“The Mad Ones” reviewed by Julia W. Rath

** “The Mad Ones”, directed by Wyatt Kent, is an energetic coming-of-age story largely told via operetta. Despite lovely singing voices and excellent musical direction by Aaron Kaplan, the show is a disappointment—perhaps unless you are 16 to 21 years old and transitioning from adolescence to adulthood. As for everybody else in the audience, the show is largely ho-hum. The songs go on for much too long; the pacing is bad; and the dialogue is too repetitious and contrived. Furthermore, matching the dialogue at the beginning of the show with that at the end might be considered clever, but this seeming foreshadowing of future events is too unnatural and forced. Plus because of so much singing, we don’t develop enough empathy for each of the characters, and the story is much too shallow. I can’t tell you how many times I looked at my watch during the performance!

This tale disproportionately focuses on the need to drive a car as a significant milestone to one’s future life after high school. Of course, knowing how to drive in our culture is important. We also know that going to prom, graduating high school, getting into a good college (or going to college at all), having a girlfriend or boyfriend, and the possibilities of having sex and leaving home are all rites of passage on the mind of young adults. But for Samantha Brown (Rachel Guth), getting her drivers license is first and foremost on her mind. Sadly, Sam has flunked the road test four times previously, and she’s too scared to try again.

Sam’s nervousness behind the wheel has largely been the result of her overbearing mother (Ann Sheridan Smith) bombarding her with statistics about vehicular accidents and dangerous driving. Constantly emphasizing mathematical problems having to do with car crashes, Sam’s mother (a/k/a Beverly) is very manipulative, presumably to ensure that her daughter will never drive at all and will constantly remain under her thumb. In contrast, Sam’s best friend Kelly Manning (Karylin Veres) is almost the opposite personality and is Sam’s safety valve. Risk-taking and adventurous, we are told that Kelly would sit on top of a car when someone else was driving. Then too, when she herself was behind the wheel, she’d make dangerous sharp turns—and would turn this into a reckless game. A college freshman, Kelly is a year older than Sam and has introduced her to social life at that institution. Palling around with Kelly thus provides Sam with a sounding board to discuss her anxieties about how her mother wants to run (and ruin) her entire life. Then there is Adam (Aiden Leake), Sam’s good-natured and compliant high school boyfriend. Adam is perhaps my favorite character because he seems the most authentic and least contrived of all—and perhaps because he sings the least!

Watching the mother’s manipulative behavior obviously comes from a place of love that’s so deep that it cuts like a knife—and I cringed every time Smith took the stage as Sam’s mother. Kelly, on the other hand, should have been (in my opinion) a much worse influence on Sam, because she is not wild enough to be a good counterweight to the mother figure. Yes, we hear about the young women’s attendance at frat parties, but we don’t see any of this, and the show would have had more depth if Kelly were to indulge in alcohol and drugs or some other types of risky behavior. Then Sam could be firmly fixed between these two very diverse individuals and clearly realize that her relationships with both are ultimately not healthy for her psyche.

Clearly, Sam has a healthy ego and doesn’t want her mother to hijack her life. Yet she is more than willing to leave not only her home but also her boyfriend and any thoughts of college behind, because she is so very intent on obtaining her freedom. In fact, she constantly sings of the freedom involved in having wheels, over and over again, and the songs keep going on and on—not to mention that her singing fell flat about her needing to have sex. So was the song about the “Mad Ones.” One or two lines are devoted to who the “Mad Ones” are, but I couldn’t figure out if these were angry people or crazy people or a bit of both. What might seem mad, however, is that Sam seeks freedom by driving on the open road. But that’s actually not a farfetched idea. At some point in our lives, many of us might have wanted to do much the same or have actually done so. However, when Sam thinks of driving as a means of running away from her miserable home environment, I was looking for a statement of what she wanted to run to. What are her dreams and ambitions? What are her hopes, her fears, and her goals? What does she aspire to become? What is it about the huge world before her that she finds potentially interesting or worthy of exploration? Other than wanting to leave home and wanting to have sex, we never really find out what she really wants out of life even if her plans are not well thought through.

Spoiler alert: One of the most interesting parts of the story occurs towards the end when her friend Kelly suddenly dies. But I was never sure how exactly her death occurred, since several rival scenarios were put forward. Was she seated atop a car? Was she a pedestrian on the street? Was she driving a vehicle? Perhaps this is a minor point. What is interesting, however, is how Sam eventually integrates the cautious side of the mother with the more reckless side of her best friend when she eventually does receive her drivers license. It is at this moment when Sam realizes that she must live her own life no matter what. This is when she comes to understand how the voices of people—alive or dead—can live on in your memory and affect your behavior throughout your entire life whether you are driving a car or involved in almost any pursuit or activity. The problem is that by the time Sam learns this lesson, most of the audience doesn’t really care about her character anymore, because too many of the songs have repeated themselves and the show in general has gone on for too long.

That said, the music is great! Credit must go to the fine musicians who make this show possible: Evelyn Ryan (keyboard), Eva Nicholson (violin), Michael Lockler (guitar), and Ksenia Sushkevich (harp).

While all of the wonderful singing and nicely executed music (plus several comedic moments) animate the production, its emphasis on driving is vastly overdone. More to the point, spending a good portion of 100 minutes on the need to get a drivers license is not the type of story that will hold most of the audience’s attention. Watching how pressured and powerless Sam feels throughout much of the show can get tiresome, even though her agonies are sincerely portrayed. And just when you think the show is going to end, the characters are revived to sing yet another chorus. In all, this is a production that we can easily pass up, especially an older crowd beyond their adolescent years.

“The Mad Ones” is playing through August 11, 2024, at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, 2936 N Southport Avenue, in Chicago.

General Admission Tickets – $39
Students and Industry – $24

Performance schedule:

Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays – 7:30 p.m.
Sundays – 3:00 p.m.
Additional performances: Monday, August 5th at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, August 10th at 2:00 p.m.

For more information about this show, go to: https://www.blanktheatrecompany.org/mad-ones.

To purchase tickets, see: https://athenaeumcenter.org/events/2024/the-mad-ones/.

For general information or to make a donation, visit: https://www.blanktheatrecompany.org/.

To see what others are saying, visit www.theatreinchicago.com, go to Review Round-Up and click at “The Mad Ones”