Ten Chimneys

                   

At the NorthlightTheatre

by Dan Zeff

Skokie – Ten Chimneys is the name of the estate near Madison, Wisconsin, where the famous American husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne retreated annually to prepare for their season on the American stage. The estate is now a major tourist attraction, a monument to the lives and careers of the Lunts.

        Now another monument exists to celebrate the Lunts, a literate, funny, poignant, and even educational play by Jeffrey Hatcher called “Ten Chimneys.” The show is receiving its local premiere at the Northlight Theatre in what may be the most stylish production of the season in Chicagoland theater. 

The play takes place during the late 1930’s, when the Lunts stood atop the American theatrical pyramid . They knew everyone in trans- Atlantic theater and Ten Chimneys was a standard destination for Beautiful People, stars like Noel Coward, Laurence Olivier, and Katharine Hepburn.

Playwright Jeffrey Hatcher hasn’t simply written an exercise in nostalgia by crowding his play with impersonations of famous personalities from the theater world. There are only seven characters-- the Lunts, Alfred’s mother Hattie, his half sister Louise and half brother Carl, and actors Sidney Greenstreet and Uta Hagen. The play takes place inside and outside the main estate house where the Lunts are rehearsing their revival of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” that’s headed for Broadway and then a national tour. A kind of epilogue ends the play after the end of World War II in 1945.

The first act introduces the audience to the complex personalities and tensions among the Lunt family. Hattie resents Lynn because the wife encroaches on the mother’s smothering love for her son. Lynn naturally resents the mother and they go back and forth in volleys of scintillating bitchy dialogue. When Lynn goes off to get the mail, Hattie comments “Look at her run. You’d think someone had sent her a mirror.”

But the play extends way beyond verbal cleverness for its own sake. “Ten Chimneys” is about the theater. Much of the play takes us inside a rehearsal of “The Seagull,” providing fascinating insights into scene and character development, how intonation and gesture illuminate a character or a moment. The Lunts were famous for their obsessive rehearsing and one of the play’s best scenes shows the couple going through a half dozen interpretations of a passage from “The Seagull” in a matter of a few minutes, allowing the audience a prismatic view of how many different ways a few lines of dialogue can be performed.

The Lunts are portrayed as two strong personalities who do not separate the theater from real life. As Lynn remarks, “We are always on stage.” They trade in larger than life emotions and seem to be performing even during their most intense personal moments. For them the theater is a miracle cure for all ailments, and dedication to the stage sweeps all of life’s other considerations aside.

  Carl and Louise are satellite figures who revolve around the Lunts’ sun. Carl is a lost soul who tries to make a living as a pool shark He grudgingly lives at Ten Chimneys year around with his difficult, high maintenance mother. Louise is something of a family servant at Ten Chimneys and doesn’t bother to conceal her resentment, but her status remains lowly.

      

                                                                                       Photo Credit: Michael Brosilow

 

Into this domestic hotbed come Uta Hagen and Sidney Greenstreet. Hagen is a young actress hired to play a leading role in “The Seagull” and she is immediately attracted to the charismatic Alfred Lunt, injecting some sexual frisson into the household that Lynne notes with unconcealed disapproval. Greenstreet is an outwardly hearty friend of the family, a moderately successful stage actor before becoming a star in Hollywood after World War II. He lives with the agony of a mentally ill wife permanently institutionalized a short distance from Ten Chimneys.

After the high comedy of the first act, the second act turns much darker. The high strung temperaments are unleashed into actions calculated to wound. Lynn wants Uta Hagen out of the show and Hattie plots against Lynn by raising the buried issue of whether Alfred had a homosexual relationship with an old friend now teaching at the University of Michigan. The jolly Greenstreet collapses under the weight of his blighted marriage and his own poor health, breaking into tears alone on the stage in one of the most moving bits I’ve seen in a play in a long time. By the end of the evening, everyone is pretty much as before, except that Hattie is slipping into senility. But the passion for the stage and for each other remain an unbreakable bond between Alfred and Lynn. So along with its other merits, “Ten Chimney’s” is a convincing love story.

The performances at the Northlight are as scintillating as the dialogue. V Craig Heidenreich is memorable as Alfred, his acting enhanced by his strong resemblance to the real Lunt. Lia Mortensen, English accent deftly in place, is splendid as Lynn Fontanne, a woman who can take no prisoners in a domestic or theatrical battle, but a woman with a bottomless love for the theater and for her husband. Fontanne was once asked if she had ever contemplated divorcing Lunt. She answered, “Murder, yes. Divorce, never.”

The supporting cast is impeccable. The find of the ensemble is Sara Griffin as Uta Hagen , a young woman who enters wide eyed and naive in the high stakes emotional gamesplaying that often afflicted the Lunt household. The only possible blemish in Griffin’s performance is her age. At the time of the play, Hagen would be a teenager, reinforcing the character’s innocence in dealing with an experienced cut and thrust character like Lynn Fontanne. Griffin seems in her mid 20’s, but age aside, she is outstanding. The same problem exists with Linda Kimbrough’s Hattie. She looks far too young to be the middle-aged Alfred’s mother, but Kimbrough still holds the stage beautifully with her waspish dialogue.

Steve Pringle delivers a wonderfully well-rounded performance, physically as well as emotionally, as Sidney Greenstreet. Lance Baker, who is having a superior season in local theater, portrays the disappointed and embittered Carl with a layer of sardonic humor that adds a dimension to this minor figure. And Janet Ulrich Brooks is very fine as the much put upon and aggrieved Louise, trying to hold her own in the psychological thicket that frequently dominates the Lunt’s domestic life.

BJ Jones does a marvelous job of directing the play in its many moods, including the rehearsal scenes of “The Seagull,” a master class in dramatic interpretation. Tom Burch designed the effective rural set that makes good use of the Northlight turntable stage. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Joe Cerqua the sound plus original music.

“Ten Chimneys” runs through April 15 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $60. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

            The show gets a rating of 3 ½ stars.     March 2012

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Black Pearl Sings!

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – “Black Pearl Sings!” is a two-hander that explores the odd couple relationship between a white female academic and a black woman in prison for murder in Texas during the depths of the Great Depression. The play touches on lots of chewy issues, like racism, sexism, and most provocatively, what constitutes authentic national heritage and who owns it.

     The play, written by Frank Higgins, is receiving a strong production at the Northlight Theatre, thanks to a pair of superior performances by E. Faye Butler as the black inmate and Susie McMonagle as the academic.

        The first act takes place on a women’s prison farm in southeast Texas in the summer of 1933. Susannah (McMonagle) is a folklore scholar traveling the hinterlands recording authentic folk songs. She stops at the prison because she knows that some of the best folk songs are embedded among prisoners in the South, especially black prisoners.

   

Photo Credit: Starbelly Studio

        Susannah singles out Alexandra Johnson, known as Pearl, as a likely reservoir of genuine black folk songs. Pearl (Butler) grew up in the Gullah community off the coast of South Carolina, a fertile source of folk music as yet untouched, and thus unblemished, by contact with the outside world. Pearl makes a stirring entrance, trudging slowly on stage with her legs in chains and carrying an iron ball. She’s been in prison for 10 years for murder and has nothing to live for beyond trying to locate her daughter, a child of 12 when Pearl went to jail.

        The first act is mostly a cat and mouse game between Susannah and Pearl. The black woman is suspicious of this white woman who comes to her seeking folk songs. Her relations with whites have not been happy throughout her life and she is wary of what Susannah really wants from her. Susannah has a genuine passion for preserving the nation’s folk heritage in its pristine form, but she also has an agenda, using her folk music expeditions to earn grant money and build a resume in the academic community, aiming as high as a teaching position at Harvard. Each woman sees the other as a meal ticket, Pearl to find her daughter, and Susannah to make a reputation as a folk music conservator.

        The second act moves to a Greenwich Village apartment in New York City in early 1934. Susannah has managed to get Pearl paroled in her custody as a national treasure of folklore. Susannah sets up a series of performances before liberal white academic organizations, showcasing Pearl’s folk singing. The liberal organizations eat up Pearl’s personality and her music, so long as her music doesn’t get controversial, like songs that praise unions.

   

Photo credit:Starbelly Studios

        The second act supplies the intellectual meat of the evening. Pearl agrees to perform before white audiences to earn money to finance the search for her daughter. She remains wary of the white interest in black folk culture, a culture totally foreign to white society but she is willing to play the game, even encouraging the audience to sing along in a call and response mode. Susannah isn’t above promoting Pearl’s violent past and her primitivism for publicity, actually proposing Pearl wear her prison stripes uniform in the concerts to lend “authenticity” to her presentations.

        For Susannah, the personal holy grail is being the first to record a black folk song that dates back to slave days, an achievement that would make her reputation in academia. Pearl knows such a song but withholds it from the white woman. That song will belong to her people and she won’t barter it away for the pleasure of uncomprehending white listeners. Pearl’s performance of that song brings the show comes to its emotional conclusion.

        “Black Pearl Sings!” probes the question of who owns the rights to a national heritage, the creators of that heritage or society at large. Higgins could have delved into the issue more deeply but at least he has raised the point for audience consideration. It’s an ongoing controversy. The Greek government still wants England to return the Elgin marble sculptures back to their birthplace in Athens, while the English claim the masterpieces serve the world better preserved in the British Museum in London. So the ownership of fragments of a heritage will always remain a touchy question, colored by volatile national and ethnic feelings.

        Higgins’s play doesn’t solve the issues it raises but it does provide sumptuous roles for its two actresses. The show includes numerous folk songs, mostly performed without instrumental accompaniment, but “Black Pearl Sings!” isn’t a musical, it’s a drama with music. The play is a special showcase for the actress playing Pearl, and E. Faye Butler seizes the opportunity with a brilliant performance that is variously belligerent, humorous, and yearning. Pearl isn’t supposed to be a professional singer, but Butler is one of Chicagoland’s leading divas and the power of her voice can’t be suppressed. Plus the woman does a terrific job of portraying a woman beaten down by racism and hard knocks her entire life but a woman who still retains a strength of character and a certain dignity, even when trying to survive in an alien white world.

        McMonagle has the more difficult of the two roles. Pearl will naturally get the attention, and sympathy, of the audience. Susannah is a more problematical figure, a woman of good intentions who is still on the make in building a career, with Pearl as her chief tool. In addition, the play scores comic points off the white character (Higgins is white), mocking white stereotypes about blacks and its patronizing attitudes. At times the play seems like a white apology to the black world for misunderstanding and mistreating African American life so blatantly. White liberal audiences should eat it up. But on balance “Black Pearl Sings!” is a solid, sometimes provocative work built on a pair of luminous characters. Viewed solely as an E. Faye Butler concert the play is worth the price of admission. Fortunately, there is enough dramatic substance underpinning the music to offer patrons two hours of stimulating, if not perfect, entertainment.

        Credit Steve Scott’s directing for sustaining the play’s dramatic and musical momentum. Jack Magaw designed the settings, Emily McConnell the spot-on Depression era costumes, Sarah Hughey the lighting, and Christopher Kriz the sound.

        “Black Pearl Sings! runs through February 19 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $60. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

     The show gets a rating of 3 stars.   January 21, 2012

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Season’s Greetings

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

Skokie—Alan Ayckbourn’s “Season’s Greetings” is an anti-holiday cheer comedy appropriate for audiences ready for an excursion into the dark side of the Christmas season. There’s drunkenness, attempted adultery, endless family bickering, a shooting, and a preposterous marionette show. For anyone who has endured a dysfunctional family holiday gathering, this show may provide an agreeable shock of recognition, and some chuckles to boot.

        “Season’s Greetings” has become something of a holiday tradition in English since it premiered in 1980. It’s being revived at the Northlight Theatre in a production that is occasionally hilarious but mostly just amusing. For some reason, Ayckbourn, the most successful British comic playwright of the last half century, doesn’t play as funny in the USA as he does in the UK.

        The play takes place from Christmas Eve through the English observance called Boxing Day, the day after Christmas when people exchange presents. The location is the suburban residence of the Bunker family. Nine adults gather to celebrate the season and to get on each other’s nerves. Cumulatively they have 12 children, all off stage. But the kiddies  aren’t missed. In this comedy, the grownups are more childish than their offspring.

