October 8, 2004 | About Last Night

My drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal is all about my recent trip to Chicago, where I saw four plays and was knocked flat by three of them.

The dud was the Goodman Theatre’s world premiere of Arthur Miller’s Finishing the Picture:

The cast included Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin and Matthew Modine, who together with their less well-known colleagues did what they could to enliven a show whose only distinction is that it isn’t quite as horrible as Mr. Miller’s last play about Marilyn Monroe, “After the Fall,” with which the Roundabout Theatre Company battered Broadway earlier this year. “Finishing the Picture” is, however, quite horrible enough, a bitter stew of score-settling and self-regard that left me wondering, not for the first time, how the author of “Death of a Salesman” could have stooped so low….

Needless to say, the playwright’s ex-wife is also among those present, though the actress playing her, Heather Prete, is never allowed to show her face (we do, however, see the rest of her naked body) or utter an intelligible word. As she grunts, mutters and screams, the other actors talk (and talk and talk) about her, emitting an endless stream of pseudo-poetic burble in the Miller manner: “What we had that was alive and crazy has been pounded into some hateful, ordinary dust.”

The pick of the litter was a revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:

Out in Hyde Park, for instance, the Court Theatre, the University of Chicago’s resident professional company, is putting on a revival of Edward Albee’s best-known play, acted with such high-keyed desperation that you’ll still be talking about it for days after you see it. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which closes Oct. 24, long ago lost the fist-in-the-face shock value it had back in 1962, but Mr. Albee’s portrait of a dying marriage in the shrieking stage is still blunt enough to make you squirm.

Kevin Gudahl, whom I hailed in January for his superb performance in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s “A Little Night Music,” is even better this time around as George, the small-time college professor who spends his drunken nights clawing at himself and his wife, Martha (Barbara Robertson), in a frenzy of self-loathing. Mr. Gudahl reeks of damnation–you can all but smell the brimstone from the back row of the theater….

I also loved Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Merry Wives of Windsor and the Porchlight Music Theatre’s Sweeney Todd:

Speaking of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, whose praises I’ve sung more than once in this space, I have nothing but happy things to say about that company’s rumbustious production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Directed by Barbara Gaines and running through Nov. 21, it’s as festive as a Halloween party, in part because of the perfect match of theater and set. When the actors come galloping down the aisles of the 500-seat Courtyard Theater and storm onto the three-quarter-round stage, upon which James Noone has placed a two-story Tudor house that revolves on a turntable, you know you’re going to have a ball–and you’re right. Ms. Gaines has brought out the bawdy comedy of “Merry Wives” without sacrificing the sweetness, and the ensemble cast enacts her vision with infectious delight. I hate to single out one player for special comment, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Lise Bruneau, whose low, sharp-edged voice and come-hither warmth are just right for Mistress Page. You’ll hear more of her.

I wanted to get off the beaten path and find out what the smaller theater companies of Chicagoland have to offer, so I took a chance on the Porchlight Music Theatre’s “Sweeney Todd,” which runs through Nov. 7, and was generously rewarded by a lively, tough-minded production of Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece. L. Walter Stearns, the director, emphasizes the melodrama, right down to the garden-hose arterial spurts with which the Demon Barber of Fleet Street bisects the throats of his victims, and Michael Aaron Lindner, the star of the show, wields his vengeful razor with galvanizing rage….

No link. As always, head for the nearest newsstand, or do the other thing.

Our Girl and I managed to do a few other things last weekend, too. For openers, we went to the Lyric Opera to see a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni that packed all the theatrical wallop of a straight play. This kind of thing is a lot less common than you might think, and not just because so many opera singers can’t act (though that’s probably the main reason). Many opera houses are simply too big for painstakingly directed productions to register clearly, and most of today’s major-house opera directors typically opt for high-concept stagings that rely on large-scale, scenery-driven effects.

Peter Stein’s approach is different. “All the drama, all the theater, lies in the music,” Stein says of Don Giovanni, and so he’s produced the opera without any obtrusive conceptual overlay, placing his singers in the midst of Ferdinand W