7-18-08
Tales from the Road
I was in Washington, D.C. June 17-23 to attend the annual conference of the American Theatre Critics Association (see separate story in this issue). Among the half-dozen shows I attended, the stand-out was the most astonishing, athletic and compelling work of dance theatre I’ve ever seen: the Synetic Theater’s sexy, visceral, nearly-wordless 90-minute Carmen, performed by 13 dancer/actors in a round steel cage to a driving, dynamic all-original score (with amplified jazz/rock violin lead). This wasn’t your namby-pamby cleaned-up Bizet version of Carmen, but one providing all the lust, sweat, sex and murder of the original Prosper Merimee novella. I tell ya’, everyone stood up and cheered at the end of this one. If the MCA, Chicago Shakes or Court Theatre (or all three collaboratively) want a limit-pushing rendition of a classic, this is it. The 7-year-old Synetic Theater is an action-based troupe founded by husband/wife Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, originally from Tbilisi, Georgia.I also caught Anthony and Cleopatra, directed by Michael Kahn, at the Shakespeare Theatre, and who came cringing on stage in the semi-comic character role of The Messenger but Scott Parkinson. In addition to his more recent Broadway and Off-Broadway credits, Scott’s bio included the Chicago Shakes, Next, Writers’, Court, Journeymen, Goodman, Northlight and Shakespeare on the Green theatre companies. Parkinson also played Cassius in Julius Caesar, which rotated with Anthony and Cleopatra, April 26-July 6. Since I was with my ATCA group, I couldn’t wait at the stage door to say hello, but we swapped messages. Scott e-mailed that he hopes to return to Chicago soon to do a show, but didn’t give any specifics. We don’t know if something’s in the works or if he merely was expressing a wish.
Seems as if I’m not the only Chicagoan on the road this season. Theatre Entropia already has returned from Athens, Greece where it presented its multi-media production, Genocide, outdoors May 27-June 2 at Metallourgeio (“Metal Works”), an alternative performance space in Athens. The work was inspired by several texts on the Rwanda conflict. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Funk It Up About Nothin’ also is Europe-bound, heading for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival immediately after its Aug. 3 closing date at Navy Pier.
On the domestic front, Theatre Oobleck’s The Strangerer already has opened (July 9) at New York’s Barrow Street Theatre for a run of six weeks (extension possible) with its Chicago cast of Guy Massey, Mickle Maher (also the author), Colm O’Reilly, and Brian Shaw. New York also features in plans for the Annoyance Theatre, which has remounted (pardon our pun) its necrophilia musical, Love Is Dead, in prep for playing the New York Fringe Festival in August.
Meantime, Griffin Theatre will wait ‘til fall to ship out Letters Home, Voices of American Troops from the Battlefields of Iraq. The tour of duty will stop at 12 cities, beginning Oct. 14 in Cerritos, CA and continuing through May 21, 2009. Other cities on the tour include Indianapolis, Cleveland, Madison, New York City (Brooklyn), Concord (NH) and the upstate New York cities of Purchase, Peekshill, Westhampton, Syracuse, Jamestown and Watertown. In addition, dates are being secured for the 2009/2010 season in San Francisco, Dallas/Fort Worth, Cincinnati and Seattle. Letters Home will be directed by Jennie Cleghorn and is adapted by Griffin co-artistic director William Massolia, who continues to update the piece by adding new letters to reflect the soldier experience today after almost six years of fighting. It’s just one of three productions the Griffin will tour nationally this coming season. The company’s young audience productions of Frindle and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales will tour to Massachusetts, South Carolina, Texas and Missouri. The Griffin estimates its productions will be seen by 100,000 people this coming year.
A new theatre company has set up shop in Lake Geneva, WI, under the leadership of artistic director Laura DeMoon. Declaring itself the town’s first professional troupe, the Lake Geneva Theatre Company opened over the Fourth of July weekend with Noel Coward’s Private Lives, continuing through Aug. 3. HQ for the company is historic Horticultural Hall in downtown Lake Geneva. More info at www.lakegenevatheatre.org
On the heels of the Tony Awards, the producers of August: Osage County have announced the show will launch a national tour at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre, Aug. 11-Sept. 26. No casting has been announced, but it won’t be the original company, who expect to reunite for a London West End production instead. The tour will play Chicago sometime in 2009 although dates and location haven’t been announced. Meanwhile in NYC, Estelle Parsons and Steppenwolf ensemble member Molly Regan have replaced Deanna Dunagan and Rondi Reed in the Broadway cast of the play. Reed has returned to Chicago and the role of Madame Morrible in Wicked. She’s expected to stay with the musical until it completes its Chicago run at the end of January.
Henry Godinez directs a Spanish adaptation of Shakespeare July 25 and 26 at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Romeo y Julieta actually is a bilingual adaptation by Karen Zacarias, a playwright and director based in Washington, D.C. who is the founding artistic director of DC’s Young Playwrights’ Theatre. The Romeo y Julieta readings will be performed at the Little Village Lawndale High School. Zacarias is the winner of the 2008 Francesca Primus Award ($10,000 smackers), administered for the Primus Foundation by the American Theatre Critics Association. As coincidence would have it, the Primus Award presentation was made to Ms. Zacarias at the GALA Hispanic Theatre during the ATCA Washington conference.
Another $10,000 smackers is up-for-grabs in a new tri-coastal playwriting program announced by Chicago’s Silk Road Theatre Project, San Francisco’s Golden Thread Productions and New York City’s Lark Play Development Center in New York. The Middle East America: A National New Plays Initiative is the first-ever national effort to cultivate and support development of Middle Eastern American playwrights and their plays. It will result in a $10,000 commission to a Middle Eastern American playwright for a new play that also will receive intensive developmental support from the Lark and staged readings and possible productions at Golden Thread and Silk Road. Travel expenses for the writer also are covered. The application deadline is this July 31 with a selected writer to be announced in September 2008. For more information: www.middleeastamerica.org.
The House Theatre of Chicago has hired Margie Korshak, Inc. to handle its media relations, replacing the in-house staff of Dennis Watkins (who continues nonetheless as The House’s director of marketing). Korshak’s Ted Boles will be the lead rep on the account. Acquiring The House represents a rare foray by Korshak into the world of Off-Loop theatre, and possibly the veteran public relations firm’s first permanent Off-Loop account. The House and Korshak first partnered for the commercial remount of The Sparrow at the Apollo Theater last autumn; a marketing marriage brokered by Broadway In Chicago as part of BIC’s sponsorship of the Emerging Theatre Award presented by the League of Chicago Theatres.