Parallel 45 Says the Shows Must Go On — Even if Not Their Own

Good News

By Lynda Wheatley | April 19, 2020

Quick on the heels of Parallel 45’s recent cancellation of its upcoming summer season at the Grand Traverse County Civic Center, Artistic Director Kit McKay announced that the group is creating a Virtual Summer Season instead. (Click here to stay tuned for the latest.)

And, while we theater junkies anxiously wait to hear what P45 is planning, she’s pulled together a bunch of archival (and new!) theatrical works from professional theatres across the country, all available for streaming — and many free.

Here are a few we’ve already watched (or listened to) and loved:

• "Soundstage," Playwrights Horizons’ podcast series of plays making their audio world premiere (www.playrightshorizons.org)

• The live recording of David Byrne’s Broadway performance of “American Utopia” (on Spotify).C

• The Chicago premiere of Mike Lew's devastatingly funny play about perception, disability, and the lengths we're willing to go to rise above our station in life, “Teenage Dick.”

• At a 12-step meeting for victims of online obsession, people much like ourselves testify, confess and even — in songs like “Hymn: The Forest” — pray. Dave Malloy’s Octet, an a cappella songfest, turned the exhilarating, exhausting, clarifying and degrading world of the internet into the kind of music previously reserved for reaching out to God.

• Cambodian Rock Band: Lauren Yee’s tragicomic play about the warping legacy of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s is punctuated by songs from the Cambodian surfer rock band, Dengue Fever. This rousing, rough-edged fusion of genres is performed by cast members portraying the doomed group of the title, with pulsing numbers like “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula.”

• A Strange Loop soundtrack: Michael R. Jackson’s audacious memoir musical about a black, queer composer of musical comedies takes place in the very conflicted, equally imaginative mind of its central character, portrayed by Larry Owens, who introduces the audience to his divided selves in “Today.” 

• The Schaubühne in Berlin is providing English subtitles for several of its daily offerings (mark your calendar; the plays change frequently). Productions by the Schaubühne’s gifted artistic director, Thomas Ostermeier, turn up regularly, including Yasmina Reza’s “Bella Figura” on Saturday, “Returning to Reims” and “The Marriage of Maria Braun." Another likely highlight is Simon McBurney’s adaptation of the 1939 Stefan Zweig novel “Beware of Pity.”

• DAN HURLIN: DEMOLISHING EVERYTHING WITH AMAZING SPEED: Award-winning puppet artist Dan Hurlin created this surreal "puppet noir," based on four beautiful but disquieting plays by the Italian futurist artist Fortunato Depero. The plays, written in 1917, had never before been translated or staged in English. These astonishing plays (with original music by Dan Moses Schreier) celebrate the energy and possibility of technology while revealing the chilling parallels between their time and ours.