Moon Under Fire
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While there were certainly plenty of stunned observers at the Moon Under Miami opening on April 30, few were delighted. Trib critic Richard Christiansen said the play “is destined to go down as one of the great train wrecks of Chicago theater history.” The Sun-Times’s Hedy Weiss agreed, calling the show “as thick and motionless as its swampy setting.” Reader chief critic Albert Williams said: “It’s a mess masquerading as a play.”
Fogelson has another reason to keep a stiff upper lip: Remains may emerge from this debacle with its balance sheet relatively unscathed. Keller says it cost the company $183,000 to mount the show, not much more than the fund-raising group contributed to the production. Remains itself will only have to pick up the tab for any operating expenses that aren’t covered by rapidly dwindling ticket sales.
Chicago theater suffered yet another black eye on Broadway with the swift shuttering of Alexandra Gersten’s My Thing of Love; the dark comedy about adultery opened at the Martin Beck Theatre May 3 and will close this Sunday. Premiered by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1992 and quickly picked up for Broadway by veteran producers Barry and Fran Weissler, the production was greeted with all-too-familiar anti-Chicago sentiment by some of New York’s most influential theater critics. The worst offender was the Daily News’s Howard Kissell: “Like last season’s moronic The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, this play comes to us from the Steppenwolf Company of Chicago. Only a decade ago, I thought the salvation of the New York theater lay in Chicago. Yes, a lot of what Chicago sent us was adolescent, but I thought that pubescent energy might be useful. Alas, based on what has come since, Chicago theater has only become more adolescent.” New York Times critic Vincent Canby, who also noted that the play was originally produced at Steppenwolf and had won the Joseph Jefferson Award for best new work, described it as “unfinished.”
