Mitchell Oldham

Culturally, the distance between 1951 and 2020 is vast.  It’s the distance between a new born entering a world transformed from what it was nearly seventy years ago and her grandparents or great-grandparents who’ve watched a Cold War dissolve and the overwhelming digitization of the planet. A span of time that could easily induce nostalgia.

Keeping that tendency in check is just one of the things that makes Drury Lane’s current production of An American in Paris so gratifying and so surprising.   Like a copy that keeps all the key elements of the original, the Drury Lane’s version of this richly pleasing classic has been contoured and shaped to make it better reflect the realities of post-war Europe and injects the story’s characters with greater complexity.  

Neither of those things stop it from being a lovely production.   If anything, in this staging, they help to more finely gild the lily.   Opting for subtle elegance, Kevin Depinet’s set breathes with a baroque refinement that manages to be both polished and cultivated without being excessive.  As the frame for a story about stumbling into love in a city defined by romance and haggard from war, the set quietly transforms throughout the performance to softly, and often beautifully, complement both the music and story’s contemporized progression.

Gershwin’s lush score, under Chris Sargent’s sure orchestral lead, may remain as resplendent as always; but the resilient people it wraps around display a little more of the grit and effort needed to fight yourself out of the residue of war and into a brighter future.  Having lived through the sacrifices and losses that come with occupation, Lise’s  (Leigh-Ann Esty)  focus is on the responsibilities needed to survive.  And, as a committed and talented artist, to follow her pointe shoe dreams.  She has little time for the attentions of an American GI, no matter how persistent and self-effacingly ebullient he is.

A not so subtle emphasis on the arts is another of the surprises of this American in Paris.  Like a discreet embellishment or a pleasing recurring sensation, it kept surfacing to highlight the importance of creative expression is to each of the main characters.   It’s an essential part of all of them.  Jerry Mulligan, the affable GI played so disarmingly by Josh Drake, is a gifted visual artist hoping to make his mark in Paris, the soul of western art.  As does his pal, Adam (Skyler Adams) whose muse is music and whose output is prodigious and exceptional; especially when it’s fueled by an unrequited love for a woman two other men are vying to win.  The third man out to conquer Lise’s heart poses the biggest challenge to the others.  With money, name and position in his cupid’s arsenal, his edge seems insurmountable. 

Taking the love story in three different directions opened the plot to tantalizing possibilities.  If played for genuine dramatic intensity rather than clever plot expansion, it could be considered operatic because the conditions for tragedy are so fertile.  Here the seriousness is handled with a deft lightness.  Henri, with Will Skrip unforgettable in the role, torments himself hiding two things that make him who he is.   He’s an artist too, and just as driven to see how high his talent can propel him as a singer. But, as the only heir of a fabric dynasty, his parents have a different destiny in their sights for him; causing him to hilariously chase his dreams in secret.     

Henri’s much harder to read when it comes to his other secret.  That’s partly because it’s so clear to everyone else.  As Skrip embodies him under Lynne Kurdziel-Formato direction, you’re never sure whether Henri’s acknowledged or even recognized his sexual self.   Or is he in some kind of unconscious denial?  His feelings for Lise seem to possess all the right markers of love; absent the passion.  A crippling omission.  But Skrip fills the character with so much sincerity and so much humor that it’s impossible not to cheer for him.  The same could just as easily be said of Skyler Adams.

These shifts of dramatic approach add a fresh vibrancy to the meaning behind many of the musical’s most treasured songs.  I Got Rhythm and ‘S Wonderful in the first act keep their timeless brilliance but in the second act, Who Cares, But Not For Me and They Can’t Take That Away From Me make you listen to them with a new set of ears because the point of view of the characters have taken on a different cast.   In 1951, some considered An American in Paris’s plot “slender”.   Craig Lucas, in this effort, has given it satisfying sinew and muscle.

Erica Evans turn as Milo Davenport, a wealthy American patron of the arts who Henri’s chic mother (Caron Buinis) considers a mere “dilettante”, alternates between ruthless and vulnerable before settling into realistic in her chances of making Jerry fall in love with her.  Given her character’s social standing and privilege, she also had the opportunity to wear some of Karl Green’s most sublimely elegant costumes.

