I am not a theater critic but I have been devoted to covering theater since my early 1980s reports on the explosion of Chicago storefront theaters for National Public Radio. On The Mara Tapp Show in the 1990s, I was honored to host weekly conversations about and offer scenes from some of Chicago’s best shows, and delighted when those interviews filled houses for our local theaters.
In 2015, at the request of friends, I started a series of emails with recommendations for shows I thought worthy of patrons. Some years later, actors, directors and publicity people in Chicago’s theater world prevailed on me to share these raves, a request I accepted, especially in light of the increasing tensions in the theater world and need to keep Chicago theaters healthy. Read more…
Find out what the critics think at the Review Round-up on the website of TheatreInChicago.com.
Breaking News
Theater fans take note: Half-Price Holidays has arrived just in time for this season of gift-giving! From December 4-15, half-price tickets will be available for a number of Chicago and suburban shows from Hot Tix, the League of Chicago’s discount ticket program. Find a comprehensive Holiday Theatre Guide at https://chicagoplays.com/chicago-theatre-guide/. An updated list of performances will be available at ChicagoPlays.com.
Theater Raves has been renamed Raves to reflect the fact that I am now also raving about music performances and art exhibitions. Here’s to raves about all the arts!
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Theater Raves
Urinetown
Photos by Liz Stenholt Photography
Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre through January 4
Highly Recommended
Well into the second act of Urinetown, the youth conscience masquerading as a child of the streets, asks the narrator with some bitterness, “What kind of musical is this?”
It’s a fine question for a Tony-award-winning musical by two men whose dramatic roots are deep in Chicago’s arts scene and dirty corruption with a dollop of the sort of brainy early University of Chicago satire for which our “second” city is known. I would call it an exemplary illustration of what happens when critical thinking is turned into a satirical musical. Every musical theater genre is spoofed, if not outright mocked, in Urinetown, as are holy highbrow musicals like The Threepenny Opera to more standard Broadway fare like Les Miserables. Any time that anyone is getting too saccharine, whoever they are addressing calls them on it with a good question or a well-deserved, snap-back snipe. However, the story is not a happy one. The action takes place in an anti-Utopia with a water shortage from a 20-year drought that has led to a ban on private toilets. Citizens must pay to play, rather pee, in public facilities owned by a huge corporation called, appropriately, Urine Good Company. If they don’t pay, they are fined and sent to an unthinkable place. Urinetown focuses on Public Amenity #9, the worst urinal with the poorest patrons.
One of the delights of this revival of Urinetown is that it brings the show back from its Broadway daze – pun intended – to the immersive Cabaret style for which Theo is known, a return to their many years in the tiny No Exit Café, one of our country’s oldest political arts cafes. In that space, immersive drama was unavoidable, and it is now been recreated in Theo’s larger home on Howard Street. This show, dedicated to co-founder Fred Anzevino, who died in April, honors his values and spirit.
And it does so with fervor and joy. Director Danny Kapinos, Music Director Aaron Kaplan and Conductor Kevin Zhou lead a talented corps of actors with excellent pipes and musicians, including Kaplan and Zhou, with fine instruments. Joining them are Dream Choreographer Brenda Didier and Cameron Turner. They work with an ideal acting ensemble. Ryan Stajmiger relishes his militaristic strutting as Officer Lockstock, the top cop, and his didactic side as the narrator. Maya Tanaka Allwardt is the perfect Little Sally, that young conscience, who keeps popping up to deliver her out-of-the-mouths-of-babes questions with the right mix of innocence and wisdom. Drew Longo zealously embodies the main villain, the arrogant and ruthless Caldwell B. Cladwell, CEO of Urine Good Company. Public Amenity #9’s unforgiving boss Penelope Pennywise is well played by Alicia Berneche as a tyrant of terrifying but laughable pitilessness. Her assistant, Bobby Strong, who does the dirty work, emerges as both the romantic lead and the leader of a revolution. Luke Nowakowski exudes passion in each role and a good bit of humanity as well. Amanda Rodriguez is winning as the object of his affections but also, alas, Hope Cladwell, the increasingly skeptical daughter of the evil capitalist preventing freedom of the pee. The rest of the cast – Kevin Chlapecka, Matt Frye, Mai Hartwich, Reginald Hemphill, Natalie Henry, Aidan Leake, Alex Madda, Christopher Ratliff and Kelcy Taylor – deserves praise for their multiple roles.
