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Book, Music, and Lyrics by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe

Directed by James Beaudry

Music Direction by Kory Danielson

Choreography by Sawyer Smith

Produced by Kokandy Productions

Playing at Theater Wit, Chicago

Heathers Musical is So Very

Discussions of the 1988 movie Heathers usually include some statement to the effect that it couldn’t get made today. And yet, a musical adaptation which ran off-Broadway was developed from 2010-2013, and now, Kokandy Productions is bringing it to Chicago in a highly enjoyable new production directed by James Beaudry. The movie, written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann, is a black comedy/thriller about a teenage girl who assists her serial killer boyfriend in purging her school of douchebags, until she realizes they’re actually the biggest monsters of all. Having predated most of the famous school massacres, the movie has a kind of tainted innocence to it, and ten years ago, this musical may not have been so funny. But in 2016, when people have become jaded to school shootings and irritated with all the pointless politics and platitudes surrounding their aftermath, a musical which ramps up the satirical elements in Heathers and adds a plethora of hilarious one-liners of its own is most welcome.

One of the first changes made by the musical is to give an extended backstory to our anti-hero, Veronica (Courtney Mack). In her opening song, “Beautiful,” she wonders as a high school senior how all the kids she grew up with, including herself, have become so dysfunctional and unpleasant. Westerburg High School’s social scene is now dominated by a tyrannical clique of girls made up of the charismatic Heather Chandler (Jacquelyne Jones), the jealous and bulimic Heather Duke (Hayley Jane Schafer), and the emotionally fragile Heather McNamara (Rochelle Therrien). Seeking their protection, Veronica offers her services as a forger, and they enjoy giving her a makeover. But participating in the Heathers’ cruel pranks on her former friends bothers Veronica, and she finds herself becoming attracted to J.D. (Chris Ballou), the new loner kid whose penchant for namedropping nineteenth century French poets makes him seem so much more mature. When Veronica incurs Heather Chandler’s wrath, she decides to throw away her reputation by having sex with J.D., but decides immediately afterwards that she should go crawling back to the Heathers.

J.D. isn’t pleased with Veronica’s wavering, and semi-jokingly prepares a mug of Drano to serve Chandler. Veronica actually does bring Chandler the poison, whether deliberately or not is ambiguous, and Chandler dies. J.D. suggest forging a suicide note, which Veronica does, and they get away with it. The school embraces Chandler as a martyr and vows to make itself a healtheir environment in her honor. J.D. suggests making a habit of disguising murders as suicides, and Veronica sets her sights on the football players (Denzel Tsopnang and Garrett Lutz) who attempt to rape her. By intermission, Veronica’s bloodlust has mostly been sated, but J.D.’s is just beginning, and he’s becoming abusive and controlling. Heather Duke now rules the school as harshly as her predecessor, and the adults are more obnoxious than ever, as they use their supposedly troubled youth as an excuse for grandstanding. As suicide becomes the cool thing to do among the very students Veronica had told herself she was protecting, she realizes she is in a very bad position.

Besides being magnetic performers, Mack and Ballou put their own spin on the characters originated by Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. Book writers Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe tried to make Veronica more sympathetic by having her come from a working class home, but they also give her the power ballads “Fight for Me” which is about how turned on she gets watching J.D. beat up the jocks, and “Dead Girl Walking,” in which she aggressively seduces J.D. after breaking into his house. Mack’s Veronica wants to get along with people, but is selfish, easily swayed by stronger personalities, and craves a dominant friend who will take responsibility for her decisions. Ballou is much larger and has a lower-pitched voice than Slater did in 1988. It’s easy to see why Veronica thought he was too far-sighted for high school drama, and his psychosis takes a long time to totally eclipse his charm. But when it does, he’s a disturbing villain, and it turns out his view of high school is the narrowest out of everybody’s. While J.D. gets as many snarky lines as the rest of the cast, his songs, like Sweeney Todd’s, are mostly straightforward angst, only made humorous by his pretentious use of metaphors.

Veronica and J.D.’s story is interesting enough to sustain a musical (and Beaudry keeps it easy to follow), but what makes this adaptation of Heathers work so well is the viciously clever humor, and the peppy songs used to deliver it. The Heathers, looking great in Robert Kuhn’s costumes, brilliantly deliver the 80s synthetic pop “Candy Store,” while the impossibly stupid jocks croon the hilariously filthy “Blue.” After Veronica and J.D. fake the jocks’ murders as a gay suicide pact, the second act opens with the gospel song “My Dead Gay Son,” which includes a description of the dead as “happy bear cubs in the Lord’s big den.” At this point the musical ramps up its satire of clueless feel-good initiatives, when the movie was drifting into becoming a psychological drama. The play doesn’t avoid that completely, but it does keep the satire much more prominent. Besides that changes in the world since 1988 require this show to take a more audacious approach, it also has much more to poke fun at. Nonetheless, the concluding confrontation and resolution are quite dramatically satisfying. Heathers ultimately, and somewhat surprisingly, has a quite positive message, and Kokandy’s production is infectious. No familiarity with the movie is required to enjoy it, but fans will be very pleased.

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Book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green

Music by Charles Strouse

Lyrics by Lee Adams

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.

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By William Shakespeare

Directed by Jonathan Munby

Produced by Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Shakespeare’s Othello is Still Full of Surprises

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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