Amped and un-amped: “Sunny Afternoon” at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and “Helena & Hermia in The Enamored Odyssey” thru Imposters Theatre Co.
The Company. Photo by Carol Rosegg.
Say this for “Sunny Afternoon”, the Kinks bio-musical now playing at Chicago Shakespeare Theater: it will blow the dust off your bones. After all, upon entering, one can see the action takes place inside a box made up of amps: literal Walls of Sound. Brace yourself for when “You Really Got Me” rolls around.
“Sunny Afternoon” lands Stateside ten-ish years after taking the Olivier Award for Best Musical on the Kinks’ home turf. It also brings along Danny Horn and Oliver Hoare, who have played the Davies brothers (Ray and Dave, respectively) on the West End. And the pièce de résistance: Edward Hall, director of that world premiere production, takes charge again, but now also serving as Chicago Shakes’s artistic director.
With this production, early in his tenure, Hall proves he can deliver a big and splashy musical. Whether it’s worth your while may depend on your general tolerance for bio-musicals.
You can surrender to the music, and that’s no small thing—the Kinks’ catalog is diverse, tuneful, deeply piercing in places, much like that of their Liverpudlian peers. You can appreciate how Kinks frontman Ray Davies (in collaboration with music supervisor Elliott Ware) is willing to fiddle with his songs to paint new portraits—”Days” is done as a wistful parting a capella quartet, and “Waterloo Sunset” emerges like a mellow sunrise from the group trading riffs. Davies, the creative muscle for the musical, is also thankfully not overly interested in prettying up his legacy: the band’s internal strifes (and their mid-concert brawls) are preserved intact. (On top of the songwriting, Davies has “original story” credit; playwright Joe Penhall takes nuts-and-bolts bookwriting credit.)
You will also have to put up with all the usual bio-musical bumps. A lot of time (too much time) is given over to contractual quibbles and squabbles. Life on the road is as lonely as ever. There are pacing issues borne of a need to slot in all the hoped-for songs. (Act Two, while refreshingly quieter than the first, tends to sag.) The characters besides Ray (the muscle, remember) are mere sketches.
And in falling into these ruts of convention, it gives Davies’ talent short shrift. Here depicted as a sort-of savant who hears fully formed songs in his head, he is given to whinging about how any given first pass at a song isn’t what he imagines; the tune then emerges effortlessly after some light tweak or other. Perhaps if some time was given to delving into his inspirations and craft, punctuated by the odd unintuitive flash (like the sound-defining choice to take a razor to a speaker cone). The best musicians may make it look easy, but it takes diligence and labor to write so enduring a songbook.
Endurance—of the songs, of the artists, of their estates—is the endgame of the bio-musical. It may be too close to call whether “Sunny Afternoon” will endure as a musical quite like some of its decades long-running brethren, but it will certainly leave you with songs ringing in your ears. That, or feedback.
Sunny Afternoon runs through Apr. 27 at 800 E Grand Ave. For tickets or more information, please call (312) 595-5600 or visit chicagoshakes.com.
Anna Roemer and Shannon McEldowney. Photo by Sam Bessler.
Full disclosure: Ian Rigg, who appears as Nick Bottom, is a close personal friend.
For scheduling reasons, I was only able to get into Impostor Theatre Co’s “Helena & Hermia in The Enamored Odyssey” during their final dress rehearsal, so they were still setting down roots. Quite literally—it’s a musical based on William Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” so the forest greenery had a ways to go. But even if the physical production wasn’t yet fully formed—and what there was was verdant, indeed—what emerged was a charming ode to love, friendship, and the unamplified voice.
In terms of plot, composer-librettist Dominick Alesia musicalizes the farce straightforwardly and cleanly—the love quadrangle, the fairies, and the rude mechanicals—weaving scenes and songs together in a manner not too dissimilar to Paul Gordon’s own neo-operetta takes on the classics. Currently scored for piano with the occasional violin and acoustic guitar, one can imagine how handsome it could sound with fuller orchestration. His big choice is to beef up the women’s roles so they’re somewhat less cotton-headed than the Bard had it. The mortals Helena and Hermia (Anna Roemer and Shannon McEldowney, respectively, both radiantly trilly) catch on to Oberon’s game and begin to fight back as they can, while Titania (Tessa Marie Hoffman, poised and rich) works her own brand of counter-magic.
In a way, though, I think Alesia overshoots his mark. The characters know they’re in a Bardic adaptation and work to counter the machinations of the plot set out before them. While some of this meta-theatricality is laid out for us smoothly, other times it’s jabbed at with sassy asides (and even a cameo from Juliet). While we can certainly thank Alesia for brushing up on his Shakespeare studies, this seems much too earnest a piece for such intrusions of smartassery. A gentler wit is called for, especially since he’s keyed the action not to Athens, but to “Harken’s Hold” in England, i.e. Regency-era Austeniana.
But the course of a newly minted musical hardly runs smoothly—there are always things to iron out and tweak, and I’d be eager to see the piece deservedly develop further. And in such an intimate setting—an upstairs black-box space at the Den—the joys of an un-mic’d cast singing out ten feet from where you’re sitting cannot be overstated. Hie thee hither, and quickly—it’s a short run.
Helena & Hermia in The Enamored Odyssey runs through Apr. 12 at 1331 N Milwaukee Ave. For tickets or more information, please visit theimpostorstheatre.com.
For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.