Book and score: Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney. At: ensemble 113 at Athenaeum Studio 3, 2936 N. Southport. Phone: 800-982-2787; $10-$15. Runs through: Aug. 7
Very few off-Broadway musicals get made into full-length movies, let alone flop ones that ran less than a month. But that's what happened with Reefer Madness: The Musical. The Showtime cable network filmed this 2001 show in 2005 as a companion piece for the launch of the pot comedy Weeds.
Reefer Madness is an adaptation of the 1936 cult film of the same name. It showed such outrageous outcomes of marijuana use that it has become a camp classic.
The film was just 67 minutes, yet composer Dan Studney and lyricist Kevin Murphy's musical adaptation fills out to a flabby two hours. It's about a half hour too long since Studney and Murphy's material is stuffed with caricatures instead of real characters you actually give a damn about. It also isn't nearly as clever as it should be ( we don't really need yet another Jesus Christ visitation production number ) .
The weaknesses of Reefer Madness become more apparent when the ensemble performing it can't get the right campy tone to mock this tale of sunny American youths getting hooked on pot. The pert and pretty performers of ensemble 113—under director Corey Lubowich and choreographer Rachel Freidman—do their darnedest to make the musical funny, but their inexperience shows.
This is very apparent in the casting of the corruptible pot fiends. Joseph Boersma as pusher Jack Stone, Kim Grossman as addict Mae and Elyse Panchen as reckless mother Sally each lack the film noir tone to make their dialogue crackle with self-aware ironic humor.
Their comic timing is also way off. Boersma's scenes of domestic abuse on Mae should be cartoonish to prompt audience laughter—not the gasps of horror like on opening night.
As the wholesome high school sweethearts Jimmy Harper and Mary Lane, Will Aaron and Amy Stricker respectively do much better at creating the laughable wide-eyed naivety of their characters. Clayton Fox also has loads of fun as the Lecturer who warns the parents ( but also seems to revel in playing other characters ranging from a randy satyr to a preachy FDR ) .
But the whole cast could ratchet up their performances with a more arch awareness of how simple the motivations are for their paltry roles. And the scene changes could be speedier ( even if the tatty couch and booze bottle-filled table fit cozily in set designer Michael Bou-Maroun's platform set ) .
Yet these qualms with Reefer Madness and ensemble 113's so-so production of it probably won't matter much to the recreational user demographic, since it cooks up plenty of jokes to suit them. But fans of well-written musical theater will probably wish they were watching a better off-Broadway movie-musical adaptation like Little Shop of Horrors instead.
THEATER REVIEW
Shrek the
Musical
Playwright: book and lyrics by
David Lindsay-Abaire,
music by Jeanine Tesori
At: Broadway In Chicago at
the Cadillac Palace, 151 W. Randolph
Phone: 800-775-2000; $25-$90
Runs through: Sept. 5
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
There's some deep psychology lurking beneath the Crayola hues in William Steig's modern fable: our hero, warned by his parents that his will be a lonely and unloved life, has learned to embrace solitude. Our heroine is afflicted with a birth defect leading to her incarceration until a cure can be found. Even our villain's cruel "ethnic cleansing" policies are rooted in his own low self-image. We also encounter a hostile thug ( who only needs a little tenderness ) , a whining crybaby ( who learns to assert himself ) and numerous other allegorical personae who come to celebrate their diversity even as Amor conquers Omnia for our well-met lovers.
For those ( like me ) unfamiliar with the animated films from which this theatrical adaptation draws its story, the plot is precipitated by the evil Lord Farquaad's ejection from his realm of all "freakish" fairy-tale personnel. In order to preserve his swampland home from infestation by strangers, Shrek the Ogre offers to plead their case at court. Upon arriving at Duloc Castle, accompanied by a Donkey companion, Shrek is assigned the task of fetching the princess whom Farquaad plans to marry. But don't worry—in the end, the deserving are rewarded and the unregenerate punished.
A text rhyming "granny dress" with "tranny mess" and has Pinocchio declare, "I'm wood! I'm good! Get used to it" is clearly aimed at grown-ups, but this is not Into the Woods. While very young children may get restless during the two and a half hours between curtains, the issues are confronted at distinctly juvenile levels—indeed, the farting contest providing the ogre sweethearts their bonding moment will likely set the adults to squirming. Assisting the message of tolerance are sly visual and musical references to everything from Motown to Philly soul ( did I mention the dragon who sings like Jennifer Hudson? ) , from Neil Diamond to Judy Blume, from Lion King to Wicked to Les Miz.
The inside humor, however, is only the decoration on a sophisticated pop score delivered by the mighty-voiced, but always endearing, Eric Petersen, augmented by Haven Burton's rebellious Fiona, Alan Mingo, Jr.'s, resourceful Donkey and David F. M. Vaughn, wearing a cageful of prosthetics, as the—um, vertically challenged Farquaad. If the tap-dancing rats ( long drape, furry shoes—trust me, you'll love it ) and the surprise encore don't win you over, then you're grumpier than Farquaad's deadbeat dad.
THEATER REVIEW
Sherlock Holmes:
The Final Adventure
Playwright: Steven Dietz, adapted
from the play by Arthur Conan Doyle
and William Gillette
At: Idle Muse Theatre Company
at the Side Project, 1439 W. Jarvis
Phone: 773-382-2472; $20
Runs through: Aug. 22
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Somewhere it's written that cold-blooded Victorian gentlemen cannot swash and swagger with cavalier flair, but upstart American authors have ratified exceptions to that rule throughout their nation's literary history. And so in 1899, Arthur Conan Doyle's hypercerebral hero was permitted to court a lady—on sound scientific principles, naturally—when triple-threat William Gillette adapted several of the famous whodunits into the hit drama that introduced the image of the deerstalker-capped, calabash-smoking slueth that we recognize to this day.
Prevailing show-business wisdom also dictates that you can't sell 19th-century melodrama to modern audiences, especially on a storefront stage barely 12 feet square. How do you replicate the picturesque locales—fashionable London townhouses, bankside industrial plants, pastoral gardens along the Danube? Won't audiences scoff at the stock characters—ruthless villains, straitlaced maidens, bumbling aristocrats and comical servants? And what about the elaborate special effects likewise characteristic of the genre? With Steven Dietz's 2006 adaptation of the Doyle-Gillette collaboration setting a waggish tone stopping just short of parody, wouldn't it be easier—and safer—to simply shrug off the whole thing as giggly camp?
Fortunately, Evan Jackson and the Idle Muse Theatre Company have, from their very inception, essayed only the most challenging of projects. Their realization of this vintage action-adventure tale overcomes its limitations with an alacrity as seemingly effortless as that with which their genius detective uncovers clues, outwits adversaries and resolves disorder presenting a threat to his society. Credit Jackson for directing his cast to play their roles seriously, with no winks or asides—even when encumbered by a running gag involving Holmes' exhaustive reference library. Conviction like this, conveyed with understatement proportionate to its intimate quarters, renders plausible the most artificial of occurrences.
Artifice being unavoidable in close quarters, however, Dennis Mae's scenic design embraces such imaginative motifs as set dressing etched on plexiglass panels, relying instead on the expository dialogue to locate us in our various milieux. The actors' youthfulness becomes invisible after a few minutes, Luke Hamilton personifying the austere Holmes with the able support of Nathan Pease's meek Dr. Watson and Elizabeth Macdougald's feisty Irene Adler. But the chief factor generating the requisite suspense is Nathan Thompson's chilling portrayal of the evil Dr. Moriarty, who—armed only with a deadly looking cane—radiates more menace than any modern WMD-schlepping baddie.
