Category: BLOG SERIES
Sanity Break: Chicago floating in the clouds – beautiful!
Now this is Chicago like you’ve never seen it before. Breathtaking!!
Video by Craig Shimala. Love it!
Wednesday Wordplay: Bette Davis and her enemies
I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn’t dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
— Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, 1962
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously…. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1811
Hysteria is only possible with an audience.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters, 1999
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
— Will Rogers
Do what you love, love what you do, leave the world a better place and don’t pick your nose.
— Jeff Mallett, Frazz, 08-03-04
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, 1973
Sooner or later we all quote our mothers.
— Bern Williams
Sanity Break: Best cover-letter ever???
Okay, we all know that the job-market sucks, and has for quite a while. Perhaps what job-seekers need is a new approach, say, like a revised cover modeled after the one below from Roanold. You might consider using it as a template – what could possibly go wrong?
Top 10 Chicago shows we’re looking forward to this spring
Top 10 shows to see this spring!
A list of shows we’re looking forward to before summer
Written by Barry Eitel
March 20th marked the first day of spring, even if it feels like winter hasn’t loosened its grip at all. The theatre season is winding down, with most companies putting up the last shows of the 2010/2011. Over the summer, it would seem, Chicagoans choose outdoor activities over being stuffed in a hot theatre. But there is still plenty left to enjoy. The rising temperatures make leaving your home much more tempting, and Chicago theatre is ending the traditional season with a bang. Here, in no particular order, are Chicago Theatre Blog’s picks for Spring 2011.
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The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? Remy Bumppo Theatre March 30 – May 8 more info |
Playwright Edward Albee has gotten a lot of love this year, with major productions at Victory Gardens and Steppenwolf (for the first time). The season has been a sort of greatest hits collection spanning his career, including modern classics like Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Three Tall Women. Remy Bumppo ends their season with some late-period Albee, but The Goat never skimps on Albee’s honest dysfunction. In the 1994 drama, Albee takes a shockingly earnest look at bestiality, and questions everything we thought about love.
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Porgy and Bess Court Theatre May 12 – June 19 more info |
Musical-lovers have a true aural feast to enjoy this spring. Following their mission to produce classics, Court produces the most well-known American opera, Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin’s ode to folk music is grandiose, inspirational, and not without controversy. But the show, telling tales about African-American life in the rural South, features brilliant music (like “Summertime,” which has been recorded by such vastly different performers as Billie Holiday and Sublime). Charles Newell, Ron OJ Parsons, and an all-black cast will definitely have an interesting take on one of the most influential pieces of American literature.
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The Front Page Timeline Theatre April 16 – June 12 more info |
For their season closer, TimeLine Theatre selected a 80-year-old play with deep Chicago connections. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur were well known journalists, reporting on the madness that was the Jazz Age. They turned their life into a farcical romp, The Front Page, which in turn served as the inspiration for the Cary Grant vehicle “His Girl Friday”. The play centers around several hardened newsmen as they await an execution; of course, things don’t go as planned. Along with loads of laughs, TimeLine provides an authentic Chicago voice sounding off about a legendary time.
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Peter Pan Broadway In Chicago and threesixty° entertainment |
Imported from London, this high-flying envisioning of the J.M. Barrie play should cause many jaws to drop. We’ve seen high school productions where the boy who never wants to grow up flies around on wires (leading to some disastrous videos on Youtube). Threesixtyº’s show has flying, but it also has three hundred and sixty degrees of screen projections. Already a smash across the pond, this will probably be one of the top spectacles of the decade. WATCH VIDEO
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Woyzeck and Pony at Chopin Theatre |
I’m not exactly sure if Georg Buchner’s unfinished 1830s play can support a whole city-wide theatrical festival, but I’m excited to see the results. The Oracle Theatre already kickstarted the Buchner love-fest with a well-received production of Woyzeck directed by Max Truax. Now Sean Graney and his Hypocrites and a revived About Face get their chance, along with numerous other performers riffing on the play. Pony offers a semi-sequel to Woyzeck, tossing together Buchner’s characters with others in a brand new tale. The Hypocrites offer a more straightforward adaptation to the play. Well, straightforward for the Hypocrites. I’m sure their white-trash-avant-garde tendencies will make an appearance, and I’m sure I’ll love it. (ticket special: only $48 for both shows)
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The Original Grease American Theatre Company April 21 – June 5 more info |
American Theatre Company ends their season with a major theatrical event—a remount of the original 1971, foul-mouthed version of Grease. Before Broadway producers, Hollywood, and John Travolta cleaned up the ‘50s set musical, “Summer Nights” was “Foster Beach.” The story of this production is probably as interesting as the actual show, with lost manuscripts and brand new dialogue and song.
