Review by Alissa Norby

As consistent as the hum of a sewing machine and the E-string pluck of a fiddle, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s heralded book musical Fiddler on the Roof has followed the wake of its own self-devised traditions. The piece and its subsequent productions have waivered inconsiderably in its near half-centennial history. The staples of Hal Prince’s original directorial concept, replete with an omnisciently perched fiddler, lavish Russian dance, and Jewish schtick humor were forever synonymous with the musical’s later incarnations.

David H. Bell has thrown most of that familiar praxis out with the horse’s leg. The Marriott Theatre’s latest rendering of the Broadway behemoth dexterously- and mirthfully- scraps some of the authors’ most celebrated gimmicks in exchange for a more conversationalist tonality.

The point of tautest intensity in Joseph Stein’s book, the anti-Semitic pogrom at Tevye’s family wedding, receives a heftier buoying with Bell’s more somber conceit. At the climax of the scene, a Russian guard grasps the vulnerable fiddle, nary waiting a second before breaking the fragile instrument in two.

It is this weighted symbolism, an overarching and unbridled willingness to expose the unhappy truths that have long been swimming in this text, which turns the tide of this Anatevka.

The remaining signature numbers evolve in a similar, albeit understated, manner. The trapeze-like brooms often integral to “Matchmaker” have been replaced by a simple scrub basin and laundry line. The multi-leveled stage landscape that once defined “Sabbath Prayer” is now threaded with hushed candlesticks.

Music director Doug Peck echoes Bell’s sobriety in every cadence of Fiddler’s famed score. “Now I Have Everything” and “Miracle of Miracles” receive refreshingly new arrangements and stagings, proffering a quiet introspection in the place of their traditionally jovial rhythms.

Cogitation, it would seem, is the driving force behind both the show’s directorial and performance approaches. Perhaps the most significant developments with regard to the cemented plot arc arrive in Tevye and his daughters. Recurrently portrayed with the husky bravura of Zero Mostel and Chaim Topol, the latest interpretation of the cantankerous dairy farmer is imbued with a gentle, everyman quality by the venerable Ross Lehman. Allowing original author Sholem Aleichem’s narrator to breathe new life into his morally vacillating monologues, Lehman grants his audience more immediate access to the musical’s universal themes. The original concept of this mammoth-sized orator encountering a faith challenge from his God has largely been unfastened. Instead, Lehman presents Tevye as a common man, in both thought and circumstance, who must grapple with impending change.

Jessie Mueller, Dara Cameron, and Laura Scheinbaum reverberate this pensiveness as the three matchless daughters. Although all of the comedic stunts are hit, “Matchmaker” is ultimately portrayed with a sobering foreboding by the three increasingly nuanced Chicago actors. Mueller tenders eldest daughter Tzeitel with harrowing clarity of the consequences of both cultural and religious constraints. During one particularly incisive moment, Mueller delivers such uncurbed despair at the thought of a betrothal to butcher Lazar Wolf, it seems as if the entire shtetl may burst at the ridges with her indocile declaration.

Bell has used the musical’s notion of metamorphosis as a tool to revise Fiddler in almost all stagnated mores of its original production. Embedding both direction and score with a contemporarily honest sensibility, Bell approaches this Anatevka within a more human framework than his predecessors. It is this earthly approach to the established text that ultimately reminds us of the impending and unconquerable nature of change. It is a change that, like the reappraisal present in this new production, will ultimately form its own tradition.

“Fiddler on the Roof” runs through April 25, 2010 at the Marriott Theatre Lincolnshire. For tickets or more information, please visit www.MarriottTheatre.com.

By Patrick McDonald

Special to ShowBiz Chicago

CHICAGO – The tale of the David Nathie Barnes journey with his new play, “A Love Lost Life: The Unauthorized Story of Marlon Brando,” is as compelling as the fine piece of revealing theater that is presented. Fashioned originally as a screenplay, it got the involvement of Brando’s son Christian before his untimely death, and made it through several incarnations before its present form at The Theatre Building Chicago, running now through March 14th.

Essentially it is the Marlon Brando story, boiled down into a captivating 90 minutes, covering three stages of his career and the tragic circumstance of Christian Brando’s shooting of his half-sister’s lover. Brando is played by three actors, first in full youthful height of his influence in the 1950s, the scarred middle-aged Brando right before his comeback in the early 1970s and the wheelchair bound, ready-to-die shell who narrates the proceedings.

The plays first presents Brando in his young icon days, ready to go to his first Hollywood meeting, sneering at his new agent all the while clad in his t-shirt and jeans rebellion. As the play unfolds, there is the potent use of an NPR report on the actor’s death, which summarizes the profound impact he had on acting during the last twenty-five years – and beyond – of the 20th century.

