A Steady Rain is a play by Keith Huff. With a plot similar to a real-life event involving Jeffrey Dahmer, it focuses on two Chicago policemen who inadvertently return a Vietnamese boy to a cannibalistic serial killer who claims to be the child's uncle. When he later becomes the man's latest victim, the lifelong friendship of the two men is threatened when it becomes clear someone must bear responsibility for their egregious failure to assess the situation accurately. The play alternates between two separate monologues and present-moment dialogue scenes.
Following readings in New York City and Los Angeles, A Steady Rain was staged by Chicago Dramatists in 2007. It opened on Broadway in September 2009.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (December 2009) |
Chicago police officers Joey and Denny are longtime partners and best friends. Joey is single and lonely, and Denny is married with children, but both men have flaws and serious problems. Denny cares deeply for his family, and that provides the justification for his criminal actions. [1] Introverted Joey struggles with a drinking problem and secretly loves Denny's wife, Connie; angry tough-guy Denny can barely disguise his racism and cheats on Connie with a prostitute on his beat.
The two men offer contrasting descriptions to Internal Affairs interrogators of their harrowing experiences. They relate how Walter Lorenz, a pimp that Denny has harassed over the years, shoots a bullet through Denny's front window, causing the flying glass to sever an artery in Denny's son's neck. Denny pursues Lorenz relentlessly, drawing Joey into a series of dangerous and incriminating activities. During a domestic disturbance call, the two return a frightened Vietnamese boy to a man who says he is the boy's uncle. The uncle turns out to be a cannibalistic serial killer, who eats the boy.
A Steady Rain initially was produced by Chicago Dramatists in 2007 and then at the Royal George Theatre in Chicago in February 2008. It won the Joseph Jefferson Awards for Best New Work, Best Actor for Randy Steinmeyer, and Best Production. [2]
Following a number of staged and table readings and an off-Broadway workshop production, [3] the play began previews at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on September 10, 2009 and opened officially on September 29. The 12-week engagement closed on December 6. Directed by John Crowley, it starred Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, making his Broadway debut. Set and costume design was by Scott Pask, with lighting design by Hugh Vanstone. [2] The producers announced that the show had broken the record for the highest weekly gross of a non-musical production on Broadway, with a weekly gross of $1,167,954 for the week ending September 20, 2009. [4]
In reviewing the original Chicago Dramatists' production, Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune called the play "a gritty, rich, thick, poetic and entirely gripping noir tale." [3] Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "Huff provides [the actors] with enough fiery, superbly rendered, often deeply poetic speeches, enough mood shifts, enough emotional cataclysms and action-packed storytelling to keep this hallucinatory roller-coaster ride in motion. I would be happy to see this production again with an audience of real men in blue, just to take the temperature in the room." [3]
Steve Oxman of Variety observed, "Keith Huff's crackerjack two-hander ... turns out to be less like the perpetual drizzle of its title and more like a snowball that builds to an avalanche. While Huff starts with a couple of familiar characters — good cop/bad cop Chicago patrolmen with alcohol and racism issues — he deepens them into complex figures, compellingly human even when at their most despicable. The adroit character development combines with a billowing narrative to deliver some rattling emotional crescendos.... While he could maybe pull back on a contrivance or two, the playwright smartly sticks to his conceit of piling one worse complication on top of another, effectively investing A Steady Rain with genuine dramatic power and a sense of true tragedy." [5]
In his review of the Broadway production, Ben Brantley of The New York Times , who was generally satisfied with the performances of Jackman and, especially, Craig, wrote, "If Mr. Huff has not managed to reweave this premise [childhood friends find themselves on opposite sides of the law and in love with the same woman] with any surprising threads, he has packed it with enough lurid incident to fill a season of Law & Order ." [6]
Time's Richard Zoglin, naming it one of the Top 10 Plays of 2009 and ranking it at #2, commented that "Casting a couple of big movie stars in a Broadway play can cut both ways. Audiences may stand in line for tickets, but critics can put on their scowling "show-me" faces — as many did for Keith Huff's one-act play, which cast Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman as a pair of Chicago cops in crisis. Both stars were excellent, but they were wonderfully served by Huff's taut, tough-minded script, which takes potentially clichéd material — the moral challenges faced by cops on the urban mean streets — and makes it fresh and compelling." [7]
"Jackman allows you to feel both the warmth and the tyranny of Denny's love. A taller presence than Craig, he takes up more stage space physically and theatrically, which is just how it should be, given the way his character swaggers like the king of his own limited universe." — Los Angeles Times [8]
"Jackman does an excellent job playing a man who heedlessly jumps the median between superego and id, in the best tradition of the self-mythologizing American sociopath. The erstwhile X-man has never spelled danger, with or without muttonchops." — New York [9]
"Under John Crowley's direction, the two stars present the increasingly far-fetched tale with an amiable diffidence that lets them show you their acting ability, as each gets into his character's moments of personal pain, while carefully keeping the sordid events at a distance [...] Jackman, with his wonderful easy fluidity, shows once again that he's a natural-born stage star." — The Village Voice [10]
William Motter Inge was an American playwright and novelist, whose works typically feature solitary protagonists encumbered with strained sexual relations. In the early 1950s he had a string of memorable Broadway productions, including Picnic, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. With his portraits of small-town life and settings rooted in the American heartland, Inge became known as the "Playwright of the Midwest".
