Filament Theatre Company has taken a page from Reduced Shakespeare, which was created initially to spoof Shakespeare’s labyrinthine plots, his more incomprehensible jokes and general iconic status. Their current production of Choose Thine Own Adventure brings together the respectable art of Bard spoofing with the fondly remembered Choose Your Own Adventure books which peaked in popularity about the time I was in junior high.

And this is also an entry in the little-studied but truly pervasive category of bar theatre. The Underground Lounge has a small stage clearly intended for a band, but big enough to give Filament’s four-person cast a little room. Rather than pretend they’re in a proscenium, director Julie Ritchey wisely gets her actors out among the patrons, which is how this kind of venue works best. So the audience gets a little bit of iambic pentameter with their drinks, and the actors encourage the groundling atmosphere they say they want to cultivate in their mission statement.

In the end, the success of spoofing Shakespeare depends on a solid mix of in-jokes for the folks who know the Bard well and broader humor everyone can enjoy. Adapter Allison Powell seems to have opted more for the latter, which also makes some sense, given the barroom setting. And of course I’m judging the work based on my one night’s experience. There is presumably a chunk of material I never saw. But what I did see was a pretty broad, pretty undisciplined show that didn’t make a whole ton of sense.

The plot was a mess, jumping from a ghost story to drinking songs to torture via leek-eating to bloody revenge for the forced consumption of a leek. There’s no real story to follow, which was the attraction of the original Choose Your Own Adventure books: the chance to see the same story over and over with different endings, some successful and some not so much. But here we have more of a design-your-own play variation with pieces that clearly don’t always move cleanly into one another.

Which would be fine if the humor worked really well. Unfortunately it’s uneven at best. Because the cast lacks a certain amount of discipline, the piece is sloppy and it’s not always clear where the jokes should be. Clearly they’re having a good time, and I’m sure the piece improves in direct proportion to how often you visit the bar. Perhaps with a larger audience, the interaction with the audience helps bring the whole thing together.  But as it stands, it’s not a particularly memorable entry into Shakespeare spoofing or bar-based theatre.

Choose Thine Own Adventure, Filament Theatre Ensemble

Nina Metz, Tribune—“The sensibility here is agreeably homemade, and under Julie Ritchey’s direction, the four-person cast appears game for just about anything—including intentional backstage stumbling, Elizabethan improv and drinks thrown in their faces. When their timing is fast and furious (like a better episode of ‘30 Rock’), the show is a gas. They can’t quite keep the momentum going, but Ped Naseri (in tights and a tunic) has real comic chops and can sell a punch line with just the right unexpected look.”

Albert Williams, Reader—“The Filament Theatre Ensemble ’s boisterous comedy is a sort of cross between The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and an improv jam. A cast of three men and one woman mash up snippets of Shakespeare, using audience suggestions to guide the hour-long performance. Viewers, for example, decide whether the play getting slapped together onstage should end happily or tragically. The gimmick yields a pretty weak product and the improv isn’t all it could be. But the actors are skilled at physical humor and at speaking blank verse, and the venue—a basement-level Wrigleyville bar that once housed a cutting-edge performance space, Club Lower Links—is hospitable to this informal, indulgent party show.”

Ryan Dolley, Time Out—“The production exalts in a threadbare charm, riffing constantly on its low production values and subterranean bar setting. The ensemble is admirably equipped for the boisterous evening that ensues, wrangling the language with speed, clarity and a hammy, hard-to-resist wink. Ritchey’s staging frees her actors to roam the bar with mischievous abandon; it paid off on opening night with a truly hysterical scene in which Rosalind kills herself via repeated blunt trauma to the midsection with a commandeered handbag… Through it all, the script stays remarkably faithful to Shakespeare’s words, recontextualizing each scene to create a bawdy new story from snippets of Hamlet, Twelfth Night, As You Like It and the like. With 20 scenarios and four possible endings mapped out by ensemble member Powell, her wonderfully entertaining take can be forgiven the slim run time and abrupt ending.”

Neal Ryan Shaw, New City—“Hoping to recreate the experience that Shakespeare’s groundlings had at the Globe Theatre, Filament has devised an interactive night of classical theater using an entertaining mix and mash of the Bard’s best-known scenes. The contemporary analogy of the dingy bar is nearly perfect, in fact, giving us the freedom to interact with the players and even sneak off to the bar for a refill, although the groundlings were never given quite such license to determine the course and outcome of the play. The ingenuity of Allison Powell’s adaptation—which ensures that no two shows will be alike—is evident, and the four-person ensemble know just which of the audience’s buttons to push. Shakespeare scholars and punters alike will find something to enjoy.”

Doo Lister’s Blues, National Pastime Theatre

Zac Thompson, Reader—“Set in 1960s Chicago, Terry Abrahamson’s drama charts the political awakening of a west-side barber and musician known as Doo Lister. As long as crime, race riots, and police brutality stay outside his shop, Doo’s content to draw the shade and noodle at the piano, producing sweet, derivative R & B too innocuous to attract attention. But once the violence works its way in, he starts sounding less like Smokey Robinson than Gil Scott-Heron. Doo never makes a convincing revolutionary, either in Abrahamson’s script or Victor Cole’s urgency-free production. But the playwright does raise—and, admirably, avoids easy answers to—a good question: In turbulent times, should art help us forget our troubles or rail against them?”

John Beer, Time Out—“The history is fascinating, but the drama is utterly inert. Scenes begin and end awkwardly. ‘We really did it, you guys!’ exclaims grating boho promoter Rebecca (Victoria Abram-Copenhaver) the morning after Doo appears on the radio. Cole’s perfunctory production amplifies the oddness of Abrahamson’s script. Rebecca, for instance, has an uncanny habit of commenting on dialogue that’s occurred a few seconds before she enters the room; whether she’s psychic or just eavesdropping is never clear. By the end, I found myself welcoming the lively hip-hop interludes, in which present-day rapper Nine Pound Hammer (Al Mayweathers) comments on urban history. Spoiler: A last-minute twist reveals that NP Hammer actually has some relation to the rest of the play.”

Zach Freeman, New City—“Set in a Garfield Park barbershop amidst the now-infamous riot of 1966, Terry Abrahamson’s Doo Lister’s Blues—originally produced as a workshop at the DuSable Museum of African American History in 1999—is Chicago-centric theater that tackles national themes of race, free speech and governmental oppression. Abrahamson, a Grammy winner with numerous impressive credits to his name, posits here that music can elicit social change. As the titular Doo—a barber-cum-songwriter—Warren Levon (an actor reminiscent of rapper Cee-Lo Green both vocally and physically) sits in his shop with his friend Catfish (Kenneth Johnson) and pens saccharine doo-wop odes in his spare time. After a personal tragedy (which director Victor Cole stages expertly) and much urging from a Jewish hippie (Victoria Abram-Copenhaver), Doo changes his tune (and tunes) and sets about writing socially relevant lyrics. This quickly lands him and those around him in hot water with Uncle Sam. As with good song lyrics, the message is clear without being ham-fisted.”

Mary Shen Barnidge, Windy City—“Terry Abrahamson’s documentary-tinged drama has undergone several rewrites since premiering in 1999 to emerge almost bursting at the seams with cogent observations on its times: the more intense harassment of Black dissenters than that imposed on white protesters, for example. Or there’s the link between the poetry-jazz fusions of the Beat era and the rise of spoken-word performance, culminating in—are you following this?—the expository verse bridging our play’s scenes and locating us historically, delivered by a young afrocentric rapper whose identity we discover only in the final moments. Abrahamson’s text might require multiple viewings to absorb in all its dimensions. But director Victor Cole keeps the story firmly rooted in the microcosmic journey of one humble hero caught amid warring factions beyond his control.”

She Loves Me, Writers Theatre Chicago

Chris Jones, Tribune—“[T]here is a danger there and a trap into which Michael Halberstam’s production falls. Mueller, a young actress with a beautiful voice and an uncommon affinity for the musical eras prior to her birth, catches the right blend of resistance and charm. But Thomas’ Georg is so unpleasant for so much of the show that you find yourself not really wanting this pair to end up together. He does recover toward the end, but you’re never really invested in the couple as a couple, which means you don’t find yourself driving the show forward. At the end, you fear that Amalia won’t be taken care of, which is hardly ideal. Thomas needs more vulnerability and accessibility… Moreover, the production can’t quite decide how much it wants to embrace the darkness of the piece, so it tends to fall between several viable worlds in the overly staccato first act. After intermission, things settle down greatly and the show finds its feet and, most certainly, a very appreciative audience. The singing is uniformly excellent; Bock’s score sounds ever-wonderful under the musical direction of Ben Johnson.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Halberstam, who will stage the Writers’ Theatre-originated musical, A Minister’s Wife, at Lincoln Center this spring, is in top form here, with Jack Magaw’s art nouveau set and Nan Zabriskie’s zesty period costumes capturing Central European style of the time."

Zac Thompson, Reader—“Parfumerie, a 1937 play by Hungarian writer Miklos Laszlo, has been adapted approximately two bajillion times. Blame an irresistible premise: two shop clerks become anonymous pen pals and fall in love by mail despite the fact that they hate each other in real life. It’s romantic comedy gold. This 1963 Broadway musical version isn’t the best of the adaptations (that would be Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 film, The Shop around the Corner), but it’s a gem nonetheless, thanks to Joe Masteroff’s gently humorous book, Jerry Bock’s elegant score, and Sheldon Harnick’s witty lyrics. Michael Halberstam’s Writers’ Theatre production isn’t very visually exciting, but it boasts uniformly fine performances, particularly from supporting players Heidi Kettenring as the shop tart, Kevin Gudahl as the shop nebbish, and Bernard Balbot as an ambitious delivery boy.”

Kris Vire, Time Out—“[E]ach member of Maraczek’s staff gets multiple moments in the sun, from frustrated singleton Miss Ritter (a delectably bitter Heidi Kettenring) to delivery boy Arpad (the charming Bernard Balbot) to Mr. Maraczek himself (the reliable Ross Lehman). Director Halberstam keeps our focus shifting with admirable efficiency. Ultimately, of course, the show comes down to Georg and Amalia (and to Bock and Harnick’s arresting score, beautifully led by music director Ben Johnson). Thomas imbues Georg with an appropriately if not unexpectedly Stewartesque manner, while Mueller recalls a less strident Streisand. In Writers’ intimate production—so close that the actors are refreshingly unmiked—She Loves Me is as darling and unadorned as the music box that secures Miss Balash her job.”

Dennis Polkow, New City—“To say that this production of She Loves Me—a charming work when done well—misses the mark is an understatement: it doesn’t even know where the target is. Typically, one either casts actors who can sing a little or singers who can act a little, and then work to bring everyone up to speed from where they are but here, the worst of all worlds is achieved by primarily casting singers but then not supplying either enough stage direction for true characterizations to emerge, nor enough musical direction to have them sound at their best. The result is a production where everyone—even obviously talented veteran performers—appear to be just going through the motions in a caricature-like manner, almost performing in italics, as it were.”

Three Sisters, Piven Theatre Workshop

Chris Jones, Tribune—“One wishes this overly choppy production had a more unified sense—it is truly stellar inside many of the scenes, which [Joyce] Piven allows to take on their own rhythms, but less successful at forging the snapshots of human dilemma into a cohesive whole. It’s never easy with this play to keep things moving at a clip, and the energy here rises and falls. So does the attention of the audience. That’s a reasonable choice, of course, but even Chekhov needs more drive. Here, you feel rather like you are sitting in on a very advanced scene-study class. You get the sense that Piven is fascinated in different ways by all of these actors, many of whom she has worked with for years. You can understand why. And it is not without its rewards for the audience, but you never fully buy that everyone here is occupying the same world.”

Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times—“Using playwright Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation, director Joyce Piven’s production often manages to capture the anguish, despair and flashes of cruelty that shoot through this play like lightning. But too frequently there is something stiff and arch about the overall effort, with the actors more often posed than allowed to move naturally, and their dialogue similarly stilted. In addition, the identity of many subsidiary characters is muddied. There are several performances that are just right, and sporadic scenes in which connections are made and everything falls tightly into place. But overall, this is an erratic production in both its pacing and focus.”

Zac Thompson, Reader—“Ruhl occasionally uses some clunky metaphors, but for the most part finds a tone at once achingly lyrical and startlingly contemporary—as in the climactic scene when Irina realizes she’s never going to make it to the big city. ‘Life leaves us and it doesn’t come back,’ she says, ‘moving and moving toward some black pit.’ Sounds like bleak stuff. But director Joyce Piven doesn’t fill this Piven Theatre Workshop staging with solemn people gazing into the middle distance. Her production has an active energy, and when characters arrive at a devastating truth they tell it simply and without sentiment and move on. This nicely captures the fact that in Chekhov as in reality, life continues after dreams die. People don’t make the trip to Moscow or get the girl or become great artists, but more often than not, they go on."

Christopher Shea, Time Out—“Certain cast members exhibit a potent pathos: Daniel Smith’s strapping Vershinin and Saren Nofs-Snyder’s Hepburn-esque Masha exude a primed, sensual energy in their scenes together. But the production actively undercuts these rare moments of human connection. The set itself—featuring an upstage platform that separates the downstage monologues from the background action—erases the brilliant tension that usually emerges in Chekhov’s fraught and awkward group scenes. Airy, heaven-bent monologues are this production’s lifeblood; unfortunately, they mostly dissipate.”

Quote of the Fortnight:

“Harbingers that a show will go catastrophically wrong can be tough for a creative team to spot, especially when a new musical opens cold on Broadway. But one tell-tale sign for the gifted director Bartlett Sher and other members of the talented group behind the new stage version of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown could have been when they blinked back at their on-stage world—all zoom-zoom sexy in their heads—with Patti LuPone, halfway up the proscenium arch, perched indelicately on a bungee cord.”—Chris Jones reviewing the Broadway production of Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the Tribune.