"Fela!" on August 13th at 37 Arts in New York, NY

This new musical is choreographed and directed by Bill T. Jones. The good news, which we pretty much could have guessed, is that the music and choreography are fantastic. After all, the music is Fela Kuti's and the choreography is by Bill T. Jones. The not-so-good news, which we also could have guessed, is that the direction isn't nearly as strong. The wild card is the book, which is written by Jim Lewis, who is presently working with The Civilians. Sadly, that's the weakest part of the show.

I could get into a discussion about the evolution of the jukebox musical and how it's led us to this place but I won't. I will say that the conceit of the play is that Fela is telling his life story at his final concert in Nigeria. His compound has been ransacked, his wives raped and beaten, and his mother murdered. The concert setting is a vehicle for Fela to sing his greatest hits and to put them in a political context. While this is an easy way to show off the music, it's a bit of a copout and doesn't make for very compelling drama. If there is a theme, and if there is it's not well developed, it's that in the face of political adversity we should keep our resolve and continue to fight the good fight. While the story is poor, I will say that I heard "Zombie" in a whole new way. The production wrung out the meaning of the song.

As someone writing a personal critique of the play, the weakness of the script matters. As a guy who just went to see it, it barely matters. The music is fantastic and it's a joy to hear it played and sung live. Bill T. Jones' choreogrpahy is impressive and lots of fun. In a way it reminds me of Ron Brown's choreography in its fusion of traditional and African and Western movement. While Ron Brown's accomplishment is that he combines African and African American movement seamlessly, Bill T. Jones' is that he adds geometry to it. If you're a fan of Afro-pop and dance, this show is a blast. I enjoyed it tremendously. From the reaction of the audience, I think the entire theater enjoyed it. And from the fact that it's been extended for a couple of months, I think people continue to enjoy it.

"Funk It Up About Nothin" at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre on July 19th in Chicago

This is the second of Shakespeare's comedies that the Q Brothers have created, the other being "The Comedy of Errors." In the days of "updating" Shakespeare, the Q Brothers have done great service to these plays by adapting them as hip hop productions. First of all, this production was 90 minutes long instead of 3 1/2 hours. As far as I'm concerned, the only people who could possibly be interested in a full production of "Much Ado About Nothing" are Shakespeare scholars. For the rest of us, it's great to pare it down to just its basic plot because those are the entertaining parts of this play.

The medium of hip hop, at least as employed by the Q Brothers, works very well here. It's a bawdy story and their lyrics bring that out, the style of lyricism serves the battles of wit well, and it plays effectively with the rhyming couplets. The Q Brothers adaptation of the language is fantastic, often rewriting complete sections of dialogue but keeping Shakespeare's original text in pieces as well. It's a clever adaptation and the most fun anyone's had seeing this play in at least a century, I'm sure.

Some of the odd characteristics of this show are dealt with masterfully here. For example, the Q Brothers comment on the ridiculous series of disguises in the play by being over the top about them. It's as though they're purposely not even trying to be convincing. At the same time, the costumes take their basic form from hip hop fashion and make them more costumey. Talentwise, the woman who plays Lady B (Beatrice), is hysterical. She has that "three snaps in a Z formation" kind of attitude down.

One aside is the ever growing practice of adapting plays and musicals using hip hop. Oddly enough, but not surprising, is that the hip hop music itself is never very innovative or new. This music, while exuberant and tons of fun, felt like something the Fresh Prince of Bel Air would have made in the late 80's. It's nothing that a current hip hop musician would have written. This is the primary reason, I think, that the audience is packed but with people who don't really listen to hip hop. Be that as it may, there was a dj on stage. Whether she was spinning improvisationally, I don't know; I doubt it. nevertheless, this was a fantastic show. Highly entertaining, incredibly witty, and quite smart.

"The Lion in Winter" at Writer's Theatre on July 18th in Glencoe, IL

Writer's Theatre's directors always pay such careful attention to scripts that they inevitably wring more meaning out of them than just about any other theater company in town would. Plays that I've never liked, I've loved when seeing their version. Frankly, the directors just seem smarter to me. It also helps that they attract the best actors in Chicago.

