10-12-07
No Review, But Here's the Roundup
Some Girl(s), Profiles Theatre
Chris Jones, Tribune—“Some Girl(s) works very well for about half of its 90-minute duration. In the first scene, when Guy visits his old high school girlfriend (intensely and honestly played by Kristin Collins), the bitter interchange just sizzles… When this show has you on the defensive, it’s very provocative. And Scene 1 is followed by a believable sequel in which Guy revisits a different girlfriend (played by the terrific Jessie Fisher), whose party-girl demeanor hides a lot of pain. Thereafter, things lose their way. The conceit of the script is harder to sustain. And Joe Jahraus’ initially strong production isn’t as well cast or as intense toward the end.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Under Joe Jahraus’ sleek direction, Cox is fully believable as the near-compulsive dissembler, and the four actresses are perfection. A wonderfully subtle Kristin Collins plays the high school sweetheart Guy abandoned on prom night—a woman who still bears psychic scars despite marriage and children. Jessie Fisher is a hoot as the sexually adventurous artist who is a master of blowback, yet more vulnerable than she lets on. Susan Price is razor-sharp as the older married woman whom Guy left in the lurch when their affair was discovered. And Sarra Kaufman is downright luminous as the twin still riddled with doubts and rage.”
Zac Thompson, Reader—“Neil LaBute’s stab at a sensitive exploration of relationships follows a writer about to be married as he meets up with old girlfriends. Joe Jahraus’s intensely intimate staging is solid, and the exes movingly convey their desperation and anger. The problem is Darrell W. Cox as the writer: it’s difficult to buy that anyone would fall for such a selfish shit in the first place. A ‘deleted scene,’ performed here, is like an outtake on a DVD: interesting but extraneous.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“All of the women in the Profiles cast do a respectable job despite their similar ‘you-hurt-me-but-I’m-going-to-try-and-pretend-like-you-didn’t-until-I-crack’ characters, with Jessie Fisher as girl number-two the most memorable of the bunch. As ‘Guy,’ Darrell W. Cox’s committed but cloying performance never achieves what either ‘Friends’ star (and Windy City native) David Schwimmer in London or ‘Will & Grace’ star Eric McCormack in New York automatically had going for them without even trying: a modicum of likeability to pierce the character’s off-putting crudeness and give him a fighting chance for sympathy. As such, it’s not even fun to be in the company of this man past the second vignette.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“In the theater, alas, we have Neil LaBute, a man who demonstrates the inability to mature not through the way he crafts his plays, but rather the way he neglects to craft them… For a production as polished as this Profiles offering, it’s strangely tough to watch, mainly because leading man Cox, whose uncannily natural style has been riveting in the past (as in LaBute’s vastly superior Fat Pig), has nowhere to go in a dramatically inert script. He mostly just stands there, like LaBute’s shrugging straw man.”
Catey Sullivan, Windy City—“Playwright LaBute, director Joe Jahraus and off-Loop leading man Cox fit together like perfectly cut puzzle pieces. And while Some Girl(s) isn’t LaBute’s best work, the intoxicating convergence of precisely the right actor, director and playwright make Profiles’ production a twisted treat of emotional heft and devious humor.”
Jitney, Pegasus Players
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“It is precisely this sense of a complete dramatic miracle unfolding before your eyes that emerges at Pegasus, where Wilson’s tale of black men, circa 1977—a tale at once homage, hymn and harangue—has been so searingly directed by Jonathan Wilson. And some magical combination of these two Wilsons (not related) also has elicited performances by an ensemble of Chicago actors that could compete with any starry Broadway lineup.”
Justin Hayford, Reader—“Jonathan Wilson’s vigorous cast spend most of the play’s first hour acting past one another, and playwright August Wilson fritters away the time with aimless chatter and melodramatic eruptions before creating a truly dramatic scene: ex-con Booster returns home only to discover there’s a demolition order on the family business. The playwright squanders the stakes act one’s finale creates, but the actors finally find genuine connections, which makes for an engaging final hour.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“[T]he show’s main event—a confrontation between a father and his adult son who’s just been freed from prison after serving a 20-year sentence for murder—is as resonant as anything Wilson ever wrote. (And as played by weathered bird Alfred H. Wilson and the explosive Quaintance, this scene between them that ends act one is one of the most engrossing moments you’ll see this fall.) Alas, father-son clash is merely a tent pole. Jitney’s egalitarian flaw is that its action is equally distributed among characters who aren’t equally interesting. But director Wilson’s serviceable work still basically gets the job done.”
The Magnificents, House Theatre of Chicago
Chris Jones, Tribune—“Judging by the rapt opening-night audience Saturday, a lot of people were understandably entranced by all of this highly entertaining show’s exuberant theatricality and its warm heart. But to fully buy into the uneasy concept, you have to buy the linkage of old-school magic and postmodern clowning. There are two shows going on at The Viaduct. And unless they can be more fully integrated, that’s one show too many.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“This notion of keeping the art alive is at the very heart of The Magnificents, the beguiling, playful, magic-infused fantasia now in its world premiere at the House Theatre. The show is the work of writer, performer and supremely polished magician Dennis Watkins, who created it as an homage to his grandfather, magician Ed Watkins. And together with director Molly Brennan, the ingenious female component of the 500 Clowns troupe who has injected her anarchic red-nose spirit throughout, Watkins has devised a tale at once zany and heartbreaking.”
Justin Hayford, Reader—“There’s much to admire in playwright-magician Dennis Watkins’s Tim Burton-esque show for House Theatre of Chicago. His magic tricks range from charming to mind-blowing, and then there’s the handsome yet creepy design, the childlike video dream segments, the melancholy score, and the precise clown routines. But this abundance of talent is put in service of a sketchy, maudlin, glacially paced story about a dying magician teaching his craft to an impressionable young boy.”
