Henry VIII
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – Local Shakespearean completests can rejoice. They finally can attend a production of “Henry VIII,” probably the least frequently revived Shakespeare play in the canon and never before staged professionally in Chicago. They will find a flawed play, but one worth seeing, elevated by an inventive staging at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater that features a handful of towering performances.
“Henry VIII” may have been the last of Shakespeare’s plays, probably written in 1613. The play likely isn’t all Shakespeare, scholars believing that parts of it were written by Elizabethan playwright John Fletcher. The audience can leave the parsing of who wrote what to the academics. There are dead spots in the script, but also scenes of tremendous theatrical power.
As
the title indicates, this is a history play about the English king Henry VIII,
he of the six wives, several of which came to violent ends. The plot centers on
Henry’s first wife, Queen Katharine of Aragon and the king’s Machiavellian
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, and their eventual downfall. The narrative moves
quickly, as though the events of the drama occurred in a matter of weeks. The
action actually covers 16 years, from 1520 to 1536, though the characters never
age.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
Spectators who look for the wit and coherence of Shakespeare’s earlier histories will be disappointed. “Henry VIII” is an episodic play, really a sequence of set pieces climaxed by brilliant monologues. The story portrays the infighting and jealousy and grasping for power that infect Henry’s court. Noblemen and high-ranking clergymen battle for positions of favor under the headstrong and mercurial Henry. The losers end up with their heads on the copping block or in disgrace.
The core plot point is Henry’s desire to divorce Katharine to marry the young and fetching Anne Boleyn. Henry seeks a divorce from Katharine, claiming that his marriage is invalid because Katharine was his older brother’s wife and thus the marriage amounted to incest. The king’s request for a divorce runs into resistance from the Vatican. In real life, the dispute was a cornerstone of the Reformation in England, leading to the establishment of the Church of England. But the play doesn’t delve deep into the historical fine points of the king’s confrontation with the church. It’s a play about personalities.
The three personalities that come most alive in the play are Katherine, Wolsey, and Henry. In a stunning performance by Ora Jones, Katherine portrays a woman of tremendous inner strength as she pleads eloquently for the validity of her marriage and her role as a true and faithful wife of the king.
As Cardinal Wolsey, Scott Jaeck dominates the stage as a corrupt political animal who rises to become the most powerful man in England after the king, only to be brought down by his own greed and duplicity. But Wolsey is a complex character and Shakespeare solicits our sympathy for the man after his overthrow. Jaeck delivers a performance of super authority, first carving out a character of venality and treachery and ending up repentant and humbled, lamenting “Would like I had served my God/With half the zeal I served my king/He would not in mine old age/Have left me naked to my enemies.”
Gregory Wooddell is a lean Henry, a long way from the famous Holbein portrait of a well-fed monarch. He’s a tyrant, a womanizer, headstrong and impulsive, but a crafty politician who must navigate through the dangerous waters of ambitious men at court jockeying for a slice of the king’s favor and its accompanying benefits in wealth and power.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
Lance Baker delivers a commanding performance as the Bishop of Winchester, a man up to his elbows in court politics and a fierce enemy of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury (played with nice understatement by Andrew Long, which also plays the fiery and betrayed Duke of Buckingham). The scene in which Henry commands Winchester and the other nobles to embrace the archbishop is a choice bit of bite-the-bullet comedy.
The large ensemble is filled with the cream of the local acting pool, like Kevin Gudahl (the attendant to Katherine, Sir Thomas More, and a treacherous servant), David Darlow (the oily Cardinal Campeius), Mike Nussbaum (a puckish Duke of Suffolk), David Lively (the Duke of Norfolk), Nathan Hosner (the Lord Chamberlain), Adam Brown (Lord Sandys), and William Dick (Sir Thomas Lovell). Other than Katherine, the female characters are mostly ornaments circling around the king, but Christina Pumariega makes a fetching Anne Boleyn.
Director Barbara Gaines has injected some of her own ideas into the play and they all work. She has omitted a few minor characters and changed Catherine’s dream scene late in the story into an erotic reunion with her now alienated husband. The play traditionally relies heavily on pageantry, which is lush to look at but slows down the action and can create considerable budgetary problems. Gaines foregoes the pageantry and interpolates several brief dance bits (choreographed by Harrison McEldowney) that illuminate emotional and narrative points along the way.
Gaines puts in a wall at the rear of the stage with openings that three of the main characters enter at their deaths. I’m not sure if the wall has any symbolic purpose but it has a definite theatrical impact. Gaines also extends the play beyond Shakespeare’s paean to Queen Elizabeth I and the reigning House of Tudor to a silent moment when Anne Boleyn intrudes upon her husband passionately kissing Jane Seymour, soon to be Henry’s third wife. Anne’s stricken expression nails the young queen’s recognition that she is doomed. It’s a startling but fitting ending to a story ripe with betrayal and intrigue and the king’s roving eye.
James Noone’s scenic design relies almost entirely on curtains and drapes to suggest a sense of royal opulence. The visuals emerge primarily from Mariann Verheyen’s period costumes, subdued colors for the noblemen and brilliant crimson for the robes of the churchmen. Anne Militello’s lighting is dramatic and atmospheric, as are the sound and original music from Lindsay Jones.
“Henry VIII” starts slowly but 30 minutes into the play it gains momentum, sustained by the fascinating personalities on stage and the terrific performances by the main actors. Artistically the play may rank at the bottom of Shakespeare’s work but it’s still Shakespeare, who provides enough dramatic and theatrical raw material to sustain this fine production.
“Henry VIII” runs through June 16 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater Courtyard theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets are $58 to $78. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com.
The show gets a rating of 3½ stars May 2013
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Julius Caesar
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – The Chicago Shakespeare Theater has imported British director Jonathan Munby to direct Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and Munby has brought a high concept vision of the tragedy across the Atlantic.
The audience enters the CST Courtyard Theater while a crowd of performers on stage mill around in an open area. There is a hot dog stand and vendors selling buttons. It could be Wrigley Field on a Saturday afternoon, though the country music line dance likely isn’t a regular feature at Addison and Sheffield. Overhead there is a giant banner with a portrait of Caesar, with a URL address below the photo.
The action is played out against a background of steep steps in front of an anonymous government-type façade. It could be the steps leading to any parliamentary building in the world. We are clearly not in ancient Rome but in some very modern capital, maybe Washington, D.C., maybe some place in Europe.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
The characters in the drama wear modern clothes, with the men in business suits and the plebeians in more informal, grungy wardrobes. There isn’t a toga in sight. One character produces an iPhone and characters watch a replay of Caesar’s assassination on television. Striking visual moments abound in the production created by the designers Alexander Dodge (sets), Ilona Somogyi (costumes), and Philip S. Rosenberg (lighting). During the battle scenes late in the play soldiers descend on ropes from the rafters and there is lots of excessively loud gunfire. The specter of the murdered, blood-soaked Caesar appears periodically to remind the anguished Brutus of his pivotal role in the great man’s death.
