Backwards and Forwards

BY Kris Vire

2007 seemed to be a schizophrenic year for Chicago theatre. Or perhaps it was simply cross-eyed, as we seemed to be looking in two directions at once.

There was a lot of looking backward—the haze of nostalgia. Earlier this month, I wrote a piece in Time Out Chicago pondering the holiday repeat factor—why audiences love to make a ritual out of seeing the same Christmas shows every year, and why those Christmas shows tend to look back at the past.

As I thought about it, I realized that this year, at least, the phenomenon wasn’t confined to the holidays. Look at the year’s two big Broadway in Chicago openings. The Color Purple was based on a book and movie from the ’80s that examined the first half of the 20th century; Jersey Boys was a jukebox biography that existed solely to return Baby Boomers to their youth. (Judging from the practically panties-throwing response of the over-50 crowd on opening night, it succeeded.)

Some theatre companies returned to past hits—Redmoon brought back its 7-year-old Hunchback, and Lookingglass remounted 2005’s Lookingglass Alice. Musicals were particularly nostalgic, though perhaps that’s the nature of the form. In addition to the New York imports in BIC’s theatres, nominations for both of this year’s Jeff ceremonies were dominated by musicals that looked to the past: TimeLine’s Fiorello (being remounted in 2008), Bailiwick’s My Favorite Year, Porchlight’s Ragtime and Assassins, ATC’s Oklahoma!, Marriott’s Shenandoah, Circle’s Mack and Mabel and Sweet Smell of Success…

And though Sweet Smell was a 2006 show, it foreshadowed another of 2007’s nostalgic fascinations: Chicago theatre’s newfound love affair with noir. From Shattered Globe’s revival of the noir-pastiche Hyde in Hollywood to Silent Theatre’s Noir: A Shot and a Chaser; from Brad Lawrence’s Chalk at the Right Brain Project and Marisa Wegrzyn’s Killing Women at Theatre Seven to the Building Stage’s simply titled piece Noir, the noir influence was everywhere.

Of course, while these noir shows were inspired by a film genre of the ’40s and ’50s, all but the Shattered Globe revival were new plays. And that’s where Chicago started to look forward: there was an embarrassment of riches in the new-work department.

Many of the great world premieres this year were inspired by the past, to be sure. Look at the three good new musicals of last spring: David Cerda’s Caged Dames, a terrific send-up of old Hollywood women-in-prison films; Jon Steinhagen’s The Teapot Scandals, a vaudeville-style revue based on, of all things, the Warren G. Harding administration; and The Adding Machine: A Chamber Musical, Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith’s transcendent translation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 play. And one of the year’s most memorable new works, Shishir Kurup’s Merchant on Venice at Silk Road, was a clever update of Shakespeare.

But more great new stuff was cut from whole cloth. Steve Spencer’s consumerism satire Another Day in the Empire took me by surprise with a killer cast at the Royal George. Paul Oakley Stovall’s Ape, in a Dog & Pony production, was a small treasure of populist intellectualism, though it lacked the immediacy of Brett Neveu’s Weapon of Mass Impact, a chilling roundelay driven by the strong performances of A Red Orchid ensemble members Mierka Girten, Jennifer Engstrom and Kirsten Fitzgerald.

The granddaddy of new work this year, of course, was Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County. There’s not much to say about the show, which transferred to Broadway and opened to rave reviews in December, that hasn’t been said—except that Letts’ sprawling family drama, written to order for the talents of the Steppenwolf cast, exemplifies the potential of Chicago-style ensemble work.

Chicago theatre looked forward in another way this year, as 2007 emerged as the year of new media. Blogs are nothing new, of course, but this was the year when blogs about theatre exploded. Tribune critic Chris Jones joined the blogosphere in the spring, and TOC began blogging in earnest around the same time. We were joining a number of Chicago theatre artists with blogs, who engage with one another and with theatre artists in New York and elsewhere. Institutions got in on it as well, with a number of theatres joining the already-blogging Steppenwolf and House on the net. Suddenly there was an ongoing conversation among critics, artists, fans, and theatres in different cities about where the theatre was headed. Some blogs even explicitly focused on the future, like that started by New Leaf and Side Project sound designer Nick Keenan, who writes about the uses of technology in collaborative storefront work.

Speaking of the House, they became (August aside) the year’s other big story. Their hit production of The Sparrow was followed by their being named, in May, the first recipients of the Broadway in Chicago Emerging Theatre Award, and then, in August, with the announcement of a commercial Sparrow run presented by Broadway in Chicago. Whether you’re House boosters (like much of the media) or detractors (like much of the blog coverage, which took on an emperor-has-no-clothes tone), The Sparrow was a lightning rod.

The year wasn’t all hits. Sarah Ruhl’s Passion Play, at the Goodman, was the most lavish swing-and-a-miss I’ve seen there since Arthur Miller tarnished his legacy with Finishing the Picture. An ill-conceived Rocky Horror revival came and went at the Mercury in a couple of weeks. And the city suffered losses on both large and small scales: Drury Lane showman Anthony DeSantis passed away, while two of the storefront scene’s brightest young talents, Backstage’s Brandon Bruce and Uma Productions’ Mikhael Tara Garver (two of TOC’s “20 Chicagoans to Watch” back in January) departed for grad school; Uma, one of the most daring and reliable storefront troupes of the last five years, chose to dissolve.

But why dwell on the downers? Looking back on 2007’s positives (which also included top-notch Chicago premieres like Bailiwick’s Jerry Springer—The Opera, Collaboraction’s Jenny Chow, and Next’s The Busy World is Hushed alongside such memorable revivals as Promethean’s Our Country’s Good, Right Brain’s The Castle, New Leaf’s The Dining Room and Boho’s Songs for a New World), I’d say the forecast for 2008 is looking good.

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