“The most amazing part of a dinner party is that it’s intimate.” – a guest at The Dinner Party
The Dinner Party premiered Monday night at Chicago’s Mayne Stage Theatre in Rogers Park, home to the Lifeline and No Exit Theatres as well as folk, blues, and hard rock tunes spilling out of storefronts on Glenwood. The Dinner Party, an arts interview show featuring Chicago and national talent held the last Monday of every month, is the city’s new addition to that local arts flavor we love so good. As the show warmed up with the sounds of Nicholas Barron’s crooning voice and vibrant guitar, fans flocked from the audience to speak with their idols next to the stage before the show went live on FearNoArt.tv.
Amy, who bought tickets to The Dinner Party Monday morning, brought her friend Inna. Coming to Chicago for the theater community, Amy said “If I had him [Tony] over for dinner, he’d probably, after a bottle of wine, end up doing that in my living room anyway.” She added earlier, “I think this is the is the sort of dinner party that people want to have at their house and their not necessarily capable of having” in terms of access to artists. Amy’s friend Inna described The Dinner Party as a “glimpse into artists minds that I wouldn’t otherwise find out.”
Jeff Award Winner Rachel Rockwell balanced the rambunctious lady-killers, Jon and Tony, by proving her theater-directing chops. As she described during The Dinner Party, she focuses deeply on story in adapting from the page into a live production, taking bold angles on tried and true material such as Taming of the Shrew for teenagers in the Chicago Shakes’s Short Shakespeare! program. The story, Rockwell explained, is about a father, Baptista Minola, a Lord in Padua, trying to marry off his daughters and one of them, Katherina Minola, is the lesser beauty in his eyes, or the “shrew.” Through the course of the play, Katherina’s hot temper must be “tamed” by Petruchio, but Rockwell turns the misogynistic taming into an “unburdening” of Katherina from her father and the pressure to get married. In the course of The Dinner Party, a clip of Rockwell’s Pinocchio was widely enjoyed.
Audiences were perplexed at what was on their plates as Chef Richie from MOTO explained the explosive nitroglycerin-cooled sugarless chocolate and corn mole bombs. The first bomb tastes salty, then after the audience “popped their pills” as host Elysabeth Alfano quipped, the saltiness became oh so sweet due to the clever Miracle Berry tablet distributed by celebrity Chef Homaro Cantu’s company.
It contains a special property that turns your taste buds from sour to sweet. The berry has been in use in “West Africa since at least the 18th century, when European explorer Chevalier des Marchais, who searched for many different fruits during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa, provided an account of its use there.” More on that sweet history here. http://mberry.us/
The next Diner Party is Monday, February 27th at the Mayne Stage Theatre and features soul singer, JC Brooks, Second City Director, Billy Bungeroth and Luna Negra choroeographer, Gustavo Ramirez Sansano with famed chef Anthony Martin of Tru. Performance painter Stacy Bowie is the opening act. Get tix here.
This post was written by Sawyer Lahr.