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.

Michael Urie in Harvey Fierstein's TORCH SONG at Second Stage

     This is a season of revivals of the canonical American gay dramas. First Harvey Fierstein's somewhat shortened version of his TORCH SONG TRILOGY, which, after runs Off-off- and Off-Broadway,  ran a thousand performances on Broadway in the early 1980s and was made into a film. In 2018, the National Theatre of Great Britain's production of Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA will play at the Neil Simon, followed by Mart Crowley's controversial picture of gay self-hatred, the 1968 play THE BOYS IN THE BAND, will come into the Booth with a cast of gay actors who have become stars including sitcom favorite Jim Parsons as the miserable Michael.
     TORCH SONG may have moved beyond being dated. We may wince at the backroom bar anal sex scene played for easy laughs, as if the AIDS crisis never happened, and be slightly discomfited in the light of all the Kevin Spacey revelations, at the lead character's love for a teenage boy in the second act. Fierstein's easy wit and Michael Urie's brilliance as a comic actor allow us to enjoy the ride through the life of a drag queen in the 1970s. There actually isn't any drag beyond the first few minutes, so "straight-looking and acting" gay men don't have to be uncomfortable with such violations of masculinity. What ensues in the almost three hours of the play is a pleasant combination of sitcom and seriousness. TORCH SONG TRILOGY is the gay version of good Neil Simon, the playwright who was still the king of Broadway when Fierstein wrote the play but has since gone out of fashion. FIerstein's weakness was his penchant for cloying sentimentality, which this production successfully overcomes. The many good lines are still very witty--it's still a very funny play.
     Basically,  TORCH SONG is three related one-act plays centering on ten years in Arnold Beckoff's (Urie), relationship with Ed, a bisexual man (Ward Horton). Each playlet is in a different style. The first is mostly alternating monologues of Arnold and Ed. The second, most inventive, depicts a weekend at the country house of Ed and his wife Laurel with Arnold and his new eighteen-year-old lover, Alan (Micael Rosen, gorgeous), a hustler turned model, as house guests. The third, more realistic in style, has Arnold battling with his mother (the magnificent Mercedes Ruehl), over his adoption of a fifteen-year-old gay boy, (Jack DiFalco (As my mother would say, I'd hate to be hanging since DiFalco was fifteen), and negotiating a relationship with Ed, who has left his wife.
     It's Arnold's play, one Fierstein wrote for himself to perform. Urie, a brilliant casting choice, is svelte where Fierstein was hefty, tenor where Fierstein was gravelly bass. The joke with Fierstein was that with that voice and figure he was an unlikely drag queen. Good-looking Urie makes a great drag queen. He's also a much better actor than Fierstein who was always more a "performer" than an actor. When Urie's Arnold explodes at his mother's homophobia, it's a real emotional explosion. He never wants pity, which Fierstein often demands. He wants to be respected and loved. Urie is both more sensitive and tougher than Fierstein. Going for the easy laugh is always a defense mechanism. Mercedes Ruehl wisely underplays the schtick as Arnold's monster mother (the original Mother was Estelle Getty who went on to play the mother in GOLDEN GIRLS, that favorite sitcom of gay men). She's less a monster than merely clueless. Ed is in a way a thankless role, a man without a sense of humor. At least, in this production, Ed isn't just a punching bag for Arnold, unlike unhappy bisexual Joe Pitt, the whipping boy for Kushner and his characters in ANGELS IN AMERICA, Ed is treated with some understanding in this production and Ward Horton makes a humorless character charming. The question in this production is not just "What does Arnold see it Ed?" but also "What does Ed see in Arnold?" Michael Rosen makes all he can of Alan's half hour on the stage. Jack DiFalco works a bit too hard as Arnold's adopted son. Moises Kaufman has given the play more depth than I have seen in previous incarnations.        
     This production gives TORCH SONG more substance than I have seen in other productions and Michael Urie, one of our best comic actors, gives another terrific performance.

