Music Theater Works (MTW) ambitiously takes on some of the problems with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s formless and dated book, keeping our focus on Arthur (Michael Metcalf), Guenevere (Christine Mayland Perkins), and Lancelot’s (Nathe Rowbotham) love triangle. In her program notes, director Brianna Borger explains, “Our Camelot envisions a troupe of revelers outside of time and space, who have taken this expansive tale and distilled it into what has always lived at its core: a story of humanist ideals, hope, and love.”

Camelot Through 11/13: Wed 1 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-920-5360, musictheaterworks.com, $39-$106

The setting is the medieval ruins of a castle. Hurrying on- and offstage, cast members gleefully narrate temporal bridges in the story. Lancelot spends the show in skinny jeans and Doc Martens. Parker Guidry, excellent as the villainous Mordred in act two, spends most of act one singing and dancing the role of one of Camelot’s resident maidens, and they are awesome doing it. 

Perkins is an excellent singer, and nicely conveys her character’s dismay as she is drawn between Arthur, whom she loves with her heart, and Lancelot, for whom she feels such unbridled passion. Metcalf knows how to belt out his songs, infusing Arthur with a refreshing boisterousness; many actors bring to Arthur their most brooding affects. Rowbotham makes Lancelot more thoughtful and plainspoken—the character’s grand pronouncements seem like humblebrags here. The show, which has undergone some heavy cuts, sometimes feels rushed, but the players and production team know where to find Camelot’s real heart.

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Being a parent requires attentiveness, and when you can muster it, patience. In many ways, parenting small children is not unlike being an artist; both necessitate curiosity, mindfulness, and a certain amount of nimbleness. The works in Jessica Labatte’s solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions, “Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” form a web of connections between the experience of being an artist and a parent stuck inside with their family during the pandemic.

When COVID first hit, Labatte found herself isolating at home with her husband, Eric May, (a fellow artist who runs the gallery Roots & Culture), and their toddler, Avery. She was also pregnant; her second child was born in June 2020. So in addition to her work as the head of the photography department at Northern Illinois University, Labatte was suddenly in charge of occupying Avery. She brought supplies from her basement studio upstairs to establish artmaking stations for herself and Avery, and also ordered him educational STEM books. Both of these prompted several of the new series on view.

“A lot of this work comes out of the curiosity of thinking about science in the world but from a really childlike perspective,” she says.

The Erratics is a luscious photo series, made when Labatte and Avery would fill containers around the house with water and random objects—tiny pom-poms, bits of colored paper—and leave them outside to freeze. Labatte would then photograph the ice sculptures in the studio, set on a mirror and lit by multi-colored lights. Printed large—at 43 by 28 inches—the melting blocks are so detailed they almost seem three-dimensional. It isn’t hard to imagine these ephemeral sculptures as metaphors for the changing climate or the fleeting years of childhood. 

Similarly, the Parallel Play series consists of sculptures of everyday detritus made solely by Avery and photographed by Labatte. Here, chunks of styrofoam are stuck with plastic cutlery, straws, pipe cleaners, and colorful feathers. One of the most striking, Balancing Equilibrium, features a horizontal bendy straw supporting one that’s vertical, the latter of which sports feathers emerging from either side. The sculptures are photographed on gradient backgrounds. In the gallery, they’re hung amongst similar-looking frames that don’t contain photos but instead the actual sculptures themselves. The works encourage close looking.

Labatte got into photography by chance. As a kid, she played competitive ice hockey—primarily on boys’ teams. But a bad arm break ended that, so for a time Labatte went to boarding school in Canada, to play on a more competitive girls’ team. That school offered a photography class, and Labatte was instantly hooked. “Being in the black-and-white darkroom was so magical,” she says. From the very beginning, she was interested in constructing pictures, using a scene to tell a story or evoke a feeling. The first photograph she printed was of classmates’ legs, clad in their boarding school uniforms, standing in front of the school’s brick facade, with a small teacup in the middle. She has loved photography ever since.

