SR Digest: Rightlynd, HeLa and what’s a critic for?
November 26, 2018—Issue #1
Welcome to the first free biweekly edition of Storefront Rebellion! This free digest will bring Chicago theater news and reviews from me, Kris Vire, right to your inbox. I definitely want to hear your feedback: Reply to this email, or if you’re reading this on the web, hit me at kris@krisvire.com or find me on Twitter @krisvire.
Reviews and other views
Photograph: Liz Lauren
Rightlynd
Last week, I reviewed the latest entry in Ike Holter’s seven-play Chicago cycle for the Sun-Times.
The latest in playwright Ike Holter’s interconnected cycle of seven plays set in his imagined 51st Ward of Chicago, “Rightlynd” finally introduces us to the neighborhood’s embattled Alderman Nina Esposito. The play that centers her is a disarmingly playful, righteously angry and ultimately mournful kind of civic fable.
Read the whole review here.
Photograph: Jonathan L. Green
HeLa
Paid subscribers to this newsletter received my exclusive review of J. Nicole Brooks’s new play, a world premiere co-production by Sideshow Theatre Company and the Greenhouse Theater Center, on Sunday. Here’s an excerpt:
Playwright J. Nicole Brooks takes [Henrietta] Lacks’s story as one of several jumping off points for her uneven but frequently affecting new play. … Brooks interweaves imagined scenes of Lacks (Nicole Michelle Haskins) enduring brusque doctor visits and excruciating hospital stays with a 1980s-set thread about a science-loving little girl on Chicago’s West Side. … And then there are the Afrofuturistic interludes with a soliloquizing space traveler (Deanna Reed-Foster).
If you missed it, you can upgrade to the paid level and read the whole review here.
Photograph: Michael Brosilow
Witch
In case you missed it, here’s my October Sun-Times review of Jen Silverman’s new play, one of the smartest and most enjoyable pieces I’ve seen this year. It runs for three more weeks at Writers Theatre.
Casting aspersions
And since this is issue 1, allow me to reach back and plug this piece I wrote last month for Chicago magazine on the parade of out-of-town actors at Chicago Shakespeare Theater: Hamlet Is the Latest Chicago Shakespeare Theater Role that Didn’t Go to a Local.
Selected upcoming openings
Familiar Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Nov 26
The Revolutionists Strawdog Theatre Company, Nov 27
The Buttcracker: A Nutcracker Burlesque (sub)version productions, Nov 28
Hershel and the Hannukah Goblins Strawdog Theatre Company, Dec 2
The Play That Goes Wrong Oriental Theatre, Dec 5
Yippee Ki-Yay Merry Christmas: A Die Hard Musical Parody The Den Theatre, Dec 5
The Santaland Diaries Goodman Theatre, Dec 6
The Second City’s 107th Mainstage Revue Second City Dec 6
The Winter Wolf Otherworld Theatre, Dec 8
Kris recommends
In the Canyon Jackalope Theatre Company, through Dec 1
Frankenstein Court Theatre, through Dec 2
Small Mouth Sounds A Red Orchid Theatre, through Dec 9
Plainclothes Broken Nose Theatre, through Dec 15
Witch Writers Theatre, through Dec 16
Master Class TimeLine Theatre Company, through Dec 9
Rightlynd Victory Gardens Theater, through Dec 23
HeLa Sideshow Theatre Company, through Dec 23
Gypsy Porchlight Music Theatre, through Dec 29
Oriental out, Nederlander in
I’m glad my days of having to type out the name “Oriental Theatre” are numbered. Broadway in Chicago announced on November 13 that the theater at 24 W. Randolph St. will be renamed for James M. Nederlander, the Broadway theater owner and founder of Broadway in Chicago who died in 2016. The new marquee is set to be revealed in February with the arrival of Dear Evan Hansen.
Oriental Theatre is a name as past its prime as that of, say, a certain Washington NFL team—a fact that really underlined itself last summer when it played host to The King and I.
At least the current stint of Miss Saigon helicoptered into the Cadillac Palace instead.
That Broadway in Chicago is proactively making the change is a good thing. And though it might have been nice to see a name that honored a Chicago artist—the “Sheldon Patinkin Theatre,” anybody?—it’s a relief that BIC didn’t go the corporate naming rights route again, lest we end up with another LaSalle Bank–Bank of America–PrivateBank–CIBC Theatre on our hands.
So what am I doing here?
I don’t just mean what are my hopes and plans for this newsletter—I addressed much of that in my introductory post last week.
I mean, what on earth am I doing launching a new arts criticism venture when the demand for criticism seems ever on the wane?
At the beginning of 2018, Chicago had four legacy publications with salaried theater critics on their staffs. We’re now down to one. One of those eliminated positions was mine. Freelance budgets, too, are tight all around; the metrics era has confirmed just how few people read most reviews online, and artists regularly gripe about the whole critical profession. Last week the founder of gossip outlet and ticket reseller Broadway.com exhorted people (in a since-deleted tweet) to stop reading reviews and go into shows blindly, and goddess-who-walks-among-us Audra freakin’ McDonald retweeted it with a string of handclap emojis, breaking my heart.
So why didn’t I just take the universe’s hint and change careers? Why create a space—and work—for myself, and god forbid ask people to pay for it?
I’ve been reading a lot about the craft of criticism recently as I weighed whether or not to take this leap: A.O. Scott’s book Better Living Through Criticism; this Matt Zoller Seitz essay that I’ve had bookmarked for years to share with new critics I was trying out; volumes of Frank Rich and Walter Kerr and Richard Christiansen. All to reacquaint myself with what good criticism can do, and needs to do.
It contextualizes, proselytizes, discovers, annotates, creates a document of the undocumentable and analyzes with rigor and reverence. And Chicago deserves to have that done by practitioners it can trust. That’s what I’m driven to do.
Last night, as I was compiling this first edition, American Theatre editor Rob Kendt shared an essay on Facebook with perfect timing. “What are critics for?” asks the headline of the 1996 piece by Fintan O’Toole. I was struck by this passage:
Critics should be honest enough to accept that they represent nobody but themselves--not the art form, not even in any real sense the newspapers that employ them. Their job is not to report on how a work was received by an audience. It is not to sell books or tickets. … The job of the critic is to try to ignore the magnifying effect of print and hyperbole, to preserve a sense of proportion, and to give a genuinely individual opinion. It is a modest but by no means a contemptible task.
I’m here representing nobody but myself, in a very real sense—no editors, no advertising. So it was heartening to me to see more than 200 of you sign up to give this newsletter a try before I’d sent a single email. I hope you’ll spread the word.
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