Produced by Filter Theatre and Chicago Shakespeare Theater
A Play as an Excuse for Play
Filter Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night is billed as a “raucous” hybrid between Shakespeare’s comedy, a rock concert, and an improv sketch show. That kind of humor is best-suited to people, probably mostly young ones, who are familiar with the play, but want to see it used in a highly informal manner. That’s not a bad idea with a comedy, but the Filter production, now at Chicago Shakespeare as part of the Shakespeare 400 Festival, hardly derives any of its humor from Shakespeare’s text, or even his characters and situations. Instead, the six actors and two musicians use the play’s heavy focus on music (the food of love) as an excuse to play with sound for ninety minutes.
Midnight Cowboy is one of the most famous and highly-acclaimed classic movies for both its storytelling and for the pushing boundaries of what was considered proper to depict in 1969 (it originally was rated X). However, Lifeline Theatre is mostly in the business of adapting novels for the stage, and James Leo Herlihy’s book is quite different from the film adaptation people are used to. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; theatre is less bound to literal representations and allows characters to be re-interpreted by different actors. But Lifeline may have bit off more than it could chew in this original adaptation. While film uses whiteouts to indicate flashbacks and clearly shows different locations, adaptor Chris Hainsworth’s script is difficult to follow, and the audience’s prior knowledge of the movie is unlikely to be of much help.
Zach Livingston (Joe Buck) and Adam Marcantoni (Ratso). Photos by Suzanne Plunkett
What is the same is that Joe Buck (Zach Livingston) leaves his native Texas in hope of becoming a high-end prostitute in New York City for an exclusively female clientele. He’s definitely got the face, physique, and charm, but he’s dumb as a brick and easy to manipulate. Though he manages to get laid within minutes of arriving, he winds up giving money to his customer, and soon realizes he has no idea what he’s doing. He appears to catch a lucky break when the chronically coughing cripple Enrico Salvatore “Ratso” Rizzo (Adam Marcantoni) directs him to a pimp he calls O’Daniel (Gregory Madden), but the man turns out to be a crackpot preacher, and Ratso makes off with Joe’s money. When Joe encounters Ratso again later, both their fortunes have declined even further, and they form an odd friendship/chaste romance, with Ratso as Joe’s new, but equally inept manager.
Livingston (Joe) and Megan DeLay (Cass)
But it takes nearly until Act II for the play to get to this familiar ground. Most of Act I centers on Joe’s relationship with Perry (Jack Miggins), a gay prostitute who specialized in sadism, and who attempted to teach Joe to exploit the fantasies the johns (or janes) aren’t comfortable acknowledging. Usually Lifeline’s set designs are flexible enough to make changes in location clear, and Joe Schermoly’s has plenty of sliding panels and transformable furniture, but director Christopher M. Walsh couldn’t find a way to communicate where or when these scenes fit into the story. I later learned that they occurred while Joe was still in Texas, but they are interspersed with O’Daniel’s preaching and earlier flashbacks, and are structured in a way that makes Perry appear to comment on Joe’s transition to servicing gay men and tutelage under Rizzo, which happens in New York. Furthermore, while Miggins fully transforms himself vocally and in his mannerisms to deliver Perry’s snide coldness, the fight choreography between him and Livingston isn’t quite believable, which undermines what is supposed to be a significant moment on Joe’s backstory.
Gregory Madden (O’Daniel) and Livingston (Joe)
Besides that Hainsworth and Walsh attempt to borrow from the book while maintaining the movie’s heavy use of flashbacks and audio association, they also let characters prattle on for too long. Most of the creeps Joe meets are also bores, and while his reaction to the closeted elderly businessman Towny (Patrick Blashill) is more sympathetic than in other versions due to the man’s sheer obnoxiousness, O’Daniel’s preaching was not something we needed fourth and fifth helpings of. Megan DeLay, as one of the few women of means interested in Joe, calls him a symbol to his face, and composes her own literary critique of her interactions with him in real time. Oddly, it’s a bit of a relief when Joe is allowed to talk for extended periods, because he’s one of the few people who’s not too egotistical for his reflections to have value.
