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    In Chicago, 3 Shows That Keep the Audience in Mind and Engaged

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    Musical adaptations of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Lord of the Rings” as well as a new Samuel D. Hunter play were on our critic’s itinerary.The musical adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” that’s playing at the Goodman Theater incorporates quite a bit of crowd work. In a final coup de théâtre that felt both radical and exhilarating, a character leads theatergoers in a communal use of their Playbills.While the three shows I saw during a recent weekend trip to Chicago were wildly different from one another, my mind kept returning to their relationship with their respective audience. Seeing “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” first set me off on that train of thought.Based on John Berendt’s best-selling retelling of a true crime in 1980s Savannah, Ga., the musical, which is running through Aug. 11, has edited out some colorful figures (goodbye, Joe Odom) and condensed the events (the legal wranglings taking up a good chunk of Berendt’s book whiz by in a few minutes). But the biggest move is a bold change in perspective for the show, which has a book by Taylor Mac and a score by Jason Robert Brown.Berendt’s omnipresent chronicler is now us, the theatergoers, whom the characters often address directly from the stage. This will particularly resonate with those familiar with Mac’s way of integrating the audience into a narrative (as Mac did most notably with the 2016 epic “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”). Another key Mac preoccupation is the haunting of America by its past, something particularly relevant when it comes to Savannah’s self-mythologizing of its lineage. “Get out of my head, dirty demons of historical pain!” the Lady Chablis (J. Harrison Ghee, a Tony Award winner for “Some Like It Hot”) says at one point. She’s referring to her own history, but it’s hard not to hear a wider reference.Chablis, an exuberant entertainer and insuppressible life force, has moved from the book’s periphery to the show’s center, and Ghee’s performance, languid yet sharply angled, is a delight. The nightclub number “Let There Be Light” could use a little more voltage, but then the director Rob Ashford and the choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres are overall too timid in the splashier scenes.The show’s other focal point is Jim Williams (Tom Hewitt), the wealthy antique dealer and furniture restorer who kills his younger lover, Danny Hansford (Austin Colby). In effect, Mac’s book is structured around two ways of being queer in the South 40 years ago. The outsider Chablis is Savannah’s very own Puck, spreading joyful bedlam and ladling out truths; Jim is both accepted and resented by the city’s elite — personified by the Ladies Preservation League, led by Emma Dawes (Sierra Boggess, revealing previously underused comedic chops).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Bark of Millions’ Review: Taylor Mac’s Rock Opera at BAM

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      If Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s four-hour rock opera were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble.Somewhere close to the four-hour mark in “Bark of Millions,” the polychromatic cavalcade of splendor that is Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s new rock opera, I finally realized why the woman in front of me had been reading on her phone throughout the performance. And why she had looked at me like I was way out of line when I couldn’t bear the glowing screen any longer, leaned forward and implored her to stop.The words on her phone were excerpts from the show’s lyrics, a free digital version of the printed fan deck on sale at concessions. More than 50 songs in, she was grasping at that text in an attempt to follow along. Because the great frustration of “Bark of Millions,” which continues through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, is that there are far too many songs in which the music drowns out the lyrics, making the meaning a bafflement. (Sound design is by Brendan Aanes.) In those moments, time decelerates.If “Bark of Millions” were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble. Those are plentiful in Ray’s genre-hopping music, richly interpreted by the band he directs, and in Machine Dazzle’s ingeniously odd costumes, such as the sparkly pastel number in which Mac begins the evening, looking like Weird Barbie as an acid-tinged sprite, dressed for Versailles by way of ’60s Vegas.But Mac’s vivid, often poetic lyrics are not incidental. In the creation of the score, they were the starting point, each of the 55 songs inspired by a figure in queer history. It is a mosaic of a show, inherently political in its affirmation of queer heritage and community, though as Mac tells the audience, it is not a history lesson: “We beg you not to Google in your seats.”From left, Jack Fuller, Mama Alto and Thornetta Davis.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesStill, there are degrees of mystery, and I do not believe that “Bark of Millions” — which Mac, its principal director, describes aptly in a program note as “an opera-concert-song-cycle-musical-performance-art-piece-play” — means to leave us so much in the dark.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More