'The Showtune Mosh Pit' for November 23rd, 2011

THE LATEST IN UNAUTHORIZED GOSSIP AND BUZZ

FROM THE HEART OF CHICAGO'S SHOWTUNE VIDEO BARS,

AND MUSICAL THEATER NEWS FROM CHICAGO TO BROADWAY

by Paul W. Thompson

Overheard last weekend under the showtune

video screens at Sidetrack and The Call:

Two national tours are pulling into the Loopthis week! It must be a holiday. The one that most Mosh Pit peeps have their eye on is “Memphis,” the 2010 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score, as a brand new Equity company, fresh from stops in Memphis and Nashville, arrives at the Cadillac Palace Theatre for a two-week stay. I’m sensing a little resistance to liking this show, as it may feel to some like a hybrid of “Hairspray” and “Million Dollar Quartet,” and with the sense that it may have won its Tonys in a weak Broadway year. But you know what? Go and enjoy it anyway. Sergio Trujillo’s choreography is amazing, and the11:00 number for Huey, the white spinner of race records (“Memphis Lives In Me”) has been known to put goosebumps onto the most jaded of forearms, and onto the back of the stiffest of necks. It’s “Memphis!”

Memphis 2011 | Broadway in Chicago

The other is an eager new non-union tour of “Fiddler On The Roof,” arriving at the lovely, cavernous Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University for this week only. I have to say that the photos and the video preview look impressive, and it seems to be a traditional (pun intended) staging of Jerome Robbins’ final Broadway effort with age-appropriate adults in the cast. If you haven’t seen this masterpiece of the musical theater on a big stage, why not go? Do you remember the story of the weeping audiences when the show first playedTokyo? When asked why tickets sales and word of mouth were so positive there, for a show about the upended lives of Eastern European Jews, the answer came back: “Because it is so Japanese!” And therein lies the axiom, “The more specific the art, the more universal its meaning.” So you will go.

Fiddler On The Roof 2011 | Broadway in Chicago 

Speaking of twos, the Royal George Theatre on Halsted Street appears to have a pair of musical theater winners on its hands right now. On the mainstage through December 30, 2011 is “Maestro: The Art Of Leonard Bernstein,” directed with an eye toward New York by Hollywood’s Joel Zwick and starring pianist and inhabiter-of-the-souls-of-composers Hershey Felder. While its subject was not limited to the Broadway realm (and neither was Felder’s previous American subject, George Gershwin), his talent and his joy in music were legendary. The same might be said for Felder. I’m sure that every reader of this column will get some insight and some excitement from attending this show, a biography, an exploration, a tribute, a concert and a play. And he wrote the music for “West Side Story!”

Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein

And in the Royal George Cabaret Theatre is the very well-received “The Doyle And Debbie Show,” a 90-minute import fromNashville that set our critics afluttering with how brilliant its satire is, how hilarious its jokes are and how well its cast members really do sing the original country and western songs this show puts forth. It’s apparently quite a good time! Here’s all those rave reviews:

The Doyle & Debbie Show Reviews - Theatre In Chicago

On the holiday front, the latest incarnation of Chicago’s very own Christmas musical, “The Christmas Schooner” seems to be raking in the raves as well! John Reeger and Julie Shannon’s show about the real-life boat that brought trees from Wisconsin to Chicago every fall for decades has been mounted at the Mercury Theater by an Equity cast that, for the most part, have performed their parts before, sometimes for several years at several different theaters. Experience apparently pays off! Director L. Walter Stearns, choreographer Brenda Didier and musical director Eugene Dizon have enlisted Cory Goodrich, Karl Hamilton, Jim Sherman, Daniel Coonley, Mark Kosten, Elizabeth Haley, Ronald Keaton, Thomas M. Shea, Kelly Anne Clark (and the rest!) for this excusion into the heart of what Christmas and family and tradition really mean. It runs through New Year’s Eve. If you are in, or into, musical theater inChicago (and who isn’t?), this is the show for you. 

The Christmas Schooner - Mercury Theatre 

On the local horizon for holiday musicals is “Christmas In Chicago,” running December 8-18 at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Avenue. Written by David Himmel and Patrick Kenney, starring Tommy Beardmore, Heather Bodie, Amber Gerencher and A.J. Miller, it’s reported rooted in the sketch comedy world, with equal parts holiday cheer and topical topics, full of scriptedness but with the spirit of improv. Could it achieve the local renown of “Schooner?” We’ll all have to live longer to find out. 

The Fine Print's CHRISTMAS IN CHICAGO 

Away out west in St. Charles, the Steel Beam Theatre has already opened its production of “Scrooge,” the much-loved stage musical version of the fondly-remembered 1970 film, which in turn was based on a certain Charles Dickens holiday story. The show, with book, music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, runs most every Thursday-Sunday from November 19 to December 23. Might be time for holiday trip toKaneCounty! 

Steel Beam Theatre of St. Charles, Illinois

If you are looking for some intimate non-holiday entertainment, you can’t go wrong with a cabaret concert by one of Chicago’s leading ladies, Barbara Robertson, on the weather-proofed stage of the Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park, December 19th at 7:30. The star of Chicago’s current “Love, Loss And What I Wore,” “Wicked,” “Working,” “Yeast Nation” and the national tour of “Angels In America,” as well as a faculty member at Columbia College Chicago, Robertson presents “Stages Of My Life,” which will chronicle her career and include songs by Sondheim, Weill, Porter, Kander and more, with Jeremy Kahn on the piano. Future evenings in the Cabaret With A View series will included E. Faye Butler on February 13, Paul Oakley Stovall on March 12 and McKinley Carter onApril 9, 2012. Mandatory.

Barbara Robertson Presents STAGES OF MY LIFE

Speaking of Stephen Sondheim, his second book is out! Talk about mandatory. “Look, I Made A Hat,” the second volume in his collected lyrics and essays thereupon, is the follow-up to last year’s “Finishing The Hat.” I assume you’ve already bought yours, or put it on your holiday wish list. This one includes the shows he wrote after 1981, as well as the movies and television work he did throughout his career and lyrics he wrote for shows otherwise written by other lyricists. Like I said, MANDATORY. There will be a quiz! And cocktail conversation, and general knowledge, and things you forgot about, and things you will wish you had known before, and, and, and….

Sondheim's "Look, I Made a Hat," Part Two of His Career in Lyrics

Lastly, do you (like Mama Rose in the Styne/Sondheim/Laurents/Robbins “Gypsy”) read “Variety?” Well, you should, or at least, you should read last week’s issue. Dated November 19, Steven Oxman’s article, “Chicago Shows Penchant For Tuners” describes some of our city’s recent efforts toward developing new musicals, some of our performance space upgrades and the general upward trajectory of musical theater in our fair lady of a city. Six theaters get special mentions, all of whom are regularly featured by yours truly. Can I say, MANDATORY READING? No, we are notNew York. ButNew York isn’tChicago, either! Why do you think I write this weekly column? For the same reason that Oxman realized there was a story here. You, my Mosh Pit peeps,ROCK. Our musical theater scene is hopping, in the best of all possible ways. 

Chicago shows penchant for tuners - Variety 

And so, that’s it for now.Turkeyawaits! Have a great and safe holiday weekend, everyone, and I'll see you when I see you, in the theater seats, or under the video screens.....—PWT

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