        There is no real plot to “Season’s Greetings,” just a series of mishaps, misunderstandings, and confrontations. The funniest character is Bernard, an inept middle-aged physician who inflicts a hopeless marionette play annually on the children. Next funniest is Harvey, a curmudgeonly old gaffer who enjoys sitting in front of the television set watching people destroyed in action movies. Phyllis is Bernard’s boozing wife, a mistress of making a spectacle of herself. Eddie is a genial and shiftless loser married to the pregnant Pattie, who can’t seem to get anyone’s attention. Belinda and Neville are enduring a marriage that has gone stale, leaving the lady ripe for a quickie seduction by Clive, a semi-successful author and a Bunker houseguest. Then there is poor Rachel, Belinda’s unmarried sister with a hopeful but futile romantic eye on Clive.

   

        These characters mix and match abrasively. The most comical encounters involve the mutual disdain between bullying arch conservative Harvey and stuffy Bernard with his liberal politics and interminable and incompetent marionette show. Then there are Belinda and Clive rolling erotically on the living floor in the wee hours of the evening, discovered in flagrante by the rest of the household gathered in various attitudes of amusement and distaste on an overlooking staircase.

   The Northlight has assembled a strong ensemble, led by those old pros Guinan and Riley. Heidi Kettenring (Belinda), Matt Schwader (Neville), Amy Carle (Phyllis, with a thick foreign accent for some reason), Steve Haggard (a bit youthful for Clive), and John Byrnes all give stylish performances. Maggie Kettenring is especially winning as the hapless Amy. But my favorite performance after Guinan and Riley came from Ginger Lee McDermott as Rachel. McDermott gives us the least cartoonish character on stage, a 38-year old trying to put a brave face of indifference on a life urgently in need of some romance.

        I sat in the Northlight admiring this fine cast and wondering why I didn’t start laughing out loud until Bernard’s ludicrous marionette show of The Three Little Pigs. Otherwise. it was all pleasant enough but not thigh slapping.

        Director B. J. Jones puts the cast briskly through their paces, everyone’s British accents strongly in place. Keith Pitts designed the two-level set, dealing as best he can with the challenges of a play more suited to a proscenium stage than the Northlight thrust stage. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Andre Pluess the sound.

        The bottom line is that “Season’s Greetings” is a diverting alternative to the endless supply of “The Nutcracker,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” flooding Chicagoland through the end of the year. But the show is probably best seen in a London theater in front of a British audience.

        “Season’s Greetings” runs through December 18 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $60. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

              Visit Dan on Facebook.   November 2011

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Snapshots

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie - We don’t lack for songwriter revues this theater season. The Porchlight Theatre is doing a Stephen Sondheim revue, while David Shire and Richard Maltby are being served at Theo Ubique and a Rodgers and Hart retrospective is upcoming at the Light Opera Works. The Northlight Theatre is getting into the mix with “Snapshots,” a revue of the music by Stephen Schwartz, but with a difference.

        The typical composer/lyricist revue strings along a sequence of tunes in “And then they wrote” fashion, usually with no dialogue and only a hint of a storyline. “Snapshots” resembles a more traditional musical, with a full book by David Stern to provide a superstructure for Schwartz’s music. And rather than pluck selections from the Schwartz canon as originally written, some lyrics in “Snapshots” have been revised to better fit the storyline.

        Today, Schwartz is famous as the composer of a money machine called “Wicked,” but his Broadway resume also includes  such hits as “Godspell,” “Pippin,” and the “The Baker’s Wife,” along with selections from lesser known scores. There are few hit songs in the almost 30 numbers in “Snapshots.” I’ve seen Schwartz’s major musicals but the only song I recognized was “Popular” from “Wicked.” So, for audiences who aren’t Schwartz zealots, nearly all the songs will  be fresh, which makes “Snapshots” a voyage of discovery for lovers of literate, often moving music for the stage.

      “Snapshots” is set in the attic of a home occupied by Sue and Dan, a middle aged couple with 20 years of marriage and one child behind them. Sue decides her marriage has gone flat and plans to move out. Indeed she has her suitcase packed and prepares to depart when Dan comes up to the attic to see what she’s doing up there. Sue gets cold feet about giving her unsuspecting husband the news that she is walking out of their marriage. As a distraction  she starts going over family snapshots and other memorabilia moldering in the attic. That launches a nostalgia trip through their relationship that occupies the rest of the show.

        To sing the songs and tell the story, the show introduces two pairs of young people (called Susie and Danny and Susan and Daniel) who represent Dan and Sue in their younger days. The two couples start out as part of the biographical flashback but eventually become living characters who interact with Sue and Dan like living people as the narrative shifts between realism and fantasy.

        The show tracks Sue and Dan from their childhood through adolescence and their college years and into their twenties. After numerous romantic and sexual dalliances with third parties, the two finally marry after Sue becomes pregnant. Eventually we learn why Sue has become disenchanted with her marriage. Dan is more wedded to his job than to his wife (at least in Sue’s eyes) and she wants out while they both still have enough good years to make something more rewarding of their lives.

     Most of the songs fit their dramatic situations well enough and those that don’t are still well worth hearing. My favorite was a haunting ballad called “Meadowlark” from “The Baker’s Wife.” A number called “Moving in with Susan” involves the entire ensemble in a rollicking and comical roundelay that’s the best production number of the evening.

        There are two problems with the show as it now stands (it’s apparently still a work in progress). At the end of the first act, Sue finally hands the stunned Dan a note announcing that she is leaving him. It’s a stirring dramatic moment and a powerful first act blackout. But the start of the second act totally dissipates the drama with a string of frivolous comic songs that trivialize the confrontation between Sue and the suddenly desperate Dan. The show has to rebuild its emotional thrust from scratch.

        The other problem, and a fixable one, lies with the imbalance between Sue and Dan. Susie McMonagle endows Sue with an intelligence and depth that swamps Gene Weygandt’s nerdy and clueless Dan. The audience is entitled to wonder, not why Sue is leaving Dan now but what took her so long.

At the end of the show Dan has acquired some dramatic heft but it’s very late in coming. Dan needs to be more of an equal to Sue from the outset, and Weygandt is a good enough actor to make the readjustment. The final scene of examination and reconciliation between Sue and Dan is genuinely poignant. Audience members of a certain age may look back on their own marriages and find personal points of emotional reference with the show.

        The supporting roles are played by Megan Long (Susie), Nick Cosgrove (Danny), Jess Godwin (Susan), and Tony Clarno (Daniel). They are all appealing and versatile performers with the perky Long perhaps first among equals with her vocal chops.

     Director Ken Sawyer and Karl Christian (credited as “musical stager”) do a fine job of keeping the physical action fluent, with nice dramatic and comic accents. Jack Magaw’s giant attic set provides a vivid visual framework for the action, enhanced by Elizabeth Flauto’s costumes, Jesse Klug’s lighting, and Lindsay Jones’s sound. Mike Tutaj, who must have a hand in half the shows in Chicagoland, contributes some nicely atmospheric projections.

A handful of composers and lyricists are credited with providing additional material but “Snapshots” is Schwartz’s showcase. For patrons being introduced to his work, the show will be a revelation. Schwartz fans will happily bask in the pleasures of songs they know and love.

        “Snapshots” runs through October 23 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $65. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

     The show gets a rating of 3 ½ stars.    September 2011

        Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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The Outgoing Tide

At The Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – Bruce Graham has achieved something special in his drama “The Outgoing Tide” at the Northlight Theatre. Graham takes a topic many viewers will find painful, disturbing, and even distasteful and delivers a play of compassion, intelligence, realism, and even some humor.

        “The Outgoing Tide” is about Alzheimer’s disease and its impact on the victim and the victim’s family. Not a happy topic and one loaded with the potential for sentimentality, preaching, emotional manipulation, and facile answers. The subject will touch many people in the audience, from the elderly facing the possibility of sinking into the Alzheimer’s morass to the appalling problems the disease inflicts on the victim’s family. Graham’s triumph is facing the subject honestly, without minimizing the seeming impossible choices before all parties.

 

        Graham sets the story in on the outdoor deck of the Concannon home on Chesapeake Bay. Gunner and his wife Meg have been married for more than 50 years. Now Gunnar has contracted Alzheimer’s, eroding his memory and his sense of reality. That’s in his bad times. In his good times Gunnar realizes he is slipping away mentally and it is an agony for him.

        Gunnar refuses to face a future of continuing deterioration until he ends up a vegetable in an assisted living facility. It offends his self respect and his sense of fiscal prudence. He doesn’t want to be kept alive in a downward spiral while doctors and medical facilities drain his financial resources. So he conceives of a solution, suicide that would put him and his family out of their collective misery and set up his wife with a fat, and legal, insurance settlement.

        The suicide plan is the hook for an ongoing debate on whether Gunnar should end his life. There are moral considerations (Meg is a devout Catholic). Meg not only resists suicide on religious grounds, she fears living alone. She is a vulnerable and insecure woman willing to care for her husband to his end. Nurturing is all she knows how to do and she insists she does it well. Her Gunnar wants her OK before ending his life. She can only react with outrage and panic.

        There is a third character in the play, a son named Jack who is caught in the crosshairs of the battle between his parents while dealing with his own psychological baggage. He’s going through a painful divorce and carries the psychic scars of being raised in a dysfunctional household dominated by his disapproving father. Jack agonizes over his father’s present condition while nursing resentments rooted in a miserable childhood.

        What makes “The Outgoing Tide” is the playwright’s skill at making a logical and eloquent case for all sides. Some viewers will leave the theater grateful they haven’t been dealt the insoluble dilemma facing the Concannons. Other viewers will feel the force of the narrative because they have been there themselves.                                   

There was much snuffling in the audience at my performance as the play wound down to its painful, legitimate conclusion. Graham could have ended the story in other ways with as much legitimacy. There is no single right answer to Gunnar’s suffering, but the one proposed in this play holds up as well as any.

        John Mahoney plays Gunnar and it’s the best stage performance I’ve seen from him, going back decades. Mahoney forces us to share Gunnar’s pain and frustration, and his recognition that he has not led a model life. His only way to make amends is to depart this life with some dignity and provide his family with financial security. It may not balance out a flawed life but it’s the best he can do, for Meg and Jack and for himself.

        Rondi Reed is magnificent in the self effacing role of Meg, looking at the loss of a mate, either now or in the definite future,  who is the center of her universe. It comes down to an insupportable choice, her desire to keep Gunnar alive and his conviction that he should die while he still maintains some control of his life. His fate is in her hands and the play’s most powerful and poignant moment comes with her decision.

        The character of Jack is an add-on of sorts, the third and lesser side of the family triangle useful to flesh out Gunnar’s crisis with another voice. Thomas J. Cox renders the man’s conflicting emotions with credibility that avoids slippage into confrontational melodrama.

        The entire play, only about 100 minutes long including an intermission, is sensitive and unflinching, beautifully written and beautifully acted under the quietly insightful direction of BJ Jones. Brian Sidney Bembridge designed the realistic woodsy set. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Andrew Hansen the sound.

        No amount of praise will convince some prospective patrons that  “The Outgoing Tide” is a downer. It’s not a happy story, but it’s honest, engrossing, and entertaining. It deserves to be seen as a fine play and a superior production. You may enter the theater with trepidation but you should leave feeling rewarded.

        “The Outgoing Tide” runs through June 19 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

                      The show gets a rating of four stars.  May 2011

                             Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Sense and Sensibility

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – “Sense and Sensibility” was Jane Austen’s first completed novel and it set the narrative theme for her classic fiction to follow. A woman meets and marries a man, but only after overcoming difficulties, usually comic.

Austen’s novels are populated by husband-hunting mothers and daughters trying to land an eligible clergyman or landowner, eligibility partly based on the size of the income one partner brought to the match. Love or at least compatibility counted for something, but not as much as an income of 30,000 pound a year.

