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Sunset Boulevard – Porchlight Music Theatre- October 18, 2019

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You get a taste of Norma Desmond’s storied fictional career by seeing the various posters and pictures projected on the walls of the set during Porchlight’s Sunset Boulevard, but it occurred to me while watching Hollis Resnik inhabit the role of Desmond that she was seemingly born to play, that a collage of posters representing Resnik’s real 12 Jefferson Award-winning parts would be even more impressive.

Resnik’s tour de force performance of As If We Never Said Goodbye in the second act could be the impetus for award number 13. The other second act highlight worth mentioning is the bathing suit entrance of Billy Rude, as Joe Gillis, which evoked a bobby soxer reaction from a young lady in the balcony, causing Rude to ever so slightly, and amusingly, break character by giving an almost imperceptible wink to the audience.

Clearly, Mr. DeMille, Rude was ready for his close-up, which leads me to inform that the line made famous by Gloria Swanson in the original screen version came in at number seven on the American Film Institute’s 2005 list of 100 movie quotes. And her “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small” was number 24, which puts Desmond in a very select company of characters with multiple attributions, equaled by the iconic Dorothy Gale, Scarlett O’Hara, James Bond, Harry Callahan and the Terminator, and bested only by the immortal Rick Blaine.

As with other Porchlight productions, I left impressed with creative touches that enhanced the experience. In particular, although there isn’t a lot of dancing in the show, the choreographed movements of a couple of the group scenes have a silent era, controlled Keystone Kops feel that fits perfectly with Norma’s hunger for those past days of movie-making and stardom. She never says it, but she could have inspired the Terminator’s “I’ll be back.”

Upcoming Events

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Normally I don’t take up my extremely valuable time, which could be better spent working on my hip flexors, publishing information about upcoming events, but the website has been acting up lately, causing several problems, like no one receiving newly published posts.  So, after two days of chatting with my new best friends in two different tech departments in two different countries, I feel the need to test the system to see if it’s working properly again, and what better way than to annoy my subscribers with unnecessary, verbose emails.

So, without revealing too much information about my clandestine movements, here’s some things you might consider attending.

Arts in the Dark Parade at 6:00 pm on October 19 on State Street.  You can dress up like your favorite movie character or just watch from the sidelines and admire the total lack of shame of the participants.

Sunset Boulevard just opened at the Porchlight Music Theatre, featuring Chicago legend Hollis Resnik as Norma Desmond.   Having attended an invitational rehearsal, I can tell you that the cast is great and the music is wonderful, but I did catch Resnik smoking in the parking lot during a break, which calls for detention.

The Art Institute is opening its Andy Warhol exhibit for member previews this week, which makes me want to look for clues as to whether he was really an undercover agent spying on extraterrestrial aliens as depicted in Men in Black III.

The Chicago Humanities Festival presents dozens of programs the last week of October.  Just like your insurance company, the festival has been furtively raising prices the last few years, but, unlike your insurer, there’s no competition, so suck it up and treat yourself.

And though I receive no commission for my continuing promotion of her (but should I?), don’t miss Meghan Murphy in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.

 

 

 

 

 

Civitas Ensemble – Allen Recital Hall, Holtschneider Performance Center – October 11, 2019

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Rob Gordon (from the movie High Fidelity): “Now, the making of a good compilation tape is a very subtle art. Many do’s and don’ts. First of all you’re using someone else’s poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing.”

So, taking the leap from a tape designed to win over a woman, to a classical music concert with, presumably, no ulterior motive other than to entertain, how does a group, such as the Civitas Ensemble, decide what to play, and, more importantly for this discussion, in what order?

The Dummies website tells us that symphony orchestras almost always follow the format: an overture, a concerto, intermission, a symphony.  To apply this enunciation to Civitas, the core of which is a four-person troupe, it occurred to me that I had to apply a sort of reverse extrapolation, if that’s a thing.    

