Review: ‘Diana' at Theo Theatre was no ordinary opening night
Back in 2021, I reviewed a widely reviled musical flop called 'Diana, the Musical' on Broadway. Soon after I returned to Chicago, I found myself at Theo Ubique Theatre (now Theo Theatre) reviewing a show and talking to its voracious artistic director, Fred Anzevino. I recall the humorous conversation as going something like this:Opening night for Anzevino's long-awaited staging of 'Diana' (music and lyrics by David Bryan and book by Joe DiPietro) arrived some four years later on Sunday night, but alas, Anzevino himself did not live to see it. The giant of tiny Chicago theater died during the rehearsal process. His co-director, Brenda Didier, followed his specific instructions to make sure his beloved project made it to the stage. I caught Didier's eye on Sunday night; she seemed at once elated, relieved and deeply sad.
I recount all of that to tell the reader that this is hardly a normal theater review for me. I admired Anzevino's directing work very deeply, and consider some of his Theo Ubique productions, mostly shows staged about a decade ago, as masterful productions that were among the very best storefront theater I ever saw in Chicago. (I thought of him as the David Cromer of Chicago musicals.) 'Diana' was, to put it mildly, a passion project for Anzevino, a gay man who was around the same age as Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a car crash in 1997 at the age of 36. I am only a little younger myself.
Anzevino had lived for years with the HIV virus and told me several times how profoundly grateful he had been in 1987, when she held the hand of a hospitalized AIDS patient, a gesture she had chosen to reduce the stigma felt by AIDS patients at the time. By 1991, Diana's handshakes had become hugs.
Some of those scenes are in the musical; they were very hard to watch on Sunday. Frankly, the whole show was very hard to watch, so you'll have to take this review in that context. It must also have been very difficult to perform in this context, even though some in the cast are young performers who did not have a long history with Anzevino. However, I don't doubt they know the level of respect in which he was held.
'Diana' did not magically become a great American musical, of course, much as I might wished such a transformation in Anzevino's memory; it simply does not have that level of insight. But he turn what was a campy affair on Broadway into something with heart, passion and integrity. Anzevino changed the show, which had seemed to all about a tabloid love triangle in New York, into a loving tribute to the woman he so admired.
'Diana' is not the first musical to look ridiculous on Broadway, only to work much better in a little room in Chicago (well, Evanston) with a young, hungry cast pouring their hearts and talent into the work. And, frankly, the passing years have been kind to the show in various ways. The young Kate McQuillan, who plays the title role, is charming as she scurries from one wig and costume into another (as designed by Patty Halajian and Kevin Barthel). Jack Saunders is delightfully dotty as Prince Charles, out-maneuvered at every turn, and Collette Todd, a veteran of many Theo shows, mercifully avoids all tempting stereotypes as Camilla.
I also don't want to suggest the show is maudlin. It's not. It's fun. Especially if you watched all of 'The Crown.' That's an apt comparison of tone and veritas, although this show certainly did not have a writer of the caliber of Peter Morgan. But then, 'The Crown' did not have power ballads like 'Pretty, Pretty Girl' and 'As I Love You.' Go in with the right spirit and you'll have a good time. Drinks are to be had at the bar.
One final note: Anzevino was spectacular when it came to casting young talent. Aside from those already mentioned, here he found a young guy named Matheus Barbee, a recent Northwestern University graduate who plays one of the AIDS patients, among other small ensemble roles. Barbee acts with real honesty and sounds fantastic in what, at this particular production, actually is the most important role in the show.
Though no official star rating appears with this review, four stars for Anzevino's life in the theater.
Review: 'Diana'
When: Through July 6
Where: Theo Ubique Theatre, 7321 Howard St., Evanston
Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes
Tickets: $51-$66 at theo-u.com
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Eater
an hour ago
- Eater
Southern-Leaning American Bistro Cannonball Dives Into South Pasadena
One of northeast Los Angeles's most charming neighborhoods, South Pasadena, welcomed Cannonball on May 2, a new restaurant from Hippo chef Matt Molina and operating partner Joe Capella. The sprawling multi-floor space, previously occupied by Piccolo, has original brick walls, an extensive vintage wine list, cocktails, and farmers-market-derived seasonal produce. It's potentially the most exciting new restaurant to open in the area in a few years (its most recent was 2023's debut of Katsu Jin on Fair Oaks). With Molina and Capella steering the ship, South Pasadena has a grown-up restaurant for drinks and classic American dishes, coupled with reasonable prices. Molina, who won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Pacific of 2012 for his work at Osteria Mozza, has had a strong run with Capella at Arts District's Everson Royce Bar (opened in 2015), which is also co-founded and co-owned by Randy Clement and April Langford (Good Neighbor Bar, Silver Lake Wine). The foursome opened Hippo in Highland Park and Triple Beam alongside Nancy Silverton in 2018, cementing their place in northeast LA's dining scene. Molina's relationships with farmers at the South Pasadena Farmers Market, a main source for Hippo's produce, led him and Capella to check out the former Piccolo. The former Venice-based Italian restaurant had expanded to Mission Street in 2022 but closed just a year later in spring 2023 (it still operates in Santa Monica). Cannonball is Capella and Molina's first collaboration, opened without involvement from Clement, Langford, and Silverton. 'Hippo was in a good spot and we wanted to do something in this neighborhood [South Pasadena,' says Molina. 'I grew up in SGV and first heard about it when our friend Steven Arroyo opened something here. He was always ahead of the game. It's so charming here, but a lot of people in Northeast LA don't know about it, or the farmers market.' After a career spent in Hollywood and Mid-City at Osteria Mozza and Campanile, Molina has become acclimated to this part of town. Molina sees a similarity to New York City restaurateurs [like Gabe Stulman], who open multiple concepts in a particular neighborhood to serve a similar audience. Like Everson Royce Bar, Molina anchors the menu with his signature flaky biscuits with honey butter and a single-patty burger made with ground chuck and Tillamook cheddar. Starters include shaved celery salad with medjool dates, roasted carrots with cumin vinaigrette, and fideos with clams, chorizo, and saffron. Most starters range $12 to $24, bucking the trend of inflationary prices that seem to affect most new LA restaurants. A short list of six mains includes the burger with fries for $23, and extends to barbecue pork loin with Anson Mills polenta, grilled prawns, or grilled New York steak with pommes aligot. An olive cake with a side of crème fraiche is the sole dessert. Molina says the menu will not feature pasta during its opening phase, but he might add some in the future. Beverages at Cannonball are another strong suit, with Joe Capella's extensive wine and spirits knowledge on full display. Capella priced the wines to drink now (he would like the entire inventory to turn over every six months), with glasses between $14 and $17, and a long bottle list with prices that are often lower than online retail. He was inspired by places he's visited in Stockholm and Japan that price wine and spirits at an accessible level and allow enthusiasts to actually 'taste the fruits' of often labor-intensive curation. 'We're not trying to profit disproportionately just because it's rare and in demand,' Capella told Eater over email. There are plenty of wines priced between the high-$30s and mid-$40s, alongside higher-end bottles for those looking to ball out. Cocktails come from a longtime relationship with Varnish co-founder Eric Alperin, who advised on the drinks and helped install lead bartender Wolfgang Alexander at Cannonball. Drinks reflect the Milk & Honey school of bartenders with playful takes on classics like the Raymond Hill (Manhattan) using bourbon, amaro lucano, Pedro Ximénez sherry, and mole. Fettle Design helped preserve the building's main interior, hoping to conjure a New York, East Coast, and London feel that stands in contrast to places like Hippo. Capella and Fettle saw the moody space working with a darker color palette; tasteful landscape art, vintage lighting, indoor plants, and pops of old-timey wallpaper complete the look. A more cheerful patio with French cafe-style chairs and greenery works well as an al fresco summer dinner. Eventually, service will expand daily to later hours and a daytime menu on weekends (no weekday lunch, though). With two industry veterans at the helm and a versatile, classic ambience — plus the very approachable food — Cannonball has brightened South Pasadena's dining scene in a big way. Cannonball is open Thursday to Monday from 5 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. with expanded hours forthcoming; it's located at 1010 Mission Street, South Pasadena, CA, 91030. Reservations are available on Resy . Sign up for our newsletter.
Engadget
an hour ago
- Engadget
Pragmata, Capcom's long-delayed PS5 game, is (probably) coming in 2026
To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Pragmata , a new sci-fi, third-person action game from Capcom, finally has a new release date. As part of Sony's summer State of Play on June 4, Capacom shared a new trailer showing off gameplay from Pragmata and revealing that the game is now targeting a 2026 release. Based on the trailer and a blog post on the Playstation Blog, you'll play as two characters in Pragmata : Hugh, a spacesuit-wearing lunk, and Diana, a young robot who appears to be able to hack into the lunar station you'll spend the game navigating. You apparently have to use both characters' abilities at the same time to get through rogue robots and other obstacles. In the trailer it look like a lot of hacking and smashing, but it'll presumably have more variety in its final release. Pragmata was announced all the way back in 2020, before the release of the PlayStation 5, targeting a 2022 release. The game has been delayed multiple different times since then, most recently in 2023 when Capcom delayed the game indefinitely. It's not clear how much of Pragmata has been reworked since then. Pragmata will be available in 2026 on PS5, presumably alongside releases on Xbox Series X / S and PC, as previously announced.
Chicago Tribune
an hour ago
- Chicago Tribune
Groundbreaking gay author Edmund White dies at 85
NEW YORK — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'The Beautiful Room is Empty,' has died. He was 85. White's death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details. Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. 'A Boy's Own Story' was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' and Henry Green's 'Nothing.' 'Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,' cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. 'A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.' In early 1982, just as the public was learning about AIDS, White was among the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated AIDS prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who didn't want him to touch their babies. White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones suffer agonizing deaths. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from AIDS. As White wrote in his elegiac novel 'The Farewell Symphony,' the story followed a shocking arc: 'Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.' But in the 1990s and after he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives. 'We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that,' he said in a Salon interview in 2009. 'Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.' In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others. 'To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,' White said during his acceptance speech. White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer 'who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.' His mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping.' Trapped in 'the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,' at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the essay 'Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,' published in 1991. As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel 'Caracole.' 'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote. Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would 'dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars.' A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and 'all hell broke loose.' 'Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,' wrote White, who soon joined the protests. 'Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.' Before the 1970s, few novels about openly gay characters existed beyond Vidal's 'The City and the Pillar' and James Baldwin's 'Giovanni's Room.' Classics such as William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' had 'rendered gay life as exotic, marginal, even monstrous,' according to White. But the world was changing, and publishing was catching up, releasing fiction by White, Kramer, Andrew Holleran and others. White's debut novel, the surreal and suggestive 'Forgetting Elena,' was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on 'The Joy of Gay Sex,' a follow-up to the bestselling 'The Joy of Sex' that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, 'Nocturnes for the King of Naples,' was released and he followed with the nonfiction 'States of Desire,' his attempt to show 'the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren't just hairdressers, they're also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.' With 'A Boy's Own Story,' published in 1982, he began an autobiographical trilogy that continued with 'The Beautiful Room is Empty' and 'The Farewell Symphony,' some of the most sexually direct and explicit fiction to land on literary shelves. Heterosexuals, he wrote in 'The Farewell Symphony,' could 'afford elusiveness.' But gays, 'easily spooked,' could not 'risk feigning rejection.' His other works included 'Skinned Alive: Stories' and the novel 'A Previous Life,' in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published 'City Boy,' a memoir of New York in the 1960s and '70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels 'Jack Holmes & His Friend' and 'Our Young Man' and the memoir 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.' 'From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,' he told The Guardian around the time 'Jack Holmes' was released. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.'
