Don’t Dress for Dinner At
the Royal GeorgeTheatre By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—Here’s
a rarity for you, a French sex farce that is actually funny. That may come as a
surprise to playgoers who have endured countless inane examples of this genre,
mostly at dinner theaters. “Don’t Dress for Dinner” at the Royal George Theatre
demonstrates that a sex farce can be done well. All it takes is an expert cast
guided by an expert director. “Don’t Dress for Dinner” is the work of Mark Camoletti, a
Swiss playwright who had great European success writing this type of comedy.
This show follows the well-worn grooves of the sex farce. The setting is a
middle class marriage. Initially a character tells a lie to avoid
embarrassment, usually connected to having a mistress unknown to his wife. That
lie precipitates the need for a second lie, and then a third, until the whole
plot careens into a kind of lunacy with every character enmeshed in mistaken
identities and other confusions. These plays rely on plot and accelerated pace to hold the
stage. Sex farces are not known for their witty dialogue or depth of
characterizations or social criticism. Timing is everything as characters
scramble to cover themselves with falsehoods and flee in or out of rooms to
avoid disastrous encounters with other characters who may be equally as
desperate. The plot of a sex farce typically is so complex and
convoluted that it resists intelligible synopsis. And so it is with “Don’t
Dress for Dinner.” Let it suffice that the mayhem begins quietly enough with
Bernard sending his wife Jacqueline to visit her mother so he can have a cozy
weekend with his mistress Suzanne (the entire action takes place in an upscale
French farmhouse near Paris in the early 1990’s). Then Robert unexpectedly
turns up. He’s a visiting American who was the best man at Bernard’s marriage
to Jacqueline and, unknown to his friend, is having an affair with his wife. Those building blocks of the story are set in place in the
first minutes of the place. Complications immediately ensue, with a cook named
Suzette making an appearance that disrupts everyone’s adulterous plans. In “Don’t Dress for Dinner,” as in most sex farces, the
characters talk and scheme a lot about sex but get little action, until the
final curtain anyhow. The plays are naughty in a harmless way and totally
inoffensive, even with a split second of partial nudity in this production. The
accent is entirely on obtaining maximum laughs from the rising crescendo of
ludicrous situations, and this is where the Royal George staging comes up big. The production employs a cast with the skills to make the
velocity of the storyline work beautifully. Sure there are moments of excessive
dithering and over the top physical comedy, but that’s built into the farce
form. Mostly the Royal George show makes the characters not only funny, but
credible, a word rarely used in describing a sex farce. Judging from the applause and squeals on opening night, the
star of the show is Jeffrey Donovan, who plays Robert and is a successful TV
and film actor. Donovan is good looking and has a real feel for broad comedy.
But the lynchpins of the production are Patricia Kalember as Jacqueline and
Spencer Kayden as the French cook. 
Kalember succeeds by keeping her cool when everyone else goes
off half-cocked. She is an oasis of stability, even with her own secrets and
suspicions. As an anchor of stability, her performance allows the production to
breathe while a lesser actress would take the role into burlesque absurdity.
Kayden is a joy, a pixie young woman with an Inspector Clouseau accent, a
character who finds herself in the eye of an erotic hurricane she doesn’t
understand but will happily go along with, for a price. Mark Harelik is Bernard, Jamie Morgan is Bernard’s sexpot
doxie, and Chris Sullivan is the cook’s husband who makes a late appearance to
roil the plot to even greater frenzy. They all happily contribute to the
evening’s madcap uproar. The real hero of the evening is John Tillinger, one of the
American theater’s most successful directors and a man who knows how to make a
farce work. His invisible guiding hand must be credited with elevating the
production to its comic heights where a less sensitive and disciplined director
would fumble the play into the lower depths of shtick and relentless wackiness. Jim Noone designed the authentic looking farmhouse interior,
Virgil John the costumes, Keith Parham the lighting, and Rob Milburn and
Michael Bodeen the sound and original music. “Don’t Dress for Dinner” runs through January 11 at the Royal
George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street. Performances are Tuesday and
Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday
at 4:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 5 p.m.