Austen creates marvels of irony, shrewd social observation, and humor out of her closed world, including some of the most delighting heroines in English literature. The Northlight Theatre recreates that world in an entertaining dramatization of “Sense and Sensibility” as adapted  by John Jory, who also directs. If the show doesn’t reach the heights of the Northlight’s earlier staging of “Pride and Prejudice,” it’s only because “Sense and Sensibility” isn’t quite as good a novel.

The heroines of “Sense and “Sensibility” are Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, sisters living with their widowed mother in the English provinces and facing lives of genteel poverty unless the sisters can land suitable mates. Elinor is the level-headed one, the “sense” half of the title. Marianne is passionate, the “sensibility” half.

During the play, Elinor and Marianne are both abandoned by men who had been expected to offer marriage, but both end up with suitable attachments. There are only happy marital endings in Jane Austen’s novels. But the path of true love for both sisters is bumpy indeed. In fact, the audience needs to concentrate on the storyline to keep track of all the romantic ups and downs inflicted on the sisters.

Before the story ends on its upbeat note, Elinor and Marianne turbulently cross paths with the brothers Edward and Philip Ferrars, John Willoughby, and Colonel Brandon. The sisters are in competition with Lucy Steele as well as off stage females, all plunged fully into the marriage market for the best men.

The race for an eligible husband also involves the Elinor and Marianne’s mother, their bitchy sister in law, and a benevolent London lady named Mrs. Jennings. It all sorts itself out by the final heartwarming scene, but not before many feelings have been wounded, misunderstandings, endured, and tears shed.

Elinor and Marianne are engaging figures, but they seldom rise to the heights of eloquence we enjoy from Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse in later Austen novels. Still, Elinor Dashwood is one of the author’s most admirable females, with her intelligence blended with compassion and a clear sense of reality, especially in comparison with her tempestuous sister.

The Northlight production starts slowly but up picks up in narrative interest as crisis after crisis afflicts the Dashwood sisters. Heidi Kettenring is the rock of the narrative as Elinor, trying to deal with her own romantic tribulations while serving as the moral support of her skittish sister and excitable mother. Helen Sadler’s Marianne is a strong emotional opposite to her sister, down to enduring a near fatal nervous collapse as her anticipated future mate abandons her.

The brigade of supporting female characters is led by Penny Slusher as Mrs. Dashwood, dedicated above all to seeing her girls settled. Wendy Robie is fine as the benevolent matchmaking Mrs. Jennings. Franette Liebow as the sister in law and Diane Mair as Lucy Steele admirably round out the feminine half of the marriage-seeking equation.

The suitors on the male side are played by Greg Matthews Anderson (the devious Willoughby), Geoff Rice (the awkward but lovable Edward Ferrars), Jordan Brown (a late entry in the action as Robert Ferrars), and Jay Whittaker (the outwardly dour but inwardly passionate Colonel Brandon). Si Osborne plays Elinor and Marianne’s brother. It’s a minor role but still a welcome but too rare appearance on local stages by Osborne, one of our drollest and most accomplished actors. The remainder of the fine ensemble consists of V. Craig Heidenreich as a blustery but amiable country squire and Ginger Lee McDermott as his wife,  

Jory stages the play in a series of short scenes, the flow facilitated by Tom Burch’s scenic design, a mostly empty stage dominated by a stand-alone doorway that accommodates the narrative’s many entrances and exists. Rachel Laritz’s costumes nicely evoke the historic period of the early nineteenth century. Todd Hensley’s lighting and Joe Cerqua’s sound design and original music complete the excellent physical production.

“Sense and Sensibility” runs through April 17 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30, Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.

    

  Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

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Eclipsed

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

Skokie – War is hell and there weren’t many grimmer hells than the civil wars that tore apart the west African country of Liberia from 1989 to 1996 and against from 1999 to 2003.

Playwright Danai Gurira sets “Eclipsed” toward the end of the second Liberian civil war. Given the subject matter, the play has got to be somber, but Gurira also injects bits of humor into the story as well as scenes of potent drama. Audiences may enter the Northlight theater expecting to be depressed, but they will leave, if not exactly uplifted, at least stirred, and most important, entertained. Give co-credit to Gurira’s powerful writing and the Northlight’s spot-on acting and staging.

        “Eclipsed” is set in a grungy shanty somewhere in Liberia. Its occupants are four women living together as the “wives” of the local warlord, women on continual call to provide sexual favors. The women have had their individuality erased by their situation to the point they call themselves by number, with Number 1 the status leader, and Numbers 2, 3, and 4 following in the pecking order.

        The women don’t understand what the fighting is all about. It’s a fact of life, to be endured. “Eclipsed” is not a political play about the terrors of the wars in Liberia, though those terrors are implicit in the action. The women seem to accept their slave status. Only Number 2 has rebelled, departing to fight against the forces of president Charles Taylor. She has been transformed into a fierce warrior with a machine gun and lots of attitude. Number 3 is perpetually pregnant, a passive young woman who accepts the hand that life has dealt her. Number 4 is the youngest of the quartet, eventually converted by Number 2 into a gun-toting soldier (females actually provided a large percentage of the combatants in the civil wars).

        The final character in the play is a woman from the city, a peacemaker trying to bring the war to an end. Number 2 treats her with disdain, as a fuzzy-thinking do-gooder from the city with no idea of the life and death struggles women face in the countryside.

       In the second act, the action and interest heat up. The storyline transcends the local problems of the women and examines the impact on war on diverse personalities. The warrior Number 2 refuses to accept that the second civil war has ended. Battle is all she has known in recent years and it’s given her an identity and a sense of empowerment. The pregnant young woman chooses to follow her man. Peace is foreign to her so she takes the path of least resistance. Number 1 sees the end of the war as an opportunity to create a new life for herself, by going to school and learning an occupation.

The most tragic figure is the young girl. Having tasted the power of being a warrior, she doesn’t know which way to turn—adopt a peacetime existence or follow Number 2 to continue a personal war. The play ends with the image of the girl, torn and fearful, a machine gun at her feet.

        The Northlight production is blessed by five outstanding performances under Hallie Gordon’s insightful directing—Alana Arenas as Number 1, Leslie Ann Sheppard as the pregnant young woman, Paige Collins as the girl, Tamberla Perry as the belligerent Number 2, and Penelope Walker as the peacemaker from the city. They form a seamless ensemble that lifts the play’s tone beyond the grim to the absorbing.

        Jack Magaw’s ramshackle set establishes the atmosphere of deprivation and oppression that dominate the lives of the characters. The physical production also profits from Charles Cooper’s dramatic lighting and Myron Elliott’s tattered costumes.

        “Eclipsed” isn’t just another celebration of the triumph of the human spirit. The play is more complex. At least one character emerges from the horrors of wartime sexual servitude determined to build a better life for herself. But her colleagues in the shanty have been scarred by the war in different ways and may never achieve normalcy in their lives.  War indeed is hell, and for some of the women in “Eclipsed” that hell will be with them for the rest of their lives.

        “Eclipsed” runs through February 20 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m. Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 6 or 7 p.m. Tickets are $40 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

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A Civil War Christmas

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – The Northlight Theatre is providing something a little different for the holiday season, a music and drama show called “A Civil War Christmas.” The Christmas part of the production comes mostly from a selection of traditional Christmas carols scattered throughout the evening (or matinee). The main Christmas content in the spoken portion of the show is Mary Todd Lincoln trying to secure a Christmas tree for the president in the White House.

        The nonmusical part of “A Civil War Christmas” was written by playwright Paula Vogel. The multiple storylines all evolve during the days leading up to Christmas in Washington, D.C., in 1864, when the bloody Civil War was winding down. The interracial cast portrays dozens of characters, many of them familiar names like Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, and John Wilkes Booth. The adult actors are joined by two quartets of young performers who fill out the Northlight stage, one from Northwestern University and the other from children who have studied with the Northlight Theatre Academy. They don’t say anything but they join in the singing, and in their period costumes they add color and animation to the staging directed by Henry Godinez.

        The kaleidoscope of vignettes eventually focuses on three storylines. One deals with an embittered black Union soldier who hates the Confederates as he grieves for his missing wife, presumably kidnapped by Southern troops. Another follows the plight of a runaway slave separated from her 11-year old daughter on the frozen streets of Washington. The third involves Abraham Lincoln and his good hearted but emotionally skittish wife Mary, especially Mary’s adventures securing a Christmas tree for the White House, a tradition apparently not as established in 1864 in America as it is now.

        Some of the nonmusical action is dramatic and some humorous. In one tense episode the unsuspecting Lincoln luckily escapes capture in Washington by Booth and two Southern sympathizers. A New England Quaker steadfastly and comically hews to his nonviolent principles in spite of humiliating depredations inflicted on him by Southern soldiers.

        The best dramatic moments are provided by the angry black Union soldier, performed with great strength by James Earl Jones II (Jones will be cast as Crown in the upcoming revival of “Porgy and Bess” at the Court Theatre and that could be one of the performances of the season). In the spoken highlight of the show, the soldier confronts a naïve but brave lad who believes passionately in the Confederate cause. The resolution of that conflict highlights the Christmas spirit advertised in the play’s title.

        The production is performed on a rough-hewn multi level set designed by Tom Burch. The set represents the site of places like the interior of the White House and the waters of the Potomac River. Characters enter and exit from the aisles as well as the rear of the stage. The choral and solo singing serves as a musical connective tissue between the dramatic moments. The songs include folk tunes and spirituals as well as carols.

     The first act was amiable but not very absorbing as the flood of characters sing and talk their way on and off stage. The material is more sturdy in the second act, basically as the storylines involving the slave mother along with the black soldier are played out. The adult cast includes some familiar faces, notably Felicia P. Fields, David Girolmo, Derek Hasenstab, Paula Scrofano, and Jones. Scrofano makes a very human and sympathetic figure out of Mary Todd Lincoln, a figure often abused by American historians. Hasenstab resembles John Wilkes Booth and beautifully evokes his scary fanaticism. Fields lends her magisterial presence primarily to the role of Elizabeth Keckley, a seamstress with a large moral dimension. Girolmo plays five characters, including Walt Whiteman and Ulysses Grant, etching a complete personality for each one.

     The rest of the ensemble does excellent work. Will Clinger is an unusually wry and accessible Lincoln. Bethany Jorgensen combines with Jones in that moving scene between the young Confederate lad and the fierce black Union soldier. Mildred Marie Langford is very strong as the frantic slave woman desperate to locate her 11-year old daughter (a fine performance by Khori Faison) before the girl freezes to death on the streets of the capital. Alex Goodrich, Kevin Douglas, and Samuel Roberson round out the cast, the last two contributing some nice comic work.

        The musical accompaniment comes primarily from Chuck Larkin, playing the piano at the rear of the stage. Members of the ensemble occasionally join in on banjo, guitar, and percussion.

        Theresa Ham designed the multitude of mid nineteenth century costumes. John Culbert designed the often dramatic lighting and Victoria Delorio is the sound designer.

        “A Civil War Christmas” is an easy to take show, though it likely won’t replace “A Christmas Carol,” “The Nutcracker,” or “It’s a Wonderful Life” as a season staple. The first act needs more dramatic spine and the second act could be shortened about 15 minutes. But there is a lot of talent on the Northlight stage and some engaging nostalgia and even a few surprising nuggets of historical information (in 1864 any citizen could go to the White House and demand to see the President and expect the request to be granted).

        “A Civil War Christmas” runs through December 19 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $55. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

   The show gets a rating of three stars.  November 2010

                    Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Daddy Long Legs

At the Northlight Theatre

by Dan Zeff

Skokie - “Daddy Long Legs” is a slender romance that could be a sentimental slog. But thanks to a pair of stalwart performances at the Northlight Theatre, the show is a charmer, too long by about 20 minutes but still a delight for audiences in the mood for something warm and sympathetic.

       The musical by Paul Gordon (music and lyrics) and John Caird (book) is inspired by a 1912 novel by Jean Webster about a wealthy businessman who becomes the anonymous sponsor of a teen-aged orphan girl’s education. The novel has been filmed several times, most notably in 1955 as the musical “Daddy Long Longs” starring Fred Astaire as the businessman and Leslie Caron as the orphan.