It is then that the middle-aged and older Brando join the young image on stage. It is the old Brando (a revelatory Robert Ashkenas) who then narrates the rest of the story, with meditations on his love lost life, including the early crush and embarrassment of his stardom, his inability to form lasting relationships and his sad road to decline, a descent that ultimately took his fledging family down with him.

The first part surrounding the youth orientation is represented in a fictional encounter at a Brando hosted party between James Dean (Beau Forbes), Marilyn Monroe (for a time, Brando’s lover, played by Audra Yokley) and “The Wild One” star (Michael Perez). This soft section is marred by the younger actors’ revealing discomfort with taking on the famous personalities. Even the old narrator seems more teddy-bearish when relating this era.

But the narrative picks up steam with the arrival of middle-aged Brando, intensely embodied by Jamie Asch. Picking up the mannerisms and the cadence of the famous voice, but never collapsing to parody, Asch imbues his Brando with an edge-of-the-knife anger and depression, which sets up the next generation’s diminished emotional capacities. Asch carries the Brando weight as an albatross that is passed to the older narrator, and the play takes on a sharper tone, with the sins of the father becoming the tragedy of the children.

The playwright David Nathie Barnes then portrays Christian Brando, partnered by his half-sister Cheyenne (Claudia Di Biccari). It is now the sibling story, portrayed like a devastating grand opera. Barnes is in concert with his character and Cheyenne’s impending breakdown is evenly exposed. The crutch of this event resonates like the echoes of a gunshot, riveting throughout.

All of this lifetime is captured on a brilliant three-tiered set in which the old Brando roams like a cat in his ninth life. What seems like a fresh, hip bungalow when Dean and Monroe inhabit it morphs into a shabbier den of iniquity when the middle- aged boozy Brando and his kin flail about in it. Set designer Shaun Renfro created this vital arena.

In essence, we are all victimized by false idolatry. The “star,” Marlon Brando, never allows himself to acknowledge responsibility within it and his admirers are constantly being seduced by the dishonesty of fame. The lesson is we all need to be more like contenders, and less like bums.

“A Love Lost Life: The Unauthorized Story of Marlon Brando” runs through March 14th at the Theatre Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont, visit www.TheatreBuildingChicago.org.

By Patrick McDonald

Special to ShowBiz Chicago

CHICAGO – Ice Age? King of the Mammals? The futility of war? Thornton Wilder (”Our Town”) covered it all through one wacky New Jersey family way back in 1942 with “The Skin of Our Teeth.” The Artistic Home theater group fires up a sumptuous revival of the classic currently on their stage at North Clark Street in Wrigleyville through March 21st.

Filtering the history of man, biblical religion, sex and philosophy through the meanderings of a suburban home in New Jersey creates an absurd atmosphere that gets more bemusing as the story builds. The play is essentially narrated by the family maid, Sabina, who introduces the audience to Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus and their children, Gladys and Henry.

The three acts center on events in civilization that influence both world culture and the relationships of the Antrobuses. Act One is the Ice Age,a period that threatens the eastern seaboard while Mr. Antrobus strives to invent essential technology (e.g. the wheel, etc.). Act Two takes place both on the other side of the ice storm and in Atlantic City, where Sabina has morphed into a beauty queen. The final act is a post-war saga, where the forces involved in the conflict split the Antrobus family asunder, and in time together again.

The play also has built in stops and starts where Sabina breaks the fourth wall – abandoning character and talking to the audience – while a harried stage manager scurries about attempting to keep order within the chaos.

The performance and staging of this American essential (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) is heightened by a multimedia presentation within the head-scratching premise. Witty YouTube style video loops are played before Acts One and Two to give a sense of proportion to the surreal proceedings, effectively introducing the Antrobus family to their circumstance.

The staging makes excellent use of the large performance area. The Antrobus home is transformed impressively between Ice Age and war, and the Atlantic City episode evokes the atmosphere of a carnival air that prefaces another disaster to come. The actors play about the arena, using the theater entrances and seating area to spread out, especially during a sequence involving a regally costumed dinosaur and wooly mammoth.

The crucial role of the family maid Sabina is handled with aplomb by the radiant Maria Stephens. She commands the stage in her role, one that asks her to engage the situation with overt sexiness, physical grace and eccentric narrative discourse. She is a force of nature not to be missed.

The heads of the Antrobus household have fun with the twists of their characters and the joyride that goes along with it. John Mossman, as Mr. Antrobus, is best when he takes on his ‘King of the Mammals’ persona, positively Mitt Romney-esque. His dutiful wife, played by Kathy Scambiatterra, morphs from suburban housewife to political arm candy to battle-scarred survivor while never losing her cheery, pasted-on disposition.