Zach Livingston (Joe Buck)
Despite this adaptation’s flaws, there are good things about it. Livingston and Marcantoni are quite appealing actors, and having Joe Buck before you in the flesh does produce a much more visceral effect than seeing him in a movie. He’s more vulnerable like this. Sarah Espinoza’s sound design gives Blashill pleasant and poignant country songs to play on his guitar, much like the movie’s soundtrack. The final scene is moving, and Rizzo’s gruff mother-hen attitude stands out from the cruelty and indifference of the other characters. People who have read the book will probably also have a much easier time following the action and understanding what is intended with each character. But on its own, this adaptation is wobbly, and the choices in production don’t help illuminate the script.
Champaign County native Mark Roberts has made a name for himself by producing and writing for hit TV sit-coms Mike & Molly and Two and a Half Men, as well as dark stage dramas like Parasite Drag (which his company is staging this fall). Now he has returned to Chicago to star in the regional premiere of his play New Country, which is billed as a comedy, but has some very dark aspects. There’s plenty of humor in this story about the inner circle of a young country star, and structurally, the early part of the play bears more than a passing resemblance to Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor, although its humor is never farcical. But the seriousness of the situations and suffering Roberts raises in his play isn’t given the focus it needs in its brief ninety minutes, resulting in a show that is a comedy in a similar sense to how Anton Chekhov used the word to describe his plays.
Directed and Choreographed by Christopher Pazdernik
Produced by Porchlight Music Theatre, Chicago
No Bumpy Night Here—Applause is a Big Winner
Porchlight Music Theatre undersells itself by referring to its Porchlight Revisits series as “minimally staged.” The three-night-only shows present older, rarely seen musicals on the set of Porchlight’s currently running show (in this case, Far From Heaven), and the actors carry their books. However, at the opening of Applause, the magnificent performers hardly needed any assistance. Not only were their songs exquisite, they also knew the complex choreography Christopher Pazdernik created for the show’s two big numbers, their costumes were just as good as in any full staging, and the orchestra, under the direction of Nick Sula, sounded so good, it’s a mystery why this musical ever faded from public consciousness.
The terms “audience participation” and “group discussion” tend to get bad reactions from theatre-goers, but when used by a knowledgeable director for the right purpose, they can have rewarding results. The Compass, a new show devised by Michald Rohd for Steppenwolf’s Young Adult series, asks the audience to directly grapple with such thorny problems as determinism, and whether free will is relevant in the criminal justice system. With the guidance of well-trained actor-facilitators, the audience become jurors in a fascinating case set a few years in the future. The issues raised are fodder for passionate discussion, and the play itself is the sort of strong story-telling which inspires young people to see the possibilities in using art to explore political issues.
Ariana Burks (Marjan). Photos by Michael Courier.
Ada (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadal), a developer, and her entrepreneur partner (Tim Hopper), have launched an app called Compass. This program mines all the information a user enters in social media accounts, and can be used to make predictions about what a person would do in any given situation. Not “should” or “will” do, the entrepreneur is careful to point out, but “would.” They market it as a way to remove the stress from making decisions. Why go through all the trouble of thinking something out and agonizing over uncertainties, trade-offs, and missed opportunities, when you have a device that tells you what decision you would inevitably make anyway? It not only saves time, it saves emotional energy. Best of all, Compass can be linked to your friends’ accounts and celebrities’ public profiles, so you can learn what other people would do in your place, as well, and what they perceive you would do.
Cruz Gonzalez-Cadal (Ada) and Tim Hopper (Entrepreneur)
Marjan (Ariana Burks), the teenage girl on trial, used Compass to arrive at her decision to call in a fake bomb threat to her school. The result was the usual chaos: wasted police resources which could have been used on actual emergencies, wasted resources for a school system that was already stretched to the breaking point, unexpected disruption for working parents of special needs students who couldn’t simply go home, and so forth. However, Marjan is no mere prankster. Over the course of her trial, we see that she is a smart young activist who has become frustrated that her complaints about the school’s safety have been ignored. To shake the adults out of their complacency, Marjan wrote a detailed guide to smuggling guns into the building, which she claims is already common knowledge among the students, anyway, and happens frequently. Naturally, her teacher (Hopper) refused to publish it, so Marjan put it online, figuring the other students would be mature enough to understand her point, and grown-ups would finally address the issue. Things did not go as she hoped.
Emilio G. Robles facilitating.
Marjan is now facing a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in an adult prison if we convict her. Her defense is that she would not have made her decision if she had not become so reliant on Compass. The prosecutor says that’s nonsense. From a legal perspective, Marjan would clearly be guilty if not for the Compass issue, and her choice of defense is a long-shot, but the moral justification for the crime itself is arguable. As for Compass, it’s clearly a way to get people thinking about the process by which they make decisions, and how much responsibility we have for that. It’s an unsettling subject for people of any age, and one well worth exploring.
The audience is divided into ten sections, and together, each section makes up a single juror. Throughout, the facilitators give us a few minutes to discuss what we’ve seen, and that time limit keeps the debate much more focused than the usual audience talk-backs. The high quality of the acting also inspires the audience to take its role seriously; Burks is completely believable, and the facilitators balance a fine line between parody and earnestness. At the performance I attended, the final vote was close, and the arguments from both the audience members and their facilitator proxies were intense, but respectful and thought-provoking. Though Compass is fictional, it is true that people have theoretical control over the algorithms which determine what information they receive online, but they usually fail to exercise that control. This is a commendable instance in which a youth theatre show has made a difficult, complex question understandable and relevant to teens without insulting their intelligence, or ours. The deliberations may have different results at the high school showings, but the balance of the viewpoints presented is sure to keep up the quality of the discourse. There are a few public performances remaining, so older people have the chance to weigh in, too.
After a string of successes for the Shakespeare 400 Festival, our own Chicago Shakespeare Theater is finally mounting its first original production of the year, and it’s magnificent. The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is one of the entries in Shakespeare’s body of work which is receiving the most attention over the course of the festival; the Q Brothers, whose Christmas Carol returned to Navy Pier over the holidays, will also be reviving their Othello adaptation later this year, and the Hamburg Ballet recently visited the Harris Theater with theirs. But for the text itself, a better display could hardly be found than this modern-dress production envisioned by British director Jonathan Munby. Though Othello is a simple story which takes a long time to unfold, James Vincent Meredith in the title role and Michael Milligan as Iago are so fascinating to watch that the time flies by, and Shakespeare’s language sounds fully alive.
Photos by Liz Lauren
Iago, as he is quick to tell his flunky, Roderigo (Fred Geyer), hates his commander, Othello. When an opening on Othello’s staff opened up recently, Othello promoted Michael Cassio (Luigi Sottile), a man with academic credentials and not much else, over the much more experienced Iago. (In the original text, Iago claims “have looked upon the world four times seven years,” but Munby changes it to “six times seven.”) Roderigo says he is in love with Desdemona (Bethany Jillard), the young, white Venetian girl Othello has just married, and Iago perceives an opportunity to take revenge on Othello by stirring up racial tension. That plan is partially thwarted when the Duke (Melissa Carlson) decides Othello is too crucial an asset for defending Cyprus from the Turks to be disciplined for marrying without permission, but Iago conceals his betrayal, and now sees Othello’s sex-life as the key to destroying him.
