Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle written to demonstrate the flight of the immigrant laborer in Chicago’s stockyards ended up getting the public to demand reforms in the food processing slaughterhouses. Adapter and director Matt Foss has mounted a moving and vividly blood curling adaptation of Sinclair’s The Jungle with emphasis on the toll and exploitation of the immigrant laborers by American society.
Read MorePlaywright Lynn Nottage has emerged as a master story teller with a keen instinct for developing characters. Her six characters in Intimate Apparel each warrant a play of their own but only Esther (the empathetic Kelly Owens) gets Nottage’s focus. We quickly love Esther. We become fully engaged as we meet Esther who is a thirty-five year old single African-American women living in lower Manhattan in 1905 in Mrs. Dickson’s (Frances Wilkerson’s) boarding house.
Read MoreAlmost unknown in America, Paul Abraham was the toast of Berlin in the late 1920’s – 30’s with his jazz-infused, sexy dancing operettas. He combined the classical German-styled operettas in the tradition of Franz Lehar with the contemporary jazz style popular in Weimar Germany. His whimsical musical style included rich ballads, tantalizing ‘show-stoppers,’ snappy dance numbers, tangos, as well as haunting lover songs such as the haunting love song: “Toujours l’amour.”
Read MoreThe Morrison clan lives in a cold water tiny flat in the East End of Glasgow in the 1930’s. Maggie (Lori Myers in a tour de force performance) is the care-worn burned-out matriarch who finds herself caring for her five children including two “wee-uns,” a teenaged boy Ernie (Michael Saguto), an adult daughter Jenny (Ellie Reed) and her oldest married son Alec (Curtis Jackson) plus Granny Morrison (Maggie Cain). Maggie is the glue that hold things together as the clan struggles to survive in the tiny flat with limited funds since John Morrison (Scot West) is out of work and on the dole
Read MoreWhen playwright David Rogers got permission to use any of the hundreds of TV show episodes from Paul Henning, a stage comedy emerged and when Rogers (with help from his daughter upon his death) decided to create a musical version of The Beverly Hillbillies, they turned to an expert musical composer, Chicagoan Gregg Opelka who has penned many smart, tuneful musicals including Sour Du Jour and the Singing Cowboy.
This collaboration resulted in a slick, fun, and, of course, tuneful Broadway musical. This is not a country or bluegrass musical but rather a character driven musical that does feature country-ish tunes depiciting the Ozark hillbillies – the Clampets but it also contains songs about the Beverly Hills characters. The banker, his wife, the secretary and the folks who run the private school as well as the grifters who try to extort money from the Clampett’s all get their songs.
Putting a frank discussion about sex on stage is a tricky endeavor at best. And to mount a play about sex with little sex is even trickier. But Bruce Norris, always one to spark controversy, loves to make audiences uncomfortable as their discomfort stimulates them to think about his themes. He has done that in The Qualms.
Read MoreDead Man’s Cell Phone is a play that is part mystery, based on a “what if” happening and part fable in a naturalistic motif. The play has an electronic character (a cell phone) that is a portal into one life. Ruhl demonstrates how much an extension of our lives cell phones have become.
Read MoreUntil Rachel Rockwell and the creatives at the Goodman Theatre have put their considerable skills and assists in use has there been a major remount and revised production of Brigadoon. This 1947 Broadway musical and a hit 1954 film with Gene Kelly, with fabulous Scottish influenced music by Frederick Loewe, upon the lush lyrics and fine book by Alan Jay Lerner, has emerged into a tuneful evening of magical musical theatre! This sweetly charming ethnic fable contains wonderful dances and several exquisite romantic ballads but the sheer charm and wholesomeness of the morality indeed get us to believe that anything is possible if you love hard enough. There is much to love in this fabulous production.
Read MoreWe meet Ulysses (Darrell W. Cox), a dirty middle aged man who appears to have given up on life as he struggles to survive. He stopped bathing and he only wears an apron around the house. He eats spoiled meat, breathes with the aid of an oxygen machine. He appears to be dying. Katie-Bell Springmann’s set design sure sets up the tone for this drama.
Read MoreMusic and Lyrics by Sting Book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey Directed by Joe Mantello Musical Direction by Ron
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