Handling the play’s choreography as well its direction, Ms. Kurdziel-Formato took full advantage of a delightful cast and ensemble that could do any and everything enviably. Of the many winning dance numbers running through the show, and depending on who you’re talking to, Fidgety Feet still induces the biggest smiles. 

An American in Paris

January 31 – March 29^th,  2020

Drury Lane Theatre

100 Drury Lane

Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181

630-530-0111

Sometimes when the lights go down and a theater stage stirs to life, you’re carried away and dropped into lives and experiences that uniquely sharpen your understanding of what it takes to either survive or thrive. 

The low boiling excitement filling the air opening night for Victory Garden’s How to Defend Yourself let you know there was something singular about this play.  The story about a handful of young college women taking a self-defense class began making its exceptionalism apparent right out of the gate.

Depending on where you sit on the age spectrum, you may feel the play is as much about youth and the language of youth as it about the larger concepts and concerns playwright Lilliana Padilla generally grapples with; “sex, intersectional communities and what it means to heal in a violent world”. How to Defend Yourself has all of those things and seeing them lived from the vantage point of the young crystalizes the power of their impact on individual lives.

Youth rules the play’s stage, and on the show’s opening night, filled a great many of the theater’s seats.  Two students in workout drag roll into a gym.  They’re there to take a self-defense class for women and talk while they wait for their trainers to show up.  Friends from way back and now sorority sisters, they have that comfort with each other that erases boundaries and speak with the candor of the guileless.  Especially Diana (Isa Arciniegas), who’s so open, honest and scabrous with her humor that she fuses herself to your favor almost instantly.  Unfiltered and brazen during her unchecked chat with her homie, it wasn’t that surprising when she breezily confides she has a real thing for guns.

Simply for the development of its characters, How to Defend Yourself could be considered a masterwork.  Offsetting one another to show how intricately different each is from the other highlights the shared and personal challenges they all face as they navigate a psychologically complex landscape.  All seven of them are drawn with the same skill and care of Diana.  And there’s also Suzanna, a character you never see but who sits squarely in the middle of the plot.   A sorority sister who sustained a horrific sexual assault, it’s the sobering reality of the attack that drives the play and makes all of them question themselves and each other about how to live in a society that makes violence as brutal as rape normal.  Ponderous?  Could be.  But Padilla’s far too extraordinary to let you feel the weight directly.   Working with Marti Lyons, another outsized talent in the director’s chair, How I Defend Myself subversively wraps it’s tale in the stuff of everyday life, making it real, giving it a humanity you naturally absorb and filling it with people who can be as maddeningly funny as they are bright and aware. 

Getting used to contradictions and things that don’t quite mesh are something you get used to in this story about finding your balance and place in the middle of so much that’s confusing.  Opening benignly enough, where the rhythmic rawness of the dialogue is the thing that romances your attention, we learn many of the people we meet view some sex acts as casual and easy as a high five.  “Regular” sex remains special; generally.  But then there are exceptions to that too.

Acting as surrogate aggressors, two male students come into the gym to help with the class shortly after trainers Brandi (Anna Crivelli) and Tara (Netta Walker) arrive.  Suzanna’s frequently referenced and, for the most part, everybody’s making the right sounds about consent and boundaries and ownership of one’s body.  Tara, as Walker so marvelously plays her, begins to push back before asking in open defiance what if she doesn’t like her sex so tame.  What if her mindset is much more tied to that embodied in Helen Hume’s 1946 recording, Drive Me Daddy?

The guys are hardly silent on matters of sex and are given the chance to vent their confusions and frustrations as well as voice their personal tenets about how they view sex.  Eggo (Jayson Lee) walks away with the disarmingly endearing trophy when he works himself into a seethe talking about his girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend.  She wanted him and sex one way but really wanted something very different.  Something he was too nice and too “skinny” to deliver.  His buddy, Andy (Ryan McBride) has his heart in the right place as he goes overboard endorsing the right of women to be free to choose their limits. In confidence however, he confesses to fantasies and behavior that belie some of his conviction.  His silence on something’s he’s seen is even more damning and offers just one of several glimpses of what complicity can look like in this tight, wonderfully memorable production.