Hugh Michael Jackman is an Australian actor. Beginning in theatre and television, Jackman landed his breakthrough role as Wolverine in the X-Men film series, a role that earned him the Guinness World Record for "longest career as a live-action Marvel character", until 2022. Prominent on both screen and stage, he has received various accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award, a Grammy Award and two Tony Awards, along with nominations for an Academy Award and a British Academy Film Award. Jackman was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2019.
Donald Margulies is an American playwright and academic. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends.
The Boy from Oz is an Australian jukebox musical based on the life of singer and songwriter Peter Allen, featuring songs written by him. The book commissioned for the musical is by Nick Enright, based on Stephen MacLean's 1996 biography of Allen. Premiering in Australia in 1998 starring Todd McKenney, a revised version of the musical, written by Martin Sherman, opened on Broadway in 2003, with Hugh Jackman in the title role.
John Guare is an American playwright and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
Craig Wright is a playwright, television producer and writer. He is known for writing for shows including Six Feet Under and Lost and creating the television series Dirty Sexy Money and Greenleaf. He also was the screenwriter for the movie Mr. Peabody & Sherman, released March 7, 2014.
Walter Bobbie is an American theatre director, choreographer, and occasional actor and dancer. Bobbie has directed both musicals and plays on Broadway and Off-Broadway, and was the Artistic Director of the New York City Center Encores! concert series. He directed the long-running Broadway revival of the musical Chicago. His most well-known acting role was Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the 1992 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls.
The Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, formerly the Plymouth Theatre, is a Broadway theater at 236 West 45th Street in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Opened in 1917, the theater was designed by Herbert J. Krapp and was built for the Shubert brothers. The Schoenfeld Theatre is named for Gerald Schoenfeld, longtime president of the Shubert Organization, which operates the theater. It has 1,079 seats across two levels. Both the facade and the auditorium interior are New York City landmarks.
Euan Douglas George Morton is a Scottish actor and singer. He is best known for his role as Boy George in the musical Taboo, receiving nominations for the Laurence Olivier Award and Tony Award for his performance. He played the role of King George in the musical Hamilton on Broadway from July 2017 to 10 September 2023.
Pal Joey is a 1940 musical with a book by John O'Hara and music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The musical is based on a character and situations O'Hara created in a series of short stories published in The New Yorker, which he later published in novel form. The title character, Joey Evans, is a manipulative small-time nightclub performer whose ambitions lead him into an affair with the wealthy, middle-aged and married Vera Simpson. It includes two songs that have become standards: "I Could Write a Book" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered".
Jack O'Brien is an American director, producer, writer and lyricist. He served as the Artistic Director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California from 1981 through the end of 2007.
Anna Davida Shapiro is an American theater director, was the artistic director of the Steppenwolf Theater Company, and a professor at Northwestern University. Throughout her career, she has directed both the Steppenwolf Theater Company production of August: Osage County (2007) along with its Broadway debut (2008-2009), the Broadway debuts of The Motherfucker with the Hat (2011) and Fish in the Dark (2014), and Broadway revivals of This Is Our Youth and Of Mice and Men, both in 2014. She won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play for her direction of August: Osage County.
John Crowley is an Irish film and theatre director. He is best known for the films Brooklyn (2015) and his debut feature, Intermission (2003), for which he won an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Director. He is a brother of the designer Bob Crowley.
War Horse is a play based on the book of the same name by writer Michael Morpurgo, adapted for stage by Nick Stafford. Originally Morpurgo thought "they must be mad" to try to make a play from his best-selling 1982 novel; but the play was a great success. The play's West End and Broadway productions are directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris; it features life-size horse puppets by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, the movements of which were choreographed by Toby Sedgwick.
Daniel Wroughton Craig is an English actor. He gained international fame by playing the fictional secret agent James Bond for five installments in the film series, from Casino Royale (2006) up to No Time to Die (2021).
Anne Kauffman is an American director known primarily for her work on new plays, mainly in the New York area. She is a founding member of the theater group the Civilians. She made her Broadway debut with the Scott McPherson play Marvin's Room (2017) and returned with the revival of the Lorraine Hansberry play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (2023) and Mary Jane (2024).
Chicago Dramatists is a theatre in River West, West Town, Chicago, Illinois, USA, focused on nurturing playwrights and developing new plays. It was founded in 1979 by Russ Tutterow and is notable for its Network Playwright Program, which offers classes, readings and critiques to writers of all abilities, and readings of new works for the general public. In 1998, the theatre received a special Jeff Award for its almost two decades of developing plays and playwrights in a manner that has enhanced Chicago's reputation for being a cradle for new theatre works. The theater space itself is small and intimate, seating 77.
Lucky Guy is a play by Nora Ephron that premiered in 2013, the year after her death. It was Ephron's final work and marked Tom Hanks's Broadway debut, in which he earned a Theatre World Award. It depicts the story of journalist Mike McAlary beginning in 1985 and ending with his death at the age of 41 in 1998. The plot covers the high points and tribulations of McAlary's career as he traverses the clubby atmosphere of the New York City tabloid industry in what some regard as its heyday. The play includes his near fatal automobile accident and devotes a large portion to his recovery.
Stephanie Kurtzuba is an American film, television, and theater actress. She is best known for her roles in the films The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Annie (2014), and The Irishman (2019), and on television in recurring roles on The Good Wife and Blue Bloods.