Tickets are $49.50 and $59.50, Call 312 988 9000 or visit www.dontdressfordinner.com. The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. November 2008
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Gutenberg! The Musical! at the RoyalGeorgeTheatre By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—“Gutenberg! The Musical!” received some
admiring reviews when it opened in New York City late in 2006. Either the Eastern critics were wearing
blindfolds and earplugs or something catastrophic happened to the show en route
from the Big Apple to Chicago, because the show at the RoyalGeorgeTheatre is a disaster.
“Gutenberg! The Musical!” is playing
in the Gallery at the Royal George. The Gallery is an oblong room with 60
uncomfortable wooden chairs facing a small stage area at the end of the room.
To reach the Gallery spectators must climb about 30 winding stairs,
inconvenient for people with bad knees. The performing space is primitive but
it does provide the intimacy for a small-scale show like “Gutenberg.” The
production runs about 95 minutes, including one intermission, a brief playing
time for most shows but an eternity for this one. “Gutenberg! The Musical!” is a
two-character enterprise (excluding a cameo appearance by a third actor at the
end of the evening). The gimmick is that the two characters, called Doug Simon
and Bud Davenport, have written a musical about Johannes Gutenberg, the
pioneering German printer of the 1400’s, and they are auditioning it for the
audience, which they claim includes some interested Broadway producers. Simon and Davenport play themselves and also all the
characters in the musical, each character delineated by an actor donning a
baseball cap with the name of the character written on it. An on stage pianist
provides the musical accompaniment. The plot, such as it is, deals with
the famous German who revolutionized history with his perfection of movable
type. But the musical admittedly is not a history lesson. In fact, the story
ends with Gutenberg burned alive by an angry mob and his printing press
destroyed. The narrative includes a villainous monk and a bunch of other
peculiar characters, including an anti Semitic little girl. Simon and Davenport announce at the outset of the show that
their musical will touch on the Holocaust, because to be considered important a
musical must deal with a major problem. That implies “Gutenberg” is a satire on
musical theater conventions. But the bulk of the show is so relentlessly
trivial and facetious that anti Semitism becomes an intrusion totally out of
sync with the rest of the material, only making the audience confused and
uncomfortable.
We can concede that the intent of
“Gutenberg” creators Scott Brown and Anthony King is to lampoon musicals, or at
least bad musicals. But one doesn’t accomplish much in the way of satire by
simply writing a bad musical to send up other bad musicals. The original score is unmemorable,
though there were a few flashes of clever rhyming in the lyrics. But overall
the enterprise is so witless and pointless that momentary outbursts of bright
lyrics only highlight the dreariness of the rest of the show. Breon Bliss (Bud Davenport) and Alex
Goodrich (Doug Simon) try desperately to be likable throughout the show, but
all that grinning and cavorting and playing to the audience wore out its
welcome in the first five minutes. That left another 90 minutes (excluding the
intermission) of enduring their mugging and begging for acceptance from the
spectators. The program credits not one but two
directors, Alex Timbers and Ian Unterman. Surely one of them should have
recognized that the acting and singing required a tighter reign instead of
turning loose all that simpering and low low comedy. High marks do go to
pianist T. O. Sterrett for his professionalism in accompanying the performers
with no visible signs of dismay. A fair play disclaimer. At my
performance the theater was more than half full and a number of the patrons
laughed a lot and seemed to be enjoying the show. So be it. Their reaction is
between them and their God. “Gutenberg! The Musical!” runs through
July 27 in the Gallery at the Royal GeorgeTheatre, 1641 North Halsted Street. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m. Saturday at 5 and 9 p.m., and Sunday at 3 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $35. Call 313 988 9000. The show gets a rating of one star. July 2008 For more information, visit www.gutenbergthemusical.com. Contact us at: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. *********************** Russian on
the Side at
the Royal George Theatre By Dan Zeff CHICAGO—“Russian on the Side” may be confused in purpose but
it doesn’t lack for a relentless desire to please. The Mark Nadler one-man show
is filling the main stage of the Royal George Theatre with anecdotes about
obscure Russian composers and little known songs by contemporary Americans. It
doesn’t make much thematic sense but the 95-minute production is tied together
by Nadler’s energy and his high octane piano playing. Nadler is a much honored cabaret performer who has made a
career out of celebrating the American pop songbook as created by composers and
lyricists like Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter,
George Gershwin, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Dorothy Fields, and Jule Styne.
He’s played in intimate chic rooms in fancy New York City hotels and also
performed with symphony orchestras and appeared in Town Hall and Carnegie Hall.
“Russian on the Side” is getting a Chicago run before Nadler takes the revue to
New York City in the autumn. The hook for Nadler’s show is a patter song from the 1941
Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin musical “Lady in the Dark” called “Tschaikowsky.”
That’s the number that made Danny Kaye a sensation as he rattled off the cumbersome
names of 49 Russian composers in a few high velocity seconds. With that song as
his basic text, Nadler plays snippets of music from the Russians (a few of whom
were actually Polish) and tosses in some anecdotes about the men along with a
few jokes and reminiscences of his own. But Nadler wanders off the Russian composer path much of the
evening. He plays and sings a revisionist medley of songs from “Oklahoma” and
tears “I Can’t Get Started” to shreds vocally and instrumentally. Unfamiliar
songs from modern American composers like Mary Rodgers and Adam Guettel (Richard Rodgers’s daughter and grandson
respectively) take up more space in the show than music by Rachmaninoff, Rimsky,
Korsakov, and Stravinsky.
The one constant in the otherwise curate’s egg content of the
show is Nadler’s buoyant approach toward his material and toward the audience.
Physically, the man cavorts around the stage and bounces on and off the piano.
What his singing voice lacks in beauty it makes up in passion and volume. And his piano playing is impressively loaded
with technique. Local audiences have seen this kind of show before, from
presenters like Sammy Cahn and Hershy Felder. But those performances were
unified by a unity of music and commentary. Nadler readily agrees that many of
his Russian composers were nonentities and deservedly so. He doesn’t spend more than a few seconds on
them and one wonders why he bothers at all. The show does not lack for his
opinions. He values the “Romeo and Juliet” music by Prokofiev over the famous
suite by Tchaikovsky. Nadler gives audiences a brief history lesson in Russian
classical music, starting with Mikhail Glinka, the founder of a Russian
national music style. And he does
connect a few Russian classical melodies with some tunes that became hits on
Broadway, like the Alexander Borodin’s music that became “This Is My Beloved”
and other songs from the musical comedy “Kismet.” But Nadler doesn’t go far
enough along this track, even after indicating at the outset of the show that
the evening would attend fully to Russian works that became hit Broadway songs.
Lots of popular songs rooted in the melodies of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff
are never heard. Nadler entertains the customers with autobiographical
stories, including the stressful experience of growing up alienated and Jewish
in Iowa. The mood is primarily lighthearted but he does attempt to inject some
emotional muscle into the performance with his intense renditions of Mary
Rodgers and Adam Guettel numbers, all of which go on too long. In the end, “Russian on the Side” is carried by Nadler’s
enthusiasm and his piano playing. Once again, one would have wished for a more
extended instrumental treatment of familiar Russian pieces instead of
scattering brief excerpts from Russian second-raters throughout the evening.
Nadler has his talents as a raconteur and vocalist, but the big pay-off in his
show flows from his skill at the keyboard. “Russian on the Side” runs through June 15 at the Royal
George Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street. Performances are Tuesday through
Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 9 p.m., and Sunday
at 3 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $34.50 to $55. Call 312 988 9000. The show gets a rating of three stars. May 2008 For
more information about the Chicago
run of the show, visit: www.RussianOnTheSideOnline.com. Contact
Dan: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com
***********************
A Steady Rain
by Chicago Dramatists
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—No new play of 2007 created more buzz in Chicago than “A Steady Rain.” The Keith Huff drama played six sold out weeks at the small but cutting edge Chicago Dramatists and clearly deserved a longer life. Fortunately for Chicagoland theatergoers, myself included, who missed the original run, “A Steady Rain” has been restaged with the same cast and director at the upscale Royal George Theatre for a seven-week run. The next stop should be New York City.
“A Steady Rain” is a cop drama. The only onstage characters are a pair of Chicago policemen named Joey and Denny. They have been friends since childhood and they now patrol the mean streets of Chicago. Denny is the dominant half of the duo, a bully and a racist who has brutalized Joey for most of their lives, though in the name of male bonding. Denny has a family—a wife and two children—while Joey is a loner, an alcoholic who lives in a one room apartment and spends most of his free time at Denny’s house.
That’s the setup as the play begins. The two men tells their stories directly to the audience when they aren’t bickering between themselves. The first few minutes are consumed by profane humor and macho backchat. Then the narrative gradually spirals into a tale of violence and almost unbearable tension. In a concentrated and uninterrupted 90 minutes, “A Steady Rain” touches on friendship, family, loyalty and betrayal, as well as offering riveted spectators a glimpse into the life of a beat policeman, with its sordid encounters with hookers, pimps, druggies, and petty criminals.
The intensity of the story escalates until a final burst of violence that is both shocking and inevitable. By the final blackout, both the characters and the audience have been put through the emotional wringer.
Playwright Huff compresses his drama into an intimate environment that consists primarily of a table and a couple of chairs enclosed by a neutral background that might be a police squad room. But the story takes the viewer throughout the city and into Denny’s home, all through Huff’s gutsy and evocative dialogue. If a motion picture version is ever made of this play, Martin Scorsese has to be the director.
Peter DeFaria and Randy Steinmeyer repeat their roles as Joey and Denny. It’s impossible to think of any other actors as either character and it’s impossible to imagine DeFaria and Steinmeyer in any other play, they inhabit the two policemen so authentically. Steinmeyer in particular is remarkable as the foul mouthed Denny, a cop who abuses his wife and best friend, extorts money from whores on the street, wallows in racial and ethnic intolerance, yet still lives by a personal moral code that puts family above everything.As Joey, DeFaria mostly reacts to Denny’s outbursts and seems helpless to reverse his friend’s descent into the maelstrom of domestic and street violence. But late in the play DeFaria’s Joey rises to his own emotional heights, filling the vacuum left by Denny’s deterioration.
The play’s producers chose well in transferring the production to the small Royal George Studio Theatre (once called the Cabaret). The tiny stage with its simple table and chairs as sole props reinforces the claustrophobic atmosphere. The play has almost no physical action beyond the actors occasionally standing up or shifting position in their chairs. This is a language driven dramatic experience, stoked with obscenities and exposed psychological nerves, and occasional very adult humor.
Russ Tutterow repeats his taut directing, so seamless that the play just seems to happen, riding its own irreversible momentum. How much of the production’s success resides with the director, the actors, or the playwright is impossible to separate and it doesn’t matter. “A Steady Rain” is an organic whole, simultaneously a scorching family drama and a stark vision of the daily stresses of police life in the big city.
The remainder of the production credits go to Tom Burch (set design), Jeff Pines (lighting design), Kerith Wolf (costume design), and Michael Tutaj (sound design). All do their part to elevate the play to its ferocious level of uncompromising realism.
“A Steady Rain” runs through April 27 at the Royal George Studio Theatre, 1641 North Halsted Street. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 5 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 5 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $45. Call 312 988 9000.
The show gets a rating of four stars. March 2008
For more information contact: www.asteadyrain.com
Contact us : zeffdaniel@yahoo.com