Mechelle Moe

Waiting for Lefty Review, Highly Recommended, WBEZ

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:24:17 -0400

American Blues Theater strikes solid gold with ‘Waiting for Lefty’

by Kelly Kleiman | Sep. 09, 2011

Call it agit-prop if you like, or say “If you want to send a message use Western Union;” but if you’re not inspired by Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty as performed by American Blues Theater, you must have ice water in your veins. In a single intermission-free hour, Odets and the troupe condemn corrupt union bosses, company spies, anti-Semites, people who argue against demands for change because they’ll undermine an ally in the White House, capitalists who make poison gas and want to sleep with their chemists, capitalists who bankroll Broadway shows and want to sleep with their actresses, and the gospel of hopelessness that says there’s nothing to be done about any of it. Most important, it reminds us that political change isn’t something that happens; it’s something we have to do.

Of course I’m precisely the audience for which the piece was written: though not quite a “red diaper baby,” I did have a godfather named Eugene Victor Debs Auerbach. But anyone who values lively and committed theater will love Lefty too. Special kudos to Terry Hamilton for yet another terrific portrayal of someone whose every word is a lie including “and” and “the”* (first Richard Nixon, then Walter Burns and now a character as much like Jimmy Hoffa as is possible without actually disappearing). Kimberly Senior directs this production (as all her others) with such a light touch it would be easy to forget that she was there, except for the fact that the performances are uniformly excellent, the pacing impeccable, and the emotional heart of the play right out there on its sleeve.

Solidarity forever!

——-

Waiting for Lefty Review, Windy City Times, Highly Recommended

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:21:57 -0400

Playwright: Clifford Odets. At: American Blues Theater at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Phone: 773-871-3000; $25. Runs through: Oct. 2

We are at a union meeting, ostensibly of the New York City taxicab drivers, circa 1935. The gathering of the employed and formerly employed are drawn from a variety of occupations, and as they wait for their tardy chairman—the “Lefty” of the title—we hear their reasons for being there: the sweethearts who postpone marriage and family for want of a secure future. The husband whose wife upbraids him for their hungry children. The Jewish surgeon fired from her hospital job, replaced by an incompetent (but well-connected) quack. The lab assistant offered lucrative benefits in exchange for working on biological weapons—and informing on her supervisor. The actor whose regional experience (including Chicago’s Goodman Theatre) can’t land him a role on Broadway (“Even Jesus Christ couldn’t play [this part]—with all his talent,” grumbles the producer).

With such a record of injustice—did I mention the corporate-friendly union boss and the strike-breaking saboteur?—is it any wonder that citizens on the verge of despair turn to the promise of Communism? If that threat seems as quaint in 2011 as catch-phrases like “coffee-and” or “stalled like a flivver in the snow,” substitute the word “Socialism.” See how familiar it suddenly sounds?

The American Blues Theater company is well-practiced in conveying the dignity inherent in plays celebrating the proletarian diversity of our nation’s populace. Under Kimberly Senior’s meticulous direction, the 25 actors immerse themselves in their disparate roles so wholly that even those stationed in the audience, as in the premiere production by the legendary Group Theatre, are distinguishable from playgoers only by their period clothing. The technical design is likewise first-rate, but Victoria DeIorio’s stirring sound design is worthy of special note.

Don’t fool yourself: This is not a docudrama, flaunting an academic veneer of “historical accuracy.” Clifford Odets’ approach to his material is undeniably romantic. In an age, however, when “truth” is the property of whomever has the most agile wordbenders on staff, sometimes a shot of old-fashioned agitprop is what’s needed to cut through the persiflage. Opinions, goes the saying, are like armpits (or assholes, depending on who’s listening) in that everybody’s got one and the other guy’s always stinks. American Blues’ 60-minute symposium offers you an opportunity to make up your own mind, and isn’t that a luxury nowadays?