How to Defend Yourself

Jan 24 – Feb 23, 2020

Victory Gardens Theater

2433 N. Lincoln Ave.

Chicago, IL    60614

773-871-3000

Nancy Pelosi might be a fascination you never knew you had.  A production premiering over the weekend at Victory Gardens Theater for an abbreviated run could dispel any doubt. On the surface, an examination of one of the most enigmatic and pivotal political figures in the country would appear tempting, but prohibitively daunting.  Access and a requisite mandate for iron clad accuracy could easily dissuade many from taking on the challenge.   The Adult in the Room, a work written by Bill McMahon and directed by Heather Arnson and Conor Bagley, nonetheless does a stunning job of revealing the influences that helped shape a diminutive giant.  One who didn’t enter politics until she had finished raising five kids in her mid-40’s and, soon to celebrate her 80^th birthday, now stands second in line to the Presidency.

Given the subject, The Adult in the Room, will necessarily be viewed through a political lens.  That’s unfortunate because it could easily distract from the gravity of this woman’s achievements.  Regardless of one’s position or thoughts on the culture storms raging in the country, ascents like those of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives merit pause and respectful recognition.  Meticulously constructed in language and flow, the one woman play cannily reflects on the progression of people and events that helped propel and sustain her on her historic journey.  By employing an in-the-moment social media tool, a live Instagram chat, the play captures her preparing for and conducting a “live” conversation with scores of women considering a run for public office.

In her role as Pelosi, Orlagh Cassidy admirably projects the anchored resolve of seasoned leadership.  Her ability to convey willed unflappability, in this case one that only occasionally falters to succumb to a chocolate craving, stands out as another of the more salient strengths of Cassidy’s performance. 

Quietly radiating our subliminal notions of what ponderous political power looks like, Ann Beyerdorfer’s uncluttered open set telegraphs the same steadiness of purpose and unshakeable balance that define gravitas.  So much so that it’s almost haunting in its memorability and seems to echo how Pelosi describes herself in the play, “an iron fist in a velvet glove”. 

The Instagram callers have lots of questions about the Speaker’s background, accomplishments and objectives.  Projected on two narrow screens running from the stage’s ceiling down to its floor, one on either side of the stage, the screens become pillars of data in the form of questions cascading in from the outside world.  They prove an effective technological triumph in the production.   It’s through the questions streaming through them and Pelosi’s responses that we get the insights needed to shape a vision of the person behind the fanfare. 

From her answers, we sense how proud she is to be her mother’s daughter, displaying the same inner strength that engenders intimidating indomitability.  We learn that other phenomenally strong women mentored her and encouraged her; including the woman who asked Pelosi, from her sick bed, to run for the California seat death was about to rob from her.  We see how deeply the attraction to public service and politics flows through her DNA.  Both her father and her brother have been mayors of Baltimore.  Her mother, always a vital strategy resource. And perhaps just as tellingly, how for her, “Catholic = Care”.  As a chief architect of the Affordable Care Act, the legislation can simply be read as a politician walking her talk.  Following conviction with action.  “Not agonizing.  Organizing.”  Since all of this activity happens in the perilously volatile world of politics, positions and actions that impact millions will necessarily draw the fire of those with differing views.  A cost of being in the game. 

What we’re left with is a compelling outline of a person playing for dizzingly high stakes with both the country and a good part of the world watching to see what happens. 

As the directors and producers of The Adult in the Room might agree, it would be delightful to find out what Pelosi herself would think of the production. For the play to attempt real depth would lead to conjecture and be unwise.  The sketch we’re provided is enough to positively stimulate lasting curiosity in some and validate admiration in others.   

As captivating as The Adult in the Room proved to be, there’s still no crime in wanting more.

The Adult in the Room

January 22 – February 15, 2020

Victory Garden Theater

2433 N. Lincoln Ave.

Chicago, IL  60614

tickets@victorygardens.org

Probably one of the most enduring and compelling attributes common to the arts is their lack of complacency.  Creativity has a need to push and explore and change and innovate and, in the end, excite.  That may be why in its 15^th year, Chicago’s Too Hot to Handel:  The Jazz – Gospel Messiah felt like a ride on lightning Saturday night in the Auditorium’s concert hall. 

It’s always been a terrific show.  Although the Auditorium’s been presenting it since 2006, Too Hot’s roots go back to its original performance in 1993; the realized concept and vision of conductor Marin Alsop.

Handel’s original Messiah has long been tremendously popular, but Alsop felt it not only could and should be “hippified”; but that it was also uniquely amenable to adaptation.  The first conductor ever to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, she collaborated with two brilliant and very different arrangers and orchestrators, Bob Christianson and Gary Anderson, to “keep the original’s bones”; but turn the rest of this iconic work into a musical avatar.   Since Marin’s Too Hot to Handel premiered at Lincoln Center 27 years ago; and because of its incredible uplift, power and excellence, orchestras now perform her interpretation of the oratorio to ecstatic audiences all over the world.

Chicago can credit Bill Fraher, the music director of Old St. Patrick’s Church, for bringing it to the Windy City. Fraher had seen the show in New York and like most people who experience it, left “impressed with the power and emotion” Alsop’s adaptation radiates.  He later performed slices of Too Hot at Old St. Pat’s before helping grow it to the showpiece it is today. As director of its very large, extremely impressive and heedlessly passionate choir, Fraher remains a key component of the production. 

200 hundred strong, and with a treacherously fine six-man jazz band burrowed into its core, Chicago’s Too Hot orchestra blazed like the crown jewels of England throughout Saturday night’s show.  Three vocalists fronted the orchestra and massive choir.  One of the soloists, tenor Rodrick Dixon, performed in the New York production Fraher attended in ’98.  Dixon’s wife, Alfreda Burke, sang soprano in this year’s Chicago performance.   Rounding out the trio, Karen Marie Richardson’s shimmering and lush alto was particularly moving in He Shall Feed His Flock.

A flexible operatic structure was one part of the “bones” Alsop and her gifted collaborators shrewdly kept from Handel’s original creation.  The grandeur and majesty of opera pays homage to the work’s foundation and melds beautifully with the jazz and gospel buttresses she and her musical magicians so beautifully devised for their update.

Mark Kelly, Chicago’s Cultural Affairs and Special Events Commissioner, in his opening remarks stoked the audience’s listening appetite by predicting that the storied concert hall was about to have its roof blown off by what they were about to witness.  He wasn’t kidding. And it happened almost immediately.  The opening, fueled by the strength of Dixon’s color rich tenor and an on-fire orchestra conducted by Suzanne Mallare Acton; prompted a jubilant standing ovation 15 minutes into the program. 

Always scheduled to honor the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., Too Hot’s spiritual message of renewal becomes subliminally linked to notions of struggle, hope, persistence and triumph.  Perhaps it was all those things combined that explains the allusive fervor powering the show and the many remarkable solo turns that filled the performance.

Greg Ward, the orchestra’s principal saxophonist, had heads shaking in awe and wonder every time his virtuosity was featured.  And the jazz band’s pre-eminent pianist, Alvin Waddles, kept proving the singular excellence of his handling of the keys as he segued seamlessly between the exquisite and the torrid. 

Even technology stepped in to make Too Hot to Handel’s musical largesse personal and engaging.  A projection screen suspended at the rear of the stage, well above the choir but low enough to be comfortably viewed by the audience, took you inside the orchestra to give the production an unexpected intimacy.  Cameras roamed the stage from above and from the sides as well straight on and behind to add a refreshing and surprising vitality to the concert. 

Temperatures outside might have been painfully frigid, but Saturday night saw the Auditorium stage smokin’.

Too Hot to Handel:  The Jazz – Gospel Messiah

January 18, 2020    7:30pm

January 19, 2020     3:00pm

The Auditorium Theater

50 East Ida B. Wells Drive

Chicago, IL  60605

As Ronnie Marmo so skillfully reminds us in his ravishing one-man show, you can pay a very high price for telling uncompromising truths.  Just entering its second extension at the Royal George, I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce takes us back to the 60s and reintroduces us to a man known more for his penchant for profanity than for his ferocious belief in that precious little freedom tucked into the first amendment; the freedom of speech. 

Marmo, who not only plays Bruce but also wrote the script for the performance, beautifully inhabits the spirit of a man who is as much a cultural touchstone as he is an icon. The show’s title, I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce is a direct quote from Mr. Bruce and likely explains precisely how he viewed himself.  Comedy was simply a vehicle for speaking truth. 

Madly ambitious, this production doesn’t hurry as it chronicles the contributions and heroism of a singular individual in its 90-minute format.  Super-sized talent helps it succeed impressively. Marmo’s performance stealthily overwhelms with its honesty and candor; giving the audience a three-dimensional perspective of who this man was when not under the hot lights of a nightclub.  It just as clearly gave us a feel for Lenny Bruce’s bracing talent; essentially canonizing Leonard Alfred Schneider’s exceptionalism.

Adding dynamism to a show that features a single individual is probably as daunting as it sounds.  Comics of course do it all the time through unexpected insights and surprise.  Productions like I’m Not a Comedian, I’m Lenny Bruce have a higher hill to climb.  They drill down to the essence of a person to highlight their uniqueness.  Enlisting the services of a savvy director insures the story moves with compelling energy and sustains curiosity.  Here, Joe Mantegna more than ably insured this look back on Bruce’s life and legacy purred with the power of a Lamborghini and flowed with immaculate ease.  By stitching together delivery, timing and structure to create something as intellectually brawny as it is relaxed and funny, his input helped make I’m Not a Comedian a flat out hit off – Broadway last year and a reason why Chicago audiences can’t seem to get enough of it. 

In addition to the excellence of the project, a lot of that admiration stems from who Lenny Bruce was.  As much as we learn about him through Marmo’s encompassing portrayal, you can’t help but want to know much much more about this complicated, intriguingly intelligent man.  Because of his mother, he grew up around show business.  So It’s not surprising he’d gravitate to it.  Entertainment attracts colorful personalities.  And in many ways, it’s proven to be a haven where conventions are relaxed. Discovering or expressing self can include experimentation.  With drugs.  With sex and sexuality.  The weight of withering judgement doesn’t exist in that world the way it does for most people.  Maybe living in such a universe creates an intolerance for hypocrisy and a heightened appreciation for the inviolability of truth. 

A passion for truth certainly fueled Lenny Bruce.  And the cosmos outside of show business gave him a wealth of material to work with.  Many of the flashpoints he referenced 50 years ago are the same ones that define the culture wars today.  Race, religion, sexuality, immigration. Judicial inequity.  Marmo would often slip into a skit to dramatize how these concepts might go down as comedy during a live Lenny Bruce routine.  Invariably the audience’s effusive laughter at the Royal George would be pouring from faces gleaming with delight.  Sharp, incisive, penetrating truth; in the right hands, can be hilarious.  Bruce did this, ferociously, in a period renowned for its buttoned-down complacency.  It made him dangerous; at least to authority, and landed him in jail multiple times on obscenity charges. As it did here in Chicago.  Two of the guilty verdicts ended up at the Supreme Court.  He proved the truth could be red hot and that nudging the envelope far enough to expose imbalance, contradictions and hypocrisies in our “happy ending culture” can sap one’s spirit as well as bankrupt you through legal fees.  By the time of his tragic death at 41 in 1966 of an unintended drug overdose, San Francisco was the only town he could get a booking. 

The frustration and exhaustion Marmo displayed recounting those years floated in melancholy poignancy because, as history, we knew what was coming.   Ironically, a rare video recording of Bruce’s next to last live concert gave few clues to the toll his one man stand to exercise his first amendment rights exacted.  He looked tired, but the potency of his intellect remained dazzling. As did his humor.

I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce celebrates this unorthodox sage, this Godfather of socially conscious comics who use their platform to do many of the things Mr. Bruce tried to do. 

More than a few people after the show vocally lamented the loss of a Lenny-Bruce-like voice in today’s maelstrom of words.  It’s as if they forgot you don’t need to be a comedian to tell the unvarnished truth.  Lenny Bruce wasn’t. 

