Daily Rehearsal: ‘Camino Real’ inspires extreme reactions

Daily Rehearsal: ‘Camino Real’ inspires extreme reactions
Photo by Liz Lauren
Daily Rehearsal: ‘Camino Real’ inspires extreme reactions
Photo by Liz Lauren

Daily Rehearsal: ‘Camino Real’ inspires extreme reactions

WBEZ brings you fact-based news and information. Sign up for our newsletters to stay up to date on the stories that matter.

1. If you missed it this weekend, I Am A Rocket Scientist, the second live film event from Screen Door, went up at the Den. It was “a sci-fi musical about space travel and a love triangle” (you can watch the trailer here). Beforehand, writer and director David Brent said ” It’s actually not terrible, speaking objectively.” Plus, Nina Metz recommends.

'Camino Real' (Photo by Liz Lauren)
2. For children of a certain generation, the news that I Love Lucy has been transformed into a musical might inspire fear or excitement. Double that, because it’s going up at the Broadway Playhouse before anywhere else. It’ll be set up so that audience members act as the audience members of the actual TV show getting a behind-the-scenes glance at how it all plays out. It opens September 12.

3. John Lahr reviews Camino Real for The New Yorker and it is not good (the review). “The Goodman marquee refers to the show as ‘Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real.’ What is onstage, however, is a co-authorship that doesn’t remotely represent Williams’s vision or his dramatic voice,” Lahr writes. Much of his criticism is reserved for director Calixto Bieito, “who is a marvellous stager [but] is not much of a thinker; his production is recklessly, exuberantly, even sometimes elegantly, wrongheaded.” And of those post-show discussions that theaters these days love so much: “[There were] thirty bewildered audience members. A show of hands revealed that most of them had never read Camino Real. They thought they’d just seen Tennessee Williams’s play; they were surprised to learn otherwise. I applaud the Goodman’s ambition but not the mischief of this approach.” On another note, the New York Times has a nice photo of the costume board for this play.

4. More on Camino Real: Bob Bullen says that you should really not attend if you are of a sensitive nature/have a child in tow. Also, you may get hit with a piece of bread — and he was not even at Rick Bayless’ Cascabel!. This only indicates to me that he had very good seats.

5. Chicago Slam Works is starting a new performance series. They’ll be spread out over a matter of months, with Two Sides on April 3, Dead or Alive in May and In Any Tongue in July, all at the Vittum Theater. A “Slam Pass” will get you tickets to all the shows, plus Slam Works’ regular programming. “For decades, Chicago’s slam community has been reshaping how poetry is viewed, presented and received,” said slam poetry founder and CSW Board President Marc Smith in a statement. “And now, through this subscription series, it is our goal for performance poetry to establish a toehold in the ‘legit’ theater domain, setting the pace for others to follow until high level professional performance poetry productions are commonplace throughout the country.” Looks to be a diverse and talented group of performers.

Questions? Tips? Email kdries@wbez.org.