Music theatre as ritual: Court's 'Gospel at Colonus'; Shattered Globe's 'London Road'; and City Lit's 'Aztec Human Sacrifice'
The Company at Gospel of Colonus. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
Given the passage of several millennia, it’s easy to forget that Sophocles’ Oedipus is a tragic character. Tragic with a capital-T, regardless of how many rhymes a jokey tunesmith can find for the word “Mom.”
In Court Theatre’s revival of Lee Brueur and Bob Telson’s Gospel at Colonus, an adaptation of the Greek tragedy played as a Black Pentecostal service, you feel a little guilty for ever having reduced Oedipus to a punchline, and not just because you’re effectively at church.
Here, Oedipus (Kelvin Roston Jr., marvel of stamina), long since deposed and blindly wandering the countryside in exile, merely wants to find a place to rest his old bones and make peace with his old kingdom and himself before he dies. Can the citizenry in good conscience forgive Oedipus for what he hath wrought? Or, more accurately, for what he was fated to do?
As the cliché goes, not a whole lot happens, per se, but so does everything, too; absolution for wrongdoing before the big D is a huge deal even in a secular context. Here, laden with the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and the ambrosia throatiness of gospel singing, Rolston shedding his guilt is positively transcendent. Co-directed by Charles Newell and Mark J. P. Hood (Hood also handling music direction), and backdropped by the loveliest bare-bones chapel you’re likely to see for a while (by John Culbert), this Colonus is serious business, and one can hope this production will have serious legs beyond Chicago.
The Gospel at Colonus runs through June 18th at the Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. For tickets or more information, please call (773) 753-4472 or visit courttheatre.org.
The Company of London Road. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
London Road is an improbable musical in many ways. Whereas musicals are typically led by protagonists actively working toward their goals, here we have a musical with a Greek chorus but no true lead, essentially all reaction. Its music is also pedantically but hypnotically teased out from the rhythms and pitches of everyday middle-class speech.
It’s also about the impact of a serial killer. A real serial killer—no long-ago far-away fable like Sweeney Todd, this.
Improbably, for a piece only just now making its professional stateside debut via Shattered Globe Theatre Ensemble, it’s also been a personal favorite of mine, having long admired it for the sheer chutzpah of its existence and the surprising humanity therein.
Reflecting on the journey its made from London, 2011, to Chicago, 2023, has only deepened its flavor, even if that flavor is somewhat arsenical.
Playwright/documentarian Alecky Blythe and composer Adam Cork set out to make a piece about a community rattled, a community wounded, a community attempting to heal itself in the ways they could grasp—quiz nights, garden contests, small incremental stuff. With time, it’s also clear theirs is a piece about what cannot be healed. As ever since Eden, that would be the loss of innocence. As surely as some people rise above themselves in the face of adversity, others reveal themselves.
You can’t ignore the obliviousness of the man who groused about not being able to comfortably go out Christmas shopping because he fears women passing by might suspect him, as if he’s the real victim. You can’t rewind back to before your best pub mate casually revealed his bigotry. (“I reckon [the killer’s a] Polish bastard.”) You can’t unsee the void of charity toward the marginalized that was only filled when the pressure built up. (“That’s what upsetting, it took all that,” says a chorus of women weaning themselves off drugs and sex work, these types of women being the killer’s prime target.) You especially can’t unhear the sweet older lady who seemingly holds together her neighborhood through sheer tenacity suggesting it’s for the greater good that the murder victims are better off “ten foot under.”
Transposing some: It’s one thing for a culture to reach a point where trying to get into the wrong car by mistake gets one shot. It’s another to look out at all your neighbors’ windows and wonder how many of them might be perfectly fine with you getting shot if you made a similar mistake. If they thought you were from the wrong side of the tracks. Belonged on the wrong side. Belonged “ten foot under.”
It’s food for thought for your next summer block party.
Sturdily helmed by director Elizabeth Margoluis and music director Andra Velis Simon, Shattered Globe’s ensemble cast is immensely likeable. They have to be to serve such deliciously poisonous tea.
London Road runs through June 11th at Theatre Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave. For tickets or more information, please call (773) 770-0333 or visit sgtheatre.org.
The Company of Aztec Human Sacrifice. Photo by Steve Graue.
Also on the topic of civilization’s tendency toward casual cruelty: City Lit’s Aztec Human Sacrifice. Its subtitle, “a musical about love, death, and the end of the world,” seems to promise something both audacious and droll. It certainly starts audaciously with an Aztec human sacrifice (and the very, very thorough program notes make it clear this was indeed a daily fact of life for the Aztec people). It then zeros in on a virginal young man chosen from birth for a particularly auspicious sacrifice, and who seems (to the high priests) surprisingly non-plussed about it. He escapes. A chase ensues.
The drollery, though, never arrives. The overly literal and cramped physical production and direction can’t keep pace with the sometimes-screwball, sometimes-surreal intent of the text. The odd anachronistic self-aware stab at humor lands less like the barbs in Urinetown than they do like the banter of the gargoyles from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame. The music, if ethnomusicologically accurate to sixteenth-century indigenous Mexican culture, never approaches the kettle-drum thunderousness that one would think “the end of the world” demands, even if City Lit’s modest space only allows so much oomph.
It’s a piece that needs to stretch out and breathe if it means to develop, though I think the knife’s in deep on this one.
Aztec Human Sacrifice runs through June 18th at City Lit Theatre, inside Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 W Bryn Mawr Ave. For tickets or more information, please call (773)-293-3682 or visit citylit.org.
For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.