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Sunday Near Millennium Park Without Anyone Named George – July 21, 2019

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Interestingly, both Doctors Without Borders and Borders book stores, which no one was able to save (thereby making the doctors’ organizational name prescient), were founded in 1971. On the other hand, Crossing Borders Music, which put on the concert by my piano teacher, Marianne Parker, that I attended at the Chicago Cultural Center, across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park, originated in 2011.

The wonderful solo concert featured music from Marianne’s new album of Haitian music, entitled Pages intimes. As I told her afterward, she obviously has been holding out on me, not teaching me everything she knows, because, shockingly, I can’t play like she can. What other reason could there be?

I then rushed over to the Art Institute, across Monroe Street from Millennium Park, to attend its annual Block Party. On my way to the Impressionism room containing Van Gogh’s The Drinkers, for a program put on by the Brewseum, I passed by Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, thereby completing my park-adjacent trilogy.

Pub historian, and Brewseum founder and executive director, Liz Garibay presented a delightful lecture to the crowd on both the Van Gogh painting and the history and culture of drinking and drinking establishments in Chicago, including the 1855 Lager Beer Riot. After this educational tasting, I now thirst for more information, which I attend to drink in at the Brewseum’s exhibition currently on tap at the Field Museum.

I ended my near-the-park Sunday by watching Mucca Pazza (which translates as mad cow) end the party with one of their unique musical performances. P.T. Barnum would have been proud of the way they closed by marching through the Monroe Street exit, helping to clear the building by leading out hundreds of visitors, who then realized that the show was over.  This way to the egress.

Southport Arts Festival – July 13, 2019

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The Southport Arts Festival is a modest gathering, where free street parking is not that far away, at least in the daytime, and one location offers free beer.

But my main reason for going was to see Bill Larkin and his Comic Songs at the Piano (and one with a ukulele) at the Venus Cabaret. Larkin acts, including some shouting, as much as sings his original songs. I see a sort of combination of Lewis Black and Tom Lehrer in him, as his dark humor highlights people’s foolishness and foibles (including his own). The size of the crowd was disappointing, but Larkin wasn’t.

Later in the day, Neal Tobin, Necromancer, took the same stage. Necromancy is a practice of magic involving communication with the dead. After only 15 minutes of his act, Tobin made me wish I were dead, so I got up and left, thinking that his act was not worth the free price of admission, and not worrying whether he could read my mind in that regard.

As with most street fairs, there were a variety of artists and artisans displaying their work. Three attracted my attention. Time After Time, it turned out, was not selling Cyndi Lauper CDs or DVDs of H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper, but rather Historic American Rephotography, where Mark Hersch merges 100-year-old photographs with photographs he takes from the same vantage point to create a single image.

Robots in Rowboats also misled me, as most of the robots were not, in fact, in rowboats, but I guess you just can’t pass on a good alliteration.

Finally, By The Yard sells outdoor furniture recycled from plastic milk jugs. Really. Afterward, it occurred to me that I should have asked whether there was a quality difference between pieces constructed from skim, 2%, and whole milk containers.

The Music Man – The Goodman Theatre – July 7, 2019

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I would rather see a Neil Simon play than one by Shakespeare, so it should come as no surprise that I smiled for two and a half hours while watching The Music Man (despite what I considered a rather drab performance by the leading man), just knowing, that at some point, the Wells Fargo Wagon would be coming down the street, to the roars of the audience, creating even more excitement than an Amazon delivery.

I didn’t find the play dated. To me, River City is like Brigadoon, a pastoral place, frozen in time, that seems uninviting if you’re a cynical New Yorker or an anvil salesman, like the ten-time Jeff-nominated, scene-stealing Matt Crowle, but, eventually, idyllic, if you’re Tommy Albright in Brigadoon, or Harold Hill, who realizes that there was nothing till there was Marian, and the beautiful singing voice of Monica West.

When Hill jumps off the train, it reminds me of the passenger, who definitely didn’t know the territory, in the Twilight Zone episode A Stop at Willoughby, a place around the bend, when he jumped into “sunlight and serenity.”

The Music Man features a wonderful group of townspeople that fittingly includes three of the actors I last saw auditioning for roles in Porchlight Music Theatre’s production of A Chorus Line in May. No solos for them this time, but Laura Savage and Adrienne Velasco-Storrs, along with Ayana Strutz (great name for a dancer), help light up the stage.

I don’t know if Meredith Wilson, through Professor Hill, introduced the “think method” of learning to play an instrument as a wink and a nod to the then incipient Suzuki method of instruction, but Rock Island and Ya Got Trouble are still my favorite rap songs.

Seventy-Six Trombones is the signature song of the show, but the best line is Hill’s concession that he always thinks there’s a band. With a nod to another show, that should be everyone’s new philosophy.

The Ballad of Lefty and Crabbe – The Understudy – July 6, 2019

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I’d never before been to the Understudy (50 seats behind a storefront door that’s easy to miss) or seen an Underscore Theatre Company production, which, unbeknownst to me, has been putting on musicals since established in 2010.

