6-22-07
Steep Succeeds with Arturo Ui
Yosh Hayashi as Arturo Ui
Bertolt Brecht had a particular fascination with Chicago. His St. Joan of the Stockyards examines capitalism and morality through the lens of the South Side slaughterhouses. Steep Theatre has mounted a lesser known play of his also set in Chicago that draws an analogy between organized crime’s infiltration of the grocery trade and Hitler’s rise to power.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a lesser known Brecht play for a reason. It starts slowly and feels muddled. It takes a long time for Ui to pull himself together and make his move. Until he does, we are left trying to sort out whether or not to care about a loan to the grocers. Once Ui does start things moving, the plot of the play picks up as well. Ui comes to dominate the vegetable business in Chicago and then turns his eyes outward to nearby Cicero.
The difficult thing about Brecht is devising a consistent style. In that, director Jonathan Berry has succeeded admirably. From the first moments, as the narrator (a broadly smiling Jonathan Edwards) sets the scene, it’s clear that Berry has ratcheted the style meter up a few points past realism. To his credit, the ensemble holds to this style with commitment. There are a few actors guilty of occasionally mugging, and Yosh Hayashi in the title role does err on the shouting side of emoting.
But the acting is mostly good to impressive and if Hayashi doesn’t have a great handle on his volume knob, he effectively evokes a bizarre, snake-y physicality that gradually morphs into a dead-on Hitler impression by play’s end.
Berry and his designers also make good use of Steep’s tiny space. The newsreel voice-over that’s intended to help the audience follow the Hitler/Ui analogy is hard to hear and understand, but the rest of Josh Horvath’s sound design is excellent.
It’s gratifying to see a small company like Steep bite off a tough play like The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and triumph. The slickness a larger, better-funded company would bring to the endeavor would, I think, dilute Brecht’s point: that we may have put down the first set of bad guys, but that doesn’t mean the next set isn’t right around the corner. The play still feels pertinent, and Steep and Berry deserve a lot of credit for seizing a hold of Brecht’s story and driving it home.
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Steep Theatre Company
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“This, as it happens, is the essential premise of Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, now receiving one of those red-hot, astonishingly accomplished storefront productions for which Chicago is famous. Steep Theatre’s large-scale, small-stage take on the play is sensational. And gifted director Jonathan Berry, whose recent hits include Dead End and The Piano Tuner, once again demonstrates his flair for animating period pieces, shaping large ensembles and orchestrating dialogue as if it were musical notation.”
Justin Hayford, Reader—“[L]ike director Jonathan Berry’s strident, unvaried Steep Theatre production, [Yosh Hayashi’s] performance barely progresses, and Ui’s rise to power seems unremarkable, inspiring neither awe nor terror. The rest of the cast members in Brecht’s oversimplified 1941 parody of Hitler’s ascension fail to find the psychological nuances in their iconic, cartoonish characters, and in their rapid-fire delivery of Brecht’s snub-nosed poetry they too often mistake shouting for emotional engagement.”
Novid Parsi, Time Out—“Among a strong ensemble, Hayashi is exceptional; “Buy me a judge,” his weaselly Ui squawks, ‘or else I got no rights.’ With Hayashi’s twisted frame manifesting Ui’s twisted soul, he enlists a pompous old actor to teach him to walk and talk power. The ensuing high jinks, as Ui adopts grotesque gestures broadly exaggerating Hitler’s, elicit our laughter. After Ui takes over the cauliflower trust by offering “protection” to grocers who fail to resist his resistible rise, those same gestures, now eerily realistic, elicit our astonishment. In the second act, Berry’s staging markedly loses force and focus, but the final image, slamming tight the Ui-Hitler link, isn’t a light in the face, but a slap.”
Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Director Jonathan Berry knows the dynamics of big stories in small rooms, however, and that the drollery of blank verse declaimed in Damon Runyon accents, however fluent, is not enough to keep us entertained for two and a half hours. So a courtroom trial is summarized in a series of blackouts bridged with musical-chorus dance set to a Looney-tunes jazz arrangement of a funeral march. Ui hires a down-and-out thespian to teach him how to ‘talk fancy,’ resulting in a spoken-word duet of Marc Antony’s oration as intricately baroque as a Bach toccata.”