Fabrizio O. Almeida, New City—“The result of this dramatic admixture is a show from which, when you’re not being happily distracted by the magic and multimedia, you contemplate some interesting themes. A tighter focus on the narrative, a stronger script and a brisker pace would have more satisfactorily explored these rich themes and better justified the reason for this sentimental tribute to Watkins’ grandfather/magical concept show. For Watkins, each performance of The Magnificents must offer one last chance to spend time with the memory of his grandfather. For the audience, it should have been a better opportunity to get to know him in the first place.”
Megan Powell, Time Out—“Orange, lemon, egg, canary is a magic trick in which an orange is peeled to reveal a lemon, and that fruit holds an egg, from which a canary finally emerges. The Magnificents not only hinges on this trick, but is as astonishing and simple—perhaps too simple. Whether or not the House’s latest fantastic voyage—inspired by Watkins’ grandfather, a real-life magician who taught his grandson the art form—is an actual play is beside the point; the company bills this story of the last days of an aged magician as a ‘magical clown show.’ And there’s plenty of both magic and clowning.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“A wonderful piece of table magic called ‘Sam the Bellhop’ is performed by playwright Dennis Watkins in his utterly charming Magnificents: A closed-circuit camera shows his wizard hands deploying cards to tell an entire story simply through numbers, seemingly with an un-tampered deck. Just as the cards act out this anecdote, the show’s feats of illusion tell their own affecting two-hour tale. It’s the perfect fusion of style and substance. Thanks to director Molly Brennan, the result is a captivating theatrical thrill show. The House wins indeed!”
Venus Zarris, Gay Chicago—“As the story unfolds you are given a window into the personal exchanges of an elderly magician and his beloved wife-assistant that also reveal the cherished reminiscences of an influential lost loved one. The dialogue is light, but the transference of heartfelt emotion is as charming as the magical moments brought to life with elegant style and creative delivery. A gifted ensemble and outstanding design team create a uniquely personal production that is entertaining, engaging, evocative and enchanting.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“So how does a magician, heir to three generations of prestidigital art, tell us about his grandfather? In a magic show, of course, with card tricks, and circus clowns and spooky-tunes recalling Max Fleischer’s funny-shivery cartoons. And who better to direct this fanciful memoir than Molly Brennan of the guignolesque 500 Clown? But The Magnificents is not just another slam-bang artsy-cutesy everything-and-the-kitchen-sink carnival from House Theatre of Chicago. At the heart of the slapstick and slippery-shuffle is playwright Dennis Watkins’ elegy for his grandfather, who—like his counterpart in the play—schooled his descendants not only in the mechanics of their craft, but in the humility necessary for its proper practice.”
Phantom, Porchlight Music Theatre
Chris Jones, Tribune—“If you are going to do the Phantom in a black box at the Theatre Building Chicago—which, let us stipulate, ain’t an easy task—you surely need some kind of radically sparse visual idea. The problem with L. Walter Stearns’ otherwise honorable Porchlight Music Theatre staging of the Phantom is that it lacks such a viable physical metaphor. And thus despite one of the hardest working casts in town, the show can’t get out from under the sense that there’s not enough room for all the unnecessary clutter, nor was there enough rehearsal time for the cast to learn how to coexist with all the wood and drapery.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“The Porchlight production is the latest collaboration between director L. Walter Stearns and his impeccable musical director, Eugene Dizon (who has overseen a truly glorious blend of voices, with Michael Frain leading the backstage musicians). And it arrives immediately after their hugely impressive work on Ragtime. This show is not quite as polished as Ragtime in terms of design (it isn’t easy to conjure the innards of the Paris Opera House on a tiny budget). But it puts some impressive talents in the spotlight—performers with both semioperatic voices and acting chops.”
Lawrence Bommer, Reader—“Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston’s version of Gaston Leroux’s ruthless romance is too lightweight: their phantom, basically a deformed music teacher longing for his lost mother, is neither sinister nor seductive enough to rise to any operatic occasion. And Porchlight Music Theatre can’t quite breathe fire into Yeston’s fusion of tortured lyrics and boilerplate ballads.”
Dennis Polkow, New City—“This version is willing to go down all sorts of dead-end plot mazes that have nothing to do with the original story, but when all is said and done, the big climax of any Phantom—namely, the unmasking—never even happens and the audience is never given the payoff of even a glimpse of the character’s face. Kind of like, uh, forgetting to show us the hump on your back if you’re doing Hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“The book’s tone is all over the place, and Stearns’s clumsy staging seems to have been focused entirely on accommodating set designer Robert Martin’s ill-advised turntable. The leads at least do their best with silly material and both sing gorgeously, though [Peter] Oyloe gesticulates too wildly, overcompensating for the mask that covers everything but his mouth. Then again, at least no one will associate his face with the show.”
Tim Sauers, Gay Chicago—“Porchlight Music Theatre opens its new season with a splendid staging by the ever-going partnership between L. Walter Stearns (direction) and Eugene Dixon (musical direction). Stearns effectively brings a grandness and elegance to the production, despite the limited playing space available to him on the north stage of the Theatre Building. This should be of no surprise since Stearns has been working in this space for several years, envisioning production after production. He keeps his pacing strong, the actors focused and, with the assistance of a revolving stage, flows the various required settings with great ease.”
Quote of the Fortnight:
“It’s not easy for humans to lose that all-important third dimension in order to become comic characters.”—Lawrence Bommer reviewing Theatre Wit’s production of Men of Steel in the Free Press.