Seeing "The Lion in Winter" was a surprising thing here. I've seen the play before a couple time and seen the movie many times. Not unsurprisingly, Rick Snyder decided to downplay the camp humor and emphasize the pathos. As usual, the direction was careful and the acting first rate. However, I ended up feeling rather unmoved. Without the camp humor, the rest of the play didn't quite hold up. So, while I can't say I was enthusiastic about this production, it was more than solid and I realized that this play is primarily a comedy and can't stand up without it.

"The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" by Gift Theatre on July 5th in Chicago

"Judas Iscariot" opens with Judas' mother recounting his suicide and burial. Judas, unsurprisingly, had been abandoned by everyone. She alone dug his grave and covered him with earth. People insisted that he was in hell but at the close of her monologue she declares, with equal parts pathos and equal parts anger, that Judas is in heaven. If Judas were not in heaven, she says, then God is unjust. At the end of the monologue, we notice Judas, humped over and drooling, on a stump in the front corner of stage right. It's a wonderful moment, partly because it raises the question of Judas' culpability in God's plan for the death of Christ (and consequently our salvation) and because we see the physical manifestation of what must have been Judas' emotional state upon betraying Christ. Thus, in the first few minutes of the play, the scene is set for what I think is one of the most fascinating stories of all time.

Judas, it turns out, is in purgatory. His name is mud and he can't get a trial that might release him from purgatory to heaven, not because God forbids it but because the other inhabitants of the place refuse to hear his case. A feisty woman decides to act as his public defender and doesn't rest until she gets him a trail. As the trail proresses, we learn why each person present is in purgatory and we learn some historical and non-historical details about people surrounding the death of Christ. Chief among them are the high priest Ciaphas and Pontius Pilate. Her challenges offer us an opportunity to reconsider the story that we'd learned and accepted without giving it much thought. Ciaphas, she suggests, also betrayed Christ, who was a Jew after all, and thus one of Ciaphas' own people. She accuses him of being in bed with the Romans and profiting from the enslavement of the Jews. How is Ciaphas any better than Judas she wants to know. Ciahas' answer is that Judas took money. Not much of an answer. Ciaphas storms off and declares that what he feels for his part of the story is between him and God. Why then is what happened not between Judas and God? Pilate doesn't get off any easier. And neither does Mother Theresa who, the play suggests, said that abortion is the worst sin of al and is responsible for all wars. The point of these testimonies seems to be to point out that everyone, including our saints, are culpable but quite willing to throw the first stone. Why then has Judas gone down in history as the worst fiend?

As the received story of Judas goes, Jesus is sent to earth to die for our sins. Due to his sacrifice, we can now be forgiven for our sins and gain entry to the kingdom of God. At the bequest of the Jews, the Romans decide to kill Jesus. Ciaphas, the Jewish high priest, resents Jesus for his power and claims it is blasphemy. Judas, we've been taught to believe, betrays Jesus' whereabouts and identity to the Romans for payment and they string Jesus up and crucify him. Thus, Judas is the scummiest of the scums of the earth. Some theologians have argued, however, that Judas' betrayal was a sacrifice itself. Jesus was sent to earth to die and Judas did an important thing by betraying him. In fact, they suggested, Jesus willed it. In either case, this is a moving story to me because Judas and Jesus seem to be incredibly close friends and Jesus' betrayal is necessary. That it comes at the hands of one so close to him, whether mandated by Christ or brought about by Judas, is a complicated story of friendship. My image is of Christ both knowing that he is responsible for Judas' betrayal and saddened by that betrayal.

The play's suggestion is that Judas is Jesus' puppet -- that Jesus puts these plans into action and that Judas' betrayal is necessary. Those pieces of silver cannot repay Judas for what he's had to do for Christ's plan and he resents the payment. Maybe he doesn't throw them away because of remorse but out of the recognition that it's paltry payment considering the magnitude of the sacrifice. When Jesus comes to Judas looking for emotional succor, Judas is still angry and sends him away. While Judas sits on trial in front of mankind (and mankind who have been less than perfect and ended up in purgatory) Judas is actually judging God.

