Displaying items by tag: Sarah Bockel

Even 40 years later, the AIDS crisis continues to shape American life. Long before Hollywood brought AIDS stories to the cultural mainstream, the theatre was a safe place for actors and writers to explore their fears and sense of injustice for a mass audience.

‘Falsettos’ playwright William Finn began working on what would become the now classic musical in the 1970s, as a response to the gay liberation movement. The play started as a series of one-acts concerning Marvin, the show’s protagonist as he navigates leaving his family for his male lover. Initially the first installment, ‘In Trousers’ was a critical and commercial failure. Finn considered abandoning theatre entirely, but instead collaborated with lyricist James Lapine to create ‘Falsettos’. A musical that would explore both gay liberation and the early years of the AIDS epidemic through the vantage point of Finn’s character Marvin.

Court Theatre and TimeLine Theatre team up for a joint revival of ‘Falsettos’ at the Hyde Park theater. With a 70s-themed set, audiences are transported back to 1979 where they meet Marvin, the play’s central character played by Steven Schellhardt. Not only is this a play about gay culture, but it’s also a celebration of the Jewish-American experience. The show begins with a song ‘Four Jews in a Room Bitching’ that introduces the sing-songy musical style that permeates throughout.

Marvin is leaving his wife Trina (Sarah Bockel) for his new lover Whizzer (Jack Ball). Trina is taking up with the family psychiatrist Mendel (Jackson Evans). Their son Jason (Charlie Long) is caught in the middle as his parents duke it over his approaching bar mitzvah. Marvin wants it all, his perfect nuclear family and his new lover, at whatever emotional cost that comes to his son, his lover and Trina. What’s so striking about the first act is how modern the themes are. Perhaps in a world without the specter of AIDS hanging over it, this odd family arrangement would have eventually worked itself out. Act I essentially lives in a vacuum uninfluenced by the coming epidemic. Act II catches up with the characters two years later. Things have slightly improved for Marvin and his family but another grim reality emerges. Whizzer becomes one of the AIDS epidemic’s first victims. This 11’o clock tone shift admittedly feels jarring especially against the chipper upbeat music. Though, it makes this musical feel unique as far as AIDS literature goes. It’s not the AIDS musical per se, but rather a musical about the gay experience that features AIDS. In this story, the virus is so new it doesn’t even have a name or a course of treatment.

Lyricist James Lapine crafted words for Sondheim classics like ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ and ‘Into the Woods’. His signature rhyming scheme are both a blessing and a curse for ‘Falsettos’. Sarah Bockel is undeniably this production’s strongest asset, especially during  numbers like ‘Trina’s Song’ showcase her talent as a singer and physical performer. However, the lyrics feel outdated as any sort of feminist anthem.

The play is aptly titled ‘Falsettos’ as the characters are often singing in a much more upbeat style than the content of the lyrics. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the rhyming feels like a reach. The musical style works well in big cast numbers like ‘Falsettoland/It’s About Time’, but when the play takes on a more serious tone the format feels contradictory to the plot.

Director Nick Bowling and music director Otto Vogel present a faithful, high-end revival that will delight fans of the musical. The cast rises to the occasion wonderfully, especially child actor Charlie Long as the hopelessly awkward teen caught in the middle of his parents’ drama. Putting ‘Falsettos’ into the context of today’s more accepting world, it feels like a victory lap, a reminder of how far society has come. It’s a celebration of love in all its forms. 

Through December 8 at Court Theatre. 5535 S Ellis Ave. 773-753-4472.

While I’d yet to see Beautiful: The Carole King Musical since it premiered to much acclaim (and a U.S. tour) a couple years ago, I entered the Cadillac Palace Theatre for its latest Chicago debut a lifelong Carole King fanboy. I knew her songs. I knew her story. But for a couple hours on Wednesday night, the cast of this latest touring production made me feel like I knew her.

But first, those songs. The audience, young and old, knew them all. The older ones, the ones who’d been there the first time around, giggled with nostalgia. And the rest of us – who know them from parents, from oldies radio, from YouTube, from simply being alive – were every bit as thrilled. From John Michael Dias’ mugging Neil Sedaka singing “Oh Carol” on national TV to his former high school flame, Carole Klein, to the ensemble’s medley of Brill Building tunes love-potioning and splish-splashing and yakkity-yakking, we were all Boomer kids taken back to a not-simpler time.

The real standouts of this jukebox time machine were two vocal quartets. Playing the parts of The Shirelles, Little Eva and her backing singers, and Janelle Woods and her own group, McKynleigh Alden Abraham, Traci Elaine Lee, Marla Louissaint, and Alexis Tidwell were magic as they brought classic takes on King’s “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “One Fine Day.” The dresses, the elegant moves, the wedding chapel harmonies, and those songs. Wow. They were only equaled by their male counterparts – Josh Dawson, Jay McKenzie, Avery Smith, and Kristopher Stanley Ward – whose coiffed hairdos, satin suits, and smooth moves as The Drifters made it look so easy as they doo-wopped and stepped to “Some Kind of Wonderful” and “Up on the Roof.” But Ms. King’s songs weren’t the only ones on display. While The Drifters did a nifty walk down Weil and Mann’s “On Broadway,” the rival songwriting duo’s “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” was retaken from Tom Cruise’s boozy Top Gun barroom ballad by Matt Faucher and Dias again as The Righteous Brothers. Faucher’s baritone filled the Cadillac, and Dias’ high harmonies brought it home. Again, wow. Wish I’d been there the first time around, but this cast showed off their chops while paying quite a tribute to the classic songs and their songwriters who the story’s about.

And about that story. Again, as a fan, I knew the outline: NYC kids slave away in a Times Square hit-making sweatshop, soundtrack a generation, and one of them makes it big herself later on. But the main cast fleshed out the story’s characters. They took them from characters to people. James Clow’s gum-chewing, contract-signing Don Kushner was intimidating but encouraging. Sarah Goecke’s witty, Cole-Porter-wannabe wordsmith, Cynthia Weil, was a woman ahead of her time. Jacob Heimer’s neurotic lady’s man, Barry Mann, made you root for him. And Andrew Brewer’s smoldering but sensitive Gerry Goffin made you swoon, even as you knew the dirty dog was sneaking around on his Carole.

And Carole. Oh, Carole. As Neil Sedaka sang, “there will never be another.” And throughout the show, lead Sarah Bockel not only proved Sedaka right, giving us Carole King’s look and playing and voice, she gave us Carole Klein, the person. Many talented performers could probably approximate King’s hair or her vocals. But Bockel went beyond that, giving us the perky and precocious 16-year-old writing those hits and falling for that hunk. She gave us the broken but devoted young mother finding out not just who she’s married to – Bockel and Brewer’s chemistry was very sweet and seemed very real – but who she herself is. And she gave us that self, finally confident to write her own words, to tell her own story, to sing it loud, for a crowd, for us. And that story, of a woman claiming her soul from the lost and found and using it to give voice to not just a generation, but many generations to come, was what wowed the Cadillac’s crowd the most. The voices will make you applaud. The songs will make you nostalgic. But the story this cast and their show tell of this natural woman, this national treasure, will make you feel. It made me feel.

For more show information visit www.broadwayinchicago.com.