself) funniest play – with mixed results.
And then there’s the music. The music is simple. I mean, like, really simple. Almost everything is I-IV-V. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think that singer/rhythm guitar player Justin Young only knew the chords C, F, and G, and just moved a capo around to change keys. But you’d be wrong. Because that’s the point. Oh, Justin Young knows plenty of other chords, he just chooses not to utilize them – because those are the only chords he needs.
Jim Manganello has set himself quite the task: adapt Leo Tolstoy’s epic War & Peace into an hour-long piece of dance-theater. On the face, it seems almost comical, absurd. But with theater like this, it forces one to strip everything but the essentials away, and we are left with a very raw, very real piece of theater, that somehow, through it all, remains true to the original text.
Building on the wonderful world of a play within a play, Stage Kiss takes the audience behind the scenes with as much surprise and fun as Noises Off. There are the actors (two of whom were lovers 20 years ago), there are the characters they play (two of whom were lovers 20 years ago), and then – in additional layers — there is the impact of the role on the one who must perform it.
The story is sort of like a film-noir version of Comedy of Errors – instead of ever Plautus play rolled into one, it’s every noir hit rolled into one. The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, various early Hitchcock . . . .
Chicago Opera Theater offers us, with this concert, a chance to see two stunning chamber pieces, one composed by Romantic Robert Schumann, the other composed by the more modern, Czech composer Leo Janáček. The only accompaniment is a piano, and the only set is a screen with projections. And they are intimate and beautiful – even when the overall production asks the audience to draw comparisons between the pieces that seem a stretch.
The costumes, makeup, and set all create this bizarre world, within which characters refuse to look at each other, staring straight at the audience, or start trembling and convulsing, throwing tables and chairs, and behaving in generally outlandish and weird manners. It’s sort of like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert on a very heavy Ibogaine trip. And it works so well.
This material could be really vital, really brutal, heart wrenching stuff. But instead it’s just entertainment. It doesn’t really grapple with the issues, you don’t leave the theater thinking about how our school systems need to be changed, updated, for the times.
A Little Night Music is something of a novelty: it is a musical set completely in waltz time (technically 3/4, although there is also some 6/8). This makes it sound like it could get monotonous: how varied can music be if it’s nothing but one time signature? But America has never had a problem with music in only one time signature (has Lady Gaga done anything that’s not 4/4 yet?), and what’s more, Sondheim’s music is so rich, so varied, so clever and complex, that it is anything but monotony.
The intricacies of plot and character are manifold, as one would expect from a play of this era, and moreover of Shaw. His wit is clever as ever, and his eye is particularly keenly pointed towards British society. He dissects what money is to those who don’t have it, what it’s not to those who do, and what sorts of things people would have to go through to get it, or keep it.