J.B. Priestley's TIME AND THE CONWAYS at the Roundabout

     I saw  revival of this 1937 gem by British novelist, playwright and essayist J.B. Priestley at the National Theatre of Great Britain a few years ago and fell in love with the play. Priestley loved to begin his plays with a familiar genre, then turn everything on its head halfway through. Here we begin with a typical British drawing room drama. The time is 1917, the end of World War I, and one of the Conway daughters, Kay (Charlotte Parry), is celebrating her twenty-first birthday with her mother (Elizabeth McGovern), two sisters and two brothers. There are welcome friends like Joan Helford (Cara Ricketts) and the family lawyer (Alfredo Narcisco), who is smitten with the Conway matriarch and an unwelcome visitor, the ambitious Ernest Beevers (Steven Boyer), a working class man eager to move up in the society of this English town. Not much happens in Act I except introduction of the characters. Mrs. Conway is a charming monster who is brutally frank about the faults of her children and her preference for the youngest son Robin (Matthew James Thomas), who is charming but feckless. At the end of Act I in Rebecca Taichman's brilliant production, the set rolls back and another, less substantial version of the same living room descends from the fly loft. We are now in 1937 and we see what has become of all the characters. The family, now out of money, is anything but harmonious. Hazel (Anna Camp), has married Ernest, who treats her badly. Ernest, now the richest man in town, despises the Conway family who has treated him with snobbish contempt, and will not help them out of their dire financial straits. Robin has deserted his wife and children but still is the apple his mother's eye. Eldest son Alan (Gabriel Ebert),who still lives at home,  is content with his life as a bank clerk. This is what an upper-middle class family has come to during the depression and on the eve of World War II. At the end of the Act, Clare and Alan have a discussion about time--about how we don't live a linear progression from one moment to another. One can experience present and past or even present and future. Deja vu isn't a trick of the brain--it's being two places at once in time. Act III takes us back to 1917 and we see the events that will lead to the family collapse we see in Act II. Clare clearly has a vision of what this future will be as the play ends. Like a seer, she is in limbo between present and future.
     So the play is both a fascinating social satire and a philosophical rumination. It's brilliantly written and always intriguing. Rebecca Taichman, who so ingeniously directed Paula Vogel's INDECENT last year, has captured all of the play's dimensions and supported the actors' rich characterizations. Everyone is.excellent, particularly Gabriel Ebert as the unambitious Alan and Steven Boyer as the working class man on the way up. Ebert and Boyer are two of the best actors currently working today.  It's always exciting to watch them. I have never been impressed with Elizabeth McGovern's rather dull performances on the London stage but she is on fire here as a self-centered, impractical and not particularly loving matriarch, the opposite of her nice matriarch on Downton Abbey. Everyone else is fine, particularly Charlotte Parry as Kay, who grows from a debutante to a cynical woman of the world to a kind of visionary. Credit is due, too, to Neil Patel for his beautiful versions of the Conway drawing room--one realistic, the other more expressionistic.
     This is a fine production of a very special play.
     

Menotti's THE CONSUL at the Chicago Opera Theater

     I haven't done many opera reviews on this blog so far but Menotti's THE CONSUL is a special case. It was first produced on Broadway in 1950. Perhaps the only revolutionary thing about Menotti was his desire to be a commercial opera composer. He was commissioned by NBC to write an opera for radio (THE OLD MAID AND THE THIEF) and for television (AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS), and many of his works were produced on Broadway (THE MEDIUM, THE TELEPHONE, THE SAINT OF BLEECKER STREET [his best work, I think] and MARIA GOLOVIN, which was also produced on television. It was only in later years that he wrote for opera houses.
     THE CONSUL was written at a time when Broadway was the site for works that blurred the lines between opera and the musical--Kurt Weill wrote STREET SCENE (with lyrics by Langston Hughes), in 1947. Marc Blitzstein's REGINA followed shortly after. Both works are now the province of opera houses and both deserve to be included in the standard repertoire. THE CONSUL has some good music but a turgid, dreadfully written libretto (also by Menotti). Everyone's English in the Chicago Opera Theatre's production could be heard perfectly but still we had surtitles and I couldn't take my eyes off of the awful, purple imagery and strained-to-the-breaking-point metaphors. The story is a real potboiler. The setting is some unnamed European police state. John Sorel has been a freedom fighter but has to leave the country or be killed. The opera focuses on his wife, Magda. Because of John's exile, the Magda and her mother live in stark poverty. Magda and John's baby dies of malnutrition. Many scenes are in the office of the consul of another country, perhaps the U.S., where a very punctilious secretary insists on correct paperwork from the group who want to leave the country (what's so awful about that?). Magda is desperate to leave but has a breakdown when she sees the secret police coming out of the consul's office. Have they told the consul not to let her go? There are further trials and tribulations and a couple of dream sequences. It's all silly, over-wrought and very repetitive. My husband was correct in saying that the work would have been more effective if it had been cut in half.
     Director Andreas Mitisek and designer Alan Muraoka have decided to present the opera as a kind of expressionist work with angular, distorted scenery and a giant, high desk from which the secretary rules her bit of bureaucracy. I'm afraid the approach to this piece of verismo only confused things more. The orchestra sounded scrappy but that may have been a result of the overly harsh acoustic of the Studebaker Theatre. Sounds don't blend in there. The raison d'être of the co-production with Long Beach Opera seems to be the presence of Patricia Racette as Magda. I was never the greatest fan of Racette's voice. She has been a favorite artist at the Met for a couple of decades and has specialized in verismo roles. At this stage of her career, the top has problems. In this over-wrought work perhaps one can pass off the spread notes as an excess of emotion. She's a game performer who was always dramatically involved but would have benefitted from a more coherent production. As the mother, Victoria Livengood got the best music and the most coherent role to play. I directed Livengood three decades ago as Rosina and Dorabella. She has moved from a being charismatic agile mezzo to a contralto specialist in character roles. She has the biggest voice of the cast and brought great authority and pathos to her role. The rest of the small cast was perfectly competent.
     This revival of THE CONSUL only showed that it is not a work that deserves revival.  There are far better works from this period that deserve to be seen and heard.

