Review: “Ernest Shackleton Loves Me” by Porchlight Theatre

Nov 14, 2023

Ernest Shackleton was an adventurer, polar explorer and a man who survived in the Antarctic by drifting on ice floes while eating penguins and dogs. In the new two-character musical at Porchlight Music Theatre, Shackleton appears from inside a refrigerator inside the apartment of a single Brooklyn mom.

As wacky as that sounds — and "Ernest Shackleton Loves Me" is one wacky-backy musical — it's not the main problem here. It's the campy way in which this show is directed, playing to the material's weaknesses rather than its potential strengths: Andrew Mueller plays Shackleton as if he were an off-brand Monty Python character and that does not even remotely gel with Elisa Carlson's more realistic Kat, a malcontent hipster who composes music for video games and engages in fraught online dating, even as her baby cries in the next room.

Shackleton is, in essence, an object of Kat's romantic fantasies and, once he has emerged from between her milk and strawberries, the two go off on an adventure that involves the explorer dispensing life advice for Kat along with tasty morsels of seal blubber.

And if that's not bizarre enough, Mueller has a second character to play: Kat's loser boyfriend and baby daddy, a "Rock of Ages" refugee and man-child who is part of a Journey cover band. Precisely how someone like Kat could possibly be with such a loser guy never is explained. It's all just a weird device.

I like many of book writer Joe DiPietro's populist shows, but the combination of this material and the Porchlight staging is, frankly, just not for me. The show's systemic issues are compounded by the use here of a giant phone screen, always a tricky idea in live theater, upon which both of Kat's men appear in weird photoshopped montages, and by the ways in which director Michael Unger's production never sets up a consistent world. At first, you are led to believe Kat is creating all of the music on her digital looping system, which is a cool notion, but then the show seems to drop that device entirely and the expressionistic elements dissipate.

Andrew Mueller and Elisa Carlson in "Ernest Shackleton Loves Me" by Porchlight Theatre. (Liz Lauren)

For most of the show, the performers don't acknowledge the audience, until Shackleton suddenly offers a bite of that blubber down the center aisle. And, at other times, shafts of light illuminate an empty stage without rhyme or apparent reason.

I will say this, though: Carlson has a formidable assignment, singing a huge amount of Brendan Milburn's music and Val Vigoda's lyrics for almost all of the available 90 minutes, not to mention manipulating all the technical elements on which the show, at least initially, depends. She's game, appealing and all-in with this nonsense: totally admirable work in each and every way.

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Review: "Ernest Shackleton Loves Me" (2 stars)

When: Through June 1

Where: Porchlight Music Theatre at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn St.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Tickets: $25-$77 at porchlightmusictheatre.org