       The Gordon-Caird version is told almost entirely in letters, most of them written by young Jerusha Abbott to her unknown benefactor, who calls himself John Smith, though the audience soon identifies him as Jervis Pendleton. Under the terms of Pendleton’s benevolence, Jerusha must write her donor monthly letters describing her experiences. John Smith will never respond.

       And so in song and speech we follow Jerusha as she enters an unnamed girl’s college (probably Vassar) in 1909. She’s a lost soul among the wealthy and privileged at first, but gradually spreads her wings, gaining social skills and book learning that lead her into the heady social and intellectual waters of early feminism.

       Pendleton is a vague figure in the first act but occupies more of the stage in the last half of the show as his interest in Jerusha turns into love, a development that should surprise nobody in the audience. Jerusha fantasizes about her benefactor, deciding he is old and gray or bald. But the audience knows that Pendleton is youngish and handsome. The final scenes are devoted to “will she or won’t she” accept Jervis as her husband. These scenes drift perilously into chic lit territory but spectators who enjoy happy endings won’t be disappointed.

     Considering that the show’s storyline is wafer thin, the action is surprisingly engrossing. Some of the credit goes to Gordon’s ingratiating score, which supplies song after song that illuminate the personalities of the two characters as they advances the plot. The growth of Jerusha from a frustrated inmate of the Dickensian orphanage to a liberal and strong willed young woman works nicely and holds the first half of the play together.  

       The success or failure of the show obviously resides in the actress and actor who play Jerusha and Jervis. They perform without a safety net. If either falters, or if there is no chemistry between the young woman and young man, the show descends into the obvious, the corny, and the tedious.

       Northlight audiences will have the good fortunate to enjoy a fetching young woman named Megan McGinnis as Jerusha. McGinnis is attractive but not glamorous, which would be fatal to the understated realism of the narrative. She sings beautifully and her acting credibly traces the growth of the teen-ager’s mind and spirit. There are probably other actresses who could manage Jerusha physically, emotionally, and vocally, but I can’t imagine anyone but McGinnis in the part. She is an enchantress without forcing the human interest into soap opera.

       As Jervis, Robert Adelman Hancock has something of a thankless role. He doesn’t get a chance to assert his character until the second act and throughout the show he plays in Jerusha’s winsome shadow. But as we learn some of Jervis’s back story his character fills out, though it is still the young woman’s show.

       The Northlight set by David Farley divides the stage into a book-lined room at the rear that is Jervis’s domain. Jerusha moves around on the stage apron. The performers are on stage virtually the entire evening but the two characters don’t meet face to face until well into the narrative. Although there is little physical action, the staging never seems static, thanks to Caird’s sensitive and unobtrusive direction. Farley’s turn of the century costumes firmly establish the story’s time and place. Paul Toban designed the lighting and Cecil Averitt the sound design.

       “Daddy Long Legs” could be trimmed to two hours with no loss of impact. Still, as currently rendered, the musical is affecting and entertaining, sustained by a pair of splendid performances in the service of two enticing characters. As such it’s recommended for viewers in the mood for an intelligent romance.  Laura Bergquist leads the effective small chamber orchestra that provides an almost continuous flow of melodic music.

       “Daddy Long Legs” runs through October 24 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7 p.m., Thursday at 7:30, Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $55. Call 847 673 6300 or www.visit northlight.org.

The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.September 2010

                Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com  

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Low Down Dirty Blues

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – The lights go down at the Northlight Theatre and Sandra Reaves-Phillips enters, singing a blues song that introduces her as Big Mama, proprietor of a South Side Chicago blues club late one Saturday night. 

 

        The opening song sets the scene for “Low Down Dirty Blues.” The rest of the show is about 80 minutes of uninterrupted African American blues belting by Phillips , Mississippi Charles Bevel, Gregory Porter, and Felicia Fields.

        The singers provide a wide-ranging portrait of the blues—the music’s  bawdy humor, defiance, pain, and guarded hope for a better tomorrow. A few patches of dialogue inject anecdotes about the lives of people South and North who sing the blues, the perilous state of authentic blues today, and white usurping of the blues commercially.

        But the revue is not a tutorial on the blues in its racial and musical contexts. “Low Down Dirty Blues” is a display of singing by four people whose comfort with the blues reveals they have been there and done that when it comes to the roots of the music.

        The show includes about two dozen blues songs, the majority likely to be unfamiliar to a general, especially white, audience. There is a handful of such recognizable blues standards as the Muddy Waters classic “I’ve Got My Mojo Workin’,” “Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache,” and the Count Basie-Joe Williams anthem “Every Day I’ve Got the Blues.”

        The show gets off to a rousing start with a set of raunchy double entendre numbers, like “Jelly Roll Baker,” “Don’t Jump My Pony,” and “My Stove’s in Good Condition.” Nearly all these songs are performed by Fields and Reaves-Phillips, two full-figured women with mountainous cleavage in the blues lady tradition. In black America, the blues anticipated feminism in the rest of the country by several generations. The women who sang the blues were no shrinking violets. They demanded performance from their men or they moved on. Blues women could be an intimidating lot and men hassled them at their peril.

        The presentation of the show has an agreeably spontaneous feeling, thanks to the deft and unobtrusive directing by Randal Myler. The ensemble sings the numbers in a variety of vocal combinations. Musical accompaniment comes from a talented trio seated at the rear of the stage. The blues club ambience is credibly established by Jack Magaw’s set, abetted by Rachel Laritz’s costume designs, Don Darnutzer’s lighting, and Victoria DeIorio’s sound.

        I saw the revue at a Saturday matinee with an audience primarily compiled of white patrons heavily leaning toward senior citizen demographics. The crowd responded enthusiastically to the music but one wistfully pondered what the reaction would have been on the South Side of Chicago. A black audience would have whooped and hollered through the show. The white audience at the Northlight obviously enjoyed themselves but white spectators do not come from a demonstrative cultural tradition when it comes to this music.

        At least at my performance, Philips seemed a bit uncomfortable physically, but she still held up her end of the program. Charles Bevel looked every inch the Deep South bluesman and sang with droll wit, ending with the plaintive ache of “Grapes of Wrath.” Porter, a large and imposing man, captured the underlying pathos and drama of the blues in “Born Under a Bad Sign” and was very affecting in singing of a better day (maybe) in “Change Is Gonna Come.”

        For me, the star of the show was Fields, an impressive mass of a woman in a jet black dress. She has a big voice, wonderfully expressive eyes, and a manner that takes a blue song by the scruff of the neck. In the show’s one non-musical interlude, Fields worked the audience, especially an elderly white couple, on their marital sexual habits. The bit could have been tasteless and patronizing but it was a hoot, the kind of one-on-one comedy that would have been a special joy in a black crowd.

        I have a quibble. The musical accompaniment swung so hard that it deserved at least one solo number, and not just the throw-away couple of choruses at the curtain call. The show’s playing time could have been extended profitably by five minutes to allow pianist Frank Menzies to romp through a South Side Chicago blues stomp, Albert Ammons style. Menzies receives fine rhythm section support from James Perkins, Jr., on guitar and Michael Mason on electric and acoustic guitar.

        “Low Down Dirty Blues” runs through July 3 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30, Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $39 to $54. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3½ stars.            June 2010

                 Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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A Life

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

Skokie – The cantankerous Desmond Drumm was a supporting character in Hugh Leonard’s popular 1978  Irish play “Da.” Two years after “Da” opened on Broadway, Leonard moved Drumm to center stage in “A Life,” a beautifully written play enhanced by a superbly acted revival at the Northlight Theatre.

        Drumm (John Mahoney) has about six months to live, according to the town doctor. The man decides he needs to look back on his life, taking “an audit” to see what his existence has amounted to.  Drumm doesn’t like what he finds. He’s spent 40 years in a civil service job he despises, supervising colleagues he finds contemptible in their laziness and backbiting. His personal life offers no more pleasurable vistas. As a young man Drumm lost the women he loved to his best friend Lar, an amiable layabout, and Drumm settled for Dolly,  a timid and compliant woman he looks down on as his inferior.

        Drumm is a bully and an intimidator. He’s more educated, more intelligent, and more articulate than most of the people around him and he funnels his advantages into a scornful and cynical attitude that costs him friendships at work and in his domestic life. The man doesn’t suffer fools gladly and nearly everyone he encounters personally and professionally seems to be a fool.

        Near the end of the play Drumm pronounces his credo. "I’ve never lied to or about a man. I’ve never smiled into the face of a knave, or pretended to see virtue where I found none. Or been a  loafer or a hanger-on, or a licker of boots.” Maybe so, but just a few minutes later Drumm recognizes the real truth of his life beneath the arrogant facade. “Instead of friends, I’ve had standards, and woe  betide those who failed to come up to them. Well, I failed. My contempt for the town…it was cowardice. What  I  called principles was vanity. What I called friendship was malice.” Quite a shock  of recognition.

        Leonard tells his story in a “then and now” manner. Drumm,   Dolly,  Lar, and Lar’s wife Mary appear in the present time (1977) and their younger selves take the stage as they were in 1937. The audience recognizes in younger characters the seeds of  their elders 40 years later. Young Drumm in particular was growing into the stiff necked, humorless man who would tyrannize over those around him for 40 years.

        “A Life” sound grim and unrelenting, but this is an Irish play, which means there is humor and warmth, and the lilting Irish brogue often elevates ordinary dialogue into a kind of prose poetry. The shifting of the storyline between 1937 and 1977 enriches the narrative without coming across as confusing or artificial (Leonard used a similar device in “Da”).

        The performances under B. J. Jones’s insightful and understated direction suit every character beautifully. Mahoney is a natural as Drumm, verbally cruel to those who can’t defend themselves. Mahoney doesn’t milk the curmudgeonly Drumm for easy laughs and his change of heart at the end isn’t overdone. Drumm is still Drumm, sharp tongued and overbearing, but a glint of humanity finally makes its way through the hard crust of the man’s insufferable superiority.

       Brad Armacost is wonderful as the older Lar, feckless but likeable (an Irish play in Chicagoland theater without Armacost would be unthinkable). Linda Kimbrough is excellent, as usual, this time as Mary, the woman Drumm should have married. Penny Slusher is an affecting Dolly, who meekly adores Drumm in spite of decades of verbal abuse.

        The young versions of the four characters are master strokes of casting. They even eerily resemble the oldsters physically. Melanie Keller is first among equals as Mibs (the young Mary) but only because she has the best scenes. It’s a wonderful portrayal of a plucky, independent young woman who may have been too much for Drumm to handle in marriage. He’ll never know.

Matt Schwader perfectly reflects the boy who is father to the man as the young Desmond. The character’s “before and after” transformation may remind the spectator of how the young Ebenezer Scrooge turned into the elderly miser in “A Christmas Carol.” Robert Belushi is just right as the happy go lucky young Lar, the butt of Drumm’s ridicule for years but too innocent and agreeable to bear a grudge.

        The action takes place within Jack Magaw’s set, a gazebo for the outdoor scenes and arrangements of furniture for the indoor scenes. Rachel Laritz designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Lindsay Jones the sound.

        “A Life” may seem wordy and low keyed compared to modern and more violent Irish plays by Martin McDonagh and his generation. There isn’t much physical action in “A Life” and occasionally the Irish accents present a problem. But the play is rich in its character revelations and the confrontation scenes, especially in the second act, crackle with drama. This is a fine adult play in the best sense of that much abused term.

        “A Life” runs through April 25 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3 ½ stars.  March 2010

                      Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .

               

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Awake and Sing!

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—All the characters in “Awake and Sing!” are angry and they have a lot to be angry about. They are living daily lives of frustration, disillusion, and disappointment and they see no way out. It sounds like grim, hard work for the audience but the production at the Northlight Theatre is exhilarating in its energy, intensity, and humanity.

        “Awake and Sing!” was staged on Broadway in 1935, the first major play by Clifford Odets and a work that catapulted him into the forefront of the American theater at the age of 29. Odets’s drama is set during the Great Depression and the economic and social anguish of the time permeates the lives of the Berger family in their crowded fifth floor walkup apartment in the Bronx.

        Director Amy Morton takes a hard look at the extended Berger family. The Bergers are New York Jews and they speak in the rhythms and argot of generations of Jews portrayed on the stage, on radio, and in the movies. But Morton doesn’t permit the stereotyped kvetching that could make such characters either endearing or sentimental. The bitterness among the Berger clan is palpable, not comical. The play has been compared to the drama of Anton Chekhov, and legitimately so in rendering three-dimensional men and women trapped in an unfulfilling existence.

      The action takes play over a year’s time during the depths of the depression. In the cramped Berger apartment three generations of the family live and argue, the atmosphere seething with resentment and acrimony.

   Bessie Berger is the family matriarch, an aggressive, bullying woman who sees herself as the bulwark again family disintegration. Jacob, her father, is an elderly old-time socialist dreamer, rambling on about the victimized masses and the criminal capitalists. Myron Berger is Bessie’s ineffectual and henpecked husband. Hennie and Ralph Berger, brother and sister in their 20’s, suffer the most in the household from the stresses of the depression and family tensions because they are both young and both see their lives withering away from forces they cannot control.

    Surrogate members of the family include Moe Axelrod, an embittered and crippled World War I veteran who loves Hennie, Uncle Morty, a dress manufacturer and the closest person to a success in the play, and Sam Feinshcreiber, a pathetic immigrant conned into marrying the pregnant Hennie who had been seduced and abandoned before the start of the play.

     Morton sets the tone for the drama with the opening scene, a family dinner roiling with rancor, the people at the table shouting insults and accusations like they couldn’t get the words out fast enough. The entire production lasts less than two hours, partly because one intermission has been eliminated and partly because of the fast paced overlapping dialogue.

        The Northlight ensemble brings the Berger brood to vivid life in all their unhappiness and futile hope for something better from life. Cindy Gold is terrific as Bessie Berger, an intimidating and humorless woman whose speeches of self-justification late in the play ring hollow to the audience. The indispensable Mike Nussbaum, 86 years old and still in top form, is Jacob. Keith Gallagher delivers the story’s core performance as Ralph Berger, a young man consumed with heartbreaking yearning and helpless protest.

    Audrey Francis is superb as Hennie, like Ralph isolated in a life she detests, enduring with a façade of brittle cynicism. Peter Kevoian is a persuasive Myron, beaten down by a married lifetime of hectoring from his wife. There is also splendid work from the three men who interact with the family—Jay Whittaker as Moe, Loren Lazerine as Morty, and Demetrios Troy as Sam. Tim Gittings rounds out the cast with a pair of cameo appearances as the beleaguered apartment building janitor.

        John Musial’s set is a model of period detail and the Jacqueline Firkens costumes capture the dowdy look of the depression decade. Keith Parham designed the lighting and Mikhail Fiksel the sound. The New York brogue sounds authentic and natural, which means dialect coach Cecilie O’Reilly has done her job well.

        “Awake and Sing!” is both a play embedded in its historical period and a show relevant to today. The agonies of economic deprivation, clashes between parents and children, and the search for love and a better life are timeless themes. “Awake and Sing!” spoke eloquently to its audiences in 1935 and it has much to say to viewers 75 years later, especially in this marvelously acted and directed production.

        “Awake and Sing!” runs through February 28 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3½ stars.   February 2010

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Souvenir

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

     Skokie - Several minutes into “Souvenir” at the Northlight Theatre, Neva Mae Powers sings her first notes as Florence Foster Jenkins and there won’t be a more startling, not to say shocking, moment on an area stage this season.

        Mrs. Foster Jenkins (1868-1944) was a woman who believed she had a great singing voice and she had the time and money to carry out her dream of being a notable concert diva. Unfortunately, the would-be diva hopeless as a singer but she was so armed in her own delusion of greatness that she carried on her career for decades, never recognizing she had become a cult figure for connoisseurs of appalling singing.

Stephen Temperley’s play is a two-hander, consisting of Mrs. Foster Jenkins and her piano accompanist Cosme McMoon. The lady’s life is fully documented. McMoon is a more shadowy figure. Apparently he really lived but in “Souvenir” he is more of a construct by the playwright, serving as narrator and as the audience’s eyes and ears to Mrs. Foster Jenkins and her anti-art.

        Indeed, while Mrs. Foster Jenkins obviously has the more showy role, it’s McMoon who provides the play’s backbone. The lady is essentially a one-note character, literally and figuratively. McMoon is the voice of reason, a disappointed composer and musician who forms the the audience’s bridge between reality and Florence Jenkins’ world of fantasy. Mark Anders delivers a wonderfully shaded portrait of the pianist, from his first astonished reaction to the woman’s singing through a growing bond of respect for the lady, for all her artistic blindness and ineptitude. He becomes her protector right up to her Carnegie Hall recital that was both the pinnacle and the nadir of her singing life after the capacity crowd laughed her off the stage when she tried to sing “Ave Maria.”

        “Souvenir” has its best moments in the first act as McMoon, reluctantly at first, forms his bond with Mrs. Foster Jenkins. The second act is mostly given over to the Carnegie Hall recital, displaying the singer in a variety of garish costumes as she tortured one classical aria after another. By the Carnegie Hall concert scenes, nearly all the play’s work was done. The concert just prolonged the evening, allowing Powers to wear a delirious display of Theresa Ham’s costumes.

     Near the end of the show, after the “Ave Maria” debacle, a shaken Foster Jenkins asks McMoon if she had been playing the fool all these years and she asks for his honest opinion. Of course, he lies to her and convinces her she’s really a star, before, now, and always. It’s an affecting scene but strikes a false note. I can’t see the lady’s confidence shaken by any negative audience reaction. Her charm for the audience is her total belief in her talent and to her music  and I doubt she would weaken, even after the Carnegie Hall disaster.

        Only a select few actresses could succeed in the role of Florence Foster Jenkins and the Northlight nailed one of them in Neva Rae Powers. She looks the part of the7 matronly lady and her squawking, tone deaf singing is consistent in its awfulness. To prove that Powers really can sing, at the end of the show she performs a luminous “Ave Maria” as Florence Foster Jenkins believes she sang it. How much of a strain the Foster Jenkins screeching has on Powers’ vocal chords only she could say, but her dedication to the lady’s wretched vocalizing is continuously convincing.

        I left the theater full of admiration for Anders, a splendid actor and a fine pianist who serves as our guide in the improbable Foster Jenkins saga while delineating a full-bodied image of the disappointed artist, lonely gay man, and improbable guardian of an impossible woman.

        Steve Scott’s unobtrusive direction turns the show over to Powers and Anders, trusting Temperley’s humorous yet compassionate script to keep the audience engaged. Tom Burch designed the effective music room set in a plush New York City hotel. Lee Fiskness designed the lighting and Victoria Delorio the sound.

        “Souvenir” runs through December 20 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Wednesday at 1 and 8 p.m., Thursday at 7:30, Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $50. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars.    November 2009

                      Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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The Marvelous Wonderettes

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—We do not lack for jukebox musicals that reprise the golden oldie songs of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Consider “Beehive,” “Forever Plaid,” and “Smokey Joe’s Café.” In one format or another the shows all revive tunes from rock’n’roll’s first generation that still appeal to the hearts and memories of baby boomers.

        “The Marvelous Wonderettes” is the latest jukebox musical to visit our area, getting its local premiere at the Northlight Theatre. The show was actually born in Milwaukee in 1999 and had a prosperous run in Los Angeles. It is now entering its second year off Broadway in New York City. Who says nostalgia isn’t what it used to be?

        “The Marvelous Wonderettes” offers about 30 songs assembled by writer-director Roger Bean. The songs are weighted heavily toward white girl soloists and singing groups of the period, though the show doesn’t make any obvious gender or racial statements. The four-performer ensemble covers records by Lesley Gore, Patti Page, Dusty Springfield, Connie Francis, the Chordettes, the McGuire Sisters, and their ilk, mostly dealing with the anguished love life of teen-age girls.

      “Wonderettes” is constructed around a concert given by four high school girls to entertain attendees of the school prom at Springfield High School (state unidentified). That’s the first act, set in 1958. The second act jumps to 1968. The girls return as young women, with changes of wardrobe and attitude but still singing the popular tunes of the day.

        The four characters are Missy, Cindy Lou, Betty Jean, and Suzy. They are all given personalities of a sort to distinguish them from each other, but we are not talking Shakespearean depth of character here. The young ladies are on stage to perform the songs.

        At the intermission the production was in deep trouble. The songs were lumbered by an intolerable amount of shtick, with the girls bickering, mugging, deliberately missing cues, and going to excessive lengths to demonstrate that they were ditsy amateurs. I had an urge to shout out “Just sing the song.” Director Bean has a lot to answer for in the desperate reaches for comedy in the opening act. If Bean is unaware of the shambles, he needs to visit the production ASAP.

        The second act is an improvement. There is more narrative to give the songs some context after the bubblegum inanity of the first act. The quartet delivers smooth Motown moves as they sing and the songs are allowed to flourish on their own merits. Laura E. Taylor (Missy) belts out a show-stopping rendition of the Fifth Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues.” Dina DiCostanzo (Cindy Lou) leads an intense version of Dusty Springfield’s “The Leader of the Pack.”  Tempe Thomas (Betty Jean) and Cat Davis (Suzy) also get in their big voice licks once they are liberated from all the first act nonsense.

        What does shine through the evening is how well these songs hold up, with their catchy melodies and lyrics that vary from the chirpy to the faux serious but are always listenable. I suspect Bean could have concocted a show harnessing 30 entirely different songs and still delivered a quality score. It really was a golden age of popular music. Could there be a similar show incorporating songs of the 1980’s and 1990’s? I don’t think so.

        The production’s designers and musical director have been imported from the New York City staging. Michael Carnahan’s set design turns the Northlight interior into a high school gym, with banners, streamers, and prom decorations surrounding a basic raised platform stage holding the four microphones. The electronic musical accompaniment is canned. It sounds good but seems a little low rent for a theater with the credentials of the Northlight.

        The press night audience obviously was having a rousing time, even in the first act.  Numbers like “Lollipop,” “Sincerely,” “Dream Lover,” and “I Only Want to Be with You” obviously still carry plenty of emotional resonance. The show should do very nicely at the box office has already been extended a week. But that in no way excuses the simpering foolery of the first act. 

        “The Marvelous Wonderettes” runs through November 1 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $39 to $54. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of three stars.    Sept. 2009

                     Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

 

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The Lieutenant of Inishmore

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—The characters of Martin McDonagh’s play “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” consists of eight human beings and three cats. By the end of the show half of the humans and two-thirds of the cats have died gruesome, bloody deaths, the humans perishing vividly on stage. And this play won the 2003 Olivier Award as best British comedy of the year!

        In spite of its gross-out violence, or maybe because of it,  “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” really is funny in the excellent local premiere at the Northlight Theatre. It’s a lesser play in the McDonagh canon, not on a dramatic par with “The Lonesome West,” “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” and “The Pillowman.” Those plays had their share of violence, both physical and psychological, but they were made of stronger stuff dramatically.

        “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” takes place in familiar McDonagh country, an island off the coast of western Ireland. The action takes place in and near a rural cottage (a splendid set by Todd Rosenthal).The central character is a psychopath named Padraic who sees himself as a patriot freeing Ireland from British domination. But Padraic is such a loose canon that his promiscuous violence has even turned off the IRA. So Padraic formed his own “splinter group” to torture and kill for the greater good of his country.

        Padraic may be a psycho, but he has a soft spot in his heart for his pet cat Wee Thomas, the man’s only friend for 15 years. The presumed death of the cat launches the play into its spiral of gore and death. The satellite characters around Padraic are his father Donny, a neighbor lad named Davey and his sister Mairead, and three hit men named Christy, Brendan, and Joey come to the cottage to eliminate Padraic, who has become an embarrassment to the IRA.

        There are lots of guns in the play and they are fired without hesitation by several of the characters. The result is the stack of bloody corpses in front of the audience at the end of the evening. And I do mean bloody. The Broadway production used five gallons of fake blood for every performance.

       So, what is so comical about all this butchery? The characters are a collection of rustic Irish Neanderthals who treat violence as a casual feature of everyday life. What would horrify us is just a subject of conversation to them. Even characters on their knees with their hands tied behind their backs and ready to receive a bullet in the head chat about death in an offhand way. The sheer incongruity of their attitudes is funny, in a grotesque way.

        The characters all speak in thick Irish accents and somehow even the most serious matters take on a light, humorous touch if discussed with a ripe Irish brogue. Above all, the violence and torture distributed throughout the play are so outrageous that they defy being taken seriously.

        There have been attempts by some critics to assign a deeper meaning beneath McDonagh’s carnival of carnage. Some say it’s a satire. Others call the play a cautionary statement about the excesses perpetrated by people who get carried away in a political or religious cause.

        McDonagh denied any social or philosophical meaning to his work and I take him at his word. Possibly some viewers require an underlying significance to justify so much brutality on the stage, but I spotted no agenda. “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” is a story about people who kill and maim casually as a way of life. Any more profound assessment of the play is a reach. That makes the play a comedy without much substance other than its dazzling violence and some rich Irish blarney in the dialogue.

        The Northlight production under the razor sharp direction of B. J. Jones gives the play a splendid full tilt rendering.  As Padraic, Cliff Chamberlain is a madman but a madman with a veneer of normalcy that is disconcerting. Matt DeCaro as Donny and Jamie Abelson at Davey beautifully walk the line between caricature and real people. Kelly O’Sullivan is marvelous as the 16-year old tomboy Mairead ready to take her bee bee gun into the service of a free Ireland (and strike up an unlikely romance with Padraic). John Judd (Christy), Andy Luther (Brendan), and Keith Gallagher (Joey) make a delightfully murderous trio of IRA assassins. Gallagher doubles as a drug dealer in the second scene suspended upside down on a hook as the subject of Padraic’s tortures.

        In addition to Rosenthal’s set, there is fine design work by Rachel Anne Healy (costumes), Chris Binder (lighting), Andre Pluess (sound), and Nick Sandys (fights). Special mention goes to Steve Tolin for his special effects, which consist primarily of concocting technical ways to spray blood all over the cottage walls. His contributions to the final scene are spectacular. It would be unfair to future audiences to say more.

      Most of the opening night crowd obviously had little or no idea of the graphic violence they would witness on the stage, in spite of warnings and general descriptions in the theater lobby. Yet I didn’t note any outrage in the crowd or anyone leaving the theater in disgust or nausea. Everyone seemed to be having a grand old time. That’s a tribute to the playwright and to the production and to the audience’s own ability to adjust to a show the likes of which few of them had ever seen before. It may be implausible to call “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” a fun evening, but there you are.

        “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” runs through June 7 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:20 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. (except May 17, 31, and June 7). Tickets are $25 to $55. Call 847 673 6300 or visit northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of 31/2 stars.   May 2009

               Visit Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .  

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Mauritius

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—Playwright Theresa Rebeck is probably weary of hearing her play “Mauritius” compared to David Mamet’s “American Buffalo.”  Yet the comparisons are inevitable and by no means diminish Rebeck’s superb drama. Both are intense, verbally and occasionally physically violent, peppered with dark humor, and the source of dream roles for the performers.

        “American Buffalo” deals with three men trying to scam a valuable coin collection. “Mauritius” is about stamp collecting, specifically two stamps from the island of Mauritius minted in 1847 and considered one of the Holy Grails of philately. The 2007 drama is being staged by the Northlight Theatre in one of the best-acted productions in that theater’s long and luminous history.

        “Mauritius” explores the conflict-filled rivalries among five characters. Jackie and Mary are half sisters picking over the meager estate of their recently deceased mother, meager except for a collection of stamps assembled by Mary’s grandfather. The collection apparently includes the two Mauritius stamps that are worth millions of dollars.

        Mary and Jackie argue over possession of the collection. Indeed, they argue over just about everything. For reasons not entirely clarified in the play, the two young women despise each other. Their mutual hatred focuses on possession of the stamp album. Mary claims the collection as hers through her grandfather. Jackie claims it’s part of their common mother’s estate.

        What riles Jackie is Mary’s determination not to sell the collection but retain it as a memorial to her grandfather. Jackie sees the collection as her ticket to a lifetime’s economic freedom. Enter Philip, Dennis, and Sterling.

        Philip is a crusty and seedy owner of a stamp collecting shop, an expert in historically valuable stamps. Dennis, about the age of the sisters, attaches himself to Jackie in an attempt to broker the sale of the collection. Sterling is a sinister and intimidating millionaire with a mania for rare stamps who is the likely purchaser of the Mauritius gems, if Mary can be cajoled, forced, or conned into yielding them. All three men have their own agendas and the power centers shift among the three, and the two half sisters, in a manner that reflects the skill of a Mamet, or a Harold Pinter.

        Rebeck’s play contains lots of twists and turns and some surprises at the end, none of which should be revealed ahead of time.  The negotiations between Jackie and Sterling for the sale of the stamps occupies much of the second act and stands among the most suspenseful and engrossing scenes performed on an area stage in a long time.

        The Northlight has assembled a dream cast, one of those ensembles that convince the spectator that this is the only way the play can be performed. That’s a behind the scenes tribute to director Rick Snyder, who pushes all the right theatrical and dramatic buttons to give the rising and falling tensions perfect pitch.

        The cast consists of familiar local faces, none of whom has ever acted with more depth, fervor, and credibility. It’s great to have the veteran Gary Houston back as the grizzled and elusive Philip and Dan Kuhlman is terrific as the insinuating Dennis, desperately trying to keep the stamp deal afloat amid a stage full of personalities working at turbulent cross purposes.

       But it’s Lance Baker who grabs the show as the menacing Sterling. His long monologue explaining to Jackie why she should accept his suitcase full of cash in exchange for the stamps is a gem of sly, logical explication. And Baker’s stunned silent reaction to seeing and actually touching the fabled Mauritius stamps speaks volumes about the passion that drives all true collectors. It’s a magnificent performance.

        Anne Adams and Suzanne Lang play the half sisters with a brilliant mixture of venomous hatred and barely civilized conciliation. Their loathing for each other is palpable and chilling, if insufficiently explained. Adams has more stage time and her encounters both with Mary and the men in the play allow her to display her acting chops with greater range, but that’s no put down of Lang’s equally committed and convincing performance.

   Snyder uses the Northlight turntable stage effectively to shift the action between Philip’s stamp shop and the apartment of the deceased mother that becomes the battleground between Jackie and Mary. Tom Burch has designed effective sets for both locations. Nan Zabriskie designed the costumes, Robert Christen the lighting, and Andrew Hansen the sound.

        Rebeck is the co-author of “Omnium Gatherum,” one of the most important American plays of the new millennium.  If that play established Rebeck as a major writer, “Mauritius” solidifies her position on the A list of American dramatists. We might not get a more audience involving, and better acted, play all season.

        “Mauritius” runs through April 5 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $55. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of four stars.

               Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com .         March 2009

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Po Boy Tango

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—Fans of the Food Channel might find portions of “Po Boy Tango” informative and absorbing. Patrons seeking a coherent drama with an accessible point of view may leave the Northlight Theatre perplexed and unsatisfied.

        “Po Boy Tango” is receiving its world premiere at the Northlight after the Kenneth Lin play was workshopped by the theater. On the evidence of the current state of the show, more workshopping is in order.

        There are three characters in the play, a Taiwanese immigrant named Richie Po, an African American woman named Gloria B. (why she has such a Kafkaesque last name is never explained), and Richie’s mother, Mama Po. The mother died in Taiwan shortly before the play’s action begins and we encounter her through a series of videotaped monologues she left for her son.

        At the beginning of the play, Gloria B. visits Kenneth’s home one dark and stormy night. We learn almost immediately that the two have a history that goes back at least 10 years and there is a residue of hostility, especially on the woman’s part.

        Richie invites Gloria to his home to help him re-create a Grand Banquet once prepared by his late mother, a famous chef. The banquet would be a wedding present for his daughter. Richie has Mama Po’s recipes and notes for the banquet but lacks the culinary skills. Gloria is a cuisine cook, at least when it comes to soul food, and Richie seeks her assistance in preparing the banquet. Gloria, still bitter over whatever went wrong in their relationship, refuses until Richie bribes her with a partnership in a restaurant she would operate in exchange for her cooking services.

    The first act meanders along with banter about cooking from Richie and Gloria in America and from Mama Po, brought alive through the videos from her home in Taiwan. It’s interesting stuff, especially if one is a gourmet, and the Chinese reverential, almost mystical attitude toward food has its fascination. But by the intermission I had no idea where the play was headed. No great issues seemed unresolved and an igniting of the Richie-Gloria relationship seemed unlikely, Richie being happily married.

        In the second act the emotional intensity suddenly detonates. Richie and Gloria explode into violent verbal assaults that touch on race, cultural gulfs, and ethnic tensions. Mama Po even gets into the recriminations via a videotape that carries a denunciation of her son for marrying a woman Mama Po rejects. At the end of the play Richie and Gloria reconcile and our final view of the pair shows them silently sitting on a bench holding hands and overcome with emotion.

        Nothing in the first act prepares the audience for the verbal fury of the second act, at least nothing I could identify. I left the theater wishing I had read the script in advance to glean any dramatic signposts that chart the storyline from the low keyed first act to the fireworks of the second act. I did grasp a few shards of information, like Gloria was a nurse who helped save the life of Richie’s daughter when she was a child. And Gloria has her own problems with a difficult college age son who struggles unsuccessfully to become a star on the Syracuse University basketball team.

        The action takes place in a series of interiors in the United States and in Taiwan, represented by kitchen counters with sink and burners moved on and off the playing area by stagehands between scenes.  Much food is prepared during the evening, all by mime. The audience doesn’t actually see any of the dishes, like shark fin soup or spoon bread. But the food mostly sounds tasty, though a few of the Asian dishes sounded pretty gross in their preparation.

        The Northlight has imported two fine actors from California to play Richie Po and Mama Po. Ken Narasaki and Jeanne Sakata deliver persuasive performances embellished with humor as well as strong emotions. The fact that both are Japanese rather than Taiwanese doesn’t matter. That reliable Chicago actress Jacqueline Williams is outstanding as the street smart Gloria B.

        Chay Yew is the director. Brian Sidney Bembridge designed the set with its all-purpose abstract geometric background, Rachel Laritz the costumes, Keith Parham the lighting, and Andre Pleuss.

        “Po Boy Tango” is advertised as “a celebration of the human spirit and the joy of cooking.” The pleasures of cooking come through enticingly enough. The celebration of the human spirit is more elusive. The play needs more of its dramatic heat injected into the first act so the audience can follow a consistent arc in the action. Right now there is too little drama in the first act and too much in the second, aggravated by grievous gaps of information about the odd couple Richard-Gloria relationship, then and now.

        “Po Boy Tango” runs through February 15 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $55. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

The show gets a rating of three stars.     Jan. 2009

Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com.

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Grey Gardens

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—“Grey Gardens” is based on a 1975 documentary motion picture, which must be a first for a hit Broadway musical. The show charts the bizarre history of a mother and daughter in 1941 and 1973, much of the interest residing with their connection to the Kennedy family.

        “Grey Gardens” is a coup for the Northlight Theatre. The much honored 2006 musical seems more a candidate for a downtown Chicago touring production, but the Northlight snagged the rights, rewarding the show with a superb staging.

        Gray Gardens is an estate on Long Island in New York. The action takes place in the 28-room mansion inhabited by Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith (“Big Edie” and “Little Edie” in the show). Big Edie was the aunt of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill and Little Edie was their cousin.

        The show is really two mini musicals connected by the weird lives of the two Edies. The first act is set in 1941, on the day Little Edie’s engagement to Joseph Kennedy, Jr., is supposed to be announced. Joseph was the future president’s brother, a young man who was killed in World War II. It’s Little Edie’s day, but her mother controls the action with her huge ego and possessiveness.