The production team also merits praise. Eleanor Kahn’s pop-up stages keep the action moving and the audience at the center of what’s happening. Lighting Designer Ellie Fey creates the atmosphere to enhance the talents on display. Costume Designer Cindy Moon’s police and company uniforms snap their wearers into shape with their sharp angles and toothpaste hues and Mark Park’s wigs and make up complete the look. Properties Designer Ab Rieve props are exactly right.
A word about the music. The talented musicians make sure that they are as present as they should be but never drown out the singers. My clarinetist friends, who accompanied me, were in accord that this is critical but not as common as it should be. No strangers to performance, they were engaged from the beginning to the end by what they deemed the “absolute highest quality professional singing, dancing” and acting in this “thought-provoking show” with an end worth the wait.
Urinetown is indeed a worthwhile show. With its wisely satirical takes on capitalism, corruption, bureaucracy, politics, the legal system, corporate greed and other issues that plague us, it is also a timely and timeless musical. This is a musical for the age of Mamdani. Follow the lead of the appropriately named semi-heroine Hope and make time to see and enjoy it for the laughter and contemplation it will bring.
I would be remiss if I did not note that, most fittingly, after the show was over, we all used Theo’s one bathroom and peed for free.
Jekyll and Hyde
Kokandy Productions at the Chopin Theatre through January 10
Highly Recommended
“There’s such a fine line between a good man and a bad,” says Dr. Henry Jekyll. And, in this oh-so-familiar story, he will cross that line repeatedly. His transgressions become so frequent that the line bears repeating.
Kokandy Production’s arresting revival of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic horror novella electrifies this iconic tale thanks to the Drama Dream Team of Director Derek Van Barham, Music Director Nick Sula, who leads a talented 15-person orchestra, Choreographer Brenda Didier, whose steps are always sublime, and a flawless cast of 12. Together they elevate the 1990 musical that ran for four years on Broadway. That adaptation reimagined Stevenson’s tale as one about a brilliant young research doctor whose father’s mental illness drives him to explore a cure for the evil in all of us that he believed caused it. Unable to persuade his colleagues to let him use human subjects, Jekyll decides to experiment on himself, leading to his dual existence as the good doctor and evil murderer. The musical also features two women, one for each man.
Leading the talented Chicago cast is David Moreland, passionate and acrobatic in his portrayal of the moral romantic Dr. Jekyll, as well as the evil, menacing Mr. Hyde. Moreland expertly moves between these opposites, showing kindness, ethics and love as Jekyll and snarling rage driven by a twisted set of ethics as Hyde. His portrayal reveals when his murders of hypocrites go awry. Nathan Calaranan gives Jekyll’s compassionate senior colleague, Sir Danvers Carew, the wisdom and gracious honesty of a man who advocates for Jekyll’s scientific pursuits, and is equally convincing as the adoring father of Jekyll’s fiancé Emma. Emily McCormick’s Emma is ideal and in beautiful voice as the loving woman who will stand by her man without losing her spirit or herself. Ava Lane Stovall is stunning and sexy as the other woman, Lucy Harris, star of a house of entertainment, and the prostitute with whom Hyde becomes obsessed. Her singing drew enthusiastic applause at the performance my Ingenious Editor and I saw. Kevin Webb is winning as Gabriel John Utterson, Jekyll’s devoted but appropriately skeptical lawyer and best friend. Jon Parker Jackson’s Bishop of Basingstoke is as pompous and righteous as he should be. Rounding out the cast are a collection of lords, ladies, sirs and secretaries – Ismael Garcia, Quinn Kelch, Quinn Rigg, Gabby Sauceda-Koziol, Quinn Simmons and Maiko Terazawa – who are disingenuous and odious in all the right ways. Everyone but Moreland as the divided Jekyll and Hyde plays multiple roles and all shimmer in each, be it in their acting, their singing or their dancing.
