All Torn Up

I Wanna F#!&ing Tear You Apart – Rivendell Theatre

Rivendell Theatre is giving Morgan Gould’s I Wanna F#!&ing Tear You Apart its Midwest premiere this month. The story centers on Samantha, a self-described fat woman and Leo, her gay best friend and roommate. They have been friends since college. Now roommates in New York, they are trying to jump-start writing careers in between bingeing reality television and fighting over who left an empty soda bottle in the refrigerator.

Pride and Prejudice

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde – Promethean Theatre Ensemble

One of the oldest maxims of the theater is that you can create drama by letting the audience know something the characters don’t, at least not yet. It’s what gives historical dramas their bite. We know what’s going to happen, but we aren’t bored as long we’re invested in the characters unknowingly marching to their doom. That truism is on full display in Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s restaging of it’s 2016 production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

The Opera You Didn’t Know You Knew

La Traviata – Lyric Opera of Chicago

Before seeing the premiere of the Lyric’s new production of La Traviata at the Civic Opera House this weekend, I attended a preshow lecture about the history of the show. I learned that though it is now considered one of the finest operas ever written and a staple of many companies’ repertoires, it actually flopped on opening night amid composer Verdi’s battles with censors demanding edits and an opera house that wouldn’t cast the roles of its young lovers with actors who were…well…young. A couple of years later, some edits and better casting made the show the hit it has remained but, while I was listening to the lecture, I couldn’t help but think how hard it is to picture how classical works were received in their own time. They didn’t come into the world at stuffy or sophisticated pieces — they were the popular culture of their day, and inspired as much passion in their audiences as Hamilton or Dear Evan Hansen do in ours. Fortunately for this show, once the curtain went up the gap was easy to bridge.

Almost

Requiem for a Heavyweight – The Artistic Home

Requiem for a Heavyweight started life as a television play in 1956 by a pre-Twilight Zone Rod Serling, starring Jack Palance as an aging boxer. It was adapted into a film in 1962 with Anthony Quinn. This week, it is adapted into a stage version at The Artistic Home. The story focuses on ‘Mountain’ McClintock, a heavyweight boxer who spent his career always almost, but never quite, winning the championship, and is now too injured to continue boxing, and his manager Maish. It is revealed in the opening scene that Maish bet against Mountain in his final fight to get the money he needed to buy the contract of a young up-and-comer, Mountain’s replacement. Seeking any work he can get, he meets Grace at an employment agency and begins a tentative friendship.

Chicago Musical Theatre Festival

5th Annual Chicago Musical Theatre Festival – Underscore Theatre Company

Producing a new musical is hard. Nearly impossible. The time, the energy, and the cost make it a daunting task. It’s part of the reason most new Broadway musicals are revivals of classics or adaptations of known, successful properties. There’s no other way to ensure a show will make back its investment. To counter that, Underscore Theater Company is dedicated to nurturing new works in Chicago. For the fifth year, they take submissions from writers around the world and give a chosen few productions over the course of three weeks. By pooling backstage resources like sound and lighting equipment and crews, new musicals can be more economically staged, and hopefully reach a wider audience.

Familiar Patterns

Between Riverside and Crazy – Redtwist Theatre

Humanity’s greatest strength is that we can adjust to anything. No matter how terrible a situation, we can almost always find a way to survive. Humanity’s greatest weakness is also that we can adjust to anything. Because we have learned to survive in even a terrible situation, we’ll stay there because the familiarity feels safe. Change, even it’s for the better, is terrifying. That pattern plays itself out several times with several people in Redtwist’s new production of Between Riverside and Crazy, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning play.

Credit Where Credit is Due

Photograph 51 – Court Theatre

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick published a model for the DNA molecule that would eventually net them and a third collaborator a Nobel Prize. Largely unknown for several decades after that accomplishment is that a large piece of the research that their model built on was done by a British scientist named Rosalind Franklin and the painstaking x-ray photography work she had refined. Court Theatre’s new production of Photograph 51 is the dramatization of Franklin’s work.

In the Blood

In the Blood – Red Tape Theater

In the Blood is a loose adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter by Suzan-Lori Parks. It premiered in New York in 1999. Like the novel, the play focuses on a woman named Hester who is punished by a hypocritical society for bearing children out of wedlock.

You’re Invited

Southern Gothic – Windy City Playhouse

I went to the worst party I’ve ever attended last night. The caterer got in an accident, so we were left with Spam and crackers for food. Absent food, everyone hit the bar a little earlier and a little harder than they probably should have. And, of course, the night spawned more than one screaming argument.

I had a ball.

Fuente Ovejuna

Fuente Ovejuna – City Lit Theater

In 1476, in the Spanish village of Fuente Ovejuna, the villagers rebelled and killed the military commander using the village as his base. Don’t worry; he really, really had it coming. He harassed, kidnapped, and assaulted the women in the village, treating them as little more than livestock. If someone tried to stop him, he had them tortured. When the King sent an investigator to find out who murdered an official, the townspeople, even under torture, would only say that “Fuente Ovejuna did it.” With no one person he could prove a case against, the king pardoned the town. The play recounting these historical events was written by Lope de Vega in 1612, and this week, an adaptation of that play gets its premiere at City Lit.