A "Nutcracker" more bitter than suite - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 11/29/10 - "In the beginning, the Christmas Eve party at the home of the very American family at the center of the House Theatre’s reinvented version of “The Nutcracker” is literally awhirl — dizzy with boisterous activity and giddy high spirits.

The hosts, Martha (Carolyn Defrin) and David (Jake Minton), along with their daughter, Clara (Carla Kessler), and several tipsy guests, feast on cookies and dance themselves into a vertiginous state. But then comes an ominous knock at the door, and rather than it being Clara’s older brother, Fritz (Chance Bone), returned from war, there is a silent soldier who very formally hands over a tightly folded flag.

With the news that Fritz has been killed, the Christmas tree that has been standing like a beacon of light at the center of the stage collapses to the floor as an indication of the overwhelming grief in the room, and it is picked up and carried aloft, like a corpse.  Indeed, Christmas itself nearly dies in this very dark though at moments whimsical dramatic reinvention of the classic E.T.A. Hoffman story, which now has a new book by Jake Minton and Phillip Klapperich, direction and inspired choreography by Tommy Rapley, and songs by Kevin O’Donnell and Minton. And the life-affirming nature of the holiday is only brought back from the brink of oblivion through the most concerted efforts of Clara, her eccentric magician explorer uncle, Erich Drosselmeyer (Blake Montgomery), and Clara’s long-remaindered “dolls,” including Monkey (Michael E. Smith), Hugo (Joey Steakley) and Phoebe (Trista Smith).

The first step is for Drosselmeyer to restore some facsimile of Fritz, which he does by presenting Clara with a lifesize nutcracker version of her brother, played with great physical ingenuity by Bone. (When Fritz breaks an arm, it is quite brutally hammered back into his shoulder.)

Ultimately the restoration process comes down to a horrific battle between restoring the light or being overwhelmed by the darkness that lurks “between the walls” — the home of two mighty rats (played by Defrin and Minton) and a horde of giant jackal-like creatures (cheers for designer Debbie Baer’s excellent red-eyed puppets).

This philosophical battle rages on far too long, especially for a “family” audience. And the show would benefit from a trim of its two hours (including an intermission), down to 90 minutes. Yet the fervent performers throw themselves into their roles with great seriousness and agility. And with her in-the-round architectural set, Collette Pollard (who also created the superb environment for Writers’ Theatre’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” this year), once again makes the audience believe it is living inside the play.

More nightmare than dream, this “Nutcracker” will no doubt fascinate each age group (including adults) according to its level of experience. To be sure, the show — haunted by death and mourning, and occupying the realms of both the real and the imagined — is no simple sugar plum".

House Theatre's sensational "The Nutcracker" is the best holiday theater deal in Chicago - Elaine Coorens, OurUrbanTimes.com 11/27/10

"It is a delightful, charming, joyous, fun, funny, scary show with a tinge of sadness. It is The Nutcracker by The House Theatre of Chicago, which opened at Chopin Theatre on Sun. Nov. 21 and will run through Dec. 26. It should be on your must see list.

Tommy Rapley's choreography and Kevin O'Donnell's music with lyrics by Jake Minton are more like toe-tapping Broadway shows than the toe pointing classic ballet performances most often associated with the Nutcracker. Like no other version of the 1816 The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by E.T.A. Hoffman, this adaptation is written by Phillip Klapperich, a founding member of House and Jake Minton, for the second time. The first was House's show at the Steppenwolf in 2007.

The story begins in the living room of Martha (mom) and David (dad). They along with Clara (daughter) and beloved Uncle Drosselmeyer are singing and dancing as they prepare for the arrival of Clara's brother Fritz. Fritz is coming home for the holidays from the military. But instead of Fritz ringing the doorbell, it is someone from the military. He delivers an American flag folded in the traditional triangle. The realization that Fritz will not be home for this or any other Christmas stuns the little family.

The next scene, a year later, begins with Clara The next scene, a year later, begins with Clara valiantly attempting to engage her parents in Christmas. But each of them is busily involved in their own life, in an attempt to escape their loss, and want no part of any Christmas celebration.

