A triple-header of musicals: Paramount's 'Fun Home', Music Theater Work's 'Zorro', and Surging's 'Urinetown'
From the small to the big to the big-made-small (depending on perspective), from the established to the underdog, the last week has been jam-packed with musicals of all shapes and subjects.
Photo by Liz Lauren.
Fun Home is an odd-duck musical in that I love it unabashedly but it seldom comes up in regular rotation. One might say I hold it close enough to observe it at a distance, not unlike cartoonist Alison Bechdel's way of perceiving the world and herself. Based on her "graphic memoir" (read: memoir in comic format) about growing up gay with a domineering and deeply closeted father, it made history as the first Main Stem musical with a lesbian protagonist and has quietly floored regional audiences ever since. (Our reviews of previous go-arounds in the Chicagoland area can be found here and here.) Paramount Theatre's production—the first musical presented in its intimate BOLD series at the neighboring Copley Theatre—is one to love and hold close, so good that it hurts, as well as an examination of parents should.
Exquisite musicianship and nearly invisible direction only underscore the inherent strengths of Jeanine Tesori's music and Lisa Kron's libretto—by turns impish, osmium-dense, and gutting—but it still requires a crack gang of performers to pull off. In this, Paramount is blessed with a proper trio of Alisons, from young to adult. Especial praise to Elizabeth Stenholt's Medium Alison (read: college-aged), who, in soaring out of the closet, flies head-first into the roiling family drama beneath her parents' cool veneer, leading us to recall the squirmy realization that our adulthood comes upon us when our parents begin speaking of themselves more openly than ever before. Emily Rohm, as mother Helen, is a capable Atlas who holds up her household and is perforced to shrug it off for her own sanity. Stephen Schellhardt is a magnetic enigma as father Bruce, forceful—brutish, even—but always with a soft gilding brush in hand. And Emilie Modaff, as grown-up Alison trying to make sense of it all while trying to maintain distance, is a dam waiting to burst, and burst it does and ever so gloriously.
Fun Home runs through September 18th at the Copley Theatre, 8 E. Galena Blvd, Aurora, IL. For tickets or more information, please call (630) 896-6666 or click here.
Photo by Brett Beiner.
Zorro: The Musical, meanwhile, up in Skokie, is a full-on regional premiere courtesy of Music Theater Works. The piece, based on the pulp tale of the masked Spaniard wrestling back his Californian colony from wicked hands, has played across Europe since 2008, and has theatrical bona fides in Stephen Clark (co-librettist) and John Cameron (co-composer), both of whom have collaborated with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (Les Misérables) on separate occasions. However, while they have that Euro-musical anthemic spirit down pat, most everything else tends to fall flat. The writers may have hoped that the character's pulpiness could gloss over exceedingly broad character sketches and comedy, but, on press night, the effort only went so far. Of the immortal triangle of hero, villain, and love interest, only Laura Quiñones emerged with real spark as Luisa.
The trio of flamenco dancers is always good to liven things up with a stomp, armed as they are with the natural flavor of the co-composers, The Gipsy Kings. But if the evening is worth anything, it's that this was the night I clapped ears on Alix Rhode as secondary love interest Inez. While in these pulpy shows the secondary characters tend to be more inherently interesting, Rhode seems to be the only performer to salt all the earnestness with a modern sensibility.
Zorro: The Musical runs through August 21st at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd, Skokie, IL. For tickets or more information, please call (847) 673-6300 or click here.
Photo by Surging Films and Theatricals.
In any other "musical comedy spoof" where performers face front wide-eyed and gasp in surprise at some over-the-top revelation, I take stock of the exits. But Surging Films and Theatricals' go at Urinetown gets that over-the-top style exactly right. Twenty years since its most improbable Broadway bow, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann's piss-take on dystopian fiction, Brechtian agitprop, and humanity's apparent inability to course-correct still has that fringe-y vim. Put together with as much love as smarts, the performances—sometimes sardonic, sometimes dew-eyed, all-times hilarious under director Billy Surges' hand—land as sharply as they should in this tiny black-box space.
You won't be rushing for the door, is my point. Unless you really have to go.
Urinetown runs through August 28th at the Edge Off-Broadway, 1133 W Catalpa Ave, Chicago. For tickets or more information, please click here.