I’m Not a Comedian…I’m Lenny Bruce

Extended through 2/16/2020

Royal George Theatre

1641 N. Halsted Street

Chicago, IL  60614

312-988-9000

www.theroyalgeorgetheatre.com

 You don’t often hear about how enticing the story driving The Light in the Piazza eventually becomes.  An unlikely love story viewed from the vantage point of an over protective mother; it’s so consciously refined that Piazza’s core message can be obscured in its romantic beauty.  Very much in the way the love between Clara (Solea Pfeiffer) and Fabrizio (Rob Houchen) brings two worlds together, this staging of The Light in the Piazza merges opera and contemporary musical theater to show how determined people meet intimidating challenges.

This limited run production at the Lyric meticulously captures the feel of a time and place slightly removed from care. A Southern mother of means, Margaret Johnson (Renee Fleming), has taken her daughter on a trip to Italy.  Her intent is to introduce Clara to a country she clearly loves while retracing a previous trip she had taken with her husband.  The old-world glow pouring from the stage and the unhurried patina of a Florence moving at its own genteel pace created an alluring backdrop.  One that was well suited to Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s casually luxurious mid-century costumes.  Mississippian Elizabeth Spencer originally wrote The Light in the Piazza as a story for the New Yorker in 1960. Its strong appeal led to a successful movie starring George Hamilton two years later.  But turning it into a lauded musical took much longer.  

In this adaptation, the relaxed sensibility of the physical set extends to the work’s musical foundation.  Despite its being sung in both English and Italian, it’s that easy accessibility and lack of formality that help make today’s Piazza more at home in the camp of musical theater than in the domain of opera. It took decades for Spencer’s story to make it to the world of music even though there’s long been an interest in doing so.  It wasn’t until 1998 when composer/lyricist Adam Guettel, grandson of famed composer Richard Rogers, approached Spencer about taking it on and she agreed.  Collaborating closely with the author throughout the adaptation, it’s Guettel’s vision, complemented with Craig Lewis’s writing, that the world is now enjoying and helped earn Piazza a Tony in 2005 for best original score.

Although there are hints of something uniquely uncommon in the love Clara and Fabrizio share; a sense of the dangerous or injurious lies at its center.  There’s something about Clara that’s different from most people.  It’s that insinuated secret that explains why her mother hovers over her so closely and causes you not to take this love story for granted.  Why is she “not like other girls her age”? 

During the first act, we’re introduced as much to the notion and essence of Italy as we are to the characters Spencer has created.  Full of fire and intellect, Fabrizio’s family live beyond caricature.  Drawn with confident suavity, Alex Jennings as Signor Naccarelli, who joined Ms. Fleming and Mr. Houchen in the original London cast, navigated the stage with the confidence of a lion. He symbolized a father who knew how to use both cunning and compassion to protect and guide his family.   Both director Daniel Evans and movement director Lucy Hind can claim success in making the physical flow of the musical appear so naturally graceful.  As it became more and more clear that Mrs. Johnson’s might fail in her efforts to stifle the romance between her daughter and the young Italian, the first act’s closing scene meant that hard choices must inevitably follow.

Up to this point, the music had been unequivocally pleasing; but safe.  Operatic in the sense that the beauty of the voice prevailed, the music’s message was intended to nurture the romantic ideal.  Even the orchestration was sublimated to allow the voice, through song, to lead the story.  After Fabrizio learns the woman who accepted his marriage proposal has disappeared, everything changes.  Mr. Houchen’s distraught solo introduced the fire of dramatic passion and a new boldness of theatricality.  Both were invigorating and the sequence served to showcase the broad range and mellow richness of Houchen’s voice. 

Ms. Fleming, who initially was concerned with mastering the greater amount of dialog this rendering of Piazza required, made an exemplary Margaret Johnson.  Faced with a challenge that could end in triumph or tragedy, she had to trust her instincts as a mother to allow her daughter to at least have a chance of living a fully developed life; a life no one believed her capable of achieving. 

It’s the stakes that help make The Light in the Piazza so interesting.  When you take the story seriously, it flowers into something infinitely rewarding.  Regardless of their backgrounds, all parents make conscious efforts to further the happiness and security of their children.  Sometimes they even do so at the expense of their own marriage.  This story, encased in music, shows how courage and growth can be inseparable.

The Light in the Piazza

Dec 14 – 29, 2019

Lyric Opera House

20 N. Wacker Drive

Chicago, IL  60606

312-827-5600

www.lyricopera.org