Unexpectedly Uncle Drosselmeyer arrives. He seems to know that the family has been on a destructive, uncommunicative journey as they struggle with the devastating loss of Fritz. He brings a gift he made for Clara.  It is a Nutcracker, the little toy soldier looks amazingly like Fritz. Then the magic begins.

Clara's toys, Phoebe (a yellow haired windup spacey doll), Monkey (a French sock monkey with an attitude and lisp) and Hugo ( a hyper nerdy robot with a light bulb on his head) along with the Nutcracker (a caring and loving brother), come to life. They all go on a journey with Clara.  Clara knows she must keep this journey with her friends and brother a secret from her family, which is not an easy task.

Initially they face rats, with English accents who are dapperly dressed and sing and dance. Clara and her fantasy friends know that they eventually must face the feared Rat King. He lives in the dark between the house's walls. Red glowing eyes in huge heads (by puppet designer Debbie Baer) emerge from the darkness and a deep voice talks with spooky music adding to the scary experience. The Rat King wants them to stay in the darkness....and then.... Guess you'll just have to go to the show to find out what happens.

Though the challenge of fighting against darkness and the rat king is a metaphor for Clara and her parents' fight against the tragic loss of Fritz and re-establishing a happy family life, this production is definitely not a downer. On the contrary, it shows hope to all for the possibility of healing from great losses.

House's production is exquisitely delightful, fast paced, funny and totally absorbing.The intimate staging on the main stage at the Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, provides the  eight actors, who play twelve roles, opportunity to play with the audience and the audience to play with the actors.

Three sections of audience seating are along the back and one side of the stage. Five musicians are tucked behind a "back wall" of the set providing wonderful musical support to the emotional ups and downs of the story line. While the depth of the story is aimed at adults and teenagers, the little kids seem to love it too. With lots of clever dialogue, running, dancing, talking toys, scary sounds, snow, presents and singing, what kid ... of any age ... could not have a good time?

At $25 per ticket, this is one of the best bargain in town for the holiday. The cast is sensational: Chance Bone - Fritz; Carolyn Defrin - Martha and Rat 1; Carla Kessler - Clara; Jake Minton - David and Rat 2; Blake Montgomery -Uncle Drosselmeyer, Rat 3, Teddy; Michael E. Smith - monkey; Trista Smith - Phoebe; and Joey Steakley - Hugo.

Critic's Choice - 'The Nutcracker' by House Theatre: Christmas is in Clara's hands in warm, four-star 'Nutcracker' - Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 11/22/10

"You might think holiday shows are safe and easy affairs, but theater-going stakes actually increase this time of year. Nobody wants to ruin a loved one's — especially a youthful loved one's — precious evening with the wrong choice.

In truth, you can get much of what many people seem to seek from seasonal entertainment — the nostalgic jangle of bells, a retro glow, a few images of snowflakes — from a free, well-timed walk down Michigan Avenue. But the best holiday theater does one thing far better than luxury shopping: it can bring your family closer together. And there is no show more fervent or successful in that most worthy of seasonal aims than the House Theatre of Chicago's warm, kind, moving, inclusive, affordable and wholly original version of “The Nutcracker.”

Not a ballet, but rather an unstintingly affirmative and emotional drama of one loving family's recovery from the loss of a child, and an older brother, House Theatre's “Nutcracker” was first seen in rented digs at the Steppenwolf Theatre in 2007. The piece, penned by ensemble members Phillip C. Klapperich and Jake Minton and replete with a haunting original score by Kevin O'Donnell, was in many ways a continuation of one of the House Theatre's central narrative themes: To find happiness, in this case Christmas happiness, you can't ignore your demons, but you have to push on and hunt them down.

And in this show, armed only with a few friendly toys and a nutcracker made by Uncle Drosselmeyer, that's exactly what Clara does. Her journey towards her beloved Christmas — and her determination to save her parents from their own grief — is a splendidly empowering Christmas story. In too many Christmas shows and TV specials, passive kids mostly sit around and just collect the presents, fetch the turkey as big as them, or watch that angel's bell ring on the tree. The adults do all the heavy lifting — and all the heavy reforming.

