“Theater Oobleck, easily the most cerebral absurdist theater company (or absurdist cerebral company) in town, presents one of its most unlikely aesthetic and formal pairings of the company’s history… Mickle Maher’s The Hunchback Variations takes as its premise a panel discussion between the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Ludwig van Beethoven…

“And if The Hunchback Variations, which consists of 11 vignettes in which Quasimodo and Beethoven meditate on their failure, wasn’t heady enough, the play… has found a new incarnation as Oobleck’s first opera, opening this week at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theatre. The A.V. Club spoke with playwright Mickle Maher, author of the now-libretto, and composer Mark Messing (of Redmoon and co-founder of Mucca Pazza) about their own artistic collaboration and why opera suddenly seems to be so popular.”

Full story.

Mia Clarke writes:

Two friends hatch a plan for a new kind of opera while at a birthday party for a billionaire.

“A billionaire’s birthday bash is not the most likely place for a pair of offbeat artists to have a meeting of creative minds. Yet, in 2008, when real estate magnate and Tribune owner Sam Zell threw himself a party, two of Chicago’s leading fringe creators found themselves mingling.”

Full story here

The Chicago Reader has listed Our top five theater picks for fall, including Baudelaire in A Box, Episode 3: Death and Other Excitements.

Tony Adler reports:

Buchen and Schoen plan to have all 126 poems boxed and ready by 2017, the sesquicentennial anniversary of Baudelaire’s death. You can gauge their progress this fall when they present cantastoria performances of the six poems that make up the “Death” section of Les Fleurs plus the magnificent “Anywhere Out of This World.”

Full article from the Reader

We love the lead of this review:

“If you’re in Chicago, and you’re looking for some brilliant comic juxtapositions, go see any show produced by the folks at Theater Oobleck; they are the Brilliant Comic Juxtapositions People.”

And the rest of it isn’t so bad either! (No, actually it’s good. Very good. You can read it here.

“In this amusing solo lecture-cum-farce, [David Isaacson] exposes the cupidity, stupidity, narcissism, and—most of all—magical thinking behind the crisis by showing how nicely it parallels the financial misadventures of a man who got in on the ground floor of laissez-faire capitalism: the legendary lover, Giacomo Casanova. . . . Charming and smart.” — Tony Adler, in the Chicago Reader

Read the full review.

“If the financial shenanigans that led to our economic meltdown still make your eyes glaze over, David Isaacson’s new one-man show, “Casanova Takes a Bath,” should go a long way toward rectifying that.” — or so sayeth Nina Metz in the Chicago Tribune

Read the full review

Rebecca Palmore, of Metromix, talks with David Isaacson about Casanova, bubbles, and the sensual pleasures of global finance through the ages.

Monica Westin chats with David Isaacson and Dave Buchen about Casanova and 6×6.

“It’s a notable month for Theater Oobleck. With the remount of the company’s recent Rhino Fest contribution, “Casanova Takes a Bath,” at Prop Thtr in late May, and their current ambitious cantastoria project in conjunction with Links Hall (along with recent performances at the Hideout and the Packer Schopf Gallery), the company’s various members are performing and collaborating all over town.”

Old Ideas: Theatre Oobleck finds contemporary resonance in ancient texts and techniques

“With all the talk about iPads and 3-D movies, I long for a great technological leap backward, and this looks like just the thing.”

The Reader’s Tony Adler is down with the crankies.

"One can see encapsulated in this passage not only Maher’s passionate engagement with language at diverse levels—from the rhetorical mastery of syntax and cadence to the semantic wizardry of words, their ability to conjure habitable worlds out of bare ice and air—but also two of the issues that drive Maher throughout his various theatrical follies. There is the idea of the impossible or meaningless project as not just an intellectual limit or an aesthetic curiosity, but an ethical necessity: a “life-duty.” And there is the sense of inescapable loneliness heightened by the attempt to communicate, as though the fundamental ethical task is to make one’s own singularity intelligible and thereby transcend it—a task which in Maher’s universe seems inevitably doomed to failure."

–John Beer, The Point

Read the whole thing.