The play is fascinating to me for its exploration of good and evil and that relationship between Jesus and Judas. The production itself I'm a bit more mixed on. The acting is frequently but not always strong, the costumes are odd, and the set is flat. The cast is racially diverse and each person of color plays a caricature of his/her ethnicity. Pilate is black and a bit ghetto. Actually, he's like a ghetto guy who has made a lot of money. One of the characters is St. Augustine's mother. She's a Latina hoochie mama. While her characterization drove people around me crazy, I found her kind of funny. About St Augustine (who wa an alcoholic and slept with more prostitutes than he drank glasses of wine), she says, he gave up hooch and whores and went down the straight and narrow. Her manner is over the top and none of the women in heaven like her. They know, though, that she can get shit done. When she approaches Judas for the first time, she slaps the drooling invalid about and makes jokes about his suicide ("How's it hangin'?"). But then she comes close to him and touches him. Against her will, she senses the centuries of pain and she bursts into tears. She hugs him, tears falling down her face, and Judas seems to warm just a bit. Like so much of the play, the conventions are weak but it delivers when it needs to. In that moment, we feel and experience Judas' isolation. For all the silly stereotypes, bad jokes, and odd costume choices, we experience a deeply human moment. Those moments make the play more than worth seeing.

"Pippin" by East West Players on June 21st in Los Angeles

I was interested to see this production for a number of reasons. First, East West Players is an Asian American theater company with a national reputation. Furthermore, they were doing a hip hop and anime version of "Pippin," the 70's rock (sort of) musical that the "L.A. Times" said had "street cred." Even the "Chicago Tribune" wrote about it.

Watching an Asian American theater company take on "Pippin" with both hip hop and anime sensibilities is pretty cool. Both are forms of art that were popular before they began to be considered legitimate by the arts establishment and both are very much identified by their urban and ethic roots but have had wide influence beyond those communitites. Many theater companies are adopting plays to give them hip hop sensibilities. It's especially trendy to do hip hop Shakespeare. That East West Players decided to weave both hip hop and anime into this production makes it much more interesting than the hip hop Shakespeare that's popping up everywhere. In this production, they go together very well, combining to give the production a stylistically sexy edge that's fun to watch.

"Pippin" is the story of a gifted child whose aspirations to do great things lead to a series of existential disappointments when he realizes that nothing makes him feel like life has meaning. At one point the narrator of the show, a sort of Satan/Dionysis figure, offers him a fiery and spectacular death as the penultimate event that will grant his life meaning. Although tempted, Pippin realizes that meaning comes through what feels like the ordinary things in life, such as loving someone and parenting. perhaps that's true but it doesn't ring true in this production. Instead, it feels a bit cheesy. I'm not sure if it's the fault of the script or the production.

The musical direction was excellent. While the original cast recording sounds hollow and tinny, this music sounds current. What makes this "Pippin" a hip hop musical is that there's a dj on stage who mixes a hip hop backbeat to many of the songs. When he does, the dancers' choreography is hip hop choreography. It is also an incredibly sexy show. The dancers are all hot as hell and we get to see lots of them.

The actor who plays the narrator is the highlight of the show. He has a sexy, Satanic, fu manchu look and he's a very good hip hop dancer. He's really the life of the show. The rest is less successful. The dancers are all excellent but they don't have the technique or precision of great hip hop dancers. While I'd be impressed watching any of them dancing in a club, they don't have the energy or technique of street dancers. It ends up looking like hip hop for older white people. The hip hop music is also very pedestrian. This, of course, is the case with pretty much all musicals. The music and choreography are always a watered down version of what more cutting edge musicians and choreographers are doing.

My guess is that theaters that are turning everything into hip hop productions imagine they'll draw teens and African Americans to their houses. Granted, I saw a weekend matinee, not the time slot that tons to draw young people. The audience was largely older white folks with a smattering of Asian Americans. I saw one African American couple who seemed to be in their late 30's. I don't think these shows draw teens or African Americans because they don't have the freshness or technique of street hip hop dancers or good hip hop dj's. Instead, they seem like hip hop for older people who think it's cool but who are a few generations behind current trends. My guess is that a black teen would think the dancing and music are pretty pedestrian. Street cred? Maybe if you live in Beverly Hills.

"How Theater Failed America" by Mike Daisey in Denver, CO.