That connection to the cold weather comes through in the video Total Accumulation, a looped edit of the cut paper snowflakes Labatte likes to make during the winter. The audio comes from the sounds of the household: toys, one of her children crying, another learning to tell time. It’s a crinkling, sometimes jarring soundtrack, illustrative of the nonstop noise of little children. (Labatte’s fondness for paper snowflakes extended to her students earlier this year, when one of her classes broke the Guinness World Record for making the largest paper snowflake. It clocked in at 44 feet by 6 inches.)

Almanac for Shade Gardeners is an ongoing series, begun in 2017, that sets the stage for much of the work in the show. Here, the artist constructs still lifes in her studio, made up of flowers and plants from her garden alongside minor objects from everyday life. A Time of New Suns features a bouquet of goldenrod set before a tie-dyed backdrop, alongside wildflowers and a pair of dried peach pits. It’s a burst of color that feels particularly welcome during this unseasonably cold autumn. Dream Feed is a psychedelic tableaux, featuring violet irises, glow-in-the-dark stars, a plastic snake, modeling clay, and other tiny elements that are like secrets for the viewer to discover. The items are again set on a mirror and photographed against a black background, like a magician’s props.

The series title refers to the land attached to Labatte’s house, which is a wooded lot. It doesn’t get a lot of sun, so only particular shade plants can grow there. “I just thought it was a perfect metaphor for what it’s like to be an artist parent, trying to navigate: how do I be an artist in this world?” she says. As an art student, there weren’t a lot of examples among Labatte’s professors of how to be both an artist and a mother. For Labatte, figuring out how to navigate motherhood and her art practice feels analogous to figuring out how to grow things in her shade garden—both feel like learning “how to nurture things in a hostile environment.”

The exhibition is enveloped by a strikingly vibrant wallpaper that Labatte printed specially for this show. It consists of scans of construction paper collages the artist made, printed out in vastly oversized dimensions. The scale lets the fuzzy details of the paper fibers come through. The collages are layered in Photoshop, which adds shadows and sharp color combinations. Flower shapes recur throughout, bringing a bright, mod feel to all the work, and a sense of connectedness. 

“Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm” is borrowed from Diane Ackerman’s poem, “Diffraction (for Carl Sagan).” The passage speaks to the expansive relationship of all things, from the interdependence of a family to the wonder that the universe elicits. Becoming a parent led Labatte to slow down, to be more mindful in each moment. She paid more attention to the changing of the seasons, the growing cycle of plants, and the milestones of her children. That shift in attention is apparent here, and this exhibition, with all its tiny details, is an invitation into that same sort of slowing down, looking, noticing.

“Jessica Labatte: Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm”Through 10/29: Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago, Suite 2C, 312-480-8390, westernexhibitions.com

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Last month drill giant and Chicago rap royal King Louie dropped his first full-length in six years, Life With Louie (Man Up Band Up/Machine Entertainment Group). I hadn’t really reckoned with what that long gap might mean for the world of rap. Louie’s string of early-2010s mixtapes gave rappers around the city (and the world) something to aspire to, and 2014’s Tony in particular will go down as one of the best full-lengths from the first wave of drill, a movement that’s since inspired some of the most exciting MCs to emerge from the UK and NYC. Life With Louie hit me like I’d been stumbling through the desert and finally had my first sip of fresh water from an oasis. Louie saunters through smoky samples (“Mind Yo Business”), bass-heavy collages (“Si Si Senor”), and twilight-calm synth melodies (“Restless”) with the same nonchalant flair. The way he tosses off his neat, blunt verses will convince you that these tracks were built from the ground up to hang on his every syllable. The 25 minutes of Life With Louie fly by, and the King makes the most of that brief run time. Atop the clobbering, spiky bass of “Kisses,” Louie claims he can persuade a car to buy an ignition or sell the ocean to fishes, surreal boasts that in a brief moment light up an already hot track. He’s impressed me plenty of times already, but on Life With Louie he wins me over again and again.

