The Magic Of Music Is Healing.
Guest Contributor | Scott Gryder
The fiesta of the “American Mariachi” audience experience began as we approached the Goodman Theatre. There, entertaining beneath the glowing-red marquee, was Chicago’s all-female mariachi band, Mariachi Sirenas! Once inside, as the lights dimmed, the members of Mariachi Sirenas took their seats in the masked, full house. The bilingual curtain speech, first in Spanish, then in English, set the tone for the night: a multicultural fusion of reality, memory, and music.
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“Forever Plaid” Soars on Angel Wings!
The lads in plaid descended from the afterlife to Drury Lane Theatre on Thursday night to complete their first professional gig, a 1964 journey to the airport Hilton cocktail bar, The Fusel-Lounge, cut short by a fatal collision with a school bus headed for the Beatles first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The story might have ended there with the group harmonizing a favorite chord while on the way to pick up new plaid tuxes for the gig, except, of course, for divine intervention, the magic of live theatre and the fertile and creative mind of Stuart Ross.
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“WORLD GOES ‘ROUND” SHINES AT MARRIOTT!
Evoking the essence of one of Kander and Ebb’s most iconic ballads, the return of live theatre at Marriott Lincolnshire began as a quiet thing at the opening of “The World Goes ‘Round” on Wednesday night. There in the dim haze of a ghost light is revealed a massive, distressed stage theatre drape wrapped around a baton among abandoned set pieces, props and the remnants of a hasty exit and another time that seems so long ago. A stage trunk awaits at center stage. A stairway system at the head of one aisle. The remains of a piano that has seen better days in another. Chandeliers lofted high above the stage almost out of view.
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Paramount’s “Kinky Boots” — Acceptance in Red
Paramount Theatre’s smashing revival of “Kinky Boots”, an exuberant, super-charged production of the Tony Award-winning musical that had its pre-Broadway debut in Chicago, electrified the sold-out opening night audience on Friday night. It was the long-awaited return to live performances in the largest and most ambitious musical in the region to date.
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BRILLIANT “MEAN GIRLS” OPENS GOODMAN SEASON
Guest Contributor | Scott Gryder
How many of you can relate to the hierarchy of the social food chain of your own school days? If you’re like me, Goodman Theatre’s long-awaited production of “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play” all-too perfectly delivers a visceral thrill of the high school hunt. But, before I delve deeper into this elegantly balanced comedy-drama, I have to say: Chicago’s theatrical community is resilient. Though masks were required at all times, and socially distanced seating was in place, the house bubbled with the hubbub and comradery expected of any opening night. But you knew the house was even hungrier than ever for the kind of theatre only Chicago can deliver, when it shook with rapturous applause as the house lights dimmed, and the play began.
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March Comes In Like A Lioness!
As the temperatures rise, vaccinations ramp up, and more people are venturing outside, Chicago artists continue to rollout summer and fall plans that include live performances with reduced capacity indoors and out. In the meantime, it’s clear that investing in online programming to bridge the artistic and financial gap caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is critically important.
In a year that has been challenging for every member of the performance community on so many levels, here are just a few worthy opportunities for your support and entertainment.
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SPOILER ALERT: ‘Theatre for One’ Is!
A letter of thanks to a civil rights crusader. The impassioned plea from an incarcerated mother. Social awareness in the midst of a pandemic argument. Just a few of the eight mini-theatrical offerings in a collection entitled “Theatre for One: Here We Are” Court Theatre’s compelling new series that places audience member eye-to-eye—and in the virtual room—with actor. One-on-one. Randomly. Live.
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MOURNFUL MARLEY IS A MULTI-VOICED GEM!
It’s may appear unfair to start a review of a “Christmas Carol” production—particularly the inventive and multi-faceted audio-only version that is now being performed live by A Theatre In The Dark—with mention of the famous opening line “Marley was dead, to begin with… Dead as a doornail.” Then I thought, what exactly is a doornail and why in the Dickens does that grouping of words work so well whenever this classic comes to mind?
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Manual Cinema’s ‘Trudy’ Mesmerizing “Christmas Carol!”
