RIVERVIEW: A MELODRAMA WITH MUSIC
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Seemingly incongruous in a family fun park, this vicious game in fact epitomized Riverview, whose rides and games all exploited visceral sensation for profit. A visit to Riverview was an experience dotted with exhilarating highs and crashing lows, the natural result of frequent short spurts of stimulation. That’s the feeling that Goodman Theatre’s Riverview: A Melodrama With Music seeks to evoke. To a great extent it succeeds: Riverview is often enormously entertaining and imaginative, though also too manipulative and cluttered for its own good.
Director Robert Falls and playwright John Logan, who share credit for creating this new work, draw from a smorgasbord of inspirations, including 19th-century melodrama, 1930s movie musicals and gangster flicks, 1940s film noir, 1970s concept musicals, and the work of British filmmaker Dennis Potter (Pennies From Heaven, The Singing Detective) as well as Riverview Park itself (which closed down in 1967 after 63 years). Their themes include the decay of post-World War II optimism, the evils of drug addiction, and the rise of black self-determination in Chicago politics; these are depicted in broad, sometimes inaccurate strokes. Yet there’s something exhilarating about Riverview’s ambition; even when it fails, it does so on a grand scale. And in the many moments when it rises to the occasion it’s a joy to watch.
Much of the credit for these high points goes to musical supervisor Larry Schanker and orchestrator David Siegel, whose big-band arrangements (splendidly played under Helen Gregory’s direction) crackle with invention and energy. And the design team Falls has assembled–Thomas Lynch on sets, Nan Cibula on costumes, Michael S. Philippi on lights, and Richard Woodbury on sound–have concocted a brilliantly textured fantasy world in which illusion and reality become increasingly hard to distinguish.
