Mary Zimmerman's THE NOTEBOOKS OF Leonardo da Vinci

     This is a season of revivals for the Goodman Theatre. First, an excellent production of August Wilson's GEM OF THE OCEAN; now THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEONARDO, which was first produced at the Goodman in 1993. NOTEBOOKS established the young director Mary Zimmerman as a creator of non-linear theatre pieces based on literary classics. Zimmerman is now a Chicago institution. 

     By 1993, companies all over the world had been performing director-inspired theatre pieces using all the vocal and physical skills of their actors. One thinks of groundbreaking work like the Living Theatre's FRANKENSTEIN and PARADISE NOW or Peter Brook's MAHABHARATA from the 1970s. Closer to home, Chicagoan Paul Sills' Story Theatre, using improvisational techniques taught by his mother, Viola Spolin, to perform fairy tales had morphed into Second City. Mary Zimmerman would build on these forbears to create ingenious, visually inventive ensemble pieces. Many of us directors who began working in the 1970s would build from the same influences.

    At its best, pieces like THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI celebrate the possibilities of all elements of theatre. Unfortunately, cleverness can supersede complex emotion. We in the audience can marvel at the array of visual images, but might not feel much beyond amusement.

    THE NOTEBOOKS OF Leonardo da Vinci offers ninety minutes of quotes from the master's ruminations illustrated by actors' movement and an ingenious, ever changing set. It's file cabinets are filled with props and scenic pieces. The eight actors are required to be acrobats as they illustrate Da Vinci's concepts.

    What do we learn about Leonardo da Vinci? Well, that his curiosity on a variety of subjects--physics, astronomy, anatomy, the possibilities of flight, the human spirit--was boundless. He was passionately interested in everything. The only hint of a personal life comes with the mention of his servant, lifelong companion, and adopted son, Gian Giacomo Copotti. Though Leonardo provided the boy with wardrobes of clothing and an allowance, the boy constantly stole from his master. Nonetheless, Copotti stayed with Leonardo until the artist's death twenty-three years later. The show turns Copotti's stealing into a comic interlude, begging the question of why Leonardo allowed it--why he didn't fire the boy. A real playwright would want to develop that relationship. Her it is merely fodder for laughs. Moreover, Gian Giacomo is played by a grown woman, covering the possibility of pederasty, which was not unknown in early modern Italy. No one knows what Leonardo's long term relationship with Copotti was. Why bring it up in such a glib way? 

    Here we come to Zimmerman's weakness. There isn't much heart in her work. I remember seeing her much-derided production of Bellini's LA SONNAMBULA at the Met. The opera's plot about an innocent maid who sleepwalks into men's beds is silly by modern standards, but the music expresses depths of emotion well beyond the libretto's inanity. Zimmerman stuck to the superficiality. She set the production in a rehearsal studio and gutted it of any feeling. At the end of her big aria, she had the heroine turn a cartwheel. A neat piece of physical theatre and we in the audience could marvel that the soprano could turn a cartwheel, but it was a theatrical trick, not a moment that sprung from any emotion. Moreover the soprano had just performed vocal cartwheels. The musical acrobatics didn't need a literal physical corollary. Her revival of THE MUSIC MAN, a show that is filled with cornball sentiment, was cold and dull.

    I enjoyed the ingenuity of NOTEBOOKS. The eight performers were game at the physical challenges the production threw at them, though audibility was sometimes a problem. It did make me want to read a good biography of Leonardo. 

 August Wilson's GEM OF THE OCEAN at the Goodman Theatre

    GEM OF THE OCEAN, which had its premiere at the Goodman in 1903 and has returned for a powerful revival, is the last play August Wilson wrote for his series depicting twentieth-century African-American life decade by decade. Chronologically, it is the first play in the series. Set in 1904, this masterpiece of poetic realism explores the difference between law and justice. 

    The title comes from the 19th century patriotic song: "Oh Columbia, the gem of the ocean,/Home of the brave and the free." For Aunt Esther, who was ripped from her African home and sold as a child, the Gem of the Ocean is the ship that brought her to the United States, and now can transport her and her comrades to the City of Bones, an eerily beautiful place of death and spiritual rebirth. In a beautiful ritual, Esther takes young Citizen Barlow, on a symbolic journey to this symbolic place. Named Citizen by his parents because he was born free, Barlow is burdened by guilt. He escaped from Alabama to find work in the North, but he and many other African-Americans traded one form of slavery for another. The mill where he works keeps its employees in constant debt by forcing them to live in mill-owned housing and eating in mill-owned establishments. Frustrated, Citizen steals a bucket of nails. The law, personified by Caesar, a Black man who has profited by becoming an agent of white man's law, blamed another man who drowned himself rather than be punished for a crime he didn't commit. Citizen watched the man die for a crime he committed. He comes to Aunt Esther to be spiritually cleansed. There he finds a new sense of self and a mission. 

