The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity

Kristoffer Diaz was a Pulitzer Finalist! How sweet is that? I hope you guys got a chance to check this show out while it was here in Chicago. Otherwise you should give it a gander if you plan to be anywhere near NYC this summer. It’s totally worth it!

This show is about so much more than wrestling. The incredible storytelling sucked me in from the first moment and had me spellbound.
The actors were fabulous – and one of them, not sure who, was recovering from the flu that had caused the Saturday performance to be canceled. So glad we were able to get replacement tickets. The house was packed and the standing O was well deserved.
I’m not a season ticket holder and I know nothing about wrestling but I would see this play again in a heartbeat.

I saw this play on the 3^rd or 4^th night after reading the GLOWING reviews in Tribune and elsewhere. I’ll start by saying I know that not all plays, movies or books can ever appeal to all people, but immediately, throughout and to the end of this play, my companion and I were wondering: are we in the wrong theater? Not ONE THING about this script was in the least bit funny to us! Two people next to us left at intermission. That said, we were absolutely dumbfounded that a) a number of lines did make people laugh throughout the show, and b) many people leapt to their feet when the main actor took his curtain call. WTF?!? Desmin Borges had his moments but overall, the production was so terrible we didn’t think any O was warranted.
The only things we could surmise are this: 1) most of the audience was older, perhaps season subscribers, who felt obliged to like it and to give the standing O because it was in their ticket series and/​or because the Trib told them they should like it; 2) they have no experience with pro wrestling and know that it’s all a put on to begin with, and to basically parody that whole racial stereotype thing is a cheap shot; 3) a number of very lame attempts to interact with the audience — like cast members running up and down the aisles, high-​fiving the audience as though they were at a real pro wrestling event (PLEASE!!!) — gave viewers a false sense of involvement and/​or intimacy with the production.
We also disagreed with reviews that praised the set design, which seemed random and unfocused and in fact, the video projections were at times very very difficult to make out — extremely poorly lit, and for a critical part of the show, this was a major flaw. The script, just amateur — I could not see this at all going to Broadway (as the Trib’s Chris Jones suggests) without major, major retooling, if it could be salvaged at all. New York audiences are too savvy for this — if anything, this seemed like an entry in the Fringe Festival for which you might pay $ 8 on a lark, last minute, in a Lower East Side church gymnasium.
I absolutely hated this show, and feel that not since The Reader put the Cornservatory’s horrific «Floss!» on its weekly «must-​see» list for like 8 years running has the Chicago theater-​going public been more misled by reviewers.