The Scottsboro Boys is not your grandmother’s Irving Berlin musical.  It’s based on the true story of nine African-American male teenagers who were falsely accused by two white women of rape while on a train passing through Alabama, and who underwent multiple trials and re-trials and spent decades in prison before being paroled.  It’s a painful scar in the history of race relations in the country.  It’s definitely the last thing you’d expect a musical to be about.  Additionally, Kander and Ebb tells this story using the conventions of minstrelsy, the popular, but polarizing, 19^th century performing arts form, which many artists and audiences alike have shunned because it reinforced black stereotypes.   The show is intense and deeply uncomfortable at times, but that’s what great theater is supposed to do.  And the use of the minstrel show elements- blackface, cakewalk, the endmen characters who perform all of the oppressive white roles such as the sheriffs and lawyers- deeply and powerfully drive home the fraught, explosive nature of race relations.  We’ve come a long way, yes, but we need to recall the past to ensure that we move forward in the present.

As you can expect from Kander and Ebb, the songs are beautifully constructed – from the energetic opening number “Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey!” to the muscularly rhythmic “Commencing in Chattanooga” which mimics the laid-back kineticism of train riding to the inspiring, defiant, 11 o’clock number “You Can’t Do Me”.  Director and choreographer Susan Stroman stages these numbers gracefully and powerfully against the minimalist sets of designer Beowulf Britt and the expressive, expressionistic lighting design of Ken Billington.  But there are also songs that come off jaunty and festive but are also provocative and discomfiting – as an audience member you feel ambivalent, are you supposed to embrace these songs, or be repulsed by them?  For example, there’s the jaw-dropping “Electric Chair” which is a musical number, energetically choreographed by Stroman, about well, getting electrocuted by the electric chair.  Or the toe-tapping charmer “That’s Not The Way We Do Things” sung by the boys’ New York-based lawyer, Samuel Leibovitz, which mercilessly skewers liberal good-doing.  Or the brassy “Financial Advice” sung by the Alabama Attorney-General which talks about “Jew money” in bribing witnesses.  Really?  Wow! But that’s the impressive cojones of Kander and Ebb, and book writer David Thompson:  for this explosive subject matter, there shouldn’t be any tiptoeing around “delicate” audience sensibilities. 

The cast is exceptional, singing, dancing, and acting their hearts out, but special nods to the magnetic Joshua Henry, just off American Idiot on Broadway, as the most well-developed Scottboro Boy character, Haywood Patterson; the outrageous, larger-than-life endmen Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon; and the versatile Sean Bradford who plays both Scottsboro Boy Ozie Powell and one of the female accusers Ruby – his fabulously femme rendition of Ruby’s recantation song “Never Too Late” is one of the highlights of this superlative show.

This isn’t a perfect production.  Only Haywood comes off as a distinctly memorable character among the nine accused teenagers; I wanted more specificity in the characterizations of the other eight Scottsboro Boys.  Also, I thought the whole costuming of the Boys for most of the play in angelic white is a pretty obvious, clichéd reference to their undeniable innocence.  I wanted more show-stopping moments for The Interlocutor, the clueless pseudo-master of ceremonies of the minstrel show, played by David Anthony Brinkley with self-effacement and great humor (and which will be played by John Cullum on Broadway, reprising his Vineyard Theater role). But the inimitable power of this production, which comes to complete clarity in the final scene (a major spoiler I will not talk about), erases any reservations about some of the material or staging.  For those highfalutin theatergoers who still think that musicals are fluffy confections that cannot compete with the thoughtfulness, the intellectual rigor, or the political sophistication of a straight play, buy a ticket to The Scottsboro Boys.  You don’t know what you’re missing.

The Scottsboro Boys will be at the Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN, until September 25.  It starts previews on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, 149 W. 45th Street, on October 7.  Check out the Broadway website for more information.

You can enjoy Frost/Nixon on a purely narrative level, since Morgan writes with so much verve and bite on the preparations leading up to, and the actual conduct of, the 1977 televised interviews which Nixon wanted to use to repair a tarnished image, but which Frost and his team planned to utilize to extract an on-air confession of Nixon’s direct involvement in breaking the law regarding Watergate.  Morgan’s scenes are crisply constructed and to the point, with seamless shifts between the self-congratulatory one-upmanship-plotting that Nixon and his Chief of Staff, Jack Brennan, do, and the sweaty, nerve-wracking research that Frost’s team, led by journalist Jim Reston, undertake (while Frost is attending movie premieres).  Contey’s masterful, cinematic direction makes these scenes suspenseful and riveting (with the invaluable help of Mike Tutaj’s video projections which establish the mise-en-scene with impressive specificity, despite having the set primarily consist of two chairs, a desk, a crescent-moon platform, and TV monitors).  But the play is also a magnificently rendered, always-engaging character study, in which the two protagonists are more similar than different, despite their varying motivations.   Both Frost (who, at the beginning of the play, has been banished to Australia after his US network show was cancelled because of low ratings) and Nixon are trying to reclaim that addictive, irreplaceable state of fame and adulation they had once tasted, and which to them represent the achievement of the respect and validation they’ve craved for all their lives.  Both are alter-egos of each other – ambitious, driven, cutthroat, motivated by outsider childhoods, fighting for a prize only one of them can win.  The theme of the play is exceptionally brought out in  Morgan’s stunningly brazen use of dramatic license near the end of the play, when a drunken Nixon makes a call to Frost to subtly concede the interview fight, but also to make the point that he knows what the journalist is made up of and is up to, one fame whore to another.

