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Champions of Magic – Studebaker Theatre – Through Sept. 2, 2026

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All seven reviews of Champions of Magic that I was aware of highly recommended it. If you’re looking for something to take your pre-teen grandchildren to, then go for it. They’ll probably have a great time, based on the enthusiasm of the kids when I attended, though I can’t personally relate based upon my youth.

As adult entertainment, unless you’re been living in a monastery your whole life, I would pass.

To be fair, there may have been awe-inspiring things in the second act, but I left at intermission, as did the two adults sitting next to me, having seen nothing I hadn’t seen before, and nothing that made these versions of old tricks stand out, not that I’m suggesting that I know how every illusion was done or that the craftsmanship was missing.

What often separates magicians is the quality of their banter, There was some decent back and forth between the performers and with the audience, and there was mild humor, all very professional, but, again, nothing memorable. The closest I came to excitement was when I almost got hit in the eye by a ping pong ball that was among the dozens launched from the stage.

Even the “death-defying” escape from a straightjacket was no match for the very old Penn and Teller version, which, though on the surface less dangerous than when performed in the manner done in Champions (a bear trap was involved), was far more entertaining.

If the regular magic shows around town aren’t enough for you, perhaps delay a trip to the Studebaker until Lucy Darling appears there in late September.  Past experience tells me that she’s a hoot.

 

Elaine Dame – Fourth Presbyterian Church Noonday Concert – July 24, 2026

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Elaine Dame let the crowd know right away not to request that she sing Old Man River, as it is not in her wheelhouse. Smart move.

She did, however, sing Moon River, and also played the flute for parts of it, though not simultaneously, which would have been something.

Her jazzy version of West Side Story’s Somewhere, while okay, did not have the emotional strength of the version sung by the four vocalists at the Grant Park Music Festival the night before.

I love jazz, but, in my opinion, layering that style of music just doesn’t make sense for every song. This profound revelation, along with Dame’s excellent scatting on some other songs, led me to wonder how composers feel about scat being added to their songs.

Out of laziness, and lack of concern for accuracy, I’m going all AI on you here. First, composers often write songs with scatting in mind and notated accordingly. Second, “songs that lend themselves best to scatting share specific traits, primarily up-tempo rhythms, jazz harmony, and repetitive or pentatonic melodic structures.” Third, singers like to ad lib different scats, even to the same song, but may defer to repetition of a scat that has become well known from a recording.

Dame included a Portuguese Samba song, the name of which I missed, as I don’t speak Portuguese. Dame admitted that she doesn’t either as she apologized in advance to anyone in the audience who did for any mispronunciations on her part. Turned out someone did, but I didn’t stick around afterward for any language lessons.

Local jazz guitarist favorite Andy Brown accompanied Dame and will be back as a headliner next week. I imagine he’ll also accompany his wife, Petra van Nuis, when she appears in three weeks.

Broadway Sings America – Grant Park Music Festival – July 23, 2026

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Giving Mel Brooks’s History of the World a run for its money, Broadway Sings America covered an historical period of approximately 225 years, in 19 songs, before finishing with a 100+ year-old topic from a current show that is still relevant in today’s political atmosphere.

Host and singer Scott Coulter provided interesting commentary before each selection and only made one glaring mistake when, despite that fact that he lives in New York, he said that the Statue of Liberty is on Ellis Island. Someone back stage must have said something to him, as next time out he corrected it to Liberty Island (duh).

Coulter sang beautifully, as did all the performers, including the Grant Park Chorus, though I found it amusing that his two big solos, Tomorrow and Maria, both contain lyrics where the title is repeated over and over again. If he does have memory problems, that probably helped.

Blaine Krauss’s big moment, on the other hand, was his rendition of My Shot from Hamilton, a five and a half minute song that, while it also repeats the title a lot, has about a million lyrics in rapid-fire succession. He was flawless.

Tiffany Mann singularly graced us with Everything’s Coming Up Roses and I Know Where I’ve Been.

Jessica Hendy won the award for most costume changes, which was a reflection of the range of styles she displayed with her crystal-clear voice, and precise stage movements, in singing everything ranging from Burn to All That Jazz to Summer Nights.

The festival will be hard-pressed to top this program in any future Broadway tributes.

Cirque: A Space Odyssey – Grant Park Music Festival – July 22, 2026

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Christopher Nolan’s epic movie wasn’t the only Odyssey playing in Chicago this week, as the Grant Park Music Festival presented Troupe Vertigo’s Cirque: A Space Odyssey. Though I haven’t seen the movie yet, I can’t imagine that Matt Damon, or his stunt double, Devyn Dalton, had to perform the kind of death-defying aerial acrobatics that the cirque performers did, high above the stage, without a net, unless they’re counting on the first row of the string section of the orchestra to help break any falls.

