Onstage
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Onstage, Visual Art, Performing Arts Broadway at Last
Posted by Albert Williams on Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 10:58 AM
Former Chicago playwright John Logan will have his first play on Broadway this spring, when Red opens at the Golden Theatre on April 1, according to a report in Playbill.com. The play, currently running at London's Donmar Warehouse, stars Alfred Molina as abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko. Previews begin March 11.
Logan, a Northwestern University alum, began his playwriting career in Chicago in the mid-1980s, when the now-defunct Stormfield Theatre presented Never the Sinner, his drama about the Leopold-Loeb murder case. (It was revived last summer by Project 891 Theatre Company.)
Friday, January 29, 2010
Onstage, Lit & Lectures, Music, Performing Arts Thursday in Chicago with Sondheim and Ebersole
Posted by Albert Williams on Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 11:57 AM
Composer Stephen Sondheim will appear at the Harris Theater on March 4 and Broadway star Christine Ebersole on March 25 as part of A Life in the Theater, a series of performances and conversations featuring noted artists.
Sondheim, who turns 80 on March 22, will be interviewed by director Gary Griffin, whose credits range from The Color Purple on Broadway to superb local stagings of Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. (Griffin's production of Noel Coward's Private Lives is now onstage at CST.) Ebersole, a Winnetka native who won Tony Awards for her performances in 42nd Street and Grey Gardens, will present an evening of Broadway songs and standards with pianist John Oddo.
Sondheim: Thu 3/4, 7: 30 PM, $35-$65, Ebersole: Thu 3/25, 7:30 PM, $45-$75, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777. harristheaterchicago.org.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Onstage, Film, Visual Art, Performing Arts, Dance Even Fringe Artists Network
Posted by Albert Williams on Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 1:06 PM
Red Tape Theatre will host the second annual Chicago Fringe Artists Networking Night on Saturday, February 6. The company, which most recently staged the Reader-recommended Mouse in a Jar, promises "a full night of entertainment provided by Chicago’s boldest and brightest performers, surrounded by innovative and provocative paintings, projections and installations . . . plus massages, tarot card readings, interactive art works, and the chance to network with Chicago's artistic movers and shakers." Theater, dance, cabaret, and film will be among the disciplines represented. Sat 2/6, 8 PM-midnight, Saint Peter's Episcopal Church, 621 W. Belmont, $20 (includes snacks and wine).
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Onstage, Lit & Lectures, Performing Arts New Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama
Posted by Albert Williams on Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:23 AM
The Theatre Communications Group has published a collection of new plays by American writers from a variety of Middle Eastern backgrounds—"exploring," according to a TCG announcement, "the complexities of Middle Eastern identity in America, while also dealing with the ravages of war and violence in their families' homelands." Titled Salaam.Peace: An Anthology of Middle Eastern-American Drama, the collection is touted by TCG as "the first of its kind."
Among the plays included in the book is Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith, by Yussef El Guindi, which received its world premiere from Chicago's Silk Road Theatre Project in 2005. The play stirred controversy among Muslim-Americans here with its portrayal of a disintegrating family dealing with dwindling religious faith, homosexuality, and arranged marriage.
Also included: Between Our Lips by Nathalie Handal, 9 Parts of Desire by Heather Raffo, Desert Sunrise by Misha Shulman, Browntown by Sam Younis, The Black Eyed by Betty Shamieh, and Call Me Mehdi by Torange Yeghiazarian.
The paperback costs $19.95. More information at 212-609-5900 and tcg.org.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Onstage, Media, Film, Performing Arts Help for Haiti: A Call from Hollywood
Posted by Albert Williams on Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 3:43 PM
Former Chicago actor Michael Stahl-David, a board member of Artists for Peace & Justice, passed on the following letter from APJ board member Paul Haggis (screenwriter for Crash and Million Dollar Baby) soliciting financial help for victims of the Haitian earthquake.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Onstage, Performing Arts Chicago Theater: The Symposium
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 9:52 PM
The history and future of Chicago Theater is the subject of a major symposium to be hosted by the Theater Department of Columbia College next year, according to an announcement released today. Capitalizing on Chicago's storied rise to "theatre capital of America" (as at least one international critic put it), Columbia expects “Sustaining Chicago Theater: Past, Present, and Future,” to draw academics and theater folk from "around the country and overseas" for four days of presentations and performances May 18 through May 22, 2011.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Onstage, Performing Arts Missing Morticia
Posted by Deanna Isaacs on Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 3:14 PM
- Joan Marcus
- Bebe Neuwirth, Nathan Lane
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Onstage, Lit & Lectures, Performing Arts Be a Playwright or Make a Living: A Study Says You Can't Do Both
Posted by Albert Williams on Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 1:21 PM
Is theater becoming a "lost art"? That's one of the concerns addressed in Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, a new book funded and published by the Theatre Development Fund. According to co-author Todd London, a former Chicagoan and artistic director of New Dramatists in New York, the book seeks "to paint the most comprehensive picture possible of how plays get written and produced in America. . . . On one hand, we have a playwriting profession that is larger, better trained, and more vital than at any time in our history. We also have a profusion of highly professional theatres with a deep commitment to new work. On the other hand, we have a profound rift between our most accomplished playwrights and the theatres who would produce them, an increasingly corporate theatre culture, dire economics for not-for-profits, dwindling audiences for non-musical work, and, perhaps most troubling of all, a system of compensation that makes it nearly impossible for playwrights to earn anything resembling a living. By telling this story--with firm statistical and anecdotal evidence--we hope to stimulate both conversation and action in the theatre field." The book is available online for $14.95.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Onstage, Gay, Performing Arts, Comedy Pioneering LGBT comic Kate Clinton Comes to Town
Posted by Albert Williams on Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 1:11 PM
Well before Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes, and Lily Tomlin came out, Kate Clinton was paving the way as an openly lesbian comedian. Since 1981, the self-described "fumorist" (feminist humorist) has been performing her acerbic, politically charged stand-up at gay pride rallies, women's music festivals, nightclubs, and fundraisers. She's also written columns for The Progressive and The Advocate, as well as two books. Clinton brings her Lady Haha tour to the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted, Sunday January 24, at 6 PM. Tickets ($40) at 773-472-6469, ext. 446 and online.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Onstage, Performing Arts, Comedy Second City's 50th Anniversary Celebration
Posted by Albert Williams on Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:46 PM
- Courtesy Second City
- From left: Eugene Troobnick, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, Paul Sand, William Mathieu, Mina Kolb, Severn Darden, and Andrew Duncan
For me, the 50th-anniversary reunion show at Second City on Saturday was epitomized by a single sketch—an oldie but goodie called Phono Pal, from the Old Town comedy theater's fifth revue. Created in 1961 by Paul Sand and Eugene Troobnick, it depicts a shy loner (Sand) playing a record by a motivational speaker (Troobnick, from offstage). As he listens to the voice on the scratchy LP, the loner starts to converse and bond with it. At last weekend's show, Sand—a brilliant, quirky actor with a special knack for conveying a paradoxically comic melancholy—sat on a caneback chair and pantomimed playing a record on a turntable, just as he had done 48 years ago. But since Troobnick died in 2003, his lines were spoken by another Second City alum, a member of the troupe in the mid-1990s: Stephen Colbert, one of today's most accomplished inheritors and purveyors of Second City's tradition of satire. That was Saturday's show in a nutshell: a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration among artists of different generations, coming together to celebrate Second City's unique contribution.