Writing this good can only bring out the best in actors, and Frost/Nixon has two of the best performances I have seen this year. Terry Hamilton is as brilliant as Frank Langella is in the film – a mammoth, outsized performance that captures Nixon’s insecurities, craftiness, determination, and ruthless ability to tread the grays and white spaces.  He is also laceratingly funny; and impressively vulnerable in the video close-up in the final scene where Hamilton exceptionally captures Nixon’s complicated personality – defeated but still defiant, seeking absolution but also convinced he did what he had to do. Hamilton is matched by Andrew Carter’s meticulously crafted, strongly nuanced Frost.  Frost, in Carter’s performance, shrewdly plays on how people perceive him on the surface – a good-looking, vivacious party boy – in order to conceal his ability to go for the jugular when his opponent has laid down his or her guard.  It is a brilliantly realized performance.  The supporting cast is excellent, but props must go to Matthew Brumlow’s intense, focused Reston, David Parkes loyal and canny Brennan, and Beth Lacke’s smoldering Caroline Cushing, Frost’s girlfriend.

I have to come out and say that if you haven’t gone to see a TimeLine production, you’re missing out on some of the best Chicago theater – between Frost/Nixon and last year’s The History Boys, they’ve proven, without a doubt (despite the grumblings of some Chicago theater snobs) that they belong right up there with the Goodman, Steppenwolf, and Victory Gardens in being the go-to theater for the Chicago/regional premieres of the most important plays of our time.

Frost/Nixon is playing at TimeLine Theatre Company, 615 W. Wellington, until October 10,2010.  Get your tickets now, before I shun you all permanently!

Surprisingly, Chicago in the early fall will be packed with must-see musicals (a genre that, to me, isn’t really our theater scene’s forte).  I’ve fully recovered from the trauma inflicted in the spring by the trainwreck that was The True Story of the Johnstown Flood, the single worst play I’ve seen this year, so I’ll be traipsing back to the Goodman’s Albert Theater for Mary Zimmerman’s sure-to-be-fresh take on Leonard Bernstein’s fantastic Candide (per Chicago Theatre Addict’s interview with musical director Doug Peck, the script will be developed through the rehearsal process with the actors, which include refugees from Broadway’s Rock of Ages, Geoff Packard and Lauren Molina) – in my opinion, one of the most exquisite musical theater scores of all time (previews begin on September 17).  I’ll be traipsing back as well, no Metra-railing to be exact, to Glencoe, site of a top-notch A Streetcar Named Desire,  for Writer’s Theatre’s production of another classic musical, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock’s She Loves Me (begins September 14), directed by Artistic Director Michael Halberstam and starring a slew of Chicago’s top-notch actors, including Kevin Gudahl, Heidi Kettenring, and Jessie Mueller.  Between Candide’s “Glitter and Be Gay” and She Loves Me’s “Vanilla Ice Cream”, I’ll be trilling like Barbara Cook in no time! (Cook originated these two plays’ female lead roles on Broadway in the 1950s).

Since I’ve added Barbara Cook to my personality, I will be the perfect audience member for Court Theatre’s it’s-so-insane-it-can-only-be-good approach to Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (begins September 16) , directed by Chicago theater MVP and The Hypocrites’ Artistic Director Sean Graney, in which six actors will be performing all of the play’s 24 characters, including two sets of twins.  Interesting.  There will be one actor per character in Timeline Theatre Company’ s Frost/Nixon (begins August 17), although Nixon may have more conflicting sides to him than a crisscrossing parallelogram.  Lou Contey directs the Chicago premiere of Peter Morgan’s multi-awarded play, and some really interesting actors are in it (including one of my favorites, the always terrific Matthew Brumlow, essaying the play’s conscience, Jim Reston).  On the other hand, an all-ensemble cast, including Laurie Metcalf and Kevin Anderson, headline Steppenwolf Theater’s world premiere of Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit (begins September 9), directed by ensemble member Austin Pendleton.  I’m not really sure what it’s about, but it all starts off with a barbecue.  Hmmm.

I’m off to Minneapolis later this month to see the pre-Broadway production of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s The Scottsboro Boys at the Guthrie Theater, written before Ebb’s death in 2004, which was highly-acclaimed during its off-Broadway premiere at the Vineyard Theater earlier this year.  Susan Stroman is directing this musical about the trial of nine African-American teenagers in the rape of two white women in 1930s Alabama.  Although most of the Guthrie cast will be re-creating their roles in New York this fall, John Cullum, who will play the Interlocutor on Broadway, isn’t appearing in the Guthrie production.

Thanks to my day-job, I’ve been flying to New York City every few weeks, so I’m able to catch some shows in between the client meetings.  I’m breathlessly anticipating the Broadway mounting of Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter, a dazzling combination of live performance and the original film, previously seen at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater.  Friend of From The Ledge,  Steve on Broadway,  selected this play as number one on his best of 2009 theater list.  I’m breathless, as well as a little apprehensive, to see what Dutch director Ivo van Hove has up his sleeve in his revisiting of Lillian Hellmann’s The Little Foxes at the New York Theater Workshop.  The last time I was at NYTW was for van Hove’s crazy-ass The Misanthrope, where tomatoes and a pecan pie were stuffed down the lead actor’s crotch (in addition, garbage was strewn all over the stage- New York City garbage, yes, kinda gross, but kinda fascinating as well).  I wonder what kind of crotch-stuffing and garbage-hauling will happen this time around?!

I’ll be in Washington DC in mid-September and I’ll be catching the beginning of the US tour of the UK’s acclaimed Tricyle Theater Company’s mammoth, ambitious take on the fraught political and socio-cultural history of Afghanistan, The Great Game:  Afghanistan, at the Shakespeare Theater Company.  This collection of 12 half-hour plays from different writers runs a total of six hours and sent the UK theater critics in a passionate, ecstatic tizzy last year.  I’m also planning to see Signature Theater’s revival of Chess, Tim Rice and ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson’s musicalization of a chess match.  Signature Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer is directing and Broadway actors Euan Morton and Jill Paice are starring; early previews are generating tremendous buzz.

I’ll be writing about all of these shows, so stay tuned!

I’ve always found Hugh Wheeler’s book for A Little Night Music to be a little too text-heavy, a little too-lengthy, and somewhat clunky in its transitions, especially compared with its exquisitely compact source, Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 dazzling film, Smiles of a Summer Night, about changing romantic relationships among lovers from different generations over a summer weekend in turn-of-the-century provincial Sweden.   I have also always been perplexed by the placement of the beautiful and blisteringly truthful song “The Miller’s Son”, sung by the maid Petra, right after “Send In the Clowns”, which has always made it seem anti-climactic.  And that problematic placement is especially pronounced in this production, when Peters, as the aging, suddenly grounded Desiree is unsurpassable in her interpretation of “Send In the Clowns” and Leigh Ann Larkin as Petra is merely serviceable in her “The Miller’s Son” (but more on that later).  The afterglow that you’re supposed to be experiencing after a highly satisfying “Send In The Clowns” becomes more like, uhmm, sweat stains under your armpits.

And I wanted my delirious, delicious afterglow, dammit, because Peters’ “Send In The Clowns” is a highlight of my theatergoing life.  “Send In The Clowns” is almost like a brilliantly conceptualized mini-play set to music, subtly but also masterfully painting the anguish, the sense of loss, the disappointment, the potentially delusional hope, of Desiree realizing, in her middle-age, that she may never have had a truer love than her former lover Fredrik.  Peters doesn’t just sing the song (and she sings it beautifully as expected from someone who originated two of Sondheim’s most memorable characters, Sunday In the Park with George’s Dot and Into the Woods‘ The Witch) but also acts it, astoundingly, clearly revealing to the audience Desiree’s memories, indecisions, and complicated relationships.  It is a great performance, not just a great musical theater performance, consistent with her work throughout the rest of the production – her Desiree is seductive but also weary, delicate-seeming but also warm-blooded and bawdy, self-involved but also smartly self-aware.

Stritch gives a terrific performance, as well, as Desiree’s rich mother, Madame Armfeldt, her first on Broadway since winning a Tony for her one-woman show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty, in 2004.  And I could imagine that her take on the role couldn’t be farther from Lansbury’s, because Stritch displays none of the put-on aristocratic airs that are traditionally associated with Desiree’s mother; she is jaded, withering, firmly tethered to the ground, a 1940s broad crossed with a cabaret act in turn of the century corsets.  It’s a unique interpretation, but she also makes us believe that this old, frail woman was a steely, calculating butterfly in her youth who seduced rich men and their fortunes, and then broke their hearts.  And her take on “Liaisons” is also more acting, than singing.  Of course she hits the notes (hey, she first performed one of the most iconic Sondheim songs of all time, Company’s “Ladies Who Lunch”), but she superbly acts through it, giving the indelible phrasing, meaningful pauses, and thoughtful inflections that make the song not just a celebration of the art of love but also a strong, passionate rebuke to the younger generations to remember that intrinsic artistry.