Waiting for Lefty Review, New City, Recommended

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:19:16 -0400

RECOMMENDED

Clifford Odets’ 1935 play centering around a cab drivers’ union planning a strike, first staged by the massively influential Group Theatre in New York, has become one of those plays you read in history and literature classes but rarely see produced these days, when most theater companies tend to believe that audiences are allergic to overly political theater. American Blues Theater’s production–tightly directed, passionately acted by a committed ensemble, perfectly paced–succeeds all the more for keeping the material from feeling even a little dated, almost a century later. Director Kimberly Senior pulls no emotional punches in the multiple vignettes of desperation and impotent rage (all-too-familiar in 2011), but with a light, steady hand that maneuvers between high-stakes scenarios with delicacy and artistry. The acting matches with controlled intensity, and the show’s famous trick of planting actors in the audience to break the fourth wall still feels fresh. (Monica Westin)

At Victory Gardens’ Richard Christiansen Theater, 2433 North Lincoln, (773)871-3000. Through October

Waiting for Lefty Review, The Reader, Highly Recommended

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:17:00 -0400

I listened to Barack Obama’s jobs speech on my way to see American Blues Theater’s Waiting for Lefty. American blues, indeed. Clifford Odets’s fiery 1935 one-act supplied an almost creepily apt counterpoint to the President’s address. The play starts out at a union hall where cabbies are debating the pros and cons of calling a strike. A commie-baiting, cigar-chomping union honcho is there to explain why this is a politically bad moment to walk out—and lean on troublemakers if persuasion doesn’t work. But the rank and file explain back that they’re bleeding to death. The rest of the hour-long piece alternates between the meeting and wide-ranging vignettes about working life in Depression-era America. A wife goads her husband to man up and get better wages. A doctor is fired because she’s Jewish. A chemist has a most surprising response when her boss asks her to inform against a colleague. In the most powerful scene, a young couple break up because they just can’t afford to get married. Most of it—no, all of it—is pure propaganda. And red propaganda, at that, in the starry-eyed, let’s-all-sing-“The Internationale” manner that was possible when Stalin looked good next to Hitler. But Kimberly Senior’s staging and cast are strong, and there’s a hell of a lot of satisfaction in watching workers hold up their fists and give a loud no, like they only seem to do in Wisconsin these days. —Tony Adler

Terrific Acting in the Early... Chris Jones, Tribune

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:11:41 -0400

Terrific Acting in the Early... Chris Jones, Tribune

Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune, Waiting for Lefty

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:11:02 -0400

Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty,” now being staged by American Blues Theater (through Oct. 2 at Biograph; americanbluestheater.com), is an episodic polemic and one of those dimly remembered works that is not the play that many people think they know. But Kimberly Senior’s production contains a number of beautiful portraits of Americans under duress. There are some formidable actresses in this production, including Mechelle Moe and Cheryl Graeff, but the performance that stands out is from Gwendolyn Whiteside, the actress playing Florrie.

Equity Jeff Nominations - Front Page/Ensemble

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:47:48 -0400

Equity Jeff Nominations - Front Page/Ensemble

New City - Waiting for Lefty

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:46:12 -0400

New City - Waiting for Lefty

Wall Street Journal Review of The Front Page

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:39:53 -0400

Just as “Porgy and Bess” is now best known as an opera, so is “The Front Page” now best known as a movie. In the original 1928 stage version, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur introduced Broadway audiences to the scoop-hungry crime reporters who covered Chicago in the age of Al Capone. But when Howard Hawks made “His Girl Friday” in 1940, he turned Hildy Johnson, the tough-guy reporter of “The Front Page,” into a woman, in the process changing a hard-nosed farce about journalism in America into a screwball comedy about the perils of workplace romance. The results were so funny that no one complained, but the play (and the earlier 1931 film version) got lost in the shuffle, and revivals are now as scarce as evening papers.

All praise, then, to Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre for resurrecting “The Front Page” and giving it a staging so full of brassy brio that you’ll wonder why you ever settled for less. Performed in the round in the company’s 99-seat theater, it puts you so close to the action that you can actually smell the ketchup on the hamburgers eaten by the characters in the first act. The acting fizzes with outrageous, nose-thumbing vitality—PJ Powers and Terry Hamilton couldn’t be better as Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns, Hildy’s unscrupulous boss—and the ultrarealistic set, designed by Collette Pollard, is so suitably grubby that you’ll want to grab a broom and start sweeping.

