Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s 1998 Tony Award-winning score for Ragtime (book by Terrence McNally) has many virtues—strong songs, strong characters, moments of great drama—but for my money, it cannot hold a candle to Ahrens and Flaherty’s earlier, less complicated, but no less ambitious musical, Once on this Island. First produced on Broadway in 1990, […]
Author Archives: Jack Helbig
Posted inTheater Review
Rocking With Chekhov
There is something about Anton Chekhov’s first successful full-length play, The Seagull, that attracts playwrights to try their hand at creating their own adaptations—faithful or otherwise. Maybe it’s the fact that the characters at the center of this nearly 130-year-old play—the narcissistic mother, her emotionally damaged son, his talented but blindly ambitious girlfriend—feel so contemporary […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Liz Miele breaks it down
Stand-up used to be a very white man domain. And the jokes you heard there were just the kind you would expect from a world dominated by verbally adept, passive-aggressive—or just plain aggressive—heterosexist white men: dick and sex jokes; ex-girlfriend jokes; racist, sexist, or homophobic jokes; jokes about getting bad service from waiters, baristas, airline […]
Posted inTheater Review
Big songs, too much story
When people talk about the glory years of Chicago theater they rarely mention Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. After opening in London’s West End in 1992, with Jane Horrocks in the title role, it was done at Steppenwolf in 1993 (with Hynden Walch as Little Voice) and was later transferred to […]
Posted inTheater Review
Ring of Fire lacks dramatic heat
Let’s begin with what this 2006 jukebox musical is not. It is not a rich, textured, nuanced, moving, memorable musical biography of Johnny Cash. It does not attempt to do onstage what the rousing, Academy Award-winning 2005 movie, I Walk the Line, did on the silver screen: bring us Cash in his power and glory […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Landree Fleming plants her feet in musical comedy
Until recently, Landree Fleming was best known as a comic actor. She has appeared in over 20 local productions, including stints at the Marriott Theatre, Drury Lane, Chicago Shakespeare, and Porchlight. But over the last year and a half she has begun to branch out into directing. Last season Fleming codirected Paramount’s “Bold” series production […]
Posted inTheater Review
Not a wasted moment in this Measure for Measure
At a time when so many larger, established theaters are cutting back their seasons, laying off staff, or suspending operations, smaller theaters, like the relatively young Forest Park Theatre (it has only done three productions in the last three years, one each summer) give me hope. Performing in an open field, this cast of young […]
Posted inFeature
Alex Nall’s comics are building a small-town world
Writers idealize themselves, spending hours at the computer, polishing their prose to make themselves sound better than they are. Cartoonists spend as much time, or more, to make themselves look, well, cartoonish. Lynda Barry erases her chin and hides her eyes behind opaque spectacles. Art Spiegelman turns himself into a neurotic mouse. In his self-portrait […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Murder, she sang
The last episode of Murder, She Wrote aired on May 19, 1996. Yet, 27 years later, the Internet bristles with fan sites. There’s Murder, She Watched, and two rival sites that both use the name Murder, She Blogged (though one of those is actually a site about true crime, not the television series). And on […]
Posted inTheater Review
A Midsummer with some twists
Is there a Shakespeare comedy better suited for an outdoor production in a park in July than A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Much of the play itself takes place outdoors in the summer, in the woods on the outskirts of a very English-seeming Athens. And the stories that unfold there are just twisty enough to keep […]
Posted inPerforming Arts Feature
Something Wonderful once again
First published in 1978, Jeffrey Sweet’s Something Wonderful Right Away, an oral history of the Second City, and its precursor, the Compass Players, has inspired generations of comic actors and improvisors to try to become part of the Second City or to create their own theater to rival Second City—or both. Ask any prominent contemporary […]
Posted inTheater Review
Not fading away
Alan Janes’s musical Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story is a clever piece of work, mixing the best elements of a biographical play, a jukebox musical, and a cover band concert into a bubbly, tightly written confection that reveals in 100 minutes why Buddy Holly was great and loved as a songwriter and performer and why […]
Posted inTheater Review
Long in the tooth
The Practical Theatre Company has earned its place in Chicago comedy history. In the 80s, this plucky troupe of young, energetic, gifted comic actors lit up stages around Chicago—including CrossCurrents, the Goodman Studio, the space that later became Second City’s e.t.c. space, and their own home theater on Howard Street in Evanston—with their bright, witty, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Call her Kayla
Fresh off her success playing Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s daunting, dark one-hander, Happy Days, Chicago actor Kayla Boye is appearing in a lighter role, that of movie icon (and OG tabloid favorite) Elizabeth Taylor in a one-person show, Call Me Elizabeth, written by Boye. The show is being produced at Venus Cabaret Theater June 16-18. […]
Posted inTheater Review
A claustrophobic Crucible
The Puritans in New England lived fearful, close-minded, claustrophobic lives. Disdainful of all other Christian sects (especially Catholics and Quakers) and of the Native Americans who they were certain worshipped Satan, they were terrified they would burn in Hell forever if they strayed from the tiny path their narrow-minded, authoritarian religious leaders set out for […]