Cascabel

At the Lookingglass Theatre

by Dan Zeff

 

Chicago – The Lookingglass production of “Cascabel” is the toughest ticket in Chicago this side of “The Book of Mormon.” The show is a magnet for foodies, for members of the In Crowd who want to be part of the big buzz show of the season, and for regular playgoers who want to try something completely different, even at prices up to $250 a seat.

        “Cascabel” raises dinner theater to a level it will likely never approach again in this town. The hook is the menu prepared by celebrity chef Rick Bayless, who operates the renowned Frontera Grill among other high end eating establishments in Chicago. The official title of the show is “Rick Bayless in Cascabel.”

The Bayless cookery is the centerpiece of a show set in a Mexican rooming house. The cuisine mingles with a cluster of stunning circus acts, both held together by a rickety plot that escalates into numerous love stories, all ending joyously as the audience completes its desert. “Cascabel” celebrates the sensuality of food and its consummation. It might sound pretentious but the show makes a strong case for dining as an almost erotic pleasure, at least if prepared and presented in the Rick Bayless manner.

                                                                                                                          Photo Credit: Sean Williams

        For “Cascabel,” the Lookingglass interior has been remodeled to recreate a rustic Mexican interior like something out of “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” But the evening actually begins in the theater lobby, where the audience is treated to hors d’ouevres and free margaritas. The patrons then file into the theater to be seated at communal tables on the main floor or at tables for two in the balcony. The three-course dinner commences, separated by intervals allotted to the circus acts and shards of the plot. The food is prepared a few blocks away and delivered warm to the tables, a dazzling logistical achievement for cuisine of this delicacy prepared for so many diners.

        The core characters include a smiling and pompous maitre ‘d (Jesse Perez), a mysterious lady in some kind of mourning (Chiara Mangiameli), a houseboy (Tony Hernandez, also the co-creator and co-director of the show), and the daughter of the house (Lindsay Noel Whiting). Periodically other characters drift onto the stage to execute their circus acts.

Presiding over the entire enterprise is Bayless himself, chopping away at a cutting board in the on-stage kitchen.  Bayless doesn’t actually cook for the 142 paying guests. He does a bit of acting and even dances at the end. His calling in life is still food preparation but he doesn’t embarrass himself and the man is a charmer, genially mixing with the patrons during and after the show.

Whiting starts off the circus portion with some deft aerialist work above the stage, with no safety apparatus. Hernandez manages to change clothes while balancing on a high wire, a sight one rarely sees in a Chicago theater.  Alexandra Pivaral does a stunning hand balancing act from a bathtub. A couple known only as solitary travelers (Nicolas Besnard and Shenea Booth) meet at the rooming house dinner table and immediately engage in a sensuous gymnastic demonstration (among its other attributes “Cascabel” is a very sexy show). The gardener (Jonathan Taylor) and his wife (Anne Goldmann) deliver a very broad comedy stint, highlighted by catching bits of banana in their mouths as the banana pieces are spit out by their partner. It sounds gross but it’s funny and requires considerable accuracy and dexterity. The Blue Man Group couldn’t do it any better.

The other member of the ensemble is Lookingglass star actor Thomas J. Cox, in what must be the most insignificant role of his career as the wooer of the mystery lady. Carlo Basile performs the atmospheric guitar background.

The food itself is rich and highly seasoned and exotic. There is a single menu for everyone with no substitutions. The individual servings were all very tasty, with the beef entree exceptional. The maitre ‘d orchestrated the consuming of each dish like Ricardo Muti directing a Beethoven symphony, and the audience cheerfully followed all his directions, down to sticking their noses into the opening course to capture the aroma. This course, if I got it correctly, consisted of ceviche-style tuna over passion fruit custard and avocado crema seasoned by bits of jicama, red onion, and tomatillo, all enclosed in a banana leaf. It’s that kind of upscale meal.

The storyline wraps up quickly at the end, with Mangiameli executing a flashy flamenco dance and everyone in the ensemble joining in on the hoofing. By this time, any wall between actor and viewer had been erased and it was party time. Some patrons doubtless had been nicely lubricated by the free margaritas, plus beer and wine were available in small metal tubs on the tables for the convenience of the diners. Water was free but alcoholic beverages were not, and consumers settled up with the waiters at the end of the performance.

A platoon of designers combined to create the superior visual and aural ambience of the show—Mara Blumenfeld and Lijana Wallenda Hernandez (costumes), Brian Bembridge (scenery and lighting), Rick Sims and Andre Pluess (composers and sound design), Maria DeFabo (properties), and Emilee Peterson (choreography).

                                                                                                                                       Photo Credit:  Sean Williams

The staging, under Heidi Stillman’s lead directing, is a model of efficiency. The dialogue and the circus acts and the food service flow without a glitch. The plot never elevates itself above the silly and the improbable, but nobody cared. The cumulative effect creates an evening of unbroken pleasure. The audience recognized it was participating in one of the most distinctive events in recent Chicagoland entertainment history and it had a ball.

“Cascabel” runs through April 29 at the Lookingglass Theatre inside the Water Tower Water Works, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. Tickets are $200 to $250. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of four stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.   March 2012

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Mr.Rickey Calls A Meeting

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago –In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, the first black man in modern baseball history to play in the majors. That’s a matter of record. Playwright Ed Schmidt uses that seminal event in American sports and social history to write “Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting,” a fictionalized riff on what might have happened on the eve of the momentous announcement that the major leagues was about to be integrated.

        Schmidt’s play was first presented in 1989 and is now being powerfully staged in a revised version by the Lookingglass Theater.

        There are six characters in the play, five of them real people. Branch Rickey was the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, the white man about to install the black Jackie Robinson on the roster of the Dodgers. Rickey calls a meeting in a midtown New York hotel room, inviting three icons of black culture at that time--boxer Joe Louis, dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and actor-militant Paul Robeson. Rickey has already decided that Jackie Robinson would join the Dodgers for the 1947 season, but he wants the seal of approval from Louis, Bojangles, and Robeson to show the country a united African American front in support of Jackie Robinson to blunt the firestorm of controversy that will explode nationally when a black man takes the field in a previously all-white sport.  

      

                                                                                                                                                                     Photo by Sean Williams

    The playwright acknowledges that such a meeting never took place but it provides the opportunity to put a group of familiar and contrasting personalities together in one confined space to speculate on what they might say to each other. It’s a common device in drama. “Nixon’s Nixon” put Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger together the night before Nixon’s resignation and invents what they might have confided to each other that turbulent night.

       After some preliminary, mostly comic, byplay, “Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting” comes down to a heated and eloquent debate between Rickey and Robeson. Bojangles and Louis support Jackie Robinson’s breaking the color line but Robeson is sternly opposed. He points out that Robinson’s success in the white major leagues will siphon off other star players from the Negro leagues into the major leagues, ending black baseball in the United States and throwing hundreds of players out of work (which actually happened within five years of Robinson’s debut).

        Robeson sees a larger issue, the white man’s distributing favors to black people in the old master-servant setup that dominated race relations in America for generations. If Rickey is so dedicated to integration, why not a team of black stars entering the majors instead of one designated poster boy? Robeson demands that black people throw off “Uncle Tomism” and take charge of their own destinies. No tiny, patient steps, no compromises. Robeson ridicules Bojangles and Louis for delivering themselves up to white America and ending broke at the end of their careers. He urges Jackie to reject Rickey’s plan to make him a Dodger and insist on a wholesale entrance of black players into the majors.

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The Last Act of Lilka Kadison

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – Blend the visual creativity we expect from the Lookingglass Theatre with the charm and resonance of an Isaac Bashevis Singer short story and you have “The Last Act of Lilka Kadison,” the charming, romantic, and dramatic short play that ends the current Lookingglass subscription season.

       In less than 80 minutes of stage time, “Lilka” (the cumbersome title is one of the play’s few blemishes) shuttles the audience back and forth in time between a home in southern California today and Poland just before and during the German invasion of that country that triggered World War II. The central character is Lilka Kadison, a teen-aged daughter of an observant Jewish family in 1939 and a crusty old lady bedridden with an injured hip in her living room today.

     The character that binds the two time frames is Ben Ari Adler, the operator of an itinerant toy theater in Poland in the late 1930’s and his ghost, a visitor to Lilka today as the old woman wrestles with her memories and secrets. The fourth character is Menelik Kahn, an immigrant from Pakistan in this country as a student and now reduced to working as a care giver. Menelik’s present assignment is looking after the irascible Lilka, a confrontational job between the long suffering young and the curmudgeonly Lilka that supplies much of the humor early in the play.

   The Lookingglass interior has been reconfigured into a proscenium stage. The small performing space is congested with the detritus of decades of accumulated possessions that imaginatively segways into 1939 Poland, where the young and innocent Lilka accidentally meets the breezy and cynical Adler. The young man persuades Lilka to collaborate with him in a play about Solomon and Sheba suitable to be presented in his portable toy theater, a wagon with crude but clever cutouts and snatches of printed dialogue (a delightful contraption designed by Tracy Otwell).

 

        The young Lilka and Adler come from two different worlds of Jewish culture but, unsurprisingly, they fall in love. Their romance lasts just long enough for Lilka to conceive a child as the Germans invade Poland and their lives are forever changed.

        And so the setting shifts back and forth, with Adler haunting the aged Lilka’s imagination and occasionally manifesting himself supernaturally to the perplexed Menelik. Gradually we get the story of Lilka’s affair with Adler and her afterlife as she escapes from Poland to the United States and marriage to an American.

      The play is credited to five writers—Nicola Behrman, David Kersnar (who also directs), Abbie Phillips, Heidi Stillman, and Andrew White.  The story originated in a radio series earlier this decade called “One People, Many Stories.” The playwright-by-committee works surprisingly well, though they stumble in presenting Lilka’s great secret, the paternity of her son, now a 69-year old man living in Maine. Without giving away too much of the storyline, Lilka’s secret just doesn’t make sense, but it does generate some of the play’s emotional trust.

Most of the production’s success resides in utterly winning performances by the four-member ensemble. Marilyn Dodds Frank (the elderly Lilka) and Usman Ally (Menelik) have been A list actors area theater for years. Frank is superb playing a woman several decades her senior. She spends nearly all her stage time prone on a lounge chair and speaks comparatively few lines of the play’s dialogue. Yet she sensitively evokes the woman’s psychological pain as well as the inner strength that made her a survivor during a horrific time in history.                   

Unfortunately, the writers strayed into turning the woman momentarily into a foul-mouthed harridan late in the play. The lapse in taste momentarily disrupts the flow of the narrative in the cause of extracting a few cheap laughs from the audience.

Usman Ally elevates Menelik from merely serving as a comic foil for Lilka into a character with his own moving back story. The character, in Ally’s insightful performance, fleshes out issues of family central to Lilka’s saga.

The revelations in the production are Nora Fiffer as the young Lilka and especially Chance Bone as Adler. Both have resumes in second tier and storefront theater in Chicago but this is their biggest exposure on a major Chicagoland stage and they come up very big. Bone and Fiffer create instant chemistry in spite of the improbable connection of their two characters back in Poland, Adler a skeptical secular Jew and young Lilka a cloistered Jewish female in a patriarchal religious society. Bone’s Adler moves easily and persuasively between old world Poland and contemporary America, with his ingratiating personality that doesn’t mask a young man of resource and even heroism.

It’s hard to identify David Kersnar’s specific contributions to the production but the flow of the action back and forth in time is smooth and credible, which must be credited to his deft if invisible hand.

There are no difficulties in identifying and praising the designers who bring this humorous and ultimately stirring story to life. In addition to Otwell’s delightful toy theater, the staging features scenic design by Jacqueline and Richard Penrod, Mara Blumenfeld’s costumes, Christine Binder’s evocative and sometimes starting lighting, Rick Sims’s sound and original music, and property designer William Anderson, who must have ransacked a lot of thrift shops to assemble the debris in Lilka’s California residence in such eye-catching clutter.

“The Last Act of Lilka Kadison” has the shimmer of a folk tale. It’s sentimental but not kitchy, natural in its humor (except for Lilka’s sudden late out bursts of profanity), and engrossing in its narrative. We’ve seen the Lookingglass triumph in sheer stagecraft before, but rarely has the theater joined so much substance with such an imaginative presentation.

 “The Last Act of Lilka Kadison” runs through July 24 at the Lookingglass Theatre, 821 North Pearson Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $34 to $62. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.   June 2011

   Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Ethan Frome

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Chicago – “Ethan Frome” isn’t your typical Lookingglass Theatre presentation. There are no tumblers, acrobats, trapeze artists, or whiz bang special effects. Instead, the company is presenting a somber realistic drama compressed into one 85-minute act.

 Lookingglass ensemble member Laura Eason adapted “Ethan Frome” from Edith Wharton’s 1911 short novel about unhappiness and thwarted love in a bleak New England rural setting around the turn of the last century. The Wharton tale had previous been converted into motion pictures and a well received Broadway play in 1936.

The audience knows where the story is heading seconds after Mattie makes her first appearance. She and Ethan will be attracted to each other as a pair of poor, deprived souls aching for affection. All that remains is the resolution to the story, and even at the brief playing time the story moves at an ostentatiously deliberate pace to its somber conclusion.

There are no R-rated adulterous meetings between Ethan and Mattie. The two don’t even touch until the final minutes of the play. Then they finally bring their mutual passion to the surface and clinch before electing to commit suicide by riding a sled into a tree. But the suicide attempt misfires, leaving both characters crippled, ironically under the care of Zenobia, who is converted from patient to caregiver.

It’s a grim saga told in a minimalist style in which characters speak in short muted phrases, never using two words when one will suffice. Voices are rarely raised and pregnant silences can be as expressive as the clipped dialogue.

Eason uses the flashback format, with a narrator continuously on stage, sometimes playing a minor character. He’s the audience’s guide through the gradual accumulation of feelings between Ethan and Mattie that leads to the story’s violent climax. The bleak, wintry background underscores the grim and humor-deprived narrative. But the story still has the rising intensity that grabs the viewer, thanks to the perfect pitch production directed by Eason.

Philip R. Smith plays the large-boned, brooding Ethan with just the right mixture of resignation and resentment. He’s locked into a life without joy in the present or the prospect of joy in the future. Smith conveys Ethan’s helplessness as he confronts his fate with a flat vocal delivery and bowed body language. Louise Lamson is superb as the self effacing Mattie, who doesn’t admit her passion for Ethan until the fateful final minutes of the play. Lisa Tejero is first-rate as Zenobia, an unsympathetic character with her own grievances and cross to bear, at least in her own mind.

Andrew White is fine as the narrator who serves as a kind of stage manager, filling in the blanks in the story as the action eases along. Erik Lochtefled resourcefully portrays several local residents with the understatement that colors the entire play. Lochtefeld even manages a few bits of humor in a story that definitely doesn’t seek chuckles from the spectator.

Eason’s spare adaptation omits the final irony, with Zenobia’s role reversal from sick woman to caregiver, tending the limping and emotional empty Ethan and the complaining invalid who is now Mattie. Another five minutes of performance would have tied up the narrative neatly. But the play still exerts a strong pull on the spectator through the rising tension of the story. And the suicidal sled ride is rendered on the stage with the visual inventiveness we expect from a Lookingglass presentation.

        “Ethan Frome” is something of a mood piece. Audiences conditioned to tragic love stories in the modern manner, filled with bare skin and heavy breathing, should be prepared for Eason’s “less is more” approach.  But the success of the Lookingglass production proves there is still room on the stage for effectively presented nuance and understatement, even with the subject deals with the fiercest of emotions.

        The design credits belong to Daniel Ostling (set), Mara Blumenfeld (costumes), Christine Binder (lighting), Rick Sims (sound), and Kevin O’Donnell (original music). They all serve this powerful, if low-keyed, drama very well.

“Ethan Frome” runs through April 17 at the Lookinggglass Theatre, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $34 to $62. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

          The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.  March 2011

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Peter Pan

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

Chicago – “Peter Pan” may be a story about children, but that doesn’t make it a children’s story. Consider the interesting if problematical adaptation at the Lookingglass Theatre.

        Adapter and guest director Amanda Dehnert takes a dark view of the story about the boy who would not grow up. Forget the Disneyfication of the J. M. Barry play. At the Lookingglass, Peter is a self absorbed and slightly cynical lad. He’s also played by a young man (Ryan Nunn), rejecting the traditional casting of a female (often a very mature female) in the title role.

Captain Hook is a real nasty, a vicious man with plenty of hate boiling in him. Even that standard charmer Tinker Bell is a particularly bitchy fairy, except when she sacrifices herself by drinking the poison intended for Peter. Then she writhes on the stage in graphic and chilling agony.

        The final battle between Peter and Hook is a genuine fight to the finish. Curiously, the defeated Hook walked to his death into the jaws of the invisible alligator with a resignation that calls to mind the heroic Sidney Carton walking up the steps to the guillotine in “The Tale of Two Cities.” Overall, there is enough intensity in this production to raise a caution warning for pre teen visitors.

        The first act is all about the staging. The performers interact with the audience as the play begins, asking for help in turning on light bulbs that represent stars. The actors wear grungy clothes on the empty stage. There is no sense of the Barrie Edwardian atmosphere in the production. The audience can admire the staging devices, including some aerial work with ropes and harnesses, but this show begins as a self referential presentation that shuts out the emotion, and narrative drive, of the original. The nuts and bolts of the staging are on display, but there is little heart and soul in the first act.

        The tension picks up in the second act. The prolonged swordfight between Peter and Hook employs steel platforms on wheels spun around the stage by the other characters, an impressive, and dangerous, display of coordinated motion. There is even a bit of humor in a production notably surprisingly lacking in comedy when Peter cajoles the audience into saving the poisoned Tinker Bell through their laughter. Based on the fairy’s previous behavior, Peter is hard pressed to rouse the spectators to rally round the dying Tinker Bell. She had not earned our good will through her disagreeable attitude toward the virtuous Wendy.

        Wendy, of course, is the oldest of the three Darling children captivated by Peter to escape with him to Never Land. There she’s to fulfill the function of storytelling mother for the Lost Boys in the land. One of the Lost Boys inadvertently shoots the flying Wendy out of the sky. It’s a scene of sudden violence that might rattle a young and impressionable viewer until Wendy rises from the dead to go her chipper way as the proxy mother.

        The 14-member ensemble is a mix of Lookingglass regulars and Northwestern University students. The students fit in nicely, especially Nate Trinrud as Toodles, the boy who shoots Wendy. Another NU student, Royer Bockus, also does a nice Lisa Kudrow turn as Nana the dog.

        Thomas J. Cox, a Lookingglass stalwart, is an almost operatic villain as Captain Hook. Amy Carle gives real emotional depth to Mrs. Darling, grieving for her missing children. Kay Kron is a strong and persuasive Wendy. Molly Brennan is Smee, Captain Hook’s second in command and a character with ambiguous loyalties.  Aislinn Mulligan gives Tinker Bell that unconventional creepy spin.  Jamie Abelson (John) and Alex Weisman (Michael) play Wendy’s siblings. Weisman is a Northwestern student but his skills as an actor elevate him way beyond the apprentice level.

        This being the Lookingglass, the physical production is inventive, particularly when characters soar above the stage.  Captain Hook and his henchmen make their first entrance in a burst of light and sound that will jolt even the adults in the audience.

        By the time I caught up with this production, the first wave of reviews was out and they were mostly uncomplimentary. The show does have its difficulties, especially in the dramatically soft opening act, and the ferocity of the second act scenes are a matter of taste. I preferred them to the saccharine kiddy-oriented manipulations that often afflict revivals. The final minutes of the show are legitimately bittersweet and poignant, even if credit goes almost entirely to Barrie’s words.

        Dehnert wanted to give the story a different look and sensibility and she succeeded. Traditionalists may not be amused but there are as many virtues to the production as demerits, presuming the viewer buys into Dehnert’s concept. Assisting the director in realizing her vision are Dan Stratton (scenic design), Melissa Torchia (costume design), Lee Fiskness (lighting design), and Andre Pluess and Michael Griggs (sound design). And much praise goes to Matt Hawkins as movement director. That swordfight scene is a gem.

        “Peter Pan” runs through December 12 at the Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $62. Call 312 337 0665 or visitwww.lookingglasstheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.   November 2010

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Hephaestus

By the Lookingglass Theatre

At he Goodman(Owen)

By Dan Zeff

 

CHICAGO—The circus is back in town, under the appropriately descriptive title of “Hephaestus: A Greek Mythology Circus Tale.” The Lookingglass Theatre first presented the show in 2005 and remounted it in 2008. Now a third version is being presented at the Goodman Owen Theatre. It was a remarkable 80 minutes of entertainment the first two times around and it’s even better now, circus wizardry at the very highest level. 

        The show begins quietly enough with a little girl in her nightdress fearfully overhearing her offstage parents quarreling bitterly. The child then starts reading from a book on Greek mythology to escape the tensions of the parental hostility. Specifically, she reads about Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith to the gods on Mount Olympus who was flung from the heavens to earth by the goddess Hera, his mother, who was repulsed by his physical deformities.

  

        Once we get through the prologue, the circus acts take over, within the context of the Hephaestus’s workshop beneath a volcanic island where he produces miraculous inventions at his forge. And what circus acts they are—a graceful ensemble ballet on fabric hangings above the stage, high wire walking, bungee jumping, hand balancing, tumbling, contortion, gymnastics, a performer rotating within a giant metal wheel—all up close and personal in the intimate space of the Goodman Owen Theatre. The breathtaking finale is a seven-person pyramid that travels across a high wire above the stage.

        The show is nonverbal except for some narration and singing provided by the little girl. The setting is highly dramatic, thanks to expressionistic lighting effects, science fiction style costumes and makeup, and a terrific New Age musical score. A trapdoor provides an entrance and exit to and from a mysterious underground workshop evoked through smoke and lights.  Periodically drummers pound away at stage level or on a balcony above the action. Visually and aurally, “Hephaestus” is the complete package, creating a magical mythical world where mind-boggling feats of grace and daring are part of the natural order.

        Unfortunately, the playbill does not match the performers with their individual circus acts so I can’t place most of the artists by name with their contributions. There are three members of the famous Wallenda family of circus aerialists—Erendira Vazquez Wallenda, Lijana Wallenda-Hernandez, and Nik Wallenda. Other featured artists include Katia Dmitrieva, Rani Waterman, and Almas Meirmanov. Let their names stand honorably for the 20 or so performers who collectively make up this memorable presentation.

        Which brings us to the Anastasini brothers from Spain—Guiliano and Fabio. Their act consists of Fabio lying on an incline board, using his feet to juggle his brother while Guiliano performs somersaults and twists in mid air, each time miraculously landing on the soles of his brother’s feet. It is a truly astonishing act that produced some of the most fervent audience cheering I have heard in a theater in a long time.

        It should be noted that all the acts are performed without a safety net or safety cables, adding an edgy element of danger to the grace and creativity and athleticism of the performances. The high risks embodied in most of the performances had the audience alternately holding its breath and squealing in apprehension.

        The mastermind behind “Hephaestus” is Tony Hernandez, who created the production, co-directed with Heidi Stillman, and plays the crippled title character. He is aided immeasurably by Brian Sidney Bembridge’s scenic and lighting design, Lijana Wallenda-Hernandez’s costume design, and the brilliant sound and music accompaniment by Ray Nardelli, Andre Pluess, and Josh Horvath. They all make “Hephaestus” a feast of the theater arts as well as a celebration of circus performance of wondrous achievement.

        An organization called Silverguy Entertainment gets co-production credit for the show and contributes many of the performers. They hire themselves out for parties and similar events and based on their work in “Hephaestus” they must put on quite a show.

        Regrettably, “Hephaestus” is being offered for a limited run. It would be an irresistible attraction for summer tourists roaming the Loop and near north side. You couldn’t ask for a better family show.

        “Hephaestus” runs through May 23 at the Goodman Owen Theatre, 170 North Dearborn Street. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $70. Call 312 443 3800 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.   April 2010

                   Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

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Trust

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

 CHICAGO - ‘Trust’ at the Lookingglass Theatre is informative, engrossing, disturbing, and superbly staged.  It’s informative in revealing one of the most insidious plagues of our high tech age, sexual predators using the Internet to prey on teen-age girls. It’s engrossing in dramatizing the psychological toll the predator takes on the victim and her family, and disturbing because this is a social problem that flies under the radar of national concern.

     ‘Trust’ was co-written by Lookingglass ensemble member David Schwimmer and Andy Bellin and co-directed by Schwimmer and Heidi Stillman.  The production is as up to date as its subject, utilizing a back wall of projections, videos, photographs, and texting in that arcane condensed language that young people use to communicate with each other.

       Annie is a 14-year old girl, apparently well adjusted but inwardly insecure about her looks and her place in the popularity pecking order among her peers. Her parents give her a laptop computer for her birthday and Annie soon makes a connection with a male who at first claims to be a teenager. They build up a highly erotic Internet relationship, though the audience learns about the development and nature of the relationship after the fact.

     The predator sets up a face-to-face meeting at a mall where the Internet correspondent turns out to be a 35-year old man who takes her to a motel and seduces her. That all takes place in the first half hour of the 105-minute intermissionless production.

      The rest of the play concentrates on the impact the seduction has on Annie’s father, who becomes consumed with rage and

guilt at his daughter’s violation. His obsession with the predator threatens to destroy the father’s career and tear his family apart. So ‘Trust’ becomes as much a drama about the consequences of the seduction on the victim’s extended family as it is about the trauma inflicted on the girl. Indeed, for much of the play Annie is in denial about the nature of her seducer. She angrily defends him in the pathetic conviction that the man is not a pervert but really loves her and is being driven away from her by the meddling of her father and the investigation conducted by the FBI.

      ‘Trust’ originated as a screenplay and it has a cinematic flow with its short scenes and its emphasis on visual as much as verbal presentation. Six actors in the nine-member ensemble play multiple roles like friends of Annie, an FBI agent, a counselor, and the father’s boss. The story would open up scenically as a motion picture but there is an immediacy to the tale that profits from the kind of live, intimate staging the play is receiving at the Lookingglass.

     ‘Trust’ can be taken as a cautionary story for parents of girls in their extremely vulnerable teen-age years. Parents should monitor, or at least be aware, of their daughters's   activity on the Internet, more easily said than done with girls jealously protecting their privacy from adult eyes.

      The play profiles a probable victim as a girl in her early teens looking for love and acceptance beyond her social circle. The girl is not beautiful or a member of the school 'in' crowd, at least in her own eyes. That makes her prime pickings for the predator, who conducts the electronic relationship with sophistication and charm until he moves in for the live kill. The predator probably is very skilled in using the Internet and thus elusive to corner. He tends to blend into the social landscape, as the final chilling moments of the play portray.

      Schwimmer is passionate about this subject but to his credit he has co-written a work that holds the stage theatrically and not just as an infomercial for a serious social problem. There is suspense and tension in the play but no melodrama. For Annie and her father the drama’s ending might be considered, if not happy, at least setting them on the path to healing. One wonders how many real life victims and their families enjoy such an upbeat aftermath.

      Allison Torem is beyond superb as Annie, a mass of conflicting emotions bundled into the mind and spirit of a girl who shouldn’t have to carry so much emotional and psychological baggage. Torem is one of the legion of brilliant teen-age actresses with their roots in the Profiles Theatre and she should be an ornament to the Chicagoland theater scene as long as she stays in the area.

       Philip R. Smith is memorable as the father, possibly sacrificing his job and the mental health of himself and his family in his single-minded search for revenge against the predator. Raymond Fox is totally persuasive in his few scenes as the villain, a low-keyed and unsettling performance. Amy Carle is strong as Annie’s mother, desperate for both her daughter and her husband. Morocco Omari, Dorcas Sowunmi, Christine Dunford, and Keith Kupferer play multiple adult characters and Spencer Curnutt, Marianna Oharenko, Zanny Laird, and Zoe Levin effectively play assorted young people in Annie’s life. The story must give the young performers some uneasy thoughts.

      The outstanding physical production is the combined work of designers Dan Ostling (scenery), Mara Blumenfeld (costumes), Chris Bindert (lighting) and Michael Griggs and Rick Sims (sound), all led by the multimedia design of Bridges Media.

       ‘Trust’ runs through April 25 at the Lookingglass Theatre at the Water Tower Water Works, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $28 to $62. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglassgtheatre.org  

The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars.              March 2010

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Icarus

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—For about half of its 90-minute running time, the Lookingglass Theatre production of “Icarus” is at the top of its game in conveying beautiful visual images and striking physical action. The other half is lumbered by a striving for the poetic that dissolves into the pretentious, or is just plain boring.

        “Icarus” is the company’s take on a group of interrelated ancient Greek myths, and woe to the spectator who doesn’t have at least a passing familiarity with Daedalus, King Minos, the Minotaur, Theseus, the Labyrinth, and the title character.

        Author-director David Catlin presents “Icarus” as a kind of psychodrama. In the opening scene, an unnamed man (Lawrence DiStasi) is wheeled out on a hospital bed, the person bound in a straightjacket. Through a mumbo jumbo of simultaneous voices on stage, we learn that the man is in a catatonic state, his condition produced by a recent trauma. To draw the man back to the real world, the medical staff retells the story of Icarus.

   

        As the play unfolds, Icarus is only one of a dozen characters from Greek mythology, and not the most important one in the narrative. Icarus is the son of Daedalus, a genius architect and artist in the ancient world. Through a convoluted series of events, Daedalus and Icarus are imprisoned in the fortress of King Minos in Crete, a fortress designed by Daedalus himself. Daedalus devises an escape by making wings of feathers and beeswax for himself and his son so they can fly to freedom. He warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, which would melt the wax in the wings. Icarus disregards the warning, his wings melt, and he plunges to his death in the sea.

        That’s just one thread in the play’s narrative. The storyline presents problems for the uninformed viewer because the six members of the ensemble shift from character to character without changing appearance. Indeed, everyone dresses in ostentatiously modern informal dress, with some performers wearing Chicago Bulls basketball jerseys. So viewers may have a hard time following when Anthony Fleming III shifts from Minos to Theseus or Lauren Hirte from Autra to Androgeus. Plus the ensemble performs on a square open stage that gives little indication of changing locations in the story.

        The show gets off to a slow, not to say tedious start. There is much pseudo lyricism in the dialogue but very little happens and what does happen was intelligible, at least to me. The tale kicks into higher gear with a sequence of those beautiful and theatrical physical displays that make Lookingglass such a one-of-a-kind theater. The three females in the cast perform acrobatically high above the stage on hanging draperies. The struggle between Theseus and the Minotaur takes place below the stage, with the audience following the ferocious battle through an open trap door emitting dramatic light and smoke accompanied by cries of anger and pain from the two combatants.

        Some of the visual pictures are brilliantly conceived, though some of them, like the drapery acrobatics, seem injected as circus acts rather than as part of the narrative structure. The best part of the storyline comes with the anger of King Minos over the death of his son Androgeus. In revenge, he demands Athens deliver 14 of their finest young people to him for sacrifice. The deaths of the 14 are marked small black children’s outfits hanging on clotheslines like a bizarre group grave. A palpable sense of grief drenches the narrative.

       The ensemble, which also includes Adeoye, Nicole Shalhoub, and Lindsey Noel Whiting, is best in the physical portions of the show. It’s difficult to assess their acting skills because they speak a stilted language that sounds like an eighteenth century translation of Homer. The language archly attempts to create a verbal classical atmosphere but all that archaic dialogue clashes with the Bulls jerseys and blue jeans.

        The stars of the evening are Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi, who created the circus choreography, lighting designer Jaymi Lee Smith, costume and properties designer Alison Siple, and sound designer and composer Rick Sims. Even when the story was a total puzzlement or dramatically inert, they gave us much of interest to see and hear, like when the troupe does clever things with suitcases, which represent everything from giant boulders to newly born babies. And in one scene the audience gets to throw paper airplanes onto the stage, likely a first for every spectator in the room.

        The playbill prints an interesting interview with David Catlin. The program should go further and provide a brief outline of mythological personalities and their adventures to clue in patrons who don’t know Aegeus from Rod Blagojevich.

        “Icarus” runs through January 24 at the Lookingglass Theatre inside the Water Tower Water Works at 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets run from $18 to $62. Visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org. or call 312 337 0665.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.    December 2009

                      Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Fedra, Queen of Haiti

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

CHICAGO—Spectators ready to give up on the Lookingglass production of ”Fedra, Queen of Haiti” by the intermission should stay the course. Morocco Omari enters the drama in the second act and saves the night, almost.

“Fedra, Queen of Haiti” is an adaptation of “Hippolytus” by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides as created by Lookingglass ensemble member J. Nicole Brooks, who also takes the title role. The Euripides original is a towering story of passion that portrays the disastrous ramifications of Queen Phaedra’s illicit lust for her stepson Hippolytus.

                At the beginning of the Brooks play, Queen Fedra is in turmoil, torn by her secret love for Hippolytus while facing the probable loss of her husband, King Theseus, missing in a plane crash and presumably dead. The government council is meeting off stage to choose a temporary ruler for the kingdom, either Fedra or Hippolytus. Neither one seeks the position, both being consumed by their private passions, Fedra for Hippolytus and Hippolytus for Aricia, a young woman imprisoned by Theseus as an enemy of the state.

        The first act is dreary going. There is much ranting and behind the scenes plotting but little legitimate dramatic tension. The language steers uneasily between contemporary facetious and stilted formal. Attempts at humor are peppered throughout the act that work against the gravity of the main story.

        In the second act Theseus makes his entrance, having survived the plane crash and subsequent imprisonment. Omari’s imposing and realistic stage presence injects desperately needed dignity and dramatic weight into the action until the accelerating power of the original story takes hold and propels the narrative to its intense finish.

     To defuse Theseus hearing about Fedra’s love for his son, the queen’s nurse (Lisa Tejero) urges Fedra to tell her husband that Hippolytus raped her during his absence. On the flimsiest evidence, Theseus buys Fedra’s lie. The queen’s preemptive strike turns the king against his protesting son and leads inexorably to the conclusion, with the nurse a suicide, the fleeing Hippolytus and Aricia dead in a hurricane, and Theseus, now aware of Fedra’s deception, stabbing her to death in a sacred pool on stage. The final image of the distraught king and the dead queen seated side by side on companion thrones is a master theatrical stroke.

     A dominant figure in the Euripides play is Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual passion. In the Brooks adaptation, Aphrodite periodically sashays through the action wearing gaudy gowns and a giant afro without establishing her critical importance in the story.                                           

Brooks is miscast as Fedra. She rants and fumes but she never reaches the tragic heights the role demands. There are several African American actresses in Chicagoland theater that could have taken this role to the necessary dramatic mountaintop. Tejero is the best performer on the stage after Omari. The nurse is a manipulator out of real life political wheeling and dealing and she also apparently has a lesbian attraction to the queen. Tejero’s mix of cunning and passion lifts the action whenever she is on stage.

        The rest of the cast consists of Anthony Fleming III as Hippolytus, Michael Salinas as a behind the scenes scheming politico in the palace, Lauren Hirte in a curious role of a white palace maid, Sharina Martin as Aricia, and Tamberla Perry doubling as Aphrodite and as Aricia’s friend Ismene, a jive talker apparently in the play for comic relief, all of it inappropriate to the play’s serious tone.

 Meghan Raham designed a set that serves as several rooms in the palace, depending on the props, along with an upper level platform. Christine Binder designed the dramatic lighting, Alison Siple the eclectic and colorful costumes, and Joshua Horvath the sound. Director Laura Eason is a co-conspirator with the author in allowing the wrong headed comic bits to intrude on the intense thrust of the narrative.

 Curiously, the adaptation doesn’t capitalize on the Haitian setting. The audience legitimately can expect voodoo and magical rites to provide an aura of exoticism and mystery to the action but the play has no real sense of place. Characters occasionally lapse into French or Spanish but in general “Fedra” is located in any country prone to hurricanes.

“Fedra, Queen of Haiti” runs through November 15 at the Lookingglass Theatre inside the Water Tower Water Works, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30.Tickets are $28 to $62. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

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The Arabian Nights

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

CHICAGO—In 1992, the Lookingglass Theatre premiered its adaptation of “The Arabian Nights” and the production became an instant classic and the signature show for the theater and its director Mary Zimmerman. I saw the 1997 revival and was blown away by its imaginative storytelling.

        Lookingglass is now presenting “The Arabian Nights” for the third time and my radiant memory of the 1997 viewing has been reinforced. It remains one of the most creative shows to bless the American theater in the past 20 years.