The Antrobus children, portrayed by Katherine Swan (Gladys) and Nick Horst (Henry), are given some transformations of their own to journey through, and run hot and cold in various degrees of performance. Gladys evolves from innocent girlhood to vamping temptress, and Swan manages to hold onto her throughout.  The quiet, more serious points of the play occur in the post-war of the third act, which don’t play as well as the higher profile follies of the previous two. But the thematic fulfillment is rich in context, surviving all the ups and downs of this timeless treatise on humankind’s interment with their own history.

The Artistic Home has taken on the Thornton Wilder challenge in adapting this beloved farce and, in keeping with the activities of their Wrigley Field neighbor, has knocked it out of the park.

“The Skin of Our Teeth” runs through March 21st at the The Artistic Home Theater, 3914 N. Clark St. in Chicago, visit www.theartistichome.org.

By Patrick McDonald
Special to ShowBiz Chicago

CHICAGO – Death, in all its finality for the person who expires, is actually a survivor’s story. It is for those who are still here to make sense of it, to put the finishing perspective upon the life that has been extinguished. And it was within the shocking suddenness of an unexpected demise that author Joan Didion wrote about her survivor’s experience on death and dying, in her 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.

In 2007, a stage version was adapted by Ms. Didion and opened on Broadway. It is a straight forward retelling of the events that comprise the book, performed by a single actress representing the author. Chicago’s Court Theater opened its version last month, magnificently rendered on their stage by Mary Beth Fisher and directed by Charles Newell.

The Year of Magical Thinking actually covers a period of time between late 2003 to the summer of 2005. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, laid in a coma with septic shock in a New York City hospital on December 30th, 2003. Didion’s husband and Quintana’s father, the prominent author and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, has just come back from that hospital with Didion and they sit down to dinner in their apartment.

After offering him a drink, Didion described Dunne as sitting by a fire, reading a manuscript for review, wondering if the scotch he was drinking was single malt. And then there was silence. Didion recalled that she thought he slumped in his chair to tease her, play acting as everyone has performed on occasion. The rest was a blur of paramedics and a rush to the emergency room. John Dunne was pronounced dead on arrival of a massive coronary one hour later.

“Magical thinking” refers to the thought process in which Didion faced his death and the methodical steps in caring for her ill daughter in the midst of that specter. The phases of her mourning are brought to light by Ms. Fisher, steeped as they are in the cold professional atmosphere of hospitals, attending on-call doctors and drug therapies that cost $20,000 dollars. “It will happen to you,” Fisher as Didion warns the audience as she begins the narrative, and the journey bears reasonable similarities to the eventuality of that aphorism.

Fisher relates the events from a rectangular riser in the middle of Court Theatre’s elegant black box ambiance. Her set consists of a simple white desk and chair, appointed with flowers and a single coffee cup. She is dressed simply, using a scarf that is artfully draped on her, to emphasize certain points in the storytelling, tying and untying the garment to relieve nervous energy. She uses the spare stage gracefully, moving like n ballerina in a cage at times, creating the time and space to illustrate certain junctures in Didion’s magical undertakings.

Special mention must also go to the lighting design (Jennifer Tipton) and sound design (Andre Pluess). As Fisher relates Didion’s specific magical thinking, the lighting is altered to take on an otherworldly, smoky quality. When the spare music or sound effects were necessary, they punctuated rather than distracted.

Mary Beth Fisher’s approach is gentle, bringing an emotion and a smile to Didion’s sometimes academic prose. There is a line in the show that speaks to how matter-of-fact a tragic event can be retold, that people often focus on ordinary circumstances surrounding the awful circumstance – the clear blue spy in September as a plane heads toward a building, for example. Fisher as Didion relates several of those background ironies plainly and beautifully, giving them a salve-like quality against the crushing pain of loss.

It will happen to you. But somehow through the inspiration of Joan Didion and the incredible performance of Mary Beth Fisher, in addition to your own magical thinking, you will get through it as well.

“The Year of Magical thinking” finishes its run February 14th at the Court Theatre, Chicago, visit www.courttheatre.org for show times and details.

Few souls have been spared the sweltering heat of an arduous family reunion. Skirted glances, biting quips, and awkward embraces abound in these casserole-laden territories. But few clans can hold a candle next to the smoldering febricity that infests the Weston household, both on and off the thermostat.

The course upon which Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County has been propelled has become something of contemporary theatrical legend. Commissioned and produced by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2007, the production became an overnight sell-out success in Chicago before making its much-hailed arrival on Broadway. Gripping its audiences with a familial toxicity that proved all-too-relatable, August swept the 2008 awards season (including a Pulitzer for Letts) and has continued to set its sights onward.

