Audience members arriving early in the lobby of the Cultural Center may be puzzled at hearing a decidedly vocal group exercise occurring inside the auditorium. After all, isn’t this the Silent Theatre Company, dedicated to live-action replications of movies from the days before sound tracks? Oh, the stageside combo supplying the customary musical accompaniment might want to play a few warm-up scales, but what purpose are these other noisy preliminaries to serve?
Citizens with first-hand recollections of pre-talking motion pictures are now aged somewhere in their 90s (though Baby Boom brats may recall afternoon broadcasts of Ben Turpin and Buster Keaton on television during the 1950s and ’60s). Taking this into consideration, Silent Theatre adapter/director Tonika Todorova provides us with a prologue: a comedy shoot in progress is interrupted by the studio producer, who threatens to withdraw his funding of the project. The desperate director claims that they have signed a sure box-office draw, the immensely popular Charlie Chaplin. After a search for a copycat Chaplin, they proceed to make A Tramp’s Christmas—a linear narrative blending slapstick, sentiment and social commentary and featuring the genre’s classic comic routines.
The speeded-up pace associated with vintage two-reelers was a technical glitch engendered by faulty projection, but even so, the Silent Theatre ensemble is to be commended for resisting the temptation to overstated facial or bodily movement, instead imposing no more exaggeration than mandated by historical accuracy and the artificial chiaroscuro created by a unified scheme of starkly neutral colors carried into all design aspects, down to the white-face makeup. Anchoring the action is the amazing Marvin Eduardo Quijada, playing the Little Tramp himself, ably assisted by Gillian Hastings as his urchin sidekick and a bevy of clown-mimes performing such familiar lazzi as ‘the piano movers’ and the ‘flea circus,’ along with three musicians as agile with a czarda or ragtime as the actors with a pants-kick or a pratfall.
Clocking in just over an hour, A Charlie Chaplin Christmas is a unique theater experience for Loop visitors reluctant to make the investment required by the playhouses west of State Street, as well as a treat for downtown shoppers looking to rest their feet and brains in some old-fashioned populist escapism.
Playwright: adapted by Tonika Todorova from the films of Charlie Chaplin. At: Silent Theatre Company at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph. Phone: 312-742-8497; $20. Runs through: Jan. 6