        “The Arabian Nights” is based on the famous collection of stories taken from such cultures as Arabia, India, Egypt, and Persia. The stories are told within a framework that begins with King Shahryar. Because his wife was unfaithful, he orders her killed and in revenge against the entire female gender he marries a new wife each night and has her beheaded the following morning.     

        The beautiful and intelligent Scheherezade is the latest sacrificial maiden but her skill as a storyteller entices the king, who allows her to recount her tales from night to night. One story leads to another and after 1,001 nights the king has fallen in love with her. They marry and live happily ever after, sweeping aside the fact that the king has been a serial killer.

       The stories dovetail with each other like a narrative labyrinth. Nearly all the tales deal with love in some manifestation, from the comic to the romantic to the tragic. Zimmerman excludes the most familiar stories from the adaptation. We don’t get retellings of Aladdin, Ali Baba, or Sinbad. But we do hear stories about Sympathy the Learned, and a philandering pastry cook, and a man falsely imprisoned in a madhouse.

        Lookingglass performs “The Arabian Nights” on an open stage with the audience surrounding the action on four sides. There is no real set, but an exotic environment is created out of props, especially Persian carpets and furniture and antique lamps that descend and rise from the rafters. The production features a remarkable number and variety of costumes that evoke the fairy tale world of mythical Baghdad.

        Zimmerman employs the full arsenal of theatrical tools—song, dance, music, and dialogue—in the service of the engrossing and often witty book. The staging even injects a bit of audience participation without breaking the once-upon-a-time spell of the narrative.

        The show has its erotic moments and also plenty of broad humor. Once story is built hilariously around a case of flatulence. It was preceded by an improvised scene in which two men try to identify the contents of a tiny bag with increasingly outlandish descriptions of what it contains. According to the playbill, different performers will improvise this scene nightly. Usman Ally and Andrew White set a very high standard on opening night for future performers with their funny riffs on the bag’s improbable contents.

        The 15-member ensemble of exceptionally versatile performers morph from character to character without leaving the stage. The chorus in one scene provides the leading characters in the next. A small troupe of musicians on stage performs accompaniment on an array of Middle Eastern percussion and stringed instruments.

        There are no stars in the show, or rather, there are 15 stars, many of them of Asian extraction to add authenticity to the background. Louise Lamson plays Scheherezade and Ryan Artzburger is Shahryar. The couple establishes the dramatic underpinnings for the evening with Artzburger particularly effective as the tortured, vindictive king who gradually falls under Scheherazade’s spell.

        Among the production’s golden moments is Susaan Jamshidi as Sympathy the Learned, a young woman of bottomless knowledge who vanquishes all the scholars at court with her learning. Andrew White and Usman Ally create one character gem after another. Barzin Akhaven is the noble and sometimes bemused Harun al-Rashid. Allen Gilmore brilliantly ranges from in character from a poignant portrait of Scheherazade’s suffering father to a madcap court jester who comes up with a devious plan to escape from an unwanted marriage.

       But the remainder of the cast deserves enumeration by name—Heidi Stillman, Louis Tucci, Nicole Shalhoub, Emjoy Gavino, David Catlin, Ramiz Monsef, Ronnie Malley, and Minita Ghandi.

        The physical production is a full partner in the evening’s success. That includes the scenic design by Dan Ostling, the evocative lighting by T. J. Gerckens, the sound design and musical compositions by Andre Pluess, and especially Mara Blumenfeld’s exotic and colorful costumes. And, of course, towering over the entire enterprise is Mary Zimmerman’s imagination and theatrical wizardry.

        The production does have its sensual moments but it is still is appropriate for youngsters in their early teens. They will love the pageantry and the storytelling and the humor (especially the flatulence tale). It’s an evening to be treasured for everyone.

        “The Arabian Nights” runs through July 12 at the Lookingglass Theatre at the Water Tower Water Works, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Wednesday and Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $60. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.     June 2009

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Our Town

By the Lookingglass Theatre

        CHICAGO—The Lookingglass Theatre is reviving Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” in a warm, honest production. Audiences with a special affection for the play will be well satisfied. Those who reject the play as a slice of saccharine and bogus nostalgic Americana with pretentious philosophical overtones may be converted into the Wilder camp.

        “Our Town” carries the burden of countless underperformed amateur productions that uncritically embrace the play’s simplicity of staging and its wholesome-sounding message. The Lookingglass company has made its reputation with innovative, highly theatrical shows but it takes no liberties with “Our Town.”`The revival respects the play and doesn’t condescend to its sentimentality. The play has its share of humor, but it ends on a pessimistic note, castigating humanity for failing to appreciate the wonders of everyday life. If that sounds like dime-store philosophy, so be it.

       The “Our Town” opening night audience in 1938 must have been startled to see a play that sidestepped expected rules of stagecraft. There was no scenery, characters talked directly to the audience, time shifted back and forth—all to recapture small town American life in the early twentieth century, an innocent way of life that may have existed only in the more cynical and urban minds of audiences a generation later.

        The play is controlled by the stage manager, who chats with the audience as he guides them through the existence of the Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, residents in three acts, set in 1901, 1904, and 1913. He introduces us to the town’s main and minor characters, all pleasant and sympathetic. The exception is the tragic Simon Stimson, the town organist and choir director who commits suicide, an outsider at war with the town’s sensibilities. H. L. Mencken attacked the play as a celebration of the anti-intellectualism and small mindedness of middle America. If Mencken assesses the play accurately, Stimson is a casualty of that intolerance.

        Joey Slotnick sets the tone for the production with his genial but no-nonsense stage manager. Slotnick avoids the pipe-puffing folksiness that afflicts so many stage manager impersonations. He mixes low-keyed charm with equally low-key realism as the story turns dark at the end. Slotnick is a little young for the traditional stage manager, just as many other actors in the ensemble seem a little old. But chronological age doesn’t matter in performing “Our Town” as the playwright reaches out for a universality of human experience that makes the age of the actor a non-issue.

        Much of the buzz surrounding the Lookingglass revival comes from the return of ensemble member David Schwimmer from the fame and fortune of Hollywood and television back to the local live stage. Schwimmer plays George Gibbs, an important character but by no means the showiest. Schwimmer plays the young George with an understatement that verges on self effacement, but his performance works and allows Laura Eason as George’s sweetheart and eventual wife to fill the stage with her radiant presence in their scenes together.

        The production is a gathering of the clan for the Lookingglass, reuniting company members who have drifted away over the years to follow other career paths. Slotnick and Eason have moved to the East Coast and Schwimmer’s success in California is well known. Set director John Musial honored the reunion by assembling the collage of props and other artifacts from past company productions that hang from the theater rafters.

        Jessica Thebus and Anna Shapiro avoid any forced or false notes in their co-directing. The production unfolds with a gentle inevitability, no bright concepts and no easy laughs or false emotionalism. The directors allow the play to speak for itself, take it or leave it.

        David Catlin and Andrew White play Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Webb as sympathetic elders without descending into gooey “Father knows best” wisdom. The same can be said for Christine Dunford and Heidi Stillman in the more theatrical roles of the two mothers. David Kersnar makes a telling impression in his brief stage time as Simon Stimson, whose desolation and bitterness hint at a back story worth a play of its own.

        The remainder of the ensemble plays assorted denizens of Grover’s Corners with distinction—Raymond Fox, Thomas J. Cox, Tracy Walsh, Louise Lamson (who also plays George’s kid sister), and Kevin Douglas.

        Janice Pytel costumes the characters mostly in a creamy off white color scheme. The mournful parade of living characters to the Grover’s Corners cemetery, wearing identical black coats over their lighter costumes and carrying identical open umbrellas creates a haunting stage picture of mortality and community grief. J. R. Lederle designed the lighting, and Kevin O’Donnell designed the sound and composed the original music.

        The capacity opening night audience watched the play with a rapt attention that was almost palpable. Whatever one feels about the merits of “Our Town,” the play still holds the stage, and it’s the hard-hearted spectator who won’t tear up a at least a little at the end.

        I suspect that many of the play’s scoffers haven’t seen a first-rate staging of the show. The Lookingglass company is remedying that. If you don’t like this production you just don’t like the show. But check it out.

        “Our Town” runs through April 5 at the Lookingglass Theatre inside the Water Tower Water Works, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Most performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $60. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

The show gets a rating of four stars.  February 2009

Contract Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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The Brothers Karamazov

At the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        “The Brothers Karamazov” isn’t the kind of play audiences expect in the Lookingglass Theatre repertory. The Russian novel is long, complex, and filled with dense discussions about guilt, redemption, religion, and ethics.  Where are the opportunities for trapezes, gymnastics, and other circus like theatricalities that have made Lookingglass productions so distinctive?

          Credit the Lookingglass with giving this almost totally literary exercise an honorable and often engrossing staging, three hours worth, with two intermissions. No stage version can encompass all the richness of Dostoevsky’s original work and the Lookingglass version, adapted by Heidi Stillman, does give cause for concern with its slow start. But by the end of the evening the attentive viewer will be rewarded with a real sense of the novel’s scope, humanity, and suspense (the story being a murder mystery to go along with its other thematic bounties).

       The novel weaves several plot lines into a unified whole about the three Karamazov brothers (four if you count the bastard Smerdyakov). There is the youngest, the saintly Alyosha. Ivan is the middle brother, wracked by religious doubts that lead to a self-destructive cynicism about God and man. Dmitri is the eldest, a volatile man in the grip of a violent passion for a sluttish young beauty of the town named Grushenka.

        Towering over the family is the father, Fyodor, a depraved sensualist who competes with Dmitri for Grushenka’s favors. It’s Fyodor’s murder that drives the narrative to its gripping finale.

        For this production the Lookingglass performing space has been configured into a theater in the round. Props do the work of scenery in locating the action in late nineteenth century provincial Russia. A three-walled room is periodically  pushed on and off stage, representing Fyodor’s home where he indulges in his debaucheries and meets his violent end.

       The first act introduces the characters, but the narrative interest doesn’t accelerate until the second act. The adaptation locates most of the key events from the novel, including fragments of the theological and ethical discussions that make the book such a feast of intellectual stimulation. Most of the theological and philosophical discourse falls to Ivan. He introduces a portion of the famous Grand Inquisitor episode from the novel, a section often anthologized as a self-contained monologue that describes Jesus’s return to earth in sixteenth century Seville, Spain.

      The focus of the adaptation is the interconnected relationships between Fyodor and Dmitri in their lust for Grushenka, with Dmitri’s scorned fiancée Katerina watching helplessly and resentfully from the sidelines. Subplots flow like narrative streams into the main river of the storyline, and may occasionally overwhelm viewers unfamiliar with the novel.

      The heart of the drama is Fyodor, an old man of vicious appetites who wallows in his own degradation. He’s a vile but robust villain, played with enormous perverse exuberance by Craig Spidle. Another outstanding performance comes from Doug Hara as Alyosha, a young monk and a good man who stands outside the emotional upheaval that engulfs his family, Hara playing him with a striking blend of intelligence and unpretentious piety.

       The large ensemble generally does well, many of the performers doubling in supplementary roles. The cast includes performances by five children, all getting through their roles gamely when they are not unintelligible or inaudible, a common malady among youthful actors.

       The women in the story are admirably played by Chaon Cross as the erotic tease Grushenka who rises to self-sacrifice by the end of the story. Louise Lamson is the discarded Katerina, a woman who turns vindictive toward Dmitri after he abandons her for Grushenka. Eva Barr, with hair dyed fiery red, provides comic relief.

        Philip R. Smith’s Ivan starts slowly, but builds from cool and matter of fact to a man finally broken by psychological guilt and spiritual burdens. Joe Sikora bursts with angst and passion as Dmitri, playing his character at full throttle nearly all his stage time.

        I would have liked to see Laurence Grimm given a larger part as Smerdyakov, one of the novel’s most fascinating characters. The Lookingglass adaptation keeps Smerdyakov in the background until his third act explosion that is one of the play’s emotional climaxes.

        As director, Stillman effectively orchestrates the large cast through the complex story. The play would need double its present length to adequately explore the riches of the novel but credit Stillman with touching all the narrative bases.

        The backstage staff is led by Daniel Ostling (scenic design), Mara Blumenfeld (costumes), Chris Binder (lighting), Ray Nardelli (sound), and Rick Sims (original music). 

        The Lookingglass has presented literary adaptations before, but none with the unbroken realism of “The Brothers Karamazov.”  The results are impressive. Whether the production marks a new direction in the theater’s artistic life remains to be scene. The next production is a revival of “Our Town,” with a suggestion that George and Emily will be married on a trapeze, so apparently the theater isn’t abandoning its dedication to theatrical adventure.

         “The Brothers Karamazov” runs through December 7 at the Lookingglass Theatre in the Water Tower Place Water Tower, 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $60. Call 312 337 0665 or visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

               The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.    Oct. 2008

                Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

               

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Lookingglass Alice

at the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        CHICAGO—The Lookingglass Theatre is staging its dazzling production of “Lookingglass Alice” for the third time, and for the second consecutive summer. The theater should be mandated to bring this show to Chicago every summer, establishing a warm weather tradition in the manner of winter’s “A Christmas Carol.” That presumes that the company can retain its extraordinary five-performer ensemble with its inexhaustible energy and astonishing bag of visual tricks.

          

        The show, of course, is the Lookingglass spin on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in an interpretation that Carroll likely would not recognize but would heartily endorse. The show captures Carroll’s whimsy and includes a considerable helping of his original text. Lookingglass also offers acrobatics and other theatrical embellishments that make the production so entertaining, and sometimes startling.

        The Lookingglass production runs about 100 minutes without an intermission, opening with a stunning visual surprise I won’t spoil by describing. Let it suffice that the show is worth seeing twice for that opening moment, one time sitting in rows beginning with A and another time in rows beginning with E.

        The story loosely follows the adventures of 7 year old Alice as she tumbles down that magical rabbit hole into the wonderland of the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the White Knight, the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty, and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Alice adapts to her dreamlike journey quickly enough to immediately decide that she wants to become a queen. The narrative then charts the girl’s progress from chessboard square to square on her way to her royal coronation.

        But the story is secondary at Lookingglass to the staging by adapter-director David Caitlin and carried out by his quintet of athletic and inventive players. Which brings us to Lauren Hirte, the Alice in the origin al 2005 production and its two summer revivals. Hirte can act, draw gasps from the audience for her prowess and grace on various trapezes, and even play a decent clarinet. Hirte captures Alice’s little girl charm and determination and the production would be unthinkable without her.

        Hirte’s four colleagues play multiple roles, wear multiple costumes, and perform with unflagging stamina and enthusiasm. Laurence DiStasi starts off as a wistful and melancholy Lewis Carroll and steals all the scenes as the White Knight cavorting perilously on a bicycle and unicycle. We first see Jesse Perez as a giant and very red Red Queen. Later he joins Anthony Fleming III as the hip-hop jiving Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.

