HOORAY!
at Factory Theater
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Seeley adopts the basic structure of Zoom–an ensemble of young teenagers appear in a series of sequences in which they play didactic games, engage in “discussions,” or read letters from listeners–but makes one crucial change. Instead of a TV world populated with the usual idealized representations of childhood, we get one kid from an interracial family, another who recently moved in from out of town and is having trouble fitting in, and a third from a broken home. True to the perky spirit of Zoom, however, they introduce their problems as if these were just interesting aspects of their lives. “Hi, I’m Buddy,” someone will say, adding in an impossibly cheerful voice, “and my dad just left my mom.” “Hi, I’m Cory,” another says. “Both of my moms are lesbian, and I don’t eat meat.”
Hooray! also supplies plenty of plain old silliness. The ensemble’s salute to the Beatles is full of self-consciously bad choreography and laughably literal interpretations of the music–the sequence in which “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is acted out is especially marvelous.
Not that George Brant the writer is entirely to blame for this tedious hour-long exercise. George Brant the actor deserves some of the blame, delivering the dad’s lines so smugly that the show’s few genuinely comic moments are transformed into pure dross. And director George Brant (assisting director Derek Goldman) surely played his part, making certain each actor turned in a performance every bit as predictable and tiresome as the script.
