THEATER REVIEW
Baal
Playwright: Bertolt Brecht
At: TUTA Theatre at the
Chopin, 1543 W. Division
Phone: 847-217-0691; $25
Runs through: June 20
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
There is no shortage of German dramas about young people embracing destructive behavior, any one of which you could pass half a lifetime without ever encountering, even in the classroom. But although the successful pop-opera adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening has not yet inspired a song-and-dance version of, say, Ferdinand Bruckner's The Disease of Youth, the renewed interest in romantic rebels has led to not one, but two, productions of Bertolt Brecht's Baal in just under seven months.
Written in 1918 when Brecht was, himself, only 20, his play's adolescent-fantasy icon is typical of the genre: our protagonist, named for a Biblical baddie, is a student who never attends class or does homework, but instead hangs out at sordid taverns, declaiming poetry, drinking, brawling and seducing a number of innocent—but curious—babes who, of course, find his unwashed lust irresistible. When his best buddy betrays their nihilistic lifestyle by falling in love, Baal kills him in a passion of thwarted dominance. Unsurprisingly, our dissolute slacker ultimately dies destitute, abandoned in a shed—but he musters the strength, nevertheless, to crawl forth and meet his sorry end under a canopy of cleansing starlight.
So how does TUTA director Zeljko Djukic propose to make this charmless brat into a Byronesque hero? American rock-and-roll being an indispensable component of the modern Eastern European aesthetic, Djukic's first step was to hire Josh Schmidt, composer of the breakout musical version of The Adding Machine, to supply a score of aggressively up-tempo songs, performed onstage by actors on instruments ranging from guitar to bass viol, and sounding nothing like the atonal Kurt Weill ditties traditionally employed by academic productions.
Other innovative elements meeting the demands of the playwright's requisite intellectual distance ( while never eclipsing the visceral rush we expect from teenagers-gone-to-hell fables ) are the slyly classical references generated by dressing up the bantamweight Ian Westerfer in satyr drag—hunched posture, hedgehog hair, goat beard, hairy chest with trousers at half-mast—for the title role, and the equal-opportunity introduction of some girl-on-boy rough sex for one of Baal's groupies. The total makes for an original theatrical vocabulary that more than justifies the 90-plus intermissionless minutes Djukic feels necessary to fully absorb the evening's experience.
THEATER REVIEW
The Colored
Museum
Playwright: George C. Wolfe
At: Congo Square Theatre Company
at Chicago Center for the
Performing Arts, 777 N. Green
Phone: 312-733-6000; $25
Runs through: June 27
BY SCOTT C. MORGAN
A lot has happened in African-American culture since 1986. That's when out playwright/director George C. Wolfe first delivered a mischievous shock to the system with The Colored Museum.
Yet, almost 25 years on, The Colored Museum doesn't particularly feel dated. Now celebrating its 10-year anniversary, Congo Square Theatre Company is more than up to the many challenges presented in Wolfe's irreverent comedy revue.
Director Anthony Irons uses his past experience in sketch comedy to keep things snapping along nicely. ( Drummer/keyboardist/DJ Sean Sykes' improv comedy experience is also vital to the show's success. ) Irons is blessed with a wonderfully versatile cast who are all experts at exploiting as many laughs and dramatic moments from Wolfe's cutting material.
Alexis J. Rogers makes you sit up and take notice thanks to her powerful gospel vocalizing as the Aunt Jemima-type character who stirs up a roaring recipe for African Americans in a cooking show spoof. The way Rogers caresses and overemphasizes the gospel melismas in her sung numbers is not only wowing, but hilarious, too.
Rogers spars well with the extremely talented Ericka Ratcliff in a scene of dueling women's wigs. ( Ratcliff is particularly memorable as the militant Black Power Afro. ) Ratcliff also has fun embodying the Black pop diva La-La, who hides her Deep South roots in favor of a Eurocentric sophistication.
For longtime theatergoers, perhaps the funniest scene is Wolfe's evisceration of African-American theater that starts out as a traditional "Mama on the Couch" play. Samuel G. Roberson, Jr., is particularly good as the angry Black man who is always pressed down by "The Man."
The scene then morphs to roll its eyes at artsy poetry plays ( Ratcliff perfectly matches the pretension found in works like for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf ) and then to color-blind casting of classical plays with African-American actors. ( Bakesta King comes into her own here as the elocution emissary. )
Of particular interest to LGBT audiences is the defiant drag-queen character of Miss Roj ( powerfully, if speedily, played by Ron Conner ) . Wolfe once mentioned in a PBS documentary at how some audience members were verbally and almost physically violent toward Miss Roj.
Hopefully it seems that audiences today are more inclined to embrace Miss Roj and all her sassy attitude instead of trying to deny her place in African-American culture.
The Colored Museum only comes off as dated by what it has missed in African-American culture since its debut ( namely, the worldwide influence of hip-hop ) . Yet Wolfe kept the show relevant by smartly holding up a sometimes uncomfortable mirror to Black culture. And, smartly, Wolfe also lessened that glare by infusing in so many insightful laughs.