If Munby had any contemporary parallels in mind, they eluded me. His updating did not call to mind any connections between Caesar’s world and today’s political climate. In spite of the comprehensively modern look of the show, it’s still Shakespeare’s play.
The ensemble is a blend of local actors and imports. It should surprise no veteran area theatergoer that the most effective actor in the production is Larry Yando, who carves out a deliciously sardonic portrait of Casca, the Roman senator and one of the conspirators. It’s a comparatively minor role and one could wish Yando were cast in a more prominent part, especially Brutus, the real core character in the narrative.
Brutus is a stubborn idealist, and that ruins his cause. Against the advice of his fellow conspirators, he allows Marc Antony to speak to the people over Caesar’s bloody corpse. The result is calamity for the assassins. On the battlefield Brutus makes one wrong-headed decision after another, leading to his defeat. Brutus is an honorable man, as Antony says, without irony during his funeral oration, but his integrity isn’t enough. The man lacks political smarts, and that proves fatal. The British actor John Light plays Brutus with a decent American accent but he doesn’t get very deeply under the skin of this complex character. Light’s Brutus initially doesn’t separate himself sufficiently from the other and less noble conspirators, some of whom have their own agendas and axes to grind.
Jason
Kolotouros is better as Cassius, though his well-built physique doesn’t match
Caesar’s description of a man with a “lean and hungry look.” David Darlow, a
local favorite, plays Caesar in a curiously low key. We miss the arrogance,
charisma, and sheer power of personality that made Caesar the leader of the
world’s mightiest empire. Better is Dion Johnstone. He is a potent plain-speaking
Marc Antony who loved Caesar in life but easily accommodates himself after Caesar’s
death to become one of the three ruthless co-leaders of the empire. Johnstone
delivers the over familiar “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech directly and
without emotional frills, telling it like it is and only gradually oozing into
manipulating the Roman rabble to avenge Caesar’s death.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
Munby expands the role of the soothsayer who warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March. The normally male role is played by female McKinley Carter. She weaves in and out of the action, often crooning a lament like one of those indecipherable Cirque du Soleil vocalists. There are only two other female roles in the play, Caesar’s wife Calpurnia (Barbara E. Robertson) and Brutus’s wife Portia (Brenda Barrie). Both characters spend their stage time either berating or pleading with their husbands but within those limitations Robertson and Barrie do well.
The play moves with commendable pace, coming in at 2½ hours with a single intermission, comparative brevity for a Shakespeare production. Most of the play’s substance resides in the first half, with the forming of the conspiracy and the assassination of Caesar and its immediate aftermath. The last half of the play is mostly the battle and arguing between Brutus and Cassius. The battle scenes are staged with power and brutality, but they are more effective as theater than drama.
Mundy demonstrates that he is a director with a strong visual sense, willing to take risks. His contemporary setting for the play can be distracting (the appearance of the iPhone elicited giggles from the audience) but it is never dull.Audiences should find his production clearly spoken and easy to follow. There is much to engage the eye though rather less to engage the mind and emotions.
“Julius Caesar” runs through March 24 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $58 to $78. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com.
The show gets a rating of three stars. February 2013
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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The School for Lies
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – Watching “The School for Lies” at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater is like sitting for two hours in a verbal wind tunnel. The word play is so dazzling and presented with such abundance that the audience can be pinned against their seats by the sheer velocity of all the clever rhymes and satirical jabs.
“The School for Lies” is David Ives’s adaptation of Moliere’s classic French comedy “The Misanthrope.” The title character in the original is a man who is disgusted with the hypocrisy, backbiting, and false flattery he sees in the Parisian society of his day (the play opened in 1666). He spares no effort in telling the people around him just how little he thinks of their affectations and superficiality. The in-your-face criticisms are not absorbed happily by the people on the receiving end of the misanthrope’s contempt.
Ives, who is growing into one of the American theater’s treasures, follows Moliere’s play when it suits him. Ives retains the names of nearly all the characters from Moliere’s script, with the exception of the misanthrope, here called Frank. The setting remains seventeenth century Paris, sumptuously recreated by Daniel Ostling’s baroque set, Susan Mickey’s elaborate period costumes, Philip Rosenberg’s lighting, and Melissa Veal’s extravagant wig designs.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
The adaptation is drenched in anachronisms. One character pipes in with an “LOL” and when the misanthrope mentions “a peak in Darien,” another character queries “Connecticut?” Ives also injects a rap bit and a considerable amount of un-Moliere-ish profanity plus anatomical references of considerable intimacy.
All the action takes place in a glittering Parisian drawing room. There the misanthrope (Ben Carlson) fulminates against the imperfections of mankind as a parade of cartoonish characters enters and exits, notably a cheerful ninny named Acaste (Kevin Gudahl), the pompous wannabe poet Oronte (Greg Vinkler), and the courier Clitander, occasionally referred to as Clitoris (Paul Slade Smith). Slightly more normal is the misanthrope’s friend Philinte (Sean Fortunato). On the female side, there is Celimene (Deborah), an aristocratic young woman who gives as good as she gets in the display of saucy language, along with her young cousin Eliante (Heidi Kettenring), and a bitchy matron named Arinsoe (Judith-Marie Bergan) who oozes moral disapproval and barely suppressed horniness.
The plot is all nonsense, mostly dealing with romantic confusions that involve self deluded men and women at cross purposes. There is much wit in the dialogue but the characters remain two-dimensional. The satire reaches for relevance to our time and sometimes strikes home in lampooning the self satisfied and malicious behavior that flourishes as much in our century as it did in Moliere’s day. But Ives is playing his adaptation for farcical comedy. He discards the darker side of the original play’s vicious men and women concealing their spiteful attitudes beneath a veneer of civility. The result is a comedy that carries more raucous humor than the original but much less depth.
Photo Credit: Liz Lauren
Ives uses rhyming couplets with remarkable ingenuity, the rhymes coming not only at the ends of lines but within the lines. Indeed, the audience can be excused for focusing on the playwright’s poetic skills at the cost of paying attention to the assorted comic antics in the plot. Ives revises the Moliere ending, which was ambiguous, into a generally happy conclusion. Ives’s ending pokes fun at the convenient if unbelievable revelations that are hallmarks of both Shakespeare and Moliere comedy. By the end of “The School for Lies,” the chief characters are satisfactorily paired off and nobody ends badly. Nobody dies or is ruined, though a few egos may be bruised and disappointed lovers abound.