Kevin Douglas rounds out the Fab Five cast as the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, and other sundry roles. And there are the stagehands who enter the action from time to time, injecting modern realism into the evening and thereby enhancing the surrealistic flavor of the action.

        The wondrous visual moments include a wicket basket that spouts a dozen metal folding chairs, Humpty Dumpty plummeting from a ladder through an open trap door, and each time Hirte ascends from the ground for one of her aerialist exhibitions (with no safety net or safety cable in sight).

        I thought this year’s edition was more raucous and busier than the first two, but that was fine with the bumptious and predominantly teenage capacity audience. I’m not sure the youthful spectators followed Carroll’s nonsense poems or Alice’s symbolic march through the chess squares, but they laughed and applauded all the gymnastics and comic bits, which dominated the evening.

        The technical credits remain exceptional, led by Mara Blumenfeld’s wardrobe of exotic and witty fantasy costumes, and Chris Binder’s dramatic, occasionally blinding, lighting design. Dan Ostling designed the scenery and Andre Pluess and Ray Nardelli the sound.

        “Lookingglass Alice” runs through August 31 at the Lookingglass Theatre, 821 North Michigan Avenue inside the Water Tower Water Works. Performances are Wednesday and Friday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Saturday at 3 and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $58. Call 312 337 0665. For more information, visit  www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.          July 2008

                      Contact Dan at  zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

 

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Nelson Algren:

For Keeps and a Day

by the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

CHICAGO—The only problem with “Nelson Algren: For Keeps and a Day” is the play’s title. Not only doesn’t it make much sense, it’s beside the point. This show by the Lookingglass Theatre does use Algren’s words, but it’s not about the author, it’s about the city of Chicago, and a remarkable show it is.

          The Lookingglass is presenting the 70-minute performance piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art, just a block away from the company’s normal home at the Water Tower. This is the first live theatrical presentation I’ve seen at the MCA that effectively utilized the museum’s auditorium.
                               

The show gets a rating of four stars.                       June 2008

For more information, visit www.lookingglasstheatre.org.

Contact Dan: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Around the World in Eighty Days

at the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

CHICAGO—Did Jules Verne write his adventure novel “Around the World in Eighty Days” with the Lookingglass Theatre in mind? The 1872 tale, with its opportunities for special effects and swashbuckling action scenes, is a perfect fit for the kind of creativity and imagination that’s earned the Chicago company its national reputation.

        The Lookingglass production does offer some eye- and ear-catching set pieces and clever touches throughout its two hours, but the emphasis is on storytelling, with visual whiz-bang coming in an honorable second. Indeed, about five years ago the Lifeline Theatre, with far fewer economic and technical resources, put on its own version of “Around the World” that provided more wry and inventive staging bits than the Lookingglass version.

        Lookingglass adaptor/director Laura Eason obviously is entranced with the narrative possibilities of the Verne story. She certainly does not neglect the visual opportunities that reside in the story, but her interpretation pays more attention to people than to special effects. That may account for the leisurely first half of the staging, which still builds into a surprisingly emotional and intense (and satisfying) conclusion.

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Hephaestus

at the Lookingglass Theatre

By Dan Zeff

CHICAGO—It’s early in the year but we likely won’t get 70 minutes of more exhilarating entertainment all season than the Lookingglass Theatre revival of its 2005 hit “Hephaestus.”  The show mounts stunning circus acts within a slender narrative framework about Hephaestus, the blacksmith of the gods in Greek mythology. Toss in echoes of Ringling Brothers, the Cirque du Soleil, Blue Man Group, and a dash of break dancing and the result is irresistible.

           Some audience members may have seen some of the acts in “Hephaestus” in other circus performances, but never in such an intimate setting. Viewers in the first row have to tuck in their legs occasionally to avoid contact with the performers. And with one exception, I saw no safety devices protecting the aerialists from mishap. This is circus up close and personal, without a bleating ringmaster or unfunny clowns.

            The show is constructed as a play within a play. A little girl in her nightgown loses herself in the story of Hephaestus to block out the roar of her arguing parents off stage.  The girl narrates the story of Hephaestus, born deformed and thrown in disgust from Mount Olympus to the earth by Hera, his mother. The story then turns into a series of hooks for the circus acts, with the performers assuming the role of assorted gods.

            By the end of the intermissionless evening, we have enjoyed breathtaking exhibitions of bungee jumping, high wire walking, acrobatics, hula hoops, juggling, and other sundry circus skills. The production was created by Lookingglass company member Tony Hernandez, a former circus performer who takes the role of Hephaestus and co-directs with Heidi Stillman. Hernandez the only true actor in the production and brings to brooding life the anger and anguish of the crippled god. Hernandez participates in a couple of the circus acts, notably as part of a three-person pyramid on the high wire that must be as dangerous as it looks.           

       

 The remainder of the cast is drawn from international circus stars. A Russian named Almas Meirmanov (the war god Ares) does terrific work as an aerialist and is the lead man in the daunting high wire pyramid. Anya Stankus of Ukraine makes a sultry goddess Aphrodite, dancing before Hephaestus, her future husband, with her hula hoops and rubber-jointed acrobatics.  Anna Vigeland, a young lady with a Canadian background, performed a show stopping solo as the goddess Iris, twisting and tumbling on a slack rope high above the stage. Lijana Wallenda-Hernandez, of the famous German troupe the Flying Wallendas, does a couple of dazzling aerial turns as Hera and sits precariously on an unanchored chair during the perilous pyramid walk on the high wire.

            A group of young men called the Silver Guys (created out of metal by Hephaestus) contribute hand balancing and other feats, all in silver costumes and makeup. Richie McGuire, one of the Silver Guys, performed an extraordinary few seconds of break dancing. The young gymnast’s contribution to the evening’s success, though brief, is extraordinary.                 

        Abigail Droeger is the little girl narrator and the only performer who speaks during the show. She acted well and spoke and sang with clarity, a considerable difficulty in the 2005 premiere of the show.

       Everyone on stage deserves mention, so to complete the record, applause also goes to Jarrett Dapier, Nich Galzin, Viktoria Grimmy, and Rani Waterman.            

       The musical accompaniment leans toward the pulsating rush of percussionists pounding away on giant drums on a balcony above the stage. The stage is bare except for a large trapdoor that represents Hephaestus’s forge and other sites. From time to time performers descend from the rafters, sometimes head first, into the fiery space. Brian Sidney Bembridge designed the setting as well as the highly dramatic lighting and the rainstorm that opens the story. Lilja Wallenda-Hernandez designed the sawdust-and-tinsel circus costumes as well as the choreography for the chorus of young women who opened the show with a lovely ballet-like synchronized act with silk draperies above the stage. The evocative sound design and original music compositions were contributed by Josh Horvath, Ray Nardelli, Kevin O’Donnell, Rick Sims, and Andre Pluess.           

      While the concept remains the same, the 2008 “Hephaestus” includes several new acts. While I admired the earlier version, the current production knocked me out. The new acts are an upgrade, and the aural and physical staging is much more dramatic. It’s truly a can’t-miss event for the entire family.

           “Hephaestus” runs through February 24 at the Looking glass Theatre in the Water Tower Water Works at 821 North Michigan Avenue. Performances are Tuesday through Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at 3 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $60. Call 312 337 0665.

            For more information contact: www.lookingglasstheatre.org 

                              The show gets a rating of four stars.

Jan. 2008

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