    Aunt Esther's house is filled with fascinating characters who exist on a real and a symbolic level. Old Solly Two Kings, who visits regularly, was a runner on the Underground Railroad. Now he is intent on battling the insidious new form of economic slavery. Solly makes a living selling "Pure," an odd name for dog shit, a fitting metaphor for the economic position of Black men in a Northern city. Eli, devoted to caring for Esther, is intent on building a protective wall outside her house,. Eli proclaims, "this is a house of peace,' but it is impossible to keep out the turbulence outside. Black Mary, Esther's servant, finds refuge in Esther's home from the demands of being a Black woman. Then there is the aptly named Caesar, the violent preacher of law and order who has replaced the Bible with a copy of Pennsylvania law. In a powerful scene, Esther challenges Caesar's law book with another legal piece of paper, her bill of sale, which valued her at $637. That was a legal document, but not a just one. Caesar's job is to protect the mill at all costs, but the mill is a symbol of economic injustice. His means of upholding the law is harsh violence.

    Operating on realistic and symbolic levels, GEM OF THE OCEAN is a challenge to produce. Chuck Smith's revival at the Goodman manages to capture most of the play's richness. Linda Buchanan's massive set, composed of sea blue wooden slats, nicely balances the real and the poetic. The cast couldn't be better.  Lisa Gaye Dixon captures Esther's quiet authority and the decades of pain below the surface. The play begins with Citizen Barlow's appearance at Esther's house and ends with his exit. Sharif Atkins captures Citizen's complexity. Kelvin Roston, Jr., manages to humanize Caesar, the villain of the piece. Everyone else in this ensemble is equally fine. Wilson has created here a group portrait of complex individuals. The cast vividly brings them to life.

     GEM OF THE OCEAN is itself a dramatic gem, one of August Wilson's strongest plays and one of the masterpieces of American Theatre. The play offers some of the richest language in our dramatic canon and an urgent message that still powerfully resonates. This revival is a must see event.  

QUEEN OF THE NIGHT by Travis Tate at Victory Gardens Theatre.

     Tennessee Williams made his macho father a picture on the wall in his autobiographical play THE GLASS MENAGERIE. At that stage of his life, he wasn't ready to deal with his relationship with the man who called him "Miss Nancy." A decade later, he created Bib Daddy Pollit in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, a tough plantation owner who has no problem with homosexuality. The plantation itself was a legacy from a gay couple. William Inge painted a picture of his troubled relationship with his father in THE DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS.  Williams and Inge were gay men at a time when homosexuality was locked away in a very dark closet (Inge titled his gayest play THE TINY CLOSET). I don't feel comfortable discussing issues of Black masculinity in a culture that has kept Black men down since the first supposedly Christian slave-owning settlers came to this country. This complicated subject is the core of Travis Tate's QUEEN OF THE NIGHT, but the play resonates beyond specific issues of Black masculinity.

     A father and son go on a camping trip in East Texas. For Stephen the father, the masculine ritual is an opportunity to bond with his estranged son, a queer college student. Ty, the son who has felt the weight of his father's disapproval all his life, has come to vent his anger and hatred. Stephen has gotten over whatever problem he had with his son's sexual orientation and wants to express his love. Over the course of a weekend, Ty airs his grievances but also realizes that he loves and needs his father. We hear that there is an older son, a successful lawyer about to be married, who may not be so easily won over. 

     Travis Tate knows how to write convincing dialogue and is a master at alternating serious and comic moments. However, he so wants his audience to like his characters that he is light on dramatic conflict. We are told that Stephen was a harsh disciplinarian who drove his sons mercilessly, but we only see a nice guy who wants his son to like him. The side that Ty is railing against is never seen in the play and his long festering rage is too easily dissipated. There are flashes of conflict but they quickly disappear. QUEEN OF THE NIGHT is enjoyable, but there doesn't isn't enough conflict to sustain the play's eighty minutes. We need to see some reappearance of the father that inspired his sons' rage. 

    The production values couldn't be better. Sydney Lynne's atmospheric woodland set offers the perfect background for the action, enhanced by Connor Sale's lighting. Ken-Matt Martin's staging balances realism with just enough stylization to support Tate's sometimes poetic language. I liked the way he had Ty try to keep his distance from his father. André Teamer and Terry Guest partner effectively as father and son. If only the playwright had made their conflict a bit more dangerous. 

Sondheim's MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG by the Porchlight Theatre, Chicago

     As is sometimes the case with Sondheim musicals, the best of the always problematic MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG is in the score. The talky book, radically repaired since the show's disastrous, short Broadway run in 1981, still doesn't work. I think of the show as Sondheim's ALLEGRO, the 1947 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical flop. Hammerstein was a surrogate father and mentor to the teenage budding composer-lyricist and Sondheim was fascinated with the making of ALLEGRO. Both ALLEGRO and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG are musicals about the loss of ideals, about selling out. Sondheim's score has also been revised considerably since the short run at the Alvin Theatre. Michael Weber's production for the Porchlight Theatre (Associate Directio nand Musical Staging by Christopher Pazdernik), makes more sense than any production I have seen of this show but still doesn't solve the show's basic problems.
     For those who aren't familiar with the show, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG (based on a 1930s play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart), tells the story of Franklin Shepard from youthful idealism to great success bought by personal compromises. In the musical, Shepard moves from being an extremely talented composer of Broadway musicals to a successful Hollywood mogul. The show assumes that Hollywood success is "selling out." The gimmick of the original play and the musical is that the story is told backward from Franklin in Hollywood in 1980 to him and his best friends on a New York rooftop in 1957 watching Sputnik fly overhead. Then Frank was an idealistic composer with his two best friends, lyricist Charlie Kringas and writer Mary Flynn. During the quarter century the show covers, Frank loses both his best friends and two wives. The show wants us to see Frank as a heartless sellout and his two best friends as his lost conscience. The problem is that Charlie is a kvetch and Mary a self-pitying drunk. They both make a point of humiliating their supposed best friend in public. I can't help feeling the Frank is well rid of them. Is he really so bad? Like Bobby in COMPANY (also book by Furth), Frank's a charming, good-looking cipher, more defined by the people around him than by the book writer. He doesn't even get character-defining songs. He's more sung about than a singer. As for Mary and Charlie, they only make sense if they're both in love with Charlie but, as with COMPANY, Sondheim and Forth, both gay, want to skirt around Charlie's desire for Frank. Without it, all his ravings just seem ill-tempered. Charlie's wife and family are invisible. Frank is the most important person in his life. As for Frank's wives, he says himself that he should have said "No." The marriages were mistakes from the start.
     Sondheim's score contains some gems and gets better as it goes along. I could do without the nightclub act the characters perform in the early 1960s, a satire on the Kennedys. It's too long and not really very good satire. There was a lot better stuff being performed in cabarets during the Kennedy years.
     The Porchlight directors gave the show a new frame. At the opening and closing we see Frank an old man in the present, sitting alone in a wheelchair, watching one of the movies he produced. As the end credits roll, Frank recalls his life. The periods of time are defined by projections of headlines and television clips. The cast are fine actors and singers. Jim DeSelm is handsome and charismatic but can't make Frank more than the cipher Furth wrote. That's not his fault. He makes more of the part than the other Franks I have seen. Neala Barron makes Mary too pathetic. This is a woman who has been a successful writer. We have to believe that Frank just doesn't see that she should be his wife--but the show gives us no reason for him to love her. Matt Crowle wasn't as much of a irritating kvetch as the last Charlie I saw in London. He's a winning performer. Still I ask, as I do every time I see this show, what do Mary and Charlie want from Frank? Basically they want things and people not to change. "I want it the way that it was," Mary sings. I always find myself on Frank's side. Charlie at least moves on after his break from Frank and becomes a successful playwright.
     MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG isn't as meretricious as ALLEGRO. There we're supposed to believe that small town life is the only good life, that success in the Big City is always a bad thing. This from two successful New Yorkers! In MERRILY, too, success means selling out, particularly if it's Hollywood success. Is there a bit of sour grapes in this attitude?
     Kudos to the fine ensemble and terrific band. This is my first Porchlight show. If this is their usual level of quality, I'll be back.
   

BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL--Touring Company

     I didn't see BEAUTIFUL in New York so was curious about the show when the national tour landed in Chicago. I love Carole King's songs and was of the generation that rushed out to buy TAPESTRY when it came out in the early 70s. In general, I'm not crazy about jukebox musicals. MAMMA MIA was fun because it paired nonsensical songs with an equally nonsensical book and made fun of its own efforts at making the songs fit into a narrative. JERSEY BOYS tried to do some interesting things with the biographical book. The Four Seasons were good musicians but not the most interesting people on the planet. I saw the show in London where the performers playing Frankie Valli and company would never pass as New Jersey Italian-Americans. The book of BEAUTIFUL (Douglas McGrath)--and there's a lot of book--is FUNNY GIRL for the twenty-first century. A very talented sixteen-year-old Jewish girl from Brooklyn has her first hit song and her first child at age sixteen. Gerry Goffin the eighteen-year-old father of the child does the right thing, as they used to say, and marries her. He also becomes her lyricist. They turn out hit after hit but he feels trapped by his life and work and starts having affairs. Eventually she realizes she can go it alone personally and professionally. She also decides to perform her music herself and becomes an even bigger name. There's also a second, comic couple as in the old days of musical comedies. They are also a composer-lyricist team, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. The show features their songs as well as the songs of King and Gerry Goffin. The songs range from fun to very good.
     As I said, there's a lot of dialogue but also twenty-six songs. There is a basic problem with a musical in which characters spend a lot of time sitting at pianos. In Marc Bruni's production (choreography by Josh Prince), the scenery, including the piano, seems to move more than the performers. The show might work better in the more intimate Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York. In the cavernous Cadillac Palace Theatre, it cries out for more movement, particularly more dancing. The cast, many of whom had understudied their roles in New York, were able performers but the charisma quotient was very low. In other words, they performed like understudies. I would love to have seen someone with real pizzazz like Jessie Mueller as Carole King. There was a time in the Golden Age when stars headlined national tours of shows. That is virtually nonexistent these days.
     It was an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. I got a discount ticket, so feelI got my money's worth.

HARD TIMES FOR THESE TIMES at Lookingglass Theatre

     I remember having to read Charles Dickens' HARD TIMES as a college freshman. I have never been a Dickens fan. His coincidence-filled stories have never seemed credible to me. His characters are often cardboard. And there's the sentimentality. Give me George Eliot or Anthony Trollope any day but, please, don't make me read Dickens! Yet, over the years, Dickens has been the source of some brilliant theatrical adaptations. The novelist loved theatre and loved the conventions of Victorian drama--or should I say melodrama. His villains are villainous, his heroes and heroines virtuous and beset with troubles they nobly endure. They make fun theatre.
     HARD TIMES is a satire on rampant capitalism, utilitarianism and the fact-based education it espoused. Capitalist Mr. Bounderby, who professes to be a proud exemplar of rags-to-riches, is a ruthless materialist. He made his money the hard way and has no sympathy with the rights of his workers. With Bounderby's money Gradgrind has founded a school, run by Mr. McChoakumchild, which offers a totally fact-based education. There is to be no imagination, no creativity, no feeling. During the course of the novel and the play, we watch the effects of this education on Gradgrind's son and daughter and on the ruthless pragmatist, Bitzer. The school is set against a traveling circus where young Sissy was raised until she is taken into the school and into the Gradgrind home. Sissy fails at facts but excels at compassion. Add a noble laborer, his ailing wife and woman friend and you have a celebration of principle over pragmatism. The men are nasty, the women have heart. The play is an entertaining mishmash of story lines and one-dimensional characters. It's also based on Dickens's shortest novel, so easy to condense into two-and-a-half hours of stage time. It also seems particularly timely in the age of Trump. Bounderby's crass, vulgar personality and pride in his ignorance makes him kin to the current President. The current downturn in the popularity of humanities courses shows how "practical" knowledge is prized over creativity. Unlike the workers in HARD TIMES, many in the American working class have chosen to believe the propaganda of the plutocracy.
     Adapter and director Heidi Stillman has crafted an absorbing, entertaining theater piece out of HARD TIMES. The excellent circus work is a colorful foil to the polluted air and harsh world of the fictional northern English town in which the play takes place. The cast, most of whom play multiple roles, is uniformly fine. The movement of the simple sets is choreographed to be an essential part of the production. Highly recommended.

ONCE ON THIS ISLAND at Circle in the Square

     I tend to get notes from press representatives when I review a show in previews although I firmly believe a show is fair game when it charges an audience money to see it. ONCE ON THIS ISLAND didn't to do well on its first Broadway outing in 1990, but musical aficionados love the Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Arenas score. The show is a kind of fairy tale set on a Caribbean island with a charming quasi-calypso score. The brilliant young director Michael Arden has cut the show to ninety minutes and made it more about storytelling as a group of islanders tell and enact the story for a young girl. The story is a romance of star-crossed lovers whose fates are sealed by the battling gods (goddesses, actually) of the island. It's a simple story but the telling couldn't be more inventively staged. Arden's production is an antidote to the impersonal Disney spectacles that have been the rage for the past twenty years. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved and charmed by Arden's production. The costumes here are clever but ragtag, the scene a few simple elements on a sandy beach. The show is performed in the Circle in the Square, a theatre-in-the round and Arden has used every inch of the space for his production. This is immersive theatre. The cast is uniformly excellent but I have to praise the amazingly talented Hailey Kilgore who plays the girl who is the central character in this romance. She's beautiful, she sings magnificently and is an amazing dancer. She's a star in the making but everyone is a joy to watch and hear.
     If I had kids, this is the Broadway show I would take them to. It's a celebration of the magic of theatre.