Alexander Hanson, the sole hold-over from Nunn’s Menier Chocolate Factory staging, is sexy, funny, and wonderfully confused as Fredrick (and if Desiree’s former lover is this daddy-hot, I’m not sure why his young wife Anne insists on keeping her virginity.  I’d jump him in a heartbeat).  Aaron Lazar as Count Magnus, Fredrik’s buffoonish rival for Desiree, doesn’t have the larger-than-life swagger, say, that Michael Cerveris brought to the Chicago Shakespeare production, but he is energetic and sings beautifully.  Erin Davie as his wife, Countess Charlotte, is appropriately self-deprecating, but seems to be gangly tomboy than glamorous nobility, although, like Lazar, she is a terrific singer as well.  Katherine Leigh Doherty as Desiree’s teenage daughter is radiant and impressively holds it together given that she has to play against Peters and Stritch most of the time. My problem is with the three other major roles.   Ramona Mallory’s Anne is quite annoying, actually, too studied and artificial.  Leigh Ann Mallory’s Petra has the Nordic look down pat, but performs the wonderful “The Miller’s Son” like she’s auditioning for America’s Got Talent:  it’s a generic performance, with none of the earthiness and sad wordliness that I’d like to see in a song about using sex to advance socially (qualities that a pre-Grey’s Anatomy Sara Ramirez demonstrated in truckloads at the Ravinia concert version).  Then there’s Hunter Ryan Herdlicka as Henrik, Fredrik’s repressed seminarian son who’s pining for Anne, his stepmother.  I’m not really sure why he’s playing this role.  He struggles with many of the complicated Sondheim notes in “Later” (made even more complicated by Jason Carr’s streamlined orchestrations); and although he is blandly handsome, he is also quite wooden, never really convincing in his intensity and enthusiasm.  Nunn’s decision to cast Herdlicka is as perplexing to me as his decision to use David Farley’s shabby-chic-meets IKEA-warehouse-sale set, full of distressed mirrors, faded carousel wallpaper, garish upholstery, and cheap painted wood.

But, ultimately, none of these matters since the Peters-Stritch-Sondheim dream team still prevails.  The non-stop cheering during the rousing, hearty standing ovation at curtain call just proves that fact.

A Little Night Music is in an open run at the Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th Street, New York City.  It’s worth the plane fare to NYC, I guarantee you!

As my avid blog readers know, I was stopped breathlessly in my tracks by Matt Hawkins’ brilliant Cabaret for The Hypocrites earlier this year.  I was also dazzled by Strawdog’s recent production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan that had the energy and the bravado of an artsy loft house party.  So my expectations, I guess, were pretty high coming into Red Noses.  Unfortunately, I think my issues start with Peter Barnes’ material, about an idealistic priest who seeks to spread joy and humanity during the darkest days of the medieval Plague, which isn’t on the same level of skill or complexity as the other two plays.  I think the play, as written, is a little too precious and cute-sy, and although it makes some salient points about religious hypocrisy and the fact that social institutions tend to become distanced and out-of-touch with its members and stakeholders, it’s also not terribly interesting. Hawkins’ staging hips it up – the large ensemble performs in modern dress, music director Mike Przygoda sprinkles rousing musical numbers of late 70s/early 80s pop songs (“Faith”, “Only the Good Die Young”, etc.) throughout the show to annotate the narrative, yellow gook is slapstick-splattered all over the stage either by puking, or in a really kinda gauche move, pissing, to represent the horrors of the Plague.  Unfortunately, unlike Cabaret, where Hawkins’ direction was masterful, mature, and controlled, his work in Red Noses is a little too slap-happy, giddy, and all-over-the-place, which makes the show feel less like a clearly-conceptualized work, than an advanced Improv workshop.  I’m also a little disturbed that this production feels very similar to the just-closed The Good Person of Szechuan  with the same energetic pop musical numbers; the casual, very contemporary demeanor of the cast;  the whole sense of play in addition to play-acting.  Since Red Noses is an earlier production, I have to wonder whether some of the play’s artistic decisions influenced Szechuan so much so that what I thought was fresh and daring in the latter was really an echo of the former?  I don’t think there’s anything wrong in incorporating what previously worked, but I’d also hate to see theaters become one-trick theatrical ponies in the future.

The acting, of course, makes up for some of the show’s shortcomings.  Once again, this production showcases some of our city’s best actors in impressive ensemble work.  The priceless Matthew Sherbach, who can make you convulse in breathless laughter with the rise of an eyebrow, is irreplaceable as one half of one-legged, ballet dancing twin brothers.  Anderson Lawfer is wickedly funny, but never campy, as the blind musician LeGrue.  Shannon Hoag once again demonstrates her impressive comedic chops as a sex-starved nun.  And John Ferrick, as the inspired and inspirational lead character, Father Flote, is radiant, affable, and pretty darn sexy.  He makes the somewhat silly premise believable- with his charisma and boundless enthusiasm, it is conceivable that he could indeed bring together a group of hopeless, miserable, surrounded-by-death people to believe in redemption and salvation.

