Playwright: Andrew Lippa
At: Bohemian Theatre Ensemble
at Stage Left
Phone: ( 773 ) 791-2393; $20
Runs through: August 13
Chicago playhouses burst with excitement as talented youngsters reinvigorate the medium. The Wild Party is Off-Loop Theater at its best as 13 actors and seven musicians explode off a small storefront stage in a profusion of music and dance. The Bohemian Theatre Ensemble can't make a dime with such a big show in a 50-seat theater, but the audience is the beneficiary of their extravagance. Plunk down your $20, folks. You'll be very glad you did and amazed at what you see and hear.
Based on a book-length poem of the 1920s, The Wild Party is a tale of sex, drugs and Charleston in the New York apartment of Queenie and Burrs, a showbiz couple. She's a blonde beauty, he's an ardent lover but brutal and possessive. Both have had many previous partners. Faithful for three years, they now chafe at the bit. Queenie decides to inflame Burrs' jealousy during the course of an all-night party they throw, and someone ends up dead in this Jazz Age variation on the classic love triangle.
This production has clear-sighted guidance from director Stephen M. Genovese, musical director A. Scott Williams and choreographer Barbara Didier, who never let the small dimensions of the stage cow them into a small production. Without a need for amplification, the company performs full tilt, filling the house with waves of vocal and instrumental music, and placing the swirl of action almost literally in audience laps. Yet the lines of movement and the dance sequences remain untangled ( if somewhat cluttered ) . Didier, especially, knows the trick of making non-dancers look like hoofers.
The music by Andrew Lippa is deeply rooted in mainstream jazz idioms filtered through Broadway, calling up scat, a hint of gospel, song-and-dance and lots of tight harmony vocal lines to tell its tale. Lippa also wrote the lyrics for the through-scored show, depending heavily on end rhymes and clever internal rhyming, yet avoiding stilted patterns or predictable word choices. His book infuses freshness into a cliché love triangle, as in the poignant expository duet, Out of the Blue.
The band—trumpet, reeds, two keyboards, guitar, percussion, bass—back the young performers with authority. Those performances feature Anthony Fett ( Burrs ) , beautiful Jess Goodwin ( Queenie ) , Ty Perry ( Queenie's new inamorata ) and Cassandra Liveris ( Kate ) in the four key roles. All have vocal and acting chops to spare, with Fett belying his pretty-boy looks as the intense and dangerous Burrs. Their Act I quartet, Poor Child, is mesmerizing. In fact, there isn't a weak link in the entire ensemble, who bring potent blend and power to production numbers such as The Juggernaut and Let Me Drown.
BoHo is too new and small to be so good. Lucky for us they are.