What’s remarkable about this Jekyll and Hyde is how nearly perfect it is. The actors excel. The directing, music and choreography are flawless. The production team is exemplary. All deserve kudos but a few merit more words of praise. Sotirios Livaditis two-level set and G “Max” Maxin IV’s lighting suit the action and allow the musical to easily morph from Henry and Emma’s engagement party to Jekyll’s lab to a house of entertainment and prostitution to the late-night streets of London. Rachel Sypniewski’s costumes hug and define everyone. One of the great pleasures of this production is the way she brings out the beauty in all shapes and sizes, especially in the Rubenesque women and portly men. Her vision of Emma as a confection in pink and white is a heavenly dream, and her black-and-red form-fitting outfits for Lucy lift the temperature. I’ve never seen such gorgeous belts on women so effectively used – or costumes, for that matter, that walk the line between Gothic, innocent and dominatrix. And Sypniewski is not restrained by gender, which is fitting – pun intended – for a cast that crosses gender lines. The lace-up vest she puts on Henry Jekyll is breathtakingly provocative and hints as his other side. The see-through shirt that the music director shows off when he removes his jacket after intermission is delightfully revealing. The white asylum caps that the orchestra members wear locate us.
A word about the songs: Lyrics here seem accessible yet they convey profound emotions and truths that define each of the relationships. They are deceptively simple and, at the same time, profoundly expressive. When Emma steps out of a loving duet with her concerned father, widowed way too young, and notes that he hoped she would “grow up and look like her” mother, one can’t help but be struck by her insight.
At intermission, my Insightful Editor and I turned to each other to express our astonishment and delight at the genius of this show. Between us, we’ve spent decades seeing musicals and plays, good and not, but this one grabbed us both. Do yourself a massive favor and see it before it closes. Aside from the brilliance of the cast and production, it will rattle your ethical and moral world even as it engages and delights your every sense.
Musical Homage
Remembering Tom Lehrer
I was about 11 when Tom Lehrer jumped into my consciousness and stole my intellectual heart.
I’ll blame it on my parents who were crazy about this genius mathematician-turned-showman, the author of some of the wittiest satirical songs most of us had ever encountered. We spent many a night after family dinner wearing out the vinyl on Lehrer’s That Was the Year that Was. By the time I was12 I knew all the lyrics on that album, and a couple other well-worn records by Tom Lehrer. For true Lehrer devotees, picking a favorite song is impossible but singing as many as possible as often as possible is impossible to resist – much to the annoyance of non-Lehrer fans or other sorts of American Puritans he would most certainly eschew. Fortunately, my parents were far from that, and I had the good luck to marry a man who happily sang Lehrer along with me, though he was usually in key. So Lehrer’s late July death at 97 hit me with enough of a smack that it’s taken me a while to collect my thoughts, and to trace his impact on my life.
In my junior year of high school, my mother was offered a visiting professorship at Harvard Law School, an opportunity she happily accepted for many reasons, not least among them that she’d not been able to accept the full scholarship Radcliffe offered her because her parents couldn’t afford to send her across the country for college. Already a surly teenager, I was eager to escape the irritating pretensions of the University of Chicago, where the administration often made racist and other horrible decisions that eclipsed the good work and politics of my parents and their friends and colleagues. My parents took the view that while the Hyde Park neighborhood had some merits and lots of smart and wonderful people, it also possessed a cloyingly small-town nature that required true city folks like us to leave it often to explore the delights of Chicago, and to find decent restaurants. Given this, my adolescent spirit was prepared to dive into in the cosmopolitan charms of Cambridge and Boston. That disappeared as soon as I discovered that pretense and academic pedigrees were an art form at Harvard compared to the rumpled, multisyllabic, grumpy nature of your average U of C habitué or Hyde Parker.
