There wasn't a lot to shout about at the final televised forum featuring the four leading mayoral candidates. The audience wasn't allowed to shout in any case. The candidates were generally civil to each other and mostly stuck to their familiar talking points, but observed time limits and avoided grandstanding thereby investing the q-and-a session with a bit of meat.
What was unusual is that the League of Chicago Theatres and Broadway In Chicago were among the 10 co-sponsors of the candidates' forum, telecast live last night (Feb. 17) on ABC-7 from the stage of Broadway In Chicago's Ford Center for the Performing Arts/Oriental Theatre. The League and Broadway In Chicago generally steer clear of any direct involvement in politics or elections, though neither (of course) was coming out in favor of any of the candidates, Carol Moseley Braun, Gery Chico, Miguel Del Valle and Rahm Emanuel.
Arts-poor mayoral forum in arts-rich Chicago
Feb. 18, 2011Onstage/Backstage: Director Dexter Bullard
Feb. 17, 2011
Dexter Bullard admits he’s been “overbusy” for several months. Two of his productions are closing soon: the eerie, gut-twisting world premiere of Brett Neveu’s “Odradek” at the House Theatre and, off-Broadway, Craig Wright’s “Mistakes Were Made,” featuring Michael Shannon. American Theater Company has already extended Bullard’s debut of Dan LeFranc’s “The Big Meal,” and Victory Gardens opens his staging of Annie Baker’s award-winning “Circle Mirror Transformation” late this month. In mid-March, the Museum of Contemporary Art restages his Link’s Hall brainchild, “The Dialogues,” in conjunction with the exhibit “Without You I’m Nothing.”
When I talked to Bullard, 45, he was in LA auditioning students for the Theatre School at DePaul, where he’s head of graduate acting. No rest for the weary, not when they’re this talented.
The city's new culture chiefs
Feb. 17, 2011The fog is beginning to clear over at the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and its newly-independent first cousin, the Chicago Tourism Fund (CTF). We now know at least a few of the people who will be running things in the name of culture. My colleague Jim DeRogatis, who broke this story last December, has kept you up-to-date on what will happen to the City's various music festivals and events, and now I'll do the same for theater programs.
To remind you: late last year, the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) and the Mayor's Office of Special Events were merged without the approval of the DCA. Many senior employees of the DCA were let go, and management of its actual presenting programs--theater, music, dance, visual arts, public art, etc.--was shifted to the Chicago Tourism Fund (CTF). Thing is, the CTF was a fiscal entity not an administrative entity. It funded various positions for folks working for the DCA and the Chicago Office of Tourism, but the CTF itself had little staff and no executive leadership. Also, longtime DCA Commissioner Lois Weisberg--who had the trust of the cultural community--resigned as of Jan. 30 in a white-hot fury over what had happened to the DCA. Along with the retirement last Dec. 30 of Weisberg's longtime Number Two, Deputy Commish Janet Carl Smith, this left the new DCASE with no leadership.
Chicago theater stars holding their own in NYC
Feb. 16, 2011In New York last week, I caught up with three theater muck-a-mucks with Chicago connections: director Gary Griffin, performer Andre De Shields and actor/writer Charles Busch.
At this very moment Griffin is enjoying a two-week holiday in Costa Rica, and he's earned it, having had two Chicago productions running at the same time, "As You Like It" at Chicago Shakespeare Theater (through March 6) and "The Mikado" at Lyric Opera of Chicago. He also found time for a concert staging of "Lost in the Stars" for New York's City Center Encores! Series, with which Griffin has been associated for some years. I saw "Lost in the Stars," the 1948 musical by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson based on Alan Paton's novel, "Cry, the Beloved Country." The musical adaptation is a simply-told but deeply affecting tale of South Africa at the time Apartheid was becoming official government policy in the late 1940's. Its tale of two fathers, black and white, who bridge the racial divide through mutual grief, remains profoundly moving. It may be Weill's most richly melodic score and it was beautifully sung (only the black characters sing), played and staged at City Center. As soon as he returns from Costa Rica, Griffin heads to Canada for his third season with the Stratford Festival, where he'll stage a lavish production of "Camelot" (April 16-Oct. 30).