The Weston guild is now making its first Broadway-backed pilgrimage to its birthing place, a long awaited homecoming for its dutiful Chicago viewers. Penned by Letts, a playwright known for such squeamish thrillers as Bug and Killer Joe, August is a densely calibrated, sucker-punch Midwestern drama. Riffing off predecessors such as Sam Shepard and Eugene O’Neill, Letts has reinvigorated the often-exhausted genre of family dysfunction. At once coolly sardonic and stirringly morose, the piece clutches tight as it tethers you along through the Weston family’s apocalyptic demise. And from the look of things Tuesday night, there is still nary an eye to its deafening storm.

Shepherded by the unyielding Estelle Parsons, the current touring cast of August: Osage County exacts a near-perfect positioning for the sweating tragicomedy. Ms. Parsons helms as Violet Weston, the acidic matriarch of the Pawhuska kin. After having lost–or rather misplaced–her husband on a particularly disarrayed summer evening (though certainly not an irregular one), Violet summons her three daughters to return to their childhood homestead. The physical abode, a glaring structure by designer Todd Rosenthal, is itself a haunted foreboding for the destructive path that is to be traversed.

Barbara (Shannon Cochran), the eldest and most gainsaying of the psycho-symptomatic trio, arrives with disaffected husband (Jeff Still) and bedraggled teenage daughter (Emily Kinney) in close tow. Ivy (Angelica Torn), the self-effacing middle child who resides nearby, reluctantly attends to the parent for whom she has long served as a repository for libel. An erupting emotional instability and incestuous relation are promptly found to be the tolls paid for assuming the arraigning role of Violet’s caretaker. In fact, in an ultimately seasoned turn of pessimism, Ivy chalks up all of her relations to “accidental genetics”. Karen (Amy Warren), the youngest and most incognizant of the bunch, arrives with slick fiancé in paw and Dr. Phil quotes at the ready.

Amidst the cataclysmic unveiling of harbored disdain, sexual misconduct, and narcotic addictions spews the locus of the Weston dilemma. Despite having extended invitations to attend her period of seeming abandonment, Violet has neither need nor want for such familial abetment. Slurping down painkillers and spurting ill-tempered ripostes, it is soon discovered that Violet employs her offspring as little more than flesh-filled punching bags. With an uncanny knack for vitriolic cruelty and tentacles at the reach, Violet sets out to single-handedly excoriate what little remains of her daughters’ sanities.

Parsons is revelatory in the role. An actress deftly particular in her craft, Parsons permits her viewers to ascertain the underpinnings of Violet’s despotism. A victim of her own family’s neglect and propensity for battering, Violet clings to a long-seeded survivor’s mentality, armored for whichever curveballs life has yet to send. The exertion to survive ultimately manifests itself in her unbridled need to lacerate those who veer too close.

Shannon Cochran renders a harrowing performance as the stalwart Barbara. Easily slipping between Letts’ most sardonic and morose, Cochran tenders an affecting portrayal at each stage of Barbara’s metamorphosis. Yet the cast as a collective has yet to reach an organic, wholly unalloyed portrayal in these characters’ dramatic propulsions. The ensemble tends to eschew the perverse and dolorous for the comical. Segments of the text that once warranted quiet reflection are now met with uproarious laughter, an audience treat in which the actors have clearly learned to indulge.

Yet one of the most formidable production aspects of August (indeed, there are several) has always been Anna Shapiro’s methodically suited direction. Shapiro invites us to observe the Weston family as if the mere instance of pre-dinner grace is ripe cause for an anthropological examination. There are minimal explorations of the theatrical in Shapiro’s directing. In its place she has allowed for the occurrence of absolute naturalism onstage. You are not provided with a seat at the dinner table, but rather given a sliver of window through which to peer and observe a most excruciating demolition. And judging by the sweating intensity that courses through the veins of those present for the meal, it is a welcomed distance.

Frequently daunting with few intermittent allowances of relief, August: Osage County is a drama both consuming and unapologetic in its bleakness. “You have to admire the purity of the survivor’s instinct,” Beverly Weston muses during the play’s opening sequence. But it is a darkness that is well worth the journey and stay, as well as several return trips.

“August: Osage County” runs through February 14, 2010 at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. For tickets or more information, please visit www.BroadwayInChicago.com.

The allaying hum of the bayou provides a guiding cadence for the denizens of The Brother/Sister Plays, a world in which fireflies ignite as rapidly as a prescient dream. A new voice premiering in both form and linguisticism, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney lilts on both the whimsical and visceral in his characters’ pilgrimages through the projects of New Orleans. The oft-episodic text, now receiving its latest incarnation at Steppenwolf, encompasses three narratives deftly informed by Yoruban folklore and Afro-Caribbean mysticism.