I'm at the Theatre Communications Group conference, where yesterday everyone was talking about this show. They were either excited to see it, resentful of it, or resentful of it but still interested in seeing it. Some thought the show might make them angry but I thought it sounded insular, and thus, wasn't terribly interested in seeing it. With all thet alk, though, I couldn't resist.

"How Theater Failed America" is a monologue, with Mike Daisey sitting at a desk on a bare stage, with very minimal lighting, talking into the full but dark auditorium. It's an incredibly funny critique of the current state of American theaters but a critique that comes out of an intense love of theater and its possibilites for transforming lives. He opens the piece by speaking directly to the audience and saying: I wonder why you've come. The implication is that he has nothing positive to say to this theater-going crowd about theater and so it's surprising that they'd show up to hear it. He list a few hysterical reasons why he's surprised folks would come to see the show and then gives a few hysterical reaons why they might have. Perhaps we want to hear him place blame, he says. Perhaps we want to hear him talk about how the young people have short attention spans, with iPods always in their ears; how funders have screwed things up; how critics, especially thet "NY Times" and Charles Isherwood, have ruined things for theater. It's a sly parody of the reasons arts administrators give for the state of the arts. The audience is good natured, though, and they laugh at themselves throughout this. Then Daisey changes his cadence and begins to speak very slowly and says "It's not the NEA, or corporate funders, or short attention spans, it's not evern Charles Isherwood that's ruined theater, it's you [long pause] and it's me." What had been 5 or 10 minutes of good fun turns very serious and just as the tenstion becomes too much to bear, he turns the page of his notes and cuts then tension.

This moment is indicative of the piece. It uses humor to challenge the audience, at times it's accusations are serious and direct, and it uses the conventions of the monologue (and to a lesser extent theater more broadly) to structure the piece but also to make the tone work. He wants to challenge the audience but he doesn't want to alienate them.

He walks the audience though a series of stories that are in turn funny and poignant. They speak to the power of theater and the ways it can provide hope for its participants and the ways in which theater companies, the artists and administrators, have sold out the theater. I'll tell one story quickly. He tells about a production of Genet's "The Balcony" in which he played the cardinal. The direction said he wanted to create a "super fucked up" production and does so. He put the actors in boots that are a foot-and-a-half off the ground, has them wear outrageous wigs and thick kabuki make-up, and has a dwarf and mud wrestling. What it didn't have, Daisey tells us, was sound dramaturgy.

When the director tells Daisey, who is a pretty fat guy, that after his speech four minutes into the play he should open his cardinal's robe and beat off, Daisey is torn. One side tells him that actors do what directors tell them to do but the other side knows this has gone too far. When he tells the director that his masturbating on stage is needless and doesn't contribute to the ideas in the play, the director replies that that is why it is "super fucked up." Daisey, being an actor, follows his director's instructions and comes up with the most fucked up way of masturbating he could imagine. After a late seating one night when a young girl enters the small theater right at the moment of his perverse masturbation scene, he wonders if he should do it. He hestitates for a while and then he does. As he readies himself in that moment to begin masturbating, he tells himself that he's an actor and he's doing what actors do. But then he can't sleep for nights. He loses sleep, not because he masturbated in front of a child, but because, as an actor, he couldn't think of what else to do.

Daisey presents a number of such stories, each bringing a different point to light. That one makes plain the danger that artists, despite their reservations, sometimes give over too much control to their collaborators. Another story illustrates the point that in our mad rush to build new buildings for our theaters, generating enough revenue to fill these large houses takes us away from our original impulses for creating theater and fiorces us to put on safe productions that do not feed our artists passion. We become a business, a corporation, and not a place where artists work together as a community. Corporations, he reminds us, can't love the theater, only individuals can love the theater. An artistic director friend told him that the name of the play shouldn't be "How Theater Failed America" but "How Theater Became America."

This is the performance's punchline and it's representative. It not only makes clear this dangerous trend in theaters, God knows we've seen plenty of that in Chicago, but it also tells us something about America. By carefully sketching out how many of us have poured cold water over the soul of theater, robbing ourselves of our creative individual impulses, he points out the similar process that has taken place in America and that so many of us particiate in.