Luigi Sottile (Cassio) and Milligan (Iago)
When Othello and his retinue arrive to take command in Cyprus, Iago notices the friendliness between Desdemona and Cassio, and engenders a plot to destroy Cassio, as well. Pretending to be friendly, he pressures Cassio into getting drunk and disgracing himself. He then advises Cassio to regain his reputation with Othello by using Desdemona as an advocate. Meanwhile, Iago subtly plants the idea in Othello’s mind that Cassio and Desdemona are having an affair. Partly by exploiting lucky circumstances and partly due to Othello’s insecurity and paranoia, Iago’s plan succeeds. Othello vows to take terrible revenge, and Iago promises to assist him like a good friend should.
James Meredith (Othello) and Milligan (Iago)
Meredith, as Othello, begins the play seeming to be a sensible, good-humored man of enormous patience. Because Othello does not have nearly as many asides as Iago, we only gradually come to see that this is as much as false outward self as Iago’s honesty; the real Othello is wrathful, whiny, and extremely dangerous. Fight choreographer Matt Hawkins has designed several hair-raising moments, but one of the finest is right before intermission, when Othello attacks Iago. As the most famous villain in theatre, Milligan is disturbingly realistic. Time and time again, he makes Iago’s half-truths and observations sound reasonable and persuasive. No magically far-sighted schemer, he lives in the moment, using only slight suggestions, which are as much in his face and body language as his words, to spin things his way. In the three-hour long play, Othello and Iago don’t get many chances to focus directly on each other, but when they do, the results are engrossing.
Bethany Jillard (Desdemona) and Jessie Fisher (Emilia)
Though Jessie Fisher’s skills as an actress are well-known to Chicago theatre-goers, it was a pleasant surprise to see how much she makes of her role as Iago’s wife, Emilia. In Munby’s vision, Emilia is also a soldier, and it seems during her first conversation with Desdemona that they had hardly known each other before. Therefore, Emilia’s allegiance is initially whole-heartedly with Iago, and she is the character who undergoes the greatest change. Luigi Sottile, as Cassio, seems exactly the street-dumb golden boy Iago describes him as, and Iago is as surprised as anybody to see what happens when he gets drunk. Bethany Jillard’s Desdemona is immature, but is able to hide it at times. She seems eager to prove she’s not a silly girl who was taken in by Othello’s tall tales, and yet, she is weirdly resistant to acknowledging the danger of her situation after Othello explicitly threatens her. There are a whole lot of characters who are not what they are.
Meredith (Othello) and Jillard (Desdemona)
Though Munby’s modern setting does not revolutionize the play, it does remove a potential barrier between the characters and the audience. Inevitably, the focus will be on Iago, who has by far the most lines, but Munby begins the play with Othello and Desdemona’s marriage. One only needs to take a single look at the brutalist façade Alexander Dodge has designed to represent her home in Venice to understand why Desdemona leapt at the chance for adventure. Lindsay Jones’s sound design works mightily to convince us that the Turkish invasion of Cyprus matters, but even for those who know the story, it is possible to get caught up in the moment. Philip Rosenberg’s flood lights are a realistic part of the set which, rather than highlighting its artifice, makes it and Linda Cho’s camouflage military costumes blend in much more with the fog of war.
Once the play transitions to Cyprus, we see nothing but the utilitarian, stark military base. There, the risk of violence is omnipresent, and yet, there is nothing that resembles romantic notions of glory. A common complaint about Othello is that the plot is linear, but slow-moving. Munby raises the tension before intermission in fits and starts, choosing to focus on building his characters. The pay-off is well worth it. Though his cast’s interpretation of Othello, Iago, and the rest is not definitive, their choices during the two climactic scenes of violence provide immensely satisfying insight into each of these ambiguous, multi-faceted characters. Shakespeare was a fully mature dramatist and poet when he wrote Othello, and the cast delivers some of his best language rivetingly. Those who are new to the play will have an ideal introduction to it at Chicago Shakespeare, and those who know it will find it still holds surprises.