And, although Damon described Dalton as having “the greatest arms I’ve ever seen,” I doubt she can do the bent over backward, one-armed handstands that the troupe’s contortionist did while using her feet to take off and put back on her hat (my description doesn’t do her justice). And don’t even get me started on hair hanging (ouch!).

Moreover, while the infamous Hollywood accounting practices are a great example of juggling the books, let’s see those executives keep multiple balls in the air while swinging on a wire.

Not to be forgotten through all of this was the orchestra providing a cornucopia (like The Odyssey, arising out of Greek mythology) of musical excellence, ranging from DeBussy, movie scores and pop tunes, all the way to cartoon themes, in half the time it takes Damon to get home on the screen.

Three Friends, Three Third Coasts, Three Non-calendar Decades

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In the late 1990’s I enjoyed watching Chicago’s 3rd Coast String Quartet, of which a friend was a member, play at a local club, after which I became the proud owner of their eponymous album, from which, apropos of the current World Cup, one can listen online to their take on the jazz classic Spain, along with the rest of the album’s songs.

Fast forward to July 8, 2026, when the Grammy award-winning Third Coast Percussion performed, with their usual aplomb, with the orchestra at the Grant Park Music Festival and, thanks to a different friend, I was able to attend a post-concert reception with the group.

Regular-speed forward to July 16, when a third friend invited me to attend, at Depaul’s Holtschneider Performance Center, Third Coast Music’s Scoring for Chicago Summer Benefit, which included a raft of performances (my favorite, of course, being Marianne Parker’s deft piano work on Pictures at an Exhibition), coordinated nicely with a variety of videos, to drive home the drive to raise money to “build the Midwest’s first scoring stage; anchoring an audio post-production center, educational facility, and community event space,” which would be about an eight-mile drive from the Center, straight down Halsted Street.

If nothing else, I now know what a scoring stage is, as does the event’s engaging emcee Lisa Parker (no relation to Marianne), who joked about her initial misunderstanding (and fear) of what it might mean. And I heard a good story — about John Wiliams recording, with the CSO, the score to the movie Lincoln with the aid of sound-dampening acoustic trucks and baffles outside Orchestra Hall — used as evidence of Chicago’s need for a scoring stage and the possibilities it might bring.

Grant Park Music Festival – Millennium Park – July 15, 2026

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Some people I know who have season tickets to the Grant Park Music Festival skipped this concert, I would guess out of concern for the heat. The weather was very warm, but not unbearable. The only thing that was too hot to handle was Michelle Cann’s virtuosity on the piano, which may have been why a couple of the bass players were wearing shorts on stage.

Cann, who I have seen and written about several times before, thrilled the crowd with her work on Ravel’s Piano Concerto, but what really set the place on fire was her encore, which wasn’t listed in the program, but, if I had to guess, was Hazel Scott’s arrangement of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C# Minor. I could practically see the smoke rising from the piano.

The orchestra opened with William Grant Still’s Festive Overture and closed with Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, both well-performed and well-received, but the night belonged to Cann, another in the list of must-see pianists the festival has presented this season.

250th Anniversary – In Case You Missed It – July 4, 2026

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Hallmark’s Anniversary Gifts by Year only goes through year 60, which seems somewhat short-sighted given extended life-expectancies, though I expect those numbers to start decreasing as the earth’s temperature continues to rise.

Still, we would be remiss in not celebrating America’s sesqui-something anniversary, so I am proposing, a little late, that the 250-year gift be potassium nitrate, a key component of fireworks, which is available in five-pound bags through Amazon.

The other supply problem is, of course, that China produces at least 90% of our fireworks and, you may have heard, there has been some tinkering with the tariffs on goods imported from there.

Nevertheless, the good news for fireworks aficionados, of which I am not one, was that the Taste of Chicago found enough funding to set off a display on July 10. The not-so-good news was that the nearby Grant Park Music Festival, in its infinite wisdom, delayed the start of its concert that evening by an hour and 45 minutes, so that instead of the fireworks starting, very appropriately, just after the music ended, the sky lit up, and the noise started, during the first movement of the orchestra’s otherwise beautiful rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony.

This faux pas did, however, allow guest conductor Leonard Slatkin to turn to the audience between movements and suggest, to a roar of approval, that the organizers had mistaken this work for the Tchaikovsky piece more often associated with fireworks.