Well, it turns out that retrograde extrapolation is a thing.  It’s used by chemists and toxicologists to estimate what a person’s blood alcohol content was at a specific time based on test results obtained at a later period of time. 

As there was no alcohol being served at the concert; no overtures, concertos, or symphonies on display; and the first two pieces were of fairly equal length, the best application of the principle I could come up with was the varying size of the ensemble playing each piece.

The program of Hungarian Masters was to start with a duet, followed by a quartet, followed by intermission, and then a sextet that included two guest artists.  Quod erat demonstrandum. 

However, though its performance of Erno Dohnanyi’s Sextet in C Major, Op. 37 rousingly closed the excellent concert, Civitas changed the order of the first two pieces, explaining that it decided to present the melancholy selection first and then the more upbeat music as a cheerful note heading into intermission.  A sound decision I felt, but one that might represent the first sign of anarchy for dummies, if that’s a thing.  

Midsummer (A Play with Songs) – Greenhouse Theater Center – October 4, 2019

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Two self-destructive people, with nothing in common, and with no apparent redeeming qualities, meet in a bar, provide a few early hope-inducing laughs for the audience, sing a couple mildly amusing but forgettable songs, lament about life, meet a variety of uninteresting characters, and somehow survive to be miserable together for at least another day in a kind of weak Scottish relative of the Scorsese movie After Hours.

Midsummer received a lot of great reviews, which highlighted what a fun, exhilarating show it is. Huh? The best laugh line was provided by a Tickle Me Elmo toy, which was not one of the dozen or so characters portrayed by Chaon Cross and Patrick Mulvey, whose talents were the saving grace of the show, which went on for an hour forty minutes, seemed like two hours, and would have been better at an hour fifteen.

The most profound line of the night was offered, twice, like a lot of other lines in the show, by a parking lot machine, the unrealistic nature of which was brought home by the inability of the machine where I parked my car to operate without human intervention by a disembodied lot attendant.

Apparently other potential audience members were smart enough to look past the reviews, as the theater was practically empty. In that regard I felt sorry for the actors, particularly Cross, whom I have greatly enjoyed in recent sold-out productions of Life Sucks, Macbeth and Photograph 51.

As if the script weren’t enough of a burden, the actors also had to put up with the on-and-off stomping from the theater space above that would have distracted me enough to stop what I was doing, bang on the ceiling, and yell out “we’re trying to work here,” which, by the way, would have been the second best laugh of the evening.

Something Rotten – Marriott Lincolnshire Theatre – October 6, 2019

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Nothing is rotten in Marriott’s Something Rotten. While this experience wasn’t quite the same as when I was lucky enough to see Christian Borle in his Tony-award-winning performance as the show’s original Shakespeare, the Marriott production is great, and its Shakespeare, Adam Jacobs, who played Aladdin on Broadway, has the audience in the palm of his hand, just like he had the genie’s lamp.

The show is sort of Forbidden Broadway meets Mel Brooks, with some Puritans thrown in for good measure, and enough colorful costumes to outfit several Renaissance Halloween parties.

If you’ve never seen another musical and know nothing about Shakespeare’s works, you may miss dozens of references and wonder why everyone around you is laughing, but, if that’s the case, you shouldn’t be out in public anyway.

If you can’t enjoyably groan when Toby reveals himself to be Shakespeare in disguise by saying Toby or not Toby, that is the question, stay home.

The show-stopping song, A Musical, contains references to 20 other musicals that fly by so fast that you wish you had an annotation with you. Well, here are a couple, one provided by Theater Nerds, and the other by, of all places, the Wall Street Journal.

The show features one slightly off-center soothsayer; two playwriting brothers with writer’s block; triple threat performers who sing, dance, and cook(?); and an omelet, which, I can’t help myself, was an eggcelent addition.

The cast is uniformly outstanding, but I’ll single out Cassie Slater as Bea because it gives me an excuse for saying that I saw her perform at Steppenwolf in We Three: Loud Her. Fast Her. Funny Her. with Meghan Murphy, whom I never miss an opportunity for mentioning and whom I will be seeing soon as The Lady of the Lake in Spamalot at the Mercury Theater.

