Playwright: Peter Shaffer
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theater
at Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand
Phone: 312-595-5600; $54-$70
Runs through: Nov. 9
Jean-Paul Sartre was wrong. Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself, when you are cursed with the devastating self-awareness that no matter how hard you strive, mediocrity is the most you will ever achieve. Amadeus photo by Michael Brosilow
With playwright Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, director Gary Griffin illuminates the tortured despair and twisted lives that spring from such understanding. Shaped by Griffin's deep reservoir of insight and humanity, Amadeus is visually ravishing and emotionally ravaging. Thankfully, it is also leavened with humor, something indispensable in a tale this darkly intense. In all, Amadeus is a stunning fugue for virtuoso performers.
In Mozart ( Robbie Collier Sublett ) , we get a luscious portrait of a juvenile, irreverent genius who delights in fart jokes and tantrums and whose music is so sublime it seems to make the very stars weep.
Listen to Sublett's Mozart describe a quartet and its relation to infinity —the passage seems to rip a pinprick through the universe. Through that miniscule opening, audiences for a split second can glimpse something vast, transcendent and overwhelmingly beautiful.
In Mozart contemporary Antonio Salieri ( Robert Sella ) , we see the tragic, horrifying and self-induced corruption of a severely pious man who believes he's been abandoned by God. As Sella's cadaverous visage and haunted depiction make clear, self-awareness is a rusty razor slowly twisting in Salieri's gut, infecting his very blood while it cruelly eviscerates him from the inside out. Mozart's music, Salieri fully comprehends, is the closest thing most people will ever hear to the voice of God. By comparison, Salieri bitterly intones, his own compositions are 'lifeless scratches.'
'He, from the ordinary, created legends,' Salieri says in a voice as black and hopeless as the underworld, 'I, from legends, created only the ordinary.' A single line, it captures an entire, unbearable lifetime.
In tour-de-force morphing of sound design and perfectly modulated monologue, Salieri denies God in a scene so thrilling it verges on astonishing. Leafing through a portfolio of Mozart's manuscripts as a segment of 'Kyrie Eleison' swells in a heavenly sonic background, Salieri becomes consumed by disbelief, horror, awe and finally rage. By the time the final sheet has fluttered to the floor, he has become monstrous.
Sella and Sublett are surrounded by a supporting cast that is a privilege to behold. The triumvirate of Lance S. Baker ( as Emperor Joseph II ) and John Reeger and David Lively ( as courtroom toadies ) is uproarious from the emperor's stern warning against 'too many notes' to Reeger's Cotton Mather prototype as a baron born without a sense of humor.
Finally, Chicago Shakespeare's storied costume and set budgets are put to excellent use in Daniel Ostling's lavishly mirrored and frescoed set and Virgil Johnson's impossibly elaborate Enlightenment-era frocks. Restricted to playing only snippets of Mozart's greatest hits, sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen nevertheless capture the essence of the composer.
THEATER REVIEW
Caroline, or Change
Playwright: Tony Kushner ( words ) ,
Jeanine Tesori ( music )
At: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis
Phone: 773-753-4472; $32-$60
Runs through: Oct. 19
BY JONATHAN ABARBANEL
In Caroline, or Change, artistic director Charles Newell finally has found the American contemporary opera he's sought for some years; a work of musical theater beyond the traditional Broadway song-and-dance formula but with American historical themes and a red-white-and-blue score that hovers between Broadway and popular music. He's directed it with a tremendously sharp eye and a superlative cast to create the season's first must-see show.
Caroline is through-scored, meaning the music never stops. The story and words are by Tony Kushner ( author of Angels in America ) who conceived it as an opera before circumstances moved it towards musical theater. The distinctions are very little about his work and mostly about the music and the voices for which it is written, which is to say not opera singers.
In suburban New Orleans in 1963, Caroline Thibodeaux keeps house for the middle-class Jewish Gellmans. She's under-educated, divorced, has four kids and earns $30 a week. She's been a maid for 22 of her 39 years. In a time of profound national change—Vietnam, JFK's assassination, landmark civil-rights legislation—Caroline finds herself too circumscribed, too repressed and too shaped by old pain to embrace the new. She works in a house of pain: a curious and isolated eight-year-old boy ( Kushner himself ) , an emotionally unavailable widowed father and a new stepmother from New York uncomfortable in the South. Especially in Act II, the emotional despair—which can grow into hatred—creates a deep current of sadness in words and music, which nonetheless never become depressing. Rather, you ache for the characters, which in theater is good.
