On the art of reinvention: ‘Once’ at Writers Theatre and ‘1776’ thru Broadway in Chicago
The Company. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
When it first came into the world, Once, the film written and directed by John Carney, played its central Dublin-set will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension for slice-of-life realism. When the film was adapted into a Broadway musical, director John Tiffany and choreographer Steven Hoggett played it as a wistful pub-set fairy tale and set a template that other productions have followed. Now at Writers Theatre, director/choreographer Katie Spelman has pulled off a peculiar conjuring act: she’s nudged the musical toward very real human comedy within the unreality of a black-box setting.
She has able magician’s assistants in the central couple played by Matt Mueller and Dana Saleh Omar, who, as the unnamed Guy and Girl, respectively, have to make beautiful music out of the plentiful aching pauses bookwriter Enda Walsh has given them, to say nothing of Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová’s shimmering folk-poetic songbook.
She has able clowns in Yuchi Chiu, Matt Edmonds, Lucas Looch Johnson, and Liam Oh, each of whom are pulled into Guy and Girl’s musical orbit, each a bit of a trainwreck, each trying his best to keep themselves together when faced with work, love, life.
She has able artisans like lighting designer Yael Lubetzky, who with the deftest touch can turn the theatre’s back brick wall into gossamer.
But it’s the prism through which Spelman casts the piece that prevails. Tasked with making theatre out of this collection of songs—none of which develop plot or character in the sense of a traditional showtune—she shows us how music can shape lives, either as a live-or-die practitioner or an earnest striver mulling a lyric for a tune playing on loop in their headphones.
Even if you’ve seen Once a million times, this will feel like your first time, guaranteed.
Once runs through April 16th at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct, Glencoe, IL. For tickets or more information, please call (847) 242-6000 or visit writerstheatre.org.
The National Touring Company. Photo by Joan Marcus.
Loop-ways, the touring production of the recent Broadway revival of the evergreen 1776 doesn’t so much knead the musical in a new direction so much as blow it to pieces to reassemble it anew. Most notably, a multi-racial all-female cast (cis, trans, nonbinary) is doing the reassembling, led by co-directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus.
What emerges from the explosion unscathed is Peter Stone’s book, largely adapted from the actual minutes of the Continental Congress leading up to the ratification of the Declaration of Independence. So, as John Adams (Gisela Adisa, she/her) and her loyalist opposite John Dickinson (Joanna Glushak. she/her) are throwing off sparks in their loggerheads, Stephen Hopkins (Julie Cardia, she/her) shouts for more rum while everyone else swelters in the Philadelphia heat wondering when they can split for the nearest brothel. Casking that saltiness is the production’s most successful gambit.
What isn’t directly taken from those minutes, however, tends to get underlined in triplicate in Sharpie. At least, I’m not sure “The Lees of Old Virginia” needed “Dixie” to be sung in counterpoint. Or that “The Egg”, a triumphant sigh of relief after the Declaration is completed, needed a flash-forward video montage of protests. Or that, when Adams reaches the make-or-break point to condemn slavery or not, everyone need face out into the audience while Adisa intones “Posterity will never forgive us.”
1776 is plenty politically fraught already—it did piss off Nixon, after all.
That said, John Clancy’s new orchestrations are rather attractive and do something to weave some stylistic unity in Sherman Edwards’s delightfully oddball score—a score that runs the gamut from vaudeville ditty to showtune to aria.
In sum, like America itself, this 1776 is a worthy experiment, a notion that can only be built upon and improved, as, undoubtedly, future productions adopt what works.
1776 runs through March 12th at the CIBC Theatre, 18 W Monroe St. For tickets or more information, please call (800) 775-2000 or visit broadwayinchicago.com.
For more reviews on these or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.