In the director's notes for this musical revue, remounted due to popular demand ( although where the demanding populace was in the 10 or so audience members on opening night will always be a mystery to me ) , Noah Simon worries that Tomfoolery might be offensive. He goes on to offer us rubes the trenchant observation that he doesn't believe satire is intended to offend people. Gee, is that right? I wouldn't have known if he hadn't told me.
Perhaps it's the director's naivete when it comes to literary form that makes Tomfoolery so laughable...for all the wrong reasons.Tomfoolery is essentially a collection of songs by Tom Lehrer, a Harvard-educated mathematician who gained fame during the 1950s and '60s for his comic ditties that poked fun at everything from romance to the bomb to religion to prejudice and beyond. The songs are cute; they're clever, and many, for their time, were topical. They seldom rise to the level of good satire; they just don't have the irony required. The cast puts a lot of energy and heart into trying to bring these faded timepieces to life ( Lehrer's songs are mired squarely in the style of late '50s, early '60s humor: not quite as good as but in the same vein as the Smothers Brothers, Pat Paulsen, or Allan Sherman ) , but the material just isn't classic enough to warrant a revival. And even the enthusiasm of the cast grows wearisome after about a quarter of the show's one-hour run: their style is the same for every song: a perkiness intended to belie the "dark" humor of gems like: "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," "The Old Dope Peddler," "The Vatican Rag," or "Pollution." A couple of songs that did work managed to do so because they were clever curiosities, and as such, managed to step out of the realm of societal observation the show attempts. "The Elements" is a sung list of elements that, because it's so absurd, managed to be funny. And "I Got it from Agnes" is clever because it's a song about a chain of venereal disease infection that's smart because it never mentions disease or sex.
No one can fault the cast for their cheerfulness and their willingness to give the show their all. But one can fault director Noah Simon for not bringing a little more variety into the proceedings. As I said above, the style employed for each number stays about the same, except when the cast inexplicably changes into liturgical drag for their "Vatican Rag" number. Having one costume change in a show where the cast doesn't change costumes for the rest of the other 20 songs seems jarringly out of place. One also wonders why a choreographer ( Klahr Thorsen ) is listed in the program when most of the choreography consisted of outstretched arms and running around on a small stage.
Producing good theater is all about making good choices. Unfortunately, with Tomfoolery, the only good choice one can make is to avoid it.
From A Going Concern. From left: Drew Vidal, Roderick Peeples, Robert Scogin, Steve Schine, Daniel J. Rivkin, Brad Johnson.
At the start of Stephen Jeffreys' semi-autobiographical play, brothers Jack and Gordon reluctantly confront the prospect of telling their father that it's time for him to retire. In turn, their sons are contemplating their own futures. Tony, Gordon's son, wants to expand the business to include American-style Pool tables in addition to the pub-sport furnishings that have been Chapel's stock-in-trade for decades. Jack's offspring, David, is a bookish University boy. Barry, heir to the late Len Chapel's stock in the company, cares only for his music. When pretty young Vicki Molyneaux arrives in her accountant father's stead to audit the books, the only one not worried is Ray, the firm's sole hired employee.
Veteran character actors Robert Scogin as the Chapel clan patriarch, along with Roderick Peeples and Daniel J. Rivkin as the squabbling Jack and Gordon, project a gravity blending exactly the right proportions of mature resignation and midlife restlessness ( while reminding us that some faces just get better as they age ) . Brad Johnson as the calculating Tony, Drew Vidal as the sensitive David and Steven Shine as the brooding Barry likewise paint vivid portraits of youth seeking its own way. And Patrick New provides comic relief as the incorrigible Ray, while Kathleen Logelin lends warmth and humanity to the role of Vicki, the outside agitator.
Father-son issues are receiving a great deal of attention these days, what with Alan Brandt's 2 1/2 Jews...another three-generation chronicle...currently running at Apple Tree. But as demonstrated in The Libertine, Jeffreys is capable of simultaneously intertwining a number of narrative threads, making A Going Concern's exploration of its topic more complex and richly textured than Brandt's single-focus story. And the cast assembled by Karen Kessler for this Famous Door production did ample justice to each multifaceted personality at the preview performance I attended, exhibiting the superlative ensemble playing that has made this company one of Chicago's finest...well, Going Concerns.
The Dining Room
Playwright: A.R. Gurney
At: TinFish Theatre, 4247 N. Avenue
Phone: ( 773 ) 549-1888
Tickets: $17.50
Runs through: Sept. 1
by Mary Shen Barnidge
It's a solid wood table, split at the center to accommodate an extra leaf ( or maybe two ) . It comes with six large, hard-seated chairs, all shipped in 1898 from a factory in Wilkes-Barre, Penn. It's the sort of furniture about which people say, "They don't make it like that any more." Indeed, this is said several times during the course of A.R. Gurney's social history of 20th-century America as revealed by its rituals conducted within the sanctuary surrounding this icon.