But young Clara has to work for her Christmas — for one thing, she has to kill off a whole tribe of menacing rats that seem to live in the walls of her parent's house (costumes and puppets are by Debbie Baer). The House's Christmas comes at a cost, which makes it all the merrier in the end.

This year — following a three-year absence — it feels like this “Nutcracker” has both been vastly improved and yet also brought home under Tommy Rapley's richly creative direction. The Steppenwolf set-up was a standard proscenium. At the Chopin Theatre, House Theatre's new digs, the show is staged, much more intimately, in the round (the five-piece band is tucked away in the back). That allows this company to play to its strengths and focus its attentions on its audience.

This is a show most overtly aimed at adults and teenagers, but the front rows were heavy with very little kids at Sunday night's opening. They were all uncommonly entranced and able to interact with the performers in a way you just can't do at “The Lion King”: taking cookies from plates on stage, answering Uncle Drosselmeyer's questions, laughing at the many puppets and jumping around in the big drifts of fake snow.

Adults often worry they'll be overrun with kids at shows like this. Meanwhile, parents tend to worry whether their kids will disturb people. This is the rare theatrical environment — child-friendly but also hip and adult — in which both groups will be fully comfortable.

Blake Montgomery, the founder of the Building Stage and now, sadly, only an infrequent actor, adds just the right note of mystery as Drosselmeyer — a master of wonders, but also a man with his own fears. Carla Kessler, who plays Clara, manages to look like a kid and yet treat her charge like a furious little adult. Chance Bone, the earnest new Fritz, adds a certain dignity and emotional honesty to what could be a wooden task.

And, as the parents who have become strangers in their own family, House stalwarts Carolyn Defrin and Jake Minton will remind most parents of themselves, or what they could so easily become. “The Nutcracker” is back to make sure that doesn't happen".

Highly Recommended - The Nutcracker, Catey Sullivan Chicago Theatre Review Examiner 11/22/10

"There’s more authentic, gleeful holiday spirit in the first three minutes of the House Theatre of Chicago's adaptation of  The  Nutcracker than you’ll find in an entire two hours traffic o’er the stage in many another holiday show. In re-casting E.T.A. Hoffman’s classic Christmas story, playwrights Phillip Klapperich and Jake Minton have created something wonderful, steeping a usually cotton candy frothy affair with dark psychological depths while maintaining a perfect balance between irreverence and joy. Moreover, instead of a generally beautiful but ultimately plot-less parade of scenes, the House Theatre’s Nutcracker, directed and choreoraphed with an agile hand by Tommy Rapley, is a story of complexity and suspense.

In the traditional Nutcracker ballet, Clara attends a family Christmas party, vanquishes a gang of mice and then travels to a real-live version of Candyland, where she sits passively through the second act entire, watching a variety show of dancing confections. The ballet is breathtakingly beautiful. And wholly free of any sort of dramatic tension.

Klapperich and Minton ditch the pas de deux and pirouettes. In their place, the insert dialogue that’s captures all the mirth, sadness and exasperation and underlying anger inherent to most any family get-together. This Nutcracker is an innovative balancing act, perched perfectly between tongue-in-cheek wise-assery and earnestness.

The narrative still centers on little Clara (Carla Kessler). But this time around, her fight is against something far worse than a kingdom of grand jete-ing rodents. (Although the bewhiskered baddies do indeed play a pivotal role.) When Fritz fails to return from the war in Christmas Eve, the family is bereft, standing in a tableau of stricken grief,  staring at happy family portraits of Christmas past. The simple staging – a newly, cruelly re-constituted family of three posed with an empty chair, gaping in shock at over-sized gilt-framed photos of their former lives as a family of four with all the chairs happily filled – goes right to the heart.

The magic begins when the action flashes to a year later. Clara’s parents (Carolyn Defrin and Jake Minton) are still buried in mourning, their annual Christmas party – and the very spirit of the holiday itself – cancelled. Enter the eccentric Uncle Drosselmeyer (Blake Montgomery), with a carpet bag full of tricks and a subversive scheme to restore joy. To her parents’ horror, he presents Clara with a nutcracker that looks precisely like her dead brother. And from here, the House spins some genuine magic as Clara enters a hero’s quest against the ever-gathering darkness.

There’s a bit of The Wizard of Oz in the adventures of Clara and her Nutcracker brother (Chance Bone). The pair is assisted by a fantastical rag-tag team of come-to-life toys including the wind-up doll Phoebe (Trista Smith, a ditzy delight), sock monkey (Michael E. Smith, oozing ridiculous savoir faire) and a shiny robot doll named Hugo (Joey Steakley, loveably nerdish. ). They’re later joined by a long-lost stuffed bear, whose dialogue is a sort of Tao of teddy that’s both witty and wise. (“If there’s one thing I know – the dark is just the light with the light switched on.”) That the group occasionally breaks into musical numbers in between fighting evil (Kevin O’Donnell’s original music captures both the gusto of merriment and the sorrow of loss.) just adds to the drollery.

Throughout, the production is rich with intelligent details that make the dialogue zip and the story appealing for a demographic that encompasses toddler through cynic.

Among those delightful details: Herr Drosselmeyer is just in from the Sargasso Sea. Lockjaw becomes a metaphor for soul-killing sorrow; shrimp chips a metaphor for jaw-dropping wonders that defy rationality and pizza bagels for a world that’s gray, dispirited and awfully lonesome. The rats wear snazzy black and white saddle shoes. There is a blinding – yes, blinding - blizzard. And when Clara sets her jaw and charges off to fight to the death against a legion of ravenous rats, she’s armed with a plastic wreath, a dollar store Santa hat and a hideous holiday sweater – all of which she shoulders with the boo-yah gusto of a Marine charging into battle with an arsenal of high-powered explosives.

The production values are both homespun and ingenious. That blizzard? A white-out Winter wonderland. The climactic appearance of the Rat King – a massive black monster with savage glowing eyes and incisors the size of saplings - just the right amount of spectacle and scary. In addition to creating those fearsome red-eyed rats, puppet/costume designer Debbie Baer has outfitted the cast in outfits that both realistic and cartoon colorful.  Clara's father has a wardrobe of sensible sweaters. Hugo wears a beanie topped by a light bulb that blinks on whenever he’s thinking hard.

In the end, Nutcracker is as poignant as it is hilarious. Fritz does not come back from the dead. Clara is forced to reckon with the fact that as far as anyone knows, he won’t even remember her once he’s gone from the world. But there’s celebration in seeing the dead soldier’s family return to the world of the living, acknowledging their grief, and finding that neither death nor rats can snuff out joy".

The Nutcracker - Neal Ryan Shaw, NewCity Chicago 11/22/10
" The House’s remount of their successful 2007 holiday show is a very loose adaptation of ETA Hoffman’s classic story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” and yet its prologue is still almost ironically evocative of the Tchaikovsky ballet. Cheerful dancing around the Christmas tree turns to tragedy, however, when news arrives of the son’s death at war. A year later, no Christmas party almost means no Christmas, until a surprise visit from Uncle Drosselmeyer, with a gift for Clara of a nutcracker that looks like her brother, upsets the somber balance of the household. The adaptation by company members Phillip C. Klapperich and Jake Minton cleverly psychologizes the tale, spinning the magical battle against darkness and Rat Kings as one against childhood grief and family wounds. The brisk, lively staging never lets you linger on such heavy thoughts for too long, but the actors all have great fun with each other, with the script, and with the audience. You’ll believe in magic again".

As its kids fly off, can the House Theatre still be an artistic home?  - Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 11/18/10

"When the House Theatre of Chicago first burst onto the Chicago scene a decade ago, several things were obvious. Here was a group of fearless, optimistic and prodigiously talented theater artists. And these youngsters had an unusually cohesive collective aesthetic, rooted in the production of original material drawn from a blend of mythology and mass culture, and produced with an uncommonly intense and open communication with a young and excited audience.