This is a play that demands acting that can handle Ives’s mile-a-minute dialogue with facility and intelligibility. The strengths of the production reside with husband and wife guest stars Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay, imported from Canada where they are luminaries of the Stratford Festival. Chicagoland audiences have seen Carlson before and know that he has one of the quickest tongues in North American theater. Carlson captures the misanthrope’s take-no-prisoners attitude toward the human race with a delicious comic intensity. Unfortunately, halfway through the play his character stops being a misanthrope and turns into a would-be lover, draining away much of the comedy’s satirical bite. Hay is his match, poured into a strapless gown that allows no margin for error. She tosses off the rap passage as though Celimene had time traveled into the late twentieth century and picked up some tips from 50 Cent and Eminem.
Heidi Kettering displays a seldom seen comic sensibility as Eliante, who finds herself infatuated with the misanthrope and graphically forces her amorous intensions on the flustered man. It’s a pleasure to welcome Greg Vinkler back to Chicago after spending two years on Broadway. His portrait of the officious Oronte is a mincing joy. Fortunato, who never disappoints, even looks good in drag, wearing a blue evening gown with distinction. It’s good enough to convince the characters that he’s the queen of France in a scene that is as preposterous as any we’ll see in a Chicagoland theater this season. And a shout-out to Samuel Taylor, who doubles as Celimene’s servant and the misanthrope’s valet. The servant’s constant mishaps with plates of hors d’ouevres grew a bit wearisome with repetition but the audience seemed to love the shtick.
Barbara Gaines directs with the pace the production requires and lots of delectable comic flourishes. Working with the skilled design team and an exemplary ensemble, Gaines has concocted a wonderful broad soufflé of comedy. I haven’t heard so much laughter in the CST Courtyard Theater in years.
“The School for Lies” runs through January 20 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $58 to $78. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com/school.
The show gets a rating of 3½ stars. December 2012
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Elizabeth Rex
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – Timothy Findley’s “Elizabeth Rex” confines Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare inside a royal barn one wintry night in February 1601. The placement of the two most luminous personalities of England’s Golden Age should set off glorious dramatic and theatrical fireworks at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The performers do their best to rock the CST stage emotionally, but the play ends up providing more heat than light.
The
play’s conceit centers on the queen’s turbulent reaction to the approaching
execution of the Earl of Essex for treason.
Elizabeth sentenced the earl to beheading at the Tower of London early
in the morning of February 25 and she is conflicted. As a queen she had to pass
the death sentence on Essex as a traitor for leading a rebellion against her
government. But Essex was also the queen’s lover, at least for the purposes of
this play. So Elizabeth grows increasingly distraught as the moment of
execution grows closer and erupts in a volcanic display of grief as she hears
canon from the Tower sounding the finality Essex’s death.
Findley took some dramatic license when Elizabeth openly admitted Essex was her lover. In real life, the relationship was only a rumor and obviously at odds with Elizabeth’s unofficially title of “the Virgin Queen.”
The action opens with Shakespeare’s acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, concluding a performance of “Much Ado About Nothing” for the entertainment of the queen and her court. The story then moves to the barn where the actors engage in some raucous and bawdy banter among themselves and with their wardrobe mistress. They are confined to the barn because the queen has levied a curfew to restrain supporters of Essex from rioting on the eve of his execution.
In the barn Shakespeare works on his latest play, a tragedy about Antony and Cleopatra. He’s wary that resemblances between the ancient lovers and Essex and Elizabeth that might offend the queen, an absolute monarch not to be trifled with. But not much happens in a narrative way until the queen makes an unexpected appearance, her face coated in white power and her head topped with a red wig.
The queen remains in the barn for the rest of the play, spending much of her time in heated verbal byplay with Ned Lowenscroft, an actor who plays leading women’s roles (females were not allowed on the stage in Elizabethan times). Ned is gay and dying of syphilis, his approaching death making him extremely bold in his conversation with the queen.
At the end of the first act, the queen and Ned make a pact. He will teach her to be a woman and she will teach him to be a man. The mutual challenge results in some incendiary exchanges of dialogue and one affecting scene in which Ned, gently crooning a song, applies makeup to the suddenly submissive queen, minus her wig, revealing her bald head.
“Elizabeth Rex” premiered at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada in 2000 and the Chicago Shakespeare Theater is presenting a revised version that lops off about 25 minutes from the original version. The production, under Barbara Gaines’s resourceful directing, is full of stirring moments leavened by ribald comedy, but overall the play falls short of its promise. After all, when we see Shakespeare and Elizabeth I together, we expect drama at a, well, Shakespearean level. The heated exchanges between Elizabeth and Ned are worth hearing, but one still gets the feeling that the queen is slumming in spending so much time with the raggedy acting company. Ned’s liberties with Elizabeth smack of the playwright reaching for high drama. Would the queen, even in her fragile emotional state, really seek any kind of consolation with a lowly pox-ridden dying actor?
Photo by Liz Lauren
The CST casts Diane D’Aquila as Elizabeth, a role she took at the Stratford premiere and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else in the part. D’Aquila renders the queen in all her complexities, her vanity and her strength of character, her iron will and her despair at the death of the man she loves mixed with her contempt for men in general. D’Aquila, with her white makeup, also bears a startling resemblance to the actual queen as portrayed in surviving paintings. Whatever the deficiencies of the play, the audience should be grateful for this actress’s powerful three-dimensional performance.
D’Aquila’s co-star is Steven Sutcliffe, another Stratford veteran, who brings Ned alive with his fear of his approaching death and his challenge to the queen to climb down from her throne and become a woman. Sutcliffe makes considerable dramatic capital out of Ned’s blend of fear and audacity.
Kevin Gudahl plays Shakespeare as a working writer, an urbane and intelligent man not aware, at least outwardly, that he will go down as the greatest writer in the history of the English language. It’s a well-judged performance minus any affectation. The rest of the ensemble plays robust character roles. Roderick Peeples is first rate as the rollicking and Falstaffian Luddy Beddoes. Andrew Rothenberg makes a strong impression as the Irish actor Jack Edmund, a man not afraid to show the queen that he’s an Irishman first and last and in total sympathy with Ireland’s rebellion against the queen. There is outstanding work by Eric Parks, Matt Farabee, Bradley Armacost, Mary Ann Thebus, Brenda Barrie, and Torrey Hanson in other supporting roles. And special props to Jude Roche inside a realistic furry costume as a pet bear who turns out to be one of the most sympathetic figures in the play.
The action is played within Daniel Ostling’s detailed bi-level barn set. Mariann Verheyen designed the convincing period costumes. Philip Rosenberg’s lighting design bathes the characters in warm autumnal illumination. Lindsay Jones designed the sound, including the vivid bear growls, and Melissa Veal makes invaluable contributions with her wig and make-up designs.
“Elizabeth Rex” runs through January 22 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $44 to $75. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com/rex.
