Midnight madness: ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’ at Goodman Theatre and ‘The Mad Ones’ thru Blank Theatre Co.
J. Harrison Ghee (center) and The Company. Photo by Liz Lauren.
As a rule, when it comes to the arts, I’m all for letting the rule-breakers into the clubhouse. So when producers hire an unapologetic bomb-chucker like Taylor Mac to work under the aegis of commercially minded musical theater, attention must be paid. Pair that bomb-chucker with a stickler for theatrical songwriting craft like Jason Robert Brown and interest doubles. Such is the case of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, now playing a world premiere production at the Goodman.
In a pre-opening piece for the Chicago Tribune, Brown seems to cop to easing up on his usual stylistic joinery for the musical, based on John Berendt’s gazillion-selling book of the same name. Kind of a travelogue of Savannah, Georgia, sort of a murder mystery, always interrupted by overlapping voices, Midnight, according to Brown, is about a community whose opposing elements—Black and white, queer and straight, young and old—will not cohere. (Cannot cohere?)
Many of these tensions come to a head when Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt)—a nouveau riche antiques dealer who contrived to catapult himself to the top of the social register—is implicated in the death of his much younger “handyman” Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). As Williams butts heads with the law and old Savannah money (headed by a particularly WASP-y Sierra Boggess), our other guide, transgender nightclub personality Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee) shows us a side of Savannah that’s a little closer to the ground and perhaps a little more lively..
Each one of these conflicts is served well by Brown’s rather tasty score which, if written with clashing styles, are held together by his piano-driven jazz-funk imprimatur. Ghee is the biggest beneficiary, having all the showstopping solos—if their Tony win a few seasons ago didn’t mint their star status, Midnight will. The game and gruff Hewitt, himself given to easy-going Johnny Mercer-like shuffles, plays the straight man (as it were) while being positioned as a sort of latter-day off-beat queer icon in the Edith Beale vein: he may be a murderer, but at least he isn’t a NIMBY.
Now how to effectively critique a developing musical with a narrative agenda like this is a tricky case. The cast regularly engages with the audience as “the author”, which is a conceit that may fare better in a thrust or black-box space rather than a proscenium, especially considering the things Mac has them say and do. Also, as much as the property, the show, and the audience craves more of Chablis—as Berendt himself had observed, she naturally soaks up focus—some recalibrating might be in order, particularly as regards a subplot about a young Black debutante with a budding entrepreneurial streak (played forthrightly by Shanel Bailey). It crops up in the second act, and rather suddenly, too, having had not a lot of time in the first. Cut it? I think, with care, it reveals the point of the adaptation: one must pay heed to the dead and buried, but one must also tend the soil for new things to grow.
The thing opens in a cemetery, after all, with a voodoo incantation at that (by Brianna Buckley), in a roundabout way reminding us that much of Savannah is built on old gardens of evil. At least a little patch of it should be used for good.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil runs through Aug. 11 at 170 N. Dearborn St. For tickets or more information, please call (312) 443-3800 or visit goodmantheatre.com.
Karylin Veres and Rachel Guth. Photo by Elizabeth Stenholt.
It’s practically its own subgenre in contemporary musical theater: “young adults caught at a crossroads reviewing their lives.” They’re not typically my cuppa if only because there’s really only one way they can proceed. To wit, “I’m anxious about what comes next” becomes “I still don’t know what comes next, but I’m no longer anxious about it.” However, it’s a worthy message for a younger-skewing audience to hear. For this purpose, The Mad Ones, by Kait Kerrigan and Bree Lowdermilk, is solid enough, and Blank Theatre gives it a solid-enough production.
The show has been making the rounds since 2006 under at least one different title. One of its songs, “Run Away With Me”, is even something of a standard within the MT / cabaret scene. So, even if only recently officially licensed, there’s a lot of mileage behind this one.
And mileage is what its protagonist Samantha Brown (Rachel Guth) is lacking. A buttoned-up overachiever whose best friend and outlet for fun and freedom has died (no spoiler, that), she sits in her driveway, freshly armed with a driver’s license, wondering whether to fulfill her mother’s collegiate ambitions for her or to make like Kerouac and hit the open road.
I’ve heard it said one should make an effort to distinguish between “the songs all sound the same” and “the songs belong together.” The Mad Ones belongs between these two poles of thought. In this hundred-minute show, there is a tight sixty to seventy-five-minute soft pop opera that’s appropriately moody yet leavened by gentle humor. That extra thirty minutes—that is, the more obviously comedic songs—feel like leftovers from the writers’ trunk, like specialty material they vowed they would place in a proper show one day. These songs are also performed almost to the point of overselling. Capable as she is, Anne Sheridan Smith’s mother character gets the short end of the stick in this regard: she begins as a cartoon of a worrisome mother pushing upon her daughter, gets a song in which she reveals her true vulnerability and insecurities…and then goes back to being a cartoon. Once you ring a bell, you can’t unring it, is all.
But Karilyn Veres, now seemingly a Blank mainstay, has a solid grasp on both the humor and pathos of her somewhat pixie-ish dead best friend character. And the music is treated sensitively—Lowdermilk themself provided orchestrations for a small band to give this pocket-sized show some proper oomph to its sound.
It’s a little engine beneath this chassis, but it may be worth taking for a spin.
The Mad Ones runs through Aug. 11 at 2936 N Southport Ave. For tickets and more information, please visit blanktheatrecompany.org.
For more reviews on this or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.