 If Red Noses comes off as somewhat messy, Billy Elliot, on the other hand, is technically polished, so polished, in fact, that it seems every emotion, every line, every friggin’ musical number is calculated and meticulously constructed – musical theater by blueprinting.  I didn’t really buy into the film and its story of a boy who finds himself through dance set against the backdrop of the 1980s coal miners’ strike in the UK, and I thought Julie Walters’ Oscar-nominated dance teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson, was overbaked and overmugged.  Thank goodness the fabulous Emily Skinner gives the musical’s Mrs. Wilkinson interesting layers – she encourages Billy’s passion for ballet since she recognizes his special talent, but you also get the sense that it’s also a way for her to live vicariously through him her what-could-have-beens.  Skinner is always a fantastic musical theater performer (her Gooch in the Kennedy Center’s Mame several years ago continues to be one of the more memorable performances I’ve seen), and she makes Mrs. Wilkinson brassy and brittle, but also warm-hearted.  The Billy in the performance I saw, Tommy Batchelor, looks a little like Jamie Bell from the film, and is a fantastic dancer, but he doesn’t have some of the edginess that Bell so memorably imbued in the movie.  His performance, though, of the showstopping “Angry Dance” which closes the first act is riveting, intense, technically superlative, and absolutely worth the price of admission.   The rest of the cast is terrific, with huge props to Susan McMonagle who gives the small role of Billy’s dead mother a clear inner life.

Despite the performances and the creative staging of the musical number “Solidarity”, which co-mingles scenes from Mrs. Wilkinson’s dance class with scenes from the front-lines of the strike, Billy Elliot, like the film, still feels too emotionally uninvolving to me.  It’s partly because I don’t think Elton John and Lee Hall’s songs have the genuine heart-stopping emotion of the best of musical theater; they play more like artsy commercial jingles (and there’s no song that you memorably hum after the show, the trademark for me of the best musicals).  It’s also because a lot of the musical numbers have been staged by Stephen Daldry, the film’s director as well, as big, bedazzling, bombastic crowd pleasers intended to elicit whoops and thundering applause from a casual theater audience on a night out on the town.  You get the bang for your Broadway in Chicago buck, but you also don’t get the wondrous quality of musical numbers that grow organically out of a well-written book.  And that’s a shame, because the best musicals make you whoop and applaud and stomp your foot because you want to, not because you’re expected to.

Red Noses is running for two more weekends, until August 15, at Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway.  Billy Elliot – The Musical is running until January 15, 2011 at the Ford Theater for Performing Arts/Oriental Theater, 24 W. Randolph.

Di Pietro updates Schnitzler’s daisy chain of sexual partners – the play starts with an encounter between a male hustler and a closeted soldier in a cruising park, the next scene has the soldier picking up an uptight graduate student in a locker room, and so on it goes, until eight pairings later, an older famous closeted journalist hires the hustler from the first scene for a sleepover in his mansion.  Despite some memorable one-liners, there’s really nothing in F**king Men that we haven’t seen before – it’s like Queer as Folk warmed over in a hotdish.  There’s a closeted movie actor, a bisexual college student, a long-term gay couple in an open relationship, a porn star looking for love, among others, and lots of hot, male-on-male action (well, until the older journalist arrives – hey Joe Di Pietro, seniors have sex too!).  These boys are horny, lonely, conflicted, horny, deceitful, self-absorbed, horny.  Some themes that I thought should have been given more play, such as when does one reveal his HIV-status to his sexual partner or why people agree to stay in long-term open relationships, are brought up, then glossed over.  The gay Looking for Mr. Goodbar writing is trite; the relationships superficial without any honest resolutions; the characters tired archetypes.  Director Tom Mullen makes the most out of the sub-par material:  the pacing is tight, the scene-changes and lighting shifts unobtrusive, the blocking well-thought out (although I’m not too sure why the gorgeous Beau Forbes, playing the closeted actor, displays his wang in a scene that is supposed to be played with the actors’ backs to the audience).  The cast is solid, with the always interesting Ryan Lanning a standout once again as the neurotic, flamboyant playwright who hooks up with both the porn star and the actor (really, some of us have all the luck).

The Kids Are All Right starts off with what seems to be a gay premise:  the teenage kids of a lesbian couple seek out their sperm donor and invite him into their lives.  But gay filmmaker Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Bloomberg addresses broader, compelling, provocative themes:  What constitutes familial bonds?  What are the emotional and moral implications of having the sperm donor participate in the child’s life, when the very nature of the donor act calls out for both anonymity and distance?  In the light of all the polarizing debate around gay marriage, how does one define family within our 21^st century context?  What is the best way to rear children in that context?  The film isn’t as weighty as The Hurt Locker, for sure, but The Kids Are All Right is as relevant and as reflective.  Although Cholodenko and Bloomberg tackle important issues, they also write scenes of such sincere familiarity and truthfulness that the film is a genuine pleasure to watch.  Scenes such as the Moms (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, both brilliant) awkwardly trying to figure out if their teenage son (a wonderful Josh Hutcherson) is gay; the sperm donor (an effortless Mark Ruffalo turning in a very complex, multi-dimensional performance; he is my early pick for Best Supporting Actor at next year’s Oscars) meeting the kids (a luminous Mia Wasikowska plays the older child) at his restaurant for the first time;  Moore and Bening having a fight during dinner with their close hetero pals- these are scenes that make you stand back and say whoa!  That’s totally me, or my friends, or my family members up on screen, dealing with the complexities, the inarticulateness, the anxiety and disappointments of everyday life.  And whether my friends, my family members, or I are gay or not.