What is most striking about TimeLine’s production, directed with lip-smacking gusto by Nick Bowling, is that it doesn’t sandpaper the rough edges of the reporters who wait impatiently to cover the hanging of a small-time anarchist (Rob Fagin). They are brutes who make no effort to hide their brutality, and they care about nothing but getting the story, least of all the bruised feelings of the anarchist’s girlfriend (Mechelle Moe), whom they treat like gum on the sole of a worn-out shoe. The contrast between the savage cynicism with which the reporters are portrayed and the comic dynamism of the play’s door-slamming plot is startlingly modern, as are the play’s overlapping dialogue (which Hawks borrowed for “His Girl Friday”) and blunt language.

While this production would surely pack a kidney punch on a conventional proscenium stage, it’s the in-your-face intimacy of TimeLine’s “Front Page” that makes it so special. If you wonder why regional theater continues to hold its own in an age of above-the-title stars and billion-dollar special effects, buy a ticket and see for yourself.

—Mr. Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

Wall Street Journal Review of The Front Page

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:38:51 -0400

Wall Street Journal Review of The Front Page

Interview with fellow cast member Rob Riley about The Front Page

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:35:34 -0400

Interview with fellow cast member Rob Riley about The Front Page

Jeff Awards - Eric & Andy Preshow Interviews

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 18:34:47 -0400

Jeff Awards - Eric & Andy Preshow Interviews

Wall Street Journal Review: The Front Page

Fri, 27 May 2011 09:33:05 -0400

Wall Street Journal Review: The Front Page:

Life of a Beggar

Wed, 25 May 2011 12:41:47 -0400

Life of a Beggar:

An Interview with Sean Graney

By MECHELLE MOE

It’s Labor Day weekend, and while most Chicagoans are planning their last summer escape, director Sean Graney is wrapping up an 80-hour week preparing for The Hypocrites opening of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera at the Steppenwolf Theatre’s Garage (running though Oct. 12). Admittedly, he confides that this is not the best time to interview him. There is a great deal of pressure, and with this being his first venture into musicals, expectations are running high. Graney’s mind is engulfed by the play, which focuses on the life of the underpaid and underfed, which perhaps explains why economics are weighing so heavily on his mind these days.
I had just turned 23 when I first met Sean Graney. We were both just out of school and pretty poor. He used to skateboard alongside my bike, and we had a bad habit spending our paychecks on one too many PBR’s at the L&L Tavern. We rehearsed in cramped living rooms, had late-night meetings at dirty, vegetarian restaurants and performed in basements filled with broken down couches. We talked a lot. We yelled more. It was mostly about our no-money theater company.

The Front Page at TimeLine Theater

Fri, 06 May 2011 09:42:08 -0400

The Front Page at TimeLine Theater

JEFF AWARD NOMINEE 2011 - ACTRESS IN A PRINCIPAL ROLE

Fri, 06 May 2011 09:39:47 -0400

JEFF AWARD NOMINEE 2011 - ACTRESS IN A PRINCIPAL ROLE:

ACTRESS IN A PRINCIPAL ROLE – PLAY

Brenda Barrie (Eva/Brenda) - “Memory” - BackStage Theatre Company

Mechelle Moe (Terry Randall) - “Stage Door” - Griffin Theatre Company

Caroline Neff (Charlotte) - “A Brief History of Helen of Troy” Steep Theatre Company

Caroline Neff (Rachel) - “Port” - Griffin Theatre Company

Joy Thorbjornsen- Coates (Fonsia Dorsey) - “The Gin Game” - Lincoln Square Theatre

Nicole Wiesner (Marie) - “The First Ladies” - Trap Door Theatre

Complete List of Jeff Nominations for 2011

Fri, 06 May 2011 09:38:27 -0400

Complete List of Jeff Nominations for 2011

THE FRONT PAGE Publicity Photos Hildy Johnson (PJ Powers,...

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:59:04 -0400

THE FRONT PAGE Publicity Photos Hildy Johnson (PJ Powers, right) and Mollie Malloy (Mechelle Moe, left) are determined to hide escaped convict Earl Williams (Rob Fagin, center) before he can be discovered by the police.