The characters that breathe through this triune echo the powers of Oyo mythology in both name and peregrination. The young female Oya, an ill-fated locus of In the Red and Brown Water, also serves as the Yoruban goddess of wind and change. Shango, Oya’s inured and intermittent lover, similarly reigns over the skies with thunder and lightning. This gnawing potentiality of Moirai hovers closely beside these Louisiana backwaters, a swamp-like everyman’s land in which both mortal and deity can give rise to gale.

Yet McCraney carefully imbues the spiritual with the humane, examining instances of the ordinary by route of the locale’s waggish dilapidation. Indeed, McCraney compels his listeners to navigate the grounded emotionality- gestated by desire, betrayal, loss and desperation- that carbonates the waters of Louisiana.

The trilogy pilots the interconnected, intergenerational lives of a kith inhabiting a metaphysicalized project. Caught between thirsty consciences and familial ties, as well as spiritual doctrine and mortal truth, McCraney’s fodder live in both the celestial and earthly worlds. It is in this literary vein that McCraney has created a genre of transference, confounding the long-obeyed separation of dramatic realism and theatrical fantasticism in exchange for a partnering between the two. This approach does not merely create a new stage amalgam, but rather the inauguration of a form in which genres are permitted to reverberate with one other in the creation of fable. A new conversation between fantasy and reality, performer and community, is subsequently unlocked.

Limned with urbane patois and winking cultural references (two characters in Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet improvise a number from “The Wiz”), McCraney frequently refracts this corporeality through shades of chimera. Characters in McCraney’s world often weave stories of dream and wonderment between such unskinned instances of funeral processions and parole visits.

In the Red and Brown Water, the first and most lyrically-based portion of the work, proffers the tragic story of Oya (portrayed with unrivaled poignancy by ensemble member Alana Arenas), a young woman bequeathed to the ill fates of stasis. Forgoing an athletic scholarship to care for her ailing mother (a powerful Ora Jones), Oya falls for Shango, an asperous and unfaithful soldier. Unable to give birth yet desperate to feel fertile, Oya becomes enmeshed between the worlds of fantasy and reality in her need for fulfillment. Ripe with street vernacular, In the Red and Brown Water invites its audience to purge its preconceptions and adopt a more raw notion of sacrifice, one in which we may partake in our own world. The ceding of body, mind, and sexual innocence are particularly at rise in the text.

Like its siblings, In the Red and Brown Water is told through choreographed poeticism. With the rhythmic tapping of water basins parroting McCraney’s dialectic meters, In the Red and Brown Water aptly sets itself inside designer James Schuette’s barren set.

The latter section, inclusive of both The Brothers Size and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet encompasses a more naturalistic, cross-generational narrative clip. In the arresting, albeit truncated, The Brothers Size, Ogun (a harrowing K. Todd Freeman) wrestles with the return of his brother, Oshooshi (the versatile Phillip James Brannon), a young man who has been granted asylum from the penitentiary only to bout with more trouble. Marcus gives voice to the intersectionality between homosexual identity and the African-American community. Fearless in its conceit, Marcus addresses both the comically awkward and harshly belittling encounters that can meet young LGBT-identified individuals. Though at times bordering on crutches of caricature and archetype, Marcus blisters with honesty in its depiction of the agony that befalls all rites of budding sexuality.

Perhaps what is to be most seminal about this triadic work is the pairing of two uniquely artistic conductions. McCraney’s text receives its syncopated pulse from Tina Landau’s intricately calculated, yet incredibly lyrical, direction. Employing aspects of the Viewpoints method (which she developed with cohort Anne Bogart), Landau sculpts her performers both physically and mentally into tableaus that enlighten McCraney’s words. Using Scott Zielinski’s lighting design, Landau has created a palate of narrative reflexivity. Silhouettes in projected shadows create a sense of dual habitation. Landau entices her audience to live in, and be aware of, all domains upon which the stories unfold, both human and otherwise.

Landau has also ushered her inquisitive search for the living community through McCraney’s dialectics. Performers in The Brother/Sister Plays often announce their own stage directions, including shifts in psychological states, to conceive a more candid platform of storytelling. One receives the sense that the story is meant to be both felt through the body and heard through the ear, a conscious reminder that our contemporized conceit of theatre still roots itself in the oral telling. It is introspective aspects such as this, while swiftly moving along the underbelly of the text, that suggest a most prolific future for these two partnering artists.

“The Brother/Sister Plays” runs through May 23, 2010 at Steppenwolf. For tickets or more information, please visit www.Steppenwolf.org.

CHICAGO – The revival of interest in the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls got a significant boost when the 2006 film version was released. Chicago now has the opportunity to see a brilliant new production of the stage version at the Cadillac Palace Theater, running from January 19th through January 31st.

The rejuvenated show premiered in New York City’s Apollo Theater last November, where the setting of the play begins. The revised soundtrack even includes a song exclusive to the film, second act’s “Listen.”

The story is a parallel universe version of The Supremes, set in the appropriate era of their rise and tribulations, the 1960s and ‘70s. The girl group featured is called the Dreamettes – later The Dreams – and features Effie White as the lead singer, with Lorrell Robinson and Deena Jones backing her up.

From their roots at the Apollo Theater to their stint as James “Thunder” Early’s background singers, the Dreamettes claw their way up the performance ladder to get a shot as an individual act. It is just as they are about to get their big break when their hustler/manager Curtis Taylor announces that the beauty Deena will now sing lead over the more full-figured Effie.

As the Dreams continue rising to the top, Effie feels more and more slighted, and her reactionary anger leads to her ouster from the group. The second act of the musical chronicles the unstoppable Effie’s comeback, both with her career and repairing the relationships she had to sever when she lost her Dreams.

This is a unique production, as it uses modern stagecraft in a way that heightens the experience of what is essentially a set-in-the-backstage story. Large LED diode panels were linked to a computer display that could create virtually any scene backdrop required, from glittery stage curtains to CBS-TV control rooms. The effect was sensational and sweetened the Dream’s journey and the epic song moments.

And what glorious songs they are. From the hits “Dreamgirls” and “One Night Only” to the narrative exposition tunes (the play is more of a rock opera format than the film) including “Steppin’ to the Bad Side” and “I Am Changing.” The songs were the storytellers, giving both an immediacy to the moment and a conveying vehicle to whatever concert, press conferences or TV studios that the Dreams inhabited in that time so long ago.

Special consideration is given to the show stopper – now, then and forever – of “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.” This remarkable moment was absolutely knocked out of the theater, maybe even the planet, by Indianapolis native Moya Angela as Effie. There is an otherworldly connection to this song when it is given a proper rendering, and Angela transported the audience to whatever functional universe they needed to be.

The rest of the cast was strong, helped along by the previous Broadway and film versions. Chester Gregory, as James “Thunder” Early (the James Brown prototype) gave his youth and effervescence to the character and bred more understanding regarding his motivations, moreso than Eddie Murphy in the film. Gregory gave Early a distinct drive and energy that underscored his indiscretions, as in “the thing that makes you great also has the power to destroy you.”

This production of Dreamgirls is a spellbinding night of musical theater, offering an essential American show business story that can be related to any rise and fall in life’s path. We are all Dreamgirls, or Soul Brothers like James Early, getting up and performing, hoping for the either the big break or at least some recognition of our unique existence.

“Dreamgirls” runs January 19th through January 31st at the Cadillac Palace Theater, Chicago, visit www.BroadwayInChicago.com.

By Patrick McDonald
Special to ShowBiz Chicago

CHICAGO – Plucky orphans, a lost dog, a capitalist with a heart-of-gold and America’s favorite comic strip heroine are back in Chicago, just in time to celebrate Christmas a month later.

Annie, the venerable Broadway stalwart (it premiered way back in 1977) begins a limited run at the Auditorium Theater from January 20th through the 24th.

The old girl orphan hasn’t aged, only we have. The songs, story and characters are as familiar in American pop culture as its previous comic strip incarnation. Annie began her life as “Little Orphan Annie” in 1924 in the funny pages, created by Harold Gray. Already popularly rendered as a strip and radio show, Martin Charnin began the adaptation of the Broadway musical in the 1970s.

Recruiting librettist Thomas Meehan and popular composer Charles Strouse, Charnin fashioned a hummable mega-hit, which includes the standards “Maybe,” “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” “Easy Street,” “N.Y.C.” and of course, “Tomorrow.”

The touring company of the Auditorium production is a tight, professional ensemble. Mining the rich source of previous productions and two film versions, the lead characters and background chorus bring life and energy to the essential story of a girl’s orphanage in New York City, featuring Annie, a girl who knows that somewhere out there the parents who abandoned her at that orphanage doorstep will someday come back to her (”Maybe”).

The orphanage is run by the comically inept Miss Hannigan, who is sick of her bureaucratic job and the orphans under her care (”Little Girls”). When Annie is swept away to spend the Christmas holidays with billionaire Oliver Warbucks, the plot engine is revved up to include a nationwide search for her parents, a visit to newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt, and a Christmas Eve surprise.

There is a lot crammed into the somewhat overlong book, but the cast makes up for the length with a verve that is a cut above the level of a touring company. Lynn Andrews as Miss Hannigan is a scene stealer, milking her oiliness for maximum laughs, especially during her signature “Little Girls” number. David Barton as Warbucks is a revelation, with the perfect balance of perplexed bluster and heart-melting adaptation in his bond with Annie.