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The Voodoo Chalk Circle State Theatre April 9 – May 8 more info |
This month, Theatre Mir already took a highly-acclaimed stab at this intriguing piece of Brecht, which tears at Western views of justice. In true Brechtian style, the State’s production is shaking the narrative up, transferring the story from an Eastern European kingdom to a post-Katrina New Orleans, where law and order have broken with the levee. We’ll see if Chelsea Marcantel’s adaptation holds water, but she has plenty to pull from, including the region’s rich folk traditions and the general lawlessness seen after the storm. WATCH VIDEO
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Hickorydickory
Chicago Dramatists May 13 – June 12 more info |
To welcome spring, Chicago Dramatists will revisit one of their own, the 2009 Wendy Wasserstein Prize-winning Marisa Wegrzyn. Directed by artistic director Russ Tutterow, the darkly whimsical piece imagines a world where everyone has a literal internal clock that ticks away towards our demise. What happens when someone breaks their clock? Through a very odd window, Wegrzyn looks at tough, relevant questions.
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Next to Normal Broadway in Chicago at Bank of America Theatre April 26 – May 8 more info |
The newly-minted Purlitzer Prize winner, Next to Normal rolls into town on its first national tour, three Tony Awards in hand. Alice Ripley, who received the 2009 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, will reprise her acclaimed performance at the Bank of America Theatre on Monroe. Contemporary in sound and subject matter, the work explores the effects of a mother’s bi-polar disease exacerbated by her child’s earlier death, Next to Normal will no doubt be anything close to normal for Chicago audiences. (watch video)
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White Noise Royal George Theatre April 1 – June 5 more info |
Like Next to Normal, the new White Noise promises to take the usually vapid rock musical genre and stuff it with some tough issues. A show focusing on an attractive female pop duo with ties to white supremacy? It ain’t Rock of Ages, that’s for sure. Produced by Whoopi Goldberg, Chicago was chosen as the show’s incubator before a Broadway debut. Perhaps the premise may overwhelm the story; either way, White Noise is going to inspire conversations. [ Listen to the Music ]
Wednesday Wordplay: The secret of being boring…
The secret of being boring is to say everything.
— Voltaire
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
— Charles Dickens
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
— Josh Billings
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?
— Rose Kennedy
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
— Freya Madeline Stark
The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
— Whitney Young
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
— Albert Camus, Happy Death
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
— James Thurber
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
— John Cleese
I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.
— Brock Clarke, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, 2007
Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice.
— Minna Thomas Antrim
Sanity Break: Bette Midler sings ‘Otto Titsling’. Hilarious!
Bette Midler sings Otto Titsling on Johnny Carson
You gotta love Bette Midler – this is hilarious!
Belarus Free Theatre wraps up Chicago stay with final show
Playing to sold out crowds, Belarus Free Theatre wraps up Chicago stay
This past Monday night, the Belarus Free Theatre gave its last Chicago performance of Being Harold Pinter to a packed house at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Their world tour will now carry them to Hong Kong and London, a development they hardly anticipated when they first escaped from the Belarus secret police in January to perform in New York City for Under the Radar Festival, sponsored by Public Theatre. As artists on the run, they have one overriding mission—to alert the world to the conditions of torture, unlawful detention and disappearance occurring in “the last dictatorship in Europe” and to continue strong sanctions imposed on Belarus for its mass arrests of Alexander Lukashenko’s political opposition during post-election demonstrations on December 19 last year.
The applause they received upon entering the champagne reception afterwards echoed the standing ovation that crowned up their final performance in Chicago. While undoubtedly deserved, one couldn’t help feeling the inadequacy of what we were offering them–that what they needed most were not cocktails and hors d’oeurvres but a home free from the terrors of state oppression. The star presence of John Mahoney, Ora Jones, Phillip James Brannon, Stephen Louis Grush, and others who joined the actors onstage to read eye-witness accounts of KGB brutality paled before both the cast’s plight and their bold achievement.
Overwhelming our attention were names of the imprisoned and tortured, their images printed up on posterboards and lined in the lobby—Anatoly Lebedko, leader of the United Civil Party; journalists Natalya Radina and Irina Khalip; Andrei Sannikov, Vladimir Nekliaev and Nikolai Statkevich, opposition presidential candidates; Dmitri Bondarenko, European Belarus Movement coordinator; Maya Abramchik and Svetlana Nosova suffering leg and eye injury from being tortured and young Danik, whose parents are still in jail from the December crackdown. “These were the photographs that we made in time for the NYC performance in January,” said BFT director Vladimir Scherban. “Some of the people have been released from jail but are under house arrest now. As for the images of those tortured, these are just those photos that we could get to print.”