As is my wont, I offered the ticket checker/concession person a bit of unsolicited advice about the company’s website, which she said she would pass on, as she wasn’t anybody, just there for the day. At intermission, after seeing her introduce the play to the audience, I returned to the counter and congenially accused her of lying to me, whereupon she (Laura Stratford, I later determined) shyly admitted that she was one of the founders of the company, but had recently stepped down from her position as Artistic Director to focus more on her writing.

Lefty and Crabbe are a vaudeville team that seems to be inspired by, among others, Laurel and Hardy. After they go to Hollywood, Lefty makes a career as a “fat guy falling down,” a specialty if ever there was one. Fortunately, for his health, the actor playing Lefty isn’t called upon to demonstrate that skill for the play. His character doesn’t even fall in love.

The last time I saw a play featuring a vaudeville theme was Thaddeus and Slocum at the Lookingglass Theater in 2016 when the show had to be delayed for twenty minutes in the middle of the performance while one of the actors was whisked away in an ambulance and someone was picked at random from the audience to replace him – I’m kidding about that last part.

Having now seen yet another group of previously unknown to me talented performers, I want to single out Mike Ott as the fast-talking agent, only because his patter seemed well-suited for the role of Harold Hill in The Music Man, which will be my next post.

Six – Chicago Shakespeare Theater – June 29, 2019

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“I’m Henry the eighth I am, Henry the eighth I am I am, I got married to the widow next door, She’s been married seven times before, And everyone was a Henry.” Turns out that’s not the real story about England’s King Henry VIII.

I’ve never seen the musical Nine, which won the 1982 Tony for best musical, but I bet it isn’t 50% better than Six, the part herstory lesson, part rock concert, part dance party, part comedic musical retelling of the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII, which I’m guessing will make its way to Broadway, with awards in its future.

All but one of the very talented performers were new to me, the exception being Abby Mueller, who was Carole King in Beautiful last time I saw her. Now she’s Jane Seymour, not the English actress (who has been married four times in her own right), but rather Henry’s third wife in the chain of “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived, but just for you tonight, we’re divorced, beheaded, live.”

Don’t worry about the list’s suggestion of violent deaths. No one actually loses their head on stage, though a majority of the audience lost their minds, whooping and hollering in reaction to the creative, illuminating, high-energy songs, which, as I learned from reading the playbill, were “queenspired” by a dozen pop stars, ranging from Adele to Beyonce to Rihanna (but, thankfully, not Herman’s Hermits).

My only regret upon leaving the theater was that Henry didn’t have more wives to entertain and educate the audience. I don’t know what the authors have in mind for their next project, but Elizabeth Taylor had seven husbands (eight marriages counting Richard Burton twice).

Improvised Shakespeare Chicago – The iO Theater – June 28, 2019

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There appeared to be many repeat attendees at the performance. When the cast asked the audience for suggestions for a title for that night’s play, they were ready with a host of responses clearly thought out ahead of time. Otherwise how would you explain an immediate shout out of the chosen title – The Gift of the Gobbler? One doesn’t come up with that out of thin air in a split second.

So, given that the premise of the performance is not taking a named Shakespearean work and riffing off of it, which I would have known had I read that part of the promotion that said a “fully improvised play in Elizabethan style using the language and themes of William Shakespeare”, what makes this show Improvised Shakespeare? Nothing. That’s just to draw you in, which I’m glad it did.

So what made the product Shakespearean? Well, they used the word proffer a lot even though there weren’t any lawyers or courtroom scenes in the show.

There was a woman playing a man and men playing women and none of them were named Yentl or Tootsie.

There was British royalty, scheming, and a lot of rhyming, but no one named Hamilton.

Enough people died that it suggested either Shakespeare, George R.R. Martin, or Quentin Tarantino, but there wasn’t any nudity, so not Martin, and there weren’t any profanities or racial slurs, so not Tarantino.

Though many of the characters died on stage, none of the actors did, relying on their perseverance, skills and tricks of the trade (both short and long form improvisation “need a mechanism in place to relieve the audience of the excruciating pain of a scene that is not working”) to entertain and move the story forward.

As is often said, dying is easy, comedy is hard.

Tank and the Beez – Washington Square Park – June 21, 2019

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Husband and wife, Brian “Tank” (bass/harmonica) and Beth “Beez” (guitar) Blankenship, added Jeff Teppema (fiddle) and someone named Charlie (guitar) for the performance.

Tank and the Beez describe themselves as an old-time roots string band, which made me wonder whether their instruments are made out of onions, potatoes, carrots, or radishes.

They specialize in traditional blues, folk, and jazz tunes and, by their own account, read their lyrics off an old-timey iPad.

The group’s other concession to modern technology was Jeff tuning his fiddle off an app on his cell phone. His fiddle looked suspiciously like a violin, which led me to a nice article in Strings Magazine, which has nothing to do with theoretical physics.

Jeff pulled a shaker out for one song, but unfortunately, one of the band’s other frequent members, Amy Malouf, was not there to play her washboard.

Beez and Tank nicely took the lead on most of the songs, but Charlie had his moment in the shade on one tune. Even before that it struck me that he appeared to speak like a would-be ventriloquist, with slight movements of the lips, while his teeth remained glued together.

Charlie noted that the song he sang was written in B Flat, and suggested that it was a common key when it was written about a hundred years ago, as it made it compatible with the hum of the electric lights in use in the United States.

Though Charlie’s singing was not on par with Tank’s, or especially Beez’s, he acquitted himself quite well on the guitar, which he suggested was Middle English for out of tune, a possible homage, given the group’s brand of music, to Pete Seeger’s line that “when you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.”

The Big Red Show – Venus Cabaret – June 17, 2019

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Watching Meghan Murphy, a.k.a. Big Red, wipe off the sweat, excuse me, glisten, between numbers made me wonder how many signature, low-cut, red dresses she must own in order to put on her show three nights in a row.

At least this night she had the foresight to bring a small towel on stage with her. Both she, and the bartender before the show, told us that he had to give her napkins the night before to stem the tide.

Seeing Murphy on a Monday added an extra level of entertainment, as the audience was filled with her show business friends who had the night off from their own gigs, and who were not shy about emitting a plethora of joyous sounds of appreciation throughout the evening to the amusement of all, including Murphy.

And Big Red is not shy about enjoying herself on stage, as when she calls extra attention to the length of a note she’s holding by turning around slowly, then looking at her watch, except she isn’t wearing a watch, and mugging her reaction to that faux realization.

Murphy plays the part, not only of actress and chanteuse, but also of storyteller and philosopher. When she told the crowd she doesn’t like people to try to fit her talents into a neat box, I half expected her to transform into a mime trying to get out of a box, though it’s hard to imagine her remaining silent, or keeping a straight face, long enough to do that.

She also played the part of music critic, taking the time to pause and humorously parse Heart’s All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You in the middle of singing it. She didn’t invent this. I found a 2013 article online that forges the same ground. Still, when Big Red does it, it’s more fun, because, as embodied in her final song as Mama Rose, some people ain’t her.

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying – Music Theater Works – Cahn Auditorium – June 15, 2019

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Without conscious effort on my part, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is the third (out of nine) Pulitzer Prize for Drama winning musical I’ve seen in the last eight months. This doesn’t rise to the level of seeing a baseball game in every major league stadium in one season, but it’s all I’ve got.

The Music Theater Works pre-show talk discussed all nine winners, but, as for this production, notably, Ken Singleton as J. Pierrepont Finch was terrific (though nobody could ever top Robert Morse, who took the part from Broadway to the movies without getting replaced by Vanessa Redgrave or Audrey Hepburn, or having his voice dubbed by Marnie Nixon), and the recorded voice of the book was done by . . . wait, wait, don’t tell me, oh right, Peter Sagal, a role previously performed for Broadway revivals by Walter Cronkite and Anderson Cooper.

Playwright Abe Burrows was one of the recipients of the award for How to Succeed in 1962, which is interesting because his Guys and Dolls was originally selected as the winner in 1951, but, rumor has it, because of his troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the trustees of Columbia University vetoed the award (and none was given that year). They must have been concerned that the difficulty in finding a location for the Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game was meant as propaganda to symbolize the predicted fall of capitalism.

As with the crap game, the lure of easy money finds its way into How to Succeed, which famously features a treasure hunt as a marketing ploy. In that spirit, if you can name the other eight Pulitzer winning musicals, six of which I’ve seen, without resorting to the internet, you win a year’s free subscription to this free blog (restrictions may apply).

Printers Row Lit Fest & Chicago Blues Festival- June 8-9, 2019

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In case you were wondering, the Lit in Printers Row Lit Fest refers to literature, not to the new Illinois law permitting recreational marijuana starting January 1, 2020. But maybe next year it will be both.

One of the attractions of the Lit Fest for me in the past has been the Flash Fiction writing contest held by the Mystery Writers of America. Again, in case you were wondering, the Flash in Flash Fiction refers to fiction written quickly, not fiction written about Barry Allen of DC Comics fame.

There was no contest this year. The Mystery Writers didn’t even have a tent. Or perhaps they did and it was flapping so quickly in the breeze that no one could see it.

And this year there was only one program each day that interested me. On Saturday, it was James Geary amusing the audience with a discussion of his book Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It.

As part of his presentation, he held a pun contest, with the winner receiving a copy of the book, and the losers presumably being sent to the witless protection program.

On Sunday I heard WTTW critic Hedy Weiss interview music director Jermaine Hill, and stars Monica West (Marian the librarian), and Geoff Packard (Professor Harold Hill) about the Goodman Theater’s upcoming production of The Music Man. I introduced myself to Hedy and spoke with her for about 15 minutes before the program, which I’m sure she also will mention in her next blog.

On the way to the Lit Fest Sunday, I stopped by the Chicago Blues Festival to listen to Erwin Helfer do his wonderful thing on the piano. Heller plays on Tuesday nights at the Hungry Brain, which seems like a good name for a place to go after a Lit Fest.