The orphan chorus was strong and showcased their cuteness for all it was worth – it’s great to see that a simple kick line can still draw an audience applause in this cynical age. Madison Kerth as Annie was up to the challenge, but it would be interesting to see this particular lead interpreted differently. It seems that all the girls as the Little Orphan are required to belt like Andrea McArdle, the original B’way Annie (Andrea can be pleased that she established such a legacy). Kerth also seemed more comfortable as an orphanage member than a poor little rich girl.

And in one more astounding piece of casting, Jeffery Duncan as Franklin Roosevelt was like seeing the man at that Disneyland Hall of Presidents, the actor looked exactly like him. Quick, someone call a casting agent for “Sunrise at Campobello.”

The first act was more compelling than the second, but it seems as though all of the stronger numbers are also in this initial sequencing. We all can live the rest of our lives without hearing “New Deal for Christmas” again, despite the cheeky references to Roosevelt’s brain trust cabinet. But ultimately it is the songs that still maintain, despite their almost clichéd over-extension. There is real wit in the wordplay, such as “so senator, so janitor, so long for awhile” and references to 1930’s culture in “go ask the Gershwins or Kaufman and Hart, the place they love the best” that fulfills the tunesmith in all of us.

And this faithful musical, set in the Depression, sure had some similar funkadelics to our current economic downturn. Sometimes adding some sap, like a lost dog found and a little orphan adopted into the material world, is just the right ingredient to make it through another day- into that elusive territory called Tomorrow.

“Annie” runs January 20th through January 24th at the Auditorium Theater, Chicago, visit www.BroadwayInChicago.com for show times and details.

“If a girl isn’t pretty like a Miss Atlantic City, she should dump the stage and try another route,” dictate the Brooklyn denizens of comedienne Fanny Brice’s initial bout with fame. This ideology, a conceit around which Isobel Lennart’s Funny Girl book is haplessly wound, propelled both Brice’s psychological journey as well as Barbara Streisand’s more untainted trek to the lights of Broadway. A recklessly aphoristic chapter of showbiz lore, Funny Girl never decidedly resolved itself to a clear narrative track. The original 1964 production, buoyed in part by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s iconic score (“People”, “Don’t Rain on My Parade”) promptly became an unrivaled- and inevitably unmounted- star vehicle for the then-unknown Streisand.

But William Osetek and Gary Griffin were willing- and ready- to test these often enervating odds. Befitting Drury Lane’s recent track record of whiz-bang musical productions, Funny Girl bestows the unassuming suburban venue with a nourishing brush of artistic risk. Juxtaposed with the film’s equitable take on Brice’s life on and off the Ziegfeld stage, this new biographical rendering shifts its focus to the performer’s precarious psyche, with Osetek and Griffin adroitly behind the lens.

Indeed, the tempestuous rise of both Brice’s vaudevillian turn and molten wedlock give warrant to this retraction. Resolute on achieving a male partner as dotingly veracious as her audiences, Brice encapsulates a character defined by want, struggle, and an inevitable void. Osetek and Griffin largely transport the text away from the bedazzled hems on Ziegfeld’s chorus girls and sparkling marquees in exchange for the more desperate backstage view. Seeped in wooden browns, Jack Magaw’s set provides an almost hermitic playing space into which the audience may peer. Brice’s tragic propensity for self-penance perches rightfully on display in Drury Lane’s latest endeavoring.

Paired with Osetek’s subtly inquisitive direction, Sara Sheperd’s Fanny is a cerebral, empathetic creature. Sheperd uses her Legally Blonde-trained schtick when scenically warranted, yet proffers an arrestingly humane interpretation of Brice’s ill-fated frays with intimacy when segregated. In contrast to her bravura vocals, Sheperd allows her audience to marinate silently with Fanny’s demons when permitted by the text. Often left alone onstage gazing into an invisible vanity, Sheperd parlays a nuanced sense of isolation to her captive onlookers, allowing the audience to sit with Fanny through her ultimate desolation. That isn’t to say that this Funny Girl turns a blind eye to its comedic source, but rather it pairs this sense of aw-shucks whimsy with a more muted intonation. The results, as helmed by Sheperd, are often harrowing to observe.

Yet the supporting cast does not seem on board for an excursion of similar verisimilitude. Paul Anthony Stewart’s Nicky Arnstein, the worldly conman for whom Brice sacrifices her self-efficacy, serves more caricature than human. Stewart rarely allows Arnstein to delve into the realm of masculine vulnerability, instead imbuing the sweet-tongued gambler with a derivative mien of charming immodesty.

In the same vein, Sheperd’s Ziegfeld-wrenched flapper paeans lack delegated support. Dampened in number and ebullience, Osetek and Griffin’s ensemble bits lack the garish opulence of the original stage follies. The numbers exhibit a paucity of the canned indulgence and blinding aesthetic that become synonymous with Ziegfeld’s productions. As a result, Fanny’s onstage marvels and dressing room confessions do not develop a wholly antithetical relationship to one another. Sheperd often appears as deserted in the sweating limelight as she does in front of her dressing room mirror.