The Life, Bohemian Theatre Ensemble
Chris Jones, Tribune—“[T]his doesn’t come close to last year’s achievement. The Life isn’t anywhere near as well sung. Tawny Newsome, who plays the lead role of Queen, is a beautiful and truthful young actress, but if she’s to headline a musical, she needs to fix her wandering pitch problems. Others have similar challenges. And Genovese can’t quite decide whether to cast this show as true 1970s grit (a better choice) or let his young-and-game cast have fun painting their characters in primary colors. In all fairness, the material is comparably inconsistent. The Life wants to be a romantic celebration of sleaze, punctuated by violent beatings and drug-induced nastiness. It’s tough to make it jive.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“With no subject off-limits for musical theater, Coleman (composer of Sweet Charity) homed in on a neighborhood he knew. The result was a raffish melodrama that tried to both exploit and humanize the sleaze, with one ear cocked to Porgy and Bess and another catching far-off echoes of Jerry Springer: The Opera. The Bohemian production, directed by Stephen M. Genovese, tries hard—very hard. But like the material itself, it’s a mess, with a great deal of off-key singing and weak acting to boot. Music director Jon Steinhagen’s band is the most professional element in this jazz-meets-disco-tuned show.”
Albert Williams, Reader—“[T]he Bohemian Theatre Ensemble’s knockout non-Equity cast delivers the jazz-funk-gospel score with volcanic power and dramatic nuance. But the script, by Coleman, David Newman, and lyricist Ira Gasman, is erratic. Clumsily melding raucous comedy and violent melodrama, it glamorizes the characters’ sleazy lifestyle, then heavy-handedly underscores its danger and ugliness. Still, director Stephen M. Genovese’s engagingly scruffy production, set in the 1970s, is worth seeing for its dynamic performances and rafter-raising vocals—Jon Steinhagen’s musical direction is superb.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“The Life is a problematic show, with a book seemingly pasted together from Hooker Clich?s for Dummies; the sprawling plot endlessly changes its tone from comedy to pathos to the sudden and unsatisfying pulp-novel conclusion. Yet for all the book’s problems, we can’t say The Life is lackluster: Coleman’s enjoyable jazz- and blues-infused score is about as funky as a traditional Broadway musical gets. BoHo attacks the production with all the big-time talent they have in their possession, from John Zuiker’s streetscape set to Brenda Didier’s always-impressive choreography, and Genovese’s staging is near perfect.”
Tim Sauers, Gay Chicago—“Unfortunately, the ensemble just doesn’t have the vocal strength to bring justice to the jazzy, bluesy, vaudeville-inspired score. The cast may certainly look the part thanks to the purposefully gaudy, flashy late 1970s-early 1980s period costuming by Theresa Ham and may gyrate perfectly to Brenda Didier’s Fosse-like bump-and-grind choreography but overall lacks strong stage presence and the ability to project power behind the creator’s emotionally powered material.”
Jonathan Abarbanel, Windy City—“Boho’s production of The Life sings and soars, too, with a company that does full justice to the music and piquant lyrics. Driving the ensemble are Anthony Fett as the charming but devious narrator, JoJo (the Sam Harris role), and Bethany Thomas as Sonja (the Lillias White role)… As triumphant as the show is musically, it’s a substantial failure visually. Director Stephen M. Genovese, costume designer Theresa Ham and set designer John Zuiker have badly misstepped. Not even for a New York second does the set look anything like New York, let alone 42nd Street circa 1980.”