The Front Page at TimeLine Theater, Chicago Tribune Review

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:55:55 -0400

April 17, 2011

‘The Front Page’ at TimeLine Theatre: Hot type, easy laughs in era newspapers were king

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THEATER REVIEW ‘The Front Page’ ★★★ Through June 12 at TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington Ave.; running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes; tickets: $28-$38 at 773-281-8463 or timelinetheatre.com

Comedy always thrives on confidence, and scribes Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur caught Chicago newspaper men when they felt like regal untouchables. Cops? Sandwich-delivery guys in uniform. Chicago mayor? Illinois governor? Insecure and impotent without the right headlines. Sheriff? An object of endless abuse. Editors? Totally dependent on the fellow sniffing out the news.

Taking a job at The New York Times? Akin to turning in your masculinity and “working in a bank.” In a “rube town.” That, in the world of “The Front Page,” meant pretty much any place other than Chicago.

Nope, these “crummy hobos full of dandruff and bum gin” would no more jettison their lives inside the pulsing press room of the Criminal Courts Building — the heaving epicenter of the endless human story that was Chicago in 1928 — than they would show up home for dinner more than two times in a month. Their raison d’etre might sound prosaic, but this was the golden age of the power and influence of the retail American voter, a newly massively expanded demographic, as this script frequently and tellingly takes note with its sexist digs and chatter about “the colored vote.” With the rising power of voters came the rising power of newspapers, their main source of information as to whom to reward and whom to punish. In Hecht and MacArthur’s minds, there was no greater position to be had than telling a million “hired girls and motormen’s wives” what was going on in their exploding town.

For those of us who work for newspapers in a more challenging era, who toil for corporations rather than solo editors like Walter Burns, “The Front Page” is a bittersweet experience. Of course, one should not assume that Hecht and MacArthur were telling anything close to the truth. They were newspaper romantics glorifying their kind. For all its vaunted veracity, “The Front Page” was never a clear-eyed picture of this town or this business, but when you watch it play out in front of you, 83 years later, it still feels far closer to the human heartbeat than, say, The Huffington Post.

And thus it is a pleasure to see “The Front Page,” that zesty yarn of hacks, scoops and screwball derring-do, back up in Chicago in a very solid, fast-paced and entertaining production at the TimeLine Theatre featuring a huge cast. With the help of an immersive design from Collette Pollard, director Nick Bowling has cast a motley crew of journalistic-type characters, ranging from the deliciously effete Mark Richard (playing, of course, the man from the Tribune) to the droll Larry Baldacci (as the man from the Daily News) to Mike McNamara (the Post). The weasel-like Bill McGough takes amusing licks as Sheriff Hartman, while Rob Riley offers a very savvy turn as The Mayor, a Chicago type (only the names change) that has proved considerably more resilient than hot type.

In this man’s world, Bridgette Pechman Clarno thrives in the thankless role of the fiancee of Hildy Johnson (PJ Powers), the ace Herald Examiner reporter on the cusp of getting married and going soft for good.

The life force of this particular production is not so much Powers’ Hildy as it is Terry Hamilton as Walter Burns, that conniving editor who knows that once you have a good newspaperman in your stable, you don’t ever let him out. Powers plays Hildy as a flustered man caught in an irreconcilable tussle between editor and lover. He shows us amusing and human panic when he realizes he can’t please both at once. But he struggles more with the other, mercurial side of Hildy — the crucial edge and drive that make him a pea in a pod with editor Burns. “The Front Page” is a comedy, and this production has plenty of laughs, but it could show us yet more of the naked souls and vicious competition on display.

Still, once the terrific Hamilton shows up in the press room, the show belatedly starts to fire on every cylinder. Hamilton knows how to take the center of the room and make all the pieces around him whir — he’s at once ruthless and affectionate, the kind of surrogate dad who can get blood from a stone, in the grand Chicago newspaper tradition of such inhuman extractions

Posted at 12:37:38 PM in TimeLine Theatre

What the Butler Saw, Court Theater, 2007 “Through it all,...

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:32:00 -0500

What the Butler Saw, Court Theater, 2007

“Through it all, though, Moe remains an emotional wreck. In one of the best comedic performances of the year, Moe intensely connects to (or invents) the emotions of her totally ridiculous character, even when she is upside down and naked with her legs flailing in the air.” Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune