Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Both the quirky charm and the utopian radicalism of this legendary figure are central to Loving Repeating: A Musical of Gertrude Stein. The Gertrude that director-adapter Frank Galati and composer Stephen Flaherty portray onstage is formidable and jolly, refined and ribald. Galati’s libretto, ingeniously stitched together from Stein’s writings, celebrates her as artistic innovator and queer pioneer. His artful staging (aided by Michelle Tesdall’s period costumes–long white dresses for the women, ice cream suits and straw boaters for the men) conveys the era’s gentility. The folk, ragtime, jazz, and blues idioms in Flaherty’s lyrical, beautifully textured score bring out the innate melodiousness of Stein’s writing, with its childlike rhymes and flowing rhythms. The three lead performers–Cindy Gold and Christine Mild as the older and younger Gertrude and charismatic Jenny Powers as Alice–are perfectly attuned to the material. Their mellifluous speaking voices, clarion sopranos, and wonderful diction, at once caressing and crisp, are well suited to a writer whose pleasure in the sounds of words is key to her work.
Loving Repeating begins with Gertrude lecturing at the University of Chicago in 1934. Proud of a fame won on her own terms, she recalls her journey from Oakland, California, to Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins (where she briefly pursued a medical degree), and finally to Paris. Gradually the lecture transforms into a theatrical revue evoking opera, cabaret, and vaudeville. (Jack Magaw’s stage within a stage has an arched proscenium framed by box seats; overhead, a voluptuous female nude blows a trumpet like the angel Gabriel.) The vignettes, performed by the leads and a gifted five-person chorus, are both rhapsodic and silly, capturing Stein’s obsessiveness, whimsicality, and sexuality. An earlier incarnation of the piece–A Long Gay Book, workshopped in 2003 at Northwestern University–portrayed Stein and Toklas’s relationship as loving but asexual. But here the physical aspect of the pair’s bond is central, illuminating the passionate subtext of lines like “You are my honey honey suckle / I am your bee” and Stein’s exuberant tribute to female orgasm: “My wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now and having a cow as now and having a cow and having a cow now, my wife has a cow and now.”
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago
