Andrew Edwards / Blue Police Box Music

Reviews for LoveTaps are in…

March 26, 2010

…and they’re great!

Here’s the TimeOut Chicago review by Zachary Wittenburg…

Chicago Tap Theatre is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The eight-year-old company has regularly premiered original tap-dance-theater and tap-opera productions which no one else, to my knowledge, is doing. (If anyone has heard of similar productions, please point me to them.) Their latest is a Choose Your Own Adventure, audience-as-matchmaker two-act in Nora Ephronese called LoveTaps, in which company director and founder Mark Yonally plays James, a web developer whose new site is débuting at the expense of his relationship. (The rub is that it’s an online dating service called LoveTaps.com, a URL that in reality takes you to an ad page for plumbing hardware, although you can see CTT’s dummy page and character profiles here.) We the audience are the website’s pairing algorithm: Each performance protagonizes, to make up a word, three of the cast’s nine singles. During the intermission, we use a ballot in the program to choose their mates; the show then closes with the duets we voted to see.

Opening scene “The Office Suite” introduces kooky cat lady Susan (Christina Merrill) and Jo (Laura Chiuve), a sultry, serious homage to the Joan Holloway Harris type. We meet Stephen the ladies’—and maybe man’s—man (Phil Brooks) at a bustling bar, and the pill-popping Barbara (Kendra Jorstad) in “The Psychiatrist’s Office.” Occasional lyrics by Micah Bucey, Andrew Edwards, Paul Hagen, and Michael Walsh fill in some details, but stop short of narration and let the show’s real concept take hold. I had surprisingly little trouble connecting the rhythmic choices of tap solos to the characters’ personalities.

In “The Bar Suite,” wallflower Vicky (Melissa Reh) wonders if she’s “flirting from too far” for anyone to notice her. She taps just behind each beat, but as her thoughts turn to fantasies of being in love, her footwork accelerates in a crescendo across the stage. Barbara’s pharmaholic is a spot-on piece of physical comedy that drew plenty of laughs: Full of meds, her toes patter out a giddy dance while her head is lolled back completely out of the picture, arms flopping haphazardly at her sides. “It takes some fortitude/to keep a lightness in one’s mood,” the song says, “Still, I smile.”

In a pre-show explanation of the laws of LoveTaps, Edwards urges us to “be creative” when making our matches, clarifying that the show’s structure is built to accommodate all possibilities. The night I attended (Saturday 21), the audience showed its colors by creating one gay and two lesbian couples. (I’d be curious to see a breakdown of all the audience’s choices once the run ends next Sunday.) Susan the cat lady ended up with Kat the butch (Stacy Milam), Stephen hooked up with pop-and-locking bellhop Ben (Richard Ashworth), and Susan and Jo initiate an office romance that I, still stuck on Mad Men, couldn’t help equating with the odd image of Joan heavy-petting Peggy. Although a triumph for gay rights, the outcome did expose an apparently-unexpected problem: LoveTaps’ same-sex endings all share the same soundtrack, so we heard one set of lyrics over three slightly-different tunes.

Projected video and photography sets LoveTaps in familiar Chicago locations–Ben and Stephen’s coy flirtation is particularly enjoyable with Navy Pier as its backdrop—and Edwards’s pop songs are pleasant enough, à la Ben Gibbard and Torquil Campbell with the spirit of an innocent, optimistic sixteen-year-old. (Edwards also co-wrote the show’s script/framework/tapbretto.) The sincere positivity of a rousing full-company finale took the edge off a long walk afterward through unwelcome sleet.

And here’s the brief review from The Chicago Reader, by Laura Molzahn…

Choreographer Mark Yonally owns the narrative tap-dance show. No character ever says a word in LoveTaps, CTT’s 90-minute comedy about online dating, but body language and expressive tapping make the stories completely clear. And there’s a wrinkle: audiences vote to decide which couples will hook up in act two, which makes for a lot of vehement intermission-time discussion about who’s compatible and why. Some candidates–a pill-popping shrink, a homicidal doorman, a wannabe celeb–are fun to watch but scary dating material; the rest brought out my inner matchmaker. Andrew Edwards, who created the show with Yonally, also composed and recorded the pop score, tailoring the clever lyrics–too often drowned out by thundering cleats–to scenes and characters.

LoveTaps runs tonight through Sunday at Theatre Building Chicago!
Hope to see you there!

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