Literature’s Lineage: Descendants of Writers Share Family Stories – American Writers Museum – September 26, 2019

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I came for the daughter of the man who created Superman, that is Laura Siegel Larson, daughter of Jerry Siegel, not Friedrich Nietzsche or George Bernard Shaw, and stayed for Steve Soboroff, the man who lent more than a dozen typewriters for the American Writers Museum’s current exhibit, Tools of the Trade.

Soboroff, a Los Angeles Police commissioner, among a wide variety of other things, could have held the audience’s attention all night with his stories about how he acquired his collection and how he goes about verifying the authenticity of the typewriters, but he shared the stage with Larson, Gwendolyn Brooks’ daughter Nora Brooks Blakely, Hugh Hefner’s daughter Christie, and Maya Angelou’s grandson Colin Johnson, as they shared memories of typewriters as the focal point of their households.

While their stories were interesting, I have to believe that a tools of the trade exhibit at Amsterdam’s Museum of Prostitution would elicit tales about more stimulating, though possibly illicit, activities.

Nevertheless, writers’ quotes concerning typewriters abound. Graham Greene, for example, wasn’t a fan. “My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.” Perhaps he should have tried using more than two fingers, not that I do.

Elmore Leonard was a little less archaic. “It took me 20 years to buy an electric typewriter, because I was afraid it would be too sensitive. I like to bang the keys. I’m doing action stories, so that’s the way I like to do it.” Different typewriters for different kinds of writing? A novel thought.

And finally, more from Leonard, though not about typewriters. “I try to leave out the parts readers skip.” And so I end.

Audra McDonald (with Seth Rudetsky) – Steppenwolf Theater – September 15, 2019

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I got to experience the best part of a Seth Rudetsky Broadway Cruise without having to get on a boat, although even I have to admit that his June, 2020 Venice to Venice excursion sounds interesting. I know there are a lot of cruise bloggers, but I don’t know if any of them get free passage for their efforts. I need an agent. What’s 10 per cent of nothing?

McDonald also has a cruise next year. Perhaps that’s the one for me. After seeing the six-time Tony award winner in person for the first time, I just know we could be friends. The woman loves to laugh so much that she gets stomach cramps, and is down-to-earth enough to share that information as it happens.

McDonald also admitted to being a little loopy after driving to Chicago from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, following a concert the night before, because her flight had been cancelled due to storms. I wonder if she sings along with the radio in the car. Seth should have asked her that.

People came to hear McDonald sing, and she didn’t disappoint, hitting a note so high at the end of her audience sing-a-long of I Could Have Danced All Night that it caused the insides of a cat in the alley behind the theater to explode. However, her inner diva appeared briefly as she admitted her competitiveness over the fact that an audience member had matched the note.

McDonald’s personality glowed in stories about a beeper in her coffin in Ragtime, her improvisation in Shuffle Along, and her daughter texting immediately after McDonald’s Climb Every Mountain solo in The Sound of Music live television production to ask her about laundry.

But I’m not kidding when I say that the hit of the evening may have been her rendition of The Facebook Song, which, be warned, or perhaps encouraged, contains language that may be considered offensive.

The Recommendation – Windy City Playhouse – August 18, 2019

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As with past productions, the Windy City Playhouse’s current show provides a different kind of experience, this time moving the necessarily small audience between a dorm room, jail cell, poolside patio, restaurant, bar, and health club sauna, which, as far as I could tell, served no purpose other than to show off the actors’ pecs and the stage crew’s ability to quickly transform the space.

There’s a lot of yelling, which, in my opinion, often replaces more interesting subtlety, and which I find annoying enough in a normal theater space, but when you’re three feet from the actors, it makes me want to close my eyes and go to a happy place.