"Operation: Orfeo" by Hotel Pro Forma at the Istanbul Theatre Festival on May 30 in Istanbul, Turkey

Every year, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts host a month-long theater festival that showcases the work of Turkish performing arts companies as well as that of other companies from around the globe. I went to see a Danish theater company performing an opera adapted from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the past few years, I've seen Mary Zimmerman tell this story in "Metamorphosis" and Sarah Ruhl in "Eurydice." In both versions, the emotional center of the work is really with Eurydice. In Zimmerman's piece, the tearful moment is not when Orpheus looks back thus losing his love forever but as he's disappearing and we witness her confusion. She can't remember exactly who he is and is confused by his sadness. The chasm between his experience and hers, due to her lack of memory, is the tragedy. Sarah Ruhl's plays are never perfect but are marked by such deep humanity and amazing dialogue that I find them remarkable. Her version explores the relationship among love, loss, and memory. Eurydice's father is in Hades when she arrives. Having manged to resist losing his memory when he crosses into Hades, he acts as her guide upon her arrival and helps her to reconstruct her memories. Without those memories, her love for Orpheus couldn't exist.

I honestly have no idea what languages this opera was in. I know two of the songs were in English but I couldn't understand those and the supertitles were in Turkish. Thus, I had the music (sans the libretto) and the staging to engage me. Even so, I enjoyed it about as much as I did the others. The company was made of of 14 singers, 12 of them in the chorus and the two title characters. I can't comment at all on the story since I understood none of it. And I can't really dissect the music's technique since I know so little about operatic music. I will say however, that I see a fair amount of opera, both old and contemporary, and this was way up there for me. My two favorite late 20th century operas are John Adams' "Nixon in China" and Phillip Glass' "Satyagraha." In fact, it's the Phillip Glass opera that got me interested in new music. Unlike even my favorites of Glass and Adams, the music in this opera, which clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes, was beautiful to me the entire time. It was haunting, sparse, and shockingly varied at times.

The program booklet refers to the show as a visual opera done in three acts. Visually, it was as astounding as anything I've ever seen. Like the music, it was incredibly restrained while also being wildly exuberant within that restraint. The set is a series of about 15 large white steps that are enclosed by a white border, visible in the picture I've attached. The first 10 or 15 minutes of the performance is done in the dark, with the chorus of 12 singers sitting pretty much in a vertical line in stage right, Eurydice lying on one of the stairs on stage left, and Orpheus standing a few steps below her. All 14 performers wear dark gowns with black crowns and wee see only their silhouettes. We listen intently to the music. Then the lights come up slightly and the chorus members begin to move their arms just slightly and in unison. While the movement is minimal, and maybe because it is, it is very beautiful. Afterwards, the staging picks up its pace but largely in terms of lighting. There are moments when Eurydice slowly rolls from one stair to the next but there is very little movement besides that. The blocking acts as tableaux and we experience each scene primarily as still moments, even if there is movement within them. And usually we experience each scene in comparison to a preceeding one. In addition to the movement, the lighting is a star of the show. At one point, the chorus members stand in a diagonal line covering the set from top to bottom. Eurydice is laying on a step and Orpheus stand a few steps below her but looms above her. With just white light and shadow, the stage is black to the left of the chorus members and completely white to the right. As a still image, it's beautiful. There are many, many ways in which the light plays with the white steps and the variety seems like a small miracle. This is something that I'm unable to describe really, so I'm hoping that the image will give you a sense. Near the end of the piece, two intensely green laser lights begin to shoot out of the set. The length of the light glows longer and a layer of green light acting as a wave lay out between the two lasers. That entire system of lights grows longer and longer, eventually extending over the audience, until it covers the entire audience.

Opera lovers, of which I'm not one, say that opera is the greatest art form because it combines music, theater, dance, and visual art (thought the set). I find that this is rarely the case. As theater, it tends to be disappointing. The stories are usually silly and the acting ineffective. The dance is usually boring and often silly. And the sets are usually very impressive but rarely interesting. This production does seem to forgo acting but it sure was high on the other three. While there was no dancing as we often think of it, there certainly was choreographed movement. The set was like something Dan Flavin would have done if he had continued to work. And the music was exceptional.