Yet ultimately the production’s fearlessness in intrapersonal inspection eclipses its setbacks. It’s an unwaivering case study of the relationship between the conceits of both public and private performance, and the position that each assume in one’s quest for identity. For the first time, Fanny Brice may have found her appropriate spotlight.

“Funny Girl” runs through March 7, 2010 at Drury Lane Theatre Oakbrook Terrace. For tickets or more information please visit www.drurylaneoakbrook.com.

The cast of “In the Heights”. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

Ice cold Pepsis, enticing lottery tickets and café con leche are just a few of the daily necessities dished out by narrator Usnavi to the urban denizens of In the Heights. “My parents came with nothing…and it’s all about the legacy they left for me,” he chimes to a pulsating red-light backdrop of the George Washington Bridge in the production’s high-octane opening number. That inspiriting canvas of Latin-American life boiled with the effervescence of the borough’s own sweltering sun in the 2008 production at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre. However, the current leg of composer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s joyous epistle to New York’s Washington Heights junction has yet to reach the same decimal point on the thermostat.

Bouncing its way through Miranda’s Latin-infused score, the fabric of In the Heights has maintained an indefatigable faculty- since its original stint at Off-Broadway’s 37 Arts- to inspire a doting sentimentality among viewers despite Quiara Alegrai Hudes’ precariously spined book. The conceit is pillared by three youthful inhabitants plagued with questions of legacy, identity, and future. Each is a second-generation Latin American, circumscribed in a nabe that once proffered hope but now faces the threatening looms of gentrification.

Usnavi, the spritely bodega owner, endeavors to return to the island of the Dominican Republic, the native home of his prematurely deceased parents. Vanessa, a vulpine salon worker, frets the uncertain credit standing that holds the propensity to fuel a one-way ticket out of the barrio. Nina, the youngest of the hankering bunch, places her sights somewhere in between her two peers’. Weighed with the stress of her family’s parlous finances, Nina has dropped out of Stanford University to the disheartenment of both kin and neighbors- two groups that, in the bosomed streets of Washington Heights, are often one and the same.

Woven into this mural is a cluster of the barrio’s residential shakers. Bemoaning bounced checks, late tax payments and communal gossip as they zip past the A-train entrance to 181st street, these individuals imbue the narrative with its infecting zest. Smirking at the woes that plague her daily trials, salon owner Daniela (a tart-tongued Isabel Santiago) is sure to include a dollop of gossip in her customer’s mani-pedi packages. Benny, a bootstrapped employee of Nina’s family-owned taxi service, harbors feelings- requited yet verboten- for the college freshman. The expenditures at stake in In the Heights are often frivolously low, while the ordained Act 2 resolutions too syrupy sweet. Even Anna Louizo’s panoramic view of the barrio, while seasoned in verisimilitude, suggests a rosy, riskless demeanor.  Yet neither Hudes nor Miranda waiver from the cynosure consideration of what it means to find a home, both in geographic and psychological renderings.

Elise Santora and Arielle Jacobs in “In the Heights”. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

Fortunately the wispy nature of the character arcs has clearly been tailored to evaporate from memory in the gyrating heat of the production’s song and dance idioms. Yet despite Andy Blankenbuehler and Luis Saldago’s pepped-up choreography (a tightly-knight marriage of hip-hop and Latin influence), the current cast does not seem quite up to the task.  Even Miranda’s throbbing score, a testament to the partnership between pop invasion and Broadway standard, tends to fizzle out in the production’s most warranting of numbers.

Kyle Betran is much too prudent in the role of Usnavi, a narrator/ensemble role drafted to meta-theatricalize the action while simultaneously propelling it. Miranda’s shredding lyrics and twisting bass lines do not percolate off of Beltran’s tongue with the ease necessitated by a character whose mom-and-pop shop acts as an emotional refuge for his community. The feisty Shaun Taylor-Corbett hits all the comic notes as Sonny, Usnavi’s would-be philanderer cousin, yet misses on the young man’s unveiled allegiance to his dishelmed streets. Arielle Jacobs projects a refreshing naïveté as the troubled Nina, yet her despondency too often recedes into the cerebral during numbers such as “Breathe” and “Everything I Know”, both anthems that would typically platform for more heightened revelations.

Ultimately this spry fraternity of performers could not consistently kindle the buoyancy licensed to them by the narrative’s libretto.  Which is a shame, because it is this passion that warms these neighborhood streets.

“In the Heights” runs through January 3, 2010 at the Cadillac Palace. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit www.BroadwayInChicago.com.