The actors do a fine job of ignoring audience members while moving among them, except on those occasions when interaction is intended, as when one of them took me by surprise by calling out my name and delivering to me a cold, awful tasting shot of coffee in the middle of a scene, the occasion of which I nonetheless intend to add to my stage resume as an uncredited role.

It’s a serious show, but I found the delivery of the message to be somewhat convoluted, with unnecessary details inserted for no apparent reason other than to fill time. In particular, I couldn’t help but cringe when a lawyer asked his client to sign something that bore no relation to the thread of the story and would be a clear violation of legal ethics rules. I later felt compelled to go to the playwright’s webpage and send him a message citing the rule he had his character breaking. I’m sure that will go over well.

I love the creativity of the Windy City Playhouse, but The Recommendation does not get mine.

Chicago Sings 25 Years of Porchlight – Museum of Contemporary Art – August 5, 2019

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The first Porchlight production I ever saw was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in the 2014-15 season. Portentous perhaps, as a funny thing happened to me on the way to their 25-year celebration – my “good” knee collapsed 5 days in advance.

But, on the hope that the pre-show hor d’oeuvres would be comforting, I decided not to let a little thing like another grade whatever sprained ligament deter me from attending, though I decided to forego the cocktails given how wobbly I already was on two bad knees and a single vintage 1968 wooden crutch that made me look like I was there to audition for the role of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.

There were luminaries in the audience and the performances were great, but the highlight of the evening for me was very slowly and carefully making it down and up the stairs to my seat and back twice without further injury, which leads me to my one complaint about the evening – NO DESSERT at intermission, even though it had been promised.

Among the performers, I’ll mention two Five Guys Named Moe alumni, Lorenzo Rush, Jr., and James Earl Jones II, who is back in town with the touring company of Come From Away; the wacky Bill Larkin, whose one-man show I recently wrote about; and triple threat Laura Savage, whom I’ve had the good fortune to see recently in Sweet Charity, Holiday Inn, A Chorus Line, and The Music Man.

The evening also included the presentation of the Guy Adkins Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Music Theater in Chicago to Gary Griffin. Having seen nine productions directed by Griffin, I can attest to his results, but listening to his choppy, rambling, somewhat incoherent acceptance speech (he assured us he was only drinking water), I wondered how he communicates with his actors. Perhaps, as in The Music Man, it’s the think system.

Teatro ZinZanni: Love, Chaos, and Dinner – Cambria Hotel – July 28, 2019

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Described as The Kit Kat Club on acid or The Moulin Rouge meets Cirque de Soleil, Teatro ZinZanni is too long, but what a hoot. Even the lobby is fun.

If you see it, be aware that it makes a difference where you sit. You don’t need to worry about blue paint or flying watermelon parts, but some of the action in the middle of the spiegeltent flows over onto a table or two, and if you’re centrally located you’re more likely to become part of the show, interacting with The Caesar or Lady Rizo, who is part Janis Joplin, part Bette Midler.

If you’re follicly challenged, you may get your scalp rubbed by various cast members, and if you’re a woman of a certain age, you might find yourself being theatrically-wooed by The Caesar, whose wild patter is reminiscent of Robin Williams. If you’re a healthy-looking young male, The Caesar may pick you out to participate in a faux competition to be his successor.

Sitting in a back booth provides relief for the stage shy. And you might, as I did, wind up in a conversation with a sixth-generation circus-family contortionist watching her ninth-generation circus-family, body-juggling, crowd-wowing boyfriend from an area behind your table in preparation for joining the show herself in a couple months when the acts change, as they regularly do to encourage return customers.

Between aerial artists, rhythmic gymnasts, and dancing waitstaff, Joe De Paul sang a little like Frank Sinatra (backed by a band that never took a break), portrayed King Kong, and partnered with the multi-talented Mr. P.P. (if you consider juggling with your mouth a talent) to leave the audience in tears of laughter from their hijinks.

My only regret was that singer Kelly Britt, hitting a ridiculously high note, failed to break the wine glass in her hand. Had she succeeded, she might have brought me over to the dark side, or as it is more commonly known, opera.