4-11-08
Terrorist Operetta at Trap Door
The Beastly Bombing, Trap Door Productions
Kerry Reid, Tribune—“[D]espite Kevin Remington’s inventive direction and choreography, The Beastly Bombing sags toward the end, both musically (the up-tempo choral numbers all sound the same after a while) and thematically. The message boils down to the questionable contention that all extremists are equally laughable, whether they manage to spread carnage or not. Still, there are some truly ingenious moments, including the appearance of Matthew Gottlieb as Jesus. And some of the lyrics draw chuckles of the nervous variety, particularly when the swaggering commander-in-chief sings ‘Knowing little, caring less, that’s the secret of my success.’”
Tony Adler, Reader—“A skinhead Nazi and a Saudi suicide bomber meet cute on the Brooklyn Bridge, each one planning to blow it up. Before this very messy, amiably offensive, relentlessly goofy entertainment is over, they’ll drop Ecstasy, fall in love, give us the real (and most believable) reason the Bush administration’s been acting that way, dance a lot, and answer the question: What would Gilbert & Sullivan write if they were alive today? Director-choreographer Kevin Remington and a paradoxically charming cast throw tons of let’s-put-on-a-show energy into the 2006 spoof operetta.”
Nina Metz, New City—“A series of connected sketches, the characters aren’t developed so much as plunked down before you as if that’s enough. It’s not—especially with a two-hour-plus running time. Nitzberg’s lyrics are witty, and Neill’s score is bouncy and easy on the ears. But the show doesn’t go far enough to offend. This type of thing should shock you into laugher, it’s so out there. Under Kevin Remington’s direction, only Stephen Lydic really pushes it. He plays the president as a manic Eddie Munster, and yes, it’s over-the-top. But boy, it works.”
Brian Nemtusak, Time Out—“The operetta idiom may constitute a new twist, but the centimeter-deep comic stereotypes of Arabs, white supremacists, party-girl first daughters and the standard preening preznit cartoon don’t. In an attempt to be an equal-opportunity offender, Nitzberg throws in gratuitous slams on Catholic priests and toothless bites at orthodox Jews, proving some are more equal than others. What saves the whole from a lot of clever-enough flatness is foremost the technical strength of Neill’s pitch-perfect songs, but also Nitzberg’s bouncy lyrical forms and Gilbertian inversions: Despite its disappointments, this is an ingenious structural anachronism. Yet while all the actors seem to have the vocal chops, not enough of them demonstrate that consistently.”
Jonathan Abarbanel, Windy City—“Billed as a post- 9/11 comic opera, The Beastly Bombing is written as a parody of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta and on a purely musical level works rather well. Whether you find it amusing or not depends on the thickness of your own racial-sexual-religious-political skin and your taste for over-the-top, vulgar, outrageous burlesque. It’s definitely not satire, which requires both subtlety and intellectual inquiry.”
Candles to the Sun, Eclipse Theatre Company
Nina Metz, Tribune—“Never heard of the title? Don’t worry, few have. It took nearly 70 years for the thing to get published (in 2005), and it never received a major Broadway run. Chances are the current earnest and forthright production (directed by Steven Fedoruk for Eclipse Theatre) is the rare chance to see Williams in his nascence…Before he moved on to the manipulative emotionalism on display in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams was a bit easier on his women. Here they are strong, solid mothers and daughters who understand even better than their men just how lousy coal mining is.”
Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Now, courtesy of an engrossing, fiercely acted Chicago premiere by Eclipse Theatre, comes ‘Candles in the Sun,’ a play initially staged in 1937 by an amateur theater in St. Louis… Kevin Hagan’s wonderfully telescoped raw wood set, Nathaniel Swift’s lighting, Jessica Pribble’s costumes and the superb sound design and musical direction of Victoria DeIorio (with a fiddler, harmonica player and mountain voices all part of the live mix) adding to a sense of authenticity. Williams’ script could certainly use some trimming, but that’s beside the point. Candles burns with the playwright’s spirit.”
Albert Williams, Reader—“This sprawling drama, about an impoverished family of Alabama coal miners swept up in a Depression-era strike, is a sturdy if sometimes melodramatic period piece with considerable historical interest: it was Tennessee Williams’s first full-length play, written when he was in his mid-20s and virtually forgotten after its 1937 Saint Louis premiere. Williams’s gifts for poetic dialogue and strong characterizations are evident, and the Eclipse Theatre Company’s atmospheric production makes the most of them. Director Steven Fedoruk’s ensemble is superb.”
Craig Keller, Time Out—“Eclipse makes the most of the budding playwright’s first brush strokes here, mining its own deft ensemble acting chops to stoke the rising tension. Spencer is spot-on as the deluded, steel-headed patriarch, a lifer whose unquestioning loyalty to the company persists even as it shrinks his wages and blackens his lungs. And Prescott and Brouwers burn up the rest of Candles’s wick as a castoff daughter and an idealistic union organizer, respectively, whose fight for the common good comes at the expense of personal gratification and love. Within Kevin Hagan’s claustrophobic wood-plank–cabin set, the couple makes the most of Williams’s first riffs on gender rifts, even as the body count—a statistic Tennessee eased up on later—rises.”
Lawrence Bommer, Free Press—“Adding mellow texture to a stark story, musical director Victoria Deiorio delivers a warm sound-text of Baptist hymns and country ballads (played by handsome fiddle player Stephen Dale). Kevin Hagan’s looming plank set suggests both the Pilcher’s confining cabin and the claustrophic mines. The immense effort behind Eclipse’s dramatic restoration pays off in the performances, if not the play.Though Candles is the quarry from which Williams would carve much stronger sculptures, it’s thrilling to be present at the creation.”
Ceres, Factory Theater
Nina Metz, Tribune—“Half-baked attempts at multimedia also show up in Factory Theater’s Ceres, a new play about brokerage-house scammers by Heather Tyler, an actress seen frequently on Factory’s stage. She’s one of the stronger members of the company, but as a playwright, she has a ways to go. I wish I could outline the plot. But it is so convoluted and confusing, I’m not sure what happens exactly. Something about shady business deals and stolen leads and cooked numbers… ]T]he cast never gets a handle on the personality types they are portraying. There is a certain ego and bluster that shows up in professions based on high-stakes moneymaking, but none of it feels authentic in Angela Martinez’s production.”
Ryan Hubbard, Reader—“Directed by Angelina Martinez, this Factory Theater production follows a bright young Chicago broker whose ambition and loyalty are tested during an investigation by a district attorney named Spritzer. ‘Follows’ is actually too strong a word: in Heather Tyler’s scrambled script, the story disappears between the lines of unremitting, thoroughly unconvincing corporate-speak. The characters and their choices lack meaningful context or development, resulting in seemingly random outbursts of unearned tension and levity. I kept thinking, ‘What are they talking about?’ and ‘Why are they yelling?’ Making things even more confusing is a gimmick in which the live cast awkwardly interacts with filmed scenes projected against the bland back walls of the set.”
Christopher Piatt, Time Out—“Although Martinez’s production can be distractingly shaky in its execution of crucial multimedia tricks—never the Factory’s forte—here’s the rare anticorporate play that offers more than just the vantage point of the disgruntled, unappreciated workers on the bottom rung (from which so many playwrights preach upward)…How credible her corporate-speak dialogue sounds to you will depend on how trained your ear is to the idioms of high-stakes money white-collar office politics (I wasn’t too distracted by it). But while there’s a tackiness to the production and a lame titular metaphor, Martinez’s direction of a hardworking cast, unlike office culture, never bores us.”
Sylvia, Metropolis Performing Arts Centre
Kerry Reid, Reader—“Greg, an overgrown boy in midlife crisis, adopts the title character, a cute and hyperactive poodle mix, much to the disgruntlement of his shrewish wife Kate. A.R. Gurney’s winsome if somewhat shopworn comedy gets a sturdy production from director John Gawlik. Kristen Pickering nails Sylvia’s transformation from ragamuffin runaway to pampered princess, fighting for the love of Gary Simmers’s deflated businessman against his humorless, well, bitch of a wife. Gurney’s knack for clever one-liners overcomes his tendency to indulge in gender cliches.”
Quote of the Fortnight“After more than 15 years of writing formulaic, glibly brutal plays about bad male behavior, Neil LaBute has finally discovered empathy—and produced a heartbreaking drama.”—Kerry Reid reviewing Profiles Theatre’s production of In a Dark Dark House