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.
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The show’s cast of non-Equity players danced superbly and the main characters were first rate. Equity should do something about such terrific talent working for way under what their worth before all Equity tours disappear.
But for Chicago audiences, Bullets Over Broadway plays as a nicely paced, well danced show with funny lines (Woody Allen at his funniest) and spot-on dancers particularly the dancing gangsters.
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Ross’s retellings of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi are a lot more similar to the fan-work genre today known as “The Abridged Series.” He comments more about the absurdities of the story, and drops in a lot more humorous references to the prequels, but also makes a greater effort to capture the emotional heart of the trilogy. Ross also throws in references to the memes and other bits of fan activity that have emerged since he created this show, prior to the rise of the internet or Episodes II and III, but these moments seldom overwhelm the basic point of telling the story.
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A new season for Eclipse Theatre means a new playwright to be spotlighted for a year, and Stephen Adly Guirgis is just the one to demonstrate theatre’s continuing relevance and vitality. From The Last Days of Judas Iscariot to The Motherfucker with the Hat, the New York-based Guirgis often wrestles with themes of responsibility, guilt, and justice in plays with a Christian framework and colorful language employed by a diverse array of urban characters. So, too, is the case with his early work, Jesus Hopped the “A” Train, which starts Eclipse’s season with an emotionally piercing production directed by Anish Jethmalani.
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Even Longer & Father Away is a fantastical quest of tropes in search of a cliché: the angry, young man gone native—accompanied by his comedic confidant, his young-but-mature sister, and her happy-go-lucky boyfriend—quests stubbornly for what he thinks he needs, but instead encounters a wise, mystical woman on a mountaintop whose perfectly felicitous stories lead him exactly to what he always really needed.
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Dreamgirls is a manic, polished and classy music and dance romp through Motown. You’ll quickly get excited by the sheer energy and deep emotional truth in this modern operetta. Powerful and richly evocative voices nail the tunes as the nuances of the struggles to attain and survive fame and fortune in the music world is sensitively presented
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Don’t Make Me Over is essentially a playlist of some of the best and most memorable Dionne Warwick songs performed by professional singers and a live, 8-piece band. Additionally, the dozen-plus hits are interspersed with short vignettes from Warwick’s life that are introduced and commented upon by the “mistress of ceremonies” Ms. Divine (Alexis J. Rogers) who guides us with a boisterous charisma down Warwick memory lane, often adding a endearing zest to the proceedings with her sharp sense of humor and interesting anecdotes. Accompanying Ms. Divine are “three Dionne’s” adorned in splendid dresses who each lend their voices to some of Warwick’s songs.
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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.
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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.
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With the players screaming and foul-mouthed dialog plus many black-outs for set changes and weird visuals and strobe lighting, the confusing plot just rambles on toward a sort of redemptive ending that finds the Internet girl being transformed back to a human after sacrificing her soul mate to save the world. Of course, by that time I had become anxious for this convoluted work to end after it self-destructed early on
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