As things get rolling in Manual Cinema’s stunning live stream holiday masterpiece “A Christmas Carol,” Aunt Trudy (N. LaQuis Harkins) is launching a holiday pandemic version of a virtual family gathering and a traditional storytelling hour with one missing member: her husband Uncle Joe, the chief storyteller and keeper of Joe’s Christmas story box. So, it is up to Aunt Trudy to pull out the stick puppets, position the slide projector and stage herself before dimming the lights to tell the tale.
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It IS a Wonderful “Wonderful Life!”
You don’t have to be a sentimentalist to be moved by the residents of Bedford Falls who come around every year about this time to teach us a lesson or two about kindness, compassion and commitment. Small town virtues and familiar faces have a way of putting you in a comfort zone, as American Blues Theater’s stellar online radio show “It’s a Wonderful Life-Live in Chicago” proves again in just under 90 heartfelt minutes.
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Grief Cries Out In The Darkness
Exposing the raw, unsettling and complicated nature of mental illness and its impact, “ ’night, Mother,” the 1983 Pulitzer-prize-winning play by Marsha Norman, speaks even more directly to our isolated culture today than ever before. Even as the conversation between Thelma and her epileptic daughter Jessie begins as any typical night at home, it pivots sharply early on, lifting a shroud on their painful and guilt-filled lives.
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“LET ME BEGIN AT THE START.”
Theatre plays to our senses. What we see: actors on a stage bathed in color and light. What we hear: tense interchanges, tender love scenes, jarring noises in the dark or voices shrouded in whispers. What we feel: joy, shock, or the rousing curiosity for what is to come. And what we can imagine that future to be: a possibility that turns into a story.
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Hershey Felder as George Gershwin Alone will stream live from the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, Italy on Sunday, September 13 at 7 p.m. CDT. As in previous livestream performances, proceeds will benefit theatres and arts organizations throughout North America and Europe severely challenged in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Porchlight Music Theatre is the Chicago beneficiary sharing ticket purchases using Porchlight’s link.
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SANDY DUNCAN - MIDDLETOWN at the Apollo
Dan Clancy’s play “MIDDLETOWN The Ride of Your Life!” is about two couples who meet and forge a 33-year friendship.
It unfolds simply, at first. The all-star cast—Sandy Duncan, Adrian Zmed, Donny Most and Kate Beddeke—take their places on a bare stage with scripts on stands and begin to present, as in a staged reading, the story of their lives together.
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“You Can’t Kill a Revolution.”
Christine Mary Dunford brings to life Chicago’s first female mayor, Jayne Byrne, in the Lookingglass Theater Company world premiere production of “Her Honor Jane Byrne,” now playing at the historic Water Tower Water Works. The play isolates the three-week period in 1981 when the mayor moved into Cabrini-Green after an eruption of gang violence that left 10 dead and 37 wounded. It frames a much broader examination of the tumultuous social, political and racial history of the area in the decades that preceded those three weeks. Whether or not Byrne’s action amounted to anything more than a publicity stunt depends upon your point of view. However, after experiencing the complexity of playwright, director and Lookingglass ensemble member J. Nicole Brooks’s multi-faceted and engaging new work, you will have a better understanding of the issues in play at the time—a volatile period of race relations in Chicago and across America that very much reflects forward to the times in which we live.
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TOGETHER AGAIN… FOR THE FIRST TIME.
PicksInSix® Review | Ed Tracy
By the time Nancy Hays and Alexa Castelvecchi settle in together for the glorious signature duet “Get Happy/Happy Days” in the second act of “JUDY & LIZA—ONCE IN A LIFETIME: The London Palladium Concert—A Tribute!” now playing at the Greenhouse Theater Center, they have already performed a brilliant series of classic solos and duets from the songbooks of Judy Garland and her daughter, Liza Minnelli.
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“Where do the old gods go?”
There is a lonesome wail bellowing from within the Oriental Institute’s dark and cavernous Mesopotamia Gallery. Surrounded on two sides by the carved wall reliefs from an Assyrian palace and casting shadows across the imposing winged bull in the Khorsabad Court, you first hear Timothy Edward Kane as The Poet, singing a haunting song of war. As “An Iliad” written by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare from a translation by Robert Fagles begins, the storyteller finds himself very much in the present, compelled by the gods to repeat the story of the Trojan War—that raged nine years with “nothing to show for it but exhaustion, poverty, and loneliness”—and recount the heroic exploits of its two great fighters—Achilles and Hector.
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