The show gets a rating of 3 stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
Visit Dan on Facebook. Dec. 2011
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Follies
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – The Chicago Shakespeare Theater doesn’t normally present musicals on its Courtyard main stage theater. But the CST is opening its season with a high risk Courtyard revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Follies,” high risk because the show is hugely expensive to produce and devilishly tricky to stage. Plus, Sondheim’s acerbic sophistication has never been an automatic attraction for the average theatergoer.
By a
quirk of scheduling, “Follies” has also just opened on Broadway, drawing rave
reviews and gathering weekly ticket sales in excess of $1 million. There’s no
way that the CST can approach those grosses and the musical’s limited five-week
run virtually guarantees the production will not make money, even if it sells
out every performance. But the CST
wanted to do the “Follies” and they have done it brilliantly. I can’t recall a
better acted, sung, and danced musical on an area stage since the earliest
touring version of “A Chorus Line.”
For “Follies,” Sondheim invented a theater impresario named Dimitri Weismann who produced an annual series of spectacular theater revues in the early 1900’s very much like the Ziegfeld Follies. Now Weismann is hosting a one-time reunion of members of those revues and their spouses. The reunion is being held in the ruins of the theater where Weismann presented his revues, a theater now being demolished to make way for a parking lot.
“Follies” has no real plot. For most of the show, veterans of the Weismann revues sing and dance numbers from their Follies performing days several decades earlier. They gossip and renew old acquaintances and then depart. The show focuses on two couples, ex chorus girls Sally Durant and Phyllis Rogers and their husbands Buddy Plummer and Ben Stone respectively. Sally and Phyllis were best friends as Weismann chorus girls wooed by the youthful Buddy and Ben. The marriages were a disaster from the beginning and two couples can barely stand each other today. Sally really loved Ben, and their romance is rekindled during the evening’s reunion.
An aura of nostalgia permeates “Follies,” along with a sense of regret and rueful reflections of the roads in life not taken. Characters look back on the exuberant hopes of their youth and wonder where all that promise went. Mortality weighs heavily with them. They got old, and that makes them sad and disappointed.
Composer Sondheim and book author James Goldman connect the characters with their youth through ghost figures who drift through the action. Ben and Buddy and Sally and Phyllis appear as their younger selves back in 1941, when passions were hot and ambitions were glowing. The audience watches the seeds of their destructive marriages planted in the romantic confusions that tied the wrong young men with the wrong young women.
Goldman wrote a tight, concise book for “Follies” but the story is told primarily through Sondheim’s music. Sondheim’s score is a pastiche of styles celebrating the great names of musical theater, from the operettas of Victor Herbert through the modern styles of giants like George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern (Sondheim’s favorite), Rodgers and Hart, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. The result is a sequence of musical numbers of extraordinary variety in the service of character exploration.
The CST has cast the production with a multi generational group of local performers, especially females who have entertained area audiences for decades—Nancy Voigts, Marilyn Bogetich, Ami Silvestre, Susan Moniz (Sally), Kathy Taylor, and Hollis Resnik among others. The production fills out its roster with a cluster of imports, notably Caroline O’Connor (Phyllis), Brent Barrett (Ben), and Robert Petkoff (Buddy). The sum total is an exceptional ensemble that delivers one showstopper after another.
Director Gary Griffin works under the considerable handicap of the CST’s thrust stage, a configuration not hospitable to musicals. A proscenium stage would allow for an evocation of the ruined interior of the theater that encloses the actions and reinforces the sense of time passed. Griffin mounts the orchestra at the rear of the stage and funnels the action to the bare thrust playing area that penetrates the audience on three sides. There is little sense of place in the staging and the ghosts of past chorus girls don’t make much impact.
Undeterred, Griffin still creates a triumphant sequence of production numbers. My favorite, “Who’s That Woman,” gathers five matronly Weismann ladies with their young ghost counterparts in an intricate display of song and dance. Moniz, O’Connor, Resnik, Voigts, and Taylor established themselves in Chicagoland music theater with their singing and acting. Who knew they could dance up such a storm? There is a stunning duet between Linda Stephens as elderly Weismann star Heidi Schiller performing the operetta duet “One More Kiss” with her younger self, sung by Kari Sorenson, thrilling the listener with its sheer vocal brilliance.
The score explodes the canard that Sondheim is an emotional cold fish as a composer. No cold fish could have written the stirring song of survival “I’m Still Here” (sung magnificently by Resnik as Carlotta) or the aching ballad “Losing My Mind” (an exceptionally powerful rendition by Moniz).
There are about 40 performers in the production and they all deserve the highest praise, from the principals to the chorus. The CST cast the ageless Chicagoland favorite Mike Nussbaum as Weismann, giving audiences an additional treat. The man belongs on a theatrical Mount Rushmore.
Virgil Johnson has designed the vast wardrobe of costumes that shuttle back and forth between 1971 and 1941 and earlier. Kevin Depinet’s scenic design is minimalist but functional. Christine Binder designed the dramatic lighting and Joshua Horvath and Ray Nardelli the sound. Alex Sanchez is the choreographer. “Follies” isn’t a dancing show but where dancing is called for, Sanchez is spot-on. Brad Haak’s musical direction is first class.
“Follies” is now established as one of the pinnacles of twentieth-century music theater, but because of its production demands it’s rarely revived. Now there are major productions on Broadway and in Chicago, which must give Sondheim a satisfying feeling of vindication. The Broadway presentation looks set for an extended run. The CST apparently is locked into its five weeks, so anyone with the merest interest in musical theater greatness needs to seize the moment.
“Follies” runs through November 6 at he Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Performances are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are priced at $55 to $75. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com/follies.
The show gets a rating of four stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com October 2011
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The Madness of George III
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is presenting a handsomely staged production of Alan Bennett’s “The Madness of George III” that features a towering performance by Harry Groener in the title role. The show looks good and Groener is terrific, but the evening will largely be of interest to patrons interested in the mental health of an English king more than 200 years ago.
In the play, George III starts out as a droll monarch with a quirky personality. He’s still in emotional agony over the loss of the American colonies a decade earlier but overall appears to be in a normal state of mind. Then he descends into what was diagnosed at the time as madness. Today, scholars lean toward George as the victim of a little understood metabolic illness called porphyria. Among the symptoms is the loss of reason.
The play dramatically portrays George’s bouts with the disease and especially his abuse at the hands of a group of smug and ambitious doctors who subject their patient to barbaric treatments without ever getting a handle on his ailment. Then there is the political tumult that gathers around the king’s mental condition. His son, the Prince of Wales, yearns to take over the crown from his father with the help of politicking from his allies in Parliament. Intrigue dominates court life as the king’s friends and opponents jockey for position over who will control the throne back in the days when the English king still wielded considerable power.
