Solo Webber – Chicago Reader

If you find Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals overstuffed and bombastic, you might be surprised by Tell Me on a Sunday. This one-woman piece, first produced in 1979, lasts only 75 minutes and has minimum staging requirements, which stands in contrast to the crashing-chandelier aesthetic and nearly three-hour runtime of The Phantom of the Opera. It’s a terrific choice for an intimate venue like Theo’s Howard Street Theatre. Particularly if you have Dani Pike on hand to play Emma, the bruised romantic whose ups and downs in love form the basis for the story.

Tell Me on a Sunday
Through 4/20: Thu–Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 6 PM; Howard Street Theatre, 721 Howard, 773-939-4101, theo-u.com, $45-$60

Perhaps ironically, the story was originally conceived by Webber’s onetime collaborator Tim Rice, but allegedly Webber, disapproving of Rice’s extramarital affair with musical theater star Elaine Paige, turned to lyricist Don Black (who wrote some of the songs for the James Bond franchise). Emma’s affair with a married man is one of four anatomized in the 75-minute piece.

So sure, it’s a fair cop to point out that her story seems to be all about her love life (which also includes interludes with an older movie producer who whisks her off on a fool’s errand to Hollywood and a younger man she meets back in New York). On the other hand, given that she’s struggling to land a green card, it’s not as if a glittering career in the States is central to her life. And for lots of twentysomething people, not just young women, romance is still a major factor in life decisions, for good or ill.

Directed with a sure and sensitive hand by Keely Vasquez, this piece feels very much like an artifact of the 1980s, expressed in Pike’s denim skirt and off-the-shoulder Flashdance tops. (The note-perfect period costumes are by Marquecia Jordan.) Eleanor Kahn’s set, with its pink tones and stacked platforms like the tier of a cake, also has a clever but functional “MTV meets Barbie” appeal. 

But the show’s weight is on Pike’s shoulders, and boy howdy, does she ever deliver. There aren’t a lot of insta-classics in the score (though the title number feels like something that the late Kirsty MacColl could have come up with, and that’s no small compliment, and “Come Back With the Same Look in Your Eyes” feels like something Burt Bacharach might have written, which is a great instance of “steal from the best”). Music director Evelyn Ryan and her four musicians modulate the volume well for the small space, and Pike knows how to make nearly every moment count in this charming and touching, if slight, story of one woman’s struggles to find herself—in and out of love.