Thirteen years ago, Avenue Q perfectly captured the hopes and fears of recent college graduates, and it remains a perfect portrait of early-to-mid twenty-somethings to this day. But those people who first saw themselves in the hapless Muppets are now on the cusp of middle-age, and having significantly shaped the paths their lives will likely unfold on, they might be wondering whether any decisions they are likely to make will still have massive impacts on their futures. For those people, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s new musical If/Then, now in its first national tour, offers a reflection on where they are now. The story, which depicts two alternate timelines, is one of the more interesting concepts to come from a Broadway stage recently, and this tour features two of the leading Broadway actors of their generation: Jackie Burns, of the tour of Wicked, and Anthony Rapp, who played Mark Cohen in the first Broadway production of Rent.
By William Inge Directed by Cody Estle At Raven Theatre Powerful Depression Era drama a rare classic William Inge (1913-73) was a playwright/novelist best know for writing Picnic and Bus Stop. His 1959 lost gem, A Loss of Roses, is being remounted by Raven Theatre in a strong production under the tight direction of Cody … Read more
Joseph Calleja (Romeo) and Susanna Phillips (Juliet). Photo credit Todd Rosenberg.
Music by Charles Gounod
Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré
Based on the Tragedy by William Shakespeare
Directed by Bartlett Sher
Conducted by Emmanuel Villaume
Produced by the Lyric Opera of Chicago
Shakespeare’s Lovers in the Romantic Era
The Shakespeare 400 Festival celebrates the innumerable adaptations and works inspired by the Bard almost as much as it does the originals, so it’s no surprise to see the Lyric Opera make an outstanding contribution. Broadway director Bartlett Sher’s production of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette premiered in Salzburg, but this is the first opportunity Chicago audiences will have to see his beautiful staging. This is also an exciting opportunity to hear Gounod’s rich, dramatic score, which while distinctly rooted in the romantic grand opera revivals of 1867 France, includes enough coloratura at times to evidence a baroque influence. Excelling in both spectacle and music, Roméo et Juliette is a magnificent opera, as well as a fascinating look into how Shakespeare was adapted in the nineteenth century.
Joshua Hopkins (Mercutio) and Jason Slaydon (Tybalt)
That said, the libretto by Gounod’s trusted collaborators, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, should be approached as an adaptation. Having been inspired directly by Shakespeare, it is more true to Romeo and Juliet than Vincenzo Bellini’s 1830 I Capuleti e i Montecchi, the most popular musical adaption up to that point, but it still tells a quite different story. As expected, since it’s in French, nearly every line is paraphrased. There are also a few fixes to the plot, most of which are for the better, such as Lord Capulet (Philip Horst) telling Romeo (Jospeh Celleja until March 8, then Eric Cutler) directly that he is welcome to remain at the masque. But the story also focuses much more tightly on its titular protagonists. The score begins with a heavy march and the entire hollow-eyed chorus delivering the prologue about the infamous two houses. We then transition immediately to Capulet’s masque. Though it is dramatically justifiable for an opera to eliminate the servants’ thumb-biting banter, which isn’t funny and has given generations of high schoolers a bad first impression of Shakespeare, it also substantially alters the dramatic world of the play. This Verona actually is the locale of the kind of melodramatic pot-boiler Shakespeare’s teenage characters imagine themselves to be living in, instead of being a world powered by affected adolescent bravado. But that’s almost just as well, since an opera score is beyond most teenagers, anyway.
Photo credit Andrew Cioffi
So what is the effect of having an older-looking Romeo and Juliet? When Susanna Phillips enters the masque in a daring pink gown, her flirtatious poise is reminiscent of the character Hanna Glawari in The Merry Widow, and not just because Juliet’s “Ah! Je veux vivre” is a waltz. This Juliet is very much in command of herself, but Phillips’s voice really comes into her own during the aria “Dieu! quel frisson court dans mes veines!” the scene in which Juliet contemplates taking the sleeping potion. Sher has imagined it as a hallucinatory nightmare, and the staging combined with the variations in Gounod’s music in this portion combine to provide Phillips with something worth her effort in exploring. Joseph Calleja’s Romeo is a bear of a man who, striding about nimbly in a black trench coat, is clearly the leader of his band. Calleja’s voice is sweet, but incredibly loud, and his hymn to Juliet during what would normally be the balcony scene (Ah! lève-toi, soleil!) is enough to blow the audience away both due to its force and the amazement inspired by his control. Obviously, it’s an effect which works best during his solos. Marianne Crebassa also gives an outstandingly melodious aria as Stephano, a footservant for Romeo invented by the adaptation, and as Mercutio, Joshua Hopkins gives the Queen Mab aria a sinister twist while delighting in its verbal complexity.
