MUST SEE

Artistry abounds as one can expect from a Marriott Theatre production. Rather than offering a standard issue cookie cutter version of Director Hal Prince’s landmark original, Alex Sanchez’s fresh and intelligent choices bring Evita’s story to exciting life again on stage.

It seems like Iago has a challenge in bringing him down, which provides the story with much-needed tension. The non-opening night I attended, Chicago Shakespeare had achieved the rare feat of attracting a truly diverse audience. Even better, it satisfied them. Othello need not be interpreted as a morality tale, but having done so, the Q Brothers made it their own, and told it with enviable skill.

Besides the inter-personal drama, the question at the core of the play is whether pop-culture should be regarded as a guilty pleasure at best, or whether it can be embraced whole-heartedly by people whose tastes also include the classics. The Book Club Play itself is a people-pleasing comedy which never gets too heavy or challenging. However, it is done so well, that, like one of the books under discussion, it may be the right thing at the right time to be a greatly rewarding experience.

By the end of Galileo’s century, autocrat Louis XIV was calling himself the Sun-King (because the world revolved around him), and Jesuits were using the newfound ease of predicting the movement of planets as evidence that the universe was designed by an intelligence who made humans in His own image. The complex relationship between science and power was one Brecht spent the latter part of his life reconsidering, and in The Life of Galileo, we are forced to reconsider it as well. Perhaps, in that sense, it fits into his conception of Epic Theatre after all.

The show does not shy away from the number of people killed, but its recounting of heroism and, in its own words, compassion and grace, works so well because it is so truthful. It’s nice to be reminded that in a crises situation, most of the strangers around you, such as the other audience members, will try to help. United Flight 232 communicates an uplifting message in a manner which resonates because it is told so convincingly, and in such a way that we feel its consequences.

Writers Theatre is entering a new phase in its history, with the opening of a $28 million dollar new theatre complex. So what better way for the literary-oriented company to celebrate than Arcadia, one of the densest works by one of the most famously intellectual contemporary playwrights?