The fact that I was sent to a “school for young ladies” in a Cambridge house did not improve my teenage outlook. However, one fact, and that school’s proximity to it, elated me. Tom Lehrer taught at Harvard and lived nearby. Call me naïve but, at 15, I thought the best way to meet him was to go to his house every day after school and sit on his steps in the hopes that he would emerge or come home after work whereupon I would express my admiration of his brilliant lyrics and fawn all over him. Weeks went by. This did not happen. Finally, one cold afternoon, the door opened and my heart leapt. A woman peered out and asked me why I was sitting on her porch every day. I explained that I wanted to meet Lehrer and asked if this wasn’t his house. Yes, she replied, but he had the good sense to go to Santa Cruz that winter and she was renting his house. Crestfallen, I went home and consoled myself with art. At that time, I intended to be a dancer and choreographer so I persuaded one of my two school friends, both also outliers, to join me in creating a dance to Lehrer’s “The Vatican Rag.” Her Czech mother sewed our nuns’ habits from old pillowcases, and we used Mardi Gras beads that doubled as belts we could swing around and as rosaries.
We started performing our “Vatican Rag” around Cambridge. People seemed to like it, except for one woman who found it scandalous and turned to express her view to my father, who was sitting next to her. “That’s my daughter,” he said with some pride. He was a professor of humanities and religious studies among other subjects so I like to think that it was more than mere paternal pride.
The Cambridge grapevine, it turns out, was as good as the Hyde Park one. When Lehrer returned to Cambridge in the spring, word reached him that two girls were performing a dance to his “Vatican Rag” around town. Connections were made, and Lehrer came over to our house, singing and playing the piano while I performed our dance for him. His delight was contagious but not nearly as enormous as mine. My mother, herself delighted, filmed this encounter. Alas that ancient videocassette returned with me to Chicago only to become the one piece of my luggage the airlines have lost forever so all I have is the memory of that remarkable afternoon – and, of course, Lehrer’s glorious song.
I headed off to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in the Fall but was so smitten with Lehrer that I managed to stay in touch with him. He was campaigning for George McGovern by singing at fundraisers, and the Twin Cities were on his tour. I got to spend an intoxicating evening following Lehrer around and watching him work his magic on crowds. By then, he’d performed on Sesame Street, singing adorable little ditties about “silent e” and its alphabetical relatives. He tickled the Twin Cities audiences by sharing the “Adult X-rated” version of “Silent E.”
As I’ve revisited his repertoire since his death, I’ve been struck by the giddy joys Lehrer’s lyrics cause in songs like “New Math” and “The Elements,” and the relevance of his lyrics in so many songs from “Pollution” to “Who’s Next?” Consider these from “National Brotherhood Week:”
Oh the white folks hate the Black folks
And the Black folks hate the white folks
To hate all but the right folks is an old established rule
But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week …
It’s fun to eulogize the people you despise
As long as you don’t let them in your school
Oh the poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks…
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Muslims
And everybody hates the Jews
But during National Brotherhood Week
National Brotherhood Week
National Everyone-Smile-at-One-Another-hood Week
Be nice to people who are inferior to you
It’s only for a week so have no fear
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year
I was moved to discover in the many odes to and obituaries to Lehrer that he decided to release the rights to all his songs, telling his fans, “So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money.” He even had a website created for people to download his songs.
No doubt that only expanded Lehrer’s following, as does his songs’ infectious singability, which has made me continue to sing Lehrer’s songs across so many decades whenever and wherever the spirit moves me, which is often. Our children grew up on Lehrer’s songs as well, and I am now introducing my grandbaby to his oeuvre. I’m sure she’ll enjoy the kiddie versions of his Sesame Street songs when she learns to read but, for now, we’re working our way through the age-appropriate highlights of his adult repertoire so she can decide what her favorite will be.