July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

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ERinVA
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July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

Post by ERinVA »

New thread for July reviews. :D
Ellen



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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

Post by cincinnati »

Saw the 100th show wed night...with the Billy Elliot version of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig........Tommy Batchelor and Keean Johnson.....what a show...what a performance...these two guys are simply outstanding
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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

Post by Steamboy »

I've finally ended up in Chicago on business, and will be making use of every opportunity to catch a BETMCHI performance (my hotel is only four blocks from the Oriental!).

Caught the matinee today, 7/11, my first BETM show since my second London trip a couple years back, and my first viewing of the US variation. I was able to snag L104 (eleventh row center of the orchestra) a couple hours before showtime, a great seat, close enough to see faces, far enough back to see the full stage.

Billy - JP
Michael - Gabe
SB - Mark Page

I arrived at the theater in half an hour before what I thought was a 2:30 showtime, only to find that I'd misremembered the curtain time, and that it was actually a 2:00 show that had just started. House staff asked me and a few other late arrivals to wait in the lobby behind the auditorium until the end of Solidarity, when they were happy to seat us. Video monitors allowed us to catch the beginning of the show, so the newbies weren't left too far behind. I was just late enough to miss the intro film, arriving about the time the screen went away.

Most of my memories of the performance have to do with differences between the Chicago version and the UK production, which have been gone over before. Some of the changes I think are to the benefit of the show (the shadow dancing, additional chaos during Angry Dance), some are equally valid (Audition scene aftermath, MCMT pageant), some are to the detriment (Jackie going into the mine, americanizing the slang). Even with the changes and the distraction of comparing the two, it's still a very good show and script.

The Oriental is somewhat bigger than the VPT, and it showed in the sound reinforcement - the show often sounded a bit overdriven, and Shine in particular was nearly unintelligible. The adaptation of the set to avoid traps works well enough, although it lacks the wow factor of the house lift in earlier versions. I did appreciate the spinning bedroom going into Angry Dance - Billy clambering down the kitchen wall is certainly a fun change from simply stomping down a spiral stair, and he certainly never got to fling as many props overboard in London.

A few easily-overlooked things reminded me of the VPT - the beamwork on the upstage wall echoes some of the architectural details found in London, along with the abandoned fake fireplaces along the far stage left. Also, the Oriental is located near one of Chicago's famous elevated train lines, so we'd get the periodic rumble of a train going by, reminiscent of the Underground train that passes under the VPT.

The show overall seemed a bit flatter than I remembered most of the London performances being, perhaps in part because of the line changes and the differences in staging. It seemed to me that the adult cast was struggling slightly with the Geordie accents, and some of the casting threw me a bit. Jackie and Tony looked more like brothers then father and son, and Mr B seemed dressed more befitting a motorcycle gang member than an unemployed pianist. The cast in general suffers from an American theater habit of clipping words and lyrics and a tendency to rush things a bit, probably in an attempt to 'improve' diction and pacing (this is a widespread problem). On the plus side, Cythia Darrow as Grandma is delightfully spacey, and Emily Skinner as Mrs. W is quite able to hold her own with her predecessors in the role.

JP Viernes turned in a solid performance as Billy. I've seen some reviews over the years naming various Billys as if they were the Seven Dwarfs, ie: Happy Billy, Grumpy Billy, Smiley Billy, etc. - from this performance, I'd call JP 'sense of wonder' Billy. He seemed to give his version a spirit of discovering the world that I don't recall having seen before in other portrayals. Technically, his performance wasn't as crisp as some I've seen from boys with more years and audiences under their belt, but having room to grow as an artist is not a bad place to be when you're 12 (I don't recall him as being one of Chicago's opening Billys, so I'm assuming that he's been somewhat recently promoted to the role), and it's nice to see Billy as 'boy with potential' rather than as 'finished product'. I do prefer Ballet Billys to Street Billys for Electricity, and seeing echoes of Liam Mower's early choreography in JP's version was a nice mental homecoming.

A few audience reaction notes - A boy of about five was sitting two seats over from me, and he was very vocal in his appreciation of the show, with 'whoa!'s and 'wow!'s being heard on a regular basis (along with requests to explain the more adult jokes), and the ladies seated behind me were discussing the show in glowing terms during intermission.

With luck, I might get the opportunity to see a couple more showings this coming week - I'll try to be on time for them!
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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

Post by ERinVA »

JP was added to the roster of Chicago Billys before the show went into previews there, and so has been an original Chicago Billy all along. Unlike you, I found him to be quite accomplished as Billy, as I said in my review back in the June Reviews thread. He is tiny, it's true, but he is not 12, he's 14. The youngest of the Chicago Billys is Giuseppe, who is actually 12. Perhaps you will get the chance to see him before you leave.
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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

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I haven't been following the cast additions/departures for a while, I was remembering only the announced originals, thus my assumption he was a recent addition. As for his age, a person in front of me as we left the theater asked an usher about JP's age, and 12 was given as the reply. My apologies to JP for understating his age and seniority. (thanks for the correction, ERinVA)

I didn't find him lacking as Billy, certainly not enough to detract from the show, just that there were little bits here and there - a hand movement that's a bit soft, a landing that wasn't quite stuck, an accent that slipped a bit for a line or two. That's all I was referring to, and it's certainly nothing that time, training, and experience won't cure (or perhaps he was just having an off day).

If anything was reducing my enjoyment of the show, it was the slang changes... I prefer the show as British as possible.

Chances are good I'll get to see the Tuesday show, and both Wednesday showings. After that I'll be busy with work again during performances.
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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

Post by ERinVA »

Don't know where the usher got the age of 12. But I asked JP myself after the show how old he is, and he told me 14, so that's where I got the information.
Ellen



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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

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I'm perfectly willing to believe the usher was misinformed/uncertain, but didn't want to appear unknowledgable to a patron, and I suspect that JP is indeed better informed of his correct age than a random usher. With that settled, on to tonight's review...

Snagged a rush ticket for this evening’s show at 11 AM today, got the second to last one available. Ended up in CCC4, Stage Left box seat under the organ grille. This is indeed an obstructed view seat, pretty much everything upstage of a line from Downstage Left to the Upstage right corner of the main set is out of sightlines from any of the seats in the box. Before the show I was looking at the speakers, and was worried when I noticed that there didn’t appear to be any speakers aimed directly at the box – I figured that sound reinforcement would be compromised as well.

Although the seats leave something to be desired if you’re wanting to watch the action, they do offer a unique perspective to watch the mechanics of the performance. Although you can’t see over the set wall into the backstage area, you can see the onstage side lights during the dance numbers, part of the pit orchestra, the dresser waiting for Billy at the end of the aisle at the close of the show, Mr B pumping the scissor lift on the cart Mrs W uses in Shine, miners assembling the sewer hut, and a number of other things. One bit I’d missed in all the other performances I’ve seen is the miners and policemen pushing the main set back to make room in Solidarity, and I’d never realized before that the giant Maggie Thatcher head is lifted by the same rope that Billy flies on. It was also a good vantage point for me to contemplate the lighting and sound rigs – lighting in particular has been condensed down a lot from the UK production, with a single truss of front lights and a couple of boom locations. But, enough of the shop talk….

Billy – Cesar
Michael – Keean
SB – Mark Page
Mrs. W – Susie McMonagle
Dead Mum – Kate Marilley
Mr. W – Kent Lewis
Adult Billy – Nicolas Torres

Having shown up on time, I got to see the intro film for the first time. I’m not sure they needed to back clear up to the defeat of the Germans in WWII, but the 80’s footage accompanying the 40’s newsreel probably does help ground US audiences into the story. My preshow worries about sound quickly proved unfounded – the box is fairly well covered by the main arrays, although it’s just far enough out of the main field of the speakers that musical numbers tended to sound a bit hollow.

Cesar quickly took command of the stage as Billy. He’s a big enough lad that he comes across as a pre-teen on the verge of asserting himself, as opposed to some younger-seeming Billys who have seemed to still be in the developmental stage of letting adults lead them everywhere. Cesar’s Billy makes one feel that when the ballet girls push him around, he’s about to push back. As ever, I was pleased to see that he did a ballet Electricity, although I started getting distracted by the lighting rig again, and didn’t pay as close attention to part of it as I should have (occupational hazard, I guess). There is some power in his leaps – I’m almost surprised that they didn’t decide to make him a street Billy.

Keean is a strong Michael, although it seemed that during Expressing Yourself he got too caught up in the dancing and forgot to keep up the singing (or perhaps the sound board op was having a bad night – I heard at least one missing line in the lead-up to The Letter).

Susie McMonagle as Mrs W was an interesting take on the role. Emily Skinner’s version reminds me a lot of Sally Dexter’s good-hearted version, but there’s a bit more world-weariness in McMonagle’s version. It really alters the dynamic in the winter scene, especially if you’ve seen the battle of wills that Jackie Clune would have with James Gaddas.

Overall a solid performance by all, with the only negatives being self-imposed ones stemming from my seating location. I’m starting to make peace with the US/UK differences, but will need to see a couple more performances to make sure :) …. Perhaps tomorrow, if I’m able to continue to avoid work.
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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

Post by porschesrule »

Steamboy wrote:As ever, I was pleased to see that he did a ballet Electricity, although I started getting distracted by the lighting rig again, and didn’t pay as close attention to part of it as I should have (occupational hazard, I guess). There is some power in his leaps – I’m almost surprised that they didn’t decide to make him a street Billy.
Overall, Street Billys don't seem to be as much the rage in the US productions as the Ballet Billys. In Cesar's case, as a student of the highly regarded National Ballet School in Canada, it's very likely he was chosen for the role, in large part, because of his ballet technique and skills. However, having said that, I suspect the athleticism and agility Cesar displays is because he has an acro background as well. He's a member of the Club IMCO Gymnastique (a gymastics club in Montreal) and has taken part in various gymnastics competitions, including winning first place at the Coupe Quebec in 2008.

Thank you, Steamboy, for the great reviews of the Chicago show. I especially like when you delve into the technical aspects of the production as, being an old theater major, I find such observations very interesting.
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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

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Thanks for the fantastic reviews Steamboy.

I really must get myself to Chicago sometime in the near future.
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Re: July 2010 Reviews - Chicago

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Double header today – had time to catch both shows, a rousing finale to an impromptu Billython.

Matinee:

To conserve funds, I did the rush ticket for the matinee, and a regular ticket for the evening show. I’d asked for a House Left ticket, and the man at the counter had pointed to the HL side on the chart, but when I got to the ushers, I discovered that I had a House Right seat, same as the night before. The only way to fix it was at the box office, so I had the ticket takers scan me back out (they don’t tear stubs, they just scan bar codes on the tickets), did the exchange, and ended up in H21, three seats from the outer edge. This puts you right in line with the Stage Right set wall, so nearly all the action is visible, a big improvement over the House Right box I was in last night. However, since the sound is set up for Left/Center/Right mixing, the speakers directly in front of you tend to be a bit heavy on the music and light on vocals (the vocals would be mixed more to the center speaker cluster) during the full cast numbers. They’re good seats if you don’t mind the sound mix.

Billy – JP
Michael – Gabe
SB – Elijah
Mrs. W – Susan Haefner
Clipboard Woman – Kate Marilley
Mr. W – Kent Lewis
Adult Billy – Nicholas Torres

Lots of substitutions today – I’ve now seen three different Mrs W’s in as many performances. I don’t think I’ve encountered that much variety in one of the adult roles before within a single Billython. Susan Haefner’s take starts out a bit more predatory, seeing in this random boxing refugee little more than another 50P a week, at least until she has him do some chenies. The second half of her portrayal seems to show Mrs. W as being unconsciously (or subconsciously) following British class roles, being subtly condescending to Jackie in the winter scene, unlike some of the more genuinely concerned versions I’ve seen from other actresses. It makes it a little harder to connect the dots between her initial feelings and her relationship with Billy.

JP was back for another session of being battered by ballet girls. He seemed in higher spirits today, kicking his way through Electricity with more energy than I remembered from Sunday’s matinee and asserting more ownership of the stage. An interesting trivia note is that he had a red finale shirt Sunday, but a light blue one today.

A minor goof was the Tall Boy losing his balloon at the end of MCMT, with it wafting up into the plaster ceiling at the far right of the cover directly over the forestage (still there for the evening performance).
The extreme side location of the seat gave me another new perspective on the show – this time, I was able to see offstage left and into the wings at times, such as the end of the breakfast scene when Dead Mum comes out – prop shelves are plainly visible, as are a couple random stagehands. Even more interesting was during Act II – you can see the flymen working the rope for Swan Lake. In London, the flymen are stage right, watching through Michael’s bedroom windows and on a video monitor. Here, a door in the masking opens, and there’s enough worklight to plainly see the lifts happening.

Last night I’d noticed on the lobby video monitors that the upstage wall opened in some fashion (the crew raises the main curtain and starts resetting the stage before the audience completely clears the auditorium), so I hung around after the show so see what I could. The portion below the horizontal beam appears to roll stage right, revealing a costume and prop area behind it. Miner’s headlamps and police riot gear seem to predominate the shelves and racks, with the real back wall a few feet farther back.

Evening:

Billy – Giuseppe
Michael – Keean
SB – Mark Page
Same adult subs as the matinee

Guiseppe took command of the stage early on, ripping pirouettes at the end of Solidarity that threatened to uproot the parquet floor. I spent a few moments wondering which would have the greater diameter, one of Guiseppe’s thighs, or JP’s entire torso, and decided only their dresser would know for sure. He puts those legs to good use – I think I spotted some double spins towards the end of the Electricity dance break. He also did something I’m not sure I’ve seen before – a couple times during the course of the dance, he would somehow get off of the centerline of the stage, and yet be able to correct his position while spinning…. That’s a level of control and spatial awareness that I stand in awe of.

Like Cesar, Giuseppe’s Billy is right on the edge of being an equal of an adult, ready to make a choice and stand with it, although without any hint of rebelliousness.

While checking out the back wall during the matinee, I’d looked up and spotted casters hanging off the back sides of two large boxes on the lighting truss. During Intermission, I wandered up to the balcony for a closer look. My first thought was that they were dimmer racks flown on the truss, but they didn’t have near enough cable going to and from them, plus there’s no reason you’d need two cases that size for the 17 conventional fixtures on the truss. I’m currently thinking that they’re sub woofers, but given the placement I suspect they’re mostly only used for special effects, like the riot shield flip. The 18” cabinets interspersed in the line array mains probably handle the bass for most of the mix.

The matinee audience seemed almost exclusively older folks, but the evening show was the standard mix of ages. My neighbor to the right had accompanied her husband to town on a business trip, and bought the ticket on a whim to kill the evening, with no knowledge of what she was going to see… she thoroughly enjoyed every minute, and seemed quite amused when I told her I was on my fourth show for the week. :D Like me, she’d gotten her Row L center ticket at a price lower than the posted one, probably because we bought them on the day of the show, when the house staff starts to try to fill in the holes down front, so that the cast isn’t faced with empty seats at close range.

Alack and alas, this brings my Billython to a close, as tomorrow will be a long day of working, and I’m hoping to be homeward bound Friday evening. Now that I’m dialed in on things like parking costs and ticket availability, I might be more likely to slip over for a weekend, but we’ll have to see how many 50Ps I can scrape together.
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