Othello, Writers’ Theatre Chicago
Chris Jones, Tribune—“No Shakespearean drama is more suited to a chamber production than Othello, an essentially domestic tragedy that revolves around personal insecurity and malfeasance in a marital bedroom. And while other productions certainly have enjoyed greater visual splendor and achieved more tragic grandeur, you’d be pressed to find an Othello anywhere that homes in so beautifully and truthfully on personal agony than the one that opened Tuesday at Writers’ Theatre.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Shakespeare went right to the meat of these matters in Othello. And in his Writers’ Theatre production, director Michael Halberstam has sliced through every last bit of theatrical fat to get to the bone and sinews of the play. It isn’t that he has cut the text (the show runs close to three hours), but he has turned this tale of primal emotions into such a lean, mean machine that you can almost hear its gears at work. There are no distractions of crowds or panoply here—only a pared-to-the-bone quality that makes the unfolding of events as inevitable as those in a Greek tragedy, with a laserlike light focused on the acting.”
Tony Adler, Reader—“What genuinely matters in Shakespeare’s play is that, black, brown, yellow, or Norwegian, Othello’s a fool—a powerful but startlingly limited man. Which is why it’s disconcerting to see James Vincent Meredith’s Othello in Michael Halberstam’s production: he radiates keen intelligence and projects enormous gravity. If there’s an upside to Meredith’s portrayal, it’s the contrast it creates with John Judd’s Buddy Ebsen-esque Iago.”
Kris Vire, Time Out—“Turns out an excellent cast is almost answer enough. Meredith’s Moor is both brawny and erudite, movie-star handsome and tenderly vulnerable; it’s easy to see why Desdemona would fall for him. Judd, remarkably making his first Shakespearean foray, crafts a plain-folks Iago that suggests he’s just taking advantage of the obvious opportunity when he seeks his revenge on the oblivious Othello. ‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’ he asks with a laid-back shrug; his answer to ‘How could you?’ may well be ‘How could I not?’”
Jenn Q. Goddu, Free Press—“Yet these two women and two other strong supporting characters—Braden Moran in a cut-down version of Cassio, the lieutenant who figures often as a victim in Iago’s plots; and Kelly Cooper as the foolish Lord who Iago enlists to do his dirty work—are not enough. Keith Pitts’s dull stage design and Nan Zabriskie’s period-melding costumes are distracting, and while Halberstam’s adaptation of the script may be focused, his actual production has a split personality. The beginning is promising, and the actresses show strong at the end, but the middle strains with exaggerated emotion.”
Venus Zarris, Gay Chicago—“Writers’ Theatre presents a striking production of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. Keith Pitts’ minimalist set design creates a setting for the play that serves to underline the text rather than cloud it with visual details. Director Michael Halberstam compiles a powerful cast to aptly deliver the cruel tragedy of conniving deceit in this stylized interpretation. But despite the commanding performances, there is something sterile about the impact of the heartbreaking brutality of the story.”
Those Sensuous Seductive ’70s, Black Ensemble Theater
Mary Houlihan, Sun-Times—“Those Sensuous Seductive ‘70s is a slam dunk. On opening night, Taylor had the audience’s complete attention from the first song as they swayed, clapped and sang along to the popular, free-lovin’ music of the decade. It’s a parade of songs by the likes of Donna Summer, Roberta Flack, Natalie Cole, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Barry White, Al Green, Minnie Riperton, the Spinners, Michael Jackson and Chaka Khan.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“Rather than sticking to this formula, which would have worked dandy a second time, Taylor patches the tunes together with vague and random padding, scenes that vacillate from a Soul Train episode to a family living through the ’70s. And the song selection is a wash; the throbbing disco in the first half makes it hard to stay in your seat, but it gives way to less engaging, slower soul in the second. Taylor’s trademark is usually her borderline industrial gift for packaging a product, but compared to other revues—including her still-running, hump-busting Memphis Soul (The Story of Stax Records)—this seems like a project that was put together between meetings.”
Quote of the Fortnight:
“Collaboraction’s annual theater rave, in which 10-minute plays are commingled with deejays and installation art, has always seemed less like a source of new important theatrical ideas than 16 Plays in Search of a Point.”—Christopher Piatt reviewing Collaboraction’s production of Sketchbook in Time Out.