March Marches On

It's no secret that February's weather was terrible, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that I was under it -- under the weather, I mean -- for the last week of February. Or, actually, most of February. That means I am way behind on telling you what's happening in March, talking about the Oscars, bidding adieu to Downton Abbey for another season, or covering the shows that opened and closed during the time I was sick. It's been a rough month!

But now that it's March and I actually started the day without running a temp, let's try to pull ourselves out of February malaise and get on with the show.

"Ameowadeus" with Christoph Waltz (L) and Kevin Spacey (R)

As a side note to last night's Oscars, I do have to direct you to Youtube to see the Jimmy Kimmel parody videos. They mix Hollywood stars and dramatic tropes with favorite video memes, like "Charlie Bit Me" and the Keyboard Cat. I have watched the Keyboard Cat one ("Ameowadeus") with Kevin Spacey and Christoph Waltz at least twelve times already. And there are no words for "David After Dentist Double Rainbow Oh My God! in 3D" as a drug-induced Baz Luhrman hallucination involving Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Catherine Zeta Jones, Samuel L. Jackson and Seth Rogen.

Back in real life, Other Desert Cities continues this week at Heartland Theatre, turning in its last four performances on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The weekday shows begin at 7:30 pm, while the final Sunday matinee begins at 2 on March 9. Theater critic Nancy Steele Brokaw lauded the show's acting and emotional punch in her review for the Pantagraph, and audiences have been reporting they are blown away by director Sandra Zielinski's production of this Jon Robin Baitz drama about a wealthy family's secrets and lies.

Today is the big day -- Monday, March 3 -- when the net series Submissions Only finally returns to tell us what's been happening with unlucky New York actress Penny Reilly (co-creator Kate Wetherhead) as she navigates auditions, shows, the drama created by crazy colleagues and friends, and the hint of a thing with the adorable Aaron Miller (Santino Fontana). Submissions Only is addictive. If you haven't already seen all the episodes from season 1 and 2, you'll watch to catch those before diving into season 3 at BroadwayWorld.com starting at 8 Central time tonight. Once you've watched (or during your viewing experience) you can also chat with the cast on Twitter @submissionsonly between 8 and 9 pm Central/9 and 10 EST.

Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld takes the stage in the Tryon Festival Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana from March 6 to 9. This production is a product of the new musical theater/opera program at the University of Illinois called the Lyric Theatre @Illinois. Opera star Nathan Gunn currently holds the position of General Director for the Lyric Theatre, while his wife, pianist Julie Jordan Gunn, acts as the Director of Lyric Theatre Studies. Orpheus, described as "an irreverent romp through a lusty and lively heaven, hell, and earth," is one of three Lyric productions planned for this year, mixing musical theater with opera in an attempt to teach and nurture well-rounded performers who can sing, dance, act and entertain across disciplines.

If you're a baseball fan and you know your Bloomington-Normal history, you know about Charles "Old Hoss" Radbourn, the Hall of Fame pitcher buried in Evergreen Cemetery. Radbourn pitched what has been called "the winningest season in big league history," piling up 59 victories in the 1884 season on his way to a career total of 309 wins. He's been dead since 1897, but he has a Twitter account nonetheless, proving you can never truly silence an ornery, cantankerous baseball player. Old Hoss has shown up in the local Discovery Walk at Evergreen Cemetery, he's got a book about that amazing 59-win season, and now he's got a play. Playwright Jared Brown has put together a piece on Old Hoss for Illinois Voices Theatre in conjunction with the McLean County Museum of History. Rhys Lovell, who portrayed Radbourn in the cemetery walk, returns to play the role, accompanied by actors John Bowen and Howard Rogers. They'll play out this new take on Radbourn's colorful life in three performances March 7, 8 and 9 in the Governor Fifer Courtroom at the McLean County Museum. Tickets are priced at $15 for the general public and $12 for members of the Museum. You can purchase tickets in person at the Museum or by phone at 309-827-0428.

Community Players is back in the game starting March 20, when they open 9 to 5 the Musical, the stage (and, yes, musical) version of the 1980 comedy film that starred Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin as three working women trying to make a living in a hostile corporate world. Dolly Parton wrote the title song for the film and the score for the Broadway show and she certainly knows her way around a pop tune. For Players, Brett Cottone directs a cast that includes Kallie Bundy, Wendi Fleming and Aimee Kerber as the three friends who take drastic action against a sexist pig of a boss, with Mark Robinson as the pig in question. Performances of 9 to 5 continue through April 6 at Community Players.

Next up at Illinois State University is the docu-drama The Exonerated, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen and based on real trial transcripts, court documents and interviews with death row inmates who'd been wrongfully convicted. What do you do when you know you're innocent but the justice system has completely failed you? Even after the miracle of exoneration, how do you go back to living a life unscarred by what you've been through? Director Cyndee Brown brings this call to action to the ISU Center for the Performing Arts in a special benefit performance on March 21, followed by a short run in Centennial West 207 from March 27 to April 5. Brown's cast includes Nate Aikens, Mary DeWitt, Levi Ellis, Joe Faifer, Anastasia Ferguson, Gregory D. Hicks, Thomas Howie, Tim Jefferson, Dave Krostal and Cydney Moody as exonerees, witnesses, police, attorneys and other interested parties. CW 207 is a small space, so get your tickets now. You can pretty much bet The Exonerated will sell out fast.

A movie I am very much looking forward to -- Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel -- has been announced for a March 28 opening at the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign. Wes Anderson is an either/or proposition for me. I loved Moonrise Kingdom and Rushmore, but was unimpressed and uninvolved with The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited. Steve Zissou landed somewhere in the middle, but probably closer to the wrong side. Will The Grand Budapest Hotel be a dream or a dud? Based on the trailer and the amazing cast (Ralph Fiennes, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, Edward Norton, Bob Balaban, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson, Tom Wilkinson, Jude Law, and of course Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman) it looks like it should be right in my wheelhouse.

OTHER DESERT CITIES Opens Thursday at Heartland

When Other Desert Cities opens at Heartland Theatre this week, it will not be the first Jon Robin Baitz play to grace that stage. It won't even be the second. As a matter of fact, Other Desert Cities completes a Baitz hat trick for Heartland.

Like Three Hotels and A Fair Country before it, Other Desert Cities is about family and the responsibility we owe to the people we're related to. Should a person do what's best for him (or her) if that isn't what's best for the family as a whole? Should blood trump one's own judgment, values and needs?

Baitz was born in the United States, but his father, a high-level exec at Carnation, the big evaporated milk/instant breakfast company, took his family to exotic places like Brazil and South Africa when Carnation sent him there. Jon Robin, also called Robbie, returned to the US for high school at Beverly Hills High School, but his time abroad certainly informed his later work as a playwright.  

Three Hotels involves a man very much like Baitz's father, a businessman whose company sells baby formula, but a formula that has resulted in illness and death for children in third-world countries. The three hotels in the title show the man, his wife, and then him again, in different places around the world, as they muse on the distance in their marriage, the compromises they've made, and the corrupting influences of ambition and money.

A Fair Country expands on those issues, looking at the family of a diplomat stationed in South Africa and charged with bringing American "culture" -- like a production of "Idiot's Delight" put on by convicts -- to people living under Apartheid. He is desperate to get out of there and bring his family to a better posting in Europe, but his wife is falling apart before his eyes, and his sons -- one an intensely political counterculture journalist and the other a vulnerable, Quixotic type who hopes to save his mother -- have major issues with the way the family operates.

You can see those same political conflicts in Other Desert Cities, with once again a family in crisis. In this one, the mother, Polly, played for Heartland by Connie de Veer,  is tougher and sharper, more of a verbal warrior, and the father, Lyman Wyatt, played by Joe Penrod, is sweeter and more kind, an actor who had a decent career in Western movies before he took a political turn and became an ambassador under his friend Ronald Reagan. But they are still conservative and traditional, on the other side of a huge political divide from their oldest son, a golden boy who took a radical, self-destructive turn as a teen, and from their daughter, a talented writer who had a mental breakdown but has now tried to write her way into understanding what happened between her parents and her brother. And then there's Trip, the youngest Wyatt, a TV producer who does his best not to get involved in the family warfare.

When daughter Brooke, played by Jessie Swiech, comes home with the memoir she's written, one that exposes all sorts of things the Wyatt parents do not want to discuss, things get dicey very quickly. Aunt Silda, played by Carol Scott, sees herself as a free-spirited knight in shining armor, and she is firmly on Brooke's side, even though Silda is living on the generosity of her sister Polly. Trip, played by Joey Banks, has always kept his head low and stayed out of trouble. But this time, lines are being drawn in the desert sand. Nobody is willing to back down, not fierce, vicious Polly, loopy Silda, well-meaning Lyman, not even Brooke, who seems so fragile.

The issues are really very interesting as Baitz unspools them in his play. Is Brooke's first responsibility to herself and to the memory of her beloved brother? Or should it be to her parents, who live in a privileged world that they are loathe to lose, one that will be shaken to its core with the revelations in Brooke's book?

You'll have to watch Other Desert Cities to make up your own mind, but Baitz is careful to give both sides their due. Other Desert Cities was nominated for five Tony Awards and was chosen as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, winning a Tony and a Drama Desk for Judith Light, who played eccentric Aunt Silda in the Broadway production.

Sandra Zielinski directs the Heartland Theatre production, which opens February 20 with a 7:30 pm "Pay What You Can" preview performance. Performances continue through Sunday, March 9, and there will be a panel discussion of those same issues -- the right to be heard, to own one's memories vs. family peace and compromise -- following the matinee on Sunday, March 2.

For all the details, visit Heartland's Show Times or Reservations pages, or check out the Now Playing page.

Heartland Announces Cast for OTHER DESERT CITIES

Heartland Theatre and director Sandra Zielinski have announced who will be whom when they present Jon Robin Baitz's dysfunctional family drama Other Desert Cities in February.

Other Desert Cities involves the wealthy Wyeths of Palm Springs, California, a family that enjoys access to the highest levels of American society. In their heyday, they dined at the White House and hobnobbed with Ron and Nancy Reagan. Patriarch Lyman Wyeth, an actor turned ambassador, probably went shooting for big game with Dick Cheney at one time or another, while his whip-smart wife Polly, who once wrote for a hit television show with her counterculture sister Silda, no doubt enjoyed cocktails with Charlton Heston on the way to the Golden Globes. On the outside, theirs looks like a charmed life.

But they have their secrets. And daughter Brooke, a writer getting over a breakdown, decides what she needs most in the world is to air her version of one of those secrets. When she comes home with the tell-all book she’s written about that particular, devastating incident in their past, push comes to shove in the wake of truth and lies and simmering conflict between parents and children, siblings, and political ideals.

The Broadway production of Other Desert Cities was nominated for five Tony Awards, winning Judith Light the first of two awards in the Best Featured Actress category. Her role as Silda, the sister who can't quite pull it together, earned her a Drama Desk as well as that Tony. Baitz was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play.

For Heartland, Connie de Veer, an Illinois State University professor who last appeared in Sirens and The Trip to Bountiful at Heartland, will play Polly Wyeth, with Joe Penrod, recently seen as Fredrick Egerman in A Little Night Music for Prairie Fire, as her husband Lyman. Carol Scott, who played Aunt Abby in Arsenic and Old Lace at Community Players back in September and took on memorable roles in Doubt, Woman in Mind and The Beauty Queen of Lenane at Heartland, will play Polly's sister Silda.

Polly and Lyman's daughter Brooke, the one who stirs up the hornet's nest, will be portrayed by Jessie Swiech, an ISU grad who appeared in The Women of Lockerbie, Julius Caesar and Major Barbara. MFA actor Joey Banks, who appeared in Spring Awakening to open ISU's fall season, will play Brooke's younger brother Tripp, someone who seems at times to be the only grounded member of the Wyeth family.

Heartland's production of this fierce, funny play will open with a Pay What You Can preview on February 20, 2014, followed by performances from February 21 through March 9th. For showtimes, click here. For reservation information, click here.

OTHER DESERT CITIES Auditions Tonight and Tomorrow at Heartland Theatre

Director Sandra Zielinski will hold auditions tonight and tomorrow night for three roles in Heartland Theatre's production of Other Desert Cities by Jon Robin Baitz, scheduled for performance in Feburary 2014.

Heartland has produced Baitz before, with A Fair Country in 2002 and Three Hotels back in 1997. Baitz's work often delves into family dysfunction and political and ethical conflicts among family members, an excellent match for an intimate space like Heartland where you can see all the characters up close.  

A Fair Country and Other Desert Cities were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, with the 2011-12 Broadway production of Other Desert Cities also nominated for five Tony Awards. Judith Light won the Tony for Best Performance by an Actress in Featured Role in a play for her role as Silda Grauman, a warm and funny woman who also happens to be a bit of a mess. Silda depends on the financial support of her wealthy sister, Polly Wyeth, even though they have diametrically opposed views of the world. That's where Baitz's skill with fully drawn characters comes into play -- everybody has shades of gray, good and bad, no matter which side of the political or social divide they fall on.

Polly and Silda are two of the characters Zielinski will be looking to cast at these auditions. The third is Lyman Wyeth, Polly's statesman of a husband, a former ambassador with all the right connections in all the right places even though he is officially retired from politics. On Broadway, Stacy Keach played Lyman, while Stockard Channing took on Polly, his sharp, polished, perfect-on-the-outside wife.

The other roles in the play are the two Wyeth children, novelist Brooke, who has come home carrying a tell-all memoir that divulges her side of family secrets, and TV producer Trip, who tries hard not to take sides in the family wars. Those roles have been cast, but their presence as characters is key to understanding how their parents and Aunt Silda operate within the context of the play. It's Brooke's arrival with her time-bomb of a book that sets everything in motion in Other Desert Cities. Rachel Griffiths played Brooke on Broadway, while Thomas Sadoski, recently seen in HBO's The Newsroom, played Trip.

For all the details on Polly, Lyman and Silda, click here to see Heartland's audition notice. Auditions will be held from 7 to 9:30 pm at Heartland Theatre tonight and tomorrow, November 24 and 25. Actors will be asked to read from the script, with no prepared monologues necessary.

Performances dates are February 20 to March 9, 2014.

What's Up at the Station in 2013-14

Urbana's Station Theatre has announced the selection of plays which will make up its upcoming 42nd season. As usual, the Celebration Company will mix old and new, musical and straight plays, provocative and experimental and tried and true.

Opening the Station's fall season will be J.T. Rogers' explosive White People, a "candid, brutally honest meditation on race and language in our culture." A play that has been well-produced all over the country, including a 2009 Off-Broadway production, White People features three characters, three decidedly white people, who reveal their feelings about race straight up. It will be directed by Joel Higgins, with performances from October 3 to 19, 2013. You can see J.T. Rogers talk about the play along with a few brief excerpts here.

That will be followed by William Inge's 1950 classic Come Back Little Sheba, directed by Tom Mitchell from the University of Illinois Department of Theatre. Come Back Little Sheba goes inside an unhappy middle-class household that gets even more unhappy when Doc, a chiropractor, and Lola, his blowsy wife, take in a pretty young boarder. Shirley Booth played the role of Lola on Broadway and in the 1952 movie, earning a Tony and an Oscar for her efforts. Her Broadway Doc, Sidney Blackmer, also won a Tony Award, but Burt Lancaster, the film version of Doc, went away empty-handed. The play was revived on Broadway in 2008, with Law & Order's S. Epatha Merkeson as Lola, Kevin Anderson as Doc, and Zoe Kazan as Marie, the young woman who upsets the fragile balance in their lives. At the Station, Come Back Little Sheba will run from November 7 to 23.

The musical Chess, with music by the male half of ABBA, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, and lyrics by Tim Rice, is up next, scheduled for performances December 5 to 21. The story goes that Rice wanted to fashion a musical around the Cold War, and he chose the game of chess to frame the action after all the brouhaha surrounding Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky's World Chess Championship in 1972. Chess the musical, complete with hit pop song, "One Night in Bangkok," began as a concept album, followed by a production in London's West End in 1986. To get the show to Broadway, a book by Richard Nelson was added, but the show still didn't take off in New York, with the Imperial Theatre version only running for 68 performances. Still, Chess has kept its fan following over the years, as musical aficionados hope to find a production of this elusive and slippery show somewhere. The Actors Fund put together a special one-night performance in 2003, with an all-star cast that included Josh Groban, Sutton Foster, Norm Lewis, Adam Pascal and Raul Esparza. Mikel Matthews, Jr. will direct for the Station.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's prep-school drama Good Boys and True will open the Station's new year, with performance beginning January 23, 2014, directed by Thomas Schnarre. Good Boys and True premiered at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre as part of its 2007-08 season that examined "what it means to be American." Aguirre-Sacasa's story involves Brandon Hardy, a golden boy at exclusive St. Joseph's prep school, and what happens to threaten his life of privilege when a video that purports to show him doing something very, very bad emerges. You'll get a better picture of  the play from Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey's intriguing notes on the play written during its production there.

Sarah Ruhl's quirky and surreal The Clean House, directed by Katie Baldwin Prosise, takes the stage next. Ruhl has become one of the freshest voices in 21st century American theatre, and The Clean House pretty much defies description. Its characters include Matilde, a young Brazilian woman who has a job as a cleaning lady but really sees herself as a stand-up comedian; Lane, her employer, who has noticed the house isn't very clean and wonders if her housekeeper is depressed; Lane's sister, Virginia, who is a compulsive-obsessive cleaner and tries to make a deal with Matilde to clean Lane's house on the sly; Charles, Lane's husband, who is cheating on her with a much older woman; and Ana, the breast cancer patient/older woman Charles is in love with. Add some apples dropped from one reality into another, the funniest joke in the world, the Jewish concept of "besheret," something like a soul mate, and a trip to Alaska to cut down a yew tree, and you have some concept of The Clean House, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won Ruhl the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for playwriting. Look for The Clean House on stage at the Station from February 20 to March 8.

The March 27 to April 12 slot is still open, with details to be announced at some future date, but the final show of the 2013-14 season will be Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities, directed by Kat Bohannon Holley, with performances scheduled for April 24 to May 10, 2014. Baitz's play, "a taut, witty drama about an affluent California couple whose daughter has written a memoir that threatens to reveal family secrets about her dead brother," was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and its Broadway production won a Tony Award for Judith Light as Best Actress in a Featured Role. The Broadway cast also included Stockard Channing and Stacy Keach as the Wyeth parents, and Rachel Griffiths as their tell-all daughter.

If you're looking for more information, you can scan the specifics -- and check back to see what fills that March/April slot -- at the Station Theatre website.