At the House Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – As a magic show, “The Magnificents” is pure gold at the House Theatre. But the show seems undecided whether its storyline wants to exist as a support for the magic of Dennis Watkins or whether it wants to be a freestanding work that features magic. The show is deeply flawed in either role, but ultimately who cares? It’s the magic we want to see and as a magic show “The Magnificents” dazzles.

         “The Magnificents” is a remount of the production that premiered in 2007. The current version sets itself up as a tale about a seedy traveling magic show in middle America, probably in the 1920’s or 1930’s, based on the recorded Louis Armstrong ad Duke Ellington music played between scenes. The star magician is called the Magnificent (Watkins, who also wrote the play). The magician and his wife and assistant Rosie (Tien Doman) lead a rag tag small company that includes Harley the strong man (Jeff Trainor), Honeydew the aerialist (the hyper sexy Lucy Carapetyan), and Chase the clown (Michael E. Smith).

Into this tightly knit entourage wanders a young drifter known as the boy (Tommy Rapley) who is mute the entire show, like a melancholy Harpo Marx. The slender plot revolves around grooming the boy as a replacement for the fatally ill Magnificent.

                                                                                 Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow  

The production begins with the Magnificent doing some wondrous slight of hand magic. He then disappears for many minutes while Honeydew, Chase, and Harley perform some dithering comedy out of the silent movies, along with an aerial performance by Honeydew on a silk hanging, joined in the act by the boy. There are also three short silent films projected during the show, purportedly showing the dreams of assorted characters that don’t contribute much to the narrative.

The tone of the play is generally light, with the characters frequently chatting directly with the audience and spectators brought on stage to assist with the magic acts. The performers even mingle in costume with the audience during intermission. Clearly the show does not take itself seriously as high drama and there is much tongue-in-cheek comedy. But the storyline darkens toward the end as the Magnificent yields to his fatal illness, upending the previous breezy tone.

                                                                                      Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

But that’s more than enough about the narrative. The payoff is in Watkins the magician, and he’s as good as anything you will see in more opulent settings on the Las Vegas Strip. Given the special and technical limitations of the intimate House Theatre, Watkins concentrates on small magic rather than large scale displays. He is a wizard at card tricks, enhanced for the audience on a magnified TV screen. He is joined by Rapley in a variation of the cups and balls trick, the two men making balls move from brass cup to brass cup, disappearing and multiplying practically at the speed of light.

The most staggering trick involves a simple blackboard. Watkins solicits someone from the audience to think of a number. The audience member writes the number on a bit of paper unseen by Watkins. Watkins then divides the blackboard into a grid of 16 chalk squares and not only guesses the number but fills in digits in the 16 boxes so they all add up to the precise sum of the number every which way--up and down, sideways, and diagonally. As a feat of mentalism the trick is so astonishing that one has to believe that the audience member is a plant and the number is preselected.  If not, it defies explanation and simply leaves the audience’s collective jaw dropping.

The show includes a version of the familiar sawing-in-half stunt, this time with the Magnificent locked upright in a cabinet. His assistants slide metal sheets into the box, separate the middle section so we see right through the contraption, and push the section back in place. They then unlock the box, and the Magnificent steps out unharmed. I’ve seen this trick countless times and it blows me away every time. The show ends with a disappearance bit reminiscent of the final moments of the musical “The Phantom of the Opera.”

                         Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

Describing the various magic acts gives away nothing. No description, however detailed, can convey the surprise and astonishment the tricks provide live.

“The Magnificents” runs just under two hours including an intermission. I would have preferred more magic and less erratic storyline, but the magic is so rich that to severely criticize the overall production would be ungrateful. The show doesn’t require much high level acting, but the ensemble carries out their roles with commitment and conviction.  Lee Keenan has designed a basic set of a battered truck that converts to a primitive stage. He also designed the atmospheric lighting. Melissa Torchia designed the costumes, and Kevin O’Donnell designed the sound and composed the original music.

“The Magnificents” runs through March 10 at the House Theatre, 1543 West Division Street. Shows are Thursday through Saturday at 7:30 with some 3 p.m. matinees. Tickets are $25. Call 773 769 3832 or visit www.thehousetheatre.com.

At the House Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – “Death and Harry Houdini” was the House Theatre’s first production back in 2001 and it’s been something of a meal ticket for the company over the years. The production played in Chicago earlier this year, transferred to Miami for a successful run, and is now back at the Chopin Theatre, selling out regularly to audiences who love magic shows, which includes just about everyone.

        The show is built around Dennis Watkins, a fine actor and even finer magician, who plays the great Houdini and performs many of his tricks, illusions, and escapes at virtually point blank range in the tiny Chopin playing space.

   There are card tricks, disappearing and reappearing gold fish, a character apparently divided in half in a box, and the fascinating spectacle of Watkins walking barefoot on a bath of broken glass (while the spectators alternately gaze in horrified fascination or look away). Most of the tricks will be familiar to magic show fans, but that doesn’t make the tricks any less entertaining or puzzling.

        The climax of the production is the Chinese Water Torture Cell. In this one, Watkins/Houdini is lowered head first into a large glass tank of water, his feet bound, and all access to the tank sealed by padlocks on the outside. A couple minutes into the immersion, the curtain that covers the tank is pulled back so we can see that the man is actually inside, holding his breath and trying to escape a watery grave. Needless to say, Watkins/Houdini survives, reappearing in a startling manner to great applause and the relief of the audience.

   The show is constructed by playwright/director Nathan Allen as a biography of Houdini from his craving as a young man to become a magician until his death in 1926 at the age of 52. It’s a deliberately ramshackle narrative, some of the storytelling replicating an edgy Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical from the 1920’s.

The chief figures in the biography are Houdini’s brother Theo (Shawn Pfautsch), who becomes his assistant and the architect of many of his famous escape illusions, and his tap-dancing wife Bess (Carolyn Defrin). On the weird side is Houdini’s mother Cecilia (Marika Mashburn), a difficult and addled woman who gets most of the show’s laughs. A boisterous figure known as the Ringmaster (Johnny Arena), weaves in and out of the show as a kind of master of ceremonies. Three other performers play multiple roles (as do the principals other than Watkins). They are Trista Smith, Abu Ansari, and Kevin Stangler. Like everyone else in the cast, the trio has a great time all night and their loosy goosy high spirits contribute nicely to the pleasurable atmosphere of the production. All the supporting players often gather as a raucous band, belting away on instruments ranging from the trombone to the mandolin.

The action occasionally shifts into fantasy with the appearance of a giant stilted figure representing Death. Houdini was obsessed with defeating death his entire life. He also despised fraudulent magicians who scammed their audiences, humiliating one French performer on stage for cheating the audience on a handcuff escape act.

The show doesn’t call for great acting, but Pfautsch delivers a strong three-dimensional performance as Theo as well as an ancient, and irritable, Chinese magician. But everyone in the ensemble does what is asked of him or her as they serve as acolytes for Watkins and his flawless escapes and feats of sleight of hand.

By House Theatre standards, the production values are elaborate, with platforms and pulleys, period costumes, film clips, and dramatic lighting effects, along with the equipment required for the more ambitious magic and escape bits. The core designers are Collette Pollard (scenery), Lee Keenan (costumes), Ben Wilhelm (lighting), and Sarah Gilmore (sound). Tommy Rapley created the choreographer and Kevin O’Donnell composed the original music.

With all its eye- and ear-catching special effects, the show still rides triumphantly on its intimacy. The audience sits in two sections facing each other. The performers are frequently within touching distance of the actor and a couple of patrons are selected from the audience to verify that the padlocks used in the Water Torture escape are legitimate. “Death and Harry Houdini” is not a David Copperfield extravaganza, but magic lovers will still get a very large bang for their buck.

“Death and Harry Houdini” runs through August 17 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 West Division Street. Most performances are Thursday, Friday, and Sunday at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $40. Call 773 769 3832 or visit www.thehousetheatre.com.

The show gets a rating of 3½ stars.   July 2012

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At the House Theater

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – In a brief story by Franz Kafka, Odradek is a harmless and mysterious living object, described as a kind of spool without the thread. Scholars don’t agree on what Odradek symbolizes, but Bret Neveu found enough inspiration in the critter to write “Odradek,” a 75-minute play now receiving its world premiere at the House Theatre.

    The play starts realistically, beginning with Kyle trying to punch out his sleeping father. The man takes his son to the doctor who runs some verbal psychological tests on the lad. At home, Kyle encounters Odradek, a creature living under the stairs who resembles a stuffed burlap sack. Kyle and Odradek exchange elliptical bits of dialogue but the creature has no major place in the narrative until the increasingly hallucinatory final minutes.

        “Odradek” isn’t really a horror story but it’s filled with unease. The audience is manipulated into a feeling of discomfort waiting for something nasty to happen. This feeling is encouraged by a cello player sawing away on his instrument above the stage, contributing a continuous flow of mournful and lugubrious sound. There is some self-mutilation by Kyle continued by the doctor in a nightmarish scene in her office. The play ends with the doctor and the father flailing about in separate wild phantasmagorical dances, the ultimate images of Kyle bidding a final farewell to his sanity?

        The other school will condemn the play as unpleasant, pointless, portentous, and pretentious. The pacing, under Dexter Bullard’s directing is excruciatingly slow, and while the three actors deliver committed performances, they serve a highly questionable cause. I belong to this school.

        I have nothing but admiration for the acting by David Parkes (the father), Carolyn Defrin (the doctor), and especially Joey Steakley (Kyle). They obviously give what the director and the playwright want. The staging is creative, with Odradek starting out as mostly a shadow play against a wall and gradually growing into a corporal reality. The vaguely sinister mood is nicely sustained by Collette Pollard’s set, Lee Keenan’s lighting, the puppet design by Dan Ker-Hobert and Bernie McGovern, and, of course, the baleful cello sounds played by Ruben Gonzalez.

        “Odradek” is clearly a matter of taste. The play might work better as a Halloween fright drama. But beneath all the weird trappings, the show is basically a disagreeable portrait of a descent into madness.

We never learn why Kyle has disintegrated mentally. His father seems like a decent man trying to do his best for his son. We don’t learn details of the divorce that tore Kyle’s mind apart so severely. The mother is an invisible off stage presence. Kids experience divorce all the time, so what made Kyle loose control of reality so destructively? The doctor turns into a sadist, perhaps as Kyle perceives her as a threat because of her involvement with his father. Her sadism is worth a couple of stomach churning shudders, but isn’t really credible.

 I suppose the author invites us to speculate about the narrative’s many perplexities as we observe, like watching a mental health train wreck, Kyle’s plunge into psychological darkness. But it didn’t work for me and at the end of the 75 minutes I breathed a sigh of relief.

        “Odradek” runs through March 5 at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 West Division Street. Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25. Call 773 769 3832 or visit www.thehousetheatre.com.

        The show gets a rating of two stars.   January  2011

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