Working

Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place

Chicago

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“The timing could not be more ideal for a reinvention of Working,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Surprisingly, the Great Recession was only a dark cloud on the horizon when Stephen Schwartz decided to update his 1977 musical—based on a Studs Terkel oral history of workers in 1970s Chicago. Initially a Broadway flop, Working has nonetheless “received countless productions in regional theaters” because audiences readily identify with the hopes and worries of the show’s characters. This edition, “winningly reimagined” to include various 21st-century touches plus two strong new songs, is a reminder that our occupations are as “tightly entwined with matters of ego and self-worth” as they were three decades ago.

One of the show’s strengths is that it “doesn’t turn workers into sentimental stereotypes,” said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Portrayed by an “accomplished ensemble” of six, the 26 workers we hear from include “an embittered schoolteacher” who misses the days of corporal punishment and a “smug 19-year-old headed to business school.” All of the characters “pack more of an emotional punch than you expect.” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new songs, including an autobiographical ditty about working at McDonald’s and a “gorgeous” rumination by an immigrant day-care worker, also enliven the show “at a point where it always used to sag.”

Despite the updates and “the best ensemble of actor-singers I’ve seen in Chicago,” the show still feels thin in places, said Steven Oxman in Variety. In director Gordon Greenberg’s staging, it is caught somewhere between a cabaret and “something splashier,” like a “workingman’s Chorus Line.” Working works best when the actors are standing still and simply telling or singing their stories. “Efforts at choreography” generally fall flat. Still, in its paean to ordinary workers everywhere, the show is often affecting. Even I left the theater “wanting to get to know my cab driver better.”