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September 29, 2006
TT: Little house, big show
In this week's Wall Street Journal drama column I review two Chicago productions, The Best Man at Remy Bumppo Theatre Company and King Lear at the Goodman Theatre. One was great, the other awful:Stop the presses--Gore Vidal wrote a good play! Granted, he wrote it in 1960, but "The Best Man," a tart, smart story of dirty politics run amok, could have been penned last week, and Remy Bumppo Theatre Company's consummately well-acted revival is strong enough to put this ambitious Chicago troupe on the national map....
Remy Bumppo, which performs in a pleasingly intimate 150-seat house, is a 10-year-old ensemble whose slogan is "Think theatre." According to its mission statement, the company "strives to delight and engage audiences with the emotional and ethical complexities of society through the provocative power of great theatrical language." This production lives up to those fancy words. Every member of the cast is ideal or close to it....
"Who is't can say, ‘I am at the worst?'" one of the characters in "King Lear" inquires of the audience. I can. Robert Falls' appallingly expensive desecration of "Lear," mounted by the Goodman Theatre in celebration of his 20th year as its artistic director, is the worst production of a Shakespeare play I've witnessed in a lifetime of theatergoing. It opens in a men's room (the first thing you see is a row of working urinals). What follows is an endless string of let's-be-ever-so-modern shock effects--oral sex, anal rape, male and female nudity, murder by garrote--that were already looking old-fashioned when Mr. Falls came to Chicago two decades ago....
I also take enthusiastic note of the long-delayed transfer to Broadway of Jay Johnson: The Two and Only, about which I raved when it played the off-Broadway Atlantic Theatre two years ago.
No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today's paper and turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the full text of my review. (If you're already a subscriber, you'll find it here.)
Posted September 29, 2006 12:00 PM