Back then, it seemed evident that the members of House would sink or swim en masse. And for a long while, the collective trajectory was certainly pointed skyward. When “The Sparrow,” a moving and memorable House creation about a small-town girl with reluctant superpowers, first opened at the Viaduct Theater, its eye-popping success led, in short order, to a commercial run at the Apollo Theater in Chicago. The show was just a hair away from a New York transfer.

But a year later, the House was not looking as institutionally healthy.

A disagreement with the owners of the Viaduct over booking dates and control of the space led to a parting of the ways. During the 2007-08 season, House produced four different shows in four different theaters. Audiences became confused, and some drifted away. When House produced its own singular take on “The Nutcracker” at the Steppenwolf Theatre in fall 2007, many of the show's admirers thought they were watching a Steppenwolf production; theater audiences in Chicago often conflate the venue and the producing entity.

Over the next year or so, the House adolescent identity crisis began to show up in its work.
 The essential youthfulness of the House style didn't feel as viable (or everything as inherently forgivable) now that the performers were passing 30 years old. Meanwhile, House also had to withstand a backlash from a few envious competitors who saw its bright-eyed optimism, marketing savvy and growing relationship with commercial producers and big theaters as anathema to the anti-establishment Chicago way. For some, House was no longer the cool new discovery, but an unfairly privileged member of the new establishment. And since House had, by this point, several full-time staffers on its payroll, the recession of 2008 could not have come at a worse time.

But even as House was faltering institutionally, the careers of the individual artists in its ensemble were taking off. Designer Ana Kuzmanic started to work on Broadway shows. Tommy Rapley became a busy national choreographer at theaters big and small. Artistic director and performer Nathan Allen found himself a sought-after guest artist on college campuses. Actress Carolyn Defrin began working often at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company (including in the recent “To Kill a Mockingbird”). Cliff Chamberlain (“The Seagull” at the Goodman Theatre) became a leading Chicago actor who, just this past week, booked the leading role in a pilot for an upcoming Fox TV sitcom. Defrin and Chamberlain had no choice but to become Equity actors — who remained members of a non-Equity ensemble.

For the first time, it started to seem that the legacy of the House would not be institutional but individual. House artists were thriving, but wither the House itself?

Allen is now both artistic and managing director — a consequence of the financial times, he says, and also out of a desire to put House resources into development and marketing, where they can propel growth. Allen acknowledges that, for a while, individual House members have been doing much better than the House itself. But, he says, not for much longer.

First and foremost, House has staked out a long-term home at the Chopin Theatre in Noble Square, where it is renting the main stage for 36 straight weeks this season. That means it gets to hang its shingle on the door. And when “The Nutcracker” (which features a cast of 10, a five-piece band and a classic House sensibility) reopens there Sunday, audiences will walk in under the House banner.

“They're really great here,” Allen says of House's long-term deal with the Chopin. “They've pointed all the lights at our sign.”

Allen says the basic strategy is to amp things up and ignore the naysayers. “We're adding programming,” he says, “and we're dropping ticket prices.” A new late-night magic show, starring House magician Dennis Watkins, has been doing big business in the Chopin's downstairs parlor.

Through all its travails, House has never lost the support of its admiring mentors: Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company and (among others) Northwestern University. “They give us everything we ever ask,” Allen says.

The board has grown. And the audience is still healthy by off-Loop standards (House hopes to sell 10,000 tickets to “Nutcracker”).

So what remains? The establishment of a home — although it looks as if the Chopin Theatre will fit that bill. The development of the aesthetic as the artists reach a different stage of their lives: That's an ongoing process — but at least it has the company's full attention. And the creation of a new relationship with Actors' Equity — so the leading House ensemble members, the ensemble members you'll see volunteering at the box office over the next few weeks, can work again at home.

“By next year,” Allen says.

And one last thing. Another hit like “The Sparrow” would be good".