There are more than 20 characters in the play. Some of them are shrewd politicians. Others are fops oozing mincing affectation, caricatures who may reflect actual behavior at the English court of the day but come across as simpering low comedy turns on the CST stage.
While there are plenty of quality performances in this production, it’s Groener’s play, just like it was Nigel Hawthorne’s show in both the stage version in 1991 and the film adaptation in 1994 (called “The Madness of King George”).
The role of King George requires almost superhuman stamina as the king shifts in and out of apparent madness. Groener is awe-inspiring, giving us a man who can be wry and witty and shrewd in one scene and a howling lunatic in another. Groener gives us the whole character—a decent family man (he and his wife Charlotte had 15 children), the shrewd politician, and the desperate victim engulfed by quack doctors and a usurping son’s machinations. The mix of physical endurance and verbal dexterity demanded by the role is daunting, but Groener is in continual command, his George dwarfing the many characters who line up to either serve the king or bring him down.
The show earns highest marks for Groener’s performance, but the play itself is more problematic. It runs far too long at nearly three hours and has problems getting to the finish line. The action felt remote to me, the brilliance of Groener’s performance apart. The show may hold considerable interest for British audiences, but for at least one American viewer the story didn’t connect emotionally. For all his suffering and sly wit, George isn’t a great or heroic man. Like many English kings, he was handed the crown by succession (from his grandfather, George II). He endured much and ended tragically, the disease incapacitating him totally for the last 10 years of his life. But he was no Henry VII or Elizabeth I as far as human or historical interest is concerned.
The playwright does neatly evoke the backroom wheeling and dealing stimulated by the king’s condition. The opposition is represented by Charles Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. They may seem like opportunists and connivers, but their government platform included abolition of slavery and parliamentary reform, so perhaps they were the good guys. The king’s prime minister, William Pitt, is a savvy politico fighting a desperate battle to retain the crown for the king, and thus save his own job. But Pitt is a pillar of rectitude compared to the smarmy and officious Prince of Wales.
The CST ensemble is a blend of reliable locals and outsiders, all of them good, though one does require a tolerance for limp-wristed mannerisms to appreciate the actors playing the Duke of York and Sir Boothby Skrymshir and his ninny nephew Ramsden among others.
Nathan Hosner is outstanding as William Pitt, striving to keep the king on his throne when it’s obvious the monarch cannot govern rationally. David Lively is excellent as Edward Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor, a political realist who must pick sides between the king’s friends and enemies while protecting his own back. Richard Baird delivers a convincing rendering of the Prince of Wales as a posturing backstabber. The young man has a legitimate cause, at least in his own mind. The prince is tired of waiting for his turn at the crown, and it was maddening being obstructed by a lunatic father. Historically, the prince became regent in 1810 and King George IV in 1820. He was one of the worst kings in English history.
Among other supporting performance, there is fine work from Ora Jones as George’s queen, Jeff Cummings as Charles Fox, Brian Rooney as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Bradley Armacost, Patrick Clear, William Dick, and James Newcomb as the coven of brutal physicians who nearly kill the king with their pseudo cures. The scenes of the sadistic treatments inflicted on George induced shudders in the audience. Kevin Gudahl is good as a king’s equerry and Patricia Eggleston does a fine turn as a lady-in-waiting who fends off the disturbed king’s advances with face-saving decorum.
William Bloodgood designed the effective neoclassic façade that serves as a backdrop for the action. Susan Mickey designed the vast wardrobe of colorful and opulent costumes of the period. Diane Ferry Williams designed the lighting and Michael Bodeen and Rob Milburn the sound. Melissa Veal is responsible for the wigs, and some of them are doozies. Penny Metropulos is the efficient director.
“The Madness of George III” runs through June 12 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Tuesday, Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $44 to $75. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com/madness.
The show gets a rating of three stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com. April 2011
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The Cripple of Inishmaan
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
by Dan Zeff
Chicago—Martin McDonagh’s Irish plays have been well served by Chicagoland theaters the past few seasons. There have been quality productions of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “The Lonesome West,” and “The Cripple of Inishmaan.” But it takes a real Irish cast to give these plays their due. Consider the production of “The Cripple of Inishmaan” as revived by Ireland’s Druid Theatre and now presented at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
Like many of McDonagh’s plays, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” is located on a bleak island off the western coast of Ireland. The island’s residents live cramped, featureless lives that lend themselves to wounding gossip, bickering, backstabbing, and other verbal cruelties. The Inishmaan folk are uneducated people who barely get along with each other in their stifling parochial environment, but they are all they have. They are also marvelously engaging when they are portrayed by actors who know their characters down to the bone, actors like the Druid Theatre ensemble.
McDonagh’s play is almost all talk, but that’s what his Irish
men and women do best. They stand there and talk at each other, often barely
moving, like mannequins with the gift of speech. And it really is a gift,
laughs coming out of the most commonplace dialogue. The opening scene consists
of two ramrod elderly women, Eileen and Kate, stiffly standing behind the
counter of their village grocery store, making the audience laugh with their
offhand chat. Part of the humor comes from the language and part because the
dialogue just seems funnier when it’s spoken with an authentic Irish brogue.
The title character is a malformed 18-year old boy named Billy Claven, who spends much of his time looking at cows, reading books (a much sneered at activity within the community), and hungering for affection from the abrasive young Slippy Helen, a foul mouthed lass who mocks Billy’s deformities with casual verbal cruelty. The play is character-driven rather than plot driven but the action does turn on the news that American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty is coming to the area to make a motion picture about the lives of the islanders, the most exciting thing, maybe the only exciting thing, that’s happened to the villagers in living memory.
For Billy, a chance to appear in a real Hollywood movie is a fantasy come true. And the lad actually gets a screen test in Hollywood. But he finally returns to Inishmaan and the arms of the doting Eileen and Kate, who raised him from infancy following the mysterious deaths of his parents by drowning. Billy finally gets to kiss Slippy Helen, but the play ends with a poignant farewell to the doomed young man.
There is very little physical activity in “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” aside from a moment of startling physical brutality. The audience’s pleasure comes from the encounters with comic characters like JohnnyPateenMike, a middle-aged gossip who is the self-appointed news gatherer and rumormonger for the community. Some of the play’s funniest moments emerge from the irascible interplay between Johnny and his bedridden and alcoholic old mother. The encounters don’t advance the storyline, slender as it is, but the comedy is earthy and irresistible.
The other characters are Helen’s doofus brother Bartley, the village doctor, and a local boat owner named BabbyBobby. The three characters interact with the others to recreate a perfect miniature of a community that is mean-spirited but caring and drenched in unaffected blarney.