King Louie Do or Die headline; King Louie, DaWreck, and Psycho & Pazzo open. Sun 10/30, 7:30 PM, the Forge, 22 W. Cass, Joliet, $30, $70 reserved balcony, 18+

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Refuge, the wrenching portrait of a Central American woman’s effort to reach the U.S. receiving its midwest premiere at Theo Ubique, is less a play than a ritual with music enacting displacement, loss, and fear—but also love and the determination to go on. So my not understanding the two-thirds of the dialogue delivered in Spanish didn’t interfere with my grasp of the experience, but I did find it alienating, which was no doubt the point: among the first words in English were, “We must not fear what we cannot understand.” It was clear that “Girl,” disguised as a boy, stumbles across the desert border onto the ranch of a man mourning the death of his daughter at the hands, as he thinks, of a migrant. Once he penetrates her disguise, though, he begins to treat Girl as the daughter he lost, despite his friendship with the Border Patrol officer tracking her. Every character struggles with conflicting loyalties, so there’s no easy resolution. And, like every artwork concerned with justice, the people who really need to see it will never do so.

Refuge Through 11/13: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 6 PM, Howard Street Theatre, 721 Howard, Evanston, 773-939-4101, theo-u.com, $45-$55 (optional dinner from Taco Diablo available for $30 per person; must be ordered with reservation)

Having said that: the piece, cowritten, codirected, and music directed by Satya Jnani Chávez, (they collaborated with Andrew Rosendorf on the story, and with Valen-Marie Santos on direction) is stunningly beautiful both visually and aurally. As the Girl, Tatiana Bustamante is appealing without being saccharine, and Bill Kalinak likewise gives the Rancher complexity so we see his humor and his rage as well as his tenderness. The puppets created by Adolfo Romero representing the dog, the wolf, the vulture, and the snake seem as real as any person. (Aida Palma Carpio is credited as the snake puppeteer, while the ensemble shares the work of animating the others.) And the voices are breathtaking. If I left this fine work feeling unsatisfied, that’s probably because the situation being portrayed is so far from satisfactory.

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Siena Marilyn Ledger’s brand-new two-person play, being produced here with 16th Street Theater and Dragonfly Theatre as part of the National New Play Network rolling world premiere program, is based on a deceptively simple premise. Luna, a quirky and precocious tween whose mother is undergoing cancer treatment, befriends Aaron, another cancer patient, also in the midst of a gender transition, undergoing treatment at the same clinic. In the wrong hands such a premise could be painfully sentimental or, worse, deadly dull. But Ledger is too clever a writer to fall into either trap. Their characters are fresh and interesting, and the story that unfolds in this tight, intermissionless 90-minute play is absorbing without being forced or unreal.

Man and Moon Through 11/13: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; no performance Thu 11/3; Madison Street Theater, 1010 Madison, Forest Park, 708-795-6704, 16thstreettheater.org, $25 (virtual performances $10)

It helps that the lead actors—indeed, the play’s only actors—Clare Wols and Peter Danger Wilde work so well together. Over the course of the play we see these two grow together as they face the harsh realities of their lives. (Though we never see Luna’s mother, we come to realize just how desperately ill she is.) Under Hayley Procacci’s direction, Wols and Wilde deliver the kind of performances that grab an audience from the get-go, and never let us go. Wols in particular brings a remarkable energy, intelligence, and depth to her part. In lesser hands this role could have been played as a mere middle-school version of manic pixie dream girl—the eccentric free spirit who teaches another character to love life again—but 12-year-old Wols possesses acting chops way beyond her years.

Editor’s note: On Tuesday, October 25, the board of 16th Street Theater announced that they were shuttering operations at the end of the year. Man and Moon is the last full production they will be offering.

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Invictus Theatre Company delivers a solid, sometimes stirring, and strikingly relevant rendition of William Shakespeare’s 1599 tragedy. It’s the story of Marcus Brutus (played by Invictus artistic director Charles Askenaizer, who also directed), a well-intentioned aristocrat in the waning days of the ancient Roman Republic, who joins a plot by his fellow senators to assassinate the political and military leader Julius Caesar (Chuck Munro), who Brutus fears is becoming a tyrant. Rather than calming Rome’s political polarization, the murder backfires when Caesar’s loyal friend, Marc Antony (Mikha’el Amin), rouses the people’s rage against the self-proclaimed “liberators” with an impassioned funeral oration. Mob violence escalates into civil war; the result, after all the blood is shed, is the establishment of the very imperial system of government that Brutus kills—and dies—trying to prevent.

Julius Caesar Through 11/20: Mon, Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Reginald Vaughn Theater, 1106 W. Thorndale, invictustheatreco.com, $35 (seniors and students with valid ID $30)

The 16 non-Equity actors in this intimate storefront staging mostly handle the dense, rigorously rhythmic text skillfully, bringing both clarity and musicality to the long-phrased verse. Particularly good are Askenaizer as Brutus, Daniel Houle and Joseph Beal as his coconspirators Cassius and Casca, and John Chambers as Caesar’s nephew and heir Octavius, shrewdly allying himself with Antony in order to position himself to become the first Emperor of Rome.

With the U.S. Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, clearly in mind, this three-hour modern-dress production features “Hail to the Chief” played when Caesar enters and people chanting “Lock them up!” and waving the star-spangled banner and a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Sometimes (especially at the end), this directorial commentary gets a little too obvious, to the detriment of the drama—but I won’t challenge the accuracy of the analogy between the dangerous demagogic politics of 44 B.C. and 2022 A.D. The tragedy of Julius Caesar is not just Caesar’s or Brutus’s, but democracy’s, and we ignore that at our peril.

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Music Theater Works (MTW) ambitiously takes on some of the problems with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s formless and dated book, keeping our focus on Arthur (Michael Metcalf), Guenevere (Christine Mayland Perkins), and Lancelot’s (Nathe Rowbotham) love triangle. In her program notes, director Brianna Borger explains, “Our Camelot envisions a troupe of revelers outside of time and space, who have taken this expansive tale and distilled it into what has always lived at its core: a story of humanist ideals, hope, and love.”

Camelot Through 11/13: Wed 1 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-920-5360, musictheaterworks.com, $39-$106

The setting is the medieval ruins of a castle. Hurrying on- and offstage, cast members gleefully narrate temporal bridges in the story. Lancelot spends the show in skinny jeans and Doc Martens. Parker Guidry, excellent as the villainous Mordred in act two, spends most of act one singing and dancing the role of one of Camelot’s resident maidens, and they are awesome doing it. 

Perkins is an excellent singer, and nicely conveys her character’s dismay as she is drawn between Arthur, whom she loves with her heart, and Lancelot, for whom she feels such unbridled passion. Metcalf knows how to belt out his songs, infusing Arthur with a refreshing boisterousness; many actors bring to Arthur their most brooding affects. Rowbotham makes Lancelot more thoughtful and plainspoken—the character’s grand pronouncements seem like humblebrags here. The show, which has undergone some heavy cuts, sometimes feels rushed, but the players and production team know where to find Camelot’s real heart.

Read More

Being a parent requires attentiveness, and when you can muster it, patience. In many ways, parenting small children is not unlike being an artist; both necessitate curiosity, mindfulness, and a certain amount of nimbleness. The works in Jessica Labatte’s solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions, “Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” form a web of connections between the experience of being an artist and a parent stuck inside with their family during the pandemic.

When COVID first hit, Labatte found herself isolating at home with her husband, Eric May, (a fellow artist who runs the gallery Roots & Culture), and their toddler, Avery. She was also pregnant; her second child was born in June 2020. So in addition to her work as the head of the photography department at Northern Illinois University, Labatte was suddenly in charge of occupying Avery. She brought supplies from her basement studio upstairs to establish artmaking stations for herself and Avery, and also ordered him educational STEM books. Both of these prompted several of the new series on view.

“A lot of this work comes out of the curiosity of thinking about science in the world but from a really childlike perspective,” she says.

The Erratics is a luscious photo series, made when Labatte and Avery would fill containers around the house with water and random objects—tiny pom-poms, bits of colored paper—and leave them outside to freeze. Labatte would then photograph the ice sculptures in the studio, set on a mirror and lit by multi-colored lights. Printed large—at 43 by 28 inches—the melting blocks are so detailed they almost seem three-dimensional. It isn’t hard to imagine these ephemeral sculptures as metaphors for the changing climate or the fleeting years of childhood. 

Similarly, the Parallel Play series consists of sculptures of everyday detritus made solely by Avery and photographed by Labatte. Here, chunks of styrofoam are stuck with plastic cutlery, straws, pipe cleaners, and colorful feathers. One of the most striking, Balancing Equilibrium, features a horizontal bendy straw supporting one that’s vertical, the latter of which sports feathers emerging from either side. The sculptures are photographed on gradient backgrounds. In the gallery, they’re hung amongst similar-looking frames that don’t contain photos but instead the actual sculptures themselves. The works encourage close looking.

Labatte got into photography by chance. As a kid, she played competitive ice hockey—primarily on boys’ teams. But a bad arm break ended that, so for a time Labatte went to boarding school in Canada, to play on a more competitive girls’ team. That school offered a photography class, and Labatte was instantly hooked. “Being in the black-and-white darkroom was so magical,” she says. From the very beginning, she was interested in constructing pictures, using a scene to tell a story or evoke a feeling. The first photograph she printed was of classmates’ legs, clad in their boarding school uniforms, standing in front of the school’s brick facade, with a small teacup in the middle. She has loved photography ever since.

That connection to the cold weather comes through in the video Total Accumulation, a looped edit of the cut paper snowflakes Labatte likes to make during the winter. The audio comes from the sounds of the household: toys, one of her children crying, another learning to tell time. It’s a crinkling, sometimes jarring soundtrack, illustrative of the nonstop noise of little children. (Labatte’s fondness for paper snowflakes extended to her students earlier this year, when one of her classes broke the Guinness World Record for making the largest paper snowflake. It clocked in at 44 feet by 6 inches.)

Almanac for Shade Gardeners is an ongoing series, begun in 2017, that sets the stage for much of the work in the show. Here, the artist constructs still lifes in her studio, made up of flowers and plants from her garden alongside minor objects from everyday life. A Time of New Suns features a bouquet of goldenrod set before a tie-dyed backdrop, alongside wildflowers and a pair of dried peach pits. It’s a burst of color that feels particularly welcome during this unseasonably cold autumn. Dream Feed is a psychedelic tableaux, featuring violet irises, glow-in-the-dark stars, a plastic snake, modeling clay, and other tiny elements that are like secrets for the viewer to discover. The items are again set on a mirror and photographed against a black background, like a magician’s props.

The series title refers to the land attached to Labatte’s house, which is a wooded lot. It doesn’t get a lot of sun, so only particular shade plants can grow there. “I just thought it was a perfect metaphor for what it’s like to be an artist parent, trying to navigate: how do I be an artist in this world?” she says. As an art student, there weren’t a lot of examples among Labatte’s professors of how to be both an artist and a mother. For Labatte, figuring out how to navigate motherhood and her art practice feels analogous to figuring out how to grow things in her shade garden—both feel like learning “how to nurture things in a hostile environment.”

The exhibition is enveloped by a strikingly vibrant wallpaper that Labatte printed specially for this show. It consists of scans of construction paper collages the artist made, printed out in vastly oversized dimensions. The scale lets the fuzzy details of the paper fibers come through. The collages are layered in Photoshop, which adds shadows and sharp color combinations. Flower shapes recur throughout, bringing a bright, mod feel to all the work, and a sense of connectedness. 

“Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm” is borrowed from Diane Ackerman’s poem, “Diffraction (for Carl Sagan).” The passage speaks to the expansive relationship of all things, from the interdependence of a family to the wonder that the universe elicits. Becoming a parent led Labatte to slow down, to be more mindful in each moment. She paid more attention to the changing of the seasons, the growing cycle of plants, and the milestones of her children. That shift in attention is apparent here, and this exhibition, with all its tiny details, is an invitation into that same sort of slowing down, looking, noticing.

“Jessica Labatte: Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm”Through 10/29: Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago, Suite 2C, 312-480-8390, westernexhibitions.com

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