"Chicago" at Pinole Community Players

I don't get to a lot of community theater productions, but I usually enjoy them when I do. At the moment, my daughter is taking a theater class for teens, and they are working on scenes from "Chicago," so when I saw there was this production in the area, I figured it would be fun to take her to see a full production. And I was right: it was fun, and she enjoyed it.

The Play

I won't spend much time summarizing, since this show is so well known. It feels remarkably timely in many ways, though it is set in the 1920s. It appears that, since reality TV hadn't been invented yet, some young ladies might have found their path to fame and fortune through the celebrity of sensationalist newspaper coverage of criminal trials. The main chorus of characters in "Chicago" are all women who have killed their husbands, boyfriends, or lovers.

Roxie Hart (Annika Bergman) kills her lover and decides to hire celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn (Mackenszie Drae) to represent her, with the hope that the publicity will lead her to a career in Vaudeville. In jail, she meets Velma Kelly (Alison Peltz) a Vaudevillian who is in jail for killing her husband and her sister (who was both her stage partner and her husband's lover). With assistance from jail matron Mama Morton (Tammara Plankers), Roxie and her lawyer manipulate Roxie's smitten nebbish husband Amos (Terry Tracy) in efforts to make her trial more dramatic and boost their notoriety.

Needless to say, not all goes as planned, and things don't end well for everyone.

The Production

Community theater productions are generally a mixed bag, with some pretty talented people and some rough filler, leading to pretty uneven productions overall. Although you could say that about this "Chicago," it was a bit more even than most, and there were still some notably high-quality performances.

Probably the two who stood out to me the most on stage were Shay Oglesby-Smith as reporter Mary Sunshine and Terry Tracy as Amos. Oglesby-Smith has a strong voice and consistent stage presence that some of the less experienced actors could emulate. Even when her character was not the focus of the action, she was still acting, where some of the others tend to look like they are waiting for their turn to act again. Tracy, too, was consistently good, starting from an early scene where he has to freeze off to the side while Roxie sings a song. He chose a somewhat comical pose and expression, and held them throughout, foreshadowing what would be a consistently strong performance for him.

I should also mention that the women's dance ensemble was strikingly good. They can all dance. And despite having a range of ages, sizes, and experience, they managed to consistently hold together in some pretty complex choreography on a very cramped stage. I should add kudos to costume designer Janet O'Brien, who managed to create dance outfits for all that were variants on black with fishnet, mostly, but which suited each of the dancers well. I was a little less keen on the overall design, because it was a lot of black, which meant all the black costumes didn't really show up as well, and the lighting system didn't seem quite up to the task of making all the dark characters visible on the dark stage.

Having a six-person live orchestra is a great choice for a show like this, but they took up a lot of space on the stage, and that really constrained what the actors (and particularly the dancers) could do. And given that "Chicago" is largely a dance show, a bit more room for the dancers would have been helpful.

Stand-outs

In addition to the performances noted above by Mary Sunshine and Amos Hart, I thought I'd particularly note that Alison Peltz's Velma was a terrific dancer, very confident and smooth. And Mackenszie Drae as Billy Flynn showcased a strong singing voice, though he seemed less confident when just speaking his lines, which surprised me.

All in all, it was a solid community theater production. We enjoyed our first visit to the Pinole Community Playhouse, and I'm sure we'll be back there again.