I didn’t go to the actual Independence Day Salute a week earlier, but did attend its prior afternoon rehearsal, which not only allowed me to see concertmaster Jeremy Black get his moment in the sun with a couple wonderful solos, but also to listen to him playing them multiple times while the conductor tinkered with the orchestral accompaniment.

Iceboy! – Goodman Theatre – Through Aug. 16, 2016

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According to the Broadway Maven Substack, ever since Oklahoma! started the trend, 5% of  Broadway show titles have ended in an exclamation point, a custom that “has become mostly ironic.” often, according to Broadway historian Laurence Maslon, “intentionally self-referential and not meant to be [taken] seriously.”  Definitely the case with Iceboy!

Richard Kind is not in Iceboy. But he was in the audience when I went. He needs to stop following me around. Almost exactly 10 years ago he was standing in line next to me at TKTS Times Square as I scored my last-minute ticket for Something Rotten.

But before I went to court for a restraining order, I did some research and discovered that Kind is in the just-released “Heads Will Roll; Heir Apparent” with Megan Mullally on Audible, whatever that is, so he probably was at Iceboy to see her starring in the show, not to stalk me.

The play is like a collection of Mel Brooks outtakes. The 40,000 year-old Iceboy even does a dance ala the monster in Young Frankenstein, which is only fitting in this mashup, as Mullally originated the role of Elizabeth Benning (Madeline Kahn in the movie) in the original Broadway production of YF.

There are a lot of laughs, many of which are provided by Mullally’s real-life husband, Nick Offerman, who costars as Eugene O’Neal, often speaking directly to the audience as part of the convoluted plot line.

The musical melodies are forgettable, which is a shame because I sat there thinking what Cole Porter could have done with some of the ideas being conveyed. The best song lyrics are in FM, which also probably got the biggest ovation. I won’t tell you what the title stands for. You’ll have to go see twice Tony-nominated performer Sarah Stiles perform it.

Mullally is intentionally over-the-top, which is appropriate for the material, but I don’t think her voice choice did her any favors, as, interestingly, her best comedic efforts came when she hardly spoke at all.

Chicago White Sox Baseball – Rate Field – July 9, 2026

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Fortunately, I didn’t bring a backpack with me to the game. Of course I don’t actually own one, which greatly reduced the chance that I would bring and have to check it (Rate Field policy), and pay for doing so, in the parking lot, which I didn’t park in, having taken the subway.

At the gate, I did show my mettle, but no metal, in allowing myself to be scanned eight or nine times, and have my hand stamped with some invisible code that may or may not ever wash off — how will I know?

As to the game itself, in the immortal words of Maxwell Smart, I “missed it by that much.” In this case the “it” was the return from the injured list of slugger Munetaka Murakami, who will be back in the White Sox lineup on July 10th, and not a moment too soon, as the Sox have scored a total of two runs in their last three games..

On the other hand, I had the good fortune to see the game from a luxury suite almost exactly behind home plate, so win, lose, who cares, pass me another piece of the decadent chocolate cake, with the eggless chocolate chip cookie dough sidecar.

Right before the first pitch, they opened the windows to the suite, allowing for the possibility of a foul ball making its way to us, which it didn’t, but we had the feel of being outside while still enjoying the benefits of the air conditioning, and, did I mention the chocolate chip cookies?

Grant Park Music Festival – Rehearsals are fun too – June 2026

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I went to the Tuesday, June 16th, free, late-morning rehearsal of Hayden’s Military Symphony in anticipation of possible bad weather for the next evening’s concert, which did provide the advantage of sitting wherever I wanted and moving around at will, which I took the opportunity to do, checking out the acoustics everywhere and moving in and out of the sun, but restraining myself from standing in the center aisle, jumping up and down and waving my arms trying to distract the musicians. I have too much class for that (and can’t jump) – but it sounds like fun, right?

As rain always seems to be forecast for Wednesdays, I went to rehearsal again on Tuesday June 23. Unfortunately, though I listened to two of the selections, I couldn’t stay for the Barber violin concerto, thereby forcing me to risk the weather the next evening, which held off long enough, but just, for me to see William Hagen perform brilliantly before the heavens opened up and the concert closed down.

Attending the rehearsal on Thursday, June 26, not out of fear of the forecast, but rather because it was outside and the performance itself was to be inside the next two evenings (more of a winter activity for me), I was treated to Sara Davis Buechner exuberantly playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1. It was interesting to observe her interaction with the conductor when he wanted the orchestra to repeat a section of the music. Shockingly, though she knew the music by heart, she had not committed the corresponding 1,625 measure numbers to memory (unlike prisoners telling jokes). Also, it allowed me, that evening, to watch the White Sox win 22-1 (what?!).