With the help of BFT co-founder Natalia Kaladia, I had managed to corner Scherban for an interview:
PL: So, how long will your tour continue from Chicago?
VS: We’ll be in Hong Kong for less than two weeks, then on to London. We’re planning to perform the play in Parliament. We hope so.
PL: So you have UK politicians helping you to set that up?
VS: We have good contacts with British artistic figures. And we hope to return here. We plan to continue our contacts with the Goodman Theatre, with the Public Theatre and the Baryshnikov Theatre in New York.
PL: Have you received enough funding from your performances here for the tour?
VS: (shrugs) We hardly knew we would be here when we arrived in New York. I suppose so—we’d plan on only 4 performances and how spontaneous to perform 14 in Chicago, fully sold out. So, this was very strange but also very pleasant situation that we could do this for Chicago audiences.
PL: How is your application for asylum in the US going?
VS: (shrugs) I really don’t know about asylum. It’s a big question whether that’s going to happen or not. We cannot re-enter our own country. Our members have already received threats or orders to return. We constantly receive threats in the form of our relatives and neighbors being called late at night by the police about our whereabouts. Several members have received invitations from the police to show up for interrogation.
Unfortunately, this [Belarus] government only understands sanctions, straightforward and unwavering sanctions. The last elections, only very harsh sanctions forced the president [Lukashenko] to release the opposition presidential candidates from jails. Discussions do nothing. During discussions, political candidates just become goods to sell America and the EU.
What you have to know about the demonstrations that took place on December 19th is that there was snow on the ground. After the police had stormed the crowd and assaulted the people, the snow was stained with blood. Then at university, students who were absent on the day of the demonstration were ordered to go for a medical check up and if they looked like they had been beaten up from the demonstration, they were expelled from school.
In some ways, it’s easier for us. We don’t fear this anymore. We’ve been beaten up, we’ve been arrested, we’ve lost our places at work—we’ve gotten used to working under pressure.
PL: What would you like people to take away most about your stay here?
VS: Well, a very big idea for everyone to understand is that we mean serious things. We’re not just about going around and telling our story. We are expecting Obama to be very precise about our situation and take a clear position against the Belarus government. This is what people should know: people are being beaten up, thrown in jail, and disappeared. [BFT co-founder] Nikolai [Khalezin] has had 9 friends disappeared in the last 16 years. The people you see on the posters who are in jail? They’re our friends, our audience.
PL: Anything else you’d like to say?
VS: Wish us luck!
UPDATE: Since the posting of this interview, the OSCE – Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights – published its report on Belarus’s December presidential election, declaring that the election did not meet the criteria for being free and fair.
![Maryna Yurevich, Yana Rusakevich, Nikolai Khalezin_thumb[1]](http://chicagotheaterbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/maryna-yurevich-yana-rusakevich-nikolai-khalezin_thumb1.jpg "Maryna Yurevich, Yana Rusakevich, Nikolai Khalezin_thumb[1]") |
![Yana Rusakevich and Aleh Sidorchyk - Belarus Free Theatre - Being Harold Pinter_thumb[1]](http://chicagotheaterbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/yana-rusakevich-and-aleh-sidorchyk-belarus-free-theatre-being-harold-pinter_thumb1.jpg "Yana Rusakevich and Aleh Sidorchyk - Belarus Free Theatre - Being Harold Pinter_thumb[1]") |
![Nikolai Khalezin, Maryna Yurevich and Yana Rusakevich_thumb[2]](http://chicagotheaterbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/nikolai-khalezin-maryna-yurevich-and-yana-rusakevich_thumb2.jpg "Nikolai Khalezin, Maryna Yurevich and Yana Rusakevich_thumb[2]") |
![Being Harold Pinter by Belarus Free Theatre at Goodman Theatre_thumb[5]](http://chicagotheaterbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/being-harold-pinter-by-belarus-free-theatre-at-goodman-theatre_thumb5.jpg "Being Harold Pinter by Belarus Free Theatre at Goodman Theatre_thumb[5]") |
Sanity Break: 5-year needs a job before getting married!
Funny!!
Here is the story from YouTube:
I am a singer/songwriter and had been asked to go on National Television to sing one of my original so-ngs. My little 5 year old sister (she’s six now) was upset and feeling left out because her big sister was doing all these fun and interesting things. This 1 minute clip is part of a 15 minute video where she discusses her views on life and decides she isnt going to let anything come between her and her goals.