CHOIR BOY by Tarrell Alvin McCraney at the Raven Theatre

     How does one react to being the brightest kid in the room and the most talented but also the most hated? How does one deal with the hate of others and the hate of oneself? That's the dilemma facing Pharus (Christopher W. Jones), a student at a Southern prep school for African-American boys. Pharus's way is to want to lead the most important arts institution at the school, the choir that sings at all the major school functions. Like many gay men of an earlier time, Pharus turns to the arts for self-expression and refuge. In the first scene of CHOIR BOY, Pharus, now a junior, sings the school song at the graduation ceremonies. He stops and turns around when his nemesis, Bobby (Patrick Agada), audibly whispers "faggot" and Bobby's friend Junior (Julian Terrell Otis), laughs. The rest of the ninety minute play gives us key moments of the year between graduations. Pharus' way of handling the homophobic sneers is to play the bitchy queen, returning nastiness for nastiness. Pharus keeps asking, "Which is better, to be feared or to be respected?" He wants the latter but feels that he has to settle for the former. He can be as cruel and insensitive as his enemies. Bobby and Junior represent the general attitude of the school toward "sissy" Pharus whose effeminacy is even a problem for his mother. He has some comfort from his kind roommate A.J. (Tamarus Harvell), and sex from an unlikely partner. There's a strict headmaster and an elderly white teacher who can't help spouting what we nowadays call microaggressions but who does have the boys' best interests at heart. There's another gay boy who can't deal with his gayness.
     CHOIR BOY is a beautifully written play that economically but richly offers us vivid pictures of its characters, particularly prickly Pharis, who reflexively employs the responses of embattled gay men, particularly effeminate ones -- lacerating wit and lots of irony. It's a fine play in its own right and also the best gay play of this century. Richness is added by the great a cappella numbers that separate scenes.
     The Raven Theatre's production, directed by Michael Menendian, was a good representation of the play with one crucial flaw. It was a mistake to dial back Pharis's effeminacy and prickliness. In many ways, Pharis is an old style queen. This makes him problematic for straight and gay audiences but I think the playwright wants us to confront our feelings about effeminacy and the performative responses to homophobia that gay men who can't look or act straight employ. In this production, Pharis is played as a nice guy who happens to be gay. Because of this, his character loses its arc from hostility to sensitivity in the penultimate scene with his loyal roommate. This is a major reservation but my only reservation about a fine performance from all the actors who also sing beautifully.
     An admirable performance of an excellent play.

HIS GREATNESS by Daniel MacIver at Pride Films and Plays

     This is going to be a season of plays about Tennessee Williams in Chicago. In the Spring, the Raven Theatre will be producing Philip Dawkins' new play, THE GENTLEMAN CALLER about a meeting of Tennessee Williams and friend, rival and perhaps onetime lover, William Inge. Now at Pride Plays and Films, we have HIS GREATNESS, a well-crafted play about Tennessee Williams toward the end of his life; broke, depressed about the loss of his artistic power and desperate for spiritual and physical rejuvenation as well as a jump start to a failing career. Since Daniel MacIver is a Canadian playwright, it is not surprising that his play depicts Williams' visit to Vancouver in 1980. A theatre there is opening a new play of Williams--actually a revision of a recent script that failed in London. Williams (Danne W. Taylor), is there for the opening with his former lover who for fifteen years has been his assistant (Andrew Kain Miller). Actually, given Williams current psychological condition, the assistant is more of a caretaker to a self- destructive old man who is dependent on liquor and drugs to keep going. Their relationship is now like a bad marriage. Whatever love the assistant felt for the playwright has been lost but there is still a strong co-dependency. At one point the Assistant quotes Edward Albee, a gay playwright who was much more of a survivor than Williams. The relationship of Williams and assistant has become like something out of an Albee play.  Enter the gorgeous hustler (Whitman Johnson), the assistant has hired to be Williams' companion at the opening. Williams sees the hustler as a new muse who will rekindle his imagination and the hustler foolishly thinks he has just gotten aboard a gravy train. He turns out to be a male Eve Harrington and manages to drive a wedge between Williams and his assistant. Like Tom in THE GLASS MENAGERIE, the Assistant, who also narrates the play, finally has to courage to escape.
     Loneliness and financial desperation are the subjects of much of Williams work and MacIvor has given us a powerful picture of those forces at work in this Vancouver hotel room. In Vancouver Williams faces another horrible defeat but he is desperate to find a way back to life as an artist. One is reminded of that brilliant self-portrait of Williams, Alexandra del Lago in that Mississippi hotel room in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH with her beautiful hustler. You don't have to know anything about Williams to enjoy this picture of dreams and a soured relationship but the echoes of Williams' work are there.
     David Zak has been for decades the champion of gay drama in Chicago at Bailiwick Repertory and now at Pride Films and Plays. He has given the play the tone and rhythm it needs and gotten very good performances out of his actors. Danne W. Taylor and Andrew Kain Miller work well together as playwright and embittered assistant. This is a version of a bad marriage with both trying to break free but neither having anywhere to go. Handsome Whitman Johnson looks too healthy and needs some rough edges to be the hustler. He's a bit too sweet and refined but he captures the man's ruthlessness. Like Chance in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, he's getting too old to continue as a hustler and dreams of getting out.
     This production is well worth seeing. I was saddened by the very small audience last night. The play and production deserve a bigger audience.

YASMINA'S NECKLACE by Rohina Malik at the Goodman Theatre

     YASMINA'S NECKLACE traces the developing relationship of Sam, the son of a Middle-Eastern father and a Puerto Rican mother, both Muslims, and Yasmina, an Iraqi refugee living in Chicago with her father. Sam has shamed his parents twice: first by changing his name to a generic American one in order to get a job and, second, by being a divorcee. Since the collapse of his marriage to Tracy, a non-Muslim, Sam has been depressed, confused and dependent on four medications to keep him going. Since his American-style romantic marriage didn't work, his parents want him to have a traditional arranged marriage. Yasmina's father is eager for her to find a husband but Yasmina is haunted by her past in Iraq and in exile in Syria. She deals with her past through her painting but doesn't want anyone to see them. For the most part, their romance is a conventional fictional romance--hate at first sight, then developing friendship, then love and marriage after which things briefly turn a bit less conventional. Yasmina repeatedly tells Sam that she's broken and that she's bound to hurt him but he continues to woo her. He's in love so all will be well. The play also includes brief flashbacks to Yasmina's past with the young man she loved since childhood and the intelligence officers and soldiers who abused her.
     Yasmina could be an interesting character but Malik's clumsiness as a dramatist keeps getting in the way of her storytelling. It's a dark story but Malik seems to want to write a crowd pleaser that doesn't really go to the dark places in Yasmina's past and in her psyche. It's all too nice. The parents are out of a sitcom, the Imam who engineers the relationship is too bland. The flashbacks aren't dark enough given their content. Yasmina has been seriously abused but the play doesn't make us feel that. The climax of the play only makes us ask why Yasmina doesn't tell Sam what's haunting her until after the wedding. Sam tells us that he's troubled but he doesn't seem very troubled. The play stays on the emotional level of a Hallmark made-for-tv film. Ann Filmer's direction reinforces the script's weaknesses. The rhythm of the production is off. There is no sense of forward momentum. The flashbacks are awkwardly handled.
     The actors do what they can with the material. Susan Jamshidi is so good that one wishes her part were better written, that the pain really came through in the script and direction. Michael Perez is sweet as Sam but the part is too one-dimensional. The parents have been directed to play their roles as if this were a sitcom.
     As written and directed, YASMINA'S NECKLACE makes a dark story bland. And, by the way, I don't for a minute believe the ending.

FUN HOME at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater

     If HAMILTON offers an upbeat view of American history, a celebration of ego, drive and talent that is typical of the American musical, FUN HOME, though a musical, is more in the tradition of classical American domestic drama, a probing view at the tensions and unhappiness that can roil under the myth of the American family. What this musical shares with many, if not most musicals, is a celebration of queerness.
     There's a brilliant moment in FUN HOME, botched a bit in Gary Griffin's production at Victory Gardens, when the ten year old Alison is watching a television show like The Partridge Family, one of those 70s sitcoms about a happy American family that also performs together. Bruce, Alison's deeply unhappy father turns off the set and tells Alison to read a book. Suddenly we're transported into Alison's imagination where her own family becomes one of those happy, sappy, singing and dancing families.  Of course, her family is anything but a Partridge-type clan. Alison is a lesbian in embryo, her father a closeted homosexual, her mother deeply frustrated woman. When college-age Alison comes home with her girlfriend, her mother tells her, "Don't come back," not as a rejection but because she wants her daughter to be able to escape this oppressive household. There are things Alison cannot escape, even at 43 years old as she looks back on her family, particularly her guilt at her father's suicide, which came shortly after she came out to her parents. Did her coming out lead to his death? It's a puzzle that can never be solved because Bruce is himself a puzzle. The musical dramatizes the process of her coming to terms with her father and, in the process, coming to terms with herself.
     FUN HOME is not a typical musical, but it's a brilliant one. Jeanine Tesori's score, very much in the Sondheim mode, is full of clever lyrics, very much in character, and lovely melodies. Some of the songs are gems, particularly "Ring of Keys" in which ten year old Alison realizes her attraction to very butch lesbian delivering packages to a coffee shop, and her mother's cry of anguish, "Days and Days." Tesori and book writer Lisa Kron pack a lot into an intense 100 minutes. FUN HOME is, with HAMILTON, a towering 21st century musical, not likely to be topped soon.
     The Victory Gardens Theater production is worthy of the show. I was particularly impressed with Rob Lindley's Bruce, the unhappy, obsessive, sometimes nasty father. Bruce is an oddity in a musical, a completely three-dimensional character. Lindley played the nastiness more overtly than Michael Cerveris in New York, but it was good to see all the contradictions in the character. Everyone else was convincing and committed. Not all the singing was on a par with the New York production, but director Gary Griffin got rich performances out of everyone.
     I had been talking to a producer the day before about the problem of getting young audiences to the theater. It was particularly joyful to see Victory Gardens packed with young people last night. They were attentive to every line and lyric, were totally with the show from beginning to end.

HAMILTON in Chicago

     Since I saw HAMILTON at the Public Theatre a few years ago, the show has become a phenomenon. The first best-selling cast album in decades. Ridiculously inflated ticket prices. For almost a year now, the show has a second company playing an unlimited sellout run in Chicago. I wondered whether, in the face of all the hype, the show would look as good to me as it did at the Public. The answer is a resounding yes. HAMILTON is one of the great works of the American musical theatre. The music and lyrics are brilliant and Thomas Kail's production with Andy Blankenbuehler's almost constant choreography perfectly complement the score. Special mention also goes to Howell Binkley's lighting design. HAMILTON is a perfect example of what Wagner called Gesamptkunstwerk--a unified work of theater in which all the elements perfectly coalesce.
     Overall, I found the Chicago company to be on a par with the original New York cast. I thought Miguel Cervantes brought more to the title role than Lin Manuel Miranda did. He has a better singing voice and is a better actor. Miranda gave you Miranda playing Hamilton; Cervantes gives you Hamilton. If only his Burr, Gregory Treco, was as good. I don't know if Treco was having an off-night, but he was a dull Burr, nowhere near as powerful as the charismatic Leslie Odom was in New York. Everyone else was on a par with the original cast.
     With HAMILTON playing in the old Shubert, now the CIBC Theatre, and FUN HOME at Victory Gardens, Chicagoans can see the two best musicals of this century.

THE REMBRANDT by Jessica Dickey at Steppenwolf

     The Rembrandt is a lovely meditation on mortality and art. Henry (Francis Guinan), a former prep school art history teacher is a museum guard. His dedication to his job and his love for the art keeps him from thinking constantly about his partner Simon, who is dying of cancer. On this Monday morning, Henry has to mentor Dodger (Ty Olwin), a new young guard whose primary vocation is creating graffiti on public buildings. He also has to watch over Madeline (Karen Rodriguez), a young woman assigned to copy Rembrandt's "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer," for an art class. Madeline is grieving the recent death of her beloved grandmother and may be getting sick herself. Dodger, heavily tattooed and sporting a Mohawk haircut, has a peculiar idea of the duties of a museum guard. He goads Henry and Madeline into touching the painting. Dodger believes that people in museums are to disconnected from the art. Henry and Madeline know that Dodger's dares are crazy and destructive but the temptation is too great. Touching the painting moves the play into a different realm. Suddenly we are in Rembrandt's studio. Is this some magical transport or Henry's fantasy? Henry has become Rembrandt, Madeline his maid turned mistress, and Dodger his adoring, nagging son who worries constantly about his father's penury and his mortality. Rembrandt touches the plaster bust of Homer in his studio and the Greek poet appears (John Mahoney), to deliver a long monologue on poetry and mortality. Is it really Homer or is it Henry's terminally ill lover, a celebrated poet himself (also played by Mahoney). The final scene is a touching dialogue between Henry and Simon. Henry, now fired from the museum is terrified of losing his life partner. Simon is realistic about his death.
     On the whole, this is a beautifully written, rich play. I could have done without the scene in Rembrandt's studio. I'm always bothered by plays that reduce great artists to talented idiots (case in point Peter Shaffer's AMADEUS). The contemporary scenes in the museum and the final scene between Henry and Simon are both funny and deeply moving. It's nice to see a play or film that deals with a loving relationship of elderly gay men. Dickey is at her best in dealing with contemporary love and grief--less good at historical fiction (or historical hallucination?).
     The acting was uniformly good. Frances Guinan is superb as Henry, capturing his kindness and his fear. Note to Chicago theatergoers--for some reason, Guinan is only playing the role until October 22. He will be replaced for the last two weeks of the run). John Mahoney doesn't appear until the last third of the play. Homer's fifteen minute monologue could use a bit more energy but Mahoney is his usual charming self as the dying Simon. Ty Olwin captures both the brash, eccentric Dodger and Rembrandt's devoted but chiding son. Hallie Gordon has paced the actors effectively.
     Well worth seeing.

Ivo van Hove's production of Arthur Miller's A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE at the Goodman

     I avoided this production in New York in part because I have trouble with Miller's play--well, particularly the last lines when Miller tries to justify, even praise, his loathsome central character. Miller's great weaknesses was his uncritical view of the respect due to white patriarchs, no matter how flawed or destructive. Now in the age of Trump and the campaign on the part of some men, with Trump's blessing, to restore white patriarchy, A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE seems frighteningly timely.
     Miller once wrote an essay entitled "Tragedy and the Common Man," expressing his desire to adapt Greek tragedy for ordinary American male protagonists. Eddie Carbone, the central character in A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, is a Brooklyn longshoreman who lives with his childless, sexually unsatisfied wife Beatrice and the eighteen-year-old- niece he has raised. Clearly he is in love, or at least in lust, with his niece and, naively, perhaps, she feeds his desire. Neither Eddie nor his niece Catherine are good at recognizing and acknowledging their sexual impulses. Enter  two distant relatives of Beatrice's, Sicilian illegal immigrants Marco and Rodolfo, and things in the Carbone household reach a boiling point. Catherine turns her attention and desire onto blond, handsome Rodolfo, which turns Eddie into Othello. He decides that Rodolfo must be homosexual because he is blond, likes to sing and can make a dress. All this is a way to mask his desire for his niece and perhaps a latent desire for Rodolfo. At the climactic moment, he passionately kisses his niece and, when Rodolfo tries to beak that up, kisses Rodolfo, ostensibly to prove that he isn't fully masculine. When that doesn't work, he turns Rodolfo and Marco into the immigration authorities.
     Eddie is a man who is totally unable to acknowledge his true desires. He demands his authority as patriarch and full respect from everyone in his household. His wife is not to talk to him about the fact that they have not had sex for months. When Marco accuses him of turning them in, he demands a public apology. In a Christian framework, Eddie might deserve forgiveness if he ever confessed to wrongdoing but he will not do that--it would weaken his position as patriarch. Greek tragic protagonists alway had a moment of anagnorisis, of recognition of their complicity in the horror we see. Not Eddie.
      Watching A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE is watching the inevitable damage wrought by a repellent human being. Yet the last lines of the lawyer Alfieri, who serves as a kind of Greek chorus, demand that we see "purity" in Eddie's actions, that we see his demand for an undeserved authority and respect as somehow noble. I could see Eddie Carbone marching with the other Fascists in Charlottesville or shouting "Lock her up" at a Trump rally. He's a man who demands his authority as a straight (maybe), white American male. To quote the 2016 Democrat candidate for president, he's a "deplorable." Too bad Miller, from his 1950s patriarchal viewpoint, doesn't see that.
       Oddly, Miller presents a Sicilian Catholic family with no mention of Catholicism or the influence that might have on the Carbones. There's no religion here. Wouldn't Eddie, in his need for self-justification, go to a priest rather than a lawyer? Miller's only concern is with the irrelevance of the law when faced with passion or a primal code of vengeance. The lawyer-chorus can only watch helplessly as Eddie becomes more and more destructive and one Sicilian vows revenge. Yet Eddie's ultimate weapon to keep Catherine under his control is immigration law.
      Ivo van Hove's production, played on a small, bare playing area, does away with all the trappings of realism and gives us a powerful elemental conflict. The cast was uniformly excellent. Ian Bedford caught all of Eddie's bluster, his jealousy and his domineering nature. He made Eddie interesting--it's impossible to make him sympathetic. Andrus Nichols made his wife Beatrice more tough than the usual dippy Arthur Miller wife. Catherine Combs caught Catherine's naivete and confusion.
     Given the minimalist physical production, one really notices the music and sound effects. I am still a bit baffled by van Hove's constant use of Faure's gentle, elegant Requiem as the opening and closing music. Key scenes are punctuated by ominous percussive sounds.
      All in all, a great production of a problematic play whose passions, in van Hove's hands, become truly operatic.
     
     

Disney's ALADDIN

     As I watched ALADDIN, I thought about how, whether intentionally or not, it is a tribute to earlier forms of musical theatre: the fairy tale spectacular that was popular around the turn of the 20th century and old-fashioned Golden Age musical comedy. It certainly is the most spectacular show I have ever seen. Disney specializes in grand, old-fashioned spectacles enhanced by the possibilities of contemporary computer technology. The show keeps topping itself. Just when you think they have run out of grand coups de theatre, you get another one. Veteran scene designer Bob Crowley has outdone himself and the hundreds of costumes by Gregg Barnes are witty and beautiful. The show is also a tribute to old-fashioned musical comedies. There's a winking, self-reflexive dimension to the show, an acknowledgement of the audience and the history of the genre. One number, "Friend Like Me," is an entire history of Broadway musical production numbers in one song. Director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw has created a valentine to the musical.
       Alan Menken's score could have been written in 1950. No rock or rap here, just old-fashioned show tunes with witty lyrics (Howard Ashman, Tim Rice, Chad Beguelin). The orchestra had strings, horns and saxophones along with the inevitable synthesizers. It's a catchy score while you hear it but not a score you remember after leaving the theatre. I had never seen the animated film so the score was new to me.
         The problem with the show, which was also the problem with THE LION KING (for me at least), is that the show soars during the musical numbers and falls flat during the dialogue scenes. The villains, tall, thin Jafar and short, chubby Iago, are neither funny nor frightening. They may have worked as cartoon characters but they don't work on stage. Physically they look like a comedy team but their are too scripted --the performers don't seem to have personality of their own, a problem endemic to Disney musicals with their assembly line casts who are supposed to repeat exactly the same performance as their predecessors. I came to dread their entrances. They barely have any music to sing, thus seem outside of the world of the musical. In an old fashioned musical, they would have been played by comics whose schtick was both familiar to audiences. They would also have room to improvise (think Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Nathan Lane). Few performers are allowed to do this nowadays. When I saw the current revival of HELLO, DOLLY!, Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce ad libbed a bit. The audience loved it.
     The show really comes to life late in the first act when The Genie appears. I doubt if Anthony Murphy was allowed much freedom to be improvisatory in the machine that is a Disney musical, but he had the funniest material and lived mostly through the musical numbers. It was literally a fabulous performance. Adam Jacobs, the original Broadway Aladdin was charming but I did have a sense that he's done the show a hundred too many times. There was not even the illusion of spontaneity (the illusion of spontaneity is all one can expect in a Disney extravaganza). He gets the best songs and is a terrific singer. Everyone else was perfectly fine, if not as funny as they could be (not necessarily the performers' fault). Real musical comedy is an art mastered only by years of experience. You can't teach someone to be funny or direct someone to be funny. Real comedy comes in part out of the personality of the performer. One rarely sees a group of good seasoned comics in a musical. SOMETHING'S ROTTEN (also directed by Casey Nicholaw), was the only musical I have seen in years with a cast of gifted comics. It was funny in a way that ALADDIN rarely was. Some of the lines were funny, the delivery less so. There was one woman in the cast who had about four lines in the entire show but managed to land laughs better with her few lines than most of the leads did. One problem is that ALADDIN is playing in the gigantic, 2500 seat Cadillac Palace Theatre. I was in the seventh row, so could see facial expressions. Most of the audience was much, much farther back, so all that registered were the heavily amplified voices, large physical gestures and scenic effects.
      I enjoyed the musical numbers enormously--could have done without a lot of the talk. Still, glad I saw it.
     

TREVOR, the musical at Writer's Theatre, Glencoe, IL

     We have moved to Chicago and heretofore, most of my postings will be about Chicago theatre and opera. There's a lot of new theatre in Chicago, often written by playwrights who are not yet known in New York. I'll cover as much of it as I can.
     The Writer's Theatre in suburban Glencoe, is a beautiful modern facility a block from the train station (40 minutes from Chicago). The repertoire is mostly revivals. This season they are offering THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, BURIED CHILD and a new dramatization of DON QUIXOTE. However the season is opening with the tryout of a new musical by the creators of SOUTHERN COMFORT (Book and lyrics, Dan Collins; music Julianne Wick Davis), which played at the Public last season, and the director and choreographer of BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROLE KING MUSICAL. TREVOR I based on the 1994 Academy Award winning short film of the same name, told the story of a flamboyant thirteen-year-old boy who is obsessed with Diana Ross. Trevor discovers that he is gay at the same time his schoolmates do. Their rejection and his own inability to deal with his sexuality lead him to a failed suicide attempt. Trevor ultimately embraces his uniqueness. The film led to the founding of the Trevor Project, whose mission is to prevent suicide among lgbtq kids.
     Collins and Wick have opened up the seventeen-minute film, added secondary characters and fleshed out Trevor's journey. In the process, they have created a charming, touching show. It's sweet and endearing and the dark moments never get too dark. Trevor's imaginary companion, Diana Ross, wonderfully played by Salisha Thomas, is now a major character. Trevor's junior high companions have a lot of energetic numbers. Director Marc Bruni and choreographer Josh Prince keep the show moving at an energetic pace that is perfect for the hormonal adolescent characters. Donyale Werle's sets are simple but highly effective. The cast couldn't be better. Trevor is never offstage and young Eli Tokash, a veteran of a number of Broadway shows, is prodigious. He manages to keep Trevor "natural" rather than a child actor star turn. He's a junior Ben Platt. He is surrounded by a consistently excellent, convincing supporting cast of sixteen.
     My one reservation about the sow is that Trevor's social world seems to be more 1950s than early 1980s. No one seems to know the word "gay," which had been around for decades. The writers seem to be reluctant to use the kind of anti-gay slurs that homophobic kids would use. We get asexual euphemisms like "weird." The show could be a little less tame about how kids really talk.
     In every way, this show is Broadway caliber and worth the train ride to Glencoe. In the Age of Trump when all sorts of bigotry seem to be legitimized, TREVOR is still timely.  

ROTTERDAM by Jon Brittain at 59 E 59 Theatre

     ROTTERDAM could have been didactic and sentimental like a made-for-tv movie on such a hot topic as transgender politics. Instead it is a probing character study of two women at a crisis stage in their relationship. Alice and Fiona are a British couple living in Rotterdam where Alice works for a shipping firm and Fiona is a teacher. Alice, like many British expats, has never bothered to blend into Dutch society. After all, since everyone speaks English, why learn Dutch? To put it mildly, Alice is uptight and an inveterate conflict avoider. She has never come out to her family. In fact, Alice keeps too much to herself. Since she is not good at dealing with her emotions, Alice freezes when Fiona tells her that she is a man in a woman's body and that she wants to transition. From here on, he will be Adrian. We won't ask why it took so long for Fiona to figure this out or why she does so at this particular moment. The playwright seems to be dissecting British emotional constipation as much as gender politics. Alice and Fiona/Adrian share an apartment with Fiona's brother, Josh, who also was Alice's boyfriend until she met Fiona. Josh, a sweet guy, seems to be frozen into the odd position of living with his ex and her lover.
     The play focuses on the emotional roller coaster ride Alice goes on. She's a prickly character who reacts testily when anyone tries to break through the wall of her privacy and reserve. However, living through watching her female lover turn into a man is too much for her. "I'm gay," she cries. The woman she loved is turning into someone else who is not feminine. Alice experiments with living the high (in all senses of the word), life in Rotterdam with a twenty-one-year old party girl, but doesn't find that totally satisfactory.
      ROTTERDAM is somewhat about gender and sexual identity but more about the larger general issue of identity. Alice doesn't seem to have any real sense of self. Fiona is massively changing who she/he is. Josh's identity seems totally to be built on old relationships, on past, not present. It's a fascinating play. Yes, there is a ridiculous plot twist in the second act, and Alice's sudden Dutchness seems to be something out of an "I Love Lucy" episode, but these flaws doesn't weaken the strength of the studies of the major characters. Alice is not a pleasant person to be around. British drama is better at people who are fascinating but not nice than American drama is. The weakness of J.T. Rogers OSLO, for instance, which is likely to win the Tony (alas!), is that it tries to hard to make all of its characters charming. Much of ROTTERDAM is comprised of heated arguments, but they are well and wittily written. Alice is a mess. So is Adrian in many ways. But they are interesting messes.
    The production is cleverly directed by Donnacadh O'Brian and very well acted by the four person cast. Highly recommended.