        By the end of the first act, Kennedy has ended the engagement out of fear that the eccentricities of Big Edie and Little Edie would impair his carefully laid out campaign for the White House. While Joseph breaks Little Edie’s heart, Big Edie receives a telegram from her husband announcing he is seeking a Mexican divorce to marry his mistress. The loss of these two men triggers the psychological spiral that ends with the horrors of their life in the mansion 32 years later.

        The second act portrays Big Edie and Little Edie as little more than derelicts, living in squalor in their decayed house. The only visitor is a teen-ager who helps out with odds jobs and filches money from Big Edie’s purse.

        The offbeat story is told largely through an eclectic score by Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics). Doug Wright wrote the book.

        Nearly all the show’s plot is concentrated in the first act. The second act is static, plot wise as the audience eavesdrops on the Edies in their squalid poverty and their life-and-death bond of dependency. Big Edie is bedridden with gout and Little Edie wanders about, nurtured by delusions that she can still make a career on the Broadway stage.

        The authors don’t identify precisely why the one-time socialites plummeted to such nightmarish depths. Big Edie’s right wing father cut off financial support out of disapproval of his daughter’s bohemian ways, but that doesn’t account for why both women end up living in filth as little more than demented bag ladies. Some spectators will find the final act haunting and tragic. Others will just find it depressing.

        The score touches a variety of styles, partly because many of the songs are programmed for Big Edie’s first act recital at the engagement party, allowing the composer to inject everything from opera to pseudo African American folksongs into his score. The music in the second act is more focused, taking us into the addled hearts and minds of the two women.

        The first act is speculation by the show’s creators. Apparently no hard evidence exists that Little Edie was ever going to marry Joseph Kennedy. The second act is based on the movie documentary and presumably is more authentic. The two acts don’t achieve any real dramatic equilibrium.

        The actresses on Broadway who played Big Edie and Little Edie both won Tony Awards and it’s easy to see why. Both are plum roles for performers who can sing and persuasively create the warped personalities of the two unstable Edies.  The Northlight production gives audiences an actress who should loom large in our own awards ceremonies at the end of the season. Hollis Resnik is triumphant as the mother in act one and the daughter in act two. Resnik has always soared in larger than life ultra theatrical characters and her rendering of Big Edie in act one and Little Edie in act two is brilliant, physically and vocally. It’s a performance demanding enormous stamina as well as huge acting chops and Resnik nails it.

        The six supporting performers appear primarily in the first act and make token appearances in the second act, mostly in fantasy musical numbers. Dennis Kelly is wonderful as the ultraconservative father and so is George Keating as Big Edie’s gay musical accompanist and companion in act one. Tempe Thomas delivers a terrific performance as Little Edie in act one, a young woman desperately trying to extricate herself from her mother’s smothering domination,

        Patrick Sarb is every inch the patrician as Joseph Kennedy. Sean Blake makes a strong impression as the family servant in act one and a local handyman in act two. The child actresses provide nicely cameos as the young Jackie Bouvier (Grace Etzkorn) and Lee Radziwill (Arielle Dayan).

        B. J. Jones does a remarkable job of directing the show through its many shifting emotional tones and dark psychological waters. He’s helped by Marla Lampert’s spare but evocative choreography.

        The designers combine for one of the most effective physical productions in Northlight history. John Culbert expertly utilizes the Northlight turntable stage to expose the mansion in both its glory days and its later decay. Jacqueline Firkins designed the costumes, JR Lederle the lighting, and Cecil Averitt the sound. Doug Peck directs the excellent six piece off stage orchestra.

        “Grey Gardens runs through December 28 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 North Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:320 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $59. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

        The show gets a rating of 3 /2 stars.   November 2008

                    Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

At the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—Jeffrey Hatcher has made a lot of choices in his dramatic adaptation of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” none of them to the benefit of Robert Louis Stephenson original. The dispiriting results are currently on view at the Northlight Theatre.

        Stephenson wrote the short novel (the full, and appropriate, title is “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”) in 1886. The story is a brilliant study of a split personality. In Victorian London, the eminent and well-liked Dr. Henry Jekyll develops a potion that allows him to separate the good and evil aspects of his personality, all in the name of scientific study. In his evil guise, the doctor takes the name of Edward Hyde. Gradually, Hyde takes control of Jekyll’s personality and commits murder. Jekyll eventually kills himself as he is about to be discovered and arrested.

        The innumerable stage and film versions of the story run the gamut from psychological suspense to violence and horror. The best versions deal intelligently with the ethical issue of good and evil co-existing in mankind and the possibility of separating the two to disarm man’s evil nature.

        The Hatcher adaptation pays almost no attention to the psychology in the Stephenson original. Jekyll does make a couple of brief statements about good and evil co-existing in man but the narrative basically is consumed with melodrama and lots of bloody killings.

        Hatcher elects to have the evil Hyde played by four different actors, three men and a woman in drag at the Northlight. The various performers all take their turns at playing the character in random order. One person could have played Hyde throughout the play with just as much dramatic effect, probably more to avoid audience confusion.

        Most perplexing is the adaptation’s presentation of Jekyll and Hyde as two distinct people, not one person with a split personality but two men, the decent doctor and the malignant Hyde. Setting aside the improbability of Jekyll’s potion creating a second physical being, the decision totally disarms the basic premise of the Stephenson story, built on a single individual with two contrasting personalities.

        There is no love interest in the novel and no major female characters. But the adaptation places a lower class young woman named Elizabeth at the heart of the story, a woman who passionately falls in love with Hyde. What Elizabeth sees in Hyde and what Hyde sees in her is a secret between Hatcher and his word processor. In any case the female character takes up an excessive amount of stage time.

The set is dominated by a row of six large doors at the rear of the playing area that rotate to allow the actors to dash on and off stage, like they are dithering about in a French farce.   

  Director Jessica Thebus obviously sees broad melodramatic implications in the adaptation, and so we get swirling capes, violently contorting bodies, and flourishes with canes. If any of the actors wore mustaches, they doubtlessly would have been twirled. The melodramatic gestures brought occasional giggles from the audience, not a good sign for a play that wants to be taken seriously.

        The production is short, only 1 hour and 45 minutes including an extended intermission. But there isn’t enough meaningful action to sustain even that brief measure of playing time. The second act is especially weak with the only activity being the net closing on Hyde.

        The ensemble gives the script its best shot. The cast includes such Chicagoland theater notables as Patrick Clear, Thomas J. Cox, and Nick Sandys, nicely complemented by Cindy Gold, Danny McCarthy, and Cora Vander Broek. Sandys plays Jekyll throughout, and from time to time is allowed to display the urbanity and wit that have made him such a distinguished performer on the local scene.

The other five play multiple roles in addition to the four representations of Hyde, with McCarthy getting the majority of the Hyde exposure. There certainly are no complaints about the acting.

        Collette Pollard designed the set, Tatjana Radisic the Victorian costumes, John Horan the lighting, and Victoria Delorio the sound.

        “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” runs through October 26 at the Northlight Theatre, at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 to $55. Call 847 673 6300 or visit www.northlight.org.

The show gets a rating of  21/2 stars.          Sept. 2008

                            Contact Dan at zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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The Lady with All the Answers

at the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

 

        SKOKIE—For more than 40 years, Ann Landers was the Oprah of her day, wielding tremendous influence through her syndicated daily advice column. A written word from Landers could generate hundreds of thousands of letters to Washington politicians.  And the politicians listened. They had to.

        Fortunately, Landers used her power for good. She wrote with intelligence, compassion, and courage. She took on the most powerful special interests groups in the country and never backed down. There may not have been a more trusted writer in American journalist during the last half of the 20^th century. Landers reluctantly had to share some of the publicity spotlight with her twin sister, who published daily advice columns as Dear Abby, though Landers was by far the superior writer.

        Ann Landers died in 2002 and nobody has come close to replacing her, in spite of the countless advice columns that saturate today’s newspapers. Like Mike Royko she was unique and lamentably we may never see her like again.

        David Rambo has created a one-woman play based on the life and columns of Ann Landers, giving it the clunky title of “The Lady with All the Answers” “(Dear Ann Landers” would have been shorter and better). The play is receiving its Midwest premiere at the Northlight Theatre.

        The noted New York actress Judith Ivey takes on the daunting title role, coming close to the Landers physical look and voice. Her performance, and the play, have their effective moments, especially in the second act, but both the script and the acting turn Landers into a bit of a lightweight instead of the real-life strong, dynamic woman.

        The action of the play takes place in 1975 in Landers’s sumptuous Lake Shore Drive apartment in Chicago (a superb set by Tom Burch). Most one-person plays really aren’t. Although there is only a single actor on stage, invisible characters are brought in through telephone calls and similar theatrical devices. 

        Rambo does insert a few phone calls, from Ann’s sister and daughter and husband, but mostly the woman talks directly to the spectators, even engaging in some audience participation. Landers/Ivey thus breaks down the wall of realism between the character and the observer, and the device works after a few opening minutes of spectator adjustment.

        During the 90 minutes of playing time, Landers reads from her columns and delivers some autobiographical background. The narrative hook of the play, only hinted at until late in the first act, is that Landers’s husband is leaving her. The man has found a younger woman and after 36 years of what Ann thought was a perfect marriage, she is getting divorced, a dissolution she invariably counseled against in her columns.

     Landers is distraught by her separation, mostly on a personal level, though she wonders if the divorce might end her career. After all, who needs domestic advice from a woman who can’t hold her own marriage together? The divorce, of course, didn’t lessen Landers’s popularity or influence and she kept writing right up to her death.

        The play has considerable humor but it doesn’t acquire any dramatic heft until the second act, when Landers describes her visit to the American military hospitals in Vietnam (she despised the Vietnam War) and deals with painful letters from writers facing life and death problems, like the teen-page boy on the brink of suicide because he suspects he is gay. And there is the delightful account of Landers appearing on Irv Kupcinet’s late night talk show opposite film porn star Linda Lovelace.

        Ivey is certainly the actress for the Landers role, though she minimized the character’s strength of character until the second act. But the play needs more dramatic substance, more about Landers and her tilting against special interests and interaction with the country’s political powers. She took on the pro-life and anti-gun control lobbies at a time when such stands were more daring than they are today. More attention to that material would give the play additional, and needed, depth.

        Possibly a revision of the play could reduce or even eliminate all the angst about Landers’s divorce. It was a personal tragedy for her but it occupies too much of the play. Landers moved in the highest levels of the American establishment and took on the thorniest issues of her time. She was the confidante for millions of people who relied on her when they wouldn’t go to their parents, spouse, or clergyman. That’s the Landers who needs to control the play, elevating it from a generally pleasing entertainment to an involving drama.

        “The Lady with All the Answers” runs through June 29 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $55. Call 847 673 6300.

The show gets a rating of three stars           June 2008.

For more information, visit www.northlight.org.

Contact Dan: zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Better Late

at the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

        SKOKIE—“Better Late” starts out as a sitcom riff on the Grumpy Old Men theme, then shifts into the dysfunctional family mode, and finally slides into a romantic comedy drama. Possibly any of the three would make a good play, but definitely not all three together.

        That’s the situation facing the highly anticipated premiere of the play co-written by Larry Gelbart and Craig Wright at the Northlight Theatre. The script has been in development for a while and clearly needs more time to sort itself out. Right now it’s riding on ingratiating performances by its four-member cast and some sharp one-liners.

        “Better Late” brings together John Mahoney and Mike Nussbaum, two of the most affectionately regarded actors in the Chicagoland theater community.  Mahoney plays Lee, a composer married for 25 years to Nora, who had previously been married to Julian (Nussbaum). Lee and Nora met at a Hollywood party and almost immediately started an affair that led to marriage two years later, dumping Julian. That’s the back story. Now Lee and Nora live comfortably in Los Angeles but their outwardly serene life is about to be disrupted by the reemergence of Julian, a houseguest (at Nora’s insistence) while he recovers from a stroke.

        The early scenes in this 85-minute one acter set the audience up for a comic conflict between Julian, who still resents Lee for breaking up his marriage, and the increasingly exasperated Lee. There are some funny exchanges between the two, the humorous zingers presumably supplied by Gelbart, showing his comedy chops as one of the original writers for the iconic “MASH” TV series.