THEATER REVIEW
Oh, Boy!
Playwright: Jerome Kern,
Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse
At: City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr
Tickets: 773-293-3682; www.citylit.org; $25
Runs through: June 27
BY JONATHAN ABARBANEL
Fans of musical theater history seldom have opportunities to see the so-called "Princess musicals," seven fluffy-but-charming shows produced between 1915 and 1918 with music by Jerome Kern, book by Guy Bolton and lyrics mostly by P. G. Wodehouse. All three talented authors went on to better things—Kern to Show Boat and Roberta, for example—but the Princess shows were important in the transition from European-style operetta to the modern Broadway musical comedy. Their love-story plots are antiquated, but they feature youthful American characters, slangy ( for the era ) speech and coherent—albeit trivial—stories and characters. Also, because Kern was the composer, there are several American Song Book standards scattered among them, such as "Till the Clouds Roll By" from this show.
So the City Lit production of Oh, Boy! is an event; a show not seen in Chicago in 92 years, its script and score carefully reconstructed from various incomplete sources in a noble act of dramatico-musical scholarship. The disarming score is well-rendered under musical director Kingsley Day, who has prepped the performers and prepared an ingratiating piano-and-woodwind reduction of the original arrangements for small orchestra. The attractive 14-person cast ranges from competent to impressive, although the comedy players have more to do both musically and dialogue-wise. In one of the few non-singing roles, Patti Roeder dazzles late-in-the-show with a comic physical turn as drunken Quaker, while Adam Pasen has the insouciance and looks for polo player Jim Marvin. Sean Knight and Harmony France are the engaging but typically-bland romantic leads.
Under director Terry McCabe, City Lit does as much right as it can given its limitations of space and budget. Thomas Kieffer's costumes surprise and please the most, with their well-observed period cuts, ice cream pastel colors ( love the gents' matching spats and bow ties ) , chintz-patterned dresses and flannel and linen fabrics.
But something about this show is too small, even for an intimate musical written in 1917 for a theater seating only 300. The even-greater-intimacy of the City Lit playhouse encourages a lack of attack in the playing and a limited range of musical dynamics in the singing. Also, Day has given most numbers diminuendo endings, rather than big finishes or strong musical buttons, thereby depriving some songs of extra punch, especially some of the jazzier tunes such as the women's close-harmony numbers "A Little Bit of Ribbon" and "Rolled into One."
Of course, these are the quibbles of a professional quibbler. A truer litmus might be the personal taste of a potential ticket-buyer. If you favor musical spectaculars such as Wicked and Billy Elliot—Oh, Boy! won't be your gin and tonic. But those with a sense of musical-theater history and period style will find this mostly well-done rarity a perfect summer bracer.
THEATER REVIEW
Tobacco Road
Playwright: Jack Kirkland, based
on the novel by Erskine Caldwell
At: American Blues Theater at
the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln
Phone: 773-871-3000; $32-$40
Runs through: June 20
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
The transition from an agricultural to an industrial society has rarely been easy, and never more protracted than in the American south, whose rural dwellers experienced not only humiliating defeat in war, but the simultaneous and irrevocable collapse of the economy providing their region its livelihood. The stories of Erskine Caldwell are rooted in first-hand observations, but—history being written by the victors—our attitudes toward farmers nowadays are undeniably ambivalent, veering between romantic-era reverence for the pilgrims who live close to the soil ( think The Grapes Of Wrath ) and scorn for the "hayseeds" who scrabble in the dirt ( think Li'l Abner ) .
Jack Kirkland's adaptation of Caldwell's Tobacco Road leans toward the latter view in its depiction of a morally degenerate clan whose patriarch is willing to swap his prettier daughter for a side of salt pork. His offspring are no better—his other daughter rolls on the ground like a cat in heat to entice a neighbor repulsed by her scarred face, his son agrees to marry a lusty female preacher upon promise of a new car, and when old granny goes missing in the fields, her kin are too absorbed in their own immediate problems to concern themselves with the likelihood of her death.
But these are the very citizens that the American Blues Theater's mission statement purports to champion. And under Cecilie Keenan's direction, a cast of celebrated actors strive zealously to impose the dignity of a Thomas Hart Benton painting on a caricatured portrait of unreconstructed landholders mired in counterproductive nostalgia.
And they very nearly accomplish their goal, thanks to players willing to adopt personalities of a physical and spiritual repugnance you hope their real-life counterparts will never have to endure ( Steve Key's makeup design—in particular, a grisly cleft palate on the otherwise-comely Gwendolyn Whiteside—renders unrecognizable even faces long familiar to local audiences ) , while the technical team exceeds the call of duty to locate us amid the dust and flies of a Georgia summer, greeting us at the door with Lindsay Jones' lonely mouth-harp whining that most mournful of Protestant hymns, "The Old Rugged Cross" ( How many sound designers would have been satisfied with that white-trash cliché "Amazing Grace"? )
However cumbersome Kirkland's early-20th-century naturalism may weigh on modern ( and presumably more enlightened ) sensibilities, there is no disputing the welcome return of a pioneering Chicago troupe still capable of great things.
