STAGES & SCREENS

William Ewart Gladstone ranked second, third or fourth on all five of the lists of the best prime ministers in UK history that are cataloged on Wikipedia, which includes lists compiled by The Times of London and four prominent historians. But as I noted in a blog post last year , Gladstone has never been the subject of a movie -- unlike Winston Churchill, who ranks first on all of the lists, and Benjamin Disraeli, who ranks considerably lower. There is however one filmed representation of Gladstone, a fifty-minute episode of a 1983 ITV television series called Number 10 , named for the home of the Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street. This month I managed to find a copy of an NTSC DVD of the series, which I’d struggled to find when I wrote that article. The show presents a character study of seven prime ministers that is unmatched by anything comparable on American television. The first episode makes a solid case that Gladstone’s story is interesting enough to merit dramatic tre...

The hard part of having an aging legacy as a playwright is “being forgotten,” confesses Eugene O’Neill in the Goodman Theatre’s new musical Iceboy!, Or The Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write ‘The Iceman Cometh.’   The O’Neill character in the Goodman’s outlandish screwball comedy, played by TV’s Nick Offerman ("Parks and Recreation"), ought to know if he’s being forgotten. He begins each act with a survey of the audience: “How many of you have heard of me?” (The results are divided. The upper balcony has largely not heard of Eugene O’Neill; the main floor largely has.) “Boo yourselves if you’ve never heard of my play The Iceman Cometh .” (Lots of hearty boos.) Iceboy! is one of seven musicals spanning quite a cross-section of the history of the genre that I happened to see in this strangely musical July. Iceboy! is not the best of them, and in many ways is the worst, but it’s the most interesting place to start. Together the musicals show the art f...

“It might seem harsh to say so, but the truth is that I am more and more convinced that as an all-round thinker, or, more properly, as a systematic thinker, Ibsen really doesn’t fit the bill. … But of course Ibsen is Ibsen, and I should be the last to complain that he is not Herbert Spencer.” - William Archer upon meeting Henrik Ibsen, as quoted in Henrik Ibsen: The Man & The Mask by Ivo De Figueiredo. Absent from the end of Timeline Theatre’s new production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People are the last lines of dialogue in the original play. The lead character, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, has been driven almost out of town by a mob angry because he has revealed to them that the water in the springs of his spa town are contaminated. Focused only on the money they stand to lose, and not the risk to people’s lives, the townspeople refuse to accept the inconvenient truth about their environment. Does this 1882 plotline sound familiar today? Paradoxically, however, Ibsen ends this...

Nine pages before the end of the new book Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future , author Caitlin Vincent quotes a more than 40-time contemporary opera librettist about the stigma against accessibility in modern opera. "Librettist Mark Campbell recalled being confronted by a composer collaborator after Campbell described his music as ‘accessible’ in a public forum. ‘He took me aside and said, Don’t ever use that word again. Critics will use that against me. And I said, I didn't mean it was dumbed down. I meant the audience will connect with it.’" When I read Opera Wars , I thought of an opera aria that managed to crack this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Song, beating out eligible pop luminaries like Ed Sheeran, Brandi Carlile, Miley Cyrus, Sara Bareilles and Stephen Schwartz to the coveted nomination. It was the first classical number to win such a nomination in a decade, according to the entertainment publication The Wrap . The aria, “S...

“Whether this music came from Alabama or Mississippi or other parts of the South doesn’t matter anymore. The men and women who make this music have learned it from the narrow crooked streets of East St. Louis, or the streets of [Chicago]’s Southside, and the Alabama or Mississippi roots have been strangled by the northern manners and customs of free men of definite and sincere worth, men for whom this music often lies at the forefront of their conscience and concerns. Thus they are laid open to be consumed by it; its warmth and redress, its braggadocio and roughly poignant comments, its vision and prayer, which would instruct and allow them to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle in which they would be both victim and the ten thousand slain.” – August Wilson, introduction, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , page xv-xvi Two shows have opened in the last month in Chicago about the impact of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to North in the 20 th ...

T.S. Eliot is known for his reservations about spring. Yet the author of the line "April is the cruelest month" wrote a friend in April 1911 to tell her about how beautiful the season was. "Paris has burst out, during my absence," Eliot wrote, "and it is such a revelation that I feel I ought to make it known. At London, one pretended that it was spring, and tried to coax the spring, and talk of the beautiful weather; but one continued to hibernate amongst the bricks ... But here!" Chicago has been more like Eliot's London than his Paris recently, but spring is almost here, so it’s time to clean out my notebook of winter stage observations from the last seven weeks of Chicago theater. After a somewhat sparse fall season for Chicago theater, with few productions that I personally found exciting, the winter has been productive. These nine shows, ranging from opera to musical theater to straight plays to one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, show a little o...