Relying heavily on rhymed couplets, Kushner's words seem simple and plain-spoken yet never simplify the social complexities of race relations, Black/Jew relations, North/South dichotomies, secularism vs. faith and more. Jeanine Tesori's music ( reduced for eight woodwind-rich pieces by triumphant musical director Doug Peck ) packs two centuries of popular song into a rhythmic and surprisingly light polyglot score with folkloric characteristics from klezmer arpeggios to Motown. This is rich stuff.
As Caroline, E. Faye Butler—a treasure—is a bedrock of voice and character in her greatest performance yet. 'Open up, girl!' ya' wanna' shout at her. The production also boasts several gifted child musical performers, a dazzling young adult ( Melanie Brezill ) as Caroline's daughter and an ensemble of great depth. As is characteristic of his work, Newell's staging offers fluid and complex movements on an open and semi-abstract stage design ( John Culbert, with Robert Denton's excellent lighting on tricky, shiny surfaces ) .
On rare occasions I see a major work of which I have little prior knowledge. I knew Caroline, or Change had been a critical success but a popular failure in its 2003-2004 New York premiere, but I hadn't seen it or heard a note of its music. Foolish me. Caroline, or Change is complex and profound musical theater given a mesmerizing local premiere.
THEATER REVIEW
Twelfth Night
Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: The Bricklayers and Collectif Masque
at Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport
Phone: 312-902-1500; $20
Through Oct. 12
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
The Bricklayers and Collectif Masque's collaborative production of Twelfth Night is something I thought I'd never see: Shakespeare set in outer space.
Oh, sure, we've all heard about weird and far-out Shakespeare somewhere before. They're usually bad sitcom jokes about avant-garde theater, but sometimes they're real anecdotes ( A college professor of mine once designed costumes for a futuristic Romeo and Juliet where Juliet had Princess Leia braids right out of Star Wars ) .
So imagine my anticipation in Studio 2 of the Athenaeum Theatre to be actually experiencing a living and breathing embodiment of Shakespeare sexed up with sci-fi. Good or bad, the combination alone would be a campy story to dine out on for years to come.
So is this space-age Twelfth Night a total disaster? No. But then again, the performances leave a lot to be desired in terms of emotional connection to the characters.
There are a lot of creative ideas at work from both local troupe The Bricklayers and French company Collectif Masque. They're largely embodied in the impressive futuristic production design.
For such a tiny space, designer Marta Cicionesi uses perspective painting on hanging flats to suggest an infinite world of modernistic tubes and shafts. David Bon and DJ Appel work the electronica music and sound design to match the look and mood ( though it does sound very 1980 synthesizer at times ) .
The rest of the budget looks to be lavished on Nieves Durand's silvery costumes, which have more than a touch of Japanese influence. Nearly all of the comic characters also sport nose masks by Etienne Champion, suggesting a mix of goofy Disney and animalistic aliens.
If looks were all, this condensed Twelfth Night overseen by directors Mariana Araoz and Matt Trucano would get an instant recommendation. But they aren't fully convincing as to why this Twelfth Night needed intergalactic updating in the first place.
The opening, where Viola ( a savvy Meredith Barry ) crash-lands on a new planet, is very effective ( as is the ease-of-use device that transforms her gender—something most people transitioning would love to get their hands on ) .
But from there, the sci-fi focus gets lost amid Shakespeare's classic comedy of gender confusion, phony letters and drunken revelry. Plus, the doubled-up actors play more to their wacky costumes instead of the characters' emotions and motivations.
Twelfth Night isn't Shakespeare's deepest comedy, but its human characters offer so much more than the cartoon slapstick and shrilly shouted character voices delivered here.
This Twelfth Night is definitely a case of style over substance. Go if you want to boast that you've seen a sci-fi Shakespeare production, but don't expect much heart to be illuminated amid the heavily caked makeup and shiny fabrics.