Cholodenko works with this dream team of an acting ensemble brilliantly.  If there is justice in the world, Bening will finally win her Oscar (wait, I hope there isn’t any arggheeke@@#!! Hilary Swank arggheeke@@#!!  Awards-bait movie coming out later this year!).  It’s a riveting, beautifully nuanced performance – the scene when she confronts Moore with her infidelity with Ruffalo’s character is amazingly, painfully played.  Moore is her peer- beautifully and heartbreakingly capturing her character’s search for validation and accomplishment.  Wasikowska and Hutcherson are so warm, funny, truthful, and luminous, that you’re left highly impressed with great talent at such young ages.  But Ruffalo is the standout for me here – his Paul is both seductive and smug, reckless and thoughtful, initially perplexed at encountering children he has never known and then bravely, almost desperately, embracing them and the ready-made lives they’ve brought with them.  Oh, and I never thought anyone can raise my temperature (ahem, among other things-!) when they say “swiss chard”!

The Kids Are All Right is, in my view, a must-see for everyone, gay and non-gay alike.  It’s a film that allows for conversation and reflection; unlike F**king Men, for example, it doesn’t reinforce preconceptions or heighten dissimilarities with the “straight world”.  Being gay, ultimately, isn’t about being different; it’s about being the person you’re meant to be.

F**king Men is at Theater 773, formerly the Theater Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave., until August 8.  You can catch The Kids Are All Right at the Landmark Century, 2828 N. Clark St., or other select theaters in the Chicagoland area.  It’s set to open wide in the next few weeks.

Anderson plays Doug, newly-released from prison and coming to stay in his elder sister Sheila (Meg Thalken)’s affluent Glencoe household.  She’s away on business so he spends his time with her prissy, delusional, OCD husband Philip (a really excellent performance from Francis Guinan), fired from his job due to suspicion of white collar theft, and her depressed, bullied, gay genius teenage son, Andrew (a convincing Bubba Weiler), who hates both his parents and wants to kill himself.  Doug has enough problems of his own – he is prone to violent outbursts, he hasn’t been able to sleep for the past five years, he is stalked by a woman (Cynthia Baker) who wrote him letters while he was in prison, he doesn’t know how to re-start his life after incarceration.  He doesn’t want to be the one “saving” these two dudes from their demons, but in the couple of days they spend together, he helps them find the beginnings of redemption.  Yawn.  The premise just feels so much like a “Lifetime for Bros” TV movie, littered with narrative and character potholes as big as the ones on Touhy Avenue.  Why is Doug inconsistently portrayed – sometimes he is mean and obnoxious, sometimes he is agreeable and tender, sometimes he is so full of joie de vivre (the whole Rolling Stones sing-along) that it feels like he has never been in prison?  It’s great to have a complex, multi-dimensional character, but his motivations, what makes him tick, should be clearly depicted as well.  We never know exactly why Doug is angry, why he tried to kill himself in prison, why he tried to kill someone which sent him to prison in the first place, why he feels so alienated from his family (there are hints about lack of familial love and understanding but Johnson never fully develops them).  With the murkiness of Doug’s character and his relationship with Andrew, the play’s ending feels contrived and unconvincing.  I think Anderson turns in a heroic job, able to capture the intensity of Doug’s emotions when needed, and displaying that sexy-edgy spark that made him the next-big-Hollywood-thing in the 1990s after Sleeping with the Enemy and the TV series Nothing Sacred, but I don’t really think Johnson gives him enough to work with here.

Weiler and, especially, Guinan also turn in brilliantly realized performances despite the shortcomings of the script.  Weiler has the brittleness of someone who thinks he is too smart and too good for the rest of the world,  but he also has the achy loneliness and terror of a teenager who doesn’t yet know his place in that world, and who doesn’t have the emotional support (from parents or mentors) to figure it out.  It’s an arresting, impressive performance. It’s particularly impressive since we don’t really get to see why Andrew doesn’t feel that support.  OK, Philip runs a very structured, rule-oriented household but is that enough to kill yourself over?  Maybe Johnson should have had Andrew work as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda to give the character a sense of perspective.  Also when Andrew says his mom Sheila is a sadist, the audience is truly perplexed since the only time we see her with him, she’s mellow, understanding, almost groveling. Whaat?!  The whole conflict between Philip and Andrew over the feeding of the tropical fish feels dramatically innocuous and actually quite unrealistic to me.  Fortunately, once again, Guinan is a pleasure to watch.  He captures Philip’s emotional rollercoaster beautifully – terrifying but frustrated when he explodes at Andrew over the dead fish, heartbreaking when he asks Sheila for a divorce, heartwarming when he helps Doug with his tie.  Unfortunately, we never get to truly know Philip – why is his marriage with Sheila on the rocks (is it just because of the alleged white collar crime or are there other issues?), or why is he really hard on the rules with Andrew (is it his OCD nature, bad parenting, or something more profound, like an attempt to make sure his son doesn’t turn out to be a white collar crook in a bad marriage like him?  Unfortunately, Johnson doesn’t help us much).

