Filled with a superb cast, many of which have played in Spelling Bee before, the show is a laugh fest of the first order. This smart, hip, thoroughly engaging musical is by far the funniest musical to hit the stage in decades.
Filled with colorful memories and scary stories such as the ghost of the yellow dog and the emergence of Sutter’s ghost at the Charles family’s house, The Piano Lesson is a well crafted and totally engrossing play that keeps your ear open with a fine assortment of storytelling with interludes of blues and an amazing rhythmic work song…
Measure for Measure is a tough Shakespeare piece to get right and this hard working cast delivers a fine evening of theatre. Promethean Theatre Ensemble continues to grow as artists
Buried Child is a most macabre and perversely humorous tale of a Midwestern family burdened with a dark, terrible secret. When the grandson Vince (winning work from Dsvid Dastmalchian) and his girlfriend Shelly (the intense Helen Sadler) return to the family farm
While the plot seems relatively uninspired, the music keeps your attention with a diversity of styles and textures. Britten’s interest in atonality comes through during more conversational moments when the vocal lines can seem almost awkward and unmusical, but these passages are balanced by a couple beautiful more diatonic arias.
The cast manically works the material and the audience to get everyone to have a good time. This is a nice date show. The cast is getting valuable experience trying to make tough material funny.
Tom Williams discusses the following stage plays with Carl Amari: Busman’s Honeymoon at Lifeline Theatre; Crazy for You at the Theatre at the Center and Once on this Island at the Theatre Building Chicago. May 16, 2009 [audio:https://chicagocritic.com/newsite/audio/TOM0516.mp3]
Once On This Island is a classic fairy tale about Ti Moune (Melanie Brezill), a poor peasant girl who falls in love with an upper-class gentleman named Daniel (Sean Walton).
Crazy for You–it has one of the finest scores of all-time and it contains an outstanding book by Ken Ludwig that has cute situations, witty one-liners and colorful winning characters caught up in a classic romantic fable. The show ran for four years on Broadway and it has become a staple of regional theatre due to its funny book and great music.
It is valid that Broadway musicals can be pure escapist fluff—as long as the show’s production elements contain a bouncy score, cute characters and smart lyrics and creative choreography. Unfortunately, none of these elements are present in Legally Blonde.