Tadhg Murphy delivers a sensitive, finally haunting performance as the blighted Billy, a performance that makes considerable physical demands on the actor. Dermot Crowley is a scene stealer as the garrulous JohnnyPateenMike. Dearbhla Molloy and Ingrid Craigie are delectable as the starchy Eileen and Kate, a pair of elderly spinsters who symbolize the arid lives of the Inishmaan folk. Clare Dunne adds some spice as the feisty and intimidating Slippy Helen, living in a community that offers precious few diversions for a high spirited young woman. Laurence Kinlan is Helen’s lunkhead brother, Liam Carney is BabbyBobby (these Irish names can really be delightful), Nancy E. Carroll is the boozing old lady, and Paul Vincent O’Connor is the doctor.
Garry Hynes directs her players in a minimalist style, letting the words do all the acting. It’s a wise choice. Francis O’Connor designed the costumes and sets, Davy Cunningham the lighting, and John Leonard the sound. Colin Towns composed the original music.
“The Cripple of Inishmaan” runs through March 27 at the Chicago Shakespeare Courtyard Theater on Navy Pier. Performances are Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $46 and $56. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars. March 2011
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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As You Like It
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago – A theater season doesn’t pass without some company reviving Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” And why not? It’s one of the Bard’s most accessible plays, filled with funny and charming characters speaking mostly in prose dialogue that enters the modern audience’s ear more easily than the Bard’s highly flying Elizabethan verse.
But even viewers totally familiar with “As You Like It,” and especially those a little tired of the play, will be won over by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s superbly staged and wonderfully acted production. This is Shakespeare at his most irresistible, presented by an ensemble of local performers who ascend to a world class level for this comedy.
The play has two chief locations, the court of Duke Frederick, which he has usurped from his brother, and the Forest of Arden, where the rightful duke lives in bucolic contentment with a band of like-minded disaffected noblemen. Young Orlando flees to the forest from his murderous older brother. At the same time, Rosalind, the rightful duke’s daughter, is exiled on pain of death by Frederick. She escapes to the forest with Cecilia, Frederick’s daughter but Rosalind’s closest friend. Rosalind disguises herself as a young man named Ganymede and Celia takes the name of Aliana.
Once the story shifts to the forest, the play settles into a roundelay of romances, headed by Orlando and Rosalind, and also including a clutch of forest rustics. By the end of the show the bard has married off every living thing in the woods but the chipmunks. There isn’t much physical action in the forest but plenty of delectable dialogue. Shakespeare doesn’t waste a lot of energy on extended narrative. The main characters fall in love at first sight, no questions asked. Even the two bad guys ultimately turn sympathetic in the blinking of an eye, dramatically illogical perhaps, but convenient.
Along with the multitudinous lovers, “As You Like It” presents two of Shakespeare’s finest comic characters, the clown Touchstone, who also escapes to the forest from Frederick’s court, and the melancholy Lord Jaques, he of the familiar “All the world’s a stage” monologue.
It’s a rich brew of characters, led by Orlando and Rosalind with their romantic manipulations. Typically, Orlando comes across as something of a ninny, a likeable doofus but under qualified as a match for the nimble-witted and intelligent Rosalind. One of the chief merits of Gary Griffin’s directing is balancing the two young people on a level romantic playing field. Matt Schwader’s Orlando has the grit and presence to match Kate Fry’s winsome Rosalind. For once the two characters are portrayed as equals--equally silly, equally attractive, equally entertaining, and equally in love.
Without turning the play into a revisionist exercise, Griffin illuminates the other major characters. Cecilia normally is a pale figure who walks in Rosalind’s shadow. But Chaon Cross endows the young woman with a feisty spirit that enriches the production every moment she is on stage. The forest bumpkins too often are a tiresome lot, lumbered with their romantic confusions. Too often Phoebe and Audrey and William and Silvius just seem to take up space in the play as they go through their wearisome mating rituals. But in this production they are all clearly etched personalities, led by Elizabeth Ledo’s saucy and willful Phoebe, and abetted by Steve Haggard’s sympathetic performance as her love struck swain. The same can be said for Nathan Hosner’s mooncalf William and Hillary Clemens’s ultra earthy Audrey. Hosner pulls of a striking dual performance, first appearing as Charles, the wrestler bent on killing Orlando in the match at court.
Ross Lehman is a one-of-a-kind Jaques. The character is normally portrayed as a self aware gloomy Gus wallowing in affected melancholy. But Lehman is a natural clown and he delivers the most animated Jaques I’ve ever seen. This isn’t the most profound Jaques I’ve ever seen but he’s the most energetic and outgoing. How well Lehman’s interpretation works resides in the eye of the beholder.
The rest of the ensemble
is unfailingly up to the mark, starting with Phillip James Brannon’s
Touchstone, a droll courtier who will have his hands full with the lusty Audrey
as his wife. Matt DeCaro makes an especially strong impression as the
villainous usurping Frederick. Jeff Parker is fine in the thankless role of
Orlando’s nasty older brother who reforms quickly enough to win Celia as his
bride. The production also profits from Patrick Clear, Dennis Kelly, Kevin
Gudahl, and Andrew Neiman in small but significant roles.
Mara Blumenfeld’s costumes give the story an early nineteenth century Jane Austen look, an appropriate connection with the novelist who was the mistress of marrying off attractive young men and women after a series of usually comic difficulties. Kevin Depinet’s set morphs effectively from the court to the Forest of Arden (which looks a little like a design from a Tim Burton motion picture). A giant pendulum swings back and forth at the rear of the stage throughout the performance, its significance eluding me.
There are also valuable contributions from Christopher Akerlind (lighting), Joshua Horvath and Ray Nardelli (sound), and Jenny Giering (original music). David Woolley directed the exceptionally persuasive wrestling match between Orlando and Charles. Matt Raftery provides the smidgeon of choreography.
The real hero of the occasion is Gary Griffin, who cast the show so flawlessly and shaped the personalities of the leading characters with such humor and individuality. He even contrives some vertical action, especially devising some risky athletic moves for Schwader above the stage.
“As You Like It” runs through March 6 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $44 to $75. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com
The show gets a rating of four stars. January 2011
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Romeo and Juliet
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
Chicago--The Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of “Romeo and Juliet” is loaded with positives. The staging tells the story with clarity and propulsive force. The modern dress setting, often pointless or distracting in a Shakespeare revival, contributes mightily to the engrossing tense and edgy atmosphere. Guest director Gail Edwards has injected some original insights into the characterizations that freshen up this most familiar story.
There is only one problem—Romeo and Juliet. The famous young lovers aren’t tragic, a considerable fault in this most passionate of doomed romances,
Jeff Lillico’s Romeo is too
boyish for a concept that leans heavily on the macho for its young male
characters. He certainly doesn’t seem strong enough to take down the uber-macho
Tybalt. This Romeo is a nice lad who got in over his head by falling for the
wrong girl.
Joy Farmer-Clary looks a little old for a Juliet who has just entered her teens, but there aren’t many 14-year old actresses who can handle the role so we can cut Farmer-Clary some slack. But for all the love language Shakespeare provides to express Juliet’s love for Romeo, the actress never sent off any sparks. The death of the young lovers at the end of the play lacks the emotional power that should leave the audience moist eyed and much moved.
Part of the difficulty lies with director Edwards. Her interpretation of the play is filled with illuminating touches, but she makes a major misfire at the Capulet ball, where Romeo and Juliet first meet. Traditionally this fateful encounter occurs during a dance and it’s love at first sight. But at the CST, the two meet each other across an empty space. They barely make eye contact yet we are expected to believe that this distant accidental occurrence immediately strikes incendiary sparks of love and lust. The moment is over so quickly that the audience has no opportunity to share in that flashpoint moment when Romeo and Juliet fall madly in love.
The limited impact of the central love story doesn’t invalidate the dramatic riches that still make this a production well worth seeing. Edwards sustains an atmosphere of barely suppressed violence and hair-trigger tempers, subtle underscored by Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set, which resembles a baroque arcade now gone to seed. This is not a pretty “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s drenched in enough intensity to keep the spectator continually involved, even though we all know the story and its tragic conclusion.
The swordfights choreographed by Rick Sordelet are stunning in their ferocity. In the opening brawl between the Montague and Capulet families, even Lady Montague and Lady Capulet get into a hair-pulling fight. I’ve never seen the animosity between the two families displayed with more ferocity.
Tybalt (Zach Appelman) and Mercutio are poster boys for the violence that infects the Verona society. The factional hatred is palpable. The only nice supporting characters are Romeo’s friend Benvolio (Steve Haggard) and Juliet’s nurse (Ora Jones). Everyone else seems angry and touchy.
The “Queen Mab” speech by Mercutio (a superb performance by Ariel Shafir) is delivered with a rawness that gives new meaning to a monologue normally tossed off as a poetic cadenza showing off the actor’s verbal dexterity. The production finds marital estrangement between Lord and Lady Capulet and tensions between Lady Capulet and her daughter that flesh out these normally shadow parents.
Ana Kuzmanic’s contemporary costumes give the story an “On the Waterfront” sensibility. The sound and originals music by Lindsay Jones and John Culbert’s lighting further enhance the sensibility of menace and danger. These characters are not figures in Elizabethan tights spouting fancy poetry. This is an earthy reading of the play that should go over big with younger audiences.
Among the other fine performances, John Judd gets high marks as the imperious Lord Capulet. David Lively is an exceptionally down to earth Friar Laurence. Judy Blue provides some effective shadings as Lady Capulet, a woman shut out of the lives of her distant husband and troublesome daughter. And Brendan Marshall-Rashid delivers a telling portrait of Paris as a decent young man, impatient to wed Juliet, who ends up still another victim of a love affair gone wrong.
The overall production is so solid that it survives the lack of passion and heart from the title characters. And there doubtless will be viewers who consider Lillico and Farmer-Clary just fine. But a staging shouldn’t send the audience out of the theater with more vivid memories of Tybalt, Mercutio, the nurse, and Lord and Lady Capulet than the star-crossed lovers.
“Romeo and Juliet” runs through November 21 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday at 8 p.m., with matinees Wednesday at 1 p.m., Saturday at 3 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $44 to $75. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com.
The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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The Taming of the Shrew
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—The big pre-opening buzz for “The Taming of the Shrew” at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the announcement that Neil LaBute was hired to write new material for the Shakespeare comedy. LaBute was contracted to replace the original introduction to the play with fresh dialogue that presumably would bring the show’s controversial themes out of the Elizabethan era and into the new millennium.
“The Taming of the Shrew” is the most problematic of Shakespeare’s comedies. It deals with how a man employs severe physical and psychological violence to break the spirit of his independent-minded new wife, a woman he has married for money. That storyline may have been a hoot 400 years ago but it rubs modern feminist sensibilities raw, and a generation of directors has labored to put acceptable spins on the narrative to pacify contemporary attitudes.
“The Taming of the Shrew” invites tampering because it isn’t
a great play, though it has its share of farcical laughs. A strong case could
be made for Cole Porter’s musical adaptation “Kiss Me, Kate” as superior to the
original.
Shakespeare wrote an opening scene in which a drunken tinker is tricked into believing he is a lord watching a performance by a company of traveling actors. The scene is usually omitted from modern productions, which then start in Renaissance Padua where the bachelor Petruchio comes “to wive it wealthily” and agrees to marry the shrewish Katharina, for a price.
In the CST revival, the play begins during a final rehearsal for “The Taming of the Shrew,” with LaBute injecting a conflict between the female director (Mary Beth Fisher) and the actress playing Katharina (Bianca Amato). Their long-standing lesbian affair is coming apart at the seams. Adding to the tensions is the actress’s loathing of the Shakespeare play for its misogyny.
After several minutes of banter and bickering, the company launches into a straight-ahead reading of the Shakespeare comedy, with no excuses for the Bard’s anti-feminine slant. Petruchio (Ian Bedford) is brawny and macho, bullying Katharina without mercy or apology. Eventually the brutalized woman falls into line as a pliant wife until the production’s final moment when the actress playing Katharina, fed up with Shakespeare’s women bashing, stalks off the stage.
LaBute’s material is entertaining and edgy. There is an extended self-pitying monologue by the director that opens the second half of the show. As a stand-alone verbal aria by the always resourceful Fisher, it’s entertaining, but as an illumination of the issues raised in “Shrew” the set piece, like the rest of LaBute’s additions, contributes little dramatic illumination.
Presumably LaBute is trying to contrast the victimization of
women in Shakespeare’s time with the spirit of open sexuality enjoyed by women
today, or at least by the director and the actress. It’s amusing to observe all
the bitchy backstage dialogue, but LaBute’s emendations run parallel to
Shakespeare’s material without intersecting the Bard to provide fresh insights.
So essentially what we have at the CST is a solid, traditional reading of “The Taming of the Shrew.” The production thankfully makes short work of the tiresome subplot involving the multiple suitors for Katharina’s pliant younger sister Bianca (Katherine Cunningham) and emphasizes the unequal combat between Petruchio and Katharina.
The ensemble features a clutch of excellent performances, starting with Ian Bedford’s dominating and domineering performance as Petruchio. Amato is better in the modern guise of the free-spirited actress than in the stock role of Katharina. Her South African accent jars at first with the American performers but that’s easily adjusted to.
