Little Caesar
adaptated from the novel with Michael Miner
Organic Theater, Chicago
divised and adapted
Little Caesar is a bulls-eye barrage of mugs, molls, and money. Thomas Riccio and Michael Miner have done a masterful job of adapting Burnett's original. Dialogue is lean, mean. The duo might have burdened the story with artful elements and clever twists. They did not.
To the simple script Riccio does add some heady atmospherics and gimmicks to evoke a gritty surreal film noir vision. Everything is in shadows and soft red neon . ...the Organic's Little Caesar is great fun. Mother of God, Rico would be pleased.
Chicago Sun-Times
In the highly stylized adaptation of the Burnett novel that Riccio has fashioned with Michael Miner, Little Caesar literally faces the music. The Organic show prominently incorporated Prohibition songs ("I Got a Man") and dance routines, along with blow-ups of newspaper photos and stills from the 1930 movie.
Riccio has also enlisted a choreographer to simulate the operatic herky-jerky moments of the actors in "LIttle Caesar" and other such antique gangster films as "Scarface" and "Public Enemy," adding both nostalgic and surrealistic flavor to his show.
While these and other innovation my suggest that Riccio is taking indecent liberties with "Little Caesar," turing a vain and arrogant killer into a vaudeville hero, The Organic boss swears it isn't so. His production is not a lampoon, he insisted, but an homage, an attempt to "mythologize" the gangster era in Chicago.
The Chicago Tribune
Here style is used as an active force to arrest the movement of this (biographical) plot and to break it up into palatable, digestible morsels of scenes bordering on tableaux, reminiscent of silent films. Style becomes the digestive juices that breaks down the story into immobile, sharp, elegant bits we can savor and assimilate. the resulting show is decorative, elegant, and civilized.
It is only natural that Tom Riccio should be the director to take this important step: he has long been a believer in style-dominated theatre based on clearly readable movement going back to Commedia del Arte.
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