This play will grab you and keep you interested throughout as we are surprised by who emerges as the hero and who becomes the villain. All three actors gave fines performances. I was impressed by the nuanced and vulnerable take on Bernard by Mark Smith. The Lake Effect give us insights into Indian American melting pot culture that finds old country values in conflict with the children’s American values.
Once upon a time, in a studio theater hidden away on Chicago’s Near West Side, a local storefront theatre troop decided to put on a play. Entitled The Silent Language, the little play had come very far and crossed many oceans and was, in fact, rather worn for wear. Yet the storefront troop was quite determined and, like water from a stone, managed to draw from the little play what magic and whimsy they could. Though sad to say, the little play was not as strong as they…
Playwright/actor Geoffrey Nauffts’ Next Fall tells the story of two gay men – Luke who believes in God and Adam who is anesthetist. Luke (Mark Jacob Chaitin) is a 20something actor while Adam ( Ryan Hamlin) is a 40something teacher. Luke’s dream is to be a working stage actor while Adam can’t make up his mind as to his life’s work. Despite their different views, their is a spark between them that allows them to coexist and live together. Their relationship is sexual, it is romantic, and it is true love.
Austrian conductor Andreas Mitisek’s boldly conceived staging of Astor Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer’s tango operita, Maria de Buenos Aires—now playing at the Harris Theater—lands like a phantom fist to the gut. Set to the sultry fluidity of the tango nuevo, this free-form adaptation of the original is a fierce piece of social realism which at once aspires to the dimensions of an expressionist myth.
In some ways, I think, it was an overly ambitious program that might have benefited in terms of consistency by being shorter and/or more focused. The rarely-played but engaging late Beethoven overture that opened the program, The Consecration of the House, gave some suggestions of being under-rehearsed:
It has been years since I’ve been able to enjoy this classic Broadway musical, Anything Goes. With all the blandly inept new musicals coming to Chicago over the last few years, it is a pleasure to see the National Tour of Roundabout Theatre Company’s Anything Goes. This toe-tapping nicely goofy show has all the elements of a wonderful musical.
It’s hard to imagine, but the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey—now being given a lively production by Porchlight Music Theatre—is over seventy-years-old. In other words, as much time now stands between us and Pal Joey’s debut 1940 production as stood between it and Gilbert and Sullivan’s earliest collaborations. And the fact that Porchlight has even secured exclusive rights from the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization to produce the original version almost begs the question: What, after all this time, does Pal Joey continue to offer?
A grand romp through the trials and tribulations of love that updates an ancient fable with modern foibles.
She teamed up with Hershey Felder who adapted and direct Mona Golabek’s one woman show, The Pianist of Willesden Lane, that utilizes Felder’s combination of storytelling with piano music. In this case, the story told by Golabek is the true story of her mother’s flight from Austria to England and eventually to the USA
One cannot help but be tickled pink by this at first, though it is questionable whether it has the lasting power of a 2 and a half hour opera. No orchestra here, just a string quartet, and pianist playing the orchestral reduction; but this actually substitutes rather well. And the company clearly has the voices to put on a greatly scaled down version of the opera. The staging, costuming, and choreography, I’m afraid to say, is another matter.