In this room, we hear a mother unsuccessfully attempt to forestall her prepubescent daughter's romantic impulses, and a father successfully turn his son from democratic influence. We see a young man petition his grandsire for the money that will provide him an education far from home and a young woman in a troubled marriage negotiate a return to the nest. A small boy bids a heartbroken farewell to a departing housemaid, a prep-school youth returns home unexpectedly to discover his mother in an illicit affair, and two teenage academy-girls make an unsupervised raid on their parents' liquor cabinet. An aged father reviews his funeral arrangements, a family Thanksgiving dinner is disrupted by the clan dowager's wavering memory, while another supper is aborted as Daddy rushes off to avenge an insult to the sibling whose "bachelor acquaintances" have aroused comment among their club fellows. ( "Is Uncle Henry a fruit?" asks one of the children, adroitly dispensing with euphemisms. )
This milieu is identified as "the WASPs of Northern New England" by the nephew who outrages his aunt with ridicule of her antiquated lifestyle, but Gurney's documentation is not restricted to that privileged segment of the population. If the arc of the individual scenes grow somewhat repetitive after a time...children defy the status quo while their parents defend it ( albeit sometimes abandoning white-collar jobs to pursue hobbies full-time, as with the stockbroker-turned-carpenter who bonds with a freshly divorced matron over the restoration of that same venerable table ) ...it is in part due to the capable ensemble work of the six actors assembled for this TinFish theatre production, whose protean rendering of their disparate characters...57 in all...allows us to find the universality in Gurney's insights into our country's progress from Elitism to Egalitarianism.
BLUE SURGE
Written by: Rebecca Gilman
At: Goodman Theater
Tickets: $29-$39
Phone: ( 312 ) 443-3800
Runs through: Aug. 5
by Rick Reed
Blue Surge, Goodman's latest offering from wunderkind playwright Rebecca Gilman, has a lot going for it: masterful direction by Robert Falls, an amazing set by Walt Spangler, moody, evocative lighting by Michael Philippi, and a bravura performance by Rachel Miner. Too bad the script didn't live up to the formidable talents bringing it to life.
Blue Surge is the story of two cops, two hookers, and their intersections in a small, Midwestern locale. The play opens with a thwarted bust of a massage parlor where the two young prostitutes work. The bust is sort of an ice-breaker for the boys ( the cops ) and the girls ( the hos ) to meet each other and begin seeing each other socially. Curt ( Joe Forbrich ) is the earnest cop, the poor white boy for whom law enforcement is his glass ceiling. Being a detective is his career pinnacle, because he comes from reduced circumstances. Gilman sets him up as a do-gooder, and as such, he can't get the troubled teenage hooker Sandy out of his mind and sets out to help her. Sandy ( the astonishingly talented Rachel Miner ) , also from reduced circumstances, is refreshing because she realizes that she is making the most of her life by being a prostitute...it's easy money. Miner makes us love her Sandy, who, in her own way, is the smartest and most realistic character in the play, a whore with a heart of gold and no illusions. The other side of this cop/whore coin is Doug ( the usually formidable Steve Key, here reduced by the script to an unbelievably stupid detective, who borders on brain damaged ) and Heather ( Rebecca Jordan, in a caricaturish, but hilarious, turn ) , who fall for each other. I suppose Gilman meant for this pair to be the comic relief in her story of the gap between the middle and lower classes, but the two of them ring resoundingly untrue: he because he would never be smart enough to make detective even in a small town, and she because we never see why she cleans up her act by the end of the play ( the love of a "good" man? ) .
Rebecca Gilman has potential as a playwright, but she's not firing on all cylinders here, in spite of the inarguably high production values the Goodman has given her latest effort. The problem with Blue Surge is its lack of authenticity. Gilman wants to write about the kind of folks who inhabit the lower depths, the economically deprived class who dare not dream too big, but the lack of credibility on display demonstrates that Gilman doesn't know these people very well. She's imagining them...and their strifes. Curt, the "good" cop at one point ( in a meandering monologue that goes on far too long ) bemoans the fact that he "doesn't know how to act." Gilman's Curt is too self-aware; he wouldn't say that. There's also no motivation for the felony he commits near the play's climax, whether his goals were altruistic or not.
Blue Surge ( the title is a play on words, from the Duke Ellington jazz piece, Blue Serge...get it? ) is clever, but the playwright never delivers on the poetry of its promise: the play lacks both genuine blues and we leave the theater still wanting a "surge" we can believe in.