Larry Yando is a joy as Katharina’s droll and long suffering father and Mike Nussbaum, God bless him, at age 86 is a hoot as a rich old codger who fancies himself a legitimate wooer for Bianca. Stephen Ouimette, a veteran of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, is fine as Petruchio’s servant and Brian Sills makes a real character out of the servant-turned–master Tranio. William Dick is smooth as the stage manager during the rehearsal. There is also good work from local veterans Sean Fortunato (Hortensio), Erik Hellman (Lucentio), Alex Goodrich (Biondello), and Marc Grapey (Vincentio).
For this show, the CST has again imported Josie Rourke from England. Rourke was responsible for the recent CST staging of “Twelfth Night” built around, and in, a large pool of water on stage. I guess if you want a daring new vision of a Shakespeare play, Rourke is a director of choice. Thus it’s surprising that her interpretation of “Shrew” is so traditional, the LaBute additions notwithstanding.
Lucy Osborne, Rourke’s British colleague, designed the set and the costumes, notable for some flamboyant codpieces for the men and an outrageous mock wedding dress for Petruchio that runs counter to the detailed description in the script. Osborne’s design for Bianca’s feathery pink wedding dress is something out of an opium dream. Philip Rosenberg designed the lighting and Lindsay Jones the sound.
The CST “Taming of the Shrew” isn’t exactly a disappointment, but the audience had been primed for something special from the union of Rourke, LaBute, and Shakespeare. They have combined for an entertaining evening, but as a breakthrough concept, the production doesn’t quite deliver.
“The Taming of the Shrew” runs through June 6 at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m., with Tuesday performances at 7:30 May 18 through June 1. Tickets are $55 to $75. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com.
The show gets a rating of three stars. April 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.
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Uncle Vanya
At the Chicago Shakespeare Theater
By Dan Zeff
CHICAGO—When a celebrated Russian acting company comes to town to perform Anton Chekhov, local theatergoers have a right to anticipate something special. And we do get something special in the Maly Drama Theatre’s production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”
The Maly is presenting “Uncle Vanya” for only five performances through Sunday at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. So serious Chekhov fans (and serious theater fans in general) should seize the opportunity to enjoy and ponder an interpretation that will have patrons rethinking their impressions of the drama.
The Maly company is performing “Uncle Vanya” in Russian, with English translations flashing on screens above and to the sides of the stage. The translations reproduce only a percentage of the script, but enough to allow spectators to get the gist of the dialogue without feeling they are reading rather than seeing the play. The translations are a worthwhile trade-off, allowing audiences to experience the drama in Chekhov’s original language with its melancholy cadences.
For this production, the Chicago Shakespeare stage has been converted into a proscenium. The set is simple but conveys the rural atmosphere that encloses the Serebriakov estate in the Russian provinces.
“Uncle Vanya” has flashes of farcical humor, but it isn’t a happy play, and I don’t think I have ever seen a staging that was so drenched in unhappiness, frustration, disillusionment, and thwarted hopes. There aren’t many plays in western drama that end so bleakly. And yet “Uncle Vanya” isn’t a downer for audiences willing to accept the playwright’s sympathetic and humane view of his hapless characters.
The core figures in the play are Vanya, a 47-year old bachelor, and Sonya, his niece. For years they have labored wearily to operate the family estate for the benefit of Vanya’s brother-in-law, an academic named Alexander Serebriakov. The professor is now visiting the estate with his young second wife Elena, his first wife, and Sonya’s mother, having died years ago. The fifth major character is Astrov, an idealistic and visionary doctor and a forerunner of the ecologists of our own time.
Vanya and Astrov both love the languid and bored Elena, while Sonya loves Astrov. All love in vain, and the marriage between the young and beautiful Elena and the elderly and demanding professor has its own discontents.
The Maly production is long on pauses and tableaus of
characters sitting in silence, emotionally cut off from each other. The play
runs a full three hours including one intermission, thanks to the silent spaces
that separate the dialogue and the play’s frequent soliloquies. The characters
seldom raise their voices, as if recognizing that cries of anger or dismay are
pointless. Indeed, Russian speakers in the audience likely had trouble
understanding some of the dialogue. The actors, especially Igor Ivanov as the
professor, often speak so softly they are inaudible. That may be a reflection
of the introspective Stanislavsky-inspired Russian acting style, or perhaps the
acting company hadn’t vocally adjusted to the Chicago Shakespeare acting space.
Director Lev Dodin’s major innovation lies in the interpretation of the professor, the only unsympathetic figure in the play. Serebriakov is normally played as a pompous blowhard, oozing ingratitude and selfishness. Ivanov plays the professor as a stoic, perhaps inwardly recognizing that his claims to brilliance as a writer on art are empty, as Vanya accuses. The professor sees the end of his life looming while a young wife yearns to be free of his self indulgence and self pity. In a striking early scene, the professor erupts with real passion for Elena and exposes by extension, his terror that he might lose her. The production elevates a cartoon villain into a figure of complexity who may not earn our approval but does earn some understanding.
Dodin extends the scene in which Elena and Sonya come together as females in mutual emotional need. The scene normally ends immediately after Sonya returns with the professor’s refusal to allow Elena to play the piano. Instead, for several more minutes the two women mime their individual reactions to the professor’s callousness, reinforcing their personal feelings of privation and unhappiness.
The casting is not exactly to type. Sergei Kurishev looks a little too virile and youthful for the beaten-down and yearning Vanya, but his acting is a model of understated anguish and loss. Elena Kalinina is attractive enough to call into question Sonya’s plainness, but her performance is filled with quiet longing and a heartbreaking acceptance of the reality that Astrov will never love her. Yet Kalina puts a brave face on Sonya. The woman will soldier on, linked with her uncle in suffering, enduring a life that denies her everything of importance.
As Elena, Ksenia Rappoport creates a character with surprising dramatic weight, an interesting departure from the emotionally empty young woman who is too bored to take charge of her life. Her Elena seems doomed to exist as a reluctant temptress, creating emotional turbulence among men with her beauty and natural charm. Igor Chernevich is super as Astrov, an intelligent and caring man whose spirit has been eroded by the pettiness and vulgarity of his provincial life.
In supporting roles, Alexander Zavialov is fine as the pathetic and ineffectual Waffles. Vera Bikova is affecting as the family’s loving old nurse, as is Tatiana Shuko as Vanya’s elderly mother, a woman who irrationally dotes on the fraudulent professor.
The Maly revival probably won’t make converts out of spectators who find Chekhov undramatic and his characters annoying in their complaining and lack of spunk. But this is a staging of exceptional sensitivity, insight, and daring (in the rethinking of the professor). It’s a connoisseur’s production and we are fortunate to have it in town, if for only five performances.
“Uncle Vanya” runs through Sunday at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Daily performances are at 7:30 p.m. except for a Sunday matinee at 2 p.m. Tickets are $65 and $75. Call 312 595 5600 or visit www.chicagoshakes.com.
The show gets a rating of four stars. March 2010
Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .