'The Showtune Mosh Pit' for November 23rd, 2011

THE LATEST IN UNAUTHORIZED GOSSIP AND BUZZ

FROM THE HEART OF CHICAGO'S SHOWTUNE VIDEO BARS,

AND MUSICAL THEATER NEWS FROM CHICAGO TO BROADWAY

by Paul W. Thompson

Overheard last weekend under the showtune

video screens at Sidetrack and The Call:

Two national tours are pulling into the Loopthis week! It must be a holiday. The one that most Mosh Pit peeps have their eye on is “Memphis,” the 2010 Tony Award winner for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score, as a brand new Equity company, fresh from stops in Memphis and Nashville, arrives at the Cadillac Palace Theatre for a two-week stay. I’m sensing a little resistance to liking this show, as it may feel to some like a hybrid of “Hairspray” and “Million Dollar Quartet,” and with the sense that it may have won its Tonys in a weak Broadway year. But you know what? Go and enjoy it anyway. Sergio Trujillo’s choreography is amazing, and the11:00 number for Huey, the white spinner of race records (“Memphis Lives In Me”) has been known to put goosebumps onto the most jaded of forearms, and onto the back of the stiffest of necks. It’s “Memphis!”

Memphis 2011 | Broadway in Chicago

The other is an eager new non-union tour of “Fiddler On The Roof,” arriving at the lovely, cavernous Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University for this week only. I have to say that the photos and the video preview look impressive, and it seems to be a traditional (pun intended) staging of Jerome Robbins’ final Broadway effort with age-appropriate adults in the cast. If you haven’t seen this masterpiece of the musical theater on a big stage, why not go? Do you remember the story of the weeping audiences when the show first playedTokyo? When asked why tickets sales and word of mouth were so positive there, for a show about the upended lives of Eastern European Jews, the answer came back: “Because it is so Japanese!” And therein lies the axiom, “The more specific the art, the more universal its meaning.” So you will go.

Fiddler On The Roof 2011 | Broadway in Chicago 

Speaking of twos, the Royal George Theatre on Halsted Street appears to have a pair of musical theater winners on its hands right now. On the mainstage through December 30, 2011 is “Maestro: The Art Of Leonard Bernstein,” directed with an eye toward New York by Hollywood’s Joel Zwick and starring pianist and inhabiter-of-the-souls-of-composers Hershey Felder. While its subject was not limited to the Broadway realm (and neither was Felder’s previous American subject, George Gershwin), his talent and his joy in music were legendary. The same might be said for Felder. I’m sure that every reader of this column will get some insight and some excitement from attending this show, a biography, an exploration, a tribute, a concert and a play. And he wrote the music for “West Side Story!”

Maestro: The Art of Leonard Bernstein

And in the Royal George Cabaret Theatre is the very well-received “The Doyle And Debbie Show,” a 90-minute import fromNashville that set our critics afluttering with how brilliant its satire is, how hilarious its jokes are and how well its cast members really do sing the original country and western songs this show puts forth. It’s apparently quite a good time! Here’s all those rave reviews: