Forget the familiar cheery Broadway musical, the land of chorus girls and tap shoes.
In a season that brought “Spring Awakening” to the Great White Way–rocker Duncan Sheik’s take on a 19th Century German expressionist play–and created an L.A. hit out of the Neo-Nazi/terrorist satirical operetta “The Beastly Bombing,” Chicago is also shaking up the world of music theater.
Steering wide of glossy Broadway fare, three local theater companies bring music to the stage this winter in starkly different productions meant to breathe new energy into the musical form, or create entirely new ones.
Evanston-based Next Theatre offers a musical adaptation of “The Adding Machine,” a 1923 play by Elmer Rice about Mr. Zero, a grunt slogging his way through the machine age and its dehumanizing effects, which opens Feb. 4 at Noyes Cultural Arts Center.
Inspired by Rice’s expressionist text, composer and Next Theatre artistic associate Josh Schmidt created a fantastical score referencing a long list of musical styles. Expect to hear notes of gospel, blues, Thelonious Monk and Tom Waits, along with classical influences Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg.
A rarefied mix? Perhaps. “We don’t expect anyone wanting to produce this on Broadway. It’s not the next ‘Cats,’ ” says Jason Loewith, the company’s artistic director who collaborated with Schmidt on the libretto for the now titled “The Adding Machine: A Chamber Musical.”
“Music theater gets stuck thinking it should be the same thing,” Loewith adds. “People say `musical’ and they think Rodgers and Hammerstein. It’s important that non-profit [theaters] are experimenting as much as possible.”
As a composer, Schmidt says he struggled to maintain a balance between musical experimentation and accessibility because the source material was so demanding. “It’s a deeply felt, deeply thoughtful work of literature,” Schmidt says. “I don’t want to end up alienating anyone, but I want audiences to have a range of thoughts and experiences.”
Indeed music adds dimension and depth to an already brilliant play, says director David Cromer, who first read Rice’s masterpiece in college and fell in love with the language.
Ultimately, Cromer explains, the score humanizes the wild, sometimes absurdist, vocabulary of expressionism. “Music has so much more power than words to grab you emotionally while introducing you to an idea. Sometimes the word is not enough.”
Moving to the opposite end of the music theater spectrum, American Theater Company will try its hand at re-imagining that mother of Broadway musicals, “Oklahoma!”
Few shows are as iconic, as synonymous with big, belting showstoppers, feel-good love stories and acres of dancers as this 1943 hit, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s first collaboration.
So how to make the classic different?
American Theater Company hopes to demonstrate the oft-ignored gritty, historical reality beneath the production’s normal sheen with a version opening Feb. 6 in its 107-seat space in the North Center neighborhood.
“This isn’t just a love story,” says Damon Kiely, who directs the show and serves as artistic director of ATC, which is known for mounting earthier work. “We have a mission . . . that asks, `What does it mean to be an American?’ The more I looked at [`Oklahoma!’], the more I saw it examines the question deeply.”
For one, the darker elements of the plot and setting are often overlooked or underplayed, Kiely points out. The story takes place in the rough-and-tough plains of a western territory in 1901, includes a murder and an attempted rape, and pits stubborn farmers against self-righteous cowboys in a scrappy pioneer community.
Now consider a love story against such a prickly backdrop: a farm girl falls in love with a cowboy, inciting jealousy from one of the farm hands.
“I don’t take the show at face value,” says longtime ATC ensemble member Marty Higginbotham, who plays Jud, the spurned farm hand. “This music is joyous–I go home every night with three tunes stuck in my head and I don’t want to diminish that–but we want to find the [characters’] grounding in the music and the songs,” Higginbotham says.
“We want to explore these people as real people with real challenges and real fears.”
ATC’s production also aims for historical realism. Think period costumes, folk dancing and a scaled-down musical arrangement that leans more to bluegrass than Broadway.
“The [1955] movie is a great document of a certain style of musical, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Oklahoma in 1900,” Kiely says. “If you read the text, you see there’s no way they dance like that, look like that or dress like that.”
Or act like that. To survive out west, folks needed to be brash, egotistical and resourceful, argues Kiely, noting that the average lifespan at the time was nearly 10 years less in the territories than in cities with potable water and medicine. “People went out there if they could embrace a certain lawlessness. You didn’t go out there if you needed order in your life or if you were afraid. The ones who survived were stubborn.”
Kiely hopes to bring that old-fashioned sense of stubborn pride to stage. A third production, “Bach at Leipzig,” in previews and opening Tuesday at the Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe, actually isn’t a musical at all, although music, musicians and musical forms figure large in the play.
Written by 30-year-old rising playwright Itamar Moses, the story is a fictional take on a historical footnote: In the Leipzig, Germany, of 1722, the town’s most prominent church considered a handful of musicians for the post of organist before deciding on Johann Sebastian Bach.
Imagine then, if you can, a hyper-philosophical “Survivor”-style smackdown between the candidates as they attempt to outmaneuver, outargue and outwit each other for the prestigious post. The result is “somewhere between Tom Stoppard, Mel Brooks and `Airplane,'” says director Nick Bowling.
And the music? For all the play’s linguistic pizazz, Bowling explains, the key moment on stage centers on the strains of Bach’s playing wafting through an open door. The six musicians, in the midst of scheming and jabbering on, turn quiet and listen to their unseen, outranking competitor.
“All this language, this brilliant, witty argument and banter, it all stops and we finally hear the music that we’re talking about,” Bowling says. “It’s not about intellectual games, [at this moment], the play knocks you over with the fact that for all these guys, their music is the reason they’re there, not the `Survivor’ aspects.”
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`The Adding Machine: A Chamber Musical’
When: Feb. 4-25 (previews start Thursday)
Where: Next Theatre, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St., Evanston
Price: $20-$40 (discounts for seniors and students); 847-475-1875 ext. 2; www.nexttheatre.org
`Oklahoma!’
When: Feb. 6 through March 4 (previews start Wednesday)
Where: American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron St.
Price: $20-$35; 773-929-1031, www.atcweb.org
`Bach at Leipzig’
When: Tuesday through April 1 (previews through Sunday)
Where: Writers’ Theatre at Tudor Court, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe
Price: $37-$58, 847-242-6000; www.writerstheatre.org
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