The female characters are not fully-fleshed out and seem to serve only as props for the narrative and the male characters to move forward, so kudos to both Baker and Thalken for giving them the good old college try (the unfortunate Thalken has to play all her scenes talking on her cell phone, shoved to the ends of the stage, since Sheila is supposed to be away).  Sandy Shinner’s direction is so unobtrusive that it almost feels invisible.  Jeffrey Bauer’s set design is terrific in capturing the feel of an affluent suburbia, but the whole rotating stage to denote scene changes is a little too 1980s for me. With the technology and resources available to a major regional theater such as Victory Gardens, there could have been more inspired and innovative approaches to use (Exhibit A:  Todd Rosenthal’s work at A Parallelogram).  On second thought, inspired and innovative probably isn’t what the script was looking for.

A Guide For The Perplexed is at Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave., until August 15.

Not for lack of trying, I missed both the New York production and the Chicago premiere (at Northlight Theater last year) of The Lieutenant of Inishmore due to schedule conflicts, so I made sure I got a ticket to the LA premiere, currently onstage at the Mark Taper Forum, when I was on a trip to the West Coast a couple of weeks ago.  I gotta say, despite all the admiring publicity surrounding this play, I’m not as sucker punched by Inishmore as I am by The Pillowman or by the subtler horror of The Beauty Queen of Leeanane.   It really pains me to say this, but I don’t think McDonagh is saying anything profound (not that he has too, but still, you’ve come to expect it of him, given his track record) in this play, which is a really tiring example of unbridled, stylized playwriting excess.  Padriac, a loony tunes, pretty extremist IRA member who’s aspiring to create a splinter group of his own, goes home to his small town to see why his beloved pet cat has taken ill, and unleashes a gruesome homecoming involving his IRA comrades, a surrogate cat, and the various village denizens (his drunk father, an airheaded teen, and the teen’s cow-shooting, Padriac-worshipping older sister) when things don’t turn out to be what he expected.

Inishmore’s themes are pretty obvious:  human beings have a violent streak; violent acts beget more violent acts, until the whole cycle just becomes bigger than what we imagined; in the end though, our redemptive qualities, which we try hard to subvert, surface.  McDonagh and Milam revel in portraying these themes in a hysterical, shock-value oriented fashion, with he-didn’t-just-say-that zingers and a pretty over the top staging of murderous carnage in the second act.  It’s all-hysteria-all-the-time, and we don’t really see anything we haven’t seen before, and depicted much better in other ways and forms (exhibit A:  David Cronenberg’s beautifully-rendered film A History of Violence).  Plus the characters are just not that interesting – you never understand why Padraic is so insane or why Mairead, the chick who’s hot for him, is so determined to enlist in the IRA.  I really admire Pine’s dedication to prove himself to be more than just flavor-of-the-cinematic-season beefcake, but his performance starts out at such an aggressively excessive level and never stops, with nuance barely visible along the way.  I also never really believed in Padraic as menacing – wacky and temperamental yes, but truly dangerous, no- maybe because Pine just has this cuddly boy-next-door quality which doesn’t come postmarked with an edge.  I’m not sure what I, or anyone for that matter, will cuddle though, because the really good-looking Pine is also angularly, almost painfully thin, so much so that I kept on forgetting about his character, and thinking of Pine, the actor, strapped-down being force-fed milkshakes and burgers (people, lift yourselves out of the gutter!).  The rest of the cast (including a pretty funny Andrew Connolly reprising his Broadway role as an IRA hatchet man) is fine, watchable despite all the frenzy.

Bruce Norris’ The Pain and the Itch would be on that top theater list of the past ten years as well, together with The Pillowman.  His newest play, A Parallelogram, despite posing stimulating questions about whether we can, or we should, change our future if we know what it will be, doesn’t have the bite, the terrifying honesty, the social relevance of The Pain and the Itch, which Steppenwolf premiered several years ago (and in the spirit of full disclosure, I am a Governor of Steppenwolf’s junior board).  I think it’s a much simpler play, with a more intellectual bent, versus the ferocious, almost unforgiving intellectual and emotional velocity of the previous play (or the other Norris work I enjoyed a lot, The Unmentionables).  Bee, played with her usual truthfulness and nuance by ensemble member Kate Arrington, encounters her future, older self (a terrific, acting-heist-triggering Marylouise Burke) who tells her about the fate of the world she’ll grow old in, and the loved ones she’ll grow old without.  These loved ones include the middle-aged guy who leaves his wife for her (an equally riveting Tom Irwin) and the Mexican gardener she subsequently leaves him for (Tim Bickel, a young actor who surprisingly holds his own with his formidable co-stars).  It’s a great cast, confidently directed by Shapiro, in-tuned with each other and at home with Norris’ singular writing.

Norris’s dialogue is still pretty crisp, and at times, quite shocking (the nervous laughs at the theater became more distinctly nervous as mentions of the Holocaust and 911 come up, for example).  The writing is also pretty funny, especially as delivered by the invaluable Burke, whose meaningful drawl and been-there-done-that demeanor helps the future Bee come off as this really hip grandmother with too much medication (and we’re not thinking Lipitor here).  But the play itself, overall, seems to be more reflective, more mellow, and more internalized, with less cutting references to the ironic craziness of the world we live in, something I’m come to expect from him after seeing his other plays.  Despite the excellent performances, the characters also feel less fully-fleshed out than usual, more vehicles for an intellectual discussion, than fiery, multi-dimensional people.  It’s not unwelcome; it’s just strikingly different from what I was expecting.  The seeming open-endedness of the ending is intriguing, but also feels like an abrupt arrival.  Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design is terrific, and the technical aspects of the set changes impressive.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore is at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA, until August 8 while A Parallelogram is at the Steppenwolf Theater Mainstage, until August 29.  And since I’m shameless, I’m taking this opportunity to post a photo of Chris Pine with a shirtless guy (co-star Brett Ryback) hanging upside down in the background.  It’s so, ahem, exciting, on so many levels! Ha!

Sir Elton’s Aida has probably, in my opinion, one of the most one-dimensional, reductive books in contemporary musical theater (written by, among others, Falls and David Henry Hwang).  It’s a historically disingenuous, somewhat narrow-minded, at times overly camp tale where everyone suffers nobly until they die.  So a production really needs strong lead performers that can captivate the audience and allow them to suspend disbelief in a show that requires a lot of it.  And Dawan, who I’ve never seen before onstage, gives this production its energetically beating heart.  She’s able to capture the dignity, refinement, and prideful will of a princess, but also beautifully gives Aida a very modern, pretty fierce, edge.  This is one chick who you know from the outset will not bow down to any man, and who will, and who can, fight it out to the death with the best of them.  And Dawan sings the songs magically, sensually, powerfully – from “Elaborate Lives” to “How I Know You” to the showstopping first act group number “The Gods Love Nubia”- elevating, and finding nuance, in John and Rice’s pop score cannily manufactured for Disneyfied Broadway audiences.  Dawan is matched by a very, very good Adrianna Parson as Amneris, the Egyptian princess who is Aida’s rival for the affections of the warrior Radames.  Amneris is initially portrayed as a shallow, fashion-obsessed, spoiled princess who, at the end, displays the merciful but determined authority that will characterize her future reign as the Queen of Egypt.  Parson has excellent comedic timing, and gets the majority of the laughs in the first act, but also excellently displays the heartbreak and the selfless compassion of an unrequited lover.  Unfortunately, her character oversees that ridiculous fashion show, which, although staged on a smaller-scale in this production, is so baked into the musical number “My Strongest Suit” that it can’t be mercilessly gutted out. Even in 1999, pre-Project Runaway, this fashion show interlude felt forced and dated.  Brandon Chandler, as Radames, is gorgeous, and sings gorgeously, but seems to be drowned out, literally and figuratively, by the two larger-than-life female lead performances.  And speaking of hotness, this ensemble is probably the best-looking and the sexiest one that is currently performing onstage in the city, and thankfully, they all sing and dance exceptionally well.   “The Gods Love Nubia” is gutsy, exuberant, joyous, a perfect first-act capper.

Director Scott Ferguson tightly directs this musical theater ship, and minimizes the cheesiness.  I’m a little perplexed, though, as to why he stages the opening second act musical number “ A Step Too Far” similarly to Falls’ conception- the three lead performers framed by windows.  I thought, then, and still think now, it’s a little too StarSearch for my taste.  I’m also not as convinced by some of Jared B. Moore’s lighting choices – those circling, patterned spotlights are so 1980s.  But the choreography, by Deeply Rooted artistic leaders Gary Abbott and Kevin Iega Jeff, is excellently conceptualized and integrated into the show.  The dancing is very urban, sexy, and hip – stylized movement that I wanted to see more of.  The dance numbers, together with the performances, really make a difference in allowing this show transcend its roots as cotton-candy Disney fare, an adult, human version of The Lion King set in Egypt instead of Africa.  And with this fresh look at Aida, a tough sell even for musical theater queens like me, the new leadership of Bailiwick Chicago auspiciously leaves its calling card – signifying that the theater is back with a vengeance.  And I’m very thrilled for that.

Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida runs at the American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron.  Discovering the immense talent of someone like Rashada Dawan is one of the pleasures of theatergoing in Chicago.