Valentine's Day theater not all roses and chocolate
Feb. 14, 2011A lucky 13 years ago, playwright Eve Ensler decided she would permit groups around the world to conduct Valentine’s Day performances of her seminal (ovarian?) feminist work The Vagina Monologues, provided they used the proceeds to combat violence against women. The demand was so great that Ensler extended her grant of one-off rights throughout the months of February, March, and April, and so what began as a single event in New York now includes more than 5000 events annually.
(That first New York reading caused a bit of a scandal when Donna Hanover, Rudy Guiliani’s wife and thus the city’s First Lady, participated, given that the text includes a rendition of all possible names for that portion of the female anatomy including my particular favorite, “Cootchie-Snorcher.” The scandal flared up again several years later when the show’s Off Broadway producers cast Ms. Hanover in the lead role, whereupon she graciously withdrew to spare her husband further embarrassment. He repaid her several months later with a public announcement that he preferred someone else’s cootchie-snorcher to hers.)
Chicago rap show London-bound
Feb. 11, 2011
Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s rap hit, “Funk It Up About Nothin,” is adding a month in London to its international touring schedule. Written and directed by Chicago- based brothers GQ and JQ (who also perform in it), the breezy, rapid-fire condensation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” already has been performed in New York and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival since CST and the two Q’s first rolled it out in 2008.
The show’s return visit to CST closes this Sunday (Feb. 13) in preparation for a five-week tour of Australia announced some months ago. The new news is that “Funk It Up” will go immediately to London for a month-long run (April 6-May 7) at the historic Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London’s richly multi-cultural East End. A half- century ago, the Theatre Royal was home to director Joan Littlewood and her working class Theatre Workshop, famous for developing the anti-war musical revue “Oh, What a Lovely War,” which went on to enjoy enormous success in London’s West End and on Broadway.
With “Funk It Up About Nothin” Chicago Shakespeare Theater now can claim to have developed a truly international stage success.
The revenge of the clowns: Tony Awards forced from Radio City Music Hall
Feb. 10, 2011In May 2010, the New York critics clobbered Cirque du Soleil's first attempt at creating a Broadway show, the stupefyingly juvenile and out-and-out vulgar "Banana Shpeel," which the Cirque folk billed as a throwback to vaudeville. It wasn't and, clearly, the Cirque People (CP) had no concept of what American vaudeville was. Alas, mes enfants! If only the CP had paid attention to the equally-bad Chicago reviews when the show tried out here, they would have been able to fix the show, or at least know what to expect when they opened in New York.
Well, now it's time for Revenge of the Clowns: having been rejected by Broadway, Cirque du Soleil now is throwing Broadway out of the house on the most important night of the Broadway calendar, the 65th annual Tony Awards ceremonies and telecast on June 12. For the first time in years, the Tony People (TP) will NOT be able to stage the big show at Radio City Music Hall, with its vast and magically mechanical stage and its vast seating capacity. Radio City has been home to the Tony Awards since 1997, but it seems the CP have signed a multi-year contract with Radio City Music Hall to produce an annual summer-long show. This means the TP have had to find other quarters for 2011 (and beyond if the Cirque venture is a hit).
Hynd tackles 'The Merry Widow' at Joffrey
Feb. 10, 2011
“The Merry Widow” is about the basic things in life, says choreographer Ronald Hynd: “Sex, money, commitment, and love. They don’t have to go in that order. That was rather crass, the order I put it.”
English native Hynd, who turns 80 this spring, is nowhere near crass. He is direct and opinionated as he discusses the full-length ballet he created in 1975 for the Australian Ballet, which he, his wife Annette Page, and the original production’s Danilo, John Meehan, have now set on the Joffrey.
Hynd’s 35-year-old ballet tells a highly theatrical story wordlessly, though hardly silently. His task was huge: to make the Byzantine plot of Franz Lehar’s 1905 comic operetta—in which two couples negotiate a dizzying series of obstacles and misunderstandings—perfectly clear.
“The challenges, always, come with making the story visible,” says Hynd. “Because there are acres of dialogue in the operetta. Obviously that’s all gone. But you’ve got to condense that right down to the minimum, and choose movements that can express words.