Philip Horst (Lord Capulet) and the ensemble
Sher has set the production in the gothic revival of the eighteenth century, providing many outstanding visuals. Catherine Zuber’s costumes and Sarah Hatten’s wigs and makeup are no less a feast of color for staying on the somber side, and the fencing choreographed by B.H. Barry between Jason Slayden’s Tybalt and Crebassa, Hopkins, and Calleja/Cutler is among the most thrilling seen on any stage. However, during this pivotal scene, the acting has a foot in Gounod’s day as far as non-verbal reactions go, and Sher’s decision to use only a single set (Michael Yeargan) for the entire production starts to show its drawbacks. Chorus Master Michael Black has done amazing work guiding the ensemble through moments of high drama; their “Personne! Persone! Le page aura fui!” in particular sounds very similar to “He Trusted in God” from Handel’s Messiah, demonstrating the influence of church music on Gounod. Conductor Emmanuel Villaume ensures that no matter what is happening onstage, the orchestral music is a sturdy pillar around which the production wraps itself. This is a late Romantic-era adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which for all the similarities in plot, is a quite different story. But it sounds and looks beautiful, and in the context of the Shakespeare 400 Festival, is a welcome exhibition of how the Bard’s place in popular culture has changed over time.
Written & Directed by Jackie Taylor At Black Ensemble Theater, Chicago The Sensational Soulful Sixties is spectacular entertainment Playing in running repertory with Doo Wop Shoo Bop, The Sensational Soulful Sixties move from the smooth Doo Wop sound into the heights and essence of “soul.” From Sam Cook’s “You Send Me,” “Chain Gang,” and “Cupid,” … Read more
The audience is divided into ten sections, and together, each section makes up a single juror. Throughout, the facilitators give us a few minutes to discuss what we’ve seen, and that time limit keeps the debate much more focused than the usual audience talk-backs. The high quality of the acting also inspires the audience to take its role seriously; Burks is completely believable, and the facilitators balance a fine line between parody and earnestness. At the performance I attended, the final vote was close, and the arguments from both the audience members and their facilitator proxies were intense, but respectful and thought-provoking. Though Compass is fictional, it is true that people have theoretical control over the algorithms which determine what information they receive online, but they usually fail to exercise that control. This is a commendable instance in which a youth theatre show has made a difficult, complex question understandable and relevant to teens without insulting their intelligence, or ours. The deliberations may have different results at the high school showings, but the balance of the viewpoints presented is sure to keep up the quality of the discourse. There are a few public performances remaining, so older people have the chance to weigh in, too.
Once the play transitions to Cyprus, we see nothing but the utilitarian, stark military base. There, the risk of violence is omnipresent, and yet, there is nothing that resembles romantic notions of glory. A common complaint about Othello is that the plot is linear, but slow-moving. Munby raises the tension before intermission in fits and starts, choosing to focus on building his characters. The pay-off is well worth it. Though his cast’s interpretation of Othello, Iago, and the rest is not definitive, their choices during the two climactic scenes of violence provide immensely satisfying insight into each of these ambiguous, multi-faceted characters. Shakespeare was a fully mature dramatist and poet when he wrote Othello, and the cast delivers some of his best language rivetingly. Those who are new to the play will have an ideal introduction to it at Chicago Shakespeare, and those who know it will find it still holds surprises.