        Then the previously comic tensions between Lee and Julian erupt into a full-scale marital battle, concluding with Lee walking out. There is a resolution of sorts at the end, all touchy feelly.

        To flesh out the skimpy main storyline, the playwrights inject Billy, the adult son produced by Nora and Julian. Billy has his own marriage issues but his character is really an add-on that contributes almost nothing to the main narrative, though it does give employment to Steve Key, one of the area’s best younger actors.

        The main dramatic moments in the play are provided first by Lee and then by Julian as they assess the psychological trauma that has endured over the 25 years since Nora switched mates. Both men get the opportunity to make literate and incisive speeches about guilt and marriage, all directed toward poor Nora (Linda Kimbrough), who mostly serves as a punching bag for the recriminations flung at her by her past and present husbands.

        The co-billing of Mahoney and Nussbaum teases the audience with the promise of fine comic fireworks between the two, but the play under uses the Nussbaum character dreadfully. It becomes Mahoney’s play as Lee duels with Nora about her feeling of shame over abandoning Julian. Nussbaum is the more enticing actor and the play needs him on the stage more. In addition, Julian as written is inconsistent, starting out as a whining manipulator and later suddenly oozing dignity and understanding. At 83, the character also seems too geriatric to fit in with Nora and Julian, who seem to be in their 60’s.  

        The conclusion is supposed to be poignant and heartwarming, but it ends the play on a lame note, with Lee and Nora standing alone illuminated by a spotlight, silently looking at each other like both performers had forgotten their lines.

        The physical production is well up to the mark, especially the slide projections and film evoking modern Los Angeles with its freeways and foliage and architecture. The visuals bring the city alive, though the script doesn’t make much of the LA ambience, a missed comic opportunity.        

        B. J. Jones directs the play but he is unable to bring the disparate emotional and narrative elements of the show into a credible and coherent plot. Stephan Mazurek designed the projections, Jack Magaw the all-purpose modernistic set, J.R. Lederle the lighting, Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen the sound and original music, and Rachel Laritz the costumes.

        It’s always a pleasure to enjoy the acting of seasoned pros like Mahoney, Nussbaum, and Kimbrough, but “Better Late” in its present form disappoints. Maybe the collaboration between Gelbart and Wright is a promising concept that doesn’t mesh, at least not yet, on this project. Alone, Gelbart might have created a tart adult comedy rich in verbal zingers, or Wright could have composed one of those edgy dramas like “Orange Flower Water” that put him on the playwriting map in American theater. But for whatever reason their effort on “Better Late” doesn’t quite work.

        “Better Late” runs through May 11 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $55. Call 847 673 6300.

        The show gets a rating of 2 1/2 stars.        April 2008

For more information contact: www.northlight.org

Contact Dan at:zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Gee’s Bend

at the Northlight Theatre

By Dan Zeff

      SKOKIE—Gee’s Bend is a tiny African American town in Alabama, settled by the descendents of slaves in the mid 1800’s. For generations the residents of the town labored in poverty, enduring the racial discrimination that saturated the Deep South. Gee’s Bend survived on its religious faith and its bonds of family. And its quilts.

      Those quilts, created by Gee Bend women for warmth, suddenly became highly prized objects of American folk art in the late 1990’s, giving the women of the town a national celebrityhood after decades of impoverished obscurity. The quilts even became the subject of a set of postage stamps in 2006.

     Inspired by the history and spirit of Gee’s Bend, playwright Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder has written an immensely entertaining and often stirring drama called “Gee’s Bend,” kind of a small-scale “The Color Purple,” now receiving its Midwest premiere in a superior production at the Northlight Theatre.

      Wilder has miniaturized the story of Gee’s Bend, concentrating on a handful of characters over a period from the late 1930’s to the start of the new millennium. The core character is Sadie Pettway, who begins the story as a naïve teen-ager about 1939. She marries an older man named Macon, has eight children, gets swept up in the civil rights revolution of the mid 1960’s, buries her well meaning but abusive husband, and lives to see the quilts of the town, including her own, hanging in a major museum and getting rave reviews by the art critic of the New York Times.

      The play runs an uninterrupted 90 minutes. Its many scenes are connected by bursts of gospel singing that reinforce the blackness of the story and the unifying force of faith to sustain the women against the buffeting forces of poverty and racial oppression. The heart of the evening is Sadie’s commitment to the civil rights uprising led by Martin Luther King, who once spoke at the Gee’s Bend church. Sadie joins the march on Selma in 1965, ending with a beating from the local whites and ostracism from her husband, who sees Sadie’s civil rights activism as a fatal threat to the hard worn economic stability he has sweated a lifetime to earn.

  

     Supporting Sadie throughout the years is an extended female family represented by her salty aunt Nella and her mother Alice. In spite of the brevity of the play and the small number of characters, there is an epic sweep to “Gee’s Bend.” The grinding poverty of generations of black sharecroppers comes alive, along with the fire of the civil rights movement. The play has little physical action. The characters recount momentous events like the Selma march and racial outrages perpetrated against Gee’s Bend with a passion and immediacy that place the audience in the heart of Gee Bend’s history and culture.

     Then there are the quilts, the symbol of Gee Bend’s unbreakable spirit. They were created to give warmth against the chilly winds that leaked through the holes in the town’s shacks.  The women never considered the quilts more than protection against the nighttime cold. They didn’t know they had created art until someone told them. But ultimately, as Sadie proclaims near the end of the play, the quilts embodied the resilience and soul of Gee’s Bend, an ongoing history of the town’s struggles and small triumphs over adversity.

     The Northlight production employs quilts made Chicagoland quilters. They were colorful enough but the show would have profited by displaying the authentic quilts of Gee’s Bend, perhaps as large colored slide projections against the back wall of the theater. There is a documentary text and photo exhibit about Gee’s Bend in the theater lobby, but the play really needs some full sized examples of the quilts to illuminate their artistic presence for the audience.

       Other than that, the production is without blemish. The breakout performance of the night comes from Charlette Speigner, just five years out of the DePaul Theatre School. Speigner has acted in a number of Chicagoland theaters but her performance as Sadie should elevate her into the top tier of area actresses.

      Speigner takes the audience on Sadie’s emotional journey beginning alone on the stage as the innocent girl of the  Great Depression. She throws herself into the civil rights movement, battles her husband for her beliefs, and ends up alone on the stage as she began, now an elderly woman who has outlived all her peers and survived to see a better world as symbolized in her quilts. Speigner runs the changes on all the emotions that envelope Sadie during her nearly 60 years of life as interpreted by Wilder’s powerful and sympathetic script.

      Speigner receives outstanding support from a pair of stalwarts of the Chicagoland acting community, Jacqueline Williams as Nella and John Steven Crowley as Macon. Penelope Walker completes the outstanding quartet in a dual role of Sadie’s mother and her daughter Asia, a member of the liberated new generation with a different mindset toward life’s possibilities for Southern blacks.

                  

        Chuck Smith directs with insight and sensitivity, keeping the pace brisk and deftly balancing the play’s rich vein of humor and its drama. In particular, Smith keeps the characters human and not just stereotype examples of the triumph of the human spirit.

     The atmospheric look and sound of the production are led by the roughhewn abstract set by Richard and Jacqueline Penrod that underscores the backwoods poverty of Gee’s Bend. Keith Parham designed the lighting, Frances Maggio the costumes, and Josh Horvath and Ray Nardelli the sound.

     “Gee’s Bend” runs through March 9 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $35 to $55. Call 847 673 6300.

         For more information contact: www.northlight.org

The show gets a rating of 4 stars.

Feb. 2008

Contact us : zeffdaniel@yahoo.com

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Ella

at the Northlight Theatre
By Dan Zeff
           

 SKOKIE- The new show at the Northlight Theatre is called 'Ella,' but it might as well be called 'Faye.' The musical is based on the life and music of jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, but the evening is really a showcase for E. Faye Butler, long one of Chicagoland theater's treasures.

    'Ella' is an outgrowth of a 2005 musical called 'Ella - Off the Record.' Given a new book by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, the show was reconceived simply as 'Ella' in 2006 and has become a hot property on the regional theater circuit. It's easy to see why. The production values are simple, a single set and a small cast and a lot of familiar music.

    There are only two characters, Ella and her manager, Norman Granz, who makes a couple of cameo appearances. The on stage musical backup comes from a jazz quartet of trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. The musical's time and place are Nice, France, in 1966. Ella Fitzgerald is booked for a sold-out concert in Nice but she's just returned from attending the funeral of her beloved half sister, Frances, and the singer isn't in such good emotional shape. The first act is a rehearsal for the show. Granz tells Ella he wants some 'patter' in her performance, bits of storytelling and chat that can connect the performer to the audience.

     The request for patter is just a playwright's excuse for Ella to talk to the audience about her life. The major problem, which Ella acknowledges, is that she didn't lead a particularly intriguing life, certainly nothing on the level of the traumatic existence of fellow jazz singer Billie Holiday. But playwright Hatcher manages to get some dramatic mileage out of Ella's biography, starting with her troubled childhood and sexually abusive stepfather, with Frances as her protector. Then came Ella's exposure at an amateur night at Harlem's famed Apollo Theatre, which led to an engagement as the vocalist with the popular Chic Webb band when she was just 16.           

     Much of the show's tension comes from Ella's difficulties with the men in her life. Ella was not a physically glamorous woman and she was grateful for any romantic attention, even if it came from sleaze ball boyfriends. Ella recounts her unsettling five-year marriage to jazz bassist Ray Brown and her troubled relationship with Ray Brown, Jr., a gift as a baby from Frances. Ella raised the child as her own, an arrangement that eventually led to the lad's alienation.

     So things did happen in Ella's life, but not enough to sustain a full musical. It's the songs that make 'Ella' go. At a guess, I'd estimate there are about 20 songs in the show. Most of the Ella hits are there, including her first recording success 'A-Tisket, A-Tasket' plus romping scat versions of the swing classic 'Flying Home' and the bebop anthem 'How High the Moon.' But no 'Mack the Knife.'

     Butler makes no attempt to mimic Ella's singing, though the timbre of her voice and her phrasing sometimes conjure up Fitzgerald, but there are also echoes of Sarah Vaughan. It would be hard for any female singer today to come up with a style that doesn¹t own something to those twin towers of modern jazz singing.

    But mostly the evening is a celebration of E. Faye Butler singing like E. Faye Butler. The woman has a superb stage presence, terrific range (even though she occasionally sounded strained on opening night), and at least as much expressive delivery as Ella, who was known more for the purity of her style than her personal interpretation of songs. Butler belts out 'Cow Cow Boogie' and serenades us with plenty of Gershwin ballads. It's an exhausting role and one wonders how she can sustain its vocal demands for five weekend performances.                                                   

         

     Butler also does some acting, leading up to Ella's near breakdown during the concert half of the show. Ella Fitzgerald never had much of a public personality (she died in 1996). She just seemed like a nice person who sang well. Hatcher endows her with a darker side, a woman with attitude and determination.           

     Surrounding Butler are her accompanists, who also exchange a few lines of dialogue along the way. They are better musicians than actors, but they swing hard: Anderson Edwards (piano), Walter Kindred (drums), John Whitfield (bass), and Ron Haynes (trumpet). David Parkes plays Norman Granz, who shaped Ella's career into the preeminent 'First Lady of Song' in modern American pop and jazz music.

    The show is directed by Rob Ruggiero, who conceived of the original production with Dyke Garrison. Michael Schweikhardt designed the nightclub style set. John Lasiter designed the lighting, Alejo Viegtti the costumes, and Michael Miceli the sound.

     People who care little for the songs of the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington and others of their ilk may not find 'Ella' very interesting. But as a display of E. Faye Butler's monumental talents as a musical comedy diva, 'Ella' has some great stuff.

     Ella' is running through January 6 at the Northlight Theatre, 9501 Skokie Boulevard. Most performances are Tuesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday at 1 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $38 to $58. Call 847 673 6300.            The show gets a rating of 3 1/2 stars.

Dec. 2007

For more information contact: www.northlight.org

Contact us :zeffdaniel@yahoo.com